Broken Hegemonies

CHAPTER 10: On the Natural Double Bind: The Will Turned against Itself

C HAP T E R 10 On the Natural Double Bind The Will Turned against Itself The historians of ideas teach that the will became a philosophical issue at the end of antiquity.58 If we recall the difficulties the Neoplatonists had in saying, if not why, at least how the one was not content in its solitude but exteriorized itself in order to constitute what is other than it, then we may be tempted to chalk this innovation up to Alexandrian henology. Some have even taken this for a philosophical effect of Christianity , such that Augustine supposedly was driven to discover the will, especially by way of the simultaneous and incompatible impulses in the individual mens—in the confessional spirit in line with Paul: “the good that I want I do not do, and the evil that I do not want I do” (Romans 7:19). The will then is thought to be born in the drama either of henological exteriorization or theological interiority. But it is one thing to establish on a diachronic line the place and date of the emergence of some gambit of thinking, and it is another to understand the newly urgent questions in response to which it emerges. Such is the case with the will. A new epistemic arrangement was necessary so it could appear. Neither Cicero nor Augustine decided to make it a theme; and that the Greeks have no word with which to expresses it is hardly a sign of interest on their part. In waning antiquity the will is constituted as a response—it remains to be seen to which preliminary, but nevertheless fundamental , questions in the new legislative structure it responds. So it had to become an issue, perhaps even the decisive issue at the moment that eidetic principles determining the genera yield, like great authorities for reasoning, to telic relations that determine beings. From where does the systematic appeal to the will in the continuous fabric of ends that is natura come? To be able to answer this we may recall the very ancient prestige of ends.59 These ends have been and remain normative, both before and after the rupture between the Greek and Latin linguistic eras. But they do not remain so in the same capacity . Teleological prestige changes its phenomenal surroundings. The new positive referents—the Rome which was, the Jerusalem that will be—formally substitute for Aristotelian eidetic principles in that they accomplish their archic function, but within a telic framework. On the other hand, in Aristotle the genera of knowledge converge on the ends; they accomplish their telic function within an archic framework. In order to know how the Latin fantasm of a network saturated by finalities summons the Its Institutions (Cicero and Augustine) 241 will, it will be helpful to briefly recall the manner in which, in Aristotle, teleology names the principle of all principles. In other words, what telos in Aristotle serves as the first arché? “By principle, I understand in each genus those truths whose existence it is impossible to demonstrate.”60 The knowledge of these principles would complete knowledge , for “he who knows the universal in a certain manner knows all the particular cases that fall under this universal”61 —in a certain manner, which is to say, only potentially. Principles are not demonstrated. This follows from a double modesty of archic thinking: Not only does it grasp only more or less universal essences, whereby it passes to the side of ultimate singulars, but it also grasps these essences in the plural , whereby it passes to the side of the ultimate universal. For Aristotle, the poverty of philosophy above all consists in this second shortcoming. He makes up for it with a mimetic principle, which is really a stopgap in the epistemic doctrine rather than its crowning moment, namely, teleology, which orients all knowledges toward a wisdom nevertheless beyond reach. Formulated as axioms, principles or “first things” (ta prôta) in each case govern only one science. Knowledge comes to us fragmented according to the various sorts of phenomena. To have hold of the principles of a science is to know, potentially— even if by way of deductions that themselves must be completed by abstractions—all the cases that fall under the purview of a particular regional experiential referent. Nevertheless it is impossible to subsume the phenomenal regions under some chief referent. Hence in Aristotle the modest standing of the first science in Aristotle. It is condemned to...