How can I be free and yet do justice to the other? After all, to be free (autonomous) is to be the source of one’s own values. So how can I be autonomous without neglecting the intrinsic value of the other? Conversely, how can I respect the value of the other without losing my freedom by falling into heteronomy? In short, is there a third between autonomy and heteronomy?





And is there a better term for this new form of freedom – this third between autonomy and heteronomy – than “pure interest”? For as has been pointed out by many others (notably Martin Heidegger and William Desmond), the original Latin verb “interesse” carries a nice ambiguity. Literally it means “being between” (“inter” = between, “esse” = being). From the Middle Ages to the present, however, the verb “interesse” gained a second meaning, namely (and obviously) that of having an interest, of finding someone or something interesting. The ‘nicety’ of this ambiguity is that it suggests how our ‘interests’ (stakes, desires, investments, passions) are always expressions of our inter-esse, our being between others. Thus we already start to see how the concept of interesse can be used to grasp that sought ofter new form of freedom, the third position between autonomy and heteronomy. Being between others, we are fundamentally influenced by them, our desires and passions are directed at them, our love and energy (and not to forget a lot of money!) are invested in them. One’s ‘free will’ is therefore always already tuned to and by the other: autonomy and heteronomy mingle. Here the ambiguity of “interest” helps us even further, since it can mean both private or self-interest (autonomy, egoism) and selfless interest in the other (heteronomy, altruism, the law of the Other – compare the Kantian “interesseloses Interese” towards beauty). With “pure interest” I want to designate the coincidence of all three aspects of interesse: 1) being in-between, 2) self-interest, 3) selfless interest in the other.





This pure interest is pure in three respects: a) ethical, b) transcendental, c) utopian:





a) It is pure in the ethical sense of being free from selfishness and domination of one by the other: in their being-in-between self and other exist only in relation to each other (their existence is the ‘happening’ between them) so that self-interest (autonomy) and the interest of the other (heteronomy) coincide.





b) It is pure in the transcendental (Kantian) sense: the relationship between one and other is ontologically prior to their empirical existence as different beings – thus their interrelation is the transcendental precondition their empirical existence.





c) It is pure in the utopian sense: the ethical ideal, although contained in the transcendental structure of being-in-between, is never fully reallized in practice, at the empirical level of human existence, where selfishness and domination are indeed the order of the day – in that sense, the actuality of human existence lags behind what it potentially is: thus pure interest remains pure, utopian potency.





In my view, this discrepancy between the transcendental and empirical levels of existence explains the utopian tendency in human history, the emergence and slow development of egalitarian relationships in human society – in short: from the Athenian ideal of democracy for some (not slaves) to the modern ideal of democracy for everyone to the postmodern ideal of anarchic pluralism...





The aim of the critique of pure interest is to further this utopian (messianic, revolutionary) development, that is, to fully unleash the powers of this pure potency. It is first and foremost a critique in the Kantian sense: an investigation into the transcendental interrelation that underlies the possibility of pure interest at the empirical level. The critique of pure interest, in other words, asks the question: How is pure interest empirically possible? How can autonomy and heteronomy go together to form a new form of freedom? In my view this question is crucial to the postmodern and (neo)conservative times we live in, dominated by economic and cultural crises and the growing importance of communication technology for the network societies in which we live, where to be connected (i.e. to be between) is everything.





My guideline – my original inspiration so to speak – in this critique of pure interest is what I call the Marxist Christology of the vanishing mediator. It hinges on the intuition that the transcendental precondition of pure interest should be sought in the vanishing mediator. I borrow this concept from (post)modern philospophers like Frederick Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, although I use it in my own rather idiosyncratic way. For me, the vanishing mediator is what makes the sought after third between autonomy and heteronomy possible. This third requires a reconciliation between self and other, such that the will of the self and the value of the other become mutually enforcing instead of being in conflict. And this reconciliation requires a mediator, a medium that provides the common ground on which self and other can meet. Now the Marxist-Christological wager of my critique is the claim that this mediator must be essentially vanishing in order to do its job. Otherwise the medium will remain between self and other, blocking their full coming together.





This is in fact a general truth about media: in order to function properly as media, they have to disappear in the process of mediation. Spoken language is a good example: it makes intersubjective communication possible because it disappears in the act of communiction. If it didn’t disappear, speech would literally become a wall of sound standing between us, directing attention to itself rather than to the notions and feelings of the communicating subjects. In a sense, then, the theory of the vanishing mediator is also a theory about communication and media in general. Yet my focus will mainly be on the vanishing mediator as a medium between the divergent interests of self and other, making a third between autonomy and heteronomy possible.





So what does this have to do with Marxism and Christology?





First of all, notice that this view of the vanishing mediator finds its most paradigmatic expression in the messianic figure of Christ as the divine mediator. Christ had to disappear from the midst of men, that is, he had to die on the cross, in order to reconcile mankind with God and with itself.





So is this simply a believer’s blog? Do I offer nothing more than faith, albeit helped by the handmaiden of philosophy? Do I make religion the master of rationality? Am I nothing more than one of those dangerous and potentially violent fundamentalists?





