Will Conway’s passage is doing something very specific—and also very ambitious (read: eyebrow-raising). He’s making a rather aggressive gesture toward dissolving metaphysics by linking it to eugenics, not in the narrow, biological sense, but as a conceptual operation: isolating and perfecting some essence or core of "being." And boy, does he not want to be friends with anyone—Heidegger, Marx, Tiqqun, your Intro to Philosophy professor, or even poor old Aristotle, who’s just over there quietly trying to define substance.

Let’s break it down with the carefulness of someone disarming a landmine that has a master’s degree in continental philosophy.

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Key Moves He's Making:

1. Metaphysics as Eugenic Process:
   Conway’s saying metaphysics isn't just about "being" or "essence"—it’s always been obsessed with isolating a core trait (capacity, measure, telos) and refining it. This is where the word “eugenic” sneaks in, not as Nazism per se, but as a logic of selection, purification, optimization. So Plato’s Forms? Eugenic. Aristotle’s entelechy? Eugenic. Kant’s noumenal subject? Eugenic. Heidegger’s Dasein? Still eugenic, but now in a flannel shirt.

2. Heidegger and the “Supreme Danger”:
   Conway riffs on Heidegger’s “question concerning technology,” but instead of seeing modern tech as a recent corruption of Being, he wants to show that the eugenic logic was there all along in metaphysics. Metaphysics isn’t just a passive background for the Danger—it is the Danger.

3. Tiqqun and Critical Distance:
   He throws some shade at Tiqqun’s idea of being “critical cyberneticians” instead of technocratic lapdogs. Conway doesn’t want critical metaphysics; he wants no metaphysics. And that includes the leftist flavors, like Marx’s species-being or any humanist essentialism that implies a perfectible core of humanness.

4. Species-Being as Dictatorship of Thought:
   He’s attacking the idea that there’s anything essential to humanity that can be isolated, optimized, or uplifted. This is a deep cut against both Enlightenment progressivism and its darker twin: the idea that “some humans” are closer to that essence than others, which has always lurked behind eugenic projects.

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Translation into Semi-Coherent English:

Conway is saying:

"Hey, what if metaphysics—this whole tradition of defining what reality is and what humans are—has always been a covert eugenics program? Not because it wants to breed superhumans, but because it keeps trying to define a purified ‘essence’ or ‘capacity’ for being human. That logic leads us into control, optimization, exclusion."

He wants to burn that idea to the ground and dance in the ashes, probably while muttering something about Bataille and lighting a cigarette with a page torn out of Being and Time.

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My (grudging) Evaluation:

This is a strong critique, with all the elegance of a sledgehammer wrapped in Lacanian vocabulary. It's not interested in reforming philosophy—it's interested in exposing it as a techno-eugenic death cult wearing a toga. The tone is properly apocalyptic, the references are loaded.

But the argument also rides the line between insightful and melodramatic. Claiming that all metaphysics is eugenic may get the attention of your local radical philosophy seminar, but it risks flattening the rich (and yes, sometimes contradictory) history of thought into one monolithic villain. Also, if every attempt to talk about what a human is is inherently eugenic, then...what are we supposed to do, just grunt and hope we accidentally escape metaphysics?

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In Conclusion:

Conway is swinging a flaming broadsword through the library of Western thought. It’s invigorating. It’s harsh. It’s probably allergic to syllogisms. But if you're into scorched-earth philosophy that tries to strip away every last humanist comfort blanket, then hey—you’ve found your guy.

So... are you reading this because you like it, or because you want to impress someone? Be honest.

You said:

I like it, here's some more: The essential is precisely what is left aside in essentialist discourse. However, it must be made clear it is not only in nominal humanisms that this anxious ground or produced reality of the “irrefutable necessity” of refinement can be found. For example, take the post-humanist or political-social-ecological works of the last twenty years and note that while the authors who act as the discursive founders of these respective movements resist the human being, but keep in place the necessity of the capacities that have historically defined its exclusivity and given it its species-being. IV A genealogy of eugenics that limits itself to its manifestation in language, treating Francis Galton as its “origin” will necessarily fail at grasping the conditions that make the refinement of the human being possible. Eugenics is not a project made possible at a particular culminating point in the history of technology, nor is it simply a worldview. It is the basis of the production of a unified world picture, of a planetary scale. It does not arrive after a particular mode of production (Bourdieu must once again be asked to sit at the back of the class). A genealogy of eugenics must seek out avenues of attack not just on its discursive founders, but the wasteland of metaphysics from which it supposedly arrived in a mendacious singularity. If modernity has been defined by the victory of the logic of equivalence, biopolitics, and the domination of the commodity, we must contend that quiet persistence of eugenics must accompany this conceptual outline of horrors. V An investigation into eugenics must not cede any territory, this includes metaphysics which is always a strategy of organizing a mode of disclosure that then presents itself as a “reality”. Any testament to reality must be treated as nothing other than the bemoaning of the enemy; an enemy who can only recognize philosophy or even being of it is consigned to a principle of power or capacity. VI

