The Temptation of the Undifferentiated. From the World Without Qualities to the Man Without Qualities

Extract

My topic will be philosophical and, more precisely still, ontological. If we wish to conceive of what is at stake in the ‘dehumanization of the world’ and if we want to oppose it, we need to widen our perspective and take in not only the destiny of the human but the status of things and beings in general.

The thesis I am going to put forward, which is still quite daring given the current stage of my thinking, is a hunch and a hypothesis that I am trying gradually to clarify. My theory is that there was a kind of originating decision, a primal ontological choice made by the Greco-Latin as well as the Judeo-Christian West about the way of viewing beings in general; a decision in favour of differentiated forms and against the representation of a real, supposed to be composed in the final analysis of a basic single substrate whose differentiated forms were merely states, pure appearances without substance. I am also putting forward the notion that this primal choice, which is or was our choice and remains my own, was not absolutely necessary; it was a contingent free opting in favour of something and against another possible option.