Toward a New Foundationalism: From Carnap to Kripke, and from Husserl to Sallis 1527562050, 9781527562059

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Toward a New Foundationalism

Toward a New Foundationalism: From Carnap to Kripke, and from Husserl to Sallis By

Bernard Freydberg

Toward a New Foundationalism: From Carnap to Kripke, and from Husserl to Sallis By Bernard Freydberg This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Bernard Freydberg All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6205-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6205-9

For Akiko, Forever.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... ix Foreword .................................................................................................... x Prelude ..................................................................................................... xiii On the Way to Ruling Image: Rethinking two Canonical Platonic Tropes A Note on the Unusual Tone of this Book............................................... xvi Rudolph Carnap .......................................................................................... 1 William James ............................................................................................ 7 Willard van Orman Quine ........................................................................ 14 Donald Davidson ...................................................................................... 28 Saul Kripke ............................................................................................... 34 Richard Rorty ........................................................................................... 41 A Surprising Measure ............................................................................... 48 Edmund Husserl ....................................................................................... 52 Martin Heidegger...................................................................................... 58 Maurice Merleau-Ponty ............................................................................ 73 Jacques Derrida ........................................................................................ 80 Hans-Georg Gadamer .............................................................................. 93 John Sallis............................................................................................... 102

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Table of Contents

Afterword ............................................................................................... 110 Appendix ................................................................................................ 112 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 113 Index ....................................................................................................... 118

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This, my tenth book, differs from my earlier ones in many respects. It advances a single and heretofore undiscovered thesis that, in my view, illuminates both sides of the current philosophical divide. It is small wonder, then, that it has evinced various responses among its early readers. I render my deepest and most heartfelt thanks to Kevin Marren, who not only grasped its peculiar force but also insisted upon the importance of the book. Thanks also go to Michael Rudar, who provided excellent comments and formatted this text, and to the anonymous reader who praised it unequivocally. I also drew inspiration from Marina Marren, as does everyone else who knows her. This is my first book for Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Its staff, especially Adam Rummens whose clear and rapid replies to my queries made the preparation of this manuscript a pleasure, gave strong support all the way. Finally, the contributors to my philosophical vocation are too numerous to mention, and go back all the way to my undergraduate studies at the University of Rochester, where the ideas of Lewis White Beck and Jerome Stolnitz continue to live in me. At Duquesne University, I studied under John Sallis, who remains the best teacher I have ever known. He has seeded most of my scholarly work, and has been both gracious and patient when I have found myself disagreeing with him. Above all stands my wife, Akiko Kotani, who unites goodness and truth in shining beauty.

FOREWORD

Just as each of my previous books was motivated by a perceived lack in the philosophical literature, so too is this one. However, the lack it seeks to remedy is more general. It cuts across the majority of both major Anglo-American and Continental thought. One seeks in vain for work affirming the presence of a governing foundation, a Grund, that pervades the whole either explicitly or implicitly. The explanation for this lies at hand: metaphysics is out of favor. Rather, most contemporary philosophy takes it for granted that late-19thcentury philosophy, continuing into the 20th century and beyond, sounded the death knell for metaphysics. The reasons for this differ dramatically between the two major strains, and even within them. The outcome, it seems to me, consists of an often overconfident and almost always false wisdom. It also seems to me that foundations are tacitly presupposed, even in the most vigorous denunciations of them. In other words, we have outsmarted ourselves and have replaced the innocence that remains so basic to philosophy with an injudicious sophistication. I do not fault the work of those most influential thinkers that challenged the traditional authority of metaphysics. To the contrary, they have done philosophy a great service. While I believe that their specific critiques of our canonical Western thinkers are rarely as decisive as they suppose, their responsiveness to apparently countervailing developments and the individual genius of some of their cohort have both advanced the level of discourse and reshaped our relationship to the pursuit of wisdom as such. Before following out these matters, I will defend one distinctive presentation of metaphysics that lives on to this day in some form or other. Kant’s Critical Philosophy provides the best source from which we can trace the origin of contemporary developments. As is well known, for Kant metaphysics is science (Wissenschaft) by its very nature. In his time, “science” meant “a system of knowledge rationally ordered.” He separated pure a priori sciences, i.e. sciences based on reason alone, from empirical sciences, i.e. sciences that rested upon an empirical component. More than just a science, however, metaphysics is a natural disposition, a claim that might sound peculiar given its academic, esoteric quality. However, a survey of the structure of “the idea and division of a

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special science under the title Critique of Pure Reason” (A 10, B 24) demonstrates the vitality and the rich humanity of this contention. The Critique of Pure Reason has two principal divisions within its Doctrine of Elements. The first division, the Transcendental Analytic, establishes the rights and the limits of reason in the realm of experience. (This division gathers into itself the prior Transcendental Aesthetic.) Reason can attain objective validity only in the realm of appearances. The second division, the Transcendental Dialectic, demonstrates how reason transgresses those limits when it ignores the restriction to appearances and so gives rise to unavoidable illusion. Kant’s influential predecessor Christian Wolff published a book of “school metaphysics,” with a title so wonderful that it continues to roll off the tongue long after the decades since I first became aware of it: Vernüftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt, der Seele des Menschen--auch allen Dingen überhaupt (1719), or Rational Thoughts Concerning God, the World, the Soul of Human Beings—and All Things in General. Breaking down this title in an academic way yields the following: “All Things in General” refers to rational ontology, the rational science of being in general. “God” refers to the rational science of theology. “The World” refers to the rational science of cosmology. “The Soul of Human Beings” refers to the rational science of psychology. Ontology was called “Metaphysics of the First Part” or “General Metaphysics.” The other three taken together were called “Metaphysics of the Second Part” or “Special” (in the sense of “specific”) Metaphysics. Special Metaphysics unfolds into the three questions that, according to Kant, touch all of us: (1) What can I know? (2) What should I do? and (3) For what may I hope? However, the cost of securing our knowledge in the realm of appearances in an ontology “that must give way to the humble title of an analytic of the understanding” exacts its toll with respect to those questions that affect our humanity most deeply. That is, we have no knowledge of God, of freedom, or of immortality—whether they can be affirmed or denied at all. The incentive for Anglo-American empiricism follows plainly from Kant’s Analytic that limits human knowledge to appearances as objects given through sensation. The transcendental trappings are disposed of easily, so also are Pure Intuition, the Categories of the Understanding, the Schematism, and the Principles (Grundsätze) of the Pure Understanding to a significant degree. Analytic Kantians tend to find issues that concern them, but tend to have little or no commitment to the metaphysics that animated the critical philosophy.

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Foreword

The Hume–Kant relation may still spark controversy, but I’ll simply recall a remark made by Lewis White Beck in his 1972 graduate Kant seminar that I was privileged to take. In our wrestling with the Second Analogy for some time, and with Beck offering a fine interpretation of Kant’s answer to his Scottish predecessor, he concluded (in his rich southern accent): “Ain’t much wrong with Hume!” Beck frequently expressed contempt for “existentialism and Buddhism and all that other nonsense,” and only essays written in the analytic tradition found their way into his edited books. Nevertheless, he was a great teacher and encouraged me even though I sought a graduate degree amidst the “nonsense” he so thoroughly and eloquently rejected. In several chapters that follow this Foreword, I will examine influential analytic philosophers whose work can be traced back to a Kantian influence. The Continental strain emerges from those elements more or less discarded from the Anglo-American tradition. German Idealism can be expressly derived from the critical philosophy. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Science) centers upon Transcendental Apperception and Transcendental Imagination (Einbildungskraft). In Schelling, imagination moves even more dramatically to the heart and art become prominent as philosophy’s exoteric organ. Hegel discerns a purposive cunning in history, whereby reason triumphs after great toil and loss. Later in the 19th century, Nietzsche disrupts any notion of rational purpose in favor of a retrieval of the Dionysian. The task concerning both strains consists of two distinct but related matters. First, I must show how each of the thinkers owes his philosophy to the abjured metaphysical tradition. Secondly, I shall exhibit the metaphysical foundations that nevertheless remain. As a Prelude, I shall excavate and reinterpret the central notion of a shared contemporary foundation, namely ruling image.

PRELUDE ON THE WAY TO RULING IMAGE: RETHINKING TWO CANONICAL PLATONIC TROPES

The Plato work of John Sallis animates the following reinterpretation of the Divided Line of Republic VI and the Cave of Republic VII. A close reading of the actual Platonic text overturned not only my long-held approach, but also convincingly confuted the conventional wisdom. Instead of the theory of two mutually exclusive worlds, with a faithful translation of the Greek language it yields ongoing and dominant concern with image and with sight. My first exposure to these canonical depictions came in my freshman year at the University of Rochester, which was still a militant and excellent Anglo-American philosophy environment. In Philosophy 103: History of Ancient Philosophy, I learned that Plato believed that there were two distinct worlds. The lesser world was the world of Sense, the scene of our hapless everyday strivings. This world was governed by opinion. By contrast, the Intellectual world, the world in which the Forms reigned, was governed by truth; there could be no admixture of the two. How I strove to enter this higher, glorious world! I couldn’t cut it in the world of Sense. I had no confidence. I had no focus, on my studies or on anything else. I was sloppy in my dress. My fellow students, the likes of whom I had never encountered before, had much greater exposure to cultural matters and so much greater sophistication. Worst of all, I had very few dates and never had a second one. But they didn’t know what I knew, that they were wasting their lives in the chaotic and quotidian pursuit of futile and meaningless goals. Hard as I tried to enter the world of the Forms with a pure mind, I never so much as approached it. What, then, to do? Look for another philosopher more congenial to my shortcomings! And I succeeded too well. I grew passionate about philosophers from many and conflicting orientations. The best sentence I read as an undergraduate (and one of the best ever) was written by Descartes in his Discourse on Method, where he

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Prelude

confesses that the result of his first-rate education bestowed by the best teachers was the discovery of his own confusion and ignorance.1 Much to my surprise and wonder and many years later, I happened upon John Sallis’s Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues.2 From it, I became aware that the Platonic text of the divided line presented the sensible and intelligible regions as continuous and not distinct at all. As one ascends from images in water, through the things of which the images are images, through the hypotheses (geometric shapes) of which the things are images, to the eidƝ of which the hypotheses are images, there occurs nothing whatsoever resembling a leap from one world to another. Rather, each segment calls one to a different way of seeing. “Form” is a loaded and godawful translation of eidos, arising from an unwarranted interpretation of a Greek word that has a crystal-clear sense. Eidos is the past participle of horaǀ, the verb that means “to see.” Along with this crucial matter of translation, the original meaning of nous is not “intellect,” but “perception.” As one reads on, the blinders continue to recede. At the end of Republic VI, Socrates and Glaucon seem to agree that as one moves up the divided line, one moves toward greater clarity and truth. However, the first words of Republic VII startle: “Meta tauta dƝ, eipon, apeikason” (“After this, I said, make an image…”) (Republic, 514a—emphasis mine). If one interprets the image of the cave that follows as an account or allegory of everyday life as ruled by opinion, as opposed to the true life that exists beyond the grave, one has committed a blunder so egregious that it outrages basic reading comprehension. After the depiction of the chained prisoners’ world of shadows projected on the cave’s wall, Glaucon observes that this image is strange (atopon), as are the shadow-bound prisoners. Socrates’s response is telling: “Homoios hƝmin” (“They’re like us…”) (Republic, 515a). We are bound to shadows, to images. Search as thoroughly as you can, but you will not find a single instance in which Socrates or anyone else claims to behold a disembodied eidos. The Republic goes no further than to point out only that the human being who ascends out of the cave is able to see that the images are images, and that their “originals” are not eidƝ but either other things of sense or abstractions from them. In the Phaedo, the statuses of the eidƝ find their most precise delineation. After claiming that nothing is beautiful except by virtue of its participation in the 1 René Descartes, Discours de la Methode, bilingual edition (Milton Keynes: Jiahu Books, 2015), 11. 2 John Sallis, Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

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eidos beauty, with the same pattern holding for the other HLGƝ of which he regularly speaks, Socrates says the following: I first posited (hupothemenos) a logos that seemed to me to be the strongest (HUUǀPHQHVWDWRQ), then I set down as true whatever seemed to agree (sXPSKǀnein) with it, and that which disagreed I regarded as untrue. (Phaedo, 100a3-8)

The strongest (or healthiest) logoi turn out to be “the beautiful, the good, the great, and the like,” each of which he frequently speaks. Nothing is beautiful except insofar as it participates in beauty, etc. In the only reference to a methodos in the entire Platonic corpus, Socrates calls his method HLNƝ phurǀ (random mixing) (Phaedo, 97b). Such a procedure could hardly be farther from “intellection.” The HLGƝ rule as the strongest logoi. But our access to them takes place as a result of the intellect’s peculiar way of seeing. Just as it sees the eidos “triangle” such that what it sees is neither equilateral, isosceles, or scalene, the intellect sees the HLGƝ in a manner that is never apprehended as having separate existence, but always as gathering what occurs under their sway as participating in them. They are images of the preeminent kind. They are ruling images. I reinterpret this notion of ruling images for the sake of comprehending what I see as a blind spot on both sides of the philosophical divide, and as a way of removing these blinders as well. “Ruling image” becomes a foundation for philosophy that has assimilated its major developments but that requires rethinking of its roots.

A NOTE ON THE UNUSUAL TONE OF THIS BOOK

Though this book has a more or less traditional philosophical goal, namely the advancement of a general thesis, its tone shall depart from that found in most customary practice and in all of my previous books. One obvious departure consists of my unabashed declaration of my opinions regarding the philosophers treated. In some quarters and even in mine for the most part, it is considered bad form, at the least, to offer opinions while offering scant or no evidence for them. However, a somewhat sizeable portion of the reflections contained within will have this somewhat undesirable feature. This circumstance belongs to the book’s design. Regarding the latter, my intention is to differentiate strictly between my own assessment of the philosopher and of the power of the philosopher’s thought, together with that power’s source. The first of the two, the assessment, requires no agreement from the reader except for the following general one: I defy anyone to claim that a single philosophical idea has ever escaped uncontested. Also, if anyone should claim that a philosophical reader comes to any work without any preexisting points of view that he or she interposes in the act of reading, then I say: Produce that person if you can, and I will reward you handsomely by handing you my credit card that has the greatest dollar limit. Please enjoy a shopping trip, travel, a cruise, whatever the heart desires. As I lead a parsimonious life, I would not make such an offer if there were any danger of my needing to honor it. This book offers not only a new foundation, but also a new way of exposition. My individual treatments of the thinkers are by and large at least acceptable, but the interpositions of my sometimes idiosyncratic views are virtually certain to displease, if not enrage, most readers at some point. I regard these views primarily as attenuated accounts of their thought, discussed with the sort of conversational relaxation one finds in a bar or a lounge. That is to say, they have some philosophical value and some entertainment value if this latter term might be stretched. However, quite by accident I stumbled upon what may be a way to bring the two opposed factions, Analytic and Continental, together and

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even into a kind of harmony. In the past, I have written several papers proving that such a rapprochement could not occur. My premise, which shall also make an appearance in what follows, was that no common conception of language obtained between the orientations that would allow for a shared ground of any kind. I realize fully that women and men with far more talent than I possess have been unable to bridge this gap. That one side sees language as predominantly guided by logic and its formal variants, and the other sees it as showing, i.e. as bringing to appearance, turns out not to be the decisive barrier between them. As the previous section of the Foreword indicates, I seek to show how the notion of ruling image provides a foundation for philosophy that once was the province of reason and/or experience (in the empiricist sense). Examination of the several major thinkers that I treat here leads me to conclude that each and every one of them relies on the foundation of a ruling image whether they are aware of this or not. More ambitiously, I hope to add this notion to the contemporary philosophical conversation as such. Although I am fully persuaded that the notion of ruling image answers every major concern that occupies current philosophy, I am only too well aware that a claim such as that one angers the gods, and that nemesis has a way of following on the heels of such hubris. Instead, I placate them by offering patently breezy critiques of every one of the twelve philosophers included for their entertainment and, far from least, for yours, Dear Reader. A career devoted to scholarship on any one of the twelve would constitute a good life indeed. I do not necessarily expect your concurrence on any portion of these energetically brisk accounts of their general positions and orientations. However, I do request that you take note of my underlying aim, namely to separate the issue of anyone’s opinion of the twelve thinkers, mine especially and yours also, from the basic matters of the power that each has undeniably exercised, and the ruling image that provides that power. The way to what passes for unity travels through the multipolar perspectives provided by their ruling images.

RUDOLPH CARNAP

Rudolf Carnap belonged to the Vienna Circle, a group that evolved during the 1920s and 1930s. It was headed by Moritz Schlick in its most prominent iteration during 1924–28. The philosophy that served as its rallying cry was, and is, called Logical Empiricism. A manifesto of its program, written by Neurath, Hahn, and Carnap in 1929, was dedicated to Schlick by its authors. Nearly a century after the fact of its publication, one reads this key proclamation with amazement: The Scientific World Conception The scientific world conception is characterized not so much by theses of its own, but rather by its basic attitude, its points of view and direction of research. The goal ahead is unified science...[F]rom this springs the search for a neutral system of formulae, for a symbolism freed from the slag of historical languages; and also the search for a total system of concepts. Neatness and clarity are striven for, and dark distances and unfathomable depths rejected. In science there are no “depths”; there is surface everywhere: all experience forms a complex network, which cannot always be surveyed and can often be grasped only in parts. Everything is accessible to man; and man is the measure of all things…The scientific worldconception knows no unsolvable riddle. Clarification of the traditional philosophical problems leads us partly to unmask them as pseudo-problems, and partly to transform them into empirical problems and thereby subject them to the judgment of experimental science. The task of philosophical work lies in this clarification of problems and assertions, not in the propounding of special “philosophical” pronouncements. 3

This mixture of grand ambition, of naiveté, of hubris, and finally of lasting power despite the other qualities may well be unique in philosophy’s long history. I dare say that no one today subscribes to its outrageous claims. Of its co-authors, Carnap has had the most influence. 3

I had difficulty locating the sure origin of this manifesto, which was issued at a Vienna Circle Conference as discussed above. Other sources ascribe it to Ernst Mach a bit earlier.

2

Rudolph Carnap

His obviously flawed program has set the task for much of the analytic philosophy that followed. Before I partially outgrew my philosophical adolescence, I regarded Rudolf Carnap as the worst prominent philosopher ever. The slovenliness of his reasoning stood in direct proportion to his arrogance. Even his committed analytic heirs repudiated his scorched-earth criticism of Heidegger. However, there can be no doubt that Anglo-American philosophy has consciously developed from Carnap’s crude beginnings. His 1932 essay titled “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache”4 (translated by Arthur Pap as “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”) presents as unambiguous a view that anyone could wish. Even a philosophical novice, if given definitions of the key terms, would be able to grasp its sense. When I first read this essay in my Philosophy 101 class with Jerome Stolnitz, it produced plenteous joy in me. I no longer had to wrestle with and lose to those big books full of fearsome vocabulary and taxing arguments. This great teacher’s meticulous lectures for this course consisted of him devoting one class to presenting the philosopher in question in the most positive light possible, followed with the next class in which he tore down the edifice praised in its predecessor brick by brick. A third class found Stolnitz commenting on what might be worth saving from his subject’s contribution. His critique seemed so thoroughly devastating to me that I have no recall of the third Carnap lecture. My opinion has changed. After decades of hearing mealymouthed papers and reading books with that same quality (written even by influential philosophers), I have come to admire Carnap’s straightforwardness, and to acknowledge, if somewhat grudgingly, the quality of his contribution. His position grows out of the inarguable advance of the empirical sciences, with physics providing considerable ballast. The relativity of space and time as joined into “spacetime” seemed to supersede Euclidean geometry, once considered a bedrock foundation of natural science. Although the fifth postulate, that parallel lines never meet, was regarded as intuitively obvious, no one could prove how it could be derived from the first four postulates. While they were not without precursors who gestured toward its development, Lobachevski and Bolyai arrived at non-Euclidean geometries. Lobachevski did so by negating Euclid’s parallel postulate. Bolyai’s formulation allowed for both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries 4 Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache,” Erkenntnis 2 (1931): 219-241.

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(depending upon a parameter). With admirable foresight, Bolyai claimed that mathematics alone could render no decision on the structure of the universe, but left this task to physical science. Riemann advanced the scope of non-Euclidean geometry by its treatment of curved surfaces. Although it can be viewed as a theoretical construct (and much work in this area remains entirely theoretical), Riemannian geometry formed a necessary component of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and plays a significant role in astronomy and cosmology. On one hand, against this background, only the most churlish among us would berate Carnap and his Vienna Circle colleagues for their uncritically militant empiricism. On the other hand, they surely had to be aware that Einstein, with whom they studied, controverted this empiricism vigorously. The “Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” is so thoroughly a piece of its time that one finds it almost poignant that it had once exercised such widespread influence. However, a cursory glance across the analytic landscape reveals that much of its substance remains in force. With characteristic certainty (not to mention a considerable measure of truculence), Carnap writes the following: In the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this realm are entirely meaningless. Therewith a radical elimination of metaphysics is attained which was not yet possible from the earlier antimetaphysical standpoints. 5

Having the benefit of retrospection, finding flaws in this so-called “logical analysis” requires scarcely more difficulty than the proverbial shooting of fish in a barrel. The most glaring of many gaffes consists of his contention that the meaning of words depends entirely upon their empirical application. To our eyes, this is a howler in light of what the author sets out to prove; a perfect specimen of circular reasoning. Still worse, his further elaboration that the meaning of a sentence consists in its truth condition is itself a sentence that has no truth condition. Like the earlier assertion, the latter is no more than an arbitrary stipulation. However, my business here is not to run riot over some regrettable blundering. Rather, my business is to bear witness to its philosophical power. 5 Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache,” 220.

4

Rudolph Carnap

Confronted with the gradual but shocking denigration of Euclidean geometry to merely one of several possibilities with no special priority, and with astronomer Arthur Eddington’s 1919 confirmation of the theory of general relativity by means of his earlier specific prediction that starlight will bend around massive objects, Riemannian geometry “won out” over its Euclidean ancestor, just as the once separate phenomenon of gravity becomes an epiphenomenon of spacetime. Recall that for centuries the major dispute concerning the nature of space and time involved the Newtonian view (and its variants) versus the Leibnizian view (and its variants). According to both views, space and time are distinct. For Newton, space and time were both infinitely extended and absolute. He designated them “divine sensoria.” Leibniz regarded both as relative and relational. In his Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant rejects both as stated in achieving his goal of presenting an a priori sensibility. However, he brought aspects of each to his own division of transcendental ideality of space and time (thereby incorporating the Newtonian perspective) and their empirical reality (doing the same for the Leibnizian perspective), calling them forms of human intuition as well as the more controversial “pure intuition.” 6 Either formulation rests upon what Kant famously called “synthetic a priori,” which is not only a transcendental/logical demarcation but the necessary condition for saving the philosophical treasure from the endless disputes to which it had been subject: “the battlefield of these endless controversies is what we call ‘metaphysics.’” 7 What need remains for Kant’s pure intuition in light of relativity physics? “None” seems to be the most plausible answer. This development in physics obliged human beings to reconsider their entire conception of the universe, as we know it. Small wonder, then, that so many philosophers signed on to some version of Carnap’s verificationism. In light of this profound breakthrough, it is more than merely charitable to reconsider his view on the meaning of words that I earlier called a mere stipulation. Question: To what, exactly, does “a priori sensibility” refer? In light of the necessary reconception of three-dimensional space and linear time as the measure of all motion, “a priori sensibility” refers to nothing, i.e. one can 6

Since Kant called all human intuition empirical and defined “pure” as “free of empirical content,” the notion of pure intuition may seem internally contradictory. But Kant never abandoned the latter term. It is best thought, in my view, as the pure element in every human intuition. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996) (A50/B74), 106. 7 Ibid., (A viii) 6.

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locate no object that it picks out. In defense of Carnap, it seems not only far from arbitrary but also quite reasonable, if not even obvious, that words that cannot point to an object have no meaning. Thus, with this single decisive stroke, centuries of illusion have been overcome. The internal problem with Carnap’s pronouncement in this paper soon came to much attention. Even his Vienna Circle colleagues quickly criticized his verification principle, according to which any sentence to be cognitively meaningful must express a statement that is either analytically or empirically determinable to be true or false. Soon thereafter, he pared this principle down somewhat to mere confirmability and at least partial testability. I will not recount these intermural squabbles, which I find not only tedious but beside the point. It became clear to many of Carnap’s sympathetic colleagues that universal statements were eo ipso nonconfirmable, but their devotion to the new empiricism led them to seek many kinds of contrivances to avoid that empiricism’s demise. But in whatever way the logical empiricist principle of meaning presented itself, that philosophical love that dares not speak its name cannot remain suppressed: metaphysics. If one accepts either formulation of Carnap’s principle of meaning, this conclusion cannot be avoided. Both must be regarded as synthetic a priori principles in a strict Kantian sense. In the first, the connection between meaningfulness and verification is neither analytic, nor empirically verifiable. If, therefore, it does provide the measure of meaning, the principle synthesizes (i.e. brings together) the two notions, and it must be regarded as apart from (i.e. in advance of) its ruling process. This sort of thing occurs when an admirable philosophical passion overreaches the new rationality that it wishes to establish. Carnap attempted to answer his critics on this matter some years later by introducing a distinction between theoretical and observational statements. Theoretical statements are derived inductively from empirical matters and the framework according to which the particular discipline may operate. Their external counterparts consist of specific rules that apply to the actual operation within the framework. Although Carnap claimed that theoretical statements belonged to the same language as the observational external statements, it became clear even to his sympathizers that such a distinction could not be sustained. Carnap declared that one could take issue with some external sentences since these might not produce confirmations, but one could not do so with internal sentences. In my view, he once again showed his hand by offering an ad hoc proviso, i.e. another stipulation. In other words, he had shown himself to be a closeted but unconsciously committed metaphysician.

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Rudolph Carnap

Although many analytic philosophers once held the outrageous conceit that their approach had solved all philosophical problems except for those pertaining to counterfactual conditionals, the field has been properly humbled. American Philosophical Association programs are fairly glutted with papers of all sorts of issues that were supposed to have been settled long ago, as well as new disputes that are no more likely to be settled than those of their predecessors. The issues raised by the early influential theories, like Carnap’s internal/external distinction, can still stir up controversies, although discussion of them might remain dormant for some time. Carnap’s unacknowledged metaphysics was no mere accidental byproduct of his efforts to purge philosophy of “pseudo-problems,” but served as the foundation of his thought. In light of its strength and its justification due to advances in physics, this cannot be the last word. I propose that we commingle these only apparently discordant elements: (1) the unacknowledged metaphysical principle that is epistemologically distinct from the empirical matters it governs, and (2) those same empirical matters. Those of us who, like myself, can discern the history of philosophy as not only implicitly present but also alive in the most determined efforts to surpass it are able to uncover illuminating resources unavailable to the intrepid but misguided would-be heralds of the new era. Carnap’s metaphysical foundation must be reformulated—as an image. However, such an image cannot be understood as a mixture of being and becoming, i.e. of being and non-being. Rather, this foundation must be apprehended as an image without an intelligible original that would determine it. Logical empiricism is a ruling image, because this image governs the region over which it holds sway. Two centuries of philosophical criticism, from both sides of the divide, have eliminated the possibility of a single ruling rational principle. However, I insist that this criticism allows for a foundationalism along different, perspectival lines. Accordingly, many such ruling images are possible, as this book will demonstrate. The ruling occurs in terms of its power rather than in terms of any presupposition.

WILLIAM JAMES

The significance of William James’s contribution to the course of 20th-century philosophy and beyond cannot be denied. Not only his championing of pragmatism, but also his propensity to deflate philosophical terminology in a manner that unites clarity and playfulness introduced a new spirit to American philosophy. The most famous example consists of his judging the success of theories by their “cash value,” i.e. how much they can produce in advancing useful human knowledge. He has diverse heirs, and even those who do not primarily call themselves pragmatists incorporate pragmatic elements into their work. That said, full disclosure requires me to reveal that pragmatism of the James (and Rorty) variety annoys me like no other philosophy. While I may believe that Carnap falls short in regard to many, if not most, important matters, he risks taking firm positions, responds to criticisms vigorously and thoughtfully, and as a result his logical empiricism still inspires thought and merits respect for these reasons. By contrast, James’s pragmatism commits to nothing and, still further, celebrates this lack of commitment as a virtue. He is a person of considerable wit, and his prose features frequent clever ripostes to his philosophical opponents. These opponents consist virtually one and all of “rationalists” and the overlapping “intellectualists.” Further, I well understand why many analytic philosophers find Heidegger’s arrogance off-putting. Many times, I join them. However, in this characteristic he is positively gracious in comparison with James, who most often is regarded with at least some warmth. I frequently find James’s writings insufferable. One of his many annoying habits is the blatant mischaracterization of positions he finds wanting, often offering trenchant dismissals of positions that nobody ever held. His primary means of philosophizing does not consist of argument but rather of ridicule for positions he opposes and praise for his own and of others of his ilk. In his first lecture in Pragmatism, 8 he reduces philosophy to the temperament of particular philosophers. On one side are the “tender8 William James, Pragmatism (New York: Dover Publications, 1995) (hereafter cited in text as Pr).

