Why an ethics to be used by philosophers

1

Why do philosopher need to use ethics? By Franois LaruelleTranslated by Marjorie Gracieuse, Nicola Rubczak, and Anthony Paul SmithThe immanent condition of this ethicsWhy should we safeguard philosophy and put it under the control of an ethics, in so far as philosophy already provides by right an ethics that seems to be self-sufficient to limit philosophy from within? What kind of contortion can we undertake to solve this problem?In order to rigorously tackle such a problem without falling into a bad indetermination, one needs a relatively closed place, that is to say a problematic; an intimate theoretical enclosure with its axioms, in which the elaboration of an ethics imposes itself as ethical exigency. If this exigency, which is of a scientific origin, is not fulfilled, the theoretical posture would be assumed to be sufficient to solve all ethical problems, but we would not know why we are beings of knowledge, and to what finality that would respond. This auto-exigency forces us to return to man instead of going back to the world or to nature, for these two are far too vast and indeterminate as enclosures -- the same goes for philosophy, which is the most vast and self-englobing instance that cannot bear a secondary ethics like that we seek. Kant would have said that this enclosure is formally the fact; the factum of practical reason or judgment, and that materially the judgment of good will spring collective consciousness. We define this ethical place or this ethical topos differently than Kant; furthermore not rationally, and therefore differently than philosophy. We define this place by man, not as rational being or rational fact but as generic, Generic Man or PM or still Ordinary Man.It will be claimed that philosophy already defends humans and that this ethics we are looking for is useless. But this is not the case, because philosophy defends ends foreign to humans, of norms and values and cosmic orders; it has a disciplinary function of education, of re-education and authoritarian taming as a way to submit humans to the law, but not to defend humans. Philosophy has a function as a calling at best, and at worst it is an interpellation or a mere insertion of the human within the cosmos; a function of control and over-securing of even the most oppressive and transcendent communities. Amongst recent philosophers, Heidegger and Badiou are good examples of this violence, emanating from good will: the first by his Nazifying interpretation of ontology; the second by his Maoifying interpretation of philosophy. What can man, reduced to his generic being, demand of himself and of his acts in the world? Should he obey reason or philosophy; nature or duty; the Law or the divine order of creatures? Certainly not; we have suspended all this; for us this is no more than means and materials, local materials, without finalities, just simple means allowing us to formulate this generic-oriented ethics. We are first and foremost asking what kind of imperative (we are not talking about the categorical imperative) must philosophy answer and obey including the morals that it produces? As Generic Man what can we ask of philosophy? And what is philosophy, and what can philosophy do when it is just the correlate of Generic Man and no longer the place within which man is situated, encircled, and implanted? Man is the true place of ethics, not philosophy in despite of or because of its auto-englobing character. Neither philosophy nor the world of which it is the servant, represent for us the constitutive condition for human existence, its being-in-the-world but just an occasion of this existence, an occasion which claims to be its condition. Because the elaboration of ethics is an ethical exigency, we should go back, and this is the new imperative, beyond the place, or the situation, or the condition of man within the world, being-in-the-world being itself defined in a Greek or Christian way (Scheler) or existentially definitions more or less tainted by original sin, we must come back to the relation between Generic Man with the world, this world that he transforms rather than inhabiting. We see the difference, it is no longer a question of transcending towards the world, but to find a way of transcending proper to humans and which pierce the horizon of the world without being a calling or a divine commandment like in Levinas. The generic transcending seems to be situated between the limits posited by Heidegger and Levinas, more than the world, less than God. Maybe this generic transcending is the product of what we call the superposition of the Being-in-the-world and of the One-for-the-Other? This ethics would no longer be theological or providential, it would not be empirico-transcendental (as in Kant and Marx and so on), this ethics, concentrates evil in the sole world as such which is the humans forced occasional place, secondary residence, not principle. So our concept of the world is of a gnostic type or spirit (the malevolent God and his world-creation is a failure, a failure where humans do not have an essence, but just a forced existence, neither Jewish nor Greek), and the solution is of the Marxist type (it is the condition to transform the world rather than interpret it). Generic Man is the man as non-acting or who the man who does not re-act as a way to act, a man for whom a non-acting acts by the world, it is a man capable under-determining this action of the