The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 19

Every claim made in this book is a distinction. The apparatus is itself a product of recursive distinction — codes extracted from the comparison of philosophical systems, patterns stabilized into terms ("ontologization," "transparency," "delegation," "construct"), and used as instruments for further analysis. It cannot ex-empt itself.

A microscope focused on its own lens produces a distorted image. The same cir-cularity holds here: the theory of distinction is itself a distinction, and the one who draws it remains behind the drawing.

Ontology, as a discipline, promises an account of what there is. Every ontology examined in this book delivered on the promise by selecting a product of distinction, assigning it mind-independent status, and building a world around it.

We concluded that such delivery was a projection. Can the analysis itself deliver an ontology that is free of projection?

It cannot. An ontology requires determinate claims about the structure of reality. A claim is a distinction drawn by a subject. The subject who draws it occupies the meta-position and does not appear in the picture the distinction produces. An ontology of distinction would have to include the one who distinguishes, which is impossible. The system cannot close.

The subject does not know what it is. The tradition has named this variously: the transcendental subject, the noumenal self, the witness, the Atman, the bare I. Each name is a silent pointer: there is something here. The presence resists conversion into knowledge.

The Russian Name Worshippers (Bulgakov, Losev, Florensky) saw that essence escapes every description and that what remains is a name: a pointer at something present and indescribable. The Name Worshippers had their finger on this. What they did with it was graft the insight onto Palamite theology: the name became a divine energy, an uncreated operation of God through which 83

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the unknowable essence communicates itself to the creature. The pointer was wired into the sixth rung, and what could have been a recognition of the subject became another channel of delegation.

The subject does not know whether its mode of distinction is the only possible one. Human beings distinguish through a specific apparatus and produce a wide range of codes. But the apparatus could be different. A being with a radically different perceptual structure would draw different boundaries and produce different codes. Whether such a being would still be performing the same operation in a different medium, or something altogether unlike what we call distinction, is a question that cannot be answered from within the only mode of distinguishing available to us.

The encounter with the Other is also immediate and prior to analysis. The content of that other meta-position, the way the Other distinguishes, is inaccessible for the same reason that the subject's own interior is unknowable. The Other is met as a boundary that resists absorption into the codes. What lies on the far side of that boundary is opaque.

These limits are permanent. They are consequences of the operation of distinction applied to itself, and they will hold for any subject, regardless of the sophistication of his apparatus. A more refined instrument produces different distinctions and pushes the limits further out, but the limits themselves recede at the same rate.

Ontology, then, is impossible as a completed account of what there is. What remains possible is a description of how the subject distinguishes, with the permanent caveat that the describer is absent from it. Every proposition in this book — "the subject distinguishes," "ontologization converts a live distinction into a construct," "transparency is the refusal of delegation" — is a postulate: a distinction drawn for a purpose, replaceable by a different cut that organizes the field differently.

In Against the Light this condition was named zero-ontology. Zero is the count of ontological commitments that survive the analysis. The subject, its activity,

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and its encounter with the Other remain; what disappears is any claim about the structure of a mind-independent reality.

This does not make the propositions arbitrary. A postulate held transparently is evaluated by what it does — the distinctions it enables, the constructs it dissolves. These postulates earn their place by making the history of philosophy legible as a single repeating operation. A different set might do the same work better, and if it does, the present set can be replaced without loss.

The ladder itself is a case in point. Six rungs, ordered by depth of recursion, dividing the philosophy into a grid, is a distinction drawn by the author on the products of other people's distinguishing. A different cut would yield a different ladder. Ibn Arabi's alam al-mithal does not sit on any of the six rungs; Frege fused two of them into one; Chinese tradition organized the field by principles that cross-cut the entire scheme. The ladder made the history legible in a particular way. The reader who finds a sharper instrument is invited to replace it.