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الرئيسية Reshaping Reason: Toward a New Philosophy
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Reshaping Reason Toward a New Philosophy John McCumber Reshaping Reason Reshaping Reason 4 Toward a New 3 Philosophy 5 John McCumber Indiana University Press bloomington & indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail email@example.com © 2005 by John McCumber All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCumber, John. Reshaping reason : toward a new philosophy / John McCumber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34503-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy. I. Title. B72.M385 2004 191—dc22 2004007895 1 2 3 4 5 10 09 08 07 06 05 4 In memory of Géza von Molnár Mentor and Friend Zu wissen wenig, aber der Freude viel Ist Sterblichen gegeben . . . —Friedrich Hölderlin Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations xvii xix 1 Historico-Philosophical Prologue 1 2 Enlarging the Philosophical Toolbox 57 3 From Metaphysics to Ontologies 104 4 The Edge of Ethics 161 Epilogue 232 viii Contents Notes 235 Bibliography Index 259 249 Preface Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant found philosophy blocked by an undigested quarrel between two groups he called "dogmatists" and "skeptics." Kant realized that old ways of thinking were i; nadequate to resolve this dispute and that a new "tribunal" would have to be instituted for that purpose. If it was to adjudicate philosophical disputes, this tribunal would itself have to be philosophical, a "tribunal of reason" founded on the "eternal and unchanging" laws of thought (KRV A xi). Knowledge of our thought is knowledge of ourselves, and obtaining it is for Kant the "most arduous of rational tasks." That task now fell to a new discipline, the "critique of pure reason" (KRV A xii), which would therefore furnish the needed tribunal. At the beginning of the twenty-¤rst century, philosophy's situation was even more dire than in Kant's time. The events of September 11 had abruptly moved philosophy from the peripheries of the cultural landscape to its exact center, for the suicide attack on a technological symbol of America was ultimately an attack on critical thought itself. It had to be answered, and answered well, by philosophers; otherwise the con®ict would degenerate into a parochial "clash of civilizations" or even into a religious war. But this sudden challenge found American philosophers unready. Their behavior and allegiances, for example, were stamped, to the tiniest detail and without exception, by whether they were "analytic" or "continental" philosophers. After ¤fty years, the quarrel between these two approaches was not merely undigested but had grown so confused, stale, and hopeless that each side rarely even x Preface mentioned the other. Indifference to philosophy, long rampant in the larger culture, thus overtook even philosophers themselves. Unable to settle their intellectual disputes, philosophers lost credibility within the academy; jobs, of¤ces, and even whole departments followed (cf. TD 96f). The "death of philosophy" seemed imminent and was fondly proclaimed. A Kantian call to self-knowledge, summoning all to the tribunal of reason, was obviously needed. None came, for in the centuries since Kant, the tribunal of reason itself had been undermined. Its original legitimacy had been founded on a view undoubted even by skeptics like Hume: that we can at least know our own minds. As Kant put it: Here nothing can escape us, because what Reason brings forth entirely from itself cannot remain hidden, but is brought to light through Reason itself, as soon as one has uncovered its common principle. (KRV A xx) Kant's con¤dence in Reason was as naïve as it sounds. Today, after Freud, Marx, Heidegger, and the Postmodernists, the "eternal and unchanging" laws of thought themselves are in question. Can we then turn, for our tribunal, to what is transient and changing? Then philosophy would adjudicate itself with reference to the ways in which philosophers articulate and comprehend historical givens, the way mid-twentieth-century analytical philosophy articulated and explained the rise of science. But philosophy, in America at least, is not doing as well with historical givens as it once did. Its failure to respond to September 11 is one example;1 my own investigations of the history of the American philosophical community, published as Time in the Ditch, furnish another. They show that American philosophy may have suffered traumatic political pressures half a century ago—and, more damningly, that the very possibility that that had happened has never been acknowledged, much less confronted. To be sure, philosophers can hardly be blamed for not acknowledging something of which they have no knowledge. Once the re- Preface xi pugnant facts are known to them, and only then, can they decide whether to learn the hard lessons of those facts and be seekers of truth, or to remain what so many of their teachers had silently hoped they would be: seekers of convenient truth. In the meantime, American philosophers stand on the brink of philosophy, unknowing whether they are followers of Socrates, on the one hand, or of Anytus and Meletus on the other. Their behavior furnishes no indication of what philosophy can or should be. 3 Facts, which come and go in time, thus cannot furnish the needed tribunal—even when they are facts about philosophers themselves. Nor, clearly, can the now suspect "eternal and unchanging" laws of thought. But I believe there is a middle way between the temporal and the atemporal. What if reason can be seen to accord not with the passing contents of time, but with what we encounter as the structure of time itself? Might it not be that our experience of time, which as Kant argued is the universal form of all knowable particularities, gives the key for determining the "source, scope, and limits" (KRV A xii) of our rational powers? The claim of this book is that it can. The traditional Kantian mind, with its unchangeable rational laws, can be replaced by a temporalized mind—one whose every single component and function has come to be and will pass away, and which has evolved rational tools to cope with that fact. The principles by which those tools operate constitute what I call "temporal reason." No full account of such reason has ever been given. The need of it was not even broached until Heidegger's Being and Time—and Heidegger himself, unable to follow through on the task, quickly fell into what was widely seen as crude irrationalism.2 Yet once we have broken through some crippling prejudices, the ¤rst part of such an account is surprisingly easy to give. The crux of the argument is that traditional philosophical thinking—i.e., the philosophical use of various forms of inference—is conducted in the present tense. Its goal and medium is the true assertion (sentence, xii Preface belief, or proposition). True assertions, however, require the simultaneous availability—the "copresence"—of the assertions themselves and whatever it is that makes them true. Otherwise they cannot be veri¤ed, however true they are, and are philosophically useless. The account of temporal reason offered here enriches such traditional philosophy by introducing methods which relate philosophical thinking to the past and future in ways which do not reduce to stating truths about them, but have de¤nable goals and techniques of their own. I call these ways of relating philosophically to past and future "narrative" and "demarcation" respectively, and I give an account of them in chapter 2 (chapter 1 is introductory). Narrative and demarcation correspond loosely to our ordinary activities of telling stories and formulating questions, but when undertaken philosophically they have special constraints on them. When they are added to traditional patterns of inference, the result is a comprehensive view of reason which sees it as fully temporal— as relating equally to past, present, and future. Quine is my standing archetype for the philosophical practice of inference; Hegel for that of narrative; and Heidegger for that of demarcation. That these three ¤gures could cooperate on anything whatever may seem strange. When we look at things this way, however, we can see that in fact a whole posse of contemporary American philosophers, so to speak, is now riding to philosophy's rescue, converging from these three long-separated corners of the philosophical landscape. First, analytical philosophers in the wake of Quine have had unparalleled success exploring reason in the present tense, without reifying its objects into atemporal fantasies; a new generation is situating itself with respect to the history of philosophy. A few of the names associated with this trend are Robert Brandom, Michael Friedman, Christine Korsgaard, John McDowell, and Michael Williams. Second, philosophers in the Hegelian tradition, such as David Kolb, Terry Pinkard, Robert Pippin, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Robert Williams, and Richard Dien Win¤eld are showing us that Preface xiii Hegel is not making silly claims about some present entity (such as the Zeitgeist or the Absolute). They open the way to seeing Hegel as teaching us how to validate the present by reconstructing a certain sort of past. Finally, Heideggereans in the wake of Jacques Derrida, such as Robert Bernasconi, Stephen Erickson, David Krell, John Sallis, Reiner Schürmann, and Gary Shapiro, as well as Daniel Dahlstrom, provide rich resources for any philosophy which aims to open up futures.3 While adequate discussion of these contemporary thinkers (and their fellows) is beyond the scope of the present book, I hope to undertake it in the future. 3 In chapter 3 I explore what sort of "reality" such temporal reason enables us to know. It seems frivolous just to say, "knowable reality," but the phrase has a point. In order to be "known" by us (as well as "experienced," "encountered," and "inferred," etc., by us), a thing must have certain characteristics. The speci¤cation of those characteristics counts as "ontology," for whatever existed but did not exhibit them could not be known by us and so would be, at best, an "ontos" without a "logy." In fact, temporal reason sees ontology itself in new ways—not as a universal "theory of being" but as a generalized recommendation as to how things should be understood, responded to, and acted upon. Ontology so viewed is anything but a recondite and abstract discipline of importance only to philosophers. Indeed, various ontologies have played crucial roles in the history of the West.4 In chapter 3, I will discuss seven of these historically signi¤cant ontologies. Once we understand what they are and how they function, we can see how they are grounded in yet another ontology, one still more basic than they, and I will discuss this as well. The real business of temporal reason, however, is not "knowing" at all, for as chapter 2 has it, knowledge is an affair of the present tense only. What temporal reason undertakes is the rational construction of situations. It goes about this by re®ectively placing xiv Preface things—components of situations—into a temporal ®ow, thus endowing them with, or allowing them to have, certain types of past and future. The ultimate job of philosophy, as a situating activity in this sense, is to help us see how it is necessary to live. In chapter 4, I embark on this in a "marginal" way. The daunting central issues of traditional ethics are based on the concept of the free and fully aware moral agent, a concept which I (along with many others) ¤nd highly problematic. After discussing some of its problems, I will head for the "edge" of ethics, to the areas where our moral agency peters out or runs against the channels that history and custom have dug for it. From this angle, ethics is as much about the way relationships channel our actions as it is about those actions themselves. There are ways to make sense of the overwhelming diversity of human relationships, for like everything human they are structured by the ways we experience time. I will give an elementary account of some of those basic relational structures and show how they apply, not merely to private affairs, but to one type of government itself. My claim, then, is that we can understand moral action and responsibility better when we see them from these edges as well as from the center. That can hardly count as a complete ethics; indeed, nothing in this book is even remotely ¤nished. Taking it for a ¤nished work is like taking a collection of stem cells for a human being. But I do think that the book's second chapter codi¤es some aspects of a "new philosophy," different from current versions—and better, because more fully temporal. And I believe that the two following chapters present some promising ¤rst results. 