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William James

minded” who are abstraction-loving rationalists. On the other are the “tough-minded” empiricists like him (though he allows himself occasional “holidays”), who attend to facts in the world. I will take a non-Jamesian holiday (see below) and indulge in a practice I would ordinarily find abhorrent, namely return wretched ad hominem for wretched ad hominem. “Rationalist” Descartes fought in wars, despite his privileged background. Spinoza stood his philosophical ground, only to be anathematized by the Jewish religion of his time and so banished from contact with those of his fellow faith. Also, this has to be the one and only instance where Kant would be placed among the tender-minded. By contrast, James was born into a very wealthy home and experienced no financial or academic challenges. He is tough-minded in the way I am tough-minded when I gesture with my fists toward the boxers on the television screen. His second lecture, titled “What Pragmatism Means,” begins with what must be an apocryphal remembrance of a camping trip that involved “a ferocious metaphysical dispute.” This dispute involved a very fast squirrel, a much slower man, and a tree. The man runs in his attempt to catch a glimpse of the squirrel as it goes round the tree, but the squirrel— running in the opposite direction—proves to be much too fast to allow this glimpse. James writes: “The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?” (Pr, 17). As James tells it, there were two quite animated groups each taking one side of the issue. When James, after a walk, returned to this protracted intellectual melee, he was asked for his view. With the admirable sobriety of a sage amidst fools, he explained to the group that the solution rests upon what one practically means by “round.” If “round” means moving clockwise from north to east to south to west to north and repeating the process, then the man goes round the squirrel. But if “round’ means being first in front of the squirrel, then on its right, then behind it, then on its left, and then in front of it again, he does not. This, to James, provides a fine—or I should rather say “useful”—introduction to the pragmatic method. He calls this dispute “a trivial example,” but both its force and its charm derive from its analogy in James’s mind with more esoteric metaphysical disputes. What would they be? The matter with which this famous lecture began resembles nothing I have ever read, not only in Kant but also in the entire German Idealist tradition that Kant inspired. The thinkers of that period wrote in language that stands in virtually incalculable inverse proportion to the language of trees and squirrels. Early in his philosophical life, Carnap studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason intensely. While he rejected most, if not all, of Kant’s conclusions

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in his later work, he regarded the analytic/synthetic distinction of sufficient importance but broke from Kant and brought considerable attention to bear upon it. Not so for James. In his third lecture, titled “Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Conceived,” James briskly treats the notions of “substance/matter,” “free will,” and “God.” If anyone thinks that these subjects require close and persevering attention, they will be saddened to learn that in a mere 16 pages of easily understood English, they are neatly disposed of. Consider “matter vs. spirit” as contenders for the ultimate source of the world. James bestows well-deserved praise upon Berkeley, whose arguments decisively do away with the notion of material substance. His praise extends as well to Hume, another of his empiricist forebears, whose thought did away with the corresponding notion of spiritual substance. The final score, metaphysically speaking, is zero to zero. Neither notion gets us any nearer to the ultimate nature of our world’s actuating principle, nor can any other. Neither metaphysical notion has any pragmatic use. But each has a pragmatic use: the notion of God provides a way to conceive of an eternal moral order. The belief in matter provides a way to conceive the negative side, namely, that all things are finite and will not endure beyond their natural time. In other words, these notions together provide a practical way to interpret the world free of “rationalist” nonsense. The problem with this analysis, as I see it, is that it makes a mockery of James’s famous claim that one should “go round” Kant because there is no need to “go through” him, for the most important feature of the Kantian antinomies is their denial of real significance to those very notions that transcend actual experience. In the case of the mathematical antinomies, both thesis (rationalist) and antithesis (empiricist) totalizing concepts are false—so James is correct to set them aside, but he was 200 years late to claim this accolade as his own. There are, of course, differences as well as similarities between James and Kant, although the differences are far less significant. While both thinkers ascribe practical significance to these respective notions, James considers their roles as providing promise toward a more perfect future (God) and as providing the denial of a more perfect future (materialism). In this way, both inform human hopes and doubts regarding the unknown future that belongs to all of us. Free will versus determinism in James just as surely recalls the dynamical antinomies of Kant, in particular here the third. For the socalled and mistakenly called rationalist Kant, the possibility of freedom hangs by the thinnest of threads. The most that can be claimed is that the

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coexistence of freedom with natural necessity (i.e. determinism) means that the two need not contradict one another. In the Critique of Practical Reason, the reality of freedom is asserted, never proven. The source of freedom and the laws associated with it remain entirely and radically incomprehensible. Both accounts provide pragmatic meaning to freedom. While Kant’s rests upon moral matters, James’s rests upon the hope that things at least can get better. Unlike Kant, he regards free will as a religious matter, a way to bring relief to the troubled state to which humans often find themselves given over. However, the pragmatic difference between them seems small, if not infinitesimal. His fourth lecture, titled “The One and The Many,” picks up from the third after a fashion. The vastly inflated treatment here is the notion of an ultimate unity, of the oneness of the world taken in some sense. James insists that experience teaches that there can be no single source, or system, or being, from which and under which everything can be derived or understood. Instead, he celebrates the variety that all sensible people, i.e. all empiricists of his ilk, easily recognize. His telling insight is: “This leaves us with the common-sense world, in which we find things partly joined and partly disjoined” (Pr, 62). To those who have wrestled with philosophy’s canonical texts and wondered whether the wool was being pulled over their eyes, James offers them welcome reassurance. Only an uncouth jester would point out that his bête noire Kant spoke repeatedly of the manifold of sensible intuitions, and that the pure categories were mere functions of unity that make the experience of this manyness possible. Lecture five presents James’s account of the history of human insight. I reproduce it (1) to illustrate its difference from both analytic histories that find the philosophy of the past lacking in scientific rigor and (2) to give the garland to those philosophers who embrace recent natural science, like Carnap and Reichenbach: My thesis is now this, that our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time. They form one great stage of equilibrium in the stage of human development, the stage of common sense. (em[phasis in original) (Pr, 65)

One cannot be certain whether James is claiming that the developments in the modern era were mere minor accretions to what was already available. In any case, he gives the canonical philosophers little or no credit, while the ancient scientists and their modern and contemporary

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epigones are permitted a bow. However, the bow is not bestowed to their theories regarding “sights unseen,” but for the practical applications devolving from their insights. Thus, “accurate clocks and accurate artillery practice” stand at the heart of Galileo’s legacy, medicines stand in the same way to the work of chemists, and the genius of Ampere and Faraday? They provided…“the New York Subway and Marconi telegrams” (Pr, 89). Once again, this brusque critique does nothing to mitigate the power of James’s pragmatism, not to mention its enormous influence. His thought provides a more open alternative than does Carnap’s to the ascendancy of the empirical sciences. Like Carnap’s, it serves a restraining function, or a check. James’s thought limits the scope of philosophical theories to include only those that pass the test of usefulness to human aims. While there can be no doubt that empiricism finds overwhelming favor, no theory is ruled out a priori. This last feature provided an outlet for some further substantive considerations. However, James seems to complicate his own notion of truth as he speaks of three types of thought concerning our world, and writes that there is no reason to claim that “at any stage as yet in sight [one] is absolutely more true than any other.” The three are (1) common sense, the most “consolidated,” (2) “august science,” and (3) what can only be termed as the more “abstract” entities of dubious reality but somehow useful to science (Pr, 72-73). To complicate matters further, at the close of his fifth lecture he enjoins his audience to be suspicious of common sense despite its more or less obvious merit as a guide to life. In a manner that recalls no philosopher as much as it does Descartes, he allows that it may be the case that some of the hypotheses upon which it has been built may yet be open to question. Finally, the fact that these three ways of thought do not intersect suggests that none of them has a purchase on truth, but that each is useful in a certain setting. This is posited as a further recommendation for the pragmatistic view that all theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality. Pragmatism, then, becomes something of a theory of theories, a view that saves itself from circularity because it accounts for itself in the very deed of proclaiming its nature. Lecture six provides a further elaboration of the pragmatist conception of truth, and of the wit of this lecturer. He likens the life of truth to a “credit system” similar to bank notes that serve for exchange so long as they are not refused. This account of truth is, in both the initial and the final analyses, an account of the plurality of truths. Their sole unity consists of the practical one, or in James’s words, if they pay. Once again,

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rationalism and intellectualism function as a red herring, as mere airheadedness in comparison with the down-to-earth wisdom he propounds. He does offer the requirement, almost in passing, that truths “pay by guiding us toward some part of a system that dips at numerous points into sense-percepts.” Once again, every philosophy from Plato’s divided line, through Aristotle’s Physics, and through the rationalists that serve as the butt of his ridicule address the matter of sense perception in a thoroughgoing manner. What a welcome waiver James provides to those who look to avoid the work of studying these difficult texts! The remaining three lectures concentrate on the human contribution to all of the above, even with respect to the oft-debated and always controversial matter of religion. In his final entry, he allows that religion can belong to pragmatism so long as it is either “pluralistic or merely melioristic.” Pluralism of religion must refer to the many forms that religion can take, e.g. Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, etc. The term “melioristic” serves to rule out insight or even belief into a disembodied afterlife, but rather restricts the adept to the possibility of earthbound change for the better. Once again, one can marvel at the mix of profundity and modesty of James’s discovery, or one can recall that such meliorism is precisely the position of Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason and other writings. Contemporary pragmatists, such as the late Richard Rorty, found value in philosophers whose work had no apparent connection to pragmatism, such as Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty distinguishes between two kinds of philosophers: the systematic ones who work within the academic tradition and those edifying ones whose work provide stimulation to the entire field. As we will soon see, Rorty’s characterization of philosophy as gadfly to contemporary concerns consciously echoes its Socratic legacy. 9 But I digress. What is the epistemological status of usefulness as it resides in the principle of pragmatism? In James’s own thinking, it cannot be a theoretical concept that transcends human life and experience. Nor can it be listed among those problems that pragmatism is designed to solve. Although Kant’s logical nomenclature does not figure in James’s thought, the principle of pragmatism as stated is synthetic a priori. In light of the Prelude, however, usefulness must be categorized as an image. Like Carnap’s verification cum confirmation, usefulness functions as a ruling image. Of what is usefulness an image? Once again, it is an image without an original. As such a ruling image, it governs the activities that are determined to occur within its region. Its success, much like that 9

See Rorty chapter below.

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allied with Carnap’s thought, derives from its ultimate indefensibility on rational grounds—that is to say, its failure in this regard—but still more from the equally emphatic power that it exercises.

WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE

In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 10 Willard van Orman Quine appears to undermine two precepts that have governed modern empiricism, both of which are found in Carnap’s philosophy. Quine claims that there is no basis for the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. As we have seen, for Carnap analytic statements are meaningful, although they are true only in a logical sense, i.e. they are tautological (Greek: logos, saying; tauto, the same). Verifiable/confirmable statements are one and all synthetic, i.e. they belong to a qualitatively different kind than analytic statements insofar as they rest upon observable experience. Given the years that had passed since and the amount of consideration that was applied to Carnap’s crucial work, the greater subtlety of Quine’s examination of the issues raised by his forebearer can hardly be unexpected. Quine’s arguments are penetrating. His observations are acute. One follows him to his most compelling conclusions. His result is both penetrating and original. Perhaps, however, we will see that this result is not quite what he thinks it is. The second tenet governing modern empiricism is a certain reductionism according to which logically formed sentences can relate to immediate experience; another view espoused by Carnap. Quine regards this tenet also as false. It would seem that nothing remains of his proud antecedent’s glorious child named “logical empiricism” after the understated and delicate, yet withering, criticism in this essay. However, Quine honors Carnap precisely by addressing himself to all of the most prominent aspects of his work. In a certain way, Quine stylistically combines Carnap’s relative crudeness and James’s sterling wit. In my opinion, James can also be included in this criticism if certain caveats are noted. Carnap’s high regard for natural science at least borders on the uncritical. James seems concerned with neither logical distinctions nor immediate experience. These matters derive from Kant, the one around whom James’s path

10

Willard Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953) (hereafter cited in text as TD).

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proceeds. However, usefulness provides a criterion every bit as immediate, and the principle of pragmatism is at least equally reductionist. At the outset of the essay, Quine indicates that abandoning the two tenets would (1) blur the distinction between speculative metaphysics and the natural sciences, and (2) indicate a shift toward pragmatism. Unlike Carnap and James, Quine draws both knowledgeably and respectfully on the history of modern philosophy, specifically upon Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. This gives him a significant advantage with respect to perspective. It would appear, therefore, that his thought provides an echo to the concerns that I raised earlier. I am almost tempted to say that it is a distant echo indeed, though both Quine’s denial of a basic distinction in the history of philosophy and the outcome of this denial surely deserve commendation. The claim of analyticity breaks down in Quine’s argumentation. I refrain from saying that he “deconstructs” analyticity since his angry loathing of this thought led him to protest Oxford University’s bestowal of an honorary degree upon the French provocateur Jacques Derrida. This attitude is one of the few that I share with Quine, and that I will explore in the second major section. After reading Derrida, and after reading book after book and paper after paper on his work—even those written and delivered by colleagues for whom I have the highest respect—I have yet to come across a satisfactory contrast between “deconstruct” and “analyze,” although certain acolytes of the former seem to imagine that they are somehow critically dismantling whatever they break into its constituent parts. Returning to the treatment of analyticity, in “I: Background for Analyticity,” Quine makes a crucial distinction between two statements widely supposed to be equivalent: “No unmarried man is married” and “No bachelor is married.” The first statement is analytic without question, because its logical form is –-(--p & p). For Quine, the second raises issues that do not lend themselves to such easy outcomes. The term “bachelor” does not allow for an analogous treatment as the first sentence. Carnap’s knowledge of this problem led him to posit “state-descriptions,” by which he could replace “bachelor” with “unmarried man” on grounds of their synonymy. But “synonymy…is in no less need of clarification than analyticity itself” (TD, 23). However, the application of state-descriptions à la Carnap, such that the truth-value of the two statements above remains the same, i.e. both are true, requires that the atomic statements of the language are mutually independent. Otherwise there could be a state-description ascribing “true” to “John is a bachelor” and “false” to “John is married.” Under the latter

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condition, “All bachelors are married” would be synthetic rather than analytic, i.e. analytically false. In “II: Definition,” recourse to definition proves no more able than state-descriptions in rescuing analyticity. Definitions differ in kind from one another and these different kinds each have usefulness in their appropriate contexts; “In formal and informal work alike, thus, we find that definition—except in the extreme case of the explicitly conventional introduction of new notation—hinges on prior relationships of synonymy” (TD, 27). In “III: Interchangeability,” Quine tests Leibniz’s salva veritate (“preserve truth”), according to which synonymy is ascribed to expressions so long as neither their truth-value nor their meaning changes whatever the context in which they appear. He disposes of such counterexamples as “bachelor has fewer than ten letters” and “unmarried male has more than ten letters” by recourse to what he calls “cognitive synonymy,” which affirms salva veritate everywhere except within words. After supplying a chain of statements that includes the interchange of “unmarried male” for “bachelor,” the conclusion reached is “Necessarily all and only bachelors are unmarried males.” Given salva veritate, the latter conclusion is analytic, i.e. it is comprised of a chain of logical inference that requires no reference to empirical content, which Quine calls “extralogical.” At this juncture, he utters his famous observation that the above argument has something “that gives it its air of hocus-pocus” (TD, 29). The first red flag is the use of the word “necessarily.” This word is required if the concluding statement is to be regarded as analytic. However, if we presuppose having a language developed enough not only to contain such an adverb, and to limit its application to analytic statements alone, then the statement whose analyticity it purports to secure becomes circular in my opinion, and not quite circular but bad enough in Quine’s view. In order to remove the aforementioned defect, the language must be relativized in such a way that its extent is specified in relevant aspects. However, once again insurmountable difficulties loom. In the language so relativized and specified, “any two predicates which agree extensionally (i.e. are true of the same objects) are interchangeable salva veritate” (TD, 30). But this interchangeability is not close to being sufficient for cognitive synonymy. First of all, there is no guarantee that two predicates that agree extensionally do so because they have identical meanings or because of mere coincidence. While our familiarity with “bachelor” and “unmarried male” might mislead us to assume a shared meaning based upon their extensional agreement, counterexamples

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abound. Quine’s is “creature with a heart” and “creature with kidneys” (TD, 31). Returning to “necessarily,” if the latter word has an intensional meaning that would be sufficient for cognitive synonymy, then once again the argument for analyticity proves to be circular since it assumes in advance, i.e. a logical notion of necessity, that it sets out to prove. His “IV: Semantical Rules” has another negative result. Semantical rules and artificial languages generally have the function of eliminating vagueness that may well undermine claims of analyticity: In short, before we can understand a rule which begins statement S is analytic for language L0 if and only if...,” must understand the general relative term “analytic for”; must understand “S is analytic for L” where “S” and “L” variables. (TD, 33)

“A we we are

Thus, “A statement S is analytic for language L” makes sense only if we understand the phrase “analytic for…” which—once again—we do not. In other words, we have another instance of circularity. Quine considers other attempts to save the notion of analyticity along similar lines, with the same unhappy result. He concludes Section IV by noting that “truth in general” consists of both language and extra-linguistic fact, and that this is obvious. At a later moment in this book, we will see his disciple Davidson take issue with both claims. They do seem to follow from the discourse to this point, and they provide a transition to “V: Verification Theory and Reductionism.” The dogma of reductionism turns out to be intimately related to, and indeed “at root identical with,” the first dogma concerning the difference in kind between analytic and synthetic statements. While certain statements that rely upon language alone may appear to be analytic, the prior analyses have demonstrated that to call a statement “analytic” invites complexities that subvert both the obviousness and the justification of this claim. Concerning empirical verification of a synthetic statement, Quine writes in a manner that refutes and honors Carnap simultaneously: “My present suggestion is that it is nonsense, and the root of much nonsense, to speak of a linguistic component and a factual component in the truth of any individual statement” (TD, 42). In “VI: Empiricism without the Dogmas,” Quine proposes his version of empiricism with admirable clarity and brevity. Measured quantitatively against Hume’s Treatise and Kant’s first Critique, Quine’s account comes in at a little over 0.2% of his great forebears. However, this concision results from his deep indebtedness to them. Unlike Carnap and

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most certainly unlike James, the doctrinal history of modern philosophy lives in his thought. However, it seems to me that his version of empiricism detaches from that history and rests rather on the results of the razing of the two dogmas. To summarize, our “so-called knowledge or beliefs” consists of a man-made assemblage of statements such that some locate in the “center” and some nearer the “periphery.” The former, more general, group of statements tends to have “logical meaning.” The latter, more particular, group tends to be closer to “sense experience.” However, the statements are one and all loosely connected, and no statement anywhere in the assemblage is immune from revision. Every revision can in principle provoke many other revisions with the assemblage in order to restore its equilibrium. This practice applies even to false and/or ridiculous revisions; ad hoc additions can accommodate virtually any revision. Even a proposal to revise the logical law of excluded middle, in order to simplify quantum mechanics, has been advanced (by the benighted Hans Reichenbach). Now comes the shift to pragmatism, and to that aspect of Quine’s thought that most arouses my philosophical instincts. He sees science as a tool that one employs to predict future experience using past experience as a guide. This tool requires the belief—Quine calls it a posit—in physical objects. He characterizes this posit epistemologically with telling honesty and far-reaching consequences as a myth that has the same status as Homer’s gods. The advantage of “physical object” over, say, Zeus and Athena consists in the former’s superiority in the practical task of prediction: Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a continuing barrage of sensory stimulation; and the considerations which guide him in warping his scientific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic. (TD, 46)

This, he claims, is “a more thorough pragmatism.” Here we have another case of the clichéd truism that to tear down is far easier than to build anew. Quine’s criticisms of the two dogmas are to my mind not only successful but beautiful in G. H. Hardy’s sense in A Mathematician’s Apology. Hardy famously insisted that, like a poet or painter, a mathematician creates patterns. The criterion they must meet is beauty. He claimed that there is no room for ugly mathematics. Both of his easy examples of mathematical beauty, (1) concerning the theorem that there can be no largest prime number and (2) that the square root of 2 is irrational, are reductio arguments, and as such resemble Quine’s argumentation in the essay under consideration.

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However, Quine’s empiricism fares no better when subjected to the same kind of examination he visited upon the two dogmas. His positive conclusions contain argumentation just as slovenly as his critiques were elegant. To begin with, he offers no reliable account of “rational,” nor is there one. “Rational” could mean anything here, from “logical” to “somewhat plausible.” Even if the meaning of meaning were to be fixed by some stipulation or other, this provides no help. To say that the fashioning of an assemblage out of one’s scientific heritage and sensory promptings are pragmatic where rational quite obviously begs the question. If somehow question-begging were permitted, “pragmatic” would prove to be just as slippery—and every bit as culpable as is James’s version treated above. In Chapter 2 of Word and Object, 11 “Translation and Meaning,” we find Quine’s positive thought at work. In the manner of the vast majority of philosophers since Aristotle, entrance into his version of empiricism requires the acceptance of certain presuppositions. In Quine’s case, the main one was called “[our] continuing barrage of sensory stimulation” in “Two Dogmas” and is here called “the past and present barrage of non-verbal stimulation” (WO, 26). Kantians like me would rejoin with appalled vexation that only by means of an a priori principle of the understanding that contains a concept of an object can its sensible contents be analyzed at all. But Kantians like me endure dismissal in the districts that house Quine and his ilk. His empiricism, however, leads to a conclusion concerning translation that must be called elenctic, at least in some sense. Quine’s famous test case addresses the issue of translating a language that is entirely foreign to the would-be translator. (He refers to the latter, impoliticly in our current milieu, as a “jungle language.”) Unlike translation between languages that are related to one another (Quine’s example is English and Frisian 12) or between unrelated languages that are translatable on account of cultural factors, translation from a known language, e.g. English, into a completely unknown language involves philosophically thought-provoking problems. Quine calls this radical translation, since no point of comparison obtains between the language of the translator and that of the native speaker. In an imagined land where its natives speak a language unknown to the would-be translator, a rabbit runs past and the native speaker says “Gavagai” or of course any similarly opaque locution would do. After 11

Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960) (hereafter cited in text as WO). 12 Frisian is a Dutch dialect, regarded as the closest extant language to English.

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establishing a way for the native language speaker to assent or dissent from first the stimulus meaning of the word, then from the sentence—in addition to such matters as reading body language—in which the stimulus meaning is contained, the translator can do a reasonably good job of inductively building a workable way to translate the native language, although this translation is hardly unequivocal. After distinguishing the relative difficulty of translating different kinds of sentences (e.g. occasion sentences), he concludes that the linguist “translates not by identity of stimulus meanings, but by significant approximation of stimulus meanings” (WO, 40—emphasis mine). The story he tells is well known by now. Because of this early concession to approximation, none of the various recourses can give any assurance that this theory of translation will not yield different results: There can be no doubt that rival systems of analytic hypotheses can fit the totality of speech behavior to perfection, and can fit the totality of dispositions to speech behavior as well, and still specify mutually incompatible translations of countless sentences insusceptible of independent control. (WO, 72)

The indeterminacy of translation results from the prior arguments, and Quine concludes somewhat playfully that this indeterminacy is less noticed in “domestic” interlinguistic matters. In the latter case, where there obtains a match between two interlocutors with respect to all verbal dispositions, this (mis)leads many, “in all positivistic reasonableness,” (WO, 79) into the false assumption that there is no semantic difference between verbal behaviors. This leads to the implicitly cheerful outcome that sometimes the most intimate conversations that we have with the people most familiar to us result in mutual misunderstanding—recasting in semantic terms the remark from Strother Martin’s warden character in the film Cool Hand Luke as he whips Paul Newman’s prisoner on a chain gang: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” To this committed Continental philosopher, the discussion above seems entirely superfluous. On this side of the divide, we have long acknowledged the difficulties concerning translation, and have developed a detailed and thoughtful literature on the subject. 13 The tortuous path through logical and semantic matters in order to reach something perfectly obvious seems rather like electing to walk east around the entire globe in 13

For example, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Lesen ist wie Übersetzen (Reading is like Translating), in Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 8: Ästhetik und Poetik I. Kunst als Aussage (Tübingen: Paul Siebeck Verlag), 1993, ௘–௘ and John Sallis, On Translation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

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order to reach a destination that stands one block west. The whole issue may be nothing more than a red herring, since no one thinks that a one-toone definitive translation of one language into another is possible, nor does it surprise anyone that sometimes communication fails. Why, then, would these towering intellects undertake a project such as this? I can only hold that this and related inquiries are contemporary efforts to achieve human self-knowledge, and so are the product of philosophia. The “logos” of Aristotle’s logon is interpreted here almost literally as logic. Logic constitutes what once would be called (but no longer) the essence of our humanity. With this in mind, bringing logic and semantics to bear on language amounts to addressing what is most basic to our humanity in the most principled and genuine way. In this sense, “indeterminacy of translation,” far from being an empty truism, announces the nature and limits of our efforts to interact with one another and with ourselves. This result, therefore, can be called Socratic. However, the element that escapes any effort to fashion a one-toone translation, in my opinion, is the (admirable) recalcitrance of the natural language. “Logos” cannot be properly restricted to logic and semantics. “Non-logical” material always intrudes. We who would philosophize in this way always deal with the mixing of logical and nonlogical. The logos of ]ǀon logon echon must include and address what these analytic philosophers call “the natural language.” Its so-called “deep structure” cannot so much as be imagined without the language we speak and write. Nevertheless, it takes nothing from the dignity of logic to call it another ruling image that governs the domain over which it holds sway.

Quine and Science Quine’s thorough annulment of the two dogmas of empiricism amounts ultimately to the annulment of reason itself in all of its guises. Many respected philosophers of science regard defenses such as Quine’s as misguided. One particularly scathing challenge can be found in Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, originally published in 1975: …Today we realize that rationalism, being bound to science, cannot give us any assistance in the issue between science and myth and we also know, from inquiries of an entirely different kind, that myths are vastly better than rationalists have dared to admit. Thus, we are now forced to raise the question of the

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Willard van Orman Quine excellence of science. An examination then reveals that science and myth overlap in many ways…. 14

In my view, the philosophical kernel within this diatribe consists in Feyerabend’s unconscious and creative transformation of Quine’s epistemological understanding of myth. As I have attempted to demonstrate above, Quine’s “success” culminates in the death of science as a rational pursuit. This notion finds itself further extended in the critiques of Against Method also to imply that science is a hoax. This is precisely Feyerabend’s claim; a claim I cannot fully endorse. Science may be founded on myth, but it is not a con as he often at least suggested. Quine’s acknowledgment of the mythical status of “physical object” inspires substantial philosophical reflection. He claims that positing physical objects proves to be superior to positing Homer’s gods only because the former enables the prediction of the future based upon the past and Homer’s gods do not. “Posit” is an epistemologically loaded word and an unclear one as well, especially for a philosopher of Quine’s acumen. Its use constitutes an admission that physical objects have no greater reality than non-physical objects. In this light, I recommend a more comely name for “posit”: poem. Though it will probably register as countersensical in some (if not all) quarters to regard “physical object” as poetry, there can be no other designation on account of its mythical status. As this manner of discourse continues, such an ascription should become non-controversial. To reconceive “physical object” and, for example, “Aphrodite” in a more traditional philosophical manner, they are both images, and moreover images without an original. Insofar as each governs the realm over which it holds sway, I say that they are ruling images as well. Physical object governs physics and the attendant empirical sciences; Aphrodite governs love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation. But some “matter-of-fact” person might rejoin that physical objects exist in the real world while Aphrodite does not, and with this that the posited existence of physical objects makes prediction possible while Aphrodite and the rest of the Olympian cohort do not. I strongly dispute the contention that Homer’s gods do not serve the task of prediction. If one shifts perspective a bit, it is quite plausible to contend that the predictions made possible by the Homeric gods are equally, if not more, profound than those of science, although prediction is not their primary purpose. Consider the following two examples of events 14

Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975). This passage occurs early in the final section of the first edition. It does not occur in the most recent update in 1975.

