The third example that can be thus analyzed is found in the realm of the “good,” rather than the “true,” of desirable conduct rather than acceptable argumentation, and of practice rather than theory. Rorty unceasingly announces his desire for a new orientation, pragmatism, and exhorts his readers to contribute to its realization. The pragmatist “must,” he “refuses to accept”—in a word, “the pragmatist is urging that we do our best to stop having such intuitions.”38 But doesn’t “doing one’s best” to achieve a position assume, on the one hand, abandoning Rorty’s own39 radical historicism and, on the other, the assertion that there is a “better” (system, attitude, practice, or behavior), which ought to be established by one’s (intentional?) action?
Briefly, as Putnam underlines, Rorty’s problem is that he tells us “that from a God’s-Eye View there is no God’s-Eye View,” thus bringing pragmatic contradiction, the gap between a statement’s contents and its status as an utter-ance,40 to its peak.
This is the first significant insight that this examination of the theme of the end of philosophy has yielded. The “end of philosophy” engenders a paradoxical discursive attitude because it consists in affirming a matter while simultaneously denying it. Before I turn to see whether this performative contradiction can be found in other versions of the end of philosophy, I must first better establish the argument that Rorty’s thought as a whole falls under this contradiction.
The Paradox of the Statement in Rorty’s “Antiphilosophy”
Why do we need further verification, when the examples I’ve discussed (argument, truth, his practical posture) abundantly illustrate my argument? Because Rorty’s defenders deny it, indeed arguing, with the help of an argument well-known since Aristotle and since repeated against every skeptical challenge,41 that we cannot reject outright so many of Rorty’s analyses. As Putnam notes, many philosophers, confronted with the objection of self-refutation, have a tendency to deny what they have maintained in stating “that they didn’t mean” exactly what they had written. In this respect, Putnam remarks that Rorty has tended to modify certain positions adopted in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that immediately fell under the force of this objection: “Well, his [Rorty’s] views are certainly much more nuanced than are typical Relativist views. He has also hanged them, often in ways I approve of. So I am not sure just what he is prepared to defend. But I shall take the risk of putting forward an amalgam of Rorty’s published views as the view I think he holds now.”42 So much rhetorical caution does not simply indicate a habit of charitable reading, nor the friendly esteem that these two thinkers share, but is rather a symptom of Rorty’s paradoxical discursive attitude. What is he “prepared to defend,” that is, to assert? Can we attribute a positive thesis (apart from the “antis” that we have teased out) to Rorty? And if we were to do so, wouldn’t he deny it? This stance (close to that of certain deconstructionists, like Derrida) means that readers as unfailing, attentive, and acute as Putnam are finally “not sure just what [Rorty] is prepared to defend.”
So let’s examine those moments where Rorty obviously confronts the objection of a performative contradiction and tries to avoid it. Consider, for example, the following passage, where this desire is palpable:
For the pragmatist,43 the only thing wrong with Nagel’s intuitions is that they are being used to legitimize a vocabulary (the Kantian vocabulary in morals, the Cartesian vocabulary in philosophy of mind) which the pragmatist thinks should be eradicated rather than reinforced. But his only argument for thinking that these intuitions and vocabularies should be eradicated is that the intellectual tradition to which they belong has not paid off, is more trouble than it is worth, has become an incubus. Nagel’s dogmatism of intuitions is no worse, or better, than the pragmatist’s inability to give noncircular arguments.44
If we break this text down, we will note that we first encounter two kinds of assertions that are likely to “trap Rorty in the bind” of performative contradiction, since he declares that x “is false” and must be “eradicated.” Yet Rorty also claims that we speak of “truth” only by “courtesy or convention”;45 it follows that the property of “being false” ought never to be attributed to any view. Yet he does so here, and, more generally, consistently throughout his work. Moreover, knowing, as we have seen, that pragmatism supports historicism, it is difficult to understand how to explain the use of voluntarist vocabulary of action like “to eradicate.” Thus, Rorty here twice utters a self-contradictory statement. Nevertheless, the second part of the passage reaffirms that it is only a question here of one position among others, “neither better nor worse” than Nagel’s, though the latter is declared “false,” and that the pragmatist can only produce a circular argument. This circularity can be understood in three ways if we adhere to the indications in Rorty’s texts. First, it could be a question of returning to the sole “criterion” of history. One would thus say, “Today we realize that the results of these intuitions are bad.” This is a position often adopted by Rorty, who, following Heidegger’s example, thinks that philosophy is at the origin of the West’s productions, both material (technology) and political (exterminating domination). There would be circularity here because we rely upon our immediate and historic present to assert that “this thing is bad.” But, if this is Rorty’s position, it contains the same contradiction as does (more obviously) the position that denies any relevance to the notion of truth. Indeed, Rorty assumes that his historical description is the best, and, in fact, that such a philosophical position “hasn’t produced any results.” How could he reply to an interlocutor who objected that philosophy hasn’t produced anything like what he rejects and that our situation is, if not absolutely good, at least better than serfdom in the Middle Ages or human sacrifice under the Aztecs? To maintain his position, Rorty must presuppose that his historical diagnosis is better than that of the happy Westerner who would see only progress (or democracy, or well-being, or equality, etc.) in the course of history. The circular argument thus assumes on the one hand a preliminary thesis and, on the other, an evaluation of this thesis as better than one that asserts the opposite. We are faced with the presupposition that there is indeed a “better argument,” which, however, Rorty rejects. This first interpretation thus does not allow Rorty to escape from a performative contradiction.
