We can neither gain access to the multiple beyond the one nor to the one beyond the multiple.īadiou agrees. But then Being must be unknowable and Badiou’s hypothesis – Being as multiple – must be as arbitrary as Leibniz’s. However, if it is to be experienced, it must surely be experienced as something and thus, as Leibniz rightfully remarks, as one. Let us suppose that Being is essentially multiple. The Problem of the One and the Multiple Assemblage, Deana Lawson, 2021, Museum of Modern Art, New Yorkīut it seems that the same problem arises again. Multiplicity is that which is counted as one, the being to which the count is applied. Oneness is what allows something to count as something. Oneness is nothing but an illusory effect of Being’s essential multiplicity. Turning around Leibniz’s dictum, he declares that what is not multiple is not being. But how, then, does Leibniz know that Being is one?īadiou’s solution is to follow experience (and Heidegger) and declare that Being must be in accordance with experience. If Leibniz is right, then Being seems to be something that we cannot experience.

A table is one as that table, but it is also the collection of its multiple parts. The problem with Leibniz’s reasoning is that it seems disproven by experience, in which everything is multiple. The idea is that everything that exists must necessarily be something and thereby unified – one – against what it is not. According to German philosopher and polymath Leibniz, oneness is a necessary condition for something to count as being: what is not a being, as he put it, is not a being. At the start of Being and Event, Badiou approaches Being through the question of the one and the multiple. This point certainly calls for an explanation. The richness that scientific thought discards is what concerns beings and not Being. For Badiou, this poverty is the very sign of sciences’ essential relation to Being. Throughout his oeuvre, Heidegger contrasts the original richness of experience with the poverty of its scientific description. Please check your inbox to activate your subscription Thank you!īadiou and Heidegger differ when it comes to scientific abstraction. It is the exploration of how, in general, things can be presented.Īlain Badiou on the Relation of Science and Being Portrait of Gottfried Leibniz by Christoph Bernhard Francke, 1695, via Wikimedia. Badiou’s definition of ontology is ‘the presentation of presentation’. Ontology is not the study of the kind of things there are but of what it is to be. What is more, the answer Badiou offers to that question supposes the ontological distinctions established in Being and Time. The stakes in Badiou’s most important work (its title Being and Event clearly alludes to Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time) are, to put it succinctly, to develop another answer to the ontological question. The French philosopher believes that all contemporary philosophy must start from the renewal of Heidegger’s question of Being. Badiou, on the other hand, sees science as one of the domains of our culture where true thought is produced.Īlain Badiou on the Question of Being Cover of the original edition of Being and Event in French, via Éditions du SeuilĪlain Badiou adopts the framework within which Martin Heidegger expresses his condemnation of philosophy and science. By its very attempt to think, science makes itself unable to do so. Science’s ambition to “think reality” behind appearances transgresses the limits of what can be thought. By Heidegger’s account, which I discuss in another article, science cannot think. The controversy concerns the status of scientific thought. This opposition crystallizes in Badiou’s disagreement with the main representative of the hermeneutic region, Martin Heidegger. Badiou, on the other hand, tries to show in his main work that thought can transgress the barrier that separates reality from the linguistic structures that we project onto it. Today, philosophy’s main “regions” or currents share the idea that thought must be subordinated to language. In a previous article about contemporary philosophy’s main ‘regions’, I wrote what follows: ‘Admittedly, at least another article would be needed to explore and evaluate the propositions Alain Badiou put forward to replace the unity of the three regions with a fourth one.’ The present article purports to be that article needed to evaluate Badiou’s contribution to the philosophical scene. Alain Badiou, photo by Basso Cannarsa, via L’Humanité

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