These considerations allow me, in addition, to posit as a hypothesis the possibility of a dialogue between philosophers, that is to say, the possibility of a cross-fertilization of theories. This cross-fertilization is equally likely to undermine a vision of a history of philosophy that has come to its completion. Philosophies can mutually respond to one another, can be pollinated through their differences, can be enlightened through their heterogeneous problematics. I have given several glimpses of this practice of cross-fertilization, here as well as elsewhere, particularly in the article “Plaidoyer pour le langage philosophique,”17 by showing, for example, how Austin can make possible a reading of Fichte, and in return how Fichte makes possible a reading of Austin. Indeed, with the conceptual tools that he crafted, Austin makes it possible to revisit the great texts of classic philosophy. The most famous example of this “use of Austin” as a rereading of the tradition is Jaakko Hintikka’s attempt to rethink the Cartesian cogito in performative terms.18 Following Hintikka’s example, I showed how Fichte, in appearance the author who has strayed the furthest from the analytic tradition, can be understood, philosophically and philologically, in terms of Austin’s most groundbreaking categories. But I also showed how, in return, the speculative tradition thus reinterpreted makes it possible to reexamine the field opened by Austin. Can we, like the decipherer of the anamorphosis, put ourselves in the unusual perspective of Austin’s thought to see the pattern formed by Fichte’s thought, and can we, in return,19 put ourselves in the unusual perspective of German speculative thought to discover a new use of Austin? Such is the wager made by the practice of cross-fertilizing authors separated in time, a praxis that, from the simple fact of its real employment, overcomes historicism.
But, it will be objected, this cross-fertilization of doctrines here takes on the appearance of a suspension of time, in which we act “as if” the philosophers were strict contemporaries. Doesn’t doing this lead to a joyous but anarchic reinvention of history? We can’t be ironic about this concept of cross-fertilization in saying that if we set aside temporal succession then the possibilities open to historians are most certainly infinite! Simplicius and Kant, Averroës and Hume, Confucius and Wittgenstein, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Rorty—so many possibilities to create hybrids that will give rise to entirely new questions! Thus, the epistemology of the history of philosophy to which this leads would clearly be Feyerabendian, and our theoretical construction would be a fictional composition. We would manipulate the texts to make them answer like a mischievous organ builder who intentionally inverts the keys to produce the most far-fetched sonorous compositions. To answer this objection, I should probably recall that every reactivation of a question is commanded by the state of philosophy at a given moment. I have said that certain possibilities for thought, sketched at certain historical moments, do not have immediate consequences, but their subsequent revival could turn out to be, at a particular moment, vital for the survival of the discipline. Consequently, these revivals bring an urgency that the historian of philosophy has to justify when he chooses to study one author rather than another. Thus, for example, Bouveresse justified his study of analytic philosophy by the state of philosophy in the 1960s, and Rorty justified his defense of Derrida because of American philosophy’s situation at a given moment. Every historian of philosophy or philosopher who revives a tradition does so in the name of a necessity at a moment in the discipline’s history.
On this point, with respect to one of the themes of current philosophy—one different from the vital theme of the discipline’s existence, which I’ve examined in this book—I could propose the study of a different tradition than the one I have revived here. For example, for the theme of the psychophysical relation, or more generally, of the nature of the mind, it would be possible to invite one’s reader to travel, for a time, in Descartes’ world. Why Descartes rather than someone else? Because it is clear that within the “philosophy of mind,”20 Descartes holds the position of that which must neither be done nor believed nor thought. His rejection is such that it takes on the appearance, Denis Fisette and Pierre Poirier tell us, of a “veritable obsession.” Indeed, if there is only one common trait among the various currents that Fisette and Poirier include in the constellation of “philosophy of mind” (behaviorism, neurologism, functionalism, and within these three categories, the three subdivisions of reductionism, eliminativism, and nonreductionism), then it is constituted in this unanimous cry, “Descartes must be destroyed.” As soon as we note that this has crystallized into an “obvious fact,” shouldn’t we, at least for a moment, adopt Descartes’ perspective? We should do so not only to reconstruct what he actually said in contrast to the distressing caricatures that are often presented, but to see what Descartes can tell us, in return, about the stakes involved in a given contemporary thesis, or even about the relevance of a given research program. But, it will be said, how could Descartes, with such an obsolete scientific apparatus and such a distressing metaphysics, tell us anything about the Churchlands’ eliminativist neurologicism or Jerry Fodor’s reductionist functionalism? It is not my task to answer this question here, because it would clearly require an experiment (Gedankenexperiment), and for that I would have to devote more than a few sentences. Nevertheless, to sketch what this possible work would be like, I’ll outline a few contours of this virtual dialogue.
