Mirror to the World: Ethics as Excrescence of Metaphysics

The Classical concept of Freedom aims to bring together the antinomic notions of the Will and of Reason. In turn, both the Will and Reason can have antithetical meanings when considered in their autonomous decisional or heteronomous instrumental aspects: the Will can have a decisional aspect as conscious Volition (voluntas, velle, arbitrium, Wollen) and an operational one as blind insatiable Appetite (appetitus, conatus, want, Lust); similarly, reason can have a substantive meaning as a faculty (Reason, Vernunft) allowing for the human comprehension of Being (esse) which then makes possible the determination of harmonious human goals (inter esse, human interests) by the autonomous Will; and an instrumental one as a tool for consistent measurable action or calculation (intellect, understanding, Verstand). The inconsistency between Will and Reason arises from the fact that in Western philosophy the Will has always been regarded as absolutely and autonomously free even free to perpetrate evil (as liberum arbitrium indifferentiae). As Cacciari notes (DeCdP, c.p.60), in Western rationalist thought, unlike the Eastern (from which Schopenhauer in particular was first to draw keenly), freedom at least in the decisional sense has always been predicated of the Will, and has also always been construed in the volitional sense as auto-nomous or ab-solute, that is, not subject to any restrictions or heteronomy and therefore as consistent with the rule of Reason, given that a choice exercised inconsistently with Reason cannot be free. As Kant insisted in the Second Critique (following Plato), to be free, the Will must be able to restrain its appetite by being reasonable in its substantive sense as Volition because, quite obviously, the will can be neither free in the sense of autonomous nor instrumentally reasonable in its aspect as appetite. And yet, if it is to be free even as volition, the will cannot be subordinate to Reason on pain of making their compatibility tautologous, or even to reason in the limited instrumental sense as the intellect, because this would turn the Will from an autonomous substantive entity into a heteronomous instrumental one, similar to mere appetite, of which freedom cannot be predicated except in the purely quantitative, self-seeking sense of free-dom that is, the seeking of satisfaction to the detriment of all other wills. Similarly and conversely, Reason cannot be free if it is to be consistent with appetite, whilst freedom cannot be predicated of reason as intellect. The word arbitrium itself gives the sense of the antithetical ambi-valence of the notion of Will: the human faculty of arbitrium makes the decision-maker an arbiter in the sense that the Will is free to decide; and yet this arbitration cannot be arbitrary but reasonable, that is, subject to the rules of Reason or at least of reason or intellect whence the phrase liberum arbitrium to emphasize the fact that the Will can be both free or unfettered and reasonable.

Freedom is therefore inconsistent with Reason because the notions of Volition as well as that of Appetite are incompatible with the restrictions that Reason must impose on Freedom by virtue of its supposed internal consistency both logico-mathematical and also practico-moral. Thus, to the extent that the concept of Will must include that of Reason, Freedom must be inconsistent with Reason, unless the two are defined tautologously that is, only reasonable decisions by the Will can be said to be free. And this is the difficulty that the negatives Denken from Hobbes to Heidegger has sought to overcome, as we shall see presently. In pursuit of his genial theory of value-neutral (wert-frei) social science, Max Weber mistakenly argues that only rational decisions are free, without noticing that rationality here must also mean reasonableness or that Freedom must be reduced to free-dom otherwise there could be irrational decisions in the sense of substantive Reason [Wert-rationalitat] that could still be said to be free if they were carried out in an instrumentally rational manner [Zweck-rationalitat]! Evidently, Weber did not intend freedom in its substantive sense as Freedom, that is, as the union of Volition and Reason, but only in its instrumental sense as free-dom, the union of appetite and calculation, as in the scientific link between Want and Provision in neoclassical economic theory. In effect, this free-dom becomes a form of co-ercion necessity in a political sense, not necessity in a scientific sense given that Weber agreed that there are indefinite scientific ways or means to attain stated goals or ends.

There are two concepts of freedom in classical liberal philosophical and political theory (cf. I. Berlin, The Two Concepts of Liberty, and N. Bobbio, Kant e le due liberta in Da Hobbes a Marx). The first concept combines the instrumental aspects of freedom appetite and intellect - and sets its boundaries heteronomously, that is to say, through an external limit to the Will as appetite: appetite and means to its satisfaction are rationally, though not necessarily reasonably, regulated through limited provision of whatever individuals seek to obtain imposed by external forces such as scarcity or other appetites or the State. This is the negative meaning of freedom also known as liberty, according to which freedom is whatever the appetite is allowed to do by scarce means and resources or by other appetites either through sheer force (Hobbes, Schopenhauer) or by convention based on labour or utility (cf. Lockes notion of labour, Mills utilitarianism, Schopenhauers sym-pathy, Constants market-based liberalism). Here is the classic definition of negative freedom what we call free-dom offered by Berlin:I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. (op.city., p.3)Of course, as Berlin correctly implies, the inconsistency between freedom and reason cannot be overcome by positing a natural or scientific or even logical necessity because what may be impossible for the Will to achieve with one set of means may be possible with another, what is impossible today may become possible tomorrow (flying to another galaxy, for instance) depending on the means available, and in any case, any restriction on an individuals aim, however unreasonable, is a restriction on its free-dom in the instrumental sense. Freedom therefore may only be opposed to coercion if we adopt a definition of necessity that allows of all means, however impractical or impossible. In other words, contra Weber, even absolutely impossible or irrational volitions can be free, and then the only obstacle to the Will is co-ercion and not physical-scientific necessity. Even where human beings attempt the impossible are constrained by necessity -, any attempt to restrain them from the attempt, however foolish it may be, must amount to co-ercion and is therefore a matter for political deliberation. Berlin himself seems to agree with this conclusion:

Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings.3 Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political freedom.4(loc.cit.) By contrast, Hannah Arendt [in On Revolution], still clings to the distinction between necessity, to which chance is opposed, and coercion, the opposite of freedom. The subtle difference between the two positions lies in the fact that Berlin does not consider impossibility as necessity, whereas Arendt does. But the impossible is not necessary because necessity always implies a positive inducement to human action, whereas impossibility is simply a statement of fact. Hence, it cannot be said that the laws of physics or indeed the axioms of logico-mathematics tell us what is necessary: they tell us only what is probable! This is what led Nietzsche to attack and refute the notion of physical-scientific and logico-mathematical necessity, as we are about to see in connection with Schopenhauer.The limit of this negative conception of freedom is that if appetites are to be externally, heteronomously, kept in check so as not to lead to self-destruction or mutual annihilation, then they must be governed by Reason in its substantive sense, which is incompatible with appetite. The extreme pessimism of this negative definition of freedom is evident in the conceptualisation of freedom developed by Western liberalism, which is also the ideological foundation of capitalism, and is evinced by the dismissive approach its theoreticians take to the positive or rationalist concept of freedom.I am free if, and only if, I plan my life in accordance with my own will; plans entail rules; a rule does not oppress me or enslave me if I impose it on myself consciously, or accept it freely, having understood it, whether it was invented by me or by others, provided that it is rational, that is to say, conforms to the necessities of things. To understand why things must be as they must be is to will them to be so. Knowledge liberates not by offering us more open possibilities amongst which we can make our choice, but by preserving us from the frustration of attempting the impossible. To want necessary laws to be other than they are is to be prey to an irrational desire - a desire that what must be X should also be not-X. To go further, and believe these laws to be other than what they necessarily are, is to be insane. That is the metaphysical heart of rationalism. The notion of liberty contained in it is not the 'negative' conception of a field (ideally) without obstacles, a vacuum in which nothing obstructs me, but the notion of self-direction or self-control. I can do what I will with my own. I am a rational being; whatever I can demonstrate to myself as being necessary, as incapable of being otherwise in a rational society - that is, in a society directed by rational minds, towards goals such as a rational being would have - I cannot, being rational, wish to sweep out of my way. I assimilate it into my substance as I do the laws of logic, of mathematics, of which I can never be thwarted, since I cannot want it to be other than it is. [15]

This is the positive doctrine of liberation by reason. Socialized forms of it, widely disparate and opposed to each other as they are, are at the heart of many of the nationalist, communist, authoritarian, and totalitarian creeds of our day. It may, in the course of its evolution, have wandered far from its rationalist moorings. Nevertheless, it is this freedom that, in democracies and in dictatorships, is argued about, and fought for, in many parts of the earth today. (Berlin, pp15-6)

Evident is the dismissive distaste with which Berlin addresses the rationalist or positive concept of freedom and its metaphysical pretensions. Yet Berlin fails to explain why the negative concept of freedom shared by liberalism in politics, empiricism in science, and neoclassical economics should be any less metaphysical than that of rationalism! Indeed, the flaws of the positive concept of freedom as a range of conduct autonomously adopted by the Will either alone or in conjunction with other wills can be said to apply equally to the negative definition of freedom (Berlin, loc.cit. p.8). To the extent that human beings may decide autonomously to restrict their freedom in the sense of their appetites or self-interests to a minimum, this restriction must be reasonable if it is not to void freedom of its meaning! In other words, even the substantive sense of the Will as volition cannot be consistent with Reason because its autonomy must be guided and enlightened by Reason and also be limited and measured by (be commensurate with) the intellect or instrumental reason because otherwise it degenerates into either insatiable appetite or self-annihilating abnegation, which means that it can reduce itself to naught (cf. I. Berlin, op.cit.).

