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
philosophypragmatism, now termed classicalwas 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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93

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 entrenchedone 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

CONCERNING PHILOSOPHY

95

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 semanticsand 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 articlesmore rarely, in the
bookswhere 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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97

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 consensusextreme, 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
analysison 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
allwould 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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99

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
phantasmsor 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 awarenessif 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 argumenttightly 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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101

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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103

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 categoriesjust 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
problemsinvention of arguments at the bar de novo, or
faithfulness to things themselvesone 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 outsidefor 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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105

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'Ulmthe cardinal points of this
imaginary continentto 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
phenomenologistsa 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

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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 thoughtexperimentsa 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 Schlitzboth 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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107

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
mailin 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 worldninety percentand where almost a
third of philosophy courses are given in Catholic establish-

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109

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 Universityin one of the bastions, then, of
philosophy seeking to be scientific, and its successive fashionshe 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 moralis 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
othersexcept 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,

CONCERNING PHILOSOPHY

111

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 mannereven 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:

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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).

CONCERNING PHILOSOPHY

113

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).