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SCIENCE

A NONEPISTEMOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION

SCIENCE’S ANTE-EPISTEMOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION

THE possibility of the “philosophy of sciences” and of “epistemologies” is an evidence that philosophers rarely interrogate. We interrogate it here by means of science itself, of a nonepistemological description of sciences. Is it certain that philosophy can legislate on science, found and even describe it?…

One way of renewing a phenomenon’s interpretation is to inventory the points that traditional interpretations systematically forgot or deemed uninterpretable, to coordinate them and to found on them a new global theory of the phenomenon such that it is not opposed to precedents, but subsumes them as particular cases. This is what we aim to do here in the case of science and with what philosophy and epistemology dismissed from science as “impossibilities.” What was at once interiorized and excluded from science, interpreted and furthermore declared beyond every possible signification, is what we can call a basic or postural realism. Not the realism that science can sometimes exhibit through certain knowledges (from this point of view, it tends instead to dissolve every transcendent reality), but a fundamental or postural realism, with the phenomena that accompany and express it: 1. an opacity of thought such that it leads us to think there is no scientific thought, but a simple, symbolic manipulation without sense and reflection; 2. an immanence of theorico-experimental criteria; 3. a realism that seems to be that of the brute and transcendent being beyond every objective genesis of object-sense, etc. This realism seems thoroughly foreign to philosophy, which must then engage in an operation of division or distinction between what, from scientific practice, is capable of being founded by logos and what “falls” outside reason and its light (as an incomprehensible and almost irrational realism).

What can we do with this realist claim that emerges beneath every local knowledge? The first rule is to take the measure of its genuine radicality vis-à-vis philosophical thought and operations. The second is to thoroughly alter the hypothesis of interpretation and to believe that this immanent realism is the very Identity of science, its “cause-of-the-last-instance”; that it is its own rule of interpretation or its criterion and that it “displaces” the ontologico-epistemological interpretation in general and serves as its real foundation. Science is perhaps the great unknown of occidental thought. Not that philosophy is not devoted to it in the form of epistemologies and of ontological foundations. Quite the contrary: it is precisely because we have always had a philosophical and Greek vision of science that it remains unknown in its essence. Our experience of science is simultaneously marked by an underestimation (science as deprived of sense and of absolute truth) and an overestimation (science as factuality and effectivity) that characterize its philosophical and “cultural” interpretation. From Plato to Kant and Heidegger, a triple division of intellectual labor has reigned: 1. One admits that science produces knowledges, but denies that it thinks. To science, knowledges without thought; to philosophy, authentic thought, the one that necessarily needs knowledges, but that, on the other hand, founds them, legitimates them, and simultaneously supplies their genealogy and their critique. “Science does not think”; it “dreams,” it only dreams thought in the very operation of knowledge. 2. There is an absolute, unique, and self-founded science—first philosophy as ontology or logic—and empirical sciences, which are multiple and contingent through their object; they produce strictly relative knowledges. Philosophy divides the concept of science after having separated knowledge and thought. 3. To philosophy, Being [Etre] or the authentic and total real; to science, not even being [étant], but the properties of being or the facts; the object of knowledge is now what is divided.

No philosophy really escapes this triple division of intellectual labor. No epistemology (whether empiricist or idealist, positivist or materialist) can break free from what is a rarely recognized invariant of science’s Greco-philosophical interpretation, including the Anglo-Saxon one.

We propose to disabuse ourselves, once and for all, of this falsifying image that philosophy has always imposed on science and from which it extracts for itself a surplus value of truth, authority, and dignity. On the essence of science and its relation to the real, we maintain an altogether different thesis that requires us to do away with this philosophical appropriation. Against this triple division, we propose to admit the Identity-of-the-last-instance of scientific thought as hypothesis or axiom—an entirely different problem from that of the unity of sciences. By what method? That of an immanent autodescription, for science is capable of rigorously describing itself when it takes its radical or postural realism (i.e., this Identity) as an immanent guide to its own understanding. Rather than “reflecting” on “scientific knowledges” in view of an “epistemology”—a procedure that endorses the philosophical prejudices and fetishizing interpretations of these knowledges—we reconstruct scientific thought and its categories (hypothesis, axiom, theory, experiment, etc.) within the limits of their immanent description. A reconstruction: in order to combat its protracted dissolution, its interminable deconstruction by philosophy. Of scientific thought as such: insofar as it constitutes an autonomous essence, irreducible to the philosophical schemas that are founded on the philosophical Decision or the operation of Transcendence: logos. This thought of science, the thought of the thought proper to science, is no longer an epistemology but an epistemic: a theory of the episteme insofar as, though named in Greek, it has no need for Greco-philosophical logos. Within the limits of its immanent description: we situate ourselves within the essence of its practice in view of describing it in its immanence, bracketing through a radical reduction—more radical than Edmund Husserl’s (we will come back to this point)—not only some philosophies like empiricism and idealism, but every possible philosophical position in general, i.e., every operation of Decision or Transcendence. In this way, we regrasp and elucidate the immanent phenomenal givens that constitute science’s essence, guarantee it an autonomous and specific reality, and avert its philosophical dissolution. We describe its essence before it is divided by philosophy into opposites, in terms of adverse positions that struggle against each other in order to impose a meaning on science and draw a surplus value from it: empiricism and rationalism; materialism and idealism; anarchism and dogmatism, etc. This description will be transcendental, but neither in the Kantian nor the Husserlian sense, because it now coincides with a real “last instance.” Only a transcendental, i.e., rigorously immanent description that has ascertained the means of avoiding any constitutive usage of metaphysical transcendence (philosophy in the Greco-traditional sense) can “found” not only the objectivity or the possibility but also the reality of knowledge against its empiricist factualization, its hermeneutic dissolution, its idealist sublation. This transcendental “determination” of a new style amounts to grasping, describing, and legitimating science’s Identity-of-the-last-instance and to distinguishing it from its philosophical masks.

Through this description, carried out in a spirit of submission to the requirements of scientific thought, we hope to render service to scientists rather than to dispossess philosophers. This conception radicalizes certain positions of Husserl or Kant and draws out all their consequences: they are not antiphilosophical or antiepistemological, but antephilosophical. We extract a real, ante-epistemological ground from which it then becomes possible to reevaluate, in their entirety, the status and the function of epistemologies and their role in scientific labor itself.

CRITIQUE OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIVISION OF SCIENCE

The majority of philosophies that sought to interpret science presupposed implicitly, sometimes explicitly, that it first presents itself in relation to them as a sort of radical alterity, a reality beyond even the reality of the object as this latter can be engendered within a genealogy of objectivity, i.e., of the object-sense. Philosophy can only recognize a certain autonomy to science on the condition that it treats science as its Other (an Other as philosophy can conceive it), that it sunders it a priori between, on one hand, a factual brute and transcendent existence, a token of the autonomy it must recognize in science, as well as a sign of its basic opacity and unintelligibility, and, on the other hand, an objectivity it can always engender in its sense and ground in the essence of the philosophical Decision. This Decision, failing to wield a power of legislation over the most transcendent real, would have in any case such a power over the relation of science to the real.

Such is the invariant of epistemologies and of ontologies: the interpretation of scientific realism proceeds by dividing it and thus dismissing science as philosophy’s Other. That science can only acquire its autonomy by stressing the aspect through which it is philosophy’s unthinkable Other is obviously already a philosophical perception and a philosophical falsification of the reality of science. That it can only be thought by philosophy—whatever this latter may be—at the price of its division and of the destruction of its autonomy, a division that is in fact the nucleus of the philosophical Decision, makes us realize that we have to alter the general hypothesis of interpretation, but it does not force us to do so. No doubt it is no longer a matter of exchanging the idealist-critical hypothesis for the positivist, the empiricist, or the “realist” (in the limited sense in which philosophy, analytical or not, can be realist). It is philosophy in general, insofar as it always includes—this is an invariant—a moment of transcendence (scission, nothing, nihilation, difference), which is deemed to be constitutive of the real, that we have to put once and for all out of play as soon as it is a matter of science, its autonomy and its essence. An attitude of descriptive fidelity, phenomenological in a radical sense since it allows the phenomenal givens of science to describe themselves immanently: such is the only “method” adapted to this philosophically impossible object; the only one that establishes the autonomy of science’s thought in terms of its proper description and therefore implies the suspension of epistemological positions and operations. It suspends from the start the thesis that science is an Other or even the Other of the philosophical Decision; this thesis already contains a priori the necessary division of its Identity and produces incalculable effects. The division of its essence alienates or tries to alienate science outside itself. It idealizes or derealizes science like every bar that strikes through a subject; it renders it transcendent and ultimately unthinkable; it deems it to be unthinking and deprived of reflection.

Our hypothesis treats science’s postural or “subjective” realism as a transcendental guide or rule of its immanent theory. It is no longer, we suspect, a hypothesis in the sense of a possibility—a simple philosophical possibilization of science—which would obliterate its reality by subjecting it to the play of the possible and of the hypothetical (philosophy reserves the anhypothetical for itself). It is the scientific attitude that consists in entrusting to science itself the elucidation of its essence, in recognizing its radicality to the very end, and in drawing all the consequences of its autonomy. Science is for itself, at least in its cause (the Identity-of-the-last-instance), an emergent theoretical object, a “hypothesis” or an “axiom” in the “hypothetico-deductive” sense. We also have to discard once and for all the idea that science is a subontology, a deficient or “regional” ontology; a “rational fact” to be interpreted; or else a simple process of production of knowledges that ontologos or epistemolgos could delimit and protect. In general: the already philosophical presupposition, which would be the Other of the supposedly first or valid philosophy. This “change in the terrain” restores science in its proper reality or reconstitutes it as its own immanent basis.

Science becomes “first” and thereby ceases to be philosophy’s Other. It is philosophy that becomes science’s Other, but the “Other” in a non-philosophical sense, for it is determined by science. The global reevaluation of science’s essence, in which we must engage, is the necessary and sufficient condition for a new position of its relations to philosophy as well as for the elaboration of a science of the philosophical Decision.

THE TASKS OF A RECONSTRUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT

If we wish to guarantee science its full autonomy vis-à-vis philosophy, three simultaneous tasks await us. They correspond to the critique of the division of intellectual labor and amount to showing that every science (“empirical” or otherwise) is equally a thought; that it is absolute in its kind; that it bears—at least “in-the-last-instance”—on the real “itself.” Here is what we will have to demonstrate:

1. Science does not confine itself to knowing; there is an authentic scientific thought, i.e., a relation to the real “in itself.” This relation is presupposed by the fact of knowledge and affords knowledge its reality. Science is an autonomous thought, altogether distinct from the philosophical. It does not use the philosophical thought’s procedures of positional transcendence (decision, reflection, division, nothingness, nihilation, etc.). Science thinks without founding itself on transcendence in general; and when it finally resorts to transcendence, it is neither the philosophical that is at issue nor the operations that flow from it.

