Philosophy has a faith that is particular to it. Laruelle claims that everything we call philosophy shares the same invariant structure as what he calls “decision.” The particularity of this faith is revealed by theorizing this decision and tracing the general practice of philosophy in its unrecognized piety. As we move toward a purely abstract or generic presentation of Philosophical Decision, I will introduce increasingly technical language before responding to some criticisms of Laruelle's theory. But before we descend into the technical details it may be useful to first anchor ourselves in the model that Laruelle uses when he presents the work of non-philosophy, claiming that it may be thought of as an apparatus or a machine, which in his latest work Laruelle compares to a particle collider.1 Standard philosophy is inserted into this apparatus and is worked upon. This processing of philosophy through the apparatus is what allows for the identity of philosophy to emerge or be seen. We shall start at the end and travel backwards. First we will turn to the summary of the results this apparatus provided and then look at the formal or generic structure which Laruelle constructed from this theoretical collider.
While each of Laruelle texts essentially starts from zero, there are certain texts where the greater emphasis is given to the identification of philosophical decision. Our main reference points will be Philosophies of Difference and Principles of Non-Philosophy, with supplements from other texts, like the Dictionary of Non-Philosophy (1998, and 2013 in English translation) which provides for us a summary of the findings of the theoretical inquiry into philosophy's identity:
Philosophy's principal and formalized invariant or structure: in accordance with philosophy, which does not indicate it without also simultaneously auto-affecting philosophy and affecting its own identity; in accordance with non-philosophy which this time gives Philosophical Decision a radical identity (of) structure or that determines it in-the-last-instance. Its synonyms: dyad and unity, amphibology, unity-of-contraries, mixture, blending – they are even likely to have a double usage, intra-philosophical and non-philosophical, which changes its sense. Philosophical Decision is a mixture of indecision and decision, never pure decision.2
Even in this general definition we see that Laruelle is attentive to the ways in which this decisional structure may manifest in a variety of ways, as he lists the various synonyms and recognizes that this decisional structure relies on a certain “amphibology” or structural inconsistency. We also see in this definition a recognition that there are at least two ways of reading the meaning of this structure, much in the way classical economics and Marxist economics are able to recognize the underlying structure of economics while their presentation of that structure varies greatly. For philosophy this recognition of a structure is a matter of speaking to philosophy's power, what it does, and why it matters that it does it. Whether it is an eliminativist philosophy that aims to cull certain manifest mythologies from the way in which we think, or it is a matter of a productive philosophy aiming to change the world, each philosopher finds a sufficient reason for their existence as a philosopher.
The supreme example of this confidence in philosophy is given voice perhaps most forcefully by Laruelle's contemporary, Alain Badiou. When asked about Laruelle's non-philosophy Badiou responded, “I have difficulty in understanding Laruelle [laughs] especially regarding the question of the Real. The strength of philosophy is its decisions in regards to the Real.”3 There is in that moment of laughter an expression of philosophy's supreme confidence, even if only in the promise of philosophy rather than its actuality since we know many philosophers are disillusioned with their work and the work of their colleagues, but still await something like a philosophical messiah (to bring to mind that double “end of philosophy” referenced in our introduction, according to which this messiah could be the fulfillment of philosophy's promise within philosophy itself or through a proliferation of other disciplines). Decision, with regard to philosophy, names the agon or contest of philosophy. It names the belief that there could emerge from the history of philosophical battle the right philosophy, and that philosophy may access this Real or what we might more colloquially refer to in English as the truth.
Non-Philosophy may be bold in its claim to have identified something invariant to philosophy, but its boldness comes from a refusal to attempt a circumscription of the Real or to provide any end or goal for thought at all. Non-Philosophy is in this way a kind of sobering up from philosophical drunkenness and its attendant harassment of the Real. Laruelle continues in the Dictionary of Non-Philosophy with his intervention, repeating to philosophy what it said the night before:
The Philosophical Decision is an operation of transcendence that believes (in a naive and hallucinatory way) in the possibility of a unitary discourse of the Real.…To philosophize is to decide on the Real and on thought, which ensues from it, that is to philosophize is to believe philosophy is able to align the Real and thought with the universal order of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (the Logos), but also more generally in accordance with the “total” or unitary order of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy.4
Philosophy has a faith in itself, it has its own driving myth.5 In relation to philosophical faith, non-philosophy acts similarly to the field of religious studies, especially as it emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the scientific study of the bible. Scholars like Ernest Renan and Ferdinand Christian Baur, building off the work of Spinoza and Erasmus, began to use new techniques in the study of Christian scriptures. In so doing they treated that scripture like one object among others, equal in the sense that it too could be subjected to this sort of critical inquiry. Non-Philosophy comes to philosophy – every philosophy – as something that claims a certain sufficiency, much like some religious communities look to scriptures or dogmas as having sufficiency in their disclosure of truth, and non-philosophy then treats that philosophy as something subject to critical inquiry.
