Introduction: A Philosophical Crisis

In the UK, over the last several years, philosophy has come under sustained state-sanctioned attack. The closure of the University of Kent’s Department of Philosophy, the dismantling of philosophy provision at Staffordshire University and the University of Hertfordshire, and the closure of Kingston University’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy have disproportionately affected institutions associated with what is commonly termed “continental philosophy.” This constitutes nothing short of a crisis for philosophy. For the state’s “businessmen” (Geshäftleute), those “tools/instruments of the government,” as Kant calls them in his 1798 The Conflict of the Faculties, the crisis in philosophy and the humanities more broadly is presented as a problem of declining “instrumentality.”[i] If one is an instrument, one thinks instrumentally, and the businessmen of the state are no different. Disciplines, in both their teaching and their research, are increasingly required to justify the continued existence of their discourse through measurable impact, policy relevance, technological applicability, or economic productivity. Universities are now almost completely corporate entities, post-Humboldtian and pre-Enlightenment; they are guided by the single corporate telos of technoscientific utility and the profit principle. Philosophy, particularly “continental philosophy,” is thus often dismissed as incomprehensible and outdated obfuscation or described as, to use a term again from Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, “Schwätzen”— to chatter, prattle, or “twaddle,” as Mary J. Gregor translates it.[ii] From the perspective of the businessmen, philosophical critique appears as an increasingly atavistic form of knowledge, one bearing no determinate relation to the telos of either the state or the market. Philosophy is a coccyx bone: a vestigial remnant of an earlier stage of development, preserved only by historical accident and awaiting eventual disappearance. Yet, this accusation that philosophy consists in what we might call a “mere logomachy” is itself philosophically significant. For what is dismissed as empty verbal conflict, as mere “twaddle,” concerns the very conditions under which critique—whose genealogy traverses Kant, Nietzsche, and Marx—remains possible: namely, the freedom to interrupt, suspend, and reopen the conflictual site of “truth.” There is thus a logomachy both of and about philosophy’s logomachic status. What is at stake is not merely the fate of several humanities departments, but the very status and future of philosophical critique.

As one might already have discerned, the present crisis bears a striking resemblance to the themes addressed in Kant’s penultimate published work, The Conflict of the Faculties. Initially censored by the Prussian state, the text would later become one of the intellectual touchstones of the Humboldtian reforms of the modern university. This article argues, as Derrida and Stiegler did before me, that Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties must be reread and reformulated in light of contemporary technocapitalist conditions.[iii] The problem is no longer simply whether philosophy may speak freely, but whether the energetic and institutional conditions required for the persistence of non-instrumental thought can continue. Logomachy, in an enriched sense, names this struggle: the thermoinformatic conflict over the conditions under which logos may still remain contestable. The danger today is not the eruption of an “illegal” conflict between the faculties, nor even the suppression of a “legal” one. It is the emergence of an imposed Baroque peace: a managed consensus in which disagreement is permitted only insofar as it remains economically productive and compatible with the reproduction of existing corporate and institutional power.

Drawing upon Kant’s account of the lower faculty as the institution charged with interrogating the truth claims of the other faculties in the name of reason’s autonomy, I argue that philosophy possesses a fundamentally metacritical function. The lower faculty does not merely produce another regional discourse among others; it preserves the possibility that reason may enter into conflict with itself, suspending and reopening claims that the higher faculties, in their administrative and corporatocratic functions, seek to stabilise as authoritative. It is, in other words, logomachy against logonomy.

Logomachy and Logonomics

Though my use of the term “logomachy” differs from its ordinary pejorative meaning—where it signifies little more than a “war of words,” empty verbal dispute, semantic wrangling, or futile abstraction—I nevertheless take this pejorative sense to be internal to the very problem I seek to describe. The dismissal of philosophy as “mere logomachy” operates as one of the mechanisms through which critique, necessarily conflictual in structure, is deprived of legitimacy. Logomachy names the constitutive conflict internal to the logos itself. As Heraclitus first recognised, the logos is war and fire: an irreducible struggle over meaning, truth, legitimacy, interpretation, and the gathering of sense.[iv] Inherent to the logos qua logos, logomachy names the instability generated wherever meaning becomes communicable and thus publicly contestable.