2. Every so-called empirical science, even if it lacks a mathematical dimension for instance, is absolute in its kind. It is guided by the Idea that it is a science and a knowing (of) self in the mode of Identity-of-the-last-instance and not only a blind production of knowledges. Its theoretical criteria are immanent to it; it does not expect to receive them from philosophy.

3. Every science that philosophy calls “empirical” is related to a real-One, such that it can grasp this real-One beneath its ontological division between Being and the properties of being. Every science falls outside ontological Difference. This difference glosses over being in itself or the One by dividing it, or rather by covering it with the division into Being (or object) and into objective properties. This division makes the One vanish, and science along with it. In reality, science relates the knowledges it produces to an “objectivity” or an “exteriority,” but this objectivity does not have the form of ideal objectivation of which philosophy is the theory and practice. Science has a real object, but this object derives from its cause or from the One, and it is an object at the same time as One-in-the-last-instance. Philosophy cannot grasp this thesis. It separates objectivity and the real, which it also calls “in itself.” It then confounds the genuine real or the real object (in a more originary sense of the word, the one to which sciences are related) with the ideal objectivity and its operations (reflection, categorial objectivation, decision, transcendence, etc.). There is a quasi “ontology” of science, entirely different from philosophical ontology (whether it is substantialist or idealist or functionalist, little matters). We propose to excavate it through a rigorous description of its most immanent phenomenal givens. Why these?

The demonstration of this triple objective—science as Identity in which the triple division of labor is in fact impossible or is an illusion—effectively supposes that scientific thought, far from being reduced to knowledges that are related either to “facts,” to a “categorial objectivity,” or to “interpretations,” is constituted (but in-the-last-instance alone) from absolute immanent givens, that it is thus a knowing of the real in itself and a knowing (of) this knowing, and that this existence of absolute immanent facts is compatible—against philosophy’s thesis—with an objectivity or an exteriority, with a stability, and lastly with a reality (rather than a simple possibility), which are its most general postulates.

All this—the cause of sciences as “absolute” knowing (not in the metaphysical sense, but in the sense of the One-of-the-last-instance) and the theory of their object—remains to be demonstrated. Rather, it has to be shown or exhibited so that we can render sciences autonomous with respect to every philosophy. But it can only be demonstrated if the “method” is rigorously adequate to its object, if the science practiced here is more than a fact (empirical or rational), if it is a real experience or a knowing (of) the “One.” The sole guiding thread of the description of scientific thought must be science itself in its immanent reality or the autonomy of its theoretical criteria, rather than alleged “scientific facts” or “knowledges” or even a “categorial objectivity.” All of these are already transcendent, already philosophically interpreted phenomena, and they “obviate” the description in an “epistemological” sense. From the moment they are faithful to epistemo-logos, all epistemologies are interpretations that transcend science and are falsifications of its essence. The real must itself determine in-the-last-instance the method of its description. The absolute immanent givens that constitute, if not the whole, at least the cause of scientific knowing as thought, require a more-than-phenomenological or nothing-but-phenomenal description. Through their radical immanence, these givens are necessarily phenomena-without-logos and can now be described only through themselves, without the procedures of logos.

We suspect that this description, which is a science, bereft of the means of philosophical reflection and construction, will be fundamentally “obscure” or “blind.” But it will not be for that reason—here lies the whole thesis of the reality of scientific thought—simply technical, manipulative, or symbolic.

Science’s quasi ontology: this term does not designate the ontology that the great philosophical decisions of Idealism and Materialism, of Rationalism and Empiricism, presuppose. It designates the ontology presupposed by the scientific posture and its immanent claims on the real. These claims are completely foreign to the Greek ontological presuppositions, which serve as the horizon of epistemological decisions. Our method will be that of a radical phenomeno(logy), of a description of the most irreducible or indivisible givens. It will eliminate from the start their empiricist and idealist reductions, which deny them every authentic reality or ground them in philosophical objectivity. There are three types of these phenomenal givens. First, those of the reality of science (which is not dissolved in a simple possibility the way it inevitably is within philosophy), i.e., this Identity that serves as its autonomous and absolute cause. Then, those of its objectivity (the transcendence of the real object to which it relates its knowledges). Instead of founding science’s reality on its objectivity, we found its objectivity on its reality. Lastly, those of its power of knowledge or of representation. They completely exceed the side of “knowledges,” of which they guarantee the reality or the transcendental claim.

Thus the central problem of this quasi ontology of science is its immanent phenomenal givens. They constitute the science of the Identity (not philosophical, not circular or reciprocal, but in-the-last-instance) of a reality and of the knowledge of this reality. What is meant by the real-One to which science posturally refers and that would no longer be deducible from a categorial or ontological objectivation of the philosophical type, i.e., from transcendence in general? As a first indication, we can situate the proposed solution in the neighborhood of Husserl’s solution: he too admits absolute phenomenal givens, but as a philosopher he continues to associate them with objectivation and representation (intentionality); he does not found the latter irreversibly on the former and does not modify their nature. Our thesis is that science, and science alone, realizes a posture that nearly all philosophers—Husserl especially—rejected as impossible: “radical transcendental realism.” This realism is effectively inconceivable at the interior of the most general Greco-ontological presuppositions. They exclude this realism—without seeing that it is of-the-last-instance—on account of the idealizing or objectivating transcendence, and presuppose a circle, a reciprocal determination of the real to be known and of knowledge, of the real object and of the object of knowledge. Science’s postural realism requires, on the contrary, the end of this circularity. On one hand, that the real or the real-object—henceforth invisible de jure in the horizon of philosophical objectivity—is an immanent given of-the-last-instance means that it cannot be transformed by the knowledge produced of it (do not conflate the observer’s intervention in the production of the object-of-knowledge with his impossible intervention in the real object). On the other hand, its representation in the object-of-knowledge is descriptive and not constitutive. It does not claim to transform the real, but only transforms old knowledges and technico-experimental products. It does so by affording them a status as “simple” knowledges that, by their sense as “scientific” and not philosophical knowledges, confine themselves to describing the real object to which they refer in an immanent yet in-the-last-instance manner.

THE VISION-IN-ONE AS CRITERION OF SCIENCES

To ground the real’s scientific phenomenalization in its reality, rather than in its simple “real possibility,” in the way we have just assumed or required it, and to distinguish it permanently from that of philosophy, we will ask whether we possess, and in what concrete way, a sufficient experience of it, an experience that can give science its autonomy of thought and thereby—this is a consequence of the structure of its essence—its greatest primitivity, its anteriority to the philosophical Decision.

How is the internal architecture of this special “transcendental realism”—which ultimately renders it noncontradictory—possible? What do we call a radical immanent given (to which science is not reduced, but which is the cause of its specific objectivity)? If the essence of the real to which science posturally refers excludes, in its intimate constitution, objectivity and all the forms of philosophical or positional transcendence (dialectical scission, alienation of consciousness, categorial representation, transcendence of the ontological project, intentionality), this is because its immanence must have an original nature. Whereas philosophy regularly combines immanence with transcendence, Identity with Scission or Difference, etc., so as to strengthen the one by the other, so as to weaken them as well and render them mutually dependent, science is above all a poorer and simpler thought. It is founded in immanence alone. Immanence must thus be deemed radical. Distinct from the philosophical, since it no longer has the support of transcendence, it must be manifested (to) itself by remaining in itself or in its Identity. And this Identity has in fact no need to be separated from itself, to be sundered and alienated. There is not one, as ontology believes, but two heterogeneous modes of phenomenalization of the real. One is the circle of every philosophical Decision, in which the real distinguishes its phenomenalization from itself in order to circularly reidentify with it, and the other is the scientific, in which the real is from the start and remains identical to its phenomenality, which it is through and through. Unseparated from its phenomenality, the real has thus no need to pass through the transcendence of knowledge in order to be what it is. Unlike philosophy, science is not an alienation of the real, a real image of the real, and it does not continually derive from it. We will call this mode of “radical” phenomenalization, which suffices to define the real or its essence, the nonpositional One (of) self or again the vision-in-One.

Yet, do we have an experience like that of the vision-in-One? A necessarily unconstitutable and unconstituted experience, describable in philosophical terms no doubt, but whose use would no longer be philosophical, i.e., categorial and essentially objectivating? Is there an experience such that, on its own and in the most immanent way, it postulates 1. the radical precession of its “object,” of the real, on its description—thus the real as not constituted by its description but as absolute before its knowledge; 2. the corresponding possibility of a non-philosophical use of philosophy, of a noncategorial use of “categories” as a procedure of this description? This experience is the scientific source anterior to every philosophy and cannot be thought and determined by it in return. It can be neither “demonstrated” nor posited by ontological procedures, at the risk of falling back under the legislation of the philosophical Decision. Rather than the object of an acquisition by means of an operation of transcendence, it must be proof (of) itself. It must be given straightaway as nothing-but-itself, without surpassing itself, exceeding itself, hollowing itself out and transcending itself; without affecting itself, in a general way, with nothing, nihilation or alterity, etc. This is probably the being-given of the hypothesis and of the axiom, their non-philosophical or simply “posited” being.

How do we know that sciences are absolute (immanent, nonmetaphysical) knowings that always have, in a certain way, access to the real? From where do we extract this “idea” or “presupposition”? From what philosophy, perhaps, that we covertly presuppose while refusing to recognize it? To this philosophical question, we can only offer a scientific response. That is: rigorously immanent or transcendental. We must reply: sciences, through hypotheses and axioms, are in-the-last-instance an experience of the real-One and not only a theorico-technico-experimental assemblage. We know this from science itself and not from philosophy, which always refuses such a response and the right to make it. All that we know, we know from the thing itself and not from philosophical transcendence. We treat science itself as an immanent guiding thread of its theory because it is such, by its intimate constitution, that it knows in a scientific and not philosophical way that it is science rather than philosophy. It is index sui (et philosophiae) and furnishes on its own the means and above all else the immanent rules of its description.

It would be contradictory for us to claim, once more, to access the essence of science through approaches and procedures that stem from the philosophical Decision and that are impregnated with transcendence. This means that neither reduction, nor analysis, nor meditation, nor regressive foundation, nor the search for ultimate requisites, is still usable and legitimate. Nor the epistemological “reflection” on sciences’ presumed “fact,” which is merely an artifact of philosophical objectivation. Through what other technique can we then access the essence of sciences? Through no technique, for every technique always codetermines its ob-ject and coproduces it in the style of philosophy. No technique is necessary to situate oneself within the most general posture of science, through hypotheses and axioms, vis-à-vis the real. The real-One’s essence rules out that it be what philosophy wants it to be: relative(-absolute). It may be that the Absolute has always appeared difficult to access, since philosophy was not constituted to think and experience it, but to denigrate, divide, and cast it into exteriority and transcendence, and thus to multiply the obstacles where none exist. Thought emancipates itself from its naive adherence to philocentrism and renounces the deforming prism of transcendence to the strict extent that it knows (itself) identical to this Identity-of-the-last-instance and knows this nonmetaphysical Absolute as the immanent being-given of the hypothesis and of the axiom.

