Doctrines that variously express one of the three characteristics that I have delineated—(1) philosophy’s scientificity, (2) examination of the nature of pragmatic contradiction, and (3) the problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse as a problem of self-reference—are legion throughout the history of philosophy. On this point, the first required trait (namely, the affirmation of philosophy as a science in the face of a devastating skepticism) is superbly embodied by the dispute between Plato and the Sophists. Similarly, many of Aristotle’s arguments could be taken up against contemporary skepticism. And again, the theme of philosophy as a science constitutes the heart of Descartes’ philosophy just like Leibniz’s, of Hegel’s just like Husserl’s. Why, then, among all these possibilities, should we give priority to one rather than the others? Why will I choose, as the guiding thread of our reflections, the precise moment of the birth of German idealism? Different answers to this question are possible:
First of all, I can argue that this moment poses the question of the scientificity of the philosopher’s discourse with a particular acuity, as is attested by the desire of the most important philosophers of the era to speak of a “doctrine of science” or a “system of science” as synonyms of “philosophy,” “ontology,” or “metaphysics.”2 Although Descartes and Leibniz considered philosophy’s scientificity to be a quasi given, this obvious fact had to be won back again against the time’s prevailing skepticism when German idealism was born3 and thus had to be better justified than previously. To put it differently, this moment (perhaps more than others, in light of both the force of skepticism and the Kantian questions) was confronted by the epistemological problem of the possibility of philosophy as an autonomous and distinct science.
Next, I can say that beginning with this period, the problem of self-reference was indissolubly linked—in a manner that I’ll discuss later—to the problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse.
I can also point out a more precise reason: apart from the scientificity that I am seeking (and that is just as much embodied by Husserl), we find in the immediately post-Kantian system an explicit theory of “speaking” in the “said,” a theory that replaces the semantic approach to meaning. But we have already seen in chapter 2 how Levinas and Austin proposed to overcome the “semantic curse” (promotion of the sign = Rorty’s relativism; promotion of reference = scientism)4 by a theory of “speaking.” These two theories—with-out any common ground in their strict content—nevertheless lead to the same conclusion: an escape from philosophy. It can thus seem particularly fruitful and opportune to see how other theories “of speaking and the said” do not lead to a call for an escape from philosophy but on the contrary to the affirmation of the first thesis that I am trying to establish, philosophy’s scientificity.
Finally, I can also note that German idealism—from the viewpoint of its theses’ contents—is the furthest removed from the current habitus. Indeed, German idealism, in both its Fichtean and Hegelian versions, is generally stigmatized as the peak of metaphysics in its worst excesses. There are very few contemporary philosophical currents that do not denounce its “totalizing,” “foundationalist,” or “metaphysical”5 ambitions. If Kant is recognized, or even proclaimed, as a precursor by all these currents, his immediate successors on the other hand are considered as the paradigmatic expression of the transgression of the limits of human reason. Concern, as Fichtean as Hegelian, for an ultimate foundation, a unique absolute, an exclusive principle, is almost always interpreted in terms of the challenge of radical finitude. The disapproval is too unanimous for these philosophies not to constitute a choice “ethnological field,” for those of us who mean to distance ourselves from the most widely shared givens of our time and to look with glasses other than those that the era liberally dispenses.
In a word, I could say—to take up my introductory comparison again—that just as we are advised, in order to clearly and distinctly recognize the anamorphosis, to place ourselves at a most unusual angle to the painting and to thus effect a maximal decentering with respect to the frontal position, here, too, if we position ourselves at the most outlying location relative to our immediate habitus, if we put ourselves at the heart of the “untimely,” that is to say, at the heart of what is taken to be the “height of metaphysics,” we might be able to overcome the suspicion of grounds—and thus to reconstruct the themes of reference and self-reference, of speaking and the said, of science and philosophy, and of identity and contradiction, in a different way than what the current order suggests.
