Prefatory Note
The Cartesian revolution calls for the rise of a world characterized by a formal split between 1. a self as “thinking thing” (res cogitans) and thus as proper seat of thought and 2. mechanically quantifiable/measurable matter (res extensa). The former is conceived as “subject” that suffers an “objective” world, only to seek to overcome his condition.
Descartes proposes to overcome our being-subject-to-objects and so our being subjected to nature’s supposed mechanical forces, by progressively integrating objective nature into a subjective form by means of a mechanical “method” supposedly abstracted out of objective nature.1 The objectification of the world allows Descartes to credibly abstract from nature a system of symbolic “mathematical” forms that the Frenchman can thereupon uphold as building-blocks for a “scientific” method to use objective nature as fuel for the rise of a new world in which the thinking ego and his material context are “algebraically” reconciled.2 Yet, reconciliation—what Hegel will call aufheben (“sublation”)—is supposed to require a radical transformation of contradictory elements.
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Modern man is raised to follow linguistic habits of a Cartesian extraction. We are raised to abide in a world of linguistic patterns mechanically juxtaposed to a world of “objective” things that our words are supposed to refer to only to lead us into discovering that the “facts” we have been taught to posit beyond words are inexorably shaped by our linguistic habits. We are led to conclude that we can have only points of view concerning the “real” world of objective facts. Upon accepting this assumption, we now seek to impose one point of view over others, until we rise to consider the context of the battle of viewpoints as a consummate viewpoint, namely that of a History fulfilled in the Free Spirit of our human species as a whole. In the context of History’s own point of view we can divine a terminal “scientific” reconciliation of objective or natural things and our own subjectivity. In this consummation of History, evoked most fiercefully and in Nietzsche’s wake by German Nazism in the 1930’s, man’s linguistic alienation from an objective nature is supposed to be resolved through a transformation of objective nature via the “scientific” use of mechanically derived aspects of it: our “scientific method” enables or entitles us to conceive nature relatively to our own linguistic demands, as fuel for what Leni Riefenstahl would glorify as The Triumph of the Will (Der Triumph des Willens).
Little does it matter if nature itself does not tell us explicitly or consciously to make a mechanical use of aspects of nature, or to try taming nature within a controlled environment defined strictly in terms of purely quantitative parameters. Indeed, in keeping with the Machiavellian principle that power defines right (if I can do something, then it is right for me to do it) nature’s silence is supposed to be decisive for the transformation of our world into a totalistic laboratory. In retrospect we can even safely assume that nature’s silence is to be understood as a loud sign of her acquiescing and so as a positive invitation for us to appropriate her as fuel for the conversion of mechanical or mechanically derived aspects of nature into a consummate machine in which our “subjective” alienation from “objective” nature is finally overcome.
In sum, we are raised to cherish the language of modern “science” as the sole or primary means at our disposal to free ourselves from universal warfare between partisan or tribal viewpoints. Freedom will here coincide with the consolidation of a mechanically structured world/order in which subjective and objective elements are fully reconciled.
Our scientific “language” or method is to reconcile us “algebraically” with objective facts, bringing about a planetary synthesis presupposing a radical transformation or overcoming of both res extensa and res cogitans, of both body and mind as conceived on Cartesian grounds.
Concluding Remarks
While the modern totalistic project does not address the problem of thought itself, it does fuel the rise of modernity’s subjectivity and thus of “autonomous individuals” as seats of the oblivion of thought itself. Subjects are used on an equal footing with their “objective” counterparts as fuel for the rise of a world-system dominated by a supreme reification of thought, or a virtual thought in which consciousness or our sense of self (self-certainty) is supposed to find its final destination. The modern “subject” that resists integration in the modern world-machine, or technocracy, is a “savage glitch” in the system. Yet, resistance has its positive condition of possibility in consciousness’s ultimate rootedness in a thought defying all reification. In order to free himself from the dominion of technocracy, man must now undertake a cardinal conversion whereby he no longer seeks integration in the oblivion of thought incarnated by today’s scientific world-system, but in thought itself—substantive, primordial and most dangerous.
1For a further exploration of the procedure in question, see Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, translated by Eva Brann, Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press, 1968 (esp. Sec. II.12: "The Concept of 'Number' in Descartes".
2Etymologically, Descartes’s algebra (from the Arabic al-jabara) designates a restoration/reconciliation of split parts; in the modern context, the reconciliation is applied to the “building” of the world of res cogitantes and res extensae.
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