The unity given to the world by either Christian scripture/dogma or philosophy is not truly sufficient. It is not rooted in some timeless essence. But, as those scholars of biblical literature showed with regard to scripture and as Laruelle shows with regard to philosophy, they developed contingently and did so radically. Everything that takes place in philosophy is grounded upon radical contingency.6 It could be otherwise. The committed biblical inerrantist counts his blessings that he was not born an aboriginal, and the philosopher praises the achievement of Plato. But it would be absurd, it would be pure theodicy or naturdicy, to think there was a reason the Christian was born in Indianapolis or Sheffield or that the name of Plato survived but that of some forgotten African thinker did not. And so, when the philosopher comes along and declares to the neophyte, “choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15), the non-philosopher refuses for there is simply no sufficient reason to choose: “there is no reason to ‘choose’ Heidegger rather than Nietzsche or vice versa.”7 To continue with the example of Heidegger(–Derrida) and Nietzsche(–Deleuze) that Laruelle explores at length in his Philosophies of Difference, there is no reason to choose because it is already a forced choice. It all depends from the start how difference is posed (in the case of these philosophies of difference), for in that initial posing or positioning by the philosopher the choice is already made.
The choice does not need to be made, however, when one realizes that there is no reason to absolutely pose or position difference or any other philosophical elemental as “everything” or “the All”: “To perceive the sheer expanse of this model [the invariant structure of philosophy], one must go back to the canonical enunciation: Everything is (Water Earth, Fire, etc.).”8 The history of philosophy is the history of the debates over such choices because philosophy is itself rooted in absolute contingency (a rejection of the principle of sufficient reason made by Laruelle decades before Meillassoux made such a move popular amongst some in Continental philosophy). It is because of this absolute contingency that philosophy turns to decision.9 Absolute contingency is as close as Laruelle comes to a positive description of the One, which often appears to take the form of a kind of apophaticism or “un-saying,” but the One is not the object of his analysis. Indeed, his point will be that philosophizing about the One (or Real, as he uses these terms largely interchangeably, depending upon context) is precisely what philosophy does. Since non-philosophy is a science of philosophy, it wants to investigate that act of philosophizing rather than the One itself (which is un-representable and thus foreclosed to such speculation). Laruelle then looks to what lies beneath philosophy's choice itself, the choice that allows for the manifestation of all philosophy's positions and, ultimately, the way in which both forms of philosophy work in terms of continuing to be productive of thought despite their seemingly mutually exclusive claims.10 What underlies it is what Laruelle calls the One in its radical immanence – no reflection need be done and no choice can be made, for the One is indifferent to all of its effects, to all the various philosophies that manifest from it. Thus the point is to model thought from the One, rather than aiming to think the One. The point is simply not to play the philosophical game at all, not to suspend some decision in favor of another, but to be indifferent to every form of the decision.
Here we come to an element of non-philosophy not often acknowledged in its early Anglophone reception – and when it was acknowledged it was often denigrated. For what underlies all philosophical decisions, claims Laruelle, is the human in its finitude and radical immanence. This is the abyssal ground of all philosophy for Laruelle: the human. It is important that we understand this is not a philosophy of the human, nor a denial that intelligence is found elsewhere (as he also explores animal life and artificial intelligence), but that the lived (reality) of the human is purely contingent and it is out of the human contingency that human thought comes:11
But measured against the finite or “individual” man who precedes philosophical decision, who affects it with stronger contingency, there is neither more nor less absurdity in one choice than in another, but an equal absurdity, an equal absence of sufficient reason for the choice, an “absence” that is the true “sufficient reason” of philosophical decision and of the war philosophical decision wages against itself. We must posit the equivalence of philosophical decisions.12
As we can see here, the human is indeed the measure of philosophy for Laruelle, but it would be a mistake to confuse this with anthropocentrism. The radical immanence of the human takes the same status as the radical immanence of the Real and the One (equivalent terms in Laruelle's work). As such there can be no philosophy of the human, or even from the human, that would provide the measure of all things. Anthropocentrism is yet another philosophical decision that must be made equivalent to others and which finds its very ground in the human.
This is not a moralism, either. Making these philosophical decisions equivalent is not simply making them equivalent as “bad” or “evil.” The point of offering this critique of philosophy is not to finally indict philosophy, to bring it to trial for some crime against humanity that arises out of its invariant structure. They are made equivalent simply as relative – or, to speak more precisely, they are made equivalent as material. Laruelle wants to do something with philosophy, not choose one philosophy over the other. Non-Philosophy is therefore not a moralism, but a pragmatic.
