One of the strangest and most obviously separating aspects of the idea and ambition of the project of plural philosophy, is the simultaneity of the necessary impetus against any idea of united, unified sense of a single possible goal of thought, of an idea of necessity of this one good (as, in what else, could plurality find the sustenance of its own essence if not in lacking the singularity of intentional affect of that idea of singularity it is opposed to?) - and at the same time, the fidelity to a tradition and goal, to philosophical truth, that implies exactly such a kind of goal, of virtue in wisdom to capture unity, of the unity of reason and nature. What is against that the position of plural self reflection in the form of philosophical systematicity? Can it be philosophy, or must it be, to borrow a term from Badiou (maybe against/orthogonal to his meaning of it), anti-philosophy? Or is there a way of rebirthing both the ancient and the modern idea of philosophy, be it ethical or critical, in a form suited for this idea of not just a plural system, but a system of plurality?
But we first need to recount the idea, and the cause of philosophy (cause here as both origin and goal, in the way in which its political use preserved the ancient duplicity), before we are to condemn it, for that is both to easy, and misses what in our own affempt at condemnation is condemnable too by its coincidence with that what it was aiming at (and which it, to a considerable extend, itself is). This conception of philosophy as idea, and then its use as critique, has however a larger prehistory; and it's that tradition that describes the movement of philosophy from living tradition to abstract idea, that the plural critique of critique as philosophy is referring to. This movement is itself inscribed into the understanding of this idea of movement and becoming, or of dialectics and the dialectical (and their difference). It therefore is also a natural object of internal interest to plural philosophy, in the description of the unity of the action of switching, posited in the subtle question, _who_ is switching, if it is not one or the other alter, and if the system itself ought precisely not to be understood to be a unity of action that creates or managing the switching process on its own terms, as thus it'd be its own singular subject. But who/what is changing then, if not even its ontological frame can be seen to be substantial?
This is the level of analysis on which becoming, and thus dialectics, must come into focus, and it is in this more concrete question that the idea of philosophy, as the heritage or weight of the dialectical idea, most also become more presently prescient even to those who otherwise might not see how a philosophical project such as plural philosophy, as preoccupied with more pressing matters as it it, ought to concentrate on itself and what or in what way it can be as philosophy, or as understanding in self-reference. Therefore, we ought to start at the origin of this idea, of the life of philosophy, to understand maybe too something about the dialectical nature of the becoming of the switch, and of its idea of who _is_ that what is the subject of its own becoming, creation or change to be what it was.
Philosophy - or at least that, what once was philosophy - is a religious movement. This seems like a strange kind of characterization, and that's because it isn't one; it's the de-characterization of its own self-protective mythology of the secularity of logos. Against this, I want to recall some basic historical circumstances:
The context of Greek philosophy is Greek society, and specifically Athenian society, since "philosophy" as a term and idea was coinded by Socrates. Athenian society at the point of philosophy's inception, around the end of the fifth century BC, is a democracy, but a conservative, traditionalist democracy, in which, mostly through mystery rituals and the connection to the arts, as in theater and music, and to athletics, a postion of authority is demonstrated, to which society should defer. This position is then, in a more distant way, referred to and taught by the sophists, who were relativists, but respected each cities rites and traditions; their main contention was, that in other contexts other things coild be true, that laws were the result of position, not nature; and in any way, that they were nothing mysterious, but a teachable tradition you can have a position against. It is against this context - not against modern secular science - that philosophy, as an idea, must be understood.
Philosophy, from its principle origin in Socrates, is anti-sophism. Its main method, that is then called dialectics, is the philosophical dialogue, that disproves the sophistic claim to knowledge (and any claim to knowledge, to clear, eternal, final knowledge is in this sense always potentially sophistic) by showing it to be inconsistent and empty, in being unable to define that what it was meant to be knowledge about.
