Abstract:
In the preface to his magnum opus Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou (2009) offers a diagnosis of our contemporary situation and the state of thought under the name ‘democratic materialism’: the ‘axiom of contemporary conviction’, or the assumption that ‘there are only bodies and languages’ (p.7). What is foreclosed by this discursive regime is the political appeal to the universal, or what Badiou refers to as ‘truth’. It is the contention of this thesis that ‘democratic materialism’ and its correlate, the contemporary dogma of ‘human finitude,’ is not really a new phenomenon, as Badiou seems to suggest. In fact, its central presuppositions are informed by a long history extending back to the early modern period and the bourgeois philosophers, most notably John Locke. These presuppositions, centred on the themes of finitude, fallibility and epistemological limitation, inform the very foundations of the modern liberal subject, whose features have been best discerned and criticized by the modern thinker par excellence, G.W.F. Hegel. The name given by Hegel to this form of subjectivity, in his essay Faith and Knowledge—which leaves thought fundamentally subjectivist—is ‘reflective consciousness’; a blanket term designating the core presupposition of a whole variety of (‘un’)-philosophies the central tenet of which is the reduction of thought to the subjectivity of an exclusively individual ‘consciousness’ that remains fundamentally divided from the world it seeks to know and engage with. The purpose of this thesis is to unearth the presuppositions at work behind this ‘metaphysics of finitude’ and the various dualisms at work therein; namely, the opposition between the finite and the infinite, the universal and the particular, subject and object, thought and being. Specific attention will be given to the political consequences of these oppositions, particularly their manifestation in the moral worldview and the theory and practice of modern liberalism. It is thought’s confinement to the givenness of the finite and the particular that is at issue, a suffocation opposed by Hegel’s central thesis that ‘the finite has no veritable being’. The logic and consequences of this proposition will be expounded in close connection with Hegel’s critique of metaphysics more generally. Finally, Hegel’s alternative, developed through an immanent critique of the metaphysics of finitude, under the name the logic of the ‘concept,’ or ‘concrete universality’, will be elucidated in conjunction with the political consequences and contemporary importance thereof.