Sententious Realism

Outside philosophy, there is as much reality as there could possibly be. And its existence does not rely on carrying any particular truth, but solely on the circumstance of not being questioned. Thus, philosophy must ask itself something else: Why is it that it has so often been regarded as near synonymous with antirealism? Instead of trying to grasp reality, philosophy should probably first seek to find its proper reach of competence, its function. It must realize that its object is not reality but truth. For a pre-philosophical mind, reality is mostly something natural, normal, and self-evident, but within the scope of its own imagination it can never be established to what extent the forms of consciousness and language are construed and shaped by reality, and to what extent it is rather reality which is formed by human practices, habits, and social institutions. And this is where philosophy must intervene. If we made an effort to consider the human mind from the most sober, distanced, impartial perspective possible, we would probably have to observe that it is, on the one hand, caught within the biologically, culturally, linguistically mediated patterns of its thought, but that it has, on the other hand, nevertheless and miraculously always been capable of performing acts of realism. However, these acts are occurring spontaneously, unconsciously, almost underhandedly. Therefore, the task of philosophy is to offer instruments and matrices with which to analyze how these processes of alleviation of reality from the constraints of human meaning are motivated, initiated, and operated. In other words, its task is to posit a theory of truth as essentially irreducible to and not deducible from reality.

First, truth emerges and did not exist before. Realism could also be defined as a stance according to which reality can never predict the emergence of truth. If it could, reality would already be comprised within the frame of certain truth expectations and thus relinquish a portion of its independent, indifferent realness. Reality is always there, but it can never know or infer from itself at which point precisely it will consolidate in its ultimate screen behind which there is nothing “more real” still waiting to surface.

Second, the original means of truth, its lever and handle, is the sublimation of a representational concept into an idea. And this idea is only “anointed” in order to pose henceforth as protection against its own incarnation within reality. We do not posit a creatio ex nihilo, an emergence of something material within the world,^[1] but only a creation of truth by way of idealization.

Third, this idealization sets in motion the process of de-symbolization of reality, the breakthrough of the symbolic frame of the traditional, sometimes pre-philosophical consciousness. If an act of idealization is irreducible to reality, it is only its realist merit and scope that makes it nonarbitrary.

Now, these three conditions can be primarily read against the truth form of the second ontology we have differentiated, the ontology of totalization. If we were to reduce the philosophy of the twentieth century to the lowest common denominator, we could say that it placed reality under the constraint of totalization which could finally only be secured and supported by language. It was the era when reality began to disclose itself explicitly, declaratively, exclusively, and inflationary within the total horizon of linguistic forms, with Wittgenstein claiming “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (TLP 5.6); Heidegger announcing “Language speaks. / Man speaks in that he responds to language”;^[2] Derrida stating Il n’y a pa de hors-texte, “There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text]”;^[3] and Barthes saying that “it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.”^[4] However, if, against the post-Kantian philosophies of the linguistic turn, today’s realists raise the accusations of depriving us of the contact with pre-discursive facticity, these charges seem to overlook a rather simple line of argumentation: if there is no reality outside language, then it is reality, and not language, that constitutes the ultimate foundation of truth. The other, neglected side of the linguistic turn shows that, when the limits of our language become the limits of our world, our world in turn begins to set the limits to our language. Every categorical “languaging of reality” activates a necessary reciprocal “realization of language.” Scholastic ideas residing in the other world and claiming God as their warrant could still afford to regard this world as “less true,” but when language is made to be the total framework of the manifestation of earthly reality, it is simultaneously reduced to a mere means of inhabiting and disclosing the world. It assumes the perspective of the whole in order to enable parts of reality to fill out and saturate its truth form. This is particularly apparent in early Wittgenstein, where language is both master of totality and slave of its parts. For the right method of philosophy is “to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science” (TLP 6.53) and to remain silent about everything else: language may govern the world, but it is only allowed to speak up when referring to external facts, just like Kant’s concept spontaneously constituted the world and was at the same time bound to being fulfilled by intuition. Even though nature exists within the limits of language, language should not dare to speak except of this very nature. The matrix of mutual restraint between language and reality defines most of the subsequent theories of language use. In late Wittgenstein, every meaning is confined to the pragmatic point of the situation, in Derrida, meaning is produced only through contexts and never outside of them, and even in the most “ironic” and anarchic postmodernism, language seems to be a mere tool of creating an infinity of situations, points of view, moves in a game. Extra-linguistic reality is thus not the only sacrifice made by the linguistic turn; noncontextual language uses fall short as well. Every “idealist” production of language that cannot be substantiated, fulfilled, or, so to speak, “cashed in” in references, contexts, and situations, becomes utterly unthinkable. As we will seek to demonstrate, all the great twentieth century programs of over-determining reality with language were conceived for the purpose of suppressing the effects of idealization.

There is thus a downside to elevating language into the supreme horizon of reality, be it in an ontologically Heideggerian, pragmatically Wittgensteinian, or metaphorically Derridean vein. This hypostasis of language also heralds an inability to think and organize a “truth creation,” that elusive surplus of language of which Hegel says that it is the more truthful. Against the accusations that with the linguistic turn (in the broadest sense of this term) “reality” was somehow lost, it must be stressed that the turn itself was invented and realized only as an attempt to regain reality and once again provide it with a foundation. As we have seen Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the “argument of language” was adopted and explicated primarily to prove the firm existence of the world in opposition to skepticism, solipsism, and immaterialism. However, the linguistic turn does deprive us of two things: on the one hand, the possibility of creating truths that are not deducible from or reducible to usages, concerns, and intents within reality and, on the other hand, the possibility of a reality that does not signify anything, a reality beyond the discretion of meaning and language. This is why a critique of the linguistic turn must fight on two fronts simultaneously: on the front of truths, the “value range” of which is no longer “saturated” by reality, as well as on the front of reality, which is no longer caught up in the truth values of language forms.

Now, to return to our tripartite structure, we have differentiated three ontologies, to which three different truth forms could be ascribed respectively. According to the traditional and most common definition, truth is the relation between subject and object appearing as adequation. Through a shift of emphasis, the realism of Heidegger and Wittgenstein—who themselves arguably only explicated the dispositions already latent in Kant’s project—abandons the conception of truth as immediate adequation, transferring both subject and object into the horizons of totalization. Hence, this small shift involves a number of considerable transformations. The solitary subject of cognition is replaced by Heidegger’s Mitsein and Mitdasein (i.e., Being-with and Dasein-with), and Wittgenstein’s Sprachgemeinschaft (i.e., the language community). The subject, once facing an isolated epistemological object, such as “the rose,” “the cannon ball,” or “the rock,” is situated in his practical daily routines, in the so-called Zeugzusammenhänge or equipmental contexts. Intersubjectivity now ontologically precedes the individual subject, the environment ontologically predetermines singular objects, and the bond between the subject- and the object-correlate is no longer epistemological, perceptual, or sensual, but practical and pragmatic, while at the same time becoming increasingly language dependent.

Yet still, each of these two realisms collides with a certain impossibility, itself a consequence of their respective approaches. The realist of immediate adequation can famously never step out of his own body in order to touch the thing, while the realist of taken-for-granted totalization shifts truth from immediate adequation to the realm of praxis, work, speaking, and communication, thereby establishing a horizon of language that can no longer be crossed in order to experience prediscursive facticity. Here, it is our aim to hint at a third option (i.e., the possibility of a realism that transcends even this “second” limit of truth as totalization and replaces the self-evident reality of linguistic “meaning” with the realism of indifference). The realist of indifferent release is now allowed to retreat into language to the point where the production of surplus truths dissolves the traditional, established, totalized horizons of meaning and discloses a reality released from representing a truth value. The correlates of these three ontologies can be deemed the following:

Our endeavor is to become aware and sensitized to truth in the form of emergence of the new insofar as it enters an entirely different relation to its outside. It is a truth which no longer considers the outside world to be the primary and exclusive truth-maker, but rather brings reality to the point of losing its meaning and becoming untrue.

Egress from Language via Retreat
into Language: Kant’s Synthetic Judgment
and Nietzsche’s Aphorism

We stand before the daunting task of pinpointing the logical space in which language reveals possible avenues of egress from itself. The first step consists of procuring circumstantial evidence: we will compare the propositional form in relation to reality in Kant and Nietzsche. It is certainly not our intention to develop a Nietzschean theory of truth,^[5] but only to outline a very specific development in the conceptualization of “truth value” from the still academic and restrained eighteenth century to the more free-spirited and excessive late nineteenth century. In our view, Nietzsche never devised a tenable truth doctrine, since his philosophy lacked any binding concepts of words, propositions, ideas, and the like. However, his intuitions may be a goldmine of incentives for pushing the limits of the processes of truth. Thus, we will only try to discern a particular correlation within his technique of creating truths and enduring reality. Nietzsche was the greatest poetical creator of language and a man who could withstand the vastest dimensions of the meaninglessness of facticity. And it is precisely this balance between emphatically emergent truths and programmatically devalued reality which we consider to be an expression of a certain logical necessity.

Kant’s philosophy of the conditions of possibility may well be serving as a paradigm of truth conceived under the form of totalization. The existence of things can only be proved from the context of the entirety of experience, the conditions of possibility concern all phenomena, and the table of categories is complete and total. With its basic coordinates (i.e., the forms of time and space as well as the categories, schemes, and principles) this system of “total control over reality” constitutes a sort of stabilizing environment for the things and events in it. This world, latently perhaps already displaying a structure intertwining the linguistic and the real, offers a suitable basis and venue for the reign of classical Newtonian mechanics. Kant posits a world where human understanding prescribes principles to nature and, at the same time, prohibits any part of nature from eluding the grasp of these human forms. The principles of pure understanding, the synthetic judgments a priori, thus represent the conditions of discovering nature and subsuming all phenomena under its laws. The purpose of these principles (which ascribe extensive magnitudes (see KrV A 162/B 202) and an intensive magnitude to intuitions (see KrV A 166/B 207) and establish necessary connections between perception (see KrV A 176/B 218)) is to set up a framework that would enable a scientific investigation of phenomena (i.e., the entire apparatus of measurement, quantification, and the definition of causal links). The central aim of Kant’s first Critique was to provide the natural sciences with a philosophical foundation. In contrast to current allegations of Kant’s antirealism, one should always remember that transcendental philosophy must first and foremost be read as an attempt to develop a scientific program of cognizing the world as definable and measurable according to the criteria of quantities (distance, numbers, forces), qualities (weight, temperature, solidity), and causation. Nature, as constituted by these forms, presents an image of causal, quantitative, and qualitative totality, contiguity, and fullness. In mundo non datur hiatus, non datur saltus, non datur casus, non datur fatum. In the world there are neither gaps, nor leaps, nor chance, nor fate.^[6]

A relation of tight reciprocity is established between the forms of understanding and the scientific empiricity of the world. Although experience is structured by way of concepts and judgments, this form of repression also works in reverse. On the one hand, in Kant’s world one cannot stumble upon a piece of being not constituted in the act of spontaneity of the transcendental subjectivity. But, on the other hand, the transcendental subjectivity is also not allowed to exceed the boundaries of its (possible) knowledge. Kant’s understanding might rely on the act of spontaneity, but “truth” itself is still, so to speak, epistemologically grounded (and can never assume the form of creation, divination, artistic production, etc.). Understanding is eternally bound to constitute objective reality, thereby merely reconciling concepts with intuitions—as the famous saying goes, “[T]houghts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (KrV A 51/B 75). It is a double bind of a sort. Being is constrained by concepts, to be sure, but understanding is constrained as well—by intuitions. “Objective knowledge” does not designate only the conceptual structuring of sensibility, but also a sensible inhibition of the conceptual form.

Kant’s philosophy of the conditions of possibility of knowledge is, of course, a highly restricted system of reciprocity between form and content, understanding and sensibility, figuratively speaking also between language and reality, and it is because of the reciprocal restrictions that this system is only sustainable within the horizon of postulated totality. It is not only the concept that gives form to the intuition, it is primarily the intuition that imposes constraints upon the concept. Roughly speaking, Kant distinguishes between two types of concepts: empirical concepts, which are constituted through a comparison of the objects of experience, and pure concepts, which originate from the understanding and are independent of experience. So, on the one hand, we have the empirical concepts of “the table” or “the rose” and, on the other, the pure concepts that are not abstractions from sense perceptions but forms of objects in general (i.e., categories). Nevertheless, claims to the fulfillment of the conceptual form by intuition also hold for the latter (i.e., for the notios, and, as a special case, for ideas). For every pure concept possesses its schema, which “realizes” the content of the concept through a common representation, thus restricting the categories to the conditions of sensibility. Of course, the sense content of the concept “table” is self-evident enough, but categories, by contrast, require a transcendental schema whose only function is precisely to restrict their competence to the objects of possible experience.

This nuance needs to be emphasized because we are mostly governed by a deep-rooted prejudice that sensibility is something discriminated against in the long-lasting reign of metaphysics, which sets the conceptual structures as limits and barriers of the multitudinous, heterogeneous, infinitely rich sensible reality. Nietzsche’s Gefängnis der Sprache, his so-called prison house of language, or Barthes’s rubriques obligatoires, obligatory rubrics, point to this tradition. The concepts seem to be the natural enemies of the manifold. But we cannot thoroughly understand Kant if we do not acknowledge the restriction running in the opposite direction as well: not only does understanding put constraints on sensibility, but it is primarily in the domain of sensibility to prevent understanding from fleeing into the areas that exceed its capabilities; this, after all, is the meaning of the word “critique.” We must not ignore the fact that at the beginning of this long process of the world assuming the structure of the spontaneous conceptuality, later language, Kant did not use the term restringieren (i.e., to restrict) in the sense of conceptual form restricting sensibility, but, quite the opposite, in the sense of the content of intuition limiting the use of the pure concepts of understanding:

A category thus receives its meaning, its “significance,” only “from sensibility, which realizes the understanding at the same time as it restricts it” (KrV A 147/B 187). Hence, one must at all times keep in mind that the realization of a concept is in equal measure its sensual restriction.

It is not only the case that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world, but apparently also that the limits of my world mean the limits of my language. The prison house of language is simultaneously and conversely a prison house of reality in which language is thrown, and all the conceptual obligatory rubrics are likewise obligated to seek their fulfillment in something other than themselves. The limits of sensibility, objective reality, and scientific practice are thus the shackles clasped around our use of concepts, our potential spontaneity in forming judgments, finally also our linguistic creativity. To this day, Kant’s philosophy is regarded as a stance according to which “conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience” (KrV A 158/B 197), that is to say, a stance which locked the world into the mind of the transcendental subjectivity and threw away the key. But Kant was also met with criticism from the other side. Rather than to his subjective idealism, Hegel objected to his sacrifice of metaphysics at the altar of the limits of possible knowledge. The fact that Kant’s philosophy systematically denied us direct contact with the thing-in-itself is only half the truth; it reciprocally also denied the concepts the right to an authentic, speculative, ideal, metaphysical, perhaps even metaphorical production. Just as it is impossible to acquire any intuitive, immediate knowledge of objects outside the form of a concept, so it is impossible to indulge in the creation of the new without the restrictions of intuition and beyond the context of experience.^[7]

Thus, there are losses on both sides. In Kant, not only is the possibility of contact with the thing-in-itself lost, but equally delicate problems arise when trying to conceive of and contextualize the concepts of “freedom,” “purpose,” “organism,” “soul,” “world,” or “God.” To put it illustratively, Kant’s concept, if compared with Hegel’s, will never open to the intrusion of its absolutely other, the arrow wounding the otherwise impenetrable body of Achilles. But, inversely, Kantian intuition does also not allow the concept to ascend from the cave and enter a heaven of ideas populated by Platonic forms, Hegelian concepts, or, as we shall see, Nietzsche’s metaphors. It is this constant weight of intuitions which denies the concepts the right to break free from their copies, from being mere forms of a given sensibility, and define their meanings within discourse. In sum, Kant’s restrictions necessarily operate both ways, so it is neither possible to descend to intuition without concept nor ascend to a concept devoid of intuition.

This tight reciprocation of form and content, this world without accidents, leaps, and gaps, could still set the stage for the unfolding of Newtonian classical mechanics, a theory almost a hundred years old by the time the Critique of Pure Reason was published. However, Kant was capable of absorbing only physics into the conditions of possibility of philosophical knowledge. It seems as though he allowed only the amount of “scientific realism” he could cultivate in the total framework of his transcendental method. Even the science of Kant’s era, “chemism” and “organism” (i.e., the findings of Lavoisier’s chemistry and the biological theories of the time), could not participate in the principles of understanding a priori.^[8] And in the period to come, new scientific discoveries were made, giving rise to the first serious theories of evolution, electrodynamics, magnetism, and so forth. Perhaps a new type of realism was needed, a post-Kantian release of facticity. With acknowledging Newton, Kant performed a “philosophical release of the area of jurisdiction of science” and thus opened a certain wound never to be mended, a certain division of labor. And in the nineteenth century, this augmenting rift between the scope of philosophy and that of science becomes deliberate, pronounced, and programmatic. Marx and Nietzsche were its most vocal proponents.

The stance that Kant’s system assumed toward Newton’s physics, the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche were forced to assume toward the new prevailing and paradigmatic science of their time: the theory of evolution. What Newton was to Kant, Darwin was, without a doubt, to Marx and Nietzsche, although with an important distinction: the relation between philosophy and science was no longer constituted within the horizon of totalization, but at best within the horizon of release. In the self-understanding of philosophy, science now played a slightly different role than in the time of Kant: it became an object of a specific enjoyment. Marx and Nietzsche, in a way, indulged in their frequent references to the merciless findings of scientific realism and sometimes almost feasted on them. The evolutionary theory, in particular, was their preferred negative metaphor of the smallness, insignificance, and animality of the human being in a purposeless, indifferent universe. However, this “act of reverence” that philosophy pays to science is only an outer reflex of the inverse operation which grants autonomy to philosophical concepts that were previously still bound by the weight of the immediate, “naturalistic,” reality. The key concepts of Marx and Nietzsche, such as Marx’s “surplus value,” “class struggle,” and the method of dialectic materialism, or Nietzsche’s “transvaluation,” “nihilism,” the argument of “power,” and the genealogical method, were developed precisely for the purpose of freeing the philosophical domain from the constraints of biologisms. Philosophy now finds itself in a paradoxical situation: while it does accept and absorb science, it also emancipates its own truth value, putting it out of science’s reach. The concomitance of two divergent operations must be thought here. Marx, for example, was a great admirer of Darwin and even thought of dedicating his Capital to him, but his greatest theoretical aspiration was to pose a social theory relieved of the bonds of organicism which had still permeated the spirit of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit and his theory of the state. Biological evolution thus becomes a “released” foundation, Marx’s naturhistorische Grundlage^[9] or naturwissenschaftliche Unterlage,^[10] a scientific substratum on top of which and against which “truth,” for instance the truth of political action, has yet to emerge and be produced. It is this fundamental disruption which must be accounted for. In comparison to Hegel, for example, Marx can allow more animality to the human being while, at the same time, conceding less biologism to his social theory. Hence, while Darwin debases the human being into an ape, Marx, inversely, elevates him into the subject of labor, society, and history; while Darwin shoves him back into the bosom of nature, Marx rips him out of it, without these two operations contradicting each other—they are, in fact, correlative, equilibrated, and, most of all, necessary.

Thus, Marx affirms and surpasses Darwin in one move; or, more precisely, because he is capable of exceeding the limits of his theory, he can afford to accept it fully. When the nature of the human being was still “expected to be true,” it needed to be denied and embellished. When, however, man began to produce its own “truth values,” his forms of recognition, economy, machinery, and so forth, his body could finally become that of an ape. In other words, because philosophy “released” the space of science into the sphere of untruth, it was no longer committed to doubt, disregard, or revise its findings.

