The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  From a more general point of view, these interpretations of Kant (Cohen’s and Heidegger’s) thus cannot serve to evaluate a questioning that cannot be understood as an answer to the question, “What is Being?” nor as an approach to this different problem, “How is knowledge of an object possible?” This is why these two positions (Cohen’s and Heidegger’s) both paradoxically embody a single orientation, confronted with an interrogation that starts in an entirely different direction. On one side, the question concerns a subject’s relation to an object (or Dasein’s to alterity); on the other, the question concerns an x’s relation to itself. This is why, however important these interpretations of Kant may be, however valid (philologically and philosophically) they may be, an interpreter is entitled to highlight their strange proximity: reference first and self-reference not even questioned.

  Conclusions: Common Ground—The Exclusive Idea of Reference

  At the end of my reading of these readings of Kant, what conclusions should we draw?

  1. First of all, the source of the reflexive deficit that leads to the omnipresence in contemporary philosophy of the theme of the end of philosophy is indeed found in this “race to reference” that characterized the past two centuries, whose genealogy I have just outlined and in which Heidegger paradoxically finds himself side by side with Cohen. On this point, we can consider Helmholtz as the mirror in which contemporary philosophy can easily gaze to find if not all its choices at least its principal orientation. Even Heidegger, who considers himself to have broken with all forms of neo-Kantianism, does not, in his reading of Kant, deflect the fundamental trend—consideration of reference ad extra and abandonment of self-reference.

  2. Next, this history of the “race to reference” to the detriment of the problem of self-reference allows us to put contemporary philosophy in its proper perspective. To be sure, we could take into account that this philosophy is divided between the Continental paradigm, embodied by phenomenology in all its aspects, and analytic philosophy, whether of the first or second wave; to be sure, we could look beyond this division to go back to their common source—which is precisely the demand for referentiality at work at the debut of phenomenology as well as at the beginning of analytic philosophy. But this demand for referentiality itself, far from being a challenge to Kantianism, is its most accomplished construction. Since Kant, and following Helmholtz, the philosophical problematic has been understood as the problematic of reference. Such is the true source of contemporary philosophy in the diversity of its movements; such is the origin of the aporias that run through it today.

  At the end of this analysis, I have been able to contextualize the theme of the end of philosophy and to go back to the sources of the concealment of self-reference. Before judging that I have accomplished my entire task—analyzing, then challenging, and finally contextualizing the theme of the death of philosophy—I must ask a final question, about the history of philosophy.

  Indeed, if, as we saw in the introduction, a certain historicist conception of philosophy21 is tied to the theme of the death of philosophy, then overcoming the theme of its death will lead us to overcome historicism. But doesn’t this overcoming of historicism entail the stance of a “return to” a particular philosopher or a particular moment of philosophy, set up as the only worthy one? The reinvestment of an old position, defining (without smile or inhibition) philosophy as a science—doesn’t this lead us to replace a current statue of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine, or Kant with a statue of Fichte or Hegel? What status should be given to the history of philosophy? Will its clear articulation allow us to break with historicism without for all that claiming to return to a past that is no more? It is only with the answer to this question that my overcoming of the death of philosophy can be entirely accomplished.

  13

  Questioning the History of Philosophy

  Overcoming Historicism Without Returning to the Past

  I have had to say in what precise sense philosophy is a first, distinct, and autonomous science in order to overcome Jacques Bouveresse’s assertion that

  the need to teach the history of the discipline (and to preserve the memory or celebrate the cult of a certain number of great figures . . .) constitutes about the only thing that still justifies the existence of a good number of philosophy departments in French universities … [and] is what maintains the idea of philosophy as a distinct and autonomous discipline.1

  I have thus challenged the idea of the death of philosophy and, thereby, overcome the historicism of those positions that assert the exhaustion of the discipline. But, in my concern to dispel the thesis of continual progress (scientism) or of inevitable decline (Heideggerianism), have I covertly advocated a return to a past moment of the history of philosophy—in this case Fichte and probably Hegel—thus repeating Eduard Zeller’s gesture, calling on his contemporaries to “return to Kant”?