Its first philosophical deployment already reveals this structure. In Plato’s Cratylus, the earliest conceptual emergence of logomachy appears precisely where Socrates suppresses what may be called a logomachy over epistēmē itself. There, the word epistēmē is shown to admit contradictory derivations, signifying both the movement of the soul in pursuit of things and the soul’s standing or stopping toward them. Faced with this internal conflict within the logos, Socrates ultimately rejects language as a sufficient ground of truth and turns instead to the purported stability of the Forms. As he concludes: “Since you and I are friends, Cratylus, we do not want to engage in a battle of words [makhṓmetha en toĩs lόgois].”[v] From the very beginning, then, logomachy names not verbal superfluity, but the threat that conflict internal to the logos poses to every attempt to stabilise knowledge, truth, and meaning, whether institutionally or metaphysically. The peace thereby secured, one between friends after all, is nothing more than a coercive settlement that seeks to suppress the constitutive contestability of truth itself.

Yet I argue that this conflict is neither purely linguistic nor merely metaphysical but conditioned by the thermoinformatic structures through which sense is materially supported, transmitted, stabilised, and reproduced. Logos persists only insofar as energetic and informational differentials sustain the metastable organisation of meaning logotechnically across institutions, texts, and technical systems. The being-through-becoming of sense is always thermoinformatic. Alongside the necessity of this conflict emerges what I call the logonomic: the ensemble of operations, institutions, doctrines, and technical mechanisms that seek to regulate, administer, stabilise, or pacify the constitutive instability internal to the logos. The logonomic thus names the governance of meaning under its thermoinformatic conditions—the energetic and informational management of discourse through which particular structures of sense, what Stiegler called idiotexts, are maintained as coherent, authoritative, operational, and reproducible across populations. The political question is therefore never simply whether conflict exists, but which idiotexts are being logonomically sustained and which are being displaced or subjected to entropic destruction. Or, to put the matter more directly, the political question is always this: which idiotexts are being logonomically sustained, and which are being attacked?.

From the early Church Fathers, under the apocryphal attribution to Saint Paul in which the concept of logomachia first emerges, to Luther’s attempts to secure proper scriptural interpretation, one encounters recurrent efforts to stabilise the dissemination of logos against the conflicts generated by its circulation.[vi] Doctrinal creeds, ecclesiastical authority, university administration, technocratic expertise, algorithmic moderation, and contemporary regimes of corporatocracy and policy all function logonomically insofar as they seek to regulate, administer, and pacify the instability internal to meaning itself. Logomachy and the logonomic are therefore structurally co-constitutive: every expansion in the circulation of logos generates new forms of conflict, while every attempt to regulate such conflict produces new regimes for the energetic, informational, and institutional governance of meaning. Logomachy appears as the pathology for which logonomy presents itself as the cure. These are, indeed, the pharmacological terms employed by the seventeenth-century Calvinist theologian Samuel Werenfels and later by Catholic Joseph de Maistre, who sought to diagnose and remedy the discursive conflicts unleashed by the Reformation, the printing press, and, ultimately, the Enlightenment itself.[vii]

The problem is not simply that discourse generates disagreement, but that the universal circulation of logos continuously threatens every authority founded upon the stabilisation of meaning. Wherever logos become publicly transmissible, reproducible, and contestable, conflicts emerge concerning truth, legitimacy, interpretation, and the right to speak. Alongside logomachy, there therefore emerge logonomic formations: theological, juridical, pedagogical, technical, and institutional mechanisms designed to govern the circulation of discourse and contain the instabilities generated by its proliferation. The modern university occupies a privileged position within this history. It is not merely a site in which knowledge is transmitted, but like the printing press, a logotechnical apparatus responsible simultaneously for the production, regulation, reproduction, and administration of discourse. The university thus appears as a fundamentally logomachic and logonomic institution: at once a site of critique, in which reason enters into conflict with itself, and a site of dogma, in which discourse is organised, legitimised, disciplined, and rendered operational for the ends of the state and the market. It is precisely this constitutive tension that Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties attempts to think at the end of the 18th century.

