XHJ's Blog

Sexual Difference and Ontology

by Alenka Zupančič 阿伦卡·祖潘契奇

To even suggest discussing sexual difference as an ontological question might induce – not without justification – strong reluctance from both the sides of philosophy (the traditional guardian of ontological questions) and gender studies. These two “sides,” if we can call them so, share at least one reason for this reluctance, related in some way to the fact that the discussion would attempt nothing new.

即便只是提出讨论性别差异作为一个本体论问题的建议，也可能会引起哲学界（传统上本体论问题的守护者）和性别研究领域的强烈抵制——而这种抵制并非毫无根据。可以说，这两个领域至少有一个共同的理由，即这种讨论试图进行一些看似并无新意的探索。

Traditional ontologies and traditional cosmologies were strongly reliant on sexual difference, taking it as their very founding, or structuring, principle. Ying-yang, water-fire, earth-sun, matter-form, active-passive – this kind of (often explicitly sexualized) opposition was used as the organizing principle of these ontologies and/or cosmologies, as well as of the sciences – astronomy, for example – based on them. And this is how Lacan could say, “primitive science is a sort of sexual technique.”¹ At some point in history, one generally associated with the Galilean revolution in science and its aftermath, both science and philosophy broke with this tradition. And if there is a simple and most general way of saying what characterizes modern science and modern philosophy, it could be phrased precisely in terms of the“desexualisation” of reality, of abandoning sexual difference, in more or less explicit form, as the organizing principle of reality, providing the latter’s coherence and intelligibility.

传统的本体论和宇宙论都强烈依赖性别差异，将其视为其建立或结构化的基本原则。阴阳、水火、地日、质形、主动被动这些（通常是明确的性别化的）对立被用作这些本体论和/或宇宙论以及基于它们的科学（例如天文学）的组织原则。正因如此，拉康才会说“原始科学是一种性的技术”。在历史上的某个节点，通常与伽利略科学革命及其后果相关，科学和哲学都与这一传统决裂。如果有一种简单且最普遍的方式来描述现代科学和现代哲学的特征，那就是可以用“去性别化”现实这一术语来概括，即放弃性别差异作为现实的组织原则，从而提供后者的连贯性和可理解性。

The reasons why feminism and gender studies find these ontologizations of sexual difference highly problematic are obvious. Fortified on the ontological level, sexual difference is strongly anchored in essentialism – it becomes a combinatory game of the essences of masculinity and femininity. Such that, to put it in the contemporary gender-studies parlance, the social production of norms and their subsequent descriptions finds a ready-made ontological division, ready to essentialize “masculinity” and “femininity” immediately.Traditional ontology was thus always also a machine for producing “masculine” and “feminine” essences, or, more precisely, for grounding these essences in being.

女权主义和性别研究对这些性别差异的本体化问题持高度怀疑态度的原因是显而易见的。强化在本体论层面上的性别差异强烈地扎根于本质主义——它变成了一种关于男性和女性本质的组合游戏。用当代性别研究的术语来说，社会规范的生产及其随后的描述发现了一个现成的本体论划分，准备立即将“男性”和“女性”本质化。传统本体论因此总是也是生产“男性”和“女性”本质的机器，或者更准确地说，是在存在中奠定这些本质的基础。

When modern science broke with this ontology it also mostly broke with ontology tout court. (Modern) science is not ontology; it neither pretends to make ontological claims nor, from a critical perspective on science, recognizes that it is nevertheless making them. Science does what it does and leaves to others to worry about the (ontological) presuppositions and the (ethical, political, etc.) consequences of what it is doing; it also leaves to others to put what it is doing to use.

当现代科学与这一本体论决裂时，它也大多与本体论整体决裂。（现代）科学不是本体论；它既不假装提出本体论的主张，也不从科学的批判角度承认它实际上在提出这些主张。科学做它的事，并让别人去担心它所做事情的（本体论的）前提和（伦理、政治等）的后果；它也让别人去利用它所做的事情。 (现代科学是是建立在主体被关闭 foreclosure of the subject 的基础上)

Perhaps more surprisingly, modern philosophy also mostly broke not only with traditional ontology but also with ontology tout court. Immanuel Kant is the name most strongly associated with this break: If one can have no knowledge about things in themselves the classical ontological question of being qua being seems to lose its ground. This is not the place to discuss what exactly the Kantian gesture and its implications was for modern and postmodern philosophy, whether it simply closed the door behind ontology (and, as some argue, left us imprisoned by our own discursive constructions, with no access to the real) or laid ground for a new and quite different kind of ontology.

或许更令人惊讶的是，现代哲学不仅与传统本体论决裂，而且还与本体论整体决裂。*（不明白）*伊曼努尔·康德是与这种决裂最紧密相关的名字：如果一个人对物自体没有知识，那么作为存在之存在的经典本体论问题似乎就失去了基础。这里不是讨论康德式的姿态及其对现代和后现代哲学的影响的地方，无论它是简单地关闭了本体论的大门（正如一些人所说，让我们被自己的话语构造所禁锢，无法接触到现实），还是为一种新的、截然不同的本体论奠定了基础。

In any case, it is a fact that the ontological debate, after a considerable time of withdrawal from the foreground of the philosophical (theoretical) stage – and, perhaps even more importantly, of not appealing to general interest is now making a massive “return” to this stage, and is already the reason for the idiom “new ontologies.”2 To be sure, these are very different philosophical projects. But it is safe to say that for none of them sexual difference (in any form) plays any part in their ontological considerations. Being has nothing whatsoever to do with sexual difference.

无论如何，事实是，本体论争论在经过一段时间的撤退后——也许更重要的是，不再吸引普遍兴趣——如今正在大规模地“回归”到这个舞台上，并且已经成为“新本体论”这一习语的原因。可以肯定的是，这些是非常不同的哲学项目。但可以说，对于其中的任何一个，性别差异（以任何形式）都没有在其本体论考量中发挥任何作用。存在与性别差异无关。

Since we are debating psychoanalysis and sexual difference, implicating Freud and Lacan in the discussion of the ontological dimension of sexual difference in any way but critical, that is might look like the peak of possible oddities.^undefined For this seems to go contrary not only to the numerous and outstanding efforts the defenders of psychoanalysis have, for decades, invested in showing the incompatibility of psychoanalysis with any kind of sexual essentialism; it is also contrary to what both Freud and Lacan thought and said about ontology. In view of the previously mentioned desexualisation of reality that occurred with the Galilean revolution in science, psychoanalysis (at least in its Freudian-Lacanian vein) is far from lamenting. Its diagnosis of Western civilization is not one of the “forgetting of the sexual,” and it does not see itself as something that will bring the sexual coloring of the universe back into focus again. On the contrary, it sees itself (and its “object”) as strictly coextensive with this move.^undefined Hence Lacan’s emphatic statements such as “the subject of the unconscious is the subject of modern science,” or, “psychoanalysis is only possible after the same break that inaugurates modern science.” I’m not pointing this out, however, in order to argue that psychoanalysis is in fact much less centered on the sexual than is commonly assumed, or to promote the “culturalized version” of psychoanalysis. Rather, the sexual in psychoanalysis is something very different from the sense-making combinatory game – it is precisely something that disrupts the latter and makes it impossible. What one needs to see and grasp, to begin with, is where the real divide runs here. Psychoanalysis is both coextensive with this desexualisation, in the sense of breaking with ontology and science as sexual technique or sexual combinatory, and absolutely uncompromising when it comes to the sexual as the irreducible real (not substance). There is no contradiction here. As there is no contradiction in the Jungian “revisionist” stance, which articulates an utter culturalization of the sexual (its transcription into cultural archetypes) while also maintaining a reluctance to forego the principle of ontological combinatory (of two fundamental principles). The lesson and the imperative of psychoanalysis is not, “Let us devote all of our attention to the sexual (meaning) as our ultimate horizon”; it is instead a reduction of the sex and the sexual (which, in fact, has always been overloaded with meanings and interpretations) to the point of ontological inconsistency, which, as such, is irreducible.

既然我们正在讨论精神分析和性别差异，涉及到弗洛伊德和拉康在性别差异本体论维度上的讨论——以任何方式但批判性的方式——可能看起来是最离奇的事情。这不仅与几十年来精神分析的捍卫者们在展示精神分析与任何形式的性别本质主义不相容的努力背道而驰；这也与弗洛伊德和拉康关于本体论的看法和说法相悖。考虑到之前提到的随着伽利略科学革命而发生的现实去性别化，精神分析（至少在其弗洛伊德-拉康脉络中）远非在哀叹。它对西方文明的诊断并不是“遗忘了性”，也不认为自己是要将宇宙的性彩重新聚焦的东西。相反，它认为自己（及其“对象”）与这一运动严格共时。因此拉康才会强调“无意识的主体是现代科学的主体”或“精神分析只有在与现代科学同样的决裂之后才有可能”。 我指出这一点并不是为了论证精神分析实际上比通常认为的更少以性为中心，也不是为了推广精神分析的“文化化版本”。相反，精神分析中的性是非常不同的东西——它恰恰是打破这种意义游戏的东西，并使其不可能。 精神分析既在这一去性别化的意义上与本体论和作为性技术或性组合的科学决裂，同时在谈到性作为不可还原的实在时也绝不妥协。 这里并没有矛盾。正如在荣格的“修正主义”立场中没有矛盾，后者表达了对性的彻底文化化（将其转写为文化原型），同时也保持了对放弃本体论组合原则（即两个基本原则）的不情愿。精神分析的教训和命令不是“让我们将所有注意力都集中在性（意义）上，作为我们的终极视野”；相反，它是将性和性（实际上总是被意义和解释所过载的）还原到本体论的不一致点，而这个点作为实在是不可还原的。

Georg Dionysius Ehret's illustration of Linnaeus's sexual system of plant classification, 1736. During the Enlightenment, Linnaeus system was polemic precisely because he proposes classification through sex

Lacan’s emphatic claim that psychoanalysis is not a new ontology (a sexual ontology, for example) is thus not something that I’m going to contest. But the reason for nevertheless insisting on examining the psychoanalytic concept of sexual difference in the context of ontology is not simply to reaffirm their incompatibility or radical heterogeneity in the circumstances of this “return” of ontology. The stakes are much higher, and the relationship of psychoanalysis to philosophy (as ontology) remains much more interesting and intricate.Perhaps the best way to put it would be to say that their non-relation, implied in the statement that psychoanalysis is not ontology, is the most intimate. This expression will hopefully justify itself in what follows.

