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 (Merleau-Ponty Reader,’Unpublished Text’, p.290)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 grandeza
del 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 el
propio centro de lo religioso realiza el descubrimiento de la naturaleza y del hombre
que 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 de
la 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 su
propia esfera de pensamientos. Aun desde los primeros tratados del Cusano es posible
seguir este proceso; y si en ellos prevalece el motivo platónico del chorismos49, en las
obras posteriores gana la primacía el motivo de la methexis50.En sus últimas obras se
manifiesta como cumbre de la teoría la convicción de que la verdad, que al principio
había buscado en la oscuridad de la mística y que había determinado como oposición a
toda multiplicidad y mudanza, se revela sin embargo precisamente en medio del reino
de la multiplicidad empírica misma, la convicción de que la verdad clama por las
calles51. Cada vez con mayor fuerza se da en Nicolás de Cusa ese sentimiento del
mundo y, con él, ese su característico optimismo religioso. El vocablo panteísmo no es
adecuado para designar acabadamente ese nuevo sentimiento del mundo, pues no se
desvanece aquí la oposición entre el ser de Dios y el ser del mundo, sino que por el
contrario se mantiene incólume en toda su plenitud. Pero como lo enseña el tratado De
visione 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 da

Vontade de saber, resume o processo atraves do qual, nos
limiares da Idade Moderna, a vida natural comep, par sua
vez, a ser incluida nos mecanismos enos calculos do poder
estatal, e a politica se transforma em biopolitica: "Par milenios,
o homem permaneceu o que era para Aristoteles: um animal
vivente e, alem disso, capaz de existencia politica; o homem
moderno e um animal em cuja politica esta em questao a sua
vida 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.)

88888888888888888888

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 ».

888888888888888888888

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”! 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 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”.

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

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

Merleau-Ponty reiterates here the Nietzschean “vivo ergo cogito”, with the
peccadillos that he refers to the “self-evident truth of perception” (what is truth
if, as he immediately yet unwittingly corrects himself, it is not backed by “some
absolute self-evident truth”?) and then the obvious reference to the ‘I’, the
Husserlian “transcendental ego” or “subject”.

88888888888888888888888888888

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.

888888888888888888888888888888

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 what
feeling, seeing and hearing were, and now these words raise problems.
We are invited to go back to the experiences to which they refer in
order to redefine them. The traditional notion of sensation was not a
concept born of reflection, but a late product of thought directed
towards objects, the last element in the representation of the world,
the furthest removed from its original source, and therefore the most
unclear. Inevitably science, in its general eff'ort towards objectification,
evolved a picture of the human organism as a physical system
undergoing stimuli which were themselves identified by their
physico-chemical properties, and tried to reconstitute actual perception*
on this basis, and to close the circle of scientific knowledge
by discovering the laws governing the production of knowledge
itself, by establishing an objective science of subjectivity.* But it is
also inevitable that this attempt should fail. If wc return to the
objective investigations themselves, we first of all discover that the
conditions external to the sensory field do not govern it part for
part, and that they exert an effect only to the extent of making
possible a basic pattern—which is what Gcstalt theory makes clear.
Then we see that within the organism the structure depends on
variables such as the biological meaning of the situation, which are
no longer physical variables, with the result that the whole eludes
the well-known instruments of physico-mathematical analysis, and
opens the way to another type of intelligibility.^ If we now turn back,
as is done here, towards perceptual experience, we notice that
science succeeds in constructing only a semblance of subjectivity: it
introduces sensations which are things, just where experience shows
that there are meaningful patterns; it forces the phenomenal universe
into categories which make sense only in the universe of science. It
requires that two perceived lines, like two real lines, should be
equal or unequal, that a perceived crystal should have a definite
number 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.

