Teleology, finally

1) Let’s finish infinity

All has an end.

Infinity cannot be verified.

Each division of the whole is finite.

Infinity is divided between its finite divisions and a whole that cannot be verified.

The division of the division is a finite movement.

Infinity of the division cannot be verified [1].

2) Let’s begin with the end

As all has an end, its end is the first quality, the first determination, the first negation of all.

It is with its end that all begins [*].

The principle of its end is the content of totality.

To divide totality until the end, is the content of totality.

As every thing is a division of totality, every thing depends on the end of totality.

Through the end of all may the content of every thing be understood.

In the content of every thing appears the end of all [2].

3) Let’s verify truth

The end of a thing is its realisation, its proof.

Only the realisation of a thing is its truth, only the truth of a thing is its realisation.

Truth is to be verified, truth is to be realised, truth is to be finished.

The possible of a thing, the contrary of its realisation, is only true as long as the thing is not realised.

This world is possible, but it is not true.

Mankind is a possibility, not yet a reality.

The possible is infinite, reality negates the possible: all is to be realised [3].

4) Teleologues of all countries, let’s get it over with

Teleology is the logic whose being is finite.

Teleology is the method of thought whose end is the beginning.

Teleology is the proof, the realisation of finality, the movement of truth.

It is a practice, a way of life, a game.

Teleologues are absolutists of the goal.

History is the environment of the teleologues, urgency and debate are its extremes.

The negation of teleology is alienation [4].

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[1] Infinity appears as a representation of imagination. It stands for what goes beyond the end, what supersedes it. Actually, infinity does not go beyond the end, but pushes away this end beyond itself, into the unverifiable. Thus the conception of infinity appears to be the unability to understand the end, the lack of conceptualisation that contains the lack of imagination. The perpetual dualism of the bad infinite only rarely meets the violent effort, the radical negation, which allows to supersede this obsession. Einstein, through the theory of relativity, has illustrated this supersession, by supressing the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise (Achilles runs twice as fast as the tortoise, and starts behind it; every time that the tortoise has travelled a distance, Achilles reduces the gap by half; and, thus, never catches up with the tortoise).

Just as for Gauss « infinity is a manner of speaking », and just as, in set theory, infinity is a quality, what is uncountable, infinity, in thought and in the world, is only what we do not know or cannot imagine the end of. Infinity exists, but has no reality.

[*] We were greatly surprised to see that the idea of modern teleology may have been understood as: the end is the beginning. Certainly, the above formulation may lead to suppose such a conception, which would consider the end as a false end, a provisional end, and would allow a cyclic and infinite chain of ends-beginnings. We confirm that after the end, there is nothing, not even any ‘after’. The sentence « It is with its end that all begins » must thus be refined. It is indeed because totality has an end that it could ever begin: only the fact that a thing has an end may allow it to begin.

But the paragraph as a whole is a methodological exhortation – the agreement and tense of the verb in the title indicate it enough – and not, as the wrong interpretation implies that it has been understood, an ontological analysis. The matter is to show that a thing is understandable from the fact that one knows that it has an end, and that what one discovers about it then is much different than what the dominant deductive thought allows, in which dialectics shall also be included: through the end of all, the content of every thing may be understood and that is why the external thought, which takes as an object, has better begin with the idea that this object itself has an end. It may have been necessary to say, instead of « It is with its end that all begins », « It is with the idea of its end that all begins to make sense ». Then, that this paragraph is about teleology may perhaps have been better understood, as was actually summed up in paragraph 4: « Teleology is the method of thought whose end is the beginning. » (Editor’s note)

[2] The method of thought used in philosophy, then in the decomposed fragments that its heirs are, is a mix of empiricism and of materialist belief. Empiricism acknowledges no starting point but self, that is the particular sensation, and rises to totality like through the degrees of a scale; likewise, materialist belief presupposes matter to any thing (except, oddly, thought), and, by matter, understands something absolutely indivisible by which every thing is only and exclusively identifiable, which practically is substance, infinite but indivisible, for Spinoza. On this solid and certain ground, one then poses all kinds of speculations, except those that take this ground as an object, and would thus threaten it.

If, on the contrary, every thing has an end, this end takes the place of this solid ground. It is a ground with no solidity whatsoever, since by essence it requires being verified, and since its verification suppresses it. To begin with the end thus offers the interest of restore speculation out of the positivist opprobrium by plunging it into the element of its own insecurity, that is by finally steadily projecting on finishing it. Speculate, speculate as much as you want. So it is not from the nature of thought, of things, that their end, or their infiniteness, as if the matter was one of maybe, maybe not, of time will tell, of an optional leisure that one may acquire after having completed one’s task, but it is from the end that what is may be understood.

Thus, it is from the realisation of the end of humanity that the strategy that leads to it may be deduced; and not from the construction of a situation more or less believed to be satisfactory, like communism for instance, where we will see later, on time, whether or not there is an end. It is here and now that this end is already determining. That is why there is urgency: urgency to realise this end, urgency to create the conditions of this realisation, urgency to found the debate that is its main condition. That is why here and now, modern riot assumes a particular importance: it is the only sparkle of this debate, of this urgency, though only the sparkle.