拉康强调精神分析不是一种新的本体论（例如一种性本体论）的说法并不是我所要争论的。但是，尽管在这种“本体论回归”的环境中，精神分析概念的性别差异与本体论之间的关系有更高的风险，并且精神分析与哲学（作为本体论）的关系仍然非常有趣且复杂。或许最好的说法是，他们在声明精神分析不是本体论中所暗含的非关系是最亲密的。希望在接下来的内容中这个表达会得到证明。

One of the conceptual deadlocks in simply emphasizing that gender is an entirely social, or cultural, construction is that it remains within the dichotomy nature/culture. Judith Butler saw this very well, which is why her project radicalizes this theory by linking it to the theory of performativity. As opposed to expressivity, indicating a preexistence and independence of that which is being expressed, performativity refers to actions that create, so to speak, the essences that they express. Nothing here preexists: Sociosymbolic practices of different discourses and their antagonisms create the very “essences,” or phenomena, that they regulate. The time and the dynamics of repetition that this creation requires open up the only margin of freedom (to possibly change or influence this process). What differentiates this concept of performativity from the classical, linguistic one is precisely the element of time: It is not that the performative gesture creates a new reality immediately, that is, in the very act of being performed (like the performative utterance “I declare this session open”); rather, it refers to a process in which sociosymbolic constructions, by way of repetition and reiteration, are becoming nature – “only natural,” it is said. What is referred to as natural is the sedimentation of the discursive, and in this view the dialectics of nature and culture becomes the internal dialectics of culture. Culture both produces and regulates (what is referred to as) nature. We are no longer dealing with two terms: sociosymbolic activity, and something on which it is performed; but instead, we are dealing with something like an internal dialectics of the One (the discursive) that not only models things but also creates the things it models, which opens up a certain depth of field. Performativity is thus a kind of onto-logy of the discursive, responsible for both the logos and the being of things.

简单强调性别是完全的社会或文化建构的一个概念死胡同之一在于它仍然在自然/文化的二元对立中。朱迪斯·巴特勒对此看得非常清楚，这就是为什么她的项目通过将其与表演性理论联系起来而激进化了这一理论。与表达性表示预先存在和独立于所表达的东西相反，表演性指的是创造本质的行为，可以说，这些本质就是他们所表达的。这里没有什么是预先存在的：不同话语的社会符号实践及其对抗性创造了它们所调节的本质或现象。 这种创造所需的时间和重复动态打开了唯一的自由边界（可能改变或影响这一过程）。这种表演性概念与经典语言学表演性概念的区别在于时间的元素：它不是说表演性姿态在被执行的同时立即创造一个新的现实（例如“我宣布会议开始”的表演性言语）；相反，它指的是一个过程中，社会符号建构通过重复和再现成为自然——“只是自然的”，人们会说。被称为自然的东西是话语的沉淀，在这种观点中，自然和文化的辩证法变成了文化的内部辩证法。文化既生产又调节（所谓的）自然。我们不再处理两个术语：社会符号活动及其作用的对象；相反，我们处理的是像一个内部辩证法的“一”（话语），它不仅塑造事物，还创造它塑造的事物，从而打开了一定的深度场。表演性因此是一种话语的本体论，负责事物的逻各斯和存在。

To a large extent, Lacanian psychoanalysis seems compatible with this account, and it is often presented as such. The primacy of the signifier and of the field of the Other, language as constitutive of reality and of the unconscious (including the dialectics of desire), the creationist aspect of the symbolic and its dialectics (with notions such as symbolic causality, symbolic efficiency, materiality of the signifier) … All of these (undisputed) claims notwithstanding, Lacan’s position is irreducibly different from the above performative ontology. In what way exactly? And what is the status of the real that Lacan insists upon when speaking of sexuality?

在很大程度上，拉康式的精神分析似乎与这一观点兼容，通常也被呈现为这样的。能指的首要性和他者的领域作为现实和无意识的构成（包括欲望的辩证法）、符号的创造性及其辩证法（诸如符号因果性、符号效率、能指的物质性等概念）……尽管有所有这些（无可争议的）主张，拉康的立场与上述表演性本体论仍然不可还原地不同。究竟以何种方式？拉康在谈到性时所坚持的实在的地位是什么？

It is not simply that Lacan has to take into account and make place for the other, “vital” part of the psychoanalytic notions (such as the libido, the drive, the sexualized body), which gets to be defined as “real,” as opposed to belonging to the symbolic. This kind of parlance, and the perspective it implies, is very misleading, for Lacan also starts with a One (not with two, which he would try to compose and articulate together in his theory). He starts with the One of the signifier. But his point is that, while this One creates its own space and beings that populate it (which roughly corresponds to the space of performativity described above), something else gets added to it. It could be said that this something is parasitic of performative productivity; it is not produced by the signifying gesture but together with and “on top of” it. It is inseparable from this gesture, but, unlike how we speak of discursive creations/beings, it is not created by it. It is neither a symbolic entity nor one constituted by the symbolic; rather, it is collateral for the symbolic. Moreover, it is not a being: It is discernable only as a (disruptive) effect within the symbolic field, yet it is not an effect of this field, an effect of the signifier; the emergence of the signifier is not reducible to, or exhausted by the symbolic. The signifier does not only produce a new, symbolic reality (including its own materiality, causality, and laws); it also “produces,” or opens up, the dimension that Lacan calls the Real. This is what irredeemably stains the symbolic, spoils its supposed purity, and accounts for the fact that the symbolic game of pure differentiality is always a game with loaded dice. This is the very space, or dimension, that sustains the previously mentioned “vital” phenomena (the libido or jouissance, the drive, sexualized body) in their out-of-jointness with the symbolic.5 More simply even, it also acts as the out-of-jointness of the symbolic. It is here that the sexuality that psychoanalysis speaks about is situated. For Lacan the unconscious sexuality is not related (as it is for Jung) to some archetypical remains that would stay with us after the desexualization (“disenchanting”) of the world; it is the new that accompanies this disenchantment, the real that comes to light with it. It is neither the remains of the sexual combinatory nor some aspect of sex that is entirely outside any combinatory. Rather, it is something that gets produced on top of any possible (or impossible) combinatory – it is what signifying operations produce besides what they produce (on the level of being and its regulation).

问题不仅在于拉康必须考虑并为精神分析概念的其他“重要”部分（如力比多、驱力、性化的身体）留出空间，后者被定义为“实在”，而不是属于符号的。这种说法和它所暗示的视角对拉康来说是非常误导的，他也从“一”开始（而不是他试图在理论中结合和阐述的两个）。他从能指的“一”开始。但他的观点是，虽然这个“一”创造了它自己的空间和填充它的存在（这大致对应于上面描述的表演性空间），但还有一些其他东西被添加到其中。可以说，这些东西是表演性生产力的寄生物；它不是由能指性姿态所生产的，而是与其一起并且“在其上”生产的。它与这一姿态不可分割，但不像我们所说的话语创造/存在那样被它创造出来。它既不是符号实体，也不是符号所构成的实体；相反，它是符号的附带物。而且它不是一种存在：它只能作为符号领域内的（破坏性）效应辨认出来，但它不是这一领域的效应，不是能指的效应；能指的出现不能简化为符号。 能指不仅仅产生一种新的符号现实（包括其自身的物质性、因果性和法律）；它还“产生”或开启了拉康所谓的实在的维度。这正是不可救药地玷污符号的纯洁性并解释了为什么符号的纯粹差异游戏总是带有赌注。这正是维持前面提到的“重要”现象（力比多或欢爽、驱力、性化身体）与符号不符的维度。更简单地说，它也作为符号的不一致而起作用。这里精神分析所谈的性就位于此。对于拉康来说，无意识的性不是像荣格那样与去性别化（“去魅”）后的某些原型残留有关；它是伴随这种去魅而出现的新实在。它既不是性组合的残留，也不是完全超出任何组合的某些性方面。相反，它是在任何可能的（或不可能的）组合之上的东西——是能指操作除了其生产的（在存在及其调节层面）之外所生产的东西。

Madelon Vriesendorp, Apres L'amour, 1975

Sexuality (as the Real) is not some being that exists beyond the symbolic; it “exists” solely as the curving of the symbolic space that takes place because of the additional something produced with the signifying gesture. This, and nothing else, is how sexuality is the Real. It is not that – through its experience – psychoanalysis found and established sexuality as its ultimate real. For this would mean that psychoanalysis put sexuality, taken as an irreducible fact, in the conceptual place of the real, conceived independently. In other words, sexuality would correspond to what is the most real. Yet what is at stake is something very different: Starting from sexuality’s inherent contradictions – from its paradoxical ontological status, which precisely prevents us from taking it as any kind of simple fact – psychoanalysis came to articulate its very concept of the Real as something new. The Real is not predicated on sexuality; it is not that “sexuality is (the) real” in the sense of the latter defining the ontological status of the former. On the contrary, the psychoanalytic discoveries regarding the nature of sexuality (and of its accomplice, the unconscious) have led to the discovery and conceptualization of a singularly curved topological space, which it named the Real.

性（作为实在）不是在符号之外存在的一种存在；它“存在”仅作为符号空间因为能指姿态而发生的弯曲。这就是为什么性是实在的。并不是说——通过其经验——精神分析发现并确立了性作为其终极实在。这将意味着精神分析将性作为一个不可还原的事实放在实在的概念位置上。换句话说，实在定义了性的本体论状态。然而，问题是完全不同的：从性的内在矛盾出发——从其悖论性的本体论状态出发，这恰恰阻止我们将其视为任何简单的事实——精神分析提出了其对实在的概念作为新发现。实在不是基于性；不是“性是实在”，意思是后者定义了前者的本体论状态。相反，精神分析对性（及其同谋无意识）的性质的发现，导致了一个独特的弯曲拓扑空间的发现和概念化，称之为实在。

The something produced by the signifier, in addition to what it produces as its field, curves or magnetizes this field in a certain way. It is responsible for the fact that the symbolic field, or the field of the Other, is never neutral (or structured by pure differentality), but conflictual, asymmetrical, “not all,” ridden by a fundamental antagonism. In other words, the antagonism of the discursive field is not due to the fact that this field is always “composed” of multiple elements, or multiple multiples, competing among themselves and not properly unified; it refers to the very space in which these different multiples exist. In the same way that for Marx “class antagonism” is not simply conflict between different classes, but the very principle of the constitution of the class society, antagonism as such never simply exists between conflicting parties; it is the very structuring principle of this conflict, and of the elements involved in it.

