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UNIFIED THEORY OF THOUGHT

TECHNOCOMPUTING REASON AND THE NEW ORDER OF INTELLIGENCE

TWO reasons lead us to revive the classical problem of a science of thought and force us to abandon the solution philosophy traditionally invokes with the names of “logic,” “science of logic,” or “doctrine of science” under which it presents itself in person.

The first is superficial and situational: the irrefutable emergence and extension of a technocomputing experience of thought in the form of extra-administrative and “intelligent” uses of informatics. In what capacity can the rise of the information technologies of intelligence and reason (“artificial intelligence,” “cognitivism,” and their future relays) still be interpreted by philosophy and dominated by its authority and procedures? Philosophy always “reduced” the autonomy of mathematics and arithmetic, casting them into an inessential “phenomenality.” But the inverse reduction, that of thought to reasoning and of reasoning to arithmetic, which receives unheard-of technological means, forces us to reconsider philosophy’s relation to science and even to technologies. The technocomputing drive has perhaps an origin that its “metaphysical” sense does not exhaust.

The second reason is more fundamental and indirectly determines the first. It is the problem of scientific thought alone and of its relation to philosophical authorities. If science, as we are trying to show, is an autonomous experience of thought, autonomous vis-à-vis philosophy, if there is a genuine thought of science, i.e., a specific relation to the real, determined by itself, that knows itself to be so determined without passing through philosophy, then all the old divisions have to be reconsidered and the general economy of the field of thought has to be disrupted.

Of these two reasons, the second is essential or “transcendental,” i.e., determinant of the degree and forms of thought’s reality. The first is only “occasional” or “empirical,” if this term still retains some sense here. The appearance of the technological pole between the philosophical pole and the scientific pole is only a symptom and is not enough to seriously endanger the traditional philosophical authority and its legislation over thought. The emergence of technocomputing reason is an indication, one that something else, science rather than technology, seeks to make visible in its specificity against the philosophical order that is regularly imposed on it. We have to do justice to what is not a sufficient reason. As such, before even being analyzed, the symptom maintains a precise discourse: the domination of Intelligence in our history. The age we are interminably entering is no longer the century of Critique or the century of History. No doubt we have no sure criterion for deciding that it is the century of Language and Communication or else the century of Intelligence. In fact, it is enough to allow the symptom to manifest itself and to form a situation. Subject to this condition, nothing prevents us from letting ourselves be affected by the technocomputing phenomenon as more fundamental than the phenomenon of Language and Communication. It seems to us that it challenges to the limit the domination of philosophy through the immediate bedrock and resources it discovers in science, whereas Language and Communication continue to move inside the sphere of philosophy, the sphere of its most invariant philosophical schema and its authority. This accounts perhaps for our impression nowadays that Language and Communication have not kept their promise and that they are exhausted as objects of science. A more or less rigorously founded science of history (Marxism) may have indeed existed, but no unified theory of the phenomena of language ever has, as we might want, unless we assume that this science of language is realized in the form of a general theory of communication.

Nevertheless, if we are entering a “century,” the objective appearances suggest that it is the century of Intelligence. From now on, Intelligence arrives on the scene with the claim—grounded or not, this is perhaps not the essential problem here—of becoming something like the principal “productive force.” A latent cognitivism, carried and accelerated by the technological drive, now traverses the philosophical and scientific as much as social and economic practices. Nothing prohibits our being affected by the amplitude of this emergence, by its dominant and “overlying” character as we were by those of History in the nineteenth century, since Intelligence announces itself, beyond Language, with the same force as History. Without doubt, this is a dominant rather than determinant phenomenon of the becoming-real of thought—the precise theoretical distinction between these concepts was invoked several times earlier. And if a rigorous science of Intelligence must at last be elaborated, Intelligence itself cannot be the foundation of this science but only its occasion. It is thus not in and around Intelligence that a general science or a unified theory of thought has to be constituted and, above all, founded. In any case, this project could have been carried out without it. On the other hand, as dominant phenomena that form a situation, the problems of Intelligence and of Thought are henceforth more fundamental than those of History and of Language. It is in this special capacity, at once crucial and secondary, that the new order of Intelligence (whatever the duration of its domination) serves here as our guiding thread for the constitution of thought into a “scientific continent.”

OF SCIENCE AS THOUGHT’S REAL BASIS

How can we pose the problem of thought scientifically? How can we make visible—it is the same thing—the technocomputing symptom as nothing more than a symptom? Traditionally, the relation to science, to technology, and to philosophy takes place on the basis of philosophy and under its authority. That philosophy is posited as the real basis of itself is what we call and describe as Principle of Sufficient Philosophy (PSP). The project of a science of thought (including of philosophy) is the radical critique of this claim. It assumes that science is recognized as the only authentic real basis of our relation to philosophy and to technology. The problem is not simply to know whether we have in science the experience of the most real thought, of the thought that can serve as such a basis—the autodescription of science has supplied the proof of this. It is first and foremost the problem of what we might mean by this experience.

A thought is generally called “real” or has a transcendental consistency if it is, by its very essence, a relation to the real and to self-knowing as well as to the knowing of this relation to the real. But this is not enough to distinguish science (as authentically real thought) from philosophy, which also raises this claim, but reserves it exclusively for itself. Philosophy’s peculiarity is precisely the PSP, the belief that it and it alone is a relation to the unique real and a knowing of this relation. A restrictive condition must thus be added in order to distinguish in a definite way the scientific form of thought from its philosophical form. Negatively, it is the exclusion of objectivating or autopositional transcendence—which is peculiar to every philosophy—outside the essence of science and even outside its practice, in which transcendence takes a nonobjectivating form. Whereas philosophy is related to the empirical real and to an ideal real (divided unity of the “real”) toward which it simultaneously transcends, scientific thought is already real by itself without having to pass through a transcendent reference in this autopositional form. Every science is the science of something “empirical.” But it distinguishes between a given or an occasion—that is necessary as support and as material, but is contingent in relation to the real essence of thought, which resides in immanence alone—and the real object or the scientific objectivity, which is not reduced to a contingent given, which includes this given without finding its own essence within it. The object’s reality is not codetermined by these empirical givens as is always circularly the case in philosophy. The description of science has clarified these points and dispelled its confusion with philosophy.