888888888888888888888
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 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
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 de
partida de toda verdadera acción creadora. Ahora bien, según el Cusano, ese sujeto sólo
puede darse en el espíritu del hombre. De este punto de vista resulta, sobre todo, un
nuevo giro de la teoría del conocimiento. Todo conocer auténtico y verdadero no puede
versar sobre una mera copia de la realidad, sino que debe representar siempre una
dirección determinada de la acción espiritual. La necesidad que reclamamos para la
ciencia y que vemos particularmente en la matemática reconoce por causa esa libre
actividad. El espíritu sólo logra verdadero conocimiento cuando no copia la existencia
exterior, sino cuando se explica a sí mismo, cuando se explica su propia esencia. En sí
mismo 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 del
mundo de los cuerpos; en sí mismo encuentra el espíritu del hombre el concepto
primordial 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 de
la intuición —tiempo y espacio—, también lo está el concepto de número y magnitud y
todas las categorías lógicas y matemáticas. En el desarrollo de esas categorías el espíritu
crea la aritmética, la geometría, la música y la astronomía. De modo que a la postre todo
lo lógico, tanto los diez predicamentos como los cinco universales, se resuelve en esa
fuerza fundamental del espíritu. Éstas son las condiciones de toda discretio, de toda
agrupación de la multiplicidad según especies y clases y de toda reducción de lo
empírico cambiante a leyes rigurosamente determinadas60. En [63] esta fundamentación
de las ciencias revélase la fuerza creadora del alma racional en sus dos momentos
fundamentales: por un lado el espíritu, al desplegarse, está dentro de lo temporal, pero
por 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 de
crear 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 un
conocimiento 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 un
fin 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, siempre
puede y debe ser superada por otra aún más exacta. Así, pues, todo nuestro conocimiento
empírico queda reducido a mera conjetura; es cálculo, es hipótesis que desde un
principio se reduce a admitir que puede ser superado por cálculos mejores y más
precisos. En esta idea de conjetura, de conjectura, quedan inmediatamente
comprendidos, y de tal manera que se confunden en una sola noción, dos pensamientos
distintos: el pensamiento de la eterna alteridad entre idea y apariencia y el pensamiento
de la participación de la apariencia en la idea. La definición que Nicolás de Cusa da del
conocimiento empírico descansa en ese encadenamiento de alteridad y participación:
“conjectura est positiva assertio in alteritate veritatem uti est participans”27. De este
modo tenemos ante nosotros, junto a la teología negativa, una doctrina positiva de la
experiencia; ambas corrientes no sólo no se oponen entre sí, sino que más bien
representan, desde dos ángulos distintos, una y la misma concepción fundamental del
conocimiento. La verdad una, inalcanzable en su ser absoluto, sólo se nos presenta en la
esfera de la alteridad; mas por otro lado no es posible que pensemos alteridad alguna
que 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 la
otra, a todo intento de suprimir el dualismo; pero precisamente esa actitud confiere a
nuestro conocimiento su relativa legitimidad y su relativa verdad. Esto enseña, y
digámoslo a la manera kantiana, que nuestro conocimiento, aunque tenga límites que
nunca podrá franquear, dentro de la esfera de su propio actuar no reconoce en cambio la
menor 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 forma

