The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  22. Thomas-Fogiel is here punning in the French: jeter is “to throw”; an ob-jet is, literally, “something thrown.”—trans.

  23. In English in the original.—trans.

  24. In my books on Fichte (Critique de la représentation and Fichte), I have shown at length how his model of “reflection” breaks with the classic model of a subject going back over a preexisting x. This is why, in conformity with the tripartite division that I have made here, I spoke in chap. 4 of “self-reference” with respect to Fichte (he used the term himself; see my introduction to his Méditations personnelles sur la philosophie élémentaire [Personal Meditations on Elementary Philosophy] [Paris: Vrin, 1999]). Furthermore, I will show in the course of this analysis that his model is one of reflexivity and neither reflection nor “sui-reference” (the other kinds of self-reference). To mark his break with the classic systems of reference, Fichte employed the term Reflexibilität to specify the Latin term reflexion.

  25. On this point, see my Critique de la représentation.

  26. Fichte confronted two kinds of definitions of rational “knowledge”: according to the first, knowledge would fundamentally mean representation (this is the Kantians’ view, as well as Descartes’ and the mathematicians’); according to the second, knowledge would consist of calculation (the anti-Kantian view, represented, for example, in Kant’s and Fichte’s time by Johann August Eberhard and clearly taken up from Leibniz). And indeed, we can give different definitions of knowledge through the course of history: knowledge can be a description of an exterior object (knowledge as mimesis), but it could also mean objectivization and representation of an object or even calculation. To exemplify these last two definitions of knowledge, we can take as an example the opposition between Descartes’ and Leibniz’s conceptions of mathematics. On this point, see my Critique de la représentation and the section on “Representation” in chap. 10.

  27. In France, only Jean Hyppolite has insisted on this dimension, in an important article devoted to Fichte and Husserl—“L’idée fichtéenne de la doctrine de la science et le projet husserlien.” But since then, commentators have acted as if Fichte had written not a science of knowledge but a science of consciousness (Alain Renaut, Alexis Philonenko), a science of being (Wolfgang Janke), of the absolute (Dieter Henrich, Martial Guéroult) or a science of religion (Jean-Louis Vieillard, Miklós Vetö and all the disciples of this school). However, Fichte never stopped insisting upon this epistemological character, and from 1793 to 1813 warned against any ontological interpretation of his system: “The Wissenschaftslehre has nothing to do with being, it is not a science of being … To the extent that the Wissenschaftslehre understands that it can have no other object than knowledge alone, that is to say, that it is a science of knowledge, that it leaves being to the side and recognizes that it cannot have a science of being, in the same measure, it is transcendental idealism … which asserts that there is no science of being, that the only possible system and absolute science of being is the science of knowledge, which is a transcendental idealism because it recognizes that knowledge is the highest object of knowledge” (Wissenschaftslehre, 1813, p. 4, in Sämmtliche Werke).

  28. In what follows, “knowledges” in the plural is always a translation of connaissances; “knowledge” in the singular still translates savoir.—trans.

  29. I obviously do not mean that these two formulations are equivalent—the first takes account of the Copernican revolution; the second recalls the more classic opposition between Cartesians and empiricists.

  30. For a specific exegesis of this phrase, which returns like a refrain in Fichte’s writing, see my Fichte.

  31. Hintikka, La philosophie des mathématiques chez Kant, 4 [in his introduction to this French translation].

  32. I use this ready-made phrase because Apel, just like Heidegger or contemporary analytic thinkers like Searle, has a real negative fixation on the Cartesian model and the philosophy of the subject. I will thus show that the model I’m constructing with Fichte cannot fall under this infamous category. But I leave aside the question of whether we could ever find even one philosopher in history who corresponds to the model that contemporary philosophy unceasingly attacks.

