The Death of Philosophy: Reference and Self-reference in Contemporary Thought

My analysis of the discourse pronouncing the death of philosophy shall begin with its most resounding assertions and end with its resigned, and even surreptitious, acceptances. Indeed, this theme, so common today, is inflected according to different variations whose nuances we must grasp so that their commonalities are more clearly illustrated at the end of our examination. This is why I will start my inquiry with the most radical antiphilosophers, those we can call, with Vincent Descombes, the “post-contemporary philosophers,”¹ and I will show how their ideas, beneath their manifest differences (since they go from the most radical skepticism to the most accepted scientism), reveal the same invariant structure. The more loudly that the death of philosophy is proclaimed, the more that this structure appears as its trademark. Once this structure has been recognized, it will serve as a touchstone for our analysis of the various, more subtle, appearances of the theme in other figures of contemporary philosophy. From pragmatism, through an (admittedly failed) attempt to reestablish philosophy’s autonomy, to the most recent forms of phenomenology, I will trace, step-by-step, the various stages of current philosophy’s self-renunciation.²

The most resounding of all the requiem’s variations today are those of radical skepticism, on the one hand, and, on the other, avowed scientists. Both of these share their origins in analytic philosophy. So I will begin with one of the most prominent skeptical positions in the postanalytic movement of the last twenty years—that of Richard Rorty. Indeed, for Rorty, without the least ambiguity or nostalgic equivocation, “there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline.”³ Rather, a “post-philosophical culture”⁴ must arise in which philosophy will no longer constitute a Fach, “an autonomous cultural zone,” which is to say that it would no longer be the discipline investigating truth (which the post-philosophical culture knows to be an empty, futile notion, a mere “compliment”⁵ paid to our colleagues’ assertions, “rhetorical pats on the back”⁶ still employed in the academic world but destined to disappear). Let’s try to more precisely characterize the moment that follows analytic philosophy.

This break occurs through a reestablishment of or a return to the American tradition that existed before the massive emigration of philosophers fleeing Nazi persecution. This motif of “return” is the second characteristic trait of a movement meant to revolutionize¹⁰ thinking. It is simultaneously a break with analysis and a “return” to the fathers of “American pragmatism”—this is Rorty’s claim in his introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism.¹¹ As Vincent Descombes notes, “His guiding idea is clearly to restore the pragmatic school, that is, the American philosophical school, to its initial splendor.”¹² To anticipate readers’ legitimate worries upon hearing this vocabulary of a “restoration” of a “tradition” unspoiled by any foreign contamination, Rorty specifies that this return to American thought before the analytic emigration does not signify a desire to extol a healthy, pure, and authentic tradition, at least as far as he is concerned.¹³ Indeed, despite his political habitus, which does not at all tend to echo an American “restoration” that is “founded” on the most radical grounds, despite the slightly humorous character of a discourse that would portray American culture as colonized, annexed, and martyred by a dominating, hegemonic, and warlike European culture, in fact, Rorty has, further and better than anyone, studied “Continental” thought—putting Heidegger (unquestionably Continental) at the summit of philosophy alongside Dewey (American, before the Franco-German emigration) and Wittgenstein (Austrian, of Cambridge).

So if a restoration of American thought is needed, for Rorty, this is because thinkers like John Dewey or William James had wanted to be done with “all” philosophy, not to propose a different philosophy. The pragmatist “views science as one genre of literature—or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries,”¹⁴ and puts William Blake and Fichte in the same category.¹⁵ Putting disciplines into the same framework in this manner is not to be understood in the obvious way, in the sense that different domains of competence (Fächer) would be of equal intellectual dignity, but in a fundamental way as “eradication”¹⁶ of the very notion of truth. This notion of truth, which gives philosophy its structure and unites ideas as opposed as those of Plato, Kant, Frege, and Russell, must be forgotten in the post-philosophical era that Rorty calls for. This is why Rorty finds a connection between “Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche,”¹⁷ in that all call for “the end of philosophy.” Like French deconstruction, but earlier, “Dewey [thought] of philosophy, as a discipline or even as a distinct human activity, as obsolete”¹⁸ and “found what he wanted [going beyond philosophy] in turning away from philosophy as a distinctive activity altogether, and towards the ordinary world.”¹⁹ The disappearance of any notion of truth is thus the third characteristic trait of this postanalytic thought. Pragmatism is both a total skepticism that “eradicates” any notion of truth and a historicism that recognizes its own thought is a convention accepted “by the standards of our culture.”²⁰ This idea could clearly be different tomorrow, and we wouldn’t be able to say that a parallel situation will be better, because the notion of “good” has disappeared as well as that of truth, with which it has been so often correlated. To be sure, the terms “skepticism” or even “relativism”²¹ appear less frequently in Rorty’s texts than “historicism,” which he constantly proclaims.²² Instead, the syntagmas that clarify the term “pragmatism” are “antiphilosophical,” “post-philosophical,” and especially the three “antis”—“antiessentialism,” “antifoundationalism,” and “antirepresentationalism.” The absence of the term “skepticism” can be explained, I think, by the fact that the skeptic still finds himself in a universe where truth is a value, whereas in the “post-philosophical” universe of pragmatism, this problem will become just as obsolete as are “the problems about Patripassianism, Arianism, etc., discussed by certain Fathers of the Church”²³ for us today. Nevertheless, I will use the phrase “total skepticism” to characterize Rorty’s thought in order to avoid a constant repetition of the overly long phrase “the one who refuses any notion of truth, whether absolute, regulatory, relative or partial.” Rorty’s stance is tantamount to saying that absolutely no proposition, argument, position, or idea is “true” anymore, nor is it “better” than another—as was also the case with Nietzsche and Derrida, this radicality renders futile the characterization of his position with any term that is still a part of the philosophical universe and with which distinctions could be drawn. The genuine pragmatist “refuses to make a move in any of the games in which he is invited to take part.”²⁴ This is undoubtedly the reason why he most often puts his positions in negative terms, such as “antirepresentationalism,” “antiessentialism,” or “antifoundationalism,” negatives that constitute so many specifications of “pragmatism”²⁵ in its refusal of any truth.

By the term “representationalism,” which constitutes the framework of his first major work,²⁶ Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty means any perspective that holds that our propositions, or representations, correspond to an assignable exterior referent. Philosophy as a whole, and Western culture more generally, is haunted by this notion of representation, in which “to know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind.”²⁷ This definition of representation and of the “mythic entity” that accompanies it—namely, truth—allows Rorty to comprehend within a single category both analytic philosophy and the Continental tradition, Platonism and “the Cartesian-Kantian tradition.”²⁸ Beyond the more-or-less virulent²⁹ criticisms that Rorty makes against the analytic trend, his most characteristic theme consists in showing that the “linguistic turn,”³⁰ far from having broken with past philosophy and inaugurated a new way of thinking, has only refashioned the old notions of “the mirror of nature” and “correspondence-truth,” of which the semantic theory (“‘p’ is true if and only if p”) is the most refined expression and of which the doctrine of reference is the zenith. The second wave of analysis (if there is such a thing) cannot abandon this fantasy of truth, even if it claims to distance itself from classical “absolutism” with phrases like “redundancy theory of truth” or “simple ‘falsifiability’” or even with “Searle’s reformulations.”³¹ The “scientific” pretention or aim, so prevalent in analytic philosophy, is nothing but the expression of a myth that has structured the West and nourished its symptom, philosophy. It is perhaps in these theses of Rortyian pragmatism that we can most clearly see the nature of his break with the analytic schema, for if that schema is constituted by an idea, it is surely the idea of a “science” as an ensemble of true propositions.