It is then however secondly also a movement for the elevation of the soul through knowledge. And this mostly for ethical reasons. The main ethical position due to Socrates that is constitutive for the philosophical research in ethics is the belief, that anyone does whatever they think is good. Therefore, if there are ethical disagreements, they are fundamentally disagreements on what is good. For example, anyone who starts a war thinks they do so for good reasons. The philosophical position then is to say, that we therefore ought to see if we really know what is good. It turns out, we have bad definitions, and such bad definitions, unclear intuitions and beliefs, ate behind all sorts of political declarations and decisions. Therefore, in order to not make such mistakes ourselves, we need to understand goodness, or good itself, or, if you want, the idea of goodness; so that then we can act better and become ourselves good. That is what is fundamentally meant by this idea of the elevation of the soul: it is the ethical basis for theory, going all the way back to abstract metaphysics, mathematics etc, which all are only needed or justified as means of understanding the good, so that then, when we know what good is, we also know what we should do, be it in practical or theoretical matters or otherwise.
The connection of the two is that the praxis of sophism is unable to achieve that elevation. If the goal is to create a curriculum you can teach to make money, it cannot be at the same time motivated by you elevating your moral character by understanding better what it means to be good. (Mostly because understanding of what it means to be good means understanding how little we know about it; how much our idea of goodness, and what the different kinds virtues actually have in common, is very limited.) Those two goals are incompatible. By placing ethics above science, philosophy as a title cannot be granted to anyone being integrated into the scientific organization, and more generally, to no one who is actually payed to teach anything, or in so far they are payed for that. For example, a philosopher can be a payed language or history teacher, but as that they are not a philosopher. Most "philosophers" then in (esp. modern) history have not been philosophers, but historians or teachers of past philosophical writings and traditions as knowledge, not as ethical attitude. Rarely, some of them have been, in other contexts, also philosophers; but that is an exception. (The same also goes for those paying for teachings, or those earning or giving titles; all forms of payment, honorifics and external motivation are equally destructive to the purely intrinsic goal of reaching closeness to the idea of what is good, true and just.)
Philosophy in general is an exceptional discipline (in all the meaning of the word); to call oneself a philosopher sounds arrogant for a reason. However, it is only from that position of aspiration, of extreme theoretical ambition, that anything can come to fruition at all beyond the mechanism of sophism. It is in the belief into this unlikely discipline and attempt that we can truly see the religious element of philosophy: to reach the gods in reflection, and to understand beyond reality that idea of what is good and virtuous, and of the virtues most of all this unity of justice and truth, as the virtues of action and speech, in the conception of goodness as the highest idea too for theoretical understanding of the world. - Of the cosmos itself as the image of justice.
In this way, it becomes obvious, that philosophy was, for a time, a reform movement in the Greek religion that we today call paganism. It was that from the time of Socrates to that of Proclus, maybe Boethius (if we grant him pagan influence, as is not difficult), but certainly not much longer. Philosophy after that, under the influence of monotheism - be it in the occident or orient, and no matter under which sect - became not so much a believe of its own, but a tool; a tool to demonstrate dogmatic points of believe with natural reason, operating on the inherited traditions of logic from the ancient philosophical schools.
This is the history of western philosophy from late ancient times to at least the time of Descartes. The common way with which this period is often glossed over in histories of philosophy lies precisely in this, that it was not autonomous philosophy, but philosophy for the sake of another faith, unable to admit its own positions without self subjugation. But yet, it is out of this tradition that the more self conscious philosophy of Descartes and his successors, like Kant and Hegel, arose. Therefore, for their correct evaluation, and especially the correct evaluation of what they deem to be "critique", it is important to keep in mind this shift, that philosophy came to mean not an anti-sophistic elevation of the soul through the idea of virtue, but the use of reason to prove the articles of another faith.
Importantly, the main difference here is not between the number of gods, but between the different understanding of the salvation of the soul; it is very well possible to discuss, whether there is one or many gods, or indeed no god, within the classical philosophical context - and in this sense all of their schools, be they sceptical or dogmatic in matters of faith, and even the gnostic schools, and the approaches to monotheism in neoplatonism after Proclus, can be counted to it - but what is irreconcilable with the philosophical goal of the elevation of the soul through understanding virtue is the idea of being saved not by knowledge, but by grace. It is therefore Augustine who ends, in this sense, philosophy, and figures like Boethius are then still philosophers, but after philosophy, limited by the faith in grace and the accompanied understanding of virtue that surrounds them in their society, which they cannot but at least nominally submit to.
