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September 13, 2005
Another post from John C. Halasz that has been taken from the comments section of this post..
Well, I read the Deleuze/Nietzsche article a few days back, though, needless to say, I wasn't exactly convinced by it, nor did it seem of compelling interest. (Such a lot of homework, but I treat it as an "open book" exam anyway.) But the bone I want to pick is the notion that there is a distinctively "post-modern" critique of metaphysics, with an unprecedented scope and force of its own.
To the contrary, my understanding of the main line of Western philosophy since Kant is precisely as a progressive critique of metaphysics. By "progressive", I don't mean a linear development, nor that the various proponents habored a progressive intent or view of history. I'm borrowing from the philosophy/historiography of science, and I mean a step-by-step and cummulative process, whereby the various positions mutually modify one another, leading through such acccumulation to the transformation of frameworks and shared, but contested problematics. You can name the parade of usual suspects, as you please, and the outliers, some of whom subsequently were promoted to the head of the class,- (though my own favorite outlier, Vico, actually preceded this whole development),- but what they all shared was a sense of growing crisis in the inherited, received metaphysical conception of reason, and the response of attempting to remedy that growing deficiency, however variously.
The case can be summarized thusly: Greek metaphysics first emerged, in opposition to the enmeshment and sacrificial submission to the mythic powers of the world, through the recognition of the transcendence of being, which yielded the sense that the world could be understood in terms of a quasi-systematic rational implicature, and a trauma of separation from the mythic world, which the "rational soul" had to master in order to be equal to its insight into that rational implicature. Henceforth, the notion of reason as a self-sufficient mode of the human understanding of the world and of human self-understanding is born. But Greek metaphysics, through its "binary" opposition to myth, carried its mythic antagonist with it as its doppelgaenger.
Further, Greek philosophy was born precisely at the point that the world of the Greek polis, which it presupposed, was at the point of collapse,- ("the owl of Minevrva flies at dusk")-, and would be transmitted into tradition by societies/cultures that were at once more politically diffuse and more mythically enmeshed than what had emerged and come to fruition in classical Greece. But eventually, the ideal of Greek metaphysics would make its way into the (re-)emergence of Western (philosophical/elite) culture, whereby the distinctive mark was that all knowledges, practices, social or natural orders, received their legitimation ostensibly through their "justification" by "Reason".
Given the forgoing synopsis, the point of the progressive critique of metaphysics is that it amounts to a reflexive continuation of the critique of myth: a critique of metaphysics is a critique of the myth of (metaphysical) reason. (Marx, a major suspect, is a crucial case here. It's important to recognize that Marx did not have a critique of religion, but rather a critique of the critique of religion. In consequence, he transferred the critique of religion on to a critique of secular ideology, while fitting it out with a "material" basis, all the while giving rise to a novel secular ideology.)
To further sharpen the point, though the metaphysical form of reason, indeed, criticizes and evades the mythified powers of natural and social domination, it is wont thereby to form conceptual mythologies of its own, de facto in submission to those self-same powers, and it is the reflexive critique of those conceptual mythologies that has been the contested burden of modern philosophy. (My own personal position is that this work is "completed" in the critical dissolution of epistemology in the work of Wittgenstein and Levinas. Henceforth, philosophy of itself has no claim to knowledge as such: there is no distinctively philosophical knowledge.
In fact, the criticism of the notion that knowledge is the supreme justification of existence is one of the main concept-fetishes to be purged of myth. Henceforth, other than the interminable debates over rationality and reason, the only competences left to philosophy as a distinct perspective or discipline are the interpretation and analysis of meaning- rather than truth-, the criticism of abstraction and its derivation, and the elucidation of norms, all without any claim to self-grounding or self-constituting "autonomy" and without any accompanying claim to the human sufficiency of reason, which is always contested and always at stake.)
The paradox of the "end" of philosophy is that it is precisely one of the finest products of the ideal of critical and self-critical reason that first emerged into the light of day under the aegis of Greek metaphysics. It's at that point that any specifically post-modern approach or mode enters onto the stage.