The two other specifications—antiessentialism and antifoundationalism—follow logically from this “antirepresentationalism.” The Platonic question, “Ti esti?” becomes off-limits because there is no possible response. There is no human nature nor any essence of art that individuals (humans or artworks) would exemplify. Neither the good, nor the true, nor the beautiful are essences; nor are the common genera of which species are particularizations, nor even the general species of which individuals are the expression. In short, postanalyticism must simultaneously abandon Platonic essences (the Good, the True, the Beautiful, inscribed in the heaven of Forms) as well as Enlightenment abstractions such as “man,” “nature,” and “morality,” which are only unconfessed echoes of the former. The atomized individual no longer embodies anything if this is a historic moment destined to disappear, an ideology proper to the contingent society in which he finds himself by chance, a behavior that he shares with his “neighbors,” not because it would be better than another but because it forms a part of the “standards of the moment.” At the heart of this radicalism, antifoundationalism goes without saying, even if it is sometimes difficult to determine precisely what Rorty includes in this category. A study of his most recent texts shows that it is initially and quite clearly a question of foundations in the sense of a supreme being (God), the basis of classical onto-theology. In this sense, antifoundationalism is a position that can be claimed by any Enlightenment philosopher, from Diderot to Kant. In the same vein, the foundation as ego, the supposed authority for the theory of knowledge, is likewise stigmatized as fiction. But beyond these classic critiques, which can be found just as easily in Hume, Fichte, Hegel, or Heidegger, the foundation also designates a point of view that would allow us to speak of science and of knowledge in general. Apparently targeted here are not only neo-Kantian theoreticians of knowledge like Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp but presumably also epistemologists like Karl Popper who indeed adopt a point of view considered to be, if not better, at the very least neutral, from which they can speak of “scientific knowledge.” Rorty’s antifoundationalism, thus defined, would connect with Quine’s, who denounced the very idea of a “theory of knowledge” in his famous article “Epistemology Naturalized.”³² Science must be done, not interpreted or explained from an exterior discourse. No reflexive point of view is possible, even in the minimal and first sense of “questions about.” The difference between this kind of antifoundationalism and Quine’s probably proceeds from the sources for their respective critiques of foundationalism: for Quine, critique of foundationalism is done in the name of nature (I shall return to this point); for Rorty, in the name of the course of history. Because no point of view can escape the limited, finite, situated perspective of a mortal individual, every position from which one could speak of science or knowledge, or morality, art, philosophy, etc., is, for Rorty, impossible. Antifoundationalism is thus not merely the critique of some traditional foundation (God, the ego, nature in a Spinozistic sense) but also the critique of every point of view that would be reflexive (as, for example, “to do the theory of such and such theory” or even “to say something about what we are saying”). This radical character makes it clear that the only viable solution would be to escape from philosophy. In this sense, Rorty is coherent, because antifoundationalism thus conceived leaves no room for an even minimal philosophical posture, even one understood as the possibility for reflection upon a given practice, usage, or discourse. Rorty goes very far in this direction because he recognizes that, despite his political engagement (he stands for democracy rather than dictatorship, courtesy rather than violence, conversation rather than force), no point of view permits him to justify this choice. “Pragmatism and Philosophy,” which introduces Consequences of Pragmatism, leaves no doubt on this question, even if numerous interpreters impute to him a less radical, but also less consistent position, one more in conformity with our belief in the intrinsic superiority of democracy.³³ I shall cite a somewhat long passage, which nevertheless has the virtue of being unambiguous. With respect to post-philosophy, Rorty tells us that what is “most difficult to acknowledge” but which nonetheless must be admitted is that none of our attitudes, even political and practical ones, can be said to be better than any other:

The most powerful reason for thinking that no such culture is possible is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places, constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognize it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.” This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre’s remark: “Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us.”³⁴

Rorty concludes, after having insisted one more time on the kinship between James and Nietzsche, that this “tough language” shows us that there are “no criteria,” no “standards of rationality,” and no “rigorous argumentation” that allow the legitimation of a point of view, for example, democracy rather than fascism. The comparison with Sartre is instructive here, for, in the context of Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre brought up this point to say that history will be what human freedom makes it and that there is thus no historical or natural necessity beyond this supreme value—freedom. But Rorty does not retain this point at all (since such an attitude would oblige him to say that there is a supreme value)—instead, he maintains that we cannot even justify the superiority of our point of view when confronting others who would advocate dictatorship, because no standard of rationality can be said to be better than another. Thus we have on the one hand a relatively classic humanism (even if it is not essentialist), which does not wish to break with philosophy at all, and on the other, a stance that would like to be done with all philosophy, regardless of its content.

Can we find in the position thus characterized anything equivalent to the “cuttlefish bone” in the painting The Ambassadors? Is it a form of painting that would say the opposite of what the artist paints and the observer first sees? Is there, in its design, a motif that would invalidate it from within? Definitely, and the argument against Rorty has been employed numerous times: self-refutation, destruction of the self by the self. As Hilary Putnam notes,³⁵ and as Rorty himself recognizes,³⁶ any position of total skepticism is self-refuting. This self-refutation almost always takes the form of what François Récanati, following others, has termed performative or pragmatic contradiction. The most obvious example of this type of proposition is the statement “I am not speaking,” which must assume the opposite of what is being said in order to be able to say it (I must speak in order to say, “I am not speaking”). Put differently, the contradiction here is located between a discourse’s contents and its status: on this point, as Aristotle said against the Sophists, every direct challenge to the notion of truth lays itself open to this type of contradiction, because to deny the notion of truth is to posit at least the truth of the statement of denial, etc. Now, it is clear that Rorty’s position sinks into paradoxes of this type. Let’s delineate the most important:

Rorty never ceases to argue, bringing in proofs, objecting to reasons, refuting some and criticizing others. Thus, he sees “contradictions” in one argument, “weaknesses” in another; he finds one thesis to be “hardly reasonable,” while another is “untenable.” One could easily multiply the examples of this kind of evaluation because all Rorty’s books are based on them. But, if no argument is really better than another, why argue? Why criticize a given position—say, that of recent analytic philosophy—if one claims that, in the final analysis, it is just one viewpoint among many? How can Rorty refute a given position, and defend his own with grounds, reasons, and arguments, if all arguments are the same, that is, if, in the end, none have value? We have here a good candidate to be considered as the epitome of a contradiction between the contents of a statement (“No argument is better than another.”) and a discursive practice (“I will make arguments to demonstrate this claim to you.”).

Likewise, if we took up again the classic example of truth, Rorty’s discursive attitude can be well characterized as that of one who claims to say something true in opposition to another such position that he views as false. As soon as he writes, for example, “Pragmatism, by contrast, does not erect Science as an idol … It views science as one genre of literature,”³⁷ he claims the rightness of this position. The rightness that he claims, moreover, presupposes a definition of literature. Rorty presupposes, finally, that this definition of literature is the right one and that his equation “science = literature” is correct. In brief, Rorty claims the truth of this statement, as he had claimed that his arguments for Dewey over Kant were correct. His practice of writing presupposes a particular stance: a claim to truth that the contents of his discourse denies. This “claim to” is intrinsic to his mode of writing. Certainly, there are many human activities (playing the piano, writing poetry, arranging a bouquet of flowers in the Japanese style, praying, etc.) that do not depend upon this sort of claim, but those are not what Rorty has chosen to do in his books. He falls back upon the activity that consists in justifying the value of his own point of view with the aid of arguments, and as a corollary, attempting to convince others that their view, if it contradicts the first, is false. Rorty claims and indeed states that, in his view, the Critique of Pure Reason is wrong, that analytic philosophy is a network of countertruths, that Putnam is wrong in objecting to his theses, that representation is a myth—a characterization as myth indeed that assumes an exterior viewpoint or perspective on this myth, from which this characterization is possible, etc.