3 Some of these results will matter, I think, to philosophers. Temporal reason views knowledge and reality as dynamically producing one another, in ways which can sometimes be disentangled— thus saving some versions of realism, if only on a case-by-case basis. Preface xv Ontologies, on this approach, do not subsist as argument chains in logical space, but arrive and depart in history and have their own sorts of validity in doing so. There is serious empirical evidence that conscious decision is not the beginning of action, but follows it in time. All these issues have bearing on traditional philosophical disciplines, such as epistemology, ontology, and ethics, which are rethought in this book. Beyond philosophy, the array of philosophical methods presented in chapter 2 aims to help us humanists see how to do what science cannot: how to situate ourselves among scienti¤c and other truths. Aristotle was right about science (at Metaph I.1 981a15–20); it can give us general information, such as what level of cholesterol is best in general or what type of bridge can be built over a river. But applying those ¤ndings requires inserting them into the ongoing life of a person or community, which in turn means seeing how the application would carry that life forward and what kinds of futures it would foreclose or open up: the kind of temporalized, "humanistic" situating activity to be explored in this book. Group identity is arguably an affair of ongoing narrative, so the accounts of narrative in chapter 2 and of its ontological consequences in chapter 3 may prove useful to critical theorists, feminists, queer theorists, and race theorists. The account of the double nature of elementary human relationships explored in chapter 4 may be useful to therapists and educators of all sorts. The fact that the "double" in question is freedom/oppression has implications for political and economic theory. I will allude to these consequences in the book, but I do not try to draw them in detail. This would have been a much longer book had I done that—but not, in my cramped and tired hands, a better one. What I present here is all that I, alone at this moment, can hope to do. 3 Though this book is my effort, and all its many defects my fault, the "new philosophy" it presents is not emerging from a single xvi Preface head. In addition to the contemporary thinkers I mentioned above, almost everything in it can be found, attributed to some historical ¤gure, in one or more of my previous books. To avoid selfreferentiality I will not document this in detail; in general terms, the enlargement of the "philosophical toolbox" in chapter 2 was adumbrated in Time in the Ditch, which in turn drew on the extended analyses of Hegel and Heidegger in The Company of Words and Metaphysics and Oppression respectively. The view of ontology as a force in history was prepared by Metaphysics and Oppression, as was the critique of traditional concepts of agency in chapter 4. The classi¤cation of basic types of relationship in that chapter builds on foundations laid in Poetic Interaction. The in®uence of philosophers past and present thus extends throughout the book; if I were to footnote them, the notes would be on every page. It would be insulting to those from whom I have learned so much to subject them to scholarly reportage and dissection; what is needed is an ongoing, and to some degree informal, discussion. In the rest of the book, these "discussions," though part and parcel of the argument, will be indented and italicized. Traditional scholarly references will remain in the notes. It is my hope that following these discussions will not only clarify the historical and contemporary af¤liations of the new philosophy, but will provide illumination of philosophy's history and present state—if only, to be sure, from an unconventional perspective. Finally, the contemporary ¤gures I have mentioned are only a few examples of the threefold convergence I have in mind. Other thinkers—some analytical, some continental, some who do not consider themselves "philosophers" at all—are already beginning to philosophize along these lines. Still others are feeling it as a need, increasingly sharp.5 The "new philosophy" is thus emerging from a variety of investigations underway today. What if those investigators care to make common cause, with me and with each other? Then philosophy, far from having died, will, once again, have just begun. Acknowledgments I would ¤rst like to thank those who freed up for me the time to write this book. My UCLA Dean, Pauline Yu, and my Dean at Northwestern and again at UCLA, Eric Sundquist, were open to crucially creative arrangements concerning leaves. My colleagues in the Northwestern University German Department, in particular Peter Fenves, Franziska Lys, and Eva Stonebraker, tolerated my absence during those leaves; and did so with unwarranted good cheer. Prof. James A. Schulz, philosophus extraordinarius, gave a perceptive and helpful reading to the entire manuscript. Dee Mortensen of Indiana University Press has once again provided wise guidance. The humane intelligence of Françoise Lionnet has, as always, saved me from numerous disasters. None of these people are responsible for the many defects in this book. At a time when the lurches of history and the hobgoblins of all-pervading power have in the view of many reduced responsible agency to a mere fantasy, it is with some relief that I can safely say that those defects are mine alone. Abbreviations AA AT CW Emp. EN Enz. KPV KRV KSA KU Metaph MO NE PF Phil Inv PhS PI SZ TD WdL Werke Kant, Akademie-Ausgabe (Academy Edition) Descartes, Oeuvres, Adam & Tannery Edition (Works) McCumber, The Company of Words Hardt & Negri, Empire Dewey, Experience and Nature Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences) Kant, Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason) Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) Nietzsche, Kritisch-Studienausgabe (Critical Edition) Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment) Aristotle, Metaphysics McCumber, Metaphysics and Oppression Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics McCumber, Philosophy and Freedom Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit) McCumber, Poetic Interaction Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) McCumber, Time in the Ditch Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) Hegel, Werke (Moldenhauer & Michel Edition) (Works) Reshaping Reason 1 HistoricoPhilosophical Prologue Explaining Philosophy Everything we do—every act, utterance, or omission— ¤ts into something ongoing and therefore is in part a response to something. To understand why, we need only to recall that acts (omissions, utterances) are events, i.e., alterations in the state of the universe, and so cannot come to be without some previous state of affairs to be altered. When an event not merely alters the state of affairs which preceded it but does so intelligently, it can be called a "response" to that state of affairs. Understanding the intelligence of such an event—indeed, deciding whether it is intelligent at all—thus requires understanding just what it is a response to. This is not often an obvious matter. Even a bare and provisional understanding of this aspect—even of this aspect of the intelligent events 2 Reshaping Reason which we cause, of our own acts—is very rarely achieved. But attempting to understand what we are responding to when we act (omit, utter) is necessary to living a human life; to what degree can you be yourself if you do not understand yourself? This all holds, in particular, for philosophy. The present work of philosophy, like all philosophy, is a congeries of acts, omissions, and utterances. It is produced by a human in such a way as to claim intelligence, and so is a set of responses. It is responsive not just to the various facts and phenomena it seeks to understand and which are contemporaneous with it, but to larger historical trends as well. Some of these trends are philosophical in nature—various developments in the history of philosophy which it tries to carry forward, evade, or stymie. But the "history of philosophy" is never just philosophical. It is inextricable from the history of philosophers, and so from the stories of the communities which these philosophers form and in which they work. I have traced some aspects of the institutional history of recent American philosophy in Time in the Ditch. Here, I want to focus on the philosophical level of the overall situation, the state of the logos just before the intervention of this book—the state of philosophy to which it responds, its pro-logos. The tale told in Time in the Ditch is, essentially, a story of decline: fewer departments, fewer tenure lines within departments, fewer journals, fewer publishers, an aging professoriat. That such institutional and social problems correspond to an intellectual crisis, indeed that philosophy's institutional and intellectual problems are two levels of a single crisis, may seem tendentious. Many philosophers, after all, have been trained to think that philosophy begins only when we negate all institutional considerations. Institutions, after all, are English, American, French, or Historico-Philosophical Prologue 3 German, while philosophy (we learn) is on a different level. To put the matter linguistically, philosophy deals not with "snow is white" or "Der Schnee ist weiß" or "La neige est blanche," but with what is common to all these. Hegel called such scurrying to the universal shooting the Absolute "as if from a pistol" (PhS 26/16), but it is really we philosophers who are shot, into some unchanging and so abstract realm where even our shadows are lost. The trajectory is as old as the Presocratics—Thales' abstract realm was water, and Anaximander's was "the inde¤nite." Though such unchanging realms have historically been important for philosophy, they are hardly necessary for it. Restricting philosophy to them was for millennia regarded as unphilosophical. It was Socrates who, as he declares in the Apology, turned from the investigation of nature to examining himself instead, and thereby turned philosophy, at least in part, into an investigation of self. In so doing, he placed philosophers under an obligation that no one, philosopher or not, could ignore—the demand that, even while trying to scurry to the universal, they pause and explain themselves. Poor Euthyphro, who was assuredly no philosopher, had to explain to Socrates why he was prosecuting his own father for murder—and why should anyone, especially a philosopher, think herself better than Euthyphro? We (philosophers) must therefore explain ourselves, and we must do so in English, French, German, etc.