The Four Fundamental Modes of Thought
The Four Cardinals: System of Transcendental Qabala - Book III
What is knowledge? We’ve begun to make a clearing in which we’ll be able to construct a system of thought, but we’re not finished making the clearing. There is still more to clear away. In the last book, Renihilation, I arrived at an outline of a system of thought. Now I have to turn attention to the question of how to fill in the outline, how to actually think, how to address each topic. What materials should be used, what rules should be followed, to what degree do they need to be followed at all? To what degree am I even able to make a conscious decision to direct what I will write? This is the theme of the Four Cardinals, the four elementary modes of thought.
But this is much more than a methodological concern; it confronts the very deepest questions already: what is the mind? What is the difference between the mind and the transcendental subject? What is the connection between thought and being? The ancients believed that the ontological and the gnoseological form a continuum. The moderns mostly view thought’s minimal traction on the real as an inexplicable accident. Some believe time is itself the closing world-historical gap between knowledge and reality, closing faster every year it seems. Some believe thought is intrinsically intersubjective, others seek to explain it away or describe it purely in terms of natural forces.
In this book I’ll show that a system of thought can only be constructed using four “cardinals”: dogma, rationalism, materialism and gnosis. It is difficult to classify this inquiry: it is a doctrine of philosophical method, at the same time it is an epistemology and a transcendental psychology which requires a consideration of history and culture, given that, while the four cardinals are lobes of the collective mind, they are at the same time evolving traditions.
My doctrine of the Four Cardinals is an attempt to update Kant’s critical project, incorporating insights in various fields that call for a new approach. To derive the four, it is worth dwelling here on Kant’s own transcendental psychology, given that every contemporary school of thought in one way or another traces itself back to his work.
Kant’s Transcendental Psychology
Without overdetermining philosophy with history, we must note that Kant’s work has an historical context: in his day, given the success of mathematical physics, it was no longer tenable to suppose that philosophy was able to say anything insightful about the physical universe or the nature of causality. For unknown reasons, geometry, algebra and controlled experiment were able to join together to discover universal principles that philosophical reflection alone would never have guessed in a million years. Principles that were non-conceptual, impossible to imagine. This was simply an ontic, historical observation anyone would make at the time, regardless of their theoretical orientation. An event had taken place.
Kant saw this event as an opportunity to refine philosophy’s role. There was still something that experimental science had no access to, and this was the form of experience as such, the ‘lense’ through which, for whatever reason, reality reveals itself to humanity, however obliquely.1 There is a kind of noetic membrane between inner experience and the outer world to which science has no access. Ordinary judgment can’t access it either. Philosophical contemplation is the only way to make contact with it, and in doing so a new meaning is given to the Parmenidean phrase “thinking and being are one”. In the transcendental, contemplation contemplates contemplation, sensibility senses sensibility; questioning is questioned. This is the primordial “A=A”.
This territory opened up by Kant has been approached by later thinkers in many different ways. He himself divided this transcendental mind into five overlapping faculties: reason, understanding, imagination, sensibility and intuition. His criterion for deriving these was that, given that we do have experience in accordance with them, these faculties ‘must’ in some sense ‘be there’. There’s no sure criterion for proving it, since it is the very form within which knowledge and proof can occur, but a ‘juridical approach’ is possible; it is simply most reasonable to imagine that they are ‘there’.
The Schemata
Intuition is the form of space and time. Time flows forward as a series of moments; space is a three-dimensional matrix of connected areas. Whether time is real or space is real, these questions mean nothing. Einstein’s discoveries about spacetime change nothing. When I close my eyes, I can detect the ‘pure empty form of time’ going forward somehow, and an orientation of three spatial dimensions. Sensibility registers sense data through organs like vision, touch, hearing and so on. Understanding analyzes this data according to logical forms, and imagination is an experienced world structured by sensibility and understanding, where objects exist and change, where events occur for various reasons and so on. Again, as I meditate on experience, it’s impossible to deny that ‘data is flowing in’, I am registering contingencies, and they are passing through a sort of proto-conceptual filter and presenting themselves as objects, agents and events in a world that I’m in too, and that in addition to my ‘direct’ experiences I have a secondary narrative making observations about this experience. Finally, reason is a kind of drive to make sense of things as a unity, which rules scientific inquiry and also contains eternal ideas of god, the soul and the world as a whole. It is very important to Kant that understanding is not able to say anything about these latter three, given that we supposedly have no experience of them, experience being required to make true judgments. Instead, reason can enumerate antinomies about god soul and world which mark the limit at which though has to stop - the North Pole beyond which you can’t go any further north by definition.
