Oscillation Between Positivism and Skepticism, and the Tendency to Self-refutation
What then are we to conclude from this analysis of Austin and from the unfolding of Searle’s and Cavell’s two interpretations of Austin? That contemporary philosophy (and here, as in Quine, within a single philosophy) again displays the tendency to oscillate between a positivist position in which philosophy, according to Austin’s hopes, would become “linguistics” and a skeptical tendency that always contains hidden pragmatic contradictions, in which the speaking contradicts what is said, its practice (analysis of ordinary language) contradicts the claim that the only possible language is ordinary language, etc. In a word, oscillation between two extremes and self-refutation are, here too, the dominant symptoms of a philosophy that hopes for its own end. This characteristic, this curious figure, just like the ellipsoidal form in Holbein’s Ambassadors, is what I was interested in reconstructing in this analysis of Austin and his posterity. Even if the theme of “ordinary language,” or of language as our unavoidable ordinariness, today seems closer to Austin’s writings than the grand generalizing ambitions of the Searle of Foundations, and even if, as Sandra Laugier29 and Michael Soubbotnik would have it, Austin’s “spirit” seems more “reincarnated” in Cavell’s oeuvre than in Searle’s, the fact nonetheless remains that assessing these two interpretations’ fidelity to the source texts was not my task, since the only thing that interested me in this contradictory reading of a single author was the fact that we find there an oscillation between positivism and skepticism. A single philosopher can give birth to two diametrically opposed ways of thinking, both of which are philologically legitimate. This does not reflect the weakness of or a preference for one of the disciples but rather an already identified structure that characterizes philosophy today: either its dissolution within a vast science that is meant to be formalized on the model of formal logic (Searle’s taking up of the formula F(P), for example), or skepticism that leads to ineluctable pragmatic paradoxes (Cavell and the impossible demonstration of his own discourse’s status), or both at the same time (Austin as the source of these two contraries).
This dual tendency to self-refutation and to oscillation is presumably likely to be found in other trends. Thus alongside the lineage from Austin to Searle and Cavell we could also study the progression from the Vienna Circle to Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend30—this analysis would doubtless show just as much the strange proximity of opposites (positivism and skepticism) that are fused in a single thesis—the end of philosophy—and a single contradiction—the impossibility of maintaining this end.31
But this philosophical situation ought not be surprising, in the philosophical sense of the term—that is, as the discovery of a contradiction that doesn’t seem able to be immediately removed and thus causes, as Plato would have it, astonishment. Indeed, it is not for me to say that relativism or skepticism would be surprising “in itself,” that is, to speak from an already established point of view about what philosophical discourse must be. That attitude, indeed, would suppose a judgment of value; but as Christiane Chauviré has forcefully demonstrated in a fine article,32 we must beware of evaluating philosophical positions in moral terms. If I speak of surprise here, that is in fact because there is a simultaneity between two positions traditionally given as antinomies: positivism and skepticism. In the configuration that I’ve described, and that has held for the last thirty years, positivism engenders skepticism in a quasi-logical manner (like a premise its consequence) and skepticism is composed at its heart of positivism.
Could the Continental paradigm serve as a counterexample to this description of the “skeptico-positivist future”33 of linguistic analysis? If certain aspects of phenomenology repeat this theme of the end of philosophy, a theme illustrated across the border, will it turn out to be more convincing, or is it, too, merely this same pattern, this same strange silhouette, this same disfiguring trait that deconstructs at the same time as it questions the entirety of a painting?
“Turning Phenomenology”?
Thinking with Husserl Against Husserl?