Philosophers of mind criticize Descartes’ dualism, but what is this dualism? We know that Descartes begins, in the Meditations, from an epistemological thesis: I can conceive of my thinking without conceiving my body. I can imagine that I have no body at all, or that it is made of glass (or even of Emmental cheese, Putnam suggests), without my idea of thinking being the least affected. From this epistemological premise, Descartes draws an ontological conclusion: body and soul are two substances with different natures. Will it be said that the contemporary programs in philosophy of mind have shown that this is not at all the case? If we want to be precise, we must say that the contemporary programs show us that we cannot move from an epistemological thesis to an ontological one so quickly and immediately. Is that their discovery? It is obviously not the philosophy of mind qua philosophy of mind or the Churchlands’ program qua the Churchlands’ program that rejects the possibility of such an immediate passage from epistemology to ontology. Kant reproached Descartes in the same way, but before him, so did Diderot, Spinoza, etc.—even Leibniz considered the reasoning to be cavalier! From this simple fact, we are entitled to say that the critique of ontological dualism as a contribution to the debate about the definition of mind is not unique to contemporary philosophy of mind. We obviously cannot reduce contemporary developments in philosophy of mind to this simple demonstration, lest we just as quickly hear scoffers say that such expensive programs are hardly justified by such meager results.
In the same vein, let’s now consider the most widely held view21 today that a psychical activity corresponds to a cerebral trace, and let’s ask which of Descartes’ claims this view challenges. It obviously cannot be about the immortality of the soul, which Descartes certainly improperly concluded from his epistemological experiment—as Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi22 had already noted. Indeed, without committing a paralogism that philosophers are too often reproached for, neurobiologists cannot say that the thesis of cerebral traces challenges the immortality of the soul as such. This latter thesis, like the existence of God, remains beyond truth and falsehood, and, to my knowledge, no current biologist has claimed that parallelism or even causalism has clearly proved that God does not exist. So it is not this one of Descartes’ theses that is invalidated (it is out of play, so to speak) but rather his claim to have made it the object of a proof. With this insight, we come back to the earlier point, namely, that the conclusion that any movement from an epistemological claim to an ontological claim is doubtful is not unique to the philosophy of mind. If that is the only insight that it leads to, this would be incommensurate with the resources invested in these meticulous programs
. So that the thesis would radically challenge Cartesian dualism, Descartes would have had to have said that during our terrestrial existence, there is no relation between the body and the soul, or still more precisely, that there are circumstances in which the soul’s movement is not echoed in the body, and vice versa. Does he really say that? The answer is not as obvious as the philosophers of mind who attack Descartes would have it. But, it will be objected, even if Descartes were not the caricature that philosophers of mind sometimes make him out to be, even if he would have said that body and soul are necessarily and always connected during our terrestrial existence, what does all this tell us, in return, about these philosophies of mind? It allows us to situate these claims and to assess their precise contribution with respect to the specific question of the definition of thought. If a thesis, in this case, of the necessary correlation between a psychical event and the cerebral trace, shows the degeneration not of immortality, nor even of dualism, but only of Descartes’ chosen model (or metaphor) of the psychocorporeal relation—in this case, the model of the homunculus—then we can judge that this thesis does not disrupt much at all (in other words, it doesn’t disturb anyone, not even Descartes). This is not at all a value judgment but rather a warning against any attempt to portray as false, from this narrow claim about correlation, any more general claim of Descartes’, and to declare its contrary to be correct. To illustrate this with an example, Paul Broca, who identified an area of the brain in which lesions will produce aphasia, clearly declared himself in favor of the localization of cerebral functions; however, he maintained the homuncular theory. To dispute the relevance of the homuncular theory by privileging a more holistic and less hierarchical representation of the brain (for example, Diderot’s spiderweb or harpsichord)23 obviously does not boil down to disputing the thesis of localization. And yet one can sometimes have the impression that some philosophers of mind tend to take a minute part for the whole and to conclude, from the fact that a given minuscule point of a system is incorrect, not only that the whole is false but that its contrary is true. I do not mean here to detail this tendency in some contemporary philosophers of mind;24 I only want to illustrate the idea of a theoretical cross-fertilization. To analyze a given program of the philosophy of mind today by adopting Descartes’ viewpoint means much more than showing that Descartes did not say this or that. It also means an interrogation of the various theses that a given philosophy of mind actually produces (for example, the end of the homuncular theory, but not a demonstration that all the propositional attitudes of common sense must in the future be understood, by common sense itself, in terms of matrices of synaptic connections in our brain).25 Finally, it also means putting oneself in a position to discuss these theses. In a word, multiplying our angles of vision is a tool that allows us to generate arguments, and this diversity of viewpoints is offered by the history of philosophy. We do not have to “choose between being a philosopher who makes arguments and a philosopher who loves texts and interprets them,” because the former calls for the latter, and the latter authorizes the former. Reading past works makes possible the argumentation that, itself, demands another reading of contemporary works.
