The Death of Philosophy: Reference and Self-reference in Contemporary Thought 9780231519632

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the death of philosophy

The Death of Philosophy reference and self-reference in contemporary thought

Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel

t ra n s l at e d by ri c h a rd a . ly n c h

columbia university press 

• 

new york

columbia university press Publishers Since 1893 new york  chichester, west sussex First published in French as Référence et autoréférence. Etude sur le thème de la mort de la philosophie © Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 2005 Translation copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle.    [Réference et autoréférence. English]    The death of philosophy : reference and self-reference in contemporary thought / Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel / translated by Richard A. Lynch.       p.   cm.    Includes bibliographical references (p.      ).    ISBN 978–0-231–14778–1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–231–51963–2 (ebook)   1.  Philosophy, French—21st century.  2.  Philosophy, Modern—21st century.  3. Reference (Philosophy)  I.  Title.    B2431.T4613  2011    190.9'051—dc22

2010042797

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Contents Acknowledgments  ix Translator’s Note  xi Introduction  xiii



part i. the end of philosophy, or the paradoxes of speaking  1

1. Skeptical and Scientific “Post-philosophy”  3

The “Postanalytic” Moment  4



The Dissolution of Philosophy in a Positive Science  16



Naturalism as a Paradoxical Synthesis  26



Conclusions: Self-refutation and Oscillation Between Scientism and Skepticism  33

2. “Saying and the Said”: Two Paradigms for the Same Subject  37

Opposition or Overlap of Paradigms?  37



The Evolution of the Linguistic Paradigm: Pragmatism  39



“Turning Phenomenology”?  49



Conclusions: Performative Contradiction and Oscillation Between Skepticism and Positivism  70

3. The Antispeculative View: Habermas as an Example  73

A Philosophy in Three Movements, Epitomizing Three Possible Antispeculative Approaches  73



Philosophy as Therapy: Knowledge and Human Interests  75



Philosophy as Inquiry into Conditions of Possibility: “Universal Pragmatics”  79

vi  contents



From Universal Pragmatics to Fallibilist Pragmatism  83



Conclusions: Confirmation of the Diagnosis  93

4. Kant’s Shadow in the Current Philosophical Landscape  96

The Skeptical Future of Kantianism: Reconstruction from the Critique of Judgment  97



The “Strong” Version of the Transcendental: Karl-Otto Apel  104



Conclusions: The Impossibility of Speaking of the End of Philosophy  123



part ii. challenging the “death of philosophy”: the reflexive a priori  127

5. A Definition of the Model: Scientific Learning and Philosophical Knowledge  129

Why This Moment Rather Than Another?  129



The Problem of the Status of the Philosopher’s Discourse  131



The Concept of Reflexive Identity, or Self-reference  134



The Power of the Model: The Law of Self-reference and Philosophical Truth  136



Self-reference and Knowledge of Knowledge: Metacognitive Problems  139



Self-reference and the Act of Speaking  141



Conclusions: Congruence Between Statement and Utterance, Said and Saying  142

6. The Model of Self-reference’s Consistency  143

The Theory of Reflexivity and Current Theories of Self-reference  143



The Theory of Reflexivity and the Prohibition Against Self-referential Propositions  150



Conclusions: The Application of Propositions to Themselves  159

Contents  vii

7. The Model’s Fecundity  162

A New Definition of Transcendental Argument  162



The New Version of the Argument as a Possible Overcoming of the “Dispute About Transcendental Arguments”  167



The Transcendental Argument’s Positivity and the “Utility” of the Law of Reflexivity  170



Conclusions: A Proposal for a Model of Application  178

8. Beyond the Death of Philosophy  183



part iii. the end of philosophy in perspective: the source of the reflexive deficit  189

9. The “Race to Reference”  191 10. The Tension Between Reference and Self-reference in the Kantian System  195

Representation  196



Reflection  200



Use of the Term “Intellectual Representation” as an Expression of the Tension Between Representation and Reflection  203



Conclusions: The Two Orientations  214

11. Helmholtz’s Choice as a Choice for Reference: The Naturalization of Critique  217

From the Transcendental to the A Priori  217



The Psychophysiological Interpretation of the A Priori  219



The Physiological Future of the Distinction Between Things in Themselves and Phenomena  221



Conclusions: A Single Orientation, the Origin of Two Paradigms  224

12. Critique: A Positivist Theory of Knowledge or Existential Ontology?  226

viii  contents



The Kantian Problematic in Heidegger and Cohen  226



Explaining Knowledge: Valorization of the “Aesthetic” or the “Analytic”?  228



Which Edition?  229



The Meaning of the Object  231



Radical Finitude and the Question of Being as Emphasizing an Orientation  234



Conclusions: Common Ground—The Exclusive Idea of Reference  237

13. Questioning the History of Philosophy  239

Overcoming Historicism Without Returning to the Past  239



Interpretation and Argumentation  244

Conclusion  250

Bibliography  253



Notes  273

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without luck, that is, encounters—encounters with books, books’ encounters with one another, but also encounters with people—that have sparked or strengthened my philosophical work. To the first among them I owe neither the contents of the ideas here defended nor my philosophical views, nor even the tradition in which they are inscribed—he is, however, one of the people to whom I owe the most philosophically: I had the good fortune to have Jean-Luc Marion as a teacher, and neither the distance between our ways of thinking nor now the distance in time has softened the shock of this encounter. I thank you, here, finally. More recently, I also had the good fortune to encounter Michel Malherbe, who has directly contributed to the development of this book with his attentive reading, perceptive remarks, and decisive suggestions. Bernard Bourgeois benevolently guided and later accompanied all my research. Jean Gayon and Heinz Wismann have, last, given me considerable support and encouragement—I thank you both four times. Finally, I thank everyone who has helped me philosophically through their

x  acknowledg m e n t s

writing and their conversation: Claude Parthenay, Bertrand Rougé, Fosca Mariani, Denis Thouard, Jean-Claude Gens, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, as well as André Charrak, Sandra Laugier, Jocelyn Benoist, Christiane Chauviré, Jacques English, Anastasios Brenner, Fabien Capeillères, Félix Duportail, Olivier Imbert, Marie-Pierre Gaviano, Aline Alterman, Ives Radrizzani, Christian Berner, Chantal Jacquet, Jeanne Salem, Christian Bonnet, André Stanguennec, Marie-Dominique Popelard, and finally, Daniel Arasse, to whose memory this book is dedicated.

Translator’s Note

When citations are to texts originally written in English or available in English translation, I have usually used the available English version. In a few exceptional cases—for example, Thomas-Fogiel’s citations of Husserl—I have altered the English if the French translation conveys a different sense than the standard English translation. My notes are in brackets; all other notes are the author’s. For assistance and support with this translation, I would like to thank Amy Allen, Linda Clute, Janet Donohoe, Barbara Fultner, Mandy Henk, Stacy Kling­ ler, Jamie Knapp, Len Lawlor, Sebastian Luft, Jonathan Powers, Dan Shannon, the DePauw University Philosophy Department, the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University (which provided a serene working space for part of the time I was working on this translation), and everybody in the Interlibrary Loan department of the DePauw University Libraries. Special thanks to Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel for very generously answering my questions along the way. I dedicate this work to my daughter Sophia Isabelle, who was born during its completion.

Introduction

In This New Yet Unapproachable America, Stanley Cavell recounts the following anecdote: “One of the most influential American teachers of philosophy . . . declared . . . that there are only three ways to make an honest living in philosophy: learn some languages and do scholarly work, learn mathematics enough to do some real logic, or do literary psychology.”1 Far from deploring this situation, in which philosophy is taken up by another discipline, Cavell affirms that it matters little to him, in the final analysis, whether what he does in writing his books is deemed to be philosophical. In a similar vein, J. L. Austin noted that history has allowed philosophy to be divided into increasingly distinct and autonomous disciplines (such as mathematics, physics, and psychology),2 and he predicted (and simultaneously hoped) that philosophy would end by disappearing in favor of, for example, linguistics. This affirmation of—indeed, this demand for—philosophy’s dissolution in a different discipline is not only expressed in the analytic tradition illustrated by Austin and Cavell. In fact, this theme of the death, or exhaustion, of philosophy is also found in the “Continental” sphere, where the idea

xiv  introduct i o n

of the death of philosophy is equally omnipresent. Whether one praises, with Heidegger, the ineluctable decline of philosophy, or whether one asserts the necessity of a deconstruction of philosophy and its supersession by a different practice, the same thesis endures: the death of philosophy. Distrust and “skepticism” toward philosophical discourse would seem to be the common element in these apparently very different ways of thought. As such, one can assert, with Vittorio Hösle, that “probably the strongest immediate evidence for the superiority of relativism is that for the past 150 years it has been the ideology, spreading ever more forcefully, of Western European philosophy.”3 In a word, we seem today to have arrived at a historical moment dominated by the idea that philosophy is an obsolete discipline that ought to disappear, like alchemy, even if it once mobilized, quite in vain, great minds. Given this assessment, the discipline could hope to survive for a while by returning to the study of tradition, by taking care of its history, by unearthing the great classical texts, in the way that the Renaissance was able to prompt a return to antiquity. But this study of the tradition, an apparent escape for an exhausted discipline, is itself the object of multiple challenges. In fact, philosophy’s relationship to its history currently takes different forms, all more or less negative, such as destruction, deconstruction, and even denial. Let’s first consider destruction. There are many who reduce the history of philosophy to a geographically and historically situated practice: philosophy’s relation to the great texts of the tradition is not, they maintain, a necessary relation, a humanistic relation, but rather a typically Continental—even exclusively French—practice. Vincent Descombes thus finds it “right to deplore that in certain countries like France philosophical studies tend to be absorbed in the history of the discipline,”4 which François Schmitz underscores in his introduction to the collection Philosophie analytique et histoire de la philosophie: “The importance accorded, at least in France, to the history of philosophy,”5 a diagnosis that Yves Michaud confirms and intensifies, writing, “the history of philosophy is a typically European—not to say French—discipline, whose importance in the curriculum, in research, and most generally in the entire climate of philosophical activity is not easily understandable.”6 In a related, if less radical, sense, Francis Wolff denounces the typically French study of the “doctrine of authors . . . taught to the point of extravagance.”7 Confronted by this disapproving tribunal, the contemporary historian of philosophy seems forced to admit that all his works are the fruits of a national particularism, of the vicissitudes of the institution, of coincidences of chance. Whether a doddering archivist or a dilettante hermeneuticist, he would have absolutely

Introduction  xv

no justification for studying Malebranche rather than Schelling, or Poincaré rather than Aristotle, unless it would be the simple assertion of an entirely personal preference, of a contingent taste, of an “I” that does not worry about being a “we.” To ask, “How can one do the history of philosophy?” is, in short, to cry out, “How can one be French?” To this assessment of an interpretive practice that is not only arbitrary (since its author cannot answer the question, “Why Aristotle rather than nothing?”8) but also harmful (since this practice verges on “extravagance”) there is only one logical response, clearly articulated by Michaud: “the end of the history of philosophy.” Various redeployments for philosophical study have been proposed to make up for the planned obsolescence of commentary upon traditional texts: redeployments such as an increased specialization or even the consideration of the most contemporary social questions. Specialization consists in subdividing the old “philosophy” into predetermined, relatively distinct “domains.” This specialization most often leads to the dissolution of philosophy within another discipline. Such is the problem of contemporary epistemology, in its limited sense of a theory of a precise discipline (logic, biology, economics, etc.).9 The first do logic and generate theorems, the others accompany biologists, neurophysiologists, researchers in artificial intelligence, etc. In short, philosophers more or less redeploy themselves in other sciences, thus fulfilling Quine’s wish to make epistemology “a branch of engineering.”10 The second redeployment, proposed to take the place of a historically oriented practice, is a philosophy conceived as a provider of answers to questions of the moment (bioethics, preservation of the planet, international law, etc.). By generating a certain number of principles, such as the famous “principle of responsibility,” the philosopher would provide the tools that allow one to grapple with the concrete problems posed by society. This production of “principles” for the contemporary world’s use can be accomplished through recourse to authors whose study would allow us to think about our society today. And so, for some, to do philosophy today consists of somehow “reactualizing” a juridico-political corpus (one is a convinced liberal; another, a famous Kantian; another, a notorious Nazi; etc.). In this configuration, a response to social and political questions must be philosophy’s objective, lest it see its place taken by another discipline (sociology, political science, law, etc.). If engineering is opposed to exegetical practice on the one hand, it seems on the other that care is taken to make philosophy into a form of social expertise, and philosophers “the reserve angels of jurisprudence,” to borrow Musil’s famous expression. In either case, the end of the history of

xvi  introduct i o n

philosophy leads to the claim that philosophy is finally “expert” because it is equipped, as Austin hoped, with “a respectable and reliable method of handling some portion of these residual problems, a new science is set up, which tends to break away from philosophy just as and when its subject matter becomes better defined.”11 Set against this image of a clearly asserted destruction is deconstruction, which has dominated philosophical study for more than a generation.12 This practice finds support in the Heideggerian discourse that sees the study of the history of philosophy as completed by the necessity of the deconstruction of metaphysics. Philosophy is conceived here as a slow process that, after a radiant dawn, will have now come to completion. To study the progressive decline that has led this discipline from the pre-Socratics to its ego-ontotheological acme (Hegel, for example), or else, to uncover several unexpected openings in this continuous process as so many counterattacks against a nonetheless inescapable history (Kant or Schelling, for example): this is the work assigned to the philosopher or the historian of philosophy. This position—which has a number of eminent representatives in France (such as Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Luc Marion, or Rémi Brague13) as in Germany (Wolfgang Janke, Rudolf Boehm, etc.) or in Italy (Franco Volpi, Gianni Vattimo, Federico Leoni)—has the not-insignificant advantage of refusing the sharp distinction between the study of traditional texts and philosophical practice. It gives a philosophical meaning to the history of philosophy and avoids making the study of this or that philosopher a gratuitous, anecdotal, or contingent practice, which could have just as well chosen Tristram Shandy14 as Jean-Baptiste Poncelet for its object. The exegetical hermeneutical tradition thus yields to a philosophical finality.15 The study of this or that text is endowed with a meaning in which the very essence of the discipline is progressively deciphered. This conception rests on the general thesis of history as a process that has now arrived at its conclusion. Between these two extreme figures (either the abandonment of a practice as destruction of a disciplinary field, or, on the contrary, “deconstruction” in the sense of a patient appropriation of the tradition with an eye toward the goal of overcoming metaphysics) it is possible to identify a third position, which can be understood, broadly speaking, as a paradoxical variation of the first: denial. It is a question, in this framework, of doing the history of philosophy while simultaneously denouncing the practice. And that is how exceptional commentators of Wittgenstein or Russell have deplored the French passion for the history of philosophy without ever answering the question, What

Introduction  xvii

is the significance of translation, transmission, commentary, explication, or interpretation of Wittgenstein, Russell, or Austin, if one is not doing the history of philosophy?16 How is this work different from commentaries upon Aristotle, Suarez, or Descartes? Could it be because what is more contemporary is, in essence, truer and more philosophical than the old? Such an assertion presupposes a conception of a constant progress of philosophy, which would become either more and more “high-fidelity,” like audio techniques, or else more and more aware of its inanity, like alchemy in the sixteenth century. Even if this thesis of a constant progress has never been verifiably defended as such by the detractors of the history of philosophy, it is no less consubstantial with their critique. To refuse to be a historian of philosophy when one speaks of a twentieth-century text is to surreptitiously think that interpreting Wittgenstein is to be doing fertile philosophy because it addresses a recent author whereas interpreting Saint Thomas constitutes a lapse into an absurd exegetical practice because he is an author of the past. In addition to the retort that one today can without absurdity claim to be a Thomist just as well as a Wittgensteinian, it seems legitimate to oppose this position with a simple statement of fact: Wittgenstein, born in the nineteenth century, is no longer our exact contemporary; and if only the last philosopher to speak is correct, it would be better, in the interests of the future, to study only those philosophers still living and to pass down “to our nephews” only those texts that they will have written themselves! We see that the history of philosophy, thus understood, is quite directly wedded to the thesis of the death of philosophy. In effect, if against those who, like Yves Michaud, call purely and simply for the end of the history of philosophy, the disciples of Heidegger give a meaning and a capital importance to the study of the texts of the history of philosophy, this meaning is grasped only in order to demonstrate the end of philosophy such as it was practiced for two millennia. The study of its history coincides with the proclamation of the death of the discipline. As a result, beyond the evident difference between the wish of destruction (abandonment of the study of ancient texts) and the practice of deconstruction (appropriation of the tradition in order to better rid oneself of it), a great number of thinkers share the same idea: philosophy no longer exists. To put it yet another way, if it were necessary to examine contemporary thinkers, none of them would dare maintain that philosophy is the queen of the sciences—although this thesis was once amply defended, from Aristotle to Leibniz, from Descartes to Hegel—nor even that philosophy is a scientific, rigorous, and distinct discipline—a thesis

xviii  introduct i o n

that was just as widely maintained from Plato to Husserl. It is this thesis of the death of philosophy as a first, autonomous, and distinct discipline that I wish to analyze (part 1), then to challenge (part 2), and finally to contextualize (part 3). I shall begin the analysis by carefully displaying it in the diversity of its actual figures, in order to identify its fundamental motifs, its lines of force, and the reasons it advances. What are the arguments that lead so many contemporary philosophers, from profoundly different perspectives, to solemnly proclaim—or to surreptitiously accept—the death of their discipline? In view of this death, endlessly announced, I have tried to avoid two positions, as facile as they are common, namely (1) accepting this thesis without discussion nor consideration of its consequences, and so continuing to write philosophy with the sole end of saying that it ought no longer be done, and (2) vigorously disputing this thesis without ever taking the trouble to argue against it nor to develop another, positive, alternative. Against this second, too often adopted, position it seems to me that the fact that philosophy may soon come to have the same status as alchemy merits more than the simple exclamation “Aren’t they foolish!”—an exclamation with which certain philosophical specialists who call themselves “professionals” would sometimes reply to others, at least as “professional” as the first (since it is a question, after all, of Heidegger, Derrida, Quine, and Austin, among others!), who proclaim the inevitable demise of the discipline. As Jacques Bouveresse said, “the first [ones] to wax indignant over Rorty’s proposals”17 (namely, “that there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline”18), would be well advised to propose something other than a glib dismissal, because “to perpetuate philosophy as a distinct academic discipline probably demands more serious justification than what the philosophers in question would explicitly or implicitly agree to provide.”19 In this book, my only concern will be to take up Bouveresse’s challenge in exhorting the historians of philosophy20 to produce a “more serious justification” in answer to the question of how philosophy is a distinct and autonomous discipline. Nevertheless, a last reservation might be raised against the long analysis of the death of philosophy that I will present in part 1. It consists in the claim that a critical analysis of these positions is in vain because philosophy is realized, like movement, in the doing. This third position, formerly adopted against every “Flaubertian bourgeois” convinced of the uselessness of practices that are not directly utilitarian, is now no longer adequate, because it is philosophers themselves who proclaim the death of philosophy. Therefore,

Introduction  xix

it seems difficult to avoid a serious examination of this thesis, ignoring it while continuing to develop isolated, particular, and local studies (an ontology of the flesh, a phenomenology of desire, or even more an epistemology of number, an interrogation of the modules of the neurophysiological system, etc.) just as a mathematician today could work on some aspect of projective geometry without needing to know whether his discipline is put at risk by the fact that, because he is so specialized, he is no longer able to communicate with a specialist in a field of algebra. The theme of the death of philosophy is as conclusive as that of the death of art, proclaimed by artists themselves or by critics who, like Arthur Danto, judge that art has realized its essence and achieved its destiny. An artist does not avoid this assertion by being content merely to paint in the style of Vermeer; nor does a philosopher of art by eliminating an analysis of ready-mades or of Warhol’s Brillo Box.21 Just as the theme of the death of art is now an integral part of the material with which artists and art critics work, the theme of the end of philosophy ought to be considered as a philosophical object and as a subject for interpretation.22 This is why, breaking with the three habitual postures (agreement without argument, rejection without proof, or a learned indifference), I have tried in part 1 to analyze this theme of the death of philosophy. In so doing, I shall disregard the different nuances, the different “gradations” of color that can clothe this theme of the death of philosophy—from the most common claims (such as the current “postanalytic”) to assertions of its necessity (the “second wave” of analytic philosophy or the “radicalization” of a certain phenomenology)23—considering along the way philosophies that, even though they set sail from different ports, end up by resignedly accepting this theme (Habermas), as well as schools of thought that imply this end as a logical consequence without always asserting it (like certain contemporary reconstructions of Kantianism). This study of different tonalities that adopt the same theme must not, however, conceive itself as a picture, portrait or landscape, of contemporary philosophy in all its dimensions. My goal is clearly not to draw up an inventory or progress report, nor to go back into a detailed discussion of every possible position;24 my aim is very simply to retrace the multiple metamorphoses of a single theme, the death of philosophy, in order to see if and how another thesis could be proposed. This is a task I will take up in part 2, which will try to demonstrate that philosophy is an autonomous and distinct discipline, and even—to go much further than Bouveresse suggested in his exhortation to historians of philosophy—that philosophy remains, in a sense that I will specify, “first.” In

xx  introducti o n

order to prove this thesis—an apparently eccentric one, since the view that a discipline is first because it is “above” (meta) is unanimously rejected—I will first have to propose a voluntary distancing from our age (specifically by an appeal to the apparently obsolete history of philosophy) in order to try to suspend our own view of the contemporary situation. Indeed, professional philosophers should always be able to distance themselves from their era for a moment, like the ethnologist who, having visited faraway lands, upon returning is better able to recognize the peculiarities of his own civilization. Similarly, those who would penetrate the mysteries of anamorphosis must adopt a different perspective than usually required. Indeed, let’s recall the definition of anamophosis. “A drawing that has been distorted to the point of illegibility . . . becomes clear if one observes it from a particular angle or through a correcting apparatus.”25 The study of the history of philosophy is able to play the role of a new angle of vision or a “corrective apparatus” for the “obvious” facts of a period in which we are necessarily immersed. In order to grasp the import of the present reality, we have to move toward an oblique, untimely, apparently inadequate point of view, just as Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous painting The Ambassadors reveals its design only from an off-center—indeed eccentric—viewpoint. Indeed, if we were to position ourselves in front of this painting, in the place assigned to the observer since the Renaissance, what would we see? Two opulent diplomats (whose appearance and ample figures we could detail), a luxurious room (whose spaces we could evaluate), various objects (all symbols of wealth and magnificence), and finally, a heavy green curtain that fills the background and partially masks a crucifix. The painting apparently26 portrays luxury, abundance, and splendor; but it is a question of a regulated abundance (the figures are diplomats, not jesters), of wealth without luxuriance, in short, of the ordering of a reasonably opulent world. Having seen this, the spectator’s eyes will come upon a spot that is unrecognizable. Has the canvas been altered, or must we see there a “cuttlefish bone” or some other unusual27 object that has come to disrupt the proper ordering and restraint that every ambassador obviously represents? What is this sparsely colored spot, this strange form in the middle of a well-ordered composition, this unexpected figure in a world without mysteries? We know that we can resolve this anomaly only through a revolution in point of view, an escape from the paradigm in effect—in this case, the laws of perspective—by adopting a habitually unadvised point of view: at an angle to the painting. What appears once the spectator moves to the extreme edge of the painting, forces himself to occupy this unfamiliar space? A skull.

Introduction  xxi

Far from telling of the wealth of nations, the painting shows their vanity at the same time that it tells of the illusory and vain transparency of perspective, the opacity of the frontal position, the false obviousness of the immediate. This play between the frontal position and the oblique view, between the literal reading and the interpretation that must take a point of view other than face-to-face or immersion in the painting can be conceived like the position that the reading of “philosophically incorrect” authors gives to the historian of philosophy in the world in which he is situated. Like the painting, the privileged motif of contemporary philosophy speaks itself of its vanity. But as with the painting, this vanity is truly comprehensible (that is to say, it is capable of being questioned and evaluated, and unable to be accepted as a given or an inevitability) only from an unusual angle of view—for example (anticipating my argument), the angle of the joyous and uninhibited affirmation of philosophy as a rigorous, distinct, and first knowledge. So I will attempt, as a thought experiment, to maintain the suspension of our current and too common belief, and to see in what sense one can today understand philosophy as a rigorous, distinct, and first discipline. Can we rely upon its history to better avert the proclamation of its end? Can we attempt a revolution in point of view; can we undertake a paradigm shift even though all converge toward the same affirmation, the exhaustion of philosophy? Once this reconsideration has been effected, we will then be in a position to put the thesis of the end of philosophy in perspective, that is, to understand the end of the end of philosophy. In part 3, to put this thesis into context, I will simply try to return to the source of the thesis of the death of philosophy. If, following the example of Mark Twain, who, upon reading his own obituary in a poorly informed newspaper, protested that “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” we must likewise declare the reports of philosophy’s death to be in error, then we ought to understand the reasons why one could think that philosophy was dead. Situating the discourse about “the end,” and showing the reasons which have led to this theme’s contemporary omnipresence, will serve to support my argument since, in order to thus put the end of philosophy into perspective, we will transcend this end, and with it, the historicism that it explicitly or surreptitiously carries. To put it more precisely: my aim is to demonstrate that philosophy is a first discipline, distinct and autonomous. To do this, I will analyze the thesis of the end of philosophy and I will show how it always contains, despite the apparent diversity of its actual articulations, the same type of logical contradictions,

xxii  introduct i o n

which lead to its necessary rejection. I shall trace these contradictions, or logical pathologies, back to an attitude common to all the authors discussed, namely, the concealment of self-reference to the benefit of the sole question of reference, a concealment that produces a “reflexive deficit”28 at the heart of the discipline, a characteristic mark of the theme of the death of philosophy. I will then demonstrate how an unrealized and untimely position—one that strongly affirms the thesis of a living and sovereign philosophy—could allow us to escape the impasse in which contemporary philosophy, with this proclamation of its end, is trapped. That is, recalling my analogy with anamorphosis, I will show how the adoption of a point of view apparently far removed from currently accepted givens can show these givens for what they are, namely, opinions whose falsehood can be demonstrated. Even more precisely, I will propose a remedy for the crisis of philosophy by restoring its “meta” function. Once I have specified this proposed treatment for philosophy’s contemporary crisis and redefined the practice of the history of philosophy, I will have to show where and when the reflexive deficit (as a concealment of self-reference in favor of the sole question of reference) first arose, and to trace the different moments of its spread—not only in the obvious analytic understandings of “reference”29 but also in Kant and particularly in his three principal interpreters: Hermann von Helmholtz, Hermann Cohen, and (in a spectacular historical paradox) Heidegger, who on this point agreed with analytic and neo-Kantian thought. Further, this history of the concealment of self-reference will have to be tenable in order to revive the historicism that has most often presided over the announcements of the death of philosophy. Ultimately, we will thus have to understand the practice of the history of philosophy by showing that in rearticulating a position that had been maintained in the past, we are not constrained to adopt the position of “a return to” this or that author or period of the history of philosophy. Briefly, in showing that past philosophers can help us to decipher the real face formed by the interlacing of contemporary thought, I do not mean to “return to” certain authors and to put them on a pedestal instead of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine, or Kant. “To think with” or “starting from” does not mean “to return to.” I will thus show how, by a sort of dual-anamorphic game, traditional authors and contemporary philosophers can both be read by starting with the other—placing oneself in the point of view of the one can illuminate the other, and vice versa. It is a matter of attempting to cross-fertilize the authors, to show how little the epoch matters for philosophical questions. From there, I will try to break with the historicism common to the conceptions I have evoked (the

Introduction  xxiii

end of history, either through progress—philosophy is replaced by a more scientific discipline—or through decline—the process has achieved its completion). This project as a whole seeks to go beyond the attempts at “naturalization”30 as well as the positions of historicism31 to propose a reelaboration of the transcendental, which may no longer be necessarily “Kantian,” and to thus attempt to escape from the curse of a discipline that seems to have no other function than to pronounce its own impossibility. This investigation shall first analyze, then challenge, and last contextualize the thesis of the death of philosophy. This investigation could just as well be described first as a diagnosis of the nature of a theme in contemporary philosophy, then the proposal of a treatment from an unusual point of view, and then an etiology of the origins and propagation of the disease. This medical nomenclature, accentuating the three moments of this project, seems justified since it is indeed a question, today, of life and death—of the announced death of philosophy, a death announced by philosophy itself and from within itself, a death that I would like to counter with a living philosophy, a philosophy living through itself and starting with itself.

the death of philosophy

I

The End of Philosophy, or the Paradoxes of Speaking

1

Skeptical and Scientific “Post-philosophy”

My analysis of the discourse pronouncing the death of philosophy shall begin with its most resounding assertions and end with its resigned, and even surreptitious, acceptances. Indeed, this theme, so common today, is inflected according to different variations whose nuances we must grasp so that their commonalities are more clearly illustrated at the end of our examination. This is why I will start my inquiry with the most radical antiphilosophers, those we can call, with Vincent Descombes, the “post-contemporary philosophers,”1 and I will show how their ideas, beneath their manifest differences (since they go from the most radical skepticism to the most accepted scientism), reveal the same invariant structure. The more loudly that the death of philosophy is proclaimed, the more that this structure appears as its trademark. Once this structure has been recognized, it will serve as a touchstone for our analysis of the various, more subtle, appearances of the theme in other figures of contemporary philosophy. From pragmatism, through an (admittedly failed) attempt to reestablish philosophy’s autonomy, to the

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most recent forms of phenomenology, I will trace, step-by-step, the various stages of current philosophy’s self-renunciation.2 The most resounding of all the requiem’s variations today are those of radical skepticism, on the one hand, and, on the other, avowed scientists. Both of these share their origins in analytic philosophy. So I will begin with one of the most prominent skeptical positions in the postanalytic movement of the last twenty years—that of Richard Rorty. Indeed, for Rorty, without the least ambiguity or nostalgic equivocation, “there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline.”3 Rather, a “postphilosophical culture”4 must arise in which philosophy will no longer constitute a Fach, “an autonomous cultural zone,” which is to say that it would no longer be the discipline investigating truth (which the post-philosophical culture knows to be an empty, futile notion, a mere “compliment”5 paid to our colleagues’ assertions, “rhetorical pats on the back”6 still employed in the academic world but destined to disappear). Let’s try to more precisely characterize the moment that follows analytic philosophy.

The “Postanalytic” Moment Its Three Characteristics This moment, whose contours have been sketched by John Rajchman in his preface to Post-Analytic Philosophy,7 can be defined by a certain number of traits, the most immediately salient of which is a desire to break with analytic philosophy. This break, or rupture, is distinct in that it is carried out internally, starting from an effective practice of analytic philosophy, not externally, like a critique posed by a Continental phenomenologist or a Persian philosopher. If, as François Récanati says, analytic philosophy has had two waves—first, logical positivism (Russell and the Vienna Circle), and second, pragmatics (Austin and the later Wittgenstein)8—then what we are witnessing now in the United States is not the emergence of a third wave but a movement whose watchword is the abandonment of the analytic paradigm.9 This break occurs through a reestablishment of or a return to the American tradition that existed before the massive emigration of philosophers fleeing Nazi persecution. This motif of “return” is the second characteristic trait of a movement meant to revolutionize10 thinking. It is simultaneously a break with analysis and a “return” to the fathers of “American pragmatism”—this is

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Rorty’s claim in his introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism.11 As Vincent Descombes notes, “His guiding idea is clearly to restore the pragmatic school, that is, the American philosophical school, to its initial splendor.”12 To anticipate readers’ legitimate worries upon hearing this vocabulary of a “restoration” of a “tradition” unspoiled by any foreign contamination, Rorty specifies that this return to American thought before the analytic emigration does not signify a desire to extol a healthy, pure, and authentic tradition, at least as far as he is concerned.13 Indeed, despite his political habitus, which does not at all tend to echo an American “restoration” that is “founded” on the most radical grounds, despite the slightly humorous character of a discourse that would portray American culture as colonized, annexed, and martyred by a dominating, hegemonic, and warlike European culture, in fact, Rorty has, further and better than anyone, studied “Continental” thought—putting Heidegger (unquestionably Continental) at the summit of philosophy alongside Dewey (American, before the Franco-German emigration) and Wittgenstein (Austrian, of Cambridge). So if a restoration of American thought is needed, for Rorty, this is because thinkers like John Dewey or William James had wanted to be done with “all” philosophy, not to propose a different philosophy. The pragmatist “views science as one genre of literature—or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries,”14 and puts William Blake and Fichte in the same category.15 Putting disciplines into the same framework in this manner is not to be understood in the obvious way, in the sense that different domains of competence (Fächer) would be of equal intellectual dignity, but in a fundamental way as “eradication”16 of the very notion of truth. This notion of truth, which gives philosophy its structure and unites ideas as opposed as those of Plato, Kant, Frege, and Russell, must be forgotten in the postphilosophical era that Rorty calls for. This is why Rorty finds a connection between “Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche,”17 in that all call for “the end of philosophy.” Like French deconstruction, but earlier, “Dewey [thought] of philosophy, as a discipline or even as a distinct human activity, as obsolete”18 and “found what he wanted [going beyond philosophy] in turning away from philosophy as a distinctive activity altogether, and towards the ordinary world.”19 The disappearance of any notion of truth is thus the third characteristic trait of this postanalytic thought. Pragmatism is both a total skepticism that “eradicates” any notion of truth and a historicism that recognizes its own thought is a convention accepted “by the standards

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of our culture.”20 This idea could clearly be different tomorrow, and we wouldn’t be able to say that a parallel situation will be better, because the notion of “good” has disappeared as well as that of truth, with which it has been so often correlated. To be sure, the terms “skepticism” or even “relativism”21 appear less frequently in Rorty’s texts than “historicism,” which he constantly proclaims.22 Instead, the syntagmas that clarify the term “pragmatism” are “antiphilosophical,” “post-philosophical,” and especially the three “antis”—“antiessentialism,” “antifoundationalism,” and “antirepresentationalism.” The absence of the term “skepticism” can be explained, I think, by the fact that the skeptic still finds himself in a universe where truth is a value, whereas in the “post-philosophical” universe of pragmatism, this problem will become just as obsolete as are “the problems about Patripassianism, Arianism, etc., discussed by certain Fathers of the Church”23 for us today. Nevertheless, I will use the phrase “total skepticism” to characterize Rorty’s thought in order to avoid a constant repetition of the overly long phrase “the one who refuses any notion of truth, whether absolute, regulatory, relative or partial.” Rorty’s stance is tantamount to saying that absolutely no proposition, argument, position, or idea is “true” anymore, nor is it “better” than another—as was also the case with Nietzsche and Derrida, this radicality renders futile the characterization of his position with any term that is still a part of the philosophical universe and with which distinctions could be drawn. The genuine pragmatist “refuses to make a move in any of the games in which he is invited to take part.”24 This is undoubtedly the reason why he most often puts his positions in negative terms, such as “antirepresentationalism,” “antiessentialism,” or “antifoundationalism,” negatives that constitute so many specifications of “pragmatism”25 in its refusal of any truth.

Negative Specifications: Antirepresentationalism, Antifoundationalism, Antiessentialism By the term “representationalism,” which constitutes the framework of his first major work,26 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty means any perspective that holds that our propositions, or representations, correspond to an assignable exterior referent. Philosophy as a whole, and Western culture more generally, is haunted by this notion of representation, in which “to know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind.”27 This definition of representation and of the “mythic entity” that accompanies

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it—namely, truth—allows Rorty to comprehend within a single category both analytic philosophy and the Continental tradition, Platonism and “the Cartesian-Kantian tradition.”28 Beyond the more-or-less virulent29 criticisms that Rorty makes against the analytic trend, his most characteristic theme consists in showing that the “linguistic turn,”30 far from having broken with past philosophy and inaugurated a new way of thinking, has only refashioned the old notions of “the mirror of nature” and “correspondencetruth,” of which the semantic theory (“ ‘p’ is true if and only if p”) is the most refined expression and of which the doctrine of reference is the zenith. The second wave of analysis (if there is such a thing) cannot abandon this fantasy of truth, even if it claims to distance itself from classical “absolutism” with phrases like “redundancy theory of truth” or “simple ‘falsifiability’” or even with “Searle’s reformulations.”31 The “scientific” pretention or aim, so prevalent in analytic philosophy, is nothing but the expression of a myth that has structured the West and nourished its symptom, philosophy. It is perhaps in these theses of Rortyian pragmatism that we can most clearly see the nature of his break with the analytic schema, for if that schema is constituted by an idea, it is surely the idea of a “science” as an ensemble of true propositions. The two other specifications—antiessentialism and antifoundationalism— follow logically from this “antirepresentationalism.” The Platonic ques­tion, “Ti esti?” becomes off-limits because there is no possible response. There is no human nature nor any essence of art that individuals (humans or artworks) would exemplify. Neither the good, nor the true, nor the beautiful are essences; nor are the common genera of which species are particularizations, nor even the general species of which individuals are the expression. In short, postanalyticism must simultaneously abandon Platonic essences (the Good, the True, the Beautiful, inscribed in the heaven of Forms) as well as Enlightenment abstractions such as “man,” “nature,” and “morality,” which are only unconfessed echoes of the former. The atomized individual no longer embodies anything if this is a historic moment destined to disappear, an ideology proper to the contingent society in which he finds himself by chance, a behavior that he shares with his “neighbors,” not because it would be better than another but because it forms a part of the “standards of the moment.” At the heart of this radicalism, antifoundationalism goes without saying, even if it is sometimes difficult to determine precisely what Rorty includes in this category. A study of his most recent texts shows that it is initially and quite clearly a question of foundations in the sense of a supreme being (God), the

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basis of classical onto-theology. In this sense, antifoundationalism is a position that can be claimed by any Enlightenment philosopher, from Diderot to Kant. In the same vein, the foundation as ego, the supposed authority for the theory of knowledge, is likewise stigmatized as fiction. But beyond these classic critiques, which can be found just as easily in Hume, Fichte, Hegel, or Heidegger, the foundation also designates a point of view that would allow us to speak of science and of knowledge in general. Apparently targeted here are not only neo-Kantian theoreticians of knowledge like Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp but presumably also epistemologists like Karl Popper who indeed adopt a point of view considered to be, if not better, at the very least neutral, from which they can speak of “scientific knowledge.” Rorty’s antifoundationalism, thus defined, would connect with Quine’s, who denounced the very idea of a “theory of knowledge” in his famous article “Epistemology Naturalized.”32 Science must be done, not interpreted or explained from an exterior discourse. No reflexive point of view is possible, even in the minimal and first sense of “questions about.” The difference between this kind of antifoundationalism and Quine’s probably proceeds from the sources for their respective critiques of foundationalism: for Quine, critique of foundationalism is done in the name of nature (I shall return to this point); for Rorty, in the name of the course of history. Because no point of view can escape the limited, finite, situated perspective of a mortal individual, every position from which one could speak of science or knowledge, or morality, art, philosophy, etc., is, for Rorty, impossible. Antifoundationalism is thus not merely the critique of some traditional foundation (God, the ego, nature in a Spinozistic sense) but also the critique of every point of view that would be reflexive (as, for example, “to do the theory of such and such theory” or even “to say something about what we are saying”). This radical character makes it clear that the only viable solution would be to escape from philosophy. In this sense, Rorty is coherent, because antifoundationalism thus conceived leaves no room for an even minimal philosophical posture, even one understood as the possibility for reflection upon a given practice, usage, or discourse. Rorty goes very far in this direction because he recognizes that, despite his political engagement (he stands for democracy rather than dictatorship, courtesy rather than violence, conversation rather than force), no point of view permits him to justify this choice. “Pragmatism and Philosophy,” which introduces Consequences of Pragmatism, leaves no doubt on this question, even if numerous interpreters impute to him a less radical, but also less consistent position, one more in conformity with our belief in the intrinsic superiority of democracy.33 I

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shall cite a somewhat long passage, which nevertheless has the virtue of being unambiguous. With respect to post-philosophy, Rorty tells us that what is “most difficult to acknowledge” but which nonetheless must be admitted is that none of our attitudes, even political and practical ones, can be said to be better than any other: The most powerful reason for thinking that no such culture is possible is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places, constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognize it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.” This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre’s remark: “Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us.”34 Rorty concludes, after having insisted one more time on the kinship between James and Nietzsche, that this “tough language” shows us that there are “no criteria,” no “standards of rationality,” and no “rigorous argumentation” that allow the legitimation of a point of view, for example, democracy rather than fascism. The comparison with Sartre is instructive here, for, in the context of Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre brought up this point to say that history will be what human freedom makes it and that there is thus no historical or natural necessity beyond this supreme value—freedom. But Rorty does not retain this point at all (since such an attitude would oblige him to say that there is a supreme value)—instead, he maintains that we cannot even justify the superiority of our point of view when confronting others who would advocate dictatorship, because no standard of rationality can be said to be better than another. Thus we have on the one hand a relatively classic humanism (even if it is not essentialist), which does not wish to break with philosophy at all, and on the other, a stance that would like to be done with all philosophy, regardless of its content.

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The Nature of the Problem: Self-refutation Can we find in the position thus characterized anything equivalent to the “cuttlefish bone” in the painting The Ambassadors? Is it a form of painting that would say the opposite of what the artist paints and the observer first sees? Is there, in its design, a motif that would invalidate it from within? Definitely, and the argument against Rorty has been employed numerous times: self-refutation, destruction of the self by the self. As Hilary Putnam notes,35 and as Rorty himself recognizes,36 any position of total skepticism is selfrefuting. This self-refutation almost always takes the form of what François Récanati, following others, has termed performative or pragmatic contradiction. The most obvious example of this type of proposition is the statement “I am not speaking,” which must assume the opposite of what is being said in order to be able to say it (I must speak in order to say, “I am not speaking”). Put differently, the contradiction here is located between a discourse’s contents and its status: on this point, as Aristotle said against the Sophists, every direct challenge to the notion of truth lays itself open to this type of contradiction, because to deny the notion of truth is to posit at least the truth of the statement of denial, etc. Now, it is clear that Rorty’s position sinks into paradoxes of this type. Let’s delineate the most important: Rorty never ceases to argue, bringing in proofs, objecting to reasons, refuting some and criticizing others. Thus, he sees “contradictions” in one argument, “weaknesses” in another; he finds one thesis to be “hardly reasonable,” while another is “untenable.” One could easily multiply the examples of this kind of evaluation because all Rorty’s books are based on them. But, if no argument is really better than another, why argue? Why criticize a given position—say, that of recent analytic philosophy—if one claims that, in the final analysis, it is just one viewpoint among many? How can Rorty refute a given position, and defend his own with grounds, reasons, and arguments, if all arguments are the same, that is, if, in the end, none have value? We have here a good candidate to be considered as the epitome of a contradiction between the contents of a statement (“No argument is better than another.”) and a discursive practice (“I will make arguments to demonstrate this claim to you.”). Likewise, if we took up again the classic example of truth, Rorty’s discursive attitude can be well characterized as that of one who claims to say something true in opposition to another such position that he views as false. As soon as he writes, for example, “Pragmatism, by contrast, does not erect Science as an idol . . . It views science as one genre of literature,”37 he claims the

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rightness of this position. The rightness that he claims, moreover, presupposes a definition of literature. Rorty presupposes, finally, that this definition of literature is the right one and that his equation “science = literature” is correct. In brief, Rorty claims the truth of this statement, as he had claimed that his arguments for Dewey over Kant were correct. His practice of writing presupposes a particular stance: a claim to truth that the contents of his discourse denies. This “claim to” is intrinsic to his mode of writing. Certainly, there are many human activities (playing the piano, writing poetry, arranging a bouquet of flowers in the Japanese style, praying, etc.) that do not depend upon this sort of claim, but those are not what Rorty has chosen to do in his books. He falls back upon the activity that consists in justifying the value of his own point of view with the aid of arguments, and as a corollary, attempting to convince others that their view, if it contradicts the first, is false. Rorty claims and indeed states that, in his view, the Critique of Pure Reason is wrong, that analytic philosophy is a network of countertruths, that Putnam is wrong in objecting to his theses, that representation is a myth—a characterization as myth indeed that assumes an exterior viewpoint or perspective on this myth, from which this characterization is possible, etc. The third example that can be thus analyzed is found in the realm of the “good,” rather than the “true,” of desirable conduct rather than acceptable argumentation, and of practice rather than theory. Rorty unceasingly announces his desire for a new orientation, pragmatism, and exhorts his readers to contribute to its realization. The pragmatist “must,” he “refuses to accept”—in a word, “the pragmatist is urging that we do our best to stop having such intuitions.”38 But doesn’t “doing one’s best” to achieve a position assume, on the one hand, abandoning Rorty’s own39 radical historicism and, on the other, the assertion that there is a “better” (system, attitude, practice, or behavior), which ought to be established by one’s (intentional?) action? Briefly, as Putnam underlines, Rorty’s problem is that he tells us “that from a God’s-Eye View there is no God’s-Eye View,” thus bringing pragmatic contradiction, the gap between a statement’s contents and its status as an utterance,40 to its peak. This is the first significant insight that this examination of the theme of the end of philosophy has yielded. The “end of philosophy” engenders a paradoxical discursive attitude because it consists in affirming a matter while simultaneously denying it. Before I turn to see whether this performative contradiction can be found in other versions of the end of philosophy, I must first better establish the argument that Rorty’s thought as a whole falls under this contradiction.

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The Paradox of the Statement in Rorty’s “Antiphilosophy” Why do we need further verification, when the examples I’ve discussed (argument, truth, his practical posture) abundantly illustrate my argument? Because Rorty’s defenders deny it, indeed arguing, with the help of an argument well-known since Aristotle and since repeated against every skeptical challenge,41 that we cannot reject outright so many of Rorty’s analyses. As Putnam notes, many philosophers, confronted with the objection of selfrefutation, have a tendency to deny what they have maintained in stating “that they didn’t mean” exactly what they had written. In this respect, Putnam remarks that Rorty has tended to modify certain positions adopted in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that immediately fell under the force of this objection: “Well, his [Rorty’s] views are certainly much more nuanced than are typical Relativist views. He has also hanged them, often in ways I approve of. So I am not sure just what he is prepared to defend. But I shall take the risk of putting forward an amalgam of Rorty’s published views as the view I think he holds now.”42 So much rhetorical caution does not simply indicate a habit of charitable reading, nor the friendly esteem that these two thinkers share, but is rather a symptom of Rorty’s paradoxical discursive attitude. What is he “prepared to defend,” that is, to assert? Can we attribute a positive thesis (apart from the “antis” that we have teased out) to Rorty? And if we were to do so, wouldn’t he deny it? This stance (close to that of certain deconstructionists, like Derrida) means that readers as unfailing, attentive, and acute as Putnam are finally “not sure just what [Rorty] is prepared to defend.” So let’s examine those moments where Rorty obviously confronts the objection of a performative contradiction and tries to avoid it. Consider, for example, the following passage, where this desire is palpable: For the pragmatist,43 the only thing wrong with Nagel’s intuitions is that they are being used to legitimize a vocabulary (the Kantian vocabulary in morals, the Cartesian vocabulary in philosophy of mind) which the pragmatist thinks should be eradicated rather than reinforced. But his only argument for thinking that these intuitions and vocabularies should be eradicated is that the intellectual tradition to which they belong has not paid off, is more trouble than it is worth, has become an incubus. Nagel’s dogmatism of intuitions is no worse, or better, than the pragmatist’s inability to give noncircular arguments.44

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If we break this text down, we will note that we first encounter two kinds of assertions that are likely to “trap Rorty in the bind” of performative contradiction, since he declares that x “is false” and must be “eradicated.” Yet Rorty also claims that we speak of “truth” only by “courtesy or convention”;45 it follows that the property of “being false” ought never to be attributed to any view. Yet he does so here, and, more generally, consistently throughout his work. Moreover, knowing, as we have seen, that pragmatism supports historicism, it is difficult to understand how to explain the use of voluntarist vocabulary of action like “to eradicate.” Thus, Rorty here twice utters a selfcontradictory statement. Nevertheless, the second part of the passage reaffirms that it is only a question here of one position among others, “neither better nor worse” than Nagel’s, though the latter is declared “false,” and that the pragmatist can only produce a circular argument. This circularity can be understood in three ways if we adhere to the indications in Rorty’s texts. First, it could be a question of returning to the sole “criterion” of history. One would thus say, “Today we realize that the results of these intuitions are bad.” This is a position often adopted by Rorty, who, following Heidegger’s example, thinks that philosophy is at the origin of the West’s productions, both material (technology) and political (exterminating domination). There would be circularity here because we rely upon our immediate and historic present to assert that “this thing is bad.” But, if this is Rorty’s position, it contains the same contradiction as does (more obviously) the position that denies any relevance to the notion of truth. Indeed, Rorty assumes that his historical description is the best, and, in fact, that such a philosophical position “hasn’t produced any results.” How could he reply to an interlocutor who objected that philosophy hasn’t produced anything like what he rejects and that our situation is, if not absolutely good, at least better than serfdom in the Middle Ages or human sacrifice under the Aztecs? To maintain his position, Rorty must presuppose that his historical diagnosis is better than that of the happy Westerner who would see only progress (or democracy, or well-being, or equality, etc.) in the course of history. The circular argument thus assumes on the one hand a preliminary thesis and, on the other, an evaluation of this thesis as better than one that asserts the opposite. We are faced with the presupposition that there is indeed a “better argument,” which, however, Rorty rejects. This first interpretation thus does not allow Rorty to escape from a performative contradiction. Second, one could suppose here that Rorty stakes out a more coherent and classical sophistical position that would mean the following: “I only support

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what you support for my momentary personal interest, and if I feign to have arguments, it is so that others will come around to my position.” Rorty sometimes adopts this well-known claim of Gorgias’s, when, for example, he compares the philosopher to a lawyer who uses appropriate rhetoric to plead for his client, and thereby, his own interest.46 For a consistent sophist, the only way to justify this stance is to admit that one converses only to earn a living; in this frame, the discourse is only perlocutionary, that is, it aims to convince another to pay to defend a cause that he will have decided, out of self-interest, to make his own. But if Gorgias holds this view and is thus consistent, the same is not true for Rorty, whose alternatives go entirely against this defense of the basest private interest. It is needless to cite the numerous well-known sentences in which Rorty denounces the civilization of individual self-interest, its structuring according to the Darwinian metaphor of the survival of the fittest, as well as the West’s oppression of different civilizations, and other edifying sermons of the virtuous moralist.47 Here, too, Rorty cannot sustain his position all the way through and falls into a contradiction in the very precise sense that justification by use of the metaphor of the lawyer, defending any case at all, is invalidated by the contents of the oeuvre as a whole (the exhortation to virtue, the edification of the people, the occasional call for a revolution in viewpoint, etc.). Finally, a third interpretation of the circularity would consist in reading Rorty’s claim as follows: “I want to eradicate because I want to eradicate, I do not like Nagel’s position because I do not like this position.” This pure tautology—a singular and, to put it bluntly, desperate cry—resembles a bet. Rorty would say to us, “There is no justification for such a position if it is not a bet, either on the future (the contingent future will perhaps agree with me) or, more radically, a gratuitous bet (even if the future disagrees and perpetuates Nagel’s old intuitions, in any case, I will claim the opposite right now).” But if this is the correct interpretation, well, as Putnam remarks: Why should we expend our mental energy in convincing ourselves that we aren’t thinkers, that our thoughts aren’t really about anything, noumenal or phenomenal, that there is no sense in which any thought is right or wrong (including the thought that no thought is right or wrong) beyond being the verdict of the moment, and so on? This is a self-refuting enterprise if ever there was one!48 Thus, it is clear that the same contradiction is to be found at every level of Rorty’s thought, insurmountable in that the speaker’s position annuls the

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contents of the statement or the contents of the statement eliminate the possibility of its utterance. Rorty cannot but lapse into these paradoxes of speaking, cannot avoid this strange logical pathology that destroys a discourse from within, without needing external arguments to do so.49 The only possible way out would be a break with the enunciative contract, which would consist, for the author, in claiming that he does not “claim” what the reader believes he has claimed. To put this clearly, it would be a matter of declaring, “You think that I claim that this intuition (Nagel’s, Descartes’, etc.) is false, but in fact, I was playing another language game, for example, poetry or parody. You thought I was developing within a discursive register where I claimed to assert ‘this is false’ and to justify this assertion with arguments that I considered better than arguments that ‘this is true,’ but in fact, I was composing a song, recounting an epic poem, writing a novel, etc.” This position, which Rorty attributes to Derrida,50 is also implicated in these often noted pragmatic paradoxes. In Rorty’s eyes, texts like Of Grammatology or The Post Card are weavings of metaphors, interlaced tales that have status only as pure fiction. As he writes, “Derrida is coming to resemble Nietzsche less and less and Proust more and more. He is concerned less and less with the sublime and ineffable, and more and more with the beautiful, if fantastical, rearrangement of what he remembers.”51 Rorty’s radicality can be seen here. Indeed, in a single movement, one can understand that Derrida is more on the side of literature (Proust) than philosophy (Nietzsche), while in fact, no one is on the side of philosophy because Nietzsche comes under literature as much as Proust—the only difference is that Nietzsche’s prose refers rather to an aesthetic of the sublime, whereas Proust and Derrida remain within a problematic of the beautiful. Could Rorty’s interpretation of Derrida—of which it is difficult to say, as Jacques Bouveresse remarks, whether it is charitable or insulting52—be applied to Rorty’s works? If so, then in fact there is no longer anything left to challenge in his work, we can only consider it as a sort of phony novel, a huge enunciative farce, a fiction worthy of Borges in which philosophers as serious as Putnam, Habermas, or Donald Davidson have allowed themselves to be fooled into “acting as if ” it were about arguments to be discussed. Would Rorty allow such a treatment of his works? Would he accept an assessment of his books that would content itself with noting that they suggest so little of a strictly literary viewpoint, or of a masked irony, that they risk imprisonment in a private language? Like Putnam, I cannot be sure how Rorty would respond, but, whatever he would say, Rorty’s alternatives, like Derrida’s, are simple: either their initial intentions are not to produce a

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stylistic work (literature, poetry, a novel) but indeed to assert theses subject to deliberation and debate (philosophy, theory, an essay), in which case their positions contain a logical pathology that can be spotted at every level; or else they are writing literature and their works should be evaluated according to criteria if no longer of beauty (a much too metaphysical category) at least of the extent to which the result (writing Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) matches its stated aim (to produce a stylistic work). If the latter is the case, we can probably allow ourselves to state that the overall aesthetic results are less “successful” than Remembrance of Things Past, but this is of little significance with respect to this study, because if Rorty and Derrida take the second of these alternatives, then their proposition that “philosophy has reached its end” cannot in the least be considered. What are we to conclude at the end of this analysis of the first occurrence of the proposition asserting the end of philosophy? That the proposition is impossible to utter. It belongs to an ensemble of propositions whose hallmark is the performative contradiction “I am not speaking.” A good understanding and a detailed analysis of Rorty’s position53 are conclusive, inasmuch as his position constitutes, in its very radicality, the horizon for discourses that deny philosophy, and their theses’ ineluctable point of convergence. It will be said, however, that the challenge to philosophy is made not only in the name of a universal skepticism but also, and perhaps above all, as the result of a clearly positivist perspective that means to “dissolve” philosophy within a “hard” science. We must now examine this second variation on the theme of the end of philosophy, for, as Sandra Laugier notes, “the partisans of post-philosophy (like Rorty) and those of cognitivist philosophy (like Jerry Fodor) have many commonalities—for example, their denial, in a sense which I have yet to demonstrate, of language and philosophy.”54 Let’s now consider this denial, in the name of an already constituted science, of the philosophical discourse as an autonomous and specific practice.

The Dissolution of Philosophy in a Positive Science Positivism, Scientism, and Radical Scientism Contemporary positivism, if it is not to be immediately compared to its great developmental period (Hermann von Helmholtz’s era, in the mid-nineteenth century),55 appears in multiple forms: either by the assertion of a hard and

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pure logicism that, rejecting any questioning of itself, aims only to become a simple calculus detached from philosophy; or by a more classical positivism that is expressed in the development of the “cognitive sciences”56 or in the various programs of the different forms of naturalism57 as well as many aspects of the “philosophy of mind”;58 or even by the bias no longer of philosophy stricto sensu but of certain human sciences that, as Pierre Bourdieu notes, sometimes tend to oscillate between the most radical relativism and the most radical scientism.59 To which of these multiple versions of positivism should we give priority, to best guide our consideration of the nature of the discourses about the end of philosophy? We should first exclude those theses or theories that, even though positivist, do not at all call for the death of philosophy. Indeed, we should not delineate “positivism” and “antiphilosophy” as synonyms, as some Heideggerian philosophers do all too often. The history of philosophy shows that positivism is a possible philosophical option, and not its antithesis. Thus Hermann von Helmholtz, one of positivism’s founding fathers, proclaimed the autonomy of philosophy as a theory of knowledge; nothing was further from his intentions than to predict its end would result from the likely advancement of physiology (of which he was the greatest specialist of his age). Likewise, for Bertrand Russell, logic’s refinement was a bearer of progress in philosophy and not, as some of his followers too quickly misrepresented it, a harbinger of philosophy’s death. And again, cognitive sciences’ development today does not at all have to be thought of as necessarily incompatible with the need to maintain philosophy as an autonomous—that is, first—discipline. This is why, more than positivism in its multiple variations, its reduction to radical “scientism” is what we must examine. Indeed, in the general term “scientific position,” we must understand two movements: (1) the choice of any positive science (biology, physics, neurology, etc.) as a paradigm of truth and (2) the exclusion of all methods and types of validity apart from those employed in the chosen science. Thus, while a positivism like Helmholtz’s can recognize different fields and forms of truth that need not be reduced to the one or the other if they sometimes meet (for example, Fichte’s developments of the notion of an “image” and the physiological theory of perception),60 scientism means to delimit a single field, to advance a single type of truth, and to employ a single method, that of “this” constituted science. However, even if we consider only those “positivisms” that have become “scientisms,” this classification remains very broad and must be narrowed for at least two reasons. First of all, scientism’s character clearly depends upon

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the chosen science. If it is a question for the scientist of reducing everything to a single science that can explain the totality of phenomena, a large number of sciences still remain that could be candidates for supremacy: biology, of course, which has given rise to the various Darwinian or Lamarckian “evolutionary” doctrines; physics, too, which, despite these trends, remains the model of a science and which some neurophysiological theories would like to copy in advocating a total physicalism.61 To these classic natural sciences have recently been added what Herbert Simon calls the “sciences of the artificial,” sciences that study neither humanity (human sciences) nor nature (natural sciences) but human-made objects. Computer mechanisms here become the absolute model for understanding the ensemble of human behaviors. This computer paradigm, so dear to the cognitive sciences, can itself be developed in several more or less antagonistic alternatives (connectionism, total or partial modularity, etc.) Moreover, within these three62 “candidates for supremacy,” we still find a gradation of positions ranging from those most ontologically marked by scientism to others that are only methodologically scientistic. To clarify this nuance, emerging from a suppressed point of view but conclusive for the purposes of our study, let’s consider an example of this “gradation” at the heart of the “physicalist” paradigm. Otto Neurath, who introduced the term “physicalism,” Rudolf Carnap, who determined its program, and finally Herbert Feigl, who attempted to realize this program, strove for the same end: to make physics the language of reference for every scientific proposition and thus to describe all phenomena—including phenomena traditionally considered relevant to the “mental sciences”—in physical terms. Nevertheless, this common project is not necessarily accompanied by the same attitude toward philosophy. Thus, with this reduction of psychology to physics, Carnap clearly did not intend to declare all philosophy (which he strictly defined as logical “construction” or “structure”)63 useless. I can indicate two noncontradictory movements in Carnap’s first writings: First, there is a reduction of all phenomena to a physical language as “elimination”64 of metaphysics. Metaphysics rests on two major categorical confusions: the desire to ask questions that are meaningless because they are unanswerable (the immortality of the soul, the existence of God) and the development of a pure thought, without any empirical reference that would be likely to invalidate it. Second, and simultaneously, philosophy is constituted as a science, and this in the purest Cartesian—even Hegelian—spirit. Indeed, today we are beginning to see that the Aufbau adopted a manner of philosophizing that resembled the

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speculative philosophy that came from criticism. In this regard, Peter Galison shows in a 1996 study65 how much the American reception of the Aufbau tended to neutralize its radicality and to obscure its globalizing vision, in a word, to silently pass over the demand for a new form of knowledge and a new way of life—which the 1928 preface nevertheless forcefully expressed: We feel that there is an inner kinship between the attitude on which our philosophical work is founded and the intellectual attitude which presently manifests itself in entirely different walks of life; we feel this orientation in artistic movements, especially in architecture, and in movements which strive for meaningful forms of personal and collective life, of education, and of external organization in general. We feel all around us the same basic orientation, the same style of thinking and doing . . . It is an orientation which acknowledges the bonds that tie men together, but at the same time strives for free development of the individual. Our work is carried by the faith that this attitude will win the future.66 As Galison remarks, the prudent pragmatism of the American audience could only poorly handle ideas like this, whose coloring hints at a totally different tradition, for which philosophy is a summative discipline, whose spirit sustains scientific knowledge as well as artistic disciplines and allows individual blossoming as well as the harmonious development of the community. This all-embracing character of the Aufbau—which some, like Sir Karl Popper, haven’t hesitated to describe as absolutism—so undeniably links it to classic philosophy that his most astute commentators, like Anouk Barberousse, do not hesitate to read in the Aufbau the resurgence of a Hegelian ambition.67 Carnap sustains the inspiration of Kant as well as Hegel, in that with his idea of a universal and completed science, he attaches himself simultaneously to neo-Kantian projects and to the properly post-Kantian ambition that Hegel, following Fichte, called the “system of science.” To put this more precisely, Carnap, probably through Helmholtz and the philosophy that he studied at Jena under Bruno Bauch, participates as much in the figure of the Aufklärer as that of the Wissenschaftslehrer, inasmuch as it is true that the idea of a universal and unified science, capable of transforming the conditions of personal life as well as community life, takes up a tradition that, beyond neo-Kantianism, draws its roots from the first post-Kantianism. And therefore, the idea that he could put an end to philosophical activity through this work is totally foreign to Carnap. This is unquestionably not the case for Feigl, who, with

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the realized—and no longer merely desired—establishment of “physicalism,” strove to make all philosophy useless. In a significantly titled article, “Unity of Science and Unitary Science,”68 Feigl meant to defend what he called a “radical physicalism,” in opposition to “linguistic” or even “natural physicalism.” This “radical physicalism” would show that all scientific laws are derivable from elementary physical laws and that every thought is reducible to a physical phenomenon. To verify this second point, Feigl will use all the resources of neurophysiology. But to reduce the entirety of the mental sphere to physical laws, by attributing to each mental property a neurological predicate, is clearly to pass from an epistemological position—according to which each proposition must, in the final analysis, be able to be judged by empirical elements—to a strong ontological thesis, according to which all phenomena are only physical states that follow physical laws. It is this strong ontological thesis that Pierre Jacob, in his analysis of Feigl’s view, terms “reductionist materialism.”69 It is no longer a question of aiming, through philosophy, at a work of clarification of complex concepts, nor of claiming to say what knowledge in general must be (for example, “clear,” and “judged by experience”), but rather of developing the neurosciences, the only ones likely to address the whole of reality (nature as well as humanity). In a word, if Carnap foresaw the elimination of metaphysics because it was a matter, for him, of “bad philosophy,” for Feigl, the project seems more to resemble a dissolution of all philosophy in an exact science, in this case, neurophysiology. In this sense, his scientism is more radical than Carnap’s. It is this very movement to dissolve philosophy within an exact science that we must investigate first of all. To do so, I have chosen to examine attempts to reduce it to biology rather than the two other paradigms I’ve mentioned, for two reasons: first, because physicalism, which we have just discussed, seems, if we accept the most widely held opinions,70 to have failed in its program, or, to put it more cautiously, physicalism is not currently the program best financed by wealthy American industry and is therefore the least likely to offer new results. Subsequently, because we will later return to the “sciences of the artificial,” we shall study one of its greatest representatives, Herbert Simon.

Radical Scientism in Biology To determine the inference or type of reasoning that leads to the dissolution of an intellectual practice in another requires that we break down the concrete

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movement by which biological concepts tend to invade all the “human sciences.” But, even if there are many who use biology in this way, it seems that the biologist model is most common and most fruitful in economics. Various “evolutionary” doctrines have thus been proposed recently to explain the organization of the sphere of exchange.71 Two extremes can be identified in this evolutionary approach: at one extreme, the biological paradigm is used as a fruitful metaphor; at the other, it is an ontologically grounded primary model that excludes all others. Hence, authors like Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter attempt to use genetics to understand organizational routines, that is, the procedures that businesses employ to acquire and exploit efficiencies (and by extension, the procedures used by individuals in these firms).72 They thus analyze routines—as behaviors produced by the firm—as if they were the firm’s genes, and conceptualize the market as the space of selection among firms. The desire to use biology as the paradigm is clear here—and is immediately attested by their use of the term “evolutionary”73—since two core biological concepts, genetics and natural selection, are employed. Nevertheless, biology is invoked only as a metaphor. So the authors clarify: We are pleased to exploit any idea from biology that seems helpful in the understanding of economic problems, but we are equally prepared . . . to modify accepted biological theories radically in the interest of getting better economic theory . . . We also make no effort to base our theory on a view of human nature as the product of biological evolution, although we consider recent work in the direction to be a promising departure from the traditional conception of Economic Man.74 If we ask what a metaphor’s status is within a scientific structure, the fact nevertheless remains that this literary attitude75 does not put other disciplines at risk because, in these authors’ minds, biology is only a heuristic method, fruitful for the moment but not necessarily exclusive of other analyses if it is really used as an analogy. At the opposite end of the spectrum from this position that employs a scientific paradigm as a convenient metaphor, we find the idea of biology as a primary, ontologically grounded, model. Geoffrey Hodgson vehemently objects to their metaphorical use of biology. It is useful to follow the development of this reasoning to understand how it leads to an explicit dissolution of the various facets of human reflection in an established science. Hodgson describes his theory of “Universal Darwinism” as resting upon the three concepts of variety, inheritance, and selection. Each of

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these concepts has an ontological equivalent in a social or human science, in this case, economics: Underneath the very real differences of character and mechanism, biological evolution and economic evolution might have types of process or structure in common, when considered at a sufficiently general level of abstraction. At this level, we are not addressing mere analogy. We are considering a degree of identity in reality.76 Thus, routines and genes, once they are taken at a sufficiently abstract level, can be considered as concepts possessing the characteristics of inheritance (storage and transmission). “At least at that abstract level, inheritance is part of both underlying ontologies.”77 Similarly, the mechanisms of selection, once transposed into the domains of human exchange, are not analogies but well and truly realities: “Some firms have the greater potential to survive than others. It is the same with natural organisms. In looking to biology, Nelson and Winter did not merely make useful analogies.”78 When we trace the author’s steps, we see an extension of biological concepts to another domain. This extension is not conceived of as a tool but as a transfer. The mechanisms of natural selection are the same in both cases. We are thus witnessing the subsumption of one science into another, in this case, economics into biology. But Hodgson goes one step further, applying these concepts not only simply to firms and the marketplace but also to individuals and in general to all human activity. Thus, in his view, individuals’ habits79—encompassing habits of behavior as well as of thought—are a social equivalent to their biological genes. In sum, “the crucial point is that all action and deliberation depend on prior habits that we acquire during our individual development.”80 Two fundamental claims overlap here: first of all, the movement from the economic sphere (theory of firms) to the individual (theory of habits) and second, the desire to explain the whole of human activity in terms of this theory; it is no longer simply a question of a specific kind of behavior (for example, the calculation of interests in an exchange of material goods) but rather of all behavior, including our ways of thinking. Hodgson thus speaks of deliberation and reason as reducible to a series of habits. Because “habits” (already reduced to the concepts of inheritance and selection) are the key to understanding “deliberation and reason,” it follows that deliberation and reason are habits, and, by transitivity, they can be understood in terms of inheritance and selection. In a word, Hodgson’s thesis is that humanity (as

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the set of possible behaviors) can be understood only through the concepts of inheritance and selection. The dissolution of all the human sciences in biology—and, later, the advent of a single science as capable of explaining all human reality—is manifest here. But what should we conclude from this examination? First, if a movement were to be rejected by many philosophers as metaphysical, Hodgson’s project is surely an example of such a movement. To reduce all phenomena to one or two constants and to a single law (which Hodgson calls “universal Darwinism”) thus seems, today, to be the work of “scientists” (economists, biologists) more than philosophers. Would metaphysics, in the sense that was once decried, take refuge with the supporters of the strictest scientism? This point (which isn’t an argument in itself) notwithstanding, we should note that in fine (that is, at a very high level of abstraction), Hodgson must face the problem of the possibility of his own discourse. In effect, given what Hodgson tells us about rationality, must we conclude that Hodgson’s discourse can be explained in the same terms? If so, Hodgson is saying that his thesis x is the product of habits of thought, themselves dependent upon an institutional context, itself a product of natural selection. If he applies the contents of his discourse on rationality to his own rational discourse, then he must say that his thesis is neither true nor universal but is a moment in the history of natural selection. Thus, he has relativized himself—he states at the same time and in the same way that “my thesis is true and is not—unlike Nelson and Winter’s—a metaphor or an analogy,” and “my thesis as a snapshot of a moment in the evolution of the species” could change tomorrow. And yet this is what he objected to in Nelson and Winter’s stance, according to which if a better model is discovered tomorrow, they will adopt it, thus making biological concepts into simple tools, not ontological theses. If Hodgson does not want to fall under the force of this argument (applying what he says about human rationality to his own rationality as a scientific researcher), he is compelled to stipulate that there is an exception to his thesis, namely his own discourse. But that, too, invalidates his general thesis. So what should we conclude from this example of an attempt to annex the totality of thought within a single natural science? First, that this position is no more viable than Rorty’s radical skepticism, and that it paradoxically exposes itself to the same danger of self-refutation. Next, that the dissolution of philosophy, if that is what was wished, has not at all been accomplished. Finally, that the announcement of philosophy’s death seems, once again, to be a bit premature.

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This troubling convergence between the most widely proclaimed scientism and the most commonly espoused skepticism is an important accomplishment of my examination, because it shows that, despite these positions’ apparent diversity, the same contradiction emerges—a contradiction that prevents us from taking seriously the proposition that philosophy has come to its end. But I probably should better specify the conclusions to be drawn from this analysis of Hodgson. It is not at all a matter of claiming that the concepts of “genes” and “natural selection” are not pertinent concepts in themselves. Neither Darwin nor any particular aspect of his doctrine is under dispute, only the desire to reduce the entirety of the world, human behaviors and human practices, to the core concepts of a single science. Hodgson’s error here rests in a categorical confusion or a confusion of levels of discourse. To better clarify this essential point for my broader analysis, I should illustrate this confusion of levels with another example, something other than this form of evolutionism in economics. So, it is more and more common today to hear a given biological thesis x directly compared either to “philosophy” itself or to whole sections of philosophy, or to an entire tradition—Western philosophy, idealism, Cartesian philosophy, etc. But one can only be surprised by the mass of clichés that certain discourses adopt to show the supposed effects of the contents of biological science or neurophysiology on philosophy. As an example, let’s look at a simple thesis of current biology. Consider the following claim: “It is evident, and we can no longer reasonably doubt, that these cognitive processes [‘perception, purposive action, conceptual organization, reasoning, learning, communication, and language are all encompassed by the concept of cognition’] are represented and embodied in the nervous system; they are, in the final analysis, so many manifestations and expressions of the brain’s functioning.”81 By what erroneous presumption, by what confusion of levels of discourse, was this simple thesis able to be promoted, by some, to the status of invalidation of the philosophical tradition or even some part of philosophy (for example, the famous Cartesian dualism)? The first presupposition, and the first cliché, consists in believing that it’s a question here of a univocal and perfectly determined biological thesis that arises “fully armed” against “philosophy” or some philosophical claim. But the claim that a cerebral process corresponds to a cognitive process is, even in biology, susceptible to multiple interpretations. Thus, staying only within what they call “neurologism,”82 Denis Fisette and Pierre Poirier distinguish three radically different forms: “reductivist neurologism,” “nonreductivist

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neurologism,” and “eliminativist neurologism.” Furthermore, beyond these three wide currents, we can note, as has Jean Delacour, for example, that on the one hand nothing today allows us to say that either a psychic state or a neurobiological phenomenon is the cause of the other; on the other hand, for some biologists, the parallelism is not necessarily total. Thus Delacour claims that it is doubtful that every state of the nervous system has a psychic equivalent. Here Delacour mentions “the case of action potentials, the capture of glucose, reactions of the oxidizing metabolism”;83 in the inverse case, certain psychic states seem to him to be “purely cultural” (without neurobiological equivalents). The bidirectional relation thus cannot currently be asserted—this is why Delacour denies that it is a relation of complete reciprocity. Against what he calls “reductionism” or “naive causalism,” he advocates a moderate form of parallelism.84 I am the last person in the world to judge whether this thesis is valid or not. My point is only to show that this is not a univocal and perfectly determined biological thesis that could be compared without further ado to “philosophy” in its entirety. And therein lies the second cliché, inversely symmetrical to the first, that we must find in these booming pronouncements a biological thesis x that would invalidate the “entire” philosophical tradition. Indeed, neither Spinoza, who advocated a strict parallelism, nor Diderot,85 who conceived a material unity continuously running without resolution from the inert to the living, nor Kant and all his followers, who repudiated the question of dualism between body and soul, would have been concerned by the biological thesis I’ve examined. It is not even certain that it would have troubled Descartes himself, but I will come back to this point later. For the moment, let’s simply underscore the obvious fact: one can’t thus oppose one discipline to another; at the very most, one could establish that such a thesis x—reductionist neurologism, for example—gets nearer to a given idea y of Diderot’s than does theme z privileged by Descartes. Thus we can say that the metaphor of the musical instrument,86 which Diderot loved to use to portray cerebral activity, seems to have more in common with a given contemporary neurological alternative than with the homuncular87 conception of cerebral functioning as understood by Descartes or, later, by many scientists who were not philosophers, like Franz Joseph Gall or Paul Pierre Broca. Such a claim does not in itself legitimate the displacement of philosophy by biology. Just as such a biological thesis is not univocal, neither is the philosophical tradition. Furthermore, and this is the third cliché or prejudice, there are many defenders of this dissolution of philosophy in an exact science (notably

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among the partisans of different forms of “eliminativism”88—whether they be behaviorists, neurologists, or functionalists) who always resort to the same type of legitimation, scientism’s trademark, namely, “the future will show that we are correct.” As Fisette and Poirier note, these defenders have to “be met with the objection of the burden of proof ”89 and as “no actual or imaginable science seems able to take up the challenge”90 that they have issued, they must show that the future will prove them correct. But, if inference from the observed past poses epistemological problems, what are we to say of inferences made from an ideal future, in the form “In the future, all xs will be y”! In brief, scientists today use an argument that they would vehemently reject in any novice theologian who would claim that “our soul is immortal, and you will have the proof in the future (i.e., after death).” It isn’t possible to offer a proof by the future, or to make a line of reasoning from the future, on an “installment plan” for a subsequent observation. We don’t have to give credit to moralizing from the possible, nor need we accept someone’s promise as a valid proof. To these scientific gamblers, we can say that the claim that “philosophy is alive and well and will continue to be so in the future” is just as credible and as legitimate as its opposite, maintained by these scientists, namely, that “as time goes by, philosophy will be dissolved in a natural science.” At the end of this examination, it becomes very clear that this attempt to annex one discipline by another rests upon a category mistake. That humans today are perceptibly different in behavior than at the beginning of prehistory, that the species that still live are the ones least poorly adapted to their environments—these are beliefs that we can accept as plausible, even obvious,91 without for all that drawing the conclusion that philosophy is dead as an autonomous, distinct, and first discipline. These arguments invite us to reevaluate, that is, to critique, the program of the “naturalization” of philosophy, the last major trend of post-philosophy and the paradoxical synthesis of the first two moments, skepticism and scientism.

Naturalism as a Paradoxical Synthesis The True “Nature” of “Naturalism” As everyone knows, programs of naturalization of this or that domain, or the desperate search for the natural foundations of this or that aspect of our psychological, social, or cultural life, are rather fashionable at the

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moment, and not only in certain areas of analytic philosophy. Probably a week doesn’t go by without a scientist or a philosopher proposing to naturalize something: ontology, intentionality, meaning, epistemology, ethics, the normative . . .92 This fad is so strong that even when certain authors adopt a position relatively distant from strict naturalism, they nevertheless feel the need to describe it as “moderated naturalism,” all this happening as if it were not possible today to reasonably situate oneself outside of or without comparison to naturalism.93 But in fact, what really is this “naturalism” to which the entire world today is coming round? Following Ruwen Ogien, we can distinguish three great forms of naturalism: ontological naturalism, epistemological naturalism, and anthropological naturalism. Ontological naturalism proposes to eliminate all terms of philosophy (or, Ogien tells us, “of psychology, ethics, or everyday sociology”) in favor of “other terms that make reference to objects or to observable physical properties.”94 Naturalism in the epistemological sense is more liberal. Broadly speaking, naturalization boils down to replacing explanations that make appeal to reasons with causal or functional explanations. This program applies in particular to the social or human sciences. “To naturalize” in the epistemological sense, in these domains, most often consists of proposing “evolutionary” types of hypotheses to explain the emergence and the persistence of certain beliefs or institutions (religion, the family, etc.).95 Finally, Ogien demarks a third category, anthropological naturalism. “ ‘To naturalize’ in this sense means making a fairly general assertion, that nothing that we do or think can go beyond what we are capable of doing or thinking, given what we are.”96 As with the various evolutionisms in economics, we must enact a selection process within these three ways of speaking of naturalism. In my sense, only ontological naturalism, and perhaps the maximal form of epistemological naturalism, fall within the category of “strict naturalism.” By “strict naturalism,” I mean naturalism as it was defined by Quine in his 1969 article “Epistemology Naturalized,” which is indissociable from the project of the dissolution of philosophy in a natural science (psychophysiology or psychology itself reduced to physical properties). This idea of a “merging” or a “rubbing out of boundaries”97 in favor of the natural sciences, this concern

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to make philosophy into “a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science,”98 constitutes the condition sine qua non of naturalism, which distinguishes it from any other stance—and this is why neither “anthropological naturalism” nor certain forms of epistemological naturalism seem to me to be an integral part of this naturalism. On that point, the definition that Ogien gives of anthropological naturalism is so broad that it could encompass, in the final analysis, just about any project. Ogien clarifies that in this particular case, he has Hume in mind much more than contemporary naturalist projects, but in truth, it could apply to every other philosopher. To see this, we need only ask who would accept the inverse of this proposition, which states that “nothing that we can do or think can go beyond what we are capable of doing or thinking, given what we are”? Aristotle? Kant? Descartes? Who could deny this apparent tautology? Hence, what is the meaning of a category that is liable to include everyone, simply because no one would accept the contrary of its defining proposition? Likewise, certain epistemological naturalisms are “minimalist” in this sense, in that they can with little difficulty describe all the great figures of the philosophical tradition. Who, for example, among Kant, Descartes, Leibniz, etc., would deny that philosophical inquiry ought to be concerned with various sciences? How, consequently, can one (with Fisette and Poirier) define as “moderated naturalism” the view that claims science and philosophy can have “mutual influence” “in certain areas”? Even Descartes (a quasi-pathological obsession99 of contemporary American naturalists) would have been the first to say so. Could we characterize naturalism by noting that it is a question of an “immanent position, refusing any transcendent (or transcendental) argument and every arrogant claim for philosophy”?100 But even if we were to accept the dual substitution—on the one hand that “transcendent” = “transcendental” and on the other that these two categories = a moral wrong, namely, “arrogance”—who doesn’t see that Hegel, who had always claimed immanence, would fall into the category thus defined? This is why it seems to me that we are better to return to Quine’s usage of the term, since he initiated it, and understand by “naturalization” any position that strives to reduce all other disciplines to a natural science. Fisette and Poirier finally acknowledge that the reductive postulate is inherent in the project of naturalization: “Philosophical naturalism refers to an epistemological position that seeks to explain thought in the terms of a natural science like psychology, biology, or even physics.”101 With this clarified, how could we better define this Quinean naturalism, synonymous with the reduction of philosophy to a natural science?

