mode in worship and prayer.
One understands, from this perspective, why juridical-religious formulas
(of which the oath, the command, and the prayer are eminent examples) have
a performative character: if the performative, by the simple fact of being ut-
tered, actualizes its own meaning, this is because it does not refer to being but to
having-to-be. It presupposes an ontology of estō and not of esti.
There are, that is to say, two distinct and connected ontologies in the tradition
of the West: the first, the ontology of the command, proper to the juridical-religious
sphere, which is expressed in the imperative and has a performative character;
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the second, proper to the philosophical-scientific tradition, which is expressed
in the form of the indicative (or, in a substantivated form, in the infinitive or
participle— esti, einai, on, “is,” “to be,” “being”). The ontology of estō and of “be!”
refers to a having-to-be; that of esti and of “is” relate to being. Clearly distinct and in many ways opposed, the two ontologies live together, struggle with each other,
and nevertheless never cease to intersect, to hybridize, and to prevail over one
another by turns in the history of the West.
א In twentieth-century thought a veritable anthropology of command was devel-
oped by Arnold Gehlen. According to this author, who in the last analysis aimed to
found a theory of the institution, the central function of the imperative in human society derives from the absence in human beings of an instinctually preestablished conduct. The
human being does not simply live like the other animals, whose conduct is instinctively
regulated, but must “lead his life [ sein Leben führen].” The institution, with its laws and imperatives, is situated precisely in this gap: “The imperative is thus the form in which
the entity is thought as valid and obligatory and in which it is rendered autonomous by
transcending the simple representation that one has of it. It . . . exonerates the will from choice: behavior is already decided in a preliminary way, and it is so independently of
the affective situation, from the state of the soul in which it is found from time to time and from circumstances. . . . This is the only form—beyond that of blunt habit—owing
to which a behavior can be rendered durable: the imperative is virtually the being-al-
ready-completed of the action” (Gehlen, 170).
It is in the light of the specific situation of the human being’s instinctual lack that
Gehlen intends to make his social justification of the imperative and the command hold
unconditionally, with a radicality with respect to which a more thorough consideration
of his own youthful unconditional adhesion to National Socialism should perhaps have
counseled more prudence: “The obligatory modality, the being-already-decided of be-
havior, the inhibition of analytic reason, the component of social reciprocity: these are all the moments of the imperative but also of the dynamics of the residual human instincts
when we imagine them transposed into the consciousness of a being that acts according
to its own will. An elementary rite, for example: ‘This is taboo! It is forbidden to touch it!’ would be, so to speak, the analogy of an authentic inhibition, instinctive and rigidly directed at a specific subject, if, naturally, a similar inhibition existed in the human being”
(ibid., 172). In this anthropological perspective, Gehlen also explains the Kantian imper-
ative: “Already Kant had recognized how the imperative responds to a social need and by
depriving it of any content, had made of the simple interest for universal validity . . . the content of duty” (ibid., 171).
19. Kant represents the moment when the ontology of command and
having-to-be reaches its most extreme elaboration and, by penetrating into the
ontology of substance and being, seeks to transform it from within. If this is
obvious as far as ethics is concerned, it is less obvious that the Critique of Pure
OPUS DEI
747
Reason can also be read from this perspective. The possibility of metaphysics
coincides here with the use of “pure” reason, that is, its use without reference
to beings and experience. The replacement of the “glorious name of ontology”
with that of “transcendental philosophy” means precisely that an ontology of
having-to-be has already taken the place of the ontology of being. The tran-
scendental object and the noumenon therefore do not designate any being, but
an X, “of which we know nothing, nor in general . . . can we know anything.”
They are not beings but demands, not substances but imperatives, to which
nothing corresponds on the level of experience. In the same way, the ideas of
reason are “regulative” ideals, “commands,” and not denotative words. That is
to say, having-to-be corresponds in Kantian ethics with the function that the
noumenon and the thing in itself take on in metaphysics: just as these impose
on thought the opening of a space that must however remain empty, so also
the categorical imperative commands practical reason in a determinate way and
nonetheless does not say anything (it is not surprising, from this perspective,
that Schopenhauer had been able to identify the dimension of the will with that
of the thing in itself and to entitle one of the supplements to his principal work
“Transcendental Considerations on the Will as a Thing in Itself”).
