Concerning Philosophy in the BYREINERSCHORMANN
A nation can count itself lucky to have several thousand relatively leisured and relatively unspecialized intellectuals who are exceptionally good at putting together arguments and puUing them apart (Rorty, 1982, pp. 220ff).
1 HIS happy nation is the United States, and these excellent intellectuals are its philosophers. In the way of simple guiding points, I will first retrace the antecedents and consequences of a historically decisive turning-point in the relations between philosophy and the national question. The thousands of intellectuals in question indeed began to make their country happy during the very decade when the Sputniks were making it unhappy. I will then suggest that the specter haunting American philosophical discourse today is the plea. [The sense of the original term plaidoyer is strictly legal: a court plea, an argument.] As not only time but also space are at issue in all of this, it will prove useful to locate the "continental rift " which separates analytic method from phenomenological method according to the common opinion in the United States. Lastly, one will have to ask if, as is sometimes claimed, a conversation is being engaged in today between technicians of arguments and phenomenologists of "the things themselves." Whatever its real chances might be, the urgency of this dialogue will only be "This article first appeared in Le temps de la riflexion 6 (1985); 303-321. an issue devoted to "The Past and Its Future: Essays on Tradition and Teaching." SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Spring 1994)
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comprehensible once the philosophical bipolarity produced by national intellectual history has been grasped.
The Eclipse of American Philosophy
Philosophy, just like culture in general, took on increasingly mottled tones in the United States depending on the waves of immigration. That is to say that few doctrines or convictions exist in the New World which were not traced out upon those of the Old World. But it is one thing to speak of philosophy in America and another to speak of American philosophy. The latter is not over a hundred years old. It was born in New England after the Civil War. Thus, without entirely sacrificing polychromia to monochromia, it presents a markedly predominant color; the optimistic green of Pragmatism. The first text in the lineage, the essay of Charles Sanders Peirce entitled "How to Clarify Our Ideas" (1878), bears witness to this. The trial of clarification that it advocated consisted indeed in the application of ideas, namely, in their practical efficaciousness. For Peirce, the meaning of a concept comes from the effective linguistic communication that it brings about. For his successors William James and John Dewey, this trial meant that a concept had to show its efficaciousness in the search for a moral or political consensus. William James' maxim is well known: "Truth is what works." This quintessentially American philosophy—pragmatism, now termed classical—was moved by an interest which was as passionate as it was particular: the interest in the defense and reform of republican institutions. Just as the genesis of American Republicanism is sui generis, the theories of knowledge, language, science, and action lo which it gave rise are so as well, even if Peirce admitted his debt to Kant, James to Bergson, and Dewey to Hegel. The fecundity of Pragmatism was such that more metaphysical thinkers, such as Josiah Royce and Alfred North Whitehead, remained marginal figures despite, or perhaps due to, their speculative
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thrust. The great educator of the United States, the spokesman of what there is called the democratic process, the optimistic reformer of institutions who repeated that one "learns by doing" remains John Dewey. Few intellectuals would deny his paternity today. He was the last representative of the golden age of American philosophy. He died in 1952. To understand the turn that was embarked upon then, one should remember two other currents which gradually spread in philosophy departments. One, originating in Cambridge. settled in America in the thirties, and the other, originating in Vienna and passing through Oxford, reached America after the war. The English like to call Bertrand Russell their Voltaire by reason of his stands on religion, morals, education, and war. But if Russell, together with his Cambridge colleagues, gave a new orientation to Anglo-Saxon philosophy, it was through what he called his analytic method. It is not easy to discern precisely what he meant thereby. This method allows one to answer, so he said, the question, "What are the constitutive elements of reality or of some of its aspects?" The analysis bears on propositions and aims at exact definitions, whether they be real or contextual. Thus, the real definition of time is that it is made up of instants, and its contextual definition is that "given an event x, any event entirely subsequent to an event which is a contemporary of x is entirely subsequent to an event which is initially a contemporary of x." In the broadest sense, analysis consists in dissolving the given unity of the world into its elements by examining the propositions of ordinary language which "make sense." As the criterion of meaning is immediate experience and, therefore, singular, in Russell at least, the tradition of Ockham and Hobbes' nominalism finds itself revived by this method. George Edward Moore, a colleague of Russell, recommended the new linguistic manner of English empiricist and nominalist usage as manifesting the inherent clarity of ancient common sense. This affinity with the medieval and modern ancestors doubtless explains why, on the other side of the Channel as well as of the
