Notes on Kant's Prolegomena, Part I
Indirect intellectivity, and the division of primordial intellect
The Pure Land of Amitabha Buddha
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“External experience of objects is for Kant immediate and not mediate. Inner experience is not immediate (as Descartes claimed) but is possible only mediately through the experience of actual things”
(x, translator's introduction)
It is quite easy to demonstrate how untrue the former proposition is. Regarding an experience that is external, one must ask “external to what?”—external to the subject's inner experience (does the subject “as such” consist in interiority?—another question), and insofar as it is an experience it is not only external to the subject's interior but external for the subject. The mediation of a subject that implicitly identifies itself primarily with its own interiority is necessary in order to render sensation into an experience-for and an experience which possesses externality. Conversely, an implicit identification with exteriority is implied in every retreat toward the interior. Descartes begins with a problematized exterior world and retreats into the security of the “cogito”. Without the presumption of this mediation we would be treating of a “subject-less sensation”, the pure tattva of manas taken apart from the self-reflexive action of ahamkara (or “automorphosis” in my terminology), to frame this in terms borrowed from samkhya. So, in sum, “external experience” (in its externality) is always of a mediate character, no less than “inner experience”, though we should acknowledge from the get-go that these domains overlap considerably, and it is quite impossible to draw any strict line of demarcation between them—or, better yet, the line of demarcation between them is a nothing, and thus is not. The distinction, in other words, between inner and outer experience (for the transcendental subject) resolves itself into a sheer virtuality, and sheer virtuality resolves itself into nothing at all. Moreover, “experience” need not refer only to that which pertains to the level of transcendental subjectivity. There are conditions which we refer to in terms of “experience” which are not primarily for the subject. Such “experiences”, e.g. of an intellectivie variety, can be meaningfully considered “immediate”. Thus, in designating the basis of experience as “immediate”, even if misapplied to the experience of mediate objects, Kant implicitly, indeed, as will be considered below, indirectly, grounds his thought in intellectivity. Naturally, one could equally state this for Descartes, though with an inverse polarity, his thought indirectly grounding itself through the “interiority” of the subject, and arguably even for Hegel beginning with the putative “immediacy” of sense-certainty. The mere ascription of immediacy, even if fundamentally false, is nevertheless noteworthy. As to whether Descartes' corresponding conception here can be said to possess a comparable rigor to the Kantian one, that is another question, and one whose answer certainly seems to be in the negative. The history of philosophy after Descartes is littered with the debris of such attempts at rendering this initial datum into a rigorous edifice, but in my view Kant's most crucial contribution may consist in the way that he, firstly, reverses the polarity of these inquiries (a reversal which arguably belongs to “empiricism” as well), and, secondly, establishes his own polarity on a rigorous basis (this second aspect is absent from “empiricism”). Not only this, but, crucially, he determines the uselessness of the other approach, that of “dogmatic metaphysics”. Useless to what? Useless for whom? Useless for modernity, and for modern humanity. Is this determination of uselessness true without qualification? I think quite obviously not, but it is true in a general way. Whatever is useful in the dogmatic metaphysics is available for use by the by the “critical idealist”, and this idealist can put it to better use than any navel gazing dogmatist.
A related aside on so-called “aphantasia”, from a different set of notes: “Imagination”, in the conventional sense (not necessarily in the specialized sense given to it in Islamic esoterism), is nothing other than sensibility polarized by the interior-exterior relation. Nota bene, the imaginative person does not possess any imagistic faculty lacking in the non-imaginative person. Sensibility is substantively the same thing as imagination, differing only in the context of its application (“interiority”). Thus, if the “non-imaginative” person has all his senses, if he is not blind and deaf, then he lacks in nothing substantive which the imaginative person possesses. What he lacks is the abstract nothing which polarizes sensibility, and divides an interior locale of sensibility from the exterior one. Consider the following analogy: the interior of a house does not exist in a merely relative sense by virtue of the outside of the house. It is its quality of interiority which is relative, here, not its existence and contents. It is the room which it is by virtue of itself, by virtue of its “contents”, but it is interior by virtue of the outside. Likewise, “imagination” is what it is by virtue of its sensible content, but it is interior by virtue of an exterior dimension of sensibility. Those who “lack imagination” have simply failed to polarize sensibility. This does not mean that they lack it. What they lack is the interior-exterior polarity, not the sensibility, and even then it is a matter of degree.