It is here that the arguments of truth, reality, and indifference between the two become most insightful and feasible. Philosophy acknowledges science in its indifferent outside, even exhibiting a great negative need for its realism, so that it could produce its own, emergent truth values against it: Darwin’s “animalization” of the human is a necessary negative condition of possibility for Marx’s political or Nietzsche’s heroic notions to truly become concepts and ideas and not just representations of the given. Marx’s revolution or Nietzsche’s saying “Yes,” for instance, are programs only to be performed by a man recognizing its inhuman origins. If man was originally something more than animal, his humanness would lose the quality of being a produced rather than given or found entity (i.e., of being an active, processual, or projective endeavor), which is precisely what Marx’s and Nietzsche’s “normative” disposition of man requires. Thus, the emergent truth of man’s self-generation is only possible upon a realist foundation, which is established by the regression of the human being into an animal. The Übermensch needs Darwin’s ape not as his actual truth, but rather as the untruth against which, as against an indifferent, factual outside, he can first make himself into something true.

Therefore, philosophy acknowledges the realism of science only to the degree it can experience it as an untruth. It is a striking, yet hardly noticed, fact that philosophy, as represented by Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others, recognized scientific realism only insofar as it, so to speak, salvaged and uplifted a specifically philosophical truth value that exceeds the powers of science. Ironically, Kant, if we compare him to the empiricists, thus stands both for the recognition of Newton providing the exclusive theory of reality and for the de-physicalization of cognition. Marx and Nietzsche stand for the inclusion of evolutionary theory as the only possible account on the genealogy of the human species as well as for the de-biologization of history and society. And it is precisely this principal disengagement of philosophy from science that accomplished the acceptance of its realism.

Along with this detachment of philosophy from science, which, at first sight paradoxically, effectuates the coincidence of increasing indifference and expanding realism, the history of philosophy itself describes a path of the disenchantment of the world. While, in Kant, the bond between concepts and intuitions still warranted the total truth value of the world, this totalization finds its perfect opposite in Nietzsche’s poetry of de-totalization of being. It could be argued without exaggeration that Nietzsche is the first philosopher after Heraclitus who indulged in a veritable enjoyment of the untruth of the world. When he claims that there is no such thing as a “true world,” this arguably does not mean that there is no world, but only that the world as it is is untrue. To qualify Nietzsche in Kant’s terms, one could say that he was the thinker who knew how to set a stage for “the descent from concept to intuition.” The key to our argument, however, lies in the fact that he could implement this descent only in a refined act of balance, since Nietzsche is not only the principal advocate of the inconsistency and untruth of immediacy, but also the most talented poet among philosophers. He is the greatest critic of language that we know of; and yet, he could arrange truth and make it expressible only by means of literary forms, rhetorical figures, and sententious effects. Consequently, the only philosopher who knew how to enact “an ascent from intuitions to concepts” was once again none other than Nietzsche. In a word, Nietzsche’s philosophy can perhaps only be understood through this logic of disruption between concepts and intuitions, progression and regression, truth and reality.

Nietzsche gives a first taste of the reciprocity between the movements of descent and ascent in his short, posthumously published essay On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, his early attack on the conceptual constitution of truth. The short text begins with an almost poetic, quoted ad nauseam, revelation of de-totalization: knowledge is an illusion of a marginal animal species called “human,” who invented it so he could feel central to the world. He is banished and enclosed “within a proud, illusory consciousness,” and, what is worse,

The aspiration of Nietzsche’s philosophy is thus to wake up the human being from the dream of “anthropomorphism.” While Kant’s scientific realism (in the form of Newton’s physics) can only unfold within the boundaries of a conceptual system—(i.e., in the middle of a circle whose circumference was still drawn by philosophy)—Nietzsche, inversely, strives to conceive of the possibility for another kind of realism—a realism that finds behind the bush something it had not put there itself, something that the concepts had not pre-formed, and the discovery of which they could not anticipate:

Instead of Kant’s total control of reality, Nietzsche opts for a realism structured as the release of reality, indeed, as a surprise. The major imperative of his early philosophy is to step out of the “prison house of language,” “the chamber of consciousness,” “a mathematically divided firmament of concepts” (OTL 147), and “the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium” (OTL 146–47). At first glance, it seems obvious what should be done: eliminate language forms. For people “merely glide across the surface of things and see ‘forms’; nowhere does their perception lead into truth” (OTL 142). In Kant, judgment is a meeting point between thought and reality, between the subjective and the objective, and it is this conjunction of concepts and intuitions that constitutes the basis of objective reality. Nietzsche, by contrast, considers the bond which is constitutive in Kant to be coincidental, figurative, and illusory—in short, metaphorical:

The concept of “truth” is an effect of language which has forgotten its metaphorical past and recognizes in conceptual boundaries the structure of the real world. Language is a tool employed by human beings as members of a community, as herd animals. As such, it is a symptom of man’s weakness. The drive to truth comes from “the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention, to lie en masse [schaarenweise; in some versions: herdenweise, i.e., in flocks, in herds] and in a style that is binding for all” (OTL 146; comment added). Language is thus essentially a language of the herd. It appears to be the case that a language of the master could not even exist—except that it does.

If language is not only an illusion but also the breeding ground of our philistinism, we could, of course, assume that Nietzsche will now subscribe to a program of pure contemplation, intuitionism, pre-symbolic imagination, and corporeal or even incorporeal experiences of facticity. Although in this early text Nietzsche had not yet formed a systematic stance on the matter and even his argumentation vacillates at this point, some hints and emphases would certainly point in the suggested direction. When he talks about “being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions” (OTL 146), or about how “every metaphor standing for a sensuous perception is individual and unique and is therefore always able to escape classification” (OTL 146), it seems as if he is advocating preconceptual, intuitive, immediate modes of experiencing truth. But, one might object, if this strategy of immersing oneself in the undreamt-of fashions of intuition was to be taken literally, Nietzsche would have to stop speaking altogether—which is the one thing he does not do. Rather than a man of reticence, profound experience, and honest intuition, Nietzsche opposes the herd animal with an unusually loquacious, nigh garrulous being, a being not unlike himself. While Nietzsche was, indeed, a proponent of the philosophy of the body, he was also never able to remain silent; and this must be considered as an almost logical balance, an equilibrium of a certain necessity. It seems that the true motivation behind this striving to “egress from the conceptual structure” is not supplied by already existing intuitions, impressions, gut movements, and collisions with facticity, but rather by a certain unexpected enjoyment of reproducing the inherent, autonomous metaphorical forms of language, its essentially illusory surfaces:

It is perhaps this passage that holds the key to the entire, even if at times rather inconsistent argumentation of this short essay. The drive to form metaphors can never be overcome; we cannot step out of language, which is why we can only seek specific elements and situations of discharge and release within itself. Nietzsche seems unequivocal on this point: language does not permit an immediate egress and descent to things themselves; only an “upward egress” is possible (i.e., an ascent to linguistic creativity as facilitated by myth and art). There is no way that opens down from concepts to intuitions; only a way up is possible, leading from concepts to metaphors.

Thus, the focal points of the argument shift decidedly. Nietzsche introduced this treatise with the images of contingency of the human species, with a vast disclosure of the world of quantities and meaningless peripheries which conceptual systems tend to suppress and overlook. For a while, it seemed as if it was the pressure of brute reality itself that motivated us to question language forms. Then, however, behind the bush, Nietzsche does not seem to encounter the thing-in-itself but rather something else. He witnesses another kind of revelation, an unexpected supplemental, autonomous, automatic life of words which disengages from the thing and finds enjoyment in its own unworldly creativity, untethered from the constraints of immediate reference. Instead of things without words, he finds words without things, as it were. Rather than immediately perceiving a reality not yet formed by the constraints of language, he experiences a life of language miraculously unburdened with the weight of reality. And it is this emancipation of language production, and not the raw reality of immediacy, which now gives leverage to deprive language of its constitutive, “objective,” Kantian function, disclosing, on the one hand, the metaphorical origin of words and, on the other, a reality finally released from their rigid forms. In a manner of speaking, the logical space of the initially tried “argument of intuition” is taken up by the surprisingly discovered “argument of the concept.” Rather than descending to pre-discursive reality, Nietzsche postulates a sort of “upward” retreat into pure discourse:

The consecutive order of argumentation, of premises leading to a conclusion, seems to be inverted. It is not the case that we found behind the bush something we had not put there ourselves, whereupon, facing this sudden epiphany of facticity, language crumbled before our eyes. Instead, it was language itself that first enabled us to retreat into it to the point where concepts are no longer inhibited by the weight of intuitions, where we can play spontaneously with its transcendent possibilities, while extra-linguistic facticity disclosed itself only on the backside of this experience of the nonconstitutive quality of language, as its released remainder. Only after dissolving the hierarchies of language systems by way of exclusively discursive strategies, do we even become capable of catching a look at and recognizing behind the bush a periphery of being that is no longer pre-formed linguistically. To paraphrase Kant, it seems that “the limits of possible knowledge” must first be surpassed, in order for the “thing-in-itself” to be raised to the surface. And, in Nietzsche, this being-in-itself does precisely not assume the object-form, but rather appears as a reality that can no longer be organized into things: it is a revelation of a nonreifiable periphery of being. The first step is thus not a surprising, disconcerting collision with the thing, but rather an experience of words casting off the constraints that compel them to name things and becoming the objects of their own, metaphorical enjoyment. The release and unfolding of irreducible facticity is only a secondary consequence of this dissociation of language from reality.

This transition developing between Kant and Nietzsche is a consequence of a radically dislocated frame of functions and expectations which philosophy is supposed to fulfill. Kant’s basic philosophical claim was to define the coordinates for the infinite expansion of knowledge of the world; reality was still something essentially safe, benign, almost benevolent, which we can keep under control by means of cognition. Nietzsche’s perspective is shifted from the outset. The categories of his pseudo-epistemology are merely derivations of the fundamental question asking how much facticity we can bring ourselves to bear. Nietzsche’s subject does not set out to cognize the world straightforwardly; he rather searches for and clings to levers that would allow him to endure it: there is no direct and innocent epistemological openness toward reality, but only an interplay of powers between the subject striving to govern it and reality’s entitlement to obliterate his existence. Hence, man no longer apprehends the world; he only knows it in the slipstream of surviving it. Nietzsche’s unknown thing hiding behind the bush is thus never an object of cognition, perception, experience, or intuition, but first and foremost an object of release, a secondary object a priori, which can only be suffered in its facticity after a certain retreat into oneself has taken place; here, in this text, it is a retreat in language. The attitude toward reality therefore no longer unfolds in the medium of theoretical domination over the world. Instead, reality acquires the status of a released remainder of our hard-won indifference to it. In this sense, the knowledge of the world is essentially secondary, post rem, so to speak. Reality, it could be said, is merely a “resultant” of a certain contest that we are engaged in with the world of how much meaninglessness are we capable of withstanding without perishing. And it is in these contests that the possibilities of realism presumably increase.

Kant’s system does not allow playing with language; judgments are constantly made to synthesize objective experience. Nietzsche’s latent argument, on the other hand, which we have reconstructed ourselves and even somewhat forced on him, might claim the following. If language is capable of a sort of “metaphorical alienation,” if concepts can be disengaged from intuitions, words from things, and judgments from knowledge, then this also means that the function of language forms is no longer objective and constitutive and has ceased to represent the conditions of possibilities of the existence of objects. By playing freely with concepts, we realize that they are metaphorical, transferrable, and overvalued, which in turn releases reality from the compulsion of expressing the structure of concepts and judgments. Admittedly, the argument is at this point weak and self-indulgent. Only later will we put some meat on its bones or, preferably, some bones in its meat, but Nietzsche apparently aims to show how only an artist, a master of metaphors, will be able to “discover” a world that exists outside the jurisdiction of language. If, for the time being, we settle for correlations instead of causations, we must make and effort to think the two most disparate elements, creativity and facticity, reaching a state of equilibrium.^[12]

Here, an inversion in the eternal discursive balances of the history of philosophy is taking place. Kant’s subject is a naturalist walking the ground of the conceptual world, a physicist, so to speak, whose feet tread the path made entirely of words. Nietzsche’s subject, by contrast, is an artist, a poet, perhaps even a rhetorically gifted “prattler,” who treads the ground of subverbal periphery, nothingness, and nonsense dissolving underneath the limits of language. He is a Zarathustrian rope dancer, capable of looking down, gazing into the abyss beneath his feet, and enduring the inconsistency of being. The secret of Nietzsche’s discursive moves relies on the claim that only “a man of words” will be able to stand on the ground of the disintegrating world which itself has never expected to be cognized and hence in fact exists realistically.

Therefore, it seems that Nietzsche’s argument is only sustainable within the frame of equilibrium and release rather than immediate contact with the thing. The concept of “truth” might prove to be illusory, but this does not endorse an abandonment of its forms and a surrender to the intuitions of the body and the facticity of reality. If language is itself a lie, there is, on the other hand, no truth in silence. The way out of the inherent lie at the heart of truth can only be shown by the discovery of the inherent truth at the heart of the lie. In the end, the critic of language, who at first strived to escape its prison house by advocating a life of pure intuitions, does not become a man of action (i.e., Hegel’s “world-historical individual”), a contemplative monk, or a dancing god, but a rhapsodist, whose identity relies on nothing other than language:

In order to discover a world beyond language, one must first become a master of words. Just as Kant needed the subject of morality to supplement the subject of the syntheses of understanding, so he could at least for a while release the starry heavens into pure objectivity not constituted within the consciousness of the transcendental subjectivity, Nietzsche must posit not one, but two subjects: the subject who sustains the synthesis of intuitions within the boundaries of the conceptual systems and the subject who can step out of this “pyramidal order based on castes and degrees” (OTL 146). Nietzsche, engaging explicitly with the metaphors of “mastery” and “servitude,” opposes the herd animal with the Herrenmensch, a member of the master race. The postulation of these two subjects is vital to the operation of truth effects; their duality is irreducible. On the one hand, the servant, caught up in the herd mentality, is needed for the construction of conceptual systems as expressions of the will to truth—without the herd, there would be no language and hence no possibility of metaphors. On the other hand, the master assumes the role of a mere supplement possessing the capability to indulge in a free and unheeding play of words which the servant still tethers to the substance of things. In fact, Nietzsche seems to reiterate Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, the difference being that the element of the “more truthful” is now all throughout represented by the master.

At this point, however, his argumentation starts to drift toward a final indeterminacy. He is unable to decide which function to assign to the new master. On the one hand, he distinguishes between “the man of reason” (i.e., the servant) and “the man of intuition” (i.e., the master) (OTL 152), while on the other, the essence of the master’s “intuition” seems to rest solely on his magical way with words.^[13] Nietzsche begins vaguely to ascribe to the master contradictory attributes, profound intuition on the one side and superficial eloquence on the other:

The master, so it seems, is a paradoxical figure. He must transcend language, but he nonetheless clings to it and exploits its possibilities. Apparently he is a heroically silent raconteur. But it is well possible that, at the site of the greatest contradiction, Nietzsche is unknowingly only tracing a new concept of “truth.” It is a concept which plants a centrifugal force between the poles of language and reality. And it is not, as Nietzsche would have us believe in the concluding, almost uplifting words of his short text, a force of joyful, creative unification. Perhaps, the only way to bestow Nietzsche’s irresoluteness between concepts and intuitions, metaphors and instincts, with any logical stringency is to place both correlates in a relation of indifference and release.

There is thus an originary divergence at the heart of the new truth value, with intuitions feeding on abstractions and a silence unable not to speak. In this context, Nietzsche’s philosophy develops two massive programs, which are in balance with each other only to the extent that they are contrary and centrifugal. The first is the program of language surplus, announced by phrases such as “forbidden metaphors,” “unheard-of combinations of concepts,” “the radiance of metaphorical visions,” and “a playing with earnest things” (OTL 152–53).^[14] The second is what we might call the program of the devaluation of reality. There was hardly a thinker before Nietzsche who advocated the total de-causalization of the world and deprived nature of its truth value as thoroughly as he did. If we were to comprise Nietzsche’s “immediate ontology of reality” in one dictum alone, we could merely inverse Kant’s a priori laws of nature, now reading, In mundo datur hiatus, datur saltus, datur casus, datur fatum. In the world there are only gaps, leaps, chance, and fate. Or, to cite a famous posthumous fragment:

Where Kant is only capable of conceiving of the world in the frame of cohesiveness, contiguity, necessity, and rationality, Nietzsche detects only gaps, contingencies, purposeless events, and the stupidity of necessity; “a hiatus between two nothingnesses” and above it “the sky chance,” der Himmel Ohngefähr.

As such, Nietzsche’s “epistemology,” as far as it can be reconstructed on the basis of his unpublished notebooks, endorses a method of discovery and advocacy of the subverbal peripheries of being. It might seem unusual, but it is precisely Nietzsche, perhaps the greatest magician of language in modern philosophy, who also passionately argues for the necessity of acknowledging and enduring the fragmentariness of being that escapes all linguistic schemes. The project of subtracting the supplement of language from reality is so overwhelming that even the ideas of truth and the real world must finally be abandoned: “The most extreme form of nihilism would be that every belief, every holding-to-be-true, is necessarily false: because there simply is no true world.”^[16] There is no outside world, because not even a minimal amount of discrete entities, providing a basis for judgments with a truth value, could be differentiated within it: “We never encounter ‘facts,’”^[17] Nietzsche says, and “our ‘outer world,’ as we project it at every moment, is suffused and indissolubly bound up with the old error of the underlying reason: we interpret the outer world with the schematism of the ‘thing.’”^[18] In this fashion, Nietzsche gradually and almost systematically abolishes all the constitutive forms of Kant’s epistemology (i.e., concepts, categories, schemas, and principles). This reduction of “qualities” lays a foundation for an ontology of quantities, becoming, and the manifold. “Logic,” for instance, is only an illusory fixation of identical examples in the becoming of the dissimilar: “words” are a violation of reality under the form of “things;” “laws,” “ideas,” “causes,” and “effects” impose the form of “oneness” onto the continuity of the manifold, and so forth. Qualities are thus merely “the artifices of the ordering, overwhelming, simplifying, abbreviating power called life.”^[19]

Nietzsche seems to follow two diverging but countervailing and correlative programs: the program of the self-referential creativity of language and the program of the release of reality from the constraints of language forms. Where there was once being, only nothing reigns, and the place formerly occupied by religion is now taken by art. It becomes the new religion, since only art can transcend the perspectival limits of “the will to truth.” From the point of view of the artistic creation, the world can suddenly become untrue. This new relation of the subject- and object-correlate is a straightforward antithesis to Kant’s theory of judgments as conceptual subsumptions of intuitions. On the one hand, Nietzsche likes to pride himself on writing books of aphorisms instead of treatises in the form of judgments of understanding, while on the other, he flatters himself that he is able to recognize and endure the illusion of the world. On one side, a prestigious form of judgment emancipates itself from the epistemic and pragmatic uses of language, while on the other, the world is released from the constitutive power of judgment. Formally, we could outline Kant’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of the truth process as a structure of four analogous parts:

Nietzsche released Kant’s “thing” into a becoming of quantities with no delimited identities. The discrete objects of our perception are always already organized through the units of qualities provided by the conventional, conformist language of the herd animal. However, these qualities also supply the material for a specific additional, emergent, superficial play with its forms which the master race can partake in. To put it pointedly, Kant’s regulative “logic of illusion” is replaced by “the will to illusion,” which is, as it were, more true than “the will to truth.” If we now compare these two four-part sequences, the Kantian and the Nietzschean, the bonds between the individual parts are exact opposites. In Kant, the thing-in-itself and the idea are excluded from the process of truth, being merely its external, marginal conditions, whereas the real truth value lies in the strengthening of the bond between intuition and concept. In Nietzsche, however, what disintegrates is precisely “the will to truth”—(i.e., the operation that connects the middle two parts and, by way of conceptual forms of the herd race, creates the appearance of qualities). And with this severance of the bond between intuitions and concepts, in effect with the revelation of the illusion of reality, the outer, most disparate parts become the carriers of a new truth value which now combines and juxtaposes the meaningless world of pure quantities on the one hand and the metaphorical brilliance of language use on the other. Kant’s transcendental dialectic is replaced by “a playing with earnest things,” which goes beyond the limits of possible knowledge, while the Kantian thing-in-itself is replaced by quantities, finally liberated from the qualitative constraints.

