Introduction
In this essay, I will situate some of Wilfrid Sellars’ epistemology and metaphysics in the context of broad methodological concerns that have brought about a fundamental divergence in mainstream approaches of the so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions in 20th Century philosophy. In particular, I trace how Sellars’ appropriation of Kant – his ‘naturalism with a normative turn’, as James O’Shea calls it – can be helpfully understood as a possible resolution of the disjunction between the wholesale depreciation of epistemology conceived by some strands within the Continental post-Heideggerian tradition, and the continuation of epistemology and of the scientific aspirations of philosophy within the context of the analytic ‘linguistic turn’.
The three major theses that I seek to draw from Sellars as bearing directly on this historical resolution are the following:
1- His materialist transvaluation of Kant’s critical philosophy. That is, the idea the transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge is itself informed by, and not merely propaedeutic to, the empirical labor of the natural sciences. This idea becomes key to understand how the non-dogmatic prosecution of ontological univocity (“being is said in one and the same sense of all its individuating instances”) supposes the endorsement of a methodological dualism that distinguishes between the order of reasons and that of causes, i.e. what O’Shea calls the causal reducibility cum logical irreducibility of the manifest image in relation to the scientific image[1].
2- His rationalist assault on empiricist approaches to epistemology and the philosophy of mind. I suggest that his famous critique of the Myth of the Given can be extended beyond the phenomenalist and sense-datum theories that were directly Sellars’ target, to understand better the limitations in the phenomenological and post-epistemological approaches championed by the post-Heideggerean Continental tradition.
3- His dialectical articulation of the relation between the manifest and scientific images of man in the world. This ideal, as we shall see, works to resist the reification of the vocabulary of the manifest image and of experiences as ontologically basic vocabularies that would lie beyond the scope of revision.
Taken together, these principles allow us to envisage the idea of an epistemologically adjudicated, critical materialism, beyond the pitfalls of classical metaphysics, including in its Kantian guise[2]. In the first section, I provide a brief preliminary sketch of the methodological issues that lie at the heart of the split between the two philosophical traditions and their respective approaches. In particular, I focus on the place that each tradition thinks epistemology and science occupy with respect to philosophical practice. In the second section, I flesh out the underlying historical motivations behind these divergences in method by considering three possible readings or genealogies, thought within the Continental tradition, dating back the relationship between scientific and philosophical modernity, distinguishing first an ‘orthodox’ reading which sees continuity between the two, and second a ‘revisionary’ approach that diagnoses a radical splitting.
Finally, I explain how a third, Sellarsian approach, informed by the three central tenets outlined above, can be understood as preparing a successful resolution of these divergences, reconciling the radicalized critical impetus of the Continental tradition with the insistence on the pertinence of epistemology and the adherence to the scientific method proper to the analytic tradition.
I METHODOLOGICAL PRELIMINARIES
One way of understanding the division between the so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophical traditions is to see them as possible reactions to the problems raised throughout modern rationalist and empiricist epistemology, concerning the relation between thinking and being, mind and world. Famously, Richard Rorty[3] proposed to read the heart of the ‘analytic project of semantic analysis’ – as Robert Brandom calls it[4] – as a direct sequel to the Kantian transcendental project in linguistic key, thereby continuing the Enlightenment ideal that a theory of knowledge informed by a rigorous understanding of language and meaning would set philosophy in “the secure path of the sciences”[5]. At heart, the broad genealogy suggested by Rorty hinges on diagnosing a parallel in methodological approaches between the two philosophical moments: the semantic inquiry into the conditions for meaning proper to the linguistic turn appears as a ‘linguistified’ iteration of Kant’s critical turn. The project to ‘lay the ground’ for metaphysics in an epistemological register would be succeeded by the analogous, semantic attempt to clarify the conditions of meaning for linguistic expressions or acts. Accordingly, the violent reactions against Hegelianism – and German Idealism more generally – that overtly inspire the works of Lewis, Moore and Russell would have been inadvertently underwritten by an unconscious Kantian desire, to set philosophy in the sure path of the sciences, well before Strawson, Carnap and Sellars would try to rekindle Kant’s legacy within the linguistic turn.
With this said, this alleged complicity between Kant and the analytic tradition is hardly uncontroversial. In contrast to the genealogy proposed by Rorty, it was Sellars who famously claimed that analytic philosophy had, if anything, lagged behind the critical turn initiated by Kant, and had rather remained caught in its ‘Humean phase’[6]. When characterizing the tradition in this way, Sellars of course targeted the new wave of phenomenalist and empiricist theories of mind which, in his estimation, fell prey to the epistemological naiveté of what he attacked under the title of ‘The Myth of the Given’, i.e. the idea, put simply, that the world imprints its structure on the mind as a seal does on wax. To bring analytic philosophy to its ‘Kantian phase’ would mean, first, to take the logical and semantic insights native to the linguistic turn beyond the retrograde assumptions which lingered in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. In any case, whether one sees the analytic tradition as continuing an exhausted Kantian rationalist legacy or rather as lagging in an empiricist phase only to await its eventual critical moment, with Kant in its future, these characterizations agree in seeing a fateful continuity between the scientific aspirations of modern epistemology, and the analytic linguistic turn of the 20th Century.