What then does the resurgence of modern philosophy, and especially of philosophical critique, since the days of Descartes and Kant mean? They, and their successors, clearly are motivated by trying to prove external teachings (such as the revealed god of scripture), but also by something else. They are in an in-between area between the use of philosophical logic for theology and for modern science, between these two instrumental areas by which "philosophy", as teaching, sophism, not attitude, is still meandering; and in between that they found a position arguably more interesting than either of them on their own, and more consequential to that what becomes, quite apart from its practice, the idea of philosophy.
The first notable, and dignifying, aspect to this modern rebirth of philosophy, is its attempt to recreation, and reconstruction, of the whole system of knowledge; of, like the old critique of sophism, a unified picture as well as an attempt of creating new foundations of knowledge, as is the guiding aspect from Descartes at least to Hegel. However, unlike Socrates, Descartes doesn't see the major flaw of this system of knowledge that he found in its justification of ethical beliefs, but in its lack of logical consistency, in its unsystematic and unscientific structure, which it needs to remedy. In other words, he (and basically all of modern philosophy) puts science above ethics, exactly in opposite to the ancient example, and didn't conceive of an ethical foundation of theory, including science, but of a scientific foundation of philosophy, including ethics. It is from this moment on then that we are burdened by the idea, present and limiting to this day, of "scientific philosophy". But this word "science" here is, as mentioned, not the external goal it has become today, not the institution of scientific research as teaching (it is not yet its sophistic aberration); it simply is the understanding, that truth is fundamental, that knowing what is true is important on its own, and not that it is important just in order to become good by understanding virtue
This also, importantly, objectifies truth: it is no longer the truthfulness of a person, the honesty and openness of character, and becomes instead the property of an external, symbolic statement; it becomes something said, not meant or experienced; it is now the object of doctrinal disputes, not its measure.
This is a radicalization of that what philosophy tended towards already when it was seen as a tool to prove God. Its content bound by external fate, the only thing free about it remained its method, logical reasoning, which became more independent first at the study of these objects that weren't bound up to much by scripture, such as optics and botanics. This tradition - largely based on the reinterpreted corpus of the Aristotelian lectures on nature - was then radicalized as an idea of objective reason that is seen as autonomous, independent of belief or content; that self-liberation of method is what we typically call the enlightenment.
Descartes did not go so far. In fact, his meditation painstakingly describe that when reason is left to itself, becomes sceptical to what extent it knowns anything, it comes to conclusions of absolute darkness, of being deceived even in its own capacity to conduct mathematical proofs, unless it finds God, by proving God, and then by Gods grace finding back to the world. He was conciliatory towards faith; but he did revert the absolute dependency on grace. The saviour from darkness for him is not a miracle done by God, but by the rational understanding that God must exist. That is enough; a very abstract, deistic God. This is already a preparation of God becoming on its own merely an abstract idea.
If Kant is the main proponent of the enlightenment in philosophy, then precisely because he did not attribute the content of the saviour from darkness in scepticism to an understanding of God, but of reason itself. Reason replaces God as the authority of the reality of the external world, as the guarantor of the consistency of experience. This reason is then both the method and its content; or as he put it, both the courthouse and judge (as that what makes use of the capacity of judgement) as well as its accused (as pure reason, or reason without limits, imagining god, the soul, or the whole world). In fact, the most fascinating aspect about Kant is this idea of unified reason, as measure (one reason, not multiple, like one per person), but also as capacity (next to understanding, judgment and imagination, as capacities of the human mind).
Kant's understanding of philosophy thus changes from scientific (as was still, just like Descartes, the goal of his youth, as can be seen by his dedication to the creation of Galaxies, and later by his continued reference to physics and mathematics), to one he calls "critical", which takes on the meaning of criticism used in political discussion. Critical philosophy becomes, very much against its original goal, a political philosophy, an ethical philosophy. Yet, Kant tries to hold practical and theoretical philosophy separate. Reason and understanding (as is his distinction between the practical understanding of the ethical impetus of judgement and the theoretical understanding of judgements to agree to the facts of experience) are irreconcilable, the two branches of philosophy only share formal logics as its empty basis together. Out of the lively impetus of critique and critical idealism is created the orthodoxy of criticalism as categorizing metaphysics (which, as Schopenhauer once rightly said, is suspiciously similar to Christianity in the end). Although his theory began with the self-limatation of reason through proof and judgement, it ended with the external limit of reason to not embark and understand that what lies on the base of its own understanding of moral reasoning.