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in the epics, the first from the Iliad and the other from the Odyssey. (1) Agamemnon has dishonored Achilles, and Achilles—the greatest Greek fighter—leaves the battlefield and remains by the ships. As a result, the Trojans threaten to annihilate the Greeks. Agamemnon realizes that only Achilles can save his side from ruin. Toward that end, he sends an embassy consisting of Odysseus, Aias, and Priam to beg for Achilles’s return. Achilles responds with predictable venom, hurling vile curses at the king who dishonored him, and the embassy ends in predictable failure. Why? Only Agamemnon could reach Achilles, and his absence provided an even greater provocation. The implicit human wisdom: If one does not take the responsibility on oneself after blundering in a major way, the outcome most likely consists of egregious and/or dreadful failure. (2) Cyclops has eaten several members of Odysseus’s crew, spitting their brains on the ground. Most clever Odysseus gets Cyclops drunk on wine, and employs a verbal stratagem that tricks Cyclops into removing the boulder that keeps him and his crew imprisoned and facing death. Odysseus mercilessly taunts his former captor, who then hurls part of a mountain that narrowly misses the men. His crew entreats Odysseus to shut up, which is undeniable wisdom from people who watched their colleagues having their flesh torn from their limbs. The vividly depicted prediction: If one’s anger takes hold and causes one to bluster in the face of extreme danger, the outcome can bring still more danger to the braggart and those affiliated with him. Recalling Plato’s Ion, Socrates declaims in one of his longest speeches that Homer (and other poets) produce their poems under the guidance of divine madness, and that these poems bring many blessings to humankind: For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed…And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning the actions of men; but like yourself when speaking about Homer, they do not speak of them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that to which the Muse impels them, and that only… (Ion, 533e-534c)

Another Greek myth can guide our discussion of Feyerabend’s response to Quine, namely the Apollinian/Dionysian struggle (and its

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occasional reconciliation). I strongly suggest that Feyerabend’s incendiary rhetoric constitutes a Dionysian rejoinder to the Apollinian character of Quine’s language. Echoing Freud’s dictum that self-betrayal oozes out of every pore, 20th-century analytic philosophy reveals the ever-ongoing tie to its ancient ancestors despite the most concerted efforts to leave it behind. In my view, this does not detract at all from analytic philosophy. Rather, whether conscious or not, its ties to the Greeks gives strength and resonance to it. What can we say about Feyerabend’s view of science in light of Quine’s claim of its superiority based on predictive capacity? Can the general public deference to science consist of a power play that bamboozles the less learned, i.e. virtually all but a very few of us, into granting science’s “excellence” as compared to the worth of other pursuits? Assuming the mythical status of the ideas—the ruling images— governing the various sciences as well as science itself, Feyerabend might claim plausibility for his view. But as usual, one can appraise it from another perspective. The ancient myths cannot be axiologically distinguished from their contemporary “scientific” counterparts. However, the faith in science finds ample grounds for its widespread acceptance. A glance at the current course offerings in American universities provides unmistakable evidence of the pervasiveness of this “irrational faith.” Classics departments, never very large, have not only shrunk in size but also in academic difficulty. All too frequently, they morph into “classical studies” departments that sometimes require no classical languages, or else are put together with religious studies. By contrast, science and engineering departments thrive, as do the various business departments that train their students to aid in the purveying of scientifically produced goods of all kinds. What can be so wrong with this generation of students and their universities? There can be no question that the intellects of majors in traditional Classics departments are on a par with the best science majors. There are manifold reasons for the decline of traditional Classics departments, of which I list a few: (1) Among the humanities, the only discipline within which one can get something definitively and unarguably wrong is Classics. Alas, the job market does not clamor for graduates of that field. (2) The canonical classical texts remain the same, of course. The requirement of facility in Greek and Latin also endures. So does the general activity of interpreting them, although such interpretations vary with the changes in society and history. For example, recent scholarship abounds with feminist themes and with studies exploring how plays were staged. (3) The third reason for the decline of traditional Classics departments

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is related to the second reason. It takes the same amount of time to read the Iliad in Greek, for example, that it did in previous centuries. By obvious contrast, it takes exponentially less time to wash clothing, to process a photograph, to travel from place to place, and to communicate with family and friends et al. etc. The almost magical use of and benefit from the technological devices made possible by “science”—whatever it is— derives also from the exemption to know anything whatsoever about the abstruse scientific principles (i.e. ruling images) that went into the fashioning of these devices. A child, e.g. my daughter Malika years ago at the age of 7, could use our computer with much greater aptitude than I had. Let us here apply the dubious but occasionally useful Jamesian standard of “cash value.” On one side, a human being has access to the beauties, the joys, and the inexhaustible wisdom of classical literature. These benefits never grow old. On the other side, a human being has access to technology that makes life easier and that expands all possibilities far beyond anything heretofore imagined. In terms of cash value, let us call it “mixed but very valuable in general.” Even Heidegger, whose critique of technology is both thoroughgoing and trenchant, agrees that the thinking that drives it, i.e. calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken), has its own great use. Moving on, many years of study loom ahead in order to gain mastery of the classical languages and conversance with the classical literature. At their end, unemployment or significant underemployment threatens unless one has the good fortune of securing one of the dwindling numbers of positions at universities. The apt user— or even the not-so-apt user—of technological devices enjoys their benefits with very minimal training, and this enjoyment bears no relation to one’s employment prospects. Is this elitism properly so called? My response could not be more emphatic: No!!! Perhaps a qualification is required. If “elite” is understood as designating a social class consisting of the wealthiest and/or the most powerful few, calling classicists “elite” in that respect would provoke gales of laughter, especially among the often-struggling members of this group. If “elite” is understood in its original etymological sense, from Old French eslite (12c.) (fem. past participle of elire, elisre “pick out, choose,” from Latin eligere “choose”), then perhaps “elite” can justifiably be ascribed to them, with appropriate modification. The choice of Classics by an individual human does not nearly meet the measure. Rather, I say that Classics chooses its acolytes, just as certain kinds of music choose their players and conductors. Jazz chose Charlie Parker, as did the alto saxophone. Classical music chose Midori

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and Bernstein. The cello chose Yo Yo Ma. Socioeconomic status has nothing to do with these elites. The novel chose Dostoevsky. Dance chose Baryshnikov and Judith Jameson. Painting chose Leonardo and Modigliani. Poetry chose Schiller and Dickinson. None of this has anything to do with high social standing of any kind. The excellence of classical music cannot be denied at all, but full concert halls provide only the most superficial evidence of this. So too do the crowds at blockbuster art shows. Both cases share the common feature that the “cost of admission” need be no higher than the cost of the ticket that allows entry. While differences in delicacy of taste surely exist, 15 all that entry requires is that one stays quiet. Fluency in modern foreign languages also brings special access and delight, but the cost is not nearly as high as the cost of access to Homer and Hesiod, although it is much higher than learning to use a cellular phone, for example. Returning to Quine, whose own empiricism was found to fail by arguments similar, if not identical, to those with which the two dogmas were found lacking, his thought nevertheless exercises extraordinary power and so its strength cannot be denied. Part of that strength rests upon his shrewd employment of Socratic elenchus with regard to a major strain of 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy. But even more of its power, in my opinion, derives from its remarkable prescience with respect to scientific developments that it predates. Perhaps the most striking example of this occurs in contemporary physics, especially string theory. String theory was first proposed in the late 1960s. Strings are posited as being one-dimensional, interacting through space and time. They must be classed as physical but unobservable objects. Often called a “theoretical framework,” string theory has led to many newer developments in physics, although its own exact nature and limit has not been determined and probably nor cannot be. However, advances in the knowledge of black holes, of nuclear and condensed matter physics, and of pure mathematics, to give a few examples, have taken place by virtue of string theory. The very recent confirmation of a 1964 prediction provides a spectacular example. In that year, Peter Higgs concluded that a certain crucial particle existed, in particular a boson that the standard model required in order to make sense. Although he persuaded most physicists of the correctness of this conclusion, the confirmation of the Higgs boson remained unaccomplished until March 14, 2013. Physicists at the CERN 15

See David Hume’s wonderful essay titled “On the Standard of Taste,” and my discussion of it in David Hume: Platonic Philosopher, Continental Ancestor (SUNY Press: Albany, 2008).

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Large Hadron Supercollider employed its unprecedented ability to detect phenomena and in so doing provided the long-sought confirmation. By putting no restrictions upon statements with regard to their admissibility, Quine’s empiricism allows science (so called) to range free among physical objects whether they are observable or not. As new results are obtained, the prior loose network of statements must revise or possibly replace the statements within it to accommodate those results. On the fringes but less so than before, superstring theory offers a new 11dimensional framework that has not yet been assimilated and might never be. Thus, Quine’s arguments for his new empiricism might fail, but his instincts in this area are sound. In this light, Quine’s myth-based empiricism without the dogmas is another ruling image. I indulge in the following counterfactual. If Quine could read what I am about to write, he might well perish again, this time of apoplexy: The outcome of Quine’s thought in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” matches up exactly with Socrates’s account of poetry cited above. Quine’s “posits” are myths, they are poetic tropes, i.e. inventions with no rational basis. Those people responsible for major developments in science are not “rational.” They are one and all geniuses in various etymological and historical senses of that word. One of the senses that especially suits my purpose is “prophetic skill.” Others derive from the Greek root “gene-” (genesis), “bring into being.” Following Quine faithfully to where his thought inexorably leads, natural science yields to poetry.

DONALD DAVIDSON

Donald Davidson’s intellectual background exceeds that of not only the other analytic philosophers but also virtually everyone else. As a Classics major at Harvard, he staged performances of Aristophanes in Greek. He acted in them as well, having memorized his large part beforehand. His philosophy dissertation provided an extensive and scrupulous interpretation of Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the leading Continental philosophers and who will be examined in the second part of this book. The turning point came when Davidson took courses from Quine. Unlike his analytic predecessors, Davidson expresses respect for the history of philosophy. When asked by Giancarlo Marchetti to name the philosophers he admired most, he replied: “I think there are endless ways of doing good philosophy and I am all in favor of all of them. Let them all flourish. I wouldn’t try to choose. The two philosophers I admire most are Aristotle and Kant, because they gave us so much work to do.” 16 Of course, I cannot be sure, even based on Davidson’s ideas that provide access to the mental states of others, but Aristotle provided the first exhaustive and formal accounts of Logic in the Organon, and Kant provided the most thoroughgoing account of the unity of the mind (the unity of consciousness, in Kant’s language). Both of these aspects find major emphasis in Davidson, albeit in a different context. In any case, one finds little or no vitriol toward any of his predecessors or contemporaries, and no agenda concerning the establishment of a new empiricist philosophy of science or a new method of inquiry to replace the negated old ones. Instead, his various papers through the years comprise an oddly yet distinctly unified body of thought. Davidson’s career presents many puzzles to me. How could someone who rejoiced in both the music and the hilarity of Aristophanes opt for a career attending to the dry logical temper of analytic philosophy of language? What could be the path that led Davidson there from his excellent dissertation on Gadamer? On a brighter note, why did Davidson always celebrate the diversity of philosophical approaches while so many of his analytic colleagues held many of them up to ridicule? On the brightest note of all, I 16

In Philosophy Now, Issue 32 (London, December 2015/January 2016).

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happened to meet “Don” (he did not tell me his last name) at a conference on Socrates in Samos, Greece, in 1990. He spoke with me about a few matters of shared interest with utter thoroughgoing unpretentiousness. When I learned later who I was speaking with, my characteristically stoic bearing received an unforgettable jolt. Among the many areas covered by his work, those that address ordinary language are the most intriguing in my view. “Actions, Reasons, Causes” goes a long way around to confirm what he calls the “common sense” view. Many, if not the vast majority, of his colleagues regarded reasons as mental events that were distinct from the law-governed (or lawlike) processes of physical actions. This paper attempts to show how reasons can be causes of actions since they belong intrinsically to the latter. His “engine” is called a “pro attitude,” and a pro attitude is actuated by “a primary reason.” To comprehend this, one must (1) know how to construct a primary reason, and (2) understand that the primary reason is the cause of an action. His example, and his examples in general, could hardly be more prosaic. Consider “I wanted to turn on the light,” followed by the action of flipping the switch that enables him to say “I turned on the light.” The two sentences are clearly independent. The source of a primary reason is the intention of the actor. “Wanting” is a genus of which all pro attitudes are species. Thus, “To know a primary reason why someone acted the way he did is to know the intention with which the action was done.” 17 The primary reason need not be expressed. For example, if one pulls weeds in order to make the lawn beautiful, the primary reason of wanting to make the lawn beautiful is implicit but not articulated. But to know the intention, it is not necessary to know the primary reason. He attributes the error(s) of his colleagues on this issue to the mistaken insistence that a mental event must be observed if it is to qualify as a cause. A primary reason for action is its cause. Mental states and state dispositions are not causes “but the onslaught of a state disposition is” (ED, 30). In even more concrete terms, if I am hungry for a hotdog, one could say that my mental state is “hunger for a hotdog.” This state is not a cause. But when I actuate my intention to eat a hotdog and therefore eat a hotdog, both the reason for this action and the action itself constitute a whole, i.e. the reason for an action is not distinct from the action. In a further difference with the view according to which physical actions are governed by empirical laws, Davidson wonders why the notion of cause cannot be logical rather than empirical. For me, this is one of the 17 Donald Davidson, The Essential Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 26 (hereafter cited in text as ED).

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few times that Davidson’s deficiency in appreciating the history of philosophy, shared by most of his analytic colleagues, mars his otherwise scrupulous discourse. Those of us for whom this history matters cannot help but recoil at the casual treatment of the issue of causality, as if this issue did not engage those ancestors who earlier received such praise from him. The “either/or” presented by Davidson bears witness to an uncharacteristic blindness. However, he argues successfully against the view that the explanation of an event requires the presence of an empirical law. Thus, his “salvation” of the common-sense view rests ultimately upon the distinction between mental events as states or dispositions and the pro attitude of intending them, thereby producing an “onslaught” or, in other words, an event in the world. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” with its cheeky title together with its artful argumentation, undermines one of the central tenets of prior analytic philosophy. Davidson goes so far as to call the idea of a conceptual scheme that organizes content external to it the “third dogma” of empiricism. “The dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something wanting to be organized, cannot be made intelligible or defensible” (ED, 202). One can rightly conclude that this position is Davidson at his most radical. He writes that if we give up this duality, “it is not clear that there is anything left to call empiricism” (ED, 202). Like his predecessors, the logos of ]ǀon logon echon is logic, or more precisely formal semantics amplified by (reversed) Tarski’s Tsentences. The latter addition removes the formal language even further from that of Carnap and even of Quine, since each retained a notion of truth as having some empirical relation, as we have seen. In “Radical Interpretation,” Davidson announces a crucial departure from Carnap and Quine: “What I propose is to reverse the direction of explanation: assuming translation, Tarski was able to define truth; the present idea is to take truth as basic and to extract an account of translation or interpretation” (ED, 191). To say this another way, Davidson’s approach is even purer than theirs. By moving from a logical/semantic theory of truth “down” to the interpretation of the utterances of others, Davidson avoids the reliance upon stimulus meanings and upon Quine’s more general empiricism that issues from accommodating the barrage of sensation to one’s inherited scientific theory. Language alone, or at least language understood in a certain way, provides sufficient resources to account for our pathway through everyday life including science, the only life that has significance for us. Davidson’s more formal philosophy of language provides the account that informs his insights here.

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As a practitioner of Continental philosophy, it took me a long time to appreciate the profundity of Davidson’s employment of Tarski Tsentences, or of Tarski T-sentences at all. The sentence “Snow is white” is true only if snow is white—do I really need philosophy for this? It turns out that I do. Davidson argues here that no scheme can even approach the capability of organizing either the world or any of its so-called parts. However, far from “giving up” the world, we reestablish our contact with it. This contact takes place by means of the only recourse we have to truth, namely the aforementioned Tarski T-sentences. “…The totality of such English sentences determines the extension of the concept of truth for English” (ED, 205). His 1978 paper titled “What Metaphors Mean,” because it is written in the natural language, sheds further light on the purism that characterizes Davidson’s thought. A long history of commentary on metaphor antedates Davidson’s purgation of this tradition. Though many analytic philosophers gave differing accounts, all seemed to agree that in addition to the literal meaning of a metaphor, a second and special meaning accompanied it. By the sharpest of contrasts, Davidson contends at the outset that whatever a metaphor may achieve in addition to the literal meaning, no semantic resources beyond the ordinary are required. The use of metaphor is legitimate across many disciplines—not only literature but also science, philosophy, and law. “Metaphors mean what the words mean in their literal interpretation, and nothing more” (ED, 209). How can this remarkable claim be understood and defended? I’ll test what might seem to be prima facie unsuccessful: “Michelle Obama is an albatross.” I assume that this metaphor would offend the sensibility of anyone worth speaking with and properly so. However, in the sense that the words carry their literal meaning and are expressed in an acceptable grammatical manner, the metaphor must be deemed acceptable. However, as we will soon see, it is false on its face. Davidson offers a plausible notion according to which metaphors might harbor within them both a literal and a figurative meaning at once. In a thought experiment somewhat analogous to Quine’s of a “jungle language,” Davidson imagines a visit from an inhabitant of Saturn whom he attempts to teach the meaning of the word “floor.” After he says the word and stomps on lots of floors, the Saturnian learns the meaning of the word. The two, then, travel to Saturn, where Davidson points to the earth below and (correctly) says “floor.” But suppose you were thinking not of something like “the hard surface below” but Dante’s poetic figure of earth as “the small round floor that makes us passionate?” This would make

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little or no difference to the Saturnian, who might merely pick up another aspect of the literal meaning. The above thought experiment demonstrates the following: the initial ostensions belong to language, while the resulting understanding points to the world. “Floor” referred to a floor in the world, and not to the banging of feet on a surface below in order to teach what it means. Consider “mouth,” a word that another Saturnian might learn by means of his teacher repeatedly opening his mouth and pointing at it, and at those of other people. There were rivers long before there were bottles, yet one has no difficulty understanding that both have mouths. The metaphorical meaning does not differ from the literal meaning of an opening through which passage is somehow possible. Davidson the classicist puts in an appearance here, reminding that Homer spoke of wounds as mouths. And while one might be tempted to reduce metaphors to their corresponding similes, this would only rob the metaphor of its original power. That power consists of revealing what Davidson calls “the unexpected subtleties and parallels,” but this revelation requires no more that the literal meanings of the words they employ. Toward the clarification of this view, Davidson argues that the vast majority of metaphors are false, while all similes are true. The former, of course, depends entirely on the literal meanings of words. “All the world’s a stage” has the truth-value “false.” All similes are trivially true because everything is like everything else in some way. “The world is like a stage” has the truth-value “true” because both are sites of action, both are spatial, etc. In a delightful side note on similes, Davidson cites Woody Allen: “The trial…was like a circus, although there was some difficulty getting the elephants into the courtroom.” 18 Davidson observes that a simile can be sabotaged by taking it too earnestly. Thus, metaphors carry no encoded messages but do their work in another way, namely through other intermediaries: …to suppose it can be effective only by conveying a coded message is like thinking a joke or a dream or a metaphor can, like a bump on the head, make us appreciate some fact—but not by standing for, or expressing the fact. (ED, 222-23)

Just as many responses are made possible by the mere tracing of a coastline or of the lines in a Picasso painting, metaphors provoke often sudden awareness of what Davidson calls “non-propositional content,” or

18

The New Yorker, 21, November 1977, p. 59.

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even more prosaically expressed, “facts.” But this content, far from being determined by the lines it traces, can occur in many diverse directions. The coastline of Italy can suggest anything from a boot to the site of the domain included at the height of ancient Greece. A line in a Picasso painting can provoke recognition of a mirror to a concealed eye. So, too, can metaphors. The essay concludes with a bow toward the critic, who “is in benign competition” with the metaphor maker but serves the latter by calling attention to “the beauty or aptness, the hidden power, of the metaphor itself” (ED, 224). “What Metaphors Mean” is itself a modest critical service for which Davidson surely deserves a bow of his own. The disarming purity of Davidson’s thought leads me to ascribe two apparently clashing elements as the ruling image: Formal semantics + T-sentences. Only by virtue of these can we reach ordinary language.

SAUL KRIPKE

Kant hovers uneasily over Kripke’s thought, even though the central features of the Critical Philosophy are not engaged either on their own terms or at all. Before long, Kripke’s attempt to revise and radically reformulate Kant’s notions of a priority and necessity will come into our view. In a paper that postdates Naming and Necessity 19 titled “Identity and Necessity,” Kripke shows a dismissiveness that exceeds Carnap’s, which is no mean feat: After a rather thick book was written trying to answer the question how synthetic a priori judgments were possible, others came along later who claimed that the solution to the problem was that synthetic a priori judgments were, of course, impossible and that a book trying to show otherwise was written in vain. I will not discuss who was right. 20

Kripke’s own positions give away his view that he sides with the anti-Kantians. In his mostly favorable review of Saul Kripke’s 1980 edition of Naming and Necessity, Richard Rorty undertakes the task of locating Kripke’s thought in the history of analytic philosophy. He titled his review “Kripke versus Kant,” 21 claiming that the previous philosophy of language articulated by the likes of Frege and Russell followed Kantian lines insofar as they regarded objects as constituted by both subjective and objective elements. To this author of books and papers on Kant that focused upon imagination as both the central and distinguishing feature of Kant’s Critical Philosophy, Rorty’s claim is preposterous. My guess is that acolytes of Frege, Russell, and their disciples would have a similar response, but for quite different reasons. Rorty has the gift of exasperating many.

19 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1981) (hereafter cited in text as NN). 20 “Identity and Necessity” in Saul Kripke, Philosophical Troubles, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011, 1. 21 London Review of Books, Vol. 2 No. 17, 4-5.

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However, his fundamental observation rings true (perhaps uncomfortably). In Frege, Russell, Quine, and Davidson, just to name a few, we decide what counts as an object by putting ideas together. This “condescending attitude toward common sense” that begat “a mad modern heresy” 22 survived until Kripke came along and exploded a bomb that has presumably smashed this bogus received wisdom to smithereens. This claim of the rebirth of common sense will be news to the many quite extensively trained people who had to labor mightily in order to understand Kripke’s remarkable thought. The most striking remark in Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity occurs in a parenthetical note. After damning the cluster concept theory of names 23 with faint praise, calling it a “nice” theory with the weakness that it’s “wrong,” he adds “…You may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place; but I hope not, because I’m sure it’s wrong too if it’s a theory.” What can we understand concerning this playful/serious jest? Most likely, Kripke regards “theories” as involving an overarching set of principles. In the history of 20th-century analytic philosophy, these “theories” combine logic and semantics in philosophy of language, neither of which (nor both taken together) have immediate contact with the world as given. Let us consider some counterfactuals concerning Barack Obama. In a possible world where law professors could not run for president, Obama might have opted not to teach law at the college or university level. Or he might have done so and decided not to run for President of the United States. In a possible world in which husbands of wives named “Michelle” cannot become politicians, Obama might have decided not to become a politician. He might have decided not to marry Michelle née Robinson. He might have asked Michelle née Robinson to change her first name, etc. But Obama remains Obama as rigidly designated. One more: In a possible world in which the 2008 election had a different result, Obama would have lost to John McCain. While this counterfactual is true for that possible world, Obama remains Obama. What, then, is Kripke offering if indeed he is not offering a theory? His claim is that he is offering “a better picture” of reference than the theories he would replace. This “better picture” rejects the practice of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for reference in favor of what he calls “baptism,” i.e. the initial naming of an object. His treatment of “Hesperus,” “Phosphorus,” and “Venus” gives a good way to understand 22

Ibid., 4. This theory regards names as referring to a cluster of properties that enable recognition of an object. 23

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this part of his thought. In an empirical account, it may well be the case (and probably is) that someone baptized an evening star as “Hesperus” upon sighting it. Someone else, perhaps, baptized a morning star “Phosphorus,” believing that it was a different star than Hesperus. Finally, upon the discovery that both were sightings of the planet named “Venus,” it was revealed that Hesperus and Phosphorus referred both to the same object and to the planet Venus. While we can construct all sorts of situations in which Hesperus and Phosphorus are not the same, and others in which they are the same but only contingently so, for Kripke their identity across possible worlds is necessary in the highest degree. Venus is always Venus. This is so because all three are rigid designators and all three name the same object. Nothing more is required. Natural kinds also function as rigid designators rather than as descriptions. Definition, long regarded as “that hoary tradition…by genus and differentia…” (NN, 134) as repeated in the views of Frege and Russell to a large degree, is rejected. Mill’s view, which regards proper names as having denotation but not connotation, is seen as superior. For Kripke, proper names fix a reference. Here may well be the best occasion to introduce Kripke’s challenge to certain Kantian notions. He denies that analyticity and necessity are coextensive; he also denies that empirical statements must be contingent, and that a priori statements can be known independently of experience. In the case of sensuously perceived phenomena of nature, “the identity fixes a reference. It is therefore a priori, but not necessary” (NN, 136). His example: “heat is that which is sensed by sensation S” is a priori, but not necessary, because heat might have existed even if we did not. In the case of natural kinds, both more and less embracing species terms are rigid designators. Therefore, “cats are animals” is a necessary truth, since both terms are rigid designators. 24 The latter is both a priori and necessary. “This desk on which I now type is made of wood” is a posteriori and necessary, because as stipulated it could not be anything other than this desk. “Any necessary truth, whether a priori or a posteriori could not have turned out otherwise” (NN, 142). Naming and Necessity concludes with a treatment of pain, in which Kripke disputes the materialist account according to which pain is explained by the stimulation of C-fibers in the brain. Unlike the case of heat, which we “pick out” by its sensible quality and not by a certain movement of molecules, we pick pain out by nothing other than pain itself. That is to say, we pick out this mental state in every instance: we stipulate 24

Such terms, when expressed in their definitions, are not synonymous with them.

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it as pain across every possible world. Pain is not a neurological inference, but a rigid designator. Once upon a time, some analytic philosophers believed that once the problem of counterfactuals was solved, so too would all philosophical problems. 25 Kripke’s advance seemed to provide much promise toward that goal, however justified the hyperbolic optimism. Much work followed, but no solution could be found. David Lewis began in an optimistic frame of mind, but gradually found that the problems connected with counterfactuals were more recalcitrant than originally supposed. 26 Like every genuine philosophical matter, no consensus on any issue has emerged—a testimony to its dialogical character since its origin. Concerning Kripke—this undoubtedly profound thinker and genuine original—I offer the following. In a possible world in which he was a student in my History of Modern Philosophy course at Slippery Rock University where I taught some years ago, he would have gotten no better than a grade-inflated “B” for his understanding of Kant. Kripke seems blind to the virtually obvious ways in which the question of synthetic a priori judgments functions and provides access to the basic metaphysical issues of his time as well as the epistemological issues of ours. The Principles of the Pure Understanding are those synthetic a priori judgments that make experience possible at all. As will be shown shortly, he cannot so much as acknowledge their role in bringing together the concerns of Descartes and Hume. Instead, he proposes to refute the notion of synthetic a priority by providing a “convincing” counterexample. A computer can clearly determine whether a particular number is prime. When the computer makes this determination, we trust the answer because of the convincing evidence for the laws of physics, for the construction of the machine, etc. Therefore, Kripke claims that we know that “9” is prime a posteriori. It somehow escapes his notice that without the a priori category of substance and the a priori First Analogy of Experience, according to which “substance as phenomenon” provides the rule for the perceptions that remain constant in time, the notion of “computer” would be entirely unintelligible, as would its necessary components. Just as he accuses the cluster theorists of doing, Kripke starts from the wrong end. He also claims that a priori and necessary are not synonymous but if they are connected, an argument is required rather than a mere claim 25 This may be more than a bit churlish, but I cannot help myself. The footnoted sentence is itself a counterfactual that remains “unsolved.” 26 In general, a few colleagues conceded that simple counterfactuals were manageable, but complex counterfactuals were not.

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of their interchangeability. Kant has provided that argument in the Aesthetic and Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, and students had to represent it accurately on their final examination. Though it pains me to say this, I suspect that he would not have done the required reading. However, the issue here does not concern an evaluation of Kripke as a Kant-interpreter. Rather, he starts from a very different point of departure—one might say that he stipulates his point of departure. Like virtually all of his analytic colleagues, he has no interest in constructing a framework wherein which experience takes place. Rather, experience and language are given, and he fashions his philosophy from there. Despite this assumption with which I disagree strongly, I confess that I found Naming and Necessity exciting. In one of his few papers that engage a major issue in the history of philosophy, “The First Person” 27 finds him addressing the notion of “I,” with frequent reference to Descartes and Hume but examining the issue in the terms in which he thinks and with the colleagues with whom he is most closely in touch. The paper engages primarily with the view of David Kaplan, but also with others of his analytic colleagues who share a kindred approach to philosophy of language, especially Frege. For Kaplan, the Cartesian view of the first person contains a circular feature, namely that the I that is aware of itself as thinking rests upon the I that thinks, and vice versa. He attributes such a circle to Frege, with whom he shares much but whom he thinks does not avoid this feature. In order to avoid the vicious circle of self-reference, one must not only have what he calls “a primitive aspect of me…that I alone have” 28 but that this primitive aspect must be expressible in a neutral scientific language. Otherwise, the circle at least threatens to recur. Though he does not express diametric opposition to Kaplan, Kripke nevertheless denies that a scientific language, i.e. a language that no one speaks but that insulates the first person from circularity, is required. He reiterates Frege’s account in “der Gedanke” that seems to support Kaplan’s criticism, but argues that Frege surely has a concept of himself: The point is that each one of us speaks a language that he himself has learned. Each one of us can fix the reference of the word “I” by means of acquaintance with himself, self27 Saul Kripke, “The First Person” in Philosophical Troubles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) (hereafter cited in text as FP). 28 Saul Kripke, “Frege’s Theory of Sense and Reference,” in Philosophical Troubles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 285. Here. Kripke is quoting John Perry from his “Frege on Demonstratives,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 86, No. 4, pp. 490.

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acquaintance. There is no requirement that this acquisition is given to us by a qualitative description expressible in a “scientific language” spoken by no one. (FP, 301)

After his critique of Kaplan, he writes that in terms of Naming and Necessity, the first person gives him no problem. He merely fixes the reference to “I” by means of a description. Then somewhat surprisingly, he offers his own view in terms of an account of his dealings with Descartes and Hume in his philosophical youth. When he was 12 or 13 years old, he found the cogito very convincing. Then he read Hume, and like many young people who find philosophy intriguing, his earlier conviction was shaken. No doubt many of us can remember being persuaded by the last thinker we read. In a peculiar way, he sided with Descartes as he pondered Hume’s denial of a principle called “himself,” based upon his awareness of a succession of impressions only. The notion that impressions could be regarded as unconnected to a bearer troubled Kripke, for whom it bordered on, or perhaps even entailed, contradiction. “I mean, what would a floating impression not belonging to anyone be?” (FP, 308). Without commenting on the caliber of his Hume scholarship (or, for that matter, his Descartes scholarship), this scruple leads him to the notion of a subject that emphatically does not exclude “the first person pronoun” as referring to the whole person in the ordinary sense” (FP, 308). His conclusion, though presented in the language of possible world semantics, echoes Descartes’s: …each of us does have a special acquaintanceship with himself or herself, as philosophers from Descartes to Frege have held. This…is more fundamental than anything purely linguistic, and is the basis of our first person locutions. And each of us can use them to make genuine claims, to express genuine propositions. (FP, 319)

Hidden in plain sight is the thread of imagination. Though Kripke uses it in an apparently casual sense, it seems to me that he is just as dependent upon it as were Kant and the German Idealists. In the context of illustrating the notion of “possible world” with an example of his giving the lecture that appears in his book, he writes: What do we mean when we say “In some other possible world I would not be giving this lecture today?” We just imagine the situation where I didn’t decide to give this lecture or decided to give it some other day. Of course, we don’t imagine everything that is true or false, but only those things that are relevant to

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Saul Kripke my giving the lecture; but in theory, everything has to be decided to make a total description of the world. We can’t really imagine that except in part; that, then, is a possible world. (NN, 44)

“Faculty theories” have become anathema not only to analytic philosophers but also to a large group of the more “sophisticated” Kant scholars and to most Continental philosophers. You cannot convince this one that the engine driving the entirety of Kripke’s thought is other than imagination as its necessary presupposition. Every stipulation of a possible world is the fashioning of an image. 30 Reflecting a bit more upon the matter of Kripke’s performance in the possible world that found him in my undergraduate History of Modern Philosophy class, I would hope that his grade would not be my final word. That is, I would hope that in that possible world I would have been thrilled by his rare and genuine talent, and would have encouraged him not to give up philosophy because of this minor setback. He would have gone on to make me proud…in Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies. In retrospect, no doubt, I would have seen his poor work on Kant as a positive springboard to his own work. But I digress. Kripke’s notions of fixing references and then exploring what happens to them in possible worlds provide an undeniably powerful path to the exploration of language in a revolutionized analytic context. Stipulation + possible worlds together comprise yet another ruling image.

30

I would say, but of course Kripke would not, that the actual world is also constituted by imagination.