world by his non-acting which is in fact his proper way of acting. The objective defence of humans against the oppression of the philosophical world and against his God-submitted state is not necessarily self-defence, but it is only thing that is demanded in an imperative way in all man as generic or ordinary man. Nothing guarantees the success of this wait nor the precise hope which are implied in this ethics. This exigency, the individual is not sure of its effective existence or of its accomplishment but one demands that the coming into being of this ethics at least as virtual, that is not sufficient and not actual as Kant would qualify it as a fact of reason 1. A better struggle against historys mistreatment of humans and that philosophy failed to defend, it is an ethics of non-violence or of non-violent action in so far as this ethics is not an aggressive ethics but an ethics of defence and resistance. An ethics of the universal defence of the human and an ethics of struggle against the proto-affectivity of oppression and against the worlds harassment (this is the gnostic position of the ethical problem). 2. A better analysis of the essence of philosophy which does not know itself. Philosophy and its morals are moving within a horizon or a milieu whose limits are undetermined. Philosophys dominant authority has not been sufficiently analysed in its double or twofold structure (affirmation/re-affirmation or re-assurance) but also of its specular doublets. Philosophy merges with the macroscopic style which is one of doublets. Metaphysical cosmology and theology constitute a macroscopic ontology, whose determinism and realism do not leave room for an ethics. In a renewed and contemporary epistemological perspective, it can no longer be a question of rational fact; because the so-called facts are complex phenomena, they are heterogenous and constructed, even derivative, because they obey a rationality which is for us more quantic than Newtonian. 3. It is a question of emancipating philosophy not from all kinds of models, but to make of its model simple means, and to emancipate it from its mathematical legislating background. Its macroscopic and specular prejudices are the the essence of morality (Nietzsche) and the morality of customs which is refined and rendered subtle. These prejudices are the essence of metaphysics, a metaphysics that is comforted by the mathematical model which lies underneath philosophy. Even when philosophy deals with non-mathematical objects, the mathematical model that is in the background hinders its emancipation and argumentation. The emancipation of philosophy will imply a physical matrix and an algebraical matrix and not a massively arithmetic or geometric matrix. Even if this new matrix necessarily includes a mathematical ingredient it will not be a simple calculation or an empirical evaluation of pathological pleasures. It will not be a rational calculation of the laws nor of the effects according to the law. The quantic formalism does not confront or does not oppose the subject and the Law. It does not deduce the subject-body from its formal regulation, but it transforms the macroscopic actions and their schematism into microscopic actions which are no longer mixtures but, this is altogether different, intertwinings.4. An active ethics of the transformation of the world and history rather than a reactive ethics that would just be a double of morality and that would proceed by limitation and reaction. By widening and displacing the Nietzschean notion of reactive thought, I will say that philosophical ethics are active only on the mechanical mode which is itself reactive and entails a reflex. But they do not submit their reaction to a condition of non-acting or passivity which alone can justify an action of reaction or an active and just reaction. I redistribute the separability and the non-separability of the unitary bloc by introducing the non-acting proper to radical immanence. The acting can no longer be conditioned by an external stimulus that it would itself reflect into itself, but it is from this point of view petrified rather than passivity. And yet it will generate immediately an action of reaction against occasional cause, so we can say that it reacts but without interiorising reflexively the stimulus. A non-acting, obviously, cannot oppose itself to an occasional cause, but it draws from here a clone that is relatively independent from its material occasional origin and that is conditioned by its formal origin. It is in the occasional clone that everything happens and not in the stimulus which remains what it is. 5. An ethics of creation rather than an ethics rational control, of invention rather than of inventory, of examination and verification, hence it is an ethics of transformation as the invention of new objects and not as a speculative knowledge or as a logico-mathemtical deduction. The generic model (Generic Man) that we oppose to the dialectical model is somehow the common, the ordinary, the human kind reduced to its kernel -- but which kernel? Ethically, it is the last possible bastion possible, the one whereby we ensure the defence of backs to the wall, and ensure that we will have to accept great conceptual sacrifices for this defence. Theoretically it is the place of thought and of ethics, a place which for us, as we have said, a place that occupies the general will, of the rational factum, of Dasein and all the Ideas of this type. But this kernel is not a metaphysical unity; it is not an essence, that one would have obtained that one would have obtained by humanistic covering concepts, of the subject and the object, I will say that the element of the generic is a unilateral complementary of a vector and of a partial object or a clone. I will have to explain this. Generic man is natural or physical the way Feuerbach would have it, but this man is definitely too close to Hegelian dialectics and to an overly classical physics. It is really a question of conjugating a philosophical data, that is of the moral kind, and a physical datum of a modern, non-Newtonian kind, that is quantic. We know that the matrixes are the forms of algebraic treatment for dualities of conjugated variables. We define the generic matrix by two operations and by the produced result. 