THE NEW YORK SPACETIMES, by Michael Cifone, is a series about philosophy, society, politics, and everything else, starting from New York City and radiating outwards, borderlessly and unboundedly.
He has worked on the philosophy and metaphysics of natural science, with a special focus on relativity and quantum theories, and on the philosophy of science more generally, especially including “Continental” treatments of science and the scientific worldview.
You can find out more about his work HERE.
PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS:
#2: Thinking in End Times II: Axial Consciousness Then
#1: Thinking in End Times I: Introduction
III. Axial Consciousness and Post-Modernity
In a very strange turn of events, humanity is forced to confront the “outside” as an “inside,” as if the mythopoeic age was returning with a vengeance as the Promethean dreams of Modernity are being fulfilled—despite our best (and worst) intentions. Modernity was supposed to be a repudiation of the mythopoeic mind, in which the inner and outer worlds were not sharply distinguished. The cosmos formed a great web of interrelations, we are told of the mentality of this age. Critical scholarship also tells us to regard this as mere poetic fancy, or as a matter of different “worldviews” or “epistemes,” etc. We moderns should know better. Yet, where we can laugh at or admire the seeming naivety of pre-axial mythopoeic peoples, we are fast realizing that what was mere fancy and dreamwork in that age is our actual destiny. Our destiny is to realize the truth of this mythopoesis—though in ways peculiar to us moderns. In this way, we can truly ask, with Bruno Latour—and with no irony—were we ever modern? No, we were not: the founding myth of modernity is modernity itself. This is the deepest originative paradox of our age, encoded in the formative moments of the Axial Age mind itself.
The philosophic spirit that animated ancient Greek philosophy from Plato on, and eventually leading to the “waterless canals” (to borrow Tertullian) of medieval scholasticism, was the quest to achieve infinite knowledge. Only with Kant was this spirit tempered by one who dared challenge this growing hubris of Modernity. Yet, again in a strange twist of historical destiny, the dream of infinite knowledge, resurrected by Kant’s successor, Hegel, finds new vitality. It was Kant himself, ironically, who first articulates what this is (or must be); but in showing why it can’t be achieved, Kant opens it up as a determinate possibility for the first time. Heidegger gives us a remarkably perspicacious discussion of this kind of knowledge:
Divine knowledge as knowledge, not as divine, is also intuition. The difference between infinite and finite intuition consists only in this, that the former in its immediate representation of the individual, that is, the singular and unique essent taken as a whole , first brings it into being, that is, effects its coming forth (orgio). Absolute intuition would not be absolute if dependent on an essent already on hand in adoption to which the object of intuition first became accessible. Divine cognition is that mode of representation which in the act of intuition first creates the object of intuition as such. Seeing right through the essence in advance, such cognition intuits it immediately and has no need of thought. Thought as such, then, is in itself the seal of finitude.[i]
In this sense, to create (originate) a thing from the ground up is to have infinite (which is to say complete) knowledge of that thing, for in this case there is no intermediary—the creator and created form an originative unity. The very possibility of “thought” as such (as finite) already, as it were, presupposes a radical (Cartesian) dichotomy: thought (concepts) is (are) needed only when the creative origin of the thing has nothing (existentially) to do with the thinker.
For Hegel, this was the very movement of history itself, embodied in the human spirit of creativity: we remake what exists in our image and therefore (if only gradually) do we achieve in the limit infinite (“absolute”) knowledge. Or rather, history is the process of “Spirit” coming to know itself through creative origination, as a “self-positing” essence. But does not the Hegelian historical itinerary describe not speculatively but literally the processes unfolding today? Did Kant not reveal the profound contradiction at the heart of the epistemology of Modernity? Premised on the disciplined cognition of experimental evidence, yet in its discoveries revealing an infinite geography (the cosmos) known by finite creatures—only now, in the final act of Modernity, do we have this finitude repudiated, as knowledge of the laws of Nature enables humankind to become an originative force itself? In this way must we think “infinite knowledge” as an actual live epistemic category.
We remake the Earth, in our own image, as a geologic, epoch-making force of nature. And of course it is not limited merely to geologic phenomena (as if there could be a “merely”); no, we are doing the same in each of the sciences that have reached a kind of originative maturity (and let us use that term with cautious irony). In biology, we have become an actual evolutionary force, determining the trajectory of life itself (again, for better or worse). In theoretical physics, long has it been known what forces create suns, galaxies and possibly universes themselves[ii]—such Promethean potential constrained (momentarily?) only by our limited ability to marshal the needed energies.
In this connection we can see Descartes, one of the first characteristically “modern” philosophers (along with Pascal), as at the same time very much “post-modern.” Descartes takes the axial reflexive mind to its absolute logical end-point: allowing everything to fall under the gaze of the critical mind, accepting profound Socratic ignorance, confronted with the existential disorientation of having learned that much of the ancient knowledge of nature and self was deeply flawed (despite its efforts to know the truth), is there anything, he asks, we can know with absolute certainty? At this level of extreme reflexivity, doubt itself self-undermining; “doubt requires certainty” as Wittgenstein would put it centuries later (himself a very “horizontal” thinker, after his break from the Anglo-American “Analytical” tradition of philosophy towards the end of his life[iii]).