  33. Because Fichte’s philosophy has often been understood as a philosophy of the subject. In my books, I have shown why, stricto sensu, Fichte’s philosophy is not immediately an understanding of subjectivity. To put it quite briefly, for Fichte, it is the act that makes the agent, and not vice versa. Before the act, there is nothing, or at least the philosopher does not have to wonder, “What was I before I acted?”

  34. Fichte does not at all mean to evoke a fact of consciousness or a mental given but wants to posit a proposition (Satz). Throughout the development of the various versions of the Wissenschaftslehre, he never stops insisting upon this term “proposition.” In these Wissenschaftslehren, his ambition is to analyze, to break down, and then to reconstruct propositions, not to describe “facts of consciousness.” Indeed, Fichte has written texts that are situated at the level of facts of consciousness. In them, he is doing a sort of phenomenology of a given perception, imagination, etc., but these texts (generally entitled Tatsachen des Bewuβtseins) are not situated at the same conceptual level as the Wissenschaftslehre, which is clearly indicated by Fichte’s opposition between Tatsache (a fact, a given) and Handlung (an action) or Tat (an act) or Tathandlung. With all these points, I am drawing upon my other works.

  35. I pass from the phrase “law of self-reference” to “law of reflexivity” in light of what I explained in the chapter on Apel, namely, that we can enumerate three kinds of self-reference: the first as self-reflection, which corresponds to the Cartesian schema of a subject going back over a preexisting x; the second as “sui-reference,” a particularity of signs that allows us (as Récanati’s project attests) to avoid the trouble of the question of an act of utterance; the third finally as reflexivity, which takes account of the utterance as an act. The differences within this third group are nonetheless important; the next chapter will allow us to better discern them.

  6. The Model of Self-reference’s Consistency

  1. Let’s briefly recall Wittgenstein’s argument: From a logical point of view, the phrase “I have a toothache” does not act in the same way as “L. W. has a toothache”; they are not values of the same propositional function. The “Blue Book” distinguishes two modes of the usage of “I”: the “I” as subject and the “I” as object. Thus, statements like “I have grown three centimeters” accentuate the objective usage, for the statement’s predicate refers to the speaker’s body and can be falsified (I may have grown only two centimeters). This objective usage presupposes the identification of a particular person in actual space and time. But statements like “I have pain” are not of the same nature, in that I cannot be mistaken, in the sense that Wittgenstein notes, “To ask ‘are you sure that it’s you who have pains?’ would be nonsensical” (Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 67). There are mental predicates that belong to a subject conscious of these predicates. These are what Wittgenstein calls the “subjective” mode.

  2. McGinn, Subjective View.

  3. Shoemaker, “Self-Reference and Self-Awareness.”

  4. I must absolutely insist on this point lest my comments be misinterpreted. I am not saying that there is only one model for reflection and that any other questions—whether about the concrete subject or about a reflection that, like attention, would take the world as its referent—are thus excluded by definition. There are multiple aspects of reflection, and some points mentioned by Ricoeur or others can be compatible with the model defended here. But if I start from reflection as self-reference, I do so in light of the question of the possibility of philosophy as an autonomous and distinct science, that is, the question of the status of the philosopher’s discourse. This model is not “exclusive” “in itself” (i.e., it does not deny any other aspects of reflection in other circumstances); it is, in light of my specific question, the mo
st appropriate. It will be replied that the relevance of my problem can be challenged. Why continue to inquire about philosophy’s distinctness? I have addressed this question in the introduction, but I will add this here: is it so bizarre that philosophers or historians of philosophy would take a moment to state why they do philosophy rather than nothing or rather than something else? Will their “nephews” eternally return to this answer: “Continue to devote long hours studying this discipline, but stop asking about its viability and its relevance, for those are Copernican and hence Continental questions”? With Bouveresse (see the introduction), I think the time has come for every specialist in philosophy to state whether he practices a useless and idle discipline or a discipline so sure of itself that it never need bother to respond to questions about its identity. As for the question whether the problem of philosophy’s conditions of possibility has become—because it was raised by Kant among others—a uniquely Kantian, or even “Königsbergish,” question, I can answer that that is a little like saying the problem of death is a problem that is no longer a concern for anyone other than the Black Forest Heideggerians! That Kant raised the problem does not make it only a Kantian problem but indeed a problem for philosophy.