The third example that can be thus analyzed is found in the realm of the “good,” rather than the “true,” of desirable conduct rather than acceptable argumentation, and of practice rather than theory. Rorty unceasingly announces his desire for a new orientation, pragmatism, and exhorts his readers to contribute to its realization. The pragmatist “must,” he “refuses to accept”—in a word, “the pragmatist is urging that we do our best to stop having such intuitions.”³⁸ But doesn’t “doing one’s best” to achieve a position assume, on the one hand, abandoning Rorty’s own³⁹ radical historicism and, on the other, the assertion that there is a “better” (system, attitude, practice, or behavior), which ought to be established by one’s (intentional?) action?

Briefly, as Putnam underlines, Rorty’s problem is that he tells us “that from a God’s-Eye View there is no God’s-Eye View,” thus bringing pragmatic contradiction, the gap between a statement’s contents and its status as an utter-ance,⁴⁰ to its peak.

This is the first significant insight that this examination of the theme of the end of philosophy has yielded. The “end of philosophy” engenders a paradoxical discursive attitude because it consists in affirming a matter while simultaneously denying it. Before I turn to see whether this performative contradiction can be found in other versions of the end of philosophy, I must first better establish the argument that Rorty’s thought as a whole falls under this contradiction.

Why do we need further verification, when the examples I’ve discussed (argument, truth, his practical posture) abundantly illustrate my argument? Because Rorty’s defenders deny it, indeed arguing, with the help of an argument well-known since Aristotle and since repeated against every skeptical challenge,⁴¹ that we cannot reject outright so many of Rorty’s analyses. As Putnam notes, many philosophers, confronted with the objection of self-refutation, have a tendency to deny what they have maintained in stating “that they didn’t mean” exactly what they had written. In this respect, Putnam remarks that Rorty has tended to modify certain positions adopted in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that immediately fell under the force of this objection: “Well, his [Rorty’s] views are certainly much more nuanced than are typical Relativist views. He has also hanged them, often in ways I approve of. So I am not sure just what he is prepared to defend. But I shall take the risk of putting forward an amalgam of Rorty’s published views as the view I think he holds now.”⁴² So much rhetorical caution does not simply indicate a habit of charitable reading, nor the friendly esteem that these two thinkers share, but is rather a symptom of Rorty’s paradoxical discursive attitude. What is he “prepared to defend,” that is, to assert? Can we attribute a positive thesis (apart from the “antis” that we have teased out) to Rorty? And if we were to do so, wouldn’t he deny it? This stance (close to that of certain deconstructionists, like Derrida) means that readers as unfailing, attentive, and acute as Putnam are finally “not sure just what [Rorty] is prepared to defend.”

So let’s examine those moments where Rorty obviously confronts the objection of a performative contradiction and tries to avoid it. Consider, for example, the following passage, where this desire is palpable:

If we break this text down, we will note that we first encounter two kinds of assertions that are likely to “trap Rorty in the bind” of performative contradiction, since he declares that x “is false” and must be “eradicated.” Yet Rorty also claims that we speak of “truth” only by “courtesy or convention”;⁴⁵ it follows that the property of “being false” ought never to be attributed to any view. Yet he does so here, and, more generally, consistently throughout his work. Moreover, knowing, as we have seen, that pragmatism supports historicism, it is difficult to understand how to explain the use of voluntarist vocabulary of action like “to eradicate.” Thus, Rorty here twice utters a self-contradictory statement. Nevertheless, the second part of the passage reaffirms that it is only a question here of one position among others, “neither better nor worse” than Nagel’s, though the latter is declared “false,” and that the pragmatist can only produce a circular argument. This circularity can be understood in three ways if we adhere to the indications in Rorty’s texts. First, it could be a question of returning to the sole “criterion” of history. One would thus say, “Today we realize that the results of these intuitions are bad.” This is a position often adopted by Rorty, who, following Heidegger’s example, thinks that philosophy is at the origin of the West’s productions, both material (technology) and political (exterminating domination). There would be circularity here because we rely upon our immediate and historic present to assert that “this thing is bad.” But, if this is Rorty’s position, it contains the same contradiction as does (more obviously) the position that denies any relevance to the notion of truth. Indeed, Rorty assumes that his historical description is the best, and, in fact, that such a philosophical position “hasn’t produced any results.” How could he reply to an interlocutor who objected that philosophy hasn’t produced anything like what he rejects and that our situation is, if not absolutely good, at least better than serfdom in the Middle Ages or human sacrifice under the Aztecs? To maintain his position, Rorty must presuppose that his historical diagnosis is better than that of the happy Westerner who would see only progress (or democracy, or well-being, or equality, etc.) in the course of history. The circular argument thus assumes on the one hand a preliminary thesis and, on the other, an evaluation of this thesis as better than one that asserts the opposite. We are faced with the presupposition that there is indeed a “better argument,” which, however, Rorty rejects. This first interpretation thus does not allow Rorty to escape from a performative contradiction.

Second, one could suppose here that Rorty stakes out a more coherent and classical sophistical position that would mean the following: “I only support what you support for my momentary personal interest, and if I feign to have arguments, it is so that others will come around to my position.” Rorty sometimes adopts this well-known claim of Gorgias’s, when, for example, he compares the philosopher to a lawyer who uses appropriate rhetoric to plead for his client, and thereby, his own interest.⁴⁶ For a consistent sophist, the only way to justify this stance is to admit that one converses only to earn a living; in this frame, the discourse is only perlocutionary, that is, it aims to convince another to pay to defend a cause that he will have decided, out of self-interest, to make his own. But if Gorgias holds this view and is thus consistent, the same is not true for Rorty, whose alternatives go entirely against this defense of the basest private interest. It is needless to cite the numerous well-known sentences in which Rorty denounces the civilization of individual self-interest, its structuring according to the Darwinian metaphor of the survival of the fittest, as well as the West’s oppression of different civilizations, and other edifying sermons of the virtuous moralist.⁴⁷ Here, too, Rorty cannot sustain his position all the way through and falls into a contradiction in the very precise sense that justification by use of the metaphor of the lawyer, defending any case at all, is invalidated by the contents of the oeuvre as a whole (the exhortation to virtue, the edification of the people, the occasional call for a revolution in viewpoint, etc.).

