2. On the other hand, if there is no internal contradiction in Habermas’s philosophy between linguistic necessity and the individual’s free act, in my view, the contradiction that does emerge from this analysis is just as serious and indeed calls for a radical modification of the theory. The contradiction is located between the idea of the species’ interest, understood as the product of a historical evolution, and the ideal structure of language. What, in the final analysis, justifies the choice of a given theory or practice at the ultimate level of argumentation? The telos immanent in language, or the biologically-then-historically constituted interests of the human species? This is the real tension that lurks at the core of Habermas’s second philosophy and puts it at risk. For Habermas, the historical schema remains54 present to such an extent that it alone is able to interfere with, or even erase, the project’s apparently transcendental structure (investigation into conditions of possibility). Swinging between a naturalist historicism (evolutionism) and an Apelian transcendentalism (investigation of conditions of possibility), without further possible recourse to his first solution (which understood interests in transcendental terms), Habermas’s only choice seems to be to definitively abandon this second conception of philosophy as investigation of conditions of possibility, a conception that he had, indeed, already implicitly condemned in defining the interests of the species as the ultimate criterion of a theory’s validity. This is why he can only turn from pragmatics to a particular form of pragmatism, in the traditionally American sense of this movement, namely, as understanding truth in terms of utility, a criterion itself filled out by a notion of individual or collective interest. Habermas’s ultimate position becomes one in which philosophical theory will be indirectly corroborated by the results of other critical sciences (sociology, history, etc.). This theory of philosophy as a reconstructive science, whose statements have to be falsified by empirical sciences that themselves take into consideration the historical evolution of the interests of the species, is not only very different from the transcendental inspiration with which he began but also leads in fine to a destruction of Habermas’s second project. The crippling aporia, that Apel has noted, is as follows: The theory of communicative action thematizes different kinds of action, “communicative action,” as well as its inverse, “strategic action,” which is divided in its turn into “concealed strategic action” (in which communication is systematically deformed because we are dealing with an unconscious illusion—madness, self-deception, etc.) and “open strategic action” (which refers to the typical manipulation often at work in commercial, financial, etc., exchanges). But the “second” Habermas presupposed that strategic action was parasitic with respect to communicative action, the primary form of exchange. In Habermas’s system, the use of language for strategic ends had to be secondary and derivative. But how is communicative action’s primacy or originality justified with respect to actions that could only be “parasitic”? Is it by reference to social praxis? But doesn’t this demonstrate precisely the opposite? Doesn’t it purely and simply falsify the “fact of communicative reason”? Doesn’t social praxis agree with Callicles, Nietzsche, and others who are contemptuous of morality, against whom Habermas initially wanted to prove rationality? The epistemic system of fallibilism and references to the so-called morality of everyday life55 and to social praxis all lead to a pulverization of his initial project. Having thrown some light on this movement from Habermas’s second to his third philosophical position and having outlined the aporia that leads, in the final analysis, to a thesis of endlessly falsifiable reconstructive sciences, we must now assess the conclusions to be drawn from my overall analysis of Habermas’s philosophy.
Conclusions: Confirmation of the Diagnosis
First of all, these three periods of Habermas’s evolution nicely embody the movement of contemporary philosophy. Thus today (since the first years of the new millennium), Habermas rejoins the most current trend in philosophy—naturalism. What is more, his evolution is an illustration of one of Quine’s hopes, “to naturalize the transcendental.” This contemporary naturalism obviously takes quite diverse forms, and there is indeed more than a slight difference between the naturalism put forward by Paul and Patricia Churchland and that adopted by Pascal Engel. Nevertheless, the pertinent authority (for none will risk speaking of foundations) is indeed “nature,” however one may define it (as a pure and simple neurobiological structure, a biological need, or indeed an interest progressively constituted from the fact of the evolution of the species or of a particular society).56 Starting from a view of philosophy as a simple negative critique (therapy), then developing at length the idea of philosophy as the determination of universal conditions of possibility, Habermas finally adopts the idea of a necessary relinquishing of the notion of truth. He does this for the very reason that each of these moments contained contradictions—because, in the final analysis, the true is what will turn out, through experience, to be in conformity with interests, that is, with what Habermas calls, in a pragmatic and no longer Kantian sense, “practical life.”