Positively, it is the very structure of the cause or the absolute “foundation” of science that excludes philosophical transcendence as useless or at any rate as not present. Whereas the philosophical real is unique-and-divided or is a relation-to the real, the real of scientific thought is One or identical (to) self. But it is not also divided and is never in its essence even an “internal” relation or a relationship. There is a point in science at which all the relations are “related” (but without any relation) to an experience (of) self that is not separated (from) thought. This self-enjoying experience of indivision is called nonthetic (of) self and forms the irreducible reality, the real kernel of thought. We equally call vision-in-One the One that would not necessarily be also accompanied by a Dyad or blended with it as is always the case in philosophy and suffices because it is nonthetic knowing (of) self. This real, which is not relational, which is simply a-rational, is the element of science as thought, as the nonpositional phenomenolization (of) the real, and not simply as the production of knowledges or assemblage of models.

Fundamentally obscure yet perfectly consistent thought, it does not pass through a representation of the real in order to become real in its turn…This new criterion of the real and of the representation that is cast outside the real allow us to include the philosophical and cognitive thought in this representation. Extending what philosophy calls representation, and of which it gives a very narrow definition, we will henceforth use this term to name every experience of thought (including philosophy) that is founded on or primarily uses transcendence in its relation to the real. On the other hand, given its ontologically decisionless and positionless nature, this experience (of) indivision, the identity of thought and (of) the real can be called cause-of-the-last-instance (of) thought. The nondecisional cause (of) thought does not fall under representation in general and in its vaster sense, since it is index sui et repraesentationis.

A science of thought-through-representation (including philosophy) cannot be founded in its turn, viciously, on a representative experience; it has to be founded in what is most real before and in representation. We also had to establish the project of such a science on its real basis (which is the nonthetic cause (of) thinking) rather than on thought itself (which includes a necessary and constitutive moment of representation). The problem is no longer to “possibilize” thought but to “realize” it—this is still a poor formula. Philosophy produces and consumes the artifact of thought that is Representation as autoposition, and the Human Sciences produce and consume this other artifact that is “Cognition.” Yet the cause (of) thought is the sole content of phenomenality or reality that is indivisible and inalienable. It alone can thus serve as the real basis for our relation to philosophy and to cognition. The experience of thought within the limits of science: this is the foundation of a science of thought that, given its absolute “universality” and priority, can include not only logos but also the technological and artificial forms of intelligence in its “phenomena” or its “objects.”

At the same time that the cause-One of science is the basis of our relation to philosophy and to cognition, the essence of science constitutes the real object that “first science” (as science of thought) describes in the first place. In other words, the very first task in a description of the essence of science can only elucidate in the One the nonthetic cause (of) thought, of every science, even if it is “empirical.” This description is in its turn another science, but a science (of) the essence of science or “transcendental science.” It is a “particular” discipline, located alongside others and free of any philosophical claims, but its object is what is more real than every Representation or Cognition.

THE PREMATURE OR ILLUSORY ATTEMPTS AT A SCIENCE OF THOUGHT

If philosophy already treated the problem of the science of thought and the thought of science as “first” or as onto-logical, why should it be posed once again? If a science of thought that comprises a thought of science is philosophy in its entirety, how can we avoid adding a new variation to already elaborated solutions?

Not only is philosophy now presented simply as a particular solution to this problem: a unitary solution that, for this very reason, only covers certain phenomena, a certain experience, but not all the actual heterogeneous forms of thought. But we are also searching for a unified theory of these forms—unified rather than unitary (we will elaborate the difference between the unified and the unitary further on), unified on the basis of science alone. To be sure, we admit the ontologico-meta-physical solution; it exists, invariant and multiple. But to this solution we “oppose” experiences of thought, those of sciences and of rational “arithmetic,” that this solution can only understand by reducing. How do we know that? The only positive reason for which we proceed in this way is science itself, which is capable of describing itself in its essence and of abandoning philosophy’s ancestral authority. We can claim to pose this problem non-philosophically only if we have the means of showing that an experience of thought that was never ontological or philosophical is at issue in science. The project is then completely renewed, for the name science can no longer signify for us what it has always signified for philosophy: either the empirical concept of sciences or the transcendental or rather metaphysical concept of “absolute” science or, better yet, the hierarchy of these two concepts. We have to grasp identity before its division: the Identity of science instead of its “being”…

It is thus science, and science alone, that can denounce the previous attempts at a theory of thought as premature or illusory. They have never ceased and are extended toward the two competing parts that currently divide up the project. On one hand, philosophy in very varied forms (theories of knowledge, logic and science of logic, transcendental and empirical epistemologies, “experience of thought,” etc.). On the other hand, “Artificial Intelligence” and “Cognitive Sciences,” as the advanced tip of Human Sciences, which are presented as sciences of “general intelligence,” i.e., of the real content of “reason.” In this fierce competition the claimants share the fundamental presuppositions: those of “transcendence.” That these knowings are simply “empirical” or more essentially “ontological” is not a pertinent difference for science, i.e., for an experience of thought that discovers its cause directly in a radical or “of-the-last-instance” identity.

What does a rigorous science of thought allow us to decipher in the present situation?