Even Berlin acknowledges that indeed before we define freedom we need to define human being itself:

This demonstrates (if demonstration of so obvious a truth is needed) that conceptions of freedom directly derive from views of what constitutes a self, a person, a man. Enough manipulation of the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes. Recent history has made it only too clear that the issue is not merely academic. The consequences of distinguishing between two selves will become even clearer if one considers the two major forms which the desire to be self-directed - directed by one's 'true' self has historically taken: the first, that of self-abnegation in order to attain independence; the second, that of self-realisation, or total self-identification with a specific principle or ideal in order to attain the selfsame end. (Berlin, p10)

Still, yet again, we can see the negative slant that Berlin places on any attempt to theorise the notion of self as anything other than the in-dividuum, the individual self or its ego-ity [Ich-heit] as if any analysis based on other than empirical, that is to say present or given, reality necessarily implied the manipulation of the human self! Once again, Berlin is agitating the delusions of Utopianism as a barrier to the construction of a rational society - and indeed as a screen and apology for the existing society of capital! as is shown in the following passage:

But if we are not armed with an a priori guarantee of the proposition that a total harmony of

true values is somewhere to be found - perhaps in some ideal realm the characteristics of which we

can, in our finite state, not so much as conceive - we must fall back on the ordinary resources of

empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge. And these certainly give us no warrant for

supposing (or even understanding what would be meant by saying) that all good things, or all bad

things for that matter, are reconcilable with each other.[29] Nevertheless, it is a conclusion that cannot be escaped by those who, with Kant, have learnt the truth that 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no

straight thing was ever made[31 at fn.58]The difficulty that Berlin is having arises from his inability to go beyond the notion of the human self as belonging to an in-dividual an indivisible atom rather than to a species-conscious being. Once more, Berlin remains trapped within the ontogenetic or individualistic and empiricist mould, - a trap which is equally shared by Western empiricism and rationalism alike, namely, their total allegiance to the metaphysical autonomy or Freedom of the human mind or soul, of Ego-ity. Classical liberal political theory assumes that the State is the holistic ethico-political ex-pression and pro-duct of more fundamental social components that precede the State both historically and analytically. The bourgeois theory of the State, known as liberalism, shares this vision of the State with the added ingredient that society itself can be separated into a scientific economic sphere governed by the laws of the market and economic value, on one side, and a political sphere of public opinion guided by ethical values, on the other. In other words, if Economics is the bourgeoisies scientific rationalisation of capitalism, then Liberalism constitutes its quintessential political ideology. Liberalism is the political expression of capitalism in that it proclaims that it is possible to separate the economic sphere of social life which is the realm of necessity or free-dom, that is, the rigid constraint of each individual free-dom imposed by the free-doms of others all understood strictly as individual freedoms (the optimal utilisation of resources made scarce by the insatiable nature of individual self-interest whence the dismal science this is the constraint that founds the scientificity of capitalist social relations, the Objective Value of neoclassical economic theory) from the sphere of freedom or public opinion in which individuals can air their most subjective beliefs, the Subjective or Ethical Values of the liberal public sphere, without for that very reason, that is, by reason of the ideal nature of opinions and beliefs upsetting the politico-technical neutrality of the State which, again, is founded on the scientificity of Economics, that is to say, on the liberalist presumption of the scientific workings of the self-regulating market mechanism.

The subjectivity of these ethical values, their origin in the ideal freedom of the human will, and the fact that this ethical-moral freedom can be founded exclusively on the objectivity and scientific operation of the market mechanism and on the laws of Economics it is these two factors combined that liberalism can exploit ideologically to vaunt its unique affinity with democracy. The central tenet of liberalism is that democracy is socially impossible unless the sphere of economic production and exchange is kept hermetically separate and protected from the sphere of public opinion with its irrational ethico-moral and religious beliefs! Locke and Constant are the great theoreticians of liberalism. For Locke, the separation of economic and political spheres is made possible by the fact that it is possible to assign individual property rights to resources by means of individual labour by which Locke means also the labour of others exchanged like any other product of labour or commodity. Constant goes further by treating liberalism as the social state that allows the transformation of proprietary antagonism from war to commerce. In other words, for Constant, commerce, or the Lockean appropriation of resources on the basis of supposedly individual labour, leads not just to social peace guaranteed by a neutral State, but also to international peace between nation-states on the basis of the disciplining effect of property and capital movements between nation-states! This could not be achieved without the existence of natural rights that precede the State. Here is Constant:War precedes commerce, because they are merely two different ways of achieving the same endnamely, coming to own what one wants to own. If I want something that you own, commerce i.e. my offer to buy it from youis simply my tribute to your strength, i.e. my admission that I cant just take the thing I want. Commerce is an attempt to get through mutual agreement something that one has given up hope of acquiring through violence. (De la liberte, p.3)But the obvious objection arises that if commerce is chosen by the weaker party as a means to obtain something from the stronger party that it could not obtain by force, then there is no reason why the stronger party should keep to their part of the commercial agreement! Constant is at once conceding that commercial transactions are founded on relationships of force, and then insinuating that they are ideally based either on mutual consent or at least on the wiles of the weak in enticing the strong to relinquish their possessions! Yet, if commerce is based on mutual consent or better still, as liberal market ideology insists, on equal exchange, then it is obviously something very different from war and cannot be said to replace it. And if commerce is based on wiles and inducements if not outright deceit, then there is still a foundation of violence, however veiled, in the commercial transaction. Of course, Constants argument flies in the face of what lies at the heart of liberalism the equal exchange on which the market mechanism supposedly rests, which necessarily rests on the neutral pricing of exchange values that wars make impossible to achieve! Hence, it is simply inarguable that commerce replaces war for the simple reason that, if commerce is claimed to be based on unequal exchange, then it is merely a form of violence akin to war which means that commerce will always degenerate into war; and if commerce is instead claimed to be based on equal exchange, then commerce and war are two completely incomparable forms of human behaviour and interaction so that commerce cannot ever be said to be able to replace war! The same argument would invalidate Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals that is, the argument that morality replaces violence - except that in that case it is the internalisation of morals and crystallisation of conventions that makes the thesis more credible. Indeed, both theses become plausible only on the Hobbesian foundation of mutual fear that is, commerce and morals as political conventions founded on the equal capacity of individuals to harm one another.

Berlins smug and obtuse insistence on the superiority of empirical facts makes it inevitable that he should cite and quote Joseph Schumpeter, perhaps the most sophisticated proponent of empiricism in social science, in the very last paragraph of his influential essay on the two conceptions of liberty:Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. 'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, 'and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian. [J. Schumpeter, CS&D, p.243] To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity. (Berlin, op.cit., p.32)

