The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  20. With respect to the contemporary situation, it is more or less required that one no longer call oneself a “historian of philosophy” because this subdiscipline is considered to be French, useless, and contrary to “true” philosophy. I take a different point of view, which I will justify in the course of this book. In my view, Bouveresse’s challenge is addressed to everyone: to himself as well as others, to commentators of ancient thinkers as well as of moderns, to specialists in Greek philology as well as in cognitive science, to partisans of a return to Emerson and Thoreau as well as advocates for a return to Kant.

  21. Let’s briefly recall the origins of Arthur Danto’s thesis: He was led to abandon an analytic model of art criticism in favor of a theory directly inspired by Hegel. This spectacular paradigm shift was precipitated by an event that Danto never ceased to recall: the April 21, 1964, opening of an exhibition by Andy Warhol at the Stable Gallery in New York. In this exposition, Danto was struck by the famous Brillo Box (portraying a box of Brillo brand scouring pads) and by the fact that it was enough for an artist to put this utilitarian object on display in a museum for the object to obtain the status of a work of art (following the example of Marcel Duchamp’s famous ready-mades). Several weeks after having seen this exposition, in an article on aesthetics, Danto developed the thesis of the death of art. (Counter to Danto’s intentions, this article served as a starting point for the “institutional theory” of art, today embodied by George Dickie.) For an analysis of this theme of the death of art, see my chapter on Danto (“Autoréférence et fin de l’art chez Arthur Danto”) in Le concept et le lieu. [See Danto, “Art World.” Dickie cites it as suggesting “the direction that must be taken by any attempt to define ‘art’” (Art and the Aesthetic, 28–29). Danto reflects on the importance of Warhol’s Brillo Box for his thinking in “Philosophy and the Criticism of Art,” 6–7.]

  22. By this analogy with the situation of art, I do not mean to put philosophy on the side of art rather than science, nor to begin my analysis with a separation between “literary philosophy” and “scientific philosophy”—a distinction that Bouveresse evokes when he writes that “analytical philosophers are those who would like to make the borders that separate philosophy from science … much more fluid and permeable. Heidegger would like to do a similar thing, but he has another type of border in mind: the one separating philosophy from poetry” (“Reading Rorty,” 130). I simply mean that it is unimaginable that an artist today would ignore the theme of the end of art (which has occupied all the art of the twentieth century), whereas, on the other hand, a mathematician is not in the least bothered by the question of the death of his discipline. Likewise, historians of philosophy, who are interpreters in the precise sense that a pianist is an interpreter of a composer, can no longer undertake to “play Descartes” while feigning ignorance of the theme of the death of philosophy.

  23. Clearly, I will return to these labels in the course of the book. Let’s quickly and provisionally say that with François Récanati I mean by “second wave” the movement inaugurated by Wittgenstein and Austin, and by “radicalization of phenomenology” the ensemble of authors who wished to go beyond Husserl.

  24. In taking up philosophers as different as Quine, Austin, Levinas, and Habermas, to cite only the most obviously distant, I am clearly not claiming to discuss anything close to all their arguments but simply to analyze their views on the question posed by Bouveresse (“philosophy as autonomous and distinct”) and to see if their positions on this point entail aporias and why.

  25. Klein, Form and Meaning, 138.

  26. Apparently because a more careful examination of the details shows, for example, that the objects are all broken.

  27. It would obviously take too long to review all the identifications that have been made for what was finally called a “cuttlefish bone” and what is nothing other than an ellipsoidal spot.

  28. I borrow this expression from Karl-Otto Apel. He writes, “A reflexive deficit came about which could be characterized as a forgetting of logos. Clearly we should not understand the term ‘logos’ here in the Heideggerian and Derridian sense of the availability of Being in presence, that is, in the sense of ‘Gestell’; rather we should understand a much broader logos like that presupposed and called for by communicative understanding” (Apel, “Meaning Constitution and Justification of Validity,” 119 [translation modified]). My entire purpose in this book will be—in agreement with Apel—to analyze this “reflexive deficit” at the heart of contemporary thought, but also—on this point in disagreement with Apel—to show that this “forgetting of logos” is a concealment of self-reference and not merely a “forgetting of communicative understanding.” Apel’s philosophy will be discussed at length in chapter 4.

  29. According to Leonard Linsky in his book Referring. Analytic philosophy is constituted, built, and developed around the question of reference.

  30. Clearly, I will come back to these attempts at “naturalization.” For now, remember simply (to adopt Ruwen Ogien’s ironic report) that nowadays “hardly a week passes without a scientist or a philosopher proposing to naturalize something: ontology, intentionality, meaning, epistemology, ethics, the normative … Only naturalization itself seems to have escaped the naturalists’ enthusiasms!” (Le rasoir de Kant, 28).

  31. As Jacques Bouveresse put it, commenting on the different traits of the Continental/analytic opposition (for example, in “Une différence sans distinction?” 163ff.), historicism characterizes the so-called “Continental” thought (Heidegger and the deconstructivists), whereas naturalism is rather characteristic of contemporary “analytics” (Quine, certainly, but also philosophers as different as Stanley Cavell and Jerry Fodor).