1/ From this new point of view and from it alone, of course, this science of thought is a project that has some effective forms. But it has not yet discovered its scientific form, the one that would be grounded in rigor and in reality. Above all, it has only had “ideological” external forms, manipulative and technological in spirit. Thought has to become a scientific continent. But this continent has only been occupied up till now by philosophy and some of its subproducts. Just as history was the object of ideological and appropriative theories in the form of “philosophies of history,” which took the place of an absent science, so thought—but we are far from having punctured this subjection—is the object of philosophies and of technologies disguised as sciences, which manipulate it more than they contemplate it and occupy the vacant place of a science. We do not yet have the rigorous concept of the reality of thought; under this name we assemble representations, self-serving substitutes, unreal artifacts, and manipulations. With its scientific claim, cognitivism sounds a serious warning to philosophy and a call to finally think rigorously this very old and very new object. We confine ourselves to knowing thought in particular through its exercise, its practical manifestation, its works (philosophy and sciences as well as common sense). But these spontaneous practices are not equivalent to a science. Science’s philosophical thought is not yet a science of thought. But if this concept is valid for sciences, will we say that it is not perhaps valid for philosophy, which is a self-knowing and a reflection even in its most spontaneous exercise? The exercise of thought in philosophy would have the privilege—an ontico-ontological privilege—of being the only one that knows itself, that is at the same time a knowledge of thought. Hence, for example, philosophical logic as a science of logic in the Hegelian style…But we want to suggest a whole other thing. In its essence, philosophy is nothing more than a spontaneous practice (a decision, a will, a scission—a practical moment through which it claims to determine and transform the real, even if it is also the theory of this essential practice). From our point of view, it is enough that “theoretical” thought be at the same time also a practice and especially, by its very essence, a decision, in order not to be a science, but a spontaneous or practical thought, with theoretical aspects or ends. Up to now this science has thus remained impregnated either with philosophical teleology and practical spirit or with manipulative and technological spirit—always the same self-serving obsession. One always wanted—though not always for avowable ends—to transform thought’s reality, at the same time that one sought to know it—a pious wish that had to remain an infinite wish, an infinite desire…A rigorous science is dis-interested, contemplative, and descriptive. For reasons of internal rigor and of reality, it is necessary to absolutely exclude every teleology, every interest, and every will from science—conjugating on this point Spinoza, Husserl, and Heidegger. For scientific reasons, thought’s self-knowing in the philosophical mode cannot be a scientific knowing. A rigorous science of the reality of thought remains to be founded. And in order to constitute thought into a scientific continent, we have to find the means of displacing all the attempts at appropriation, exploitation, and division of its unique cause (of) the One.

2/ The current claimants share—this is the foundation of their competition—a certain division of intellectual labor and of its tasks. To Human Sciences, the science of thought—but a science without thought, whose object is simple “cognition.” To philosophy, the science of thought—but a thought without science, whose object is a simple “representation” without the reality of the scientific object. On one hand, sciences that were created for other objects (whether human or nonhuman) have been projected on this new object; on the other, the object “thought” is hardly a real object, it is rather an aggregate of outlines, an assemblage of heterogeneous perspectives on thought. As always, when a new object tries to appear, one first claims to identify it through the incoherent combination of sciences created for other phenomena. This is why the reality of thought, its cause, has not yet been manifested as such or as the thing itself through a science adequate to it. It was simply outlined at the horizon of certain psychologies, of certain information technologies, of certain biological disciplines. How can we imagine that it can be reached through the accumulation of several different sciences that aim at objects other than it? On the other hand, philosophy claims (rightly, it seems at first sight) to be capable of situating itself at the heart of thought because it is identical to thought. But its problem is that it is not a science in the authentic sense of the term. It is not a rigorous description that does not modify its object in-the-last-instance; it is an autotransformative practice of thought. It is doubtful that philosophy can extract from what it calls representation the real kernel outside-of-representation. Thus some of the current sciences of thought are perhaps sciences (others are manipulative technologies), but their object is not thought. Rather: their objects are the objectivated and transcendent artifacts, lost in the World. And philosophy, which claims to access the essence of thought, does not do so via scientific procedures. At present, a science of thought is not possible, or it is divided in two. Thus human sciences and philosophy have in common the division of the nevertheless undivided thought. They have a common problem, which stems from their transcendent presuppositions. They have an external experience of thought, as object or as representation (ontological and constitutive of its reality). Obviously this thesis is meaningful only from the standpoint of another experience of thought, which takes place, if not more “internally” to thought, at least more immanently or more “radically.” This immanent experience of thought—where thought is neither an object nor a representation, neither a technique nor an operation of transcendence or of alienation for reaching this object—can describe itself in its essence and, on this basis, in its exercises and its works, i.e., philosophy and science. It is science, insofar as it has its seat in the One.

PASSAGE TO THE SCIENTIFIC POSITION OF THE PROBLEM OF THOUGHT’S ESSENCE

As soon as a problem of simultaneous distinction and unity (this is what we call “unitary”) is posed, philosophy lays claim to it and takes it on: it is its problem, the task philosophy was created for. Science can thus claim to resolve this problem instead of philosophy—but in another mode and through another (nonsimultaneous) distribution of Identity and Duality—only if its essence has been elucidated and has shown itself to be anterior, from the standpoint of reality, to the essence of philosophy. This is the only way to displace philosophy’s unitary claims, by means of something other than a “revolution.” In elaborating a science of philosophy, our main objective is to recognize that science liberates itself from philosophical authority by its own means, i.e., by means of a rigorous autodescription in which it treats the One as an immanent guiding thread. On this basis it is then possible to recognize that science suspends the claims of various philosophies as well as their major claim to constitute the most originary experience of thought. This task of constituting thought, in the vastest sense (including “Reason” and “Intelligence”), into the object of science implies first that thought is wrested away from the illusions of the philosophical Decision. Only science can lift the philosophical resistance by manifesting it as such. So long as the attempts to unify its heterogeneous experiences remain unitary in style (simultaneity of Division and Unity) and take place by reduction to the authoritarian paradigm of philosophy, thought’s continent will remain undetected as such. The discovery of the scientific paradigm’s absolute autonomy, of the existence of an absolute original and primitive thought that is experienced as what traverses the process of production of scientific knowledges, wrests in one stroke all the experiences of thought from philosophy—even the philosophical, which becomes the object of a non-philosophical science…To rediscover and describe the real order that unifies—without reducing them—these qualitatively distinct experiences is then the second task, and it naturally follows from the first.

Such a project cannot therefore be realized by replacing philosophy with an existing “empirical science.” This science would be more or less rigorously constituted; it would only be in this case a mixture of philosophical presuppositions, hidden psychological prejudices, and technomathematical procedures. We would thus remain in the current—cognitivist—state of the position of the problem. As we will see, the “sciences” and “technologies” of the artificial and of cognition are partially positivist subproducts of empiricist or rationalist philosophies, conclusions that are unaware of their premises. A science of thought takes up the cognitivist project again only as an indication or a symptom—as we have already said—and proposes to formulate it in its broadest extension, doing justice to the whole heterogeneity of thought (in particular to its philosophizing experience). An empirical science, like those that study cognition, would lead back to the current state of affairs, i.e., to philosophy’s implicit and poorly elucidated domination over these problems. And this would create a supplementary vicious circle. The precise meaning of thought’s constitution into a “scientific continent” resides primarily in the immanent seizure of scientific thought’s Identity, in the way that this thought can describe it before its philosophical division; the grasping of its transcendental power to describe the real itself; finally, of its nonunitary function of ordering or unifying the fields of thought.