Evidently, Berlin and Schumpeter are relying on the truth-fulness of empiricism, on its realism as against the metaphysical need of rationalism, that is, against its presumed intransigence and recalcitrance, according to Berlin, in the face of facts. Schumpeter begins Chapter Two of his Theorie with this sweeping and suggestive summation:The social process which rationalizes our life and thought has led us away from the metaphysical treatment of social development and taught us to see the possibility of an empirical treatment; but it has done its work so imperfectly that we must be careful in dealing with the phenomenon itself, still more with the concept with which we comprehend it, and most of all with the word by which we designate the concept and whose associations may lead us astray in all manner of directions. Closely connected with the metaphysical preconception. is every search for a meaning of history. The same is true of the postulate that a nation, a civilization, or even the whole of mankind must show some kind of uniform unilinear development, as even such a matter-of-fact mind as Roscher assumed (p.57)The footnote at rationalizes was expanded for the English translation and reads as follows:This is used in Max Webers sense. As the reader will see, rational and empirical here mean, if not identical, yet cognate, things. They are equally different from, and opposed to, metaphysical, which implies going beyond the reach of both reason and facts, beyond the realm, that is, of science. With some it has become a habit to use the word rational in much the same sense as we do metaphysical. Hence some warning against misunderstanding may not be out of place.Evident here is the maladroit manner and dis-comfort (not aided, and perhaps exacerbated, by the disjoint prose) with which Schumpeter approaches the question of the meaning of history. The Rationalisierung, which Schumpeter adopts from Weber, has made possible a scientific empirical treatment of social development (Entwicklung), but has done so only imperfectly, not to such a degree that we are able to free ourselves entirely of metaphysical concepts which is why we must be careful in dealing with the phenomenon [of Entwicklung] itself. Nevertheless, Schumpeter believes that it is possible to leave metaphysics behind and to focus on both reason and facts, and therefore on the realm of science. In true Machian empiricist fashion, Schumpeter completely fails to see the point that Weber was making in adopting the ante litteram Nietzschean conception of Rationalisierung to which he gave the name. The social process which rationalizes is an exquisitely Weberian expression: far from indicating that there is a rational science founded on reason and facts that can epistemologically and uncritically be opposed to a non-scientifc idealistic and metaphysical rationalism, Weber is saying what Nietzsche intended by the ex-ertion of the Will to Power as an ontological dimension of life and the world that imposes the rationalization of social processes and development in such a manner that they can be subjected to mathesis, to scientific control! What Weber posits as a practice, one that has clear Nietzschean onto-logical (philosophical) and onto-genetic (biological) origins, Schumpeter mistakes for an empirical and objective process that is rational and factual at once forgetting thus the very basis of Nietzsches critique of Roscher and historicism, - certainly not (!) because they are founded on metaphysics (!), but because they fail to question critically the necessarily meta-physical foundations of their value-systems, of their historical truth or meaning!Far from positing a scientific-rational, ob-jective and empirical methodology from which Roscher and the German Historical School have diverged with their philo-Hegelian rationalist teleology, Weber and Nietzsche before him were attacking the foundations of any scientific study of the social process or social development that does not see it for what it is Rationalisierung, that is, rationalization of life and the world, the ex-pression and mani-festation of the Wille zur Macht! By contrast, Schumpeter believes that the mere abandonment of any linearity in the interpretation of history, of any progressus (as Nietzsche calls it), is sufficient to free his rational science from the pitfalls of metaphysics! Berlin considers and acknowledges the limitations of the liberal worldview when human needs other than those that have to do with claims on social resources are considered such as the need for full participation in the conduct of social affairs:

This is the degradation that I am fighting against - I am not seeking equality of legal rights, nor liberty to do as I wish (although I may want these too), but a condition in which I can feel that I am, because I am taken to be, a responsible agent, whose will is taken into consideration because I am entitled to it, even if I am attacked and persecuted for being what I am or choosing as I do. [22].

All this has little to do with Mill's notion of liberty as limited only by the danger of doing harm to others. It is the non-recognition of this psychological and political fact (which lurks behind the apparent ambiguity of the term 'liberty') that has, perhaps, blinded some contemporary liberals to the world in which they live. Their plea is clear, their cause is just. But they do not allow for the variety of basic human needs. (Berlin, op.cit., p.26)

Here at last, Berlin confronts the realistic limits of liberalism, and therefore of capitalism and its market ideology, and their negative conception of freedom, as well as their utter inability to provide a tenable foundation for human society, let alone participatory democracy! (Exposing the repression by liberalist bourgeois regimes such as the American Federation and the French First Republic of constituent power and democracy in the interests of constituted order is the greatest merit of Hannah Arendts study On Revolution, - a theme reprised in Antonio Negris Insurgencies.) The liberal State is a non-State, it is the dissolution, the dis-gregation of human society. As we are about to see, it is the negatives Denken from Hobbes through to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche that exposes pitilessly the nihilism of liberal political theory, and constitutes indeed its reductio ad absurdum by exasperating its most fundamental assumptions which turn out to be just as metaphysical as anything proffered by rationalism! For whilst Hobbes demonstrates apodictically the impossibility of liberalism as a framework for a State conducive to a human society founded on its assumptions on the human self, Schopenhauer epitomizes the extreme pessimism implicit in these assumptions again to the extent that his empiricism reveals the utterly unsustainable and self-dissolving nature of the liberal State and of its society.Hobbes was always keen to reduce human beings to their blind appetites or passions whilst at the same time confining their volition to the instrumental exercise of reason: his political theory is aimed at deriving the foundations of a rational State by reducing human action as much as possible to the predictability of mathematics and mechanics. Obviously, Hobbes believed that rationality could be imposed scientifically on the Will.

FROM the principal parts of Nature, Reason and Passion, have proceeded two kinds of learning, mathematical and dogmatical : the former is free from controversy and dispute, because it consisteth in comparing figure and motion only; in which things, truth, and the interest of men, oppose not each other : but in the other there is nothing indisputable, because it compareth men, and meddleth with their right and profit ; in which, as oft as reason is against a man, so oft will a man be against reason. And from hence it cometh, that they who have written of justice and policy in general, do all invade each other and themselves with contradictions. To reduce this doctrine to the rules and infallibility of reason, there is no way, but, first, put such principles down for a foundation, as passion, not mistrusting, may not seek to displace; and afterwards to build thereon the truth of cases in the law of nature (which hitherto have been built in the air) by degrees, till the whole have been inexpugnable. (Dedication to De Homine)

Here it is clear that the rules and infallibility of reason Hobbess mathematical learning whereby truth and the interest of men oppose not each other - are in complete opposition to irrational Passion or self-interest Hobbess dogmatic learning whereby right and profit meddleth with men by warping their allegiance to reason not merely in terms of instrumental infallibility, but above all in terms of truth, by which Hobbes intends a universal value and not just logico-mathematical consistency. For Hobbes, it is possible to reduce this doctrine [dogmatical learning - that is, political and ethical science] to a foundation [of Reason such] that passion may not displace it, and to base this foundation on the truth of cases in the law of natureby degrees, till the whole is inexpugnable. In other words, despite their appetite or passion, human beings are still able to follow the dictates of reason to reach a political convention that is mutually beneficial and universally valid and thereby preserve their individual lives by choosing freely to erect a State that will guarantee social peace. Hobbess freedom, reason, life and peace are not purely instrumental categories, for if they were there is no way that human beings could place them above their egoism or passions. Clearly, these values must be universal and not purely instrumental they form part of the make-up of the world, of the constitution of the universe in a way that clearly invokes the transcendental if not divine nature of human being.In contrast to Hobbes, Locke conjectured a political theory in which human beings can give themselves a rational political order a State - based on natural law or natural rights (jusnaturalism) without first alienating their freedom. Such a freely-entered political order preserves the natural rights possessed by humans in the state of nature, which amounts therefore to a pre-political civil state (Bobbio, Da Hobbes a Marx). Like Hobbes, however, Locke conceives a legal system erected by the State based on rights that derive almost entirely from Labor and its pro-ducts Property -, with the difference that for Locke property rights based on Labor exist in the pre-political or civil state or state of nature they are natural rights -, whereas for Hobbes there can be no rights in the state of nature but only in the State all rights must be positive.

As a concession to Hobbes, Locke admits that whilst Hobbess authoritarian state is not necessary, it would become so were humans not to erect a neutral state to arbitrate their competing claims to natural rights because, if their pre-statal society or pre-political state were to descend into civil war into the clutches of Hobbesian passions then, according to Locke, the ensuing civil war of the state of nature would continue indefinitely. In other words, the conflictual Hobbesian state of nature is not congenital to humanity, and therefore the mechanical authoritarian State devised by Hobbes is not inevitable. But if it is not pre-empted by the erection of a political state, the Hobbesian state of nature may well eventuate and thence, contra Hobbes, be impossible to escape via a Hobbesian social contract. Lockes theory deals neatly with one of the principal objections to Hobbess political theory, which is that if humans were originally in a bellicose state of nature, it is impossible to imagine how they ever escaped it! Which is why the Hobbesian State totters uncertainly between a state by political institution and one by historical acquisition.

The obvious problem with Lockes theory is of course that it is impossible to identify the natural rights that he takes for granted in setting out his theory of the liberal state. Indeed, the same applies to Hobbes, because although his State is a state by conventional institution and not by historical acquisition, it is impossible to see what role it can play in its civil state (status civilis) in the evolution of its social life in all its aspects (economic and ethical) apart from its role in the reception of the status quo, that is, the conditions that prevailed in the state of nature, at the time of the establishment of the State. In other words, both for Locke and Hobbes, either the State is an autonomous institution that, by that very fact, will inevitably intervene in and interfere with its civil state, or else it is an entirely neutral and mechanical entity that relies on the organicity or innate harmony of that civil state in which case, again, it is hard to see why a State should be erected at all, except in the Lockean sense of insuring against the degeneration of the civil

into a Hobbesian state of nature but then, why should it do so, and according to what law or right can it function other than Lockes questionable natural law?