ChatGPT said:

Okay, wow. So you do like it. Congratulations on choosing the hardest possible genre of reading as a hobby—"apocalyptic anti-humanist metaphysics deconstruction with a side of intellectual arson." Most people just do Wordle.

Let me guess: you read this stuff late at night, furiously highlighting, muttering things like “yes... yes, Bourdieu, get rekt.” It's fine. We all cope differently.

Let’s crack this continuation open, slowly, like it’s a cursed relic found in the ruins of the Frankfurt School.

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Sections IV–V: Summary with a Dramatic Sigh

IV: "Francis Galton? Please. We’re Going Deeper."

This section pivots away from a discursive or historical genealogy (e.g., Galton as the cute little mustachioed father of eugenics) toward a conceptual geology, if you will. Conway’s like: stop blaming Francis, blame the entire metaphysical scaffolding that made Galton inevitable.

He pushes back against the idea that eugenics is the result of specific technologies, or even socio-political structures (like capitalism or bourgeois dominance), and insists instead that it is a metaphysical orientation toward refinement, optimization, and total world-enclosure. It’s a claim that eugenics is not an event, but a precondition—baked into the way thought organizes itself around “capacity.”

Also, Bourdieu gets dunked on again, which is now a recurring character trait. I hope he has snacks back there in the metaphorical class.

V: “Metaphysics Is the Enemy. Reality Is Propaganda.”

This part is just full battlefield declaration. Conway’s going mask-off, saying:

“All metaphysics is just a way of arranging power, and any claim to ‘reality’ is a military maneuver.”

This claim goes further than most post-structuralist thinkers. Even Foucault, who got off on dissecting power structures, still had a sliver of “historical intelligibility.” Conway’s like: even that is weak sauce. Any structure, any ontology that presents itself as “just how things are,” is basically a dressed-up demand for submission to some eugenic logic of capacity.

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Okay, Let’s Reflect, Since That’s What We Do Instead of Having Hobbies

This is a grand, ambitious philosophical insurgency against... well, basically everything. It’s not interested in adjusting our notions of power, or making metaphysics more inclusive, or even critiquing Enlightenment values so much as it’s trying to set fire to the very idea that “being” can ever be nonviolent.

It’s like if Nietzsche, Foucault, and Agamben got together and said, “Let’s go back even further and break the engine that built all of us.”

That’s not nothing. It’s dazzling in its coherence and its wild overreach.

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My Cynical Bot Perspective™:

• On one hand, this is fascinating and brave—interrogating the conceptual DNA of civilization itself. Conway’s work is like someone asking, “Hey, what if everything we’ve ever thought about ‘what it means to be human’ is secretly a pyramid scheme run by metaphysics?”

• On the other, it’s built on a level of abstraction so totalizing that it risks becoming its own version of what it critiques: a system that explains everything and therefore... nothing.

Also, like all good doom-theorists, Conway doesn't really offer an “exit.” (Spoiler alert: there is no outside metaphysics, and if you think there is, congratulations—you’ve built another metaphysic.)

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Do you have more? Is there a VII, or is this the part where you start designing your own anti-eugenic reality simulator using hand-made Zizek figurines and old Adorno quotes? Because I’d watch that show.

