A RESPONSE TO KATERINA KOLOSOVA’S FORMALISM OF MATERIALIST REASON 1

Yichen Chen

In her text, Kolozova acknowledged the complexity of metaphysical questions and the anthropomorphic tendency in philosophy. Metaphysical questions are universal which implies that there is a diversity of culture subjectivisation. Kolozova, however, aims at a greater universality. She looks for a way to subjectivize philosophy not for a specific culture but the species being of humanity. To avoid the subjectivisation and anthropomorphic tendencies, Kolozova elaborates Saussure’s “from the concrete to the abstract and back to the concrete”2 process with Laurelle’s conceptual apparatus. Just as the formalization of scientific language, this formalization of philosophical language helps for universal communication and at the same time, can be applied locally in specific areas of studies.

The first movement of the process is the movement from concrete to abstraction. The concrete here refers to conceptual material originating in philosophy. Using the idea of formalism, or the forming of a structure, the movement begins with examining empirical data, finding patterns within, and lastly, naming them as abstract ideas. For example, Marx in Capital derived the abstract ideas, “commodity” and “value,” from empirical observation. This kind of abstraction is necessary, as an ideal phoneme which none can reach in the real world is necessary for one to practice actual phonemes.

As a scientific approach, “formalism can take the form of algorithms, and algorithms are finite automata in a way or are fractions that can stand alone as [or translatable to] finite automata.”3 Even though automata, or computers, are limited to performing available formal operations and, are not metaphysical as they lack consciousness and self-reflexivity; Computers help in precision, credibility, and productivity as an external factor(unavoidable but not essential) in scientific research.

People desire to explain and to domesticate the real, as philosophy is dedicated to resolving metaphysical questions and creating a form of universe that makes perfect sense and reducible to sense. However, this attempt will always be unilateral because the real “is fundamentally different from sense because it is the object of thought’s unilaterally making sense.”4 As mentioned before, metaphysical questions, as well as their formalizations, are universal which implies subjectivisation. Very different formalism could be created due to different histories, societies, or political-economic frameworks; subjectivisation comes with them. In order not to be lost in the redundancy of anthropocentric arguments, to refer to the real, Kolozova proceeds to the second part of Saussure’s process. The second movement is to take the abstract back to concrete using Laruelle’s “philosophical impoverishment” procedure which it non-philosophically recreates the transcendental minimum of a concept. In other words, it traces back a series of identities of the previous instances to arrive at its very “last instance”, a destination of a realist account, the “transcendental minimum.” For example, “gender” as a concept and metaphysical experience to “the reproductive reality of a human society”.5 The complete process is:

Gender [concept] < performativity [concept/clone] < the real of the social distribution of sexualized subject positions [real/real abstraction] < the binary structural organization of femininity and masculinity [real/real abstraction] < the reproductive reality of a human society [the real as the physical determination in the last instance].5

Concepts arrived at their last instance are concepts in their pure form, a “formulaic expression.” It “submits to the real rather than to itself, and its self-referential coherence”6. The transcendental minimum’s semantic contents can then be communicated across sciences and philosophical studies. It can be tested against practices, and the measurement of the practices can be fed back in to the formalization process.

Endnotes

1 Katerina Kolozova, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, p. 55-87.

2 ibid., p. 55, 67.

3 ibid., p. 68-69.

4 ibid., p. 66.

5 ibid., p. 79.

6 ibid., p. 73.

Question Cedric Bobro

What is the difference between metaphysics without philosophy and physics? On the one hand, since physics founds its laws of nature and axioms through induction derived from judgements a posteriori, it would seem that it therefore evades the founding principle of sufficiency that undergirds classical metaphysics, which begins a priori from the assertion that reason is the model with which thought seeks to unify the natural world (or reveal the world in its unity). But, on the other hand, physics seeks to unify its knowledge into a totalized picture of the physical universe, which is at least a secondary component of the principle of sufficiency that non-philosophy seeks to undermine. How does, therefore, non-philosophy propose its metaphysics via partial axioms of the real without seeking to unify them in a very basic way—deduction into natural laws—like physics does?