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

Before Habermas, the therapeutic current had numerous representatives, since it encompasses different positions according to which philosophy is possible only as a simple deconstruction of illusion or as therapy, as a simple analysis or demonstration of the inherent error of the discipline. To deconstruct illusion and not to construct a Weltanschauung—this approach is embodied first and foremost by Wittgenstein, for whom metaphysics is a sickness and the analysis of language its cure. This approach clearly dates back to Kant and is carried out in the themes of Habermas’s first major work, Knowledge and Human Interests. Habermas exemplified the second approach, namely, the critical approach as an investigation into conditions of possibility, in his subsequent foray into “universal pragmatics.” Finally, starting in 1999 with Truth and Justification, Habermas seems to make do with a certain form of naturalism, for which the foundational authority for everything and every thought is the evolution of the species. This illustration of very different approaches by a single author is quite beneficial for me, for it allows us to understand, dynamically and from an internal perspective, the aporias proper to each of these approaches. For in the end, what has pushed Habermas to progressively abandon these different faces of his thought? The answer to this question (along with a contextualization of three fundamental moments in current philosophy, moments that Habermas sums up through his disavowals, changes, and his very evolution) will be given as the story of the defeat of the “maintaining of philosophy,” Habermas’s initial concern. Indeed, we will see how the different stages of Habermas’s philosophy can be read as the progressive abandonment of the idea of a philosophy as autonomous, distinct, and primary.

The route that has led Habermas from Knowledge and Human Interests¹ in the 1960s, to The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity² in 1985, to Truth and Justification³ in 1999, is a route marked by breaks, which has seen an overall shift from a critical theory understood as the deconstruction of illusions to a universal pragmatics that was part of the “linguistic turn”⁴ (more than his first stage, which was still dependent upon the paradigm of the Kantian subject), to finally arrive, today, at a sort of fallibilist perspective, in which philosophy is no longer critical theory nor linguistic analysis but becomes a science among others, in the same way as physics or sociology. This evolution in three movements is, without any doubt, the source for the profound differences of interpretation to which Habermas’s philosophy has given rise. Indeed, conflicting positions have been imputed to Habermas, thus some thinkers define his project as an attempt to transfer the traditional predicates of subjectivity (purposiveness, self-reflection) to language in order to avoid any reference to a subject. Manfred Frank proposes this reading (in order to critique it)—in his eyes, when Habermas speaks of language, he “is not very far from the position of a philosophy of origins reviewed and corrected by Heidegger and Derrida, for whom sometimes being, sometimes the text, speaks as if it were a subject capable of action and reflection.”⁵ Others, like Niklas Luhmann, assert to the contrary that, despite his paradigm shifts, Habermas revives the old concept of subjectivity by transforming it: “Habermas essentially considers the subject as well as the intersubjectivity that precedes it as a potential suitable foundation for truth: in his view, human subjectivity rests on the capacity for giving reasons … , which supposes a much more deeply rooted concept of the subject.”⁶ Thus for Frank, the subject is nonexistent in Habermas; for Luhmann, it is omnipresent. Interpretations as diametrically opposed as these cannot simply be the result of a misunderstanding by one or the other of the readers but is indeed anchored in Habermas’s philosophy itself and, in my view, in his paradigm shifts.⁷ Let’s consider each of these evolutions in turn to show how the symptoms of the current crisis persist, regardless of the period studied or the paradigm chosen by Habermas.

But this critical theory, at the risk of itself being a mere ideology produced by society, must find a foundation. After an attempt to ground critical theory in the historical subject of the Enlightenment (an attempt that corresponds to two publications from the early 1960s, Theory and Practice⁸ and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere⁹), this foundation will, beginning in 1965, take the form of a revived albeit transformed transcendental philosophy. Indeed, all the chapters of Knowledge and Human Interests aim to show that human interests, tied to the fundamental conditions of the reproduction and constitution of the species and of which there are three (technical mastery of nature, a practical orientation, and emancipation), are expressed in types of activities that, though subject to historical modifications, nevertheless constitute “transcendental” frameworks. Habermas here is still largely dependent upon the Kantian idea of a transcendental subject. Indeed, even if, hostile to any absolute rational foundation, he refuses to consider self-reflection as the activity of an “I” and relocates this process in a contingent human species, the fact remains that this species must constitute itself as a conscious subject—self-reflection, which grounds the emancipatory interest, aims at a transparency, a self-comprehension of the subject by himself. And yet, after Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas will abandon this support for Kantian self-reflection and this conception of a philosophy that would be only a deconstruction of illusions. Why? We must now look at the internal difficulties at the origin of this shift.