Continental and Analytic Philosophy
Kant broke philosophy in two. He created a fork in the road; one path was to basically accept the answer he provided to his question and to refine it further or simply take it for granted in one’s approach to other questions. The other path was to acknowledge the importance of his questions but to reject his answer altogether - to contemplate the transcendental but reject Kant’s own schemata.2
Hegel’s Radicalization of Kant’s Critique
Hegel was the first to reject Kant’s answer, which he performed by radicalizing the questions. He supposed that just as Kant was dispelling transcendental illusions about God, Soul and World, Kant himself didn’t realize he was still under the sway of these illusions, if to a lesser degree, by granting them reality-in-itself, as though they were unchanging objects. Where is this ‘place’ outside of thought where God, Soul and World are supposedly sealed off? Similarly, Kant employed a metaphorical image of thought as a pair of glasses, a camera, a receiver of images. What if thought can create and act? He was also solipsistic in his account of the transcendental subject, imagining it as uncaused, interior, sealed off from any kind of genesis. But doesn’t it require a community to form judgments? Isn’t thought something generated by people? Dialectic between people, which involves power relations, desire, a kind of circulatory process of musical chairs - I see you, I imagine what you think about me, imagine myself as seen through your imagined eyes, do and say things in order to give an appearance which might be at odds with my interiority, or what I take to be my interiority. There is a game going on, a dance, what the medievals called ‘perichoresis’. There is a kind of void at the heart of this, an abyss of nonmeaning and dissatisfaction, the eye of the whirpool. And the whirpool itself is a glorious dance of spirit, unity and difference melting into one another, you and I constructing, wondering, taking leaps, being surprised or disappointed, Life.
Fervor
The conclusion that Hegel drew from this is that there is no being outside of thought, and all antinomies are challenges to be overcome rather than absolute barriers. Kant’s schema of transcendental psychology bizzarely transforms into an elaboration of world history as and through an account of exactly the topics Kant had proscribed - God, World and Soul. Hegel makes use of reason and understanding in Kant’s sense, but he changes their meaning. The followers of this path, the path of continental philosophy in Europe, go further than Hegel, leaving Kant’s schemata behind entirely. Marx, Nietszsche and Deleuze reject representation altogether, experimentally using materials from evolutionary biology, mathematics, linguistics to engage the transcendental not just to ‘paint a picture’ but to participate in this dance, to ‘philosophize with a hammer ‘. If the transcendental subject is generated by people in its immediacy, isn’t perhaps its structure also generated by evolution, or a metaphysical flux of which physical evolution is one instance ? Maybe it is able to evolve further, by a process more akin to art or insemination than reflection and syllogism.
This is the tradition of philosophy that I first fell into. As a mode of knowing, I name it Fervor, because of all modes of thought, it wrestles most sincerely with nonmeaning, contains the most originality, the most danger. In the United States it is seen as a fairly non-academic mode of thought, more popular in the art world, political movements, literary departments at universities. In short, in rejecting Kant’s reification of God, World and Soul, it always ends up imagining and reifying a kind of anthropomorphic gnostic life-force which supposedly works through philosophy to transform reality. From the perspective of American academic philosophy, this is seen as unserious, fanciful, merely literary. While I was studying in an analytic philosophy department during college, I felt the tension between these two approaches acutely. Felt is the right word. I could sense the scorn the members of each side of this debate felt for the other side. Debate is the wrong word, since at the time there wasn’t even really communication between the two. Gradually I developed the view that the cleft between the two was itself an antinomy, that neither side was more grounded than the other, and that they were simply two modes of thought.
Catharsis
After Fervor, then, we turn to Catharsis, the second mode of thought. Historically there was a path following a different tendency within Kant as well, which was truer to his intention of delimiting philosophy’s scope so that it can be more useful. First there were neo-Kantians who attempted to refine his schemas, and then, In the UK, there were Russell and Moore, the founders of Analytic philosophy. These reacted against the Byzantine Hegelianism of the British Idealists like Bradley and McTaggert. They sought clarity above all else, they sought to create a common logical language, to make sure to know the meaning of one’s questions and to be able to transmit them unambigioulsy. There was also an imperative to understand math and science which was not felt in the same way by continental philosophers. In school I took the Lacan course I mentioned, and courses on Hegel and Nietzsche and the history of philosophy and history of aesthetics. But there was always shame in it; these courses were second class citizens compared to symbolic logic, analytic metaphysics, probability, Wittgenstein. I loved these more abstract courses too, as well as discrete mathematics and computer science.
