PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION (1992)

THIS book is a contribution to a few local problems that philosophy is currently examining, like “singularities” and “fractals,” but above all to fundamental problems of philosophy itself. It does not comment on texts; it forges new tools for thinking at last, in global terms, and for transforming the theoretical status of the philosophical genre. It does not question yet again its origin and its historiality, but asks how it can afford philosophy a future other than that of memory and nostalgia, commentary and deconstruction. Under what conditions can philosophy still be useful to us without being, as it has always been, conservative and authoritarian? True, the philosopher is a hero, but he is a fatigued hero whose life is a life of survival and whose vigor is the vigor of sudden fits and starts. How can we make this discipline enter into the concert of the sciences? How can we finally satisfy this requirement of reality and rigor that philosophy has only ever been able to half-fulfill by its own means, but without reducing and weakening it in a positivist way? A scientific reform of the philosophical understanding—such is the program that four fundamental concepts punctuate: identities-of-the-last-instance, nonepistemological conception of science, generalized fractality and chaos, and artificial philosophy.

The central problem is the one through which contemporary philosophies have critiqued and “liquidated” the Hegelianism, the Marxism, and the structuralism that preceded them: the problem of singularities and differences, partial objects and critical points, catastrophes and effects, disseminations and language games… All of these objects were directed against “logos,” “presence” or “representation,” “metaphysics” and so on, and have become philosophy’s commonplace. But from our point of view, they represent a half-solution, an unfinished attempt at the critique of metaphysics. Why? Because they always associate with these singularities of various types an identity, but as at least equal to them or reversible with them. Identity thus falls back on the singularities, appropriates them, capitalizes or traditionalizes them, subordinates them to an indeterminate generality, and so forth. This solution entails their erasure or drowning.

At their origin, nevertheless, those objects were scientific and belonged to thermodynamics, differential calculus, the theory of sets and of critical points, the theory of catastrophes and of fractals…But their appropriation by philosophy (ontology, Kantianism, Nietzscheanism, structuralism) and their placement in the service of Being, Desire, and Language contributed to limiting their scope. Their philosophical generalization partially effaced them.

To restore to these singularities their positive and critical vigor, their theoretical dignity, we propose to reinscribe them in the content of science rather than of philosophy; but the content of a science that is itself rethought and described in its essence in a new way. This new description is no longer epistemological, i.e., philosophical—it is in fact futile to try to free multiplicities and singularities from their servitude without freeing the science that produced them—but properly scientific. In the wake of earlier works, we seek to demonstrate that science also “thinks”; that it is a specific and original way of relating to the real, distinct from the philosophical way; that it can thus describe itself. We call this conception epistemic and no longer epistemo-logical. This is why the book opens with a systematic exposition of science’s “nonepistemology”. The outcome of this description is that science and identity entertain the most intimate relations; but this identity no longer has its traditional essence (transcendence) nor its philosophical functions (totalization and closure). We call it real Identity or Identity of-the-last-instance. This formula is to be taken, in its strict theoretical or nonphilosophical sense, to mean that Identity is not alienated in that of which it is the Identity, in its effect, and correlatively that it autonomizes this effect without folding back on it or reappropriating it.

Thus understood, this Identity emancipates singularities that are at last radical, fractals that are no longer subjected to it. It gives them their reality and prevents them from dissolving in philosophical possibility. It authorizes the constitution of an autonomous order of singularities in the form of chaos. We will describe this nonepistemological generalization as simultaneously scientific and not regional (geometrical, set-theoretical, catastrophist, thermodynamic, etc.); transcendental and not philosophical (Aristotelian, Kantian, Nietzschean, Lacanian, etc.). It alone “conserves” the singularities in a nonconservative way and imparts to the old, rather worn-out philosophical “multiplicities” a new power, which will be the power of generalized “fractality” and “chaos.”

This contribution to the theory of a few contemporary problems presents a precise difficulty for the reader. It is a matter of a new type of intersection between science and philosophy: a nonepistemological intersection. For us, it is no longer a matter of philosophically reflecting once again on science; but of conjugating recent scientific objects (fractal objects and chaos) with philosophical objects, which are rethought in a new way: Identities—as what is no longer their “foundation,” which effaces them, but their “cause of-the-last-instance” that safeguards them. This is the source of our text’s peculiar difficulty, which we cannot conceal. Nevertheless the difficulty resides not so much in the expression as in the nature of the examined problems and objects: it is “objective” and has to do with the content. We ask the reader to penetrate into a manner of thinking that has both scientific traits (yet without mathematics, without “equations,” always in natural language) and philosophical traits (but also critical of philosophy). To mitigate this difficulty, the book is progressive; it proceeds by increasing complication, by a continuous introduction of new objects. But above all it has a “fractal” nature: each chapter reexposes in a distinct mode, at different “scales,” and under variations of objects the same structure of nonphilosophical inequality or irregularity, of fractality-in-philosophy itself and no longer in “logos,” in “presence” or “representation”…Thus by osmosis, by habituation to invariants, the reader gradually penetrates into this manner of thinking.