In Habermas’s early philosophy, self-reflection was understood as unconstrained communication, whose engine was “the interest in emancipation.” This emancipation is necessarily connected to its opposite, domination, always first in the collective consciousness. But this proposition—apparently simple since it says only that emancipation presupposes domination or ideology (just as, for Wittgenstein, therapy presupposes an illness)—nevertheless implies a number of theses that will be the source for this first system’s implosion. First of all, emancipation needs domination. Servitude, the first ideology, and the restless wanderings of the collective consciousness are the factual conditions for a future emancipation. In a word, without an initial servitude, there is no need to rid oneself of it; without illness, no need for therapy. Second, domination is ultimately inexplicable, as Jacques Rivelaygue very rightly remarks, “Institutions and ideologies are grounded in the facticity of a preexisting domination.”¹⁰ And indeed, in order to explain domination, Habermas can neither refer to the Hegelian theory of history—which presupposes an absolute knowledge that he rejects—nor identify this domination with simple economic exploitation—which, in his view, would repeat Marx’s error of conflating production and reflection, work and interaction. Domination thus appears as a difference without reason, as an irreducible remainder, that is to say, irrational. This second thesis, finally, calls forth a third: an impassible divide between the real and the ideal. We are, indeed, thrown back upon the opposition between an always false (because ideological) empirical communication and a direct communication that, however, remains ideal. This ideal is conceived as an inaccessible beyond that, in the final analysis, renders all communication inadequate. Here Habermas is back in the most characteristic aporia of Kantian philosophy—this aporia will raise the problem of maintaining philosophy as a critical theory, as self-reflection on an external content (ideology), a self-reflection that would aim at a self-understanding (liberation or emancipation). Indeed, if we accept these three theses (emancipation needs domination, domination is inexplicable through reason, the schism between the real and the ideal cannot be overcome), we are led to genuine internal contradictions. Thus, philosophy as critical reflection (or, to continue the comparison to Wittgenstein, as therapy) aims at the disappearance of its other, ideology (illness), but if its aim were to be realized, philosophy would disappear. It follows, in the final analysis, that philosophy aims at its own eradication. Moreover, if we maintain that domination is in fine irrational, and if we renew ad infinitum the Kantian schism between the real and the ideal, then a critical discourse, as a liberating practice allowing the dissolution of illusions, is impossible. To illustrate this contradiction, even more basic than the first, let’s consider the example of psychoanalysis. Habermas interprets psychoanalysis as a practice of clarification that participates in the exercise of emancipation by means of self-reflection. The analyst and patient are comparable to the “for us” of the philosopher and the “for itself” of consciousness, and each step of the cure is understood according to the philosophical categories of alienation, self-reflection, and appropriation. On the basis of this reading, Habermas thus makes psychoanalysis the model of a self-reflective science with the same status as philosophy. But if we apply the three statements identified earlier (again: emancipation needs domination, which is irrational, and thus there is an irreducible schism between the real and ideal) to psychoanalysis, we get the following theses: (1) the subject’s self-understanding depends upon a preexisting neurosis or psychosis, which corresponds to the claim that critical reflection must confront ideology in order to be exercised. There is nothing surprising in this first statement, and it even seems like simple common sense (who indeed would dream of seeking treatment if he neither was nor felt ill?)—but the same is not true for the next two theses; (2) self-understanding, the intended goal, will never be achieved (there will always be a schism between the real and the ideal). From a therapeutic perspective, this is a relatively distressing statement because it means, indeed, that no one will ever be cured. The third statement will accentuate this; (3) neurosis is, in the final analysis, irrational (indeed, the reasons behind neurosis cannot be articulated without sinking into a brutally causalist or essentialist explanation, proper to a Hegelian, Marxist, or even biological model that Habermas rejects). But liberation or emancipation presupposes an understanding of the reasons behind a syndrome. If this understanding is not possible, then the chances for a recovery are zero. These propositions are even more untenable if we transpose them onto social domination. But we are entitled to effect this transposition, because Habermas purely and simply identifies repression in the Freudian sense with social censorship: “The same configurations that drive the individual to neurosis move society to establish institutions.”¹¹ If we extend this analysis consistently, it gives us the following theses: On the one hand, philosophy must wait for events (for example, Nazism) before it interprets them (the owl of Minerva). Only after the catastrophe is complete can philosophy discover, through the work of critical reflection, the power of the illusion. On the other hand, if historical catastrophes are, in the final analysis, irrational, it is utterly impossible to predict them by bringing to light the reasons that caused them and to make sure that they do not appear again. This clearly challenges the definition of self-reflection as capable of transforming the real. Therefore, to summarize the consequences (which, so we could see them more easily, I took the liberty of illustrating with the example of psychoanalysis), we are led to the following conclusions: Initially wanting to legitimate philosophical discourse against its positivist dissolution in a hard science, Habermas very closely adheres to the Kantian explanatory model and is logically led to this series of conclusions: First, philosophy is sterile in that it cannot produce any content (the object of its investigation is always outside it); second, it cannot claim to explain the real (domination is, in the last analysis, without reason); finally, it cannot even transform the real, because it is obligated to work on accomplished facts and because, moreover, it cannot through its analysis of reasons prevent the eventual return of those facts (the symptom in psychoanalysis, barbarism in history). But this cascade of paradoxes and contradictions is brought about by the seminal idea of a philosophy as simple therapy, that is, as deconstruction of illusions. We could also find these paradoxes in Wittgenstein, or at least in those who read Wittgenstein only as a therapist.¹² Therapy accepts illness, but what makes the illness? It can be answered that to try to determine that would be to risk adopting foundational hypotheses (for example, that illusions stem from human nature, or from the intelligible character of humanity, or even from the necessary movement of history), a stance that Wittgenstein rejects. Nevertheless, if it is necessary to reduce illusory metaphysical subjects to ordinary language, the sole purveyor of truth, how is it that this language could engender deviant languages like that of metaphysics? Is it ordinary language that gives rise to the illusions of philosophy? How, in that case? This question is all the more pressing for if the truth is in ordinary language, I cannot see how the latter could give rise to such a monster (the metaphysicians’ delirium). Here again, we fall into troubling aporias, aporias that already appeared in my analysis of Austin.

