It remains for me only to put this discourse about the death of philosophy into perspective. I said in the introduction that if we show that an obituary is (like Mark Twain’s) mistaken, then the question is no longer about said death but rather the reasons for its announcement. What happened so that the idea of an exhaustion of the discipline could become so obvious and so common? How can we situate—and thus relativize—the discourse of the end of philosophy? What reasons led to this theme’s omnipresence today? The reasons are probably multiple; and I propose here to study only one possible direction among others. To return to my theory of signification, it seems to me that, well before the “catastrophe of Frege’s semantic triangle,” philosophy had committed itself, in a progressively exclusive way, to the question of reference, of the “said,” to the detriment of the question of self-reference, from which I have reconstructed its possibilities as a first, distinct, and autonomous science. Therefore, in the third moment of my reflections, I will follow the guiding thread of reference—I will trace the progressive establishment of its hegemony through a concealment of self-reference. A single dimension—reference—has been brought to the fore, even though, as I have shown, reference and self-reference could have been understood together, and a possible joint structure could be proposed—by indicating, for example, how the thesis of self-reference, apparently opposed to reference ad extra, makes it possible, in fact, to generate propositions about the world (like the impossibility of radical antirealism, of a total determinism, or a reduction of the mind to pure repetitive mechanisms, etc.). The theme of the end of philosophy is fed by this concealment of self-reference. And so my task now is to put the theme of the end of philosophy in perspective by bringing this progressive concealment of self-reference to light.
III
The End of Philosophy in Perspective: The Source of the Reflexive Deficit
9
The “Race to Reference”
The twentieth century, particularly on its analytic side, was undeniably marked by what Jocelyn Benoist does not hesitate to call the “race to reference.”1 Interest in the problem of reference would be a kind of reaction against Kantian idealism and, in general, against any form of representationalism. With Bernard Bolzano and Gottlob Frege, later with the early Husserl and of course Bertrand Russell, a desire was expressed to return to the object, against a too-exclusive concern for our representations of the object. In a word, the thematization of reference was presented as an offensive against the transcendental—which, by means of its preoccupation “less with the object than our modes of knowledge of the object” would have finished by crushing it [the object]—prompting, in reaction, a return to realism. On this point, Benoist, after having noted that “‘the race to reference’ … seems to have led philosophy to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,”2 identifies the origin of this attention to reference in Bolzanian anti-Kantianism. This historical thesis—of “Bolzano’s inauguration, breaking with Kantian representationalism, of a certain kind of consolidated referential demand”3 that would be the “inaugural formation of twentieth century philosophy”4—is well established but needs, in my view, to be put in perspective. To be sure, there is no doubt that Bolzanian realism was in opposition to Kantian idealism, that semantics was meant to be a reaction to the transcendental problematic, or finally that this reaction colors part of contemporary philosophical debates. But does the problem of reference merely represent the acceptance of a particular realism in contrast to Kantian idealism? If that were the case, what would become of Heidegger, or even Husserl’s transcendental turn, which would have to be ignored in such a reconstruction of the history of twentieth-century philosophy?5 Likewise, what would become of the neo-Kantians who dominated the beginning of the twentieth century? And what if the problem of reference—far from being born in the break between Kant and Austrian philosophy—finds its source beyond that, at the very origins of contemporary philosophy? Why, moreover, should we restrict the problem of reference to the sole question of an object’s “reality”? Indeed, whether the object is a solid, existing “entity” (as in the realism of Bolzano, Russell, and even the early Husserl) or a phenomenon conceived as the synthesis of representations (as in Kant, of course, and the neo-Kantians but also Ernst Mach’s phenomenalism) changes nothing about the fact that in both cases it is a question of reference, not of self-reference—of the said, not of saying, to put it in Austin’s and Levinas’s terms.