能指所生产的东西，除了它作为其领域所生产的东西之外，还以某种方式弯曲或磁化这个领域。这就是为什么他者的领域或他者的领域从来不是中立的（或由纯差异性结构化的），而是充满对抗、非对称、“并非全部”的，被一种基本对抗所困扰。换句话说，话语领域的对抗并不是由于这个领域总是由多个元素或多个多重组成，这些多重之间相互竞争而未能适当统一；它指的是这些不同的多重存在的空间本身。正如马克思所说，“阶级对抗”不仅仅是不同阶级之间的冲突，而是阶级社会构成的基本原则，对抗作为这样的对抗从来不仅仅存在于对立方之间；它是这个冲突及其涉及元素的结构化原则。

The antagonism conceptualized by psychoanalysis is not related to any original double, or original multiple, but to the fact that a One introduced by the signifier is always a “One plus” – it is this unassignable plus that is neither another One nor nothing that causes the basic asymmetry and divide of the very field of the One. The most general, and at the same time precise, Lacanian name for this plus is jouissance, defined by its surplus character. One is cracked by what it produces on top of what it produces – and this is precisely what incites Lacan to name this fractured, or “barred,” field of the symbolic One the Other. The Other is not the Other of the One; it is the Lacanian name for the “One plus,” which is to say, for the One in which this plus is included and for which it thus has considerable consequences. This, by the way, is also why the Other referred to by Lacan is both the symbolic Other (the treasury of signifiers) and the Other of jouissance, of sexuality.

精神分析所概念化的对抗并不与任何原始的双重或原始的多重相关，而是与由能指引入的一个始终是“一加”的事实相关——它既不是另一个一，也不是无，它导致了这个一领域的基本非对称和分裂。最通用且同时精确的拉康命名这个加号的名称是欢爽，以其剩余特征定义。一个由其所生产的东西加之所生产的东西裂开——这正是促使拉康称这个裂开的或“带斜杠”的符号领域为他者的原因。他者不是一的他者；它是拉康对“一加”的称呼，即在其中包含这个加号的一，这对其产生了相当大的后果。顺便说一句，这也是为什么拉康所指的他者既是符号他者（能指的宝库），也是欢爽、性之他者。

The first and perhaps most striking consequence of this is that human sexuality is not sexual simply because of its including the sexual organs (or organs of reproduction). Rather, the surplus (caused by signification) of jouissance is what sexualizes the sexual activity itself, endows it with a surplus investment (one could also say that it sexualizes the activity of reproduction). This point might seem paradoxical, but if one thinks of what distinguishes human sexuality from, let’s say, animal or vegetal sexualities, is it not precisely because of the fact that human sexuality is sexualized in the strong meaning of the word (which could also be put in a slogan like, “sex is sexy”)? It is never “just sex.” Or, perhaps more precisely, the closer it gets to “just sex,” the further it is from any kind of “animality” (animals don’t practice recreational sex). This constitutive redoubling of sexuality is what makes it not only always already dislocated in respect to its reproductive purpose but also and foremost in respect to itself. The moment we try to provide a clear definition of what sexual activity is, we get into trouble. We get into trouble because human sexuality is ridden with this paradox: The further the sex departs from the “pure” copulating movement (i.e., the wider the range of elements it includes in its activity), the more “sexual” it can become. Sexuality gets sexualized precisely in this constitutive interval that separates it from itself.

第一个也是最显著的后果是，人类的性不是因为包含性器官（或生殖器官）而成为性的。相反，欢爽的剩余（由意指引起的）是性活动本身性化的原因，为其赋予了剩余投资（可以说，它性化了生殖活动）。这个观点可能显得悖论，但如果考虑到人类性与动物或植物性之间的区别，难道不正是因为人类性在强烈意义上被性化了吗（这也可以用口号“性是性感的”来表达）？它从来不是“只是性”。或者更准确地说，它越接近“只是性”，就越远离任何形式的“动物性”（动物不会进行娱乐性行为）。这种性行为的构成性重叠不仅总是已经与其生殖目的相脱节，而且也首先在于与自身的脱节。我们试图提供一个清晰定义性活动的那一刻，我们就会遇到麻烦。因为人类性充满了这个悖论：性越远离“纯粹”的交配动作（即它在活动中包含的元素越广泛），它就越“性化”。性正是在这种将其与自身分离的构成间隔中被性化的。

Sanja Iveković, A New Years Eve Party, Silba, 1969-1970, "Grazia", July 1975, gelatin silver print, magazine page and typewritten text by the artist.

So far we’ve discussed the question of the Real in respect to the psychoanalytic notion of sexuality (or the sexual) in its peculiar ontological status. But how does sexual difference enter this debate? What is the relationship between sexual difference and sexuality tout court? Is it accidental or essential? Which comes first? Is sexuality something that takes place because there is sexual difference? Freud’s answer is unambiguous and perhaps surprising. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he insists on the original nonexistence of any germ of two sexes (or two sexualities) in preadolescent time.

到目前为止，我们已经讨论了关于实在的精神分析概念在其独特的本体论状态下的性（或性别）问题。但性别差异如何进入这一讨论？性别差异与性别整体有什么关系？是偶然的还是本质的？哪一个是第一位的？性别是因为存在性别差异而发生的吗？弗洛伊德的回答明确且也许令人惊讶。在《性学三论》（1905年）中，他坚持在青春期前不存在任何两性（或两种性别）的萌芽。

The auto-erotic activity of the erotogenic zones is, however, the same in both sexes, and owing to this uniformity there is no possibility of a distinction between the two sexes such as arises after puberty … Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine,” it would even be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessary of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.6

“在青春期之前，性器官的自恋活动在两性中是相同的，由于这种一致性，不可能出现青春期后那种两性之间的区别……确实，如果我们能够给‘男性’和‘女性’概念一个更明确的内涵，甚至可以说力比多无论出现在男人还是女人身上都是一种男性的性质，而不论其对象是男人还是女人。”

In other words, at the level of the libido there are no two sexes. And if we were able to say what exactly is “masculine” and “feminine,” we would describe it as “masculine” – but we are precisely not able to do this, as Freud further emphases in the footnote attached to the quoted passage. 7

换句话说，在力比多层面上没有两性。如果我们能确切地说出什么是“男性”和“女性”，我们会描述它为“男性”——但我们正是无法做到这一点，正如弗洛伊德在引用的段落附带的脚注中进一步强调的那样。

So, when confronted with the question of sexual difference, the first answer of psychoanalysis is: From the strictly analytical point of view, there is in fact only one sex, or sexuality. Moreover, sexuality is not something that springs from difference (between sexes); it is not propelled by any longing for our lost other half, but is originally self-propelling (and “autoerotic”). Freud writes, “The sexual drive is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.”8

所以，当面对性别差异问题时，精神分析的第一个回答是：从严格的分析角度来看，实际上只有一个性或性别。而且，性不是从差异（性别之间）中涌现的；它不是由我们失去的另一半推动的，而是本质上自我驱动（和“自恋”的）。弗洛伊德写道：“性驱力首先独立于其对象；它的起源不太可能是由对象的吸引力所致。”

Does this mean that sexual difference is only and purely a symbolic construction? Here waits the other surprise (not unrelated to the first, of course) of the psychoanalytic stance: Sexual difference doesn’t exist in the symbolic either, or, more precisely, there is no symbolic account of this difference as sexual. “In the psyche, there is nothing by which the subject may situate himself as male or female being.”9

Andy Warhol,Unidentified Male (With Decorative Stamps), 1950s ballpoint and stamped ink on paper 17 x 13 in

That is to say, although the production of meaning of what it is to be a “man” or a “woman” is certainly symbolic – and massive – it doesn’t amount to producing sexual difference as signifying difference. In other words, sexual difference is a different kind of difference; it doesn’t follow the differential logic. As Mladen Dolar most concisely puts it:

这是否意味着性别差异仅仅是纯粹的符号建构？在这里等待着精神分析立场的另一个惊喜（当然与第一个不无关联）：性别差异在符号中也不存在，或者更准确地说，没有作为性别的符号差异。“在精神领域，没有任何东西可以让主体将自己定位为男性或女性。” 也就是说，虽然关于“男人”或“女人”是什么的意义生产无疑是符号性的——而且是巨大的——但这并不等于生产出作为符号差异的性别差异。换句话说，性别差异是一种不同种类的差异；它不遵循差异逻辑。正如姆拉丹·多拉最简洁地指出的那样：

There is a widespread criticism going around that aims at the binary oppositions as the locus of enforced sexuality, its règlementation, its imposed mould, its compulsory stricture. By the imposition of the binary code of two sexes we are subjected to the basic social constraint. But the problem is perhaps rather the opposite: the sexual difference poses the problem of the two precisely because it cannot be reduced to the binary opposition or accounted for in terms of the binary numerical two. It is not a signifying difference, such that it defines the elements of structure. It is not to be described in terms of opposing features, or as a relation of given entities preexisting the difference … One could say: bodies can be counted, sexes cannot. Sex presents a limit to the count of bodies; it cuts them from inside rather than grouping them together under common headings.10

“有一种广泛存在的批评，认为二元对立是强制性别化的源泉，是规制其强制性结构的基本框架。通过强加二元编码的两性，我们被迫服从基本的社会约束。但问题或许恰恰相反：性别差异提出了两个的问题，因为它不能还原为二元对立，或者用二元数字来解释。它不是一种定义结构元素的符号差异。它不是以对立特征或预先存在的给定实体之间的关系来描述的……可以说：身体可以被计数，性别不能。性别在内部而不是在共同标题下将身体切开。”

And sex does not function as a stumbling block of meaning (and of the count) because it is considered morally naughty. It is considered morally naughty because it is a stumbling block of meaning. This is why the moral and legal decriminalization of sexuality should not take the path of its naturalization (“whatever we do sexually is only natural behavior”). We should instead start from the claim that nothing about (human) sexuality is natural, least of all sexual activity with the exclusive aim of reproduction. There is no “sexual nature” of man (and no “sexual being”). The problem with sexuality is not that it is a remainder of nature that resists any definite taming; rather, there is no nature here – it all starts with a surplus of signification.