Briefly, whether we’re concerned with Habermas or Wittgenstein, the idea that philosophy is an exclusively negative discourse, a practice aiming at emancipation (or, in Wittgenstein, a return to ordinary language) through the dissolution of ideology (in Wittgenstein, the dissolution of linguistic nonsense), engenders paradoxes entailing that it must be abandoned. Which is what Habermas does, having recognized these impasses, in the mid-1970s. From that point, all his efforts will seek to overcome this schism between the ideal and the real (a schism implied by the definition of philosophy as pure therapy). This is the second period of his philosophy, by far the best known and the longest lasting,¹³ namely:

The starting point for the reconstruction is the theory of speech acts. Habermas takes up Austin’s thesis, already discussed, according to which our utterances are acts and not simply representations or descriptions of events. But the theory of discursive acts is only a starting point, for Habermas will quickly criticize philosophers of language for not going beyond the level of accidental contexts and not wondering about the more fundamental level of the universal and necessary presuppositions of any discursive act. Habermas’s movement thus consists in radicalizing pragmatic theory by going from the initial pragmatists (Austin, Searle, etc.) to what Habermas will call “universal pragmatics.” Starting with an analysis of the communicative situation, in which I effect discursive acts, Habermas will show that every discursive form presupposes a series of claims implicitly uttered and mutually admitted by the interlocutors. There are four such claims: in making an utterance, the speaker implicitly claims that what he says is understandable (verständlich), that the propositional content is true (wahr), that the utterance is appropriate (richtig), and that the expression of his intentions is sincere (wahrhaftig). Taken together, these four make up a statement’s validity claims and constitute its veritable conditions of possibility. As soon as an activity oriented to understanding is initiated (“communicative action”), the interlocutors have always already raised these four validity claims. Every discourse, even those of a practical order, like morality and law, is an enactment of these demands, the basis for communication. The model of communication thus described is, of course, an ideal distinct from the empirical conditions of communication. Nevertheless, Habermas explains, in carrying out discursive acts we proceed counterfactually as if the ideal speech situation were not merely fictional but real. Habermas has thereby overcome the sterilely and self-contradictorily regulative dimension of philosophy as therapy. What we have here are constitutive presuppositions, because these claims are conditions of possibility. On this point, Habermas writes in “What is Universal Pragmatics?” that “I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech action, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.”¹⁵ Without intelligibility claims, truth claims, etc., there is no communication, that is, no speech teleologically oriented toward mutual understanding between interlocutors. Thus, where his first philosophy failed by asserting the radical schism between empirical and ideal communication, his second seems to succeed by demonstrating that communication is the immanent telos of language. Philosophy is no longer a therapeutic and negative reflection; it becomes an enterprise aimed at clarifying the conditions implicit in every speech act. This paradigm shift appears to be a necessary step to “save” the philosophical discourse. The philosopher is no longer a mediocre school teacher for humanity who, unable to explain or even transform the real, glorifies radical finitude, unhappy consciousness, inescapable tragedy, and all those sorts of things but becomes a scholar who unveils the universal conditions of possibility necessarily inscribed in the very use of language.¹⁶ This dimension of necessity, which is not present in Habermas’s first philosophy and is introduced by universal pragmatics, is emphasized in his subsequent works. Thus, Habermas doesn’t hesitate to say, “I would agree, with certain qualifications, with the statement that a speaker, in transposing a well-formed sentence into an act oriented to reaching understanding, merely actualizes what is inherent in the sentence structures.”¹⁷ The idea of an actualization by each subject of a structure “always already” inscribed in language underscores the necessity thesis that Habermas maintains. Likewise, in “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” he explains that even the most radical skeptic, in the final analysis, cannot help but aim at mutual understanding: “Unless he is willing to take refuge in suicide or serious mental illness … he cannot extricate himself from the communicative practice.”¹⁸ He cannot, as Habermas repeatedly explains,¹⁹ because strategic action itself (namely, the sophist’s discourse that does not mean to “communicate with” but to produce an effect in his interlocutor, which thus privileges the perlocutionary over the illocutionary) presupposes communicative action. If the sophist were to succeed, he would have to feign to be engaging in communicative action in the sense that “the use of language for mutual understanding is its original mode.”²⁰ Habermas here presupposes a telos (mutual understanding) immanent in language, posits that language has a “good” essence, and makes the implicit claims “always already” expressed by the speaker into strong claims inherent in the very structure of language. As Habermas writes, these conditions are “speech-act-immanent obligation[s].”²¹ Thus, he will no longer hesitate to say that “morality is inscribed in the grammar learned by every subject.”²²

What should we conclude from this analysis of Habermas’s second period? First of all, it is clear that he has totally changed his definition of philosophy. It is no longer a merely negative, deconstructive, therapeutic activity but becomes the elucidation of the necessary conditions for any language. Its function is thus first to reveal a true structure (for example, the four conditions), not the elimination of a behavior. The status of philosophical discourse has undeniably changed. With this first observation, we can now say that the phenomenon of philosophy’s oscillation between two functions can be found in Habermas’s philosophy—the first, which we could call the function ad minima, the therapeutic function, and the second, more positive, namely the discovery of a truth inscribed in nucleo in the structure of the real (here, in this case, in the structure of language, for since the “linguistic turn”²³ language has served as ultimate reality). A single doctrine thus offers an illustration of the swinging pendulum that we saw earlier in multiple philosophies. Thus, in his first period, Habermas articulated a renewed criticism, not very far from a moderated skepticism, and then turned to a more positive theory of truth, in which the necessity “inscribed in language” becomes the key idea.

