Modern philosophy begins, one might say, with Descartes’ self-centered syllogism, “I think, therefore I am”; cogito ergo sum; je pense, donc je suis.
The idea that my existence must be confirmed by a syllogism can be seen as a symptom of metaphysics that must be put to rest. Descartes begins by doubting anything he might be able to doubt, the enabling of doubt with respect to a given proposition being defined by the mere possibility of asserting the contrary without self-contradiction. But saying “I do not exist” is clearly incompatible with non-existence.
With this gesture we take final leave of the philosophical agora of the ancients for the confines of the individual mind, empowering the intellectual adventures of modern idealism, culminating in Kant and Hegel—and leading subsequently to the two-century battle with metaphysics as “the prison-house of language,” ending with deconstruction, French Theory… and the birth of GA.
Je pense donc je suis cannot “prove” Descartes’ existence to any but himself. Only he knows he is thinking, but to say this demonstrates his “being” is to suggest that the sense that one exists depends on reasoning. He cannot say “I eat, therefore I am” because one can eat without thinking and therefore without being aware of existing. But what is then the status of existing, or simply, “being”? What is key here is that the self needs to establish its existence independently of “the world,” of which it can always “doubt,” a world which at the limit includes my own body, all but my “thinking.” By thus affirming my mind’s existence as more certain than that of the rest of the universe, I effectively deny the necessity of the polis and its god(s) to my existence. Thinking is understood on the model of mathematics, as the elaboration of a system of ideas independent of the (human) scene, wholly predefined by a set of axioms.
But what must not be forgotten in this transition is the trans-individual, communal reason behind Descartes’ “method” of doubt. His final purpose is not philosophical but proto-scientific. As opposed to the Greek philosophers, his isolation in a poêle or heated room in Germany is a precondition of modern scientific activity; this figurative laboratory serves as a model for a real one. And accordingly, Descartes’s Discours de la méthode was written so to speak as a preface for his essays on Dioptrics, the study of light and its refraction through lenses, and The Meteors, which also touches on a variety of other atmospheric phenomena. Previous works (Le Monde [The World] and L’Homme [Man], published only posthumously) offered what might be called proto-scientific descriptions of the physical world, including a lengthy disquisition on the circulation of blood in the human body through the heart and the circulatory system, as first described by Harvey.
Descartes’ move from the agora to the poêle should thus be understood primarily as a step toward making philosophy the helpmate of mathematics and physical science, and his Discourse as providing a basis for their necessarily rigorous theorizing. Which is to say that the roots of modern philosophy were created in response to a new configuration that has remained at the root of modern society, one dependent, as ancient society was not, on ever-evolving science and technology.
Unlike the world of the polis that could serve Plato as a substitute for the originary scene of language, the modern sciences required to be isolated from human interaction in order that the scientist focus his efforts not on refining our understanding of the Ideas that regulate society, but on making empirical observations and deducing from them laws that would allow him to manipulate the material world to practical effect. That this led philosophy to separate metaphysics from its roots in the human scene and focus on the material world can hardly be viewed in itself as detrimental; yet it concomitantly inspired a focus on the individual mind as if detached from its roots in the community, leaving it to religion to supply the providential foundation of the latter’s existence in the world.
No doubt early modern philosophers such as Kant and Hegel were concerned with matters involving this community, but the direct connection between the world of ideas and this community was lost, with the result that the world of the agora was no longer congruent with the cogito-bred mind of the modern thinker. The resulting disconnect between the political order and the scientific one, what Parmenides had called the path of truth and the path of opinion, was not just problematic, as in the Athens that condemned Socrates, but understood as a reflection of their different natures.
Whereas the Ideas of classical philosophy were the norms that presumably or ideally governed the polis, those of modern philosophy have no obligation other than to logical consistency. The early modern philosopher makes of his mind a laboratory like that of the proto-scientist of his era, but unlike the latter, applies logic as if it could conjure up reality, constrained only by the consistency of his propositions. Such is the universe of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant, and even Hegel, in whose thought we must take the concepts of history, art, religion, etc., as in the first place not real-world phenomena but conceptual entities whose consistency is determined wholly in the dialectical realm of ideas. That Hegel’s concepts are also understood as embodied in worldly institutions presumably demonstrates that the play of concepts as a priori determined through Hegelian “logic” was the template upon which the historical human world was constructed.