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“For Kant, there is a reality behind appearance”
(xii, translator's introduction)
In the first place, appearance is always appearance-for, at least where subjectivity is presumed. Appearance for a transcendental subject is not appearance for Dasein (passive intellection) is not appearance considered from the “standpointless standpoint” of active intellection, that is, considered metaphysically [1]. To say that there is a reality behind the appearance is to correctly intuit that, from the standpoint of transcendental subjectivity, an appearance-for-the-subject is a sort of limiting barrier. Insofar as an appearance is “ontic” for a transcendental subject, it is necessarily occlusive of other modalities of appearance (such as the disclosure of beings in their being for Dasein). It also occludes the active intellection that renders appearances metaphysically transparent. From the standpoint of the transcendental subject, appearances have a behind (or appear to have one). For Dasein (passive intellection) and for active intellection, there is no behind-appearance, but appearance is both encompassed through an intellection which renders it intelligible and consists in a being-with which encompasses Dasein, which “shelters” Dasein. Summary formulation—appearance, for Dasein, is a being-in, and for the active intellect appearance is a being-as (adequation; identification). We may speak of “appearance” or “phenomena” both when considering transcendental subjectivity and when referring to intellect, but the ontological difference allowed for by these terms must also figure into our thinking. The “appearance” one speaks of in an intellective context is not reducible to the “appearance” one speaks of in a transcendental context.
1: In the case of intellectivity, the “for” of appearance is only a “for” in speech, a “for” in the way we discuss intellectivity. Intellectivity is immediate. It is not a subject which apprehends an appearance “outside” itself.
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“When such a priori concepts (e.g. substance and existence) are employed so as to try to determine something about supersensible objects rather than mere sensible objects, such employment oversteps the bounds of all possible experience”
(xiv, translator's introduction)
It oversteps the bounds of the transcendental subject's experience, the subject for whom sensory experience, a priori judged by “pure concepts”, constitutes a limiting factor, a barrier over and against being. A number of things must be said here Firstly, such “pure concepts” are not really so pure. They have a number of modalities, straddling diverse conditions. They are a nothing that allows all manner of signification to enter into themselves—they are generically ambiguous. Their “earthly origin” is as metaphor, a transposition of lived things into thought through the “medium” of passive intellection. This is their “etymological genesis”, that which can be uncovered through an examination of the the concept's history as a word. In this sense, their modality as “poetic wisdom”, to use Vico's expression, is historically primary. They also have conceptual modalities as the Kantian one of a priori conditioning concepts. And, naturally, they also have metaphysical modalities, those modalities which are transparent to the operations of active intellection. These distinctions will be addressed further on in these notes, in reference to the concepts of “space” and “time”, for instance. Secondly, with reference to the expression “supersensible objects”—that mode of “experience” which is “supersensible”, which can only really refer to that of intellect, no longer makes clear cut, hard-and-fast distinctions between subject and object. Indeed, the very word “experience”, according to Kant, precisely refers to sensation constituted through a priori judgment as an object. Hence, the “supersensible”, if we can admit of the possibility of such a thing, would not have an object-ive character (anymore than a subjective one). In that respect, supersensible intellection somewhat resembles Dasein's way of being. Dasein's way of being is indeed the passive corollary of active intellection. It is a passive intellection. In this regard, Kant's transcendental subject can be said to be an indirectly intellected way of being, a way of being (or, rather, precisely of not-being) in which active intellect projects through us onto a world of more or less “ontic” sensory experience—a kind of intellectual accidens [1]. We have, then, two “essential intellects”, passive and active, and an indirect or “accidental” intellectivity, which is the same as to say transcendental subjectivity or discursive-conceptual thought. Accidental intellect is a boundary wherein movement from one essential intellect passes on its way to the other, from passive to active and from active to passive [2]. Again, “accidental intellect” is the same as to say “transcendental subjectivity”. We use the former term when we wish to emphasize the transcendental subject's stance vis a vis the two intellects, as the place wherein they leave a re-presentational trace while on their passage from one to the other—they, as it were, merely “happen” to pass through it, and the trace they leave is only indirectly intellective, an “accidental” re-presentation.
