Ontic Structural Realism and Scientific Realism: On Ladyman and Ross, Sellars and Brassier

- ONTIC STRUCTURAL REALISM AND SCIENTIFIC REALISM -

On Ladyman and Ross, Sellars and Brassier
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   Ladyman and Ross go a long way in debasing Kuhn-inspired relativisms about science by showing how discontinuity in scientific theories at the level of content is underwritten by continuity at the level of structure. In doing so, they also build on the epistemological (rather than ontological) valence of the distinction between observables and unobservables as posited in theoretical physics. Their brand of ontic structural realism predates on the semantic approach to theory-modeling which situates the relationship between mathematical structures as primary as opposed to the partial-interpretation of theoretical terms on the basis of observables (the 'syntactic' approach advocated by Carnap). Similarly to Badiou's deflation of the empiricist notion of content (the 'third dogma of empiricism' he criticizes apropos Quine in The Concept of Model), L&R seek to undermine the ontological valence of the entities postulated within the manifest image ("Scholastic" and "neo-Scholastic" metaphysics included) and its reference to middle-sized objects and properties, the better to assert (again, like Badiou or Meillassoux) the reality of primary mathematical properties. These, however, do not demand commitment to the positive ontological status of imperceptible particles; the  underdetermination of objects obtained in avowing the reality of processes remains ontologically agnostic about any entity in current science. In this regard, L&R seek to anchor their realism in scientific predictive success (the so-called 'no-miracles argument'), while at the same time having leverage to resist the underdetermination of realism by instrumentalism in consideration of theory-change (the so-called 'underdetermination problem'). The latter challenge applies even to positions such as Van Fraassen's constructive empiricism. Below I will explain what I find most problematic about this restriction of the realist commitment to structure, but provisionally we can gauge that if Meillassoux's metaphysical argument against the frequentialist implication is correct, then the predictive success of science is no less miraculous than its potential disruption by the sudden change of these laws ex nihilo. Intra-systemic predictability at the level of local laws provides no less a secure foundation for realism than unpredictable anomalies (in Kuhn's sense) force us into accepting pragmatic instrumentalism about science.

Of course, L&R's principled reluctance to make metaphysics refractory to empirical science would no doubt resist the very epistemological coordination between thought and reality in terms of a correlation between subject and object: ontic structural realism is precisely meant to revise the epistemological framework to dislodge traditional representational analogy in favor of structural isomorphy (or homomorphy). Yet what I find most unpersuasive so far about the book is the early defense in Chapter I of scientism, since in a certain sense it seems to me to rest, on similar grounds to the Churchlands, on an opaque sense of super-empirical virtue tethered to a rather thin pragmatism. Brassier above all has shown the deficiencies in appeals to the super-empirical in Churchland's  neurocomputational idealism through pragmatism, much like Badiou criticizes Quine's naturalism for reifying science on alleged pragmatic grounds (again, this point is belabored in The Concept of Model). In L&R's account, the metaphysical subordination to science, and physics in particular, is entirely sketched on pragmatic grounds under what they programmatically label the "Primacy of Physics Constraint", or PPC in short. The following quote provides the basic position:

"Special science hypotheses that conflict with fundamental physics, or such consensus as there is in fundamental physics, should be rejected for that reason alone. Fundamental physical hypotheses are not symmetrically hostage to the conclusions of the special sciences.

This, we claim, is a regulative principle in current science, and it should be respected by naturalistic metaphysicians. The first, descriptive, claim is reason for the second, normative, one." (Pg. 45)

This reinforces the earlier, more general "Principle of Naturalistic Closure", which states that:

"Any new metaphysical claim that is to be taken seriously at time t should be motivated by, and only by, the service it would perform, if true, in showing how two or more specific scientific hypotheses, at least one of which is draw from fundamental physics, jointly explain more than the sum of what is explained by the two hypothesis taken separately, where this is interpreted by reference to the following terminological stipulations:

Stipulation: 'scientific hypotheses' are understood as hypotheses that are taken seriously by institutionally bona fide science at t

Stipulation: A specific scientific hypothesis is one that has been directly investigated and confirmed by institutionally bona fide scientific activity prior to t or is one that might be investigated at or after t, in the absense of constraints resulting from engineering, physiological, or economic restrictions, or a combination, as the primary object of attempted verification, falsification, or quantitative refinement, where this activity is a part of an objective research project fundable by a bona fide scientific research funding body

Stipulation: An objective research project has the primary purpose of establishing objective facts about nature that would, if accepted, on the basis of such a project, be expected to continue to be accepted by inquirers aiming to maximize their stock of true beliefs, notwithstanding shifts in the inquirers practical, commercial, or ideological preferences" (Pg. 38)

Notice the appeal to the communitarian 'consensus' evoked here, which is doubtlessly strange considering that L&R later go on to attack scientific realism (which they distinguish from their own OSR) on the grounds that it is dependent on subjective matters of consensus and pragmatic factors, e.g the disposition of specific scientists or the scientific communities. Their arguments against these accounts in grappling with the problem of the reference of theoretical terms are of great value.

Yet the avowal of scientism is there transparently tethered to an explicitly pragmatic, normative subordination of metaphysics to science, without any further epistemological labor or explanation. Although I endorse the idea of making metaphysics continuous with science, as well as their arguments for structural realism in order to account for theory change, it seems to me that the early stages of the book do not advance a sufficiently robust account about the rational necessity for making science metaphysically authoritative, failing thus to clarify the position from which the ontological prerogative of science derives. Perhaps this is where a Sellarsian approach has something to contribute still, specifically insofar as it insists on the necessity of a methodological dualism keeping the normative-register of the manifest image as a necessary condition of possibility for the epistemic entitlement endowed to science, and for the logic of revision itself. In this regard, perhaps the question concerning the ontological status of unobservables in L&R's account vis a vis their discussion of Van Fraasen's constructive empiricism makes my concern particularly salient. I would quote the following passage from the book:

"Opponents of scientific realism, such as Van Fraassen, deny that the local defenses of realism about specific unobservables are compelling, arguing that they can in each case be reinterpret in pragmatic terms as inferences to the empirical adequacy of the explanation in question, plus a commitment to continue theorizing with the resources of the theory... If unobservable entities merely happened to be around when certain phenomena were occurring then their presence would not be explanatory. Hence, Van Fraassen argues, scientific realism relies upon some kind of metaphysical theory of laws of nature, singular causation, or essential natures. For Van Fraassen, this means it ultimately rests on explanation by posit. Here we reach an impasse with the scientific realism insisting on the need for explanations where the antirealist is content without them." (Pg. 74)


And yet, if I understand Van Fraassen correctly, his point is not that explanation is no good, but that explanation by posit appealing to the abovementioned metaphysical items (laws of nature, singular causation...) is what is left unexplained qua posited by the scientific realist, and as such they would require a justification not circularly defined terms which would simply presuppose the pragmatic requirement that we ought to continue using the theory in dispute. At that point Van Fraassen seems to think the 'realist' wager becomes fatally undermined by its tacit pragmatic instrumental appeals. Similar to Meillassoux's hijacking of the correlationist argument to unearth a tacit realism in the form of the factial, Van Fraassen hijacks the scientific realist to unearth a tacit instrumentalism in their argument. Yet as we have seen L&R do not, despite their claims to the contrary, escape from instrumentalism by witholding epistemic commitment about individuals, and circumscribing realism to structural properties. For whether the prescription to philosophize in continuity with contemporary physics is wed to a notion of individuated objects or to merely relational structural properties is strictly speaking irrelevant to Van Fraassen's point, which is that one obviates explanation by normative prescription/proscription, and as such cannot but be instrumental on those grounds. Even if OSR can explain theory change while remaining metaphysically agnostic about individuals, the same questions raised apropos the latter in classical scientific realism reappear in OSR with regard to the prescription to endorse the ontological valence of structural properties. And since this endorsement seems to be postulated in pragmatic terms, in principle rather than established by argument, it is not clear Van Fraasen's hijacking of the scientific realist argument to unearth its tacit circular appeals to authority is not reproduced in OSR. Pragmatism is idealist in tenor since it subordinates the reality or ontological valence of a given set of postulates, in this case scientific individuals and structure, to the normative injunction to 'do science'.

In this regard, it is important to notice that structure fares no better than individuals in L&R's account: both are finally undermined by the pragmatic claim that physics ought to be metaphysically endorsed since it cannot be rendered explanatorily virtuous and non-miraculous without assuming their reality in principle. If regularity provides grounds to motivate realism this cannot be surreptitiously postulated in order to avoid its instrumentalization, since in doing so one ends up doing just that, whether we tether our metaphysics to structure or individuals. Unyoking scientific modeling from observation and inference fares no better than mathematical structure if it must be assumed relative to the unexplained necessity to endorse realism on the basis of the scientific capacity to explain and predict phenomena, i.e. the latter remains just as susceptible to instrumentalization as the syntactic scientific realism about individuals was susceptible to deflation into empiricist constructivism. Now, ironically, L&R themselves attempt to return Van Fraassen the favor by claiming that constructive empiricism must commit to a minimum metaphysical endorsement of objective modal relations; i.e. it must ground its assertion of the probable-predictable adequacy of phenomena to theoretical posits in the reality of their possibility or actuality, even if it remains agnostic about their other properties. Thus L&R claim:

"If science tells us about objective-modal relations among the phenomena (both possible and actual), the occasional novel predictive success is not miraculous but to be expected." (Pg 153)

However, this misses the deflationary point raised by Van Fraassen, because to be a realist about modal objectivity is not sufficient to be a realist about the mind-independent reality, or about scientific phenomena in any orthodox sense. We know, at least since Kant, that it is perfectly possible to avow the causal efficacy of phenomena as constrained to our experiential field, just like in Hegel's objective idealism the ontological determinations that yield objectivity do not for that reason escape idealism. Thus irrespect6ive of whether pragmatism must be underwritten by some metaphysical commitment or other, the point, which Brassier stresses brilliantly apropos the Churchlands, is that they cannot but be complicit with an idealist miraculous congruence between thought and being. This follows transparently once we realize that just like Kant reactivates the valence of causal efficacy at the price of inflecting objectivity as a function of subjective synthesis, L&R operate under the frequentialist implication whose motivation is the 'no-miracles' argument. The latter is meant to justify the endorsement of naturalist metaphysics. This move, contrary to its pretension, relativizes the explanatory demand of scientific practice to the pragmatic concern to explain predictive success, rather than to legitimate the relation between our concepts and the objects presumably existing independently of the former. Both Van Fraassen and L&R may endorse modal objectivity, but since both finally accept a prescriptive rather than explanatory legitimation for the valence of science, it is the constructive empiricist idealization Van Fraassen openly accepts which seems to be tacitly presupposed by L&R's OSR, and not the latter's realism that is to be found in the former. At a loss for an epistemological account which distinguishes mathematical relations from properly physical structure, L&R simply assume a miraculous congruence between thought and the real through physics, supported by their two founding principles. Now, consider L&R's appeals to recent developments in GR and QM which attempt to ground objectual relations in terms of diffeomorphic transformations, nested in an explanation of symmetry understood in group theory as inclusion to equivalence classes with the appropriate rules for preservation. This allows one to explain structural continuity in purely formal terms. It endows the OSR to ground objective modality in structural symmetry. But how does the latter mathematical structure relate to physical structure at all? What relation holds between the two, i.e. what epistemic grounds solicit the postulate of the mind independence of the phenomena described by structure, once we have disowned appeals to the noumenal or qualia? This, again, L&R fail to do, folding back on their convenient prescriptive principle PNC, at a loss for any justification. Thus if OSR is indeed a realism in any way about science it is because the objective modal structure it ontologically asserts is in fact separate from the relational mathematical expression and yet indistinguishable from it all the same. This point is made by Van Fraassen (2006) and it dramatically entails that OSR cannot properly explain what separates mathematics from physics, they can only postulate it. In fact, they have no shame in admitting this much:

"When theories are empirically adequate they tell us about the structure of the phenomena and this structure is (at least in part) modal structure. However there is still a distinction between structure and non-structure. Merely listing relations among locators does not state anything with modal force. Therefore it doesn't specify structure in our sense and it isn't yet scientific theory as we've defended it. Physical structure exists, but what it it? If it is just a description of the properties and relations of some underlying entities this leads us back to epistemic structural realism. What makes the structure physical and not mathematical? This is a question that we refuse to answe. In our view, there is nothing more to be said about this that doesn't amount to empty words and venture beyond what the PNC allows. The 'world-structure' just is and exists independently of us and we represent it mathematico-physically via our theories." (Pg. 158)

 The emergent result seems to be, quite predictably, either a kind of mathematical realism or neo-Pythagoreanism (Maddy, Rednik) purported by mathematicians themselves, or philosophers of science now insisting, like their repudiated Continental 'mystics', on an unobjectifiable excess to structure grounding the realist locus for naturalist metaphysics; which now starts sounding a whole lot more like Heidegger than Hegel, if not Scheller. Take the following passage which sums up the ordeal:

"Of course, all the considerations from physics to which we have appealed do not logically compel us to abandon the idea of a world of distinct ontologically subsistent individuals with intrinsic properties. As we noted, the identity and individuality of quantum particles could be grounded in each having a primitive thisness, and the same could be true of spacetime points. What we can establish is that physics tells us that certain aspects of such a world would be unknowable... On our view, things in themselves and qualia are ideal wheels in metaphysics and the PPC imposes a moratorium on such purely speculative philosophical toys... we take it that such a gap between epistemology and metaphysics is unacceptable. Given that there is no a priori way of demonstrating that the world must be composed of individuals with intrinsic natures, and given that our best physics puts severe pressure on such a view, the PNC dictates that we reject the idea altogether." (Pg. 154)

If our considerations hold here the PNC and PPC both merely aggravate the gulf between epistemology and ontology rather than palliate it. At a loss for justification beyond the super-empirical call for theoretical 'unification' restricted to scientific practice and their instituional approval, both principles are laid to rest on the pragmatic grounds criticized above, and end up soliciting the much repudiated invocations of the 'noumenal' and 'qualia' that L&R associate with philosophical spooks; the specter that Hegel had long since warned against: the uncanny coincidence of all merely 'contingent' (pseudo) philosophical accounts which obviate dialectical necessity by subordinating themselves to the empirical, as well the reification of abstraction in the form of a pure non-conceptual externality, a pure 'thisness' or immediacy intractable by conceptual means. This is yet another dimension in which the kind of pragmatic idealism bolstered by so-called 'hardcore' philosophers who claim to be continuous with science, following Kant, end up enacting, like Meillassoux diagnoses, a Ptolemaic counter revolution of sorts. Although L&R seek to escape this mystical evacuation of realism into a kind of neo-Kantian endorsement of noumenal ineffability, they end up bolstering it through their pragmatism.