At the very beginning of modern philosophy, that is, we see the end of modernity itself, and in this we see as well the absolute limit to the Axial Mind become clear, as in Descartes, when it falls into the trap of its own self-created schizoid system of thinking (it was R.D. Laing who discerned this structure in Descartes very clearly[iv]). When axiality is allowed to become total, when it pushes itself to this extreme limit, we see, again, the return of the repressed mythopoeic mode of absorptive human consciousness. European philosophy from this point (Descartes) onward has struggled with this potential return to neo-archaism, the return of the repressed core of human consciousness. It has tried ever since to escape this hermeneutic circle, or to at least adjust to it. Ever since Modernity begins, with its founding myths of abstract rationality (which is an attempt to find a measure of safe, controlled distance from the archaic), there was a dialectic of opposition to it—an alternative tradition seeking to explore the unexplored possibility of horizontal modes of human consciousness. The story of this alternative tradition is told, for example, by Deleuze in his monograph studies of various thinkers and writers (many of them “philosophers” in the academic sense)—the philosophers of “immanence” as he calls them (reversing the title of “prince” of immanence for Spinoza). Deleuze’s list is telling: Spinoza (not Descartes); Leibniz (not Kant); Hume (not Locke); Nietzsche (not Hegel)…
What has troubled philosophy since Kant, as was suggested above, is the position of Hegel with respect to these questions. Thinking about how this has played out in the recent history of philosophy, we have, on the somewhat extreme end, Deleuze who thinks Hegel is a deeply problematic thinker, that he ended up distorting or falsifying existential movement (“the being of becoming” to use a Nietzschean phrase) as conceived in philosophy. To Hegel, Deleuze offers the criticisms of a Nietzsche, who, Deleuze thinks, sought to disclose the “subterranean” dimension of thought, where is found authentic (or real)existential movement.
What Deleuze realized is that Nietzsche rejects transcendence for immanence, looking for the somatic basis of thought, the depth-dimension of thought as a somatic phenomenon, a symptom of “subterranean” forces (if not also having the power to be their cause). Hence Nietzsche’s style of writing as a kind of court jester, a wearer of masks, a “player” of concepts. Perhaps in this connection we should re-phrase the title of Nietzsche’s first, break-out book: it should really be “the birth of philosophy out of the spirit of music” in light of his somatic diagnosis of the forces overtaking Socrates in the opening passages of Twilight of the Idols. Reason, Nietzsche writes, became tyrannical with Socrates because it was employed as a means of keeping at bay the instinctual forces of human nature that threatened to burst through the desperate social structures holding them back. Nietzsche saw the Greeks of Socrates’ time as already in a state of cultural and moral decline, exhausted, and grasping for the glory days of past triumphs—an age of decadence. As Athens declined in influence and power, this social and cultural decline simultaneously expressed itself in a kind of frenzy for the rational, a desperate attempt to regain decisive self-control. Their loss of regional control was at the same time sensed viscerally (at the level of the social unconscious we could say) as a loss of control tout court. No longer able to hold power over others, the Athenians became fascinated and then obsessed with maintaining it over themselves, imposing on themselves what they could no longer impose on others. Finally, we had the last act of this for the Greeks as a whole in Alexander and his world-conquering pursuits (to the death), after which the Greeks are supplanted by the Romans.
Working quite against (in many ways) Deleuze’s witheringly critical view of Hegel (or at least of Hegelian thought) we have the likes of contemporary philosophers such as Žižek who see in Hegel a kind of unfinished project—or at least one that could only resume in the wake of Marx and psychoanalysis. The fundamental insight of Žižek, I think, is that Hegel’s central idea (the Dialectic) is simultaneously psychoanalytic and ontological. Yet, the fundamental problem of modernity itself seems to still remain here—as Žižek puts is, it’s the residual problem of the “transcendental horizon”, the problem of escaping the hermeneutic circle of thought and being within which philosophy since at least Descartes has been pathologically trapped. Or so it would seem. I will return to this problem again in a moment, and look at it from the point of view of axial consciousness, and the dimensions of vertical and horizontal consciousness; but before we do that, we should point out a couple of very important, indeed, salient, insights Žižek has taken from Hegel (notwithstanding Deleuze’s critique).
The first has to do with the theory of the “subject” or of subjectivity. The insight is very simple, and it is something we can see as psychoanalytic—something about the way we encounter ourselves. It is simply that there is no essential core to what we “are”—that the “core” is just the gap between self/other. The gap constitutes subjectivity, so that, even to myself, I am an “other”. Subject/object are not just categories of thought; even more paradoxically, it’s not that thought is only on the subjective side—it, too, is already an object in itself. Lacan’s formula was that “the substance (of self) is already subject, before it is substance”. This is the way Hegel’s dialectic works, and I believe that what Hegel really discovered was a kind of movement or current within axial consciousness in which it struggles with its archaic-somatic origins. Consciousness unfolds in a series of stages or moments, according to Hegel. But the traditional understanding of this system of dialectical stages gets it wrong, as Žižek and others have pointed out: it isn’t that we have a neat succession of three moments, the thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Rather, Hegel really shows that already at the first moment we have, implicit in it, the “antithesis”—the negation of the thesis. And at the second moment we have the negative core of the first moment rendered explicit. For example, Hegel’s development of the concept of “master” shows that a master can only be a master by depending upon the slave, so that the master, as master, is already enslaved—yet at first the one appears to be outside of, and independent, of the other.