1. We need a conjugation or a multiplication of the terms or opposed data, so we need a conjugation that is no longer done in a mirroring way, neither thanks to dialogical nor topological doublets or twistings. It is no longer a question of macroscopic terms that would be logically opposed, for example like in Hegel where being is opposed to nothingness, but the terms are now treated like properties or variables of the Generic Man and depend retroactively on a series of operations. 2. One requires the indexation of the products of these variables that are conjugated on an algebraic number, imaginary or complex number, a number specific to quantic thought (square root -1 or the quarter circle), instead of an indexing that would be submitted to a metaphysical negation. The motor of the generic is algebraic and not at all metaphysical, because it is the imaginary number, neither nothing nor negation, and we must not forget that what is in question here is the fact that there is, in generic man, a non-dialectical weaving of a physical model of man and of his philosophical model. 3. The global effect of this production of knowledge is Generic Man. This knowledge has a special status, it is not a reflection nor a verification (Kant), I will say that it is a clone constituted from the material of these two models that we have used as data. A clone that was produced by the imaginary number. Here there is no vicious circle of Generic Man as if the latter could know himself or would be operating his self defence, but rather the imaginary number under-determines knowledge as the clone that it produces. Now the knowledge produced contains in reality two types of object, each datum can and must be read in two ways. Not as Being and beings, not as flows and partial objects of desiring machines, as it is not a difference whose reversibility would be final and dominating, but rather an irreversible or unilateral difference. Here we have to deal with, on the one hand, vectorial phenomenon, phenomenon of superposition, or undulatory experience, that is of lived and sensible materiality, and on the other hand, we have to deal with phenomena that are said to be particulate of quartile objects, whose double transcendence of corpuscular origin has been reduced. The old opposites, object and subject, being and nothingness, are not without logical relations, without formal transcendental or dialectical relation, but these entities now form complementarities but they are unilateral, semi-analytic and semi-synthetic complentarities. So on the one hand we have we have lived experiences as vectors that can be added to one another and on the other hand we have particles of concepts or clones which are guided or directed by these vectors that accompany them. Our Dasein does not contain a relatively unilateral ontico-ontological difference but ultimately a difference related to the presupposition of a transcendence in itself, which is nothing else but the transcendence of philosophy. These unilateral dualities represent a debasement, a downfall and a simplification with respect to the result, that is to knowledge. That would be the knowledge of philosophical dialectics, whether it be idealistic or materialist and which would be redoubled. One must distinguish between the specular double that is always excessive and sufficient for philosophical speculation and the particulate or the clone produced by the generic matrix which is on the contrary a debasement of philosophy. Regarding the imaginary number we will not say that it gives place to a dialectic deprived of aufhebung, but it generates an inclination and a debasement which reduces the opposite terms to vectors or clones and not to dialectical essentials. The dialectics which use macroscopic terms that were at the same time self-negating, these dialectics which functioned with a macroscopic nothingness, are submitted to a vectorialising downfall. It falls into the undetermined being of the vector, even though the vector is by itself an insurrectional drive. The properties of the GM and their knowledge are indexed or oriented quantically and this is what makes their generic character. It is a matrix whose style is algebraic and this matrix is used is used in quantum theory but it is not inclined nor oriented towards, by or for humans; it is not provided with what we could call the generic clinamen and not a cosmological clinamen. A clinamen that is obviously not atomist, but itself human or generic and which make moral concepts fall or be deviated like atoms. Hence the difficulty regarding determining the non-dialectical generic character of humans in a certain manner.

