Introduction

A mortal must think mortal and not immortal thoughts.

Epicharmus, Fragment 20*

Procedure and Object

The attempt to discuss Husserl′s pure phenomenology in the spirit of the dialectic risks the initial suspicion of caprice. Husserl′s programme deals with a ′sphere of being of absolute origins′,¹ safe from that ′regulated, methodically cultivated spirit of contradiction′, which Hegel once called his procedure in conversations with Goethe.² The dialectic, as Hegel conceived it and which was later turned against him, is, however congenial, qualitatively different from the positive philosophies, among which in the name of the system his is included. Though Hegel′s logic, like Kant′s, may be ′fastened′ to the transcendental subject, and be completed (vollkommener) Idealism, yet it refers beyond itself – as does everything complete according to Goethe′s dialectical dictum. The power of the uncontradictable, which Hegel wields like no other – and whose force later bourgeois philosophy, including Husserl′s, only gropingly and in fragments rediscovered for itself – is the power of contradiction. This power turns against itself and against the idea of absolute knowledge. Thought, by actively beholding, rediscovers itself in every entity, without tolerating any restrictions. It breaches, as just such a restriction, the requirement to establish a fixed ultimate to all its determinations. It thus also undermines the primacy of the system and its own content.

The Hegelian system must indeed presuppose subject–object identity, and thus the very primacy of spirit which it seeks to prove. But as it unfolds concretely, it confutes the identity which it attributes to the whole. What is antithetically developed, however, is not, as one would no doubt currently have it, the structure of being in itself, but rather antagonistic society. For it is no coincidence that all the stages of the Phenomenology of Spirit – which appears as self-movement on the part of the concept – refer to the stages of antagonistic society. What is compelling about both the dialectic and the system and is inseparable from their character of immanence or ′logicality′, is made to approximate real compulsion by their own principle of identity. Thought submits to the real compulsion of societal debt relations and, deluded, claims this compulsion as its own. Its closed circle brings about the unbroken illusion of the natural and, in the end, the metaphysical illusion of being. Dialectic, however, constantly brings this appearance back to nothing.

In the face of this, Husserl appealed to the end, in the name of his serried complete presentation of phenomenology, to that Cartesian illusion which applies to the absolute foundations of philosophy. He would like to revive prima philosophia by means of reflection on a spirit divested of every trace of the entity pure and simple. The metaphysical conception which characterized the beginning of the era appeared in the end as most exceedingly sublimated and disabused. As a result, however, it just appeared all the more unavoidable and consistent, naked and bare: The development of a doctrine of being under the conditions of nominalism and the reduction of concepts to the thinking subject. But this phenomenological conception just rejects dialectical analysis and Hegel′s negativity as the enemy. The doctrine that everything is mediated, even supporting immediacy, is irreconcilable with the urge to ′reduction′³ and is stigmatized as logical nonsense. Hegel′s scepticism about the choice of an absolutely first (absolut Ersten), as the doubt-free and certain point of departure for philosophy, is supposed to amount to casting philosophy into the abyss. In the schools deriving from Husserl this theme quickly enough turned against all labour and effort of the concept, and thus bore the brunt of inhibiting thought in the middle of thinking.

Whoever does not let himself be intimidated by this, seems from the outset to miss his measure. He seems to pander to the fruitless transcendent critique which repays the empty claim to an overarching ′standpoint′ with being non-binding and with the fact that it never did enter into the controversy, but prejudged it ′from above′, as Husserl would have said.

Immanent Critique

Yet Husserl′s methodological objection remains far too formal in regard to the dialectic, which utterly refuses to be committed to the distinction between matter and method. Dialectic′s very procedure is immanent critique. It does not so much oppose phenomenology with a position or ′model′ external and alien to phenomenology, as it pushes the phenomenological model, with the latter′s own force, to where the latter cannot afford to go. Dialectic exacts the truth from it through the confession of its own untruth.

Genuine refutation must penetrate the power of the opponent and meet him on the ground of his strength; the case is not won by attacking him somewhere else and defeating him where he is not.⁴

The contradiction in the idea of an ontology gained from an historically irrevocable nominalism is evident to a consciousness armed against academic consensus. This contradiction is that there should be found, openly or disguised, a doctrine of being disposed before all subjectivity and lifted above its critique, but with reference back to that very subjectivity which had denied the doctrine of being as dogmatic. The thought of dialectic, however, does not leave this contradiction abstract, but uses it as the motor of conceptual movement to the binding decision concerning what has been phenomenologically asserted. No stratum can be uncovered as the authentic first with the hammer of original being from under the constituents of pure phenomenology. And the phenomenological claim cannot thereby be somewhere surpassed. Rather, ostensible originary concepts – in particular those of epistemology, as they are presented in Husserl – are totally and necessarily mediated in themselves, or – to use the accepted scientific term – ′laden with presuppositions′.

The concept of the absolutely first must itself come under critique. Were it to turn out that the givenness with which epistemology deals, postulates the mechanism of reification, while in philosophy of immanence, to which that term belongs, reified existence refers back to the structure of the given, it does not reciprocally follow that the reified has primacy over the given. Indeed the hierarchical schema of supporting first and what is derived from it rather loses validity. Any attempt to pass justification on to a privileged category gets entangled in antinomy. This is expressed in immanent method by the analysis of the reified running into the given and vice versa. That, however, is no objection to a procedure which does not appropriate the norm of reducibility, just against the method which obeys the canon of such reducibility. If critique of the first does not seek to set off in quest of the absolutely first (Allerersten), then it must not plead against phenomenology what the latter and many of its successors have in mind, namely providing an immanent philosophical foundation for transcendent being. The issue is the very concept and legitimacy of such a foundation and not the content thesis, however constantly it may change, of what the final ground may be. The character of philosophical compulsion must be broken by taking it strictly and calling it by name. No other newer and yet older constraint (Bann) should be devised in its place.

Mediating the First

An emphatic use of the concept of the first itself is implied in the fact that the content of what is asserted as first is less essential than the question of the first as such, and that perchance the conflict over dialectical or ontological beginnings – whether to begin with a first principle at all, that of being or spirit – remains irrelevant before the critique of representation. That use lies in the identity hypothesis. Everything should just arise out of the principle which is taken as the philosophically first, regardless of whether this principle is called being or thought, subject or object, essence or facticity. The first of the philosophers makes a total claim: It is unmediated and immediate. In order to satisfy their own concept, mediations would always just be accounted for as practically addenda to thought and peeled off the first which is irreducible in itself.

But every principle which philosophy can reflect upon as its first must be universal, unless philosophy wants to be exposed to its contingency. And every universal principle of a first, even that of facticity in radical empiricism, contains abstraction within it. Even empiricism could not claim an individual entity here and now or fact as first, but rather only the principle of the factical in general. The first and immediate is always, as a concept, mediated and thus not the first. Nothing immediate or factical, in which the philosophical thought seeks to escape mediation through itself, is allotted to thinking reflection in any other way than through thoughts.

This was both noted and explained by the pre-Socratic metaphysics of being in Parmenides′ verse that thought and being are the same. And thus certainly the genuinely Eleatic doctrine of being as absolute was already denied. With the principle of νοεĩν, that reflection was thrust into the process which had to destroy the pure identity of εἶvα ı though remaining confined to it as the most abstract concept, the ineradicable opposite of the most abstract thought.

The criteria which have been bestowed on the ′true being′ of things are the criteria of non-being, of nothingness; the ′true world′ has been constructed out of contradiction into the actual world: indeed an apparent world, insofar as it is merely a moral–optical illusion.⁵

All ontology ever since was idealistic.⁶ It was idealistic at first unknowingly, then for itself as well, and finally against the despairing will of theoretical reflection, which wants as an in-itself to break out of the self-established realm of spirit into the in-itself. In contrast, the distinctions, which sustain the official history of philosophy, including that of the psychological and the transcendental, pale into irrelevance.

Husserl′s sincerity conceded that in the Cartesian Meditations. Yet he constantly reiterates that even pure descriptive psychology is in no sense transcendental phenomenology, despite the strict parallelism between the two disciplines.

To be sure, pure psychology of consciousness is a precise parallel to transcendental phenomenology of consciousness. Nevertheless the two must at first be kept strictly separate, since failure to distinguish them, which is characteristic of transcendental psychologism, makes a genuine philosophy impossible.⁷

But what is at issue are the nuances. This admission weighs all the heavier in that Husserl himself must furnish the criterion that allowed the contrast between the pure ego which in the end he promoted, the homeland of the transcendental, and the immanence of consciousness in traditional scientific style. In the latter the data of consciousness could be a part of the world – existence (Dasein)– but not in the former. But to the question as to what else they may be, he imparts the information ′actuality phenomena′.⁸ Non-existent (ohne Dasein) phenomena can, however, hardly be in question.