—for we obviously cannot do it in "what is common to all these." We must do it, moreover, to people who are not philosophers. To refuse this task is to take the stance that philosophy is either a special taste whose merits cannot be explained to outsiders—or not worth doing at all. Both stances are philosophical, because they make im- 4 Reshaping Reason portant statements about the nature of philosophy itself. But both are untenable. The latter leads obviously to a tu quoque, to refutation by "you do it too"; if philosophy is worthless, why are you doing it? The former stance is as self-contradictory as advocating universal lying. If, tonight at midnight, everyone on earth stopped telling the truth and started lying, there would be no way for new members of our species to learn to talk, and language itself would eventually die out. If I advocate that something like that should happen, I am using language to push for the destruction of language, which as Kant pointed out is a practical contradiction—another tu quoque.1 Similarly for philosophy. If it is to survive, philosophers, even those who populate its most abstract realms, must explain themselves at least to those who will, perhaps, one day become philosophers. And since no one can tell just who those people are, philosophers must be ready to explain themselves not just to each other but to non-philosophers in general. If they do not do that, no one will become a philosopher, and philosophy will eventually die out. To do philosophy without explaining to non-philosophers why you do it is thus to do philosophy in a way which guarantees its extinction—another sort of practical contradiction. Any philosopher must therefore hold that philosophy is an activity which is worthwhile and whose merits can and must be explained to outsiders. Such explanation is a Socratic task, for it means explaining ourselves as philosophers. Perhaps it is the philosophical task par excellence. Yet the apparent institutional decline of philosophy within the university suggests that it is not going well. If philosophers were making the case for philosophy, if they were explaining to others why they do it and why it should be done, more resources—if not, perhaps, many more— would be allocated to it. Historico-Philosophical Prologue 5 That philosophers cannot explain themselves to nonphilosophers may be a philosophical failing, then; but it is a philosophical failing with institutional consequences. To ask why it is occurring is to reach the point of intersection between the institutional and intellectual levels of philosophy's crisis. That crisis, I suggest, is aporetic in nature. Philosophy's Aporia I: A General Account An "aporia," as I will use the term, is a situation in which two sides disagree but cannot resolve their dispute because it presupposes a hidden, but mistaken, agreement. In the present case, the two sides would be philosophy which claims to study the various changeless and abstract realms into which philosophers have traditionally escaped, and philosophy which seeks instead to explain the lives they and others lead. This aporia, which opposes philosophy's atemporal intellectual orientation on the one hand to its changing institutional circumstances on the other, is nothing new. Plato was caught, there too, unable to explain the relation of the eternal Forms to the world we actually live in with anything more than a word—and, as Aristotle points out, a metaphor at that (methexis: Metaph I.9 991a20–23). As Plotinus pointed out in turn, the problem hardly goes away when the relation between unchangeable essences and the beings of which they are the essences is restated in terms of Aristotelian forms-in-matter (Enneads VI.3.4ff). To dissolve the aporia, we need a more speci¤c account of just what the disagreement is between the two sides, and of the common mistake they have made. Helpful in this will be an outline of the basic structure of the aporia as it arises today, and I will approach this from two directions. First, I will give a basic, general sketch of the kind 6 Reshaping Reason of aporia that I think philosophy currently exhibits. Then I will give a broad-brush historical account of how an aporia of that type could actually have arisen within philosophy. Each approach should have some plausibility on its own. The general sketch should match with what philosophers see with their own eyes as they practice their discipline, and the historical account should resonate with what they learned, early on, about the history of the ¤eld. The convergence of the sketch with the account will increase the plausibility still further. Though the aporia I am about to state is a product of interpretation, then, there are reasons to believe that the interpretation is a plausible one. It is this aporia to which this book offers a conscious response. As will become evident, however (I hope), the kind of philosophy I am proposing has other merits as well, and can be accepted or rejected independently of its success in resolving the aporia at hand. We can begin the general account by considering philosophy loosely, as a way of doing certain things, a way, and several or many things (just which way, and which things, will be explained when I move to the historical level). When a way of doing things no longer works, we must either ¤nd a new way or stop doing those things. But what happens when those things are great and important and have to be done, and no new way turns up? What happens when that bind persists for a couple of generations? We might expect two sides to develop: One side still adheres to the old way, even though it no longer works. Since the original goals of the "old way" can no longer be achieved in that way, those goals must be rede¤ned; otherwise the old way itself must be abandoned. Those who refuse to abandon it therefore cut back Historico-Philosophical Prologue 7 their goals to match the old methods, but that still leaves them with the uncomfortable memory of the great goals they once had. One way to suppress that memory is by sealing themselves off from everyone who could call it up. If the goals were great and the memory widespread, this may eventually require excluding everyone but themselves. Cut off from its original tasks and goals, what was once only a way of doing things now becomes an island unto itself, peopled with things that were originally the mere artifacts and tools of a greater project but which now have been left with the status of brute, and so primary, realities. Those so-called realities are, however, really only fantasies, i.e., beings originally thought up by people for speci¤c tasks that have now vanished. The unchangeable, universal realm has now become a sort of Fantasy Island, and I will call this wing of the general aporia the "Fantasy Island" approach. The other side abandons the old way—but since no new way shows up, it merely struggles. After some time, its practitioners accept that no new way is going to come along and that their confusion is permanent. At that point, this approach ceases to be a mere phase leading toward something else and becomes—like Fantasy Island—a goal in itself. This struggling is both honest and worthy of pursuit, i.e., good. But all that can make it good is its distance from Fantasy Island, for there is nothing else by which it can measure itself. So it holds its confusion to be not only honest and good, but (because it increases the distance) liberating as well. It is a liberation which departs from the old ways without settling into any new ways, and so is a form of subversion. I will call this second wing of the aporia the "Subversive Struggle." It is tempting to apply this to contemporary philosophy 8 Reshaping Reason by seeing Fantasy Island as the domain of analytical philosophy, with its timeless ¤cta of absolute truth, purity of reference, and validity of argument. It is also tempting to see the Subversive Struggle as postmodernism, priding itself on liberating us from the binary oppressions of metaphysics (e.g., True and False, Valid and Invalid, Right and Wrong) without installing any new fantasies in their places. Tempting—but wrong; Fantasy Island and the Subversive Struggle are not merely two different schools of philosophy, to one or the other of which every would-be philosopher must declare allegiance early on. They are, ¤rst and foremost, two tendencies that wrestle within each of us and produce, in contemporary philosophers, a complex family of feelings. One moment we ¤nd ourselves pursuing traditional goals which we know we cannot reach—if only the most ancient and general philosophical goal, that of coming up with an argument that will convince everybody that our thesis is wholly right. At other moments, we ¤nd ourselves trying to slither free of the whole thing, fooling around with ingenious but suspect thoughts that lead only to more dissatisfaction. This, I suggest, is because— as in that particular type of aporia which constitutes an "antinomy"—each approach incites the other. As we crawl around Fantasy Island, seeking new things to say about its ¤xed repertoire of primary beings, we twist and bend our thoughts and ¤nally thought itself, struggling to come up with something new—until we have challenged things so basic that we ¤nd ourselves off the Island, struggling about in a dark ocean. And when we swim forth into that ocean, all we have to bring with us is our memories of what we are escaping from, which grow dimmer and more misleading until they are just abstract fantasies themselves. Historico-Philosophical Prologue 9 Philosophy's Aporia II: A Historical Account If an aporia of the general type sketched above has in fact arisen in the case of philosophy, here is how that could have happened. Fortunately, the terms of the philosophical history I am about to recite are well-known, and so my recitation can be short. It begins by asking what the "old way" was, the one which no longer works. Socrates was a skeptic, but his faithless young friend Plato propounded that we can arrive at important truths just by arguing about them. This view was basic to philosophy for thousands of years. The rise of science threw it into doubt; for while argument is necessary to science, it is so only in the service of empirical investigation. Hence Hume, discerning that mere argument could produce nothing but tautologies, abandoned philosophy altogether and became a historian. Kant claimed to have discovered a realm for which mere argument suf¤ced, but this "realm"—the universal, ahistorical faculties of the human mind—was such an embarrassment that it is roundly ignored by some of today's best Kant scholarship.2 When it comes to ascertaining the truth about the nature we live in, including our own natures, the action is all in science. And so the old way stopped working. Philosophy ceased to be a quest for the "great truths" and settled down in the ambit of things it could deal with by argument alone —¤rst and foremost characteristics and outcomes of argument itself, such as sentential truth, reference, and rational decision. These things ceased to be what they once were—means to larger ends—and became primary topics in their own right. Those who did not accept such restrictions could not re- 10 Reshaping Reason turn to the old style of doing philosophy, for science was all around them and its superiority to mere argument in the matter of producing truth was beyond challenge. So they sought to philosophize without arguing, referring, saying true things, or deciding anything—a hopeless struggle if ever there was one. Philosophy's Aporia III: The Path to Resolution The devotees of Fantasy Island and the Subversive Struggle are thus opposed on the issue of whether unaided argument can yield important truths about anything. The Islanders hold that it can; since this goes against the evidence of history, they eschew history. The Strugglers hold that it cannot—but such a truth, clearly an important one, could be philosophically established only by argument. Eschewing argument, they eschew justifying themselves as well. Neither side can explain itself, then. The Islanders cannot do so because that would require taking into account things that happen off the Island, for we can only explain ourselves by referring to the histories that make us what we are. The Strugglers cannot do so because they can only struggle. Beneath the disagreement, however, is the common view that if philosophy has any de¤nable job to do, that job is ¤rst and foremost establishing truths by argument alone. Showing the falsity of this view is the way past the aporia and is the task of this book. It has three phases, of which one is now completed. This is the task of stating the underlying agreement of the two sides of the aporia. Merely stating that common agreement is enough to render it dubious. Who gave philosophy the job of establishing truths? Why is it the only possible job? Why should philosophy Historico-Philosophical Prologue 11 have just one function, one ergon, one essence—in a time in which nothing else is allowed to have one, in which "essentialism" has become a banal intellectual insult? The second phase of the task, to be adumbrated below but accomplished in chapter 2, is to show that there is a second, very important job, which philosophy has always done and to which it can credibly devote itself now that science has taken over its ¤rst job. This, I will argue, is the task of rationally constructing situations—or, brie®y, of "situating" us.3 For human reason does not have to be either universal or situated; it can be actively situating as well. Truth, in the sense which applies to sentences anyway, is then to be viewed not as the single and sovereign goal for philosophy, but as merely one of several means to the larger end of constructing situations. The third phase—to be broached in the ¤nal two chapters, and one which I have also undertaken in other works —is actually to engage in that sort of philosophy. For the most persuasive evidence that there is something else to do and a way to do it is just to go and do it. (Taking care, all the while, to