But the post-Kantian ‘Continental’ philosophical tradition of the 20th Century largely did not share a similar optimism and trust in epistemology, however reformed by the New Logic or the semantic revolution, to set philosophy in ‘the secure path of the sciences’. Nor was the latter ideal conceived still as philosophy’s singular telos. Following Brandom again, we can say if the incipient analytic tradition by and large continued the enthusiasm with reason that animated modernity from Descartes to Hegel and beyond, then the Continental tradition was largely taken by the disillusionment with reason that had emerged in the late 19th Century, with the manifold genealogical critiques of rationality, both local and global, and whose central, inaugural names were Marx, Nietzsche and Freud[7].
Throughout the 20th Century, the ‘critique of critique’ that characterizes this disillusionment would find its home in the various forms of phenomenological, hermeneutic, and deconstructionist approaches, which followed roughly the genealogical impetus of their 19th Century predecessors. So the story goes, the exacting methodological scruples first elaborated in Kantian critique and the Enlightenment avowal of knowledge (sapere aude!) would soon turn against themselves, once the latent, unexamined core of transcendental philosophy was revealed as harboring all sorts of metaphysical prejudices, never mind its aim to ‘lay the ground for metaphysics’. Canonically, Heidegger proposes to radicalize Kant’s own attempt to ground metaphysical knowledge through a resolutely non-epistemological, but rather existential and pragmatic kind of fundamental ontology, for which the question of knowledge is displaced from philosophical primacy so as to reveal more primitive forms of intentionality than those tracked by the cognitive stance, including that of Husserlian phenomenology[8]. And once the transcendental aspirations of philosophy had to be revealed as ultimately untenable, the horizon for philosophical thought had to become a ceaseless self-reflection on its historical, textual and ideological underpinnings.
The various forms of post-Heideggerean assaults against metaphysics implied then a kind of radicalization of critique which would put the systematic and scientific aspirations of philosophy in a crisis, with the common diagnosis that philosophy’s alignment to the scientific method was now understood as a pathological hang-up carried from the modern philosophical ambitions, if not perversions. From Heidegger’s history of being (Geschichte des Seins) leading to the assault on ‘ontotheology’, to Derrida’s deconstruction of ‘logocentrism’ against metaphysics of presence, to Adorno’s assault on the ruthless circuit of instrumental reason, to Foucault’s archeology of knowledge against the ubiquity of ‘power’, and in spite of the significant divergences between these approaches, we can say that the Continental tradition largely conceived of the task of philosophy (or post-philosophical ‘thinking’) as a definitive break with the guiding impetus of modernity towards knowledge and the alignment of philosophy with science.
At the end of this vector of ‘radicalizing critique’, we find the repeated operation of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (to use Foucault’s term), progressively revealing further prejudices in the philosophical text, pushing critique towards the limit of self-reflexivity, even calling philosophy’s rights to exist into question. It is not surprising then to see that Rorty’s characterization of the analytic tradition as being ‘Kantian’ in its epistemological aspirations is but the obverse of his diagnosis of the relative backwardness that he claims it would have harbored in relation to the Continental post-Kantian tradition and its destitution of epistemology from philosophical primacy.
Two traditions, separated it would seem by a divergent appreciation of the legacy of modernity, yielding two destinies for philosophy: either as continuous with science or the scientific method, or else as perturbing the urge toward scientificity which grounds at once metaphysical and scientific cognition. In what follows, I wish to clarify how philosophical methodology articulates itself precisely in relation to its ‘scientific condition’, by proposing a schematic, three-stage dialectic about the history of scientific and philosophical modernity. To do this, I accordingly propose to trace three possible readings about the relation between philosophical and scientific modernity, on whose basis we can better assess the demands for a contemporary philosophy that traverses the methodological disjunction between its analytic and ‘Continental’ trajectories. It is precisely the work of Sellars that embodies and anticipates how this traversal is to be carried out.
II PHILOSOPHICAL & SCIENTIFIC MODERNITY
The Orthodox Reading – Continuity and Perversion
According to the history I call ‘orthodox’, one would find a continuity between the scientific revolutions initiated by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and the philosophical modernity that emerges with the advent of epistemology in the wake of Cartesian doubt, leading to the ‘critical method’ in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In a famous passage from the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant himself describes his methodological guidelines by drawing an analogy to what he takes to be ‘the primary hypothesis’ of the Copernican revolution: the realization that, whatever nature is taken to be, its objects must be seen as somehow conforming to our knowledge of them:
We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition of objects[9].