Perhaps Nietzsche deems it necessary to produce excess enjoyment of speech in order to break apart the middle pair of concept and intuition, releasing reality into a nonconceptual quantifiable periphery. Consequently, the formula of truth changes from Kant to Nietzsche according to the following schema:

With this shift, the dash in both correlations acquires a contrary function, respectively. With Kant, the relation between the two parts is one of conditioning, implication, and totalization, whereas Nietzsche’s formula sets up a relation of dissociation and release.

In Kant’s endless syntheses, the symbolic discloses and constitutes its real, while Nietzsche’s autarky of sententiousness discloses the real as released from the symbolic forms. Here, perhaps, the slightest hint of a possibility of egress from the ontologies of the linguistic turn might present itself. Compared to Kant, Nietzsche obviously takes a step up within the domain of language, so he could take a step down within the domain of reality. He ascends to the heaven of ideas in order to descend to the reality of untruth. And here he seems to give us a crucial lesson: a descent toward reality outside language can only be administered by first taking a step in the opposite direction. In other words, surpassing the horizon of language is initially possible only by going up, not down.

What we are following here are perhaps the footsteps of a broader historical transformation. In the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism and beyond, from academics to existentialists, from Kant to Nietzsche, the concept of “truth” seems to have induced a disruptive movement between language and reality. Once philosophers were natural scientists, and yet the world was full of meaning. Then they became poets, and the world found itself in a state of doom. However, by solely tracing this development, by remaining merely on the surface of discursive shifts between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s judgment forms, we have done nothing more than pinpointed a historical coincidence. To put it starkly, we have detected a correlation according to which Nietzsche happened to write aphorisms while also arguing for the ontology of quantities, but we have proved nothing. Still, in his “production of truths,” Nietzsche provides us with a basis, a point of departure, from where we could break through the surface of discourse and establish a logical bond between the methods of idealization of linguistic entities and the processes of de-symbolization of reality, its release from the constraints of language. Following Nietzsche’s intuitions, which were never thought through by him, the language form of sententiousness could be recognized as the minimal discursive space of possible realism. Our final task will be an analysis of specific remarkable statements in the history of philosophy.

Fear of the Originality of Propositions

In our view, the largest part of the language philosophy of the twentieth century, from Heidegger to Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy, from Saussure to Deleuze and Derrida, was constructed around a single effort: to trim the spontaneous impulses of idealization and thus to deprive language of producing more truth than it could be vouched for and redeemed within the partial, particular, local, and more or less provincial frameworks of speech acts, circumspections, customs, pragmatic intentions, contexts, and situations. And in order to downplay the surplus of truth arising within discourse, one instrument in particular was employed: the method of pinning down the proposition to the “place of enunciation” and thus utterly over-determining it with the circumstances of its emergence. These immense attempts to cultivate and neutralize sentences and statements come from the justified fear that the proposition form is an extraneous element which makes the world itself unstable. In Hegel, as we have seen, the greater truthfulness of language enters the scene by means of an in itself most modest proposition, a protocol sentence; the slightest supplement is added to the world to which the world gave no cause. And nothing is as it used to be.

In other words, the proposition is the minimal form of linguistic novelty; with it, something occurs and an effect is produced. According to Benveniste and Ducrot, every utterance unfolds a universe of its own and institutes a historical event in which something previously nonexistent enters the world. It was perhaps Fichte who was the first to give a name to this authentic, self-generative, supplemental, and emergent truth value of the proposition as proposition. In Fichte, the entire world relies on the point of new origin, new beginning, uttered through the judgment I am which is not synthetic and does not refer to a fact or describe an experience, but rather represents an emergence of a fact by virtue of being uttered. Fichte calls this ontological scope of the proposition thetisches Urteil, “thetic judgement.”^[20] Propositions now set the conditions of their own truth value—they make themselves true by the sole fact of being pronounced; the function that was later named performative by Austin. Fichte thus discovers the production of truth beyond the principle of sufficient reason, and it is this invention that might represent the first and principal impulse of German idealism. If German idealism had its own gospel, it would probably start with “In the beginning was the Sentence, and the Sentence was with the Being, and the Being was the Sentence.”^[21]

As Fichte already suspected, at least to a degree, every proposition also contains a thetic surplus over its content, so it does not merely refer to a fact but is itself a fact, the emergence of a “case” that was not there before. The world could be comprised within the total matrices of language only by means of propositions, but this empowerment also opens up a Pandora’s box that gives language the right to develop its own poetic autarky. The proposition may be a form of domination over the world, but it also becomes a hazard which must be restricted at all times. In the last two centuries, language has become the second skin of the philosophical subject; however, this absorption of language was countered by a fascinating and up until this point, as far as we know, undetected symptom, a sort of defense reaction of the philosophy of the past two hundred years: a fear of original propositions. It is precisely the form of the sentence which the totalizing ontologies, in their restrictive programs of reducing language to reality, treat most shabbily and aim to suppress and neutralize its spontaneous creativity.

Heidegger’s early concept of “truth” was conceived precisely in opposition to treating judgments as the incentive and the foundation of truth. So, according to Heidegger, it is not proposition “that is the locus of truth, but rather truth is the locus of proposition.”^[22] Challenging the analytical philosophy of Bolzano or Frege, where it is possible to distinguish between true and false only after uttering a judgment, he says,

Although a proposition can be true or false, it cannot be a truth per se. And the whole shift of emphasis from propositions to the place of their enunciation was only introduced in order to secure that under no circumstance could an utterance produce more truth than the external conditions of its uttering.

In a similar vein, Wittgenstein in his Tractatus implements a strict program of the factic cultivation of the utterable. A proposition, a Satz, has a projective relation to the world, hence, its “sense” always lies in its outside: “A proposition, therefore, does not actually contain its sense, but does contain the possibility of expressing it. / [. . .] / A proposition contains the form, but not the content, of its sense” (TLP 3.13). All statements are reducible to elemental propositions, so it finally stands that they are all “of equal value” (TLP 6.4), and that they “can express nothing that is higher” (TLP 6.42). Although Wittgenstein composes the most notorious aphorism of twentieth century philosophy, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” (TLP 7) this maxim is only an explication of the program according to which philosophical propositions should be forgotten once their sense has been grasped. The reader “must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it” (TLP 6.54). Thus, the most memorable philosophical statement of the century actually advocates a doctrine of amnesia of philosophical propositions. It seems that Wittgenstein could only allow himself to write sententiously pointed, performatively constructed, and esthetically polished sentences, representing an ideal foundation for endless citation, insofar as he assured himself in advance that philosophy was surpassable and abolishable, and that within its framework every aphoristic surplus is destined to be forgotten. Contrary to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein dared to indulge in linguistic enjoyment only in the face of the promise of oblivion. In On Certainty, he, in an admittedly somewhat different context, even claimed, “The propositions which one comes back to again and again as if bewitched—these I should like to expunge from philosophical language” (OC 31).

Intriguingly, the same “fear of the originality of propositions” can likewise be perceived on the other pole of organizing linguistic meaning, in structuralism, semiology, and deconstruction, although their strategy of the suppression of its creativity is diametrically opposite to the one employed by Kant, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger who reduced the meaning of the proposition to its outside, to its epistemic or pragmatic context. In post-structuralism, with Derrida or Barthes, the context can no longer be fixed in a presence of fact or intention, which is why the utterances can never be fully realized but only relinquished to the processes of the perpetual, infinite metaphorization of the linguistic sign. And, interestingly enough, a casualty of this new foundation of meaning is once again the sentence form. Structuralism opens the proposition’s boundaries, makes it interminable, and deprives it of the right to a full stop at its end.

In classical structuralism, in Saussure and Benveniste, the proposition is an element of parole and not langue, of discourse and not system, while Derrida and Barthes reintegrate the elements of discourse into the domain of language. By doing so, however, they once again surpass and skip the proposition as the function of fixating and producing meaning and rather dissolve it into the wider web of the text. The knots of “meaning” are now located either beneath the level of the proposition (i.e., in metaphorical transfers among words, in anagrammatic and phonemic play), or above it (i.e., in the infinite text)—for instance, in Barthes’s idea of atopic and inexhaustible writing and reading. Derrida’s style becomes increasingly fluid, diffuse, and paratactic. It seems as though he is adamant in employing precisely those language tricks (homonyms, rhymes, paragraph indentures, collages, grammatical peculiarities, and graphic effects) that could deprive the proposition form of its innermost productivity, its most autonomous truth. Still, structuralism’s most pronounced antipropositional ressentiment was professed by Barthes:

While positivists, pragmatists, and phenomenologists displaced the “sense” of the proposition to its outside, in structuralism—because there was no outside left!—the sentence itself had to be ravaged and dissolved in either words or interminabilities. According to Barthes, the “completed” sentence is a weapon of social power, and as such becomes one of the primary objects of his critique of ideology:

At its close, structuralism turns more and more to stuttering, murmuring, hesitation, slips of the tongue, the openness of the structure, the incompleteness of the process of writing and reading, the endlessness of metaphoric and metonymic transfers—in short, to all that prevents the sentence from being fixed in its conciseness and pointedness. Suddenly, meaning has to be freed from the obligatory rubric of the full stop.

Nietzsche’s invention of the metaphorization of the linguistic sign released the boundlessness, the playfulness of language, and somewhat loosened the space of meaning. With Barthes, language began to “rustle,” and with Derrida, every sign became subject to dissemination, leading to a number of postmodern theories on the infinite open-endedness of language production. Rorty started to promote “irony” and Lyotard “paralogy” (i.e., language games in which we make unexpected “moves” for the “sheer pleasure of invention”).^[25] However, it is our belief that these generalized imperatives of linguistic creativity, this joyful postmodern wordplay which occasionally even goes so far as to command aphoristic production, render the sentential fundament impotent: the proposition no longer extends between the capital letter and the full stop, but instead opens its borders, exposes itself to extensions, and loses its sentential and sententious distinction. After all, the Greek aphorismos stems from horos, boundary, and means “definition.” An aphorism is by definition a finished sentence. Hence, against these postmodern dictates of perpetual metaphorization, ironization, and even aphorization, it is our claim to regard the sententious organization of the proposition precisely as a closed structure of the greatest determinacy and fixation of its semantic units. As such, it may be the most relevant tool for transcending all the “bad infinities” of postmodernism.

We have observed specific systems of “neutralization of the proposition form,” reaching from epistemic and pragmatic realizations to metaphoric shifts. The twentieth century was a century of the linguistic turn as well as a century of a certain “infinity of language.” Reality disclosed itself exclusively within the horizon of language, but, in return, language lost its center and any possibility of ever assuming a systematic form. Wittgenstein induced a movement of its dissolution into a plurality of language games and Derrida into an infinite play of differences, a text with no outside or boundary. Finally, the ontologies of language were brought to the point of an almost Humean disintegration, because this was the only possibility left to still maintain the tight reciprocal restriction of reality being permeated with language and of keeping language tied to the weight of reality. Perhaps it is now time to conceive of another life of language, a life of infusing this plural, polycentric, unending field of language games and plays of differences with a kind of higher, Kantian order.

Against the postmodern “infinity of language,” we will inquire whether it is possible to locate and identify language productions that refuse to be reduced to their context, be it Wittgenstein’s pragmatic point of a specific situation, its Witz, or Derrida’s trace of difference that imbues the linguistic sign each time with a different meaning, and whether it is possible to define the processes of idealization inasmuch as they resist any possibility of being grounded in everyday references, practical instructions, and shifts of meaning. Instead of striving to dissolve any “truth surplus” in usages and metaphors, we will sift out and nurture precisely these emergent, ideal, definite, and no longer pragmatically or differentially soluble truths. Thus, to the infinite corrosion of meaning framed by the linguistic turn and postmodernism, we will oppose the theory of certain distinctive and remarkable “truth creations” (i.e., propositions) not insofar as they express a specific truth, but insofar as they produce more truth than the context in which they arose. It could be said that, against Heidegger, we will posit the proposition as the originary locus of truth, and, against Barthes and Wittgenstein, the basis of our analysis will be the “essentially completed” sentences “which one comes back to again and again as if bewitched.”

Therefore, the “excess value” of the proposition form can perhaps be taken up again and exploited anew. By applying abstract words to concrete situations, a proposition brings into play an irreducible ideality, which is why it is traditionally censored and repressed. Instead of being able to withstand its surplus, philosophy pins it down to contexts and simultaneously opens the semantic boundaries of its concepts to the infinite indeterminacy of meaning. To this correlation of contextualizing propositions and de-idealizing concepts, we will oppose the fragile and subtle relation between propositions achieving a certain trans-contextual immunity and concepts idealizing in order not to be incarnated again. Thus, in order to provide some logical security against the (infinite) processes of linguistic pragmatics and deconstruction, against constraining the idealities to be realized in a given situation, to be pinpointed to an object, to become mere tools of communication and mere signs and signals in the practices of speech, a new logical space must be established. One possible instance of this new dimension, especially appropriate because of its elementary, heuristic, basic qualities, is something which might be called the “logical space of sententiousness.” It is a space in which surplus speech forms are produced, transcending the circumstances of their own emergence and reproducing themselves with a certain amount of semantic indemnity with respect to their context.

Repression of the Proposition and
the Monovalence of the Word

We are examining the forms and instruments deployed in order to keep the effects of idealization of linguistic signs at their minimum. As we have seen, one strategy was to bereave the proposition form of its context transcending poignancy and to the horizons of open-endedness and utility. Now, another, strictly correlative, method can be explored, the method of reducing all concepts to a common value, making them all basically referential, all semantically open due to their manifold pragmatic usages, or all metaphorical due to their various differential contexts.

According to the schema subject-predicate, two values of the concept could be distinguished, as in the case of Frege’s complete and saturated objects and incomplete and unsaturated functions. But the unsaturatedness of Frege’s concepts simply means that they are in need of completion and saturation. The function “x conquered Gaul” is completed when the proper name “Caesar” fills its empty place. Frege may have been a Platonic idealist, but a “concept” possesses an empty place at its core that can only be filled with spatio-temporal things of this world. It is as if, in the end, all words dream of referring to something substantial, to being simple names for simple things. And philosophy seems to be incapable of tolerating this dualism of empirical and pure concepts, of names and ideas, and puts some effort into brushing off the ideal surface of every conceptual entity.

As we will see in Wittgenstein and Derrida, ideas are constantly crumbling in order to maintain contact with the conceptually structured and linguistically controllable world. It seems that they avoided the possible idealist connotations of incomplete concepts by simply blurring Frege’s strict and exclusive distinction. In early Wittgenstein, the meaning of every word must be reducible to its object, in his mature phase, it must be reduced to its everyday use, and in Derrida, every sign is differential and, as such, it can never “saturate” the given context, but it can also never simply transcend it. Generally speaking, a grand leveling of the conceptual values is performed which is utterly unsusceptible to the difference between subject and predicate and works equally well on both of them. It seems that the methods of both ordinary language philosophy and deconstruction were designed to cut through the differentiations of classical logic and offer a general, monovalent theory of the linguistic sign.

In this vein, it was already Kant who burdened the concept with what we described as “the constraint of intuition.” Although Kant sets up a hierarchy of concepts, dividing them into concepts of understanding and concepts of reason, even the latter make an, albeit unattainable and infinite, claim to fulfillment by intuition. And since intuition is a necessary element of realizing the concept, this also means that, on the semantic level, the hierarchy of reason and understanding is suddenly inverted. The concept of reason is admittedly superior to the concept of understanding because it expresses the latter’s total determination, but it is the concept of understanding which represents the semantic measure of the concept of reason insofar the constraints of the intuition are in the end applied to the ideas of reason as well. The famous dialectical “illusion” of transcendental ideas consists solely of the fact that, in Kant, it is actually the empirical concept that sets criteria of verifiability to pure concepts, notios, and ideas—as opposed to Hegel, where the concept can emancipate itself in discourse, enter the realm of speculation, and begin to conceive of itself by use of the logic of negation. Hence, Kant’s concept may enjoy some speculative, dialectical freedom, but only to realize that it is forever chained to the ground of intuition.

Perhaps, it is no exaggeration to say that the control of reality by way of language has always gravitated toward a final monovalence of concepts. This leveling of the value of concepts is thus a recurring motive in the theories of truth and language after Kant. Finally, it is also the operation that survives and bridges the greatest break in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the transition from his early “naturalistic” to his late “pragmatic” phase. The program of the Tractatus is, of course, based on an absolute reduction of propositional elements to objects of thought, and, indirectly, to facts of the world:

A proposition is thus “completely analysable”; one can separate it into “simple signs” that refer to objects of thought, and these, in turn, refer in their projective relation to the world to the objects of reality. The realist basis of each proposition is the relation “name–object.” All propositions are reducible to elementary propositions which consist of names only: the aim of Wittgenstein’s (and before him Russell’s) undertaking is precisely to abolish the Fregean “dualism” of functions and arguments as two irreducibly different entities. “One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another” (TLP 4.0311). So, if we claim “the rose is red,” the names “rose” and “red” both represent things (i.e., individuals). And when verbs, and not just copulas, come into play, Wittgenstein invents a theory of logical forms in order to show, in his antiidealist claim, that even universals are to be treated as objects. If we say “I pick a rose,” there are three, not two objects involved: “I,” “rose,” and “picking,” whereas the proposition’s syntactic form expresses the arrangement of this state of affairs. In short, there is no universal entering the stage at any point. And a great effort was taken to overcome the inherent Platonism of Frege, or, more broadly, the spontaneous idealism of language. Certainly, Wittgenstein’s method of “complete analysis” has one primary consequence: the expulsion of metaphysical, ethical, esthetical, or any kind of normative or value-related vocabulary from meaningful language use.

The early Wittgenstein of elementary sentences and natural facts is followed by a seemingly more open, multifarious Wittgenstein of language games and the inter-subjective constitution of meaning. It was this Wittgenstein who was so famously exploited by postmodernism. If previously all words were reducible to a “name for the object,” the concept now acquires “blurred edges” and forfeits its simple grounding in a thing:

Against this naïve claim that everyone carries in their heads a small version of Plato’s heaven (i.e., a permanent set of “universals”), Wittgenstein postulates a “softer” logic of “family resemblances,” reducing the words to their multiple uses in various situations. We learn the meaning of words through specific, always partial, and never definitive examples. The ideality of the signified of a word thus opens to increasingly complex, yet unknown possible uses:

Whereas in the Tractatus the proposition used to be completely analyzable, now it is no longer possible to provide words with any conclusive definitions. But why is it impossible to define a word in the way Socrates was still capable of doing it in Plato’s dialogues? If we were to define it, we would claim that in addition to its possible referent(s), the word also has its ideal representational image that diverse language usages cannot defer and shift—what is called “the signified” in another tradition. And it is precisely this model of idealization that is the object of Wittgenstein’s most careful reductions and inhibitions: the word is deprived of the right to any signified which could, in its ideality, transcend its meaning being defined by its uses. In too simple terms, words should never assume more meaning than they can express in their practical references to things. Thus, Wittgenstein’s intention to dissolve the closed semantic image of the word in a plurality of family resemblances is hardly an expression of some kind of postmodern love of language, of enjoying its play, but, quite the opposite, an attempt to restrict the autonomous productivity of language. The theorem of “family resemblances” should rather be described as a program of a total and unrelenting effort of realizing the ideal.