explain yourself!) Philosophy's Second Job We still do not fully understand the aporia I sketched above, because we do not fully understand where the underlying agreement comes from. It will be helpful, in uncovering this, to look at an alternative view of what philosophy's job might be, and ask why philosophy does not see itself as having that sort of job—especially in view of the fact that philosophy has not only had that other job all along, but has performed it admirably. The number of true assertions (Sätze: beliefs, proposi- 12 Reshaping Reason tions, or sentences) philosophers have succeeded in establishing by argument alone was embarrassingly small long before modern science came on the scene. In fact, it has always been close to zero. As modern philosophers like Hume and Kant point out, often and with inexhaustible glee, their predecessors were unable to agree on anything and spent much of their time on Fantasy Islands of their own, arguing about essences and quiddities. Only religious enforcement brought any kind of consensus—and that was on good days! Suppose, however, we look at the concepts philosophers have taken up, clari¤ed, and reshaped in the course of making their arguments—inadvertently, as it were. To do so is to stumble upon nothing less than the intellectual treasure house of our civilization. Assertions can be true or false;4 but the concepts, or words, in which they are couched are well- or ill-shaped, often for good or evil. Truth, Beauty, Justice, Freedom, Cause, Body, Nature, Force, Right, Courage, Love, and scores of other "philosophical" concepts serve us every day. In them and through them, and only so, we articulate our aspirations, our fears, and our sense of ourselves. That is why we philosophers cannot explain ourselves in "what languages have in common"; the various languages we speak shape us to our very cores, and without them we are unintelligible, even to ourselves. It is not even clear whether the basic words we use for this are our tools, or we theirs— just as it is not clear whether or not I am, biologically speaking, a mere envelope for my DNA. Hegel put it well: "we only know about our thoughts, only have determinate, real thoughts, when we [give them existence] in words. . . . What cannot be formulated in words is in truth something murky and fermenting, which only gains clarity when it is able to put itself into words" ( Werke X § 462 zus. Historico-Philosophical Prologue 13 280/221). Heidegger puts it by adopting Stefan George's dark poetry: "Where word breaks off, no thing may be."5 And Wittgenstein says it with illuminating intensity: "Language itself is the vehicle of thought."6 All three philosophers, of course, view thinking as something that takes place not in a single isolated head, but out in the open, among people. Seeing thought as public enables them to circumvent insoluble problems about proving the existence of an external world and of other people; but in order to be public, thought must be linguistic. This does not mean that thinking cannot be carried on in solitude. It can, just as sex can. But the public thought process is not founded on the private one, any more than making love is founded on masturbation. Nor does the view that thought is linguistic deny that the diverse languages we speak may share certain universal features. I am skeptical that such a claim, with its high empirical burden, could ever be proven; certainly not all languages have been examined to date for such features. Such examination as has been carried out tends, moreover, to be inconclusive; if ancient Greek had the copula, a grammatical device which asserts mere existence and nothing more, what do we make of Gorgias's claim that "to be nowhere is not to be" (Gorgias, B.3.69, 70)?7 But even if such universal features could be found, they would have at most an auxiliary, enabling function, for they would not include the words we use to understand our lives and explain them to others. The (empirical) proof of this is massive, and the only one possible: the meanings of those basic words vary with place and time. Aitia is not causa, and neither is Ursache. What is clear, from even a super¤cial glance at the history of Western philosophy, is that each of its basic concepts has been carefully cast, recast, shaped, and polished by thirty generations of critical dialogue. None of them simply matches or mirrors some given fact about the world or pattern in our experience. If they do that at all, it is because, like the concept of cause, they have been made to do so—mainly by philosophers. Who, all the while, 14 Reshaping Reason thought that they were doing something else entirely: establishing truths by argument alone. There is a political point to this. Those who, in our multicultural era, attack "Western Civilization" for its wars, lies, and oppressions are often taken to task because they usually do so from privileged positions as professors and cultural critics. Both sides in this fail to understand the degree to which such attacks not only bene¤t "Western Civilization" but constitute its vital core. For the dynamic core of "the West" is nothing more than the sum of basic intellectual attacks on it—and that, in turn, is nothing other than the history of philosophy. Even the most intense critics of "Western Civilization" can be "non-Western" only in the sense of being hyper-Western, and all such hyper-Westerners, whatever they call themselves, are philosophers. The Last God What made philosophy's allegiance to argument so unconditional? Why was philosophy so mistaken about its own nature? Because, presumably, philosophers wanted what they thought argument could provide: truth. To what, then, are philosophers really committed by their allegiance to truth? What do they take truth to be? I have shown elsewhere that philosophers, beneath a common surface rhetoric, have meant wildly divergent things by the word "truth" (TD 43–44). Plato, who established the "old way" of doing philosophy, is particularly revealing on the point. For him, to be true is to be timeless. One of his standard ways of referring to the Forms, eternal and unchanging, is as t'alêthê, the "true things." "True" knowledge is of these things, and so is unchanging. Plato's metaphysics of Forms has been heavily cri- Historico-Philosophical Prologue 15 tiqued during the intervening centuries, of course. But the association of truth with atemporality has been far too slow to die. The recent problems philosophy has had with issues of selfreference are indications of this. It seems only natural that a sentence can be about itself; "this sentence has ¤ve words" seems unproblematic. But what about "this sentence is false?" Is it true? Then it must be false, for that is its claim. But if it is false, then it correctly reports on itself and is true. Implicit in the view that an assertion can be about itself is the idea that it can be simultaneous with what it refers to. Two things are "simultaneous," as I will use the term, if there is no time when one exists and the other does not. Anything is therefore simultaneous with itself, for there is (presumably) no time when it both does and does not exist. Thus, to say that an assertion can refer to itself is to say that reference is compatible with simultaneity. As long as we take reference as Frege and Russell took it, early on—to be some property that assertions simply have, all by themselves—there is no obvious problem with this. But if we view reference as something that human beings themselves bring about with their utterances, it becomes problematical indeed. For it is clear that we must already know something about a thing in order to talk about it at all—to "refer" to it. And it also seems that whatever we know about "exists" in some virtual sense—as an object of our knowledge, even if not materially. Thus, Cinderella, pi, the cat on the mat, and my late parents all "exist" in the sense, at least, that they "are" possible objects of speech (as Hegel would put it, they have "being" but not "existence"). An act of referring thus, on this view, requires pre-existing knowledge of the thing referred to, and so requires that its object pre-exist the act of referring itself—at least in whatever ways objects of knowledge "exist." Since no act of reference can be simultaneous with what it refers to, no utterance can refer to itself. "This sentence has ¤ve words," for all its seeming innocence, is as problematic as "this sentence is false." For it did not have ¤ve words until I had ¤nished uttering it (or 16 Reshaping Reason you had ¤nished reading it), at which time its "object"—itself— was already in the past, not the present.8 My point here is not to solve problems of self-reference by providing grounds for a universal ban on it, for no such ban has been instituted; we are still free to invent such things as "sentences" which (somehow) exist independently of being uttered on a given occasion, and which as thus detemporalized may be simultaneous with that to which they refer. My point here is twofold: (a) paradoxes of self-reference do not arise unless we assume such simultaneity, and (b) we need not assume it for the utterances we actually make. Atemporality shows up in the empirical world, either as presence (of one thing) or as simultaneity (the relation between two things when at every moment in which one is present, the other is as well). Simultaneity often functions in philosophy as a sort of hidden philosophical imperative: sit omnia simul. Thus, in much contemporary philosophical thinking, an assertion, its meaning, and even (as in issues of self-reference) its referent are all assumed to be simultaneous. As an expression of the imperative of simultaneity, consider the following quote from Quine: Our ordinary language shows a tiresome bias in its treatment of time. Relations of date are exalted grammatically as relations of position, weight, and color are not. This bias is of itself an inelegance, or breach of theoretical simplicity. Moreover, the form that it takes—that of requiring that every verb show a tense—is particularly productive of needless complications, since it demands lip service to time even when time is farthest from our thoughts. Hence in fashioning canonical notations it is usual to drop tense distinctions. We may conveniently hold to the grammatical present as a form, but treat it as temporally neutral. Where the arti¤ce comes in is in taking the present tense as timeless always, and dropping other tenses. This arti¤ce frees us Historico-Philosophical Prologue 17 to omit temporal information, or, when we please, handle it like spatial information.9 It is a fatefully short distance from this to what Peter Hylton characterizes as the tendency of analytical philosophers to see analytical philosophy "as taking place within a single timeless moment." 