Any attempt to do something with some material requires that we develop some kind of general understanding of that material. And crucially – and this bears repeating because of its importance – philosophy is cast as material by non-philosophy. We have already followed much of the shape of that general understanding in this chapter through a discussion of philosophy as having a faith that is particular to it – a faith that says it can affect everything through its particularity. Like most faiths, this particular philosophical faith is rooted in a practice. That practice is the focus of this section, as we trace the structure of Philosophical Decision.
The most technical explication in English of Laruelle's theory of the Philosophical Decision has been Brassier's in Nihil Unbound. There he presents a largely synthetic reconstruction of Laruelle's understanding of Decision. Brassier focuses on the mixture of transcendence and immanence in philosophy. In this mixture there is an initial separation of the empirical/immanent and a priori/transcendent, of datum and factum, that are then “gathered together” and united again under some absolute transcendental authority (Descartes' “I think,” Kant's faculties, Husserl's ego). This transcendental authority is ultimately thought as some reified empirical thing and so the final moment of unification is one where the conditioned and the unconditioned are “mixed” and shown to co-constitute one another. This final moment, in Brassier's reconstruction, is said to be a second form of immanence, but one that is transcendentally represented. It is this whole process, taken to expose the transcendental conditions for being, that is coextensive with philosophy and leads to the delusion that philosophy is thereby co-constituting of the Real. For Brassier this means that Laruelle understands every philosophical decision to be recapitulation of the formal structure of Kant's transcendental deduction.13
Brassier's reading, as has already been said, is a very powerful reconstruction of Laruelle's theory of Philosophical Decision, which is presented in a number of places in different ways according to the philosophical material that is at play. However, Brassier's focus on the Kantian form of Decision allows him to overstate certain elements and thereby present a less formal understanding of the structure than he could. This is because his reading depends in large part upon Laruelle's essay “The Transcendental Method,” which focuses on this Kantian element and the post-Kantian trajectory of the German Idealists and phenomenologists (Hegel, Fichte, Husserl, and Michel Henry in particular). The essay is particularly useful for Brassier's reading since he presents Laruelle as a corrective to certain problems he finds in Meillassoux's project while wanting to retain certain elements of his philosophy. Laruelle appears to have a certain fit with Meillassoux as he appears to diagnose correlationism in this 1989 essay.14 And, indeed, in that essay Laruelle marks an equivalence between transcendence and decision writing: “not every philosophy can be called transcendental, but the transcendental inheres in every philosophy…For philosophy is always a decision or a transcendence.”15 Brassier's reading is largely faithful to Laruelle's own theory and should remain useful for students attempting to work through the difficulty of that theory. However, Brassier's engagement with Laruelle was always in the service of Brassier's own project (and rightly so, since Brassier was not producing a history of philosophy or a secondary work on Laruelle) and so his presentation of the theory of Decision leaves out aspects that may also be important and useful for other projects.
With regard to “The Transcendental Method,” this general form of philosophy plays out specifically with regard to factum and datum. This specificity makes sense when Laruelle is focusing upon the transcendental form of European philosophy, though conceivably other terms may be inserted into the general protocol and produce a different analysis of the actuality of that particular philosophical form. Laruelle suggests this plasticity in the same essay. “The Transcendental Method” largely focuses on the way the transcendental plays out in Kant and Husserl (these being names that index what he calls the “major tradition”), but also explores the way in which this major tradition contains elements exploited by a “minor tradition” (indexed by the names of Fichte, the early Schelling, and Henry). This minor tradition is also said to push the boundaries or functioning of decision itself, again suggesting a certain plasticity not emphasized in Brassier's reading.
Laruelle is more general than Brassier when he writes: “To philosophize is thus to circulate, or to circulate-in-half: ‘to turn.’…Always the same mechanism: first the dyad or decision that divides/doubles – with more or less undivided distance and positivity in distance – then its reprise and reposition in a synthetic and systematic unity, and finally the ‘transcendental’ return to the empirical dyad.”16 And Laruelle shows later on in Principles of Non-Philosophy how this general shape may be given precise shape by different determining materials. As Principles of Non-Philosophy focuses upon post-Kantian idealism and phenomenology (whose proponents, following the argument of Jean-Luc Marion, include Descartes), we find him again using the material of Kant here as he sketches out five layers of determination whereby Philosophical Decision may be seen as akin to Kant's table of judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason.17 These five determinations are: essence of the form of Philosophical Decision; essence of the contents of Philosophical Decision; the two possible conditions for the existence of Philosophical Decision; the specific a prioris that arise from these two dimensions; the terms that individuate these essences and exist with the a prioris he identifies.18 These are presented as material or “layers” from which Philosophical Decision emerges and we will now examine each in turn.
