Note on A Philosophical Over-Determination of Non-Philosophy
Much discussion of the reception of non-philosophy involves the role of ‘abstraction’ in its axiomatic framework. At the same time, non-philosophy speaks incessantly of the immanence of the lived (more precisely, the lived-without-life). These two ‘sides’ of non-philosophy have seemed irreconcilable and have raised a new antinomy. This antinomy can be resolved via a re-initiation of non-philosophy itself, taking the antinomy to indicate a philosophical resistance and normalization. The antinomy is a form of philosophical decision that works in either direction and is based on a traditional concrete/abstract dyad. The romanticist privileges and re-doubles the concrete as mediation, the theoreticist the abstract. From the standpoint of a hallucinatory appearance of non-philosophy, both trajectories appear as "deviations" from an ideal "correct stance" or orthodoxy.
In the case of the romanticist trajectory, the primacy of the lived submits the axiomatic as means for auto-position, whereby the axiomatic will ultimately merely “reflect” the lived, carrying it forth, “expressing” as what is most genuine and precious, and so as a "truth of the Real". In this way, the lived will in fact be double transcendence or mediation, governing the relation between it and 'the axioms,' that is, as authentic, romantic, genuineness of the mere use of axioms to represent and defend authentic life. What is lost here is the lived-without-life in so far as the lived will degenerate into Life when it aims to circumscribe the axioms as modes of re-flection of authenticity.
For the theoreticist trajectory, abstraction here is taken as a sufficient way of determining the Real, if it can be “intensified” far enough. This ultimately becomes dialectical and it is held that the Real is grasped once abstraction is sufficient to account for itself, a direct form of philosophical sufficiency. This is what occurs in Ray Brassier's work and it misses the abstract-without-abstraction.
This antinomy clearly arises from a philosophical decision and overdetermination in philosophy, which we can think of as the concrete-abstract dyad. In the romanticist case, the concrete is the doubled term, occurring twice. In the theoreticist, the abstract. In both cases, this dyad is mediatized by transcendental mediation, either as reflection/authentic expression (and so a "truth of the real"), or dialectical self-thinking ("closing the circle"). Its resolution is in the given-without-givenness, taking this is an axiom, but an axiom-without-axiomatization. The ‘romantic’ and the ‘abstract’/’scientific’ can be thought as in-identity since, depending on the occasion, the Real can be modeled both by phenomenological, religious, and spiritual materials, as well as by philosophies-of-science or epistemo-logies. The Real is in fact indifferent to the oppositions between 'the spiritual' and 'the abstract' as they appear in doxa.