Perhaps this is where the dialectical interplay between the scientific and manifest images advanced in the classical Sellarsian account can be put to work in some sense, by securing the relation between the two relatively autonomous registers (the conceptual-normative, and the natural-causal), and so avoiding the gratuitous demand for scientism which renders it epistemologically, if not metaphysically, rest on dubious grounds. Here the question would be to track the dialectic of concept revision by describing the porous frontier between the observable and the unobservable, and thus between the reviseable manifest register, still tethered to the reality of objects, as well as the scientific register's description of both elementary imperceptibles and non-perceptual structural properties all the same. Below I will indicate why Brassier particularly underlines the Sellarsian endorsement of secondary-properties as ontological valences.

The other point which seems of paramount interest is of course going back to the semantic-approach for theory modeling which reactivates the questions raised by Frege and Hilbert, and whether such an approach can be satisfactorily representational in a rigorous sense by means of structural isomorphy without having to invoke the privilege of intuition (in this regard Badiou seems to have taken the side of Hilbert in denouncing any notion of empirical 'content' as grounding structural isomorphy between domains and axiomatics, whereas the scientific realist- empiricist Sellarsian might want to salvage a role for sensibilia in some form or other). I take it that the revisionist naturalism endorsed by Brassier is an attempt to reconcile the rationalism from the Badiouean/Hilbertean deflation of self-grounding intuitions by underlining the relational autonomy of our conceptual economy, while insisting along Sellars' naturalism that an ontological role can be preserved for sensa as long as the latter are understood as pertaining to the autonomous domain of causal efficacy, and so as mediated processes themselves. This would simultaneously revoke the privilege of the manifest image to render scientific postulates of non-phenomenologizable content subordinate to perception (thus against instrumentalizations of science in terms of analogical modeling or pragmatic postulation), while at the same time explaining how sensibilia ontologically conditions conceptual mediation in resolutely non-conceptual terms; that is, in natural-causal terms, as neurophysiological processes. Furthermore, Brassier deems this as a crucial move in order to salvage the epistemic priority of science which, beyond purely mathematical structure, is capable of remaining anchored in the world. At this juncture the idea of 'real patterns' might be metaphysically useful, even if epistemologically still on dubious grounds. The problem with a blunt realism about ontic structure with a physicalist bent is that it adjudicates the privilege of science while remaining open to the kind of instrumentalist-pragmatic seizure of the kind Van Fraassen proposes, in which case we fare no better than Quine or Churchland in grounding the metaphysical labor. I take it this is why Brassier considers the unavoidable juncture of epistemology and metaphysics to remain the problematic moment for thought, and the one in which Sellars can help.

Correspondence From Ray Brassier on this Issue
 
I share your reservations about their attenuated conception of explanatory virtue and their pragmatic justification for scientism. Ultimately, L&R are too willing to throw out the rationalist baby with the metaphysical bathwater. What is frustrating about the book is they nowhere address the obvious Sellarsian-rationalist rejoinders to van Fraasen's empiricism; which is frustrating given that there was a substantial debate between Sellars and Van Fraassen on this very issue back in the 1970s (and van Fraassen was Sellars' student). In fact, there is only one reference to Sellars in the whole book, at the very beginning of Chapter 1 when they cite approvingly from "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man". But one can imagine a Sellarsian critique of OSR given Sellars' remarks in his 1966 critique of Feyerabend "Scientific Realism or Irenic Instrumentalism": The idea that the framework of common sense has a rock bottom does not require that this rock bottom consists of sense-impressions. The framework of common sense is a framework of (among other things) colored physical objects extended in space and enduring through time. And while objects which are red on the facing surface have the power to cause normal observers in the standard conditions to have sense impressions of red, this is incorrectly taken to mean that the physical property of being red on the facing side is to be analyzed in terms of this causal power.


As Berkeley, Kant, and Whitehead, among others, have pointed out, physical objects cannot have primary qualities only for structural and mathematical properties presuppose what might be called content qualities. And unless one falls into the trap of thinking of the framework of physical objects as a common sense theory evolved with unconscious wisdom to explain the manner in which sense data occur, it will scarcely do to say that the content qualities of physical objects are conceived, by a common sense use of analogy, to be the physical counterparts of the qualities of sense data (i.e. to play in the realm of physical things the content-role played in sense data by sense qualities). For, if the conceptual space of common sense physical
objects is underived, their content qualities must be directly rather than analogically conceived, for it is only in terms of perceived, and therefore conceptualized, qualitative difference that form and content can be distinguished.


1. The abandonment by scientists of the conceptual framework of common sense physical objects would involve either the abandonment of the conceptual space of color tout court, or the retention of this conceptual space as it reappears in its analogical offshoot, the conceptual space of sense impressions. The latter would be cut off from its foundation and left to wither on the vine. In either case, the conceptual space of the qualities of sense (secondary qualities) in one use of this phrase) would disappear from the public observation base of science. It would enter science only in linguistics, in the
study of the structure of the language of non-scientists and of scientists only to the extent that their sense impression talk
continued to reflect the pre-revolutionary framework of common-sense physical objects.

2. Only when the conceptual space of sense impressions has acquired a status which is not parasitical on the framework of common sense physical objects. In other words, only with the development of an adequate scientific theory of the sensory capacities of the central nervous system could the framework of common sense be abandoned without losing conceptual contact with a key dimension of the world. (Scientific Realism or Irenic Instrumentalism, pp. 175-178)

The exceptional strength of Sellarsian rationalism lies in its reconciliation of realism and empiricism: neither manifest objects nor unobservable posits are merely "useful fictions": one severs the link between the sensible and the intelligible at one's peril. By the same token, the notion of "real patterns" seems to me too weak to bear the burden of adjudicating between appearance and reality, or to bridge the gap between epistemology and metaphysics.


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So, to sum up:


The view that philosophers would benefit from learning actual science does not transparently entail philosophical sobriety, nor does it overcome by itself the critical injunction. Let us disambiguate:

1) The relation between metaphysics and science is not only ontological, or of ontological choice, but fundamentally epistemological. And in this particular regard, it is the question about the relationship between the two levels: what there is cannot be disassociated from the question about how we know what there is, i.e. the question of normative standards for epistemology cannot be dislodged from the ontological question about the structure of reality lest we revert to a form of dogmatic metaphysics. The question about the relationship between philosophy or metaphysics and science is necessarily at the juncture of questions about what we can know about the world, the relation between concepts and objects.

2) Ladyman and Ross explicitly subscribe to the idea of making metaphysics continuous, and even subordinate, to science, and physics in particular. Theirs is a brand of scientism which undermines the ontological valence of objects qua individuated particulars by arguing that physics teaches us to remain ontologically agnostic about them, the better to avow the reality of structure and primary relations, tracked by mathematical structural patterns. In this regard, L&R are very much informed by work done not just in the philosophy of science, but in science itself; they perform a restricted 'bracketing' about ontological commitments about individuals the better to anchor realism on structure.

3) However, without a proper epistemological footing, naturalist metaphysics cannot be appropriately legitimated on realist grounds, and that in obviating this demand, L&R are forced to appeals on the principled authority of science which devolves in a tacit instrumentalization of science and scientific phenomena, as in Van Fraassen's constructive empiricism, despite their claims to the contrary. The ontological agnosticism about objects is not remedied by an ontological commitment to structure if the authority of the latter merely follows circularly from the 'avowal of science' in principled grounds. In this regard Brassier's remark apropos the Churchlands and Badiou's apropos Quine can be reiterated about L&R, and any variety of scientific realism which is taken to draw its legitimation from a super-empirical standpoint which authoritatively prescribes rather than explains. Pragmatism is complicit with idealism insofar as it adjudicates science from the unexplained principled prescription of the normative practice of science in its current canonical forms.
 

4) In that regard, L&R's attempts to reshuffle epistemological terms apart from the relation between subjects and objects vis a vis analytic "neo-scholastic" metaphysics is analogous to the criticism against Meillassoux advanced by Gabriel Catren's observation that contemporary physics does not make appeals to inference on the basis of induction from observational terms. This again reiterates the deflation of the terms of the manifest image, and secondary properties in particular, in favor of the mathematicity of structure. More importantly, this reflects L&R's adoption of the semantic approach to theory modeling which dislodges the role reserved for observables vis a vis partial-interpretation in the syntactic approach.  We can also say thus that the scientific revision of epistemological norms by ontic structural realism would itself undermine the construal of the relation between science and the world in terms of subjective inference from observational instances. But, in doing the opposite move, that is, by simply modeling epistemology on a physicalist metaphysics, their philosophy already runs on an unjustified epistemological commitment which endows ontological valence to the postulates of science in pragmatic, principled terms. And this is, like we surmised above, subject to instrumentalist relativization, since the argument cannot be formulated in intra-theoretical terms which would simply insist on the importance of thinking in continuity with the theory in question lest we fall on circularity.

In this regard, the authoritarian validation of science on pragmatic grounds fares no better philosophically than classical metaphysics in its dogmatic pretense to uncritically yield descriptively the nature of reality. Saying we must be continuous with science because science helps us predict the world with accuracy does not get us beyond constructive empiricism, and so it is insufficient for a robust metaphysical naturalism with a realist bent. Realism can not rest on the satisfaction of the no-miracles argument plus a commitment to structure. The autonomy of the real does not follow from predictive success, any more than predictive failure reinforces the dependence of the real on thought. Saying the structure can be metaphysically avowed because there is concensus in bona fide science is both a) motivated by subordinating subordinating metaphysical to the institutional legitimation arbitrarily posited in the PPC and PNC. But through the latter the priority of physics turns out to be prescribed rather than explained. This is made particularly salient in the refusal by L&R to explain the relation between theoretical mathematical posits and 'real' physics structure.

5) Following Sellars, we must claim that the dialectic of concept revision must itself be the condition of possibility for the epistemic endowment of scientific claims. This is what Sellars describes as the methodological, non-ontological, independence of the normative-conceptual register of the manifest image with respect to the natural-causal register of the scientific image. Their relation is not one of plain subordination or undermining, but of a perpetual negotiation. Thus eliminativism does not follow from naturalism; the manifest image retains a methodological independence. The autonomy of the conceptual cannot be eliminated since it is the condition of possibility for the endowment of epistemic entitlement and concept revision itself: it alone tells us on what epistemic basis we should revise our theories and metaphysical commitments. 

Gabriel Catren and the Correlationist Circle

     

- GABRIEL CATREN AND THE CORRELATIONIST CIRCLE -
Speculative Physics, Speculative Realism?
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       Gabriel Catren's project, in short, is to advance a 'speculative physics', where the latter is to be understood as the a priori determination of the laws of nature, and more specifically those described by physics in quantum mechanics. Following Schelling and Hegel, and perhaps in a broader sense the work of Iain Grant, Catren thus seeks to rehabilitate the idea of a philosophy of nature, where the empirical scope of physics is ontologically grounded upon what he describes as a non-transcendental, a priori foundation.

     It is within the scope of this project that Catren finds himself at odds with Meillassoux's own. Although he openly endorses Meillassoux's claim that the post-Enlightenment philosophical tradition initiated a Ptolemaic counter-revolution against its own pretences, he claims that Meillassoux's endorsement of the contingency of the laws of nature is in fact yet another iteration of the reaction motif which fails to remain true to the lessons of the Copernican revolution. In order to show this, Catren briefly takes issue with what he takes to be a gratuitous dismissal of the possibility of establishing that the laws of nature obtain by necessity. Thus, against Meillassoux, Catren holds that the principle of factiality, which claims that contingency is absolute and not correlational, runs on the unjustified assumption that the necessity of the laws of nature couldn't be established by speculative thought.

    First, Catren disputes Meillassoux's assimilation of scientific-natural knowledge to inferential knowledge. In doing so, Meillassoux ignores that 'inductive reasoning does not play any role in contemporary physics'. Although that remark is stated in passing, it should be said that Meillassoux's does not equate scientific knowledge to induction, but rather is targeting the epistemological constraint that the post-Humean correlationist (and idealist) philosophies claimed to condition scientific activity as such. Thus, while it may be perfectly true that physics today makes no explicit reference to induction or inference, this misses the point; since the question is whether physics can be epistemologically grounded without having its principles underdetermined by the pragmatic-formal constraints relative to the knower; the cognizant pole of the correlational circle which is articulated inferentially. The latter claims that the facticity proper to knowledge undermines any claim at necessity that science could strive to; thus Catren's target should be to dispute facticity itself as an epistemological constraint for knowledge as a whole, rather than to claim physics makes no appeals to inference. For Meillassoux's claim about the contingency of the laws of nature is supposed to follow from the general epistemological construal according to which metaphysical claims (and physical claims by extension) are rendered relative to the experience of the knowing agent, and thus to transcendental conditions for disclosure; this is precisely what the circle of correlation tells us. In this regard, Catren would need to explain why physics in particular is not susceptible to the circle, and this he does not do in the paper, albeit more is to be said about this issue below.

     On any account, Catren's weightier argument comes in later. This argument proceeds in different stages. I will address each of these in order, for clarity:

1) First, Catren claims that Meillassoux conflates the formal ontology of worlds with the question about the necessity or contingency of the laws of nature. That is, he reasons that because the idea of grounding the laws of nature with necessity would require either a metaphysical first mover or an infinite regress, their contingency must follow. Since the actual necessity of the physical world could not be said to follow without the dogma of a metaphysical unexplained explainer, it must follow that there is no way to get from the a priori concept to the existence of actual physical reality, no 'ontological argument' as he puts it. Thus even if it was shown that many possible worlds correspond to reason, this has no saying as to whether laws are necessary or not, or whether an enquiry into the necessity of the laws of physics would be futile by necessity. In short, it does not suffice to establish contingency. According to Catren then, even if this were true it doesn't follow that physics could not consolidate an ontological argument it could still be true that 'a physical theory provides a provisional solution to a particular problem. For instance, quantum mechanics is the best solution that we have at the moment for explaining the objective consistency of nature.' (463) Finally, this leads Catren to Claim that '...it is difficult to understand why the supposed impossibility of providing a satisfactory rational global model for the 'topology' of absolute knowledge... would imply the futility of such a project.' (Ibid).

    The problem with this line of argument is that it leaves entirely undecided what this putative 'provisional' explanatory purchase endowed to physics is supposed to supervene on, once it is accepted that modally a plurality of possible worlds prevent an ontological streamlining of principled necessity to actual reality. The sense in which quantum physics or any other theory could be 'best' to describe the cohesion of the universe will necessarily be an attempt to describe reality from the purview of its present cohesion. But this does not seem to threaten Meillassoux, for his point is not that a description of locally operative principles could be produced by science or otherwise, but that their alleged necessity fails to obtain. In order to show that the contingency of the laws of nature fail, Catren would need to show not only that quantum mechanics provides the 'best' salient description for reality as we know it, but that the principles it describes can be established as necessary. For the gulf between the manifold possibilities or possible worlds rendered available to thought and presupposed a priori necessity of a set of laws only occurs in sight of the epistemic constraints set on the knower who theorizes. Claims to the 'partial' and 'fallible' nature of science seems on that account to subordinate Catren's putative claim for natural necessity to a kind of pragmatic instrumentalism: our most cohesive theory is taken to describe reality, but we know that it will eventually be displaced in favor of other theories given our epistemic limitations. But this seems to want to have your cake and eat it: either quantum mechanics is endowed with a priori necessity and thus its laws are not contingent to instrumental progress in science, but perhaps susceptible to specification, or they are subject to such variability in which case science must surrender its pretensions of a prioricity. Of course, Catren will claim that this merely states the inherent limitation of all epistemic traction before the real, and it doesn't solicit a wholesale negation of the necessity of the laws established by thought. But Catren surely thinks more: he thinks it is possible to show that the laws of nature are necessary. And yet since this is the goal of Catren's project rather than an accomplished result, it seems that it is he who is presupposing that such a necessity must exist, rather than Meillassoux assuming that they must not exist.