Finally, a third interpretation of the circularity would consist in reading Rorty’s claim as follows: “I want to eradicate because I want to eradicate, I do not like Nagel’s position because I do not like this position.” This pure tautology—a singular and, to put it bluntly, desperate cry—resembles a bet. Rorty would say to us, “There is no justification for such a position if it is not a bet, either on the future (the contingent future will perhaps agree with me) or, more radically, a gratuitous bet (even if the future disagrees and perpetuates Nagel’s old intuitions, in any case, I will claim the opposite right now).” But if this is the correct interpretation, well, as Putnam remarks:

Thus, it is clear that the same contradiction is to be found at every level of Rorty’s thought, insurmountable in that the speaker’s position annuls the contents of the statement or the contents of the statement eliminate the possibility of its utterance. Rorty cannot but lapse into these paradoxes of speaking, cannot avoid this strange logical pathology that destroys a discourse from within, without needing external arguments to do so.⁴⁹ The only possible way out would be a break with the enunciative contract, which would consist, for the author, in claiming that he does not “claim” what the reader believes he has claimed. To put this clearly, it would be a matter of declaring, “You think that I claim that this intuition (Nagel’s, Descartes’, etc.) is false, but in fact, I was playing another language game, for example, poetry or parody. You thought I was developing within a discursive register where I claimed to assert ‘this is false’ and to justify this assertion with arguments that I considered better than arguments that ‘this is true,’ but in fact, I was composing a song, recounting an epic poem, writing a novel, etc.” This position, which Rorty attributes to Derrida,⁵⁰ is also implicated in these often noted pragmatic paradoxes. In Rorty’s eyes, texts like Of Grammatology or The Post Card are weavings of metaphors, interlaced tales that have status only as pure fiction. As he writes, “Derrida is coming to resemble Nietzsche less and less and Proust more and more. He is concerned less and less with the sublime and ineffable, and more and more with the beautiful, if fantastical, rearrangement of what he remembers.”⁵¹ Rorty’s radicality can be seen here. Indeed, in a single movement, one can understand that Derrida is more on the side of literature (Proust) than philosophy (Nietzsche), while in fact, no one is on the side of philosophy because Nietzsche comes under literature as much as Proust—the only difference is that Nietzsche’s prose refers rather to an aesthetic of the sublime, whereas Proust and Derrida remain within a problematic of the beautiful. Could Rorty’s interpretation of Derrida—of which it is difficult to say, as Jacques Bouveresse remarks, whether it is charitable or insulting⁵²—be applied to Rorty’s works? If so, then in fact there is no longer anything left to challenge in his work, we can only consider it as a sort of phony novel, a huge enunciative farce, a fiction worthy of Borges in which philosophers as serious as Putnam, Habermas, or Donald Davidson have allowed themselves to be fooled into “acting as if” it were about arguments to be discussed. Would Rorty allow such a treatment of his works? Would he accept an assessment of his books that would content itself with noting that they suggest so little of a strictly literary viewpoint, or of a masked irony, that they risk imprisonment in a private language? Like Putnam, I cannot be sure how Rorty would respond, but, whatever he would say, Rorty’s alternatives, like Derrida’s, are simple: either their initial intentions are not to produce a stylistic work (literature, poetry, a novel) but indeed to assert theses subject to deliberation and debate (philosophy, theory, an essay), in which case their positions contain a logical pathology that can be spotted at every level; or else they are writing literature and their works should be evaluated according to criteria if no longer of beauty (a much too metaphysical category) at least of the extent to which the result (writing Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) matches its stated aim (to produce a stylistic work). If the latter is the case, we can probably allow ourselves to state that the overall aesthetic results are less “successful” than Remembrance of Things Past, but this is of little significance with respect to this study, because if Rorty and Derrida take the second of these alternatives, then their proposition that “philosophy has reached its end” cannot in the least be considered.

What are we to conclude at the end of this analysis of the first occurrence of the proposition asserting the end of philosophy? That the proposition is impossible to utter. It belongs to an ensemble of propositions whose hallmark is the performative contradiction “I am not speaking.” A good understanding and a detailed analysis of Rorty’s position⁵³ are conclusive, inasmuch as his position constitutes, in its very radicality, the horizon for discourses that deny philosophy, and their theses’ ineluctable point of convergence.

It will be said, however, that the challenge to philosophy is made not only in the name of a universal skepticism but also, and perhaps above all, as the result of a clearly positivist perspective that means to “dissolve” philosophy within a “hard” science. We must now examine this second variation on the theme of the end of philosophy, for, as Sandra Laugier notes, “the partisans of post-philosophy (like Rorty) and those of cognitivist philosophy (like Jerry Fodor) have many commonalities—for example, their denial, in a sense which I have yet to demonstrate, of language and philosophy.”⁵⁴ Let’s now consider this denial, in the name of an already constituted science, of the philosophical discourse as an autonomous and specific practice.

To which of these multiple versions of positivism should we give priority, to best guide our consideration of the nature of the discourses about the end of philosophy? We should first exclude those theses or theories that, even though positivist, do not at all call for the death of philosophy. Indeed, we should not delineate “positivism” and “antiphilosophy” as synonyms, as some Heideggerian philosophers do all too often. The history of philosophy shows that positivism is a possible philosophical option, and not its antithesis. Thus Hermann von Helmholtz, one of positivism’s founding fathers, proclaimed the autonomy of philosophy as a theory of knowledge; nothing was further from his intentions than to predict its end would result from the likely advancement of physiology (of which he was the greatest specialist of his age). Likewise, for Bertrand Russell, logic’s refinement was a bearer of progress in philosophy and not, as some of his followers too quickly misrepresented it, a harbinger of philosophy’s death. And again, cognitive sciences’ development today does not at all have to be thought of as necessarily incompatible with the need to maintain philosophy as an autonomous—that is, first—discipline. This is why, more than positivism in its multiple variations, its reduction to radical “scientism” is what we must examine. Indeed, in the general term “scientific position,” we must understand two movements: (1) the choice of any positive science (biology, physics, neurology, etc.) as a paradigm of truth and (2) the exclusion of all methods and types of validity apart from those employed in the chosen science. Thus, while a positivism like Helmholtz’s can recognize different fields and forms of truth that need not be reduced to the one or the other if they sometimes meet (for example, Fichte’s developments of the notion of an “image” and the physiological theory of perception),⁶⁰ scientism means to delimit a single field, to advance a single type of truth, and to employ a single method, that of “this” constituted science.

However, even if we consider only those “positivisms” that have become “scientisms,” this classification remains very broad and must be narrowed for at least two reasons. First of all, scientism’s character clearly depends upon the chosen science. If it is a question for the scientist of reducing everything to a single science that can explain the totality of phenomena, a large number of sciences still remain that could be candidates for supremacy: biology, of course, which has given rise to the various Darwinian or Lamarckian “evolutionary” doctrines; physics, too, which, despite these trends, remains the model of a science and which some neurophysiological theories would like to copy in advocating a total physicalism.⁶¹ To these classic natural sciences have recently been added what Herbert Simon calls the “sciences of the artificial,” sciences that study neither humanity (human sciences) nor nature (natural sciences) but human-made objects. Computer mechanisms here become the absolute model for understanding the ensemble of human behaviors. This computer paradigm, so dear to the cognitive sciences, can itself be developed in several more or less antagonistic alternatives (connectionism, total or partial modularity, etc.)