The problem of Identities and of singularities serves as our guiding thread, and the theoretical status of science and of philosophy is examined and formulated along the way, but three concepts or three theoretical discoveries are the direct objects of our research.

1/ The first concept is Identities-of-the-last-instance. It renders possible a theory of science that is no longer epistemological in nature or philosophical in origin. This concept cannot in fact be discovered—at least as it has been expounded—in traditional philosophy, including deconstructions (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida). It serves here to describe the chaos-essence of the real and that of science.

2/ The second concept is Generalized Fractality, intended to replace the concepts of “singularities” and “multiplicities,” “differences” and “disseminations.” Taking as our guide or theoretical signpost B. Mandelbrot’s works (which have been universally accepted by the scientific community and widely used in various areas of research), we generalize them in the aforementioned mode, which remains internal to science, but to a science endowed with an authentic power of relating to the real (Identity) and of thinking this relation. Generalized “non-Mandelbrotian” fractals are then no longer objects of “nature” but of knowledge or of theory, and above all they form a novel theoretical tool, adapted at last to the disciplines of language (philosophy, poetry, literature) and no longer only to geometrical and perceived forms (physical phenomena of turbulence, cartography, painting, photography, etc.). This concept is accompanied by others (“fractal a priori,” “fractal intentionality,” “generalized chaos,” etc.) which cash out its theoretical force in a nonpositivist mode.

3/ The third concept is Artificial Philosophy. It responds to a project and to a solution. The project: can an Artificial Philosophy be established in the mode of “Artificial Intelligence” and certain “cognitivist” practices, or practices that can be envisioned within the framework of a “philosophy of the mind”? Can a synthesis of philosophical statements be imagined that retains a philosophical or nonpositivist type of value, but that is realized by means of science? The solution: if it is impossible to computerize philosophy itself without destroying it as philosophy or destroying it in its “transcendental” dimension, without reducing it to local and abstract, mathematically dominatable problems, it is, on the other hand, possible to take another path that uses theoretical means of a different nature: no longer mathematical but linguistic and in some sense “qualitative.” The deciphering of philosophical texts or problems by the rules of a generalized “non-Mandelbrotian” fractality, rather than a geometric fractality, allows the synthesis of artificial statements, which have one last philosophical color but no longer respond to philosophical codes of acceptability and admissibility. Such synthetic statements are “artificial” in a more powerful sense of the term than simple “artificial” Intelligence. For they are produced on the basis of sciences’ transcendental essence rather than on the basis of this or that particular science or information technology. In general we call “non-philosophy” the type of activity that uses philosophy under scientific and no longer philosophical conditions. And if there is a philosophy as “rigorous science,” it will instead take the form of a science of philosophy or a non-philosophy. The Idea of an Artificial Philosophy is only one of its particular but nonexclusive modes of realization. The ultimate goal—if it is still a goal—is to “apply” a theory of generalized fractality and chaos, which does not itself have a philosophical origin, to philosophy, to its most invariant decisional and positional structures. From this point of view, our entire book is a search for conceptual formalisms and rules of theoretical treatment, of algorithms, which allow the use of philosophical statements in view of the production of synthetic statements. These statements make possible a better analysis and a more radical critique of philosophy; they represent, more positively, a crossed threshold, a mutation in the traditional exercise of thought.

Philosophy’s future—if we wish, of course, to imagine and realize such a thing—surely does not lie in its infinite commentaries or its interminable deconstructions, and even less in its naive, more or less positivist practice. It lies in its intimate, nonhierarchical cooperation (once all its legislative ambitions have been deposed) with sciences, according to relations of use that exclude every will to domination. Something different, therefore, from a “new alliance.” This research would like to have contributed, however slightly or in a very elementary way, to the global reevaluation of the relations between science and philosophy, to the destruction of their unitary (epistemological or philosophical) theory, and to the establishment of a unified (scientific) theory of thought.