With this answer, Apel shows the true nature of his project: when he speaks of an ultimate foundation, he remains within the order of discourse, because the framework of discussion is always presupposed. Too many objections are born from the abstraction from or the forgetting of this key point. As another illustration of this type of mistake, I can cite the objection made by both Sylvie Mesure58 and Jean-Marc Ferry. They suspect Apel of moving unduly from the müssen of transcendental argumentation (I am constrained to accept such and such rules in order to argue) to the sollen of moral duty (I ought to will these rules as norms of my action). For Mesure and Ferry, the theoretical necessity of argumentation cannot under any circumstances ground the practical obligation, the duty to argue. But, as in the preceding objection, here again we should inquire into what Apel’s adversaries presuppose to be able to say what they say. From what point of view does the notion of an authentically moral obligation, the notion of sollen—in contrast to the only theoretical constraint of müssen—obtain meaning? It can only be from the point of view of a duty conceived of as separate from discourse, that is, from the point of view of an “obligation” in itself. Consequently, the objection against Apel is, again, formulated from the hypostasis of a sovereign and first subject who, beyond being constrained to respect the rules of argumentation, should, before any argumentation, will them as a duty. This objection has its origins in an absolutization of the moral subject, and of practical duty, that Apel unambiguously rejects when he writes, “I think that transcendental philosophy in general and ethics in particular may be grounded in a radical way by avoiding all metaphysical implications of the Kantian system—as, e.g., Kant’s unsolvable problem of a ‘transcendental deduction’ of the reality of the free will and hence of autonomous reason.”59 Although he is always worried about an ultimate foundation, Apel’s philosophy is much less “absolutist” than are his Kantian adversaries. For Apel, the notion of a right intention has no meaning for the discussion. The good will is not only unverifiable but, moreover, it doesn’t really matter. This is why Apel reproaches Kant for having grounded an ethics of belief that still always secretly supposes a man’s good will would be recognized in its true value (by a God, somehow assuming responsibility for history). And indeed, if we analyze, for example, the demand for sincerity implicit in a given instance of speaking, we realize that the speaker’s real intention is not a pertinent parameter. From the fact that I speak, I am not at all committed to being truly sincere, but the act of discussion commits myself relative to the intentions that I have expressed. In this sense, the rule of sincerity, if it says nothing about the psychological state that the speaker ought to have, nevertheless constrains him to answer for his intentions publicized through language. This allows Apel to write that “it is not the good will that matters but rather that the good be realized.”60 In this sense, from a strictly Kantian point of view, Apel’s undertaking appears more like a foundation for the law than a foundation for morality, inasmuch as he leaves to the side the notions of a free subject, a right intention, a good will, and even of wrongdoing (every breach of argumentation being interpreted as nonsense, as madness). In a word, it is only a matter, for Apel, of demonstrating that once I enter into a discussion, I have always already recognized that there are a certain number of rules immanent in that discussion. That is all that is meant by the project of a “transcendental” and “ultimate foundation” of “the ethics of discussion.”
Does this dissolution of the most current objections against the Apelian project suffice to give credence to it as a whole? Probably not, for a serious difficulty remains, an important problem, an apparently unsolvable aporia that is liable to mortgage this second great reconstruction of the “transcendental.”
The Question of Self-reference in Apel
The problem takes its origin in the following question: what status should be accorded to the notion of “being constrained to argue”? Unlike the preceding objections, this question is not asked with respect to an empirical choice—which Apel has always accepted—but with respect to the transcendental possibility to reflect upon the rules of discourse. Apel identifies this problem as the problem of “transcendental reflection.” When I find myself in the language game of discussion, I have the capacity “to go back over” this language game and, through analysis of it, to illuminate the rules that govern it. But how, precisely, are we to understand this expression “to go back over”? It cannot be a matter of reviving the Cartesian model of a reflection guided by a subject exterior to this discussion, since Apel rejects the solipsistic temptation inscribed in nucleo, in his eyes, in Cartesian reflection. To avoid any surreptitious revival of a reflection conceived as the movement of a sovereign subject that is outside and above the phenomenon to be analyzed (in this case, language and its rules), Apel hypothesizes that, in fine, language itself is what allows reflection on its own rules. To the question, “How is reflection on language possible in language?” Apel will answer, in Transformation der Philosophie, that language is simultaneously “the subject and the medium of transcendental reflection.”61 Furthermore, he will go so far as to show that self-reflection on the use of language is the condition of possibility for participation in a discussion.62 Thus, language produces in and of itself the demonstration of its functioning. Language would be the object, the means, and even the authority for reflection. To put it in yet another way, “the principle of discussion [is] established through reflection,”63 and this reflection itself is allowed by language.
