It is a question, in this framework, of doing the history of philosophy while simultaneously denouncing the practice. And that is how exceptional commentators of Wittgenstein or Russell have deplored the French passion for the history of philosophy without ever answering the question, What is the significance of translation, transmission, commentary, explication, or interpretation of Wittgenstein, Russell, or Austin, if one is not doing the history of philosophy?16 How is this work different from commentaries upon Aristotle, Suarez, or Descartes? Could it be because what is more contemporary is, in essence, truer and more philosophical than the old? Such an assertion presupposes a conception of a constant progress of philosophy, which would become either more and more “high-fidelity,” like audio techniques, or else more and more aware of its inanity, like alchemy in the sixteenth century. Even if this thesis of a constant progress has never been verifiably defended as such by the detractors of the history of philosophy, it is no less consubstantial with their critique. To refuse to be a historian of philosophy when one speaks of a twentieth-century text is to surreptitiously think that interpreting Wittgenstein is to be doing fertile philosophy because it addresses a recent author whereas interpreting Saint Thomas constitutes a lapse into an absurd exegetical practice because he is an author of the past. In addition to the retort that one today can without absurdity claim to be a Thomist just as well as a Wittgensteinian, it seems legitimate to oppose this position with a simple statement of fact: Wittgenstein, born in the nineteenth century, is no longer our exact contemporary; and if only the last philosopher to speak is correct, it would be better, in the interests of the future, to study only those philosophers still living and to pass down “to our nephews” only those texts that they will have written themselves!
We see that the history of philosophy, thus understood, is quite directly wedded to the thesis of the death of philosophy. In effect, if against those who, like Yves Michaud, call purely and simply for the end of the history of philosophy, the disciples of Heidegger give a meaning and a capital importance to the study of the texts of the history of philosophy, this meaning is grasped only in order to demonstrate the end of philosophy such as it was practiced for two millennia. The study of its history coincides with the proclamation of the death of the discipline. As a result, beyond the evident difference between the wish of destruction (abandonment of the study of ancient texts) and the practice of deconstruction (appropriation of the tradition in order to better rid oneself of it), a great number of thinkers share the same idea: philosophy no longer exists. To put it yet another way, if it were necessary to examine contemporary thinkers, none of them would dare maintain that philosophy is the queen of the sciences—although this thesis was once amply defended, from Aristotle to Leibniz, from Descartes to Hegel—nor even that philosophy is a scientific, rigorous, and distinct discipline—a thesis that was just as widely maintained from Plato to Husserl. It is this thesis of the death of philosophy as a first, autonomous, and distinct discipline that I wish to analyze (part 1), then to challenge (part 2), and finally to contextualize (part 3).
I shall begin the analysis by carefully displaying it in the diversity of its actual figures, in order to identify its fundamental motifs, its lines of force, and the reasons it advances. What are the arguments that lead so many contemporary philosophers, from profoundly different perspectives, to solemnly proclaim—or to surreptitiously accept—the death of their discipline? In view of this death, endlessly announced, I have tried to avoid two positions, as facile as they are common, namely (1) accepting this thesis without discussion nor consideration of its consequences, and so continuing to write philosophy with the sole end of saying that it ought no longer be done, and (2) vigorously disputing this thesis without ever taking the trouble to argue against it nor to develop another, positive, alternative. Against this second, too often adopted, position it seems to me that the fact that philosophy may soon come to have the same status as alchemy merits more than the simple exclamation “Aren’t they foolish!”—an exclamation with which certain philosophical specialists who call themselves “professionals” would sometimes reply to others, at least as “professional” as the first (since it is a question, after all, of Heidegger, Derrida, Quine, and Austin, among others!), who proclaim the inevitable demise of the discipline. As Jacques Bouveresse said, “the first [ones] to wax indignant over Rorty’s proposals”17 (namely, “that there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline”18), would be well advised to propose something other than a glib dismissal, because “to perpetuate philosophy as a distinct academic discipline probably demands more serious justification than what the philosophers in question would explicitly or implicitly agree to provide.”19 In this book, my only concern will be to take up Bouveresse’s challenge in exhorting the historians of philosophy20 to produce a “more serious justification” in answer to the question of how philosophy is a distinct and autonomous discipline.