性别之所以成为意义（和计数）的绊脚石，并不是因为它被认为是道德上的顽固，而是因为它是意义的绊脚石。这就是为什么性和法律上的去罪化不应该走自然化的道路（“无论我们做什么性行为都只是自然行为”）。我们应该从以下断言开始：关于（人类）性没有任何东西是自然的，最不自然的是以生殖为唯一目的的性行为。没有人类的“性本质”（和“性存在”）。性的问题不在于它是无法完全驯服的自然残余物；相反，这里没有自然——一切都从符号化的剩余开始。

If we now return to the question of what this implies in relation to ontology in general, and, more specifically, to the performative ontology of contemporary gender studies, we must start from the following, crucial implication: Lacan is led to establish a difference between being and the Real. The real is not a being, or a substance, but its deadlock. It is inseparable from being, yet it is not being. One could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no being independent of language (or discourse) – which is why it often seems compatible with contemporary forms of nominalism. All being is symbolic; it is being in the Other. But with a crucial addition, which could be formulated as follows: there is only being in the symbolic – except that there is real. There “is” real, but this real is no being. Yet it is not simply the outside of being; it is not something besides being, it is as I put it earlier the very curving of the space of being. It only exists as the inherent contradiction of being. Which is precisely why, for Lacan, the real is the bone in the throat of every ontology: in order to speak of “being qua being,” one has to amputate something in being that is not being. That is to say, the real is that which the traditional ontology had to cut off in order to be able to speak of “being qua being.” We only arrive to being qua being by subtracting something from it – and this something is precisely that which, while included in being, prevents it from being fully constituted as being. The real, as that additional something that magnetizes and curves the (symbolic) space of being, introduces in it another dynamics, which infects the dynamics of the symbolic, makes it “not all.”

如果我们现在回到这个问题：这对一般的本体论和更具体地对当代性别研究的表演性本体论有什么影响？我们必须从以下关键的含义开始：拉康被引导建立了存在与实在之间的区别。实在不是存在或物质，而是其僵局。它与存在不可分割，但它不是存在。可以说，对于精神分析来说，没有独立于语言（或话语）的存在——这就是为什么它经常看起来与当代形式的唯名论兼容。所有存在都是符号性的；它是在他者中的存在。但有一个关键的补充，可以这样表述：只有在符号中存在——除了有实在。这“有”实在，但这个实在不是存在。但它不仅仅是存在的外部；它不是存在之外的东西，而是——正如我之前所说的——存在空间的弯曲。它只作为存在的内在矛盾存在。这正是为什么对于拉康来说，实在是每个本体论中的骨头：为了谈论“作为存在的存在”，必须从存在中截取一些东西，而这个东西不是存在。也就是说，实在是传统本体论必须切割的东西，以便能够谈论“作为存在的存在”。我们只有通过从存在中减去某些东西才能到达作为存在的存在——而这个东西恰恰是虽然包含在存在中，却阻止其完全构成存在的东西。

Now, a very good way of getting closer to the relationship between sexuality as such (its real) and sexual difference is via an excerpt from a lecture by Joan Copjec, in which she made the following crucial observation:

现在，接近性作为实在与性别差异之间关系的一个很好的方法是通过琼·科普杰克的一个讲座摘录，其中她做了以下关键观察：

The psychoanalytic category of sexual difference was from this date [the mid- 1980s] deemed suspect and largely forsaken in favor of the neutered category of gender. Yes, neutered. I insist on this because it is specifically the sex of sexual difference that dropped out when this term was replaced by gender. Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex. For while gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; in brief, sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.11

“从那时起（20世纪80年代中期），精神分析的性别差异类别被认为是可疑的，并在很大程度上被中性类别性别所取代。是的，中性。我坚持这一点，因为当性别取代这个术语时，特别是性别的性被移除了。性别理论实现了一项重大壮举：它从性中移除了性。虽然性别理论家继续谈论性行为，但他们不再质疑什么是性或性别；简而言之，性不再是本体论探究的主题，而是恢复到普通话语中的意义：某种模糊的区别，但基本上是一种次要特征（当应用于主体时），是其他特征的修饰符，或者（当应用于行为时）是一种有点顽固的东西。”

I would like to use this quote as the background against which the following thesis can fully resonate: It is because sexual difference is implicated in sexuality that it fails to register as symbolic difference. Indeed, psychoanalysis doesn’t try to de-essentialize sexual difference. What de-essentializes it most efficiently (and in the real) is its implication in sexuality as defined above; that is, as the out-of-beingness of being. And this is what psychoanalysis brings out and insists upon – as opposed to the gender differences, which are differences like any other, and which miss the point by succeeding too much, and by falling in the trap of providing grounds for ontological consistency. It might seem paradoxical, but differences like form- matter, yin-yang, active-passive … belong to the same onto-logy as “gender” differences. Even when the latter abandon the principle of complementarity and embrace that of gender multiplicity, it in no way effects the ontological status of entities called genders. They are said to be, or to exist, emphatically so. (This “emphatically” seems to increase with numbers: One is usually timid in asserting the existence of two genders, but when passing to the multitude this timidity disappears, and their existence is firmly asserted.) If sexual difference is considered in terms of gender, it is made – at least in principle – compatible with mechanisms of its ontologization. Which brings us back to the point made earlier, and to which we can now add a supplementary point: De-sexualization of ontology (its no longer being conceived as a combinatory of two, “masculine” and “feminine” principles) coincides with the sexual appearing as the real/disruptive point of being. And taking the sexual away (as something that has no consequences for the ontological level) opens again the path of the ontological symbolism of sexual difference.

我想用这个引用作为背景，使以下论题能够充分共鸣：正是因为性别差异涉及到性别，它才无法作为符号差异注册。实际上，精神分析并没有试图去本质化性别差异。最有效地去本质化它（在实在中）的正是它在上述定义的性别中的涉及；即作为存在的出局。而这正是精神分析所揭示并坚持的——与性别差异相反，性别差异是像其他任何差异一样的差异，它们通过过于成功地提供本体论一致性的基础，而错过了要点，并落入了陷阱。这看起来可能是矛盾的，但像形态-物质、阴阳、主动-被动等差异属于与“性别”差异相同的本体论。即使后者放弃了互补性原则，转而接受性别多样性，这在任何方面都不会影响被称为性别的实体的本体论地位。它们被说成是存在的，或者存在，这一点强调得非常明显。（这种“强调”似乎随着数量的增加而增加：人们通常在断言两种性别的存在时会有些胆怯，但当转向多样性时，这种胆怯就消失了，它们的存在被坚定地断言。）如果将性差异考虑为性别，它至少在原则上与将其本体论化的机制相容。这又使我们回到了前面的观点，并可以再加上一个补充点：本体论的去性化（它不再被构想为两种“男性”和“女性”原则的组合）与性作为存在的现实/破坏性点同时出现。而将性拿走（作为对本体论层面没有后果的东西）再次打开了性差异的本体论象征主义的道路。”

This is why, if one “removes sex from sex,” one removes the very thing that has brought to light the problematic and singular character of sexual difference in the first place. One doesn’t remove the problem, but the means of seeing it and eventually tackling it.12

这就是为什么，如果一个人“从性中移除性”，就会移除最初揭示性别差异问题和独特特征的东西。一个人不会移除问题，但会移除看到问题和最终解决问题的手段。

The fact that “sexual difference” is not a differential difference (which might explain why Lacan actually never uses the term “sexual difference”) can explain why Lacan’s famous formulas of sexuation are not differential in any common sense: They don’t imply a difference between two kinds of being(s) – there is no contradiction (antagonism) that exists between M and F positions. On the contrary, contradiction, or antagonism, is what the two positions have in common. It is what they share, the very thing that binds them. It is the very point that accounts for speaking about “men” and “women” under the same heading. Succinctly put, the indivisible that binds them, their irreducible sameness, is not that of being, but that of contradiction or out-of-beingness of being. This is also what it means that “there is no sexual realtionship”: It doesn’t mean, as the popular title goes, that “men are from Mars and women from Venus,” and as such it can never form a harmonic couple. It is not something that aims at explaining the war between sexes, “the war of the Roses,” the alleged incompatibility of sexes. For these explanations are always full of claims about what is “feminine” and what is “masculine” – something that psychoanalysis denies all knowledge of, as we’ve already seen. The psychoanalytic claim is at the same time much more modest and radical: Sexes are not two in any meaningful way. Sexuality does not fall into two parts; it does not constitute a one. It is stuck between “no longer one” and “not yet two (or more)”; it revolves around the fact that “the other sex doesn’t exist” (which is to say that the difference is not ontologizable), yet there is more than one (which is also to say, “more than multiple ones”).

“性别差异”不是一种差异化的差异（这可能解释了为什么拉康实际上从不使用“性别差异”这个术语），可以解释为什么拉康著名的性别公式不是通常意义上的差异化：它们不意味着两种存在之间的差异——在男性和女性位置之间没有矛盾（对抗）。相反，矛盾或对抗是两者共有的。这是它们共同的东西，将它们联系在一起的东西。这是解释“男人”和“女人”在同一标题下的理由。简而言之，绑定它们的不可分割性不是存在的，而是矛盾的或存在的出局性。这也意味着“没有性关系”：这并不是说像流行的说法那样“男人来自火星，女人来自金星”，因此永远无法形成和谐的情侣。它不是解释性别之间的战争“玫瑰战争”，性别不相容的解释。这些解释总是充满了关于什么是“女性化”的和什么是“男性化”的断言——这是精神分析所否认的知识。精神分析的断言既谦虚又激进：性别在任何有意义的方式中都不是两个。性别不是分为两部分；它不构成一个一。它介于“不再是一个”和“还不是两个（或更多）”之间；它围绕“另一性别不存在”这一事实旋转（这就是说，差异不是本体化的），但有多个（这也是说“多个之一”）。

Psychoanalysis is not the science of sexuality. It doesn’t tell us what sex really is; it tells us that there is no “really” of the sex. But this nonexistence is not the same as, say, the nonexistence of the unicorn. It is a nonexistence in the real that, paradoxically, leaves traces in the real. It is a void that registers in the real. It is a nothing, or negativity, with consequences.

精神分析不是性别的科学。它没有告诉我们性别的真正是什么；它告诉我们性别没有“真正的”。但这种不存在并不等同于独角兽的不存在。它是在实在中留下痕迹的不存在。它是一个在实在中注册的虚无或否定。

Which brings us to the logic implied in the following joke: A guy goes into a restaurant and says to the waiter, “Coffee without cream, please.” The waiter replies, “I am sorry sir, but we are out of cream. Could it be without milk?” Sexuality is that cream whose nonbeing does not reduce it to a mere nothing. It is a nothing that walks around and makes trouble. The fundamental lesson of psychoanalysis is precisely that of the joke above: if psychoanalysis cannot “serve” us anything without sexuality, it is because there is no Sexuality that it could serve us. And it is precisely this “there is no,” this non-being which nevertheless has real consequences, that is lost in translation when we pass from sex to gender.