  5. In English in the original.—trans.

  6. Tarski—who, following Russell (see the next section), would prohibit any self-referential statement—asserts that this pertains only to propositions that contain a truth predicate. But I will show that this pertains to many other propositions (probably to all of philosophy’s fundamental propositions, but also to anthropology’s, and even to some economic propositions—see chap. 7).

  7. Recall in passing that this speculative reflexivity was also thematized by Hegel: the “speculative proposition” (which is opposed to the attributive proposition of ratiocination, the proposition of “ordinary knowledge” or of the “common consciousness”) must always distinguish between the subject of the statement (the predicates’ base, the subject as the being about which we speak) and the philosophizing subject who makes connections between predicates (the subject of the utterance, as the subject who speaks). On these points, see Litt, Hegel.

  8. “Here,” that is, within my framework, of metalanguage or metadiscourse. We can understand, in carefully disassociating the two levels, why my concern, although it is epistemological, will not be to determine these propositions’ type of validity by examining, for example, the problems of induction, definite description, etc.

  9. The problem could obviously be raised about Descartes’ “I,” which does not refer to the empirical individual René Descartes. This “I” is thus a universal “I” but for all that is not a “we,” because to say “we think” would be going too far with regard to the argument of the evil genius.

  10. On Moore’s influence on Russell, see Benmakhlouf, Bertrand Russell, 14n1: “It was indeed Moore who awoke him from his idealist slumber in 1898.” On Russell’s initial idealism, see Russell, My Philosophical Development, where Russell recalls the influence of F. H. Bradley and the entire neo-Hegelian current.

  11. On the synonymy between “grounding” and “showing the noncontradiction,” see Rivenc, Sémantique et vérité, 42: “We must return here to what it meant in the 1920s to ‘establish the foundations’ of a discipline: to give a proof of its non-contradiction.”

  12. This paradox, Russell tells us, was initially discovered through an examination of Georg Cantor’s works, specifically “by considering Cantor’s proof that there is no greatest cardinal number” (My Philosophical Development, 75). The problem is this: there is no greatest cardinal number (which Cantor proved), and yet, it can also be demonstrated (as Cesare Burali-Forti noted in 1897) that there is a greatest cardinal number. Russell explains it in the form of an antinomy in section 344 (pp. 362–63) of The Principles of Mathematics: there is no greatest cardinal number and yet there is a greatest cardinal number, the cardinal number of “the class of all entities.” This mathematical paradox directly leads to the logical paradox.

  13. He presents this problem in a January 17, 1901, letter to Louis Couturat (pp. 210–12 in Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell). He expresses it in quasi-identical terms in a June 16, 1902, letter to Frege (245–46) and, as we shall see, kept coming back to it later.

  14. Russell, June 16, 1902, letter to Frege (ibid., 246).

  15. Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 156.

  16. Rouilhan, Russell et le cercle des paradoxes, 22.

  17. Reported by Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, II.10.108 (1:237).

  18. Russell, My Philosophical Development, 83.

  19. Russell, “Mathematical Logic,” 224.

  20. Respectively, in “Das Problem der phänomenologischen Evidenz im Lichte einer transzendentalen Semiotik” and Russell et le cercle des paradoxes.

  21. Rivenc, Sémantique et vérité, 37.

  22. Rouilhan, Russell et le cercle des paradoxes, 17.

  23. Reichenbach, Theory of Probability. [The French translation cited by Thomas-Fogiel, Introduction à la logistique (Paris: Hermann, 1939), includes only chap. 2, “Introduction to Symbolic Logic,” from this work, as well as two additional sections available only in French.]

  24. This problem of the universalization of logic has been particularly illuminated by François Rivenc in Recherches sur l’universalisme de la logique.

