The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  The second stage of argumentation is a challenging of the general principle itself. The speaker will thus be compelled to give “a theoretical justification” in response to this challenge. If the challenge concerns truth claims, he will be able to propose one or several empirical verifications. He will thus argue by recourse to induction. In the moral domain (justice claims), if someone responds to a speaker’s exhortation with “it is tedious to repay money that one has borrowed and is used to thinking of as one’s own,”37 thus challenging the legitimacy of a norm in the name of one’s own pleasure, then the interlocutor should find a substitute for empirical verification—in this case, Habermas tells us, a consideration of interests. But the interest invoked in support of the norm obviously cannot simply be the individual’s sole interest, for it is true that the listener would have an easy time showing that it is never in one’s immediate interest to repay a debt, retorting that “you—you pay your debts, but my poor friend you will never be anything, much less a government office-holder.”38 This is why the interest must be a universalizable interest. On this point, a Habermasian speaker could learnedly reply that we must repay our debts because “loans make possible a flexible use of scarce resources.”39 He thereby underscores that this act, which contributes to society’s smooth functioning, is beneficial in return for the individual. If, in the theory, the movement between a principle and its casuistic evidence is by induction, in practice, it is the principle of universalization that permits the establishment of a norm: “Participants in a practical discourse strive to clarify a common interest.”40 From an analysis of discourse in “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” Habermas shows the necessity of this principle of universalization for discussion. The passage to this second level of discussion is thus also necessary. Indeed, to legitimate a norm is to justify it with an interest common to all; but interests, as Habermas explains repeatedly, are themselves the product of the species’ evolution, of historically elaborated needs. Hence, the norm is nothing other than a confirmation of appropriateness spontaneously adjusted by evolution. If argumentation encompassed only these two levels, its necessity would be absolute and it would be impossible to define argument as a “force of rational motivation.” This is why a consensus can be real only if it is possible to modify the justifying language. This is the function of the third level of discussion. “Modifying the terminological or conceptual system” consists quite simply in asking whether the theories (the ensemble of norms or assertions) are well adapted to their aims. This means, for example, in physics, the possibility to move from an Aristotelian theory to a Copernican; similarly, in morality, it means the possibility of challenging a norm’s relevance, whether it is adapted to our present needs, with, Habermas tells us, “considerations of a meta-ethical or metapolitical order.” This can be done without necessarily sinking into the comical bad faith of one of Albert Cohen’s characters, who, disputing the debtor’s obligation, accuses his creditor of immorality: “For thirty years, Abravanel, you’ve demanded payment from him with a disgusting greed.”41 A number of more plausible arguments can indeed be called upon. It is thus possible to take up something comparable to Hegel’s analysis of deposits—to show that the demand for repayment supposes a society founded on property, that the declared advantages of “a flexible use of scarce resources” are meaningful only in a capitalist society, and finally, that other kinds of relations are conceivable. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, shows in analyzing the notion of debt that it has no meaning within a community like the family—of which the current French civil code has preserved certain traces, since it stipulates that every debt requires a written act, except among members of a family, which clearly shows that the notion of debt has meaning only for certain kinds of relations.42 But on what authority can a theory be criticized? One could initially reply that a theory will be challenged by counterexamples that falsify it. Thus, in physics, the discovery of sunspots demonstrating generation and corruption in the extralunar world could be considered as one of the decisive experiments contributing to the establishment of the Galilean theory. Similarly, in morality, the proposition “one must always pay one’s debts” is liable to be falsified in the name of morality itself: it is not always in the general interest that third-world countries repay their debts, and the fact that a dictator in one of these countries is acquitted is not necessarily a sign of an irreproachable integrity of character. By definition, when a principle relies on induction (or on its practical equivalent, the universalization of interests), counterexamples are always possible. However, it does not seem that this possibility is what Habermas intends for a critique of theories, for such a thesis would presuppose an epistemological conception that he views, moreover, as naive. Indeed, we all know that the credibility of experiments in physics depends upon a prior theoretical framework in which they are situated, and—without necessarily sharing Pierre Duhem’s holistic conception in which an experiment is not even capable of falsifying an existing theory—the fact nevertheless remains that Habermas here refuses to claim that new theories are born out of an experiment or a series of experiments. This is why the challenging of a theory can be effected only in the fourth and final level of discussion. This ultimate stage “leads to a level of discourse at which with the aid of the peculiarly circular movement of rational reconstruction we become aware of what should count as knowledge: how cognitive achievements which may lay claim to the title of knowledge ought to be constituted.”43 This stage presupposes a radicalization that goes well beyond a discourse limited to scholars (and, moreover, this is why Habermas calls this the level of self-reflection). Here it is a matter of inquiring about the ultimate meaning of a scientific theory. To clarify this somewhat difficult point of the thesis, let’s look at three theories in physics: the theory developed in 1245 by Gossuin of Metz in his text Mirrour of the World,44 Galileo’s theory, and finally, Descartes’. Beyond their clear divergences on properly physical statements (their theories of space, movement, light, the stars, etc.), there is a much more fundamental difference that goes well beyond the framework of a discussion among specialists—namely, the purpose that they assign to physical knowledge. For the medieval physicist, physics’ goal was not to know the world for what it is but to understand God’s message through it. The physicist’s work thus resembles that of the hermeneuticist—it consists in decoding the forest of symbols that is nature, deciphering beyond its literal meaning the hidden meaning of a universe understood as a collection of theophanies organized according to a hierarchy leading from the invisible world to the visible world. For Gossuin, following Aristotle’s example in astronomy, to know nature such as it is devoid of meaning or interest. In contrast, Galileo defined physics as the theoretical and neutral explication of what is, and Descartes understood it as a means of creating technical objects and thus of ameliorating the conditions of human life. (On this point, he is far removed from Galileo’s physics—the last articles of part 4 of The Principles of Philosophy45 go so far as to claim that he cares very little, in the final analysis, whether these physical laws correspond to the reality of the world as long as technical objects can be elaborated on their basis.) What is the aim of physics? A goal of immortality, by a relation to the Eternal; a goal of natural reality, by the neutral description of experiments; a goal of morality, by the amelioration of the conditions of life on earth—this must be determined by the fourth level of discourse. But what are the criteria that will allow us to classify one theory as scientific and another as mythical? In whose name do we determine the value of a knowledge claim? Habermas tells us that at this stage of argumentation, it is impossible to dissociate theoretical and practical discourse: “This last step breaks through the boundaries of theoretical discourse … theoretical principles reveal their practical core,”46 and reciprocally for practical discourse, “this last step also breaks through the boundaries of practical discourse because the practical question ‘what knowledge ought we to desire?�
�� … is obviously dependent upon the theoretical question ‘what knowledge are we able to desire?’”47