      For therein lies precisely Meillassoux's wager against Hume: against the skeptic who claims that even if we cannot establish the necessity of causal laws it doesn't follow that causality doesn't obtain, Meillassoux rather asks why should we assume it does obtain if reason indicates otherwise. Thus, Catren cannot simultaneously claim physical laws are endowed with a priori necessity and that at a loss for showing how the former the instrumental cohesiveness of physical description should suffice to justify belief in such a necessity. For the latter Catren would need to show, against Meillassoux, that something like the 'frequentialist' implication holds, such that the pragmatic success of physical description and the 'cohesiveness' it enjoys whilst framing nature in fact suggests that necessity must be rendered plausible. But at a loss for any such argument, Catren's tantalizing promise for a speculative physics seems to preemptively want to discount contingency as an unfounded assumption, while itself resting on dubious super-empirical virtue of physics, which are meant to indicate the 'provisional' state of the science.

      Now, Catren points out that the underlying motivation behind his disavowal of the necessity for such epistemological legitimating of the status of physics concerns the simultaneous endorsement of the principle of reason and the abandonment of the principle of ground. The latter is understood as the transcendental machinery of representation which enforces the circle of correlation in Meillassoux's case; and more generally any form of metaphysical 'grounding principle' which remains refractory to science's subtractive modus operandi. Thus, against Meillassoux's avowal of induction, Catren contends that contemporary physical science does not need to run the gaunlet of having to assume a metaphysical first-principle, or an infinite regress. Quite the contrary, to endorse the principle of sufficient reason adequate to science enforces the disavowal of any notion of ground: "Science does not progress by trying to found itself on a last self-posited metaphysical or transcendental reason, but by trying to absolve itself from any kind of presupposed background." (469).

     However, the ambiguity that we indicated above persists in Catren's account, since on the one hand this deposition of any notion of ground is supposed to account for the perpetual revisability of science, while Catren defends simultaneously the a priori necessity of its laws. Of course, the idea is that the lessons of physics force us to adapt to a post-humanist, de-anthropomorphized conception of the universe, where the valence of objective representation construed as a transcendental problematic is dismissed (on this account it is not surprising to see Catren's work overlap with the vocation of some contemporary post-Deleuzians/post-Landians, like Reza Negarestani, whose project seems at times very close to Catren's). But this seems to render the epistemological demand to explain how cognitive claims about reality, either advanced by science or philosophical speculative physics, is supposed to gain traction on an extra-experiential reality. Although Catren's observation that science's scope pushes us to "understand nature in non-correlational terms" is well taken, it is unclear what this prescribes for philosophy, and whether it suffices to circumvent the question of representational access and so of representation altogether. The putative authority endowed to science to not have to scale its descriptive methods through any transcendental machinery surely does not by itself provide an argument for philosophy about why the transcendental problematic is obsolete, any more than a marine biologist's focus on marine life is not a reason to think we have to stop asking questions about how we know the world. Thus it is not clear that 'the principle of ground' can be dispensed of in favor of a physics-friendly principle of reason without further argument.

     But in any case, Catren is right to insist in that the crucial problem assuaging Meillassoux is that his entire argument depends on hijacking the facticity that the correlationist claims inevitably places in the epistemological circle. This leads to the second point.

 2) Catren states that Meillassoux presupposes the impossibility of determining that the laws of nature obtain to argue for their contingency. This is inaccurate and conflates the generality of the argument, since Meillassoux hijacks in the correlationist argument the claim that it is impossible first to know that the conditions for knowledge are necessary, i.e. thought is factical. This is doubtlessly more general than claiming that the necessity of the laws of nature or physics is impossible to ground, since facticity is targeted at epistemological conditions for knowledge, which are at least not transparently tethered to physical laws. But this is a minor gripe, since the point surely also applies to physical principles, taken as epistemic conditions for objectivation. Still, even if we suppose in a naturalistic register that the conditions of knowledge are those specified by physics, the question concerns whether facticity obtains or not. However, Catren's argument focuses on what he deems to be a confusion of two dilemmas in Meillassoux's argument, which confuses a limitation for knowledge with an idealist determination by knowledge. The two dilemmas are:

 1) If we cannot determine the necessity of rational laws is this because of a limitation of our capacities, or because or their contingency?
 2) If physical laws are contingent, is this contingency correlative to thought, or absolute in itself?

      Accordingly, Catren claims that while Dilemma 1 is a perfectly good one, Meillassoux obscures it by focusing instead on the (fictitious) Dilemma 2. The difference in short is between epistemological criticism and ontological idealism, according to Catren. "To summarize, we can say that Meillassoux's proof... begins with an unquestioned (and probably) false) presupposition (namely, that physics cannot discover any rational necessity in physical laws), and proceeds by means of an illegitimate 'deductive' inference (namely, that of absolutizing a supposed limitation)."


      Again, we should remark that, strictly speaking, Meillassoux's construal of facticity cannot be circumscribed to 'physical laws', since the specific argument against the laws of nature follows rather after the principle of factiality has been argued for, as one of the three 'figures of factiality' (which follows from Meillassoux's argument against the frequentialist implication...) To ask whether facticity is relative to thought or not is not necessarily to ask whether physical laws are necessary or not, but more generally whether any knowable principle could be necessary. Thus the focus of the argument is the facticity of knowledge, rather than the contingency of natural laws; since the latter are in a sense subordinated to the former qua objects of knowledge. We have already seen why Catren's attempt to circumvent the transcendental problematic are insufficient for now, but let us leave this for the moment.


 As we know, Meillassoux's argument proceeds from absolutizing facticity and rejecting that it is a mere correlate of thought since, if it were, we would have accepted the idealist identification of all thinkable possibilities as necessary correlates of thought. In that regard, we should claim that Catren's 'real' epistemological criticism following from Dilemma 1 is part of what is included in Meillassoux's refutation against the correlationist 'possibility of ignorance'.  Recall that in the process of absolutizing facticity the correlationist, as hehijacks the speculative philosopher, claims that Meillassoux has illegitimately confused a mere limitation of our knowledge for an absolute limitation on things themselves. Thus while the speculative philosopher thinks that contingency is necessary lest we become idealists, the correlationist insists that for all we know this contingency is still as conceived for us, while the possibility of necessity obtaining outside our knowledge remains. Thus it would seem that Dilemma 1, as Catren presents it, is actually considered by Meillassoux as a possible objection which arises precisely in the course of absolutizing facticity; and so from within Dilemma 2.

     Against the correlationist rebuttal, as we indicated above, Meillassoux claims that the contingency under which reality appears before thought cannot itself be rendered relative to thought, lest we proceed to identify all thinkable reality as correlated to our knowledge, i.e. it wouldn't have occurred to us not to be idealists if we did not accept of the thinkability of an in-itself non-relative to thought. For the putative 'strong correlationist' stand before the idealist is to insist precisely in that it is possible to think of the correlation not being just as it could be, ; facticity threatens the correlation with a loss for reasons for itself to be, and so opens a possible gulf between the thinkable and that which is relative to thought. In this regard, Catren's argument fails again to realize the true pivotal point in Meillassoux's argument is to be found in his putative hijacking of facticity, rather than in the secondary attack on the laws of nature.

      For how does Meillassoux proceed? First, we are told by the hypothesized correlationist that one can find no reasons to ground the necessity for the conditions for thought which organize the range of knowable phenomena, i.e. thought is factical. Meillassoux then goes to say that this shows that facticity must be an absolute principle of things themselves, unless we accept the infinity of thought inherent in the idealist. But at this point Meillassoux's argument takes a strange emphasis: the argument against the idealist, and the rejoinder to the correlationist 'possibility of ignorance', consists in insisting on the facticity of the agent of the correlation, that is, our knowledge that the very agent who embodies the conditions of thought necessary for the correlation could not be, and that this possibility cannot itself be rendered relative to thought lest we think it immortal. My capacity-to-be-other must be thought as absolute lest we claim, like the idealist, that even the thought of death is relative to thought. I quote Meillassoux in full here:

      "She does so by maintaining that we can think ourselves as no longer being; in other words, by maintaining that our mortality, our annihilation, and our becoming-wholly-other in God, are all effectively thinkable. But how are these states conceivable as possibilities? On account of the fact that we are able to think - by dint of the absence of any reason for our being - a capacity-to-be-other capable of abolishing us, or of radically transforming us. But if so, then this capacity-to-be-other cannot be conceived as a correlate of our thinking, precisely because it harbors the possibility of our own non-being. In order to think myself as mortal, as the atheist does - and hence as capable of not being - I must think my capacity-not-to-be as an absolute possibility, for if I think this possibility as a correlate of my thinking, if I maintain that the possibility of my not-being only exists as a correlate of my act of thinking the possibility of my not-being, then / can no longer conceive the possibility of my not-being, which is precisely the thesis defended by the idealist.

       For I think myself as mortal only if I think that my death has no need of my thought of death in order to be actual. If my ceasing to be depended upon my continuing to be so that I could keep thinking myself as not being, then I would continue to agonize indefinitely, without ever actually passing away. In other words, in order to refute subjective idealism, I must grant that my possible annihilation is thinkable as something that is not just the correlate of my thought of this annihilation. Thus, the correlationist's refutation of idealism proceeds by way of an absolutization (which is to say, a decorrelation) of the capacity-to-be-other presupposed in the thought of facticity - this latter is the absolute whose reality is thinkable as that of the in-itself as such in its indifference to thought; an indifference which confers upon it the power to destroy me."

       However, we should note that at this stage of the argument Meillassoux seems to be claiming that the capacity of things-in-themselves to be other is established bythe factical knowledge of one's own capacity to be other. In other words, whereas Meillassoux originally claims that his argument does not depend on knowledge of anything actual, but merely considering that which is possible, in order to refute the idealist, facticity appears to be tethered to knowing that one could-not-be; that one cannot find any reasons for thought to exist. However, this by itself does not seem to solicit the thesis that every being will necessarily be contingent, but only that the agent of the correlation, that is one's thought itself, is contingent. This is not to repeat the argument in favor of the possibility of ignorance, since what we are claiming now is rather that while Meillassoux might have claims for the necessity of contingency on the basis of the knowledge of 'ourselves to be mortal' this is at best to know that we are necessarily contingent; that is, that the correlation is necessarily contingent, and perhaps that which appears within it as the realm of 'appearances'. But from this it seems totally illegitimate to conclude that being-in-itself construed as a mind independent reality is necessarily contingent, since there is no logical necessity from my capacity to acknowledge that I am a finite mortal and therefore contingent in being, as is my every thought and phenomenal correlate, to the necessity that everything that is thinkable as being independent of my thought and phenomenal correlates is contingent. The former is to assert that it must follow that facticity is absolute for the correlational agent; the latter is to say that facticity is a property of all things-in-themselves, and not just for the agent of the correlation. Meillassoux slides from one conclusion to the other through by attributing factical knowledge to the agent of a 'capacity-to-be-other', while within the scope of the circle of correlation the most facticity could show is the absolute contingency of appearances along with its conditions for objectivation. The difficulty creeps in the moment Meillassoux must conflate our knowledge of facticity to a knowledge of finitude, in his way to rebutting the idealist.

      But if this is the case then it bears radical consequences for Meillassoux's subsequent 'figures of factiality', contingency of the laws of nature included. If the principle of factiality is to be restricted to the realm of the phenomenal and to the reality of the correlational agent qua condition for phenomenal objectivation, then the three figures of the factial appear likewise circumscribed to the agent and its phenomena. And it is here that Catren's argument might be given some speculative weight: the idea that Meillassoux conflates epistemological criticism with ontological idealism. For now it seems that the contingency of the laws of nature no longer applies to being-in-itself simpliter, but only to the peculiar being under which phenomena are given within the circle. And since now positive knowledge seems circumscribed to the circle of correlation, at a loss for a positive knowledge of the actual, this seems to reactivate the Kantian idea according to which the laws of Nature, as we know them, are relative to appearances, and the domain of phenomena. But unlike Kant's static categorical framework, Meillassoux's absolute seems to solicit the possibility of an absolutely contingent modification in the laws that articulate appearances, while nevertheless remaining silent about the necessity/contingency of being outside the correlation.

      Indeed, it remains entirely open whether such beings even exist or not, and so the decision between realism and idealism seems suspended in favor of a kind of ontological agnosticism, paired with knowledge about the absolute certain of the contingency of the phenomenal. But this seems like transcendental idealism with a vengeance: we cannot know if being is outside thought, or if it would conform to any necessary laws, let alone whether these resemble our knowledge and appearances. At the same time, we are also unable to establish, a priori, that a given categorical framework for the stability of appearances obtains within the circle itself. Thus the laws of nature, taken in its restricted sense as the laws of appearance, are contingent in form as well as in their existence, i.e. that there is no reason for things to appear as they do entails that appearances could very well not appear, or that they could suddenly appear under radically different modalities than we have known thus far.

      The startling conclusion is that Meillassoux's absolutization of subjective facticity rehabilitates the possibility of the necessity of the laws of nature, understood as the laws of a mind independent reality, like Catren stipulates, but for this very reason forecloses the possibility of there being any knowledge of such laws, let alone a priori knowledge, or of their necessity. The only thing about the in-itself that I'm allowed to solicit is a nightmarish hybrid of Descartes and Heidegger: the transparency of my thinking, and the certainty of my death. The status of speculative physics would thereby seem, on that account, merely constricted to a regional study for the transient stability of phenomena presented under given conditions, and to the extent that a metaphysically fragile cohesion allows to discern. Every knowledge of the relation between the in-itself and the for-us is foreclosed in principle, excepting the knowledge that subordinates my being to the possibility of death as the one entity who I know must exist of itself. Thus the conditions for objectivation which remain the sole 'realist' ground for thought remain irreducible to the phenomena yielded within the correlational circle, but for this reason envelops thought as the dream of an opaque shadowy subjectivity which, for all we know, might lay suspended in utter solitude, shrouded by nothing but void.