For a moment it seemed as if Wittgenstein opened up toward Derrida and deprived the word of what would later become the much “forbidden” referent; it seemed as if he broke apart the rigid equivalence of “name–object” and softened it into a fluid and plural system of non-totalizeable practices of speech in which language breaks free of the weight of things and surrenders to the ease of Lyotard’s language games. However, there is a restrictive side to Wittgenstein’s semantic détente to be accounted for. The “name–object” bond from the Tractatus did not foresee, but nevertheless subconsciously allowed the idealization of the signified, the fixation of the final “image of the object” (since “to the objects of the thoughts” correspond “the elements of the propositional sign,” which means that the “object” is as much an element of the world of thought as an element of the factual world), whereas the true impulse behind the transition from early to later Wittgenstein might lie in an attempt to accomplish the task of relieving the word of the ideal aura of the signified.

Virtually everything changed in passing between Wittgenstein I. and Wittgenstein II., except the program of the de-metaphysicization of words which, in itself, is nothing but the program of leveling the value of concepts. It seems that Wittgenstein II. in fact intensified his endeavor to inhibit the effects of idealization, even though this meant that he had to forfeit all semantic fixations:

Words such as “being” or “I” must simply be voided of the belief in any essence which would allow an ideal hypostasis. Wittgenstein’s theory of language expanded and gradually included all kinds of linguistic products, even metaphors, puns, or joke. But this apparent breadth of scope, this pragmatic fluidization of meaning, is only there to deprive language of its ideal fixations and, consequently, of its metaphysical connotations. In Wittgenstein, our speech is only an incessant process of ripping the words out of the system of ideal definitions. Ironically, it is now the ideas that have become sworn enemies of this linguistic usurpation of the world. For an idea—as Plato may have already sensed—might begin to enjoy the fact of not being incarnated, of having its meaning defined and fixated precisely because its name can no longer be pragmatically used.

At this point, we can trace a path to Derrida whose theory of language seems to be symmetrically opposite to Wittgenstein’s. What these two, very much dissimilar, thinkers have in common is primarily a certain logical bond between the un-totalizability of language and the totalization of the world. On the one hand, they discovered language in its heterogeneous, plural, diffuse unsystematicity, while on the other, they recognized in this disintegration the only remaining means for the total interpenetration of being and language. In order to infiltrate every joint of reality, language has become humble. Wittgenstein and Derrida had to dispossess it of its center, its constant, unchangeable order, its systemic synchronicity. In Wittgenstein, language is “an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses” (PI 18). In Derrida, the fact that language lacks a center is precisely the reason why it occupies the totality of being: “This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse.”^[28] However, this method of the totalization of being through language describes a different trajectory in each case. Wittgenstein reduces the entire field of linguistic meaning to the pragmatics of language use with its fixed and definite anchor in the practical context of this or that utterance. Inversely, Derrida’s theory of language exercises a critique of the metaphysics of presence and, consequently, follows the program of deconstruction of meaning and dissemination of the linguistic sign. It could perhaps be said that Wittgenstein, with his plural, communal language games, enthroned, to make use of Nietzsche’s terminology, the Herdensprache, the language of the herd, as the measure of truth. But in Derrida, every linguistic sign is already minimally idealized and as such de-contextualized, caught in a web of absences, deferrals, and citations, so, with the concept of différance, the producer of linguistic meaning now becomes the Herrensprache, the language of the master (i.e., the never entirely useful or utilizable play of metaphors).

Thus, the differences between the two paradigms are almost schematically oppositional. To Wittgenstein, ordinary language is the only language there is:

For Derrida, by contrast, the only available language is the language of metaphysics:

Wittgenstein tried to reduce the metaphysical use of words to the ordinary, while Derrida showed that every word is always already metaphysical, even if used in the most ordinary of contexts. Idealization is an automatic consequence of the iteration of the sign, and metaphorization is its necessary effect, an effect of “archi-writing,” and therefore concerns every linguistic sign. To put it in a simplified manner, Wittgenstein’s objective was to bring “being,” “I,” and “knowledge” into the mode of “table” or “chair,” whereas Derrida claimed that even “table” and “chair” were caught in the same system of metaphysical connotations as “being,” “I,” and “knowledge”; in the end, even a proper name is laced with a web of differences.^[31] If in Kant the empirical concept, being filled out by intuitions, prescribes the semantic measure of pure concept and, finally, of the idea, we could now claim that with Derrida, it is the idea and the pure concept that sets the semantic measure of any possible empirical concept. The ideality of language permeates even words as immediately applicable as indexical signs and pronouns. Linguistic meaning thus merely scrapes at the metaphorical surface of every word, extending between the phonematic and graphematic image of the signifier and what we referred to as the “ideal aura of the signified.” Precisely the element which Wittgenstein wanted to remove from language, Derrida considers to be its most originary raw fabric, the primary impulse of the production of meaning. But the outcome is, on some level, the same. Ideality is always differential, and this differentiality is only a means of the obligatory contextualization of every sign. The sole purpose of Derrida’s shift of emphasis from presences to metaphors, from realities to idealities, from pragmatics to metaphysics, is to sew in in every ideal entity a trace of the context through which it is gliding with the appearance of intangibility, that is, to find ways to stitch down the ideas to textual circumstances and to deprive them precisely of their ideal immunity.

Wittgenstein and Derrida presumably represent the most extreme opposites of the organization of linguistic meaning in the twentieth century. But from the perspective of the twenty-first century, they can be seen as part of the same structure, even though they assumed opposite poles within it, and the trajectories of their reductions proceeded in reverse directions. It was the aspiration of both to establish a “general theory of language,” and in order to achieve that they generalized the linguistic sign under a single value, although in each case the contrary. Both in Wittgenstein and in Derrida, the “concept” is finally monovalent. Wittgenstein reduces every abstract, universal, metaphysical concept to the context of its ordinary use, so the linguistic sign in its ultimate meaning is the carrier of a certain pragmatic attitude, the paradigm of which is some sort of practical reference, the “projective” impulse of the executability of a given order, anchored in the “outside reality” it invokes: e.g. in the hammer we grab upon hearing “Bring me the hammer!”^[32] Derrida, by contrast, shifts every context into a web of transfers and metaphors, which is why even the most immediate reference (by a demonstrative pronoun or a proper name) is always already deferred into a system of differences. Just by calling out someone’s name (e.g., “Jacques!”), we trigger an entire process of metaphorization that can no longer “saturate” a given situation. To simplify in the extreme, Wittgenstein reduces possible ideas to either present facts (Tractatus) or present situations (Investigations), while Derrida reduces present facts and situations to always already minimally idealized metaphors. Although Wittgenstein could conceive of a reality in its presence, he always included it in a prior horizon of linguistic meaning. And while Derrida could conceive of a concept in its ideality, a trace of difference kept passing through it, endlessly constituting new contexts. The claim of their general theories of language was of course to warrant meaning for all speech acts, every part of reality, and each linguistic sign. Both theories are to an extent successful in their totalizing aspirations. Wittgenstein convincingly demonstrates that words, by being used, obtain a multitude of dispersed meanings with regard to a given situation. And Derrida is persuasive in showing how the inherent ideal metaphoricity of the sign displaces every possible situation or fact. But every generalization of a field of competence creates its own blind spot which necessarily eludes it. It seems that, in the end, the entire system architecture of the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Derrida comes down to one single claim: to prevent an idea to arise, stabilize, and gain immunity to any given context.

Thus, what Wittgenstein and Derrida are finally incapable of detecting and establishing, are reactive idealizations of concepts, discursive events of re-sharpening their meaning which lost its semantic edges in everyday discourse or the play of differences.^[33] Their strict, “monovalent,” reductions might be the reason why their theoretical frameworks make it impossible to conceive of the higher life of truth we are in search of (i.e., a life of truth which posits and exploits the correlation between the processes of idealization and the revelations of reality outside the constraints of language), the correlation of ideas posing as levers for the release of reality in its realistic dimension.

In sum, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Derrida each offer their own “general theory of the linguistic sign.” In Kant, it revolves around the concept that must not remain without an intuition, in Wittgenstein around the word that must be usable in everyday language, and in Derrida around the sign that is only a contextual difference to other signs. Moreover, each theory makes necessary claims to the totality of a linguistically construable reality: in Kant, the world is the absolute totality of phenomena, in Wittgenstein, the world is the “sum-total of reality” (TLP 2.063), and Derrida sometimes refers to “all reality” being enclosed within a web of differences and, in the final scope, even becoming a text with no outside. There is, of course, some reciprocal constraint at work here between the aspiration to generalize language under the same value and totalize the world. All these projects, despite their stark differences, in the end produce a similar inhibition of philosophy as such. Even the names chosen by Kant, Wittgenstein, and Derrida for their respective philosophies betray a specific philosophical sterility common to all three of them. Kant’s project bears the methodological name “critique,” meaning a critical restriction of metaphysical concepts, an endeavor to tie down all concepts to intuitions. This antimetaphysical, purely critical stance is not unlike that of Wittgenstein who conceived philosophy as a therapy of language. “All philosophy is a ‘critique of language’” (TLP 4.0031), he states, and “Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts” (TLP 4.112), which is why it must finally be surmounted by the reader, recognized as senseless, and thrown away as “the ladder after he has climbed up it” (TLP 6.54). Ideally, philosophy has the sole function of self-abolition.^[34] And, finally, Derrida’s addresses his own philosophy as “deconstruction,” a concept which could be defined as an exact inversion of Kant’s critique: the deconstructive method is nothing but a constant effort to reduce intuitions to concepts, presences to metaphors, and experiences to absences and differences. In the outcome, philosophy no longer possesses an origin of its own but is merely a deconstruction of previously constructed stances.

Therefore, it could well be argued that Kant’s critique, Wittgenstein’s therapy, and Derrida’s deconstruction are three possible methods that make philosophy forfeit the capability of producing truth. Kant deprives philosophy of speculative metaphysics; Wittgenstein bereaves it of all its idealist aspirations (i.e., of ethics) of aesthetics (and of all spiritual, religious elements as well), and eventually even relinquishes philosophy as such; while Derrida, symptomatically, even renounces the concept of “truth.”^[35] We could thus establish three possible correlations between the totalization of the world and the sterilization of philosophy:

In our view, these three correlations function precisely as systemic inhibitions of recognizing a truth surplus which cannot be further contextualized. If we limit this diagnosis to the linguistic turn, it could be said that its final effect is, surprisingly, a self-inflicted impotence of language. The consequence of this total languaging of the world is a certain de-potentialization of concepts which ultimately divests language of the right to create and fixate truth. Wittgenstein reduced the spontaneous metaphysics of concepts to the contexts of concrete usage, while Derrida dispersed the impulses of idealization into a diffuse game of a plurality of differences. Outside of this methodology of family resemblances and disseminations, however, there remain two worlds that these theories are unable to grasp: the realm of producing ideal truths which no context can saturate with its own meaning, and the released world lying outside the constraint of always signifying something. Illustratively put, both Wittgenstein’s therapy and Derrida’s deconstruction suffer from two inabilities. On the one hand, they are incapable of conceptualizing a surplus of truth that is irreducible to possible contextual uses or shifts. On the other, they are incapable of stepping out of language and witnessing the revelation of a world without meaning and sense.

Even though their methods run in opposite directions, this is the point at which Wittgenstein and Derrida coincide. There can be no ideality beyond the context and no reality outside the sign. This may very well be the essential poverty of all philosophies of the linguistic turn. Derrida claims: “The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (‘there is nothing outside the text’), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context.”^[36] Every produce of the ideal, every “ideality” ensuing from the iterability of the sign, has always already been placed within a context that imbues it each time with a slightly different meaning.^[37] But on the other hand, Derrida also says, “every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace.”^[38] While idealities are constantly being dispersed in real contexts, realities, on the other hand, have always already been placed within the ideal relations of language signs.

it could be claimed that the world in which language sets up the horizon of being is caught up within the relation between contexts and linguistic signs (the only difference being that in Derrida every context is over-determined by the sign, its differences and absences, whereas in Wittgenstein it is the simple presence of the context, its Witz, that over-determines every usage of the linguistic sign), while both boundary elements, reality and the idea, drop out of the truth process. The system seems to expel, on the one hand, reality insofar as it escapes being contextualized within a possible language use but rather discloses itself in its realism, and, on the other hand, the idea which emerges in the process of truth, transcends the pragmatic and differential contexts of its emergence, and achieves a certain immunity of reproduction.

Put differently, the fact that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” and that there is “nothing outside of the text,” skims off the ideal as much as the real. Nowadays, there is a wide consensus that realism was the greatest victim of the linguistic turn. However, by restricting the possibilities of realism, the possibilities of idealism^[39] run dry as well. The ontologies of totalization may fail to trespass the horizon of meaning, but they are just as incapable of acknowledging the effective autonomy of the “ideal” sphere.^[40] A typical symptom of these attempts to restrict and neutralize the emergent idealities is that the metaphysical and normative concepts are steadily pushed to the edges of the unspeakable, their full meaning being usually shifted to a never attainable future. Kant infers the meaning of ideas solely from their regulative function, Wittgenstein’s philosophical project is all about omitting the elements that cannot be expressed by language, such as good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, death and God, while Derrida in his later work elaborates on the notion of “undeconstructibility,” itself a sort of unacknowledged regulative idea that, always deferred to an eternally suspended future, reigns over the field of constructions and their incessant deconstructions.^[41] In these ontologies, the sphere of the “ideal” represents the presumed but never present totality, an endlessly postponed limit which can never be produced in a truth emerging here and now.

To sum up, the twentieth century philosophy seems to have strived to establish an all-encompassing, dense, and impermeable relation between circumstantial situations and diffuse meanings of words, between particular contexts and disseminating signs. In contrast, the question might be posed whether it is not possible to distinguish a new correlation between the emergence of contextually immune ideas and the revelation of reality beyond linguistic constraints. The starting point of our investigation will be specific discursive products, “truths” in our vocabulary, of such mnemic poignancy that no context could saturate them with additional sense, no usage bestow them with its own point, and no situation shift and dissipate their meaning. Perhaps certain rudimentary utterances could be isolated insofar as they exceed the limits of possible experience, transcend the context in which they emerge, and produce more truth than can be guaranteed by the intention of the speaker, the rules and customs of a language community, or the web of differences to other signs. Hence, it is our goal to identify “truths” whose emergent meaning could bracket the processes of pragmatics and deconstruction and, so to say, put their “semantic infinity” on ice.

For heuristic and simplicity purposes, the limited object of our investigation will be certain propositions that succeed in enclosing within their boundaries two irreducible conceptual valences, emergent idea and reality revealing itself through the fall of a symbolic barrier. Truth, in our definition, will be capable of, on the one hand, salvaging the ideality of a discursive entity from its manifold uses and webs of differences and, on the other, relieving reality from any context of significance or situational point. Let us take a look, then, at how truth in its ideal surplus could perhaps coincide with the revelation of a world no longer structured by way of human forms. It is precisely this reciprocity between the creation of truth and the disclosure of a reality beyond meaning and sense that is the object of our effort.

The Idea and the Untruth of Reality

Few generalizations can be made, but in today’s realism there are two slight tendencies to be observed. What some of the speculative realists seem to suggest and perform is a certain descent from the traditional philosophical discourse, from its metaphysical conceptual systems consisting of “human” valuations and differential hierarchies, to perhaps more immediate, but certainly extra-linguistic ways of referring to reality, as in Meillassoux’s mathematics or Brassier’s eliminativism. And, as a consequence of the attempts to subtract the “human touch” from reality, these same realists proceed by sending us on journeys to the edges of time and space, as if some kind of “truer reality” is experienced on exotic, speculative expeditions. They seem to believe that the ultimate realist foundation of their theories will only be found in places and times where the human being has either not yet existed or will cease to exist. Meillassoux looks for the innermost reality of being in eras preceding the emergence of the species homo sapiens,^[42] Brassier in the stretch of time following its extinction.^[43] However, these strategies both disillusioning and adventurous could be reversed. Perhaps the touchstone of realism does not lie in geological antiquity or the cooling stars but in the ability to recognize phenomena of inhuman reality even in the cultivated environment around us, finally perhaps even on the imperfect surfaces of our own anatomy. When, for example, we fail to symbolize and give social value to the decay of our physique, the waning of its power, and the advancing signs of aging, the human body starts to sink and dissolve into the continuum of the very nature that is unaware of the concept of “man.” Thus, as opposed to descending to pre-discursive ways of grasping reality, we might want to dare to enter the metaphysical heart of discourse instead and investigate the operations which, unknotting the knots at the top of conceptual hierarchies, release the reality of the world of here and now.^[44] On the basis of several examples from the history of philosophy, we will demonstrate that its discursive procedures have always known how to perform operations of de-symbolization of reality. Realism has always been there, but it has come at a cost of instituting ideas. Instead of trying to grasp reality-in-itself directly, we will rather examine the delicate equilibria of paying the price of idealization for the revelations of reality. In other words, it will be our objective to determine the unacknowledged idealist surplus in the always already functioning processes of realism, and to recognize the so far uncharted realist releases in the mechanics of idealism. As we might be surprised to discover, these discursive procedures were practiced by philosophy, albeit somewhat unknowingly, ever since the pre-Socratics and Plato.

Spinoza’s Re-Idealization of Relativized Concepts

Language is not necessarily a solid obligatory rubric and an impenetrable prison of thought, but could at all times be one step away from falling apart. Those who (either affirmatively or critically) present language as something which possesses no outside can all too easily imagine it as some sort of ordo idearum incarnating in ordo rerum in an immediate and parallel manner. But language is no reservoir of names for the objects, of words straightforwardly falling down on things and clinging to them. Instead, words have a tendency to achieve a level of abstraction, to spontaneously idealize and preserve their ideality only by entering in relations with other words, thereby forming a system of differences and equivalences. Yet even this system never achieves a harmonious, neutral, eternal, Saussurean synchronicity. Therefore, language should rather be conceived of as an unfinished, crumbling set of systemic dependencies, syntactic proportions, and logical compulsions, which can only be sustained and upheld with enormous inputs of unduly partial, biased, necessarily prejudiced semantic energy. Perhaps the best way to describe this suspense at the core of language is to say that differential symmetries are always held together by asymmetries of value. Good, for instance, can only be defined against evil if it assumes the role of the better, more valuable, more ideal part. Or, to take another example, the world divided into Heaven and Earth will maintain this polar division only by investing it with stark hierarchies, making Heaven into a semantic attractor of positive connotations of eternity and perfection, and Earth into a depository for negative contents of fleetingness and deficiency. And because the synchronic balances of meaning are constantly being upholstered by the diachronic imbalances of valuations, the system itself seems to strive for a resolution of its inner structural tensions. The twentieth century considered language either in terms of restrictive limits and obligations or, in postmodernism, as a stage for haphazard, free, and open-ended play. But language is neither oppressive nor arbitrary; it exhibits a propensity to constantly bring its repressed prejudices to the surface and thus to trigger and operate the production of its own necessities. There are processes of logification taking place which are affected precisely by means of ideal relations gaining independence from their correspondence to external facts. We are used to regarding language as something suffusing and blending with reality, but it is also a force that constantly elevates its forms from it. Thus, language could be observed from another perspective: as something which itself motivates the fixation of ideas as no longer being incarnated, something which pushes them to their trans-contextual definitions, thus making them appear precisely as ideas detached from the function of referring to a given reality. In the highest manifestations of its life, in its most seminal discursive shifts and events, language shows itself as an array of dormant impulses just waiting to stir its own conceptual hierarchies, establish them on a new ground, and thus dissolve the very boundaries and discretions that laid out the coordinates of their incarnability.