Yet, despite their obvious differences, the Reason of Hobbes and Locke, as well as that of Grotius and Spinoza and Rousseau, is still the onto-theo-teleo-logical reason of the late Renaissance, of Leonardo and Galileo and Newton, if not of Cusanus and Aquinas (cf. E. Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos): it is not just an instrument, but also a guide to a universal Truth, a human inter esse, - albeit, in Hobbess case, one understood as ultima or extrema ratio. Hobbess State is a deus mortalis mortal indeed because it is the by-product of human appetite, dire necessity (fear of death) and political convention, yet still a god because of its derivation from the principles of innate reason. Hobbes keeps faith with the notion that truth must prevail over passion, reason over egoism. This is why human beings only surrender their freedom in foro externo, in the political sphere when erecting the State, and then only ob metum mortis, upon fear of death, in dire necessity. But for Hobbes human beings still preserve intact their freedom in foro interno in the smithy of their souls, as Joyce might say which is where reason also ultimately prevails over passions to erect the State. This decision requires in Hobbes an ultima ratio that is founded on a human interest or inter esse (it is not, as in Schmitt, auf Nichts gestellt, sprung out of nothing, as in Nietzsche). Indeed, both in Hobbes and Locke the social contract is founded on the common human interests of preserving life and protecting and advancing the acquisition of wealth estate - through Labor.

It is this faith in the ability of reason as intellect to act as and surge to the status of Reason as an autonomous guide to action (Practical Reason) that Schopenhauer, following Schellings positive philosophy, will demolish in his radical critique of Kantian ethics and, as a corollary, also in his critique of Hobbess authoritarian positivism and of Lockes liberal jusnaturalism. For Hobbes and Locke, human reason is more than a calculative instrument that facilitates the reaching of the social contract (that is, the con-tracting of many interests into a common goal): for them, freedom and reason and truth are universal values that can overwhelm passions and egoism to safeguard life and attain social peace. Reason is a positive quality of the natural order that emerges from the universal agreement of what Hobbes calls mathematical learning despite the fact that human passions ensure the equally universal disagreement over metaphysics and religion. The very possibility of mathematical learning the self-evident (irresistible for Arendt, in The Life of the Mind) truth of logico-mathematics is conclusive proof of the existence of Reason and is actual evidence of the possibility of overcoming dogmatic learning by means of the mathematical.But, as the tone of the passage below shows, whereas for Hobbes and Renaissance man the ability of human beings to agree universally on logico-mathematical means (mathematical learning) rather than on metaphysical and ethical ends and values (dogmatic learning) reveals the existence of Truth as a supreme universal Value, for Schopenhauer the neutral instrumentality of these truths shows the exact opposite of what Renaissance man aspired to that is, the impossibility of universal values such as Reason and Truth or indeed Freedom in its substantive sense: Now, had it been wished to use Reason, instead of deifying it, such assertions as these must long ago have been met by the simple remark that, if man, by virtue of a special organ, furnished by his Reason, for solving the riddle of the world, possessed an innate metaphysics that only required development; in that

76 THE BASIS OF MORALITY.

case there would have to be just as complete agreement on metaphysical matters as on the truths of arithmetic and geometry ; and this would make it totally impossible that there should exist on the earth a large number of radically different religions, and a still larger number of radically different systems of philosophy.

The so-called universal truths of logico-mathematics belong to the realm of instrumental reason and therefore lack any Value whatsoever because they are perfectly devoid of any content or substance: in its perfect instrumentality, logico-mathematics is utterly devoid of any inter esse! It is the very formalism of logico-mathematical truths their very universality! that relegates them to the status of mere and pure instrument, of a tool that takes the content of the use to which it is put and that therefore voids them of any innate metaphysics, of any Truth! The fungibility of logico-mathematics, its neutrality or invariance, is precisely what empties it of any content as truth. Far from being its ultimate and insuperable instance, logico-mathematics exposes the ultimate ineffectuality of Truth its Value-lessness. (I have called this Nietzsches Invariance in my Nietzschebuch. A further discussion is in my The Philosophy of the Flesh.)

This point, which we believe is of insurmountable importance for our interpretation of what is commonly called science, natural or historical, may be re-stated as follows: human action can never be said to be true or false because its practical effects can be neither; similarly, formal identities are not and cannot be true or false because they are pure identities without content or consequences, and, where they have practical consequences, these can be neither true nor false. As Cacciari sums up the matter (in Krisis, at p.59):The nihilistic critique does not re-found, does not reformulate these problems. Its skepsis is radical: either there is no sense or else the forms of reason discover a new logic, a new relationship with reality forms and reality that are now found to be without substance. Either the nihilist situation is invertible only ideologically, as in Schopenhauer or else that very misery of the formalism of reason, in which the crisis of the Kantian a priori seemed to terminate, needs to be founded founded on the necessity, precisely, of this formalism, of this loss of substantive nexus, of this definitive retreat of truth.

We will deepen and sharpen this analysis in our next piece on another, this time rationalist, great liberal theoretician Benedetto Croce.

Tale e la stessa tragedia del soggetto. Per potere effettualmente, esso deve non solo disincantarsi sulle proprie forme a priori, sulla verita e bonta del mondo, sullo schematismo tra forme e mondo - ma deve altresi liquidare lestremo Valore, quello che anche il nichilismo piu radicale aveva conservato, anzi: di cui era stato il piu accanito difensore, lautonomia della soggettivita, la via interiore schopenhaueriana. Potere e integrarsi nel sistema, (K, p66).In our last intervention we saw how the radical critique of the Western notion of Freedom has led to the retreat of Truth and to the demise of the Subject in favour of the recognition of necessity as the expression of the Will to Power. Our aim throughout is to expose this Will to Power behind the entire political enterprise that capitalism imposes on humanity under the guise of Science and Technology. Capitalism in its political expression as liberalism thrives on the neat separation of the sphere of necessity that of science, and most preeminently the dismal science or science of choice called economics and the sphere of freedom or public opinion which can be preserved if and only if economic science is allowed to govern every human society rationally, that is, according to its dictates.The inconsistency between the strict determinism of economic science and the loose irrationalism of public opinion, of the human spirit and the liberal arts, is something that the bourgeoisie is quite happy to overlook because, on one hand, it is keen to defend its exploitative rule as scientific whilst, on the other hand, it wishes to promote its oppressive rule as the only way in which freedom of expression can be preserved. The liberal State serves this specific role as Police as an instrument that allows the co-existence of a dictatorial workplace in a free society.

What we are doing here is to present a third way, an immanentist theory of the human self and society, between the scientism of capitalist industrial production and the liberalism of capitalist mass consumption.

The whole pyramidal structure from perception to conception, from intuition to the intellect and reason, from conduction to deduction, has no other aim than to explain how it is possible for human beings to share perceptions as knowledge (Heidegger, Kantbuch, quoted in my The Philosophy of the Flesh)! It is the claim to scientificity of this crystallisation of symbolic interaction that Nietzsche shattered by exposing its con-ventionality. And it is instructive to see how Benedetto Croce deals with this critique in the Logica. Having already tersely lampooned the aestheticist critique of pure concepts which denies their validity and existence in favour of sensuous experience and activity such as the artistic, and then the mystical critique which, like Wittgensteins, insists that what is truly worthwhile is what cannot be spoken of, Croce then turns to the arbitrary or empiricist critique (which surely must count Nietzsche among its proponents):Ce (essi dicono) qualcosa di la dalla mera rappresentazione, e questo qualcosa e un atto di volonta, che soddisfa lesigenza delluniversale con lelaborare le rappresentazioni singole in schemi generali o simboli, privi di realta ma comodi, finti ma utili, (Logica, p10).There is, they say, something that goes beyond mere representation, and this something is an act of will that serves the function of universals by elaborating the particulars or single representing into general schemes or symbols deprived of all reality but yet functional, - false yet useful.Croce does not accept that concepts are conventions or, as he prefers to call them on behalf of the critics, fictions. As proof of the erroneity of this critique, Croce enlists the tu quoque; in other words, this arbitrarist critique of logic and pure concepts is itself a logical argument based on concepts and therefore it is either equally false like all logic, or else it must claim validity on logical grounds, and thence confirm the validity of its concepts, and therefore the validity of conceptual reality in any case (see Logica, p12). What Croce fails to grasp is that, so far as Nietzsche is concerned, the crystallization critique does not deny the reality of concepts and still less their validity; indeed, if anything, it highlights and warns their validity, against their effectuality. But this effectuality is made possible not by their transcendental or pure status as timeless truths, for instance but rather by their immanent status, by their instrumental character as an act of will. Not the innateness of these concepts, not their truth, but their instrumentality is what matters not Augustines in interiore homine habitat veritas (cited and discussed by Merleau-Ponty in Phenom.ofPerception, at p.xi) but the content of the act of perception is what constitutes life and the world for us. Earlier, Croce had emphasized the active side of concepts as human representations of intuited reality privileging yet again the spiritual nature of concepts as dependent on intuition and experience yet separate from it.