The singular use of the term is of course familiar to readers of Kant and post-Kantian philosophy as referring to what comes before experience in the structure of rational thought. Laruelle's own plural use of the term is derived in part from this use, but also derives from Foucault's own pluralizing in The Order of Things where these a prioris are not taken to be ahistorical, but structure certain historical epistemological stances. Foucault summarizes this understanding of a prioris clearly when he writes:
all [inquiries of a philosophical and scientific nature] rested upon a sort of historical a priori, which authorized them in their dispersion and in their singular and divergent projects, and rendered equally possible all the differences of opinion of which they were the source.…This a priori is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man's everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to be true.23
While Laruelle's non-philosophical analysis does not historicize philosophy, it does relativize it and so is able to identify the elements of philosophy that must structure it prior to the philosophical act in a way parallel to Foucault's own historicizing.
Returning then to Kant's table of judgments, let us unpack these a prioris before then developing how they help us to see philosophy in this newly relativized way. We see in Laruelle's sketching of the table that auto- or self-givenness and auto- or self-position each has three a prioris that correspond to three different forms of givenness. These three forms of givenness may circulate amongst one another in various ways in the works of various philosophers. The first form of givenness is what Laruelle calls an “empirico-regional” sort. This refers to a term like “life” raised to the status of a “real transcendence” that philosophy identifies with, as is the case of Henry in his phenomenology of life. The a priori attached to this form of givenness is “affection.” The second form of givenness is that of the discourse of philosophy itself in relation to all possible experience. Philosophy here is an ahistorical Idea that is receptive to all possible experience, and accordingly the a priori attached to it is given the name “reception.” The third form of givenness emerges from the divided nature of the preceding two, where some givenness is needed to unify the philosophical act, and the a priori attached is called “intuition.” Students of the history of European philosophy will be familiar with these terms as they circulate in German Idealism and phenomenology, and Laruelle explicitly draws upon these traditions here.
Since Decision is always structured by a dyad, the three a prioris of auto-givenness find a second corollary set of three a prioris attached to auto-position. For Laruelle, position is simply “the objectification of philosophy itself”24 – that is, the way in which philosophy understands philosophy to be positioned in the world and with regard to itself. He identifies three moments attached to the three a prioris. The first moment of position is to locate philosophy as exterior to its object, and the a priori attached here is “transcendence.” The second moment of position is that of philosophy's foundation or basis, and the attached a priori takes the name of “plane.” The third moment of position is again the dyad produced by the preceding two, and it takes the a priori name of “unity.” Laruelle's claim is that these a prioris can be located in individual philosophies as structuring their work. In his examinations of those philosophies these a prioris are surfaced and shown to be operative.
The reader may indeed be a bit bewildered by the abstraction of Laruelle's sketching of his theory here, but the phenomenological detail with which he unpacks his theory witnesses to a genuinely rigorous theory. This theory is beyond its caricature as something akin to a moral condemnation of philosophy or a declaration of the end of philosophy. The style that Laruelle pursues in developing this theory in Principles of Non-Philosophy is borrowed from Kant and phenomenology, though now the object under consideration is not cognition or Being, but philosophy itself. Each layer of Philosophical Decision developed is a tracing of the structure out of which philosophy emerges. If philosophy is, as Brassier claims, “an intellectual practice with a complex material history” and simply “what philosophers do,” then the layers of Philosophical Decision are the structure of that practice, history, and doing.27 While each individual practice of philosophy, each historical instantiation of philosophy, and each particular philosopher may be different, that difference is caught and constrained by the structure of Decision, according to Laruelle. Take, for example, the difference between philosophies of transcendence or philosophies of immanence, which in recent decades have been the focus of a seemingly grounding antagonism within the history of philosophy due in part to the important influence of Gilles Deleuze. Laruelle sees the difference between these to be minimal. Concerning this difference he writes:
The most universal invariant trait of philosophy is a fractional matrix in 2/3 terms: it gives itself an interiority and an exteriority, an immanence and a transcendence simultaneously, in a synthetic or hierarchal structure, the one overcoming the other in turn. This matrix of “Philosophical Decision” can be read as the identity of a double relation of philosophy to itself. First, an identity of 2/3 (insofar as the third term, synthesis, is immanent to the dyad, philosophy being in need of itself). Second, a 3/2 identity (insofar as the term of synthesis is transcendent to the dyad, philosophy being in excess of itself).28
This minimal difference means that within philosophy and even from a relative distance outside philosophy, the difference matters a great deal, but from a stance of indifference toward philosophy (within or outside) the difference is still constrained by the general structure. Regarding this indifference, remember that Laruelle locates a major and minor tradition in transcendental philosophy whereby the minor tradition constitutes a philosophy that pushes the structure to its limit. This matters in terms of the forms of philosophy that non-philosophy will take as useful for its own practice. If non-philosophy aims to produce a radical form of thought, then it will need to do so using tools amenable to such retrofitting.
