Thread by @deontologistics

Right, I'm a man of my word, and I'm going to do a thread on Laurelle, transcendental philosophy, and non-philosophy. But, I'm going to put a bit of a narrative and philosophical spin on it. I'm going to talk a bit about ignorance, and what to do with it. TBC in 2021.

So, let's get started with what makes this thread uncomfortable: it involves me providing not merely an admission of the extent of my ignorance on a topic, but a justification of this ignorance. However, this might not mean what you think it means.

Let's get the book keeping out of the way first, and maybe I can dig deeper into the conceptual stuff tomorrow. How well do I know Laruelle's work? Not very well at all. How well do I understand Laruelle's basic ideas? Quite well for someone who's skillfully avoided reading him.

The key word in the last sentence is 'skillfully', because I think that there is an art to such things, and it's an art one has to master if one wants to pursue synoptic projects which implicitly demand reading wide ranges of material. This might be a useful advice for some.

I'm not actually a very fast reader. I digest very quickly, and I'm very good at retaining a gestalt impression of a thinker's position even when certain details escape me. In fact, I've cultivated this gestalt understanding over the years, because it serves me very well.

I like to think I'm especially good getting a feel for a position by sparring with it in open dialogue. This allows me to poke and prod it as if it were a black box, whose contents one slowly builds a mental model of, so that eventually you can anticipate its behaviour.

These little mental models get honed through reading and dialogue until you can ask yourself 'what would a Hegelian (subtype 3b) think about this?' and a reasonably well formed intuition will pop out. However, there are difficulties in engaging people and positions in this way.

On the one hand, it's difficult to approach the person/position with enough charity to actually get a picture of what they think, rather than some convenient caricature. On the other, it's always tempting to impose your model on them even when it conflicts with their behaviour.

On has to be sensitive to those error signals that demonstrate a divergence between your model and the person/people/positions you're mentally simulating (yes, that's a predictive processing reference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictiv…)

This is both a matter of discursive charity, which compels one to build the strongest model compatible with someone's behaviour, and a matter of what we might call skillful ignorance, which is to say an awareness of what one doesn't know that makes one sensitive to error signal.

I've been really getting into the epistemology of ignorance over the last year or two, the premise of which is that ignorance is not the privation of knowledge, but something positive that can be studied on its own terms.

However, when I say 'positive' here that generally doesn't have any normative connotations. In fact, the epistemology of ignorance largely still focuses on it as a sort of epistemic vice, and active resistance to learning information which one should learn. This is important.

But, I think there is also a positive form of ignorance in the normative sense of the word, or that one can cultivate one's ignorance as an epistemic virtue. I think this is the true philosophical meaning of Socrates's claim that he only knows that he knows nothing.

Socrates specialises in knowing what he doesn't know, and it is this that makes him such a potent dialogical force, insofar as he does not ignore potential challenges revealing his errors, but uses these challenges as dialogical pivots, avoiding those areas that can be contested.

That sounds pretty slippery, and we have all no doubt at some point had this thought about Socrates when reading one of Plato's dialogues. Yet I think Socrates is not merely ironic, but often sincere, and this sincerity involves a genuine commitment to the acknowledging error.

It's only by playing the dialogical game for keeps, by fully committing to the dialectical process in which the contradictions implicit in your own position may force you to change it, that you can really play the game for its own sake (i.e., truth): deontologistics.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/tfe…

One way of understanding this sincere, skillful ignorance is as an ability to ask the right questions (and perhaps ask them at the right time). It is a sense not merely of what is relevant to a topic, but more generally what questions *mean* even when one cannot answer them.

It's this understanding that enables one to appreciate negative responses to questions for which one is expecting or has even conjectured a positive response. Going further, the greatest skill is to get responses to questions that tell you to ask better ones: to learn to learn.

So, the question really is: do I know enough about Laruelle's work, or is my ignorance sufficiently skillful? Sufficient for what? Well, I suppose, sufficient to justify pursuing my synoptic project without going away and reading a lot more Laruelle. This is what I have to show.

There are multiple concerns that impact on such a justification, but I'll get one out of the way with immediately: as anyone who has stumbled onto Laruelle knows, not only is his work notoriously awkward to read, but it keeps getting worse as he develops it. This lowers the bar.

Anyone who claims you *must* read some thinker in order to do X has more work to do to justify this demand, the harder it is to get to grips with the relevant thinker. We all inevitably have a list of thinkers we think are simply too much work to bother with. Time is finite.

But, as the Dunning-Krueger effect demonstrates (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E…), the less people know about a topic, the more they are likely to overestimate their own competence. When someone tells you you have to read Hegel, they might understand his relevance better than you.

This type of interaction ("You really must read X if you want to understand Y") is a perennial feature of philosophical circles, and will never ever go away. This doesn't stop it being annoying. The Hegel-Marx axis is particularly bad for making grandiose philological demands.

It must be possible to legitimately reject these demands, for otherwise none of us would get anything done. The sheer vastness of the primary literature, let alone the secondary literature is completely intractable, and choices must be made. How do we make them though?

What are the conditions under which I should take someone seriously when they insist that I should put down the Kant I've been reading and pick up Lacan, especially when Lacan is another one of those thinkers where there's a question about the balance of effort and reward.

Under what conditions do I have no choice but to listen to someone who tells me that I simply must read Laruelle, because I simply cannot understand the flaws in my philosophy, and even the flaws of philosophy as such, without going through the unpleasant exegesis.

If I'm to be sincere, I've got to play the game for keeps, and this means setting a bar that any such challenger can reasonably meet. Here's my response: you have to surprise me first.

The sort of active ignorance I try to cultivate is about susceptibility to such surprises. I have done my best to build an internal model of the Laruellian position that is not especially complicated, but which has served me fairly well in anticipating their responses.

So, the line of justification I will pursue in claiming that my ignorance of Laruelle is perfectly adequate is that I have had many interactions with Laruellians, and even several (interpreted) conversations with Laruelle himself, none of which were in the least surprising.

There is a sole exception, that occurred recently when I began to read Katerina Kolozova's Cut of the Real, which I purchased on the recommendation of Dom Fox: codepoetics.com/blog/tag/cut-o…

My surprise at seeing something interesting done with Laruelle, even if I suspect it could have been done without him, was matched only by the cringe induced by reading his preface, which attempted to borrow terminology from quantum mechanics in a way I was less than enthused by.

So, I can still be surprised, and maybe my justification will finally give out. But before we get there I'm going to explain my limited history with non-philosophy, and unpack my mental model of it for you, in a way that will let you assess for yourself whether the time has come.

I'll get back to this tomorrow, but I want to leave you with exhibit A. Back before the character limit on twitter expanded, I won a competition to win a copy of Philosophies of Difference by providing the best explanation of non-philosophy in a tweet:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/447032735421698049?s=20

Make of this what you will. I'll return to the more substantive material tomorrow!

Okay, allow me to clear up some misunderandings of what I’m doing before I go any further. If you want to make criticisms of *what* I’m attempting while the attempt is in progress, attach them to this tweet, as I want to separate them from my actual engagement with Laruelle.

I fully intend to decompress my mental model of Laruelle and non-philosophy into this thread, but I don’t want to be perceived as making claims about the origin of this mental model that aren’t true, i.e., that it’s based on deep dive exegesis, because it isn’t.

It's based on experiences (in the sense of Erfahrung), that are hard to evidence (as Husserl might put it) in the same way as exegesis. This problem with evidencing my opinions trips me up a lot: I often have a gestalt picture of some topic whose origins are not easy to trace.

My recent interview on the 'embodiment paradigm' is a good example (thephilosopher1923.org/interview-wolf…), where I think you can see how broad my engagement with it has been, and how charitable I'm trying to be, even though there aren't specific references to every paper/person I've engaged.

One of the reasons I'm so much more productive on my blog or on twitter is that these mediums allow me to obviate certain referential constraints in a way that makes it easy for me simply to decompress my mental model onto whichever virtual surface I'm writing on.

