Dan Pen issues a provocation: why not accept the inevitable doom of Western societies. Does this mean the convergence, terminating Western peoples, will end science? The achievement of the Redirection is the Completion of Western societies, ending them in this sense. But it would not end what the Redirection is, as such. Moreover, this is because of what Cartesian science is. The meaning of Pen’s provocation is really this --that the conception of science is metaphysically neutral. But no one who has read even two words of Descartes, say “metaphysical matter”, can say that science is neutral. The “provocation” this is to say, is a “test.” If you considered it a real alternative you failed the test. The Redirection or what is coherent for the coincidence of the Real as chaotic matter (“Absence” [of fixed order]) and symbol or what is coherent only for non-rational “speech” meaning symbolic mathematics generating equations (coincidence) for the abstracted Real, that is, for symbolic number, is transcendence for Thought, which is transcendent as reason (as “metaphysical matter”).
And here --where Thought is the creator of transcendence its object, this being the “apriori deduction after the fact” --is the founding action of Second Intention (this is the ens rationis, the Being of Reason which is science, meaning the reality which constitutes science is Thought is Being). In other words, although science is the unquestioned cornerstone of reason such that all else is Uncertainty, including human purpose and human being, these being rooted in Certainty as Telos telling us what things are, the fact is science is irrational. In fact it is “irrationalism” according to Jacob Klein who is the Descartes expositor or “Superior,” and a man of science. This is to say the Redirection, whose metaphysical aspirations are unprecedented, is unique, as such. What is unique about the Redirection, as such?
It begins with the irrationalism of Speech contra Thought where the first is rendered metaphysically (but also actually) incoherent by the second. Thought refers to symbol such that Mind or Pure Intellect (“Thought”) cannot speak without contradiction. Mathematical intentionality, the basis of “knowledge in the strict sense,” science, is incoherent for speech. Thought is literally Not-Speech. (This is explained in the “Bachet Mistake Segment” of A Preliminary.1) The Redirection is founded in the alienation of Self from its participation in existence as given. This is done purposely. First, Self at the point of its experience (external sense experience of World) is transcended by Thought by the ens rationis. But second, internal sense experience feeding Imagination is automatically, because naturally, alien to Self. Descartes effectively adds Speech to this. He does this by way of “local motion”.2 Men do not experience what is “really there,” whether recorded by Speech as images, or do men have access, as science has, to what Imagination really “sees”. This teaching and its verification in science is portrayed in Descartes’ famous example of the pen in Rule XII. A pen used to write acts in opposite directions at its two ends to perform its automatic action. This example is about figurate extension connecting Mind and Body, for in truth Descartes says Imagination is Body at the same time he says it is a faculty of Mind.
Now this transcendence at the point of Self (Mind and Imagination, namely Thought and Speech) is not what makes the Redirection unique as such. What comes of this, however, following the collapse of the Terms of Existence as given --God, Self, Society, World-- which is an altered kind of participation in existence which is the Fall from Being, is in fact unique. As for the Fall from Being itself, it cannot be called unique. The Fall from Being is the human bent. It is the Rise to Being which is unique, a fact well known and recognized by the three founding orders of Western societies. Still, except for Western societies no other human course of the Rise to Being exists. Its bases, ended by the Redirection, are informed by the experience of reason as transparent for access to the divine ground, for revelation (although again, the Fall from Being is understood as entailed within this ground, and not separated from it).
The three founders of order constituting Western societies refers to the Jews (Israel and Christianity, so-called Judeo-Christianity), and to the Philosophers –Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, effectively an anti-Sophist moment of Athens. Athens injected the means to sustain the revelation to Israel fitted to a Nazirite-like variation of this revelation. Christianity is itself Judeo-Christianity. As for Israel, the order of the Jews exists today only in small groups and families as a reminiscence, it having otherwise vanished from the face of the earth. Indicating what is unique as such in the Redirection is of the most supreme importance. It is the aim of this Weekly Essay (taken, as all the Essays are, from A Preliminary).
What is unique as such about the Redirection --again it is abbreviated on this site as Science (Certainty) and OpenSociety-History (Uncertainty), a Reciprocal relation of two modes, which are Certainty-Uncertainty, this being the visible mode, and figurate extension is the invisible mode; these two together embodying Telos as Certainty in their symmetrical certitude for historical ontology, in the heavens and in World where the incoherence of Thought for Speech is Science (Certainty), symmetrical with incoherence in Speech in the affairs of men or what sustains political order, in the Open Society or World State, as History (Certainty) --is the Completion of the Whole in the Part. This is what the collapse of the Terms is actually.
