The Philosophy of the Flesh: Toward an Immanentist Ontology of Perception

The notions of Nature and Reason, … far from explaining the metamorphoses… from perception to the more complex modes of human exchange, make them incomprehensible. Because by relating them to separate principles, these notions conceal a constantly experienced moment, the moment when an existence becomes aware of itself, grasps itself, and expresses its own sense. The study of perception could teach us a “bad ambiguity”, a mixture of finitude and universality, of interiority and exteriority. But there is a “good ambiguity” in the phenomenon of expression, a spontaneity that accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we considered only the separate elements, a spontaneity that gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture into a single whole. To establish this wonder would be metaphysics itself and would at the same time give us the principle of an ethics. (Merleau-Ponty Reader,’Unpublished Text’, p.290)

As is abundantly well known, one of the major weaknesses of the Marxian critique of political economy is its “determinism”. In seeking to discover “the economic laws of society”, Marx ended up reducing all significant human activity to the “labour that is socially necessary to ensure the reproduction of human society”. The “laws” governing the pro-duction of use values and exchange values also govern their distribution among social classes and thus form “the economic base” upon which all other social structures and institutions – from the family to the state to culture at large – are founded and that form therefore an “ideal superstructure” that serves merely to hide or camouflage the rock-solid reality of the basic social relations of production. This is the forma mentis of traditional Marxism: in this perspective, it is the “material economic base” that determines or drives the “ideological superstructure”; and it is the combination of the two that constitutes human history. This duality of physical realism and of spiritual idealism is yet another manifestation of the separation of Nature and Reason, of Form and Matter, of Mind and Body, and finally of Subject and Object, that has characterized Western thought from its inception.

Because Marx’s thought – his “realism” – tended to relegate all philosophy to the sphere of mere interpretation, Marxism has always displayed a clear aversion to and insufferance for philosophical speculation and especially the prima philosophia, the theory of the foundation of reality itself – namely, meta-physics and ontology. In this regard, Marx was replicating for his “critique of political economy” what Kant had performed in the Critique of Pure Reason, neatly separating the world into “mere appearances” and “things in themselves”, the latter being the ultimately inscrutable “cause” behind the former. For human knowledge to be founded on

“scientific” bases, Kant proposed that we acknowledge the strict separation of appearances in search of explanation and the ultimate immutable reality of which they were a mere “re-presentation” (Vor-stellung). This is the separation (chorismos) or “the separated principles” of Nature and Reason to which Merleau-Ponty alluded in the quotation above – a separation or worse still an opposition (Gegen-stand, the German word for “object”) that we must transform into a “participation” (methexis, in the terminology of Nicholas of Cusa) in harmony with our project for a better world.

What we find inspiring in Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of this separation is the fact that it states the problem in the tersest manner, and then suggests an answer together with the reason why it is a valid answer. The problem, tersely but improperly stated, is whether metaphysics can suggest an ethics – that is to say, whether an ontology, a theory of reality, can provide the “ground” not just for a “view” of reality but also for a de-ontology, for a framework or pro-ject of action upon reality. One of the hardest things to do for people of a radical disposition is to provide a foundation for their “convictions”, for their intention no longer “to interpret the world, but to change it”. Yet such foundation must be found or at least our inquiry into it (remember that the original word for history in Greek was istorein, to inquire) must be commenced somewhere. Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach betrays most eloquently his “in-sufferance” for the task of (philosophical) interpretation of social reality and his urgency for its practical “scientific” transformation. Had Nietzsche been aware of this Thesis, he would most probably have retorted that “philosophers thus far have pretended to interpret the world when in reality they were attempting to change it”! For unlike Marx, Nietzsche held no illusions that social reality could be deterministically reduced to “scientific laws” or that “socially necessary labour time” could ever constitute and determine “the laws of motion” of human history and societies.

The entire aim of our studies so far has been not merely to attempt to change the world as it is at present by interpreting it, by “under-standing” its functioning and mode of operation the more easily to intervene on it or at least to contrast it; but it has been also in large part to understand the reasons behind our exertions, behind our radicalism. We may know what to change and how to do it out of what Daniel Guerin once called a “visceral opposition” to the status quo, but we still need to know why we engage in “the ruthless criticism of all that exists” if we are going to have any chance of success. Our goals need to be clear before we set out to deploy our means. What we are attempting here is a critical re-foundation of an “autonomist ontology” that generates its goals not from the positing of extrinsic

values but rather from the identification of the most basic human mode of perception of reality. (Cf. M-P, end of “Unpublished Text” synopsis in ‘Reader’.)

So far we have employed the approach of “critique” on the road to this quest because it is often easier to learn from the discoveries as well as the mistakes of theoreticians and practitioners that have preceded us. But “critiques” are necessarily “negative” in character: they are meant to de-struct rather than to con-struct – and that is what we have done predominantly to date, except to the degree that every “negation” often involves also “the negation of the negation” and so, perhaps, some “positive affirmation” as well. It is obvious that our task cannot be confined to “the ruthless criticism of everything that exists” (Marx) because such critique would have no “meaning” unless it also had a “purpose”. There where actions have no meaning they can also be said to lack purpose, and vice versa. What then can be our purpose – and on what meaning can it be founded?

This is the area perhaps where the thought of Karl Marx leaves most to be desired, even in view of its (again) “fundamental” importance. The most refined corrections and improvements on Marxist thought in this arena have probably come from post-Nietzschean elaborations, culminating especially in the Italian left-Heideggerianism that was an offshoot of the “new left” move away from the orthodoxy of Communist parties of the European post-Stalinist era. Marxism may well have provided a “deontological” guide to our opposition to the ravages of capitalist industry, morally, ethically and then politically predicated on the notion of “the theft of labour time”. But if “labour time” is merely the time that is “socially necessary” to produce goods and services for “consumption”, then it is obvious that Marx has reduced the entire “problem” of capitalism to the mere “distribution” of the “social product”. Not only does this “critique” crumble to a mere “gripe or grudge” over distribution, over the share of the spoils; but it also fails to challenge the technical-scientific orientation of capitalism, its technology and science, - the political choice of what it produces and how it produces it. Even if we agree with Marx that a certain “quantity” of labour-time is (physically!) necessary for a human society to reproduce itself (again, “physically”), it is still obvious that this “minimum quantity” necessary for “reproduction” may well constitute a “necessary condition” but not in the least a “sufficient condition” to ensure the actual “reproduction” of a society – a process that is as much political and cultural as it is narrowly “economic”!

The Marxian critique also never proffered the ontological ground on which any praxis or deontology could be founded and erected. It is

fair to say that Marx was too tied to the philosophy of the Enlightenment in its twin excrescences of German Idealism and scientific rationalism to be able to escape the fallacies that engulfed them both and that were exposed so virulently already by the critics of the negatives Denken from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche through to Weber and finally Heidegger (cf. for all, this last author’s Letter on Humanism). The fundamental error of Western philosophical and scientific thought has always been to seek to identify “objectively” the purpose and meaning of action with its “object” – to con-fuse therefore activity with matter, the operari with the opus, the agere with the actus and the facere with the factum. And this con-fusion of the quest for the “meaning” of human reality (of its “perception”) with the “certainty” and “calculability” of it has meant that, in the words of Nietzsche, Western metaphysics has always sought the “fixity” of Being, its “essence”, and has neglected its “being-as-becoming”. As a result, this Western “will to truth” (Nietzsche) has turned into a maniacal “quest for certainty”, for the “full end” (Voll-endung) of history and consequently of philosophy itself. This quest, however, could only end in nihilism – that is, in the debunking of all “truths” and “values” -, and determine what Heidegger called the ‘Vollendung’ – at once the ful-filment and com-pletion, and therefore the ex-haustion, of the Western metaphysical tradition. (Again, the obligatory reference is to Heidegger, Vol.2 of his Nietzsche.) Given that no “ultimate” values can be “fixed” with “certainty”, given that “truth” can never be identical with its “object”, Nietzsche was keen to stress the importance of what happens in “life”, in that place that lies be-tween “the first thing” (birth) and “the last thing” (death).

The question for us is: if we accept with Nietzsche that there are no ultimate values or final and definitive truths, that there is no summum bonum, what “meaning and purpose” can we then bestow upon our lives that will guide our living activity and that will make our political action worthwhile? It may be said that we are a purpose in search of a meaning, a need in search of a reason. Nietzsche’s ontology is in-comprehensible (it cannot be grasped practically) without his notion of the Eternal Return of the Same which is premised entirely on the interpretation of historical events as “symptoms” or “signs” of either the underlying “health” or else of the “Disgregation” of the instincts of freedom (will to power) of human agents. The notion of the Eternal Return is neither cyclical (palingenesis) nor anagogical (as in the anakyklosis), but refers instead to a novel conception of “time” as nunc stans – the “now” understood not as a point on a “sequence” of past nows and future nows, but rather as an entirely different “dimension” in which time is not spatialised, in which it cannot be measured, added to or subtracted from. For Nietzsche, everything

happens at once; only in this sense does it “return eternally” and in this sense must “fate be loved” (amor fati).

Arendt’s profound incomprehension of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values is due in large part to her inability to penetrate Nietzsche’s entirely novel interpretation of place (Ort) as different from “time and space”! – Which is strange, because Heidegger (whom Arendt knew…intimately, to be scabrous) elaborated it at great length though incompletely or incorrectly in his thorough critique of the Kantian notion of intuition in his Kantbuch, which he meant as the second part of Being and Time. Arendt also and rightly begins her peripatetic assessment of the life of the mind with a critique of Kant’s epistemology (a cours force’ it seems for most modern thinkers), which in turn she interprets as a response to the solipsism of the Cartesian cogito. We agree with Arendt that the mind has a life not merely metaphorically but in the full sense of the word, materially, because we do not accept as valid the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter – a dualism that degenerates inevitably into solipsism given that the cogito admits and conceives of ec-sistence exclusively as a “mental thing” – the res cogitans as opposed to the res extensa -, and that the res cogitans must constitute an indivisible unity (in Leibnitz’s powerful phrase, “a being must be a being”). The mind has a life because it is “part” of life, it is within “life and the world”: that is its “materiality”. A mind without life and the world is unimaginable because for the mind to ec-sist it needs a life and a world in which to be situ-ated, loc-ated, that is, it needs a site and a locus, a “place” that is categorically distinct from our conventional notions called “time and space”. Similarly, life has a mind to the extent that we cannot conceive of life without an organ capable of conceiving life – the mind, whose locus is not necessarily the brain or the heart but again a “place”, a dimension categorically distinct from any body organs or functions.

[Cassirer, Individuo y Cosmos, fn.57 – Nietzsche and “inter-pretation”, no “thing” to be interpreted. Being-as-becoming, “place” and not “time and space”.]

Pero la grandezadel Cusano en este aspecto y su significación histórica estriban en el hecho de que en él,lejos de cumplirse este proceso en oposición al pensamiento religioso de la Edad Media,se lleva a cabo precisamente dentro de la órbita de ese pensamiento mismo. Desde elpropio centro de lo religioso realiza el descubrimiento de la naturaleza y del hombreque intenta afianzar y fijar en ese centro. El místico y el teólogo que hay en Nicolás [56]de Cusa se sienten a la altura del mundo y de la naturaleza, a la altura de la historia y dela nueva cultura secular y humana. No se aparta de ellas ni las rechaza sino que, como

cada vez se entrega más y más a su círculo, va incluyéndolas al mismo tiempo en supropia esfera de pensamientos. Aun desde los primeros tratados del Cusano es posibleseguir este proceso; y si en ellos prevalece el motivo platónico del chorismos49, en lasobras posteriores gana la primacía el motivo de la methexis50.En sus últimas obras semanifiesta como cumbre de la teoría la convicción de que la verdad, que al principiohabía buscado en la oscuridad de la mística y que había determinado como oposición atoda multiplicidad y mudanza, se revela sin embargo precisamente en medio del reinode la multiplicidad empírica misma, la convicción de que la verdad clama por lascalles51. Cada vez con mayor fuerza se da en Nicolás de Cusa ese sentimiento delmundo y, con él, ese su característico optimismo religioso. El vocablo panteísmo no esadecuado para designar acabadamente ese nuevo sentimiento del mundo, pues no sedesvanece aquí la oposición entre el ser de Dios y el ser del mundo, sino que por elcontrario se mantiene incólume en toda su plenitud. Pero como lo enseña el tratado Devisione Dei, si la verdad de lo universal y lo particular de lo individual se compenetran mutuamente en forma tal que el ser de Dios sólo puede ser comprendido y visto en la infinita multiplicidad de los puntos de vista individuales, del mismo modo podemos descubrir también el ser que está más allá de toda limitación, de toda contracción, solo y precisamente en esa limitación. De modo que el ideal hacia el cual debe tender nuestro conocimiento no consiste en desconocer ni en desechar lo particular, [57] sino más bien en comprender el pleno despliegue de toda su riqueza, pues sólo la totalidad del rostro nos proporciona la visión una de lo divino.

We can see here, in Cassirer’s account of the thought of Nicholas of Cusa, which in many ways pre-announces that of Hegel (cf. at par.60), how the notion of “totality” subsists even as Nicholas elevates the “participation” (methexis) of the particular as an “a-spect”, a “view” of the “whole”. Similarly, in the erroneous exegesis of Nietzsche’s thought (in Jaspers as in Foucault), the primacy of “interpretation” is supposed to refer to the im-possibility of encompassing this “totality”. But this is far from Nietzsche’s meaning! The notion of “inter-pretation” always implies a “mediation” between the interpreter and the “interpretandum” – “that” which is inter-preted, a mediation between the “thing” and the “knowledge of the thing” on the part of an “inter-preter”. But this is exactly what Nietzsche denies – the ec-sistence of a “thing” whose “totality” or “truth” we cannot com-prehend or en-compass. Far from ec-sisting independently of the knower or interpreter (whose ineluctable task it is to be con-fined to “infinite interpretations” -, for Nietzsche neither “the thing” nor its “truth” have a “totality” that can re-fer (bring back) to an under-lying, sub-stantial “re-ality” (thing-iness or what-ness). This is the consistent meaning of “esse est percipi” that eluded both Berkeley and Schopenhauer – because both thought that “being” was a function of per-ception, so that it is the “perceiver” that bestows being to the “perceived” – which is the true meaning of “idealism” as against “realism”. In effect, both Berkeley and Schopenhauer conceive of “the

world as representation or Idea” in a neoplatonic sense that opposes Ideas to the “world of appearances”. But Nietzsche and Nicholas of Cusa are speaking the language, not of pantheism but of “immanence”, like Spinoza: they are saying that “being” ec-sists only as appearance, as per-ception; for them, “the apparent world” has disappeared together with the “real or true world”. The opposition of “real” and “apparent” worlds or being is the ineluctable outcome of the transcendental attitude that opposes (this is the meaning of the Platonic chorismos, of the philosophia perennis) particular “beings” to “the Being of beings” – the particular to the “totality”, the part to the whole. Note that Heidegger (cited by Arendt in ‘LotM’, p.11) claims that with this phrase Nietzsche has “eliminated the difference between the sensible and supra-sensory worlds” – and in this he is clearly wrong because Nietzsche never wished to refute “the difference” between the two worlds: he wished instead to make a dif-ference by exposing the meaninglessness of their “opposition”! Of course, Heidegger had every interest in “relegating” Nietzsche to the nihilism (incomplete or complete) that he had denounced and sought to overcome! This is the point that Arendt herself misses completely: “What is ‘dead’ is not only the localization of such ‘eternal truths’, but also the distinction itself” (p.10).

And this is the meaning of nihilism for Arendt. Yet she also is wrong: nihilism for Nietzsche does not consist in “the elimination of the distinction or difference” between true and apparent worlds. Nihilism is the very fact that belief in the suprasensory world leads to the annihilation of the sensible world. The seed of nihilism is contained in the very thought of trans-scendence – and this is a “fallacy” to which Arendt clearly and genially points, but ultimately does not elude (see Preface, p.11). The “overcoming” of nihilism, however, starts precisely with the overcoming, not of the distinction or difference between the two worlds, but with the real source of this “distinction” or opposition, which is the forma mentis that generates this distinction, with the transcendental attitude that forms the substratum of this philosophia perennis. This is the “com-pletion and exhaustion [Voll-endung] of metaphysics” for Nietzsche. What Nietzsche certifies is “the end of transcendental metaphysics” in a practical, even political, sense. But that is not to say that a “metaphysics of immanence” is no longer possible: on the contrary, it becomes necessary. – Because, as Arendt insists, as do Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, “meaning” and “truth-as-certainty” are not the same thing! (Preface to ‘LotM’.) [Refer to discussion of Nicholas of Cusa.]