Hegel and Heidegger on Representation: Objectivity, Truth, Science

                - HEGEL AND HEIDEGGER ON REPRESENTATION -

Objectivity, Truth, Science

            __________________________________________________


Introduction
In his seminal essay The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger advances a robust account of what is art, where the latter comes to acquire a distinctive privilege, along with poetry, as a locus for the disclosure of truth (wahrheit). In doing so, Heidegger seeks to oppose the tradition’s overburdened conceptions of art cashed out in terms of objectual representation and sensible aesthesis, where the being of the artwork is seen to come into bare presence through the act of an apprehending subject. Instead, Heidegger proposes that truth be conceived fundamentally as unconcealment (aletheia), evincing a structure of incompleteness and withdrawal as being co-constitutive of the ‘creative disclosing’ proper to the artwork. Only by unyoking truth from its objectual framing does one escape the totalizing ambition under which the merely ontic enterprise of modern science attempts a compulsive wresting of being and a thorough domination of Nature. These nefarious results which follow from our epoch’s ontological forgetfulness include the devaluation of artworks into mere objects for commerce and curatorial interest, as well as the technocratic compulsion which accounts for both concentration camps and the fumigation of fields in agriculture. Prefiguring thus the latter diagnosis from Was Ist Denken? that “science does not think”, Heidegger dislodges the ‘ontic violence’ of objectual representation from truth, and proceeds to argue that science does not reveal truths. The task of rehabilitating an originary conception of truth as unconcealment through an understanding of art becomes then of a piece with the overcoming of the technical dominance advanced by modern reason, which thrives in an ever aggravating forgetfulness of being. The movement from the earlier attempt at a fundamental ontology, still tethered to a vision of philosophy as (phenomenological) science, is thus progressively displaced in favor of the hermeneutic Destruktion of a post-metaphysical thought wherein science loses its prerogative along with the ontological valence of objectual representation.

Bearing a strong dissymmetry, Hegel's ambitious project as delineated in his Encyclopedia Logic is an attempt to enact the elevation of common knowledge (Wissen) from the explicit cognition (Erkennen) of representational objects into the comprehensive science (Wissenschaft) of the dialectically imbued Concept. Far from signaling the straightjacket of our epoch's waywardness before a rigidified and forgotten tradition or path of questioning, Hegel views philosophy's task as one of securing the necessary logical continuity between thought and the real, which renders a direct complicity between logic and metaphysics, or the discursive presentation on being (ontology) and the world itself. Thus, while Hegel would agree with Heidegger in that philosophy's task is first and foremost to prize philosophy free of the insufficiently developed conceptual baggage that comes with immediate representations and which remain ungrounded, it is not the ‘technical’ unbecoming of calculating reason and its objectual occlusion which is to be overcome. Rather, it is the incapacity of non-scientific reason to settle for merely contingent determinations on being which fall short of logical necessity, and thus of a properly scientific status.

For all their apparent divergences, however, we find at the heart of both theories a common sense of urgency towards conceiving truth as essentially untotalizable, and anchored on an unconquerable point of resistance. In Heidegger’s thinking, this kernel is the receding dimension of "The Earth", as the observe side of Dasein's positive projection of Worlds. In Hegel’s system, this kernel is constituted by the self-relating negativity of the infinite Concept which, always affected by opposite determinations, threatens to usurp the stable identitarian regime of epistemological representation in its rigid individuation of objects under schematic form. The 'truth' of the Concept is therefore nested, Hegel argues, in the primordial self-alienation which constitutes its spiraling movement into various moments. We shall examine below how for Hegel withholding truth from a total deliverance to the stasis of representation implies not just a philosophical rectification of the tradition, but a consummation of a philosophy which had always 'fallen short' of its name.

While Heidegger still sees poetry and the poetic word as possessing the distinctive privilege of placing us before truth, disassociating science from philosophical thought, Hegel's system of the Concept insists on their continuity. This verdict finally separates the two thinkers, in spite of their fundamental agreement in understanding the structure of truth as a dynamic movement, which remains incomplete and untotalizable, and wherein history unfolds itself. The Heideggerean movement of deconstructing (Destruktion) the Western tradition, removing itself from the objectification of conceptual abstraction, stands opposed to the Hegelian operation of sublation (Aufgehoben), where conceptual determination endows being its full actuality. Each of the two philosophers would take the other's attempt as a movement towards abstraction: for Hegel the phenomenological abstraction of the immediate, for Heidegger the abstraction of conceptual determinacy as a reification of the modality of presence-at-hand. Our discussion, in short, will modestly attempt to trace the continuity between the methodological strategies which affect the ontological registers in the work of these two philosophers, through an understanding of how thought attempts to dislodge itself from the shackles of a tradition which has driven it to a forgetfulness of its deeper questions, or failed to rise to the dignity of a science worthy of the name.





I – Heidegger and the Artwork – Things, Thingliness, Truth

”In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, lighting. Thought of in reference to what is, to beings, this clearing is in a greater degree than are beings.” (Martin Heidegger -The Origin of the Work of Art)



At the outset of The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger subscribes to the task of unearthing the origin or ‘essence’ (Wesen) of art, prizing common conceptualizations of the latter free from the presuppositions handed down to us by the metaphysically invested tradition. This amounts to asking how art itself comes to acquire precedence in determining the relation between artist and artwork, or as Heidegger puts it: “In themselves and in their interrelations, artist and work are each of them by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely that which also gives artist and work of art their names—art.” (OWA; Pg. 17) If the question about the origin of art as such comes to acquire methodological priority with respect to asking about the subject of art, or the object (Ob-jekt) of art, it is because an understanding proceeding from the dyad of subject-object relations already occludes a more fundamental determination which Heidegger deems as ‘essential’, i.e. which establishes “…that by which something is what it is and as it is” (Ibid; Pg. 17)[1]. But since the investigation into the origin or ‘Nature’ of art must take the extant reality of artistic works as its beginning, we thereby enter a ‘hermeneutic circle’, where the essence of art is first inferred from the artwork, and yet the latter comes to be seen as determined by the former (Ibid; Pg. 18). This leads Heidegger into a propadeutic assessment of the traditional conceptions of art which obtain from the tradition.

Heidegger first raises the question about the ‘thingly’ character inherent in all works of art, understood as a “self-evident element” which is brought to last or endure in a presencing (Anwesen) which constitutes the work's artistic being and which endows it with a structure[2]: “It seems almost as though the thingly element in the art work is like the substructure into and upon which the other, authentic element is built.” (Ibid; Pg. 20) By the same token, the artist himself is not taken to be a mere ‘subject’ of representation, who stands before the work, endowing it with its ‘thingly’ character. This disassociation of the agent of art from the subject follows since crucially “…a man is not a thing.” (Ibid; Pg. 21) And since the ‘thingly’ element of the work cannot thus be squarely identified with the merely objectual representations of artworks the tradition provides, Heidegger first seeks to point towards the limitations inherent in the three prevalent conceptions about the artwork’s essence, which circulate around these misconceptions in a dominant manner (Ibid; 23-26):

1) The work as a mere thing/object – Under this conception, the work comes to be understood as a mere object or thing; taken as an ‘assemble’ comprised of a bundle of properties. These become then expressed in propositional form, i.e. subject-predicate attributions. Against this view, Heidegger underlines that the visibility of the thing must already precede predicative determinations, whose origin propositions are unable to express. Thus the ‘thing-structure’ reflected in the subject-predicate propositional form is said to derive from ‘a common source’ (Ibid; Pg. 22). This common source remains, however, shrouded in mystery.

2) The work as an aesthetic datum – Under this conception, the work comes to be individuated as a transparent totality delivered over to our perception or sensibility, given as a distinctive unity, synthesizing a ‘manifold of intuition’[3]. Against this view, which is paired to the former in producing a singular thing-concept of the work, Heidegger contests the putative transparency and completeness of the work as given in its presencing, claiming rather that “"In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e. listen abstractly.”[4] (Ibid; Pg. 26) This way, Heidegger invites us to hear in the originary Greek notion of the hupokeimenon a ‘ground’ which is not reducible either to the fully present object of representation, expressed by a conceptual propositional frame, or to the agency of a subject apprehending perceptual unities from subsisting matter.

3) The work as a dual determination of form and matter – Under this conception, the work is understood as a complex articulation between a primal material substratum (hyle) and form (morphe) set visible before an apprehending subject through aspects (eidos)[5]. Against this conception, Heidegger underlines the irreducibility or the dubious subordination of the being of tools or equipment (Zeug) with which Dasein engages in purposive practice to a distribution of form by matter. It follows that the ‘usefulness’ of tools can never be an additional property surreptitiously aggregated to the object, understood as a form-matter compendium. Quite the opposite, the ‘usefulness’ of these tool-beings are said to be ontologically fundamental with respect to such merely ontic, objectual determinations: “Such usefulness is never assigned or added on afterward to a being of the type of a jug, ax, or pair of shoes. But neither is it something that floats somewhere above it as an end.” (Ibid; Pg. 28)

Significantly, these three conceptions tie in with three traditional conceptions of truth: 1) as correspondence between proposition and fact, 2) as subjective-conscious intentionality directing the ‘ego’ towards a unified object, or 3) as the Idea which gives form to the bare givenness of matter in producing the being of the object. The issue must be thus that there is in the ‘truth of the work’ something which resists objectification, and for this the usefulness of tools delivers the first clue (Ibid; Pg. 28). All of these conceptions must already presuppose, Heidegger argues, that beings have already made themselves available to us, taking part amidst in usefulness for Dasein's comportments, in doing so evincing a structure intractable through the modality of objective representation.

Heidegger paves the way thus to a discussion of tool-beings or equipment, extending on the famous ‘tool-analysis’ from Being and Time. What is crucial for us at this stage is simply to underline how for Heidegger the being of equipment challenges the objectual form of representation, construing the latter rather as a derivative function of the ‘breakdown’ or malfunctioning of the former[6]. In other words, whereas the traditional conceptions would have the ‘usefulness’ or serviceability of an entity as one more property or attribute, or as a contingent integration of such serviceability outside its strict determinations (a distinctio rationis, in the Scholastic sense), Heidegger deems the usefulness of tool-beings to be the ‘condition of possibility’ (to use Kant’s language) for objectual representation. This more fundamental understanding pertaining to readiness-to-hand implies thus a kind of ‘mindlessness’ in act, where no 'subject' or 'object' occur in its structure.

We should note that although Heidegger’s frequent examples of equipment involve man made ‘tools’, such as hammers or nails, the propriety of equipment does not pertain to a class or species of entities, since this would surreptitiously reintegrate them within the axes of objectual representation described above. Neither does readiness-to-hand pertain to a modality of beings, such that the same hammer could be said to present-at-hand or ready-to-hand, according to whether it is being theoretically grasped or practically put to use. Both readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand are modalities of being, and strictly speaking, entities qua particulars obtain only in the modality or presence-at-hand. The point is thus that present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) objects of representation (Vorstellung) are individuated only as derived from the malfunction of ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) equipment (Zeug) in engaged practice. This separates the positive ontic-regional enterprise of the sciences or scientific rationality, from the global-ontological scope of philosophy.

Already a few years later, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger will delineate more clearly the scope of this distinction. Philosophy, understood still as metaphysics, does not concern itself with a particular being (God, the animal, the human…), a stratified domain of beings like science does (biological, physical, social…), or even with all the different beings or domains of beings. Conceptual typologies are delegated to the secondary ontic enterprise expressed by scientific categories, while philosophy in turn unearths their ontological ‘ground’ or enabling conditions through comprehensive concepts (Heidegger: 1995, Pg 9)[7]. Philosophy occupies itself with worldhood, which thinks of 'beings-as-a-whole', i.e. it thinks of the pre-theoretical, unified, and transcendental horizon wherein a "clearing" (Lichtung) of beings are made manifest, and being as such is 'given over' to Dasein: “The fundamental concepts of metaphysics and the concepts of philosophy, however, will evidently not be like this [scientific understanding] at all, if we recall that they themselves are anchored in our being gripped, in which we do not represent before us that which we conceptually comprehend, but maintain ourselves in a quite different comportment, one which is originarily and fundamentally difference from any scientific kind.” (Ibid)

As fundamental, metaphysical comprehension (Begreifen) becomes the condition of possibility for the rest of the sciences or merely ontic enquiries: “there are only sciences insofar as there is philosophy”, not the other way around", or even more dramatically “…all science is perhaps only a servant with respect to philosophy.” (Ibid; Pg. 5) The ontological status of scientific phenomena is thereby said to be derivative from the transcendental and unitary structure of worldhood adequate to Dasein's dwelling, and which it falls to philosophy to clarify. In this sense, if the being of equipment constitutes a subject for philosophical enquiry proper, this is because it cannot be adequate to an ontic, "regional science". That is, even if Heidegger earlier was more akin to associate the strict scientific method with the phenomenological enquiry in advancing a fundamental ontology[8].

The ‘readiness’ proper to the being of equipment is then not simply that of a set of man-made, useful entities. It rather shatters the individuating objectual frame of objects and properties described in propositional (apophantic) form altogether. Heidegger accordingly claims that “taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment” but only an ‘equipmental-whole’ wherein subject and object are rendered indistinct (BT: Pg. 97). Dasein’s comportments (Verhalten) towards being as integrated and purposive practice thus trump Husserlian intentionality, since the latter remains tethered to the modality of subject-object relations, however reduced to its logical form through successive reductions (epoche)[9]. Consequently, it makes sense to conceive of natural-kind beings within ready-to-hand comportments, as long as we do not formally distinguish them from Dasein.

Heidegger’s famous depiction of Dasein as the ‘shepherd of being’ may be useful here and unpacked as an example: the guiding shepherd follows in unison with the herd of sheep an aim-oriented trajectory, mindlessly integrated and indistinct. Only when a sheep ‘diverts’ from the herd and interrupts the trajectory’s fluid migration, only when the stable functioning of the act breaks down, does 'the animal' appear, as some-thing, as an object to be dealt with. The shepherd correspondingly appears thus as a subject, as an agent which quickly proceeds to reintegrate the sheep onto the undisturbed movement of the herd[10].

At this juncture, it becomes evident that Heidegger’s understanding of essence (Wesen) problematizes the traditional (Scholastic) conception of the same in terms of ‘whatness’, i.e. the essence of an object is not a matter of ‘defining’ what it is. The latter already pertains to the derivation which sets-before the being qua object, and already loses the availability under which the being’s equipmentality comes to work alongside Dasein, rather than against the subject. Crucial then becomes the disavowal of all merely ontic or objectual determinations of being, in favor of a properly ontological clarification of the same. It is clearly thus a question of the ontological difference between being and beings; between entities conceived as individuated particulars, and being as that which precedes and grounds the being of particulars. We obtain here a series of distinctions: art’s essence or truth, which derivatively determines the artist as subject and the artwork object, is: 1) not one distributed in the modality of that-being (Wasein); 2) equipment is not localizable as mere presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) but rather as the available, ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit); 3) the agent is not a ‘subject’ but a who (Das-sein), existing there, dealing with beings in the world in ways which are fundamentally practical and productive more than reflexive or cognitively apprehensive. If the objectification proper to representation occludes the being of the work of art then it is because what withdraws from such a comprehension is not a being, or an ‘essential’ property which determines the content of the object propositionally. Rather, being qua thing simply dis-appears as a thing by the philosophical deconstructive operation, and becomes ontologically grounded.