Science is thus nondecisional science (of) self or (of) science. This knowledge is so radically immanent that it excludes philosophical reflexivity and its operations, all of which are tied to transcendence. In other words, science and the experience of science are the same thing or, more rigorously, are strictly identical in-the-last-instance alone. Science is the nonthetic unity (of) (self) (of) science and (of) the science (of) science.

Far from being formal and tautological, and far from expressing any Principle of Identity, these statements are nothing more than “transcendental theorems.” They are theorems formulated by the science (of) science or transcendental science. They express the real identity, the identity (of) the real, and, finally, the identity of the last instance (of) the real and (of) knowledge (of) this real. Clearly the “foundation” that renders “empirical sciences” absolute in their own way is no longer by any means the logico-formal identity to which a reality would be attributed. This attribution would give place once more to a transcendental Illusion. It is a nothing-but-transcendental or real Identity that has never been also logical. Science—even formal logic, provided it is understood as an already authentic science—is the best destruction of the confusion of “general logic” with the real in the mixture of a “transcendental logic.” This mixture is the heart of every philosophical decision. Science—even formal logic as science…—is an alogical knowing (of) the real, by its essence at least. It is not founded first on the Principle of Identity, which will have always served both as ground and as foil to the philosophical Decision. A science obviously cannot be reduced to this identity. In particular, it renders compatible an “objectivity” and an immanent reality of its real objects, those to which it relates these knowledges in-the-last-instance. Lastly, it orders or submits these latter, its objects-of-knowledge, to its real objects. But it is decisive for the moment—in order to distinguish science and philosophy—to identify precisely the purely immanent quasi relation of sciences (to) the real. This relation has never been a relation, since it is instead the immanence-of-the-last-instance alone (of) the real and (of) the knowledge (of) the real.

Of science we say: its identity. In effect, unlike philosophy, which always combines Identity with scission, transcendence, difference, and so forth, science discovers its cause, its ultimate reality in a radical Identity. By this we mean that it does not result from an analysis or a synthesis. It is without differentiation or identification; it is “in itself” and precedes all the phenomena of scission, of separation, of rupture, of interruption, of transcendence, etc. And so, even if it is transcendental, i.e., rigorously immanent to itself and received as such, it is in no way conflated with the superior Unity of the subject and of the object in the idealist way. This is why we ensure the real cause of science’s objectivity in an Identity that is always already given before any opposition (for example: the identity of the subject and the object) and never also concluded from them. And this is why we aim to bracket, as philosophical still, the transcendental Idealism that continues to divide science’s essence and thereby loses it.

Science is just a simple identity without identification. But it is at least, and at any rate, an identity. Its radicality means that it “begins” from itself alone and that it does not leave itself. Hence the term nonthetic (of) self, to signify that it need not alienate itself in order to posit itself. It is the identity of the real (and) of thought, but on the condition that we see in this identity their a priori root, not a common root but a root of-the-last-instance, nothing-but-anterior, rather than their simultaneously anterior and posterior synthesis.

The positive reason for all these phenomena, the reason that explains this (non-)relation (to) the real, can be summarized in this term: the vision-in-One. For us, it is an operative concept. Science’s element is the One, not Being. Science is not a mode of the Western ontological project. There are—they are their own criteria of reality and truth, transcendental criteria—immanent givens in a nonthetic manner (of) self; they reject ob-jectivity’s philosophical artifact. Thus science’s essence is not given by philosophy, but experienced directly in itself and in the non-ontological form of the One as a radically unreflected, transcendental experience. In this experience we find the reality of a sphere of absolute immanent givens; we can immediately begin to describe them without having to proceed, as philosophy does, to the preliminary operations of dividing, constituting, reducing…the object. Our attitude, although transcendental, is rigorously naive, scientific, and not philosophical.

Since science is the sole mode of nondecisional and nonpositional thinking (of) self, philosophy, which desires this apositionality but cannot acquire it, denies science’s autonomy. It is not only Kantian or neo-Kantian idealist epistemology that rejects the existence of immanent givens or of a nonthetic phenomenalization (of) self in order to oppose the categorial objectivity to them. It is the whole of philosophy that, as Decision or Transcendence, cannot truly access science’s essence and produces in turn this “reactive” symptom called “epistemology.” If the program of a rigorous science of philosophy passes at any rate through the “destruction” of epistemology, it is because the traditional unitary relation of prominence between science and philosophy is reversed and even more-than-reversed. For it cannot be a matter of a reversal of hierarchy and a passage to antiphilosophical “positivism.” To sum up what is excluded here, we will say that science does not receive its essence from the philosophical Decision; that it possesses a positive and specific essence; that this essence does not allow itself to be thought as a mode of Being or an avatar of the ontological project or an exploitation of the properties of being; that, in general, its nonrelation (to) the real does not pass through the philosophical objectivity it absolutely precedes, and does not fall under the legislation of the ontological Difference.

THE IMMANENT ONE-MULTIPLE OF SCIENCE OR CHAOS

Whether it is understood in its substantialist sense, in its idealist-transcendental sense, or in the broadened sense of an ontotheology, ontology still lies at the foundation of all epistemological positions, even the most empiricist among them. It has never ceased to constitute the element in which the Occident has claimed to think the essence of science. Conceived in its broadest sense, Being has not ceased to be the ultimate reference, the last authority to which scientific knowing must be related and measured. It is this gesture that should perhaps be abandoned now in order to “test” another hypothesis, that of the One. What the Greco-Occidentals call the “One”—without ever distinguishing it absolutely from Being or thinking it for itself and in its essence—is obviously not the one that can serve to found science’s postural realism. It may be that the forgetting of the One’s essence and the forgetting of science’s essence are the same thing, the same presupposition, which is necessary for the unbridled development of the philosophical disposition. But scientific thought, considered as such, elucidated in its essence, can be nothing other than the thought of the One or the vision-in-One. And just as we have posited the antiphilosophical rule: let science describe itself in its immanent phenomenality, so we have to prolong this emancipation and to suppose that the thought (of) the One is none other than the One-as-thought. We have to posit the following rule: let the One describe itself in its most immanent phenomenality. Here again, we suspect that the One thus experienced as nondecisional “vision” requires the exceptionless suspension of every philosophical Decision that is supposed or that supposes itself—as is always the case—co-constitutive of the real (of its sense, of its phenomenality, of its realization). This is why we will have to understand the One as One-Multiple and the One-Multiple as chaos. How should we proceed to these “rectifications”?

What we call the One is thus no longer Unity when it is mixed with the Dyad, interior and exterior to the Dyad, and with the Multiple. Philosophers’ “Unity” is regularly connected to a Multiple, and this Multiple has another source and represents another origin of reality. So much so that these two principles, Unity and Dyad, are presumed to be given together for a thought of overhanging [surplomb] or survey, which is Unity itself, endowed with the power to transcend itself. This system requires a certain concept of the Multiple, which seems obvious and is no more elucidated than the One: the Multiple is necessarily acquired or obtained within the system via transcendence; it is a result, that of a scission, a nihilation, an opposition…of “contraries.” It is at times the fruit of an interruption or a division, at others it is identical to a positive distance that serves as Unity. But it is always tied to an operation of transcendence; it is never an absolutely originary and immanent multiple that has its principle in itself. On the other hand, it is this nonoriginary that is posited as originary and constitutive of the real. As to Unity or Indivision, it too remains an abstract or formal principle. It has not been elucidated in its concrete or real essence, in its reception (of) itself; it is supposed nothing more than real. It is a simple function; it is required or requisitioned in a function of unification and synthesis of the manifold of “contraries” or the Multiple. The One and the Multiple thus abstracted from their reality form together a unique circular operation. For instance: a multiplicity that is neither One nor Multiple, in which the one is inseparable from the other, but where neither is elucidated in its real essence, where both are functionalized in an external and transcendent mode: philosophy.

We obviously should rid thought of this image, i.e., this surreptitious transcendence of the One and the Multiple. At least the image of their essence and no doubt, thereby, that of science. We will take care not to choose—this would constitute a new philosophical Decision—the One in the dogmatic-substantialist way, or rather the Multiple, as though it could be isolated from the One. This abstraction merely represses the other “contrary,” which always finds the opportunity to return and to produce effects. In any case, in their philosophical as well as scientific use, they are inseparable. But while they are also separated in philosophy, once again two united contraries, a unified duality, they are strictly identical in science and do not form a new, more or less unified, duality. Where there is no longer any transcendence or decision, there can still be some Multiple and even the most immanent, the most primitive multiple, that which will never have been the product of an operation of division or this division itself. And where there is this Multiple, there can also immediately be the One, i.e., immanence itself.

In the laudable desire to found science on the most radical Multiple, we cannot believe that we can dismember the philosophical Decision’s complex unity and simply choose, for example, as originary and as the real itself, the Multiple-without-Unity—which still presupposes transcendence as constitutive—rather than the Unity-without-Multiple. At any rate, the other contrary will come at the same time, but as unthought or repressed. It is a matter—this is an entirely different gesture, it is not a Decision—of no longer choosing the One or the Multiple in their transcendent Unity. It is a matter of considering their transcendence itself as already suspended; of allowing the radical Identity of the One and the Multiple to describe itself in its phenomenality, without founding itself in the transcendence of logos. For this transcendence is reduced or suspended by the description itself—and, despite appearances, this suspension, let’s repeat, is not a choice or a transcendence. Here again, what we call the nonthetic One (of) self is no doubt still the One-Multiple—since to choose between “contraries” is no longer the problem or the method. But it is so in an Identity that this time excludes both Multiplicity and Unity in the form they have within transcendence, where they continue to be opposed as two distinct principles united in a synthesis or else in a unity. The One as real Identity is a One-without-unity (and) a Multiple-without-multiplicity. So long as we have not really rid the One of the ideal-transcendent Unity, and the Multiple of the Multiplicity that is also, that is still a universal-transcendent predicate, we remain shackled to the philosophical aporias of the Unity-of-contraries, to the unitary style of the “decision” and to abstractions of transcendence. The One in its essence, i.e., the One-Multiple when it is nothing-but-immanent, deprived of the predicates of Unity and of Multiplicity, is no longer a unity-of-contraries. It is what we also call the undivided, the individual [individu], the indivi-dual [l’individu-a-l], rather than indivi-duel [individuel], or again chaos considered in its phenomenal and no longer philosophical content. It is Identity that constitutes the basis of the reality of every thought and of every experience. The philosophical Decision clearly tries in its turn to divide this One-Multiple, to impose on it a division of intellectual labor, which should be specified in this case as a transcendent division of transcendental truth or of the real. And it does not separate the One and the Multiple without also separating the One from itself in the form of a Unity and the Multiple from itself in the form of a Multiplicity—both already incorporate transcendence and are thus partially constituted by it.

How can we describe the most real One, the nothing-but-One? How can we describe its immanence (to) itself and its immediate identity (to) the multiple, i.e., the One as nothing-but-individual? And in such a way that this individual is in the multiple state, is even the Multiple as the real root of transcendent multiplicities? In such a way that the Multiple can be the real basis or the cause of science?