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Atlantic, terms such as "analysis" and "analytic philosophy" have gained such prestige since the beginning of the century, so much so that they equal in pathos and elasticity the "Cartesianism" invoked by the French. In both cases, too, I suspect that these verbal adornments serve the purpose of the same illusory transmutation, analogous to the Edison effect: one thinks that one is converting, by means of a mere invocation, the ardor of preferences and opinions into the clarity of the concept. The other current asserting itself at the moment of the great forced divide of ideas in the fifties is the logical positivism stemming from Vienna. Shortly before Hitler's advent, some Austrian philosophers had assembled in a society with a significant name: the Verein Ernst Mach. They aimed at translating into philosophy the ideal of scientific purity associated with the name of the physicist Mach. The title of their manifesto acknowledges the same ideal: Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung : der Wiener Kreis ("The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle"). Among the members of this Circle, Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Herbert Feigl, Kurt Godel, and Rudolf Garnap were to be found. Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein were among its associates. In Germany, Hans Reichenbach and Garl Hempel considered themselves to be close to the Circle. It is not an exaggeration to see in this group's debates the archetype of those which go on today in most American universities. Wittgenstein above all remains the uncontested patriarch. The publications of the Vienna Circle are like the birth certificate of all that has passed for rigorous philosophy in the United States for the last thirty years. The key element of this rigor consists of what must indeed be translated as the "principle of verifiability." This principle stipulates —at least for the "operationalists" —that the meaning of a proposition is given by the method of verifying it. It may also imply that a proposition means exactly the set of experiences of which it gives an account, and that its truth is coextensive with this set. The main part of traditional
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philosophical assertions thus falls under the verdict of nonsense (Sinnlosigkeit). Every ethical proposition, whether normative or metaphysical, calls upon emotional associations, which render it unverifiahle and deprive it of any cognitive value. Such a proposition is neither true nor false; it has no truth-value (Wahrheitswert). The same holds for epistemological realism: to speak ofthe outside world is no more sensible than to speak of a higher world. We do not possess any method to verify if a world exists independently of our propositions, yes or no. The principle of verifiability ends up redirecting the very discourse of philosophy itself. Henceforth the latter does not concern itself with the world hut with the language through which people speak of the world. The data that it analyzes is language-bound, that is why it is transmuted into logic; moreover, its data are empirical, and that is why it is positivist. Insofar as it is logical, it lends itself to formalization, with the ensuing indifference towards history; insofar as it is positivist, it dedicates itself to scientism. At Oxford, John L. Austin and Alfred Ayer translated these premises for the Anglo-Saxon world. American pragmatism, British empiricism, and Viennese positivism joined together to form an intellectual drama during the fifties in the United States. At the time when Senator Joseph McCarthy was launching his crusade against any variety of critical thinking in the name of antiCommunism, none ofthe philosophy departments ofthe great universities escaped from the purge. The country entered into the Age of Suspicion. The coincidence with the readjustment of the axes of philosophy is striking, to say the least. Here is how Richard Rorty described this change: [I]n the early Fifties, analytic philosophy began to take over American philosophy departments. The great emigres— Carnap, Hempel, Feigl, Reichenbach, Bergmann, Tarski— began to be treated with the respect they deserved. Their disciples began to he appointed to, and to dominate, the most prestigious departments. Departments which did not go along
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with this trend began to lose their prestige. By 1960, a new set of philosophical paradigms was in place. A new sort of graduate education in philosophy was entrenched—one in which Dewey and Whitehead, heroes of the previous generation, were no longer read, in which the history of philosophy was decisively downgraded, and in which the study of logic assumed an importance previously given to the study of languages (Rorty, 1982, pp. 2I4ff). Rorty, himself one of the names in analytic philosophy, sees no political trace in this displacement (while writing that "on the other side of the street," "unscientific" European philosophy predisposed Heidegger to Nazism and Sartre to Stalinism, just as it prevented Foucault from sharing in "the ordinary civilized hope for the rule of law" [Rorty. 1982. p. 229]). The take-over in question cannot be dissociated from the governmental and academic "witch hunt." If the social reformer Dewey and the philosopher of life Whitehead were no longer read, the reason was that it was no longer prudent to read and teach them. The eclipse of American philosophy in America, that is, of pragmatism, is to be inscribed in a broader cultural overshadowing. It became dangerous to make pronouncements on what were then called "values." Whoever could not hang these on the American flag in some way or other was labeled a Gommunist and put his career at risk. Even the positivists were not entirely safe, for what could be more subversive than declaring concepts like "God" and "country" to be meaningless? In this atmosphere, where could one turn? Some German emigres, such as Hannah Arendt, even considered exiling themselves once again. Others quietly left the academic world. But for the majority of intellectuals only two places of refuge presented themselves: religion and the sciences. These were the two clear and avowable ways of settling the question of "values"—one being homiletic, and the other, as the Viennese had rightly put it, wertneutral, neutral with regard to values. May Hblderlin forgive me—"There where the danger lies, also grows / That which saves." What was growing was Willard
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Quine, "the greatest of the living systematic philosophers" (Stuart Hampshire)—and what was to be saved was the logical regime of ordinary language. Quine's essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," which would become the dictionary of any philosophy that wanted to be scientific, appeared in 1951. The guiding question in philosophy became: "What do we mean when we say that . . . ?" The task of analysis became restricted to the examination of propositions such as "No bachelor is married," words such as "and," "not," or "as," and of what Quine called ontic commitment. When we say, for instance, that "There is an x such that x is a bachelor," we are committing ourselves to holding that something like a bachelor exists. The logical regime of ordinary language thus allows itself to be axiomatized. Values no longer fall under the verdict of nonsense but into the network of beliefs about which the philosopher of ordinary language has nothing to say. The reference of words, Quine said, remains impenetrable. Strengthened by this restriction, he not only survived the cross-fire of denunciations at Harvard University but, moreover, established the model for what scientific philosophy would henceforth become. To the great dismay of the newcomers on the market of elite universities, such as Princeton and Pittsburgh, the department at Harvard set and continues to set the tone in academic philosophy. • "As Harvard philosophy goes, so goes the discipline," an apothegm that one is told . . . at Harvard. Consequently, a similar turn was to be taken in all of the major universities of the country. From Berkeley, Hannah Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers, "Philosophy has fallen into semantics—and third-rate semantics at that."^ A representative proposed a law which aimed at eliminating any philosophy courses other than elementary and advanced logic on public campuses. The latter subjects were "safe" because in the catalogues their course descriptions referred to computers. The prestige of formal logic was indeed combined, quite naturally, with the new formula for guaranteeing national prestige: to put scientific research in step with military defense. For a
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professor of philosophy, the guaranteed means of obtaining important federal grants was and remains submitting research programs which are treatable in formalized language. If it is true, as Hegel thinks, that the philosopher is the spokesman of the objective spirit of his time, the United States have and can effectively deem themselves happy. The faith in technology is the cement to which the systems of ideas, as varied as they may be, owe their cohesion, and which the relative intellectual diversification of recent years has neither shaken nor even revealed. It is enough to study the disposition of the buildings on many American campuses to see how philosophers discharge themselves of the task that Hegel assigned to them. Their departments are often adjacent to the computer center. The monochromatic constellation of knowledge, which henceforth is steel gray, reaches the dignity of the concept in the articles—more rarely, in the books—where philosophy makes itself the ancilla of scientific knowledge and of its contemporary methods. To be sure, it is only in some fine elements of research that it direcdy serves the State Department or the Pentagon, but in all of its exercises, analytic reason consolidates and legitimates the surrounding scientism. A culture receives the philosophers that it deserves. If in Germany their deformation professioyielle leads them to ceaselessly bring back into service a tradition which is perhaps over, and in France to give in to literary posturings, in America, it is the search for the right effect in the sense of efficaciousness which lurks in them. As Reichenbach said, ". . . scientific philosophy which, in the science of our time, has found the tools to solve those problems that in earlier times have been the subject of guesswork only" (Rorty, 1982, p. 211). Here is the matrix which the post-war baby boom came and filled, producing an unequaled growth in the student population. During the sixties, all departments were in expansion. What was the training of those who obtained teaching positions in philosophy then? They grew up with Quine's disjunctive motto: study either history of philosophy or philosophy. The major part of the new professors
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considered that any reading other than that of the most recent articles bearing their colleagues' names was not conducive to philosophical practice. As the leading figures in linguistic analysis admit themselves, a generation of uncultivated intellectuals was put into place twenty years ago. As demographic growth soon slowed, most institutions today find themselves blocked up by a mass of instructors nearing fifty, whose canon of excellence only consists in rigor in argumentation with the ensuing uniformity of method and style. Towards the middle of the seventies, the mentors became aware that they could no longer quite find positions for their disciples. In order to fully grasp the features of the turn that presents itself here, it is advisable to briefly describe each of the two forces which Quine disjointed. The scientific philosophy which he advocated has indeed transformed itself into an an of the plea, and the history of philosophy that he took exception to, into phenomenology. What the Greeks called "preserving phenomena" {diasozein ta phainornena, Eudoxus) or "following phenomena" {akolouthein tois phainomenois, Aristotle), the "return to things themselves" to which Husserl exhorted us, thus fmds itself excluded from rigorous philosophical discourse in America. This results from an extreme conception of truth as consensus—extreme, for what then is true, as Richard Rorty has said, is what your colleagues are willing to let you say. The locus of truth understood as consensus is the articles and the congresses where one shows oneself off One may doubt that Charles Peirce would recognize himself in this version of his theory, which has been entirely reduced to professionalism. But the cleavage is there: "Our geniuses invent problems and programs de nova, rather than finding them in the things themselves" (Rorty, 1982, p. 218). The Standing-Out of Analysis
Once the gap separating scientific philosophy from the rest has been institutionalized, and scientific method has been
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defined by analysis, it is not difficult to establish an inventory of some of the outstanding traits of the discourse that is held to be serious. In the way of illustrations, here are four characteristics, of which only the first directly results from sciemism invested with national hopes. The others already presuppose a degree of suspicion cast upon the exemplarity of scientific rigor. The deductive model. In a broad sense, this model is the ideal which, with the Greeks, gave rise to the type of statements that are called philosophical. It seems that Aristotle was less optimistic than Plato about the chances that a mortal has of reasoning without fail and without dispersion from intuitive principles. In the strict sense, the deductive model was imposed by the Vienna Circle. Rudolf Carnap held that a reasoning was deductive if there existed between two given propositions a relation of implication such that the meaning of the one could be obtained from the other by mere formal analysis—on condition, to be sure, that what their relation of implication must be has previously been defmed. This defmition of deduction in all its brevity is a formal principle which has no need of specific laws to be valid (Carnap held it to be compatible with the definition of induction in logic, but that is another problem). Specific laws only intervene in order to move from a first proposition to derived propositions. Linguistic analysis, at least in the second generation of the Vienna Circle, therefore aims at showing the consequences of a proposition treated as a principle. One does not examine what a proposition speaks of, but which are the formal operations which it enables. The analysis is rigorous if it allows one to identify the laws according to which a first proposition gives rise, or does not give rise, to secondary effects of meaning. The ideal —to which some professors of ethics still cling above all—would be to discover a supreme proposition whose formal consequences might all be mapped out in the manner of Einstein's universal formula, these consequences being applicable, if not to every sentence claiming to be meaningful, at
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least to any theory of meaning whether physical, ethical, or political. Such a principle of principles would allow one to decide in matters like the allocation of competencies by assigning a type of sentence to that type of discipline and, hence, to that academic faculty. Within a discipline, the perfect deductive method would allow one to say what is a good physical, ethical, or political doctrine, and what is a bad one. Thus, Alan Gewirth's "principle of generic coherence" (Gewirth, 1978) serves to decide what is a consistent and an inconsistent thing to do, even in individual situations. One no longer sets much store in the coming of an Einstein of analytic philosophy, but "research programs" for establishing such disciplinary principles which would be supreme in a genre remain the professional secret for a good number of teachers and authors. If the leaders of the field no longer subscribe to this, it is because the scientists already relegated the ideal of universal coherence, and of a formula that would capture it, to phantasms—or to paradigms, as they have been called since Thomas Kuhn. The deductive method is the strategy which instituted a certain paradigm in modern science. To acknowledge this is already to renounce the canon instituted by the great Viennese. Tke pleading style. As the scientists recognized that Wertneutralitdt had been embraced by their predecessors as an ideal, as a value, precisely, philosophers discovered an unexpected nakedness of their own: the mantle of monochromatic objectivity was withdrawn from them. They were not any more ready to renounce deductive discourse. However, as they were abandoned by their physicist heroes, they fell back onto the latter's style. The new polychromia which was born from the sixties results from the polymorphous causes which are pleaded for. Today, the most widespread philosophical style in the United States is that of litigation, and the most outstanding trait of how it is stated is sallying forth, standing out^ in the sense of attacking. A good paper is one in which one chooses a topic to plead or
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argue for and an opponent to unseat. Like a lawyer, one constructs an argument, one stakes out a claim, and one says "I." The idea that one is holding forth may be a mere opinion or preference, the reasoning may lack any critical sense, and the knowledge base, any historical awareness—if in the exordia and in the conclusion the words "I argue" and "I claim" are to be found, one is assured of respectability. When the affinities of philosophical discourse are thus displaced from the laboratory to the bar association, certain ancient traditions find themselves partially rehabilitated: Greek sophistics and medieval disputatio. But in those two preceding cases, the aim was to convince, while the pleading style seeks to confound. One takes an opponent to trial not in order to persuade him, but to prove that he is in the wrong. "Philosophy is carried on as a coercive activity," writes Robert Nozick, a new star at Harvard.^ The good argument—tightly constructed, in the guise of a relentless deduction — is one which leaves the opponent without any recourse. Therein it destroys the art of rallying the contradictor, the rhetorical art. Sophistic techniques and, generally, dialectical techniques aim at winning over the antagonist to a cause; here, on the other hand, the aim is to win a cause. As a matter of style and skill, philosophical demonstration may place itself at the service of any party. Here is how Richard Rorty describes these professionals of argumentation again: [T]he able philosopher should be able to spot flaws in any argument he hears. Further, he should be able lo do this on topics outside ofthose usually discussed in philosophy courses as well as on "specifically philosophical" issues. As a corollary, he should be able to construct as good an argument as can be constructed for any view, no matter how wrong-headed. The ideal of philosophical ability is to see the entire universe of possible assertions in all iheir inferential relations to one another, and thus to be able to construct, or criticize, any argument (Rorty, 1982, p. 219). That is the ideal of a corporation^ of technicians. Rorty
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compares them to the corporation of the French inspecteurs des finances.
The counter-tactics. Just like the sophists again, analytic philosophers have developed the art of the counter-attack. Insofar as the strategy of thetic discourse is deductive, the most efficient tactic of antithetical discourse is that of the counter-example. The opponent produces a case which does not fail under the proposed deduction and which, if the counter-example is pertinent, ruins that deduction. Laws, therefore, have to be determined according to which one might formally establish the conditions under which a particular case really invalidates a thesis. An example will be used to illustrate both the tactic of the counter-example and one of the subjects in which this sort of argumentation is practiced with a vehemence not always worthy of a government inspector.'' The example is taken from the debate opposing the majority of the feminists and the defenders of the "right to life." A spokeswoman for the majority declares herself ready to admit, for the sake of argument, that a fetus is a person, and even that it is a talented person. It does not follow that the fetus has a right to life. That can be shown by the following counter-example: Suppose that you woke up one morning and found that you were connected to a talented violinist (because he had a rare kidney disease and only you had the right blood type) and the Music Lover's Society had plugged you together. When you protested, they said "Don't worry, it's only for nine months, and then he'll be cured. And you can't unplug him because now that the connection has been made, he will die if you do."' This counter-example is considered not only to weaken the position of the defenders of life but also, moreover, to prove the right to abortion. The middle term is the right of property. You own your body, for it would be absurd to hold that the person in the counter-example to whom the sick person was connected would not have the right to unplug him. The story.
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therefore, serves to establish that a human has the right to dispose of his or her body like property, even when the life of another is at stake, and that consequendy the supporters of the right to life are not only guilty of faulty reasoning, but wrong. The art of the counter-example consists in granting the opponent his premises and then showing that the conclusions that he draws from them do not follow at all. But it has proved difficult to establish with any precision under which conditions a particular case may serve to ruin a general thesis. Hence, the frequent, and more modest, appeal to intuition. One will say that the supposed obligation to remain connected to a sick musician for nine months is contrary to intuition, counter-intuitive. One obviously cannot help asking what knowledge that conforms to intuition would be, and where it would come from. The least one could say is that is not a popular question on Anglo-Saxon soil, and for good reasons. It would cast doubt upon common sense; it would oblige one to view the latter as a product of historical, sociological, and psychological constellations rather than as the last instance in any search for legitimation; lastly, it would hit an unanalyzed nerve of all analysis. That common sense might be an ideology is a suspicion that none of the tendencies 1 have taken account of is capable of facing up to: not the older pragmatism, not positivism, and not analysis. All of them would cast it off, on the contrary, by invoking ordinary language as that which offers the last parameters for a more sober philosophy. Thus, common sense would be that which speaks in ordinary language. Ockham's razor. The principle of parsimoniousness stated by William of Ockham deserves to be cited amongst the outstanding traits of analytic philosophy not only because it expresses the ideal of a tighdy woven plea, but also because it constitutes one of the very rare intrusions of a thinker prior to Quine into established discourse. It would be pointless to multiply the premises beyond those which are necessary: this principle enjoys an exorbitant prestige today. It is exorbitant
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because the injunction to use premises economically finds itself extended to every possible figure of reasoning, and also because it is torn from the universe of medieval philosophy. It, nevertheless, indicates the ideal of a succinct proof clearly, for the "razor" must cut off from an argument the propositions which do not relate to the base of the cause in litigation. One may already doubt that Ockham would have recognized himself in the nominalist label that he is given; but to enroll Ockham in the corporation of the inspecteurs des Finances of the American philosophical establishment is to exert some violence on his innovative talents which were captured by the name given to him, inceptor venerabilis.
A comparable list of categories—just as cursory, and just as rhapsodical —can be drawn for the tendencies of which I have said that they are termed European, historical. Continental, or phenomenologicai without any great care taken to distinguish them. As the disagreement bears on the origin of philosophical problems—invention of arguments at the bar de novo, or faithfulness to things themselves—one may retain the epithet of phenomenology and ask which are the existentialia which characterize its being-in-the-new-world.
The Existentialia of Phenomenotogy in the United States
First of all, it is a genre, and it is that in several senses. If it simply designates the other of analysis, its purported unity will be easier to discern from outside—for example, seen from Harvard —than from inside. It would indeed be contradictory that the other of clarity divide itself by means of clearly identifiable specific differences. Seen from within, judging from the conference topics and the course catalogues, the generic label of "phenomenology," however, covers an astonishing number of species, even if people do not go as far as to include history of philo.sophy in it. At the annual congresses of the society which bears the word "phenomenol-
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ogy" in its name, seminars are held not only on Husserl and his direct or indirect followers but also on Structuralism, Nietzsche, and Freud, without forgetting the "interfaces" which seem to offer so many contemporaiy modes of access to the apeiron: "Phenomenology of X," or "Phenomenology and X." To quote only the titles of some of the presentations at the 1984 conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, "X" may be replaced by Rant, Hegel, Barthes, Foucault, critical theory, anti-humanism, deconstruction, cognitive psychology, education, ecology, or even the televised debates between Reagan and Mondale. Phenomenology has become a genus with many species. It is also a "style"** that one can give oneself, which in other academic circles would run up against the walls in which peras, the goddess Limit, ordinarily encloses Anglo-Saxon respectability. When an author inspired by Sade and Bataille read his texts in front of this Society, the objection was made to him that he was in the wrong country and that his place was rather in France. A double forced extension of the genus [or genre], then, as a class of species, and as a way of being, in which only the former combines well with the most widely shared conviction of the New World, that is, that limits are an inhibition of the Old World. If phenomenology as a discipline is hospitable, its generosities are poorly returned by the institutions. Hence, a second trait follows, the condition oi^ diaspora. A survey performed ten years ago showed that the teaching community then only considered nine philosophy departments out of eighty-six in the entire country to be offering a viable program in recent and contemporary European philosophy (phenomenology in the broad sense and Marxism).-' No one would contest that since then the number has gone down further. The diaspora is thus of a geographical sort: the plane is the main working instrument of any research seminar. It is also of an institutional sort. In the big state universities, one may easily find three or four highly specialized professors of contempo-
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rary logic, the same number teaching ethical theories (for instance, naturalist, deontological non-naturalist, cognitivist, linguistic non-cognitivist), and only one teacher of the history of philosophy from the pre-socratics to the post-moderns. The latter will typically have the rank of Assistant Professor, be replaced every four to six years, and be told that he would be better suited to a history department. The intellectual isolation is, therefore, not to be construed as resulting only from geographical distances; it stems more from the phenomenon of the 'token', that is, the granting for form's sake of a position to the disciplines which are prior or external to the linguistic turn in philosophy.'" The two factors, geographical and institutional, are de facto indissociable, and the margins of analytic philosophy are preferably located on the East and West coasts of the country. Another trait would be willing satellization. As the curious heading of "Continental philosophy" indicates, everything that circulates under that label bears an import marking. One goes to, and continues to go to, Freiburg, Frankfurt, the College de France, and the rue d'Ulm—the cardinal points of this imaginary continent—to bring back the ipsimma verba of the respective master. This satellization in fact preceded the rise of the actual master-thinkers. A considerable percentage of the American philosophers who call themselves or are called phenomenologists—a percentage which is difficult to reckon with any precision —was recruited amidst former Thomists. Twenty years ago still, the quadrant in question connected Chantilly, Louvain, Munich, and Freiburg in Switzerland, instead. The events of the sixties had much to do with this new staking-out of the marking-points. To the corridor of ideas coming from the East another most be added, whose importance is underestimated in Europe. The latter reproduces the data of the physical map of the world more faithfully onto the phantasmatic map. As is known, in America, the Orient is to the west. In California above all, the gods whose nothingness is contemplated in Kyoto are closer to people's
r
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hearts than the one whose Being is proven in Louvain. Consequently, phenomenologists with broad horizons found in Zen Buddhism fitting nourishment for their thoughtexperiments—a philosophical monstrosity for any Kantian. The natural setting of the exchange with the Asian schools is the University of Hawaii, which notably discharges itself of this responsibility by publishing a good journal. To speak of satellization does not mean that innovative work in phenomenology is lacking in the United States. But, if only because of the lineage which is stiil short, this work still relies on vocabularies and schemes acquired elsewhere. The spread of phenomenological discourse can unfold itself, lastly, according to stakes other than philosophical ones. Therein lies one of the benefits of the condition of diaspora and sateilization. From this a fourth trait follows, that of faculty dispersion. Its ontogenesis may be narrated in few words, a narration scanning the meetings with students attempting to develop a study program. The typical personal itinerary produces a forced interdisciplinarity: the student registers in a philosophy department in her geographical area; instead of the Truth that she was searching for, all that is offered are linguistic analyses which ultimately are tiresome; then she changes disciplines and ends up writing a thesis entitled "Phenomenology of Moby Dick" or of class struggle, or of the paternal complex. Following all this she will be hired in a department of literature, social sciences, or psychology and will satisfy in turn the disappointed philosophical aspirations of a new generation. From many angles, the Continental tradition is better taught, thus, outside of philosophy departments than within them. With all classificatory caution, one may say that the work of mediation of literary theory was mainly accomplished by and around Paul de Man, and that of the social sciences, by Alfred Schlitz—both of European origin, it is true. In the human sciences, the situation is too complex for a name to be cited as a marking-point. The numerous forms of dispersion give rise to equally
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numerous palliatives. Supposedly charitable sponsors are there to support journals, colloquiums, and publications of all kinds, and the specialists join together in associations which are half Masonic lodges, half familial homes. Socialization is effected through ^'circles"—by the "Nietzsche Society," the "Husserl Circle," the "Heidegger," "Sartre," or "Merleau-Ponty" Circle. Considering the names of these figures, it is not entirely wrong to describe the cleavage dividing philosophical America as a continental divide.