The entire aim of Kant’s critique of metaphysics – his enquiry into the “possibility” of any “future metaphysics able to call itself ‘science’” – was to avoid the Cartesian dualism by relegating the subiectum of reality to the inscrutable status of “the thing in itself”, which allowed the hiatus between this last and human knowledge to be “bridged” or “mediated” by the human faculties of intuition, the intellect (the understanding), and finally pure reason, in a series of “mediations” that moved from “mere appearances” to “the laws of nature” and those of logico-mathematics as “governed” by the rule of pure reason. Kant accepted the skepticism of both Leibnitz and Hume over the existence of a “subject” as the “author” or agent of the thinking process. Descartes had committed the fallacy of presupposing an “agent” behind every “action” – and therefore he presumed that the act of thinking necessarily presupposed the existence of a “thinker”. Both Leibnitz and Hume, and most emphatically Nietzsche, showed that this was a non sequitur. Leibnitz, in particular, postulated that reality could not be divided into noumena and phenomena for the “sufficient reason” that everything that exists, including phenomena or mere appearances (Kant’s blosse Erscheinungen), has a greater right to exist than what does not: - and that is a “sufficient reason” for its being.

Only in this limited sense, the certainty of “per-ception” – the fact that there is something instead of nothing – was the Cartesian cogito “certain”. And in this sense Nietzsche was right to replace the Cartesian cogito ergo sum with his “vivo ergo cogito”. As Merleau-Ponty reminds us in the quotation below regarding the cogito: “Sa vérité logique … est que pour penser il faut être.” It is not the act of thinking that comes first; rather, it is the ineluctable reality of “living” or perception that precedes “thinking-as-reflection” or “consciousness” and, much farther down the track, that of the thinking subject, of the ‘I’. This conceptual chain, what Nietzsche calls “the ontogeny of thought”, and the evermore strict con-nection between perceptions, then reflection, and then the extrapolation to a conceptually or logically necessary chorismos (Plato) or separation between the perceiver and the perceived (of ideas and things, says Merleau-Ponty below) was to become the fateful problematic for Western thought. Had Descartes been more careful in his formulation of the cogito, as Nietzsche and Arendt suggested, he would have expressed it as “cogito me cogitare, ergo sum” (p.20, LotM). But in that case it would have become obvious to him that the first “cogito”, the one that “perceives” that “I think”, begs the question of whether the “thinking” is done by a “thinker”, by an ‘I’ – which, as Nietzsche showed beyond question, leads to a circulus vitiosus (each fresh statement pre-supposes a previous “thinking subject” or ‘I’); or to a non sequitur (because thinking can occur without a thinking subject

or ‘I’). This is the “fundamentality” of thought, its “abyss” or, with Nietzsche, its “Being-as-becoming”:

Quant à la source même des pensées, nous savons maintenant que, pour la trouver, il nous faut chercher sous les énoncés, et [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, SIGNES. (1960) 27] notamment sous l'énoncé fameux de Descartes [that is, the cogito]. Sa vérité logique - qui est que « pour penser il faut être » -, sa signification d'énoncé le trahissent par principe, puisqu'elles se rapportent à un objet de pensée au moment où il faut trouver accès vers celui qui pense et vers sa cohésion native, dont l'être des choses et celui des idées sont la réplique. La parole de Descartes est le geste qui montre en chacun de nous cette pensée pensante à découvrir, le « Sésame ouvre-toi » de la pensée fondamentale. Fondamentale parce qu'elle n'est véhiculée par rien. Mais non pas fondamentale comme si, avec elle, on touchait un fond où il faudrait s'établir et demeurer. Elle est par principe sans fond et si l'on veut abîme; cela veut dire qu'elle n'est jamais avec elle-même, que nous la trouvons auprès ou à partir des choses pensées, qu'elle est ouverture, l'autre extrémité invisible de l'axe qui nous fixe aux choses et aux idées. (Merleau-Ponty, Signes, p.27.)

This “fundamentality” of thought is why for Kant, contrary to Descartes, the question of the Ich-heit or Ego-ity (the thinking subject), could not be settled by rational means: the ‘I’ was a concept that belonged to the transcendental dialectic in that its existence could not be proven by scientific or logical means. Arendt (in the preface to ‘LotM’, pp13ff) rightly laments the distinction Kant made between Reason and Intellect and the relegation of the former to the task of “cognition” rather than “thought”, of “truth” rather than “meaning”, - something that he ought to have left to the Intellect instead, as Schopenhauer rightly insisted (see discussion in section below). But neither Kant nor Schopenhauer nor even Arendt ever question the nexus rerum constituted by the physical laws of cause and effect; and this failure is what prevents them from posing correctly, “meaningfully”, the question of “transcendence”, of the “separation” of the suprasensible and the sensible worlds. Though he questioned the possibility of meta-physics, Kant’s philosophical efforts were directed at showing how scientific laws were possible: how it is possible for human beings to discover invariant relations between physical events with the predictable precision or “certainty” of logico-mathematics that justified their description as “natural laws” on account of the causally necessary link – otherwise known as nexus rerum - that permitted the ontological and epistemological ordo et connexio rerum et idearum (order and connection of things and ideas). Kant reasoned that we need to go beyond the Leibnitzian Principle of Sufficient Reason because that principle cannot account for the mathematical regularity of scientific observations: - as he revealingly put it, Reason had to give back to Nature the “order” that the latter had supplied with its “regularity”. Although reason is

inconceivable without human intuition to provide it with the material content of its conceptual categories, this human intuition in turn could not become aware of its content (it could not con-ceive or com-prehend or “grasp” it) without the mediation of the Schematismus of the intellect and, in turn, of the logico-mathematical “rules” of Pure Reason.

Kant regresses back into Cartesian dualism by simply positing the “finitude” of the per-cipient subject and the “noumenality”, the incom-prehensibility of the per-ceived Object, of Being in its “totality”. This is the kernel of what we may call (with Merleau-Ponty) “the transcendental attitude”. Kant distinguishes two “moments” (momenta) of experience, one being the “constitutive” (perception) and the other the “regulative” (concepts or theory). This “separation” (or chorismos) of perception and the perceived, of the percipi and the esse, already pre-supposes a dualism of perceiving Subject and perceived Object. The act of perception is founded on the logical presupposition that there is a “thing” that is to be perceived – the Object. And the logical requirement of the act of perceiving is that there be an “entity”, a Subject, that “does” the perceiving. Whereas Descartes had placed the Ego or the Soul at the summit of philosophy, Kant preferred to appoint the logico-mathematical powers of human thought. It is the very ec-sistence of logico-mathematical id-entities that are within life and the world, within experience, and yet are independent of experience for their “truth” or “validity” – it is this a priori ec-sistence of logico-mathematical rules or laws that confirms the ec-sistence of two separate yet inextricable aspects of human existence: the constitutive principle of experience and the regulative principle of theory, the awareness or intuition of the res or “things”and the cognitive ability to link these “things” according to cognitive rules. There exists therefore both a faculty that “links” or “con-nects” ideas between themselves, and a faculty that links or connects these “ideas” with “things”, and an entity that pro-duces these “ideas” (the Sub-ject) as well as the “things” (that are ordered and connected) in themselves! Here Being is seen as “pre-sence”, as a fixed entity: what is forgotten is that the only “fixity” is that of the “degree zero” of being, which is its “being-for-others”, its perceptibility and not some kind of “nothing-ness” (Heidegger), as even Merleau-Ponty ends up mistaking it:

Les choses et le monde visibles, d'ailleurs, sont-ils autrement faits? Ils sont toujours derrière ce que j'en vois, en horizon, et ce qu'on appelle visibilité est cette transcendance même. Nulle chose, nul côté de la chose ne se montre qu'en cachant activement les autres, en les dénonçant dans l'acte de les masquer. Voir, c'est par principe voir plus qu'on ne voit, c'est accéder à un être de latence. L'invisible est le relief et la profondeur du

visible, et pas plus que lui le visible ne comporte de positivité pure. (Signes, p26, my emphases.)

Merleau-Ponty, like Heidegger and Husserl and Hegel before them, continues to approach the question of being in its “verticality”, its transcendence – and so betrays his own enterprise. (Arendt speaks of “depth” [or ‘true being’] and “surfaces” [or ‘mere appearances’] to distinguish between transcendence and immanence [see ‘LotM’, p26 and p30 on “the value of the surface”]. Negri adopts this term, too in his writings on Spinoza.) Had he turned to the immanentists, he would have understood more fully what he himself sustains below when he substitutes “visible et invisible” for “etre et neant” – the impossibility of Being ec-sisting in its “totality”, as “pre-sence” that would render the pre-sent (the nunc stans) meaningless, as “un etre sans restriction”; - and therefore the futility or irrelevance of transcendentalism:

Dimensionnalité, ouverture n'auraient plus de sens. L’absolument ouvert s'appliquerait complètement sur un être sans restriction, et, faute d'une autre dimension dont elle ait à se distinguer, ce que nous appelions la « verticalité », - le présent - ne voudrait plus rien dire. Plutôt que de l'être et du néant, il vaudrait mieux parler du visible et de l'invisible, en répétant qu'ils ne sont pas contradictoires. On dit invisible comme on dit immobile: non pour ce qui est étranger au mouvement, mais pour ce qui s'y maintient fixe. C'est le point ou le degré zéro de visibilité, l'ouverture d'une dimension du visible. Un zéro à tous égards, un être sans restriction ne sont pas à considérer. Quand je parle du néant, il y a déjà de l’être, ce néant ne néantise donc pas pour de bon, et cet être n'est pas identique à soi, sans question. (Signes, p27.)

The limit of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception can be sensed in his failure to appreciate how the notion of “becoming” in Nietzsche’s version of the concept does not leave “the sensible, time and history” untouched but trans-values them quite radically:

La philosophie qui dévoile ce chiasma du visible et de l'invisible est tout le contraire d'un survol. Elle s'enfonce dans le sensible, dans le temps, dans l'histoire, vers leurs jointures, elle ne les dépasse pas par des forces qu'elle aurait en propre, elle ne les dépasse que dans leur sens. On rappelait récemment le mot de Montaigne « tout mouvement nous découvre. » et l'on en tirait avec raison que l'homme n'est qu'en mouvement 6. De même le monde ne tient, l'Être ne tient qu'en mouvement, c'est ainsi seulement que toutes choses peuvent être ensemble. La philosophie est la remémoration [anamnesis] de cet être-là, dont la science ne s'occupe pas, parce qu'elle conçoit les rapports de l'être et de la connaissance comme ceux du géométral et de ses projections, et qu'elle oublie l'être d'enveloppement, ce qu'on [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, SIGNES. (1960) 28] pourrait appeler la topologie de l'être.

But Merleau-Ponty’s interesting notion of “invisibility” as “the degree zero of visibility” leads us back to the discussion over Schmitt’s

“exception” and Hobbes’s “hypothesis” and Nietzsche’s Invariance – all of which are “border” or “liminal” concepts, as it were, and offer revealing radiographies of the bourgeois transcendental and ontogenetic understanding of human being. Having just stated that “quand je parle du néant, il y a déjà de l’être”, Merleau-Ponty remains locked in the transcendental attitude that he attempts to supersede because he remains tied to the Heideggerian phenomenological notion of “nothing-ness”: if “being is in motion”, if it is a “be-coming”, then there must also be a non-being that pre-supposes being, which is the “space” left “empty” by the pre-sent being understood as a fixity. Similarly, “in-visibility” has meaning or “sense” only in the light of visibility (“la lueure de l’etre” [p21], an echo of Heidegger’s Lichtung). Merleau-Ponty has a vice of falling into these delusional dualisms as when he speaks of “silence” enveloping “words”, for meaning or “sens” as “l’etre d’enveloppement” and the Platonic “anamnesis” (cf. his expressions above, at p.28 of ‘Signes’).

It is interesting also that Foucault and then Agamben (Homo Sacer) mistake this “degree zero” for some puerile pre-political “state of innocence” that has been tainted by “statality”, by civil society as “bourgeois society”, as a degeneration or de-secration from “zoe” to “bios”. In effect, Agamben et alii erect a “naked life” as a bulwark against the “fiction” of citizenship that de-fines the “border” between the state of legality and that of “exception”.

E em referencia a esta definicao que Foucault, ao final daVontade de saber, resume o processo atraves do qual, noslimiares da Idade Moderna, a vida natural comep, par suavez, a ser incluida nos mecanismos enos calculos do poderestatal, e a politica se transforma em biopolitica: "Par milenios,o homem permaneceu o que era para Aristoteles: um animalvivente e, alem disso, capaz de existencia politica; o homemmoderno e um animal em cuja politica esta em questao a suavida de ser vivente." (Foucault, 1976, p. 127) (See pp.3-4 of Eng. Edtn.)

Despite his appeals to the authoriality of Hannah Arendt (for he is a master at seeking out associations with “authors” such as Heidegger and Deleuze), Agamben neglects the cardinal importance that Arendt gave precisely to the concept of “citizenship”, not as a mark of biopolitical repression, but indeed as the only realistic and real “protection” of a human being by a human community! There is no reference in Arendt to this “primacy of natural life” to which Agamben refers (p.4). Little wonder that he should complain (same page) that “Arendt establishes no connection” between the analyses in ‘HC’ and in ‘OT’! The Nazi concentration camps operated not on the basis that “citizenship” was denied to the Jews, as Agamben foolishly believes,

but precisely on the Nietzschean and later Schmittian notion that society and its “ontogeny of thought” are fictitious “masks” that serve to dissemble the “nakedness” of life as exploitation! Though this debacle may have begun with the progressive emargination of social groups from the protection of citizenship, as Arendt genially showed, the Nazis never saw Jews as “people deprived of citizenship” – and they never meant thereby “to exclude” them from any kind of biopolitical “statality” or “statal power”. The Nazis quite simply ob-literated the very notion of “citizenship” altogether! – In such a way that the Jews became in their eyes the “innocent” (Unschuldig!) victims of the struggle for life, the war of all against all, - the state of nature that is exactly what Agamben’s notion of “nuda vita” and Foucault’s earlier Aristotelian one of “zoe” ineluctably revive! In the Nazi ideology, Jews were merely the representatives of a losing “slave morality” that were to be dominated by the homologously “ir-responsible” or “un-accountable” (un-ver-antwort-lich) Nazi “Arian” bearers of the “master morality”! To lump together political systems that retain the notion of “citizenship” with systems like the Nazi state that abolished citizenship completely is to commit a political misjudgement of the worst possible kind! The puerility of Agamben’s “late-romantic” Rousseauean reveries is of an almost unbearable naivete’ – something that Nietzsche exposed and ridiculed with “the ontogeny of thought” which shows, in a manner later rejuvenated by Arendt, the (sit venia verbo!) “nakedness” (allusion to Agamben’s “nuda vita” or naked life) of the violence that the bourgeois transcendental attitude and ontogeny unleashes on beings human because of its equally “naked” denigration and denial of any phylogenetic inter esse, let alone “citizenship”! Nietzsche falsely believed to be able to overcome the nihilism of Western thought by exposing its Invariance: in reality, however, he only ended up identifying the ineluctability of exploitation and of “the pathos of distance”, as well as the instrumentality of the capitalist logico-mathematical and scientific order. (Esposito, incidentally, has sought to redefine inter esse as comunitas, with the emphasis on the munere which preserves the social individuality of the esse and shifts the political emphasis from the inter.)

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Or, si nous chassons de notre esprit l'idée d'un texte original dont notre langage serait la traduction ou la version chiffrée, nous verrons que l'idée d'une expression complète fait non-sens, que tout langage est indirect ou allusif, est, si l'on veut, silence. (‘Signes’, p45)

Again, the “totality” of being, just like “the complete expression” is a non-sense, says Merleau-Ponty. The “parallelism” of word and object, of thought and word is therefore also a nonsense:

Il n'est pas davantage de pensée qui soit complètement pensée et qui ne demande à des mots le moyen d'être présente à elle-même. Pensée et parole s'escomptent l'une l'autre. Elles se substituent continuellement l'une à l'autre. Elles sont relais, stimulus l'une pour l'autre. Toute pensée vient des paroles et y retourne, toute parole est née dans les pensées et finit en elles. Il y a entre les hommes et en chacun une incroyable végétation de paroles dont les « pensées » sont la nervure. - On dira - mais enfin, si la parole est autre chose que bruit ou son, c'est que la pensée y dépose une charge de sens -, et le sens lexical ou grammatical d'abord - de sorte qu'il n'y a jamais contact que de la pensée avec la pensée -. Bien sûr, des sons ne sont parlants que pour une pensée, cela ne veut pas dire que la parole soit dérivée ou seconde. Bien sûr, le système même du langage a sa structure pensable. Mais, quand nous parlons, nous ne la pensons pas comme la pense le linguiste, nous n'y pensons pas même, nous pensons à ce que nous disons. Ce n'est pas seulement que nous ne puissions penser à deux choses à la fois : on dirait que, pour avoir devant nous un signifié, que ce soit [26] à l'émission ou à la réception, il faut que nous cessions de nous représenter le code et même le message, que nous nous fassions purs opérateurs de la parole. La parole opérante fait penser et la pensée vive trouve magiquement ses mots. Il n'y a pas la pensée et le langage, chacun des deux ordres à l'examen se dédouble et envoie un rameau dans l'autre. (‘Signes’, p24)

In fact here even the “la” of “la pensee” ought to be in cursive – because if languages interpenetrate thoughts, then it is foolhardy to postulate the existence of “one” thought: there are as many “thoughts” as there are words to articulate and express them. Merleau-Ponty obliquely argues as much when he rightly observes that there cannot be any plausible analytical distinction between synchronic “parole” and diachronic “langue” a’ la Saussure. (See generally “Le Phenomene du Langage” in Signes, p.85:

L'expérience de la parole n'aurait alors rien à nous enseigner sur l’être du langage, elle n'aurait pas de portée ontologique.

