However, with this legacy Apel also bequeaths to us some formidable difficulties. First of all, there is an ambiguous concept of self-reference, because he juxtaposes two concepts: the “sui-reference” of language and a “speaker’s reflexivity” (here, the philosopher’s).74 To avoid confusion, it seems to me that we must carefully distinguish three senses of self-reference, which each belong to different conceptual fields: (1) “Reflection” (and even self-reflection) as in the classic Cartesian model, which always defines the movement by which a subject (prior to this movement) looks into himself as if looking into a preexisting x. This model of self-reference as reflection revives what we can call, following many others, the philosophy of the subject. (2) “Sui-reference,” a property of signs, by which a sign says or indicates that it is a sign and not a thing. The Port-Royal logic defined this type of self-reference. According to that analysis, a sign refers to a thing (“it represents something else”) but simultaneously marks itself as not being that thing (“it represents itself”). In the final analysis, this “sui-reference” of the sign, which Récanati explains, is what defines self-reference in Apel. (3) Finally, there is what we can call, with Ricoeur, Benveniste, and Granger,75 “reflexivity.” This kind of self-reference refers to an act (initially understood in the pragmatic expression “speech acts”)76 and introduces the problem of the speaker. In a word, we have a generic term, “self-reference,” that can be understood in at least three ways: the “self-reflection” of a subject, the “sui-reference” of language, and the “reflexivity” of an utterance.
But, if we consider what my objections to Apel have established, the last form of self-reference, reflexivity, must be understood as the philosopher’s utterance. Indeed, Apel’s problem emerges from the philosopher’s position or status. In the same way, the contradictions that I have already pointed out in other philosophical currents also reflect this problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse. This is why I do not at all mean, in this provisional determination of self-reference as a possible reflexivity, to refer to an ailing and concrete subject, such as Ricoeur’s “shattered cogito.” My question is not to ask what it means to say “I”77 in a world that is always already there, at the heart of an eternally finite existence, but rather to ask, What is a philosopher? What is presupposed by this type of utterance? What are we saying when we speak of “philosophy”? Is the philosopher’s position tenable? If not, why not; and if yes, under what conditions?
This analysis also allows me to situate my questions with respect to Apel’s. I have said that I cannot follow Apel because of the tension in his conception of self-reference, but moreover, his initial project is not what I intend to accomplish here. Indeed, Apel begins with the problem of grounding ethical norms in reason. My question is about the foundations of philosophical practice, about the possibility of philosophy (always with another question on the horizon: if philosophy is not possible, why not; and if it is, under what conditions?). Our projects’ different orientations will allow me to conclude my discussion of Apel by bringing other aporias of his system to light, aporias that I was not able to discuss in the course of my analysis but that are nevertheless important for my questioning with respect to his.
Apel wants to ground ethical norms in reason—but why this project? Of course, one might retort that this question can be asked of any project at all. Nevertheless, there are cases in which a failure to answer the “why?” question does not entail the disappearance of what one wants to understand, but sometimes the impossibility to answer why requires an abandonment of what one wanted to understand. For example, an inability to ground ethical norms in reason does not imply the disappearance of what is considered ethical behavior—the “peasant of Savoy,” so dear to philosophers, can continue to behave morally even if Hume is correct. Furthermore, the possibility that ethical norms are, in fact, simple customs or pure illusions is not in itself self-contradictory. On the other hand, to say that philosophy’s relevance and uniqueness cannot be established entails the disappearance of the discipline. Likewise, to do philosophy for the sole purpose of denouncing the inanity of such a practice is an immediately self-refuting position. This is why we can reproach Apel for not having sufficiently elucidated the necessity for a project according to which “ethical norms should be grounded.” To be sure, he shows us that the current situation of the world demands a morality, but notwithstanding that a given empirical and historical situation could demand many kinds of grievous things (for example, the creation of a thousand-year Reich), this empirico-historical situation cannot have the force of a proof within Apel’s epistemology. It follows that Apel cannot legitimate his project to “ground ethical norms” in reason, whereas I can legitimate my project because if it is impossible to answer my question, then the discipline that I practice is invalidated.
Moreover, we are entitled to ask if it is really “morality” that Apel grounds. I have shown in the course of this analysis that his system as a whole leads rather to a foundation in the legal sphere because, in a discussion, the devil is constrained to behave “as if” he were moral—that is, to take up the Kantian categories, “in conformity with duty” (law) and not “from duty” (morality). Why then does Apel insist on speaking of ethical foundations, since by this term he means what Kant termed law? 78 In reading his challenge to notions of the will, right intention, and autonomy, a reader can get the impression that Apel is one of the fiercest destroyers of Kantian morality. If his reference to Kant can be justified from the viewpoint of transcendental argumentation (as a regressive investigation into the conditions of possibility of a factum), on the other hand it is hard to see what is left of the substantive content of the Critique of Practical Reason (which still defines what should be understood by Kantian morality). In a word, why not do without reference to Kantian morality?
