13

Philosophy as impossibility

From the perspective of the MTT, there is no other possibility than to derive the self-indifferentiating and increasingly normalized world from the processual sequences resulting from reason as such (i.e. from the idea-matter difference-matrix). Thinking is able to penetrate the I-M-M in a mathematico-technological manner; in doing so, it inevitably inscribes itself within the production paradigm and thus encounters nothing but itself, or itself in various perverted forms. It may perhaps be able to purify itself of these forms. Yet this does not change the monochromatic character of the field of thinking, of the I-M-M. The latter is monochromatic insofar as every thing in it is thought as the unity of idea and matter.

The monochromatic character of the I-M-M is presented in the TCM universal through the universality of technology.capital.medium, i.e. as the con-sequence of particular movements of the MTT. The corresponding determination of the TCM universal as the only possible and thus necessary world-form raises the question whether this universal can contain anything other than that which affirms and integrates into it. A related question is whether anything is capable of overcoming the universal compulsion to produce.

Philosophy introduces a certain disquiet into the productivity of the universal TCM world-form. It gives the impression that it could escape the sphere of production. While philosophy as such is an imprecise term, it nonetheless designates a certain core that, despite the many departures from the Greek origin (such as analytic philosophy and its successor, the philosophy of mind), has remained intact over the course of 2,500 years.

This core consists in an understanding that thinking as an occurrence is superior to its realization as a product. Philosophy is first of all theory, first of all thinking, and only secondly thought and a body of thoughts. Now philosophical texts of course amount to products of a sort. Yet for all the meaning they impart, what matters in philosophy is not an end product but a certain ‘thinking-with’, a mutual experience of thinking – thinking that leaves no trace.

Yet even philosophy cannot escape the pull of the TCM universal. If all thinking (as opposed to poetizing or storytelling) necessarily occurs within the space of the MTT, and if the latter necessarily enjoys a correspondence with the I-M-M, then all thinking is always already integrated into this correspondence. It cannot think anything other than the intrinsically coplanar movement of the TCM universal. It is always TCM thinking.

Philosophy is then inescapably tied to the production paradigm. Like all human activities, it would appear incapable of anything other than TCM-compliant production. Understood in this way, philosophy would be just another form of indifference and normalization – however much philosophers might like to believe that its critical dimension functions as a form of moral and political differentiation. Aside from the needs they satisfy, there would then be no difference between philosophy and the fashion industry.

And yet the idea that philosophy is a form of differentiation is not false. The question, however, is what kind of critique, what kind of krisis it presents. In its strongest sense, the Greek word krisis means ‘distinction’. To critically judge is to distinguish the true from the false, the beautiful from the ugly, the good from the bad, and so on. Philosophy has inscribed the human being, the subject within this process of distinguishing between true and false, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, etc. Philosophy differentiates by differentiating the human being.

Differentiation is to be thought as a specific movement. It is a form of turning over or reversal, a conversion even – at any rate a turning, an overturning, a revolution. All of these forms of movement serve to transform the human being from one specific state into another. By means of them, the indifferent subject is differentiated.

Such a movement is not isolable. It affects the whole sphere in which the differentiated human being is localized. Where the human being is transformed, so is the surrounding environment. Philosophy not only differentiates the subject; it also differentiates her topography. What has to be asked here is then not only ‘what is the place that the unphilosophical subject has to leave?’ but also ‘what is the place of the philosophical subject?’

This transformation serves to radically shake the whole, interrupting its tendency toward integration. Differentiation and transformation are accompanied by disintegration. This is what drove the polis of Athens to execute Socrates. On account of its differentiating and transformative character, philosophy has always been accorded a disintegrative significance.

In the history of philosophy (as in Christianity), there are many examples of this transformative de-indifferentiation of the human being.

The first example of the philosophical de-indifferentiation of the subject is Parmenides’ (or rather a young man’s) journey to consult the goddess Dike, who teaches him to distinguish the heart of truth from the opinions of mortals.¹

A similar ‘journey’ is involved in Plato’s allegory of the cave when the soul turns around toward the light. It is this movement toward the light that first makes the soul a soul, or at least that first brings forth the soul of the philosopher.² This movement – of whose violence Plato leaves us in no doubt – is a revolutionary transformation.

The same movement is called for by Aristotle at the end of the Nichomachen Ethics.³ Asking how one can guide someone who lives by their passions toward the path of virtue, he answers that words are not sufficient here and that force is needed.

The same movement returns in the story of Saul’s metamorphosis into Paul on the road to Damascus – the story of the conversion of this persecutor of Christians into the first Christian. It too is a transformation, a violent upheaval.