The Higher and Lower Faculties: Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties

Read in the above logomachic and logonomic terms, The Conflict of the Faculties appears as an inquiry into the political organisation of logos itself: who may speak, who may judge, and under what institutional conditions the conflict internal to reason can be preserved. Importantly, Kant’s distinction between the “higher” and “lower” faculties is not grounded in any epistemic superiority, where the higher faculties are valued over the lower, but in the relation between knowledge and state power. The higher faculties—theology, law, and medicine—are said to be “higher” because their teachings directly concern the government’s capacity to regulate the population: their power to command. As Kant writes: “the government is interested primarily in means for securing the strongest and most lasting influence on the people, and the subjects which the higher faculties teach are just such means.”[viii] Theology governs “eternal well-being,” law governs “civil well-being,” and medicine governs “physical well-being.”[ix] The hierarchy of the faculties is therefore fundamentally political. The higher faculties inform and are informed by the executive function of state power; its faculty members are integrated into the reproduction of social order insofar as these faculties produce the tools of the state, the businessmen. As Kant repeatedly emphasises, those operating within the higher faculties are, therefore, not “free” in the same sense as those in the lower faculties. Clergymen, magistrates, and physicians are described as figures who “have legal influence on the public and form a special class of the intelligentsia, but who are not free to make public use of their learning as they see fit.”[x] Their role is not principally the pursuit of knowledge, but the application of doctrine in accordance with state interests. As Kant states: “the government does not teach, but it commands those who, in accepting its offices, have contracted to teach what it wants.”[xi] The nature of this “contract” is important. It marks not only the external obligation to the state but also the economic hold it has on those permitted to teach. The higher faculty thus occupies a structurally heteronomous position: its legitimacy derives from a state-ordained utility rather than the autonomy of reason.

By contrast, philosophy, which includes science and mathematics, occupies the position of the “lower” faculty precisely because its pursuit is said to lack direct governmental utility and influence. Its institutional “inferiority,” insofar as it does not command, becomes the very condition of its epistemic freedom. Kant therefore insists that “it is absolutely essential that the learned community at the university also contain a faculty that is independent of the government’s command with regard to its teachings.”[xii] Unlike the higher faculties, philosophy “concerns itself with the interests of the sciences, that is, with truth.”[xiii] “Without a faculty of this kind,” he writes, “truth would not come to light.”[xiv]

Yet for Kant “truth” (“Wahrheit”), since it is pursued through critique and reason, is not simply another object or means of governance—unlike in Plato, where the philosopher’s access to the truth of the Forms grounds the very legitimacy of rule. Reason, Kant insists, “is by its nature free and admits of no command to hold something as true.”[xv] The pursuit, or, with Badiou, we might want to say, procedure of truth, thus remains irreducibly logomachic: philosophy is a practice that suspends command precisely through the unrestricted conflict of critique itself. Or truth is truth only insofar as it does not command what is given as true. Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, therefore, names a constitutive tension between the autonomy of reason and the demands of state administration. Philosophy cannot, stricto senso, become an executive instrument without ceasing to be philosophy.

The significance of the lower faculty therefore lies not in its possession of truth, but in its capacity to preserve the conditions under which truth remains contestable. Its task is not to establish a final orthodoxy, but to ensure that no orthodoxy becomes immune to critique. In the university, the lower faculty institutionalises reason’s capacity to enter into conflict with itself, exposing every claim to legitimacy, authority, and knowledge to the possibility of revision. For this reason, philosophy functions as a metacritical practice. It does not merely intervene within particular disputes as some form of applied science; it preserves the very possibility that disputes concerning truth may continue to occur. The disappearance of such a faculty would not signify the triumph of truth against “twaddle”, but the disappearance of the institutional conditions under which the metastability of truth can remain a matter of rational contestation.

