One might object to Putnam’s argument that Quine is skeptical in order to relativize his positivism, that he understands his naturalism in the light of skepticism. In short, if he specifies a condition for deciding between what is true knowledge and what isn’t, then, to put it most charitably, in the end that condition can be changed and is thus not unconditioned. Let’s consider this last aspect of the possible defense of Quine.
Quine would say, in fact, that a given statement is true “for the moment,” for him because he maintains it, but at a later stage of his life, or of the evolution of society, or even of the species’ evolution, this statement will be false. On this point, he writes, in one of his last works, “a sentence is analytic if the native speaker learns to assent to it in learning one of its words.”114 Thus, “in learning our language, we each learn to accept certain sentences straightaway as true.”115 Quine returns to the conventionalism peculiar to skepticism that we have examined at length in Rorty. But Quine is thereby subject to the same objections as skepticism. Indeed, what is the status of this assertion that today’s truth is tomorrow’s error? A convention? Should we say that this proposition (“today’s truth, tomorrow’s error”) appears true to us today because we are at a certain moment in the evolution of the species? At every stage of the proof, in applying itself to itself, the proposition is self-refuting. We find here a structure analogous to what we discovered in Rorty’s radical historicism; if everything that depends upon history can change, we cannot say why this proposition (“everything depends upon history”) should be accepted as true or even as more likely than its exact opposite. In brief, either the proposition is self-refuting or it has no way to refute the claim that its contrary is preferable. We can no longer argue for the value of our point of view if we make it dependent upon the most complete contingency. Quine’s system leads, in the final analysis, to these forms of contradiction. Even those commentators least likely to be suspected of not defending the American philosopher’s point of view end by identifying the performative contradiction that strains the entire system.116 On this point, Sandra Laugier writes at the end of L’anthropologie logique de Quine, a book entirely dedicated to showing the coherence of Quine’s system, “however, there is, ultimately, a contradiction. Not between one thesis and another of Quine’s system, but between Quine’s conception of what philosophy ought to be and his philosophical practice.”117
This examination of Quine’s thought shows that the system contains a tension between a proposition’s status and its contents—which we already saw in Rorty. This is a major discovery for my analysis, because it reveals more and more clearly a common characteristic of discourses claiming the end of philosophy. Whether this end is proclaimed in the name of skepticism or in the name of its apparent contrary, scientism, this assertion is always marred by the same peculiarity—its impossibility of being said! And so I am now able to draw out the conclusions of this first discourse that explicitly calls for the end of philosophy.
Conclusions: Self-refutation and Oscillation Between Scientism and Skepticism
The principal lesson of my analysis is the following: the end of philosophy can neither be self-proclaimed nor self-diagnosed in a coherent manner. Each of the positions I’ve considered rests upon the impossibility of asserting its contents without falling into a performative contradiction. The philosophers that I have discussed find themselves in a quite strange situation—they have spent years and years working in a discipline, with the singular goal of demonstrating its worthlessness or its impossibility. Philosophy is worthless—so claims scientism—because neurobiology (or any “hard” science) will cut through the old, now futile, philosophical questions. (This is a stance that, despite its declared antifoundationalism, draws upon a foundation that is simultaneously most traditional and most radical—nature. We think x and y, since we are mammalian and bipedal, that is “by nature.”) Philosophy is impossible—so claims skepticism and relativism—because of their conception of the philosophical discourse’s intrinsic impotency. Philosophy is impossible—finally, according to deconstruction,118 which would “overcome” the Western philosophical tradition to reach its completion. Theirs is thus the strange situation of a discipline that apparently has no other end but to articulate its own impossibility, and in order to do so, sinks into a unique practice, self-refutation.
We have seen how this self-refutation always takes the form of what François Récanati, following others, has called a performative or pragmatic contradiction, illustrated by statements like “I am not speaking,” which in order to be spoken must always presuppose the inverse of what is said. Karl-Otto Apel has suggested that this pragmatic paradox weighs on all contemporary analytic philosophy, and he has argued that it has never taken the trouble to address this contradiction. Without taking up this claim in its entirety, I have, at least, shown that, on a very particular point—namely, the theme of the end of philosophy—performative contradiction is omnipresent and radical. It follows that this proposition that philosophy has reached its end cannot be maintained in a consistent manner.119
Beyond this lesson about the existence and the nature of this contradiction at the heart of these declarations of the end of philosophy, the preceding analyses yield a second insight: that the most radical skepticism and the most thoroughgoing scientism stand in surprising proximity. I have shown that the gap here between strict scientism and radical relativism is very narrow. What’s more, the two extremes seem not only to follow in temporal succession but also necessarily to give rise to each other, as is attested by the fact that both skepticism and positivism, in all the cases we’ve considered, proceed from one and the same text. Thus Rorty makes reference, as do Paul and Patricia Churchland, to Quine; and all three seem empowered to do so. Indeed, if we consider Quine’s thesis that “‘Save logical truth’ is conventional in character because of the indeterminacy of translation,”120 then Rorty is clearly right to count Quine among the fathers of contemporary skepticism. On the other hand, if we consider Quine’s desire to imagine a “naturalized epistemology,” by which he means to dissolve philosophy in another science,121 then we’re compelled to recognize that that is the consistent project of the most traditional scientism, encompassing the Churchlands’ naturalist program. This congruence—between scientism, for which truth (that of a given “hard” science) is real, and the idea that truth, as Rorty puts it, is only a “compliment paid to successful normal discourse”122—is surprising, and we will see in the following chapters whether it should be considered as a simple quirk of Quine’s successors, or whether, on the contrary, it is located within any discourse that asserts—in whatever manner—the death of philosophy.