From the point of view of my larger project, this analysis of Habermas’s philosophy can only confirm my initial diagnosis: contemporary philosophy is simultaneously characterized by a logical pathology—pragmatic contradiction—and by a strange oscillation between two extremes. We have seen that this tendency to self-refutation or self-contradiction is present in each period of Habermas’s philosophy. At the same time, his movement from one philosophy to the next has revealed the swing from one extreme to another: on the one hand, philosophy understood simply as negative, therapeutic, leads ineluctably to the advocacy, by philosophy itself, of its own extinction (a resurgence of the skeptical figure); and, on the other hand, a desire to be anchored (in language, history, or, in fine, the evolution of the species) also betrays itself through a dissolution of philosophy as a distinct discourse and leads from an initial skepticism to a universally positivist face of philosophy, namely, what Quine called the “naturalization of epistemology.” From scientism to positivism and back again, with the same kind of contradiction that disfigures each of the moments taken separately—this is the strange pattern that endlessly shapes current philosophy. Before proposing an escape from this pattern, I must definitively establish my diagnosis with a final demonstration.
Having started with the most radical protests against philosophy (Rorty and the scientism in programs of naturalization), then proceeded through more neutral assertions of its necessary exhaustion (Austin and Levinas), and finally arrived (with Habermas) at the failure of an attempt to “maintain philosophy,” all that remains for me to do now is to consider the surreptitious views that would articulate the end of philosophy without openly proclaiming it. We find this view in many places and in many thinkers57—I have chosen to analyze it in a “current” that I have not yet had the chance to discuss directly. Indeed, up to this point we have encountered two paradigms—analytic and Continental—that have divided the philosophical field since the beginning of the twentieth century, and I have been able to bring out a few points of overlap: thus Rorty joins the deconstructivists in his desire for an “antiphilosophy” and Levinas meets Austin in his desire to conceive a theory of meaning beyond the semantic triangle; similarly, Habermas’s second period proposed an overcoming of the paradigmatic disputes.
But my examination of the theme of the “death of philosophy” in contemporary philosophy cannot stop short of a complete assessment—there is a guiding thread of Ariadne that runs through all these currents despite their undeniable diversity (relativism and positivism in American epistemology, phenomenology, analytic philosophy, the Habermasian synthesis, etc.). This common point is reference to—and often, reverence for—Kant, a rare philosopher esteemed by all these currents. The contemporary critique of “metaphysics” and the refusal of the so-called “speculative” tradition, as well as the rejection of grand totalizing systems or Weltanschauung, all are fed not only with Heidegger or Wittgenst
ein but equally and incontestably by Kant, even if his theme of the critique of metaphysics is not “magnified” in the same way as the other traditions. Thus, for example, Heidegger and his disciples (hermeneuticists or phenomenologists) glorify through criticism the themes of radical finitude and discovery of the onto-theological structure of philosophy; while the Anglo-Saxons have either attempted, through Strawson, to rehabilitate a type of argumentation (transcendental argument), or, when they are relativist, to make a fairly intensive use of the “as if” of the Critique of Judgment. On this point, I have already shown how Stanley Cavell, in his questioning of the claim to speak in the place of all others, adopted a position extremely close to Kant’s first skeptical readers, who, adopting the system of the Critique of Judgment, considered their claims to be nothing more than plausible demands for agreement.58 In this generally analytic tradition I can include—with a completely different orientation than Strawson’s rationalist or Cavell’s skeptical movements—movements to reappropriate the critical project initiated by Wilfred Sellars and continued today by John McDowell, movements that Jocelyn Benoist doesn’t hesitate to include within the generic label of “Kantian movements within analytic philosophy.”59 Apart from these positive references that run through all these currents60 (and by which Kant escapes the contemporary disapproval of what is called without further specification “metaphysics,” because he insists upon the finiteness and the necessary limitations of our knowledge), there are philosophers today who once again call for a “return to Kant.”61 These are the views that I propose to examine to complete my inquiry into the theme of the death of philosophy. This final stage of the analysis will then allow us to challenge the idea of the death of philosophy.