这引出了以下笑话所暗示的逻辑：

一个人走进餐馆，对服务员说：“请给我一杯不加奶油的咖啡。”服务员回答：“对不起，先生，我们没有奶油。可以是不加牛奶的吗？”

性别就是那个其不存在并不将其简化为纯粹虚无的奶油。它是一个四处游荡并制造麻烦的虚无。精神分析的基本教训正是上述笑话：如果精神分析不能“为我们提供”任何没有性的东西，那是因为没有性别可以提供给我们。这正是这种“没有”这种不存在，但却有实际后果的东西，在我们从性别转向性别时所丧失的。

---

This paper was originally presented at the conference "One Divides Into Two: Negativity, Dialectics, and Clinamen," held at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin in March 2011.

这篇论文最初在2011年3月于柏林文化研究所举行的“一个分成两个：否定性辩证法和随机偏差”会议上发表。

Alenka Zupančič (born 1 April 1966) is a Slovenian philosopher whose work focuses on psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. She is currently a full- time researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a visiting professor at the European Graduate School. Zupančič belongs to the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, which is known for its predominantly Lacanian foundations. Her philosophy was strongly influenced by Slovenian Lacanian scholars, especially Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek. Zupančič has written on several topics including ethics, literature, comedy, and love. She is most renowned as a Nietzsche scholar, but Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Henri Bergson and Alain Badiou are also referenced in her work.

阿伦卡·祖潘契奇（1966年4月1日出生）是一位斯洛文尼亚哲学家，其研究重点是精神分析和大陆哲学。她目前是斯洛文尼亚科学院与艺术学院哲学研究所的全职研究员，同时也是欧洲研究生院的客座教授。祖潘契奇属于卢布尔雅那学派的精神分析学者群体，以其主要的拉康基础而闻名。她的哲学受到斯洛文尼亚拉康学者的强烈影响，尤其是姆拉丹·多拉和斯拉沃热·齐泽克。祖潘 契奇撰写了关于多个主题的文章，包括伦理学、文学、喜剧和爱情。她最著名的是尼采学者，但她的作品中也提到了伊曼纽尔·康德、格奥尔格·威廉·弗里德里希·黑格尔、亨利·柏格森和阿兰·巴迪欧。

The starting point of the dialectical process is not the plenitude of a self-sufficient substance, identical with itself, but the absolute contradiction: the pure difference is always-already the impossible “predicate” of identity-with-itself – or, to put it in Lacanian terms, the identity of a signifier’s mark (S) always-already represents the subject (Image). This absolute contradiction is “resolved” by way of excluding from the substantial set an element charged with representing the void, the lack of determination that pertains to a tautology; by way of excluding from a series of signifier’s marks “at least One” which thereby remarks the void of their very space of inscription. The subject is this void, this lack in the series of the predicates of the universal Substance: it is the “nothing” implied in the Substance’s tautological self-relationship – the mediating fourth term which vanishes in the final Result, in the accomplished Triad. 主体逻辑，不是这个，不是这个，不是这个…… 我只不过是一个路人，辩证过程的起点，你是谁？这个是个开端，不是一个自足的实体，无实体的主体性，它是与你所有的规定性，实体所有可以讨论的东西反过来的，但是它又把自己变成开端。在绝对反冲中，主题逻辑，客体逻辑。所以一个能指，符号的认同，当你与它同一的时候，你必须以敞开的，必须以一种不同的，才能与它同一

The “metaphor of the subject”

These paradoxes of the “logic of the signifier” enable us to locate properly Lacan’s thesis on the “metaphor of the subject”, his assertion that the very status of the subject is linked to a metaphor, to a metaphoric substitution. In a first approach, there are two complementary readings of this thesis:

• the first would be simply to conceive the subject as the last, ever-elusive Signified of the signifying chain: there is no “proper” signifier to the subject, every signifier can serve only as its metaphor; in it, the subject is always (mis)represented, simultaneously disclosed and concealed, given and withdrawn, indicated, hinted at between the lines …

• the opposite reading would insist that a signifying chain is “subjectivized” precisely by way of its metaphoricity: what we call “subject” is not the unfathomable X, the ultimate reference point of its meaning, but rather a name for the very gap that prevents human language from becoming a neutral tool for designation of some objective state of things, a name for the different ways the described state of things is always-already presented from some partial, biased position of enunciation. In other words, our speech is “subjectivized” precisely in so far as it never “says directly what it wants to say” – instead of “vagina”, one can say “blossom of femininity”, where the second expression, repulsively exuberant as it may be, is no less “objective” than the first.39

The interesting point about these two readings is that, although opposed, they both possess a kind of “primary”, “common-sense” self-evidence: we somehow “feel” that no words can adequately represent our innermost subjectivity, that its proper content can only be alluded to; yet simultaneously we “feel” that a speech which functions as pure, transparent medium of designation is in a way “subjectless”; that one can detect the presence of a subject through the elements of style, metaphoric devices, and so on-in short: through all the elements which, from the viewpoint of transmitting information, present a superfluous “noise”. How do we account for this opposition? The key to it is contained precisely in the paradoxical logic of the Exception, of the “reflective” term in the form of which the universal genus comes across itself within its species. To recall again the Marxian logic of royalism: republicanism in which royalism encounters itself in the form of its opposite is a metaphoric substitution for royalism:

– that is, republicanism taking over the place of royalism-in-general. Yet, as we have just seen, this Exception (the “pure” signifier) is a Janus-like entity with two faces:

• on the one hand, it entertains a metonymic relationship towards the universal genus: in it, a part functions as a metonymic substitute for the Whole, as in the Marxian example of production, where production as a term in the tetrad production–distribution–exchange–consumption simultaneously stands for the Whole;

• on the other hand, it entertains a metaphoric relationship towards the void, the lack in the substantial Universal: the Exception fills out the void in the midst of the Substance.

This duality is precisely what Lacan means when he speaks of the signifier as the “metonymy of the object” and the “metaphor of the subject”: the Exception entertains a metonymic relationship towards the substantial Object and a metaphoric relationship towards the substanceless void which is the subject. The metaphor, in its most radical dimension, is this latter substitution of One for Zero, this act by means of which the One (the signifier’s feature) “stands for” the Zero, the void which “is” the subject – in short, the act by means of which Zero is counted as One. This would be the most elementary Lacanian definition of the subject: a Nothing which is not pure nothingness but already “counted as One”, remarked by the Exception, the plus-One in the series of marks – in other words: a Nothing which appears in (is represented by) the form of its opposite, of One. The “original metaphor” is not a substitution of “something for something-else” but a substitution of something for nothing: the act by means of which “there is something instead of nothing” – which is why metonymy is a species of metaphor: the metonymic sliding from one (partial) object to another is set in motion by the metaphoric substitution constitutive of the subject: the “one for another” presupposes the “one for nothing”.

From here we can return to the two ways to read the formula of the “metaphor of the subject”: it is clear, now, that in the first reading (the subject as the last, ever-elusive point of reference) the subject is still conceived as substance, as a transcendent substantial entity, whereas the second reading (the subject as the gap preventing our speech from becoming a neutral medium of designation) indicates the proper dimension of the subject. In other words, these two readings express, on the level of commonsensical intuition, the very duality of Substance and Subject.

IMMEDIATE OR INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE

§ 61. The Intuitional Theory § 62. Jacobi § 63. That Reason is Knowledge of God § 64. Knowing that the Infinite Is § 65. That Immediate knowledge can possess a true content § 66. Immediate knowledge is to be accepted as a fact § 67. But education is required to bring it out. n. Innate ideas .. a sort of mere capacity in man § 68. Something bound up with immediate experience § 69. The doctrine of Immediate Knowledge § 70. Being per se § 71. The one-sidedness of the Intuitional school § 72. Superstition is allowed to be true § 73. Only tells us that God Is. § 74. The general nature of the form of Immediacy n. Consciousness is impossible without mediation § 75. Asserts that Immediate knowledge is a Fact § 76. "I think therefore I am" § 77. The Cartesian Philosophy § 78. Reject the opposition between immediate facts and mediation

关于"思维对客观性的第三种态度：直接或直觉知识"的深度解析

一、核心定义与哲学定位

1. 黑格尔哲学框架中的位置：

• 出自《哲学科学百科全书》第三部分"逻辑学"
  • 三种认知态度演进路径：

    第一态度：前康德的形而上学（独断论）
    第二态度：经验主义与批判哲学
    第三态度：直接知识论（雅各比、谢林等）
    

2. 本质特征：

• 真理获取方式：无需概念推演的中介过程
• 认知模式：主体与对象的瞬间同一性
• 典型表现：宗教启示/道德直觉/审美体验

二、历史演进脉络

发展阶段	代表人物	核心命题
古希腊雏形	普罗提诺	灵魂与太一的直接合一
中世纪神秘主义	艾克哈特	上帝临在的灵性直观
近代哲学体系化	F.H.雅各比	对绝对者的直接确信
德国观念论整合	谢林	理智直观作为哲学开端

三、认知结构图示

认知主体
 │
 ├─理性推理：概念→判断→推理（中介过程）
 │
 └─直觉认知：
     直接性 → 内容确定性 → 真理明证性
     （无逻辑链条的瞬间把握）

四、与其它认知模式对比

1. VS 经验主义感知

• 相似点：强调直接性
• 差异点：
  • 直觉知识指向超验真理
  • 经验感知限于现象领域

2. VS 理性主义演绎

• 相似点：追求必然真理
• 差异点：
  • 理性依赖逻辑中介
  • 直觉主张直接穿透

五、经典论证模型

雅各比的"三段论困境"：

1. 所有真理判断都需要前提
2. 前提本身又需要证明
3. 导致无限倒退 → 必须存在无需证明的直接知识作为根基

六、现当代理论嬗变

1. 现象学改造（胡塞尔）：

• 本质直观作为范畴显现方式
• 保留"直接性"但去除神秘主义

2. 分析哲学视角（齐硕姆）：

• 自我呈现的命题态度
• "直接可知"作为基础信念

3. 认知科学验证：

• 镜像神经元系统的直觉判断
• 格式塔心理学中的顿悟现象

七、批判与超越路径

黑格尔的辩证批判：

1. 内在矛盾揭示：

• 直接知识声称的"内容确定性"实则依赖：
  • 文化传统（如宗教教义）
  • 主观心理状态
• 陷入"空洞的形式主义"

2. 中介必要性论证：

直觉的明证性
→ 需经概念化表达
→ 进入辩证发展过程
→ 实现具体普遍性

八、实践应用领域

1. 道德决策：

• 伦理直觉主义（摩尔）
• 困境中的直接价值判断

2. 科学发现：

• 爱因斯坦："直觉是科学发现的真正因素"
• DNA双螺旋结构的顿悟时刻

3. 人工智能局限：

• 当前AI缺乏人类直觉的跨域类比能力
• 机器学习的"黑箱"与人类直觉的透明性对比

九、当代思想实验

直觉知识可靠性测试：

1. 设计场景：道德两难困境快速判断
2. 控制组：理性分析组 vs 直觉反应组
3. 测量指标：

• 决策一致性
• 神经激活区域（fMRI监测）

4. 结论指向：直觉中的文化基因编码

十、学习进阶路径

1. 原始文献：

• 黑格尔《小逻辑》§§61-78
• 雅各比《论斯宾诺莎学说》

2. 研究工具：

• 概念分析矩阵：

  [直接性][确定性][中介需求][真理类型]
  

3. 前沿课题：

• 量子认知中的直觉机制
• 数字时代直觉能力的异化

此认知模式在元宇宙语境下正衍生新形态：神经接口技术可能创造"增强直觉"的新认知维度，引发关于知识本质的再思考。

§ 61

If we are to believe the Critical philosophy, thought is subjective, and its ultimate and invincible mode is abstract universality or formal identity. Thought is thus set in opposition to Truth, which is no abstraction, but concrete universality. In this highest mode of thought, which is entitled Reason, the Categories are left out of account. The extreme theory on the opposite side holds thought to be an act of the particular only, and on that ground declares it incapable of apprehending the Truth. This is the Intuitional theory.