To speak of the “scientism” of phenomenology, in the sense of choosing a particular science as a paradigm of truth, is clearly impossible34 insofar as phenomenology (in fact a profoundly innovative and important philosophical current for the twentieth century) has produced its own analytical instruments, its own rules, and its specific method and has defined its field of investigation without ever looking to align itself with another, more serious, science (logic, mathematics, or some human science such as psychology). Not subjugated to an exterior science, phenomenology nevertheless proclaimed itself, in Edmund Husserl, as a science. In a word, Husserl did not index his propositions to so-called “positive” knowledges but rather presented them as an expression of knowledge or “rigorous science.” But it seems that his disciples, up to a recent period, have not wanted to maintain this aspect, thus abandoning the guiding and controlling question of Husserl’s phenomenology: what can philosophy mean as a science? This is what Jocelyn Benoist notes about the great majority of Husserlian studies,35 as does Bruce Bégout, who writes, “The will to transform philosophy into a rigorous science, just like the will to offer a complete rationalism for the wrongs of our time, has something unbearable about it. Interpreters have thus exhausted themselves trying to find something that does not go down that road.”36 The situation has definitely changed in the last five years,37 but the fact remains that Husserl’s disciples, throughout the twentieth century, fiercely worked to conceal the centrality of the Husserlian theme of philosophy as science; thus, Bégout adds, “Again and again they brought out analyses of personal temporality, or of the lifeworld … as if Husserlianism did not exist.”38 Indeed, with its insistence on the analysis of passive syntheses, its glorification of the flesh and of the body in its most subjective folds, its praise of the most profound “lived experiences” and the pursuit of life in its ineffable singularity, the phenomenology of the twentieth century seems, as Dominique Janicaud also notes,39 to have strayed from its initial source.
To be sure, the Husserlian concepts of descriptions, evidence, and immediacy are mobilized by his epigones (whom I will qualify, because of their themes’ content, as “existential epigones”40 of phenomenology), but these notions are meant to be detached from their original function of founding philosophy as a science. Eidetic description seems to become the evaluation of an individual’s singular feelings, anchored in the hic et nunc that looks away from an objectivizing claim to universality. As Dominique Janicaud notes, from Merleau-Ponty’s and the early Sartre’s ventures, “phenomenology is spirited away by [their] existential project; the density of descriptions manages to excuse the thinness of methodological justifications. Intentional analysis is put itself to the service of the ‘perceptive genius’ and the prereflexive cogito.”41
Having noted this orientation, it is not at all my task to criticize it in the name of fidelity to Husserl,42 nor to issue any sort of value judgments by declaring such investigations into the body, desire, feeling, primary drives, or other arche-original experience to be a priori empty. I must only try to understand how these themes proper to contemporary phenomenology could have been conjoined at a certain point with the idea of the end of philosophy, an idea totally absent in phenomenology’s founder. Only after I have reconstructed this strange history—which leads from a phenomenology understood as a revitalization of philosophy to a phenomenology understood as an assertion of philosophy’s end—will I be able, again, to attempt to assess the validity of the proposition that philosophy must be superseded by another practice.
The founding fathers of this existential phenomenology are, of course, Martin Heidegger and, in France, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and later Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, and probably Jean-Luc Marion.43 Today, it is populated by an entire constellation of thinkers whose project is to transform phenomenology: Marc Richir or Rudolf Bernet in B
elgium,44 Franco Volpi in Italy, Ingeborg Schüssler in Switzerland, Hans-Helmuth Gander or Bernhard Waldenfels45 in Germany, Jean-Louis Chrétien or Claude Romano in France, or even, to cite those who have very recently attempted “to turn phenomenology,”46 Natalie Depraz, Hugues Choplin, or Gilles Grelet. With this far from exhaustive list, I clearly do not mean to claim that these authors all hold the same views on every issue; it is simply a question of recognizing that, beyond their various and sometimes divergent positions, these authors mean to effect a turn within phenomenology—not only by “radicalizing” it through an extension to domains neglected or unsuspected by Husserl but even by modifying its very project. Still more precisely, it is a question, for these authors, of thinking with Husserl against Husserl. With Husserl, for phenomenology is given as the privileged method of philosophy; but against Husserl, for his controlling project of a philosophy as an autonomous, first, and distinct science must be rejected. This torsion that describes and delimits the existential current finds its origins in one of the first and most important phenomenologists, Emmanuel Levinas.