This orthodoxy, however, breaks more or less immediately, and the critical tendency triumphs over the system of criticism. This is most important to understand today, as many people consider Kant apart from his critics and successors, like Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Herder, Reinhold, Schulze, Fichte etc., without which however the period 1785-95 cannot be understood, that is the most important for the later development of German idealism, but also for the idea of critical philosophy in the more urgent sense, for the question how philosophy should behave in the time of political revolution (be it in America, France or Germany). This question - that culminates in the mid 19th century debates between Feuerbach, Marx, Stirner etc. - is also most urgent for us today when we want to understand what "critical" consciousness could mean in connection to philosophy, and theory in general, and so we should think through Kant's first general change of position (say in the preface to critique of pure reason and in his famous definition of enlightenment) without the later categorization of reason and the dejecting use of "raisonnement" in his systematization of the difference of reason and understanding.
Critique is the act of separation and decision - of krisis, the Greek word from which it comes, originally used in a medical sense of the decision to do an operation - but specifically of intellectual separation, between that what is reasonable and what is not. It's main criterion therefore is reasonability, or its understanding. (The main goal of the differentiation of reason and understanding is therefore, to separate this methodological understanding from that what is being criticized, by calling the latter "reason" instead. We will not go along with thus, calling the understanding of "reasonability" reason, as is more natural, but in fact in disagreement with Kantian terminology.) Critique therefore, as a general philosophical method, lies in the following activity: to first disect, or analyze, a given philosophical thesis or set and system of theses (such as Leibniz-Wolffian metaphysics in his case); then to evaluate each such element according to some standard of reasonability, be it to logical consistency, evidence or general acceptance (this kind of open, or varying, measure of acceptability shows the similarity of this to the judicial judgement, which is quite often invoked by Kant); and finally, to try to stich together two parts, one of positive result (the "analytics", or "system" of philosophy) which now should be internally consistent and fully compliant with reason, and one of negative result (the "dialectics", or "critique" in the more specific use of the term; where dialectical referrs to the position being criticized, but critical refers to the treatment or that position), which only exists as a mark of correction, of which mistakes maybe naturally arise and should be avoided (in this sense Kant remarks that the dialectical contradictions are necessary: that their natural appearance, although they are untrue, is necessary).
This distinction between analytics and dialectics, or between system and critique, is a different one and, in my view, more fundamental than Kants distinction between practical and theoretical, which is mostly one in the system of metaphysics, whereas the critique and dialectics is continuous. Also, while Kants successors mostly reject the strict difference between theory and praxis he posed, they generally continue the difference between the act of critique and the resulting system; most of them at least.
Hegel is the main exception. Instead, he identifies system and dialectics, but creates now a new form of critique; one not before, but after the system; one not oriented on the legal critique of the righteousness of understanding, but on the artistic criticism of the system as a work of spirit, of history exhaling itself. However, the systems such criticized are taken to being themselves dialectical; they are, as much as the view of them, critique.
In the Hegelian view (succinctly described in his article on philosophical critique with which he opens the journal for critical philosophy, and which he described before in his writing on the difference between Fichte and Schelling), philosophies are not systems of thoughts, that are merely collections of true or false statements, but organic beings that historically develop out of each other. In order to understand them, we need to look at them as a whole; not disect them, but rebirth them in our spirit. Only then we know what they truly wanted to say.
Hegel claims now however, that they basic try to all express the same thing, namely reason - which he uses, like Kant, to describe not rationality of method, but something outside or beyond it, but _also_ is the essence of that form of understanding - this impulse of seeing reason as transcendent and as the concrete description of consciousness is in part the basis of his use of "dialectics" shifting from the transcendent element of what goes beyond understanding to something that is concretely already part of our understanding; that is part even of all words and ideas and our expressions of them.