It is in this manner that we will risk a re-reading of a few of the most prominent and persuasive semantic moves in the history of philosophy. In its theoretical, critical, and conceptual work, philosophy often, more or less unconsciously, performs two operations simultaneously. First, it singles out some metaphysically highly invested and exploited concept, such as “good,” “evil,” “happiness,” “man,” or “truth,” recognizes its inherent illusion, and, as a consequence, attempts to relativize and reduce it to the “lower” mechanics of bodily urges, utilitarian aims, perspectival distortions, or scientific de-sublimations. It, so to speak, reduces the metaphysics of the concept to a physics of its empiricity. But then, on the reverse side of its implementation and without being fully aware of it, this operation establishes an ideal, normative horizon which is a prerequisite for the former relativization to be possible in the first place. And finally, the ideal sphere, under the horizon of which this degradation of the concept took place, is usually assigned the very same name as the unmasked and now seemingly abolished concept: the illusion of the concept of “good,” for instance, reveals itself only to the ideal stance of the “highest good.” Or, as we will see in Nietzsche, the overman is the only figure able to realize the complete hollowness and falsity of the concept “man.” So, in order to dispose of the conceptual constraint of “goodness,” as monists, utilitarians, or materialists have aimed to do, it is not enough to be bad; first, one must become better than good, and only from there is it possible to witness the fall of a symbolic boundary, the disclosure of indifference between good and bad. Philosophers often enjoyed being cynics, trans-valuators, and immoralists; but they tend to fail to recognize that, by doing so, they inadvertently adopt the attitude of nevertheless valiant and moralizing idealists. There is no disenchantment without heroism and no demystification without an aura of holiness.

Spinoza’s philosophy is a classic case of this sort of disruptive method between pronounced relativizations and unaccounted for idealizations. It was his declared program to dispense with the categories of scholastic philosophy. However, he accomplished this “critical effort” of the secularization of metaphysical concepts only within a previously constituted framework of the absolutization of the higher life of truth. Behind the famous Spinozistic “realizations” of concepts lies a concomitant constitution of their necessary reactive idealizations. Spinoza, for example, constantly proved that good and evil have no real existence in the world, and yet he could not abandon the ideal semantics of the concept of “good,” which, as a summum bonum, represents the ideal limit of our fulfilled philosophical lives. The concept of “good” thus obtains two semantic valences, the “real” and the “ideal,” so to speak.^[45] In the order of the real, “good” is merely an illusion of our limited perspective on the world; nonetheless, this voidness of “good” can only be detected and recognized from the viewpoint of some higher, “ideal” good to which our intellect aspires. It is precisely this divide between the real and the ideal semantics of a given concept that underlies the fundamental structure of Spinoza’s philosophy and is crucial to understanding his argumentation. It could perhaps be referred to as his “basic operation.” Spinoza’s short Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect even begins by drawing a line between the two possible “goods”:

The concepts of good and bad are relative, entirely affective, and therefore misguided ways to make distinctions in the world—they are merely forms of the perspectival illusion of a finite, human being. However, this trivialization and downplaying of good and evil begets an aspiration for a “higher good,” transcending the discrete boundaries of our effects, which run between seeking comfort and avoiding discomfort, between the love and hate of things, between prescriptions and prohibitions of social prejudice. The “real” good is only an affective (i.e., illusory), opposite of evil whereas the “ideal” good sets up an emergent sphere underneath within the old discriminant between good and evil in the real world collapses.

Perhaps one could almost be tempted to assume that this vector, pointing from the critical “realizations” of metaphysical concepts to their normative idealizations, also determines the structure of Spinoza’s Ethics, the trajectory of its development. While in the first three, possibly four parts of the book, we gradually cast off the prejudices of humanness, freedom, happiness, purpose, or goodness. This movement slowly builds up to the forth and the fifth part where the final (idealist) aspiration of educating a free, happy, purposeful, and good human being unfolds. Spinoza’s expressly nonteleological ontology is finally framed by a great normative teleology. In the fourth part, for instance, Spinoza first takes a Hobbesian approach to relativizing both of the highest moral concepts of metaphysics:

Still, even though “good” and “bad” in reality only bear a relative, affective, and perspectival meaning, Spinoza himself recognizes the necessity of retaining both expressions as ideal limits which set up the framework for our gradual approaching or receding, respectively:

Hence, good and bad are erroneous concepts in the order of the real, but they must be preserved, otherwise we will no longer be able to structure the order of the ideal, and without this ideal structure, a certain fundamentally realist dimension of the world would never come to the surface and would remain overlooked. In reality, the boundaries between good and bad constantly shift and diffuse, depending on the perspective, while there is nothing left in the world to correspond to any of the two. However, in order to realize this deflation, an ideal leverage point must first be defined from where this revelation of the world beyond good and evil can unravel in the first place. Thus, a representative of this “higher good” is free thought, characterized precisely by the inability to differentiate between the concepts of good and evil: “If men were born free, they would form no conception of good and evil so long as they were free” (E IV. P68). To put it in a paradox, “the higher good” ultimately denotes nothing but the ability to recognize the fact that there is nothing good in the world, and that the concept itself has no (immediate, referential) meaning whatsoever. In the end, the only aim of the ideal “good” is to achieve a stance which allows us to realize and endure the meaninglessness of exactly the concepts of which “good” is the primary example.

This very procedure of relativization and concurrent normative idealization is performed by Spinoza on a series of metaphysical concepts, the most famous and systemically most significant being the polysemy of the concept of “freedom.” Although his monist system does not admit to the existence of free will (see E II., P48), Spinoza still devotes the fifth and final part of Ethics to the libertas humana, the freedom of man, which represents a godlike resistance to being defined by external reasons. The system of the monist causalization of the world thus already nurtures an ideal of being excepted from precisely those causal chains which are only designed in order not to permit any exceptions. The concept of “freedom” therefore begins to lead a paradoxical life, splitting into (at least) two disparate but nonetheless complementary senses, the “real” and the “ideal.” “Real” freedom is the illusion of a human being not fully aware of the complex causal network engulfing him, whereas “ideal” freedom represents a rigorous program of transcending “human bondage,” freeing us of all the prejudice of the human mind, such as purposefulness, good and evil, happiness and misery, and finally also free will. So, while freedom does not really exist, its nonexistence can only be conceived of in the ideal realm of the freedom of thought. In other words, the normative objective of philosophy is to achieve exactly the freedom of thought that enables us to recognize our own lack of free will.^[48]

If there is a method behind the critical claim of Spinoza’s philosophy, it consists, first, in disposing of the binary conceptual pairs of traditional metaphysics. In order to do so, Spinoza, secondly, targets the concepts whose re-definition might untangle the entire discursive system of differences and oppositions from the top down, dissolving the conventional hierarchies of values which, for example, favor good over bad, happiness over misery, freedom over necessity, soul over body, and so forth. This disengagement of symbolic discretions holding reality in the clutches of binary structures describes two concomitant movements: a descent to the pre-discursive mechanics of affects and forces on the one hand, and an ascent to the refuge of an ideal perspective on the other.

Only the concepts capable of performing both semantic processes in one move—critical abolition as well as idealization—can become the fundamentals of Spinoza’s system, because it is they that purport to simultaneously unknot all other metaphysically charged conceptual pairs. It is perhaps the concept of freedom which condenses all these semantic operations most beautifully: freedom in its immediate reality vanishes, while its ideal image, carried only by the ideal of the “free man,” heralds the dissolution of the binaries life/death, good/evil, man/woman, self/other, and finally, to some extent, even man/God. Propositions 67 and 68 of the fourth part offer the best testimony to this collapse of traditional conceptual oppositions under the ideal jurisdiction of the ideal of “freedom.” Let us quote a couple of passages:

Therefore, while freedom can never exist realiter, it nonetheless represents an ideal point at which the symbolic boundaries between good and bad, life and death, soul and body, and self and other falls, and the boundary between man and God begins to wane.

And this is exactly where the relation between idealism and realism gets redefined. In Spinoza, the concepts that once structured the world and divided it into free men and slaves, men and animals, earthly existence and celestial life, virtue and vice, and so forth, irrevocably fall in ruins. However, the knowledge of this collapse can only be gained by assuming an ideal point which, in its carefully acquired and laborious emergent status, first of all builds a defense shield against having already been personified or substantiated anywhere in this newly de-symbolized world. The idea becomes an ideal, a processual, normative entity which, by virtue of its future efforts, maintains distance to possible past embodiments. And only from the vantage point of constructing ideas beyond the possibility of incarnation can the realism of reality reveal itself.

Nietzsche’s Aphoristic Method

We have embarked on this short walk through Spinoza’s discursive strategies to deduce the basic form on which Nietzsche’s aphoristic method relies. So far, to our knowledge, no one has ever proposed a conclusive, tenable theory of the aphorism, a theory capable of setting up a conceptual frame that would clarify and truly capture the elusive magic of these short, sententious productions. To venture a modest step in this direction, it might be possible to show how some of Nietzsche’s aphorisms are construed precisely on the ground of the aforementioned bivalent structure of the concept, extending between the idealization and the reciprocal de-symbolization of the area previously subject to binary discrimination through this concept and its opposite. What Spinoza achieved via a complex tissue of axioms, propositions, and proofs, Nietzsche was able to express in the concise form of a single proposition. As so often in history, an aphoristic condensation of the philosophical method was accomplished.

In the same vein as Spinoza’s, Nietzsche’s philosophy is a balancing act between the critical work of the trans-valuation of old values and positing new idealities. Even Nietzsche could not suspend the constraints of the perennial discursive equilibria. Thus, even in his way of philosophizing with a hammer, every descent into facticity is juxtaposed with a correlative apotheosis. The examples are abundant. Although he was never weary of proving that man was in fact an animal, he was also bound to counterbalance this regression with the figure of the overman, the notorious Goethean Übermensch. Notwithstanding his contempt for all forms of social recognition, he still venerated the eternal glory of those rare giants who “justify the existence of whole millennia.”^[49] In spite of mocking the belief in the afterlife, he knew how to invest time with glimpses of eternity, to bring it to a halt at “[n]oon; moment of the shortest shadow.”^[50] And, last but not least, even though he considered all, even the smallest, language forms as a hotbed of illusions, he nonetheless wrote aphorisms. Let us then examine one of them and peer closer at the mechanics of its semantic operations.

The aphorism might well be a minimum of the “truth creation.”^[51] If we take a look at one of Nietzsche’s most acclaimed statements, Der Mensch ist das noch nicht festgestellte Tier, we could recognize it as the prime example of a “truth” emerging by way of proposition and ascribing two irreducible values to two concepts respectively. “Man is the still undetermined animal,” goes the proper translation, or even “Man is the animal that has not yet been fixed.” Here, we have the “man” and the “animal,” and in between them some barely tangible aphoristic magic which carves this sentence, without its semantic core ever being altered, into the memory of centuries to come.

It seems that it was Nietzsche himself who already turned this aphorism into a “quote,” since he repeated it at least three times, once in Beyond Good and Evil^[52] and twice in his Notebooks, known as Nachgelassene Fragmente:

What seems to make man “human” is his occupation of a bivalent position between pure animality and a certain surplus by means of which better chances of success entail a higher probability of failure.

Nietzsche’s aphorism is a meta-definition, where not the definiendum but the defining form itself appears in the definiens, albeit in a negative manner. It is a definition of something which is defined by the fact that it has not yet been defined. Man is the still undefined animal, as it were, and his “indefiniteness” is also his differentia specifica. This “being defined” now arranges and distinguishes the values of both nouns in the sentence. The concept “animal” is already festgestellt, fixed, determined, defined, and assumes in this bon mot the role of the name, which refers to a certain immediate reality, the givenness of which is unproblematic. Within the bounds of this utterance, the “animal” perhaps represents the Kantian empirical concept, the Wittgensteinian everyday word, or even the forbidden Derridean transcendental signified which points to a simple presence of a definite referent. In this sense, it could almost be said that the concept “animal” is in this case completed and saturated, and it is also precisely why—and this is crucial—it cannot complete and saturate this proposition and provide it with a truth value. In its “saturated” presence through which no trace of difference is threaded, the animal in the aphorism represents the untruth against which truth has yet to constitute itself in the definiendum.

The point of Nietzsche’s aphorism is that on the level of simple reference man is only an animal among animals, so that there is no immediate substance of “humanity” to refer to which would in any way transcend his animality. Man is ultimately “an aristocracy of cells,” “a center of the will to power,” “a perspective,” “a body,” nothing more. If this was all there is to it, the concept of the “human” should have been dispensed with long ago, leaving only animals to exist. But who are we now left with to apprehend the animal nature of man? The animals do not even know of their own, let alone human animality. So, it seems that we nevertheless need words in order to recognize a reality no longer structured by them. While animals can never know that they are animals, only man is capable of recognizing this fact, because it is only he who can disown his previous symbolic identity and return his mandate of being a “man.”

A man can now perhaps begin to affirm and enjoy his animality—but it must be made clear that this enjoyment is a strictly discursive product, and the inhumanness of man can only be realized by means of words. All that now remains is to define the locus from which he could live to see the collapse of the boundary between man and animal. And this locus is finally not our immediate, fully lived animality but the ideal surplus over it. Elsewhere, Nietzsche will refer to this surplus as the Übermensch. It is worth stressing that Nietzsche never defined his Übermensch as something “all too human,” as an intensification of humanness, but rather precisely as a subject capable of relinquishing his humanity and acknowledging his animality: “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and overman—a rope over an abyss.”^[54] The Übermensch is no substantial entity, he is an ideal limit, the view from which manifests that man has run out of the firm ground beneath his feet and that the tightrope on which he balances extends between the postulate of the overman and the reality of the animal. The overman, in other words, is the never immediately incarnated ideal point of realization of his entirely carnal nature.

Hence, Nietzsche’s aphorism is not an ordinary utterance with a single reference, expressing one Fregean thought—rather, its sententiousness suggests two propositions at once:

It is here that the world splits in two. Within the order of the real, one of the key traditional metaphysical oppositions, the difference between man and animal, dissolves. But it is categorically not the animalized man who is privy to this dissolution. It is disclosed only to the one who observes it from the angle exceeding the perspective of man. Man must be “metaphorically” transferred into the order of the ideal, he must sacrifice the “real” substance of humanness, his given identity, and produce a superhuman nature from where, however, the view spreads only onto his own animality. Two operations are performed with a single brush stroke: the ideal construction of the concept “man,” now framed as overman, and the release of the symbolic barrier that separates man from animal. Idealism thus becomes the balancing correlate of realism.

It seems as though the aphorism draws its semantic energy from very specific effects which general theories of language cannot account for. If, for instance, we were to interpret the sentence “Man is the still undetermined animal” within the scope of traditional, adequational theories of truth, we would have to prove that there exists a class of objects named “animal” and a class of objects named “man,” the latter encompassing a class of properties empirically displaying some sort of shortage compared to the properties of the class “animal.” But this would miss the crucial point of Nietzsche’s aphorism which hints precisely at the fact that no referent can be found on the human body that would designate its difference from the animal. The point is that there is no empirical, immediate, given difference between man and animal. The meaning of Nietzsche’s famous statement most probably lies in the fact that the concept “man” does not possess its own empirical saturation, that there exists no originary nature of man which could justify having its own concept to express it. Rather than a given thing, “man” resembles a metaphor in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. According to Frege’s theory, the subject of the proposition (“Caesar”) is saturated and its predicate (“conquered Gaul”) unsaturated. On the syntactic, logical level, this arrangement applies to Nietzsche’s proposition as well: “is the still undetermined animal” is an incomplete predicate only to be completed by “man.” But, on a “conceptual” level, if we may say so, the concept “man” shows itself to be utterly empirically incomplete, while the concept “animal,” comparatively, possesses some completion. But although it is the “animal” that here assumes the function of “conceptual” saturation, it represents within this proposition an element of untruth, while the empty, undefined, undetermined “man” is the one in whom the truth of this utterance saturates. In other words, there is nothing to which we can directly refer to as specifically “human”; there is, however, the concept of “man,” which signifies an empirically unsaturated but ideally saturated truth. And what does this “truth” truly signify? Arguably the fact that man, in the end, is nothing if not an effort to endure the inhumanity of the world.

Even if we analyze the bon mot within the coordinates of Derrida’s effects of différance, there seems to emerge in it a surplus which perhaps eludes and surpasses the grasp of deconstruction. The aphorism relies on one of the prime metaphysical dichotomies (man/animal), but, by enveloping and internalizing this oppositional pair, it neutralizes the play of differences to the other signs among which it could appear. It is perhaps this internal tension of the binary man/animal and its resolution which assigns to the proposition a certain sententious conciseness, compactness, and solidity, granting it a relative immunity with regard to the possible contexts of its utterance.^[55] Therein lies the true magic of the aphorism, unthinkable within the frame of Derrida’s theory: it over-determines the situation in which it is uttered, rather than being permeated by it; it is always truer than any possible situation in which it is quoted. In this case, the essential asymmetry between the use of the two concepts, man and animal, may be believed to invalidate the effects of différance. If a trace of difference were still to thread through the concept “animal,” we would fail to address the crucial sense of the aphorism that builds its differential structure precisely on the determination of the basis that is already fixed and not differential in itself. Within this proposition, “man” defines himself differentially, by negating the definiteness of “animal,” which in turn does not require the same differentiality toward “man.” In Derrida, every sign is always open to metaphorical displacements. Here, however, the concept “animal” is a contrasting ground against which man himself must establish his own truth. As such, the animal represents a nonmetaphorical presence on the basis of which the metaphorical ideality of man can emerge in the first place. To put it differently, the meaning of the aphorism is not to create ever new differences, but to institute an ideal realm from where contextual reality can finally appear to be relieved from a differential structure. If Derrida’s endeavor was to suspend every possible presence into a web of differences, here, an operation of de-differentialization at the pinnacle of the expressive possibilities of language is being performed—a disclosure of reality no longer governed by one of the prime conceptual dichotomies. It is with these de-contextualized idealities that the aphorism attains its relative citational finality and definitiveness, no longer allowing Derrida’s shifts of meaning or Barthes’s extensions and catalyses.^[56]

We have thus deduced a sufficiently rigorous structure extending between the subject, where the idealization of the concept takes place, and the predicate, where, collaterally, a liquidation of the symbolic barrier between two concepts is performed. Thereby, we might have established a basic matrix for the analysis of some of the most distinguished statements of our culture.^[57] An example is the following aphorism written by Nietzsche, perhaps more admirable than the previous one: “Love. —Love forgives the beloved even his lust.”^[58] The sentence is based on the opposition “love/lust” (Liebe/Begierde) and builds a specific asymmetry between the two concepts. It is often the case that the concept “love” has no other immediate content than sexual desire, while it also always makes a claim to being something more, to designating a kind of surplus that lacks a definite reference in the world of the real. The concept “love” now assumes two positions at once: on the one hand, it signifies the inability to pin down its difference to lust, on the other, it identifies an ideal perspective from where the boundary between the two dissolves. So, in the end, it is only this surplus of ideal love that is capable of forgiving the beloved his lust, love’s only reality, thus abolishing the traditional opposition between love and lust, amour and passion. Love may be a somewhat complicated emotion, and it seems that one only loves someone in whom the reason for being loved can never be definitely pinpointed, someone eternally withdrawing his or her lovable ground. In this case, love is precisely an idea eluding its final incarnation. Some define it as “the thing that remains after sex.” And in Nietzsche’s aphorism, love is perhaps only an idea which must first overcome desire in order to recognize that there is no such thing as a givenness of pure Platonic love, but only and incessant exertion of forgiving lust. In the same way, one could say: “Übermensch.—Only the Übermensch is big enough to forgive man his animality.”