  1. Skeptical and Scientific “Post-philosophy”

  1. I borrow this expression from Descombes, “Something Different,” 57, to designate all those who call, in an explicit and demanding way, for the abandonment of philosophy or, in Rorty’s terms, the accession of “antiphilosophy” or “the post-philosophical era.”

  2. Following common usage in history as well as philosophy, I will speak of philosophy since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (the French Revolution, for historians) as “contemporary philosophy” and refer to work by living, or very recently deceased, philosophers as “current philosophy.”

  3. This is Jacques Bouveresse’s description of Rorty’s view, in “Reading Rorty,” 131.

  4. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (henceforth CP), xxxvii.

  5. Ibid., xxv.

  6. Ibid., xvii.

  7. Post-analytic Philosophy. All the authors in this collection do not necessarily illustrate all the traits that I am about to describe. These traits are most particularly Rortyian, even if, as Rajchman notes in his long introductory essay, Arthur Danto and even Stanley Cavell, Harold Bloom, and Ian Hacking share several of these views. I have chosen Rorty because, within the postanalytic nebula, he has most insisted on the “necessary end of philosophy.”

  8. Récanati, La transparence et l’énonciation, 95.

  9. On this point, see Récanati, “La philosophie analytique.”

  10. John Rajchman uses this term among others in his discussion of “postanalytic thought” or “contemporary American thought,” writing that pragmatism is “at the center of an uncompleted revolution in the very nature of philosophy” (Post-analytic Philosophy, xi). He is characterizing Rorty’s view. [The French title of this book is Pensée américaine contemporaine, or “contemporary American thought.”]

  11. Rorty considered himself to be the spearhead of this postanalytic movement, which he combines with American pragmatism, a pragmatism that he opposes to all of philosophy, whether analytic, Cartesian, Platonic, or transcendental; see, for example, his introduction to CP, significantly titled “Pragmatism and Philosophy.” He proposes a “post-philosophical” culture, thus annexing American pragmatism to what he also calls “antiphilosophy,” in the fifth section of this introduction.

  12. De
scombes, “Something Different,” 57 (emphasis added).

  13. Nevertheless, this “restoration” movement goes well beyond Rorty alone. As Jean-Pierre Cometti notes in his introduction to Lire Rorty, “we are currently witnessing a process of this kind,” namely, “reviving an authentically American philosophy” (12n8). In his preface to Post-analytic Philosophy, John Rajchman reveals a worry that Cavell’s return to Emerson or Rorty’s return to Dewey might give birth to “an official nationalism” (xxvii) that would be nothing but a reduction of philosophy to the standards of “American commercialism” (performance, efficiency, management), which Bertrand Russell himself saw Dewey as enacting.

  14. Rorty, CP, xliii.

  15. Ibid., xv.

  16. “Eradication” is a recurrent term in Rorty’s texts. It is not a question of transforming or ameliorating but of eradicating the philosophical habitus of humanity to come.

  17. Rorty, CP, xlii.

  18. Ibid., 52.

  19. Ibid., 53. It is clearly not within the scope of my project to evaluate whether or not Rorty misinterprets Dewey. That being the case, the connections between pragmatism, skepticism, and the return to the ordinary can be found, in fact, in many American thinkers.

  20. Ibid., xxv.

  21. On “relativism” as a description of Rorty’s thought, see Hilary Putnam, “Part Two: Relativism,” in Realism with a Human Face, 18–29. [This part of the essay was translated into French as “Richard Rorty et le relativisme,” in Lire Rorty, 127–43.] Rorty has rejected the term “relativist” in the classic sense, but, like Putnam, one has difficulty seeing what other general category one could use apart from radical skepticism. Stanley Cavell, unlike Rorty, embraces the term “skepticism” and “in the work of Emerson and Thoreau Cavell finds a skepticism which would be the American counterpart to Heidegger’s return to the everyday life world and Wittgenstein’s return to ordinary language” (Rajchman, Post-analytic Philosophy, xvi–xvii.).

  22. Which explains his willingness to be linked to Heidegger. See the chapter “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey” in CP.

  23. Rorty, CP, xxxi.

  24. Ibid., xxviii.

  25. On this point, Jean-Pierre Cometti spontaneously defines American pragmatism with these three negative terms. He writes, “in support of pragmatism (that is to say, of antifoundationalism, antiessentialism, and antirepresentationalism)” (Lire Rorty, 13 [12n8]). He summarizes in one phrase the specifications that Rorty has given throughout his work.

  26. Before this work (published in 1979), Rorty had edited The Linguistic Turn in 1967, coedited Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos in 1973 (Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum), and published numerous articles and reviews, notably on John Dewey, Wilfred Sellars, Nelson Goodman, P. F. Strawson, and Wittgenstein.

  27. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (henceforth PMN), 3.