The same movement is experienced by Saint Augustine in the Milanese garden, when a child’s voice exhorts him to read the passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans that finally brings about his conversion.⁴

Rousseau too speaks of the same movement. On visiting Diderot in prison at Vincennes he comes upon a question in the Mercure de France that initiates his career as a philosophical event.⁵

Hegel refers to the same movement in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit, when he states that ‘ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era’, and calls the latter a ‘qualitative leap’.⁶

Marx speaks of the same movement when he reflects on the ‘period of revolutionary transformation’ and conceives the ‘political transition period’ from capitalist to communist society as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.⁷

Nietzsche thinks the same movement in Zarathustra, when his protagonist urges the shepherd to bite off the head of the snake that has crawled into his mouth and accept the eternal return of the same: ‘No longer shepherd, no longer human, a transformed […] being’, thus spoke Zarathustra.⁸

Heidegger too thinks this same movement when he speaks of the transformation of the animal rationale into ‘Da-sein’ and inscribes this transformation within the ‘turn’.⁹

In all of these examples we find the same [dieselbe] but not the very same [die gleiche] movement. In each case, the end of the movement is different. Being transformed into a philosopher is not exactly the same as being transformed into an apostle or a Church Father, or into the provisional power of the proletariat, the overman, or Da-sein. These are all particular modifications of this movement. Yet all of these inversions, reversals, returns, conversions and turnings have an identical sense, insofar as they present us with the radical and thus violent transformation of a human being who in the TCM universal is normalized and indifferent.

Philosophy has a transformative character. It stirs the human being; it differentiates her. Clearly, this differentiation can only be understood as a violent process. Violence is the trauma of the differentiated subject. In bringing forth the philosopher by means of a transformative process, philosophy is then traumatic; the philosopher is a differentiated, traumatized subject.

Contemporary philosophy, however, has a problematic relation to its history. It can no longer emphasize its transformative character. This has been undermined by the MTT through the universal phenomenon of production. It is not that the thought of Plato or Aristotle has lost its explanatory power. On the contrary, the allegory of the cave is one of the most popular contemporary philosophical narratives. Yet the production of the transformed human being, the revolution, stems from the same topology as production in general. If philosophy consists in the de-indifferentiation or the transformation of the subject, then it too is a category of production.

The origin of philosophy is inescapably tied to the transformative character of thinking. It is due to its transformative character that philosophy is integrated into the universal sphere of TCM production. Philosophy presents itself as an institution with which one can ‘do something’. It is therefore extremely difficult to assess whether philosophy’s integration into the modern, production-oriented university represents its alienation or its culmination. What is clear, however, is that philosophy is a specific type of integrated thinking. We can then outline a philosophical typology comprised of different degrees of integration. Philosophy can be divided into the following integration types:

1A progressive type of supervisory moral and sociological critique.

2A techno-scientific type wholly committed to the functionality of technology and science (analytic philosophy, the philosophy of mind).

3A type that addresses the practical questions arising from technological developments (applied ethics, etc.).

4A very timely type that affirms the commodification of philosophy enabled and required by the unity of technology.capital.medium. This type does not shrink from offering guidance in the form of pseudo-non-conformist wisdom (sometimes packaged as an ‘Eastern art of living’).

5A type that is integrated through its apparent rejection of integration.

6A type that (vainly) seeks to escape the unity of technology.capital.medium through the intensification of a philosophical disposition.

7A type of corrective Christian thinking.

8An academic type that, while almost immobilized by its sheer conformity, is at least able to avoid the commodification of thinking (which for technology.capital.medium of course amounts to a weakness).

These types amount to eight different, and differently regarded, TCM consulting services. The first four have proven to be especially successful at establishing themselves and gaining adherents. They not only participate in the TCM production process, but also affirm it through their presentation of the MTT. They do so even when they sharply criticize the TCM universal (thereby committing a performative contradiction). The more trenchant their (non-de-indifferentiating) critique of the TCM universal, the more it is integrated into the universal itself. Success beckons as much for the intelligent critic as it does for the shrewdest non-critic. The difference between the two, however, is that the second avoids the performative contradiction.

The above typology is itself an integral of the TCM universal. It too competes for attention; it too commits the performative contradiction, since it cannot but affirm the integral conditions of the universal in attacking them. One of these conditions is that of TCM production. As long as it remains in force, philosophy must remain an integral – a form of affirmation – of the universal.

This is true of philosophy as possibility. As such, it is a dimension of the absolute possibility and thus necessity of the TCM universal. From such philosophy we cannot expect anything but an affirmation of the universal. The eight types noted above, along with the typology itself, are forms of affirmation. Ambitious affirmation is one of the two kinds of freedom found in the universal. The successful philosopher is an exponent of such freedom – a representative of the power of disposal and the pleasure purchasing power.