C'est ce qui est impossible. Dès qu'on distingue, à côté de la science objective du langage, une phénoménologie de la parole, on met en route une dialectique par laquelle les deux disciplines entrent en communication.

D'abord le point de vue « subjectif » enveloppe le point de vue « objectif » ; la synchronie enveloppe la diachronie. Le passé du langage a commencé par être [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, SIGNES. (1960) 86] présent, la série des faits linguistiques fortuits que la perspective objective met en évidence s'est incorporée à un langage qui, à chaque moment, était un système doué d'une logique interne.

Here once again Merleau-Ponty seems unable to distinguish between human ana-lysis – literally, the retrovisual categorization of reality that ends up in the prima philosophia (ontology) and the “reality” that is the “fundament” or even the “abyss” of thought and language and

action, in short, of what may be called the point of intuition, the reality of perception.

Yet Merleau-Ponty’s conception of thought remains tied to the intra-mundane notion of time:

Il n'y aurait rien s'il n'y avait cet abîme du soi. Seulement un abîme n'est pas rien, il a ses bords, ses entours. On pense toujours à quelque chose, sur, selon, d'après quelque chose, à l'endroit, à l'encontre de quelque chose. Même l'action de penser est prise dans la poussée de l’être. Je ne peux pas penser identiquement à la même chose plus d'un instant. L'ouverture par principe est aussitôt comblée, comme si la pensée ne vivait qu'à l'état naissant. Si elle se maintient, c'est à travers - c'est par le glissement qui la jette à l'inactuel. Car il y a l'inactuel de l'oubli, mais aussi celui de l'acquis. C'est par le temps que mes pensées datent, c'est par lui aussi quelles font date, qu'elles ouvrent un avenir de pensée, un cycle, un [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, SIGNES. (1960) 21] champ, qu'elles font corps ensemble, qu'elles sont une seule pensée, qu'elles sont moi. La pensée ne troue pas le temps, elle continue le sillage des précédentes pensées, sans même exercer le pouvoir, qu'elle présume, de le tracer à nouveau, comme nous pourrions, si nous voulions, revoir l'autre versant de la colline : mais à quoi bon, puisque la colline est là ? À quoi bon m'assurer que ma pensée du jour recouvre ma pensée d'hier : je le sais bien puisque aujourd'hui je vois plus loin. Si je pense, ce n'est pas que je saute hors du temps dans un monde intelligible, ni que je recrée chaque fois la signification à partir de rien, c'est que la flèche du temps tire tout avec elle, fait que mes pensées successives soient, dans un sens second, simultanées, ou du moins qu'elles empiètent légitimement l'une sur l'autre. Je fonctionne ainsi par construction. Je suis installé sur une pyramide de temps qui a été moi. Je prends du champ, je m'invente, mais non sans mon équipement temporel, comme je me déplace dans le monde, mais non sans la masse, inconnue de mon corps. Le temps est ce « corps de l'esprit » dont parlait Valéry. Temps et pensée sont enchevêtrés l'un dans l'autre. La nuit de la pensée est habitée par une lueur de l'Etre. (‘Signes’, pp20-1)

This is a “spatial” con-ception of being and time - there cannot be “empty space” because even “emptiness” pre-supposes “space”! And indeed even intra-mundane “time” is “spatialised” because it is conceived as a “now-sequence” of equal intervals unfolding from past to future (cf. Heidegger’s early essay on time). “I do not jump out of time when I think” betrays Merleau-Ponty’s nunc fluens conception of time, as a “flowing river” in which all being floats. So does his reference to “the arrow of time” and to “time is the body of the spirit” – in other words, for the spirit, time is its “embodiment” or “corpo-reality”. Yet we know, first, that “time” is a meaningless concept outside of human intuition (“spirit” here), and second, that if “time” is what gives “body” to the “spirit”, then it comes into opposition with “space”: in other words, we still do not know “where” this “spirit” is! It is this “invisibility” of “spirit” and this “spirituality” or “corporeality” of “time” that relegates us to the illusory dualism of Body and Spirit, of Idea and Thing. These are transcendental notions because they conceive of being as “something” that can be located in a spatio-temporal continuum. Merleau-Ponty himself acknowledges as

much when he meekly suggests that “l'être et [le] néant, il vaudrait mieux parler du visible et de l'invisible, … ne sont pas contradictoires”. Yet they are! Nothing-ness does not admit of “being”, unless “being” is understood transcendentally, in terms of the philosophia perennis, as the suprasensible world of which “nothing-ness” is only the kingdom of shadows, of appearances, the “negative” or “reverse” of being; or else as “possibility” or “contingency” (Heidegger, Sartre), which is certainly not “nothing-ness” but “being in gestation”, potentiality or Aristotelian dynamis – all of which poses an antinomic dualism that Merleau-Ponty was desperately trying to eschew from the inception. In this “antinomic world”, nothing-ness also has its “being”, and Heidegger’s sophistries come to resemble closely Hegel’s dialectical teleology (see his discussion of Aristotle in Vol.1 of Nietzsche).

It is instructive that Merleau-Ponty’s ultimate lunge to evade this linguistic trap is to prefer the phrase “topology of being” – which is closer to our notion of “place” (Ort) and the “nunc stans” to re-place (!) the old intra-mundane notions of space and time. The “fundamentality” that Merleau-Ponty is chasing is the “materiality” or immanence of being.

Dans le texte tardif que nous citions en commençant, Husserl écrit que la parole réalise une « localisation » et une « temporalisation » d'un sens idéal qui, « selon son sens d'être » n'est ni local ni temporel, - et il ajoute plus loin que la parole encore objective et ouvre à la pluralité des sujets, à titre de concept ou de proposition, ce qui n'était auparavant qu'une formation intérieure à un sujet. Il y aurait donc un mouvement par lequel l'existence idéale descend dans la localité et la temporalité, - et un mouvement inverse par lequel l'acte de parole ici et maintenant fonde l'idéalité du vrai. Ces deux mouvements seraient contradictoires s'ils avaient lieu entre les mêmes termes extrêmes, et il nous semble nécessaire de concevoir ici un circuit de la réflexion : elle reconnaît en première [121] approxi-mation l'existence idéale comme ni locale, ni temporelle, - puis elle s'avise d'une localité et d'une temporalité de la parole que l'on ne peut dériver de celles du monde objectif, ni d'ailleurs suspendre à un monde des idées, et finalement fait reposer sur la parole le mode d'être des formations idéales. L'existence idéale est fondée sur le document, non sans doute comme objet physique, non pas même comme porteur des significations une à une que lui assignent les conventions de la langue dans laquelle il est écrit, mais sur lui en tant que, par une « transgression intentionnelle » encore, il sollicite et fait converger toutes les vies connaissantes et à ce titre instaure et restaure un « Logos » du monde culturel.Le propre d'une philosophie phénoménologique nous parait donc être de s'établir à titre définitif dans l'ordre de la spontanéité enseignante qui est inaccessible au psychologisme et à l'historicisme, non moins qu'aux métaphysiques dogmati-ques. Cet ordre, la phénoménologie de la parole est entre toutes apte à nous le révéler. Quand je parle ou quand je comprends, j'expérimente la présence d'autrui en moi ou de moi en autrui, qui est la pierre d'achoppement de la théorie de l'intersubjectivité, la présence du représenté qui est la pierre d'achoppement de la théorie du temps, et je comprends enfin ce que veut dire l'énigmatique proposition de Husserl : « La subjectivité transcendantale est intersubjectivité. » Dans la mesure où ce que je

dis a sens, je suis pour moi-même, quand je parle, un autre « autre », et, dans la mesure où je comprends, je ne sais plus qui parle et qui écoute. La dernière démarche philosophique est de reconnaître ce que Kant appelle [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, SIGNES. (1960) 96] l'« affinité transcendantale » des moments du temps et des temporalités. C'est sans doute ce que Husserl cherche à faire quand il reprend le vocabulaire finaliste des métaphysiques, parlant de « monades », « entéléchies », « téléologie ». Mais, ces mots sont mis souvent entre guillemets pour signifier qu'il n'entend pas introduire avec eux quelque agent qui de l'extérieur assurerait la connexion des termes mis en rapport. La finalité au sens dogmatique serait un compromis: elle laisserait face à face les termes à lier et le principe liant. [122] Or c'est au coeur de mon présent que je trouve le sens de ceux qui l'ont précédé, que je trouve de quoi comprendre la présence d'autrui au même monde, et c'est dans l'exercice même de la parole que j'apprends à comprendre. Il n’y a finalité qu'au sens où Heidegger la définissait lorsqu'il disait à peu près qu'elle est le tremblement d'une unité exposée à la contingence et qui se recrée infatigablement. Et c'est à la même spontanéité, non-délibérée, inépuisable, que Sartre faisait allusion quand il disait que nous sommes « condamnés à la liberté ».

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Merleau-Ponty, to my knowledge the only philosopher who not only tried to give an account of the organic structure of human existence but also tried in all earnest to embark upon a “philosophy of the flesh”, was still misled by the old identification of mind and soul when he defined the mind as “the other side of the body” since “there is a body of the mind and a mind of the body and a chiasm between them”. Precisely the lack of such chiasmata or crossings over is the crux of mental phenomena and Merleau-Ponty himself, in a different context, recognized the lack with great clarity. Thought, he writes, is “‘fundamental’ because it is not borne by anything, but not fundamental as if with it one reached a foundation upon which one ought to base oneself and stay. As matter of principle, fundamental thought is bottomless. It is, if you wish, an abyss.” But what is true of the mind is not true of the soul and vice versa. The soul, though perhaps much darker than the mind will ever manage to be, is not “bottomless”; it does indeed “overflow” into the body; it “encroaches upon it, is hidden in it – and at the same time needs it, terminates in it, is anchored in it” (‘LotM’, p33, this last quotation is from Augustine, De Civitate Dei).

This is not the first time that we pick on Arendt for her stubborn attachment to this distinction between “mind”and “soul”. There is indeed a distinction to be made between “emotional thought” and “abstract thought” – but both “modes of thinking” are just aspects of mental life that are different only in their “content”, not in their “fundamentality” or their ontological status. And this is what Merleau-Ponty is saying but Arendt cannot comprehend because of her attachment, again, to the distinction between “cognitive thought” which is oriented to “truth-as-certainty” (logico-mathematics and scientific regularities) and “thinking” proper, which for her includes “meaning” but which in effect ends up referring to logico-deductive and formal-rational, in short, “abstract thought”. Only in this regard does her own thought differ from Kant’s basic distinction between the thinking ego, whose eminent faculties are the understanding and reason, and the soul or the self. Kant ends up “reducing” all thinking

to cognitive thought or thought directed at “certainty” and “truth”. Arendt instead categorises this as only a branch of abstract thought, of which “meaning” forms the greater part. But as we will see, Arendt bases her entire argument on the “otherness” of “thinking” – its being in the world and yet apart from it – precisely and ontologically on the “truth-status” of logico-mathematical abstract thinking or reasoning – on Kant’s notions of intellect and reason. Although she agrees that thought is an “abyss”, it is “fundamental”, because it is only through “thought” that we are able to pose the most fundamental questions of existence and reality, she fails to understand thereby that from the ontological standpoint even abstract thought still constitutes an “emotional” aspect of the life of the mind - however “cool” or “impassive” or “dis-interested” it may appear - of which its “intellectuality” is only a part or subset thereof. Mental activity, whether intellectual or emotional, is one and the same: the problem is that too often we con-fuse, as clearly does Arendt, the “focus” or “mode” of thought with its “real referent”, with its “object” (which, as we will see in our critique of Heidegger’s Kantbuch, is no “ob-ject” at all) – as if emotive thought dealt with “the soul” and intellectual thought dealt instead with “the mind ” as “pure activity”, and then split itself again into “rational” and “meaningful” activities. Contrary to what Arendt believes, both intellectual and emotive thought have repercussions on “the body” – and to this extent Merleau-Ponty is quite right to insist on “the mind of the body” and vice versa, rather than just “the soul of the body” and vice versa, and their chiasmata, their crossings-over.

The stumbling block for Arendt is a distinction that she makes and that Merleau-Ponty does not tackle whilst Nietzsche certainly did and, by so doing, made one of his greatest discoveries, what we have called “Nietzsche’s Invariance”, which is that cognitive thought (logico-mathematics) and reflective thought, both of which make up “abstract or intellectual thought”, are not “separate” from other modes of thinking – and that indeed “thought and body” cannot be “separated” the way Arendt earnestly wishes they could! The mind has a “life” also in this “sense” or “meaning”, what Arendt calls “the sixth sense” (pp49-50): - that it cannot be separated from “life”, even in its most “abysmal” or “fundamental” intuitive or rational cognitive or abstract functions. Arendt clearly mistakes what Merleau-Ponty means by “fundamental”: thought is not “borne” by any “thing” not because it is in opposition to or contrast with “the world of things” – because, as Arendt herself points out, thinking beings are not just “in the world but also of the world”. Rather, thought is “fundamental” because it is only through thought that we can intuit the nature of reality. But this intuition tells us precisely what Arendt (and Heidegger, then Kant, as we are about to see) refuses to acknowledge: - that thought is

immanent in life and the world, that it cannot “abstract” from the latter, even in its most “intellectual” modes and functions and operations. This is what Nietzsche, first among philosophers, discovered. And here we come to “self-evident truths”.

Arendt’s The Life of the Mind is quite evidently hinged on the misconception that Kant operated a dichotomy or an opposition – a Platonic chorismos – between “things in themselves” (the Ideas) and “mere appearances”, between the “(true) world” and its effects. Yet this is not correct – because Kant emphatically elevates those “mere appearances” to ineluctable a-spects of the thing in itself so that no real ultimate “opposition” exists between the two – which is what Arendt herself is advancing here. Where the opposition relevant to Arendt’s criticism of Kant arises is not between appearances and things in themselves but rather between pure intuition and “thing”, between perception and reflection, between perception and knowledge, between knowledge and reason, between idea and object – whence “transcendental idealism” -, and finally between Subject and Object. This is why Schopenhauer could celebrate in “the distinction between appearance and thing in itself….Kant’s greatest discovery” – because he could see immediately that in fact there cannot be any “dualism” between perception and knowledge and that therefore the real dichotomy was to be located between the Understanding or Intellect and its “representations” on one side and the Will, the true “thing in itself”, on the other – with the two making up “the world”: hence, “the world as will and representation” (or Idea).

Heidegger has enucleated and illustrated, with characteristic didactic and analytical brilliance, this important aspect of Kantian meta-physics: for Kant there is no “opposition” whatsoever between “things in themselves” and “appearances” – nor are the latter “caused” by the former; rather, for the Koenigsberger, appearances are the necessary manifestation of “things” as “beings-in-the-world” open to perception by the thinking ego of human beings (Heidegger calls them “things for us” in What is a thing? At about p5) who then (and here comes causality) “orders” them into “concepts” or constructions from which deductions (synthetic a priori statements) can be made by pure reason. It is not the case that for Kant “appearances” are “mere” and therefore false events (Geschehen) that need to be interpreted in the light of the “things” that cause them. Arendt’s miscomprehension can be gleaned when she summarises Kant’s position as follows:

“His notion of a ‘thing in itself’, something which is but does not appear although it causes appearances, can be…explained on the grounds of the theological tradition,” (LotM, p40).

Kant was carried away by his great desire to…make it overwhelmingly plausible that ‘there undoubtedly is something distinct from the world which contains the ground for the order of the world’, and therefore is itself of a higher order,” (p42).

