The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  13. Roughly speaking, this period lasted from 1972 to the very end of the 1990s and thus includes the vast bulk of Habermas’s writings. It is in this period that Habermas is closest to a transcendental stance, for example like Karl-Otto Apel’s, in which philosophy investigates the conditions of a given phenomenon (communication, morality, etc.). I define the term “transcendental” in the sense that P. F. Strawson gave it, following Kant, in his 1966 essay on Kant (Bounds of Sense), that is, as a project to bring to light an experience’s conditions of possibility. On this point, see my article “Fichte et l’actuelle querelle des arguments transcendantaux” and my book Fichte.

  14. Habermas, “What Is Universal Pragmatics?”

  15. Ibid., 2 (emphasis added).

  16. It goes without saying that while these two understandings of philosophy are both originally Kantian, the two have become distinct today, for the idea of philosophy as a mere therapy takes us to Wittgenstein, for example, whereas philosophy as critical investigation of conditions of possibility takes us to Karl-Otto Apel.

  17. Habermas, “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” 27 (emphasis added).

  18. Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” 100.

  19. For example, in The Theory of Communicative Action and in “Remarks on the Concept of Communicative Action.”

  20. This phrase comes from a note added in 1983 to “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” included in the French translation but not in the earlier English translation (Habermas, Logique des sciences sociales et autres essais, 401n87).

  21. Habermas, “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” 63 (emphasis in original).

  22. Rochlitz, “Avant-propos du traducteur,” viii.

  23. In English in the original.—trans.

  24. Langlois, “Habermas et la question de la vérité.”

  25. Ibid., 568n13. He is referring to Wellmer, “Ethics and Dialogue.”

  26. Langlois, “Habermas et la question de la vérité,” 566 (emphasis in original, my additions in brackets).

  27. Ibid., 563.

  28. On this point, see especially Apel, “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory.’”

  29. That is, philosophy at the very end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, since Habermas’s third period dates from 1999.

  30. Recall that pragmatism is the view, maintained for example by John Stuart Mill, that utility would be the criterion of truth. “Pragmatism” is not tightly connected to “pragmatics,” defined simply as analysis of linguistic acts, whether it is a matter of initial pragmatics (Austin, Searle) or radicalized pragmatics (Habermas’s universal pragmatics or Apel’s transcendental pragmatics).

  31. Habermas developed his theory of argumentation essentially in three texts: “Wahrheitstheorien” [written in 1972, available in Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergänzungen. At Habermas’s request, this article has never been published in English; a French translation was published as “Théories rélatives à la vérité.”], The Theory of Communicative Action, and Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. In these two latter texts, indeed, he explicitly refers to the 1972 work. On this point, he writes in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, “I have recently set forth the outlines of a theory of argumentation. I will not discuss that here” (“Discourse Ethics,” 62). He makes the same remark in The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:26n28, for example. It is of course possible to detect a certain reserve with respect to his earlier analyses, for example in his 1987 preface to the French edition of The Theory of Communicative Action: “I feel the desire to complete my work devoted to the theory of truth and argumentation, which is taken up here only in an excursus” (“Préface à l’édition française, 1987,” 9). Nevertheless, Habermas specifies in his notes (“Théories rélatives à la vérité,” 327n47 [in a 1983 supplemental note], “Discourse Ethics,” 86n65) the point to be revised—the possibility of will formation on the basis of truth. That is, Habermas no longer holds that there is a deducible connection between “recognizing the truth of a norm” and acting in conformity with it, between the logic of truth and the free will of a particular individual. But, as we shall see, this is not the problematical point in his theory of argumentation.

  32. This last level of Habermas’s theory has been, up to now, the most discussed and developed, sometimes to the detriment of the theories of truth and argumentation. Many act as if there were no essential connection between the theory of truth and the theory of society and thereby take any theoretical legitimacy away from Habermas’s concrete positions. Thus, we are told what must be done and what is good (political and practical philosophy) without being told why a given proposition is true or false. This kind of presentation profoundly misrepresents Habermas’s system.