Returning to the general structure from which individual philosophies emerge, we see that it is a structure of circulation of philosophy itself. From the layers discussed above come three major terms that circulate. These terms may be beings, Being, and Dasein, where Dasein comes to be dominated by the Being that exceeds it as in Heidegger, or the actual, virtual, and real as in Deleuze. The process of dualysis that Laruelle develops as a way of analyzing various instances of Philosophical Decision is a method of untangling these terms and specifying their function within each instance. We can see how that dualysis may play out using these two examples, though we will use them only in an extremely abbreviated way. The purpose here is simply to point toward examples of what this may look like, while fully developing such a dualysis would require delving into their texts with more depth and rigor. In Heidegger, there is a scission between beings (empirical) and Being itself (transcendent) that is synthesized in an immanent way by Dasein, as the being that has Being as its fundamental concern. In Deleuze, the virtual and the actual are both held together within the real (breaking the old dualism of the possible and the real), but the actual emerges from the process of virtualization that forms the plane of immanence.
Scholars of Heidegger and scholars of Deleuze undoubtedly would quibble with the terms “empirical” or “transcendental” applied to Heidegger's and Deleuze's specific terms, especially since Laruelle's non-philosophy may be understood as challenging or moving outside of these historical philosophical positions, but these terms still serve to loosely map their work into the general structure of philosophy. Thus the point is not to denigrate their work or to show that Heidegger or Deleuze is really an empiricist or a transcendental philosopher. That sort of counter-reading is the typical philosophical move made by philosophers in their readings of the history of philosophy, including Heidegger and Deleuze when they write on their forebears. Rather the purpose of mapping them using these terms is to identify the internal functioning of their philosophy as philosophy and to rework its functioning or connect up its functioning with other disciplinary functions to produce different theoretical results rather than another instance of Decision.
Turning to another summary of Philosophical Decision, we can begin to see how non-philosophy's own practice emerges from a mutation of this decisional structure in an analogous way to the emergence of non-Euclidean geometry. Non-Euclidean geometry does not emerge from a negation of Euclidean geometry, but it emerges from a generalization of Euclidean geometry. We can see this generalization of philosophy's decisional structure when Laruelle writes, “We will say that Philosophical Decision is the Idea of a relative-absolute whole. Its most encompassing and least detailed mechanism can in effect be described – and we have done so here and there – as a structure in 2/3 terms, as a Dyad + One, as an empirico-transcendental mixture, a quasi-circular and topological doublet, etc.”29 Here the meaning of the 2/3 or 3/2 becomes clearer. In the structure of Philosophical Decision there is always a dyad – like the beings/Being dyad in Heidegger – and some kind of synthesis taken as One. In the case of Heidegger, it is Dasein, the lived (reality) of the human that carries forth both its existence as an empirical human being and concern or awareness of transcendent Being. Following in part Michel Henry's reading and redirection of Heidegger's fundamental ontology, we may see in Dasein not simply a synthesis that would be dividable again so that Dasein comes ultimately to be subject to the Being that exceeds Dasein, but a radical immanence of being/Beings. Laruelle thus shifts philosophy to non-philosophy by thinking from these instances of the One, with a studied indifference to the dyads of philosophy, treating these instead as effects of the One that may be useful but are not determinant of the One.
In order to truly understand Laruelle's theory of Philosophical Decision, we must also consider a major criticism of it that has been presented. In a debate between Laruelle and Derrida, it was claimed that there is a reductive violence done to philosophy in Laruelle's theory of philosophical decision, a kind of terrorism practiced upon its body.30 This view is shared by Brassier. For Brassier the claim to have uncovered the invariant structure of philosophy is the source of non-philosophy's fruitlessness and its inability to spawn anything but mystagogy. For his part, Brassier attempts to recast Laruelle's non-philosophy in the mold of philosophy through a focus on determination-in-the-last-instance as a powerful form of philosophical negation, while excising the tumor of Laruelle's theory of Philosophical Decision.31 Yet, as Part I will show in outline, Laruelle's project is both a “science of philosophy” (its critical and negative mode as found in the theory of Philosophical Decision) and a “philo-fiction” (its constructive mode as found in the construction of various new theories). The theory of Philosophical Decision is the science of philosophy in condensed form. To excise it is to mutilate the body of non-philosophy beyond recognition and to break the very apparatus that allows Laruelle to construct a concept like determination-in-the-last-instance. For, ultimately, the two aspects of non-philosophy are one. They are not separated in any meaningful sense. Non-Philosophy is generic in this way.