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Quine’s Scientism In order, as he hoped, to make epistemology “[fall] into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science,”102 Quine proposed a program that can be broken down into different steps: 1.

Define a criterion of scientism on the basis of a constituted science. As Fisette and Poirier note, it is a question for Quine of borrowing from science “[his] conceptual apparatus (the only rigorous typology being scientific typology), [his] predictive apparatus . . . , and [his] apparatus of justification.”103 2. Show that a given discipline, or domain of study, does not implement the criterion of scientism defined in step 1. Thus the discipline that studies the phenomena of intentionality (or, if you prefer, phenomenology) does not meet this criterion. It follows that this discipline should disappear. To put it more concretely, for Quine, phenomenological statements but also psychological statements, like certain ordinary (dispositional, modal) sentences, common statements like “I believe that . . . ,” “I desire,” etc., are not extensional “and thus do not satisfy the criterion of scientism defined by extensionality.” As Fisette and Poirier write, these statements must thus “be eliminated from a well-regulated scientific practice.”104 3. Reduce every statement of a domain considered to be nonscientific (here, for example, phenomenology) to a statement of the chosen science. Quine establishes this program by setting up a strict behaviorism that could be defined as the attempt to reduce “mental” phenomena (like “believing” or “learning a language” or “feeling pain”) as responses conditioned by identifiable stimuli in our environment. In Word and Object, Quine developed this behaviorist approach to meaning, founded on the theory of conditioning (stimulus meaning).105 His program is thus very simple: reduce each psychic phenomenon to a behavior and each behavior to a prior action of the environment. Naturalization means that all the old philosophical problems will be relegated to psychology, which is not the study of autonomous “mental states” but the recording of behaviors, themselves physiological reactions to physical phenomena. Philosophy is reduced to psychology, and psychology to physiology. This is why, Quine tells us,

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Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input—certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance—and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history.106 Action/reaction—such are the fundamental categories, in Quine’s eyes, for understanding humanity and human history. This radical scientism is subject to a number of objections. We could reject the excessive rigorousness of Quine’s criterion of scientificity, noting that certain statements of contemporary physics cannot even meet it. Or we could maintain that the burden of proof has been postponed to a distant future, a future even more problematic today as so many forces are converging to invalidate the behaviorist theory of meaning.107 Thus many now speak of the failure of behaviorism. But these are not the arguments that I will emphasize; rather, I will examine Quine’s very strange enunciative posture. How, indeed, are we to understand and articulate this proclaimed scientism with his stated skepticism?

A Difficult Reconciliation Doubtless it will be retorted that skepticism is not necessarily incompatible with a certain form of positivism. Didn’t Hume write, at the end of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that we must throw into the fire those books that did not follow Newton’s experimental method,108 thus inaugurating the peaceful cohabitation of naturalist positivism and skepticism? Isn’t Quine simply Hume’s heir in hoping to understand positivism under the auspices of skepticism? It will be easiest to answer this question in two steps. 1. It is not obvious that Hume was the first thinker of “the end of philosophy,” to take up the significant title that Yves Michaud gave him. To show why not, we could note that Hume’s discourse on the end of a discipline that he practiced without cease would sometimes itself be self-refuting—but I will not undertake this kind of argumentation, as Karl-Otto Apel has done, showing the extent to which self-refutation is a trait of every doctrine inherited from Hume and a characteristic of current Anglo-Saxon philosophy.109

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2. Quine’s scientism is much stricter than was Hume’s positivism. It doesn’t appear that Hume could have reduced a “value,” such as belief in the superiority of communication over violence, to a “fact,” namely the appropriate reaction to a physical stimulus, because values cannot be reduced to facts, being to necessity, norms to what is. But on this point it seems that Quine would go much further than the Scottish philosopher in affirming that the mental should be reduced to the physical. Must the question, “How should we think and act?” be considered as identical and reducible to the different question, “How do we think and act?”? Quine’s answer is certainly affirmative; for Hume, the response is less clear. In a word, we shouldn’t summon Hume to defend all Quine’s claims. We thus ought to consider Quine in his own right, and then, as Hilary Putnam observes, “It is reconciling what Quine says here with what Quine says elsewhere that is difficult and confusing.”110 So let us now examine the tension—even contradiction—within Quinean naturalism. By naturalism, Quine means to reject the foundationalism that is traditionally attributed to Descartes’ project of first philosophy but that, in my view, defines every classical “philosophical” endeavor. Indeed, this foundationalism presents itself as the project that aims to determine which conditions must be met by a belief (proposition, idea, judgment, statement, etc.) in order to be accepted as true knowledge. But to specify a criterion of scientism by means of a stipulation of extensionality, and to determine on that basis that “psychological statements are not extensional and consequently will not meet the criterion of scientism,”111 is definitely to determine what conditions a proposition must meet to be accepted as true knowledge (for example, a sentence will be such if it is extensional). Whether this criterion is borrowed from an empirical science rather than an a priori system does not at all change the move’s structure—to determine what will be accepted as true knowledge and to differentiate it from what will be rejected as false (that is to say, “mythological,” or “metaphysical,” or even “Cartesian,” “foundationalist,” etc.). It follows that Quine is unable to avoid precisely what he rejects. It is as if his philosophical practice invalidates what he has said thereby. The paradoxical structure of Quine’s ultimate view can also be shown in another way, following, for example, Putnam’s analysis. Thus, Putnam tells us, if we accept the following sentence as an acceptable summary of Quine’s ultimate view: A statement is rightly assertible (true in all models) just in case it is a theorem of the relevant “finite formulation”, and that formulation

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is a “tight fit” over the appropriate set of stimulus-true observation conditionals.112 then This statement, like most philosophical statements, does not imply any observation conditionals, either by itself or in conjunction with physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Whether we say that some statements which are undecidable in the system are really rightly assertible or deny it does not have any effects (that one can foresee) on prediction. Thus, this statement cannot itself be rightly assertible. In short, this reconstruction of Quine’s positivism makes it self-refuting. The difficulty, which is faced by all versions of positivism, is that positivist exclusion principles are always self-referentially inconsistent. In short, positivism produced a conception of rationality so narrow as to exclude the very activity of producing that conception . . . The problem is especially sharp for Quine, because of his explicit rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, his rejection of a special status for philosophy, etc.113 One might object to Putnam’s argument that Quine is skeptical in order to relativize his positivism, that he understands his naturalism in the light of skepticism. In short, if he specifies a condition for deciding between what is true knowledge and what isn’t, then, to put it most charitably, in the end that condition can be changed and is thus not unconditioned. Let’s consider this last aspect of the possible defense of Quine. Quine would say, in fact, that a given statement is true “for the moment,” for him because he maintains it, but at a later stage of his life, or of the evolution of society, or even of the species’ evolution, this statement will be false. On this point, he writes, in one of his last works, “a sentence is analytic if the native speaker learns to assent to it in learning one of its words.”114 Thus, “in learning our language, we each learn to accept certain sentences straightaway as true.”115 Quine returns to the conventionalism peculiar to skepticism that we have examined at length in Rorty. But Quine is thereby subject to the same objections as skepticism. Indeed, what is the status of this assertion that today’s truth is tomorrow’s error? A convention? Should we say that this proposition (“today’s truth, tomorrow’s error”) appears true to us today because we are at a certain moment in the evolution of

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the species? At every stage of the proof, in applying itself to itself, the proposition is self-refuting. We find here a structure analogous to what we discovered in Rorty’s radical historicism; if everything that depends upon history can change, we cannot say why this proposition (“everything depends upon history”) should be accepted as true or even as more likely than its exact opposite. In brief, either the proposition is self-refuting or it has no way to refute the claim that its contrary is preferable. We can no longer argue for the value of our point of view if we make it dependent upon the most complete contingency. Quine’s system leads, in the final analysis, to these forms of contradiction. Even those commentators least likely to be suspected of not defending the American philosopher’s point of view end by identifying the performative contradiction that strains the entire system.116 On this point, Sandra Laugier writes at the end of L’anthropologie logique de Quine, a book entirely dedicated to showing the coherence of Quine’s system, “however, there is, ultimately, a contradiction. Not between one thesis and another of Quine’s system, but between Quine’s conception of what philosophy ought to be and his philosophical practice.”117 This examination of Quine’s thought shows that the system contains a tension between a proposition’s status and its contents—which we already saw in Rorty. This is a major discovery for my analysis, because it reveals more and more clearly a common characteristic of discourses claiming the end of philosophy. Whether this end is proclaimed in the name of skepticism or in the name of its apparent contrary, scientism, this assertion is always marred by the same peculiarity—its impossibility of being said! And so I am now able to draw out the conclusions of this first discourse that explicitly calls for the end of philosophy.

Conclusions: Self-refutation and Oscillation Between Scientism and Skepticism The principal lesson of my analysis is the following: the end of philosophy can neither be self-proclaimed nor self-diagnosed in a coherent manner. Each of the positions I’ve considered rests upon the impossibility of asserting its contents without falling into a performative contradiction. The philosophers that I have discussed find themselves in a quite strange situation— they have spent years and years working in a discipline, with the singular goal of demonstrating its worthlessness or its impossibility. Philosophy is

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worthless—so claims scientism—because neurobiology (or any “hard” science) will cut through the old, now futile, philosophical questions. (This is a stance that, despite its declared antifoundationalism, draws upon a foundation that is simultaneously most traditional and most radical—nature. We think x and y, since we are mammalian and bipedal, that is “by nature.”) Philosophy is impossible—so claims skepticism and relativism—because of their conception of the philosophical discourse’s intrinsic impotency. Philosophy is impossible—finally, according to deconstruction,118 which would “overcome” the Western philosophical tradition to reach its completion. Theirs is thus the strange situation of a discipline that apparently has no other end but to articulate its own impossibility, and in order to do so, sinks into a unique practice, self-refutation. We have seen how this self-refutation always takes the form of what François Récanati, following others, has called a performative or pragmatic contradiction, illustrated by statements like “I am not speaking,” which in order to be spoken must always presuppose the inverse of what is said. Karl-Otto Apel has suggested that this pragmatic paradox weighs on all contemporary analytic philosophy, and he has argued that it has never taken the trouble to address this contradiction. Without taking up this claim in its entirety, I have, at least, shown that, on a very particular point—namely, the theme of the end of philosophy—performative contradiction is omnipresent and radical. It follows that this proposition that philosophy has reached its end cannot be maintained in a consistent manner.119 Beyond this lesson about the existence and the nature of this contradiction at the heart of these declarations of the end of philosophy, the preceding analyses yield a second insight: that the most radical skepticism and the most thoroughgoing scientism stand in surprising proximity. I have shown that the gap here between strict scientism and radical relativism is very narrow. What’s more, the two extremes seem not only to follow in temporal succession but also necessarily to give rise to each other, as is attested by the fact that both skepticism and positivism, in all the cases we’ve considered, proceed from one and the same text. Thus Rorty makes reference, as do Paul and Patricia Churchland, to Quine; and all three seem empowered to do so. Indeed, if we consider Quine’s thesis that “ ‘Save logical truth’ is conventional in character because of the indeterminacy of translation,”120 then Rorty is clearly right to count Quine among the fathers of contemporary skepticism. On the other hand, if we consider Quine’s desire to imagine a “naturalized epistemology,” by which he means to dissolve philosophy in another sci-

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ence,121 then we’re compelled to recognize that that is the consistent project of the most traditional scientism, encompassing the Churchlands’ naturalist program. This congruence—between scientism, for which truth (that of a given “hard” science) is real, and the idea that truth, as Rorty puts it, is only a “compliment paid to successful normal discourse”122—is surprising, and we will see in the following chapters whether it should be considered as a simple quirk of Quine’s successors, or whether, on the contrary, it is located within any discourse that asserts—in whatever manner—the death of philosophy. This dual insight is analogous to the “cuttlefish bone” in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, the unusual element that comes to upset the meaning and general order of the whole. This dual insight makes our question even more urgent: given philosophy’s status today, must we unavoidably accept either self-refutation (which effectively renders the discipline useless) or abandon philosophizing (turning instead to the “hard” sciences)? Is the idea of philosophy as a rigorous and autonomous science123—an idea proclaimed by Aristotle and Fichte, as well as Hegel and, later, Husserl—is this idea untenable now, and must we relegate it to the dustbin of obsolete disciplines? What is it about this claim (Stanley Cavell calls it “arrogance”124) on philosophy’s behalf that the contemporary world would prefer self-destruction or self-refutation to philosophy? To answer these questions, we will have to take our analyses even further. Up to now, we have examined the most radical denials of philosophy—the “antiphilosophy” that Rorty would seek and those forms of scientism that originate in the naturalist claim that philosophy has become a “chapter of natural science.” Now we must examine philosophies in which this theme is less directly expressed, albeit quite perceptible. To best show its excesses, we will need to look at all the guises or variations in which this theme of “death” appears. And yet I noted in the introduction that this theme of philosophy’s end or exhaustion is just as visible in Austin and his successors as in Heidegger and his disciples. And it is not the least paradoxical to observe how this thesis hovers above the paradigmatic disputes, as if beyond the strident opposition that has left its mark on the philosophies of the twentieth century, a single motif that unites them in the end. This is why I won’t hesitate to challenge old habits, to refuse to accept dichotomies, and to disregard given boundaries in encompassing two different ways of pronouncing the end of philosophy in a single chapter. It is clearly not a question of proposing a synthesis—both impossible and ridiculous—of the two paradigms, but rather of following a single theme—the end of philosophy—through first its pragmatic and then

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its phenomenological variations. I will show how, regardless of whether one is Continental or analytic, the end of philosophy is articulated in very similar, quasi-identical terms. In contrast to the first chapter, where we saw an aspiration to “post-” or “antiphilosophy” as such, we shall see that the assertions are less stark, not as uncompromising or demanding as Rorty’s or Quine’s radical positions. Nevertheless, they just as clearly declare that philosophy is completed or exhausted, in that other practices (scientific or poetic, even religious) are supposed to take its place. We must analyze this funerary eulogy in the analytic paradigm, and then in current Continental philosophy, that is, in a certain type of contemporary phenomenology.

2



“Saying and the Said”: Two Paradigms for the Same Subject

Opposition or Overlap of Paradigms? That two traditions as opposed as the Continental and analytic traditions could thus be encompassed within a single thematic calls for a more nuanced justification than a simple assertion. Different reasons undergird this grouping, reasons whose full force won’t be able to appear until my analysis has been completed. As I showed earlier in Critique de la représentation,1 these two philosophical currents—both the most widely practiced and the most different in style— have as a common horizon a questioning of the concept of representation. But even if these two great movements of contemporary philosophy are both structured around this critique, they do not give it the same significance. Indeed, for that part of contemporary philosophy that emerges from phenomenology, to critique representation is to denounce objectivizing, classically scientific, knowledge’s claim to take account of all aspects of the world or a thing. The thing, far from being reducible to its representation, would

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remain an excess with respect to representation. Catherine Chalier adopts this perspective when, commenting on Emmanuel Levinas, she asks, “How are we to resolve the paradox—that is, contradiction— . . . between finite, mortal humanity and an infinite God; between the visible, its splendor and its intimate closeness, and the invisible that actually shatters its limits, decries the violence of its light and drives us to despair of security in its view?”2 To interrogate the thing’s irreducible excess with respect to its representation, to reject thinking’s pretentions to make visible what is not (the other, the infinite, God, being, etc.)—this is the guiding intention that animates this form of the critique of representation. Apart from this guiding intention, for which it is a matter of insisting on the thing’s transcendence, this passage from Chalier reveals two other decisive parameters. First of all, there is the theme of vision and its opposite, the invisible; second, that of limits and the infinite. This type of critique is very explicitly structured by the oppositions between the visible and the invisible, and between the finite and the infinite. This first current, which springs from a certain Heideggerian reading of phenomenology, brings together the biblical problematic of idolatry and its theme of the referent’s irreducible excess. In a word, the critique of representation is effected here in the name of an incommensurability, an invisibility, a transcendence. This, however, is certainly not Anglo-Saxon philosophy’s understanding of the critique of representation. When François Récanati writes, for example, that “between the two World Wars, two authors have decisively undertaken the critique of representationalism—and they are Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin,”3 the term “critique of representation” clearly does not have the same meaning it does above. In this analytic context, it is not a question of acknowledging the thing itself, its excess or its transcendence. Récanati’s term “representationalism” here refers to theories in which the unique function of a statement is to represent a thing’s state or a fact. Representationalism thus designates the first wave of analytic philosophy, defended by the Vienna Circle philosophers (among others), for whom the truth value of a proposition is determined by the state of affairs to which it refers. “To represent,” in the context of early logical empiricism, means to refer to an exterior object; representation thus becoming a synonym for the act of referring to a prior state of affairs. This is the thesis that Austin criticizes, in showing that a statement does not necessarily represent facts but can also manifest a desire, exert an influence, etc. In the analytic context, critique of representation is constructed around the idea that a sign’s function is not necessarily to refer to a being or a state of affairs external to the sign. This is why, in Austin’s prag-

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matism, what is examined is not the thing’s excess with respect to representation but rather the statement’s excess with respect to the exclusive representation of facts. The excess here is an excess of the sign, which says more than it ought to say and thus goes beyond its simple referential function. And so it is because the sign has an excess with respect to the simple function of representation (as reference to a state of affairs)—not, on the contrary, because the referent (the thing, God, the infinite, etc.) has an excess with respect to representation—that a “critique of representation” is needed. The two critiques of representation are thus oriented in inverse directions; there is also a difference in their view of the pertinent parameters likely to define representation. In the analytic lens, the visible/invisible, finite/infinite oppositions—which structure the critique of representation that springs from phenomenology— are strictly speaking meaningless. The thematic is that of the symbol and its transitivity, of the sign and its reference. On the one hand we have the face and visibility, limits and infinity; on the other, sign and reference: the contemporary critique of representation seems to have split into two antagonistic currents in which the first valorizes the thing’s excess with respect to representation, while the second valorizes the sign’s excess with respect to its simple function of referring or reference to a state of affairs. But if this difference is real, it nevertheless remains that the interrogation of concepts of “vision” on the one hand and of the “sign” on the other are at the service of the same critique, that of representation, which was itself given as the paradigm of all prior philosophy. This first point of convergence is important for our inquiry because it clearly seems that, in both cases, philosophy is considered as something that must be overcome. In particular, this overcoming will be presented as a demand to go beyond or outside philosophy (Austin, Levinas). Moreover, beyond this already troubling commonality, an even more surprising one will emerge: in both cases, critique of representation and of philosophy4 takes the form of a theory of saying and the said—clearly in Austin’s case, but also, I will show, in Levinas’s. The critique of philosophy through a new theory of saying and the said—this is the paradoxical proximity that unifies the two paradigms, an overlap that will become apparent at the end of my analysis.

The Evolution of the Linguistic Paradigm: Pragmatism If the struggle between philosophy of consciousness and philosophy of language today seems to have tipped in favor of philosophy of language,5 it has

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not resulted in a pure and simple continuation of the first model of analysis that—with Carnap—professed an entirely positivist theory of truth. The “redundancy theory” of truth—according to which the “proposition ‘p’ is true if and only if p,” in which a proposition’s truth is thus nothing other than the affirmation of a fact exterior to the proposition (for example, snow is white), and for which only this extrinsic reference validates our propositions—is far from being as widely accepted today as it was up to the middle of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the second wave of the “linguistic turn,”6 which Wittgenstein and Austin inaugurated in the second half of the twentieth century, today embodies a widely shared trend—which we must examine insofar as it is a bearer of the theme of philosophy’s exhaustion.

Austin’s View Let’s recall first of all that Austin, in initiating “ordinary language”7 philosophy, effected an upheaval with respect to the classical practice of philosophy. Indeed, just like the later Wittgenstein, he meant to disrupt the “essentializing,” “generalizing” visions proper to metaphysics, which multiplied imaginable entities as well as insoluble problems. He judged that classical philosophy was trapped in bad questions where a rigorous analysis of the terms used ought to be easily able to reveal the ostensible problems’ inanity. On this point, his treatment of the old and enduring philosophical problem about perceptual illusions—the dispute about realism (are things anything other than their appearances?)8—is emblematic of his general approach. But by means of this clear rupture, amply underscored, Austin decisively breaks with the “first wave of analysis”9 initiated by the Vienna Circle, who, granting what Austin decried as the “ ‘descriptive’ fallacy,”10 asserted that in order for a statement to have meaning it must necessarily be “constative” (it must say something about a prior and exterior referent). But Austin, with his differentiation between constative and performative utterances (the latter doing something by the very fact of being spoken, for example, “I leave my watch to my brother”), introduced what he himself termed a “revolution”11 in the history of philosophy, because he no longer tied a statement’s truth only to its reference to an exterior x. This challenge to the descriptive fallacy is even more significant for Austin, for he is not content to simply divide statements into constatives (which would be liable to empirical validation) and performatives (which could be successful or unsuccessful—a distinction that would, by itself, leave intact the

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Vienna Circle’s logical positivism); rather, he understands all statements as containing a performative dimension. More precisely, Austin’s central claim is that every manifestation of thought in speech is definitely a form of action. The very organization of the argument in How to Do Things with Words manifests this strict synonymity. Indeed, before “Lecture VIII,” Austin divided statements into constative and performative, as if it were a matter of two distinct classes that are not unified in a single statement. But this bifurcation12 gave rise to so many aporias that he was led to ask whether, rather than a division between performatives and constatives, each statement could be simultaneously a locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary act. A locutionary act says something; an illocutionary act does something by saying it (performatives of the sort “I promise you that . . .” or “I swear that . . .”); finally, a perlocutionary act aims to cause some effect in another (such as “to threaten,” “to intimidate,” “to persuade,” etc.). With this distinction, Austin constructed a general theory of action that was also, at the same time and in the same way, a general theory of speaking in its multiple aspects. From the eighth lecture forward, Austin—who was so suspicious of philosophers’ generalizations—effected a generalization of speaking as an act, even talking of a “more general theory”13 that would establish a typology, for example, of “explicit” performatives (verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives, and expositives). The very notion of truth is thus profoundly altered with respect to logical positivism. But how, precisely, should Austin’s new approach to the notion of truth be understood? In fact, two conceptions could come out of it. First, one could insist that the notion of a performative as the realization of an act is not related to the notion of truth. Performatives, as Austin said, are successful or unsuccessful (“felicity” or “infelicity”14), not true or false. Consequently, if we insist that the dimension of success or failure is tied to limited circumstances, it is possible to say that Austin rejects any notion of truth by linking it to a given context in which the empirical, singular individual is plunged more or less by chance. With the notion of a “successful” or “failed” act, and by insisting on the context’s (by definition) contingency,15 truth is boiled down to a question of what works or doesn’t, as in classical utilitarianism. In this sense, the theory of “speech acts”16 rejects any notion of truth and any idea of intrinsic rules governing the elaboration of universal propositions, quite simply because the act succeeds or fails at the whim of external circumstances. Thus interpreted, Austin can give rise to a radical skepticism, which is later exemplified by Barry Stroud.17 Alongside this first conception

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of truth that Austin may have held, we can propose a second, quite different, interpretation: even though he defined an utterance in terms of its success or failure, Austin would nevertheless not have renounced all definitions of truth, nor would he have embraced utilitarianism. Indeed, Austin could also mean (and the eleventh lecture of How to Do Things with Words leads us to think so) that the truth is defined as what is appropriate. Thus understood, Austin’s proposed theory of truth is quite different from the Vienna Circle’s representationalism, and his works give rise to a new philosophy. This is, by the way, what he himself seems to say when he writes, “Now we said that there was one further thing obviously requiring to be done, which is a matter of prolonged fieldwork. We said long ago that we needed a list of ‘explicit performative verbs’; but in light of the more general theory we now see that what we need is a list of illocutionary forces of an utterance.”18 His reflection is not only therapeutic, negative, and critical but also pioneering, creative, and productive of new tasks for thought. But this positivity could also be understood in two senses: a return to a certain form of positivism or an entirely new version of classical skepticism. These two paradoxical sides of Austin’s legacy have been taken up by two very different thinkers, John Searle and Stanley Cavell. Let’s examine these two diametrically opposed legacies.

Searle as a “Positivist” Version of Austin Starting explicitly from Austin’s claim that an expression’s meaning cannot be reduced to its simple propositional content (to what is said) but also encompasses the saying, Searle attempts to inventory the inevitable implications of speaking (“pragmatic implications”). Every successful use of a discursive act supposes that a certain number of conditions have been satisfied; hence, the task of a philosophy of language ought to be to discover them and lay them out in some sort of typology.19 There are a variety of conditions for a discursive act—for example, the “sincerity condition” inherent, for Searle, in an utterance’s illocutionary force. This implicit condition means quite simply that if I assert that p then eo ipso I express the belief that p, if I promise that x then eo ipso I express the intention to do x, etc. To assert, declare, warn, promise, etc., has the sincerity condition that the speaker believes that p; to advise has the sincerity condition that “S believes A will benefit H,”20 etc. It follows that there is a necessary connection between my speech and the conditions that are implied for my speech to be successful. Succinctly put, the speaker cannot, without contradiction or paradox, perform a discursive act and deny

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its implications. This is why the relation between the speech act and its conditions is one of necessity. And these implications (like sincerity) are always posited as pragmatic constraints. These implications cannot be denied without a “pragmatic contradiction.” So the sincerity conditions are thus said to be inherent in the speech act, since they are immanent in the act of “making” a promise, issuing a warning, and even of making an assertion. This necessary implication is what makes it possible to formalize the theory of speech acts, which Searle sets out to do with Daniel Vanderveken in Foundations of Illocutionary Logic.21 They break down illocutionary force into its basic components capable of formal combinations. In so doing, they offer a certain number of universal laws that necessarily govern the successful accomplishment of a speech act. Every illocutionary act has the form F(P), where F is the illocutionary force of the utterance and P the propositional content of the statement. Having made this first formalization, they combine the necessary components of illocutionary force (F) in the following formula: F = , where π is the illocutionary point, μ is the degree of strength of the illocutionary point, k is the mode of achievement of the illocutionary point, q is the propositional content condition, e is the preparatory conditions, y is the sincerity condition, and h is the degree of intensity of this sincerity condition. To show the necessary implications of a speech act and to reduce it to a number of primitive components that could be combined and formalized—this is indeed the goal of Foundations.22 Searle is interested here in the universal rules that govern the structure of the act. His project thus consists of systematizing Austin’s intuition by attempting to construct a vast typology of the set of implications that constitute speech acts like promising, threatening, pleading, etc. But to inventory all such speech acts and to find the universal rules that govern their successful function, to formalize them and to deduce their intrinsic and formal components—these are all efforts that manifestly revive the motivating demand of the first analytic philosophers. As it happens, this is what the formula F(P) indicates, as it articulates less a critique of the Vienna Circle’s claims as the temptation to enlarge its field of investigation. Austin’s project is indeed brought back alongside a certain classically scientistic demand—to make speech acts into a formalized science, following the model of logic. But, one might object, isn’t this concern for a system of acts, and for an inventory of its implications understood as universal rules, precisely the opposite of the way of thinking that Austin encouraged? Isn’t Searle, with

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this systematization, rather distanced from Austin? This is Michael Soubbotnik’s view, echoing other authors like Sandra Laugier or Stanley Cavell: Searle is not content to effect a technical (even considerable) reconstruction which would transform a brilliant “discovery” into a field of knowledge that was, if not mature, at least adolescent. I wouldn’t even hesitate to say that despite the use of concepts like “performative,” “illocutionary act,” “force,” etc., and certain seeming points of convergence on the question of truth, Searle and Austin quite simply do not speak the same philosophical language.23 It is not within the scope of my project here to take a position on the nature of the inheritance passed on by Austin’s oeuvre, whose undeniable laconic diversity allows multiple possibilities. My concern is simply to show that numerous suggestions in Austin’s oeuvre foreshadow the “possibility” of Searle’s philosophy. To be convinced of this we need only remember that Austin spoke of his hope for a vast “science of language.” Searle does not betray Austin but rather exhibits one potentiality. This potentiality consists, at least in Foundations and Speech Acts, of reviving a certain form of philosophical practice proper to the Vienna Circle, in which it is a matter of constructing vast typologies that indicate the correct use of language. Briefly, once it is acknowledged that Austin’s great innovation was to have shown that statements are not merely concerned with facts but also with actions, then it is a matter for Searle of showing that these different forms of action (to promise, assert, threaten, warn, etc.) are capable of being formalized in the classic form F(P). Foundations of Illocutionary Logic thus constitutes the positivist interpretation of Austin’s project—a reading that, I have insisted, is a legitimate interpretation of an oeuvre that speaks quite clearly of his hope for the dissolution of philosophy within a discipline “sure of its object and of its method.”

Cavell as a “Skeptical” Version of Austin Opposed to this reading of Austin is Stanley Cavell’s interpretation, which clearly presents itself as skeptical in comparison with the systematizations of the early Searle. For Cavell, Austin is the philosopher of the ordinary, and not the philosopher of “speech acts.” Austin wanted to precisely analyze the multiple—that is, infinite—occurrences of the terms we use, not construct a

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system of universal rules governing all language. We ought to pay attention, therefore, to our use of language. This way of reading Austin, which Cavell embodies, consists in developing a moderated skepticism, which is inscribed, as I read him, in the system of reflective judgments of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and thus gives his own statements only the status of plausibility. It is not a matter of saying, with Hegel, that “the I is a we,” but rather of stating that “everything happens as if ” and we “act as if ” the “I” could be a “we,” “everything happens as if ” our statements could be, if not universal, at least virtually shared by others. This reading of Cavell’s project, starting from the “as if ” or reflective judgment of the Critique of Judgment, seems to me to be corroborated first of all by the constant references to the author of the “allgemeine Stimme,”24 who, in Cavell’s texts,25 is offered as the answer to the question of language’s claim to speak the truth, or even to an individual’s claim to speak in the name of everyone. As it is not possible to say that this claim is entirely empty and illusory without asking about this proposition’s own status—isn’t it, too, empty and illusory? Barry Stroud’s radical skepticism falls into this sort of abyss—as it is not a question, for all that, of renewing the foundational demand that so-called classical philosophy expresses, Cavell’s chosen plan is intermediary. Our judgments (statements) are no longer constitutive but regulative (“everything happens as if ”), a crystallization of the finitude of human speech. Moreover, this interpretation of Cavell’s project as an extension of Kant’s argument in the Critique of Judgment seems to me all the more plausible since Cavell repeats the Kantian argument against metaphysics, namely, that of “radical finitude.” In his eyes, classical metaphysics cannot accept the absence of a “guarantee” (a foundation) because it denies finitude and “misfortune”—always interpreted as the “failure inherent in the act of speaking.” His return to ordinary language, to what he banally, that is, trivially, tells us of the world, constitutes a recognition of finitude as radical and inescapable. This explains, in my view, Cavell’s recourse to autobiography and to the individual “I.”26 This recourse allows Cavell to avoid sinking into a totally self-refuting argumentation (“I say that nothing is universal or valid, and at the same time and in the same way, I claim my own proposition is universal and valid”). With this use of autobiography transformed into a form of philosophical writing, it is a matter of asserting the fragility, precariousness, and fallibility of subjective speech while also “calling for” a “we” and infinitely hoping for it as a possible validation. Having justified this reading of Cavell framed in terms of the Critique of Judgment, I must now show that even if, as I have said, Cavell does not

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immediately sink into the aporias of Barry Stroud’s radical skepticism, his measured skepticism or “critique” is nevertheless not exempt from a certain number of pitfalls that closely resemble the logical pathology of self-refutation. This tendency to pragmatic paradoxes can be found at several levels. First of all, to deny every generalization, as Cavell does, taking up one of Austin’s claims, is to risk falling into an infinity of speech situations. Indeed, to attempt to define a statement’s pertinence only as measured by its context is to risk confronting the irreducible incommensurability of contexts. Briefly, the new “pitch of philosophy” would be less the proposal of a new writing, “skeptically consistent” because it draws its source from the “everything happens as if ” of the Critique of Judgment, but rather a polygraph test of situations so infinite, singular, and atomized that no generalization, discussion, or argument could corroborate it. In sum, the study of usage, in Austin, is part of an inventory of idiomatic expressions; and autobiography, in Cavell, would be the most refined example of what Wittgenstein called private language. Moreover, if the ordinary is the only judge of our claims (as Cavell claims, following Austin), how are we to explain the very possibility of analysis of ordinary language? Indeed, from the perspective of the ordinary, the status of the “philosophy” or the “analysis” of the ordinary remains problematic. How are we to understand the possibility of Austin’s reflection on different usages, a reflection that is not part of ordinary language but of its analysis? What is the truth of the philosophy of ordinary language? The question here is indeed to determine whether one can define the truth (as being immanent in ordinary language) without asking, on the other hand, a question about the truth of what one says about ordinary language. If we do not wish for ordinary language philosophy to fall into self-contradiction (which would consist in claiming one’s analysis of ordinary language to be true while rejecting that ordinary language is true), then we are forced to ask, as do both Austin and Cavell, the question of the pragmatic consistency of their practice of ordinary language analysis. It follows that, even though Austin and Cavell refuse the term “philosopher,” they cannot avoid, insofar as they are theoreticians of ordinary language, an interrogation of their own analyses’ status. Shouldn’t we therefore examine this use—that is, the philosophical use of language— rather than contradictorily denying its relevance? The categories of “performatives” such as “verdictives, exercitives, etc.” are not ordinary uses of language and are concepts just as obscure, for the neophyte reader, as the Hegelian categories of “Aufhebung,” “Wirklichkeit,” and “für sich” and “für uns.” How

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are we to classify them, as Austin does, while maintaining the irrelevance or the noxiousness of nonordinary language? Doesn’t ordinary language at some point have to reflect on itself, go back over itself, understand itself as speech or language? One could retort that it is precisely because there have been deviant uses over the course of the centuries that we must go back to the ordinary. But how then are we to explain that ordinary language could have produced these monsters of metaphysical usage if it was initially the very locus of truth? After all, isn’t this return to the ordinary, as Austin’s very practice attests, effected by the implementation of a nonordinary language? And doesn’t this practice raise, ultimately, the question of philosophical language, of its uses and its own rules? The analysis of ordinary language or “linguistic phenomenology,” in its claim to say something, must also reflect itself as analysis, otherwise it falls into self-refutation in the same way that radical skepticism does. Finally, the Cavellian conception of a truth placed under the sign of the plausibility of an “everything happens as if ” engenders, again, the question of the pragmatic consistency of such an affirmation. Indeed, to say that finitude is radical and that this is why we can claim the plausibility of “everything happens as if ” amounts to claiming the truth of what one says. What indeed must we presuppose to say that the truth cannot be attained because finitude is truly too radical if not the unavoidable truth of this very proposition? This pragmatic paradox becomes established in what I have shown to be Cavell’s implicit model, namely, the Critique of Judgment’s model of reflective judgments; indeed, as I had the occasion to note in my studies of Kant and the post-Kantians,27 a paradox that the post-Kantian skeptics (Aenesidemus,28 Salomon Maimon) were superbly able to reveal is hidden at the heart of the Critique: the thematization of what is said in the Critique of Judgment (for example, “the living world comes under reflective judgments”) presupposes a point of view in which this thesis is assumed to be valid. The division between determinant and reflective judgments must be given by the philosopher writing the Critique as a clearly nonreflective judgment; in other words, the point of view from which the Critique of Judgment is written must not come under “everything happens as if ” without leading us to a series of absurd statements, such as “everything happens as if the Critique were true, everything happens as if the distinction between reflective and determinant judgments were relevant,” or even, facetiously, “everything happens as if humanity had ended.” To put it in a formula, in such a configuration, humanity has ended to the extent that

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there is no legitimate point of view from which the proposition “humanity has ended” can be uttered. These three pitfalls of Cavellian skepticism show how much his discourse, like many others, is ultimately marked by the logical pathology of self-refutation.

Oscillation Between Positivism and Skepticism, and the Tendency to Self-refutation What then are we to conclude from this analysis of Austin and from the unfolding of Searle’s and Cavell’s two interpretations of Austin? That contemporary philosophy (and here, as in Quine, within a single philosophy) again displays the tendency to oscillate between a positivist position in which philosophy, according to Austin’s hopes, would become “linguistics” and a skeptical tendency that always contains hidden pragmatic contradictions, in which the speaking contradicts what is said, its practice (analysis of ordinary language) contradicts the claim that the only possible language is ordinary language, etc. In a word, oscillation between two extremes and self-refutation are, here too, the dominant symptoms of a philosophy that hopes for its own end. This characteristic, this curious figure, just like the ellipsoidal form in Holbein’s Ambassadors, is what I was interested in reconstructing in this analysis of Austin and his posterity. Even if the theme of “ordinary language,” or of language as our unavoidable ordinariness, today seems closer to Austin’s writings than the grand generalizing ambitions of the Searle of Foundations, and even if, as Sandra Laugier29 and Michael Soubbotnik would have it, Austin’s “spirit” seems more “reincarnated” in Cavell’s oeuvre than in Searle’s, the fact nonetheless remains that assessing these two interpretations’ fidelity to the source texts was not my task, since the only thing that interested me in this contradictory reading of a single author was the fact that we find there an oscillation between positivism and skepticism. A single philosopher can give birth to two diametrically opposed ways of thinking, both of which are philologically legitimate. This does not reflect the weakness of or a preference for one of the disciples but rather an already identified structure that characterizes philosophy today: either its dissolution within a vast science that is meant to be formalized on the model of formal logic (Searle’s taking up of the formula F(P), for example), or skepticism that leads to ineluctable pragmatic paradoxes (Cavell and the impossible demonstration of his own discourse’s status), or both at the same time (Austin as the source of these two contraries).

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This dual tendency to self-refutation and to oscillation is presumably likely to be found in other trends. Thus alongside the lineage from Austin to Searle and Cavell we could also study the progression from the Vienna Circle to Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend30—this analysis would doubtless show just as much the strange proximity of opposites (positivism and skepticism) that are fused in a single thesis—the end of philosophy—and a single contradiction—the impossibility of maintaining this end.31 But this philosophical situation ought not be surprising, in the philosophical sense of the term—that is, as the discovery of a contradiction that doesn’t seem able to be immediately removed and thus causes, as Plato would have it, astonishment. Indeed, it is not for me to say that relativism or skepticism would be surprising “in itself,” that is, to speak from an already established point of view about what philosophical discourse must be. That attitude, indeed, would suppose a judgment of value; but as Christiane Chauviré has forcefully demonstrated in a fine article,32 we must beware of evaluating philosophical positions in moral terms. If I speak of surprise here, that is in fact because there is a simultaneity between two positions traditionally given as antinomies: positivism and skepticism. In the configuration that I’ve described, and that has held for the last thirty years, positivism engenders skepticism in a quasi-logical manner (like a premise its consequence) and skepticism is composed at its heart of positivism. Could the Continental paradigm serve as a counterexample to this description of the “skeptico-positivist future”33 of linguistic analysis? If certain aspects of phenomenology repeat this theme of the end of philosophy, a theme illustrated across the border, will it turn out to be more convincing, or is it, too, merely this same pattern, this same strange silhouette, this same disfiguring trait that deconstructs at the same time as it questions the entirety of a painting?

“Turning Phenomenology”? Thinking with Husserl Against Husserl? To speak of the “scientism” of phenomenology, in the sense of choosing a particular science as a paradigm of truth, is clearly impossible34 insofar as phenomenology (in fact a profoundly innovative and important philosophical current for the twentieth century) has produced its own analytical instruments, its own rules, and its specific method and has defined its field of

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investigation without ever looking to align itself with another, more serious, science (logic, mathematics, or some human science such as psychology). Not subjugated to an exterior science, phenomenology nevertheless proclaimed itself, in Edmund Husserl, as a science. In a word, Husserl did not index his propositions to so-called “positive” knowledges but rather presented them as an expression of knowledge or “rigorous science.” But it seems that his disciples, up to a recent period, have not wanted to maintain this aspect, thus abandoning the guiding and controlling question of Husserl’s phenomenology: what can philosophy mean as a science? This is what Jocelyn Benoist notes about the great majority of Husserlian studies,35 as does Bruce Bégout, who writes, “The will to transform philosophy into a rigorous science, just like the will to offer a complete rationalism for the wrongs of our time, has something unbearable about it. Interpreters have thus exhausted themselves trying to find something that does not go down that road.”36 The situation has definitely changed in the last five years,37 but the fact remains that Husserl’s disciples, throughout the twentieth century, fiercely worked to conceal the centrality of the Husserlian theme of philosophy as science; thus, Bégout adds, “Again and again they brought out analyses of personal temporality, or of the lifeworld . . . as if Husserlianism did not exist.”38 Indeed, with its insistence on the analysis of passive syntheses, its glorification of the flesh and of the body in its most subjective folds, its praise of the most profound “lived experiences” and the pursuit of life in its ineffable singularity, the phenomenology of the twentieth century seems, as Dominique Janicaud also notes,39 to have strayed from its initial source. To be sure, the Husserlian concepts of descriptions, evidence, and immediacy are mobilized by his epigones (whom I will qualify, because of their themes’ content, as “existential epigones”40 of phenomenology), but these notions are meant to be detached from their original function of founding philosophy as a science. Eidetic description seems to become the evaluation of an individual’s singular feelings, anchored in the hic et nunc that looks away from an objectivizing claim to universality. As Dominique Janicaud notes, from Merleau-Ponty’s and the early Sartre’s ventures, “phenomenology is spirited away by [their] existential project; the density of descriptions manages to excuse the thinness of methodological justifications. Intentional analysis is put itself to the service of the ‘perceptive genius’ and the prereflexive cogito.”41 Having noted this orientation, it is not at all my task to criticize it in the name of fidelity to Husserl,42 nor to issue any sort of value judgments by declaring such investigations into the body, desire, feeling, primary drives,

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or other arche-original experience to be a priori empty. I must only try to understand how these themes proper to contemporary phenomenology could have been conjoined at a certain point with the idea of the end of philosophy, an idea totally absent in phenomenology’s founder. Only after I have reconstructed this strange history—which leads from a phenomenology understood as a revitalization of philosophy to a phenomenology understood as an assertion of philosophy’s end—will I be able, again, to attempt to assess the validity of the proposition that philosophy must be superseded by another practice. The founding fathers of this existential phenomenology are, of course, Martin Heidegger and, in France, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and later Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, and probably Jean-Luc Marion.43 Today, it is populated by an entire constellation of thinkers whose project is to transform phenomenology: Marc Richir or Rudolf Bernet in Belgium,44 Franco Volpi in Italy, Ingeborg Schüssler in Switzerland, Hans-Helmuth Gander or Bernhard Waldenfels45 in Germany, Jean-Louis Chrétien or Claude Romano in France, or even, to cite those who have very recently attempted “to turn phenomenology,”46 Natalie Depraz, Hugues Choplin, or Gilles Grelet. With this far from exhaustive list, I clearly do not mean to claim that these authors all hold the same views on every issue; it is simply a question of recognizing that, beyond their various and sometimes divergent positions, these authors mean to effect a turn within phenomenology—not only by “radicalizing” it through an extension to domains neglected or unsuspected by Husserl but even by modifying its very project. Still more precisely, it is a question, for these authors, of thinking with Husserl against Husserl. With Husserl, for phenomenology is given as the privileged method of philosophy; but against Husserl, for his controlling project of a philosophy as an autonomous, first, and distinct science must be rejected. This torsion that describes and delimits the existential current finds its origins in one of the first and most important phenomenologists, Emmanuel Levinas.

Levinas’s Reading of Husserl We should pause to note a historical fact with a considerable impact on the fate of contemporary phenomenology, namely that phenomenology was discovered, in France,47 beginning with Levinas’s writings on Husserl and Heidegger. Thus Sartre recalled that he “had come to phenomenology through

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Levinas” just before he left for Berlin,48 and Derrida observed in Writing and Difference that “the departure from Greece was discreetly premeditated in [Levinas’s] The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. In France, in 1930, this was the first major work devoted to the entirety of Husserl’s thought.”49 This assessment was confirmed by Maurice Blanchot, who reported that “without him [Levinas], in 1927 or 1928 I could not have begun to understand Being and Time. This book provoked a genuine intellectual shock in me.”50 Likewise, Jean-François Lyotard declares in Phenomenology51 that The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, as well as Levinas’s articles from the same period,52 constitute the key texts for understanding phenomenology in France.53 From his first major work,54 Levinas proposed a significant alteration to Husserl’s thought, an alteration that his later works would accentuate. This alteration can certainly be described in terms of a bias in Levinas toward a Heideggerian reading of Husserl. Nevertheless, if, as Jean Hering (the first to review this work) immediately saw, Levinas attempted to explain “the tree by its fruit, I mean, Husserl’s phenomenology by Heidegger’s metaphysics,”55 we still must note that this Heideggerian commitment quickly takes on a particular, and specifically Levinasian, character. Indeed, Levinas is less concerned about Being and its history than the concrete human being situated in the world. On this point, it appears that Hering’s diagnosis that Levinas would uphold “ontology’s claim of primacy over phenomenology in Husserl’s philosophy”56 must be reconsidered in that, from this text, we can discover the traces of a departure from the question of Being. While he is certainly not Husserlian, as Hering notes, neither is Levinas totally Heideggerian, even in his prewar texts.57 From The Theory of Intuition we see three orientations that Levinas will not cease developing— the concrete man, the invisible, and the undervaluation of “reduction.” Let’s look at these three orientations so we can better understand phenomenology’s first “turn.” For Levinas, Husserl misses the “concrete man” because of his “intellectualism.” The inventor of phenomenology maintains a theoretical attitude and therefore cannot break with the objectivism proper to science and metaphysics.58 Confronted with this objectifying attitude of theoretical thought, Levinas asks, “Is our main attitude toward reality that of theoretical contemplation? Is not the world presented in its very being as a center of action, as a field of activity or of care—to speak the language of Martin Heidegger?”59 This reference to Heidegger does not have to be the only image of the transformation that Levinas hopes to effect on phenomenology—indeed,

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he employs a host of non-Heideggerian references, such as Bergson, to resist Husserl’s “intellectualism” or “theoreticism”: “Bergson’s philosophical intuition tightly bound to man’s concrete life and destiny, reaches to its highest point, namely, the act of freedom. This metaphysical foundation of intuition is lacking in Husserl’s phenomenology, and the ties which relate intuition to all the vital forces which define concrete existence are foreign to his thought.”60 This dual citation shows that Levinas means to go in the direction of concrete life and, he specifies, the life of affective states that are found beneath any objectifying act, beyond representation.61 To be sure, we are not far from the themes of Being and Time, but with this—not insignificant—exception: the critique of objectifying thought and the concern for its “before” or its “beyond” is not necessarily tied to the thinking of Being. The concrete man is sought as such, for himself, in himself, the sole aim of phenomenological investigation. To summarize, where Husserl speaks of pure consciousness, Levinas means concrete life, this life of an embodied and unique single being, with its areas of obscurity (sensibility, feelings, occasional nonintentional movements, etc.).62 This strictly speaking existential63 concern will considerably impact the phenomenological method. Indeed, a sentiment or a feeling cannot be seen; furthermore, to subject it to vision would be to deny its uniqueness, because I do not see pain, I feel it, I have it. The gift will not therefore be synonymous with vision. Thus the idea of a necessary “ruin of representation” with a view to overcoming objectivism, to be coupled with a relativization of vision. The transformation that opens up the theme of the invisible is key. Beginning with Levinas, the phenomenon is no longer the only problem for phenomenology. From then on, the enigma of the invisible will be found confronting the phenomenon. “This way the Other has of seeking my recognition while preserving his incognito, disdaining recourse to a wink-of-theeye of understanding or complicity, this way of manifesting himself without manifesting himself, we call enigma—going back to the etymology of this Greek term, and contrasting it with the indiscreet and victorious appearing of a phenomenon.”64 From the visible to the invisible, from the phenomenon to the enigma, from manifestation to “what does not manifest itself,” the transformation is radical. The development of this transformation will entail the relativization of Husserl’s most important concept, reduction. The Theory of Intuition’s undervaluation of reduction has been widely observed; while the text was meant to be an introduction to phenomenology—and was perceived as such—an

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analysis of reduction appears only at the very end of the book, as if it were merely one theme among others, not the very foundation of phenomenology. Why this reduction of reduction? Probably because reduction cannot be right about the opacity of embodied consciousness, the obscurity of passivity, or the irreducible uniqueness of “concrete life.” Whatever the possible explanations, the distance between Husserl’s phenomenology and Levinas’s first texts turns out to be vast: pure consciousness gives way to concrete life, intention to nonintention, the visible to the invisible; moreover, reduction becomes a tool that most often misses the essential; finally, anti-intellectualism or antitheoreticism becomes the sign of a successful escape from objectifying representation.65 This concretizing of phenomenology, this “becoming flesh” or “feeling” that will mark it beginning with and after Levinas, seems to be at the source of the advancement, in phenomenological studies, of a mode of expression that approaches literary writing. The theme of the embodied, passive man, thrown into a world that transcends him, is much more likely to come into agreement with the concerns of writers or artists than Husserl’s austere analyses of numbers. Neither Maurice Blanchot, nor Georges Bataille,66 nor Sartre the writer are mistaken on this point—from the first, they rejected an excessive attention to the general in Husserl’s phenomenology and welcomed Levinas as the thinker of the singular. Philosophy, insofar as it claimed to be science, had lost sight of something essential that literature or art could perhaps give back to it. “Seeing the invisible”—isn’t that what artists do?67 But doesn’t the turning then turn out to be an escape from philosophy? Indeed, Levinas’s reading leads to a questioning not only of metaphysics but of all philosophy. Before Husserl, philosophy defined itself as metaphysics, and even Nietzsche, according to a famous claim of Heidegger’s, remained a metaphysician. With the establishment of phenomenology, Husserl should have overcome philosophy as metaphysics. But according to Levinas’s terms, Husserl has not gone far enough and remains within metaphysics by virtue of his attention to theoretical generality. We thus have a first movement that consists of understanding phenomenology as breaking with metaphysics, and a second that consigns phenomenology itself to metaphysics. Jocelyn Benoist, going back over phenomenology’s fate, succinctly summarizes this series of substitutions (metaphysics = all philosophy prior to Husserl, then phenomenology = metaphysics): “[Phenomenology’s] considerable success, certainly, was at first indissociable from an anti-metaphysical struggle. But along the way, it may be that phenomenology became the last resort of

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the very metaphysics that it had rejected.”68 This equation achieves a simple result: philosophy has always been metaphysics; to escape from metaphysics will henceforth be to examine other ways of expressing, writing, and saying than those employed by philosophy. The swerve that phenomenology takes toward a literary mode seems to me to be extremely important for understanding the ambiguity that runs through contemporary phenomenological writing, an ambiguity that will go beyond Levinas—we will see how—but that we must first locate in his epigones.

Oscillation Between Literature and Metaphysics The current infatuation with what is called—depending upon the day and the person—the intimate experience of “there is,” the protomovement of existence, the arche-original feeling, the fleshly body—variations on what Levinas called “concrete life”—gives rise to a question about the status of this phenomenological practice. Indeed, like most contemporary analytics, “existential” phenomenologists vigorously reject classical philosophy’s claim to preside over different areas of knowledge, to bring reason to a reality become transparent, and to have an overarching position with respect to other disciplines. But a certain affinity seems to have covertly taken shape between this much-disparaged hegemonic claim of old philosophy and the phenomenological movement of the end of the twentieth century. For, indeed, Dominique Janicaud asks, “How [is] the method of eidetic description going to enable us to encounter and to restore the concrete—in particular, in the affective domain—without falling into essentialism”?69 With this injunction to think the concrete, phenomenology seems constrained to implement even more systematically what it objected to in classic philosophy; indeed, the desire to annex the least rustles of intimacy, the concern to hunt down an arche-original “je ne sais quoi” (feeling, desire, drive) in the most minute nooks of contingency, make certain phenomenologists’ projects even more all-encompassing than Hegel’s, who at least abandoned genuine contingency without trying to deduce the movements of his pen or of his momentary feelings. Thus it can seem as if a good number of the professors of “the lived” and other “feelings” or “distortions” in every genre confront the following option: either they generate an even more hegemonic discourse than the one that they vehemently reject as metaphysics, or else, if they do not wish to take on this totalizing vision (to speak the essence of the least, most fleeting feeling), they give up philosophical propositions as candidates for truth. And

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consequently, their descriptions can claim only to be literature. In saying this, I do not mean to mock, like those who say, “All that is only literature.” Indeed, the resort to literature as a possible escape from philosophy is a move proclaimed and assumed by many phenomenologists. On this point, Hugues Choplin’s recent article “L’homme ou la littérature? Levinas et la phénoménologie de la transcendance radicale”70 articulates in just a few sentences the series of substitutions that I have pointed out (metaphysics = phenomenology = all philosophy) while simultaneously bringing out its rigorous consequence: the literary future of phenomenology. He writes: Whether it is a question of Heidegger, Derrida, Marion, or even Levinas, they all (each in his own way) recognize the originality of the Husserlian project while rejecting Husserl’s challenge to metaphysics—that is, to presence—as ultimately insufficient . . . As a result, they each have elaborated a phenomenology that rests on a radical transcendence insofar as it goes beyond the Husserlian phenomenological system and that of metaphysics, taking the form of Being (Heidegger), différance (Derrida), the gift as such (Marion) or even the other as inadequacy par excellence.71 We can clearly see here the movement relegating Husserlian phenomenology to metaphysics, and, therein, the assertion that every philosophy up to now was also metaphysics. Thinking will therefore break with the philosophy of the past. Confronting this diagnosis of a philosophical past to be rejected, it is necessary, Choplin tells us, “to cultivate metaphysical language in order to demonstrate radical transendence.”72 But the problem—the tension or equivocation—immediately crops up: “Is it possible, and how, to speak a transcendence by rights unspeakable because in its very radicality it surpasses the regime of the sayable.”73 To overcome this tension, it will be necessary to overcome the language of philosophy. This work on “saying” (carried out, in Choplin’s eyes, as much by Heidegger and Levinas as by Marion and Derrida) is the work of a “ ‘writer [who] twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions.’ ”74 There is another commonality in these projects, Choplin tells us, namely, “a radically literary writing,” an apparently natural conclusion to the series of substitutions effected on this path. To escape from metaphysics thus means to escape from philosophy in order to move toward literature.

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This stance is not contradictory in itself as long as it is maintained all the way to the end. To maintain it to the end means to accept the claim that phenomenological descriptions—for example, the description of a half-sleeping state or of a present perception that is also a memory—have the same status as the portrayals created by Marcel Proust or other writers. Proust, of course, never claimed to be doing philosophy but did want to make a work of art and thus created an unparalleled style of writing. Proust’s portrayals, if they aim to come into agreement with the reader, to make him feel, if not the same memories (we haven’t all eaten madeleines), at least similar experiences (perception, memory, then the projection of a memory on the present, etc.), nevertheless do not claim to take a position on the history of philosophy or even on philosophy itself. It will be said that I am here assuming distinctions between literature and philosophy that have gone out of fashion. Why wouldn’t Derrida be a writer and Robert Musil a philosopher, if not in the eyes of a depressing and ridiculous conservatism?75 To respond to this challenge, I can, roughly speaking,76 suggest the following: in presenting a book to his readers, Proust does not intend that, after having read it, someone would say to him that “this is totally false and I will try to show you, so that, convinced by my words, you will write something else.” The appraisal that Proust seeks is not of this sort but rather of the order of aesthetic evaluation. Even if one considers these categories obsolete (“speaking the truth” or “creating an aesthetic feeling”), the fact remains that there is a sort of discursive contract that commits both author and reader to practice a specific language game, with defined, if sometimes tacit, rules. It will be granted, perhaps, that the statement “This is entirely false and I will convince you of that” would not apply to Remembrance of Things Past and would be a negation of “what the author was doing.” This is why, without going so far as to inscribe the categories of the true and the beautiful in the heaven of Forms, I can say that “claims to” are not the same, depending on whether the author is situated in an artistic or philosophical system. But, when one says that “philosophy has reached its conclusion,” if one claims that this statement is true, then one is not at all in the realm of literature. And that is the equivocation, for phenomenologists never seem to totally and entirely stick to a strictly literary definition of their work. Here again, we are confronted with the paradoxes of the statement, which, as in Rorty, make characterizing their positions very delicate—for “radical” phenomenology cannot maintain its stance all the way to the end without admitting that it does not claim that what is says is true. But if it did, we would not have to consider its proclamation of the end of

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philosophy. Aren’t we being asked, in speaking of this end, for our opinion about the beauty of this statement? But we know that this is not the case, as does the phenomenologist who challenges us to admit that “radical transcendence” “surpasses the Husserlian phenomenological system as well as metaphysics,”77 that is, every statement that has an implicit claim to be true. But on the other hand, the impossibility of maintaining a literary posture poses a problem about the nature of this quest for the concrete, this hunt for the singular, this trail to the intimate, this search for the contingent on which every phenomenological description today seems to outdo yesterday’s. Doesn’t the impossibility of maintaining a literary stance trap subsequent phenomenology in the same corner as the metaphysics that it rejects?78 To show the problem, let’s look at the example of Hegel, who is always subject to the same accusation79—of advancing a totalizing vision of philosophy, of wanting to ground contingency, of claiming to deduce reality while ignoring its fullness, its opacity, and its irreducibility. But a careful reading of the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit shows that this text begins by bracketing contingency—it is the meaning of this bracketing that we should understand in order to grasp the distance between Hegel and contemporary phenomenologists,80 a distance to be understood contrary to how contemporary despisers of metaphysics see it. Let’s reread the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit to understand how it begins in what could be considered as the defeat of contingency, the “failure of the singular” (singular in the sense of “sense-certainty,” of “here and now,” and not, of course, in the sense that this concept will have in the “system of science”81). The “this,” Hegel tells us, is certain, but this certitude cannot be philosophically expressed, that is, it cannot rise to the significance of a concept; if this certitude were to be expressed, it would immediately dissolve and become other. For example, if, wanting to express the most concrete, most immediate time, the singularity of my experience of the direct present, I were to say, “Now is night,” I could never inscribe this sentence within the element of a philosophical signifier because “if now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale.”82 Likewise: If they [somebody] wanted to say “this” bit of paper . . . then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to that which is inherently universal . . . Those who started to describe it would not be

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able to complete the description, but would be compelled to leave it to others, who would themselves finally have to admit to speaking about something which is not. They certainly mean, then, this bit of paper here which is quite different from the bit mentioned above; but they say “actual things,” “external or sensuous objects,” “absolutely singular entities” and so on; i.e., they say of them only what is universal.83 It is constitutively impossible for philosophy to speak the immediate, the contingent, the isolated sensation. Having reconstructed this analysis of the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the task, of course, is to determine its true meaning. Does Hegel here relegate lived experience, the sensible instant, to a definitive insignificance? If we rigorously follow the text, it is a matter of the absence of philosophical importance, not of insignificance or of radical nonexistence. Hegel simply says that this lived immediacy does not have meaning for philosophy, which aims, by definition, at the true, that is, at what lasts and is universally valid. On this point, if philosophy claims to speak the concrete, the lived, immediacy, individuality in its most specific singularity, it cannot but miss it for philosophy will transform it with conceptual language into a universal, an essence, a concept, by general definition. But, if we draw out this statement’s consequences, that philosophy cannot explain immediacy without negating it, this does not at all mean that in other registers it would not be able to have the meaning of evoking the “now of the night” or of recalling those individual and concrete moments that make up the “now” for each singular person. So Aloysius Bertrand, in his poem “Gaspard de la nuit,” which begins with the phrase “It was night,” as much as Proust, in the description, prelude to the night, that follows the famous line “For a long time I used to go to bed early,”84 could attempt through his art of writing to say what seems to escape language, namely the fleetingness of the instant, the lived experience of “now,” the intimate temporality of existence. The individual, in this particular sense of concrete immediacy, is the domain of literature, its loam and its horizon, but not at all the domain of philosophy, which can only transform this individual concretude, this intimate life, into a universal and thus, inexorably, to negate it. It follows that Hegel’s bracketing of the “this”—far from having to be interpreted as a violence done to the real, to its infinite and indescribable iridescence, on the contrary—presents itself as the only way philosophy can take it into account. Bracketing the contingent speaks to the respect that one holds for it. The fact that Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, progressively

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delimits philosophy’s domain of relevance does not mean that he rejects what cannot be philosophy as nonsense. Literature can attempt to approach the “now,” it can go to the deepest feelings, but philosophy is concerned with the universal and could only do violence to the infinite wealth of contingent individuation in transforming it into an essence, a concept, a universal. This interpretation—of the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a delimiting of philosophy’s domain of significance and thereby as respect for the contingent through the very fact of its bracketing—contrasts point by point, in my view, with the opposite practice of some phenomenologists who seem, according to their descriptions, to want to return to the trap of a language that essentializes the ineffable, the rustle of a feeling, the irreducible individuality of the lived, the specific dynamic of a given desire or drive. This is an aporetic enterprise, as Renaud Barbaras himself notes, writing of Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to grasp the principle of individuality that, “by means of its purity, the formal determination exceeds the concreteness of the individual. How can what is universal in itself possess an individuating power? Thus as soon as one isolates a principle of individuation, one finds oneself led back immediately to the opposite pole.”85 This sentence could just as well be a faithful commentary on the “defeat of the individual” that opens the Phenomenology of Spirit, which is even more the case for what Barbaras says next: “Taken at the level of matter, individuality disappears into indetermination; but assigned to a form, it dissolves into the universality of the quid. The individual, then, is always missed—by excess or by lack—by the principle that is supposed to account for it.”86 So why not stop there, why not resolve that, regarding what must be denied in being said, we must be silent? Why continue this hunt for individuality, for example through the themes of the “flesh,” of which Philippe Fontaine shows in an article on the status of the individual in Merleau-Ponty87 that his goal in his later works is to think as nearly as possible individual concretude? Why want to say “the unnameable,” which the poets, like Samuel Beckett in his novel of the same name88 or Nathalie Sarraute in her stories, surely attempt to think but through a literary language, a style, that is, through the creation of a language honed for that purpose? We can address these perplexities by noting that Merleau-Ponty’s later concepts (notably his strange topological metaphors like “interweaving” or “encroachment,”89 “circles,” “knots,” “linings”) show the extent to which, aware of the problem, he had tried to create a new language. But here, too, a question arises about the status of these concepts or metaphors, that is, about the status of this linguistic intervention: is it philosophy or literature?90 If it is literature—the images used here would be stylistic

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figures in the sense that Pierre Fontanier defined them—why not proclaim it as such? If it is philosophy—the images would definitely be conceptual figures to compare, at least in their claim to say the truth, to the images of mathematical topology that they clearly echo—how are we to characterize this movement by which the concrete is seized, grabbed, speared by means of concepts that claim to be universal? How are we to understand not only a real universal, sought after long before the invention of phenomenology, but also, and more paradoxically, a lived universal, or even an intimate temporality, which we know Merleau-Ponty defined as “tacit” subjectivity, as my own individuality, limited by my birth and my death and embodied by my body? Isn’t to want to philosophically understand this concretude of the individual tantamount to extending the domain of philosophy to the least recesses of contingency? Isn’t it, thereby, to claim to make transparent what is given as a mystery? Isn’t it, consequently, to extend the metaphysical claim to what philosophers like Descartes or Hegel recognized as specific and irreducible precisely by refusing to accept them as a subject of philosophical investigation? I probably ought to clarify my position here: by thus interrogating the project of existential phenomenology, I do not at all mean to reject a priori any description nor to declare that philosophy has nothing to do with embodied man, natural consciousness, or immediate phenomena like feelings, worldly phenomena like history, or existential phenomena like death. I am investigating the status of a practice and am showing how its systematization can sometimes lead to the logical pathologies or paradoxical discursive postures that I am bringing to light. So what I am criticizing is the possibility of reflection of the unreflected. In Ideas I, sections 76 and following, Husserl attempts to show this possibility and respond to various critiques that could be made of this project. He shows that philosophical reflection upon concrete life is possible, just as in Ideas II he wonders about the constitution of one’s own body,91 an impenetrable, self-obscuring opacity, as he tells us, “The Body is, in the first place, the medium of all perception” but is a hindrance in its own self-perception.92 So isn’t it a question, given my previous discussion, of excluding the descriptive method advocated by phenomenology from philosophy?93 I only mean to show on the one hand that the violence done to the concrete by Hegel and the old metaphysics is mythological and, on the other, that the status of a discourse of the unreflected must be disclosed, otherwise one runs the risk of extending the domain of phenomenological analysis all the way to complete contradiction: speaking the immediacy of the instant, the ephemerality of lived experience, presenting the original unreflected, empty of any reflection.

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But this quest for the prereflective original is not at all Husserl’s aim, as he attests in section 77 of Ideas I (as well as elsewhere)—there Husserl begins a meditation on immediate lived experience: When the lived experience94 which, at any particular time, is actually being lived comes into reflective regard it becomes given as actually being lived, as existing “now.” But not only that: it becomes given as having just now been and, in so far as it was unregarded, precisely as having been unregarded, as not having been reflected on. In the natural attitude, without our thinking about it, we take it for granted that lived experiences do not exist only when we advert to them and seize upon them in an experience of something immanent; and we also take it for granted that they actually existed and, indeed, were actually lived by us if they are still, in reflection on something immanent, within retention (“primary” memory) as having been “just now,” “still intended to.”95 But, Husserl tells us, “We make all that clear to ourselves in the natural attitude, perhaps as psychologists, and we trace the broader contexts in which the phenomena are involved.”96 The phenomenological reduction should be operated on this basis. Once it has been effected, “our findings . . . change into exemplificatory cases of eidetic universalities which we can appropriate and systematically study within the limits of pure intuition.”97 The study of what has, by the reduction, already become universality, not concretude, and without remainder, must simultaneously consider that the lived experience in question is a lived experience regarded and perceived as something immanent, fluctuating and fading away thus and so as it is regarded reflectively. At the same time, the freedom of the course of thought suffers; we are now conscious of it in a modified manner; . . . that too we can observe by adverting our regard in yet other directions.98 Reflection of the unreflected must grasp the reflection reflecting on the unreflected; it is not a matter of achieving the arche-original but of scientifically understanding the relation between the unreflected and reflection. The questions are, “How do they influence each other? How do these two elements mutually inflect each other?” It is not at all a matter of aiming—forever impossible—at a “before” the aim.

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As these considerations show, for me it is not a question of declaring that only the reflectible can be reflected, or of holding any analysis of lived experience, in the precise sense that Husserl used this term, to be nonphilosophical. I said at the beginning of this discussion that my only question is, Why did phenomenology, at its beginning understood by Husserl to “save” philosophy, become a synonym, at the end of the century, for “the end of philosophy”? Why do current phenomenological studies only sing the tunes of “antiphilosophy,” “post-philosophy,” and “literature”—terms that would have astounded its inventor? I think this may be explained as “enthusiasm” for the questions of existence, of the unreflected, and the concrete. It seems to me that we can locate a sort of progressive deterioration in the existential derivatives of phenomenology, from Levinas’s and Merleau-Ponty’s controlled and conscious shift to the more radical projects illustrated in the recent issue of the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, “Tourner la phénoménologie.” To eliminate any confusion as to the nature of my investigation and thus to bring my analysis to completion, let’s take up my question from a different angle.

The Utterance in Question We know how Merleau-Ponty wanted to explore natural consciousness, the domain of the preobjective. He wrote, “The truth is that the relationships between the natural and the transcendental attitudes are not simple, are not side by side or sequential,”99 even if he concluded, later in the text, that, “there is undeniably something between transcendent Nature, naturalism’s being in itself, and the immanence of mind, its acts, and its noema. It is into this in-between that we must try to advance.”100 The concept of “encroachment,” which Merleau-Ponty gives as a synonym for “philosophy,”101 is meant to explore this in-between. The concept of encroachment is in line with the object he’s aiming for, namely the “in-between” that is neither the object of pure nature (“naturalism’s being in itself ”) nor the transparent subject of Husserl’s transcendental position (“mind’s acts and noema”). The “inbetween” that is neither totally subject nor completely object is the body, the incarnated body, my own body. My body is at the same time an inner worldly thing, a figure in a time and a space, an object of nature subject to its causality, and a body of flesh by which there are objects. It is therefore a subject but no longer the disembodied subject of Descartes that holds for every subject, but rather this subject that is me (born and soon dead) and no other.

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This Leibkörper requires tools other than vision and, in particular, objectifying Cartesian representation, which inexorably transforms this body into res extensa, an inert object of nature. We can thus understand why the concept of “encroachment” is necessary to the unveiling of the “in-between.” My own body is neither subject nor object and displays, Merleau-Ponty tells us, its own reflexivity that has nothing to do with the specular vision too often paradigmatic of philosophical reflection.102 This reflexivity consists in “the fact that [the body] touches itself touching, sees itself seeing,” but this possibility “does not consist in surprising a connecting activity behind the connected, in reinstalling oneself in this constitutive activity; the self-perception . . . : in fact I do not entirely succeed in touching myself touching, in seeing myself seeing, the experience I have of myself perceiving does not go beyond a sort of imminence, it terminates in the invisible, simply this invisible is its invisible, i.e. the reverse of its specular perception, of the concrete vision I have of my body in the mirror.”103 We have here the possibility of a reflection of the unreflected (in the sense that the body possesses a form of reflexivity); this reflexivity of the body proceeds from noncoincidence and not, as in the Cartesian ego, from coincidence with itself. Given Merleau-Ponty’s analyses, my problem is not to claim that the body is not an “in-between,” nor that it “does not reflect,” even less that it is not accessible to philosophy—that would be a direct opposition to the content of the author’s theses. My problem is much more simply expressed in this question: what can account for the experience that I have of my body? Who makes this analysis of the “in-between”? Who uses the concept of encroachment to attempt to adequately express the aimed for object? My body? No, of course not, but rather the philosopher himself—this reflection is not by the body but by Husserl himself in section 77. Consequently, the assertion of an end of philosophy here would clearly be impossible, because it is the philosopher who speaks the encroachment, the in-between, the body. It is the philosopher, in all these analyses, who cannot be eliminated. To put it differently, we are observing here a gap between what is said (the said) and the saying. Admittedly, we must leave aside the possibility of an “in-between” of discourse that would be neither the pure causality of nature (“naturalism”) nor the Cartesian ego’s position of total coincidence (which we can provisionally agree to call, with Merleau-Ponty, the “transcendental position”104). But we must also leave aside the possibility that this “said by the body,” like the “in-between” that is understood through encroachment, would be the work of a saying; if, according to Merleau-Ponty’s suggestive

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phrase, we must “unveil little by little and more and more the savage vertical world,” this unveiling is not the work of the savage world itself. Even if such were the case, wouldn’t we also have to show its possibility, just as Heidegger shows that Being is the speaking authority? But we have nothing of the sort, neither in Merleau-Ponty (which is understandable, since death did not leave him enough time), nor in his disciples—who, taking every possible opportunity to draw from his uncompleted texts and dismembering writings that were meant to be part of a work and not flashes of heat lightning, neglect to ask the question of phenomenology’s status and thus too often oscillate between a totally private language that could not be literature and a metaphysical though disgraced essentialism. Jocelyn Benoist notes this absence of methodological reflection in contemporary phenomenology: “What is to be done now that we will have ‘seen everything,’ as Dante said, and before phenomenology’s eyelids probably close for an eternal sleep in the paradise of philosophical doctrines? Perhaps there is still time to bring the phenomenological look’s attention precisely on the fact that it is a look, that in its legitimate claims to produce knowledge it has something to say to itself, and that there is something in the fact that a look has something to say to itself and in the way that it can do so—something not at all obvious, but extremely problematic. Perhaps by asking this question, interest in the idea of phenomenology (failing phenomenology itself, if it exists) will be revived.”105 The choice of lived experience, of individual concretude, or of the flesh as the most appropriate thing for a phenomenological discourse thus does not have to be taken to the detriment of the question of the philosophical status of phenomenological description. As Benoist notes further, the phenomenological shipwreck106 in the folds of pathos, feeling, and life feeds on the concealment of this question of the philosophical status of phenomenological description. If, indeed, existential phenomenology would agree to reflect upon the conditions of its own practice and on the status of its own discourse, then it would take care of the tension that traverses it today—a tension between the vehement rejection of a discourse that would unveil the real (so-called classical metaphysics, Husserlian phenomenology supposedly remaining metaphysics) and this hunt for the singular to which a certain kind of phenomenology has surrendered itself; a contradiction between the proclamation of the end of philosophy and its extension to the “savage vertical world”; a contradiction between the rejection of philosophy in its entirety, suspected of wanting to “enclose the real,” and the always-broader extension of its domain of investigation; a contradiction, in a word, between the “said” and the “saying,” between a

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discourse’s subject and its status; a contradiction that only Levinas was courageous enough to confront. I would like to conclude my analysis by looking at this courageous move.

