The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  Self-reference and Knowledge of Knowledge: Metacognitive Problems

  To better illuminate this model, proposed by Fichte and then Hegel, I must first emphasize the obvious point that this principle of self-referentiality (identity between saying and the said) develops within an epistemological—not ontological—set of problems. Having underlined this obvious fact (which is not recognized as such by many of Fichte’s commentators27), I should focus on the nature of this epistemology, for two levels can be distinguished in its interrogation of knowledge. The first aims at determining the nature of our knowledges [connaissances28]: are they a priori or a posteriori, innate or integrally dependent upon experience?29 To say that our knowledges are only founded on, by, and in experience is to rely on the support of Lockean empiricism, while to claim that there are knowledges that are entirely independent of experience is to situate oneself in the rationalist current illustrated, in different modalities, by both Descartes and Kant. These claims, despite their differences, are nonetheless situated in the same set of problems: defining the nature of our knowledges. But—and this is the important point—Fichte’s problem does not principally consist of situating himself in this debate. His question is no longer concerned with the existence or nonexistence of a priori knowledge but addresses the possibility of knowledge (Wissenschaft) about these knowledges (Erkenntnis). This second level of questioning, relative to knowledge of knowledges, is distinguished from the first by it metacognitive character: it is no longer a matter of examining the structure of our cognitive apparatus (intuition, concepts) but of understanding the possibility of a kind of knowledge likely to determine this structure. In this sense, it seems legitimate to say that the Fichtean question is to the classical epistemological question (about the nature of our knowledges) as the question of the possibility of a metalanguage is to an examination of language. To ask how language functions (for example, how it speaks the real) is not the same thing as questioning the possibility that a language could describe the very structure of language.

  It is probably because they have not perceived this difference of levels that a good number of his contemporaries—like the later commentators—understood the Fichtean enterprise on the model of precritical dogmatism and thus relegated it to the infamous category of “metaphysics.” In fact, they have taken for a language what was explicitly given as a questioning of the possibility of a metalanguage. The insistent repetition in Fichte’s texts of the question, “How does a philosopher know?”30 How does he know that he knows? has the goal of making the differences stand out between these two questions “How do we know [connaissance]?” and “How do we know [savoir] that we know [savoir]?” If, as Kant would have it, certain elements of our learning are a priori, it is a matter of knowing what kind of knowledge makes it possible to ascertain that certain elements are a priori. Do these elements become, for the philosopher’s knowledge, facts? If so, what is the status of these facts, knowing that in the Kantian theory, facts can be learned only through concepts, knowing also that Kant denies any recourse to an internal observation? If not, what is the status within the critical project of a knowledge that would not rely on facts? Such are the questions that explain the appearance of a hyperepistemology or an epistemology squared taken by the science of knowledge, to which it will henceforth be incumbent to understand how “we know that we know”—according to a demand echoed by Jaakko Hintikka, who makes the following question one of the most important for our time: “What constitutes the human activity by which we come to know that we know?”31

  It follows that, far from a transcendental subject’s overlooking perspective, the viewpoint of self-reference as a metacognitive question abandons any thematization of vision, of introspections, of a preexisting subject’s observation, and puts forward only a single principle: the principle of congruence between what is said and its saying. Its inscription within what is commonly called the metaphysics of subjectivity32 thus makes no sense at all. However, to even better describe this version of self-reference, which is becoming the backbone of philosophical knowledge, we must now understand the last dimension that distinguishes it—the dimension of action, of Tun. In the Fichtean framework, self-reference is defined neither as a thing nor an object but as a “doing,” realization, an act of saying. Why speak of an act of utterance and not a fact, and what status is this act to be given?

  Self-reference and the Act of Speaking

  I must first elucidate this dimension while remaining strictly within the model proposed by Fichte—only in the next chapter will I be able to compare this model to different contemporary problems of self-referentiality and to current debates about the “fact” of speaking, the “act” of speaking, and the speaking “agent.”