10 The imperative of simultaneity, even if hidden, blocks philosophy's way to history, and in particular to its own history as the casting, polishing, and reshaping of concepts. It is the clear contemporary descendent of philosophy's ancient concern with timelessness, for eternal entities, such as Forms or propositions, are all simultaneous with each other. There is no time, for a Platonist, at which the Good exists but the Beautiful does not, or for a Christian that God exists but his Wisdom does not, or for a Kantian that the category of cause exists but the other eleven do not. Simultaneity runs into trouble, however, when we are dealing with empirical entities, if only because after the Theory of Relativity, "absolute" simultaneity is impossible; two events are "simultaneous" only from a particular perspective. If we shift standpoints, they may no longer be simultaneous. A weaker concept is required, which I will call "contemporaneity." Two things are contemporaneous if there is some time at which they both exist. I am in this sense "contemporaneous" with the Washington Monument, and my writing this sentence is contemporaneous with various visitors ascending the monument. Contemporaneity is thus a diluted version of simultaneity (and a doubly diluted version of eternity). The referent of a sentence cannot, I have suggested, be simultaneous with the sentence itself. It also may, as a ma- 18 Reshaping Reason terial object, not be contemporaneous with the utterance of that sentence, as Caesar's crossing the Rubicon is not contemporaneous with my writing "Caesar crossed the Rubicon." But a sentence does have to be contemporaneous, though not simultaneous, with whatever makes us accept it for true. I accept that Caesar crossed the Rubicon because I have a memory, right now, of reading history books which I also remember as having been trustworthy. If there were no sense in which the evidence for the crossing were available to me right now, I could not accept the sentence as true. It is very dif¤cult to come up with a concept of truth that is not "timeless" in at least this way. It is a plain fact that to inquire whether an assertion is true, in the ordinary sense, is not to inquire about its relation to earlier or later members of a temporal sequence. Such information is sometimes extremely important; but to ask about it is not to ask after truth.11 If I ask you whether it is true that the cat is on the mat, I am not asking how the sentence "the cat is on the mat" came to be produced on this occasion, or what effects producing it will have. (Still less am I asking how the cat came to be on the mat in the ¤rst place.) Rather, I am asking for evidence or testimony to be produced now that will verify the sentence: the mat with the cat on it, or an argument, or a nod of your head. And if I ask you whether it is true that the cat was on the mat last Thursday, I am also asking for evidence, argument, or testimony to be produced now that will verify or falsify that assertion. In both cases, the evidence, argument, or testimony must be produced now. For without some sort of contemporaneous availability of sentence and evidence, the notion of veri¤cation makes no sense. And without the possibility of veri¤cation, the notion of truth makes, as far as Historico-Philosophical Prologue 19 I can see, no sense. Even when limited to contemporaneity, then, evaluation of the truth of an assertion never carries us beyond the present tense. Philosophy's exclusive concern with truth is the limiting of itself to the present tense. Nietzsche protested this in a particularly telling way. As he puts it in Human All Too Human, everything has come to be (alles aber ist geworden); there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. That is why historical philosophizing is necessary from now on.12 This suggests that there are two ways in which something can be taken to be timeless. First, its Before and After can be denied, in which case we think we are dealing with what Nietzsche calls an "eternal fact." Or a thing's Before and After, without being actually denied, can simply be ignored, in which case we are I think dealing with what Nietzsche called an "absolute truth." 13 When Nietzsche says that scientists "are very far from being free spirits, because they still believe in truth,"14 he is accusing them of deifying truth, of making it, so to speak, the last god. If "god" here is to be understood in the Augustinian sense, as that which is timeless, then philosophy which seeks truth is really seeking timelessness, a doomed quest which Nietzsche derides—with some jibes at Augustine—at Beyond Good and Evil § 200.15 Philosophy for Nietzsche must in fact kill this last god; it must abjure timeless truth, i.e., the "pure truth, apart from any of its consequences" which Nietzsche even calls a "thing in itself." It must come to see truth as a "mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: metaphors that have become worn out and drained of sensuous force."16 Philosophy's original sin, as Heidegger reminds us (SZ 227), is therefore lust for eternity. Like a recurrently deceived but still entranced lover, philosophy has reinterpreted the object of its affections over the millennia, 20 Reshaping Reason sometimes in radical ways: as Platonic forms, eternal and separate from the world we live in; as Democritean atoms and Aristotelian essences, unchanging components of a changing world; as the unchanging structures of the Kantian mind; and, ¤nally, as linguistic entities whose only notable function is to be true or false, and which are therefore indifferent to temporal orderings. In each case, the timelessness turned out to be an artifact of our minds—a fantasy. Plato's mistaken separation of forms from sensibles was diagnosed as such by Aristotle; Aristotle's exemption of essences from change was diagnosed eventually by Darwin; the Kantian separation of mind from history was diagnosed by Schiller; the reduction of utterances to propositions was diagnosed by the later Wittgenstein, and so forth. After Quine, we are left with no more atemporality than this: Strictly speaking . . . what admit of meaning and of truth and falsity are not the statements but the individual events of their utterance. However, it is a source of great simpli¤cation in logical theory to talk of statements in abstraction from the individual occasions of their utterance; and this abstraction, if made in full awareness and subject to a certain [technical] precaution, offers no dif¤culty.17 This point is echoed by Quine's Harvard colleague John Rawls. If such things as knowledge of one's own class, position, social status, natural assets and liabilities, and psychological propensities18 count as temporal information—as they surely do— then it is by what Quine, in my earlier quote from him, called the "omission of temporal information" that we arrive at what Rawls calls the "perspective of eternity": Thus to see our place in society from the perspective of this [original] position is to see it sub specie aeternitatis: it is to regard the human situation not only from all social but Historico-Philosophical Prologue 21 from all temporal points of view. The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world.19 As Rawls is not the only one to teach us, such a perspective can be very valuable indeed. It results from what John Dewey called the "principle of selective emphasis," focusing on only certain aspects of a thing, rather than on its entirety. The principle of selective emphasis, for Dewey, validates precisely what Quine does in the above quote from him: Selective emphasis, with accompanying omission and rejection, is the heartbeat of mental life. To object to [it] is to discard all thinking. . . . Deception comes only when the presence and operation of choice is concealed, disguised, denied. (EN 24–27) Philosophy is prone to such deception: The objects of re®ection in philosophy, being reached by methods that seem to those who employ them rationally mandatory, are taken to be "real" in and of themselves— and supremely real. (EN 9) Thus the genesis of what I call Fantasy Island. When we view sentences as the basic units of language, and examine them only for their truth, we place philosophy under the imperative of simultaneity. We are then thinking "universally," for what is true in English is true in French, Chinese, or Twi—if it can exist there at all. Often, however, it does not. If "the mind is identical with the brain" is true in English, then it would be true in French or German. But since neither of those languages has a word for "mind," the sentence cannot be uttered in either language. Dewey suggests, in different places, two ways to counter this. One, which if left to itself betrays the standard failure of Pragmatists to appreciate the importance of the past, is testing what we are saying "to see what it leads to in ordinary experience and what new meanings it contributes" ( EN 9). The other is to 22 Reshaping Reason look to the origin of what we are saying, which for Dewey is the act of re®ection which produces our selective emphasis: Honest empirical method will state when and where and why the act of selection took place and thus enable others to repeat it and test its worth. Selective choice, denoted as an empirical event, reveals the basis and bearing of intellectual simpli¤cations; they then cease to be of such a selfenclosed nature as to be affairs only of opinion and argument, admitting no alternatives save complete acceptance or rejection. (EN 28) But selective emphasis is not only produced by conscious acts; as I will argue in chapter 2, the languages we speak do much of the selecting for us without our even being aware of it. Hence, "honest empirical method" requires serious attention to how the languages we speak guide our thoughts, and this in turn requires us to look deeply into the histories of the words we use— for only there can this function of language be uncovered. Simpli¤cation, of course, is a form of falsi¤cation, and this leaves philosophy's pursuit of truth in a ¤nal paradox. Philosophy which pursues truth alone treats temporal things as if they were timeless, and so grasps falsity instead. Truer to the spirit of Quine and Rawls is to readmit the temporal information they only provisionally omit, if we can do so in regulated and principled ways. Truth Temporalized: One Step Forward Philosophy thus has (at least) two jobs. One, which it acknowledges but which it has performed miserably, is producing true assertions by argument alone. The other, which it has performed well but largely surreptitiously, is the creation and revision of the basic concepts which inform our lives and societies—the "reshaping" of reason itself. What has kept philosophy from acknowledging this second job is its exclusive devotion to truth, which is itself Historico-Philosophical Prologue 23 rooted in an ancient desire for timelessness. This desire has trapped philosophy in the aporia I have described; either it remains with the old way of trying to establish truth by argument alone, in which case it restricts itself to a self-enclosed "island" of fantastic rei¤cations, or it struggles free and goes nowhere. In the former case, it cannot explain itself to non-philosophers, since that would require dealing with realities that are not to be found on its Fantasy Island; in the latter case, it can explain nothing at all to anyone. In order to resolve this aporia, we need either to articulate goals for philosophical thought that do not reduce to truth, or to reconceptualize truth itself in more temporal terms. Two brilliant members of the philosophical tradition, Hegel and Heidegger, suggest that the latter is the more promising course. While I think they are wrong, they have important lessons for anyone who, like me, wants to take the former path. In Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Wahrheit denotes a certain sort of outcome; it is what happens to a "certainty" (Gewißheit) when you try to live by it. A Wahrheit, or a truth, is, as the Phenomenology uses the term, not "true" in any of the traditional senses philosophers are familiar with, all of which contrast with falsity. Hegelian "truth," by contrast, does not correspond more closely to reality than does falsehood, nor does it cohere any better with other things. It is not pragmatically more successful than falsehood; nor is it (and not falsehood) the outcome, even ideal, of some process of consensus formation. We know this because every Wahrheit in the Phenomenology is refuted in turn, becoming a falsehood. What is true for one section is false for the next until the book's end, when the whole game sort of dissolves. It is tempting to say that all the Phenomenology's truths, 24 Reshaping Reason since they are later refuted, were false all along and only seemed to be true. But that is not what Hegel says. What he says, in the "Preface" to the Phenomenology, is this: "True" and "false" belong among those determinate thoughts which are held to be motionless . . . essences . . . each standing ¤xed and isolated from the other. . . . To know something falsely means that there is a disparity between knowing and its substance. . . . But out of this distinguishing comes their identity, and this identity that has come to be is truth. (und diese gewordene Gleichheit ist die Wahrheit: PhS 33f/22, translation altered) There is nothing here about seeming truths being refuted. Rather, for Hegel, "truth" is explicitly de¤ned in temporal terms, as an "identity which has come to be." Something is "true," then, if it has a certain sort of past. Truth, in the ¤rst instance, is a relation of a thing to its past. The closest contemporary philosophy comes to this is perhaps Habermas's "consensus" theory of truth, as presented for example in his Wahrheitstheorien.20 But truth is not for Habermas, as for Hegel, simply what emerges from the discussion. For the discussion could in principle concern any one of Habermas's three validity claims. When a given discussion concludes that an utterance is true (as opposed to appropriate or truthful), it is deciding, quite traditionally, that the sentence in question corresponds to something about the "objective" world.21 With truth being an affair of the past tense in this way, Hegel has rendered