Mathematicization

Since the philosophical first must always already contain everything, spirit confiscates what is unlike itself and makes it the same, its property. Spirit inventories it. Nothing may slip through the net. The principle must guarantee completeness.

The accountability of the stock becomes axiomatic. Availability establishes the bond between philosophy and mathematics that has lasted ever since Plato amalgamated both the Eleatic and the Heraclitean tradition with that of the Pythagoreans. His later doctrine that Ideas are numbers is no simple orgy of exotic speculation. One may almost always read off what is central from the eccentricities in thought. The metaphysics of numbers exemplarily effects the hypostasis of order with which spirit so thoroughly weaves a cover over dominated things, until it seems as though the fabric were itself what is concealed. Socrates in Plato′s middle period already feels it ′necessary to take refuge in concepts, and use them in trying to investigate the true essence of things′.⁹

But the thicker the veil before spirit, the more reified spirit, as master, itself becomes – as occurs with numbers. In the concept of the first already belongs in the number series. Wherever a πϱώτον and becomes thematic in the concept of being in Aristotelian metaphysics, number and computability are also thought. In itself the first already belongs in the number series. Wherever a πϱώτον is discussed, a δεύτεϱον must present itself and let itself be counted. Even the Eleatic concept of the supposedly isolated One is comprehensible only in its relation to the Many that it negates. We object to the second part of Parmenides′ poem on account of its incompatibility with the thesis of the One. Yet without the Idea of the Many, that of the One could never be specified. In numbers is reflected the opposition of organizing and retentive spirit to what it faces. First spirit reduces it to indeterminacy, in order to make it the same as itself, and then determines it as the Many. Of course, spirit does not yet say it is identical with or reducible back to itself. But the two are already similar. As a set of unities the Many forfeits its particular qualities till it reveals itself as the abstract repetition of the abstract centre.

The difficulty of defining the concept of number arises from the fact that its peculiar essence is the mechanism of concept construction, which must then help in defining number. Concepts themselves involve subsumption and thus contain numerical ratio. Numbers are an arrangement for making the non-identical, dubbed ′the Many′, commensurable with the subject, the model of unity. They bring the manifold of experience to its abstraction. The Many mediates between logical consciousness as unity and the chaos which the world becomes as soon as the former confronts the latter. If, however, unity is already contained in the Many in itself as the element without which the Many cannot be considered, then conversely the One demands the idea of counting and plurality. Surely the thought of plurality has not yet restored what the subject faces to unity through synthesis. The idea of the unity of the world belongs to a later stage, that of the philosophy of identity. The continuity of the number series, however, remained since Plato the model of all continuous systems and of their claim to completeness. The Cartesian rule, respected by all philosophy which presents itself as science, not to skip intermediate steps, can already be inferred from it. In dogmatic anticipation of later philosophical identity claims, it already imprints a uniformity on what is to be thought, though it is uncertain whether continuity actually belongs there. The identity of spirit with itself and the subsequent synthetic unity of apperception, is projected on things by the method alone, and thus becomes more ruthless as it tries to be more sober and stringent.

That is the original sin of prima philosophia. Just in order to enforce continuity and completeness, it must eliminate everything which does not fit from whatever it judges. The poverty of philosophical systematics which in the end reduces philosophical systems to a bogey, is not at first a sign of their decay, but is rather teleologically posited by the procedure itself, which in Plato already demanded without opposition that virtue must be demonstrable through reduction to its schema, like a geometrical figure.¹⁰

Concept of Method

Plato′s authority, as well as the inculcation of mathematical habits of thought as the only kind which are binding, hardly permit one to become fully conscious of the monstrousness of the fact that a concrete social category, like that of virtue – which was expressly located by Gorgias in a social context, namely that of lordship¹¹ – should in such a way be reduced to its skeleton as if that were its essence. In the triumph of mathematics as in every triumph resounds, as in the oracles′ decree, something of mythical mockery: Whoever heeds it has already forgotten the best. Mathematics is tautology also by the limitation of its total dominance to what it itself has already prepared and formed. In the Meno Socrates′ desideratum that virtue be reduced to its unchangeable but also abstract features, extracted from Gorgias′ context, is expressed as self-evident and thus unfounded and dogmatic – indeed without opposition. And this is perhaps not without reason, for the monstrousness can thus be obfuscated.

But this desideratum, which can still be detected behind every analysis of meaning in pure phenomenology, is already the methodological desideratum in the pregnant sense of a mode of procedure of spirit, which can always be reliably and constantly used because it divests itself of any relation to things, i.e. the object of knowledge – a relation which Plato still wanted to be held in respect.¹² Such a concept of method is one of self-implication and of recourse to the self-mastering subject, the as yet unconscious preliminary form of epistemology. It was hardly ever more than reflection of method. Yet it completes a pattern which belongs constitutively to the concept of a πϱώτη φιλοσοφία. Since this cannot be represented as other than methodical, so method, the regulated ′way′, is always the law-like consequence of a successor to something earlier. Methodical thinking also demands a first, so that the way does not break off and end up being arbitrary. For it was devised against that. The procedure was so planned from the beginning that nothing outside its sequence of stages could disturb it. Hence the imperviousness of method to everything from Cartesian doubt right up to Heidegger′s respectful destruction of the philosophical legacy. Only specific and never absolute doubt has ever become dangerous to the ideologists. Absolute doubt joins of itself in the parade through the goal of method, which is once again to be produced out of method itself. This corresponds in Husserl′s epistemology to the distinction between the ἑποχή and sophistry or scepticism.¹³ Doubt simply shifts judgement to preparing for assuming the vindication of pre-critical consciousness scientifically in secret sympathy with conventional sensibility (Menschenverstand).

At the same time, however, method must constantly do violence to unfamiliar things, though it exists only so that they may be known. It must model the other after itself. This is the original contradiction in the construction of freedom from contradiction in the philosophy of origins. The τέλος of cognition which, as methodical, is protected from aberration, autarchic and takes itself to be unconditioned, is pure logical identity. But it thereby substitutes itself for things as the absolute. Without the act of violence of method, society and spirit, substructure and superstructure would have hardly been possible. And that subsequently grants it the irresistibility which metaphysics reflects back as trans-subjective being. The philosophy of origins, which as method first matured the very idea of truth, was also, however, originally a Its thought paused for breath only in moments of historical hiatus such as that between the relaxation of the force of scholasticism and the beginning of the new bourgeois-scientific impulse. In Montaigne, e.g., the timid freedom of the thinking subject is bound to scepticism about the omnipotence of method, namely science.¹⁴

Socially, however, the split of method from things in its constitution appears as the split between mental (geistiger) and physical labour. In the work process the universality of the advance of method was the fruit of specialization. Spirit, which has been narrowed to a special function, misunderstands itself as absolute, for the sake of its peculiar privilege.

The break in Parmenides′ poem is already a sign of the discrepancy between method and matter (Sache), although a concept of method is still missing. The absurdity of two sorts of truth, which enter unmediated beside one another, though one of them is supposed to be mere appearance, flagrantly expresses the absurdity of the earliest manifestations of ′rationalization′. Truth, being and unity, the highest Eleatic terms, are pure determinations of thought and Parmenides recognizes them as such. They are also, however – as he and his successors still conceal – instructions as to how to think, viz. ′method′. Natorp′s a-historical neo-Kantianism had a better grasp of this aspect of ancient philosophy than the far too respectful immersion in its archaic venerability. Things confront both methodical procedure and Parmenides′ original utterances as just disturbing content. They are a simple fraud which method rejects. Parmenides′ δόξα is the surplus of the world of sense over thought; only thought is true being. It is not so much that the pre-Socratics authentically pose original questions which have grown dumb through the guilt of later desecration. Rather, in them and even Plato the break and alienation are expressed purely and undisguisedly. That is their value, one of thoughts which have not yet veiled the unholy to which they give witness. The advancing ratio, however, has as an advancing mediation ever more ingeniously hidden that break without ever coming to master it. Thus it continually strengthened the untruth of the origin. Plato′s doctrine of χωϱισμός already thought both spheres together, as opposed to the yawning and conceptually unrestricted contradiction of the Eleatics, though in their glaring contradiction. This was a first mediation before all μέθεξις, and Plato′s later work, like all of Aristotle′s, strives strenuously to fill the gap. For while this is built into philosophies of origin as their proper condition, yet they cannot possibly tolerate it. It admonishes them of their impossibility in that their objectivity is derived from subjective arbitrariness. Their inclusiveness is the break.