Can we add another conclusion to this first insight, namely, that there is an internal contradiction in this second position, a contradiction that would compel its abandonment and a turn toward a third epistemic paradigm, closer to classical fallibilism? Without a doubt, for as Luc Langlois recalls in his article “Habermas et la question de la vérité,”²⁴ Habermas himself recognizes that “revisions to his theory of truth were in large part motivated by Albrecht Wellmer’s objections.”²⁵ But what does this objection consist of, if not, once again, the exhibition of a performative contradiction? Indeed, Langlois explains, “The idea of a definitive consensus [which is the telos toward which language, internally and necessarily, tends] turns out to be fundamentally contradictory, because this idea [presupposes] something beyond argument and discourse, that is, the very thing for which it is supposed to provide the index of rationality.”²⁶ Thus, the logical pathology that we have seen in every contemporary doctrine so far appears again. However, while I share Langlois’ view that because of the contradictions that Wellmer had brought out, “Habermas undertook, in Truth and Justification (published in 1999), to review from top to bottom the premises of his theory of truth, whose main tenets had been articulated in 1972,”²⁷ in my view, a question nevertheless remains unanswered. Why is this redevelopment done in favor of a fallibilist theory? Why hasn’t Habermas tried, following the example of Karl-Otto Apel, to overcome this contradiction while remaining in the same framework, namely, of philosophy understood as an investigation of the conditions of possibility inherent in our communicative acts? Indeed, it is perhaps not strictly necessary, given the idea that “we cannot escape from communicative theory,” that we go back to the Hegelian idea of a final realization of the good—that is, in this context, a final realization of the ideal communicative action, freed of any strategic or parasitic action. If we follow Apel,²⁸ Habermas could have avoided any performative contradiction with out completely disrupting his theories of truth and of philosophy. The latter, however, is exactly what he did. Why this very unexpected return—given the universal character of his second philosophy—to a fallibilist pragmatism when he could have effected, if not a totally transcendental, at least an Apelian reorientation of his project? I have to address this question for, beyond the intrinsic interest in tracing Habermas’s philosophical evolution, it gives us one of the most telling illustrations of the trends in philosophy today.²⁹

The seemingly incomprehensible shift from philosophy as an investigation into the ultimate conditions of possibility to a philosophy that, like the other empirical sciences, is subject to verification by reality and is liable to be falsified, can be explained in my view by the following: the tensions in Habermas’s philosophy do not cease with a simple self-contradiction in his fundamental doctrine of truth. On this point, we can see the extent to which the theory of argumentation, which Habermas developed throughout his second period,³¹ contains such difficulties and serious contradictions that it forced an abandonment of the system of “universal pragmatics” (an abandonment of its universally transcendental character), and thus explains, in my view, the withdrawal to a classic form of fallibilist pragmatism or utilitarianism. Before we carefully dissect this nodal theory of argumentation, recall that Habermas’s second philosophy is composed of three closely interwoven levels that must nevertheless be kept distinct. Universal pragmatics constitutes the first level, where it is a matter of seeking criteria to identify valid propositions. The inherent presuppositions of any discursive act that claims to be valid will be what determines a theory of truth. The second level is of argumentation, where it is a matter of exhibiting the rules of justification for propositions in the current argumentative practice. This is effected by a theory of argumentation. Third and finally is the sociological level, where a twofold question is asked: how do legitimation problems arise at the heart of a society, and how does a theory of communicative action allow us to grasp social life in all its dimensions? These questions are addressed by a theory of society?.³² I have already shown that the contradiction at the level of a theory of truth is of a pragmatic order. Let’s now consider what sort of contradictions appear in the theory of argumentation, the hinge between the theories of truth and society and, in my view, the key point for Habermas’s second philosophy. First of all we should recall that for Habermas, an argumentative inference is what orients a series of acts toward a conclusion. Argumentation thus does not merely establish that a given thing is true in a given world (a classic positivist view) but must also establish it relative to the intention to convince a listener and to obtain his assent. The intention to convince by means of proof is one of the specific characteristics of argumentation distinguishing it from a simple logical inference, like implication. Arguments, because they must be adaptable to some purpose, are thus liable to be ranked (one argument may be deemed better than another in regard to a given end). Given that, how are we to determine the “force of the better argument”? Habermas answers that the force of the better argument is simultaneously “constraining and non-coercive”—a model that pushes for agreement, “the justification that should motivate us to recognize a validity claim,”³³ but that cannot be reduced to the constraint imposed by logical propositions that are as necessary as they are empty of content, or by empirical propositions that “come into argumentation, so to speak, from the outside.”³⁴ In a word, the force of the better argument neither obliges nor imposes, it motivates. Let’s consider now the different steps of argumentation as well as how one passes from one stage to the next. The first stage is clearly occasioned by the disruption of an initial consensus, that is, by the challenging of a validity claim. The speaker will then try to justify his claim by a “deduction from a justifying language,” that is, by exhibiting a principle or general norm that is liable to explain his statement. How does a validity claim come to be contested? In other words, why do certain propositions that had been accepted up to that point (God exists, Aristotelian physics is correct, one must always pay one’s debts) become transformed into problems? Far from the results of a sovereign individual’s sudden decision, these challenges arise from the evolution of society, or even, more generally, the species. Through this process of evolution, a consensus is transformed into a dissensus. This is explained by the “theory of the life-world” that Habermas develops at the end of volume 2 of The Theory of Communicative Action. The lifeworld is defined as the ensemble of beliefs shared by the individuals of a given society. “Taken as a whole, they [these beliefs] form the context of background knowledge accepted without question.”³⁵ But if at a given moment a participant challenges not the totality but a fragment, a segment of this reservoir, it puts things under pressure: “It takes an earthquake to make us aware that we had regarded the ground on which we stand every day as unshakable … Whether a lifeworld, in its opaque take-for-grantedness, eludes the phenomenologist’s inquiring gaze or is opened up to it does not depend on just choosing to adopt a theoretical attitude.”³⁶ Here Habermas develops two fundamentally anti-Cartesian theses: the first, which he borrows from Wittgenstein, asserts that radical doubt is impossible, that there will always be propositions that are held to be paradigmatic (which Habermas terms “background knowledge”) on whose basis an only-partial challenge can arise; the second shows that the origin of reflection cannot be imputed to a philosopher’s act of will but results from an external event. The real in itself is his concern here (the metaphor of the earthquake, at least, seemingly must be interpreted in this way). It is thus clear that a movement from a zero level (shared belief) to a first level (its challenge) is a necessary movement, induced by the real itself.