insuperable en su Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur cómo
ambos problemas se compenetran y complementan mutuamente y, por lo tanto, cómo
sólo es posible resolverlos por la consideración simultánea de uno y otro. Desligarse del
latín medieval y construir y desarrollar paulatinamente el volgare como forma
independiente de la expresión científica eran condiciones previas del libre
desenvolvimiento 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 la
cual 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 una
cosmovisión distinta. De suerte que aun en este caso la lengua no se limita a servir de
mero receptáculo o continente de la nueva cosmovisión sino que además contribuye con
su propia formación y estructura a engendrarla. El pensamiento técnico y lingüístico del
Renacimiento se orienta en la misma dirección94. Aun en este aspecto —cosa que a
primera vista resulta sorprendente— también Nicolás de Cusa se había anticipado ya a
su tiempo. En efecto, en su filosofía da una nueva significación al espíritu técnico, al
espíritu del inventor y le asigna una dignidad también del todo nueva. Cuando expone y
propugna su concepción general de la ciencia, cuando explica que toda ciencia no es
sino el desarrollo y la explicación de lo que yace encerrado y complicado en la natural
esencia del espíritu, no sólo se refiere por cierto a los conceptos fundamentales de la
lógica, de la matemática y de las ciencias exactas de la naturaleza, sino también a los
elementos de la ciencia técnica y de la creación técnica. Así como el espíritu desarrolla
el 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 número
partiendo de la unidad, así también un bosquejo o plan ideal debe preceder a toda
acción 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 hacia
abajo es el mismo, pues el intelecto sólo desciende a lo sensible para elevar hasta sí el
mundo de los sentidos. Su acción sobre un mundo material, aparentemente contrario,
constituye precisamente la condición para que pueda reconocer y realizar su propia
forma, para que pueda pasar de su ser potencial a su ser actual96. Henos aquí ante un
punto 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. El
propio Nicolás de Cusa repite también esta expresión87, sólo que la aplica a una nueva
relación universal. En efecto, para él la naturaleza no constituye sólo el reflejo del ser de
Dios 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 —y
digámoslo con Schelling— hemos pasado al libre, al abierto campo de la ciencia
objetiva, pues el sentido del libro de la naturaleza no puede ser desentrañado —ni el
hombre puede apropiarse de él— por el solo sentimiento subjetivo o por el puro
sentimiento místico; para descifrar ese libro es preciso examinarlo, es preciso recorrerlo
palabra 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 una
interpretación sistemática. Según la dirección que se tome, esa interpretación lleva, ya a
una nueva metafísica, ya a una nueva concepción de las ciencias exactas de la
naturaleza.

La filosofía de la naturaleza del Renacimiento echó a andar por el primero

de estos caminos. Partiendo del pensamiento capital de que la naturaleza es el libro de
Dios, lo va modificando sin cesar con nuevas variaciones. Sobre este fundamento
Campanella 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, el
templo viviente y el códice de Dios en el cual Él ha asentado y ha inscripto cosas de
infinita 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 el
hombre por otro lado, está enteramente pensado como vínculo de carácter mágico y
místico. El hombre sólo puede comprender la naturaleza introduciendo inmediatamente
en ella la propia vida. Los límites que establece su sentido de la [78] vida, los confines
del 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 signos

de la naturaleza está representada por aquella tendencia de la ciencia natural que
partiendo de Nicolás de Cusa continúa a través de Leonardo de Vinci en Galileo y
Kepler. Los representantes de esta dirección no se contentan con la energía metafórica
de los signos materiales en los cuales leemos la estructura espiritual del universo; antes
bien, exigen que esos signos formen un sistema concluso en sí mismo, un complejo
conexo 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 puede
satisfacerse por medio de las matemáticas, pues frente a la arbitrariedad e inseguridad
de las opiniones únicamente ellas establecen una unidad de medida necesaria e
inequívoca. De ahí que para Leonardo la matemática constituyó la línea divisoria
entre
sofística y ciencia. Aquel que infiere injurias a su suprema certeza sustenta su espíritu
con la confusión. Mientras se aferra a las palabras aisladas, cae en la vaguedad y en la
ambigüedad propias de la palabra sin más, y se ve así enredado en una pura
logomaquia90. Solamente la matemática, al fijar las significaciones de las palabras y al
subordinar a reglas determinadas sus relaciones, es capaz de señalar una meta a esas
controversias, pues de esta suerte, en lugar de presentar una mera yuxtaposición de
palabras, los pensamientos y proposiciones se disponen ante nosotros en una severa
concatenación sintáctica. Galileo lleva estas consideraciones hasta sus últimas
consecuencias; 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 sí
mismos nada significan, que no entrañan ningún contenido de significación objetivo y
determinado91. Una significación de tal índole sólo se da cuando el espíritu humano
refiere el contenido de la percepción a una de esas formas básicas del conocimiento
cuyo arquetipo encierra el espíritu mismo. Únicamente en virtud de esa relación y de
ese 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 los
símbolos que el espíritu del hombre necesita y es capaz de crear, sólo los signos
matemáticos poseen tal certeza—; de este modo, pues, llegamos en la sucesión histórica
directa a esa célebre y capital enunciación normativa que señala la meta y la
singularidad 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.