System Without Method

Abstract

Substantive formulations like the political and the modern arouse suspicion. Is this to ontologise one’s own embarrassment? Is the inability to specify more precisely the concept transformed verbally into a metaphysical virtue? Ontology claims that epistemological questions presuppose clarification of the foundation on which they rest. The assertion could be easily reversed. Ontology could itself be said to presuppose a theory of knowledge. The relation of the epistemological and the ontological at this level of abstraction presents yet another of the dualisms typical of the ordinary modern structure. Its reappearance only furthers the suspicions. The originary is everywhere, and thus nowhere. Hegel’s attack on the romantic `night when all the cows are black’ was directed at a similar vagueness. Marx’s scorn for the ‘holy family’ of contemplative philosophy and for ‘German ideology’ has the same root. The demand for system cannot replace the articulation of a method that guarantees against the reproach of abstract tautology. This method cannot be simply the application of the system. An object to which a system could be applied stands in principle outside the system itself. It is a presupposition. Such a presupposition is not modern. The same modern structure forbids the other alternative which conceives the method as the action by which the system constitutes an object domain.1 To leave the system simply in its self-related completeness and necessity — as ‘God’s thought before the Creation’, in the words of Hegel’s Logic — is no solution. A mediation is necessary. Neither philosophy alone nor politics alone can provide it.KeywordsCivil SocietyFrench RevolutionClass StruggleReal FoundationSocial ExistenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.