THE DEATH OF PHILOSOPHY
The Death of Philosophy
REFERENCE AND SELF-REFERENCE IN CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT
Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel
TRANSLATED BY RICHARD A. LYNCH
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS • NEW YORK
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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First published in French as Référence et autoréférence. Etude sur le thème de la mort de la philosophie © Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 2005
Translation copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-51963-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle.
[Réference et autoréférence. English]
The death of philosophy : reference and self-reference in contemporary thought / Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel / translated by Richard A. Lynch.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 978–0-231–14778–1 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–231–51963–2 (ebook)
1. Philosophy, French—21st century. 2. Philosophy, Modern—21st century. 3. Reference (Philosophy) I. Title.
B2431.T4613 2011
190.9'051—dc22
2010042797
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Translator’s Note
Introduction
PART I. THE END OF PHILOSOPHY, OR THE PARADOXES OF SPEAKING
1. Skeptical and Scientific “Post-philosophy”
The “Postanalytic” Moment
The Dissolution of Philosophy in a Positive Science
Naturalism as a Paradoxical Synthesis
Conclusions: Self-refutation and Oscillation Between Scientism and Skepticism
2. “Saying and the Said”: Two Paradigms for the Same Subject
Opposition or Overlap of Paradigms?
The Evolution of the Linguistic Paradigm: Pragmatism
“Turning Phenomenology”?
Conclusions: Performative Contradiction and Oscillation Between Skepticism and Positivism
3. The Antispeculative View: Habermas as an Example
A Philosophy in Three Movements, Epitomizing Three Possible Antispeculative Approaches
Philosophy as Therapy: Knowledge and Human Interests
Philosophy as Inquiry into Conditions of Possibility: “Universal Pragmatics”
From Universal Pragmatics to Fallibilist Pragmatism
Conclusions: Confirmation of the Diagnosis
4. Kant’s Shadow in the Current Philosophical Landscape
The Skeptical Future of Kantianism: Reconstruction from the Critique of Judgment
The “Strong” Version of the Transcendental: Karl-Otto Apel
Conclusions: The Impossibility of Speaking of the End of Philosophy
PART II. CHALLENGING THE “DEATH OF PHILOSOPHY”: THE REFLEXIVE A PRIORI
5. A Definition of the Model: Scientific Learning and Philosophical Knowledge
Why This Moment Rather Than Another?
The Problem of the Status of the Philosopher’s Discourse
The Concept of Reflexive Identity, or Self-reference
The Power of the Model: The Law of Self-reference and Philosophical Truth
Self-reference and Knowledge of Knowledge: Metacognitive Problems
Self-reference and the Act of Speaking
Conclusions: Congruence Between Statement and Utterance, Said and Saying
6. The Model of Self-reference’s Consistency
The Theory of Reflexivity and Current Theories of Self-reference
The Theory of Reflexivity and the Prohibition Against Self-referential Propositions
Conclusions: The Application of Propositions to Themselves
7. The Model’s Fecundity
A New Definition of Transcendental Argument
The New Version of the Argument as a Possible Overcoming of the “Dispute About Transcendental Arguments”
The Transcendental Argument’s Positivity and the “Utility” of the Law of Reflexivity
Conclusions: A Proposal for a Model of Application
8. Beyond the Death of Philosophy
PART III. THE END OF PHILOSOPHY IN PERSPECTIVE: THE SOURCE OF THE REFLEXIVE DEFICIT
9. The “Race to Reference”
10. The Tension Between Reference and Self-reference in the Kantian System
Representation
Reflection
Use of the Term “Intellectual Representation” as an Expression of the Tension Between Representation and Reflection
Conclusions: The Two Orientations
11. Helmholtz’s Choice as a Choice for Reference: The Naturalization of Critique
From the Transcendental to the A Priori
The Psychophysiological Interpretation of the A Priori
The Physiological Future of the Distinction Between Things in Themselves and Phenomena
Conclusions: A Single Orientation, the Origin of Two Paradigms
12. Critique: A Positivist Theory of Knowledge or Existential Ontology?
The Kantian Problematic in Heidegger and Cohen
Explaining Knowledge: Valorization of the “Aesthetic” or the “Analytic”?
Which Edition?