Finally, concerning the factum rationis itself, we are entitled to wonder whether Apel does not effect an absolutization of the language game of argumentation. Indeed, argumentation becomes a synonym for all discussion, all communication. It is on this basis that Apel can establish that we are always already moral (at least following ethical norms such as not to “falsify your results,” or “claim universality,” etc.). And yet we can wonder about the legitimacy of this reduction of all communication to the rules of argumentation. Without speaking of strategic actions, one need only mention other discursive registers, such as poetry, irony, or artistic expression in general, which immediately seem to escape the constraints of argumentation.79 The question arises whether, in the final analysis, Apel has unduly stretched Peirce’s idea of the “scientific community” to encompass all linguistic situations. A good number of his proofs seem to hold for only those who are engaged in discourses meant or claimed to be scientific or philosophical but don’t seem to hold for other discourses, like poetry or irony. It is important to note this point insofar as the notion of “claiming to” is what allows a performative contradiction to take effect. Also, we should immediately note, pace Apel, that certain constraints hold only for certain kinds of discourse, like the philosophical discourse, which is all I’m concerned with in this book. Having noted these final details about Apel’s philosophy, I should now sum up what we have learned.
Conclusions: The Impossibility of Speaking of the End of Philosophy
I have now analyzed contemporary approaches that challenge philosophy’s status as a first, distinct, and autonomous discipline—either through self-dissolution in the hard sciences, philology, or literature, or even through an insistence upon the death of philosophy. The following conclusions emerge from this analysis:
1. Any series of propositions that advance in this direction necessarily produces self-refuting arguments. I have shown this in every position we’ve examined. A good portion of philosophy today is marked by a specific kind of paradox, performative contradiction, in which a statement is destroyed by the very fact of being uttered.
2. We’ve also seen an oscillation between sk
epticism and positivism, relativism and scientism, within the approaches we’ve examined. This oscillation is not a movement in time from one extreme to the other but is often the movement from a quasi premise to its consequences within a single philosophy.
3. The propensity to self-refutation or self-contradiction is most often born from a lack of reflection upon the status of the maintained discourse (what must be presupposed in order to say that there is no truth or that philosophy should disappear or that it is only therapy or even that there is no other use of language than ordinary usage, etc.?). What seems to be lacking is this “reference to self,” this questioning of one’s own status—or, to put it in phenomenological terms, as Jocelyn Benoist has done, a look is not only for seeing but also for telling itself that it is a look and that “in the fact that a look has something to say to itself and in the way that it can do so [there is] something not at all obvious, but extremely problematic.”80 We have seen that this concealment of the question of the status of one’s own discourse, or “reflexive deficit” in Apel’s sense, holds for a good number of the cases we’ve considered—all taking place as if contemporary philosophy, in the multiplicity of its manifestations, shared a single presupposition, a refusal of the question of self-reference.
Calling the distinctness and autonomy of a discipline into question—this is the general picture with which we began. I have been able to show the recurrence of a particular kind of contradiction (self-refutation) at the heart of this picture, born from neglect of the notion of reference to self as reflection on one’s own status—this is the mark that specifies the landscape I’ve analyzed, this is the figure or design that accompanies and defines, at the same time as it deconstructs this landscape.81
Consequently, the choice is simple and the challenge is clear: Either we rally to this questioning of philosophy while trying not to commit a pragmatic contradiction, that is, while refusing this paradoxical stance that consists of spending one’s life practicing a discipline for the sole purpose of saying that it is dangerous, harmful, and vain. In that case, the only and unique consistent position is an abandonment of philosophy, relegating it to the dustheap of obsolete disciplines, like astrology (which Kepler still practiced but in the course of time lost any scientific connotation). Or else we must understand the possibility of philosophy as philosophy, that is, as a discipline that is neither philology, nor literature, nor mathematics, nor “the reserve angel of jurisprudence.” To take up this challenge, we must undertake a thought experiment and assert, as a hypothesis, the opposite of what the evidence of our time seems to dictate, namely that
philosophy is a rigorous science;
it can be such only if it is willing to directly examine the curious sort of contradiction that it rather constantly engenders, namely, self-refutation;
it must be willing to ask the question of its own status and must understand itself and thus must grasp its self-referential dimension. To put this in other words, as Leonard Linsky notes,82 reference as a question of reference ad extra was at the heart of twentieth-century philosophy; in its turn, the question of self-reference can and should be placed at the heart of its concerns to come. This is, in any case, the attraction of a “corrective apparatus,” to take up again my metaphor of the anamorphosis, that implicitly appears as a prism that may allow us to reread the past and to propose a future other than dwelling on our own death. Is this “corrective apparatus” still viable; is its angle of vision still fruitful? This is what we must determine in the next chapters, whose aim will be to challenge the thesis of the end of philosophy and to test a remedy—the reflexive a priori—in order to try to overcome the crisis engendered by the current “reflexive deficit.” After undertaking a description of this model, borrowed from the history of philosophy (chapter 5), I will show this theory of self-reference’s consistency by comparing it with current theories (chapter 6) and will then illustrate its fruitfulness (chapter 7). I will thus be able to show how it is possible to go beyond the theme of the death of philosophy (chapter 8).