  The disappearance of the boundary between the theoretical and the practical poses an interpretive problem: if it is easy, in a pinch, to understand how the practical presupposes the theoretical (we cannot declare something desirable if it turns out to be not only unrealizable but moreover unrepresentable and inconceivable), on the other hand, the theoretical’s reference to the practical is more ambiguous, at least in Habermas,48 for he posits that the ultimate criterion for the determination of a theory is the consideration of interests. On this point, Habermas explains that to evaluate knowledge we must consider its content as well as the interests with which this content must always coincide. But this interest is no longer to be understood, as it was in his early philosophy, in the sense of interest in emancipation. Indeed, in his second period Habermas no longer takes up this theme,49 which had initially arisen in Max Horkheimer’s critical theory. For this reason, the use of interest here means, for example, that the adoption of Cartesian physics had been commanded by humanity’s interest in increasing its technical competence. Conversely, if a scientist today were to propose that science has a different purpose (for example, to know what is, in order to live in harmony with nature), he would be authorized to say that humanity has an interest—for its survival—in ending the exclusive pursuit of technical development. If, indeed, the survival of humanity is at stake, this theory will be adopted out of self-interest, or else this physicist will be relegated among the dreamers and poets, in other words, among the nonscientific thinkers. These propositions, taken in themselves, are not at all bizarre, but they are difficult to reconcile with the other theses. Indeed, if we consider the entirety of Habermas’s analysis, the determination of a theory’s value seems, at first, to depend on the extent of its conformity with an ideal speech situation. Indeed, the progressive radicalization of argumentation is encouraged by this reference to the ideal; the stages of discourse are tracked by this necessary anticipation. Here, this explanation of argumentation is analogous to Kant’s or Peirce’s. What ensures a theory’s value is its aim, its purpose: the ideal speech situation for Habermas, the idea of system for Kant, the community of scholars for Peirce. But, if not only moral argumentation (by the universalization of interests at the second level) but also theoretical argumentation (by reference to humanity’s interest to determine the ultimate significance of knowledge at the fourth level) depend in the final analysis on the consideration of real interests, it becomes impossible to articulate this thesis with reference to an ideal. What, then, is the ultimate criterion of a theory’s value? Must it be determined on the basis of what is (interests) or of what should be (the purpose inherent in language, embodied in the ideal speech situation)? In other words, if, as Habermas writes, theory refers to the practical, what is the latter’s content—taking account of the interests of humanity, or an investigation of the ideal?