This is to say this “Whole” is the transcendent order essential to “knowledge in the strict sense” [Descartes], and “absolute Wisdom” [Hegel-Kojeve] as the creation of Thought (symbolic intentionality). This transcendence and access to it is uniquely a creation of Thought so that World has the character of Thought manifest (“local motion”, and “History” as Time participant with this motion where Speech, on account of Time in motion, resumes its character as Thought). In sum Descartes’ famous Mind Body frame is what realizes the “access” to transcendence conceived by Thought (or “reason”) made possible as an “apriori deduction [of transcendence] after the fact.” To simplify, this deduction (repeated in the formation of science by Descartes’ mathematical physics to serve his version of the mathesis universalis, more dominating today than ever) is the action of Second intention. The best known presentation of this in Descartes is the exemplar; which is the cogito. In it the subject conceives knowledge of itself in the object as concept, this concept becoming Primary intention or “therefore I am” because “I think.” This formulary intentionality, as I say, forms the basis of all of Descartes’ mathematical reasoning; above all, for Thought qua Thought, that is, for reason, and because of it for the transcendent basis of order in our times. In effect, this is the order of symbolic reason. It completely replaces image. Upon one’s grasp of the profound reach of this transformation, its effects certainly, but also its conception, depends any grasp at all of the Redirection; indeed of its uniqueness as such. Again this is the Completion of the Whole in the Part (my formulation, not Descartes’ although I understand it to mean what he means by “metaphysical matter,” or again what Hegel-Kojeve conveys by Spirit, or “metaphysical Realism”). Essentially, in both instances, this is the Completion of the Whole (of transcendence in the Part or matter). These are alike based in the transcendence (by Thought) of experience (Descartes); and by the negation (by Speech) of experience (Hegel-Kojeve).
What I have described here is the “transcendence” of transcendence by “Thought”; and the addition to it of Imagination or Self, as likewise transcendent. This, and the action of the Reciprocal it makes possible in Science and in History is what is unique as such in the Redirection. Science and History, as a single transcendence and transcendent reason that makes access to it, have transformed the Terms of Existence as given. These given Terms (and readers must understand they are necessary conditions for knowing anything) replace Speech with symbol. The Law of Contradiction is absorbed by this such that both symmetrical expressions of order in Certainty as Telos are sustained by contradiction as true; that is, by what we still describe as “incoherence.” When Jacob Klein proclaimed (in what is today a famous, posthumously published lecture) that Cartesian science is “irrational” even as “Mathematical physics is the most important part of our entire civilization and actual life…[,]” he expressed the truth of the Redirection without subscribing to any objection to science-history (except to say –in that same essay --that we experience a “loss of ourselves” without fully granting we are practically automata.) And so Self is the other Term (God or transcendence is the first and main one) of the four Terms of Existence that have been taken from us as the Truth of Existence in the Fall from Being, by science on purpose and expressly for the sake of Certain knowledge. This is Certainty is Telos.
What is unique as such about the Redirection is the Fall from Being is this transformation or collapse of the actual Terms of Existence as the bases to create the Completion of the Whole in the Part: for there to be Science (Certainty) = OpenSociety-History as the means of coherence in human life (as incoherence). Put another way, the Redirection (and this is principally Science although History is essential to its completion, and is part and parcel of its transcendence, the order of Thought is Being), has made human life possible as perfect and complete atheism and Enlightenment. No Fall from Being but that of science has achieved this for the Truth of Existence represented in it. I have said before the “model” all of us know is that of the French Revolution, the first try at the Redirection. Lacking science, while implementing in its stead the “Fall from Being” directly as death in murder, it set down the new basis of political rule on the style of the World State. (This is so-called totalitarianism in the active phase distinct from Democracy or the Open society which is the passive or resting phase.) The French Revolution attracted Hegel-Kojeve, first Robespierre and finally Napoleon as indicating universal order. Hegel recognized Napoleon, his defeat of Hegel’s own homeland, as the ruler of the future. Science is infinitely further advanced than the French Revolution, Self as such assuming its place in transcendence (in Imagination and Memory “in me”).