To help us unpack this generic nature of non-philosophy, let us look more closely at Brassier's criticism so as to have it as a background from which our image of non-philosophy may emerge. Brassier begins with a criticism of Laruelle's insistence that when one writes of philosophy one does so with the definite article: la philosophie. Thus every philosophy is a Philosophy-with-a-capital-P, as we might emphasize it in English, following Robin Mackay's translation. This is how we may speak of philosophy “in general” – or, as Alexander Galloway calls it, the standard model of philosophy.32 However, Brassier seems to think that this single remark is the same as Laruelle's entire argument regarding the invariant structure of philosophy. In my estimation Brassier is wrong. While in English we do not need the definite article to speak of philosophy, there is still a sense that to discuss philosophy generally is to discuss philosophy as such. It would then have some kind of identity. For Brassier, though, this identity (which has a technical sense for Laruelle) is a search for an ideal essence: “Thus Laruelle's insistence on identifying the essence of la philosophie over and above any listing of all those things which are named ‘philosophy’ seems as misguided as would be the attempt to define the essence of le sport over and above a list of all those activities which we happen to call ‘sport.’ ”33
This is a weak criticism, since even what gets defined as sport would indeed take on a certain identity. Outside the deployment of metaphor, one would not call the writing activity I am currently engaged with “sport.” To invoke the phenomenological tradition that Brassier utterly maligns, we get to the identity of sport through what Husserl called “eidetic variation” or getting to the essence of a thing by allowing its many ways of appearing to appear.34 Sport may appear in many ways, but for Husserl one may get to the invariant essence or idea of sport through the perception of that variation and, perhaps more importantly, its limits. Thus, there may be some structural overlap between Halo (the popular first-person shooter video game) and football, but there is enough of a structural difference that the way in which they appear is different enough for us to need to distinguish them if we hope to provide any kind of meaningful analysis. Husserl's concept of “eidetic variation” is a familiar phenomenological tool that shares much in common with the way in which Laruelle's own science of philosophy works. While Brassier asserts that “the claim decisional auto-position embodies the essence of philosophy saddles Laruelle with an intolerable burden” of going, philosophy by philosophy, and showing its structure, the claim is actually ridiculous as it would imply that in order to speak of sport one would have to go, individual player by individual player, to show that there was something called “sport.”35 Laruelle and Brassier are not playing out the usual realist versus nominalist game here: for Laruelle the existence of transcendentals and particulars that are so important in those philosophical debates is a simple material with which to do something. Thus, while our earlier reference to Husserl might suggest to some readers that Laruelle is a kind of Platonist in the way Husserl was (and so anti-nominalist), it is rather that, in taking on the posture of science (to be explained in more detail in chapter 4), Laruelle acts pragmatically in his identifications, rather than with a concern for metaphysical sufficiency or determination.
Brassier, despite attempting to create a materialist and realist philosophy, deploys his nominalist argument when he writes, “What we call ‘philosophy’ is an intellectual practice with a complex material history, and even though its register of abstraction distinguishes it from others, only idealists like Heidegger have sought to exalt it above all other activities by imbuing it with a perennial and abyssal ‘essence’ whose epochal unfolding is deemed capable of determining the course of history.”36 The claims here are difficult to parse, since on the one hand philosophy is beyond the sort of identification Laruelle claims to perform, and yet Brassier still is willing to distinguish it from other intellectual practices on the basis of its “register of abstraction.” Assumedly such a register would be invariant in some sense, even if only temporally local to some particular philosophical epoch. But this is merely a continuation of the obfuscation of what Laruelle is doing in his identification of philosophy, and the attempt to associate him with the idealist philosophy of someone like Heidegger, thereby sullying him, does not cover that obfuscation. For Laruelle the invariant character of decision does not determine history in any straightforward sense. This would be to assume that history is real in the sense that Laruelle intends this term (a theme we will turn to in chapter 6). Rather, the focus on the identity of philosophy is precisely attuned to the material structure of its practice, which in turn precisely impoverishes and brings low Philosophy-with-a-capital-P rather than exulting it in some Heideggerian salute to authenticity.