Yet Kant says precisely what Arendt seems to be saying: - that the “thing in itself” does appear; in fact, it can do nothing else but appear to human beings – who can never com-prehend it fully. Arendt herself comes close to grasping Kant’s admittedly intricate ontologico-epistemological position when she observes: -

The theological bias [in Kant] …enters here in the word “mere representations”, as if he had forgotten his own central thesis: “We assert that the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the experience of the objects of experience, and that for this reason they have objective validity in a synthetic a priori statement.” (LotM, p.41)

In fact, Kant has not “forgotten his own central thesis” and, for him, both “the possibility of experience” and that of “the experience of the objects of experience” actually coincide because “things in themselves” that become “objects of experience” are known to us – that is, are “things in themselves for us” – when they are not “things in themselves of a higher order” whose “ec-sistence” (“they are not nothing”) is required by Pure Reason. What is of a “higher order” for Kant is not at all the “thing in itself” but rather the “Pure Reason “which contains the ground [not the cause!] for the order of the world. The difference between the thinking ego and “other” things in themselves is that the former is the faculty that can “give order” [Sinn-gebende] to the world…made up of other things in themselves, which are named so because they are not knowable “in themselves” and not because “they do not appear”! Unlike Plato or Mach, Kant does not sanctify the lofty philosopher or scientist who rises above the apparent world. Quite to the contrary, and this is a point that Arendt keenly appreciates (p41), Kant bases himself precisely on this world of appearances from which that of noumena can be deduced thanks to the intellect and reason. Perception is the construction from which reason can derive its synthetic deductions.

By failing to understand this subtle yet essential point of the Kantian critique, Arendt cannot undo and re-erect her own “phenomenology of the flesh” on proper ontological foundations; for the simple reason that her privileging of appearances or phenomena over things in themselves or noumena or qualitates occultae remains firmly bound to the transcendental attitude, just as Merleau-Ponty’s exaltation or elevation of perception from “secondary” (the effect of “things” or “objects”) to “primary” (the dis-closure of the “object” that presupposes its partial “invisibility” or “nothing-ness”) is tightly chained to this philosophical “framework”. Arendt amply demonstrates and corroborates this conclusion when describing her

own understanding of the difference between thinking ego and the self:

The thinking ego is indeed Kant’s “thing in itself”: it does not appear to others and unlike the self of self-awareness it does not appear to itself, and yet “it is not nothing”. The thinking ego is sheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities and without a life story…For the thinking ego is not the self” (pp42-3).

And here is the crux. The crucial characteristic of the transcendental attitude rests not on the distinction between the true world and the apparent world, but rather on the conception of human intuition as “ordering the world”, on the separation between the intuitive and the conceptual tasks of the mind. This is what Merleau-Ponty was attempting to circumvent with “the topology of being”, yet failed to achieve because of that “and yet ‘it is not nothing’”! Heidegger’s explication of this Kantian expression in What is a Thing? (at p5) genially and instructively distinguishes between two kinds of things in themselves: - those that “appear” to us [things for us] and those that do not, such as God and the thinking ego. Arendt fails to make this distinction and so believes that all Kantian things in themselves are the same and that her distinction of Being and Appearance applies to Kant and that Kant reduced the thinking ego and all thinking to pure reason ! So long as “chiasmata” are possible between body and soul, immanence is assured. But it is when the “mind” comes into play as “sheer activity”, when the ageless, sexless, thinking ego without qualities fails to appear, and yet “it is not nothing” and like God it is not a “thing for us” - when this “fundament” or “abyss” is considered mystically, then we have trans-scendence, the op-position of Subjet and Object – a theo-logy. This is the underpinning of Schopenhauer’s (then Nietzsche’s) devastating critique of Kant’s transcendentalism.

Arendt speaks of

the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it,” (‘LotM’, p43).

Yet so long as Arendt keeps speaking of “the world of appearances”, she will be stuck with this “paradoxical condition” for the simple reason that she exalts, like Kant and even Heidegger, the “primacy” or “primordiality” or “purity”, the “sheer activity” – the “transcendence”! - of thought and intuition over their “materiality” or “sensuousness” or immanence. For to say that thought can “withdraw from the world” because of its “abstract” and “inescapable” (a reference again to logico-mathematical thought) character or quality is effectively equivalent to saying that thought “trans-scends” life and the world! The “life of the mind” then becomes an “impossible

chiasmus”, indeed an oxymoron. An illustration of this misconception can be gleaned from Arendt’s critical comments on P.F. Strawson’s presumption, characteristic of the Oxford analytical school, in a passage she quotes from one of his essays on Kant:

It is indeed an old belief that reason is something essentially out of time and yet in us. Doubtless it has its ground in the fact that…we grasp [mathematical and logical] truths. But…one [who] grasps timeless truths [need not] himself be timeless,” (Strawson quoted on p45).

What neither Strawson nor Arendt understand, and this is the reason why they are entangled in this “paradoxical condition”, is that “mathematical and logical truths” are neither “true” nor “timeless”! The prism that distorts the entire Western ontological tradition’s view of reality is precisely this notion of “self-evident truths”. This is the prism, the illusion, that Nietzsche’s Invariance smashes mercilessly to smithereens. For a “truth” to ec-sist it must be “com-prehensible” (Heidegger uses the term “umgreifen” early in the ‘Kantbuch’) and therefore, unlike the Kantian and Schopenhauerian “thing in itself”, “within” time: it must be intra-temporal and intra-mundane. But then it cannot possibly be “time-less”! A “timeless truth” does not ec-sist: it is either a tautology or else it is “a practical tool”, an “instrument”, and as such neither “true” nor “false”, just as the world is neither “true” nor “apparent”.

Yet so long as Arendt keeps speaking of “the world of appearances”, she will be stuck with this “paradoxical condition” for the simple reason that she exalts, like Kant and even Heidegger, the “primacy” or “primordiality” or “purity”, the “sheer activity” – the “transcendence”! - of thought and intuition over their “materiality” or “sensuousness” or immanence. For to say that thought can “withdraw from the world” because of its “abstract” and “inescapable” (a reference again to logico-mathematical thought) character or quality is effectively equivalent to saying that thought “trans-scends” life and the world, however much Arendt may eschew this conclusion! Tertium non datur: unless Arendt can enlighten us about the ontological status of “the mind”, she has no grounds to back the assertion that “the mind [can] withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it”. The “life of the mind” then becomes an “impossible chiasmus”, indeed an oxy-moron. An illustration of this miscomprehension can be gleaned from Arendt’s critical comments on P.F. Strawson’s presumption, characteristic of the Oxford analytical school, in a passage she quotes from one of his essays on Kant:

It is indeed an old belief that reason is something essentially out of time and yet in us. Doubtless it has its ground in the fact that…we grasp [mathematical and logical] truths. But…one [who] grasps timeless truths [need not] himself be timeless,” (Strawson quoted on p45).

What neither Strawson nor Arendt understand, and this is the reason why they are entangled in this “paradoxical condition”, is that “mathematical and logical truths” are neither “true” nor “timeless” because both notions are “transcendental” and therefore antinomical. It is simply not possible for someone who is not “timeless” to be able “to grasp timeless truths” that are, by definition, “out of time” – unless one posits the “transcendence” of “reason” and its “timeless truths”! But that would be tantamount to allowing that there ec-sist entities of thought or reason that are “out of time” even though those entities are “thoughts” originating in the mind of a “thinker” who is not “time-less”!

The notions of “truth” and “timelessness” require precisely that “com-prehensive being or grasping-from-the-knower” [Jaspers’s Um-greifende or Heidegger’s Totalitat] or “totality” or “being-in-itself” - not “for us”, that belongs to “what is not and yet it is not nothing” (cf. Kantbuch, pp18-22) - that directly contra-dicts both their ec-sistence (either in space-time or in “place”) and the “finitude” of the knower! The prism that distorts the entire Western ontological tradition’s view of reality is precisely this notion of “self-evident truths” as “comprehensive being” or “totality” or “being-in-itself”. This is the prism, the illusion, that Nietzsche’s Invariance smashes mercilessly to smithereens. For a “truth” to ec-sist it must be “com-prehensible” (Heidegger uses the term “umgreifen” early in the Kantbuch, at par.5, p20) and therefore, unlike the Kantian and Schopenhauerian “thing in itself”, “within” time: it must be intra-temporal and intra-mundane. But then it cannot possibly be “time-less”! A “timeless truth” does not ec-sist: it is either a tautology or else it is “a practical tool”, an “instrument”, and as such neither “true” nor “false”, just as the world is neither “true” nor “apparent”. As Heidegger’s discussion in par.5 of the ‘Kantbuch’ reveals (at p19 especially), the whole notion of “comprehensive grasping” or “totality”, indeed the entire Kantian effort to tie intuition to thinking and then both to knowledge, has to do with the “communicability” of intuition.

Knowledge [and therefore thinking] is primarily intuition, i.e., a representing that immediately represents the being itself. However, if finite intuition is now to be knowledge, then it must be able to make the being itself as revealed accessible with respect to both what and how it is for everyone at all times. Finite, intuiting creatures must be able to share in the specific intuition of beings. First of all, however, finite intuition as intuition always remains bound to the specifically intuited particulars. The intuited is only a known being if everyone can make it understandable to oneself and to others and can thereby communicate it.

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”! It is 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 Wittgenstein, 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):

C’e’ (essi dicono) qualcosa di la’ dalla mera rappresentazione, e questo qualcosa e’ un atto di volonta’, che soddisfa l’esigenza dell’universale con l’elaborare le rappresentazioni singole in schemi generali o simboli, privi di realta’ ma comodi, finti ma utili,” (‘Logica’, p10).

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; indeed, if anything, it highlights and warns against their “efficacity”. But this “efficacity” 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, but their “instrumentality” is what matters – not Augustine’s “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 l’universalita’ dell’individualita’, l’unita’ della molteplicita’; l’una intuizione, l’altra concetto; conoscere logicamente e’ conoscere l’universale o concetto. La negazione della

logicita’ importa l’affermazione 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’ un’illusione: di la’ dalla semplice rappresentazione non vi sarebbe nulla di conoscibile, (pp7-8).

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 have tried to show here invoking the aid of Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology of perception”, neither of Croce’s “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 dell’espressivita’ e’comune al concetto e alla rappresentazione, proprio del concetto e’ quello dell’universalita’, ossia della trascendenza rispetto alle singole rappresentazioni, onde nessuna….e’ mai in grado di adeguare il concetto. Tra l’individuale e l’universale non e’ ammissibile nulla di intermedio o di misto: o il singolo o il tutto… (Logica, pp.26-7).

We have here once again the Platonic chorismos, the Scholastic adaequatio, the Kantian noumenon, and the Fichtean hiatus irrationalem – 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! Both are “representations” (cf. Croce’s contrary argument on pp.28-9). This is the basis of Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant’s 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! Croce’s own categorization of these notions is at p.42 of the Logica:

La profonda diversita’ tra concetti e pseudoconcetti [identified with “l’idea 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’ l’ufficio di elaborare cio’ che ora chiamiamo pseudoconcetti, e alla seconda i concetti puri.

Evident is Croce’s 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”, Deus sive Natura. 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 Cusa’s “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 subject’s existence in terms of the thought he has of existingand 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 basethis defacto self-evident truth, this irresistible belief, on some absoluteself-evident truth, that is, on the absolute clarity which my thoughtshave for me; if I tried to find in myself a creative thought which bodiedforth 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 possibleinstead 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 assertionin my life. This facticity of the world is what constitutes theWeltlichkeit der Welt, what causes the world to be the world; just asthe facticity of the cogito is not an imperfection in itself, but ratherwhat 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”.

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FLESH: Hannah Arendt and Nietzsche’s Invariance

Reality in a world of appearances is first of all characterized by ‘standing still and remaining’ the same long enough to become an object for acknowledgement and recognition by a subject. Husserl’s basic and greatest discovery takes up in exhaustive detail the intentionality of all acts of consciousness…” (Life of the Mind, p46).

As we have seen, Arendt’s critique of the Cartesian cogito moves correctly from the observation that “thinking” shows merely that “there are thoughts” (p49). But from this conclusion Arendt does not, unlike Nietzsche (again, p49), proceed as she must to question the entire notion of a “subject”, of a “thinking ego”, and therefore also of Husserl’s “transcendental ego” and its “intentionality”. For what can it mean to say that “reality is characterised by standing still and remaining the same long enough to become and ‘object’ for a ‘subject’”? No matter how hard it may try, thought will never be able “to stand still and remain the same long enough” (!) to be able to identify an “object” and a “subject”, but only “to perceive or intuit” that there is a “thereness”, an ever-present or present-ment (pressentiment or “sixth sense” or Aquinas’s sensus communis) of “reality”. This is so for the devastatingly simple reason that all that thought can ever be conscious or aware of is the “pre-sent”, which is neither “the past”, because even “memories” are “present”, nor quite evidently “the future” – which is a “present pro-jection”. Instead, Arendt stops at the conclusion that “thinking” con-firms the existence of a “reality”, of a “world” from which even the most “meditative” or abstract thought can “withdraw” and yet one that it can never quite “leave”. Presumably, one ought to infer from this “withdrawing without leaving” that Arendt has relinquished the notion of the “transcendence” of thought – but in fact she has not, as she herself demonstrates with the following observation:

Whatever thinking can reach and whatever it may achieve, it is precisely reality as given to common sense, in its sheer thereness, that remains forever beyond its grasp….Thought processes, unlike common sense, can be physically located in the brain, but nevertheless transcend all biological data, be they functional or morphological…(LotM, pp51-2).

Yet again, in her preoccupation or haste to offer “thinking” a privileged place in ontology, Arendt forgets that “common sense” and “thinking” are one and the same thing, that they are located neither “in the brain” nor in any other “organ” (cf. Arendt’s objection to the early Wittgensteinian notion of “language is part of our organism” at p52) as every philosopher from Hegel to Merleau-Ponty (in ‘Signes’ or

the ‘Reader’) – whom Arendt expressly acknowledges and agrees with contra Kant (pp48-9) – would tell her. On this specific point, Arendt misconstrues Merleau-Ponty’s charge against Descartes of seeking to distill and then isolate thought from perception for the simple reason that for Merleau-Ponty perception and thought – just like perception and language – cannot be separated as Arendt attempts to do here by “elevating” thought (though strangely not language) to a higher “transcendental” level from (mere?) “biological data be they functional or morphological”!

The reason why Arendt is so persistent, even obdurate, in this “transcendental attitude” is that she thoroughly misconceives the entire “nature” or “ontological status” of abstract thought – that is, of thought that pretends or presumes “to ab-stract from” and therefore to transcend the world, as Descartes’s “meditations” or Husserl’s “epoche” (suspension) were meant to do, albeit in different ways.

Kant’s famous distinction between Vernunft and Verstand, between a faculty of speculative thought and the ability to know arising out of sense experience,…. has consequences more far-reaching….than he himself recognized….Although he insisted on the inability of reason to arrive at knowledge, especially with respect to God, Freedom, and Immortality – to him the highest objects of thought – he could not part altogether with the conviction that the final aim of thinking, as of knowledge, is truth and cognition; he thus uses, throughout the Critiques, the term Vernunftererkenntnis, ‘knowledge arising out of pure reason’, a construction that ought to have been a contradiction in terms for him, (LotM, pp62-3).

Reprising Heidegger’s (and even earlier, Nietzsche’s) critique of the exhaustion of Western philosophy in the erroneous identification of “truth” with “certainty” or “cognition” or “knowledge”, Arendt demonstrates incontrovertibly just how little she has grasped the real problematic of Western philosophy and of the Kantial critique in particular. Arendt cannot understand that if indeed Kant had chosen to con-fine pure reason to the sphere of “sheer activity”, that is to say of pure thought, of pure concepts (Croce), he would then have had to concede the “sheer conventionality” of pure reason and its “abstract thought” – its naked “instrumentality” and cognitive “emptiness” (intuition without concepts is blind; concepts without intuition are empty”). Arendt seeks here to elide and elude and avoid the entire problem of the “ordo et connexio rerum idearumque”! A pure reason that remains “sheer activity”, “abstract thought” with no “empirical” nexus to reality, perception and intuition – such a pure reason would end up being a mere “ghost” and, in its “formal logico-mathematical” aspect, a welter of total, complete and abject tautologies. Arendt herself intelligently identifies this Kantian quandary when she quotes him writing that

“[for the sake of mere speculative reason alone] we should hardly have undertaken the labor of transcendental investigations….since whatever discoveries might be made in regard to these matters, we should not be able to make use of them in any helpful manner in concreto” (p65).

The problem for Kant as for all Western philosophy has been always, and quite justifiably, to discover the “nexus rerum”, “the purposive unity of things”, the “link” between “objective reality” and “subjective knowledge” of that reality. To negate or deny that such a link ec-sists means effectively that one must then either discard the “content” of abstract thought or else to jettison the “scientificity” of all knowledge! Arendt has simply failed to comprehend this crucial predicament that has been the bane of Western metaphysics and science. Instead, she curiously and naively believes that Kant could easily have abandoned the “confusion” involved in reconciling thought and experience.

