the “immanentization” of the Sovereign Good quaThing through the categori-
cal imperative.
At this stage, we should ask ourselves a naïve question: why does Kant (and
Sade) plan a refounding of nature through ethics in the first place? We should now
return to some of our earlier considerations regarding Lacan’s interpretation of
Descartes’s notion of the nondeceiving God and the parallel birth of modern
science. To put it bluntly, the “high point of the crisis of ethics”^180 marked by the
work of Kant and Sade is nothing but a long-term reaction to the crisis of Aris-
totelian science, as well as the product of a dissatisfaction with respect to the new
responses that Galilean–Newtonian science and Cartesian philosophy had already
offered. The subtle argument elaborated by Lacan to interlink the history of ethics
with that of (the philosophy of ) science could be summarized in the following six
points:( 1 ) Aristotelian epistemeultimately relied on a direct reference to nature, namely to
the fact that celestial bodies seemed to follow a regular spherical trajectory in the
sky, and “always returned to the same place”: the universe was thus deemed to be
structured around a concentric set of incorruptible celestial spheres at the centre
of which resided a divine “immobile mover.” On these premises, Aristotle was able
to develop a philosophical system according to which there is a coincidence be-
tween God as “immobile mover”—the Thing which is the ultimate guarantor of
both physics andmetaphysics—and God as transcendent Sovereign Good.
( 2 ) The crisis of Aristotelian science originates from a reversal of the relationship
between the earth and the sky: Galilean physics ascends the sky (think of the in-
vention of the telescope) and demonstrates that the celestial bodies “are by no
means... incorruptible, that they are subject to the same laws as the terrestrial
globe”; furthermore, “we know something else, we know that [celestial bodies]
might not be in the same place,”^181 that they do not follow a spherical trajectory.
This gives rise to the following set of abyssal questions: Does matter exist? How do
we guarantee the “truthfulness of the Other”?
( 3 ) Descartes’s epochal answer to these interrogatives is: matter exists, and the
Other is true insofar as, by definition, God is not a liar. As I have already explained,
according to Lacan, the most important operation of Cartesian philosophy should
be identified with the fact that it secures the Other to a nondeceptive a priori which
is itself purely symbolic.In other words, although Descartes’s nondeceiving God as
the guarantor of the truthfulness of the Other continues to be associated with the
Sovereign Good, in opposition to Aristotle’s God, he is definitely no longer a real
Thing: the objects of everyday reality are safe, but only at the price of introducingthe subject of the fantasy... and beyond