RICHARD RORTY

While his philosophical pedigree comes from the analytic tradition, Richard Rorty claims no abiding commitment to it. To the contrary, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 31 he explains: The reason the book is largely written in the vocabulary of analytic philosophers, and with reference to problems discussed in the analytical literature, is merely autobiographical. They are the literature with which I am most familiar, and to which I owe what grasp I have of philosophical issues. (PMN, 8)

Unlike much of the analytic literature that can be located in papers and in relatively short works, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a massive work with major and sweeping ambition. On the negative side, it seeks to invalidate the pursuit of foundations, which he considers to be the primal error in academic philosophy since and including the ancient Greeks. This futile search is rooted in the view that objects are constituted in part by contributions from the human mind and partially from what outer experience provides. In whatever way this “dualism” may be conceived, the resultant view is that philosophy sees the mind as the mirror of nature. Rorty’s book seeks to dismantle this mirror, if not smash it altogether. From the positive side, Rorty introduces the aforementioned distinction between traditional philosophers who offer arguments, and edifying philosophers who, by contrast, offer powerful intuitions that serve to stimulate and so to advance the ongoing conversation in which philosophy in its best sense takes place. At the conclusion of this chapter, I will offer my comments on his project. For now, I will restrict (and restrain) myself from entering into such an appraisal that will certainly acknowledge its peculiar strength. Like the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues and like Kant, Rorty regards his work as therapeutic. Foundationalism, with its attendant symptoms as the illness he would cure. In one way, this large aspiration belongs to the history of philosophy’s key turning points. In another, the 31 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) (hereafter cited in text as PMN).

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distinction between two styles of philosophizing offers something original and unprecedented. In still another, his general method in critiquing his analytic predecessors resembles their own: refutation along logical lines. Finally, he has no “aim.” That is to say, he not only offers no “new” or “better” account, he offers no account at all. For clarity and economy’s sake, I shall address Rorty’s criticisms of the analytic philosophers that I have covered in this chapter in the same order, except for Kripke, who he admires but here devotes very little space. Carnap does not receive a great deal of attention, but the attention he does receive reveals much concerning Rorty’s outlook. Carnap (along with Russell) labored under the illusion that logic serves as philosophy’s foundation: The sort of optimistic faith which Russell and Carnap shared with Kant—that philosophy, its essence and right method discovered at last, had finally been placed upon the secure path of a science—is not something to be mocked or deplored. Such optimism is possible only for men of high imagination and daring, the heroes of their times. (PMN, 173)

Rorty’s claim goes beyond his contention that philosophy cannot become scientific. He also holds that analytic philosophy no longer consists of an identifiable discipline. Since its capture of university departments in many countries, it has fractured in many ways. It has become a mere style, a function of a more or less accidental historical event. However, this view could not be further from a disparaging one for Rorty. Rather, it constitutes an advance to the more appropriately sober view that, like any philosophical movement, analytic philosophy should be seen for what it is or rather was: a sociological and stylistic phenomenon. Quine receives much more attention, but ultimately fares no better than Carnap. If one would suppose that Quine’s recourse to pragmatism might soften Rorty’s treatment, more disappointment would be the result. While Rorty commends the abolition of the analytic/synthetic distinction and its consequent denial of a difference in kind between the languages of speculative metaphysics and natural science, he rails at Quine’s notion of a “primitively adopted and ultimately inscrutable ontology” (PMN, 196 32). What to make, then, of Quine’s painstaking path to the indeterminacy of translation? For Quine, the linguistic fixing of an enduring object can be justified by the “likelihood” of its accurate reference, but not 32

From Quine’s Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 50-51.

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by its certainty. It is a practical way of settling what is “objectively indeterminate.” However, the latter is, for Quine, merely a “philosophical point.” This “philosophical point” could not offend Rorty any more than it does. In a representative passage, he writes: “A ‘philosophical point’ in this sense is, at a minimum, one that has no relevance to deciding how the world is” (PMN, 197). One trembles to suppose how he would characterize such a point “at a maximum.” Employing one of Quine’s most significant conclusions against him, Rorty argues that the former’s privileging of natural science contradicts his accurate conflation of scientific and metaphysical pursuits. Selecting several among a series of rhetorical questions animated by Rorty’s concerns, he asks: Why do the Naturwissenschaften limn reality while the Geisteswissenschaften merely enable us to cope with it? What is it that sets them apart, when we no longer think of any sort of statement having a privileged epistemological status…? Why should not the empirical inquiry be the whole of culture (including both the Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften) rather than just the whole of physical science? (PMN, 201)

Quine becomes enmeshed in these conundrums because of the similar unexamined assumptions that animated his predecessors, such as those from Carnap and from the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, namely that a view of “the world can be ‘completely described’ in an extensional [i.e. logical/semantic] language” (PMN, 204). Contact with the world—i.e. intensional language, language for which substitutions can produce different truth-values—is required in order for a complete description of the world to be possible. Rorty insists yet again that no difference in status obtains between extensional and intensional language. Intensional language, for Rorty, brings completeness (at least in principle) to spatio-temporal matters. These can be separated in various ways and into various regions. Once separated, we can make accurate descriptions of all of the region and sound predictions as well. An easy example: By isolating the behavior of nicotine in the human body, we can both describe its effects with precision and so predict the deleterious consequences to health consequent to its overuse. No extensional language can do more than state identity conditions for a concept. For empirical knowledge, one must have recourse to language that cannot guarantee the truth-value of its statements but must investigate. The flattening out of earlier qualitative differences continues apace.

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If Rorty has an overarching critique of Davidson, it consists more of the significance of its outcome than of its weaknesses in any particular area. That is to say, even if Davidson proves to be substantially correct or even interesting in his philosophy of language, it would not matter much, if at all. He is subject to objections from several different angles. One concerns the theory of meaning, which for Davidson involves the inferential relationships between sentences. Such a theory must therefore be empirical in nature, and it enjoys no special status. The extraction of a “rich concept” from bits of evidence (i.e. truth-values) may indeed have the happy result of allowing it to be absorbed into the formal structure governing every sentence in the language. Then, the concept is amenable to translation. But what does this amount to? Very little, in Rorty’s view. For one, “hard work” would be required to flesh out issues such as adverbial modification—with no guarantee of success. But even if this work were to be completed, “Davidson’s suggestions would do little to help or hinder any solution of any of the textbook problems of philosophy” (PMN, 261). Rorty offers a similar appraisal of Davidson’s coupling of the impossibility of an uninterpreted language and its (perhaps strange) support provided by the latter for objective truth. In a characteristically daring suggestion, Rorty implies that Davidson may be a verificationist and a relativist. He bases this suggestion on Davidson’s claim that “most of our beliefs are true” (PMN, 309). His critique amounts to the following: (1) While Davidson does not proceed along Platonic lines in discussions of Truth and Goodness, he does not really do away with them but (à la Kant’s Ideas) merely shows how they function; (2) in another audacious passage, Rorty claims that there is “not a great deal to say” about the Platonic Idea (this should be news to librarians), i.e. there is no way to connect them to the world; and (3) therefore, “I am fairly sure that the philosophy of language has not given us any interesting new debating points” (PMN, 311). What is to be made of this? First of all, I found myself recalling my almost lifelong prejudice against analytic philosophy confirmed by Rorty, namely its irrelevance to the love of wisdom. Although I will never do analytic philosophy, my newfound respect for it gained while writing these pages leads me to bristle at virtually all of Rorty’s characterizations. Rorty’s arguments are one and all circular, and circular in a cruder manner than any of the philosopher’s he critiques. His presupposition, which is declared openly and persistently to his everlasting credit, is that things in the world exist unproblematically, as do we among them. Any philosophy

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that wrestles with any problem of metaphysics or epistemology, at least along logical lines, is mistaken eo ipso. Could Rorty be unaware of the rule concerning circularity? Would this violation of the rule forbidding circularity trouble him? No to both of these: logic, formal or informal, is not the measure of philosophy. The distinction between official and edifying philosophy becomes especially relevant here. Dewey, the Wittgenstein of the Investigations, and the later Heidegger do not attempt to persuade by traditional argument, but rather interrupt the official philosophy of their time. Some interject by ridicule, others by hammering away at the conceit of system building, still others by exposing the disconnect introduced by philosophers of language who separate words from their contact with the world. It could not be clearer that Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature belongs to this non-traditional tradition. The shrewdness (I intend this as a neutral term) of Rorty cannot be overestimated. If logic no longer serves as any kind of a measure, then all bets are off regarding the vast majority of analytic philosophical discourse. Can one find flaws in Rorty’s treatments of every thinker from Plato and Aristotle through Kant to his analytic once-colleagues? Easy! Does every one of them buy into the notion that the mind serves as a mirror of nature? Yes, if one goes looking for fragmentary evidence in support of the mirror thesis. No, if one applies the principle of charity, according to which a philosopher’s account (or any person’s) should be examined at its strongest. Rorty outrages the principle of charity, doing so consciously. He does so, however, in service to what might ironically appear as a Socratic vision of philosophy, however much he disputes Platonic thought. Though I could not give him a grade as high as an inflated “C” if he were a student in my undergraduate History of Ancient Philosophy course for his understanding of Plato, I would be compelled to acknowledge this certain kinship. The outcome of the purification Rorty purports to enact is not a view of, or a claim to, knowledge at all, but to conversation—to ongoing dialogue. One could properly say that the Socratic dialogues are also never completed, that they never claim knowledge, and that they all conclude with an opening to resume seeking truth, to begin again. By way of contrast, I offer a revealing comparison. For a conference on “The Philosophy of Socrates” held at Samos, Greece, in 1990, Donald Davidson presented a talk titled “The Socratic Concept of

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Truth.” 33 After praising Gregory Vlastos for liberating Socrates as a philosopher from Plato’s identity, Davidson wonders about the puzzle of the Socratic elenchus as a way to lead to moral truths. He asks why Socrates thought that elenchus would lead to truth, and why he would go about bothering one and all with his relentless questioning inviting scorn and death when he might have merely used elenchus for the sake of his own reflections. First of all, Davidson acknowledges that elenchus alone cannot arrive at truth but only expose falsity, so something other than elenchus is required. With recourse to his own theory of interpretation, he reiterates his conviction that communication takes place since a common ground between reasonable beings exists, and since most of our beliefs have to be true. Thus, we do know moral truths, although we do not have certainty regarding them. Examples abound: It is better to suffer injustice than to do it. It is better to admit ignorance than to pretend to know what one does not know. So, why does he use elenchus everywhere and on anyone? Davidson considers some alternatives: (1) He hopes to learn from others— but this never happens; (2) he does it to benefit others—but this doesn’t work; (3) he hopes to make the citizens better—plausible, but the magnitude of this aim is much too great; and (4) his daimon so directs him—alas, this view that eschews argument is not respectable to the rational Davidson. Instead of any of the above, he offers his own view: only by speaking with one another, by “verbal exchange,” by “active communication,” 34 do our thoughts become shaped to the highest degree of clarity; “Dialogue, particularly in the form of the elenchus, provides the forum in which alone words take on meaning and concepts are slowly clarified. The better we understand others the better we know what we think.” 35 In an imaginary exchange between Rorty and Davidson based on the above (no doubt they had many actual ones), what can be learned? The comparison reveals Davidson’s concern for the scrupulous examination of concepts and views, as opposed to Rorty’s gleefully bringing a sledgehammer down upon them. Yet though I would like to, I cannot claim that Davidson is the victor here. Is Davidson more faithful to the text? Yes. Is his discourse more compelling? Again, yes. But Rorty could easily incorporate Davidson’s account of Socrates into the conversation 33

Donald Davidson, “The Socratic Concept of Truth,” in The Philosophy of Socrates: Ethics, Elenchus, and Truth, Vol. 2 (Athens: Kardamista Publishing Company, 1992), 51-58. 34 Ibid., 56. 35 Davidson, “The Socratic Concept of Truth,” 58.

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that constitutes the result of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. That always-present possibility of incorporation is at once its greatest strength and its most conspicuous weakness. What shape does Rorty predict for the future of the conversation? He doesn’t! Any direction, any theme is possible, except perhaps the reinstalling of the mirror. The good news and the bad news are the same: he cannot possibly be wrong. In the language of my daughter Malika, Rorty’s philosophy is a hot mess. No inference—true, false, or indeterminate—can be drawn from it. Every philosopher he treats, even the ones he calls edifying, he botches. After enjoying the finest of analytic educations “to which I owe what grasp I have of philosophical issues” (PMN, 8), he systematically trashes it. The same question that has arisen in the context of the analytic philosophers treated earlier arises even more forcefully here: How can such an outrageously unscholarly and unreasonable book have so much resonance? It does so because at bottom, Rorty’s is a book of abounding health. He sees a sickness in contemporary philosophy, which he identifies as a centuries-long doctrinal error. I suggest that this is not the primary reason for its impact. To many, analytic philosophy has strayed too far from the pursuit of human wisdom. The problems it studies and on which it works are, as Rorty often insists, unconnected to the world. Can he be called a Continental philosopher, even a closeted one? I think not. And I lack the courage even to imagine the mess he would make of the philosophers I love. This committed anti-foundationalist has bequeathed a conversation to us, a conversation to which no precise measure applies. Calling philosophy an ongoing conversation founds philosophy in spite of Rorty’s claim. However, this foundation is not reason, not “experience,” not logic, certainly not God. From it, no derivation can occur. However, the conversation inspires philosophy by keeping it open to whatever of interest comes its way. Like the others before it, the conversation is a ruling image.

A SURPRISING MEASURE

Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought produces strong responses, both positive and negative. In most cases, analytic philosophers draw little or nothing from it. Continental philosophers, not to mention young people experiencing their first intellectual excitement, find themselves drawn to it as if to a magnet. However, both strains agree that a certain wildness attaches to his philosophy, a style that deliberately flouts the sobriety characterizing virtually all philosophical writing before him. Nevertheless, a traditional scholar dwells within this so-called wildness. Nietzsche was a brilliant classicist, the youngest ever to hold the position of Professor of Classics at the University of Basel. His early writings reflected the issues animating this discipline, although they would occasionally indicate a disposition that went beyond the usual bounds. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music appeared in 1872 during his Basel professorship and received two kinds of responses. The first consisted of yawns and indifference. The second declared outright hostility. In the most calumniatory book review I have ever read, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möellendorff denounced both the book and its author vehemently and censoriously. Here are a few representative passages: [Mr. N] demonstrates a truly infantile ignorance the moment he deals with any archaeological issue. He favors the satyr, his “simple man” [“der tumbe Mensch”] (8, 65/63), with goat feet; he can’t distinguish between Pan, Silenus, or the satyr; he has Apollo swing the Gorgon’s head rather than the Aegis (2, 39/32); and, when attempting, in a “titanic and barbaric” (4, 46/40) fashion, “to level Apollinian culture stone by stone” (3, 41/34), he finds the “Olympian figures of the gods standing on the gables of this structure. 36

Further: Let him seize the thyrsos; let him move from India to Greece. But let him step down from the lectern from which he is supposed to teach knowledge. He may gather tigers and 36 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möellendorff, “Future Philology!” trans. Babette Babich in New Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 4, Issue 1/2 (Summer/Fall, 2000), 6.

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panthers around his knees but not Germany’s philologically interested youth who are supposed to learn—in the asceticism of self-denying work—to look everywhere for nothing but the truth. 37

However, Nietzsche’s procedure was governed not only by “logical insight” but also and primarily by “the immediate certainty of intuition.” This claim resounds far more loudly and far more grandly than his opponent’s call for self-denial. In retrospect, one can see this as an extraordinary risk, a very long shot, for a newly minted 24-year-old full professor. It surely looked like a losing bet at the time of its appearance, when it attracted no attention at first and only the vituperation cited above two years later. In one of the rare historical transformations from original indifference to latter day triumph (e.g. Van Gogh), The Birth of Tragedy continues to inspire. Returning to the more scholarly, or at least less flamboyant, side of Nietzsche, he published Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen) during the same period as the appearance of The Birth of Tragedy. Each of four distinct essays addresses an issue confronting the German culture of its time. The second, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (Vom Nutzen un Nachteil der Historie für das Leben), quite deservedly lives on, and will serve (and has already served implicitly) as the measure of my deliberations in this book. Concerning history, Nietzsche distinguishes three kinds: Monumental, Antiquarian, and Critical. The first, Monumental, and the last, Critical, are each capable of great good and great harm. Monumental history serves life, doing great good in the following way: by bearing witness to great deeds accomplished in the past, it assures the possibility of great deeds in the present and future. However, it is also capable of great harm, as Nietzsche writes: Monumental history deceives with analogies: with tempting similarities the courageous are enticed to rashness, and the enthusiastic to fanaticism; and if one thinks of this history as being in the hands and heads of talented egoists and enraptured rascals then empires are destroyed, princes murdered, wars and revolutions instigated…what can it not inflict if the impotent and inactive master it and put it to their uses! 38

37

Ibid. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 17. 38

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Critical history is required as an antidote to such harm. Its great good consists in its living rejection of the past with its injustices: …this again is in the service of life as well. He must have the strength, and use it from time to time, to shatter and dissolve something to enable him to live, and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it, in order to be able to live: This he achieves by dragging it to the bar of judgment, interrogating it meticulously and finally condemning it: every past, however, is worth condemning—for that is how matters stand with human affairs…It is not justice which here sits in judgment: even less is it mercy, but life alone… 39

However, like Monumental history, it also can do great harm. It is always a dangerous process, namely, a dangerous process for life itself. And men or ages which serve life in this manner of judging and annihilating a past life, by judging and destroying a past, are always dangerous and endangered men and ages. We are products of earlier generations, we also bear all of their ills. It is impossible to loose oneself from this chain entirely. When we condemn that confusion and consider ourselves released from it, then we have not overcome the fact that we are derived from it. In the best case, we bring the matter to a conflict between our inherited customary nature and our knowledge, in fact, even to a war between a new strict discipline and how we have been brought up and what we have inherited from time immemorial. We cultivate a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that the first nature atrophies. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were, a past a posteriori… In general, Critical history is characterized by iconoclasm, the smashing of idols. We can see at once (or at least I can) that Monumental history and Critical history can and often do cut against one another. Critical history reigns in the treatment of Carnap, James, and Quine above. By smashing the idols of metaphysics and of most of the prior history of philosophy, the thought of these three philosophers serves life by calling attention to dramatic advances in science that overturn the science of the past. Aristotle’s geocentric universe and Ptolemy’s epicycles have been long surpassed, as has Kant’s insistence upon the absolute completeness and perfection of Euclidean geometry such that revision of any part could not occur. I experienced a vivid example of the impulse to assail the past at the University of Rochester during my undergraduate education. As a modern choreographer, the celebrated Erick Hawkins led his own company 39

Ibid., 21-22.

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for many years, with which he struck out in new directions. Long after his death, his company still performs and thrives. Enrolling in a dance class that served non-majors with the (fruitless) hope of meeting young women who would favor me, I enjoyed the marvelous benefit of taking master classes with the likes of Hawkins, Merce Cunningham (with John Cage), and a principal dancer in Alvin Ailey’s company. Hawkins, at that time well past the age of performance himself, approached me for reasons I will never know. Without any introduction, he explained at some length that ballet places damaging and unnatural demands on the human body, and should no longer exist in light of this physiological discovery. This was good news to me. At a painfully unsophisticated age of 20, I believed that ballet was by sissies for sissies. Ballet would, no doubt, die out soon given this knowledge. (Much later, I learned that his career included a tenure as a dancer with George Balanchine’s American Ballet during his younger years.) In a manner analogous to that of the three analytic philosophers, Hawkins’s view served life by his strong advocacy of modern dance and the creative new avenues it explored. The disadvantage for life is clear in the work of the three analytic philosophers and in the terpsichorean views of Erick Hawkins. Both very different pursuits judge the past as in major ways unjust, and in so doing disadvantage life in several ways. In terms of the Nietzschean division, this judgment blinds the judges to the monuments that have both shaped and inspired life. Further, the judges disadvantage life by failing to recognize their very dependence upon that same past for their own work. The “second nature” they would create derives directly from the first nature that they would leave behind. Thus, the new nature called “scientific philosophy” can be traced back expressly to the so-called “metaphysical philosophy,” just as modern dance can to ballet. It pains me to admit that the disadvantage of analytic philosophy to life is even greater in Continental philosophy, especially in its post-Heideggerian French variant. But I get ahead of myself.

EDMUND HUSSERL 40

Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations inaugurated Continental philosophy in the way that we recognize it currently. Although the word “phenomenology” appears in the work of earlier thinkers, most prominently in the title of the first of Hegel’s major works. Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes) appeared in 1807, in which “phenomenology” meant the logos of appearances of spirit in history, as spirit developed through its “gallery of images” until it attained its truth. Husserl recreated phenomenology in a specific science that returned philosophical attention to “the things themselves.” Of all Continental philosophers, Husserl remains an anomaly despite his originary role. His basic view is expressly foundationalist. However, his thought has spawned anti-foundationalist philosophers of many stripes, all of whom love his work and claim to be his descendants in some manner. Among the philosophers with whom he engaged prior to the Investigations, one finds that Frege and Brentano play a far greater role than Kant and Nietzsche. Hume, however, did serve as a major precursor. All too briefly on these two closest contemporary influences, Frege served as a collegial critic during Husserl’s evolving views on the philosophy of mathematics. Ultimately, they differed on the relation between logic and mathematics. For Frege, mathematics could be derived from logic; for Husserl, it could not be—logic and mathematics, while related, each dwelled in its own non-reducible area. Their developed views on this matter did not find their way into the major strains of 20th-century Continental philosophy. From Brentano, Husserl absorbed the former’s notion of consciousness as intentionality. Intentionality distinguished mental phenomena from physical phenomena in that consciousness always directs itself to its contents. All consciousness, as Husserl frequently reminds, is consciousness of something. This notion occupies a prominent place in Husserl’s developed theoretical philosophy, although many significant

40

All citations in this section are drawn from Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) (hereafter cited in text as HSW).

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future philosophers either did not take it up or else opposed it in some manner, as will be shown. Hume’s thought had considerable impact and in several directions: (1) Husserl creatively transformed Hume’s notion of association into consciousness’s role in constituting the spatial world; (2) Hume’s contribution to the understanding of abstraction (along with that of Locke and Berkeley) led to a more rigorous psychology of this phenomenon, which plays a major role in Husserlian eidetics; and finally (3) Hume’s critique of the doctrine of necessary connection aided Husserl in turning philosophy toward being a descriptive discipline rather than a causal one. 41 Although the following entry can hardly be called easily accessible, his Encyclopedia Britannica article gives an abbreviated account of its overarching methodology. Three levels are involved that must carefully be distinguished and their order ascertained. The first, the “natural attitude,” might well be likened to what philosophers call naïve realism. According to this attitude, the objects we encounter exist outside and separate from us. Considered as the lowest level, most of us operate on it uncritically, even Husserlian phenomenologists when they navigate everyday life. Both Continental and analytic philosophers probe beyond this level, thereby erecting a barrier between academic philosophers and the vast majority of the rest of humanity. Phenomenological method requires what Husserl calls reduction or epoché. By reduction, Husserl understands the stripping away of those attitudes that prevent us from encountering the “things themselves.” By “bracketing” the natural attitude, i.e. leaving it out of play, the content of consciousness remains. This content constitutes the second of the three levels. What do these contents consist of? The de-objectified or denaturalized former “external objects.” They now are viewed as belonging entirely to inner consciousness; in other words, they are psychological objects. Attaining the final and highest level requires eidetic reduction. On this level, psychological consciousness gives way to transcendentalphenomenological consciousness, in which consciousness encounters its objects directly. This directedness of consciousness toward its objects is

41 See David Hume’s wonderful essay titled “On the Standard of Taste,” and my discussion of it in David Hume: Platonic Philosopher, Continental Ancestor (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008). Since then, Babette Babich has collected several articles on Hume’s essay and was kind enough to include mine in it. See her Reading David Hume’s On the Standard of Taste (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019).

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called intentionality. In principle, all consciousness is intentional. But only on the eidetic level can this feature be discerned. Euclidean triangles provide an excellent illustration of the three levels. When we see a triangle drawn on paper and so recognize it as an object without further reflection, we operate in the natural attitude. On the first bracketing of this attitude, consciousness reduces the naïve externality of the triangle of the natural attitude to an inner correlate, i.e. a psychological object, the reality of which is constituted entirely by its presence in inner consciousness. In the final eidetic reduction, the triangle becomes an idea representing all triangles in general. When we see a geometrical proof for, for example, the theorem that the sum of the angles of any triangle are equal to two right angles, the eidetic triangle—the thing itself, in Husserlian argot—is the object upon which the operation is performed. However, this can hardly be a last word concerning geometry. “The Origin of Geometry,” published in 1932, shares the virtue with the Encyclopedia article of admirably condensing a key aspect of Husserlian thought here concerning the role of history. Given the current postmodern Zeitgeist, this essay reads like a relic of an age long behind us. However, this signals that an “untimely meditation” upon it is eminently called for. In a most untimely fashion in regard to our current situation, Husserl offers several unfashionable views. In post-Husserlian Continental philosophy, many of these views will be reformulated, or weakened, or expressly opposed. First, Husserl holds that a historical self-reflection can enable us to “finally take possession of the meaning, method, and beginning of philosophy, the one philosophy to which our life seeks to be and ought to be devoted” (HSW, 255—emphasis in original). Next, he affirms a world horizon within which a human horizon dwells, in which he stands in reciprocal and communicable relation to others. “It is precisely to this horizon of civilization that common language belongs” (HSW, 258). Thirdly, the process of recovering and reactivating turning points in the history of culture depends upon “the immense structural a priori”: Only the disclosure of the essentially general structure lying in our present and then in every past or future historical present as such, and, in totality, only the disclosure of the concrete, historical time in which we live, in which our total humanity lives in respect to its total, essentially general structure—only this disclosure can make possible historical inquiry (Historie) which is truly understanding, insightful, and in the genuine sense, scientific. (HSW, 265)

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Such a quaint sentiment informs this otherwise demanding essay, which moves in the opposite direction from the Encyclopedia essay. In the latter, Husserl proceeded from fact to essence, then from essence to eidos, i.e. he proceeded “upward,” rising from the drawn triangle on the page. Here, he provides what he calls a “regressive inquiry” aiming at uncovering those “spiritual” experiences that first secured the self-evidence of geometry, to the best of our ability. Of course, a complete regression to the origin is in principle impossible. However, the “generalities” within which we proceed “can be richly explicated, with prescribed possibilities of arriving at particular questions and self-evident claims as answers” (HSW, 256). The original spiritual event in which geometry became selfevident is, of course, lost to us. But as a result of the ideality of language, we can gain perceptible access to it. According to Husserl, the forward progress of geometry, even to its non-Euclidean forms, is owed to a “continuous synthesis in which all acquisitions retain their validity” (HSW, 256). Our engagement with language can move from passive receptivity to a position of reactivation; the latter gains special meaning to the original and ongoing sense of geometry as an ideal science. Although those disciplines that take their departure from factical existence (e.g. astronomy, zoology) do not have the same ideality as geometry, they too presuppose the same structural a priori that enables them to regress to those “primal self-evidences that constitute their origin” (HSW, 266). In this way, “The Origin of Geometry” becomes a discourse on language as the possibility of continuous tradition as much as it is a discourse on geometry. Perhaps the word “origin” should receive the most emphasis. For Husserl, origin (Ursprung) has two intertwined senses. First, it refers to the initial historical event that establishes a tradition or a discipline. Second, a historical origin can be repeated and reactivated however far we may be in time from its inception. One cannot therefore draw a distinction between “origin” and “beginning” for Husserl. Husserl’s foundationalism resounds from virtually every page. Looking back upon his Preface to the English edition of Ideas, we find a mixture of bold declarations and modest demurrals. In this Preface, Husserl takes pains to distinguish transcendental phenomenology as, first, science from so-called “phenomenological” psychology in order to disclose the former as the ultimate presupposition of all genuine inquiry. He calls it “transcendental phenomenology” (HSW, 44), “the immediate a priori phenomenology” as “first philosophy” (HSW, 46), “transcendentalphenomenological Idealism” (HSW, 47), and “an intentional and constitutive phenomenology” (HSW, 51). It stands above and beyond all Realism–

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Idealism disputes. It satisfies the goal once articulated by Kant that “philosophy will be able to present itself as a science” (HSW, 51). Its central notion arises as the result of the reduction: [I]n particular, a transcendental phenomenology is set up under the leading of a philosophical idea, so that through phenomenological reduction the transcendental Ego is directly set up at the locus of reflection, and made the theme of a transcendental description. (HSW, 45)

The transcendental Ego not only serves as the focal point of all reflection, but also is the sine qua non for the world to have meaning at all. However, Husserl recognizes that notwithstanding his accomplishment, a great deal remains to be done, and that he will not nearly live long enough to witness its completion. In addition to filling out the many ontologies that would be gathered under the decisive authority of pure phenomenology by means of its attendant reductions, foundation crises that arise from time to time within the sciences can be resolved through it. For example, mathematics went through a foundation crisis in the early part of the 20th century. If the following three opposed views were considered as factical, no resolution would be possible. The Russellian conception held that logic constituted the foundation of mathematics. For Hilbert, the foundation was formalism. Brouwer championed intuitionism. By means of the phenomenological reduction, each stance becomes interpreted as a possibility of consciousness. In transcendental-phenomenological terms, this is what each had to be before it became actualized, and constituted the essential characteristic of each. On the highest level, there is no crisis, nor can there be. Indeed, 20th-century mathematics incorporated each of these basic theoretical insights into the body of mathematics, where today they can be discerned only with much effort. Husserl may be the most valiant major thinker in the history of philosophy. After the rise of 19th- and 20th-century positivism that aimed to destroy all philosophy other than that which is rooted in the positive sciences, and after Nietzsche who sought quite literally to annihilate not only the prior history of philosophy but also all systems such as the one presented here, Husserl declares triumphantly that he has both found and elaborated the promised land from which philosophy can proceed without interruption. It seems to me that such optimism has occurred only once previously, in post-Kantian German Idealism where the discovery of the ultimate system of reason was thought to put an end to philosophical disputes of any real significance.