But Kant does not insist on this side of the matter [the irrelevance of reason to cognition and knowledge], because he is afraid that his ideas might then turn out to be ‘empty thought-things’ (leere Gedankendinge)… It is perhaps for the same reason that he equates what we have here called meaning with Purpose and even Intention (Zweck and Absicht): The “highest formal unity which rests solely on concepts of reason, is the purposive unity of things. The speculative interest of reason makes it necessary to regard all order in the world as if it had originated in the [intention] of a supreme reason”, (LotM, pp64-5).

Right in the midst of the passages quoted above occurs the sentence that stands in the greatest possible contrast to his own equation of reason with Purpose: “Pure reason is in fact occupied with nothing but itself. It can have no other vocation, (LotM, p65).

What Arendt fails to understand is something that Kant knew all too well, and that is that unless the “truths” of pure reason” can be intimately “con-nected” to the regularities found in nature, then they can lay no claim to “truth” at all – and, worst of all, neither can the “scientific truths or verities” that Arendt espouses, because there would then be “nothing at all” in those “empirical regularities” that could lend them the status of “scientific truths”. Science would then be exposed for what it is: - sheer “instrumentality”. Arendt is aware of this difficulty, which is why, on one hand, she attempts to preserve the word “truth” for scientific discoveries of a “finite” and “paradigmatic” (she cites Kuhn) nature; whilst on the other hand she seeks to avoid the word “truth”, preferring “meaning”, for the “sheer activity” of abstract thought, preserving thus its “formal” and “non-purposive” quality. Weber does the same with his Zweck-rationalitat, which is in fact “non-purposive” in the sense that it is “instrumental” and not “teleological”, and yet Weber, unlike Arendt, intelligently and perspicaciously acknowledges the “technical-purposive” instrumentality of this “instrumental reason” without dignifying it with a patina of “spirituality” or transcendence as Arendt does!

Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in any scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific, (LotM, p54).

This is pure Weber: but whereas Weber perceives that thinking is pure instrumentality, “a means to an end”, it is Zweck-rationalitat rather than Wert-rationalitat, Arendt steadfastly refuses the “purposivity” of this notion of “thinking” or “reason”, clinging instead to a romantic notion of “meaning”. Weber sees the “purpose” in “reason” and leaves it at that, at its “technicality” which he confuses with “scientificity” rather than “instrumentality”. Arendt instead is looking for “something more” in “thinking” – wishing to rescue it from, and to give it a “content” or “transcendence” over and above its, (sterile) “purity”. So here is the crux: what can it mean for Arendt, more than for Kant who obviously was ambivalent about the idea, to say with Kant that “pure reason is occupied with nothing but itself and can have no other vocation”? Arendt obviously seeks simultaneously to preserve the “purity” (non-instrumentality and non-purposiveness) of “reason”, and to avoid the “sterility” of such “neutrality” – its tautologous quality – by emphasizing its “meaningfulness”, and finally to redeem the “spiritual” side of thinking – not its “faith”, pace Kant, but its “meaning-fulness”.

[Kant] never became fully aware of having liberated reason and thinking, of having justified this faculty and its activity even though they could not boast of any ‘positive’ results. As we have seen, he stated that he had “found it necessary to deny knowledge… to make room for faith”, but all he had “denied” was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought , (LotM, p63).

Yet whilst Arendt resists every notion that “thinking” is confined to its “content” – whether as reason or intellect -, at the same time she intuits that if the ontological status of thinking is defined by “thinking the unknowable”, such a “spiritual” notion will reduce both the ontological status of thinking and its content or subject-matter to abstract, ghostly-ghastly sterility and insubstantiality as well as irrelevancy: - which is quite precisely why Kant had said that by rescuing “reason” for cognition he had also rescued “faith”, that is, what lies “beyond” the “materiality” or “instrumentality” or “purposivity” of thinking that is “necessarily required” by “the unity of things”, the nexus or connexio between cognition and world! Arendt is still shackled to the notion that “thinking” transcends the world even though she seeks to avoid the idealistic implications of this position by redefining thought as “withdrawing from the world without ever leaving it”! What Arendt has failed to do is to fulfill the original goal of her reflections on “the life of the mind” – that “philosophy of the flesh”

that, as was Merleau-Ponty’s great intuition, does not distinguish between thinking and its content, perception and its “object”, thought and the senses, thought and language, and treats them instead as immanently connected (see quotation from his ‘PoP’ in next section.)

Here is Arendt again emphasizing the “gap” between thinking and cognition or certainty or “truth”:

There are no truths beyond and above factual truths: all scientific truths are factual truths…and only factual statements are scientifically verifiable….Knowing certainly aims at truth, even if this truth, as in the sciences, is never an abiding truth but a provisional verity that we expect to exchange against other, more accurate verities as knowledge progresses. To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know….In this sense, reason is the a priori condition of the intellect and of cognition; it is because reason and intellect are so connected….that the philosophers have always been tempted to accept the criterion of truth – so valid for science and everyday life – as applicable to their own extraordinary business as well, (LotM, pp61-2).

The difficulty is evident: the only “test” for “verities” is “truth”; if we renounce the notion of “truth” we are left not with “verities”, but with nothing at all except either “con-venience” or “con-vention”, which are the nemesis of “scientific endeavor” (cf. Mach, ‘EuI’). Furthermore, the “criterion of truth and error” is in fact just as applicable to “thinking” as it is to factual truths: contrary to what Arendt thinks, the opposite of factual truth can be “error” and not just “the deliberate lie” (p59) – because factual truth can be as aleatory or “falsifiable” as factual untruth! The terrifying reality is that Arendt has abolished the notion of “truth”, much as Nietzsche and Weber did, without being able to replace it with a “meaningful” one of “thinking”. When she does attempt to infuse “thinking” with “meaning”, the result is as revealing as it is fallimentary and fallacious.

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By drawing a distinguishing line between truth and meaning, between knowing and thinking, and by insisting on its importance, I do not wish to deny that thinking’s quest for meaning and knowledge’s quest for truth are connected. By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetitefor meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce…works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded. In this sense reason is the a priori condition of the intellect and of cognition; it is because reason and intellect are so connected….that the philosophers have always been tempted to accept the criterion of truth – so valid for science and everyday life – as applicable to their own rather extraordinary business as well, (LotM, pp61-2).

Here we reach the final stage of our critique of Arendt’s notion of mind and thinking. For it is becoming easier to discern where she has gone wrong. The problem is that Arendt seeks, on one hand, to draw a firm ontological line between thinking and meaning on one side and truth and cognition or knowledge on the other side. But then, on the other hand, she wishes to posit “meaning” rather than “truth” as the “spiritual objective” of thinking because – and here is the crunch – she confuses “truth” with “certainty” (!) – which is precisely the conceptual and practical-political “mistake” that Nietzsche first and then Heidegger had exposed! Arendt believes that “truth”, by which she means “factual truth”, is something that, though never attainable in its “totality”, can be ascertained nevertheless either in science or in logico-mathematics – as a matter of fact! So much so that, as we saw above, for her the opposite of factual truth is not “error” but – “the deliberate lie”! Arendt herself puts this point, and her own con-fusion of the concepts of truth-as-meaning and truth-as-fact or “certainty”, beyond all doubt when she states: “Truth is what we are compelled to admit by the nature either of our senses or of our brain” (p61). In other words, not only are we “compelled to admit” logico-mathematical “truths” by virtue of “the nature of our brains” – a “psychologism”, this, that had already been exposed as fallacious by Frege and Wittgenstein -, but also “we are compelled to admit” what Arendt calls “factual truth” by virtue of “the nature of our senses” – which begs the question of how our “senses” can ever know that what they perceive is “truly the truth”!

Arendt here is failing to distinguish between the “truth” of the philosophia perennis and what Nietzsche unmasked instead as “the Will to Truth”. By so doing, and by identifying scientific “truth” and logico-mathematical “truth” with “truth” itself (despite her untenable distinguo between “truth” and “verities” which we exposed earlier above), Arendt is in reality and in effect relegating her own notion of thinking-as-meaning to the ethereal sphere of transcendental irrelevancy. If indeed we were to agree that the task and essence of thought was merely to pose “unanswerable questions”, we would at one and the same time fulfill Hegel’s demand that philosophy be something more than “the handmaiden of the sciences” and consign it to the status, not of “sheer activity”, as Arendt calls it, but of “sheer futility”! For “activity” as abstract and immaterial or transcendent as the one Arendt envisages for the task of human thought, far from challenging the operari of the sciences and of logico-mathematics and denouncing it under capitalism as “Will to Truth”, serves only to confirm its ontological and epistemological superiority as “factual truth” – to which Arendt’s quest for “meaning” is a pallid and power-less reply – the very embodiment of Nietzsche’s Wille zur Ohnmacht (Will to Powerlessness)! Ultimately, Arendt’s confusion of these

concepts – thinking and knowing, meaning and truth – condemns her to that very “transcendental attitude” that Kant himself could not escape, though he valiantly confronted it, and that his German Idealist epigones turned into a cult of consciousness.

What undermined Kant’s greatest discovery, the distinction between knowledge, which uses thinking as a means to an end, and thinking itself as it arises out of “the very nature of reason” and is done for its own sake, was that he constantly compared the two with each other, (LotM, p64).

In fact, as we are arguing and demonstrating here, far from undermining his philosophy, Kant’s constant effort to establish the “connection” between thinking and knowing is what elevates his work to the status of “critique”, however limited and imperfect it may have remained. It is because thinking is not “done for its own sake,” it is because of its “immanence” and “materiality” – its “instrumentality”! - that “knowing” in the sense of “science” or logico-mathematics will not and cannot reach the status of “truth” but must remain a “will to truth” that we must confront critically if we do not wish to remain its ideological victims.

Happily, these points are summarized for us by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception:

Once more, reflection—even the second-order reflection of science –obscures what we thought was clear. We believed we knew whatfeeling, seeing and hearing were, and now these words raise problems.We are invited to go back to the experiences to which they refer inorder to redefine them. The traditional notion of sensation was not aconcept born of reflection, but a late product of thought directedtowards objects, the last element in the representation of the world,the furthest removed from its original source, and therefore the mostunclear. Inevitably science, in its general eff'ort towards objectification,evolved a picture of the human organism as a physical systemundergoing stimuli which were themselves identified by theirphysico-chemical properties, and tried to reconstitute actual perception*on this basis, and to close the circle of scientific knowledgeby discovering the laws governing the production of knowledgeitself, by establishing an objective science of subjectivity.* But it isalso inevitable that this attempt should fail. If wc return to theobjective investigations themselves, we first of all discover that theconditions external to the sensory field do not govern it part forpart, and that they exert an effect only to the extent of makingpossible a basic pattern—which is what Gcstalt theory makes clear.Then we see that within the organism the structure depends onvariables such as the biological meaning of the situation, which areno longer physical variables, with the result that the whole eludesthe well-known instruments of physico-mathematical analysis, andopens the way to another type of intelligibility.^ If we now turn back,as is done here, towards perceptual experience, we notice thatscience succeeds in constructing only a semblance of subjectivity: it

introduces sensations which are things, just where experience showsthat there are meaningful patterns; it forces the phenomenal universeinto categories which make sense only in the universe of science. Itrequires that two perceived lines, like two real lines, should beequal or unequal, that a perceived crystal should have a definitenumber of sides,^ without realizing that the perceived, by its nature,admits of the ambiguous, the shifting, and is shaped by its context. (pp10-1)

But let us deal now with Arendt’s claim that logico-mathematical “truths” are “irresistible” just like “factual truths” in science because “we are compelled to admit them….by the nature of our brains and of our senses”, respectively.

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The notion of axiomatic mathematical truth as “despotic” was not lost on the earliest theoreticians of the doctrine of the Ab-solutist State – the “statolatrists” – in Renaissance Europe. Yet again, it was Hannah Arendt who came closest to intuiting the complex problematic of logico-mathematical id-entities or “laws” and the theorization of ab-solute power in On Revolution:

There is perhaps nothing surprising in that the Age of Enlightenment should have become aware of the compelling nature of axiomatic or self-evident truth, whose paradigmatic example, since Plato, has been the kind of statements with which we are confronted in mathematics. Le Mercier de la Riviere was perfectly right when he wrote: 'Euclide est un veritable despote et les verites geometriques qu'il nous a transmises sont des lois veritablement despotiques. Leur despotisme legal et le despotisme personnel de ce Legislateur n'en font qu'un, celui de la force irresistible de l'evidence';26 and Grotius, more than a hundred years earlier, had already insisted that 'even God cannot cause that two times two should not make four'. (Whatever the theological and philosophic implications of Grotius's for-mula might be, its political intention was clearly to bind and

Foundation II:Novus Ordo Saeclorum 193limit the sovereign will of an absolute prince who claimed to incarnate divine omnipotence on earth, by declaring that even God's power was not without limitations. This must have appeared of great theoretical and practical relevance to the political thinkers of the seventeenth century for the simple rea-son that divine power, being by definition the power of One, could appear on earth only as superhuman strength, that is, strength multiplied and made irresistible by the means of violence. In our context, it is important to note that only mathematical laws were thought to be sufficiently irresistible to check the power of despots.) The fallacy of this position was not only to equate this compelling evidence with right reason –the dictamen rationis or a veritable dictate of reason - but to believe that these mathematical 'laws' were of the same nature as the laws of a community, or that the former could somehow inspire the latter. Jefferson must have been dimly aware of this, for otherwise he would not have indulged in the somewhat incongruous phrase, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident', but would have said: These truths are self-evident, namely, they possess a power to compel which is as irresistible as despotic power, they are not held by us but we are held by them; they stand in no need of agreement. He knew very well that the statement 'All men are created equal' could not possibly possess the same power to compel as the statement that two times two make four, for the former is indeed a statement of reason and even a reasoned statement which stands in need of

agreement, unless one assumes that human reason is divinely informed to recognize certain truths as self-evident; the latter, on the contrary, is rooted in the physical structure of the human brain, and therefore is 'irresistible'. (pp.192-3)

Arendt observes that “divine laws” and the “laws” of ethics and of States – in short, “all values” – differ from those of mathematics because the latter describe the constitution of the mind and therefore “cannot be resisted”, whereas the former, however “reasonable” they might seem, require “agreement” unless one appeals to a mystical “intuitus originarius”. Arendt, however, fails to comprehend the enormity of the problem she has dimly perceived, which is the reason why she is unable to enucleate it with the ruthless clairvoyance that Nietzsche applied to it. When Mercier calls Euclid a “despot” he is equiparating the “legislative” power of his geometrical axioms to the “ab-solute” power of despots in that both kinds of “power” effectually do not admit of “questioning” or “agreement”! Grotius, by contrast, is placing mathematical axioms above the power of Sovereigns and of God himself (!) – but in so doing he too is equi-parating the two powers in the sense that mathematical axioms in their “universality” offer a “guarantee” of “truth” and validity that even the power of Sovereigns and of God, in its “ab-soluteness”, cannot proffer.

The significant feature that escapes Arendt is that both Mercier and Grotius interpret the “truth” of mathematical axioms as a “Value” – as an “ab-solute truth”, one that requires no de-monstration – that can stand as the ultimate, ab-solute guarantee of all human universal values, of that inter esse that is threatened by the arbitrariness implicit in the “ab-soluteness” (the “unanswerability”, the “unaccountability”, the “irresponsibility”) of any and all “political” or “divine” power! And because Arendt does not grasp the profound significance of this “equi-paration”, she is then unable to penetrate the next, the ultimate and most devastating conclusion – one that she eludes, or that eludes her, when she attributes the “self-evidence” of mathematical “truths” to “the physical structure of the human brain” (a “psychologism” already refuted by Wittgenstein and Husserl before him).

Arendt seeks to keep separate and distinguish the “logical necessity” or “irresistibility” or “irrefutability” of logico-mathematics (as a “power of the human brain”) from the “political necessity” of human coercion. Yet, the devastating conclusion that Nietzsche was first to outline as the “con-clusion” or “com-pletion” or “ful-filment” (in the sense of “ex-haustion”, of “fully-ending”, Heidegger’s Voll-endung) of the

Western metaphysical Ratio-Ordo is that it is precisely because human beings can conceive of logico-mathematical id-entities that we have ultimate proof of the complete value-lessness of life and the world! It is the very arbitrariness and con-ventionality of logico-mathematical id-entities that con-firms ineluctably the futility of all “Truths and Values”! Far from being “the ultimate and ab-solute guarantee” of the presence and reality of Reason and Order, of universality, in the human world, either as a hypostatic “truth” or as a “power of the human brain”, logico-mathematical identities constitute the evidence of the ultimate instrumentality of human action, of the ability of human beings to reify and “crystallise” their perceptive and thinking reality, and therefore they represent also the ultimate value-lessness, the ultimate un-reality of “all values and truths and verities”, of all “Truth”! This is what Nietzsche meant by “the trans-valuation of all values”!