Not at all… Well, at least that’s not my intention. Note that my quest is for a third between autonomy and heteronomy (in other words: this elusive ‘third’ is my Holy Grail). And this places my undertaking squarely between autonomous, critical thought on the one hand and heteronomous, dogmatic faith on the other. That is, on my quest for the vanishing mediator I have to straddle the fine line (or war zone) between rationality and religion, between concept and intuition, between critique and domatism, between cold logic and emotion, between head and heart, between yang and yin, between modernity and pre-/postmodernity… Exactly how this balancing act will work out is something I am anxious to find out. Hence this blog.





And hence my use of the nice oxymoron “Christology” – a term that combines the autonomous rationality of logic with the heteronomy of faith in Christ (after all, “Christology” means the logos of Christ). This conjunction of rationality and religion is precisely the mode my investigation must take, as I explained above. Of course, the same oxymoron can be found in the term “theology” but obviously my focus on Christ implies the primacy of “Christology”.





But why a Marxist Christology?





Well, first of all, notice that my problem statement – “Is there a third between autonomy and heteronomy?” – is decidedly dialectical. The reconciliation of the opposition between self and other (or thesis and antithesis) is nothing more or less than the core business of the dialectical method as practiced by Hegel and Marx. In fact, the very term “mediation” derives from the dialectical tradition in philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Marx (all four philosophers will figure prominently on this blog).





By developing a Christology of the vanishing mediator, I am decidedly on the side of the materialist Marx as opposed to the idealist Hegel. As an idealist, Hegel wanted to think the Absolute (that is, God) as subject, not as object (see Hegel’s preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit). In contrast, the Christology of the vanishing mediator aims to understand the Absolute neither as subject (as Hegel did) nor as object (as Hegel accused Spinoza of doing) but rather as what happens between subject and object (or self and other). In this perspective, dialectical negativity – which Hegel saw as the fundamental activity of the subject towards the object – turns out to be an autonomous process that constitutes and therefore precedes both self and other. Hegel’s notorious negation of the negation can thus be reworked as the self-negation of this absolute negativity (in Christological terms: the self-sacrifice of God) which thereby functions as the vanishing mediator in the meeting of self and other. As I hope to make clear in the rest of this blog, this is all in line with Marx’s turning inside out (Umstulpüng) of Hegel’s dialectic.





But in order to give a preliminary clarification of the Marxist aspect of my Christology, it is perhaps better to focus on the ethics that follows from it. This is an ethics of imitatio Christi, the passionate imitation of Christ as vanishing mediator. Following Christ, we should spend ourselves, give ourselves completely as vanishing mediators for those around us. More generally, we should let all vanishing mediators do their job, that is to say: we should let them vanish. Unfortunately, due to its greed and idolatry, mankind (and Western man in particular) is often unable to let go, to accept loss as an inevitable, necessary part of reality. We hold on to the vanishing mediator, turning it into our possession, thereby frustrating its proper function. People are generally unreconciled because they make the mediator their private property, which thus becomes a stumbling block rather than a reconciler. For many centuries the Church has done this to Christ himself, unable to accept the vanishing nature of Christ, turning him into an idol justifying the Church’s imperial claims. But in modern times this sickness of mankind, the inability to let go of the vanishing mediator, has taken the form of capitalism. For in modern social life, money is the means of exchange, the mediator par excellence (next to language). And there is nothing wrong with that as long as money is allowed to do its job: to vanish from one’s pocket during one’s exchanges with others. But in capitalism, money is accumulated in capital. The vanishing mediator no longer vanishes but keeps returning for ever growing profits. Thus robbed of its proper function, the mediator adds to the strife among men instead of solving it. Hence our duty to spend ourselves with revolutionary passion, to give ourselves as the vanishing mediators of modern social life by breaking the stiffling power of capital. In that sense, Marx was the greatest imitator of Christ in modern times!





This Marxist commitment adds a second meaning to my critique of pure interest, which is not just a critique in the Kantian sense (an investigation into the transcendental condition of freedom between autonomy and heteronomy) but also a Marxist critique of pure interest in the economic sense, namely the return on investment.





In my future posts, I will publish fragments that elucidate different aspects of my Marxist Christology. I have been working on this theory for more or less ten years now, originally inspired by the Dutch philosopher Henk Oosterling and his musings on “the between” (though he would probably recoil in horror if he saw the direction I am taking with this concept). Some of the other thinkers that inspired me were Martin Buber on the dialogical between, Heidegger on the ontological between, Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer on the agonistic between, Voegelin and Desmond on the Platonic between (metaxy), Kant on imagination as the mediator between understanding and sensibility, Derrida on différance, René Girard on the scapegoat mechanism, Sloterdijk on intersubjective spheres, Plato on dialogue, Aristotle on topos and middle term, Žižek obviously though I find his treatments of the vanishing mediator to be far from systematically satisfying (which holds for all of his thought), and last but not least Hegel and Marx. All these philosophers (and many others) will be discussed in future posts. Finally I would also like to mention Taoism as major source of influence.





The critique of pure interest – that is, the Marxist Christology of the vanishing mediator – is still in statu nascendi. This blog traces its development. Hence, the fragmentary nature of what I am about to offer on this blog. It is systematic, but it is not a system. In a sense what comes out on this blog is a procession of the many turts I have accumulated over the years… Not a very refreshing image, but to the point nevertheless. Shit is one of the most important vanishing mediators in human life. No good metabolism can do without it. In that sense Christ can be defined as divine Shit…