  From this first difficulty engendered by the theory of argumentation, two more can be deduced:

  1. If the entire logic of argumentation rests on interest, knowing that the latter is the product of the evolution of the species, a theory’s value would be determined from its appropriateness to what is. We would thus be returned to the second level of argumentation, where the norm was nothing other than the affirmation of an agreement adjusted by evolution. But the third and fourth levels’ function is to overcome the position brought about by the second. This position closely resembles a form of evolutionism, related to naturalism, which we have seen illustrated by economists like Geoffrey Hodgson. Humanity’s needs evolve as a function of its history and each generation will adapt to new needs. Laws or social organizations—of which individual beliefs and behaviors are traces or echoes—are what could be called natural responses to these needs, for even if some are products of the evolution of societies, they all nevertheless correspond to the necessity of a given moment of the history of the human species (and subsequently, this will be a recognized tenet of contemporary naturalism).

  2. This thesis supposes that the determination of our interests resembles a neutral and clear report, that is, it presupposes the possibility of a discourse that would not be tied to interests. Let me explain this point: either interests are entirely transparent and self-evident (but in that case, an individual or society does not need to intervene), or else the determination of interests must be the object of a fifth level of discourse. Even though this second possibility is implied by Habermas’s theory, it is contradicted, and here the system is self-refuting. As for the first possibility, also a consequence of the system, Habermas denies it because it supposes an ultra-essentialist configuration that Habermas vociferously rejects. For Habermas (particularly in his second period), the alteration of any given presupposes the free act of an individual or a collective subject.

  We obtain two important results from this analysis of the theory of argumentation:

  1. First of all, the contradiction in Habermas’s philosophy can no longer be characterized, as numerous interpreters have done, as a contradiction between an individual’s free act and the institution of language (the paradigm of the subject versus the paradigm of language). If this contradiction or tension might possibly be found in Apel, it cannot be imputed to Habermas, for a human, in his view, is not exclusively a creature of language. This is underlined by his statements such as “The distortion results directly from the uncontrolled penetration into language of paleosymbolic offshoots … the systematic distortion of colloquial communication can be traced to the encapsulation, like foreign bodies, of paleosymbolically linked semantic content in the linguistically regulated application of symbols”50 or again “In the self, a communication block subsists between the language competent ego … and that ‘foreign land within.’”51 This view allows him to maintain the principal thesis of a good essence of language, and to reject as outside it such things as symptoms, deviance, and the unconscious—which, in Habermas’s terms, appear as foreign bodies coming from outside to perturb the structure of language. But this alternative at the same time allows him to conceive individual liberty as the possibility of action upon the real. Indeed, a subject’s freedom or act is located in the gap between a “paleo” level and the structure of language. The subject’s self-reflection, understood here as reflection on the unconscious limitations generating deviances, is founded upon language, to the extent that the demand that motivates the self-reflection is deducible from language, but at the same time the subject’s self-reflection works upon a content exterior to language. Habermas can thus without contradiction count the act of an individual subject among the characteristic traits of a rationality founded on language. To put it more generally, Habermas overcomes this supposed contradiction through the classic distinction between the form of a discourse and its content.52 Indeed, from the point of view of the universal form or structure of discourse, it is not possible to refer to a subject’s act. The constituted authority of language cannot be overcome, nor its immanent telos modified. In this respect, the subject is entirely dependent upon what we could call the pragmatic institution; he discovers, over the course of his apprenticeship, a given that he has not constituted. An analysis of illocutionary force shows its different components (claims to, relations to, engagements with, as well as the four presuppositions inherent in the aim of mutual understanding), which cannot be denied except by sinking “into serious mental illness or suicide.” These components are thus necessary, universal, and independent of spatiotemporal contexts. Must we then conclude, for all that, by a strict application of the principle of the excluded middle (as Manfred Frank seems to do, as well as Jean-Marc Ferry with the alternative that he proposes—either language is the authority and we are not subjects, or else we are subjects and we can supersede and change language), that for Habermas we are not free subjects? No, for the subject will be in charge of bridging the gap between this ideal structurally included within language and its real and
contingent situation, with a content exterior to the form of language. This act, by which a subject “possesses the power to behave reflectively in relation to his subjectivity and to see through the irrational limitations,”53 can be deduced, Habermas tells us, neither from the given nor from the ideal—not from the given for it is not the unconscious, for example, that requires its own updating; not from the ideal for the end orients the act, it does not produce it, or communicative action would be automatically realized, which would return us to a Hegelian schema that Habermas rejects. It follows that if the ideal is given by language, only the subject’s act could try to make the real—that is, deformed communication within the empirical—coincide with the ideal. The institution of language does not negate a subject’s constitutive act but rather furnishes its universal purpose.