  33. Habermas, “Théories rélatives à la vérité,” 309.

  34. Ibid., 308.

  35. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2:125.

  36. Ibid., 2:400, 401 (emphasis in original).

  37. Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin.

  38. Balzac, Wild Ass’s Skin.

  39. Habermas, “Théories rélatives à la vérité,” 311.

  40. Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” 72.

  41. Cohen, Les valeureux, 15.

  42. I have taken the liberty of illustrating Habermas’s general discussion with literary and philosophical examples of my own choosing. I will do likewise in what follows, as I will draw examples from the history of physics.

  43. Habermas, “Théories rélatives à la vérité,” 321 (emphasis in original).

  44. William Caxton’s 1480 English translation of this text is available as Caxton’s Mirrour of the World.—trans.

  45. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1.

  46. Habermas, “Théories rélatives à la vérité,” 321.

  47. Ibid., 322 (emphasis in original).

  48. It is clearly not ambiguous in itself, but with respect to the whole system and the definition of the term “practical” at its heart.

  49. As Yves Cusset points out, noting that “the notion of interest has just about disappeared from Habermas’ lexicon after the 1973 Postface to Knowledge and Human Interests” (“Sommes-nous encore intéressés à l’émancipation?” 586).

  50. Habermas, “On Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality,” 310.

  51. Ibid., 303–4. [Habermas is quoting Freud.]

  52. Habermas suggests this point, notably on pp. 31–32 of The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1. The form, he explains, is common to all lines of argument regardless of their object (in this sense, there is no need, in the final analysis, to separate practical discourse from theoretical discourse). The content, on the other hand, is constituted by empirical verifications, interests, each one’s needs, etc. “handing over information, raising a legal claim, raising objections to the adoption of a new strategy, … criticizing a musical performance, defending a scientific hypothesis, supporting a candidate in competition for a job, and so forth. What is common to these cases is the form of argumentation: We try to support a claim with good grounds or reasons; the quality of the reasons and their relevance can be called into question by the other side; we meet objections and are in some cases forced to modify our original position” (ibid., 31 [emphasis added]).

  53. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1:21.

  54. “Remains,” for it was Habermas’s first theoretical engagement—even before Knowledge and Human Interests, which, as we have seen, thematized a transcendental interest in emancipation. An initially Marxist-hued engagement is undeniably the “Ariadne’s thread” that runs through all Habermas’s periods.

  55. Habermas writes, for example, “Nor need moral philosophy maintain the claim to ultimate justification because of its presumed relevance for the life-world. The moral intuitions of everyday life are not in need of clarification by the philosopher” (“Discourse Ethics,” 98). It would be easy here to retort to Habermas that the Nazis had nothing like “moral
intuitions of everyday life,” and that they therefore could not serve to demonstrate that a search for understanding is primary with respect to a violent or strategic action. As Apel writes, “He who is openly situated in a position of power has no need to … convince with arguments” (“Sprachliche Bedeutung,” 51–88).

  56. I should also note that “naturalism” can also take the form of a theory of society. It is sufficient that the ensemble of social analyses (the role of institutions, of the environment, etc.) rely upon a theory of the species. It must also be said that naturalism today is a category so vast that the neophyte could sometimes be under the impression that M. Jourdain [1734–1816, Anselme Louis Bernard Bréchillet] is a naturalist if he is aware that “the species that have best survived are still living.”

  57. To put it in a nonnegative way, there are not very many philosophers today who do not assert, either voluntarily or surreptitiously, the end of philosophy: in the analytic paradigm we find Putnam (already mentioned) and Searle (whose “positivism” I’ve examined and who does not assert the “end of philosophy” as a “strong naturalism”); in the Continental paradigm we find Apel (whom I’ll discuss in the next chapter) and, probably, Ricoeur. Neither the hermeneuticists (all marked by themes of radically radical finitude) nor those living phenomenologists whom I wasn’t able to examine seem to have resisted this theme of the exhaustion or death of philosophy. As for the “Wittgensteinians”—a category whose distinctive feature is to include as many different readings of Wittgenstein as it does individuals—they are the most “post-philosophical” or “antiphilosophical” of all.