Of course, it will be retorted that a comparison is not an argument, and that I am taking liberties when I say, “Let’s go directly to the eccentric (German idealism) and see what it will yield.” This objection will allow me to specify the status of my choice. It is a thought experiment, a Gedankenexperiment, a topic dear to Hilary Putnam and many others.6 If American philosophers can very seriously ask, “What is it like to be a bat?”7 why shouldn’t French historians of philosophy have the right to ask, “What is it like to conceive philosophy as a first and distinct science?” To do so, can’t they try to climb on the “ladder” of those who meant to prove it?8 Why not attempt this thought experiment? Moreover, mustn’t we also recognize that my objector asks me to first justify my reliance on German idealism only because this ladder is unusual—even though there are many who, relying on Wittgenstein, Husserl, or Heidegger, multiply expressions like “Wittgenstein has shown us … ,” “We have known since Wittgenstein … ,” “Wittgenstein teaches that it is a mistake to … ,” etc., without any other justification than the very words of the master?9 That will be my final argument: my model’s advantage is that it is so unobvious that it spares us from any lazy references to an argument from authority.
Beyond the demand for philosophy’s scientificity—which, I have said, is consistently maintained by both Fichte and Hegel and which thereby fulfills the first of the conditions that I have specified—the problem that decisively launched German idealism’s way of philosophizing was the problem of the status of Kant’s discourse.10 Indeed, in the Critique of Pure Reason, if knowledge is true, an image must be created by application of a concept to an intuition. But the enumeration of knowledge’s conditions of possibility, to which the Critique of Pure Reason is devoted, does not satisfy this criterion of truth because these conditions are not representable with intuitions and concepts. It follows that philosophical argumentation, such as Kant exhibits, constrains us to covertly accept a mode of truth outside the application of a concept to an intuition. To put this in other words, if in defining what confers validity on mathematical and possibly physical propositions Kant relegates metaphysical statements to the status of illusion, the problem nonetheless remains unresolved, in his immediate successors’ eyes, of knowing the status of the Critique of Pure Reason’s statements, which are neither mathematical, physical, nor metaphysical. These statements obviously claim that what they say is valid, but how is this validity to be understood, since Kant defines it as being exclusively the link between a concept and an intuition? This objection—which was made as early as 1792 by Gottlob Ernst Schulze (who adopted the name of the ancient skeptic Aenesidemus)11—is radical in that it calls into doubt the very possibility of writing the Critique of Pure Reason. What is challenged here is not the contents of this or that critical statement but the very possibility of its utterance. Indeed, Kant produces a definition of truth that does not encompass his own philosophical propositions. Thus, his definition of truth is invalidated by its very articulation. This aporia of critique was variously taken up later: Ernst Cassirer mentions it several times, without for all that resolving it; P. F. Strawson considers it at various occasions in The Bounds of Sense;12 finally, Karl-Otto Apel uses the argument against logical positivism, showing how this philosophical movement, for which only empirical and analytic propositions are true, cannot account for this claim, quite simply because this proposition is neither empirical nor analytic. This aporia, that Aenesidemus implicitly outlines, is the necessity that philosophical statements be self-referential if they are to be consistent. At the same time as they say something about the truth, these statements must also describe themselves as true. Salomon Maimon,13 another skeptical contemporary of Kant’s, took up this same problem about the status of critique’s statements in a different way, thus contributing to an outline of the problem of German idealism and to the configuration of its various possible solutions. Maimon proposed, as I noted earlier, to rethink critique starting not with the concept of representation but with the concept of reflection—in other words, he was the first to undertake a rereading of the entire critical project beginning with the Critique of Judgment.14 That said, this reconstruction still faces a serious difficulty. Indeed, Kant divides all of knowledge into determinate judgments (which hold for mathematics and part of physics) and reflective judgments (which hold for art and the living organism). These reflective judgments yield only heuristic concepts