Only philosophy can find here a paradox or a mystery. The great rule of the immanence of the description, the scientific and “realist” rather than philosophical rule, forces us to use philosophical or other objects, themes, operations, and languages (immanence has no “proper” language, which does not mean that it is inexpressible). But we have to use them precisely in terms of this immanence of the One, under its laws and in order to describe it without claiming to constitute it; in order to subject them as representations to this real that they can no longer claim to “realize.” This scientific description of science itself is indeed the description of a specific mode of phenomenalization (of) the real. But this description is subordinated to the real or presupposes it as an absolute precession, without also claiming at the same time to codetermine and thereby to transform it. Manifesting the essence of the One scientifically, and by the same token the essence of science, we reveal it in a way that is immanent (to) itself without transforming it in this operation. We simply transform the content of representations or of “knowledges” produced of this essence.

Other possible descriptions of the One, more complete perhaps, were carried out elsewhere (A Biography of Ordinary Man, Philosophy and Non-philosophy). We will not repeat them here.

SCIENCE’S “POSTURAL” REALISM OR THE INVISIBLE MANIFEST

The technico-experimental apparatus is a material and a means ordered to the essence of science. It is not this essence itself. Science’s essence resides only in positivity, the quasi-“ontological” consistency of naive and “decision-less” realism and certainty, which affect the theory itself and its particular means. To be sure, it is not a matter of local “objects” and “representations” produced by science, but of what every scientific posture immanentally postulates about the real to which it is related as such—of the scientific “intention” and its transcendental claim, if you want. So this conception of science does not rest in any way on the Husserlian principles it nevertheless evokes, and even less on “occidental metaphysics.” It rests on a renewed experience of what is given in an emergent and irreducible (if not certain) way in the hypotheses and the axioms: on an experience of the lived real as radical in its type of transcendental immanence. Furthermore, philosophy’s traditional—and necessary—skepticism about the existence of absolute immanent givens (even Husserl limits their reality in his transcendental Ego, which he partially obtained through philosophical operations) is not a serious theoretical objection for us. It is a simple “resistance,” founded in the philosophical Decision as transcendence, and it uses theoretical means; science can analyze it as such.

Science is realist in the sense that it knows itself straightaway as science (of) the real. This fact does not rule out, but rather requires, a rectification and a recasting of representations. That it is immediately identical (to) the real and to its fundamental immanence, without having to pass through a process of identification with a transcendent real, should not be conflated with a mysticism that excludes representation. Representation is quite simply not the foundation of sciences. Sciences are not sciences—rather than a mixture of already existing sciences and of philosophy—unless they assume this realist posture of the last instance: above all, not the eventual reality-effect which this or that particular representation can induce. From this standpoint, science implies the destruction of the primitive transcendent realism of perception. It is a matter of the immanent or transcendental reference (to) the real of-the-last-instance, a reference of the theory that appears with the index of exteriority and transcendence. Science establishes the distinction between a transcendent realism it destroys; a transcendental yet objective, therefore ideal and semitranscendental realism it partially destroys, only conserving transcendence in a simple and nonthetic form, and a nothing-but-transcendental or “postural” realism in which the real is immanent, even as “object.” If science has an “ontology,” it is neither empirical-substantialist nor idealist-categorial nor existential and projective. It is strictly the ontology of immanent phenomenal givens, which are what is known in-the-last-instance by knowledges.

This postural or immanent realism clarifies what remains philosophy’s stumbling block: the Identity (of) the real, the vision-in-One, is deprived of transcendence and of logos (of reflection, light, position, horizon, project, etc.); it is nevertheless a thought or an experience, a nonthetic knowing (of) self. Science’s lack of consciousness or reflexivity, its obscurity, and its blind nature do not signify the absence of thought as philosophy believes. This is one of the most formidable Greco-Occidental misunderstandings. There is indeed an opacity of scientific thought, and this thought does not think like philosophy. But it “thinks” in an original and positive manner. Unable to understand the sense and origin of science, which is the nonthetic Identity (of) thought and (of) the real, philosophy falsifies all those traits by interpreting them as a lack or defect of reflection, a degradation or a deficiency of the light of logos, of reason itself…This confusion of the scientific order and of the philosophical order leads to the philosophical denigration of science. Considered as a mode of the ontological project or else a mode of self-consciousness, science becomes a necessarily dethroned and deficient mode. It is condemned to discover in philosophy the sense, the value, and the truth it naturally lacks…

In reality, it is quite possible to “reconcile” in the vision-in-One not only knowledge but also thought and even the transcendental with science’s unreflection. It is enough to conceive this unreflection, not as a lack of logos, but as the positive structure of the vision-in-One, which is indeed a thought or a transcendental experience, even if it is without distance to itself or exteriority. The whole strategy consists in inverting the sense and the origin of this apparent scientific nonthought. Instead of imagining it the way philosophers do, as a supplement or an excess of objectivity, as an objective yet brute reality projected beyond its condition (the dimension of objectivation), we will bring this scientific realism under objectivation and objectivity themselves. We will seek science’s apparent non-sense in its original essence of the vision-in-One. This essence excludes sense, but through excess of reality rather than through excess of objectivity; it excludes transcendence not through excess of transcendence, but simply through immanence.

Philosophy seeks and posits science always too far: at the end of its “reflection,” of its “project” of objectivity, of its “dialectic”—in general, at the end of the transcendence that founds all these techniques. It is precisely this transcendence that science excludes at least from the relation (the nonrelation) it “entertains” with the real of-the-last-instance. Hence science’s naïveté, unreflection, realism, and “blindness,” which are so intolerable to philosophical ob-jectivation that it has not ceased to deny, reduce, and falsify them. This is what is called epistemology; it is even the epistemo-logos of every epistemology.

Science’s opacity, blindness, and muteness, as well its realism: these phenomena are not those of the supposedly brute and meaningless object. Rather, they are the phenomena of thought itself, of the transcendental experience when it is, as is the case here, “unreflected.” Only absolute immanent givens explain the paradox of these phenomena, which, on the mirror of philosophical representation, are reinterpreted as defects or insufficiencies (genealogy of philosophical judgment about science). By right, these absolutely immanent givens cannot be grasped by philosophy, which is founded on transcendence. But they explain the fundamental scientific realism, the “dual”—i.e., without synthesis—distinction, science’s nonconfusion of the real and of objectivation.

Thought in its real essence is thus invisible within the horizon of objectivity, on account of its structure of radical immanence, of the immanence that remains in itself. The vision-in-One is invisible in the sphere of the Greek presuppositions of Being or of logos and the Judaizing presupposition of the Other. It is manifested, we might say, only through this invisibility that must be understood as a thoroughly positive essence rather than an oblivion, a withdrawal, a “self-concealment” of the phenomeno-logical type in order not to cast it into a transcendence. How can we grasp this indivisibility in a positive way?

The true manifest is invisible in its very essence or is the essence of this invisibility. The essence of the real or of the radically immanent phenomenon is the invisible that has become positive and is finally received as such in its own mode, which is invisibility. Invisibility ceases thus to be the negation, lack, or privation of an ontological or phenomenological visible. The Invisible is no longer an attribute or the predicate of an ontic subject interior to Being’s transcendent visibility, nor is it the predicate or property of Being, elevated to the state of Being’s essence. The Invisible is, from the start, “essence,” without having to be first the attribute of a subject. The real One is nonpositional (of) self: it is not alienated in an attribute, any more than it receives its sense from an attribute or is determined by a universal. The task is thus to tear the Invisible away from its state as an attribute in order to describe it as a “subject” without attributes. It will perfectly visible as such and its invisibility-of-structure will not be undermined, limited, or even partially negated by its visibility, only if it ceases to be experienced in the transcendent frame of perception, then of ontology, in the general context of the unity-of-contraries. Because the Invisible is nonthetic “cause” (of) self or essence, it has no contrary. Even its specific visibility, its own phenomenalization is not its contrary or what limits it, but forms a type of manifestation that suits the Invisible and safeguards it as such.

As to scientific discourse itself, to produced knowledges, it is not, it has never been, an illumination that transforms the real. It is a simple reflection-without-mirror, a unilateral manifestation. It remains invisible by its essence of-the-last-instance, but renders the real visible in this mode of nonthetic reflection, without making this visibility penetrate into the essence of manifestation and without transforming it in turn. Scientific representation is the manifest. But since this manifest has the Invisible (of) the real as its essence, it does not render this Invisible ontologically or epistemologically visible: the Manifest is invisible—it is the real; the Invisible is manifest—it is the science of the real.

Philosophy is caught in this trap. It fails to grasp this phenomenality, more interior (to) self than every philosophical subject, which is already partially tied to a transcendent attribute. And it interprets the phenomenality by projecting its own model of the object on this real. It is then condemned to imagine the real as an absurd beyond of its own object. If so-called empirical sciences do not seem to correspond to this picture, it is because we continue to examine them through the philosophical prism of objectivation, as a degraded or dethroned form of objectivation: a hyperobjectivity. An immanent, purely phenomenal description, disabused of philosophical prejudices, shows, on the contrary, that science derives its specificity and its autonomy from the fact that its naïveté, far from being a deficiency in philosophy, in reflexivity, and in self-consciousness, is its essential and positive structure. It gives science its consistency. Just as the One’s essence was “forgotten” by philosophy in the name of the metaphysical “One,” which is always transcendent in some part of itself, just as it was requisitioned and put in the service of the guardianship of Being, so science’s essence was “forgotten” or denigrated by philosophy. Philosophy conflated science with its own operations, with the project or the objectivation; it mistakenly assigned to it the unique task of knowing the object, accused it of lacking this knowledge or of lacking the problem of the ob-ject’s origin, and ended up relegating it outside the experience of the authentic real under the now inevitable pretext of naïveté, technicism, manipulative and blind thought, and so forth. Science’s naïveté is real, but it is essential and positive: it is that of the transcendental nonreflexive or nonthetic experience (of) self. Science “thinks”; it therefore does not think in the philosophical mode of transcendence or of position. It has no ob-ject in this sense; it is vision-in-One.

HOW TO THINK IDENTITY QUA IDENTITY: THE HYPOTHESIS OR THE AXIOM OF THE LAST-INSTANCE

“To think Identity qua Identity” cannot have the sense of an ontological injunction, or of a call to: “take care of being as a whole,” nor the quasi-ethical sense of a commandment or of an imperative to “be the keeper of the Other man as of your brother.” It is an axiom, a simple position of immanent thought, for a thought that would equally be a science. It is the description of a posture of thought that is adopted right now without preconditions or philosophical presuppositions.

A scientific posture confines itself to starting from the “object” to be explained, treated as a guiding thread, or as a cause of the new representation, a cause that is not exhausted in this representation. But it undertakes to modify representation in its existing forms in terms of this new object. The scientific posture, as we have described it, programs the abandonment of philosophical operations and decisions as constitutive. But it does not program the rejection of philosophy, which subsists in the state of “objective givens” necessary for the construction of the new theoretical field. This task is obviously complex and presupposes several kinds of operations that will be described later on, but its sense is clear.