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However, something interrupted this optimism almost at once: philosophy, with its penchant for contesting, transforming, and radicalizing, and/or dialing back virtually every page and every locution. Scholars devote themselves to Husserl’s program and/or to refining it and finding new resources in it, or to critiquing aspects of it. But in terms of current philosophical pursuits, this admirable strain is merely minor, one of a superabundance of others. Nevertheless, his influence remains strong and alive in the way that the influence of all great thinkers permeates philosophy even after the initial enthusiasm wanes. His provision of an entirely fresh way of considering phenomena, i.e. by allowing them to show themselves as themselves rather than through a prior account of their possibility in accord with a theoretical scheme, continues to exercise a liberating effect upon Continental philosophy in its many manifestations. The notion of a transcendental-phenomenological philosophy rooted in intentional consciousness did not survive for his most prominent disciples, despite their sincere admiration for Husserl and their acknowledgment of their debt to him. Similarly, his superior scientific credentials in mathematics, together with his fruitful relationship with Frege, won him few, if any, friends on the analytic side. The notion of an all-embracing consciousness carried both too much and too little weight for it to survive intact. In an age when philosophy on both sides of the ocean moved more toward concerns with empirical and existential matters, Husserlian consciousness ultimately seemed to belong to a disembodied mind, despite its point of departure in the natural attitude. Secondly and from another side, the notion of a rigorous science that is idealist in principle seems impossible—it cannot be falsified, and it cannot yield a single empirical result. Neither of these objections can be regarded as entirely decisive, for these also presuppose notions that are themselves immune to falsification. So far as Husserl attained his aim to elevate transcendental phenomenology to a plane above all disputes, this elevation had the inverse effect of signaling its irrelevance to those who had a very different conception of science, one far from an updated Fichtean conception of a science of sciences. Husserl remains significant for many reasons: his liberation of philosophy from antecedent theoretical encroachments that relegate appearances to second-order status; his commitment to thoroughgoing rationality at a time when Nietzsche had already called it into serious question; and his unfortunately neglected and creative insights into mathematical matters. As a result of his thought, transcendental phenomenology itself is a ruling image.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

I A sufficient grasp of Martin Heidegger’s chief philosophical approach requires examination of Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). The forgottenness of the Being-question abides as the animating catalyst for Heidegger. The citation from Plato’s Sophist with which Being and Time opens hovers over the entire work: “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’ [‘seiend’]. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.” 42 The Being-question (Seinsfrage), “What is the meaning of Being?” dominates this work. “Being” in the term “human being” (der Mensch) is overgrown with interpretations that have become so sedimented as to be unrecognizable. Instead, Dasein is the name given to that being whose Being is an issue for it. Dasein is always mine (jemeinig), although Being-with others (Mitsein) belongs to the essence of Dasein. A worthwhile way to survey this daunting book involves looking at it through two lenses at once. The first consists of the threefold structure of questioning, a structure that recurs throughout. All questioning consists of the following elements: (1) what is asked about (der Gefragte), i.e. Being; (2) the being to which that question is directed (der Erfragte): (Dasein); and (3) what is sought in the questioning (der Befragte): the meaning of Being. A major such threefold occurs with respect to that which will provide an important step on the way to an answer of the Being-question. It consists of (1) existentiality, (2) facticity, and (3) fallenness. Existentiality concerns possibilities of Being for Dasein as it makes its way thoughtfully in the world; facticity concerns Dasein’s thrownness (Geworfenheit) into the world, i.e. finding oneself at a historical moment in a particular place with its surrounding culture. Fallenness concerns Dasein’s tendency to lose itself amid the average everydayness of the world, e.g. in empty talk (Rede), i.e. in the general thoughtlessness 42

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 1. Page numbers refer to Heidegger’s text and are found in the margin of the translation as well.

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of Das Man, often rendered as “the they” but referring to an impersonal “one.” This threefold belongs to the originary selfhood of Dasein. One can see how clock-time derives from this more primordial time: clocktime as bound to (1) future, (2) present, and (3) past. However, this threefold culminates in an ultimate twofold: authenticity/inauthenticity (Eigentlichkeit/Uneigenlichkeit). For Heidegger, these are not moral categories but existential modes. The second twofold is the most general. Entities as they occur to us in an everyday manner are beings (Seiendes)—indicated by a small “b” as its introductory letter. The Being (Sein) that gives beings their character as beings begins with a capital “B” as its introductory letter. (As we do not have the two distinct words Seiendes and Sein in English to differentiate the two distinct senses, the distinction occurs in terms of the case of the first letters.) In the way we ordinarily experience beings, Being is concealed. This concealment, far from being an accident or an oversight, constitutes the path of the history of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle, and this path itself is no accident but belongs essentially to the history of Being. The things we encounter every day—e.g. the pen next to my keyboard, the lamp that lights my desk, the book that lies open before me—we regard as objects, beings that occupy space and time. In this regard, we can measure their size and weight, and compare them to others. In Heideggerian language, we regard them as present-at-hand (vorhanden). However, this is not the way we encounter them. The pen, the lamp, the book, the keyboard are equipment (Zeuge) that we use and that always stand in relation to one another as governed by the task they are designed to perform. In their originary relation as work-equipment, they are zuhanden, ready-to-hand. Cartesian ontology establishes the present-athand relation. This distinction, called ontological difference, has existentiell on one side, referring to the ontic, and existential on the other, referring to the ontological. Ready-to-handness names the ontological character of appearances, as well as what Heidegger calls the worldhood of the world. The latter structures constitute the phenomena of phenomenology. 43 The Greek logos characterizes the twofold experience of language. Everyday language, i.e. idle talk (Rede), constitutes the ontic dimension of language. Who speaks in this way? The “they” (Das Man) do. This talk, found anywhere and everywhere, consists of the exchange of random opinions, material from mass media, and general chatter. It makes up the 43 I do not intend a neologism here. I merely call attention to the genuine joining that belongs to Heidegger’s phenomenology.

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stuff of unreflective human communication. By contrast, an originary speaking consists of Saying (Sagen), directing oneself thoughtfully to the matters that concern Dasein most essentially. Unlike the chatter of Rede, silence belongs essentially to Saying as does Hearing (Hören), attending thoughtfully to that which is unsaid as well. The unsaid—the concealed depth that resounds with the utmost reticence—allows what is said to come forth at all. Saying and Hearing constitute the second part of phenomen-ology: logos. Both the ontic and ontological are dimensions belonging to Dasein. That is to say, just as Dasein always has the potentiality for essential logos, Dasein also finds itself already given over to Rede. The most decisive twofold occurs with respect to time. Its ontic meaning is clock-time, the time that makes calendars possible, that measures timestretches quantitatively, that guarantees the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of watches. Time’s ontological dimension consists of its rootedness in Dasein’s worldhood, Dasein’s being alongside entities in the world in an equipmental relation. As the work moves toward its conclusion, the threefold ontological dimension of time comes into focus as the determination of the meaning of Being. Dasein’s comportment toward death provides the site of this ultimate twofold. Das Man can determine the comportment, by average everydayness. “The they” says: everyone dies. “The they” fears death, for death is clearly the end of all things, it is “the possibility that outstrips all possibilities,” and so takes away what is most precious—life. In this inauthentic mode, fear undergirds casual unconcern interrupted by unfulfilling restlessness. In this mode, Dasein’s being is not its own but has been relinquished to its most commonplace possibility. “Authenticity” translates Eigentlichkeit uneasily. The German original contains Eigen (own); a clunky but more literal translation would be “ownness.” For Dasein to own its selfhood, its comportment toward death must include a relation to a mortality that is jemeines (always mine). Heidegger calls this relation Angst for dem Tod (anxiety in the face of death). For Heidegger, anxiety does not mean anything like mental disturbance or panic. Rather, it hearkens back to the sense of “scrupulous care,” one of its 16th-century Latin meanings. As a mood, it comes upon Dasein rarely but decisively, when the surrounding world suddenly withdraws from concern and without warning. This mood imposes calm and attentiveness to one’s ownmost, essentially individuated Being, and brings Dasein face to face with its mortality. Far from being a negative mood, it discloses Dasein’s unique destiny and makes possible authentic affirmation of Dasein’s selfhood.

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In Being and Time, Heidegger’s thought presents a different sort of “foundation.” It is not a first principle, like Husserl’s transcendental ego. It is not a logical or an empirical principle, or a joining to these two. It is not a pragmatic principle. This “foundation” is no principle at all, but rather what is most questionable: Being. What Heidegger calls “fundamental ontology” involves allowing the reemergence of the Being-question to govern the discourse. The ontological difference takes priority even over Dasein, the one to whom this question is an issue. The question addresses Dasein, rather than the reverse. In the language of this book, the Beingquestion is its ruling image.

II The matter of language (Sprache) appears throughout Heidegger’s thought. “The Origin of the Work of Art” 44 enhances and further specifies Heidegger’s account of language. Poetry elevates language to its highest and most genuine sense, at least alongside philosophy. While Heidegger surely regards the Greek poiesis in its broader sense as “creation,” i.e. of “bringing into being,” he insists that “the linguistic work, poetry in the narrower sense, has a privileged position among the arts as a whole” (OWA, 198). Everything depends upon the nature of language for Heidegger. Here, he stresses that language does not consist of communication when understood in its originary sense. In this context, language brings beings “to word and to appearance,” and does so for the first time. That is to say, in terms of the ongoing Heideggerian reversal, what we name “river” does not come forth as what it is until language so names it: Projective saying is poetry: the saying of world and earth, the saying of the arena of their strife and, thereby, of all nearness and distance of the gods. Poetry is the language of the unconcealment of beings. The prevailing language is the happening of that saying in which the world rises up historically for a people and the earth is preserved as that which remains closed. (OWA, 198)

Although Heidegger studies other poets as well, e.g. Sophocles, Ranier Maria Rilke, Stefan George, and others, the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin occupies the leading role. Citing Hölderlin, he writes: 44

Martin Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, trans. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) (hereafter cited in text as OWA).

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Martin Heidegger Much man has learned, Many of the heavenly ones has he named, Since we have become a conversation And have been able to hear from one another 45

Heidegger comments that we are a single conversation, that conversation is what we are and not a mere activity in which we engage. Language is “the supreme event of human existence” through which human existence acquires “its meaning and foundation.” 46 This reversal, in terms of which language essentially occurs prior to its actual articulation, may be Heidegger’s most stunning and most challenging of all.

III The work of Friedrich Hölderlin takes an especially significant place, at least as important to Heidegger’s thought as any of the more traditional philosophical concerns such as time, imagination, and even art. He insists that all great poetry stands outside the usual categorizations as, for example, literature and culture. Hölderlin’s, however, stands uniquely apart from the rest of the moderns, including such masters as Rilke and Georg. A course in German classicism will study Goethe and Schiller closely and extensively, but their contemporary and friend, Hölderlin, may well receive scant, if any, mention. To Heidegger, such academic categories mean nothing. If anything, they are a symptom of our fallen age, which he characterizes in his Letter on Humanism as an age of namelessness, godlessness, and homelessness. In his short essay titled “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” he begins to develop the weight of Hölderlin’s poetry as it bears upon the philosophical enterprise. After dispelling the belief that “poetry” and “dwelling” are incompatible, Heidegger writes, “When Hölderlin speaks of dwelling, he has before his eyes the basic character of human existence. He sees the ‘poetic,’ moreover, by relation to this dwelling, thus understood essentially.” 47 The poetic word sounds the originary nature of the human being as dweller; the poem initiates what in Heidegger’s language is “the lettingdwell.” Everything depends upon the proper comprehension of language:

45 Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Existence and Being, trans. Douglas Scott (Chicago: Gateway Edition, 1970), 300. 46 Ibid., 280-81. 47 Martin Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 215.

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“Language speaks, not the human being.” 48 Here, he reiterates this reversal of the ordinary understanding of language as a tool of communication, instead insisting that our task consists of responding to the saying of language. For Heidegger, language speaks most authentically in the poetry of Hölderlin, not because its quality testifies to this poet’s superiority, but on account of Hölderlin being the site of the occurrence of originary language, much as Homer is the site of the happening of the Greek language. This notion further presents the most difficult point of access to Heidegger’s thought, more formidable even than his unfamiliar locutions in other places. Access for me once again recalls Plato’s Ion in which Socrates provides an account of Homer’s poetry (1) as the product of divine madness, and (2) as the voice not of Homer but of the god. The Stone of Heracleia functions as the magnet that draws from the god, through the poet, to the rhapsode, then to the beholder. I liken Heidegger’s Hölderlin to Socrates’s Homer. The analogy does not hold across all elements: in modern poetry, even modern German poetry, one finds so many fine poets and such a wide range both of kinds and of subjects. In this sense, Heidegger is not making a claim, or rather the validation of this claim consists entirely in the interpretation. Again, this is no ordinary validation. Consider the following: Full of merit, yet poetically, man Dwells on the earth. 49

In his view, the binding of the word “poetic” to “on the earth” secures the bond of poetry to the earthboundness of mortals, thereby redirecting thought away from the habitual belief that poetry consists of imaginings that may be somehow unmoored from reality. At this juncture, Heidegger remarks that poetry and thought “meet each other in one and the same” 50 only when each travels along its own path. “The same” does not mean “the identical.” The manner in which the thinker thinks “dwelling” and the way the poet sings “dwelling” differ. For the thinker, dwelling involves building of a special kind. Such building can arise only when mortals confront the twofold sense of (1) their alienation from the very nature of dwelling, and (2) the homelessness that may spark a building within which mortals may dwell. Building in 48 See Martin Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 198, as well as “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” 215. 49 Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 216. 50 Ibid., 218.

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this sense has nothing to do with erecting actual houses, but rather with the activity of thought out of which building occurs in connection with the now absent but sought and slowly restored meaning of dwelling. Although Hölderlin offers no discourse on building, this is not his task. Rather, he brings the poetic dwelling of mortals to song, and so founds it. This founding consists of an originary saying, and could not be farther from an act or a fact in the “real world.” At the conclusion of this essay, Heidegger stresses that human beings today most emphatically do not dwell poetically. However, he takes this non-poetic dwelling as an indication of genuineness of poetic dwelling as proper to human beings. This propriety seals itself in the poetic word. “Remembrance of the Poet,” a much longer essay that treats Homecoming, one of Hölderlin’s longest hymns, develops the notion of poetic saying in a more precise way. The poem reenacts the ancient Greek from Greek hymnos, a song in praise of gods or heroes. The hero in this poem is the poet, not as the one who displays extraordinary power in the confrontation with other men and with gods, but rather as the one to whom the vision celebrated in the poem is vouchsafed—the messenger between gods and mortals. According to Heidegger’s interpretation, a reading that has nothing to do with literary scholarship, the “kindred ones” in the subtitle of the poem are those whose daily lives partake in what he calls “The Most Joyous,” as beamed down to them from the god who dwells above, bringing happiness in the midst of their daily toils. They stand as kin to the poet insofar as their lives preserve the openness to the not-yet-achieved essence of home that the poet sings. The essay concludes with an invocation of the poet’s knowledge of “the mystery of the reserving proximity,” 51 and cites another Hölderlin passage in which “…the poet gladly joins with others, / So that they may understand how to help.” 52 What is homecoming? Homecoming is not the subject matter of the poem. The poem is homecoming. That is to say, the poetic word provides the scene in which homecoming for mortals can occur. Once again, Heidegger declares the specifically German inevitability of facing what he sees as a turning point in human history. On one hand, proclamations like these have exercised an execrable influence, leading to an affiliation with Nazism and with what, in my opinion, led to an unfathomable degradation of the language he celebrated in other 51 Martin Heidegger, “Remembrance of the Poet,” in Existence and Being, trans. Douglass Scott (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949), 287. 52 Martin Heidegger, “Homecoming / To Kindred Ones,” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), 49.

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contexts. I refer to his response to a postwar letter from his former student and unwavering admirer Herbert Marcuse, in which the latter urged Heidegger to apologize for supporting a regime that ordered the murder of six million Jews: the rejoinder was that no apology was forthcoming, but Heidegger compared the Holocaust to the Germans who had to move after losing their farms. Many cannot get past this undeniable aspect of his history. I can, and in my opinion people who practice philosophy should get past it as well—however horrible one finds this, and I do find it horrible. In basic logic courses, we teach our first-year students two consequential considerations: (1) arguments ad hominem are abusive and invalid on their face, and (2) one should seek to take every point of view at its strongest; as noted earlier, many basic books call this “the principle of charity.” And Heidegger’s thought has so very much merit. Even Marcuse, in his letter of distress and entreaty, had to say that he and others “learned infinitely” from him. His valorization of the German language, together with his thought-provoking and controversial interpretations, have set in motion previously unexplored dimensions of the philosophy–poetry relation, and the orientation of much Continental philosophy to art as the exemplary paradigm for the pursuit of wisdom, as opposed to logic and natural science on philosophy’s other major side. “Remembrance of the Poet” traces the nature of poetry through five citations (he calls them “pointers”) drawn from Hölderlin in various places and contexts. This is the essay that best accounts for this poet’s special prominence in Heidegger’s thought. No doubt the greatness of other poets like Virgil and Dante is incontestable. But Hölderlin’s uniqueness consists in his embodiment of the essence of poetry as the theme of his work. Because of this, Heidegger calls him “the poet of poets.” Once again, Heidegger explicitly bypasses the traditional notion of essence as universal, tying it rather to its literal Greek sense as part of the verb “to be” (to ti Ɲn einai). The essay provides its own context from deepening the meditation on the relation of poetry and thought. The first comes from a letter to his mother, in which he calls poetry “the most innocent of occupations.” 53 The second selected passage might seem to contradict it on the surface: “Therefore has language, most dangerous of possessions, been given to man…so that he can affirm what he is.” 54 Heidegger addresses this matter by means of a discourse on language considered as a possession. Augmenting a theme raised earlier in Being and Time, considering 53 54

Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Existence and Being, 270. Ibid., 273.

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language as our possession, i.e. as our means of communication, misses its essential nature entirely. It can be called a “possession” in this sense only upon its becoming ordinary, everyday. Language is most dangerous first of all because, according to Heidegger, language can lose our essence when it occurs only in its average everyday mode. But most of all, language in its most essential sense makes possible (1) our ability to stand in the midst of beings at all, (2) our possibility of taking on our historical existence, and (3) our relation to one another as a conversation (Gespräch). The naming of the gods dominates the brief section on one of Hölderlin’s most often cited lines: “Yet what remains, the poets found” 55 (Was bleibet aber / stiftet die Dichter). For Heidegger, naming is not subsequent to the discovery of objects that are somehow there but don’t have a word by which to call them. In comparison with the analytic thinkers discussed in the first part of this book, his thought stands apart from arguments of denotation versus connotation. The naming of the poet first founds the beings named “so that things first shine forth,” and so in this naming “man’s existence is brought into a firm relation and placed on a ground.” 56 At this point in the book, an irreconcilable difference between the two major strains announces itself. The difference derives from the traditional conception of the human being as ]ǀon logon echon. Until Nietzsche and Heidegger, logos translated almost unanimously as “reason.” 57 The interpretation of reason in its most fundamental sense as logic animated virtually all analytic work. The kindred extension into formal semantics served to purify its methods even as it led to concessions concerning the limits of this approach. Husserl certainly championed the rational approach to philosophical matters, but his notion of reason assumed an anterior intuitive encounter with “the things themselves.” However, any connection between the Heideggerian notion of language and the approach of the analytic writers seems impossible, at least to me. The notion that language is originary saying that utters the essential word, or that poetry exemplifies language antecedently to any “logic,” is entirely outside the analytic understanding so as to be incomprehensible. Saying that Heidegger has a deeper or even just another sense of purity does nothing to bring the enormous asymmetry to any 55 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. W. McNeill and J. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 151. 56 Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 59. 57 Schelling is an exception in part.

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equilibrium or even compromise. Language as poetry, before all else, is a most provocative ruling image.

IV Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, while it has essential ties to his philosophy of language, exceeds the latter in influence. Some 70 years since this essay aroused much attention in many philosophical quarters, technological devices have become ever more sophisticated and ever more dominant in the world economy and in human social life. By the latter, I include not only the online exchanges that facilitate dating, the exchange of goods and services, and the purveying of news and opinion, but also the many and different uses for political organization, from the most banal to the most violent and destructive. If the logos of the ]ǀon logon echon can now be said to reside more in the computer than anywhere else, then the traditional essence of the human being has undergone a significant warp at the very least. During the earlier days of the rise of technological things, Heidegger calls the essence of technology into question, claiming that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.” 58 He calls the accepted notion of the meaning of technology as a means to an end “the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology” (QT, 5). In order to excavate the essence of technology beneath the prevailing account, Heidegger undertakes the questioning of the traditional understanding of causality, the one that had its initial location in Aristotle. Unsurprisingly at this point in the course of his thought, he offers a heterodox interpretation of this understanding. He begins by retranslating the Greek aitia, fatefully translated into Latin as causa, in terms that faithfully present aitia’s sense: “being responsible for” or “being indebted.” Employing the image of a silversmith as he crafts a chalice, Heidegger notes that the silversmith is not an efficient cause—indeed, there is no word in Greek that corresponds to this notion. And when one studies the original text, one finds “t’ dia,” i.e. simply that “from which” something else emerges: “the primary source of the change or coming to rest; e.g. the man who gave advice is an aitia cause, the father is aitia of the child, and generally what makes of what is made and what is 58

Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1977), 4 (hereafter cited in text as QT).

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responsible for the change of what is changed.” 59 In the case of the silver chalice, the “four ways of being responsible” enable the chalice on the path to its full arrival, i.e. they make possible the bringing forth of the chalice, its revealing. The essay then turns to its pivotal insight: since every bringing forth issues in a revealing, technology is “a way of revealing, i.e. of truth” (QT, 12). Once the means-end view is jettisoned and out of the way, the question concerning technology can be asked—for the first time. There occurs a revealing that belongs to physis, translated too often automatically as “nature.” But physis comes from the Greek SKXǀ (to bring to light). Phos translates as “light.” The emergence from physis happens of its own accord. By contrast, the emergence from technology happens as a challenging (Herausfordern); more specific, the emergence from technology occurs as a challenge to the earth to yield more and more energy for human consumption. Physis no longer happens as bringing to light of its own accord; rather, “nature” becomes conceived as a “standing-reserve” of energy to be exploited when human wishes so dictate: We now name that challenging claim that gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve: “Ge-stell” [Enframing]. We dare to use this word in a sense that has been thoroughly unfamiliar up to now. (QT, 19)

The root verb stellen (to place or to produce) remains in force within Enframing. It contains within itself the Greek poiesis, the source of all poetry and all creating, but does so in a manner that deforms it. The deformation consists in restricting the field of possibilities to those that can be calculated. For Heidegger, this is why technology and its devices direct themselves to precise calculation alone. The energy, for example, that can be seized from an oil field is measured in terms of a specific volume and sold at a specific price in order to yield a calculated profit. With this, we have still not yet arrived at the essence of technology, but: “The essence of modern technology shows itself in what we call Enframing” (QT, 23). Since this self-showing disfigures all appearance into intrinsically calculable standing-reserve, it similarly disfigures human beings and keeps us from encountering our own essence as well. That is to say, Enframing destines human beings, sends them, to a place governed by ordering and 59

Aristotle’s account of the four causes can be found in his Physics II, 3 and Metaphysics V, 2.

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controlling rather than to a place in which a liberating mystery—a sense of primordial wonder—that pervades all things can occur. Thus, Enframing is not something dangerous. Rather, Enframing is danger itself. What can this mean? On the most superficial and dramatic level, it means that the ordering and controlling of nature has resulted in the fashioning of weapons capable of wiping out all life on earth. More subtly and even more devastatingly, it means that our essence—that which makes us who and what we are—can be silently extinguished. Toward the end of the essay, Heidegger draws upon a poetic resource, a couplet from Hölderlin’s Patmos: “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch” (But where danger is, grows / The saving power also) (QT, 28). The first two lines of the poem are: “Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott” ([God] is near / and difficult to grasp). While Heidegger’s thought on technology occurs more than two decades after Being and Time, the recurrence of his insight that what is nearest is at once most far away—there, the Being-question—is unmistakable. If a difference can be found, it consists in allowing the words of a poet to speak authoritatively at the end of the discourse. 60 Here, he holds that as we approach the danger more closely, that saving power shows itself more decisively. Heidegger closes the essay by noting another Hölderlin passage that was treated above, “poetically man dwells,” and recalls a word from Plato’s Phaedrus, ekphanestaton (QT, 34), most shining of all. Here, in the artistic/poetic impulse, the saving power resides. Heidegger speaks of the ambiguous essence of technology: “behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery” (QT, 33). The precipice beckons. Will our thought remain mired in calculative Enframing, or will it orient itself by the same mystery of the start that animates Thales, our most distant but still closest ancestor? Though they have little else in common, Quine and Heidegger share a blind spot where the significance of myth is concerned. As shown above, Quine’s acute recognition of the mythical status of “physical object” gave way to a pedestrian pragmatism. Although “physical object” enjoys no greater epistemological status than do Homer’s gods, Quine prefers the former on the grounds that he can use “physical object” to make scientific predictions while Homer’s gods do not permit this. Although Quine’s specific commitment to empirical science cannot be questioned, his basic philosophical commitment compels him inexorably to the view that science finds its ultimate root in poetry, the view championed by one whose thought Quine is just as unalterably opposed. 60

For Heidegger, as for many thinkers, scholars are wont to divide their work into “periods.” For many, the break occurs with respect to the preeminence of poetry.

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Ironically, he remains most sophisticated and less dismissive of myth than does his bête noire Heidegger. Heidegger expressly rejects the narrative nature of myth. Rather, the nature of Dasein as the one whose Being is an issue for it, i.e. Dasein as the being who questions its own Being, stands at the heart of his thought. If one seeks a mythical component, one finds it in the poetic language of Hölderlin. Just as Heidegger gathers Greek thought into his own, Hölderlin gathers Greek imagery into his own. Heidegger’s well-known remark that thought and poetry dwell on similarly lofty mountain peaks yet apart from one another can be understood in this light: thought lives in questions, poetry lives in images. Often, we are given reminders that this era and this kind of questioning, far from providing new insights, dwells haltingly at the outset of a new beginning. Being and Time may seem to conclude with something of an answer to the Being-question, namely the existential unity of authentic temporality, i.e. of time temporalizing itself. As Being-in-theworld, Dasein occurs as (1) ahead of itself, (2) already in a world, and (3) alongside entities in the world. The designations of (1) existentiality, (2) facticity, and (3) fallenness name these three components that Dasein always is. Despite this apparent answer, Heidegger declares that the work is incomplete and requires a second half in which the destruction of Western metaphysics would be the result. The second volume never appeared. When prospective events such as Being and Time II do not happen, the floodgates of speculation open as to why. However, Heidegger’s subsequent books indicate clearly that the resources of Western metaphysics remain considerable and resistant to destruction, and that his interpretations of virtually all of its major thinkers—the early Greek thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche— have done a great service in excavating its untapped resources. It seems to me that he studied the major phenomena—the texts—of Western metaphysics with uncommon scrupulousness. In this spirit, he resembles a scientist attempting to make new discoveries in areas that seemed settled. For example, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics redirected Kant scholarship for many. Rather than attending to the customary epistemological orientation, Heidegger saw that Kant expressly addressed metaphysics, the science of being as being. The outcome of this wellgrounded interpretation culminated in the eminently supportable claim that transcendental imagination bore the central weight of human thought. He also famously regarded Schelling as the deepest and farthest-reaching thinker in the great age of German classicism. However, in his rightly

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acclaimed Schelling book, his concentration focused on “onto-theology,” i.e. the way Being came to be thought in the 1809 Freedom Essay (Freiheitsschrift) when another more prominent avenue beckoned. Schelling’s attention was captivated by the “FKǀra” of Plato’s Timaeus, that “third thing” that one glimpsed only with the greatest difficulty as if in a dream, that never shows its own face, and that conventional language—even conventional philosophical language—could not address. Instead, only a ORJLVPǀ QRWKǀ, a bastard or “misbegotten” discourse could do so. 61 However, as the FKǀra is that necessity that makes being and becoming possible at all, one has to wonder about the precise status of “bastard logos.” In one sense, it departs from the earlier discourse from intellect (nous) that seems to be standard. However, without the discourse from necessity, no discourse from intellect—no discussion of being and becoming—could take place at all. Schelling, demonstrably more than any other philosopher of his and perhaps any time, regarded art as the organ of philosophy, i.e. as the exoteric expression of the absolute analogous to its esoteric expression in philosophy. Still further, no philosopher attended to myth and to mythology to the degree and with the depth that did Schelling. In my strong opinion, any discriminating reader of Schelling would be compelled to conclude that his language uniquely fused mythical and rational elements. Of course, Heidegger’s magisterial Schelling interpretation alone made this insight possible. Whatever one says concerning Heidegger’s language—its idiosyncratic nature has been both praised and reviled, and called everything from unintelligible to poetic—it has never been deemed as mythical. Even the opaque discourses of the Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie) can best be seen as an effort to enact a language commensurate with the new horizon opened by Being and Time. Heidegger’s notion of truth as DOƝtheia (“unconcealment” or “unhiddenness”) remains one of the cornerstones of his accomplishments. Even such a traditional interpreter as Paul Friedländer came to endorse it after opposing it. However, the very effort to fashion and/or enact a suitable language bears witness to lurking correspondence and/or coherence theories of truth. Such theories belong to the history of the natural sciences. Heidegger never rejected such theories; rather, he relegated them to second-order significance. However, their surreptitious reappearance in his attempts to speak in a manner commensurate to this insight repeats the practice of the kind of science he sought elsewhere to undermine. Language—together with 61

Plato, Timaeus, 52b.

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the Being-question—with all of its problematic senses, is Heidegger’s ruling image.