Second, one could suppose here that Rorty stakes out a more coherent and classical sophistical position that would mean the following: “I only support what you support for my momentary personal interest, and if I feign to have arguments, it is so that others will come around to my position.” Rorty sometimes adopts this well-known claim of Gorgias’s, when, for example, he compares the philosopher to a lawyer who uses appropriate rhetoric to plead for his client, and thereby, his own interest.46 For a consistent sophist, the only way to justify this stance is to admit that one converses only to earn a living; in this frame, the discourse is only perlocutionary, that is, it aims to convince another to pay to defend a cause that he will have decided, out of self-interest, to make his own. But if Gorgias holds this view and is thus consistent, the same is not true for Rorty, whose alternatives go entirely against this defense of the basest private interest. It is needless to cite the numerous well-known sentences in which Rorty denounces the civilization of individual self-interest, its structuring according to the Darwinian metaphor of the survival of the fittest, as well as the West’s oppression of different civilizations, and other edifying sermons of the virtuous moralist.47 Here, too, Rorty cannot sustain his position all the way through and falls into a contradiction in the very precise sense that justification by use of the metaphor of the lawyer, defending any case at all, is invalidated by the contents of the oeuvre as a whole (the exhortation to virtue, the edification of the people, the occasional call for a revolution in viewpoint, etc.).
Finally, a third interpretation of the circularity would consist in reading Rorty’s claim as follows: “I want to eradicate because I want to eradicate, I do not like
Nagel’s position because I do not like this position.” This pure tautology—a singular and, to put it bluntly, desperate cry—resembles a bet. Rorty would say to us, “There is no justification for such a position if it is not a bet, either on the future (the contingent future will perhaps agree with me) or, more radically, a gratuitous bet (even if the future disagrees and perpetuates Nagel’s old intuitions, in any case, I will claim the opposite right now).” But if this is the correct interpretation, well, as Putnam remarks:
Why should we expend our mental energy in convincing ourselves that we aren’t thinkers, that our thoughts aren’t really about anything, noumenal or phenomenal, that there is no sense in which any thought is right or wrong (including the thought that no thought is right or wrong) beyond being the verdict of the moment, and so on? This is a self-refuting enterprise if ever there was one!48
Thus, it is clear that the same contradiction is to be found at every level of Rorty’s thought, insurmountable in that the speaker’s position annuls the contents of the statement or the contents of the statement eliminate the possibility of its utterance. Rorty cannot but lapse into these paradoxes of speaking, cannot avoid this strange logical pathology that destroys a discourse from within, without needing external arguments to do so.49 The only possible way out would be a break with the enunciative contract, which would consist, for the author, in claiming that he does not “claim” what the reader believes he has claimed. To put this clearly, it would be a matter of declaring, “You think that I claim that this intuition (Nagel’s, Descartes’, etc.) is false, but in fact, I was playing another language game, for example, poetry or parody. You thought I was developing within a discursive register where I claimed to assert ‘this is false’ and to justify this assertion with arguments that I considered better than arguments that ‘this is true,’ but in fact, I was composing a song, recounting an epic poem, writing a novel, etc.” This position, which Rorty attributes to Derrida,50 is also implicated in these often noted pragmatic paradoxes. In Rorty’s eyes, texts like Of Grammatology or The Post Card are weavings of metaphors, interlaced tales that have status only as pure fiction. As he writes, “Derrida is coming to resemble Nietzsche less and less and Proust more and more. He is concerned less and less with the sublime and ineffable, and more and more with the beautiful, if fantastical, rearrangement of what he remembers.”51 Rorty’s radicality can be seen here. Indeed, in a single movement, one can understand that Derrida is more on the side of literature (Proust) than philosophy (Nietzsche), while in fact, no one is on the side of philosophy because Nietzsche comes under literature as much as Proust—the only difference is that Nietzsche’s prose refers rather to an aesthetic of the sublime, whereas Proust and Derrida remain within a problematic of the beautiful. Could Rorty’s interpretation of Derrida—of which it is difficult to say, as Jacques Bouveresse remarks, whether it is charitable or insulting52—be applied to Rorty’s works? If so, then in fact there is no longer anything left to challenge in his work, we can only consider it as a sort of phony novel, a huge enunciative farce, a fiction worthy of Borges in which philosophers as serious as Putnam, Habermas, or Donald Davidson have allowed themselves to be fooled into “acting as if” it were about arguments to be discussed. Would Rorty allow such a treatment of his works? Would he accept an assessment of his books that would content itself with noting that they suggest so little of a strictly literary viewpoint, or of a masked irony, that they risk imprisonment in a private language? Like Putnam, I cannot be sure how Rorty would respond, but, whatever he would say, Rorty’s alternatives, like Derrida’s, are simple: either their initial intentions are not to produce a stylistic work (literature, poetry, a novel) but indeed to assert theses subject to deliberation and debate (philosophy, theory, an essay), in which case their positions contain a logical pathology that can be spotted at every level; or else they are writing literature and their works should be evaluated according to criteria if no longer of beauty (a much too metaphysical category) at least of the extent to which the result (writing Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) matches its stated aim (to produce a stylistic work). If the latter is the case, we can probably allow ourselves to state that the overall aesthetic results are less “successful” than Remembrance of Things Past, but this is of little significance with respect to this study, because if Rorty and Derrida take the second of these alternatives, then their proposition that “philosophy has reached its end” cannot in the least be considered.