This is especially important in what you might call 'miasmic' topics, in which everyone knows *what* they're talking about even though nobody knows *how* they know, and arguments generally devolve into mutual recrimination about whether there's even something to be talked about.

Cf. terms for more or less miasmic intellectual trends such as: 'postmodernism', 'relativism', 'identity politics', 'neoliberal ideology', 'the metaphysics of presence', 'grievance studies', 'the California ideology', 'communism', 'accelerationism', and so on, and on, and on.

One of the things that the Anglophone Continental tradition is good at, often to the exclusion of everything else, is (re)articulating narratives that provide referential and critical purchase on such miasmic trends. This is why they tend to consider themselves better historians.

This is also why they tend to have so much more influence in the arts and humanities in the Anglophone context, despite having less institutional support and power, insofar as they're good at telling simply stories about the 'big picture' that are easily communicable.

This isn't to say that they're unique in this regard: precisely what drew me to the work of Robert Brandom was that he's such a good story teller, whose work actually has some powerful things to say about what's going on in this process of historical exegesis and narrativisation.

This is directly relevant to Laruelle, beyond any difficulties I have coralling the miasma of 'non-philosophy' in a way that let's me evidence my opinions, because his project is explicitly an attempt to articulate a bigger, more encompassing narrative than Heidegger and Derrida.

Rather than simply articulating a critique of 'metaphysics' that motivates a break with the metaphysical tradition, either to 'turn' away from (Heidegger) or 'play' with it (Derrida), Laruelle articulates a critique of 'philosophy' as such, in order to motivate a 'science' of it.

There's a whole genre of objections to Laruelle's project based on finding counter-examples to his definition of philosophy, in order to show that it is not the general science of philosophy that it claims to be. There are many good cases here, but this is not the tack I'll take.

The strategy just mentioned is scrupulously referential, in the manner of what gets called Tory history, whereas mine is thoroughly miasmic, fighting Whig history with Whig history: making a series of tactical manoeuvres in a wider strategic conflict between 'grand' narratives.

Yet I want to fight this (relatively minor) guerilla war over the soul of philosophy in a way that is *sincere*, because the great failure modes of the narrativisation so popular in 'Continental' circles are insufficient charity and exaggeration of one's own exegetical authority.

There is a truly maddening type of tactical insincerity that is adopted in proximity to Cont. phil that I really detest, in which one engages in iterated Chinese whisper games about history whose inaccuracies and negative consequences are justified by ruthless pragmatism.

This is not to reject the need for ruthless pragmatism in some cases, but this pragmatism is almost always tactical in nature, and very often *staggeringly* strategically counter-productive in the long term. This is the true face of bad faith, and I *must* avoid it at all costs.

So, I'm being as open about my ignorance as I can be going forward, without conceding to any simple suggestion that my limited experience of Laruelle and non-philosophy obviates my strategic awareness *of* and ongoing philosophical conflict *with* the tendencies they represent.

This deliberate, strategic sincerity demands a certain amount of rhetorical craft, and an unwavering commitment to explain the experiences that have shaped the mental model whose decompression-expression is the real purpose of this exercise.

As should already be apparent, there is a form/content reflection running through this thread whose precise parameters will not be apparent till it is finished, but it all centres on the nature of ignorance and its proper disposition. I must both *show* and *tell* here.

Let's get back to book keeping. I'll give a minimal description of my experiences with Laruelle and non-philosophy sufficient to delineate what grip I have on the relevant dialectical miasma, precisely so I can be accused either of *bad faith* or *bad ignorance* but not both.

This is another way of saying that I'm trying to tactically deploy *skilful ignorance* as opposed to wallowing in *wilful ignorance*, which is a delightful little rhyming pair I'll be using in my epistemological work going forward.

So, the question for the moment is, how best to describe my experience with Laruelle and those influenced by him (Erhfahrung), which generated and calibrated the mental model I intend to unpack?

The reason I shared my tweet summarising non-philosophy in less than 140 characters is that it's something like the limit-case of communicating my mental model of Laruelle by decompressing and recompressing it into a restricted expressive form.

Indeed, it's the limit-case of twitter communication: the original character limit with no threading. At least now I have the full power of sequentially ordered chunks of 280 characters a piece, and even a little bit of tree-like tangent structure if absolutely necessary.

But the big question is, have I articulated my opinions about Laruelle/non-philosophy in a more formal context, in which there are both more flexible expressive constraints and more strict epistemic demands. As far as I can tell there are 5 places he is mentioned in my book.

The (sub)titular theme of the book is the evolution of the concept of the noumenon from the moment Kant founds what Meillassoux calls 'weak correlationism' through the various forms of 'strong correlationism' developed in the C20th, with a focus on the Continental tradition.

As I've suggested above, there's a trajectory in the anti-metaphysical strain of Cont. phil. that became dominant in the postwar period, beginning with Husserl, before running through Heidegger and Derrida, which reaches Laruelle as something like an obvious end point.

The two in text references to Laruelle include him in narratives like this, presenting his notion of the One as term late in the noumenal series: givenness (Husserl), Ereignis (Heidegger), différance (Derrida), the Real (Lacan), inconsistency (Badiou), Hyperchaos (Meillassoux).

Yet he's distinguished within this series as the terminus of that branch of 'strong correlationist' thought that passes through Heidegger/Derrida by developing their critique of the metaphysics into a critique of philosophy as such. One simply cannot pass beyond Laruelle.

In order to explain why this dialectical trick that Heidegger performs on Husserl, Derrida performs on them both, and then Laruelle performs on all of them, cannot then be applied to Laruelle, I need to explain my account of the history of metaphysics in more detail.

There's a thread in which I provide the core of this story (in more detail than I do in the book even), but it skips most of the history between Kant and Laruelle, even while it explains the basis of Heidegger's critique:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1341003725310205953

Yet, what it doesn't do is consider the formal structure of the dynamic of critique and subversion that is common to Heidegger, Derrida, and Laruelle, and has its foundations not simply in Husserl, but to some extent in Fichte and Nietzsche. I call this *paradoxical usurpation*.

It'd be easier just to point you at ch. §3.5 ('What is Metaphysics Anyway?') and leave it at that, but I suspect you'd like a more edifying description of the dynamic that fits into the context of this tweet thread, being as it is about not reading books.

I'll come back to this, because I want to finish the book keeping and scene setting first. It's worth mentioning that the other 3 references in the book are footnotes that make less firm suggestions about the place of non-philosophy in the (miasmic) trends the book collates.

What I want you to note about the terminal position that Laruelle occupies in my schema is that it consists in the non-philosophy's ability to beat its predecessors at their own game in a way that can never be assailed by an upstart successor. It is *hyperbolic*, in some sense.

This gives as good a sense of the discursive dynamics involved when philosophy meets non-philosophy as you'll find anywhere: non-philosophy is less about achieving an explanatory goal, than it is about beating other players in a dialectical game very popular in ContPhil circles.

I say this not as someone who has tried to seek out the various positive things that non-philosophers claim can be done within their framework, but as someone who has never been presented with any. My experience of dialogue with non-philosophers is pure dialectical combat.

This makes more precise what I have said about my criterion of surprise. I'm never surprised because I'm never shown how non-phil. is relevant to any of my substantive concerns, only told that it automatically trumps my own (transcendental) methodological framework.

This means that my mental model of non-philosophy is entirely governed by this dialectical game of *methodological* Top Trumps. I haven't read much Laruelle, but I am very good at Top Trumps, precisely because I'm so steadfastly committed to *transcendental philosophy*.

I'll try to explain how this game is played later, as I think it will ultimately be the best way to unpack my mental model of non-philosophy, but first, I should at least try to explain it in Laruelle's own terms, if only in a very compressed (i.e., clear and concise) fashion.

Before I do even this though, I want to finally finish the book keeping exercise. So I've given you my maximally compressed tweet, and listed the few claims I have been willing to make about Laruelle in print, but I should say a little more about my experiences.

