In pursuing a ‘primary philosophy’, I specify two paths that are untenable:
[size=85]A truly presuppositionless philosophy, a ‘primary philosophy’, must begin in such an infinite differentiation of pure Negativity, for the way is closed via the apprehension of pure Being by infinite reflection or eidesis, [Kierkegaard’s dismantling of the Hegelian dialectic through an ironic submission of the dialectic to the dialectic reveals the impossible or ‘ineffable’ Being whose Loss no power of the human intellect can account for and recover through either the philosophical synthesis of logos or the monistic synthesis of the subject viz. the ‘modality of the knower’ prompted by the apophatic or objective negation of the known. Or. as Eriugena tells us, following Dionysus and Plotinus: “Gregory of Nyssa and Eriugena both affirm that no created essence can define itself and the limits of its own nature by itself, even endowed with reason and intellect as man is.”] as it is equally closed to us via an infinite abstraction of the Fichtean ego in pure thought or noesis, for the faculty of Reason is not independent from language, [Hamann’s primary thesis in his Metacritique of Reason is just that: language and reason are inseparably bound up in one symbolic activity characterizing the general phenomenon of human intelligence.] such that no object of noesis might be obtained that is not limited to the symbolic registers instantiated by language, ie. no infinitely abstracted recursion from thought’s ideatum.
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^ To this later one, characteristic of transcendental idealism, especially German idealism, and all philosophy for which Reason exists as a privileged independent faculty, I added significant notes, arguing against both the rationalists and the Kantians who attacked them, as well as arguing against the anti-Kantians who attacked Kant, like Schiller:
[ Freedom, the ‘first principle’, according to Schelling, of a new philosophy for which the question of the Good is primary to any ontology, that is, primary to any question of the True, is a principle shielded within the dark prematutinal longing of Sehnsucht whose sovereign movement, as objectless poros, instigating the birth of the drive toward knowledge which proves itself coincident with the more general drive to give birth itself, that is, the procreative drive or flight of Eros within the heart of all organic life in its emergence from unthinking matter to an ascendant bent toward the Good,- toward that in whose enunciation the object of thought rests upon the very bulwark to the fury of Nature in which God’s polynomous nullity calls to the nullified anonymity of man, and that in which the aporia of language makes itself known in the attempt to name the very nameless longing to sequester from the chain of causes some initiatory motive, to conquer the elements and bring into existence, to give form, and to create, which it itself is,- always exceeds its productive results, remaining forever unbound to them and unrestricted by them,- a principle, in Spinozist vocabulary, whose ideatum always exceeds its idea, and whose activity or conatus can therefor never be subsumed by that which it engenders, leaving open no possibility of fatally abstracting the former from the later. As Plato-Socrates explains this aporia in the Phaedrus, for philosophy to love and desire Wisdom, it must know that Wisdom is worthy of being loved and desired, that it is Good; yet, in order to recognize Wisdom as Good, philosophy must already know what the Good is, that is, philosophy must already be wise. Totality would exert itself precisely by the subsumption, to the domain of the True, of the excess or ‘remainder’ latent in all questioning of the incomprehensible ground of the first principle, a principle upon which all discourses are founded that cannot itself be founded, and leaves therefor all discourse of the Good separated from the former domain by an ‘unsurpassable gulf’. The irremediable distance of the Good provokes the errant muse of that third member of the Platonic triad to wander the unclaimed space between these two domains, namely the space of the Beautiful, which Kant understood in terms of the aesthetic faculty and its access to the appercepted unity of the supersensible ground of Nature, (Noting Donelan, in “Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic: Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, and the Systemprogramm Fragment”, we see that the German idealists, seeking to overcome the Kantian system and following Hegel’s lead, saw in this unity of the supersensible ground of Nature the basis of a new self-postulating ethics reliant upon a ‘first idea’, namely the presentation of the self to itself in absolute freedom,- the self, not as an already existent subjectivity attempting to contemplate itself, but the self presented to itself imaginatively, originating in no act of a creative subject, but originating in itself as the very act, by which such self-consciousness might precede all other deductions of a priori knowledge, constituting an intuition of the aesthetic faculty satisfying, in a reversal of terms in the series of conceptual events from which Kant’s self-consciousness emerges in recognition of the Grund of Nature as its appercepted unity, the condition of Kant’s own ‘supersensible unity’.) for by this same faculty, man experiences a higher species of pleasure in the movement of the Will toward the True, in the movement from the formless anarchy of freedom toward the contained genius of Form, from the temporal to the eternal, and in all such diversions by which the categorical imperative might find the beginnings of its inescapable moral compulsion. However, we see that Kant is simply enumerating the movement of Eros in several assumed guises and echoing Franz von Baader’s identification of the procreative drive with the emergence of the drive to knowledge such that, just as the instinctive movement of Eros toward its object falls to the psychoanalytic critique as merely a denial of Thanatos, or its own incomprehensible ground, we find in the Kantian conceptualization of the Beautiful only a kind of philosophizing repetition of the very same unconscious forces we had deigned to explicate in taking up the question of Reason’s tentative independence from the psychical reality of human life, from