Returning to the original line of thought, the projection of concepts onto the supersensible appears to the (Kantian) transcendental subject as an overstepping of bounds precisely because the transcendental subject is that bound. That subject is loathe to accept anything which seemingly obviates it. The transcendental subject is, so to speak, a two-dimensional screen with its face ordinarily turned toward the world, and it is “indirectly intellected” vis a vis that world of sensible objects—indeed, it is precisely that indirect intellectivity which reconstitutes sensory appearance into the form of rationally constituted objects. I say “ordinarily turned”, because it is precisely Kant who prescribes this norm of turning toward the world for all speculative thought. There are obviously many instances of post-Cartesian philosophers turning that same transcendental face toward the transcendent [3], toward the “supersensible”—this latter is the sort of metaphysics that comes under Kant's criticism, but it is certainly no less “legitimate” than Kant's turning of transcendental subjectivity toward sensible world. The application of conceptual thought towards the supersensible appears to it illegitimate because such concepts are always, as such, toward-world from its standpoint—that is, the light of active intellect shines through the transcendental subject, where it is discursively filtered into a concept, and from thence onto the world of passive intellection. Which is to say, the Kantian philosophy “indirectly” grounds the transcendental subject in active intellect. In that respect, the Heideggerian criticism of modern philosophy, as taking its point of departure in the noesis of antique philosophy, which he interprets as a primarily ontic gesture, has some legitimacy (i.e. because this antique noesis serves as the basis for later developments), though not without certain reservations. Moreover, the Kantian criticism of philosophy in excess of the bounds of “possible experience” receives further clarification in light of the foregoing considerations. Kant's thought is grounded concretely, albeit in an indirect way [4]. The philosophers which he criticizes are those who divorce themselves from such a grounding in active intellect (though, obviously, he never expresses his criticism in such terms), taking discursive thought as their point of origin toward active intellect [5]. Had they, at least, been grounded in the passive pole of intellection such a criticism would not be applicable, but a philosophy grounded in this pole of intellection, at least in the Western philosophical tradition, does not even emerge until Heidegger. Moreover, it should also be mentioned that while Kant is grounded in active intellect (the specifics of this grounding, via the rigor of his synthetic a priori categories, will be addressed later), he does not seem to have any awareness of this grounding, or at least not of its intellective character (especially since he manifestly rejects “intellectual intuition”). Nevertheless, whether he recognizes it or not, he is, in fact, so grounded (indirectly). As another aside, it is also worth asking how, theoretically or practically speaking, one takes passive intellect as an “indirect” ground for “legitimate” speculation (that is, speculation which does not exceed the bounds of “possible experience”)? Just as in the case of active intellect as indirect ground we take the synthetic a priori categories as the guarantee of rigorous speculation, so it is reasonable to suppose that passive intellect would provide an analogous “guarantee”. Heidegger seems to outline the form of such a “guarantee” through the phenomenological exposition of being-in-the-world as “care”, a seamless relation with one's work environment. Thus, from this standpoint, the imperative is to ensure that our thought remains grounded in a way of being and working, just as in the Kantian case the imperative is to ensure that our thinking remains grounded in the experiential categories which grant that thought rigor. One could say that, broadly, the former is practically grounded (as “care”) as an assurance against theoretical deviations (against “the forgetting of being”) and the latter is theoretically grounded (in an account of the “forms of possible experience”) as an assurance for rigorous scientific practice. Thus, the thought of Kant and Heidegger seem to exhibit ontological inversion in relation to one another (though, the inversion between Heidegger and Guenon is more direct, since Heidegger is not as explicitly transcendental as Kant—Heidegger does however have a significant Cartesian “trace”; see my notes on Being and Time). Moreover, both of these ways of thinking have political implications consistent with their theoretical content, an aspect which I may pursue elsewhere in detail, though much has already been written about this by others.