I was first introduced to Laruelle by Ray's Nihil Unbound, in which the chapter on Laruelle is legendary as the most difficult section of a difficult book, and yet still somehow more accessible than Laruelle's own prose. I can vividly recall reading it at least 3 times.

That's not supposed to be a humble brag BTW. It's just that there's a certain sort of hermeneutic trauma that leaves a distinct mnemonic trace. The last time I read it was in the process of writing this short summary of Ray's project: deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/ray-br…

While I was still doing my PhD at Warwick my then GF organised for Laruelle to come and give a talk, and I roped in 3 people I knew to give introductory talks on Laruelle's work, and a 4th native French speaker to translate and interpret for him. It was, weirdly entertaining.

It was a representative instance of Laruelle's obliviousness to his own impenetrability. The 3 intro talks based on his earlier work were incredibly clear, and rather interesting. They left me primed to hear something from the man himself. However...

...the paper which he presented, and which every audience member had been given an advanced copy of in English & French was definitely from his later period, in which he was appropriating concepts from QM in order to add extra logical resources to his non-philosophical framework.

This was already incomprehensible to 99% of the audience, including Francophone attendees. It was made worse by Laruelle's decision to go off script half-way through the lecture, relying on my friend to interpret him in real time. It was a thoroughly bizarre spectacle.

Some of my favourite philosophy is of the French variety that gets looked down on by Dunning-Krueger cases like Sokal & Bricmont and their contemporary descendents. I even *enjoy* the conceptually dense, referentially allusive, stylistically inventive prose so many struggle with.

Yet time and again Laruelle's work has proved a bridge too far even for me. This is what I mean when I say I'm not sure it's worth the effort. I saw three carefully articulate his 20 year old work only for it to bear no obvious connection to what he was now talking about.

I spoke to Laruelle at the subsequent dinner, and I asked him a question that I have put to many people since, including Ray, and a variety of current and recovering Laruellians. This question encapsulates the conflict between non-philosophy and (transcendental) philosophy.

I'll mention it in passing so that I may return to it later: "If non-philosophy defines itself in terms of a certain pragmatic operation whereby it suspends certain axiomatic features of philosophical thought, does it not presuppose a transcendental account of such thought?"

It's unfair to say he couldn't answer the question, as neither of us spoke the other's language, and we were being mediated by an exhausted interpreter. But the frank incomprehension of the question has remained constant in my engagement with those influenced by him.

This feeling of not speaking the same language, or playing the same dialogical game, has persisted across each of my encounters with non-philosophers. Yet they *consistently* claim that this incomprehension is asymmetric: that it is only *I* who do not understand them.

I suspect I'm not alone in finding this sort of discursive asymmetry frustrating, and there's no avoiding it in any heated debate, in which asymmetric accusations of misunderstanding are sometimes the only tool available to steer the discussion in the right direction.

Yet this provides an insight into non-philosophy as a dialectical strategy, rather than a substantive theory: it bakes this asymmetry directly into its technical apparatus, positioning itself as already encompassing its opponent's viewpoint without possibility of reciprocity.

This is ironic, given the terms in which Laruelle chooses to frame this technics, but it's an irony that won't be apparent without further explanation. Still, it's worth noting that Meillassoux traced this issue in outline when he wrote about the influence of Fichte on Laruelle.

This is why he presented his critique of correlationism in Fichtean terms at the original Speculative Realism event at Goldsmiths, because he was aware of Laruelle's influence on Ray, and it was part of their ongoing conversation (cf. urbanomic.com/book/collapse-…)

I put precisely the same question I put to Laruelle to Ray at the 2nd Speculative Realism event, and his response was that he felt this problem vitiated his use of Laruelle, and he was turning to Sellars as an alternative. This was just the beginning of *that* conversation.

Let's get the rest of my experience out of the way quickly. Outside of dialectical sparring with sundry non-philosophers, I've read a reasonable amount of secondary literature and even talked to Laruelle a second time, after we shared a stage:

None of this substantially changed my mental model of non-philosopy, even if it has refined that model through successive cycles of decompression-recompression. My opinion remains essentially the same as it was in that initial tweet, all those years ago. I best unpack it then!

Let's start by repeating the definition in that tweet: "non-phi. is an extension of phi. that results from suspending the assumption that its categories are adequate to its topic."

The thrust of this definition is that it resists reading the 'non' appended to 'philosophy' as a matter of negation. Lately, Laruelle has qualified his project further as 'non-standard philosophy', using the adjective 'non-standard' to indicate branches of his project.

This allows an ordered proliferation of 'non-standard' aesthetics, Marxism, theology, and so on. Most of the controversy between philosophers and non-philosophers concerns whether this qualification is still a disguised negation, and this will be the main theme I wish to discuss.

If non-philosophy is not a negation of philosophy then it is not opposed to transcendental philosophy, but for every sense in which they might be read as 'competing' a small semantic quantum of negativity creeps back into the 'non'. Meaning is use, and negating is something done.

But I do not wish to prejudge the issue, only to frame the question in such a way that we might give it proper consideration. What we wish to know is whether or not there can be solidarity between transcendental philosophy specifically, and non-standard philosophy more generally.

The meaning of the 'non' in 'non-standard' is indeed given pragmatically for Laruelle, insofar as it names an operation of suspension. The analogy most often made is with the suspension of the parallel postulate that expands geometry from its Euclidean to its non-Euclidean forms.

This analogy is made tighter by the claim that, just as in the case of geometry, something like and axiom is being removed from play, even if there is a technical distinction between axioms and postulates that could be made here (h/t @drjauge). How tight does this analogy get?

This will be the real source of contention here, as Laruelle (and Laruellians) has a tendency to vacillate between the register of *proof syntax* and *rhetorical semiotics*, between the language of *deductions* and the language of *fictions*. Where does the truth lie here?

Of course, I can already hear Laruellians reaching for their characteric weapon, the challenge that I am already talking philosophy, and perhaps even projecting onto them worries that are really directed at my own too self-sufficient certainties. Must I be a philosopher here?

What if I change my professional hat for the purposes of this exercise, suspending it, if you were, and substitute it for the hat of a mere logician. Is this allowed by the game we're playing? Or is the very attempt to bring the science of discourse into our discussion verboten?

Let's be charitable for the moment, and assume that no such assumption has been made, and thereby need not be suspended. I'll do my best to remain a mere logician until I have exhausted what can be said about this analogy of axiomatics (not unlike Aquinas's analogy of Being).

There will come a point at which I must become a transcendentalist once more, but till then, let us live this little fiction. As long as I make sure to *do* what a logician does, it should not matter whether my *motives* are those of a philosopher, subject to study or competion.

This is the gambit of pragmatics after all, and I aim to exploit it pragmatically.

But even here, you might ask, does even the concept of pragmatics fall back into philosophy? What about those of syntax and semantics? What about that of logic? There's a ramifying list of questions here not unlike the regress invited by Pyrrhonian skepticism. I'll revisit this.

For now, we go back to the simple definition with our newfound logical eyes. When I say that the 'axiom' that is suspended concerns the adequacy of one's categories to one's topic, I'm drastically compressing the idea in a way that erases Laruelle's own preferred terminology.

Laruelle thinks that every instance of philosophy involves a decision that articulates the range of phenomena to be explained (the a posteriori) and the resources available to explain them (the a priori). Here he is certainly *borrowing* the language of transcendental philosophy.

Here, the a posteriori is like the space of possible experience, to which Kant's transcendental deduction fits the a priori categories seemingly all too cleanly. Within this story regarding the possibility of synthetic knowledge Laruelle detects a familiar whiff of the analytic.

The axiom which he calls the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy illicitly fixes the parameters (an analytic a priori) of that which it claims to derive (the synthetic a priori). The categories are legitimated not by their explanatory power, but by their limited explanatory range.

To put this in different terms, Laruelle believes that each philosophy contains a constitutive kernel of wilful ignorance, which ensures the sufficiency of its explanans (categories) by excluding inconvenient explananda (topics).