按照批判哲学的理解，思维是主观的，其终极的、不可克服的规定是抽象的普遍性或形式化的同一性；就此而言，思维与真理(作为内在具体的普遍性)相对立。在思维的这个最高规定亦即理性里，丝毫没有考虑到范畴。——相反的立场是，把思维仅仅理解为特殊东西的活动，然后通过这个方式同样宣称思维没有能力去把握真理。

§ 62

According to this theory, thinking, a private and particular operation, has its whole scope and product in the Categories. But these Categories, as arrested by the understanding, are limited vehicles of thought, forms of the conditioned, of the dependent and derivative. A thought limited to these modes has no sense of the Infinite and the True, and cannot bridge over the gulf that separates it from them. (This stricture refers to the proofs of God’s existence.) These inadequate modes or categories are also spoken of as notions: and to get a notion of an object therefore can only mean, in this language, to grasp it under the form of being conditioned and derivative. Consequently, if the object in question be the True, the Infinite, the Unconditioned, we change it by our notions into a finite and conditioned; whereby, instead of apprehending the truth by thought, we have perverted it into untruth.

思维作为特殊东西的活动只能把范畴当作它的产物和内容。知性所坚持的范畴是“有条件者"、"有所依赖者”、"经过中介者"之类受限制的规定或形式。对局限于此的思维而言，不存在无限者或真相；思维不可能过渡到无限者或真相(与对于上帝存在的证明正好相反)。这些思维规定也被称作概念；就此而言，所谓对一个对象加以概念把握(begreifen),无非意味着在"有条件者"和"经过中介者"等形式下把握这个对象，因此，哪怕对象是真相、无限者、无条件者，也必须被转化为一个有条件者和经过中介者，因此这不是以思维的方式去把握真相，毋宁是把真相颠倒为非真实的对象。

Such is the one simple line of argument advanced for the thesis that the knowledge of God and of truth must be immediate, or intuitive. At an earlier period all sort of anthropomorphic conceptions, as they are termed, were banished from God, as being finite and therefore unworthy of the infinite; and in this way God had been reduced to a tolerably blank being. But in those days the thought-forms were in general not supposed to come under the head of anthropomorphism. Thought was believed rather to strip finitude from the conceptions of the Absolute — in agreement with the above-mentioned conviction of all ages, that reflection is the only road to truth. But now, at length, even the thought-forms are pronounced anthropomorphic, and thought itself is described as a mere faculty of Unitisation.

Jacobi has stated this charge most distinctly in the seventh supplement to his Letters on Spinoza — borrowing his line of argument from the works of Spinoza himself, and applying it as a weapon against knowledge in general. In his attack knowledge is taken to mean knowledge of the finite only, a process of thought from one condition in a series to another, each of which is at once conditioning and conditioned. According to such a view, to explain and to get the notion of anything, is the same as to show it to be derived from something else. Whatever such knowledge embraces, consequently, is partial, dependent, and finite, while the infinite or true, i.e. God, lies outside of the mechanical interconnection to which knowledge is said to be confined. It is important to observe that, while Kant makes the finite nature of the Categories consist mainly in the formal circumstance that they are subjective, Jacobi discusses the Categories in their own proper character, and pronounces them to be in their very import finite. What Jacobi chiefly had before his eyes, when he thus described science, was the brilliant successes of the physical or ‘exact’ sciences in ascertaining natural forces and laws. It is certainly not on the finite ground occupied by these sciences that we can expect to meet the in-dwelling presence of the infinite. Lalande was right when he said he had swept the whole heaven with his glass, and seen no God. (See § 60n.) In the field of physical science, the universal, which is the final result of analysis, is only the indeterminate aggregate — of the external finite — in one word, Matter: and Jacobi well perceived that there was no other issue obtainable in the way of a mere advance from one explanatory clause or law to another.

§ 63

All the while the doctrine that truth exists for the mind was so strongly maintained by Jacobi, that Reason alone is declared to be that by which man lives. This Reason is the knowledge of God. But, seeing that derivative knowledge is restricted to the compass of finite facts, Reason is knowledge underivative, or Faith.

Knowledge, Faith, Thought, Intuition are the categories that we meet with on this line of reflection. These terms, as presumably familiar to every one, are only too frequently subjected to an arbitrary use, under no better guidance than the conceptions and distinctions of psychology, without any investigation into their nature and notion, which is the main question after all. Thus, we often find knowledge contrasted with faith, and faith at the same time explained to be an underivative or intuitive knowledge — so that it must be at least some sort of knowledge. And, besides, it is unquestionably a fact of experience, firstly, that what we believe is in our consciousness — which implies that we know about it; and secondly, that this belief is a certainty in our consciousness — which implies that we know it. Again, and especially, we find thought opposed to immediate knowledge and faith, and, in particular, to intuition. But if this intuition be qualified as intellectual, we must really mean intuition which thinks, unless, in a question about the nature of God, we are willing to interpret intellect to mean images and representations of imagination. The word faith or belief, in the dialect of this system, comes to be employed even with reference to common objects that are present to the senses. We believe, says Jacobi, that we have a body — we believe in the existence of the things of sense. But if we are speaking of faith in the True and Eternal, and saying that God is given and revealed to us in immediate knowledge or intuition, we are concerned not with the things of sense, but with objects special to our thinking mind, with truths of inherently universal significance. And when the individual ‘I’, or in other words personality, is under discussion — not the ‘I’ of experience, or a single private person — above all, when the personality of God is before us, we are speaking of personality unalloyed — of a personality in its own nature universal. Such personality is a thought, and falls within the province of thought only. More than this. Pure and simple intuition is completely the same as pure and simple thought. Intuition and belief, in the first instance, denote the definite conceptions we attach to these words in our ordinary employment of them: and to this extent they differ from thought in certain points which nearly every one can understand. But here they are taken in a higher sense, and must be interpreted to mean a belief in God, or an intellectual intuition of God; in short, we must put aside all that especially distinguishes thought on the one side from belief and intuition on the other. How belief and intuition, when transferred to these higher regions, differ from thought, it is impossible for any one to say. And yet, such are the barren distinctions of words, with which men fancy that they assert an important truth; even while the formulae they maintain are identical with those which they impugn.

The term Faith brings with it the special advantage of suggesting the faith of the Christian religion; it seems to include Christian faith, or perhaps even to coincide with it; and thus the Philosophy of Faith has a thoroughly orthodox and Christian look, on the strength of which it takes the liberty of uttering its arbitrary dicta with greater pretension and authority. But we must not let ourselves be deceived by the semblance surreptitiously secured by a merely verbal similarity. The two things are radically distinct. Firstly, the Christian faith comprises in it an authority of the Church: but the faith of Jacobi’s philosophy has no other authority than that of a personal revelation. And, secondly, the Christian faith is a copious body of objective truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine: while the scope of the philosophic faith is so utterly indefinite, that, while it has room for the faith of the Christian, it equally admits a belief in the divinity of the Dalai Lama, the ox, or the monkey — thus, so far as it goes, narrowing Deity down to its simplest terms, a ‘Supreme Being’. Faith itself, taken in this professedly philosophical sense, is nothing but the sapless abstract of immediate knowledge — a purely formal category applicable to very different facts; and it ought never to be confused or identified with the spiritual fullness of Christian faith, whether we look at that faith in the heart of the believer and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, or in the system of theological doctrine.

With what is here called faith or immediate knowledge must also be identified inspiration, the heart’s revelations, the truths implanted in man by nature, and also in particular, healthy reason or Common Sense, as it is called. All these forms agree in adopting as their leading principle the immediacy, or self-evident way, in which a fact or body of truths is presented in consciousness.

§ 64

This immediate knowledge, consists in knowing that the Infinite, the Eternal, the God which is in our Idea, really is: or, it asserts that in our consciousness there is immediately and inseparably bound up with this idea the certainty of its actual being.

To seek to controvert these maxims of immediate knowledge is the last thing philosophers would think of. They may rather find occasion for self-gratulation when these ancient doctrines, expressing as they do the general tenor of philosophic teaching, have, even in this unphilosophical fashion, become to some extent universal convictions of the age. The true marvel rather is that any one could suppose that these principles were opposed to philosophy — the maxims, viz., that whatever is held to be true is immanent in the mind, and that there is truth for the mind (§ 63). From a formal point of view, there is a peculiar interest in the maxim that the being of God is immediately and inseparably bound up with the thought of God, that objectivity is bound up with the subjectivity which the thought originally presents. Not content with that, the philosophy of immediate knowledge goes so far in its one-sided view, as to affirm that the attribute of existence, even in perception, is quite as inseparably connected with the conception we have of our own bodies and of external things, as it is with the thought of God. Now it is the endeavour of philosophy to prove such a unity, to show that it lies in the very nature of thought and subjectivity, to be inseparable from being and objectivity. In these circumstances therefore, philosophy, whatever estimate may be formed of the character of these proofs, must in any case be glad to see it shown and maintained that its maxims are facts of consciousness, and thus in harmony with experience. The difference between philosophy and the asseverations of immediate knowledge rather centres in the exclusive attitude which immediate knowledge adopts, when it sets itself up against philosophy.