Levinas’s Reading of Husserl
We should pause to note a historical fact with a considerable impact on the fate of contemporary phenomenology, namely that phenomenology was discovered, in France,47 beginning with Levinas’s writings on Husserl and Heidegger. Thus Sartre recalled that he “had come to phenomenology through Levinas” just before he left for Berlin,48 and Derrida observed in Writing and Difference that “the departure from Greece was discreetly premeditated in [Levinas’s] The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. In France, in 1930, this was the first major work devoted to the entirety of Husserl’s thought.”49 This assessment was confirmed by Maurice Blanchot, who reported that “without him [Levinas], in 1927 or 1928 I could not have begun to understand Being and Time. This book provoked a genuine intellectual shock in me.”50 Likewise, Jean-François Lyotard declares in Phenomenology51 that The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, as well as Levinas’s articles from the same period,52 constitute the key texts for understanding phenomenology in France.53 From his first major work,54 Levinas proposed a significant alteration to Husserl’s thought, an alteration that his later works would accentuate. This alteration can certainly be described in terms of a bias in Levinas toward a Heideggerian reading of Husserl. Nevertheless, if, as Jean Hering (the first to review this work) immediately saw, Levinas attempted to explain “the tree by its fruit, I mean, Husserl’s phenomenology by Heidegger’s metaphysics,”55 we still must note that this Heideggerian commitment quickly takes on a particular, and specifically Levinasian, character. Indeed, Levinas is less concerned about Being and its history than the concrete human being situated in the world. On this point, it appears that Hering’s diagnosis that Levinas would uphold “ontology’s claim of primacy over phenomenology in Husserl’s philosophy”56 must be reconsidered in that, from this text, we can discover the traces of a departure from the question of Being. While he is certainly not Husserlian, as Hering notes, neither is Levinas totally Heideggerian, even in his prewar texts.57 From The Theory of Intuition we see three orientations that Levinas will not cease developing—the concrete man, the invisible, and the undervaluation of “reduction.” Let’s look at these three orientations so we can better understand phenomenology’s first “turn.”
For Levinas, Husserl misses the “concrete man” because of his “intellectualism.” The inventor of phenomenology maintains a theoretical attitude and therefore cannot break with the objectivism proper to science and metaphysics.58 Confronted with this objectifying attitude of theoretical thought, Levinas asks, “Is our main attitude toward reality that of theoretical contemplation? Is not the world presented in its very being as a center of action, as a field of activity or of care—to speak the language of Martin Heidegger?”59 This reference to Heidegger does not have to be the only image of the transformation that Levinas hopes to effect on phenomenology—indeed, he employs a host of non-Heideggerian references, such as Bergson, to resist Husserl’s “intellectualism” or “theoreticism”: “Bergson’s philosophical intuition tightly bound to man’s concrete life and destiny, reaches to its highest point, namely, the act of freedom. This metaphysical foundation of intuition is lacking in Husserl’s phenomenology, and the ties which relate intuition to all the vital forces which define concrete existence are foreign to his thought.”60 This dual citation shows that Levinas means to go in the direction of concrete life and, he specifies, the life of affective states that are found beneath any objectifying act, beyond representation.61 To be sure, we are not far from the themes of Being and Time, but with this—not insignificant—exception: the critique of objectifying thought and the concern for its “before” or its “beyond” is not necessarily tied to the thinking of Being. The concrete man is sought as such, for himself, in himself, the sole aim of phenomenological investigation.
