SUPERCRITICAL POSTLOGUE
(In FLORA: Sprachkunst im Zeitalter der Information / Language Arts in the Age of Information, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020.)
THE CLINAMEN OF THE WORLD
The idea of savage freedom poses a demand for radicalizing philosophy. In order to face up to savage freedom, philosophy must venture on a fantastic journey and become a fantastic philosophy, and even more: a philosophical fantasy[i]. The journey of fantastic philosophy is equally the journey towards a supercritical radicalization, itself fantastic as well, of Kantian critique – a radicalization simultaneously opposed to Kantianist ‘standard’, that is to say to the hypostatizing of the subject-object relation as dichotomy of human and natural, and to the new anti-Kantian ontologies, holding Kant responsible for the ‘anthropological turn’ of modern philosophy[ii]. If we must persist alongside Kant beyond Kant, we must then persist alongside the fundamental question of critical philosophy, the question of philosophy itself, in brief: freedom. That which persists, must persist.
This radicalization is the ultimate goal of an ontology to come, but also of a philosophy of nature, which would not henceforth be possible as anything other than a philosophy of nature to come[iii]. Clearly, the supercritical turn is not aimed at affirming a principally archaizing, crypto-animistic ‘spiritualization’ of nature or at imagining the permeation of the world by some kind of obscure ‘reason’. In short, the supercritical turn is not a retro-utopian looking back at the dawn of naïve autopoietic materialism. On the contrary, its maximal objective would be to reconfigure the conceptual relief, so that where was once inert necessity determined by blind forces or powerful impersonal mechanisms, there shall be an agent, that is to say an active force, realizing itself through choices. In Aristotelian terms: through the entelechy of a given activity where a certain magnitude and intensity of possibility is chosen over another (that is to say the possibility is configured and expanded, while at the same time modally reduced) – to persist in the agency, in which the world simultaneously sprouts and persists.
What does Epicurus say in his teachings about nature and freedom? Borrowing the atomistic doctrine from Democritus, Epicurus will not endorse, unlike his teacher, the omnipotence of fate – the determinism, if not the fatalism, of the pre-configured trajectory of the movement of matter. On the contrary, Epicurus will conceptualize fortuity as the one and only fate, that is to say as lack of fate.[iv] But is the omnipotence of fortuity an omnipotence of freedom?[v] Is it any different from the ‘regularity of chance’, and if it is, in what do both differ?
Epicurus, however, is also a philosopher of the unexpected and unaccountable deviation in the course of freely falling atoms that would all of a sudden break their trajectories only to clash, to collide with each other and form conglomerates, bodies: the clinamen. It is precisely this prominent, yet enigmatic idea of his that is the key to the Epicurean supercritical interpretation of Kant. Clinamen – the unexpected swerve of atoms, lending dynamism to their trajectories, manifests itself as force of a different order. This force seems to exceed the dimension of mechanical regularity, of regularity of chance, but at the same time remains in the dimension of the immanent operation, exceeding its order through alteration. Within the conceptual perspective of clinamen, Epicurus is not simply the philosopher of omnipotent fortuity, that is to say of fortuity as (lack of) fate; he is the philosopher of freedom as fate of fortuity. This would refer not to the necessity of chance, but to necessity as the principle of chance – the inner core engine that resolves the trajectory of atoms from within. A secondary order, which is not rupture, but dynamism, therefore a choice, hence a decision. A microscopic reason, acting within the depths of matter. Pan-necessity of unbridled Pan.
Yet, why is it necessary to base this radical turnover on Kantian fundamentals? Here is the key to super-Kantian radicalization. Although Kantian freedom has no relation to the Epicurean clinamen or its prototype – Anaximander’s vortex, it nevertheless sustains and fans the flame that for the first time surged in their archaic cosmogonies, namely: the necessity of freedom. Freedom as ontological necessity. An if the excess of Kantian reason would go so far as to grasp the rationality of subjective necessity, which unexpectedly alters an atom’s trajectory, it would not only repeat the mistake of reducing existence to essence (which Kant never did anyway, thus anticipating Schelling, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche), but it would also fail to split asunder the ontological order, saturating the world with doubles and daemonic necessity. The horizon of this excess, in which Reason dissolves into the vapors of the apeiron and becomes indistinguishable from madness – just like Anaximander into the vortex of Pontus, Arthur Gordon Pym or The Drunken Boat beyond world’s end – is the de-regulating horizon of the super-Kantian perspective.
Therefore, the time of freedom must be ‘injected’ in the very natural order and be grasped as the radical unconditional contingency of a self-willing reason. Nature itself is a self-willing reason. Self-willing reason would not mean an un-reasoning or capricious reason, much less a reason that fails to abide by any conditions, maxims or goals. Self-willing would here refer to a reason of choices, which acts by splitting asunder at any given moment. It is through the choice of the ‘blind force’ that the eye of reason emerges. The choice is vision, pro-vision, seeing through the shadow, embodying the twilight. (Forget about any form of scopocentrism and phenomenology. A given sense emerges as organ in the body of the world, it transforms the world just like fire transforms matter.) This signifies many things all at once. Reason is viewed neither as substance, nor as condition, but as the force of relational reflexivity, which, by delineating the fact through difference, that is to say by altering it, founds/forms the ontoaisthetic relief, namely the sensual-intellective surface of existence. Reason departs not, but returns to itself. The return, however, is always a new departure. Thus, through the pulsations of desire and decision, the world is becoming, reason is becoming, freedom is. The free being is not an obligated being – the free being is a being of decision.
The quanta do decide. Miracle or decide? Precisely: the miracle of decide.
HYPERTHETICS OF THE UNIVERSAL, OR TOWARDS THE SUPERCRITICAL FANTASTIC
This is why transcendental idealism in its capacity of empirical realism, in order not to banish freedom from the world, wishes instead to ‘dissolve’ it on a nuclear level. The dynamic schemes of manifestation of things (Maimon’s theory of differentials) – these transversal transcendentals – presuppose a particular subjectivity prior to the subject. Precisely, freedom is not beyond the world, as should follow from the Antithesis assumption. Freedom is, therefore, a pre-world or under-world – it is a peculiar continuation of the romantic-Freudian depth[vi]. We will not, however, proceed to affirm freedom either as something external to the world, or as force of a Super-World (as demanded by the thesis on transcendental freedom), or some kind of deep-rooted force of an under-world – we state that freedom emerges despite the world[vii]. Such is the revolutionary scheme of the transcendental idea of freedom and, following from it, practical freedom: although set against their power, it entirely on its own opens up the possibility of a new order, of a new beginning. Freedom is the force of the world’s self-overcoming. Freedom is not an inner otherness, but the force that makes the world a world in its own self-overcoming. The transcendental will thus be understood as the force of the world’s self-overcoming as regards the world itself. In other words, transcendental idealism will be regarded as superrealism: as supercritical realism. Inasmuch as supercritical realism demands the operation of overcoming – the immanent force of freedom – to be viewed as regards the world itself (because in this perspective Reason emerges not as opposed to the world, but as force of the world and in the world: this is how Kant pre-announces Hegel), then supercritical realism exceeds the critical domain along the line of the ‘doctrinal’ (in Kant’s terms) mode of the new ontology, emerging on its own as modal ontology, that is to say an ontology of the necessary being, an active or dynamic ontology of becoming more-(than)-being, of becoming as freedom-existence of the world. Existence of freedom: existence as freedom.
The question that we pose here is the following one: is it possible (desirable or even necessary) to think Kant’s transcendental domain as an act of overcoming, namely as exceeding the regulative employment towards a fantastic constitutive horizon? Another modality of decision? Such a fantastic presupposition would correspond to the proposition to regard super-Kantianism as projection of the transcendental condition onto nature: nature not being opposed to reason as noumenon, but revealing the noumenon as another reason – the Reason, in which ‘we’, the subjects who are granted constitutive access to the transcendental, emerge empirically? (The clinamen – the flexion of deflection – a transcendental of being?).
Therefore, Reason must eventually ‘regress’ by necessity to its empirical fundamentals, namely – the affiliation to the ‘psychophysiological’ expediency of a definite species, homo sapiens; hence, Reason is subject to organic natural conditionality, to the condition of neural and cerebral functions of higher organisms – fundamentals, from which it extricates itself, transcending itself. But if the transcendental, the purely speculative employment of reason, is reduced to the overcoming of this conditionality, then this statement would be valid – as normative prescription – for each determining relation.
