François Laruelle begins his initiation of non-philosophy by taking issue with the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy. Such a principle, Laruelle tells us, lies further at the core of philosophy than any other philosophical principle (such as the principle of sufficient reason) and is, in itself, not a philosophical principle at all. The Principle of Sufficient Philosophy lies outside of philosophy’s vision much in the same way that Narcissus does not see the pool which reflects his image back to him and it is thus only non-philosophy’s refusal of this principle (which is, of course, prefigured in other figures and methods) which brings it into vision. The Principle of Sufficient Philosophy can be summed up in the belief that everything is philosophisable. In this way philosophy gives itself a fundamental or necessary status in the discourses in which it shares (philosophy of art, political philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, etc.). As Laruelle’s project begins to be written about it will be said over and over in every single piece (at least for a time) that Laruelle’s project is not created to overcome or destroy philosophy. The Principle of Sufficient Philosophy is merely located as a fact about philosophy which may explain its many failures and which may be used in other ways as well. It is, as such, simple material.
Laruelle attempts to use this material while thinking according to what he terms the Real. According to and not about the Real and in this way the Real itself takes on a quasi-divine character. I’m still unsure how to understand this Real, which is described in a variety of ways through axioms scattered throughout his work. The nature of an axiom, however, is that it is fundamental for some system but cannot itself be proven. One must simply decide that it is and work out the system from it. In this way non-philosophy actually refuses the philosophical de-cision through its own decision for particularizing its own work according to what is not strictly particular – the Real. Via its method of axiomatization it does not decide and it does not think according to the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy – non-philosophy has and recognizes its limits (indeed, this is one of the most refreshing aspects of Laruelle’s passage from Philosophie I to III – the up-front recognition of his own works’ failures and inadequacies). Yet, and this perhaps is always the philosophical temptation, who can think according to the Real and not ask about the nature of the Real itself? Such is a temptation to heresy itself, but also to orthodox codification; that is, it is a temptation to theology. Laruelle’s axioms become, as is suggested in his Futur Christ: Une leçon d’hérésie, a form of unlearned knowledge [savoir indocte] (which he quickly differentiates, in fact far too hastily and without enough pedagogical comment, from Nicholas of Cusa’s learned ignorance) that reminds me of Bergson’s description of mystics in his Two Sources. Not mystical obfuscation, but the unlearned knowledge of the Real from which one proceeds. Something of this is deeply unsatisfactory, as it is Bergson, and yet, of course, I find myself drawn to it quite strongly.
There is a relationship one may draw between non-philosophy’s method and theology. Theology has its own self-sufficient problem analogous to philosophy’s: that of the Principle of Sufficient Theology. This is a bit different from philosophy’s narcissism and may find some elucidation by a comparison with the other figure in that myth, the nymph Echo. The history of all hitherto theology has been that of the interplay between echo and control (the figure of Hera). Theology, it is often said, has no object proper. It is at once simply in the service of the central event of the faith, for Christianity the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, claiming to merely echo that event while, at the same time, its complex task has been to codify the truth of that event into some sort of doctrine. The Creeds perform this function of theological determination brilliantly as a perfect instance of learned ignorance. The Creeds respond to the historical heresies, and one may generalize about heresy by claiming that, in contradistinction to orthodoxy, they always say too much and perform a sort of learned knowing (Laruelle himself locates this difference between his unlearned knowledge and the Principle of Sufficient Heresy). At the same time the Creeds go on to say quite a bit, all of it very learned, which is to say, with Laruelle, all very Greek, but all of it quite ignorant. Echo and control – learned ignorance.
Non-philosophy appears to mimic theology in its thinking from the Real and not of it. Rather than the Real we find the name God. Theology thinks from God and not of God in the same way that philosophy would think of God. Theology cannot think of God without first thinking from God and in this way theology is an axiomatic practice like non-philosophy. Yet it is this very axiomatic aspect of theology’s practice that underlies its Principle of Sufficient Theology where everything is theologisable because theology’s non-object, God, is related or even meta-related to everything that is. In non-philosophy’s methodological cloning of theology how does it avoid its own self-sufficiency? The Principle of Sufficient Theology is clearly in a different register than the-philosophy’s self-sufficiency principle in that it does not claim to have privileged place in the thinking of everything self-sufficiently, but as auto-donation of Divine sufficiency from its own notion of the Real. Laruelle suggests in Futur Christ that it is the figure of the heretic which must be taken up and that Christ is a model of heresy. Yet, Christ himself wanted to draw all things unto himself and Laruelle wants to use this universal salvation in his presentation of what non-Christianity can do. Can one still have this sort of theological universal, even as cloned in non-religion (whatever that may come to really look like), and avoid theology’s Principle of Sufficient Theology? Does not, then, non-philosophy need to be unified with non-theology in order then to overcome this principle?
An und für sich 