Philosophy without epistemology
357
"More
generally, it is difficult to imagine that any activity would
be entitled to bear the name “philosophy” if i-t had nothing
to do with knowledge—if it were not in some sense a theory
of knowledge, or a method for getting knowledge, -. or at
least a hint as to where some supremely important kind of
knowledge might be found. The difcu-l-ty stems from a
notion shared by Platonists, Kantians, and positivists: that
man has an essence—namely, to discover essences.
Humans mirror, but based on their eyes
358
Gadamer
" “The hermeneutics developed here,” he says,
“is not . . . a methodology of the human sciences, but an
attempt to understand what the human -sciences truly are,
beyond their methodological self-consciousness, and what
connects them with the totality of our experience of the
world."2
"For my present purposes, the importance of Gadamer’s
book is that he manages to separate off one of the three
strands—the romantic notion of man as self-creative-—in the
philosophical notion of “spirit” from the other two strands
with which it became entangled. Gadamer (like Heidegger,
to whom some of his work is indebted) makes no concessions
either -to Cartesian dualism or to the notion of “transcendental
constitution” (in any sense which could be given
an idealistic interpretation)?
359
not about redescribing ourselves
He does this by substituting the
notion of Bildung (education, self-formation) for that of
“knowledge” as the goal of thinking
language helps to shape us, our learning - becomes more important as we learn more.
Creation:
" Gadamer develops his
notion of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (the sort of
consciousness of the past which changes us) to characterize
an attitude interested not so much in what is out there in
the world, or in what happened in history, as in what we
can get out of nature and history for our own uses."
In this
attitude, getting the facts right (about atoms and the void,
or about the history of Europe) is merely propaedeutic to
nding a new and more interesting way of expressing ourselves,
and thus of coping with the world.
From the educational,
as opposed to the epistemological or the technological,
point of view, the way things are said is more
importan-t than the possession of truths.‘
360
edification
"The attempt to edify (ourselves or
others) may consist in the hermeneutic activity of making
connections between our own culture and some exotic culture
or historical period, or between our own discipline and
another discipline which seems to pursue incommensurable
aims in an incommensurable vocabulary. But it may instead
consist in the “poetic” activity of thinking up such new
aims, new words, or new disciplines, followed by, so to
speak, the inverse of hermeneutics: the attempt to reinterpret
our familiar surroundings in the unfamiliar terms of
our new inventions.
pretty cool.
For edifying
discourse is supposed to be abnormal, to take us out
of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in
becoming new beings.
If there
is a conflict, it is between the Platonic-Aristotelian view that
the only way to be edied is to know wha-t is out there (to
reect the facts .accurately—to realize our essence by knowing
essences) and the view that the quest for truth is just one
among many ways in which we might be edified
361
"It is
merely to say that it presents a temptation to self-deception
insofar as we think that, by knowing which descriptions
within a given set of normal discourses apply to us, we
thereby know ourselves. For Heidegger, Sartre, and Cadamer,
objective inquiry is perfectly possible and frequently
actual—the only thing to be said against it is that it provides
only some, among many, ways of describing ourselves, and
that some of these can hinder the process of edification.
This is self-deceptive not
simply because of the general absurdity of ultimate justication’s
reposing upon the unjustifiable, but because of the
more concrete absurdity of thinking that the vocabulary used
by present science, morality, or whatever has some privileged
attachment to reality which makes it more than just a further
set of descriptions.
362
The utility of the “existentialist"
view is that, by proclaiming that we have no essence, it permits
us to see the descriptions of ourselves we nd in one of
(or in the unity of) the Naturwissenschaften as on a par
with the various alternative descriptions offered by poets,
novelists, depth psychologists, sculptors, anthropologists,
and mystics. The former are not privileged representations
in virtue of the fact that (at the moment) there is more
consensus in the sciences than in the arts.
