by Terence Blake The thesis of this blog is that Laruelle’s philosophy (like those of Badiou, Deleuze, Latour, Stiegler) is a metaphysical research programme Popper’s sense, combining both testable or empirical material with untestable more metaphysical material. This is Karl Popper’s definition, which I have been applying on this blog to render possible the analysis and comparative evaluation of the claims and the theses of rival research programmes in Continental Philosophy. It is to be noted that Laruelle himself confirms this analysis in his PRINCIPLES OF NON-PHILOSOPHY: Under the perhaps too classical title of “Principles” we will find a program of research defined by a problematic; by a form of work called a “unified theory of science and philosophy” (1). What Laruelle does not seem to realise is that this characterisation does not establish his project as sui generis (what I have elsewhere called Laruelle’s “Uniqueness Hypothesis”), but confirms his inclusion in a more general configuration of thought. A second denegation (whether due to naiveté or to bad faith I leave the reader to decide) is Laruelle’s omnipresent scientism. In PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY he calls this unified theory of science and philosophy a “science-thought” or a “first science”. This constant morpho-syntaxic privilege accorded to one face of the so-called “Identity” of philosophy and science is a marker of Laruelle’s incoherence on the question of science. To see this incoherence even more clearly we need only consult Laruelle’s unique book devoted explicitly to the question of science and non-philosophy: THEORY OF IDENTITIES, first published in French in 1992. In the first chapter Laruelle tells us: De Platon à Kant et à Heidegger règne une triple division du travail intellectuel… A cette triple division du travail intellectuel, aucune philosophie n’échappe réellement. Aucune épistémologie — empiriste ou idéaliste, positiviste ou matérialiste — ne peut se libérer de ce qui est un invariant, en général peu reconnu comme tel, de l’interprétation gréco-philosophique de la science, anglo-saxonne comprise (54-55). My translation: From Plato to Kant and to Heidegger there reigns a triple division of intellectuel labour … No philosophy ever really escapes from this division of intellectual labour. No epistemology – whether empiricist or idealist, positivist or materialist – can free itself from what is an invariant, generally not admitted as such, of the Greco-philosophical (including the Anglo-Saxon) interpretation of science. The invariant “triple division” of intellectual labour between science and philosophy is according to Laruelle: 1) Philosophy thinks, science knows but does not think 2) Philosophy is absolute science, empirical sciences are contingent and relative 3) Philosophy thinks Being, science knows not even beings but their properties or the facts. In this text it is asserted that “No philosophy ever really escapes from this division of intellectual labour”. This universalising gesture is typical of Laruelle, he condemns the totalising pretentions of “Philosophy” but he himself sees invariants everywhere. The leap from “philosophy from Plato to Heidegger” to all philosophy is absolutely unfounded. In this text it is asserted that “No philosophy ever really escapes from this division of intellectual labour”. This universalising gesture is typical of Laruelle, he condemns the totalising pretentions of “Philosophy” but he himself sees invariants everywhere. The leap from “philosophy from Plato to Heidegger” to all philosophy is absolutely unfounded. Laruelle’s discussion of these points, as of so many others, belongs to another age. Both Bergson and Bachelard had already dismantled and discredited the sort of philosophy that Laruelle would have us believe to be the Standard Model that has traversed the history of philosophy unchanged and unrecognised until he came along. Laruelle is not an innovator here, but a late-comer to the feast of conceptual creation. Elsewhere in PRINCIPLES OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Laruelle admits that his earlier thought had been impregnated with scientism (something that his followers have steadfastly denied), and indicates that this book embodies his attempt to break with “the excessive critique of philosophy in the name of the primacy of science”. This is the tendency in Laruelle that I encourage. Talking about his evolution from Philosophy II to Philosophy III, Laruelle declares: If I is intra-philosophical and II marks the discovery of the non-philosophical against philosophy and to the benefit of science, III frees itself from the authority of science, i.e. in reality from any philosophical spirit of hierarchy, and takes as its object the whole of philosophical sufficiency (PRINCIPES DE LA NON-PHILOSOPHIE, 40, my translation). Whatever one may think of the rest of Laruelle’s non-philosophy project (and I think that there is much interesting and useful material to be found in his works) we must admit that his continuing scientism that continues within his attempt at elaborating a non-standardphilosophy remains decidedly sub-standard. This article is taken from:
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