The true aphorism is presumably an inherently paradoxical language form, comprising both the idealization of the concept and the de-symbolization of reality. There are, however, other, less strict bons mots, perhaps not aphorisms per se, but more like parodies, which often resort to a different technique to achieve a somewhat similar effect: they perform a descent of a general concept into some small, almost laughable, outside particularity. One of Nietzsche’s most beautiful quotes goes along these lines: “Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.”^[59] It is hardly a true aphorism, but it nevertheless manifests a two-part structure: there is the assertion that merely negates a platitude, followed by a witty addendum which calls by its name a particular contingent entity. In his (possibly inferior, somewhat ridiculous) specificity, the Englishman represents not only the facticity of the pursuit of happiness, but also its essentially partial aspect, hence, its untruth. There is a certain finesse to Nietzsche’s strategy: if he had simply said that man does not strive for happiness, we would be inclined to believe that it is in man’s nature not to pursue happiness. But the necessary empirical factor, “the Englishman,” suggests that man might well have an inclination to seek happiness, but that this drive expresses only his lower, primitive nature. Against this background, only a man who does not strive for happiness displays a higher disposition that asserts itself against the natural one. Referred to by proper name, manifesting the couleur locale of his empirical concept, “the Englishman” indicates that the pursuit of happiness might indeed be real, but it does not possess the dignity of truth. And perhaps the point of Nietzsche’s bon mot lies not so much in invoking the differences in national character, but rather in implying that the Englishman in question is merely a representative of that lowly aspiration typical of general human weakness, that Spencerian pragmatism of the pursuit of happiness, which makes all higher pursuits, for instance the “discipline of suffering, of great suffering,”^[60] all the more true. The Englishman stands for the fact that the nonpursuit is no authentic, inherent trait of the species homo sapiens, but an effort against his original “English” nature. A great deal of culture seems to be needed in order not to pursue happiness.

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that Nietzsche got rid of happiness altogether. Rather, the concept itself begins to fluctuate between two valences, the low, “English,” and the high, heroic value. Every relativization and empiricization of the metaphysical concept triggers a reaction of re-idealization on a higher level. Just as Spinoza, despite all the attempts at “utilization” of good and evil, cannot help but arrive at the contemplative life of the higher good, Nietzsche, despite all his mockery of the concept of happiness, cannot desist from its ideal, speculative semantics. It is not surprising, then, that he himself played through all the possible ways of specifying happiness and probably invented more definitions of it than anyone else. In other words, there is not one happiness, but two. The first, the dull contentment of the masses, is something utterly despicable: “The goal which the English set makes every higher nature laugh! It is not desirable—a lot of happy people of the lowest rank is an almost disgusting thought.”^[61] The other which only rare individuals can bear is not a given or intended state but an endeavor, a happiness which only exists insofar as it is constantly making itself to be: “To be nothing but desire [Wunsch] is happiness, and a new desire again and again.”^[62] Thus, the pursuit of happiness is replaced by the happiness of pursuit. A reality is being elevated into an ideality.

Thereupon, Nietzsche begins to define happiness ever more frequently by an integration of opposites: “Formula for my happiness: a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal.”^[63] Or: “What is happiness?—The feeling that power is growing, that some resistance is overcome.”^[64] And it is this aphoristic coincidentia oppositorum that performs the most essential, most inherently philosophical operation of all. Before Nietzsche, we lived in a universe where the symbolic boundary between pleasures and displeasures was clear and immovable. After all, the modern, utilitaristic and materialistic remit to de-sublimate the old scholastic ideas, reducing them to a mere play of comforts and discomforts, was introduced due to the belief that this simple mechanism of attractions and repulsions, Leibniz’s appétit du bien and fuit du mal, was the only remaining dividing line along which the symbolic and the real still overlap and correspond, the only way of binarizing all the heterogeneous and chaotic phenomenology of human behavior in a world from which God had begun to abscond. Comfort/discomfort thus became the only consistent conceptual pair still able to organize, discriminate, and classify the once divine ideas of good and evil, truth and error, or justice and injustice. But, according to Nietzsche, this view is deemed to be the most naïve:

It is against this backdrop that Nietzsche’s aphoristic revaluation of happiness must be read. The theorem of the two happinesses does not represent a dividing line within the order of the real, but rather a distinction between the real and the ideal realm. While the first happiness, the numb satisfaction of the servant race, believes that it can still distinguish clearly between comfort and discomfort, it is only the second happiness, emanating from the growing power of the master, which, in the course of its actualization, suddenly realizes its inability to draw a line between pleasure and pain. Happiness now begins to be defined by its opposite and to include in its content repulsion and suffering as well. The true purpose of Nietzsche’s correlative depreciation and heroic idealization of the concept of “happiness” is therefore to disclose the universe of the real, no longer structured by former symbolic boundaries. Only the ideal, processual happiness, which incorporates its opposite, suffering, pain, resistance, finally opens up a view beyond the binary pair of pleasure and pain.

To conclude, our examples followed a certain semantic life of three concepts in Nietzsche’s philosophy, (over)man, love, and happiness. All three of them display the ability to idealize and, at one point, begin to nurture and enjoy their distance to being definitely incarnated. Man becomes a project, love an act, happiness a power still growing. And at this precise moment they can afford to recognize that their empirical origin is humble and plebeian: animal, lust, pleasure. And the binary symbolic discriminations which thus far structured the world are alleviated.

Good and Evil from Augustine to Schopenhauer

The purpose of investigating these aphorisms was to trace a process of truth which traditional, general theories of language are unable to conceptualize. We ascended to the very top of the metaphysical hierarchies where concepts start living their sententious lives. Nigh exemplary instances of this subtle, volatile, speculative life of words are provided by two of the highest concepts in metaphysics, “good” and “evil” (or “bad”). The history of philosophy witnessed all the conceivable permutations of their reciprocal attempts to define one another, depending on which occupied the place of the “real” and which of the “ideal” correlate. With some audacity, one could, by merely following the changing of places of good and evil, by determining which defines the other in a given epoch, identify one of the vital tendencies in the history of metaphysics.

Even at the beginning of philosophy, “good” was already torn between identity and difference. First, it was considered to be the epitome of pure presence. Plato’s ἀγαθόν, ἕν, the One, as well as πέρας, the definite, is the entity against which duality first delimits and differentiates itself, and as such represents the nondifferential in itself, the final basis of referentiality. But Plato nevertheless suspected that “good” cannot be defined outside its difference to “bad.” As Socrates remarks in the aporetic dialogue Lysis,

The good may be the “first beloved” with Plato, and yet, one loves it only through its absence, through the presence of the bad. But the question arises, is it the bad which represents the decrease of the good, or is it the good toward which one strives from the state of the bad? How to construct a sentence that would hold them together sententiously?

It was Augustine who, in his short treatise De natura boni (contra Manichaeos), identified good with God: the highest good is God himself, and all other things are only from Him. Thus, from God a field of decreasing good is spread out, a field that knows no immediate evil:

All that can be referred to by language is a quantitative dilution of the first Good. Every being is good by tautology; if it were not good, it would not be a being at all. “All things are good; better in proportion as they are better measured, formed and ordered, less good where there is less of measure, form and order.”^[68] The good is thus a matter of proportion. De natura boni is the last of Augustine’s anti-Manichean writings, and it indicates a fundamental break with the world governed by and organized according to the binary principles of good and evil. While the Manichean universe was split into two symmetrical halves, the Augustinian world surpasses this symbolic boundary of the real and releases the world to the state of quantifiable continuity. The true purpose of this new arrangement of good and evil was to abolish their mythical polarity. Some even speak of Augustine’s “demythologization of evil.”

The word “malum” denotes no discrete entity, but only a deficiency symptom of something that is good simply because it is. “Bad,” or “evil,” is thus per definitionem a word without reference, so its ontological justification can only lie in relation to an entity which is itself not relative.

Ultimately, there is only one way out of this ontological asymmetry, out of this pseudo-existence of evil defined differentially to a nondifferential: namely, an aphorism. It seems as if an empty word which is not permitted to refer to a thing strives toward redemption through the form of the sentence. On this ground, Augustine’s adage is uttered: Malum est privatio boni, the notorious privation thesis that he was most likely the first to articulate. The birth place of the bon mot, one of the most prominent in the history of philosophy, is considered to be his Enchiridion: “What, after all, is anything we call evil except the privation of good?”^[70]

“Good” and “evil” thus become asymmetric correlates. Instead of sharing a world, as was still the case with the Manicheans, one concept assumes the function of the “real” and the other of the “ideal” entity. Of course, at first glance, it is not entirely obvious which is which. If we interpret Augustine in a Platonic sense, “good” occupies the ideal realm, while “evil” indicates merely the imperfection of the real, concrete, and tangible world. Everything perceivable, every incarnated earthly being, bears the blemish of a lack of good, i.e., of evil. Therefore, all that we can refer to directly is de iure good and de facto already to some extent evil. On the other hand, however, the very form of the proposition “realizes” the good and “idealizes” the evil. It is evil which is defined by the lack of something most real, something good.

Could it be, then, that this evil, which exists nowhere, which subsists only quantitatively, will at one time start having fantasies of becoming a universal, an all-encompassing entity? Because of the symmetrical opposition of both concepts, each of them struggling for asymmetry, Augustine’s adage becomes unstable and provokes its own inversion. Augustine’s definition was adopted by the Neo-Platonists, Thomas Aquinas, and Anselm, and it more or less determined the semantics of good and evil up until the seventeenth century. The concept of “evil” (or “bad”) is not even a real negation of good but only its privation, and as such it represents a mere quantitative delay, something that is entirely remediable. But in this differential liberation from the bonds of direct reference, in the ideal non-incarnability, there also lies the lever of its semantic emancipation: evil may become a metaphor undistorted by presence and not bound to any kind of origin. What Augustine had not reckoned with was the price to be paid for the abolishment of the ontological autonomy of evil and the subsequent quantification of the relation between good and evil: this price was the spontaneous idealization of evil. “Evil” does not refer to any particular thing, it is not defined in a separate principle, as was the case with the Manicheans, but, in return, it perhaps begins to reproduce itself metaphorically throughout reality and verify itself in its totality. It seems that evil can never be embodied in any single thing, except if this single thing becomes the universe. It may have started with some small “evil,” perhaps an illness or some bad luck, but then, suddenly, the entire world is transformed into a vale of tears. It is interesting that Augustine, following the same schema, defined sickness as the “privation of health,” since “the wound or the disease is a defect of the bodily substance which, as a substance, is good”;^[71] but he did it on the threshold of an epoch fraught with leprosy, smallpox, and the plague (i.e., an epoch in which sickness ceased to be a private affair and grew into an epidemic). Evil, once incapable of being fixated in any immediate presence, thus occupies the world. Since “evil” is nowhere, gradually everything becomes malicious, sick, and bad.

The effect of this instability between sententious idealizations and global realizations is a certain internal conceptual tendency of the definiendum and the definiens switching places at some point in history. In the late renaissance, the age of Deus absconditus, the divine good shrinks to private well-being, while good and bad swap places for the first time; Montaigne utters on occasion, Notre bien-estre, ce n’est que la privation d’estre mal. To the burgeoning atheists, it must have suddenly dawned that it is health that lacks a referent and can only be thought of as the privation of sickness. In utilitarianism, it became common practice to define “good” through “evil,” as its privation, although Bentham seems to have reached the stage of symmetric equilibrium by stating: “This may at first sight appear a paradox; but as the absence of good is comparatively an evil, so the absence of evil is comparatively a good.”^[72] This differential symmetry of definition seems to be the point in which the world is neither good nor evil. Both concepts obtain their content only relatively, whereby they alternate in assuming the “real,” referential function, pushing the respective other to the “ideal,” differential function.

After this historic achievement of balance, however, the scales tip towards “evil.” From being mere privation, evil advances onto the position of natural law and occupies the place of the definiens. Most eminently, it was the great cosmic pessimist Schopenhauer who accomplished this inversion. His defiance of theodicy, his claim that we live in “the worst of all possible worlds,” makes evil into a referential concept designating a pure presence:

While it appears that good can still be counterbalanced, explained away, metaphorically shifted, evil represents an immovable presence of facticity, the fundamentally nonmetaphorical being. “Good” is, according to Schopenhauer’s own words, a “trivial concept,” a relativized entity:

Good has no presence and is relative to a nonrelative evil. In this world of fluid boundaries of desire it can never exist factually. But, as we have seen, every relativization is only possible within a previously established frame of idealization. Even a pessimist as great as Schopenhauer could not abolish the semantics of good. While becoming void in the order of the real, the concept can be preserved at the metaphorical level of totality (i.e., as an ideal, a telos):

In Augustine evil was relative, and in Schopenhauer it becomes absolute. Good, synonymous with God, was once absolute and is now, after the death of God, semantically relative. In the Augustinian world, evil was unreal and remediable in the fullness of the first and final good. Now, in the pessimist world of Schopenhauer, evil is the only thing that is real and, consequently and inversely, good, being unreal, can exist only within a process of the annulment of being, the dissolution into nothingness. No discourse, no margin call, no frame of meaning, can counterbalance the “mere existence,” bloßes Dasein, of evil, this milestone of the greatest cosmic asymmetry and deepest irreconcilability of being—except an aphorism. That is why Schopenhauer’s “inversion of the Augustinian privation theory” is often referred to, and the new definition now reads: Good is the privation of evil. It is here that the Augustinian paradox of whether the existence of evil is real or rather ideal is resolved: everything real is by definition evil, while good assumes the role of a produced, emergent ideality of our endeavor to eliminate evil.

Here, it seems, the concepts have finally found their proper places. In Augustine, evil was semantically idealized, while good enjoyed the given, eternal, sacred reality of an otherworldly idea. Schopenhauer reversed these valences. Evil now stands for the facticity of the world in which the differences between good and bad things are thoroughly blurred. And the good represents an idea of recognizing this collapse of possible differentiations within reality, an idea never to be incarnated except in the nothingness itself.

Hegel’s Infinite Judgment

Examples such as those discussed above could be carried on indefinitely. There exists a number of philosophical propositions that draw their memorability from the very interplay between the semantic symmetry and the ontological asymmetry of a metaphysical binary. Engels ascribed to Hegel the famous saying, “Freedom is the recognition of necessity.” Here, necessity is cast in the role of the referent, of all there is, and freedom in the role of its dependent, most meagre and precarious differential. It seems that the sole function of freedom is to realize its own nonexistence. But this proposition nevertheless performs a momentous semantic operation. First, its purpose is to overcome and abolish any kind of (post-Cartesian) dualism. In the order of the real freedom does not exist, and therefore the boundary between matter and spirit collapses. And, inversely, it is only from the ideal vantage point of freedom that this monism of necessity announces itself. Second, the differential function of freedom thereby becomes semantically stronger than the referential function of necessity. It was never Hegel’s intention to construct a system of necessity, but rather a system of freedom. It is thus “freedom” that becomes an “idea,” whereas necessity, albeit being the only thing that exists “realistically,” starts representing its own untruth.

Perhaps, one could accord a provisory common formula to the examples examined thus far. They all employ semantically symmetric oppositions, such as man/animal, good/evil, love/lust, freedom/necessity, and produce an asymmetry that, in turn, relieves reality from their binary code. There is the empirical concept that is mostly placed in the definiens; it is referential and, in this sense, saturated, since it can always refer to an object of the real word. And there is the differential, pure concept, usually occupying the definiendum and lacking any immediate reality. But the aphoristic magic occurs precisely in the trick of reversing the truth value of both correlates: in an aphorism truth saturates, so to speak, in the differential yet ideal concept, while the referential concept is released to an indifferent, untrue facticity. In this view, an aphorism performs an oblique act of realism. It is a discursive product that, by way of idealization, makes reality appear in its untruth and thereby reveals its eluding the grasp of language.

Of course, these stark conceptual dichotomies of good and evil, man and animal, freedom and necessity, pleasure and pain are hardly a necessary precondition for construing truth. They are only the simplest instruments for making truth more pointed, for sharpening its impact. And because of their semantic lucidity and comprehensibility, they represent an ideal object of study for a theory still very much in its infancy.

But the question might be asked, why does reality need to undergo a downfall of its symbolic structure in order for a concept to be idealized? Why do “words” achieve truth only by virtue of no longer having any things to refer to? Why is the untruth of reality a price to be paid for the emergence of truth? Why does good need to be defined through the absence of evil, and man through the indeterminacy of animal? And where does this strong inclination of truth for symmetrical oppositions and their circumventions come from?

If we look into the matter, we might discover a logical bond between idealization and de-symbolization, between truth emerging and reality losing meaning. In order for truth to create its surplus, the world must show itself worthy of not offering any more ground for an idea to be incarnated. For this purpose, it must relinquish the very structures that could still accommodate ideal entities and maintain an illusion of the symbolic and the real realm overlapping. Of course, language does not provide a word for every singularity of the world. And this great imbalance of a limited number of abstractions and an unlimited number of facts and instances can only be overcome by reality itself adopting a more and more transparent, proportional, polar, symmetrical, and equilibrated structure. In other words, only wide generalizations and gross polarizations of symbolic operations can hold the reins of a heterogeneous, diffuse nature. Instead of every single thing expressing its own “individual concept,” the world begins to be organized by analogies and dichotomies. And this universe of clear polarities is the last resort for ideas being incarnated. It is presumably the ultimate warranty of reality having meaning. This is perhaps the reason why the mythical worldview was obsessed with the contrariness of heaven and earth, day and night, land and sea, life and death, and why it carefully secured the points and lines of their intersection. However, an idea in its surplus must precisely free itself from the possibility of being metaphysically, theologically, mythically, or ideologically “realized.” Its ideality needs assurance that it will never be embodied again. Thus, when an idea lives to see its de-finition, when it stabilizes in its definitive emergent status, the structure of its former incarnability must collapse. It is now that it must be defined with respect to its opposite, as its ideal vanishing point, because only through these “sententious,” oppositive determinations can reality be relieved of the boundaries by which it has formerly been structured and divided. Only now does reality cease to represent the fertile ground for planting the ideas. When, for instance, good is defined by the absence of evil, this definition obliterates the line between good and bad within reality in order to uphold it within the ideal realm. A certain “depolarization” of reality thus becomes the condition of possibility of idealization of language. Seen from this angle, language is no doubt a means of structuring, discriminating, polarizing, grouping, and aligning the world. But at the peak of its “linguistic immanence,” so to say, at the core of its spontaneous idealization, it also separates from the world and blurs the confines that it has imposed upon itself. Here, idealism and realism might coincide.

Probably the most striking, most literal manifestation of this matrix, combining idea and released reality, is Hegel’s infinite judgment. It might be worthwhile to take a closer look at this most dicey proposition form. A recurring motif of Hegel’s thought is that speculative truth can never be expressed by a single proposition; instead, two successive judgments are needed, an assertion, immediately followed by negation. “The soul is simple,” for instance, must be complemented with “The soul is complex.”^[76] Still, in the barely traceable loops of his system, he nonetheless outlined certain forms that fit into one compact sentence and yet evoke the speculative dimension. These propositions are his illustrious “infinite judgments,” the paradigm of which is Der Geist ist ein Knochen, “The Spirit is a bone,” from the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The infinite judgment is initially a parody of the judgment of understanding in the Kantian vein. Formally, it is an ordinary synthetic judgment with a subject and a predicate.^[77] But in terms of content, there is no universal predicate assigned to a particular subject—the general property of redness to a singular rose, for instance. Instead, it seems as though the judgment posits a (grammatically singular) subject of the utmost universality and then releases the predicate to its outside particularity. It is no longer the case of the smaller concept of the rose finding its refuge in the larger concept of redness, but the case of the absolute concept of Spirit somehow disgorging its most trivial exteriority, the bone. Following Hegel’s matrix of self-reflection, the concept must first lose itself in its irreducible otherness in order to become itself in the first place.