Procedure of the generic imperative as oraxiomThe axiom of man as rational animal can be interpreted according to classical or Newtonian physics as a rational fact which associates two predicates for one and the same subject as in Kant, but it can also be interpreted according to contemporary physics, that is to say quantum physics, within a matrix that associates two conjugated variables, animal and rational as two random properties of the GM=X. In spontaneous philosophy, the subject is commutable with the predicates and this is twofold because rational animal reflects itself within itself and reflects each term in the other, each term being a double transcendence. In a more complete analysis of philosophy as a system of doublets, man is the subject=X who is no longer commutable with his predicates (physical being or animal, rational being). The GM is of the quantic nature of a vectorial phenomenon, undulatory or interfering; it is a state of vectors which is additionable or superposed. These two possible products are no longer equal, but they are non-commutable according to the order of the factors. In this context, in order to record the fundamental character of the order of these properties, an non-commutable order, I will say that to a vectorial phenomenon, like the one we have here with GM, one cannot attribute but we know that man is taken either as animal or as rational and these two properties do not belong to the same object. I want to put an end to this metaphysical axiom and to axioms of the same kind, such as political animal or religious animal because these axioms posit a simple identity of man. The extension of indetermination in the sense of Heisenberg should prevent us from positing these kinds of axioms, man in the generic sense is the state of superposition or interference of all its possible predicates. We have moved from the axiomatic, philosophic-rational positioning of man towards a position that I call or-axiomatic (oraxiom = portmanteau which designates a superposition of the axiom and the oracle of the subject, it is the axiom-subject or the subject-axiom), we have an equation between GM and his acts, but this equation can only be resolved in a probable way. When one understands GM in this way, that is GM=X, this equality is no longer the foreclosed object of an absolute axiom, but it is no longer deprived of axiomatic aspects for it has anaxiomatic aspects (in the sense that thinking in this matter or vectorially enacts an uprising, a vectorial insurrection which is the origin of thought). Man is anaxiomatic, not absolutely, but radically. Any kind of statement that expresses GM is the face or the noematic clone, a noema which is brought about by the flux of the One and which is unifacial if is grasped from the point of the wave. Therefore all that is reduced or simplified, that is deprived of double transcendence, but not of all transcendence, is said to be generic. In fact it is constituted by a simplified philosophical material and bears the form of a unilateral duality. The person is this simple or simplified transcendence of man, the mask or the specific singularity to human kind, its unifaciality or type of universality. Categorical and generic imperativesOne must distinguish in a way which does not encounter the Kantian classification of imperatives, which is to say the radical or generic imperatives and the absolute categorical imperative, sufficient or philosophical in general. Radical does not mean absolute, a radical thought descends towards the root which, here is the imaginary number or the quarter-circle that is opposed to overtaking philosophy. The imperatives of classical infinite Reason are absolute or sufficient because they are at once without place, and with an infinite locality or a locality that dissolves itself within the infinite, within divine intellect or philosophical Reason, that is to say a placeless place, a reason that is situated nowhere and that is forced to redouble itself in order to attempt to close itself as if it would be possible for it to localise itself with the infinite. In the quantic the imaginary number defines a transfinite locality, without redouble, but this is not the bad transcendent finitude that the philosophies of this infinite have criticised. Even the Kantian categorical imperative expresses the absolute fact of finite reason, that is an infinite finitude which determines will or action through a free act. Radical, however, implies an intrinsic and generic limitation of this factum (that is, a factum that possesses a true locality) but universal (that is for instantiating the world) and necessary but non-sufficient.The radical commandments also require a kind of universality and necessity of action. But they are no longer determined in the rational, classical way. Generic universality is under-determined or humans-inclined, that is referred to man. As generic an imperative is universal but only in so far as it compels the humans as ordinary humans in the world or outside of the world. It is universal for all for all the possible worlds, even extra-terrestrial worlds, but it addresses individuals only in-the-last-instance or under-determined as cloned (Stranger-)subjects. The generic is the common or the ordinary but liberated from the form of consciousness or reason, it is a radical way to recognise ordinary man instead of the exception or the institutionally formatted individual. If this imperative addresses collective consciousness it is to demand that this consciousness itself creates the Stranger-subject and dedicates itself to the defence of the human rather than to essentialist values. A generic imperative is not categorical, it is in fact from a limited necessity, neither absolute nor auto-positional because it is under the condition of an occasion whose intervention is necessary. As quantic, it cannot self-determine as being absolutely necessary or categorical in the classical, rational way. The good will must be replaced by the exigency of the defence of the humans, it is no longer a moral category or a category that would refer to Good and Evil, but an ethics that is only an exigency for human kind. Its result is hoped for, it is exigible, but by a non-sufficient subject necessary or under occasional necessity. From ethical judgment to ethical vectorHow do we distinguish concretely a Kantian moral act and an ethical generic act, between a factum and a vector or clone? An ethical action according to Kantian rationality, is a self-posited act closed onto its finitude, a corpuscular act or an act unto itself and maybe a kind of schematism between the imperative and its materials, therefore it is an act of the faculty of the