history and language, etc., and certainly nothing of their resolution or annulment,- an order of abstract knowledge that further entrenches the ‘transcendental illusion’ opposing the Intellect to a modality of sensation that is at the same time concealed in Nature’s play of shadows by a veiled apprehension that requires the Intellect to consolidate and bind multiplicity into unity so as to render clear what Nature herself cannot, namely the Pleasure by which the imperative is secured, the heart of the creative impulse animating her entire multitude and excess, (the Plotinian prohodos) thereby paradoxically reinstating the metaphysical gambit in a disclosure of meaning whose limit is once again lost upon the threshold of articulation to the ‘transcendental illusion’, to the inexorable call of the inaugural One and unity of Spirit,- a threshold like that revealed by the approach of death or madness at the nebulous periphery of our thinking which, paraphrasing Saitya B. Das, in “Political Theology of Schelling”, instead of ‘signifying the cessation of life and thought occurring at the end of their possibility’, rather opens up life and thought to the space of ‘the unconditional which defines the tragic condition of mortals as mortals’ by the imposition of an “ineluctable law of necessity” which is also Thought’s very freedom, the ‘uber etwas hinaus wherein the immeasurable abyss of freedom is furtively glimpsed’ in the “eternity of the transient” (or still better formulated, the ‘eternity of the Beginning’, that is, the radical ceaseless interruption of finitude that draws forth all that has not become immanent to itself and ensures the infinite multiplicity and generativity of Nature in Time; see Wirth, “Schelling’s Practice of the Wild”; Extinction, P. 19.) that “suspends the sacrificial foundation” of philosophy through the derivation of a Love whose desire is not lack, but rather a mobilization of the lack intrinsic to the subject’s own nullity against the fixity of repression and the constraint of the egoic self,- a threshold that returns us to ourselves by exhausting the Form into which Thought has poured itself to learn thereby the measure of its own potency,- (by way of Depontenzierung) a threshold that, as Werner Beierwaltes elaborates concerning Plotinus and Proclus’ metaphysics of the One, “presupposes the self-unfolding of the Spirit just as it preserves and annuls it”, introducing a “degree of mediation to the unity of the Spirit”, (Note Tritten, in “Beyond Presence”, P. 49. Spirit cannot be an absolute self-mediation and simultaneously acknowledge its own content as Reason, providing no means by which to comprehend the actuality of existence within the self-positing ideality of Schelling’s negative philosophy.) “for that unity remains conscious of the differentiation of the manifold [i]eide /i through the mediating prohodos even when that differentiation is annulled”, evincing the “reflexivity of the origin that persists within itself, the origin that is reintegrated with itself after enduring the self-unfolding but that still contains within itself the multiplicity and diversity constituted by the prohodos”,- a threshold by which Beauty is herself split, through chorismos and methexis, (Pugh, “Logic and Metaphysics; Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics.”, P. 93.) into her antithesis in the Sublime, calling into question the autonomy of the aesthetic faculty, and therefor, the independence of Reason from the ‘Naturzwecke’ (nature’s reasons) and ‘Naturstaat’ (state of nature) by implying a doubled teleology in which the ends of man, being the perfection of Reason, and the ends of Nature, being the perfection of aesthetic form (Beauty) in the development of organic life, whose pinnacle was reached in the human body, must be somehow conjoined in the ends of the one Good, which would fulfill them both,- something that would seem to require a ‘new mythology’ as ‘a discursive correlative of the intellektuale Anschauung’, (Balfour, in “The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy; Holderlin’s Moment of Truth”.) that is, a new ‘category’ of the mind capable of uniting the sensible with the intelligible and so balancing the disparate fields of theology, myth, history, physics, art, philosophy, and religion, within a singular aim, and for whose production the later, more radical Schelling, turns to art itself, with the production of the art-work standing as just such an all-encompassing category. The promulgators and enthusiasts of late German idealism, accordingly, made no firmer progress in overcoming Kant and repudiating the encroachments of Totality than did the Romantics make progress in silencing the rationalism of their forbears in the boundlessness of Nature and the ‘Infinity’ of Sehnsucht, for whom the Beautiful becomes what Schiller conceives of as a zero-condition between freedom and form, sense and reason, the ‘singularity of ethical truth’ and the ‘multiplicity of natural event’,- (George Kelly, “Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis: Studies in Political Thought”.) “a principle that is simultaneously the root of reality and ideality” (See Manfred Frank, “Schiller’s Aesthetics between Kant and Schelling”.) within whose dialectical extremity the True and the Good share one flesh, through which alone we could make comprehensible, in keeping with the more general system of transcendental idealism, “the formulation that reason encounters itself in the other of reason”; the “absolute identity of the real and ideal, of nature and spirit”, standing as the “necessary presupposition of both relations and their play of oppositions”, and through which alone the Kantian imperative could be dispensed with through the consummating act of Reason,- a supreme act by which the philosopher, equaling the aesthetic force of the poets, both asserts the absolute identity and independence of the rational faculty, subverting the primacy of the Good, and extends the intellection of this faculty across the entire unity of the Ideas, bolstering Beauty as a kind of inductress of human nature and returning us, through this final unification, to Totality. As to the second point raised here concerning the independence of man’s rational faculty, … ]
And then my notes on the impossibility of asserting Reason’s independence as a faculty due to it being conjoined with language.