“Saying,” “Said,” and “Unsaid” in Otherwise Than Being107 In Otherwise Than Being, Levinas develops his theory of signification (“the very signifyingness of signification”)108 starting with the categories of the “said” and the “saying.” As he had done since The Theory of Intuition, he means to break with Husserl’s “objectivism” and thus to link himself to a rejection of the semantic intentionality that the father of phenomenology had developed. Indeed, for Husserl, the “said”—conceived as a topic, as what is said, thus as an object—tends to become sovereign. His project—which in itself would be just as positivist as the Vienna Circle’s—would be to eclipse the “saying” for the sole benefit of the “said.” For Husserl, the correlation between the “saying” and the “said,” Levinas writes, is only “the subordination of the saying to the said,”109 “the said which dominates the saying which states it.”110 But because “apophansis does not exhaust what there is in saying,”111 it is necessary to reexamine the entire Western theory of meaning, which hangs on the theory of objectivity, strict corollary of “representationalism” and of the imperialism of “objectivity,” which Levinas’s 1930 text had already rejected. But, it will be asked, if the “said” is the object, the topic, the content, what is the “saying”? Is it the act of a speaking subject? Evidently not. Levinas’s critique of the objectivism of Husserl’s Logical Investigations does not mean to effect a revival of the transcendental subjectivity of Ideas, nor does the reversal of semantic intentionality lead to a restoration of the act of a sovereign subject. Nor can the “saying” be interpreted, following Austin and Searle, as the illocutionary force implied in any propositional content. His critique of representationalism must not be understood as the illumination of a “speech act,”112 as an assertion of the pragmatic against the hegemonic claims of the semantic. But what, then, is this “saying”? “Saying” is first of all speech addressed to an other, turned toward the other, anterior to any “said”—that is, to any intentionality toward an object. “The saying that states a said is . . . a pure for-another, a pure giving of signs.”113 We know that in Levinas, the relation to the other is originally primary, foundational, that the other constitutes me deep down in myself, before myself. This foundational intersubjectivity has nothing in common with the communicational

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exchange, a relation between two equal consciousnesses, that Habermas will develop. If I am, first of all and before anything else, a response to the other, this response is passivity, suffering, or even, Levinas tells us here, “exposure.” Step-by-step, saying becomes “the supreme passivity of exposure to another.”114 This exposure to another leads quite clearly to the dismissal of the cogito but also of any idea of communicative action in a symmetrical intersubjective relation. This “exposure” by which I offer myself to another makes me infinitely vulnerable. This fragility is born in the “sincerity” with which I give myself to another. Unconcealed, sincere, exposed—I am thus liable to be wounded, or even annihilated by this gift of myself to the other: “The one is exposed to the other as a skin is exposed to what wounds it, as a cheek is offered to the smiter.”115 “Led to sincerity, making signs to the other,”116 a simple “ ‘here I am,’ ”117 a “gift of myself ”—with this sincerity of saying, I take the risk of an offering without insurance, “the limit of the stripping bare,”118 “tearing from oneself,”119 “absolute non-coincidence,” “towards the skin,” “trauma.”120 This saying as “saying to the other,” this sincere and thereby infinitely dangerous “saying to the other,” is anterior to and the condition for any “said about something.” “This saying has to be reached in its existence antecedent to the said, or else the said has to be reduced to it”121—this clearly moves in the opposite direction from Logical Investigations, for which signification depends upon the said, the topic, the object. This saying that always already constitutes me, by which I come into relation with another in sincerely exposing myself to him, this “here I am” is like the trace of the infinite that traverses me and constitutes me. The “Thou” to whom I am the response, this “Thou” by which I become a “here I am,” is in fact originally the call of God. At the end of this analysis of “saying,” we are led to what Levinas calls the “glory of the Infinite.” Saying is ultimately the way in which the infinite speaks itself in multiple ways in each of us: That the glory of the Infinite is glorified only by the signification of the-one-for-the-other, as sincerity, that in my sincerity the Infinite passes the finite, that the Infinite comes to pass there, is what makes the plot of ethics primary, and what makes language irreducible to an act among acts. Before putting itself at the service of life as an exchange of information through a linguistic system, saying is witness; it is saying without the said, a sign given to the other . . . saying that does not say a word, that signifies, that, as responsibility, is signification itself, theone-for-the-other. It is the subjectivity of the subject that makes itself

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a sign, which one would be wrong to take as a babbling utterance of a word, for it bears witness to the glory of the Infinite.122 The series of substitutions is clear that leads us from “saying” to “the response to the other,” from this “response” to “sincerity” (which, Levinas notes, is not an attribute of saying but rather is the saying itself), and from “sincerity” to “the Infinite speaking itself.” The other is not others as an earthly empirical subject, it is the Infinite of which others, through their faces, are the trace.123 The signifyingness is from the Infinite, my saying carries its trace, as Abraham’s “here I am” carried in itself the call of God. We can see that Levinas’s theory of signification is quite the reversal of Logical Investigations, a reversal in that saying precedes the said, the sign, the expression, the respondent’s passivity, the observer’s activity. Semantics is relativized not by a theory of acts (pragmatics) but by a conception of the sublime, the eruption of the Infinite, which disorganizes the relation between what is said and the fact of saying. But here too—as with Merleau-Ponty’s “body,” “in-between,” and “savage world”—the question arises as to who says this, the question of the philosopher. Levinas, far from his contemporaries’ concealment or his successors’ frivolous shunning of it, is willing to answer the question. Even if, Levinas tells us, the objection has “overcome skepticism” since “the dawn of philosophy,”124 it is necessary to confront it and ask: What about our discussion, narrating, as though they were fixed in themes, the anarchy and the non-finality of the subject in which the Infinite would pass? They are thus found to answer in the end not with responsibility, but in the form of theoretical propositions, to the question “What about . . . ?” They do not answer the proximity of the neighbor.125 Levinas does not only thematize this performative contradiction, but, what is more, he assumes it, he demands it by and in what he calls the “philosopher’s unsaid.” The philosopher must accept this gap, not try to fill it in by arguing here for an impossible to realize coherence. To conceive the otherwise than being requires, perhaps, as much audacity as skepticism shows when it does not hesitate to affirm the impossibility of statement while venturing to realize this impossibility by the very statement of this impossibility.126

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The philosopher must accept this “unsaid” to better signify “the proximity itself in which the Infinite comes to pass.”127 Philosophy, by the demonstration of its defeat, by this unsaid that it accepts, by this coherence that it rejects, gives way to another mode of expression—revelation and prophetic speech: The revelation is made by him that receives it, by the inspired subject whose inspiration, alterity in the same, is the subjectivity or psyche of the subject. The revelation of the beyond being is perhaps indeed but a word, but this “perhaps” belongs to an ambiguity in which the anarchy of the Infinite resists the univocity of an originary or a principle. It belongs to an ambiguity or an ambivalence and an inversion which is stated in the word God, the apex of vocabulary, admission of the stronger than me in me and of the “less than nothing,” nothing but an abusive word, a beyond themes in a thought that does not yet think or thinks more than it thinks.128 The performative contradiction thus becomes a trace of God, an expression of the sublime. Remember that in his treatise On the Sublime129 Longinus already regarded the rhetorical figure expressing the sublime to be an oxymoron, the union of opposites. Performative contradiction allows one to conceive the infinite in the finite, the unsayable at the very heart of what is said. Performative contradiction would be the “appearance of the Infinite,” an appearance that, in Kant’s terms, is given in the impossibility of its appearance, as in the second commandment, for Kant the most sublime passage in the Old Testament.130 But—and this is the decisive point for understanding Levinas’s movement from philosophy to religion—contradiction, oxymoron, is the stylistic figure most often employed in the Psalms; it is the privileged mode of expression for prophets, who, in the face of God’s word and the prohibition to represent it, resort to this expression that destroys expression. To say the infinite in the finite is to introduce the inexpressible in the expression and thus to destroy the expression at the very moment that it is made. Such is the structure of the words of the prophets; such is the theory “of saying” that Levinas proposes. The series of substitutions in Otherwise Than Being—just as in Nine Talmudic Readings,131 which, significantly, followed this book—leaves no doubt: Levinas articulates a performative contradiction, he accepts and reverses it, by making our impossibility into the outstripping of the trace of God in us. We are rejecting philosophy

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for religion, Husserl for Isaiah—who, significantly, is invoked in Otherwise Than Being, which asserts a performative contradiction. This examination is of capital importance in that we see here how the nonresolution of a performative contradiction requires the abandonment of philosophy in favor of religion. It is not at all my aim to condemn this recourse to religion, which others have shown to constitute “the very heart of Levinas’s thought,”132 nor to criticize a style that tends to revive the words of the biblical prophets against the apophansis of Greek philosophy.133 My task was only to analyze the structure of a discourse that was meant to be critical of philosophy, and here, too, I was able to establish that this discourse takes the form of a performative contradiction. Levinas—who asserts, assumes, and even calls for this contradiction—proves it.

Conclusions: Performative Contradiction and Oscillation Between Skepticism and Positivism The conclusions of these analyses are completely identical with those of the first chapter, namely, that performative contradiction and oscillation between skepticism and positivism mark every discourse relative to the end or the supersession of philosophy. Of course, at the heart of phenomenology, the oscillation between radical skepticism and scientism is transformed into a swaying between literature and metaphysics. The impossibility of reflecting upon the status of one’s discourse or, as Jocelyn Benoist says, of “conceiving the look that sees,” leads too many phenomenological analyses to oscillate between a discourse that would give up a claim to truth in order to become a purely poetic proclamation and an essentializing discourse that at its height would reduce the infinite wealth of a singular real to the generality of a concept. But however this difference in accent may appear—doubt or science on one side, literature or metaphysics on the other—it is the same structure that leads a corpus to go from one extreme to the other, often at the same time and in the same respects. Of course, phenomenology—at least in Levinas—does not suffer but rather proclaims a performative contradiction, taking the defeat of Logos, the ruin of reason, all the way to the end, harbingering a turn to religion. But this distinctively Levinasian feature must not mask what is important for my initial inquiry, namely, that the end of philosophy cannot be articulated without contradiction. It can certainly be wished for, so that the time of prophets

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and religion will come, so that the unrepresentable will happen and God will arrive, but it cannot be discursively uttered. Beyond this common structure—oscillation, contradiction—this examination also yields another conclusion: the critique of philosophy in this chapter has been done in the name of a new theory of meaning. If, to put it in Putnam’s terms, skepticism (analyzed in the first chapter) was born from excessive respect for the sign and scientism from excessive respect for reference,134 in this second chapter, the “catastrophe of the semantic triangle” was avoided even though necessarily the new theory of signification did not supersede the structure (contradiction, oscillation) encountered in the first chapter. The distinguishing feature of this new theory of signification was to understand the “saying” in the “said.” Of course, “saying” and “said” do not have the same meaning in Austin as in Levinas! I have shown enough to be able to ask whether these two theories of signification could be understood on the basis of a single theme—overcoming the semantic triangle by showing, beyond the content of what is said, the “saying.” This theory of signification justifies a posteriori my apparently paradoxical, even provocative, grouping of them; in fact, this proximity between Austin and Levinas can be reformulated more precisely. They both share the idea that representation must be overcome. This representation, in both cases, is understood as the imperialism of reference or of the object—the spoken object for Austin, the seen object for Levinas. But, it will be said, this project of overcoming representation can be attributed to the entirety of contemporary philosophy;135 so it should be specified that Levinas and Austin propose an overcoming beginning with the implementation of a new theory of signification that, in both cases, takes account of “saying.” Moreover, for them both, taking account of “saying” signals the end of philosophy, which must be superseded by another practice— linguistics for Austin, or ordinary language for Austin again and Cavell,136 religion for Levinas (or poetry for some of his disciples). Of course, I am not trying to reduce these two tendencies of current philosophy by amalgamating them in a bizarre syncretism. The relevant concepts in phenomenology for understanding and criticizing representation are the visible and the invisible, limits and the infinite, that is, iconic concepts; on the other hand, the salient oppositions in the pragmatic current are reference and utterance, hence, concepts of the theory of signs. This gap between sign and face, between the linguistic and the iconic order, is especially clear in current debates about aesthetics, which are split between phenomenological and analytic trends, between analysis of signs and of images. Nevertheless

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(though the idea of a common structure for images and signs never frightened the Port-Royal school—but that is not the issue here137) I have been able to show that Austin, like Levinas, attempted to escape from representation by taking account of “saying” and that this accounting led, in both cases, to a reappraisal of philosophy. The two authors’, or trends’, originality with respect to those I discussed in chapter 1 is clear: they do not start from a semantic theory (investing in signs—Rorty—or referents—scientism) but from a theory of saying in what is said. They nevertheless share with the authors from chapter 1 the idea of a necessary overcoming of philosophy. But the articulation of this end demonstrates the same symptoms, too—namely, an oscillation between two antinomic discourses (skepticism and scientism, metaphysics and literature) within a single way of thinking, and a pragmatic kind of contradiction. Can we find these symptoms in other schools of thought that do not claim to be representative of either the generally Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, nor classical epistemology, nor the more “Continental” phenomenology— schools of thought that, like these, also proclaim the end of philosophy? As I said in the introduction, we must examine not only the most blatant claims but also the most surreptitious assertions, for the proclamation of the end of philosophy has become more and more muffled, nuanced, and prevalent. We are arriving at an area of philosophy that does not declare itself, like Rorty, to be antiphilosophy, that does not conceive, like Levinas, of overcoming philosophy in religion, but that nevertheless assigns a more and more restricted role to philosophy. On this point, Habermas’s position appears to me to be absolutely exemplary in that he first tried to maintain philosophy as an autonomous, even first discipline, but then—in a progression that I will reconstruct—made it into a discipline whose contours were less and less clearly defined, a practice that was more and more dependent upon the empirical sciences.

3



The Antispeculative View: Habermas as an Example

A Philosophy in Three Movements, Epitomizing Three Possible Antispeculative Approaches Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy seems, across its different periods, to display the most salient trait of contemporary philosophy. This contemporary philosophy is characterized by what we can call its “antispeculative” habitus, a habitus that is entirely structured around a critique of classical metaphysics, generally characterized as a symbol of the hubris of a human thought that desires to subjugate the entirety of what there is under its almighty power. All the trends that I have already discussed could be united under this banner, as could just as easily Derridian deconstruction. Habermas has illustrated this vast genre, the veritable backbone of contemporary philosophy in three periods (or movements), each in turn embraced and then abandoned: a therapeutic approach, a critical approach (that is, the idea of philosophy as bringing out a phenomenon’s conditions of possibility), and finally, his most recent approach, which adopts a certain form of naturalism.

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Before Habermas, the therapeutic current had numerous representatives, since it encompasses different positions according to which philosophy is possible only as a simple deconstruction of illusion or as therapy, as a simple analysis or demonstration of the inherent error of the discipline. To deconstruct illusion and not to construct a Weltanschauung—this approach is embodied first and foremost by Wittgenstein, for whom metaphysics is a sickness and the analysis of language its cure. This approach clearly dates back to Kant and is carried out in the themes of Habermas’s first major work, Knowledge and Human Interests. Habermas exemplified the second approach, namely, the critical approach as an investigation into conditions of possibility, in his subsequent foray into “universal pragmatics.” Finally, starting in 1999 with Truth and Justification, Habermas seems to make do with a certain form of naturalism, for which the foundational authority for everything and every thought is the evolution of the species. This illustration of very different approaches by a single author is quite beneficial for me, for it allows us to understand, dynamically and from an internal perspective, the aporias proper to each of these approaches. For in the end, what has pushed Habermas to progressively abandon these different faces of his thought? The answer to this question (along with a contextualization of three fundamental moments in current philosophy, moments that Habermas sums up through his disavowals, changes, and his very evolution) will be given as the story of the defeat of the “maintaining of philosophy,” Habermas’s initial concern. Indeed, we will see how the different stages of Habermas’s philosophy can be read as the progressive abandonment of the idea of a philosophy as autonomous, distinct, and primary. The route that has led Habermas from Knowledge and Human Interests1 in the 1960s, to The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity2 in 1985, to Truth and Justification3 in 1999, is a route marked by breaks, which has seen an overall shift from a critical theory understood as the deconstruction of illusions to a universal pragmatics that was part of the “linguistic turn”4 (more than his first stage, which was still dependent upon the paradigm of the Kantian subject), to finally arrive, today, at a sort of fallibilist perspective, in which philosophy is no longer critical theory nor linguistic analysis but becomes a science among others, in the same way as physics or sociology. This evolution in three movements is, without any doubt, the source for the profound differences of interpretation to which Habermas’s philosophy has given rise. Indeed, conflicting positions have been imputed to Habermas, thus some thinkers define his project as an attempt to transfer the traditional predicates

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of subjectivity (purposiveness, self-reflection) to language in order to avoid any reference to a subject. Manfred Frank proposes this reading (in order to critique it)—in his eyes, when Habermas speaks of language, he “is not very far from the position of a philosophy of origins reviewed and corrected by Heidegger and Derrida, for whom sometimes being, sometimes the text, speaks as if it were a subject capable of action and reflection.”5 Others, like Niklas Luhmann, assert to the contrary that, despite his paradigm shifts, Habermas revives the old concept of subjectivity by transforming it: “Habermas essentially considers the subject as well as the intersubjectivity that precedes it as a potential suitable foundation for truth: in his view, human subjectivity rests on the capacity for giving reasons . . . , which supposes a much more deeply rooted concept of the subject.”6 Thus for Frank, the subject is nonexistent in Habermas; for Luhmann, it is omnipresent. Interpretations as diametrically opposed as these cannot simply be the result of a misunderstanding by one or the other of the readers but is indeed anchored in Habermas’s philosophy itself and, in my view, in his paradigm shifts.7 Let’s consider each of these evolutions in turn to show how the symptoms of the current crisis persist, regardless of the period studied or the paradigm chosen by Habermas.

Philosophy as Therapy: Knowledge and Human Interests I have said that Knowledge and Human Interests marks the first period of Habermas’s philosophy. In this text, he shows himself above all to be concerned to maintain philosophical discourse’s distinctness in the face of a triumphant positivist trend, whose only task is to legitimate a largely dominant technical and scientific rationality. Against this discourse, he commits himself to promoting self-reflection as a philosophical method. His critical theory is defined by a dual reflexivity: on the one hand with respect to the context from which it emerges, on the other with respect to its context of application. Following a clearly (and, moreover, self-proclaimed) Kantian movement, selfreflection appears, simultaneously and in the same respects, as both a radical questioning of rationality about its conditions of possibility and as the critical dissolution of illusions. Thus the truth will come out of a reflection upon the false, which Habermas interprets in Knowledge and Human Interests as domination in general, whatever ideological forms it may take on. Through self-reflection (which is understood in Knowledge and Human Interests as a

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development of communicative activity in social life), the subject will come to an accurate understanding of himself, and thereby, to “emancipation.” But this critical theory, at the risk of itself being a mere ideology produced by society, must find a foundation. After an attempt to ground critical theory in the historical subject of the Enlightenment (an attempt that corresponds to two publications from the early 1960s, Theory and Practice8 and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere9), this foundation will, beginning in 1965, take the form of a revived albeit transformed transcendental philosophy. Indeed, all the chapters of Knowledge and Human Interests aim to show that human interests, tied to the fundamental conditions of the reproduction and constitution of the species and of which there are three (technical mastery of nature, a practical orientation, and emancipation), are expressed in types of activities that, though subject to historical modifications, nevertheless constitute “transcendental” frameworks. Habermas here is still largely dependent upon the Kantian idea of a transcendental subject. Indeed, even if, hostile to any absolute rational foundation, he refuses to consider selfreflection as the activity of an “I” and relocates this process in a contingent human species, the fact remains that this species must constitute itself as a conscious subject—self-reflection, which grounds the emancipatory interest, aims at a transparency, a self-comprehension of the subject by himself. And yet, after Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas will abandon this support for Kantian self-reflection and this conception of a philosophy that would be only a deconstruction of illusions. Why? We must now look at the internal difficulties at the origin of this shift. In Habermas’s early philosophy, self-reflection was understood as unconstrained communication, whose engine was “the interest in emancipation.” This emancipation is necessarily connected to its opposite, domination, always first in the collective consciousness. But this proposition—apparently simple since it says only that emancipation presupposes domination or ideology (just as, for Wittgenstein, therapy presupposes an illness)—nevertheless implies a number of theses that will be the source for this first system’s implosion. First of all, emancipation needs domination. Servitude, the first ideology, and the restless wanderings of the collective consciousness are the factual conditions for a future emancipation. In a word, without an initial servitude, there is no need to rid oneself of it; without illness, no need for therapy. Second, domination is ultimately inexplicable, as Jacques Rivelaygue very rightly remarks, “Institutions and ideologies are grounded in the facticity of a preexisting domination.”10 And indeed, in order to explain

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dom­i­nation, Habermas can neither refer to the Hegelian theory of history— which presupposes an absolute knowledge that he rejects—nor identify this domination with simple economic exploitation—which, in his view, would repeat Marx’s error of conflating production and reflection, work and interaction. Domination thus appears as a difference without reason, as an irreducible remainder, that is to say, irrational. This second thesis, finally, calls forth a third: an impassible divide between the real and the ideal. We are, indeed, thrown back upon the opposition between an always false (because ideological) empirical communication and a direct communication that, however, remains ideal. This ideal is conceived as an inaccessible beyond that, in the final analysis, renders all communication inadequate. Here Habermas is back in the most characteristic aporia of Kantian philosophy— this aporia will raise the problem of maintaining philosophy as a critical theory, as self-reflection on an external content (ideology), a self-reflection that would aim at a self-understanding (liberation or emancipation). Indeed, if we accept these three theses (emancipation needs domination, domination is inexplicable through reason, the schism between the real and the ideal cannot be overcome), we are led to genuine internal contradictions. Thus, philosophy as critical reflection (or, to continue the comparison to Wittgenstein, as therapy) aims at the disappearance of its other, ideology (illness), but if its aim were to be realized, philosophy would disappear. It follows, in the final analysis, that philosophy aims at its own eradication. Moreover, if we maintain that domination is in fine irrational, and if we renew ad infinitum the Kantian schism between the real and the ideal, then a critical discourse, as a liberating practice allowing the dissolution of illusions, is impossible. To illustrate this contradiction, even more basic than the first, let’s consider the example of psychoanalysis. Habermas interprets psychoanalysis as a practice of clarification that participates in the exercise of emancipation by means of self-reflection. The analyst and patient are comparable to the “for us” of the philosopher and the “for itself ” of consciousness, and each step of the cure is understood according to the philosophical categories of alienation, self-reflection, and appropriation. On the basis of this reading, Habermas thus makes psychoanalysis the model of a self-reflective science with the same status as philosophy. But if we apply the three statements identified earlier (again: emancipation needs domination, which is irrational, and thus there is an irreducible schism between the real and ideal) to psychoanalysis, we get the following theses: (1) the subject’s selfunderstanding depends upon a preexisting neurosis or psychosis, which

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corresponds to the claim that critical reflection must confront ideology in order to be exercised. There is nothing surprising in this first statement, and it even seems like simple common sense (who indeed would dream of seeking treatment if he neither was nor felt ill?)—but the same is not true for the next two theses; (2) self-understanding, the intended goal, will never be achieved (there will always be a schism between the real and the ideal). From a therapeutic perspective, this is a relatively distressing statement because it means, indeed, that no one will ever be cured. The third statement will accentuate this; (3) neurosis is, in the final analysis, irrational (indeed, the reasons behind neurosis cannot be articulated without sinking into a brutally causalist or essentialist explanation, proper to a Hegelian, Marxist, or even biological model that Habermas rejects). But liberation or emancipation presupposes an understanding of the reasons behind a syndrome. If this understanding is not possible, then the chances for a recovery are zero. These propositions are even more untenable if we transpose them onto social domination. But we are entitled to effect this transposition, because Habermas purely and simply identifies repression in the Freudian sense with social censorship: “The same configurations that drive the individual to neurosis move society to establish institutions.”11 If we extend this analysis consistently, it gives us the following theses: On the one hand, philosophy must wait for events (for example, Nazism) before it interprets them (the owl of Minerva). Only after the catastrophe is complete can philosophy discover, through the work of critical reflection, the power of the illusion. On the other hand, if historical catastrophes are, in the final analysis, irrational, it is utterly impossible to predict them by bringing to light the reasons that caused them and to make sure that they do not appear again. This clearly challenges the definition of self-reflection as capable of transforming the real. Therefore, to summarize the consequences (which, so we could see them more easily, I took the liberty of illustrating with the example of psychoanalysis), we are led to the following conclusions: Initially wanting to legitimate philosophical discourse against its positivist dissolution in a hard science, Habermas very closely adheres to the Kantian explanatory model and is logically led to this series of conclusions: First, philosophy is sterile in that it cannot produce any content (the object of its investigation is always outside it); second, it cannot claim to explain the real (domination is, in the last analysis, without reason); finally, it cannot even transform the real, because it is obligated to work on accomplished facts and because, moreover, it cannot through its analysis of reasons prevent the eventual return of

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those facts (the symptom in psychoanalysis, barbarism in history). But this cascade of paradoxes and contradictions is brought about by the seminal idea of a philosophy as simple therapy, that is, as deconstruction of illusions. We could also find these paradoxes in Wittgenstein, or at least in those who read Wittgenstein only as a therapist.12 Therapy accepts illness, but what makes the illness? It can be answered that to try to determine that would be to risk adopting foundational hypotheses (for example, that illusions stem from human nature, or from the intelligible character of humanity, or even from the necessary movement of history), a stance that Wittgenstein rejects. Nevertheless, if it is necessary to reduce illusory metaphysical subjects to ordinary language, the sole purveyor of truth, how is it that this language could engender deviant languages like that of metaphysics? Is it ordinary language that gives rise to the illusions of philosophy? How, in that case? This question is all the more pressing for if the truth is in ordinary language, I cannot see how the latter could give rise to such a monster (the metaphysicians’ delirium). Here again, we fall into troubling aporias, aporias that already appeared in my analysis of Austin. Briefly, whether we’re concerned with Habermas or Wittgenstein, the idea that philosophy is an exclusively negative discourse, a practice aiming at emancipation (or, in Wittgenstein, a return to ordinary language) through the dissolution of ideology (in Wittgenstein, the dissolution of linguistic nonsense), engenders paradoxes entailing that it must be abandoned. Which is what Habermas does, having recognized these impasses, in the mid-1970s. From that point, all his efforts will seek to overcome this schism between the ideal and the real (a schism implied by the definition of philosophy as pure therapy). This is the second period of his philosophy, by far the best known and the longest lasting,13 namely:

Philosophy as Inquiry into Conditions of Possibility: “Universal Pragmatics” To overcome the schism between ideal and real, Habermas will try to see if he can’t find ideal communication within empirical communication. The philosophy of language will give him a guiding thread, by whose measure he will attempt to rethink his system. It becomes a matter, around the middle of the 1970s, of reconstructing, from an analysis of empirical communication, the presuppositions of an ideal communication.14

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The starting point for the reconstruction is the theory of speech acts. Habermas takes up Austin’s thesis, already discussed, according to which our utterances are acts and not simply representations or descriptions of events. But the theory of discursive acts is only a starting point, for Habermas will quickly criticize philosophers of language for not going beyond the level of accidental contexts and not wondering about the more fundamental level of the universal and necessary presuppositions of any discursive act. Habermas’s movement thus consists in radicalizing pragmatic theory by going from the initial pragmatists (Austin, Searle, etc.) to what Habermas will call “universal pragmatics.” Starting with an analysis of the communicative situation, in which I effect discursive acts, Habermas will show that every discursive form presupposes a series of claims implicitly uttered and mutually admitted by the interlocutors. There are four such claims: in making an utterance, the speaker implicitly claims that what he says is understandable (verständlich), that the propositional content is true (wahr), that the utterance is appropriate (richtig), and that the expression of his intentions is sincere (wahrhaftig). Taken together, these four make up a statement’s validity claims and constitute its veritable conditions of possibility. As soon as an activity oriented to understanding is initiated (“communicative action”), the interlocutors have always already raised these four validity claims. Every discourse, even those of a practical order, like morality and law, is an enactment of these demands, the basis for communication. The model of communication thus described is, of course, an ideal distinct from the empirical conditions of communication. Nevertheless, Habermas explains, in carrying out discursive acts we proceed counterfactually as if the ideal speech situation were not merely fictional but real. Habermas has thereby overcome the sterilely and self-contradictorily regulative dimension of philosophy as therapy. What we have here are constitutive presuppositions, because these claims are conditions of possibility. On this point, Habermas writes in “What is Universal Pragmatics?” that “I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech action, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.”15 Without intelligibility claims, truth claims, etc., there is no communication, that is, no speech teleologically oriented toward mutual understanding between interlocutors. Thus, where his first philosophy failed by asserting the radical schism between empirical and ideal communication, his second seems to succeed by demonstrating that communication is the immanent telos of language. Philosophy is no longer a therapeutic and negative reflection; it becomes an enterprise aimed at clarifying the conditions

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implicit in every speech act. This paradigm shift appears to be a necessary step to “save” the philosophical discourse. The philosopher is no longer a mediocre school teacher for humanity who, unable to explain or even transform the real, glorifies radical finitude, unhappy consciousness, inescapable tragedy, and all those sorts of things but becomes a scholar who unveils the universal conditions of possibility necessarily inscribed in the very use of language.16 This dimension of necessity, which is not present in Habermas’s first philosophy and is introduced by universal pragmatics, is emphasized in his subsequent works. Thus, Habermas doesn’t hesitate to say, “I would agree, with certain qualifications, with the statement that a speaker, in transposing a well-formed sentence into an act oriented to reaching understanding, merely actualizes what is inherent in the sentence structures.”17 The idea of an actualization by each subject of a structure “always already” inscribed in language underscores the necessity thesis that Habermas maintains. Likewise, in “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” he explains that even the most radical skeptic, in the final analysis, cannot help but aim at mutual understanding: “Unless he is willing to take refuge in suicide or serious mental illness . . . he cannot extricate himself from the communicative practice.”18 He cannot, as Habermas repeatedly explains,19 because strategic action itself (namely, the sophist’s discourse that does not mean to “communicate with” but to produce an effect in his interlocutor, which thus privileges the perlocutionary over the illocutionary) presupposes communicative action. If the sophist were to succeed, he would have to feign to be engaging in communicative action in the sense that “the use of language for mutual understanding is its original mode.”20 Habermas here presupposes a telos (mutual understanding) immanent in language, posits that language has a “good” essence, and makes the implicit claims “always already” expressed by the speaker into strong claims inherent in the very structure of language. As Habermas writes, these conditions are “speech-act-immanent obligation[s].”21 Thus, he will no longer hesitate to say that “morality is inscribed in the grammar learned by every subject.”22 What should we conclude from this analysis of Habermas’s second period? First of all, it is clear that he has totally changed his definition of philosophy. It is no longer a merely negative, deconstructive, therapeutic activity but becomes the elucidation of the necessary conditions for any language. Its function is thus first to reveal a true structure (for example, the four conditions), not the elimination of a behavior. The status of philosophical discourse has undeniably changed. With this first observation, we can now say that the

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phenomenon of philosophy’s oscillation between two functions can be found in Habermas’s philosophy—the first, which we could call the function ad minima, the therapeutic function, and the second, more positive, namely the discovery of a truth inscribed in nucleo in the structure of the real (here, in this case, in the structure of language, for since the “linguistic turn”23 language has served as ultimate reality). A single doctrine thus offers an illustration of the swinging pendulum that we saw earlier in multiple philosophies. Thus, in his first period, Habermas articulated a renewed criticism, not very far from a moderated skepticism, and then turned to a more positive theory of truth, in which the necessity “inscribed in language” becomes the key idea. Can we add another conclusion to this first insight, namely, that there is an internal contradiction in this second position, a contradiction that would compel its abandonment and a turn toward a third epistemic paradigm, closer to classical fallibilism? Without a doubt, for as Luc Langlois recalls in his article “Habermas et la question de la vérité,”24 Habermas himself recognizes that “revisions to his theory of truth were in large part motivated by Albrecht Wellmer’s objections.”25 But what does this objection consist of, if not, once again, the exhibition of a performative contradiction? Indeed, Langlois explains, “The idea of a definitive consensus [which is the telos toward which language, internally and necessarily, tends] turns out to be fundamentally contradictory, because this idea [presupposes] something beyond argument and discourse, that is, the very thing for which it is supposed to provide the index of rationality.”26 Thus, the logical pathology that we have seen in every contemporary doctrine so far appears again. However, while I share Langlois’ view that because of the contradictions that Wellmer had brought out, “Habermas undertook, in Truth and Justification (published in 1999), to review from top to bottom the premises of his theory of truth, whose main tenets had been articulated in 1972,”27 in my view, a question nevertheless remains unanswered. Why is this redevelopment done in favor of a fallibilist theory? Why hasn’t Habermas tried, following the example of Karl-Otto Apel, to overcome this contradiction while remaining in the same framework, namely, of philosophy understood as an investigation of the conditions of possibility inherent in our communicative acts? Indeed, it is perhaps not strictly necessary, given the idea that “we cannot escape from communicative theory,” that we go back to the Hegelian idea of a final realization of the good—that is, in this context, a final realization of the ideal communicative action, freed of any strategic or parasitic action. If we follow Apel,28 Habermas could have avoided any performative contradiction with-

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out completely disrupting his theories of truth and of philosophy. The latter, however, is exactly what he did. Why this very unexpected return—given the universal character of his second philosophy—to a fallibilist pragmatism when he could have effected, if not a totally transcendental, at least an Apelian reorientation of his project? I have to address this question for, beyond the intrinsic interest in tracing Habermas’s philosophical evolution, it gives us one of the most telling illustrations of the trends in philosophy today.29

From Universal Pragmatics to Fallibilist Pragmatism30 The seemingly incomprehensible shift from philosophy as an investigation into the ultimate conditions of possibility to a philosophy that, like the other empirical sciences, is subject to verification by reality and is liable to be falsified, can be explained in my view by the following: the tensions in Habermas’s philosophy do not cease with a simple self-contradiction in his fundamental doctrine of truth. On this point, we can see the extent to which the theory of argumentation, which Habermas developed throughout his second period,31 contains such difficulties and serious contradictions that it forced an abandonment of the system of “universal pragmatics” (an abandonment of its universally transcendental character), and thus explains, in my view, the withdrawal to a classic form of fallibilist pragmatism or utilitarianism. Before we carefully dissect this nodal theory of argumentation, recall that Habermas’s second philosophy is composed of three closely interwoven levels that must nevertheless be kept distinct. Universal pragmatics constitutes the first level, where it is a matter of seeking criteria to identify valid propositions. The inherent presuppositions of any discursive act that claims to be valid will be what determines a theory of truth. The second level is of argumentation, where it is a matter of exhibiting the rules of justification for propositions in the current argumentative practice. This is effected by a theory of argumentation. Third and finally is the sociological level, where a twofold question is asked: how do legitimation problems arise at the heart of a society, and how does a theory of communicative action allow us to grasp social life in all its dimensions? These questions are addressed by a theory of society.32 I have already shown that the contradiction at the level of a theory of truth is of a pragmatic order. Let’s now consider what sort of contradictions appear in the theory of argumentation, the hinge between the theories of truth and society and, in my view, the key point for Habermas’s second philosophy.

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First of all we should recall that for Habermas, an argumentative inference is what orients a series of acts toward a conclusion. Argumentation thus does not merely establish that a given thing is true in a given world (a classic positivist view) but must also establish it relative to the intention to convince a listener and to obtain his assent. The intention to convince by means of proof is one of the specific characteristics of argumentation distinguishing it from a simple logical inference, like implication. Arguments, because they must be adaptable to some purpose, are thus liable to be ranked (one argument may be deemed better than another in regard to a given end). Given that, how are we to determine the “force of the better argument”? Habermas answers that the force of the better argument is simultaneously “constraining and noncoercive”—a model that pushes for agreement, “the justification that should motivate us to recognize a validity claim,”33 but that cannot be reduced to the constraint imposed by logical propositions that are as necessary as they are empty of content, or by empirical propositions that “come into argumentation, so to speak, from the outside.”34 In a word, the force of the better argument neither obliges nor imposes, it motivates. Let’s consider now the different steps of argumentation as well as how one passes from one stage to the next. The first stage is clearly occasioned by the disruption of an initial consensus, that is, by the challenging of a validity claim. The speaker will then try to justify his claim by a “deduction from a justifying language,” that is, by exhibiting a principle or general norm that is liable to explain his statement. How does a validity claim come to be contested? In other words, why do certain propositions that had been accepted up to that point (God exists, Aristotelian physics is correct, one must always pay one’s debts) become transformed into problems? Far from the results of a sovereign individual’s sudden decision, these challenges arise from the evolution of society, or even, more generally, the species. Through this process of evolution, a consensus is transformed into a dissensus. This is explained by the “theory of the lifeworld” that Habermas develops at the end of volume 2 of The Theory of Communicative Action. The lifeworld is defined as the ensemble of beliefs shared by the individuals of a given society. “Taken as a whole, they [these beliefs] form the context of background knowledge accepted without question.”35 But if at a given moment a participant challenges not the totality but a fragment, a segment of this reservoir, it puts things under pressure: “It takes an earthquake to make us aware that we had regarded the ground on which we stand every day as unshakable . . . Whether a lifeworld, in its opaque take-forgrantedness, eludes the phenomenologist’s inquiring gaze or is opened up

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to it does not depend on just choosing to adopt a theoretical attitude.”36 Here Habermas develops two fundamentally anti-Cartesian theses: the first, which he borrows from Wittgenstein, asserts that radical doubt is impossible, that there will always be propositions that are held to be paradigmatic (which Habermas terms “background knowledge”) on whose basis an only-partial challenge can arise; the second shows that the origin of reflection cannot be imputed to a philosopher’s act of will but results from an external event. The real in itself is his concern here (the metaphor of the earthquake, at least, seemingly must be interpreted in this way). It is thus clear that a movement from a zero level (shared belief) to a first level (its challenge) is a necessary movement, induced by the real itself. The second stage of argumentation is a challenging of the general principle itself. The speaker will thus be compelled to give “a theoretical justification” in response to this challenge. If the challenge concerns truth claims, he will be able to propose one or several empirical verifications. He will thus argue by recourse to induction. In the moral domain (justice claims), if someone responds to a speaker’s exhortation with “it is tedious to repay money that one has borrowed and is used to thinking of as one’s own,”37 thus challenging the legitimacy of a norm in the name of one’s own pleasure, then the interlocutor should find a substitute for empirical verification—in this case, Habermas tells us, a consideration of interests. But the interest invoked in support of the norm obviously cannot simply be the individual’s sole interest, for it is true that the listener would have an easy time showing that it is never in one’s immediate interest to repay a debt, retorting that “you—you pay your debts, but my poor friend you will never be anything, much less a government office-holder.”38 This is why the interest must be a universalizable interest. On this point, a Habermasian speaker could learnedly reply that we must repay our debts because “loans make possible a flexible use of scarce resources.”39 He thereby underscores that this act, which contributes to society’s smooth functioning, is beneficial in return for the individual. If, in the theory, the movement between a principle and its casuistic evidence is by induction, in practice, it is the principle of universalization that permits the establishment of a norm: “Participants in a practical discourse strive to clarify a common interest.”40 From an analysis of discourse in “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” Habermas shows the necessity of this principle of universalization for discussion. The passage to this second level of discussion is thus also necessary. Indeed, to legitimate a norm is to justify it with an interest common to

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all; but interests, as Habermas explains repeatedly, are themselves the product of the species’ evolution, of historically elaborated needs. Hence, the norm is nothing other than a confirmation of appropriateness spontaneously adjusted by evolution. If argumentation encompassed only these two levels, its necessity would be absolute and it would be impossible to define argument as a “force of rational motivation.” This is why a consensus can be real only if it is possible to modify the justifying language. This is the function of the third level of discussion. “Modifying the terminological or conceptual system” consists quite simply in asking whether the theories (the ensemble of norms or assertions) are well adapted to their aims. This means, for example, in physics, the possibility to move from an Aristotelian theory to a Copernican; similarly, in morality, it means the possibility of challenging a norm’s relevance, whether it is adapted to our present needs, with, Habermas tells us, “considerations of a meta-ethical or metapolitical order.” This can be done without necessarily sinking into the comical bad faith of one of Albert Cohen’s characters, who, disputing the debtor’s obligation, accuses his creditor of immorality: “For thirty years, Abravanel, you’ve demanded payment from him with a disgusting greed.”41 A number of more plausible arguments can indeed be called upon. It is thus possible to take up something comparable to Hegel’s analysis of deposits—to show that the demand for repayment supposes a society founded on property, that the declared advantages of “a flexible use of scarce resources” are meaningful only in a capitalist society, and finally, that other kinds of relations are conceivable. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, shows in analyzing the notion of debt that it has no meaning within a community like the family—of which the current French civil code has preserved certain traces, since it stipulates that every debt requires a written act, except among members of a family, which clearly shows that the notion of debt has meaning only for certain kinds of relations.42 But on what authority can a theory be criticized? One could initially reply that a theory will be challenged by counterexamples that falsify it. Thus, in physics, the discovery of sunspots demonstrating generation and corruption in the extralunar world could be considered as one of the decisive experiments contributing to the establishment of the Galilean theory. Similarly, in morality, the proposition “one must always pay one’s debts” is liable to be falsified in the name of morality itself: it is not always in the general interest that third-world countries repay their debts, and the fact that a dictator in one of these countries is acquitted is not necessarily a sign of an irreproachable integrity of character. By definition, when a principle relies on

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induction (or on its practical equivalent, the universalization of interests), counterexamples are always possible. However, it does not seem that this possibility is what Habermas intends for a critique of theories, for such a thesis would presuppose an epistemological conception that he views, moreover, as naive. Indeed, we all know that the credibility of experiments in physics depends upon a prior theoretical framework in which they are situated, and—without necessarily sharing Pierre Duhem’s holistic conception in which an experiment is not even capable of falsifying an existing theory— the fact nevertheless remains that Habermas here refuses to claim that new theories are born out of an experiment or a series of experiments. This is why the challenging of a theory can be effected only in the fourth and final level of discussion. This ultimate stage “leads to a level of discourse at which with the aid of the peculiarly circular movement of rational reconstruction we become aware of what should count as knowledge: how cognitive achievements which may lay claim to the title of knowledge ought to be constituted.”43 This stage presupposes a radicalization that goes well beyond a discourse limited to scholars (and, moreover, this is why Habermas calls this the level of self-reflection). Here it is a matter of inquiring about the ultimate meaning of a scientific theory. To clarify this somewhat difficult point of the thesis, let’s look at three theories in physics: the theory developed in 1245 by Gossuin of Metz in his text Mirrour of the World,44 Galileo’s theory, and finally, Descartes’. Beyond their clear divergences on properly physical statements (their theories of space, movement, light, the stars, etc.), there is a much more fundamental difference that goes well beyond the framework of a discussion among specialists—namely, the purpose that they assign to physical knowledge. For the medieval physicist, physics’ goal was not to know the world for what it is but to understand God’s message through it. The physicist’s work thus resembles that of the hermeneuticist—it consists in decoding the forest of symbols that is nature, deciphering beyond its literal meaning the hidden meaning of a universe understood as a collection of theophanies organized according to a hierarchy leading from the invisible world to the visible world. For Gossuin, following Aristotle’s example in astronomy, to know nature such as it is devoid of meaning or interest. In contrast, Galileo defined physics as the theoretical and neutral explication of what is, and Descartes understood it as a means of creating technical objects and thus of ameliorating the conditions of human life. (On this point, he is far removed from Galileo’s physics—the last articles of part 4 of The Principles of Philosophy45 go so far as to claim that he cares very little, in the final

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analysis, whether these physical laws correspond to the reality of the world as long as technical objects can be elaborated on their basis.) What is the aim of physics? A goal of immortality, by a relation to the Eternal; a goal of natural reality, by the neutral description of experiments; a goal of morality, by the amelioration of the conditions of life on earth—this must be determined by the fourth level of discourse. But what are the criteria that will allow us to classify one theory as scientific and another as mythical? In whose name do we determine the value of a knowledge claim? Habermas tells us that at this stage of argumentation, it is impossible to dissociate theoretical and practical discourse: “This last step breaks through the boundaries of theoretical discourse . . . theoretical principles reveal their practical core,”46 and reciprocally for practical discourse, “this last step also breaks through the boundaries of practical discourse because the practical question ‘what knowledge ought we to desire?’  .  .  . is obviously dependent upon the theoretical question ‘what knowledge are we able to desire?’”47 The disappearance of the boundary between the theoretical and the practical poses an interpretive problem: if it is easy, in a pinch, to understand how the practical presupposes the theoretical (we cannot declare something desirable if it turns out to be not only unrealizable but moreover unrepresentable and inconceivable), on the other hand, the theoretical’s reference to the practical is more ambiguous, at least in Habermas,48 for he posits that the ultimate criterion for the determination of a theory is the consideration of interests. On this point, Habermas explains that to evaluate knowledge we must consider its content as well as the interests with which this content must always coincide. But this interest is no longer to be understood, as it was in his early philosophy, in the sense of interest in emancipation. Indeed, in his second period Habermas no longer takes up this theme,49 which had initially arisen in Max Horkheimer’s critical theory. For this reason, the use of interest here means, for example, that the adoption of Cartesian physics had been commanded by humanity’s interest in increasing its technical competence. Conversely, if a scientist today were to propose that science has a different purpose (for example, to know what is, in order to live in harmony with nature), he would be authorized to say that humanity has an interest—for its survival—in ending the exclusive pursuit of technical development. If, indeed, the survival of humanity is at stake, this theory will be adopted out of self-interest, or else this physicist will be relegated among the dreamers and poets, in other words, among the nonscientific thinkers. These propositions, taken in themselves, are not at all bizarre, but they are difficult to reconcile with the other theses.

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Indeed, if we consider the entirety of Habermas’s analysis, the determination of a theory’s value seems, at first, to depend on the extent of its conformity with an ideal speech situation. Indeed, the progressive radicalization of argumentation is encouraged by this reference to the ideal; the stages of discourse are tracked by this necessary anticipation. Here, this explanation of argumentation is analogous to Kant’s or Peirce’s. What ensures a theory’s value is its aim, its purpose: the ideal speech situation for Habermas, the idea of system for Kant, the community of scholars for Peirce. But, if not only moral argumentation (by the universalization of interests at the second level) but also theoretical argumentation (by reference to humanity’s interest to determine the ultimate significance of knowledge at the fourth level) depend in the final analysis on the consideration of real interests, it becomes impossible to articulate this thesis with reference to an ideal. What, then, is the ultimate criterion of a theory’s value? Must it be determined on the basis of what is (interests) or of what should be (the purpose inherent in language, embodied in the ideal speech situation)? In other words, if, as Habermas writes, theory refers to the practical, what is the latter’s content—taking account of the interests of humanity, or an investigation of the ideal? From this first difficulty engendered by the theory of argumentation, two more can be deduced: 1. If the entire logic of argumentation rests on interest, knowing that the latter is the product of the evolution of the species, a theory’s value would be determined from its appropriateness to what is. We would thus be returned to the second level of argumentation, where the norm was nothing other than the affirmation of an agreement adjusted by evolution. But the third and fourth levels’ function is to overcome the position brought about by the second. This position closely resembles a form of evolutionism, related to naturalism, which we have seen illustrated by economists like Geoffrey Hodgson. Humanity’s needs evolve as a function of its history and each generation will adapt to new needs. Laws or social organizations—of which individual beliefs and behaviors are traces or echoes—are what could be called natural responses to these needs, for even if some are products of the evolution of societies, they all nevertheless correspond to the necessity of a given moment of the history of the human species (and subsequently, this will be a recognized tenet of contemporary naturalism). 2. This thesis supposes that the determination of our interests resembles a neutral and clear report, that is, it presupposes the possibility of a discourse

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that would not be tied to interests. Let me explain this point: either interests are entirely transparent and self-evident (but in that case, an individual or society does not need to intervene), or else the determination of interests must be the object of a fifth level of discourse. Even though this second possibility is implied by Habermas’s theory, it is contradicted, and here the system is self-refuting. As for the first possibility, also a consequence of the system, Habermas denies it because it supposes an ultra-essentialist configuration that Habermas vociferously rejects. For Habermas (particularly in his second period), the alteration of any given presupposes the free act of an individual or a collective subject. We obtain two important results from this analysis of the theory of argumentation: 1. First of all, the contradiction in Habermas’s philosophy can no longer be characterized, as numerous interpreters have done, as a contradiction between an individual’s free act and the institution of language (the paradigm of the subject versus the paradigm of language). If this contradiction or tension might possibly be found in Apel, it cannot be imputed to Habermas, for a human, in his view, is not exclusively a creature of language. This is underlined by his statements such as “The distortion results directly from the uncontrolled penetration into language of paleosymbolic offshoots . . . the systematic distortion of colloquial communication can be traced to the encapsulation, like foreign bodies, of paleosymbolically linked semantic content in the linguistically regulated application of symbols”50 or again “In the self, a communication block subsists between the language competent ego . . . and that ‘foreign land within.’ ”51 This view allows him to maintain the principal thesis of a good essence of language, and to reject as outside it such things as symptoms, deviance, and the unconscious—which, in Habermas’s terms, appear as foreign bodies coming from outside to perturb the structure of language. But this alternative at the same time allows him to conceive individual liberty as the possibility of action upon the real. Indeed, a subject’s freedom or act is located in the gap between a “paleo” level and the structure of language. The subject’s self-reflection, understood here as reflection on the unconscious limitations generating deviances, is founded upon language, to the extent that the demand that motivates the self-reflection is deducible from language, but at the same time the subject’s self-reflection works upon a content exterior to language. Habermas can thus without contradiction

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count the act of an individual subject among the characteristic traits of a rationality founded on language. To put it more generally, Habermas overcomes this supposed contradiction through the classic distinction between the form of a discourse and its content.52 Indeed, from the point of view of the universal form or structure of discourse, it is not possible to refer to a subject’s act. The constituted authority of language cannot be overcome, nor its immanent telos modified. In this respect, the subject is entirely dependent upon what we could call the pragmatic institution; he discovers, over the course of his apprenticeship, a given that he has not constituted. An analysis of illocutionary force shows its different components (claims to, relations to, engagements with, as well as the four presuppositions inherent in the aim of mutual understanding), which cannot be denied except by sinking “into serious mental illness or suicide.” These components are thus necessary, universal, and independent of spatiotemporal contexts. Must we then conclude, for all that, by a strict application of the principle of the excluded middle (as Manfred Frank seems to do, as well as Jean-Marc Ferry with the alternative that he proposes—either language is the authority and we are not subjects, or else we are subjects and we can supersede and change language), that for Habermas we are not free subjects? No, for the subject will be in charge of bridging the gap between this ideal structurally included within language and its real and contingent situation, with a content exterior to the form of language. This act, by which a subject “possesses the power to behave reflectively in relation to his subjectivity and to see through the irrational limitations,”53 can be deduced, Habermas tells us, neither from the given nor from the ideal—not from the given for it is not the unconscious, for example, that requires its own updating; not from the ideal for the end orients the act, it does not produce it, or communicative action would be automatically realized, which would return us to a Hegelian schema that Habermas rejects. It follows that if the ideal is given by language, only the subject’s act could try to make the real—that is, deformed communication within the empirical—coincide with the ideal. The institution of language does not negate a subject’s constitutive act but rather furnishes its universal purpose. 2. On the other hand, if there is no internal contradiction in Habermas’s philosophy between linguistic necessity and the individual’s free act, in my view, the contradiction that does emerge from this analysis is just as serious and indeed calls for a radical modification of the theory. The contradiction is located between the idea of the species’ interest, understood as the product of a historical evolution, and the ideal structure of language. What, in the final

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analysis, justifies the choice of a given theory or practice at the ultimate level of argumentation? The telos immanent in language, or the biologically-thenhistorically constituted interests of the human species? This is the real tension that lurks at the core of Habermas’s second philosophy and puts it at risk. For Habermas, the historical schema remains54 present to such an extent that it alone is able to interfere with, or even erase, the project’s apparently transcendental structure (investigation into conditions of possibility). Swinging between a naturalist historicism (evolutionism) and an Apelian transcendentalism (investigation of conditions of possibility), without further possible recourse to his first solution (which understood interests in transcendental terms), Habermas’s only choice seems to be to definitively abandon this second conception of philosophy as investigation of conditions of possibility, a conception that he had, indeed, already implicitly condemned in defining the interests of the species as the ultimate criterion of a theory’s validity. This is why he can only turn from pragmatics to a particular form of pragmatism, in the traditionally American sense of this movement, namely, as understanding truth in terms of utility, a criterion itself filled out by a notion of individual or collective interest. Habermas’s ultimate position becomes one in which philosophical theory will be indirectly corroborated by the results of other critical sciences (sociology, history, etc.). This theory of philosophy as a reconstructive science, whose statements have to be falsified by empirical sciences that themselves take into consideration the historical evolution of the interests of the species, is not only very different from the transcendental inspiration with which he began but also leads in fine to a destruction of Habermas’s second project. The crippling aporia, that Apel has noted, is as follows: The theory of communicative action thematizes different kinds of action, “communicative action,” as well as its inverse, “strategic action,” which is divided in its turn into “concealed strategic action” (in which communication is systematically deformed because we are dealing with an unconscious illusion—madness, self-deception, etc.) and “open strategic action” (which refers to the typical manipulation often at work in commercial, financial, etc., exchanges). But the “second” Habermas presupposed that strategic action was parasitic with respect to communicative action, the primary form of exchange. In Habermas’s system, the use of language for strategic ends had to be secondary and derivative. But how is communicative action’s primacy or originality justified with respect to actions that could only be “parasitic”? Is it by reference to social praxis? But doesn’t this demonstrate precisely the opposite? Doesn’t it purely and simply falsify the “fact of communicative reason”? Doesn’t social

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praxis agree with Callicles, Nietzsche, and others who are contemptuous of morality, against whom Habermas initially wanted to prove rationality? The epistemic system of fallibilism and references to the so-called morality of everyday life55 and to social praxis all lead to a pulverization of his initial project. Having thrown some light on this movement from Habermas’s second to his third philosophical position and having outlined the aporia that leads, in the final analysis, to a thesis of endlessly falsifiable reconstructive sciences, we must now assess the conclusions to be drawn from my overall analysis of Habermas’s philosophy.

Conclusions: Confirmation of the Diagnosis First of all, these three periods of Habermas’s evolution nicely embody the movement of contemporary philosophy. Thus today (since the first years of the new millennium), Habermas rejoins the most current trend in philosophy—naturalism. What is more, his evolution is an illustration of one of Quine’s hopes, “to naturalize the transcendental.” This contemporary naturalism obviously takes quite diverse forms, and there is indeed more than a slight difference between the naturalism put forward by Paul and Patricia Churchland and that adopted by Pascal Engel. Nevertheless, the pertinent authority (for none will risk speaking of foundations) is indeed “nature,” however one may define it (as a pure and simple neurobiological structure, a biological need, or indeed an interest progressively constituted from the fact of the evolution of the species or of a particular society).56 Starting from a view of philosophy as a simple negative critique (therapy), then developing at length the idea of philosophy as the determination of universal conditions of possibility, Habermas finally adopts the idea of a necessary relinquishing of the notion of truth. He does this for the very reason that each of these moments contained contradictions—because, in the final analysis, the true is what will turn out, through experience, to be in conformity with interests, that is, with what Habermas calls, in a pragmatic and no longer Kantian sense, “practical life.” From the point of view of my larger project, this analysis of Habermas’s philosophy can only confirm my initial diagnosis: contemporary philosophy is simultaneously characterized by a logical pathology—pragmatic contradiction—and by a strange oscillation between two extremes. We have seen that this tendency to self-refutation or self-contradiction is present in each

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period of Habermas’s philosophy. At the same time, his movement from one philosophy to the next has revealed the swing from one extreme to another: on the one hand, philosophy understood simply as negative, therapeutic, leads ineluctably to the advocacy, by philosophy itself, of its own extinction (a resurgence of the skeptical figure); and, on the other hand, a desire to be anchored (in language, history, or, in fine, the evolution of the species) also betrays itself through a dissolution of philosophy as a distinct discourse and leads from an initial skepticism to a universally positivist face of philosophy, namely, what Quine called the “naturalization of epistemology.” From scientism to positivism and back again, with the same kind of contradiction that disfigures each of the moments taken separately—this is the strange pattern that endlessly shapes current philosophy. Before proposing an escape from this pattern, I must definitively establish my diagnosis with a final demonstration. Having started with the most radical protests against philosophy (Rorty and the scientism in programs of naturalization), then proceeded through more neutral assertions of its necessary exhaustion (Austin and Levinas), and finally arrived (with Habermas) at the failure of an attempt to “maintain philosophy,” all that remains for me to do now is to consider the surreptitious views that would articulate the end of philosophy without openly proclaiming it. We find this view in many places and in many thinkers57—I have chosen to analyze it in a “current” that I have not yet had the chance to discuss directly. Indeed, up to this point we have encountered two paradigms—analytic and Continental—that have divided the philosophical field since the beginning of the twentieth century, and I have been able to bring out a few points of overlap: thus Rorty joins the deconstructivists in his desire for an “antiphilosophy” and Levinas meets Austin in his desire to conceive a theory of meaning beyond the semantic triangle; similarly, Habermas’s second period proposed an overcoming of the paradigmatic disputes. But my examination of the theme of the “death of philosophy” in contemporary philosophy cannot stop short of a complete assessment—there is a guiding thread of Ariadne that runs through all these currents despite their undeniable diversity (relativism and positivism in American epistemology, phenomenology, analytic philosophy, the Habermasian synthesis, etc.). This common point is reference to—and often, reverence for—Kant, a rare philosopher esteemed by all these currents. The contemporary critique of “metaphysics” and the refusal of the so-called “speculative” tradition, as well as the rejection of grand totalizing systems or Weltanschauung, all are fed not only

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with Heidegger or Wittgenstein but equally and incontestably by Kant, even if his theme of the critique of metaphysics is not “magnified” in the same way as the other traditions. Thus, for example, Heidegger and his disciples (hermeneuticists or phenomenologists) glorify through criticism the themes of radical finitude and discovery of the onto-theological structure of philosophy; while the Anglo-Saxons have either attempted, through Strawson, to rehabilitate a type of argumentation (transcendental argument), or, when they are relativist, to make a fairly intensive use of the “as if ” of the Critique of Judgment. On this point, I have already shown how Stanley Cavell, in his questioning of the claim to speak in the place of all others, adopted a position extremely close to Kant’s first skeptical readers, who, adopting the system of the Critique of Judgment, considered their claims to be nothing more than plausible demands for agreement.58 In this generally analytic tradition I can include—with a completely different orientation than Strawson’s rationalist or Cavell’s skeptical movements—movements to reappropriate the critical project initiated by Wilfred Sellars and continued today by John McDowell, movements that Jocelyn Benoist doesn’t hesitate to include within the generic label of “Kantian movements within analytic philosophy.”59 Apart from these positive references that run through all these currents60 (and by which Kant escapes the contemporary disapproval of what is called without further specification “metaphysics,” because he insists upon the finiteness and the necessary limitations of our knowledge), there are philosophers today who once again call for a “return to Kant.”61 These are the views that I propose to examine to complete my inquiry into the theme of the death of philosophy. This final stage of the analysis will then allow us to challenge the idea of the death of philosophy.

4

Kant’s Shadow in the   Current Philosophical Landscape

Kant expresses himself in multiple ways—this is why current proposals to renew or “reappropriate”1 the critical project do not all move in the same direction. Thus, if we undertake an analysis of these contemporary returns to Kant, we ought to distinguish two general ways of reading Kant— one starting from the Critique of Judgment and regulative judgment; the other from the notion of the a priori and from the transcendental, the fulcrum of the Critique of Pure Reason. But, as in previous chapters, we will see how these two ways of reading Kant embody the oscillation that I have stigmatized everywhere else—Kant, like Quine (in chapter 1) or Austin (in chapter 2), is the core that supports an oscillation between skepticism and positivism. On the other hand, we will see in this chapter that only one of these reformulations of Kantianism contains the logical pathology of pragmatic contradiction. The second, Karl-Otto Apel’s, contains a tension that I will elucidate but does not repeat stricto sensu the contradiction that I have analyzed up to this point. It will thus constitute an indirect proof of my thesis that the destruction (Rorty, Quine, Austin, Levinas) or even minimization of

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philosophy’s role (Habermas) leads to an insurmountable contradiction that annuls the denial or minimization. And indeed, among all the authors I’ve examined Apel is the only one to assert that philosophy is a first,2 autonomous, and distinct discipline. Before I tackle Apel’s view, unique in an otherwise relatively unanimous context, I shall first analyze the reconstruction of Kantianism that surreptitiously, without ever saying as much or sometimes even meaning to, endorses the idea of an “end of philosophy” and thus finds itself “standing with” Rorty.

The Skeptical Future of Kantianism: Reconstruction from the Critique of Judgment If Karl-Otto Apel is the source for a second reading of Kant,3 the first, which takes the Critique of Judgment as the nodal text for the critical project, is proposed by the ensemble of contemporary commentators on Kant. Indeed, beyond the difference between their propositions and the diversity of their sources, all the contemporary interpreters of Kant share a single presupposition: the Kantian enterprise as a whole should be reconstructed or reinterpreted starting with the notion of Urteilskraft, as it is particularly developed in the Critique of Judgment. In Germany, Manfred Riedel’s work4 best embodies this desire to take the principles of reflection proper to the faculty of judgment as the sole guiding thread. In France, Beatrice Longuenesse’s fine study, Kant and the Capacity to Judge,5 has systematically clarified the first Critique in light of the theory of reflection thematized in the third. The same perspective is shared by Claude Piché, whose Kant et ses épigones,6 moreover, underlines the undeniable preeminence of the third Critique today and traces it back to a 1982 colloquium held at Cerisy under the direction of Jean-François Lyotard, whose participants’ papers have been collected under the telling title La faculté de juger.7 Allow me to note, finally, that of the writers today who claim to be representatives of Kantianism, such as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, although their reading is apparently very far from Lyotard’s, they, too, propose nothing less than a promotion of the Critique of Judgment to the key position for the entirety of the critical project. Both as historians and as philosophers concerned to advance a “return to Kant,” Ferry and Renaut offer a reconstruction that begins with the Critique of Judgment—and it is for this reason that I have chosen to focus on their reading of Kant, among numerous other candidates.8 To give meaning again to the Kantian vision of the world is the goal

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that Ferry and Renaut gave themselves a few years ago, naming this project “critical humanism”—a goal whose implications are developed in Renaut’s book Kant aujourd’hui. By “the critical project,” Renaut means Kant’s oeuvre in its entirety and two years of Fichte’s philosophical activity: the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre and the doctrine of law. Critical humanism proposes to rethink our modernity starting with this entity (Kant-Fichte). So I must reconstruct their proposed reading.9

The General Principle: The Critique of Judgment as Foundation for the Two Other Critiques Relative to Kant, critical humanism accepts the Heideggerian thesis of radical finitude. It thus reads the Critique of Pure Reason in light of Kant’s aesthetics. However, the advocates of this rereading of Kant refuse to accept the corollary thesis that in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant cannot relativize the thesis of radical finitude with the idea of an absolute self-placement.10 Similarly, critical humanism accepts and takes up in its entirety Alexis Philonenko’s interpretation of Kant and the early Fichte; however, they do away with the basis for this interpretation, namely, his reference to Martin Luther and the idea of philosophy as practical theology.11 This dual acceptance, accompanied by a dual refusal, explains their attempt to find in the Critique of Judgment the means to affirm the moral dimension of the Critique of Practical Reason without either renouncing radical finitude or founding it on a theology that would give it meaning and value. Thus, in The Era of the Individual, after having recalled the impasse at the Davos debate (either a radical finitude but no autonomy—Heidegger—or autonomy but a relativization of finitude—Cassirer), Alain Renaut proposes critical humanism’s solution: “The discourse on moral freedom (autonomy), as it is presented in Kant’s practical philosophy, exhibits the same distinctive features as the discourse in the Critique of Judgment on intuitive understanding—that is, on God as an infinite being.”12 Moral statements should be read not as determinate but reflexive judgments: “This would involve conceiving of the supreme principles of practical reason as constituting principles of reflection.”13 The movement is clear: in order to preserve the thesis of radical finitude, moral judgments are understood as having the same status as judgments about art or life. We can best bring out the simultaneously concrete and profoundly skeptical implications of critical humanism’s decision to transform [moral] judgments

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into reflective judgments by first examining another of these two writers’ positions, namely, on the question, which they consider as central for Kant and Fichte, of recognition of others.14 Let’s recall the problem as it has been posed in French Fichte studies of the last thirty years: for Fichte, if I do not manage to find a criterion that proves, in the phenomenal world, that I am dealing with a free being with whom I can communicate, and not with a machine stripped of all intentionality, then the Critique of Practical Reason loses all philosophical legitimacy. This question about the appearance of recognition of others as rational beings can be illustrated by the following example:15 a Nazi officer could conduct himself in a morally or juridically irreproachable manner with those whom he considers to be German, for they are, in his eyes, part of humanity. But we cannot say, from a strict Kantian point of view, that he transgresses the moral law in his attitude with respect to those whom he considers to be Jewish, because the latter, in his eyes, are not part of humanity. Put bluntly, if it is not possible to understand the recognition of every other as a free being, then it is illicit to condemn Nazism—what is called, from themes developed in the second Critique, the “moral vision of the world” thus has no philosophical validity. To be assured of consistency will thus mean to determine that status of the description of the empirical sign of freedom in Fichte. It obviously cannot be a matter of a purely empirical description, without which it could not function for even a moment as a proof. It is thus a matter of phenomenological description—hence the question becomes, What relationship does this phenomenology maintain with a theory of truth? What is the relation between philosophy as a rigorous science and lived experience, between scientific construction and phenomenal manifestation? What is the status of Fichte’s discourse when he claims to be able to have an apprehension of freedom in man? Put differently, what sort of judgment claims that the mechanism does not work for all phenomena? To this question there are two possible responses: 1. It may be a matter of strong necessity. To be able to speak of a phenomenal manifestation of freedom, it must be shown that certain objects of the sensible world escape the determinism of phenomena; it follows that Fichte would claim to have demonstrated the nonpertinence of the mechanism in the phenomenal world and would truthfully answer the question thus: how does one recognize an other?

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2. Or it may be a matter of a simple universality claim. This claim would take the form of a regulative judgment like this: “Everything happens as if the absence of determination of the other’s body is a sign pointing in the direction of freedom.” French interpretations, prior to the critical humanist interpretation, tended to hold that Fichte must give a necessary status to his proposition; Fichte must demonstrate that the phenomenal world is not entirely ruled by the law of determinism, or else (and this is entirely Martial Guéroult’s view) the philosopher must either renounce “a certain number of his practical assertions,”16 or else rethink his speculative philosophy as a whole. The difference between the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794 (understood by Guéroult as a system of the finite subject) and the Wissenschaftslehre starting in 1801 (understood as a system of the absolute) could be understood by the necessity to ground in an absolutely true manner (in Kantian terms, from determinate judgments) the mechanism’s limitation in the world of phenomena. Conversely, for Ferry and Renaut, Fichte’s discourse must be reflective. On this point, Fichte renews the Kantian analysis of the teleological antinomy of the Critique of Judgment.17 This last point can be summarized thus: certain beings are infinitely improbable, according to the laws of determinism alone. It follows that we can postulate purposiveness not as a determinate principle but as a principle of reflection (that is, as a maxim allowing the direction of thought). In the Critique of Judgment, if the viewpoint of purposiveness must be considered as a reflective moment, it must likewise be so from the viewpoint of the mechanism [of nature]. If that were not the case, we would have absolute opposites, where the affirmation of a thesis would necessarily entail the negation of its antithesis, insofar as—unlike in the third antinomy—the subject of the two propositions is the phenomenal world. Hence, Kant tells us, [nature’s] mechanism and purposiveness can be maintained only if we refuse to think of them as constitutive principles—that is, as laws governing phenomenal reality—but rather make them principles governing the scholar’s investigations. The contradiction, as Schelling had already remarked, would be less a contradiction in reality than an irreducible opposition in the human mind. This solution has the advantage of not transgressing the limits of finitude in the Heideggerian sense of the term, but it is not, however, exempt from paradoxical consequences. Indeed, nature’s mechanism cannot claim to limit purposiveness, but—and reciprocally—nothing can claim by

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means of argumentation to limit nature’s mechanism. Here again, we have two principles of reflection, both legitimate if the subjects will agree to consider them as simple principles of investigation. A scientist will choose to follow one rather than the other without having to understand why. To put this concretely, an imitator of La Mettrie today could well say that man is a machine and proceed to show its mechanisms if he underlines with his work that “everything happens as if ”; reciprocally, a scientist could, if he wished, attempt to reconceive purposiveness provided that he claims to obey only a heuristic principle. A historian or a sociologist could maintain a thesis and accept its coexistence with its opposite, without claiming to dispute this, for in the final analysis, everything depends upon the principle of reflection that one adopts. This is a solution whose immediate adoption in the scientific community would have the advantage of giving scientific discussions an amiable, consensual, even ecumenical character but would have the disadvantage of delegitimizing any attempt at argumentation, or even of eliminating any discussion. Moreover, with this solution, Kant and Fichte strangely become precursors to Paul Feyerabend’s view that “anything goes in science,” the strongest purposiveness as well as the strictest determinism.18 Neither facts nor principles govern the scientist’s investigations. Here the skeptical appearance of this system becomes patently clear. With such a lens, science is in line with aesthetic judgment; the evaluative structure that holds for works of art becomes the ultimate model to which every judgment must refer. If we accept this as Kant’s solution and if we apply it to moral questions, we risk being logically19 forced to the following assertion: moral questions are not subject to determinate judgments, rather they are placed, like our aesthetic judgments, under the sign of “everything happens as if.” We may not recognize another’s humanity, just like we might not recognize the beauty of a painting or the value of a poem, and we have nothing with which to oppose the Nazi apart from the opposite principle (the method of construction). To make moral questions depend upon reflective judgment risks leading us to a renunciation of any validity for ethical norms. In this domain, we could claim only universality, without necessarily, as in the case of a discussion of art, de facto condemning someone who claimed the opposite. Transforming truth into a problematical demand leads to defining meaning from only its aesthetic style. And yet a lack of taste (such as not recognizing Picasso as a great painter, or objecting to a given kind of musical harmony) does not seem, in its initially Kantian presentation, to be

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the object of the same kind of genuine condemnation as moral errors like, for example, exterminating an entire community. The critical humanist theory, however, does not seem to be able to philosophically produce a conceptual distinction. Aesthetic communication becomes the reference for all communication—moral, juridical, political, even scientific. On this point, Ferry and Renaut write, “Law and aesthetics are then reunited in the general theory of communication or direct intersubjectivty20 whose core is surely to be investigated in the notion of reflective judgment.”21 On the basis of these analyses, we are able to perceive the structure of the entire system attributed to Kant and Fichte, and upon which critical humanism rests: the theory is founded on practice (repeating Philonenko’s reading of Fichte). This practice itself is founded on the juridical (Renaut’s contribution in Le système du droit). But the juridical has the same structure as aesthetic judgments (according to Renaut and Ferry). It follows that all theoretical, ethical, juridical, etc., judgments are aesthetic judgments placed under the sign of “everything happens as if.” All the faces of human rationality are reduced to the single component analyzed in the Critique of Judgment. Truth must be replaced by meaning, whose model is found in art. “Valorization” (in the sense of Wertlehre) must not be understood in a conceptual or determinate sense but in an aesthetic sense. To be sure, I could not dispute this philosophical reconstruction on the pretext that it cannot produce a conceptual difference between a moral judgment and an aesthetic judgment. Indeed, the demands of individuals, of the common conscience, of the citizen (who would evidently prefer to see Nazism condemned and to see every human being’s humanity founded in truth) cannot be taken into account here. The metatheoretical claim “Notions like the Good, Humanity, etc., have no absolute foundation” is philosophically acceptable. It is thus obviously imperative, to preserve the distinctness of philosophical questioning, to distinguish the demands of a given empirical conscience and the philosopher’s point of view. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in reference to Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi Party, had to forcefully recall, in this respect, the distinctiveness of the philosopher’s question that asks, “ ‘From what position can we judge?’ ”22 Who, qua philosopher, has not “considered [it] an accepted fact, and beyond question, that being a Nazi was a crime[?] This is something one may argue politically. I do so myself.”23 And indeed, we cannot mix different levels of argumentation and judge a philosophical discourse on the basis of criteria external to that discourse.

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A Skepticism Denied Nevertheless, we can note, in the present case, that if we come to a typically Maimonian, that is, skeptical, configuration, then some of the most important theses of an assumed skepticism are not, for all that, taken up by Ferry and Renaut. The theses that they do not take up—which are, however, necessary consequents of this reconstruction—are the following: 1. First of all, there is the thesis of ethical relativism—which a consistent skeptic must fully adopt in accord with his philosophical principles. But the necessity of a moral vision of the world is sometimes still affirmed by the critical humanists as a true perspective and not simply as a judgment of taste (which in all logic, however, they ought to say). Indeed, they rebut other philosophers in the name of this moral vision. Thus, because Heidegger was not able to put a moral philosophy into practice, he is condemnable: “It has scarcely dawned on them [Heidegger’s disciples] that Heidegger risked being led astray [i.e., into joining the Nazi Party] at all only to the extent that, confronted by Nazism, he had no ethical point of view consistent enough to allow him to immediately condemn it.”24 Similarly, in his article “Les subjectivités: Pour une histoire du concept de sujet,” Renaut denounces Michel Foucault’s statements in the name of morality.25 Renaut’s only arguments against Foucault’s position are the absence of “morality” to which his position leads, and therefore the reader can have the impression, as in the sentence cited against Heidegger, that Ferry and Renaut claim to refute other philosophical viewpoints with these simple value judgments. 2. Next, Ferry and Renaut do not emphasize, as Maimon does, the question of the status of discourse in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s statements in the Critique of Pure Reason are, in their eyes, true. Finitude is indeed radical; objective knowledge consists in the relationship between a category and an intuition, through the productive imagination of representable figures. But there is a paradox here, for if the Critique of Practical Reason is written from the viewpoint of reflective judgments, from what viewpoint must the Critique of Pure Reason be read? How is an affirmation of the eternal truth of the Critique of Pure Reason compatible with this other assertion that aesthetic judgment is the model for a finite and human rationality? Are we so finite that we can’t even find a legitimate viewpoint from which we could assert that “we are finite”? Don’t we find in this reading of Kant the very process of self-refutation that I have brought to light in the other trends? Here again, the question of the status of the discourse attributed to Kant is what

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is at stake. If we are told that not only statements about the beautiful and the living are reflective but also the statements in the Critique of Practical Reason, what then are we to say of Kant’s statements in the Critique of Pure Reason, statements that demand the division into determinate and reflective? If we are to reconstruct the entirety of the critical project from the Critique of Judgment, then what is the status of the statements in the Critique of Pure Reason? Why are its statements the only ones that aren’t reflective? But if we admit that they are just as reflective as practical principles, then how can we not see that we’re dealing here with a very powerful skepticism, of which Maimon is the most important representative? Why don’t Ferry and Renaut declare themselves to be “critical skeptics” like Maimon, unless it is because they deny a skepticism that all their analyses nonetheless combine to bring about? Therefore, the reconstruction of the critical project from reflection as it is deployed in the Critique of Judgment leads to the advocacy of a skepticism that is not far from that of Feyerabend, or even Rorty.26 Furthermore, we are led to an aestheticization of statements that critical humanism nonetheless denounces in thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard. In a word, the movement that promotes the Wertlehre into the place of the Wissenshaftslehre clearly leads to the legitimization of skepticism. Our study of this reading of Kant thus shows the extent to which this reconstruction of the critical project is run through by skepticism—denied even though present, and thus this reconstruction is also run through by a tendency to self-refutation. There is, however, a contemporary attempt to stand up to skepticism. It is even more important that we examine it, since—in contrast to all the approaches presented so far—it is the first to have conceived of pragmatic contradiction as a symptom of the crisis into which philosophy has entered, and the first to have spoken of a “reflexive deficit” in contemporary thought. Of course, I am referring to the work of Karl-Otto Apel.

The “Strong”27 Version of the Transcendental: Karl-Otto Apel The Notion of “Transcendental Pragmatics” The reference to Kant is clear in Apel, because in the tradition of the Critique of Practical Reason, his project consists of seeking an ultimate foundation for

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ethical norms. It is a question, for him, of adopting the Kantian heritage of an a priori of reason while effecting a “transformation of transcendental philosophy” in light of the acquired knowledge of the “linguistic turn.”28 In fact, contra Kant, who remained a prisoner of the philosophy of the subject, Apel refers to Wittgenstein: I have never laid claim to a prelinguistic “experience of certainty” in the sense given this phrase by Descartes, Fichte, or Husserl. Rather, I have laid claim first and foremost to the “paradigmatic certainty” belonging to a language game in Wittgenstein’s sense. Such certainty is already linguistically interpreted.29 Rational thought is by definition public, already within a language game, in a form of life governed by rules. It is thus a matter of integrating what we have learned from pragmatics into the Kantian project of a rational foundation for morality. And this integration will obviously give rise to a “transformation” of first philosophy because the factum that structures what Apel significantly proposes to call “transcendental pragmatics”30 is the “factum of communication” and the ethics that he means to ground is an “ethics of discussion.” Apel underscores this difference with Kantian philosophy when he specifies that this attempt differs from Kant’s classical transcendental philosophy in that it does not see the “highest point”—which transcendental reflection takes as its starting-point—in the “unity of consciousness of the object and self-consciousness” that is posited in a “methodologically solipsistic” manner, but rather in the “intersubjective unity of interpretation” qua understanding of meaning and qua consensus of truth.31 The project of transcendental pragmatics is thus simply expressed: against the radical deconstruction of reason (whether this deconstruction be Heideggerian, skeptical, or fallibilist), it is a matter of taking up the Kantian challenge of an ultimate foundation; but against Kant, and thus with his contemporary critics, he must challenge the idea of an “a priori of consciousness,” of a solipsistic and sovereign substance.32 Having defined this project, his implementation is also rather easy to grasp, and Apel summarizes it admirably in “The A Priori of the Communication Community and the Foundations of Ethics.” It shares the view of ethics as simultaneously “necessary and impossible.” Ethics is necessary because

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contemporary science, by the nature of its own products, calls for a clear understanding of norms (consider, in this respect, our bioethical committees confronting scientific technologies like, for example, cloning). But although it is necessary, over the course of the centuries ethics has just as much seemed to be impossible. This impossibility is born, Apel tells us, in the very concept of science as it was established in the seventeenth century in the West. Why does modern science forbid ethics? To understand this, we should “attempt to present the most important of [these] propositions”33 that demand the idea of an impossible ethics from the age of science. Three propositions, according to Apel, are covertly included in the current conception of science: 1. Norms cannot be derived from facts . . . [Apel calls this “Hume’s principle”]34 2. Science, insofar as it provides us with substantive knowledge, deals with facts . . . 3. . . . For this reason, an intersubjectively valid grounding of normative ethics is absolutely impossible.35 In a word, facts are subject to a rationally motivated agreement; on the other hand, they point to an arbitrary choice, irreducibly contingent and individual. This gap between an objective science and a subjective ethics is not only supported by the most traditional positivism but also by apparently opposed philosophical movements like the existentialism of a Kierkegaard or a Sartre. Paradoxical but objective allies, they indeed insist on the irreducibility of moral choices. Thus, Apel writes: Analytical philosophy and existentialism by no means contradict each other in their ideological function, but rather they complement one another. They corroborate each other through a kind of division of labor by mutually assigning to one another the domain of objective scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and the domain of subjective ethical decisions on the other.36 There is indeed, Apel concludes, a “complementarity between the value-free objectivism of science, on the one hand, and the existential subjectivism of religious acts of faith and ethical decisions, on the other.”37 From this analysis, Apel undertakes to bring down the myth of a valuefree science. He shows that in scientific practice there are “always already”38

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presuppositions of a prescriptive and not descriptive nature. “I should like to reconstruct the ethical preconditions for the possibility and validity of human argumentation and, consequently, of logic.”39 The sciences depend upon a number of clearly normative conditions like, for example, the prohibition against falsifying the results of an experiment, the presupposition of equality among participants in an argument, and even the rejection of all physical violence, implicitly included in the very act of wanting to convince with a demonstration, etc. Science implies a number of conditions without which it could not be practiced, but these conditions turn out to be ethical norms, not natural facts. Apel condenses the set of these “always already there” conditions (which I have already detailed when I discussed Habermas’s universal pragmatics—itself, on this point, a clear copy of Apel’s analyses) to a single phrase: “the community of argumentation.” An extension of what C. S. Peirce called “the scientific community”40 and an echo of Kant’s “community of saints,” this “community of argumentation” holds for any discussion whether its purpose is scientific, ethical, political, artistic, etc. This “community of argumentation” is the presupposition—always already made as soon as I begin to argue—that the truth will be attainable, without violence, in an ultimate and universal consensus. When I begin to argue in the factual world, I have always already presupposed the possibility, in an ideal world, of a community of argumentation with all its prerequisites (sincerity, universality, equality among participants, etc.). But, it will be asked, why should we accept rational discussion? If obeying logical norms presupposes an acceptance of ethical norms, why should we be logical? To put it in Kantian terms, aren’t Apel’s ethical norms just simple hypothetical imperatives and not a categorical imperative that demands of morality a foundation in reason? If logic and science presuppose morality, are we only moral if we want to be logical? And why would we want to be? Apel proposes to answer this formidable question—in which the very notion of an ultimate foundation of morality and its corollaries of an a priori or a “categorical imperative” are at stake—by first working out the central notion of a transcendental condition, that is, of a necessary condition of possibility.