Hence the fanatical intolerance of the method and its total arbitrariness, against any arbitrariness as deviation. Its subjectivity sets up the law of objectivity. The lordship of spirit believes only itself to be without bounds. As regained unity, however, it merely assures disunion. It is truly an absolute, the appearance of reconciliation, disattached from that to which it was to be reconciled, and in such absoluteness all the more an image of the hopeless debit structure. Indeed the continuous texture, which spirit nevertheless cannot do without, inflicts disaster on philosophies of origin, and also takes the condition of their freedom from them. The process of demythologization, which spirit merging into second mythology undergoes, reveals the untruth of the very idea of the first. The first must become ever more abstract to the philosophy of origin. The more abstract it becomes, the less it comes to explain and the less fitting it is as a foundation. To be completely consistent, the first immediately approaches analytic judgements into which it would like to transform the world. It approaches tautology and says in the end nothing at all. The idea of the first consumes itself in its development, and that is its truth, which would not have been gained without the philosophy of the first.

Promoting the Subject

By furnishing the principle from which all being proceeds, the subject promotes itself. Thus little has changed from Husserl back to the market cries and self-publicity of those pre-Socratics who, like unemployed medicine men, roam around and whose dishonesty echoes in Plato′s rage against the Sophists. Husserl′s writings are full of wonder for the ′prodigious expanses′¹⁵ which open up to him. In the Cartesian Meditations he says, ′A science whose peculiar nature is unprecedented comes into our field of vision′¹⁶ or

Once we have laid hold of the phenomenological task of describing consciousness concretely, veritable infinities of facts – never explored prior to phenomenology – become disclosed.¹⁷

Heidegger strikes the same note in his pronunciamento that being is ′the most unique of all′.¹⁸ Since long ago the spokesman for prima philosophia has beat his breast as he who has everything in the bag and knows all. He makes a claim to sovereignty over the many (which he binds to himself through scorn) such as Plato still acknowledged as part of a demand for philosopher kings. Even at its highest level, viz. Hegel′s doctrine of absolute knowledge, prima philosophia has not been cured of this. Hegel just let slip what otherwise poor sages mostly kept to themselves, i.e. that philosophy itself is true being. Plato, on the other hand, was contented, outside of utopia, with reserving a favourable place for philosophers in immortality.¹⁹ The open or secret pomp and the totally unobvious need for absolute spiritual security – for why, indeed, should the playful luck of spirit be diminished by the risk of error? – are the reflex to real powerlessness and insecurity. They are the self-deafening roar through positivity of those who neither contribute to the real reproduction of life nor actually participate in its real mastery. As middlemen, they only commend and sell to the master his means of lordship, spirit objectified (versachlicht) into method. What they do not have they want at least in the mirage of their own domain, that of spirit. Irrefutability replaces mastery for them and merges with the service which they in fact carry out, their contribution to the mastery of nature. Punishment immediately overtakes their subjectivism, deluded from the very beginning, for its restrictiveness. For the sake of mastery, subjectivism must master and negate itself. Just to avoid mistake – since that is how they promote themselves – they abase themselves and at best would like to eliminate themselves. They use their subjectivity to subtract the subject from truth and their idea of objectivity is as a residue. All prima philosophia up to Heidegger′s claims about ′destruction′²⁰ was essentially a theory of residue. Truth is supposed to be the leftover, the dregs, the most thoroughly insipid. The content of even Husserl′s phenomenological residuum is utterly meagre and empty and is convicted of that as soon as philosophy, as in the sociological excurses of the Cartesian Meditations, ²¹ ventures the slightest step to free itself from the prison of the residuum and return to free life.

For philosophia perennis behaves towards undiminished experience as do Unitarians towards religion, and culture to what it neutralized concept administers. Huxley is ironically correct when he passes thinkers in review and picks out his philosophia perennis from what they have in common. The resulting flimsy quintessence extracts what had already been implied, where true being was pathetically awarded for the first time to the general concept. Only in freedom is spirit capable of filling and reconciling itself with what it let go. An element of uncertainty comes over spirit whenever it does not descend to mere protestation. Freedom itself is never given and constantly menaced. The absolutely certain as such, however, is always unfreedom. The requirement to indulge in certainty works, like all compulsion, at its own destruction. Under the banner of doubt-free certainty the scientific spirit obliterates all doubt-free certainty.

But that does not upset the leading idea of something left over. The absolutist Husserl, who wishes to methodically extract the ′phenomenological residuum′,²² shares that idea and even its terminology with raging nominalists and relativists like Pareto, who contrasts residues and derivatives.²³

The most divergent tendencies of traditional theory²⁴ are agreed that, in accord with the practice of natural science, whatever conceals pure things, viz. ′interfering factors′, should be eliminated. Such factors, however, are a constant subjective supplement in things. But the more fundamentally the operation is carried through, the more compellingly it leads to pure thoughts and thus to the very humans it strives to eliminate. The path to freedom from anthropomorphism, which first philosophy enters under the standard of demythologization, leads to the apotheosis of as a second mythology. Not least because it was reminiscent of psychology, did proud philosophy since Husserl reject psychology. Dread of psychology leads philosophy in quest of the residuum to sacrifice everything for which it exists. What innocent parsons in distant provinces may still preach – namely that infinity is worth no more than a penny – is implied in all prima philosophia, not least of all that of Max Scheler who so thoroughly despised the petite bourgeoisie. But, since Plato hypostatized eternal ideas, the fact that the temporal has ensconced from metaphysics, and the residua of the temporal been reified, is due to metaphysics thriving in deficiency, the continual fear of forfeiting the insignificant. Metaphysics disconcertedly constructs its infinity along the lines of the temporal, viz. property relations constructed by men and which, alienated, rule over them. Husserl′s programme of philosophy as a rigorous science and its idea of absolute security are no exception. His Cartesianism builds fences around whatever prima philosophia believes it holds the title deeds of the invariable and a priori for, i.e. around what (in the French of the Cartesian Meditations) ′m′est spécifiquement propre, à moi ego′.²⁵ Thus prima philosophia itself becomes property. Accordingly, prima philosophia is unaware of the function of invariants for cognition and whether it is dealing with something essential or indifferent. Thus Husserl expects a healthy reform of psychology in the construction of an intentional, i.e. pure a priori psychology, without discussing whether, in the richness of its insight, empirical and certainly not unvarying psychology furnishes much more than the other which can be fearless because it risks nothing.

Persistence as Truth

With the imposition of the persisting (das Bleibende) as the true, the onset of truth becomes the onset of deception. It is a fallacy that what persists is truer than what perishes. The order, which remodels the world into disposable property, is passed off as the world itself. The invariance of the concept, which would not be unless the temporal determinacy of what is grasped under concepts were ignored, is confused with the unchangeability of being in itself.

The grotesque manœuvre of that phenomenological practitioner* who deals with what is called the problem of immortality in his jargon, by unblushingly acknowledging the destruction of every soul, but then consoling himself because the pure concept of every such soul, its individual εἶδος, is incorruptible – this helpless trick brings to light simply through its clumsiness what is hidden in the cavernous depths of great speculation.

Heraclitus, whom Hegel and Nietzsche both praised,²⁶ had already compared essence and the past. Ever since the first authentic formulation of the theory of Ideas,²⁷ the past has always been ascribed to appearance, the kingdom of δόξα and illusion. Infinity was reserved for essence. Only Nietzsche protested.

The other idiosyncrasy of the philosophers is no less dangerous; it consists in confusing the last and the first. They place that which comes at the end – unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all! – namely, the ′highest concepts′, which means the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last smoke of evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning. This again is nothing but their way of showing reverence: the higher may not grow out of the lower, may not have grown at all. Moral: whatever is of the first rank must be causa sui. Origin out of something else is considered an objection, a questioning of value. All the highest concepts, the entity, the unconditional, the good, the true, the perfect – all these cannot have become and must therefore be causa sui. All these, moreover, cannot be unlike each other or in contradiction to each other…. That which is last, thinnest, and emptiest is put first, as cause in itself, as ens realissimum. ²⁸

But what Nietzsche views as the sacrilege of ′sick web-spinners′²⁹ that, for the sake of life, never should have ′come about′, was perpetrated with the wildness of life itself. The calamity which he explains out of that πϱώτον ψευδος as a sickness of spirit, arises from real lordship. Victory was codified by the victor setting himself up as better. After a successful act of violence, the subjugated should believe that what survives has more right on its side than what perishes. The dues the survivor has to pay for this, namely that thought transfigures him into truth, is his own life. He must be dead in order to be consecrated to infinity.