What, then, of the reverse procedure just hinted at in reference to post-Cartesian philosophers, that is, the procedure which turns transcendental subjectivity toward the supersensible? I believe that what this procedure consists in is an analysis and elaboration of these “pure concepts”, concepts which “in origin” possess a “supersensible” character (which is to say, an intellective character, particularly in the active sense), an elaboration which, noting their composition and possibilities, attempts to intuit what their pure constitution “looked like” prior to their “descent”. That is the significance of the endless concept mongering, the impulse behind which is a perfectly sincere attempt at fathoming what such concepts “really mean”, as though this real meaning could be attained by modifying discursive schemes. It is an attempt at re-constructing that transcendent constitution through the elaboration of discursive concepts. It is the dissection of angels in the laboratory of rational thought. So, in a strict sense, Kant is correct in deriding these philosophers. Indeed, they do not actually turn toward the supersensible. Rather, they turn toward it virtually. Stated another way, and in more figurative language, they turn only toward those concepts which have “descended” to them from active intellect, or those concepts which have “risen” as metaphor from out of our passive intellection in the world—in either case, the origin is intellective, in the one supersensible in a more obvious way (“pure contemplation”), and in the other super-sensible with respect to the sensation of the transcendental subject (it transcends the sensation of this subject in the direction of being-in-the-world). For that matter, not only does the “pre-critical philosopher” not genuinely turn toward any supersensible realm, but neither does Kant turn toward the world, at least not in its being, but only toward objectively constituted experience. An actual transcendental philosophy which turned toward the world (in its being) would consist in an attempt at a retrospective analysis, in a phenomenological “format”, of our being-in-the-world (i.e. Heidegger), and an actual transcendental philosophy turned toward the supersensible would consist in the retrospective analysis of intellective activity in the language of “a priori concepts” [see, again, note 5 below]. If this artificient [6] cleavage of the transcendental subject were removed, passive and active “supersensibility” would again overlap—a state to be referred to as “primordial intellection”, both and neither the passive intellection of Dasein and the active intellection of intellect (naturally, passive intellection is just as much “intellect”, but we refer to active intellect as “intellect” eminently). Given the unreality and impossibility of transcendental subjectivity (an impossibility which nevertheless really asserts itself), there never truly is any departure from primordial intellect, or any hard and fast differentiation between passive and active intellect. The apparent divergence from this condition (that is, from primordial intellection) is entirely a matter of degree. Even the sort of actively intellective doctrines expounded by the Neoplatonists, or by Aristotle, exhibit traces of this “primordial” character (that is, exhibit a confounded unity of passive and active intellect), albeit one “slanted” toward the side of active intellection—they cannot help themselves when speaking of intellective activity but to speak in the same breath of gods and various sensible realities, combining sensible being-in-the-world (recall the imaginal vastness of “world”) with transcendent contemplation. This has much more the character of an intermingling of passive and active intellection across the empty spaces of an inconspicuous transcendental subject, whose separative (im)possibilities have not yet come to the fore—this transcendental condition still constitutes a “background” for intellective activity. It is Kant's “hardening” of transcendental subjectivity, bringing it to the fore to the maximal extent, and essentially setting it up as a fortress against being, asserting its total reality against the unreality of being (passive intellection) and knowing (in the sense of gnosis or intellectus), which clarifies the transcendental condition with critical precision and makes it into an efficacious actor in the social field, a scientfic and modern entity. In declaring being and knowing unreal (he does this, of course, only implicitly, and presuming we understand those terms in a very specific way), he claims the maximal reality for the unreal transcendental subject—a remarkable reversal (and, in fact, an audaciously Promethean one—we commend him for it!). In any case, given this structure of transcendental subjectivity, the way in which it structures its world, we might propose that the noumena which the transcendental subject seeks (or else claims are unseekable) are not hidden behind appearances, behind sensible objects, but are situated behind the transcendental subject itself. It is the transcendental subject that cordons appearances away from their being, and moreover rigorously constitutes those appearances as “objects” (that is, constitutes them in conformity with the “forms of possible experience”). Ordinarily (e.g. the “everydayness of Dasein”), an appearance and its being are not found apart from one another. The transcendental subject interposes itself between them, and thus, facing apparent objects (objects which are, as it were, desiccated beings), the noumena which it claims cannot be searched out lie hidden behind its back, or rather the “noumenality” of the beings which it has rendered as objects.
