9	The “Race to Reference”

The twentieth century, particularly on its analytic side, was undeniably marked by what Jocelyn Benoist does not hesitate to call the “race to reference.”¹ Interest in the problem of reference would be a kind of reaction against Kantian idealism and, in general, against any form of representationalism. With Bernard Bolzano and Gottlob Frege, later with the early Husserl and of course Bertrand Russell, a desire was expressed to return to the object, against a too-exclusive concern for our representations of the object. In a word, the thematization of reference was presented as an offensive against the transcendental—which, by means of its preoccupation “less with the object than our modes of knowledge of the object” would have finished by crushing it [the object]—prompting, in reaction, a return to realism. On this point, Benoist, after having noted that “‘the race to reference’ … seems to have led philosophy to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,”² identifies the origin of this attention to reference in Bolzanian anti-Kantianism. This historical thesis—of “Bolzano’s inauguration, breaking with Kantian representationalism, of a certain kind of consolidated referential demand”³ that would be the “inaugural formation of twentieth century philosophy”⁴—is well established but needs, in my view, to be put in perspective. To be sure, there is no doubt that Bolzanian realism was in opposition to Kantian idealism, that semantics was meant to be a reaction to the transcendental problematic, or finally that this reaction colors part of contemporary philosophical debates. But does the problem of reference merely represent the acceptance of a particular realism in contrast to Kantian idealism? If that were the case, what would become of Heidegger, or even Husserl’s transcendental turn, which would have to be ignored in such a reconstruction of the history of twentieth-century philosophy?⁵ Likewise, what would become of the neo-Kantians who dominated the beginning of the twentieth century? And what if the problem of reference—far from being born in the break between Kant and Austrian philosophy—finds its source beyond that, at the very origins of contemporary philosophy? Why, moreover, should we restrict the problem of reference to the sole question of an object’s “reality”? Indeed, whether the object is a solid, existing “entity” (as in the realism of Bolzano, Russell, and even the early Husserl) or a phenomenon conceived as the synthesis of representations (as in Kant, of course, and the neo-Kantians but also Ernst Mach’s phenomenalism) changes nothing about the fact that in both cases it is a question of reference, not of self-reference—of the said, not of saying, to put it in Austin’s and Levinas’s terms.

Furthermore, this problematic of reference in contrast to self-reference can encompass the themes of existentialists like Heidegger just as well as analytic philosophy’s problematic of the object—it thus invites a different reconstruction of the advent of current philosophy. In fact, in history’s eyes, can’t we propose another story of the inaugural formation of contemporary philosophy that takes the concealment of self-reference as its guiding line? Indeed, beyond Bolzano’s realism and Kant’s idealism, they can both be considered as thinkers of reference, in contrast to the problematic of self-reference. Such is the thesis that I mean to demonstrate, by providing what is needed for a dive down to the origins of contemporary philosophy. For this dive, I will not discuss the analytic beginnings of contemporary philosophy, for it goes without saying that this paradigm is governed by an understanding of reference. Nor will I become attached, as Benoist has so admirably and magnificently done, to the early Husserl, who shares with analytic philosophy this concern for reference. These two currents indeed constitute the acme of the “race to reference.” But if analytic philosophy shares its “demand for referentiality” with the early Husserl, it seems to me that this demand should not be understood as a reaction to the critical project but rather as its realization, its completion. I thus must go back to Kant to show how philosophy’s referential ethos has unceasingly become more pronounced over the last two centuries and to show how the analytic currents of contemporary philosophy are its apotheosis, the culmination of a furrowed and plowed path, worked to the point that the ground has become infertile from overuse and must today be left to lie fallow.

To understand the assumption of reference, I will show how the contemporary philosophical options are indebted to two ways of reading Kant in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. They thus have in common that they travel down only one of two paths that were open to philosophy then. To put it differently, this time in Emil Lask’s⁶ terms, at the beginning of the century two paths (that were not contradictory, that could be followed at the same time and come together at some point) were open to philosophy: it could secure the status of its own discourse (a metaphilosophical perspective), or it could anchor “categories” in experience (the real in general) or in existentials (for example, the first strata of the relation to the world in Husserl, such as the “prepredicative”). Only one of the paths proposed by Lask was taken, the path of reference. However, in the specific case of readings of Kant, this path of reference was taken in two absolutely distinct senses: The first is the classically epistemological path of reference as the sciences’ relation to the real—here we find, for example, Hermann von Helmholtz’s and Hermann Cohen’s problems. The second is the existential path of reference—such as, for example (apart from the Husserlian opening to the prepredicative) Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. In my view, these two different ways of reading Kant have accentuated the divorce between reference and self-reference, already at work in Kant himself. To retrace the lines of this history, upon which we are still dependent, I will first try to show how the tension between the two orientations, reference and self-reference, plagues the Kantian system to the point of weakening it. Next, we will see how Helmholtz, to overcome this tension that appeared as a contradiction, opted exclusively for a single path, reference, thus giving twentieth-century philosophy its orientation. A veritable fulcrum in the determination of the “race to reference,” Helmholtz has colored the most contemporary investigations. By his configuration of the Kantian problem, this author—whom we too often tend to forget today⁷—launched twentieth-century philosophy. Finally, we will see how, paradoxically, interpretations like Heidegger’s have not deflected the route adopted in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, we will find, in comparing interpretations of Kant as different as Cohen’s and Heidegger’s, an exclusive concern for reference. My comparative reading’s only aim is to establish that Cohen’s (positivism) and Heidegger’s (hermeneutic phenomenology) lines of questioning are, in the final analysis, identical. I thus do not at all need to enter into a detailed analysis of these authors, nor to elucidate their work in a new way.⁸ I need only to demonstrate a paradoxical thesis: these apparently incommensurable currents of philosophy share the same line of questioning—a concern for reference to the detriment of attention to self-reference. It is the exclusivity of this concern that has engendered the erroneous announcement of the death of philosophy. This inquiry into the historical source of the referential demand will enable me to better show the necessity of opening a different path of investigation.