Il soddisfacimento e dato dalla forma non piu meramente rappresentativa ma logica del conoscere, e si effettua in perpetuo, a ogni istante della vita dello spirito, (p13).

Now, again, Croce draws a stark contrast between the two positions, his idealism and what he calls scetticismo logico (p8):

La conoscenza logica e qualcosa di la dalla semplice rappresentazione: questa e individualita e molteplicita, quella luniversalita dellindividualita, lunita della molteplicita; luna intuizione, laltra concetto; conoscere logicamente e conoscere luniversale o concetto. La negazione della logicita importa laffermazione che non vi ha altra conoscenza se non quella rappresentativa (o sensibile come anche si suole dire), e che la conoscenza universale o concettuale e unillusione: di la dalla semplice rappresentazione non vi sarebbe nulla di conoscibile, (pp7-8).Logical knowledge is something beyond simple representation: the latter is individuality and multiplicity, the former is the universality of the particular instance.the former is intuition and the latter is concept.The negation of logic is tantamount to saying that there is no other knowledge than by mere representations and that universal knowledge is an illusion.

But this contrast is almost palpably fictitious, opposing high-sounding concepts in what is almost a play of words, and simply fails to tell us why and how concepts and representations differ ontologically. Croce ends up rehashing the Kantian Schematismus with the pure concepts of beauty, finality, quantity and quality and so forth whose content is furnished by fictional concepts such as universals (nouns) and abstract concepts like those of mathematics (cf. Logica, ch.2 at p18). But in fact, as we try to show here invoking the aid of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of perception, neither of Croces pre-suppositions of logical activity, that is, intuition and language (see pp5-6 of Logica), is such that logical activity can be separated onto-logically from them. Croce insists that a concept must be expressible whence the essentiality of language to it, no less than intuition or representation:

Se questo carattere dellespressivita ecomune al concetto e alla rappresentazione, proprio del concetto e quello delluniversalita, ossia della trascendenza rispetto alle singole rappresentazioni, onde nessuna.e mai in grado di adeguare il concetto. Tra lindividuale e luniversale non e ammissibile nulla di intermedio o di misto: o il singolo o il tutto (Logica, pp.26-7).No representation is ever capable of satisfying adequately the concept.Between the particular and the universal no mixture or intermediate stage is possible: either all or nothing.We have here once again the Platonic chorismos, the Scholastic adaequatio, the Kantian noumenon, and the Fichtean hiatus irrationalis in other words, that antinomy that requires a leap (trans-scendence) from experience to thought. Except that what Croce believes to identify as a particular is already and immanently identical with a universal: not only is a concrete experience already a universal, but so is a universal abstraction also a concrete experience! (The irrefutable proof of this reality that there is no hic et nunc - is the greatest merit of Hegels great Preface to the Phenomenology.) Both are representations (cf. Croces contrary argument on pp.28-9). This is the basis of Schopenhauers critique of Kants separation of intuition from understanding and again from pure reason, in the sense that the Kantian universal is toto genere different from the particular and cannot therefore represent it separately in an ontological sense either as Sinn-gebende totality and Subject-ity, or else as causal cousins, as Ego-ity, as Subject! Croces own categorization of these notions is at p.42 of the Logica:

La profonda diversita tra concetti e pseudoconcetti [identified with lidea platonica on p.41] suggeri (nel tempo in cui si solevano rappresentare le forme o gradi dello spirito come facolta) la distinzione tra due facolta logiche, che si dissero Intelletto (o anche Intelletto astratto) e Ragione: alla prima delle quali si assegno lufficio di elaborare cio che ora chiamiamo pseudoconcetti, e alla seconda i concetti puri.Evident in all this is Croces obstinacy in seeking to differentiate, however vainly, thought from perception or representation or intuition: - an effort that must remain vain because no onto-logical priority can be given to thought over matter and because indeed no thought is possible without perception and vice versa. A world without thought would be a world without life, and a world without life would not be a world at all! That is not to say that thought takes precedence ontologically over the world because it is essential to the world; the two are co-naturate. For universals and particulars, for abstract thought and concrete intuition, to be able to enter into a practical real relation with each other, they must participate (Nicholas of Cusas methexis) in the same immanent reality! Indeed, it seems obvious to us that perception and thought are immanently connected: methexis replaces chorismos. Here is Merleau-Ponty:

The true Cogito does not define the subjects existence in terms of the thought he has of existing and furthermore does not convert the indubitability of thought about the world, nor finally does it replace the world itself by the world as meaning. On the contrary it recognizes my thought itself as an inalienable fact, and does away with any kind of idealism in revealing me as 'being-in-the-world'. (PoP, p.xiii).

To seek the essence of perception is to declare that perception is, not presumed true, but defined as access to truth. So, if I now wanted, according to idealistic principles, to base this defacto self-evident truth, this irresistible belief, on some absolute self-evident truth, that is, on the absolute clarity which my thoughts have for me; if I tried to find in myself a creative thought which bodied forth the framework of the world or illumined it through and through, I should once more prove unfaithful to my experience of the world, and should be looking for what makes that experience possible instead of looking for what it is. The self-evidence of perception is not adequate thought or apodeictic self-evidence. The world is not what I think but what I live through [m.e.]. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. 'There is a world', or rather: 'There is the world'; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life. This facticity of the world is what constitutes the Weltlichkeit der Welt, what causes the world to be the world; just as the facticity of the cogito is not an imperfection in itself, but rather what assures me of my existence, (PoP, pp.xvi-xvii).