Performative Noncontradiction as the Ultimate Transcendental Condition Apel’s contribution, with respect to the Kantian sense of a fact’s necessary condition of possibility, is to have conceived the set of conditions starting with the notion of performative noncontradiction. On this point, he thinks

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that it is important today to carry out a reflection upon the necessary transcendental presuppositions of an argumentative discourse, that is, on what cannot be disputed without performative contradiction. This explanation of the transcendental starting from the pragmatic category of “performative contradiction” clearly confers all its meaning to the juxtaposition effected in the phrase “transcendental pragmatics.” Transcendental necessity becomes synonymous with pragmatic noncontradiction. Performative contradictions are by definition always false—not because of their meaning (as in the analytic proposition “every bachelor is married”) but because of the status of their utterance. In addition, as in logic, the contrary of a statement that is always false is necessary. So statements whose contraries cannot be said without self-contradiction would therefore be necessary. Within the category of performative contradiction, defined as statements that cancel themselves out by the fact of being uttered, two types of contradiction can be found: (1) There are “pragmatico-empirical” contradictions, which relate to the empirical conditions of a discourse. In this case, the contents of a discourse and the empirical conditions that make that discourse possible are performatively contradictory, as in the statement “I was on the boat that was shipwrecked with no survivors.” (2) There are “pragmatico-transcendental” contradictions, which relate to the conditions of the actual argumentation itself, for example when I say, “The truth does not exist.” This is the classic self-refutation of radical skepticism, the necessary suicide of the consistent sophist. No discourse can, without contradiction, argue for a refusal of argumentation. In a word, there is only one alternative: accept these transcendental conditions or condemn oneself to silence; to speak is to enter into communication, signifying that one has already accepted these conditions. This refusal of performative contradiction is what gives the “a priori factum of argumentation” its meaning, transcendental philosophy its necessity, and reason its ultimate foundation. On this point, Apel does not hesitate to compare his pragmatico-transcendental argument to the fundamentum inconcussum: Along with ego-consciousness, a language game is presupposed as the fundamentum inconcussum in the sense of the critically reconstructed and transformed Cartesian tradition of philosophical foundations. In this language game the existence of a real lifeworld and the existence of a communication community are presupposed along with the actual evidence of thinking myself as existing in the sense of paradigmatic language-game evidence.41

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In a word, there are no sensible alternatives to our membership in a communication community; in this sense, when we communicate, we actualize a transcendental condition. This is why even the devil, if he were to enter into a discussion, would be obliged to respect a certain number of ethical norms. It follows that the prior acceptance (“always already”) of the norms of argumentation (that is, acceptance of the obligation to seek a motivated agreement rather than resort to violence or to an argument from authority) corresponds to the Kantian “fact of reason,” just as in the second Critique, transcendental reflection brings to light a principle already present in every human being. With Apel, this “fact of reason” becomes the “communicative a priori.” Before I turn to look at recent objections to Apel’s philosophy, I should underline the extent to which we are dealing with a “strong” version of “pragmatics.” Apel simultaneously radicalizes the insights of standard pragmatics (for example, Searle’s, for whom, as we have seen, while a number of constraints are implied in discourse, they are never given as ultimate conditions of possibility)42 and of the “universal pragmatics” of Habermas’s “second” period. The difference between the two authors can be seen in three terms that echo one another and are implicated in Apel’s reasoning but rejected in Habermas’s: “transcendental,” “a priori,” and “ultimate foundations.” Apel emphasizes this difference in declaring: Habermas nevertheless continues to reject, as impossible and unnecessary, the demand for an a priori valid ultimate justification of the philosophical validity claim made in universal-pragmatic statements about the necessary presuppositions of argumentative discourse just mentioned above. For example, he has disputed an epistemologically and methodologically relevant distinction in principle between the possible statements of the empiricoreconstructive social sciences (e.g., the hypothetical statements made by Chomsky’s linguistics about grammatical universals) and the, in my view, a priori valid universal statements of philosophy (e.g., the above-mentioned statements of universal pragmatics).43 What is peculiar to transcendental pragmatics is an acknowledgement of presuppositions of mutual understanding that are not historically contingent but are rather incontestably universal[.] Such presuppositions

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provide the grounds for doubt and mark the limits of possible doubt, and to this extent they provide the grounds—in the sense of a philosophical ultimate justification—of validity claims. In providing such grounds, however, are not such presuppositions transcendental insofar as they transcend in principle the relative background resources of historically contingent forms of life?44 A sharp distinction is drawn between the transcendental (universal and necessary) and the historical (particular and contingent). This refusal to index norms to the course of history, to the lived world, to contingent forms of life clearly allows Apel to avoid the various oscillations of Habermas’s philosophy—all caused, as I have shown, by an ultimate recourse to history and to social reality. But for all that, is this “strong” foundation exempt from aporias and difficulties? We must now turn to this question as we inventory the various objections to Apel’s philosophy.

Objections to Transcendental Reconstruction

a. objective necessity and individual decision The most immediately apparent objection to Apel’s “foundationalism”45 bears on the notion of individual liberty with regard to an actualization of transcendental presuppositions. Recourse to performative necessity could seem to make morality,46 in the particular sense of ethical norms underlying discussion, inescapable and necessary. The example of the devil (a frequent figure in Apel), forced regardless of his intentions to obey ethical norms if he will engage in discussion, only serves to fuel this simple question: where in all this is an individual’s free choice? To answer this first classic objection concerning the claimed necessity implied by “transcendental pragmatics,” we should distinguish, with Apel, between objectively necessary actions and their subjectively contingent realization. Indeed, I can always refuse discussion. I could hit someone instead of arguing. Recourse to violence is still obviously a historical and human possibility, without which good would already have been achieved for eternity. To understand this as something other than an ad hoc distinction, we must recall the structure of Apel’s “system.” I use the term “system” on purpose, for, in contrast to Habermas, Apel’s philosophy is presented as a systematic enterprise. Indeed, from 1973 to 2005, whether he is in dialogue with Heidegger, hermeneutics, Searle, Rorty, or Hans Albert’s fal-

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libilism, whether he is addressing first philosophy or more immediately concrete problems (like the education of children), he has always maintained the same structural orientation, which he summarizes in “Limits of Discourse Ethics?”47 It is important 1. that a universal ethics in the age of science be grounded in reason (what Apel terms option A of ethics) and 2. that we reflect upon the application of ethical principles to history in a concrete community (what he terms option B of ethics). All his books, articles, and lectures exemplify this clearly systematic organization, which takes its inspiration, without inhibition, from the great reconstructions of German idealism, like Fichte’s, for example, who in The System of Ethics48 just as in the Foundations of Natural Right49 first asks about the necessary conditions of possibility of the field under study (“deduction of the general principle” of ethics or of right), then asks about the applicability of these conditions to concrete communities or to real historical processes. In its very form, Apel’s philosophy revives the Kantian demand for systematic organization and runs counter to the entire contemporary doxa, for not only does he not hesitate to use the notion of an ultimate foundation but he also retains a systematic structure for philosophy in which diverse elements are integrated into a unified whole. And this systematic structure, organized in two large levels (A and B), allows us to respond to the initial question. Indeed, for Apel, there is and always has been a difference between grounding ethical norms in reason and understanding their application to history. The foundation (A) is necessary; the application (B) is aleatory. The individual’s freedom of choice remains whole and historically conclusive. Here, Apel is back in a typically Kantian structure that leaves space for individual action and does not understand moral achievement as a historical necessity. For all that, Apel protects himself from falling into certain Kantian pitfalls relative to the question of principles’ applicability. That a principle must be applicable to a real historical process does not mean that we must go back to the impasses of “On a Supposed Right to Lie.”50 We can recall that, under the pretext that any universalization of a lie destroys it as such (demonstrating that to tell a lie is not moral), Kant moves without mediation to the application of this maxim to a real situation and deduces that he must never tell a lie regardless of the contingent circumstances. We know the possibly horrendous consequences of this intransigence from a

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now-classic example: on the pretext that I must never lie, must I tell a potential murderer where to find his intended victim? In Apel’s eyes, Kant’s error here is due to the still too “metaphysical” character of his doctrine, which remains imprisoned in the philosophy of subjectivity.51 In order that ethics can be an ethics of responsibility and not merely one of belief, some sort of limitation for the ideal principle must be found. The principle, while it may be universal, is applicable to a complex and multiform reality; it therefore must not be applied without mediation as Kant had done. We can say that it is a matter, for Apel, of finding a schema or a mediator between the condition (the universal principle) and the conditioned (the historical situation). Not only his Diskurs und Verantwortung (1988)52 but also all his articles written in the 1990s about concrete ethics are consecrated to developing and illustrating this principle of limitation. Let’s briefly summarize this aspect of his work that addresses a too-often-heard objection, for clearing out erroneous objections will allow us to concentrate on the real ones. If we consider the example of lying, it is clear, for both Apel and Kant, that a lie as a universal principle is a performative contradiction. Its contrary “Do not tell a lie” is thus a necessary statement. Nevertheless, we should not absolutize a single concept of reason, and we should recognize that sometimes the only reasonable way to realize the principle is to have recourse to a strategic action directly contrary to the rational principle. In a word, there are historical situations in which telling a lie is better in conformity with reason than refusing to do so. Thus, in the case of a Nazi who is searching for a victim, I must exercise a counterviolence in the face of this real violence. We can see, in this case, that the mediating principle consists in attempting to eliminate the obstacles to a future application of the universal principle. The obstacle here is the Nazi regime that denies universality. To eliminate this obstacle, I must implement a strategic action, in this case, I must lie. This movement from a morality of belief (“Do not lie.”) to a morality of responsibility (“Lie, in light of the given historical circumstances.”) can only be accomplished on the basis of a dual refusal: refusal of an unavoidable accession of morality in history (a rather Hegelian schema), and refusal of the terroristic application of principles in the mode of Fiat justitia, pereat mundus53 (a rather KantianFichtean schema). That said, having brought objective necessity and subjective action into agreement, without for all that reiterating Kant’s mistakes on the question of application (one does not move from the principle to its application without mediation nor without taking a given historical situation into account), Apel

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seems to be confronted by a much more serious objection, posed by a certain form of decisionism.

b. o  pting for reason and contingent decision: apel versus popperian fallibilism I have said that if we actualize a transcendental presupposition in argument, we still have the empirical possibility to refuse to argue. But what is the status of this refusal? Can’t we say, with Karl Popper, that the first commitment for or against reason would be, in the final analysis, irrational? Hans Albert would thus be correct in asserting, in his Treatise on Critical Reason,54 that Apel’s project for an ultimate deduction of reason cannot exclude a decisionist moment. Reason can no more found itself on itself than the “hilarious baron” could get himself out of a swamp by pulling himself by the hair. The first, initial, original commitment in favor of reason would thus be itself without reason; it follows that the project of ultimate foundation would be condemned to defeat, the actualization of a categorical imperative would be null and void, and the very notion of transcendental necessity would be vain. Apel directly answers this strong argument by analyzing the presuppositions implied in the objection.55 The principal presupposition is that the objector forgets that the first fact is the discussion and covertly supposes that a decision can be made before any discussion. But the factum of which Apel speaks, which he means to account for, is discussion and nothing other than discussion. But to say that a choice for reason would be preceded by an irrational decision, which would be its condition of possibility, has no meaning unless one first abstracts from the discussion. This surreptitious abstraction shows that Popperians sink into the most banal solipsism in implicitly supposing a subject prior to the discussion, before the intersubjective exchange, a sovereign and voluntary subject, deciding for or against reason. A pure metaphysical myth, this subject opting for reason or not, is in fact the answer to a question devoid of meaning after Wittgenstein and the “linguistic turn,”56 namely, “What is there before discussion?” This question, the implicit presupposition of the objection, clearly does not enter into Apel’s philosophical horizon, as he takes care to specify that a decision in favor of reason is “the only decision possible” for “anyone who does not make this choice but instead chooses obscurantism, for instance, terminates the discussion itself and his decision is, therefore, irrelevant for the discussion.”57 That Apel takes care to italicize the expression “for the discussion” shows the extent to

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which he is speaking only of an ultimate foundation relative to the project of accounting for the phenomenon of discussion, and shows how he is not at all invoking a foundation in itself, an original act, first decision, irreducible choice, the cause of itself and everything else. There is no choice stricto sensu, and if, to be sure, the devil’s choice is empirically possible (once again, I can hit someone instead of speaking with him), this choice is without meaning in accounting for the factum of discussion and for understanding its conditions of possibility. With this answer, Apel shows the true nature of his project: when he speaks of an ultimate foundation, he remains within the order of discourse, because the framework of discussion is always presupposed. Too many objections are born from the abstraction from or the forgetting of this key point. As another illustration of this type of mistake, I can cite the objection made by both Sylvie Mesure58 and Jean-Marc Ferry. They suspect Apel of moving unduly from the müssen of transcendental argumentation (I am constrained to accept such and such rules in order to argue) to the sollen of moral duty (I ought to will these rules as norms of my action). For Mesure and Ferry, the theoretical necessity of argumentation cannot under any circumstances ground the practical obligation, the duty to argue. But, as in the preceding objection, here again we should inquire into what Apel’s adversaries presuppose to be able to say what they say. From what point of view does the notion of an authentically moral obligation, the notion of sollen—in contrast to the only theoretical constraint of müssen—obtain meaning? It can only be from the point of view of a duty conceived of as separate from discourse, that is, from the point of view of an “obligation” in itself. Consequently, the objection against Apel is, again, formulated from the hypostasis of a sovereign and first subject who, beyond being constrained to respect the rules of argumentation, should, before any argumentation, will them as a duty. This objection has its origins in an absolutization of the moral subject, and of practical duty, that Apel unambiguously rejects when he writes, “I think that transcendental philosophy in general and ethics in particular may be grounded in a radical way by avoiding all metaphysical implications of the Kantian system—as, e.g., Kant’s unsolvable problem of a ‘transcendental deduction’ of the reality of the free will and hence of autonomous reason.”59 Although he is always worried about an ultimate foundation, Apel’s philosophy is much less “absolutist” than are his Kantian adversaries. For Apel, the notion of a right intention has no meaning for the discussion. The good will is not only unverifiable but, moreover, it doesn’t really matter. This is why Apel reproaches Kant

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for having grounded an ethics of belief that still always secretly supposes a man’s good will would be recognized in its true value (by a God, somehow assuming responsibility for history). And indeed, if we analyze, for example, the demand for sincerity implicit in a given instance of speaking, we realize that the speaker’s real intention is not a pertinent parameter. From the fact that I speak, I am not at all committed to being truly sincere, but the act of discussion commits myself relative to the intentions that I have expressed. In this sense, the rule of sincerity, if it says nothing about the psychological state that the speaker ought to have, nevertheless constrains him to answer for his intentions publicized through language. This allows Apel to write that “it is not the good will that matters but rather that the good be realized.”60 In this sense, from a strictly Kantian point of view, Apel’s undertaking appears more like a foundation for the law than a foundation for morality, inasmuch as he leaves to the side the notions of a free subject, a right intention, a good will, and even of wrongdoing (every breach of argumentation being interpreted as nonsense, as madness). In a word, it is only a matter, for Apel, of demonstrating that once I enter into a discussion, I have always already recognized that there are a certain number of rules immanent in that discussion. That is all that is meant by the project of a “transcendental” and “ultimate foundation” of “the ethics of discussion.” Does this dissolution of the most current objections against the Apelian project suffice to give credence to it as a whole? Probably not, for a serious difficulty remains, an important problem, an apparently unsolvable aporia that is liable to mortgage this second great reconstruction of the “transcendental.”

The Question of Self-reference in Apel The problem takes its origin in the following question: what status should be accorded to the notion of “being constrained to argue”? Unlike the preceding objections, this question is not asked with respect to an empirical choice— which Apel has always accepted—but with respect to the transcendental possibility to reflect upon the rules of discourse. Apel identifies this problem as the problem of “transcendental reflection.” When I find myself in the language game of discussion, I have the capacity “to go back over” this language game and, through analysis of it, to illuminate the rules that govern it. But how, precisely, are we to understand this expression “to go back over”? It cannot be a matter of reviving the Cartesian model of a reflection guided by a subject exterior to this discussion, since Apel rejects the solipsistic temptation inscribed

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in nucleo, in his eyes, in Cartesian reflection. To avoid any surreptitious revival of a reflection conceived as the movement of a sovereign subject that is outside and above the phenomenon to be analyzed (in this case, language and its rules), Apel hypothesizes that, in fine, language itself is what allows reflection on its own rules. To the question, “How is reflection on language possible in language?” Apel will answer, in Transformation der Philosophie, that language is simultaneously “the subject and the medium of transcendental reflection.”61 Furthermore, he will go so far as to show that self-reflection on the use of language is the condition of possibility for participation in a discussion.62 Thus, language produces in and of itself the demonstration of its functioning. Language would be the object, the means, and even the authority for reflection. To put it in yet another way, “the principle of discussion [is] established through reflection,”63 and this reflection itself is allowed by language. To better grasp this definition of a transcendental reflection automatically produced by language itself, we should go back to Paul Ricoeur’s clarifying distinctions. In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur takes care to distinguish between “sui-reference” (unique to language) and self-reference, the act if not of a subject in the Cartesian sense at the very least of an enunciative authority in Emile Benveniste’s or G. G. Granger’s sense. In his analysis, Ricoeur notes first of all that if semantic inquiry (represented by the first wave of analytic philosophy) was interested only in an utterance’s referential dimension, pragmatic analysis on the other hand (encouraged by the second wave) was able, by means of the speech act, to become interested in its reflexive or selfreferential dimension. Initially only a simple “complication along the path of the reference”64 (or even an “obstacle”65 to its veritable access), self-reference is later considered to be part of every utterance that refers to something other than itself (in the statement “Snow is white,” the statement refers to a fact that is not of language) and simultaneously refers to itself (in the sense that a statement marks itself as a statement and not as the thing itself). A sign says something (reference ad extra) and proclaims itself as a sign (self-reference). Ricoeur insists on the difference between this self-reference, a very fact of language, and another, produced by the act of an “I.” This “I” must be understood not in the metaphysical sense of a material subject but as an act of utterance, which Benveniste has shown to be the first “indicator”66 of any utterance. Contrary to Benveniste, pragmatics as François Récanati promotes it has more than a tendency to want to eliminate the speaker and to make the speech act make due with the utterance itself. Ricoeur underlines this point, “The reflexivity in question up to now has been constantly attributed, not to

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the subject of utterance, but to the utterance itself . . . Récanati . . . relates reflexivity to the utterance considered as a fact, that is, as an event produced in the world.”67 In this framework, the utterance itself is in fact what, reflecting itself, produces the demonstration of its functioning as of its identity. This conception of “sui-reference,” distinct from a “reflexivity” conceived as an act of utterance, is what Karl-Otto Apel develops on the whole. Indeed, reflection, immanent in linguistic phenomena, is a fact of language itself. Language or speech (die Sprache) is the “theme” and the “medium” but also the vehicle and the condition of possibility for reflection. And yet this conception of reflection cannot avoid giving rise to several paradoxes: First of all, the question arises as to how, if language itself produces the possibility of reflection, philosophical mistakes about language have been and are still possible? Why, since the authority for reflection is a process automatically generated by use, can we be mistaken in bringing to light the rules that govern communication? To put it differently, reflection on language must allow, Apel tells us, the construction of a critical theory of meaning, a theory that must supplant the classic but obsolete theories of knowledge from before the “linguistic turn.”68 But if this reflection is done by language itself, why would there have been anything other than this contemporary critique of language? How can language reflect upon itself today while yesterday it was misled? We can see the wide gap between these temporal markers (“today, the truth,” “yesterday, errors”) and a thesis that implies that it should hold for all eternity. Furthermore, this conception of reflection immanent in language implies a certain form of essentialism that makes it difficult, or even impossible, to explain philosophy’s role in this system. What is Apel doing when he writes these books that reveal, bring out, and show the rules that govern our utterances? Is it a simple echo, reflection, mirror, or container for a language that speaks itself? Apel has never maintained such a thesis, though his choices about reflection seem to call for it. In a word, his “immanentist” conception is cornered by questions of a Spinozist, Hegelian, or even Heideggerian nature, but he nevertheless refuses to ask these questions that his system provokes. If the authority—whether this authority be God or nature (Spinoza), Spirit (Hegel), Being (Heidegger), or language (Apel)—reveals its own identity, speaks itself through philosophy, then not only should the possibility of error, of negativity, be explained (objection 1) but also how Being, substance, Spirit, etc., speaks itself through philosophy (thus for Spinoza

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substance speaks itself through the modes and then the accidents that are thinking individuals). And yet Apel clearly refuses to close off his system with this type of consideration, to which any form of immanentism leads. Stricto sensu, language speaks itself and thus reflects upon itself without an external intervention from the philosopher. Nevertheless, there are many passages in which Apel denies this implication of his system and falls back upon a classical conception of the philosopher’s critical reflection. For example, he explains that participation in the use of language can be interiorized and distanced by reflection. If language speaks itself, then talk, with respect to reflection, of a process of distancing oneself from language has no meaning, for such a proposition implicitly postulates an inquiring philosopher who oversees language and its rules. Rüdiger Bubner has noted this ambiguous, even impossible, status of philosophical reflection in Apel, in a sense different from but analogous to mine: The second objection is directed at the lack of a place for the reflection called transcendental itself. The interaction community of the partners participating in the language-game forms the point of departure, at which the character of the dialogue, as something which encroaches upon the individual subjectivity, is emphatically set up as a corrective against Kant’s alleged narrowing of vision to the isolated ego. The ideal norm of mutual recognition of subjects forms the vanishingpoint towards which the transcendental reflection is to be orientated. The activity of transcendental reflection for its part, however, which is supposed to mediate between the given point of departure and the counterfactual assumption, does not fit at all into the assumed picture. The communication community does not reflect on itself consistently, as a kind of collective subject, with a view to the unalterable presuppositions for its existence, but a philosopher approaching from the outside points to certain normatively characterized premises on the basis of the various language-games, only loosely connected by family resemblances. This act of external elucidation and criticism cannot however be called “transcendental” even in the most generous interpretation of the term. The philosopher, as privileged subject, is not by any means associated by virtue of reflection with what is reflected upon but speaks externally about it from a special meta-position . . . We are faced with the problem of the non-identity of the reflecter with the reflected.69

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In a word, the question of reflection as self-reference leads Apel’s system to a quite ruinous alternative: Either (1) there is a deficit of explanation and justification, for if language speaks itself, if the philosopher’s analyses are the reflection, mirror, or echo of linguistic mechanisms, then Apel must explain this possibility, as Hegel, Spinoza, and even Heidegger have done. Or else (2) Apel accepts the idea of a critical philosopher who uncovers, through his analyses, the rules that govern language, but then his system, in fine, contradicts itself. Having developed this objection, I ought next to better specify its status. It is not a matter of demanding, through this objection, some sort of return to the subject of reflection, in the sense of a metaphysical substance or an authority that is prior, exterior, and superior to language. It is quite simply a matter of asking about the status of the philosopher’s act of speaking. With his critical theory of meaning, Apel presupposes that the philosopher has a certain position (in the example given above, he presupposes the possibility of putting distance between oneself and the object, “language”); but this “philosopher’s position” comes into conflict with the thesis that language speaks itself, reveals itself, and shows itself. In contrast to the objections that I’ve just discussed, I am thus not calling for a substrate of reflection but posing a question about the status, within Apel’s discourse, of the philosopher’s utterances. Likewise, I do not mean to reproach pragmatics, as Ricoeur, for example, does, for its “depsychologized”70 conception of reflection. Nor do I mean to claim, in a way external71 to Apel’s system, that it is not language but concrete subjects, subjects of flesh, individuated and anchored in eternally unique places in time and space, that reflect. My problem is not to determine what the “subject” of reflection is (whether this subject be conceived as a universal authority or as a finite subject, a “self ” forever shattered by theoretical finitude or practical wisdom’s own body) but to understand how Apel can consistently account for the status of his own philosophical analyses. There is indeed an ambiguity, internal to Apel’s philosophy, in the term “reflection,” which sometimes designates linguistic self-reference and sometimes designates the distancing act of the critical philosopher who brings to light the rules of discussion. The aporia of metalanguage that burdens Apel’s system prevents me from following his reconstruction, from leaning on his philosophy. We have seen a characteristic movement in the two extreme styles of criticism today—a pendular oscillation between a skeptical reading of an author (the reconstruction of Kant in light of the Critique of Judgment) and a reading that is,

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if not positivist,72 at the very least more foundationalist and essentialist, in which a unique and first authority (here, language) becomes the theme, the medium, the vehicle, and the foundation of all things. Having shown this pendular movement, I could of course take up the second reading, since it accepts philosophy as a first, autonomous, and distinct science. But Apel’s system contains a tension between the general thesis about language and the philosopher’s presupposed position, a tension between what the philosopher “says” (language reveals itself) and what he presupposes in order to say it (the philosopher puts himself at a distance from language to be able to extract its rules). Nevertheless, I should underline that if there is a tension in Apel, it does not immediately refute73 the whole of his project, as did the contradictions of radical skepticism or a phenomenology inebriated by the singular. In addition, we must remember that Apel was the one who demonstrated that the notion of performative contradiction was the necessary fulcrum of logicophilosophical reflection. And yet I have shown that this contradiction runs through all the contemporary strains of thought that seek to be done with the classic stance of philosophy as a first and distinct science. It follows that Apel’s philosophy can undeniably easily spot this contradiction in different discourses. Finally, it was Apel who showed the importance that consideration of self-reference has taken on today, in contrast to a polarization only in terms of reference. Apel has contributed much to open the way for pragmatics to be able to alter semantics’ weaknesses and dictums, and for it to revitalize philosophical analysis from top to bottom. However, with this legacy Apel also bequeaths to us some formidable difficulties. First of all, there is an ambiguous concept of self-reference, because he juxtaposes two concepts: the “sui-reference” of language and a “speaker’s reflexivity” (here, the philosopher’s).74 To avoid confusion, it seems to me that we must carefully distinguish three senses of self-reference, which each belong to different conceptual fields: (1) “Reflection” (and even self-reflection) as in the classic Cartesian model, which always defines the movement by which a subject (prior to this movement) looks into himself as if looking into a preexisting x. This model of self-reference as reflection revives what we can call, following many others, the philosophy of the subject. (2) “Suireference,” a property of signs, by which a sign says or indicates that it is a sign and not a thing. The Port-Royal logic defined this type of self-reference. According to that analysis, a sign refers to a thing (“it represents something else”) but simultaneously marks itself as not being that thing (“it represents

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itself ”). In the final analysis, this “sui-reference” of the sign, which Récanati explains, is what defines self-reference in Apel. (3) Finally, there is what we can call, with Ricoeur, Benveniste, and Granger,75 “reflexivity.” This kind of self-reference refers to an act (initially understood in the pragmatic expression “speech acts”)76 and introduces the problem of the speaker. In a word, we have a generic term, “self-reference,” that can be understood in at least three ways: the “self-reflection” of a subject, the “sui-reference” of language, and the “reflexivity” of an utterance. But, if we consider what my objections to Apel have established, the last form of self-reference, reflexivity, must be understood as the philosopher’s utterance. Indeed, Apel’s problem emerges from the philosopher’s position or status. In the same way, the contradictions that I have already pointed out in other philosophical currents also reflect this problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse. This is why I do not at all mean, in this provisional determination of self-reference as a possible reflexivity, to refer to an ailing and concrete subject, such as Ricoeur’s “shattered cogito.” My question is not to ask what it means to say “I”77 in a world that is always already there, at the heart of an eternally finite existence, but rather to ask, What is a philosopher? What is presupposed by this type of utterance? What are we saying when we speak of “philosophy”? Is the philosopher’s position tenable? If not, why not; and if yes, under what conditions? This analysis also allows me to situate my questions with respect to Apel’s. I have said that I cannot follow Apel because of the tension in his conception of self-reference, but moreover, his initial project is not what I intend to accomplish here. Indeed, Apel begins with the problem of grounding ethical norms in reason. My question is about the foundations of philosophical practice, about the possibility of philosophy (always with another question on the horizon: if philosophy is not possible, why not; and if it is, under what conditions?). Our projects’ different orientations will allow me to conclude my discussion of Apel by bringing other aporias of his system to light, aporias that I was not able to discuss in the course of my analysis but that are nevertheless important for my questioning with respect to his. Apel wants to ground ethical norms in reason—but why this project? Of course, one might retort that this question can be asked of any project at all. Nevertheless, there are cases in which a failure to answer the “why?” question does not entail the disappearance of what one wants to understand, but sometimes the impossibility to answer why requires an abandonment of what one wanted to understand. For example, an inability to ground ethical

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norms in reason does not imply the disappearance of what is considered ethical behavior—the “peasant of Savoy,” so dear to philosophers, can continue to behave morally even if Hume is correct. Furthermore, the possibility that ethical norms are, in fact, simple customs or pure illusions is not in itself self-contradictory. On the other hand, to say that philosophy’s relevance and uniqueness cannot be established entails the disappearance of the discipline. Likewise, to do philosophy for the sole purpose of denouncing the inanity of such a practice is an immediately self-refuting position. This is why we can reproach Apel for not having sufficiently elucidated the necessity for a project according to which “ethical norms should be grounded.” To be sure, he shows us that the current situation of the world demands a morality, but notwithstanding that a given empirical and historical situation could demand many kinds of grievous things (for example, the creation of a thousand-year Reich), this empirico-historical situation cannot have the force of a proof within Apel’s epistemology. It follows that Apel cannot legitimate his project to “ground ethical norms” in reason, whereas I can legitimate my project because if it is impossible to answer my question, then the discipline that I practice is invalidated. Moreover, we are entitled to ask if it is really “morality” that Apel grounds. I have shown in the course of this analysis that his system as a whole leads rather to a foundation in the legal sphere because, in a discussion, the devil is constrained to behave “as if ” he were moral—that is, to take up the Kantian categories, “in conformity with duty” (law) and not “from duty” (morality). Why then does Apel insist on speaking of ethical foundations, since by this term he means what Kant termed law?78 In reading his challenge to notions of the will, right intention, and autonomy, a reader can get the impression that Apel is one of the fiercest destroyers of Kantian morality. If his reference to Kant can be justified from the viewpoint of transcendental argumentation (as a regressive investigation into the conditions of possibility of a factum), on the other hand it is hard to see what is left of the substantive content of the Critique of Practical Reason (which still defines what should be understood by Kantian morality). In a word, why not do without reference to Kantian morality? Finally, concerning the factum rationis itself, we are entitled to wonder whether Apel does not effect an absolutization of the language game of argumentation. Indeed, argumentation becomes a synonym for all discussion, all communication. It is on this basis that Apel can establish that we are always already moral (at least following ethical norms such as not to “falsify your

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results,” or “claim universality,” etc.). And yet we can wonder about the legitimacy of this reduction of all communication to the rules of argumentation. Without speaking of strategic actions, one need only mention other discursive registers, such as poetry, irony, or artistic expression in general, which immediately seem to escape the constraints of argumentation.79 The question arises whether, in the final analysis, Apel has unduly stretched Peirce’s idea of the “scientific community” to encompass all linguistic situations. A good number of his proofs seem to hold for only those who are engaged in discourses meant or claimed to be scientific or philosophical but don’t seem to hold for other discourses, like poetry or irony. It is important to note this point insofar as the notion of “claiming to” is what allows a performative contradiction to take effect. Also, we should immediately note, pace Apel, that certain constraints hold only for certain kinds of discourse, like the philosophical discourse, which is all I’m concerned with in this book. Having noted these final details about Apel’s philosophy, I should now sum up what we have learned.

Conclusions: The Impossibility of Speaking of the End of Philosophy I have now analyzed contemporary approaches that challenge philosophy’s status as a first, distinct, and autonomous discipline—either through selfdissolution in the hard sciences, philology, or literature, or even through an insistence upon the death of philosophy. The following conclusions emerge from this analysis: 1. Any series of propositions that advance in this direction necessarily produces self-refuting arguments. I have shown this in every position we’ve examined. A good portion of philosophy today is marked by a specific kind of paradox, performative contradiction, in which a statement is destroyed by the very fact of being uttered. 2. We’ve also seen an oscillation between skepticism and positivism, relativism and scientism, within the approaches we’ve examined. This oscillation is not a movement in time from one extreme to the other but is often the movement from a quasi premise to its consequences within a single philosophy. 3. The propensity to self-refutation or self-contradiction is most often born from a lack of reflection upon the status of the maintained discourse (what

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must be presupposed in order to say that there is no truth or that philosophy should disappear or that it is only therapy or even that there is no other use of language than ordinary usage, etc.?). What seems to be lacking is this “reference to self,” this questioning of one’s own status—or, to put it in phenomenological terms, as Jocelyn Benoist has done, a look is not only for seeing but also for telling itself that it is a look and that “in the fact that a look has something to say to itself and in the way that it can do so [there is] something not at all obvious, but extremely problematic.”80 We have seen that this concealment of the question of the status of one’s own discourse, or “reflexive deficit” in Apel’s sense, holds for a good number of the cases we’ve considered—all taking place as if contemporary philosophy, in the multiplicity of its manifestations, shared a single presupposition, a refusal of the question of self-reference. Calling the distinctness and autonomy of a discipline into question—this is the general picture with which we began. I have been able to show the recurrence of a particular kind of contradiction (self-refutation) at the heart of this picture, born from neglect of the notion of reference to self as reflection on one’s own status—this is the mark that specifies the landscape I’ve analyzed, this is the figure or design that accompanies and defines, at the same time as it deconstructs this landscape.81 Consequently, the choice is simple and the challenge is clear: Either we rally to this questioning of philosophy while trying not to commit a pragmatic contradiction, that is, while refusing this paradoxical stance that consists of spending one’s life practicing a discipline for the sole purpose of saying that it is dangerous, harmful, and vain. In that case, the only and unique consistent position is an abandonment of philosophy, relegating it to the dustheap of obsolete disciplines, like astrology (which Kepler still practiced but in the course of time lost any scientific connotation). Or else we must understand the possibility of philosophy as philosophy, that is, as a discipline that is neither philology, nor literature, nor mathematics, nor “the reserve angel of jurisprudence.” To take up this challenge, we must undertake a thought experiment and assert, as a hypothesis, the opposite of what the evidence of our time seems to dictate, namely that 1. philosophy is a rigorous science; 2. it can be such only if it is willing to directly examine the curious sort of contradiction that it rather constantly engenders, namely, self-refutation;

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3. it must be willing to ask the question of its own status and must understand itself and thus must grasp its self-referential dimension. To put this in other words, as Leonard Linsky notes,82 reference as a question of reference ad extra was at the heart of twentieth-century philosophy; in its turn, the question of self-reference can and should be placed at the heart of its concerns to come. This is, in any case, the attraction of a “corrective apparatus,” to take up again my metaphor of the anamorphosis, that implicitly appears as a prism that may allow us to reread the past and to propose a future other than dwelling on our own death. Is this “corrective apparatus” still viable; is its angle of vision still fruitful? This is what we must determine in the next chapters, whose aim will be to challenge the thesis of the end of philosophy and to test a remedy—the reflexive a priori—in order to try to overcome the crisis engendered by the current “reflexive deficit.” After undertaking a description of this model, borrowed from the history of philosophy (chapter 5), I will show this theory of self-reference’s consistency by comparing it with current theories (chapter 6) and will then illustrate its fruitfulness (chapter 7). I will thus be able to show how it is possible to go beyond the theme of the death of philosophy (chapter 8).





II



Challenging the “Death of Philosophy”: The Reflexive A Priori



5



A Definition of the Model: Scientific Learning and Philosophical Knowledge 1

Why This Moment Rather Than Another? Doctrines that variously express one of the three characteristics that I have delineated—(1) philosophy’s scientificity, (2) examination of the nature of pragmatic contradiction, and (3) the problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse as a problem of self-reference—are legion throughout the history of philosophy. On this point, the first required trait (namely, the affirmation of philosophy as a science in the face of a devastating skepticism) is superbly embodied by the dispute between Plato and the Sophists. Similarly, many of Aristotle’s arguments could be taken up against contemporary skepticism. And again, the theme of philosophy as a science constitutes the heart of Descartes’ philosophy just like Leibniz’s, of Hegel’s just like Husserl’s. Why, then, among all these possibilities, should we give priority to one rather than the others? Why will I choose, as the guiding thread of our reflections, the precise moment of the birth of German idealism? Different answers to this question are possible:

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First of all, I can argue that this moment poses the question of the scientificity of the philosopher’s discourse with a particular acuity, as is attested by the desire of the most important philosophers of the era to speak of a “doctrine of science” or a “system of science” as synonyms of “philosophy,” “ontology,” or “metaphysics.”2 Although Descartes and Leibniz considered philosophy’s scientificity to be a quasi given, this obvious fact had to be won back again against the time’s prevailing skepticism when German idealism was born3 and thus had to be better justified than previously. To put it differently, this moment (perhaps more than others, in light of both the force of skepticism and the Kantian questions) was confronted by the epistemological problem of the possibility of philosophy as an autonomous and distinct science. Next, I can say that beginning with this period, the problem of self-reference was indissolubly linked—in a manner that I’ll discuss later—to the problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse. I can also point out a more precise reason: apart from the scientificity that I am seeking (and that is just as much embodied by Husserl), we find in the immediately post-Kantian system an explicit theory of “speaking” in the “said,” a theory that replaces the semantic approach to meaning. But we have already seen in chapter 2 how Levinas and Austin proposed to overcome the “semantic curse” (promotion of the sign = Rorty’s relativism; promotion of reference = scientism)4 by a theory of “speaking.” These two theories—without any common ground in their strict content—nevertheless lead to the same conclusion: an escape from philosophy. It can thus seem particularly fruitful and opportune to see how other theories “of speaking and the said” do not lead to a call for an escape from philosophy but on the contrary to the affirmation of the first thesis that I am trying to establish, philosophy’s scientificity. Finally, I can also note that German idealism—from the viewpoint of its theses’ contents—is the furthest removed from the current habitus. Indeed, German idealism, in both its Fichtean and Hegelian versions, is generally stigmatized as the peak of metaphysics in its worst excesses. There are very few contemporary philosophical currents that do not denounce its “totalizing,” “foundationalist,” or “metaphysical”5 ambitions. If Kant is recognized, or even proclaimed, as a precursor by all these currents, his immediate successors on the other hand are considered as the paradigmatic expression of the transgression of the limits of human reason. Concern, as Fichtean as Hegelian, for an ultimate foundation, a unique absolute, an exclusive principle, is almost always interpreted in terms of the challenge of radical finitude. The disapproval is too unanimous for these philosophies not to constitute a

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choice “ethnological field,” for those of us who mean to distance ourselves from the most widely shared givens of our time and to look with glasses other than those that the era liberally dispenses. In a word, I could say—to take up my introductory comparison again— that just as we are advised, in order to clearly and distinctly recognize the anamorphosis, to place ourselves at a most unusual angle to the painting and to thus effect a maximal decentering with respect to the frontal position, here, too, if we position ourselves at the most outlying location relative to our immediate habitus, if we put ourselves at the heart of the “untimely,” that is to say, at the heart of what is taken to be the “height of metaphysics,” we might be able to overcome the suspicion of grounds—and thus to reconstruct the themes of reference and self-reference, of speaking and the said, of science and philosophy, and of identity and contradiction, in a different way than what the current order suggests. Of course, it will be retorted that a comparison is not an argument, and that I am taking liberties when I say, “Let’s go directly to the eccentric (German idealism) and see what it will yield.” This objection will allow me to specify the status of my choice. It is a thought experiment, a Gedankenexperiment, a topic dear to Hilary Putnam and many others.6 If American philosophers can very seriously ask, “What is it like to be a bat?”7 why shouldn’t French historians of philosophy have the right to ask, “What is it like to conceive philosophy as a first and distinct science?” To do so, can’t they try to climb on the “ladder” of those who meant to prove it?8 Why not attempt this thought experiment? Moreover, mustn’t we also recognize that my objector asks me to first justify my reliance on German idealism only because this ladder is unusual—even though there are many who, relying on Wittgenstein, Husserl, or Heidegger, multiply expressions like “Wittgenstein has shown us  .  .  . ,” “We have known since Wittgenstein  .  .  . ,” “Wittgenstein teaches that it is a mistake to . . . ,” etc., without any other justification than the very words of the master?9 That will be my final argument: my model’s advantage is that it is so unobvious that it spares us from any lazy references to an argument from authority.

The Problem of the Status of the Philosopher’s Discourse Beyond the demand for philosophy’s scientificity—which, I have said, is consistently maintained by both Fichte and Hegel and which thereby fulfills

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the first of the conditions that I have specified—the problem that decisively launched German idealism’s way of philosophizing was the problem of the status of Kant’s discourse.10 Indeed, in the Critique of Pure Reason, if knowledge is true, an image must be created by application of a concept to an intuition. But the enumeration of knowledge’s conditions of possibility, to which the Critique of Pure Reason is devoted, does not satisfy this criterion of truth because these conditions are not representable with intuitions and concepts. It follows that philosophical argumentation, such as Kant exhibits, constrains us to covertly accept a mode of truth outside the application of a concept to an intuition. To put this in other words, if in defining what confers validity on mathematical and possibly physical propositions Kant relegates metaphysical statements to the status of illusion, the problem nonetheless remains unresolved, in his immediate successors’ eyes, of knowing the status of the Critique of Pure Reason’s statements, which are neither mathematical, physical, nor metaphysical. These statements obviously claim that what they say is valid, but how is this validity to be understood, since Kant defines it as being exclusively the link between a concept and an intuition? This objection—which was made as early as 1792 by Gottlob Ernst Schulze (who adopted the name of the ancient skeptic Aenesidemus)11—is radical in that it calls into doubt the very possibility of writing the Critique of Pure Reason. What is challenged here is not the contents of this or that critical statement but the very possibility of its utterance. Indeed, Kant produces a definition of truth that does not encompass his own philosophical propositions. Thus, his definition of truth is invalidated by its very articulation. This aporia of critique was variously taken up later: Ernst Cassirer mentions it several times, without for all that resolving it; P.  F. Strawson considers it at various occasions in The Bounds of Sense;12 finally, Karl-Otto Apel uses the argument against logical positivism, showing how this philosophical movement, for which only empirical and analytic propositions are true, cannot account for this claim, quite simply because this proposition is neither empirical nor analytic. This aporia, that Aenesidemus implicitly outlines, is the necessity that philosophical statements be self-referential if they are to be consistent. At the same time as they say something about the truth, these statements must also describe themselves as true. Salomon Maimon,13 another skeptical contemporary of Kant’s, took up this same problem about the status of critique’s statements in a different way, thus contributing to an outline of the problem of German idealism and to the configuration of its various possible solutions. Maimon proposed, as I noted earlier, to rethink

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critique starting not with the concept of representation but with the concept of reflection—in other words, he was the first to undertake a rereading of the entire critical project beginning with the Critique of Judgment.14 That said, this reconstruction still faces a serious difficulty. Indeed, Kant divides all of knowledge into determinate judgments (which hold for mathematics and part of physics) and reflective judgments (which hold for art and the living organism). These reflective judgments yield only heuristic concepts within statements governed by an “everything happens as if,” in contrast to the “it is thus” of determinate judgments. Consequently, the question arises in this division as to where Kant’s own philosophical judgments are located in this schema. As Aenesidemus has demonstrated, these judgments cannot be determinate judgments (the link between a concept and an intuition) without contradiction—they can thus only be reflective judgments (for the Kantian typology allows only two kinds of judgment). Maimon draws a simple consequence from this reasoning: the philosopher cannot claim the absolute validity of what he says, he generates statements of the order of plausibility, or reflective judgments governed by an “everything happens as if.” This is why Kantianism is a skepticism that I was able to summarize in chapter 4 with this series of destructive claims: “everything happens as if the Critique of Judgment were true, everything happens as if man were finite,” and finally, catastrophically, “everything happens as if the distinction between determinate and reflective judgments were relevant.” In a word, German idealism was born from the problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse. More precisely, Kant’s successors are confronted by a specific type of aporia: the Kantian system’s self-contradiction as a contradiction between the contents of what it says (validity is in the connection between a concept and an intuition) and the status of its utterance (Kant claims that this proposition is valid even though it is not a connection between concept and intuition). This problem, it will be noted, is not at all indexed to a dogmatic demand, a demand for an external (God or nature) or internal (the ego) foundation, nor does it present itself as the assertion of an ineffable absolute. To disregard this problematic as absurd by relegating it to the domain of metaphysical, foundationalist, or onto-theological pseudodemands is to reveal that one is unable to give an account of the status of one’s own discourse. I can add, on this point, that Wittgenstein (among others) raised this problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse again at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. A philosopher like Kant cannot accept this contradiction,15 that is, that his system’s contents would be invalidated by

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its articulation—in a word, he cannot agree to say, “I say x and at the same time I say not-x.” He thus must accept the problem. But what then should he do? To refuse to address it amounts, for Kant as for any philosopher, either to adopting a skeptical viewpoint (which is self-refuting, as Fichte and Hegel later showed, and as I have been able to confirm in part 1) or to giving up any claim to validity for one’s own statements. Kant would say, “I say x but as I cannot claim validity in saying it, consider it as seems best to you.” If that were the case, we would no longer need to consider this position that claims nothing. So it appears at the end of this explanation that the problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse, a problem at the source of the first post-Kantians’ demands, is neither metaphysical nor “foundationalist.” A demand that validity claims be justified cannot be accused of “foundationalism” without giving this term such a wide scope as to make it synonymous with any argumentative and discursive reasoning. I can thus attempt to revive this nodal problem that gave birth to the great constructions of German idealism. Having established this point, let’s continue to build our “corrective apparatus.”

The Concept of Reflexive Identity, or Self-reference Fichte never ceased demonstrating that philosophical constructions—those of his time as well as the classic constructions of Spinoza’s era—contain a certain kind of contradiction, which he calls a contradiction between what a philosopher says and what he does (Sagen and Tun), or even a contradiction between what is done and its doing, a contradiction that strictly corresponds to what I have called, with François Récanati and Karl-Otto Apel, a pragmatic or performative contradiction. Indeed, the Sagen (the saying) is defined by what a given philosopher says—for example, “God is the cause of the self,” “The ego is the foundation,” “the material, source, and origin of the world in its totality,” or else “The will to power, the unconscious, Being, etc., is the engine of history,” or even “Finitude is radical,” “Truth is x + y (concept + intuition),” or even “Truth is unattainable, totalitarian, etc.” The Tun (the doing) is what the philosopher “does” (an “act of application,” Fichte calls it) or presupposes in order to be able to say what he says. If he presupposes or does the opposite of what he says, then his thesis, whatever it may be, must be considered false because it destroys itself,16 without any need to make recourse to external objections.

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This type of contradiction brings to light, as its opposite, a certain kind of identity that Fichte was committed to defining. This is the identification between “what was to be explained” and the “ground of explanation.”17 Fichte discovered this identity, which the Science of Knowledge aims to promote, and was the first if not to thematize it18 at least to assert it as the grounding principle of any philosophical system in its entirety. This type of noncontradiction or identity is innovative in that it is not a contradiction of formal logic (the tautology a = a), nor a physical contradiction between two opposing forces (which Kant, following Newton, termed “opposition”), and even less a contradiction between a proposition and the given that it should translate (the classic definition of nonformal identity as adequacy between a proposition and its external referent). The identity that Fichte means is the identity between an act of saying x and what is said by x, a contradiction between saying “I do not speak” and the act of speaking in order to say it, between saying “the truth does not exist” and the truth claim intrinsically presupposed by this proposition. And yet in simultaneously making this principle the foundation for the system and the model to which all propositions to come must conform,19 Fichte actually discovers a new kind of rationality—in that it does not come under either the mathematical reasoning favored by Spinoza (deduction of propositions from a unique principle) or the logicism or formal calculus dear to Leibniz (which contemporary logicians will develop again), nor Cartesian evidence, nor the Kantian typology of judgments, nor apagogic reasoning. Before seeing whether this rationality is able to legitimate the status of the philosopher’s discourse, I must first address a series of objections. Identity as defined here is, I would say, a “foundational” principle, posited as something to which we must subsequently conform. Quid juris? Isn’t there something utterly arbitrary in positing this identity as a principle that shall govern our future statements (that is, in making it a principle that determines the nonacceptability of statements that are not in conformity with it)? It is important to understand here that what is posited as a principle is a demand (the demand for non-self-refutation)—it is a model to be constructed or achieved (the statements that we will accept must all be unmarked by this kind of contradiction). I thus posit pragmatic noncontradiction as a standard, and I make it the principal engine for the series of propositions to come. But my objector could again reply that if a philosopher wanted to contradict himself, wouldn’t that choice be as good as the opposite? To this objection, I can only respond affirmatively—but we must still understand what this objection is

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really saying: if a philosopher wants to destroy his own propositions or to destroy what he is saying at the very moment he says it, he can; in a word, if a philosopher wishes to commit suicide, he can. Indeed, really anyone has the concrete option of positing contradiction as desirable, and as such, to seek it in the future. Those who wish to posit contradiction as an ideal will do so, but we have seen that they cannot do so from within philosophy, nor even from within rationality, because they cannot argue for the necessity of positing a contradiction. It will be said that this antiphony has been well-known since Aristotle’s Metaphysics! Of course, and I’d ask my objector to take the trouble to answer in return why we must want contradiction! If he were to say why, under the pretext that he wants to put himself in a position where he can no longer speak, then must we do likewise?20 Briefly, if an argumentative discourse is possible, then it must posit noncontradiction between a statement (what Fichte calls “what is done”) and its utterance (“the doing”) as a demand. Having replied to these objections, how shall I now move from a wish—that philosophy must be a science—to a principle that will allow it to really become one?

The Power of the Model: The Law of Self-reference and Philosophical Truth The answer can be given in one word: self-referentiality. With a clear thematization of philosophical truth as the agreement between a statement’s contents and the statement’s status, Fichte thought he had found a viewpoint from which he could resolve the most serious problem that he had identified in critique. The exclusive division into determinate and reflective judgments gave rise to this problem in which Kantianism dissolved: to which class do philosophical judgments belong? But the identity that Fichte brought out allows us to discover a new kind of judgment, self-referential judgments. In doing so, it gives a criterion for falsehood, a distinct status to philosophy, and a law to reflexive identity. Let’s consider these three dimensions, to show how they can overcome the aporia of philosophical discourse. The opposite of a demand for identity cannot be assumed by a speaker without immediately falling into a performative contradiction. We thus have here an extremely constraining model (taken up again by Apel), for it is a proposition whose opposite cannot be argued for nor even said without self-destructing. On this model, we can define philosophical truth as requir-

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ing, at a minimum, agreement between a statement’s contents and the status of its utterance. The displacement effected here in the concept of truth is patently clear. Truth as adequatio is certainly maintained—but it is no longer agreement between propositions and things, facts, or even phenomena (reference ad extra), but rather agreement between the proposition’s contents and its status, the only thing likely to indicate the discourse’s agreement with itself (self-reference). We thus have at our disposal a criterion for determining falsehood.21 Any proposition will be false, and any system erroneous, that contravenes the necessary agreement between saying (Sagen) and doing (Tun), in a word, that contravenes the demand for self-referentiality. In other words, if philosophy’s contents (its definition of self-consciousness, of science, truth, knowledge, the good, politics, law, etc.) sets self-referentiality aside, then that philosophy is condemned to fall into fundamental contradictions. We can thus concretely see how this discovered identity provides a minimal touchstone for any future philosophical truth, for a future system will accept only those propositions whose contents (what is “done”) do not contradict the fact of being said (the act of application, as it is put in the 1794 Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre), or, in strictly equivalent contemporary terminology, all propositions in which the statement’s contents are contradicted by the fact of being spoken will be rejected. It follows that the law of self-referentiality is what is likely to give philosophy its claim to “scientificity.” Still, we ought to better understand this term “scientificity.” It is not a matter of copying philosophy’s procedures from those of mathematics, nor of seeking a foundation in biology or any other settled science—in a word, it is not a matter of bringing philosophy’s reasoning in line with the positive sciences, and even less of dissolving it in them. These different disciplines do not employ the same mode of rationality. To give a deliberately simplified example, a science like Euclidian geometry delimits its object (space, not numbers; figures, not living beings; etc.), constructs figures and then determines their properties. The mind’s movement is thus a movement toward an ob-ject (something thrown in front of one’s gaze,22 or a representation of an x—a triangle, for example), a movement of delimitation and construction (I define an object by three dimensions within an indeterminate space) and of analysis (I define the properties of my figure: the sum of the angles is equal to two right angles). Conversely, philosophy is not the sighting of an exterior object nor the analysis of a being thrown before oneself. The act of utterance contained in a proposition is neither an object, nor a being, nor a fact that I could have before my eyes. To put it in

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Searle’s terms, he shows in Foundations of Illocutionary Logic that any successful use of a discursive act presupposes the satisfaction of a certain number of acts; and when, as a philosopher, Searle disentangles those acts contained in the fact of the utterance, he does not “turn his gaze” to an object defined like a triangle or a leech’s brain, rather he brings to light an act (“speech acts”)23 and wonders about the nonconformity between the contents of what is said and the act of saying it. In the same way, thanks to the foregrounding of a third kind of identity (an identity that is neither analytic identity, the law of formal logic, nor identity between a proposition and an exterior object, identity aimed at by the physicist), Fichte gives philosophical discourse a principle that avoids confusion with the other rational procedures at work in other sciences (geometry, biology, arithmetic, formal logic). This self-referentiality (thus defined from the principle that governs it— identity as the congruence between an utterance and a statement) is thus conclusively distinguished from the old model of knowledge [connaissance], for it is not a matter, in the case of a particular philosophical statement (relative to humanity, morality, etc.) of seeing a fact or describing an already existent being or object. Moreover, the danger normally tied to the traditional model of philosophical self-reflection—namely, the risk of defining reflection as the location of an exterior “eye” that looks over an anterior “posit”—totally disappears.24 The idea of seeing thus does not have to be understood as the assertion of an eye that would see the seeing eye, etc., and on to infinity. The reflexive system is entirely different: accepting a given proposition and refusing another will be done in the name of the principle of self-referentiality. This strong law cannot not be presupposed by all philosophers, even if many transgress it; this is amply clear in my descriptions of the stain in the contemporary philosophical scene. Fichte detected it in a good number of his predecessors, whom he divided into “dogmatists” and “idealists,” who in his eyes committed, for the most part, the same contradiction between the Tun and the Sagen at some point in their systems. The law of self-reference is a law that no philosopher can escape. Fichte opposes this law of self-reference (the relation to oneself as the relation of a discourse to itself) to the law of “representation” (a subject’s relation to an object or a proposition’s relation to a referent other than itself).25 This law is what allows him to make use of a knowledge that is defined neither as a movement of objectivation and figuration nor as a simple formal calculation;26 this law is what allows him to take up the skeptics’ challenge. Self-reference, so conceived and strictly defined, thus allows philosophical knowledge to be freed from the sterile

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choice between promoting the same rationality as the positive sciences or embracing skepticism (whether this skepticism takes the classical form of a declaration of the impossibility of philosophy or takes the form of literature or deconstruction). This is why Fichte, just as Hegel will do later, means to signal this revolution by reserving the term “learning” [connaissance] for the positive sciences and thinking of philosophy with the term “knowledge” [savoir]. The choice of this term “knowledge” sums up in itself what is at stake: neither learning in the sense of the positive sciences, nor for all that literature, nor a simple deconstruction of illusions, nor alchemy, philosophy is a science in the sense that it moves within the dimension of knowledge. I must now elucidate the nature of this knowledge in order to refine my explanation of this model of self-reference.

Self-reference and Knowledge of Knowledge: Metacognitive Problems To better illuminate this model, proposed by Fichte and then Hegel, I must first emphasize the obvious point that this principle of self-referentiality (identity between saying and the said) develops within an epistemological—not ontological—set of problems. Having underlined this obvious fact (which is not recognized as such by many of Fichte’s commentators27), I should focus on the nature of this epistemology, for two levels can be distinguished in its interrogation of knowledge. The first aims at determining the nature of our knowledges [connaissances28]: are they a priori or a posteriori, innate or integrally dependent upon experience?29 To say that our knowledges are only founded on, by, and in experience is to rely on the support of Lockean empiricism, while to claim that there are knowledges that are entirely independent of experience is to situate oneself in the rationalist current illustrated, in different modalities, by both Descartes and Kant. These claims, despite their differences, are nonetheless situated in the same set of problems: defining the nature of our knowledges. But—and this is the important point—Fichte’s problem does not principally consist of situating himself in this debate. His question is no longer concerned with the existence or nonexistence of a priori knowledge but addresses the possibility of knowledge (Wissenschaft) about these knowledges (Erkenntnis). This second level of questioning, relative to knowledge of knowledges, is distinguished from the first by it metacognitive character: it is no longer a matter of examining the structure of our cognitive apparatus (intuition,

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concepts) but of understanding the possibility of a kind of knowledge likely to determine this structure. In this sense, it seems legitimate to say that the Fichtean question is to the classical epistemological question (about the nature of our knowledges) as the question of the possibility of a metalanguage is to an examination of language. To ask how language functions (for example, how it speaks the real) is not the same thing as questioning the possibility that a language could describe the very structure of language. It is probably because they have not perceived this difference of levels that a good number of his contemporaries—like the later commentators—understood the Fichtean enterprise on the model of precritical dogmatism and thus relegated it to the infamous category of “metaphysics.” In fact, they have taken for a language what was explicitly given as a questioning of the possibility of a metalanguage. The insistent repetition in Fichte’s texts of the question, “How does a philosopher know?”30 How does he know that he knows? has the goal of making the differences stand out between these two questions “How do we know [connaissance]?” and “How do we know [savoir] that we know [savoir]?” If, as Kant would have it, certain elements of our learning are a priori, it is a matter of knowing what kind of knowledge makes it possible to ascertain that certain elements are a priori. Do these elements become, for the philosopher’s knowledge, facts? If so, what is the status of these facts, knowing that in the Kantian theory, facts can be learned only through concepts, knowing also that Kant denies any recourse to an internal observation? If not, what is the status within the critical project of a knowledge that would not rely on facts? Such are the questions that explain the appearance of a hyperepistemology or an epistemology squared taken by the science of knowledge, to which it will henceforth be incumbent to understand how “we know that we know”— according to a demand echoed by Jaakko Hintikka, who makes the following question one of the most important for our time: “What constitutes the human activity by which we come to know that we know?”31 It follows that, far from a transcendental subject’s overlooking perspective, the viewpoint of self-reference as a metacognitive question abandons any thematization of vision, of introspections, of a preexisting subject’s observation, and puts forward only a single principle: the principle of congruence between what is said and its saying. Its inscription within what is commonly called the metaphysics of subjectivity32 thus makes no sense at all. However, to even better describe this version of self-reference, which is becoming the backbone of philosophical knowledge, we must now understand the last dimension that distinguishes it—the dimension of action, of

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Tun. In the Fichtean framework, self-reference is defined neither as a thing nor an object but as a “doing,” realization, an act of saying. Why speak of an act of utterance and not a fact, and what status is this act to be given?

Self-reference and the Act of Speaking I must first elucidate this dimension while remaining strictly within the model proposed by Fichte—only in the next chapter will I be able to compare this model to different contemporary problems of self-referentiality and to current debates about the “fact” of speaking, the “act” of speaking, and the speaking “agent.” To understand the Fichtean view of the act of application, it is imperative that we guard against a first misinterpretation, which would consist in wanting to immediately assign the Tun to a subject, substrate of the action, and to thereby transform a philosophy of the act into a philosophy of the agent. As surprising as it might prima facie appear,33 Fichte’s concern is the act, not the agent, and his problem is to exhibit the structure of the action of knowledge, not to determine the identity of a substrate or support (subject, person, individual)—in a word, his “science” is a science of knowledge and not a science of consciousness, of the person, or of the mind. Knowing is an act—this is Fichte’s cardinal thesis; philosophy grasps the act and not the being; ontology thus gives way to actology. How are we to understand this claim without covertly entering into problems of the agent? To understand it, we must first remember that Fichte systematically begins with propositions34 and not with facts of consciousness; next, that within these propositions he distinguishes between what is said and the fact of saying it, “what is done” and “the doing.” It is thus a question of finding the propositions’ structure and not of referring to an agent. But can we say precisely why Fichte identifies the fact of saying (the application) with an act and not with an event in the world—as does, for example, François Récanati? To answer this question, we ought to return to the principle of knowledge, the principle of reflexive identity. I have said that this reflexive identity is the “foundation” for future propositions. But this foundation—far from being an obvious, absolute, and first principle from which a set of propositions can be taken more geometrico—is worked out as an end to pursue, a task to be achieved. The principle says that I should, in the future, act so that the propositions that I accept will have undergone the test of performative noncontradiction. It is in this sense that knowledge

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is defined as an action because it is a process to be accomplished in light of a prescribed end. More precisely, the identity of the statement and its utterance is simultaneously a starting point (a foundation, of course, but conceived as a model to be achieved in the future) and something that must be accomplished, the end that will be achieved by the system, the task that the philosopher freely assigns himself. It follows that the concept of an act, of praxis, of doing (strictly defined as the production of something—in this case, a system of propositions, which is not yet in the world—in light of a prescribed end) goes beyond the narrow framework of morality and of politics and becomes the cardinal concept of knowledge, in the same way that, for Austin, the order of the sayable became that of action and the act of expression, the expression of an act. At the end of this analysis, we can directly answer the question why we should speak of an act and not of a fact. We are authorized to do so quite simply because “to produce something in light of a prescribed end” is the common definition of an action and not of a fact or an event.

Conclusions: Congruence Between Statement and Utterance, Said and Saying Thus at the end of this path we are in possession of a model of self-reference, encapsulated in its principle: congruence between a statement and its utterance. Despite its brevity, this final definition nevertheless contains multiple implications, which I have examined in detail throughout this chapter, namely 1. the law of self-reference is the law that gives philosophy its distinctive status and structures its propositions; 2. this law provides philosophy its dimension of knowledge in contrast to scientific learning or literary creation; 3. this law of self-reference does not point to some sort of metaphysical substrate, nor does it necessitate some sort of psychological introspection, but is a law immanent in philosophical discourse. In a word, this law of reflexivity35 avoids all the pitfalls usually denounced by contemporary philosophy while overcoming the generalized skepticism toward philosophical discourse. Having specified this model, I now have to test its consistency by systematically contrasting it with the most contemporary theories of self-reference.

6



The Model of Self-reference’s Consistency

To demonstrate how the proposed model can still allow us to provide a remedy to the aporias diagnosed in part 1—gathered together under the general characterization of a “reflexive deficit”—requires that it confront today’s current theories of self-reference. By refining and specifying it, this confrontation should allow us to reinforce the theory of self-reference that was initially proposed by German idealism in order to cope with the critical project’s failure.

The Theory of Reflexivity and Current Theories of Self-reference Going Beyond the Question of “I” The most fertile of the currently espoused models of self-reference is, as I have already indicated, the one that Paul Ricoeur criticizes as a “doctrine of

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sui-reference,” which tends to reduce reference to self to a reference ad extra. This understanding of self-reference consists in reducing any self-referential statement, like “I speak,” to a referential statement, like “he speaks.” The act of utterance is interpreted, in fact, as a standard reference to an exterior being. For example, when I utter the sentence “He is speaking,” I refer to a being in the world who can be designated by his proper name (and his initials, like “L. W.”) or by a definite description (“the philosopher of the ‘Blue Book’ ”); moreover, my proposition can be verified or falsified by reference to the facts: either the individual “L. W.” is speaking right now, or not. And yet the proposition “I am speaking” can be analyzed as a strictly referential expression because it can be replaced salve veritate by a proper name or a definite description. To secure a definitive trivialization of the selfreferential phrase “I,” we can say that a statement like “I speak” has the same traits as referential statements of the sort “L. W. speaks” because, contradicting the proposition that “no one is speaking,” it implies the proposition that “someone is speaking” and behaves therefore as a value of the propositional function “x speaks.” This is the first argumentative strategy for making self-reference a worldly fact, one species among others of reference ad extra. There have been many critics of this reduction, such as Ricoeur, already mentioned, but also Wittgenstein, who himself challenged the referential dimension of the “I,”1 or Colin McGinn, who tried to show the “infallible” or “incorrigible” character of the self-attribution of psychological states such as pain,2 or even Sydney Shoemaker, who showed in “Self-reference and Self-Awareness”3 how self-reference is the condition of possibility for any other form of reference. And yet however interesting these different conceptions may be and whatever importance this debate may have today, we must note that from my point of view, that is, from the viewpoint of the problem of the status of philosophical discourse, this problem is not relevant.4 Indeed, my model of self-reference as a principle of reflexivity does not try to answer the question, “What is being done when one says ‘I’ in sentences like ‘I have a toothache’?” but to ask, “What is said when one utters propositions like ‘The truth does not exist’ or ‘A proposition is true only if an intuition or an empirical fact verifies it,’ etc.?” The law of reflexivity is not identical with any of the versions of selfreference that I’ve cited—from Récanati’s “sui-reference” to the reflection sought by Ricoeur. The law of reflexivity can be explained as follows: given a certain number of propositions like those I’ve mentioned—here, relative to truth—what is presupposed in order to be able to utter these proposi-

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tions; what is implied, or even what set of laws must they obey so that they do not destroy themselves? It is important to insist on this point, for we have here a very different problem of self-referentiality than before. Indeed, it is not a matter of knowing whether the “I,” a simple “shifter,”5 refers to an empirical fact of the world (“sui-reference”), nor of understanding the “I” as subjective in contrast to the body’s objectivity (Wittgenstein), nor even of making it an anchoring point—whether this anchoring point is defined as a shattered cogito (Ricoeur) or the “limit-point of the world” (Granger)— nor even of deciding in favor of a forever “infallible” “I” (Shoemaker) or conversely for an “I” that is a pure grammatical illusion (Nietzsche and the deconstructivists). Knowing what is said when one says “I” is not my problem because the problem of reflexivity here is the problem of a proposition’s reference to itself. My task is thus to circumscribe a type of propositions and to determine the grammar that governs them. Even admitting, with the philosophy of language, that philosophy is only one language game among others, the question nevertheless arises of what are the rules that structure it. And yet in this language game of philosophy, we find certain propositions that must encompass themselves under penalty of self-destruction. The problem of reflexivity is clearly circumscribed here relative to the other contemporary problems. Its domain of relevance and of analysis is precisely delimited as the class of propositions that must refer to themselves to avoid contradiction. Having now characterized this difference from other theories of self-reference, all of which are structured around the meaning of the pronoun “I,” I must next clarify the class of propositions that must be applied to themselves.

Applying a Proposition to Itself To have to apply to itself without self-contradiction is a requirement first for propositions relative to the concept of truth. I have shown this throughout my discussion, on the basis of three examples: skepticism, which claims that truth does not exist; Kantianism, which defines it as the connection between a concept and an intuition; and logical positivism, which understands a proposition’s truth in terms of its analyticity or its conformity with experience. Given that, it does not seem (contrary to Alfred Tarski’s view6) that the mention of the predicate of truth in a proposition would be the only case of a proposition’s necessary reflexivity. Thus, to cite only two further examples, when a historian, sociologist, or psychoanalyst asserts that “every

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man’s thinking is the reflection or the product of his social environment or of his contingent history,” he is simultaneously and in the same respect saying that the proposition that he has uttered is the product of his own specific and contingent social environment. In doing so, he cannot avoid this dilemma: On the one hand, because he admits that his proposition is the expression of a contingent moment, he can no longer claim that it is universal. That proposition thus becomes the expression of a contingent individual (whose name, for example, is Pierre Bourdieu), himself the product of a historical moment (the second half of the twentieth century) and a particular social milieu (the educated middle class), and no longer a proposition valid beyond this precise place and this particular time. Or, on the other hand, he acknowledges that his proposition has exceptions, in particular at least that very proposition, but, once again, he cannot claim that this proposition is universal because, at least for that individual’s proposition, “it is not the case,” as the logician’s canonical phrase would have it. However that may be, in both cases his proposition is false because it fails to apply to itself. We have here an example of a proposition that, although it does not immediately or indirectly contain the terms “truth” or “validity,” is self-refuting if it does not apply to itself, that is, in this case, if it does not take account of the entirety of the statement, in which the authority of the utterance is implicated, which authority must not be a counterexample of what is said at the level of contents. To give another example, if, in the manner of an empiricist and antiCartesian psychologist, we define the “subject” (in contrast to animals or things) as a simple psychological singularity, inscribed here and now, we will see that to thus determine the subject is, at the same time and in the same respect, to claim the universal validity of what is said. If the psychologist says, for example against Descartes, that the subject is neither a substance nor a universal authority but is only an empirical individual hic et nunc, he claims that his proposition is valid and that Cartesianism is not. It follows that this proposition, which applies to the definition of a human subject in contrast to animals and things, must apply to the one who says it, or else it is not universal (see the preceding dilemma). And yet—and this is the key point—the psychologist, despite his definition of the subject, does not claim that the empirical individual x that is himself says that the subject is nothing other than an empirical individual but claims a much larger truth and thus in his very assertion presupposes another definition of the speaking authority, in this case the psychologist or philosopher or anthropologist who says, “The subject is defined as x and not as y.” Here again we encounter a proposition

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that must apply to itself in order to not be false but that for all that does not exclusively concern the concept of truth. My analysis reveals two groups of self-referential propositions: The first is when a proposition must apply to itself directly, that is, at the level of the very content that is said—this is the case for propositions that aim to define truth, like the example of the Kantian definition (truth = intuition + concept), which is self-destructive because it is not included in the category that it aims to define. The second is when a proposition must encompass the authority that pronounces it —for example, the sociologist (example 1) and the psychological philosopher (example 2). We should dwell a little longer on this second group, which not only shows how propositions that must apply to themselves go beyond the single category of propositions aiming to define the true, but also conclusively clarifies the concept of the authority of the utterance.

The Authority of the Utterance: Us The last two propositions that I’ve discussed contain a hidden performative contradiction because of the noncongruence between the sentence’s contents (“Every thought is the expression of a contingent social environment” or else “Every subject is an empirical individual, singular, a hic et nunc viewpoint on the world”) and the authority of the utterance (the philosopher x who claims in saying this that he is not an empirical individual, a simple contingent point or product of his social environment, but an authority that overcomes it). Two subjects are to be taken into consideration in the proposition: the subject itself of the predicative proposition (“Every subject or every human or every speaking being is . . .”) and the authority of the utterance (the philosopher who says that “the subject is . . .”).7 And yet the authority of the utterance invalidates the predicative proposition’s definition of the subject (“all are . . . except me, who says so”), or again the subject of the proposition is in contradiction with the authority of the utterance. This is why the contents of the proposition, if they are applied to the authority that pronounces them, self-destruct and thereby show their falsity. And yet these details clarify the nature of the authority of the utterance. Indeed, in the given example, it appears that the authority, as a philosopher, is not an “I” but a “we”; a “we” that is immediately given as a “we” and not by the addition of several “I”s. Let’s try to clarify this key point, starting with a comparison of several propositions.

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In the proposition “All swans are white,” the authority of the utterance (philosopher or naturalist in the ancient sense) claims the truth of what he says. This truth can be demonstrated or invalidated by different means (which I shall not enumerate), but the proposition does not have to apply to the speaker himself, who does not claim to be a swan. Neither does it include truth as a predicate because it says “All swans are white” and not “All true statements are x.” If we do find a claim to universality implied in this proposition, the required universality concerns exterior things or beings—to put it in terms of personal pronouns, the universality is relative to “them” (I could replace the term “swans” with “they”). These propositions pose no problem here,8 for even though they make a universality claim (which the “all” indicates), they do not require a test of self-application nor do they encompass the authority of the utterance. If we now consider first-person propositions like “I have a toothache,” here we indeed have a direct reference to oneself, not a statement concerning an impersonal “he” or “she.” Nevertheless, in this case, the speaker does not claim that the entire world has a toothache. A universality claim is not included in this proposition. The “I” that speaks can thus be readily identified with a given empirical subject here and now. But if we turn to propositions of the type “All humans, subjects, or speaking beings are x,” we seem to have both the universality of the first case and the necessary self-referentiality of the second. Indeed, the proposition applies both to the “they” (“all humans or all speaking subjects” contained in the proposition) and at the same time must include the one who utters it. The relevant personal pronoun here is thus not the “I” nor the “they.” Not the “I,” for the proposition claims that it concerns all humans;9 nor the “they,” because it must include the one who utters it. Clearly, neither is it governed by a singular “you,” nor by a plural “you,” for once again the “I” must be included. Thus the authority of the utterance is indeed a “we” that has the peculiarity of combining the two required dimensions: the universality claim and self-referentiality. Neither the empirical “I,” nor the “I” of the Cartesian cogito, and even less the “he” of “God or nature” can account for the dual dimension revealed by these propositions. This discovery is important in more than one respect: First of all, it allows me to characterize the authority of the utterance that is a philosopher or an anthropologist or anyone who claims to truly say what humans, speaking beings, etc., are. The philosopher is a “we” and nothing other than a “we.” This “we” allows me to overcome the imputation of solipsism, whether it be

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understood in the Wittgensteinian sense of a “private language” or the Heideggerian sense of a “metaphysics of subjectivity.” Moreover, this discovery allows me to cut off any realist sort of questioning about the entity to which this or that personal pronoun would refer: “my own body” for the “I,” an additional “I” for the “we,” a set of things for the “they,” etc. What is important here is not to know what this “we” refers to (a group, a crowd, a nation, etc.) but to establish that some propositions—of key importance because they concern what humanity, thought, speech, etc., are—are governed by a pronoun, the “we,” which is regulated by definite usages and a precise grammar. This insight authorizes a remark: many contemporary discussions of the personal pronoun “I,” in common with classical metaphysics, search for a basis, a being, an external reference for the pronoun “I.” This realist quest shares the same hope: to answer the question, “Who is it that speaks?” rather than the different, less essentializing question, “How do these propositional categories function, and how must they function to be consistent?” Some realist (or, on the contrary, nominalist) currents of contemporary analytic philosophy have, with this realist antiphony, more in common than they realize with the metaphysics that they reject. Furthermore, that my problem is not the realist problem also allows me to dismiss the dispute about the precedence of one pronoun over another. To know whether the “I,” the “you,” the “he,” or the “we” is first has absolutely no importance in my framework. It is not a matter of knowing how the “I” becomes a “we” (the problem of overcoming the solipsism of Cartesian philosophy or the problem of self-interest in political philosophy); nor of determining how the “we” becomes an “I” (the psychological problem, or the problem of the phenomenology of Dasein, where it is asked for example how the child individuates himself with regard to the entity that he initially forms with the maternal body). The question is, How can we more precisely describe this type of proposition that must be able to apply to itself without self-destructing? Finally, this discovery allows me to refine our understanding of performative contradiction. What causes a performative contradiction in the second group of propositions that I’ve analyzed? The fact that the authority of the utterance excludes itself from what it says. The dual characteristic of making a universality claim and of including oneself in this universality is thus the mark of this group of self-referential propositions. Given these stakes, I can only regret that the “we” has been so neglected in the study of personal pronouns. This oversight in linguistic as well as philosophical studies is indisputably harmful, for the “we” is the pronoun that

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governs a good number of philosophical, and even anthropological, statements that apply to humanity in general, or to “the subject” or “the mind” or “the speaking authority,” or, if one likes a more naturalist expression, the “brain.” The neurologist, for example, cannot define the brain’s activity in general and exclude from this definition the scientist’s own cerebral activity. I will illustrate this type of paradox—very common today in the cognitive and the social sciences—at greater length in what follows. It will suffice for now to summarize what the present analysis has established: self-referentiality as the law of reflexivity applies to propositions and need not address any realist questions concerning the reference of indexicals (my own body, the shattered cogito, the metaphysical subject, the empirical individual, etc.). For the moment, I have discovered two kinds of propositions that must apply to themselves: propositions concerning truth and (to put it most succinctly) propositions concerning humanity (in contrast to things and animals). We have also seen that, within this second group, the speaking authority is the “we,” defined as “all the others” and “myself.” That said, if we have been led in the course of this analysis to distinguish two groups of propositions, the latter nonetheless belong to the same genre, of propositions that must apply to themselves or include themselves. But the insights just summarized can legitimately give rise to the following objection: self-referentiality as I have just defined it seems to be precisely the self-referentiality that Russell (and after him, all of formal logic) prohibited. Has all my research into the meaning and the consistency of self-referentiality today led me to revive a problem already settled by logic at the beginning of the twentieth century? This is the second major debate that I must address to better ensure the current viability of the model.