The High and Low-value Faculties: Our Conflict of the Faculties

This structure acquires renewed significance within the contemporary university. Today, the “higher” faculties are no longer theology, law, and medicine alone; rather, disciplines once relatively autonomous and philosophical at heart (insofar as they pursued non-interested truth) are increasingly integrated into technocapitalist administration and reorganised according to strategic imperatives condensed by the state under the moniker of STEM. However, the contemporary crisis should not be mistaken for a conflict between the humanities and the sciences. As I have repeatedly tried to recall, mathematics and the sciences were, for Kant, no less philosophical in certain regards than philosophy itself; they were considered components of the lower faculty insofar as they pursued truth independently of governmental command. Today, however, they too are increasingly evaluated according to criteria external to knowledge itself: innovation metrics, third-party commercialisation strategies, industrial relevance, and economic impact. The result is a situation in which even those disciplines historically associated with the autonomy of reason are progressively reorganised according to the logic of command. For example, one is granted funding in science and mathematics if and only if one’s research has clear and patent market value. What changes is not the object of inquiry but the criterion of value. Contemporary universities thus tend to collapse the distinction between higher and lower faculties by subordinating all forms of knowledge to economic rather than epistemic criteria of legitimacy. Under such conditions, disciplines are compelled to justify themselves through demonstrable utility alone, and where they cannot, their apparent “low value” becomes sufficient justification for institutional withdrawal, terminal restructuring, or disappearance.

In transformed form, the contemporary university therefore reproduces Kant’s distinction between the high and low faculties into high-value faculties—faculties ordered toward the market—and low-value faculties—those still ordered toward the freedom of critique and the pursuit of truth but perceived as lacking clear market relevance. The survival of the latter is predicated on either their subservience to the former or their adoption of the former’s principles of value. A striking example of such adoption by philosophy is the rise of so-called AI ethics. As I have written elsewhere, philosophy now seemingly only flourishes when it serves the needs of the market, responding to AI corporations’ demand for ethical legitimation.[xvi] This is why much of AI ethics is, in fact, only philosophically condoned bourgeois morality. The issue has little to do with the technology itself, AI, and everything to do with the logonomic organisation of discourse: philosophy is permitted to prosper only insofar as it addresses those questions that the market permits it to ask. That over five thousand articles in AI ethics were published last year alone indicates how logonomic command from the state and the market functions to reinvest significative exergy from one domain to another. Significative exergy is that available energy used to preserve a particular idiotextual domain’s informatic relation.[xvii] When energy is invested in a particular domain, it almost always means a divestment from another.

The contemporary crisis, therefore, differs decisively from Kant’s own. For Kant, the lower faculty, though subject to censorship and external pressures upon its public use of reason, nonetheless remained institutionally secured as the site in which truth could enter into conflict with authority. The pursuit of non-interested knowledge—universal, critical, and open to contestation—still constituted the very horizon of the Enlightenment. Today, however, this space is progressively deprived of the energetic and institutional support required for its reproduction. The closure of philosophy and humanities departments, therefore, marks more than a cultural or ideological transformation; it signals the withdrawal of the thermoinformatic conditions necessary for the persistence of critical reason itself. Furthermore, the question we must pose to ourselves as philosophers is: What will happen to philosophy if it becomes simply just another arm of the market? What Kant understood primarily as a juridico-institutional conflict between faculties must now be reformulated in logomachic terms. The question is no longer simply whether philosophy may speak freely, but whether the energetic infrastructures required for the survival of non-instrumental thought can continue to exist at all.