II
Challenging the “Death of Philosophy”: The Reflexive A Priori
5
A Definition of the Model: Scientific Learning and Philosophical Knowledge1
Why This Moment Rather Than Another?
Doctrines that variously express one of the three characteristics that I have delineated—(1) philosophy’s scientificity, (2) examination of the nature of pragmatic contradiction, and (3) the problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse as a problem of self-reference—are legion throughout the history of philosophy. On this point, the first required trait (namely, the affirmation of philosophy as a science in the face of a devastating skepticism) is superbly embodied by the dispute between Plato and the Sophists. Similarly, many of Aristotle’s arguments could be taken up against contemporary skepticism. And again, the theme of philosophy as a science constitutes the heart of Descartes’ philosophy just like Leibniz’s, of Hegel’s just like Husserl’s. Why, then, among all these possibilities, should we give priority to one rather than the others? Why will I choose, as the guiding thread of our reflections, the precise moment of the birth of German idealism? Different answers to this question are possible:
First of all, I can argue that this moment poses the question of the scientificity of the philosopher’s discourse with a particular acuity, as is attested by the desire of the most important philosophers of the era to speak of a “doctrine of science” or a “system of science” as synonyms of “philosophy,” “ontology,” or “metaphysics.”2 Although Descartes and Leibniz considered philosophy’s scientificity to be a quasi given, this obvious fact had to be won back again against the time’s prevailing skepticism when German idealism was born3 and thus had to be better justified than previously. To put it differently, this moment (perhaps more than others, in light of both the force of skepticism and the Kantian questions) was confronted by the epistemological problem of the possibility of philosophy as an autonomous and distinct science.
Next, I can say that beginning with this period, the problem of self-reference was indissolubly linked—in a manner that I’ll discuss later—to the problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse.
I can also point out a more precise reason: apart from the scientificity that I am seeking (and that is just as much embodied by Husserl), we find in the immediately post-Kantian system an explicit theory of “speaking” in the “said,” a theory that replaces the semantic approach to meaning. But we have already seen in chapter 2 how Levinas and Austin proposed to overcome the “semantic curse” (promotion of the sign = Rorty’s relativism; promotion of reference = scientism)4 by a theory of “speaking.” These two theories—with-out any common ground in their strict content—nevertheless lead to the same conclusion: an escape from philosophy. It can thus seem particularly fruitful and opportune to see how other theories “of speaking and the said” do not lead to a call for an escape from philosophy but on the contrary to the affirmation of the first thesis that I am trying to establish, philosophy’s scientificity.
Finally, I can also note that German idealism—from the viewpoint of its theses’ contents—is the furthest removed from the current habitus. Indeed, German idealism, in both its Fichtean and Hegelian versions, is generally stigmatized as the peak of metaphysics in its worst excesses. There are very few contemporary philosophical currents that do not denounce its “totalizing,” “foundationalist,” or “metaphysical”5 ambitions. If Kant is recognized, or even proclaimed, as a precursor by all these currents, his immediate successors on the other hand are considered as the paradigmatic expression of the transgression of the limits of human reason. Concern, as Fichtean as Hegelian, for an ultimate foundation, a unique absolute, an exclusive principle, is almost always interpreted in terms of the challenge of radical finitude. The disapproval is too unanimous for these philosophies not to constitute a choice “ethnological field,” for those of us who mean to distance ourselves from the most wi
dely shared givens of our time and to look with glasses other than those that the era liberally dispenses.
In a word, I could say—to take up my introductory comparison again—that just as we are advised, in order to clearly and distinctly recognize the anamorphosis, to place ourselves at a most unusual angle to the painting and to thus effect a maximal decentering with respect to the frontal position, here, too, if we position ourselves at the most outlying location relative to our immediate habitus, if we put ourselves at the heart of the “untimely,” that is to say, at the heart of what is taken to be the “height of metaphysics,” we might be able to overcome the suspicion of grounds—and thus to reconstruct the themes of reference and self-reference, of speaking and the said, of science and philosophy, and of identity and contradiction, in a different way than what the current order suggests.
Of course, it will be retorted that a comparison is not an argument, and that I am taking liberties when I say, “Let’s go directly to the eccentric (German idealism) and see what it will yield.” This objection will allow me to specify the status of my choice. It is a thought experiment, a Gedankenexperiment, a topic dear to Hilary Putnam and many others.6 If American philosophers can very seriously ask, “What is it like to be a bat?”7 why shouldn’t French historians of philosophy have the right to ask, “What is it like to conceive philosophy as a first and distinct science?” To do so, can’t they try to climb on the “ladder” of those who meant to prove it?8 Why not attempt this thought experiment? Moreover, mustn’t we also recognize that my objector asks me to first justify my reliance on German idealism only because this ladder is unusual—even though there are many who, relying on Wittgenstein, Husserl, or Heidegger, multiply expressions like “Wittgenstein has shown us … ,” “We have known since Wittgenstein … ,” “Wittgenstein teaches that it is a mistake to … ,” etc., without any other justification than the very words of the master?9 That will be my final argument: my model’s advantage is that it is so unobvious that it spares us from any lazy references to an argument from authority.
The Death of Philosophy Page 19