THE CONCEPT OF “TRANSCENDENTAL SCIENCE”

Thus a rigorous science of thought presupposes first of all a new, nonepistemological description of the power of truth proper to science. This description on its own constitutes a new science, at once a transcendental science, due to its real object (the essence of science) and its relation to the other sciences (it elucidates the transcendental structure in which all sciences, even “empirical” ones, already participate), and an empirical science alongside others, due to its need to discover its object-phenomenon outside itself. For if this science is constituted in its essence in the mode of an immanent autodescription of the essence of existing sciences, then it can only become an effective or “empirical” science when it finds its object or the contingent given that serves as material for its object (for example, in the philosophical Decision) and passes in this way from the state where it is a simple essence to the state where it becomes effective as “science of philosophy.”

As a transcendental science, it is science (of) science (the (of) signifies “nonthetic (of)…”); it is the immanent autodescription of the essence of sciences. But as a science that finds an empirical object in philosophy, it adds a worldly and contingent given to its immanence and includes it under the conditions of this immanence. It is thus the same science that is science (of) sciences and science (of) philosophy, but according to a distribution of its identity and of its difference that is altogether distinct from their philosophical or unitary distribution.

From all points of view, it will thus be distinguished from philosophy. It will be a genuine “empirical” science; it will not be circularly codetermined as science by its contingent object; it will not result from the combination of a Decision and of a Position à la philosophical Decision. But like and more than philosophy, it will be a transcendental power of manifestation of the real essence of sciences and will not confine itself to constituting an empiricist and psychological description-theorization of thought. The current claimants to a science of thought—who are divided because they have in common the division of thought’s Identity—are disqualified together in the name of what, from the outside, can appear as their synthesis in the Idea of a transcendental science, but is instead their Identity before its division. This Identity of a transcendental power of revelation in-the-last-instance of real essences and of their rigorous “empirical” description is an unacceptable paradox for philosophy, which seeks to divide Identity. But thought’s economy can only be redistributed by a science—and we will have finally recognized that science is not merely a blind and technical process for the production of knowledge, but a power (more originary than the philosophical itself) of revelation of the immanent phenomenal givens, which form the “real essences,” i.e., nonpositional Identities (of) self.

Perhaps we can specify philosophy’s scientific impertinence with science’s transcendental pertinence. The philosophical theory of thought is not the thought in which the ordinary man lives as an individual. It engenders—through its own operations of Reversal and of Displacement, of Decision and of Position—a certain image and a certain practice of thought. But this practice covers neither the thought of science nor that of “common sense” (as a type of experience). It imposes on them, by definition, its fully practical (decisional and positional) image and seeks to reduce all the other experiences of Intelligence to this image. It is the superior power [puissance] that is divided into itself and into science, into science and into common sense, which proceeds and returns to itself through them. It is the superior Unity of all these heterogeneous spheres of thought, whereas common sense and science are the deficient spheres of the philosophizing thought, which is not separated from itself in them without rejoining itself, rewilling itself, and so on, in order to be—starting from their presumed ideality, i.e., from their presumed division—a real and infinite unity, a unity for itself rather than for these spheres. In this case, the sense of the specific reality of science and common sense is altered: this reality is cut in half, idealized or unrealized into a degraded or deficient empirical reality outside philosophy, which must be sublated and critiqued, and into an identified thought, already identifying itself with philosophy, that affords it its essence, its sense, and its truth. Scientific thought is no longer real on its own and from its own depths, but through something else that has to make it intelligible in the mode of logos. It is understood by means of something else, which understands itself. Thus science is not grasped as such in its own essence; it is appropriated, captured, and reproduced as a “mystical result” (Marx). Philosophy has no end other than itself. This is why it transforms science’s reality in order to try to adapt to it willingly or forcibly. It conflates the philosophical essence and the real as essence or the specific essence of the real. It is a voluntarist way of unifying and unitarily rubbing out the heterogeneity in the Idea, the Mind, the Will to Power, Substance, as well as in Difference and Différance, etc. Thought’s real essence does not perhaps lie in its logical determination or its determination of logos, which is only one among others, which is particular even in its type of universality. Philosophy exhibits the real as autodetermination of unitary logos, but there is a “logic” proper to the real, to science, for example, and it is not the logic of the Concept, of Logos, of Difference, and so forth. Science has to be justified in its “empirical” existence, in a sense of this term that is not programmed by the philosophical Decision and can only be programmed through science itself. Science has its own experience and its own concept of “reality” and of the “empirical” (the “occasional”).

Thus the solution that would turn science and “common sense” (the “ordinary”) into simple empirical presuppositions—to be lifted, sublated, or deconstructed—of philosophical sufficiency is ruled out. Such “presuppositions” are always imperfect and empirical and have to undergo the labor and the sense-donating operations of the philosophical Decision. Here they are something other than “presuppositions”—i.e., necessary for the beginning, but ultimately inessential and can be “abolished” or “deconstructed,” etc. Instead they form the real basis that conditions, at least in its reality if not in its effectivity, the philosophical experience of thought. It is not this experience that formulates the reality of these “presuppositions.” The philosophical Decision is incapable of reproducing and truly transforming the movement of thought (for example, the scientific movement), which belongs only to itself.

THE UNITY OF MAN AND OF SCIENCE

This attempt intersects with a set of similar projects in the history of philosophy, but perhaps these projects failed—not as philosophies, but as scientific projects—precisely because of the excess of philosophy and the submission to the PSP. Marxism and positivism, for example, not to mention Kant, Husserl, and countless others. Consider—but this is an example, not an obedience—positivism. Between a science of thought and a philosophy of Intelligence like positivism, there are a few common points. We will mark the appearance of these points, since it is a matter of rediscovering the real content, the phenomenal sense of historical positivism. From our point of view, positivism is a philosophical success and a scientific failure because it took place on predominantly philosophical grounds and because it was unfaithful to science’s essence in the name of a particular science.

• A “transcendental science” (not a transcendental philosophy as science) is positive insofar as it describes only phenomenal states of affairs. But it is transcendental because these phenomenal givens are strictly immanent. It is science’s power to show itself as autonomous and first, as the power to elucidate (itself) as relation (to) real. This is the kernel of a science of thought, which is more originary than “empiricist” or “logical” positivism.

