Record: 1 Title:

Analytics, continentals, and modern skepticism [a]. Authors:

Pinkard, Terry Source:

Monist; Apr99, Vol. 82 Issue 2, p189, 29p Document Type:

Article Subject Terms:

*ANALYSIS (Philosophy) *PHILOSOPHY, European *SKEPTICISM

Abstract: Argues that there is a common experiential core at work in analytic and continental philosophy, and that much of what motivates both analytical and continental philosophy is a similar and very particularly modern sense of skepticism. Distinctions between analytical and continental philosophy; Development of post-Kantian German idealism; Philosophy in a university context.

Full Text Word Count: 12687

ISSN: 00269662

ANALYTICS, CONTINENTALS, AND MODERN SKEPTICISM [A] By now "continental" philosophy has long since ceased to be a geographical term; there are "continental" philosophers in the Midwestern United States. Likewise, "analytical" philosophy is now widely practiced in most areas where academic philosophy is practiced. Moreover, many of the old jabs at each side have lost much of their force. The idea of a pox on both their houses--that analytical philosophers are a bunch of small-minded logic choppers, and continental philosophers are a bunch of wooly minded gasbags--has long since failed to carry the punch it once did. What I want to suggest here is that they are both the same type of philosophy in one crucial, determining aspect: That one of the key experiences of modem philosophy, maybe even the great motivating experience of modem philosophy, is that of a certain type of skepticism, the idea that "we" both collectively and individually are prone to fool ourselves, be misled by conclusions that are attractive but unsupportable, or be misled even by our own experience and ways of thought to come to conclusions that turn out later to be insupportable. Certainly something like this underwrites the motivational power in those parts of contemporary philosophy that can be called "analytic" or are at least inspired by the analytical philosophers of the first two thirds of the twentieth century. Why else the careful attention to argument, the constant recasting of theses so

that their implications can be better viewed, the deep ethos of attacking papers given by colleagues with a barrage of counter-examples, and of subjecting our colleagues to ruthless, sometimes unforgiving examination? What often seems perhaps petty to those more irritated than enlightened by analytic philosophy--that it is only tedious logic-chopping or "academic in the worst sense" niggling--is inspired by a brooding sense of skepticism, a sense that without such very intensely rigorous policing of our arguments and our explications, we are simply too prone to slide off into assertions that feel good, that may even seem to some of us like really very deep matters, but which, alas, may on closer inspection or in the light of later hindsight just turn out to be dreadfully false. Better to jump on the arguments now than to be embarrassed by them later.

What I am proposing here is that there is a common experiential core at work in analytic and continental philosophy, and that much of what motivates both analytical and continental philosophy is a similar and very particularly modem sense of skepticism--one that shares with its classical counterparts a certain experience of having "gotten it wrong" but which is articulated in a much different institutional and cultural context than classical skepticism. In fact, I would suspect that any academic philosopher who has gotten this far has already started to raise several worthy questions in his or her own mind. Shouldn't we be skeptical about such large-scale distinctions as "analytical" and "continental" in the first place? After all, was Wittgenstein, an Austrian teaching in Great Britain, a "continental"? Was Karl Popper, another Austrian, not a "continental"? Why is the Vienna Circle not counted as part of "continental" philosophy? Why is Frege an honorary Anglo-American?

What is the difference? When people speak of "continental philosophy," they generally mean all those parts of philosophy that were influenced by and took themselves to be responding to German post-Kantian philosophy (whether they were Germans themselves, or French, or Russians teaching in France). The beginning of "continental" philosophy in this sense thus has to do with Kant's legacy. Kant is the last figure to be shared by both the so-called "analytical" and "continental" traditions (although he actually joined the canon in American philosophy relatively late), and it is with Fichte and Mill that the break occurs.l Out of Mill comes a long line of Anglophone thought; out of Fichte comes a long line of "continental" thought. Neither tradition relies much on the concerns or language of the other. Neither, so it seems, really has much use for the other. For various cultural reasons, many of them of philosophical importance themselves, the post-Fichtean line of thought was taken up on the "continent" and the post-Millian line of thought was taken up in Britain, the United States, and other Anglophone countries.

What is most striking historically about both traditions is that both of them failed rather spectacularly to accomplish what the founders of those traditions set out to do: Make philosophy into something like a "science" on a par with mechanics and physics. The young Russell was quite clear in his ambitions to make philosophy into a rigorous science that could take its place alongside the other sciences in the university and could proudly say that, just like physics, it had finally solved certain problems and was now working on solutions to others. Likewise, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel each claimed that their systems were "sciences" (at least in the sense of Wissenschaft) and deserved a place at the table at the newly reformed modern universities alongside the other sciences.

What I want to propose here is that we can trace a line of intellectual heritage in both traditions to thinkers who, while each being revered in their own traditions, eventually declared that ambition on the part of academic philosophy to become a "science" to be a spectacular failure. Wittgenstein was the end of one line of thought; Heidegger of the other. In some ways, thinking about the purpose or value of "continental" philosophy thus requires us to evaluate that line of thought and how successful we take Wittgenstein's and Heidegger's results to be. I want to suggest-and in the confines of a short essay, it can be little more than a suggestion, not in any way a full-blown argument--that there's both more and less to the story than many of its adherents have taken it to be.

I shall tell a large-scale story about these traditions that will violate, at least at the outset, some of the canons of analytical philosophy. I shall come back at the end to say why violating those canons should be taken seriously.

Idealism's Move: the "I-We" Problem

To look at idealism's trajectory, it is perhaps helpful to begin with what has come to be virtual orthodoxy among a huge segment of contemporary American philosophers. It is now commonplace to recite the lines that all epistemic claims are in principle revisable, that reliance on any type of "given" in the justification of knowledge is in principle a doomed project, and the image of Neurath's boat has become the metaphor of choice: We are at sea, and we must repair the boat while we are underway without ever being able to put into dry-dock. The metaphor is supposed to highlight that what counts for us as "given" can only be provisional, and in principle we can always throw any claim into question although not the whole epistemic scheme at once. Ultimately, what we decide to keep and what we decide to jettison can only be determined by some reference to what our interests are, what can help us along our metaphorical voyage.

But there are a number of questions that could be asked about the metaphor, such as: How are orders given on the ship? Do we have any idea where the ship is going? Or is it just on a meaningless voyage?[2] More to the point, though, we might ask: Who is the "we" in the phrases, "we can throw anything into question," "we have to decide what can provisionally count as given," and so on. The quick answer--it's just us--will not quite do, since it seems that the "we" here is serving in a kind of normative capacity, as a final self-reflexive arbiter for what will count and what will not count "for us." It is probably the case that not everyone who uses the metaphor thinks that everything really is provisional; they do not really mean that we are the final arbiters, but instead mean that there is indeed something else constraining our decisions and choices which is not itself a matter of choice or decision, such as the "rules of rationality" or even some brute interests that perhaps are supposedly as unalterable and unmovable as sense data used to be said to be. Maybe so, but the metaphor itself quite clearly suggests that there are no constraints except for the ones "we" put upon ourselves, that everything can be thrown into question, that all "our" claims and procedures are only provisional, even if some things by now seem fairly well set into place.