The second stage of argumentation is a challenging of the general principle itself. The speaker will thus be compelled to give “a theoretical justification” in response to this challenge. If the challenge concerns truth claims, he will be able to propose one or several empirical verifications. He will thus argue by recourse to induction. In the moral domain (justice claims), if someone responds to a speaker’s exhortation with “it is tedious to repay money that one has borrowed and is used to thinking of as one’s own,”³⁷ thus challenging the legitimacy of a norm in the name of one’s own pleasure, then the interlocutor should find a substitute for empirical verification—in this case, Habermas tells us, a consideration of interests. But the interest invoked in support of the norm obviously cannot simply be the individual’s sole interest, for it is true that the listener would have an easy time showing that it is never in one’s immediate interest to repay a debt, retorting that “you—you pay your debts, but my poor friend you will never be anything, much less a government office-holder.”³⁸ This is why the interest must be a universalizable interest. On this point, a Habermasian speaker could learnedly reply that we must repay our debts because “loans make possible a flexible use of scarce resources.”³⁹ He thereby underscores that this act, which contributes to society’s smooth functioning, is beneficial in return for the individual. If, in the theory, the movement between a principle and its casuistic evidence is by induction, in practice, it is the principle of universalization that permits the establishment of a norm: “Participants in a practical discourse strive to clarify a common interest.”⁴⁰ From an analysis of discourse in “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” Habermas shows the necessity of this principle of universalization for discussion. The passage to this second level of discussion is thus also necessary. Indeed, to legitimate a norm is to justify it with an interest common to all; but interests, as Habermas explains repeatedly, are themselves the product of the species’ evolution, of historically elaborated needs. Hence, the norm is nothing other than a confirmation of appropriateness spontaneously adjusted by evolution. If argumentation encompassed only these two levels, its necessity would be absolute and it would be impossible to define argument as a “force of rational motivation.” This is why a consensus can be real only if it is possible to modify the justifying language. This is the function of the third level of discussion. “Modifying the terminological or conceptual system” consists quite simply in asking whether the theories (the ensemble of norms or assertions) are well adapted to their aims. This means, for example, in physics, the possibility to move from an Aristotelian theory to a Copernican; similarly, in morality, it means the possibility of challenging a norm’s relevance, whether it is adapted to our present needs, with, Habermas tells us, “considerations of a meta-ethical or metapolitical order.” This can be done without necessarily sinking into the comical bad faith of one of Albert Cohen’s characters, who, disputing the debtor’s obligation, accuses his creditor of immorality: “For thirty years, Abravanel, you’ve demanded payment from him with a disgusting greed.”⁴¹ A number of more plausible arguments can indeed be called upon. It is thus possible to take up something comparable to Hegel’s analysis of deposits—to show that the demand for repayment supposes a society founded on property, that the declared advantages of “a flexible use of scarce resources” are meaningful only in a capitalist society, and finally, that other kinds of relations are conceivable. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, shows in analyzing the notion of debt that it has no meaning within a community like the family—of which the current French civil code has preserved certain traces, since it stipulates that every debt requires a written act, except among members of a family, which clearly shows that the notion of debt has meaning only for certain kinds of relations.⁴² But on what authority can a theory be criticized? One could initially reply that a theory will be challenged by counterexamples that falsify it. Thus, in physics, the discovery of sunspots demonstrating generation and corruption in the extralunar world could be considered as one of the decisive experiments contributing to the establishment of the Galilean theory. Similarly, in morality, the proposition “one must always pay one’s debts” is liable to be falsified in the name of morality itself: it is not always in the general interest that third-world countries repay their debts, and the fact that a dictator in one of these countries is acquitted is not necessarily a sign of an irreproachable integrity of character. By definition, when a principle relies on induction (or on its practical equivalent, the universalization of interests), counterexamples are always possible. However, it does not seem that this possibility is what Habermas intends for a critique of theories, for such a thesis would presuppose an epistemological conception that he views, moreover, as naive. Indeed, we all know that the credibility of experiments in physics depends upon a prior theoretical framework in which they are situated, and—without necessarily sharing Pierre Duhem’s holistic conception in which an experiment is not even capable of falsifying an existing theory—the fact nevertheless remains that Habermas here refuses to claim that new theories are born out of an experiment or a series of experiments. This is why the challenging of a theory can be effected only in the fourth and final level of discussion. This ultimate stage “leads to a level of discourse at which with the aid of the peculiarly circular movement of rational reconstruction we become aware of what should count as knowledge: how cognitive achievements which may lay claim to the title of knowledge ought to be constituted.”⁴³ This stage presupposes a radicalization that goes well beyond a discourse limited to scholars (and, moreover, this is why Habermas calls this the level of self-reflection). Here it is a matter of inquiring about the ultimate meaning of a scientific theory. To clarify this somewhat difficult point of the thesis, let’s look at three theories in physics: the theory developed in 1245 by Gossuin of Metz in his text Mirrour of the World,⁴⁴ Galileo’s theory, and finally, Descartes’. Beyond their clear divergences on properly physical statements (their theories of space, movement, light, the stars, etc.), there is a much more fundamental difference that goes well beyond the framework of a discussion among specialists—namely, the purpose that they assign to physical knowledge. For the medieval physicist, physics’ goal was not to know the world for what it is but to understand God’s message through it. The physicist’s work thus resembles that of the hermeneuticist—it consists in decoding the forest of symbols that is nature, deciphering beyond its literal meaning the hidden meaning of a universe understood as a collection of theophanies organized according to a hierarchy leading from the invisible world to the visible world. For Gossuin, following Aristotle’s example in astronomy, to know nature such as it is devoid of meaning or interest. In contrast, Galileo defined physics as the theoretical and neutral explication of what is, and Descartes understood it as a means of creating technical objects and thus of ameliorating the conditions of human life. (On this point, he is far removed from Galileo’s physics—the last articles of part 4 of The Principles of Philosophy⁴⁵ go so far as to claim that he cares very little, in the final analysis, whether these physical laws correspond to the reality of the world as long as technical objects can be elaborated on their basis.) What is the aim of physics? A goal of immortality, by a relation to the Eternal; a goal of natural reality, by the neutral description of experiments; a goal of morality, by the amelioration of the conditions of life on earth—this must be determined by the fourth level of discourse. But what are the criteria that will allow us to classify one theory as scientific and another as mythical? In whose name do we determine the value of a knowledge claim? Habermas tells us that at this stage of argumentation, it is impossible to dissociate theoretical and practical discourse: “This last step breaks through the boundaries of theoretical discourse … theoretical principles reveal their practical core,”⁴⁶ and reciprocally for practical discourse, “this last step also breaks through the boundaries of practical discourse because the practical question ‘what knowledge ought we to desire?’ … is obviously dependent upon the theoretical question ‘what knowledge are we able to desire?’”⁴⁷

