The purpose of this text is to discuss the feeling of being-alive that the use of David Bessis’s System 3 may or may not provide, and consequently its fruitfulness, taking as a starting point my personal use of this system, which has been increasing for some time now in my scientific and philosophical research. Before beginning, let us recall that System 3 is the one that strives to update System 1 with the results obtained by System 2. It is intense and profound work—the most intense and profound of all. It is also the most tiring. It has affinities with Nietzschean “rumination” and, although to a far lesser extent, with meditation.
Let us now proceed. Increasingly, I inject as little energy as possible into System 2 when I use it—just the bare minimum required to produce correct results. The vast majority of my energy goes into System 3 in vivo, without delay. As soon as System 2 produces a result, however minor, System 3 seizes upon it, and that is where most of the work takes place.
The advantages of this are twofold: by working in this way, errors, what has been understood, what is already known, and what is new can all be identified as clearly and distinctly as possible at any moment. Moreover, the feeling of being-alive while working in this way is also very strong, because only this kind of work enables the organism to grow, since growth necessarily entails updating System 1—at least in the case of animal growth; properly human growth would merit further discussion.
Regarding the second point, Nietzsche indeed showed, by moving beyond Schopenhauer’s “will to live” through the “will to potency”—whose primary aim, if not its sole aim, is, I should recall, to enable the individual to gain access to a feeling of potency—that not growing was equivalent to dying.
The work of System 3 is also a work of transmuting being. Here, in order to go further and say something genuinely precise and useful, I would need to examine how the present line of thought relates to my underlying theory of the relationship between being and potency—an underlying theory whose basic duality is not exclusively my own work, but rather my joint work with Alba Maria Tortosa Benito.
Young scientists very often run System 2 at full capacity for quite a long time, and only after producing numerous results through System 2 do they set System 3 in motion. For my part, I find this way of working increasingly alienating, which is why I am moving away from it.
The tension in this text is as follows: the slowness, and therefore the apparently very moderate productivity, of the way of using System 3 that I describe here must, I believe, be understood in light of the profoundly unphilosophical way of life of society as a whole. What must be understood is that whatever has been produced in this way has immediately been translated into a transmutation and transformation of the individual, which is generally not the case with customary working methods. In other words, after such a working session, the individual is no longer the person he was before the session. His instinct has changed; his reflexes have changed. The pain one may feel because of this discrepancy between an excessively low productivity that is both specific and identifiable by others, and the growing conviction that productivity is in fact greater in terms of vital growth, constitutes the philosophical tension of this text.