The question becomes then how art as such comes to be understood within this complex distribution, having unyoked ‘essence’ and being from the shackles of representation, and using the clue of equipment. Heidegger takes as his lead example an anonymous painting by Van Gogh, which depicts a pair of peasant shoes. Beyond the explicit objectual content which merely gives us over to a pair of worn shoes, for Heidegger, the painting reveals the background of the peasant woman’s context in its holistic network of relations. Her dwelling above the rugged soil and her confrontation in the vast Openness of the fields, struck by the flagellating winds, are all part of the thick background that withdraws from the work’s explicitly objectual ‘content’. Heidegger’s description reveals the strife or tension between what he will distinguish as the Earth and the World: “This equipment belongs to the earth and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting within-itself.” (OWA: Pg, 33) In addition to usefulness-serviceability, the shoes in the painting reveal a dimension of reliability in equipment, a grounding in which the dwelling of the peasant woman and her horizon of meaning is firmly placed. Heidegger goes on to identify the World with the projective horizon of possibilities wherein Dasein dwells purposively as equipment becomes serviceable (Ibid). In Van Gogh’s painting, this would correspond to the holistic network of meaningful practices in which the shoes are integrated. The artwork correspondingly fulfills the function of ‘delivering us over’ into the peasant woman’s dwelling-space, transposing us into the 'there' wherein the woman inhabits, while revealing itself in connection to the usefulness or serviceability of beings for a people and an epoch.

Correspondingly, the Earth is structurally twofold: first, it designates the primordial dimension of reliability which simultaneously withholds or resists something from Dasein. In the painting, this can be found in the asymmetry between the depicted content of the shoes, and the receding background which illuminates it. Second, the Earth is the depth of being which withdraws or ‘self-encloses’ itself, the necessary back-ground upon which creative world-formation operates. The ‘self-enclosure’ of the Earth is thus not to be equated with the abstract persistence of beings or objective entities; it rather designates the ‘being of beings’ which resists objectification and which founds it, as well as that from which truth comes to happen for Dasein. The artwork discloses the being of equipment as the destitution of the subject-object dichotomy, evincing the dynamic twofold strife between the World and the Earth, which Heidegger now calls the truth of equipment as such:

“Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being. The Greeks called the unconcealedness of beings aletheia…” (Ibid; Pg. 35)

The artwork comes to be understood as a locus to disclose truth conceived as un-concealment (Unverborgenheit), from the tense relation of strife between the World and the Earth. Heidegger expounds his analysis expressly through the example of the Greek temple, as being paradigmatic of this non-representational quality in art, and wherein the artist himself disappears and becomes “…almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge” (Ibid; Pg. 39) Just like the shoes reveal the peasant woman’s holistically articulated world, the Greek temple comes to be a work insofar as it discloses and unfolds in its being a horizon of possibilities common to a people and an epoch. So that it plainly follows that “…to be a work means to set up a world." (Ibid; 43) In the temple, the Gods’ presencing can be felt, i.e. the opening of all ontic possibilities, and the recession of being’s excessive dimension. It is not a ‘full presence’ that comes before Dasein (Vor-handen / Vor-stellung), but an asymptotic deliverance onto being, which can never be fully disclosed. The receding Earth grounds Dasein’s worldly dwellings by providing thus an asymptotic horizon of undisclosed possibilities, which remain untotalizable and inexhaustible, only ever progressively wrested. The Gods are in the temple, before presencing, insofar as they index the recession of being as the Earth as the precondition for Dasein’s being-in-the-world.

At this point we should underline that it is not simply that objectual representation does not pertain to worldhood given its occluding nature, but rather that it is not its primary ontological dimension. It is merely the one which remains most alien to the ‘self-containment’ of being qua Earth, in un-concealment, since it thinks to possess full traction before being in its object by positing the object as something 'grasped' and enduring before a subsistent subject. It is merely the most reified conception of being as presence, which disjoins beings from their dynamic integration in worlds. But doing so of course renders invisible the receding background of immersion where serviceability, availability and reliability mark the dynamic strife of truth in the being of the entity, in equipment as well as 'works'. Dasein’s being is then broadly construed as its factical transcendence onto beings in a World[11]: a) its factical thrownness (Geworfenheit) into the Open (Offen) encounter with beings as ‘being-in-the-world’ (In-der-Welt-Sein); second, b) its dwelling in the earth which is ‘self-enclosing’ and which grounds it; third, c) a projective (Entwurf) horizon which constitutes the World which ‘lights up’ a clearing of possibilities which it creatively wrests from the grounding, withdrawing Earth: "World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being"[12] (Ibid; Pg. 43) Thus all ‘commercial’ or curatorial dislodging of creative works from their historical, worldly specificity, to exhibit them as objects for contemplation, cannot but destroy their essential capacity to disclose. This creative dimension which opens up a space for the presencing of truth as the World-Earth strife is the prerogative of Dasein’s activity, and is presupposed by all externalized objectifications of being where the latter is merely thought of as present, and not attuned to the integral phenomenon of presencing: "But it is not we who presuppose the unconcealedness of beings; rather, the unconcealedness of beings (Being) puts us into such a condition of being that in our representation we always remain installed within and in attendance upon unconcealedness." (Ibid; Pg. 50).

The role of the artist is then not just to create the work as an object, but to preserve in its coming-to-be the rift wherein truth comes into presencing, in the tension of un-concealment. The artistic work thereby serves as a sort of punctual concentration where on the one hand the creative projection of Dasein’s world-formation, and the grounding self-concealment of being as the Earth on the other, become palpable in their co-appropriateness. Thus to ‘set-to-work’ means to stand within the space of truth opened by the work, realizing that the latter is in such a strife, and that "…to create is to cause something to emerge as a thing that has been brought-forth." (Ibid; pg. 58) This dynamic movement of creation and concealment obviously relates back to the link between equipment as incorporated within a nexus of opened possibilities, discursive or practical, and non-objectual being which withdraws from theorizing. The work in this way produces a ‘framing’ (Ge-stell) for the disclosure of truth; and not merely a presented form (morphe) for objects. Therefore, if the thing’s ‘thingliness’ is to be found in its ‘earthly’ dimension (in its concealment) as much as in its ‘worldly’ dimension (as disclosed usability or serviceability), then it is because truth is precisely this unified tension between the two movements. And since the Earth’s recession does not index a set of invisible properties, essences or forms, that which conceals itself is the void of being as such, in its non-objectual depth: “The thing’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.” (PLT; Pg. 167) For Heidegger it becomes the prerogative of art and the poetic word, to let unconcealment resonate in the work’s presencing, against scientific abstraction.

As we shall see in the next section of the paper, this will turn out to have a radical bearing on Heidegger’s conception of history, and by extension, of the tasks pending for thought in relation to science, cognition and action. We shall briefly recapitulate how the work of Hegel offers an alternative account of truth which both challenges and expounds the former’s key critical insights.

II – Hegel and Representation: Cognition, Knowledge, Science.

"What is rational, is actual

What is actual, is rational"

G.W.F. Hegel - Preface to the Philosophy of Right (p.ixi)

As we saw above, Heidegger's attempt to unyoke truth from the tradition required first and foremost to overcome the framework of representational rationality wherein being was equated to the object, the merely 'present-at-hand' correlate of thought for a subject. In similar spirit, Hegel's The Encyclopaedia Logic contends that although philosophy must indeed begin with a consideration of ob-jects (Gegenstand) as given to us in common-sense cognition (Erkennen), this is only propadeutic in the way of elevating knowledge (Wissen) into the 'comprehensive cognition' proper to scientific thinking (Wissenschaft)[13].While in immediate representation being remains contingently postulated, it falls to philosophy to produce the appropriate concepts to establish their actual logical necessity: "... in the order of time consciousness produces representational notions of ob-jects before it produces concepts of them; and that the thinking spirit only advances to thinking cognition and comprehension by going through representation and by converting oneself to it... that thoughtful consideration implies the requirement that the necessity of its content should be shown, and the very being, as well as the determinations of its ob-jects should be proved."(Hegel, EL, Pg. 24).

This 'conceptually comprehensive' cognition which exceeds representation must first dislodge itself from the various "forms of thought" in which knowledge is commonly yielded: feeling, intuition, representation, etc (Ibid. Pg. 25). The scientific valence of the philosophical concept is so uncompromising on this account that Hegel will even go as far as claiming that representational notions are 'mere metaphors' of these concepts. (Ibid). In this regard, we can already grasp a fundamental divergence with Heidegger's account, insofar as for the latter the valence of conceptual rationality must in the last instance see itself as performing an ontological occlusion in contrast to the disclosing function of the poetic word, prized free from representation. Although both Hegel and Heidegger agree in that philosophical production generates the discursive necessity of being as opposed to mere objectual representation, for Hegel nothing is lost by virtue of the transcription to the concept. Quite the contrary, it is only within the scope of thought and ideality that the abstractions of immediate being and representation attain full-fledged actuality, i.e. logico-metaphysical necessity. As Hegel himself puts it: "... the genuine content of our consciousness is preserved when it is translated into the form of thought and the concept...the content of philosophy is actuality. The first consciousness of this content is called experience. Within the broad realm of outer and inner thereness a judicious consideration of the world already distinguishes that which only appearance, transient and insignificant, from that which truly and in itself merits the name of actuality." (Pg. 28-29). Thus while Heidegger conceives that the coruscating abstraction of the concept and the object further removes one from the opening of being given over to immediate experience and against the mediation of subject-object relations, Hegel disavows experiential immediacy as a merely transient abstraction which falls short of determining the ontological valence of the datum of representation. Whereas thinking experience requires for Heidegger a deconstructive (Destruktion) restoration from conceptual abstraction, for Hegel all such appeals to experience just exacerbate conceptual abstraction itself, as the most barren thinking requiring sublation (Aufgehoben). The enigmatic formula 'the actual is rational' therefore means: nothing escapes logical necessity, there is no gulf of 'pre-conceptual' being or 'pre-ontological' understanding through which emanates the positive actuality of the wealth of the possible, no 'gift' of being cleared in the Open. The immediacy of that 'inner and outer thereness' is quickly deposed of as a trite banality for Hegel, in which the Concept (affected by self-relating negativity) comes to sublate itself from its height of abstraction. Because logic qua scientific reason establishes the actuality of being, it will follow that all contingent determinations falling back on our unmediated 'clearing onto' the world amidst beings, as conceived in Dasein's primordial 'thrownness', are shed off as gratuitously posited, empty thoughts. More dramatically, Hegel allots such an elevation of the abstraction of experience to being one of the 'passions of the understanding' and which, given over to contingency and facticity, disassociate being and the Idea to the point of exacerbating its emptiest moment:

"But even for our ordinary feeling, a contingent existence does not deserve to be called something-actual in the emphatic sense of the word; what contingently exists has no greater value than that which something-possible has; it is an existence which (although it is) can just as well not be. But when I speak of actuality...I distinguish it clearly and directly, not just from what is contingent... but also, more precisely, from being-there, from existence, and from other determinations.

The notion that ideas and ideals are nothing but chimeras and that philosophy is a system of pure phantasms, sets itself at once against the actuality of what is rational... However, the severing of actuality from the Idea is particularly dear to the understanding, which regards its dreams (i.e. its abstractions) as something genuine" (Ibid: Pg. 30)



What is interesting here is that while, for Heidegger, the dismantling of the object of representation is conceived precisely as such a removal from abstraction, delivered back from the present-at-hand to the holistic integration of worlds and of ready-to-hand equipment, Hegel sees the hermeneutic 'peddling backwards' to a point of originary disclosure as a literary embellishment of abstraction at its culprit. As such, those attempting to seize a 'pre-conceptual' or 'pre-ontological' domain from the understanding through conceptual means, that is, those who have too high a 'regard for their dreams', end up doing reifying the most barren of abstractions, disguising the inherent incoherence of their endeavor. Or, as Hegel puts it, "To want to have cognition before we have any is as absurd as the wise resolve of Scholasticus to learn to swim before he ventured into the water." (Ibid: Pg. 34) Only the Concept in the pure thinking carried by the scientific philosopher can establish by itself the necessity to legitimize the actual; everything else becomes mere moralistic prescription or metaphorical abstraction (Ibid). The 'beginnings' elevated by the phenomenological embrace of the lifeworld, along the purported restoration of an authentic attunement (Stimmen) by heeding to the call of the pre-conceptual, are rather always "immediate, found, presupposed"(Ibid: Pg. 33). Philosophy's job is not to recuperate or restore them, but to prize them free of their contingently established content by the means of 'speculative thought'. The relation between the universal genera of thought and the wealth of particular determinations as found in objective reality must then, through philosophy, follow intrinsically from the dialectical deployment of the Concept's self-relation, and not as a relation of an experiential pole contingently tethered to an externality (Ibid). Against the flattening of the subject-object dyad into the 'World' through an account of purposive practice, Hegel's that "...while each of these moments does also appear as distinct, neither of them can be wanting, and they are inseparably bound together" (Ibid; Pg. 36).

But this must mean that whatever appears as immediately given must in truth be always already, implicitly, affected by a mediation, by its exact opposite. The purely given must in truth already presuppose that to which it is given as given; the object of immediate reflection can only be implicitly given as datum for the factum of thinking. In order to capture the pregnancy of the concept which triggers its reversal, Hegel inscribes thus the general operation of the dialectic's logical movement, in which the identity of a being is all the same affected by its opposite determination, reverting into it before establishing the unity of its moments[14]. And just like the immediacy of pure Being reverts into Nothing, only to see itself sublated as the unity of Becoming, logico-metaphysical knowledge supersedes the immediacy of all sensible content to unearth its tacit conceptual mediation[15]: "In this way, our knowledge of God, like our knowledge of all that is supersensible in general, essentially involves an elevation (Aufgehoben) above sensible feeling or intuition; hence it involves a negative attitude toward the latter as first and in that sense it involves mediation.[16]" (Pg; 82)

We should be clear to read the implicitly anti-Kantian gesture indicated here by the appeals to intuition and sensibility. The point Hegel seeks to underline, and which applies to Heidegger as well, is that the factical 'givenness' of the representational form of experience, tethered to sensuous receptivity, is irremediably external to thinking if merely posited as a given datum 'without reason'. Thus the facultative split in the Kantian edifice, which separates the understanding from intuition as the two 'species' of representation, cannot but reproduce the externality of the universal (categories) with regard to its particularizing sensible content, which then become contingently stapled one onto the other as a series of schematic instantiations of the objects of experience. Similarly, with Heidegger, although the horizonal, ecstatic transcendence of Dasein's projection is the condition of possibility for Worlds and the clearing of all beings, this enabling condition must be itself factically given or unconditioned, i.e. Dasein's facticity (Fakticitat) entails that it is thrown 'without reason' into the world, capable of the anxiety before being's non-latency in the Open.