Moreover, within these three⁶² “candidates for supremacy,” we still find a gradation of positions ranging from those most ontologically marked by scientism to others that are only methodologically scientistic. To clarify this nuance, emerging from a suppressed point of view but conclusive for the purposes of our study, let’s consider an example of this “gradation” at the heart of the “physicalist” paradigm. Otto Neurath, who introduced the term “physicalism,” Rudolf Carnap, who determined its program, and finally Herbert Feigl, who attempted to realize this program, strove for the same end: to make physics the language of reference for every scientific proposition and thus to describe all phenomena—including phenomena traditionally considered relevant to the “mental sciences”—in physical terms. Nevertheless, this common project is not necessarily accompanied by the same attitude toward philosophy. Thus, with this reduction of psychology to physics, Carnap clearly did not intend to declare all philosophy (which he strictly defined as logical “construction” or “structure”)⁶³ useless. I can indicate two noncontradictory movements in Carnap’s first writings: First, there is a reduction of all phenomena to a physical language as “elimination”⁶⁴ of metaphysics. Metaphysics rests on two major categorical confusions: the desire to ask questions that are meaningless because they are unanswerable (the immortality of the soul, the existence of God) and the development of a pure thought, without any empirical reference that would be likely to invalidate it. Second, and simultaneously, philosophy is constituted as a science, and this in the purest Cartesian—even Hegelian—spirit. Indeed, today we are beginning to see that the Aufbau adopted a manner of philosophizing that resembled the speculative philosophy that came from criticism. In this regard, Peter Galison shows in a 1996 study⁶⁵ how much the American reception of the Aufbau tended to neutralize its radicality and to obscure its globalizing vision, in a word, to silently pass over the demand for a new form of knowledge and a new way of life—which the 1928 preface nevertheless forcefully expressed:

As Galison remarks, the prudent pragmatism of the American audience could only poorly handle ideas like this, whose coloring hints at a totally different tradition, for which philosophy is a summative discipline, whose spirit sustains scientific knowledge as well as artistic disciplines and allows individual blossoming as well as the harmonious development of the community. This all-embracing character of the Aufbau—which some, like Sir Karl Popper, haven’t hesitated to describe as absolutism—so undeniably links it to classic philosophy that his most astute commentators, like Anouk Barberousse, do not hesitate to read in the Aufbau the resurgence of a Hegelian ambition.⁶⁷ Carnap sustains the inspiration of Kant as well as Hegel, in that with his idea of a universal and completed science, he attaches himself simultaneously to neo-Kantian projects and to the properly post-Kantian ambition that Hegel, following Fichte, called the “system of science.” To put this more precisely, Carnap, probably through Helmholtz and the philosophy that he studied at Jena under Bruno Bauch, participates as much in the figure of the Aufklärer as that of the Wissenschaftslehrer, inasmuch as it is true that the idea of a universal and unified science, capable of transforming the conditions of personal life as well as community life, takes up a tradition that, beyond neo-Kantianism, draws its roots from the first post-Kantianism. And therefore, the idea that he could put an end to philosophical activity through this work is totally foreign to Carnap. This is unquestionably not the case for Feigl, who, with the realized—and no longer merely desired—establishment of “physicalism,” strove to make all philosophy useless. In a significantly titled article, “Unity of Science and Unitary Science,”⁶⁸ Feigl meant to defend what he called a “radical physicalism,” in opposition to “linguistic” or even “natural physical-ism.” This “radical physicalism” would show that all scientific laws are derivable from elementary physical laws and that every thought is reducible to a physical phenomenon. To verify this second point, Feigl will use all the resources of neurophysiology. But to reduce the entirety of the mental sphere to physical laws, by attributing to each mental property a neurological predicate, is clearly to pass from an epistemological position—according to which each proposition must, in the final analysis, be able to be judged by empirical elements—to a strong ontological thesis, according to which all phenomena are only physical states that follow physical laws. It is this strong ontological thesis that Pierre Jacob, in his analysis of Feigl’s view, terms “reductionist materialism.”⁶⁹ It is no longer a question of aiming, through philosophy, at a work of clarification of complex concepts, nor of claiming to say what knowledge in general must be (for example, “clear,” and “judged by experience”), but rather of developing the neurosciences, the only ones likely to address the whole of reality (nature as well as humanity). In a word, if Carnap foresaw the elimination of metaphysics because it was a matter, for him, of “bad philosophy,” for Feigl, the project seems more to resemble a dissolution of all philosophy in an exact science, in this case, neurophysiology. In this sense, his scientism is more radical than Carnap’s.

It is this very movement to dissolve philosophy within an exact science that we must investigate first of all. To do so, I have chosen to examine attempts to reduce it to biology rather than the two other paradigms I’ve mentioned, for two reasons: first, because physicalism, which we have just discussed, seems, if we accept the most widely held opinions,⁷⁰ to have failed in its program, or, to put it more cautiously, physicalism is not currently the program best financed by wealthy American industry and is therefore the least likely to offer new results. Subsequently, because we will later return to the “sciences of the artificial,” we shall study one of its greatest representatives, Herbert Simon.

To determine the inference or type of reasoning that leads to the dissolution of an intellectual practice in another requires that we break down the concrete movement by which biological concepts tend to invade all the “human sciences.” But, even if there are many who use biology in this way, it seems that the biologist model is most common and most fruitful in economics. Various “evolutionary” doctrines have thus been proposed recently to explain the organization of the sphere of exchange.⁷¹ Two extremes can be identified in this evolutionary approach: at one extreme, the biological paradigm is used as a fruitful metaphor; at the other, it is an ontologically grounded primary model that excludes all others. Hence, authors like Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter attempt to use genetics to understand organizational routines, that is, the procedures that businesses employ to acquire and exploit efficiencies (and by extension, the procedures used by individuals in these firms).⁷² They thus analyze routines—as behaviors produced by the firm—as if they were the firm’s genes, and conceptualize the market as the space of selection among firms. The desire to use biology as the paradigm is clear here—and is immediately attested by their use of the term “evolutionary”⁷³—since two core biological concepts, genetics and natural selection, are employed. Nevertheless, biology is invoked only as a metaphor. So the authors clarify:

Hodgson describes his theory of “Universal Darwinism” as resting upon the three concepts of variety, inheritance, and selection. Each of these concepts has an ontological equivalent in a social or human science, in this case, economics:

When we trace the author’s steps, we see an extension of biological concepts to another domain. This extension is not conceived of as a tool but as a transfer. The mechanisms of natural selection are the same in both cases. We are thus witnessing the subsumption of one science into another, in this case, economics into biology. But Hodgson goes one step further, applying these concepts not only simply to firms and the marketplace but also to individuals and in general to all human activity. Thus, in his view, individuals’ habits⁷⁹—encompassing habits of behavior as well as of thought—are a social equivalent to their biological genes. In sum, “the crucial point is that all action and deliberation depend on prior habits that we acquire during our individual development.”⁸⁰ Two fundamental claims overlap here: first of all, the movement from the economic sphere (theory of firms) to the individual (theory of habits) and second, the desire to explain the whole of human activity in terms of this theory; it is no longer simply a question of a specific kind of behavior (for example, the calculation of interests in an exchange of material goods) but rather of all behavior, including our ways of thinking. Hodgson thus speaks of deliberation and reason as reducible to a series of habits. Because “habits” (already reduced to the concepts of inheritance and selection) are the key to understanding “deliberation and reason,” it follows that deliberation and reason are habits, and, by transitivity, they can be understood in terms of inheritance and selection. In a word, Hodgson’s thesis is that humanity (as the set of possible behaviors) can be understood only through the concepts of inheritance and selection.

The dissolution of all the human sciences in biology—and, later, the advent of a single science as capable of explaining all human reality—is manifest here. But what should we conclude from this examination? First, if a movement were to be rejected by many philosophers as metaphysical, Hodgson’s project is surely an example of such a movement. To reduce all phenomena to one or two constants and to a single law (which Hodgson calls “universal Darwinism”) thus seems, today, to be the work of “scientists” (economists, biologists) more than philosophers. Would metaphysics, in the sense that was once decried, take refuge with the supporters of the strictest scientism? This point (which isn’t an argument in itself) notwithstanding, we should note that in fine (that is, at a very high level of abstraction), Hodgson must face the problem of the possibility of his own discourse. In effect, given what Hodgson tells us about rationality, must we conclude that Hodgson’s discourse can be explained in the same terms? If so, Hodgson is saying that his thesis x is the product of habits of thought, themselves dependent upon an institutional context, itself a product of natural selection. If he applies the contents of his discourse on rationality to his own rational discourse, then he must say that his thesis is neither true nor universal but is a moment in the history of natural selection. Thus, he has relativized himself—he states at the same time and in the same way that “my thesis is true and is not—unlike Nelson and Winter’s—a metaphor or an analogy,” and “my thesis as a snapshot of a moment in the evolution of the species” could change tomorrow. And yet this is what he objected to in Nelson and Winter’s stance, according to which if a better model is discovered tomorrow, they will adopt it, thus making biological concepts into simple tools, not ontological theses. If Hodgson does not want to fall under the force of this argument (applying what he says about human rationality to his own rationality as a scientific researcher), he is compelled to stipulate that there is an exception to his thesis, namely his own discourse. But that, too, invalidates his general thesis.

