Author: M. Hejazi Moughanlou

(…Among the points that ought to be raised here and not forgotten:

1. War has taken shape prior to peace; how, through war, armies, etc., certain economic relations – such as wage labour, the use of machinery, etc. – took shape before their emergence within the heart of bourgeois society.
2. Also the relation between productive forces and relations of intercourse, especially visible in the army. The relation between current historiography – which is the historiography of thought – and real historiography. What is called, by convention, the history of civilisation, which also includes the history of all religions and states. (If opportunity and occasion arise, something could also be said about the various kinds of historiography up to now: so-called objective, subjective (moral and the like), and philosophical historiography.)
3. Secondary and tertiary relations of production, essentially derived, fictive: relations that are not authentic. Here I shall raise international relations.
4. The accusations levelled against this approach for being materialist. The relation with naturalistic materialism.
5. The dialectic of the concepts of productive force (means of production) and relations of production; a dialectic whose boundaries must be determined and which does not negate real distinction.
6. The uneven development of material production, taking the example of artistic production. Fundamentally, we should not place the concept of progress in the mould of common abstraction. Let us not regard this disproportion with art as merely important and difficult – (more important and difficult than this disproportion) within the framework of practical-social relations themselves, for example, the relation with education. The relation of the United States to Europe. The truly difficult point we must examine here is how relations of production, as legal relations, enter into uneven development – thus the relation of Roman private law (and in criminal and public law, which is less discussed) with modern production.
7. This conception appears to be bound to necessary development, but the legitimacy of contingency and accident (do not forget). How. (Freedom and other things as well.) (The influence of means of communication; world history has not always existed; history as the result of world history.)
8. The point of departure is naturally determination by nature: subjective and objective. Tribes, races, etc.)
   — Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction. [IV, M-21]

Before and above all else, the question of ethics and morality, and the relation of the one who wills to action with morality, must at this juncture be brought into the middle of discourse and into difficulty, and thereby its form become manifest to us. For an encounter with Marx in such a manner, we must pose a preliminary question to Marx’s own epoch, inasmuch as the relation between my willing self and my praxis must determine our problem, as a political matter, within our political will. A glance, however minimal, at our surrounding circumstances suffices to make us aware of this: the problem of myself, an Iranian, and on a larger scale, of myself as a human being of the 21st century, is my will-lessness and my moral torpor. From politics and democracy to economic progress, financial entanglements, and interpersonal relations, even in the simplest everyday matters, thus, to preserve intersubjectivity, we regard extra-textual reference with suspicion. The question concerning Marx – if it is for the purpose of inquiring into economics and testing the will that we ought politically to exercise, and thus we have in mind the political-economic Marx – must, before any other problem, speak of the how and the proper modality of political willing and its possibility. For the specific reason that the dualistic and romantic subject still stands, in relation to the reason that exercises that particular will, in a positional inversion. To put it more clearly, we subjects, as we are, must first consider the possibility of will, the limits of our will, and the kinship of will with form, end, and means. By what guarantee do we exercise a will and then accept responsibility for the resulting consequence? For such an event, we must at least have conceived of the outcome of our action in its desirable form. The inquiry we seek concerns the relation between the form of the object of will and its end, and how the form of the so-called collective will takes shape. It is through this passage that we turn to dialectics. The paramount question is: how do the wills of individuals relate to one another? And by this same method, we inquire into the form of the possibility of history and of historical occurrence.

At this stage, what we must speak of is the history that has passed over us. And yet, if we acknowledge that in the very essence of that which has passed, there is no connection whatsoever with the present – for to negate this claim we would have to posit historical causality as established, that is, to suppose that we at least perceive, or can perceive, the addition and continuity of the form of a past event with another event, i.e., the signification of the two together – even in this case, past history, insofar as it makes us aware of our resultant inheritance, is among the specifically necessary sciences. And for this task, even a methodological re-reading and revision of history is not required. Our problem in this section is not the science of history itself, but rather the historical continuity of the will of our ancestors with us. We speak of what happened in the past, but that part of science which ought to address “so what?” remains crippled. The narration of events is impossible without investigating how they have taken form; and this latter science, through its determined and synthesised direction, attains the importance of dialectics.