Whereas philosophy takes as its transcendental guide of description, in the worst cases the constituted object or else objectivation itself, and in the best their difference—Differe(a)nce—i.e., in all cases, some transcendence (exteriority, nothingness, scission, etc.), science takes as its guide the “real object” to be known. This object is never given in the form of object-objectivation, in the form of transcendence or of representation in the state of autoposition. And Identity is given in this way least of all: for Identity is not any object whatever—as we might expect—but the “prototype” of every real object. Since it is no longer possible to objectivate Identity and its causality in any mode whatsoever, we have to let it think itself; to stop hanging over it philosophically and putting ourselves in its place; to accompany instead, at its own level, Identity’s experience of thought and to confine ourselves to describing it, to manifesting it as such, without claiming to constitute or transform it through this operation, which must be a pure “reflection-without-mirror.”

Now, how does a transcendental science—transcendental both because it is real science (of) the real and because it knows (itself) to be such—think while producing knowledges? The formula “a science of Identity qua Identity” is equivalent to the formula “the One qua One.” Both can clearly receive an ontological or philosophical sense, like the other statements about Identity or the One that accompany them in this context. But can they receive a truly scientific sense, which would no longer be the sense of the Aristotelian “science of the One” that had to recognize its failure as science?

The hallmark of a philosophical statement is that its sense as a statement and its nature as an enunciation continually and circularly communicate—save for a few nuances that are impertinent here—and that a statement like “Identity qua Identity” is presumed to be endowed with a will or a power of autointerpretation and autoposition. To treat it, on the other hand, as a scientific statement, two conditions must be fulfilled: 1. This statement and the others must stop interpreting themselves; they must stop transmitting a knowing, and the sole possible knowing, about their object—that of which they speak, Identity. They are now simple data, indications for the production of a new knowing—which they do not already contain in any capacity—about the One. These statements can thus be explained by something other than themselves, other than their “spontaneous” philosophical economy (syntax and sense). Here the rule is that the real explains its representation, not that this representation explains itself by becoming explicit. The latent “hermeneutism” of every philosophy is eliminated: the couple statement-enunciation is no longer enough to produce some knowing; it requires the radical and unilateral distinction between the real (the object to be explained) and its representation, with the real functioning as the cause—but of-the-last-instance—of representation. The real cannot be deduced from representation by any theoretical procedure; it is representation that is deducible from the real by means of a certain labor carried out only on this representation. The real-cause is not circularly exhausted in its representation. It is not determined by this representation, but rather determines it in the form of a new object-of-knowledge. 2. But the most significant condition is the following: we can only treat Identity as the real object of a science by positing it as a theoretical “object,” radically new vis-à-vis the state of the existing or present theoretical fields—in this case, the field of philosophy, which seeks to be but is not or is “not yet” a theory. If the cause that explains scientific representation is the real, insofar as it unilaterally or unequally determines representation (the very sense of “last-instance”), and if the real is so original in relation to representation that it is not even its “Other” but its “cause,” the cause that precedes it “unequally,” then objects necessarily emerge as absolutely new in the given theoretical field. And science is nothing other than the labor that produces at last an adequate representation of these objects. We must thus treat Identity as a theoretical object of the type “hypothesis” or “axiom” (we do not distinguish the two here), philosophically unheard-of, ontologically unintelligible, and capable of entirely displacing this spontaneous theory that is philosophy. That the statement “Identity qua Identity” was first formulated in ontology does not affect this consequence and proves all the more that ontology as a whole must be treated as a “symptom” for science (we will employ other concepts: “indication,” “material,” “symbolic support”). Ontology is only apparently first in the order of knowing, but in reality it is present only as a material. That we treat Identity as an emergent object from which thought sets out, and not as a simple presupposition to be made explicit or to be understood and critiqued, has also nothing exorbitant about it. For philosophy gives itself in the manner of a first Given (but not exclusively, this is its illusion), with Difference for example as its experience.

How can we now think this Identity qua Identity from the standpoint of its materiality? For this philosophically impossible object, we have merely ready-made spontaneous representations, already available in an existing corpus, but in fact inadequate. We can already eliminate some typical and traditional representations of philosophy: the form-object, objectivation, the intentional aim, every form of transcendence that pretends to aim for Identity and that could only divide it anew and negate it. Rather than an ob-ject in the philosophical sense, it is a cause, and the true “objects” of science are causes rather than objects. But here again philosophy offers its spontaneous representations of the cause, which must be discarded. It separates the cause (its Identity) from what it can do. It distinguishes four forms of the cause (form, agent, end, matter) and only recognizes to them a unity by analogy or by other procedures that claim to reconstitute the identity of the cause from the outside: philosophy loses the efficacy of the cause as cause or again the cause of the “last-instance” and disperses it in the transcendence of Being. The forms are clearly modes of Being, and it is thus that the essence of causality (Identity) is lost for the benefit of its convertibility with the transcendent, illusory “causality” of Being. The minimal, irreducible efficacy of the cause as cause does not pass through the mediation of form, end, agent, or matter. It is rooted in the immanence that constitutes Identity—the cause that is not “immanent,” but is the very causality of real immanence. But how can we think in a rigorous theoretical mode the whole of these determinations, for which philosophy has no instruments and on the very denial of which it is constructed?

“To think Identity” means: to think it qua Identity. And this implies: to think according to the already given Identity, in terms of this Identity as the very cause of thought rather than as the object that is aimed for. This fact has already been established. But having eliminated the form-object from the cause in its nondecisional, nonontological, or nontranscendent form (of) self, we have to equally eliminate the form-subject from science. Identity as cause (of) self of-the-last-instance is not a transcendental subject any more than it is an object. For the philosophical “subject” is not only the object’s correlate; it is a mode of this latter, equally divided or shackled in its essence to the division, and its essence is thus abstract or dependent. Science is a process-“in-cause,” nonintentional cause (of) self. And if this process is without-subject or without will (for it the deconstruction of metaphysical will is an obsolete question), it is also—one forgets too often as a result of materialism—without-object.

Thus to think Identity means first of all: to think (the World) according to Identity. But a thought that thinks “according to Identity” thinks Identity itself only to the extent that, not treating it as object or as subject, as mode of transcendence in general or of Difference, it thinks in the “succession” or “posterity,” in the inequality of Identity as “last-instance.” Since Identity is phenomenal or manifest through and through, it has neither need nor desire for an operation to support its manifestation. By definition it will have never been a metaphysical will, a subject, an object, or their Difference, and has no need to be deconstructed. In effect, the qua no longer indicates here the donation…by means of Being, but the sole Given that has the power, being given, to transform the operations that would claim to give it; to strip from them this claim in particular. What has to be thought is not some more or less forgotten already-thought or some unthought that remains to be thought; it is some given that has no other character, in any case not the “idealist” character of being some already-thought or some yet-unthought. The most rigorous thought does not think thought (old or implicit and concealed or self-withdrawing); it thinks some given. Here the term given does not mean “primary” and “foreign” to thought or its Other, but—this is altogether different—what precedes it in principle and forever as its cause. And the cause that unilaterally derives it is not the Other of thought, but transforms thought into its Other.

We have managed to treat the One as a first Given, an emergent theoretical object, only because it is clearly constituted of immanence alone; it is not blended with any transcendence or representation. And when it is a matter of Identity, “immanence” is not a simple predicate; it is the essence or the real itself, which knows (itself) as real without passing through the mediation of representation. Real Identity, what we call the nondecisional cause (of) self, is no longer that which is convertible (with Being, Difference, the Other, the analytical relation). It is no longer a mode or even an ingredient of Difference. It is that which is “qua Identity.” We will call it “real Identity” in opposition to its logical form (the “Principle of Identity”) or even its logico-real form (Self = Self). The “qua” does not indicate mediation by division, thus by Being and soon by Difference—the Difference that Being always is and the Difference that will soon be the essence of Being. Instead, it indicates the being-identical or the being-identity (of) Identity, its immanence, which is anterior to every scission and forever inaccessible to such a division.

To think Identity qua Identity now also means: to treat the traditional philosophical statements about Identity (the whole ontology and metaphysics of the One, for example) as objective givens or phenomena of this thought and to relate them to Identity as cause-of-the-last-instance. From this redistribution of Identity between the determination-in-the-last-instance and the determinable emerges a new experience of thought, a scientific reform of the understanding. To transform the indicative statements supplied by philosophy in terms of this cause, which is not in its turn determined by this material: these specifications eliminate every risk of objectivating Identity and thereby of “subjectivating” it, every temptation to turn it into a superior object or an ultimate subject. But they also preclude its other convertibility, its other equally philosophical confusion: with the Other, after its confusion with Being; with the Trace, Withdrawal, Difference, after its confusion with the Object. Qua, in ontology, designates an attribution, a sense of…and for…, as a predicate given to Identity through a necessary operation of language. In a science, by contrast, it directly designates the essence itself, that which does not depend on an operation of language; the cause that instead conditions language. Science destroys the predication’s traditional ontological scope and reduces it to the secondary function of materials.

Once Identity is posited as a scientific discovery that globally exceeds the philosophical horizon, the only problem is to recast this false theory that is philosophy. Our work only uses the material provided by philosophy, but its principles stem from science alone. In philosophy and for several reasons, Identity alone, which is not convertible with Difference, appears unthinkable. But science does not preoccupy itself with this prohibition cast on Identity, and, just as it treated Identity as a theoretical discovery, so it turns the adequate thought of the One into a simple problem it has the means to resolve. For science, it is a matter of discovering, if not “inventing,” the forms of the specific thought of emergent Identity; and of doing so by rendering philosophy and its authority immediately contingent. Science does not try to deduce these forms from philosophy’s operations as though philosophy constituted the unsurpassable horizon of every thought. And so it ceases to do ontology, to pose aporetic questions to Identity, to suppose that the philosophical use of language and of representation is the only possible one and to object to the Idea of such a science.

Furthermore, Identity as such sets us on the path of a “third type” of experience of thought, which is neither that of Being nor of the Other. A thought has to be invented, or rather discovered, that does justice to this philosophically incomprehensible exigency: that Identity is thinkable in-the-last-instance (not in the manner of a circle, of course) on its own, with the simple help or the occasion of philosophy rather than thinkable by philosophy. Provided it is the very Given that precedes every operation of thought or of constitution, Identity has the force—it is this force—of defining a new form of thought, which is unilaterally ordered to it and cannot be discovered within the horizon of philosophy. Philosophy does not modify its operations or its posture in terms of the real, but claims to impose them on it, and, for that reason, it begins by alienating the real, raising it to the surface so as to better objectivate and cut it willingly or forcibly. This languid voluntarism is philosophy itself, which insists or prefers to “endure” the real rather than to let itself be modified or transformed by the real. A science, on the other hand, ceases to languish and only transforms the object, which it distinguishes from the real precisely because it paradoxically begins by letting the real be-given.