So what should we conclude from this example of an attempt to annex the totality of thought within a single natural science? First, that this position is no more viable than Rorty’s radical skepticism, and that it paradoxically exposes itself to the same danger of self-refutation. Next, that the dissolution of philosophy, if that is what was wished, has not at all been accomplished. Finally, that the announcement of philosophy’s death seems, once again, to be a bit premature.

This troubling convergence between the most widely proclaimed scientism and the most commonly espoused skepticism is an important accomplishment of my examination, because it shows that, despite these positions’ apparent diversity, the same contradiction emerges—a contradiction that prevents us from taking seriously the proposition that philosophy has come to its end.

But I probably should better specify the conclusions to be drawn from this analysis of Hodgson. It is not at all a matter of claiming that the concepts of “genes” and “natural selection” are not pertinent concepts in themselves. Neither Darwin nor any particular aspect of his doctrine is under dispute, only the desire to reduce the entirety of the world, human behaviors and human practices, to the core concepts of a single science. Hodgson’s error here rests in a categorical confusion or a confusion of levels of discourse. To better clarify this essential point for my broader analysis, I should illustrate this confusion of levels with another example, something other than this form of evolutionism in economics. So, it is more and more common today to hear a given biological thesis x directly compared either to “philosophy” itself or to whole sections of philosophy, or to an entire tradition—Western philosophy, idealism, Cartesian philosophy, etc. But one can only be surprised by the mass of clichés that certain discourses adopt to show the supposed effects of the contents of biological science or neurophysiology on philosophy. As an example, let’s look at a simple thesis of current biology. Consider the following claim: “It is evident, and we can no longer reasonably doubt, that these cognitive processes [’perception, purposive action, conceptual organization, reasoning, learning, communication, and language are all encompassed by the concept of cognition’] are represented and embodied in the nervous system; they are, in the final analysis, so many manifestations and expressions of the brain’s functioning.”⁸¹ By what erroneous presumption, by what confusion of levels of discourse, was this simple thesis able to be promoted, by some, to the status of invalidation of the philosophical tradition or even some part of philosophy (for example, the famous Cartesian dualism)?

The first presupposition, and the first cliché, consists in believing that it’s a question here of a univocal and perfectly determined biological thesis that arises “fully armed” against “philosophy” or some philosophical claim. But the claim that a cerebral process corresponds to a cognitive process is, even in biology, susceptible to multiple interpretations. Thus, staying only within what they call “neurologism,”⁸² Denis Fisette and Pierre Poirier distinguish three radically different forms: “reductivist neurologism,” “nonreductivist neurologism,” and “eliminativist neurologism.” Furthermore, beyond these three wide currents, we can note, as has Jean Delacour, for example, that on the one hand nothing today allows us to say that either a psychic state or a neurobiological phenomenon is the cause of the other; on the other hand, for some biologists, the parallelism is not necessarily total. Thus Delacour claims that it is doubtful that every state of the nervous system has a psychic equivalent. Here Delacour mentions “the case of action potentials, the capture of glucose, reactions of the oxidizing metabolism”;⁸³ in the inverse case, certain psychic states seem to him to be “purely cultural” (without neurobiological equivalents). The bidirectional relation thus cannot currently be asserted—this is why Delacour denies that it is a relation of complete reciprocity. Against what he calls “reductionism” or “naive causalism,” he advocates a moderate form of parallelism.⁸⁴ I am the last person in the world to judge whether this thesis is valid or not. My point is only to show that this is not a univocal and perfectly determined biological thesis that could be compared without further ado to “philosophy” in its entirety.

And therein lies the second cliché, inversely symmetrical to the first, that we must find in these booming pronouncements a biological thesis x that would invalidate the “entire” philosophical tradition. Indeed, neither Spinoza, who advocated a strict parallelism, nor Diderot,⁸⁵ who conceived a material unity continuously running without resolution from the inert to the living, nor Kant and all his followers, who repudiated the question of dualism between body and soul, would have been concerned by the biological thesis I’ve examined. It is not even certain that it would have troubled Descartes himself, but I will come back to this point later. For the moment, let’s simply underscore the obvious fact: one can’t thus oppose one discipline to another; at the very most, one could establish that such a thesis x—reductionist neurologism, for example—gets nearer to a given idea y of Diderot’s than does theme z privileged by Descartes. Thus we can say that the metaphor of the musical instrument,⁸⁶ which Diderot loved to use to portray cerebral activity, seems to have more in common with a given contemporary neurological alternative than with the homuncular⁸⁷ conception of cerebral functioning as understood by Descartes or, later, by many scientists who were not philosophers, like Franz Joseph Gall or Paul Pierre Broca. Such a claim does not in itself legitimate the displacement of philosophy by biology. Just as such a biological thesis is not univocal, neither is the philosophical tradition.

Furthermore, and this is the third cliché or prejudice, there are many defenders of this dissolution of philosophy in an exact science (notably among the partisans of different forms of “eliminativism”⁸⁸—whether they be behaviorists, neurologists, or functionalists) who always resort to the same type of legitimation, scientism’s trademark, namely, “the future will show that we are correct.” As Fisette and Poirier note, these defenders have to “be met with the objection of the burden of proof”⁸⁹ and as “no actual or imaginable science seems able to take up the challenge”⁹⁰ that they have issued, they must show that the future will prove them correct. But, if inference from the observed past poses epistemological problems, what are we to say of inferences made from an ideal future, in the form “In the future, all xs will be y”! In brief, scientists today use an argument that they would vehemently reject in any novice theologian who would claim that “our soul is immortal, and you will have the proof in the future (i.e., after death).” It isn’t possible to offer a proof by the future, or to make a line of reasoning from the future, on an “installment plan” for a subsequent observation. We don’t have to give credit to moralizing from the possible, nor need we accept someone’s promise as a valid proof. To these scientific gamblers, we can say that the claim that “philosophy is alive and well and will continue to be so in the future” is just as credible and as legitimate as its opposite, maintained by these scientists, namely, that “as time goes by, philosophy will be dissolved in a natural science.” At the end of this examination, it becomes very clear that this attempt to annex one discipline by another rests upon a category mistake. That humans today are perceptibly different in behavior than at the beginning of prehistory, that the species that still live are the ones least poorly adapted to their environments—these are beliefs that we can accept as plausible, even obvious,⁹¹ without for all that drawing the conclusion that philosophy is dead as an autonomous, distinct, and first discipline. These arguments invite us to reevaluate, that is, to critique, the program of the “naturalization” of philosophy, the last major trend of post-philosophy and the paradoxical synthesis of the first two moments, skepticism and scientism.