And yet it was as a self-evident or immediate truth that the cogito, ergo sum of Descartes, the maxim on which may be said to hinge the whole interest of Modern Philosophy, was first stated by its author. The man who calls this a syllogism, must know little more about a syllogism than that the word ‘ergo’ [“therefore”] occurs in it. Where shall we look for the middle term? And a middle term is a much more essential point of a syllogism than the word ‘ergo’. If we try to justify the name, by calling the combination of ideas in Descartes an ‘immediate’ syllogism, this superfluous variety of syllogism is a mere name for an utterly unmediated synthesis of distinct terms of thought. That being so, the synthesis of being with our ideas, as stated in the maxim of immediate knowledge, has no more and no less claim to the title of syllogism than the axiom of Descartes has. From Hotho’s ‘Dissertation on the Cartesian Philosophy’ (published 1826), I borrow the quotation in which Descartes himself distinctly declares that the maxim cogito, ergo sum is no syllogism. The passages are Respons. ad II Object.; De Methodo iv; Ep. i. 118. From the first passage I quote the words more immediately to the point. Descartes says: ‘That we are thinking beings is prima quaedam notio quae ex nullo syllogismo concluditur’ (a certain primary notion, which is deduced from no syllogism); and goes on: ‘neque cum quis dicit: Ego cogito, ergo sum sive existo, existentiam ex cogitatione per syllogismum deducit’ (nor, when one says, I think, therefore I am or exist, does he deduce existence from thought by means of a syllogism). Descartes knew what it implied in a syllogism, and so he adds that, in order to make the maxim admit of a deduction by syllogism, we should have to add the major premise: ‘Illud omne quod cogitate, est sive existit’ (Everything which thinks, is or exists). Of course, he remarks, this major premise itself has to be deduced from the original statement.

The language of Descartes on the maxim that the ‘I’ which thinks must also at the same time be, his saying that this connection is given and implied in the simple perception of consciousness that this connection is the absolute first, the principle, the most certain and evident of all things, so that no scepticism can be conceived so monstrous as not to admit it — all this language is so vivid and distinct, that the modern statements of Jacobi and others on this immediate connection can only pass for needless repetitions.

§ 65

The theory of which we are speaking is not satisfied when it has shown that mediate knowledge taken separately is an adequate vehicle of truth. Its distinctive doctrine is that immediate knowledge alone, to the total exclusion of mediation, can possess a content which is true. This exclusiveness is enough to show that the theory is a relapse into the metaphysical understanding, with its catch words ‘either-or’. And thus it is really a relapse into the habit of external mediation, the gist of which consists in clinging to those narrow and one-sided categories of the finite, which it falsely imagined itself to have left for ever behind. This point, however, we shall not at present discuss in detail. An exclusively immediate knowledge is asserted as a fact only, and in the present Introduction we can only study it from this external point of view. The real significance of such knowledge will be explained when we come to the logical question of the opposition between mediate and immediate. But it is characteristic of the view before us to decline to examine the nature of the fact, that is, the notion of it; for such an examination would itself be a step towards mediation and even towards knowledge. The genuine discussion on logical ground, therefore, must be deferred till we come to the proper province of Logic itself.

The whole of the second part of Logic, the Doctrine of Essential Being, is a discussion of the intrinsic and self-affirming unity of immediacy and mediation.

§ 66

Beyond this point then we need not go: immediate knowledge is to be accepted as a fact. Under these circumstances examination is directed to the field of experience, to a psychological phenomenon. If that be so, we need only note, as the commonest of experiences, that truths which we well know to be results of complicated and highly mediated trains of thought present themselves immediately and without effort to the mind of any man who is familiar with the subject. The mathematician, like everyone who has mastered a particular science, meets any problem with ready-made solutions which presuppose most complicated analyses: and every educated man has a number of general views and maxims which he can muster without trouble, but which can only have sprung from frequent reflection and long experience. The facility we attain in any sort of knowledge, art, or technical expertness, consists in having the particular knowledge or kind of action present to our mind in any case that occurs, even, we may say, immediate in our very limbs, in an outgoing activity. In all these instances, immediacy of knowledge is so far from excluding mediation, that the two things are linked together — immediate knowledge being actually the product and result of mediated knowledge.

It is no less obvious that immediate existence is bound up with its mediation. The seed and the parents are immediate and initial existences in respect of the offspring which they generate. But the seed and the parents, though they exist and are therefore immediate, are yet in their turn generated; and the child, without prejudice to the mediation of its existence, is immediate, because it is. The fact that I am in Berlin, my immediate presence here, is mediated by my having made the journey hither.

§ 67

One thing may be observed with reference to the immediate knowledge of God, of legal and ethical principles (including under the head of immediate knowledge what is otherwise termed Instinct, Implanted or Innate Ideas, Common Sense, Natural Reason, or whatever form, in short, we give to the original spontaneity). It is a matter of general experience that education or development is required to bring out into consciousness what is therein contained. It was so even with the Platonic reminiscence; and the Christian rite of baptism, although a sacrament, involves the additional obligation of a Christian upbringing. In short, religion and morals, however much they may be faith or immediate knowledge, are still on every side conditioned by the mediating process which is termed development, education, training.

The adherents, no less than the assailants, of the doctrine of Innate Ideas have been guilty throughout of the like exclusiveness and narrowness as is here noted. They have drawn a hard and fast line between the essential and immediate union (as it may be described) of certain universal principles with the soul, and another union which has to be brought about in an external fashion, and through the channel of given objects and conceptions. There is one objection, borrowed from experience, which was raised against the doctrine of Innate Ideas. All men, it was said, must have these ideas; they must have, for example, the maxim of contradiction present in the mind — they must be aware of it; for this maxim and others like it were included in the class of Innate Ideas. The objection may be set down to misconception; for the principles in question, though innate, need not on that account have the form of ideas or conceptions of something we are aware of. Still, the objection completely meets and overthrows the crude theory of immediate knowledge, which expressly maintains its formulae in so far as they are in consciousness. Another point calls for notice. We may suppose it admitted by the intuitive school, that the special case of religious faith involves supplementing by a Christian or religious education and development. In that case it is acting capriciously when it seeks to ignore this admission when speaking about faith, or it betrays a want of reflection not to know, that, if the necessity of education be once admitted, mediation is pronounced indispensable.

The reminiscence of ideas spoken of by Plato is equivalent to saying that ideas implicitly exist in man, instead of being, as the Sophists assert, a foreign importation into his mind. But to conceive knowledge as reminiscence does not interfere with, or set aside as useless, the development of what is implicitly in man; which development is another word for mediation. The same holds good of the innate ideas that we find in Descartes and the Scotch philosophers. These ideas are only potential in the first instance, and should be looked at as being a sort of mere capacity in man.

§ 68

In the case of these experiences the appeal turns upon something that shows itself bound up with immediate consciousness. Even if this combination be in the first instance taken as an external and empirical connection, still, even for empirical observation, the fact of its being constant shows it to be essential and inseparable. But, again, if this immediate consciousness, as exhibited in experience, be taken separately, so far as it is a consciousness of God and the divine nature, the state of mind which it implies is generally described as an exaltation above the finite, above the senses, and above the instinctive desires and affections of the natural heart: which exaltation passes over into, and terminates in, faith in God and a divine order. It is apparent, therefore, that, though faith may be an immediate knowledge and certainty, it equally implies the interposition of this process as its antecedent and condition.

It has been already observed, that the so-called proofs of the being of God, which start from finite being, give an expression to this exaltation. In that light they are no inventions of an oversubtle reflection, but the necessary and native channel in which the movement of mind runs: though it may be that, in their ordinary form, these proofs have not their correct and adequate expression.

§ 69

It is the passage (§ 64) from the subjective Idea to being which forms the main concern of the doctrine of immediate knowledge. A primary and self-evident interconnection is declared to exist between our Idea and being. Yet precisely this central point of transition, utterly irrespective of any connections which show in experience, clearly involves a mediation. And the mediation is of no imperfect or unreal kind, where the mediation takes place with and through something external, but one comprehending both antecedent and conclusion.

§ 70

For, what this theory asserts is that truth lies neither in the Idea as a merely subjective thought, nor in mere being on its own account — that mere being per se, a being that is not of the Idea, is the sensible finite being of the world. Now all this only affirms, without demonstration, that the Idea has truth only by means of being, and being has truth only by means of the Idea. The maxim of immediate knowledge rejects an indefinite empty immediacy (and such is abstract being, or pure unity taken by itself), and affirms in its stead the unity of the Idea with being. And it acts rightly in so doing. But it is stupid not to see that the unity of distinct terms or modes is not merely a purely immediate unity, i.e. unity empty and indeterminate, but that — with equal emphasis — the one term is shown to have truth only as mediated through the other — or, if the phrase be preferred, that either term is only mediated with truth through the other. That the quality of mediation is involved in the very immediacy of intuition is thus exhibited as a fact, against which understanding, conformably to the fundamental maxim of immediate knowledge that the evidence of consciousness is infallible, can have nothing to object. It is only ordinary abstract understanding which takes the terms of mediation and immediacy, each by itself absolutely, to represent an inflexible line of distinction, and thus draws upon its own head the hopeless task of reconciling them. The difficulty, as we have shown, has no existence in the fact, and it vanishes in the speculative notion.

§ 71

The one-sidedness of the intuitional school has certain characteristics attending upon it, which we shall proceed to point out in their main features, now that we have discussed the fundamental principle. The first of these corollaries is as follows. Since the criterion of truth is found, not in the nature of the content, but in the mere fact of consciousness, every alleged truth has no other basis than subjective certitude and the assertion that we discover a certain fact in our consciousness. What I discover in my consciousness is thus exaggerated into a fact of the consciousness of all, and even passed off for the very nature of consciousness.

Among the so-called proofs of the existence of God, there used to stand the consensus gentium, to which appeal is made as early as Cicero. The consensus gentium is a weighty authority, and the transition is easy and natural, from the circumstance that a certain fact is found in the consciousness of every one to the conclusion that it is a necessary element in the very nature of consciousness. In this category of general agreement there was latent the deep-rooted perception, which does not escape even the least cultivated mind, that the consciousness of the individual is at the same time particular and accidental. Yet unless we examine the nature of this consciousness itself, stripping it of its particular and accidental elements and, by the toilsome operation of reflection disclosing the universal in its entirety and purity, it is only a unanimous agreement upon a given point that can authorise a decent presumption that that point is part of the very nature of consciousness.

Of course, if thought insists on seeing the necessity of what is presented as a fact of general occurrence, the consensus gentium is certainly not sufficient. Yet even granting the universality of the fact to be a satisfactory proof, it has been found impossible to establish the belief in God on such an argument, because experience shows that there are individuals and nations without any such faith.