The Theory of Identities-of-the-last-instance is thus not a transcendent or arbitrary theory, a “doctrine,” a new “philosophical position.” It is not the false theory and the true ideology of ready-made Identities, conflated with phenomena or else abstracted from them, elevated above “experience.” Its “objects” in the most general sense of this term belong from the outset to two heterogeneous types (this averts every confusion): on one hand, philosophical statements about Identity, which now serve it as data or phenomena; on the other, and especially, Identity as cause of the regulated theoretical transformation of these statements. In both cases Identities intervene insofar as they are “posited” or required by a science. We will take care not to imagine the Identity-cause in the manner of “natural,” “geometric,” or else metaphysical singularities. These abstract identities of phenomena are, in reality, divisible like the phenomena themselves and can at most serve as data in this science. If thoroughly undivided Identities are already given (and, if they have to play the role of the cause-of-the-last-instance, they can only be given unconditionally), then they are not given in nature, in dynamic geometry, or in philosophy, but in science itself and as such rather than in its regional “objects” or its philosophical Idea. They are indeed what we can call “theoretical objects,” discovered or given as such; but they cannot in fact be discovered on the plane of constituted knowledge, which has become just as transcendent as a “nature” or a philosophy. Instead, they are given as what forces the theory (of these objects) to modify itself.

THE THOUGHT OF IDENTITY QUA IDENTITY: A SCIENCE RATHER THAN A PHILOSOPHY

Although these are indications to be elaborated, several traits of this thought at least suggest a science, which can and must be named in this way:

• The only causality required here is the causality of the real as strictly immanent: we can call “science” the knowledge grounded in reality. This causality of radical immanence, on the other hand, implies the immanence of theory’s real criteria and of theoretical criteria themselves. We can call “science” a knowledge grounded in rigor and in autonomy.

• This thought is the full exercise of causality, i.e., of a nondivided causality. The determination-of-the-last-instance is the cause qua cause, whose efficacy is not divided between it and its cause and does not return to it through its cause. Thought as theory, for its part, is the effect, as effect (which knows itself to be an effect and nothing more), of this cause and does not claim to codetermine the cause in return but lets-it-be as cause. We can call “science” a knowledge that is unilaterally ordered to the real.

• The thought of Identity as the sole (real) cause is the simplest of all and the most minimal. The most rigorous, the one that reflects rather than expresses the real’s structure with the least possible mediation and that emphasizes this structure as the cause of theoretical representations. The poorest because it rejects—although it exercises itself as a transcendence or a dimension of the theoretical—every foundation in a metaphysical or religious transcendence: in an autoposition.

• It is a reflection-thought (of the real); but an unreflected reflection, without the mediating structure of the mirror or of the third term presupposed by every philosophy. It is ordered without remainder to the real, but in-the-last-instance alone, as the absence of the mirror-mediation requires it. And it submits itself to the real of which it is the reflection by ceaselessly producing new knowledges that do not determine this real.

• Its materials consist of representations with theoretical claims (philosophies) and of already elaborated experimental data, which are reified knowledges…rather than alleged properties of things. It is not empiricist but “materialist” (in the sole sense that it uses materials).

• It is not a science of the “singular” (there is only a philosophy of this “singular,” which has as its object the “difference” between the singular and the universal). It is rather a science of Identity, by means of its transcendent (philosophical) phenomena (for example: “singularities”), which are symptoms or indications for its universal theoretical representation. But the problem of a singularity of-the-last-instance will be posed apropos this theoretical universality itself.

• Philosophy aims for Identity, but in reality it thinks Identity in a different way than it aims for it—precisely because it merely aims for or intends it. It thinks Being or the Universal rather than Identity and thus produces symptoms. Science thinks Identity just as it “aims” for it. More explicitly: because it does not aim for it, but thinks (it) starting from itself, i.e., rectifies the “symptomatic” indications of Identity that philosophy supplies. Philosophy exploits and displaces from within the symptom that it is by its very existence. In contrast, science unravels the symptom: not in itself or by claiming to destroy it, but in knowledge (of the philosophical symptom) and on its behalf. We can call “science” the knowledge of the symptom that is not itself symptomatic, even if it becomes so once again for another knowledge.

• If there is a problem to be resolved, it does not affect the very phenomenon of the Identity-cause or the Given, but what is deduced from it as well as from this Given. Science’s cause-of-the-last-instance is, in effect, announced “within” theory or is manifested within the sphere of knowledge in the form of the existence of a new theoretical object. This object requires existing thought to stop claiming to be valid for it and to transform itself into a simple material or data for a specifically theoretical recasting of these knowledges. We can call “science” a knowledge that presents itself as the resolution of a problem or in terms of a new given theoretical object. That science has a cause in the real, a cause distinct from itself in the mode of the “last instance,” is enough to order current knowledge to the theoretical form, i.e., to the requirement of a new and more universal knowledge, which begins by invalidating or limiting the old one to the state of datum (of “material”) and proceeds through the inauguration of a new discursivity. For example, at the most elaborated level, a non-philosophical or nonphenomenological…discursivity.

SCIENCE: A REALISM OF-THE-LAST-INSTANCE; THE SCIENTIFIC DESTRUCTION OF BACK-WORLDS AND OF PHILOSOPHICAL TELEOLOGIES

The revelation of Identity qua Identity takes place in the form of a new and particular science. Inversely, Identity is what allows us to rectify our idea of science “in general” and to wrench it away from the philosophical horizon. We will call “science” the manner of thinking that relates phenomena to their Identity as their cause of-the-last-instance and does so by means of the theoretical representation (of) this cause. A science is the theoretical knowledge not of phenomena, but of their cause (the Identity of the real) by means or the “occasion” of these phenomena. “Knowledge-of-phenomena” is an ambiguous, amphibological expression that has a philosophical inspiration; it suggests that science is fundamentally an activity of objectivation and a knowledge of objects in the philosophical sense of the term. In reality, the real alone is known, the Identity (of) phenomena rather than phenomena themselves. We will not conflate the theoretical objectivation of phenomena with their knowledge. The former is the means of the latter; knowledge is knowledge (of) the real by means of this objectivation. Knowledge on its own does not have any real meaning, but only a meaning as representation. The actualization of Identity qua Identity compels us not to conflate the real and its knowledge amphibologically.

How should we now understand the formula: “Identity of phenomena,” which says the real object of every science? In philosophy, it signifies a continuity, a blending of given phenomena X, Y, Z and of their reality or Identity. This blending has no meaning for science, which gives another sense to the formula and teaches us to distinguish the “objective data” of a theory and their Identity. It dispels their spontaneous confusion and assembles them instead on the mode and by means of theory in new, philosophically unintelligible relations. Instead of their identification in an amphibology fated to autoposit and autointerpret itself, science arranges them in a process of knowledge. This process presupposes operations that exclude every autointerpretation and that afford this relation its reality. Philosophy’s transcendental illusion consists in believing that Identity can be discovered at the level of objective givens, in their extension or at their horizon, in the mode of transcendence in which Identity is divided. But such a phenomena or objective data of a scientific field is only said of Identity in the mode of means-of-knowledge and insofar as it fulfills indicative functions for a certain region of data (material, index, support), but not functions that constitute a real object. And Identity is only said of the “objective” phenomena under the reason of the “last-instance,” of the cause (of) self that determines without amphibological continuity. There is indeed a relation between the two, but it is a relation of knowledge, marked by contingency from the perspective of the reality of Identity or of its internal constitution. The “objective givens” (old theories, laws and models of the domain, technico-experimental labor) are necessary only to the scientific representation of Identity, not to Identity itself. Still, this necessity is of a special type, given the apriority and specificity of the scientific dimension, which cannot be reduced, as we will show further on, to its local theorico-experimental components.

Common sense and the philosophy that takes over from it spontaneously presuppose a continuity of nature and sense from the objective givens to the Identity (of) the real. This is how we speak, without reflecting on it anymore, of the identity of a people, of a race, of an object. Scientific practice sufficiently suggests that any phenomenon whatsoever is indefinitely divisible and multipliable in its properties and that if there is one Identity of these properties, it will not be on the same plane of reality as they are, but will have to belong to another order. Obviously the paradox that an analysis of the philosophical decision (one that does not come to a stop prematurely) identifies is that Identity becomes a metaphysical back-world [arrière-monde] of phenomena the moment it is placed within the continuity of “empirical” phenomena, in a relation of essence (in the metaphysical sense) or of difference to them. But the difference between undivided Identity and divisible phenomena is only the last possible form of back-worlds, whose concept is inseparable from philosophy’s.

The complementary paradox—always for philosophy—is that the scientific “separation” of phenomena and of the Identity (of) the real, their unilateral or unequal distinction, is precisely the destruction of every possible back-world. Identity as such appears to be a metaphysical “interiority.” But if it is absolutely primary and not divided from the beginning, if it is nonintentional cause (of) self, if science installs itself within Identity and remains there even when it assembles the elements of its theoretical representation, it is because there is no longer, there has never been any back-world: so wills the “last-instance”…

Identity qua Identity is the destruction of metaphysical worlds, of the “World” that is always a “back-world.” The only way to vanquish metaphysics (and its scientistic and positivist species) is to situate oneself in the posture of radical immanence of the One, which is neither a Beyond nor even an Other of the World, but the cause-of-the-last-instance that enjoys [jouit (de)] its precession on the World. Instead, it is phenomena and, in general, “objective givens” that are “beyond” the Identity (of) the real. This is more than a reversal of the metaphysical hypothesis. Science confines itself to thinking according to the real order. Not, like philosophy, according to the order of supposedly real phenomena, but to the order that goes from the real to phenomena—causality itself. The indefinite scientific divisibility of properties shows that there are no simple natures or essences at their level, in correlation with them, whatever the (“differentiated”) mode of this correlation may be. Nothing can stop the scientific analysis of phenomena, their dissolution, but the analysis never reaches anything real. It is a procedure necessary to theory, insofar as theory is a nonobjectivating knowledge of the real. Science presents and describes Identities: the Identity of Identity as such, the Identity of other orders (Theory, Experience, or again Being, being, etc.).

The concentration of the real outside phenomena, within Identity alone, opens a new type of space for thought: theory, which, unlike philosophy, is representation as determined in-the-last-instance by Identity as cause (of) self. Theory is the sole thought adequate to Identity precisely because it no longer objectivates the real à la metaphysics. But why this liberation of thought? From the viewpoint of reality, the concentration of the real in a cause-of-the-last-instance renders contingent, first, the “objective givens” or the “phenomena” and, then, the theory that uses them. So much so that the theoretical space is no longer itself intrinsically limited in its very reality (which is a priori and dependent only on its cause-One) by these data of experience, which are necessary to it in another capacity, that of “simple” indication and support. Hence an absolute, infinite de jure opening of theoretical labor, the production of knowledges that encounter no ontological limit, no philosophical finality. The finitude of Identity, radical immanence, is clearly the reason for this free opening of knowledge as thought. Correlatively, since “phenomena” cease in their turn to be predetermined by Being or by some ontological finality and horizon, and since “experience” is delivered to its own identity-of-order, science is extended to any phenomenon that can now become the “object” of a science. Or, rather, that can give place and indication to a new science. Science’s open multiplicity has no other reason than this expansion, for which the Identity (of) the real is the cause and militates against every transcendent philosophical economy of “objective givens” and of the field of research.