The disappearance of the boundary between the theoretical and the practical poses an interpretive problem: if it is easy, in a pinch, to understand how the practical presupposes the theoretical (we cannot declare something desirable if it turns out to be not only unrealizable but moreover unrepresentable and inconceivable), on the other hand, the theoretical’s reference to the practical is more ambiguous, at least in Habermas,⁴⁸ for he posits that the ultimate criterion for the determination of a theory is the consideration of interests. On this point, Habermas explains that to evaluate knowledge we must consider its content as well as the interests with which this content must always coincide. But this interest is no longer to be understood, as it was in his early philosophy, in the sense of interest in emancipation. Indeed, in his second period Habermas no longer takes up this theme,⁴⁹ which had initially arisen in Max Horkheimer’s critical theory. For this reason, the use of interest here means, for example, that the adoption of Cartesian physics had been commanded by humanity’s interest in increasing its technical competence. Conversely, if a scientist today were to propose that science has a different purpose (for example, to know what is, in order to live in harmony with nature), he would be authorized to say that humanity has an interest—for its survival—in ending the exclusive pursuit of technical development. If, indeed, the survival of humanity is at stake, this theory will be adopted out of self-interest, or else this physicist will be relegated among the dreamers and poets, in other words, among the nonscientific thinkers. These propositions, taken in themselves, are not at all bizarre, but they are difficult to reconcile with the other theses. Indeed, if we consider the entirety of Habermas’s analysis, the determination of a theory’s value seems, at first, to depend on the extent of its conformity with an ideal speech situation. Indeed, the progressive radicalization of argumentation is encouraged by this reference to the ideal; the stages of discourse are tracked by this necessary anticipation. Here, this explanation of argumentation is analogous to Kant’s or Peirce’s. What ensures a theory’s value is its aim, its purpose: the ideal speech situation for Habermas, the idea of system for Kant, the community of scholars for Peirce. But, if not only moral argumentation (by the universalization of interests at the second level) but also theoretical argumentation (by reference to humanity’s interest to determine the ultimate significance of knowledge at the fourth level) depend in the final analysis on the consideration of real interests, it becomes impossible to articulate this thesis with reference to an ideal. What, then, is the ultimate criterion of a theory’s value? Must it be determined on the basis of what is (interests) or of what should be (the purpose inherent in language, embodied in the ideal speech situation)? In other words, if, as Habermas writes, theory refers to the practical, what is the latter’s content—taking account of the interests of humanity, or an investigation of the ideal?

From this first difficulty engendered by the theory of argumentation, two more can be deduced:

1. If the entire logic of argumentation rests on interest, knowing that the latter is the product of the evolution of the species, a theory’s value would be determined from its appropriateness to what is. We would thus be returned to the second level of argumentation, where the norm was nothing other than the affirmation of an agreement adjusted by evolution. But the third and fourth levels’ function is to overcome the position brought about by the second. This position closely resembles a form of evolutionism, related to naturalism, which we have seen illustrated by economists like Geoffrey Hodgson. Humanity’s needs evolve as a function of its history and each generation will adapt to new needs. Laws or social organizations—of which individual beliefs and behaviors are traces or echoes—are what could be called natural responses to these needs, for even if some are products of the evolution of societies, they all nevertheless correspond to the necessity of a given moment of the history of the human species (and subsequently, this will be a recognized tenet of contemporary naturalism).