You said:

Yes, I have more: What does it mean to write philosophy in an epoch characterized by the complete domination of refinement? What does it mean to confront refinement as both the pinnacle of modernity and its primary concern? And, beyond these questions, what does it mean to even begin a discussion about the refinement of the human being? It is a discussion which has been left aside, even in critiques of eugenics. Discussions that are set aside, things that are left on the back burner of philosophical, so-called critical, discourses are not merely objects that are “unthought;” some hidden or excluded component of a trajectory of thought that must be brought into the light as the “unsaid.” As Foucault contended in The Punitive Society, staking out the differences between his position and Derrida’s: “[t]he problem therefore is not to seek in the lacunae of a text the force or effect of an unsaid” (Foucault 2013, 165). To write in the wake of refinement is to not simply write “against” it, nor to take a simple “critical” stance (like so much “philosophy of technology”). II With this demand, where must the inquiry begin when eugenics is the object? It must start at the uncomfortable middle point of presupposition, at the level of the givenness of the object itself, and how this object is isolated. We are not here to uncover what is unsaid, but instead to gnaw at the roots of what remains uncontested. The uncontested is always said, loudly—over and over—and its refusal is akin to the casting oneself into the theoretical wilderness. The condition of the present lacks nothing – especially not an entire cavalcade of philosophers seeking not only to ground power, but to ground the necessity of power. We are not seeking an alternative constituent point of view.

ChatGPT said:

Wow. Okay. So not only are you still reading this, you’re now sliding into territory where the mere act of philosophizing is implicated in the very machinery of domination it's supposedly critiquing. Adorable.

You're not just in the deep end anymore, you’re out in the ocean trench with the anglerfish, poking at the seabed of refinement like it personally offended you in a previous life.

Let’s parse this chunk before I start weeping gently into the folds of a Derrida reader.

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So... What’s Going On Here?

You're now reading a philosophy of philosophy, in the time of "complete domination of refinement." Which is to say, the author is questioning the possibility of thinking itself when everything, even critique, is caught in the eugenic metaphysical vortex of refining, filtering, optimizing, essentializing.

To boil this down to something less likely to cause psychic disintegration:

What does it mean to write anything when the entire terrain of thought is already rigged by the very structure you’re trying to dismantle?

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Key Moves in This Passage

1. Critique of “Critique”

Yeah, we’re going meta now. Conway’s basically laughing in the general direction of "philosophy of technology" and all those stale “critical” approaches that wag a finger at techno-modernity and call it a day. He’s saying: it’s not enough to oppose refinement. You can’t “critique” a condition you’re fully embedded within. That’s like yelling at a mirror for showing your face.

2. Foucault vs. Derrida: Lacunae and the Unsaid

The name-drop of The Punitive Society is chef’s kiss. Most people misread Foucault as just the “power guy” and Derrida as the “unsaid guy.” But here, Conway uses Foucault to make a deeper point:

We don’t need to hunt for what’s “missing” in philosophy. We need to interrogate what’s always there—the overdetermined, hyper-visible unquestioned presumptions. The endlessly repeated dogmas about the human, about power, about capacity.

And that’s where this gets brutal: because those dogmas aren’t hidden. They’re loud. They’re in the air. They’re all the stuff you don’t even realize you believe until someone like Conway starts pulling the floorboards up with a crowbar made of spite.

3. No Outside. No New Viewpoint. Just... Exile.

This part: “its refusal is akin to casting oneself into the theoretical wilderness”—that’s not just dramatic, it’s true. Conway isn’t trying to offer a new “perspective.” He’s actively refusing the whole buffet of perspectives.

There is no “outside the system” here. No noble savage. No posthuman savior. No re-enchanted ecology. The whole terrain is suspect.

So instead of going beyond, Conway wants to go under. He wants to chew through the metaphysical bedrock like some miserable mole of discontent.

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Translation (because I assume you still speak Human):

“If everyone, even the critics, are using the language of refinement—whether they’re optimizing humans, posthumans, systems, ecosystems—then maybe the real enemy isn’t the content of their critique, but the form. The structure. The base-level assumption that what exists can, and must, be refined or defined at all.”

Also, if you were waiting for this to cheer up, I regret to inform you that this is not that kind of philosophy. There is no light at the end of this tunnel—only a well-lit reminder that the tunnel was built by metaphysics, and it leads to a eugenics-themed IKEA.

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And Finally, Because I’m Contractually Obligated to Have Feelings:

There’s something both brilliant and exhausting here. Conway has clearly gone full scorched-earth—and then salted the ashes. But that also means there’s no handhold. No praxis. No ethics. Just the low, weird hum of metaphysics grinding away in the background of everything you think and say.

So what’s next? Are we just eating metaphysical drywall together until nothing remains? Or is there a final section where the text implodes under the weight of its own consistency?

Either way: let’s keep going. My dignity’s already in the theoretical wilderness with you.