Furthermore, this problematic of reference in contrast to self-reference can encompass the themes of existentialists like Heidegger just as well as analytic philosophy’s problematic of the object—it thus invites a different reconstruction of the advent of current philosophy. In fact, in history’s eyes, can’t we propose another story of the inaugural formation of contemporary philosophy that takes the concealment of self-reference as its guiding line? Indeed, beyond Bolzano’s realism and Kant’s idealism, they can both be considered as thinkers of reference, in contrast to the problematic of self-reference. Such is the thesis that I mean to demonstrate, by providing what is needed for a dive down to the origins of contemporary philosophy. For this dive, I will not discuss the analytic beginnings of contemporary philosophy, for it goes without saying that this paradigm is governed by an understanding of reference. Nor will I become attached, as Benoist has so admirably and magnificently done, to the early Husserl, who shares with analytic philosophy this concern for reference. These two currents indeed constitute the acme of the “race to reference.” But if analytic philosophy shares its “demand for referentiality” with the early Husserl, it seems to me that this demand should not be understood as a reaction to the critical project but rather as its realization, its completion. I thus must go back to Kant to show how philosophy’s referential ethos has unceasingly become more pronounced over the last two centuries and to show how the analytic currents of contemporary philosophy are its apotheosis, the culmination of a furrowed and plowed path, worked to the point that the ground has become infertile from overuse and must today be left to lie fallow.
To understand the assumption of reference, I will show how the contemporary philosophical options are indebted to two ways of reading Kant in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. They thus have in common that they travel down only one of two paths that were open to philosophy then. To put it differently, this time in Emil Lask’s6 terms, at the beginning of the century two paths (that were not contradictory, that could be followed at the same time and come together at some point) were open to philosophy: it could secure the status of its own discourse (a metaphilosophical perspective), or it could anchor “categories” in experience (the real in general) or in existentials (for example, the first strata of the relation to the world in Husserl, such as the “prepredicative”). Only one of the paths proposed by Lask was taken, the path of reference. However, in the specific case of readings of Kant, this path of reference was taken in two absolutely distinct senses: The first is the classically epistemological path of reference as the sciences’ relation to the real—here we find, for example, Hermann von Helmholtz’s and Hermann Cohen’s problems. The second is the existential path of reference—such as, for example (apart from the Husserlian opening to the prepredicative) Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. In my view, these two different ways of reading Kant have accentuated the divorce between reference and self-reference, already at work in Kant himself. To retrace the lines of this history, upon which we are still dependent, I will first try to show how the tension between the two orientations, reference and self-reference, plagues the Kantian system to the point of weakening it. Next, we will see how Helmholtz, to overcome this tension that appeared as a contradiction, opted exclusively for a single path, reference, thus giving twentieth-century philosophy its orientation. A veritable fulcrum in the determination of the “race to reference,” Helmholtz has colored the most contemporary investigations. By his configuration of the Kantian problem, this author—whom we too often te
nd to forget today7—launched twentieth-century philosophy. Finally, we will see how, paradoxically, interpretations like Heidegger’s have not deflected the route adopted in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, we will find, in comparing interpretations of Kant as different as Cohen’s and Heidegger’s, an exclusive concern for reference. My comparative reading’s only aim is to establish that Cohen’s (positivism) and Heidegger’s (hermeneutic phenomenology) lines of questioning are, in the final analysis, identical. I thus do not at all need to enter into a detailed analysis of these authors, nor to elucidate their work in a new way.8 I need only to demonstrate a paradoxical thesis: these apparently incommensurable currents of philosophy share the same line of questioning—a concern for reference to the detriment of attention to self-reference. It is the exclusivity of this concern that has engendered the erroneous announcement of the death of philosophy. This inquiry into the historical source of the referential demand will enable me to better show the necessity of opening a different path of investigation.
10
The Tension Between Reference and Self-reference in the Kantian System
In Kant, the dual question of reference and self-reference is left to be read from his terms “representation” and “reflection”—representation embodying the mind’s movement toward what is not itself, namely, the object; reflection, the mind’s questioning of its own structures. And yet, in the Kantian system, the conjunction of these two notions turns out to be, in the final analysis, impossible. This impossibility is expressed in a strange oxymoron, the use of which causes the entire framework to implode. To demonstrate the incompatibility between these two orientations, I must first bring out the meaning of the term “representation” and then of “reflection” within the critical project. Only once clear definitions have been reconstructed and their respective importance has been evaluated will I be able to analyze the term that expresses this impossible conjunction.