Nevertheless, a last reservation might be raised against the long analysis of the death of philosophy that I will present in part 1. It consists in the claim that a critical analysis of these positions is in vain because philosophy is realized, like movement, in the doing. This third position, formerly adopted against every “Flaubertian bourgeois” convinced of the uselessness of practices that are not directly utilitarian, is now no longer adequate, because it is philosophers themselves who proclaim the death of philosophy. Therefore, it seems difficult to avoid a serious examination of this thesis, ignoring it while continuing to develop isolated, particular, and local studies (an ontology of the flesh, a phenomenology of desire, or even more an epistemology of number, an interrogation of the modules of the neurophysiological system, etc.) just as a mathematician today could work on some aspect of projective geometry without needing to know whether his discipline is put at risk by the fact that, because he is so specialized, he is no longer able to communicate with a specialist in a field of algebra. The theme of the death of philosophy is as conclusive as that of the death of art, proclaimed by artists themselves or by critics who, like Arthur Danto, judge that art has realized its essence and achieved its destiny. An artist does not avoid this assertion by being content merely to paint in the style of Vermeer; nor does a philosopher of art by eliminating an analysis of ready-mades or of Warhol’s Brillo Box.21 Just as the theme of the death of art is now an integral part of the material with which artists and art critics work, the theme of the end of philosophy ought to be considered as a philosophical object and as a subject for interpretation.22 This is why, breaking with the three habitual postures (agreement without argument, rejection without proof, or a learned indifference), I have tried in part 1 to analyze this theme of the death of philosophy.
In so doing, I shall disregard the different nuances, the different “gradations” of color that can clothe this theme of the death of philosophy—from the most common claims (such as the current “postanalytic”) to assertions of its necessity (the “second wave” of analytic philosophy or the “radicalization” of a certain phenomenology)23—considering along the way philosophies that, even though they set sail from different ports, end up by resignedly accepting this theme (Habermas), as well as schools of thought that imply this end as a logical consequence without always asserting it (like certain contemporary reconstructions of Kantianism). This study of different tonalities that adopt the same theme must not, however, conceive itself as a picture, portrait or landscape, of contemporary philosophy in all its dimensions. My goal is clearly not to draw up an inventory or progress report, nor to go back into a detailed discussion of every possible position;24 my aim is very simply to retrace the multiple metamorphoses of a single theme, the death of philosophy, in order to see if and how another thesis could be proposed.