within statements governed by an “everything happens as if,” in contrast to the “it is thus” of determinate judgments. Consequently, the question arises in this division as to where Kant’s own philosophical judgments are located in this schema. As Aenesidemus has demonstrated, these judgments cannot be determinate judgments (the link between a concept and an intuition) without contradiction—they can thus only be reflective judgments (for the Kantian typology allows only two kinds of judgment). Maimon draws a simple consequence from this reasoning: the philosopher cannot claim the absolute validity of what he says, he generates statements of the order of plausibility, or reflective judgments governed by an “everything happens as if.” This is why Kantianism is a skepticism that I was able to summarize in chapter 4 with this series of destructive claims: “everything happens as if the Critique of Judgment were true, everything happens as if man were finite,” and finally, catastrophically, “everything happens as if the distinction between determinate and reflective judgments were relevant.” In a word, German idealism was born from the problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse. More precisely, Kant’s successors are confronted by a specific type of aporia: the Kantian system’s self-contradiction as a contradiction between the contents of what it says (validity is in the connection between a concept and an intuition) and the status of its utterance (Kant claims that this proposition is valid even though it is not a connection between concept and intuition). This problem, it will be noted, is not at all indexed to a dogmatic demand, a demand for an external (God or nature) or internal (the ego) foundation, nor does it present itself as the assertion of an ineffable absolute. To disregard this problematic as absurd by relegating it to the domain of metaphysical, foundationalist, or onto-theological pseudodemands is to reveal that one is unable to give an account of the status of one’s own discourse. I can add, on this point, that Wittgenstein (among others) raised this problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse again at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. A philosopher like Kant cannot accept this contradiction,15 that is, that his system’s contents would be invalidated by its articulation—in a word, he cannot agree to say, “I say x and at the same time I say not-x.” He thus must accept the problem. But what then should he do? To refuse to address it amounts, for Kant as for any philosopher, either to adopting a skeptical viewpoint (which is self-refuting, as Fichte and Hegel later showed, and as I have been able to confirm in part 1) or to giving up any claim to validity for one’s own statements. Kant would say, “I say x but as I cannot claim validity in saying it, consider it as seems best to you.” If that were the case, we would no longer need to consider this position that claims nothing. So it appears at the end of this explanation that the problem of the status of the philosopher’s discourse, a problem at the source of the first post-Kantians’ demands, is neither metaphysical nor “foundationalist.” A demand that validity claims be justified cannot be accused of “foundationalism” without giving this term such a wide scope as to make it synonymous with any argumentative and discursive reasoning. I can thus attempt to revive this nodal problem that gave birth to the great constructions of German idealism. Having established this point, let’s continue to build our “corrective apparatus.”
Fichte never ceased demonstrating that philosophical constructions—those of his time as well as the classic constructions of Spinoza’s era—contain a certain kind of contradiction, which he calls a contradiction between what a philosopher says and what he does (Sagen and Tun), or even a contradiction between what is done and its doing, a contradiction that strictly corresponds to what I have called, with François Récanati and Karl-Otto Apel, a pragmatic or performative contradiction. Indeed, the Sagen (the saying) is defined by what a given philosopher says—for example, “God is the cause of the self,” “The ego is the foundation,” “the material, source, and origin of the world in its totality,” or else “The will to power, the unconscious, Being, etc., is the engine of history,” or even “Finitude is radical,” “Truth is x + y (concept + intuition),” or even “Truth is unattainable, totalitarian, etc.” The Tun (the doing) is what the philosopher “does” (an “act of application,” Fichte calls it) or presupposes in order to be able to say what he says. If he presupposes or does the opposite of what he says, then his thesis, whatever it may be, must be considered false because it destroys itself,16 without any need to make recourse to external objections.