Laruelle clearly derives some of his understanding of the history of philosophy from Heidegger's own. However, Laruelle's relationship to Heidegger's philosophy is almost uniformly antagonistic from his earliest writing. Heidegger develops a Eurocentric vision of philosophy as being born in Greece and coming to adulthood in Germany. The political and ethical consequences of this narrative are not inconsequential and should not be downplayed as some readers have tried to do regarding his allegiance to Nazism and anti-Semitism. Laruelle's understanding of this history differs greatly from Heidegger's. While Heidegger remains Eurocentric and while Laruelle refers to the “Occidental” character of philosophy, the overall framework and evaluation diverge completely. Heidegger sees philosophy as a universal element of human life and, by virtue of its being born in Europe, he values the human life of Europeans more for carrying the child of philosophy into the future. Insofar as philosophy may spread throughout the world – to Japan, for example (the site where some of his work was taken up in serious ways by the Kyoto School) – it does so through a kind of transcendental form of Europe that spreads to other cultures and changes them.37 In his transformation of philosophy into simple material, Laruelle does not understand philosophy as “universal” in the usual sense. When he speaks to the Occidental character of philosophy, he speaks to the particularity of philosophy, the recognition that (European) philosophers' claims to universality in their philosophy are false and constitute a kind of harassment of human beings denied the status of “human.” To generalize philosophy is then to disempower its internal Eurocentrism and to make it a material that can be taken up outside of the European colonialism that philosophy has served for centuries, even in its radical forms.38
Some readers could accuse me here of misunderstanding Brassier's criticism, since he in fact goes on to claim that Laruelle conflates this invariant identity of philosophy with the idea that it can be embodied by individual philosophers:
Thus Laruelle conflates the defensible claim that Plato, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche exemplify what is most profound in philosophy with the indefensible idealist claim that they embody its essence. This is like claiming that great sportsmen [sic] not only exemplify certain physical and mental prowess, but also embody the essence of sport. So when Laruelle declares that “philosophy itself” has told him that it is an auto-affecting whole, one can only respond that “philosophy itself” never speaks, since it is a figment; only philosophers speak – even and especially those philosophers who claim philosophy itself speaks through them.39
It is difficult to adjudicate Brassier's claims here, since in the midst of this accusation he cites no text that would show Laruelle making this claim that “philosophy itself” speaks in some particularly egregious way. As when certain commentators do claim that a particular athlete embodies the essence of sport, it seems perfectly reasonable that Laruelle would make such a poetic use of language.
At the same time, to understand Laruelle on individual philosophers requires that we concede that certain names index the constellation of texts, claims, and indeed material practices of the individual philosopher and those who may attempt to expand their work. Thus we may speak of Marx-the-philosopher, but the name-of-Marx also indexes a number of texts and readings of texts that are simply not reducible to the individual life of Karl Marx as he lived it. We will explore this question of subjectivity throughout the book, but this further probing into Brassier's criticism and the demonstration of its ultimate confusion should be enough for us to begin to see the reasonableness behind claiming that there is something like philosophy as a kind of infrastructure for thinking that determines – or, more accurately, “overdetermines,” in the usual and technical sense we will explore later – the human practice of thought as such.
Understanding this – human thought – as the scope of the project of non-philosophy may open Laruelle to charges of hubris, but it is the very hubris of philosophy that Laruelle aims to disempower and weaken with his theory of Philosophical Decision. For while non-philosophy aims to be a science of philosophy, and thus of those bordering regional knowledges infected and modified by their spontaneous forms of philosophy, philosophy itself claims to provide the very conditions for thinking the Real as such. Since the reader may not yet be familiar with the meaning behind this term for Laruelle, we may state the claim in this way: philosophy believes itself to be sufficient unto itself to know and change whatever it comes into contact with. While this aspect of decision runs deep through the practices of every aspect of Western philosophy, this identification akin to eidetic variation does not claim that every individual work of the philosopher = X (Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Russell, Derrida, Deleuze, or even the Churchlands) manifests the essence of philosophy, but that when those philosophers act in ways that are non-philosophical those acts are overdetermined by that overarching philosophical structure of decision and they are alienated from those intellectual products by that overdetermining decisional structure. Laruelle himself indicates as much in his own attempt at a succinct definition of Philosophical Decision: “Philosophical Decision is a mixture of indecision and decision, never pure decision.”40
Allow me to summarize then the argument against the criticism voiced by Brassier (it is a criticism shared by others, but Brassier presents it the most seriously and fully, and so we index it generally with his name). Brassier's main claim is that Laruelle's theory of Philosophical Decision is too broad, and this broadness commits him to either an idealism (the ultimate sin for a materialist philosopher) or an infinite task of demonstrating this decisional structure within each person who takes the title “philosopher.” This infinite task would be required if Brassier is correct in his claim that there is no essence of philosophy, and that philosophy is only what emerges from a complex material history. There is thus no invariant philosophy, only certain ways of doing philosophy and we may follow Brassier in adjudicating which are true and which are not through deference and compliance to what the sciences tell us the nature of reality is.