Gadamer begins Truth and Method
with a discussion of the role of the humanist tradition in
giving sense to the notion of Bildung as some-thing having
“no goals outside itself.”° To give sense to such a notion
we need a sense of the relativity of descriptive vocabularies
to periods, traditions, and historical accidents. This is what
the humanist tradition in education does, and what training
in the results of t-he natural sciences cannot do.
363
The natural sciences, by themselves,
leave us convinced that we know both what we are and
what we can be—not just how to predict and control our
behavior, but the limits of that behavior (and, in particular,
the limits of our significant speech).
" More broadly, it is the attempt to
prevent abnormal inquiry from being viewed as suspicious
solely because of its abnormality.
"This “existentialist” attempt to place objectivity, rationality,
and normal inquiry within the larger picture of our
need to be educated and edied is often countered by the
“positivist” attempt to distinguish learning facts from
acquiring values.
"But from the viewpoints of Gadamer,
Heidegger, and Sartre, the trouble with the fact-value
distinction is that it is contrived precisely to blur the fact
that alternative descriptions are possible in addition to
those offered by the results of normal inquiries."
fact-value distinction
"It sug- g
gests that once “all the facts are in” nothing remains except
“noncognitive” adoption of an attitude——-a choice which is
not rationally discussable.
set of true sentences?
" one set of true sentences to describe ourselves is already
to choose an attitude toward ourselves, whereas to use
another set of true sentences is to adopt a contrary attitude.
Only if we assume that there is a value-free vocabulary
which renders these sets of “factual” statements commensurable
can the positivist distinction -between facts and
values, beliefs and attitudes, look plausible. But t-he philosophical
ction that such a vocabulary is on the tips of our
tongues is, from an educational point of view, disastrous. It
forces us to pretend that we can split ourselves up into
"So Gadamer’s effort to get rid of the classic picture of
man-as-essentially-knower-of-essences is, among other things,
an effort ~to get rid of the distinction between fact and value,
and thus to let us think of “discovering the facts” as one
project of edication among others. This is why Gadamer devotes
so much time to breaking down the distinctions which
Kant made among cognition, morality, and aesthetic judgment."
There is no way, as far as I can see, in which to argue
the issue of whether to keep the Kantian “grid” in place or
set it aside. There is no “normal” philosophical discourse
which provides com-mon commens-urating ground for those
who see science and edica-tion as, respectively, “rational”
and “irrational,” and those who see the quest for objectivity
as one possibility among others to be taken account of in
wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein.
365
socialization
The hermeneutic point of view, from which the acquisition
of truth dwindles in importance, and is seen as a component
of education, is possible only if we once stood at
another point of view. Education has to start from acculturation.
So the search for objectivity and the self-conscious
awareness of the social practices in which objectivity
consists are necessary rst steps in becoming gebildet. We
must rst see ourselves as en-soi——as described by those statemen-
ts which are objectively true in -the judgment of our
peers-—before there is any point in seeing ourselves as poursoi.
Similarly, we cannot be educated without nding out a
lot about the descriptions of -the world offered by our
culture (e.g., by learning the results of the natural sciences). Later (I ii -perhaps, we may put less value on being in touch
with reality” but we can afford that only after having passed
through stages of implicit, and then explicit and self-conscious,
conformity 'to the norms of the discourses going on
around us.
even if we revolt, we still use "system"?Move against the system?
"The caution
u so \ _ .
2 amounts to saying that abnormal and existential dis
course is always parasitic upon normal discourse,"
366
hermeneutics is always parasitic upon the
possibility (and perhaps upon the actuality) of epistemology,
and that edicaition always employs materials provided
by the culture of the day. To attempt abnormal discourse
de novo, without being able Ito recognize our own abnormality,
is madness in the most literal and terrible sense.
existentialism is reactive
systematic and edifying philosophies
Successive philosophical revolutions
within this -mainstream have been produced by philosophers
excited by new cognitive feats—e.g., the rediscovery
of Aristotle, Galilean mechanics, the development of
self-conscious historiography in -the nineteenth century,
Darwinian biology, mathematical logic.
367
Build knowledge as a reaction from previous
The cynics!
"On -the periphery of the history of modern philosophy,
one nds gures who, without forming a “tradition,” resemble
each other in their distrust of the notion that man’s
essence is to be a knower of essences. Goethe, Kierkegaard,
Santayana, Willia-m James, Dewey, the later Wittgenstein,
the later Heidegger, are gures of this sort. They are often
accused of relativism or cynicism. They are often dubious
about progress, and especially aboult the latest claim that
such-and-such a discipline has at last -made the nature of
human knowledge so clear that reason will now spread
throughout the rest of human activity.
368
Calls these guys edifying
"They make fun of the classic picture
of man, the picture which contains systematic philosophy,
the search for universal commensuration in a nal
vocabulary. They hammer away at -the holistic point that
words take their meanings from other words rather than by
virtue of their representative character, and the corollary
that vocabularies acquire their privileges from the men who
use them rather -than from their transparency to the real.“
369
Different philosphers - revolutionary
"
370
The distinction between systematic and edifying philosophers
is not the -same as the distinction between normal
philosophers and revolutionary philosophers. The latter
distinction puts Husserl, Russell, the later Wittgenstein,
and the later Heidegger all on the same (“revolutionary”)
side of a line. For my purposes, what matters is a distinction
between -two kinds of revolutionary philosophers. On
the one hand, there are revolutionary pl'1ilOSOph€I‘S—-thOS6
who found new schools within which normal, professionalized
philosophy can be practiced—who see the incommensurability
of their new vocabulary with the old as a temporary
inconvenience, to be blamed on the shortcomings of
their predecessors and to be overcome by the institutionalization
of their own vocabulary. On the other hand, there are
great philosophers who dread the thought that their vocabulary
should ever be institutionalized, or that their writing
mightbe seen as commensurable with the tradition. Husserl
and Russell (like Descartes and Kant) are of the former sort.
371
views and subjcts
Both men suggest
we see people as saying things, better or worse things,
without seeing them as externalizing inner representations
of reality. But this is only their entering wedge, for then we
must cease to see ourselves as seeing this, without beginning
to see ourselves as seeing something else.
372
"We have to see the term
“corresponds -to how things are" as an automatic compli- l
ment paid to successful normal discourse rather than as a
relation to be studied and aspired -to throughout the rest of
discourse.
To see edifying
philosophers as conversational partners is an alternative to
seeing them as holding views on subjects of common concern.
One way of thinking of wisdom as something of which
the love is not the same as that of argument, and of which
the achievement does not consist in nding the correct vocabulary
for representing essence, is to ‘think of i-t as the
practical wisdom necessary to participate in a conversation.
373
I want now to enlarge this suggestion that edifying
philosophy aims at continuing a conversation rather than
at discovering truth, by making out of it a reply to the
familiar charge of “relativism” leveled at the subordination
of truth to edification.
"thus that the cultural role of the edifying
philosopher is to h€lip us avoid the self-deception which
comes from believing that we know ourselves by knowing a
set of objective facts. In the following sec-tion, I shall try to
make the converse point. There I shall be saying that the
wholehearted behaviorism, naturalism, and physicalism I
have been commending in earlier chapters help us avoid
the self-deception of thinking that we possess a deep, hidden,
metaphysically signicant nature which makes us “irreducibly”
different from inkwells or atoms.
374
Philosophers thus condemn -themselves to a Sisyphean
task, for no sooner has an account of a transcendental
term been perfected than it is labeled a “naturalistic
fallacy," a confusion between essence and accident." I think
we get a clue to the cause of this self-defeating obsession
from the fact that even philosophers who take the intuitive
impossibility of nding conditions "for “the one right thing
to do” as a reason for repudiating “objeotive values” are
loath to take the impossibility of nding individuating conditions
for the one true theory of the world as a reason for
denying “objective physical reality.