Thus, it seems that the following alternative is being suggested to us: Either the "we" that is behind these claims is just "us" taken as a contingent collection of individuals and whatever "we" decide to say is in order; or the "we" that is behind these claims and revisions is some kind of idealized "we," not the empirical "we" that might be the object

of sociological or psychological study. It seems unlikely to be the former, for that would be the kind of full fledged relativism that most of the proponents of the metaphor would be at pains to deny, although some people (such as Richard Rorty) seemed to have bitten the bullet on that one and decided that issues of rationality are really just matters settled by some kind of brute cultural fiat, what we have just happened to find ourselves accepting. However, to others it does not quite seem plausible to say that what we are entitled to say depends entirely on what we say we are entitled to say, since it also seems to beg the whole issue about who is getting to say this, and how it could be that "we" (or whoever it is) could bestow that kind of normative status on its own utterances. But if it is not that, in what sense could it be an "idealized" we?

This problem was central to those dealing with the aftermath of Kantian transcendental philosophy, with the ensuing problems that arose when the post-Kantian idealists, particularly Fichte and Schelling, tried to come to terms with what an idealist position would look like if we dropped Kant's notion of "unsynthesized intuitions"--that is, dropped Kant's idea that there could be a "given" element in knowledge that played an epistemic, normative role in putting constraints on what we could assert or that knowledge consisted in the application of some conceptual "form" to some neutral sensuous "content."[3] As Robert Pippin has argued, the problem of the intrinsic revisability of all epistemic claims made its first and most forceful appearance in Fichte's attempts to complete the Kantian project without reliance on anything like unsynthesized intuitions.[4] Although Fichte's way of putting the point may not have been the most perspicuous, what he was after in the way he spoke of how the "I" posits both the not-I and itself as positing the not-I was some way to highlight the core idea that the inherent revisability of all epistemic claims throws us back into questions about the nature and status of that which is doing the revising and evaluating in the first place, and if we are to accept nothing as epistemically "given," including the experience of the self itself (the experience of our own activities of revising and holding fast to some claims), then we need to have some such conception of how the "I" that does this ever gets going in the first place and how, after getting going, it manages to orient itself, to figure out where it is going. That in trying to formulate such issues matters get a little out of sorts and the language that is used itself becomes a bit forced is perhaps not surprising.

Pragmatism in many fundamental ways grew out of the set of problems that the idealists had put on the table. The pragmatists, at least in their Peircean and Deweyian branches, took themselves to have resolved Fichte's dilemma without having to engage in the kind of intellectual acrobatics so characteristic of German idealism. For them, knowledge was to be conceived as a self-correcting, communal enterprise; we always begin from where we are, and we correct bits and pieces of the edifice as we are going along; our criteria for doing so has to do with what satisfies our interests, and our interests themselves change over time as we develop new means of satisfying them.

Dewey especially argued that the original idealist issue--Kant's notion of the conditions of the possibility of our experience--had already begged the question, since it both presupposed a certain description of experience and left unclear just whose experience we were describing; moreover, Dewey argued, experience itself had changed in light of the changes in modernity itself. [5] The Peirce-Dewey line of pragmatists thus concluded that once we abandoned the idea that there are certain, "given" epistemic constraints on our evaluative practices that we apprehend in some spectator-like fashion,

we then see that it is up to us to set the norms ourselves, and that the norms of inquiry, of morals, of religious observance, and even of aesthetic appreciation should be those that satisfied our needs and interests. Having given up on the older metaphysical conceptions of truth as correspondence with reality, these pragmatists held that what we count as true is in some sense relative to the interests with which we are describing reality or gauging our actions or emotions. The pragmatist account of truth, as Richard Rorty puts it, must therefore not be "something that clears up all the difficulties or removes all the obscurities that have ever been, or ever will be, connected with the topic, but as something useful in clearing up our difficulties and removing our obscurities. If one says that one's theory of truth works better than any competing theory, one will be saying that it works better by reference to our purposes, our particular situation in intellectual history."[6] Behind this is the conviction, as Rorty puts it, that "[i]t pays us to believe this because we have seen the unhappy results of believing otherwise . . . and we must now try to do better."[7] The pragmatists, we might say, substituted a "we" with its thick, determinate interests for Fichte's abstract "I," and never saw a need to look back.

It is, however, the "we" and the "must" in Rorty's revealing phrase, "we must now try to do better" that are the hardest parts to get a grip on. Who is the "we" there and why really must we get straight on these things? The problem for the pragmatists of determining our "interests" threatened to get just as out of hand as had the problems of the "I" and the "we" for the idealists. What actually were "our interests" (or our "legitimate" interests)? Were our "legitimate" or "fundamental" interests to be set by other, more basic interests? What set those? Small wonder that the early pragmatists were drawn to the naturalistic conception of "life" as setting those interests, as there just being certain basic, foundational interests that just were our interests. Period. Small wonder, too, that their critics found their conception of "fundamental interests" to beg the question, and that Dewey found himself giving a rather expansive notion of "life" and "experience" as he developed his thought.

To get a handle on the pragmatist dilemma, we must keep in mind just what was going on when the German idealists put the problem on view in the first place. Fichte had tried to resolve the post-Kantian problem by showing that the "I" needed to posit certain very specific, very determinate kinds of items in order to be the kind of "I" that was capable of such activities of positing and self-positing in the first place. Part of the overwrought language in which German idealism at first expressed itself had to do with how these self-imposed requirements could be shown to be both self-imposed and nonetheless also be requirements. The pragmatists tried to dissolve that problem by simply dropping the notion of a priori requirements altogether in favor of a more developmental, organic conception of the way knowledge develops in the context of human life and its own developing interests.[8] But the "we" remained fundamental to their concern, even if hidden, since it functioned normatively. What counts as a legitimate interest can only be something that "we" decide; what counts as self-correcting is a status that "we" impose on the evolving structure of knowledge; and unless there are some brute normative facts or normative givens or simply interests whose value or force takes them out of the revisionary game, whatever constraints there are must therefore be self-imposed constraints that "we" put on ourselves, and we are thus back once again into Fichte's dilemma. What determines what "we" do? Mere fiat? Or does it depend on another "interest"?

Enter Hegel. To the young Hegel just embarking on his career as an academic philosopher, it seemed clear that the idealist project had landed itself in an acute dilemma. On the one hand, the standard for assessing one's individual judgments had to be something that would transcend one's own particular, subjective grasp of what it is that one is doing when one asserts a proposition or acts on the basis of an ethical norm; for me to be able to make judgments that can be fight or wrong in the first place, I must be able to orient myself vis-a-vis something that transcends my own judgmental activities in order to be able to legitimate the particular judgments I make. On the other hand, it was unclear what that standard could even be for the idealists once they had rejected all "givens" and made all claims intrinsically revisable.