I bring this up because it’s important to situate my own view in the history of philosophy and world history. Continental and analytic philosophy aren’t just two approaches to a topic, they were themselves movements of the world spirit during the 20th century. Through continental philosophy, humanity’s soul was unfurling further, towards greater uniqueness, freedom and courage. It was through this that discourse on race, gender, sexuality, patriarchy, the science of the exercise of power, deconstruction and so on were born. Humanity’s dignity was evolving, with a paradoxically visionary nihilism. It is a field of philosophy, but it extends to other activities, in particular politics, art and music. Much of this is predominantly left wing, but it can be right wing too; what’s more important is that it occupies the extremes, at odds with dominant and superficial forms of society, more intense, more refined, arrogant, esoteric, elitist, contrarian.
Through analytic philosophy, the laws of thought were increasingly generalized so as to be of use in administering the world, developing computation and ultimately artificial intelligence. Instead of art and politics, this tendency transcends philosophy to encompass mathematics, logic, computer science, logistics. It is centrist, the daytime opposed to continental philosophy’s night. Good natured, seeking clear elaboration, honest in self critique but potentially destructive to uniqueness, annihilating of alterity.
To take up Kant’s project and incorporate Hegel’s insights, I assert that the transcendental subject is comprised of these two active, unfolding intersubjective traditions as faculties themselves, just as Kant considered understanding and sensibility to be faculties. At this stage, the ‘thought of thought’ has to reflect on the sociology of thought itself.
But then we have to step back and look at the fact that academia and the art, science and politics surrounding it is all just one part of culture. In terms of numbers, a small part. Where did academia come from? The modern university system has its roots in Europe at the end of the first millennium A.D. this was all part of the development whereby the Catholic Church broke off from the Orthodox Church, Charlemagne was crowned by the pope and the rudiments of modern Europe began to take shape as France, Germany, Italy and England under Western Christianity, out of the ashes of the Western Roman Empire. Philosophy was carried out in universities which were at first primarily monastic, but which more and more came to be museums of the humanity and institutes for scientific research, where professors could make a living and so on. A sense of pedigree and standard developed. Interestingly Descartes, Hume, Spinoza were not professors, but Kant, Hegel, Russell, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Deleuze and so on all relied on university positions. And there was a particular culture of modernism circumscribing the whole thing. The role of the university today is as a kind of secular church, or a church of secularism. I don’t say that to denounce it, but I am pointing out a contradiction which is difficult to see from the inside. You are not allowed to seriously consider God in a theoretical context in these environments, because of social pressure, shame, social programming, and for no other reason. You just won’t get an academic job if you do. This isn’t a criticism exactly, but it’s an observation about a limitation.
Ascesis
Philosophy has other capacities, which have never been disproved or gone away. The term ‘academia’ actually comes from Plato’s academy, which had no formal structure, and was something more like a cult. Pythagoras, who was in some ways the first true Greek philosopher, had much more literally a cult, which involved dietary restrictions, rituals and so on. And in India and China at this time, the equivalent of philosophy very much included specific practices of meditation that were designed to catalyze insights into the nature of reality, with conceptual thought only being one path to this.
This dimension of thought is also a cardinal direction on the horizon, which I will call Ascesis. Ascesis is a path, it produces particular kinds of truth that cannot be gotten in any other way, and it has a whole history of its own. In modern times it has a place of lower prestige but higher volume and more profit. The yoga industry, the self help industry; during the late 19th century and early 20th it produced theosophy and spiritualism, it also intervened in western philosophy with Schopenhauer. Today in the west it is for the most part distorted into a simulacrum by capitalism. In the former-Soviet East it often Fascist. Evola, Alexander Dugin. Western liberalism is not unjustified in seeing Ascesis as too dangerous to be granted real authority. Nevertheless, as a mode of thought it exists, and it is the oldest mode.
Majesty
And the fourth Cardinal is that from which Catharsis directly broke away from at the dawn of modernity: the true vine of Christianity, rooted in the scriptures of the Bible, the life of Christ, and the ecumenical councils where his nature and the nature of the Trinity were decided. I call this trajectory Majesty, and it is to be strictly distinguished from Ascesis, even thought both are spiritual - it is a cardinal of faith in a personal god, not of meditation. It was founded by the Israelites, in an historical mythos of being estranged, subaltern, enslaved, of beating the odds by way of faith in one true loving God. Moses was rejected, sent down the river in a basket as an infant, grew up and led his people out of slavery. Then he went up a mountain and was given a new set of laws by God. Israel was conquered over and over again, and it was during Christ’s life that it was conquered by the Roman Empire, which was at the height of its glory - Caesar crossed the rubicon only 80 years before. The lives of Moses, Christ, Paul demonstrate a mode of thought that is more agentive than noetic, oddly more aligned with the philosophy of Marx than most of the philosophical tradition. I’ll get more into the details in the next post, which will be devoted to Majesty, but for now I simply distinguish it from other modes.