  28. Analytic philosophy, Rorty tells us from the very first pages of PMN, “fits within the traditional Cartesian-Kantian pattern” (9). One might be surprised to see analytic philosophy characterized by the term “representationalism,” since representation seems to appertain to classical philosophy (Descartes, Kant), from which analytic philosophy distinguished itself with the term “proposition” or “statement.” In fact, Rorty shows this distinction to be superficial, for (this is the key idea) a proposition is true because it “refers to something outside of the mind.” On this view, the crux of the matter in analytic philosophy is the question of reference, which could be translated, without difficulty in Rorty’s eyes, into the language of classical philosophy: “Does something (i.e., the referent) correspond to our representations (i.e., propositions, utterances, etc.)?” François Récanati, too, takes up the term “representationalism” in speaking of Russell and Carnap; for further analysis of Récanati on this point, see my Critique de la représentation, 9.

  29. For example, Rorty judges that analytic philosophy can be characterized as “ignorant,” “intolerant,” and “empty technicality.” They are “ignorant,” he tells us, because analytic philosophers are unacquainted with the twenty-five-century history of philosophy and are instead faithful to “American professionalization”: “Graduate study in philosophy in most American philosophy departments is largely a matter of going over the publications of the last ten or twenty years in order to get the background necessary for throwing oneself into the ‘hot topics’ of the last one or two years—the topics currently being discussed on the preprint circuit” (“Response to Jacques Bouveresse,” 147). They are “intolerant” because analytic philosophers exclude everything Continental, as illustrated by an imagined analytic’s response to Gadamer or Heidegger or Derrida, “Well, as a trained philosopher, I can tell good from bad philosophy, and this stuff is bad” (ibid., 148). And, finally, analytic philosophy is guilty of “empty technicality” because, resorting to an abstruse symbolism solely in order to imitate the so-called hard sciences, the analytic philosopher no longer questions his technical tricks and thus sinks into unintelligibility and obscurity. It is amusing and significant to note that Bouveresse reproaches Continental philosophers for the exact same faults (ignorance, intolerance, and unintelligibility)!

  30. “Linguistic turn” is in English in the original.—trans.

  31. On Searle, see “Is There a Problem About Fictional Discourse?” in CP. A problem can be posed for a theory of reference that maintains that whatever can be referred to is true—raising a question about utterances such as, “Sherlock Holmes was born in England” or any other “representation without an object.” From an analysis of this problem and a brief survey of its history (Meinong, Russell), Rorty shows how Searle—and not just Searle but every known position in analytic philosophy—remains a prisoner of “representationalism.”

  32. “Epistemology Naturalized.”—trans.

  33. It seems to me that this is the stance of both Jacques Bouveresse and Vincent Descombes in Lire Rorty. Neither brings up Rorty’s all-the-way-down thoroughness. Bouveresse, for example, taking up the idea that “democracy is superior to philosophy,” does not want to see that Rorty, because he is consistent, will not say that democracy is better as such but insofar as it is his current view. If tomorrow history brings it to pass that the entire world accedes to the idea of totalitarianism, then the “democrat” will not be able to critique it from a supposedly “better” point of view. To put it more precisely, Bouveresse fully sees that one of the consequences of pragmatism is to call into question every—even a minimal—notion of truth and every—even “motivational”—realism, and he states his disagreement with Rorty on these points. On the other hand, on values like democracy, he seems to attribute to Rorty the idea that there is a better value than totalitarianism. But there cannot be better values in pragmatism as Rorty understands it, just as there couldn’t be a better argument nor any hierarchies on any topic. With the same tendency to soften Rorty’s radicality, Descombes wants to believe that the philosophy that Rorty means to be rid of is “excessive generalization, radical but also verbal questioning, substitution of personal exaltation for the obligation of solidarity” (Lire Rorty, 58). But Rorty (who, described here by Descombes, is a small figure of Continental romantic philosophy) does not wish to part with “this” or “that” philosophy but all philosophy. This radicality is intrinsic to Rorty and must not be “sugarcoated” if we want to truly characterize his position.

  34. Rorty, CP, xlii. Rorty quotes from Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism. A slightly different translation of this remark can be found on p. 36 of the 2007 Yale University Press edition.—trans.

  35. Putnam, “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized,” 234. Putnam notes that “the situation is complicated, because cultural relativists usually deny that they are cultural relativists” (235). He adds, “I count Richard Rorty as a cultural relativist, because his explicit formulations are relativist ones” (235). In fact, as we have already seen, Rorty’s position is indeed to say
that there is no truth, no superior point of view, and no arguments that are better than others—whatever we may call his position, there is no doubt about its substance. Like Putnam, we thus must answer affirmatively the question, “Is Rorty trapped in the same bind as the Relativist, then?” (Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 24).

  36. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism.”

  37. Rorty, CP, xliii.

  38. Ibid., xxx. Rorty uses expressions such as “the pragmatist must,” “it is necessary” “he refuses to accept,” “we must accept this tough language,” etc., all too frequently for me to cite them all. Similarly, there is a vast number of statements of the sort “x is wrong to say that … ,” or “he is mistaken to think that … ,” or even claims like “Wittgenstein has shown us … ,” or “we have known since Wittgenstein . . .” We could try to do an experiment in which we cross out all the expressions or assertions that lead Rorty into the trap of performative contradiction.