Yet, as Marx most famously emphasized, the Hegelian dialectic of ideas was in fact realized in the real world of human society by the “dialectic” of social groups each promoting their own interests. The source of this insight, which has defined the modern political world, was the French Revolution, which dared to extend the Christian equality of all souls before God into a demand for political and economic equality of earthly conditions: liberté, égalité, fraternité!
With the birth in the 1789 National Assembly of the enduring political categories of Right and Left, the latter of which denied the authority of the King, there emerged what I have called the epistemology of resentment, a mode of ethical thought that refuses to conceive the polis as naturally harmonious but rather as—until the “final conflict” that would bring about the earthly paradise of socialism/communism—a structure of inequality and oppression, ultimately, of masters and slaves. Henceforth political debate could lead to compromise but never to a stable synthesis—whence the disappointments that have followed ever since upon the apparent moments of harmony, from the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 to the postwar founding of the United Nations to Fukuyama’s 1989 “End of History.”
And whence the need to found a new minimal understanding of humanity, a new anthropology, with its point of departure in a hypothesis of origin on an originary scene of human interaction on which emerge the minimal human attributes of language and the sacred.
Why has this not been recognized? Here we meet the crux of humanistic thought in the contemporary, always-not-quite-postmodern human world. And, given that modernity in the sense of movement toward ever-more-efficient techniques has been since the beginning, at first unconsciously and then deliberately, the telos of human activity, as each modernizing revolution creates a new metaphysical prison escaping which will be yet more challenging… the history of humanity, its institutions and ideas, can be understood as a single whole.
In this context, rather than a new version of the “final conflict,” a positive or negative apocalypse that promises to end the beginning and begin the end, GA puts an end to “ends of history.” Practitioners of humanistic thought, anthropology with a small ‘a’, must return to philosophy’s original inspiration of perfecting the polis, which has begun what is likely to be a never-ending process of transforming itself into a post-national world community.
The great political question of today is whether there is indeed a stable alternative—I would not presume to suggest a synthesis—to the models currently being offered to the world, let us say, by the USA, the European Union, China, Russia, and Iran with its jihadist dependencies. Can humanity’s ever-present temptation to mimetic conflict be kept at a manageable level—for the moment defined by the non-use of nuclear weapons—while the “historical dialectic” proceeds toward, not utopia or Armageddon, but an incomplete yet tolerable version of Kant’s “perpetual peace”?
Dare I say it, but is it perhaps a sign of “progress” that the antisemitism of Hitler has been replaced by that of Yahya Sinwar? One thing we know about Hamas is that, unlike Nazi Germany, it contains no minds on the level of Werner Heisenberg or Martin Heidegger. In its wake, there will be no new science designated, like our number system, as Arabic; no new Alhambras, only an Al-Aqsa built on the site of the Hebrew Temple. Yet Islam surely deserves a more noble destiny than to become the final repository of world resentment.
The difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of GA’s “originary thinking” is the very difficulty that philosophy was from the beginning created to solve. Socrates-Plato would not have needed to find “all the answers” had these “answers” not been contested by the powers who put the former to death.
Descartes’ discipline indeed helped to construct the foundation for modern science, with its ever-growing potential for enriching and improving human life. Yet science’s immense self-confidence today strikes me as naïve in the face of the continual expansion of the universe of the unknown at the expense of the known—for example, of “dark” matter and energy at that of the matter and energy we can describe. How far are we from Pope’s Enlightenment optimism:
Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light!
Yet the human itself has not changed its essence. It is time that we recognized the need to describe it in a minimally mystified form—which is to say, as Generative Anthropology strives to present it. Our uneven yet unending progress toward modernization, hopefully continuing to follow what Churchill called “the worst system, except for all the others…,” must accept what Hegel’s dialectic truly implies, its pursuance to the end of human time.