In this sense, the history of philosophy does not simply “maintain the idea of philosophy as a distinct and autonomous discipline,” it bears witness to and demonstrates it. The history of philosophy demands a shift in our point of view, requires a decentering, calls for a disorientation that will, as Montesquieu would have it, make our gaze sharper.
Conclusion
All the arguments that I have put forward have had but one goal, to answer Jacques Bouveresse’s charge that “the first to wax indignant over Rorty’s proposals” (namely, “that there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline”) would be well advised to find a “more serious justification than what the philosophers in question would agree to provide,”1 in this case, either the simple practice of the history of philosophy or the development of a particular local investigation, both of which dodge the difficulties of the problem. I thus wanted to show how it is possible to understand philosophy without the end of its history and its history without the end of philosophy.
To do so, I first analyzed the theme of the end or the death of philosophy. Who defends this position, why, and how are they theoretically consistent? These were my questions in part 1. Beginning from the most pronounced assertions (calls for “anti-” or “post-philosophy,” or even the wish for philosophy’s dissolution in an empirical science), I then analyzed this theme in other guises, less provocative than the first but still positing2 the death of the discipline. The theme was circumscribed (in that I am not trying to take a stand on other themes, like the nature of the psychophysical relation, the epistemology of numbers, the meaning of existence, wisdom, or morality) but also foundational, for before taking a stance on wisdom in the face of death, on the ontology of the flesh, on the status of logical universalism or the fecundity of the computational model in the study of the psychophysical relation, we still must respond to those who judge that philosophy no longer has anything to say and only the so-called “hard” sciences, or literature or even religion can speak on such problems. In this sense, Bouveresse is right to call for something other than the untroubled continuation of local practices without ever directly confronting the question of philosophy as an autonomous and distinct discipline.
The analysis of the theme of the end of philosophy in its various guises has taught us that it cannot be uttered or argued for in a consistent manner. Indeed, in the course of my examination, I always found the same logical pathology, a pathology that demanded that we challenge the claim that philosophy is dead as a first, autonomous, and distinct discipline. Can we “begin philosophy again,” that is, can we agree to “reground”3 it? For, once again, we cannot accept the current self-refuting stances in which humanity is so finite that it can no longer even find a possible viewpoint from which it could assert that “humanity is finite.” Confronted by these types of self-refutation, I have tried to construct a model capable of overcoming this pathology, namely, the “reflexive a priori,” a principle of self-referentiality that makes it possible to show that philosophy is a distinct, first discipline, endowed with a rigorous method—a redefined and revitalized transcendental argument.4 This challenge to the death of philosophy, through the demonstration of its distinctness and its autonomy, invited us to put the thesis of the end of the discipline into perspective by looking for its source. I found its source in the “race to reference” that characterized not only analytic philosophy since its birth at the beginning of the century but also, beyond Russell and the early Husserl, beyond Bolzano’s realist turn, has marked all the trends since Kant. I thus showed how readings of Kant as different as Helmholtz’s, Cohen’s, and—an astounding paradox—Heidegger’s converge toward the same point where philosophy would have to give itself up, not because of its real exhaustion but because of its narrow focus on the theme of reference to the exclusion of self-reference.
Thus, we saw how the most diverse and apparently the most contradictory philosophies can be considered as variations on and from critical philosophy. And so Kant has been, for the two centuries that have just passed, what Aristotle was for the Middle Ages—I obviously do not mean to deny this5 but, on the contrary, to contribute to its demonstration by redirecting these different variations of contemporary philosophy to their source and to the problem from which they spring: the tension between representation and reflection, between reference and self-reference within the Kantian system.
Attempting to go beyond this tension, I discovered a principle that, while neither Kantian nor a part of simple formal logic, makes it possible simultaneously to judge the truth value of a philosophical system and to generate positive statements. Beyond this insight, the thesis of a reflexive a priori or a model of self-referentiality also makes it possible to reconsider the history of philosophy, because the theme of the end of philosophy—so widespread today�
��was historically and philosophically born from a single problem, a single tension, a single question. The model of self-reference makes it all the more possible to overcome, from a well-supported basis, the great oppositions that structure current reflection and thus to escape from the sterile confrontation between Continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophy, as well as to escape from the strange connection that unites positivism and skepticism in a single thought. In a word, the model of self-reference, whose path I have suggested we can reclaim and decipher, is able to help us escape from the age of reference that has led us to the impasses that I have described. In this sense, the model allows us to overcome the ostensible death of philosophy in order to return to an affirmation of its always renewed life.
The Death of Philosophy Page 34