  It would of course be permissible to answer this question by first noting that it is less a matter of a “return to” than a reappropriation,2 or, still more precisely, less the reappropriation of a response than the reactivation of a question. Indeed, a revival of the Wissenschaftslehre could never be a repetition but rather, as Fichte said, a construction. It is not a matter of applying ready-made instruments but of constructing—each time in a new way—a model of rationality that is neither contradictory nor self-refuting.3 But this answer cannot suffice, for fundamentally this definition of a philosophy that is not a collection of contents to be redeployed but an activity to be reinvested could just as easily be imputed to Kant, or even Plato or Descartes. And not only have I not taken up the Kantian philosophy but I have most often rejected its premises.

  Must we therefore answer, this time with Jonathan Barnes, that whatever the author may have intended, we must act as if he had just written yesterday and “read Plato … as if he had published his dialogues with the Clarendon Press … [and] read Aristotle’s essays as if they appeared in the most recent issue of Mind”?4 This will to “contemporaneousness” is not at all incompatible, as Barnes shows in his essays, with the rigor of the historian of philosophy who must accept the simultaneous use of historical, philological, and systematic analyses, just as the ethnologist must go to study a given civilization on-site and not be content with Herodotus’s reports. Barnes’s position must thus be accepted and defended. Nevertheless, if contemporaneousness can be postulated, each author’s supposed truth is incompatible with a variety of doctrines, and I have incontestably made German idealism—not, as many today do, Wittgenstein or Heidegger—serve as Ariadne’s guiding thread.

  I have given a first beginning of an answer to this question in chapter 5, namely, that with regard to the situation in which philosophy currently finds itself, this moment of the history of philosophy can appear to be one of the best angles of vision or “corrective apparatuses.” As we could say of an ethnologist that he has chosen a “field” more or less suited to his initial question, I can say that a historian of philosophy determines a more or less adequate field according to the questions that he asks and the questions that arise. Those who want to see the curious pattern formed by the theme of the death of philosophy in contemporary thought (part 1) probably should not position themselves in the place of one or another figure whom it constitutes (Wittgenstein, or Heidegger, American naturalism, or the “turning” of phenomenology, etc.). None of these figures, constituting a part of the painting, is able to grasp it in its totality. Moreover, since my concern is to answer Bouveresse about philosophy’s status as a first and distinct science, it seemed appropriate to “test” or “verify” the consistency of a model that advanced this hypothesis. I have thus examined the value of this hypothesis—of philosophy as a first and autonomous science—by subjecting it to new problems, such as the dispute about transcendental arguments, the prohibition of self-referentiality, naturalism, etc., and by comparing it to current thinkers (part 2).