To summarize, where Husserl speaks of pure consciousness, Levinas means concrete life, this life of an embodied and unique single being, with its areas of obscurity (sensibility, feelings, occasional nonintentional movements, etc.).62 This strictly speaking existential63 concern will considerably impact the phenomenological method. Indeed, a sentiment or a feeling cannot be seen; furthermore, to subject it to vision would be to deny its uniqueness, because I do not see pain, I feel it, I have it. The gift will not therefore be synonymous with vision. Thus the idea of a necessary “ruin of representation” with a view to overcoming objectivism, to be coupled with a relativization of vision. The transformation that opens up the theme of the invisible is key. Beginning with Levinas, the phenomenon is no longer the only problem for phenomenology. From then on, the enigma of the invisible will be found confronting the phenomenon. “This way the Other has of seeking my recognition while preserving his incognito, disdaining recourse to a wink-of-the-eye of understanding or complicity, this way of manifesting himself without manifesting himself, we call enigma—going back to the etymology of this Greek term, and contrasting it with the indiscreet and victorious appearing of a phenomenon.”64 From the visible to the invisible, from the phenomenon to the enigma, from manifestation to “what does not manifest itself,” the transformation is radical.
The development of this transformation will entail the relativization of Husserl’s most important concept, reduction. The Theory of Intuition’s undervaluation of reduction has been widely observed; while the text was meant to be an introduction to phenomenology—and was perceived as such—an analysis of reduction appears only at the very end of the book, as if it were merely one theme among others, not the very foundation of phenomenology. Why this reduction of reduction? Probably because reduction cannot be right about the opacity of embodied consciousness, the obscurity of passivity, or the irreducible uniqueness of “concrete life.” Whatever the possible explanations, the distance between Husserl’s phenomenology and Levinas’s first texts turns out to be vast: pure consciousness gives way to concrete life, intention to nonintention, the visible to the invisible; moreover, reduction becomes a tool that most often misses the essential; finally, anti-intellectualism or antitheoreticism becomes the sign of a successful escape from objectifying representation.65
This concretizing of phenomenology, this “becoming flesh” or “feeling” that will mark it beginning with and after Levinas, seems to be at the source of the advancement, in phenomenological studies, of a mode of expression that approaches literary writing. The theme of the embodied, passive man, thrown into a world that transcends him, is much more likely to come into agreement with the concerns of writers or artists than Husserl’s austere analyses of numbers. Neither Maurice Blanchot, nor Georges Bataille,66 nor Sartre the writer are mistaken on this point—from the first, they rejected an excessive attention to the general in Husserl’s phenomenology and welcomed Levinas as the thinker of the singular. Philosophy, insofar as it claimed to be science, had lost sight of something essential that literature or art could perhaps give back to it. �
�Seeing the invisible”—isn’t that what artists do?67 But doesn’t the turning then turn out to be an escape from philosophy? Indeed, Levinas’s reading leads to a questioning not only of metaphysics but of all philosophy. Before Husserl, philosophy defined itself as metaphysics, and even Nietzsche, according to a famous claim of Heidegger’s, remained a metaphysician. With the establishment of phenomenology, Husserl should have overcome philosophy as metaphysics. But according to Levinas’s terms, Husserl has not gone far enough and remains within metaphysics by virtue of his attention to theoretical generality. We thus have a first movement that consists of understanding phenomenology as breaking with metaphysics, and a second that consigns phenomenology itself to metaphysics. Jocelyn Benoist, going back over phenomenology’s fate, succinctly summarizes this series of substitutions (metaphysics = all philosophy prior to Husserl, then phenomenology = metaphysics): “[Phenomenology’s] considerable success, certainly, was at first indissociable from an anti-metaphysical struggle. But along the way, it may be that phenomenology became the last resort of the very metaphysics that it had rejected.”68 This equation achieves a simple result: philosophy has always been metaphysics; to escape from metaphysics will henceforth be to examine other ways of expressing, writing, and saying than those employed by philosophy. The swerve that phenomenology takes toward a literary mode seems to me to be extremely important for understanding the ambiguity that runs through contemporary phenomenological writing, an ambiguity that will go beyond Levinas—we will see how—but that we must first locate in his epigones.
The Death of Philosophy Page 9