  58. The first philosopher to have thus reconstructed the entirety of the Kantian edifice was Salomon Maimon. See my Critique de la représentation, 34–52 (“La notion de réflexion et la question de la reference”), which reconstructs Maimon’s reading. It seems to me that Sandra Laugier retains this type of “skeptical Kantian” solution in the final pages of her book Du réel à l’ordinaire.

  59. Jocelyn Benoist explains that in the most contemporary analytic philosophy (McDowell), “the reference to Kant has again become absolutely axial and constitutes, in the appropriation as well as the critique [of Kant], a contemporary philosophical issue” (“‘Le mythe du donné,’” 511).

  60. Including the French current of deconstruction, for Jean-François Lyotard attempts to rethink the critical project beginning from a reading of the Critique of Judgment. 61.

  61. “Returns to Kant” have been made just about every forty years in the history of philosophy, since the first neo-Kantianism of Hermann von Helmholtz. The phrase “Back to Kant!” comes from Eduard Zeller; on this point, see Cassirer, Problem of Knowledge, 4–6.

  4. Kant’s Shadow in the Current Philosophical Landscape

  1. The term was suggested by Alain Renaut in Kant aujourd’hui.

  2. As Hilary Putnam notes, Apel is perhaps the only one currently who maintains philosophy’s status as a first science. Others, like Putnam, may, against naturalism or skepticism, maintain its distinctness or proclaim its autonomy, but they hesitate about its “primacy.” Apel believes it and attempts to demonstrate it. In this sense, he effectively holds a position that is, historically speaking, absolutely classical but also, in the contemporary world, totally original and unique.

  3. I will not undertake a study of P. F. Strawson’s philosophy, which also revives a certain form of transcendentalism, because I will discuss it in part 2, in the chapter devoted to transcendental arguments. Furthermore, Apel is indeed the one who claims to be most representative of the transcendental Kantian project.

  4. In particular, Riedel, Urteilskraft und Vernunft.—trans.

  5. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge.

  6. Piché, Kant et ses épigones.

  7. Derrida et al., La faculté de juger.

  8. Furthermore, critical humanism claims to be representative of a certain reading of Fichte, quite different from what I would offer, which makes a confrontation of viewpoints even more necessary. Given that, I should also be able to study, in the framework of this interrogation of the contemporary recourse to the third Critique, Lyotard’s proposed reading, whose skeptical implications are just as visible and probably more widely accepted than are those of critical humanism.

  9. I do not at all mean to be polemical but rather to discuss a certain way of reading Kant. A historian of philosophy cannot abstain from discussing other interpretations without showing a most perfect contempt for one’s predecessors or to consider the practice of the history of philosophy to be a personal, even private, adventure that need not be encumbered by a confrontation with different viewpoints. This is why I can only dispute the validity of an attitude that, under the guise of not wishing to criticize living writers, in reality makes its texts into objects unworthy of being discussed. I hold, on the contrary and in agreement with a particular Anglo-Saxon practice of philosophical discussion, that every interpretation of an author should be able to be challenged (i.e., in the first place, to be recognized and considered), especially if this interpretation regards the philosopher under consideration (here, Kant) to speak the truth.

  10. The dispute between Heidegger and Cassirer at the famous Davos debate was about the Critique of Practical Reason’s status in the Kantian edifice and can be summarized like this: either we have radical finitude and no autonomy—autonomy being an escape from irreducible passivity in Heidegger’s eyes—or we have the Cassirerian affirmation of autonomy but also a relativization of finitude. [This debate is available in English as “Davos Disputation Between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger,” in Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 193–207.]

