The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  We can best bring out the simultaneously concrete and profoundly skeptical implications of critical humanism’s decision to transform [moral] judgments into reflective judgments by first examining another of these two writers’ positions, namely, on the question, which they consider as central for Kant and Fichte, of recognition of others.14

  Let’s recall the problem as it has been posed in French Fichte studies of the last thirty years: for Fichte, if I do not manage to find a criterion that proves, in the phenomenal world, that I am dealing with a free being with whom I can communicate, and not with a machine stripped of all intentionality, then the Critique of Practical Reason loses all philosophical legitimacy. This question about the appearance of recognition of others as rational beings can be illustrated by the following example:15 a Nazi officer could conduct himself in a morally or juridically irreproachable manner with those whom he considers to be German, for they are, in his eyes, part of humanity. But we cannot say, from a strict Kantian point of view, that he transgresses the moral law in his attitude with respect to those whom he considers to be Jewish, because the latter, in his eyes, are not part of humanity. Put bluntly, if it is not possible to understand the recognition of every other as a free being, then it is illicit to condemn Nazism—what is called, from themes developed in the second Critique, the “moral vision of the world” thus has no philosophical validity. To be assured of consistency will thus mean to determine that status of the description of the empirical sign of freedom in Fichte.

  It obviously cannot be a matter of a purely empirical description, without which it could not function for even a moment as a proof. It is thus a matter of phenomenological description—hence the question becomes, What relationship does this phenomenology maintain with a theory of truth? What is the relation between philosophy as a rigorous science and lived experience, between scientific construction and phenomenal manifestation? What is the status of Fichte’s discourse when he claims to be able to have an apprehension of freedom in man? Put differently, what sort of judgment claims that the mechanism does not work for all phenomena?

  To this question there are two possible responses:

  It may be a matter of strong necessity. To be able to speak of a phenomenal manifestation of freedom, it must be shown that certain objects of the sensible world escape the determinism of phenomena; it follows that Fichte would claim to have demonstrated the nonpertinence of the mechanism in the phenomenal world and would truthfully answer the question thus: how does one recognize an other?

  Or it may be a matter of a simple universality claim. This claim would take the form of a regulative judgment like this: “Everything happens as if the absence of determination of the other’s body is a sign pointing in the direction of freedom.”

  French interpretations, prior to the critical humanist interpretation, tended to hold that Fichte must give a necessary status to his proposition; Fichte must demonstrate that the phenomenal world is not entirely ruled by the law of determinism, or else (and this is entirely Martial Guéroult’s view) the philosopher must either renounce “a certain number of his practical assertions,”16 or else rethink his speculative philosophy as a whole. The difference between the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794 (understood by Guéroult as a system of the finite subject) and the Wissenschaftslehre starting in 1801 (understood as a system of the absolute) could be understood by the necessity to ground in an absolutely true manner (in Kantian terms, from determinate judgments) the mechanism’s limitation in the world of phenomena.

  Conversely, for Ferry and Renaut, Fichte’s discourse must be reflective. On this point, Fichte renews the Kantian analysis of the teleological antinomy of the Critique of Judgment.17 This last point can be summarized thus: certain beings are infinitely improbable, according to the laws of determinism alone. It follows that we can postulate purposiveness not as a determinate principle but as a principle of reflection (that is, as a maxim allowing the direction of thought).

  In the Critique of Judgment, if the viewpoint of purposiveness must be considered as a reflective moment, it must likewise be so from the viewpoint of the mechanism [of nature]. If that were not the case, we would have absolute opposites, where the affirmation of a thesis would necessarily entail the negation of its antithesis, insofar as—unlike in the third antinomy—the subject of the two propositions is the phenomenal world. Hence, Kant tells us, [nature’s] mechanism and purposiveness can be maintained only if we refuse to think of them as constitutive principles—that is, as laws governing phenomenal reality—but rather make them principles governing the scholar’s investigations. The contradiction, as Schelling had already remarked, would be less a contradiction in reality than an irreducible opposition in the human mind.

  This solution has the advantage of not transgressing the limits of finitude in the Heideggerian sense of the term, but it is not, however, exempt from paradoxical consequences. Indeed, nature’s mechanism cannot claim to limit purposiveness, but—and reciprocally—nothing can claim by means of argumentation to limit nature’s mechanism. Here again, we have two principles of reflection, both legitimate if the subjects will agree to consider them as simple principles of investigation. A scientist will choose to follow one rather than the other without having to understand why. To put this concretely, an imitator of La Mettrie today could well say that man is a machine and proceed to show its mechanisms if he underlines with his work that “everything happens as if”; reciprocally, a scientist could, if he wished, attempt to reconceive purposiveness provided that he claims to obey only a heuristic principle. A historian or a sociologist could maintain a thesis and accept its coexistence with its opposite, without claiming to dispute this, for in the final analysis, everything depends upon the principle of reflection that one adopts. This is a solution whose immediate adoption in the scientific community would have the advantage of giving scientific discussions an amiable, consensual, even ecumenical character but would have the disadvantage of delegitimizing any attempt at argumentation, or even of eliminating any discussion. Moreover, with this solution, Kant and Fichte strangely become precursors to Paul Feyerabend’s view that “anything goes in science,” the strongest purposiveness as well as the strictest determinism.18 Neither facts nor principles govern the scientist’s investigations. Here the skeptical appearance of this system becomes patently clear.