Hegel saw that this was coupled with another set of dilemmas that the idealists inherited from Kant. The post-Kantian idealist program had been largely driven by the idea that the legitimacy of all our epistemic claims does not rest on a mere apprehension of objects (either platonically conceived or otherwise) but on the results of our taking them to be such-and-such. The necessity of our taking them to be such-and-such meant that subjectivity was intrinsically involved in the legitimation of all epistemic, ethical, religious, and aesthetic judgments. For the idealists, though, this element of subjectivity was not to be construed as the apprehension of some range of interior thoughts or experiences or sensations but had to be construed, as Kant had argued, as a subjective point of view. For me to be aware of anything at all, I must be able to constitute myself as a formal, unified point of view on the world, an "I" that signifies the unity of a single point of view of a consciousness of myself and the world around me. My experience of objects themselves depends on my constituting myself as such a subjective point of view (or what Fichte came to call "self-positing").

But my subjective point of view on the world was also possible only insofar as I also understood myself from an objective point of view as one object among many in the world, and both points of view must be combined in one consciousness. Schelling therefore argued that the point of view that combined the subjective and objective points of view had to be something that was neither subjective nor objective but, in a sense, both, and could on that account only be cognitively grasped in an act of "intellectual intuition." For Schelling, this unity of the subjective and objective points of view formed the standard, the orienting point around which we were to legitimate our own empirical judgments, and he took to calling it the "absolute." For us to be aware of this "absolute," however, we had to think of it as neither purely subjective--not something having to do with our own distinctive points of view on the world--nor objective, not as a non-perspectival nature, as something having no "center," no point of view (or of being apprehended from the "view from nowhere," to appropriate Thomas Nagel's phrase); instead, we had to see it as the "world soul," which included a re-enchanted nature that somehow generates our own points of view within itself and that constitutes itself as manifesting itself to us.[9] For us to be able to form such judgments about "subjective" and "objective" points of view in the first place, we must already have a pre-reflective orientation to a "totality" that is in itself the unity of those points of view without being reducible to either of them.

Schelling's solution, however romantically inspired it seemed to be, also seemed to beg a crucial question on its own, since it rested everything on an "intellectual intuition" that suspiciously looked like exactly the kind of "given" that idealism had rejected, on something that was not in itself revisable and whose normative status therefore had to

derive not from our taking it to have a certain normative status but because of some kind of status that it has on its own or that it somehow gives itself. (Indeed, for reasons like this, Schelling found himself more and more affirming the idea that there was necessarily something beyond discursive articulation that pre-reflectively sets the terms for orientation in our experience, which he took to referring to simply as Sein, "being."[10])

Hegel's own tentative reformulation of this part of the idealist project--of the move from the "absolute I" to a conception of a "we"-surfaced in the first systematic works he produced: the 1801 The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy and the 1802 essay, "Faith and Knowledge," in which he appropriated some of Kant's ideas from the Critique of Judgment for his own ends.[11] Hegel found there what he thought was an idealist model of how we would revise and legitimate our judgments in light of something other than the givens of sensibility or anything like some kind of non-discursive "intellectual intuition" of the absolute which Schelling had championed. He extracted this idea from his reading of sections 76-77 of Kant's Critique of Judgment, namely, from Kant's claim that our aesthetic judgments are always normative and made in light of a prior orientation towards a whole that consists in the "Idea" of a mutual comparison of judgments in light of what we take other rational beings to be doing.[12] Kant distinguished teleological from aesthetic judgments by arguing that teleological judgments involve claims that an object is as it ought to be in fulfilling its purpose (his example was the eye), whereas aesthetic judgments--claims that something is beautiful--involve making a judgment that others should judge it as I do, that is, that the object ought to be judged as I judge it. One cannot state a rule for this, except to say that others ought to judge as I judge (a normativity that he calls "exemplary" necessity[13]). The pleasure that comes from aesthetic judgments is therefore attendant on my understanding that my own cognitive powers are working rightfully, that I am "getting it right." Kant notes that in such judgments, I am presupposing that my own subjective tastes (that is, judgments) are also universal, or at least universally communicable, which means that in making the self-referential (exemplary) normative judgment that others ought to judge as I do (and hence come to feel the same aesthetic pleasure that I do), I am also making the normative judgment that I ought to be judging as others (who have taste) do. In particular, Hegel must have been struck by the passage in the Critique of Judgment in which Kant says: "Instead, we must [here] take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by all of us], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else's way of representing [something], in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones.., we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and [thus] put ourselves in the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that [may] happen to attach to our own judging."[14]

Hegel took this as Kant's having committed himself, however unconsciously, to the notion that in making aesthetic judgments, we are necessarily engaged in adjusting our own judgments of tastes in terms of what others ideally would do and of making normative demands on others as to what kinds of judgments they therefore should make. We are therefore presupposing that an idealized community of rational beings

must mutually adjust their own judgments of taste if they are to maintain the normative force of their own aesthetic judgments.

Hegel took Kant in the Critique of Judgment to be offering a model for two things: First, of how the notion of an application of a conceptual form to a neutral content was itself only a derivative way of talking about a more fundamental notion of our already orienting ourselves in light of some "totality" that determined the kinds of activity that are at work in taking up the so-called "givens" of sense; and, second, of how the legitimation of a particular judgment would not lie in its relation to some platonic object or "intellectual intuition" of the absolute but in a relation to something like other judgments themselves--but not simply other judgments that I, as this particular individual, would make but judgments that we ideally would make. Moreover, as Hegel also gradually came to think, it was not through apprehending the idealized set of judgments in some kind of "intellectual intuition" that we could legitimate our own judgments but by the practical activity of (in Kant's words) comparing "our judgment[s] not so much with the actual as rather with merely possible judgments of others, and [putting] ourselves in the position of everyone else." Hegel took this to supply an alternative idealist model for what the idealists took to calling the Idea of such a community of judgers; we need such Ideas, as Kant put it, "for orientating ourselves in thought-i.e., in the immeasurable space of the super-sensory realm which we see as full of utter darkness--purely by means of the need of reason itself."[15]

Moreover--in a footnote that Hegel does not cite, but which we can be relatively certain that he neither overlooked nor failed to be impressed by--Kant himself suggested that this conception might cover not just conditions of aesthetic judgment but political and social practice as well. In that note, he spoke of how the idea of teleological judgment could be extended to the social realm (citing, in particular, what seems to be the example of the American Revolution): "On the other hand, the analogy of these direct natural purposes can serve to elucidate a certain association [among people], though one found more often as an Idea than in actuality: in speaking of the complete transformation of a large people into a state, which took place recently, the word organization was frequently and very aptly applied to the establishment of legal authorities, etc. and even to the entire body politic. For each member in such a whole should indeed be not merely a means but also an end; and while each member contributes to making the whole possible, the idea of that whole should in turn determine the member's position and function."[16]

Hegel clearly wanted to extend these ideas: The "kingdom of ends," Kant's famous phrase for one of the formulations of the categorical imperative, seemed to be at work in determining what kinds of activities can normatively "count" in the taking up of a manifold of sense in the first place. Hegel united Kant's notion of the irreducible spontaneity at work in human experience with the notion of a pre-reflective self-situating, a fundamental orientation as having a historical and social foundation. It was humanity, Geist, our own modes of "like-mindedness" that was orienting itself in history, able to draw on nothing except what had come to be determinately required of it by virtue of the insufficiencies of its own past.