If I were not wearing my logician's hat, I might note that this looks very much like an epistemology of ignorance of precisely the sort I began by recommending. A pragmatics that aims to unravel wilful ignorance and cultivate skilful ignorance. But 'epistemology' is suspect here.

In Laruelle's terms, the problem with philosophy is that it is auto-positional. It always sets the terms of the debates it will allow itself to be drawn into in advance. Non-standard philosophy strives to avoid such auto-position, and thereby permit more symmetric interactions.

How does suspending the PSP achieve this? Another way to ask this question is to inquire about the other assumptions (axioms and lemmas) beyond the PSP that philosophy and non-philosophy still have in common. How and to what extent does Laruelle articulate these?

As far as I can tell, though Laruelle does use the language of deductive syntax, and even borrows specific syntactic elements from other 'scientific' fields (e.g., the notion of superposition from QM), he does not have anything like a completely axiomatised logic of thought.

This is not intended as a harsh judgment against him. Who has such a complete axiomatisation? Even Kant separated his own formal logic (analytics) from those substantive problems that it couldn't solve in principle (dialectics). Does it even make sense to talk of completion here?

Of course, this takes us too far into the abstract realm of philosophy of logic (there to be challenged by a non-standard logic, no doubt). What we can do is look at those aspects of the structure of discourse which he articulates and do our best to frame them in logical terms.

This is a useful methodology, at least insofar as the few remaining terms we must define can all too easily be given metaphysical interpretations that Laruelle and his followers would reflexively reject: the One, unilateral duality, and determination in-the-last-instance.

What is the One? It's what determines thought in-the-last-instance without itself being determined by thought in return. There is thus a duality between thought and the One that is *unilateral*: thought distinguishes itself from the One, but the One makes no such distinctions.

There's no way of referring to the One that isn't an index of unilateral duality. It has no substantive content beyond the formal role it plays within the *logic* common to both standard and non-standard philosophy. But this logic must thereby include determination/distinction.

This is where things become more vague, insofar as it's not entirely clear what the logic of determination and distinction is. Laruelle admits that it is in some sense causal, which is an understandably minimal assumption shared with every empirical 'science' of note.

We might say (in a suspiciously transcendental fashion) that any attempt to talk about the specific ways in which thought is determined (e.g., psychology) would already admit the applicability of some notion of causality in merely virtue of its own explanatory ambitions.

Yet Laruelle tries to minimise his commitment to causality, by restricting it to a maximally uncontroversial limit-case: 'in-the-last-instance' means 'in-the-limit', but in the limit of what exactly? He reintroduces the notion of occasional causation to make his minimalism clear.

What distinguishes an occasional cause is precisely its lack of explanatory content: the loss of a nail that triggers a cascade of calamities resulting in the loss of a kingdom occasions the latter, without telling us anything relevant to the analysis of kingdoms in general.

In case that proverbial reference is too terse, I had in mind a this old chestnut: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_…

This is reasonably straightforward, as it concerns the implications of proposition, which is nothing if not a matter for logic. Distinction is somewhat trickier, as it's hard to say what the thought and the One could both be *doing* such that denying it to the latter makes sense.

To be a pedant (a common synonym for 'logician'), some denials are so trivial as to be not worth mentioning, e.g., that it is not the case that Caesar is identical to the number 9. That's not an informative statement. We might express this by noting that it 'goes without saying'.

Statements like 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' go even further than this, passing from uninformative to clearly nonsensical. What about statements regarding the (non-)distinction of things from one another? Where do the bounds of sense lie here?

'Thought distinguishes itself from the One' seems perfectly good, but 'the One distinguishes itself from thought' is perhaps a little more tenuous. Only certain types of thing can perform actions like this, or perhaps have features that may be described as analogous to actions.

This means that there's a weird sense in which, even though the One is *defined* by its abject indifference to every topic we might wish to distinguish from its 'oneness-without-unity', we must still treat it as something like a silent partner/perspective in ongoing conversation.

From a logical perspective, we might say that the One is precisely defined as *the* null position in discourse. It's this feature of Laruelle's unilateral duality that Ray exploits in Nihil Unbound to frame Extinction (qua Nothing) as the common object of all scientific thought.

Once more, I suspect many Laruellians will want to throw out this interpretation as somehow illicitly philosophical, rather than blandly logical (if they even accept such a distinction). As such, I won't make much of it. But it does let me suggest some further logical questions.

Here are two: i) is the minimalist logic of occasional causation articulated by counterfactual reasoning (e.g., subjunctive conditionals or defeasible reasons)? ii) is the minimal logic of unilateral distinction articulated by epistemic modality (i.e., discursive position)?

The answers to these questions walk the fine line between triviality and nonsense just discussed: i) the One permits no modal variation, so counterfactuals are obsolete, and ii) this includes epistemic variation, so positionality is obsolete. The One is the limit of *sense* here.

Again, I don't wish to make too much of this for the moment. I merely want to show that logic broadly construed (including mathematical logic) provides some formal purchase on the discursive operations Laruelle recommends. Logic will be my Archimedean lever here.

One final thought on this topic before I move on to compare and contrast Laruelle's axiomatic analogy with the philosophical appropriation of axiomatics Lyotard and Badiou, who are themselves usefully at odds in some ways. What is the relation of the One and Truth?

Seen as *occasional cause* of thought, the One could only be identified with the Truth substantively, as we find with Hegel's Absolute. Yet seen as the *indifferent object* of thought, it's emptied of any substantive content, like an abject schism between substance and subject.

If there's any thinker in the 'Western' philosophical canon that Laruelle resembles here, it is Parmenides, who also inaugurated a split between the philosophical ambitions of his predecessors and his own scientific project by defining a relation between thought and the One.

So, in addition to explaining how Laruelle fits into an arc running through Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida, and comparing his axiomatic operations with Lyotard and Badiou, I now need to situate him to trends that precede even Plato. I've got my work cut out for me!

Let's begin tonight with a correction:

https://twitter.com/joui_sans/status/1345549165875572739?s=20

In essence, I made a technical error in describing Laruelle's use of the concept of 'occasional cause' that doesn't effect my argument but is actually quite interesting. My ignorance is enriched, and I have learned something new!

To unpack this slightly, Laruelle makes a distinction between the One and Being, and it's only within the context of the latter that phenomena can be differentiated, and so be articulated as occasion/occasioned. This is relevant to the comparison I wish to draw with Parmenides.

However, it's worth pointing out a different comparison, namely, with Plotinus and Spinoza, who articulate an (atemporal) notion of emanation/imminent causation that is orthogonal to the (temporal) regime of efficient causation in which occasioning makes sense.

For anyone unfamiliar with this, the NeoPlatonism of the former is an important influence on both the gnostic and mystical strands of Judaism/Christianity, as well as the more mainstream theology articulated by Augustine. This may be relevant later when we consider non-theology.

I've said several times recently that early modern rationalism can be seen as a NeoPlatonist rebellion against the dominant Aristoteleanism of the Thomistic tradition, with Descartes, this is clearly Augustinian, but with Spinoza, it seems more directly influenced by Plotinus.

Deleuze describes this in detail in his big book on Spinoza (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressio…), where he focuses on the Plotinian concept of emanation and its relation to Spinoza's concept of immanent causation. It's probably worth articulating the epistemic dimension of this.

As with most Platonist ideas, the best examples to draw on are mathematical, though the distinctly modern dimension of this NeoPlatonic rebellion revolve around the applicability of mathematics to physics being worked out by Descartes, Galilieo, Leibniz, and eventually Newton.

The taxonomy of types of cause developed by the early modern rationalists, drawing on Platonic resources, concern the different sorts of answers to the question: 'Why is this the case?' It's all too easy to restrict this to cases like 'Why did the apple fall to earth?'.