Arendt completely fails to see that both logico-mathematical and juridical-ethical “laws” are con-ventional (Nietzsche and Wittgenstein), and that therefore they too require “agreement” (!) just like juridical-ethical and behavioural laws, which can also be given ab-solute logico-mathematical axiomatic form, as in game theory, and can then become a “fate” (in Wittgensteinian language games), which is the opposite of what “truth” is supposed to be! So, in fact, “self-evident truths” (Jefferson), whether logico-mathematical or practical, are not “truths” at all (thus, the Jeffersonian “we hold” can be applied to the former as well as the latter): – indeed, the required “ab-soluteness” of all ultimate values and truths demonstrates that there can be no such value or truth except for “truth-as-value”. Differently put, “truth” can ec-sist as “value” but not as the actual correspondence of concept with its object (the Scholastic adaequatio rei et intellectus). Far from being the ultimate protection against political arbitrariness, it is the very fact that the axiomatic rules of mathematics and logic can never acquire the status of ab-solute ultimate truth and value that reveals their ineluctable con-ventionality and therefore the utter “value-lessness” of life and the world, which in turn is due to the im-possibility of “truth”! It is for this precise and quite understandable reason that Mercier and Grotius both feel “tempted” to equiparate logico-mathematical necessity and political coercion – because “logico-mathematical necessity” is the ultimate instance of the ability of human beings to transmute a symbolic “con-vention” into “political coercion” (indeed into “irrefutable truth”!) and vice versa. This is the

“secret” of the Rationalisierung! (It will be recalled that in George Orwell’s 1984 the main character Winston Smith seeks refuge from the pervasiveness of Big Brother’s totalitarian power in the “truth” of the statement “two plus two makes four no matter what Big Brother says”. What Smith fails to perceive is that it is precisely the ability of human beings to devise logico-mathematical identities that exhibits the ultimate futility of “truth” as a “value” and that demonstrates instead its utter instrumentality, and therefore the possibility of Big Brother’s “ab-solute power”.)

Differently put, mathematical id-entities and logical axioms demonstrate both the ultimate attempt and the ultimate inability of the human mind to con-ceive of “truth and value” as objective entities and represent therefore the ultimate de-monstration of their “un-reality”. According to Nietzsche’s “invariance”, if “truth” existed we could not “think” of it , we could not con-ceive of it, we could not grasp or detect it: – it would be removed to the status of Leibniz’s intuitus originarius, what Arendt calls above “[a] human reason… divinely informed to recognize certain truths as self-evident” - which is why Nietzsche could satirize that the “higher” a “truth” becomes, the less “truthful” it grows because it becomes more “intuitive” and therefore less “provable” and more “de-monstrable”! In other words, the ontological status of “truth” is “invariant”, makes no dif-ference, has no real material and practical impact on human affairs except for its impact as a “belief”, as a “faith”, as a “will to truth”! (This argument as applied to Leibnitz is in Heidegger’s Metaphysical Foundations of Logic.)

Mathematical id-entities and logical axioms are borderline concepts (Schmitt, Politische Theologie); they de-monstrate (in the Wittgensteinian sense of “showing”, “pointing to” but never explaining meaningfully or proving!) both the ultimate attempt and the ultimate inability of the human mind to con-ceive of “truth and value” as objective entities: they represent therefore not only the ultimate de-monstration of the “un-reality” of “truth and values” but also and most terrifying of all the possibility of turning human arbitrariness into a “science” and a “logic”. This is “the Will to Truth”. Arendt came frighteningly close to this terrifying conclusion when she wrote in On Revolution: -

Whatever the theological and philosophic implications of Grotius's formula might be, its political intention was clearly to bind and

Foundation II:Novus Ordo Saeclorum 193

limit the sovereign will of an absolute prince who claimed to incarnate divine omnipotence on earth, by declaring that even God's power was not without limitations. This must have appeared of great theoretical and practical relevance to the political thinkers of the seventeenth century for the simple reason that divine power, being by definition the power of One, could appear on earth only as superhuman strength, that is, strength multiplied and made irresistible by the means of violence. In our context, it is important to note that only mathematical laws were thought to be sufficiently irresistible to check the power of despots.) The fallacy of this position was not only to equate this compelling evidence with right reason –the dictamen rationis or a veritable dictate of reason - but to believe that these mathematical 'laws' were of the same nature as the laws of a community, or that the former could somehow inspire the latter.

To echo Arendt by way of confutation, the fallacy of her position is failing to equate mathematical ‘laws’ with right reason and to believe that these mathematical ‘laws’ are not of the same nature as the laws of a community, or that the former cannot somehow inspire the enforcement of the latter! Even the most “irresistible laws” (Arendt), the “laws” of logico-mathematics, are just as “con-ventional” as “the laws of a community”: indeed, it is the ultimate “con-ventionality” of even logico-mathematical “laws” that demonstrates how all laws, including moral and juridical ones, are ultimately “con-ventional” and therefore political. This is what Mercier, more explicitly, and Grotius, implicitly, meant to say in the quotations that Arendt selected (which she reproposes in The Life of the Mind). It is the fact (understood in the Vichian and Nietzschean sense of verum ipsum factum, meaning that “the truth” is what human beings actu-ally do, from the Latin actus, act, and facere, to do) that human beings can mis-take logico-mathematical con-ventions (agreements) for “irresistible truths” that evinces definitively the “con-ventionality” of all “truths” and all “laws” – their “legal” character, and therefore their lack of “legitimacy”, their dependency on some “authority” that is not and cannot be “ab-solute” (not requiring “further proof”). (On the antinomy of “legality and legitimacy” the reference is to Carl Schmitt’s homonymous work. We will examine the homology of Nietzsche’s Invariance and Schmitt’s notion of “decision auf Nichts gestellt” [made out of nothing] later.)

Rowthorn email: "In a nutshell, my quest, provoked by your early work, was to answer this question (put in Kantian form): given that "value" is not and cannot be an "objective" entity, contrary to what Marx sought to prove with his "socially necessary labour time", how is it possible for the capitalist economy to function, that is, to reproduce and even expand the wage relation? (This is the classic question of economics that Hayek brought back to the centre of economic analysis - broadly put, how is a market economy "co-ordinated"? how is "the social synthesis" possible?) The important hint was in your genial link or nexus between "conflict" and "inflation": yet many questions remained unanswered. The task was not to determine how to measure inflation but rather to understand the far deeper "meaning" of inflation as a

"measure" of social conflict, - put differently, to establish what the institutional and instrumental use of inflation as a monetary category could be. But above all, the hardest task remained to explain how it was possible for a "mathematical" relationship between two obviously fictitious notions - that of "price" and that of "value" or "quantities" (cf. the title of Hayek's "Prices and Production") - to be "effectual", that is, to serve as the "rule of thumb" for the conduct, regulation and expanded reproduction of the wage relation (let us remember that "profit" is meaningless without its "negation" - money wages). Once we have established, with Nietzsche, that there is no "scientific truth", the question then assumes Weberian overtones, revolving around how it is possible for the "rationalisation" [Weber] of social reality to occur. To answer this question I had to revise Marx's own approach to the content and methodology of what we call "science" - including especially this thing called "economic science". 

And that is what I have done in the works on Nietzsche (mainly in Part One, section 2 of "The Ontogeny of Thought") and Weber (mainly Part 3 dedicated to his methodology of social science). They are admittedly difficult works - because the subject-matter is difficult, involving a level of abstraction that would have tested even Marx himself, but one for which Nietzsche was far better equipped. So I am sending you now the draft chapters of the Nietzschebuch that I would be quite pleased for you to pass on to David. There is a whole universe of learning here; my greatest reward in life has been to have earned the financial freedom to be able to commit it to writing!

Once this analysis is understood, the musings of a Joan Robinson on "History versus Equilibrium" begin to sound like the kind of philosophical dualistic puzzles that keep undergraduates amused. The whole "intention" of neoclassical analysis was never to comprehend the capitalist economy as a "historical" reality, to reveal its "truth". The aim and practice of equilibrium analysis was never "to capture" or "photograph" a reality of any description. (Weber made this pellucid in the quotations I give in Part Three of the 'Weberbuch'.) Nor should neoclassical theory be confused as an "ideology" that somehow "distorts" this (fanciful notion of) "reality" (what Robinson and Lawson and others would call "history" or "the ontic"). A million times no! The power of neoclassical theory, and of equilibrium as the core aspect of it, is that it expresses "the will to power" of the bourgeoisie: it describes and understands life and the world NOT as it "should" or "ought" to be, least of all "as it is" - but rather as it MUST be for the bourgeoisie to be able to control the society of capital, to command living labour. In short, neoclassical theory is a pure instrument. Put in Weber's own analytical framework, it is the purest expression of the "value-free rationality" that displays entirely the "freedom" of the bourgeoisie, subject to their will to power! That is what Weber called "the politics of responsibility" opposed to the moralising "politics of conviction" espoused and represented by the Sozialismus. For Weber (and I accept this) "ideology" belongs to the Sozialismus, not to the "rationality" of the bourgeoisie! Equilibrium theory and game theory with their "equilibria" are the bluntest "value-free" expressions of this will to power - the will to exploit and dominate - because they allow that "mathematisation" or rationalisation of social life that makes the reproduction of the society of capital dependent on the survival of the wage relation as its dominant institution. Here "rationality" and "freedom" are seen not as "positive values", as "ultimate truths" shared by and common to all human beings; they are seen instead "negatively" in terms of "choosing what conflict and strife among human beings make us choose"!

(Just to exemplify the total in-comprehension of this point by academic economists, this is from Prof. Harris's [Stanford] review of Robinson's "History v. Equilibrium":

Though critical of the concept and uses of equilibrium, Robinson was not a“Luddite”. She was too diligent and penetrating an analyst to dismiss the advantages,albeit recognized to be quite limited, of using the equilibrium concept as a tool for analytical purposes. She herself used the device to great effect in her own work. She viewed it, at times, as a “thought experiment”, useful for solving “analytical puzzles”, even to the point of recognizing a “perverse pleasure” in this practice [1956, p. 147, n. 3].

Obviously, had Robinson truly recognised the significance of equilibrium analysis as a project of command over living labour she could never have used it "as a tool for analytical purposes" because the usefulness of neoclassical equilibrium theory does not lie in the "analysis", which is "meaningless" as Hayek first and then Myrdal [and Tony Lawson, da ultimo] showed, but in the "purpose", which is the mathesis of capitalist "command"! As Weber would put it, economic theory is not an end but a means, a tool; its rationality is not a Wert-rationalitat but a Zweck-rationalitat.)

This aspect of capitalist reality is entirely absent from Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation. The book valiantly and lucidly enucleates and explains the complex institutional interaction between the "phenomenon" of inflation and its "role" as the "measure" as well as a mediation of class antagonism as the product of a "trade-off" between money wages and unemployment levels. But it does not answer the basic question of how it is possible, not just institutionally but above all epistemologically, even ontologically (!), for inflation as a cognitive notion to serve as a "measure" of class conflict - as a tool (!) for the analysis of conflict. For inflation to be a "measure" of conflict, the bourgeoisie has to ensure that "conflict" remains within the institutional bounds that can be measured by inflation. Above all (and this is the most important point of all) "conflict" must be of such a "nature" that it is capable of being measured and mediated by the "phenomenon" of inflation.This in turn requires the elimination of all "values" other than the simple and blunt function of capitalist command over living labour represented by its political subordination to dead labour through the institutional form of the money-wage. Keynes's 'General Theory' is all here! This is his greatest discovery: - the money wage as the fundamental "unit" of measurement of social conflict in the society of capital; the centrality of the working class in that historical stage of capitalism - a "centrality" that the working class and Keynesianism (!) are clearly losing and "ex-hausting" as the social conflict generated by the wage relation poses new "systemic risks" to the rule of capital.

From the epistemological angle, we must come to another realisation. Neoclassical analysis works on mathematical identities (equilibria). As Keynes would say, "one of two things": either the two sides of a mathematical equation are absolutely identical, in which case they cancel each other out (they "say" absolutely nothing - Wittgenstein); or else they are not identical (Nietzsche), in which case the "equation" is impossible. Yet it is the very ability of human beings to perform mathematical calculations and to treat them as "valid" that displays the full "value-lessness" of life and the world for Nietzsche (and for me), and that annihilates all notions of "truth", scientific or otherwise. I call this "Nietzsche's Invariance" (as in matrix algebra). (A literary example: you will recall that Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984 believes that it is "the truth" of the statement "two plus two makes four" that "saves" him from the arbitrariness of Big Brother's totalitarian power. What Nietzsche and I argue here instead - but so did Wittgenstein! - is that it is precisely our ability to conceive of mathematical identities that is the supreme proof that the "power" of Big Brother

is possible!) Put in other words, if "truth" actually ex-isted it would not be "detectable" by us - because all criteria for "truth" need themselves to be "truthful" (a regressio ad infinitum). (Thomas Jefferson intuited the difficulty when he wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." But if "these truths" are "self-evident", why do we need "to hold them to be so"? The same applies to "mathematical and logical truths" - cf. Godel.)

Don Patinkin also came very close to this pivotal point in the philosophy of mathematics, language and science. His response or objection was that mathematical equations "save time" in computation! But Wittgenstein will reply (maybe aiming his poker at him!): What does "time" have to do with mathematics and logic? Patinkin says that "time is a device to stop everything from happening at once". But Nietzsche will reply (almost his exact words): who tells you that everything does not happen at once? If mathematical and logical identities "say" anything, it is precisely that "all the powers of the universe are drawing to their own conclusion". (These conclusions were reached but inchoately as early as Nicholas of Cusa in the 1400s and then taken up by Leibnitz - and of course by Russell in his discussion of Leibnitz's "pantheism". None of them went as far as Nietzsche in confronting them "fearlessly" [I am referring to the book of the 'Gaya Scienza' called "We, the Fearless Ones"].)"]

Kant’s transcendental idealism spawned a response that Kant himself would not have approved of in the speculative apotheosis of dialecticians like Fichte, Schelling and then Hegel, the German Idealist philosophers that followed took his transcendental “dialectic” and turned it into a new type of Logic! To Kant’s “formal logic”, Hegel and others substituted a method of dialectical reasoning whereby human thought, identified as self-consciousness, was no longer “op-posed” to any Ob-ject – be it Nature or the Thing in itself – that was not “generated” by thought itself – the Hegelian Idea or the Fichtean ‘I’ (Ich or Ego) that doubled up also as an “empirical I”! The nihilism of post-Kantian German Idealism consists precisely in the fact that Nature is “abolished” or “superseded” as a logical “moment” in the unfolding of the Idea. (The word “nihilism” itself was first used by Jacobi in this context in a letter on Fichte.)

The fact that Marx “inverted” the Hegelian dialectic serves only to show how much he “flirted” with it, how dependent he was on it: and certain post-modernist critics have been right to speak of the ‘Kapital-Geist’, of the teleology implicit in the Marxian critique. There is even a strong dose of Darwinian evolutionism (Nietzsche intuited provocatively that “Darwin is unthinkable without Hegel”) and Newtonian determinism in his critique of political economy. Now, these are “ingredients”, this is a forma mentis that we must eschew and expel from our own theoretical-practical framework. And to deepen this process I have chosen to follow, as intimated above, Arendt’s discussion of this “knot of problems” in The Life of the Mind. In explaining rapidly above the double genitive meaning of this phrase

– that life has a mind and that the mind has a life – we meant to agree wholeheartedly with Arendt’s critique of the Cartesian solipsistic cogito, and particularly with Arendt’s invocation of Nietzsche’s strictures in this regard. Where we differ from Arendt, however, is in the manner she tackles Kant and about how she wishes to proceed therefrom.

For our purposes, and to elucidate the problematic that we are confronting, we need to describe and overcome what may be called (again with Merleau-Ponty, Reader, p.24) “the transcendental attitude”, - an attitude that has afflicted Western thought from its inception and that consists in positing a “whole” of which perception is a “part” that cannot com-prehend (um-greifen) that whole. But herein lies its error – to wit, in the fact that the transcendental attitude expressly denies the possibility of immanence and invokes logic to postulate the primacy of “categories” or “rules” that order and explain our perception of life and the world – and it does so for the simple reason that transcendentalism falsely conceives of life and the world, of reality, as if it constituted a whole! This, if you like, is the proton pseudon (the first and fundamental error) of transcendentalism: - the “logical requirement”, that is, that “phenomena”, or “mere appearances”, must somehow “depend” or “be caused by” some “re-ality”, some “thing” that lies behind, or beneath or beyond the phenomenon. Yet only a moment’s reflection on this dualism “required” by logical thought will show us that no “logic” could ever lay down the “necessity” of its own “rules”! No mathematics could ever be or represent the “necessity” of its own id-entities or of its axioms!