Merleau-Ponty reiterates here the Nietzschean vivo ergo cogito, with the peccadillos that he refers to the self-evident truth of perception (what is truth if, as he immediately yet unwittingly corrects himself, it is not backed by some absolute self-evident truth?) and then the obvious reference to the I, the Husserlian transcendental ego or subject. Here is the inverted Platonism that Nietzsche was first to attempt but only after he had lifted the veil of all the Schleier-machers (veil-makers), chief among them his own educator, Arthur Schopenhauer.Metaphysical Foundation of EthicsThe Bounds of Free-dom: The Lutheran Re-definition of Classical Freedom in Schelling and SchopenhauerIt is common to oppose the concept of freedom to that of necessity most notably in the philosophical debate over determinism. Yet freedom is a political notion the opposite of coercion. Once the notion of freedom is reduced to the opposite of necessity, then it becomes mere chance or hazard or contingency and is reduced to an onto-logical problem. The fact is that, as we are seeking to demonstrate here, there is no such thing as necessity, either logical or scientific, so that all truths are contingent.But the factthat truth can be understood as necessity- that the necessity of logic or science is what makes them true - and that freedom can be mistaken for contingency means that truth and necessity can be abused or be used instrumentally for the purpose of political coercion! By this process, freedomofthe will can be mistaken for a telos that, by positing the systematicity of life and the world as a totality, becomes a quest for freedomfromthe will. This critique of the Western metaphysical concept of freedom, which saw its epitome in the Freiheit of Classical German Idealism, is what thenegatives Denkenhas rightfully contributed to our understanding of freedom, whilst at the same time, by denying the existence of freedom in a political sense (because it understands freedom only ontologically), it denies the possibility of political freedom or else reduces it to contingency, to superfluity (Sartres de trop, Heideggers de-jection andDaseinas pro-ject). Freedom is understood then as universal Eris, as total conflict so that it is no longer a function of the will but the will becomes a function of freedom understood as cosmic contingency. Arendt correctly distinguishes between freedom (political) and contingency or chance (ontological), pointing to their discrete opposites coercion or and logico-scientific necessity or irresistibility. But she fails to see that there is nothing irresistible or true about logico-mathematics and science, that these are contingent, and that therefore these (contingent, arbitrary) conventions can be utilized for the purposes of coercion by erecting measurable frameworks of conduct (institutions) that force human conduct and choices into measurable channels or behavioral straitjackets. The irresistibility of mathesis can ec-sist only as a value, as truth, and therefore as a will to truth that is internalized to coerce human behaviour. This is the necessity of mathesis precisely, a restriction or channeling of human freedom understood not ontologically (as contingency, which is categorically not, and can-notbe affected by mathesis) but ratherpolitically. (Arendts discussion of these matters can be found in The Life of the Mind and Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy as well as in On Revolution. We have reviewed them at length in our The Philosophy of the Flesh.)This transformation of the concept of freedom can be traced most lucidly in the work of Schelling and Schopenhauer who can be identified as the founders of what we call negatives Denken. Thenegatives Denkenunderstands free-dom as thebattlegroundof conflictbetweenwills. For Weber, for instance, the individual willacts freelyif it acts rationally; and rationality is defined as the wills choice of adequate means in pursuit of its own ends. This choice the will makes is therefore con-ditioned by the choices of other wills in conflict with it. In essence, for Weber, rationality is the game-theoretic strategy that is chosen by independent and conflicting willsfreely pursuing their irreconcilable ends or wants whose provision is scarce. The freedom of the will is de-fined not intrinsically as in the Freiheit of German Idealism but rather instrumentally in terms of the relationship of given means to projected ends. It is free-dom in the sense of room to manoeuvre (Ellenbongsraum, Weber, in CPW) - to manoeuvreagainstother wills, that is. Thus, there can be no freedom of the will in the objective genitive. It is the will that is a function of free-dom, not the other way around which means that the freedom of the will has no positive universalistic telos orinter esse, but is rather the op-posite, the contrary of thisinter esse. For thenegatives Denken there is no freedom in an ab-solute, idealistic sense: freedom exists only as contingency, as the opposite of necessity, not of co-ercion - onto-logically, not politically! And insofar as there is freedom, as in Schopenhauer or Heidegger, this ec-sists only as transcendence, as intelligible freedom (even in Kant), - something Nietzsche derided as astute theology (vedi his scathing comment on Kant and on Schopenhauer in Twilight of the Idols; and note the etymological link between theory and theo-logy, traced in W. Jaeger, Early Greek Theology).Thenegatives Denkenreplaces the IdealistFreiheitwhich, as we have seen, turns by reason of its systematicity into a quest for freedomfromthe will, from its arbitrariness, with the conversion of this teleological freedom into an instrumental free-dom, one that is intended not as a telos, as an common human aspiration or inter esse, but rather as its opposite, as contingence, a mere lack of conceptual or material necessity; and thus it conceives of the Will as an antagonistic universal condition (Schopenhauers Weltprinzip, Nietzsches Wille zur Macht) as the obverse of KantsDinge an sich. The de-struction of the telos of freedom invites and elicits the destruction of any system, of any teleological rule by means of the exception. For the negatives Denkenthe exception is not what con-firmsthe rule, not Hegels negation that is meaningfully re-absorbed by the negation of the negation. (We are extending to ontology a notion applied by Carl Schmitt to politics, see his The Concept of the Political. And see on this point, the insightful confrontation of Schelling and Hegel in B. Matthewss Introduction to Schellings The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, and S. Zizeks The Abyss of Freedom). No such repechage is possible. Instead, it is the exception that determines the veryessenceof the rule, the truth of the system, by de-fining itslimits. Schmitt quotes from Kierkegaard (in PT, p15): The exception explains the general [the rule, the system] and itself. Yet if the exception explains the general, it can do so only if it de-structs the general or rule or system if it negates the system as a totality, as truth. Any attempt to erect the system to a universal application as the Sozialismus, the Left, seeks to do in politics will result only in the suppression of any free-dom that remains beyond the grasp of the system and within the purview of the exception. Schmitt writes (op.cit., p.15):It would be consequentrationalismto say that the exception proves nothing and that only the normal can be the object of scientific interest. The exception confounds the unity and order of the rationalist scheme.

Here thenegatives Denkencan conceive of the will only as a destructive force that works or uses the world only in the sense of consuming it because the opposite, the will and itsArbeitas the creation of wealth, would entail the possibility of a common-wealth, of aninter essecommon to all wills, and not merely a subjective greed-dom orappetitus. (See on all this, our Capitalist Metaphysics.) This de-struction of truth, of the telos of freedom, entails also the de-struction of Reason and the Ratio as thesummum bonumof humanity, as the Platonic Good. (Useful in this context is G. Lukacss Die Zerstorung der Vernunft but Lukacs takes for granted the whole notion of a Marxian-inspired Ratio-Ordo.) In this perspective, not only can the Logic not be a science as in Hegel and even in Kant where synthetic a priori judgements are made possible by Reason, but it becomes a mere instrument of the intellect this last understood as mere perceptions or intuition (Anschauung) or sensations (Empfindungen) in accordance with causality and the principle of sufficient reason. Yet in much of thenegatives Denken - from Schopenhauer to Weber for instance -, the attachment to scientific intellect and logical rationality, albeit conceived as instrumental faculties, remains steadfast. Later, Nietzsche will ridicule this simplistic faith in the intelligible character and scientific and logical rationality, although it was his Educator Schopenhauer who first insisted on the purely instrumental, non-theological, ontological status of logic (see G. Piana, Commenti su Schopenhauer., 2). It is not necessity that is opposed to freedom, then. Freedom is a politico-ontological, hence ethico-political, concept that can only be opposed to coercion. The true opposite of necessity is chance. Yet, because everything of which we are conscious can only ultimately be attributed to chance because of the contingency of being (Heideggers Dasein) -, necessity is a highly-charged term that is used to mask human activities that involve coercion: necessity, if it exists, can do so only as an instinct, as dire necessity, the preservation of life (as in Hobbess dira necessitas). (The definitive ontological and epistemological proofs against necessity start with Nietzsche [Uber Wahrheit und Luge through to Jenseits von Gut und Bose], through to Weber [The Methodology of the Social Sciences], and then Heidegger [Sein und Zeit].) The sphere of economic activity and production disguised as the sphere of necessity like all other forms of science and technology is the major form of coercion in capitalist societies. (The inability of the sharpest critical minds from Arendt [On Revolution], to Cacciari [Liberta e Tecnica] and Zizek [The Abyss of Freedom], on the tracks of Heideggers late-romantic notion of Technik [cf. the hideously anti-humanistic Brief am Humanismus], to understand this is hard to believe. Arendt [also in The Life of the Mind and The Human Condition] still clings to scientific necessity and logical irresistibility, whilst Cacciari and Zizek never go beyond Heideggers basic premise of Da-sein.) The ideological role of the sphere of necessity (economics, science and technology) in industrial capitalism is aimed principally at narrowing the range of democratic choice available to citizens as against the consumer choice imposed by the violence of capitalist industry with its rational expectations: (b) It can be demonstrated in still another way that indeterminism, to be consistent, would have to cripple our efforts and abilities. If events in external nature did not turn out in accordance with necessary laws, could we count on them? Could our mighty technological achievements have taken place without our utilizing the laws of nature? Certainly not; only our knowledge of these laws gives us such power, and this power grows in proportion to our knowledge. We would be powerless in the face of the phenomena of the will if they did not unfold in accordance with necessary laws. We would then neither know such laws nor be able to employ them in order to achieve our aims. No matter how long we were acquainted with a person, we could feel no certainty as to his future behaviour. Everything we experienced previously would be merely coincidental. Correspondence among the cases observed would not rest upon a single underlying cause, nor would a habit that has arisen construct incidentally a concomitantly determining principle. Promises that we make or that are given us would not offer any security, for regard for a particular agreement would no more be a determining ground for future action than would habit. But along with the possibility of rational expectations about our mutual relations we would also lose every sort of orderly union between people. The whole of human society would be destroyed. No long-term undertaking would be possible; the most powerful force on earth, the human will, would become unpredictable, and everything would be so completely veiled in doubt and darkness that no one would be able to form a plan even for himself, let alone one requiring assistants for its fullment. (Franz Brentano, The Foundation and Construction of Ethics, p.165.)Because Brentano takes social cohesion as the resultant of individual decisions, he must then postulate that individual wills are causally determined and therefore not free. And because he understands freedom exclusively as the province or attribute of individual wills, he is then unable to account for social cohesion (what we call social synthesis), so that he unwittingly reverts, as he does above, to the collective human will! If the free-will advocates were right, argues Brentano,

the most powerful force on earth, the human will, would become unpredictable, and everything would be so completely veiled in doubt and darkness that no one would be able to form a plan even for himself, let alone one requiring assistants for its fullment.