But we might also consider questions like: 'Why is there no largest prime number?' or 'Why is momentum conserved?', which do not ask after reasons for what we'd now just call *causal relations* between events, but ask for what are now called *grounding relations* between facts.

Although this is all technically *metaphysics*, the problems that motivate this distinction between causes and non-causal grounds, or efficient and immanent causes, are essentially *epistemological*.

This is clear even in gnosticism, where the guiding questions concern matters of spiritual edification and prescription (gnosis), in contrast to early modern rationalism, wherein the guiding questions concern matters of empirical explanation and prediction (scientia).

The layers of emanation traversed by the living spirit in its ecstatic journey towards unity with the divine have essentially the same *logical* structure as the layers of principles explored by the knowing subject on the inferential path to systematic comprehension of nature.

The incomparable genius of Spinoza consists in uniting these diverse epistemic imperatives in an integrated account of the divinity of nature: whose attributes and modes are articulated by the *temporal* distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata.

I cannot say precisely how Laruelle would react to this comparison, or how he would suspend the sufficiency of these epistemological problems and their metaphysical solutions. Yet I do think we can say something interesting about the logical structures *implicit* in all three.

My task as a logician (if not a philosopher) is to make these structures *explicit* in a way that illuminates the relevant questions. The distinction between the One and Being is useful in this regard, insofar as it creates a clear contrast between Laruelle and such Platonisms.

One of the perennial problems of Platonism is the question of the relationship between Being and the Good. Plato famously describes the Good as 'beyond Being', and this plays a significant role in the way that Platonism configures the debates that dominate Abrahamic theology.

It's possible to distinguish conservative and radical strands of NeoPlatonic influence running through this tradition, based on whether they reconcile the good (qua God) with Being or exploit and explore the difference between them, respectively.

Augustine is the great representative of the conservative strand here, insofar as it's the position of God both within, and at the apex of the hierarchy of Being that allows him to articulate the theory of transcendentals (unum, verum, bonum) on which his arguments are founded.

Pseudo-Dionysius is the great representative of the radical strand, at least in the Christian tradition, insofar as the 'supersubstantial, superdivine, and supergood Trinity' pulls away from the inferential linkages that would secure any such argumentation.

Laruelle's distinction between Being and the One recapitulates this mystical gesture, but, prima facie, it does so in a way that is designed to preserve the position of the One with respect to the Logos, i.e., without dissolving *scientia* in the name of *gnosis*.

At least in principle, the status of non-philosophy of a *science* of philosophy is supposed to preserve its ability to communicate with other sciences on their own terms, without demanding some mystical supplement that would grant it authority over them.

In suspending the sufficiency of every philosophy, non-philosophy is supposed to humble philosophy without supplanting it, without contesting the empty throne of theology qua queen of sciences. But this strategy rests on a fidelity to logic that cannot be circumvented by gnosis.

Of course, there are those who say that the aim of negative theology as articulated by Pseudo-Dionysius is never to contest this throne, because it has no wish to sit on it, only prevent others from doing so. But the balance of (epistemic) power here is surprisingly delicate.

If one must secure every territory that borders the centre of epistemic power in order to ensure no one seizes it, there's a distinct danger that one will exercise (illegimate) authority over these disparate disciplinary regions. The war for science might become a war on science.

Negative theology is not not theology. Even when its impulses are supposedly pure, having been purified by the lessons learned from its own history of complicity with oppressions of various sorts, its methods remain as queenly as ever, even when it refuses the title.

So, what have we learned from tonight's historical tangent? We've returned to my claim that logic is indispensable for the analysis and justification of non-philosophy, via a novel route. Even if this logic is not made fully explicit, it implicitly articulates the project's goal.

The next step is to go even deeper into history, to the point at which the *logical* relation between thought and Being is first expressed by Parmenides, to see how this positions him relative to his philosophical predecessors, and from there to trace its axiomatic destiny.

So, let's talk about Parmenides. I'm going to be leaning on the story I told in the thread about the history of metaphysics and ontology, so you may need to consult that:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1341003725310205953

There are two basic things to understand about Parmenides' relation to his predecessors: i) the way in which he articulated the philosophical distinctions they produced, and ii) the way in which he used these not to reject but methodologically reorient their study of nature.

The key distinctions are: persistence/change, reality/appearance, and unity/multiplicity. The first part of Parmenides' Proem 'On Nature' begins with an argument that aligns and combines the first term of each distinction.

The argument simultaneously articulates the distinction between Thought and Being that shapes the 'Western' tradition, and inaugurates the philosophical practice of formalising rigorous deductive arguments that override more tentative abduction explanations. Logic starts here.

The argument goes something like this: change/multiplicity can only be real if Being is somehow bounded or otherwise divided by nothing; but being is and nothing isn't, and therefore reality is persistent unity, even though what appears is changing multiplicity.

But it's always important to understand that the point of this section of the proem ('The Way of Truth') was to methodologically clear the way for the substantive study of the dynamics of nature covered in the second half ('The Way of Seeming').

Parmenides used deduction to foreclose nature to deduction, in order to then proceed with the inductive/abductive task of what we would now call empirical science (or 'physics'). He aimed to achieve some logical self-consciousness in the study of nature that had already begun.

This gesture of critical delimitation is quite familiar later on in the tradition, such as in the Hume's epistemic challenge to metaphysics, and Kant's critical response. There are many moments where skepticism about (metaphysical) problems leads them to be better delimited.

But we're not used to seeing such methodological self-consciousness in Presocratic thinkers, generally because we have a very insipid perspective on the plausibility of their scientific views and the contexts in which they were developed.

Both Parmenides and Heraclitus try to fix a problem they see in the underlying logical framework within which the Ionians (amongst others) appealed to familiar elements to explain natural dynamics in terms of what is conserved across change.

Both configure the logical relation between Thought and Being that frees them from the overcoded analogies with everyday matter (arche): P does it by abstracting away from the *material* principle (Being), while H does it by separating out the material *principle* (Thought)

The key difference between them, beyond their opposite takes on the reality/appearance distinction, is not just a matter of expression, but a matter of logic: P sees appearance as the domain of opinion (doxa), while H sees reality as the domain of counter-intuition (para-doxa).

Parmenides deductively restricts knowledge (episteme) to a vacuous limit-case in order to secure the unlimited reach of inductive/abductive opinion (doxa), whereas Heraclitus expressively extends wisdom (sophia) beyond opinion by pushing his language beyond its limits (paradoxa).

This opposition between internal delimitation and expressive expansion will become important later, as we see more complex critical delimitations and even greater diversity of expressive style. But its best not framed in terms of the meta-'physics' that comes after P and H.

The Aristotelian project that became what we call 'metaphysics' is *first* philosophy (prote philosophia) in the sense that it provides the *primitive* and *general* explanatory resources upon which specific sciences are founded. I've written about this in detail in my book.

But Parmenides is best not understood as a first philosopher, as if he bequeathed some explanatory resources to those after him that would somehow grant purchase on the structure of reality beyond mere appearance. His gift to those after is the foreclosure of such explanations.

Parmenides is not a first philosopher, but a *last* philosopher. He is less like Kant than he is like Hume, wielding deduction only to keep it out of the hands of others, who left unchecked would get in the way of the real empirical work.

Laruelle is similar to Parmenides not simply because of the way he wields the One against every supposed metaphysical supplement to science, but also because he is the most recent in a long line of last philosophers, declaring an end to philosophy and the start of something else.

Laruelle's relation to Heidegger/Derrida can then be seen as something like the opposition between Parmenides and Heraclitus, between a democratic attempt to empower opinion, and an esoteric attempt to push the expressive edge of the sayable (paradox). But this needs unpacking.

Let's expand this thought. But first, let's articulate the disanalogy between Laruelle and Parmenides whose rhyme and reason we seek to understand and explain. This will enable us to situate Laruelle in relation to the history of ontology/metaphysics from Parmenides to Derrida.

What differentiates Laruelle from Parmenides is his identification of Being with appearance, rather than reality. This lets him abstract his *generic axiomatics* of the One from the *specific deduction* Parmenides uses to set up his own rejection of philosophical sufficiency.