In order to judge of the greater or less extent to which Experience shows cases of Atheism or of the belief in God, it is all-important to know if the mere general conception of deity suffices, or if a more definite knowledge of God is required. The Christian world would certainly refuse the title of God to the idols of the Hindus and the Chinese, to the fetishes of the Africans, and even to the gods of Greece themselves. If so, a believer in these idols would not be a believer in God. If it were contended, on the other hand, that such a belief in idols implies some sort of belief in God, as the species implies the genus, then idolatry would argue not faith in an idol merely, but faith in God. The Athenians took an opposite view. The poets and philosophers who explained Zeus to be a cloud, and maintained that there was only one God, were treated as atheists at Athens.

The danger in these questions lies in looking at what the mind may make out of an object, and not what that object actually and explicitly is. If we fail to note this distinction, the commonest perceptions of men’s senses will be religion: for every such perception, and indeed every act of mind, implicitly contains the principle which, when it is purified and developed, rises to religion. But to be capable of religion is one thing, to have it another. And religion yet implicit is only a capacity or a possibility.

Thus in modern times, travellers have found tribes (as Captains Ross and Parry found the Esquimaux) which, as they tell us, have not even that small modicum of religion possessed by African sorcerers, the goetes of Herodotus. On the other hand, an Englishman, who spent the first months of the last Jubilee at Rome, says, in his account of the modern Romans, that the common people are bigots, whilst those who can read and write are atheists to a man.

The charge of Atheism is seldom heard in modern times: principally because the facts and the requirements of religion are reduced to a minimum. (See § 73.)

But there can be nothing shorter and more convenient than to have the bare assertion to make, that we discover a fact in our consciousness, and are certain that it is true: and to declare that this certainty, instead of proceeding from our particular mental constitution only, belongs to the very nature of the mind.

§ 72

A second corollary which results from holding immediacy of consciousness to be the criterion of truth is that all superstition or idolatry is allowed to be truth, and that an apology is prepared for any contents of the will, however wrong and immoral. It is because he believes in them, and not from the reasoning and syllogism of what is termed mediate knowledge, that the Hindu finds God in the cow, the monkey, the Brahmin, or the Lama. But, the natural desires and affections spontaneously carry and deposit their interests in consciousness, where also immoral aims make themselves naturally at home: the good or bad character would thus express the definite being of the will, which would be known, and that most immediately, in the interests and aims.

§ 73

Thirdly and lastly, the immediate consciousness of God goes no further than to tell us that he is: to tell us what he is would be an act of cognition, involving mediation. So that God as an object of religion is expressly narrowed down to the indeterminate supersensible, God in general: and the significance of religion is reduced to a minimum.

If it were really needful to win back and secure the bare belief that there is a God, or even to create it, we might well wonder at the poverty of the age which can see a gain in the merest pittance of religious consciousness, and which in its church has sunk so low as to worship at the altar that stood in Athens long ago, dedicated to the ‘Unknown God’.

§ 74

We have still briefly to indicate the general nature of the form of immediacy. For it is the essential one-sidedness of the category which makes whatever comes under it one-sided and, for that reason, finite. And, first, it makes the universal no better than an abstraction external to the particulars, and God a being without determinate quality. But God can only be called a spirit when he is known to be at once the beginning and end, as well as the mean, in the process of mediation. Without this unification of elements he is neither concrete, nor living, nor a spirit. Thus the knowledge of God as a spirit necessarily implies mediation. The form of immediacy, secondly, invests the particular with the character of independent or self-centred being. But such predicates contradict the very essence of the particular — which is to be referred to something else outside. They thus invest the finite with the character of an absolute. But, besides, the form of immediacy is altogether abstract: it has no preference for one set of contents more than another, but is equally susceptible of all: it may as well sanction what is idolatrous and immoral as the reverse. Only when we discern that the content — the particular — is not self-subsistent, but derivative from something else, are its finitude and untruth shown in their proper light. Such discernment, where the content we discern carries with it the ground of its dependent nature, is a knowledge which involves mediation. The only content which can be held to be the truth is one not mediated with something else, not limited by other things: or, otherwise expressed, it is one mediated by itself, where mediation and immediate reference-to-self coincide. The understanding that fancies it has got clear of finite knowledge, the identity of the analytical metaphysicians and the old ‘rationalists’, abruptly takes again as principle and criterion of truth that immediacy which, as an abstract reference-to-self, is the same as abstract identity. Abstract thought (the scientific form used by ‘reflective’ metaphysic) and abstract intuition (the form used by immediate knowledge) are one and the same.

The stereotyped opposition between the form of immediacy and that of mediation gives to the former a half-ness and inadequacy that affects every content which is brought under it. Immediacy means, upon the whole, an abstract reference-to-self, that is, an abstract identity or abstract universality. Accordingly the essential and real universal, when taken merely in its immediacy, is a mere abstract universal; and from this point of view God is conceived as a being altogether without determinate quality. To call God spirit is in that case only a phrase: for the consciousness and self-consciousness which spirit implies are impossible without a distinguishing of it from itself and from something else, i.e. without mediation.

§ 75

It was impossible for us to criticise this, the third attitude which thought has been made to take towards objective truth, in any other mode than what is naturally indicated and admitted in the doctrine itself. The theory asserts that immediate knowledge is a fact. It has been shown to be untrue in fact to say that there is an immediate knowledge, a knowledge without mediation either by means of something else or in itself. It has also been explained to be false in fact to say that thought advances through finite and conditioned categories only, which are always mediated by a something else, and to forget that in the very act of mediation the mediation itself vanishes. And to show that, in point of fact, there is a knowledge which advances neither by unmixed immediacy nor by unmixed mediation, we can point to the example of Logic and the whole of philosophy.

§ 76

If we view the maxims of immediate knowledge in connection with the uncritical metaphysic of the past from which we started, we shall learn from the comparison the reactionary nature of the school of Jacobi. His doctrine is a return to the modern starting-point of this metaphysic in the Cartesian philosophy. Both Jacobi and Descartes maintain the following three points:

(1) The simple inseparability of the thought and being of the thinker. Cogito, ergo sum is the same doctrine as that the being, reality, and existence of the ‘Ego’ is immediately revealed to me in consciousness. (Descartes, in fact, is careful to state that by thought he means consciousness in general. Princip. Phil. i. 9.) This inseparability is the absolutely first and most certain knowledge, not mediated or demonstrated.

(2) The inseparability of existence from the conception of God: the former is necessarily implied in the latter, or the conception never can be without the attribute of existence, which is thus necessary and eternal.

Descartes, Princip. Phil. i. 15: ‘The reader will be more disposed to believe that there exists a being supremely perfect, if he notes that in the case of nothing else is there found in him an idea, in which he notices necessary existence to be contained in the same way. He will see that that idea exhibits a true and unchangeable nature — a nature which cannot but exist, since necessary existence is contained in it.’ A remark which immediately follows, and which sounds like mediation or demonstration, does not really prejudice the original principle.

In Spinoza we come upon the same statement that the essence or abstract conception of God implies existence. The first of Spinoza’s definitions, that of the Causa Sui (or Self-Cause), explains it to be ‘that of which the essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing’. The inseparability of the notion from being is the main point and fundamental hypothesis in his system. But what notion is thus inseparable from being? Not the notion of finite things, for they are so constituted as to have a contingent and a created existence. Spinoza’s eleventh proposition, which follows with a proof that God exists necessarily, and his twentieth, showing that God’s existence and his essence are one and the same, are really superfluous, and the proof is more in form than in reality. To say that God is Substance, the only Substance, and that, as Substance is Causa Sui, God therefore exists necessarily, is merely stating that God is that of which the notion and the being are inseparable.

(3) The immediate consciousness of the existence of external things. By this nothing more is meant than sense-consciousness. To have such a thing is the slightest of all cognitions: and the only thing worth knowing about it is that such immediate knowledge of the being of things external is error and delusion, that the sensible world as such is altogether void of truth; that the being of these external things is accidental and passes away as a show; and that their very nature is to have only an existence which is separable from their essence and notion.

§ 77

There is however a distinction between the two points of view:

(1) The Cartesian philosophy, from these unproved postulates, which it assumes to be unprovable, proceeds to wider and wider details of knowledge, and thus gave rise to the sciences of modern times. The modern theory (of Jacobi), on the contrary, (§ 62) has come to what is intrinsically a most important conclusion that cognition, proceeding as it must by finite mediations, can know only the finite, and never embody the truth; and would fain have the consciousness of God go no further than the aforesaid very abstract belief that God is.

Anselm on the contrary says: ‘Methinks it is carelessness, if, after we have been confirmed in the faith, we do not exert ourselves to see the meaning of what we believe.’ [Tractat. Cur Deus Homo?] These words of Anselm, in connection with the concrete truths of Christian doctrine, offer a far harder problem for investigation, than is contemplated by this modern faith.

(2) The modern doctrine on the one hand makes no change in the Cartesian method of the usual scientific knowledge, and conducts on the same plan the experimental and finite sciences that have sprung from it. But, on the other hand, when it comes to the science which has infinity for its scope, it throws aside that method and thus, as it knows no other, it rejects all methods. It abandons itself to wild vagaries of imagination and assertion, to a moral priggishness and sentimental arrogance, or to a reckless dogmatising and lust of argument, which is loudest against philosophy and philosophic doctrines. Philosophy of course tolerates no mere assertions or conceits, and checks the free play of argumentative see-saw.

§ 78

We must then reject the opposition between an independent immediacy in the contents or facts of consciousness and an equally independent mediation, supposed incompatible with the former. The incompatibility is a mere assumption, an arbitrary assertion. All other assumptions and postulates must in like manner be left behind at the entrance to philosophy, whether they are derived from the intellect or the imagination. For philosophy is the science in which every such proposition must first be scrutinised and its meaning and oppositions be ascertained.

Scepticism, made a negative science and systematically applied to all forms of knowledge, might seem a suitable introduction, as pointing out the nullity of such assumptions. But a sceptical introduction would be not only an ungrateful but also a useless course; and that because Dialectic, as we shall soon make appear, is itself an essential element of affirmative science.

Scepticism, besides, could only get hold of the finite forms as they were suggested by experience, taking them as given, instead of deducing them scientifically. To require such a scepticism accomplished is the same as to insist on science being preceded by universal doubt, or a total absence of presupposition. Strictly speaking, in the resolve that wills pure thought, this requirement is accomplished by freedom which, abstracting from everything, grasps its pure abstraction, the simplicity of thought.