it temporal—but in a way odd enough to lack plausibility. Some can be bestowed on it by considering Hegel's relation to Kant. In the terms of Kant's logic, the traditional view of truth as the relation of a thought to an object can be cashed out in one of two ways. First, the object in question may be taken (as the tradition Historico-Philosophical Prologue 25 takes it) to exist independently of our minds, as a "thingin-itself." In that case, since things in themselves cannot be known, we have what purports to be a cognitive relation between two terms, one of which is wholly unknowable. That will not work, so only the other way is left: to construe the object as, like thought itself, dependent on our minds, as an appearance. Then, says Kant, we can at best compare appearances with one another. This argument is found in Kant's Vienna Logic,22 which according to the "Translator's Introduction" to the English edition, dates from around 1780. It is repeated in the Jäsche Logic published in 1800.23 It is missing from the Critique of Pure Reason, though its traces can be found in the speed with which the discussion there moves from the question "what is truth?" to "is a criterion of truth possible?" (KRV B 82). The two logical passages show that we need a criterion of truth because we can never have truth itself, in the traditional (dogmatic) sense of the known agreement of our cognition with the world outside, or independent of, our minds. But here, if we read Kant the way Hegel would have read him—with more ingenuity than accuracy—something interesting happens. All appearances, for Kant, are in time.24 The temporal form of appearances is, ¤rst and foremost, succession, i.e., that ordering in which they do not coexist but are before or after one another. This is evident from Kant's account of simultaneity.25 That two things exist at the same time is not perceived directly, for "our apprehension of the multiplicity of appearances is always successive" (KRV B 225). What we actually perceive is always ¤rst one thing and then the other: A → B or B → A. A and B are "simultaneous" when the order in which we do this is indifferent.26 Simultaneity, as well as endurance (that "endures" which is simultaneous with a 26 Reshaping Reason succession [KRV B 67]), are thus not parts of the original structure of appearances, but are derivative possibilities for ordering them. It follows that the most basic relationship any two (or more) appearances can have to one another is that of being "before" and "after" each other. Whatever other relations they have will be superadded to this one. This would hold, though Kant does not say so, for the truth-relation, if it is construed as holding among appearances only— precisely as Hegel's Phenomenology construes it. If truth is understood as a relation between a sentence and a fact, for example, then one of these two appearances should come before the other. Simultaneity is not an option, unless it does not matter whether the sentence comes before the fact, or the fact before the sentence. But of course it does matter; as I noted above, something which has not, in some way or other, "appeared" to us is something about which we have no knowledge and so is something we cannot even speak about. In Kantian terms, then, a declarative sentence cannot pre-exist what it is about, and the "appearance" referred to by a true sentence must precede the sentence itself. "Phenomenological truth" for Hegel is then what happens when an object is followed by a sentence in the appropriate way. Everything now rests, of course, on just what that "appropriate way" is. I will come back to this in chapter 2. For the moment, what Hegel has done is, I hope, clear: he has imported time into the nature of truth. For something to be true of something else, it must—in an appropriate way—follow it in time. To put this differently, to be "true," in the Phenomenology at least, means to have a certain sort of past. Heidegger's most important book is Being and Time, and the most important word in that title is, famously, "and." Historico-Philosophical Prologue 27 Heidegger wrote the book to show (a) that the West has traditionally construed Being as atemporal, and (b) that Being cannot in fact be understood independently of time, that time is the "sense of Being" (SZ 1). But if Being and Time temporalizes Being, it is in a very different way than the Phenomenology temporalized truth. For Hegel, truth lay in the relation of a thing to what preceded it; but on Heidegger's account of time, the future is more basic than the past.27 Heidegger's discussions of truth, like Hegel's, are far too complex to treat here, and in any case I shall be making use of only a small part of them. This is the part captured by three points made in Daniel Dahlstrom's magisterial Heidegger's Concept of Truth: (1) truth in its most originary sense is for Heidegger the disclosure of time itself, as the "sense of being"; (2) "the basic phenomenon of time is [in turn] the future"; and (3) the future "is at bottom the 'becoming' exempli¤ed or, better, authenticated by a resolute anticipation of death."28 Truth for Heidegger is the disclosure of the authentic future. We can ®esh this out by noting that in Being and Time, death is the "possibility of no more possibilities." We do not know what death is or when it will come. But each of us knows that it is coming, sometime, whatever it is. Death, in short, is the ¤nal shapelessness (Gestaltlosigkeit) of our future (SZ 257–258). As such it determines, in its current absence and impending presence, the shape and scope of our lives right now. For our lives are shaped by the commitments we make, and it is the fact that we are going to die, at some unknown time, that requires us to make those commitments. If I were going to live forever, for example, I would not have to choose a life partner. I could marry every other member of the human race and live a hundred years with each—and when I had ¤nished 28 Reshaping Reason with that, there would be new humans to marry. Nor would I have to commit myself to a career, or to a community; I could be a Philadelphia lawyer for sixty or seventy years, then move into medicine in Houston or boxing in Marseilles for a couple of centuries, and then take up subsistence farming on the slopes of Mount Everest. It is because we are mortal that the major decisions we make require us to let some possibilities go past de¤nitively. Our unknown but impending future thus structures our present to its very core. Each of us, always, is feeling along the edge of something radically unknown but impending, and the necessity of that tâtonner is what it is to have what I will call an "authentic future." The future on this view is not something we describe or connect with, for there is nothing in it to be described or connected with. It is a gap which we open up. Such opening to futurity is how I cash out Dahlstrom's account of Heidegger's version of truth. It gets carried through in very diverse ways among Heidegger's many followers; I will discuss it in more detail in chapter 2. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Heidegger's Being and Time thus offer not global "theories of truth" which compete with established theories such as correspondence and coherence, but something else entirely. Their accounts are of goals for speci¤c forms of thought—in particular, for their own thinking—which are not reducible to "truth" in any of its traditional philosophical senses. Both philosophers say as much, but in a backhanded way not easily intelligible to English speakers. In accordance with much German philosophical usage, they use the word "correctness" (Richtigkeit) to cover the traditional senses of "true," and use "true" (Wahr) to designate their innovations.29 And under this name, both af¤rm the standard views of truth. As Hegel puts it, Historico-Philosophical Prologue 29 Philosophy must at least complain, where justi¤ed, about the false statement of the facts, and if one looks closely this species [of incomprehension] is, surprisingly, the most common, and sometimes attains unbelievable dimensions.30 For Hegel, then, the "phenomenological" concept of the truth of a thing as its proper relation to its past does not supplant the "ordinary" truth of sentences which state facts; it supplements it and even presupposes it (cf. CW 62–64). Heidegger is more succinct. Diese Angaben der Physik, he writes, sind richtig.31 To be sure, the disparity between Hegel's and Heidegger's innovations and the traditional concepts of truth is masked by their own repeated efforts to validate their own views as somehow more basic conceptualizations of truth than the standard variety, rather than as entirely different concepts. But in a later work, Heidegger repents: To raise the question of aletheia, of unconcealment as such, is not the same as raising the question of truth. For this reason it was inadequate and misleading to call aletheia, in the sense of opening, truth.32 And Hegel, in a spoken addendum to his lectures on logic, refers to his concept of truth as a "completely other" (ganz andere) meaning of the term. This expression is a telling one for a philosophy which takes nothing to be "completely other" to anything else.33 We now have two very different ways in which philosophers have taken truth out of the present tense. To anticipate chapter 2, the Hegelian approach seeks to reconstruct the relation of a philosophical unit—say, the notion of duty—to its past, by reconstructing a step-by-step process in which each stage solves a problem with the previous stage, and no other problems (explaining this in detail will 30 Reshaping Reason mark my return to the issue of the "appropriate way" in which something true relates to its past). Such "dialectical reconstruction" offers us not a truthful picture of how things actually happened, but a step-by-step account of how things currently around us now could have been rationally built up; it appeals to a notion of validity other than truth. Heidegger, by contrast (and in further anticipation of chapter 2), seeks to project a future for a philosophical unit—say, the fragment of Anaximander—by putting its old words together in new ways, appealing to meanings not usually attributed to this text, etc. (for details see MO 240–251). Both of these approaches, like all thought, make use of assertions claimed to be true and arguments constructed of them, but neither has establishing true sentences as its proper goal. This can be made evident if we take Hegel and Heidegger a second step forward and cease to call their innovative concepts by the name of "truth." In chapter 2, I will baptize the Hegelian and Heideggerean goals of discourse "Nobility" and "Appropriateness" respectively. Analytic, Continental I previously presented Fantasy Island and the Subversive Struggle as two con®icting dimensions of the contemporary philosophical personality, and viewing them in that way will be important to my upcoming argument about the emergence of what I call the "new philosophy." But one very traditional way of dealing with con®icts within one's psyche, of course, is to identify with one side in the con®ict, repressing the other or projecting it onto others. Philosophers who do this turn out to bear a high resemblance to what we know today as analytical and continental philosophers. This yields what amounts to a Historico-Philosophical Prologue 31 rather-too-neat interpretation of the analytical/continental distinction. Analytical philosophy, philosophy in the present tense, is on this view an approach to philosophy which renounces time itself, and with it leaves behind our lives and experiences in order to dwell alone—on Fantasy Island. The strictly philosophical price paid for this is that such philosophers are unable to distinguish between philosophical debates that originated only recently and debates that have been going on for centuries or even millennia, and which are therefore likely to be more important. (Recall the amount of thought and ink that went into the discussion of "sense-data" around the middle of the last century, and how quickly that whole issue evaporated.)34 This leads in turn not merely to philosophical prices, but to a personal fate. Those who do not ask themselves where their thinking can lead ¤nd, all too often, that it leads to nothing. Those who ignore the past inevitably join it and are ignored themselves. Continental philosophy, seeking to reinstate time, discovers that it must wriggle free of the static nature of the analytical present, and comes to struggle