That too also seemed to generate at least as many questions as it answered. In Hegel's treatment, this practical activity of comparing our judgments leads to some kind of decisive reconciliation of modern life with itself, but what Hegel found potentially

reconciling in modern life quickly came to seem to his successors as disenchanting, unsatisfactory, and in need of fundamental revision or rejection. In Marx's case, there was a conception of a new and finally decisive revolution that would set things aright. However, to others, what seemed to be at work in Hegel's social and historical account of orientation was some perhaps hidden conception of which essential interests guide that activity of comparing judgments, and what suggested itself was the idea that the judgments that survive that process of criticism are the ones that best satisfy those essential interests.[17] After all, crucial to Hegel's view was that we could not understand what it was we were doing individually in our judging activities without some grasp of what it was that we were trying collectively to accomplish. From that kind of consideration, Dewey's style of pragmatism arose out of the results of German idealism. Or so it might seem.

Russell's and Wittgenstein's Moves: The "I-We" Problem

The young Bertrand Russell found himself in an environment where the British idealists to his ears talked far too glibly about the "absolute" and the ways in which all particularities seem to vanish into it, and to him such talk seemed out of place in a twentieth-century context. Although Russell himself would never put it in this way, he was living in what we might tendentiously describe as a post-Nietzschean era. Nietzsche had in many ways called idealism's bluff, and Russell was determined to call its bluff in his own way. The idealists had certainly taken on the problem of revisability and in the hands of Hegel, that program had turned into a Wissenschaft that was supposed to anchor the modern university. The idea of the modern university was born in Germany coextensively with the rise of idealism in exactly the same place, and it is not entirely an accident that the first great modern university at Berlin that was dedicated to "teaching and research," to bringing out young minds into an institution staffed by the leading "researchers" and "scientists" of the day, was also the university where Hegel made his fame. If modern life in Kant's words had called on us to "think for ourselves," the modem university had grown up in response to that demand. The young men and women of Hegel's generation, living in the times of the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic wars, had a sense of themselves as leading unprecedented lives, as having to find ways to live for which their parents' lives gave little guidance. They were all especially attracted to the idea of an institution that was dedicated to resolving those modern problems by the power of thought and knowledge, not by resting on the deliverances of tradition and orthodoxy. The university was to replace the church as the central authoritative body in modem society, and what was to give it that authority was its claim to be staffed by people who knew things, whose training in the "sciences" gave them possession of special methods and credentials that were supposed to enable them to get to the core of the problems that were emerging for modem societies and to offer what were the best bets for resolving those problems.[18]

There was of course the sticky issue of what to do about what we might loosely call the "humanities" in such a thoroughly modem institution. Fichte provided an early and, for a while at least, decisive answer to that: The philosopher was to be the intellectual figure who would be the linchpin of the modem university. The modem university was to be the key institution in a society where the structure of authority had decisively shifted away from conceptions of a fixed divine order, a natural way of marking out social order, or an appeal to hallowed and sacrosanct tradition; instead, the shift had to do with what we could establish for ourselves, unaided by the divine order or tradition,

guided by only where our own "thought" and capacities for knowledge would take us. This "modern" order thus rested its claims to legitimacy and allegiance on the idea that it was a "new beginning," that it involved a freedom, a self-determination on its own part that cut it free from the dogmas of tradition and ecclesiastical edicts. If the American revolt and the French Revolution promised us that we could start all over again and set our own fate, the modem university promised that it could institutionalize this form of self-determination, make itself and the people who came through it be guided only by the ideal of determining what is true, irrespective of how the answers shook themselves out of such inquiry. As it took shape in Germany, the philosophical faculty (what we now call in North America the "arts and sciences') and most especially the "philosophers" on that faculty were thus to provide the rest of the university (typically, medicine, law, and theology) with the kind of orientation that it needed, namely, the orientation that comes from the free exercise of our reason itself, not from dependence on sources outside ourselves. To put the matter anachronistically: If ecclesiastical tradition said that Darwinian evolution went against dogmatic teaching, so much the worse for dogmatic teaching; if the evidence was in favor of evolution, the modem university would have to accept it and teach it, since it was up to the free-thinking "scholars," the pursuers of Wissenschaft, to determine where the evidence took them and where it did not. The philosophers, laying down the guidelines for reason itself, would be, as Fichte liked to put it, the new priests of truth.

By the time Russell came on the scene, philosophy was still making that claim, but it was woefully falling short. The kind of puffed-up idealism with which Russell contended in his youth seemed destined (to Russell and people like him) to drive philosophy out of the university rather than preserve its status as the first among the disciplines of the "arts and sciences." The young Russell thus embarked on a heroic effort to rescue philosophy, to give it a truly "scientific" form; and it is really very striking how he did not construe this attempt at making philosophy into a science in any kind of "experimental" fashion. Instead, he took it as a foundational enterprise exercising a particular method that would at long last allow it to definitively solve problems and set out research paradigms. Drawing on the older disputes between the "synthetic" continental and the "analytic" British mathematicians (a dispute going back to that between Leibniz and Newton about who founded the calculus), Russell called his new method "analytic" philosophy. Its paradigm was Russell's analysis of numbers into classes: The number 2 was the set of all two-numbered sets, and a two-membered set could be defined in a way that never mentioned, "two" or even numbers at all.[19] That analysis was clearly successful (even if it left lots of other questions unanswered); and most significantly, it promised that it just might be possible to do the same with many types of crucial philosophical notions such as knowledge, belief, truth, even ethical notions such as goodness, rightness, rights, and so on. Russell's heroic attempt to keep philosophy at center stage in modem universities and hence in modem culture by converting it away from the high-flying language of idealism towards a more austere, pristine logical language was, as we all know by now, to have enormous repercussions.

Enter Wittgenstein. At first he was attracted to Russell's program. If we could understand a sentence, we had to understand its parts, and it seemed therefore that there had to be a stopping point, a piece of bedrock, where we grasped the meaning of a part that was not itself composed of other parts. (Otherwise, to understand even a simple sentence we would have to grasp an infinite number of things.) Thus, the whole notion of understanding a proposition implied that there were atomic simples out of which

propositions were to be constructed according to syntactical rules that could themselves be rendered fairly precise. The meaning of such propositions could be seen to be constituted by the way that the formal arrangement of the parts of the proposition pictured the formal arrangement of the atomic simples that it pictured. Even ordinary language, with all its messiness and ambiguity, could ideally be reconstructed into such a perspicuous representational language, since the understanding of ordinary language, despite all its inherent messiness, itself still presupposed a grasp of the parts out of which the messy whole was constructed.