As to Nietzsche, I've never exactly taken him as a "positive" doctrinal philosopher, rather than as an extremely acute philosphical critic/critic of philosophy. I'd thought Heidegger's point about Nietzsche being, willy-nilly, enmeshed in the metaphysical tradition, aside from that deriving from taking the "doctrinal" Nietzsche a bit too seriously, even ponderously, was that Nietzsche was relying on a metaphysical notion of subjectivity, both in his appeal to "will" and to "values", which subjectivity, according to Heidegger, is a reflex of the metaphysical notion of substance. The critique of the metaphysics of the will, in my humble opinion, is one of the more valuable and recuperable parts of Heidegger, however mightily he sinned against it.
But I've alway thought that, whatever his broader prospects as a classical philologist, Nietzsche really needs to be understood against the background of Kant. It's not just that his ad hominem polemics bring out all those half-truths that are suppressed by the four-square Kantian conception of "Reason". It's that the basic move he makes is to reduce and identify all judgments to aesthetic judgments of taste, the rationality of which Kant first foregrounded and vindicated.
But the Kantian "justification" of aesthetic judgments of taste relied precisely upon the infrastructure of Kantian differentiations between domains of judgment, which are at once relied upon and collapsed by Nietzsche's generalization of aesthetic judgments onto a "cosmic" scale. (Briefly, the correlation would run: the "will-to-power" = transcendental synthesis, the uebermensch = transcendental subject, and "eternal recurrance" = the categorical imperative gone beserk. It's not so much that Nietzshe is "wrong", as that he's already operating in a parodic mode of criticism.)
But Nietzsche's criticisms actually gain greater force if one understands the "will-to-power", not as some generalization of 'cosmic" force, as he seems to present it, but as an existential locus of a perspectival criticism of presuppositions: where Nietzsche differs from his aestheticizing contemporaries is not just in his refusal to restrict such awareness to the domain of art, but rather in his lending it a specifically ethical import- hence "immoralism". Perhaps the whole paradox of Nietzsche's subsequent reception- how could he have known?- is that, while the thrust of his endeavor is against the notion of a return to any mythic "home", as represented to him by romanticism, as well as, Hegelian historical dialectics, he was taken by his epigones as authorizing a "new" mythology, in whatever direction, as a requirement for new "meaning".
As for Deleuze and his ilk, there are several worries. For one, does the obsession with difference actually have a flattening and de-differentiating effect, authorizing a regressive atavism by failing to sustain a sufficient conception of reason to acknowledge real differences and their effects? Does the collapsing of the notion of reason and its infrastructure proceed so far as to lose the demythifying intent and "authorize" or perversely legitimize new forms of mythic delusionality? Does the obsession with "becoming" not only conflate the the differences between change in "being", change in the world, and change in individual or collective human existences, but convert human freedom into a blind compulsion, rather than a real phenomenon, which can be delineated under different contents and conditions?
And doesn't such a self-insistent approach to sheer differentiation for difference's sake mirror the disintegrative tendencies of late capitalist societies without allowing for the establishment of any framework of social analysis by which such differentiation can be appreciated, beyond the sheerly categorical level? (It matters little that the claim is issued in the name of the acategorial: what is really at issue is what is "properly" and meaningfully acategorial.) Finally, isn't the insistence on differentiating "force" a (sollipsistic) continuation of the classical metaphysical insistence on the superiority of activity over passivity: patience, waiting, attentiveness, vulnerability, suffering, woundedness?
So, to return to the initial question about being and becoming, I'm not sure that is a good one in which to raise the issue of "binary oppositions" and the excluded middle and the ways such oppositions determine the alternatives of thinking, since, while the Parmenidean identification of thought and being is irremediably broken, the association of being and becoming is not, nor is it a crux through which to view different perspectives on reality.
"Reality" is precisely not that which remains the same through all change, but rather that which changes of itself, willy-nilly, whereby we understand change through what endures and enduring reality through what changes. Reality is the sense of cohesion in change. That such a reality does not satisfy us, indeed, might on occasion appall us, does not mean we can change it by simply appealing to its opposite.