375
mediation
language
376
"which has set the problems of Western philosophy by
Sartre adds to our understanding of the visual imagery I
helping us see why this imagery is always trying to tran
scend itself. The notion of an unclouded Mirror of Nature
is the notion of a mirror which would be indistinguishable
from what was mirrored, and thus would not be a mirror at
all.
377
To abandon the notion
that philosophy must show all possible discourse naturally
converging to a consensus, just as normal inquiry does,
would be to abandon the hope of being anything more than
merely human. It would thus be to abandon the Platonic
notions of Truth and Reality and Goodness as entities
which may not be even dimly mirrored by present practices
and beliefs, and to settle back into the “relativism” which
assumes that our only useful n-otions of “true” and “real”
and “good” are extrapolations from those practices and
beliefs.
edifying philosophy - reactive
Edifying philosophy
is not only abnormal but reactive, having sense only as a
protest against attempts to close off conversation by proposals
for universal commensuration through the hypostatization
of some privileged set of descriptions. The danger
which edifying discourse tries to avert is that some give-n
vocabulary, some way in which people might come to think
of themselves, wi-ll deceive them into thinking that from
now on all discourse could be, or should "be, normal discourse.
The resulting freezing-over of culture would be, in
the eyes of edifying philosophers, the dehumanization of
human beings. The edifying philosophers are thus agreeing
with Lessing’s choice of the innite striving for truth over
“all of Truth.”2
Strive for truth
378
" To see keeping a conversation going as a suicient aim of
philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the albility to sustain
a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of
new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to
describe accurately.
That is why “existentialism”—and, m-ore generally, edifying
philosophy—ca1n be only reactive, why it falls into selfdeception
whenever it tries to do more than send the
conversation off in new directions.
379
Much recent philosophy—under the aegis of “phenomenology”
or of “hermeneutics,” or both——has toyed with
this unfortunate idea. For example, Habermas and Apel
have suggested ways in which we might create a new sort of
transcendental standpoint, enabling us to do something like
what Kant tried to do, but without fal-ling into either scientism
or hist-oricism.
380
I have been insisting that we should not try to have a successor
subject to epistemology, but rather try to free our- l
selves from the notion that philosophy must center around
the discovery of a permanent framework for inquiry.
382
suspicious - transcendtalism
Normal scientic discourse ca-n always be seen in two different
ways-——as the successful search for objective truth, or
as one discourse among others, one among many projects
we engage in. The former point of view falls in with the
normal practice of normal science. There questions of
moral choice or of edication do not arise, since they have
already been preempted by the tacit and “self-condent”
commitment to the search for objective truth on the subject
383
ask such questions as “What is the point?” to “What moral is be drawn from our knowledge of how we, and the rest of nature, work?" or “What are we to do with ourselves now that we know the laws of our own behavior?"
So he created new forms of philosophical bad faith—substituti:ng ‘transcenden-tal” at- tempts to nd one’s true self for “metaphysical” attempts to nd a world elsewhere.
384
To put this claim in another way, which may help bring
out its connections with naturalis/m, I am saying that the
positivists were absolutely right in thinking it imperative to
extirpate metaphysics, when “metaphysics” means the attempt
-to give knowledge of what science cannot know. For
this is the attempt to nd a discourse which combines the
advantages of normality with those of abnormality--the intersubjective
security of objective -truth combined with the
edifying character of an unjustiable but unconditional
moral claim. The urge to set philosophy on the secure path
of a science is the urge to combine Plato’s project of moral
choice as ticking off the objective -truths abou-t a special sort
of object (the Idea of the Good) with the sort of intersubjective
and democratic agreement about objects found in
normal science."
in question. The latter point of view is one from which we
We must get the
visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphors out of
our speech altogether." To do that we -have to understand
speech not only as not the externalizing of inner representations,
but as not a representation at all.
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