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

Although the time of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work overlapped significantly with that of Heidegger’s, and although significant kinships obtain between them, it must be acknowledged that Merleau-Ponty is a true original. He took his cue from Husserl rather than from Heidegger. His landmark Phenomenology of Perception, 62 MerleauPonty’s acute creative transformation of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, ranks as one of the great achievements of 20th-century philosophy. His Preface to that work stands alongside Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit as one of the most compact and most profound presentations of philosophy in its history. The Preface seeks to draw together “the various themes of phenomenology as they have grown in life” (PP, viii). In one of the most concise and compelling characterizations of phenomenology that distinguishes it both from all analytic philosophy and from the metaphysics of modern philosophy, he writes: “It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing” (PP, viii—emphasis mine). All science, both the natural and the social kind, presupposes our immediate relation to the always already present world. The most groundbreaking aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Husserl consists of the denial of a major role to causality. This denial follows from the descriptive nature of phenomenology, and by extension philosophy as well. Perhaps paradoxically, he calls the scientific point of view “both naïve and dishonest” (PP, ix), (1) since all knowledge refers to the world disclosed to consciousness before any position is taken with regard to it, and (2) since therefore science and its language present material that is abstract and derivative in light of consciousness’s direct experience. Here we observe not only the kinship with Heidegger but also the telling difference. Science has a second-order status for both, but consciousness moves to the center of Merleau-Ponty’s thought in a distinctive way. In a more ambiguous mode, Merleau-Ponty exhibits an aesthetic side in his writing that plays some role in his thought. For 62

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith and updated by F. Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1962) (hereafter cited in text as PP).

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example, he compares the relation of science to the world disclosed to consciousness “as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is” (PP, ix). In line with this, he praises Husserl for eschewing a noetic reflection that would more or less repeat the Kantian move from the object to the concept—his “Copernican revolution”—in favor of a noematic reflection that stays with the object. This is the justification for his view that Husserl’s return to “the things themselves” can be distinguished from the kind of idealistic return to consciousness that takes place in modern philosophy. He gives the name of perception to that relation in which consciousness and the world meet each other. Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception can be and should be differentiated from its predecessors in the history of philosophy. It is neither the source of ideas on the tabula rasa of Locke, nor is it Berkeleyan esse est percipi, nor is it akin to Hume’s “bundle.” It is neither constructed by thought as Descartes has it, nor is it the passive side of which conception is the active, nor Leibniz’s view that it is “of the outside.” Nor does perception require a prior synthesis or series of syntheses as in Kant. He answers several putative “philosophical” problems in a single passage: My field of perception is constantly filled with a play of colors, noises, and fleeting tactile sensations which I cannot relate precisely to the content of my clearly perceived world, yet which I nevertheless “place” in the world, without ever confusing them with my daydreams. Equally constantly I weave dreams around things…Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them. (PP, x)

To Merleau-Ponty’s notion of perception belongs a layered immersion, rooted in the facticity of life. The passage above can only be the product of a second-order reflection on this primary immersion, which he calls his constant though ever-shifting background. In accord with his express task of tracing the themes of phenomenology as they occur in life, he observes that this immersion is so thoroughgoing (my words) that “…the only way to become aware of the fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it our complicity (to look at it ohne mitzumachen, as Husserl often says), or yet again, to put it ‘out of play’” (PP, xiii). The content of “common sense” and “a natural attitude toward things” cannot only never be rejected, but always remains “the constant theme of philosophy.” The paramount sense of Husserl’s reduction, for

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Merleau-Ponty, consists of achieving that distance from the world in order to render visible the objects and relations within it. Unlike Husserl’s view, phenomenology does not aim at the eventual accomplishment of a science of sciences. Instead, Merleau-Ponty endorses Eugen Fink’s formulation of “wonder…in the face of the world.” The world as it presents itself to wonder “steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like the sparks from a fire” (PP, xiii). Instead of revealing the world as intelligible along Cartesian and Kantian lines, phenomenological wonder finds the world “strange and paradoxical,” i.e. teaches “the unmotivated upsurge of the world” (PP, xiv). Such wonder cannot issue from an unconditional detachment from the world. Since we are always immersed in it, “[t]he most important lesson which the reduction teaches is the impossibility of a complete reduction” (PP, xiv). For this reason, he makes the remarkable claim that phenomenological reduction belongs to existential and not idealistic philosophy, a contention that Husserl might have summarily rejected. Merleau-Ponty absorbs those elements from Husserl that comport with his own original insights. Thus, no entry for “logic” can be found in the index to the entire Phenomenology of Perception, nor can any for thinkers such as Frege and Bolzano whose influence upon Husserl is also considerable. However, he embraces Husserl’s characterization of the philosopher as a “perpetual beginner” (PP, xiv), taking nothing including philosophy itself for granted. His claims that Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World can be understood only against Husserl’s reduction and that Husserl’s reduction functions as an existentialization of consciousness. These lead Merleau-Ponty to regard essences as means, rather than as the ultimate purpose of phenomenology. He writes: “Husserl’s essences are destined to bring back all the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman’s net draws up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed” (PP, xv). In distinction from both Husserl and Heidegger, both of whom place possibility higher than actuality, the so-called separation of essences is a function of language, which Merleau-Ponty calls the “ante-predicative life of consciousness” (PP, xv). The difference works itself out most clearly in their respective understandings of truth once again. For Husserl, “Truth is manifestly the correlation of the perfect rational character of the protodoxa, the belief certainty.” 63 This notion, though not as well fleshed out as one might hope, includes the relation to the full intuitive self-evidence of what is given to consciousness. Heidegger’s notion of truth as a-OƝWKHLD—unconcealment or unhiddenness— 63

Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, §139.

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includes a necessary component of untruth. Neither conception fits Merleau-Ponty, although one can trace his transformation of both if done with great care. 64 Including but reshaping his debt to Husserl, he writes: …doubt, or the fear of being mistaken, testifies as soon as it arrives to our power of unmasking error, and that it could never tear us away from truth. It is the “experience of truth” which is self-evident. To seek the essence of perception is to declare that perception is, not presumed true, but defined as access to truth. The self-evidence of perception is not adequate thought or apodeictic self-evidence. (PP, xvi)

Intentionality, another theme that runs through phenomenology, is distinguished both from Kant’s transcendental apperception and from his Refutation of Idealism. The difference consists of the insight that a relation to the world does not need to be either constituted or argued for, but rather is “lived” as ready-made or already there. In a fondness for the Critique of Judgment shared by several French philosophers, MerleauPonty devotes two paragraphs for reflections upon it. In terms of actual textual scholarship, he fails just as much as do his French colleagues. The Critique of Judgment demands recognition of the generic difference between determinative judgments, which apply to theoretical and moral reason, and reflective judgments, which apply to art and to the pleasures of nature. This does not seem to interest Merleau-Ponty. However, one can make a case for his Kant interpretation in the following sense and in terms of the seductive sentence in §9.: The subjective universal communicability of the mode of representation in a judgment of taste, since it is to be possible without presupposing a definite concept, can refer to nothing else than the state of mind in the free play of the Imagination and the Understanding (so far as they agree with each other, as is requisite for cognition in general). 65

It can easily be read to suggest that the harmonious coming together of the imagination and the understanding without any concept, as the necessary condition for cognition in general, leads to the conclusion that we are always in the domain of beauty so soon as we think at all. Not

64

AlƝtheia may be read as unreflective self-evident, and meaning-bestowing perception. 65 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, §9.

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so. 66 However, this is a most productive misinterpretation, for it allows Merleau-Ponty to assert the primacy of perception in a way that buttresses his notion of an ante-categorical perception: …the hidden art of imagination must condition the categorical activity. It is no longer the aesthetic judgment, but knowledge too which rests upon this art, an art which forms the basis of the unity of consciousness and of consciousnesses. (PP, xvii)

The role of teleology in the Critique of Judgment also receives another acute rereading. For Kant, the teleological judgment is the necessary condition not only for securing the unity of consciousness under the teleological idea, but also for the conception of even a single blade of grass in nature in reflective judgment. Once again, Merleau-Ponty existentializes this viewpoint: It is a question of recognizing consciousness as a project of the world, meant for a world which it neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually directed—and this world as this pre-objective individual whose imperious unity decrees what knowledge should take as its goal. (PP, xvii-xviii)

This unfolds into what Merleau-Ponty calls a “broadened” notion of intentionality that now includes not only and not primarily the intellectual directedness of consciousness but also rather toward origins. Origins refer here to that which is disclosed through pre-objective perception: …not only what these things are for representation (the “properties” of the things perceived)…but the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the pebble, the piece of wax, in all the events of a revolution, 67 in all the thoughts of a philosopher. (PP, xviii)

The daring notion that both things and actions express themselves has not been taken up by Merleau-Ponty’s progeny (if they may be called that), who concentrate upon quirky approaches to language. Not until the American John Sallis takes this theme up prominently in Force of 66

In other words, before we can perceive anything at all, our entire historical past is brought to bear upon it 67 Again, a great thinker falls victim to bad political judgment. Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror provides a defense of the Stalinist purges in all their horror, doing so in the name of the price that history must exact.

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Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (to be treated later) does this crucial theme resurface for the phenomenological tradition. A still more encompassing view emerges such that even history both in general and in every one of its particulars belongs to antepredicative perception 66; “It is true, as Marx said, that history does not walk on its head, but it is also true that it does not think with its feet. Or one should say rather that it is neither its ‘head’ nor its ‘feet,’ that we have to worry about, but its body” (PP, xix). Merleau-Ponty understands “history” with striking comprehensiveness. It includes not only events of every kind, but also doctrines. To perceive doctrines properly, one must traverse them in terms of their step-by-step unfolding as it proceeds from its genesis of meaning (Sinngenesis—a term found in Husserl’s unpublished writings). The life of an author also requires such critical scrutiny if it is to be apprehended appropriately. Thus, history large and small presents no unconnected moments: “…all periods of history appear as manifestations of a single existence, or of a single drama” (PP, xix). Leibniz, in his Monadology, wrote, “…there is nothing barren, sterile, dead in the universe; nothing chaotic, nothing confused except in appearance.” 68 For Leibniz, the one all-encompassing whole is governed by unvarying mechanical and final causes; the former for things that have more matter than soul, the latter for those things whose souls dominate. Merleau-Ponty prefers to present the whole as an everdeveloping “drama” with an unknown ending. We are “condemned to meaning” (emphasis in original), but “meaning” is always open to criticism, to questioning, even the questioning concerning what meaning is. The final sections of the Preface present phenomenology itself as developing into a unified phenomenon, disclosing what he calls a rationality that emerges from the experiences it discloses: “To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perspectives confirm each other, a meaning emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart…” (PP, xix). Such rationality can only be disclosed in “a violent act that is validated by being performed” (PP, xx). Phenomenology reveals this rationality in all its mystery, and can be said to be mysterious itself in the way it has grown together from its various strains. Merleau-Ponty presents this evolution in terms of art rather than of science, Hegelian or otherwise:

68

G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, #69.

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It is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry, or Cézanne—by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being. (PP, xxi)

This conception of phenomenology can be seen from the outside as combining the Husserlian-developed orientation toward “pregivenness” that renders us eternal beginners and the Heideggerian-developed orientation toward art. But from within, this view transforms phenomenology from a philosophical doctrine of any kind into a flowing stream of life that elicits our most careful attention and self-reflection. But what, after all, is perception for Merleau-Ponty? We can neither sense it, nor conceive it. Perception is presupposed in any human pursuit at all, yet it escapes characterization. We are told that its existence, together with the existence of the world, is unproblematic and requires no proof. Merleau-Ponty’s perception provides the foundation for much else: his meditations on psychology, aesthetics, science, everything except his politics. 69 In Platonic terms, it is neither being nor becoming, but participates in both in a strange way—like the FKǀra in the Timaeus. I call it, once again, a ruling image.

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His Humanism and Terror is a defense of the Stalinist purges.

JACQUES DERRIDA

At this juncture, I find myself in a quandary even more precarious than any that I endured in treating the analytic philosophers who are not part of my tradition. The case of Derrida reveals a virtual chasm between my reception of his thought and my evaluation of its power. Since the appearance of the translation Of Grammatology, followed by publication after publication, many of which I read, and lecture after interminable lecture, a few of which managed to keep me awake at least some of the time, I still just don’t get it. However, many people, including good friends and sympathetic philosophical colleagues, vouch for his profundity. And there can be no doubt at all that his influence reaches farther than any other philosopher of his time, into language, architecture, and pedagogy especially in the humanities. My initial response stands together with several other sapient predictions of my past. After watching Michael Jackson present his new songs and new persona—one white glove, lots of sequins, moonwalk—on the 1983 Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever NBC special, I knew that he had just destroyed his once promising career. 70 George W. Bush, looking for all the world like a deer caught in the headlights, responded with “Jesus Christ, because he saved my soul” when asked about the political philosopher who influenced his worldview the most during the 2000 Republican primary debates. Nobody that obtuse, I claimed with serene confidence, could possibly be nominated for the United States Presidency, and certainly never elected. And a boorish ignoramus like Donald Trump? Utterly preposterous! So when in 1976 a fellow graduate student slammed a copy of Of Grammatology down on a lunch table around which I was sitting with several others and informed us with prideful disdain, “This is the next big thing in Continental philosophy,” I told him that he could bet his own life and the life of his loved ones (that is, if he had any) that that book was dead in the water, sure to be pulped within the year. My evaluation was so thoroughly negative because it seemed to me (and still does, to an extent) 70

This program proved to be a turning point in American popular music, the significance of which I missed entirely.

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to depend crucially upon uncritical elements and to demonstrate a stunning lack of self-reflectiveness. Throw in a careless, unsound, and now sadly prevalent view of the “the history of metaphysics,” as if this history were homogenous and capable of encapsulation in a single formulation, and you have a manifest debacle69. However, it seemed and seems manifest to me and only a very few colleagues. However, such judgments remain far from the purpose of this book, toward which end I shall attempt to present a Derrida of whom acolytes would approve. Toward that goal, I shall examine key portions of three early and influential texts that appeared simultaneously, and that prefigured the shape(s) that his labyrinthine thought would take.

Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction71 Derrida’s Introduction constitutes itself in a radical sense, recalling the ambiguity in the 14th-century French introduccion, a leading (ductio) inner. He interprets Husserl’s own ambiguous treatment of Reason as both inside and outside of history, as what one might call an instance of a concealed binary that contains within itself something that both makes it possible and undermines it, although Derrida does not speak explicitly of binaries in this work. The Logos72 that belongs to the animale rationale is also conditioned by an implicit binary. The Divine Logos, however, that Logos that supervenes every finite instance of language, itself occurs as a twofold that destabilizes it: The dia-historicity or the meta-historicity of the divine Logos only traverses and goes beyond “Fact” as the “ready-made” of history, yet the Logos is but the pure movement of its own historicity. (OG, 148) If there is any history, then historicity can be only the passage of Speech [Parole], the pure tradition of a primordial Logos toward a polar Telos. But since…there is no Being which has sense outside of this historicity or escapes its infinite horizon, since the Logos and the Telos are nothing outside the interplay (Wechelspiel) of their reciprocal inspiration, this signifies then that the Absolute is Passage. (OG, 149)

71 Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1989) (hereafter cited in text as OG). 72 This is capitalized in the translation.

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By virtue of the historicity that belongs to every utterance, a slippage of sorts occurs between Being that is announced and its arrival in Logos. This is what Derrida understands by The Absolute, by Passage, and by the “is” that unites them. The nature of primordial temporality must always carry its historicity with it. Therefore, fact and arrival are always constituted by a discontinuity that brings delay, deferral to the absolute as passage that which stands both apart from and within it (if one can say “it” here): Here delay is the philosophical absolute, because the beginning of methodic reflection can only consist in the consciousness of the implication of another previous, possible, and absolute origin in general. Since this alterity of the absolute origin structurally appears in my Living Present…, this very fact signifies the authenticity of phenomenological delay and limitation. (OG, 152-53)

In the midst of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Derrida discerns a breach that both empowers it and renders impossible its ultimate aim of providing both a science of sciences and a method for developing those particular sciences that would take their places guided by it. It is a delicate matter to decide whether and to what degree Husserl’s thought is preserved in the face of Derrida’s Introduction. One can surely see shadows of the Hegelian Aufhebung. However, nothing can be found in Hegel that corresponds even remotely to infinite deferral. With this, one can begin to discern that challenge posed by Derrida’s thought to the reception of the history of philosophy among Continental philosophers. Those who, like me, see that newly revealed history freed from the uncritical dominance of reason as a wellspring of untapped resources. Does the thought of Derrida undermine this view of the history of philosophy? Could it even do so? Or, perhaps, can his thought recast that view in an even and ironically more secure way?

Voice and Phenomenon73 Like his book on Origin of Geometry, Voice and Phenomenon comes forth as a meditation on Husserl’s thought that is occupied primarily (but not exclusively) with key sections of the first of the Logical 73

Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011) (hereafter cited in text as VP).

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Investigations. The major issue with which Derrida concerns himself and that constitutes the thread uniting all seven chapters is the distinction within the double sense (Doppelsinn) of sign (Zeichen), such that it can mean “expression” (Ausdruck) or “indication” (Anzeigen) (VP, 3). As the discourse progresses, Derrida will explore what at the outset can be called the hidden complications within what would seem to be unproblematic distinctions and claims. In the narrower sense, he discusses those complications as they concern Husserl’s texts, but a larger sense always makes itself manifest: these complications, for which he will supply a new vocabulary, concern the history of metaphysics and the history of philosophy heretofore. In the Introduction, Derrida speaks of a “language against language” issuing from these complications, and writes: “If language never escapes from analogy, even if it is analogy through and through, it must…freely take up its own destruction and cast metaphors against metaphors” (VP, 12). Thus, the very possibility of sense itself—the apparently unquestionable presupposition of all philosophy—must be put into question: As a polemic for the possibility of sense and of the world, this war takes place in this difference, which…cannot inhabit the world but only language, in its transcendental restlessness. In truth, far from merely inhabiting language, this difference is also its origin and abode. Language keeps watch over the difference that keeps watch over language. (VP, 12)

Like others that will appear later in the discourse, this circle cannot be closed. The brief Chapter 1, “Sign and Signs,” exposes the problem belonging to the double sense of sign. This problem strikes at the origin of phenomenology, i.e. at the claim that consciousness is its incipient act: Is not what is at issue precisely the rejection or erasure of preunderstanding as the apparent starting point, indeed, its rejection or erasure as a kind of prejudice or presumption? By what right may we presume the essential unity of something like the sign? (VP, 21)

Derrida’s implicit answer to this is negative—there is no such right. Rather, the hidden fissure in phenomenology, between its challenge to naïve apprehension and its attachment to what Derrida repeatedly calls “the metaphysics of presence,” must be scrutinized. The almost equally brief Chapter 2 locates the fissure in terms of the prior two senses of sign as (1) expression and (2) indication:

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Jacques Derrida Do we not already have the right to say that the entire future problematic of the reduction and all the conceptual differences in which they are declared (fact/essence, transcendentality/mundanity, and all the oppositions that are systematic with them) are developed in a hiatus between the two types of signs? (VP, 26—emphasis in original).

The notion of a hiatus, which will come to receive several other names, serves as a major “element” (though it is not an element strictly speaking) in Derrida’s thought. Much that is decisive takes place in an unnamed and unnamable lacuna that is indeed not merely a lacuna, but rather also that which allows for the aforementioned divisions to make their appearance at all. Voice and Phenomenon continues to treat the difference between indication and expression in Chapter 4, titled “Meaning as Soliloquy.” In this chapter, Derrida undermines the supposedly unproblematic inner dialogue written of in Plato’s Sophist as the soul’s dialogue with itself. His discourse begins by denying that indication, insofar as it takes place in the soul of the human being, necessarily not only fails to reach what he calls “the presence of the other’s lived experience,” but further, such indication steals it from the other. Indication must extend beyond itself into expression, but that “extension” is precisely what cannot be accounted for. Derrida divides the process supposedly belonging to soliloquy (i.e. inner language) into three separate components: (1) the life of self-presence; (2) indication; and (3) expression: With all of these “exitings” exiling this life of self-presence into indication, we can be sure that indication, which covers so far nearly the entire surface of language, is the process of death at work in the signs. And as soon as the other appears, indicative language—which is just another name of the relation to death—no longer lets itself be erased. (VP, 34)

Why is indicative language, the language of signs that purport to point directly to “things,” another name for the relation to death? Indicative language is marked through and through by finitude, though this response is only implicit here. Here we may note a departure from Heidegger, to whom Derrida quite openly owes much. In Being and Time, anxiety in the face of death occurs when the world in which Dasein finds itself suddenly withdraws. In Derridean terms, one might say that this essential mood enters

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when language—logos—breaks off. At least in Voice and Phenomenon, death belongs to the language, to the indicative sign that cannot be erased but is always left behind after it has been sounded. Chapter 4, “Meaning and Representation,” expands the critique of the doubled sign to embrace what Derrida extravagantly calls “in truth…the philosophy and history of the West” (VP, 44). He claims that philosophy considers the sign as derived from intuited meaning in consciousness, and in so doing fashions another circle that cannot be closed: …to restore the originality and the non-derivative character of the sign against classical metaphysics is also, by means of an apparent paradox, to erase the concept of the sign whose entire history and entire sense belong to the adventure of the metaphysics of presence. This schema holds as well for the concepts of representation, of repetition, of difference, etc., as well as for their entire system. (VP, 44)

Clearly, passages such as this one divide those many friends of mine who discovered an approach to philosophy that opens entirely new and promising horizons with Derrida and other post-Heideggerian French thinkers, and the very few of us who look on in disbelief as important and complex matters are batted around as if they are badminton shuttlecocks. In any case, for Derrida the previously suppressed concepts and systems happen inside metaphysics and come forth at its current closure. In Chapter 5, “The Sign and the Blink of an Eye (Augenblick),” Derrida introduces another unprecedented issue based upon the claim that consciousness, which he calls “evidentness itself” (VP, 53), governs every concept of truth and sense. This assertion is at least somewhat astonishing not only after Heidegger but also after much modern and even analytic philosophy—though it does apply to Husserl in a manner. Together with this, Derrida contends that philosophy assumes the privilege of the actual present. If one questions this privilege, as Derrida does, neither foundation of, nor security for, thought can remain: And it is really around the privileged actual present, of the now, that, in the last analysis, this debate, which resembles no other, which is played out between philosophy, which is always a philosophy of presence, 74 and a thought of non-

74 This citation and the subsequent one seem to me to betray an ignorance of key insights of our modern tradition, especially those of Hume and Kant. See Hume’s

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Just as non-presence always inhabits, interrupts, and even makes possible presence, the same interruption occurs with respect to the claim of self-identity. The “now” of consciousness as it intends to think itself unfolds not into another now, but already contains a heterogeneous nonnow that interrupts any act that might be directed toward self-presence, self-identity: Must we not say that the concept of pure solitude—and of the monad in the phenomenological sense—is split open by its own origin, by the very condition of its self-presence: “time” rethought as the difference in auto-affection, beginning from the identity of identity and non-identity in the “same” of the im selben Augenblick? (VP, 59)

The blink of an eye counts neither as duration nor as durationless. Nevertheless, it undermines any sense of self-presence. “The Voice that Keeps Silent,” the title of Chapter 6, prepares for Derrida’s famous claim that writing is prior to speech. Far from being a mere absence of language, silence is possible only through “a double reduction or double exclusion,” namely of indicative communication with the other in me, or expression and its precedence over sense—thus continuing the thread that unites the chapters. Metaphysics and philosophy itself are bound to being as presence, a notion that receives a decisive twist here; he calls the latter: …the epoch of the voice as the technical mastery of objectbeing…[I]n order to really understand the unity of techné and phoné, it is necessary to think the objectivity of the object. The ideal object is the most objective of objects… (VP, 65)

This, it seems, is Derrida’s appropriation of Heidegger’s critique of technology. Instead of locating technicity as the outcome of the history of Being that has forgotten its essence, Derrida locates it in the very folds of metaphysical language as an unacknowledged element that silently inserts itself within the thought of ideality. The ideal object exists for a non-empirical consciousness only, and as such is infinitely repeatable and expressible only in a kindred analysis of consciousness as a bundle of perceptions, and Kant’s On the Paralogisms of Pure Reason..

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element: “The voice is the name of this element. The voice hears itself” (VP, 65). The technical control exercised by the voice nevertheless cannot escape the possibility of writing that dwells silently within every act of speech. Though “the phoneme gives itself as the mastered ideality of the phenomenon” (VP, 67—emphasis in original), the substratal operation of writing proves to be more basic than the most basic consciousness through the movement of differénce: The movement of differénce does not supervene upon a transcendental subject. The movement of differénce produces the transcendental subject. Auto-affection is not a modality of experience that characterizes a being that would already be itself (autos). Auto-affection produces the same as the selfrelation in the difference with itself, the same as the nonidentical. (VP, 71)

On the final page of this chapter, Derrida notes that the interweaving of indication and expression constitutes what is originary. While these terms, adopted from Husserl, might not be replicated elsewhere, I cannot restrain myself from pointing out that this insight can be found as well at major junctures of the history of philosophy, for example: (1) in Plato’s Republic V at 476d, where Socrates says that only those who are able to grasp both the eidƝ and the pragmata (things) in both their separateness but even more in their togetherness; (2) in Kant’s Transcendental Logic, in which the Principles of the Pure Understanding have neither sense nor significance without their juncture in the schemata of imagination; and (3) in Schelling’s division within God, in which God himself (Spinoza’s God) requires not only the unruly ground of his existence in order to be born, but also a solicitation in order make possible this birth in the first place. In my opinion, Derrida betrays an ignorance of philosophy’s history that is almost shocking in its extent. However, looked at through another lens, he is an interesting and relevant heir of Heidegger and stands beside the other thinkers treated in this book. Concerning Heidegger, Derrida both picks up on and extends the notion of the primacy of language as holding sway over humanity, rather than the reverse. He takes a different direction insofar as he occupies himself with the anomalies within signification and within grammar, rather than with poetic saying and its revelatory power. The truly radical course taken concerns the fracturing of and within logos itself. As is well known, logocentrism has entered philosophical discourse (and other discourses) as pointing to the dominant feature of

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Western thought, and usually also of being somehow responsible for oppressions and for hierarchical “isms” that work to the denigration of virtually (if not in fact) all non-European non-white males. In my opinion, this puts not only too much weight upon a single notion, but also does so upon a notion that indefensibly extends to a complicated and often chaotic tradition that the author of this neologism fails to recognize. Once again, however, when one looks through another lens, its widespread influence among very capable people who seek to improve our world becomes comprehensible. “Logocentrism” as the basis of a critical strategy also serves to welcome long-ignored voices to philosophy that offer not only other perspectives but other now vigorous disciplines as well, such as feminism, critical race theory, post-colonial studies, queer theory, et al. As I argued in what might be called an anti-logocentrism Plato paper years ago, 75 although the term is surely misapplied to the Platonic dialogues, the liberating benefit cannot be denied. The fact that I find only a very small proportion of the newer work interesting is beside the point. Chapter 8 carries the deliberately paradoxical title “The Originative Supplement,” and gives one of the most understandable formulations of the key notion (if “notion” is what it might be called) of differénce. Breaking it into parts, it is (1) an operation of differing that at once splits and delays presence; (2) subjects differing to originary division and originary delay; and (3) to be thought prior to the separation between deferral (differér) as delay and differing (differér) as the active work of differénce. Derrida calls it “unthinkable” (VP, 75) if one starts from consciousness, from presence, or from the opposites of either or both. The previous six chapters explored the implicit hiatus between indication and expression, reaching the insight that the assumption of presence is both a metaphysical prejudice and an unwarranted assumption, however thoroughly it has captivated the entire history of Western philosophy. This final chapter rewrites that assumption by exposing the complicated structures that both undercut that prejudice and point the way to a more justifiable and authentic account of language and of the pursuit of wisdom. As to the supplement, it is a most peculiar signifier in that its substitution for another in the chain of signifiers results in “a possibility [that] produces by delay that to which it is said to be added” (VP, 75). Derrida calls the effect of the supplement “the play of difference,” and this play interjects itself beneath indication and expression by deferring the fulfillment of any intention to infinity. “Fullness is therefore merely 75

“(Non)Logocentric Logos in Plato’s Timaeus: Extending Sallis and Derrida,” Philosophy Today, Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring 2004.

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contingent. The absence of the intended object does not compromise the meaning…” (VP, 77). In his rethinking of the central concepts of the history of philosophy, i.e. sense, ideality, truth, intuition, perception, and expression, they one and all belong to the “common matrix” (VP, 85) of presence. The living present, according to Derrida, is the founding concept of phenomenology as metaphysics and as such cannot be broken up in any way. However, when thought conceives presence, it conceives presence as ideality and not as living. Thus, the living present is deferred to infinity, according to Derrida. In other words, the gap between the ideal as essence and the fact as living removes the marking of any measurable distance between them, but rather the living present is always not only quantitatively but also qualitatively removed from the ideal thought of presence: “This differénce is the difference between ideality and nonideality” (VP, 85). His notion of infinitude becomes of signal importance in Voice and Phenomenon. Most dramatically, the infinite gap that first occurs in the distinction between indication and expression discloses the impossibility of self-presence. According to Derrida, this impossibility of self-presence undermines not only Husserl’s but also every metaphysical edifice that has been and can be constructed. Although deconstruction is not an express theme in this book, one can surely see its implicit emergence here in the overturning of the belief in presence through the operation of differénce. In Of Grammatology, this theme becomes explicit: This deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of the trace (Spur), as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian discourse. And finally, in all scientific fields, notably in biology, this notion seems currently to be dominant and irreducible.76

Especially in Of Grammatology, a work too large for close consideration here, Derrida mixes humility with outrageous arrogance. He admits that he is bound to the very traditions that his critical readings undermine, and with a most problematic gesture claims that supplanting them could not be further from his effort. However, he claims to have decisively undermined the entire history of philosophy with a few French neologisms and a few recastings of German and Greek ones. He speaks from a lectern, but does so for hours and without making the slightest 76

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. H. Spivak (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 70.

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gesture toward coherence. Whatever doubts one may harbor concerning his work, there can be little concerning its power to provoke.