2. This thesis supposes that the determination of our interests resembles a neutral and clear report, that is, it presupposes the possibility of a discourse that would not be tied to interests. Let me explain this point: either interests are entirely transparent and self-evident (but in that case, an individual or society does not need to intervene), or else the determination of interests must be the object of a fifth level of discourse. Even though this second possibility is implied by Habermas’s theory, it is contradicted, and here the system is self-refuting. As for the first possibility, also a consequence of the system, Habermas denies it because it supposes an ultra-essentialist configuration that Habermas vociferously rejects. For Habermas (particularly in his second period), the alteration of any given presupposes the free act of an individual or a collective subject.

We obtain two important results from this analysis of the theory of argumentation:

1. First of all, the contradiction in Habermas’s philosophy can no longer be characterized, as numerous interpreters have done, as a contradiction between an individual’s free act and the institution of language (the paradigm of the subject versus the paradigm of language). If this contradiction or tension might possibly be found in Apel, it cannot be imputed to Habermas, for a human, in his view, is not exclusively a creature of language. This is underlined by his statements such as “The distortion results directly from the uncontrolled penetration into language of paleosymbolic offshoots … the systematic distortion of colloquial communication can be traced to the encapsulation, like foreign bodies, of paleosymbolically linked semantic content in the linguistically regulated application of symbols”⁵⁰ or again “In the self, a communication block subsists between the language competent ego … and that ‘foreign land within.’”⁵¹ This view allows him to maintain the principal thesis of a good essence of language, and to reject as outside it such things as symptoms, deviance, and the unconscious—which, in Habermas’s terms, appear as foreign bodies coming from outside to perturb the structure of language. But this alternative at the same time allows him to conceive individual liberty as the possibility of action upon the real. Indeed, a subject’s freedom or act is located in the gap between a “paleo” level and the structure of language. The subject’s self-reflection, understood here as reflection on the unconscious limitations generating deviances, is founded upon language, to the extent that the demand that motivates the self-reflection is deducible from language, but at the same time the subject’s self-reflection works upon a content exterior to language. Habermas can thus without contradiction count the act of an individual subject among the characteristic traits of a rationality founded on language. To put it more generally, Habermas overcomes this supposed contradiction through the classic distinction between the form of a discourse and its content.⁵² Indeed, from the point of view of the universal form or structure of discourse, it is not possible to refer to a subject’s act. The constituted authority of language cannot be overcome, nor its immanent telos modified. In this respect, the subject is entirely dependent upon what we could call the pragmatic institution; he discovers, over the course of his apprenticeship, a given that he has not constituted. An analysis of illocutionary force shows its different components (claims to, relations to, engagements with, as well as the four presuppositions inherent in the aim of mutual understanding), which cannot be denied except by sinking “into serious mental illness or suicide.” These components are thus necessary, universal, and independent of spatiotemporal contexts. Must we then conclude, for all that, by a strict application of the principle of the excluded middle (as Manfred Frank seems to do, as well as Jean-Marc Ferry with the alternative that he proposes—either language is the authority and we are not subjects, or else we are subjects and we can supersede and change language), that for Habermas we are not free subjects? No, for the subject will be in charge of bridging the gap between this ideal structurally included within language and its real and contingent situation, with a content exterior to the form of language. This act, by which a subject “possesses the power to behave reflectively in relation to his subjectivity and to see through the irrational limitations,”⁵³ can be deduced, Habermas tells us, neither from the given nor from the ideal—not from the given for it is not the unconscious, for example, that requires its own updating; not from the ideal for the end orients the act, it does not produce it, or communicative action would be automatically realized, which would return us to a Hegelian schema that Habermas rejects. It follows that if the ideal is given by language, only the subject’s act could try to make the real—that is, deformed communication within the empirical—coincide with the ideal. The institution of language does not negate a subject’s constitutive act but rather furnishes its universal purpose.

2. On the other hand, if there is no internal contradiction in Habermas’s philosophy between linguistic necessity and the individual’s free act, in my view, the contradiction that does emerge from this analysis is just as serious and indeed calls for a radical modification of the theory. The contradiction is located between the idea of the species’ interest, understood as the product of a historical evolution, and the ideal structure of language. What, in the final analysis, justifies the choice of a given theory or practice at the ultimate level of argumentation? The telos immanent in language, or the biologically-then-historically constituted interests of the human species? This is the real tension that lurks at the core of Habermas’s second philosophy and puts it at risk. For Habermas, the historical schema remains⁵⁴ present to such an extent that it alone is able to interfere with, or even erase, the project’s apparently transcendental structure (investigation into conditions of possibility). Swinging between a naturalist historicism (evolutionism) and an Apelian transcendentalism (investigation of conditions of possibility), without further possible recourse to his first solution (which understood interests in transcendental terms), Habermas’s only choice seems to be to definitively abandon this second conception of philosophy as investigation of conditions of possibility, a conception that he had, indeed, already implicitly condemned in defining the interests of the species as the ultimate criterion of a theory’s validity. This is why he can only turn from pragmatics to a particular form of pragmatism, in the traditionally American sense of this movement, namely, as understanding truth in terms of utility, a criterion itself filled out by a notion of individual or collective interest. Habermas’s ultimate position becomes one in which philosophical theory will be indirectly corroborated by the results of other critical sciences (sociology, history, etc.). This theory of philosophy as a reconstructive science, whose statements have to be falsified by empirical sciences that themselves take into consideration the historical evolution of the interests of the species, is not only very different from the transcendental inspiration with which he began but also leads in fine to a destruction of Habermas’s second project. The crippling aporia, that Apel has noted, is as follows: The theory of communicative action thematizes different kinds of action, “communicative action,” as well as its inverse, “strategic action,” which is divided in its turn into “concealed strategic action” (in which communication is systematically deformed because we are dealing with an unconscious illusion—madness, self-deception, etc.) and “open strategic action” (which refers to the typical manipulation often at work in commercial, financial, etc., exchanges). But the “second” Habermas presupposed that strategic action was parasitic with respect to communicative action, the primary form of exchange. In Habermas’s system, the use of language for strategic ends had to be secondary and derivative. But how is communicative action’s primacy or originality justified with respect to actions that could only be “parasitic”? Is it by reference to social praxis? But doesn’t this demonstrate precisely the opposite? Doesn’t it purely and simply falsify the “fact of communicative reason”? Doesn’t social praxis agree with Callicles, Nietzsche, and others who are contemptuous of morality, against whom Habermas initially wanted to prove rationality? The epistemic system of fallibilism and references to the so-called morality of everyday life⁵⁵ and to social praxis all lead to a pulverization of his initial project. Having thrown some light on this movement from Habermas’s second to his third philosophical position and having outlined the aporia that leads, in the final analysis, to a thesis of endlessly falsifiable reconstructive sciences, we must now assess the conclusions to be drawn from my overall analysis of Habermas’s philosophy.