  Nevertheless, all these answers, legitimate in themselves, probably do n
ot suffice to entirely exhaust the question of an appeal to a given moment of philosophy. If the history of philosophy is neither a “royal road” leading to progress and progressing to a fixed end, nor a path that leads only to its exhaustion, nor a moment of truth (Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, or any other) within an ocean of falsehoods, then what is it? Perhaps a sort of “garden of forking paths.”5 At a given moment of history, multiple directions present themselves and can be taken, scrutinized, deepened. And yet among these multiple paths, only one or two will be taken or traveled by the majority; the others will be forgotten, hidden, left fallow. These paths can be taken again, if at a given moment the state of the garden seems to demand it. To put it in Emil Lask’s terms, already mentioned, if at the beginning of the century philosophy had to embark upon a dual orientation—to bring the categories into a much wider field of existentials (the categories’ reference to a “real”) and to understand its own cognitive value by orienting itself toward a metaphilosophy (self-reference)—I have shown how philosophy, in its various forms, has invested in the first problem, cultivated the first path, but abandoned the second to neglect. I have demonstrated on this point how the two paradigms constitute only one, because Heidegger takes up only the first orientation—his goal is to bring out the categories’ derivative character with respect to existentials. Thence is born the idea that the Logos has its roots in the existential analytic of Dasein; thence also come the phenomenological themes, now dominant, of the existential subject, of radical finitude, of primary passivity, etc. As for analytic philosophy, if it is obviously not in its case a matter of some sort of application of the categories to existentials, the fact nevertheless remains that the orientation of questioning is the same—namely, the problem of reference to an exterior other, the problem of reference that, as I have shown, “has had a central position in philosophical discussion from the very beginning of this century.”6 The second path, self-reference, that German idealism traveled and that Lask hoped to take up again, was temporarily covered up in favor of tasks that appeared, at the time, to be more urgent. But today, as the path of reference has led us to the aporias that I have inventoried in part 1, now that contradictions that threaten the very practice of the discipline have appeared, isn’t it necessary to revive another orientation, to survey another path? These orientations—reference on one side and self-reference on the other—are not diametrically opposed, in the sense that one would be dogmatic and the other not, one outdated and the other not. The choice of direction is commanded by the state of the garden at a given moment of history. Yesterday, reference was first; today it doubtless ought to be accompanied by a reflection upon self-reference, in part to overcome its own aporias.7 If the problem of reference has occupied the last two centuries, it has clearly obscured the path of self-reference while at the same time, by giving rise to multiple obstacles, made its own path impracticable—and this impracticable character has led too many thinkers to proclaim the end of philosophy, when the only thing that could be established was that a thematic that would exclude all others was a dead end.

  It is not for me here to precisely define why a given path is abandoned at one moment, to be taken up again later. It could be, sometimes, for reasons that are totally contingent or exterior to the discipline. Thus, in mathematics, Henri Poincaré’s discoveries, advances, and his lines of inquiry were undervalued in the middle of the twentieth century—only in recent years has he been revived as a decisive reference, a major contributor whose paths must be surveyed again, whose projects must be pursued, whose “intuitions” must be relaunched. Why? This obviously could be due to theoretical and intrinsically mathematical reasons—as is urged by the “Nicolas Bourbaki” group’s arguments—but we could just as well argue that part of the generation that Poincaré had educated were killed in World War I8 and thus could not help his insights to flourish. In the same way, the school of “French epistemology” (in particular with Jean Cavaillès) was destroyed during World War II. And again, Jean Largeault’s9 premature death has probably changed the face of the French reception of Anglo-Saxon philosophy—indeed, by very quickly stigmatizing the idiosyncrasies into which some French analytics could fall, Largeault probably could have attenuated them and given a more fruitful theoretical turn to the clash between traditions.10 In an analogous way, Dominique Janicaud’s11 absence threatens to extremely negatively impact future phenomenology. Briefly, a series of isolated and undeducible facts can shatter the philosophical given at any moment and make it continue down one path while it leaves another unexplored. What would the philosophical landscape be like today if Michel Foucault had lived as long as Kant? We cannot say. But these deaths have doubtless blocked otherwise possible paths.

  To put this in less-metaphorical terms than “a garden of forked paths,” I could show that every foundational moment in the history of philosophy (Plato confronting Parmenides, Descartes confronting Aristotle, Kant confronting Hume, etc.) always embodies a set of questions. Within this constellation of questions, the subsequent tradition will privilege one or two problems that it will set in stone in a corpus of answers. The choice of this or that question will have a number of grounds, rational grounds to be sure, but also others that are contingent and sometimes external to the discipline. The rational reason predominates when a failure to answer the question jeopardizes the discipline itself (Aristotle and the invention of logic as a response to the Sophists). As for the external grounds, they are quite simply a function of historical and ideological contexts. Certain historical events force a given idea if not to be completely altered, at the very least to be redirected. Thus Ernst Cassirer tells how, before the Nazi catastrophe, the various members of the Marburg school were relatively unconcerned about political questions. But driven by the tragic events in Germany, all the survivors brought a consideration of politics to their initially epistemological reflections. In contrast to the neo-Kantians’ relative political disinterest in the 1920s, Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle did not understand their doctrine as separate from their social and political militancy. However this dimension was totally erased precisely because of the context in which it was received, namely the puritan American landscape that could only reject the vehement socialist claims that were expressed in the preface of The Logical Structure of the World. All these reasons are clearly extrinsic to the discipline, but they nonetheless serve to configure it at a given moment—and thus today, too, we intimately depend upon transplants imposed by the murderous madness of history.