The Theory of Reflexivity and the Prohibition Against Self-referential Propositions The Reasons for Russell’s Prohibition A confrontation between this model of reflexivity and Bertrand Russell’s prohibition requires that I return in the first case to the reasons that led Russell to prohibit self-referentiality. To briefly retrace this history, recall that Russell, spurred by G. E. Moore to abandon his initial Hegelianism,10 undertook to demonstrate that all mathematical operations can be reduced to noncontra-

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dictory expressions and that logic thus grounds mathematics.11 Concerned to reduce set theory to a pure logical calculus, Russell boiled the mathematical concept of sets down to the logical concept of classes. The set of humans corresponds to the class determined by the function “is a human.” In doing this, Russell came up against a still famous paradox.12 This paradox stems from the following: Certain sets can be members of themselves, thus the set or the class of inanimate objects is itself an inanimate object and the set of sets is a set. Other sets are not members of themselves: the set of all humans is not a human, and the set of pipes can say, without batting an eyelid, that “this is not a pipe.” Taking this last type of classes into consideration, Russell wondered whether, in the final analysis, “this class contains itself or not.”13 This question cannot be answered with a yes or a no, as true or false. Indeed, if w (the set of all sets that do not contain themselves) contains itself, then it does not (because w contains only sets that do not contain themselves); but if it does not contain itself, then it does (because it is the set of all sets that do not contain themselves). Thus true and false, yes and no, reciprocally imply each other: if the set contains itself, then it does not; if it does not contain itself, then it does. As Russell writes, “From each answer its opposite follows,”14 and there is a contradiction. This contradiction cannot be reduced, nor transformed, nor overcome—unlike many paradoxes, major or minor, that adorn the history of logic or mathematics. Nor does this contradiction belong to the category of statements that are neither true nor false, neither a nor not-a. Indeed, in logic, statements that are neither true nor false, that is, statements to which no truth value can be attributed, are either statements that have not yet been determined, which is what Russell has in mind when he writes, “ ‘x is human’ is a propositional function; so long as x remains undetermined, it is neither true nor false, but when a value is assigned to x it becomes a true or false proposition”;15 or else statements that are neither true nor false are undeterminable statements, in which case we have what logical analysis called nonsense, like the statement “Caesar is a prime number,” which is neither true nor false, to which no value a or not-a can be attributed. And yet the paradoxical statement that Russell discovered is not a statement that is neither true nor false, nor is it an undetermined or undeterminable statement; it is purely and simply a statement that is both true and false, a and not-a, itself and its contrary, in that if it is the one, it is the other. As Philippe de Rouilhan notes in Russell et le cercle des paradoxes, “this paradox stated in logical terms carries a contradiction without any possible escape in logic itself.”16 In a word, the reduction of rational procedures to a logical calculus leads, in the end, to the

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pure and simple transgression of logic’s very basis, namely, the principle of noncontradiction. Indeed, if logic has not always been defined in the same way, if it has not employed the same techniques throughout its history, if there is a gulf between Aristotelian predicate logic and the Megarian school’s propositional logic, between Russell’s logic and the various logics that have succeeded it, if—to take up Otto Neurath’s metaphor—the history of logic is comparable to Theseus’s ship, which must be constantly reconstructed on the open sea in order to continue sailing, the fact nevertheless remains that however diverse its forms, logic cannot violate the principle of noncontradiction, nor can the ship go without the very condition for navigation. Russell compares this logical paradox to a much older semantic paradox, known as the liar’s paradox or Eubulides’ paradox, whose purest formulation we owe to Eubulides of Miletus.17 Eubulides states, “I lie.” His statement ought to be true or false; either he is lying or he is not lying (a, not-a). But if it is true that he is lying, then he is telling the truth in saying that he lies and thus he does not lie. It follows that if he is lying then he is not lying. On the other hand, if it is false that he is lying, then what he says (in saying that he lies) is false and thus he lies. There again, he is lying and is not lying. The medievals classified the liar’s paradox among the insolubilia, and the Stoics’ adversaries presented it as the ultimate limit of human rationality. Russell, for his part, makes it the prototype of serious paradoxes, of absolute contradictions that are both true and false, which simultaneously affirm and deny. A logician will obviously try to determine the nature of this pure form of contradiction, that is, he will try to establish a diagnosis that aims to indicate why a certain class of propositions gives rise to this simultaneity of truth and falsehood, this juxtaposition of yes and no, this coexistence of opposites. The propositions that generate contradictions, Russell tells us, all have in common the fact that they are self-referential: “It will be found that in all the logical paradoxes there is a kind of reflexive self-reference which is to be condemned on the same ground: viz. that it includes, as a member of a totality, something referring to that totality.”18 Logical contradictions that can be neither reduced nor overcome all proceed to employ a particular relation, namely, the relation of self to self, of a proposition to itself, of a class to itself, of a system to itself, etc. And whether it is a matter of logical or semantic paradoxes, the disruptive element is, for Russell, always the same: in all contradictions, “there is a common characteristic, which we may describe as self-reference or reflexiveness. The remark of Epimenides must include itself in its own scope. If all classes, provided they are not members of themselves,

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are members of w, this must also apply to w; and similarly for the analogous relational contradiction.”19 Self-reference or reflexivity happens when a class, a proposition, or a system refers to itself: self-inclusion occurs in the case of classes that are members of themselves, and self-application in the case of propositions that apply to themselves. To put this differently, a statement that ought to say something about something in fact says something about itself. The sign’s transitive function is interfered with by a reflexive dimension. For example, the proposition “Snow is white” says something about something—we have here the traditional transitive or representative function of a statement. On the other hand, in Jan Łukasiewicz’s statement, “The proposition that I am uttering is false,” the reflexive function interferes with the transitive function. We have two levels: the sentence seems to say that p, but, in fact, it says itself. This confusion—between what is said and the speaking about what is said—is what leads to the absolute contradiction, to the incredible junction of opposites, and is what endangers logic’s very principle. Having presented this diagnosis, it is clear that logicians will try to find a solution. The common thread in all these solutions is that they neither dissolve nor resolve the contradiction: the contradiction can be defined but it cannot be overcome—it is irreducible, so that the only solution seems to be to prohibit this kind of statement. Thus Russell proposes not to reduce, transform, or overcome it but quite simply to prohibit self-referential statements in the establishment of the logical calculus. This prohibition is articulated in his 1910 theory of types, which adds the condition that “a class cannot contain itself ” to the construction of logical language. We are thus led to establish a hierarchy of domains of meaning, to classify different types of statements, and to proscribe all self-referential statements. This is, as writers as diverse as Karl-Otto Apel and Philippe de Rouilhan have noted,20 a way to prevent the paradox but not to solve it. Tarski undertakes the same strategy of prohibiting this type of statements rather than resolving the contradiction. Indeed, he proposes to disassociate two levels, the object language and metalanguage. If the liar’s statement is paradoxical, it is indeed because he confounds two different types of statement, the proposition p itself and the proposition that is about p. This is why we must distinguish between what is said from a point of view and what is said about that point of view. It is clear that, for Tarski as well as Russell, we can ask whether the contradiction has been bypassed rather than resolved. In any case, this is what François Rivenc maintains, who points out in Sémantique et vérité: De Tarski à Davidson that what is commonly considered as Tarski’s solution to the liar’s

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paradox would be better interpreted as “giving up any attempt to analyze the paradox.”21 This is echoed by Philippe de Rouilhan, who notes that Tarski finally resolved, at the end of his reconstruction, to “call ‘regular’ those statements in which a truth-predicate (or any related predicate) does not appear, and to reserve judgment on other statements (and to take action, if necessary, for exceptional statements such as Eubulides’ and Łukasiewicz’s).”22 This strategy of avoidance can also be read in a project like Hans Reichenbach’s. Indeed, his proposed solution in The Theory of Probability23 is to create a category of the undecidable, into which statements that produce contradictions can be placed. He tells us that we must accept a trivalent logic that rejects the principle of the excluded middle (a is true or false, and there is no third possibility). Between truth and falsity there is a third value, the undecidable. But we are compelled to note that the introduction of this category threatens logical analysis itself. Indeed, what is logic if not the determination of what is decidable, the articulation of decision procedures? For logic, a system is decidable if there is a finite procedure, a sort of algorithm, that determines whether all the system’s expressions are demonstrable or not, that is, whether a value a or not-a can be attributed to all the system’s propositions. In light of this definition, the undecidable is a paradoxical category that, in the final analysis, relativizes logic’s scope (if the principle of noncontradiction does not hold for some statements, then logical analysis cannot claim to be universal). It follows that whether we declare self-reference to be prohibited (Russell), exceptional (Tarski), or undecidable (Reichenbach), the fact remains that the contradictions that it engenders are not diminished but only isolated and, in the end, abandoned. In a word, classical logical analysis declares itself powerless to overcome the kind of contradiction that these statements are liable to produce—and therefore prohibits them. The reason for this prohibition thus resides in the impossibility to resolve the type of contradiction created by certain propositions’ self-reference. Having grasped the genesis of what Récanati unhesitatingly calls the first wave of analysis’s “phobia of reflexivity,” we are now in a position to relativize Russell’s prohibition, for 1. what turns out to be insoluble in a given domain—formal logic, for example—is not necessarily so in another. No argument a priori authorizes an extension of the prohibition; there is nothing that permits, immediately and without proof, its universalization or its extension to other domains. In a word, that a type of statement is unanalyzable in one domain does not mean

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that it is so in all domains. On this point, as I will show in what follows, the liar’s paradox can be explained, and—in a context other than Russell’s—no longer need be classified among the insolubilia. A question thus arises about the limits of this prohibition of self-referential statements,24 because it is illicit to decree a priori that the prohibition holds universally. All the less so, as 2. the universalization of this prohibition is de facto impossible, because it is contradictory. Karl-Otto Apel has demonstrated this through an analysis of the Russellian proposition that articulates the prohibition, that is, that “no sign of signs can relate to all signs and in the same way to itself.” This proposition means, if we display the assertion implicitly contained therein, that “it holds for all signs that no sign of signs . . .” Apel’s demonstration shows that a universalized prohibition is self-destructive and falls into the series of paradoxes that it had aimed to overcome. This is why the classical analysis is unable to consistently maintain its own conclusion, namely, its prohibition of self-referential statements. This relativization of the Russellian prohibition allows me to now attempt an objective comparison of the two proposed systems in light of self-referentiality.

The Similarities and Differences Between Two Attitudes Toward Self-referentiality In the first place, I should note that there are common points between the birth of German idealism and the birth of logical positivism, that is, between these two historical moments in which the problem of propositions’ reference to themselves becomes fully clear. There are four commonalities: First of all, the two moments are situated at the same level—the epistemological—and not at an ontological level. Next, these two moments are based on the problem of grounding a discourse or a discipline. For German idealism, this is an interrogation of the grounds for the Kantian discourse; for Russell, it is an interrogation of the foundations of mathematics. Moreover, in both cases, this question about the grounds for a type of discourse gives rise to a serious contradiction that challenges the definition of the discipline itself (the failure of Kantianism, the crisis of mathematics). Finally, in both cases, the contradiction brings to light a specific mode of relation, the relation of an x to itself. For Russell, this is a proposition’s or a class’s relation to itself; for Fichte, it is philosophical propositions’ relation to themselves.

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But the analogy stops there, for if we consider how this concept of relation to oneself is treated, the difference is twofold. Whereas Russell understands the contradiction’s origins as induced by the reference of an x to itself, Fichte traces the contradiction back to the absence of philosophical propositions’ reference to themselves. And whereas Russell prohibits all self-reference, Fichte makes it the fundamental basis for all philosophical knowledge. In a word, on the one hand, the reference of an x to itself is considered to be the source of insurmountable paradoxes and is thereby slapped with a prohibition, while on the other hand, this relation allows the creation of authentically philosophical propositions and is thereby promoted to the rank of a first principle, itself understood as the task or the model that we must fulfill when we do philosophy. Will this identification of real differences allow me to show that it is not only possible but even necessary to ignore the Russellian prohibition?

The Lessons of This Comparison This comparison allows us to rethink the nature of the opposition between these two philosophical moments. Indeed, if self-reference is slapped with a prohibition in one case and, in the other, considered as one of the conditions that philosophical propositions must honor, this is not at all because the former wonder about language and its mechanisms while the latter dwell on consciousness and its nature. Nor is it because the former are good contemporary logicians and the latter poor, obsolete metaphysicians. Indeed, the denial of any self-reference, in the Russellian context, is explained by the fact that truth is there defined from the following principle: “All statements are true that are obtained from the schema ‘x is a true statement if and only if p’ by replacing x with the name of a statement and p with the statement itself.”25 Self-referential statements are not paradoxical in themselves; but they only become so within this conception because the source of the paradox is located in the application of the schema “x is a true statement if and only if p” to statements already containing a truth predicate. Therefore, we can legitimately ask whether we must maintain the universality of this schema. But all German idealism has answered that we need not do so. The uniquely and purely representational conception of truth (as reference to an exterior x or to the world spoken of) was criticized by Fichte as well as Hegel. Selfreference does not have to be understood on the model of reference ad extra. It clearly follows that to establish a relevant debate between the two philo-

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sophical approaches requires understanding the opposition not as an opposition between the paradigm of language and the paradigm of the subject, nor as the opposition between a past historical moment and our necessarily true present, but as the opposition between different conceptions of truth. Must we understand self-reference in terms of the model of reference ad extra, or must we recognize another type of “reference” as well as the first that does not obey the same rules but can, however, produce propositions that can be understood in terms of true and false? Various arguments lead me to answer this question by reaffirming the rights of self-reference: 1. First of all, if we consider the liar’s argument, we can show that its paradoxical character is born from a certain definition of truth but is not in itself insurmountable. Indeed, if the liar’s argument is both true and false, in the context of early analytic philosophy, this is because it was held that every proposition must say something about something, that the proposition must refer to a “state of affairs.” But in the context of revitalized pragmatism, the same liar’s argument does not pose any particular problems. The statement is not both true and false but simply false, because it is self-destructive. In saying “I lie,” Eubulides cannot claim that his proposition is true without contradicting himself in the very contents of his statement. The truth claim is denied by the contents of what is said. It follows that the proposition “I lie” is a pragmatically false proposition—or possibly, because it shows that it cannot claim what it says is true, a proposition that belongs to a different discursive register from philosophical or scientific propositions. In saying “I lie,” I show my interlocutor that I invalidate—consciously, if I am being ironic—my claim to say the truth; I thus situate myself in a different framework from the one for truth-claiming propositions. As we can see, the diagnosis (serious contradiction or, on the contrary, a pragmatically false statement) is a function of the very conception of truth that is brought forward in each of these traditions. Therefore, the mode of reference ad extra does not appear to be the only one likely to express truth and falsity, and we should be able to consider that reference to an utterance—if it is not of the same order as reference to the world—ought not be understood with the same definition of truth. We can see that extending the prohibition to the liar’s argument is illegitimate; conversely, nothing prevents us from making self-referentiality a hypothesis to explore as the starting point for new propositions. 2. Furthermore, at a certain level of analysis, it seems impossible to eliminate this type of relation of self to self, even for analytic philosophy itself. On

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this point, to take a more contemporary example than Russell’s, Pascal Engel’s work, bearing the very title of La vérité [Truth], is extremely symptomatic of this quasi impossibility to eliminate the problem of self-reference. In this text, Engel reviews the various definitions of truth generated in the course of history (correspondence theories, coherence theories, pragmatic theories, etc.), and at no point in his survey does he mention truth as a proposition’s noncontradiction with itself—or as congruence between a statement and its utterance, what is said and its saying. But this omission is eminently paradoxical in light of the author’s own reasoning, for Engel uses this definition of truth at a critical moment in his demonstration. Thus, when he wants to establish, against the relativists, a “minimal concept of truth,” the argument to which he resorts is quite precisely the argument that Fichte employed without cease, namely, “those who make this claim contradict themselves in saying it.” Indeed, disputing that it must be admitted, with the relativists, that two theses are true because they are true relative to a perspective, Engel writes: Let’s now consider a thesis concerning the justification of the two theses . . . To defend relativism, regarding justification, it must be maintained that the rules of justification are equally justified for those who believe the first theory and for those who believe the second. Here, too, relativism will have to apply this to its own thesis and to admit that its rules of justification are just as good as those of its adversary. But by the same reasoning as above, it cannot admit as much without presupposing the validity of a point of view according to which some rules are better than others.26 This simple reasoning calls upon the entirety of my definition of self-reference. The thesis “must apply to itself,” and yet, if it is applied to itself, it self-terminates. It follows that it is false. This is a conception of truth and falsity (as the success or failure of a proposition’s application to itself) that thus ought to be listed along with the other conceptions, since it is mobilized at the most critical moment of the argument. Moreover, the employment of this type of relation to self (the application of a proposition to itself) is what makes possible, in Engel’s specific case, an outline of an answer to the question of reference to the world. Indeed, to reject relativism is to reject the idea that our discourse does not refer to anything tangible and is only the expression of contingent and isolated constructions. And yet what leads to Engel’s

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rejection is clearly the use of a reference that is not a reference to the world but a reference or a relation to self. This analysis—which reveals how much even those who mean to challenge or ignore it are led to self-reference—shows us on the one hand that the mode of relation of an x to itself, far from having to be considered as something that we must track down and exclude, can be proposed as what will be likely to assure consistency for propositions that claim to be philosophical. On the other hand, it leads us to think that the question of reference (in the name of which the prohibition of self-reference was pronounced) actually goes through a consideration of the question of self-reference. Far from being a sterile “metaphilosophical” problem that enquires as far as the eye can see into the conditions of conditions—and so on to infinity—of the philosophical discourse,27 the question of philosophical propositions’ relations to themselves could indeed constitute a part of the answer to the question of a proposition’s relation to what it is not. Consequently, we can say that the mode of reference ad extra is not the only one capable of being understood in terms of true and false, and that one can legitimately—despite Russell’s prohibition—consider that in certain circumstances reference to the utterance can enable a decision about truth and falsity (for example, in the case of the liar’s paradox). The opposition between traditions can no longer continue to be interpreted as an opposition between one definitively historically superannuated way of philosophizing and another, legitimate because more contemporary. This is why I am entitled here to answer the initial question—the question whether selfreference is strengthened by this confrontation with formal logic’s prohibition—in the affirmative.

Conclusions: The Application of Propositions to Themselves More generally, the results of this dual confrontation (contemporary theories of self-reference and the prohibition of formal logic) are as follows: 1. First of all, I have been able to further clarify my model of self-reference. Self-reference is strictly defined as the possibility of a proposition’s application to itself. Two groups of propositions have emerged from my analyses: propositions concerning truth and propositions concerning humanity. If

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universality is indeed required in these two groups, the fact remains that not all propositions with a universality claim are necessarily called to be directly self-referential, as we saw with the example of “All swans are white.” This apparently insignificant insight is important in that it enables a strict delineation of the field of self-reference: self-reference does not concern all propositions with a universality claim but only propositions that contain the terms truth or humanity.28 It follows if a specialist in leeches’ brains can certainly continue to develop in a uniquely referential and classically “scientific” microcosmos, without ever posing the question of self-reference, a specialist in human brains, on the other hand, is much less able to do so because his propositions do not apply to an objective “it” and must answer to the principle of identity that I have revealed (congruence between a statement and its utterance). Here again, the division between science (“All swans are x”) and philosophical knowledge (“Every human is z”) is clearly defined without either having at any point to be dissolved in the other. This division between science and knowledge can just as well be understood as a division between the question of reference as a question of validity and the question of self-reference as a question of truth. We do not have to prohibit the study of leeches’ brains in order to proclaim the distinctiveness of philosophical analysis; we have to show how each discipline, legitimate in itself, moves in domains that call for different ways of reasoning and arguing. Learning and knowledge, reference and self-reference, validity and truth—these are the categories that appear, at the end of these developments, capable of articulating this division. 2. Also, that Russell’s prohibition need not be honored everywhere—for I have shown (apart from the liar’s paradox, which no longer is one) that self-reference is impossible to deny and turns out, in the final analysis, to be a potential condition for the resolution of the problem of reference. Here again it is the concepts of science and knowledge, of reference and self-reference, of validity and truth that make it possible to clearly define the difference between a discipline that thinks of itself as technical—logic—and another that claims to exist as knowledge as a whole—philosophy. But if self-reference as a principle of reflexivity (congruence between a statement and its utterance) is now not only entirely elucidated but moreover justified, the question again arises as to what such a principle engenders. Is it an isolated principle, a simple criterion to apply to external propositions, a negative principle in the sense that it indicates only falsity? Or is

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this principle the source for a way to link together and produce propositions? Can we define the distinctive laws of reasoning from this first principle? Does the law of self-referentiality permit the construction of a “logic” or a method of argumentation that is then likely to unfurl a network of interdependent truths? Moreover, does this principle enable the capture of authentic content? I must now address this crucial question of the fecundity of the reflexive principle.

7

The Model’s Fecundity

The question of the fecundity of the principle of congruence between a statement and its utterance can be addressed in two parts: an elucidation of the mode of reasoning that gives rise to this principle of self-referentiality, on the one hand, and of its possible modalities of application on the other. The first is probably the most important in that it determines the mode of reasoning that advances philosophy to the rank of a knowledge that aspires to truth by taking self-referentiality as a law, model, and guide.

A New Definition of Transcendental Argument The model of reflexivity as I have just presented it allows me to propose a revitalized definition of transcendental argument. Before making this renewal explicit, let’s first recall the canonical definition of transcendental argument as well as the dispute that gave rise to it.

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We owe the introduction1 of the term “transcendental argument” to P. F. Strawson, who showed2 how Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, used two types of argumentative systems to establish his theses: On the one hand, and most often, Kant devotes himself to a description of the way that our faculties, in harmony with one another, produce experience. On the other hand, and much less frequently, Kant has recourse to a type of argumentation that aims to show that if we do not accept a given concept, then we can neither think nor act as we understand ourselves to do. Thus, Kant justifies reliance on the concept of cause by showing that this concept is the necessary condition for our experience of succession. To show how certain concepts or series of concepts are necessarily implied in cognitive operations that we actually carry out is, in Strawson’s eyes, the nuclear structure of “transcendental argument.” Strawson uses this argumentative system in his own philosophical analyses, detaching this argument from its initial context in order to consider it as a type of valid reasoning, and thus reusable beyond the single context of transcendental philosophy. Thus, he means to show that we cannot differentiate the objects that we perceive if we are not able to understand ourselves and the objects as two entities coexisting in space. Following him, and again considering a general type of commonly executed cognitive operations (like, for example, perception of objects, reference to something, or even predication), Gareth Evans tried to bring out their necessarily implied presuppositions. In the same way, we have seen how Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel use this type of reasoning when they try to bring to light the necessary conditions underlying our most common communicative experiences. Transcendental argument thus consists in bringing out the necessary presuppositions of an experience of thought or speech. Having recalled the argument’s definition, in light of the context of its birth (namely, Strawson’s revival of the Critique of Pure Reason’s reasoning), it seems permissible to formally analyze the argument in the following way: 1. 2. 3. 4.

p It would not be possible that p if we did not think that q. We must think that q. It is true or it is necessary that q.3

In order that a transcendental argument be considered as such, the premise (p) must be a cognitive operation, like, for example, perceiving an object, establishing a link between cause and effect, or making any prediction.4 These

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are the cognitive operations that we perform daily. These operations thus refer to propositions of the type, to take up the examples cited by Strawson, “I perceive objects,” “I get my bearings in space,” “I communicate with others” and not to assertions about reality like “The earth rotates” or “Gold is a metal.” The initial fact or factum cannot be any old fact about the world but must be a cognitive factum. In contrast to ontological arguments that aim to establish a proposition that applies to the objects themselves and their properties (arguments that thus take the form of “s is p”), a transcendental argument must establish a proposition that applies to the concepts or representations necessarily implied in our thinking. As Michel Bitbol, who is interested in the use of transcendental arguments in quantum physics, has emphasized, “transcendental arguments [have] absolutely nothing to tell us from an ontological point of view.”5 In summary, a transcendental argument is an argument that does not directly apply to the reality of the world but to cognitive operations.6 It shows that human beings’ everyday representations would not be possible without a certain number of conditions that the researcher must determine (q, r, etc.). This is why a transcendental argument is often articulated in a negative way, with propositions of the type “We cannot do otherwise than to posit q” or “We cannot not posit certain conditions in order that certain representations become intelligible.” For example, the representation of an object presupposes the possibility of distinguishing it as an entity distinct from ourselves, just as the possibility of understanding a communication presupposes the possibility of distinguishing a speaker. It is clear, in such a framework, that a transcendental argument will be all the more convincing as the initial premise or factum will be difficult to challenge. Given this first definition of transcendental argument, it goes without saying that it was the object of challenges, contestations, and objections, which justifies the now generally used phrase “the dispute about transcendental arguments.” This dispute has the advantage of uniting two paradigms that are taken to be opposed—the Continental paradigm (references to Kant) and the Anglo-Saxon paradigm, since, as Sandra Laugier recalls in a recent article, “debates about transcendental arguments  .  .  . have dominated analytic philosophy at the end of the twentieth century.”7 And indeed, from Strawson to Jaakko Hintikka, from Dieter Henrich8 to Richard Rorty,9 from Barry Stroud to Apel, and even, quite recently, from Michel Bitbol10 to Elie Zahar,11 there are numerous authors from both horizons who have taken part in this famous “dispute about transcendental arguments.” Against Strawson’s argument, three major types of challenges can be identified.

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table 7.1

Strawson’s Transcendental Argument 1 That p.

“I perceive an object.”

2. It would not be possible that p

“I cannot perceive an object without



conceiving it as distinct from myself.”

if we did not think that q.

3. We must think that q.

“It is necessary to conceive the existence



of objects outside myself.”

4. It is true or it is necessary that q.

“Objects outside myself exist.”

1. The first objection comes from Barry Stroud in a 1968 article.12 Taking up Strawson’s work, he attacks transcendental argument on the grounds that the latter does not manage to achieve the goals that it is assigned. Thus, for Stroud, transcendental argument had meaning only in Kant in opposition to skepticism, that is, for him, to philosophies that deny the possibility of positing the existence of a world beyond thought. I summarize Strawson’s argument in table 1. Stroud objects that a skeptic will deny the first premise and the possibility of moving from the third proposition to the fourth. Indeed, hallucinations and dreams are two counterexamples that can be used in opposition to Strawson’s argument. Thus Stroud can conclude that it is possible to assert only that the idea of the perception of an object calls for the idea of the existence of objects outside the self. Consequently, the transcendental argument misses its objective. The first question in the debate is thus the following: is transcendental argument’s only purpose to challenge skepticism, itself reduced to the simple position of doubt about the existence of things outside ourselves? And must we conclude, with Stroud and later Rorty, that this purpose cannot be attained, that without an appeal to principle the argument loses any meaning and value? 2. The second objection concerns transcendental argument’s lack of distinctiveness, in that it may be perfectly reducible to a simple logical argument. Indeed, what does proposition 2 (“It would not be possible that p if we did not think that q.”) mean? It can be conjugated in the following way: proposition 1 (“That p.”) presupposes proposition 2 (“It would not be possible that p if we did not think that q.”), meaning that 1 is not true unless 2 is true. Transcendental argument is thus nothing other than a deductive logical argument in which proposition 2 is only a premise having the status of a

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table 7.2

Objections to a Transcendental Argument A standard Strawson’s Skepticism’s Logicism’s transcendental reasoning objection objection argument

Objection about the argument’s bearing

1. That p.

“I perceive

We can say

The proposition Transcendental



an object.”

only that

can take the

argument is an



“I think that

form p logically

exclusively



I perceive

implies q.

negative



an object.”

argument and



consequently



yields nothing.

2. It would not “I cannot

be possible

perceive an object without



that p if we



did not think conceiving it



that q.



as distinct from myself.”

3. We must

“It is

The movement



necessary to

from 3 to 4



conceive the

meets counter-



existence of

examples



objects out-

(hallucinations,



side myself.”

dreams).

4. It is true or it

“Objects

think that q.



is necessary

outside my-



that q.

self exist.”



Transcendental Transcendental



argument

argument is not



cannot stand

distinctive.



in the way of



skepticism.

The Model’s Fecundity  167

postulate. Thus Alain Boyer, summarizing a widely held analytic position, asserts that there is no place in science for arguments other than a. deductive arguments, in which the conclusions cannot contain anything more than the premises and in which, consequently, any supplemental inference is illegitimate. These deductive arguments cannot be said to be absolutely certain insofar as the premises can never be anything other than postulates accepted by pure convention (such as, for example, Euclid’s on parallel lines). b. Inductive and generalizing inferences, which, as Karl Popper showed, have never had any definitive validity because they are dependent upon experience—nevertheless, these inductions help us to orient ourselves in reality (as is the case, for example, with the proposition “All swans are white”). Thus, as Boyer concludes, “a reasoning is either deductive or non-deductive; in the latter case it is inductive. Tertium non datur.”13 The question here is thus to know whether there are argumentative systems other than simple deduction (subject to arbitrary postulates or axioms) or simple induction (a simple probabilistic assertion, always subject to falsification). 3. The third objection is transcendental arguments’ possible lack of fecundity. Transcendental arguments may in fact be powerless to help us discover new statements, propositions unknown until now. Indeed, because they almost always make recourse to a negative proposition of the form “You cannot say that x,” they can seem to fail to produce positive statements. Can transcendental arguments be anything other than simple machines for refuting past systems or propositions, and, if yes, what really enables them to do so? This is the third question that arises from this objection. These three objections can be presented in table 2.

The New Version of the Argument as a Possible Overcoming of the “Dispute About Transcendental Arguments” How does the principle of self-reference bring about a different version of transcendental argument, capable of overcoming the current terms of the dispute about transcendental arguments? In the first place, the initial factum is very different from Strawson’s “mental facts” or Apel’s “facts of communication.” This initial factum is not a mental given (like “I perceive myself as distinct from objects”) nor an empirical given (in fact, we communicate) but is rather a claim inscribed in certain

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types of statements—a claim to truth and to universality implied in scientific or philosophical statements. It is thus a question of examining a demand at work in the structure of sentences and not of starting from a fact that is considered to be indisputable. In this sense, transcendental argument here does not repeat Kant’s stance—which has been criticized since his time, notably by Karl Leonhard Reinhold, for whom the Critique of Pure Reason’s structure is clearly hypothetico-deductive because it can be analyzed in these terms: if mathematical and physical propositions are valid (the initial factum), then this can be only under certain conditions (intuition, concepts, etc.). But this does not start from a fact that could be considered primary or originary; it is a matter of determining under what conditions certain types of statements (statements that make a universality claim) can be consistent. In a parallel fashion, this does not start from a fact that could be considered true (the discipline of mathematics) but from the truth claim. The type of argumentation employed can therefore be expressed like this: (scientific) validity claims or (philosophical) truth claims require that a certain number of rules or conditions, that an explanation can bring to light, be respected. Thanks to this formulation, we can understand why this is about a type of transcendental argument, for it is understood in terms of the conditions or requirements indispensable for a given x. At the same time, it allows us to precisely define its difference from the canonical formula, for the factum in question is a class of statements, those that make universality and truth claims. Thus defined, how can this transcendental argument answer the objections I’ve enumerated? Against Stroud’s and Rorty’s arguments, I can show that it is not at all about establishing some sort of realism against skepticism.14 Against the attempt to reduce the argument to other, more classic forms of reasoning, I can show the irreducibility of this reasoning. From there, I can establish its fecundity. First of all, to respond to the skeptics, I must say that transcendental argument is not about trying to secure the existence of objects outside ourselves.15 Transcendental argument has no immediately ontological value but, on the other hand, has an epistemological bearing insofar as its concern is to examine the validity claim inscribed in nucleo in any philosophical discourse. Transcendental argument concerns the status of a discourse that makes a truth claim, not the limited contents of this or that philosophical or scientific proposition. In other words, from physics to economics, from mathematics to philosophy, from biology to sociology, a speaker claims to say something true and cannot assert that in the framework of the practice

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of his science he claims to say things that are entirely false (even if in fact he can make false statements, he does not claim to do so without giving up the particular status of his discipline, which is to want to say the truth). It follows that if the skeptic wants to challenge a transcendental argument thus reformulated, he must understand that the question does not concern the relation between our representations and exterior objects but rather the relation between a speaker and what he says when he wants to hold a discourse that makes truth claims. Can a skeptic go so far as to say that everything he says is false, including the proposition that he just uttered that “everything is false”? It is thus the status of a discourse that is at stake in this renewed version of the transcendental argument. Next, to the objection that the argument lacks originality or distinctiveness, we must recall that transcendental argument rests upon the ground of the congruence between what is said (the contents of a discourse) and the procedures employed to be able to say what is said. The argument here does not consist in drawing a consequence from a given premise (deductive reasoning). Nor is it the generalization of an empirical given. The cognitive process required by this type of argument is thus to reflect, at the same time as one articulates the effective contents of a proposition, on the procedures of utterance underlying one’s statement. The argumentative process consists in reconstructing the conditions upon which a proposition—or a series of propositions—acquires meaning, coherence, and consistency. Each proposition refers in fact to a network of more or less implicit statements and conditions for its consistency. These are the propositions tacitly presupposed “to be able to say what is said” that transcendental argument means to methodically reveal in every philosophical system. Argument thus comes back to find the grounds intrinsically and implicitly attached to an assertion that makes a truth claim. It is thus a matter here, as Jaakko Hintikka put it, of directly confronting the question, “How do we know that we know?”16—or, to put it differently, “How can a scientist say what he says?” It is clear, in doing so, that this is not a matter of drawing a logical consequence from an initial axiom nor of generalizing a given experiment. Consequently, it appears that transcendental argument, thus defined, possesses a distinctive and original structure—in any case, it cannot be folded back into the modalities of reasoning of the form modus ponens. For all that, this argumentative structure cannot be relegated, as those who hold to a strict logicism would have it, to the group of propositions that are invalid because they are neither deductive nor inductive. Tertium datur [a third choice is possible], we could say, in

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that transcendental argument thus conceived is “totally new,” and, as Bitbol notes, its employment “could considerably alter our understanding of what constitutes physical theories”17 and, as a general rule, of what constitutes any system of propositions that claim the truth of what they say. To complete my response to these objections, I must address the third criticism—is transcendental argumentation anything other than a simple machine for refuting opposing statements, such as skepticism, critique, strict positivism (scientism), etc.? Is it doomed to establishing a list of what cannot be said without ever indicating what must be said? This objection, by far the most formidable, requires that we tackle the other major aspect of transcendental argument’s fecundity.

The Transcendental Argument’s Positivity and the “Utility” of the Law of Reflexivity First of all, I should note that if, in fact, transcendental argument is particularly illustrated by refutations like “you cannot say what you are saying,” these refutations cannot be considered to be only negative, since the work that delimits the set of statements that we cannot accept and the systems to which we cannot adhere is, in the end, constructive. For example, with this argument, we are now in a position to reject the two key stances of contemporary philosophy—skepticism and scientism. Given that contemporary philosophy is torn between a certain form of strict positivism (the cognitive sciences, naturalism, all the way to various materialisms)18 and an increasingly radical relativism (Feyerabend, Rorty), we can now propose a third, positive solution. Thus even if my argumentative practice—which consists in showing that a discourse x self-destructs—can appear to be only negative, its yields are no less considerable because, as we have seen, the currently most common and widely shared theories must be abandoned. The argumentation that takes the form “You cannot say that x” is heavy with positive propositions in that it clears the barriers that obstruct the horizon of thought today. In addition, I can also show that transcendental argument can move from the proposition “You cannot say x” to another that, despite the double negative, is heavy with positive propositions, namely, “You cannot not say that x.” I have illustrated this passage from the negative to the positive in my works on Fichte, through (among other examples) the theory of affection (called the theory of stimulus), the theory of the relation between the finite and the

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infinite, and even through certain practical statements, even (and including) his most concrete views, such as his condemnation of the death penalty, which rests entirely on the employment of this kind of reasoning. The very production of a given proposition within a given system (in this case, Fichte’s or Hegel’s) attests to the fact that transcendental argument produces positive statements that take the form of “You cannot not say that x.” I should probably insist on this style of praxis or of the regulated production of statements, a general style of argumentation that is born in the distinctions of its starting point. I have noted that in Fichte, the starting point—namely, identity as congruence between what is said and what one does—is a task to be accomplished, an end to pursue, and not a psychological or factual given. I have also noted that the most immediate characteristic of the science of knowledge is that it is not defined as the description of an x but as the construction of itself. A construction because to reflect does not mean to reflect like a mirror or to give an image of something anterior but rather means to produce concepts and propositions as a task that one freely sets for oneself (the noncontradiction between the Tun and the Sagen). We thus can see how to argue is, stricto sensu, to produce something. But to be sure, if the whole of Fichte’s system demonstrates that we can move from a negative statement of the sort “You cannot say x” to a positive statement of the form “You cannot not say that x,” then I must—beyond the production of this or that concrete proposition of Fichte’s—demonstrate this capacity with more contemporary examples. Confronted with this challenge, I could be tempted first of all to retort to those who complain about the argumentation’s negative character that I have nevertheless demonstrated the necessity of positing the concept of truth. Indeed, the skeptic cannot say that truth does not exist without destroying the contents of this proposition. On the other hand, to say “truth exists” undergoes the test of self-application of a proposition to itself without difficulties (“truth exists” and “I claim that this proposition is true” do not mutually exclude each other, unlike in the previous case). It will probably be replied that the term “exists” does not mean anything here. To avoid this verb, full of misunderstandings, it suffices to say that the notion of truth cannot ever be consistently eliminated from our scientific or philosophical discourses. To put it positively, scientific and philosophical discourse cannot not posit the concept of truth—even if it cannot immediately determine its contents. (Is it an intuition and a concept, empirical verification, some sort of a priori, etc.?) We can clearly see that despite an apparently negative for-

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mula “to not be able not to posit that x,” the analytical gain is considerable. That said, one could retort that this proposition is too general to be useful. My law of reflexivity would, of course, be acceptable, and the idea of truth absolutely inescapable but unusable in concrete and specific contexts. In a word, the reflexive law could be accepted but would give rise to the question, What is it good for in concrete terms? To answer this question, I propose to address, as a case in point, a problem in the “philosophy of mind,” a problem that is taken for concrete since the problem is to know how our mind functions—the brain, or reason? I approached this quantitatively important aspect of current philosophy in part 1, and I recalled—in order to overcome them—Herbert Feigl’s physicalist thesis and (at greater length) Geoffrey Hodgson’s evolutionary view. In so doing, I thus brought up two of the foundational paradigms of contemporary philosophy of mind—physics and biology—but neglected the third paradigm, the sciences of the artificial. It is on this third paradigm that I would like to test the utility of transcendental argumentation that comes from the reflexive a priori. I shall do so by comparing this argument to what the founder of the paradigm of the sciences of the artificial, Herbert Simon, has to say about reason.19 First of all, I should recall that Simon’s field of investigation goes far beyond the single domain in which he has been honored.20 Compared, because of his multiple scientific competencies, to Leonardo da Vinci,21 Simon undeniably embodies the anachronistic figure of the complete humanist who, having mastered his epoch’s fundamental fields of knowledge and having innovated within some of them, does not for all that disdain wondering about the definition of reason and of science. In this sense, Simon would probably have been described, in a different time, as a philosopher, in light of the guiding question that defined his domain of investigation. Indeed, he wrote in the preface to Reason in Human Affairs that the question of how we can understand individuals’ rationality is the very heart of all his reflections: “The nature of human reason—its mechanisms, its effects, and its consequences for the human condition—has been my central preoccupation for nearly fifty years.”22 Starting from the behavior of “economic agents” (firms, and then the individuals that compose them), Simon has in the course of his work expanded the scope of his investigations to encompass human reason in its entirety. His project is thus not only to determine agents’ possible behaviors in an economic context —that is, to grasp only one aspect among others of human behavior—but in fact, as is attested by the sentence I just quoted, also to discover the “mechanisms” of human rationality in general. This detail is

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significant in that it alone entitles me to examine Simon but not any economist or any sociologist or any other specialist in some aspect of humanity. Indeed, if the economist confines himself to only the domain of economic rationality while asserting that this rationality is not at work in other (moral, political, scientific) domains, then transcendental argument cannot be used, even indirectly, to analyze these propositions. To say something about the rationality of economic laws is not necessarily to understand all rationality, for example, the rationality of moral agents or scientific researchers. Different demands (investigation into self-interest, happiness, or the better argument) could preside over the behavior of an acting human. It follows that only the economist’s assertion that he indeed is speaking of “the nature of human reason” makes the comparison possible. Such is surely the case for Simon, who in a first approach defines human rationality as a “limited rationality.” How should we understand this first characterization? Rationality, from a general point of view, means that human beings can, most of the time, give reasons for their decisions. Unlike animals, humans can enter into a process of justification for their behavior. As Simon writes, “By a weak definition of rationality, virtually all human behavior is rational. People usually have reasons for what they do, and if asked, can opine what these reasons are.”23 Nevertheless, this rationality is limited, in that humans find themselves in a particular environment in which they do not control all the elements, thus they cannot calculate every possibility; moreover, they can delude themselves about what they can do or what they are: Of course, as Freud (and laboratory experiments) have taught us, people may deceive themselves; the real reasons may be different from what people suppose they are . . . To say that people have reasons for their actions means that there is a connection between the actions and the goals (values, utility functions) the actors possess. The actions increase the likelihood that some of these goals will be achieved. However, even in behavior that we would call rational, there may be serious gaps between action and goal achievement.24 Individuals thus make decisions as a function of limited “goals or values,” on the basis of a series of finite inferences and observations, which could be false. Even if the inferences are false, the behavior would be called rational.

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This definition of rationality could appear banal, in that it simply tells us that a human, unlike the Leibnizian God, cannot calculate, foresee, or know everything, and therefore that his choice of the “best possible” is not perfect but is necessarily limited by his finite capacities. This generic definition nevertheless has considerable importance at the narrow level of economic debate and particularly as a critique of market theories stemming from Léon Walras, all of which presuppose the “utopian hypothesis”25 of “perfect rationality.” This very general definition is made more precise by what Simon terms “procedural rationality.” Here again, this definition must be understood in opposition to the neoclassical economic theories in which Homo economicus must ideally effect all the possible calculations to make the best choice. If this type of rationality, which Simon calls “substantively rational” (and which, again, amounts to the rationality of Leibniz’s God), is presupposed, then it is sufficient to know the environment (the possible worlds) to anticipate an agent’s choice. Conversely, for Simon, we should consider the procedures by which individuals make this or that decision. It only makes sense to revise the rationality at work in the decision-making procedure in situations when agents’ choices are difficult: The process of rational calculation is only interesting when it is nontrivial—that is, when the substantively rational response to a situation is not instantly obvious. If you put a quarter and a dime before a subject and tell him that he may have either one, but not both, it is easy to predict which he will choose, but not easy to learn anything about his cognitive processes.26 And yet, as a general rule, the world in which we have evolved is complex, not simple: “We are concerned with how men behave rationally in a world where they are often unable to predict the relevant future with accuracy.”27 Briefly, given a particular end, humans employ a procedure to choose a situation that is most likely, in one’s eyes, to lead to that end. And yet for Simon, these decision procedures can be scientifically analyzed; they are predictable, even if our rationality is limited, our environment is complex, and we are likely to deceive ourselves. Analysis of the environment is given as a response to stimuli: A stimulus, external or internal, directs attention to selected aspects of the situation to the exclusion of competing aspects that might turn

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choice in another direction. Within the central nervous system are built up channels that permit impulses to be translated into action while leaving large portions of the central system undisturbed.28 For complex decisions, instead of automatic reactions (action-reaction, stimulus-response), a “deliberative procedure” must be employed. The rational agent investigates “alternative solutions” and adopts one of them, not because it is in itself the best but because it appears “satisficing,”29 solutions that Simon defines as “solutions that are good even though they are not optimal.” In a word, it is a matter of subjectively noticeable solutions, even if they are not objectively and in themselves (from the point of view of a calculating God) the best. But, it will be asked, how are we to analyze and predict—that is, to scientifically deal with—these decision procedures, which can initially seem to be numerous, or even infinite? Simon proposes to do so beginning with artificial intelligence, a domain on which his innovations have incontestably left a mark. The mind, like the computer, can be conceived as a stock of symbols that can be combined with one another. The symbols are “physical patterns (e.g., chalk marks on a blackboard) that can occur as components of symbol structures (sometimes called ‘expressions’).”30 Thus, a well-stocked symbol structure can be brought into relation with other symbol structures; it can also be transformed in order to create structures more appropriate for the environmental stimuli. These symbols are “physical symbols” in that they have a physical substrate, the brain—computers and brains are thus equivalents, because the physical substrates are “fabricated of glass and metal (computers) or flesh and blood (brains).”31 Despite their differing substrates, the computer and the brain thus have the same skills at their disposal: The physical symbol system hypothesis has two important corollaries: Corollary 1. A computer, appropriately programmed, can engage in general intelligent action. Corollary 2. The human brain is a physical symbol system.32 Having established this equivalence, the computer can serve both as a norm—in the sense that certain programs can improve decisions (for example, expert systems that function as assistants)—but also as an image, a representation, a photograph of human intelligence. Artificial intelligence thus enables a description of the ways in which individuals make decisions:

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However primitive the existing understanding programs may be, they do provide a set of basic mechanisms, a theory, to explain how human beings are able to grasp problems, both in new domains about which they have no knowledge and in domains about which they have a greater or lesser amount of previous semantic knowledge.33 How can this definition of human rationality and its comparison with computers be of interest to transcendental argumentation? Because it cannot be brought to completion without contradiction, and because the demonstration of this impossibility enables me to posit another definition of human rationality. Let’s look at these two points. First of all, I should generally say that three parameters are clearly to be considered in Simon’s discourse; these are the economist’s discourse on agents’ rationality, the contents assigned to agents’ rationality, and reality (even if this reality is understood as a set of rules or conventions). These three parameters multiply the economist’s tasks: On the one hand, he must state what reality is (for the scientist)—is it a set of arbitrary conventions or a set of immutable and necessary laws? This is the classic question of realism or of reference. On the other hand, he must define individuals’ rationality (limited, unlimited, determined or undetermined, a pure calculus of self-interest, etc.) Also, the economist must determine how the economic agent understands or represents reality (because this understanding is not necessarily the same as the economist’s). Finally he must try to understand the relation between the rationality that he employs qua scientist and the rationality that he attributes to the individual or the economic agent. If the question of “human reason” is Simon’s “central problem,” he must not define this reason as if his own scientific discourse were not also an expression of it. Here we confront the problem of self-reference. In view of these tasks (which I can specify without having to get into the details of analysis, nor having to test the proposed mathematical models’ falsifiability), what can we say a priori? That human rationality and the rationality employed by the economist must be congruent. The economist’s rationality, through its very employment, must not enter into a contradiction with what he says about human rationality. In a word, the scientific (economic but also sociological or anthropological) discourse must make sure not to invalidate itself by attributing a rationality to humans that its own discourse contradicts. Here, indeed, we find my law of reflexivity, which can now be defined as a reflexive a priori because we can say before any experience of a

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theory to be analyzed that the status of its utterance and the contents of its statements must not enter into conflict. And yet if we apply this point to Simon, it seems that human rationality is entirely determined, that is to say, predictable, reducible to mechanisms that a computer could accomplish. Alain Boyer underscores this point, writing about Simon’s conception that “the ‘self satisfying’ agent seems unable to be anything but an automaton following rules or routines, almost incapable of any critical and reflexive look at the routines in question.”34 This determinist conception is also noted by John Searle: Herbert Simon of Carnegie-Mellon University says that we already have machines that can literally think. There is no question of waiting for some future machine, because existing digital computers already have thoughts in exactly the same sense that you and I do. Well, fancy that! Philosophers have been worried for centuries about whether or not a machine could think, and now we discover that they already have such machines at Carnegie-Mellon.35 I can now demonstrate that this determinism is unsustainable in this form. If we envision rationality in terms of routines or automatic functioning, of a stock of symbols that combine together according to precise algorithms that we can reconstruct, if we are thus able to predict future combinations, then the scientific discourse must understand itself in the same way. But Simon never claims, when speaking of science, that it is a sequence of routines or a regulated combination of stockpiled structures, and even if he were to do so, it would make his discourse and his activity futile. As a pure sequence of routines, science could not claim to be anything other than a mechanical repetition, always starting over. From this, I can say that the act of reconstructing the scientist’s rationality is a necessary exception to his theory of rationality— Simon’s theory of rationality is not universal because it cannot be applied to its inventor. Because scientific rationality, through its very employment, goes beyond what it says about rationality, it is self-contradictory. And yet—a significant fact—Simon himself recognizes that he cannot explain the rationality at work in the sciences and in particular in the discovery process. He forcefully rejects Karl Popper’s view that discovery is, in the final analysis, irrational but admits that science has not yet achieved a demonstration of the mechanisms that preside over the process of creating new representations. He even speaks of a missing link with respect to the process of creating new

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representations: “The process of discovering new representations is a major missing link in our theories of thinking and is currently a major area of research in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.”36 It will be said that Simon answers my question here in arguing that we will be able to account for this process in the future. But—apart from the character of this kind of proof by “induction from the future”37 that I have already discredited—it turns out that the model he uses (of computation as a sequence of routines or a regulated combination of stockpiled structures) normally makes the discovery of something new impossible! With his model, Simon prohibits innovation and, at the same time and in the same way, states that a later groundbreaking discovery will demonstrate it. Paradoxically, Simon does not ask future science to confirm his hypothesis but rather, indeed, to demonstrate its falsehood. As it happens, this is not the only “remainder” that Simon acknowledges in his theory. The problem of determining ends and values also remains in suspense. If rationality is a procedure for achieving an end, who decides the contents of the end—for example, Nazism or perpetual peace between nations? However, I am not emphasizing this drawback here but rather the contradiction at work in the discourse of justification. My analyses’ conclusions are not merely negative, even if they arise from a specific challenge to the contents of a theory x, in this case, a theory in which human thought is reducible to a computer’s functions. These conclusions include an immanently positive side, which I can now present.

Conclusions: A Proposal for a Model of Application 1. I can establish that determinism is, in certain frameworks—in this case, of hypotheses concerning the definition of human rationality—impossible to articulate. Determinism is not only, as Kant would have it in the Critique of Judgment, infinitely improbable from the perspective of certain kinds of phenomena, it is false and this falsity is demonstrable through argumentation. Here we see the difference between this system, which enables a demonstration of determinism’s falsehood, and the current discourse, more or less coming out of the Critique of Judgment (a discourse that I’ve already analyzed), which denounces determinism in the “social sciences” either from “everything happens as if,” that is, from a heuristic hypothesis, whose internal contradiction I have already shown, or from a moralizing viewpoint (determinism—in favor of individual self-interest, etc.—must not be accepted, because it is not

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good), a viewpoint that Christiane Chauviré has quite effectively criticized in her article “Pourquoi moraliser les normes cognitives?”38 Between the relativism of “everything happens as if ” and the moralism of “that ought not be so,” another route remains open for the philosopher: demonstrating that a proposition is quite simply false. 2. Apart from the impossibility of articulating a total determinism, we can also easily show, from the reflexive a priori, why other theories about “human rationality” are impossible: to thus reduce human rationality to a pure calculation of a strictly individual self-interest (a case frequently assumed in economics) amounts to a simultaneous claim that the scientific discourse that maintains this proposition is also the product of pure self-interest—which means that there are no general values, and we can neither discuss nor argue with someone who implicitly does nothing but express a preference or individual self-interest. Briefly, there are many frameworks and theses that can be analyzed from the perspective that I have called the reflexive a priori. 3. Furthermore, these considerations make it possible to outline several concrete positions: thus any political discourse that aligns itself with an ostensibly immutable necessity (divine right, or the necessary laws of economics) or with an ostensibly necessary rationality (like a pure calculation of individual self-interest or an accumulation of routines and automatic functions) can be rejected. We see here that the reflexive a priori, far from yielding no general propositions, leads to a concrete stance, founded in reason. This stance is adopted through consideration of what can be said and what is impossible to say without contradiction or self-refutation. I have demonstrated this for the hypothesis of an entirely determined rationality; I have also shown it to be the case for a conception of rationality as a pure calculation of self-interest. These assertions are not without concrete consequences for an understanding of how a society, a business, an institution, or a state is organized. Consequently, there are many varied fields of application for this general epistemological thesis. 4. At the end of this analysis, I can also propose a schema (an interpretive grid) to enable a consistency test for a hypothesis or a discourse in the human sciences or the sciences of mind, such as Simon’s thesis about human rationality. Indeed, three factors are to be considered: the economist’s discourse, the contents or the form of rationality attributed to agents, and reality, whether this latter be understood as a system of arbitrary rules or conventions (according to a more or less Wittgensteinian thematization) or as a series of immutable laws (according to a classically positivist or even naturalist thematization). If we return to Simon’s theory, for example, we obtain the following concrete schema:

  Economist

  Economic agent

2. systematizes this thinking, notably with the help of artificial intelligence

1. posits realist hypotheses about the world in order to analyze how humans think and

Representation: the economist

Lacuna: the economist’s rationality is qualitatively different from that attributed to agents.

Limited representation of the world, with investigation into the best possible adaptation.

* Imperfect information

* Limited cognitive capacity

Lacuna: reality is not totally accessible but plays the role of a proof.

Reality

Reality is not totally accessible. Adaptation to representations is made through a confrontation between what is expected and what happens.

The Representation of Representations in Simon

figure 7.1

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Two kinds of lacunae are immediately recognizable in this schema: The first—which I could show (with the same schema) to apply to many “concrete” thinkers—is to maintain that reality is a proof of one’s hypotheses’ validity (this is why Simon holds that his hypothesis is more viable than Milton Friedman’s or an Aztec myth, which Paul Feyerabend could say does the job just as well), even though one also claims that this reality is not knowable. This first lacuna corresponds to the classic problem of reference. The second is clearly the contradiction that appears between the definition of “human rationality” (Simon’s very ambition, in his own terms) and the use of a scientist’s rationality. This lacuna corresponds to the problem of self-reference— and the failure to consider this problem has led to the serious crisis situation that I analyzed in part 1. And yet we see that this position is rich with concrete views, with positions on particular propositions in particular human sciences, without which the philosopher would necessarily have to transform himself into an economist and become a rigid specialist, in Nietzsche’s sense of an “expert” concerned with only one-thousandth part of the leech’s brain. In my view, the philosopher can determine which general discourses cannot be maintained in a logical and consistent manner. Having said that, I will certainly be accused of putting philosophy in a position “above and beyond,” so that philosophy presides a priori, as queen of the sciences, over all the sciences with a uniform incompetence. This is why, in order to explain my point of view, I should specify things with Simon as my example. Economics, to put it crudely,39 has had two great phases or directions: In the first, at its moment of birth and modeled after physics, economics is understood as the identification of natural laws. In the second, born from the aporias of the first, economics, as well as identifying the laws of reality (physical laws or systems of conventions), must wonder about agents’ rationality (how do individuals act and interact with one another?). It follows, on the one hand, that, like physics, economics raises general epistemological problems (hypotheses’ realism or antirealism)—debates that philosophers can contribute to without for all that claiming a position “above and beyond”; on the other hand, in its latest developments, economics particularly tends toward the problem of the nature of rationality (is reason an appropriate response to a set of exterior stimuli? is it a simple calculation from individual self-interest? a product of genes? adaptation to an environment?). Here, too, philosophers can have something to say in this debate, without “arrogance” (see, on this point, Popper’s discussions of particular human sciences’—for example, psychoanalysis’s—status in light of

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his epistemology). From reflexive a priori as the congruence between a statement and its utterance, philosophers can show how a given thesis x about rationality cannot be said. That philosophy can converse with this or that science without for all that becoming one among them is thus clearly demonstrated, and its fecundity is thereby shown. The ensemble of these conclusions confirms what we discovered at the end of chapter 6, namely, how the question of self-reference enables me to outline certain answers to questions relative to reference to the world. Consequently, far from being a uniquely negative model (which I have shown would nevertheless be important, as “every specification is a negation”), the model of self-reference appears as a model that is likely to yield positive and concrete propositions. These insights about transcendental argument’s undeniable fecundity and the productivity of what I can now entirely legitimately call the reflexive a priori prompt me to recapitulate all my conclusions by showing how we can now answer Jacques Bouveresse’s challenge.

8



Beyond the Death of Philosophy

The key result of my analyses is to bring to light an a priori principle that was not thematized by Kant (who only accepted the a priori in pure analyticity or in the synthesis of categories and intuition) nor by the logical positivists (who deny any a priori other than tautologies, which are, hence, analytic). This a priori, which is not Kantian and does not fall under simple formal logic,1 is the law of self-reference, which makes possible judgments about the consistency of a system or a certain type of proposition and thereby enables the creation, from itself, of a logic of production structured by a revived transcendental argument. This global conclusion yields several insights: 1. This principle makes it possible to avoid the oscillation so characteristic of contemporary philosophy between skepticism and positivism, positions that cannot be uttered in a consistent manner. Their falsity can be demonstrated by means of argumentation. Their reflexive inconsistency requires their abandonment. This gain is clearly important because, as I have shown,

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these two options run through different fields of contemporary philosophy and are at the origins of the crisis that the discipline is going through today. 2. Next, I can assert that, thanks to the reflexive a priori, we have arrived at a definition of philosophy as science without indexing its methods and problems to a given existing science. Philosophy is knowledge [savoir] (in contrast to learning [connaissance] about a given object or a given ontic region); this knowledge claims to be the truth; in the framework of philosophy, this truth appears simultaneously as a claim to universality (in that philosophy shares this claim with other sciences) and as the necessity of successful self-application of a proposition to itself. Universality and self-referentiality are thus the two dimensions that delimit the sphere of relevant propositions: propositions concerning validity and truth in general and propositions concerning humanity (or subjectivity, or a certain kind of beings in the world, or speaking beings, or if we want to be even more minimalist and naturalist, a certain species of mammals, the species that the speaker belongs to). This precise delimitation assures philosophy of its distinct status. It is presented not as a language but as a metalanguage. Philosophy’s “meta” function can be carried out and displayed without contradiction. On the other hand, the neglect of this dimension is at the origin of all the contradictions encountered by contemporary philosophy today. 3. This field is made possible by a rigorous method of argumentation: transcendental argument. Neither deduction from a given hypothesis,2 nor induction from an empirical fact,3 nor reasoning from the absurd,4 nor a climb toward conditions of possibility from a factum initially taken as true,5 nor a pure formal decomposition,6 transcendental argumentation is presented as a method for clarifying the presuppositions attached to the class of propositions defined above. 4. This recourse to transcendental argument makes it possible to recast the relation between philosophy and the empirical sciences concerning humans, or its relation to what is traditionally called the human sciences, formerly the sciences of mind or of culture.7 Philosophy can make claim to a position not of negation from “above and beyond” but of putting certain general claims of the human sciences to the test. I have shown that any thesis concerning human rationality must be subject to a model or schema in which three factors—not two, as in physics—must be considered: the scientist’s discourse, the contents and the form of rationality attributed to humans, and, as in physics, reality, whether this reality is conceived as a system of arbitrary conventions or rules (according to a more or less Wittgensteinian thematiza-

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tion) or as a series of immutable laws (according to a classically positivist thematization). This conclusion also made it possible to show that the law of self-reference is not unimportant for the ultimate question of reference. As I have proved, establishing the nature of reality sometimes goes through a selfreferential type of reasoning. 5. This model or schema makes possible a demonstration of a certain number of more directly concrete theses, such as the impossibility of strict determinism as far as human reason is concerned, or even the falsity of a reduction of the subject to a pure calculation of self-interest. These last results serve only to better underscore the difference between the transcendental argument that comes from the reflexive a priori and the positivist positions that would claim to naturalize humanity or, on the contrary, the more or less skeptical stance of “everything happens as if,” a stance common to a certain version of Kantianism as well as Stanley Cavell. From a general point of view, I can summarize these insights by shedding light on a theory of signification. As I showed in part 1, the theory of signification can be understood either in terms of the semantic triangle or from a consideration of saying within the said, which can take the form of a pragmatic theory of the utterance (Austin or Searle) or else the form of a phenomenological theory of signification (Levinas). We saw, taking up Putnam’s analysis, how if we take semantic theory since Frege, we incur a certain number of risks depending upon which side of the famous semantic triangle (sign, meaning, reference) is emphasized. If we emphasize the sign, we risk a semantic relativism; if we emphasize meaning  .  .  . [we risk] mentalism through intentionality [or] a Platonic objectivism . . . ; [and if we emphasize] reference (denotation), we risk naturalizing reason or ontologizing meaning, which precedes a metaphysical realism.8 I have carefully examined several of these sides (Rorty, the forms of scientism, Quine) and have shown how, with a theory of saying and the said, the semantic theory can be superseded, not by denying it but in completing it with another dimension. This makes it possible to avoid emphasizing any one of these sides, which always implies a theoretically self-refuting figure. However, my “theory of saying and the said” is neither Levinas’s theory—who, as I have shown, attempts within phenomenology to climb over the first Hus-

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serl’s overly semantic theory—nor even a pragmatic theory—Austin. I have shown the aporias proper to each of these theories; we have seen in part 2 how, in contrast to Austin, the conditions of utterance here are not the consideration of a contingent context in which the individual is immersed more or less by chance. Pragmatics thus does not consist, for me, in defining the context of utterance, nor in specifying the limited circumstances that make a discursive act either successful or failed.9 The reflexive a priori, defined as a principle of performative noncontradiction, supersedes contingent conditions and is the condition of philosophical meaning. Thus reformulated, the theory of signification makes it possible for me to bring out another relation between reference and self-reference. This is why, from my conclusions thus far, I could judge that I had proposed an answer to Bouveresse’s challenge—that those who would be “the first to wax indignant over Rorty’s proposals”10 (namely, “that there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline”)11 would be well advised to say why philosophy can still be considered to be distinct and autonomous. Simultaneously overcoming the self-dissolution of philosophy in a supposedly exact science (scientism) and the renunciation of the concept of truth (skepticism), the reflexive a priori makes it possible, at the end of this journey, to affirm what at the beginning was only improbable, or even extravagant—namely, that philosophy is a distinct, first, and rigorous science. It is a science because a truth claim is intrinsically linked to its utterance; it is distinct because it is able to define its field (propositions concerning truth and humanity) and its methods (application of a proposition to itself and transcendental argument); it is first because it consistently asserts its function as a metadiscourse; and it is rigorous because it is endowed with a mode of reasoning—transcendental argument, which turns out to be rich in discoveries or future propositions. Therefore, the antiphony of the death of philosophy can be purely and simply abandoned. It remains for me only to put this discourse about the death of philosophy into perspective. I said in the introduction that if we show that an obituary is (like Mark Twain’s) mistaken, then the question is no longer about said death but rather the reasons for its announcement. What happened so that the idea of an exhaustion of the discipline could become so obvious and so common? How can we situate—and thus relativize—the discourse of the end of philosophy? What reasons led to this theme’s omnipresence today? The reasons are probably multiple; and I propose here to study only one possible direction among others. To return to my theory of signification, it

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seems to me that, well before the “catastrophe of Frege’s semantic triangle,” philosophy had committed itself, in a progressively exclusive way, to the question of reference, of the “said,” to the detriment of the question of selfreference, from which I have reconstructed its possibilities as a first, distinct, and autonomous science. Therefore, in the third moment of my reflections, I will follow the guiding thread of reference—I will trace the progressive establishment of its hegemony through a concealment of self-reference. A single dimension—reference—has been brought to the fore, even though, as I have shown, reference and self-reference could have been understood together, and a possible joint structure could be proposed—by indicating, for example, how the thesis of self-reference, apparently opposed to reference ad extra, makes it possible, in fact, to generate propositions about the world (like the impossibility of radical antirealism, of a total determinism, or a reduction of the mind to pure repetitive mechanisms, etc.). The theme of the end of philosophy is fed by this concealment of self-reference. And so my task now is to put the theme of the end of philosophy in perspective by bringing this progressive concealment of self-reference to light.





III

The End of Philosophy in Perspective: The Source of the Reflexive Deficit

9



The “Race to Reference”

The twentieth century, particularly on its analytic side, was undeniably marked by what Jocelyn Benoist does not hesitate to call the “race to reference.”1 Interest in the problem of reference would be a kind of reaction against Kantian idealism and, in general, against any form of representationalism. With Bernard Bolzano and Gottlob Frege, later with the early Husserl and of course Bertrand Russell, a desire was expressed to return to the object, against a too-exclusive concern for our representations of the object. In a word, the thematization of reference was presented as an offensive against the transcendental—which, by means of its preoccupation “less with the object than our modes of knowledge of the object” would have finished by crushing it [the object]—prompting, in reaction, a return to realism. On this point, Benoist, after having noted that “ ‘the race to reference’ . . . seems to have led philosophy to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,”2 identifies the origin of this attention to reference in Bolzanian anti-Kantianism. This historical thesis—of “Bolzano’s inauguration, breaking with Kantian representationalism, of a certain kind of consolidated referential demand”3

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that would be the “inaugural formation of twentieth century philosophy”4— is well established but needs, in my view, to be put in perspective. To be sure, there is no doubt that Bolzanian realism was in opposition to Kantian idealism, that semantics was meant to be a reaction to the transcendental problematic, or finally that this reaction colors part of contemporary philosophical debates. But does the problem of reference merely represent the acceptance of a particular realism in contrast to Kantian idealism? If that were the case, what would become of Heidegger, or even Husserl’s transcendental turn, which would have to be ignored in such a reconstruction of the history of twentieth-century philosophy?5 Likewise, what would become of the neoKantians who dominated the beginning of the twentieth century? And what if the problem of reference—far from being born in the break between Kant and Austrian philosophy—finds its source beyond that, at the very origins of contemporary philosophy? Why, moreover, should we restrict the problem of reference to the sole question of an object’s “reality”? Indeed, whether the object is a solid, existing “entity” (as in the realism of Bolzano, Russell, and even the early Husserl) or a phenomenon conceived as the synthesis of representations (as in Kant, of course, and the neo-Kantians but also Ernst Mach’s phenomenalism) changes nothing about the fact that in both cases it is a question of reference, not of self-reference—of the said, not of saying, to put it in Austin’s and Levinas’s terms. Furthermore, this problematic of reference in contrast to self-reference can encompass the themes of existentialists like Heidegger just as well as analytic philosophy’s problematic of the object—it thus invites a different reconstruction of the advent of current philosophy. In fact, in history’s eyes, can’t we propose another story of the inaugural formation of contemporary philosophy that takes the concealment of self-reference as its guiding line? Indeed, beyond Bolzano’s realism and Kant’s idealism, they can both be considered as thinkers of reference, in contrast to the problematic of self-reference. Such is the thesis that I mean to demonstrate, by providing what is needed for a dive down to the origins of contemporary philosophy. For this dive, I will not discuss the analytic beginnings of contemporary philosophy, for it goes without saying that this paradigm is governed by an understanding of reference. Nor will I become attached, as Benoist has so admirably and magnificently done, to the early Husserl, who shares with analytic philosophy this concern for reference. These two currents indeed constitute the acme of the “race to reference.” But if analytic philosophy shares its “demand for referentiality” with the early Husserl, it seems to me that this demand should

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not be understood as a reaction to the critical project but rather as its realization, its completion. I thus must go back to Kant to show how philosophy’s referential ethos has unceasingly become more pronounced over the last two centuries and to show how the analytic currents of contemporary philosophy are its apotheosis, the culmination of a furrowed and plowed path, worked to the point that the ground has become infertile from overuse and must today be left to lie fallow. To understand the assumption of reference, I will show how the contemporary philosophical options are indebted to two ways of reading Kant in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. They thus have in common that they travel down only one of two paths that were open to philosophy then. To put it differently, this time in Emil Lask’s6 terms, at the beginning of the century two paths (that were not contradictory, that could be followed at the same time and come together at some point) were open to philosophy: it could secure the status of its own discourse (a metaphilosophical perspective), or it could anchor “categories” in experience (the real in general) or in existentials (for example, the first strata of the relation to the world in Husserl, such as the “prepredicative”). Only one of the paths proposed by Lask was taken, the path of reference. However, in the specific case of readings of Kant, this path of reference was taken in two absolutely distinct senses: The first is the classically epistemological path of reference as the sciences’ relation to the real—here we find, for example, Hermann von Helmholtz’s and Hermann Cohen’s problems. The second is the existential path of reference—such as, for example (apart from the Husserlian opening to the prepredicative) Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. In my view, these two different ways of reading Kant have accentuated the divorce between reference and self-reference, already at work in Kant himself. To retrace the lines of this history, upon which we are still dependent, I will first try to show how the tension between the two orientations, reference and self-reference, plagues the Kantian system to the point of weakening it. Next, we will see how Helmholtz, to overcome this tension that appeared as a contradiction, opted exclusively for a single path, reference, thus giving twentieth-century philosophy its orientation. A veritable fulcrum in the determination of the “race to reference,” Helmholtz has colored the most contemporary investigations. By his configuration of the Kantian problem, this author—whom we too often tend to forget today7—launched twentieth-century philosophy. Finally, we will see how, paradoxically, interpretations like Heidegger’s have not deflected the route adopted in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, we will

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find, in comparing interpretations of Kant as different as Cohen’s and Heidegger’s, an exclusive concern for reference. My comparative reading’s only aim is to establish that Cohen’s (positivism) and Heidegger’s (hermeneutic phenomenology) lines of questioning are, in the final analysis, identical. I thus do not at all need to enter into a detailed analysis of these authors, nor to elucidate their work in a new way.8 I need only to demonstrate a paradoxical thesis: these apparently incommensurable currents of philosophy share the same line of questioning—a concern for reference to the detriment of attention to self-reference. It is the exclusivity of this concern that has engendered the erroneous announcement of the death of philosophy. This inquiry into the historical source of the referential demand will enable me to better show the necessity of opening a different path of investigation.



10



The Tension Between Reference and Self-reference in the Kantian System

In Kant, the dual question of reference and self-reference is left to be read from his terms “representation” and “reflection”—representation embodying the mind’s movement toward what is not itself, namely, the object; reflection, the mind’s questioning of its own structures. And yet, in the Kantian system, the conjunction of these two notions turns out to be, in the final analysis, impossible. This impossibility is expressed in a strange oxymoron, the use of which causes the entire framework to implode. To demonstrate the incompatibility between these two orientations, I must first bring out the meaning of the term “representation” and then of “reflection” within the critical project. Only once clear definitions have been reconstructed and their respective importance has been evaluated will I be able to analyze the term that expresses this impossible conjunction.

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Representation In the Critique of Pure Reason, representation is identified first of all as cognitive activity in general, whatever its strata. Thus Kant writes, “all kinds of representation” and adds, “(intuition, sensation, and thought).”1 Representation designates all kinds of thought: perception, sensation, reproduction (in the imagination), and concept. Briefly, representation as a “genus” refers to any modification of the mind and includes various species, which Kant lists in the Critique.2 The definition of representation is thus very wide, for in the final analysis, sensation, imagination, and thinking with concepts or with ideas will all be “representation.” If we keep to this generic term, there would be no reason to claim that Kantian representation is likely to conceal the current term “representation,” insofar as representation is given as the entirety of mental activity and not only as a thematization of the object and our relation to it. So we should go further in our elucidation of this term in the three Critiques to show how his understanding of representation becomes an understanding of reference ad extra. Within this very broad genre of representation, valid knowledge is defined in the Critique of Pure Reason as a connection between representations—but this connection is clearly not just any sort of connection, lest any imaginative construct, such as a chimera, be considered knowledge. Valid knowledge is thus a specific connection between representations: “Knowledge is [essentially] a whole in which representations stand compared and connected.”3 Knowledge is a well-ordered relation between different “representations.” Still more precisely, knowledge is defined as the elaboration of a passive authority by an active authority. Only the categories applied to space and time by means of the imagination produce valid knowledge. We can know in a universal and necessary way only in the intuition and the understanding, whose agreement produces the “phenomenon.” Kant’s famous distinction between thinking and knowledge follows from this specification: “To think an object and to know an object are thus by no means the same thing. Knowledge involves two factors: first, the concept  .  .  . ; and secondly, the intuition.”4 Having clarified this dual definition (wide—the genus—and narrow—valid knowledge as a well-ordered relation between different representations), we must now understand how, from this, the critical project as a whole will be given as a “theory of representation,”5 to the exclusion of any other thematization.

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First of all, the Kantian theory rests entirely upon the following postulate: to know is to know an object (this is stated in section 22 of the Critique, as well as elsewhere). Kantianism’s presupposition is the idea that philosophical inquiry is exhausted in the explication of the relation between subject and object—for Kant, to philosophize means to produce a theory of the objective world. To express this with an example, Kant defines knowledge in terms of judgment. Fundamentally, the power of the mind is the power of judgment. In doing so, he divides judgments into two classes, determinate judgments and reflective judgments. The common point between these two types of judgment is that they both express a relation to the object: for determinate judgment, a relation to mathematical objects and, in their major structures, physical objects; for reflective judgment, a relation to beautiful objects and to objects organized by nature. And yet, even if these judgments clearly do not have the same kind of validity (the former are valid, the latter are plausible), the fact remains that what is defined are judgments about objects of experience. To be sure, Kant “internalizes” the traditional schism between a subject and an object that exist as two separate entities; this schism, having become internal to the subject, is certainly expressed in subjective terms as the relation between activity (understanding, the categories) and passivity (the intuition, time and space). But despite this obvious subjectification (Kant’s Copernican revolution), it is knowledge as knowledge of an object that is the focus of Kant’s attention. To put this differently, Kant’s question is indeed, “What is an object?” In this sense, even if his response is not that of classical realism (an object is the thing in itself, independent of my representations), the stakes of the question are still the same as for realism—to make a theory of the objective world. And yet, this conception of philosophical inquiry as a “theory of the objective world” is not at all self-evident, because—even without needing to wait for the various contemporary critiques of the “philosophy of representation,” like Michel Henry’s—Fichte had defined philosophy’s task differently. From the beginning of Personal Meditations on Elementary Philosophy,6 Fichte indicated that the question that philosophy must address is no longer, “How can representations be related to an object?” (which he defined in a Kantian way as a phenomenon) but rather, “How do thoughts accord with the action of our mind?” This is why he concluded that “philosophy is reflection” and no longer simply a theory of representation. We can see with this simple example that to philosophize is not necessarily to make a theory of the objective world. And yet this is

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what Kant immediately presupposes—in contrast to Fichte, and later Hegel. We can see here in outline the two orientations for and the bifurcation of philosophy: on one side, philosophy as a theory of representation or of reference ad extra; on the other, philosophy as the praxis of reflection, or self-reference. Thus in Kant, the relation between subject and object is given as the totality of what is to be understood; philosophical inquiry’s only task is the clarification of this relation. Defined in this way, critique corresponds to Michel Henry’s characterization of “an ontology of representation; that is, of experience understood as the general rapport between subject and object”;7 the philosophy of representation exhausts itself in the idea of objectivity and culminates, as Henry reiterates, in “an elaborate theory of the objective universe.”8 This focus upon the object is what allows me to speak, with respect to Kant, of the idea of reference, for knowing always comes back to knowing something other than oneself, which means always knowing ad extra. To be sure, critique is not at all a form of realism, but it is nevertheless defined as a theory of the objective world. In doing so, it expresses a concern analogous to what we find in analytic ideas of reference at the beginning of the twentieth century. The dividing line between realism and critique is found in their respective definitions of the object but not in their exclusive attention to knowledge of the object. Let’s try to more closely characterize this Kantian definition of the object to better legitimate and specify the nature of my apparently eccentric connection. One of the characteristic traits of critique surely resides in its definition of the known object: an object is an object of valid knowledge only insofar as it can be delimited, depicted, and schematized. This synonymy between knowing and depicting9 can be briefly illustrated by two examples, namely, the Kantian theory of mathematics and his theory of the subject. 1. The way in which a philosopher establishes the relation between algebra and geometry is always significant for his theory of knowledge, as Ernst Cassirer has already shown. To confirm this point, we can recall the opposition between Descartes’ and Leibniz’s conceptions of mathematics. We know that Descartes not only gave a remarkable impetus to certain algebraic techniques but also mastered (as a good number of his letters bear witness) the process of integration on which Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus is based. But he rejects these algebraic procedures for one sole reason: they possess no geometrical equivalent; they cannot be projected as a geometrical figure nor can

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they be delimited by the contours of a graph. In a word, they aren’t depictable. That they cannot be depicted is precisely why they must, in Descartes’ eyes, be considered as outside the sphere of mathematical knowledge. The subservience of algebra to geometry, the refusal to calculate the equations for some transcendental curves, and finally, the rejection of procedures of integration—these are all thus functions of a theory of knowledge in which knowing and depicting are synonyms. Leibniz’s convictions in this domain will be quite different—for whom, on the contrary, knowing is neither seeing nor delimiting figures (in the intuition or the imagination) but rather is calculating. In Leibniz, we will thus see a promotion of algebra and the demotion of geometry. The relation between these two disciplines is dependent upon his theory of knowledge, in which thinking is neither seeing nor depicting in space but calculating (in the sense of logical calculation). If we now consider Kant,10 algebra is subservient to geometry and the theory of numbers to that of figures.11 And yet if this is the case, it is as a function of a theory of knowledge for which knowing is representing and representing means to make an object depictable. A geometrical figure—as something that can be grasped through its dimensions, represented through its contours, discernible through its limits— here becomes a criterion of knowledge. Consequently, the philosophy of representation is distinguished by the fact that it takes the problem of objectivity (the relation of subject and object) as the sole problem of philosophy, and by the fact that this objectivity is defined in its turn by objects’ being visible, that is, depictable. Representation is connected to vision through the concept of the figure. The theory of representation is thus given as a theory of reference to the world—which is posited as the totality of what is to be understood—and this theory of representation simultaneously chooses the [geometrical] figure as the paradigm of knowledge. 2. The second example with which I can establish the synonymy between knowing and depicting in Kant is precisely the theory of the subject. If we read section 16 of the Critique of Pure Reason literally, the transcendental subject = x is unknowable. This is because it is not representable, that is to say, it cannot be schematized in space, like a triangle, or in time, like rational numbers. Consequently, the fundamental presupposition from which the subject’s unknowability is pronounced is indeed that all knowledge is representational. The subject’s unknowability is declared in the name of the figure. In this sense, Kant is not the heir of what we traditionally call the philosophy of the subject, because his problem is above all the problem of objectivity.12 He was trying to answer the question, “How can we know an object?”—and

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this is why the Kantian theory of representation is presented as a theory of different possible judgments about the object. Having clarified these points, I can say that the Kantian theory is a theory of representation in three respects: (1) in its general definition, since each aspect of cognitive activity is defined as representation; (2) in its definition of knowledge, since knowing consists of representing in a certain way; and (3) in this definition’s presuppositions, namely, that all knowledge is of an object (even if the object is defined as a phenomenon) and that knowing an object boils down to delineating it in time or space. From this clarification of the precise meaning of “representation” in Kant, I can situate his project with respect to the problem of reference. The Kantian theory is undeniably an idea of reference—in that what is to be known is the object, and only objects can be known. In this sense, critique and the beginnings of analytic philosophy can be indexed, without historical distortion or philological eccentricity, to a single encompassing category, “ideas of reference.” The difference between these approaches hinges on their definitions of the object, not the key thesis that only objects can be known. The common genus, ideas of reference, is thus divided into different species: objects as empirical entities or as figures constructed a priori. This designation of critique within the general problematic of reference is confirmed by Kant’s definition of the concept of reflection. Critique—far from being an idea of reflection—turns out rather to be the moment of its impeachment. Let’s explain this seeming paradox.