This type of contradiction brings to light, as its opposite, a certain kind of identity that Fichte was committed to defining. This is the identification between “what was to be explained” and the “ground of explanation.”17 Fichte discovered this identity, which the Science of Knowledge aims to promote, and was the first if not to thematize it18 at least to assert it as the grounding principle of any philosophical system in its entirety. This type of noncontradiction or identity is innovative in that it is not a contradiction of formal logic (the tautology a = a), nor a physical contradiction between two opposing forces (which Kant, following Newton, termed “opposition”), and even less a contradiction between a proposition and the given that it should translate (the classic definition of nonformal identity as adequacy between a proposition and its external referent). The identity that Fichte means is the identity between an act of saying x and what is said by x, a contradiction between saying “I do not speak” and the act of speaking in order to say it, between saying “the truth does not exist” and the truth claim intrinsically presupposed by this proposition. And yet in simultaneously making this principle the foundation for the system and the model to which all propositions to come must conform,19 Fichte actually discovers a new kind of rationality—in that it does not come under either the mathematical reasoning favored by Spinoza (deduction of propositions from a unique principle) or the logicism or formal calculus dear to Leibniz (which contemporary logicians will develop again), nor Cartesian evidence, nor the Kantian typology of judgments, nor apagogic reasoning.
Before seeing whether this rationality is able to legitimate the status of the philosopher’s discourse, I must first address a series of objections. Identity as defined here is, I would say, a “foundational” principle, posited as something to which we must subsequently conform. Quid juris? Isn’t there something utterly arbitrary in positing this identity as a principle that shall govern our future statements (that is, in making it a principle that determines the non-acceptability of statements that are not in conformity with it)? It is important to understand here that what is posited as a principle is a demand (the demand for non-self-refutation)—it is a model to be constructed or achieved (the statements that we will accept must all be unmarked by this kind of contradiction). I thus posit pragmatic noncontradiction as a standard, and I make it the principal engine for the series of propositions to come. But my objector could again reply that if a philosopher wanted to contradict himself, wouldn’t that choice be as good as the opposite? To this objection, I can only respond affirmatively—but we must still understand what this objection is really saying: if a philosopher wants to destroy his own propositions or to destroy what he is saying at the very moment he says it, he can; in a word, if a philosopher wishes to commit suicide, he can. Indeed, really anyone has the concrete option of positing contradiction as desirable, and as such, to seek it in the future. Those who wish to posit contradiction as an ideal will do so, but we have seen that they cannot do so from within philosophy, nor even from within rationality, because they cannot argue for the necessity of positing a contradiction. It will be said that this antiphony has been well-known since Aristotle’s Metaphysics! Of course, and I’d ask my objector to take the trouble to answer in return why we must want contradiction! If he were to say why, under the pretext that he wants to put himself in a position where he can no longer speak, then must we do likewise?20 Briefly, if an argumentative discourse is possible, then it must posit noncontradiction between a statement (what Fichte calls “what is done”) and its utterance (“the doing”) as a demand. Having replied to these objections, how shall I now move from a wish—that philosophy must be a science—to a principle that will allow it to really become one?
The answer can be given in one word: self-referentiality. With a clear thematization of philosophical truth as the agreement between a statement’s contents and the statement’s status, Fichte thought he had found a viewpoint from which he could resolve the most serious problem that he had identified in critique. The exclusive division into determinate and reflective judgments gave rise to this problem in which Kantianism dissolved: to which class do philosophical judgments belong? But the identity that Fichte brought out allows us to discover a new kind of judgment, self-referential judgments. In doing so, it gives a criterion for falsehood, a distinct status to philosophy, and a law to reflexive identity. Let’s consider these three dimensions, to show how they can overcome the aporia of philosophical discourse.