  11. Alexis Philonenko, whose interpretation is at the source of critical humanism’s reconstruction, never disguised his theological reading of Fichte or of philosophy in general. This is the aspect that Renaut does not take up. In fact, with respect to his reading of Fichte, interpretations like those concurrently articulated by Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron and Miklós Vetö and recently continued by Jean-Christophe Goddard and Alexander Schnell are, in the final analysis, closer to Philonenko than is critical humanism’s. For these writers from the Poitiers school of Christology, philosophy is and must be if not theology at least “religious phenomenology,” to borrow a phrase from Vieillard-Baron, the undisputed leader of this school.

  12. Renaut, Era of the Individual, 194.

  13. Ibid., 193.

  14. See Renaut, Le système du droit, where all the implications of this central question of intersubjectivity are developed.

  15. Fichte takes the example of a Russian lord who sees his serf only as an instrument. See Fichte’s letter to Reinhold, August 29, 1795, in Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, 406–10. Hannah Arendt asks this question of Kant again, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. On Arendt’s question, see my Critique de la représentation.

  16. Guéroult, L’évolution et la struture de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte, 1:342n4. In this chapter, entitled “The Concept of Community and the Viewpoint of the Finite ‘I,’” Guéroult is asking about the movement between 1794 (system of the finite “I”) and 1801 (system of the Absolute). In his view, this problem of the intersubjective community is the motor for Fichte’s evolution. In the early philosophy, a certain number of practical assertions would not be grounded.

  17. See Ferry, Political Philosophy, and Renaut, Le système du droit, part 2, chap. 2, sect. 2, “L’apport de Kant (Fichte et l’antinomie de la faculté de juger téléologique),” 201–10.

  18. This obviously also holds for the human sciences. In Le système du droit, Renaut says that only the Kantian-Fichtean position allows us to limit the brutal determinism that they show. But with the interpretation that he gives to Kant and Fichte, he weakens any reasoned critique that would aim at rationally limiting the field of extension of their principles, because, from his point of view, the mechanism cannot be limited without exiting the framework of finitude, that is, by adopting God’s viewpoin
t.

  19. Here I am mentioning a risk for this position, but I am not claiming that Renaut and Ferry have held such a view. We must dissociate what an author says from the possible, and probably unintended, consequences of his system. But it seems to me that Renaut, wanting to avoid the pitfalls of the “constitutive,” ends up, through his promotion of the “regulative,” bringing Kant under threat of skepticism. In a word, if the reconstruction of Kant must be done starting with reflection—which is a possible and perfectly legitimate reading of Kant’s texts—then Maimon was right: “the critical project is skepticism.”

  20. They add in a footnote: “See on this point Alexis Philonenko’s introduction to his translation of the Critique of Judgment.”

  21. Ferry and Renaut, Système et critique, 199.

  22. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, 31.

  23. Ibid., 32.

  24. Renaut, Era of the Individual, 191 (emphasis added).

  25. Renaut, “Les subjectivités,” 56, 70.

  26. It is probably not an accident that we find the thematic of the end of philosophy in Renaut, who spoke of “the last philosopher”—the subtitle of his book on Sartre [Sartre, le dernier philosophe].

  27. The term “strong” in opposition to a “weak” version is from Apel himself. It does not encompass value judgments but is synonymous with “determined,” or “decided.” For Apel, the “weak” version is often illustrated by Habermas’s “universal pragmatics.”

  28. “My attempt is conceived as a transformation of transcendental philosophy that is critical of meaning” (Apel, “A Priori of the Communication Community,” 267). [“Linguistic turn” in English in the original.]

  29. Apel, “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory,’” 158.

  30. Apel’s chosen terminology (“transcendental pragmatics,” “the factum of reason,” “founding on the basis of norms,” and “philosophical conditions of possibility”) are clearly so many signs of his Kantianism.

  31. Apel, “A Priori of the Communication Community,” 267.