This also has the affect of situating his own foreclosure on the cusp of the phenomenological tradition, insofar as, following Husserl, this tradition associates ontology (regional, formal, and fundamental) with the structure of appearance as opposed to reality.

In order to describe this arc from Parmenides through Heidegger/Derrida to Laruelle, our initial focus must be on metaphysics in particular, rather than philosophy more generally. This allows us trace the transition from the critique of metaphysics to the critique of philosophy.

To describe this transition in other terms: it is the move from advocating a non-metaphysical philosophy (Heidegger/Derrida) to advocating a non-standard philosophy, without thereby advocating a non-scientific alternative to standard philosophy (e.g., some form of mysticism).

Once more, I direct people to my book or the thread on the history of ontology and metaphysics mentioned upthread if they want to further fill out the details of this story. I'm going to try and be as concise as possible here.

One aspect of the story told in my book about the history of metaphysics which I haven't discussed on twitter is what I call the *dialectic of demarcation*. This concerns the relationship between the definition of 'metaphysics' and the range of problems that are 'metaphysical'.

Heidegger's complaint that Aristotle's definition of metaphysics is a crude 'onto-theological' compromise that ignores the 'ontological difference' is broadly correct, and so is his complaint that the subsequent tradition lost even this (flawed) degree of self-consciousness.

Another way to put this is that Aristotle tried to define metaphysics as a range of philosophical problems, but that those who followed him added to this range in an unsystematic fashion, such that 'mainstream metaphysics' became bloated and unwieldy.

I think that this is but one moment in a dialectical dynamic that repeats itself across the tradition: a definiton of metaphysics is given, a skeptical attack is made that declares its problems 'false', and then a new definition is created which demarcates the 'true' problems.

To grasp the distinction between steps 1 and 3, you have to understand that the *mainstreaming* of the framework provided in 1 creates a slow trickle of 'false problems' that it that are slowly imported back into it as methodological false-consciousness sets in.

Here's my favourite example of this dynamic: Hume articulates an epistemological challenge to metaphysics (it isn't grounded in experience), Kant responds by distinguishing the true problems from the false (critique), and then German Idealism reimports the problems he foreclosed.

For example, Kant agreed with Hume about the impossibility of dogmatic rational theology, and provides a deflationary/regulative conception of belief in the divine, before Hegel and Schelling reimport the entirety of the old theological problem set into Kant's framework.

There's a comparable dynamic in the analytic tradition, where Carnap provides a semantic critique of metaphysics (its statements are meaningless), which Quine presents a small exception to (ontological commitment), before Lewis and co reimport everything else, including theology.

I didn't use this terminology in the book, but this is essentially the dynamic between *first* and *last* philosophy discussed above, except that the first/last dynamic isn't restricted to those problems that traditionally define metaphysics as a specific mode of philosophy.

Here's how we fit Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida into this story. I've already mentioned that Husserl in some sense severed the link between Being and reality, insofar as the epoché involves bracketing the existence of intentional objects in order to understand their objecthood.

But it's important to see that this bracketing is a *practice*. It not something justified so much as something done in order to provide justification. Heidegger extends this practice in order to do metaphysics more generally, but ultimately fails and becomes a sort of skeptic.

This means that one can see Heidegger as articulating a *pragmatic* challenge the whole metaphysical tradition that came before him, a challenge that recommends us to turn away from onto-theology (a deliberate *action*) by cultivating a new attitude (Gelassenheit).

Derrida is remarkably similar. He presents deconstruction as an *ethics* that remains fundamentally practical in its engagement with philosophical problems and texts proposing their solution. Even the principles that secure these orientations are similar (Ereignis/différance)

Although this trajectory begins with Husserl's account of phenomenological ontology, both Heidegger and Derrida are deeply influenced by Nietzsche's prioritisation of practice over theory, whereas Laruelle's version of the primacy of practice is much closer to Fichte.

Here we can see an echo of the dispute between Heraclitus and Parmenides, insofar as it is ultimately about parameters of philosophical expression: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida try to push language beyond its limits (paradox), while Laruelle and Fichte try not to (doxa).

Heidegger appeals to the power of poetry, and Derrida to the subtleties of style, but they both see this as a philosophical excess over everyday debates. There are many other philosophers with similar attitudes, including thinkers as diverse as Lao Tzu and Kierkegaard.

By contrast, even though Laruelle wishes to go beyond H&D by presenting a pragmatic challenge philosophy as such, the post-philosophical praxis he recommends retains the structure of ordinary debate, insofar as he wishes it to be continuous with scientific praxis.

However, this commits him to a pragmatics of discourse that is held to higher standards than the expressive experiments that run throughout the tradition. This is what I mean when I say that the success of his project turns on logic, and thus that logic cannot be suspended.

There can't be a non-standard logic that isn't in some sense still part of the discipline of logic. Not only does logic describe the nature of negation ('non' = 'not'), it also describes the nature of axiomatic suspension ('non' = 'non-standard'). This is the real crux point.

To reframe this in yet another way, I think it helps to consider an alternative prefix to 'non' that captures the sense Laruelle intends: instead of speaking of non-philosophy and non-standard philosophy, we might rather talk about para-philosophy.

This permits a concise formulation of the fine line which Laruelle has to walk: the question is whether it is possible to articulate a project of para-philosophy (Parmenides/Fichte/Laruelle) that does not somehow collapse into para-doxa (Heraclitus/Nietzsche/Heidegger/Derrida).

If we are to make progress on this question, it's a good idea to formalise the relation between the 'para' and the 'meta' understood as discursive operators that somehow change the topic of the discourse at issue, either widening it, or narrowing it, respectively.

The 'para' is the 'non' read as 'non-standard', a suspension of assumptions about the topic that effectively broadens it into a wider one. This is most obvious in mathematics, not simply in non-Euclidean geometry, but in the dialectical trajectory of the concept of space as such.

There's a back and forth interplay between the concepts of space and quantity that generates progressively more abstract syntactic frameworks for thinking about both (in space: from analytic geometry to algebraic topology, from pointless topology to topos theory, etc.).

The para operation 'zooms out', or 'takes a step back', gaining a more abstract vantage point on the wider problem domain within which your original concerns are embedded, and on that basis discovers more general tools or points of leverage applicable to these specific problems.

This approach is what Grothendieck called 'the rising sea' as opposed to 'the hammer' (landsburg.com/grothendieck/m…), the latter is all too easily limited by its current conceptual framework, looking everywhere and seeing nothing but nails. This isn't limited to mathematics.

Consider another 'science' that non-philosophy aims to free from its own internal limitations: Marxism. Marx's approach to the classical economists that precede him is to immerse their ideas within a more expansive dialectical framework, in order to reveal their contradictions.

Laruelle proposes to perform something like the same operation on Marxism itself, freeing it from overcoded consequences premised on its own auto-positional sufficiency. I won't discuss this in detail, but you can see how the 'para' operation gets iterated here.

How do we understand the 'meta' then? In the case of the 'meta-physics' inaugurated by Aristotle, the move might also be described as a process of abstraction, except that its aim is not to widen the domain under discussion but to narrow one's focus until a central core is found.

One strips away extraneous detail in order to find what is common to them all, establishing this as a foundation upon which explanations of the original range of phenomena can be built. This is also about finding more general tools and points of leverage. What's different then?

Well, it's something to do with the *logical direction* in which the operations take the discourse: one aims to expand the range of phenomena to be explained (para), while the other aims to contract the resources used to articulate explanations for them (meta).

Just as one might talk of Aristotle's meta-physics as an attempt to found physics in suitable abstractions, we might talk of Galileo's para-physics as an attempt to identify phenomena that Aristotelian physics had not simply misunderstood, but effectively ignored (e.g., inertia).

This opposition gives us the resources we need to make sense of a the failure modes of the metaphysical dialectical of demarcation discussed in my book: vicious circularity and paradoxical usurpation. The former is more an Analytic vice, and the latter is a more Continental one.