Thus, the question of ethics – and, in a related order, of every kind of human will within uncommon conceptualisations – shapes the present inquiry. The manifest and distilled core of the story is this:

1. Can the human will be an unethical will? Can a human being do something that, at least in his own view, is unethical? And does it have any meaning at all that a human being, and human subjectivity, can choose anything other than what he considers right?
2. If, in the previous question, we concluded that we cannot (conceptually and possibly) choose other than what we know to be morally good, then does talk of nature, utility, and any extra-referential or extra-textual matter have any meaning?
3. Ultimately, if the human will is formal and is the subject of ethics, then is his political will also not in line with that moral belief? Or is political ethics something other than individual ethics, even contrary and opposed to it?
4. This juncture leads us to the question of the relation between ethics, religion, and politics, and we must address the formation and formal possibility of political will, and the how of this possibility. The present section deals specifically with the first question:

What is the pure ethical proposition – even if we call it the categorical imperative? In the previous section (I), we spoke a little of this. Here we ask again: in the form of the ethical proposition, is the association of the two sides of the proposition possible? In other words, is the relation of subject-noun to predicate in itself associable, or are the copulas – which decree negation or affirmation – the important and performative part of the proposition? When we look at the subject-noun of the ethical proposition, do we see anything other than one form among possible forms that could come to human will? And then, in the concept and the form of the being-ness of this subject-noun, do we see good and evil? This romantic and anti-rational claim – that ethical propositions initially report on the essence of their own subject-noun – is an epistemological claim that must be seen on a larger scale and examined: is such a thing at all possible, namely, reporting on the core of a thing, and apart from the phenomenon of that thing? Then we must ask: what is the phenomenon of a thing? And then say: what judgment does this render in ethics?

Every categorical imperative is, initially and ultimately, a positive proposition and concept. If we come to understand that what is meant by an ethical proposition is only our willing, and that the subject of the moral law is the will in development – then we rearrange the ethical proposition in such a manner that it has the following form: “The human will ought/ought not to perform such-and-such a volitionable act.” And if we further grasp that will can only be understood through affirmation, then at the beginning of every categorical imperative we will conclude that the ethical proposition cannot be conditional, negative, or of any other possible category; rather, it is certainly and affirmatively positive. In the sequel of the proposition, however, we return to a discussion I proposed in the previous paragraph, namely: can a human being do anything other than what he knows to be right? And is the subject of the science of ethics anything other than performative utterance, command, and the correctness of science? Since the subject, in a single temporal and spatial moment, among all his own self’s choices, and in comparison and relation to all other possible actions, has the condition to choose only one condition from among these – therefore, however conditional or negative an ethical or imperative proposition may appear, in the end, human will is confronted only with a possible and formal affirmation, whereby even if he does not do something, this very non-doing is accepted as an act.

The end of every thing is found in its form, and the ideal of that thing likewise: when we intend something, we can only consider its form:

“This infinitude is a spurious or negative infinitude, for it is nothing other than the negation of the finite; but the finite thereby arises again in the same manner, and consequently has not been surpassed. In other words, this infinitude only posits the condition that the finite must be surpassed. This progress to the infinite does not go beyond the expression of the contradiction that the finite contains, namely, that it is both something and its other; and this progress is the eternal alternation of these determinations, each producing the other.” (Translation as given.)

The first thing that comes, in childhood, into the vessel of reason, and that matures in old age – so to speak – is the form of things, and nothing more or less. By that same simple relation: the only unit that claims its own unity is the form of every thing.