  To understand the Fichtean view of the act of application, it is imperative that we guard against a first misinterpretation, which would consist in wanting to immediately assign the Tun to a subject, substrate of the action, and to thereby transform a philosophy of the act into a philosophy of the agent. As surprising as it might prima facie appear,33 Fichte’s concern is the act, not the agent, and his problem is to exhibit the structure of the action of knowledge, not to determine the identity of a substrate or support (subject, person, individual)—in a word, his “science” is a science of knowledge and not a science of consciousness, of the person, or of the mind. Knowing is an act—this is Fichte’s cardinal thesis; philosophy grasps the act and not the being; ontology thus gives way to actology. How are we to understand this claim without covertly entering into problems of the agent? To understand it, we must first remember that Fichte systematically begins with propositions34 and not with facts of consciousness; next, that within these propositions he distinguishes between what is said and the fact of saying it, “what is done” and “the doing.” It is thus a question of finding the propositions’ structure and not of referring to an agent. But can we say precisely why Fichte identifies the fact of saying (the application) with an act and not with an event in the world—as does, for example, François Récanati? To answer this question, we ought to return to the principle of knowledge, the principle of reflexive identity. I have said that this reflexive identity is the “foundation” for future propositions. But this foundation—far from being an obvious, absolute, and first principle from which a set of propositions can be taken more geometrico—is worked out as an end to pursue, a task to be achieved. The principle says that I should, in the future, act so that the propositions that I accept will have undergone the test of performative noncontradiction. It is in this sense that knowledge is defined as an action because it is a process to be accomplished in light of a prescribed end. More precisely, the identity of the statement and its utterance is simultaneously a starting point (a foundation, of course, but conceived as a model to be achieved in the future) and something that must be accomplished, the end that will be achieved by the system, the task that the philosopher freely assigns himself. It follows that the concept of an act, of praxis, of doing (strictly defined as the production of something—in this case, a system of propositions, which is not yet in the world—in light of a prescribed end) goes beyond the narrow framework of morality and of politics and becomes the cardinal concept of knowledge, in the same way that, for Austin, the order of the sayable became that of action and the act of expression, the expression of an act. At the end of this analysis, we can directly answer the question why we should speak of an act and not of a fact. We are authorized to do so quite simply because “to produce something in light of a prescribed end” is the common definition of an action and not of a fact or an event.

  Conclusions: Congruence Between Statement and Utterance, Said and Saying

  Thus at the end of this path we are in possession of a model of self-reference, encapsulated in its principle: congruence between a statement and its utterance. Despite its brevity, this final definition nevertheless contains multiple implications, which I have examined in detail throughout this chapter, namely

  th
e law of self-reference is the law that gives philosophy its distinctive status and structures its propositions;

  this law provides philosophy its dimension of knowledge in contrast to scientific learning or literary creation;

  this law of self-reference does not point to some sort of metaphysical substrate, nor does it necessitate some sort of psychological introspection, but is a law immanent in philosophical discourse.

  In a word, this law of reflexivity35 avoids all the pitfalls usually denounced by contemporary philosophy while overcoming the generalized skepticism toward philosophical discourse. Having specified this model, I now have to test its consistency by systematically contrasting it with the most contemporary theories of self-reference.

  6

  The Model of Self-reference’s Consistency

  To demonstrate how the proposed model can still allow us to provide a remedy to the aporias diagnosed in part 1—gathered together under the general characterization of a “reflexive deficit”—requires that it confront today’s current theories of self-reference. By refining and specifying it, this confrontation should allow us to reinforce the theory of self-reference that was initially proposed by German idealism in order to cope with the critical project’s failure.

  The Theory of Reflexivity and Current Theories of Self-reference

  Going Beyond the Question of “I”

  The most fertile of the currently espoused models of self-reference is, as I have already indicated, the one that Paul Ricoeur criticizes as a “doctrine of sui-reference,” which tends to reduce reference to self to a reference ad extra. This understanding of self-reference consists in reducing any self-referential statement, like “I speak,” to a referential statement, like “he speaks.” The act of utterance is interpreted, in fact, as a standard reference to an exterior being. For example, when I utter the sentence “He is speaking,” I refer to a being in the world who can be designated by his proper name (and his initials, like “L. W.”) or by a definite description (“the philosopher of the ‘Blue Book’”); moreover, my proposition can be verified or falsified by reference to the facts: either the individual “L. W.” is speaking right now, or not.

  And yet the proposition “I am speaking” can be analyzed as a strictly referential expression because it can be replaced salve veritate by a proper name or a definite description. To secure a definitive trivialization of the self-referential phrase “I,” we can say that a statement like “I speak” has the same traits as referential statements of the sort “L. W. speaks” because, contradicting the proposition that “no one is speaking,” it implies the proposition that “someone is speaking” and behaves therefore as a value of the propositional function “x speaks.” This is the first argumentative strategy for making self-reference a worldly fact, one species among others of reference ad extra. There have been many critics of this reduction, such as Ricoeur, already mentioned, but also Wittgenstein, who himself challenged the referential dimension of the “I,”1 or Colin McGinn, who tried to show the “infallible” or “incorrigible” character of the self-attribution of psychological states such as pain,2 or even Sydney Shoemaker, who showed in “Self-reference and Self-Awareness”3 how self-reference is the condition of possibility for any other form of reference.