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I probably should amend the 3rd paragraph from the end, (as reparagrphed here), as it's a bit muddled by virtue of conflating issues together. What I meant was that what in the Anglophone world is called "post-structuralism" should not necessarily be taken at face value, as a set of free-floating issues concerning categorical differentiation and conflicts/contestations of meaning, logomachy, with a concommitant search for acategorical "concepts", by which to pry apart fixed structures of categories. (Well, that accords with the renunciation of philosophical "autonomy" enunciated above.) Complex late-capitialist societies are characterized by highly differentiated social structures and ultra-pluralistic social formations. To its occupants, it can seem fragmentary and disintegrated, as well as, due to its complexity, terrifyingly opaque, even as its complexity tightly enwraps its occupants in a finely differentiated web of constraints, all the more so, since the imperatives of social reproduction have been transferred onto such complex structures. At the same time, a proliferation of specialized discourses results from that institutional differentiation, while the loss of any community of "common ground" can be felt as a loss of the sustaining supports of a sense of self or personal "identity", as a depersonalization of "reality". On the other hand, the finely differentiated weave of social relations leads to a slippage of social controls, yielding a peculiarly asocial sense of freedom, while the proliferation of discourses and perspectives leads to the prospect of a new form of individuation/differentiation via a "creative", improvisatory performance. That would be the sociological context, in which "post-structuralism" emerged as an avant-garde mode of exploration, with the ambivalances of that condition being reflected in the splittings of such thinking.
Now, one line of criticism I meant to suggest has to do with the identification of the acategorical, as the "affirmed" null point of particular existence, giving license to such "new beginnings", with the model of the work of art, giving rise to an aestheticism that is at once overgeneralized and peculiarly de-aestheticized. (I think that's the point at which Adorno would have strenously objected). I think that Levinas basically has it right in identifying the acategorical rudiment of thinking with the modal relation to the otherness of the other, which he, in turn, identifies with the ethical, qua "infinite" obligation, as the source of the individuation of a self. That, at least, has the "logical" merit that, while the modal-relational dimension of meaning constitution is necessary and "essential" to the meaningfulness of meaning, it is precisely not semantic/categorical. (Works of art then could be viewed as efforts to body forth the modal-relational dimension of meaning constitution, which otherwise disappears in its very instantiation. In other words, the function and criterion of works of art is to "contain" otherness, which would explain at once their polyvalancy/interpretive inexhaustibilty and their ultimate emptiness.)
The other line of criticism, of course, is that there should be no need to present the "post-modern" world as a quasi-Heideggerian destiny, whose obscure imperative is somehow impelling, rather than as a socio-historical development that is susceptible to rational analysis and understanding. Of course, the objection could be raised that such analysis is itself just another discourse, side by side with all the others. But doesn't that resemble the classic Platonic, formal "refutation" of relativism, which fails to recognize that the rejection of a claim to absolute truth does not occur at the same level and with the same force as the assertion of such a claim? Such a counter fails to acknowledge that such an analysis is referent, however vaguely or inadequately, to a real extention, that does not reduce claims, but rather qualifies and elucidates them.
Of course, the point of such an analysis is to raise the open question of whether it can bring the claims of a "post-modern condition" back into the notion of a common world and a public realm, since I remain enough of a socialist to insist on the fundamental sociality of human beings and their need for an anchoring of recognitions in a social world, however mediated across real differences. That's perhaps the burden of Habermas' work, though I've never been quite convinced by my readings of him, limited as they are.
Perhaps another way to characterize the distinctiveness and failure of philosophy is that it is constituted on an impossibility: the desire to "know" the possible. Certainly, any possibility can only be attained by finding a route through reality, whether an avenue or an alleyway, and, in that sense, realism is a criterion of philosophical reason. But it is in the realm of the possible, of the inevitably shared, hence conflictual, potentiality for being, that human responsiblity is registered. And that potentiality for and of being is as much a matter of the possible becoming of the world, as it is of the possible becoming of human beings who encounter it.