The ensemble of these effects, which are produced on thought and its relation to the World, signals a scientific derealization of the World and of philosophy. Science now makes use of these latter in the nonontological capacity of simple index, material, and support. A nonmetaphysical, non-Cartesian derealization. They are not “simple” phenomena abandoned to science; it is, on the contrary, science itself as authentic thought, endowed with a transcendental yet no longer metaphysical power, that derealizes the object and abandons it to philosophy itself. More than ever, in a sense, the “method” (in this case, the scientific posture itself) constitutes—a nonidealist, non-Kantian constitution this time—its “objects” as simple givens in terms of indication and support and does not allow the World’s demands to be imposed.

SCIENCE’S REAL OBJECT OR ITS A PRIORI STRUCTURES

Now that this first description, the main one, has been completed, it remains for us to describe the other phenomenal givens that constitute the reality of a science. First, those of the real object in the narrow sense, to which a science relates its knowledge. Nonthetic Identity founds a quadruple a priori postulation of reality, of exteriority, of stability, and of unity that together constitute the real object, the a priori condition of the object of knowledge. It founds here the noncircular relation, free of reciprocal determination, that makes it so that a knowledge is subject to the real and only claims to “reflect” or describe it through the very operation of theorico-experimental production of its representations. It finally founds the object of knowledge as the articulation of empirical procedures (in the broad sense: the whole theorico-technico-experimental apparatus) qua phenomenal objective givens and aprioric procedures of the real object (the insertion of this apparatus and its labor into the real object, in view of knowledge). It is then a matter of understanding how the “epistemological” givens and the special realism that science postulates are articulated. The distinction between two objects does not, in effect, encompass the distinction between experience and the concept, the concrete and the abstract, experimentation and the theoretical—or any of their “dialectizations” or “couplings.” The real object already contains theorico-technico-experimental ingredients (but in the state of overdetermination of a priori structures). So much so that the two objects contain the same representations, but with an altogether different status. Their distinction is not epistemological (or transcendent, from our point of view), but uniquely of-the-last-instance, i.e., transcendental or immanent and founded in the very essence of science.

To begin with, science has to specify the knowledge of the real-One in the form of an a priori quadruple structure called the “real object.” If the “real object” expresses a transcendental claim, for example a claim of reality and of stability, which is that of science, it does so in a mode that equally shows the feeling of exteriority necessary to science. Although founded as absolute (albeit finite) power on a pure immanence that does not contain the least parcel of transcendence, science does not exclude transcendence absolutely. Quite the contrary, it requires that the transcendence of its objects and of its representations participate in this absolute essence or this wholly immanent phenomenality. Because it blends the essences, philosophy believes that this requirement is contradictory and proposes itself as the solution to this “contradiction,” which it resolves by mixing or coupling contraries. In reality, it is entirely possible to describe, among the phenomenal givens that constitute a science as such, a special experience (of) transcendence. A nonautopositional experience, unknown to the philosophical order, because it is a form of objectivity that flows in-the-last-instance, in an irreversible order, from the One; it is not viciously transferred or somehow copied from the experience of objects or from their objectivation the way it is in philosophy, which always “fabricates” some transcendence with some transcendent. There is—given immanently with the One for a rigorous description—an experience of reality, of stability, of unity, and of exteriority; but they are also nonthetic (of) self by their essence, which is the One and does not produce their autoposition: this is not a de-cision. Science relates all produced knowledges to an object it never “decided” or “autoposited”; and the object precedes, in the order of the given, these philosophical operations.

In effect, this “objectivity” or this “nonthetic” transcendence in general is one of science’s phenomenal givens, which philosophy can only deny by attempting to divide and thus to redouble it. In philosophy the “object” is not only given in this quadruple characterization vis-à-vis the knowledge drawn from it. It is also given in its redoubling, in the autoposition of transcendence and thus the autoposition of traits that this transcendence can ground. The “fact” of science, what the philosopher calls “fact” by fixing and reifying scientific labor, is this circular redoubling of transcendence. Transcendence is, at any rate, necessary to the scientific object, but perhaps not in this decisional and autopositional form. Rather, the object must be radically or noncircularly “caused”; it is not caused by itself, but by nonthetic Identity (of) self, which is the cause (of) science and its transcendental determination. Given its immanence without blending, this Identity functions like “Occam’s razor” for the philosophical Decision in general and for transcendence in particular. It “simplifies” transcendence by prohibiting its circular redoubling, its vicious autoposition, by destroying at the root of transcendence what constituted its philosophical specificity or use: its nature as decision and as autoposition, which is in some sense, as we will incessantly see, “reduced” by the One.

To manifest its absolute reality, i.e., to recognize a transcendental cause that would not be imposed on it by philosophy, by its project and its will, science (as “subject” of its own description) proceeds not to one but to two transcendental reductions. These reductions are clearly heterogeneous by their source, their procedure, and their scope; the second has an immanent source and has already been carried out or completed. If we assume this slightly external perspective, then no less than these two reductions are necessary to “access” this essence. They bear on science’s supposedly “crudest” objectivity and realism. Let’s assume with philosophy that science is thought’s Other, that it is an almost total and “ontic” obscurity, an absolute Other or an Unconscious of thought. Let’s suppose with philosophy, for a moment, this point of departure. Two reductions are possible:

1/ A reduction that is already called “transcendental,” but is idealist and thus philosophical, resting on an operation of transcendence toward science’s ideal(-real) essence. It allows us to pass from the supposedly “in-itself” object to the object as objectivity and as objectivation; from the supposedly transcendent real to the ideal objectivity of the sense-of-object. This reduction is grounded in philosophy or in transcendence; it is precisely a philosophical or epistemological Decision, which forms a system with the assumption of the primary and unconscious realism that, according to philosophy, would be that of science.

2/ A whole other reduction, since it now bears on what subsists from philosophical transcendence in the previous operation. This reduction can thus no longer be philosophical: it is scientific, carried out from the start and already completed by science and its transcendental cause; nor idealist: it is included in the vision-in-One or in the reality of immanent givens that form the absolute determination of science. It suspends not objectivity itself (there is no scientific representation without objectivity), but its circular redoubling in itself, which is peculiar to philosophy. Philosophy is not only a practice of the object’s objectivity; it is equally its alleged theory in the form of its autoposition.

Science thus forces us to take the concept of objectivity in two different senses. Sciences have a use of objectivity, but objectivity is not autonomous. It is transcendentally “caused” and simplified, not redoubled. It constitutes the nonthetic “real object” (of) self or the a priori to which representations are related. Philosophy, in contrast, is the vicious redoubling of objectivity, which claims to found itself and thus becomes this alleged “rational fact” at the foundation of epistemologies. Science “lacks” self-reflection; it in no way lacks transcendental essence and transcendental autonomy. Science is a simplification of objectivity, reduced to its minimal aprioric givens, and a subjection of these givens to the real, i.e., to the transcendental Identity. It implies the destruction of the illusory autonomy of philosophical objectivity. These results will prove to be fundamental when we undertake the real critique of alterity, of the concept of the Other that contemporary philosophies assume without elucidating.

THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE

A third, ultimate, or transcendental condition has to be finally fulfilled for an autonomous thought of scientific knowledge to exist: this knowledge must represent the “real object” in an “object of knowledge” (finite product of the process), which has the property of modifying itself without thereby claiming to modify the known real, as is the case in philosophy. Knowledge is not an attribute or a determination of the known real, which is a cause absolutely anterior to its knowledge. Science changes the order of its thoughts without also claiming to change the order of the real. It is indeed a representation, but is also nonthetic (of) the real. It is knowledge of the real, but paradoxically it can only be so in a mode that, for instance, excludes the causality through which (philosophical) objectivation claims to modify the object or the being of being. It is thus deprived of every efficacy over the One and over the real object, at least the efficacy that would pass through autopositional transcendence, through the scission “in view of” the position of this object. The distinction between two “objects” is a duality-without-synthesis, without a superior unity, because it does not derive from a scission or a decision. But it is not without cause in Identity or without occasion in experience. We can now have a better understanding of the nature of this Identity-without-identification, of the fact that it is not a superior synthetic Unity—since it tolerates and conditions a radical duality, which is nevertheless not without internal relation—but rather a relation of unilateral determination, as we call it, and it goes irreversibly from the real to its representation. Science thus knows itself as science (of) the real, but strictly ordered to the real. This knowing is not grounded in the suspension of every relation of ontological causality between representation and the real; it is founded by what causes this suspension: the specific Identity of the real itself.

Science is then an intrinsically “dual” or “dualitary” activity, traversed by an irreversible cleavage, which no longer results from a scission of a prior Unity, a scission that would necessarily belong to it like the Dyad to the One.

a/ It knows itself as science (of) the real in-the-last-instance and not as science of the “properties” of being for which philosophy alone could supply being, presence, or objectivity. There is a real in itself, which is neither Being nor being, neither the objective nor its properties nor their “difference.” Science does not leave, it has already left the equation of metaphysics (because it never entered into this equation): logos = being, thinking = the real, which always presupposes a transcendence of Being or the real to thought, and vice versa, and their identity as the Same. Science immediately inhabits the real; it knows the real and can assert this knowledge against philosophy. Its essence is a transcendental experience whose secret is not contained in philosophy.

b/ Although it knows straightaway that it inhabits the real and does not have to identify with it, to posit it, science knows at the same time that it is just a simple representation of the real, a simple reflection that does not constitute or determine it, as philosophy always believes it can. It is thus a nonthetic reflection (of) the rigorously unconstituted real. This status of the absolute or mirror-less reflection explains the necessity of a permanent “rectification” of concepts at the same time as their “adequation,” which corresponds, if not to a “local,” at least to a “finite” and of-the-final-instance realism of representations. This adequation is thus not the metaphysical certainty that philosophers, dazzled by their own illusions, want to inject into science. That science knows that it is a nonobjectivating representation (of) the real does not prevent it—quite the contrary—from rectifying its representations, but science does so on the basis of its subjection and its adequation. For the scientific posture consists in “assuming”—in a nothing-but-immanent way—a nonobjectivating Identity-without-identification and without-synthesis of the real and of representation and, only thereby, in representing it without claiming to transform it in this operation. It is not a matter of a “poor” adequation: knowledge is not subject to a real as already represented or given in the mode of autoposition, i.e., to its anterior representations. But it is subject to the real that is to be known and that is necessarily already given in-the-last-instance alone and prior to every synthesis. Hence what must be called, in opposition to philosophy’s unlimited journey, science’s intrinsic or postural finitude, which forever prohibits its secession from the real to be known, but not from its current representation. The representation is therefore voided of every ontological function. And this explains its reduction to the state of description and the destruction of its constitutive claims, at the same time that it goes from the circle of autoposition to the state of nonthetic reflection or representation. The scientific use—the one we make here—of language in general and of “categories” is thoroughly heterogeneous to philosophy’s use of “logos,” i.e., as constituting or unveiling = realizing the real. Science implicates a descriptive and no longer constitutive use of representation in general, which alters nothing by manifesting it. Whereas science alters the order of its representations rather than the order of the real, philosophy claims to alter the latter through the former. Hence its transcendental illusion. Only science can then found another, nonillusory use of philosophy: as nonthetic representation (of) the real. This scientific use of philosophy receives the name of “non-philosophy.”