Brentano senses that even if individual wills were causally determined indeed, we say, especially if they were so! - this could still not explain the possibility of society, let alone its actual existence! For why should wills that are individual be pre-determined or pre-ordained to collective harmonious social action (much like Leibnizs monads)?What makes social cohesion possible is not the predictability of wills taken individually or ontogenetically but rather the inter-dependence of human needs (not necessity!) due to their phylogenetic nature which is not contrary to their being free in an ontological and then in a political sense. In contrast to Brentanos position, both Marx and Weber agreed that it is this very Sozialisierung or rational expectations this very need, not necessity! - that confutes determinism as the scientific basis of individual decisions, because it shows that in fact it is the phylogenetic attributes of species-conscious human beings the non-individuality of human needs, whether understood in a constructive sense (Marx) or in a conflictual one (Weber, Schmitts friend and foe) that makes possible the co-ordination of social labour through decisions, whether democratic or authoritarian, that are ineluctably political and therefore free at least in an ontological sense. (The further elaboration of these complex matters can be found in our Schmitt and the Concept of the Political, in Part Two of our Weber-buch, and in Part Three of our Nietzsche-buch, respectively from political, sociological, and ontological perspectives.)For the bourgeoisie to disguise coercion under the cloak of necessity, it needs a set of ideological tools that allow it to define social reality, and freedom in particular, in a way that emarginates conscious democratic choice from the concept of freedom so that it becomes all but irrelevant to our conception of social reality. It is not sufficient for the bourgeoisie to impose the rule of capital, the wage relation: it must also present this rule as a Mussen (Must), a choice made necessary by its scientific rationality, which makes it also a Sollen (Ought).For how else could choice, which implies the absence of logical or scientific necessity, become a matter of scientific inquiry unless it could be travestied as a necessary choice? Herein lies the key to the otherwise oxymoronic Robbinsian definition of economic science (cf. Lionel Robbins, Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science) as the science of choice. With Brentano and his psychologism (rational expectations), we are already at the origins of the Austrian School, marginal utility (Menger), and finally neoclassical economics (Walras). (Note that Brentanos strict determinism cannot even be compared to Windelbands idiographic/nomothetic distinction, because this last presupposed the existence of free individual choices but distinguished different levels of social scientific analysis, - the individual biographic level for the idiographic and the collective level for the nomothetic. The aporetic nature of this divide how can the historical turn to scientific when we shift our focus from individual to society? - was exposed by Weber in Roscher und Knies and F. Hayek in The Counter-Revolution of Science.) The trick lies in the well-hidden metaphysical-ethical assumption of bourgeois economics, disguised as rigourous science, that the welfare (read, self-interest) that individuals (read, fictitious atomised economic agents who in fact do not act at all cf. my Schumpeter-buch) can extract out of limited or given or scarce resources (but why scarce unless we assume that in-dividuals are even possible and that their self-interests are limitless?) is maximised (but how if self-interests are inscrutable except through the market which leads to the vicious circle: individuals decide market prices and market prices reflect their true decisions because they are made through the market mechanism?) through the application of rationally and scientifically-selected choices of, again, limited and scarce (on what criteria?) methods of production. The question arises: how has this complex if inglorious feat come to pass? How could freedom be transformed from a positive notion, a common human aspiration and universal goal or interest an inter esse (common being) -, into a negative notion as the resultant of endless and inextinguishable conflict between irreconcilable self-interests?The ultimate impenetrability of the Object, of the Kantian thing-in-itself, means that no Subject or Ego armed with whatever Reason will ever be able to reconcile appearance and reality, operari and esse. All that we know are appearances (Vorstellungen), because Reality is a qualitas occulta that com-prehends the totality of appearances as their meta-physical foundation, their sub-stratum, but no empirical Subject or Ego or other entity from within Reality can either initiate or even com-prehend them for the simple reason that Reality is neither their causa causans, nor is it their totality or sum of appearances, - again, because Reality is categorically different as their sub-stance, their being, their esse! In other words, the basis or ground of Reality is not something that can be derived from within its ec-sistence, its mani-festation, its ap-pearance, its epi-phenomenality, but rather it is something that is the very foundation of these. Yet this is the very dual purpose that the Reason is called upon to serve in Kants transcendental idealism as comprehension of the Object and as agency upon the Object as the positing of the transcendental Subject and of its Freedom or auto-nomy. But how can the Subject be able freely to initiate and comprehend Reality when it is an empirical part of this Reality subject to the very laws of Reason and nature to which every other being is subject? If indeed the thing-in-itself, Re-ality, is knowable only through phenomena or appearances, then there is no way in which even the totality of such appearances perceived by a Subject armed with Reason can ever, first, causally affect the thing-in-itself by initiating its causal chain, and second, be able to comprehend it in terms both of understanding it, giving a sense to it, and also of encompassing it. The two entities Subject and Object and the appearances that are the product of their interaction (the Subjects perception of the Object) are categorically distinct, wholly heterogeneous, and can therefore never affect each other. Either the Subject is yet another thing-in-itself, in which case it is an operari subject to the necessity of natural laws and has no free will, or else it is an autonomous entity that is neither a Subject nor a Reason (that is, an entity conscious of itself, an id-entity), but is instead a substance that is immanent to Reality and thereby constitutes its very Being (esse). This is the fundamental starting point of the critique of Kants summation of Western philosophy that will give rise to what we call here negatives Denken. The earliest statement of this critique is to be found in Schellings critique of Kant and then extended with significant modifications and additions by Schopenhauer. Kant had sought to bridge the Gap, the anti-nomy, between the Thing-in-itself and appearances, between noumena and phenomena, by invoking the necessity of a regulative principle that (a) could initiate such phenomena (what Kant called Grundmass or Aristotles causa causans) and thus serve as an autonomous Subject, and (b) could be their immanent sum-total (what he called Inbegriff) without thereby being deducible from such a sum or totality on pain of degenerating into a bad infinite. For Schelling and Schopenhauer, the chain of causality to which the Thing-in-itself or Reality is bound cannot be abstractly deduced a priori from a false infinity at the end of which there must be a transcendental substance or category that can com-prehend it as its toto genere (categorically) op-posite Ob-ject (Gegen-stand, standing against the Subject).

Put differently, there cannot be a Subject whose Freedom and Reason, upon which Kant relies, can then found both Pure Reason as the rational entity and Practical Reason as the ethical moment of Pure Reason whereby the free will is governed by rational rules that lead to the Categorical Imperative. To indulge in such abstraction is to posit axiomatically and quite unjustifiably, without a shred of empirical evidence, the very conclusion that we are seeking to prove. But how is it possible for a regulative ideal to execute such a foundational role? This question becomes even more acute when Kant demands that this unconditioned totality support and determine all the things of the world as their ground [Grundmass], not [merely] as their sum [Inbegriff](B 607).61 It is hard to overestimate the extent to which this distinction shapes Schellings thinking. For in distinguishing between the necessary ground and the Inbegriff of all things that follow from it(A 579/B 607),Kant makes clear the difference between an original unconditioned necessity and a derivative yet still unconditioned sum-total of all possible predicates(A573/B 601). But in demanding an original status for this necessary being, Kant sets for himself a goal that appears impossible to achieve from within his negative science. For an original ground cannot be reconciled with the regulative function of an ideal, which, as an ideal, is much more suited to delivering the sum-total of all possible predicates as the result of an ongoing process of determination. Moreover, it would appear that [39] an unconditioned ground must be more than merely possible, that it must be actual, that is positive [be empirically and intuitively rather than logically located], if it is to serve as the ground and basis for the determination of all things by reason. This absence or lack of an actual positive basis to support and receive all possible predicates is what Schelling calls a hole in Kants critique, which he believes his positive philosophy can fill, and indeed, with system resources Kant himself provides, yet fails to employ consistently (II/3,168). Accepting Kants claim that only an unconditioned ground can supply reason with a systematic unity of the grounds of explanation(A 612/B 641), it follows that this idea itself cannot be the result of an additive process, since such a process would be never-ending, generating instead only what Kant calls a potentially unconditioned ground. An actually unconditioned ground, in contrast, provides an absolute measure, which Kant calls a Grundma.62 Such an absolute measure is categorically different from the members of the series it initiates and supports, insofar as it is the starting point of a process to which other members of that series are subordinated(A 417/B 445). As Kant makes clear in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, an Absolute of this kind lies jenseits (beyond) any external reflective measure that depends on relative comparisons. As unconditioned, this Grundma is a measure that is only equal to itself.63 Kant describes how this works in his account of how the sublime generates a fundamental measure whose scope and force exceeds our powers of conceptualization. Calling this unlimited force exuberance [das berschwengliche], Kant states that it is, as it were, an abyss for our conceptual powers, insofar as they fear to lose themselves therein.64 While what Kant here describes is the encounter of our reflexive faculties with the sublime, the functional purpose of this Grundma in the third Critique parallels that of the unconditioned ground of the transcendental ideal in the first: both supply a ground that is jenseits [beyond] the series they ground, and which serves as the unifying and thus absolutely positive starting point of the reflective process of negation qua determination. Applying the very same terms in Berlin, Schelling goes a step further and maintains that the ground of explanation, and thus of reason, cannot itself be immanent to reasons operations. It must instead be jenseits of the series it grounds, so that this ground can be neither reflexively appropriated nor conceptually articulated, since per definitum it must precede our discursive analysis of it. (B. Matthews, Introduction to Schellings The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, pp.38-9.)