In sum, the Redirection is unique as such because God and Self are vanished from human life as what is essential to Progress in Certainty. No other order of the Fall from Being in all the courses of man have promised anything like this. Moreover, the promise is realized, above all in us. And so Pen’s challenge to consider admitting defeat and succumbing to the Redirection, now when the Elites of Western societies have given up on communism to embrace the Redirection, its convergence with Islam driven by deepest hatred for the last remaining Western society, the sole nation-state which contains in itself, in distraction and disarray, the World State as its national basis, is a test clearly. The test, as you recall, is lodged in the assumption that science is “neutral.” But here you see, at least in outline, that it is science of all things that is driving this convergence. Ours is the most revolutionary situation, perhaps of any hitherto known to men. But we are not capable of rising to it. On the contrary we are revolutionaries on the other side, egging it on.
Finally, consider the words of another writer about Descartes. His conclusion is pertinent in several ways which are perhaps new to you having now considered the points of this Weekly Essay. Richard Kennington’s description is Descartes’ idea of Enlightenment “is an unprecedented [i.e., “unique”?] type of political action undertaken by the founders of modern philosophy and continued by most of their followers….Enlightenment implies ‘open societies’ linked with each other….It is necessarily antithetical to any societies or elements in a society, that seek the autonomous cultivation and preservation of their own morality and way of life. Thus Enlightenment is by intention a universal politics, potentially of global magnitude, and the first of philosophic origin [i.e., again “unique”].”
The point about this description, which is quite correct, comes from a writer who understands science is neutral. In other words, Kennington makes this assertion, and in a very good essay of its kind, as one of the Best Men; the professorial element identified as “conservative” and Straussian; even Voegelinian. As a practical matter this means Kennington cannot be one who is prepared, even with Klein, to say science is irrationalism; and certainly not to say that the undertow in Western societies (of which the Best Men complain, to be sure) is somehow leading Western societies to their doom; now as in the last two centuries driven by the university, all of education forwarding this doom. This is not a sociological consideration, and certainly not a personal one where the late Kennington is concerned. I know him only by this essay, and it is a useful one.
But instead the import of implication in the Redirection is this transcendence I describe here in this essay. It has the meaning, in public life certainly but in professorial life especially, that one can disguise agreement with the Redirection’s incoherence for Speech establishing Thought, with our puerile relativism and deconstructionism, nihilism and so forth, that is, one can go along, by saying this piece is my best judgment and opinion, which I believe is true and right such that opposite statements about Descartes are false, adding, in the mode of Best Men and gentlemen and scholars, “but I don’t insist upon it.” Not recognizing that Science is not neutral and writing about Descartes’ notion of Enlightenment is transparent for a forfeit of acceptance for the teaching of absolute Wisdom as circularity: all opinions are true for absolute Wisdom to be circular, this being the Truth of Existence expressed in our puerile relativism, deconstructionism, nihilism.
Kennington's definition is an accurate one of what the Redirection is. But, because it stops short of the Redirection’s basis in mathematical physics where it must become the “definition” of the Redirection, meaning its completely artificial basis in metaphysical matter or Thought, it can be verified only as realization. This means any definition that excludes the main thing of the Redirection, which is mathematical physics and the mathesis universalis it serves by way of Second Intention and finding, is Thought manifest or revealed, for example, local motion or figurate extension itself as factors in the Redirection as action, that is, as the Completion of the Whole in the Part. Thought or reason, this is to say in the nature of what it is as transcendent, is untranslatable to Speech. One cannot say, saying this, what we do, especially what we say is meaningless, first because, as “meaningless”, it fits the Truth of Existence either way. But we also cannot say, I am right so long as “Certainty” is the Telos such that our being, historical ontology, is true, and made so by participating in our life in World where I must say, in our circumstances, it’s merely my opinion. This establishes Certainty and its entailed ontology as true things where these things are the Truth of Existence in the Fall from Being. In other words, the still easiest and worst thing is to acknowledge “science works, I cannot deny that,” this being what Klein did where it is apparent to you –it was not to Kennington and this is not a mitigation – that what makes it work is “irrationalism,” or particularly it is “ontologically unclarified.”
Western men, beaten down, cannot in any case look to the Best Men to assist them at this time.
RJL
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