This is not the place to present criticism of Brassier's scientistic ideology that underpins the quasi-religious nihilism of Nihil Unbound. But it is necessary for our response to this criticism to point out that Laruelle and Brassier have wildly different understandings of science and the importance of science for any theoretical undertaking. Brassier makes special reference to the empirical findings of a particular science – namely cosmology and its prophetic modeling of the heat death of the universe – which he takes to act as a universal acid for any philosophy of meaning. Brassier also makes reference to other particular sciences, specifically in their eliminativist and deflationary modes as what might challenge philosophies of subjectivity or mind, since some scientists claim there is no evidence for a substantial self underlying processes of the brain and other biological processes. The point here is not that such appeals are wrong, but that the appeal is to the empirical aspect of the sciences and not their essence of identity as identical with the “immanental” practice of science.41
It is too easy to point out that there is a contradiction in Brassier's reasoning here – because, on the one hand, appeals to particular empirical claims by particular sciences manifest universal validity in philosophical claims like “we are dead already”; and, on the other hand, Brassier claims that Laruelle goes too far when he argues that there is something generic to philosophy's practice. Furthermore, from the philosophical perspective of materialism, it is true of everything, including the sciences, that they are produced by complex material histories. Even from the non-philosophical perspective, it would be true that there is no sufficient reason for something to be what it is, as Laruelle affirms the radical finitude and contingency of the emergence of philosophy. This philosophical claim that everything develops (either in itself or in the way it is understood) is true of all objects of scientific inquiry. Science, like philosophy, has an essence or identity that is also radically contingent and but an effect of the One (explored in the next chapter).42 Insofar as non-philosophy aims to be a science of philosophy and takes the same scientific posture or stance toward philosophy as other sciences do for their particular objects, then non-philosophy is able to model a structure or tendency within those material processes.
The power of science is that it is able to model these generic structures, without any necessary claim to determination, structure, or mixture with that object. In those cases where the subject observing does impact understanding of the object or the object itself, the particular science takes this as a single phenomenon – or as at least a single material problem – to engage.43 It does not in either case claim final sufficiency of its knowledge over the unrepresentable (the One or the Real) but only claims to be a particular practice. Those well-known examples when a particular scientist does begin to claim sufficiency – as in the case of some popular science or those scientists acting as public intellectuals – begin to embody a certain philosophical subject position as they pass from the actual practice of their science to (often disappointingly weak) philosophical practice. Laruelle has simply taken the common scientific practice of speaking about something in general and attempted to sketch out the actual structure of that generic nature, which we will now turn to.
Many may reasonably approach Laruelle's non-philosophy with suspicion, wondering how in fact he supports the broad claim that there is an identity to philosophy that non-philosophy uncovers as the science of philosophy. However, hopefully the preceding at least opens up the possibility of such an identification akin to the ways in which science, in neither a philosophically realist nor nominalist way, pragmatically identifies and distinguishes all manner of things without thereby claiming to have destroyed them, negated them, or even spoken the final word regarding them (in this way phenomenology, for all the ways in which it is maligned, is closer to science than contemporary “speculative realists”). With that openness in place, we will turn now to tracing the actual conception of decision as Laruelle lays it out in his work. As Laruelle “reprises the same problems ‘from zero,’ ” we do not focus on a single text, but construct a kind of kaleidoscopic view by engaging with a range of texts on the decision. Readers should understand that, while non-philosophy certainly can be cast linearly, there is a remarkable consistency to the way in which the theory is presented.44
If we now see Brassier oscillating between realism and nominalism, the purpose is not to show how Laruelle decides finally on the correct way forward.45 Laruelle flat out refuses to play the game of asking whether the true philosophy is philosophy X or philosophy Y. That game is all too typical of philosophy as such. The aim of non-philosophy is instead to locate what is generic to both realism and nominalism (and any philosophy = X). Being made equivalent, in the sense of expressing the identity of philosophy, is what transforms the hallucinated vision of philosophy into a simple material, one thing amongst others liable to be used by human beings.
Now, at the end of our exploration of the Philosophical Decision, we can see the ways in which it allows one to cast philosophy as material that may be worked with, rather than a kind of quasi-divine discipline of knowledge. Marking one last return to Brassier's criticism, we can certainly admit that Laruelle's description of this structure owes much to the tradition of philosophy running from Plato through Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, to contemporary French philosophers like Derrida and Deleuze. We have also seen, however, that while the overall sense of decision remains consistent, there is a multitude of ways for that consistency to manifest itself. So if someone wanted to use the non-philosophical method to investigate the practice of the neurophilosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland, to take the case that Brassier identifies as a limit to non-philosophy, its description would necessarily change due to the change in particularity. Laruelle's point regarding this structure of philosophy is not to negate philosophy, but to relativize it. Laruelle does not deny in his work that there are philosophical elements running throughout other regional knowledges. This is in part an example of the power of philosophy. Laruelle's critique of philosophy is carried out so as to disempower certain authoritarian aspects of philosophy in favor of unleashing and recasting philosophical concepts in new ways. This positive project is what we now turn to.