The shadow of principles

Why the single cause is so strong: principles that lost their floor and go on demanding obedience on the floor below.

The previous text showed why explaining the fall of the Monarchy by a deep cause is a category mistake. A question was left open, and it is the one that matters: if the mistake is easy to demonstrate, why is it so strong?

This page proposes an answer.

The century that expelled metaphysics

The nineteenth century declared metaphysics closed, and did so by programme, with a date and a doctrine.

Auguste Comte named the three states through which humanity would pass: the theological, the metaphysical and the positive. The metaphysical is the middle one — the phase to be left behind. To explain by essences, by principles, by hidden natures: all of that was announced as the infancy of thought. From then on, facts and laws.

Keep that sentence, because it will turn back against the man who wrote it.

What returns

The law of the three states is not an empirical finding. Nobody arrived at it by observation. There is no way to test it and no way to falsify it, and it orders the whole of history in a single direction. It is itself a metaphysics of history.

Which is to say: the doctrine that announces the end of metaphysics is metaphysics, and does not know it.

The same repeats among the neighbours. Marx expels philosophy and keeps the dialectic. Freud expels the soul and keeps, under another name, the effort to persevere in being. Each leaves by the front door and comes back in at the rear.

Freud has a name for this: the return of the repressed. The repressed content comes back disguised, and comes back precisely in the form of what repressed it. That is exactly what happens here — with the added grace that Freud is one of the cases, and the concept describing the thing is his.

Shadows

The thesis is this. These explanations are strong because they are shadows of metaphysical principles.

Monism is a proposition about being: everything is one substance. Brought down a floor, it becomes the single cause: everything has one explanation. The two sentences look like relatives and are not. The first says what there is; the second says where it comes from. One is ontology, the other is a recipe.

Conatus is the effort to persevere in being — a determination of existing, without a subject and without an end. Brought down, it becomes drive, will to power, motor. It acquires a subject who wants, and what was the form of existing becomes somebody's desire.

And the aspiration of a fragment to stand for the whole — which is what one sees when economics explains everything, or sexuality explains everything — is the metaphysics of the One reappearing in a part. The single creator operating where he is no longer recognised as such.

Why the shadow is stronger

Here is the mechanism, and it is simple.

A shadow keeps the absoluteness of the principle and loses the register in which that absoluteness was legitimate.

As metaphysics, monism is a proposition about being, and can be discussed as such — it has been discussed for two thousand years. Brought down to the single cause, it remains absolute but now presents itself as a statement about facts.

And there it is armoured on both sides. It cannot be refuted empirically, because it is not empirical: no datum overturns the thesis that at bottom everything is economics. And it cannot be examined metaphysically, because it presents itself as empirical: anyone who tries is accused of running away from the facts.

That is why arguing does not dissolve it. What one faces is not a mistaken hypothesis but a principle that has lost its floor and goes on demanding obedience on the floor below.

Why it is not a symptom of anything

One misunderstanding remains to be undone, and it comes from the vocabulary usually employed here.

The single cause is said to be a symptom of something — of an age, of a class, of a malaise. And then one goes looking for the disease behind the sign.

Precision is needed, because the word comes from medicine and in medicine it works. A fever is the sign of an infection that exists independently of it; the pain in the flank is the sign of a stone that is there, and that can be seen. There are limited chains of cause and effect, and they can be verified: treat the infection and the fever subsides. The symptom leads to the disease because the disease is a thing separate from the symptom, and verifiable without it.

That is exactly what is missing in our case, and it is why the word deceives when it is borrowed. There is here no separate entity of which the single cause would be the sign, and no means of finding one without it. The thesis that at bottom everything is economics is not the indication of a state of affairs examinable by some other route: it is the state of affairs. It appears, and in appearing it is already all there is.

Note that this is the same refusal as before, now in a third register. Goethe: there is nothing behind the phenomenon. The whirlpool: there is no substance behind the form. And now: there is no disease behind this, because it is not a symptom — it is what one has.

The consequence is practical. If it were a symptom, it would be enough to treat the other thing, and the rest would subside as a fever subsides. But the law of the three states does not signal some deep ailment awaiting diagnosis: it was taught at the Military School, applied to Rio Grande do Sul, and people died under it. It is not the sign of a violence. It is the violence, in the form in which it thinks.

What this asks for

None of this is a settling of accounts with the nineteenth century. It is an indication of method.

If these explanations were merely false, it would be enough to replace them with better ones. Being shadows, what can be done is another thing: to return them to the register from which they fell, and there to examine them as what they are.

What is left, after that, is not a better cause. It is the form — read in the event as one reads a whirlpool, by the drawing and not by what would lie behind it.