You ask me which of the philosophers′ traits are really idiosyncrasies? For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeterni – when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies: nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honourable idolaters of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections – even refutations. Whatever is does not become; whatever becomes is not. Now they all believe, desperately even, in the entity. But since they never grasp it, they seek for reasons why it is kept from them.³⁰

But at the same time Nietzsche undervalued what he saw through. Thus he stayed in a contradiction out of which the self-reflection of thought still has to emerge.

Formerly, alteration, change, any becoming at all, were taken as proof of mere appearance, as an indication that there must be something which led us astray. Today, conversely, precisely insofar as the prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being, we see ourselves caught in error, compelled into error. So certain are we, on the basis of rigorous examination, that this is where the error lies.³¹

The metaphysics of the persisting draws its epistemological foundation from the constancy of the thing over its appearances. So the enlightened critique which Nietzsche revives (for it is in essence Hume′s) disintegrated the hypostasis of the thing set up by that metaphysics. But even that cannot succeed without a hitch. Opposing the solid to the chaotic and mastering nature would never succeed without a moment of solidity in the subjugated. Or else it would constantly expose the subject as a lie. Just sceptically disputing that moment as a whole and localizing it in the subject, is no less subjective hubris than the absolutization of the schemata of conceptual order. In both cases subject and object are already congealed in ὐποxείμενον. Sheer chaos, from which reflective spirit disqualifies the world for the sake of its own total power, is just as much spirit′s product as the cosmos which it establishes to revere.

The Elementary

Philosophical concepts represent the solid and supporting as the elementary. It should be simpler than what is supported – something even Descartes never doubted. But since the ὐποxείμενον is truer than that which is raised above it, primitiveness and truth are brought together.

That is perhaps the most disastrous consequence of the assumption of immediacy, with which the subject desperately deceives itself about itself as mediation. A tendency to regression, a hatred of the complicated, is steadily at work in theory of origins, thus guaranteeing its affinity with lordship. Progress and demythologization have neither exposed nor extinguished this tendency, but rather have let it appear even more crassly wherever possible. The enemy, the other, the non-identical is always also what is distinguished and differentiated from the subject′s universality. Philosophers have defamed it wherever reflection behaves radically and with obvious vigour, from Plato′s curse against ostensibly effeminate musical keys to Heidegger′s invective against ′idle talk′ (Gerede). Ever since they began to question what was at the beginning, the act which cuts the Gordian knot lay on their lips. Even Hegel warded off that tendency of traditional philosophy with the motif of the nullity of the individuated. To its greater glory, the pure concept abuses the more highly developed individual as impure and decay. No progress of scientific and philosophical rationality without such retrenchment.

Totalitarian systems have not contrived that saying out of the historical nowhere, but rather brutually executed what ideology for thousands of years had prepared spiritually as the lordship of spirit. The word ′elementary′, however, includes both the scientifically simple and the mythologically original. The equivocation is as little an accident as most. Fascism sought to actualize philosophy of origins. The oldest, what has existed the longest, should immediately and literally rule. Hence the first′s inclination to usurpation lurches glaringly into the light. Blood and earth, the original forces which the fascists concretized, and which in industrial society are entirely chimerical, became child′s play even in Hitler′s Germany. The identity of originality and lordship came down to whoever had the power being presumably not just the first, but also the original. Absolute identity as a political programme turns into absolute ideology which no one any longer believes.

The Regressive

First philosophy has in no sense been pure lordship. Its initial goal is liberation from the context of nature, and rationality has never entirely given up the memory of autonomy and its acualization. But as soon as it was absolutized, it almost constantly approached the feared dissolution. The philosophy of origins – which through self-consistency, the flight before the conditioned, turns to the subject and pure identity – also fears that it will lose itself in the determinacy of the purely subjective, which, as isolated moment, has precisely never reached pure identity and bears its defect as well as its opposite. Great philosophy has not escaped this antinomy. Thought, which regards itself as the ground of being, is always on the point of prohibiting itself as a disturbing factor in being. Even idealistic speculation has only apparently transgressed this prohibition, that is, so to speak, desubjectivized the subject. The self-concealed abstraction mechanism immanently inclines to the same ontology as it works against. By dint of this tendency, troubled philosophy of origins has fled from subjective reflection back into Platonism and must also strive despairingly to reduce such recidivism to a common denominator with the irrevocable subjective-critical motif.

That goes back to Kant. He wished to both refute the conclusion of the first as immediacy and to verify the first in the form of the constituens. He liquidated the question of being, and yet taught prima philosophia, ′foundationalism′ in every respect. Even Hegel′s heroic struggles against this were ineffective. Subject-object was still disguised subject.

The problem of being today does not stand before us once again, free from the ruins of millennia, as authentic in the face of such transcendental subjectivity – though the apologists of this question would like that. Rather, its absolute in-itself is merely absolute delusion about its own subjective mediacy, which is immanent to the question of being itself. The movement of thought which aims at knowledge of origins announces its own bankruptcy with its both dogmatic and empty positing of being. It celebrates origin at the expense of knowledge.

The irrationality, in which the philosophically absolutized ratio perishes, confesses to the arbitrariness of whatever seeks to eliminate the arbitrary. It does so not just in talk about existential projects but already in Husserl, who decreed that phenomenological reductions should produce his ′sphere of being of absolute origins′, as if their execution were arbitrary. This is, in express contradiction to the concept of obligation (Nötigung) from Kantian ethics, for example, and Kant′s derivation of the Copernican revolution as altogether necessary and needed by reason for mastering those contradictions in which reason is no less necessarily entangled. Today the more total the claim of ontology, which stretches out to mythos over all reflective thought, the more dependent it becomes on mere ′attitude′ (Einstellung), which in Husserl functions as practically an existential of cognition.

While such philosophizing straightforwardly emulates mathematics in its handling of the so-called constitution problem, since mathematics can proceed arbitrarily, in the name of the most rigorous stringency, and posit and vary manifolds at will, the arbitrariness of the absolute soon fulfils its political function. The form of total philosophy is appropriate to the total state in that it links the arbitrariness of speech, in which the necessity of words vanishes, with the dictatorial command of unprotesting recognition. Authority and usurpation return to being immediately one.

Philosophy of Origins and Epistemology

The philosophy of origins took shape scientifically as epistemology. The latter wished to raise the absolutely first to the absolutely certain by reflecting on the subject – not to be excluded from any concept of the first. But the drive to identity is also strengthened in the course of such reflection. Thoughts – which are no longer, in Husserl′s words, ′straightforwardly′ (geradehin) executed, but rather turned back upon themselves – seal themselves off more and more from whatever does not emanate from them and their jurisdiction, the immanence of the subject. The fact that in immanence the world is produced, or rather the validity of judgements about the world is verified, is to begin with no more problematic than judgement unconcerned with mediation. So it was only very gradually established as a principle in the progress of reflection.

Arbitrariness, the complement of compulsion, already lurks in the assumption that such a recourse is the sufficient condition of truth, even though it be motivated step by step by scientific contemplation. Epistemology falls into this arbitrariness by its own process. The qualification of the absolutely first in subjective immanence founders because immanence can never completely disentangle the moment of non-identity within itself, and because subjectivity, the organ of reflection, clashes with the idea of an absolutely first as pure immediacy. Though the idea of philosophy of origins aims monistically at pure identity, subjective immanence, in which the absolutely first wishes to remain with itself undisturbed, will not let itself be reduced to that pure identity with itself. What Husserl calls the ′original foundation′ (Urstiftung) of transcendental subjectivity is also an original lie. Hence immanence itself is constantly being polarized into subjective and objective moments in epistemological analysis. Emil Lask showed quite emphatically how that was so. Husserl′s noeticonoematic structure is likewise one of dualistic immanence, though that did not make him conscious of the contradiction thereby perpetuated.