Without trying to give an evaluation of the dialectical treatment of logic, what is interesting is his idea of the unity of the goal of philosophy, and of the shift of dialectics from an ethical practice of discussing and remedying contradictions, over the use of that method for external goals in medieval dialectica, to the self-revelation of truth in reason as present in consciousness. Viewing philosophical criticisms as art criticism fundamentally changes what philosophy is; Hegel criticizes Schelling in a fundamentally different register than Socrates Protagoras. And yet Hegel claims that this is the correct measure of the idea of philosophy; that without it, philosophy would have no unity, as art would have without the idea of beauty.
Interestingly enough, one might be brought to think by that analogy that Hegel's understanding of the idea of philosophy was largely accepted, when after Schelling most people talked about the end of systems of philosophy, about the death of philosophy, in much the way the end of the rule of beauty and realism is the content of modern art; Kirkegaard and Van Gogh, Picasso and Wittgenstein are, like Benjamin said about more ancient art and philosophy, not merely outwardly similar, but of the same substance. Philosophy since Hegel has not escaped its understanding as artwork of the absolute; it is bound by the disappointment, and the spectacular effect of that disappointment, to not be able to reach it.
Since then, what has been called philosophy either manages this ever declining screech if not being able to understand everything under this idea of self-consciousness capturing itself, be it in its idealist (analytic) or materialist (Marxist etc.) form, or is an attempt at a revival of the Cartesian-Kantian position of critique (phenomenology seems to be the most active of those at this point); or has now purely moved to become the servant of a new master, ancilla scientiae, and to only present to it, as Hegel so aptly named it, mummies and intestines without spirit, results and useful bits of method without intent or even possible future.
After this somewhat depressing overview of dead and dying traditions, I want to return to my main question: How is such a thing as plural philosophy possible? And how is its idea of the switch related to the understanding of dialectics, and of the dialectical change or the unity of "becoming"?
The Hegelian view can be seen as that of absolute fusion: not just within one body, but in all of history, into one absolute reason understanding itself concretely as its own beyond. In this sense, as a proponent of plurality against the dominance of the One, plural philosophy must be absolutely anti-Hegelian.
But it must not be so in the disappointment of the failed artists of the absolute. The plural non-unity is not a failure of totality, but a beyond, a more of totality. A plural self is more than everything. It has achieved totality and, much like Hegel's idea, is left out to be free; but not for dialectical, conceptual reasons, but through the experience of the other; by the ethical experience of the alter as being beyond the reality of the One.
I see my project of philosophy therefore also as a true successor to Hegelian dialectics, in that it is an organic system in this sense, one that is beyond and not against Hegel. It is also trying to extent it beyond Hegel by actually reconciling the idea of absolute unity with it only being partial, in a way that recreates philosophy as ethical aspiration.
To listen to the others, to understand them as real, is a form of elevation of the soul; the inner appearance of the other is a transcendent vision of the idea; one exactly as limited as Hegel speaks often above the immediate appearances when it comes to knowledge, but important when it comes to the question of the ethical value of knowledge itself, of truth as the virtue of speech. Only in that notion of speech, logos is bounded by arete, by what is good; but in a way that the good, that is one (as in, is to each alter their understanding of the One as the image of value in the appearance of all of reality to it as absolute idea), but in opposite to a bounded idea of one-ness. Not by inner movement of ideas, but by the movement and inner dialectics of the subjective system, in which the I, that thinks, lives, does the One come to the Other; the meeting of alters is itself the dialectical unity of the ethical and the intellectual idea of unity as multiplicity.
If this project is practically possible is a whole different question. Maybe, much like Kant did with mathematics, I may just assume it works; he didn't know about Gödel's theorems either and mathematics still exists. But I may also be able to prove it in a more clear, philosophical way. Socrates proof was political and personal (and the Marxist attempts at proving philosophical facts are in some sense an attempt to repeat it, albeit with a metaphysics counter to that); Kant's and Hegel's proofs of their truth and sincerity where abstract and formal, trying to find a point of deduction; the proof of plural philosophy must be different to those two, but in some sense also combine them; it has to be an ethical proof within the confounds of formal logic itself; to find the sleeping headmate in the existential quantor qualifier. To seek after that goal, in all its absurd aspiration and necessity, is the highest arrogance, that is so necessary for the absurd intellectual endeavor, that aspires to understand, from all objects of the world, the self as an other.