To The Things Not-in-Themselves!

Positivity is bad faith--this could be the slogan of our times, the latter designation applying to the post-WWII world. Everything turns upon this negation.

The positive as that which is itself in itself, or rather even for itself, cannot be but is. We cannot help doubting the utter inconceivability of something complete, even as we strive for it in all branches of thought, positive or negative as they may be. This is the great paradox, that thought as universal becomes its dialectical opposite, that negation of which the determinateness of all being is constituted. Positivity being bad faith, where does that leave negativity? One cannot be utterly negative, try as Adorno did. The time for that striving for completeness in incompleteness has come and gone. But this criticism is not just one blindly putting forth the positivity in all things due to their givenness--this Hegel destroyed in the very first deduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Rather, what we are left with is the quality of positivity as concreteness. It is the only positivity that still makes sense. But how exactly is it positive?

The concrete is "positive", in that the particularity of the given is constituted by determinate negation. Not that the negation of the negation is positive, but that, on a surface-level, objects are constituted concretely by determinate negation. There is no longer the question, as there was for Hegel, as to whether essence appears and is that very appearance. Rather, our question is different, given our immediate discounting of the question of essence. We ask whether the surface phenomena do not themselves preclude the possibility of themselves, not just of their essences, having a really determinate existence. In other words, we no longer believe in the whole, whether a Concept/Notion (Begriff) or the totality itself, and rightly so. We need a new relation to the whole and especially the totality, a negative and contradictory one. It cannot be such that it is a self-positing subject, as it was for Hegel. Rather it will be a self-negating, truly dialectical totality. It is thus a dialectic that will never cease--the prospect is scary. As Marcuse said: Reason is the truly undialectical element of Hegel's philosophy (paraphrased from Reason and Revolution).

So how to synthesize this with my previous thoughts on the totality relating to the theory of mysticism? Inevitably it has something to do with the nature of determinate negation and its relation to non-duality, and that would work it in nicely with revolutionary politics. So, onward! To the things not-in-themselves!

The Saturated Character of Despair

I was thinking today about the problems or ideas that just seize a group/generation/class and lead them onward into uncharted territory. Typically these are present in the history of philosophy as insoluble aporias which must be neutralized by a shifting of philosophical perspective. New concepts must be developed, and new ways of thinking employed. For Hegel's generation the aporia was that between radical Kantian freedom and the embodied expressivist theory of the subject (see Taylor's "Hegel"). For Marx and the Young Hegelians it was rather the refutation by political and social reality of Hegel's Geist, which was disguised by the latter as the "cunning of reason". But what is this problem now, for us? Do we have an animating idea for our age?

It appears we are still stuck in the radical negativity of the Frankfurt School, as far as intellectual consciousness is concerned. Sure, Zizek and Badiou and whoever else have dazzling new philosophies, but I think they have not yet penetrated the age's consciousness. Perhaps in time they will. But for now it still remains: Where do we go from here? Where does thought (and with it radical politics) go? Where can it go, based on the political, social, and economic "parameters"?

I suppose it would be pertinent to ask: Where do I want it to go? What a question! As interested as I am in philosophy, I don't really know. Perhaps in this sense I am a good example of what I think our aporia is. We are directionless. This lack of direction manifests itself not just as an empty field, wherein one could go wherever one so pleases, but as a radical reification, as a chaining to directionlessness itself. If one wants to go somewhere else, one is "a dreamer! An idealist! You can't just change things--it's irresponsible!"

To use Badiou's concept, I think that the current discourse is "saturated". Something must "happen". But how to make that happening a determinate negation? It must begin here, and nowhere else. We live in an age of ideological contradiction, and a major one of these is that between the naive liberal optimism of consciousness and the profound subjectivist pessimism of the sub-/unconscious. The problem is this, that when that deeper level is broken into, when the most egregious theses of bourgeois ideology are abandoned (insofar as these can be), what is there to do but feel despair?

The Night in Which All Absolutes are Abstract

The comparison of Brahman with the noumenal is one that is quite easy to make, and one that I have made numerous times in the past. Brahman is like the Ding-an-sich, but non-formal. It is not a precondition for our understanding, but rather an object of experience (as a model?). Brahman can be found, seen, and experienced as the non-phenomenal. A kind of experience of non-experience that is only such because of the initial sundering. It is a concretized process, one of initial unity followed by separation and then the inevitable reconciliation. But this answering in regards to the process still does not adequately answer Hegel's critique of Schelling's Absolute (which applies to Kant's Ding-an-sich of course, being a more formal version of Schelling).

Schelling's Absolute, "the night in which all cows are black" (says Hegel), was one in which  opposition could not be found. It was the naive unity which could not help but differentiate itself and thus undermine itself. This differentiation of the concept is shown to be necessary by Hegel (as in the Greater Logic). However, what if Brahman was not a concept such as Schelling's Absolute, not a non-differentiated and thus empty idea, but a concrete unity, that is, a concept in which both separation (Trennung) and identity are to be found? The explicit working-out of the concept of Brahman ought to be different from the Hegelian Logic due to the non-practical nature of that Logic (while formally the Absolute Idea is not transcendent, I have a certain suspicion that unless one integrates experience and conceptuality explicitly and practically, and not just a formal equation of the two, then one cannot really have overcome the difference; this is where Hindu philosophy comes in handy).

Hegel remarks that "indeterminateness and emptiness of representation" is "altogether the same as what an Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, looking only at the tip of his nose, externally motionless and equally unmoved in sensation, representation, phantasy, desire, and so on, he inwardly says only Om, Om, Om, or else nothing at all. This dull, empty consciousness, taken as consciousness, is just this - being" (Hegel, The Science of Logic, Cambridge 2010 edition, p. 73).

Perhaps it is supererogatory to state that Hegel (and pretty much all Europeans of the day) has no idea what he is talking about. I aim to find exactly why this is true, philosophically at that.

The Maybe-Heaven

Actuality, the Actual Totality, is a meaningless mechanistic conglomeration of cold, dead matter--the dregs cast out from the realm of the Virtual as being unfit to serve; Actuality is what is too bad to be even concrete possibility. The contradictions of past as against future, and of future as against past (this being distinct from the first), assure the present as the greatest contradiction of all, against whatever good reckoning might be brought to bear on the problem. In other words, the actuality of the present is pulled both ways by bullshit (the bullshit of freedom, or is it the freedom of bullshit?).

This is not to say that the Virtual Totality is a heaven. Virtual (symbolic) commitments are eternal, but only so long as we allow them to be. Unfortunately, that freedom only emerges from the self-determined (read: non-determined!). Thus, the Virtual Totality may be meaningful, it may make sense, but, being Virtual, it is anyone's guess whether this is the case. The fact that Actuality is fundamentally shitty (maybe primarily in its relation to the Virtual?) doesn't help one's spirits either. Notice the lack of referent--who's it shitty for? That question is one of the shittiest.

So here we have the closed loop of freedom once again, a loop which is not so much self-determined (as would be a real freedom) as it is determined by planar differences (these being Virtual or Actual as the case may be). A diremption necessary for time, but then again badness is eternally temporal. Reminds me of Benjamin--maybe doubt is truth, in its aspect as the Infinite, that self-determined parts-and-whole which was only so recently the Ought. I believe we are trapped in this Ought, though the dialectic may go on unabated, unheeding.