4
Kant’s Shadow in the Current Philosophical Landscape
Kant expresses himself in multiple ways—this is why current proposals to renew or “reappropriate”1 the critical project do not all move in the same direction. Thus, if we undertake an analysis of these contemporary returns to Kant, we ought to distinguish two general ways of reading Kant—one starting from the Critique of Judgment and regulative judgment; the other from the notion of the a priori and from the transcendental, the fulcrum of the Critique of Pure Reason. But, as in previous chapters, we will see how these two ways of reading Kant embody the oscillation that I have stigmatized everywhere else—Kant, like Quine (in chapter 1) or Austin (in chapter 2), is the core that supports an oscillation between skepticism and positivism. On the other hand, we will see in this chapter that only one of these reformulations of Kantianism contains the logical pathology of pragmatic contradiction. The second, Karl-Otto Apel’s, contains a tension that I will elucidate but does not repeat stricto sensu the contradiction that I have analyzed up to this point. It will thus constitute an indirect proof of my thesis that the destruction (Rorty, Quine, Austin, Levinas) or even minimization of philosophy’s role (Habermas) leads to an insurmountable contradiction that annuls the denial or minimization. And indeed, among all the authors I’ve examined Apel is the only one to assert that philosophy is a first,2 autonomous, and distinct discipline. Before I tackle Apel’s view, unique in an otherwise relatively unanimous context, I shall first analyze the reconstruction of Kantianism that surreptitiously, without ever saying as much or sometimes even meaning to, endorses the idea of an “end of philosophy” and thus finds itself “standing with” Rorty.
The Skeptical Future of Kantianism: Reconstruction from the Critique of Judgment
If Karl-Otto Apel is the source for a second reading of Kant,3 the first, which takes the Critique of Judgment as the nodal text for the critical project, is proposed by the ensemble of contemporary commentators on Kant. Indeed, beyond the difference between their propositions and the diversity of their sources, all the contemporary interpreters of Kant share a single presupposition: the Kantian enterprise as a whole should be reconstructed or reinterpreted starting with the notion of Urteilskraft, as it is particularly developed in the Critique of Judgment. In Germany, Manfred Riedel’s work4 best embodies this desire to take the principles of reflection proper to the faculty of judgment as the sole guiding thread. In France, Beatrice Longuenesse’s fine study, Kant and the Capacity to Judge,5 has systematically clarified the first Critique in light of the theory of reflection thematized in the third. The same perspective is shared by Claude Piché, whose Kant et ses épigones,6 moreover, underlines the undeniable preeminence of the third Critique today and traces it back to a 1982 colloquium held at Cerisy under the direction of Jean-François Lyotard, whose participants’ papers have been collected under the telling title La faculté de juger.7 Allow me to note, finally, that of the writers today who claim to be representatives of Kantianism, such as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, although their reading is apparently very far from Lyotard’s, they, too, propose nothing less than a promotion of the Critique of Judgment to the key position for the entirety of the critical project. Both as historians and as philosophers concerned to advance a “return to Kant,” Ferry and Renaut offer a reconstruction that begins with the Critique of Judgment—and it is for this reason that I have chosen to focus on their reading of Kant, among numerous other candidates.8 To give meaning again to the Kantian vision of the world is the goal that Ferry and Renaut gave themselves a few years ago, naming this project “critical humanism”—a goal whose implications are developed in Renaut’s book Kant aujourd’hui. By “the critical project,” Renaut means Kant’s oeuvre in its entirety and two years of Fichte’s philosophical activity: the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre and the doctrine of law. Critical humanism proposes to rethink our modernity starting with this entity (Kant-Fichte). So I must reconstruct their proposed reading.9
The General Principle: The Critique of Judgment as Foundation for the Two Other Critiques
Relative to Kant, critical humanism accepts the Heideggerian thesis of radical finitude. It thus reads the Critique of Pure Reason in light of Kant’s aesthetics. However, the advocates of this rereading of Kant refuse to accept the corollary thesis that in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant cannot relativize the thesis of radical finitude with the idea of an absolute self-placement.10 Similarly, critical humanism accepts and takes up in its entirety Alexis Philonenko’s interpretation of Kant and the early Fichte; however, they do away with the basis for this interpretation, namely, his reference to Martin Luther and the idea of philosophy as practical theology.11 This dual acceptance, accompanied by a dual refusal, explains their attempt to find in the Critique of Judgment the means to affirm the moral dimension of the Critique of Practical Reason without either renouncing radical finitude or founding it on a theology that would give it meaning and value. Thus, in The Era of the Individual, after having recalled the impasse at the Davos debate (either a radical finitude but no autonomy—Heidegger—or autonomy but a relativization of finitude—Cassirer), Alain Renaut proposes critical humanism’s solution: “The discourse on moral freedom (autonomy), as it is presented in Kant’s practical philosophy, exhibits the same distinctive features as the discourse in the Critique of Judgment on intuitive understanding—that is, on God as an infinite being.”12 Moral statements should be read not as determinate but reflexive judgments: “This would involve conceiving of the supreme principles of practical reason as constituting principles of reflection.”13 The movement is clear: in order to preserve the thesis of radical finitude, moral judgments are understood as having the same status as judgments about art or life.
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