From the point of view of my larger project, this analysis of Habermas’s philosophy can only confirm my initial diagnosis: contemporary philosophy is simultaneously characterized by a logical pathology—pragmatic contradiction—and by a strange oscillation between two extremes. We have seen that this tendency to self-refutation or self-contradiction is present in each period of Habermas’s philosophy. At the same time, his movement from one philosophy to the next has revealed the swing from one extreme to another: on the one hand, philosophy understood simply as negative, therapeutic, leads ineluctably to the advocacy, by philosophy itself, of its own extinction (a resurgence of the skeptical figure); and, on the other hand, a desire to be anchored (in language, history, or, in fine, the evolution of the species) also betrays itself through a dissolution of philosophy as a distinct discourse and leads from an initial skepticism to a universally positivist face of philosophy, namely, what Quine called the “naturalization of epistemology.” From scientism to positivism and back again, with the same kind of contradiction that disfigures each of the moments taken separately—this is the strange pattern that endlessly shapes current philosophy. Before proposing an escape from this pattern, I must definitively establish my diagnosis with a final demonstration.

Having started with the most radical protests against philosophy (Rorty and the scientism in programs of naturalization), then proceeded through more neutral assertions of its necessary exhaustion (Austin and Levinas), and finally arrived (with Habermas) at the failure of an attempt to “maintain philosophy,” all that remains for me to do now is to consider the surreptitious views that would articulate the end of philosophy without openly proclaiming it. We find this view in many places and in many thinkers⁵⁷—I have chosen to analyze it in a “current” that I have not yet had the chance to discuss directly. Indeed, up to this point we have encountered two paradigms—analytic and Continental—that have divided the philosophical field since the beginning of the twentieth century, and I have been able to bring out a few points of overlap: thus Rorty joins the deconstructivists in his desire for an “antiphilosophy” and Levinas meets Austin in his desire to conceive a theory of meaning beyond the semantic triangle; similarly, Habermas’s second period proposed an overcoming of the paradigmatic disputes.

But my examination of the theme of the “death of philosophy” in contemporary philosophy cannot stop short of a complete assessment—there is a guiding thread of Ariadne that runs through all these currents despite their undeniable diversity (relativism and positivism in American epistemology, phenomenology, analytic philosophy, the Habermasian synthesis, etc.). This common point is reference to—and often, reverence for—Kant, a rare philosopher esteemed by all these currents. The contemporary critique of “metaphysics” and the refusal of the so-called “speculative” tradition, as well as the rejection of grand totalizing systems or Weltanschauung, all are fed not only with Heidegger or Wittgenstein but equally and incontestably by Kant, even if his theme of the critique of metaphysics is not “magnified” in the same way as the other traditions. Thus, for example, Heidegger and his disciples (hermeneuticists or phenomenologists) glorify through criticism the themes of radical finitude and discovery of the onto-theological structure of philosophy; while the Anglo-Saxons have either attempted, through Strawson, to rehabilitate a type of argumentation (transcendental argument), or, when they are relativist, to make a fairly intensive use of the “as if” of the Critique of Judgment. On this point, I have already shown how Stanley Cavell, in his questioning of the claim to speak in the place of all others, adopted a position extremely close to Kant’s first skeptical readers, who, adopting the system of the Critique of Judgment, considered their claims to be nothing more than plausible demands for agreement.⁵⁸ In this generally analytic tradition I can include—with a completely different orientation than Strawson’s rationalist or Cavell’s skeptical movements—movements to reappropriate the critical project initiated by Wilfred Sellars and continued today by John McDowell, movements that Jocelyn Benoist doesn’t hesitate to include within the generic label of “Kantian movements within analytic philosophy.”⁵⁹ Apart from these positive references that run through all these currents⁶⁰ (and by which Kant escapes the contemporary disapproval of what is called without further specification “metaphysics,” because he insists upon the finiteness and the necessary limitations of our knowledge), there are philosophers today who once again call for a “return to Kant.”⁶¹ These are the views that I propose to examine to complete my inquiry into the theme of the death of philosophy. This final stage of the analysis will then allow us to challenge the idea of the death of philosophy.