To better grasp this definition of a transcendental reflection automatically produced by language itself, we should go back to Paul Ricoeur’s clarifying distinctions. In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur takes care to distinguish between “sui-reference” (unique to language) and self-reference, the act if not of a subject in the Cartesian sense at the very least of an enunciative authority in Emile Benveniste’s or G. G. Granger’s sense. In his analysis, Ricoeur notes first of all that if semantic inquiry (represented by the first wave of analytic philosophy) was interested only in an utterance’s referential dimension, pragmatic analysis on the other hand (encouraged by the second wave) was able, by means of the speech act, to become interested in its reflexive or self-referential dimension. Initially only a simple “complication along the path of the reference”64 (or even an “obstacle”65 to its veritable access), self-reference is later considered to be part of every utterance that refers to something other than itself (in the statement “Snow is white,” the statement refers to a fact that is not of language) and simultaneously refers to itself (in the sense that a statement marks itself as a statement and not as the thing itself). A sign says something (reference ad extra) and proclaims itself as a sign (self-reference). Ricoeur insists on the difference between this self-reference, a very fact of language, and another, produced by the act of an “I.” This “I” must be understood not in the metaphysical sense of a material subject but as an act of utterance, which Benveniste has shown to be the first “indicator”66 of any utterance. Contrary to Benveniste, pragmatics as François Récanati promotes it has more than a tendency to want to eliminate the speaker and to make the speech act make due with the utterance itself. Ricoeur underlines this point, “The reflexivity in question up to now has been constantly attributed, not to the subject of utterance, but to the utterance itself … Récanati … relates reflexivity to the utterance considered as a fact, that is, as an event produced in the world.”67 In this framework, the utterance itself is in fact what, reflecting itself, produces the demonstration of its functioning as of its identity. This conception of “sui-reference,” distinct from a “reflexivity” conceived as an act of utterance, is what Karl-Otto Apel develops on the whole. Indeed, reflection, immanent in linguistic phenomena, is a fact of language itself. Language or speech (die Sprache) is the “theme” and the “medium” but also the vehicle and the condition of possibility for reflection.
And yet this conception of reflection cannot avoid giving rise to several par
adoxes:
First of all, the question arises as to how, if language itself produces the possibility of reflection, philosophical mistakes about language have been and are still possible? Why, since the authority for reflection is a process automatically generated by use, can we be mistaken in bringing to light the rules that govern communication? To put it differently, reflection on language must allow, Apel tells us, the construction of a critical theory of meaning, a theory that must supplant the classic but obsolete theories of knowledge from before the “linguistic turn.”68 But if this reflection is done by language itself, why would there have been anything other than this contemporary critique of language? How can language reflect upon itself today while yesterday it was misled? We can see the wide gap between these temporal markers (“today, the truth,” “yesterday, errors”) and a thesis that implies that it should hold for all eternity.
Furthermore, this conception of reflection immanent in language implies a certain form of essentialism that makes it difficult, or even impossible, to explain philosophy’s role in this system. What is Apel doing when he writes these books that reveal, bring out, and show the rules that govern our utterances? Is it a simple echo, reflection, mirror, or container for a language that speaks itself? Apel has never maintained such a thesis, though his choices about reflection seem to call for it. In a word, his “immanentist” conception is cornered by questions of a Spinozist, Hegelian, or even Heideggerian nature, but he nevertheless refuses to ask these questions that his system provokes. If the authority—whether this authority be God or nature (Spinoza), Spirit (Hegel), Being (Heidegger), or language (Apel)—reveals its own identity, speaks itself through philosophy, then not only should the possibility of error, of negativity, be explained (objection 1) but also how Being, substance, Spirit, etc., speaks itself through philosophy (thus for Spinoza substance speaks itself through the modes and then the accidents that are thinking individuals). And yet Apel clearly refuses to close off his system with this type of consideration, to which any form of immanentism leads. Stricto sensu, language speaks itself and thus reflects upon itself without an external intervention from the philosopher. Nevertheless, there are many passages in which Apel denies this implication of his system and falls back upon a classical conception of the philosopher’s critical reflection. For example, he explains that participation in the use of language can be interiorized and distanced by reflection. If language speaks itself, then talk, with respect to reflection, of a process of distancing oneself from language has no meaning, for such a proposition implicitly postulates an inquiring philosopher who oversees language and its rules. Rüdiger Bubner has noted this ambiguous, even impossible, status of philosophical reflection in Apel, in a sense different from but analogous to mine:
The second objection is directed at the lack of a place for the reflection called transcendental itself. The interaction community of the partners participating in the language-game forms the point of departure, at which the character of the dialogue, as something which encroaches upon the individual subjectivity, is emphatically set up as a corrective against Kant’s alleged narrowing of vision to the isolated ego. The ideal norm of mutual recognition of subjects forms the vanishing-point towards which the transcendental reflection is to be orientated. The activity of transcendental reflection for its part, however, which is supposed to mediate between the given point of departure and the counterfactual assumption, does not fit at all into the assumed picture. The communication community does not reflect on itself consistently, as a kind of collective subject, with a view to the unalterable presuppositions for its existence, but a philosopher approaching from the outside points to certain normatively characterized premises on the basis of the various language-games, only loosely connected by family resemblances. This act of external elucidation and criticism cannot however be called “transcendental” even in the most generous interpretation of the term. The philosopher, as privileged subject, is not by any means associated by virtue of reflection with what is reflected upon but speaks externally about it from a special meta-position … We are faced with the problem of the non-identity of the reflecter with the reflected.69
In a word, the question of reflection as self-reference leads Apel’s system to a quite ruinous alternative: Either (1) there is a deficit of explanation and justification, for if language speaks itself, if the philosopher’s analyses are the reflection, mirror, or echo of linguistic mechanisms, then Apel must explain this possibility, as Hegel, Spinoza, and even Heidegger have done. Or else (2) Apel accepts the idea of a critical philosopher who uncovers, through his analyses, the rules that govern language, but then his system, in fine, contradicts itself.
Having developed this objection, I ought next to better specify its status. It is not a matter of demanding, through this objection, some sort of return to the subject of reflection, in the sense of a metaphysical substance or an authority that is prior, exterior, and superior to language. It is quite simply a matter of asking about the status of the philosopher’s act of speaking. With his critical theory of meaning, Apel presupposes that the philosopher has a certain position (in the example given above, he presupposes the possibility of putting distance between oneself and the object, “language”); but this “philosopher’s position” comes into conflict with the thesis that language speaks itself, reveals itself, and shows itself. In contrast to the objections that I’ve just discussed, I am thus not calling for a substrate of reflection but posing a question about the status, within Apel’s discourse, of the philosopher’s utterances. Likewise, I do not mean to reproach pragmatics, as Ricoeur, for example, does, for its “depsychologized”70 conception of reflection. Nor do I mean to claim, in a way external71 to Apel’s system, that it is not language but concrete subjects, subjects of flesh, individuated and anchored in eternally unique places in time and space, that reflect. My problem is not to determine what the “subject” of reflection is (whether this subject be conceived as a universal authority or as a finite subject, a “self” forever shattered by theoretical finitude or practical wisdom’s own body) but to understand how Apel can consistently account for the status of his own philosophical analyses. There is indeed an ambiguity, internal to Apel’s philosophy, in the term “reflection,” which sometimes designates linguistic self-reference and sometimes designates the distancing act of the critical philosopher who brings to light the rules of discussion.
The aporia of metalanguage that burdens Apel’s system prevents me from following his reconstruction, from leaning on his philosophy. We have seen a characteristic movement in the two extreme styles of criticism today—a pendular oscillation between a skeptical reading of an author (the reconstruction of Kant in light of the Critique of Judgment) and a reading that is, if not positivist,72 at the very least more foundationalist and essentialist, in which a unique and first authority (here, language) becomes the theme, the medium, the vehicle, and the foundation of all things. Having shown this pendular movement, I could of course take up the second reading, since it accepts philosophy as a first, autonomous, and distinct science. But Apel’s system contains a tension between the general thesis about language and the philosopher’s presupposed position, a tension between what the philosopher “says” (language reveals itself) and what he presupposes in order to say it (the philosopher puts himself at a distance from language to be able to extract its rules).
Nevertheless, I should underline that if there is a tension in Apel, it does not immediately refute73 the whole of his project, as did the contradictions of radical skepticism or a phenomenology inebriated by the singular. In addition, we must remember that Apel was the one who demonstrated that the notion of performative contradiction was the necessary fulcrum of logicophilosophical reflection. And yet I have shown that this contradiction runs through all the contemporary strains of thought that seek to be done with the classic stance of philosophy as a first and distinct science. It follows that Apel’s philosophy can undeniably easily spot this contradiction in
different discourses. Finally, it was Apel who showed the importance that consideration of self-reference has taken on today, in contrast to a polarization only in terms of reference. Apel has contributed much to open the way for pragmatics to be able to alter semantics’ weaknesses and dictums, and for it to revitalize philosophical analysis from top to bottom.
The Death of Philosophy Page 18