Reflection In comparison to Kant’s interest in representation, his interest in reflection is in fact much less. To become convinced of this we need only note Kant’s difficulty in giving this concept a precise and univocal definition. Indeed, if representation is very clearly defined (genus, then species, and within this species, valid knowledge), reflection on the other hand is the object of multiple definitions that are not at all compatible with one another. In fact, Kant gives at least four meanings to reflection: 1. First of all, he gives it a very broad meaning, writing in the Lectures on Logic that “the origin of concepts as to mere form rests on reflection and on abstraction from the difference among things that are

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signified by a certain representation.”13 In this framework, any conception is reflection. 2. He uses it in “The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection”—here discussing transcendental reflection, the faculty that enables a philosopher to understand representation in terms of the concepts of form/material, internal/external, etc. “The act by which I confront the comparison of representation with the cognitive faculty to which it belongs, and by means of which I distinguish whether it is as belonging to the pure understanding or to sensible intuition that they are to be compared with each other, I call transcendental reflection.”14 3. He quite obviously uses it in the Critique of Judgment. Reflection, in this text, is defined as investigation of a universal from a given particular. Reflection results in the regulative judgment that commands an “everything happens as if.” 4. Finally, Anthropology makes reflection a purely empirical faculty. From this enumeration we can note (1) the scattershot nature of these definitions, (2) the incompatibility of these definitions, and (3) the way in which Kant distances himself from the classic definition of reflection. We must pay attention to this third dimension in that it shows how Kantian thought moves closer to an idea of reference in the current sense of the term. Indeed—and in my view, this has not been sufficiently appreciated—by advancing the term “representation” and obscuring the term “reflection,” Kant breaks with the tradition born in Descartes, namely, the study of one’s relation to self understood as going back over the operations of a thinking subject. In Descartes, this review was possible only through a suspension of one’s belief in the world (the first Meditation)—for the possibility of reflection to emerge, the object and one’s relation to the object must be momentarily abolished. Beyond Descartes, Locke, too, made a basic distinction between impressions of perception by which I know an object and the impressions of “reflection” by which I go back over the operations I have effected: “When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions.”15 This definition of “reflection” as knowledge of our mental operations was also put forward by Leibniz: “Thus it is good to distinguish between perception, which is the internal state of the monad representing external things, and apperception, which is consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this internal state, something not given to all

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souls, nor at all times to a given soul.”16 And yet—a revealing fact—in Kant, apperception is defined as the condition of possibility of objective unity, no longer as a relation to oneself. Thus, Kant had to break with a process that modern philosophy has advanced, even if it never managed to think this process all the way through, for we find a temptation, for example in Descartes, after having highlighted reflection (the subject’s review of its own operations), to understand it as a relation between two terms,17 a subject (“I”) looking into a subject res (“me”). But for Kant, the “I” can never turn its attention onto itself, because the object cannot be bracketed. The bracketing of the world is a procedure that is missing in Kant’s text. In section 16 of the Critique, to make the unity of the subject appear, he uses neither a reflective method nor a method of suspension (epoché or doubt) but employs a synthetic procedure whose avowed goal is to enable the constitution of a known object. How is the subject to be obtained? By showing that it is a necessary term for understanding objectivity. And yet the chosen route—eliminating a reflective process—is clearly dependent upon the advancement of a representational paradigm. This desire to understand knowledge solely from knowledge of the object is later reiterated by the neo-Kantians and colors the Kantian legacy. On this point, the way that the neo-Kantians understood Husserl’s transcendental doctrine— whose epoché revives a Cartesian type of reflective process—is extremely revealing of this demand for referentiality. Let’s quickly consider this point, as a supplemental confirmation of the thesis that Kant’s philosophy, as much in its content as in its historic reception, is given as a philosophy of representation, as an idea of reference. Indeed, it is extremely indicative to see how the later Husserl—the one that embraces the transcendental problematic—was criticized by the Kantians of his era (the neo-Kantians). In fact, they accused him of ontologizing the sphere of validity. This dispute, which arose between orthodox Kantians at the beginning of the twentieth century and Husserl regarding the categorical intuition, unmasks the theory of knowledge that critique leads to. Husserl, who was considered, in some of his texts, as a Kantian writer, was accused by Friedrich Kreis, Rudolf Zocher, and others of “spilling,” “falling,” etc., into ontologism, because he “extends” the concept of intuition to “essences.” (This controversy was launched by Rickert and his school: Friedrich Kreis attacked Husserl’s intuition in a 1930 text Phänomenologie und Kritizismus.18 Eugen Fink responded to his criticisms in a 1933 article “The Phenomeno-

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logical Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism.”19 Paul Ricoeur takes up this debate in “Kant and Husserl.”20) The concept of a view of essences is understood by the neo-Kantians as the representation of idealities comprehended in the same way as objects of experience. The Kantian conditions of possibility, “the components of valid meaning,” are thus, in the Kantians’ eyes, objectivized by Husserl into objects posited as of an ontically superior order. This criticism, as Eugen Fink showed, rests on a total misunderstanding of the Husserlian project. Indeed, for Husserl it is not a matter of transferring empirical knowledge’s or scientific knowledge’s mode to essences that are given to the philosopher like a table or a triangle. It is rather a question, as he will later attest in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy,21 of employing a different kind of rationality. The roots of the Kantians’ misunderstanding of Husserl’s project take their origin in the Kantian conception of validity: Kant, obsessed by the theme of knowledge of objects, came to either conceal or to prohibit knowledge of the subject’s actions, though it was required for the completion of his project. As Ricoeur argues, precisely with respect to this dispute between the neo-Kantians and Husserl, there is a rough or “implicit phenomenology of Kantianism”22 simultaneously presupposed and concealed by the problem of objectivity. What is important here is that we see the extent to which the problem of objectivity dominates the center stage in forbidding the use of another path. The Kantians’ edict against any other approach is no less severe than the analytics’. Having established this point and clarified the nature of the Kantian doctrine, it remains for me to show how an impossible reconciliation of these two terms gives birth to a serious aporia within the Kantian system.

Use of the Term “Intellectual Representation” as an Expression of the Tension Between Representation and Reflection This valorization of representation over reflection would not have posed an immediate problem in Kant if he had asserted that he privileged one approach—here, emphasizing the object or reference—while leaving it to other books or other philosophers to explore the other approach. But that is not what he did, and Kant himself makes the impossibility of his viewpoint appear, through the use of a term that causes the system to implode in that it

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contradictorily says one thing and its contrary. This term—the extreme point of the tension between representation and reflection— is “intellectual representation.” When Kant uses this term in a positive sense, it is to try to express a point of view that his own doctrine forbids. To put it more precisely, with this term “intellectual representation,” Kant twice puts his own doctrine at risk. Let’s analyze the use of this term within the Critiques: In L’élucidation critique du jugement de goût selon Kant, Louis Guillermit notes that “the word ‘intellectual’ is very rarely used in Kant.”23 The philosopher’s avoidance of the term is such that not only does he use it in often negative contexts (as, for example, in the expression “intellectual intuition”) but he even modifies the canonical expression of his time, “intellectual world,” using instead the uncommon phrase “intelligible world.” The term’s rarity in the Kantian lexicon serves only to accentuate its few occurrences. In this respect, it seems legitimate to divide them into two distinct groups. The first usage of the term is in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment. For example, in section 42 of the Critique of Judgment, he is giving a definition of an intellectual interest in beauty. In this context, “intellectual” is in contrast to the sensible and the empirical. Moreover, this adjective refers to a character of immediacy—Kant writes of someone who takes pleasure in contemplating nature that “such a person is taking a direct interest in the beauty of nature, and this interest is intellectual.”24 Finally and above all, the term “intellectual” characterizes the will’s capacity to be determined a priori by reason: “something intellectual, viz., the will’s property of being determinable a priori by reason.”25 In a general way, the term thus refers to spontaneity and immediacy. If this first usage does not pose any particular problems, the second group of occurrences turns out, on the other hand, to be more problematical. This no longer concerns the practical domain or the aesthetic field but only the theoretical domain. Thus, the adjective “intellectual” is used in the Critique of Pure Reason with respect to the representation of the “I,”26 and, in a letter to Johann Schultz, with respect to the properties of arithmetic.27 And yet, in both cases, Kant meets with the same difficulty because he introduces a mode of validity that transgresses the definition given in the Critique of Pure Reason. To demonstrate this claim, I shall examine each of these occurrences separately.

Use of the Term “Intellectual” with Respect to Numbers In a November 25, 1788, letter to the mathematician Johann Schultz, Kant wrote with respect to the properties of arithmetic:

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Time, as you correctly notice, has no influence on the properties of numbers (considered as pure determinations of magnitude), as it may have on the property of any alteration (considered as alteration of a quantum) that is itself possible only relative to a specific state of inner sense and its form (time); the science of number, notwithstanding succession, which every construction of magnitude requires, is a pure intellectual synthesis that we represent to ourselves in thoughts.28 To say that the properties of numbers are not at all dependent upon time seems like an astounding concession. With this text, Kant puts his own doctrine in jeopardy and goes “so far as to contradict the letter of the Critique”29 in that he seems here to recognize the existence of propositions that, although authentic knowledge (that is, not merely analytic, as is indicated by the use of the word “synthesis”), are not given in an intuition. We should be even more wary about this anomaly, for arithmetic is constantly defined by Kant as what is closest to the laws of pure thought. Kant’s letter to Schultz is, in its entirety, the epitome of the difficulties that Kant faces in accounting for arithmetic with his own principles. Let’s first clarify the meaning of the restriction in the passage I quoted— “notwithstanding succession, which every construction of magnitude requires.” In the Critique of Pure Reason, a number, defined as the unity of a multiplicity, has a need for time in order to be constituted. The arithmetical judgment 7 + 5 = 12 is a synthetic a priori judgment because it presupposes the application of a category (quantity) to an intuition (succession in time). Every accumulation of a multiplicity is the generation of a unity from another unity. This is expressed, in the “Introduction” to the Critique of Pure Reason, by the still-famous example of the generation of 12 as the addition of 7 + 1 + 1 + 1, etc., a generation that can be depicted with the fingers of one hand or with marks on a page. Taken literally, these examples are undeniably disastrous. They justify Louis Couturat’s fury, who reads only an obscene empiricism in the expression; they authorize Frege’s irony, who on this precise point puts Kant and John Stuart Mill together in the unflattering category of those who do arithmetic with cakes and stones; they inevitably provoke the massive objection that William and Martha Kneale have summarized30— one could never, by simply counting on one’s fingers, obtain the proposition 135,664 + 37,863 = 173,527. To save the Critique from such a reading, we clearly ought, as did mathematicians like Johann Schultz as well as philosophers like Salomon Maimon,31 to understand the unity that Kant discusses

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as unspecified, that is to say that any number (for example, 1,000) could be taken as a point of reference. This makes it possible to explain the addition of large numbers while still maintaining the proposition that numeration presupposes a generation in time. Numbers become the understanding of the method thanks to which I can construct the multiplicity and are thus no longer the intuition’s generation of a real succession that would seem to be implied by the unfortunate example in the “Introduction.” In this way, the too-empiricist character of the genesis of numbers can easily be neutralized. But this reconstruction, which all his disciples will immediately implement, comes with its own cost: arithmetic becomes an exclusively symbolic form of knowledge.32 But if symbolic knowledge is not absolutely opposed to ostensive construction, the former is nevertheless distinguished from the latter by a greater degree of intellectualism. The genesis of numbers thus reveals the dual obstacle facing the Kantian theory of rational numbers—taken literally, this theory illustrates Locke’s principles better than Kant’s; but in a parallel way, its necessary and legitimate reformulation makes arithmetic into a science far removed from ostensive demonstration, which in its obvious sense no longer applies to anything but geometry. The second stage of the Kantian theory of arithmetic only accentuates the trouble—a truly intermediate level, it leads to an astounding final concession. The Kantian theory of the schema, as a necessary construction of the concept in the intuition, cannot account for [irrational] numbers like √2. This is why Kant explains that if this number can be thought, it cannot be represented (that is, depicted in the intuition). I can think it, because I can consider a square as the product of two factors even if I cannot represent any of the factors to myself as a number. Thus, knowledge or manipulation is possible, but I cannot produce this number as given in the intuition. It follows that Kant admits concepts that are neither pure creations (√2 is not the product of a mathematician’s fantasy, it is necessary), nor illusory (propositions about these numbers are of the order of knowledge, not of appearance), nor empty (√2 has a geometrical analogue in the diagonal of a square). We are thus confronted by a concept that is, from the point of view of Kantian theory, imminently paradoxical—a number that can be understood as necessary, that is capable of being known, but that I cannot represent in the intuition as the unity of a multiplicity. To preserve his theory, Kant brutally solves the problem: all this simply proves that √2 is not a number. Only rational numbers will be considered to be numbers. The square root of 2, because I cannot produce it as the unity of a multiplicity, thus negatively confirms the theory

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that every number must be produced in the intuition. We would be wrong to be ironic about this solution, which apparently consists in drastically reducing the field of concepts to be explained (by eliminating every number that does not belong to the class of rational numbers) to better preserve a theory of arithmetic. Here Kant does not succumb to the ideological argument in which one answers an opponent who has shown that a theory does not account for reality with the retort, “That proves that reality does not exist.” Indeed, in Kant’s era, it was not yet possible to mathematically understand irrational numbers, and we would have to wait for Richard Dedekind, with his idea of the “Dedekind cut” (Schnitt), before these numbers (that Leibniz himself considered to be “amphibious beings”) could be given a mathematical status. Given that, if Kant could not mathematically understand the status of these numbers, the fact nevertheless remains that philosophically he recognized that there are concepts that cannot be represented but are nonetheless neither empty, nor illusory, nor metaphysical. This is thus a curious hole in the proposition that “a concept without intuition is empty.” August Wilhelm Rehberg tried to propose a solution that seemed more in conformity with the letter of the Critique. To the question, “Since the understanding has the power to create numbers at will, why is it incapable of thinking √2 in [rational] numbers?”33 Rehberg answers that this impossibility is explained by “the nature—inaccessible to any human capacity of elucidation—of the transcendental faculty of the imagination and its connection with the understanding.”34 This answer is rather strange, because it consists in explaining a fact with a mystery—if we cannot understand a given mathematical fact, that is because, in the final analysis, we know nothing about how the imagination works. This is an explanation that obviously poses a problem for the critical project: philosophy must investigate the conditions of possibility for scientific judgments (mathematics and physics); these conditions of possibility cannot refer to a mystery, incomprehensible for reflection, without causing the entire project to crumble upon its basis. If the entire Critique of Pure Reason should boil down to explaining the facts from which it starts by invoking in fine “a nature, inaccessible to any human capacity of elucidation,” it would have absolutely no value. The quintessence of the Kantian theory being to subordinate all concepts to methods that make them accessible to human consciousness, it cannot do anything by this method with an inexplicable mystery seated in a faculty of incomprehensible function. Consequently, Rehberg, by wanting to be more faithful than Kant himself to the letter of the critical project, reveals the impossibility of this

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purely verbal solution that appeals to a faculty of imagination without being able to concretely show how it operates. For all that, we would be deceiving ourselves if we were to explain Rehberg’s answer as a simple weakness on his part. This strange solution is rather the index of a real problem in the critical project. Indeed, no matter what explanation is given, certain mathematical concepts transgress its principles. If Rehberg’s solution makes the transcendental method more or less irrational, Kant’s own solution leads to the following paradoxical admission: there are scientifically valid notions for which we cannot show their method of construction. Consequently, the impossibility of constructing a concept in the intuition is no longer proof of its emptiness; which is obviously significant for the Kantian critique of metaphysics.35 Kant’s recognition of knowable but unrepresented concepts points toward an exit from strictly Kantian principles, an exit that is definitively realized when it comes to understanding the properties of numbers. The meaning of the phrase “Time  .  .  . has no influence on the properties of numbers,”36 as such—that is, not in reference to Kantian principles—is easy to understand: when I do ordinary addition, I add 7 to 5. If I reflect not only on the terms but on the operation itself, I immediately grasp that it is commutative, the result remains the same no matter the order of the factors. In a parallel way, if I perform an operation of subtraction, I notice that this does not possess the same property. The commutative and associative properties are properties of the calculation, of the act of addition or multiplication. Given this simple fact, two explanations are possible. Either these properties are reduced to the sole principle of identity—a Leibnizian solution that Kant can obviously only reject—or else the associative, commutative, etc., properties are taken as axioms—a solution proposed by Johann Schultz, but which Kant also rejected: “It is true that arithmetic has no axioms, since its object is actually not any quantum.”37 Indeed, for Kant, axioms are the result of the application of a quantity to the formal intuition and are thus present only in geometry, like propositions such as “Two points determine one and only one straight line,” or “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” It follows that if, for Kant, the properties of arithmetic do not depend upon the exclusive application of the principle of identity, they are not analytic; if they do not presuppose recourse to the intuition of time, then they are not synthetic, in the Kantian sense of the term. Nevertheless, they constitute immediately certain knowledge. In such a situation, Kant’s only option is to innovate with respect to his own taxonomy by determining a totally new class of knowledge, “a pure intellectual synthesis that we represent to our-

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selves in thoughts.”38 We discover the contradiction in terms that contain this strange—in the Kantian context—expression “intellectual representation.” Intellectual representation is indeed the sign of a difficulty, the visible trace of a problem that jeopardizes the very definition of the concept of validity. This is confirmed if we consider the details with which Kant explains this singular expression. If he denies the existence of arithmetic axioms in this letter to Schultz, the philosopher does speak of “postulates, that is, immediately certain practical judgments.”39 What does this term mean in this context? First of all, it is not about postulates in the Euclidian sense, that is, propositions that one is required to accept without being able to demonstrate them, because in Kant strictly Euclidian postulates refer (according to the standard usage of the time) to axioms. Rather, the term “postulates” in this context marks the difference in status between arithmetical properties and mathematical procedures in the Euclidian sense. But nor does “postulate” refer to its use in the Critique of Practical Reason. It is clear here that the term “practical” has absolutely no moral dimension, only concerns speculative reason, and is nevertheless neither a hypothesis nor a demand.40 The properties of arithmetic thus curiously seem to go beyond the division between theoretical and practical, as the term “intellectual” exceeds the theory of representation. The only meaning that can be given to Kant’s expression, it seems to me, is the following: arithmetical operations are operations that establish a relation; properties are the reflection upon this action of establishing a relation. In other words, the mere doing of the action ipso facto produces its rules. This is precisely what is expressed in the definition of postulates as “immediately certain practical judgments.” “Practical,” because the properties of arithmetic describe an action that must be done;41 “certain,” for to do the action is to find its rules; “immediately,” because this does not presuppose any construction in time or space. In sum, the postulate’s goal is to explain the syntagma of “pure intellectual syntheses”—it refers to an action that has to be accomplished and not to an object constructed in time or space; it is given as a certain synthetic proposition; it goes beyond the divide between theoretical and practical reason (arithmetical propositions are certain for speculative reason not—it will be easily agreed— for practical reason); but on the other hand, as “time . . . has no influence” on these properties, they do not belong to theoretical propositions as the Critique of Pure Reason defines them. In a word, arithmetical properties are called intellectual because they are certain truths that nevertheless do not belong to the sphere of representation. “Intellectual means a concept whose content is an action”—such is the surprising definition that we find in Kant’s Reflections.42

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Before drawing any conclusions relative to this use of the term “intellectual” in the Kantian system, I should respond to the potential objector who, armed with some of the closing sentences of Kant’s letter to Schultz, doesn’t see—from the beginning of these analyses—any tension between the proposition that “time has no influence on the properties of numbers” and the famously Kantian principle that every proposition, in order to be coherent and valid, must be obtained through the intuition. My response to this objection will allow me to even more clearly bring out the difficulty posed by the use of the term “intellectual.” Kant, aware of the importance of the concession he has just made, immediately corrects himself: But insofar as specific magnitudes (quanta) are to be determined in accordance with this, they must be given to us in such a way that we can apprehend their intuition successively; and thus this apprehension is subject to the condition of time. So that when all is said and done, we cannot subject any object other than an object of a possible sensible intuition to quantitative, numerical assessment, and it thus remains a principle without exception that mathematics applies only to sensibilia.43 This means quite simply that if the properties of arithmetic are not acquired by the intuition, in general, however, arithmetic has no other use than to be applied to sensible objects—in a word, arithmetic is designed exclusively for geometry, and still more concretely, physics.44 We should note, first of all, that arithmetic applies to the intuition or the sensible indirectly. Indeed, it is not possible to show how a good number of arithmetical propositions are constructed; only when it is useful for geometry or physics can arithmetic as a whole be called intuitive, simply because these disciplines’ objects are. This explanation attests to a considerable weakening of the initial doctrine. The associative property is discovered in a purely “intellectual” way; there is thus a sensible and exact45 discourse about a calculation, without this discourse being subordinated to the methods of intuitive construction. But as the propositions of arithmetic are used only for geometry or for sensible objects, they are intuitive in a mediated way. And yet to be useful for geometry or sensible objects is not entirely synonymous with being constructable in space and time. Besides, this is expressed in the letter’s dual proposition: “It is true that arithmetic has no axioms, since its object is actually not any quan-

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tum . . .” and “But insofar as specific magnitudes (quanta) are to be determined in accordance with this . . .”46 Kant’s final specification makes it possible not so much to reintegrate arithmetic in the theory of representation as to distinguish two levels in arithmetic—the first purely intellectual, the second representational because it indirectly aims at objects that, as it happens, are not stricto sensu intuitions but syntheses of a concept and an intuition (objects of geometry or physics). At the first level, certain propositions are true (the commutative property of addition, etc.), independently of any reference to intuition. This assertion remains, even with his final reservation, fundamentally anti-Kantian. As proof, logical empiricism (notably in its purest expression, namely in Rudolf Carnap) can quite definitely say that arithmetical propositions absolutely do not need to have recourse to space and time in order to be grasped and at the same time show that arithmetical propositions have no application except in the real world. To say that arithmetic is used only for geometry or physics thus does not show that arithmetical propositions all need the intuition to be identified as legitimate. Briefly, despite his ultimate denial, the letter to Schultz shows that Kant makes exceptions to his own conception of mathematics. Thus, there is indeed a tension between his general theory (which demands that all synthetic propositions be connected to a concept or an intuition) and the status of arithmetic.47 Therefore, it is clear that the term “intellectual” is the index of a difficulty that jeopardizes the critical project as a whole. At the same time as it indicates the impossibility of the Kantian notion of validity, this term signals in another way the Kantian system’s failure. Thus, more than an indication of a problem, the term “intellectual” appears as the moment when the critical edifice cracks and even implodes. In making use of this concept, Kant jeopardizes his own principles and demands the overcoming of his own doctrine. The terms “representation” and “intellectual” could not be more opposed—the first indicates the necessary relation to an object as a marker of valid knowledge; the second calls for overcoming this relation. This contradictio in adjecto and its interpretation as a tension between two mental orientations will become clearer if we consider the second problematical occurrence of the term, namely, at the moment of the utterance of “I” in the Critique of Pure Reason. These difficulties have been remarkably illuminated by Michel Henry—who shows, on the one hand that the “transcendental I” signals less the apogee of subjectivity as its liquidation;48 who remarks, on the other hand, that this moment of the transcendental “I” is the moment when the

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Kantian edifice self-destructs;49 and who notes, finally, that the system’s self-destruction is distinguished by the use of the term “intellectual.”50 I will take up and extend Henry’s demonstration.

Use of the Term “Intellectual” with Respect to the “I” With respect to “I think,” Kant writes: For it must be observed, that when I have called the proposition, ‘I think’, an empirical proposition, I do not mean to say thereby, that the ‘I’ in this proposition is an empirical representation. On the contrary, it is purely intellectual, because belonging to thought in general.51 This characterization of the “I” as an intellectual representation follows from a purely negative definition: “this ‘I’ is as little an intuition as a concept.” It could certainly be said that this is not a matter of a condition of possibility, but then why speak of an “intellectual representation”? The difficulty only increases if we recall Kant’s characterization of consciousness: “in the transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in general, and therefore in the synthetic original unity of apperception, I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am.”52 We thus have a strange situation: the positing—the existence—of a nonobject, to whose nature consciousness does not have access while being nevertheless capable of defining it and of making it into a certain proposition clearly not at all a hypothesis or a judgment governed by the “everything happens as if.” But what interests me is that Kant’s embarrassment with respect to the grasping of this “nonobject” that is “I am” manifests precisely through his use of the term “intellectual.” This characterization even enjoys a privilege relative to all the other definitions of the “I” that Kant attempted, for as Michel Henry rightly notes, “Wherever Kant attempts to designate the being of ‘I think,’ the only expression that he uses without immediately feeling the need to rectify and replace it with another is ‘intellectual representation.’ ”53 This term, “intellectual representation,” expresses the impossibility of saying the “I” in Kant’s philosophy, for if he keeps to the method he advocates, he does not in fact have the right to say what he says about the “subject.” Indeed, when Kant determines the transcendental apperception as “I” and attributes spontaneity rather than passivity to it, he uses a type of reasoning that gives birth to a mode of certainty that is not at all dependent

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upon investigation into conditions of possibility. If we had to summarize the steps of the apagogic reasoning that Kant employs, we would get the following development: the unity of experience is real since mathematics and physics exist as real sciences. To be able to account for this fact, it is necessary to postulate, as a condition of possibility, an ultimate synthetic function that Kant calls the synthetic unity of apperception. In other words, in order to know an object, I must link the representations. This linkage requires the unity of consciousness. Subjectivity is thus nothing other than the objective condition of knowledge; it is a requirement of thought, not a fact upon which one reflects. But if we had to respect this reasoning, we would obtain neither the “I” nor (even less) the “I am.” Nor does anything oblige us to define this synthetic function as the spontaneity of a subject rather than as the functioning of a structure. The regressive reasoning does not even allow us to affirm the proposition that “it is necessary that something is thinking” but simply allows the conclusion that “something is thought.” In his book La notion d’a priori, Mikel Dufrenne has remarkably articulated this characteristic of the Kantian doctrine, “An entire part of the analysis is conducted as if the ‘I think’ . . . were a cogitatum est.”54 I am not insisting here on this aspect of the Kantian doctrine, which has had a paradoxical legacy—both in logical positivism, as in the early Wittgenstein, and in certain developments in the human sciences, like in Claude Lévi-Strauss—an aspect quite aptly described by Jean Hyppolite’s incisive phrase “a transcendental field without a subject.”55 It suffices for my purposes to note that a good number of the statements in the Critique of Pure Reason would be strictly impossible if one held to a mere apagogic reasoning. The critical project’s most important theses exceed the prescribed method and point to another way of investigating. Thus, if we stay with the simple apagogic method, we are forced to conclude either that something is thought or, to put things better, that “something or ‘it’ (Es)56 thinks.” To say that it is a spontaneous “I” that thinks, more is required than what is contained in this reasoning’s conclusion. This is why Kant, in order to characterize how the “I” is grasped, must transgress his own principles and use the adjective “intellectual,” so uncommon to his pen. The term “intellectual” certainly shows the impossibility of saying the “I” but also expresses, at the same time and in the same way, the necessity of saying it. Indeed, the “I” is the foundation of the system, and this foundation must be able to speak itself (at least as “Me”) if critical philosophy as a whole does not want to fall into inconsistency in revealing itself incapable of accounting for its own propositions. Isn’t this the reason

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that Kant keeps the term “representation,” a term much more familiar to the critical project than the adjective that disfigures it? Representation and intellectual—never were two terms more contradictory. Every representation is defined as the application of a concept to an intuition; on the other hand, intellectual designates what is “as little intuition as concept.” Every representation is “necessarily mediated”; intellectual always specifies what is immediate. A representation is simultaneously active (concept) and passive (intuition); the adjective “intellectual” refers only to spontaneity. With this expression, Kant seems to say—at the same time and in the same way— something and its contrary. Intellectual representation is indeed the sign of a difficulty, which Michel Henry has masterfully summarized, “Kant takes the metaphysics of representivity to the limit, to that extreme point where claiming ultimately to found itself, to subordinate its own condition to representation, it falls into the abyss and self-destructs.”57 The theory of representation, if it wants to claim to be, must make recourse to an authority that denies it. Thus, not only does mathematics—at the origin of the theory of representation—escape, with some of its propositions, from this law that says that knowledge necessarily is the connection between a concept and an intuition, but also the theory of representation cannot account for certain philosophical statements, like the status of the “I” in the Critique. In a word, the use of this term expresses the impossible conjunction of two mental orientations, representation and reflection. Consequently, the problem can be posed in the following way: to know always signifies orienting toward the object (reference). This object is a depiction in space and time. But what the Kantian theory brings out, despite itself and in its own defense, is another modality of knowing, namely, knowledge as reflection upon one’s operations (self-reference). We thus have a fissure in the nuclear structure since these two mental orientations are mutually incompatible and cause the system to implode.

Conclusions: The Two Orientations The conclusions of this analysis are therefore clear and can be expressed in one sentence: Kant privileges the idea of reference ad extra but at the same time articulates, with a strange oxymoron that weakens the former idea, the necessity of another orientation; this paradoxical necessity is revealed in two of the most important moments for the Kantian system—namely, the deter-

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mination of mathematics’ validity and the thematization of the “synthetic unity of apperception.” Obsessed by the “demand for referentiality,” nevertheless at the same time and in the same way Kant points out the necessity of another orientation—an orientation that the post-Kantians will adopt but that the neo-Kantians will abandon. Before examining neo-Kantianism’s point of departure, which is the origin of the twentieth century’s race to reference, it is probably not without value to note in passing how the Kantian definition of validity still determines the entirety of our mental universe today. It is difficult to conceive of a definition of knowledge other than that of mathematical or physical rationality, as is attested by the fact that every new discipline, as a candidate for scientificity, begins by mathematicizing itself (like, for example, economics). To be sure, the definition of mathematical and physical rationality is certainly not the same in various systems since Kant. Nonetheless, the fact remains that knowing has been defined for two centuries as knowing an object, that is, is specified from an orientation toward the object. We can understand the history of all the possible configurations of philosophy in light of this observation. For example, it could be said that when philosophy is not science, it is nonsense (the analytics), or else poetry (Heidegger), or even hermeneutics (Gadamer). But whatever unfathomed differences there may be in these proposed definitions, they all have a definition of “science” as knowledge of the object as a common background and shared presupposition. When Heidegger exclaims that “science does not think,”58 what he has in mind is still this scientific definition of knowledge. He does not criticize it but rejects it in favor of a meditative thought that turns more and more toward poetry. Likewise, if hermeneutics considers itself to be of a “lesser truth value” than the hard sciences, this is because the Kantian definition of validity remains in effect. This Kantian definition is, in fact, a “positivist conception of knowledge,” in the sense that there is ultimately no other rationality than the mathematical/physical—however one might define the essence of this rationality: as knowledge of something that is given as a Gegenstand and as the connection between an intuition and a concept (Kant); or as a mere logic connected, for physics, with a posteriori experience (the Vienna Circle). This positivism will be the path pursued by the first philosophers who in 1850 will advocate a “return to Kant,” in Eduard Zeller’s famous phrase. And in fact, with neo-Kantianism we can witness the abandonment of what I have characterized as metadiscourse, the renunciation of the question, “How do we know that we know?” (the orientation of reflection) in favor

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of a simple epistemological question, “How do we know?” and even, to take up Hermann von Helmholtz’s expression, “In what way do our ideas correspond to reality?”59 (the orientation of reference). Between Wissen (knowledge [savoir]) and Erkenntnis (learning [connaissance]), the first neoKantians would plow the furrows of Erkenntnis. This reading of Kantianism, so decisive in the history of the “race to reference,” is what I must now show; this passage from the science of knowledge to epistemology [la théorie de la connaissance] (from Wissenschaftslehre to Erkenntnistheorie) is what we must next understand.



11

Helmholtz’s Choice as a Choice for Reference: The Naturalization of Critique

From the Transcendental to the A Priori The return to Kant is in fact the choice of a single path that brings an end to the tension in the critical project. It is a matter of “returning” to the question of representation as an explication of the relation between a subject and an object. Let’s first of all recall that, from 1810 to 1850, Hegel and his disciples were the main figures on the philosophical scene. Henri Dussort points this out, “From 1800 to about 1840, speculative thought, its famous developers and their disciples occupied the center stage.”1 Friedrich Engels himself noted that this enthusiasm for the Hegelian doctrine was at its peak between 1830 and 1840, “It was precisely from 1830 to 1840 that ‘Hegelianism’ reigned most exclusively, and to a greater or lesser extent infected even its opponents.”2 But beginning in 1850, this widespread Hegelianism rapidly broke down, and as Ernst Cassirer notes, “In place of the metaphysical orgy inspired by post-Kantian philosophy, a complete sobriety appears.”3

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Why did it break down? In fact, it is traditionally attributed to the development of and the orientation adopted by the positive sciences, which seemed to undermine the Hegelian analysis of the sciences and the ostensible absence of mathematics in Hegel despite the fact that the age witnessed a clearer and clearer mathematicization of all the positive sciences. This is an established historical point, in the sense that it is indeed what his contemporaries said—it was necessary to distance philosophy from Hegelianism and tie it to the so-called exact sciences. However, we could maintain that it was not only about Hegelianism’s ostensible “weakness” or nonconformity with the science of the time but also about a choice for a kind of rationality (representation, to the detriment of reflection). The opposition between Wissenschaftslehre and Erkenntnistheorie is less the opposition between one conception that will turn out to be false (German idealism) and another one, true (positivism), but rather the choice between two possible orientations for philosophical questioning. What launched this return to Kant, apart from Eduard Zeller’s famous discourse, was Hermann von Helmholtz’s simultaneously scientific and philosophical elaboration as a whole. From a general point of view, Helmholtz presented a positivist reading of Kant that tended to “naturalize” the critical project. First of all, this resolute naturalism reflected Helmholtz’s scientific training, since, apart from logic (which would not be reinvigorated until after his time), he distinguished himself in all the distinct sciences of the nineteenth century—the biological, physical, and chemical sciences, and geometry.4 Helmholtz’s scientific viewpoint can be expressed relatively simply: his fundamental approach consists in applying strictly mechanistic and quantitative models to all phenomena, including biological phenomena. In doing so, he disagreed with his era’s physiologists’ vitalism. In his eyes, a Newtonian mechanism could account for the totality of natural phenomena. What is of interest to me is the way that he thought Kant could justify this entirely Newtonian conception of science. His decisive reinterpretation of Kantian concepts is always carried out along the same axis: a concealment of the reflexive dimension and a naturalization of Kantianism. On this point, we should note the shift in meaning that occurs in Helmholtz’s use of the terms “transcendental” and “a priori.” In all his analyses, Helmholtz considers these concepts to be strictly equivalent. In fact, he reduces knowledge to two dimensions: knowledge is either empirical or a priori, that is, it is either dependent upon or independent of experience. With this reduction, he purely and simply identifies a priori knowledge with transcendental knowl-

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edge. But in Kant we could enumerate not two but indeed three ways of knowing: the transcendental, which is knowledge about knowledge, not a mode of knowledge of objects; then a priori knowledge, defined as a structure independent of experience; and finally, a posteriori knowledge. Thus, here we should note the impact of Helmholtz’s shift, for we can read the first eclipse of reflection in it. Indeed, to reduce the transcendental to the a priori amounts purely and simply to concealing the possibility of a metacognitive questioning (knowledge of knowledge). This first shift of meaning that paves the way for the naturalization of critique is echoed by another, just as important, namely:

The Psychophysiological Interpretation of the A Priori Here we must grasp the movement of Helmholtz’s interpretation—it first effects an initial reduction, of the transcendental to the a priori, and then understands the a priori in psychophysiological terms. This is indeed what I have characterized as a naturalization of critique. This second shift can be seen above all in Helmholtz’s theory of perception. This theory of perception is based on the fundamental law of the physiology of perception, articulated by Johannes Müller, called the “law of specific nerve energies.” This law explains that our sensible impressions do not depend upon the type of stimulation but exclusively upon the stimulated nerve. Each kind of nerve provokes in us a unique, specific, and incommensurable form of sensation, regardless of the kind of external stimulation. Inversely, the same stimulation, in contact with different nerves, causes different sensations. For example, the same sensation can be caused by a given source of light (electromagnetic waves) but also by pressure on the eyeball, or even, Helmholtz explains, by a displacement of the optic nerve caused by a brusque movement of the eye, etc. Thus, various sources can have the same effect. On the other hand, the same electromagnetic waves will prompt a sensation of heat if they are in contact with a nerve of the skin and a sensation of light if they are in contact with the nerves of the eye. It follows, from a general point of view, that the type of our sensible impressions does not depend on the type or the origin of the stimulation but on the stimulated nerve—such is what the “law of specific nerve energies” says. But Helmholtz interprets this physiological law as a proof of the Kantian thesis about the a priori forms of sensation. Sensations do not depend upon the object (since, in the last example, it is the same object—namely, electromagnetic waves) but

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upon the subject (the affected nerve). There is thus a psychophysiological predisposition of the subject that explains that the sensation will be of one sort or another. This is why, Helmholtz explains of the discovery of this law of specific nerve energies, that “in a certain sense, it is the empirical fulfillment of Kant’s theoretical concept of the nature of human reason.”5 These two displacements (the shift between transcendental and a priori and the shift between a priori and psychophysiological) illustrate Helmholtz’s relation to critique, which he summarizes in a passage in “The Facts of Perception”:6 That is the answer we must give to the question: what is true in our ideas? In giving this answer we find ourselves at the foundation of Kant’s system and in agreement with what has always seemed to me the most fundamental advance in his philosophy. I have frequently noted in my previous works the agreement between the more recent physiology of the senses and Kant’s teachings.7 Thus, Helmholtz claims in fact to have arrived at the same conclusions about the a priori as Kant but through a scientific demonstration, drawing upon experimental verification. Not only does he judge that the transcendental derivation on the one hand (Kant) and the empirical derivation on the other (here, the law of specific nerve energies) give the same status to the propositions that they yield (which is inaccurate in Kant’s eyes, since the transcendental deduction is absolutely necessary while the empirical is always hypothetical), but he also considers the results of these deductions to be identical. In doing so, he draws an interpretation of the forms of sensibility in terms of the origin, or even the cause, of our affections—this is characteristic, in my view, of the naturalization of the transcendental, because precisely the question of the source, of the origin, should be avoided in Kant through recourse to the concept of transcendental. Thus we have here a dual movement of naturalization: first, Helmholtz encompasses the a priori and the transcendental within one term, thereby denying the transcendental’s specificity; next, he assimilates the empirical results of physiology to Kant’s philosophical statements. As Moritz Schlick saw it, Helmholtz believed his theory of knowledge to be in better agreement with Kant’s than it really was.8 To be sure, it could be retorted that this naturalization is already present within critique. Remember, on this point, that Husserl reproached Kant

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for having naturalized the subject—but Helmholtz incontestably accentuated what was only one tendency among others in critique. He embodies the first great naturalist reading of critical statements. This naturalist reading has the advantage of erasing the contradiction induced by the Kantian use of the term “intellectual,” but it has the disadvantage of cementing the distinction between two kinds of questions: “How do we know?”—which leads to investigation into the nature of our knowledge (is it dependent upon experience or not, a priori or a posteriori?)—and “How do we know that we know?”—which leads to an investigation into the very structure of knowledge, as knowledge of knowledge. Helmholtz’s system marginalizes the second question so much that it eliminates it. This naturalization becomes even more apparent if we consider a third example: Helmholtz’s transformation of the Kantian distinction par excellence, the distinction between things in themselves and phenomena. Indeed, his naturalism culminates in this reinterpretation—which, moreover, allows us to understand how this reading of Kant had such a decisive influence on the Vienna Circle and logical positivism at the beginning of the century, thus determining what would become the “race to reference.”

The Physiological Future of the Distinction Between Things in Themselves and Phenomena In “The Facts of Perception,” Helmholtz reformulates the distinction between things in themselves and phenomena in physiological terms— phenomena are what the perception tells us about the nature of the real. He extends the thesis of the thing in itself as “unknowable,” because perception does not give an image of the real but only consistent signs. Indeed, Helmholtz, taking the law of specific nerve energies as the basis for his thesis about access to the real, shows how this law in itself implies the rejection of a theory of perception as a simple reflection of the real. The specific action of nerves (that is to say, our psychophysiological constitution) is interposed between the objective cause of a sensation (for example, electromagnetic waves) and its transformation into a sensation. It follows that this sensation does not give us a reflection, nor an image, nor a copy of the real but is the regulated result of stimulation of the nerves. This leads Helmholtz to reject any naive realism or natural and immediate empiricism, for which sensations give us a trace of the real and in which perception

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would be considered as a copy of exterior things. The only correspondence that we can establish between perceptions and the causes of stimulation is, Helmholtz tells us, a relation encrypted by signs. Nevertheless, once this naive realism has been rejected, the specter of radical skepticism emerges, as it does in all Kantians. But Helmholtz averts the possibility of skepticism (according to which, because our sensations are not images of things, they are dreams) by advocating a new form of “scientific realism.” Indeed, insofar as signs are consistent, they tell us that the real processes are also. We have to acknowledge here that the structure of such reasoning actually appears very Kantian: it is neither naive realism (perception as a reflection or copy of the very thing) nor for all that radical skepticism (there is no connection between our perception and things). The connection is in fact a relation through the law; the signs’ regularity informs us about things’ regularity and about the lawfulness of real events. That said, before I can systematically reconstruct the “scientific real,” I must discuss an additional stage of encryption between sensations and thought. This intermediate step completes the theory of perception and shows us how Helmholtz interprets, in the final analysis, the difficult Kantian distinction between a “thing in itself ” and a “phenomenon.” The necessary intermediary is what Helmholtz calls “unconscious thought,” which is exerted, despite ourselves, on the information delivered by the nerves.9 Between what the nerves give us and what we perceive, an unconscious processing takes place. This is particularly obvious for binocular vision: each of the optic nerves gives a different image of the thing we see, but we see only one image (except in the case of excessive—reprehensible—drunkenness). For Helmholtz, the explanation of this well-known physiological phenomenon is found in “unconscious inferences,” a doctrine that furnishes the basis for his theory of perception. With this doctrine, Helmholtz physiologically reinterprets the famous chapter of the Critique on “Anticipations of Perception.” Despite appearances, he remains Kantian here, for in upholding this theory of “unconscious inference,” he disagrees with a much more deterministic vision of humanity, known in his era as “nativism.” Nativism, in physiology, claimed that we are born with a given psychophysiological structure; this constitution was the absolute framework in which the real is given. Thus nativism maintained that the structure of our impressions (for example, spatial) is directly ordered by our physiological organization. In this sense, because he is unilaterally determinist, the nativist is the dia-

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metrical opposite of critique. In contrast, Helmholtz’s theory of perception could seem to him to be a kind of Kantianism. To give a precise example, for the nativists, our visual image’s uniqueness results from the connection of each of the two nerves corresponding to the same location on the retina. The exact physiological conjunction of these nerves results in the construction of a unique image. The definitive structure of spatial intuition would be innate, that is, organic. But Helmholtz argued at length against this theory (which was supported by Ewald Hering10)and stigmatized it as “explain[ing] nothing,” “rash and questionable,” and “unnecessary.”11 He observes that animals, and in particular humans, need a long apprenticeship to be able to use their faculties or to adapt them to new conditions. Far from being innate, the spatial structure of perception (for example, the correspondence between different senses) is acquired through experience, throughout one’s existence, by means of unconscious inferences. These inferences are not inferences in the strict sense (in the sense of reasoning of the sort “if . . . then”) but are unconscious mental processes with which we structure the information transmitted by the nerves. These processes, from the viewpoint of their results, coincide with the processes of conscious thought. If the existence of these inferences makes it possible to oppose the nativist and “innate” conceptions, it also provides a very precise reformulation and reinterpretation of the “Anticipations of Perception,” unconscious anticipations by which, in Kant, our relation to the real is forged prior to conscious thought. Here again, this is an extremely significant expression of the naturalization of critique, because the chapter in which Kant goes furthest into the question of the origins of sensation is formulated here in psychophysiological terms, in terms of unconscious inferences and processes of encryption of various sensations. These three aspects of the reinterpretation of Kant show the extent to which the question of knowledge as a relation to the real is taken up and accentuated. This orientation is adopted to the detriment of self-reflection and the type of argumentation connected with it, namely, transcendental arguments. Helmholtz abandons the question, “How do we know that we know?”—the question of one part of German idealism. In doing so, he naturalizes Kantianism and, paradoxically, makes empiricism and Kantianism into two doctrines that are no longer antithetical but relatively close, because Kant’s discoveries or conclusions are experimentally verifiable (through psychophysiology), and, reciprocally, the experimental results are corroborated by the Kantian deduction.

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Conclusions: A Single Orientation, the Origin of Two Paradigms In conclusion, it is clear that Helmholtz quite well embodies a positivist reading of critique, which he specifies as a naturalization of critique (psychophysiology). Nevertheless (and this is the interesting point for my inquiry into the “race to reference” in the twentieth century), this authentically positivist conception is broad enough to be claimed by both the classical neoKantians, like Ernst Cassirer, and by the Vienna Circle. In this respect, we can read in “The Vienna Circle Manifesto” that “Epistemological analysis of the leading concepts of natural science has freed them more and more from metaphysical admixtures which had clung to them from ancient time. In particular, Helmholtz, Mach, Einstein, and others have cleansed the concepts of space, time, substance, causality, and probability.”12 In the same way, Cassirer salutes “Helmholtz, who quite fiercely asserts a theory of knowledge proper to physics . . . and who, in order to accomplish this task must return to Kant.” To be sure, Hermann Cohen severely criticized what he called Helmholtz’s psychologism, rejected his concept of “representation” as vacuous, and meant to give back to the term “transcendental” its methodological, not physiological, significance. However, Cohen’s reading was nonetheless marked by this positivism. Two essential traits of positivism can indeed be noted in his doctrine. On the one hand, as Cassirer himself noted, “Cohen thought that the transcendental method’s essential point is that it begins with a fact in order to investigate what makes the fact possible . . . But he limited this general definition by only offering the mathematical natural sciences as really worthy of this investigation.” And in fact Cohen, disputing the idea that philosophy is the analysis of representations (a term that is so vague, in his eyes, as to mean nothing) or even the analysis of consciousness,13 defined philosophy as the clarification of knowledge, whose only model is furnished by the mathematical and physical sciences. On the other hand, stigmatizing the conception of a Cogito as a mental event, Cohen makes the “I think” into a simple methodical principle. This second trait is undeniably true to Kant but at the same time entails the risk of a simply logical, even superfluous, subject. This second interpretation of the subject in Kant has been, by far, the most historically common, for, beyond the Marburg school, its traces can be found in the philosophy of the subject. Frédéric de Buzon, in an important article, “L’individu et le sujet,” shows how positivism, in almost all its forms, follows this Kantian line, “Philosophies of the concept are not philosophies

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of the absence of the subject,  .  .  . these philosophies only assert a subjective lack of differentiation.”14 This influence can be detected even in the early Wittgenstein. Indeed, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he still maintains a “sort” of transcendental subject, an empty form, the other name for the structure—in other words, a subject that is the world’s horizon, about which nothing can be said. Be that as it may, with this dual choice, Cohen follows Helmholtz’s positivist reading, even if for Cohen positivism takes on a different coloration, which we will examine in the next chapter. In summary, Helmholtz’s Kantianism has chosen a particular orientation, investigation of the relation of our knowledge to things (the problem of reference). This orientation can either take the form of naturalization or Cohen’s more methodological form. But be that as it may, this orientation interprets critique as a form of positivism. And yet the beginning of the twentieth century will witness another reading of Kant, and from that, an apparent “bifurcation” in its interpretation through an overcoming of the positivist temptation. Nevertheless, this bifurcation takes place, in my view, within a single orientation, namely orientation toward the object. If Heidegger and neoKantianism certainly embody two different ways of reading Kant, these two ways nevertheless have a point in common: they reconstruct the entirety of critique exclusively from the problematic of the Critique of Pure Reason, and consequently do not plow the second path, of metacognitive justification. I will try to explain this proposition by reconstructing the Heideggerian reading of Kant and comparing it with Cohen’s.



12

Critique: A Positivist Theory of Knowledge or Existential Ontology?

In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,1 Martin Heidegger’s principal concern is to distance Kantianism from the neo-Kantian epistemological interpretation in order to make the Critique of Pure Reason the harbinger of the phenomenological revolution. It is not unreasonable to assert, in this respect, that Heidegger’s reading is the systematic counterpoint to Cohen’s. The opposition can be read (1) in their understandings of Kant’s problematic, (2) in their explanations of knowledge, (3) in the importance they accord to one or the other of the Critique of Pure Reason’s two editions, and (4) in the meaning that each thinks should be given to the term “object.” I shall analyze these four oppositions in order to better tease out (5) the general lessons to be drawn from Heidegger’s reading of Kant.

The Kantian Problematic in Heidegger and Cohen The Marburg school’s epistemological interpretation can be summarized, in Heidegger’s eyes, in several theses: The transcendental method is the

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analysis of the conditions of possibility for a fact. The only universal fact is positive science (mathematics, physics). Transcendental investigation is thus exhausted in an examination of the judgments at work in the sciences. Consequently, philosophy’s object is scientific judgment, its guiding problematic is that of objective validity. Against this reduction of the Critique to a simple theory of knowledge, Heidegger’s argument consists in showing that judgments’ truth presupposes the prior constitution of regions of meaning. The ontic objectivity of the judgment “7 + 5 = 12” presupposes a more basic ontological objectivity. In this sense, Kant becomes the precursor to Husserl’s assertion that before any act of judging there is a universal ground of experience, a ground that is postulated as the harmonic unity of possible experience. “Hence, what makes the comporting to beings (ontic knowledge) possible is the preliminary understanding of the constitution of Being, ontological knowledge.”2 To put it differently, Kant—in Heidegger’s eyes—starts from the problem of a Metaphysica Specialis (beings in the most eminent sense—God) that, in order to be resolved, presupposes the problem of a Metaphysica Generalis (beings in general, beings qua beings). This dual problem is clearly not at all new, because it is a problem, in its very duality, throughout the entire history of philosophy. For Kant, inquiry into beings in general does not call for a determination of their relation to the most eminent being (God) but rather an interrogation of the Being of beings—on this point if Kant is not an innovator, he at least revives one possibility in Aristotle’s metaphysics.3 Knowledge of beings is possible only on the basis of knowledge of beings’ ontological structure; that is, in order to understand a given object, it is first necessary to inquire about what gives it being as an object. Kant’s problematic is thus an ontological problematic in the sense that he does not investigate judgments as such (as Hermann Cohen does) but uncovers the Sachverhalt [facts] that makes these judgments possible. Far from being exhausted in an epistemology of the exact sciences, the Critique of Pure Reason is consecrated to establishing the foundations of metaphysics.4 But if any vision of ordinary reality presupposes an implicit grasp, or understanding, of the structure of the Being of beings, if—to use Husserl’s simpler terms—every object presupposes an “original ground” upon which it manifests, then what in the Critique will be this ground upon which any understanding of the object depends? The “Aesthetic,” or as Heidegger prefers to call it, temporality.5 This is the second point of Heidegger’s disagreement with Cohen.

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Explaining Knowledge:Valorization of the “Aesthetic” or the “Analytic”? Hermann Cohen’s epistemological bias entails, in Heidegger’s eyes, the marginalization of the transcendental aesthetic—intuition appears as a simple auxiliary faculty that all genuine knowledge must reduce. This is attested by the (entirely Leibnizian) importance that Cohen places on the principle of intensive magnitudes,6 which allows him to effect a reduction of intuition to passivity. But Heidegger criticizes this view, seeing in it a return to a pre-Kantian problematic. With this reduction, Cohen would define sensibility’s passivity as a lesser being compared with an absolute—active and creative—knowledge of its object.7 Consequently (and in conformity with the metaphysical tradition), finitude is still understood as an accidental negativity, as an extrinsic limitation that knowledge must work to reduce. Against this bias, Heidegger’s entire interpretation rests upon the “Transcendental Aesthetic.” The transcendental aesthetic is the original ground upon which objects appear. Thus, the intuition—far from being what must be overcome to achieve genuine knowledge—becomes what makes knowledge possible. This is why, going directly against the Marburg school’s orientation, Heidegger writes, “In order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason this point must be hammered in, so to speak: knowing is primarily intuiting.”8 All knowledge is irremediably and structurally receptive, always already tied to a preexisting object, forever dependent upon an original gift. Truth is constituted by, in, and through temporality. Contrary to the idealist interpretation that emphasizes activity, Heidegger accentuates passivity and posits the idea of a positive finitude—positive in that finitude, far from being the sign of an imperfect being in contrast to an absolute of knowledge, becomes the very thing that makes knowledge and truth possible. This promotion of the aesthetic, this reading of finitude from temporality, dominates the whole of the interpretation, because Heidegger tips the entire system in the direction of the “Aesthetic.” Indeed, spontaneity is to be understood from this ground, this intuition. The categories, as products of spontaneity, do not externally come about on top of passivity but must be attached to the synthesis of temporality (rather than to the table of judgments). In this respect, the categories and the intuition have a common source—the imagination. Here again this movement betrays the guiding thread of Heidegger’s interpretation: reading the critical project from an affirmation of finitude and connecting it to the valorization of passivity in humanity. In the same way,

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the essential place accorded to activity in Cohen’s interpretation and to passivity in Heidegger’s can be seen in Heidegger’s debate with Ernst Cassirer, at Davos, about the Critique of Practical Reason.9 To Cassirer, who claimed that Kant transcended human passivity with his statement of the moral law as pure form, Heidegger replied that only the feeling of respect makes it possible to understand practical reason. Here again it is passivity—that is, a certain form of gift (feeling)—that shows the Kantian truth. This desire to give feeling the same role that intuition plays in pure reason most fully embodies the Heideggerian concern to make finitude—understood as an irreducible passivity—the alpha and omega of the Kantian message. In summary, if finitude is absolute in Heidegger, this is principally because the absolute is finitude. These two antithetical interpretations clearly do not emphasize the same passages in the Kantian oeuvre, nor do they situate it in the history of philosophy in the same way.

Which Edition? The controversy about the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason seems to have lost its intensity today: even though Kant’s immediate successors made it a subject of dispute (Karl Leonhard Reinhold championed the second, the orthodox Kantians the first), even though the German commentators at the beginning of the twentieth century made it one of the crucial points for an understanding of Kantianism, contemporary interpreters no longer see anything conclusive at stake.10 However, the meaning of this revision is not unimportant, because with the second edition (and in particular the rewriting of the transcendental deduction), Kant seems to orient critique toward an epistemological problematic—that is, he seems to regard the Critique’s contribution to philosophy to be a demonstration of judgments’ objective validity. It follows that choosing to emphasize the first edition (Heidegger) or the second (Cohen) is opting either for the ontological problematic or the epistemological problematic. If we analyze the most important revision, namely the total replacement of the transcendental deduction in the second edition, various signs give evidence of this epistemological reorientation: (a) Kant suppresses the subjective deduction,11 whose psychological accents ran the risk of masking the problem of scientific judgment and of uniquely marring the critical enterprise of subjectivism. To put it more gen-

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erally, the subjective deduction posed the question of the genesis of mental faculties, the objective deduction was attached to a description of the internal functioning of knowledge.12 The suppression of the subjective deduction thus testifies to the desire to be rid of a genetic explanation. (b) While the imagination appears in the first edition as the fundamental faculty, in the second, it is entirely subordinated to the understanding. This promotion of the understanding is even more apparent if we consider that three syntheses are at work in the first edition—the syntheses of apprehension (sense), of recognition (concepts), and of reproduction (the imagination)—while in the second edition, these three syntheses disappear in favor of the sole synthesis of the understanding, and the “I think” becomes the only synthetic unity. The second edition sanctions, as Heidegger would have it, the dismissal of the productive imagination as the principal faculty of synthesis. In opposition to Alexis Philonenko,13 it does not at all seem to me that the Heideggerian reading of a devaluation of imagination in the second edition is “contradictory and unfounded.” Heidegger’s interpretation is nothing other than a reading made by a good number of commentators who do not claim to be Heideggerians. On this point, H. J. de Vleeschauwer writes, “The deduction [in the first edition] revolves around the function of synthesis. The intuitive world or nature consists of the ensemble of phenomena, synthetic products of a material diversity and pure concepts. In sum, the deduction is only the schematic construction of this intuitive world, effected by the superposition of synthetic operations realized by the pure subject in an irrationality given in advance,” and adds in a note that “this is also where the omnipresence of the imagination—a synthetic faculty—comes from in the 1781 deduction.”14 But more profoundly (because all the commentaries on Kant could turn out to be “contradictory and unfounded” as well), the displacement indeed attests to an emphasis on the epistemological perspective. The chapter on the schematism, retained in both editions, is not by itself able to answer the question of the imagination’s status, because according to the two editions’ different emphases, it could be read as the unveiling of an origin (first edition) or as the description of a mechanism (second edition). The problem is to know if, as the second edition would have it, the imagination is a simple exterior connection whose function is to tie together the only two sources of knowledge (understanding and sensibility), or if the imagination is the source itself of the understanding and sensibility. To put this differently, Kant affirms the duality of sources of knowledge (understanding and sensibility) and simultaneously the trinity of mental faculties,

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since the understanding, imagination, and sensibility are the three original sources of the soul. How, therefore, are we to understand the imagination’s role? Is it a simple intermediary (second edition), or the original source of the two sources of knowledge (first edition)? If the imagination is given as the origin of the two powers of knowledge, then the transcendental schematism must be read as the principle of the methodological constitution of objectivity. We thus return to the initial alternative: is Kant limited to clarifying the conditions of objectivity, or does he rather pose the question of the source, the genesis, or the provenance of the sources of knowledge (the understanding and sensibility)? We can very well understand why the Marburg school, repudiating the question of origins, will give the second edition a more Newtonian appearance (in the sense of an updating of laws without questioning their origins). With this devaluation of the imagination, Kant seems to justify Cohen’s promotion of the Analytic and therefore to legitimate the epistemological interpretation.

The Meaning of the Object The first edition speaks of the object as a transcendental object = x. For the second, the given object is the object of knowledge, such as it is intuited and thought with concepts.15 This is a key difference that can encapsulate the conflict between these two interpretations. In the second lens, the real is understood as a phenomenon; more precisely, the object is reduced to a scientific experiment, because what is given is the conjunction of a category and an intuition. On the other hand, in the first edition, the object has an undeniable transcendence. Beyond the scientific experiment, there is only an irreducible opacity, a mysterious exteriority. Heidegger’s interpretation is based upon this alterity’s mystery—certainly not to reduce it but rather to magnify it. The Kantian message comes down to an assertion of the irreducible that is the real. This obviously could not hold for Cohen’s interpretation, for the simple and good reason that, in conformity with the second edition, he means by “object” the connection between a category and an intuition, that is to say, a scientific experiment. With this basis, it is clear that Cohen could not conceive any opacity of the object without sinking Kantianism into, to say the least, an absurd relativism of knowledge. Indeed, an assertion of the object’s unknowability would mean (with respect to the second edition’s definition of the object) the unknowability

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of science. As we can see, the difference in interpretation hinges upon these definitions of the object—but this difference is not as Heidegger understood it. Cohen does not deny the finitude of knowledge, he considers that as given and asks about what a finite subject can know. If by object we mean mathematical knowledge, it would in fact be a little bizarre to assert that the object is opaque, transcendent, and exterior to the thinking subject. Cohen’s task is thus not to reduce finitude but to describe the mechanism of knowledge. On the other hand, Heidegger increases finitude because he chose the first edition’s definition of the object. And yet the two definitions are not contradictory, they simply adopt two different points of view. In both cases, indeed, knowledge is limited. Cohen, contrary to received opinion, never denied this fact ([a denial supposedly effected] by attempting to reduce the Aesthetic in order to go back to a Leibnizian point of view). His epistemological bias simply inflects the questioning: the philosopher is not interested in constantly referring to this unknowable about which nothing can be said; his task is to describe the mechanism by which we arrive at what is known. To constantly point out the thing’s irreducible alterity, for Cohen, does not make philosophy a positive enterprise but rather sinks into a pathos of the unknowable. Philosophical inquiry, if it means to be something other than an eternal dwelling upon the opacity of reality and its inexpressible mystery, must determine how what is known is known. Thus the difference between these two readings of Kant is fundamentally explained by this difference in perspective (which takes its source in the shift in perspective between the first and second editions and the dual definition of the object). Heidegger emphasizes the meaning of the object as an opaque other, as existence; Cohen emphasizes the definition of the object as an object constructed by the sciences. That said, I have established that, however we understand this clearly capital and decisive difference, the orientation of the questioning remains unchanged: if one means to go back to a prepredicative existence and the other means to apprehend the constitution of the scientific object, the fact nevertheless remains that in both cases the question that is taken as decisive is the question of our relation to the object (to the world, to beings). To put it succinctly, in both cases, the question asked is the question of reference ad extra. In terms of the orientation of their interests or concerns, Cohen and Heidegger can be compared and both can be contrasted—without absurdity—to the other orientation that Emil Lask identified, a path that is hidden,

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obscured, and abandoned in Heidegger’s ontological perspective as well as in Cohen’s epistemological perspective. We should recall the scope of my enterprise here—I am considering only Heidegger’s reading of Kant, not Heideggerianism in general. I am concerned only to demonstrate that his reading is not a rupture in the reception of Kant, just a different response to what is always the same question, namely, orientation toward the object or reference ad extra. Thus, my task is not to critique Heidegger’s reading. This is why I have not pointed out, for example, with Ernst Cassirer, Heidegger’s difficulty in explaining Kant’s mention, as early as the Aesthetic and thus from the first edition of the Critique, of an Intuitus Archetypus, which allows Kant to specify intuitive knowledge as finite. Nor need I be surprised, as is Alexis Philonenko, by the complete disregard given to the second edition in this reading of critique. Nor have I shown, as Jules Vuillemin has done, the extent to which this reading makes Kant the greatest skeptic in the history of philosophy. I have not taken up any of these criticisms because disputing Heidegger’s reading of Kant is not my purpose. My concern is simply to show that Heidegger, like Cohen or Helmholtz, interprets critique from only one perspective, namely, the problem of reference. For this reason, I will quite simply be contented, for an evaluation of Heidegger, with the following reasoning: Let’s accept the philological, hermeneutic, and philosophical correctness of Heidegger’s interpretation. Let’s accept the absolute wellgroundedness of the thesis of radical finitude and the pertinence of the Kantian response to the question, “What is Being?” And having done so, let’s ask the question, What in this orientation prevents the other orientation—how does it condemn the approach of self-reference? To put it differently, from what I have shown about the questioning that gave birth to German idealism (from Salomon Maimon to Hegel), how could their questioning be considered a transgression, in the sense of a return or a restoration “of everything that Kant had thrown to the ground”? Indeed, even if we agreed with all of Heidegger’s theses, even Hegel could not, stricto sensu, be called “anti-Kantian.” Or, to put it in terms other than those of the history of philosophy, even if Heidegger’s chosen path (anchoring the categories in the existential) is viable, what in this choice would condemn eo ipso the other path? Heidegger does not invalidate the other route; he obscures it—which is not the same thing. Having established this point, I can now further clarify and better understand the meaning of Heidegger’s

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two nodal theses about Kant—radical finitude and the question of Being— theses that, better than any other, express the chosen orientation.

Radical Finitude and the Question of Being as Emphasizing an Orientation The thesis of radical finitude is probably the must subtle and the most difficult point of the Heideggerian interpretation. Since Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, we have had the habit of saying that Kant radically distances himself from prior philosophy in that he no longer posits finitude as a lack stemming from God. What is posited as prior in the Aesthetic is finitude; God is relativized in light of it. In other words, the difference between finitude and infinite knowledge is no longer quantitative but qualitative. Heidegger repeats this schema for the whole of the Critique, because he wants to make the sentiment of respect the analogue of the gift by intuition. To accept Heidegger’s interpretation of finitude inevitably leads to accepting the whole of his interpretation. We cannot posit the radical finitude of the subject in the Critique of Pure Reason as he does and accept the Critique of Practical Reason’s idea of an absolute autonomy, which he rejects, because this latter idea relativizes the theoretical finitude of the subject. The subject of the Critique of Pure Reason would indeed appear as a lesser being with respect to the absolute subject of the Critique of Practical Reason. Thus, Kant would fall back into the classical schema of a finitude relativized by the consideration of an absolute. If we accept the correctness of Heidegger’s interpretation, a question nevertheless arises in critique itself and without escaping finitude: How does Kant know that we are finite? What kind of knowledge makes it possible to posit finitude as an absolute? As Jules Vuillemin says in his conclusions about Heidegger, “We will probably repeat over and over again that Kant discovered finitude, but always with the condition that Kant himself is exempted from this finitude—the eternal Kant of thought.”16 This little joke is obviously more serious than it seems, insofar as it locates the problem of the possibility of Kant’s own discourse. In order that the claim of finitude be considered as something other than an arbitrary assertion, an unjustified decision, it is even more necessary that judgments about a priori forms of knowledge are justified, and that the discourse that makes their description possible is able to be exhibited. But, as Manfred Meier notes, if the Kantian viewpoint

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would itself again articulate statements about the constitutive moments of knowledge, it does not have the opportunity. Indeed, “the pure forms of the intuition and the categories of the understanding are precisely not objects of a sensible intuition,” that is to say, of finite knowledge.17 It follows that, “considered in this way, the Kantian kind of a priori knowledge . . . is transformed into a dogmatic position, for the possibility that it can be known and demonstrated remains and must remain without justification.”18 I should underline here that the term “dogmatic” is used in Meier’s article in its strict Kantian sense, not as a “defamatory argument.” Indeed, in Kant, all knowledge is dogmatic that is not concerned about its own presuppositions. It follows that, if Heidegger’s interpretation—that is, radical finitude—is true, we are led to the following alternative: either, to secure Kant’s assertion, we must examine the presuppositions that make this assertion possible (Lask’s and Fichte’s metacognitive path); or else the assertion of radical finitude is a dogmatic statement that a Kantian, in conformity with the demands of critique, cannot accept. The dogmatism does not reside in the proposition’s contents but in its status. The assertion of finitude as absolute can be an entirely and authentically dogmatic assertion, resulting (like any dogmatic proposition) not in the liberation of a space for reflection but rather the enclosure of a territory. And yet if we now take up the connection that Heidegger and his followers establish between radical finitude in critique and its supposed transgression (by restoration of the seventeenth-century conception) by the postKantians, we are forced to recognize that this connection is illicit. The kind of question that is asked has changed since Aenesidemus, because as we have seen, the question that launched German idealism can be put thus: “What allows the assertion of this finitude as absolute?”—that is, it is a question that concerns the saying and not directly what is said. Thus, to give only one example, with respect to finitude in Kant, Hegel brought his criticism to bear on this point. How, he asked, if we posit that the limitation is absolute, do we explain our knowledge of this limitation?19 Put differently, Kant posits an “absolute” (finitude), what kind of knowledge is it that posits this absolute? This question, which comes from the post-Kantians as a group, is not at all anti-Kantian and, as I have shown, is absolutely not dogmatic in the Kantian sense. Any positing of an absolute (whatever content one gives to it) supposes, for Kant, reflection upon the presuppositions that allow this positing. It follows that the thesis of radical finitude, even if it is the epitome of critique, does not allow any judgment about the questioning of its legacy. This

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questioning is not a return to the seventeenth century,20 it is simply different. This difference is summarized in a question that Heidegger does not address in his reconstruction of critique: what is the status of the philosopher’s discourse? Which is the relation of the “saying” to the “said.” I have thus amply demonstrated what I needed to show, namely, that Heidegger’s reading, with respect to Cohen’s, does not constitute a change of question or of orientation but is a different answer to the same question. The orientation remains identical, even if the paths are different. I can show the same thing through an analysis of the second great characteristic dimension of the Heideggerian reading, namely, the question, “What is Being?” and the theme of a “return to the thing itself.” To understand Kant, Heidegger starts from the Husserlian theme of “return to the thing itself.” The problematic is about Being, existence, the subject’s relation to the other, in the sense that any knowledge supposes an original gift, is tied to an alterity that is not itself. And yet it is difficult to see how the other of the active subject is not ad extra. To be sure, it is not an object as understood by science or knowledge, an object held under the philosopher’s gaze; but it is nevertheless an other for the subject, an other that is given to the subject, not created by it. This Nonsubject is transcendence, exteriority, what is “always already there.” The Kantian subject is defined as an opening to this other that it neither creates nor posits but receives. And yet, in my view, whether the object is defined as an inexpressible exteriority or as the physical world, whether the subject is understood as an “opening to the other” or as the subject of scientific knowledge, this changes nothing about the fact that the question is about the subject’s relation to an x, an original or transcendental ground. To put it in a less-paradoxical way (for it is obvious that Heidegger would refuse to define his questioning as the subject’s relation to an object), if we consider the Levinasian theme of the Other, close to the Heideggerian philosophy, we see that this Other’s anteriority is postulated, and it is through its revelation that I achieve subjectivity. In this framework, even if the Other is not an objective being in the scientific view, even if it is no longer an object represented by an active and knowing subject, the fact nevertheless remains that what must be thought is a reference ad extra as other, alterity, transcendence. And yet, even if Kant would answer this question in Heidegger’s way, there is still no a priori justification for reading the other orientation—embodied in the theses that I have defended in light of the first post-Kantians’ model—as so many (dogmatic) answers to the question of knowledge’s relation to

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some other term (the object as some x). Indeed, my analysis has shown how philosophy can orient itself toward a questioning that is no longer concerned with objectivity or alterity but rather with the philosopher’s relation to his own operations, or the relation of knowledge to itself. Consequently, if Heidegger’s reading of Kant were entirely accurate, it would allow neither an understanding of nor a judgment about the validity of this orientation and therefore does not authorize the invalidation of another kind of questioning. From a more general point of view, these interpretations of Kant (Cohen’s and Heidegger’s) thus cannot serve to evaluate a questioning that cannot be understood as an answer to the question, “What is Being?” nor as an approach to this different problem, “How is knowledge of an object possible?” This is why these two positions (Cohen’s and Heidegger’s) both paradoxically embody a single orientation, confronted with an interrogation that starts in an entirely different direction. On one side, the question concerns a subject’s relation to an object (or Dasein’s to alterity); on the other, the question concerns an x’s relation to itself. This is why, however important these interpretations of Kant may be, however valid (philologically and philosophically) they may be, an interpreter is entitled to highlight their strange proximity: reference first and self-reference not even questioned.

Conclusions: Common Ground— The Exclusive Idea of Reference At the end of my reading of these readings of Kant, what conclusions should we draw? 1. First of all, the source of the reflexive deficit that leads to the omnipresence in contemporary philosophy of the theme of the end of philosophy is indeed found in this “race to reference” that characterized the past two centuries, whose genealogy I have just outlined and in which Heidegger paradoxically finds himself side by side with Cohen. On this point, we can consider Helmholtz as the mirror in which contemporary philosophy can easily gaze to find if not all its choices at least its principal orientation. Even Heidegger, who considers himself to have broken with all forms of neo-Kantianism, does not, in his reading of Kant, deflect the fundamental trend—consideration of reference ad extra and abandonment of self-reference.

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2. Next, this history of the “race to reference” to the detriment of the problem of self-reference allows us to put contemporary philosophy in its proper perspective. To be sure, we could take into account that this philosophy is divided between the Continental paradigm, embodied by phenomenology in all its aspects, and analytic philosophy, whether of the first or second wave; to be sure, we could look beyond this division to go back to their common source—which is precisely the demand for referentiality at work at the debut of phenomenology as well as at the beginning of analytic philosophy. But this demand for referentiality itself, far from being a challenge to Kantianism, is its most accomplished construction. Since Kant, and following Helmholtz, the philosophical problematic has been understood as the problematic of reference. Such is the true source of contemporary philosophy in the diversity of its movements; such is the origin of the aporias that run through it today. At the end of this analysis, I have been able to contextualize the theme of the end of philosophy and to go back to the sources of the concealment of self-reference. Before judging that I have accomplished my entire task—analyzing, then challenging, and finally contextualizing the theme of the death of philosophy—I must ask a final question, about the history of philosophy. Indeed, if, as we saw in the introduction, a certain historicist conception of philosophy21 is tied to the theme of the death of philosophy, then overcoming the theme of its death will lead us to overcome historicism. But doesn’t this overcoming of historicism entail the stance of a “return to” a particular philosopher or a particular moment of philosophy, set up as the only worthy one? The reinvestment of an old position, defining (without smile or inhibition) philosophy as a science—doesn’t this lead us to replace a current statue of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine, or Kant with a statue of Fichte or Hegel? What status should be given to the history of philosophy? Will its clear articulation allow us to break with historicism without for all that claiming to return to a past that is no more? It is only with the answer to this question that my overcoming of the death of philosophy can be entirely accomplished.

13



Questioning the History of Philosophy

Overcoming Historicism Without Returning to the Past I have had to say in what precise sense philosophy is a first, distinct, and autonomous science in order to overcome Jacques Bouveresse’s assertion that the need to teach the history of the discipline (and to preserve the memory or celebrate the cult of a certain number of great figures . . .) constitutes about the only thing that still justifies the existence of a good number of philosophy departments in French universities  .  .  . [and] is what maintains the idea of philosophy as a distinct and autonomous discipline.1 I have thus challenged the idea of the death of philosophy and, thereby, overcome the historicism of those positions that assert the exhaustion of the

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discipline. But, in my concern to dispel the thesis of continual progress (scientism) or of inevitable decline (Heideggerianism), have I covertly advocated a return to a past moment of the history of philosophy—in this case Fichte and probably Hegel—thus repeating Eduard Zeller’s gesture, calling on his contemporaries to “return to Kant”? It would of course be permissible to answer this question by first noting that it is less a matter of a “return to” than a reappropriation,2 or, still more precisely, less the reappropriation of a response than the reactivation of a question. Indeed, a revival of the Wissenschaftslehre could never be a repetition but rather, as Fichte said, a construction. It is not a matter of applying ready-made instruments but of constructing—each time in a new way—a model of rationality that is neither contradictory nor self-refuting.3 But this answer cannot suffice, for fundamentally this definition of a philosophy that is not a collection of contents to be redeployed but an activity to be reinvested could just as easily be imputed to Kant, or even Plato or Descartes. And not only have I not taken up the Kantian philosophy but I have most often rejected its premises. Must we therefore answer, this time with Jonathan Barnes, that whatever the author may have intended, we must act as if he had just written yesterday and “read Plato . . . as if he had published his dialogues with the Clarendon Press . . . [and] read Aristotle’s essays as if they appeared in the most recent issue of Mind”?4 This will to “contemporaneousness” is not at all incompatible, as Barnes shows in his essays, with the rigor of the historian of philosophy who must accept the simultaneous use of historical, philological, and systematic analyses, just as the ethnologist must go to study a given civilization on-site and not be content with Herodotus’s reports. Barnes’s position must thus be accepted and defended. Nevertheless, if contemporaneousness can be postulated, each author’s supposed truth is incompatible with a variety of doctrines, and I have incontestably made German idealism—not, as many today do, Wittgenstein or Heidegger—serve as Ariadne’s guiding thread. I have given a first beginning of an answer to this question in chapter 5, namely, that with regard to the situation in which philosophy currently finds itself, this moment of the history of philosophy can appear to be one of the best angles of vision or “corrective apparatuses.” As we could say of an ethnologist that he has chosen a “field” more or less suited to his initial question, I can say that a historian of philosophy determines a more or less adequate field according to the questions that he asks and the questions that arise. Those who want to see the curious pattern formed by the theme of the death of philosophy in contemporary thought (part 1) probably should not position them-

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selves in the place of one or another figure whom it constitutes (Wittgenstein, or Heidegger, American naturalism, or the “turning” of phenomenology, etc.). None of these figures, constituting a part of the painting, is able to grasp it in its totality. Moreover, since my concern is to answer Bouveresse about philosophy’s status as a first and distinct science, it seemed appropriate to “test” or “verify” the consistency of a model that advanced this hypothesis. I have thus examined the value of this hypothesis—of philosophy as a first and autonomous science—by subjecting it to new problems, such as the dispute about transcendental arguments, the prohibition of self-referentiality, naturalism, etc., and by comparing it to current thinkers (part 2). Nevertheless, all these answers, legitimate in themselves, probably do not suffice to entirely exhaust the question of an appeal to a given moment of philosophy. If the history of philosophy is neither a “royal road” leading to progress and progressing to a fixed end, nor a path that leads only to its exhaustion, nor a moment of truth (Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, or any other) within an ocean of falsehoods, then what is it? Perhaps a sort of “garden of forking paths.”5 At a given moment of history, multiple directions present themselves and can be taken, scrutinized, deepened. And yet among these multiple paths, only one or two will be taken or traveled by the majority; the others will be forgotten, hidden, left fallow. These paths can be taken again, if at a given moment the state of the garden seems to demand it. To put it in Emil Lask’s terms, already mentioned, if at the beginning of the century philosophy had to embark upon a dual orientation—to bring the categories into a much wider field of existentials (the categories’ reference to a “real”) and to understand its own cognitive value by orienting itself toward a metaphilosophy (self-reference)—I have shown how philosophy, in its various forms, has invested in the first problem, cultivated the first path, but abandoned the second to neglect. I have demonstrated on this point how the two paradigms constitute only one, because Heidegger takes up only the first orientation—his goal is to bring out the categories’ derivative character with respect to existentials. Thence is born the idea that the Logos has its roots in the existential analytic of Dasein; thence also come the phenomenological themes, now dominant, of the existential subject, of radical finitude, of primary passivity, etc. As for analytic philosophy, if it is obviously not in its case a matter of some sort of application of the categories to existentials, the fact nevertheless remains that the orientation of questioning is the same—namely, the problem of reference to an exterior other, the problem of reference that, as I have shown, “has had a central position in philosophical discussion

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from the very beginning of this century.”6 The second path, self-reference, that German idealism traveled and that Lask hoped to take up again, was temporarily covered up in favor of tasks that appeared, at the time, to be more urgent. But today, as the path of reference has led us to the aporias that I have inventoried in part 1, now that contradictions that threaten the very practice of the discipline have appeared, isn’t it necessary to revive another orientation, to survey another path? These orientations—reference on one side and self-reference on the other—are not diametrically opposed, in the sense that one would be dogmatic and the other not, one outdated and the other not. The choice of direction is commanded by the state of the garden at a given moment of history. Yesterday, reference was first; today it doubtless ought to be accompanied by a reflection upon self-reference, in part to overcome its own aporias.7 If the problem of reference has occupied the last two centuries, it has clearly obscured the path of self-reference while at the same time, by giving rise to multiple obstacles, made its own path impracticable— and this impracticable character has led too many thinkers to proclaim the end of philosophy, when the only thing that could be established was that a thematic that would exclude all others was a dead end. It is not for me here to precisely define why a given path is abandoned at one moment, to be taken up again later. It could be, sometimes, for reasons that are totally contingent or exterior to the discipline. Thus, in mathematics, Henri Poincaré’s discoveries, advances, and his lines of inquiry were undervalued in the middle of the twentieth century—only in recent years has he been revived as a decisive reference, a major contributor whose paths must be surveyed again, whose projects must be pursued, whose “intuitions” must be relaunched. Why? This obviously could be due to theoretical and intrinsically mathematical reasons—as is urged by the “Nicolas Bourbaki” group’s arguments—but we could just as well argue that part of the generation that Poincaré had educated were killed in World War I8 and thus could not help his insights to flourish. In the same way, the school of “French epistemology” (in particular with Jean Cavaillès) was destroyed during World War II. And again, Jean Largeault’s9 premature death has probably changed the face of the French reception of Anglo-Saxon philosophy—indeed, by very quickly stigmatizing the idiosyncrasies into which some French analytics could fall, Largeault probably could have attenuated them and given a more fruitful theoretical turn to the clash between traditions.10 In an analogous way, Dominique Janicaud’s11 absence threatens to extremely negatively impact future phenomenology. Briefly, a series of isolated and undeducible facts can

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shatter the philosophical given at any moment and make it continue down one path while it leaves another unexplored. What would the philosophical landscape be like today if Michel Foucault had lived as long as Kant? We cannot say. But these deaths have doubtless blocked otherwise possible paths. To put this in less-metaphorical terms than “a garden of forked paths,” I could show that every foundational moment in the history of philosophy (Plato confronting Parmenides, Descartes confronting Aristotle, Kant confronting Hume, etc.) always embodies a set of questions. Within this constellation of questions, the subsequent tradition will privilege one or two problems that it will set in stone in a corpus of answers. The choice of this or that question will have a number of grounds, rational grounds to be sure, but also others that are contingent and sometimes external to the discipline. The rational reason predominates when a failure to answer the question jeopardizes the discipline itself (Aristotle and the invention of logic as a response to the Sophists). As for the external grounds, they are quite simply a function of historical and ideological contexts. Certain historical events force a given idea if not to be completely altered, at the very least to be redirected. Thus Ernst Cassirer tells how, before the Nazi catastrophe, the various members of the Marburg school were relatively unconcerned about political questions. But driven by the tragic events in Germany, all the survivors brought a consideration of politics to their initially epistemological reflections. In contrast to the neo-Kantians’ relative political disinterest in the 1920s, Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle did not understand their doctrine as separate from their social and political militancy. However this dimension was totally erased precisely because of the context in which it was received, namely the puritan American landscape that could only reject the vehement socialist claims that were expressed in the preface of The Logical Structure of the World. All these reasons are clearly extrinsic to the discipline, but they nonetheless serve to configure it at a given moment—and thus today, too, we intimately depend upon transplants imposed by the murderous madness of history. With these considerations, it seems that the impasse in which a certain current philosophy (one that proclaims its own death) finds itself was born in a fork in the road that left one possible path unexplored—namely, the pursuit of the question of self-reference. This path had been surveyed by German idealism and hidden by our current world with the defamatory curse of “metaphysics.” But this path can be taken by others besides German idealism. For example, as Jocelyn Benoist has said, it could also be the path for phenomenology’s questioning of itself, or even the path of the objections

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that Aristotle made to the ancient rhetoricians, or perhaps even the path of a different Wittgenstein than the one that the American vulgate, magnified by certain French ambassadors, would give us. In this sense, I do not think that we ought to return to Fichte, to Hegel, nor to anyone, but that we ought to decipher and reclaim one possible path among others that will perhaps contribute to improving the landscape and the common garden.12

Interpretation and Argumentation To all these observations about the history of philosophy, I must add what is, in my view, the most conclusive. I said in chapter 5 that a reading and then a reinvestment of a tradition can and must have the extremely precise status of a thought experiment (Gedankenexperiment). Why wouldn’t a reading of Hegel have the same meaning and the same functions as thought experiments like the idea of a dual Earth or the hypothesis of “super-spartans” and “X-worlders”?13 To project oneself into a different system, in contrast to the obvious facts that inundate us, can serve as a dual Earth; from this different Earth, we can better grasp the meaning and the shape of our blinding “obvious facts.” In an article entitled “Philosophie analytique et philosophie continentale,”14 Putnam regrets that one would have to “choose between being a philosopher who makes arguments and a philosopher who loves texts and interprets them”;15 and indeed, it would be best to be done with this opposition—an opposition that would bewilder a Renaissance humanist who argued at the same time as he commented upon texts, who redeployed ideas to better criticize the prejudices of his time, who recalled history to better craft the future. How is argumentation incompatible with interpretation, if not, as Putnam shows, for catastrophic historical reasons (nationalisms and the madness of World War II)? To make the study of the history of philosophy into a thought experiment, to give it the same status and the same place in argumentation as this specific type of reasoning has today in Anglo-Saxon philosophy, makes it possible to overcome the alternative that Putnam decries. Furthermore, the concept of a reading as a Gedankenexperiment makes it possible to escape from the dilemma between historicisms (continuous progress or an inevitable decline) and the idea of “a return to this or that”—from historicism, first of all, because with the reactivation of past systems, we will show that these forms of thought can still suit us; and from any attempt to “return to,” for it is not a matter of ordaining this or

Questioning the History of Philosophy  245

that philosophy, in its entirety, valid to the exclusion of all others. Indeed, no more than Putnam would assert the reality of his twin Earth, the historian of philosophy does not definitively settle within such a system for itself and in itself. I am simply proposing to make interpretation into a ladder allowing us to reach an “other Earth,” from which we can perhaps16 better read the layout of the “first Earth” (interpretation, again) and discuss it (argumentation)—that “other Earth” is formed by the set of philosophical systems that are today considered to be scientifically erroneous, historically outdated, or paradigmatically exhausted. As for “our Earth,” it is constituted by lines of force that bring the most contrary currents together in the same thesis. We have seen the extent to which the theme of the end of philosophy has been one of these lines of force, a line of agreement and not a dividing line, that forges our habitus and from which we should distance ourselves to see to what extent it is possible to think differently. These considerations allow me, in addition, to posit as a hypothesis the possibility of a dialogue between philosophers, that is to say, the possibility of a crossfertilization of theories. This cross-fertilization is equally likely to undermine a vision of a history of philosophy that has come to its completion. Philosophies can mutually respond to one another, can be pollinated through their differences, can be enlightened through their heterogeneous problematics. I have given several glimpses of this practice of cross-fertilization, here as well as elsewhere, particularly in the article “Plaidoyer pour le langage philosophique,”17 by showing, for example, how Austin can make possible a reading of Fichte, and in return how Fichte makes possible a reading of Austin. Indeed, with the conceptual tools that he crafted, Austin makes it possible to revisit the great texts of classic philosophy. The most famous example of this “use of Austin” as a rereading of the tradition is Jaakko Hintikka’s attempt to rethink the Cartesian cogito in performative terms.18 Following Hintikka’s example, I showed how Fichte, in appearance the author who has strayed the furthest from the analytic tradition, can be understood, philosophically and philologically, in terms of Austin’s most groundbreaking categories. But I also showed how, in return, the speculative tradition thus reinterpreted makes it possible to reexamine the field opened by Austin. Can we, like the decipherer of the anamorphosis, put ourselves in the unusual perspective of Austin’s thought to see the pattern formed by Fichte’s thought, and can we, in return,19 put ourselves in the unusual perspective of German speculative thought to discover a new use of Austin? Such is the wager made by the practice of cross-fertilizing authors separated in time, a praxis that, from the simple fact of its real employment, overcomes historicism.