[3] Truth is a concept that is dissolving today. Truth is no longer taught, its importance and its use are no longer perceived. While moral was once meant to be identified with truth, today truth is identified but with moral. Moral now being worldwide and unified, truth now only appears as one of the worst constraints of an equally dissolving moral. Consequently, there are more and more instances where to lie is advised and practiced by the guards of the dominant moral (after a hostage taking in a kindergarten in Neuilly, the antitraumatic pedagogy advocated lying to children about the execution of the hostage taker by the police, arguing in an unverifiable manner that the lie would less traumatic than the affirmation of what seems to have been no more and no less than a murder, which, obviously, these children know). And, in the opposite party, lying is sometimes considered a form of subversion, and would be even more so, if all the parties practicing the negative had not always declared themselves the best upholders of truth, a heritage the meaning of which seems forgotten in a pre-tactic past.

What was lost in the moral wringing of the concept of truth, is precisely the concept. Truth truly is the concept, because it is the realisation of the idea of concept. Truth as reality, as end of thing thing, is negated by moral, though not explicitely, because moral poses truth not only outside the thing itself, but outside anything that is not moral, which itself is endowed with infiniteness. In fact, truth as reality of the thing is urgency: urgency of realisation, of completion. Truth is the aspiration for the end.

While the conceptual essence of truth, which makes it the future (to be-come) and not a presupposition, is today no longer much known, its other, formal meaning is the one that the dominant moral and its dissolution are squabbling over today. It is the truth of the word. While truth as a concept is opposed to possible, truth as a word is opposed to lie. This truth, unlike its concept, is very well known by all, since it is the object of various doctrines, religions, schools, informations, polices, justices. But, while our enemies continue to claim to be its defenders, we will continue as long as they exist to point in what way this defence is hypocrit. First, obviously, the truth of the word is not independent from the concept of truth. The word is the commitment to the realisation of a thing. In this sense, the truth of the word is the guarantee of supersession in the debate on the end of things. Otherwise, the truth of the word has indeed only a sense of moral value, which, in our perspective that has an end, makes no sense. Lying is thus always a manoeuvre that aims at delaying and conserving, actually at buying time against truth, realisation, suppression of what it is the commitment that will not be kept or the refusal of commitment. Paradoxally, as appearance often indicates the contrary, lying in the word must thus be considered as opposed to urgency.

While it needs not be a rule, it may be recommended to lie to the enemy, especially when one is held prisoner and questioned. In this exceptionnal figure, the difficulty is the same as in the realisation of truth, but pushed away in a detour: the matter there is to determine well the enemy. To lie to somebody, or not keeping one’s word, generally turn him into an enemy. The safest thing to do, in this case, is to consider this rupture as definitive. Anyway, the proposition to abolish it or not to, primarily belongs to the one that was lied to.

[4] In classical philosophy, the concept of teleology is much more limited than it appears here. While it indeed designates finality, it does so exclusively in relation to the laws of nature, in contrast with causality. Now, a finality that superseded the mechanism of nature, in addition to not necessarily being an end in itself, belonged to and so came from the surnatural. For Kant, then for Hegel, teleology thus is the relationship between the limited mechanism of nature and the freedom in infinite spirituality. The materialist position, notably expressed by Engels, unveals (though also restricts) teleology as a religious conception, as the implicit supranatural can only be God.

The modern concept of teleology comes from the teleological critique of these two conceptions. Firstly, spirituality is not infinite; on the contrary, it is limited by its own end, the end of mankind. As even if things are today endowed with spirituality, there is no spirituality outside mankind. These things are part of humanity, even if they are part of no human, and the division of spirituality, thus also its freedom, which allows it to haunt things, even if they belong to no human, belongs to humanity.

On the other hand, nature is a division of thought, and not the other way around. This is understandable, in our pseudo-materialist world, only insofar as one considers what is called nature as finite. For materialists, on the contrary, consider nature as infinite. And their only modesty, though a large one, consists in representing themselves as a tiny part of this infinite nature. They oppose this nature, gigantic since it is go beyond their imagination, not their thought, but thought, where thought is a sort of gas that dissolves as soon as it is produced, to be sure nothing that exists in nature. On the contrary, nature is a form of human thought, and thought is something effective, and not only in a head, but until the extremity of time and of the stars.

The accelerated modifications of the representation of the Universe represent, as a caricature, the accelerated modifications of human thought. Thus the discovery of billions of galaxies and of prodigious distances is perfectly proportional to the explosion of spirit since the demographic explosion that began a hundred and fifty years ago; thus, the « Big Bang » theory, its childish aspect aside, is the attempt to ascribre a beginning to something that would have no end, an unexplainable and besides untenable extremity to nature. The view of the « Big Bang » is the vision of the inverted finiteness of the world; it results from the attempt of conciliation of observers who seek to verify, on behalf of an ideology that presupposes it, the infinite materialism and the explosion of human though which is what they really observe, but without knowing it. The « Big Bang » is the theoretical attempt to stop and control this expansion, to ascribe a limit to it, material, in the very terms of the dominant materialist ideology.

For the modern teleologues, the creation of mankind is the exlusive work of mankind. The end of time, and of the Universe, is the end of mankind, its origin discovered. Time and space, history and the universe are only thought in movement, the game of spirit that the teleologues are impatient with.

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(Abstract from the bulletin n° 7 of the Bibliothèque des Emeutes [Riots’ Library], 1994, editor’s note added in 2001.)

Source: www.bellesemotions.org/naissanceT2/partie2/txttele.html

Translated in 2009 by a third party. Contact: historyhereandnow@gmail.com