At the threshold of modernity, when theology and metaphysics seemed to
definitively cede the field to scientific rationality, Kant’s thought represents the
secularized reappropriation of the ontology of estō in the bosom of the ontology
of esti, the catastrophic reemergence of law and religion in the bosom of philoso-
phy. In the face of the triumph of scientific knowledge, Kant sought to secure the
survival of metaphysics, engrafting the ontology of command and having-to-be
into that of being and substance and allowing it to act there. He believed himself
to have secured in this way the possibility of metaphysics and to have founded,
at the same time, an ethics that was neither juridical nor religious. Yet on the
one hand, he welcomed the inheritance of the theological-liturgical tradition of
officium and operativity without rendering an account of it, and on the other, he
took leave of classical ontology in a lasting way.
The “Copernican revolution” worked out by Kant did not consist in having
put the subject at the center in place of the object, so much as rather—but the
two services are, in truth, inseparable—in having substituted an ontology of com-
mand for an ontology of substance. And one does not understand the history of
post-Kantian philosophy if one does not know how to make out in it the succession
of crossings, conflicts, and compromises between the two ontologies, which with
phenomenology and Being and Time reach their provisional rendering of accounts,
in which estō and esti, “be!” and “is” seem for an instant to be indeterminated.
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א During his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann declared at a certain point that he had
“lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to a
Kantian definition of duty.” Asked to specify what he intended to say, he added, thus
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showing that he actually had read the Critique of Practical Reason: “I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the
principle of general laws” (Arendt, 135–36).
Curiously, Arendt, who is certainly ironic toward this “version of Kant ‘for the house-
hold use of the little man’” (ibid., 136), seems to maintain that Eichmann’s thesis was to be taken seriously in some way. “Much of the horribly painstaking thoroughness in the
execution of the Final Solution . . . can be traced to the odd notion, indeed very com-
mon in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act
as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys. . . . Whatever Kant’s role in the formation of ‘the little man’s’ mentality in Germany may have been, there is not the
slightest doubt that in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant’s precepts: a law
was a law, there could be no exceptions” (ibid., 144).
Kant’s blindness is not to have seen that, in the society that was arising with the in-
dustrial revolution, in which human beings had been subjected to forces that they could
not in any way control, the morality of duty would habituate them to consider obedience
to a command (it matters little whether external or internal, because nothing is easier
than interiorizing an external command) as an act of freedom.
20. That the Kantian ontology is in truth an ontology of command becomes
most evident in Kelsen. He moves from an absolutization without reserve of
Sein and Sollen, being and having-to-be, assumed unconditionally as a dualistic postulate: “My studies begin from the presupposition of separating two opposed
fundamental principles: being and having-to-be, content and form. I am aware
that a monistic conception cannot and must not recognize as definitive the
dualism between being and having-to-be, content and form. If, however, I here
take into consideration two opposed principles and remember that I have to
renounce the attempt to link together being and having-to-be, form and con-
tent, on a higher level that would comprehend these two concepts that exclude
one another, it is with justification that from my point of view I have not, at
bottom, found a sincere response other than this: I am not a monist” (Kelsen 2,
v–vi). The difference between being and having-to-be cannot be further ex-
plained: it is an immediate given of our consciousness. “Nobody can deny that
the statement: ‘something is’—that is, the statement by which an existent fact is
described—is fundamentally different from the statement: ‘something ought to
be’—which is the statement by which a norm is described. Nobody can assert
that from the statement that something is, follows a statement that something
ought to be, or vice versa” (Kelsen 1, 14/5–6).
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The pure theory of law presupposes, that is to say, two ontologies that are
irreducible to one another and, like Kant, chooses as its proper sphere that of
command and having-to-be. It is “pure” because it claims to maintain itself con-
stantly in the sphere of the Sollen, without ever trespassing into that of Sein.
Juridical duty does not coincide, in fact, with a being or a state of things, that is,
with due behavior, but expresses only the fact that a certain behavior is decreed
by a norm and that this norm refers to another norm (coercive sanction) and this
again to another: “Legal obligation is not, or not immediately, the behavior that
ought to be. Only the coercive act, functioning as a sanction, ought to be. If we
say, ‘He who is legally obligated to a certain behavior, “ought” to [ soll ] behave in this way according to the law,’ we only express the idea that a coercive act as a
sanction ought to be executed if he does not behave in this way” (ibid., 141/119).
The relationship between norm and behavior is not, that is to say, a relation
of being but a relation of having-to-be. Norms, considered in themselves, are not
concrete facts but “meanings [ Sinngehalte] and precisely the sense of the acts in
which the norm is established. This sense is a Sollen. Both ethics and jurispru-
dence are normative sciences, having as their object norms containing a Sollen
[ Soll-Normen], understood as meanings” (ibid., 73n1).