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But, it will be objected, this cross-fertilization of doctrines here takes on the appearance of a suspension of time, in which we act “as if ” the philosophers were strict contemporaries. Doesn’t doing this lead to a joyous but anarchic reinvention of history? We can’t be ironic about this concept of cross-fertilization in saying that if we set aside temporal succession then the possibilities open to historians are most certainly infinite! Simplicius and Kant, Averroës and Hume, Confucius and Wittgenstein, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Rorty—so many possibilities to create hybrids that will give rise to entirely new questions! Thus, the epistemology of the history of philosophy to which this leads would clearly be Feyerabendian, and our theoretical construction would be a fictional composition. We would manipulate the texts to make them answer like a mischievous organ builder who intentionally inverts the keys to produce the most far-fetched sonorous compositions. To answer this objection, I should probably recall that every reactivation of a question is commanded by the state of philosophy at a given moment. I have said that certain possibilities for thought, sketched at certain historical moments, do not have immediate consequences, but their subsequent revival could turn out to be, at a particular moment, vital for the survival of the discipline. Consequently, these revivals bring an urgency that the historian of philosophy has to justify when he chooses to study one author rather than another. Thus, for example, Bouveresse justified his study of analytic philosophy by the state of philosophy in the 1960s, and Rorty justified his defense of Derrida because of American philosophy’s situation at a given moment. Every historian of philosophy or philosopher who revives a tradition does so in the name of a necessity at a moment in the discipline’s history. On this point, with respect to one of the themes of current philosophy— one different from the vital theme of the discipline’s existence, which I’ve examined in this book—I could propose the study of a different tradition than the one I have revived here. For example, for the theme of the psychophysical relation, or more generally, of the nature of the mind, it would be possible to invite one’s reader to travel, for a time, in Descartes’ world. Why Descartes rather than someone else? Because it is clear that within the “philosophy of mind,”20 Descartes holds the position of that which must neither be done nor believed nor thought. His rejection is such that it takes on the appearance, Denis Fisette and Pierre Poirier tell us, of a “veritable obsession.” Indeed, if there is only one common trait among the various currents that Fisette and Poirier include in the constellation of “philosophy of

Questioning the History of Philosophy  247

mind” (behaviorism, neurologism, functionalism, and within these three categories, the three subdivisions of reductionism, eliminativism, and nonreductionism), then it is constituted in this unanimous cry, “Descartes must be destroyed.” As soon as we note that this has crystallized into an “obvious fact,” shouldn’t we, at least for a moment, adopt Descartes’ perspective? We should do so not only to reconstruct what he actually said in contrast to the distressing caricatures that are often presented, but to see what Descartes can tell us, in return, about the stakes involved in a given contemporary thesis, or even about the relevance of a given research program. But, it will be said, how could Descartes, with such an obsolete scientific apparatus and such a distressing metaphysics, tell us anything about the Churchlands’ eliminativist neurologicism or Jerry Fodor’s reductionist functionalism? It is not my task to answer this question here, because it would clearly require an experiment (Gedankenexperiment), and for that I would have to devote more than a few sentences. Nevertheless, to sketch what this possible work would be like, I’ll outline a few contours of this virtual dialogue. Philosophers of mind criticize Descartes’ dualism, but what is this dualism? We know that Descartes begins, in the Meditations, from an epistemological thesis: I can conceive of my thinking without conceiving my body. I can imagine that I have no body at all, or that it is made of glass (or even of Emmental cheese, Putnam suggests), without my idea of thinking being the least affected. From this epistemological premise, Descartes draws an ontological conclusion: body and soul are two substances with different natures. Will it be said that the contemporary programs in philosophy of mind have shown that this is not at all the case? If we want to be precise, we must say that the contemporary programs show us that we cannot move from an epistemological thesis to an ontological one so quickly and immediately. Is that their discovery? It is obviously not the philosophy of mind qua philosophy of mind or the Churchlands’ program qua the Churchlands’ program that rejects the possibility of such an immediate passage from epistemology to ontology. Kant reproached Descartes in the same way, but before him, so did Diderot, Spinoza, etc.—even Leibniz considered the reasoning to be cavalier! From this simple fact, we are entitled to say that the critique of ontological dualism as a contribution to the debate about the definition of mind is not unique to contemporary philosophy of mind. We obviously cannot reduce contemporary developments in philosophy of mind to this simple demonstration, lest we just as quickly hear scoffers say that such expensive programs are hardly justified by such meager results.

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In the same vein, let’s now consider the most widely held view21 today that a psychical activity corresponds to a cerebral trace, and let’s ask which of Descartes’ claims this view challenges. It obviously cannot be about the immortality of the soul, which Descartes certainly improperly concluded from his epistemological experiment—as Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi22 had already noted. Indeed, without committing a paralogism that philosophers are too often reproached for, neurobiologists cannot say that the thesis of cerebral traces challenges the immortality of the soul as such. This latter thesis, like the existence of God, remains beyond truth and falsehood, and, to my knowledge, no current biologist has claimed that parallelism or even causalism has clearly proved that God does not exist. So it is not this one of Descartes’ theses that is invalidated (it is out of play, so to speak) but rather his claim to have made it the object of a proof. With this insight, we come back to the earlier point, namely, that the conclusion that any movement from an epistemological claim to an ontological claim is doubtful is not unique to the philosophy of mind. If that is the only insight that it leads to, this would be incommensurate with the resources invested in these meticulous programs. So that the thesis would radically challenge Cartesian dualism, Descartes would have had to have said that during our terrestrial existence, there is no relation between the body and the soul, or still more precisely, that there are circumstances in which the soul’s movement is not echoed in the body, and vice versa. Does he really say that? The answer is not as obvious as the philosophers of mind who attack Descartes would have it. But, it will be objected, even if Descartes were not the caricature that philosophers of mind sometimes make him out to be, even if he would have said that body and soul are necessarily and always connected during our terrestrial existence, what does all this tell us, in return, about these philosophies of mind? It allows us to situate these claims and to assess their precise contribution with respect to the specific question of the definition of thought. If a thesis, in this case, of the necessary correlation between a psychical event and the cerebral trace, shows the degeneration not of immortality, nor even of dualism, but only of Descartes’ chosen model (or metaphor) of the psychocorporeal relation—in this case, the model of the homunculus—then we can judge that this thesis does not disrupt much at all (in other words, it doesn’t disturb anyone, not even Descartes). This is not at all a value judgment but rather a warning against any attempt to portray as false, from this narrow claim about correlation, any more general claim of Descartes’, and to declare its contrary to be correct. To illustrate this with an example, Paul Broca, who identified an area

Questioning the History of Philosophy  249

of the brain in which lesions will produce aphasia, clearly declared himself in favor of the localization of cerebral functions; however, he maintained the homuncular theory. To dispute the relevance of the homuncular theory by privileging a more holistic and less hierarchical representation of the brain (for example, Diderot’s spiderweb or harpsichord)23 obviously does not boil down to disputing the thesis of localization. And yet one can sometimes have the impression that some philosophers of mind tend to take a minute part for the whole and to conclude, from the fact that a given minuscule point of a system is incorrect, not only that the whole is false but that its contrary is true. I do not mean here to detail this tendency in some contemporary philosophers of mind;24 I only want to illustrate the idea of a theoretical crossfertilization. To analyze a given program of the philosophy of mind today by adopting Descartes’ viewpoint means much more than showing that Descartes did not say this or that. It also means an interrogation of the various theses that a given philosophy of mind actually produces (for example, the end of the homuncular theory, but not a demonstration that all the propositional attitudes of common sense must in the future be understood, by common sense itself, in terms of matrices of synaptic connections in our brain).25 Finally, it also means putting oneself in a position to discuss these theses. In a word, multiplying our angles of vision is a tool that allows us to generate arguments, and this diversity of viewpoints is offered by the history of philosophy. We do not have to “choose between being a philosopher who makes arguments and a philosopher who loves texts and interprets them,” because the former calls for the latter, and the latter authorizes the former. Reading past works makes possible the argumentation that, itself, demands another reading of contemporary works. In this sense, the history of philosophy does not simply “maintain the idea of philosophy as a distinct and autonomous discipline,” it bears witness to and demonstrates it. The history of philosophy demands a shift in our point of view, requires a decentering, calls for a disorientation that will, as Montesquieu would have it, make our gaze sharper.

Conclusion

All the arguments that I have put forward have had but one goal, to answer Jacques Bouveresse’s charge that “the first to wax indignant over Rorty’s proposals” (namely, “that there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline”) would be well advised to find a “more serious justification than what the philosophers in question would agree to provide,”1 in this case, either the simple practice of the history of philosophy or the development of a particular local investigation, both of which dodge the difficulties of the problem. I thus wanted to show how it is possible to understand philosophy without the end of its history and its history without the end of philosophy. To do so, I first analyzed the theme of the end or the death of philosophy. Who defends this position, why, and how are they theoretically consistent? These were my questions in part 1. Beginning from the most pronounced assertions (calls for “anti-” or “post-philosophy,” or even the wish for philosophy’s dissolution in an empirical science), I then analyzed this theme in other guises, less provocative than the first but still positing2 the death of

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the discipline. The theme was circumscribed (in that I am not trying to take a stand on other themes, like the nature of the psychophysical relation, the epistemology of numbers, the meaning of existence, wisdom, or morality) but also foundational, for before taking a stance on wisdom in the face of death, on the ontology of the flesh, on the status of logical universalism or the fecundity of the computational model in the study of the psychophysical relation, we still must respond to those who judge that philosophy no longer has anything to say and only the so-called “hard” sciences, or literature or even religion can speak on such problems. In this sense, Bouveresse is right to call for something other than the untroubled continuation of local practices without ever directly confronting the question of philosophy as an autonomous and distinct discipline. The analysis of the theme of the end of philosophy in its various guises has taught us that it cannot be uttered or argued for in a consistent manner. Indeed, in the course of my examination, I always found the same logical pathology, a pathology that demanded that we challenge the claim that philosophy is dead as a first, autonomous, and distinct discipline. Can we “begin philosophy again,” that is, can we agree to “reground”3 it? For, once again, we cannot accept the current self-refuting stances in which humanity is so finite that it can no longer even find a possible viewpoint from which it could assert that “humanity is finite.” Confronted by these types of self-refutation, I have tried to construct a model capable of overcoming this pathology, namely, the “reflexive a priori,” a principle of self-referentiality that makes it possible to show that philosophy is a distinct, first discipline, endowed with a rigorous method—a redefined and revitalized transcendental argument.4 This challenge to the death of philosophy, through the demonstration of its distinctness and its autonomy, invited us to put the thesis of the end of the discipline into perspective by looking for its source. I found its source in the “race to reference” that characterized not only analytic philosophy since its birth at the beginning of the century but also, beyond Russell and the early Husserl, beyond Bolzano’s realist turn, has marked all the trends since Kant. I thus showed how readings of Kant as different as Helmholtz’s, Cohen’s, and—an astounding paradox— Heidegger’s converge toward the same point where philosophy would have to give itself up, not because of its real exhaustion but because of its narrow focus on the theme of reference to the exclusion of self-reference. Thus, we saw how the most diverse and apparently the most contradictory philosophies can be considered as variations on and from critical philosophy. And so Kant has been, for the two centuries that have just passed,

252  conclusio n

what Aristotle was for the Middle Ages—I obviously do not mean to deny this5 but, on the contrary, to contribute to its demonstration by redirecting these different variations of contemporary philosophy to their source and to the problem from which they spring: the tension between representation and reflection, between reference and self-reference within the Kantian system. Attempting to go beyond this tension, I discovered a principle that, while neither Kantian nor a part of simple formal logic, makes it possible simultaneously to judge the truth value of a philosophical system and to generate positive statements. Beyond this insight, the thesis of a reflexive a priori or a model of self-referentiality also makes it possible to reconsider the history of philosophy, because the theme of the end of philosophy—so widespread today—was historically and philosophically born from a single problem, a single tension, a single question. The model of self-reference makes it all the more possible to overcome, from a well-supported basis, the great oppositions that structure current reflection and thus to escape from the sterile confrontation between Continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophy, as well as to escape from the strange connection that unites positivism and skepticism in a single thought. In a word, the model of self-reference, whose path I have suggested we can reclaim and decipher, is able to help us escape from the age of reference that has led us to the impasses that I have described. In this sense, the model allows us to overcome the ostensible death of philosophy in order to return to an affirmation of its always renewed life.

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Notes

Introduction 1.  Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 5. 2.  Austin, “Performative-Constative,” 42. Philosophy will become “tomorrow perhaps grammar or linguistics. I think that in this way philosophy will overflow more and more widely from its original channel.” 3.  Hösle, Objective Idealism, 4–5. 4.  Descombes, “Something Different,” 67. Here and in the subsequent quotations I have emphasized the terms “France” or “French.” 5.  Schmitz, “Introduction,” 10. 6.  Michaud, “La fin de l’histoire de la philosophie,” 153. 7.  Wolff, “Avant-propos,” 6 (emphasis in original). 8.  The problem of hermeneutics, when it departs from its original theological foundations (that is, when it no longer limits its studies to sacred texts), is (in addition to understanding the status of its practice via the categories of comprehension, etc.) to justify the choice of a given author and a given period. Why interpret Aristotle rather than Descartes, Descartes rather than Hegel, etc.? Apart from the “hermeneutic

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phenomenology” launched by Heidegger (to which I will return), hermeneutics by and large does not seem to have addressed this question, and this is probably why Yves Michaud, with others, considers this laicized exegetical practice to be fruitless and demotes hermeneutics to the rank of the scholarly or, better, French discipline of “the history of philosophy.” 9.  Given this more and more extensive specialization, it is difficult not to recall Nietzsche’s famous passage against the “expert” who would not presume to understand the leech, a subject much too immense for a serious scientist, but only the brain of the leech and more precisely only one part of the leech’s brain (Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathrustra,” 360–63, aphorism 64, part 4, no. 4). 10.  Quine, “Reply to Morton White,” 664–65. 11.  Austin, “Performative-Constative,” 42. 12.  On this point, see Janicaud, Heidegger en France. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the viewpoints of Martial Guéroult, Jules Vuillemin, and Luigi Payerson (for Italy)—that is, the classic history of philosophy—are no longer included in the debates, and discussion about the history of philosophy has definitively crystallized around the question, “Is philosophy the study of a process that has come to its end (metaphysics), or ought it no longer to exist?” The choice is, to put it in blunt terms, Heidegger or Wittgenstein. What’s more, it’s worth noting that the thought of deconstruction is not uniquely French but has had, under the banner of Derrida, a considerable influence in the United States in the past thirty years; on this point, see Cusset, French Theory. 13.  I borrow these three examples from Dominique Janicaud, who describes these authors as “illustrations of the fecundity of the Heideggerian inspiration in the domain of the history of philosophy” (Heidegger en France, 1:497). But I know that Rémi Brague has quite vigorously criticized the Heideggerian interpretation of ancient Greece, particularly the pre-Socratics, in Aristote et la question du monde; and that Jean-Luc Marion has constructed an oeuvre independent of the Heideggerian framework, which he has quite clearly left behind since Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes. 14.  Sterne, Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. 15.  It is as early as paragraph 7 of Being and Time that Heidegger thematizes his “hermeneutic phenomenology.” This practice is indissociable from the task of deconstruction of the ensemble of ontology. On the connections between hermeneutics, phenomenology, and ontology in Heidegger, and the genesis of these connections, see Volpi, “Phenomenology as Possibility.” 16.  Of this instability, which remains inchoate because it is less a question of affirming a thesis than denying the value of a practice, we could evoke certain (but not all) of the texts by Jacques Bouveresse, who, in fact, comments on Wittgenstein; François Rivenc or Philippe de Rouilhan, who comment on Frege, Carnap, and Tarski; or even Pascal Engel, who comments on Frege and Russell, in The Norm of Truth,

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and examines the history of a discipline through his articles in Philosophie et psychologie. Most often, it is a question of a French “manner” of doing Anglo-Saxon philosophy: one produces monographs on Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, or Cavell without ever accepting the idea that this work participates in the same practice as an interpretation of Suarez or Descartes. 17.  Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty,” 131. 18.  Ibid. I will return to Rorty’s view and its assessment by Bouveresse, who takes Rorty to be “one of the most interesting philosophers one can read today” (132). 19.  Ibid., 131 [translation modified]. The philosophers in question are not designated by name, but in the context it is a question of “historians of philosophy”; indeed, Bouveresse writes, “It’s certainly no exaggeration to say that the need to teach the history of the discipline  .  .  . constitutes about the only thing that still justifies the existence of a good number of philosophy departments in French universities . . . [and] is what maintains the idea of philosophy as a distinct and autonomous discipline” (131, emphasis added). In this book, I hope to respond to Bouveresse by conceiving philosophy without the end of its history and its history without the end of philosophy. In confronting this charge—to say how philosophy is still a Fach, a field of knowledge and not merely an institutional vestige (and a typically French one, at that)—we must not be content to declare either that analytic philosophers are doing serious science and that, consequently, commentaries on them constitute doing science, nor, on the other hand, to deny that the episodes in the history of phenomenology de facto add up to doing philosophy. Nor can we be satisfied, in a supposedly middle road, to show how the best Continental philosophers are in fact analytic thinkers who haven’t gone all the way (consider, for example, the separation between the early Husserl, quite close to analytic philosophy, and the later, henceforth incomprehensible because “transcendental”), or, on the other hand, to show that the greatest analytic philosophers are doing deconstruction without realizing it (consider, for example, certain attempts to reinterpret Wittgenstein). To answer this challenge means rather to revive the time when “William James was read just about everywhere, and in particular, by Husserl . . . and by Bergson[; when] Mach was a world-renowned scientific and philosophical figure, and his works were studied and discussed in England, in France, and in Russia[; when] Russell disputed with Poincaré in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale; [when] its founder, Xavier Léon, let Frege know that, since he was struggling to have his philosophical and mathematical articles published in Germany, he was welcome to appear in the pages of the Revue” (Bouveresse, “Une différence sans distinction?” 169). 20.  With respect to the contemporary situation, it is more or less required that one no longer call oneself a “historian of philosophy” because this subdiscipline is considered to be French, useless, and contrary to “true” philosophy. I take a different point of view, which I will justify in the course of this book. In my view, Bouveresse’s challenge is addressed to everyone: to himself as well as others, to commentators of

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ancient thinkers as well as of moderns, to specialists in Greek philology as well as in cognitive science, to partisans of a return to Emerson and Thoreau as well as advocates for a return to Kant. 21.  Let’s briefly recall the origins of Arthur Danto’s thesis: He was led to abandon an analytic model of art criticism in favor of a theory directly inspired by Hegel. This spectacular paradigm shift was precipitated by an event that Danto never ceased to recall: the April 21, 1964, opening of an exhibition by Andy Warhol at the Stable Gallery in New York. In this exposition, Danto was struck by the famous Brillo Box (portraying a box of Brillo brand scouring pads) and by the fact that it was enough for an artist to put this utilitarian object on display in a museum for the object to obtain the status of a work of art (following the example of Marcel Duchamp’s famous ready-mades). Several weeks after having seen this exposition, in an article on aesthetics, Danto developed the thesis of the death of art. (Counter to Danto’s intentions, this article served as a starting point for the “institutional theory” of art, today embodied by George Dickie.) For an analysis of this theme of the death of art, see my chapter on Danto (“Autoréférence et fin de l’art chez Arthur Danto”) in Le concept et le lieu. [See Danto, “Art World.” Dickie cites it as suggesting “the direction that must be taken by any attempt to define ‘art’ ” (Art and the Aesthetic, 28–29). Danto reflects on the importance of Warhol’s Brillo Box for his thinking in “Philosophy and the Criticism of Art,” 6–7.] 22.  By this analogy with the situation of art, I do not mean to put philosophy on the side of art rather than science, nor to begin my analysis with a separation between “literary philosophy” and “scientific philosophy”—a distinction that Bouveresse evokes when he writes that “analytical philosophers are those who would like to make the borders that separate philosophy from science . . . much more fluid and permeable. Heidegger would like to do a similar thing, but he has another type of border in mind: the one separating philosophy from poetry” (“Reading Rorty,” 130). I simply mean that it is unimaginable that an artist today would ignore the theme of the end of art (which has occupied all the art of the twentieth century), whereas, on the other hand, a mathematician is not in the least bothered by the question of the death of his discipline. Likewise, historians of philosophy, who are interpreters in the precise sense that a pianist is an interpreter of a composer, can no longer undertake to “play Descartes” while feigning ignorance of the theme of the death of philosophy. 23.  Clearly, I will return to these labels in the course of the book. Let’s quickly and provisionally say that with François Récanati I mean by “second wave” the movement inaugurated by Wittgenstein and Austin, and by “radicalization of phenomenology” the ensemble of authors who wished to go beyond Husserl. 24.  In taking up philosophers as different as Quine, Austin, Levinas, and Habermas, to cite only the most obviously distant, I am clearly not claiming to discuss anything close to all their arguments but simply to analyze their views on the question posed by Bouveresse (“philosophy as autonomous and distinct”) and to see if their positions on this point entail aporias and why.

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25.  Klein, Form and Meaning, 138. 26.  Apparently because a more careful examination of the details shows, for example, that the objects are all broken. 27.  It would obviously take too long to review all the identifications that have been made for what was finally called a “cuttlefish bone” and what is nothing other than an ellipsoidal spot. 28.  I borrow this expression from Karl-Otto Apel. He writes, “A reflexive deficit came about which could be characterized as a forgetting of logos. Clearly we should not understand the term ‘logos’ here in the Heideggerian and Derridian sense of the availability of Being in presence, that is, in the sense of ‘Gestell’; rather we should understand a much broader logos like that presupposed and called for by communicative understanding” (Apel, “Meaning Constitution and Justification of Validity,” 119 [translation modified]). My entire purpose in this book will be—in agreement with Apel—to analyze this “reflexive deficit” at the heart of contemporary thought, but also—on this point in disagreement with Apel—to show that this “forgetting of logos” is a concealment of self-reference and not merely a “forgetting of communicative understanding.” Apel’s philosophy will be discussed at length in chapter 4. 29.  According to Leonard Linsky in his book Referring. Analytic philosophy is constituted, built, and developed around the question of reference. 30.  Clearly, I will come back to these attempts at “naturalization.” For now, remember simply (to adopt Ruwen Ogien’s ironic report) that nowadays “hardly a week passes without a scientist or a philosopher proposing to naturalize something: ontology, intentionality, meaning, epistemology, ethics, the normative . . . Only naturalization itself seems to have escaped the naturalists’ enthusiasms!” (Le rasoir de Kant, 28). 31.  As Jacques Bouveresse put it, commenting on the different traits of the Continental/analytic opposition (for example, in “Une différence sans distinction?” 163ff.), historicism characterizes the so-called “Continental” thought (Heidegger and the deconstructivists), whereas naturalism is rather characteristic of contemporary “analytics” (Quine, certainly, but also philosophers as different as Stanley Cavell and Jerry Fodor).

1. Skeptical and Scientific “Post-philosophy” 1.  I borrow this expression from Descombes, “Something Different,” 57, to designate all those who call, in an explicit and demanding way, for the abandonment of philosophy or, in Rorty’s terms, the accession of “antiphilosophy” or “the postphilosophical era.” 2.  Following common usage in history as well as philosophy, I will speak of philosophy since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (the French Revolution, for historians) as “contemporary philosophy” and refer to work by living, or very recently deceased, philosophers as “current philosophy.”

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3.  This is Jacques Bouveresse’s description of Rorty’s view, in “Reading Rorty,” 131. 4.  Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (henceforth CP), xxxvii. 5.  Ibid., xxv. 6.  Ibid., xvii. 7.  Post-analytic Philosophy. All the authors in this collection do not necessarily illustrate all the traits that I am about to describe. These traits are most particularly Rortyian, even if, as Rajchman notes in his long introductory essay, Arthur Danto and even Stanley Cavell, Harold Bloom, and Ian Hacking share several of these views. I have chosen Rorty because, within the postanalytic nebula, he has most insisted on the “necessary end of philosophy.” 8.  Récanati, La transparence et l’énonciation, 95. 9.  On this point, see Récanati, “La philosophie analytique.” 10.  John Rajchman uses this term among others in his discussion of “postanalytic thought” or “contemporary American thought,” writing that pragmatism is “at the center of an uncompleted revolution in the very nature of philosophy” (Post-analytic Philosophy, xi). He is characterizing Rorty’s view. [The French title of this book is Pensée américaine contemporaine, or “contemporary American thought.”] 11.  Rorty considered himself to be the spearhead of this postanalytic movement, which he combines with American pragmatism, a pragmatism that he opposes to all of philosophy, whether analytic, Cartesian, Platonic, or transcendental; see, for example, his introduction to CP, significantly titled “Pragmatism and Philosophy.” He proposes a “post-philosophical” culture, thus annexing American pragmatism to what he also calls “antiphilosophy,” in the fifth section of this introduction. 12.  Descombes, “Something Different,” 57 (emphasis added). 13.  Nevertheless, this “restoration” movement goes well beyond Rorty alone. As Jean-Pierre Cometti notes in his introduction to Lire Rorty, “we are currently witnessing a process of this kind,” namely, “reviving an authentically American philosophy” (12n8). In his preface to Post-analytic Philosophy, John Rajchman reveals a worry that Cavell’s return to Emerson or Rorty’s return to Dewey might give birth to “an official nationalism” (xxvii) that would be nothing but a reduction of philosophy to the standards of “American commercialism” (performance, efficiency, management), which Bertrand Russell himself saw Dewey as enacting. 14.  Rorty, CP, xliii. 15.  Ibid., xv. 16.  “Eradication” is a recurrent term in Rorty’s texts. It is not a question of transforming or ameliorating but of eradicating the philosophical habitus of humanity to come. 17.  Rorty, CP, xlii. 18.  Ibid., 52.

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19.  Ibid., 53. It is clearly not within the scope of my project to evaluate whether or not Rorty misinterprets Dewey. That being the case, the connections between pragmatism, skepticism, and the return to the ordinary can be found, in fact, in many American thinkers. 20.  Ibid., xxv. 21.  On “relativism” as a description of Rorty’s thought, see Hilary Putnam, “Part Two: Relativism,” in Realism with a Human Face, 18–29. [This part of the essay was translated into French as “Richard Rorty et le relativisme,” in Lire Rorty, 127–43.] Rorty has rejected the term “relativist” in the classic sense, but, like Putnam, one has difficulty seeing what other general category one could use apart from radical skepticism. Stanley Cavell, unlike Rorty, embraces the term “skepticism” and “in the work of Emerson and Thoreau Cavell finds a skepticism which would be the American counterpart to Heidegger’s return to the everyday life world and Wittgenstein’s return to ordinary language” (Rajchman, Post-analytic Philosophy, xvi–xvii.). 22.  Which explains his willingness to be linked to Heidegger. See the chapter “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey” in CP. 23.  Rorty, CP, xxxi. 24.  Ibid., xxviii. 25.  On this point, Jean-Pierre Cometti spontaneously defines American pragmatism with these three negative terms. He writes, “in support of pragmatism (that is to say, of antifoundationalism, antiessentialism, and antirepresentationalism)” (Lire Rorty, 13 [12n8]). He summarizes in one phrase the specifications that Rorty has given throughout his work. 26.  Before this work (published in 1979), Rorty had edited The Linguistic Turn in 1967, coedited Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos in 1973 (Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum), and published numerous articles and reviews, notably on John Dewey, Wilfred Sellars, Nelson Goodman, P. F. Strawson, and Wittgenstein. 27.  Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (henceforth PMN), 3. 28.  Analytic philosophy, Rorty tells us from the very first pages of PMN, “fits within the traditional Cartesian-Kantian pattern” (9). One might be surprised to see analytic philosophy characterized by the term “representationalism,” since representation seems to appertain to classical philosophy (Descartes, Kant), from which analytic philosophy distinguished itself with the term “proposition” or “statement.” In fact, Rorty shows this distinction to be superficial, for (this is the key idea) a proposition is true because it “refers to something outside of the mind.” On this view, the crux of the matter in analytic philosophy is the question of reference, which could be translated, without difficulty in Rorty’s eyes, into the language of classical philosophy: “Does something (i.e., the referent) correspond to our representations (i.e., propositions, utterances, etc.)?” François Récanati, too, takes up the term “representationalism” in

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speaking of Russell and Carnap; for further analysis of Récanati on this point, see my Critique de la représentation, 9. 29.  For example, Rorty judges that analytic philosophy can be characterized as “ignorant,” “intolerant,” and “empty technicality.” They are “ignorant,” he tells us, because analytic philosophers are unacquainted with the twenty-five-century history of philosophy and are instead faithful to “American professionalization”: “Graduate study in philosophy in most American philosophy departments is largely a matter of going over the publications of the last ten or twenty years in order to get the background necessary for throwing oneself into the ‘hot topics’ of the last one or two years—the topics currently being discussed on the preprint circuit” (“Response to Jacques Bouveresse,” 147). They are “intolerant” because analytic philosophers exclude everything Continental, as illustrated by an imagined analytic’s response to Gadamer or Heidegger or Derrida, “Well, as a trained philosopher, I can tell good from bad philosophy, and this stuff is bad” (ibid., 148). And, finally, analytic philosophy is guilty of “empty technicality” because, resorting to an abstruse symbolism solely in order to imitate the so-called hard sciences, the analytic philosopher no longer questions his technical tricks and thus sinks into unintelligibility and obscurity. It is amusing and significant to note that Bouveresse reproaches Continental philosophers for the exact same faults (ignorance, intolerance, and unintelligibility)! 30.  “Linguistic turn” is in English in the original.—trans. 31.  On Searle, see “Is There a Problem About Fictional Discourse?” in CP. A problem can be posed for a theory of reference that maintains that whatever can be referred to is true—raising a question about utterances such as, “Sherlock Holmes was born in England” or any other “representation without an object.” From an analysis of this problem and a brief survey of its history (Meinong, Russell), Rorty shows how Searle—and not just Searle but every known position in analytic philosophy— remains a prisoner of “representationalism.” 32.  “Epistemology Naturalized.”—trans. 33.  It seems to me that this is the stance of both Jacques Bouveresse and Vincent Descombes in Lire Rorty. Neither brings up Rorty’s all-the-way-down thoroughness. Bouveresse, for example, taking up the idea that “democracy is superior to philosophy,” does not want to see that Rorty, because he is consistent, will not say that democracy is better as such but insofar as it is his current view. If tomorrow history brings it to pass that the entire world accedes to the idea of totalitarianism, then the “democrat” will not be able to critique it from a supposedly “better” point of view. To put it more precisely, Bouveresse fully sees that one of the consequences of pragmatism is to call into question every—even a minimal—notion of truth and every—even “motivational”—realism, and he states his disagreement with Rorty on these points. On the other hand, on values like democracy, he seems to attribute to Rorty the idea that there is a better value than totalitarianism. But there cannot be better values in pragmatism as Rorty understands it, just as there couldn’t be a better argument nor any hierarchies

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on any topic. With the same tendency to soften Rorty’s radicality, Descombes wants to believe that the philosophy that Rorty means to be rid of is “excessive generalization, radical but also verbal questioning, substitution of personal exaltation for the obligation of solidarity” (Lire Rorty, 58). But Rorty (who, described here by Descombes, is a small figure of Continental romantic philosophy) does not wish to part with “this” or “that” philosophy but all philosophy. This radicality is intrinsic to Rorty and must not be “sugarcoated” if we want to truly characterize his position. 34.  Rorty, CP, xlii. Rorty quotes from Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism. A slightly different translation of this remark can be found on p. 36 of the 2007 Yale University Press edition.—trans. 35.  Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” 234. Putnam notes that “the situation is complicated, because cultural relativists usually deny that they are cultural relativists” (235). He adds, “I count Richard Rorty as a cultural relativist, because his explicit formulations are relativist ones” (235). In fact, as we have already seen, Rorty’s position is indeed to say that there is no truth, no superior point of view, and no arguments that are better than others—whatever we may call his position, there is no doubt about its substance. Like Putnam, we thus must answer affirmatively the question, “Is Rorty trapped in the same bind as the Relativist, then?” (Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 24). 36.  Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism.” 37.  Rorty, CP, xliii. 38.  Ibid., xxx. Rorty uses expressions such as “the pragmatist must,” “it is necessary,” “he refuses to accept,” “we must accept this tough language,” etc., all too frequently for me to cite them all. Similarly, there is a vast number of statements of the sort “x is wrong to say that . . . ,” or “he is mistaken to think that . . . ,” or even claims like “Wittgenstein has shown us . . . ,” or “we have known since Wittgenstein . . .” We could try to do an experiment in which we cross out all the expressions or assertions that lead Rorty into the trap of performative contradiction. 39.  Rorty’s historicism clearly doesn’t take the systematic form of Hegelianism nor, it seems, Heidegger’s futural form, even if Rorty very often congratulates Heidegger for his “historicism.” For Rorty, this recourse to history is in fact the consequence of contingency. The future is contingent and we do not know it, but it alone will decide between this or that position. To return to the example already discussed, if fascism reigns tomorrow, history will have agreed with it, and no democrat will be able engage a resistance by claiming to have stronger arguments or a “better” viewpoint. 40.  With Récanati and, clearly, Apel, I make no distinction between a pragmatic and a performative contradiction—it is in both cases a contradiction between the statement and the utterance. We will come back to this later. 41.  As Apel has remarked, there are many who have no other objection to the argument that they engage in a performative contradiction than that they are tired of

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hearing this argument again and again! Notwithstanding that the fact that an argument is already known seems to give no indication of its falsehood, it seems that if we mean to insist on this logical pathology—certainly recognized since antiquity, as Putnam notes, who finds it in Rorty and Quine—this is because, as I will show, it runs insistently throughout contemporary philosophy. So it seems to me that it is time to ask why. How is it at this point that an error of this kind (contradiction between a statement and its utterance) could be perennial? Why, moreover, are we witnessing today its unprecedented resurgence? What stage of discursive thought are we at that self-refutation could become a quasi-systematic feature? These are my questions. So it is not a question of raising an unheard of argument, never before raised by anyone, against Rorty or Levinas, but of interrogating the exact structure of a logical pathology and of understanding (in part 2) the bearing, form, and contents of a way of thinking that would make the rejection of this performative contradiction one of philosophy’s express tasks. 42.  Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 24. 43.  In this context, it is clear that “the pragmatist” refers to Rorty himself. This curious particularity of his writing seems to me to be one more indication of Rorty’s uncomfortable discursive position, but since I don’t need this supplemental argument in order to portray his attitude, I mention the phrase only in passing. 44.  Rorty, CP, xxxvii. 45.  Ibid., xviii. 46.  See, for example, CP, 222: “We can only do what lawyers do—provide an argument for whatever our client has decided to do, make the chosen cause appear the better.” 47.  Following Richard Bernstein (“Faire la part”), one can indeed point out this very “preachy” and “moralistic” side of Rorty. In his texts, there is virtually always discussion of the “arrogance” of the West—or of philosophy always mixed up in the same opprobrium—of its brutality, its failure to care for the weak, of the commercialized greed of the American middle class, etc. 48.  Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” 246. 49.  Which could be done as well. For example, the framing of pragmatism as “anti-” presupposes at a minimum that the objectionable positions (“essentialism,” “representationalism,” and “foundationalism”) are not Don Quixote’s windmills. 50.  In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (henceforth CIS) and elsewhere. In the same vein, see the article “Nietzsche: Un philosophe pragmatique.” [This is an expanded version of “On Bloom’s Nietzsche.”] 51.  Rorty, CIS, 136. 52.  “Rorty’s charitable readings of authors like Heidegger and Derrida do carry evident drawbacks: such readings run the risk of considerably relativising their philosophical importance and of confirming the suspicions . . . [and] above all, . . . reinforcing the already widespread conviction that, in regards to these matters, everything

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is a simple question of subjective attraction, indifference or distaste” (Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty,” 134). 53.  With the notable exception of very rare French analytic philosophers who do not consider Rorty to be part of “serious” or “professional” analytic philosophy and therefore think he should not be discussed at all, the philosophical world has always recognized Rorty’s importance. Rorty is extensively discussed by the most important philosophers, including—to give only a brief outline—Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank in Germany; and, in the Anglophone countries, apart from Hilary Putnam, whom we’ve already discussed, Donald Davidson (“Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”), who even claims agreement with Rorty on certain points. See also Nancy Fraser’s intervention in the same volume [“Solidarity or Singularity?”; also in Fraser, Unruly Practices]. I can also cite Thomas McCarthy, “Private Irony and Public Decency” [a revised version published as “Philosophy and Social Practice: Richard Rorty’s ‘New Pragmatism,’ ” in Ideals and Illusions, 11–34] and Bernstein’s important piece (“Faire la part de ce qui sépare Rorty et Habermas et se situer dans l’entre-deux”), which situates Rorty in the category of “skeptical moralists” and tells us that “the more [Rorty] insists upon the irreducibility of incommensurable vocabularies, the more he  .  .  . seems trapped in ‘performative contradictions’” (18). See also Saatkamp, Rorty and Pragmatism. In France, apart from the authors already mentioned, I would cite Claudine Tiercelin (“Un pragmatisme conséquent?”), who even writes that “Peircian reflection lacks a political and historical dimension, a dimension that Rorty deserves credit for reintroducing, at the risk of appearing frankly unfashionable.” 54.  Laugier, Recommencer la philosophie, 19–20. 55.  On my reading, a certain current philosophical configuration (notably in the mode of naturalism) goes back to Hermann von Helmholtz’s views. I mean no slander in this—Helmholtz was a great scientist as well as a great philosopher, too little studied in my opinion—but these various “positivist” thinkers generally do not even think of referring to Helmholtz, who was nevertheless the veritable founder of the current naturalist movement. 56.  Let’s recall the goal: it is a matter “of constructing a new science of the phenomena constitutive of our psycho-biological apparatuses and the interactions between these apparatuses and our behaviors—including their highly symbolic forms such as languages and cultures” (Vignaux, Les sciences cognitives). 57.  On “naturalism,” see—apart from W. V. O. Quine’s famous article “Epistemology Naturalized,” to which I will return—Pascal Engel’s definition in Philosophie et psychologie: “A naturalized epistemology aims to define the notion of knowledge, which is an essentially normative notion, in natural terms—that is, in terms of processes that are causal, psychological, neurophysiological, biological, or otherwise determinable by the natural sciences” (340). The most “radical” form of naturalism is that “there is nothing but these psychological, neurophysiological or biological descrip-

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tions of these causal processes implying a relationship between the sensory stimuli and an exterior environment . . . This radical naturalism simply denies that there is an autonomous philosophical discipline that could be called ‘epistemology’ or ‘theory of knowledge’ ” (345). It is difficult to put forward a typology of the different forms of naturalism since “programs of naturalization” “are fashionable at the moment” (Ogien, Le rasoir de Kant, 128). 58.  By this term we clearly must understand the last thirty years of what Anglophones term “philosophy of mind” [In English in the original], which “designates, in a first approximation, the field of philosophy concerned with the nature of mental phenomena and their manifestations” (Fisette and Poirier, Philosophie de l’esprit [henceforth PEEL], 11). I will return to this point, of course. 59.  Bourdieu calls for sociology to break with “both terms of the epistemological couple formed by logicist dogmatism and relativism,” in which, in his view, sociology has been trapped in recent years (Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 3). This suggests that the swings between relativism and scientism that we will see here in philosophy are also happening in the human sciences. 60.  Fichte is the author most cited and most esteemed by Helmholtz, who sees him not only as the apogee of true criticism as far as the theory of knowledge is concerned but also as a harbinger, with his theory of perception, of a number of discoveries in physiology. 61.  As Daniel Andler notes in “Calcul et représentation,” it is a matter in this context of a “reduction of biology to physics” (17n2). As he also notes, at the current time, this reduction is desired rather than realized, programmatic rather than effective. This is clearly also the case for all the versions of scientism that I’ve mentioned here. 62.  It is not an innocent fact that mathematics is today no longer a candidate for supremacy, as it could be in Descartes’ era—in my view, this is an index of scientism’s growth. Indeed, when (in the Discourse on Method and not the Meditations) Descartes considered mathematics as the paradigm of truth, he took up its methods (the distinction of clear and distinct ideas, etc.) and not its contents (to give one example, he did not take up the concept of a figure to explicate the passions or thought). But this is not the case for those who assert biology as the paradigm for all truth, to the extent that not only the methods but also the contents of the concepts themselves (genes, natural selection, cerebral processes) are taken up by philosophers, who therefore work as biologists and not merely as taking inspiration from its methods. 63.  On the difficulty of translating Aufbau, see the French translator’s notes on the 1928 text (La construction logique du monde). [The German title is Der logische Aufbau der Welt, the English title is The Logical Structure of the World; Aufbau is translated into French as “construction” and into English as “structure.”] 64.  This is the famous 1932 text “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache.” This theme, as has been noted many times, is also to be found in Heidegger; see Soulez, “ ‘Que reste-t-il.’ ”

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65.  Galison, “Constructing Modernism.” 66.  Carnap, Logical Structure of the World, xviii. 67.  Barberousse, “Le présupposé de la science achevée.” Barberousse writes, “I will try to show that if we follow the consequences of this presupposition of a completed science, we will arrive, perhaps unexpectedly, at a tightly closed system similar to that of the Hegelian Absolute Knowledge” (95). 68.  Feigl, “Unity of Science.” 69.  Jacob, “Le problème du rapport du corps,” 421, where he analyses the “reductionist materialism” developed “in the middle of the century by Herbert Feigl, U. T. Place, and J. J. C. Smart.” “Reductionist materialism,” he tells us, “anticipates the identification of the mental states of ordinary psychology and cerebral states on the model of the following scientific identifications: [1] Water is a liquid composed of H2O molecules. [2] A body’s temperature = the average kinetic energy of the molecules that constitute it. [3] Lightning = an electrical discharge” (422). 70.  See, for example, Fisette and Poirier in their preface to PEEL. 71.  As a general rule, evolutionary theory in economics is defined by its reference to either Darwinian or Lamarckian biology. 72.  “Firms” refers to all businesses with an economic aim. 73.  Nelson and Winter write, “Our use of the term ‘evolutionary theory’ to describe our alternative to orthodoxy also requires some discussion. It is above all a signal that we have borrowed basic ideas from biology” (Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, 9). In economics, the term “orthodox” refers to Milton Friedman’s theses and more generally to neoliberalism. 74.  Ibid., 11 (emphasis in original). 75.  I use this expression to differentiate those for whom the models are metaphors and those for whom they are realities. My task is not at all to take up these positions, and even less to enter into a debate on the role of “analogy” in different disciplines, but simply to examine how (methodologically or ontologically?) a model is used. 76.  Hodgson, “Mystery of the Routine,” 366 (emphasis added). This analysis of Hodgson, as well as all my analysis of economists (see the subsequent discussion of Herbert Simon) is based upon the work of Claude Parthenay, in particular his doctoral dissertation “Théorie de la firme,” as well as his book Vers une refondation de la science économique?. He and I coauthored the article “Science économique et philosophie des sciences.” I thank him for allowing me to present some of our analyses and conclusions here. 77.  Hodgson, “Mystery of the Routine,” 367 (emphasis added). 78.  Ibid. (emphasis in original). 79.  In English in the original.—trans. 80.  Hodgson, “Hidden Persuaders,” 167 (emphasis added). 81.  Imbert, “Neurosciences et sciences cognitives,” 54.

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82.  Within the philosophy of mind PEEL establishes the following typology: behaviorism, neurologism, and functionalism. Furthermore, within each of these categories are three subclasses: reductionism, nonreductionism, and eliminativism. See the table summarizing these divisions on p. 139. 83.  Jean Delacour, Une introduction aux neurosciences cognitives (Brussels: De Boeck Université, 1998), 27. 84.  Delacour writes that we must “conceive their relation in terms of equivalence, of correspondence, rather than causality” (ibid.). 85.  Even if Diderot admitted the following: “We must all agree on this: the organization or coordination of inert parts most certainly does not produce sentience. Secondly, the presence of universal sentience in all molecules of matter is only a supposition, and a supposition of which the whole strength is derived from the difficulties from which it extricates us; and in good philosophy, that is not enough” (“Refutation of the Work of Helvetius,” 285). 86.  In D’Alembert’s Dream, Diderot compares the brain to a harpsichord, in which the philosopher is not to be understood as a pilot driving the instrument but rather as the instrument itself. The philosopher is simultaneously both the musician and the musical instrument. 87.  Recall that Descartes thought that the union of body and soul was located in the pineal gland. This led to the idea of a seat of representations, that some sort of homunculus orchestrated. Diderot, with his idea of the musician-instrument, rejected this “localist” model. 88.  I have said that Fisette and Poirier (PEEL) use a typology of three classes, each subdivided into three subclasses: eliminativism, as its name suggests, consists of “eliminating” the terms of a relation. Thus if the question is to know the relationship between physiology and intention, then one could understand the relation as a parallelism (there are physiological states and intentional states), or a causalism (physiology is the cause of intentions), or rather one could reduce one of the terms to the other by eliminating intention. This appears in the present case as the following: the day will come when we will no longer need our current psychology, which thinks in terms of propositional attitudes (i.e., in terms of belief and desire as in “I believe that I am hungry, I desire to eat”), but we will think directly in neurological terms such as, “Fiber c has activated, neurological type z responds”). In sum, someday we will view our states as we look at an ultrasound on the monitor. 89.  Ibid., 147. 90.  Ibid., 146. This concerns all forms of eliminativism, whether behaviorist (Quine), neurological (Paul and Patricia Churchland), or functionalist (Fodor). 91.  Indeed, the second proposition borders on the truism that says that the species that are best adapted are those that are least badly adapted. 92.  Ogien, Le rasoir de Kant, 128.

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93.  This is what I understand Denis Fisette and Pierre Poirier to be doing in defining their “moderated naturalism” in opposition to a “strong naturalism,” even though their position is not, in my view, particularly “naturalist.” They write that “Moderated naturalism must thus explain how the conceptual scheme necessary to establish philosophical knowledge is sufficiently distinguished from that of science to not be reducible to the latter (in which case it would defend a strong naturalism) while at the same time being sufficiently close to that of science that the two conceptual schemes could entertain the relationships of mutual influence posed by its naturalism” (PEEL, 125). This definition could be applied to any nonnaturalist philosophical project, including the Cartesian project, and is thus so vast that it isn’t clear why the position is termed “naturalist” rather than something else. The naturalism that I am about to consider can in fact be defined as what Fisette and Poirier here call “strong naturalism.” 94.  Ogien, Le rasoir de Kant, 129. 95.  Ibid., 129–30 (emphasis in original). 96.  Ibid., 130 (emphasis in original). 97.  Quine uses both these phrases in “Epistemology Naturalized,” 90. 98.  Ibid., 82. 99.  Fisette and Poirier note this character trait of contemporary “philosophy of mind.” In this literature, Descartes is the devil himself and the very example of what must neither be said nor believed. I will come back to Descartes’ current paradoxical status (he has, negatively, fathered every claim of contemporary naturalism), but be that as it may, naturalism has historically defined itself in contrast to the Cartesian position. It thus wouldn’t be possible to dub as “naturalist” a position that Descartes would have been the first to advocate, unless we were to say that the “naturalism” that has been introduced as a break with all classical philosophy is in fact its continuation. The only philosopher who could deny science has any impact on philosophy or philosophy on the sciences (“mutual influence”) would surely be Heidegger—that is, the only philosopher who shares the scientists’ view of the death of philosophy! 100.  Laugier, “Présentation de W. V. Quine,” 33. 101.  PEEL, 100. 102.  Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” 82. 103.  PEEL, 102. Fisette and Poirier rightly insist on a feature of Quine’s philosophy that some of his numerous commentators have tended to pass over in silence, namely, that Quine is one of the most radically scientistic philosophers of the entire analytic movement. Considering several parameters for defining the different degrees of naturalism, Fisette and Poirier show how Quine always fits in the category termed “radical.” 104.  Ibid., 146. On intentional and extensional statements, and on Quine’s view that only the latter correspond to the criterion of scientism and thus nonextensional statements constitute a “trademark of non-scientism,” see chap. 5.

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105.  Behaviorism was initiated by the psychologist John B. Watson, who studied animal behavior in terms of stimulus-response and wanted to show that the psychic phenomena of consciousness or the so-called interior life were reducible to external stimulus behavior and response. This theory is at the origin of materialist and determinist theories of meaning for which language is an ensemble of reactions to nonlinguistic stimuli determined by external stimuli. B. F. Skinner and Quine are the principal representatives of what Fisette and Poirier also term “eliminativist behaviorism.” 106.  Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” 82–83. 107.  Thus Noam Chomsky could demonstrate, contra B. F. Skinner, that to learn a language is not at all a conditioned response to an identified stimulus of our environment. The behaviorist project’s failure has now been established by many others. 108.  Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 114. 109.  See in particular two articles: “Das Problem der phänomenologischen Evidenz im Lichte einer transzendentalen Semiotik” and “Transcendental Semiotics and the Paradigms of First Philosophy.” 110.  Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” 242. I will not take up Putnam’s argument in full. I cite him here simply to indicate that I am clearly not the first to have noticed the tensions in Quine’s thought. Many authors have taken up, for example, the tension between a proven skepticism and the strictest scientism. This tension or contradiction between “what Quine says here” and “what Quine says elsewhere” explains how he can be claimed by two opposed camps of contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy, namely Rorty, the skeptic, and Paul and Patricia Churchland, initiators of what Fisette and Poirier term the “eliminativist neurologism,” and who are currently the best examples of the most extreme scientism. 111.  PEEL, 146, about Quine. 112.  Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” 243 (emphasis in original). 113.  Ibid., 243–44 (emphasis in original). Putnam adds here, “It may be, also, that I have just got Quine wrong. Quine would perhaps reject the notions of ‘right assertibility’, ‘intended model’, and so on. But then I just don’t know what to make of this strain in Quine’s thought.” 114.  Quine, Pursuit of Truth, 55. 115.  Laugier, L’anthropologie logique de Quine, 173. 116.  I make this argument because one could reply that Quine would perhaps be willing to accept self-contradiction, and that only an exterior point of view—for example, a certain conception of reflexivity—could be concerned to see this kind of contradiction appear in a system. We will return, in the next chapter, to the position that consists in claiming the right to performative contradiction. In the meantime, I will only point out, with this example, that for every thinker, including those as well versed in pragmatism as Laugier, it is disturbing that a series of propositions would assert both one thing and its opposite at the same time and in the same sense.

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117.  Laugier, L’anthropologie logique de Quine, 270. It is Laugier who employs the term “system” in reference to Quine’s philosophy (13). 118.  I’m speaking here of Rorty insofar as he endorses Derrida’s claims, since I haven’t examined deconstruction except through him. 119.  Unless one were to embrace this contradiction and claim to “desire incoherence”—this is a stance that we will discuss in the next chapter and is not held by the authors I’ve discussed so far. 120.  Quine, “Replies,” 318; quoted in Laugier, L’anthropologie logique de Quine, 178. 121.  Once again, in “Epistemology Naturalized,” Quine wants to do away with any idea of a theory of knowledge and transform it into a chapter of psychology. 122.  Rorty, PMN, 372. 123.  That is, contrary to the current trend, a philosophy, independent of the sciences of physics, mathematics, etc., that need make no reference to them in order to claim to speak the truth. 124.  See Pitch of Philosophy, 3: “The arrogance of philosophy is not one of its best kept secrets.” The phrase does not necessarily have a moralistic connotation, but it is nonetheless revealing of philosophy’s position in Cavell’s eyes.

2. “Saying and the Said”: Two Paradigms for the Same Subject 1.  Critique de la représentation. 2.  Chalier, “L’idolâtrie de l’être,” 89. On the problem of idolatry, see Jean-Luc Marion, especially Idol and Distance. Olivier Boulnois adopts the same perspective of “critique of representation.” This style of critique of representation clearly has its source in Heidegger’s philosophy. 3.  Récanati, La transparence et l’énonciation, 95. 4.  I associate the critique of philosophy with critique of representation because the authors that I shall look at do so, but I have shown in Critique de la représentation that representation can be overcome while simultaneously preserving philosophy. Briefly put, I have shown that moving from critique of representation to critique of philosophy does not have a happy outcome. 5.  As Sandra Laugier ironically remarks, some of her French analytic colleagues have adopted the habit of setting themselves up as “victims” of a malevolent fate and of a grievous epoch (Du réel à l’ordinaire, 17.) In their eyes, Anglo-Saxon philosophy is vilified, scorned, and quite simply ignored in France. If this claim was accurate in the 1960s and 1970s—that is, at the time when Bouveresse introduced Wittgenstein into a landscape describable as either structuralist or Heideggerian—it is now more than forty years later, however, and analytic philosophers cannot continue to take on the airs of condemned philosophers. As early as 1980, Jean Largeault noted, with a humor that his analytic successors have often lacked, “As a new panacea, analytic phi-

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losophy has supplanted Marxism. I miss Marxism. This is a new act in a bad play” (Quine, 179). He summarizes the struggle between paradigms as follows: “In France, two sorts of epistemology are struggling for primacy: the grotesque (that of literary hacks and similar types) and the boring (neopositivism or Popperianism). I prefer the grotesque  .  .  . Here, logicians and analytic epistemologists like to underscore how different they are from other philosophers. The bulk of their work consists in putting down the others’, by invoking precision and rigor . . . My feeling is that it would be better to opt for the others, because they might, by chance, discover a hidden treasure, which won’t happen with the first” (180). I won’t take sides here between the “grotesque” and the “boring,” fertile confusion and sterile precision, but I would like to quote these passages from the most important figure to introduce Quine to France, to show how surprising it is, twenty-five years later, that certain French analytics not only continue to scorn the Continentals but, moreover, continue to pose as martyrs even though, as Largeault noted, analytic philosophers had “supplanted” the Continentals as early as 1980. 6.  In English in the original.—trans. 7.  Austin preferred “linguistic phenomenology” to this expression. Be that as it may, its task is to investigate our ordinary usage of various expressions in various contexts—we ought rather to answer the question, “What are we doing when we say that . . . ?” instead of the Platonic question, “Ti esti?” “What is . . . ?” 8.  For Austin, we are not mistaken when we say that a stick bends when put in water. Ordinary language describes what we perceive without wondering about allegedly deceitful appearances. Appearances are visible and ordinary language conveys them accurately. On this canonical example of the classic dispute about realism, see, for example, How to Do Things with Words (henceforth HTW), 3 and 12. “The stick that looks bent in water . . . is far too familiar a case to be properly called a case of illusion” (Sense and Sensibilia, 26). See also Kim Sang Ong-Van-Cung, “L’‘argument d’illusion.’ ” 9.  As François Récanati terms it in La transparence et l’énonciation (95); he characterizes Wittgenstein and Austin as the originators of the second wave. 10.  An expression favored by Austin to evoke the tradition’s most important error; see, among many other examples, HTW, 3. 11.  Austin uses this term rather frequently to describe the break that he is making with earlier approaches. See, for example, HTW, 3 (“it cannot be doubted that they are producing a revolution in philosophy”), as well as Philosophical Papers, 234 (“they have effected, nobody could deny, a great revolution in philosophy”). 12.  On this switch at the heart of HTW—from a bifurcation to the view that every utterance is an act and the division of this act into three subcategories—see, among others, François Récanati’s commentary in the section entitled “Performative Versus Constative: Austin’s Critique of His Earlier View” in Meaning and Force, 67–70. 13.  “In the light of the more general theory we now see that what we need is a list of illocutionary forces of an utterance” (HTW, 149–50).

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14.  In English in the original.—trans. 15.  I cannot declare, “The meeting is in session,” under any circumstances or in any context—for example, by myself deep in a forest. It is thus the concrete context that determines whether the same act, “The meeting is in session,” will be successful or not. 16.  In English in the original.—trans. 17.  There is another possible interpretation, which can be supported by some of Austin’s comments (for example, when he speaks of usages of the phrase “the survival of the fittest” [In English in the original]). Here it is a matter of a form of linguistic “Darwinism.” This form of evolution consists in claiming that in the end, that an expression has survived through time testifies to its suitability. Extinct expressions would have disappeared through a sort of natural selection, because they were inadequate or ineffective. Briefly, if to philosophize is uniquely to analyze the different contexts in which the expression x has meaning (“what we say when . . .”), if the only way to do this is to consult a dictionary of current usage—which Austin does—then either we are led to a classical conventionalism (arbitrariness of usage like the arbitrariness of words), or we assert that certain expressions are true because they have best held up over time. Usage is to be judged by how well it holds up. 18.  HTW, 149–50 (emphasis in first sentence added). 19.  See the table of “Types of Illocutionary Acts” and their conditions in Speech Acts, 66–67. 20.  Ibid., 67, from the table. 21.  Searle and Vanderveken, Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. 22.  To be specific, with this theory of speech acts, Searle does not commit the “mistake” that he sometimes blames others for, of moving from a theory of speech acts to a theory of states of the agent (of the subject, or of what is behind the act). Indeed, the necessary link between the statement and—to use my example again— the “sincerity conditions” requires that the linguistic analyst carefully separate the expressed intentional state from the real intentional state. For more on this point, see my article “Plaidoyer pour le langage philosophique.” 23.  Soubbotnik, La philosophie des actes de langage, 13. 24.  “Universal voice,” Kant, Critique of Judgment, 59–60.—trans. 25.  See Claim of Reason. 26.  See Pitch of Philosophy. 27.  See my Critique de la représentation and Fichte, as well as my article “Dogmatisme et criticisme.” 28.  A pseudonym adopted by Gottlob Ernst Schulze.—trans. 29.  See Du réel à l’ordinaire and especially Recommencer la philosophie. 30.  I could include the sequence Quine-Rorty-Churchland here, too. 31.  Recall that for Feyerabend myths have no less value as a matter of knowledge than science or philosophy. Briefly, we are in a world in which there is as much “truth”

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in a novel as in scientific discourse and where the statement “The earth is blue like an orange” is just as valid as “The earth rotates.” See, for example, Against Method. 32.  Chauviré, “Pourquoi moraliser les normes cognitives?” She shows how a certain contemporary philosophy, notably in its Anglo-Saxon version, has a tendency to think in terms of good and bad rather than in terms of true and false. This is a further sign of a discipline that has lost its bearings. 33.  I allow myself this apparently absurd neologism insofar as I have shown that positivism and skepticism, far from being antinomies, engender each other, that is, come together within a single line of thought (Quine and Austin). 34.  In a recent article, Jocelyn Benoist speaks of Husserl’s “positivism,” but he does so in order to recall his claim of scientificity (“Dépassements de la métaphysique”). But, as I said at the beginning, I call “scientistic” a philosopher who elects a different science (whether it be mathematics, physics, sociology, etc) as a paradigm of truth. I reserve the term “scientificity,” in contrast to “scientism,” for philosophers who have proclaimed philosophy as an entirely separate science. In my view, the two steps are clearly not a shared assessment, since in one case one chooses a different science in which philosophy is dissolved, but in the other one proclaims philosophy’s distinctness. 35.  See, for example, the introduction to Phénoménologie, sémantique et ontologie. 36.  Bégout, La généalogie de la logique, 10. 37.  This evolution was initiated by Jocelyn Benoist’s work—notably the most recent: L’a priori conceptuel, Représentations sans objet, and Intentionalité et langage dans les “Recherches logiques” de Husserl—as well as Bruce Bégout’s magnificent study La généalogie de la logique. The pioneer of this more epistemological orientation was Jacques English, who, for a certain period of time, was preaching in the desert. Then came the innovative work of Benoist, Bégout, and Robert Brisart (see the collection he edited, Husserl et Frege). The figure or period of phenomenology that I am discussing is not theirs, nor is it that of Jean Toussaint Desanti. My focus is on a particular phenomenology inspired by the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and later, Emmanuel Levinas. 38.  Bégout, La généalogie de la logique, 10. 39.  In his “Theological Turn of French Phenomenology.” 40.  Life, intimacy, passivity, affect, the body, sensation, arche-original desire, etc., are among the themes that, it will be easily granted, have a very clearly existentialist coloration. 41.  Janicaud, “Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” 20–21 (emphasis added). 42.  Even if I might share, in the end, Bruce Bégout’s astonishment, surprised to see so many philosophers today claiming to represent Husserl while they distort his aims. Perhaps it would be better, for the concept’s univocity, if all these thinkers, including Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, were to find another name besides phenom-

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enology to characterize their investigations. I say that without meaning any negative critique, since Merleau-Ponty is the first to recognize and to announce that what interests him is the Husserl located “at the limits of phenomenology.” (This was the title of his 1959–1960 course at the Collège de France: Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 113.) On this proclaimed “infidelity” to Husserl, see also Richir, “Le sens de la phénoménologie.” In a similar vein, see Strasser, “Antiphénoménologie et phénoménologie.” 43.  I include Jean-Luc Marion among the founding fathers even though from a strictly generational point of view he ought to be placed on the other side of the line. In fact, his writings’ importance compels me to place him where I have. My “probably” indicates a hesitation with respect only to the question whether Marion really belongs to the existential phenomenology that I’m describing. He sometimes seems to situate himself in an “elsewhere,” which would require an entirely different study. 44.  I could obviously add many other names. As my aim is not to make an exhaustive list (which would be impossible), I cite only a few names in a few “Continental” countries. Further, I have not named anyone who is strictly a historian of philosophy, not even the most significant, for their project is not to transform phenomenology, even if their observations can alter its meaning. To be sure, all those I have named are also historians of philosophy, but they mean to add something to phenomenology. Take for example Natalie Depraz: she is, of course, a historian of philosophy and a Husserl specialist, but she adds gnosis to her reading, which has nothing to do with a strict commentary on his texts. This is the act of transformation that I am trying to define within this constellation that I’ve called “existential phenomenology.” 45.  Here again, it is impossible to list all the most significant thinkers. See Escoubas and Waldenfels, Phénoménologie française et phénoménologie allemande. In this text, Waldenfels points out current German trends in phenomenology. 46.  See n. 70.—trans. 47.  I accept here the historical thesis of a dual transfer of phenomenology, which would be at the origin of its current forms. Phenomenology left Germany and was then successful in France, where it was transformed and returned to Germany after the war (where, due to Heidegger’s role during the war, it had been in certain aspects neglected) and expanded to other countries (including the United States, via Derrida et al.). The contemporary phenomenology that I have identified with the authors I’ve named is the product of this journey. 48.  Sartre, Situations, 230. 49.  Derrida, Writing and Difference, 84. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida says that this book “was for me, as for many others before me, the first and best guide” (11). 50.  Blanchot, “Penser l’apocalypse,” 45. This passage is quoted in Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas, 68. 51.  Lyotard, Phenomenology.

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52.  Some of these are collected in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. [A partial English translation is available as Discovering Existence with Husserl; other essays included in the French edition are not in that volume but are available elsewhere in English translation. See n. 64.] 53.  Paul Ricoeur makes the same claim in “L’originaire et la question-en-retour dans le Krisis de Husserl,” 167. 54.  Levinas, Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. [Originally published in 1930.] 55.  Hering, “Recension de E. Levinas,” 479. 56.  Ibid., 478. 57.  Levinas’s distancing from Heidegger is often dated back to World War II, but in fact Levinas is not entirely Heideggerian even in his first works. 58.  Consider a reproach to Husserl that will be ceaselessly repeated in his later work: “For a theory of intuition, the primacy of theoretical consciousness is of the first importance, as we shall see later. The act of intuition, which brings us into contact with being, will be first and foremost a theoretical act, an objectifying act, and it remains so despite the modifications that Ideen [Ideas] will try to introduce in the notion of an objectifying act” (Theory of Intuition, 63). 59.  Ibid., 119 (emphasis in original). 60.  Ibid., 155. 61.  This theme, already present in The Theory of Intuition, will clearly become central in his later work, as he says in “The Ruin of Representation” [1959]. 62.  The theme of “nonintentional” consciousness can be found in Levinas’s first texts and is a characteristic marker. On the explicit development of this theme, see his much later [1991] work Entre Nous. 63.  The multiplicity of Levinas’s sources and influences has often been noted. In this particular case, his early education, i.e., his Hasidism, seems decisive. This religious movement is distinguished by a concern to promote, against the flagrant intellectualism of Talmudic scholars, a concrete, carnal, immediate piety. 64.  Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon,” 70. [This 1965 article is included in the 1967 French edition of En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger but is not available in the English translation. See n. 52.] 65.  The link between an escape from representation and anti-intellectualism does not go without saying; I have shown in Critique de la représentation how a line of thought could use reason against representation. But the connection is present in Levinas. 66.  Bataille, “From Existentialism to the Primacy of Economy.” 67.  I am of course evoking the title of Michel Henry’s book on Kandinsky, Seeing the Invisible. 68.  Benoist, “Dépassements de la métaphysique,” 167. 69.  Janicaud, “Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” 19.

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70.  Choplin, “L’homme ou la littérature?” This is a special issue of the journal, whose title, “Tourner la phénoménologie,” I have taken as the heading for this section. [Literally, “to turn phenomenology,” or, more loosely, “turning phenomenology.” See n. 46.] This special issue asks, from its introduction, if phenomenology “is more in alignment with a scientific or rather artistic type of project” [Choplin, “Tourner la phénoménologie,” 147], and seems to represent, if not all, at least a significant part of the various trends in current phenomenology. Thus, if Jocelyn Benoist [“Dépassements de la métaphysique”] defines it as a philosophy marked from the beginning, in the same way as the analytic movement, by scientificity, Hugues Choplin considers it as a “radically literary style of writing”; Natalie Depraz [“Le tournant pratique de la phénoménologie”] puts phenomenology “in touch” with the “cognitive sciences” as well as “gnosis,” while Gilles Grelet [“Anti-phénoménologie”] understands it as a pure gnostic theory whose problem is “that the angel would arrive.” 71.  Choplin, “L’homme ou la littérature?” 200, Choplin’s emphasis on “metaphysics.” The idea that all philosophy is metaphysics and that, therefore, to escape metaphysics means “the end of philosophy” is just as forcefully underlined by Gilles Grelet, who writes in the same issue, “A word of warning: phenomenology is understood here as an opportunity to deploy an anti-philosophical theory and method” (“Antiphénoménologie,” 211). We see that “antiphilosophy” or “post-philosophy” are not to be found only in Rorty. It is a theme that crosses paradigms. 72.  Choplin, “L’homme ou la littérature?” 199, in a section heading. 73.  Ibid., 199. 74.  Ibid., 201, quoting Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 176. 75.  I take these two examples, of course, for if Derrida embodies Continental philosophy, the idea of Robert Musil as a philosopher is not self-evident. And hence we can see that, above and beyond the paradigmatic disputes, certain temptations are shared. 76.  Given that the aim of this book is to understand philosophy as an autonomous and distinct discipline, a full response to this question about the overlaps between art, science, and philosophy cannot really be given until the inquiry has been completed. 77.  Choplin, “L’homme ou la littérature?” 199. 78.  In this section devoted to contemporary phenomenology as “metaphysics” or literature, I am using the term “metaphysics” in the sense employed by its detractors. 79.  An accusation that transcends the differences between approaches, for it is made by Derrida and deconstruction, the existential phenomenologists, and even analytics. 80.  It goes without saying that I’m not making any comparison between these two absolutely incommensurable uses of the term “phenomenology.” I use the example, or counterexample, of Hegel simply because he is taken to have raised to its summit the demand for metaphysics’ self-transparence and thereby for the domination of the real, while in my view it is the existential phenomenologists who have pushed this demand to its climax, where Hegel “let go” of contingency.

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81.  Recall that the Phenomenology of Spirit is the first part of what would be, according to Hegel’s title, the “system of science,” or Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science, that would encompass three moments or deployments of truth—logic, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of mind—moments for which the phenomenology of spirit was a propaedeutic conceived as a deconstruction of the illusions of consciousness. 82.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 60, para. 95. 83.  Ibid., 66, para. 110 (emphasis in original). 84.  This is the first sentence of Swann’s Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past.—trans. 85.  Barbaras, Being of the Phenomenon, 183. 86.  Ibid. 87.  Fontaine, “Le statut de l’individualité chez Merleau-Ponty.” 88.  Beckett, Unnamable.—trans. 89.  On the centrality of this “image,” see Saint-Aubert, Du lien des êtres aux elements de l’être, which takes as its epigraph a phrase of the later Merleau-Ponty, “Encroachment, which is, for me, philosophy.” 90.  Having said this, it is not at all my intent to criticize Merleau-Ponty but to pose the question of the status of these concepts. In so doing, I cannot but repeat what his most talented interpreters, like Saint-Aubert, have said: “The wealth of semantic overtures nevertheless introduces a possible byproduct, confusion  .  .  . To successfully keep oneself from any form of univocity, . . . the philosopher sometimes moves within the margins of equivocity . . . And when this image [i.e., encroachment] is excessively generalized, it narrowly avoids a new abyss, the risk of self-destruction. [The ‘flesh of the world’ becomes that] about which nothing more can be said, since it is everything. The ‘flesh of the world’ of the last writings poses this problem most acutely” (ibid., 20). Later, Saint-Aubert recalls what has been noted long before, that the “metaphorical” writing of Merleau-Ponty’s last works is “more literary than properly philosophical.” 91.  “Le corps propre” (my own body) in the French translation of Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book; Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (henceforth Ideas II) is, in the English translation, “the Body,” with a capital “B.”—trans. 92.  Husserl, Ideas II, 61. 93.  With Dominique Janicaud, I must say that phenomenological description is an important and essential part of philosophy, but that it is not all of philosophy, which can be defined other than by description. I will come back to this point. 94.  What Paul Ricoeur, in his French translation of Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book; General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (henceforth Ideas I), terms “le vécu” (lived experience) is, in the English translation, “the mental process.” The earlier English translation (by W. R. Boyce Gibson) rendered it as “experience.”—trans.

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95.  Husserl, Ideas I, 175 [translation modified]. 96.  Ibid. 97.  Ibid., 175–76. 98.  Ibid., 176 [translation modified]. 99.  Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 164. 100.  Ibid., 166 [translation modified]. 101.  In “Notes de lecture et notes de travail sur et autour de Descartes” [unpublished manuscripts held in the Bibliothèque Nationale], quoted by Saint-Aubert as the epigraph to the introduction of Du lien des êtres aux elements de l’être (17). 102.  On reflection and its various possible definitions, including the specular reflection of an image in a mirror and the optic reflection of light on an obstruction, see my Critique de la représentation. Merleau-Ponty outlines a form of reflection other than those whose typology I described in that text—namely my own body’s unconscious reflection. 103.  Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 249. 104.  If we follow the semantic chain deployed in Merleau-Ponty’s texts, “transcendental” is a synonym for an “overlooking position,” for “transparency,” and for “self-coincidence.” It may be admitted that these terms describe the Cartesian ego, which is beyond the world to the extent that the world is suspended from it, and which is coincident with itself by the fact that thinking and the thought are equal at the moment of the cogito’s utterance. “Transparency” might even be accepted, if the attributes exhaust substance—which, for all that, Descartes does not say. But I confess that for Kant, normally considered the father of the transcendental, I do not know how to explain these adjectives. 105.  Benoist, “Faut-il défendre la phénoménologie?” 64 (emphasis added). 106.  I allow myself to use this negative expression because Benoist, more competent and better versed than I am in the history of phenomenology, describes this phenomenology as “kindergarten phenomenology with which certain contemporary French phenomenology often appears to identify itself ” and defines it as “the pathos of impairment and affection” (ibid.). 107.  Three concepts put forward in Levinas, Otherwise Than Being [henceforth OTB]. 108.  Levinas, OTB, 5. 109.  Ibid., 6. 110.  Ibid., 7. 111.  Ibid., 6. 112.  In English in the original.—trans. 113.  Levinas, OTB, 62. 114.  Ibid., 47. 115.  Ibid., 49. 116.  Ibid., 144.

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117.  Ibid., 145. 118.  Ibid., 49. 119.  Ibid., 74. 120.  Ibid., 111, et al. On this noncoincidence with oneself or the contradiction of thinking as trauma in Levinas, see Bernet, “Le sujet traumatisé”; Waldenfels, Grenzen der Normalisierung; Gondek, “Trauma”; Haar, “L’obsession de l’autre”; and finally and especially Duportail, Intentionnalité et trauma, especially chap. 2. Duportail analyzes this notion of noncoincidence with oneself in Otherwise Than Being to show how its explication, its legitimation, and its continuation are found, in fine, in Lacan’s notion of “trauma.” 121.  Levinas, OTB, 46. 122.  Ibid., 150–51. 123.  On this point, see Levinas, Totality and Infinity. 124.  Levinas, OTB, 7. 125.  Ibid., 155. 126.  Ibid., 7 (emphasis in original). 127.  Ibid., 156. 128.  Ibid. 129.  Longinus, On the Sublime. 130.  Kant, Critique of Judgment, 135. 131.  Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings. [This translation combines two French texts, Quatre lectures talmudiques (published in 1968) and Du sacré au saint: Cinq nouvelle lectures talmudiques (1977). Since Otherwise Than Being was published in 1974, Thomas-Fogiel is referring in particular to the latter French text.] 132.  Gondek, “Trauma,” 456. 133.  Derrida writes, “We live in and of difference, that is . . . ‘the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets’ ” (Writing and Difference, 153 [Derrida is quoting Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 24]). That said, if I intend not at all to criticize Levinas’s recourse to religion, I can express certain doubts about the practices of the numerous disciples who take up or imitate his style without leaning upon the prophets, even though this reference seems to me to give Levinas’s text its meaning. To speak of literature is to mask the religious aspect (Choplin); to replace the specific religion that Levinas consults with gnosis (Depraz, Grelet) is not to see that oxymoron—the inexpressible in the expressed, the invisible in the visible, the unsayable in the sayable—is inherent in prophetic discourse, whose status and structure have been struggled with by religious commentaries throughout the centuries, and which Levinas’s text takes up very specifically. Briefly, it seems to me that Levinas’s recourse to the prophets is not one “module” among others, which could be replaced by another (gnosis, literature, flesh, desire, or another). Thus, the problematic of incarnation introduced by Christianity because it says “the infinite in the finite” could only take up as such the theme of the oxymoron, inherent in the discourse

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before the incarnation. In a word, one subject cannot be substituted for another as if Levinas’s theme did not have coherence in its very demand for incoherence. In my understanding, the prophetic, and thus oxymoronic, style is the very content of Levinas’s religious thought, which, he himself says, is no longer philosophy. 134.  In an interview with Christian Bouchindhomme, Hilary Putnam says that Frege’s “semantic triangle [sign, meaning, denotation] is a catastrophe.” “A certain number of risks” are incurred, he says here, “depending upon which point is emphasized”: if we emphasize the sign, we run the risk of relativism, while conversely reference (denotation) induces scientism. As for meaning, it is liable to two pitfalls: mentalism through intentionality or Platonic objectivism, which absolutizes truths (Putnam, “Les voies de la raison,” 55). 135.  That is what I maintained in the introduction to Critique de la représentation. 136.  Searle does not propose a supersession. I have discussed him only to show a possible reading of Austin, but Austin is much more “scientistic” than Searle in his declarations of the necessary dissolution of philosophy. 137.  In a chapter on Marin (“Le signe et l’image: Louis Marin et la critique de la representation”) in Le concept et le lieu, I have shown how he tried, with an original theory of signification, to overcome the opposition between the iconic and linguistic orders. For Marin, the sign and the face have as a common point a dual structure of transitivity and reflexivity: “to say something about” and “to understand oneself to be saying something about.” This common structure allows Marin to analyze the Port-Royal theory of signs with the same instruments as for a painting by Poussin. This connection explains one of the most basic aspects of Marin’s venture, to tirelessly flush out the procedures by which the representation of painting realizes itself as a representation, a self-realization that is itself unrepresentable.