  With such a lens, science is in line with aesthetic judgment; the evaluative structure that holds for works of art becomes the ultimate model to which every judgment must refer. If we accept this as Kant’s solution and if we apply it to moral questions, we risk being logically19 forced to the following assertion: moral questions are not subject to determinate judgments, rather they are placed, like our aesthetic judgments, under the sign of “everything happens as if.” We may not recognize another’s humanity, just like we might not recognize the beauty of a painting or the value of a poem, and we have nothing with which to oppose the Nazi apart from the opposite principle (the method of construction). To make moral questions depend upon reflective judgment risks leading us to a renunciation of any validity for ethical norms. In this domain, we could claim only universality, without necessarily, as in the case of a discussion of art, de facto condemning someone who claimed the opposite. Transforming truth into a problematical demand leads to defining meaning from only its aesthetic style. And yet a lack of taste (such as not recognizing Picasso as a great painter, or objecting to a given kind of musical harmony) does not seem, in its initially Kantian presentation, to be the object of the same kind of genuine condemnation as moral errors like, for example, exterminating an entire community. The critical humanist theory, however, does not seem to be able to philosophically produce a conceptual distinction. Aesthetic communication becomes the reference for all communication—moral, juridical, political, even scientific. On this point, Ferry and Renaut write, “Law and aesthetics are then reunited in the general theory of communication or direct intersubjectivty20 whose core is surely to be investigated in t
he notion of reflective judgment.”21

  On the basis of these analyses, we are able to perceive the structure of the entire system attributed to Kant and Fichte, and upon which critical humanism rests: the theory is founded on practice (repeating Philonenko’s reading of Fichte). This practice itself is founded on the juridical (Renaut’s contribution in Le système du droit). But the juridical has the same structure as aesthetic judgments (according to Renaut and Ferry). It follows that all theoretical, ethical, juridical, etc., judgments are aesthetic judgments placed under the sign of “everything happens as if?’ All the faces of human rationality are reduced to the single component analyzed in the Critique of Judgment. Truth must be replaced by meaning, whose model is found in art. “Valorization” (in the sense of Wertlehre) must not be understood in a conceptual or determinate sense but in an aesthetic sense.

  To be sure, I could not dispute this philosophical reconstruction on the pretext that it cannot produce a conceptual difference between a moral judgment and an aesthetic judgment. Indeed, the demands of individuals, of the common conscience, of the citizen (who would evidently prefer to see Nazism condemned and to see every human being’s humanity founded in truth) cannot be taken into account here. The metatheoretical claim “Notions like the Good, Humanity, etc., have no absolute foundation” is philosophically acceptable. It is thus obviously imperative, to preserve the distinctness of philosophical questioning, to distinguish the demands of a given empirical conscience and the philosopher’s point of view. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in reference to Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi Party, had to forcefully recall, in this respect, the distinctiveness of the philosopher’s question that asks, “‘From what position can we judge?’”22 Who, qua philosopher, has not “considered [it] an accepted fact, and beyond question, that being a Nazi was a crime[?] This is something one may argue politically. I do so myself.”23 And indeed, we cannot mix different levels of argumentation and judge a philosophical discourse on the basis of criteria external to that discourse.

  A Skepticism Denied

  Nevertheless, we can note, in the present case, that if we come to a typically Maimonian, that is, skeptical, configuration, then some of the most important theses of an assumed skepticism are not, for all that, taken up by Ferry and Renaut. The theses that they do not take up—which are, however, necessary consequents of this reconstruction—are the following:

  1. First of all, there is the thesis of ethical relativism—which a consistent skeptic must fully adopt in accord with his philosophical principles. But the necessity of a moral vision of the world is sometimes still affirmed by the critical humanists as a true perspective and not simply as a judgment of taste (which in all logic, however, they ought to say). Indeed, they rebut other philosophers in the name of this moral vision. Thus, because Heidegger was not able to put a moral philosophy into practice, he is condemnable: “It has scarcely dawned on them [Heidegger’s disciples] that Heidegger risked being led astray [i.e., into joining the Nazi Party] at all only to the extent that, confronted by Nazism, he had no ethical point of view consistent enough to allow him to immediately condemn it.”24 Similarly, in his article “Les subjectivités: Pour une histoire du concept de sujet,” Renaut denounces Michel Foucault’s statements in the name of morality.25 Renaut’s only arguments against Foucault’s position are the absence of “morality” to which his position leads, and therefore the reader can have the impression, as in the sentence cited against Heidegger, that Ferry and Renaut claim to refute other philosophical viewpoints with these simple value judgments.