However, from this hypothesis would follow the conclusion that, no more or less, the transcendental condition cannot be constitutively ascribed, much less prescribed, exclusively to human reason. In fact, Kant explicitly surmounts the human condition along the line of his fantastic universalism. In a note to the categorical imperative he offers an utterly clear and eloquent comment on this issue: ‘Now, this principle of morality, precisely on account of the universality of the legislation that makes it the formal supreme determining basis of the will regardless of all subjective differences of the will among individuals, is declared by reason at the same time to be a law for all rational beings insofar as they have a will at all, i.e., a power to determine their causality by the presentation of rules […] Therefore this principle of morality does not restrict itself to human beings only, but applies to all finite beings having reason and will, and indeed includes even the infinite being as supreme intelligence.’[viii] If, as we have established in the very beginning of this transition, Kant even speaks of a ‘nature of Reason’, it so follows from what has been mentioned so far that we ought to reciprocally speak of the Reason of nature. Once again: we are not dealing with a new type of romantic pantheism (regardless of the fact that the thought of Schleiermacher, Novalis and the late Schelling would scarcely be possible without the Kantian turn). We are dealing with uncovering the inevitable consequence of the transcendental condition, in case it be maintained at the peak-point of its intensity and range. This persistence towards the consequences is a task of super-Kantianism. It will insist on the inevitability of projecting the transcendental condition onto nature. The norm thus transforms itself, reaching the intensity of an upset normativity, where practical reason emerges as general economy of the form-alteration.
Because freedom is the condition of exceeding its own condition. The excess is the one and only ontological scheme: the excess is namely the irreducibility of dynamism to a genetic condition, meaning not only the idea of beginning and end of the world, but also the order of regularity. The ontological necessity makes itself manifest in existence, not in substance. The force of existence is an affirmation, running counter to personal interest. The practical interest of Reason must be understood only as general economy of interest, along the line of the supercritical radicalization achieved by Bataille. This is why the very nomos is excess, or immanent excess. The immanent excess of the decision-clinamen.
This is why the super-Kantian act reveals – or rather liberates – the excess of the nomos, or more precisely the very nomos as excess[ix]. Thus, in the end of this journey at the open sea of critique we discern the practical horizon of super-Kantianism. To ontological implosion super-Kantianism counterposes ontological excess. Supercritique versus dogmatic anti-Kantianism: ontological implosion versus ontological excess.
The miracle of decision: freedom.
Translated into English: Philip Stoilov
[i] Although the word ‘fantastic’ does not exist as a feminine noun in French, this form remains the most adequate possibility, so it seems to me, for conveying the specificity of Novalis’ employment of the German word as designating a philosophical domain and even a new science. Analogically: Die Logik = the logic; Die Fantastik = the fantastic.
[ii] Here is an eloquent example, moreover coming from two authors who have themselves achieved a turnover of the relation between philosophy and science, thus marking my own line of thought: ‘It is the tentative of speaking about the world without passing it through the Kantian trial, without positing at the center of one’s system the human subject defined by intellectual categories, without subjecting one’s goals to the criterion of what can be legitimately thought by such a subject. In brief, we speak of the pre-critical or acritical thinkers.’ [The thinkers in question are Lucretius, Leibniz, Bergson, Whitehead, Serres and Deleuze – B. M.] (Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, La nouvelle alliance. Métamorphose de la science, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, p. 387). Is the same misunderstanding not repeated, and even aggravated, by recent tendencies of ‘perspectivist’ anthropology, ‘multinaturalism’ and ‘speculative realsim’? The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, whose theoretical propositions are in more than one aspect close to me, proposes a ‘unified anti-Kantian front’ in his article ‘Transformation in Anthropology, Transformation of Anthropology’ (2012, it appeared posterior to the publication of the original version of this text): ‘One should not be surprised (…) that Amerindian ethnography for example, shows stunning points of convergence with what Pierre Montebello has called “the other metaphysics”; that undercurrent of thought alien or antagonistic to the Kantian revolution that (…) converted all ontological issues into epistemological concerns, and subordinated all questioning of the real to the issue of our conditions of access to it – what is today called the “correlationist hypothesis”’(Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Transformation in Anthropology, Transformation of Anthropology’, in The Forest and the School, ed. by Pedro Neves Marques, Berlin: Archive Books, 2014, pp. 582-583). Provided the fact that the theoretical equipment of ‘prespectivist’ anthropology was to a great extent developed in parallel with the ontological project of the metamorphosis, morevover presenting it as one of the ‘natural’ allies, the rejection of transcendental philosophy, standing in clear-cut contrast with my supercritical proposition, becomes even more significant.
[iii] Such is notably the orientation of my book Liberté malgré tout. Surcritique et ontologie modale, which was published in Bulgarian at the same time (op. cit.).