And this is perhaps the most universal corollary of Nietzsche’s Invariance: - the fact that for a “truth”, logico-mathematical or ethical or empirical, to be “self-evident”, it would have to be so self-evident that it would simply be impossible to detect! But an undetectable “truth” is no truth at all – because it would amount to the identity of “idea” (Subject) and “thing” (Object), an identity so complete and total that it would not be possible for the Subject to be “aware” or “conscious” of it. As Nietzsche showed most devastatingly for the delusions of Western thought, “consciousness” does not require or necessitate the existence of a subject and an object, either logically or in terms of “common sense” – although in terms of “common sense” that is exactly what has happened historically, that is, this false and illusory requirement has led to the development of “logical rules of reasoning” that require precisely such a dualism. The fact remains, however, that “consciousness” or perception does not require the ec-sistence of a Subject or self-consciousness and, therefore, not even of an Object that is necessarily required by that Subject. This is a thesis

that directly contradicts Arendt’s summary of Cartesian solipsism and Nietzsche’s opposition to it. Nietzsche does not object to the cogito merely because it shows only that there are “cogitations”. He also does two things for which Arendt gives him no credit whatsoever: he shows that there is a non sequitur from “I think” to “I am” to “egoity”; and above all, as Arendt who cites Merleau-Ponty agrees (p49), he shows that the “experience” of reality comes before that of “I think” or “the thought of perception” (vivo ergo cogito), and second – again, the most important thing that Arendt leaves out – that there is absolutely no difference between abstract thought and any other kind of thought or emotion! (This last notion is evinced when Nietzsche describes dreams as thoughts from “the same book” of human experience.) Not only, says Nietzsche, does thought never really manage “to leave the world”, but it also never manages, pace Arendt, “to withdraw from the world”!

This is Arendt’s real stumbling block; the source of all her “paradoxes”. – Which does not prevent her from realizing the “instrumental” role of science; but it also induces her into re-iterating the fallacies that lead straight and lend support to “scientific reasoning”. Had Arendt reflected more deeply on the Marxian “Gattungswesen” instead of enlisting it only as evidence for the “sensus communis”, she would have realized that the notion of “man” as “thought made flesh” is a “mystery” – “the always mysterious, never fully elucidated incarnation of the thinking capability” (p47) – only when considered abstractly, as “man”, and if we ignore the “fundamentality” of thought that Merleau-Ponty indicated and that she herself was seeking – and that both could only describe as a chiasmus. (See ‘LotM’, pp46-7.) The meaning of “fundamentality” is what we are pursuing. In one of the passages quoted above (from ‘PoP’), Merleau-Ponty stresses the primacy of this “sense of reality” or Arendt’s “sensus communis” above all “intellectualizations” of perception and therefore of “thought” – something with which Nietzsche with his “ontogeny of thought” would agree implicitly. So the problem to be explored is not the “intentionality” of science – the fact that its “direction” is a matter of praxis and not of pure “scientificity” or “methodology”. Much rather, the paramount problem is the “real subsumption” of the scientific praxis both in terms of “direction” and in terms of the “sample uni-verse” that it has already “con-ditioned” if not determined! Scientific praxis both reacts to and acts upon the existing world in such a way that its own “research” is determined or conditioned in large part by its accumulated praxis. Human beings have now trans-formed their environment to so large an extent that no scientific “research” can properly be labeled “dis-interested” even before we realize that it cannot be such in any case!

If we return to the problem of “inflation” and other economic categories, for instance, we will see that – as Arendt herself points out intelligently in ‘HC’ – these can be given a meaningful and measurable role as “a box of tools” (Robinson, Schumpeter) only once the social environment (institutions) has been pre-determined by a certain praxis of political power! (Contrast this devastating insight with the idiotic platitudes of the “New Institutional Economics”.) Yet Arendt never develops this penetrating conception in ‘LotM’, confining herself instead to observing that “scientific truth” is guided by the research choices of scientists and to the fact that this has changed the attitude of scientists to their findings as one of “verities” (infinitely perfectible in the chain of “progress”) rather than “truths” (final and certain), (‘LotM’, pp55-6). Here the problem is that Arendt speaks of “science” in general and fails to understand its “subsumption” to social relations of production. It is this unwarranted, fallacious “separation” of scientific research from social relations that leads her to the equally fallacious separation of the interested use of what she calls “scientific common sense” and the dis-interested use of “sheer thinking” which, through its “critical capacity”, alone is capable of providing “safeguards” against the tendency of scientific research “to force the non-appearing to appear” in its quest for “infinite cognition or knowledge” (p56). Again, like Plato and Mach and Heidegger and myriads of other thinkers, Arendt draws the now well-established confrontation of “philosophers” against “sophists” – a banality that Nietzsche denounced (in ‘ToI’). Unlike Nietzsche and Weber, however, she has failed to integrate this “will to truth” in the broader socio-political context of the “real subsumption of science and technology” by the capitalist social relations of production.

Once more, the thought of Nicholas of Cusa can assist us in this regard by “bringing into focus” the problem we are confronting.

En cambio para Nicolás de Cusa las ideas no constituyen, como para el neoplatonismo,fuerzas creadoras, pues él reclama un [62] sujeto concreto como centro y punto departida de toda verdadera acción creadora. Ahora bien, según el Cusano, ese sujeto sólopuede darse en el espíritu del hombre. De este punto de vista resulta, sobre todo, unnuevo giro de la teoría del conocimiento. Todo conocer auténtico y verdadero no puedeversar sobre una mera copia de la realidad, sino que debe representar siempre unadirección determinada de la acción espiritual. La necesidad que reclamamos para laciencia y que vemos particularmente en la matemática reconoce por causa esa libreactividad. El espíritu sólo logra verdadero conocimiento cuando no copia la existenciaexterior, sino cuando se explica a sí mismo, cuando se explica su propia esencia. En símismo encuentra el espíritu el concepto primordial y el principio del punto, del cual,por conveniente repetición, hace nacer la línea, el plano y, finalmente, lo totalidad delmundo de los cuerpos; en sí mismo encuentra el espíritu del hombre el conceptoprimordial del ahora, partiendo del cual se despliega para él la infinitud de la sucesión

temporal. Así como están implícitas en el espíritu humano las formas fundamentales dela intuición —tiempo y espacio—, también lo está el concepto de número y magnitud ytodas las categorías lógicas y matemáticas. En el desarrollo de esas categorías el espíritucrea la aritmética, la geometría, la música y la astronomía. De modo que a la postre todolo lógico, tanto los diez predicamentos como los cinco universales, se resuelve en esafuerza fundamental del espíritu. Éstas son las condiciones de toda discretio, de todaagrupación de la multiplicidad según especies y clases y de toda reducción de loempírico cambiante a leyes rigurosamente determinadas60. En [63] esta fundamentaciónde las ciencias revélase la fuerza creadora del alma racional en sus dos momentosfundamentales: por un lado el espíritu, al desplegarse, está dentro de lo temporal, peropor otro está, sin embargo, por encima del tiempo considerado como simple sucesión,porque el espíritu, que es origen y creador de la ciencia, no está en el tiempo, antes bien,el tiempo está en él. El espíritu, en virtud de su fuerza de discernimiento, es capaz decrear períodos de tiempo y divisiones temporales, de delimitar horas, meses, años.

Again we see Nicholas’s insistence on the notion of “Subject” and “the human spirit” as the “source” of the intuition of time and space and in the “creation of ideas and concepts” that are “expressions of human freedom” and that above all bestow “values” that seek “to unite opposites” (Nature and Reason), to oscillate between chorismos and methexis, and even to intuit the divine or thr totality from the consciousness of finitude. What is truly novel and most insightful in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa as explicated by Cassirer, however, is the intuition that human science and logico-mathematics itself, far from being pro-ducts or ef-fects of the per-ception by humans of an “objective reality” that lies beyond our ability to com-prehend and that yet lends itself to being described as “truth” or “error”– far from this, Nicholas finally intuits as Nietzsche will do much later that science and logico-mathematics may be an expression of human activity aimed in a pre-determined or deliberate direction[determinada direccion]!

“The necessity of science and mathematics” displays in reality- not “the truth”! - but only the “discretion”, the arbitrariness of human action, its de-liberation, its “value-lessness” or, as Nietzsche would say, its “extra-moral sense”! The apex of human arbitrium, of human discretion, is the all too human ability to decree “the necessity of logico-mathematical or scientific laws” that are then traduced into “laws of logico-mathematical and scientific necessity”! That is why Nietzsche claims – with profound intuition – that “human beings find in nature, in the world, what they had already hidden in it”. Far from being “necessary”, such deliberate or discretionary action is “auf Nichts gestellt” – originating from the void or nothingness (Nichts) – in exactly the same way in which Carl Schmitt will challenge the “vicious circle” of legality and

legitimacy and the ultimate foundation of sovereignty and the State on the “decision on the exception”. Schmitt, like Donoso Cortes before him, acutely identifies the similarity of “the state of exception” or “dictatorship” that suspends the legal and constitutional order with the status of “miracles”, which suspend the physical order!

Nicholas of Cusa himself had anticipated Nietzsche with his notion of “conjecture” (cf. his De Conjectura), which is the “hypothesis” behind the “convention”, where the “convention” (axioms, for instance) crystallizes human action so that “hypotheses” (modes of conduct toward the cosmos) can be made about life and the world.

La experiencia brinda unconocimiento auténtico, pero ciertamente tal conocimiento no es en sí exacto y límpido,pues, por más que progrese, nunca alcanzará lo absoluto; siempre tendrá una meta y unfin relativos; en esa esfera no reina la verdadera exactitud, la precisión, la praecisio,sino que por grande que sea la exactitud de una afirmación o de una medición, siemprepuede y debe ser superada por otra aún más exacta. Así, pues, todo nuestro conocimientoempírico queda reducido a mera conjetura; es cálculo, es hipótesis que desde unprincipio se reduce a admitir que puede ser superado por cálculos mejores y másprecisos. En esta idea de conjetura, de conjectura, quedan inmediatamentecomprendidos, y de tal manera que se confunden en una sola noción, dos pensamientosdistintos: el pensamiento de la eterna alteridad entre idea y apariencia y el pensamientode la participación de la apariencia en la idea. La definición que Nicolás de Cusa da delconocimiento empírico descansa en ese encadenamiento de alteridad y participación:“conjectura est positiva assertio in alteritate veritatem uti est participans”27. De estemodo tenemos ante nosotros, junto a la teología negativa, una doctrina positiva de laexperiencia; ambas corrientes no sólo no se oponen entre sí, sino que más bienrepresentan, desde dos ángulos distintos, una y la misma concepción fundamental delconocimiento. La verdad una, inalcanzable en su ser absoluto, sólo se nos presenta en laesfera de la alteridad; mas por otro lado no es posible que pensemos alteridad algunaque de algún modo no se refiera a la unidad y que no tenga en ella parte28. [41]Debemos, pues, renunciar a toda identidad, a toda compenetración de una esfera en laotra, a todo intento de suprimir el dualismo; pero precisamente esa actitud confiere anuestro conocimiento su relativa legitimidad y su relativa verdad. Esto enseña, ydigámoslo a la manera kantiana, que nuestro conocimiento, aunque tenga límites quenunca podrá franquear, dentro de la esfera de su propio actuar no reconoce en cambio lamenor limitación, en la alteridad misma, libre y sin impedimentos de ninguna clase,puede y debe explayarse en todos los sentidos. (Cassirer, par.41.)

[Euclid. Extra-temporal time and extra-mundanity]

It is clear from the above that “scientific language” (logico-mathematics) is the “instrument” that dis-covers “regularities” in life

and the world – but these do not “belong to”, are not “properties of”, life and the world; rather, they are “dictated” by the ability of certain “experiences” to be described in and by that “language”. And this “language” is not simply an “inert and impartial tool”; it is much rather the expression of a certain “attitude” toward life and the world. Not only Nicholas of Cusa, but especially his scientific “inventors” like Galileo, Leonardo and then Kepler and Leibnitz understood that what they were “dis-covering” was quite similar to the Platonic anamnesis in that the “laws of nature”, although independent of the mind were nothing other than the extension and application to life and the world of a “harmony” that was already located in the human spirit and was now “re-called” or “re-collected” by human reason (see Cassirer quotation below at [79] re Leonardo and Galileo and Kepler).

Olschki [81] ha mostrado en formainsuperable en su Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur cómoambos problemas se compenetran y complementan mutuamente y, por lo tanto, cómosólo es posible resolverlos por la consideración simultánea de uno y otro. Desligarse dellatín medieval y construir y desarrollar paulatinamente el volgare como formaindependiente de la expresión científica eran condiciones previas del libredesenvolvimiento del pensamiento científico y de su ideal metodológico. Y aquí se prueba una vez más la verdad y la profundidad de la concepción de Humboldt según lacual el lenguaje no se limita a seguir y a acompañar al pensamiento sino que constituye un momento esencial de la formación del pensamiento mismo. En el caso del latín escolástico y el italiano moderno, las diferencias que presentan ambas lenguas no son por cierto meras disparidades de sonidos y signos; expresan respectivamente unacosmovisión distinta. De suerte que aun en este caso la lengua no se limita a servir demero receptáculo o continente de la nueva cosmovisión sino que además contribuye consu propia formación y estructura a engendrarla. El pensamiento técnico y lingüístico delRenacimiento se orienta en la misma dirección94. Aun en este aspecto —cosa que aprimera vista resulta sorprendente— también Nicolás de Cusa se había anticipado ya asu tiempo. En efecto, en su filosofía da una nueva significación al espíritu técnico, alespíritu del inventor y le asigna una dignidad también del todo nueva. Cuando expone ypropugna su concepción general de la ciencia, cuando explica que toda ciencia no essino el desarrollo y la explicación de lo que yace encerrado y complicado en la naturalesencia del espíritu, no sólo se refiere por cierto a los conceptos fundamentales de lalógica, de la matemática y de las ciencias exactas de la naturaleza, sino también a loselementos de la ciencia técnica y de la creación técnica. Así como el espíritu desarrollael concepto de espacio partiendo del principio del punto que el mismo espíritu encierra,así como desarrolla; la noción de tiempo partiendo del simple ahora y la de númeropartiendo de la unidad, así también un bosquejo o plan ideal debe preceder a todaacción del espíritu sobre la naturaleza. Todas las artes y oficios reconocen su raíz en un bosquejo de esa índole. Junto a los predicamentos de la lógica, junto a los conceptos de la geometría y de la aritmética, de la música y de la astronomía, deben citarse también como testi-[82]-monios de la autonomía y de la eternidad del espíritu las conquistas técnicas; hay que citar la lira de Orfeo y el astrolabio de Ptolomeo95.

Y aunque el espíritu no permanezca sencillamente en sí mismo cuando aplica su propia fuerza creadora, cuando volviéndose a una materia sensible la configura y transforma, ello no significa empero que pierda algo de su naturaleza y esencia, pues éstas siempre son, puramente intelectuales. En efecto, aun en este sentido el camino hacia arriba y haciaabajo es el mismo, pues el intelecto sólo desciende a lo sensible para elevar hasta sí elmundo de los sentidos. Su acción sobre un mundo material, aparentemente contrario,constituye precisamente la condición para que pueda reconocer y realizar su propiaforma, para que pueda pasar de su ser potencial a su ser actual96. Henos aquí ante unpunto que nos explica con gran claridad cómo precisamente del idealismo de Nicolás de Cusa resulta un efecto fuertemente realista, cómo el renovador de la doctrina platónica de la anamnesis pudo convertirse en guía de los grandes empiristas, de los fundadores de la moderna ciencia experimental, pues tampoco para ellos existe la menor oposición entre apriorismo y empirismo, ya que en la experiencia no buscan sino la necesidad, la razón misma. Cuando Leonardo se vuelve hacia la experiencia, lo hace para demostrar en ella misma la eterna e inmutable legalidad de la razón. Más que la experiencia misma, el verdadero objeto de Leonardo es alcanzar los principios racionales, las ragioni que en ella se ocultan y en cierto modo se materializan. Y él mismo manifiesta que la naturaleza está llena de tales razones que nunca se encuentran en la experiencia (la natura è piena d'infinite ragioni che non furono mai in isperienza97). No es otro el camino que sigue Galileo cuando, sintiéndose campeón de la legitimidad de la experiencia, sostiene que sólo el espíritu es capaz de crear la verdadera, la necesaria ciencia partiendo de sí mismo (da per sè). Por lo que se [83] desprende del sentido general del pensamiento de los espíritus directores que la guiaron, se comprende cómo la nueva ciencia de la naturaleza, al liberarse de la Escolástica, no necesitó romper el vínculo que la mantenía unida a la filosofía antigua y al intento de renovarla, y cómo, por el contrario, hubo de hacerlo aún más ceñido.