The result is that while metaphysical concepts may clarify the necessary structure for the encounter with beings, it is no less true that the contingency of the transcendental with respect to its object remains as a purely contingent givenness. This is the unobjectivizable aspect of experiential givenness, the factical ecstatic transcendence which makes Dasein 'in each case mine' (Jemeinigkeit), irreducible to the still conceptually objectified subjective consciousness. This is a transcendental agency shorn of its substantialist residue, and which is tethered to the world not just as object, but as caretaker and producer[17]. Dasein's ecstatic transcendence is the phenomenological analogue to the Kantian spontaneous synthetic transcendence of thinking which yielded the inseparability between the understanding and intuition, concept and object[18]. However, there is a second transcendence at work here, which in Kant already marked the external kernel to the co-determination of the transcendental subject and the transcendental object[19]. While the latter remains the 'empty form of the object' constituted only under the general category of substance within the understanding, the noumenon is rather the 'concept without an object' (ens rationis), which is not transcendental but transcendent to all subjective synthesis, negatively determined within it as its opaque Other[20]. And it is this negative noumenon which, for Kant, grounds the transcendence of the subject in the externality of the world. It serves thus as a kind of index within experience of what is resolutely non-experiential, i.e. it is irreducible to the phenomenal order of appearances and its categorical form as given in thought. Similarly, in the Heideggerean account, we find a structural counterpart to the disclosing horizon of Dasein and beings, signaled through the opaque externality of the Earth. The latter targets a non-objectivizable excess to Dasein's world-disclosing capacity, not just to the objectual configurations of present-at-hand abstraction, but even to ready-to-hand practical engagement, and so to the pre-ontological understanding in the midst of beings[21]. It is not so much an abstract concept as much as the concept of an absolute abstraction, shorn of even the pre-ontological disclosure of the ready-to-hand, let alone objectual presence-at-hand in substance. For Heidegger, however, this paradoxical experiential index of the non-experiential 'nothingness of being' is not the supplementary source of practical imperatives, as is the case with Kant's 'noumenal freedom'. It is rather distantly indexed under peculiar 'ontologically attuned' dispositions such as anxiety and profound boredom, where being-as-a-whole, in its non-latency and removal, levels the horizon of beings, showing their common grounding in the void of being[22].

That way, the ontological difference between being and beings, and the former's incommensurability to ontico-scientific rationality produces an iteration of the contingently posited relation between transcendental subject along with its phenomenal objects, and the purely negative, non-experiential noumenal 'concept without an object'[23]. Only this time it is cashed out in terms of a) Dasein's world-disclosure as a clearing of beings, and b) the transcendence of the Earth's asymptotic and abyssal recession as the ground of being. The former co-appropriation of being and thought remains fully ideal since it locates the transcendence of being within the experiential horizon opened by Dasein's transcendence onto beings, while the latter remains the concept of an abslolute scission from the ideal. Thought's transcendence, just as Hegel remarks apropos Kant's 'spontaneity of thinking' and the noumenal as limit-concept, then simply presupposed as an a priori factum for thought, falling short of the necessity proper to philosophico-scientific cognition. In this regard, the disclosing transcendence of Dasein severed from its transcendent ground repeats the Kantian gesture of locating the 'noumenal' transcendence of the object as a formal distinction (distinctio formalis) within the objectivating transcendence of the subject and its intra-experiential content[24]. Ray Brassier (2011) develops this line of thought in fuller detail.

" [T]he noumenal ground of appearances is not a substance considered in abstraction from its relation to the subject, but a concept considered in abstraction from its relation to the object. Thus the noumenon as “thought-entity” or intelligible nothing is not just an abstract concept, but rather the concept of an absolute abstraction, existing independently of its abstraction from experience. In this regard, and contrary to the familiar Hegelian rebuke according to which Kant abandons the in-itself to the domain of the inconceivable, the noumenon as intelligible nothing lays claim to the territory of the in-itself for conceptualization, without presumptively annexing it to the latter. From Kant, through Heidegger, to Laruelle, the postulate of the in-itself requires that we rethink the metaphysical hypostatization of being-in-itself, which is an abstraction relative to an empirically given reality, as the absolute reality of abstraction.[25] " (Brassier, 2011, pgs. 9-10)

The Earth as the receding polar counterpart of the World as horizon localizes immanently within experiential possibilities an excessive dimension which establishes its actual 'grounding', by virtue of its unobjectivizable transcendence. This is what is indexed by Dasein's dwelling on an abyssal Earth, insofar as being qua being remains intractable by the objectivizing concept. Thus Heidegger can claim that in the passage from the possible to the actual "... this transition is to be understood, not in the sense that the possible relinquishes a way of being, but rather in the sense that it first of all receives a being." (Heidegger, 1988: Pg, 98) The ground of the Earth is the 'gift' of being upon which Dasein's horizonal disclosure of possibilities sets to work. And since this element of productivity is rendered entirely correlative to Dasein's projective disclosure of worlds, endowing a particular prerogative to the laborious production of the poetic word (poiseis) and of the artist, only existence can guarantee the full actualization of the givenness of being's abstract void. While the non-objectual Earth grounds Dasein's existential possibility for worlds, thrown into the world the latter becomes the 'shepherd of being'- its 'caretaker', insofar as existence endows it with the capacity of productivity needed to fully actualize being-as-ground over into the vast expanse of beings.

So in Heidegger's dislodging of essence from substance-determined 'whatness', annexing it rather to the pre-objectual, being as such ceases to be the correlate of an ideal act produced within transcendental disclosure, but becomes a reified conceptual abstraction negatively rendered as the polar counterpart of conceptual thought with positive content. Laruelle (1986) in this regard writes: "Essence is no longer a transcendent ideality, in the metaphysical sense. It is rather real or absolute transcending- not a particularly, i.e. objectivized being that is transcendent in the theological style, but rather the transcending of the real in-itself that no longer has any object-term and that is absolute scission [separating its radical immanence from transcendental horizonal disclosure]. Under the name of Finitude, Heidegger thinks the real, absolute opposite, the 'Other' of every relation of objectivation; the un-objectivizable real that is the essence of Being[...]" (Laruelle 2010; Pgs. 63-4)

Yet under strict Hegelian scrutiny these obdurate appeals to an unobjectivizable transcendence continue to ring hollow, in virtue of the gratuitous facticity endowed to Dasein's transcendental status, and the equally contingent externality endowed to the Earth's transcendent status. In this regard, Hegel's diagnosis against the critical autonomy of immediacy and experience in a way reiterates the criticism Kant had already leveled against classical metaphysics. Insofar as metaphysics remains incapable of deducing the categories which give way to the objects of experience, philosophy falls short of its name by failing to secure the necessity between the empirical and the transcendental: the universal genera which provide the determinations, and the manifold particular contents which actualize them. That is, if the determination of the empirical can only be legitimated a priori by an arbitrarily posited categorical framework for objective individuation, then critique has merely transposed the arbitrariness of dogmatic metaphysics into the agency of the transcendental subject. Thus while we find in Kant a transcendental deduction of the categories, their synthesis as the 'transcendental unity of apperception' is contingently posited, and presupposed as factically given. Indeed, this seems to be Hegel's own contention when claiming that for Kant experience is endowed with necessity, but that it is factically given as the necessity/universality of appearances within the 'spontaneity of thinking'. Hegel writes: "Critical philosophy holds on to the factum that universality and necessity, being also essential determinations, are found to be present in what is called experience. And, because this element does not stem from the empirical as such, it belongs to the spontaneity of thinking, or is a priori. The thought-determinations of concepts of the understanding make up the objectivity o the cognitions of experience...Bu the critical philosophy extends the antithesis in such a way that experience in its entirety falls within subjectivity, i.e. both of these elements together [subjectivity and objectivity] are subjective, and nothing remains in contrast with subjectivity except the thing-in-itself" (Ibid: Pg. 81).[26] Kant thus finally subordinates necessity to a kind of contingency, that of the transcendental subject as the unified agent of synthesis. And insofar as it ventured to neatly separate the subject and the object, and to initiate a preliminary study into the faculty of knowledge ("pure reason") disentangling itself from its counterpart, critical philosophy attempted, like we indicated above, to not go into the water until it had learnt to swim (Ibid: Pg. 82).

The facticity of the transcendental and of the understanding which predates on the immediacy of intuited content as an external datum must therefore appear to Hegel as a gratuitous presupposition. If, as phenomenological wisdom would have it, immediate experience is the source of all philosophical meditation and of the content of representation, then this is only insofar as thinking has always already affected it with mediation, the stigma of contradiction and negativity. Negativity becomes the sufficient reason by which the Concept immanently unfolds itself into its concrete determinations with logical necessity; both object and subject must bear the mark of their respective polar opposites. However, this is not to say that it would be possible to think of an object without 'categories', prized free of individuating distinctions. Rather, what Hegel means is that "Although the categories... pertain to thinking as such, it does not at all follow from this that they must therefore be merely something ours, and not also determinations of objects themselves." (Ibid: Pg 86). This resists the Heideggerean and Kantian appeals to the transcendent object or to the Earth, as the 'thought entity', the 'intelligible nothingness', void even of minimal objectual determinations, glaring in their foreign and empty conceptuality. That Heidegger refuses to acknowledge the height of conceptual abstraction in his appeals to the Earth is on this account trivial, since Hegel insists on refusing to glorify barren abstraction and to endow it with non-conceptual reality. There is no index of non-experience within experience, or of 'the void of being' as external to thought. Thought determines Being as implied in the Concept's self-determination, or as thinking to itself. The Concept is not merely thought's abstracting agent; being-in-itself is not transcendent to thought[27].

It follows that no propadeutic enquiry into the faculty of the understanding or pure reason, inflecting reflection on the 'transcendental subject', could neatly disentangle itself from the object, just like the latter cannot be understood without implicit mediation by the subjective. By the same token, no deconstructive return to the pre-ontological understanding of worldhood can neatly disentangle itself from implicit conceptual determinacy. The putative immediacy of experience, bereft from all thought, constitutes thus the abstraction in critical philosophy we indicated above apropos Heidegger's avowal of a pre-ontological understanding in worldhood:

"We can say that philosophy owes its first beginning to experience (to what is a posteriori). But that is not saying very much, for thinking is in fact essentially the negation of something immediately given... thinking's own immediacy (that which is a priori) is inwardly reflected and hence inwardly mediated; it is universality, the overall being-at-home-with-itself of thinking." (EL: Pg 36) The purported formal emptiness of the categories, quilted in by the 'givenness' of the sensible manifold is utterly disavowed by Hegel, who insists on the contrary that the categories themselves must be taken, not as formal husks void of content, but as the determinate content of the objects themselves: "To assert that, by themselves the categories are empty is unfounded, because they have a content in any case, just by being determinate." (Ibid: Pg. 86)

In similar spirit, we could suggest that the so called 'occlusion' of the Vorhandenheit upon the realm of being, its 'merely derivative nature', and so also the allegedly abstract status of the scientific 'ontic' specification of beings, would all be for Hegel supervening on a gratuitous depreciation of conceptuality by appeals to the non-conceptual / non-latency of being's concealment. The latter is merely to repeat Kant's critical unilateral inflection of the object into the subject in phenomenological form. Even if the phenomenon is nested within Dasein's transcendental horizon, this is still only insofar as their synthesis remains tethered to the unobjectivizable Earth, which ultimately indexes the ontological remove of all scientific cognition-objectification. The inability of critical philosophy to dialectically deduce the possible content of the object from the Concept itself thus prevents it from realizing that immanent contradiction within thought renders it sufficient, with no needs for an ephemeral outside. Once contradiction and radical negativity is seen to infect thought from the start, it is shown to be the base ontological principle or sufficient reason of the dialectic. This marks the fundamental limitation in critical philosophy: in the transcendental idealist account, antinomies reduce contradictions to mere possible schemas of objects, within the specific domain of what Kant called 'cosmological objects'. These, however, remain relatively independent, and merely form distinct classes designating possible instantiations of contradictory objects. Against this, contradiction must be pervasive so that we can see that its “…true and positive significance is that everything actual contains opposed determinations within it, and in consequence the cognition and, more exactly, the comprehension of an object, amounts precisely to our becoming conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations.” (Ibid, Pg. 93).

We may summarize Hegel’s contention as saying that contradiction cannot merely be a set of possible, purely logical schemas on the basis of a presupposed categorical framework. The object is not merely contradictory insofar as it finds itself in possible "antinomic" individuation with respect to certain categories. Rather, the primacy of contradiction entails that the latter is not just logical but also constitutively metaphysical or ontological; the gap between the universal and the particular indexes that which is metaphysically real, the 'between the two' as self-relating negativity. Contradiction comes to install itself from the start and all-pervasively, so that it will not be a possibility of logical reason alone, but a real necessity, shown by the dialectic, as well. The Kantian impasse consists then in subordinating contradiction to the categories and so to the understanding.

”It may also be remarked that, as a result of his failure to study the antinomy in more depth, Kant brings forward only four antinomies. He arrives at them by presupposing the table of categories just as he did in the case of the so-called paralogisms. While doing this he followed the procedure, which became so popular afterwards-, of simply subsuming the determinations of an ob-ject under a ready-made schema, instead of deducing them from the Concept…[but] antinomy is found not only in the four particular ob-jects taken from cosmology, but rather in all objects of all kinds, in all representations, concepts, and ideas.” - (Ibid: Pg. 92)



We must be clear to differentiate the scope of the manifold concepts “within which” antinomies are found in pure reason, from the general claim according to which contradiction functions as a general principle of the Concept, i.e. the logico-metaphysical motor of the dialectic which leads from the immediacy of Being to the full historical movement of the Spirit. Thinking is then deserving of the name of an 'active universal' insofar as it enacts the process whereby actual necessity is established in all of the Concept's moments, and in which the externality of thought with respect to being is overcome: "The Logical is to be sought in a system of thought-determinations in which the antithesis between subjective and objective (in its usual meaning) disappears." (Ibid; Pg. 56)

In that regard, we should not understand Hegel's dissolution of the gap between subject and object to mean that they will be rendered trivially indistinct in a higher synthesis. Rather, they will be shown to be mutually implicating, as opposite determinations, and therefore presented as moments in the Concept's self-deployment. By the same token, every concept or universal determination will be affected by its opposite, and so it will contain within itself a moment of 'untruth' in not fully coinciding with its particularizations. Insofar as every positive determination is finitely given, "...all finite things, however, are affected with untruth; they have a concept but their existence is not adequate to it." (Ibid) This permanent gap between the universal and the particular is what allows us to see that the subject contains in itself the objective determination which was merely a contingent externality for critical philosophy, and a blinding derivation in Heidegger's account[28]. Similarly, it allows us to see how the object in itself is not the mere synthesizing of the transcendental form endowed by the understanding, a factum operating upon the passivity of empirical intuition as a datum. This is accomplished by subverting the identitarian, static regime of ontic individuation in favor of nesting the dynamism of contradiction or 'absolute negativity' at the heart of every finite conceptual determination. This is why, strictly speaking, both Being and Nothingness as the first moment of the Concept remain 'empty abstractions', falling short of dynamic becoming. Only once their mutual implication is established in the oscillation of Becoming do we get a 'first concrete determination', albeit still a rather barren one: "Becoming is the first concrete thought and hence the first concept, whereas being and nothing, in contrast, are empty abstractions... Becoming is imply the positedness of what being is in its truth." (Ibid, Pg. 144).

However, the role of philosophy is not just to isolate the finite, nested antitheses proper to beings (which belong still to the faculty of the understanding). More importantly, the sublation of the nested antitheses at the 'higher level' of mediation, allows logic to specify further the objects of thought by the latter's speculative means (which belongs to Reason properly speaking, and so to infinite thought). Philosophy "...is in fact the very discipline that aims at liberating man from an infinite crowd of finite purposes and intentions and at making him indifferent with regard to them..." (Ibid; Pg 146). Philosophy must both begin by prizing itself free from the finitude of contingent determination, and must thus begin with a pure abstraction from those determinations. If being-in-itself is thus the starting point for the science it is also because it prizes thought free of subordinating being to its finite 'interests', as the abstract starting point for the logical movement of the Concept. In this regard, Hegel sees a putative advantage already in classical metaphysics over modern critique, since it ventured to think of the determinations of being-in-itself as inseparable from thought, thus resisting the severance occasioned by the transcendental "philosophies of access"[29]. Nevertheless, its fault lied in thinking that objective determinations could simply yield the determinations of thought uncritically, and therefore it did not supersede the one-sided dimension of the subjective understanding, and thus of finite thought. Thought's infinity, unyoking itself from the understanding and ascending to Reason, therefore involves enacting the immanent (rather than transcendent) co-determination of thought on being, thinking and its object[30]. Or rather, in philosophy, one cannot think anything but thinking itself, since thought becomes its own object: "Hence, the finite subsists in its relation to its other, which is its negation and presents itself as its limit. But thinking is at home with itself, it relates itself to itself, and is its own ob-ject. Insofar as my ob-ject is a thought, I am at home with myself. Thus the I, or thinking, is infinite because it is related in thinking to an ob-ject that is itself... If thinking thinks itself, then it has an ob-ject that is at the same time not an ob-ject, i.e. an ob-ject that is sublated, ideal." (Ibid: Pg. 67)

This infinitude must be immanently determined within the antithetical positivity of the finite, since if it were merely posited externally to it, then it would pose a limit to it, reactivating the spurious infinity of dogmatic metaphysics and of religious reifications of the 'highest being'. The dialectical movement of sublation as self-relation is finally what renders the speculative identity of the infinite Concept and the finite determinations of being, overcoming their antithetical positing. Or put in Hegel's own words: "Genuine cognition of an ob-ject, on the other hand, has to be such that the ob-ject determines itself from within itself, and does not acquire its predicates in this external way." (Ibid). John McCumber (1993) renders this point in the following passage:

"If finite being can be resolved into its properties, and if those properties are the same as the determinations brought forth in the self-development of the Concept, does it not seem plausible for Hegel to say that correspondence of finite being and infinite Concept is, ultimately, their identity? It is then unsurprising to find Hegel saying that nothing can exist "completely without identity of concept and reality."" (McCumber: 1993, Pg. 50) This is to reiterate the original thesis according to which logic coincides with metaphysics. The thesis 'the actual is rational' reinstates the unity of thought and being, the former endowing with logical necessity the finite determinations of the latter.

The infinite displacement of being's determinacy over and into opposite determinations, then achieving sublating antithesis, is therefore immanent to the Concept alone. And so all appeals to a world-disclosing function by non-conceptual means, in sight of reintegrating thought to its 'world', cannot but be seen from the Hegelian perspective as a desperate reification of immediate being or absolute abstraction as a finite externality of sorts[31]. In its Heideggerean version, this would amount to the transcendent abstraction of the Earth set against the finite transcendence of Dasein's temporal-horizonal being-there. In this regard one might anticipate that, for Hegel, the Heideggerean gesture of localizing the 'realist' locus for metaphysics on the receding Earth, set-to-work in the poetic act and in the artwork, attempts a mystical evacuation of the pervasiveness of the Concept. For, after all, the worldly expanse, the 'there' reserved for the artistic and foreclosed for the artisan, is paired by Hegel to the dogmatic lure which remains unworthy of the Idea: "Being-there is in no way a merely positive determination, but one that is to lowly for the idea, and unworthy of God." and so that attributions of transcendence reified in such a manner offer "... a restricted content, and they show themselves to be inappropriate to the fullness of the representation (of God, nature, spirit) which they do not at all exhaust." (Ibid: Pg. 68).

Although Hegel shares the Heideggerean suspicion against the merely predicative form of propositional truth, he would nevertheless insist that the quasi-poetic ruminations on art and religious temples, in the process of seeking to index the Earth's receding ground, remains a surreptitious moment of predicative attribution obscuring through metaphoric bombast the arbitrariness of its external delimitation. The real means toward overcoming sedentary finite representation consists rather in locating within the Concept's immanence the capacity of opposite determinations, or contradiction as such, in order to dynamically set it in motion. Representational correctness is supplanted by dialectical truth only when the Concept sublates the antithetical placing of terms and shows their co-determination as a unity, or their mutual implication: "...these determinations are not valid when they are isolated from one another, but only when sublated...since the Concept is something-concrete and since it is itself every determinacy without exception, it is essentially, and within itself, a unity of distinct determinations" (Ibid: Pg. 70). Again, McCumber outlines the predicament: "Truth is not then for Hegel the simple identification, partial or full, of concept and thing; it is rather the complex movement from one to the other, in which both degrees of identity are equally necessary and which cannot be understood in terms of either alone: in his early formulation, it is the "identity of identity and non-identity."" (McCumber: 1993, Pg. 51)

Hegel thus allows us to crystallize the reasoning behind the Heideggerean drama against science and technology, and in favor of poetry and art. It also allows us to precipitate the later Heidegger's wholesale deposition of philosophy as complicit with metaphysics, now squarely allotted against 'thinking' as such[32]. Already in OWA, the artwork, and not scientific speculation or metaphysics, is the site of preservation where being's tensional split is ‘set-to-work’ in its having come-into-being through the createdness of world-forming Dasein. Science, the handmaiden of poetry and philosophy, crucially "is not an original happening of truth, but always the cultivation of a domain of truth already opened, specifically by apprehending and confirming that which shows itself to be possibly and necessarily correct within that field. When and insofar as a science passes beyond correctness and goes on to a truth, which means that it arrives at the essential disclosure of what is as such, it is philosophy.”[33] (Heidegger, OWA; Pg. 60) For both poetry and art, as we have seen, testify to the holistic framework of relations and possibilities which structures worlds and historical epochs. That worlds could only emerge apart from science’s coruscating forgetfulness, and only in the ‘thinking’ of truth under which art, poetry and philosophy are siblings, underlines Heidegger's antipathy to the object, to cognition and representation as complicit with the unthinking scientific method. For it is clear that Heidegger’s sustained attack on conceiving being from representation’s emptying occlusion articulates more generally what he deems to be the destiny of the Western historical development, leading down the spiral towards the technical domination of nature’s non-objective givenness. The occlusion of truth in favor of objectual presence cannot but render invisible the primordial strife between the Earth and the World in which art and philosophical meditation (Besinnung) stand to presencing. The compulsion to ‘wrest’ beings without limitation accounts for the modern derail of Man as ‘standing-reserve’ (Ge-Stell), that is, the technological obsession now destining Western thought to ‘frame’ nature, rendering it pragmatically available and fixed before man through the context-shattering cog of representation and science:

“That context is essential, because related to the destiny of Being. Framing, as the nature of modern technology, derives from the Greek way of experiencing letting-lie-forth, logos, from the Greek poiesis and thesis. In setting up the frame, the framework—which now means in commandeering everything into assured availability—there sounds the claim of the ratio redderpda, i.e., of the logon didonai, but in such a way that today this claim that is made in framing takes control of the absolute, and the process of representation—of Vor-stellen or putting forth—takes form, on the basis of the Greek perception, as making secure, fixing in place.” (Heidegger, QCT, Pg; 83)



The dialectic of the Absolute coming into its own thus finds a curious inversion in Heidegger’s thinking. Representation’s proliferation only exacerbates the movement of forgetfulness already implied in the derail of the first Greek beginning of metaphysics, where being was equated to the aspect of presence in the Idea. The calamitous aftermath of this forgetting of being devolves in the conversion of art into a commercial issue, of philosophy into mere science, and all ontology into ontics[34]. Under the oblivious reign of technology, impervious to the call of being, man’s destiny seems apocalyptically sealed, so that in the end “only a God can save us![35]” For Heidegger thus, the hopeless recipe against the maledictions of technology and science imply a certain passivity, rather than cognitive activity, perhaps leading to "three hundred years of silence" and an attitude of ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit), prescribed to undo the damage performed by the tradition. If we understand the presencing of the Gods as the ‘situatedness’ of Dasein before truth as unconcealment, making up a historical destiny, then we can understand that Heidegger’s call for the Gods' return in sight of their ‘flight’ signals the requirement to recuperate the truth-disclosing and world-inaugurating ambition of art and poiesis, away from science and mere techne. If poetry is wed essentially to art and truth, Heidegger argues, it is in the original Greek sense in which poiesis lets what is present come forth into unconcealment, and thereby articulates a historical world.



“For now the melting down of the self-consummating essence of the modern age into the self-evident is being accomplished. Only when this is assured through world views will the possibility arise of there being a fertile soil for Being to be in question in an original way – a questionableness of Being that will open ample space for the decision as to whether Being will once again become capable of a god, as to whether the essence of the truth of Being will lay claim more primally to the essence of man. Only there where the consummation of the modern age attains the heedlessness that is its peculiar greatness is future history being prepared.” (QCT; Pg. 153).



Against the fatalist drama against the perils of technological reason, Hegel's predicament stands as remarkably modern in turn: philosophy only exist as science, and it has yet to rise to become worthy of that name. The supposition of a non-latent reservoir of unobjectivizable and transcendent being is the truly occluding gesture, which veils the necessity to determine the Concept's self-relation and thinking's immanent pursuit with regards to itself: "But is it easy to see that, even if it is taken in its totally abstract sense, the Concept includes being within itself. For however, the Concept may be further determined it is itself minimally the immediate relation to itself that emerges through the sublation of its mediation, and being is nothing but that... for thought, nothing can have less import than "being". (Ibid: Pg. 94). Mediation does not trump immediacy, but explains it; conceptuality does not occlude the purity of being, it actualizes it and determines it (Ibid: Pg. 115)[36]. This ultimately renders transparent the division between the two philosophers, and wherein they locate truth: either on the side of unobjectivizable being onto which only caring creation in the setting-to-work of art and poiesis harbors the hope of a non-conceptual thinking that restores a primordial innocence, or on the side of the Concept's self development, by its own, strictly immanent means.





References/Cited Works/ Bibliography

1. Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

2. Brassier. Ray. The Reality of Abstraction, in Speculations, 2011.

3. Brassier, Ray. Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter, doctoral thesis for Warwick, 2009.

4. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 1962.

5. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, translated by Alfred Hofstadter, Indiana University Press, 1982.

6. Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, translated by William McNeil and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

7. Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking?, translated by J. Glenn Gray, Harper and Row, 1968.

8. Heidegger, Marin. Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Row, 2001.

9. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, translated by William Lovitt, Harper Torchbooks.

10. Hegel, G.W.F. The Encyclopaedia Logic, translated by Theodore Garaets, H.S Harris, W.A Suchting, Hackett Pub, 1991.

11. Kant. Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

12. Laruelle, Francois, Philosophies of Difference, translated by Rocco Gangle, Continuum, 2010.

13. McCumber, John, The Company of Words, Northwestern University Press, 1993.

14. Sellars, W. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1997.

15. Veto, M. De Kant a Schelling. Les deux voies de l'Idealisme allemand. Tome II, Grenoble: Jerome Millon, 1998.


Index of Abbreviations

· EL : Enclyclopedia Logic, by G.W.F. Hegel

· OWA = Origin of the Work of Art, by Martin Heidegger

· PLT = Poetry Language, Thought, by Martin Heidegger

· BT: Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

· QCT: The Question Concerning Technology by Martin Heidegger




[1] The German word for 'object' generally has two possible translations: Objekt and Gegenstand. Although these two distinct terms differ little in meaning, both in common German and in Heidegger's account, it will turn out to be a weightier distinction for Hegel, as we shall see below. Provisionally, it should be remarked Objekt is usually paired with Subjekt so as to emphasize the former's relation of 'standing against' the latter, and thus of the correlation between the two terms. Heidegger's use of begegnen is often also used to illuminate how 'beings encounter us within the world (B&T: Pg. 44), which derives from gegen as "coming-up-against", to "en-counter", or confront (LXV, 269). For Heidegger Gegenstand will also tend to be used to underline the object's temporal dimension, as overdetermined by the presence, or the present. For a discussion on these usages see Inwood (1999).


[2] A possible definition of presencing is given on his essay Science and Reflection: “We think presencing as the enduring of that which, having arrived to un-concealment, remains there.” (QCT; Pg. 161) The connection between this term and Heidegger’s account of truth as unconcealment is developed below.


[3] Heidegger seems to have Kant implicitly in mind here.


[4] As we shall see below, this contestation against the unified ‘thing-concept' will turn out to be a crucial point of contention also for Hegel; who already prefigured Heidegger in denying the objectual totalization of truth in the way of affirming the latter’s fundamental incompleteness, that is to say, its excessive character with respect to mere objectivity of its specific moments or instances.


[5] The essential referent left implicit for these last two conceptions would be, of course, Aristotle, who in a certain way already indexes the first two iterations and serves as a pivotal moment in the tradition’s understanding of the artwork.


[6] For reasons of space, we cannot undertake a thorough review of how this process occurs in Heidegger’s account. Let us just note here that the breakdown of ready-at-hand equipment occurs in three successive stages, leading to bare reflexive abstraction from a primary dimension of engaged practice. Usefulness and serviceability withdraw thus, and equipment is reduced to the form of an extant, present-at-hand object (Vorhandenheit). The three stages are correspondingly: conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy. It is this latter ‘objectual’ form which roughly corresponds in Heidegger’s account to the object or representation indexed earlier in three varieties. It is thus, for Heidegger only the most derivative, or abstract stage wherein the indistinction in act between Dasein and tool-beings qua an equipmental-whole is severed. For details, see Being and Time: Part I; Chapter I.


[7] The 'comprehensive concepts' here will thus seem closely knit to Hegel's own determination of philosophy as comprehensive cognition. The 'comprehensiveness' at stake here concerns in both thinkers the establishing of the necessity of these concepts, i.e. their proper philosophical deduction, which elevates them from arbitrary/contingent determinations.


[8] For Heidegger's more confident association of philosophy and in particular phenomenology with the scientific method, see in particular his lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927).


[9] The polemic with Husserl is implicit in Being and Time, much like the polemic with Kant seems implicit in Hegel's EL.