1: The relation of this “accidental intellect” with the Marxist “general intellect” merits further comment at some point. We might venture a preliminary formulation—general intellect is accidental intellection in its rigorous (scientific) development along the “plane” of historical time.
2: That the passage runs both ways is a crucial thesis of my thinking here and elsewhere. In that respect, we should not let the language involved deceive us. “Passive intellect” is not merely a passive receptacle of sorts for “active intellect”, except precisely from the standpoint of active intellect, which is also to say from the standpoint of virtually all antique and medieval philosophy in the West. In reality, these designations are relative, ontologically inverse, and ultimately collapse into one another—the very distinction between passive and active intellect is an “illusion”, a virtuality produced by the interference of “nothing” into a prior “primordial intellection”, an primordial intellection which never actually goes away.
3: Passive intellect is just as “transcendent” as active intellect, but we speak of the latter as “transcendent” eminently, and of the former as “immanent” (I briefly touch on this subject in my essay “Class Dictatorship and Sovereign Power”). Immanence is just as much a kind of “transcendence” with respect to the transcendental condition:
Thus, a certain semantic confusion is liable to crop up here. We speak of a broader category of “transcendence” (A) of which “transcendence” (B) and “immanence” are both types. Seemingly, this confusion could be avoided by simply adopting different terms for the broader sense of “transcendence” and the specified kind, but there are a number of reasons militating against this. For instance, if the broader category (A) were to be referred to under another name, e.g. “ecstasis”, we would lose the advantage of being able to call immanence a “kind of transcendence” in reference to its intellective character. On the other hand, if we call the specified kind of transcendence (B) by another name, say, again, “ecstasis”, we lose a concrete reference for the term “transcendence” (A). After all, the broader sense (A) is primarily referred to in its capacity as a mere genera, in the above scheme. If we lose this concrete reference, calling “immanence” a “kind of transcendence” becomes an empty gesture. The whole point is to subsume “immanence” in the same general category (A) precisely by demonstrating its essential kinship with transcendence in the specified and concrete sense (B). Thus, it is preferable to maintain the ambiguity entailed by using the same term for the genera and for one of its species. Moreover, the ambiguity here is not only semantic but genuinely resides in the phenomena under question. The very division between this immanence (= passive intellect) and transcendence (of the specified kind, i.e. active intellect) is a virtual one, a relative one. They are “driven both ways” (ambi-agere) by the intrusion of transcendental subjectivity into the midst of “primordial intellection”. Thus, by maintaining the generic ambiguity (a “driving both ways” inhering in a “pure genera”) of the term “transcendence” (A+B) we also maintain a close theoretical contact with the phenomena that we are expositing. As an aside, the “driving both ways” here can itself be taken in two senses. The first sense is that of the two intellects, and the second sense places intellectivity on one side (both intellects together) and the generic category on the other.
4: This “concrete grounding” is outside the bounds of (the transcendental subject's) possible experience. It is due to the indirection of this grounding that one can say that the limits Kant sets on inquiry are not violated. The subject has not violated anything here. The violation in question just is, in a manner of speaking.