This is a task I will take up in part 2, which will try to demonstrate that philosophy is an autonomous and distinct discipline, and even—to go much further than Bouveresse suggested in his exhortation to historians of philosophy—that
philosophy remains, in a sense that I will specify, “first.” In order to prove this thesis—an apparently eccentric one, since the view that a discipline is first because it is “above” (meta) is unanimously rejected—I will first have to propose a voluntary distancing from our age (specifically by an appeal to the apparently obsolete history of philosophy) in order to try to suspend our own view of the contemporary situation. Indeed, professional philosophers should always be able to distance themselves from their era for a moment, like the ethnologist who, having visited faraway lands, upon returning is better able to recognize the peculiarities of his own civilization. Similarly, those who would penetrate the mysteries of anamorphosis must adopt a different perspective than usually required. Indeed, let’s recall the definition of anamophosis. “A drawing that has been distorted to the point of illegibility … becomes clear if one observes it from a particular angle or through a correcting apparatus.”25 The study of the history of philosophy is able to play the role of a new angle of vision or a “corrective apparatus” for the “obvious” facts of a period in which we are necessarily immersed. In order to grasp the import of the present reality, we have to move toward an oblique, untimely, apparently inadequate point of view, just as Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous painting The Ambassadors reveals its design only from an off-center—indeed eccentric—viewpoint. Indeed, if we were to position ourselves in front of this painting, in the place assigned to the observer since the Renaissance, what would we see? Two opulent diplomats (whose appearance and ample figures we could detail), a luxurious room (whose spaces we could evaluate), various objects (all symbols of wealth and magnificence), and finally, a heavy green curtain that fills the background and partially masks a crucifix. The painting apparently26 portrays luxury, abundance, and splendor; but it is a question of a regulated abundance (the figures are diplomats, not jesters), of wealth without luxuriance, in short, of the ordering of a reasonably opulent world. Having seen this, the spectator’s eyes will come upon a spot that is unrecognizable. Has the canvas been altered, or must we see there a “cuttlefish bone” or some other unusual27 object that has come to disrupt the proper ordering and restraint that every ambassador obviously represents? What is this sparsely colored spot, this strange form in the middle of a well-ordered composition, this unexpected figure in a world without mysteries? We know that we can resolve this anomaly only through a revolution in point of view, an escape from the paradigm in effect—in this case, the laws of perspective—by adopting a habitually unadvised point of view: at an angle to the painting. What appears once the spectator moves to the extreme edge of the painting, forces himself to occupy this unfamiliar space? A skull. Far from telling of the wealth of nations, the painting shows their vanity at the same time that it tells of the illusory and vain transparency of perspective, the opacity of the frontal position, the false obviousness of the immediate. This play between the frontal position and the oblique view, between the literal reading and the interpretation that must take a point of view other than face-to-face or immersion in the painting can be conceived like the position that the reading of “philosophically incorrect” authors gives to the historian of philosophy in the world in which he is situated. Like the painting, the privileged motif of contemporary philosophy speaks itself of its vanity. But as with the painting, this vanity is truly comprehensible (that is to say, it is capable of being questioned and evaluated, and unable to be accepted as a given or an inevitability) only from an unusual angle of view—for example (anticipating my argument), the angle of the joyous and uninhibited affirmation of philosophy as a rigorous, distinct, and first knowledge. So I will attempt, as a thought experiment, to maintain the suspension of our current and too common belief, and to see in what sense one can today understand philosophy as a rigorous, distinct, and first discipline. Can we rely upon its history to better avert the proclamation of its end? Can we attempt a revolution in point of view; can we undertake a paradigm shift even though all converge toward the same affirmation, the exhaustion of philosophy? Once this reconsideration has been effected, we will then be in a position to put the thesis of the end of philosophy in perspective, that is, to understand the end of the end of philosophy.
In part 3, to put this thesis into context, I will simply try to return to the source of the thesis of the death of philosophy. If, following the example of Mark Twain, who, upon reading his own obituary in a poorly informed newspaper, protested that “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” we must likewise declare the reports of philosophy’s death to be in error, then we ought to understand the reasons why one could think that philosophy was dead. Situating the discourse about “the end,” and showing the reasons which have led to this theme’s contemporary omnipresence, will serve to support my argument since, in order to thus put the end of philosophy into perspective, we will transcend this end, and with it, the historicism that it explicitly or surreptitiously carries.