in the following way: Pursuing the truth of sentences, I have suggested, requires us to ignore the Before and After of those sentences. To pursue truth is then to pursue something timeless. The goal of a discourse, moreover, structures its nature in many ways (as Roger Scruton has noted in the case of truth),35 and so is "appealed to" constantly, if usually implicitly, by that discourse. Hence, if continental philosophers pursue sentential truth, they are making a structuring appeal to something timeless. To be consistent, they cannot take such truth as their overriding goal. But they have no other goal, as is shown by Hegel's and 32 Reshaping Reason Heidegger's inability, noted above, to use any word other than "truth" to denote their very different conceptions of the goal of philosophical thought. The extreme variance of these conceptions with more traditional concepts of truth is thus masked by the very word by which they call them. Because of that mask, those goals appear to be competing with truth as traditionally conceived, rather than complementing it. Pursuing either of them then requires, it appears, wholly abjuring such truth. And so even using the truth of sentences—by making those sentences premises or lines in our arguments, or ingredients in our descriptions—also requires us to ignore their Befores and Afters. Philosophers who accept this line of reasoning will be unable to appeal to true sentences as even the medium of their thinking. Continental philosophy so pursued is clearly going to be a most implausible enterprise, for in abandoning truth it must also abandon sentences. We are left with what Derrida calls a writing without presence, without absence, without history, without cause, without archê, without telos, absolutely deranging every dialectic, every theology, every teleology, every ontology.36 Continental philosophers do, of course, use and presuppose true sentences on every page of their writings. If it were not true, for example, that Hegel wrote the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Derrida could not deconstruct it in "Le puits et la pyramide."37 To be sure, establishing truths like that—or of any other kind—is not Derrida's goal. But true sentences must be among his tools, if he is to do anything at all. The problem is that neither Derrida nor any other "postmodern" philosopher, so far as I know, tells us why this is Historico-Philosophical Prologue 33 so (Heidegger laments it on one occasion).38 If they believe that sentence structure is dispensable and wrong, and have not dispensed with it, then they surely owe us just such an explanation. In its absence, the most charitable conclusion is that they do not see sentence structure— and, hence, some version of truth—as dispensable. They take it for granted, even as they try and go beyond it. In order to be true to our lives and experience, as opposed to pursuing "truth" within the horizon of a previous simpli¤cation/falsi¤cation, philosophy must become both postanalytical and metacontinental. "Postanalytical" in that the restriction of rationality to the present tense must be de¤nitively ended. "Metacontinental" in that thought's necessary inclusion of things like reference and truth must be re®ected upon, not merely indulged. Philosophy in Time: Postanalytic, Metacontinental This suggests a nicely inclusive view of philosophy. All our experience is in time, and time has three dimensions —past, present, and future. While it is possible to focus on any of these to the exclusion of the others,39 we should allow all of them to come forth in philosophy. To do otherwise is like stubbornly proffering drawings where statues alone will do. Only an approach which uni¤es analytic and continental philosophy in this sort of way can be true to the fact that we, as human beings, are inescapably and to our very cores "in time." But what is time? This seems to be a question for physicists and for philosophers of physics. But if time is a core constituent in the way we are, we have a primary relation to time that we can neither overcome nor escape. Whatever that rela- 34 Reshaping Reason tion to time may be, it is one basic determinant of the way we are. An investigation of that relation is thus an exercise in self-knowledge and requires knowledge of time, not merely as it is "in itself" apart from our minds, but of time as it operates within our fundamental relation to it. The ¤rst step in uncovering that relation is to investigate our experience of time—how time appears to us. Such an investigation is "phenomenological." It is quite possible, of course, that our relation to time, though basic to our natures, is somehow hidden from us—like the Freudian unconscious. In that case, our experience of time would disguise, rather than reveal, our real relation to it. But we can determine whether that is the case only if we ¤rst understand what time seems to be; we must begin with a re®ection on our experience of time. Such re®ection, according to Heidegger, is the job of phenomenology (cf. SZ 34–39). The next few pages will be devoted to a couple of phenomenological points about time. One way in which our traditional way of thinking about time distorts, if not time itself then our experience of it, can be made clear at the outset. Foucault is rumored to have once said that "two sexes are not enough; we need a thousand." Similarly, to be true to the ways in which time affects our knowledge of ourselves we would need, not three tenses (or a thousand), but six; for time as we live it out, and as it constitutes us, is experienced in (at least) six dimensions. Since three of these dimensions are largely unknowable and so ineffable, our languages have understandably dispensed with them. Insofar as our experience of time is shaped by our language, our "real" relation to time is indeed disguised (and other disguises are possible, though I will not pursue them here). Still, the other dimensions are quite accessible to attentive common sense—which is another name for "phenomenology." Historico-Philosophical Prologue 35 Two of these dimensions are commonly lumped together as "the past." My "past," in one sense, contains everything which has happened to me up to now. This past is, obviously, unknowable; to run through in memory everything which has happened to me in my ¤fty-nine years of life would, if performed ®awlessly, take another ¤fty-nine years. Since it is inherently unknowable in its totality, this past approximates what Kant would call a "thing in itself,"40 and I will call it "the past in itself." Out of the past in itself, then, I must create for myself a "usable past," the personal history which I use to "situate" myself, to determine where I am and what I am about in my life. Common sense tells us that the usable past is simply that part of the overall past which is known, but in fact there is abundant evidence that our mind is much more creative than that in constructing our usable past. We could hardly function if it were not. Much empirical research has con¤rmed that memory operates, not according to norms of truth, but as what Hegel, in his Philosophy of Spirit, calls Erinnerung (Werke X 258–262/203–206). It produces not faithful recollections of what "really" happened, but rationalized interpretations of it. As one contemporary researcher puts it, The interpretive mechanism . . . is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reason, even where there is none, which leads it to constantly make mistakes. It tends to overgeneralize, frequently constructing a potential past as opposed to a true one.41 Note the phrasing here. Our researcher clearly believes that the proper job of memory is to mirror the past, rather than to construct a usable past. That our mind has evolved to do the latter suggests, by contrast, that the search for "order and reason," rather than factual accuracy, is the 36 Reshaping Reason real job of memory; deviations from the actual facts are not "mistakes" or "overgeneralizations," but merely the way memory works. What we need for our lives, and all we can have, is what our researcher calls a "potential past"; a "true" one is not an option. (The construction of a usable past, along with the speci¤c sort of "order and reason" which philosophical memory uses to constitute this sort of past, will be discussed in chapter 2.) The past in itself and the usable past clearly differ from each other, and radically. The one is a set of brute givens; the other is constructed by me out of a small selection from those givens. The one is a mass of facts (Caesar stepped into the Rubicon and his sandals got wet and an attendant ran across the river with a fresh pair, etc., etc.); the other is an organized construct. The one cannot be known; the other is not only constructed by me in such a way as to be knowable, but is there as a basis for cognizing other things. For I become aware of my pen when I have decided that it is time to write a letter; I become aware of the gathering clouds when I have decided that it is time to go outside.42 My aim here is not to clarify the nature of these two pasts in any sort of detail. (In the case of the past in itself such clari¤cation is impossible, since that past is unknowable.) For the moment I wish simply to note that both sorts of past are there, and that temporalized philosophy must take account of their differences. There are also two senses of "future": the predictable future and the unpredictable future. This point is an obvious one—so obvious that we spend a lot of time trying to deny it. Even when we are at our most knowledgeable about how things are likely to turn out (and enormous amounts of effort and money go into this), the unpredictable future has a larger scope than we are comfortable Historico-Philosophical Prologue 37 with. Indeed, the very laws of nature, the most reliable of constants, are increasingly viewed by scientists as susceptible to change.43 There is, moreover, no way to be certain that the laws of logic themselves will not follow. It is quite possible that, as Nancy Cartwright has argued concerning the laws of physics, the laws of logic are really just a collection of templates for producing certain sorts of text.44 How can we be certain that students in logic classes 1000 years from now will learn things in any way resembling today's modus tollens or modus ponens? How can we be certain that the formulas inscribed on the ®aps of today's logic textbooks will not look to the thinkers of that time as Roman numerals look to us—as a collection of unbelievably clumsy and seriously misleading ways to do things? There are thus two futures: the one that is predictable because it looks pretty much the way the present and the past have looked; and the other one, about which we cannot speak because we know nothing—the "future in itself." The predictable future and the future in itself are as different from one another as the usable past and the past in itself, and for the same reasons: we create the predictable future in order to know and do other things, while the future in itself is neither made nor known by us. A genuinely temporalized thought must respect the difference between these two sorts of futures. The present, too, has two senses. There is the incredibly large set of things which are actually happening, just in my vicinity, at any given moment, far too large to be known and therefore constituting a "present in itself," and there is also the "presentable" present, the set of things of which I actually become aware—or had better become aware—in the course of my life. It is clear that the presentable present is conditioned 38 Reshaping Reason both by the past we construct and by the future we cannot predict. What we ordinarily notice, or need to notice, are the things going on around us which are relevant to the ongoing history we are constructing with our lives, to our usable past, and to the future we have conceptualized for ourselves. As with the past and the future, the present in itself and the presentable present are radically different from one another, and the index to that radicality is truth. For the concept of truth, in our everyday employment of it, brings the important lesson that things are not always what we assume them to be. Those assumptions are generally made on the basis of our usable pasts and predictable futures. I assume the eggs are fresh because I have gotten hungry and can predict that a nice dish of eggs will assuage that hunger. My presentable present thus includes fresh eggs. But the eggs in my refrigerator may not in truth be fresh; the