• A science of thought is, if you want, an (immediate) mode of the science of men, of the genuine human science we are looking for; it has nothing in common with a sociology and a psychology. It is the science of men within the limits in which, qua radical Identities par excellence, they are the cause (of) science, understood in the ante-epistemological sense. A science of men is necessarily a science of thought. This does not mean a science of reason alone, of transcendent and thus abstract intelligence. Rather, it extracts and describes the phenomenal real kernel through which reason and cognition access humanity and are immanent and real lived experiences of man as “cause.” Under this definition, thought is man himself, but this is an anti-idealist definition. Thought does not codetermine human reality; it is man who, through his nonthetic reality (of) self, i.e., through the experience (of) self that he is, determines-in-the-last-instance the transcendent forms of thought that are grouped under the term reason.

• The task is to rediscover the real order of Intelligence. The recognition of the real order takes place via its “theoretical” rather than practical knowledge. On the basis of the real order (that of Identities and of Unilaterality), the continuous “progress,” i.e., the production of knowledges, represents the only chance for a real and nonhallucinatory transformation of man’s products (City, History, Language, Sexuality). We stay in the vicinity of Positivism (progress through order) on the strict condition of voiding it of any ultimate philosophical or transcendent reference. “Revolution” is a metaphysical and “terrorist” motif that promises order only in the form of terror and peace only in the form of war. But the real order in question is the one that the specifically human causality, tied to the essence of man rather than to his labor (activism and voluntarism), introduces not into the World, but from man to the World and to its authoritarian attributes. The real transformation of the World’s transcendent or unitary orders can take place only on the real basis of this nothing-but-human order that science expresses—in its essence rather than in its results… Hence this general maxim: to philosophy, order through disorder; to science, chaos through order.

UNIFIED THEORY AND UNITARY THEORY: DETERMINATION-IN-THE-LAST-INSTANCE

This project is characterized by two complementary traits: 1/ it is a unified and not a unitary theory of the fields of thought; 2/ it is a scientific and not a philosophical theory of the unity of these fields.

Only a science can found a unified theory; only philosophy can found a unitary theory. We have to carefully distinguish between unified and unitary. It is not a matter of the same type of unity, although they are usually confused. A unified theory is not one whose unity is weaker than the unitary, more feeble and less consistent. It is more heterogeneous and more multiple; it is not less grounded or less rigorous.

Negatively, the unified is not a mode of the unitary, an empirical and weakened mode. It does not proceed by incremental induction and does not consist in gathering heterogeneous fields of thought from the outside. This is precisely the unitary style, the style of a general economy or distribution of knowing that proceeds through a divided-dividing Unity, through a divided Relation or Hierarchy, a Coupling of contraries (even a topological coupling). These modes of unification are excluded here: not only the massive metaphysical Unity of different types of “representation” that philosophy critiques, dissolves, dismisses, deconstructs, etc., but the more “differentiated,” more “disseminated” types of unity it substitutes for them. The “unitary” is vaster than “Representation” or “logocentrism”; it merges with the philosophical operation of transcendence, decision and position, whatever its specific nature (Scission, Nothingness, Nihilation, Other, etc.). It is unity-through-division, ongoing-or-process-unity. The “unified” is a whole other thing.

Positively, the conditions of the problem are clear. Thought knows three or four heterogeneous forms. How can we allow them their specificity, in particular their specificity to the philosophical experience of thought, but also to scientific thought and, finally, to the technocomputing field? How can we allow them more specific autonomy than philosophy does (exclusion/interiorization, game, critique, differe(a)nce, etc.)? From this moment on, philosophy is only one thought among others (the same applies to its mode of unitary distribution). And since we cannot confine ourselves to a simple juxtaposition, the problem is to discover a more liberal, more “phenomenological” and positive mode of unity that lets phenomena be without practically transforming them in view of a Unity (be it a divided unity). Is there a mode of Unity less unitary than philosophy and yet grounded and rigorous? And one that is compatible with scientific knowledges’ chaos-of-the-last-instance?

The Unitary is the correlation of a Dyad and a Unity, of a division or a distance, and of a Unity that is coextensive and superior to these two terms, at once internal and external to them such that each of the terms is accountable to it as a third party, even if it has not always been simply transcendent. One may recognize here the “Same” of contemporary philosophers. Another, simpler mode of Unity, the “dual,” consists in abolishing this third and superior Unity as authoritarian, in making it useless, in leaving Duality to itself, in leaving only two terms—among them the One—to arrange themselves, without contracting any debt toward a third, without being accountable to an instance responsible for unifying them. Nevertheless, this Duality must not become a simple indifferent juxtaposition and an absence of thought. The solution consists first of all in radically “interiorizing,” without remainder or transcendence, the function of Identity or of absolute reality that was divided between the third term and the Dyad of the first two: this third term finds its reason in itself, i.e., the One-in-One. Instead of imagining that it has to be identified with the Dyad in order to acquire some reality through the multiple, we will place this identity and this reality directly within it. This will be—we have already described it—an Identity-without-identification and a Reality-without-realization. In its turn, Duality necessarily changes its sense and loses the external and reflected reference to Unity. It becomes a simple duality that no longer derives from a scission; i.e., the second term then appears necessarily contingent for the first or the One. The true Duality, that which is strictly a Duality without third and superior Unity, is the one that forms this Identity-without-identification (and) the second term, but grasped this time in the radical contingency that the first inscribes within it. The phenomenal content, i.e., Duality’s irreducible real kernel, is no longer the two or the dyad that presupposes a survey, a coextensive unity. It is the dual, the contingency of the second term thus unilateralized, a contingency that is itself transcendentally grounded in absolute Identity—in other words, it is not a juxtaposition.

We will call this matrix a dual or dualitary rather than unitary unification. Just as the “One” was an Identity without identification (it neither results from an identification nor produces one), the duality of terms is now a Duality-without-division or a “dual.” On one hand, Identity is not obtained by reducing the second term to the first in a reciprocal and superior Unity, in a synthesis, a violent and reductive economy. It lets-be the second term (the philosophical Decision, for example, the field of thought that will be pervaded by radical contingency). On the other, the Duality neither results from a decision or a separation effected in a superior Unity nor reproduces such a Unity. It is not a praxis or a practice (of scission) exerted on a transcendent, already given Unity whose underside would be an identification. The second term is indeed—in its contingency at least or in its relation to the first term—grounded by the first. It is not indifferently juxtaposed to it; it is allowed-to-be as indifferent. This foundation of contingency does not reduce it (interiorization/exclusion, etc.) unitarily and hierarchically.