The return of subject and object within subjectivity and the duality of the one is detailed in two types of epistemology, each of which lives on the unrealizability of the other. These fall roughly into the rationalist and empiricist sort. As complementary enemies, they are not so radically distinguished in their internal structure and their conclusions as traditional history of philosophy suggests. The metacritique of epistemology should deal with both. Empiricism has never defended as conclusively as rationalism and its idealistic successors the idea of the absolutely first and absolute identity. It seems less entangled and thus abandons itself with far diminished energy to the process which leads through entanglement up to the bounds of the qualifications of immanence itself. Thought capitulates into empiricism too early and with too little resistance. By humbly deferring to sheer existence, thought fails to come to grips with it and thus abandons the moment of freedom and spontaneity.

Logically consistent critical and self-reflective thought grasps, in the very jurisdiction of immanence, incomparably more about essence – viz. about the life process of society – than a procedure that resigns itself to registering facts, and really lays down its arms before even beginning. Though empiricism as an epistemology tracks down the conditions of all knowledge in factical-psychological consciousness which it regards as an underlying principle, this consciousness and what is given in it could always be different, according to empirical ground rules. Such consciousness contradicts the idea of the first which is nevertheless the only motivation for analysis of consciousness, even the empiricist analysis of the ′human understanding′,* as philosophical method. The isolated subjective antipode within consciousness, however, or ′spirit′, which withdraws from the isolated objective encounterability of the entity or the ′given′, thus withdraws from determination just as much as its opposite. Both spirit and its ′actions′ defy analysis. It does not let itself be established in the way that epistemology as scientific method should demand, while what can be established itself is already formed according to the model of that facticity to which spirit should present the antipode. But spirit can as little be separated from the given as the given from spirit. Neither is a first. Since both are essentially mediated by one another, both are equally unsuitable as original principles. Were one of them to want to discover the original principle itself in such mediacy (Vermitteltsein), then it would confuse a relational with a substantial concept and reclaim the flatus vocis as origin.

Mediacy is not a positive assertion about being but rather a directive to cognition not to comfort itself with such positivity. It is really the demand to arbitrate dialetic concretely. Expressed as a universal principle, mediacy, just as in Hegel, always amounts to spirit. If it turns into positivity, it becomes untrue. Mastering such aporia is the perennial effort of epistemologies, though none will succeed. Every one of them stands under Anaximander′s curse, whose philosophy of being was one of the earliest but practically prophesied the coming destiny of them all.

The metacritique of epistemology requires constructive reflection upon its structure as one of guilt and punishment (Schuld und Strafe), necessary error and futile correction. With growing demythologization, philosophical concepts become ever more spiritual and more mythical. The Introduction to Hegel′s Phenomenology of Spirit and its hitherto unredeemed programme anticipates something of that need. Certainly the immanent critique of epistemology itself is not exempt from the dialectic. While philosophy of immanence – the equivocation between logical and epistemological immanence indicates a central structure – can only be ruptured immanently, i.e. in confrontation with its own untruth, its immanence itself is untruth. Immanent critique must transcendently know of this untruth just to begin. Hegel′s Phenomenology corresponds to this by both passively following the movement of the concept and actively directing this movement, thus transforming the object.

The concept of immanence sets the limits on immanent critique. If an assertion is measured by its presuppositions, then the procedure is immanent, i.e. it obeys formal-logical rules and thought becomes a criterion of itself. But it is not decided as a necessity of thought in the analysis of the concept of being that not all being is consciousness. The inclusiveness of such an analysis is rather thereby halted. To think non-thinking (Nichtdenken) is not a seamless consequence of thought. It simply suspends claims to totality on the part of thought. Immanence, however, in the sense of that equivocation of conscious and logical immanence, is nothing other than such totality. Dialectic negates both together. Epistemology is true as long as it accounts for the impossibility of its own beginning and lets itself be driven at every stage by its inadequacy to the things themselves. It is, however, untrue in the pretension that success is at hand and that states-of-affairs would ever simply correspond to its constructions and aporetic concepts. In other words, it is untrue according to the measure of scientificity which is its own.

That the critique of such untruth may itself remain imprisoned in the abstractions which it undoes, as a superfluous concern of the erudite, cannot be maintained after the materialistic dialectic, whose aim is to stand the philosophy of consciousness on its head, degenerates to the same dogmatics and dispatches philosophy of consciousness by sheer decree, without ever having confronted the logic of the matter. Before that succeeds, idealism will rise easily from the dead.

System and Debit

Despite its static-descriptive tenor and apparent reluctance to speculate, Husserl′s epistemology is also roped into a debit structure. Its very system resembles, in modern terms, a credit system. Its concepts form a constellation in which everyone must redeem the liabilities of another, even though the presentation conceals the litigation pending between them. Husserlian expressions like fulfilment (Erfüllung) – i.e. of a contract; evidence – judicial exhibits; judgement – of a trial – all unwittingly construe epistemology analogously to a legal contest. In the end, the similarity grows even stronger at every possible locus through archaizing supplements from the language of law, such as ′demesne′ (Domäne), and ′endowment′ (Stiftung). *

The most enlightened epistemology still participates in the myth of the first in the figure of a contract which is never fulfilled and therefore in itself endless, self-repeating without respite. Its metacritique presents it with its promissory note and forces from it the external insight, gained from society, that equivalence is not truth and that a fair trade-off is not justice. The real life process of society is not something sociologically smuggled into philosophy through associates. It is rather the core of the contents of logic itself.

Opposing Forces in Epistemology

Epistemology, the quest for the pure realization of the principle of identity through seamless reduction to subjective immanence, turns, despite itself, into the medium of non-identity. As advancing demythologization, it does not simply consolidate the jurisdiction of the concept, purified of everything heterogeneous, but rather also works at breaking through that jurisdiction. Its posthumous realization and the writing of its inner history is the true awakening. Individual epistemological conditions are thus not absolutely false – they become that only when they seek absolute truth – but neither are they concerned with states-of-affairs. Each of them is necessitated only by the demand for non-contradiction. What must be eliminated is the illusion that this non-contradictoriness, the totality of consciousness, is the world, and not the self-contemplation of knowledge. The last thing the critique of epistemology – whose canon is the mediacy of the concept – is supposed to do is proclaim unmediated objectivism. That is the job of contemporary ontologies or the thought bureaucrats of the Eastern bloc.

Criticizing epistemology also means … retaining it. It must be confronted with its own claim to being absolute, be it Kantian and its question of how metaphysics as science is possible, or Husserl′s ideal of philosophy as rigorous science. The usurpation of universality which epistemology perpetrates also requires that the universality of thought be satisfied. This implies the disintegration of the privilege on which the philosophical spirit has survived by ascribing universality to itself. Cognition, which measures itself by the ideal of universality, can no longer be monopolized by the medicine men and sages who compel it. Wisdom is just as anachronistic as – according to Valéry′s insight – virtue. The more consistent the procedures of epistemology, the less it expands. Thus it prepares the end of the fetishism of knowledge. The fetishizing spirit becomes its own enemy. And this has seldom been as penetrating or prototypical as in Husserl. If philosophy of immanence codifies the ὒβϱις of spirit that wants to be everything, then it has precisely already discovered the moment of reflection and mediation. And thus it has also determined both knowledge as labour and the bearer of knowledge, the logical-general subject, as society. Every concept of dialectic would be null without the moment of subjective reflection. What is not reflected in itself does not know contradiction. And the perversion of dialectical materialism into the state religion of Russia and a positive ideology is theoretically based on the defamation of that element as idealistic.

Though philosophy of immanence may, with reason, tend to lapse into dogma, ontology or replica realism, it does also develop the antidote. Idealism was the first to make clear that the reality in which men live is not unvarying and independent of them. Its shape is human and even absolutely extra-human nature is mediated through consciousness. Men cannot break through that. They live in social being, not in nature. Ideology, however, is idealism which merely humanizes reality. In this it is one with naive realism as its reflective justification. It thus immediately revokes what is in ′nature′, even transcendental nature.

The Drive for System

The structure of immanence as absolutely self-contained and all-inclusive is necessarily always already system, irrespective of whether it has been expressly deduced from the unity of consciousness or not. Nietzsche′s mistrust of prima philosophia was thus also essentially directed against system builders. ′I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.′³² Just as newer authors infer the thought of the system of right from didactic requirements, such as for a self-contained presentation convincing to hearers,³³ so philosophical systems may indeed be referred to a related need.