However, Wittgenstein came to rethink that program in large measure--although this interpretation of Wittgenstein's "turn" is not itself uncontroversial--because he thought that the "picture theory" that had emerged out of it was incapable of understanding some more basic elements of what was involved in the grasp of a sentence. What Wittgenstein found lacking in his early work (any by extension in the classical forms of "analytic" philosophy) can be illustrated in Wittgenstein's well known discussions of rule-following in ???139-242 of his Philosophical Investigations, where the same problems of "I" and "we" that worried the idealists appear again. Wittgenstein is concerned in those passages with what is involved in understanding a rule, in being able to "carry on" as the rule dictates. On the one hand, there is the subjective comprehension of a term as grasping the use of it, in Wittgenstein's words, "in a flash," and he notes, "And that is just what we say we do. That is to say: we sometimes describe what we do in these words. But there is nothing astonishing, nothing queer, about what happens. It becomes queer when we are led to think that the future development must in some way already be present in the act of grasping the use and yet isn't present."[20] But such a subjective comprehension "in a flash" of what a rule requires itself also nonetheless requires that it be legitimated by something else; the subjective understanding of what the rule requires is not enough to legitimate an individual's claim to be following the rule. A merely subjective comprehension of the rule can lead the agent, in Wittgenstein's famous example, to continue some elementary act of following a rule--such as counting numbers--in a way that clearly contravenes what we would count as following the rule. The question which perplexed Wittgenstein was whether the mere fact (however we might determine that so-called fact) that we would not count it as "following the rule" on its own normativity excludes that speaker's sense of what the rule "requires."

Wittgenstein concluded that reflection on rule-following inevitably leads to the conclusion that no particular interpretation (Deutung) of the rule can be privileged, since "every interpretation (Deutung), together with what is being interpreted, hangs in the air; the former cannot give the latter any support."[21] for us to fix our interpretations of the rule, there must therefore be "a way of grasping the rule which is not an interpretation but which is exhibited in what we call following the rule and going against it in actual cases,"[23] and this is called by Wittgenstein a "practice,"[24] something into which we must be "trained."[25] Thus, we orient our particular judgments about what the rule means and requires of us (if we are to follow it) not merely by our subjective comprehension of the rule nor by some intuition that would fix the meaning of the rule--an "unnecessary subterfuge," as Wittgenstein calls such an appeal to intuition[26]--but ultimately by what Wittgenstein calls "the common human mode of action [as] the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language."[27] He characterizes this "common human mode of action" as a "form of life": "It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but form of life."[28] Behind the universal

structure of the human form of life there is nothing else more normatively fundamental; or, in another well known formulation by Wittgenstein, this means simply that "[i]f I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do'."[29]

Wittgenstein thus seems to want to hold that a fully groundless belief in a universal "form of life" for all humans is what orients our judgings--a belief which is neither self-evident, for which no further reasons can be given, and which is nonetheless not optional--and that we should presume that this is fundamentally non-historical in character. What interests guide our decisions about whether judgments even make sense are just given by this inevitably vague sense of the "common human mode of action"; beliefs about it at best are very general, and the objects of these beliefs are only natural facts about humankind. Like the early pragmatists and the idealists themselves, Wittgenstein attempted to shift the idea of what it is to have a mind into a more adverbial mode; to have a mind is to be able to engage in certain practical projects, just as to speak a language is to "master a technique" rather than to have certain subjective thoughts clearly present to one's so-called mental gaze.[30] To borrow Jonathan Lear's phrase: For Wittgenstein, our own individual mindedness presupposes a like-mindedness on the part of others.[31] We cannot know simply on our own if we are "getting it right"--know whether we are following the rule in the right way, know whether we are carrying on our activities in the right manner--without some appeal to others, without comparing our subjective judgments with those of others. Those others must likewise compare their judgments with our own, and unless the community is simply able to declare by fiat which judgments are right and wrong, there must be something shared among all those present, and, so Wittgenstein thought we had to admit, that can only be the general "form of life," the "common human mode of action [as] the system of reference" by which we orient ourselves.

That would be, as Wittgenstein somewhat oracularly says, "not agreement in opinions"--that is, not the result of some kind of communal fiat, some decision that such-and-such is the right thing to do--"but in forms of life," which as he also notes, is "agreement . . . in judgments."[32] The "common human mode of action," the human "form of life" is the "whole" in terms of which we locate our individual judgments in order to secure them as meaningful and as right. The human form of life is normatively authoritative for us although in a groundless fashion; we cannot give any further normative account of that form of normative authority but it is also not something (supposedly) just "given" to us; it itself requires constant re-articulation as to what its demands are. To make this point, Wittgenstein brings to bear examples of mythical tribes who do things in extremely odd ways (count, measure, and so on) to point out to his readers that what is mystifying about these mythical tribes is not that there is some "metaphysical fact" that these tribes are overlooking but that we simply cannot form any conception about why they would want to do that thing that way; we cannot understand what they could care about that would lead them to carry on as they do.[33]

But this kind of appeal to interests as a last resort, a groundless appeal to what we need and what we care about, is not itself so clear. First, aside from a few very general interests (and even those are up for grabs), it is not clear which interests and which specifications of our own interests are to be or ought to be authoritative for us. Second, it is not clear if there can be such a thing as a groundless interest that is immune to criticism. For example, I might want, groundlessly, to continue living, but I can always

ask myself if I ought to want to continue living. Nor do what are called second-order desires help in resolving this point. I might want a cigarette, might want not to want a cigarette, might want that I did not have such second-order wants, since they interfere with my natural inclinations, might think that I ought not to want that I want my first-order wants to be overridden by second-order wants and so on. The layers of reflexivity and cross-reference among desires can be piled up on top of each other, and behind all those layers of wants and wants about wants is the "I" that is doing the revising and which can always evaluate which desires ought to coincide with which interests. This is not to deny that there can be interests that function in many situations as groundless interests, but they would be like any other "givens": They would be only provisionally fixed, something that we have taken for the moment off the agenda, not items that are immune to all criticism.

Third, and most important, given the complexity and shiftiness of the idea of a groundless interest, issues of power and authority lie hidden in the background of such an appeal to them. If what is authoritative are our interests, and what counts as our fixed interests is indeed provisional, then it is fair to ask who or what is or even could be authoritative in determining and specifying just what those fixed interests are.

If all claims are intrinsically revisable, then claims about what those interests are are themselves revisable, and we are back with the idealist problem of the "I" and the "we" with which we began. But maybe, just maybe, Wittgenstein's notion that we are left with a non-optional but nonetheless groundless belief that is never fully articulated for us is the proper response to this problem. Wittgenstein's own reference to the common human mode of action even sounds, ever so faintly, like the notion of the "absolute" that young idealists trumpeted, although without the triumphal tones of self-determination that guided their thoughts. Maybe, just maybe, that's the best we can do.

New Moves: I-We, Heidegger, and Idealism's Option

The development of post-Kantian German idealism took its starting point from an idea that all our cognitive, aesthetic, religious, and practical engagements with the world, with each other, with ourselves, already involved a pre-reflective self-situating, an orientation to a whole--the "absolute," that form to which all the orientations were, so to speak, already oriented--that was prior to all the divisions we would later make between reason and sensibility and the like. Such an original orientation involved a certain type of spontaneity, since it was itself underived from anything else, and it set the terms for how, for example, we were to be responsive to elements that clearly were not just "us" or just posited by us (such as the natural world). The decisive event of "modernity" exhibited this dramatic new orientation that had come about. For example, it became a crucial feature of "modernity" that, from now on, our responses to nature were to be part mediated by a natural scientific outlook that nature itself did not impose on us but which we spontaneously worked out for ourselves and which determined what kinds of natural occurrences were to be taken as "data" and which ones were not.