  2. Next, Ferry and Renaut do not emphasize, as Maimon does, the question of the status of discourse in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s statements in the Critique of Pure Reason are, in their eyes, true. Finitude is indeed radical; objective knowledge consists in the relationship between a category and an intuition, through the productive imagination of representable figures. But there is a paradox here, for if the Critique of Practical Reason is written from the viewpoint of reflective judgments, from what viewpoint must the Critique of Pure Reason be read? How is an affirmation of the eternal truth of the Critique of Pure Reason compatible with this other assertion that aesthetic judgment is the model for a finite and human rationality? Are we so finite that we can’t even find a legitimate viewpoint from which we could assert that “we are finite”? Don’t we find in this reading of Kant the very process of self-refutation that I have brought to light in the other trends? Here again, the question of the status of the discourse attributed to Kant is what is at stake. If we are told that not only statements about the beautiful and the living are reflective but also the statements in the Critique of Practical Reason, what then are we to say of Kant’s statements in the Critique of Pure Reason, statements that demand the division into determinate and reflective? If we are to reconstruct the entirety of the critical project from the Critique of Judgment, then what is the status of the statements in the Critique of Pure Reason? Why are its statements the only ones that aren’t reflective? But if we admit that they are just as reflective as practical principles, then how can we not see that we’re dealing here with a very powerful skepticism, of which Maimon is the most important representative? Why don’t Ferry and Renaut declare themselves to be “critical skeptics” like Maimon, unless it is because they deny a skepticism that all their analyses nonetheless combine to bring about?

  Therefore, the reconstruction of the critical project from reflection as it is deployed in the Critique of Judgment leads to the advocacy of a skepticism that is not far from that of Feyerabend, or even Rorty.26 Furthermore, we are led to an aestheticization of statements that critical humanism nonetheless denounces in thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard. In a word, the movement that promotes the Wertlehre into the place of the Wissenshaftslehre clearly leads to the legitimization of skepticism.

  Our study of this reading of Kant thus shows the extent to which this reconstruction of the critical project is run through by skepticism—denied even though present, and thus this reconstruction is also run through by a tendency to self-refutation. There is, however, a contemporary attempt to stand up to skepticism. It is even more important that we examine it, since—in contrast to all the approaches presented so far—it is the first to have conceived of pragmatic contradiction as a symptom of the crisis into which philosophy has entered, and the first to have spoken of a “reflexive deficit” in contemporary thought. Of course, I am referring to the work of Karl-Otto Apel.

  The “Strong”27 Version of the Transcendental: Karl-Otto Apel

  The Notion of “Transcendental Pragmatics”

  The reference to Kant is clear in Apel, because in the tradition of the Critique of Practical Reason, his project consists of seeking an ultimate foundation for ethical norms. It is a question, for him, of adopting the Kantian heritage of an a priori of reason while effecting a “transformation of transcendental philosophy” in light of the acquired knowledge of the “linguistic turn.”28 In fact, contra Kant, who remained a prisoner of the philosophy of the subject, Apel refers to Wittgenstein:

  I have never laid claim to a prelinguistic “experience of certainty” in the sense given this phrase by Descartes, Fichte, or Husserl. Rather, I have laid claim first and foremost to the “paradigmatic certainty” belonging to a language game in Wittgenstein’s sense. Such certainty is already linguistically interpreted.29

  Rational thought is by definition public, already within a language game, in a form of life governed by rules. It is thus a matter of integrating what we have learned from pragmatics into the Kantian project of a rational foundation for morality. And this integration will obviously give rise to a “transformation” of first philosophy because the factum that structures what Apel significantly proposes to call “transcendental pragmatics”30 is the “factum of communication” and the ethics that he means to ground is an “ethics of discussion.” Apel underscores this difference with Kantian philosophy when he specifies that

  th
is attempt differs from Kant’s classical transcendental philosophy in that it does not see the “highest point”—which transcendental reflection takes as its starting-point—in the “unity of consciousness of the object and self-consciousness” that is posited in a “methodologically solipsistic” manner, but rather in the “intersubjective unity of interpretation” qua understanding of meaning and qua consensus of truth.31

  The project of transcendental pragmatics is thus simply expressed: against the radical deconstruction of reason (whether this deconstruction be Heideggerian, skeptical, or fallibilist), it is a matter of taking up the Kantian challenge of an ultimate foundation; but against Kant, and thus with his contemporary critics, he must challenge the idea of an “a priori of consciousness,” of a solipsistic and sovereign substance.32

  Having defined this project, his implementation is also rather easy to grasp, and Apel summarizes it admirably in “The A Priori of the Communication Community and the Foundations of Ethics.” It shares the view of ethics as simultaneously “necessary and impossible.” Ethics is necessary because contemporary science, by the nature of its own products, calls for a clear understanding of norms (consider, in this respect, our bioethical committees confronting scientific technologies like, for example, cloning). But although it is necessary, over the course of the centuries ethics has just as much seemed to be impossible. This impossibility is born, Apel tells us, in the very concept of science as it was established in the seventeenth century in the West. Why does modern science forbid ethics? To understand this, we should “attempt to present the most important of [these] propositions”33 that demand the idea of an impossible ethics from the age of science. Three propositions, according to Apel, are covertly included in the current conception of science: