For Nietzsche, nihilism potentially reaches an end stage, at which it is “accomplished,” meaning completed or fulfilled. For me, nihilism is accomplished when the contradiction internal to the hermeneutic experience of truth is fully acknowledged. And that acknowledgment is a “logical” stance, if logic broadly means the mode in which we think truth, and in which we engage in thought and discourse in whatever contingent circumstances, historical and linguistic, are given to us. On that basis, the connection between truth and rhetoric adduced in the previous chapter does not take anything away from logic. But if logic merely denotes the technique of producing valid inferences, then certainly the assertion that truth is a rhetorical matter, a matter of persuasion ad homines, does remove truth to some extent from logic’s area of competence. (And as far as that goes, it is well known that inferential logic has never been able to grasp the concept of truth on its own.) But what I described in the previous chapter as the connection between truth and the history of Being does not in the least rob logic of meaningfulness as the science of the logos, as reflection on the modes of thought available to us in the single historical apertures of Being, which are the horizons of truth and falsehood of a culture.
To put it another way: I myself have never invented a criterion on the basis of which to verify or falsify propositions, but I utilize criteria of this kind, and the fact that they are there when I need them is something that actually escapes my control. I can reflect on them, try to remold them, but I am unable to dominate and comprehend their compulsory force. It is my very existence that, already and de facto, gives me forms and criteria the compulsoriness of which I do not know and cannot establish. My relation to Being is my having-been thrown inside a horizon of truth and falsity, where I have to deal with criteria already given—but it doesn’t say anywhere that they are the only ones possible, or that they could possibly be normative everywhere and at all times. So if I understand logic not as the neutral and universal mode for speaking of Being, but as reflection on criteria given time and again, then logic is nothing more than a part of the ontology of actuality, and it’s business there is to be constitutively suspicious, to subject the criteria of truth to ongoing, relativizing clarification.
It interests me to learn more, for example, about non-binary, many-valued logics; non-Euclidean geometries interest me too. The evolutions and vicissitudes of these formal sciences, these purely formal ways of knowing, could hardly fail to be of interest for the ontological perspective, for a hermeneutics focused on the history of Being. But more than anything else, difference interests me, the fact that there is difference among logics, among geometries, and that the domain of the formal, exact sciences is itself caught up in the history of Being. Conversely, I believe that these vicissitudes act in their own way on the history of Being. If scientific transformations in general affect our mode of being, and of thinking Being, those in logic and the purely formal sciences must do so even more.
If I were more at ease with formalism, and all the expressive possibilities offered by the formal sciences, I would probably find elements that would help me construct an even more serious ontology of actuality. I’ve often wished to encounter a logician seriously logical and sufficiently Heideggerian to make an attempt at collaboration feasible. Giancarlo Rota, who died recently, filled the bill to some extent.1 But I can’t set off down that road on my own. A philosopher can’t treat the specialized sciences as if they were a tourist destination (taking a trip there out of curiosity, to see what others are up to), and if you try to be more than a tourist, you risk losing your bearings. I know people who began to get involved with Lacanian psychoanalysis, because there was a specifically philosophical side to it, and got lost in Lacanism. Likewise, if I tried to delve too deeply into logic, I’d risk becoming a lost soul, bewildered and bemused by a practice that ultimately has nothing more to say to philosophy.
If philosophy does have a stake in the differences among the logics, then it would be more worthwhile to know something about their history, and how different logics evolved. But that ought to be part of the professional baggage of an ontologist, just like knowing something about information technology, for example—and frankly information technology seems more accessible to me because I use it more often. In some cases a degree of formalization may be useful for solving knotty problems in natural language that are otherwise baffling. For example, the argument that since “nothing is greater than God,” then God must be so tiny that even nothing is greater than he is,2 looks absolutely irresistible, and it is useful to find out why: why it looks compelling and why it fundamentally isn’t. Apart from that, when I read texts by philosophers using logic, and when I can understand them, I generally feel like I am reading some sort of game or science fiction novel, a diverting pastime. I have friends who sometimes challenge me with mathematical quizzes that I find frivolous, and indeed as a philosopher I sometimes feel that that mode of knowledge is even a bit threatening.
Actually, the effect formalized discourse has on me is that I skip all the formalization and go straight to the conclusion to find out what the message is. And if I can’t understand the demonstration in nonformal terms, the argument doesn’t really convince me; in other words, I regard formalization as helpful in the way stenography, or a chalk drawing, or an illustration are helpful. But it remains ancillary with respect to common discourse. I am a believer in something Gadamer says: philosophy is a discourse of the language we use every day, of natural language.
So in sum: at the logicians’ stall, there are formal systems on offer that they insist I have to use, even to speak of Being. I for my part believe that their systems form part of an epoch of Being worth learning about, but only so that I can better relate to Being through natural language. If formalized systems are to achieve rigorous construction, they have to see themselves as definitional and definitive, and avoid reflecting on their own history too much. So there is a kinship, but also a contradiction, between logic and the history of Being, and here it seems to me that logic runs the risk of all the “human” sciences that aim to become rigorous sciences: they tend to Platonize, to turn into sciences of eternal, stable, immutable structures. Paradoxically, the task of the philosopher today is a reversal of the Platonic program: the philosopher no longer recalls human beings to eternal Being, she recalls them to historicity. Even psychoanalysis, for example, has a tendency to describe the person in objective terms, whereas the philosopher is the one saying: hold on a minute, you yourself only came on the scene in 1900, when The Interpretation of Dreams was published.
Speaking of psychoanalysis: it is certainly a science of modern mankind because it originates together with modern mankind; but I always wonder whether it isn’t also a science of modern mankind in the objective sense—that is, only modern mankind is an object of psychoanalysis. The same applies in part to sociology. Sociology works when it comes to describing societies already sufficiently complex, almost like class consciousness in Marx: it could hardly coalesce among individual craft workers scattered over the countryside, but in large industrial installations, it could. Sociology is the science of a society that is born at the same time sociology is born. Psychoanalysis is probably a science that comes about when social relations grow more complex. Norbert Elias’s analysis holds up: a causal factor of overwhelming importance was the construction of the modern state, in which individuals no longer seek justice, or do justice, for themselves. That’s where both sociology and psychoanalysis come from.
Can logic fairly be compared to those disciplines? Should philosophy be reminding logic of its own historicity or not? Supposing the answer to both questions is yes, then the conflict or incomprehension between logicians and philosophers can always be read as the Heideggerian problem of metaphysics: logicians want to state laws of thought that also apply to philosophers, and so philosophers are supposed to bend their necks to this yoke, but always on the unstated premise that the discussion is bounded by some kind of static rationality. This is the problem Husserl addresses in all his writings on the logic-philosophy question (with a nod once again to Philosophy as Rigorous Science): Are the laws of logic binding objectively, for a rationality divorced from experience? Isn’t there rather a logical experience, a logic as experience, that is itself the foundation of logic?
Philosophy has one abiding query for logic, which is: supposing we do wish to describe certain objective forms of language and thought, there is good reason to think that such forms are not and never could be static and immutable. How can logic, purporting to be pure apprehension of the laws of thought in any setting, at any time, also purport to be a normative science? If there are eternal logical laws, I have to submit to them, and if I do submit to them, everything that determines who I am just evaporates, especially the difference between me and someone living 2000 years ago, or the difference between my actions yesterday and my actions tomorrow, my individual historicity and historicity in general …
It’s on this level that the question of normativity arises: who decides on the use of one logic rather than another? It’s like linguistic games. Games are many and various, but there is a linguistic game into which I am thrown right from the start—right from the moment I first realize that there is an array of linguistic games. So if I am thrown from the outset into this game, it’s the game that comprises the fact that there are various games. Accepting that means setting discourse free from the requirement of adequation to a predefined rule capable of deciding the truth or falsity of whatever human beings say and do.
At this point, assuming that logic as a unique (suprahistorical) description of (suprahistorical) forms of thought is inadmissible in philosophy, two questions follow. The first is: does the idea that there is a course of Being, a history of Being, not in fact entail the more or less self-aware use of a certain logic, or the preference for a certain logic? And the second: is there a specific “logic of philosophy” different from scientific logic? (Obviously logic is part of philosophy, but like every other philosophical discipline, it has the potential to regulate the ensemble.)
These two queries actually boil down to just one, as we see clearly as soon as we try to answer the second. It is true that philosophy perforce utilizes some mode of reasoning. This mode of reasoning could be called “the preference” for a certain logic. But it is also true that the logic that philosophy utilizes is the elementary logic available and prevalent in a given epoch. I insist on the privileged relation between philosophy and common discourse, which always overrides the link between philosophy and any specific kind of knowledge. On that basis, philosophy is obviously a historical way of knowing in many senses, and that includes the straightforward sense that it belongs within a certain historical horizon, of which it is aware and which it doesn’t believe it can hoist itself up out of. The historical horizon also entails the normality (and in part normativity) of common discourse, on which philosophy labors not so much to adequate it to an ideal structure as to throw into relief whatever contradictions it may harbor, or to render it more coherent.
I’ve sometimes said, a bit provocatively, that philosophy is merely the prevailing ideology rendered a little less vague and confused, or put in order, or enhanced with some critical awareness. The underlying notion is that the prevailing mentality contains its own antibodies. For example, we know that we ought not to kill, and today we are mostly convinced that we ought not to make war either, and so on. This even applies to those who defend apparently opposite ideologies. If you encounter a Nazi, he will likely try to justify even the extermination of the Jews—but by describing it as a necessary measure, for example to eliminate the germs of violence buried in society. What this means is that even the Nazi ideology contains a formal acknowledgement of a value to life, which is perversely sought through wreaking violence. Nobody goes around proclaiming that the Jews have to be exterminated just because they do, end of story, or because the whole human species should be wiped out, or something like that. Naturally this is not a guarantee of anything; it neither legitimates nor even suggests the idea that there was any rationality in the Nazi ideology. But it does illustrate the notion that, in the very history of the epoch, in the very constitution of the most deviant and perverse ideologies, there exist potential antibodies, and that there is no need to appeal, when seeking a way to correct wrongs, to certain extrahistorical principles that we would find if we could hoist ourselves up into the world of ideas.
This seems to me relevant when it comes to philosophical reflection as well. I strive to modify the situation as a critic, not in the name of a principle located somewhere completely outside the situation, but in the name of a guideline of sorts that is somehow given to me in the situation. I am not entirely confident that it really always is given; I wouldn’t entrust the government of the country to a Nazi. But what this does mean is that I can and should—as a critic—engage in discussion even with someone like him. I can’t just classify him as an outcast whom I can shoot on sight, as Rorty sometimes seems to be suggesting. Admissibility to the debate has limits, according to Rorty, that Gadamer (as a German, perhaps) wouldn’t accept. I’m basically with Gadamer on that, I could even try to engage a Nazi in debate. Naturally the debate might go badly, and if it does I’ll just have to sink or swim as best I can, but the fact is that the moment I perceive (if I do perceive) that he too is oriented (albeit perversely) toward achieving betterment for humanity, all I can do is try to push ahead with the discourse. I have confidence that I will be able to make him see that camps and crematoria won’t produce betterment for humanity.
So philosophy has a logic (of the norms of thought) that is historically rooted. That doesn’t seem to me to contradict the notion of preferring a certain logic. I prefer a logic that stands up robustly to awareness of the plurality of logics, and awareness of the fact that I am living in an epoch, in a world, that allows for the plurality of logics. The discourse that includes all this, and succeeds in finding a guideline that includes all this—that’s the preferable discourse. But it’s not a discourse preferable in the absolute, it’s a discourse that is absolutely preferable here and now.
So if anything, we should be asking: What does it signify ontologically that today philosophical logic functions as it does, that it “must” function that way? Is it a psychological datum that we are taking note of, or an anthropological one, or a cultural one? Does it mean “we all reason like that”? In a sense it does, but the fact that I can then ask “why, though, do we all reason like that?” entails that the question is suspended halfway between a description of how we reason and a vision of how we might reason differently.
This, as I see it, profoundly separates the hermeneutic vision of logic from the vision any analytic philosopher would propose: an analytic would stop short of talking about the history of Being. Even Rorty would think that was going too far. So is talk of the history of Being just ornamental, just an add-on? Is it not enough to talk about history period, about the history of the sciences and the transformations in ways of knowing? Well, things aren’t that simple. Nietzsche tells us that “the real world has become a myth,” but if I forget that the real world has become a myth, I am always in danger of mistaking the myth in which I find myself for the real world. It’s like what Heidegger says about the parousia in the letters of Saint Paul: the messiah may not return in hard fact, but the promise and the expectation that he will keeps you from believing in every charlatan you meet. The history of Being is like that: it is not the history of what necessarily had to happen, it is occurrences that teach you to mistrust dogma and anything else presented as necessity.
Today analytic philosophers have more and more to say about ontology I am told, and I don’t imagine they had much choice once they realized there is no other way to justify any kind of normativity and regularity in thought. That is what I take ontology to mean too, but rather in the sense that it is the encounter with an other (thing, or person) that my thought responds to. When Heidegger speaks of the history of Being, he speaks of a message that summons me. If that is the case, why on earth should ontology exclude history?
For me the only way to speak of ontology is to speak of the history of Being, not limit oneself to speaking just of Being. How so? Above all, and in down to earth terms: if ontology were not the history of Being, logic would only be the history of human psychology, only an account of the various ways we have been fumbling around the elephant in the room labelled Being. That creates difficulties, like whether or not the history of our fumbling has made any progress: are you really going to try to tell me that Aristotle was a lot stupider than Bertrand Russell? In the second place, everything flows from the existential analytic in Sein und Zeit: Being is not given except through us, Being is not given otherwise than in a thrown project (Heidegger uses the noun Entwurf and the participle geworfen), which is the same point as before—in this sense Aristotle isn’t stupider than Russell—but which is thought from the point of view of the analysis of so-called immediate experience, the point of view of the simple question: what are objects for me? And the answer is: objects are instruments within a project, this project is linked to a provenance, and so on. So there is ontology, there are things, there is a Being that “there is,” but this ontological is only given within a history. If I speak of ontology, I can speak only of the history of Being; if I speak of Being without history I impose silence on myself regarding a determining part of that of which I am speaking, or else I am being spoken and governed unwittingly by a story bigger than I am …
When both the analytics and we Heideggerians speak of ontology, we are actually alluding, more or less knowingly, to something with which there comes a dialogue, something against which we measure ourselves, something that puts on the brakes when we feel the tug of “anything goes.” And this something is that with which we have to reckon. Those who speak of ontology without speaking of the history of Being are still envisioning it in a way that leaves a quantity of unanswered questions.
Their tendency to strip the history out of ontology makes it hard, in general, for analytics to consider the link between Being and language. In the wake of the discovery that Being is given in the thrown project, questions remain: from where does its voice arrive, and in what does its cogency consist, if it is not just the simple cogency of the senses, of empirical data? The hermeneutic answer is that it has to do with summoning, a summons that comes to me not just from words but from a lived tradition that I assimilate, recognize, and live out within language. So it is not so far-fetched to maintain, with Heidegger, that language is the dwelling place of Being. With historicity stripped away, though, language is just one more item in the toolkit, to be used when needed like all the rest.