  With these considerations, it seems that the impasse in which a certain current philosophy (one that proclaims its own death) finds itself was born in a fork in the road that left one possible path unexplored—namely, the pursuit of the question of self-reference. This path had been surveyed by German idealism and hidden by our current world with the defamatory curse of “metaphysics.” But this path can be taken by others besides German idealism. For example, as Jocelyn Benoist has said, it could also be the path for phenomenology’s questioning of itself, or even the path of the objections that Aristotle made to the ancient rhetoricians, or perhaps even the path of a different Wittgenstein than the one that the American vulgate, magnified by certain French ambassadors, would give us. In this sense, I do not think that we ought to return to Fichte, to Hegel, nor to anyone, but that we ought to decipher and reclaim one possible path among others that will perhaps contribute to improving the landscape and the common garden.12

  Interpretation and Argumentation

  To all these observations about the history of philosophy, I must add what is, in my view, the most conclusive. I said in chapter 5 that a reading and then a reinvestment of a tradition can and must have the extremely precise status of a thought experiment (Gedankenexperiment). Why wouldn’t a reading of Hegel have the same meaning and the same functions as thought experiments like the idea of a dual Earth or the hypothesis of “super-spartans” and “X-worlders”?13 To project oneself into a different system, in contrast to the obvio
us facts that inundate us, can serve as a dual Earth; from this different Earth, we can better grasp the meaning and the shape of our blinding “obvious facts.” In an article entitled “Philosophie analytique et philosophie continentale,”14 Putnam regrets that one would have to “choose between being a philosopher who makes arguments and a philosopher who loves texts and interprets them”;15 and indeed, it would be best to be done with this opposition—an opposition that would bewilder a Renaissance humanist who argued at the same time as he commented upon texts, who redeployed ideas to better criticize the prejudices of his time, who recalled history to better craft the future. How is argumentation incompatible with interpretation, if not, as Putnam shows, for catastrophic historical reasons (nationalisms and the madness of World War II)? To make the study of the history of philosophy into a thought experiment, to give it the same status and the same place in argumentation as this specific type of reasoning has today in Anglo-Saxon philosophy, makes it possible to overcome the alternative that Putnam decries. Furthermore, the concept of a reading as a Gedankenexperiment makes it possible to escape from the dilemma between historicisms (continuous progress or an inevitable decline) and the idea of “a return to this or that”—from historicism, first of all, because with the reactivation of past systems, we will show that these forms of thought can still suit us; and from any attempt to “return to,” for it is not a matter of ordaining this or that philosophy, in its entirety, valid to the exclusion of all others. Indeed, no more than Putnam would assert the reality of his twin Earth, the historian of philosophy does not definitively settle within such a system for itself and in itself. I am simply proposing to make interpretation into a ladder allowing us to reach an “other Earth,” from which we can perhaps16 better read the layout of the “first Earth” (interpretation, again) and discuss it (argumentation)—that “other Earth” is formed by the set of philosophical systems that are today considered to be scientifically erroneous, historically outdated, or paradigmatically exhausted. As for “our Earth,” it is constituted by lines of force that bring the most contrary currents together in the same thesis. We have seen the extent to which the theme of the end of philosophy has been one of these lines of force, a line of agreement and not a dividing line, that forges our habitus and from which we should distance ourselves to see to what extent it is possible to think differently.