The Four Cardinals of the Horizon
The transcendental subject then is a horizon or a globe, a world. Ascesis, catharsis, fervor and majesty are it’s directions. To return to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, in a little-understood passage from Chapter 3, he suggests that the transcendental subject in the Kantian sense is actually an assemblage. Reason, imagination, understanding and Intuition are clustered together as a kind of ecosystem, in just the same way that animal and plant populations, weather systems and geological and geographical formations come together to generate evolving worlds comprised of entities nourishing and feed off of one another as recurring cycles and habits.3
If we return to the idea that the transcendental subject isn’t just a ‘pair of glasses’ but is Adam Kadmon, the world spirit (what I call SHEYMN), we see that it is naive to reify any faculty as something fixed and abstract, as Kant does with his schemata. Each lobe of the transcendental mind is a collective, human activity which is itself evolving on its own path, evolving in its connection and disconnection from other faculties, and evolving perhaps because of its subjection to forces and tendencies on a higher level that it does not understand, like a cell being absorbed into a primitive multicellular organism.
In order to give an account of each of the thirty-six decans of the System, then, we’re forced to consider it from the perspective of each of these trajectories, each of these cardinals. All four of them. In principle the hope is for the resulting theory to ‘add up’, it should at least have specificity and coherence to some degree, inasmuch as that can be achieved in ten days. The result may be less systematic than one that would come from limiting to just one mode of thought, but it will be more honest, more true.
This is consistent with an important aspect of Ark Work, which is to be outside of the world, the worlds, to not accept the presuppositions of any one world. As someone who has been doing philosophy for a long time and spoken to many people with different perspectives, I’ll note that from my experience this approach is incredibly upsetting to most people. There are real ideological axioms that people submit to unconsciously. Installed by and as shame and humiliation, by social bullying at an early age, a wound, a trauma. But then a bandage painted to resemble reason is placed over the wound, and the wounded person believes they have a reason to justify the belief that they have in fact only submitted to out of pain and fear. When pressed to explain the reason, at a certain point reasoning breaks down and they are filled with anger or disgust. They instinctively hate anyone who crosses into this territy, violently. This phenomenon is articulated well in Wilhelm Reich’s book The Murder of Christ. Christ is the person who lives in a fully embodied way and does not compromise his joy, and he is killed because people who have sacrificed this joy for themselves want to kill him. Interestingly, this is not so much because of fully coherent outward-directed antipathy, but is a side effect of inward-directed shame. The same superego, the same criticizing inner voice that bullied me into sacrificing my joy and uniqueness will turn around and wreak the same abuse upon anyone else. The unconscious has a hard time distinguishing between inner and outer. This is the sense in which society is itself founded on shame, as in the Garden of Eden. Eve bit the apple and realized she was naked, and was ashamed - but if one person can’t be naked, no one can be naked. This is the price of knowledge.
As a personal aside, this socio-psychological phenomenon is also, in my view, the source of all of the senseless anti-transgender hate in the world today. Trans people don’t present any kind of threat at all to society, except to the constitutive humiliation whereby the primordial division of labor between childbearer and breadwinner was established, one which is no longer necessary, if it ever was. The same irrational antipathy towards alterity is present in philosophy. Rationalists despise theists and materialists. Materialists despise rationalists and theists, it’s a war out there. But the Universal Mind of SHEYMN will ultimately coordinate these faculties in perfect harmony.
this was his answer to Hume’s empirical skepticism. The latter made the provocation that there’s no such thing as causality, because we’ve never observed it. There’s no way to prove that what appears to be a law isn’t just a temporary habit that might break down tomorrow. Kant’s ingenious answer was to be even more skeptical. Yes, we don’t observe causality, but we also don’t observe space, time, objecthood, change, or anything directly about our supposed experiences, which are all structured in advance, even the ones which seem to be immediate. Therefore there must be some kind of ‘lense’ we’re looking through which provides all these categories
There are those who reject his line of questioning altogether as well, but they have a very difficult time being taken seriously as contemporary philosophers
while Deleuze attempts to ground this insight in his own materialist metaphysics, one does not have to accept the metaphysics wholesale to appreciate the insight