[iv] ‘I have anticipated you, Fortune, and have barred your means of entry. Neither to you nor to any other circumstance shall we hand ourselves over as captives. But when necessity compels us, we shall depart from life, spitting on it and on those who vainly cling to it, declaring in a beautiful song of triumph how well we have lived.’ (The Essential Epicurus, ‘Vatican Sayings’, 47; cit. op. p. 81.).
[v] ‘The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.’ (ibid., 77, p. 64).
[vi] The relation with the romantic depth is further indicated by a hypothetical, yet possible and, in accordance with the prospect of this study, desirable connection with a principle image in my own perspective, though appearing marginally in Novalis’s fragments – the image of the general anarchy [die allgemeine Anarchie] and the manifestation of freedom as lawlessness and opposition to the natural law: lawlessness or anomia, anarchy, which Novalis seems to associate with a concept that Kant introduced in the Third Analogy of Experience, the concept of communion [Gemeinschaft], used in the dual sense of communio (communion of apperception of phenomena in possible experience) and commercium (real communion of substances) as principle of dynamic relations, leading to the formation of a composite unity (compositium reale). (A213 / B260 – A215 / B262, pp. 278-280).
[vii] Here follows an additional argument in a passage from the Solution of the Third Antinomy: ‘[…] the annulment of transcendental freedom would simultaneously eliminate all practical freedom. For practical freedom presupposes that although something did not occur, it yet ought to have occurred, and that hence the cause of this something in the realm of appearance was not completely determinative, that there did not lie in our power of choice a causality for producing, independently of those natural causes and even against their force and influence, something that in the time order is determined according to empirical laws – and hence a causality whereby we can begin a series of events entirely on our own.’ (А534 / В562, pp. 536-537).
[viii] Critique of Practical Reason, § 7: ‘Basic Law of Pure Practical Reason’, p. 47. Schopenhauer, a devout follower of ‘the great Kant’ (see the beginning of § 24 of The World as Will and Representation, Second Book: ‘The World as Will’, as well as the Preface to the second edition), goes a long way in expressing this particular belief as well. In § 24, proceeding from Kant and arriving at the ontological thesis on will (‘What is the thing in itself? – The will: this has been our answer, but I will set it aside for the moment’), Schopenhauer also achieves certain concretizations of his ontological super-Kantian thesis, which seemingly bring him close to Spinoza, and later on – with Bergson, Whitehead, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and all the newest super-Kantians, yet over Heidegger’s head – a head un-struck by the stone of being: ‘Spinoza says (Letter 62) that if a stone thrown flying through the air were conscious it would think it was flying of its own will. I only add that the stone would be right […] I, on the other hand, think that the inner essence presupposed by all real necessity (i.e. effects of causes) is what gives necessity its meaning and validity in the first place. It is called character in the case of people and quality in the case of stones, but it is the same in both. Where it is known immediately it is called will; it has its weakest degree of manifestation, of objecthood, in stones, and its strongest in humans. (The World as Will and Representation, op. cit. pp. 151); ‘The most universal forces of nature present themselves as the lowest levels of objectivation of the will; for one thing, they appear in all matter without exception, as gravity and impenetrability; for another, they divide the matter we generally encounter amongst themselves.’ (ibid., § 26, p. 155).
When Prigogine and Stengers discuss the recognition of ‘the autonomy of things, and not just the living ones’, are they not entering the domain of the supercritical fantastic or the new reality – the goal of their own pursuit – thus overcoming the uncalled for neo-dogmatic misunderstanding, which, reducing the transcendental act to a dogmatic one, regards the supercritical possibility as pre-critical or acritical? (‘It is the tentative of speaking about the world without passing it through the Kantian trial, without positing at the center of one’s system the human subject defined by intellectual categories, without subjecting one’s goals to the criterion of what can be legitimately thought by such a subject. In brief, we speak of the precritical or acritical thinkers.’ [The thinkers in question are Lucretius, Leibniz, Bergson, Whitehead, Serres and Deleuze – B. M.]; ‘In this sense, our science has finally become a physical science as it has recognized the autonomy of things, and not just the living ones.’ (La nouvelle alliance. Métamorphose de la science, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, pp. 387-390).
[ix] In this respect, see Jean-Luc Nancy’s analysis in one of his most significant, yet least known books The Categorical Imperative (Jean-Luc Nancy, “Le kategorein de l’excès”, in L’Impératif catégorique, Paris, Flammarion, 1983).