And yet the significance of philosophy, as manifested in the above transformational movements from Plato to Heidegger, would remain underdetermined if we failed to consider the source from which philosophy draws its knowledge of the necessity of differentiation and transformation. Only this source can explain why philosophers have called on us to take our leave of an unworthy life and have praised the freedom from the freedoms of habit.

If the freedom of the TCM universal has gained an absolute status among the possibilities of the MTT, then philosophical freedom – to the extent that it constitutes an alternative to TCM freedom – cannot be thought in terms of possibility. All that is possible falls back into the MTT; all that is possible is production. Philosophical freedom therefore manifests itself as unproductivity – as impossibility.¹⁰

Philosophy not only involves the possibility of the differentiation and transformation of the subject; it only comes to this possibility by touching upon impossibility. This does not constitute a logical contradiction: the impossibility from which all possibilities acquire their true meaning proves to be an intensive difference within the fragile continuum of being. The opening of this difference is nothing less than the appearance of the impossible beyond the MTT. Beyond the MTT, this is the source of every topology. The impossible is universality itself, the universal of the UT. Universality as such is impossible since it is not a possibility contained within the TCM universal. Universality itself is completely independent, and as a self-opening, intensive difference is a form of eruptive escape. There is a freedom of the UT.

Impossibility amounts to freedom from possibilities. In the movement of possibilities, we follow the production processes of the TCM universal. Even the transformative possibilities of philosophy arouse the subject’s productive motivations. Philosophy remains an integral figure of the TCM universal. In the face of impossibility, however, all of these movements come to a halt. Nothing more can be produced. The subject is dis-integrated. The TCM universal can no longer contain her. She has left behind the freedom of the TCM universal and is now free in another sense.

Impossibility is liberating – this is the Neoplatonic position,¹¹ which preserves philosophy from its total integration into the TCM universal. By means of this freedom, philosophy is able to encounter itself in a way that it cannot in the TCM universal. When philosophy exposes itself to the dark stability of impossibility, it itself becomes impossible. It comes to an end, loses itself – since impossibility, the universal of the UT, can neither be said nor thought. It is only when philosophy loses itself in its impossibility, however, that it discovers its source. For the first time, it encounters itself in its ownmost freedom. In becoming impossible, it becomes possible.

Philosophy is free when it liberates itself both from TCM freedom and from the freedom of intimacy. In rejecting these two freedoms, these topographies, it discovers its atopic character. There is no place of philosophy. The philosopher is a philosopher in the transit space of the airport and the seminar room, in the intimacy of her study, and in the jungles of the tropics. Philosophy is placeless because it issues unprethinkably from impossibility.

Philosophical freedom also liberates itself from the freedom of intimacy. The latter is rooted in the PT. Intimacy is always a narrative. Philosophy, however, does not narrate. It destroys the narrative and immerses it in melancholic irony. It has to be able to reconstruct the inversion of the PT and the MTT – this revolutionary con-sequence of the determinations of the TCM universal. It has to know where it stands in the TCM world-form. It has to recognize what is.

What philosophy nonetheless shares with intimacy is the affect, or passion. The philosopher loves thinking. And she loves all those who, under its influence, set out to leave the indifference and normality of the TCM universal. The freedom of philosophy is a form of friendship in which, through the contestation of passions as well as arguments, one not only grants but also willingly gives one’s thought to the other. The philosopher always desires the other in her entirety, i.e. thoughtfully.

In the flux of possibilities, impossibility is placeless. The sheer impossibility that can never become possible does not exist in the TCM universal and is meaningless under its conditions. The TCM universal is absolute possibility – the possibility of possibility, as it were. Impossibility is therefore freedom from possibility, freedom from inescapable production. The question whether the impossible exists [ob es das Unmögliche gibt] is itself impossible. And yet all our thinking and action revolves around this central point, a point that extends to form an infinite space that absorbs all topographies.

Impossibility is the point at which topological determination comes to an end; it is placelessness. It is from impossibility that philosophy sets out and it is toward impossibility that philosophy, placeless, is on its way – in the freedom of thinking. Plotinus puts this in terms of an appeal that captures the passion of philosophizing: aphele panta! (‘take away everything!’)¹² – let the impossible come, let it happen! Free yourself from the freedom of the TCM universal!

Ending like this, however, is out of the question. The above eight types of philosophical integration prove that passion is no longer a prerequisite for philosophizing. Indeed, what seems most important here is rather the quantity of various intelligences. Philosophy does not differ essentially from other areas of social life.

In the TCM universal, thinking and action is only meaningful as long as the individual universal subject experiences, in the conjunction of her universal and intimate freedom, her joys and sorrows as ever before. These may well have been normalized, yet the pain of loss remains. Should anyone be in a position to observe this process, they would perhaps be melancholically struck by the clear course of the topological con-sequences, by the stable continuity of the almost perfect unity of technology, capital and medium. They would recognize that escape – the other – is impossible.