world as it is, the present in itself, may not be amenable to my current projects. My need to know whether it is amenable is my need for truth. Truth so employed is not merely the excellence of cognition, then, but actually constitutes our experience of the present out of the interplay between what we would like to be the case, in virtue of our usable pasts and future projects, and what really is the case—the present understood as the Greek ta nun, the prevailing circumstances. The present as we experience it is thus not a primary given, but is the product of a six-way interplay between our pasts and our futures. To appreciate this is to admit in the most radical way that we are radically temporal beings. Only a philosophy which can accommodate this radical temporality—the fact that nothing is immune from time, that everything has a Before and an After that is different from its Now—can get philosophy beyond its in- Historico-Philosophical Prologue 39 creasingly debilitated oscillation between Fantasy Island and the Subversive Struggle. I suggested above that philosophy needs either to reconceptualize truth in more temporal terms or to go beyond "truth" altogether. Hegel and Heidegger did the former, but they were wrong to call their very different notions by the term "truth," as if they were offering new "theories of truth" to compete with more traditional ones. Perhaps, to be fair, that is what they thought they were doing. On my reading, however, they were broaching ways of relating to the past and future which have nothing to do with traditional senses of "truth." The differences between the past in itself and the usable past, between the future in itself and the predictable future, and between the present in itself and the presentable present, mean that the world we live in—the usable past, the predictable future, and the presentable present— cannot be gotten at by the traditional rules of truth alone. The world we live in does not mirror some given natural reality, but is constructed out of it by various principles of selection and ordering; these principles fall under the overall heading not of faithful replication of the givens or truth, but of the regulated construction I call "situating." The philosophical application of these principles, while not restricted to truth, is not a mere struggling. When the various pasts, presents, and futures are responded to in the proper way, three different "keys" of philosophical thinking are being played at once. When they function together, each according to its own rules, a new philosophy emerges. If this philosophy cannot give us an immovable crag to cling to when the seas of life fall upon us, it can at least—as Plato said—give us a raft on which to ride them (Phaedo 85d). This book will present what is, I maintain, a continua- 40 Reshaping Reason tion of analytical and continental philosophy, but some aspects of it will look quite odd to philosophers trained in both of those paradigms. A brief statement of some of the oddest of those aspects, together with the rationales for them, is then in order. In all cases, the alienating factor is the role of time in the emerging philosophy. Bivalence and the Present Bivalence is the view that any assertion is either wholly true or wholly false, that there are no third possibilities and no degrees. One of the great structuring principles of traditional philosophy, it is also a crippling one—for it tells us that if we do not get things wholly right, we have gotten them wholly wrong. The number of things we can hope to get wholly right is tiny—and the number of things we can know we have gotten wholly right is even smaller. Fortunately, bivalence is a fantasy; it exists only as a timeless ¤ction. Not only is ordinary language in general not bivalent, it has no "truth valence" at all. Though bivalence has ancestry going back to Aristotle, that ancestry is suspect. Aristotle's most rigorous de¤nition of truth states that when the separations and connections of things in my mind are the same as those existing in the objects I perceive, I have attained "truth."45 But separation and connection are matters of degree, as is sameness. In On Interpretation Aristotle puts the matter not in terms of sameness but in those of similarity: the things in my soul are "likenesses" ( homoiômata) of the things outside my soul (On Interpretation 1 16a7seq) and therefore can be more or less like them. Bivalence in its current, rigorous sense was introduced into philosophy by Russell and Frege, where it applied to—in fact, de¤ned—those strange, timeless entities called "propositions." As de¤nitive of propositions, it was merely asserted, not argued, to hold for them.46 Propositions, being timeless, could not change; nor could their truth values. Each was eternally true or eternally false. But Historico-Philosophical Prologue 41 when propositions, the notion of which was decidedly at variance with the Empiricist allegiances of analytical philosophy, were replaced by sentences, something rationally constructed was replaced by something empirical. The change was momentous. It was as if philosophers stopped arguing about essences and started arguing about horses; though no individual horse is a complete incarnation of what it is to be a horse, we can at least look at empirical instances of "horseness" and get an idea of what it is like. Bivalence ought at this point—for example, in the work of Quine—to have become a matter of empirical investigation. Philosophers should have looked at a large number of sentences and tried to establish whether they were bivalent or not. That no such investigation ever took place may owe something to the politics of the McCarthy era, which enjoined philosophers to view themselves as engaged in a "timeless, sel®ess, quest of truth" (cf. TD 39–42 and passim). But it may owe even more to the idea that bivalence was the necessary connection between logic and language—and to the obvious point that ordinary language, if tested for bivalence, would fail. Few notions, to begin with, as are entrenched in ordinary language as the notion of degrees of truth. Consider, for example, such locutions as "that is very true," "that is quite false," "that is not true at all," "that is really true," and "that is sort of true." Such expressions are quite common—far more common than the simple "that is true" or "that is false." It is hard to see why they would exist if English sentences were bivalent. Indeed, one could substitute "large" and "small" for "true" and "false" and the sentences above would all make sense; so why not see true and false as, like large and small, matters of something's position on a continuum? This accords with our intuitions that some sentences are falser than others. It is false to say that Lincoln was a Christian, but falser still to say he was a Catholic, and even falser to say he was a Nazi. Conversely, it is true that 42 Reshaping Reason Lincoln was an Illinoisan, but truer that he was an American. On another scale, it is true that there are more than ¤fteen pine trees in the Rocky Mountains, truer that there are more than a thousand, and truer still that there are more than a million. These facts about ordinary language can be explained (away) in only two ways. If the degrees are not in truth itself, but in actual sentences, they must have been put there either on the occasions of use, i.e., by the speaker, or as standing features of the language in question. In the former case, we could say that phrases such as I adduce above do not express degrees of truth, but degrees of con¤dence that the speaker has in the truth of what she is saying. In the latter, the lack of bivalence can be viewed as an imperfection in language itself, to be remedied by philosophers. Both of these approaches eventually land us back with propositions, i.e., with entities whose only job is to be true or false—for that is what will be left once we have abstracted away from things like speakers' attitudes and natural imperfections in language. But they have other problems than that. The degrees-of-con¤dence approach ignores the fact that English, like other natural languages, has plenty of ways for speakers to express degrees of subjective certainty or its lack; "that's absolutely true" means something quite different from "I am absolutely certain that that is true." The imperfection-of-language approach is a recommendation for philosophers that enjoins them to make use of formal logic in dealing with their problems, and it trades on a speci¤c notion of what a philosophical problem is. Philosophical problems, such as the mind/body problem or the existence of God or of other minds, are generally Historico-Philosophical Prologue 43 very old; they were being talked about and wrestled with long before modern logic had been invented.47 The terms in which they are couched are likewise very old, and most of them (like "mind," "body," "existence," "God," and even "problem") are multiply ambiguous. Before a given problem can even be stated in a logically correct language, those ambiguities must be resolved. Which means in turn that the problem itself cannot be solved—because we are always free to resurrect it using other meanings for its basic terms. Even if we run through all the possible meanings of each of those terms, new ones can always crop up, for words—like the rest of our world—change continually. One of the main engines of philosophical creativity, in fact, is coming up with new meanings for the words of some ancient problem—as when Saul Kripke rede¤ned "identity" and reopened the old problem of mind/body identity, which had been relegated to the list of exhausted topics.48 Bivalence, then, is not tenable, either as part of an account of how our languages actually operate, or as a feature of an arti¤cial language that would do for philosophy what arti¤cial languages are supposed to do: restate philosophical problems in a way suf¤ciently precise to enable them to be solved (or dissolved). Some of the main alternatives to bivalence partake of its problems. Trivalence, for example, is the view that there is a third option for sentences—they are true, false, or neither; it fails (or refuses) to capture degrees of truth at all. What I will call the "supervaluational" approach explicitly attempts to do this, because it assigns to each assertion a speci¤c degree—say, 60.437%—of truth. The problem with applying this to utterances in natural language is that such determinations cannot be made. For one thing, we do not, in conversation, have time to 44 Reshaping Reason make them. How would I determine the degree of truth in a sentence such as "The actions of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in covering up the abuse of children by priests are both reprehensible and stupid"? How can I even begin to determine it? What, indeed, is the degree of truth in "it's hot," or "it's 90°"? By the time I ¤nd out just how true even such a simple statement is, the conversation— even a typically glacial philosophical conversation—will have moved on. Supervaluation is a viable approach only if we forget about the timeliness of our speech. Furthermore, if we were able to determine the exact degree of truth of a given sentence, we would be returned to bivalence; "S is 60.437% true" would be bivalently true, or false. Otherwise, we would need to assign a degree of truth to it and would ¤nd ourselves in a regress, in which in order to ascertain the degree of truth of any sentence we must ¤rst ascertain the degree of truth of other sentences, including the one which speci¤es the degree of truth of the ¤rst sentence, and so on. A supervaluational approach thus becomes "untimely" indeed; it would take in¤nite time to determine the truth value of a single sentence. Finally, none of these approaches is adequate to one key aspect of the temporal nature of our experience: that things are constantly changing. Western thought about change is very old indeed, and there is a clear, though recently suspect, consensus that change is continuous. Something changes, that is, when it begins in state S and moves to state S′ by a continuous series of modi¤cations. For bivalence, however, such a process reduces to two stages: S and not-S. For trivalence, it has three: S, not-S, and neither. Bivalence cannot "accommodate" a movement from 30° to 70° because the only kind of change it recognizes is Historico-Philosophical Prologue 45 from 30° to not-30°. Trivalence could do no better. The idea that changes could be strung together so that a sentence correctly describing the ¤rst sta