The importance of this “attitude” or “view” cannot be over-emphasised. The earliest and greatest representatives of modern science and technology, as well as the greatest modern exponents of logico-mathematics, had no doubts or qualms about the fact that their “discoveries” were really an “un-covering” of “the truth”, of the laws of nature. The “necessity” of these laws lay for them not principally in the independent phenomena of nature that they sought to rationalize, but rather in the “instrument” that they adopted to describe them! It goes without saying that “science” thereby was interested only (!) in what could be described and encapsulated in mathematical formulae! Put in other words, “science” does not “dis-cover” the world but rather “orders” it in terms of the instrumental needs of the scientist and the inventor – indeed, the scientist as inventor! -, needs that are now ex-pressed through a new instrumental language, that of logico-mathematics, which, as Cassirer superbly reminds us, is “an essential moment” of the development of theories. The earliest scientists and inventors of the bourgeois era came very close to identifying the implicit nihilism of the transcendental attitude: what stopped them

from recognizing it was the very “transcendentalism” that they espoused with regard to the supremacy of the human spirit or Reason, of the “divinity” of the Subject as opposed to “the created world of nature”, the Object.

Pero si lo espiritual en sí permanece inaccesible para nosotros, y si de ningún modo podemos comprenderlo sino como imagen sensible, como símbolo, sin embargo podemos pretender que por lo menos la imagen sensible misma no implique nada dudoso ni confuso, pues el camino que conduce a lo incierto sólo puede pasar a través de lo cierto y lo seguro86. La novedad de esta concepción consiste en establecer que por los símbolos mediante los cuales podemos concebir lo divino se alcanza no sólo la plenitude y la fuerza de lo sensible, sino que de ellos se obtiene, sobre todo, precisión y seguridad teoréticas. De modo que así la naturaleza de la relación entre el mundo y Dios, entre lo finito y lo infinito, experimenta una enérgica transformación. Para la esfera del pensamiento místico, cualquier aspecto o sector del ser puede convertirse sin más en punto de enlace de esa relación, pues en cada caso particular se puede reconocer la huella de Dios. Él mismo se presenta a nuestra vista en el esplendor de lo finito. Elpropio Nicolás de Cusa repite también esta expresión87, sólo que la aplica a una nuevarelación universal. En efecto, para él la naturaleza no constituye sólo el reflejo del ser deDios y de la fuerza divina; es además un libro que Dios escribió con su propia mano88.Estamos aún aquí en terreno firmemente religioso, pero a [77] la vez también —ydigámoslo con Schelling— hemos pasado al libre, al abierto campo de la cienciaobjetiva, pues el sentido del libro de la naturaleza no puede ser desentrañado —ni elhombre puede apropiarse de él— por el solo sentimiento subjetivo o por el puro sentimiento místico; para descifrar ese libro es preciso examinarlo, es preciso recorrerlopalabra por palabra, carácter por carácter. Ya el mundo no podía ser por más tiempo,frente al hombre, un mero jeroglífico de Dios, un signo sagrado; demandaba unainterpretación sistemática. Según la dirección que se tome, esa interpretación lleva, ya auna nueva metafísica, ya a una nueva concepción de las ciencias exactas de lanaturaleza.

La filosofía de la naturaleza del Renacimiento echó a andar por el primerode estos caminos. Partiendo del pensamiento capital de que la naturaleza es el libro deDios, lo va modificando sin cesar con nuevas variaciones. Sobre este fundamentoCampanella construye íntegramente su doctrina del conocimiento y toda su metafísica.Para él, conocer no es otra cosa que leer los caracteres de la escritura divina en el libro de la naturaleza: intelligere no significa sino intus legere. “El mundo es la estatua, eltemplo viviente y el códice de Dios en el cual Él ha asentado y ha inscripto cosas deinfinita dignidad que albergaba en su espíritu. Feliz es aquel que lee en ese libro y de él aprende las condiciones de las cosas, sin imaginarlas según su propio arbitrio o según las opiniones ajenas.”89 Para expresar esta idea Campanella se vale de un parangón que, como tal, por cierto no constituye ninguna novedad —al contrario, es fácil encontrarlo a través de Nicolás de Cusa en la filosofía de la Edad Media e inclusive en San Agustín y Santo Tomás—, pero que con todo expresa un sentido nuevo y específico de la naturaleza; resulta significativo, empero, que las frases citadas se encuentren al final de un tratado que lleva por título De sensu rerum et magia. En efecto, el vínculo que

mantiene unida a la naturaleza consigo misma en lo íntimo y que la enlaza con elhombre por otro lado, está enteramente pensado como vínculo de carácter mágico ymístico. El hombre sólo puede comprender la naturaleza introduciendo inmediatamenteen ella la propia vida. Los límites que establece su sentido de la [78] vida, los confinesdel sentimiento inmediato de la naturaleza representan por lo tanto, al mismo tiempo,los límites de su conocimiento de ella.

La otra forma de la interpretación de los signosde la naturaleza está representada por aquella tendencia de la ciencia natural quepartiendo de Nicolás de Cusa continúa a través de Leonardo de Vinci en Galileo yKepler. Los representantes de esta dirección no se contentan con la energía metafóricade los signos materiales en los cuales leemos la estructura espiritual del universo; antesbien, exigen que esos signos formen un sistema concluso en sí mismo, un complejoconexo y universal. El sentido de la naturaleza no debe sentirse sólo en forma mística;es preciso pensarlo como sentido lógico. Ahora bien, esta exigencia sólo puedesatisfacerse por medio de las matemáticas, pues frente a la arbitrariedad e inseguridadde las opiniones únicamente ellas establecen una unidad de medida necesaria einequívoca. De ahí que para Leonardo la matemática constituyó la línea divisoria entresofística y ciencia. Aquel que infiere injurias a su suprema certeza sustenta su espíritucon la confusión. Mientras se aferra a las palabras aisladas, cae en la vaguedad y en laambigüedad propias de la palabra sin más, y se ve así enredado en una puralogomaquia90. Solamente la matemática, al fijar las significaciones de las palabras y alsubordinar a reglas determinadas sus relaciones, es capaz de señalar una meta a esascontroversias, pues de esta suerte, en lugar de presentar una mera yuxtaposición depalabras, los pensamientos y proposiciones se disponen ante nosotros en una severaconcatenación sintáctica. Galileo lleva estas consideraciones hasta sus últimasconsecuencias; para él aun las mismas percepciones sensibles particulares, por más que se nos den con gran intensidad y energía, no son más que puros nombres que en símismos nada significan, que no entrañan ningún contenido de significación objetivo ydeterminado91. Una significación de tal índole sólo se da cuando el espíritu humanorefiere el contenido de la percepción a una de esas formas básicas del conocimientocuyo arquetipo encierra el espíritu mismo. Únicamente en virtud de esa relación y deese nexo el libro de la naturaleza se torna legible y comprensible [79] para el hombre.De este modo, partiendo del pensamiento básico de la certeza indestructible(incorruptibilis certitudo) que enunciara Nicolás de Cusa —a saber: de todos lossímbolos que el espíritu del hombre necesita y es capaz de crear, sólo los signosmatemáticos poseen tal certeza—; de este modo, pues, llegamos en la sucesión históricadirecta a esa célebre y capital enunciación normativa que señala la meta y lasingularidad de la investigación de Galileo.

This is a point of the greatest importance that can be derived from, but is not made explicit in Heidegger’s Kantbuch, his lamentably much-neglected “sequel” to Being and Time. Indeed, the opposite is

the case because Heidegger, as we shall see, remains chained to the “transcendental attitude” that we are de-structing here. In the tradition of the negatives Denken, Heidegger seeks to re-found metaphysics through a punctilious critical review of Kant’s epistemology which, he claims, was always intended as a meta-physics, though an ultimately flawed one. The “flaw” lies precisely in what we are discussing here: - the Kantian pre-requisite of a “separation” (chorismos or “gap”, hiatus) between noumenon and phenomenon between which he coveted a “bridge” (Ubergang) through the “mediation” of per-ception and con-ception by the Understanding or Intellect and its “constitutive” Schematismus that is ultimately “regulated” by Pure Reason. Kant’s “logic” – the Analytic that is founded on the Aesthetic – is so “formal”, so much the product not of experience itself but of Kantian moral formalism, the Sollen, that it invited the recriminations of Schopenhauer. Above all, it inspired the dialectical idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, in whose direction Nietzsche poured his atrabilious ridicule for what he lampooned as “cunning theology”. Of course, Marxian philosophy sprang from these transcendental, indeed theo-logical, loins - so much so that in Marx the valiant attempt at immanence is always threatened by the teleological tendency of his critique, which is what prompted R H Tawney to immortalize him as “the last of the Schoolmen”.

Now, we agree with Kant that for a sequence of homogeneous concepts or events it is impossible to be described consistently and coherently by individual elements that are dependent on that sequence for their meaning. And we agree with Heidegger that Leibnitz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason is flawed in that the “criterion” of what makes a “reason to be” sufficient needs to be made explicit given that “what is” is only an aspect or “moment” of becoming. But this does not apply to the “materiality” of our perception of life and the world which, whilst it does not com-prehend life and the world, yet at the same time is a part of it without which the very notion of life and the world, of “totality”, would have no meaning whatsoever. The notions of “Totality” and “Truth” can ec-sist as “notions” only because there is no such “thing” or “being” as totality or truth. Hegel’s “dialectic of self-consciousness” seeks to overcome the dualism of Kantian formal logic by introducing an “evolutionary” dimension that is “historical” only as a “moment” in the extrinsication of the Idea. Hegel supersedes Cartesian and Kantian transcendental idealism by “radicalizing” the Subject – in effect by making the Subject objectify itself. This is the Eskamotage to which all post-Hegelians (from Feuerbach to Bruno Bauer to Marx) and the negatives Denken (from Schopenhauer to Heidegger)

objected with varying degrees of relevance and success, and then tried to supplant with their own teleologies.

Our aim here is to overcome the “transcendental attitude” (Merleau-Ponty) by exposing its fallacies and antinomies; and then to pursue a return to immanence. Indeed, the point we are making is that once we understand properly the character and content of our perception of life and the world – its full immanence and materiality -, the very notion of “totality” (Kant’s “Thing in itself”, Schopenhauer’s “qualitas occulta”, Heidegger’s “Totalitat” or Jaspers’s “Um-greifende”) becomes contra-dictory. This is a conclusion that Nietzsche reached originally and that we have styled (partially, because as we have seen there are important corollaries to it) “Nietzsche’s Invariance” – and one that even Merleau-Ponty has articulated with great acumen and indeed…”perceptiveness”.

In a nutshell, philosophy has always perceived that human consciousness is “consciousness of some thing”, and therefore it is only a “partial” perspective on life and the world because it is “only a part of it”. Yet at the same time consciousness attempts to com-prehend the world: to de-fine it, to en-compass it and to encapsulate it – which it cannot do because life and the world are “greater” than consciousness. This “greater” – that without which consciousness cannot aspire to or claim “totality” – can be called the qualitas occulta, the “whatness” or quidditas of the world, its “essence”, its sub-stance (what “stands under” the world), that which subtends the world in its totality. Yet it is precisely this con-ception of “life and the world” as an ob-ject (“that”) that constitutes a “quantity”, a “whole” (“totality”, “part”, “greater”) that is the proton pseudos, the fundamental fallacy of this “Welt-anschauung”, of this “view” or perspective of the world! Starting with Kant, and continuing particularly with Schopenhauer and the negatives Denken, philosophy has renounced the task of com-prehending life and the world understood as a whole, as a “totality”. Utterly mis-conceived and mistaken, therefore, must remain for us Jaspers’s attempt to interpret Nietzsche’s critique in the perspective of “totality”, of the Um-greifende. It is exactly this “totality” as well as the Schopenhauerian “powerless” [ohn-machtig] illusion of “renouncing” it [!] that Nietzsche shatters forever. This “renunciation” or Entsagung represents the attempt by the bourgeoisie to eschew every “totality”, every inter esse or “common being” of humanity, preferring instead to highlight the ineluctable “conflict”, the “strife and struggle”, the Eris that characterizes relations between human beings as in-dividuals – that is, not in their “species-conscious being” or Gattungswesen (Marx) or phylo-genetic shared traits, but rather in their “onto-genetic” idiosyncrasies (Nietzsche). But whereas the bourgeoisie

always relegates the construction of a humanized society to the unreachable horizon of utopian dreams, to the empyrean of “the human spirit”, the better to underline the futility of all attempts to overturn the established order of things, Nietzsche pitilessly de-structs precisely this bourgeois U-topia, this “opium of the masses”, this “kingdom of shadows” – this “true world” as well as the “apparent” world because these two worlds have “meaning” only in their op-position! By overcoming their opposition, Nietzsche was able to dispose of both worlds and to enter a wholly new dimension of the human perception of reality. It is thus that Nietzsche overcame both the Hegelian “spiritualization” (Vergeistigung) and the Weberian “dis-enchantment” (Ent-zauberung, Ent-seelung) – which are still products of the transcendental attitude and whose progeny is nihilism itself.

The peculiar praxis of the bourgeoisie resides precisely in this: - that whilst it posits the dualism of idea and reality, of subject and object, of soul and form, so as to interiorize or spiritualise life and the world – to reduce all praxis to Utopia -, at the same time the bourgeoisie renounces and denounces this U-topia (literally, no place) as inter esse, whilst it still traduces, exalts and elevates it as “in-dividuality”, as (private) inter-est for its own purposes, the better to seize on the effectuality of its instrumental praxis by constructing an entire “technico-scientific” reality around it.

The problem is to show how it is possible for this instrumental praxis to become “scientific”, how this praxis can be “crystallised” (a term that Marx then Nietzsche and Simmel and Weber used) to become an “objective reality” – a reification. Part of the answer is that the bourgeoisie narrows, restricts and reduces the scope and sphere of human action to such an extent that its “science” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy! Contrary to what both Marx and Lukacs (or Weber with the homologous concept of Rationalisierung) believed, it is quite impossible – indeed, contra-dictory – for reification (or the fetishism of commodities) to be “a necessary illusion” in a “scientific” or mechanistic sense – because what distinguishes “reification” (or Nietzsche’s Verinnerlichung, that is, the “interiorisation” of social values) is precisely its “arbitrariness”, its utter contingency. The “necessity” of the “illusion” consists not in any “scientific” inevitability or logical inexorability, not in any “automatism”, but precisely in its arbitrariness (!), in its ec-sistence as a sheer ex-ercise of naked power, co-ercion and co-action made possible by the very “instrumentality” of the “science” or “the will to truth” that mathesis allows! In other words, it is exactly and precisely the ab-straction from life and the world that mathesis allows that permits the so-called “rationalization of the world”. The “iron necessity” of the “illusion” that reification represents is given by and made possible by the

reduction of power relationships, of “violence”, to the status of mere ciphers, of mathesis.

This is the “truth” (intended as the out-come, the “success” or effectuality [Er-folg], of “the will to truth”) of Nietzsche’s Invariance! Contrary to an almost universal belief, it is precisely (!) the precision of the mathematical exakte Kalkulation(Weber’s phrase) that enables, not the dis-covery of “truth”, but instead the en-forcement, the co-action of violent strategies! The limit of the Weberian Rationalisierung, re-cast in Marxist garb as “reification” by Lukacs, is that it hypostatizes “reification” itself (!) because it presents it either as the outcome of Zweck-rationalitat (Weber) - which, as we have shown in the ‘Weberbuch’, is an im-possible operation if we adopt Weber’s notion of “technical rationality”, the product of a flawed (Simmelian) formalism. Or else it presents it (Marx-Lukacs) as the “quantification” of labour-time – again a task that is either contra-dictory because human labour cannot be quantified; or else it is self-defeating because it admits what it seeks to condemn, - that labour time is “quantifiable” as “socially necessary labour time” and that therefore all that is wrong with reification is the “theft of labour time” as surplus value extraction. In effect, Marx-Lukacs concede the “possibility” of the quantification of human living labour, shifting the emphasis of “exploitation” from the social relation of alienated labour – the violent reduction of human living labour to dead labour - in the process of production to that of “distribution” of the social product. Interestingly, whereas the former notion (of alienated labour) points to a broader political scope of capitalist exploitation, the latter (the moralistic notion of “theft of labour time”) becomes frankly "reductionist" and “scientistic” – in effect “reifying” living labour and the notion of “production” in a “technical-scientistic” sense in terms of “the reproduction of society”, as well as “moralistic” in the sense denounced by Nietzsche. This is exactly what Habermas seeks to expose with his neo-Kantian “meta-critique” of Marx; and yet simultaneously it is the problem he elides and thus con-serves by “spiritualizing” or “idealizing” it through the notion of “reflection”! By op-posing “reflection” as theoretical action to “labour” understood as instrumental action, Habermas regresses to that dualism of Nature and Reason that Merleau-Ponty so elegantly indicts in our opening quotation.