The two first system builders in the grand manner were also the first directors of organized schools. As the system leaves nothing out, so behaves the teacher, speaker and demagogue to his listeners. His irrational authority is mediated through ratio. The claim to leadership is mediated through logical-argumentative compulsion. Even Plato′s Socrates finished off his interlocutors with the far from Attic-elegant proof of their ignorance. The soft echo of discomfort at this reverberates through Alcibiades′ panegyric at the end of the Symposium. The more problematic wisdom becomes, the more untiringly it must stress its stringency. Therefore, the logic of consistency commends itself since it permits the exercise of the compulsion to thought while ignoring the experience of the object – and thus ′formally′ and in-contestably. While Plato′s philosophy denounced the rhetoricians, who dealt formally with objects about which they understood nothing, he also applied himself to an advocate′s formalism, in the method of conditioning concepts, which surpassed sophistic formalism only in logical consistency. In the contest Socrates must almost always be in the right against those designated as his opponents, even though and because he ′knows nothing′. Not by chance does it remain in suspense in Agathon′s speech, or occasionally in the Phaedrus, whether Plato is parodying a rhetorical showpiece or presenting a stage of the truth, or, in the end, both. The bombastic character of several pre-Socratic sayings certainly follows from the concomitant exclusiveness of the total knowledge they ascribe to themselves, the inclusiveness of the system.

That is perhaps the darkest secret of first philosophy. Its great discovery, the emphatic distinction between essence and appearance, has equally the aspect of ′I know and you don′t′, however much callous and self-alienated life requires that distinction as its corrective.

Doctrine of Antinomies

Yet the excessive zeal with which first philosophy offers its knowledge to the fools immediately testifies to its insecurity. The claim of the absolute with which it enters is the medium of its own convulsion. The system, which reduces this claim to a formula in the name of inclusiveness and completeness, runs up against the impossibility of satisfying it. Idealism, which through reduction to the absolute unity of the ′I think′ was the very first to be amenable to a systematics developing on all fronts, has, by the measure of its own radicalism, revealed how questionable is the residue it crystallized out.

Prima philosophia came to awareness of this in the doctrine of the antinomies in the Critique of Pure Reason. The search for the utterly first, the absolute cause, results in infinite regress. Infinity cannot be posited as given with a conclusion, even though this positing seems unavoidable to total spirit. The concept of the given, the last refuge of the irreducible in idealism, collides with the concept of spirit as complete reducibility, viz. with idealism itself. Antinomy explodes the system, whose only idea is the attained identity, which as anticipated identity, as finitude of the infinite, is not at one with itself. The recourse to subjective immanence occurred only to remove what was not already contained in a first. Otherwise philosophy of immanence forfeits its raison d′être. But its own course, the analysis of consciousness, brings to light that it does not contain some such absolutely first, independent of its material and from what ′befits′ consciousness. The ontologically first is the ontologically non-first and thus its idea falters. Kant helped himself quite ingeniously and artificially out of the difficulty with the distinction between form and content. In the specification of contradiction and its necessity, which really forbids the arbitration which Kant himself sought, there lies – in comparison with later idealism, for its part – the less forgiving truth.

But as apologist of first philosophy, Kant did later advocate the primacy of form. The reciprocal dependence of form and matter, which he himself arrived at, could not touch the onset of system. Forms as givenness sui generis became for him the absolutely first. As the second version of the Transcendental Deduction³⁴ says, no ′further ground′ may be named for those forms. That is the model for Husserl′s later procedure of describing transcendental structures. Kant certainly seeks to unravel the secret and deduce the somewhat paradoxical givenness of the forms. Thus he arrives at pure identity, pure thought itself, the subject which, as ′pure′ and cut off from all content, is made into a simple non-entity (nichtseienden) and yet hypostatized. The Transcendental Deduction flows into reason as absolute being; the Transcendental Dialectic criticizes the absoluteness of both being and reason. So in a certain way the Deduction lags behind the doctrine of antinomies. In spite of this, the antinomies presuppose the Deduction and the proof of the subjective character of the category in order to ward off the ′naive′ unreflective positing of the infinite. By the retreat to formalism, for which first Hegel and then the phenomenologists reproached Kant, he did honour to the non-identical. He did not deign to involve it in the identity of the subject without residue (ohne Rest). As a result, however, he narrowed the very idea of truth which no longer expected more than to classify the heterogeneous by concepts of order. Husserl′s restorative phenomenology is anxiously on its guard against that. That is its genuine pre-critical element which qualified it as a pacemaker for ontology, but it is also its legitimate objection to formalism.

Nothing distinguishes phenomenology and what came of it so emphatically from the otherwise closely related neo-Kantianism as the fact that Husserl every time, in writings which determined his later course, hardly allows the question of infinitesimality to be posed, or else neutralizes it to the possibility of continuous arbitrary variability and ′unrestricted (entschränkten) horizons′. The infinite was the paradoxical shape in which absolute and, in its sovereignty, open thought takes control of what is not exhausted in thought and blocks up its absoluteness. Ever since humanity really begins to be absorbed in closed systems of administration, the concept of infinity atrophies and the physical law of the finitude of space begins to suit it.

Nominalism

According to Kant, the antinomies appear wherever thought transcends the possibility of experience. But prima philosophia, the system, is endangered by experience. Thus the Kantian critique of reason has thought itself to death. In no way, however, does the problem of prima philosophia thereby coincide with the realism–nominalism debate. All philosophies of origins of modern times arose under the auspices of nominalism. Indeed Aristotle′s Metaphysics, with the equivocity of its concept of οὐσία, already stands on the threshold. For it opens the question of whether every philosophy of the first may not comply with the nominalism it opposes in reflections where it tries to determine its substratum out of thought, the concept-construction procedure. The turn to the subject makes the concept the product of its thought. Insisting on the pure in-itself, quod nulla re indiget ad existendum,* transforms it into a for-another. Nominalism like realism stands under the primacy of the first. In both the game is one of ante or post, and all talk of post implies an ante – in re as the principle of the entity no less than in the universal.

Nominalism, of course, once meant something else. The sophistry of Gorgias and the Cynicism of Antisthenes certainly will. As a theory of the foundation of science, it turns inevitably sophy of being. But ever since the fusion with science and the victory of the great schools, including those which arose from those untrustworthy groups, the impulse was deflected. Once it has sworn itself to the given and hence to subjective immanence as well as its counterpart, nominalism falls into the position of having to say B because it has said A, however much against its will. As a theory of the foundation of science, it turns inevitably to ′extreme empiricism′.³⁵ But, as Husserl well knew, extreme empiricism contradicts its own concept. The newer empiricism since Hume – not to speak of logical positivism – out-trumped absolutist metaphysics wherever possible in its concern for criteria of absolute certainty and thus for the fundamental. Conversely, the resignation before the absolute which is proclaimed by nominalistic and empiricist trends, was secretly not so foreign to absolutist metaphysics. For Husserl it was practically self-evident. The problem of the first itself is retrospective. Thinking which like Plato′s has its absolute in memory, can really no longer be expected.

The praise of the unchanging suggests that nothing should be otherwise than it has always been. A taboo is issued about the future. It is rationalized by the demand of all ′method′ that the unknown be explained by the known. It is even at work in Plato who tacitly imputes a normative status to custom and general agreement in established language. With axioms like those of completeness and continuity, the thought of identity really always already presupposes total surveyability and acquaintance. The new is filtered out. It figures simply as ′material′, contingent and as something of an intruder. What helps the subject out of its self-imprisonment is emphasized as negative. It is a danger which must be overpowered and immediately withdrawn into the preserve of the familiar. Thus empiricism agrees with its opponents and is linked to philosophy of origins.

Motivation and Tendency of Ontology

The turn to ontology, which Husserl hesitatingly began and speedily revoked, was conditioned by the downfall of the great systems, as it so abruptly and thus so imposingly terrified the Kantian critique of reason. Ontologies want to be first philosophy, but innocent of the compulsion and the impossibility of deducing itself and what is from a first principle. They want the advantages of a system without paying the penalty. They want to restore the obligation of order from spirit without grounding it in thought and the unity of the subject. Their twofold claim is rooted in arbitrariness, and thus the advance of ontology over the system is just as ambiguous as most late bourgeois progress. Resurrected ontology regresses. It casts off the compulsion for system, in order to abruptly appropriate that first for itself which became thoroughly questionable through its universal mediation. Its escape from immanence sacrifices rationality and critique in objective harmony with a society which descends into the darkness of immediate lordship.