5: As for the possibility of a philosophy which somehow grounds itself in active intellect (indirectly) and, unlike the Kantian philosophy, pursues its inquiry back toward the supersensible via the mediation of transcendental concepts, I would propose that such a thing could be possible, and arguably there are a few philosophers in the West who do manifest such a character. Without “naming names”, suffice it to say that any Western (modern) thinker that pursues such post-Cartesian (in the sense of conforming to the Cartesian turn, not leaving it behind) development of conceptual thought while nevertheless maintaining a genuinely (and indirectly) intellective character, could be easily identified by virtue of a definite “occult” stamp in their thinking and in the genesis of their concepts, and by a rigorous “borrowing” from genuine metaphysics and theology. For instance, attempts at developing branches of Scholastic-Thomistic philosophy in the wake of the Cartesian turn, often have such a character, that is, the character of an indirectly intellected transcendental thought which nevertheless “violates” the Kantian principle of keeping within the “bounds of possible experience”.
6: “Artificient” refers to the kind of intelligence or being capable of making use of or producing tools or any kind of technology, that is, of anything which is artificial. Transcendental subjectivity is an “artificient intelligence” in this sense, a condition of being which is radically slanted toward instrumentalizing whatever presents itself to it, or readying it for use in advance by circumscribing it in scientific theory. “Artificial intelligence”, as commonly conceived, is an artificient intelligence produced by another artificient intelligence.
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“The question of whether a science be possible presupposes a doubt as to its actuality”
(2)
The question that must be posed here is—to whom (or what) does that doubt of metaphysics belong? Doubts are not simply “there”, free-floating, emerging from nowhere. The doubting of metaphysics is the doubting of metaphysics by someone or something in particular or in general (not to mention, that it is the doubting of a particular kind of “metaphysics”, and this kind, too, must be specified)—it is a doubt which belongs-to. The doubting of metaphysics obviously does not belong to intellect, since intellect's very operation is a metaphysics, so to speak. Intellect is not free to doubt itself anymore than the Cartesian (or transcendental) subject is free to obviate itself through self-doubt. In both cases, however, that is, in the case of intellect and in the case of the Cartesian subject (the transcendental subject), doubt can assail us from “outside”, as it were—by analytical and critical reason. It is reason which can cast doubt on both the transcendental subject (consider the Buddhist criticism of “ego”) and on intellect. Its relation to intellect is indirect and retrospective. It organizes intellectual operations into discursible “data”, renders them standardizable (more or less adequately) and susceptible of exposition. So, in a sense, it is not even really free to doubt intellect, but only its own retrospective expositions of intellection which it identifies with intellect and calls by the name of “intellect” (or “metaphysics”). As for reason's confrontation and conflict with the transcendental subject—this conflict is an open and direct one. Reason and the transcendental subject occupy the same plane, so to speak. Reason only ever criticizes the transcendental subject when the transcendental subject allows it to. Reason is always wielded by the subject against itself. This is why the Buddhist critique of the subject is never considered complete and self-sufficing, but merely a preliminary to the fundamental “break” of nirvana, which renders this critique into something actually attained, a real destruction of transcendental subjectivity or the unveiling of the unreality which always characterized it. The motion of critique is like the warm up before the “leap” of enlightenment. The reason that this critique can only run in circles and can never complete itself is that critical reason is the transcendental subject. It is the flesh out of which the transcendental subject is made. Therefore, we must qualify our claim as pertains to the inability of the transcendental subject to doubt itself. The transcendental subject doubts and confirms itself in one and the same motion. It affirms its capacity to doubt itself, and it doubts its capacity to be affirmed. It strengthens itself at the same time that it weakens itself. It discovers that all its strength amounts to nothing, and that in nothingness lies a great yet subtle strength.