Our paramount and fundamental question is this: can something other than the mind affect the subjectivity of the subject? And is the world anything other than the perception of the subject? For a long time, this writing of mine has been mistakenly and gravely misconstrued as a kind of idealism and subjectivism, as if I were claiming that the world is nothing but our illusion. Yet the sequence of such a claim yields nothing of the sort. Firstly, affirming an illusion necessarily entails believing, in addition to it, in the existence of a reality/truth other than it – which is not the case. Secondly, the label “idealism” is superfluous here. Consider the study: the apprehension and organisation of a scientific system for rationality and subjectivity is not idealism; it is merely an attempt to prepare an answer to the question: “How do we think?”

Can the subjectivity of the subject be affected by any other abstract thing whatsoever? Can the subjectivity of the subject, by virtue of its gazing upon its own subjectivity, bear witness that that subjectivity and its noetic station can be affected by something? For this appears to stand against the abstract definition we give of subjectivity. On the other hand, the explanation that subjectivity is a physiological network – and that these affections speak, in fact, from a meta-scientific, meta-rational, and extra-subjective position, which can only be accepted through the authority derived from revelation and intuition – this explanation is problematic. It becomes difficult to conceive that the subject could will something without first having perceived it. And for this same reason, it is hard to accept that anything other than the subject’s own quotidian subjectivity influences his knowledge. For even if external factors do influence his subjectivity, he has no actual consciousness or self-consciousness of them. Thus, whatever his subjectivity may be, in a redefinition it remains what it is; and in accordance with what it is, it is this subjectivity that is directed toward the primacy of external matters. Therefore, to measure the affection of the subject, the subject again places those external matters at a secondary, outer level and makes them the object of its investigation. Hence we say that subjectivity is something abstract. The correspondence of physiological relations with bodily function, and then with mental health, and their totality in relation to the station of subjectivity, and the investigation of these matters in laboratories – none of this determines anything beyond a mere correspondence, nor does it in any way conclude with signification, or perhaps with the ontological priority of one over the other. These cannot be deduced from them. For this reason, subjectivity is epistemically prior to anything that comes after it; and only two subjects, in relation to one another, can shape an other-conscious, self-conscious, and dialectical relation of this kind. The critique of the Neo-Kantians and the existentialists of the nineteenth century is of this same tenor. Nietzsche’s famous critique in The Will to Power – when he regards causality as an illusion of direct human volition – rests upon this evidently clear argument: that the mechanism is itself something that has been studied, claimed by the subject; and all these matters, except for a negative aspect, possess no clear positive form.

Only that knowledge can become the object of a genuine, systematic, and scientific investigation which has a positively formal aspect. Just as, in a customary manner, we ontologically prioritise a thing over a fictitious one – even if that thing is also temporally prior, epistemically speaking – it has ontological priority over that which follows from it. In this matter, the positive, as is apparent from the convention in its definition, is something that is first known, and then makes possible, either potentially or actually, the negation for the subject. In any relation, what the subject apprehends and, for the first time, comes to know is something that, in its own kind and within the dialectic in which it is situated, is a material that serves as the ideal of knowledge for itself. For this specific reason, negative science can bring forth the dialectical function of things and the world, but conceptually, it is not a concept that would be an instance of a signifying science by measure and analogy. At this juncture, the problem of the present section is the problem of the form of the proposition and its relation to its content.

The specific and general problem of our surrounding world is, on the one hand, the supposition that it is the content of propositions that produces their final formal shape. Hence, there is an inner truth hidden behind worldly events – indeed, not even that this concealed truth has become concealed in the movement of these forms; and, in the Heideggerian manner, truth as something unconcealed emerges from this concealing movement. Thus we suppose that a here-and-now declarative proposition truly reports on the essence of the subject-noun, through the association of content – whereas, in fact, every positive proposition is initially only a performative proposition. For it is only after the form of the proposition has taken shape that the subject-noun of those propositions acquires a core and a truth. Otherwise, outside the state of movement, the subject-noun, without any sign, is merely a simple subject-noun; and in a negative state, it is returned to the proposition that has been shaped in the performative mode of the proposition – a proposition which we then revert to its own simple and abstract state.