The Meaning of the Object
Radical Finitude and the Question of Being as Emphasizing an Orientation
Conclusions: Common Ground—The Exclusive Idea of Reference
13. Questioning the History of Philosophy
Overcoming Historicism Without Returning to the Past
Interpretation and Argumentation
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without luck, that is, encounters—encounters with books, books’ encounters with one another, but also encounters with people—that have sparked or strengthened my philosophical work. To the first among them I owe neither the contents of the ideas here defended nor my philosophical views, nor even the tradition in which they are inscribed—he is, however, one of the people to whom I owe the most philosophically: I had the good fortune to have Jean-Luc Marion as a teacher, and neither the distance between our ways of thinking nor now the distance in time has softened the shock of this encounter. I thank you, here, finally. More recently, I also had the good fortune to encounter Michel Malherbe, who has directly contributed to the development of this book with his attentive reading, perceptive remarks, and decisive suggestions. Bernard Bourgeois benevolently guided and later accompanied all my research. Jean Gayon and Heinz Wismann have, last, given me considerable support and encouragement—I thank you both four times. Finally, I thank everyone who has helped me philosophically through their writing and their conversation: Claude Parthenay, Bertrand Rougé, Fosca Mariani, Denis Thouard, Jean-Claude Gens, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, as well as André Charrak, Sandra Laugier, Jocelyn Benoist, Christiane Chauviré, Jacques English, Anastasios Brenner, Fabien Capeillères, Félix Duportail, Olivier Imbert, Marie-Pierre Gaviano, Aline Alterman, Ives Radrizzani, Christian Berner, Chantal Jacquet, Jeanne Salem, Christian Bonnet, André Stanguennec, Marie-Dominique Pop
elard, and finally, Daniel Arasse, to whose memory this book is dedicated.
Translator’s Note
When citations are to texts originally written in English or available in English translation, I have usually used the available English version. In a few exceptional cases—for example, Thomas-Fogiel’s citations of Husserl—I have altered the English if the French translation conveys a different sense than the standard English translation. My notes are in brackets; all other notes are the author’s.
For assistance and support with this translation, I would like to thank Amy Allen, Linda Clute, Janet Donohoe, Barbara Fultner, Mandy Henk, Stacy Klingler, Jamie Knapp, Len Lawlor, Sebastian Luft, Jonathan Powers, Dan Shannon, the DePauw University Philosophy Department, the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University (which provided a serene working space for part of the time I was working on this translation), and everybody in the Interlibrary Loan department of the DePauw University Libraries. Special thanks to Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel for very generously answering my questions along the way.
I dedicate this work to my daughter Sophia Isabelle, who was born during its completion.
Introduction
In This New Yet Unapproachable America, Stanley Cavell recounts the following anecdote: “One of the most influential American teachers of philosophy … declared … that there are only three ways to make an honest living in philosophy: learn some languages and do scholarly work, learn mathematics enough to do some real logic, or do literary psychology.”1 Far from deploring this situation, in which philosophy is taken up by another discipline, Cavell affirms that it matters little to him, in the final analysis, whether what he does in writing his books is deemed to be philosophical. In a similar vein, J. L. Austin noted that history has allowed philosophy to be divided into increasingly distinct and autonomous disciplines (such as mathematics, physics, and psychology),2 and he predicted (and simultaneously hoped) that philosophy would end by disappearing in favor of, for example, linguistics. This affirmation of—indeed, this demand for—philosophy’s dissolution in a different discipline is not only expressed in the analytic tradition illustrated by Austin and Cavell. In fact, this theme of the death, or exhaustion, of philosophy is also found in the “Continental” sphere, where the idea of the death of philosophy is equally omnipresent. Whether one praises, with Heidegger, the ineluctable decline of philosophy, or whether one asserts the necessity of a deconstruction of philosophy and its supersession by a different practice, the same thesis endures: the death of philosophy. Distrust and “skepticism” toward philosophical discourse would seem to be the common element in these apparently very different ways of thought. As such, one can assert, with Vittorio Hösle, that “probably the strongest immediate evidence for the superiority of relativism is that for the past 150 years it has been the ideology, spreading ever more forcefully, of Western European philosophy.”3 In a word, we seem today to have arrived at a historical moment dominated by the idea that philosophy is an obsolete discipline that ought to disappear, like alchemy, even if it once mobilized, quite in vain, great minds.
Given this assessment, the discipline could hope to survive for a while by returning to the study of tradition, by taking care of its history, by unearthing the great classical texts, in the way that the Renaissance was able to prompt a return to antiquity. But this study of the tradition, an apparent escape for an exhausted discipline, is itself the object of multiple challenges. In fact, philosophy’s relationship to its history currently takes different forms, all more or less negative, such as destruction, deconstruction, and even denial.