Conclusion: The Future of the Lower Faculty

The issue, then, is not whether logomachy can be eliminated. It cannot. Where there is logos, there is logomachy. The issue is more whether the logonomic erosion of the lower faculty within the university may actually imply the complete disappearance of critique itself. Across the contemporary intellectual landscape, para-academic institutions such as The New Centre for Research and Practice, the School of Materialist Research, independent journals such as the Philosophical Salon, reading groups, school philosophy groups such as Localising Philosophy, and autonomous research collectives increasingly assume functions once associated with the lower faculty. These formations preserve spaces in which reason may continue to enter into conflict with itself beyond the increasingly managerial structures of the university. Their emergence demonstrates that logomachy persists wherever logos circulates.

At the same time, their very existence reveals the depth of the present crisis. Unlike the lower faculty envisioned by Kant, these institutions generally lack stable public support and remain dependent upon precarious configurations of voluntary labour, private tuition fees, donations, subscriptions, and contingent forms of patronage. They preserve the possibility of critique, but only under conditions of structural fragility. The question is, therefore, not only whether alternative institutions can be created, they can, but whether the material and energetic conditions necessary for their long-term reproduction can be secured.

The task of philosophy today is therefore neither to retreat into disciplinary self-defence nor to demonstrate its utility according to heteronomous standards imposed from elsewhere. It is to preserve the logomachic conditions under which reason may continue to contest its own limits. Against the imposed Baroque peace of technocapitalist administration, philosophy’s vocation remains what it was for Kant: to ensure that no authority, including its own, is exempt from critique. Whether this task occurs within the university, beyond it, or through institutional forms yet to emerge is ultimately a secondary question. The primary question is whether the thermoinformatic and institutional conditions required for the reproduction of critique can be sustained. The future of philosophy depends not upon securing consensus with regard to knowledge, but upon preserving conflict. That is, if philosophy has a task today, it is not to bring the conflict of the faculties to an end, but to ensure that the logomachic conflict internal to logos itself remains open.

***Since writing this paper, the situation it describes has become an immediate reality. The University of Dundee has announced plans to cease offering Philosophy as a named degree from 2027, placing one of the UK’s leading centres for Continental Philosophy under serious threat. If you wish to support students, staff, and the future of philosophical education and research, please consider signing and sharing the petition: Save the Philosophy Programme at Dundee University.***

NOTES:

[i] Immanuel Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 25

[ii] Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 49.

[iii] Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos; Or the Conflict of the Faculties,” in Richard Rand, ed., Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 1–34; Bernard Stiegler, “Le nouveau conflit des facultés et des fonctions dans l’Anthropocène,” in *La technique et le temps: 1–*3 (Paris: Fayard, 2018).

[iv] See Joel White, “Transduction of The Laws of Logomachy: Metastability, Simondon, and the Heraclitean Lógos,” Technophany: A Journal for Philosophy and Technology 1, no. 2 (2023): 1–29, especially the discussion of Heraclitus, conflict, and the energetic conditions of sense.

[v] Plato, Cratylus 411b–412c (on epistēmē), and 438d–440e (on abandoning names as a route to truth and avoiding a “battle of words”).

[vi] The term logomachia appears in the Pauline corpus at 1 Timothy 6:4 and 2 Timothy 2:14, though both epistles are widely regarded by contemporary scholarship as pseudepigraphical. See Raymond F. Collins, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 4–10; On Luther’s opposition to competing scriptural interpretations and his doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture, see Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. Philip S. Watson and Benjamin Drewery (London: James Clarke, 1957); and Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 152–67.

[vii] Samuel Werenfels develops an explicitly pharmacological treatment of logomachia in De Logomachiis Eruditorum (1702), where disputes over words are diagnosed as a pathology of learned discourse. For de Maistre’s attempt to restore doctrinal and political authority against the destabilising effects of Enlightenment rationalism, see Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and An Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, trans. Jack Lively (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001)

[viii] Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 27.

[ix] Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 31.

[x] Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 25.

[xi] Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 27.

[xii] Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 27.

[xiii] Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 27.

[xiv] Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 29.

[xv] Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 29.

[xvi] Joel White, “The Questions Concerning the Ethics of AI,” Triple Ampersand, February 22, 2026.

[xvii] Joel White, “On Significative Exergy: Toward a Logomachics of Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 54, no. 5 (2022): 477–488, https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1903435

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