This dual insight is analogous to the “cuttlefish bone” in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, the unusual element that comes to upset the meaning and general order of the whole. This dual insight makes our question even more urgent: given philosophy’s status today, must we unavoidably accept either self-refutation (which effectively renders the discipline useless) or abandon philosophizing (turning instead to the “hard” sciences)? Is the idea of philosophy as a rigorous and autonomous science123—an idea proclaimed by Aristotle and Fichte, as well as Hegel and, later, Husserl—is this idea untenable now, and must we relegate it to the dustbin of obsolete disciplines? What is it about this claim (Stanley Cavell calls it “arrogance”124) on philosophy’s behalf that the contemporary world would prefer self-destruction or self-refutation to philosophy?
To answer these questions, we will have to take our analyses even further. Up to now, we have examined the most radical denials of philosophy—the “antiphilosophy” that Rorty would seek and those forms of scientism that originate in the naturalist claim that philosophy has become a “chapter of natural science.” Now we must examine philosophies in which this theme is less directly expressed, albeit quite perceptible. To best show its excesses, we will need to look at all the guises or variations in which this theme of “death” appears. And
yet I noted in the introduction that this theme of philosophy’s end or exhaustion is just as visible in Austin and his successors as in Heidegger and his disciples. And it is not the least paradoxical to observe how this thesis hovers above the paradigmatic disputes, as if beyond the strident opposition that has left its mark on the philosophies of the twentieth century, a single motif that unites them in the end. This is why I won’t hesitate to challenge old habits, to refuse to accept dichotomies, and to disregard given boundaries in encompassing two different ways of pronouncing the end of philosophy in a single chapter. It is clearly not a question of proposing a synthesis—both impossible and ridiculous—of the two paradigms, but rather of following a single theme—the end of philosophy—through first its pragmatic and then its phenomenological variations. I will show how, regardless of whether one is Continental or analytic, the end of philosophy is articulated in very similar, quasi-identical terms. In contrast to the first chapter, where we saw an aspiration to “post-” or “antiphilosophy” as such, we shall see that the assertions are less stark, not as uncompromising or demanding as Rorty’s or Quine’s radical positions. Nevertheless, they just as clearly declare that philosophy is completed or exhausted, in that other practices (scientific or poetic, even religious) are supposed to take its place. We must analyze this funerary eulogy in the analytic paradigm, and then in current Continental philosophy, that is, in a certain type of contemporary phenomenology.
2
“Saying and the Said”: Two Paradigms for the Same Subject
Opposition or Overlap of Paradigms?
That two traditions as opposed as the Continental and analytic traditions could thus be encompassed within a single thematic calls for a more nuanced justification than a simple assertion. Different reasons undergird this grouping, reasons whose full force won’t be able to appear until my analysis has been completed.
As I showed earlier in Critique de la représentation,1 these two philosophical currents—both the most widely practiced and the most different in style—have as a common horizon a questioning of the concept of representation. But even if these two great movements of contemporary philosophy are both structured around this critique, they do not give it the same significance. Indeed, for that part of contemporary philosophy that emerges from phenomenology, to critique representation is to denounce objectivizing, classically scientific, knowledge’s claim to take account of all aspects of the world or a thing. The thing, far from being reducible to its representation, would remain an excess with respect to representation. Catherine Chalier adopts this perspective when, commenting on Emmanuel Levinas, she asks, “How are we to resolve the paradox—that is, contradiction—… between finite, mortal humanity and an infinite God; between the visible, its splendor and its intimate closeness, and the invisible that actually shatters its limits, decries the violence of its light and drives us to despair of security in its view?”2 To interrogate the thing’s irreducible excess with respect to its representation, to reject thinking’s pretentions to make visible what is not (the other, the infinite, God, being, etc.)—this is the guiding intention that animates this form of the critique of representation. Apart from this guiding intention, for which it is a matter of insisting on the thing’s transcendence, this passage from Chalier reveals two other decisive parameters. First of all, there is the theme of vision and its opposite, the invisible; second, that of limits and the infinite. This type of critique is very explicitly structured by the oppositions between the visible and the invisible, and between the finite and the infinite. This first current, which springs from a certain Heideggerian reading of phenomenology, brings together the biblical problematic of idolatry and its theme of the referent’s irreducible excess. In a word, the critique of representation is effected here in the name of an incommensurability, an invisibility, a transcendence.