Derrida on Heidegger Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question is the text of a lecture course given by the author in 1987, with notes added later. Derrida’s lectures tend to be long, opaque, and to quotidian listeners like me, utterly disjointed. His acolytes tell me that this comportment encourages us to alter—to decenter—the way we, who are imprisoned by metaphysics and ontotheology, habitually think. Happily, Of Spirit seems to follow a consistent theme, and aim at something resembling a final issue. However, this appearance is somewhat misleading, as the discourse demands that its reader take several leaps in order to experience this always-fascinating Auseinandersetzung/Miteinandersetzung with Heidegger, perhaps the most important thinker for Derrida’s own work. If Of Spirit was a more traditional work, a serial record of its themes could serve as a plausible table of contents. However, its many eccentric peregrinations undermine the very notion of a table of contents. Even a skeletal list makes this apparent: (1) the silence regarding spirit (Geist), i.e. non-appearance of the word, in Being and Time; (2) spirit’s major position in Heidegger’s Inaugural Address as Rector in which it is exalted as leading the German people; (3) spirit in the Introduction to Metaphysics as geopolitical, recalling the famous passage concerning Germany in pincers between Russian and American mediocrity which, despite their difference, remain metaphysically the same; (4) spirit as fire, flame, Heidegger’s final determination, although this delineation hovered throughout. Among the many provocative moves in Of Spirit, the most daring, most interesting, and most questionable among them seems to me to be the claim that “Sein und Zeit was all tortuous prudence, the severe economy of a writing holding back declaration within a discipline of severely observed markers.”77 If undertaking a fruitless pursuit appeals to you, try to find a reader of any orientation who finds Being and Time too stilted. Since Derrida ascribes such consequential philosophical significance to the philosophically marginal Rectoral Address in which spirit’s “sudden inflammation” supposedly occurs, the remarkable opinion that somehow 77 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). The original French title, which seems much better to me, is simply De l’esprit (Editions Galilée, 1987).

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Being and Time is artificially constrained may make a perverse kind of sense. By tracing the various ways “spirit” enters into Heidegger’s texts, Derrida paints a portrait of a Heidegger that admits of no “early,” “middle,” and “late.” Instead, he presents Heidegger’s thought as an ongoing encounter with “spirit” with other characteristically major themes as ancillary, such as the Being-question, the response to the history of metaphysics, and the relation of thought to poetry. But this is in no sense a unitary portrait. The matter of “the question,” which Derrida addresses as “the question of the question,” issues in the claim that “question” can be neither the first nor the last word or concern in a language. In a certain manner, Derrida’s entire critique of Heidegger rests upon this reassignment of questioning to a gesture that cannot be originary. A feature of this critique concerns the role of the promise, and a putative omission in Heidegger’s texts. When Françoise Dastur pointed out Derrida’s mistake on this and gave a precise reference to Heidegger, Derrida responded with an extensive note in which he absorbed Dastur’s objection into his own then-enhanced discourse. This represents a remarkable philosophical flexibility to his admirers. To lesser people like me, a simple “Oops” would have sufficed. Of Spirit concludes with an imagined and at least somewhat bizarre conversation, conducted entirely by Derrida, between Heidegger and Christian theologians. The outcome? It looks like a draw to us boxing fans—which means, I suppose, that Heidegger lost. But in genuine Derridean fashion, I am undecided.

Derrida’s Unacknowledged Foundationalism A double foundationalism occurs in the work of Derrida. The most interesting from a philosophical point of view is interruption. Since no language and no system can ever be closed, and since consequently there is no center—no transcendental signifier that is capable of accounting for all other possible signifiers—philosophy’s task consists of disrupting “master narratives.” These narratives have lost all pretense of genuine mastery, and those discourses on their margins give voice to those absences and silences that surreptitiously inhabited the old metaphysical structures, undermining them thoroughly. This lack of a master narrative is a pregnant lack that inspires previously unacknowledged discourses of value that have come forth as a result of its power. It is my opinion that a second foundationalism obtains here, and (again my opinion) it is not as connected to the first as one might suppose. Given Derridean interruption of master narrative, many other previously

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marginalized discourses have found their voice in philosophy. Feminism, post-colonialism, queer theory, critical race theory, Latin American philosophy, and others can now lay claim to the same official status as metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and other more traditional pursuits. Every one of them (1) addresses the oppression of the named group, and every one of them brings a left-wing agenda with it. My political sympathies align with these groups. But I view both their institution and their Derridean justification to be opportunistic rather that genuinely philosophical. At the root of both foundations is differénce, which makes possible the various and varying postures taken by this consequential thinker. Differénce is the ruling image.

HANS-GEORG GADAMER78

No doubt the unprecedented and self-denominated violence of Heidegger’s thought and the equally unprecedented deconstructive force of Derrida’s challenge to all prior philosophy have elicited strong responses and considerable influence. Amid the clamor stands Hans-Georg Gadamer, who writes in dry philosophical prose, who holds rational dialogue to be the highest form of philosophical activity, and who assigns a positive significance to tradition even when it becomes necessary to call it into question. Those of us who read Truth and Method79 closely find not only much originality but also fire of a different kind than that attributed by Derrida to Heidegger. Gadamerian fire burns quietly but enduringly on every page of his discourse. Instead of problematizing fundamental terms and methods, Gadamer adopts them and augments them. In Part 1, for example, he builds upon Kant’s notions of beauty and of the aesthetic attitude. Kant deserves high praise for detaching aesthetic experience from concepts. Gadamer presents Kant’s view as follows. On one hand, “Where art rules, the laws of beauty are in force and the frontiers of reality are transcended. This ‘ideal kingdom’ is to be defended against all encroachment, even against the moralistic guardianship of state and society” (TM, 71). However, this implicit ahistorical nature of art is jettisoned in favor of Gadamer’s ongoing insistence that, like every experience, the experience of art is rooted in history; “The pantheon of art is not a timeless present that presents itself to a pure aesthetic consciousness, but the act of a mind and spirit that has collected and gathered itself historically. Our experience of the aesthetic too is a mode of self-understanding” (TM, 83). This recognition of art’s historical setting does not mean that art and aesthetic apprehension are reducible to history. Although Gadamer does not make this claim explicitly, the phenomenon of play serves to liberate aesthetics from any historical determinism. 78 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall (New York: Continuum Impacts Edition, 1989) (hereafter cited in text as TM). The original text was published in 1960. 79 It seems to me that much more work remains to be done on the Heidegger– Gadamer mentor–student relationship. The complication of World War II should not obscure their kinship and differences.

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Play and shallowness have nothing in common. On the contrary, play issues from the highest and most sacred seriousness. However, this seriousness is suspended in the artwork, in favor of a “to-and-fro” movement freed from any goal. Gadamer’s commitment to dialogue announces itself with particular force at this juncture. The work of art, if it is to deserve this name, is born in play and reaches out to the one who apprehends it as play. The response to the work is itself playful, belonging at once to the consciousness of the person and to the work standing before that consciousness. Gadamer insists frequently that the artwork must be for someone. This belongs to its very nature, just as the work’s completion requires the active engagement of another person. The aim of this active engagement is understanding (Verstehen), and the aim of understanding is to bestow meaning. The encounter with an artwork always takes place for a finite mind. Thus, one never reaches total comprehension. Something must intervene, perhaps historical factors on either side, perhaps human shortsightedness, perhaps aporia intrinsic to the work. The attempt to understand, then, is original and creative in the crucial sense that the act of interpretation brings forth something entirely new in every instance, even when the same person interprets the same work more than once. In the same way, the attempt to understand is limited by those unalterable limitations of historical circumstance and of human insight. Aesthetic consciousness is no special consciousness that can be exempted from contact with the actual world and placed in a separate realm. Rather, “aesthetics has to be absorbed into hermeneutics” (TM, 157). The large ambition for Truth and Method involves uniting all forms of philosophical inquiry into a single guiding enterprise. To call hermeneutics a “principle” would be to mistake it for a concept or concept-laden proposition. To call it a “procedure” would miss the mark, because there are no fixed rules, algorithms, or habitual practices. Hermeneutics, Gadamer’s characterization of interpretation, includes several key insights packed together and intertwined: the finitude of the human mind; the capacity for play; the fact of historical rootedness; the fact of release from the bonds of history in the act of interpretation; the aim of understanding in order to arrive at meaning; the creativity of the attempt to understand; the limits to our understanding—all these gather into our ongoing effort to understand ourselves as we are in the world. Thus, the question is not whether the meaning of an artwork can only emerge when it is understood in terms of its time and origin. Rather, what Gadamer calls an “ideational reconstruction” that leads to a thinking relation to the past both honors the pastness of the past and the presence of the present. “Here Hegel states a definite truth, inasmuch as the essential

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nature of the historical spirit consists not in the restoration of the past but in thoughtful mediation with contemporary life” (TM, 161). In Part 2, Gadamer delineates his theory of hermeneutic experience. “Theory” should not be taken in a mathematical sense or as analogous to such a sense. Since he was a lifelong student of Greek and Greek thought, I think we should construe it in the sense of beholding, the literal meaning of theoria. What follows is a description of hermeneutics, and a hearkening back to Husserl’s phenomenological motto: “To the things themselves.” Adherence to a work or a text in such a way as to set aside our own projections 80 is required, as is the recognition of “the alterity of the text” as well as to another person. When these preconditions are accomplished to the most propitious degree, the posture of the interpreter must be openness, i.e. letting the text or the person speak so as to be truly heard. In what might seem to run counter to the above, Gadamer speaks well of prejudice and rejects the Enlightenment’s negative treatment of it. The prejudices of a person mark the historical existence of him or her. Thus, such prejudices anchor the historical reality of the individual, rather than his or her judgments. Gadamer quite properly locates Nietzsche as Heidegger’s most significant progenitor. Here, I think he serves as a consequential ancestor of the more conventional Gadamer as well. In “On The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” that served as the midpoint and measure of this book, what can now be called useful prejudices drive both monumental and critical history. Adapting Nietzsche’s model, the hermeneutical encounter seeks to honor great accomplishments of our tradition by interpreting them as they stand in relation to our current situation. In this light, the “debate” between the natural sciences and the human sciences comes to an anomalous outcome. The so-called hard, natural sciences exist in a state of continuous flux as new discoveries are made and new theoretical conceptions replace previous ones. By contrast, “the great achievements in the human sciences almost never become outdated” (TM, 285). As this latter statement stands, it cannot be defended categorically. Many products of those “softer” sciences such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology have certainly been left behind. Phrenology no longer occupies the honored place it once held in psychology since it occupies no place at all. Social evolution no longer has supporters of a universal scale of societal development; its demise came quickly after the researches of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. Scientific 80 In this context, Gadamer discusses Heidegger’s “fore-meanings” which, while unavoidable, need not encroach upon the genuineness of the interpretation.

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racism, an anthropological view that was used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to justify imperialism that subjugated non-white populations, has few remaining defenders and these receive condemnation rather than respect. However, works of art, literature, and performance endure, and present themselves as always new to each generation. The excitement and inspiration that the Homeric epics still deliver bear eloquent witness to their abiding worth to those of us fortunate enough to enter them. The 20th-century interpretations such as those of Milman Parry, 81 Gregory Nagy,82 and Erich Auerbach83 refresh our enjoyment and understanding of these towering works. The Greek comedies and tragedies live. Recently, Spike Lee’s film Chi-Raq84 recreates Aristophanes’s Lysistrata by locating it in Black Chicago. Gadamer’s comments on classic works as normative hit the mark85 and give concretion to Heidegger’s notion of world-decay. That is, we recognize the classic by the sharp falling off that occurs in its wake. Nevertheless, in other works Gadamer turns his attention to the art of his time, engaging them through the hermeneutic model that he has demonstrated in Truth and Method. Can it be that wonder, the phenomenon that gives rise to philosophy according to Plato’s Theaetetus, is effaced in Gadamer’s relatively colorless language? No! Two rejoinders suggest themselves at once. This first concerns the hermeneutic process itself, in which the engagement of the person with a text or performance brings about a qualitative change in the interpreter. In somewhat more lively language, unanticipated sparks ignite in the hermeneutical process. The second consists of Gadamer’s occasional invocation of magic. For example, “…the capacity to read, to understand what is written, is like a secret art, even a magic that frees and binds us” (TM, 156). Though he gives no example of the issue under treatment, we would do well to consider what occurs when we read Sophocles’ Antigone, where the values celebrated in this tragedy become matters to which our understanding directs itself, bringing the past back purely while at the 81

Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 82 Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 83 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 2013). 84 Lee joined the words “Chicago” and “Iraq” signaling the war zone within which his interpretation takes place. 85 He was also a distinguished classicist.

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same time having our own values encounter those of the ancients. In neither case does the reader exercise control over the encounter. This is why Gadamer denies any tie of the hermeneutic process to subjectivity. Reading binds us—to the text under consideration. Reading frees us, opening us to hear what the text provides and liberating us from imposing our own propensities. With the subtraction of the anchoring subject, reading furthers and accomplishes understanding on its own, i.e. as if magically. Thus, a person reading a text is part of that text and is required for the text’s very existence. This is especially the case when a text from the tradition is under consideration. When person and text join in such a way that understanding ensues, the moment of this juncture gathers tradition and person at once. This is the background for Gadamer’s wellknown and, to some, controversial claim that it is possible for an interpreter to understand an author better than that author understands himself or herself. This claim does not rest on a belief in the superiority of more recent insight. Rather, since the efficacy of history builds itself into every work and into every interpreter, the outcome of an attempt to understand merges the horizon of the text with the horizon of the interpreter, yielding something new, something different, and perhaps something that illuminates the text in question in ways that the original author could not. Again, one need not look hard to find many, e.g., some examples: In Hume’s Shakespeare criticism, learned opinion on this poet’s work as an artist had not yet solidified, yet the plays were seen as promising. By the turn of the 19th century, such acclaimed German critics as Schiller and Schelling regarded Shakespeare as the most sublime poet of all. Schiller celebrated his naiveté, while Schelling marveled at his inspired depiction of human beings and their travails. No feminist approaches to Shakespeare came into being until the mid-20th century, and as a result such plays as Taming of the Shrew received both censure and creative reimagination. For The Merchant of Venice, directors reconceived Shylock’s character in several ways, thereby bringing out novel complexities. Hamlet, of course, has stimulated truckloads of books and articles. T. S. Eliot called it a failure. Freudian Ernest Jones focused on the Oedipal issue. Nietzsche saw it as the torment of a superior being. Many others, scholars or ordinary people like the rest of us, supposed that Hamlet just couldn’t make up his mind. Gadamer teaches that these interpretations need not contradict one another, but rather constitute original and irreducible acts.

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The outcome of such interpretive practices can never be called ultimate or decisive. This explains why Gadamer prefers the term “insight” to “knowledge.” One can see this as a shift from the orientation of Kant and German Idealism, where system and knowledge (the latter both as Erkenntnis and as Wissen) represented philosophy’s pinnacle. The Hegelian dialectic, according to which prior history as aufgehoben although not as simply past, cannot be accommodated within hermeneutics. Tradition can never be transcended in any sense; rather, every engagement with tradition bears witness to its enduring presence. This enduring presence has nothing to do with eternality or time-independence. Rather, tradition maintains itself in language: Hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition. This is what is to be experienced. But tradition is not simply a process that experience teaches us to know and govern; it is language—i.e. it expresses itself like a You (Du).86 A You is not an object; it relates itself to us…I maintain that the understanding of tradition does not take the traditionary text as an expression of another person’s life, but as meaning that is detached from the person who means it, from an I or a You. (TM, 358)

There can be no surprise when Gadamer praises the art of conversation, an art that requires that the other person be “with us.” However, his view of the Platonic dialogues has always struck me as somewhat strange, especially in this context. He contends that in Socrates’s examination of the opinions of his interlocutors, the genuine logos arises of its own accord and, in a way, decisively. Thus, he credits the continuing relevance of the dialogues to their “art of strengthening.” There can be no doubt that a certain kind of strengthening occurs, namely insofar as knowing ignorance strengthens us one and all. However, I must insist that this enhancement owes itself to what I will call “the art of weakening,” namely through the elenchus as well as through other means. Another aspect of dialogue in general, according to Gadamer, concerns the way in which “something comes to speak” (TM, 371). This “something” is not us, but rather is the common language that comes to speak when the interlocutors address one another. They do not merely presuppose a common language; they create one. The success of a dialogue has nothing to do with who “wins” or who persuades. Rather, a 86 The translation has “Thou,” which seems to have overtones of Buber. Instead, I renderer Du as the less loaded “You.”

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successful dialogue changes its interlocutors, bringing them into previously unsuspecting communion. Here, I discern another instance in which a more dramatic Heideggerian phrase finds gentler yet still powerful resonance in Gadamer: “Language speaks, not the human being.”87 Along Schellingian lines, Gadamer insists upon the distinction between the infinitude of the divine word and the finitude of human language.88 In Truth and Method, hermeneutics is called a special case of the relation of speaking and thinking, i.e. a case in which understanding occurs through the interlocutory fashioning of language that exceeds the interlocutors. This “special case” reaches its ideal form in writing. However, in what might be called its “real” form, writing reveals its weakness. Gadamer recalls the passages from Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates declares speaking to be superior to writing for several reasons, among which concerns the inability of the written word to answer when questions are posed to it. However, writing can serve to remind one of a matter that has been forgotten but needs to be recalled. Noting the way the irony of these passages reflects upon Plato’s own writing, Gadamer points out with rare acumen that the position of speaking is not different from that of writing. He means that both share the need of being understood, and understanding always requires interpretation. In a way that differs both from Heidegger’s and from Derrida’s, Gadamer claims: “Everything written is, in fact, the paradigmatic object of hermeneutics” (TM, 396). “Everything?” one may ask. A shopping list? A telephone message? A silly limerick, or even an obscene one? In principle, the answer must be affirmative. The “text,” such as it is, must be translated or translatable into our own language. In hermeneutical terms, neither speaking nor writing but language provides the wellspring of all meaning and all understanding. However, there can be no doubt that the texts of our tradition enjoy a preferential place, as do the great artworks. The hermeneutical process may be grasped as a threefold simultaneous act. (1) A text is read. Even the act of reading involves interpretation. (2) Through this verbal act of interpretation, the text is made to speak. In order to speak in such a way that it can engage another person, it must “find the right language” (TM, 398). (3) What is “the right language?” Strictly speaking, one cannot claim a single correct language, any more than one can claim a single correct interpretation. It belongs to 87 See Martin Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 198, as well as “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” 215. 88 The divine word is uttered all at once and founds all things. The human word arises historically and successively, and is manifest in interpretation and in dialogue.

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the nature of the hermeneutic act that each interpreter engages with the text in terms of what she brings to the particular concatenation of horizons that constitute the historical moment in which she finds herself and is found. Accordingly, the “right language” comes when the interpretation engages another person by drawing them into the matters articulated in the text. The site of truth for Gadamer is discourse, his name for Platonic logos. This view represents a subtle departure from that of Heidegger, to which it owes its lineage. That is to say, truth indeed takes place in unconcealment. But unconcealment occurs on the way of dialogue between human beings as they address themselves to the texts (and artworks) of tradition in which understanding always provides the aim. Concealment always belongs to truth for Heidegger, and in a rough analogy, one can never speak of an ultimate truth for Gadamer. But it would badly misjudge Gadamer (and for that matter Heidegger) to say that truth is relative in any sense. Absoluteness/relativity have no place in his thought. A multiplicity of interpretations affirms the fundamental unity and pervasiveness of the hermeneutic process. This process provides the requisite universality. Hence Gadamer writes: By seeing that language is the universal medium of [the mediation between past and present], we were able to expand our inquiry from its starting point, the critiques of aesthetic and historical consciousness and the hermeneutics that would replace them, to universal dimensions. For man’s relation to the world is absolutely and fundamentally verbal in nature, and hence intelligible. Thus, hermeneutics is, as we have seen, a universal aspect of philosophy… (TM, 470-71)

Truth and Method comes full circle at its end, returning to matters that belong to modern aesthetics but that receive ancient echoes. For Gadamer, the beautiful not only gives rise to the hermeneutic process but also belongs intimately to it. Gadamer weaves this now essential insight into the strains of language, understanding, being in general, and truth. The shining of the beautiful stands as a solicitation of the hermeneutic act. Its very radiance marks it as an image. Plato receives special praise for ascribing alƝtheia to the beautiful, i.e. the coming-to-shine as appearance. Although he does not make the direct reference, this determination shows itself powerfully in the underappreciated Philebus, in which the true and the good are said to be sheltered in the beautiful. Gadamerian play makes itself manifest in what he calls language games, which cannot be under our control but nevertheless give rise to

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understanding when they play themselves out in the hermeneutical experience. The very same phenomenon occurs in the experience of the beautiful, if the latter is seen as a special case of the former. Truth and Method concludes with a reminder of human finitude, i.e. our bond to images, and a homage to Plato in which “the discipline of questioning and inquiring” (TM, 484) provides a way to truth that can transcend that same finitude. My principal difficulty with Gadamer concerns what I see as an excessive graciousness. That is to say, his hermeneutics seems to rule out absolutely nothing as suitable for interpretation, and does not seem to provide a measure for declaring the invalidity of any interpretation, however far-fetched. One of the few strengths I find in contemporary philosophy education is the across-the-board logic requirement, despite the frequency of its overemphasis. Like the Ancient languages, it cannot be dumbed down. And alone among the humanities, you can get something indubitably wrong. I’m not sure that I can find something that decisive in Gadamer. However, there is no doubt that the Platonic spirit dwells in his work as it does in the work of few others. Hermeneutics is both dialogical and generous, and provokes thought even if elenchus is hard to find in it. In this light, the hermeneutic process itself serves as a ruling image to which all philosophical activity can be submitted. In Gadamer’s reticent, straightforward manner, he offers an impressive contrast to both Heidegger, his teacher, and to Derrida, his adversary. 89 One finds a method of creatively addressing and transforming our tradition that stands far from both the destruction of the history of ontology and the deconstruction of the history of philosophy.

89 John Sallis also benefitted from several summer conversations with Gadamer at Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Italy.

JOHN SALLIS

In Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental,90 John Sallis ventures a major rewriting of 20th- and 21st-century Continental philosophy in many ambitious ways as well as in diverse areas. If one were to characterize this work in a compact manner, its language shows itself to be not only touched by poetry but also poetic itself, even as his analyses display thoroughgoing scholarly rigor. Like several of his contemporaries, Sallis speaks often of conducting philosophy at the limit. His understanding of this phrase, however, sets him apart. In what seems to me to be another instance of both analytic and Continental philosophers agreeing that assures mutual misguidedness and mistakenness, metaphysics gets unceremoniously bashed. The reasons given may differ dramatically, but the outcome is the same: metaphysics is somehow bad, although this sentiment is conveyed in much more learned language. Thus, it is no surprise that metaphysics receives so much scorn. One of the most humorously ironic of such scorn comes forth in the not infrequent claim that the metaphysical tradition has caused manifest evils, such as sexism, racism, colonialism, etc. It would be very funny if it weren’t so damaging. The notion of cause, embodied most specifically in the principle of sufficient reason, provides the necessary engine of metaphysics. So, the aforementioned claim resembles nothing so much as the scene in J. D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters: a celebrated classical musician gives devastating argumentation to his daughter’s school’s instructor for teaching popular music and, very pleased with himself, sings “K-K-K-Katie” on his walk home. I’ll be gracious and leave aside the matter of how the science of being as being can reach down into current political travails of any kind. “Philosophy at the limit” does indicate “…at the limit of metaphysics.” But metaphysics, governed by the prior presupposition of the sensible/intelligible distinction, can no more be erased or even overcome by an act of will: acts of will also belong to metaphysics. As Sallis writes, “that limit (peras) is understood, not simply as the end of

90 John Sallis, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington, Indiana University Press), 2000.

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something, but as that from which something begins.”910 In what sense, then, is metaphysics still living, although no longer decisive? Among its elements dwell those that undermine its authority. Imagination shows this undermining most definitively. Imagination is unquestionably required by metaphysics. It plays varying roles, but stands unmistakably present throughout the modern tradition. But imagination takes its measure from images, and the danger accruing to images consists in their being taken for originals. Thus, many philosophers of the tradition indicate a wariness of imagination. Descartes and Spinoza surely guarded against its influence, even as this influence crept into their discourse. For Sallis, the danger does not lie with imagination, but rather with yoking imagination to the apparatus of the tradition, to concepts, to objects, to subjectivity in general. I have chosen to devote this final section to Sallis both because of his singular approach to imagination and to images, and to articulate the contrast of his thought from that of Derrida, his long-time dialogical partner whose influence currently exceeds his. Derrida, as has been demonstrated above, has—in the views of so many across several disciplines—undermined belief that philosophy rests, or can rest, upon any foundation. The so-called “history of metaphysics” rests on the tacit assumption of a center of some kind, a “transcendental signifier,” that always fails to account for the marginal presuppositions that subvert it. Certain passages in Sallis’s books seem to accord with this on first reading. In particular, consider these passages from the surprising last section of The Gathering of Reason: But imagination, giving birth to metaphysics, does so illegitimately, outside the law, lawlessly. The turning which it inscribes at the origin of metaphysics is akin to certain vertiginous turnings of madmen… Imagination is original ecstasy; it is a standing out into the play of imaging, a being set out beyond itself in such radical fashion that the self is first constituted in a recoil from this ecstasy of imagination. 92

However, in the ultimate sense imagination can neither be a faculty nor a function. Rather, one must think force of imagination as a unity. We mortals do not and cannot activate force of imagination. Rather, force of imagination visits itself upon us. Thus, the first passage above speaks to this supervenience that is neither immanent nor transcendent, but 91 92

John Sallis, Chorology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 6. John Sallis, The Gathering of Reason, Athens, 1980, 161.

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rather that which makes immanence and transcendence possible at all. Liberated from subjectivity and hence from either subservience to reason and concepts or from the active role of originating aesthetic ideas, Sallis’s thought hinges upon imagination’s anteriority to the founding metaphysical distinction of sensible/intelligible. It would be grossly mistaken to regard Sallis as antimetaphysical. Rather, its putatively founding distinction, perhaps best gleaned from the final parts of Republic VI, issues rather from a prior turning that might deserved to be called chaotic in the Hesiodic sense, namely the originary amorphousness out of which all things came into being. To characterize this matter in a somewhat rough fashion, metaphysics is a second-order result issuing out of the originary force of imagination. Sobriety “enforced” by reason has madness, or at least chaos, as its heritage. “The Sense of the Elemental” constitutes the second part of the title. “The elemental” indicates the way that earth, sky, fire, and water disclose themselves. What does sense indicate in this context? Sallis’s signature insight must be described as follows. On one hand, “sense” retains its traditional meaning, namely as that which is given to our apprehension. Also and at once, “sense” names the very way of our apprehension. Thus, sense is double by its very nature—sense of sense. “Intellect” does not enter the picture. Employing Monet’s Haystacks, Sallis notes that while sense certainly apprehends the images of the painting, the image can separate from its site. For example, the sense of light, far from being fixed by its appearance in the painting, can release light from the configuration by which it determines the showing of the haystacks, i.e. can liberate light. Another way of doubling occurs through speech, i.e. through logos. By its anterior orientation alone, we are able to point to things. Sallis refrains from using the traditionally laden term “object” for many reasons, not least because of its association with the term “concept.” For example, Kant held that concepts were rules for the synthesis of a sensible manifold. The Pure Concepts of the Understanding stood as the conditions for the possibility of experience at all. Imagination served to bridge and to bring together the two heterogeneous realms of spontaneous concepts and receptive intuitions. By locating force of imagination apart from subjectivity and as prehending those matters with which mortals find themselves occupied, Sallis reconfigures the fundamental nature of our experience. Unlike Kant and many of his modern predecessors who treated our experience in terms of reason and science, for Sallis even our most mundane comings and goings have an aesthetic character.