The opposite of a demand for identity cannot be assumed by a speaker without immediately falling into a performative contradiction. We thus have here an extremely constraining model (taken up again by Apel), for it is a proposition whose opposite cannot be argued for nor even said without self-destructing. On this model, we can define philosophical truth as requiring, at a minimum, agreement between a statement’s contents and the status of its utterance. The displacement effected here in the concept of truth is patently clear. Truth as adequatio is certainly maintained—but it is no longer agreement between propositions and things, facts, or even phenomena (reference ad extra), but rather agreement between the proposition’s contents and its status, the only thing likely to indicate the discourse’s agreement with itself (self-reference). We thus have at our disposal a criterion for determining falsehood.21 Any proposition will be false, and any system erroneous, that contravenes the necessary agreement between saying (Sagen) and doing (Tun), in a word, that contravenes the demand for self-referentiality. In other words, if philosophy’s contents (its definition of self-consciousness, of science, truth, knowledge, the good, politics, law, etc.) sets self-referentiality aside, then that philosophy is condemned to fall into fundamental contradictions. We can thus concretely see how this discovered identity provides a minimal touchstone for any future philosophical truth, for a future system will accept only those propositions whose contents (what is “done”) do not contradict the fact of being said (the act of application, as it is put in the 1794 Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre), or, in strictly equivalent contemporary terminology, all propositions in which the statement’s contents are contradicted by the fact of being spoken will be rejected.
It follows that the law of self-referentiality is what is likely to give philosophy its claim to “scientificity.” Still, we ought to better understand this term “scientificity.” It is not a matter of copying philosophy’s procedures from those of mathematics, nor of seeking a foundation in biology or any other settled science—in a word, it is not a matter of bringing philosophy’s reasoning in line with the positive sciences, and even less of dissolving it in them. These different disciplines do not employ the same mode of rationality. To give a deliberately simplified example, a science like Euclidian geometry delimits its object (space, not numbers; figures, not living beings; etc.), constructs figures and then determines their properties. The mind’s movement is thus a movement toward an ob-ject (something thrown in front of one’s gaze,22 or a representation of an x—a triangle, for example), a movement of delimitation and construction (I define an object by three dimensions within an indeterminate space) and of analysis (I define the properties of my figure: the sum of the angles is equal to two right angles). Conversely, philosophy is not the sighting of an exterior object nor the analysis of a being thrown before oneself. The act of utterance contained in a proposition is neither an object, nor a being, nor a fact that I could have before my eyes. To put it in Searle’s terms, he shows in Foundations of Illocutionary Logic that any successful use of a discursive act presupposes the satisfaction of a certain number of acts; and when, as a philosopher, Searle disentangles those acts contained in the fact of the utterance, he does not “turn his gaze” to an object defined like a triangle or a leech’s brain, rather he brings to light an act (“speech acts”)23 and wonders about the nonconformity between the contents of what is said and the act of saying it. In the same way, thanks to the foregrounding of a third kind of identity (an identity that is neither analytic identity, the law of formal logic, nor identity between a proposition and an exterior object, identity aimed at by the physicist), Fichte gives philosophical discourse a principle that avoids confusion with the other rational procedures at work in other sciences (geometry, biology, arithmetic, formal logic).
This self-referentiality (thus defined from the principle that governs it—identity as the congruence between an utterance and a statement) is thus conclusively distinguished from the old model of knowledge [connaissance], for it is not a matter, in the case of a particular philosophical statement (relative to humanity, morality, etc.) of seeing a fact or describing an already existent being or object. Moreover, the danger normally tied to the traditional model of philosophical self-reflection—namely, the risk of defining reflection as the location of an exterior “eye” that looks over an anterior “posit”—totally disappears.24 The idea of seeing thus does not have to be understood as the assertion of an eye that would see the seeing eye, etc., and on to infinity. The reflexive system is entirely different: accepting a given proposition and refusing another will be done in the name of the principle of self-referentiality. This strong law cannot not be presupposed by all philosophers, even if many transgress it; this is amply clear in my descriptions of the stain in the contemporary philosophical scene. Fichte detected it in a good number of his predecessors, whom he divided into “dogmatists” and “idealists,” who in his eyes committed, for the most part, the same contradiction between the Tun and the Sagen at some point in their systems. The law of self-reference is a law that no philosopher can escape. Fichte opposes this law of self-reference (the relation to oneself as the relation of a discourse to itself) to the law of “representation” (a subject’s relation to an object or a proposition’s relation to a referent other than itself).25 This law is what allows him to make use of a knowledge that is defined neither as a movement of objectivation and figuration nor as a simple formal calculation;26 this law is what allows him to take up the skeptics’ challenge. Self-reference, so conceived and strictly defined, thus allows philosophical knowledge to be freed from the sterile choice between promoting the same rationality as the positive sciences or embracing skepticism (whether this skepticism takes the classical form of a declaration of the impossibility of philosophy or takes the form of literature or deconstruction). This is why Fichte, just as Hegel will do later, means to signal this revolution by reserving the term “learning” [connaissance] for the positive sciences and thinking of philosophy with the term “knowledge” [savoir]. The choice of this term “knowledge” sums up in itself what is at stake: neither learning in the sense of the positive sciences, nor for all that literature, nor a simple deconstruction of illusions, nor alchemy, philosophy is a science in the sense that it moves within the dimension of knowledge. I must now elucidate the nature of this knowledge in order to refine my explanation of this model of self-reference.