[10] This complicates certain accounts of Heidegger’s tool-analysis from a pragmatic framework; and specifically some readings which purport to find in the realm of readiness-to-hand a second kind of intentionality, supplementing the traditional vector of consciousness intending its objects. For an example of this approach see Dreyfus (1990).


[11] Heidegger crucially appropriates the concept of facticity from Kant (Faktizität), where the latter is to be understood as the 'lack of reason' for the being of transcendental conditions of disclosure. Thus while for Kant the categories are the necessary conditions of possibility for all ontic transcendence, these categories are themselves 'without reason', i.e. we cannot know why there are only twelve rather than thirteen categories, why thinking is ‘spontaneously’ given, etc. Similarly, for Heidegger, while Dasein's ecstatic transcendence allowing the clearing of the world is the condition for the encounter with beings, this ecstatic transcendence is properly factical, and as such simply designates the situatedness onto which Dasein is 'given over'. This is what is meant by saying that Dasein is ‘thrown into the world’. Thus we can gauge the complicity of the critical philosophy with terms such as 'thrownness' (Geworfenheit), which index this horizon of unobjectivizing transcendence that remains itself unobjectivizable.

It is my wager that one of Hegel's most remarkable challenges to Kant, and by extension to Heidegger, lies precisely in his rejection of facticity as a kernel 'without reason' that resists conceptual appropriation, either to open the space for practical reason to glorify noumenal freedom, or the space for the 'morning of the world' of the poetic word. For Hegel, contradiction establishes itself as the 'sufficient reason' which from the very start guarantees and secures the full-fledged deployment of the dialectic with logical necessity, so that immediacy can by itself unfold itself into its other by including opposite determinations within it. This happens just like Being as a first figure of thought becomes indiscernible from Nothing and so reverts to it, both already implying the unity of Becoming, etc. See Malpas (2003), Pg. 110; Heidegger B&T: Pg. 82, Meillassoux (2006), Pg. 35-46.


[12] Significantly, since the horizon for the disclosure of beings is a feature of worldhood, and since the latter is properly the transcendence proper to Dasein’s being (its being-in-the-world as ecstatic-horizonal transcendence) it follows that animals and plants have no world (OWA; Pg. 43). In this Heidegger retracts from his more ambiguous formulation from 1930 given in his lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics in which it was expressed rather that the animal was “poor in the world”, and which remained, as Ray Brassier (2007) has indicated, a ‘desperate sophism’ since at a loss for horizonal transcendence for which beings are no worldhood can obtain either.


[13] As should be apparent, here it is Gegenstand which is translated as 'ob-ject', while Objekt remains translated as simply object. Although for Heidegger this distinction had limited philosophical interest, for Hegel it plays a more substantive role. For the latter, Objekt pertains to a logical category, proper to the pure thinking advanced by philosophy, while Gegenstand comes to stand for the ordinary objects of experience. Thus when Hegel wages against the 'ob-ject' it should be understood that he sets against the 'common object of experience' which comprises the bulk of representational determinations of the object given to us by common sense and the tradition. These knowledges (wissen) obviously fall of the scientific cognition (Wissenschaft) which gives over the pure form of the object as a component within the dialectic. See the translator's pertinent notes in EL: Pgs. xxii, xxiii.


[14] This is what is generally meant when tracing the passage of the in-itself to the for-itself, and then in the in-and-for-itself as the synthesized alternation of being. From the immediacy of being in-itself we move into the self-alienation of being into its other, which implies already mediation and relation; only to show the mutual implication of one concept into the other as a self-supporting unity. Let us simply recall in passing the initial moment of the Logic which reproduces this movement: Being passes over onto Nothing, and their in-distinction becomes then sublated in the unity of Becoming: B ®N ® B... .«. BC. The same movement repeats itself to determine the entire wealth of determinations from this initial moment of abstraction. See McCumber (1993), and Badiou (2009).


[15] In this regard, the Hegelian logical usage of negation clearly resists the classical Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction and the excluded middle; and consequentially the principle of double negation. The negation of the negation is not equivalent to immediate affirmation, but determines its reflexive existence, its sublation at the next level of determination.


[16] Although the translators use elevation for Aufgehoben I have chosen to stick to the more standard (by now) sublation.


[17] This point is stressed by Dan Zahavi's (2005) trenchant critique of Thomas Metzinger. See his Being Someone, published in Psyche, University of Copenhagen, June 2005.


[18] The formal spontaneity of thinking is of course rendered in the fully impersonal synthetic unity proper to what Kant calls "the spontaneous unity of apperception". This unity is formal and objective since it never coincides with the empirical subject of experience (Kant 1998, B139, Pg. 157). More crucially, it is the unity of apperception which generates the bridge between a priori empty logical necessity and the empirical contingency of the a posteriori, guaranteeing an isomorphy of theory and experience. It is thus the condition of possibility for the combinatorial activity of the transcendental imagination, and so for the bridge between the transcendental analytic and the aesthetic, between the transcendent subject and transcendent object. See Brassier (2001), Pg. 168.


[19] Crucially, for Kant, the reciprocity between the transcendental subject and the pure form of the transcendental object which maps subjective representation to its represented objects. Thus "the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience."" (Kant. 1998, A158/B 197, . p194).


[20] Kant 1998: A290-2/B347-9


[21] In this regard, one of the most salient divergences from critical philosophy concerns how Heidegger dislodges Kant's residual rationalism found in the correlate of subjective synthesis: the 'transcendental object' as the degree zero of presence-at-hand. For Heidegger, it is not just the Earth's properly non-experiential character that designates a non-conceptual reality, but also the pre-conceptual understanding in which Dasein finds itself amidst the World, that is, amidst beings-as-a-whole. The horizon of oppenness which constitutes Dasein's relation to Being is thus not myopically tethered to form of the object, any more than to that of the subject. To do so, Heidegger finds 'the pure category of substance' still tethered to a conception of essence (ousia) as presence-at-hand. In this regard, Heidegger radicalizes what was already prefigured in the Scholastic distinction between essentia and existentia, 'whatness' and 'thatness', and the latter's actuality as irreducible to the determinacy of the former. See Heidegger (1982), particularly Part I.

However, by indexing a pre-conceptual reality and rendering it as co-determined by our meaning-endowed dealings (the co-appropriation of Man and Being, or Sein and Dasein), worldhood remains an ideal configuration, only relative within human 'activity' and thought. The Earth, for its part, remains the non-objectivizable residue which renders, even within Worlds, the dimension of the void of Being, intractable to even pre-ontological thought. In that regard it resembles the 'thought entity' of the Kantian noumenon, the 'empty concept without an object'. Our wager is that, for Hegel, to postulate a pre-conceptual, non-objectual, and indeterminate relation to Being is undermined by the surreptitious conceptual configuration that describes it from the perspective of 'factical givenness'. Facticity becomes a way to obviate the inescapability of rational necessity; it does overcome this requirement . To determine the entire structure of the holistic network of pre-ontological practice through conceptual, descriptive means renders entirely obscure the relation between such a conceptual endeavor and the structure of being itself, rendering the relation contingent and gratuitous. This point will be insisted upon for the rest of the paper in different manners.


[22] Since being is not a being, there is a sense, in which Heidegger avows the Hegelian equation between Being qua Being and Nothingness. However, whereas for Hegel this Nothingness is not a latent reservoir in recession, for Heidegger this being's 'nothingness' can be experienced, not as an object, but precisely as the impossibility of the object, of the radical split between being and beings. It is of outmost interest that if the noumenon is for Kant the 'intelligible nothing', for Heidegger this Nothingness is also intelligible, as a purely empty abstraction, void of specifiable positive content (lacking even, as with Kant, the form of 'substance' as the minimal characterization of the experiential object). This is why the leveling refusal of being-as-a-whole, which reveals the asymptotic dimension of Being as such, is reserved not for cognition or the 'violence' of the understanding, but for the dispositional disquietude which deflates the understanding's occlusion. For Heidegger's account on anxiety as a peculiarly ontologically elucidating disposition, division II of Being and Time is prerequisite. For an account on 'profound boredom' see The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.


[23] Kant 1998: A290-2/B347-9


[24] For a discussion on the three kinds of Scholastic distinction, and their pertinence apropos the essence-existence dyad, its effect on the Kantian edifice, and the prefiguring of the ontological difference, see Heidegger's Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988, pgs. 88-99.


[25] Brassier follows Francois Laruelle's (2010) reading of Heidegger, in which Being is read as objectivating transcendence, and the transcendent reality of being is tethered as the non-objectivizable residue in the entity. I believe this conflates Being with Worldhood, or Sein to Dasein, since for Heidegger the non-objectual dimension is finally on the side not of the entity, but of Being itself, which is indexed in the resistant ground of the Earth as concealment. To say being is identical with horizonal disclosure is to render it indistinguishable from Dasein's ecstatic transcendence, which renders the strife between World and Earth unintelligible. Both Brassier and Laruelle are right, however, in mapping out a strong parallel between the noumenon in Kant and the non-objectual in Heidegger, and rendering the former's abstract ens rationis as continuous with the latter's attribution of Being as the void of withdrawal. For Laruelle the Heideggerean distinction between being and the entity-in-itself is analogous to the Kantian distinction between transcendental object and the noumenon. For us the proposed analogy is rather between the Heideggerean World as the unity of Dasein's transcendence onto beings along the Earth as receding index of being, and the Kantian transcendental subject-object unity (the unity of apperception) along the noumenon as the 'thought entity'. See Laruelle (2010), Chapters 2 and 3; Brassier (2011).


[26] It has been shown that in this regard Kant's project remains undermined by its one-sidedness. Transcendental philosophy presupposes the empirical immanence of scientific theory and a scientific delineation of the synthetic a priori through the assumption of a system of apodictic mathematico-scientific principles-truths. Thus, it is transcendental philosophy that assumes empirical science in order to constitute a categorical framework for subjective-objective synthesis, rather than transcendental philosophy which 'grounds' empirical science. As Veto (1998) shows this criticism had been already leveled against Kant by his immediate successors; including Haaman, Fichte, Schelling, and of course Hegel. In short, the criticism is that "...by simply tracing the transcendental conditions from the empirically conditioned, and superimposing the presumed unity of pure apperception onto the synthetic combinations of the empirical manifold, Kant merely construct a redundant, second order abstraction which, far from explaining them, simply reproduces the formal features of empirical generality at a higher level. Consequentially, the supposed transcendental reciprocity between critical philosophy and the scientific mapping of experience is only operative from the perspective of the former." (Brassier, 2001, Pg. 171). As our discussion shows, this renders the putative 'analytic' deduction of the categories and so their putative logical necessity subordinate to a contingent, factical act of transcendental synthesis modeled arbitrarily from empirical sciences. In this regard, Hegel's criticism to Kant and critical philosophy is that it presupposes science rather than grounds it with actual necessity.


[27] This is why for Hegel is makes sense to drive philosophy from the abstract to the concrete through sublation, rather than to seek the fundamental or originary, as in the deconstruction Heideggerean 'history of being' (Seinsgeschick) and its attempt to wrest the primal happening (Ur-etwas) whilst poring over old Greek words. See Brassier (2007).


[28] This point is also elaborated by McCumber (1993): "The finite thing is in truth nothing other than its role in this process- but part of that role is to stand in untruth: to take a stand against the whole process, isolate itself, and assert itself as a moment against the whole Only thus can truth be the process of its own development." (McCumber 1993: Pg. 52).

Externality, or being-other, is thus for Hegel simply a moment in the Concept 'coming-out-of-itself', where reflexivity renders it as an antagonistic pole of opposition, which is then sublated in showing itself as in-and-for-itself; the truth is precisely rendered in the dynamic self-alienation of the Concept as it develops itself through the powers of the negative, i.e. as it shows itself to be nested by opposite determinations, and set to determine itself as united to that which appears at one point as alien to itself. Thinking thus does not close the gap between thought and reality as much as preserves it in its unfolding. The identity of Concept and finite being is therefore established as they both partake as moments of thinking's (scientific) cognition, and self-determination.


[29] The expression is Graham Harman's. See his Tool Being: Heidegger and the Carpentry of Things, Open Court, 2004.


[30] In this regard, while Hegel credits Kant for having delineated the distinction between the Understanding and Reason, he resists that the latter should be indeterminate. He claims "But we ought not to stop at this negative result, or to reduce the unconditioned character of reason to the merely abstract identity that excludes distinction... the genuine-infinite is not merely a realm beyond the finite: on the contrary, it contains the finite sublated within itself." (Ibid; Pg. 88).


[31] Being-there, which already involves the factical specificity of a determination of being by thought, is for Hegel not the first moment or figure of the Concept, but rather follows after becoming has be shown to be the truth of Being and Nothingness, determining their co-determinacy. Thus, being-there is already a figure which is nested within Conceptual determination and which proceeds from abstract Being, rather than beginning 'along with it': "In becoming, being, as one with nothing, and nothing as one with being, are only vanishing; because of its contradiction becoming collapses inwardly, into the unity within which both are sublation; in this way its result is being-there.. as reflected into itself in its determinacy, being-there is that which is there, something." (EL: Pg. 145-146).

It follows that the 'qualitative' dimension of being-there, the something it's involved with, already renders it objectual in the sense in which Heidegger would already see too much of a reification of presence-at-hand, subject-object representation, presupposed into the alleged purity of the determination (Ibid). However, Hegel resists that there is a dimension of pre-Conceptual being which is conceptually made available in abstraction, which devolves thought into the receptive gift of being and renders thetic productivity primary. Such a stipulation would be nothing but a pragmatic-performative contradiction from the Hegel's view, again trying to 'swim before venturing into the water.'


[32] This is most clearly articulated in his late seminar What is Called Thinking?, translated by J. Glenn Gray, Harper and Row, 1968.





[34] And for Heidegger it is specifically this forgetfulness of being through ‘technical reason’ that accounts for the political disasters of National Socialism where, as in his infamous statements from 1949, concentration camps were equated ‘essentially’ to fumigation fields: “Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs." (Heidegger 1949; Pg 64)


[35] See Heidegger, Martin, Der Spiegel Interview, 1966, http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~other1/Heidegger%20Der%20Spiegel.pdf


[36] In that regard, it should become apparent that Hegel's project anticipates the Sellarsian rejection of the 'Myth of the Given'. See Sellars Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, in Science, Perception, and Reality, Ridgeview, 1991, p. 127. I quote Sellars: ‘Many things have been said to be ‘given’: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even givenness itself.’ (My emphasis). Also, see Brassier (forthcoming, 2012):

"Self-knowledge certainly comprises a dimension of non-inferential immediacy that endows us with a privileged epistemic access to our own internal states, but only within certain limits, since the immediacy of self-knowledge is itself the result of conceptual mediation and cannot be evoked to ratify the appeal to an allegedly intuitive, pre-conceptual self-acquaintance. The prejudice that immediacy is not the result of a mediating self-relation seduces us into absolutizing phenomenal experience. Phenomenology’s absolutizing of givenness as such is the most extreme variant of the myth dismantled by Sellars."