Carter Ratcliff in Vanitas
The Anaxagoras Variations: A Note on Theory
In theory, there is theory and practice. In practice, there is only practice. That is because theory, in every strong sense of the word, is a method for separating the inseparable. You and the world, for instance.
The world is the realm of happenstance—not of chaos, usually, but of contingencies so often surprising that, to make sense of things, you must incessantly improvise. Theory is for those who don’t like surprises and can’t trust their own improvisations. Theorists want certainty. They want to step up and out of the world to a view of the really Real, the absolutely True. They find it pleasant to dispense the latest news about the Real and the True. They enjoy even more the feeling of having exchanged their ordinary selves for superior selves. This is an ancient pleasure.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Anaxagoras said that the universe began as an undifferentiated mass. Then Mind—a transcendent force with cognitive inclinations—sorted it out. The trouble, as Anaxagoras saw it, is that our senses can’t tell us what Mind has done. Our senses can only delude us with appearances. If we want to know how things Truly are, if we want to know what is really Real, we must separate ourselves from everything ordinary, including our daily, merely phantasmal selves. Disentangled from the world, we are free to ascend to a unity with Mind.
At one with Mind, we will see Truth, for Truth is the work of Mind. Ancient philosophy claimed to know how to achieve this oneness. To maintain the plausibility of the claim, later philosophers—and theologians—revised the ancient accounts of Mind and how to get in touch with it. Modernity began when Mind turned into History—not history as it is lived but History as a transcendent agent, eternal Mind with a sense of time. A further variation: Mind is chiefly concerned with capital or the lack of it, or Mind is not Mind but Capital itself or possibly the Marketplace. Others said it was the New Science or, in any case, something new, though still transcendent, still the source of the really Real.
Nowadays, those who devise variations on Anaxagoras tend to call themselves theorists and assign the work of Mind to Social Construction or Discourse or to this or that Hegemony. Most theologians and metaphysicians praised their conceptions of Mind. Theorists are often at odds with theirs. They don’t merge with Mind so much as infiltrate it, the better to reveal its oppressive workings. Yet they resemble their predecessors—everyone from Anaxagoras and Plato to Descartes and Kant—in wanting us to see themselves as masters of transcendence.
The role of those who are not theorists is to be thankful for the revelations of theory. Theorists want to help us. Chiefly, though, they want to relieve the itchy need to find a way out of their own skins. You can’t do that, so theory is impossible. But if theory is impossible, what do theorists do? They carry on with one practice or another and give it an aura of theory. What they offer is not theory but theoryism. I’m tempted to say that no one with any taste would do that. But to generalize this way is to produce the silly clang of theoretical certainty. It is better—because truer—to say that pretensions to theory impose a handicap that prevents all but a very few theorists from coming to grips with anything but their own need to speak from on high.