But the subjective arbitrariness of the escape avenges itself. It fails. The tautological emptiness of the sacrosanct highest determinations is vainly concealed by contraband from psychology and anthropology, for its subjective descent is written all over it. What in the end fancies itself origin is simply antiquarian and manifests, along with the Jugendbewegung in Germany, that allergy for the nineteenth century which does not so much surpass the present as it becomes uncontrollable and betrays freedom. Since the question of the immediately first is inappropriate to the current situation of spirit and must resolutely blind itself against mediation, it entreats an outmoded historical situation. What it timelessly disposes before the ontic is a changeling, a past which has been made unrecognizable.

Even Brentano′s student, Husserl, whom many of his contemporaries felt to be a scholastic and in whose positive descriptive approach the trace of the critical was almost completely missing, inclined against his will to the archaic. After him critical reflection became fully and paradoxically silenced for the sake of the postulate of the binding as inherited from critique. The categories are dispensed from reflection as states-of-affairs which still just have to be recorded, or, in the language devised for that purpose, uttered (zu sagende). The abdication of the concept and the despairing need for something absent, and thus negative, is chosen as a positive a priori. The decree of positivity in itself through reason and against the ostensibly destructive drive of reason, is no doubt as old as urban bourgeois philosophy.

Yet the difference between the tradition of positivity and resurrected metaphysics has to do with the whole. Kant reckons to be sure about the reconstruction of truth out of the immanence of consciousness. And the ′How is it possible?′ forms the determining figure of all his questions, since for him possibility itself poses no problems. Thus, like Hegel after him, he assumes the burden of carrying through that reconstruction on all fronts.

Husserl is in despair over this.³⁶ In the transcendental investigations which are his substitute for the system, that thought breaks off. He holds to singular determinations and the luckily newly attained concreteness is due not to more but rather less philosophy. Husserl′s successors think the thought only to weaken it and yet canonize a binding and thus abstract dogma. If the critical completion of the themes which flow around phenomenology reveals its gaps, which it vainly plugs by switching from one concept to another, then in a certain sense phenomenology wills those very gaps in its ontological final phase. Its innermost irrationalistic intention profits from its involuntary irrationalities.

Hence phenomenology speaks the jargon of authenticity which meanwhile ruined the whole of cultivated German language and turned it into sacred gibberish. It struck a theological note devoid of theological content, or any other content except self-idolization. It feigns the incarnate presence of the first which is neither incarnate nor present. Its authority resembles that of the bureaucratic world which rests on nothing except the fact of bureaucracy itself. Socially, enthroning the completed abstract also enthrones sheer organization regardless of its social content, which is neglected for good reason.

In comparison with the doctrinal edifices of Aristotle and Thomas, which still hoped to accommodate all of creation, ontology today acts as if it found itself in a glass house with impenetrable but transparent walls, and spied the truth outside – like an ungraspable fixed star, words whose sanctity one approaches too closely if one but asks what they mean. All subject matter, however, the life of concepts, is disdainfully relegated to the individual sciences like history, psychology and sociology. Yet these sciences′ emancipation from philosophy also does not lead to their blessedness. So philosophy should only be what concerns itself with the utterly indifferent. Its value increases with the indifference of its highest term which comprehends everything and thus nothing. The new ontology returns penitently to the beginning of Hegel′s Logic and expires in the abstract identity with which the whole game began.

Illusory Concretization and Formalism

Ever since Scheler′s book on Kantian ethics, epistemological and systematic formalism have been in disfavour. In its place, material philosophizing was promised, though indeed immediately burdened with the exceedingly questionable concept of value drawn from trade relations. Instruments needed no longer to be sharpened, but rather, as Hegel wished, should be tried out directly on matter. But the phenomenological movement which began as epistemology, later started unflinchingly to withdraw anew from all entities and even their highest concept, that of existence (Dasein), which Husserl in fact originally wished to eliminate.

Thus is ratified the necessarily formal character of πϱώτη φιλοσοφία itself, and not only its form of reflection in the philosophy of immanence. Whoever wishes to name an absolutely first must eliminate whatever a direct first does not need. Once, however, in the resistance to the accidental, the ontological difference is asserted to be unmediated, solid and irremovable, then the purifying process encroaches on the entity. It could, as Husserl bluntly expresses it, when measured by the pure concept of being, just as well not be. One ignores the contrary, that even the idea of being may only be thinkable in relation to entities. That would be fatal for resurrected ontology. In vain, though necessarily, it projects the doom upon the structure of being in itself. What has today become popular as the question of being does not divulge apologetically cited originality so much as the need of philosophy of origins, through whose net the ontic slips, though it cannot do without one. Through hatred of mediation its concept of being must still ontologize the entity.

In the end, however, the question of being dissolves the ontico–ontological difference (Differenz) on the side of the sheer concept, while solemnly protesting to be beyond the difference.

Anti-idealism comes to itself in the sheer idea, just as Husserl′s phenomenology already reverted to transcendental idealism. The necessarily false consciousness of this movement of thought is the prototype of ideology. The tendency of the doctrine is in that direction. If the entity merges indistinguishably with being most broadly extended, then the entity lets itself be absolutized when it chooses and historical opportunity presents itself. That is the schema of the ontological surpassing of formalism. In comparison, Husserl′s old-fashioned loyalty to formalism has proved to be more justified. And finally ontology is repentant, but returns to formalism ashamed when it elaborates a ritual of the pure concept which denies that it is one.

The illusion of concretization was the fascinosum of scholastics. The spiritual should be intuitable and immediately certain. Concepts are sensually tinted. The metaphorical, art nouveau, purely ornamental quality of such language, however, becomes obvious in Husserl himself in that the sensuousness claimed for thought has no consequences in the philosophical structure. Expressions from Formal and Transcendental Logic (which was, of course, published after Being and Time), such as ′authentification′ (Bewährung),³⁷ ′rules throughout′ (durchherrscht),³⁸ ′awakening′ (Weckung),³⁹ possess a noticeably contrived selectivity and distance, slightly reminscent of the Stefan George school. The ἑποχή changes into the esoteric. Husserl′s epistemology furnished the auxiliary implements for an ideology, with which his scientific disposition wished to have nothing to do, but which, for its part, directly connected the pretension of the binding with what Husserl expounded in the posture of scientific reliability.

Thus critique of his specialized epistemology extends essentially beyond it. The aura of the concrete accrues to the concept, which presents itself to consciousness as unbesmirched by abstracting, through the theorems of the ideal unity of the species and ideation. Subjectively mediated determinations are credited to whatever completely lacks the subjective as qualities of its being in-itself. And so its authority is established. The counter-question as to the source of those determinations is blocked. But under the taboo against facticity, those concrete concepts are at the same time thoroughly flimsy. They feed themselves with ontic elements which are then simply labelled ′pure′, pure consciousness or purely ontological. The illusion of the concrete rests on the reification of results, not unlike positive social science which records the products of social processes as ultimate facts to be accepted. Its metaphysical pathos, however, takes the illusory concrete directly from what is emphatically distant from the facts, viz. that spirituality which is pre-ordained to facticity in ontological idealism as in all German Idealism. No participant in idealism need dirty his hands with those mere entities from which characteristic concepts borrow their tone.

In this mode of procedure late πϱώτη φιλοσοφία energetically forgets the critique of the crude thesis that the logically superior is also the metaphysically superior. No less, however, does it forget the logical process itself. Such forgetfulness institutes the logical in-itself. As method (Weise), the ancient wisdom understands that in the end all the scars of its miscarriages should be presented as monuments. Everything strikes it as for the good. Because mediations were frightened into the dark, the determinations, which must be renounced in the formation of general concepts, can without notice, nevertheless, be added, by philosophical need, back to the result. One does not need to observe what was left aside in order to reach ′being in general′. Since, however, this being contains everything conceivable within itself, it lets itself be undisputedly filled with what is contained.

Being is transcribed in the most sensual metaphors with a partiality for such early historical achievements, because every criterion, which allowed removal of the metaphors from what was meant, disappeared from the concept. The harmless scientific maxims of Husserl′s phenomenology to intuit (erschauen) the essence of concepts in descriptively faithful analyses of meaning – as if every individual concept had an unshakeable solid essence without reference to the others and their constellation – are already a stimulus to illusory concretization. In contrast, the obsolete concept of system still possesses its corrective truth as knowledge of the impossibility of the isolating praxis of spirit. This became the prerogative to magically attach those colours to the concept which it lost in the historical process of alienation. They are, however, a fleeting phantasmagoria as long as the concept which conjures up essentiality denies its own essence. Husserl commended his discussions as radical and since then fictively radical issues have shot up everywhere. They become their own answer and, moreover, rely completely on that old answer which is supposed to be their truth.