Let’s first consider destruction. There are many who reduce the history of philosophy to a geographically and historically situated practice: philosophy’s relation to the great texts of the tradition is not, they maintain, a necessary relation, a humanistic relation, but rather a typically Continental—even exclusively French—practice. Vincent Descombes thus finds it “right to deplore that in certain countries like France philosophical studies tend to be absorbed in the history of the discipline,”4 which François Schmitz underscores in his introduction to the collection Philosophie analytique et histoire de la philosophie: “The importance accorded, at least in France, to the history of philosophy,”5 a diagnosis that Yves Michaud confirms and intensifies, writing, “the history of philosophy is a typically European—not to say French—discipline, whose importance in the curriculum, in research, and most generally in the entire climate of philosophical activity is not easily understandable.”6 In a related, if less radical, sense, Francis Wolff denounces the typically French study of the “doctrine of authors … taught to the point of extravagance.”7 Confronted by this disapproving tribunal, the contemporary historian of philosophy seems forced to admit that all his works are the fruits of a national particularism, of the vicissitudes of the institution, of coincidences of chance. Whether a doddering archivist or a dilettante hermeneuticist, he would have absolutely no justification for studying Malebranche rather than Schelling, or Poincaré rather than Aristotle, unless it would be the simple assertion of an entirely personal preference, of a contingent taste, of an “I” that does not worry about being a “we.” To ask, “How can one do the history of philosophy?” is, in short, to cry out, “How can one be French?” To this assessment of an interpretive practice that is not only arbitrary (since its author cannot answer the question, “Why Aristotle rather than nothing?”8) but also harmful (since this practice verges on “extravagance”) there is only one logical response, clearly articulated by Michaud: “the end of the history of philosophy.”
Various redeployments for philosophical study have been proposed to make up for the planned obsolescence of commentary upon traditional texts: redeployments such as an increased specialization or even the consideration of the most contemporary social questions. Specialization consists in subdividing the old “philosophy” into predetermined, relatively distinct “domains.” This specialization most often leads to the dissolution of philosophy within another discipline. Such is the problem of contemporary epistemology, in its limited sense of a theory of a precise discipline (logic, biology, economics, etc.).9 The first do logic and generate theorems, the others accompany biologists, neurophysiologists, researchers in artificial intelligence, etc. In short, philosophers more or less redeploy themselves in other sciences, thus fulfilling Quine’s wish to make epistemology “a branch of engineering.”10
The second redeployment, proposed to take the place of a historically oriented practice, is a philosophy conceived as a provider of answers to questions of the moment (bioethics, preservation of the planet, international law, etc.). By generating a certain number of principles, such as the famous “principle of responsibility,” the philosopher would provide the tools that allow one to grapple with the concrete problems posed by society. This production of “principles” for the contemporary world’s use can be accomplished through recourse to authors whose study would allow us to think about our society today. And so, for some, to do philosophy today consists of somehow “reactualizing” a juridico-political corpus (one is a convinced liberal; another, a famous Kantian; another, a notorious Nazi; etc.). In this configuration, a response to social and political questions must be philosophy’s objective, lest it see its place taken by another discipline (sociology, political science, law, etc.). If engineering is opposed to exegetical practice on the one hand, it seems on the other that care is taken to make philosophy into a form of social expertise, and philosophers “the reserve angels of jurisprudence,” to borrow Musil’s famous expression. In either case, the end of the history of philosophy leads to the claim that philosophy is finally “expert” because it is equipped, as Austin hoped, with “a respectable and reliable method of handling some portion of these residual problems, a new science is set up, which tends to break away from philosophy just as and when its subject matter becomes better defined.”11
Set against this image of a clearly asserted destruction is deconstruction, which has d
ominated philosophical study for more than a generation.12 This practice finds support in the Heideggerian discourse that sees the study of the history of philosophy as completed by the necessity of the deconstruction of metaphysics. Philosophy is conceived here as a slow process that, after a radiant dawn, will have now come to completion. To study the progressive decline that has led this discipline from the pre-Socratics to its ego-ontotheological acme (Hegel, for example), or else, to uncover several unexpected openings in this continuous process as so many counterattacks against a nonetheless inescapable history (Kant or Schelling, for example): this is the work assigned to the philosopher or the historian of philosophy. This position—which has a number of eminent representatives in France (such as Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Luc Marion, or Rémi Brague13) as in Germany (Wolfgang Janke, Rudolf Boehm, etc.) or in Italy (Franco Volpi, Gianni Vattimo, Federico Leoni)—has the not-insignificant advantage of refusing the sharp distinction between the study of traditional texts and philosophical practice. It gives a philosophical meaning to the history of philosophy and avoids making the study of this or that philosopher a gratuitous, anecdotal, or contingent practice, which could have just as well chosen Tristram Shandy14 as Jean-Baptiste Poncelet for its object. The exegetical hermeneutical tradition thus yields to a philosophical finality.15 The study of this or that text is endowed with a meaning in which the very essence of the discipline is progressively deciphered. This conception rests on the general thesis of history as a process that has now arrived at its conclusion. Between these two extreme figures (either the abandonment of a practice as destruction of a disciplinary field, or, on the contrary, “deconstruction” in the sense of a patient appropriation of the tradition with an eye toward the goal of overcoming metaphysics) it is possible to identify a third position, which can be understood, broadly speaking, as a paradoxical variation of the first: denial.
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