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“...reason was altogether deluded with reference to this concept [cause-and-effect], which she considered one of her children, whereas in reality it was nothing but a bastard of imagination”
(3)
It is true that Reason did not give birth to cause-and-effect. “She”, as Kant nominates “her”, merely employs it, and occasionally claims it as her own (which, in a certain sense it is, albeit indirectly). Reason, furthermore, does not give birth at all. She is Artemis, the chaste patroness of childbirth (an image taken from Plato's Theaetetus). She inspires birth in others, like a muse, but never gives birth herself. Reason interposes a nothing into things and renders them question-able, renders them perplexing, mysterious. This spurs the imagination, in its aesthetic, conceptual, and symbolic (metaphysical) modes into its productive activity in order to fill in the blanks that Reason presents it with. Therefore, to say that Reason does not give birth is not entirely correct. She does give birth—to nothing! That is, she gives birth to herself. Reason re-produces herself. She re-produces nothing. This nothing, in turn, spurs the imagination to give birth to manifold somethings. Reason cannot quite be said to impregnate the imagination so much as she renders the imagination fertile enough to impregnate itself. Imagination is an androgyne, and Reason is a chaste, though ravishingly beautiful, goddess. Her action on the imagination (in both its symbolic or imaginal mode and its aesthetic or imaginative mode) is always indirect and at a distance. She inspires like a muse. Reason's interposition of nothings (“analysis” as understood in my description hermeneutic) and its fundamental irrationality (reason's lack of a “common measure” with anything else) have been dealt with elsewhere. In any case, we ask—in what sense does cause-and-effect belong to Reason “indirectly”? It belongs to Reason as a nothing, as the pure structure of mechanistic cause-and-effect which is meaningless apart from the flesh provided by intellect and imagination. Even to say “mechanistic” is to imbue purely rational cause-and-effect with too imaginative a flesh. To Reason, as such, belongs a purely conceptual cause-and-effect, threadbare to the point of insubstantiality. It is pure, “invisible” structure, barren of flesh—i.e. it is a nothing. Does this abstractive cause-and-effect come before or after (either in temporal terms or in terms of ontological priority) intellective and imaginative conceptions of cause-and-effect (an instance of an intellective cause-effect scheme, to give but one example, is the theory of “karma” as found in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions)? To abstract entails a coming-after, that we abstract from out of that which is already there. Therefore, the abstraction was, at the first, not there. The abstraction, however, is a nothing in itself, in its “purity”. Therefore, in its not being there, it was always already there. For, to be nothing is precisely not to be. Abstraction is the intermingling of that which is and that which is not. It is always already there in its not being there, and it is not there in its being there. This accounts for the impression of universality produced by the abstract or the conceptual. The universal is that which always is. Generality (abstraction) and universality should not be confused with one another. They are distinct. And yet, the abstract shares in this property of always-being. And yet, again, the abstract is not the universal, for the abstract also is not. Indeed, its always-being is both the same and different from its always-not-being. Put another way—abstraction always is not.
Therefore, the abstract indeed is universal, but this should not distract us from the fact that it is also (and primarily) not universal. This universality which is also non-universal we call the “general”. This generality is, at the same time, an individual which is non-individual. It belongs to the order of individual things without being an individual (on the “continuity of general and individual” see my notes on Kojève). In political terms, what is this “generality” if not the generality, in the colloquial sense of that expression, i.e. the masses? Hence, communism as the real movement of the masses, is the real movement both of the generality and of the power of scientific abstraction, of generalization, the formulation of abstract laws and heuristic schemes which facilitate use. Communism is the ideology which is not an ideology. It is the real movement of the masses, but that real movement is obliged to continually express itself in ideological forms, and each of these forms both is and is not communism. Communism also expresses itself as metanoia, “conversion”, that is, in intellective form, but we would be mistaken to wholly identify communism with its intellective dimensions. Communism is materially grounded abstraction, that is, the real and historical movement of the generality. It is from, and to, the masses, including their capacity to abstract from themselves institutions in an efficacious way. This “efficacious abstraction” of the masses is proletarian dictatorship.