To better illuminate this model, proposed by Fichte and then Hegel, I must first emphasize the obvious point that this principle of self-referentiality (identity between saying and the said) develops within an epistemological—not ontological—set of problems. Having underlined this obvious fact (which is not recognized as such by many of Fichte’s commentators27), I should focus on the nature of this epistemology, for two levels can be distinguished in its interrogation of knowledge. The first aims at determining the nature of our knowledges [connaissances28]: are they a priori or a posteriori, innate or integrally dependent upon experience?29 To say that our knowledges are only founded on, by, and in experience is to rely on the support of Lockean empiricism, while to claim that there are knowledges that are entirely independent of experience is to situate oneself in the rationalist current illustrated, in different modalities, by both Descartes and Kant. These claims, despite their differences, are nonetheless situated in the same set of problems: defining the nature of our knowledges. But—and this is the important point—Fichte’s problem does not principally consist of situating himself in this debate. His question is no longer concerned with the existence or nonexistence of a priori knowledge but addresses the possibility of knowledge (Wissenschaft) about these knowledges (Erkenntnis). This second level of questioning, relative to knowledge of knowledges, is distinguished from the first by it metacognitive character: it is no longer a matter of examining the structure of our cognitive apparatus (intuition, concepts) but of understanding the possibility of a kind of knowledge likely to determine this structure. In this sense, it seems legitimate to say that the Fichtean question is to the classical epistemological question (about the nature of our knowledges) as the question of the possibility of a metalanguage is to an examination of language. To ask how language functions (for example, how it speaks the real) is not the same thing as questioning the possibility that a language could describe the very structure of language.
It is probably because they have not perceived this difference of levels that a good number of his contemporaries—like the later commentators—understood the Fichtean enterprise on the model of precritical dogmatism and thus relegated it to the infamous category of “metaphysics.” In fact, they have taken for a language what was explicitly given as a questioning of the possibility of a metalanguage. The insistent repetition in Fichte’s texts of the question, “How does a philosopher know?”30 How does he know that he knows? has the goal of making the differences stand out between these two questions “How do we know [connaissance]?” and “How do we know [savoir] that we know [savoir]?” If, as Kant would have it, certain elements of our learning are a priori, it is a matter of knowing what kind of knowledge makes it possible to ascertain that certain elements are a priori. Do these elements become, for the philosopher’s knowledge, facts? If so, what is the status of these facts, knowing that in the Kantian theory, facts can be learned only through concepts, knowing also that Kant denies any recourse to an internal observation? If not, what is the status within the critical project of a knowledge that would not rely on facts? Such are the questions that explain the appearance of a hyperepistemology or an epistemology squared taken by the science of knowledge, to which it will henceforth be incumbent to understand how “we know that we know”—according to a demand echoed by Jaakko Hintikka, who makes the following question one of the most important for our time: “What constitutes the human activity by which we come to know that we know?”31
It follows that, far from a transcendental subject’s overlooking perspective, the viewpoint of self-reference as a metacognitive question abandons any thematization of vision, of introspections, of a preexisting subject’s observation, and puts forward only a single principle: the principle of congruence between what is said and its saying. Its inscription within what is commonly called the metaphysics of subjectivity32 thus makes no sense at all. However, to even better describe this version of self-reference, which is becoming the backbone of philosophical knowledge, we must now understand the last dimension that distinguishes it—the dimension of action, of Tun. In the Fichtean framework, self-reference is defined neither as a thing nor an object but as a “doing,” realization, an act of saying. Why speak of an act of utterance and not a fact, and what status is this act to be given?