“If the fear of falling into error introduces a mistrust of Science, which without any such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually comes to know, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust.” — G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

To date, it must have become evident to every knower that the question of knowledge, before any other question, stands at the forefront of our era’s intellectual horizon. Kant’s fourfold inquiries remain our paramount concern: (1) What can I know? (2) What ought I to do? (3) What may I hope for? (4) What is the human, and what is human beingness? And each of these inquiries is profoundly bound and linked to the others. Although Kant enumerates others who influenced his first question—“What can I know?”—and even credits them for having awakened him from his dogmatic slumber, ultimately it is he alone who formulates this question for us and gives it shape. Thus our question, ranging from its innocent and complacent levels to its most complex later iterations, is the question of the form of reason, of formal rationality, and the question of the possibility of knowledge. Can we truly inquire into the essence of objects, things, and the world? Can we pose a question to the world? What are the delimitations of reason? And on what basis can we be assured that we have answered and possess knowledge of it?

In our everyday lifeworld, we hear and speak of economics and economic, subject-oriented ownership, of man and woman, sexuality and gender, of punishment, religion, theology, and the formal orders of the world and the collapse of form and content, of art and its content and the necessity of form therein, and, in sum, of science, scientific authority, and academic consequences. In any case, whether a human being engages with the primary question or not, they are compelled to immerse themselves in the secondary question: a human being, even if they do not prepare a defence of the orders of their thought, inevitably speaks of the imperatives of praxis and action. Yet whatever the case, the subject cannot find its self-same self in any fixed moment, nor can it know itself either negatively or affirmatively—for the very necessity of believing in and validating such a hypothesis can only find the possibility of authenticity if we deny that, in order to gain knowledge of something, the object of knowledge must behave in a determinate and fixed manner within a given moment so as to attain the status of being posited. The subject, in the very moment it seeks to know itself, is no longer that same self. Hence, it must make its own self into its own object, presupposing that the preceding moment and the present moment are two different things, and further claim that subjectivity can be defined and compounded only as a part of itself, that is, through a relation to something other than itself.

For this reason, we establish our first hypothesis: the subject can never attain knowledge of its own subjectivity, for the subjectivity of the subject—that is, its actual consciousness—cannot become the object of any kind of knowledge, nor become its theme, because in its concept and meaning it is something simple, unless we speak of it negatively and, as with any other simple thing, adopt a negative approach to its definition. Beyond this, when we consider reason, we must pay heed to the question: where is the vessel of possibility for this rationality, and in what manner does rationality take form? Then we must ask: can a human being exercise will beyond reason? Or, more precisely, when we say “human,” can we will anything other than his volitional subjectivity? And, in view of the framework we have laid out, is it at all possible to regard the human as anything other than an indivisible unit hostile to composition?

Plainly, the claim we are making aspires to convey an elucidation of human agency and to invite a reconsideration of human knowledge, so that perhaps the prevailing dogmatism might, once again, in the continuation of history—by linking this era to the preceding one—be broken, dismantled, and deconstructed. Friends and critics will ask what justification there has been for the terminology employed here; I shall endeavour, throughout the text, to provoke crisis in this very inquiry.

To begin my work, in order to point toward the zero point of the discussion, I start from Kant’s second question: “What ought I to do?” Some have argued that Kant’s intention was to move from ethics toward religion. We shall have, in general, no concern with the historical Kant’s own imagination and thought. Rather, we shall ask: does what Kant does—namely, the clarification of the self-sufficiency and autonomy of the moral law and the categorical imperative—stand in opposition to religion, religious discourse, theology, and the like? Such a thought assumes this very position, and must provide a defence for what is taken as self-evidently presupposed, namely, that religious texts and works, as objects, present themselves with a self-interpretation—and, astonishingly, many great and small alike commit this error. With Kant, we must return to the primary question, even if his second question comes before the first, albeit in a methodologically erroneous manner: from what does the self-sufficiency and autonomy of the moral law derive? And, essentially, what is the addressee of such a claim?