  25. Rouilhan, Russell et le cercle des paradoxes, 16.

  26. Engel, La vérité, 78.

  27. This is generally the objection that some analytics make against German idealism, or against any metatheoretical type of questioning: it is useless to try to define philosophy, we are told, it must be done. And yet it happens that the doing always presupposes an implicit stance on the essence of philosophical truth. Thus, for Pascal Engel, the argument employed to refute relativism is given as a valid argument. But this argument says specifically that philosophical propositions must be able to apply to themselves without contradiction. It is on the basis of this argument, with a self-referential structure, that a thesis (relativism) is rejected, a thesis that clearly bears, in the final analysis, on the nature of our reference to the world, since relativism declares this reference to be arbitrary and contingent.

  28. This insight also shows how it is different from Apel’s “extensive” conception, which I discussed earlier.

  7. The Model’s Fecundity

  1. Truly speaking, we could even speak of its invention, because the phrase transcendental “argument” is not literally present in Kant. In Fichte, it is often a question of a “transcendental” “way of proceeding” or reasoning; however that may be, the two authors understand transcendental philosophy in general as an investigation into the conditions of possibility for a fact (factum). As we have seen, Karl-Otto Apel takes up this definition in his concept of transcendental pragmatics.

  2. Strawson, Bounds of Sense, especially 72–89.

  3. I borrow this definition from Stélios Virvidakis, “Les arguments transcendantaux.” [Virvidakis in his turn has taken this definition from Moore, “Conative Transcendental Arguments,” 271.]

  4. On this point Virvidakis rightly specifies that in general the initial premise (p) “refers to a way of imagining reality that could be described as a conscious or intelligible experience such as self-consciousness, the use of concepts, the formation of beliefs, and the formulation of assertions or communication by language, and “q” designates an aspect of reality that is often the object of some skeptical doubt” (Virvidakis, “Les arguments transcendantaux,” 111).

  5. Bitbol, “Arguments transcendantaux en physique moderne,” 81 (emphasis added).

  6. Which justifies in part the term transcendental, since according to the famous expression of the Critique of Pure Reason, “any knowledge is called transcendental that is generally concerned not so much with objects as with our mode of knowledge of objects,” except that Strawson depsychologized the Kantian inquiry. In this usage of the term, we no longer think in terms
of faculties but strictly in terms of the conditions of meaning for a cognitive operation.

  7. Laugier, “Langage, scepticisme et argument transcendantal,” 11. She adds, “It is particularly difficult to know, despite (or due to) all the discussions that have taken place on the subject, what transcendental arguments consist of” (12).

  8. Henrich, “Challenger or Competitor?”

  9. Rorty, “Transcendental Arguments, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism.”

  10. Bitbol, “Arguments transcendantaux en physique moderne.”

  11. Zahar, “Mathématiques applicables et arguments transcendantaux.”—trans.

  12. Stroud, “Transcendental Arguments.”

  13. Boyer, “Pourquoi des arguments transcendantaux?” 37 (emphasis in original).

  14. On this point, see Dieter Henrich, who judges, pace Rorty, that the use of the transcendental argument has nothing in common with the problem of realism and the skeptical challenge to the existence of things outside ourselves.

  15. Paradoxically, it is the skeptics who have most “ontologized” the debate, through wanting at any price to show that the argument is not able to remove doubt about the exterior world. Indeed, transcendental argument, properly understood, need not have this function. This is why, in table 2 about Strawson’s argument, the argument should not accept the conclusion of point no. 4 (“Objects outside myself exist”) but should stop at “It is necessary to conceive the existence of objects outside myself.” In the United States, the debate (because of the skeptics) has taken the form of a dispute between realism and antirealism, which the concept of transcendental argument does not necessarily call for.

  16. See chap. 5, n. 31.—trans.

  17. Bitbol, “Arguments transcendantaux en physique moderne,” 82.

  18. See Fisette and Poirier, Philosophie de l’esprit, 28.