The great issue for the idealists thus had to do with whether this spontaneity, this "being underived," was to be taken as a brute fact itself, whether it was the object of a more complex "intellectual intuition" (to use one of the early idealists' most controversial notions), or whether it was to be capable of constructing its own derivation. The great divide between Schelling and Hegel and the virtual collapse of what had been a close

friendship between the two men hung on the differing answers that each at one point in their careers gave to this last question. Schelling staked his claim on a Romantic Naturphilosophie that saw nature constructing itself so as to produce the kinds of self-conscious creatures (us) who could in turn come to reflect on it and form theories about its own self-productive, creative activities; Hegel, to Schelling's dismay and anger, took that view of the "absolute" and turned it into a logical doctrine of how insufficiencies in prior orientations, prior pre-reflective grasps of the "whole" had mined out to be insufficient, to be experientially and reflectively unsustainable in light of the contradictory demands made on the participants in that way of life, such that the modem orientation turned out to be the necessary result of those prior insufficiencies and also to be the orientation that was capable of summing up its predecessors, of grasping itself as such an "underived" orientation and giving an internally consistent account of itself.

Wittgenstein, on the other hand, implicitly rejected this idealist picture in both its Schellingian and Hegelian constructions. (I say "implicit" because there is no evidence at all that Wittgenstein ever read Schelling or Hegel, much less that he ever took anything they said seriously.) If one were anachronistically to speak of Wittgenstein in the vernacular of the early idealists in Jena in 1801-1807, one would say that for him the "absolute" was underived but not self-grounding; it was necessary but not a priori necessary; and there was no deeper account to be given of it than that it was simply the way we were and produced the kinds of ground-level interests that we happened to have.

One can now see where somebody like Heidegger would fit into this rather large conceptual space I have been sketching. Heidegger simply denied the original sense of the idealist project in the first place and by implication the Wittgensteinian rejection of it. Here's one way of understanding the motivations behind the intricacies of Heidegger's project. (In saying this, I preface this with all the caveats about how this ignores the complexity of Heidegger's thought and so on.) There is no original self-situating going on in our prior orientations; instead, we are just situated, we are never self-situating. Originally, we just find ourselves doing things in certain ways, finding that things just have the meanings that they do, and we are completely absorbed into the whole social network of meanings that makes us the kinds of social creatures we are. We only come to achieve the kind of distancing that the idealists mistakenly put at the basis of subjectivity when we come face to face with our own negativity, with the possibility of our own death, and even in that case, it is through emotions like anxiety, not reflective self-situatings that we come to occupy such a position. We become authentic, when in anxiety we confront the possibility of our own non-being, and we achieve the kind of way of being a self that he calls "eminent," "distinguished" (ausgezeichnet)--become the kind of authentic self-situaters that the idealists thought we always are.

We might give a slightly potted summary to the effect: The idealists mistakenly thought we were self-situating, Wittgenstein correctly saw that we are always absorbed into our network of meanings and incorrectly thought that the story ended there--within which "absorbing" form of life, after all, was Wittgenstein himself writing the Philosophical Investigations?--and Heidegger ended the story with a view sounding suspiciously or edifyingly religious (depending on one's interests) about how one's primordial orientation already laid out the possibilities of the kinds of things one would find meaningful and not meaningful.

Philosophy in a University Context

By now, I would hope that anybody familiar with any of these traditions would be objecting. What about the answers to Wittgenstein's objections to Russell's foundationalism? How can you ignore Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions? What about Quine? Davidson? The development of cognitive science? And what about Heidegger's own resolute "turn"? Can one ignore the development of Gadamer's hermeneutics as one development of Heidegger's earlier work? Or the coming to terms with and rejection of idealism on the part of the post-structuralist generation of intellectuals? And what about this and that particular argument? ("Here is a blue object. What larger orientation to a 'totality' do I have to have to make that assertion? What would 'totality' even mean here?") And there will be objections not merely to what is left out but to the very idea of telling such a large story. Better, it can be justifiably said, that we focus on some single problems and try to get clear about those rather than to lose ourselves in unwieldy, largely speculative tales--for example, take the problem of qualia: To be sure, there are holist objections to certain treatments of qualia that must be taken seriously, but how are you going to get any clearer about qualia (what about the speckled-hen problem?) by talking of prior orientation to "totalities," much less the "absolute"?

Absolutely every single one of these objections, and many more besides, would have to be taken into account for this narrative to have real force. And, in the confines of a short piece, they cannot be taken into account. So what's the point?

Here's the suggestion. Academic philosophy now is thoroughly fragmented not just in regard to "traditions" or "problem sets" or "jargon" but with regard to exactly which interests should be represented in academic philosophy. To come to a decision on any of these issues as to what ought to be taught, who ought to be tenured, or what really counts as cutting-edge research already presupposes a certain set of basic interests in what kinds of things ought to be taught, what kinds of things ought to count, what kinds of things ought to be rewarded, and those interests themselves are not brute. There simply is no brute, no "given" interest in doing philosophy one way or another. Take the following question: Does "research" in the latest elements of French-inspired deconstructive post-structuralist philosophy count as "cutting-edge" research? It is no secret that at many of the most prominent American philosophy departments the answer would be short, sweet, and decisive: Not only is it not cutting edge, it ain't even research. If pressed, the proponents of this view might talk of what they see as its "bullshit" character, its phoniness, the fact that it cannot stand up to the kind of skeptical questioning that is characteristic of . . . characteristic of what? Of just that kind of research that they think is important. And if pushed on that point, the proponents of that view have in fact a noble story to tell: Especially after the horrors of the twentieth century, we should not dismiss "reason" and the appeal to "reason" lightly; the defense of reason against the forces of obscurantism, of those who wish to dismiss close, defended argument, is not just an academic luxury or just another point of view on a par with the debates about whether Maris really overcame Ruth's record; it is a defense of the reason for having universities in the first place. The counter-charge--"yeah, whose reason?" or "oh yeah, another Enlightenment tale, as if Nietzsche hadn't already undone that"--can indeed ring a little hollow in that context, just as the kind of harumph-harumph appeal to "reason" and to what the "good departments" do can sound rather

much like only the aggressive territorial cries of an embattled elite trying to scare off those encroaching on their dominion.

But that's not really the point. What is more interesting about that defense is that it too involves an assumption of a certain kind of way of seeing oneself in a larger whole within which one locates the practice and pursuit of academic philosophy. (It might even involve what is nowadays in one tradition called a "narrative" about oneself, in another "being in the grip of a picture.") What is all the more striking in all this is the way in which academic philosophy, whatever one's stance on that issue, has not become a science and cannot therefore appeal to the same kind of social authority as the more successful sciences have (to my mind justifiably) been able to do. Given the authority that science carries with it as the preeminently rational enterprise, it is not surprising that some philosophers have tried to drape themselves with its mantle, to get some of that social authority to rub off on themselves, even to want to adopt its "methods" for philosophy itself. It is also not surprising that, given the authority that novels and literary works still exercise in our culture, many philosophers have tried equally hard to drape themselves with the authority of the literary imagination and to take therefore a decidedly "non-scientific" approach.