What are we to conclude at the end of this analysis of the first occurrence of the proposition asserting the end of philosophy? That the proposition is impossible to utter. It belongs to an ensemble of propositions whose hallmark is the performative contradiction “I am not speaking.” A good understanding and a detailed analysis of Rorty’s position53 are conclusive, inasmuch as his position constitutes, in its very radicality, the horizon for discourses that deny philosophy, and their theses’ ineluctable point of convergence.
It will be said, however, that the challenge to philosophy is made not only in the name of a universal skepticism but also, and perhaps above all, as the result of a clearly positivist perspective that means to “dissolve” philosophy within a “hard” science. We must now examine this second variation on the theme of the end of philosophy, for, as Sandra Laugier notes, “the partisans of post-philosophy (like Rorty) and those of cognitivist philosophy (like Jerry Fodor) have many commonalities—for example, their denial, in a sense which I have yet to demonstrate, of language and philosophy.”54 Let’s now consider this denial, in the name of an already constituted science, of the philosophical discourse as an autonomous and specific practice.
The Dissolution of Philosophy in a Positive Science
Positivism, Scientism, and Radical Scientism
Contemporary positivism, if it is not to be immediately compared to its great developmental period (Hermann von Helmholtz’s era, in the mid-nineteenth century),55 appears in multiple forms: either by the assertion of a hard and pure logicism that, rejecting any questioning of itself, aims only to become a simple calculus detached from philosophy; or by a more classical positivism that is expressed in the development of the “cognitive sciences”56 or in the various programs of the different forms of naturalism57 as well as many aspects of the “philosophy of mind”;58 or even by the bias no longer of philosophy stricto sensu but of certain human sciences that, as Pierre Bourdieu notes, sometimes tend to oscillate between the most radical relativism and the most radical scientism.59
To which of these multiple versions of positivism should we give priority, to best guide our consideration of the nature of the discourses about the end of philosophy? We should first exclude those theses or theories that, even though positivist, do not at all call for the death of philosophy. Indeed, we should not delineate “positivism” and “antiphilosophy” as synonyms, as some Heideggerian philosophers do all too often. The history of philosophy shows that positivism is a possible philosophical option, and not its antithesis. Thus Hermann von Helmholtz, one of positivism’s founding fathers, proclaimed the autonomy of philosophy as a theory of knowledge; nothing was further from his intentions than to predict its end would result from the likely advancement of physiology (of which he was the greatest specialist of his age). Likewise, for Bertrand Russell, logic’s refinement was a bearer of progress in philosophy and not, as some of his followers too quickly misrepresented it, a harbinger of philosophy’s death. And again, cognitive sciences’ development today does not at all have to be thought of as necessarily incompatible with the need to maintain philosophy as an autonomous—that is, first—discipline. This is why, more than positivism in its multiple variations, its reduction to radical “scientism” is what we must examine. Indeed, in the general term “scientific position,” we must understand two movements: (1) the choice of any positive science (biology, physics, neurology, etc.) as a paradigm of truth and (2) the exclusion of all methods and types of validity apart from those employed in the chosen science
. Thus, while a positivism like Helmholtz’s can recognize different fields and forms of truth that need not be reduced to the one or the other if they sometimes meet (for example, Fichte’s developments of the notion of an “image” and the physiological theory of perception),60 scientism means to delimit a single field, to advance a single type of truth, and to employ a single method, that of “this” constituted science.
The Death of Philosophy Page 4