Put in other words, Kants regulative or transcendental ideal cannot account for phenomena (be their raison detre as initiation and comprehension) nor can it be derived from them because (a) it is categorically different from these phenomena, and (b) it cannot be immanent to them, least of all as their totality, which would result in a bad infinite, because such immanence would prevent the transcendental ideal from initiating and comprehending them. Kants Grundmass can neither initiate phenomena in a causal sequence (as an Aristotelian causa causans), nor can it com-prehend them as their as their totality or sum (Inbegriff) because it cannot at one and the same time be reflectively conscious of them and yet be immanent to them! In other words, if it is to initiate phenomena and their connection, the Subject or Reason cannot comprehend or be immanent to them, and if it is immanent to them, then it cannot comprehend them reflexively as their initiator, that is, transcend them as a conscious entity, as an identity ; it cannot be their Subject or Grundmass and Substance or Totality or Inbegriff at one and the same time. Thus, in Matthewss summary, and this is a crucial point, [i]t is reasons demand for a positive existing being of unconditioned necessity that ultimately forces reason to acknowledge its inability to ground itself from within its own sphere of reflexive thought, a failure of self-grounding which occurs when reasons compulsive movement comes face to face with the necessary concept of that which groundlessly exists, and before which nothing can be thought. This is what Kant calls the abyss of human reason, and what Schelling terms das Unvordenkliche: that which just exists is precisely that which crushes everything that may derive from thought, before which thought becomes silent, and before which reason itself bows down (II/3,161).It is perhaps here that we can see most clearly Schellings inversion of the modern ordering of the cogito to being.(Matthews, loc.cit., p.48)

The Grundmass that Kant was searching for must be a substance that sub-tends reality and appearances the world -, but it also cannot possibly be theorised as a Subject or an Ego-ity, a Self, an id-entity in other words, as an entity conscious of this Ground, because to be conscious of the Ground, of the Substance of the World, would be equivalent to being able to view objectively by being immanent to the object viewed - what is necessarily a subjective view (a-spect, An-blick). Reason itself must logically presuppose that existence, being, comes before its conceptualisation, before thought; reason itself must have, literally, a raison detre, a reason for being that is first and foremost the reason of being. In Schellings own words,Existence, which appears as accidental in everything else, is here the essence. The quod [the that] is here in the position of the quid [the what]. It is thus a pure idea, and nonetheless it is not an idea in the sense that this word enjoys in the negative philosophy [i.e. rationalist Western metaphysics]. That which just is [das blo Seyende] is being [das Seyn] from which, properly speaking, every idea, that is, every potency, is excluded. We will thus only be able to call it the inverted idea [Umgekehrte Idee], the idea in which reason is set outside itself. Reason can posit being in which there is still nothing of a concept, of a whatness [Latin, quidditas], only as something that is absolutely outside itself (of course only in order to acquire it thereafter, a posteriori, as its content, and in this way at the same time to return to itself). In this positing reason is therefore set outside itself, absolutely ecstatic. (II/3,1623)76 (Schelling quoted in Matthews, loc.cit. at p.50)But this being cannot be some thing that stands still in time; nor can it be the mere idea of being as an abstract entity; instead, it must be our actual experience of being. Although inverted, Schellings inverted idea still remains an idea; and although ec-static, it still remains within the ambit of reason. But this ec-stasis is not derived from standing outside the idea of reason that is derived from the interaction of the perception of reality our representations of it - and its regulation by Reason: it actually comes from penetrating the materiality of the thinking process the being of thought, which is the experience of existence or ec-sistence or, better still, our awareness or intuition of existing (vivo ergo cogito [Nietzsche], not cogito ergo sum [Descartes]). This awareness or intuition, because it precedes thought and reason, is not and cannot be consciousness, which is still in the sphere of thought, of cognition: it is rather awareness that is closer to intuition, and therefore to the conative, not cognitive, human experience of existence! This is the aspect, that of the Will, that Schopenhauer will develop, moving from Schellings still idealistic stance to a more physiological, naturalistic and materialist and immanentist position. For the moment, we shall limit ourselves to this formalist and idealist residuum in Schellings critical advance on Kant transcendental idealism. For Schelling, again, understands his inverted idea as the result of the logical priority of existence over thought, of experience over theory: given that even thought must have a certain materiality, then the ec-sistence of thought as a faculty must be prior to its conceptual or discursive development intuition must be prior to Reason. (Cf. on all this, our critique of Cacciari in Aesthetics vs. Aesthesis in relation to art as the problem of philosophy.) Not only, but this very primacy of existence over thought must also create an abyss, a chasm, a Fichtean hiatus at the very core of theory and Reason a hole in Kants philosophy and in rationalism tout court. It is this abyss, this impossibility of grounding thought and reason in their own essence because, remember, existence is now the essence that determines instantly the contingency of thought, the ineluctability of chance, of risk and therefore, for human beings, of freedom. Here is Matthews:The wish of rationalism for a perfectly complete and unchanging system of thought promises for Schelling nothing less than the nightmare of absolute [54] boredom. What is stronger than thinking? Wonder, amazement, ecstasy: all are volatile and ambiguous catalysts capable of breaking through the mediation of reflective thought, and thereby actually tying directly into our existence.

Herein lies the connection between ecstasy and alterity: reasons encounter with both entails the risk that accompanies all real freedom, a risk that in turn is the necessary condition for a philosophy that is not mythic, [and thus] like its political counterpart, ideology, silences present and future debate by locating certainty and closure in the non-historical and thus static now of eternity.

With this inverted idea, [] Schelling provides us with his final draft of the premise missing from Kants critical edifice, a premise of brute existence, whose alterity to thought provides Schelling with the actual conflict and opposition necessary to drive a real dialectical process. This processs trajectory of development betrays the unpredictable markings of living freedom. And it is precisely from the perspective of this chaotic field of the reciprocal interaction of thinking and being that Schelling aims his critique of Hegels mythic animation of the logical concept. (Matthews, pp.54-5)Because freedom is understood here in its raw facticity, as naked intuition, as brute existence, it follows that such freedom must precede all thought, all conceptualisation and therefore also all consciousness because the primary quality of consciousness is precisely its presumed discursivity and logic (cf. Wittgenstein). But as consciousness, as reflective thought, this con-scientia would entail the human ability to isolate positively a common goal, a common being, a human inter esse. Precisely because Schelling, and Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard after him, posit freedom as a universal state that precedes all reflexive thought as brute existence, this freedom in its crude immateriality, in its meta-physical ether-reality, in its total absence of corpor-reality, can exist only as conflict and opposition but this time not, as in Hegel, as a dialectical process intrinsic to thought and therefore subject to the strict Logos the extrinsication of the Idea in history but rather as raw, contingent, abysmal un-consciousness:That primordial deed which makes a man genuinely himself precedes all individual actions; but immediately after it is put into exuberant freedom, this deed sinks into the night of unconsciousness. This is not a deed that could happen once and then stop; it is a permanent deed, a never-ending deed, and consequently it can never again be brought before consciousness. For man to know of this deed, consciousness itself would have to return into nothingness. For man to know of this deed, consciousness itself would have to return into nothing, into boundless freedom, and would cease to be consciousness. This deed occurs once and then immediately sinks back into unfathomable depths; and nature acquires permanence precisely thereby. Likewise that will, posited once at the beginning, and then led to the outside, must immediately sink into unconsciousness. Only in this way is a beginning possible, a beginning that does not stop being a beginning, a truly eternal beginning. For here as well, it is true that the beginning cannot know itself. That deed once done, it is done for all eternity. The decision that in some manner is truly to begin must never be brought to consciousness; it must not be called back, because this would amount to being taken back. If, in making a decision, somebody retains the right to re-examine his choice, he will never make a beginning at all, (F. Schelling, W