Representation
In the Critique of Pure Reason, representation is identified first of all as cognitive activity in general, whatever its strata. Thus Kant writes, “all kinds of representation” and adds, “(intuition, sensation, and thought).”1 Representation designates all kinds of thought: perception, sensation, reproduction (in the imagination), and concept. Briefly, representation as a “genus” refers to any modification of the mind and includes various species, which Kant lists in the Critique.2 The definition of representation is thus very wide, for in the final analysis, sensation, imagination, and thinking with concepts or with ideas will all be “representation.” If we keep to this generic term, there would be no reason to claim that Kantian representation is likely to conceal the current term “representation,” insofar as representation is given as the entirety of mental activity and not only as a thematization of the object and our relation to it. So we should go further in our elucidation of this term in the three Critiques to show how his understanding of representation becomes an understanding of reference ad extra.
Within this very broad genre of representation, valid knowledge is defined in the Critique of Pure Reason as a connection between representations—but this connection is clearly not just any sort of connection, lest any imaginative construct, such as a chimera, be considered knowledge. Valid knowledge is thus a specific connection between representations: “Knowledge is [essentially] a whole in which representations stand compared and connected.”3 Knowledge is a well-ordered relation between different “representations.” Still more precisely, knowledge is defined as the elaboration of a passive authority by an active authority. Only the categories applied to space and time by means of the imagination produce valid knowledge. We can know in a universal and necessary way only in the intuition and the understanding, whose agreement produces the “phenomenon.” Kant’s famous distinction between thinking and knowledge follows from this specification: “To think an object and to know an object are thus by no means the same thing. Knowledge involves two factors: first, the concept … ; and secondly, the intuition.”4 Having clarified this dual definition (wide—the genus—and narrow—valid knowledge as a well-ordered relation between different representations), we must now understand how, from this, the critical project as a whole will be given as a “theory of representation,”5 to the exclusion of any other thematization.
First of all, the Kantian theory rests entirely upon the following postulate: to know is to know an object (this is stated in section 22 of the Critique, as well as elsewhere). Kantianism’s presupposition is the idea that philosophical inquiry is exhausted in the explication of the relation between subject and object—for Kant, to philosophize means to produce a theory of the objective world. To express this with an example, Kant defines knowledge in terms of judgment. Fundamentally, the power of the mind is the power of judgment. In doing so, he divides judgments into two classes, determinate judgments and reflective judgments. The common point between these two types of judgment is that they both express a relation to the object: for determinate judgment, a relation to mathematical objects and, in their major structures, physical objects; for reflective judgment, a relation to beautiful objects and to objects organized by nature. And yet, even if these judgments clearly do not have the same kind of validity (the former are valid, the latter are plausible), the fact remains that what is defined are judgments about objects of experience. To be sure, Kant “internalizes” the traditional schism between a subject and an object that exist as two separate entities; this schism, having become internal to the subject, is certainly expressed in subjective terms as the relation between activity (understanding, the categories) and passivity (the intuition, time and space). But despite this obvious subjectification (Kant’s Copernican revolution), it is knowledge as knowledge of an object that is the focus of Kant’s attention. To put this differently, Kant’s question is indeed, “What is an object?” In this sense, even if his response is not that of classical realism (an object is the thing in itself, independent of my representations), the stakes of the question are still the same as for realism—to make a theory of the objective world. And yet, this conception of philosophical inquiry as a “theory of the objective world” is not at all self-evident, because—even without needing to wait for the various contemporary critiques of the “philosophy of representation,” like Michel Henry’s—Fichte had defined philosophy’s task differently. From the beginning of Personal Meditations on Elementary Philosophy,6 Fichte indicated that the question that philosophy must address is no longer, “How can representations be related to an object?” (which he defined in a Kantian way as a phenomenon) but rather, “How do thoughts accord with the action of our mind?” This is why he concluded that “philosophy is reflection” and no longer simply a theory of representation. We can see with this simple example that to philosophize is not necessarily to make a theory of the objective world. And yet this is what Kant immediately presupposes—in contrast to Fichte, and later Hegel. We can see here in outline the two orientations for and the bifurcation of philosophy: on one side, philosophy as a theory of representation or of reference ad extra; on the other, philosophy as the praxis of reflection, or self-reference.