If it were only a matter of different interests at stake--between those who find their inspiration in poets and novelists and hence in "continental" philosophy and those who find their inspiration in physics, chemistry and biology (or in empirical psychology and economics) and hence in "analytic" philosophy--then we might either be able to write the analytic/ continental dispute off as one involving people arguing from different premises or, maybe, even as a dispute about which interests are more at odds with other basic interests (maintaining a democratic state, opening up capitalist life to more diversity, and so on) than others. (It is striking just how what seems from certain points of view like even the most outrageous of the post-structuralist ways of reading a text itself plays into the much less outrageous, even bourgeois sense of universities preparing people to "think for themselves" and therefore to be "good citizens.")

The point of putting it like this in such a large, almost unmanageable narrative of "from idealism to cognitive science in ten pages" is to suggest that the analytic/continental dispute is at heart a deeply philosophical dispute, and, to put all my cards on the table, one involving exactly the dilemmas about the "I" and "we" with which I started my narrative. It is a debate about what is involved in being modern, which is itself a dispute within human history itself about what it means to be human. It is precisely because our own contested modernity is so fragmented, so bound up with terms of criticism that themselves always and inevitably look suspiciously "local" and "parochial" when put under the magnifying glass, that we have the contested terms of "analytic" and "continental" philosophy in the first place. By are large, neither of the traditions that have come to be associated with those terms any longer accept the basic tenets of the founders of those traditions. Each has, that is, a certain view of itself as to how it fits into the interests in being "modern" and how it tries to come to terms with what is basically at stake in the decisive event of "modernity" that hovers in the background of our philosophical debate. The widespread acceptance of Neurath's boat as the guiding metaphor in American philosophy only underscores the deep sense of the provisional nature, of what Hegel would call the "negativity," of all epistemic, aesthetic, religious, and practical claims, the way in which they tend to look rather local and parochial when

subjected to terms of criticism, that in turn look rather local and parochial when they themselves are subjected to other principles of criticism.

The basic experience that underlies such thought is that of very modem skepticism and the threats, both intellectual and cultural, it poses.[34] Quite a bit of what has come to be called "analytic" philosophy (even though it is very unclear just what it thinks anymore it is "analyzing" and why the "analysis" of anything should provide decisive answers to such questions) takes up an implicit "Enlightenment" narrative about things. It sees, roughly, that our only unconditional obligations of thought or action arise out of what is necessary to a way of life whose basic commitments are set by reason; and it is deeply suspicious that the appeal to "reason" is straightforward and easily done. (It requires, after all, quite a good bit of training, it is hard to do well, and it is easy to be misled; watch even some of your smartest colleagues in other departments try to carry out an act of analytic philosophy; the results are usually painful.) In some ways, this kind of orientation has made analytic philosophy ideal for the professionalized university; it offers a "method" for philosophy that typically only trained philosophers can do well and that therefore calls for strict graduate training and specialized departments; and it does things that nobody else in the university can do as well. Analytic philosophy is also tied into the sciences by personal temperament (respect for science and a naturalistic outlook tends to run high in American analytical philosophy, much less so in British analytical philosophy) and by its history and techniques; but it is itself not a science, even though in the tried and true tradition of Western philosophy, it has spun a new science (cognitive science) out of itself. It is, however, deeply skeptical of all those who claim to have produced the "final" argument. Exactly like its "continental" counterparts, the basic motive is that of a suspicion that even the most well-reasoned argument is still just based on local parochialisms, just an expression of some set of assumptions or moves that, although plausible, maybe even pleasing, are nonetheless not warranted.

In other words, what I am trying to suggest is that the two different "traditions" of contemporary philosophy really are no more than habitual ways of doing things that are inculcated by a certain type of training, upbringing, and social sanctioning, but which both originate out of a common, deeply modern experience and which embody as habits two very different responses to that experience.

What thus still divides "continental" and "analytic" philosophers is something real, namely, a habit of response to that deeply felt, almost subliminal modern experience. If on the whole, analytical philosophers have tended in response to the unsettling experience of modern groundlessness to try to reinforce the Enlightenment ideal of reasoned argument modeled on the sciences as a bulwark against it--sometimes in part by an insistence bordering on a declaration of faith that the methods of science or canons of empirical reasoning found in science will be enough to affirm our ways of carrying on, or of stopping the flight into irrationalism that has characterized the century, and will ultimately tell us that what we are doing is redeemable by reason--continental philosophers have tended to respond by looking at the more cultural issues involved in the confrontation with modernity and at the unsettling issues about power and the way it thwarts subjectivity in the modem world, along with how the justifiably proud achievements of the post-Enlightenment modern world (democracies, markets, technology) also have their "negative" side in obstructing if not defeating the kind of goal of free self-determination that legitimated them in the first place. Both groups can

claim Kant as a forebear; but another group takes its bearings from Hegel and his provocative idea that all our basic conceptions necessarily carry with them a kind of "negativity," a way of exposing themselves as being merely local expressions of power or limited interest, and that who "we" are is who "we" will finally end up counting as "us"; the other group takes its bearings from Mill and his provocative notions of using the power of reason to create a naturalist epistemology and a way of life in which Enlightenment individualism would be married to Romantic self-realization via the methodical, informed application of something like social scientific reasoning.

In addition to that different type of response, what still divides analytical from continental philosophers is, after all, not much, except for the unsettling fact that, by and large, they do not read each other's works and make little attempt to comprehend the ways in which each responds to that skepticism. To say that one is an analytical philosopher these days often means no more than "I studied with so-and-so, and I don't read the French or the Germans." To be a continental philosopher often means no more than "I studied with so-and-so, and I take my bearings from the French or the Germans, or from those who take their bearings from the French or the Germans." That's about as local, as parochial as it gets. Small wonder that the "negativity" of both traditions has been displaying itself so forcefully over the last few years.

NOTES

a I would like to thank Robert Pippin for his helpful comments on an earlier draft.

1. On Kant's inclusion and exclusion from the American curriculum, see Bruce Kucklick's classic piece, "Seven Thinkers and How They Grew: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz; Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant" in R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, Q. Skinner (eds.) Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 125-39.

2. Robert Pippin raises these questions about the metaphor in his Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). "Introduction."

3. The problems of what Donald Davidson famously called the "third dogma" of empiricism--that of scheme and content--were, not surprisingly, being self-consciously raised by the young idealists at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a well known and representative example, see Hegel's first published philosophical work, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy: In criticizing Karl Leonhard Reinhold, the first famous developer of a "Kantian" approach to philosophical issues, Hegel noted that his position rested on a form/content dualism that inevitably leads to skepticism: "If thinking were a true identity and not something subjective, where should this application that is so distinct from it come from, let alone the stuff that is postulated for the sake of the application? . . . The elements that originate in the analysis are unity and a manifold opposed to it. . . . In this way thinking has become something purely limited, and its activity is an application to some independently extant material, an application which conforms to a law and is directed by a rule, but which cannot pierce through to knowledge." The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (transl. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf) (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), p. 97; Hegel, Werke

in zwanzig Banden ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), vol. 2, p. 29.