Notes

¹ Parmenides, The Proem, in The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Fr. 1 (242–3).

² Plato, Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 518d.

³ Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, in Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1179b28.

⁴ Saint Augustine, Confessions, ed. Michael P. Foley, trans. F. J. Sheed, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006), Book Eight, XII (159–60).

⁵ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, ed. Patrick Coleman, trans. Angela Scholar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 379.

⁶ G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 6.

⁷ Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Collected Works, vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989), 95.

⁸ Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Robert Pippin and Adrian del Caro, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 127.

⁹ Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 346–7.

¹⁰ In recent decades, discussions of impossibility have been dominated by the thought of Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. In The Space of Literature (trans. Ann Smock [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982]), Blanchot addressed the impossibility of the work. The ‘point’ from which this impossibility irradiates is ambiguous. On the one hand it is ‘a region anterior to the beginning where nothing is made of being’, the ‘point to which the work can never lead us, because this point is always already the one starting from which there never is any work’. On the other hand, it is the ‘point to which the work leads us’, ‘the one where the work is achieved in the apotheosis of its disappearance – where it announces the beginning, declaring being in the freedom that excludes it’ (46). Impossibility enters where something appears to be unfolding in the entirety of its presence, without ever being able to be truly there in this presence [ohne in dieser Präsenz je wahrhaft sein zu können]. The work never arrives there where it essentially already is. Impossibility would then seem to be something like a rupture in presence, through which the sense of being is so distorted that the work is able to become the ‘freedom’ that it is at the ‘apotheosis of its disappearance’. In his ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’ (trans. Gila Walker, Critical Inquiry 33 [Winter 2007]: 441–61), Jacques Derrida takes a similar approach. Derrida nonetheless focuses on the ‘event’ rather than the ‘work’. Before it occurs, the event ‘can only seem to me to be impossible’ (452). Here, then, the possible manifests itself in the ‘impossible’: ‘We should speak here of the im-possible event, an im-possible that is not merely impossible, that is not merely the opposite of possible, that is also the condition or chance of the possible. An im-possible that is the very experience of the possible’ (454). The ‘impossible’ is therefore a more intensive, ‘promising aporia’ (457). In the present context, however, the impossible is simply impossible.

¹¹ Cf. Plotinus, ‘On the Good or the One’, in Ennead VI. 6–9, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), VI, 6, 11 (344–5): ’kouphisthēstai di aretēs epi noun iōn kai sophian kai dia sophias ep’ auto. kai outos theōn kai anthrōpōn theiōn kai eudaimonōn bios apallagē tōn allōn tōn tēde, bios anēdonos tōn tēde, phēgē monou pros monon’ (‘he will again be lightened and come through virtue to intellect and wisdom and through wisdom to that Good. This is the life of gods and of godlike and blessed men, deliverance from the things of this world, escape in solitude to the solitary’).

¹² Plotinus, ‘On the Knowing Hypostases and That Which Is Beyond’, in Enneads V, 1–9, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), Va, 3, 17 (135). I shared my affection for Plotinus with László Tengelyi, who chose a Plotinus citation as the epigraph of his last book, Welt und Unendlichkeit: Zum Problem phänomenologischer Metaphysik (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2014). He died shortly before its publication. A loss.

Note on the Wittgenstein epigraph

In this remark¹ from 1947, Wittgenstein expresses both a conjecture and a possibility (‘It may be that …’). The whole passage has a careful tone. Yet it is strange that Wittgenstein should call any speculation about ‘a coming collapse of science and industry’ ‘simply a dream’. What is it that is dreamed here? Is it a good dream? Or would such a ‘collapse’ rather be a nightmare? The rest of the passage confirms that Wittgenstein is indeed thinking of a good dream, since the unification of the world achieved by ‘science and industry’ will have caused ‘infinite misery’. The effects of ‘science and industry’ are destructive: ‘to be sure peace is the last thing that will […] find a home’ in the unified world.

A world of technology.capital.medium is certainly a world without peace. Yet peace is a poetic topos – the shared breathing room in which each individual can be who she is, without fault, without external determination – free. It belongs to another topography, to an other – and probably wholly other – phase of the double topology’s extension. The universal is the consequence of technology.capital.medium, just as the latter is a consequence of the universal. Nothing could be other than it is. And were it otherwise, it likewise could not be otherwise.

Thinking has a gorgon-like character. We desire the other immensely, yet we are then forced to look on as this other always turns into the same stone. The horrific face of Medusa – is the horror one feels before oneself. And no one will come to free us from it.

Note

¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Alois Pichler, trans. Peter Winch, rev. edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 72e.