"Since
we have
been a conversation
..."
If during the fifties the tendency was to run to the shelters from the suspicion of anti-American ideas, and during the sixties it was to consolidate the scientism which issued from that suspicion, what is happening today? Evidence shows that scientism in philosophy, even if it has turned Into the art of the plea, has lost none of its prestige. But one is also witnessing a slow diversification of discourse. For a few years, this has taken on the shape of an open power struggle within the association of philosophy professors, the American Philosophical Association. This astonishing struggle goes on by means of the mechanism through which Americans have shaped their democracy since its beginning: parliamentary deliberation. The struggle mainly plays itself out in the annual congresses of the profession, which bring together several thousands of philosophers each time. In order to have historical and phenomenological methods approved, one has to move straight away onto the terrain of elections, commissions, secret or open votes, and ballots handed in at assemblies or by mail—in other words, onto the terrain of [legal] proceedings. By means of a carefully orchestrated usage of these procedures, the opposition was able to win a series of victories since 1978 in the game of representation. This opposition has come
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together under the label of "pluralists." Who are they? To know this contesting coalition, it is enough to remember the successive purges since the war and draw up the list of those who were rejected. The "pluralists" were, therefore, born from an alliance between classical pragmatists, historians of European philosophy, speculative metaphysicians who were followers of Whitehead, and phenomenologists in the specific sense. One should not believe either that all these groups demanding to be recognized today profess Leftist or subversive critical doctrines, or that the old obsession with the defense of values has disappeared. In the armchair battles at the conferences' business meetings, the two parties sometimes call each other Communists. To the vanquished of the last decades, two groups must be added who, for different but complementary reasons, found themselves on the victor's side, yet who sometimes sympathize with the pluralist cause. I have said that the two ideological shelters in the McCarthy era were science and religion. Among the philosophers who received their training during the sixties, some were subsequently driven to supplement the antiintellectualism of their studies by auto-didact activity. These philosophers were not as easily intimidated by the "analytic" norm, so that their independence in voting sometimes makes for the sorrow of their former masters. The other newly emboldened ex-victors are the intellectuals for whom religious affiliation had served as a shield. Their number is impressive: in the directories of the profession, the specialization most frequently referred to is "philosophy of religion." To this contingent must be added those among the leaders of the pluralist revolt whose motives are more or less tacitly of a religious order. The importance of this factor should not be surprising in a country whose percentage of inhabitants declaring themselves to be believers is, after India's, the highest in the world—ninety percent—and where almost a third of philosophy courses are given in Catholic establish-
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ments (an introduction to philosophy is compulsory for students in all disciplines, including science and medicine). The new eclecticism of philosophy in the United States does not only manifest itself in the struggle for institutional recognition. It also appears in publications whose tone would have been inconceivable ten years ago. This is because the misadventure of a once pure and hard discourse which has fallen today to the level of mere techniques of argument has ended up confusing the line of demarcation between analysis and its other. This misadventure is illustrated in exemplary fashion by the itinerary of Richard Rorty. Until recently a professor at Princeton University—in one of the bastions, then, of philosophy seeking to be scientific, and its successive fashions—he first published work on the "linguistic turn" and its consequences. Then, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(1979), he made himself the advocate of the "edifying" thought of Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger against the epistemological heritage and its contemporary heir, analytic method. After this disenchantment, it was only natural that he resign from Princeton. But how has he re-oriented himself? Contrary to what one might expect, he has not joined forces with any of the tendencies in the "pluralist" coalition. He now calls himself, not without a strong dose of irony, it is true, a literary critic. His disenchantment has therefore left the either/or between rigorous philosophy and its other intact, that between science and letters. He continues to hold that the gap between analysis and phenomenology is as deep as that which separates biology from classical studies, for example. Only now that the scientific ideal has twisted itself into the style of the plea, he can unmask analytic philosophy as the public-relations agency of the sciences, and Continental philosophy as that of literature. On either side of the Atlantic, or of the Channel, those who call themselves and are called philosophers have in truth been lawyers, knowingly in the case of the phenomenologists and their associates, and unknowingly in that of the Viennese and
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their cohorts. This allows Rorty to plead for a new cause: the conception of history as an uninterrupted conversation with multiple voices. He could have quoted Holderlin {"Seit ein Gesprdch wir sind . . . ") in the poem ''Friedensfeier" but he calls