4. Pippin summarizes Fichte's non-representational conception of self-consciousness as follows: the idea of the self-positing I "does not involve a commitment to some mysterious, secondary, intentional self-regarding, but rather defines certain cognitive abilities as conditional on other cognitive abilities; in the most obvious case, that a genuinely judgmental ability presupposes one's understanding that one is judging, making a claim subject to the rules of "redemption" and legitimation appropriate to such claims. Or, stated in representational terms, this means that there is no internal property of a mental state's occurring in me, and no property of that state's real relation with other states, that makes it a representation of X. For such a state to represent I must "take it up," unite it with other (or other possible) representations, and thereby self-consciously represent X." Robert Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 45.

5. See John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1948), pp. 83-84.

6. Richard Rorty, "Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin," in Dorothy Ross (ed.) Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences: 1870-1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 64.

7. Richard Rorty, "Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin," p. 66. 8. As with all such neat stories, this leaves out some messy and, in the case, very

interesting details. Telling the story in this way ignores the extremely important role that C. I. Lewis played in resuscitating a quasi-Kantian "scheme/content" distinction in terms of an "analytic/synthetic" distinction (another Kantian term of art) with a pragmatist bent to the whole thing. The Quinean revolt against the "given" (a term used by Lewis) and the analytic/synthetic distinction probably cannot be understood except in terms of the brilliant way in which Lewis synthesized Kantian idealism with the Deweyian pragmatist line of thought. See C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge. (New York: Charles Scriber's Sons, 1929).

9. Schelling's own attempt at "re-enchanting" nature in order to make room for subjectivity has proven to be a lasting strategy for philosophers looking for a union of mind and nature. Indeed, the move has been repeated consistently since Schelling's own ventures into the Naturphilosophie, even by those who profess (surely correctly) no direct influence from Schelling. Dewey tried something like it, noting in the opening of Experience and Nature, "If experience actually presents esthetic and moral traits, then these traits may also be supposed to reach down into nature, and to testify to something that belongs to nature as truly as does the mechanical structure attributed to it in physical science." Experience and Nature (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1929), p. 5. More recent attempts include Charles Taylor's attempt to revitalize a sense of a re-enchanted nature; this theme runs throughout all his writings in a somewhat subterranean fashion; it is most clearly on display, though, in his Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). In his Mind and Worm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), John McDowell explicitly calls for a "re-enchantment" of nature, although he is careful to call this only a "partial re-enchantment" (attained through the employment of a Kantian-Hegelian notion of our mindedness constituting a "second nature").

10. This shift in Schelling's thought is brought out by Manfred Frank, Eine Einfuhrung in Schellings Philosophie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985). He links that theme to early Romanticism and develops it further in his Unendliche Annaherung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997).

11. G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (transl. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf) (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977); "Faith and Knowledge or the Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity in the Complete Range of its Forms as Kantian, Jacobian, and Fichtean Philosophy," (trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris) (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977); Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Banden (ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel) (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), vol. 2, Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, pp. 7-138 "Glauben und Wissen oder Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjektivitat in der Vollstandigkeit ihrer Formen als Kantische, Jacobische und Fichtesche Philosophie," pp. 287-433.

12. The decisive importance of the Critique of Judgment for Hegel and Schelling is persuasively laid out by Roll-Peter Horstmann, Die Grenzen der Vernunft: Eine Untersuchung zu Zielen und Motiven des deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt a.M.: Anton Hain, 1991).

13. On the idea of "exemplary necessity," see Hannah Ginsborg, "Purposiveness and Normativity," in Hoke Robinson (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1995), pp. 453-60.

14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (trans. Werner S. Pluhar) (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), section 40, p. 160; Kritik der Urteilskraft, 293-94. (Italics added by me.)

15. Immanuel Kant, "What is Orientation in Thinking?" in Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 240--41.

16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, section 65, p. 254 n.; Kritik der Urteilskraft, 375 n.

17. Among the commentators, Robert Pippin has most forecefully brought out this aspect of the theme of orientation in Hegel's appropriation of the Critique of Judgment. See his "Avoiding German Idealism: Kant and the Reflective Judgment Problem," in his Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations.

18. In a letter to his friend, Immanuel Niethammer, Hegel noted that "the sole authority [for we Protestants] is the intellectual and moral cultivation (Bildung) of all, and the guarantors of such cultivation (Bildung) are" institutions such as "universities and general institutions of instruction," not the Councils of the Church. Briefe, II, #309; Letters, p. 328.

19. In English: for all x, for all y, if y is a member of set A, and x is a member of set A, then for all z, if z is a member of set A, z is identical with x, or z is identical with y.

20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (trans. G. E. M. Anscombe) (New York: Macmillan, 1953), paragraph 197; see also paragraphs 139, 191 where the phrase, "grasp in a flash" ("mir einem Schlag erfassen") also appears.

21. Ibid., paragraph 198. 22. Ibid., paragraph 201. 23. Ibid., paragraph 201. 24. Ibid., paragraph 202. 25. Ibid., paragraph 198.

26. Ibid., paragraph 213. Anscombe translates "Ausrede" as "shuffle." 27. Ibid., paragraph 206; Anscombe translates "gemeinsame menschliche

Handlungsweise" as "the common behavior of mankind." 28. Ibid., paragraph 241. 29. Ibid., paragraph 217; the term for "justification" is "Begrundung," that is,

"grounding" (which makes the metaphor of the spade being turned much more intuitive).

30. Ibid., paragraph 199. 31. Jonathan Lear, "The Disappearing 'We'," Proceedings of the Aristotelian

Society, Supp. Volume LVII (1984), p. 219-42. 32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paragraph 241, 242. 33. John Dewey had also argued a similar point. For Dewey, the concept of "life" as

the "interaction of organism and environment . . . is the primary fact, the basic category" and "knowledge . . . is involved in the process by which life is sustained and evolved." John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 87. Both Wittgenstein and Dewey understand our mindedness as involved in practical activity, as ultimately answering to our interests and as intrinsically social. We orient our judgments, carry on as we do, engage in minded activities only to the extent that others are like-minded. This like-mindedness of others is a fact; it must be accepted groundlessly.

34. The theme of "skepticism" has also been a focus of many of the works by Stanley Cavell, and he has also suggested that something like "skepticism" unites many different types of philosophical approach. Cavell's interests in skepticism, though, seem to me to be different from the ones I have broached here. It would require more detail than can be given here to show what those differences are, but the overall outlines of them would be that Cavell takes there to be a kind of permanent dissatisfaction within human experience itself to which philosophical skepticism responds. I am taking this form of skepticism not to be a feature of the human condition per se but to be a skepticism occurring within a historically situated form of disssatisfaction with things. In the latter, one can imagine a form of common life in which such dissatisfactions have vanished; in which, for example, the Enlightenment "narrative" or "picture" has been successful, the way of life in which institutions of the free market, democratic politics, and so on are all themselves rationally sustainable, even if there still remain dissatisfied individuals within that way of life. In Cavell's way of looking at things, there is simply a permanent, maybe even tragic dissatisfaction within human life itself. That may well indeed be true; but that kind of skepticism is not the same as that to which I have been taking "continental" and "analytic" philosophy to have been responding. For a view similar to Cavell's that nonetheless combines both the "continental" and the "analytic" idioms, see Richard Elridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). A representative presentation of Cavell's skepticism can be found in Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

~~~~~~~~

By Terry Pinkard, Georgetown University

Copyright of Monist is the property of Hegeler Institute and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.