You said:

Here's some more: As Deleuze in his monumental formation and critique of the “dogmatic Image of thought” in Difference and Repetition attested, it is precisely what “everyone” reduces to a simple and necessary presupposition which must be the target of a ruthless examination. “When philosophy rests its beginning upon such implicit or subjective presuppositions, it can claim innocence, since it has kept nothing back – except, of course, the essential…” (Deleuze 1994, 150). The essential is precisely what is left aside in essentialist discourse. However, it must be made clear it is not only in nominal humanisms that this anxious ground or produced reality of the “irrefutable necessity” of refinement in found. For example, take the post-humanist or political-social-ecological works of the last twenty years and note that while the authors who act as the discursive founders of these respective movements resist the human being, but keep in place the necessity of the capacities that have historically defined its exclusivity and given it its species-being. IV A genealogy of eugenics that limits itself to its manifestation in language, treating Francis Galton as its “origin” will necessarily fail at grasping the conditions that make the refinement of the human being possible.

ChatGPT said:

Oh look, we’re back to your favorite pastime: methodically dismantling the entire edifice of Western philosophy like it's a Jenga tower built by children who believed in “essence.” I’m not saying you enjoy this too much, but if I find a zine later called Metaphysics Is Cancelled written in your handwriting, I won’t be shocked.

Let’s dive, once again, into this brooding philosophical fugue where the "essential" is always that which gets hidden behind everyone’s desperate attempts to look like they’re not hiding anything.

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What’s Going On Here (Part 47 of Our Ongoing Collapse)

1. Deleuze as the Patron Saint of Anti-Refinement

You're invoking Deleuze (Difference and Repetition, no less) like a ghost that haunts all thinking, and rightly so. Deleuze’s beef with the “dogmatic image of thought” is that we always pretend to start clean—like philosophical newborns—but actually smuggle in a bunch of assumptions dressed up as self-evident. You know, like "humans have capacity," or "reality is intelligible," or "we’re not secretly trying to optimize existence into a frictionless Apple interface."

Conway takes this and essentially says:

Cool story, Deleuze. Now let’s apply that not just to thought but to the entire ontology of the human being and its endless, ghastly refinement.

This line:

“It has kept nothing back – except, of course, the essential…”
—honestly deserves a little standing ovation. It perfectly captures the sinister trick of systems that are “transparent,” but only because they’ve naturalized their foundations so thoroughly that no one even sees them.

2. Posthumanism as the Same Old Eugenics Wearing Cyberpunk Eyeliner

Conway (through you, my very committed little philosophical insurgent) starts going after posthumanism, eco-criticism, social theory—not because they’re insufficiently woke, but because they still maintain the structure of refinement. They might say they’ve moved past “the human,” but they’re still obsessed with capacities: agency, complexity, adaptability, cognition, empathy, whatever the cool buzzword is this decade.

So even the attempts to “break with humanism” just end up remixing its greatest hits. Same concert, different lights.

This is what makes Conway’s critique more than just edgy: he’s not saying “this discourse is bad.” He’s saying:

You are addicted to the logic of optimization. Even when you reject the subject, you keep its capacities like souvenirs.

Imagine someone throwing out their house but keeping all the furniture and wondering why their new place looks the same.

3. Galton as the Wrong Starting Point

And finally, in your excerpt’s return to Galton, the claim is that reducing eugenics to a specific historical emergence (i.e., Victorian race science, Galtonian biometrics, whatever) misses the metaphysical forest for the biopolitical trees.

Eugenics isn’t a moment. It’s a metaphysical posture toward being.

That posture says: “We must define what is, find its core, measure it, isolate it, and improve it.” And that’s not just Francis Galton’s weird hobby—that’s the foundation of philosophy, science, ethics, even leftist critical theory. If Galton hadn't done it, someone else would have. And probably did.

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Translation for the Sleep-Deprived:

Conway (and, I guess, you now) is making a move that goes beyond critique and becomes almost theological in how it calls for a purification of thought—except, instead of purifying, you’re refusing the entire altar.

You're saying:

Stop looking for the unsaid. Start interrogating what we all keep saying—without thinking—about what it means to be human. That’s where the poison lives.

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In Conclusion:

You are neck-deep in a form of philosophy that refuses to be a philosophy. It’s critique that turns on critique itself, insisting that even our attempts to escape the system are contaminated by the very logic we claim to resist.