If science does not intervene in the contingent given, that is because in a certain way it receives this given from the outside. This formula must, nevertheless, be grasped clearly: it does not mean that science does not transform some givens in a technico-experimental way, but that this transformation does not pass through philosophical operations, through operations of the type “Decision” and “Position,” “Reversal” and “Displacement,” and that their interpretation by means of these operations (the theme of “objectivation”) is an epistemological falsification. In a sense, and in this sense only, it lets be the transcendent given even better than philosophy does, which can only receive this given on the condition that it affects it with a “division” or a “decision” and, in a certain way, constitutes it in its sense or its being. On the other hand—this is the underside of the “letting-be”—science impresses a sterility of a transcendental origin on this given. The technico-experimental transformation of givens is not their ontological constitution. Even when they are inserted or included in the form of the “real object,” they are not ontologically transformed. The consequence is that they are necessary only from the perspective of their function as “support” or “occasion”; for the rest, i.e., for the real essence of science, they are contingent and do not contribute to determining it in an essential or “ontological” way.

This operation of the One belongs to science. It is not only the operation of knowledge; it is a revelation of the real itself. But, far from being exerted in the mode of reciprocal determination (the manifestation of the real as its pro-duction as well, its essential transformation), it is exerted through a reflection, which leads back to the causality of the real as a determination that, at any rate, lets be the contingent term. This is the phenomenal residue—indivisible because of its minimal simplicity—of what was formulated a first time, in the materialist, philosophical, and transcendent context, under the name Determination in the last instance. Grasping the exact (and rigorous) meaning of this concept leads us back to the specifically scientific causality and to the “unified” or dualitary relationship. The description of Determination-in-the-last-instance brings to the fore the following traits:

• It is the causality that passes through the dual, through a “duality” that is no longer unitary or obtained by division, that is no longer continuous and reciprocal as are all the modes of philosophical causality, and that lets be the second term in its autonomy and its contingency and does not divide it in its turn.

• It is the causality of the real and not the causality of effectivity, the way in which the real basis acts on the transcendent and contingent given, the causality that presupposes in fact such a term.

• It is a unidirectional or unilateralizing causality; it prevents the given or transcendent term from returning to the real. “Last-instance” does not designate a first/last term in a continuous and circular series, but an irreversible order.

• It is a causality of the term as such, thus of a single term; it is not divided or distributed into two terms, which are equal from the standpoint of their hierarchy. It is the specific causality of Identity (the one that does not pass through a relation), the causality of the unique term or the individual in its solitude.

In general, we will avoid interpreting it in terms of transcendent, brute, or material causality. It is instead the transcendental causality that science exercises as such on the material to be known and whose correlate is a nonthetic-Reflection. It alone founds a science of thought, even more than a science of history. Determination-in-the-last-instance is the same thing as the real, dualitary rather than unitary order, the foundation of a new economy of the Continent “Thought.” It makes possible a unified theory of the fields of thought. It has no relation, by its procedure, with a hierarchizing and conflictual unification, with the way in which, here and elsewhere, one will have attempted to coordinate neighboring “fields,” to “throw bridges,” to trace frontiers or adjoinments, to place all the modes of the philosophical Decision in a topology or in relations of proximity…What we have just described are the phenomenal givens of a dualitary thought, which nevertheless unifies its object in its own way, but with a minimum of violence. It does not, in any case, resort to the violence of philosophical praxis (Decision and Position, Reversal and Displacement).

When the time comes to describe a “science of philosophy” and its result (“non-philosophy”), all the concepts and results outlined here have to be taken up again and specified from the fractal perspective in terms of the object “philosophy.”

SCIENCE OF SCIENCE AND SCIENCE OF PHILOSOPHY: THEIR UNITY

We can now exemplify the general structure of the “dualitary” unification in the case of the science of thought. We will certainly not “apply” an external and abstractly defined method. Science itself, as an autonomous paradigm, has supplied the model of every real and grounded relation. This is less an application than a description of science’s effects.

It is obviously a matter of thinking science and philosophy together under the general rubric “science of thought,” but they are perhaps not caught in a dyad in the way that philosophy considers and treats them spontaneously or as they are ordinarily imagined. In that case, their type of unity would be unitary once again; they would be again conceived in their “ideological” or philosophical image. The dualitary relation is applied to the relationships of science, of philosophy, and of cognition, only provided it has already transformed these last two experiences of thought into the object of science in terms of the Determination-in-the-last-instance. The “dualitary,” nonunitary duality is not the duality of “science” and of “philosophy” in general; it is the duality of science itself. And it is the essence of science that grounds it. Thus we will not have a science and a philosophy face to face, but two sciences in a dualitary correlation through their respective object: a science of the essence of science (or of “empirical” sciences) and a science of philosophy. The first is a “transcendental” science, an episteme-without-logos, a transcendental epistemic rather than an epistemology. The second is the science (as well as a critique and a new practice) of the philosophical Decision in the way it is included in the first science, which discovers its particular object within it: philosophy itself. There are two sciences here, but only because there are two types of “objects” (science and philosophy are the two poles of every thought; cognition and the computing experience of thought are situated between these two poles), for these two sciences are one only in-the-last-instance through their essence, because it is the essence of science as such that makes them possible.

One should not see in this formulation the old unitary theme, as if (unique) science were divided, the way it is, for example, in Marxism between dialectical Materialism and historical Materialism: a dialectical or unitary formulation. Science, as we described it antephilosophically, is in fact an undivided Identity, which is only varied in exteriority and in a contingent way: through the contingency of this new object—philosophical thought and cognition. There is only one science, at least in the sense that the essence of science is anterior to every division and synthesis, whether dialectical or not, without being for that reason a transcendent (always divisible) unity. Just as the “dualitary” dual presupposes a second term, which is contingent with respect to the first, and is only a duality through this contingency that makes it itself contingent (it would otherwise be unitary once again…)—so science, far from being a divided unity, has a dual form. It is essentially science (of) self and thus science (of) the philosophical Decision, if this Decision at least is presented as a possible object. Such a “duality” does not redouble, nor does it derive from, the duality that is immediately given under the very epistemological rubric: “science and philosophy.” It is not accountable before a superior Unity, at once coextensive to the two terms and divided. From the perspective of its conditions of reality or of its transcendental conditions, it is founded in the Identity-of-the-last-instance of every science. And from the perspective of its objects and its extension, i.e., of the “effective” conditions of its duality, it is founded on the contingency of the given philosophical Decision.