This, however, is certainly not Anglo-Saxon philosophy’s understanding of the critique of representation. When François Récanati writes, for example, that “between the two World Wars, two authors have decisively undertaken the critique of representationalism—and they are Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin,”3 the term “critique of representation” clearly does not have the same meaning it does above. In this analytic context, it is not a question of acknowledging the thing itself, its excess or its transcendence. Récanati’s term “representationalism” here refers to theories in which the unique function of a statement is to represent a thing’s state or a fact. Representationalism thus designates the first wave of analytic philosophy, defended by the Vienna Circle philosophers (among others), for whom the truth value of a proposition is determined by the state of affairs to which it refers. “To represent,” in the context of early logical empiricism, means to refer to an exterior object; representation thus becoming a synonym for the act of referring to a prior state of affairs. This is the thesis that Austin criticizes, in showing that a statement does not necessarily represent facts but can also manifest a desire, exert an influence, etc. In the analytic context, critique of representation is constructed around the idea that a sign’s function is not necessarily to refer to a being or a state of affairs external to the sign. This is why, in Austin’s pragmatism, what is examined is not the thing’s excess with respect to representation but rather the statement’s excess with respect to the exclusive representation of facts. The excess here is an excess of the sign, which says more than it ought to say and thus goes beyond its simple referential function. And so it is because the sign has an excess with respect to the simple function of representation (as reference to a state of affairs)—not, on the contrary, because the referent (the thing, God, the infinite, etc.) has an excess with respect to representation—that a “critique of representation” is needed. The two critiques of representation are thus oriented in inverse directions; there is also a difference in their view of the pertinent parameters likely to define representation. In the analytic lens, the visible/invisible, finite/infinite oppositions—which structure the critique of representation that springs from phenomenology—are strictly speaking meaningless. The thematic is that of the symbol and its transitivity, of the sign and its reference. On the one hand we have the face and visibility, limits and infinity; on the other, sign and reference: the contemporary critique of representation seems to have split into two antagonistic currents in which the first valorizes the thing’s excess with respect to representation, while the second valorizes the sign’s excess with respect to its simple function of referring or reference to a state of affairs.
But if this difference is real, it nevertheless remains that the interrogation of concepts of “vision” on the one hand and of the “sign” on the other are at the service of the same critique, that of representation, which was itself given as the paradigm of all prior philosophy. This first point of convergence is important for our inquiry because it clearly seems that, in both cases, philosophy is considered as something that must be overcome. In particular, this overcoming will be presented as a demand to go beyond or outside philosophy (Austin, Levinas). Moreover, beyond this already troubling commonality, an even more surprising one will emerge: in both cases, critique of representation and of philosophy4 takes the form of a theory of saying and the said—clearly in Austin’s case, but also, I will show, in Levinas’s. The critique of philosophy through a new theory of saying and the said—this is the paradoxical proximity that unifies the two paradigms, an overlap that will become apparent at the end of my analysis.
The Evolution of the Linguistic Paradigm: Pragmatism
If the struggle between philosophy of consciousness and philosophy of language today seems to have tipped in favor of philosophy of language,5 it has not resulted in a pure and simple continuation of the first model of analysis that—with Carnap—professed an entirely positivist theory of truth. The “redundancy theory” of truth—according to which the “proposition ‘p’ is true if and only if p,” in which a proposition’s truth is thus nothing other than the affirmation of a fact ex
terior to the proposition (for example, snow is white), and for which only this extrinsic reference validates our propositions—is far from being as widely accepted today as it was up to the middle of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the second wave of the “linguistic turn,”6 which Wittgenstein and Austin inaugurated in the second half of the twentieth century, today embodies a widely shared trend—which we must examine insofar as it is a bearer of the theme of philosophy’s exhaustion.
Austin’s View
Let’s recall first of all that Austin, in initiating “ordinary language”7 philosophy, effected an upheaval with respect to the classical practice of philosophy. Indeed, just like the later Wittgenstein, he meant to disrupt the “essentializing,” “generalizing” visions proper to metaphysics, which multiplied imaginable entities as well as insoluble problems. He judged that classical philosophy was trapped in bad questions where a rigorous analysis of the terms used ought to be easily able to reveal the ostensible problems’ inanity. On this point, his treatment of the old and enduring philosophical problem about perceptual illusions—the dispute about realism (are things anything other than their appearances?)8—is emblematic of his general approach. But by means of this clear rupture, amply underscored, Austin decisively breaks with the “first wave of analysis”9 initiated by the Vienna Circle, who, granting what Austin decried as the “‘descriptive’ fallacy,”10 asserted that in order for a statement to have meaning it must necessarily be “constative” (it must say something about a prior and exterior referent). But Austin, with his differentiation between constative and performative utterances (the latter doing something by the very fact of being spoken, for example, “I leave my watch to my brother”), introduced what he himself termed a “revolution”11 in the history of philosophy, because he no longer tied a statement’s truth only to its reference to an exterior x.
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