this polyphony sometimes hermeneutics, sometimes pragmatism. The amalgamation of Dewey, Heidegger, and the later Wittgenstein underscores quite sufficiently not only that the disjunction between the scientific mode and the other mode remains untouched, but also that this other mode remains a genre which is describable as such. At bottom, the authors of this genre all seek the same thing: to edify the reader. From Jacques Derrida, Rorty retained that it would be pointless to search for a first text beneath the textual traces which made history —a first text which most logical positivists precisely hoped to be able to bring to light. But one may doubt that Jacques Derrida would be very happy to fmd himself annexed to a pragmatism which here again is defined by the parliamentary model: "For the pragmatists, the pattern of all inquiry —scientific as well as moral—is deliberation concerning the relative attractions of various concrete alternatives" (Rorty, 1982, p. 164). The continental rift does indeed continue to separate those who know what they are doing from the others—except that now those who know are the pragmatists, phenomenotogists. Structuralists, post-Structuralists, literary critics, archaeologists of knowledge and theorists of communicative action combined, and what they are doing is edifying the uninterrupted poem of Western civilization. The others continue to believe that somewhere there exists an ultimate truth to be discovered and that the sciences hold the key to it. Other contemporary developments could be cited to show that the old confidence in analytic rigor has come upon hard times, and that the contours of institutionalized discourse are becoming vague. The physical and intellectual presence of Paul Ricoeur in the United States no doubt has something to do with it. Thus, John Searle, the champion of the theory of speech acts, now speaks of intentionality, and Jaakko Hintikka,
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the logician of the semantics of possible worlds, of the life-world. But it would be just as easy to show that these are borrowings of terminology rather than genuine dialogues with Husserl. This is so because the continental rift separating the two discursive universes, even if it is overdetermined by effects of power, remains first of all of a philosophical order. In order to convince oneself of that, it should suffice to read Hans-Georg Gadamer here and Donald Davidson (1984) there on language and interpretation, or Max Scheler here and Thomas Nagel (1979) there on ethical problems, or lastly Karl Jaspers here and Robert Nozick there on as modest an assortment of problems as self-identity, the conditions of free will, of knowledge and of being tout court, without forgetting those of philosophy. One will then notice that the bifurcation bears on the method applied to them and the type of intelligibility that is sought for, at least, if not always on the actual questions raised. A research institute with a broad focus, as the Max Planck Institute at Starnberg was until three years ago, is without doubt alone capable of putting these heteromorphous languages to work. Indeed, only the disciples of Jiirgen Habermas seem to me to pursue a conversation between Anglo-Saxon and Continental traditions in an alert, continuous, and nuanced manner—even if they are guided by a specific interest, that of a theory of communicative action. The place of birth of this exchange is not to be found on the other side of the Atlantic but of the Rhine. Translated by Gharles T. Wolfe
Notes Cf. Bruce Kucklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). ^ Quoted by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl (1982), p. 295. ^ ['Sallying forth' and 'standing out' render the single term saillie, which the author plays on, beginning with the title of this section:
•• 1
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'*Les saillies de I'analyse" could also be rendered as "The Sallying-Forth of Analysis"; analysis has "outstanding traits" (traits sailla?its).] '' Robert Nozick (1981), p. 4. He adds that, "The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments/orc^ you to a conclusion . . . " ^ ['Corporation' should be taken in its older sense, akin to 'guild' or 'body of working people'. The original term is simply 'corps', used in the sense of, for example, 'corps diplomatique'.] ^ ['hispecteur des finances'.]
' The argument has been developed by Judith Thomson and summarized byjanice Moulton (1983), pp. 159ff. ** [As the author indicates in the beginning of this section, different senses of the word 'genre' are at work: it is used lo mean 'genus' in the preceding sentence; here, 'se donner itn genre' is to give oneself a style.] "'These nine departments were to be found, in order of preference, in the following universities: Northwestern, Yale, Pennsylvania State, New School for Social Research, University of Texas (Austin), Duquesne, Boston University, University of California (San Diego), and SUNY (Stony Brook); cf. Solomon (1975). '" An example would be the University of Illinois at Chicago. The philosophy faculty are a total of nineteen professors. Of these, eleven are specialized in philosophy of language, epistemology, and logic, five in philosophy of law or ethics, one in aesthetics, and only two in historical disciplines: one in Greek philosophy and the oiher in "Existentialism, Phenomenology, and Marxism."
'
Bibliography
Davidson, D., Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Gewirth, A., Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Kucklick, B., Th.e Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1977). Moulton, J., "A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method," in Harding, S. and Hintikka, M.B., eds.. Discovering Reality (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983). Nagel, T. , Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
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Nozick, R., Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Rorty, R., Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Solomon, R., "Graduate Study in Continental Philosophy in American Universities," Teaching Philosophy 1/2 (Autumn 1975). Young-Bruehl, E., Hannah Arendt: For Love ofthe World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