To put it more precisely: my aim is to demonstrate that philosophy is a first discipline, distinct and autonomous. To do this, I will analyze the thesis of the end of philosophy and I will show how it always contains, despite the apparent diversity of its actual articulations, the same type of logical contradictions, which lead to its necessary rejection. I shall trace these contradictions, or logical pathologies, back to an attitude common to all the authors discussed, namely, the concealment of self-reference to the benefit of the sole question of reference, a concealment that produces a “reflexive deficit”28 at the heart of the discipline, a characteristic mark of the theme of the death of philosophy. I will then demonstrate how an unrealized and untimely position—one that strongly affirms the thesis of a living and sovereign philosophy—could allow us to escape the impasse in which contemporary philosophy, with this proclamation of its end, is trapped. That is, recalling my analogy with anamorphosis, I will show how the adoption of a point of view apparently far removed from currently accepted givens can show these givens for what they are, namely, opinions whose falsehood can be demonstrated. Even more precisely, I will propose a remedy for the crisis of philosophy by restoring its “meta” function. Once I have specified this proposed treatment for philosophy’s contemporary crisis and redefined the practice of the history of philosophy, I will have to show where and when the reflexive deficit (as a concealment of self-reference in favor of the sole question of reference) first arose, and to trace the different moments of its spread—not only in the obvious analytic understandings of “reference”29 but also in Kant and particularly in his three principal interpreters: Hermann von Helmholtz, Hermann Cohen, and (in a spectacular historical paradox) Heidegger, who on this point agreed with analytic and neo-Kantian thought. Further, this history of the concealment of self-reference will have to be tenable in order to revive the historicism that has most often presided over the announcements of the death of philosophy. Ultimately, we will thus have to understand the practice of the history of philosophy by showing that in rearticulating a position that had been maintained in the past, we are not constrained to adopt the position of “a return to” this or that author or period of the history of philosophy. Briefly, in showing that past philosophers can help us to decipher the real face formed by the interlacing of contemporary thought, I do not mean to “return to” certain authors and to put them on a pedestal instead of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine, or Kant. “To think with” or “starting from” does not mean “to return to.” I will thus show how, by a sort of dual-anamorphic game, traditional authors and contemporary philosophers can both be read by starting with the other—placing oneself in the point of view of the one can illuminate the other, and vice versa. It is a matter of attempting to cross-fertilize the authors, to show how little the epoch matters for philosophical questions. From there, I will try to break with the historicism common to the conceptions I have evoked (the end of history, either through progress—philosophy is replaced by a more scientific discipline—or through decline—the process has achieved its completi
on). This project as a whole seeks to go beyond the attempts at “naturalization”30 as well as the positions of historicism31 to propose a reelaboration of the transcendental, which may no longer be necessarily “Kantian,” and to thus attempt to escape from the curse of a discipline that seems to have no other function than to pronounce its own impossibility.
This investigation shall first analyze, then challenge, and last contextualize the thesis of the death of philosophy. This investigation could just as well be described first as a diagnosis of the nature of a theme in contemporary philosophy, then the proposal of a treatment from an unusual point of view, and then an etiology of the origins and propagation of the disease. This medical nomenclature, accentuating the three moments of this project, seems justified since it is indeed a question, today, of life and death—of the announced death of philosophy, a death announced by philosophy itself and from within itself, a death that I would like to counter with a living philosophy, a philosophy living through itself and starting with itself.
I
The End of Philosophy, or the Paradoxes of Speaking
1
Skeptical and Scientific “Post-philosophy”
My analysis of the discourse pronouncing the death of philosophy shall begin with its most resounding assertions and end with its resigned, and even surreptitious, acceptances. Indeed, this theme, so common today, is inflected according to different variations whose nuances we must grasp so that their commonalities are more clearly illustrated at the end of our examination. This is why I will start my inquiry with the most radical antiphilosophers, those we can call, with Vincent Descombes, the “post-contemporary philosophers,”1 and I will show how their ideas, beneath their manifest differences (since they go from the most radical skepticism to the most accepted scientism), reveal the same invariant structure. The more loudly that the death of philosophy is proclaimed, the more that this structure appears as its trademark. Once this structure has been recognized, it will serve as a touchstone for our analysis of the various, more subtle, appearances of the theme in other figures of contemporary philosophy. From pragmatism, through an (admittedly failed) attempt to reestablish philosophy’s autonomy, to the most recent forms of phenomenology, I will trace, step-by-step, the various stages of current philosophy’s self-renunciation.2
The Death of Philosophy Page 2
