24 Of Thinking I (Interview with Jean François Lyotard)

Thinking of thinking; i.e., reflection over thinking itself, is according to Aristotle the most exquisite task of philosophy and of humankind.

Of Philosophy, because it leads to the realization of truth. Of mankind, because thinking alone sets human beings apart from all other animals. Fierce passions and feelings may also be found among other animals, in order to preserve themselves and their species.1

Yet in what language, and how, should one think? – In the ensuing years every branch of the sciences has acquired its own language, is fixed by it within its own domain, interests, tradition. There are new sciences with their own new language, such as linguistics or sociology, and old sciences with older language, such as philology or even mathematics (although these languages have, at least, developed into formal ones).

I regard philosophy not as a science, but rather as an art form. Even with mathematics I remain uncertain whether I should describe it as a science, even when it employs the language of (natural) science.

As soon as philosophy submits to the dictates of a specialist branch of science, such as with the science of language and its so-called “linguistic turn” (which was, in the end, in its recasting as “philosophy of science,” completely de-fanged), or follows those of biology (what is, biologically, Truth, Beauty, the Intellect?), psychology, or theology, then it is already ensnared. As soon as it allows itself without resistance or skeptical distance to be misused—which also means without inquiry into the whence and whither of its linguistic play—then this great and time-honored art, indeed what ought to be the exponent of free thought and freedom in general, is immediately unfree, and imprisoned. It is fixed by the preconceptions of those respective specialist sciences, which occasionally antagonize even one another, in order to assert their own definition of rationality, reason, logic, etc. It is ensnared in relativism. Thought becomes a slave of definitions and determinations of terms, that is, of the currently ruling dogmatism (concerning the Occupation of Terms and Definitions, see Blog No. 3).

In which language do I speak? – Am I so entirely free of determinations, relativities, dogmatisms? – Most certainly not. Each of us has his or her roots, origins, path. If I am to argue reasonably, likewise comprehensibly and intelligibly as well, then I am indeed already fixed in a manner to some linguistic play, a discourse, which is (at least I hope) guided by tradition, i.e. by the history of philosophy. And should I plead for a return to our fathers, even forefathers, that is to their language, their terminology and texts, not however unconditionally to their solutions to certain problems, then I do so only because I still hold these courses of action to be useful to cultivate the thinking of thinking beyond deliberations over electronic cerebral hemispheres, unconscious impulses, or logical dogmata.

Of which there are already the most differentiated conceptions of rationality in our intellectually history. Plato, in our present age, is a pure irrationalist, wholly undiscussible and orse the strictly regulated input-output controls of the behaviorists), falls through the cracks, is almost a Talibanesque of thinking. A real language police of “clean terms” and “clean thinking” was uncritically activated in certain faculty departments in our universities and actively pursues drastic measures. Thus come to pass cases such as that of Jacques Derrida at Cambridge, as he was to receive an honorary doctorate there (see my last blog entry).

Philosophy should, from time to time, thus be able—be permitted—to be art as well, and likewise art should be philosophy. Both are presently doing so, in fact, in Concept Art in the arts or in the mise-en-scène artworks of some theater directors. This flight and circumvention remains in philosophy sometimes the only possibility to be heard. All the more so as it is just now in Germany vanishing from the syllabi of institutions of general liberal education. In the public discourse it seems to play no role whatsoever anymore.

I include here two comments, as they were presented to me by French philosopher Jean François Lyotard in a full-page interview in 1985 for the Berlin tageszeitung, conducted in the Stuttgart Gallerie Kubinski, regarding this complex of problems. At the time of this discussion I was wholly ensconced in the Frankfurt School, that is to say that Apel and Habermas were my polestars. Yet already in my book on “Meaning” I had realized that both of them, as epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse had “ventured into the lion’s den (of analytical philosophy), had sought there in the language of their opponents the confrontation and the dispute, and … lost the same.” For dogmatists are not to be won over with the language of dogma. (Reinhold Urmetzer, „Über die Sinnfrage“ [“On the Search for Meaning”], p.134).

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How reasonable is reason?

Reinhold Urmetzer spoke with the French philosopher Jean François Lyotard

Reinhold Urmetzer: You æstheticize philosophical language, as do other authorly philosophers, with literary artifices and a “mixed language.” Do you not thereby entirely destroy philosophy, render it ambiguous and into an always-differently-readable “artform”?

Jean François Lyotard: Certainly not. Your question requires that there exist beforehand a philosophical language as a specifically philosophical idiom. I don’t understand what you mean by philosophical language. There is no tradition of philosophic idiom. In posing your question a particular base assumption resonates as well—and this appears to be very widespread in German thinking today—that the philosophical language of the present age must necessarily be argumentative.
But I think, inclusive of thinking from classical antiquity, that there are many philosophical texts that aren’t argumentative. If you read such important texts as Aristotle’s Metaphysics or his Refutation of the Sophists attentively, this argumentation is not at all clear. Not at all unconditionally plausible.
Or consider Plato. Do you believe that his Dialogues represent an æstheticization of philosophical language? Naturally, these Dialogues—which were, for example, taken up once again in the French philosophical tradition of the 18th century—belong to a literary tradition. Many texts, from Didero or Voltaire, are written in the form of a dialogue. I could also name any number of novels or philosophical diaries for you—would you say of something like Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer, that it is a negation, a discreation of philosophical language? It belongs to the classical corpus of philosophy. Or take the Sic et Non of Abélard, it is a work of philosophical literature and furthermore not always so argumentative as it should be.

Do you accept the argumentative language of the present philosophical discourse?

Naturally. I think that it is essential for philosophy to have the argumentative idiom represented in the corpus of idiomata. But I do not believe that certain things can be said in an argumentative idiom.
There are types of questions that cannot belong to this argumentative idiom. This is for a very simple reason, which is not in any way “irrational,” in how French thought is often criticized from the German side. I refer once more to Aristotle, or to the term “ultimate justification,” as Karl Otto Apel used it. Every argumentation ostensibly rests upon the evidence of certain arguments or certain principles, something like the Law of Noncontradiction. Likewise they rest, though perhaps to a different degree, on the principle of reason. But as Aristotle quite well elucidates in his third or fourth book of the Metaphysics, it’s not possible to argue any further over the law itself, as it is the basic prerequisite of every argumentation; one either accepts it or not.
That which one denotes “rational argumentation” is fundamentally but yet another hypothesis, which is buttressed somewhat too much by the claim that outside of the Law of Noncontradiction no other philosophical language is possible. I don’t believe that to be true.

In France there have been philosophers for the last two centuries who write: Authors. Consequently the relationship between philosophy and literature is a very old one in France. In Germany by contrast, the philosophers were overwhelmingly university professors. They were entirely and essentially professors, whom we ascribed a specific and important status. Thereby, however, a type of discourse was also fixed, which was only ever its own magistral discourse, while the French philosophers never once stood within the tradition of magistral philosophical discourse. There are, of course, also such professorial philosophers in France. They may be superb, but they are philosophy professors. Here lies a very great difference in the traditions of our peoples.

In memory of Achim Kubinski (1951-13-07 – 2013-12-17)

1These claims are neither as straightforward nor as defensible as here formulated. More recent research into animal cognition has revealed that the difference between human and other animal cognition is far more a difference of degree than of kind. The interested student may find an informative survey of thought processes throughout the animal kingdom, and particularly the implications of the same for the discipline of philosophy, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Animal Minds,” http://www.iep.utm.edu/ani-mind/ (retrieved 2017-10-31), and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Animal Cognition,” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognition-animal/ (retrieved 2017-10-31).-ed.

Translated by N.Andrew Walsh