Although the Open Society is created by science and effectively ruled by it, still science does not nurture the divided Self it has itself certified. Quite the reverse. Moreover, it is a measure of Descartes’ ingeniously reticulated grounding of science, including in Time, that Self is at the center of this inclusion by way of the great primacy accorded to motion in the fashioning of extension and figure. This extension and figure (figurate extension) prepares what is required to understand science’s relation to this divided Self within the Mind Body frame. The natural and inevitable persistence of given Self, its speech and inescapable preeminence in the way we are all bound, naturally to participate in existence opposite the Truth of Existence in science, assures, to the progressive increase in the  importance of figurate extension, the progress of science (and of progress as such) in the ultimate context of transcendent History. Naturally this entails or is historical ontology itself. This, as already clear to you, is the progress of the Completion of the Whole in the Part. The effect of this progress, as anyone can see starting from the French Terror and the Napoleonic empire to which Robespierre was effectively consequent --the event that inspires Hegel’s completion of the Whole in the mathesis universalis Descartes set in the place of a new Thought’s  transcendence, has been the rapid degradation of the original Terms of Existence in Western societies. They are now entirely redirected. In other words the divided Self serves the Redirection as figurate extension increases the pace of transformation of the Terms of Existence, as it were “invisibly” in the progress of science, but therein fixed to the dialectical order of historical ontology replacing fixed Being or what drives the visible Reciprocal.

 

·          Note (You must realize this formulation I give here is not put the way Hegel-Kojeve gives it. He maintains, correctly considering it the basis of his standing as a philosopher, there are two orders of Being of which “fixed Being” is one. He calls this Space. The other is Time; thus a so-called realist and dualist conception, the first of its kind. (Although it is not this philosophic “first” that counts. Hegel-Kojeve completes –which does not mean he “continues” the symbolic mathematization of all existence. I mean he completes its conception as action, certain for telos and replacing it, that is, by Time in Space. This completion is the substitution of Thought untranslatable for Speech, for image, therefore for Self, properly so-called.) Man is here entirely self-made in History by Speech constituting History as transcendent (but absolutely finite). “Nature precedes and follows the advent of Man,” as Hegel puts it. I do not presume to refute his doing this; or do I say he failed. He did not fail. But if his success is because Time is the author of human being, I am quite prepared to say this is false, although it is the Truth of Existence, verified in the Terms of Existence or the Redirection that constitute the Epoch of Science and History.  I discuss these points in the final pages of this A Preliminary.)

 

In other words, to continue, what we see in the rapid forward movement toward the ultimate or final Open Society, which is the World State, is evidence of science’s domination of our “civilization and actual life” in all of existence by means of the symbolic mathematization of this same existence.

 

**

But some men also see, to be sure with confusion of mind, and perfect hopelessness, we are too late. It prompts them to ask (but I think only of themselves)  --“what has become of us?”

 

 

by RJL

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