Hegel’s parodic turn of phrase The Spirit is a bone is based on a popular contemporary theory, Lavater’s phrenology, according to which the vitality of spirit, its inner richness, is embodied in the shape of the skull, this so-called caput mortuum, as Hegel would say. Truth in the form of adequation, or, again in Hegel’s words, “the observing reason,” posits the simple relationship: “the actuality and existence of man is his skull-bone” (PdG 200). Nonetheless, the equation “skull equals character trait” turns out to be a colossally erroneous scientific hypothesis, confounding two dimensions that cannot be traced back to one another: the Spirit which can never be embodied in a single thing and which no judgment of understanding can express, and the bone, “the solid inert Thing” (PdG 197), which only exists in order to not represent a truth.

Hegel’s move, the true infinity of his infinite judgment, is to invoke the irreducibility of two realms. On one side, there is the human self-positing individuality, the concept of which is not to be filled by Kantian intuition. Man is only what he becomes, his essence lies in surpassing his immediate being:

To the other side, however, an indifferent facticity is released, a bone that represents nothing but its own immovable presence. It almost seems that the bone is only there to resist any kind of Cartesian doubt, Kantian inclusion in the context of experience, Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian utilization as tool or equipment, and any kind of Derridean metaphoric deferral:

Hegel suggests that this tension of the excluding duality, this conspicuous nonidentity, can only be expressed in a judgment of identity, namely, “that the being of Spirit is a bone” (PdG 208). A judgment is uttered that claims two truth values at once: as a judgment of understanding, it is utterly nonsensical, but as a judgment of reason, it creates a truth that cannot be reduced to adequation. With considerable accuracy, Hegel identifies the three essential functions of this new judgment form: first, it must assert the truth of the un-real correlate (“Spirit”), second, it must profess the untruth of the real correlate (“bone”), and, third, it must show that the only way to express this nonadequacy adequately is a self-suspending judgment:

The relation between subject and predicate is not one of inclusion and participation, but one of emergent emancipation and finally indifference. The “thing” becomes an impervious outside of the self-consciousness and in its “untruth” represents, by way of contrast, only the fact that Spirit is, to paraphrase Sartre, “nothing else but that which it makes of itself.” The function of the bone is still most necessary and nontrivial. First, Spirit exists nowhere else but in the matter inside the bone. Second, with its inert subsistence, the bone signifies that Spirit is not a given, but an emergent, self-reflexive, ideal entity. The indifferent background reality poses as a necessary condition of the self-creation of Spirit: “But objectivity proper must be an immediate, sensuous objectivity, so that in this dead objectivity—for the bone is a dead thing, so far as what is dead is present in the living being itself—Spirit is explicitly present as actual” (PdG 262).

And therein lies the inherent realism of the infinite judgment. Hegel discloses a reality that is no longer structured by way of spiritual, conceptual, human forms, but in its dull presence maintains its distance to truth. An almost scandalous object of untruth emerges before our eyes, an object that seems to surpass the conceptual frames of all traditional theories of truth. The “bone” as an object of release is neither a fact that saturates the truth value of a judgment nor an entity that incorporates or expresses an eternal concept, a symbol that represents an ideal order of reason, a tool that constitutes Dasein’s environment or makes a language game work, a state of affairs in need of consensual justification, a referent that has the structure of a differential trace, or, finally, an exchange object that could be integrated within a structuralist value system. On the one hand, Hegel idealizes Spirit into something that no given thing can embody, and on the other hand, he relieves the bone of the obligation to represent something spiritual. Here, a transition takes place from a hyper-symbolized world of parallelism between the material and the spiritual into a universe of indifference between them, where Spirit becomes an emergent property, and matter is no longer required to be the bearer of any meaning.

In this rearrangement, Hegel overturns the traditional values of mind and body. In the times of dualism, or even parallelism, spirit was a given fact, something immediately experienced in its self-evidence, while matter was invariably suspected of meaning something or embodying something rational. However, with Hegel, Spirit undergoes a disruptive transition. On the one hand, it forfeits the status of being a substance of its own, a creature of God, an eternal idea, and becomes a self-reflexive movement necessarily bound to its material substrate. It resides nowhere if not in the grey matter of the brain, enclosed by a skull—in this, Hegel is a materialist. On the other hand, because Spirit has no preexisting identity, no original sense of self, it is “condemned to freedom,” as Sartre would say, and must first become what it is: it must actualize itself in social, cultural, and historic forms. In this double act of superseding dualism, Spirit thus casts off its givenness and immediacy, and matter its meaning and sense. The semantic parallelism of two realities, mind and body, the symbolic and the real, character and skull, is replaced by the ideal realm of the spiritual releasing the reality of the material. Since Spirit has emancipated itself and now lives in the realm of social institutions, all the conventional foundations of its ideal existence (i.e., the material exclusiveness and superiority of the human being), the preformed virtue of his body, the cryptogram of his skull, are now obsolete. Because Spirit has the ability to make itself true, the human body can finally become an untruth.

In Hegel’s confrontation with phrenology, a philosopher and a scientist come face to face, Hegel and Lavater, a speculative idealist and an empiricist. And yet, it is the philosopher who makes a scientific move in the truest sense of the word. Lavater (and other physiognomists before him) tried to project meaning onto the skull, translate every accidental curving of the bone into something significant, and overwrite every facticity with a symbol. But only the omission of this “total interpretability” of reality will release the skull to scientific appropriation. Only when the bone stops signifying a character trait can it become an object of quantification, measurement, and induction. The infinite judgment thus salvages Spirit from the realm of adequation and totalization (for instance, the Kantian realm of the “natural capacities of mankind”), and, concurrently, releases the bone from the compulsion of meaning, from the Procrustes bed of symbolic redoubling. The nose is no longer bound to “courage” and the lower eyelid to “language,” so their immediate nature may elude symbolic over-determination and become an object of empirical research; they can let themselves be disengaged from any significant form and fall into an indifferent formlessness. The natural man can finally be measured, for he has been freed from the yoke of the symbol.

From this perspective, Hegel’s infinite judgment does establish a new relation between the ideal surplus of discourse and its outside, a relation no longer governed by reference, correspondence, signification, but by release, de-symbolization, and revealing the untruth. In its boundaries, in what we call the “logical space of sententiousness,” a discursive ideality is produced, and it emerges only for the purpose of being withdrawn from reality and reality being relieved from it. For heuristic purposes only, let us differentiate three possible judgment forms based on three possible relations between the real and the ideal correlate. The impulse for this distinction is of course altogether arbitrary: one could ascribe to each of the “three ontologies” a judgment that is quasi its trademark:

In the ontology of adequation, a specific entity, say, this rose, is subsumed under the domain of a general concept, in this case redness. The bond between the subject and the predicate can only hold because reality is still presupposed to manifest and ideal order. Redness is incarnated in the rose. Within the ontology of totalization, in comparison, the universal concept, as in the case of Heidegger’s famous example, already assumes a relative function (“heavy” turns into “too heavy”) and serves only as a conductor pointing from one thing to another. The universality of the concept regresses to a practical reference, converting the “heaviness” into a makeshift bridge between one hammer and another. This judgment from the “Analysis of Dasein” seems to be an almost pleasurable presentation of the dissolution of a universal concept, an idea. Heaviness is prevented from being fully embodied, but it can perform its function within the total horizon of ideal significance. However, the third example, the infinite judgment, utterly reverses the functions of subject and predicate. The relation between the two is now governed by release and indifference: the subject is no longer enclosed within the “value range” of the predicate and refers to no particular thing. The predicate is only ascribed to it in order to express the impossibility of the subject to be incarnated. An idea arises again, but it maintains its ideality only by virtue of never being merged in any reality. And it is this ideality striving not to substantialize which releases its original reality, the bone, to an indifferent facticity. While Heidegger’s hammer, figuratively speaking, presses the concept of “heaviness” down to the ground and debases it into a mere word-tool, but can only do so within the scope of the presupposed ideal meaning, here, Spirit makes itself irreducible to the bone as its material carrier, thus finally disclosing the meaninglessness of the world. Whereas the hammer expresses the essential nonideality of the universal concept of “heaviness,” it is the bone in its indifference that bestows upon “Spirit” the status of ideality no longer wrought with the weight of things. “Spirit” is an historical artefact, raised to a Platonic Idea, and the outside facticity of the bone is the price to pay for this self-produced apotheosis.

In an era when the world seems to have lost its secret, the days of adequation are over. It may very well be that ever since God died and the Earth has been occupied to the last corner, truth can enter the scene only by way of a sententious surplus, and the only thing that renders this surplus nonarbitrary, is its ability to liberate reality from the constraints of truth. Reality can never predict or generate the emergence of truth; but truth’s primary necessity lies in its operation of making reality untrue.

The Adages of the Pre-Socratics

Our analyses so far could give rise to the impression that we are dealing with insignificant discursive shifts and coincidences at best. At first glance, Nietzsche’s aphorism or Hegel’s infinite judgment may look like minor linguistic extravagances, nothing more. But there is a stricter, tighter, more precise and historically well-documented connection between aphoristic production and the establishment of realism—the very realism that invented the empiricity of science in the first place. The most peculiar, perhaps even spectacular feature of Pre-Socratic philosophy is probably the coincidence of two seemingly incongruous, even contradictory phenomena: on the one hand, the ancient Greeks constructed the first models of reality which were no longer symbolic but quantifiable, and the world began to de-symbolize for the first time in history; on the other hand, it was also the Greeks who cultivated philosophy as an emphatically and almost exclusively discursive practice and, consequently, nurtured, more or less invented, or at least perfected the art of the aphorism. In these early days, the distinction between philosophy and the natural sciences did not yet exist, and the famous aphorists were also the only empiricists on hand.

Already the first real “event” of Western philosophy can be treated as a key piece of evidence for the correlation that our treatise is about, the bond between the creation of truth and the release of reality from symbolic forms. The history of philosophy, and science in general, usually recognizes as its point of origin a single initiation figure—Thales of Miletus, “the first philosopher,” as he was addressed by many, including Aristotle and Hegel. What is less well known, but philology now finds to be the case, is that Thales’s famous thesis according to which everything originates from water was not a result of empirical scientific work and rational argumentation, but was formed and uttered as an adage. The first impulse of Western science was thus not a finding resulting from precise and comprehensive observations, measurements, experiments, hypotheses, and arguments, but merely a saying, an apophthegm, uttered by a political, publicly speaking being. Perhaps we are not sufficiently aware of it, but philosophy was not born within the framework of “normal science,” but by means of an act of rhetorical pointedness. Or, to put it aphoristically, something as grand as the history of knowledge may very well have begun with an aphorism.

That Thales’s thesis came to be considered a great “event” is probably due to the fact that it was perceived as extremely counter-intuitive^[78] at the time it was pronounced. Neither Greek myths nor the practical and pragmatic knowledge of the period would likely posit water at the beginning of the world, which is why the utterance “All things are water,” as Thales’s adage may have read, has to be considered in light of the discursive possibilities conceded by the mentality of the given era. Thus, when the question arises why exactly the first substance of Western knowledge is water, we should probably not jump at the material qualities of this fluid element, but rather share Aristotle’s concern as to why the Pre-Socratics did not choose the most self-evident option out of all the elements, namely, earth. The real question might not be “Why water?” but rather “Why not earth?”:

Hence, the statement “All things are earth” is, according to Aristotle, the most natural, self-evident, even vulgar expression of public opinion. Of course, this proposition does not claim that there exists nothing except earth, but merely expresses a spontaneous semantic valuation of the Greek world: everything comes from and returns to earth. Being a seafaring nation, the ancient Greeks, especially those in the colonies, most likely lived their everyday practical lives within the binary frame stretching between the inconstancy of the seas and the solidity of earth. And since all the early philosophers were inhabitants of the colonies in Asia Minor (and later Magna Grecia), philosophy can be, and has always been, regarded as a direct product of the spirit of coastal cities. If we commit “everything,” or even “the origin,” to the element “earth,” then the binary, polar, balanced symmetrical world of sea and land can still be hierarchized into the symbolic order of perilous sailing and safe harbors, uncertain voyages and solid ground under our feet. Within the value system of a seafaring city, the utterance “All things are earth” means that every sea journey has its anchorage, every expedition its end, every storm its shelter, every trade its profit. It means that there exists a presupposed symbolic warranty which organizes the real, “natural,” dichotomies into ideal benefits. This is probably the frame of mind in which Pittacus of Mytilene, one of the seven sages, declared, Πιστὸν γῆ, ἄπιστον θάλασσα, “The earth is trustworthy, the sea untrustworthy” (DK10a3).^[80]

If on this discursive basis, within the scope of these semantic compulsions and anticipations, someone claims that “All things are water,” this statement could not, in any immediate sense, pass as a scientific theory on the (empirical) nature of the world. But that does not mean that Thales’s thesis is deprived of meaning altogether. Its purpose is rather, by a simple substitution of the predicate with its traditional contrary, to facilitate a dissolution of the boundary between the two most invested symbolic opposites, earth and water. With his notorious, to this day not entirely comprehensible thesis, Thales may have performed a very precise operation: by shifting the focal point from earth to water, he invalidated the hierarchy of values between the two elements and, thereby, revoked the symbolic constraints that order and organize reality. Before philosophy, the Greek world may still have been structured by the belief in the full overlapping of the symbolic and the real, in mythically guaranteed discreet boundaries between heaven and earth, earth and water, saltwater and fresh water, this and the other world. The coastline, for instance, was the exemplary site of this overlapping, and this most clear-cut of all boundaries was invested with many mythical connotations. But, suddenly, the “center of gravity” was transferred to the other, less stable, arguably inferior element—and the boundaries that made the symbolic and the real coincide began to crumble. It comes as no surprise that Thales’s proposition had a traumatic effect on the ancient Greeks who, later in history, persistently cast him in anecdotes of water sources springing from the ground, of rivers being prevented from flowing into the sea, of Thales, the great engineer, altering the river flow to enable the army safe passage, or, as is the case in the most famous philosophical anecdote, dropping into a well and falling victim to the laughter of the Thracian woman. Since Thales, earth seems to have forfeited its natural, steady, dependable solidity, and the symbolic values have lost their footing in reality.

Hence, the thesis on water is not a testable, verifiable theory of immediate reality; it is so extravagant, so “out of this world,” that it is not even falsifiable. But it does execute an egress from a specific value system that encloses reality in conceptual discretions and makes empirical knowledge of it impossible. Until the present day, philologists keep wondering what in the world Thales had in mind with positing water as the original and supreme substance, and how it is possible that a respected, well-educated, rational man of such extensive technical and mathematical prowess could formulate a hypothesis as unfounded as this.^[81] But such reasoning neglects what he produced with his thesis, what truly emerged in it. The theory according to which everything originates from water probably never, not even in Thales’s mind, possessed a great amount of immediate adequacy, of “correctness,” and could never have passed any empirical experiment or rational justification. But we can nevertheless consider it a “truth” insofar as it has broken through and transcended the barriers of prior symbolizations. If it is true that Thales shifted the emphasis from earth to water in front of an audience that believed in the ontological primacy of earth, if he uttered “water” where others had expected to hear “earth,” then, although he might not have provided a scientific theory that could be proven true or false, he did produce a “discursive event” that overthrew and undercut one of the most essential symbolic hierarchies of a specific Lebenswelt, of the particular practical, pragmatic, and cultural environment of ancient Greece.

And it is discursive moves like these that open the world to quantification. Only now the transition from a traditional, binary, polarized, and symbolically structured world of earth and water into a homogeneous universe is possible, where earth dissolves into water and water permeates the earth. If Thales, centuries later, earned the title of “first philosopher,” it was not because he posited the first empirical and rational theory of reality, but presumably because he was the first to dare to deprive the world of its symbolic meaning. “Water” is thus not the first substance of Western knowledge, but only the first idea whose purpose is not to refer to the world, to observe, describe, and conceptualize it, but to de-symbolize nature, to undermine the ground underneath, and to blur the boundaries to other, solid elements. Water is the ideal point of recognizing the realist inconsistency and porosity of the earth. Or, put differently, water might not be anything “true” in itself; its “truth” consists in making the most immediate element earth untrue. This may be the crux of Thales’s revolution.

Greek empirical knowledge is an effect of the valediction to the “total significance of the world,” and the protagonist and elicitor of this movement was none other than philosophy. We are treading in uncharted territory, but it may be that every discovery in the realm of the factual is only possible if it is first triggered by a process of truth which is irreducible to and undeducible from reality, but nevertheless performs a release of facticity. If the history of philosophy teaches us anything, it is that only when a field of reality has been freed from the claim to truth, the facts, previously invisible within the symbolic frames, can be recognized at all. Ever since its beginnings, one of the most intuitive aspirations of philosophy seems to be to exhibit things in the process of losing meaning. And it was precisely the ancient Greeks who, by elevating speech to an ontological principle, simultaneously invented the subverbal real, whether it be the seeds of Anaxagoras, later called homoeomeries, or the atoms and the empty space of Leucippus and Democritus. One of the first, perhaps even the originary operation of philosophy is to establish an equilibrium of rhetorical effects of which Greek philosophy was never free on one side, and elementary particles that can no longer be organized, classified, and differentiated by words on the other.

Concluding Remarks

Perhaps the ultimate question of realism is, how to know reality, which only deserves this name if itself has no desire to be known. Why would the world disclose itself to a particular, localized point within it? And would a world actively striving toward such a disclosure be “realist” at all? Hence, we must always think reality as emphatically lacking any motive to become an object of knowledge. Something must therefore occur on the side of the knower, something spontaneous and supplemental. But what? Our answer is that a counterweight must first be placed against reality, a form created, which breaks the confines of its own local embeddedness and relieves its environment from conforming to its purposes. Something must emerge that can never be incarnated. We call it truth. Only someone who created truth can cease to expect it from reality. And reality reveals itself only to the one who can endure the fact that it never wanted to be true.

Nowadays, two forms, consciousness and language, are most regularly and consistently accused of confining our mind and depriving us of contact with reality, of being a prison of our thought. In the course of the history of philosophy, we are supposed, first, to have lost reality to consciousness, and then language put the final nail in the coffin of realism. However, this typically philosophical prejudice could at the very least be challenged and infringed upon. Perhaps consciousness itself is already equipped with impulses and levers for the emergence of certain self-referential processes, for retreating into oneself and establishing distance to immediate perceptions, which arguably allows a more realist experience of reality than it is given by acts of direct attention; however, this was our subject only indirectly. For, in our view, it is only language and its idealist spontaneity which grants to consciousness the freedom of surpassing the limits of its momentary experience. Thus, all the efforts made in this book must finally come down to one single question: Does language increase our knowledge of the world or not? Can language be thought of as an instrument of realism? The answer should probably be affirmative. Animals may be equipped with consciousness and they certainly set up and inhabit an environment; but they are incapable of surpassing its boundaries, of replacing their Umwelt with the Welt. Only language provides the surplus forms that empower us to transgress these centered and totalized radii and reveal the world beyond the constraint of signifying something to someone, of representing utility or truth. It was our goal to unveil this other face of language, which promises to break the spell of meaning and perhaps offers some methods for transcending the blockages and limitations of consciousness.