Thus, in terms of this new type of “relation” or rather of causality, not only does philosophy no longer (ontologically) precede science, but even the science (of) philosophy can no longer precede the science (of) science. If there is a science (of) philosophy and if philosophy is thus subjected to science (as the object of a science, nothing more…), it must proceed from science. And a science (of) science must precede and include a science (of) philosophy. We “pass” from the first to the second (without “leaving” the former or “alienating” it) through the receipt of a new object; it is, no doubt, very particular, because it has the power to give itself with the claim of being other than science or in a state of resistance and self-defense against science.

These “two” sciences therefore correspond to the duality of the real and of effectivity. But with one nuance. The objects of (“empirical”) sciences are phenomena that are extracted from effectivity, and sciences include them in a “real object” specific to science. By the same token, the philosophical Decision is an effective given that must be in its turn included in the “real object” or in the “form” of scientific objectivity, which is absolutely irreducible to the simple transcendent donation of historico-cultural or physical…phenomena. But the philosophical Decision sees its importance increase. It will be distinguished from other worldly or transcendent phenomena both (but it is no doubt the same thing) as what claims to be the most general form of the phenomena of effectivity or of the World and as what opposes the most vigorous resistance to science’s extension toward it and above all to the “thesis” of science’s transcendental consistency.

So as better to describe the specificity of these two objects and their “dualitary” relation, the freest possible relation, we can sketch out a comparison with Marxism, with the relation it instates between science, as science of history (Historical Materialism = HM), and philosophy, as philosophy of the science of history (Dialectical Materialism = DM).

Like Marx, we will go from science to philosophy. Science is the criterion of every knowledge; we have to start from it in order to find philosophy. But this imperative, this guiding thread that we apparently take up, is still a vague and confused generality. In fact, if the science of history precedes philosophy in Marxism, it continues to do so in the classical reflexive and philosophical mode. Science (of history) remains a historico-factual given, the most certain science of reality (sociohistorical reality in this case), and philosophy (as DM) remains essentially a reflection on this science, on the possibility of thinking it, on its relation to the real of history, etc. From our point of view, this is once again the unitary construction and very general reflexive schema that make science an obscure nonthought, which produces knowledges but requires the complement of a philosophy—in this case, the complement of DM, which is responsible for “epistemologically” elucidating HM.

In relation to this Marxist version of the real order (from science to philosophy), the present terms should be apparently “inverted.” In reality, we have to start from philosophy’s equivalent, i.e., from the instance that fulfills the functions of the real cause and the transcendental. In our case, this instance is directly science rather than philosophy. And it is here a science (of) the essence of science, which is not yet created, but has to be. And we have to go toward a science of philosophy (rather than toward a crowning, terminal, and superior philosophy of science). But this time philosophy will be reduced to the state of a science’s object rather than invoked as developing its own scientific virtualities or else as the founding philosophy of science.

So the trajectory is at once the same as Marxism’s as well as “inverted” in relation to it. It is presented (at least from the perspective of philosophy as PSP) as the appearance of an inversion of the traditional relations of domination between science and philosophy. From our perspective, Marxism as always detected the right order, i.e., the real order between science and philosophy, an order required by the essence of science rather than decided or willed by philosophy. But it did not hold fast to this order. It hastened to reinterpret it with the help of the old philosophico-unitary conception, which subjects science to philosophy and strips it of every transcendental claim. Not only the real order requires that science be first and philosophy second, but two decisive clarifications must be added against philosophical resistance. The first is that science no longer needs a philosophical supplement in the form of a DM. It is nonthetic knowing (of) self because it is absolute knowing or knowing (of) the real and is thus not materialist (= philosophical thesis, for materialism is a transcendent form of realism, just as matter is a transcendent form of the real). Given the real-One, it is absolute or autonomous, the equivalent—just the equivalent—of a philosophy. This simply means: science assumes the transcendental functions of the pertinent relation to the real, but it assumes them in a non-philosophical mode, without needing to pass through the form of first Transcendence or of Decision. Since it is already, on its own, a thought in the definitive and full sense (but not in a reflexive form), it does not need a supplementary philosophy, a supplement of consciousness, reflection, meditation, or mediation in order to be what it is and be grounded. It finds its cause in the One and thus knows itself without passing through the operation of an autofoundation. Science is a nondecisional process-in-cause (of) self.

The second clarification is that the science (of) science, which is first and precedes philosophy—and this is what allows it to replace philosophy in non-philosophical forms and a non-philosophical place—can no longer and must no longer be only a particular science, at least the way HM is science of history, the science of a sector or of a domain of total experience or of one continent among others. The science (of) science is not only the science of philosophy. Marx follows the classical reflexive and ontological trajectory: he starts out not from science as such or in its essence (this science is the object of the transcendent science or of first science), but from a particular or contingent science: if history and the relations of production are the real of socioeconomic foundations, and if HM is thus—this is clear—the science of a real object, it is still from our perspective a particular, empirical, and transcendent object. We have to start from science itself, i.e., from its essence, which, in order to be a “particular” object, is no longer one that belongs to effectivity and transcendence. It is the essence or the reality both of knowing and of thought in their undivided Identity. Marx takes the traditional path that goes from the particular to the universal, from a science to Philosophy [la philosophie] that will give the essence of this science. He does not leave the epistemological schema he tries to burst in vain. What we call the science (of) the essence of science is at once (1) a singular radical appearance or, as we call it, a chaos, which does not need philosophy in order to be real and not only in order to be a science of the real, and (2) an absolute “universal” experience in another, non-philosophical or scientific sense of the word. Philosophy’s universality, not to mention that of the philosophical concept of universality, appears now as a “particular case” in the face of the theoretical power of Identity as cause (of) science. Philosophy becomes a simple object, a particular case for a way of thinking that, given its real individuality, no longer falls under the philosophical Decision, but is more powerful than it.