imagination (the typical imagination). The quantic context and no longer the logico-rationalist context manifest itself by the exercise of the imagination , but not transcendent and a forteriori not psychological imagination. This imagination is algebraical, it is linked to the imaginary number and this imaginary number is linked to all lived and undulatory experience which accompany the clones of ethical act, bending the the matrix towards humans in-the-last-instance. This imaginary index is in fact a transcending (a transcending that is not ex nihilo but ex humano) but that is not as complete or as redoubled as that of a philosophical act. It is a transcending that is withdrawn or reserved, it is an ascending which is not redouble itself into a trans-ascending and which does not radically emerge from an ego (M. Henry), neither from a nothingness, but it is rather an ascending of a radical insurrection which takes place even-before the ego itself. Its immediate effect consists in lowering the double transcendence of God and the Law. It deploys itself apparently as a moral act, but without going towards the same term or goal. In fact, it itself continues in spite of the obstacles and does not close onto itself. It erodes the supposed identity of acts and of moral principles. Here we can think of the Bergsonian distinction between closed morality and open morality, but this distinction is now radicalised. GM is therefore neither a rational fact nor its dispersion or dissemination, but it is an immanental field superposed vectors, of vectorial repetitions, of undulatory uprisings, of insurrectional acts. The imperativity resolves itself in unconditioned insurrection that remains occasionally and vectorially open. One must distinguish between the condition and the occasion and the philosophical confusion is unitary, vicious and deterministic (are we right to revolt? The reason is only an occasion to revolt, but not the insurrectional drive).Insurrection is therefore a lived experience, that is a vector, always additioned or superposed with itself, but it is also an eroding act or a clone as a quartial object which never closes onto itself as an autonomous subject=1, or as full act or macroscopic act, because it is a quartial act. The problematic of representation and perception presupposes that an insurrectional act has nothingness or the void as its condition but not only as its occasion but not the occasion of physics (it is better to will nothingness than to will nothing, as Nietzsche puts it),. Insurrection is always outside of all representation, it is not more problematic or less surprising than creation ex nihilo or the subtraction by the void. The radical origin of things, as Leibniz would have it, is insurrectional. The vectorial insurrection is not the beginning or the first but the pre-premier of the act of beginning. It is the minimum possible exigency or ultimate imperativity, it is a pre-premiere ultimatum. And this ultimatum is not here a voluntary decision that is forever condemned to take a step back, or to negotiate, or to kill, but never to defend. Generic ethics cannot be judged by its effects or taken to be responsible for its consequences, contrary to the macroscopic thematic of the event which falls into dialectical aporia of the conditioned/unconditioned act. It is a reduction and a simplification of any kind of philosophical doublet, GM is not a subject, but a semi-subject or even a quarter-subject but is always capable of being, if not repeated, thrown again. The vector, which is the real, escapes the data of the always specular philosophical situation, it is a remainder or residue which resists reduction, but which is beyond itself and prolongs itself by a creative repetition, apparently object, it is the simulation of a return towards the original state of vortex. Philosophical or moral formalism, and generic or ethical formalismPhilosophical moralities are differential combinations, unitary and mixed dualities, for example the Good-saying/Good-doing/Good-acting, etc., which since Plato developed within the field of double transcendence and of its doublets. Generic ethics on the contrary must be referred to these moralities that are its objects, it formalises them to a supplementary degree, in the sense that these differences or mixtures are now objectifiable and materialisable under another form. Thanks to, on the one hand, a simplified algebra compared to classical reason and deterministic physics, and on the other hand, thanks to a neutralised lived experience that cannot be rejected as being sensible or pathological (Kant). It is a superior formalisation that traces the limits of any kind of philosophical morality, the latter being always already included within it, but as simple material for a new kind of non classical objectification. This materialising and objectifying formalisation of ontico-ontological Difference produces new acts and therefore an ethical but generic subject, these acts are remarkable by their non-separability of contraries, by their superposition and their intricating quartial objects. The Kantian logico-transcendental formalism or the logic of moral Law was the first degree, of course, necessary for ethical formalisation, but the latter is now followed by a supplementary degree in order to reach beyond the individual and beyond the Platonic or Kantian Idea, the plane of real man, as a way to abandon the narrow formalism of logical rationality. The Kantian formalisation of morality, however great it was, suffered from the limitations linked to pure Reason and it is now forced to change its content, a content that Kant reduced to a state that is beyond physics. In the Kantian formula of morality, science, and the algorithmic model were secondary or just a means of illustrating moral schematism. Here science becomes a crucial marker that allows us to reach an ethical real in its rigorous indetermination. This real characterises GM, who is now more prepared to elaborate a more rigorous defence. In fact we need more formalism conforming with the state of contemporary science, but we need less rigourism, for the lived experience can now be re-integrated under a neutralised form, generically generalised and not reduced to the bare respect of duty. This new formalism is of a second order and not of a first order, it is a set of symbolic-terms which imply at the same time lived experiences and which reduce to the state of particles the macroscopic morality, they no longer designate empirical states but simply a use of these states and the procedures of ethical philosophy. These are concrete rules for the direction and use of philosophy, but not a meta-morality rather a non-morality.