  And yet however interesting these different conceptions may be and whatever importance this debate may have today, we must note that from my point of view, that is, from the viewpoint of the problem of the status of philosophical discourse, this problem is not relevant.4 Indeed, my model of self-reference as a principle of reflexivity does not try to answer the question, “What is being done when one says ‘I’ in sentences like ‘I have a toothache’?” but to ask, “What is said when one utters propositions like ‘The truth does not exist’ or ‘A proposition is true only if an intuition or an empirical fact verifies it,’ etc.?” The law of reflexivity is not identical with any of the versions of self-reference that I’ve cited—from Récanati’s “sui-reference” to the reflection sought by Ricoeur. The law of reflexivity can be explained as follows: given a certain number of propositions like those I’ve mentioned—here, relative to truth—what is presupposed in order to be able to utter these propositions; what is implied, or even what set of laws must they obey so that they do not destroy themselves? It is important to insist on this point, for we have here a very different problem of self-referentiality than before. Indeed, it is not a matter of knowing whether the “I,” a simple “shifter,”5 refers to an empirical fact of the world (“sui-reference”), nor of understanding the “I” as subjective in contrast to the body’s objectivity (Wittgenstein), nor even of making it an anchoring point—whether this anchoring point is defined as a shattered cogito (Ricoeur) or the “limit-point of the world” (Granger)—nor even of deciding in favor of a forever “infallible” “I” (Shoemaker) or conversely for an “I” that is a pure grammatical illusion (Nietzsche and the deconstructivists). Knowing what is said when one says “I” is not my problem because the problem of reflexivity here is the problem of a proposition’s reference to itself. My task is thus to circumscribe a type of propositions and to determine the grammar that governs them. Even admitting, with the philosophy of language, that philosophy is only one language game among others, the question nevertheless arises of what are the rules that structure it. And yet in this language game of philosophy, we find certain propositions that must encompass themselves under penalty of self-destruction. The problem of reflexivity is clearly circumscribed here relative to the other contemporary problems. Its domain of relevance and of analysis is precisely delimited as the class of propositions that must refer to themselves to avoid contradiction. Having now characterized this difference from other theories of self-reference, all of which are structured around the meaning of the pronoun “I,” I must next clarify the class of propositions that must be applied to themselves.

  Applying a Proposition to Itself

  To have to apply to itself without self-contradiction is a requirement first for propositions relative to the concept of truth. I have shown this throughout my discussion, on the basis of three examples: skepticism, which claims that truth does not exist; Kantianism, which defines it as the connection between a concept and an intuition; and logical positivism, which understands a proposition’s truth in terms of its analyticity or its conformity with experience. Given that, it does not seem (contrary to Alfred Tarski’s view6) that the mention of the predicate of truth in a proposition would be the only case of a proposition’s necessary reflexivity. Thus, to cite only two further examples, when a historian, sociologist, or psychoanalyst asserts that “every man’s thinking is the reflection or the product of his social environment or of his contingent history,” he is simultaneously and in the same respect saying that the proposition that he has uttered is the product of his own specific and contingent social environment. In doing so, he cannot avoid this dilemma: On the one hand, because he admits that his proposition is the expression of a contingent moment, he can no longer claim that it is universal. That proposition thus becomes the expression of a contingent individual (whose name, for example, is Pierre Bourdieu), himself the product of a historical moment (the second half of the twentieth century) and a particular social milieu (the educated middle class), and no longer a proposition valid beyond this precise place and this particular time. Or, on the other hand, he acknowledges that his proposition has exceptions, in particular at least that very proposition, but, once again, he cannot claim that this proposition is universal because, at least for that individual’s proposition, “it is not the case,” as the logician’s canonical phrase would have it. However that may be, in both cases his proposition is false because it fails to apply to itself. We have here an example of a proposition that, although it does not immediately or indirectly contain the terms “truth” or “validity,” is self-refuting if it does not apply to itself, that is, in this case, if it does not take account of the entirety of the statement, in which the authority of the
utterance is implicated, which authority must not be a counterexample of what is said at the level of contents.