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Instead of concepts synthesizing and so ruling sensations, speech is in the service of sense. Sallis recalls an old word to characterize the implications of this transition. Phenomenology, he says, becomes monstrology, which carries the original sense of monstrare (“to show”), a sense that we find in our “demonstrate.” “Re” has the sense of “again” or “anew.” Remonstrative discourse, as originary and memorial at once, already bears the notion of temporality within itself—thereby replacing the now redundant notion of pure intuition. In further distinction from his dialogical partner Derrida, Sallis depicts the way of language not as writing, but rather as drawing. Drawing here has an unusual sense of tracing. Such tracing is remonstrative in the sense that what is traced enables the tracer to see the unseen but present the design beneath the transparent paper only by first tracing it. In order to mark off remonstration from other possible approaches, Sallis reserves the aforementioned word “apprehension,” which is preferred to “perception,” “intuition,” and even “vision,” the word that has played a central role but will now be restricted to the sense of sight. “What is called for, then, is a remonstrative tracing of the apprehension of things themselves as they show themselves” (FI, 106). Apprehension here is released from its traditional tie to the sense and/or the intellect. Rather, one can apprehend a thing by picking it up, or in the case of a tool, by using it. In the case of images in general, one cannot properly say that “images are present,” as if being present could be “an other” in relation to an image. Rather, their very character as images includes their presence—there is no other. Images that are there are one and all both made possible and limited by two kinds of interwoven horizons: frontal and lateral. Such images are apprehended frontally, i.e. we sense only the side of the image facing us, as a decorated vase or a Japanese bowl. However, the lateral horizon that disposes those aspects of the image that are present but nonoccurring are said to be “displaced from the there.” In other words, they are apprehended as present but absent at once, and as directing apprehension to their frontal image. Of course, as one turns the thing to observe its other aspects, the horizons turn with it. Sallis employs another linguistic shift to account for the way the image shows itself: spacing. This differs from the Kantian notion of pure intuition in a subtle way. According to the Critique of Pure Reason, every object of experience must and does conform to the Principles (Grundsätze) of the Pure Understanding. These Principles gather the Categories, the Schemata, and pure intuition into a single synthetic a priori proposition. Thus, every object given through sense conforms to pure intuition. For

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Sallis, as has been shown, images (and things) replace objects as the subject matter proper to philosophy at the limit. By their very nature, he writes, images are spaced, the result of spacing. Insofar as the frontal image presents itself most directly to us, Sallis calls it “circumspaced,” in a sense framed by its spacing. To ask the question that serves as a title to one of Heidegger’s major Kant books: What is a thing? For Sallis, then, a thing—far from being an object of a concept or a substance—is that which shows itself horizontally, nothing more and nothing less. It is apprehended through force of imagination, and nothing else. In the apprehension of a frontal image, the thing presents itself in a particular aspect or profile. Its surface, first of all, conveys itself to the sense of sense in a particular manner: according to Sallis, the thing—recalling the way it resounds in an ancient word—shines. The ancient word ekphainesthai means “from that which shows itself” when rendered literally. In the great myth of Plato’s Phaedrus, the beautiful alone among the HLGƝ is manifest in the realm of the visible as that which shines most brightly, a fuller rendering of ekphainesthai. “[O]ne could say: the beautiful (kalos) names the way in which being shines forth in the midst of the visible” (FI, 118). And Sallis quickly adds that the shining occurs as both originary and memorial at once. In other words, it is the thing itself that shines, and if one can still distinguish the image—the delicate, shining image—from the thing, it is only by way of a distinction that leaves the image intact only as the surface of the thing. Force of imagination releases the image that strikes sense immediately and allows the thing to constitute itself as speech responds to the image. “One can say: there is nothing more forceful than the force of imagination” (FI, 128). One can say this since only force of imagination can bring together what cannot be brought together, yet at the same time hold apart and secure the integrity of each of the opposites. In so doing, force of imagination violates the law of non-contradiction that supposedly governs all discourse—although in terms of Sallis’s reversal, one would rather say that the law of non-contradiction violates the basis of all showing. “And yet, one can say also: there is nothing less forceful than imagination” (FI, 128), since imagination does not force anything at all, but merely supplies its force of protraction/retraction that is required for things to show themselves from themselves. To dispel any lingering preconception and misconception that such philosophically dominant ascription to imagination compromises truth in any way, Sallis notes that once imagination is thus installed in perception, its impoverishment with respect to disclosure and truth disappears. As drafting the very configuration of the self-showing of

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things, tractive imagination—imagination given over to drawing originally and remonstrably at once, as discussed above—is requisite for any disclosure of things themselves in their truth. With the refined endorsement of Heidegger’s recovery of the sense of the Greek aOƝtheia of truth as unhiddenness, as unconcealment, truth belongs intrinsically to the disclosure of things. To be sure, Sallis is acutely aware of a-OƝtheia’s darker side, namely that untruth always accompanies truth, that there can never be total unconcealment. However, his discourse does not dwell on this side, and in this way the spirit of his thought can be marked off clearly from Heidegger’s. There can be no doubt concerning the consequential influence of Heidegger here. But just as Heidegger occupied himself with what for him is the role of tragedy in philosophy, Sallis shows only passing interest in it, using it as a shorthand to illustrate various aspect of poetic language. In his massive Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues, one finds long treatments of comedy in many guises, and fewer than a handful of minor references to tragedy. Another significant alteration of Heidegger’s influence occurs in his more recent works on aesthetics. The openings onto the major themes of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” consisted of three actual works of art, rather than from a theory or doctrine: Van Gogh’s Shoes, C. F. Meyer’s poem “The Roman Fountain,” and a Greek temple. Other brief artistic images also take their place in the essay. In a much more extensive and extended way, Sallis’s discourses on art take their departure from individual works of art that are not limited at all to the German and Greek works as Heidegger’s are. As such, this challenges the Heideggerian assumption of the privileging of Germany and Greece as the properly philosophical homes. Force of Imagination celebrates so-called English Romanticism, which is often subjected to the generalized complaint that it “valorizes imagination,” which somehow indicates a lack of seriousness. Sallis responds, “Yet if ever there was an era, the thought and poetry of an era that utterly resisted generalizations and syntheses, it is precisely this epoch of almost unprecedented inceptiveness and intensity” (FI, 16). Keats’s famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has become so well known that it borders on cliché. For Sallis, it receives a reinterpretation that situates it in terms of the Greek philosophical tradition, in which the unique status of the beautiful in the realm of the visible, as detailed above from the Phaedrus, finds itself sung throughout the poem and not merely in its final lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

108

John Sallis

Shades—of Painting at the Limit contains his analysis of Monet’s Haystacks discussed above, as well as the work of other painters. Stone treats a Jewish graveyard, the Tower of Babel, and the Gothic Cathedral at Cologne as provocations for philosophical reflections. His recent Senses of Landscape finds him invoking his notion of “the sense of sense” upon landscape paintings as diverse as those of Paul Cezanne, Caspar David Friedrich, Paul Klee, and Guo Xi, with chapters devoted respectively to the themes of density, tragedy, resonance, and effacement. In On Translation, he provides an exhaustive reimagining of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, even offering an argument that in some instances a translation can provide a gain over its original. His conclusion to Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art, titled “The Promise of Art,” takes its departure from the tacit assumption that the limit at which philosophy now takes place is understood, not simply as the end of something, but as that from which something begins. A superficial reading of Hegel’s texts lends to the view that Hegel was a metaphysician through and through, and that his proclamation that art is dead, while not as uncomplicated as one might suppose, nevertheless accounts for the triumph of Spirit, i.e. of self-reflective reason. However, Sallis locates a means to a fresh beginning for us in Hegel’s aesthetics. On painting, Hegel emphasizes its sensible shining, which differs from the tincture of materiality. In this way, it points to the possibility of interpreting painting and art generally as liberated from the dualism of material as sensible and spiritual as intelligible. To Heidegger, he ascribes the great credit of rethinking the notion of beauty from the transcendental significance to which Kant (and implicitly Hume) ascribed it. After Heidegger, this notion becomes the shining of the sensible that is the artwork. Truth as unconcealment is at work in this transformation, and plays a major role in Sallis’s final chapter in the following way. In terms of the metaphysical notions of truth as correspondence and/or correctness, art can indeed no longer play any other but a subservient role to reason and science. But with this nonmetaphysical and more fundamental redetermination of truth as sense, as sense of sense, art recovers the stature it once enjoyed, only doing so now at the limit. That one speaks of a promise of art includes the possibility that such a return of art might not occur, and also includes no prediction— either confident or halting—of what shape such a possibility might take. Sallis’s final paragraph consists, therefore, of a series of questions. These questions concern the relation of the artwork to the earth, or perhaps otherwise; to the artworks’ own opening onto nature, or otherwise; to the

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reconfiguration of the world/earth axis itself. If we are indeed at a new beginning, questioning is the only appropriate posture. In his final words, Sallis wonders whether these questions have been already broached from the side of art, through the works of Cezanne, Klee, and Chilleda, among others. He does not say—as I will here—that philosophical speech is necessary to carry forth this promise, whatever its fate. To speak of a ruling image in Sallis’s work in terms of argument seems to require one to perpetually circle. But Sallis’s thought insists upon what I will call the primacy of showing. And showing is always showing of an image, from an image. Thus, no one image rules. Images themselves supply the basis or foundation of Sallis’s work. However, words like “basis” and “foundation” must be written with scare quotes, since the delicacy of an image precludes anything resembling a firm and/or fixed cornerstone atop which the edifice of his philosophy rests or a principle that so anchors his philosophy such that its parts can be derived from it. However, he has said both that nothing is more forceful and nothing is less forceful than imagination. According to the measure that I have followed throughout, force of imagination functions as the ruling image of Sallis’s thought. For these reasons, I regard Sallis as the most radical thinker studied in this book. He is not the most original; he freely acknowledges his debts to those who have cleared the pathways for his thought. Nor does he provide a clear program upon which he and others can continue to build. However, he has creatively transformed all that has come before him, and he concludes with questions that recall the originary and memorial Socratic ignorance, which reminds us always that we may have to begin again.

AFTERWORD

In the research preparatory to the writing of this book, I gained a new respect for analytic philosophy and analytic philosophers. No longer do I wonder how people of undoubtedly superior intelligence could spend their lives occupying themselves with matters that seemed trivial to me at one time. Language, logos, remains our distinguishing feature, and the devotion to its logical side is entirely in keeping with philosophy’s noblest traditions. The widespread dismissal of those aspects that interest my Continental colleagues and me most is difficult for us to understand. It does not seem to us that the questions raised and discussed in ancient and modern philosophy have largely been answered or can be avoided. And I do not understand how it achieved preeminence in the academy. But it surely did, and I now can see better why people who combine intelligence with wonder. As I reread what I have written, I must confess that I dealt more harshly with the analytic philosophers than I did with those of my orientation, with the exception of Derrida whose appeal still escapes me. However, I hope that the reader will separate the matter of my opinions, which are surely open to debate, from the matter of the power exercised by each thinker’s work. I also have tried to remain focused on my task, namely to expose the tacit or overt foundationalism that dwells at the heart of all contemporary philosophy. None of the foundations ascribed to these philosophers concerns reason. However, perhaps reason itself can function as a ruling image and in several specified manners. I have called them ruling images, one and all. The attempt to dispose of them in light of more recent developments has failed utterly. As I write this, I am painfully aware that in some respects, it may seem that I am treating the greatest thinkers of our era—my teachers!—as if they were ping pong balls or shuttlecocks to be swatted. Perhaps a wise jury would find me guilty of this. But I doubt it. I take to mind and to heart the developments that have led to the wide anti-metaphysical disposition in philosophy of our era. But not only do I reject its attendant antifoundationalism, I also find that philosophy without foundation is a mere caricature of it, an excess of sophistication, or (in Socratic terms) a claim that reveals our pretense to a knowledge that we do not have. My happy

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discovery is that foundationalism yet lives, perhaps most of all where it is most energetically denied.

APPENDIX

List of Ruling Images as presented in the text: Carnap: Logical empiricism James: Usefulness Quine: Logic itself (mixed with non-logic) Davidson: Formal semantics + T-sentences Kripke: Possible world semantics Rorty: Conversation (ongoing) Husserl: Transcendental consciousness Heidegger: Language as poetry Merleau-Ponty: Perception Derrida: Differénce Gadamer: Hermeneutics Sallis: Force of imagination Of course, I do not pretend that this is the only possible list, nor do I think that other thinkers might have been studied and may well have produced a different list. The central notion that I wish to advance is that these are one and all foundations, i.e. precepts and percepts in terms of which philosophical reflection can take place at all.

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—. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” W. McNeill and J. Davis, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. —. Introduction to Metaphysics. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, trans. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. —. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Richard Taft, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Homer. The Iliad. Richmond Lattimore, trans. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. —. The Odyssey. Richmond Lattimore, trans. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1967. Hume, David. “On the Standard of Taste” in Reading David Hume’s On the Standard of Taste. Babette Babich, ed. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019. —. A Treatise on Human Nature. L. A. Selby-Biggs, ed., revised by P. H. Niddich. Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1978. Husserl, Edmund. “Phenomenology.” Article for the Encyclopedia Britannica (1927), Richard E. Palmer, trans. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2:2, 2014. —. “The Origin of Geometry” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. David Carr, trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. —. Husserl: Shorter Works. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston, eds. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. —. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. W. R. Boyce Gibson, trans. New York: Routledge, 2012. —. Logical Investigations, Vol. I-II. J. N. Findlay, trans. New York: Routledge, 2001. James, William. Pragmatism. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Werner S. Pluhar, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987. —. Critique of Practical Reason. Lewis White Beck, trans. Indianapolis and New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1956. —. Critique of Pure Reason. Werner S. Pluhar, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996. Keats, John. Ode On A Grecian Urn, The Eve Of St. Agnes: And Other Poems With Biographical Sketch, Introduction And Notes. New York: Andesite Press, 2015. Kripke, Saul. “Frege’s Theory of Sense and Reference” in Philosophical Troubles. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. —. “Identity and Necessity” in Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, Vol. I. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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INDEX

Notes are indicated by 'n' following the page number. A absolute, 82 absoluteness/relativity, 100 actions, 77 ad hoc proviso, 5 ad hominem arguments, 8, 65 aesthetics, 92–4, 104, 108 Ailey, Alvin, 51 DOƝWKHLD (unconcealment or unhiddenness), 71, 75, 107 Allen, Woody, 32 American Ballet, 51 American Philosophical Association, 6 analytic philosophy, xvi, 34–5, 42, 44, 47, 51 statements, 14, 16 analyticity, 15–17 analyze, 15 anthropology, 95 Antiquarian history, 49 antithesis, 9 anxiety in the face of death $QJVWIRU dem Tod), 60 DSRVWHULRUL statements, 36–7, 50 apprehension, 104–5 DSULRUL sciences, x sensibility, 4 statements, 11, 19, 34, 36–7, 54–5, 105 Aristophanes, 96 Aristotle, 12, 19, 21, 28, 45, 50, 59, 67 art, 61–2, 71, 78, 93–4, 108 association, 53 Auerbach, Erich, 96 authenticity (LJHQWOLFKNHLW  60

authenticity/inauthenticity (LJHQWOLFKNHLW8QHLJHQOLFKNHLW  59 B Balanchine, George, 51 ballet, 51 baptism (initial naming of object), 35– 6 Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 26 beautiful, 100–1, 106–7 beauty, 76, 93, 108 mathematical, 18 Beck, Lewis White, xii being (seiend), 58, 70 Being (Sein), 58, 60–1, 70, 82 Being-in-the-World, 75 Being-question 6HLQVIUDJH  58, 61, 70 ruling image, as, 61 ruling image with language, as, 71– 2 beings (Seiendes), 59 Being-with others 0LWVHLQ  58 Berkeley, George, 9, 53 Bernstein, Leonard, 26 black holes, 26 Boas, Franz, 95 Bolyai, János, 2–3 bracketing, 53–4 Brentano, Franz, 52 Bush, George W., 80 C Cage, John, 51 calculative thinking UHFKQHQGHV 'HQNHQ  25 Carnap, Rudolph, 1–8, 10–15, 17, 42– 3, 50

Toward a New Foundationalism Cartesian ontology, 38, 59 cash value, 7, 25 causality, 30, 73 cause, 29, 102 cave, xiii–xiv CERN Large Hadron Supercollider, 26–7 Cezanne, Paul, 108–9 chaos, 104 Chilleda, Eduardo, 109 chǀUD 71, 79 circularity, 3, 17, 38, 45 Classicism, German, 70 Classics departments decline of traditional, 24–5 clock-time, 59 cluster concept theory of names, 35 cognitive synonymy, 16–17 colonialism, 102 common sense, 11, 30, 74 communication, 63, 66 active, 46 computer, 37 concealment, 100 concepts, 103–5 rich, 44 connotation, 36, 66 consciousness, 52–4, 56–7, 73–5, 77, 85, 85n, 88 aesthetic, 94 transcendental as ruling image, 112 Continental philosophy, xvi, 28, 31, 40, 47–8, 51–2, 57, 82, 102 conversation, 62, 66 art of, 98 ruling image, as, 47, 112 Copernican revolution, 74 cosmology, xi counterfactuals, 27, 35, 37, 37nn critical philosophy, 34 race theory, 88, 92 Critical history, 49–50 Cunningham, Merce, 51

119

D daimon, 46 Dasein, 58–61, 70, 84 Das Man (the they), 59 Davidson, Donald, 17, 28–33, 44–6 death, 60, 84 deconstruction, 15, 89, 93, 101 GHILQLWLRQ 16, 36 demonstrate, 105 denotation, 36, 66 Derrida, Jacques, 15, 80–93, 99, 103 (GPXQG+XVVHUO V2ULJLQRI *HRPHWU\ $Q,QWURGXFWLRQ 81–2 Heidegger, on, 90–1 unacknowledged foundationalism, 91–2 Voice and Phenomenon, 82–9 Descartes, René, xiii, 8, 11, 37, 39, 74, 103 determinate judgments, 76 determinism, 9–10, 93 Dewey, John, 45 Dickinson, Emily, 26 difference ontological, 59 play of, 88 GLIIHUpQFH 88–9 ruling image, as, 92, 112 divided line, xiii–xiv, 12 divine word, 99, 99n Doctrine of Science :LVVHQVFKDIWVOHKUH  xii doctrines, 78–9 Doestoevsky, Fyodor, 26 drawing, 105 dualism, 30, 41 dwelling, 62–4 E Eddington, Arthur, 4 Ego, transcendental, 56, 61 eidƝ xiv–xv, 87, 106 HLGHWLF reduction, 53–4 eidos, xiv–xv, 55 Einstein, Albert, 3

120 either/or, 30 HNSKDLQHVWKDL 106 element, 84 elemental, 104 elenchus, 26, 46, 98, 101 HOHQFWLF 19 Eliot, T. S., 97 HOLWLVP 25 empirical sciences, x, 2, 11, 22 empiricism, xi, 3, 14, 17, 19, 26–7, 30 Enframing, 68–9 Enlightenment, 95 entities, 11, 59–60, 70 epistemology, 45 HSRFKp 53 equipment (Zeuge), 59 essence(s), 55, 68, 89 poetry, of, 65 separation of, 75 technology of, 67–9 ethics, 92 Euclidean geometry, 2, 4, 50 triangles, 54 events, 78 evidence, 44 exclusion, double, 86 existence, 87 existeniality, 58, 70 H[LVWHQWLDO 59 H[LVWHQWLHOO 59 experience, xvii, 47 spiritual, 55 expression, 83–4, 87–8 extension, 84 extensional language, 43 F facticity, 58, 70, 74 facts, 33, 55 faculty theories, 40 fallenness, 58, 70 falsity, 46 feminism, 88, 92, 97 Feyerabend, Paul, 21–4 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, xii, 57

Index finitude, 84, 99, 101 fixing references, 36, 40 fore-meanings, 95n IRUPDOLVP 56 forms, xiii foundationalism, 6, 41, 52, 55, 110–11 double, 91 foundations, 61, 112 governing *UXQG  x metaphysical, 6 freedom, 9–10 free will, 9–10 Frege, Gottlob, 34–5, 38, 52, 57 Friedländer, Paul, 71 Friedrich, Caspar David, 108 future, 9, 59 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 28, 93–101 generalities, 55 geniuses, 27 geometry, 54–5 George, Stefan, 61–2 *HZRUIHQKHLW 58 Glaucon, xiv God, 9, 47, 87 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 62 Goodness, 44 *UXQG (governing foundation), x H Hardy, G. H., 18 Hawkins, Erick, 50–1 KHDOWK 47 hearing +|UHQ  60 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 52, 108 Heidegger, Martin, 58–73 Derrida on, 84–7, 90–1, 93 other philosophers on, 2, 7, 12, 25, 75, 95–6, 99, 107–8 hermeneutics, 94–5, 98, 99–101 ruling image, as, 101, 112 Hesiod, 26 hiatus, 84, 88 Higgs, Peter, 26

Toward a New Foundationalism Higgs boson, 26 Hilbert, David, 56 historicity, 82 history, 49, 52, 78 Antiquarian, 49 Critical, 49–50 metaphysics, of, 50, 83, 103 Monumental, 49–50 philosophy, of, 28, 30, 59, 82–3, 89, 101 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 61–5, 69–70 homecoming, 64 Homer, 23, 26, 32, 63 horizons, 105 Hume, David, xii, 37, 39, 52–3, 74, 97 Husserl, Edmund, 52–7, 61, 66, 73–6, 89 Derrida on, 81–2 hypotheses, xiv I iconoclasm, 50 idea, 54 Idealism, German, xii, 8, 39, 56, 76, 98 ideational reconstruction, 94 identity, 43, 88n idle talk (Rede), 58–60 imagery, 70 images, xiii–xiv, 12, 22, 40, 103–6 imagination, xii, 39–40, 40n, 62, 103– 4 force of, 103–4, 106–7 ruling image as force of, 109, 112 tractive, 107 immanence, 103–4 LPPHUVLRQ 74 indeterminacy of translation, 20–1, 42 indication, 83–4, 87–8 indicative language, 84 inference, 47 infinitude, 89 insight, 10, 98 intellect (nous), xiv, 71 intellectualism, 7, 12 intensional language, 43

121

LQWHQWLRQ 29 intentionality, 52–3, 76–7 interchangeability, 16, 38 interpretation, 99–100 LQWHUUXSWLRQ 91 intuition, 105 pure, xi, 4, 4n LQWXLWLRQLVP 56 irony, 99 J Jackson, Michael, 80 James, William, 7–15, 18, 50 Jameson, Judith, 26 jemeinig, 58 K Kant, Immanuel, 50, 52, 98 beauty, on, 93 consciousness, on, 28, 77 Critical Philosophy, x–xii, 34 &ULWLTXHRI3UDFWLFal Reason, 12 &ULWLTXHRI3XUH5HDVRQ 38 freedom, on, 9–10 intuition, on, 4, 4n metaphysics, xi, 70 Kaplan, David, 38–9 Keats, John, 107 Klee, Paul, 108–9 knowledge, 43, 73, 98 Kripke, Saul, 34–40, 42 L language, 73, 83–6, 98–9, 110 conventional, 33, 71 extensional, 43 games, 100 Heidegger on, 61, 63, 66 inner, 84 intensional, 43 philosophy of, 44, 67, 71 poetry as ruling image, as, 112 ruling image with Being-question, as, 71–2 Latin American philosophy, 92 law of non-contradiction, 106

122 Lee, Spike, 96 Lewis, David, 37 Liebniz, Gottfried Wilhem, 4, 16, 74, 78 light, 104 Lobachevski, Nikolai, 2 Locke, John, 53, 74 logic, 28, 30, 45, 47, 52, 56, 66 ruling image, as, 21, 112 logical, 19, 29, 110 insight, 49 logical empiricism, 1, 6–7, 14 ruling image, as, 6, 112 ORJLVPǀQRWKǀ 71 logocentrism, 87–8 logoi, xv logos, 21, 87, 98, 100, 110 divine, 81 language, and, 59–60, 81–2, 84 reason, as, 66 speech, and, 104 ]ǀRQORJRQHFKRQ of, 21, 30, 66–7 M Mach, Ernst, 1n madness, 104 magic, 96 Marchetti, Giancarlo, 28 Marcuse, Herbert, 65 master narratives, 91 materialism, 9 mathematical beauty, 18 mathematics, 52, 56 matter, 9 McCain, John, 35 Mead, Margaret, 95 meaning, 78, 85, 94 meliorism, 12 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 73–9 metaphors, 31–3 metaphysics, 45, 73, 85, 92, 102–3 Carnap's metaphysical foundation, 5–6 general, xi history of, 50, 83, 103 Kant and, x–xi, 70

Index presence, of, 83 speculative, 15, 42 Midori, 25 mind as mirror of nature, 41 misconception, 106 modern dance, 51 Modigliani, Amedeo, 26 Monet, Claude, 104, 108 PRQVWUDUH (to show), 105 Monumental history, 49–50 mystery, 69, 78 myth, 18, 22, 27, 69–70 Greek, 23 N Nagy, Gregory, 96 naïve realism, 53 natural attitude, 53–4, 74 kinds, 36 language, 21, 31 science, 10, 15, 27, 42–3, 95 Nazism, 64 necessity, 16–17, 34 neologism, 59n Newton, Isaac, 4 Nietzche, Friedrich, xii, 12, 48–52, 56–7, 66, 95, 97 QRHPDWLFUHIOHFWLRQ 74 QRHWLFUHIOHFWLRQ 74 non-Euclidean geometry, 2–3 non-presence, 86 O Obama, Barack, 35 Obama, Michelle (Robinson), 35 objectively indeterminate, 43 objects, 59, 103–4, 106 external, 53 ideal, 86 physical, 18, 22, 69 psychological, 53 observational statements, 5 ontology, xi, 101 fundamental, 61 ontotheology, 71, 90

Toward a New Foundationalism openness, 95 opinion, xiii origin 8UVSUXQJ  55 RULJLQV 77 P pain, 36–7 Parker, Charlie, 25 Parry, Milman, 96 past, 59, 94 perception, 74, 76n, 77–9, 105–6 ruling image, as, 79, 112 periods, 69n phenomena, 53, 59 mental, 52 physical, 52 phenomenological psychology, 55 phenomenology, 52–3, 60, 73, 75–6, 78–9, 105 immediate DSULRUL 55 transcendental, 55, 57, 82 philosophical point, 43 philosophy first, 55 history of, 28, 30, 59, 82–3, 89, 101 language, of, 44, 67, 71 limit, at the, 102, 105, 108 metaphysical, 51 phrenology, 95 physics, 22 Plato, xiii, 12, 23, 45 Derrida on, 84, 87 Gadamer on, 96, 99 Heidegger on, 59, 63, 69 Platonic dialogues, 41, 88, 98 Idea, 44–5 play, 93–4, 100 pluralism, 12 poetry, 22–3, 27, 61–5, 68–70 poiesis (creation), 61, 68 SRVLW 18, 22, 27 positivism, 56 possession, 65–6

123

post-colonialism, 88, 92 power, 6 saving, 69 pragmatism, 7, 10–12, 15, 18 preconception, 106 prediction, 22, 26, 69, 108 pregivenness, 79 prejudice, 95 presence, 86, 88–9, 94 present, 59, 85, 89, 94 present-at-hand YRUKDQGHQ  59 prime numbers, 18, 37 principle of charity, 45, 65 Principles *UXQGVlW]H  xi, 25, 35, 37, 105 priority, 34 pro attitudes, 29 SURPLVH 91, 108 prophetic skill, 27 psychology, xi, 95 Ptolemy, 50 purism, 31, 33, 66 Q quantum mechanics, 18 queer theory, 88, 92 question, the, 91 questioning, 58 Quine, William van Orman, 14–27, 30, 42–3, 50, 69 annulment of two dogmas of empiricism, 14, 19, 21 science, and, 21–7 R racism, 102 scientific, 95–6 UDGLFDOWUDQVODWLRQ 19 rational, 19 rationalism, 7–9, 12 rationality, 78 reading, 97 ready-to-hand (zuhanden), 59 realism, 55 naïve, 53 reality, 11

124 reason, xvii, 29, 56, 81, 104, 108 primary, 29 red herring, 21 UHGXFWLR arguments, 18 reduction, 53, 74–5 double, 86 phenomenological, 56, 75 reductionism, 14, 17 reflective judgments, 76–7 regressive inquiry, 55 Reichenbach, Hans, 10 relativity absoluteness, 100 physics, 4 space and time, of, x religion, 12 UHYHDOLQJ 68 Riemann, Bernhard, 3 Riemannian geometry, 3–4 Rilke, Ranier Maria, 61–2 Romanticism, English, 107 Rorty, Richard, 7, 12, 34, 41–7 ruling images, xii, xv, xvii, 6, 22, 24– 5, 110 Being-question, 61 conversation, 47, 112 GLIIHUpQFH 92, 112 force of imagination, 109, 112 formal semantics + T-sentences, 33, 112 hermeneutics, 101, 112 language and Being-question, 71– 2 language as poetry, 112 logic, 21, 112 logical empiricism, 6, 112 perception, 79, 112 possible world semantics, 40, 112 rethinking two canonical Platonic tropes, xiii–xv transcendental consciousness, 112 transcendental phenomenology, 57 usefulness, 12, 112 Russell, Bertrand, 34–5

Index S Salinger, J. D., 102 Sallis, John, xiii–xiv, 102–9 VDOYDYHULWDWH (preserve truth), 16 Saying (Sagen), 60 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, xii, 71, 87, 97, 99 Schematism, xi Schiller, Friedrich, 26, 62, 97 science, x, 11, 25, 27, 57, 73–4, 78 sciences, of, 57, 75, 82 scientific philosophy, 51 principles, 25 world conception, 1 seeing, way of, xiv self-denial, 49 self-evidence, 75–6 selfhood, 59–60 self-identity, 86 self-knowledge, 21 self-presence, 84, 86, 89 self-reference, 38–9 self-reflection, 54, 79, 81 semantics, formal T-sentences as ruling image, and, 33, 112 semantics, possible world ruling image, as, 40, 112 sense, xiii, 83, 85, 104 sexism, 102 Shakespeare, William, 97, 108 shallowness, 93 shines, 106, 108 showing, 109 sight, xiii sign, double sense of, 83, 85 simile, 32 sociology, 95 Socrates, xiv, 23, 26–7, 45–6, 63, 87, 99 soliloquy, 84 Sophocles, 61 space and time, 2, 4, 59 Liebnizian view of, 4 Newtonian view of, 4 spacing, 105–6

Toward a New Foundationalism Special Metaphysics, xi speech, 86–7, 99, 104–5 Spinoza, Baruch, 8, 87, 103 spirit *HLVW , 90–1 spiritual experiences, 55 state-descriptions, 15–16 Stolnitz, Jerome, 2 string theory, 26 VW\OH 42 subjectivity, 97, 103–4 substance/matter, 9 superstring theory, 27 surprising measure, a, 48–51 synonymy, 16 synthetic DSULRUL 4, 12 judgments, 37 principles, 5 synthetic statements, 14, 16–17 T Tarski, Alfred, 30 technology, 25, 86 essence of, 67–9 philosophy of, 67–8 teleogical judgment, 77 teleology, 77 theology, xi theoretical framework, 26 philosophy, 52 statements, 5 theory, 35, 95 general relativity, of, 3 meaning, of, 44 WKHUDSHXWLF 41 thesis, 9 things, 77, 84, 87, 106 thought, 22, 99 time, 59, 62, 94 tradition, 98 transcendence, 103–4 Transcendental Aesthetic, xi, 4 Analytic, xi Apperception, xii, 76 Imagination, xii, 70

125

transcendental-phenomenological consciousness, 53 idealism, 55 philosophy, 57 transcendental phenomenology, 55, 57, 82 ruling image, as, 57 truth, 11, 30, 44, 106–7 DOƝWKHLD as, 71, 75, 107 logical/semantic theory of, 30 moral, 46 sense, and, 85 truth-values, 16, 43–4 T-sentences, 30–1 formal semantics as ruling image, and, 33, 112 U unconcealment, 71, 75, 107 understanding 9HUVWHKHQ  xi, 87, 94, 99–100 unhiddenness, 71, 75, 107 untruth, 76 usefulness, 15–16 ruling image, as, 12, 112 V verbal exchange, 46 verifiable/confirmable statements, 14 verificationist, 44 verification principle, 5 Vienna Circle, 1, 3 da Vinci, Leonardo, 26 vision, 105 Vlastos, Gregory, 46 W ZDQWLQJ 29 weakening, art of, 98 von Wilamowitz-Möellendorff, Ulrich, 48 wisdom, 44 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 12, 43 Wolff, Christian, xi wonder, 75

126 world, xi intellectual, xiii possible world semantics as ruling image, 40, 112 scientific conception, 1

Index spatial, 53 writing, 86–7, 99 X Xi, Guo, 108