The concept was radically castrated with the help of theology. If the Theses on Feuerbach were meant to find the root of the evil, then the concept should now still borrow its force from the question which admits of no further inquiry – a forestalling of the answer which does not exist. No information is left to thought (which brackets out the multiplicity of facts in the determination of the first for the sake of their conditionality and mediacy) other than that which the new ontology secretes. This is the paradoxical news which Leibniz imparted to Lockean empiricism: intellectus ipse. In this paradox, as in its abstract opposite, the doctrine of tabula rasa, is expressed the impossibility of the polarization of cognition and thus the impossibility of the very question of the first.

New and Old

With the concept of the first also collapses that of the absolutely new in which phenomenology participated without really coming up with any new themes and so phantasmagorically. The first and the absolutely new are complementary, and dialectical thought had to dispose of (sich entäuβern) both of them. Whoever refuses obedience to the jurisdiction of philosophy of origins has, since the Preface to Hegel′s Phenomenology, known the mediacy of the new as well as that of the old. It is qualified as already contained in the older form as the non-identity of its identity. Dialectics is the quest to see the new in the old instead of just the old in the new. As it mediates the new, so it also preserves the old as the mediated. If it were to proceed according to the schema of sheer flow and indiscriminate vitality (Lebendigkeit), then it would degrade itself to a replica of the amorphous structure of nature, which it should not sanction through mimicry, but surpass through cognition. Dialectic gives its own to the old as reified and consolidated, which dialectic can move only by releasing the force of its own weight. Dialectic reaches the insight that the closed process also includes the non-included. It thus reaches a boundary to knowledge itself. Dialectic itself would only be surpassed by transformed praxis. But before that, the new is just as much in its jurisdiction as the old. If the old wants the mastery of the autochthonous to date back to the divine, then the new idolizes the primacy of production, in which the principle of mastery is concealed, just as, on the market of spirit, the question of what novelty has been offered tends to become synonymous with that of origins.

The spitefulness of this question and thus the devaluation of the new in general is basic bourgeois. Out of the familiar nothing unfamiliar, nothing other should possibly arise. All the stones in the game are supposed to have been played. Thus speaks the self-contempt of the father, mutilated and condemned to unfreedom, a father who does not allow his son to become better and happier than the inherited disgrace. The wife in patriarchal society, on the other hand, unlike the son, does not completely participate. One moment of the debit structure forms the awareness that it could not be breached. Seeing through the law of identity, however, means not exculpating oneself from the fact that what has escaped can breach the jurisdiction of origin.

All music was once in the service of shortening the longueurs of the high-born. But the Late Quartets are hardly background music. According to psychoanalysis, tenderness is training in reaction to barbaric sadism. But it has become a model for humanity. Even the decaying concepts of epistemology point beyond themselves. Right up to their highest formalisms and, before that, in their miscarriages, they are to be rescued as a bit of unconscious transcription of history. For they must be helped to procure self-consciousness against what they explicitly mean.

This salvation, mindfulness of the suffering that sedimented itself in concepts, waits for the moment of their ruin. It is the idea of philosophical critique. It has no other measure than the ruin of illusion. If the age of interpreting the world is over and the point now is to change it, then philosophy bids farewell, and in its farewell concepts leave off and yet persist (innehalten) and become images. Should philosophy as scientific semantics desire to translate speech into logic, then it is left to it as speculative philosophy to bring logic to speech. It is time not for first philosophy but last philosophy.

* [Fragment *263 (123^b Ahr), p. 140, Poetarum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, vol. VI, fasc. prior.; Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. Georg Kaibel, Doriensum Comoedia Mimi Phlyaces, vol. 1, fasc. prior. (Weidmann, Berlin, 1899). Source of fragment, Arist. Rhet. II, p. 1394b 25. Trans.]

* [Max Scheler. Trans.]

* [In English in the text. Trans.]

* [In Husserl these are usually translated as ′domain′ and ′foundation′ respectively. Trans.]

* [′Which needs nothing to exist′. Trans.]

¹ Ideen, I, p. 107; cf. Ideas, p. 154.

² Goethes Gespräche mit Eckermann (Insel, Leipzig, 1925), p. 375, 18 October 1827; cf. R.O. Moon, tr., Eckermann′s Conversations with Goethe (Morgan, Laird and Co., London, no date), p. 527.

³ Cf. Ideen, passim, esp. pp. 59 and 94 ff; and Ideas, pp. 103 and 140 ff.

⁴ G.W.F. Hegel, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hermann Glockner, vol. 5, Wissenschaft der Logik, zweiter Teil, Die Subjektive Logik oder Lehre vom Begriff, 4th ed., Jubiläumsausgabe (Fromann, Stuttgart – Bad Cannstatt, 1964), p. 11; cf. Hegel′s Science of Logic, tr. A.V. Miller (George Allen and Unwin, London, Humanities Press, New York, 1969), p. 581.

⁵ Nietzsche Werke, kritische Gesamtausgabe, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, part VI, vol. 3, Götzendämmerung (de Gruyter, Berlin, 1969), p. 72; cf. The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann, Twilight of the Idols (Viking, New York, 1968), p. 484.

⁶ Ibid. p. 71; Kaufmann, p. 483.

⁷CM, pp. 33–4; cf. Cairns <70>.

⁸ Ibid. p. 34; Cairns <71>, ′Wirklichkeitsphänomenon′ .

⁹ Plato, Phaedo, p. 99; cf. also ibid., p. 100.

¹⁰ Cf. Plato, Meno, passim, esp. pp. 86–7.

¹¹ Ibid. p. 73.

¹² Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, pp. 265–6.

¹³ Cf. Ideen [56] and Ideas, p. 99.

¹⁴ Cf. in Montaigne, Essais (Rat, Paris) o.J. II, chap. XII (′Apologie de Raimon Sebond′), pp. 113. ff.

¹⁵ Logik [21], cf. also [225 ff]; and Cairns <157> and <217 ff>.

¹⁶ CM, p. 31; cf. Cairns <68>.

¹⁷ Ibid. p. 43; cf. Cairns <79>.

¹⁸ Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Niemeyer, Tübingen, 1953), p. 60; cf. tr. Ralph Manheim, Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale, New Haven and London, 1968), p. 79.

¹⁹ Plato, Phaedo, passim, esp. p. 82.

²⁰ Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Niemeyer, Tübingen, 1972), pp. 19 ff; and tr. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson Being and Time (Harper and Row, New York and Evanston, 1962), ibid.

²¹ CM in §58, pp. 135 ff; Cairns <159 ff>.

²² Cf. Ideen [91 ff]; Ideas, p. 136 ff.

²³ Vilfredo Pareto, Traité de la sociologie générate (Paris, 1932), pp. 56 and 459; cf. The Mind and Society; a Treatise on General Sociology, ed. Arthur Livingston, tr. Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston (Dover, New York, 1963).

²⁴ Cf. Max Horkheimer, ′Traditionelle und kritische Theorie′, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1937), p. 245 ff; and Critical Theory, Selected Essays, tr. Matthew J. O′Connell, et al. (Herder and Herder, New York, 1972).

²⁵ MC, p. 78; cf. CM, p. 39; and Cairns <78>.

²⁶ Cf. Hegel, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 17, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I, pp. 344 ff; cf. Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, p. 69 and Kaufmann, Twilight of the Idols, pp. 480–1.

²⁷ Plato, Symposium, pp. 210e ff.

²⁸ Nietzche, Götzendämmerung, p. 70; Kaufmann, Twilight of the Idols, pp. 481–2.

²⁹ Ibid.; ibid. p. 482.

³⁰ Ibid. pp. 68–9; ibid. pp. 479–80.

³¹ Ibid. p. 71; ibid. p. 482.

³² Ibid. p. 57; ibid. p. 470.

³³ CF. Helmut Coing, Geschichte und Bedeutung des Systemgedankens in der Rechtswissenschaft, in Frankfurter Universitätsreden, Heft 17, 1956, p. 36.

³⁴ Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt (Meiner, Hamburg, 1956), B 146; cf. tr., Norman Kemp-Smith (St Martin′s Press, New York, 1965), ibid.

³⁵ Cf. LU I, p. 84; and Findlay, p. 115.

³⁶ Cf. Herbert Marcuse, ′Begriff des Wesens′, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936), pp. 12 ff.

³⁷ Logik [70]; cf. Cairns <57>.

³⁸ Ibid. [134]; and <114>.

³⁹ Ibid. [217]; and <186>.