And just as the sense of the norm is not identified with the factual behavior
prescribed, so also the command, which is in question in the norm, does not
coincide with the act of will of which it constitutes the sense, which already has
the form of a being. The norm does not decree that one behave in a certain way,
only that one has to [ soll ] behave in a certain way.
Kelsen’s program of constructing a theory of law without any reference to being
cannot be completely actualized. The two ontologies (being and having-to-be),
while clearly distinct, cannot be entirely separated, and they refer to and presup-
pose one another. This appears clearly in the theory of sanction and penalty. To
say that the norm that establishes the sanction affirms that the executioner must
apply the penalty and not that he in fact apply it, takes away any value from the
very idea of a sanction. The problem of violence—like that of pleasure—cannot
easily be expunged from law and ethics and constitutes a tangent point between
the two ontologies. As in Kant, being and having-to-be are articulated together
in the pure theory of law in the manner of a fugue, in which separation refers to
a tangent and this latter again to a separation.
Threshold
THE moment has perhaps come to attempt to read the ontology of opera-
tivity and command, which we have here sought to define by means of an
archaeology of office, in parallel with the “metaphysics of will” that Ernst Benz
has reconstructed in a book whose importance for the history of philosophy is
still far from being fully appreciated (Benz, passim). Benz’s studies show that the
concept of will, which in Greek philosophy of the classical era did not have an
ontological meaning, was elaborated (probably developing motifs drawn from
Hermetic texts) by Neoplatonism and later by Christian theology beginning in
the fourth century, to explain the process of hypostatization of the One and the
trinitary articulation of the Supreme Being.
If at the beginning of this process there stood the production in the One of
an inclination toward itself ( neusis pros heauton), this is defined, in the treatise of the sixth Ennead, which bears the significant title “Free Will and the Will of
the One,” as “will” ( thelēsis, boulēsis) and “love” ( agapē, erōs): “all therefore was will and in the One there was nothing unwilled or prior to will: he was above all
will [ prōton ara hē boulēsis auto]” (Benz, 302). Will, which is originarily will of self, names the intradivine movement through which the One, unfolding itself
toward itself, is constituted as intellect ( nous) and gives itself reality and existence in three primary hypostases. From this perspective, will and potential are identified: “the power (of the One) is absolutely sovereign over itself [ hautēs kyrian], being what it wills to be [ touto ousan ho thelei]” ( Enneads 6.8.9; cf. Benz, 298).
And not only is potential essentially will, but the good is also only will of self
(“
the nature of the good is in reality the will of itself [ thelēsis hautou]”; Enneads 6.8.13; cf. Benz, 299). With a gesture in which one can make out the birth of the
modern metaphysics of the will, Plotinus ultimately identifies will with being it-
self: “will [ boulēsis] and substance [ ousia] must in itself coincide necessarily with being in itself” ( Enneads, ibid.; cf. Benz, 301).
By means of this identification of being and will, the progressive unfolding
of the divine unity into the hypostases is already conceived “in a homoousian
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way” (Benz, 414), as it will be in Christian theology. Will is at once the origin of
the movement of the hypostases and the principle that agrees to lead them back
to unity. It is precisely this “voluntarization” ( Voluntarisierung, ibid.) of Greek metaphysics that, by transforming from within both the image of the world of
the Timaeus and the Aristotelian unmoved mover, will render possible the elab-
oration of the Christian creationist paradigm.
With a consistent analysis Benz can show at this point how it was precisely
the assimilation of the Plotinian model—through Marius Victorinus, the Gnos-
tics, Irenaeus, Origen, and Athanasius—that permits the articulation together of
trinitarian theology and Christian anthropology that will find its complete for-
mulation in the Augustinian triad of memory, intellect, and will (ibid., 365–413).
Solely preoccupied with the argumentation of his archaeology of will,
Benz—who is surely perfectly aware that the doctrine of the hypostases implies
a “dynamic conception” of the divine being (ibid., 414)—does not seem to be
interested in the definition of the characteristics of the new operative ontology
that is here in question. What our archaeology has intended to show is that, on
the contrary, only a point-by-point definition of these characteristics allows us
to explain the appearance and centrality of the concept of will. It is not only a
matter of the fact that here being is “mobilized” and put in movement (which
was already achieved in Aristotelian ontology): what is decisive is that the move-
ment of being is here not produced in itself and by nature but implies an energeia
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