This fad is so strong that even when certain authors adopt a position relatively distant from strict naturalism, they nevertheless feel the need to describe it as “moderated naturalism,” all this happening as if it were not possible today to reasonably situate oneself outside of or without comparison to naturalism.⁹³ But in fact, what really is this “naturalism” to which the entire world today is coming round? Following Ruwen Ogien, we can distinguish three great forms of naturalism: ontological naturalism, epistemological naturalism, and anthropological naturalism. Ontological naturalism proposes to eliminate all terms of philosophy (or, Ogien tells us, “of psychology, ethics, or everyday sociology”) in favor of “other terms that make reference to objects or to observable physical properties.”⁹⁴

Finally, Ogien demarks a third category, anthropological naturalism. “‘To naturalize’ in this sense means making a fairly general assertion, that nothing that we do or think can go beyond what we are capable of doing or thinking, given what we are.”⁹⁶ As with the various evolutionisms in economics, we must enact a selection process within these three ways of speaking of naturalism. In my sense, only ontological naturalism, and perhaps the maximal form of epistemological naturalism, fall within the category of “strict naturalism.” By “strict naturalism,” I mean naturalism as it was defined by Quine in his 1969 article “Epistemology Naturalized,” which is indissociable from the project of the dissolution of philosophy in a natural science (psychophysiology or psychology itself reduced to physical properties). This idea of a “merging” or a “rubbing out of boundaries”⁹⁷ in favor of the natural sciences, this concern to make philosophy into “a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science,”⁹⁸ constitutes the condition sine qua non of naturalism, which distinguishes it from any other stance—and this is why neither “anthropological naturalism” nor certain forms of epistemological naturalism seem to me to be an integral part of this naturalism. On that point, the definition that Ogien gives of anthropological naturalism is so broad that it could encompass, in the final analysis, just about any project. Ogien clarifies that in this particular case, he has Hume in mind much more than contemporary naturalist projects, but in truth, it could apply to every other philosopher. To see this, we need only ask who would accept the inverse of this proposition, which states that “nothing that we can do or think can go beyond what we are capable of doing or thinking, given what we are”? Aristotle? Kant? Descartes? Who could deny this apparent tautology? Hence, what is the meaning of a category that is liable to include everyone, simply because no one would accept the contrary of its defining proposition? Likewise, certain epistemological naturalisms are “minimalist” in this sense, in that they can with little difficulty describe all the great figures of the philosophical tradition. Who, for example, among Kant, Descartes, Leibniz, etc., would deny that philosophical inquiry ought to be concerned with various sciences? How, consequently, can one (with Fisette and Poirier) define as “moderated naturalism” the view that claims science and philosophy can have “mutual influence” “in certain areas”? Even Descartes (a quasi-pathological obsession⁹⁹ of contemporary American naturalists) would have been the first to say so. Could we characterize naturalism by noting that it is a question of an “immanent position, refusing any transcendent (or transcendental) argument and every arrogant claim for philosophy”?¹⁰⁰ But even if we were to accept the dual substitution—on the one hand that “transcendent” = “transcendental” and on the other that these two categories = a moral wrong, namely, “arrogance”—who doesn’t see that Hegel, who had always claimed immanence, would fall into the category thus defined? This is why it seems to me that we are better to return to Quine’s usage of the term, since he initiated it, and understand by “naturalization” any position that strives to reduce all other disciplines to a natural science. Fisette and Poirier finally acknowledge that the reductive postulate is inherent in the project of naturalization: “Philosophical naturalism refers to an epistemological position that seeks to explain thought in the terms of a natural science like psychology, biology, or even physics.”¹⁰¹ With this clarified, how could we better define this Quinean naturalism, synonymous with the reduction of philosophy to a natural science?

Quine establishes this program by setting up a strict behaviorism that could be defined as the attempt to reduce “mental” phenomena (like “believing” or “learning a language” or “feeling pain”) as responses conditioned by identifiable stimuli in our environment. In Word and Object, Quine developed this behaviorist approach to meaning, founded on the theory of conditioning (stimulus meaning).¹⁰⁵ His program is thus very simple: reduce each psychic phenomenon to a behavior and each behavior to a prior action of the environment. Naturalization means that all the old philosophical problems will be relegated to psychology, which is not the study of autonomous “mental states” but the recording of behaviors, themselves physiological reactions to physical phenomena. Philosophy is reduced to psychology, and psychology to physiology. This is why, Quine tells us,

This radical scientism is subject to a number of objections. We could reject the excessive rigorousness of Quine’s criterion of scientificity, noting that certain statements of contemporary physics cannot even meet it. Or we could maintain that the burden of proof has been postponed to a distant future, a future even more problematic today as so many forces are converging to invalidate the behaviorist theory of meaning.¹⁰⁷ Thus many now speak of the failure of behaviorism. But these are not the arguments that I will emphasize; rather, I will examine Quine’s very strange enunciative posture. How, indeed, are we to understand and articulate this proclaimed scientism with his stated skepticism?

1. It is not obvious that Hume was the first thinker of “the end of philosophy,” to take up the significant title that Yves Michaud gave him. To show why not, we could note that Hume’s discourse on the end of a discipline that he practiced without cease would sometimes itself be self-refuting—but I will not undertake this kind of argumentation, as Karl-Otto Apel has done, showing the extent to which self-refutation is a trait of every doctrine inherited from Hume and a characteristic of current Anglo-Saxon philosophy.¹⁰⁹

2. Quine’s scientism is much stricter than was Hume’s positivism. It doesn’t appear that Hume could have reduced a “value,” such as belief in the superiority of communication over violence, to a “fact,” namely the appropriate reaction to a physical stimulus, because values cannot be reduced to facts, being to necessity, norms to what is. But on this point it seems that Quine would go much further than the Scottish philosopher in affirming that the mental should be reduced to the physical. Must the question, “How should we think and act?” be considered as identical and reducible to the different question, “How do we think and act?”? Quine’s answer is certainly affirmative; for Hume, the response is less clear. In a word, we shouldn’t summon Hume to defend all Quine’s claims. We thus ought to consider Quine in his own right, and then, as Hilary Putnam observes, “It is reconciling what Quine says here with what Quine says elsewhere that is difficult and confusing.”¹¹⁰ So let us now examine the tension—even contradiction—within Quinean naturalism.

By naturalism, Quine means to reject the foundationalism that is traditionally attributed to Descartes’ project of first philosophy but that, in my view, defines every classical “philosophical” endeavor. Indeed, this foundationalism presents itself as the project that aims to determine which conditions must be met by a belief (proposition, idea, judgment, statement, etc.) in order to be accepted as true knowledge. But to specify a criterion of scientism by means of a stipulation of extensionality, and to determine on that basis that “psychological statements are not extensional and consequently will not meet the criterion of scientism,”¹¹¹ is definitely to determine what conditions a proposition must meet to be accepted as true knowledge (for example, a sentence will be such if it is extensional). Whether this criterion is borrowed from an empirical science rather than an a priori system does not at all change the move’s structure—to determine what will be accepted as true knowledge and to differentiate it from what will be rejected as false (that is to say, “mythological,” or “metaphysical,” or even “Cartesian,” “foundationalist,” etc.). It follows that Quine is unable to avoid precisely what he rejects. It is as if his philosophical practice invalidates what he has said thereby. The paradoxical structure of Quine’s ultimate view can also be shown in another way, following, for example, Putnam’s analysis. Thus, Putnam tells us, if we accept the following sentence as an acceptable summary of Quine’s ultimate view:

Quine would say, in fact, that a given statement is true “for the moment,” for him because he maintains it, but at a later stage of his life, or of the evolution of society, or even of the species’ evolution, this statement will be false. On this point, he writes, in one of his last works, “a sentence is analytic if the native speaker learns to assent to it in learning one of its words.”¹¹⁴ Thus, “in learning our language, we each learn to accept certain sentences straightaway as true.”¹¹⁵ Quine returns to the conventionalism peculiar to skepticism that we have examined at length in Rorty. But Quine is thereby subject to the same objections as skepticism. Indeed, what is the status of this assertion that today’s truth is tomorrow’s error? A convention? Should we say that this proposition (“today’s truth, tomorrow’s error”) appears true to us today because we are at a certain moment in the evolution of the species? At every stage of the proof, in applying itself to itself, the proposition is self-refuting. We find here a structure analogous to what we discovered in Rorty’s radical historicism; if everything that depends upon history can change, we cannot say why this proposition (“everything depends upon history”) should be accepted as true or even as more likely than its exact opposite. In brief, either the proposition is self-refuting or it has no way to refute the claim that its contrary is preferable. We can no longer argue for the value of our point of view if we make it dependent upon the most complete contingency. Quine’s system leads, in the final analysis, to these forms of contradiction. Even those commentators least likely to be suspected of not defending the American philosopher’s point of view end by identifying the performative contradiction that strains the entire system.¹¹⁶ On this point, Sandra Laugier writes at the end of L’anthropologie logique de Quine, a book entirely dedicated to showing the coherence of Quine’s system, “however, there is, ultimately, a contradiction. Not between one thesis and another of Quine’s system, but between Quine’s conception of what philosophy ought to be and his philosophical practice.”¹¹⁷

This examination of Quine’s thought shows that the system contains a tension between a proposition’s status and its contents—which we already saw in Rorty. This is a major discovery for my analysis, because it reveals more and more clearly a common characteristic of discourses claiming the end of philosophy. Whether this end is proclaimed in the name of skepticism or in the name of its apparent contrary, scientism, this assertion is always marred by the same peculiarity—its impossibility of being said! And so I am now able to draw out the conclusions of this first discourse that explicitly calls for the end of philosophy.

The principal lesson of my analysis is the following: the end of philosophy can neither be self-proclaimed nor self-diagnosed in a coherent manner. Each of the positions I’ve considered rests upon the impossibility of asserting its contents without falling into a performative contradiction. The philosophers that I have discussed find themselves in a quite strange situation—they have spent years and years working in a discipline, with the singular goal of demonstrating its worthlessness or its impossibility. Philosophy is worthless—so claims scientism—because neurobiology (or any “hard” science) will cut through the old, now futile, philosophical questions. (This is a stance that, despite its declared antifoundationalism, draws upon a foundation that is simultaneously most traditional and most radical—nature. We think x and y, since we are mammalian and bipedal, that is “by nature.”) Philosophy is impossible—so claims skepticism and relativism—because of their conception of the philosophical discourse’s intrinsic impotency. Philosophy is impossible—finally, according to deconstruction,¹¹⁸ which would “overcome” the Western philosophical tradition to reach its completion. Theirs is thus the strange situation of a discipline that apparently has no other end but to articulate its own impossibility, and in order to do so, sinks into a unique practice, self-refutation.

We have seen how this self-refutation always takes the form of what François Récanati, following others, has called a performative or pragmatic contradiction, illustrated by statements like “I am not speaking,” which in order to be spoken must always presuppose the inverse of what is said. Karl-Otto Apel has suggested that this pragmatic paradox weighs on all contemporary analytic philosophy, and he has argued that it has never taken the trouble to address this contradiction. Without taking up this claim in its entirety, I have, at least, shown that, on a very particular point—namely, the theme of the end of philosophy—performative contradiction is omnipresent and radical. It follows that this proposition that philosophy has reached its end cannot be maintained in a consistent manner.¹¹⁹

Beyond this lesson about the existence and the nature of this contradiction at the heart of these declarations of the end of philosophy, the preceding analyses yield a second insight: that the most radical skepticism and the most thoroughgoing scientism stand in surprising proximity. I have shown that the gap here between strict scientism and radical relativism is very narrow. What’s more, the two extremes seem not only to follow in temporal succession but also necessarily to give rise to each other, as is attested by the fact that both skepticism and positivism, in all the cases we’ve considered, proceed from one and the same text. Thus Rorty makes reference, as do Paul and Patricia Churchland, to Quine; and all three seem empowered to do so. Indeed, if we consider Quine’s thesis that “‘Save logical truth’ is conventional in character because of the indeterminacy of translation,”¹²⁰ then Rorty is clearly right to count Quine among the fathers of contemporary skepticism. On the other hand, if we consider Quine’s desire to imagine a “naturalized epistemology,” by which he means to dissolve philosophy in another science,¹²¹ then we’re compelled to recognize that that is the consistent project of the most traditional scientism, encompassing the Churchlands’ naturalist program. This congruence—between scientism, for which truth (that of a given “hard” science) is real, and the idea that truth, as Rorty puts it, is only a “compliment paid to successful normal discourse”¹²²—is surprising, and we will see in the following chapters whether it should be considered as a simple quirk of Quine’s successors, or whether, on the contrary, it is located within any discourse that asserts—in whatever manner—the death of philosophy.

This dual insight is analogous to the “cuttlefish bone” in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, the unusual element that comes to upset the meaning and general order of the whole. This dual insight makes our question even more urgent: given philosophy’s status today, must we unavoidably accept either self-refutation (which effectively renders the discipline useless) or abandon philosophizing (turning instead to the “hard” sciences)? Is the idea of philosophy as a rigorous and autonomous science¹²³—an idea proclaimed by Aristotle and Fichte, as well as Hegel and, later, Husserl—is this idea untenable now, and must we relegate it to the dustbin of obsolete disciplines? What is it about this claim (Stanley Cavell calls it “arrogance”¹²⁴) on philosophy’s behalf that the contemporary world would prefer self-destruction or self-refutation to philosophy?

To answer these questions, we will have to take our analyses even further. Up to now, we have examined the most radical denials of philosophy—the “antiphilosophy” that Rorty would seek and those forms of scientism that originate in the naturalist claim that philosophy has become a “chapter of natural science.” Now we must examine philosophies in which this theme is less directly expressed, albeit quite perceptible. To best show its excesses, we will need to look at all the guises or variations in which this theme of “death” appears. And yet I noted in the introduction that this theme of philosophy’s end or exhaustion is just as visible in Austin and his successors as in Heidegger and his disciples. And it is not the least paradoxical to observe how this thesis hovers above the paradigmatic disputes, as if beyond the strident opposition that has left its mark on the philosophies of the twentieth century, a single motif that unites them in the end. This is why I won’t hesitate to challenge old habits, to refuse to accept dichotomies, and to disregard given boundaries in encompassing two different ways of pronouncing the end of philosophy in a single chapter. It is clearly not a question of proposing a synthesis—both impossible and ridiculous—of the two paradigms, but rather of following a single theme—the end of philosophy—through first its pragmatic and then its phenomenological variations. I will show how, regardless of whether one is Continental or analytic, the end of philosophy is articulated in very similar, quasi-identical terms. In contrast to the first chapter, where we saw an aspiration to “post-” or “antiphilosophy” as such, we shall see that the assertions are less stark, not as uncompromising or demanding as Rorty’s or Quine’s radical positions. Nevertheless, they just as clearly declare that philosophy is completed or exhausted, in that other practices (scientific or poetic, even religious) are supposed to take its place. We must analyze this funerary eulogy in the analytic paradigm, and then in current Continental philosophy, that is, in a certain type of contemporary phenomenology.