The second moment is already “inside” the first. And the third, the “synthesis”, is the recognition of the inextricable unity between the two—how they are mutually dependent, or better: how one is internal to the other, before they appear to be externally related in opposition. Now, what I think Žižek himself is trying to show is that there are (and can be) no “higher” stages, no “arborescence” in the Hegelian dialectic, just successive negations. In other words, though Hegel does at times appear to try to “verticalize” the dialectic (and this is the transcendent/religious interpretation of Hegel that Žižek and other Marxist-leftists resist), it is, at its core, a purely horizontal movement of a series of differences internal to each other, a kind of Moebius logic of concepts[v]. The insight of Žižek here, finally is just this: that the subject is the substance of this dialectic, and the substance of reality itself is already this subjectivity, before it is “substance”.
With this we move to the second of Žižek’s key insights into Hegel’s philosophy: Hegel’s dialectic in fact constitutes a profound reply to Kant, that Kant’s own insight into what he called the “antinomies of reason” was not about the limitations of mere human knowledge—but that the antinomies of reason are themselves ontological. The dialectical ontology of reality precedes and conditions human reason, which in turn entails the antinomies as an ontological implication. In other words, what Hegel realized, says Žižek, was that no conclusive answer can be found to questions about the finitude (or not) of the universe, or questions about a first cosmological moment or “prime mover” (God), and so on—questions that seek to know what is, effectively, of the order of the infinite—because reality is itself incomplete, which is to say that it is always caught in the act of coming-to-be. Subjectivity is also of this order. Reason is antinomic because that’s the way things are: radically indeterminate, incomplete, let unspecified. The proper response, therefore, to such transcendent questions is that “it isn’t finished yet, ask me later”—and so the existence of God, the origins of the universe, etc. are questions that try illegitimately to force what is fundamentally open and processual into the Procrustean bed of the already-complete and final. Hegel tries to think this openness and indeterminacy as such, without trying to force it to conform to static conceptual categories. In this way we see that the lesson of Žižek’s interpretations of Hegel is that Hegel was creating a philosophy adequate to the reality of this indeterminacy and incompleteness—a language of incompleteness. Or what is perhaps a more accurate analogy: Hegel was writing the musical score of reality itself, finding its grammar and syntax. The only trouble is—and was this not a key point of contention within so-called “post-modernity”—that this would seem to defeat the purpose: because the change is of a second-order: change changes. All “grammar” would seem to reproduce the quixotic attempt to capture or stabilize what Nietzsche calls “being of becoming.” Thus, Hegel demonstrates the ceaseless anxiety and inner tensions of the Axial Mind itself, as it recognizes its own impossibility. Yet the allure of Hegel’s all-encompassing logic is hard to shake.
We see that there is something today resisting the vertical dimension of axial consciousness; we see this in Žižek’s Hegelian insights and indeed, in much of Žižek’s own thinking. Something, at any rate, very much in the direction of the horizontal, and away from the vertical. What is clear is that we are moving now outside of the orbit of the modern vs. the postmodern (for indeed, we were never modern to begin with): we are forced now to confront the return of the mythopoeic past as a kind of ancient and archaic future come crashing down into the present. Never taking seriously the category of “infinite knowledge” (except for that Being we no longer seem to believe in), we realize that now, it is the only category of knowledge that remains both viable and unexplored, sadly having been encased in centuries of abstraction and idolatry. Which is to say: we have no categories for what thinking and being is, at the very end of the “Axial Age.” Indeed, does the sudden appearance of this wholly new and unexplored category (in this our age of the collapse of dichotomies) not announce the first moment of an apocalypse—a revelation of some as-yet unknown future age of consciousness we only can see, darkly, with the eyes of our fictions, our myths … our dream-eyes? Must we not, then, suspend the scholarly in order to see with the eyes of an art, a new art, in order to write a new fiction of concepts that might bring this future into the past (for all philosophy comes too late)?
NOTES
[i] M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. R. Taft (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1997),p. 30.
[ii] The philosophically inclined theoretical physicist Lee Smolin recounts this possibility in many of his works. See esp. his Time Reborn (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
[iii] See Morris Berman’s brilliant study Wandering God (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000] of the question of the horizontal as a largely unknown and unexplored mode of human consciousness, and how this alternative has been a kind of shadow following Modernity since its inception, often being suppressed. Wandering God is the last book in his “consciousness” trilogy, all three volumes of which have very deeply influenced my own thinking.
[iv] See Berman’s discussion in The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981).
[v] This was likely what fascinated Lacan when he attended Kojève’s famous lectures on Hegel in the 1930s, which exerted a profound influence on the young psychoanalyst (and we know of Lacan’s obsession, towards the end of his life, with the mathematics of surfaces, topology).
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