I must first elucidate this dimension while remaining strictly within the model proposed by Fichte—only in the next chapter will I be able to compare this model to different contemporary problems of self-referentiality and to current debates about the “fact” of speaking, the “act” of speaking, and the speaking “agent.”
To understand the Fichtean view of the act of application, it is imperative that we guard against a first misinterpretation, which would consist in wanting to immediately assign the Tun to a subject, substrate of the action, and to thereby transform a philosophy of the act into a philosophy of the agent. As surprising as it might prima facie appear,33 Fichte’s concern is the act, not the agent, and his problem is to exhibit the structure of the action of knowledge, not to determine the identity of a substrate or support (subject, person, individual)—in a word, his “science” is a science of knowledge and not a science of consciousness, of the person, or of the mind. Knowing is an act—this is Fichte’s cardinal thesis; philosophy grasps the act and not the being; ontology thus gives way to actology. How are we to understand this claim without covertly entering into problems of the agent? To understand it, we must first remember that Fichte systematically begins with propositions34 and not with facts of consciousness; next, that within these propositions he distinguishes between what is said and the fact of saying it, “what is done” and “the doing.” It is thus a question of finding the propositions’ structure and not of referring to an agent. But can we say precisely why Fichte identifies the fact of saying (the application) with an act and not with an event in the world—as does, for example, François Récanati? To answer this question, we ought to return to the principle of knowledge, the principle of reflexive identity. I have said that this reflexive identity is the “foundation” for future propositions. But this foundation—far from being an obvious, absolute, and first principle from which a set of propositions can be taken more geometrico—is worked out as an end to pursue, a task to be achieved. The principle says that I should, in the future, act so that the propositions that I accept will have undergone the test of performative noncontradiction. It is in this sense that knowledge is defined as an action because it is a process to be accomplished in light of a prescribed end. More precisely, the identity of the statement and its utterance is simultaneously a starting point (a foundation, of course, but conceived as a model to be achieved in the future) and something that must be accomplished, the end that will be achieved by the system, the task that the philosopher freely assigns himself. It follows that the concept of an act, of praxis, of doing (strictly defined as the production of something—in this case, a system of propositions, which is not yet in the world—in light of a prescribed end) goes beyond the narrow framework of morality and of politics and becomes the cardinal concept of knowledge, in the same way that, for Austin, the order of the sayable became that of action and the act of expression, the expression of an act. At the end of this analysis, we can directly answer the question why we should speak of an act and not of a fact. We are authorized to do so quite simply because “to produce something in light of a prescribed end” is the common definition of an action and not of a fact or an event.
Thus at the end of this path we are in possession of a model of self-reference, encapsulated in its principle: congruence between a statement and its utterance. Despite its brevity, this final definition nevertheless contains multiple implications, which I have examined in detail throughout this chapter, namely
- the law of self-reference is the law that gives philosophy its distinctive status and structures its propositions;
- this law provides philosophy its dimension of knowledge in contrast to scientific learning or literary creation;
- this law of self-reference does not point to some sort of metaphysical substrate, nor does it necessitate some sort of psychological introspection, but is a law immanent in philosophical discourse.
In a word, this law of reflexivity35 avoids all the pitfalls usually denounced by contemporary philosophy while overcoming the generalized skepticism toward philosophical discourse. Having specified this model, I now have to test its consistency by systematically contrasting it with the most contemporary theories of self-reference.