These are essentially failures to consider the question 'What is metaphysics?' head on. Vicious circularity is what happens when you define metaphysics in metaphysical terms. This prevents us getting purchase on what metaphysics is supposed to do, or whether it is doing it.

My favourite example of this is Kit Fine, who in an otherwise very good paper about 'The Question of Ontology' ends up defining metaphysics by means of a primitive notion of 'reality' as a whole that is itself straightforwardly metaphysical.

Paradoxical usurpation is what happens when a thinker (e.g., Heidegger/Derrida) creates a seemingly new discourse not subject to the constraints of 'metaphysics', but which essentially plays the role of metaphysics insofar as it also depends on some conception of reality.

I've explained how this works in the Heidegger/Derrida case already, but it's important to make it fully explicit: Ereignis/difference essentially configure a relationship between reality/appearance that is itself taken as real, and is thereby in some sense repressed metaphysics.

But now that 'metaphysics' as such has been foreclosed, it's impossible to address these metaphysical assumptions as what they are, namely, a conception of the fundamental structure of reality, even if that structure essentially constitutes the genesis of appearances.

What's going wrong in these cases? Unsurprisingly, I'm inclined to say that they don't appreciate the *logic* that articulates and relates the 'meta' and 'para' operations. The former is supposed to establish certainty, while the latter is supposed to enhance our uncertainty.

But a vicious circle is an all too cheap source of certainty, while a paradoxical usurpation is an all too cheap source of uncertainty. Both operations are generic in a way that not only cheapens them, but undermines their utility. Yet this ease is the source of their popularity.

The questions are now: What would it mean to do meta-philosophy or para-philosophy in a way that didn't fall into these traps? How does 'logic' understood in a broad sense help us diffuse these traps, and does Laruelle's curious vacillation on its status undermine his project?

For anyone still be wondering how all this is related to the conflict between transcendental philosophy and non-philosophy, look no further! The former is meta (critique), while the latter is para (suspension). It is a conflict between first philosophy and last philosophy.

Let's reconsider the Aristotle-Hume-Kant dialectic: (1) meta-physics is defined by isolating the key concepts of physics and examining their underpinnings; (2) this definition is challenged using empiricist epistemology; (3) Kant gives an alternative epistemology and definition.

In some sense, these dialectics of demarcation are cycles of first-last-first, and they are not restricted to operating on physics, as Laruelle's para-philosophical demonstrates. However, we can also see that the flavour of these dialectics changes between our examples.

The one just given is clearly epistemological, but the dialectic involving Carnap and Quine is semantic, while that involving Husserl and Heidegger is pragmatic (NB: this can be run last-first-last, if Heidegger occupies spots (2) and (3)): epistemology > semantics > pragmatics.

What are we to make of the relations between these critical flavours? My claim is that they are essentially the three dimensions of logic as it is traditionally understood, namely, the study of the normative structure of thought. This is a familiar but expansive use of the term.

Does this mean that my logician cap is bigger than it seems? Have I just smuggled a whole load of additional 'philosophical baggage' into our discussion by widening the scope of logic beyond the realm of formal mathematical logic? I don't think so, but I need to be explicit.

One way of looking at logic is to say that it is the mathematical study of a domain of well-defined object, i.e., propositions, their syntactic relationships (proofs), and their semantic content (consequences). But this leaves us with disparate syntactic frameworks for reasoning.

Looking at things this way leaves us with many logics (e.g., Boolean, intuitionistic, free, relevant, dynamic, paraconsistent, etc.) the study of which can proceed independently from one another, like disparate formal games played only for their own sake.

But this is to annihilate the topic, or subject matter of logic while retaining its current results. Compare with the various mathematical theories of space (e.g., analytic geometry, algebraic topology, topos theory, etc.), which all emerged out of the same ongoing dialectic.

Mathematics might push itself further and articulate new concrete syntactic frameworks with which to identify and analyse yet more abstract spaces. The concept of space exceeds the syntax of space. The same holds true for the concept of logic, which exceeds the syntax of proof.

What is unique to logic as a discipline which overlaps with philosophy, but which can stand on its own if needed? It is the formalisation of formalisms. It is not always already mathematised, but practicing it demands a commitment to mathematisation.

The history of logic constitutes a dialectic of *expression* which expresses its own parameters as it unfolds (cf. Hegel's Logic). This means we can talk about epistemology, semantics, and pragmatics as dimensions of logic without reducing them to a given, limited formalism.

We can say something about the logic of meta/para operations that unites epistemology (knowledge), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (action): they reconfigure explanation by contracting the range of explanatory resources, or expanding phenomena to by explained, respectively.

The interwoven strands of this interplay between expansion and contraction have their own peculiar pragmatic dynamics, semantic consequences, and epistemological effects. The ebb and flow of explanation is modulated by syntactic devices of logical self-consciousness on each axis.

We have gradually formalised some of these syntactic devices, producing different regimes of conditionals (linear, relevant, intuitionistic), quantifiers (game theoretic, substitutional, model theoretic), and modals (deontic, epistemic, alethic). But others remain informal.

The most relevant of these examples are the modal operators just mentioned, which *literally* articulate the three dimensions we're discussing, albeit in a way that disrupts the neat order I've been using so far: deontic (pragmatic), epistemic (ditto), and alethic (semantic).

If you want a quick introduction to the difference between epistemic/alethic modals, and their subtypes, check out my dictionary entry on Meillassoux's argument for the necessity of contingency, which revolves around this difference, and its conflation: deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/the-ne…

If you want a quick introduction to the difference between deontic/alethic modals, and their subtypes, check out this earlier blogpost on Meillassoux's theory of mathematical syntax, which revolves around this difference, and its conflation: deontologistics.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/mei…

The dialectical function of modal operators is to expand and contract the domain of discourse we're working in, increasing and decreasing the range of reasons we may appeal to, and thereby loosening or tightening their normative force, up to the limit of pure deductive necessity.

Modal operators let us say that propositions must/may be *true* (alethic), must/may be *taken* as true (epistemic), and must/may be *made* true (deontic), and in doing we (interactively) shape the discursive context within which we're (interactively) reasoning.

If you're interested in how this works in the case of practical reasoning, I've written a few pieces on 'moral logic' that are very informal (deontologistics.wordpress.com/2019/09/09/tfe… and deontologistics.wordpress.com/2019/10/06/tfe…), in contrast to formal systems of deontic logic.

The important insight to take away from this discussion is that there's a sense in which deontic modality expressively articulates the wider dynamic contexts within which narrower epistemic book-keeping, and the consequent object-level haggling over Truth itself takes place.

From a narrow syntactic perspective, it looks as these are distinct regimes of Truth: truths about practice, truths about knowledge, and truths about everything else, but from a more synoptic logical perspective, we see articulate the structure of Truth as such.

I'm coming dangerously close to the line between logic and transcendental philosophy here, and so I must be very careful indeed. What I need to do is step over that line briefly, not to justify my logical position, but to tie it into the historical story I've been telling.

To return to a theme I've already mentioned, what we're talking about here is the relationship between theory and practice. This usually divides into two historical streams: the Nietzschean path (Heidegger/Derrida/Deleuze) and the Kantian path (Fichte/Hegel/Brandom/Laruelle).

There is a tricky relationship between these two streams, as evidenced in the work of Foucault, who nominally sits at their intersection. Though, as I've noted elsewhere (

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1340619205784301570

), it's somewhat tragic that he's more often read as a Nietzschean than as a Kantian.

This lets me say what I've been trying to do in this elaborate reconstruction of Laruelle's use of a 'para' operator, which is to read him as a Kantian, rather than a Nietzschean on this question regarding the relation between theory and practice. Indeed, as a Fichtean.

Fichte makes explicit something that was only implicit in Kant's dialectical division of discourse between the *constitutive* and the *regulative*, namely, the primacy of practical reason, insofar as it makes sense of such regulation. The Ideas of reason are *practical ideals*.