Thus in Kant, the relation between subject and object is given as the totality of what is to be understood; philosophical inquiry’s only task is the clarification of this relation. Defined in this way, critique corresponds to Michel Henry’s characterization of “an ontology of representation; that is, of experience understood as the general rapport between subject and object”;7 the philosophy of representation exhausts itself in the idea of objectivity and culminates, as Henry reiterates, in “an elaborate theory of the objective universe.”8 This focus upon the object is what allows me to speak, with respect to Kant, of the idea of reference, for knowing always comes back to knowing something other than oneself, which means always knowing ad extra. To be sure, critique is not at all a form of realism, but it is nevertheless defined as a theory of the objective world. In doing so, it expresses a concern analo
gous to what we find in analytic ideas of reference at the beginning of the twentieth century. The dividing line between realism and critique is found in their respective definitions of the object but not in their exclusive attention to knowledge of the object. Let’s try to more closely characterize this Kantian definition of the object to better legitimate and specify the nature of my apparently eccentric connection.
One of the characteristic traits of critique surely resides in its definition of the known object: an object is an object of valid knowledge only insofar as it can be delimited, depicted, and schematized. This synonymy between knowing and depicting9 can be briefly illustrated by two examples, namely, the Kantian theory of mathematics and his theory of the subject.
1. The way in which a philosopher establishes the relation between algebra and geometry is always significant for his theory of knowledge, as Ernst Cassirer has already shown. To confirm this point, we can recall the opposition between Descartes’ and Leibniz’s conceptions of mathematics. We know that Descartes not only gave a remarkable impetus to certain algebraic techniques but also mastered (as a good number of his letters bear witness) the process of integration on which Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus is based. But he rejects these algebraic procedures for one sole reason: they possess no geometrical equivalent; they cannot be projected as a geometrical figure nor can they be delimited by the contours of a graph. In a word, they aren’t depictable. That they cannot be depicted is precisely why they must, in Descartes’ eyes, be considered as outside the sphere of mathematical knowledge. The subservience of algebra to geometry, the refusal to calculate the equations for some transcendental curves, and finally, the rejection of procedures of integration—these are all thus functions of a theory of knowledge in which knowing and depicting are synonyms. Leibniz’s convictions in this domain will be quite different—for whom, on the contrary, knowing is neither seeing nor delimiting figures (in the intuition or the imagination) but rather is calculating. In Leibniz, we will thus see a promotion of algebra and the demotion of geometry. The relation between these two disciplines is dependent upon his theory of knowledge, in which thinking is neither seeing nor depicting in space but calculating (in the sense of logical calculation). If we now consider Kant,10 algebra is subservient to geometry and the theory of numbers to that of figures.11 And yet if this is the case, it is as a function of a theory of knowledge for which knowing is representing and representing means to make an object depictable. A geometrical figure—as something that can be grasped through its dimensions, represented through its contours, discernible through its limits—here becomes a criterion of knowledge. Consequently, the philosophy of representation is distinguished by the fact that it takes the problem of objectivity (the relation of subject and object) as the sole problem of philosophy, and by the fact that this objectivity is defined in its turn by objects’ being visible, that is, depictable. Representation is connected to vision through the concept of the figure. The theory of representation is thus given as a theory of reference to the world—which is posited as the totality of what is to be understood—and this theory of representation simultaneously chooses the [geometrical] figure as the paradigm of knowledge.
The Death of Philosophy Page 27