The claim of this text is as follows:

Firstly, the subject of the ethical proposition is not its empirical subject. When we say “murder is contrary to ethics,” “murder” as the subject of the proposition has no subjecthood in the foundation and constitution; it is rather the object of the proposition. The core claim resides in the fact that “you shall not commit murder, never and at no time.” On this approach, “murder” as the object of ethical knowledge must be comprehensively defined and delimited: when, provisionally, we are excepted from this rule, and when not; in brief, when we are confronted with murder, and when with something other than what is meant in this proposition. Our proof and argument, by way of evidence, ask: in what sense can the subject-noun, in itself, be situated? When we look at “murder,” pondering its concept and essence, is it not the case that we have attended to something whose subject-noun is once again our will? And, apart from pointing to an aggregate of indirect volitional relations, can it indicate something else? When we examine its concept, can we find any sign or indication of goodness or badness in its lexical meaning and concept? How can it be thought that by pondering the concept of murder and ethical good and evil, the judicative decree—the “is” and “is not” of the proposition—will be evoked for us? And, above all else, this claim itself is romantic, intuitionist, and consequently anti-rational. Apart from this, what meaning does it have, and in what form is it cast, when we say “murder is contrary to ethics,” if not that it is comprehended only within the vessel of will—i.e., within the “oughts” and “ought-nots”? And, in a more collective layer, is meaning anything other than form—and here, the form of the volitional act?

Secondly, what Kant bestows upon us—at the initial stage, even if historically he himself did not realise this, just as Hume historically did not realise the import of his own words—is this: the human being apprehends the ethical proposition and its self-sufficiency and autonomy from any other argument. But to the same degree, by what rational method and in which vessel of intelligence can the two sides of the proposition—i.e., the subject-noun and its product—evoke one another? To put it another way, Kant, in all three Critiques, summons us to a kind of formalism: to see the concept of every thing in its form. And yet every human being will ask themselves: such a form, which cannot be positively analysed (and thus cannot report on anything), from what does it originate, and who enunciates it?

Thirdly, the subject apprehends the ethical proposition only within the vessel of possibility and the power of its own will. Apart from this path, the parts, in the event of collapse, are negators of ethical formalism. And at this point we return to an earlier stage, where we must expand the first claim. If we accept that the moral law and the categorical imperative are conceivable only with regard to the will, then they cannot report on their own truthfulness or falsity, correctness or incorrectness.

Fourthly, no proposition—especially the ethical proposition—can report on the essence of its own subject-noun, even if we accept that that subject-noun might have an essence. In that case, we return to Kant’s first question and the problem of language-games.

We return to the first question and the final part of such a section: Where and when has the subject’s first confrontation with actual knowledge taken place? Subjectivity of the subject—i.e., the subject as a potentiality, prior to actualisation—and here we conduct a negative investigation: in what vessel has the possibility of knowledge been found? And how have the experiences, inductions, syllogisms, and inferences of a knower taken shape, from infancy to old age? Does the knowledge of the knower of the known thing occur except in the form of that thing? And even when he imagines that he reports on the essence of that thing, is it not fundamentally otherwise than what is imagined—that he has come to know the final form and ideal of the thing? And in relation to this same approach: is not the idealism that claims knowledge of the final form—the final form as ideal and cognitive form—obliged to mount a renewed defence of itself against this materialist interrogation and inference? For in that case, we are confronted, in all simplicity, not with a final form but with one state among the possible states of a thing, and we should confine ourselves to this manifest phenomenality. Then, what relation would this have to the science of phenomenology? To answer each of these questions, we must first prepare an answer to the question we have quoted: what sort of vessel is the vessel of knowledge, and in what manner? For if a subject, by taking a negative approach, shows this vessel to be that which negates vessel-hood—if it arrives at a negative determination—has it not thereby committed an act of anti-rationalism?