We thus dissolve, through this theory of nonthetic reflection, the philosophical reduction of science, i.e., the thesis according to which science would rest on objectivation. Since objectivation is the theme of philosophy par excellence, science is stripped of its own essence from the start and receives a substitute essence, that of philosophy, of which it is then the degradation. This logic is irrefutable, but it is possible to extirpate it, at its root, from scientific thought.

What happens? For philosophy, it is fundamental to circularly conflate—even if it is in the more or less long run and with more or less delay—the known real with its objectivation, the real and its knowledge, the real object and the object of knowledges, which are supposed to be determined reciprocally. In their hegemonic will over the sciences, philosophers confuse two heterogeneous modes of phenomenalization of the real: the philosophical, which implicates Decision or Transcendence as its major operation, and the scientific that excludes such a Decision from its essence or that phenomenalizes the real as already-Phenomenon and keeps it in its most realist and immediate “naïveté,” in its immanence, which is deprived of any exteriority. This confusion is naturally followed by another: every knowing is finally reduced to a historical knowing, i.e., to the deployment of a transcendence. In contrast, science in its relation to the real to be known does not proceed through objectivation, which is always a supposedly primary and constitutive exteriority or transcendence. Philosophy is the circular theory and practice of objectivity and of its essence, which reciprocally determine each other. Yet science does not ultimately have an object in this sense or in the ob-jective sense. The known real and the knowledge of this real form an irreversible duality. Knowledge is a reflection (of) the real, but a reflection that neither posits nor objectivates it and that has its ultimate nonsynthetic cause in the real. This presumes that science, in its specificity, is a knowing in which the observer can modify the objective phenomena without modifying the real implicated in and through the immanence of the scientific posture. Science does not form a circle with the real as does philosophy, which claims to be not only its knowledge but its coproduction. What is in fact called “ob-jectivity” in general is a confusion of the known real with the (ever modifiable) object of knowledge. Hence the following distinction: philosophy is the theory and practice of the ob-ject or confounds the real with its representation; science has a real “object,” i.e., it does not have ob-jects in the philosophical sense; it entertains with the real a “relation” that is no longer one of objectivation. There are two heterogeneous modes of phenomenalization that philosophy—always unitary—seeks to conflate, while science seeks the autonomy of its way of thinking the real and the distinction between these two modes.

Science possesses and exhibits from itself an absolute cause of-the-last-instance, an untransformable Identity (of) self and (of) its nonthetic representation. Scientific posture is already complete or finished; it claims—an immanent claim—to have access (to) the real from the start—not to the object of knowledge…—without having first to deny or posit it. Truth be told, science posits neither the real it represents nor the representation it gives of the real. Its realism is not secondary, transcendent, or willed; it is primitive or “first.”

EMPIRICAL SCIENCE AND TRANSCENDENTAL SCIENCE

In the division of intellectual labor it imposes on science, philosophy draws a final distinction that flows from the others and sums them up: it distinguishes “empirical” sciences and “transcendental” science, that is, itself as science of Being or of Logos. To be sure, this distinction and this correlation, this hierarchy that carries the “empirico-transcendental doublet,” and this circle are broken by science itself when it undertakes to describe its real essence.

1/ Every science, even “empirical” science—or a science that philosophy calls “empirical” in order to degrade it—is in reality also “transcendental”: it bears on the real itself and, moreover, it knows that it is related to the real. Undoubtedly, philosophy also claims to be related to the real. But this is an abstract resemblance and a generality. For science is related (to) the real itself and knows that it is related to the real twice in a nondecisional and nonpositional way, within the intrinsically finite limits of absolute immanent givens or of the One as Identity (of) self (and) (of) knowing (of) self. It manifests itself as more primitive and more elementary than philosophy and dismisses its claim.

2/ A transcendental science—for example, the science (of) the essence of science sketched out here—is necessarily also “empirical,” but in the new sense that it has to receive its object (being unable to create it), taken from matter or from thought, that it obtains this object in the “World”: for example, in this case, existing sciences, epistemologically blended with the philosophical Decision, in view of constituting a science that would take this blend as its object-material and would have to receive it without being able to create it. The relation of the aprioric structures of every possible science to the “empirical” object should be clarified more fully by means of the description of the “dualitary order,” of the “unilateral order,” or of the order of “determination-in-the-last-instance” that regulates this relation.

Although every science participates in the transcendental structures of the One, of the real Object and of the Object of knowledge, we will more particularly call “first science” or “transcendental science”—at the risk of recreating a misunderstanding akin to the old philosophical hierarchy—the particular “empirical” science constituted as “auto”description of the essence of sciences and that must necessarily take the philosophical Decision itself as its object-phenomenon. This will be a “transcendental” science—a first time in the sense in which from now on any science, “empirical” by its object or its worldly materials, deserves to be transcendental by its essence and a second time in the sense in which it is constituted by describing the essence of any worldly empirical science. Yet these two uses of the “transcendental” are, in reality, perfectly identical. Such a science remains empirical by its materials (the epistemological Decisions), even if it is transcendental by the way in which it is constituted (the description of every science’s aprioric structure).

In relation to the circle, to the divided unity of the empirical and the transcendental, in relation to their philosophical hierarchy, which is the hierarchy of a division of labor, the new distribution of the empirical and of the transcendental reflects the “dual” or “dualitary” spirit of science, namely the fact that every science immanently requires both: 1/ an empirical given it does not create but discovers in the World or Effectivity; thus the contingency and transcendence of this given that serves it as materials and as occasional cause, but a cause it cannot produce; 2/ the use of this given in terms of the four scientific a prioris, rather than its presumed objectivation and “categorial” transformation, as soon as it is inserted or included in the form of the “real object,” i.e., of the “nonthetic” or non“autopositional” “objectivity.”

The transcendental (the cause of sciences) and the empirical (the given or occasional materials) no longer form the circle of a divided Unity or a philosophical Decision. They at last shatter the famous empirico-transcendental parallelism by distributing themselves according to the relation of the “dual” (rather than of the philosophical unitary duality) or of Determination-in-the-last-instance. We will have to clarify this relation by examining the case of the relation between “transcendental science” or “nonthetic science (of) sciences” and its object-materials: the philosophical Decision.

At the foundation of this new nonunitary distribution of the empirical and the transcendental clearly lies a new experience of the transcendental: within the limits of scientific finitude. Every science indicates itself and starts from itself without having to leave itself. It is not philosophy but, rather, science that is the “transcendental subject.” But on the imperative condition that it modifies our concept and our experience of this subject: as nothing-but-immanence and without transcendence, thus as nonepistemological or non-Kantian. It is not the immanence of the reflexive process of the Idea of the Idea (Spinoza). It excludes every transcendence, intentionality, or reflection, every logos in general. Science supplies its criterion of reality and of validity from its own foundation. It exhibits on its own its ultimate givens without resorting to the mediation of philosophical operations. It is capable of bracketing the philosophical positions (ontology, epistemology, idealism, materialism, positivism, skepticism, etc.) and philosophical positionality in general.

Thus philosophy has never really founded science. It has instead projected a possible image on it, the possibility or the project of a science. Science, nevertheless, does not found itself. If it is capable of describing itself, without constitutively resorting to philosophy’s technologies, it can do so through the immanence of its cause. In other words, the real content of what we have called the epistemic is no longer a philosophy-of-science, an epistemology. It is a first science, a transcendental science of a new type. We have—rather, we are, and as humans—an absolute, if not effective experience (of) science, absolute albeit naive and unreflected, but quite sufficient to allow us to describe science’s internal structure. We can thus pass directly from sciences to transcendental science, which is the theory of their essence, and circumvent the allegedly “uncircumventable” philosophical Decision. Through the One, we pass from empirical sciences to transcendental science, in which empirical sciences describe themselves and retain their naïveté without passing through the philosophical operation as constitutive.

By its transcendental kernel, science can assume some of the functions of philosophy, but it transforms them without resorting to the Decision’s fundamental procedures. It does not occupy the place vacated by philosophy. On one hand, philosophy never leaves any place vacant; on the other, a transcendental science is not a philosophical image of science like positivisms, which are nothing more than philosophy’s autodenials via scientific intermediaries. This is why the reevaluation of sciences against their traditional image programs the necessity of a science of philosophy and of epistemology and can found this project.

What we have described is the real infrastructure, real in the rigorous sense of every science and not in the empirico-logical sense.

To conclude: we have not described here the scientific labor grasped in exteriority or in the epistemological prism, but science’s immanent thought, which gives experimentation and theorization their scientific values, i.e., their relation to the real. Science is not any combination of more or less already elaborated givens, already constituted knowledges. It only acquires its supposed theoretical meaning under certain conditions—the One as determination-of-the-last-instance, with the “realism” that follows from it—and these conditions are spontaneously realized in the scientific posture. If there is a possible description of science, this description requires us to take science right at the level of its phenomenality, insofar as it is nothing other than immanent phenomenon (of theory, of givens, of experimentation, of deduction, etc.). We thus take it outside transcendent constructions and philosophical interpretations (conditions of possibility, dialectic, hermeneutics, structuration, etc.), which are spontaneous but invert science’s meaning by projecting it in the wholly other space of reflection, of consciousness, of the concept, and of the philosophical circle in general. All these elements intervene locally in the complex scientific practice, but certainly not in its essence. And a “first science” must keep them absolutely in abeyance.

As it will be noted, as it will perhaps be objected, we have refrained from supplying an epistemological description. This is not our problem. Instead, the problem to which we should draw the attention of scientists, and perhaps of philosophers as well, is that it is less urgent to fabricate a new ad hoc epistemology on the transcendent presupposition that science is an empirico-rational fact than to know if epistemology in general has some meaning (and what meaning) for science. Before being an alleged empirico-rational and fetishized fact, science is an immanent infrastructure. Our point of view—but we cannot demonstrate this in detail here—forces us to posit the scientific impertinence of epistemologies (impertinence at least as to the essence of science). And then to posit the equivalence—with respect to science and from its perspective alone—of all the possible epistemological Decisions. The Principle of equivalence of all the epistemological observers of science cannot be in its turn a philosophical Decision; it flows from science itself when science is restored to its essence and when this essence shows itself indifferent to philosophy.¹