Thus it is at last the science (of) philosophy (the science of thought’s transcendent forms and probably its “cognitive” and “computing” forms) that takes the place—another place…—of the science of history, of HM, with a supplement of generality, since HM is still dependent on philosophy. This is indeed what we sought: to form thought, its various fields, into a new scientific continent. But the science (of) philosophy and of Intelligence only replaces the science of history from the perspective of the studied “object,” and certainly no longer from the perspective of the “subject” or the thought that takes place in that science. Philosophy is no longer the supreme legislator; the PSP is toppled. The philosophical Decision is a particular simple object that comes after history as the object of science.

Science enters into philosophies in two different forms, which are conflated as soon as science is interpreted in its turn in philosophical terms and as soon as its essence is forgotten.

On one hand, science enters into philosophies—it is true—under the regulation of the philosophical a priori itself and in view of this use. It is thus anticipated and programmed by the form it receives, which is the form of reciprocal causality. From this point of view, one knowing represents a potential philosophy for another knowing, and, reciprocally, a philosophy represents some virtual knowing for another. Two given phenomena, one scientific, the other philosophical, as distant as they may be from each other, form a priori a virtual connection that has to be actualized or fulfilled under the law of reciprocal determination or of nonseparability. This connection then gives place to a new philosophical sequence. On the other hand, science also intervenes in philosophy while remaining outside it or, rather, while remaining within itself as the real basis of philosophy. There is a double use of science: under the conditions of philosophical nonseparability and now under the conditions of what we will call a scientific separability. Duality of intervention effaced by the dominant philosophism.

Conceived in this second form, science represents the real that entertains a specific relation with philosophy, more exactly with nonthetic representation or the reflection in which this representation is from now on inscribed: a unilateral relation through which it can determine the representation without being, in its turn, determined by it. This unilateral or irreversible relation, that through which the One determines its reflection, is all that can and should be understood by “determination-in-the-last-instance.” Even if this statement occasions misunderstandings, we will say that science takes the place of an infrastructure—from now on, real rather than material and transcendental rather than transcendent. The real, most universal infrastructure is the science of the essence of science and not the science of history in particular. But science cannot be reduced to its logico-theorico-experimental means, anymore than it can be reduced to some materiality. We avoid at once a materialism that is effectively “without thought,” since it represents the denial of a philosophical position, and a scientistic positivism that would fold the essence of science back on its local procedures of representation and would thus conflate, by a new idealism, the real object with its representation.

Perhaps we can now better grasp what distinguishes science and philosophy, without any possible unity—at least a unity of the type of “synthesis” or “ontological difference.” There is a fundamental posture of science vis-à-vis the real, entirely different from philosophy’s posture, to which one habitually reduces science so as to better accuse it of having derailed and “objectivated” the good thought.

Philosophy produces effectivity rather than the real—a reality of synthesis and of simulacra that passes off in its eyes for the authentic real, the doubling of a first real which, it decides, is insufficient—to the same extent that science knows the real without producing it and produces only “scientific knowledge,” which philosophy requisitions and transfers to effectivity. Philosophy grasps reality in terms of a coherent and unlimited system of operations of closure and opening, just as science grasps it in a “closed” or “finite” posture—a nonpositional posture in the most radical way—and, on this basis, can finally give an unlimited technico-theoretical representation of reality.

There is indeed a philosophical domination inside other possible dimensions or inside the possible dimension of other attributes (Language, Sex, Power, etc.). But from this sphere of dominance in which the domination of attributes is exercised by turns, another sphere has to be distinguished: the sphere of determination or reality (which is not transcendentally conflated here with the forces and relations of production), in the grounded and rigorous sense of the terms, and in which science does not encounter philosophy. For, if there is a frontier, a mobile and ceaselessly crossed limit between philosophy and technology, there is none between these two taken together and science. Between them and science there is no frontier, but a duality, or rather a “dual” or an identity without identification or synthesis, without any possible unitary reappropriation; its unilateral relation is expressed in terms of “Determination-in-the-last-instance.” The concept of the infrastructure, a transcendental concept, rigorously founded in the reality of its object, allows us to understand once and for all why it is in the end really irreducible to the philosophical “superstructure” and how every philosophical interpretation of science is an idealist reduction of the infra- to the superstructure.

The foregoing is a very schematic example of the work that a science of philosophy can carry out on its object and of the statements it can produce from this object, in this case from Marxism. Beside the generalization of Marxism, countless others are possible. Let’s suppose, to conclude, that such a scientific generalization of Kantianism can be carried out. We will say that the instance of truth, the one that enables the delimitation of the philosophical illusion, is not science in its particular physico-mathematical figure. It is science in its essence, which should have been recognized as an absolutely real, transcendental essence from the start and by its own efforts. That science is, from and “in” the One, the authentic “transcendental subject”—as some neo-Kantians hypothesized, while conserving the partially transcendent philosophical and logical subject—is possible only if the transcendental nonthetic experience is finally recognized as real and not illusory, if it distinguished for that reason from every “intellectual intuition.” But this is possible only if we finally manage to truly expel from it every transcendence and not to conserve, in the nonautopositional essence of the One, the least “parcel of the World” (Husserl). More than the transcendental Ego, which requires operations of reduction, the One fulfills this requirement as long as it is exerted as nonpositional testing (of) self.

By its essence, science is absolute and cannot presuppose or tolerate a supplementary “condition of possibility,” a philosophical requisite. This discovery inverts the order of thoughts and foils philosophical objections. It is science that is the (transcendental or immanent) criterion of philosophy. A radical critique of the philosophical Decision becomes at last possible when the critical operation itself becomes secondary and is founded on the recognition of science’s (transcendental) positivity, on the rock of a real identity that will never have been—as Fichte objected to metaphysics—at first formal or logical in order then to be “realized.” Rather: an identity that is from the start recognized as real and “alogical.”

The One is thus what absolutely disjoins science and philosophy, what dissolves their “epistemological” mixture, and what ensures science’s precession on philosophy—their nonunitary unity.

If it is no longer science that “dreams” (Plato, Heidegger), then it is philosophy…These results can be read as a generalization of the Kantian critique.