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“...metaphysical knowledge, i.e. knowledge lying beyond experience”
(9)
Herein lies one of the shortcomings of the term “metaphysics” and, related to it, one of the shortcomings of the term “experience” (or the “empirical”)—the domain of metaphysics, as it has been understood historically (pre-Cartesian) has been the domain of the intellective, but the intellective is not purely and simply “beyond experience”. The intellect, while possessing a certain principial beyondness, also inhabits the world of the senses, eminently as passive intellection (or Heidegger's “being-in-the-world”). This “world” is also the mundus imaginalis, and therefore includes a broader field of experience than the colloquial use of “world” indicates. Thus, while metaphysical exposition generally gives expression to the beyondness of intellect, it should not therefore be supposed that intellect itself, in an “operative” sense, is reducible to metaphysical exposition or to the beyondness this exposition refers to. It is the temptation to strictly identify intellect with metaphysical exposition which is the problem. For Kant, this is doubly so, since the identification in his case is implicit and “indirect”—Kant recognizes metaphysics only in such retrospective and discursive expositions of the indirectly intellected experience of the transcendental subject (as opposed to a symbolic exposition which has something more to it than pure discursion, and also as opposed to any direct taste of metaphysics, that is, metaphysics in a gnosensiential sense). That is, Kant indirectly identifies intellect with expositional metaphysics (moreover, a certain kind of metaphysics) without knowing that he is doing so, since Kant does not “officially” recognize intellect. Put another way, he often speaks here of metaphysics and almost never of intellect, as though they could be taken separately. Indeed, this taking metaphysics and intellect separately is “metaphysics” in its modern sense. The departure from antique and medieval metaphysics occurs precisely through the occluding of intellection (especially of gnosense), re-making metaphysics into a purely conceptual and abstract affair. Kant, however, does not merely continue this Cartesian trend, but offers a necessary corrective, even if he lacks a certain self-awareness as to what he accomplishes here. He renders the all-too-ungrounded concept mongering of modern metaphysics, untethered by intellect, into something which is, at least, indirectly intellected and this in a rigorous way. Kant departs from the whimsical metaphysics which he calls “dogmatic metaphysics”, and pursues a rigorous and critical form of “idealism”. This indirectly intellected metaphysics becomes, when translated into Kant's terms, the synthetic a priori judgment or the forms of possible experience. That which is “indirectly intellected” here is the transcendental subject. This subject (or, rather, the transcendental condition generally, in both its subjective and objective poles) is indirectly intellected by active intellect. The “light” of active intellect shines “through” this transcendental plane “on its way” to the passive pole of intellection (and this latter pole stands in for “world”, sensory experience). At the same time, one can equally say that the transcendental subject is indirectly intellected by passive intellect. That is, it is only through this subject's engagement with the world that it is forced to reckon with metaphysics. It is the world which turns this subject inwards (consider the typical Heideggerian imagery—a tool breaks down and one is forced inward, to contemplate, to reckon), toward the thinking of synthetic a priori forms, the formulation of scientific laws and general explanations, and these a priori forms ultimately have their terminus in contemplation of that which is actually intelligible. The syllabus of Plato's ideal Republic is relevant here—one first studies mathematics in its axiomatic form, and only afterwards directly contemplates the ineffable truth of mathematics. Passive intellect (or, what is for the transcendental subject, the same thing as “world”) forces the transcendental subject toward active intellection, though, insofar as the transcendental subject remains transcendental subject it cannot reach intellect. Just so, from the “other direction”, active intellect makes it possible for transcendental subject to constitute its world under the synthetic a priori forms of possible experience, though it never can penetrate into that experience such that it becomes a lived being-in-the-world so long as it remains transcendental subject. Transcendental subject is the indirect recipient of active intellect's light, and is also that which leaps into the foreground through the “breakdown” of passive intellect (the breakdown of our seamless working relationship with our environment and our tools).
Now, regarding the problem of “experience”—when Kant's thought is contextualized intellectively, “experience” precisely assumes the form of a more-or-less clean break of subject and object produced by the interposition of a transcendental subject between active and passive intellect. “Experience” is here understood as the experience of the indirectly intellected transcendental subject of its object. This transcendental sense of the term “experience” is not the only possible one. Certainly, Dasein's being-in-the-world is also a sort of experience, an experience belonging to passive intellect, an experience in which subjectivity and objectivity are entangled in the world and not clearly differentiable. Likewise, active intellection can also be considered a type of “experience” (dhawq, gnosense), one which is expressed as varying degrees of the unity of knowing and being in contemplative activity. The synthetic a priori judgment constitutes the possible forms of experience for the transcendental subject, but not all experience (in the multiple senses that this term possesses) belongs to the transcendental subject.