The treatise thus risked an attempt to follow in the footsteps of the higher life of language, which no longer serves any epistemic, significative, pragmatic, communicative, or metaphorical purposes, and to detect the overlooked but necessary other side of these linguistic functions. There are moments in which the very same culture that restricted reality into frames of pragmatic environments and linguistic structures is capable of producing acts of realism: suddenly, some sort of revelation of reality beyond the constraints of previous truth claims takes place. And these acts must be recognized and conceptualized.

In some ways, we are repeating a tacit, almost subconscious argument performed many times in the history of philosophy. Hegel, for instance, in his Philosophy of Right, opposed the social contract theorists, who strived to explain the somewhat miraculous fact of the existence of the social bond by regressing in time to the act of entering into the social contract, with a progressive argument, demonstrating that we are inter-subjectively constituted even before we become rational subjects, that there was no historical moment of signing the contract, that there exists no exotic past of rational beings assessing the maximization of their self-interest and recognizing the benefit of cooperation, and that this alleged rationality is, if anything, a consequence and not the cause of socialization. The first premise of Hegel’s social theory thus only presupposes that society is always already functioning, and only from there is it able to determine its conceptual structures and regularities. Even more clearly, against the empiricists’ attempts to reduce rationalist concepts to the strict immediacy of the acts of perception, Kant assumed a more “holistic” perspective and, instead of asking himself how to apprehend and perceive the forms of understanding, proceeded from the implicit presupposition that the process of the scientific cognition of the world is already in full function. So it is not Kant’s endeavor to descend to the ultimate foundations of isolated entities in a regressive manner, but to progress to a comprehensive set of conditions of something already taking place. In this vein, the problem of realism should perhaps not be approached by regressive but by progressive methodology. We should not seek the ultimate ground of reality and try to reach it by inventing a reductive, eliminative, perhaps mathematical method, but rather assume a broader, holistic perspective, presuppose that realism has already been practiced and has led to distinctive results, and, accordingly, determine the conditions of its functioning and pinpoint the spot where reality truly discloses itself.

For centuries now, at least since Kant, the task of philosophy has no longer been to render straightforward theories of reality; science undertook this work. It could also be anticipated that, in the future, the task of philosophy will no longer be to provide theories of cognition, language, signs, information, argumentation, or communication; these theories will arguably fall under the jurisdiction of other sciences, such as neurology, linguistics, semiology, sociology, and the like. Therefore, philosophy has been left with a highly limited jurisdiction and very little scope for action. In this restricted logical space for making moves, it can only endeavor to reconstruct the emergence of new truth values in the midst of already established discourses, already functioning sciences and social systems, and already accumulated knowledge. What remains for philosophy to do is to safeguard the irreducibility of truth over reality. Its task is to demonstrate that reality never discloses itself naturally, candidly, and openly to common sense or science, but does so only by the agency of complex discursive equilibria. It was our intention to give a few inklings on what these processes are, how they are discursively produced and semantically organized, and, finally, to offer some clues and pointers as to how these emergent truth effects may henceforth be investigated. In order to offer some conceptual framework, some theoretical program, for further analyses of the relation between truth and reality, we have established a correlation between the emergence of truth and the untruth of reality, between the impulse of idealization and the procedures of de-symbolization. Only an examination of the schemes and strategies of alleviation of truth from reality can prepare a foundation for a more lasting and sustainable realism.

On a final note, let us repeat that it was our intention to distinguish a certain quality of truth whereby it is never completely merged and absorbed in the situation of its emergence. With truth, something always arises that transcends its context and inscribes itself in history. And, correspondingly, if truth is a historical artifact, then the ultimate reality is merely the one revealing itself in the course of the history of de-symbolizations. In other words, truth is but a process of the world becoming untrue.

NOTES

In the sense of a Meillassouxean advent of a new world.

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 210.

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976) 158.

Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 13.

Just as much as it was never our ambition to advocate a strictly Hegelian theory—we only pointed out certain more or less latent and not entirely exploited possibilities in Hegel’s thought. With the “third ontology,” we most certainly do not claim that with Hegel philosophy came to an end, and that its subsequent development represents some sort of regression. In our opinion, it is only the later development which allows us to recognize shifts and revolutions in Hegel that he himself was hardly aware of.

“Hence the proposition ‘Nothing happens through a mere accident’ (in mundo non datur casus) is an a priori law of nature; likewise the proposition ‘No necessity in nature is blind, but is rather conditioned, consequently comprehensible necessity.’ (non datur fatum)” (KrV A 228/B 280). “The principle of continuity forbade any leap in the series of appearances (alterations) (in mundo non datur saltus), but also any gap or cleft between two appearances in the sum of all empirical intuitions in space (non datur hiatus)” (KrV A 228–29/B 281).

The argument could be expanded. It is not the whole truth to the linguistic turn that the entire reality is placed within language and that the rich and polymorphic sensibility is being constantly shackled by “metaphysical” language forms. There is also the necessary other side. In a world that, in its totality, discloses itself within the horizon of language, language is also steadily tied to reality, and sensibility also weighs on the pureness of thought and pushes it to the ground. Paradoxically, it is the philosophy of the linguistic turn itself that finally becomes incapable of living in a world consisting of nothing but spontaneous linguistic idealizations. Wittgenstein’s philosophy is perhaps the greatest example of this intricate relation between an apotheosis of language and the danger of slipping on the smooth surface of logic: “(For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not something I had discovered: it was a requirement.) [. . .] We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction, and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” (PI 107).

Kant was well aware that biology combines two causalities, the mechanical and the teleological, and has to adopt efficient as well as final causes that supersede the limits of possible human knowledge: “[A]bsolutely no human reason [. . .] can ever hope to understand the generation of even a little blade of grass from merely mechanical causes. For if the teleological connection of causes and effects is entirely indispensable for the possibility of such an object for the power of judgment [. . .]: then it is absolutely impossible for us to draw from nature itself any explanatory grounds for purposive connections” (KU 279). And about chemistry he said the following: “So long, therefore, as there is still for chemical actions of matters on one another no concept to be discovered that can be constructed, that is, no law of the approach or withdrawal of the parts of matter can be specified according to which, perhaps in proportion to their density or the like, their motions and all the consequences thereof can be made intuitive and presented a priori in space (a demand that will only with great difficulty ever be fulfilled), then chemistry can be nothing more than a systematic art or experimental doctrine, but never a proper science.” [Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7].

Darwin’s Natural Selection is a “book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views.” Letter from Marx to Engels, 19. Dec. 1960, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 41, Marx and Engles 1860–1864, trans. Peter and Betty Ross (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), 232.

10.

Darwin’s work “provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.” Letter from Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 16. Jan. 1961, in Marx, Engels, Collected Works, vol. 41, 246–47.

11.

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), (hereafter cited in text as OTL).

12.

Perhaps, a brief comment is due here. The theory we will propose is unmistakably anti-postmodern. We refer to this seemingly open, free, and spontaneous play with language only for the sake of the argument. Below, we will show that this supposed “creativity of language” can only be unleashed by simultaneously constituting constraints of a new logic.

13.

In German, of course, Nietzsche’s “intuition” is not the same as Kant’s, Nietzsche’s being Intuition, and Kant’s Anschauung. One could venture a guess that Nietzsche’s terminologically diffuse Intuition means both immediate Anschauung and an intuitive, nonrational, perhaps playful mode of thought.

14.

This disposition finds its final embodiment in Nietzsche’s art of aphorisms. It has become his veritable method to substitute the judgments of understanding, which constituted phenomena in Kant, with prestigious hyperbole: “In books of aphorisms like mine there are merely forbidden and long things and chains of thought between and behind short aphorisms; and some of it, which would be questionable enough to Oedipus and his Sphinx. Treatises I do not write; they are for jack-asses and magazine readers” (KSA 11, 37 [5] [translation mine]). Friedrich Nietzsche, “Nachgelassene Fragmente,” in Kritische Studienaugabe, vol. 11 (KSA 11) (Nietzsche’s fragments from the notebooks hereafter cited in text as KSA, volume number, paragraph number).

15.

KSA 13, 16 (25) (translation mine).

16.

KSA 12, 9 (41) [translation cited from Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, trans. Kate Surge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 148].

17.

KSA 13, 11 (113) (translation cited from Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 221).

18.

KSA 13, 15 (90) (translation cited from Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 271).

19.

KSA 12, 6 (14) (translation cited from Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 125).

20.

See J. G. Fichte, “Grundlagen der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre,” in Fichtes sämtliche Werke, vol. 1, Berlin 1845/1846, 117.

21.

This a priori “propositionalization” of reality was obviously traumatic enough for Hölderlin and Schelling, so they had to meet it with the first heresy that posited the absolute, pre-discursive being before the first proposition could appear. For every judgment, Ur-Theil, is an ur-division, Ur-Theilung. This subsequent justification of being preceding the proposition might well be an expression of opposing the excessive power of judgment, bestowed upon it by Kant and Fichte.

22.

Martin Heidegger, Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, GA 21 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 135 (translation mine).

23.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973), 49.

24.

Barthes, The Rustle of the Language, 96.

25.

Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1984), 10.

26.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The Blue Book,” in The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations” (Malden: Blackwell, 1969), 18. Here, Wittgenstein practices some self-criticism: it was he who was once tempted to regard all words as names.

27.

Wittgenstein, “The Blue Book,” 19.

28.

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, New York: Routledge, 1978), 280.

29.

Wittgenstein, “The Blue Book,” 28.

30.

Derrida, Writing and Difference, 354.

31.

“Thus the name, especially the so-called proper name, is always caught in a chain or a system of differences. [. . .] Metaphor shapes and undermines the proper name. The literal [proper] meaning does not exist, its ‘appearance’ is a necessary function—and must be analyzed as such—in the system of differences and metaphors.” Derrida, On Grammatology, 89.

32.

By “practical reference” we, of course, mean the exact opposite of “epistemic reference”: linguistic meaning is no longer anchored in (cognizable) things but in the (pragmatic) contexts of speech. By speaking, we do not name things, we just use them. The process of naming would already be too idealized, making the “word-in-itself” by way of “meaning-in-itself” refer to the “thing-in-itself.” But there is no such in-itselfness in Wittgenstein: “Water! / Away! / Ow! / Help! / Splendid! / No! / Are you still inclined to name these words ‘names of objects’?” (PI 27), he asks. Thus, the “thing,” the object, is displaced from the focus of meaning, not because things were in any way too elusive, doubtful, stricken with absence, untrue, but because in their very presence and reality they are too ideal. If we regard the thing as thing (as Heidegger famously beheld the jug), it may delude us into thinking that it is a carrier of meaning in itself. So, by means of language, we have to gloss over things in their thingness in order to be able to use them for what they are: real objects bereaved of any ideality. Again, Wittgenstein’s dissolution of the relation “name–object,” his relieving language of the weight of things, may be interpreted by some as a postmodern opening to innovative, fluid uses of words, but it must nevertheless at all times be considered as a draconian attempt at prohibiting idealizations in language. From this perspective, Wittgenstein’s examples are unambiguous. Even though language games encompass singing rounds, guessing riddles, cracking a joke, and so forth, it is propositions such as “Hand me a slab!” that teach all the other uses how to understand the meaning of the word. The semantic reductions all point to the everyday applicability of utterances. It is most probably no coincidence that Wittgenstein never quoted jokes or aphorisms in Philosophical Investigations, even though he collected them throughout his life—because to understand the meaning of a joke or a bon mot, one has to possess a high sensitivity for the ideal productions of language.

33.

The Socratic method, to name only one counterexample, always sought to determine the final meaning of words which common sense used so indistinctly; and had it not been for this vagueness of multiple everyday uses, Plato would never have invented his method of creating the ideal meaning of words. That does not mean that Plato’s “definitions” were in any way definitive and irrevocable; but he did make explicit that trans-contextual idealizations of linguistic signs were an essential part of the truth process.

34.

Or, to quote from Philosophical Investigations, philosophy is not allowed to invent or discover anything new, but rather restore us to the rough ground of ordinary language: “Philosophy must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language, so it can in the end only describe it. / [. . .] / It leaves everything as it is” (PI 124).

35.

Any attempt to fixate truth merely opens new paths to motivate the effects of nontruth: “On the one hand, repetition is that without which there would be no truth. [. . .] But on the other hand, repetition is the very movement of nontruth.” Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London, New York: Continuum, 1981), 166.

36.

Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 136 (emphasis added).

37.

Derrida’s theory has no power of granting contextual immunity to idealities—and it is precisely this immunity that is the signature feature of more influential “events” of truth.

38.

Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., 148.

39.

The word is here used in a more Platonic sense, as the idealism of language productions, not in the early-modern sense of enclosing the world within the limits of a human consciousness.

40.

This is arguably the reason why the domains of the ethical, the esthetic, or even the existential are always afflicted with the aura of the impossible.

41.

Justice is a paradigmatic example of such an “undeconstructible,” as opposed to the deconstructibility of the law. Justice is never present, but nevertheless poses as a condition of possibility of law: “The undeconstructibility of justice also makes deconstruction possible.” Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law. The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Acts of Religion (New York, London: Routledge, 2001), 243.

42.

“I will call ‘ancestral’ any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species” (Meillassoux, After Finitude, 21).

43.

“In this regard, extinction unfolds in an ‘anterior posteriority’ which usurps the ‘future anteriority’ of human existence.” (Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 230.)

44.

One of the overt examples of this operation is Nietzsche’s highly intuitive, poetic, and spontaneous “aphoristic method.” His critique of metaphysics employed far more intricate strategies than just abolishing language and eradicating the human race. Rather, his technique consisted in detecting the preestablished metaphysical conceptual systems, isolating the supreme conceptual pairs structuring all those beneath, overthrowing their seemingly self-evident hierarchy (by inverting it and putting lie before truth, becoming before being, evil before good, war before peace, etc.), and thereby suddenly releasing the gaze onto the real which now appeared free from traditional symbolic discriminations.

45.

Note that we do not use the terms “real” and “ideal” in a Spinozistic fashion.

46.

Spinoza’s “true good” is what we call the “ideal good”; comment added.

47.

Baruch Spinoza, “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,” in Complete Works, 3.

48.

This elementary discursive paradox of Spinozism represents the focal point of Spinoza’s political philosophy as well. Since the prime imperative of his political theory is expressly freedom (freedom to philosophize, freedom of opinion, freedom of belief), it could be said that Spinoza propagated the very social order that would guarantee enough freedom for people to contemplate and advocate the refusal of the existence of free will. So, paradoxically, free will is an illusion that is maintained only by a social system of great unfreedom, whereas within the political system that allows freedom of thought, the illusion of free will becomes obsolete; hence, the order of the ideal and the order of the real enter a relation of disjunctive exclusion. After all, there was no other great philosopher before or after Spinoza who denied the existence of freedom more decisively, while also personally suffering more from being deprived of it.

49.

KSA 11, 23 (16), (translation mine).

50.

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” in Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 171.

51.

We proceed here from the narrowest possible definition of “aphorism,” not including paragraph essays that constituted Nietzsche’s All Too Human, but only the short maxims and pointed assertions that the French call bons mots and the Germans Sentenzen.

52.

“Even with humans, successful cases are always the exception and, since humans are the still undetermined animals, the infrequent exception.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 55–56).

53.

KSA 11, 25 (428), (translation mine).

54.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7.

55.

Borges’s short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is about a man who creates a new Don Quixote for the twentieth century. Yet his version coincides with that of Cervantes word for word. It is the new context, the new era, which makes the old text new and bestows it with new, infinitely richer meanings. Cervantes’s phrase “truth, whose mother is history” changes its sense completely, for “Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality.” [Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 53.] However, our sensitivity to the life of truth is altogether different and decidedly anti-postmodern: we claim that if a phrase is remarkable and striking enough, it is the context which must adapt and change in order to preserve the truth value of the aphorism. The greatest truths do not alter their meaning through time but make time alter, so that their meaning may remain the same.

56.

On the other hand, the aphorism triggers some other life of truth. A “truth,” in our view, always represents a certain congestion of meaning, it is a form of semantic inertia, so to speak. However, although it might be immune to particular contexts shifting its meaning directly, it also exposes its sentential surface to new variations. If, for instance, “man” himself were to become a newly fixed substance (if, for example, it was eventually in his power to exert total control over his genetic material, perfect his existence, and become “relatively immortal”), this new outlook could see the concept of “animal” slide into indeterminacy, and we might be inclined to say something like “The animal is the still unoptimized human.” But this does not constitute a deferral of meaning of Nietzsche’s statement—instead, it is a variation which retroactively stabilizes its main theme.

57.

At this point, it is too early to tell whether this matrix could be extrapolated to a “general theory of aphorism.” Our guess is that aphoristic magic always relies on an interplay between the idealization of a concept and a correlative de-symbolization of reality. An aphorism usually does not speak about things but about words; it rarely (or never) refers to a given fact but rather offers a re-definition of a word. However, with this hypostasis of the word, there unfolds a new dimension of meaninglessness to our gaze upon reality. It is perhaps this balancing act between exaltation and disillusionment that makes bons mots so thrillingly enjoyable. But we cannot pursue this matter any further here.

58.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 72.

59.

Translation mine. For a less word-to-word translation, see Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” 157.

60.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 116.

61.

KSA 11 (210), (translation mine).

62.

KSA 10 (211), (translation mine).

63.

Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” 161.

64.

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Anti-Christ,” in Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, 4.

65.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 116.

66.

Plato, “Lysis,” 220c, in Complete Works, 705.

67.

Augustine, “The Nature of the Good Against the Manichees,” in Earlier Writings, trans. J. H. S. Burleigh (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 326.

68.

Augustine, 327.

69.

Augustine, 327.

70.

Augustine, “Enchiridion III/11,” in Confessions and Enchiridion, trans. Albert Cook Outler (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1955), 342.

71.

Augustine, “Enchiridion III/11,” 343.

72.

Jeremy Bentham, “The Rationale of Reward,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. VII, Edinburgh 1839, 194.

73.

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 576.

74.

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 362.

75.

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 362.

76.

Or: “Thus, idealism will say, ‘The soul is neither just finite nor just infinite, but is essentially both the one and the other, and hence neither the one nor the other’” (Enz. I, § 28).

77.

Hegel does not expressly engage Kantian infinite judgments, such as “The soul is non-mortal,” but always prefers singular, affirmative judgments whose “infinity” will only flare up on the level of content.

78.

This is a short summary of the thesis developed in detail in the following book, published in the Slovene language: Jure Simoniti, Svet in njegov predikat II. Preizkušanje meja izrekljivega (The World and its Predicate II. Testing the Limits of the Utterable) (Ljubljana: DTP Analecta, 2014), 164–84.

79.

Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” 989a, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1563.

80.

Cited from Hermann Diels, Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Zürich: Weidmann, 1985) (referred to by Diels-Kranz numbering system; translation mine).

81.

Kirk and Raven conclude resignedly “Two things, then, have emerged from the present discussion: (i) ‘all things are water’ is not necessarily a reliable summary of Thales’ cosmological views; and (ii) even if we do accept Aristotle’s account [. . .], we have little idea of how things were felt to be essentially related to water.” [G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 93.] But the striking unfoundedness of Thales’s thesis is only problematic if we are to understand it within the frame of empirical rationality, if we assume that one always has to have reasons to claim this instead of that (i.e., that one always means something when saying something). However, we will presumably never understand Thales’s water, if we apply to it Davidson’s “principle of charity.” The original impetus of Thales’s thesis is more likely to be sententious than scientific and factual. The meaning of Thales’s adage may not lie in what he meant by it, but in the meaning he created, and the quantity of meaning of which he deprived the world. The magic of this “first theory of the Western world” resides not in its immediate reference to reality, but rather in its release of reality from the valuations of a certain cultural life form. Only secondarily can this reality become an object of a realist, scientific appropriation.