What distinguishes this Fichtean line from its counterpart is the recognition that these ideals still have their own logic, a practical logic of tactics and strategy, heuristics and principles, which taken together constitute normative demands rather than (meta)physical objects.

Fichte is the first to truly grasp Kant's re-articulation of Plato contra Aristotle, which continues to treat the intelligible realm as essentially sui generis, precisely insofar as the True is ordered and organised by the demands of the Good and the gifts of the Beautiful.

But there is an ongoing line of Fichtean Kantians opposed to the Schellingian and Hegelian Absolute Idealists that mainstream Kant's critique of metaphysics, reimporting these regulative problems by transforming them back into constitutive objects (i.e., God, World, Soul).

These include amongst their number Feuerbach (and maybe on that basis Marx), the NeoKantians of both Marburg and Baden schools, and on this basis both the progenitors of Frankfurt critical theory and the French and Viennese philosophers of science who would shape the early C20th.

However, the history that connects this Kantian lineage is all too often forgotten, taking with it even those Kantian elements of thinkers who are more clearly Nietzschean, such as Heidegger, Derrida, and most tragically Foucault, who explicitly revises Kant's critical project.

The question of the 'non' read not as 'not' but as 'non-standard' (para) in the interpretation of Laruelle's project is whether it makes a substantive contribution to this tradition, rather than simply attempting to end it for the purpose of practical discursive convenience.

It is the question of whether or not non-philosophy ultimately relapses into Nietzscheanism: articulating a discursive will to power (queenly, or otherwise) that eschews the demands of thought, its axiomatics revealed as a formal ruse to disguise rhetoric as logic (paradox).

If Laruellians are serious about syntax and pragmatics, then they have no choice but to engage with the discourses of semantics and epistemology, because these can be rendered as formal sciences whose dialectical trajectories are guided by the will to Truth.

This Truth is not a constitutive object. It's the regulative ideal which unifies every such dialectical trajectory *in-the-last-instance*. To put this in another way: it is One without Being. Needless to say, this looks a lot like Laruelle's modification of Parmenides's praxis.

In order to reinforce the points just made and build towards a more concrete engagement with the conjunction of syntax and pragmatics in Laruelle's position, I'm going to do something a little crazy and look at an actual example. It's finally happening guys.

The example I'm going to look at is the exchange between Laruelle and Derrida (pervegalit.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/laruel…), which is fascinating for various reasons, most important among which is their opposing configurations of the dialogical relation between War and Peace.

There is a curious *symmetry* in the way each thinker presents the discursive *asymmetry* between between them. Each treats the other as the violent aggressor and themselves as the simple man of Peace, defending themselves only in the name of ending every such discursive War.

On balance, it's an opposition between discursive terror (Polemos) and discursive charity (Agape), in which one can rationalise one's opposition to an opponent as being entirely their fault: they intend to act *unilaterally*, and so you are entitled to a *pre-emptive* strike.

This pre-emptive strike is designed to sabotage the opponent's whole discursive strategy in advance (making it 'always already' defused), destroying their tools and/or erasing points of leverage they might use to get purchase on your own position.

This curious equipollence is worth exploring in some depth, as it allows us to make the similarities and differences between Derrida and Laruelle I've already explained much clearer, and on that basis unpack the point I'm making about the relation between non-philosophy and logic

As such, let's rehearse the terms we've already discussed in providing the requisite historical context. How is the relation between War and Peace configured by the dynamic of first and last philosophies, between 'meta' and 'para' operators?

For Derrida, War is metaphysics: the imposition of an asymmetric binary distinction, a favoured terrain stipulated to give one side advantage over their opponent in discursive combat; Peace is justice: the constitutively impossible Idea of respect for difference without identity.

For Laruelle, War is philosophy: the asymmetric imposition of a decision that limits the challenges that others can make the auto-positioned philosopher, insofar as the range of acceptable counter-examples has been fixed in advance.

Whereas Peace is democracy: the equalisation of the differences between every possible decision by means of their common relation to the indifferent identity of the One.

Before we comment on the technical details of these opposing views of opposition, I'd like to suggest a framing for what is to come, borrowed from Klauswitz: "[non-philosophy] is the continuation of [philosophy] by other means." This can be read in either direction.

Laruelle presents his non-philosophy as more general precisely insofar as it continues the work of philosophy in a different way, whereas Derrida presents his conception of philosophy as more general, insofar as it can do everything one might want to do with philosophy.

The Klauswitz claim functions as what Hegel would call a 'speculative judgement' in which subject and predicate can reverse roles, while Debord would call it an instance of 'detournment' in which syntactic inversion reveals deeper semantic symmetries. Which way should we read it?

The inversion of difference and identity between D&L's positions is a very clear here (syntax), but the relation between their respective practical operations is less so (pragmatics). I'll discuss two aspects of these opposed perspectives: the para operator and the meta operator.

For Derrida, the para is the move to arche-writing, itself seen as the ur-suspension of *logocentrism* and the opening up of a wider range of matter on which to deploy deconstructive techniques.

For Laruelle, the para is the ur-suspension of the *principle of sufficient philosophy* as such, not merely the suspension of a given instance of decision. It consists in the principled refusal to decide.

For Derrida, the meta is the quasi-transcendental machinery of binaries, différance, the trace, iterability, etc., which provides the tools needed to perform deconstruction on this wider range of texts, not merely metaphysical texts, but the metaphysics *implicit* in every text.

For Laruelle, the meta is that which Derrida and sometimes he himself defines as 'transcendental', though they dispute the meaning of this term and its continuity with Kant's usage. It's the language use to frame non-philosophy's action on philosophy: One, axiom, decision, etc.

Between these two moments each thinker has delimited a wider field of *matter* to operate upon than the positions one can adopt and oppose within ordinary philosophical discourse, and then declared the *techniques* that they will deploy in this practical manoeuvre.

There's mutual recognition here, but only that which passes between nemeses who must still fight one another to the death. Nevertheless, I think the analysis just given let's us see why Laruelle bests Derrida here, even when he is in some sense mirroring his rhetorical strategy.

1. They both perform the gesture of last-philosophy, but L's is strictly more general, at least in rhetorical posture. D claims to end metaphysics without ever passing beyond it, continuing a meta-commentary on the metaphysics present in every text.

L claims to end philosophy in a similarly liminal fashion, though he promises substantially novel uses of philosophy that stand on their own without collapsing back into philosophy. L wins through encapsulation: anything deconstruction can do non-philosophy can do better.

2. They both describe the semiotic/syntactic structure of the matter they are operating on. However, D has already suspended logocentrism and with it any claim to the rhetorical force of logic.

D has blurred the lines between substance/style and logic/rhetoric to the point that he can't defend his para-doxa from Laruelle's hungry doxa, whereas L can claim not only to be still within the realm of logic (axiomatics), but that this logic circumscribes praxis (suspension).

L's Fichtean praxis undercuts D's Nietzschean stylings, by being both less capricious and closer to ordinary discourse, i.e., the speech that D so fears.

These are the conditions under which Laruelle bests Derrida: i) his schema can subsume Derrida's, while ii) simultaneously restricting its available actions. It's less free and yet more powerful. But both of these depend upon the precise way its relation to logic is configured.

What's most interesting here is that oppositions of every kind are articulated by the logic of *negation*. This applies as much to the different senses of 'non' through which 'non-philosophy' is read as to the binaries Derrida describes and the cold war between the two of them.

Indeed, if one studies logic from a game theoretic perspective (Lorenz/Hintikka/Blass) or something similar (Girard's ludics), then the role of negation is precisely to switch control between two players, inverting the roles of attack/defence. This is our symmetric asymmetry.

Laruelle may have beaten Derrida at his own game, but we can clearly see that there is a game going on, one in which stipulation of permissible moves plays a very significant role. The practical dimension of the 'non' thus forces us to move from a static to a dynamic perspective.