3. The Antispeculative View: Habermas as an Example 1.  Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests. 2.  Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. 3.  Habermas, Truth and Justification. 4.  In English in the original.—trans. 5.  Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität, 13. 6.  Luhmann, “Systemtheoretische Argumentationen,” 326ff., cited in Ferry, Habermas, 391–92. 7.  Perhaps because Jean-Marc Ferry does not give sufficient attention to Habermas’s evolution, he reduces the contradiction or tension in Habermas’s work to a single moment. Thus, simultaneously agreeing with both Luhmann and Frank, he writes: “In this respect, there is a question left unanswered, that is . . . to know what, in the final analysis, is more fundamental: is it language . . . or is it, on the contrary,

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reflexive activity itself . . . or is it language that possesses us, and not we who possess language  .  .  . or should we rather regard communication to be somehow prior to language, or at least that it is this capacity for practical self-reflection that allows us to go beyond the constituted authority of language—that historical facticity—to reflect upon it, to cause it to evolve, and to renew it. Thus, the question is to know whether, at bottom, we are subjects or not” (Ferry, “La philosophie moderne face à la société moderne,” 32–33). As we shall see in what follows, it is not at all obvious, in my view, that this contradiction structures Habermas’s philosophy. 8.  Habermas, Theory and Practice. 9.  Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 10.  Rivelaygue, “Habermas et le maintien de la philosophie,” 296. 11.  Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 276. 12.  There are multiple ways to interpret Wittgenstein: the reading asserted by the first-wave analytical positivists, as well as the second wave’s interpretation (Cavell), which criticizes the first, the radical skeptics’ (Rorty), or the deconstructionists’, or even the naturalists’ (there are a few). My point is not to catalog the different guises that Wittgenstein has been given in the twentieth century, which would require an entirely different book. Here I mention only one of Wittgenstein’s possible guises. 13.  Roughly speaking, this period lasted from 1972 to the very end of the 1990s and thus includes the vast bulk of Habermas’s writings. It is in this period that Habermas is closest to a transcendental stance, for example like Karl-Otto Apel’s, in which philosophy investigates the conditions of a given phenomenon (communication, morality, etc.). I define the term “transcendental” in the sense that P. F. Strawson gave it, following Kant, in his 1966 essay on Kant (Bounds of Sense), that is, as a project to bring to light an experience’s conditions of possibility. On this point, see my article “Fichte et l’actuelle querelle des arguments transcendantaux” and my book Fichte. 14.  Habermas, “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” 15.  Ibid., 2 (emphasis added). 16.  It goes without saying that while these two understandings of philosophy are both originally Kantian, the two have become distinct today, for the idea of philosophy as a mere therapy takes us to Wittgenstein, for example, whereas philosophy as critical investigation of conditions of possibility takes us to Karl-Otto Apel. 17.  Habermas, “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” 27 (emphasis added). 18.  Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” 100. 19.  For example, in The Theory of Communicative Action and in “Remarks on the Concept of Communicative Action.” 20.  This phrase comes from a note added in 1983 to “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” included in the French translation but not in the earlier English translation (Habermas, Logique des sciences sociales et autres essais, 401n87). 21.  Habermas, “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” 63 (emphasis in original). 22.  Rochlitz, “Avant-propos du traducteur,” viii.

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23.  In English in the original.—trans. 24.  Langlois, “Habermas et la question de la vérité.” 25.  Ibid., 568n13. He is referring to Wellmer, “Ethics and Dialogue.” 26.  Langlois, “Habermas et la question de la vérité,” 566 (emphasis in original, my additions in brackets). 27.  Ibid., 563. 28.  On this point, see especially Apel, “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory.’ ” 29.  That is, philosophy at the very end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, since Habermas’s third period dates from 1999. 30.  Recall that pragmatism is the view, maintained for example by John Stuart Mill, that utility would be the criterion of truth. “Pragmatism” is not tightly connected to “pragmatics,” defined simply as analysis of linguistic acts, whether it is a matter of initial pragmatics (Austin, Searle) or radicalized pragmatics (Habermas’s universal pragmatics or Apel’s transcendental pragmatics). 31.  Habermas developed his theory of argumentation essentially in three texts: “Wahrheitstheorien” [written in 1972, available in Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergänzungen. At Habermas’s request, this article has never been published in English; a French translation was published as “Théories rélatives à la vérité.”], The Theory of Communicative Action, and Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. In these two latter texts, indeed, he explicitly refers to the 1972 work. On this point, he writes in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, “I have recently set forth the outlines of a theory of argumentation. I will not discuss that here” (“Discourse Ethics,” 62). He makes the same remark in The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:26n28, for example. It is of course possible to detect a certain reserve with respect to his earlier analyses, for example in his 1987 preface to the French edition of The Theory of Communicative Action: “I feel the desire to complete my work devoted to the theory of truth and argumentation, which is taken up here only in an excursus” (“Préface à l’édition française, 1987,” 9). Nevertheless, Habermas specifies in his notes (“Théories rélatives à la vérité,” 327n47 [in a 1983 supplemental note], “Discourse Ethics,” 86n65) the point to be revised—the possibility of will formation on the basis of truth. That is, Habermas no longer holds that there is a deducible connection between “recognizing the truth of a norm” and acting in conformity with it, between the logic of truth and the free will of a particular individual. But, as we shall see, this is not the problematical point in his theory of argumentation. 32.  This last level of Habermas’s theory has been, up to now, the most discussed and developed, sometimes to the detriment of the theories of truth and argumentation. Many act as if there were no essential connection between the theory of truth and the theory of society and thereby take any theoretical legitimacy away from Habermas’s concrete positions. Thus, we are told what must be done and what is good (political and practical philosophy) without being told why a given proposition is true or false. This kind of presentation profoundly misrepresents Habermas’s system.

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33.  Habermas, “Théories rélatives à la vérité,” 309. 34.  Ibid., 308. 35.  Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2:125. 36.  Ibid., 2:400, 401 (emphasis in original). 37.  Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin. 38.  Balzac, Wild Ass’s Skin. 39.  Habermas, “Théories rélatives à la vérité,” 311. 40.  Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” 72. 41.  Cohen, Les valeureux, 15. 42.  I have taken the liberty of illustrating Habermas’s general discussion with literary and philosophical examples of my own choosing. I will do likewise in what follows, as I will draw examples from the history of physics. 43.  Habermas, “Théories rélatives à la vérité,” 321 (emphasis in original). 44.  William Caxton’s 1480 English translation of this text is available as Caxton’s Mirrour of the World.—trans. 45.  Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1. 46.  Habermas, “Théories rélatives à la vérité,” 321. 47.  Ibid., 322 (emphasis in original). 48.  It is clearly not ambiguous in itself, but with respect to the whole system and the definition of the term “practical” at its heart. 49.  As Yves Cusset points out, noting that “the notion of interest has just about disappeared from Habermas’ lexicon after the 1973 Postface to Knowledge and Human Interests” (“Sommes-nous encore intéressés à l’émancipation?” 586). 50.  Habermas, “On Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality,” 310. 51.  Ibid., 303–4. [Habermas is quoting Freud.] 52.  Habermas suggests this point, notably on pp. 31–32 of The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1. The form, he explains, is common to all lines of argument regardless of their object (in this sense, there is no need, in the final analysis, to separate practical discourse from theoretical discourse). The content, on the other hand, is constituted by empirical verifications, interests, each one’s needs, etc. “handing over information, raising a legal claim, raising objections to the adoption of a new strategy, . . . criticizing a musical performance, defending a scientific hypothesis, supporting a candidate in competition for a job, and so forth. What is common to these cases is the form of argumentation: We try to support a claim with good grounds or reasons; the quality of the reasons and their relevance can be called into question by the other side; we meet objections and are in some cases forced to modify our original position” (ibid., 31 [emphasis added]). 53.  Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:21. 54.  “Remains,” for it was Habermas’s first theoretical engagement—even before Knowledge and Human Interests, which, as we have seen, thematized a transcenden-

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tal interest in emancipation. An initially Marxist-hued engagement is undeniably the “Ariadne’s thread” that runs through all Habermas’s periods. 55.  Habermas writes, for example, “Nor need moral philosophy maintain the claim to ultimate justification because of its presumed relevance for the life-world. The moral intuitions of everyday life are not in need of clarification by the philosopher” (“Discourse Ethics,” 98). It would be easy here to retort to Habermas that the Nazis had nothing like “moral intuitions of everyday life,” and that they therefore could not serve to demonstrate that a search for understanding is primary with respect to a violent or strategic action. As Apel writes, “He who is openly situated in a position of power has no need to  .  .  . convince with arguments” (“Sprachliche Bedeutung,” 51–88). 56.  I should also note that “naturalism” can also take the form of a theory of society. It is sufficient that the ensemble of social analyses (the role of institutions, of the environment, etc.) rely upon a theory of the species. It must also be said that naturalism today is a category so vast that the neophyte could sometimes be under the impression that M. Jourdain [1734–1816, Anselme Louis Bernard Bréchillet] is a naturalist if he is aware that “the species that have best survived are still living.” 57.  To put it in a nonnegative way, there are not very many philosophers today who do not assert, either voluntarily or surreptitiously, the end of philosophy: in the analytic paradigm we find Putnam (already mentioned) and Searle (whose “positivism” I’ve examined and who does not assert the “end of philosophy” as a “strong naturalism”); in the Continental paradigm we find Apel (whom I’ll discuss in the next chapter) and, probably, Ricoeur. Neither the hermeneuticists (all marked by themes of radically radical finitude) nor those living phenomenologists whom I wasn’t able to examine seem to have resisted this theme of the exhaustion or death of philosophy. As for the “Wittgensteinians”—a category whose distinctive feature is to include as many different readings of Wittgenstein as it does individuals—they are the most “postphilosophical” or “antiphilosophical” of all. 58.  The first philosopher to have thus reconstructed the entirety of the Kantian edifice was Salomon Maimon. See my Critique de la représentation, 34–52 (“La notion de réflexion et la question de la reference”), which reconstructs Maimon’s reading. It seems to me that Sandra Laugier retains this type of “skeptical Kantian” solution in the final pages of her book Du réel à l’ordinaire. 59.  Jocelyn Benoist explains that in the most contemporary analytic philosophy (McDowell), “the reference to Kant has again become absolutely axial and constitutes, in the appropriation as well as the critique [of Kant], a contemporary philosophical issue” (“ ‘Le mythe du donné,’ ” 511). 60.  Including the French current of deconstruction, for Jean-François Lyotard attempts to rethink the critical project beginning from a reading of the Critique of Judgment.

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61.  “Returns to Kant” have been made just about every forty years in the history of philosophy, since the first neo-Kantianism of Hermann von Helmholtz. The phrase “Back to Kant!” comes from Eduard Zeller; on this point, see Cassirer, Problem of Knowledge, 4–6.

4. Kant’s Shadow in the Current Philosophical Landscape 1.  The term was suggested by Alain Renaut in Kant aujourd’hui. 2.  As Hilary Putnam notes, Apel is perhaps the only one currently who maintains philosophy’s status as a first science. Others, like Putnam, may, against naturalism or skepticism, maintain its distinctness or proclaim its autonomy, but they hesitate about its “primacy.” Apel believes it and attempts to demonstrate it. In this sense, he effectively holds a position that is, historically speaking, absolutely classical but also, in the contemporary world, totally original and unique. 3.  I will not undertake a study of P. F. Strawson’s philosophy, which also revives a certain form of transcendentalism, because I will discuss it in part 2, in the chapter devoted to transcendental arguments. Furthermore, Apel is indeed the one who claims to be most representative of the transcendental Kantian project. 4.  In particular, Riedel, Urteilskraft und Vernunft.—trans. 5.  Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge. 6.  Piché, Kant et ses épigones. 7.  Derrida et al., La faculté de juger. 8.  Furthermore, critical humanism claims to be representative of a certain reading of Fichte, quite different from what I would offer, which makes a confrontation of viewpoints even more necessary. Given that, I should also be able to study, in the framework of this interrogation of the contemporary recourse to the third Critique, Lyotard’s proposed reading, whose skeptical implications are just as visible and probably more widely accepted than are those of critical humanism. 9.  I do not at all mean to be polemical but rather to discuss a certain way of reading Kant. A historian of philosophy cannot abstain from discussing other interpretations without showing a most perfect contempt for one’s predecessors or to consider the practice of the history of philosophy to be a personal, even private, adventure that need not be encumbered by a confrontation with different viewpoints. This is why I can only dispute the validity of an attitude that, under the guise of not wishing to criticize living writers, in reality makes its texts into objects unworthy of being discussed. I hold, on the contrary and in agreement with a particular Anglo-Saxon practice of philosophical discussion, that every interpretation of an author should be able to be challenged (i.e., in the first place, to be recognized and considered), especially if this interpretation regards the philosopher under consideration (here, Kant) to speak the truth.

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10.  The dispute between Heidegger and Cassirer at the famous Davos debate was about the Critique of Practical Reason’s status in the Kantian edifice and can be summarized like this: either we have radical finitude and no autonomy—autonomy being an escape from irreducible passivity in Heidegger’s eyes—or we have the Cassirerian affirmation of autonomy but also a relativization of finitude. [This debate is available in English as “Davos Disputation Between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger,” in Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 193–207.] 11.  Alexis Philonenko, whose interpretation is at the source of critical humanism’s reconstruction, never disguised his theological reading of Fichte or of philosophy in general. This is the aspect that Renaut does not take up. In fact, with respect to his reading of Fichte, interpretations like those concurrently articulated by Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron and Miklós Vetö and recently continued by Jean-Christophe Goddard and Alexander Schnell are, in the final analysis, closer to Philonenko than is critical humanism’s. For these writers from the Poitiers school of Christology, philosophy is and must be if not theology at least “religious phenomenology,” to borrow a phrase from Vieillard-Baron, the undisputed leader of this school. 12.  Renaut, Era of the Individual, 194. 13.  Ibid., 193. 14.  See Renaut, Le système du droit, where all the implications of this central question of intersubjectivity are developed. 15.  Fichte takes the example of a Russian lord who sees his serf only as an instrument. See Fichte’s letter to Reinhold, August 29, 1795, in Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, 406–10. Hannah Arendt asks this question of Kant again, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. On Arendt’s question, see my Critique de la représentation. 16.  Guéroult, L’évolution et la struture de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte, 1:342n4. In this chapter, entitled “The Concept of Community and the Viewpoint of the Finite ‘I,’ ” Guéroult is asking about the movement between 1794 (system of the finite “I”) and 1801 (system of the Absolute). In his view, this problem of the intersubjective community is the motor for Fichte’s evolution. In the early philosophy, a certain number of practical assertions would not be grounded. 17.  See Ferry, Political Philosophy, and Renaut, Le système du droit, part 2, chap. 2, sect. 2, “L’apport de Kant (Fichte et l’antinomie de la faculté de juger téléologique),” 201–10. 18.  This obviously also holds for the human sciences. In Le système du droit, Renaut says that only the Kantian-Fichtean position allows us to limit the brutal determinism that they show. But with the interpretation that he gives to Kant and Fichte, he weakens any reasoned critique that would aim at rationally limiting the field of extension of their principles, because, from his point of view, the mechanism cannot be limited without exiting the framework of finitude, that is, by adopting God’s viewpoint. 19.  Here I am mentioning a risk for this position, but I am not claiming that Renaut and Ferry have held such a view. We must dissociate what an author says from

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the possible, and probably unintended, consequences of his system. But it seems to me that Renaut, wanting to avoid the pitfalls of the “constitutive,” ends up, through his promotion of the “regulative,” bringing Kant under threat of skepticism. In a word, if the reconstruction of Kant must be done starting with reflection—which is a possible and perfectly legitimate reading of Kant’s texts—then Maimon was right: “the critical project is skepticism.” 20.  They add in a footnote: “See on this point Alexis Philonenko’s introduction to his translation of the Critique of Judgment.” 21.  Ferry and Renaut, Système et critique, 199. 22.  Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, 31. 23.  Ibid., 32. 24.  Renaut, Era of the Individual, 191 (emphasis added). 25.  Renaut, “Les subjectivités,” 56, 70. 26.  It is probably not an accident that we find the thematic of the end of philosophy in Renaut, who spoke of “the last philosopher”—the subtitle of his book on Sartre [Sartre, le dernier philosophe]. 27.  The term “strong” in opposition to a “weak” version is from Apel himself. It does not encompass value judgments but is synonymous with “determined,” or “decided.” For Apel, the “weak” version is often illustrated by Habermas’s “universal pragmatics.” 28.  “My attempt is conceived as a transformation of transcendental philosophy that is critical of meaning” (Apel, “A Priori of the Communication Community,” 267). [“Linguistic turn” in English in the original.] 29.  Apel, “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory,’ ” 158. 30.  Apel’s chosen terminology (“transcendental pragmatics,” “the factum of reason,” “founding on the basis of norms,” and “philosophical conditions of possibility”) are clearly so many signs of his Kantianism. 31.  Apel, “A Priori of the Communication Community,” 267. 32.  So although he preaches the necessity of an ultimate foundation for reason (the Kantian project), Apel can also write of Habermas and himself that “we are both heirs of the ‘hermeneutic-linguistic-pragmatic turn’ taken by contemporary philosophy, finding ourselves in agreement with thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Gadamer, Searle, and even with Richard Rorty” (“Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory,’ ” 126). I must note that the transformation of philosophy as Apel understands it always consists of an overcoming that preserves something of the authors (Heidegger, Husserl, etc.) and is rarely a condemnation of the entirety of a thinker’s work. This is why he can simultaneously be in agreement with Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Heidegger without incoherence. If the hub of his philosophy indeed consists in raising the Kantian hope for an a priori foundation for ethical norms, all its spokes are constituted by the acquired insights of the most contemporary philosophy. 33.  Apel, “A Priori of the Communication Community,” 241.

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34.  On Hume’s thesis and its repercussions in G. E. Moore, see my Critique de la représentation, 281ff. 35.  Apel, “A Priori of the Communication Community,” 241 (emphasis in original). 36.  Ibid., 233–34. 37.  Ibid., 235. 38.  It is a question of hermeneutics’ famous “always already” that Apel means to incorporate while overcoming it. 39.  Ibid., 267. 40.  On Apel’s relation to Peirce, see Apel, “From Kant to Peirce.” Recall that Apel was Peirce’s German translator. 41.  Apel, “Problem of Philosophical Foundations,” 280. 42.  On this point, see my article “Plaidoyer pour le langage philosophique.” 43.  Apel, “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory,’ ” 128. 44.  Ibid., 126–27. 45.  As I have said, the term comes from Quine and Rorty, who mean thereby any investigation into foundations, however the term may be understood: either in an onto-theological sense (God) or in a simply epistemological sense (as the foundation of a discourse or discipline, for example, as Bertrand Russell was able to investigate the foundations of mathematics). 46.  This criticism of Apel is made by a number of authors, including Jean-Marc Ferry (Habermas, 522), and Sylvie Mesure, in particular in “Choisir la raison.” She shows how Apel seems to shift from the müssen [must] of the transcendental necessity of argumentation to moral necessity which is a sollen [should]. In Apel’s eyes, the theoretical necessity of argumentation becomes the practical obligation to argue, thus to choose reason as “an authentic moral obligation, that is, as a duty” (Mesure, “Choisir la raison,” 233). These two important interpreters of Apel both criticize this shift from müssen to sollen. 47.  Apel, “Limits of Discourse Ethics?” 48.  Fichte, System of Ethics. 49.  Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right. 50.  Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie.” 51.  Once again, Apel’s only criticism of Kant, a criticism that will be examined in several respects later, is that it is a metaphysics of subjectivity. Taking account of the “linguistic turn” [in English in original] allows Apel to shift to a postmetaphysical transcendental system, unburdened by any reference to a mythical subject. 52.  Apel, Diskurs und Verantwortung. 53.  “Let there be justice, though the world perish.”—trans. 54.  Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason. 55.  The response that I am reconstructing notwithstanding, Apel shows, pace fallibilism in general, that this thesis cannot consistently conceive itself. Indeed, to claim contra any attempt at an ultimate foundation that every thesis is fallible is to admit

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that this very claim (that everything is fallible) escapes fallibilism; it is thus self-contradictory. On the other hand, the claim that there is an ultimate foundation is unscathed by any contradiction of this sort. The contents of this foundation are perhaps not easy to determine, but at least the claim does not immediately contradict itself—as does unlimited fallibilism. 56.  In English in the original.—trans. 57.  Apel, “A Priori of the Communication Community,” 268 (emphasis in original). On this point, see also the decisive article “The Problem of Philosophical Foundations in Light of a Transcendental Pragmatics of Language.” 58.  See, for example, her article “Choisir la raison.” 59.  Apel, “Normative Ethics and Strategical Rationality,” 99. 60.  Apel, “Normative Ethics and Strategical Rationality.” 61.  According to the title of an essay in vol. 2 of Transformation der Philosophie, “Sprache als Thema und Medium der transcendental Reflexion.” [The article originally appeared in Man and World 3, no. 4 (November 1970): 323–37.] 62.  The possibility of metacommunication in the functioning of language games has been studied by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin, and Don D. Jackson in Pragmatics of Human Communication. This is the idea that Apel appears to defend— reflection as a metalanguage would be a part of the conditions of language. 63.  Apel, “A Priori of the Communication Community,” 269 (emphasis before the brackets in the original, emphasis after added). 64.  Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 41. 65.  Ibid. Here Ricoeur refers to François Récanati’s analyses in La transparence et l’énonciation. 66.  Recall that for Benveniste the “I” is the fulcrum of the system of indicators and signifies “any person who represents himself in speaking”; this “I” presupposes and calls for a “you” but does not presuppose a “he,” which Benveniste, reacting against the semanticists, purely and simply excludes from his theory of indicators and discursive acts. [For Benveniste’s discussion of the “I” as an “indicator,” see his Problems of General Linguistics, especially chap. 20, “The Nature of Pronouns,” 217–22.] 67.  Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 47. 68.  In English in the original.—trans. 69.  Bubner, Modern German Philosophy, 88 (emphasis in original). 70.  On this point, Ricoeur exclaims, “But how far can this depsychologization be taken, if an ego must still be taken into consideration?” (Oneself as Another, 47). 71.  I mean an “external” criticism in contrast to an “internal” criticism of the system. External criticism pits other theses against a philosopher without having first deconstructed the philosopher’s own. Internal criticism attempts to show that the philosopher being analyzed is not entirely consistent, contradicts himself, does not accomplish the project that he claims to have done, or allows a critical ambiguity to persist in a foundational concept. In his criticism of a reflecting language, Manfred

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Frank sometimes tends to sink into external criticism when he claims for example that it is not language that reflects upon itself but rather a subject (Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität, 11). In fact, both options—language and subject—are initially formally possible, and we cannot eliminate one by some sort of appeal to good sense (of the sort, “My neighbor has the impression that it is he himself who reflects, not God or nature in him”). Likewise, Ricoeur, in his desire to anchor self-reference in the concrete individual, sometimes seems to me to too often appeal to common consciousness—which some phenomenologists less scrupulous than himself identify a little too quickly as the “phenomenon.” In contrast to these external criticisms, I am attempting to understand the system’s limits starting from its own contradictions. 72.  This term would obviously be meaningless in reference to Apel’s project. Nevertheless, it is clear that if we compare it to the Kantian “skepticism” proclaimed by Lyotard or even critical humanism, his position claims to be much more “scientific” in the sense of a universal and ultimately grounded truth. 73.  In fact, Apel has the possibility of reconstructing a system in choosing between two theses: he could either adopt a clearly Hegelian system in which he would explain why the philosopher can be the simple voice of Spirit, or he can relativize his thesis of a language exhibiting its own rules of functioning by understanding the term “reflection” differently. If he manages to bring either of these approaches to fruition, the objection will fall. On the other hand, the skeptic who asserts that “there is no truth” or the fallibilist who claims that everything is falsifiable are immediately self-refuting, without any hope of rebuilding, adjusting, or “loosening” their hypotheses. 74.  I borrow these distinctions between “sui-reference” and “reflexivity” from Ricoeur. “Sui-reference” is the expression favored by linguistic analysis. 75.  Just like Ricoeur, G. G. Granger has noted the difficulty of understanding the self-reference of the utterance in terms of reference to a fact of the world. He writes, “Reference to the speaker is not of the same order as properly semantic references. The utterance is thus not located in the world of which one speaks; it is taken as the referential boundary of this world” (“Syntaxe, sémantique, pragmatique,” 404). 76.  In English in the original.—trans. 77.  On this point, see Stéphane Chauvier’s book Dire “je.” This is also why my project does not come under what Vincent Descombes envisions in Le complément de sujet. 78.  I am obviously not accusing Apel of not having grounded the notion of duty, even less of not being sufficiently Kantian. I am simply wondering about the relevance of his references to Kant. Why insist on referring to this philosopher if one doesn’t take up any of his cardinal concepts? 79.  To claim otherwise, it would be necessary to demonstrate that these discourses are indeed encompassed in argumentation, which Apel does not at all do. In my studies of art—presented at the Colloque du CICADA [Centre Inter Critique des Arts Anglophones] (1995–2005) and brought together in my book Le concept et le lieu—I

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have tried to bring out the constraints proper to various artistic forms of expression, while neither identifying them with the constraints of philosophy nor trying to make their practices suffice for philosophy. 80.  Benoist, “Faut-il défendre la phénoménologie?” 64. 81.  To continue my analogy with painting, we could say that the philosophical landscape—here constituted by those who advocate the end of philosophy—offers an extensive palette of colors, but that its composition is unchanged. Skepticism can be painted in blue or in green; the structure nevertheless remains the same. This is how the landscape appears: a single face with a multiplicity of colors. 82.  “The topic of referring has had a central position in philosophical discussion from the very beginning of this century” (Linsky, Referring, ix.)

5. A Definition of the Model: Scientific Learning and Philosophical Knowledge 1.  Thomas-Fogiel takes advantage here of a distinction in French between connaissance and savoir, a distinction not easily made in English. (Both terms are usually translated as “knowledge.”) When Thomas-Fogiel explicitly contrasts these terms—a distinction at play here in the chapter’s title as well as at a certain point in its argument—I have translated connaissance as “learning” and savoir as “knowledge”; when the distinction is not being made, I use “knowledge” for either term.—trans. 2.  My examples are clearly Fichte, who wanted to replace the term “philosophy” with “doctrine of science,” and Hegel, whose Encyclopedia’s complete title (as I mentioned earlier) was “The System of Science.” 3.  On the historical significance of skepticism in Kant’s era, see my Fichte, especially chaps. 1–3 of part 1. 4.  I allow myself these cavalier characterizations insofar as I have already discussed in detail Hilary Putnam’s characterization of what he calls the “catastrophe of the semantic triangle” in chapter 2. 5.  These three terms always accompany criticism of these systems. The first is often used by deconstructivists—for example, Derrida and Lyotard thus characterize Hegel’s ambition, summarizing with this term Heidegger’s long analysis of the “will to power,” to “seizure,” to a total “exhaustion” of the real, of which this totalizing concern takes part. We have seen the second term in Rorty, who uses it to encompass any investigation into explanatory conditions, whether they be ontological, epistemological, or moral. And the term “metaphysical” is even more insulting and tarnished today than it was in Alfred Tarski’s time, even though he noted in 1944 that, “When listening to discussions in this subject, sometimes one gets the impression that the term ‘metaphysical’ has lost any objective meaning, and is merely used as a kind of professional philosophical invective” (“Semantic Conception of Truth,” 363). Its status as “invective” has only increased since Tarski’s cynical observation.

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6.  It’s well-known that the thought experiment has become a particular form of argumentation in Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Putnam has proposed many, including the still famous “dual earth.” This type of argumentation and its status in analytic philosophy would have to be studied. However that may be, I am not asking anything else here except to try a thought experiment. But as I have less imagination than the analytic philosophers, I propose to transpose us into a past and untimely philosophy, instead of into a work of fiction. 7.  See Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” in Mortal Questions, 165–80.—trans. 8.  This chapter thus resembles the setting up of a “corrective apparatus”; the subsequent chapters will test its viability. It is clearly a possibility—as with any thought experiment—that my “corrective apparatus” will be neither reliable nor feasible. So first I must describe it and then test it. 9.  These phrases are given as proofs of the assertion’s self-evidence and not to explicate the author’s thinking, which legitimates the propositions in this case. On this point, we must imagine what would happen if we were to read in an article, without any justification, “Since Fichte, we have known that knowledge is absolute,” or, “Descartes has taught us that the soul is immortal,” or, “That the body is all there is, is a mistake, as Descartes has taught us,” and were to take these propositions as given and obvious! This is what some current Wittgensteinians do. We should try an experiment and make a comprehensive list, in all the works of philosophy to be published this year, of all the phrases that begin with something like, “Since x, we know that . . .” or, “x has taught us that . . .” without giving any other justification of the claim than the reference to x, to see which author is the most cited. Intuitively, I would say that Wittgenstein would be at the top of the list, followed by Husserl, then Heidegger and Kant—but this is just a guess. In saying that, I am obviously not criticizing these philosophers themselves—far from it—but only some of the ways they are used. 10.  I am summarizing here what I have historically and philologically established in my various books and articles on Kant and the immediate post-Kantian period. I obviously cannot again present all the details of the argument, but I am drawing upon these claims demonstrated elsewhere. I will make reference to these more specific analyses in the notes. 11.  For a detailed analysis of the claims in the Aenesidemus and a study of its historical impact, see part 1, chap. 3 of my Fichte. 12.  Strawson, Bounds of Sense.—trans. 13.  On Maimon and his version of skepticism, see my Critique de la représentation, part 1, chap. 2. 14.  On Kant’s concept of reflection, see my Fichte, part 2, chap. 1. 15.  We saw, in Levinas, the conditions in which a thinker (who, in his particular case, no longer wants to be a philosopher) could claim it. But it will be easily agreed that nothing in Kant’s philosophy would allow us to think that at some moment he would agree to say that everything he wrote in the three Critiques was mistaken or

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invalid! This is even more the case when we remember the role that performative noncontradiction plays for Kant in the process of universalizing moral maxims. On this particular point, see my Fichte. 16.  In my various studies of Fichte I have shown the extent to which self-contradiction (what Fichte calls “internal” contradiction) is the nerve of the argument against a system. A system is thus challenged not by raising an external objection but by showing that it destroys itself. 17.  Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 190. He also very often expresses this as an identity between a proposition’s form and its content, and, as I’ve said, as the identity between the “Tun and the Sagen,” or “what is done and its doing.” Finally, he expresses it in his less-technical works, like “Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation,” as “the pure I can never contradict itself ” (“Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation,” in Early Philosophical Writings, 149). 18.  A certain reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, book IV (Gamma), chap. 4, could show that Aristotle made recourse to this kind of argument to refute the Sophist who would deny the principle of noncontradiction (the formal principle). Indeed, to deny it, the sophist would be obligated to employ it: his “doing” would not be “in agreement with what he says,” and, as Aristotle notes, he could no longer speak. Aristotle concludes, “One who is in this condition will not be able either to speak or to say anything intelligible” (Metaphysics IV.4:1008b9, in Basic Writings of Aristotle, 742). This argument was thus clearly known for a long time and was one of the tools for refuting skepticism. Fichte’s specific contribution is to make it the principle of principles, the foundation of any philosophical discourse, the starting point for all propositions to come, and thus a positive principle and no longer (as it was for Aristotle) a negative argument (i.e., the argument from absurdity). 19.  I will explain more precisely in what follows why this first proposition, as knowledge of knowledge, taking shape in the congruence between the utterance (what is done) and the saying (the doing), is a goal to achieve, a task to accomplish, and not a first proposition in the Wolffian sense of the term, a proposition whose contents will allow the deduction of other propositions on the hypothetical-deductive model. 20.  On this point, see also Karl-Otto Apel’s responses to Popper, which I discussed and defended in chap. 4. 21.  As for the logical principle of noncontradiction, which Kant called a negative principle of truth, we should understand that it does not suffice that a proposition is free of any performative contradiction in order to be acceptable. On the other hand, a proposition is certainly false if it contravenes pragmatic identity. 22.  Thomas-Fogiel is here punning in the French: jeter is “to throw”; an ob-jet is, literally, “something thrown.”—trans. 23.  In English in the original.—trans.

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24.  In my books on Fichte (Critique de la représentation and Fichte), I have shown at length how his model of “reflection” breaks with the classic model of a subject going back over a preexisting x. This is why, in conformity with the tripartite division that I have made here, I spoke in chap. 4 of “self-reference” with respect to Fichte (he used the term himself; see my introduction to his Méditations personnelles sur la philosophie élémentaire [Personal Meditations on Elementary Philosophy] [Paris: Vrin, 1999]). Furthermore, I will show in the course of this analysis that his model is one of reflexivity and neither reflection nor “sui-reference” (the other kinds of self-reference). To mark his break with the classic systems of reference, Fichte employed the term Reflexibilität to specify the Latin term reflexion. 25.  On this point, see my Critique de la représentation. 26.  Fichte confronted two kinds of definitions of rational “knowledge”: according to the first, knowledge would fundamentally mean representation (this is the Kantians’ view, as well as Descartes’ and the mathematicians’); according to the second, knowledge would consist of calculation (the anti-Kantian view, represented, for example, in Kant’s and Fichte’s time by Johann August Eberhard and clearly taken up from Leibniz). And indeed, we can give different definitions of knowledge through the course of history: knowledge can be a description of an exterior object (knowledge as mimesis), but it could also mean objectivization and representation of an object or even calculation. To exemplify these last two definitions of knowledge, we can take as an example the opposition between Descartes’ and Leibniz’s conceptions of mathematics. On this point, see my Critique de la représentation and the section on “Representation” in chap. 10. 27.  In France, only Jean Hyppolite has insisted on this dimension, in an important article devoted to Fichte and Husserl—“L’idée fichtéenne de la doctrine de la science et le projet husserlien.” But since then, commentators have acted as if Fichte had written not a science of knowledge but a science of consciousness (Alain Renaut, Alexis Philonenko), a science of being (Wolfgang Janke), of the absolute (Dieter Henrich, Martial Guéroult) or a science of religion (Jean-Louis Vieillard, Miklós Vetö and all the disciples of this school). However, Fichte never stopped insisting upon this epistemological character, and from 1793 to 1813 warned against any ontological interpretation of his system: “The Wissenschaftslehre has nothing to do with being, it is not a science of being . . . To the extent that the Wissenschaftslehre understands that it can have no other object than knowledge alone, that is to say, that it is a science of knowledge, that it leaves being to the side and recognizes that it cannot have a science of being, in the same measure, it is transcendental idealism . . . which asserts that there is no science of being, that the only possible system and absolute science of being is the science of knowledge, which is a transcendental idealism because it recognizes that knowledge is the highest object of knowledge” (Wissenschaftslehre, 1813, p. 4, in Sämmtliche Werke).

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28.  In what follows, “knowledges” in the plural is always a translation of connaissances; “knowledge” in the singular still translates savoir.—trans. 29.  I obviously do not mean that these two formulations are equivalent—the first takes account of the Copernican revolution; the second recalls the more classic opposition between Cartesians and empiricists. 30.  For a specific exegesis of this phrase, which returns like a refrain in Fichte’s writing, see my Fichte. 31.  Hintikka, La philosophie des mathématiques chez Kant, 4 [in his introduction to this French translation]. 32.  I use this ready-made phrase because Apel, just like Heidegger or contemporary analytic thinkers like Searle, has a real negative fixation on the Cartesian model and the philosophy of the subject. I will thus show that the model I’m constructing with Fichte cannot fall under this infamous category. But I leave aside the question of whether we could ever find even one philosopher in history who corresponds to the model that contemporary philosophy unceasingly attacks. 33.  Because Fichte’s philosophy has often been understood as a philosophy of the subject. In my books, I have shown why, stricto sensu, Fichte’s philosophy is not immediately an understanding of subjectivity. To put it quite briefly, for Fichte, it is the act that makes the agent, and not vice versa. Before the act, there is nothing, or at least the philosopher does not have to wonder, “What was I before I acted?” 34.  Fichte does not at all mean to evoke a fact of consciousness or a mental given but wants to posit a proposition (Satz). Throughout the development of the various versions of the Wissenschaftslehre, he never stops insisting upon this term “proposition.” In these Wissenschaftslehren, his ambition is to analyze, to break down, and then to reconstruct propositions, not to describe “facts of consciousness.” Indeed, Fichte has written texts that are situated at the level of facts of consciousness. In them, he is doing a sort of phenomenology of a given perception, imagination, etc., but these texts (generally entitled Tatsachen des Bewußtseins) are not situated at the same conceptual level as the Wissenschaftslehre, which is clearly indicated by Fichte’s opposition between Tatsache (a fact, a given) and Handlung (an action) or Tat (an act) or Tathandlung. With all these points, I am drawing upon my other works. 35.  I pass from the phrase “law of self-reference” to “law of reflexivity” in light of what I explained in the chapter on Apel, namely, that we can enumerate three kinds of self-reference: the first as self-reflection, which corresponds to the Cartesian schema of a subject going back over a preexisting x; the second as “sui-reference,” a particularity of signs that allows us (as Récanati’s project attests) to avoid the trouble of the question of an act of utterance; the third finally as reflexivity, which takes account of the utterance as an act. The differences within this third group are nonetheless important; the next chapter will allow us to better discern them.

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6. The Model of Self-reference’s Consistency 1.  Let’s briefly recall Wittgenstein’s argument: From a logical point of view, the phrase “I have a toothache” does not act in the same way as “L. W. has a toothache”; they are not values of the same propositional function. The “Blue Book” distinguishes two modes of the usage of “I”: the “I” as subject and the “I” as object. Thus, statements like “I have grown three centimeters” accentuate the objective usage, for the statement’s predicate refers to the speaker’s body and can be falsified (I may have grown only two centimeters). This objective usage presupposes the identification of a particular person in actual space and time. But statements like “I have pain” are not of the same nature, in that I cannot be mistaken, in the sense that Wittgenstein notes, “To ask ‘are you sure that it’s you who have pains?’ would be nonsensical” (Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 67). There are mental predicates that belong to a subject conscious of these predicates. These are what Wittgenstein calls the “subjective” mode. 2.  McGinn, Subjective View. 3.  Shoemaker, “Self-Reference and Self-Awareness.” 4.  I must absolutely insist on this point lest my comments be misinterpreted. I am not saying that there is only one model for reflection and that any other questions— whether about the concrete subject or about a reflection that, like attention, would take the world as its referent—are thus excluded by definition. There are multiple aspects of reflection, and some points mentioned by Ricoeur or others can be compatible with the model defended here. But if I start from reflection as self-reference, I do so in light of the question of the possibility of philosophy as an autonomous and distinct science, that is, the question of the status of the philosopher’s discourse. This model is not “exclusive” “in itself ” (i.e., it does not deny any other aspects of reflection in other circumstances); it is, in light of my specific question, the most appropriate. It will be replied that the relevance of my problem can be challenged. Why continue to inquire about philosophy’s distinctness? I have addressed this question in the introduction, but I will add this here: is it so bizarre that philosophers or historians of philosophy would take a moment to state why they do philosophy rather than nothing or rather than something else? Will their “nephews” eternally return to this answer: “Continue to devote long hours studying this discipline, but stop asking about its viability and its relevance, for those are Copernican and hence Continental questions”? With Bouveresse (see the introduction), I think the time has come for every specialist in philosophy to state whether he practices a useless and idle discipline or a discipline so sure of itself that it never need bother to respond to questions about its identity. As for the question whether the problem of philosophy’s conditions of possibility has become—because it was raised by Kant among others—a uniquely Kantian, or even “Königsbergish,” question, I can answer that that is a little like saying the problem of

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death is a problem that is no longer a concern for anyone other than the Black Forest Heideggerians! That Kant raised the problem does not make it only a Kantian problem but indeed a problem for philosophy. 5.  In English in the original.—trans. 6.  Tarski—who, following Russell (see the next section), would prohibit any selfreferential statement—asserts that this pertains only to propositions that contain a truth predicate. But I will show that this pertains to many other propositions (probably to all of philosophy’s fundamental propositions, but also to anthropology’s, and even to some economic propositions—see chap. 7). 7.  Recall in passing that this speculative reflexivity was also thematized by Hegel: the “speculative proposition” (which is opposed to the attributive proposition of ratiocination, the proposition of “ordinary knowledge” or of the “common consciousness”) must always distinguish between the subject of the statement (the predicates’ base, the subject as the being about which we speak) and the philosophizing subject who makes connections between predicates (the subject of the utterance, as the subject who speaks). On these points, see Litt, Hegel. 8.  “Here,” that is, within my framework, of metalanguage or metadiscourse. We can understand, in carefully disassociating the two levels, why my concern, although it is epistemological, will not be to determine these propositions’ type of validity by examining, for example, the problems of induction, definite description, etc. 9.  The problem could obviously be raised about Descartes’ “I,” which does not refer to the empirical individual René Descartes. This “I” is thus a universal “I” but for all that is not a “we,” because to say “we think” would be going too far with regard to the argument of the evil genius. 10.  On Moore’s influence on Russell, see Benmakhlouf, Bertrand Russell, 14n1: “It was indeed Moore who awoke him from his idealist slumber in 1898.” On Russell’s initial idealism, see Russell, My Philosophical Development, where Russell recalls the influence of F. H. Bradley and the entire neo-Hegelian current. 11.  On the synonymy between “grounding” and “showing the noncontradiction,” see Rivenc, Sémantique et vérité, 42: “We must return here to what it meant in the 1920s to ‘establish the foundations’ of a discipline: to give a proof of its non-contradiction.” 12.  This paradox, Russell tells us, was initially discovered through an examination of Georg Cantor’s works, specifically “by considering Cantor’s proof that there is no greatest cardinal number” (My Philosophical Development, 75). The problem is this: there is no greatest cardinal number (which Cantor proved), and yet, it can also be demonstrated (as Cesare Burali-Forti noted in 1897) that there is a greatest cardinal number. Russell explains it in the form of an antinomy in section 344 (pp. 362–63) of The Principles of Mathematics: there is no greatest cardinal number and yet there is a greatest cardinal number, the cardinal number of “the class of all entities.” This mathematical paradox directly leads to the logical paradox.

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13.  He presents this problem in a January 17, 1901, letter to Louis Couturat (pp. 210–12 in Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell). He expresses it in quasi-identical terms in a June 16, 1902, letter to Frege (245–46) and, as we shall see, kept coming back to it later. 14.  Russell, June 16, 1902, letter to Frege (ibid., 246). 15.  Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 156. 16.  Rouilhan, Russell et le cercle des paradoxes, 22. 17.  Reported by Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, II.10.108 (1:237). 18.  Russell, My Philosophical Development, 83. 19.  Russell, “Mathematical Logic,” 224. 20.  Respectively, in “Das Problem der phänomenologischen Evidenz im Lichte einer transzendentalen Semiotik” and Russell et le cercle des paradoxes. 21.  Rivenc, Sémantique et vérité, 37. 22.  Rouilhan, Russell et le cercle des paradoxes, 17. 23.  Reichenbach, Theory of Probability. [The French translation cited by Thomas-Fogiel, Introduction à la logistique (Paris: Hermann, 1939), includes only chap. 2, “Introduction to Symbolic Logic,” from this work, as well as two additional sections available only in French.] 24.  This problem of the universalization of logic has been particularly illuminated by François Rivenc in Recherches sur l’universalisme de la logique. 25.  Rouilhan, Russell et le cercle des paradoxes, 16. 26.  Engel, La vérité, 78. 27.  This is generally the objection that some analytics make against German idealism, or against any metatheoretical type of questioning: it is useless to try to define philosophy, we are told, it must be done. And yet it happens that the doing always presupposes an implicit stance on the essence of philosophical truth. Thus, for Pascal Engel, the argument employed to refute relativism is given as a valid argument. But this argument says specifically that philosophical propositions must be able to apply to themselves without contradiction. It is on the basis of this argument, with a selfreferential structure, that a thesis (relativism) is rejected, a thesis that clearly bears, in the final analysis, on the nature of our reference to the world, since relativism declares this reference to be arbitrary and contingent. 28.  This insight also shows how it is different from Apel’s “extensive” conception, which I discussed earlier.

7. The Model’s Fecundity 1.  Truly speaking, we could even speak of its invention, because the phrase transcendental “argument” is not literally present in Kant. In Fichte, it is often a question

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of a “transcendental” “way of proceeding” or reasoning; however that may be, the two authors understand transcendental philosophy in general as an investigation into the conditions of possibility for a fact (factum). As we have seen, Karl-Otto Apel takes up this definition in his concept of transcendental pragmatics. 2.  Strawson, Bounds of Sense, especially 72–89. 3.  I borrow this definition from Stélios Virvidakis, “Les arguments transcendantaux.” [Virvidakis in his turn has taken this definition from Moore, “Conative Transcendental Arguments,” 271.] 4.  On this point Virvidakis rightly specifies that in general the initial premise (p) “refers to a way of imagining reality that could be described as a conscious or intelligible experience such as self-consciousness, the use of concepts, the formation of beliefs, and the formulation of assertions or communication by language, and “q” designates an aspect of reality that is often the object of some skeptical doubt” (Virvidakis, “Les arguments transcendantaux,” 111). 5.  Bitbol, “Arguments transcendantaux en physique moderne,” 81 (emphasis added). 6.  Which justifies in part the term transcendental, since according to the famous expression of the Critique of Pure Reason, “any knowledge is called transcendental that is generally concerned not so much with objects as with our mode of knowledge of objects,” except that Strawson depsychologized the Kantian inquiry. In this usage of the term, we no longer think in terms of faculties but strictly in terms of the conditions of meaning for a cognitive operation. 7.  Laugier, “Langage, scepticisme et argument transcendantal,” 11. She adds, “It is particularly difficult to know, despite (or due to) all the discussions that have taken place on the subject, what transcendental arguments consist of ” (12). 8.  Henrich, “Challenger or Competitor?” 9.  Rorty, “Transcendental Arguments, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism.” 10.  Bitbol, “Arguments transcendantaux en physique moderne.” 11.  Zahar, “Mathématiques applicables et arguments transcendantaux.”—trans. 12.  Stroud, “Transcendental Arguments.” 13.  Boyer, “Pourquoi des arguments transcendantaux?” 37 (emphasis in original). 14.  On this point, see Dieter Henrich, who judges, pace Rorty, that the use of the transcendental argument has nothing in common with the problem of realism and the skeptical challenge to the existence of things outside ourselves. 15.  Paradoxically, it is the skeptics who have most “ontologized” the debate, through wanting at any price to show that the argument is not able to remove doubt about the exterior world. Indeed, transcendental argument, properly understood, need not have this function. This is why, in table 2 about Strawson’s argument, the argument should not accept the conclusion of point no. 4 (“Objects outside myself exist”) but should stop at “It is necessary to conceive the existence of objects outside myself.” In the United States, the debate (because of the skeptics) has taken the form

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of a dispute between realism and antirealism, which the concept of transcendental argument does not necessarily call for. 16.  See chap. 5, n. 31.—trans. 17.  Bitbol, “Arguments transcendantaux en physique moderne,” 82. 18.  See Fisette and Poirier, Philosophie de l’esprit, 28. 19.  This comparison will be all the more important as Simon, Nobel laureate in economics, is recognized as a concrete, practical writer. 20.  Simon was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions in the theory of organizations. His protean oeuvre goes beyond this narrow domain. 21.  On this comparison, as well as for an evocation of Herbert Simon’s considerable oeuvre, see Demailly and Le Moigne, Sciences de l’intelligence. 22.  Simon, Reason in Human Affairs, vii (emphasis added). 23.  Simon, “Rationality in Political Behavior,” 45. 24.  Ibid., 45–46. 25.  There are defenders of this theory who themselves speak of “their hypotheses’ unreality.” Nevertheless, for their axiomatic systems to work, they must posit individuals’ perfect rationality—that is, complete knowledge—and that they will thereby choose the best world. This is quite precisely the Leibnizian God. 26.  Simon, “From Substantive to Procedural Rationality,” 132. 27.  Ibid., 142. 28.  Simon, Administrative Behavior, 101. 29.  The word “satisficing” is a neologism that Simon created: “Since there did not seem to be any word in English for decision methods that look for good or satisfactory solutions instead of optimal ones, some years ago I introduced the term ‘satisficing’ to refer to such procedures” (Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, 119). 30.  Ibid., 22. 31.  Ibid. 32.  Simon, “Unity of the Arts and Sciences,” 32. 33.  Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, 98. 34.  Boyer, “La rationalité simonienne est-elle satisfaisante?” 165. 35.  Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, 29. 36.  Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, 109 (emphasis added). 37.  I allow myself this highly paradoxical phrase because of my earlier discussion of this kind of proof from an observation or a discovery to come. 38.  Chauviré, “Pourquoi moraliser les normes cognitives?” 39.  All these developments are built upon Claude Parthenay’s analyses, one part of which is an exploration of the possible applications of transcendental argument to the economic field. Clearly, I would not have been able to draw these insights about economic thought without his work, in particular his innovative doctoral thesis (“Théorie de la firme”), but also his articles, especially his study of Herbert Simon, “Comportement des agents.”

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8. Beyond the Death of Philosophy 1.  I say nothing of the skeptics, who by definition deny any a priori principle. 2.  A type of reasoning privileged by mathematicians, thematized by Descartes and Wolff as deduction. 3.  An argumentative procedure dear to empiricists. 4.  A reasoning that Aristotle sometimes recommended. 5.  Kant, of course, or even the upward climb of dialectic in Plato. 6.  Recommended by Leibniz and taken up again by the logicians at the beginning of the twentieth century. 7.  All the cognitive sciences, as well as parts of neurology, belong to these human sciences in that they necessarily employ self-referentiality. 8.  Putnam, “Les Voies de la raison,” 54–55. [The quotation is from a question that Bouchindhomme poses to Putnam.] 9.  I can only christen a ship or open a meeting as a function of a given contingent—social—position. An utterance’s success is thus, in the pragmatic functioning of a changing “context,” by definition not necessary. 10.  Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty,” 131. 11.  Ibid.

9. The “Race to Reference” 1.  Benoist, Représentations sans objet, 6. 2.  Ibid. 3.  Ibid., 9. 4.  Ibid., 6–7. 5.  Benoist always treats Husserl’s transcendental “turn” harshly. After having spoken of the “crushing” of different modalities of intentionality that would be induced by this “turn” (ibid., 12n1), he contrasts a phenomenology freed of prejudices to “transcendental phenomenology” (ibid., 15n1). The desire to dismiss the transcendental problematic in order to make twentieth-century philosophy merely a debate between two realisms (that of the Logical Investigations and that of analytic philosophy) is obvious in all his analyses. In this, Benoist is quite close to the tendency in current analytic philosophy to definitively eradicate any reference, even historical, to any transcendental problematic (investigation into the conditions of possibility of a fact, a discipline, a discourse, a language game, etc.). Husserl is retained only insofar as he shares certain presuppositions with analytic philosophy—as soon as he distances himself from them in favor of the transcendental, he is appraised in negative terms (“crushing,” “wasting his time in turning towards himself,” etc.). I cannot agree with this reproduction of the origins of contemporary philosophy. Transcendental phi-

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losophy cannot be thus ousted from the “inaugural formation” of twentieth-century philosophy. However much Quine, and later all contemporary American philosophy, may have desired to “naturalize the transcendental,” we cannot consider the transcendental current to be of no importance in the establishment of either of the two paradigms—phenomenological or analytic—nor can we thus erase the history of the last two centuries of European philosophy. 6.  Lask, Logic of Philosophy (Gesammelte Schriften, 2:210ff.). See, on this point, Dastur, “La problématique catégoriale.” It is clearly not an accident that Lask dedicated his dissertation to Fichte. Unfortunately, he was unable to follow the paths that he had mapped out because he was killed on the front in 1915. 7.  I will give only one example as an indication. Pierre Wagner has edited a quite remarkable volume, Les philosophes et la science. This collection, which establishes a high bar with the subtlety and depth of its analyses, reviews the important figures who have marked the relation between philosophy and science. And yet one can only be astounded to realize the pure and simple absence of any mention of Helmholtz, who was not only the last philosopher who was also authentically a scientist—as he illustrated in different disciplines, including the physiology of perception—but was also the one who specified philosophy as a “theory of knowledge,” and, finally, who (de facto and before anybody else) “naturalized” the “transcendental.” 8.  It is thus out of the question for me to claim to bring anything to the study of Heidegger. I will not even consider his doctrine (as I have done for Levinas’s, Rorty’s, or Quine’s) in a meticulous way, in order to test its coherence on a particular theme, the end of philosophy. For Heidegger, my task is much more restricted—to discover the orientation of his line of questioning. As I cannot take up the entirety of his work, I will study this orientation in his reading of Kant, still more precisely the reading in his Kantbuch [Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics]. My question about Heidegger is thus strictly the following: is the questioning by which he glorifies Kant in the Kantbuch absolutely incommensurable with what Cohen attributes to Kant? I mean to be read only in the light of this specific question and in relation to my general perspective—not at all from a supposed reading or evaluation of Heidegger’s oeuvre (which I have no intention of making here).

10. The Tension Between Reference and Self-reference in the Kantian System 1.  Kant, What Real Progress Has Been Made in Germany, 151. 2.  Kant writes, “The genus is representation in general (repraesentatio). Subordinate to it stands representation with consciousness (perceptio). A perception which relates solely to the subject as the modification of its state is sensation (sensatio), an objective perception is knowledge (cognitio)” (Critique of Pure Reason, 314 [A320]). 3.  Ibid., 130 (A97).

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4.  Ibid., 161–62 (B146). 5.  On this well-known thesis that critique is exclusively “a theory of representation,” see, for example, Michel Henry and Rudolf Bernet, but also—without any critical intent but purely out of concern for elucidation—André de Muralt, or—this time for his glorification of Kant—Alexis Philonenko, followed by Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry. This interpretation of Kantianism as a theory of representation is presented (and, as can be seen, evaluated) in various ways. That is why I am carefully specifying how Kant uses the term. I will do the same for reflection, and then, having completed this elucidation of the two terms in the Critique, I will be able to show how the term “intellectual representation” expresses, through its own contradiction, the impossible synthesis of these two orientations in Kantianism. 6.  Fichte, “Eignen Meditationen über Elementarphilosophie.” [Thomas-Fogiel has translated this text into French.] 7.  Henry, Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 3. 8.  Ibid., 7. 9.  In Critique de la représentation, I have extensively developed this view of representation as depiction through schematization in Kant. I showed the different stages of the establishment of this synonymy between representation and depiction, and Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s, Fichte’s, and Salomon Maimon’s critiques of this thesis. I am thus summarizing here what is demonstrated elsewhere. However that may be, this thesis can be expressed quite clearly: in Kant, the valid object (the phenomenon) is the product of the application of a concept to an intuition through the imagination, which, to do so, produces a depiction, not an image. Valid representation is this process of depiction; a valid object is the result of this process. 10.  On the subservience of algebra and arithmetic to geometry in Kant, see Vuillemin, L’intuitionnisme de Kant. 11.  Before Vuillemin, Ernst Cassirer had extensively commented on this subordination of algebra to geometry. Certainly, one could say that this is explained by the fact that Kant was primarily interested in the problems of physics, but that does not suffice to explain the subordination, because Leibniz was also interested in physics’ problems but nevertheless prioritized algebra. Following Cassirer’s example in The Problem of Knowledge, I think that the reversal is not uniquely a historical moment situated at the end of the nineteenth century but rather a thesis maintained much earlier as a function of a theory of knowledge. 12.  There are different ways of interpreting Kant here: either Kant is read as Descartes’ heir (as does Marc Lachièze-Rey), or (with Michel Henry as well as Michel Meyer) he is interpreted as the “liquidator” of subjectivity. 13.  Kant, Lectures on Logic, 591 (emphasis in original). 14.  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 276–77 (A261/B317). 15.  Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book II, chap. XXVII, sect.11; 1:449.

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16.  Leibniz, “Principles of Nature and Grace,” 208. 17.  On this point see my analysis in Critique de la représentation. 18.  Kreis, Phänomenologie und Kritizismus. 19.  Fink, “Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl.” 20.  Ricoeur, “Kant and Husserl.” 21.  Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences. 22.  Ricoeur, “Kant and Husserl,” 176. 23.  Guillermit, L’élucidation critique, 167. 24.  Kant, Critique of Judgment, §42, 166. 25.  Ibid., §41, 163. 26.  Kant writes, “For it must be observed, that when I have called the proposition, ‘I think’, an empirical proposition, I do not mean to say thereby, that the ‘I’ in this proposition is an empirical representation. On the contrary, it is purely intellectual, because belonging to thought in general” (Critique of Pure Reason, 378 [B423]). 27.  Immanuel Kant, “To Johann Schultz, November 25, 1788,” in Correspondence, 283–86. Kant had already employed the term “intellectual” to distinguish arithmetic from geometry in his 1770 inaugural dissertation, “On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World,” in Theoretical Philosophy, §12, 390. [The term “intellectuel” is present in the French translation of Kant’s 1770 dissertation (in Œuvres philosophiques, 1:645) but is not in fact present in the English translation. In English, the passage in question is “In addition to these concepts, there is a certain concept which in itself, indeed, belongs to the understanding . . .” The English phrase “belongs to the understanding” corresponds to the French “intellectuel.” In the original Latin the term is “intellectualis” (Kants Werke, 2:397).] 28.  Kant, “To Johann Schultz, November 25, 1788,” Correspondence, 284–85. 29.  Vuillemin, “Kant aujourd’hui,” 23n29. This article is also reprinted in L’intuitionnisme de Kant. 30.  Kneale and Kneale, Development of Logic, 447: “But it is surely absurd to maintain that we can establish the truth of the equation, 135,664 + 37,863 = 173,527, by calling to our aid an intuition of 173,527 fingers.” 31.  Maimon, “Sur la connaissance symbolique” [“Über symbolische Erkenntnis und philosophische Sprache”], 175 [273]: Maimon writes with respect to 100 and 1,000, “Let’s suppose that there are 1,000 soldiers and that I want to lead someone to form the concept of the number 1,000 in telling him that that is how many soldiers are present. He will begin by counting them, but this will not be of any assistance because in the end he can form a concept only of the manner of generating the number 1,000 but not of the number itself as an object of intuition.” 32.  Which Kant does not say. When he distinguishes in “The Transcendental Doctrine of Method” between symbolic construction and ostensive construction (Critique of Pure Reason, 579 [A717/B745]), he speaks only of algebra and refuses to include arithmetic therein. But the reinterpretation (both necessary and legitimate) of the

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genesis of numbers makes necessary the integration of arithmetic into symbolic construction. Which, as it happens, is not contradictory in itself in relation to the whole of the Kantian system—if Kant did not say this, he certainly could have accepted it. But this simply illustrates the difficulty of understanding arithmetic’s status, including accounting for the simplest operations such as 1,000 + 3,000. 33.  Kant, “To August Wilhelm Rehberg, before September 25, 1790,” Correspondence, 356. [He is paraphrasing Rehberg’s own question, on p. 432 of the next citation.] 34.  August Wilhelm Rehberg, “D’August Wilhelm Rehberg, avant le 25 septembre 1790,” in Kant, Correspondance, 433. 35.  Johann August Eberhard was not mistaken in proposing to understand the status of metaphysical notions on the model of mathematical notions. Mathematicians show that certain concepts are necessary, certain reasonings intersubjectively shared, and all this even though we do not have any intuition of these concepts. On this point, see my article “Dogmatisme et criticisme.” 36.  Kant, “To Johann Schultz, November 25, 1788,” Correspondence, 284. 37.  Ibid. (emphasis in original). 38.  Ibid., 285. 39.  Ibid., 284 (emphasis in original). 40.  Recall the Kantian distinction: for practical reason, postulates (immortality of the soul, etc.) designate a “subjective but nevertheless unconditional rational necessity” (Critique of Practical Reason, 9 [Ak. V:11n]), but with respect to theoretical reason these same postulates are only simple hypotheses without apodictic certainty. Arithmetical properties fit into neither the first class (postulates for practical reason) nor the second (hypotheses without knowledge for theoretical reason). 41.  Christian Wolff already defined a postulate as a practical proposition in the sense of a problem to address, a task that contains its solution in the sole fact of its being carried out. See Philosophia Rationalis Sive Logica, II.1:259 (§§268–69). 42.  Kant, “Reflection No. 968,” 591 (2:291). 43.  Kant, “To Johann Schultz, November 25, 1788,” Correspondence, 285. 44.  As Jules Vuillemin writes, summarizing the Kantian theory of arithmetic, numbers “have meaning only insofar as they make it possible to measure a possible object of experience,” or again, “the concept of number, considered in itself or metaphysically as intellectual, inexorably becomes sensible . . . in being applied to geometry” (“Kant aujourd’hui,” 23n29). 45.  I will insist that the fact that the associative, etc., properties of addition are true propositions for Kant is just as surprising as that they can appear as syntheses without the intuition. The only solution that could save Kant from developing a concept as improbably incompatible with his thesis of synthetic a priori judgments would indeed be the one proposed by Schultz—to make these propositions simple axioms. But Kant explicitly denies this. For this reason, I cannot follow Gottfried Martin’s fine analysis in Arithmetic and Combinatorics. Concerned to demonstrate the legitimacy

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of Kant’s arithmetic theory, Martin proposes to understand the principal properties of arithmetic as axioms. In this way, Kant would have been the first to conceive a necessary axiomization of arithmetic. Besides the fact that this analysis goes against Kant’s explicit denial, I must note the following as a supplementary argument: even if Kant would have accepted Schultz’s solution, the problem still would not at all have been solved. Indeed, this axiomatization orients the theory of arithmetic in a direction completely incompatible with Kantian theory. We would indeed have the following structure: arithmetic starts from hypotheses that must be admitted and cannot be grounded—its other propositions are deduced from these initial hypotheses. And yet, Kantianism cannot allow itself to say that mathematics is a hypothetico-deductive system without having to reconsider the Critique of Pure Reason’s theory of mathematics. 46.  Kant, “To Johann Schultz, November 25, 1788,” Correspondence, 284, 285 (emphasis added in the second passage). 47.  As Jules Vuillemin writes, “However it may be settled, Kantian intuitionism is nonetheless not exempt from impurities. They stem from two kinds of subordination to which Kant subjects numbers and arithmetic” (“Kant aujourd’hui,” 22). The two kinds of subordination are geometry and physics. 48.  See Henry, Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. 49.  On this point, Henry writes, “Kant takes the metaphysics of representivity to the limit, to that extreme point where claiming ultimately to found itself, to subordinate its own condition to representation, it falls into the abyss and self-destructs” (ibid., 124). 50.  Ibid., 123. On this paradoxical use of the term “intellectual” with respect to the “I think,” see also my introductory “Présentation,” 27. 51.  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 378 (B423). 52.  Ibid., 168 (B157). 53.  Henry, Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 123. 54.  Dufrenne, La notion d’a priori, 18. 55.  This phrase comes from remarks Hyppolite made in the discussion following a lecture by H. L. van Breda (“La réduction phénoménologique,” 323) but probably was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego (36). For more on the history of this phrase, see Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origins of Geometry, 88n91; BorchJacobsen, Lacan, 278n67; and Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, 77n3.—trans. 56.  “Das Es” (literally, “the it”) is Sigmund Freud’s German term for the preconscious seat of the drives, usually translated into English with the Latin term “the id.”—trans. 57.  Henry, Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 124. 58.  Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 8.—trans. 59.  Helmholtz, “Facts of Perception,” 368. More precisely, Helmholtz writes that “the problems which that earlier period considered fundamental to all science were those of the theory of knowledge: What is true in our sense perceptions and thought? and In what way do our ideas correspond to reality?” (368).

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11. Helmholtz’s Choice as a Choice for Reference: The Naturalization of Critique 1.  Dussort, L’école du Marbourg, 29. 2.  Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach,” 601. 3.  Cassirer, Problem of Knowledge, 4. 4.  Recall that Helmholtz’s first great scientific discovery was the mathematical formulation of the principle of the conservation of energy. It was an entirely “mechanistic,” that is, Newtonian, formulation of a physiological phenomenon. Helmholtz taught physiology, anatomy, and physics; he invented new optical devices [including the ophthalmoscope]; he also distinguished himself in thermodynamics, wrote on numbers and geometry, and outlined at length an epistemology that he proclaimed as Kantian. In a word, he embodied one of the last examples of the “complete scientist.” 5.  Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics, 2:20 (§17). 6.  Helmholtz, “Facts of Perception,” 392ff. 7.  Ibid. 390. 8.  In fact, Schlick insisted on the difference between these two authors in order to highlight Helmholtz’s positivism and his having overcome several metaphysical concepts that remained in Kant. The direction of his argument is thus the opposite of my own. 9.  This doctrine of “unconscious inferences” was taken up by Ivan Pavlov—who, moreover, cites Helmholtz as a precursor. This is further evidence of the naturalist character of this reading of Kant. 10.  See Bouveresse, Langage, perception et réalité, 50ff. 11.  Helmholtz, “Facts of Perception,” 383. 12.  Hahn, Carnap, and Neurath, “Scientific Conception of the World,” 334. 13.  On this point, see Planty-Bonjour, “La Critique de la raison pure.” 14.  Buzon, “L’individu et le sujet,” 24–25.

12. Critique: A Positivist Theory of Knowledge or Existential Ontology? 1.  Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I will draw exclusively from this 1929 text and from the Davos discussions of the same period. Recall that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant evolved along with the shifts in his own philosophy. In this 1929 text, Heidegger makes Kant into a foreshadowing of his own philosophy and even claims that Kant went further than Husserl. 2.  Ibid., 7. 3.  Ibid., 4–5. Recall Heidegger’s principal thesis about philosophy and its history: Aristotle’s Metaphysics contains an ambiguity about the definition of the prote philosophia, because philosophy is knowledge of beings qua beings as well as knowledge of

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the most eminent being, from which the totality of beings can be understood. Scholastic philosophers ignored this duality and reduced Aristotle’s two questions to one: “Western metaphysics after Aristotle owes its development not to the assumption and implementation of a previously existing Aristotelian system, but rather to a lack of understanding concerning the questionable and open nature of the central problems left by Plato and Aristotle” (5). Hence, metaphysics was destined to be only a series of variations on an onto-theological structure. 4.  See the first chapter of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, entitled “The Unfolding of the Idea of a Fundamental Ontology Through the Interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason as a Laying of the Ground for Metaphysics”; see also Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” the introduction, “The Critique of Pure Reason as Laying the Foundation for Metaphysics as Science.” 5.  As Didier Franck has shown, Heidegger’s philosophy systematically depreciates the problem of space to the benefit of the problem of time (Heidegger et le problème de l’espace). The same is true in his interpretation of Kant. 6.  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Analytic,” book II, chap. 2, §3.—trans. 7.  Heidegger’s interpretation of Cohen here is, it seems to me, disputable. Cohen does not reestablish or return to a “metaphysical” system in which finitude would be denied or relativized, because understood in terms of an already posited absolute of knowledge. Cohen’s thesis about knowledge is not given as an attempt to reduce finitude compared to an absolute. It is a description of how mathematical knowledge functions. 8.  Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 15. The German text [and English translation] is noticeably stronger [than the French translation] because it literally says, “this must be hammered in: knowing is primarily intuiting.” [The French translation literally reads, “this must be constantly remembered.”] 9.  This debate is available in English as “Davos Disputation Between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger.”—trans. 10.  Clearly, I must note one significant exception: in Science et métaphysique chez Kant, Michel Meyer relaunches this debate and sees in the two editions the expression of an insurmountable contradiction of Kantianism, even of philosophy as a whole. Meyer also notes how rarefied the question has become today. 11.  He had already done so in 1783 in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. It is not an accident that this text opens with an homage to David Hume. 12.  We probably ought to prefer this more general formulation, rather than simply accusing the subjective deduction of psychologism, because it was the Marburg school that directly associated the “subjective deduction” with “psychologism.” But this association’s directness is historically misleading in that Hegel said the precise opposite: for Hegel, the subjective deduction translated “a reality put forward

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in overcoming empirical psychology,” while the objective deduction relapses into psychologism, “into this formal or more properly, psychological idealism.” “Its idealistic side—which claims for the subject certain relations, called categories—is nothing but an extension of Locke’s view” (Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 75, 78). The general formulation that I am proposing of the difference between the two editions avoids this ambiguity insofar as everyone accepts the claim that the objective deduction is a description of a mechanism and not a genetic explanation of a product. 13.  Alexis Philonenko vehemently rejects Heidegger’s reading and challenges the interpretation in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics in these terms: “Heidegger’s thesis is, it seems, contradictory and unfounded. Indeed, Heidegger unceasingly underscores how in the second edition of the “Transcendental Deduction” Kant makes a point of denying the imagination in the understanding. But—and this point is essential—the transcendental schematism in which according to Heidegger himself primacy is conferred upon the imagination, was not altered in the second edition!” (L’œuvre de Kant, 1:176). The same argument is made by Alain Renaut (Era of the Individual, 187–88). But as Heidegger notes (Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” 131ff.), the chapter on the schematism can be read in two ways (as a description of a mechanism or as the unveiling of an origin). The resolution of the debate thus depends on one’s general orientation. 14.  Vleeschauwer, La déduction transcendantale, 3:16n2. Vleeschauwer also addresses the status of this question in his own era (18). See also, for more contemporary commentators, Michel Meyer’s revival of this debate (why is the imagination devalued in the second edition?) in Science et métaphysique chez Kant. 15.  On these differences, see Meyer, Science et métaphysique chez Kant, 170ff., and Vleeschauwer, La déduction transcendantale, vol. 3, part 1, entitled “The Transcendental Deduction in the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.” 16.  Vuillemin, L’héritage kantien et la révolution copernicienne, 302. 17.  Meier, “Traits fondamentaux de la critique kantienne,” 236. 18.  Ibid. 19.  This criticism can be found as early as Faith and Knowledge, where Hegel shows that if one is consistent, critical knowledge itself becomes invalid (76ff.). For later criticisms along the same lines, see Stanguennec, Hegel critique de Kant. But in this remarkable text, Stanguennec does not emphasize enough, in my view, the criticisms put forward in terms of the consideration of a discourse’s status. 20.  It is to be noted in passing that this idea of a quantitative finitude is thus “of a forgetting of the ontological difference” and for the seventeenth century itself is subject to caution. In his studies of Descartes, Jean-Luc Marion was able to show how, with the strange thesis of eternal truths, Descartes acknowledged a qualitative difference between our rationality and God’s, and thereby escaped the ontotheological structure.

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21.  The end of history is decreed either by an assertion of progress (philosophy is replaced by a more scientific and rigorous discipline, as Austin, for example, would have it when he articulates his desire that philosophy be transformed into linguistics) or by a decline (the onto-theological process has reached its completion, as Heidegger and his successors hold).

13. Questioning the History of Philosophy 1.  Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty,” 131 (emphasis added). 2.  The expression is Alain Renaut’s, made with respect to Kant in Kant aujourd’hui. This is also the position of every hermeneuticist who knows that any return to a tradition is an active reinterpretation and not a passive appropriation. 3.  This is, we know, one of Fichte’s great theses, repeated at the beginning of each Wissenschaftslehre: reading the Wissenschaftslehre is not a matter of appropriating a content or even a method but rather each time of constructing and producing, not repeating and reproducing. It follows that the idea that one could return to Fichte as one could at times return to Kant (for example, in judging that philosophical inquiry had been closed by the philosopher and that the only thing left to do was to apply his insights to fields that Kant had not really studied—politics, society, etc.) literally has no meaning for Fichte, because the truth does not reside in a proposition but in the unceasingly repeated production of rationality as a constant wrenching from naturalness. The Wissenschaftslehre must therefore not be applied, but must be unceasingly produced, or else one is not really dealing with the Wissenschaftslehre. 4.  Barnes, “Aristote chez les anglophones,” 706. 5.  This is the title of one of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories in Ficciones. 6.  Linsky, Referring, ix. 7.  As I have shown, neither an assertion of a minimal realism nor a given thesis about the nature of the brain can do without a consideration of self-reference. To put it differently, the problems of reference to the world sometimes fall within a consideration of self-reference. It is because this dimension of self-reference has been concealed that the endless disputes about realism and antirealism have again been able to occupy the philosophical scene. As long as one remains within the orientation of “reference” (as I have shown in my analysis of one of Pascal Engel’s texts), the problem of reference to the world cannot be resolved, nor can the realism/antirealism debate be decided. 8.  Poincaré held the chair of mathematical physics at the Sorbonne from 1886 until his death in 1912; his disciples, who likely would have extended and advanced his work, were thus among the generations decimated in World War I. 9.  Born in 1930, Largeault died in 1995.—trans.

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10.  In addition to my earlier citation [chap. 2, n. 5], in which Largeault attacks the way that French practitioners of a global and more or less mythical “analytic philosophy” aim to “put down other philosophers, by invoking precision and rigor” and thus become “a new panacea,” let’s recall a few of Largeault’s phrases in Quine: “Through a disgust with speculative chimeras, or perhaps through foolishness, epistemologists tend to believe that scientific work consists in treating minuscule problems with meticulous care. By definition, this is science! [But] imprecision can be fertile. Theories have been invented with a view of achieving an objective X or because one thought that p. X turns out to be impossible or p false; in compensation one discovers q or attains objectives Y, Z . . . , that are more interesting than X and that had not been suspected. Knowing X and p with precision would have prevented the undertaking” (178n1). Or again: “[They] believe logic is honored through attention to details. Attention to details is a congenital trait of what is done in the name of analytic philosophy” (178). Or again: “Carnap and Popper have become the tokens for a crossbreed of rationalist mandarins and puritans” (185n12). Wittgenstein has “prompted philosophers to see, in reasoning or in expression, only what is mechanical or mechanizable” (185n9). All “the neopositivists should compare themselves to doctors who go to great lengths ‘discussing the treatment for a patient who died yesterday’ ” [Molière, Hypochondriac, act 3, scene 10, p. 88] (185n16), etc. It is important that these foibles—in which some representatives of the analytic paradigm occasionally fall—were noted by one of the greatest experts in this paradigm, and clearly not by a Continental phenomenologist or a Persian philosopher. 11.  Janicaud died of a heart attack in 2002 at the age of sixty-four.—trans. 12.  But however that may be, whichever forking path each of us—as historians of philosophy—will choose to cultivate, nothing in the final analysis could be worse than the situation in which philosophy is declared to be dead, and the history of philosophy to be futile. To the many today who reject the French practice of the history of philosophy in exclaiming, “But why do the history of philosophy!” historians of philosophy can respond, “To avoid making philosophy into what you have made it, that is, a discipline that each day solemnly pronounces its own death, and each morning organizes its own funeral.” In contrast to this brooding about a never-ending death, the history of philosophy can offer the willing and joyful practice of an always-living philosophy. 13.  The two examples are taken from Hilary Putnam. I have already mentioned the first, about “the twin Earth”; the second is drawn from the 1963 article “Brains and Behavior,” an article in which Putnam elaborates his “functionalist” theory. 14.  Putnam, “Philosophie analytique et philosophie continentale.” 15.  Ibid., 48. 16.  I say “perhaps” because a thought experiment could fail but one would not know it until it had been carried through to completion. 17.  Thomas-Fogiel, “Plaidoyer pour le langage philosophique.”

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18.  See Hintikka, “Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?”—trans. 19.  We can see here how doing an interpretation “in return” is not a “return to” but rather an intersection of questions. 20.  On this general term and the constellation that it encompasses, see chap. 1 and especially Fisette and Poirier, Philosophie de l’esprit, to which I made frequent reference. 21.  See chap. 1, where I have approached this problem from a different angle. I take the minimal thesis of parallelism and not causalism because, as we have seen, the latter is not unanimously shared among neurobiologists themselves. 22.  Both were contemporaries of Descartes’.—trans. 23.  I choose this example as it seems to have a certain consonance with some current neurological alternatives. 24.  It is clear that these few very rapid suggestions are only sketches of an analytical orientation to illustrate (with examples other than Fichte or Hegel, already taken up in this book) what a well-ordered dialogue between philosophers of different times could mean. The philosophy of mind summons Descartes as a foil, it is thus natural to make him participate in the debates, and, by putting oneself in his place, to understand what the philosophy of mind really contributes. 25.  This is the Churchlands’ program that I’ve already mentioned.

Conclusion 1.  Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty,” 131. 2.  With the clear exception of Karl-Otto Apel, analysis of whom made possible the transition to part 2. 3.  We have seen throughout this text that “to ground” means nothing other than “giving arguments or justifications with a view to demonstrating x or y.” That this term has become what Martial Guéroult called a “slanderous” term does not stop me from claiming it. 4.  See the first section of chap. 7, “A New Definition of Transcendental Argument.” 5.  Kant, like very few other philosophers—Aristotle, certainly; Descartes, without any doubt—is a “civilization maker,” in the sense that, for centuries, the most diverse thinkers and the most directly opposed trends remain dependent upon the way of thinking that he inaugurated.