For the Continental tradition of the 20th Century however, undermining the rationalist optimism borne in Kant’s epoch-grounding declaration, this stipulated continuity between science and philosophy would result ultimately in a kind of fatal complicity, or so the story goes. Thus, as we briefly surmised in the first section, the hermeneutic scrutiny of the 20th Century post-critical philosophy, waging against the legacy of the Enlightenment, would systematically establish a thwarted and direct continuity between the pursuits of modern science and its philosophical counterparts. According to this narrative, familiar to Heidegger and Adorno, among others, philosophy and science would share a pernicious, if not dogmatic, obsession with ‘knowing’, a restriction of thought to ‘cognition’, a radical forgetfulness of the fundamental question of ‘being’, and a blind trust in the powers of calculation leading to technological waywardness, just to name a few of the evils imputed against the ethos of the Enlightenment.[10]
The optimism with which modernity claimed to position itself in relation to its past would end up, according to these genealogies, tacitly reifying further unquestioned dogmas, revealed only in an eventual and violent ‘deconstruction’ or historicism dismantling our metaphysically laden past, finally moving us to a ‘post-modernity’ that brings necessary moderation to the rhetoric of Enlightenment if not Greek thought; an awakened historical consciousness that embraces historical-discursive contingency to its ultimate consequences, and encourages distrust in the utopia of reason.
The Revisionist View – Divergence and Piety
More recently, however, a ‘revisionist’ reading of the history of modernity has stipulated a radical divorce between its philosophical and scientific sides. Some of its central proponents include the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, the English philosopher Nick Land, among others[11]. It is also, like the orthodox reading, partially anticipated in the variegated genealogical challenges that emerge in 19th Century philosophy against Enlightenment rationalism. But according to these readings, the philosophical ‘transcendental revolution’ in truth camouflaged the lingering temptation of a kind of anthropocentric conservatism, already incubated in Kant’s idealism. Thus, although Enlightenment rationalism saw it to secularize the objects of knowledge by delimiting them within the bounds of possible experience, in doing so it nevertheless continued to harbor residual piety in the side of the human subject, whose transcendental status vis a vis the order of being was said to resist thoroughbred naturalization. The exorcizing of all divinity would thus remain incomplete as long as the place of the subject in ontology, and the Kingdom of Ends as its collateral teleology was still conceived in exception to the causal lawfulness of the natural order[12].
Refusing the wholesale denunciation of rationality and the cognitive pursuit towards knowledge, the revisionary history nevertheless sees philosophical Enlightenment as failing to align speculation to the solemn conquests of the epoch’s scientific revolutions. Thus, while the modern scientific break mainly worked to achieve the derogation of the theological conception of the world, opening a secular, cosmological horizon of exploration for thought beyond the safe cohorts of the Earth and the familiarity of human experience, philosophical modernity, along with its epistemological invention, served instead as a reactive movement, binding thought to the confines of an ‘immobile Earth’ and the strictures of an static transcendental subject. This ‘Ptolemaic counter-revolution’ with respect to scientific modernity, as Quentin Meillassoux calls it, far from being called into question by hermeneutic, phenomenological, or deconstructive prudence, finds itself further exacerbated through it, subordinating the unearthed explorations of science to the familiarity of our lifeworld, of ‘Dasein’s everydayness, or of culturally configured socio-discursive dimensions[13]. So, those proponents of the orthodox reading who had diagnosed a residual metaphysical baggage in Kant’s edifice would have merely intensified the ‘exceptionalism’ of the human, subordinating the Natural world explored by the scientific method to the human subject in its transcendental status.
This vicious removal of philosophy from science cannot but thus amputate the powers of the intellect from the amplified navigational horizons set by science, wherein thought appears as the vehicle to think of a reality that reaches well-beyond human existence or even Life, and where the exceptional being of the homo sapient appears but the product of a contingency rather than a purposeful fulguration. Bemoaning the ensuing conservatism of philosophy in relation to the formal and natural sciences, and following through Meillassoux’s revisionary diagnosis to the end, the Argentinean philosopher Gabriel Catren proposes a ‘true philosophical modernity’, one that would see past the anti-realist configuration of the legacy of critique:
Rather than accepting that a genuine transcendental revolution is nothing but the angelic beginning of inhuman terror, even Kant used his critique to demonstrate that science would never be able to sublate the humanity of its subjective local supports… Philosophy will finally be modern only if it can sublate the critical moment, crush the Ptolemaic counter-revolution and deepen the narcissistic wounds inflicted by modern science[14].
Failing to coordinate different entities in different ontological domains (Descartes’ ‘connection problem’ to relate the res cogitans with the res extensa), or failing to coordinate the different faculties of transcendental subjectivity (Kant’s attempt to coordinate the understanding and intuition), the modern epistemological venture tips into a kind of dualism as it disassociates the structure of thought from the broad expanses discovered by modern science. To traverse the faux philosophical modernity means to denounce that piety for what it is, and to render our manifest and historical self-understanding as liable to revision as any of our postulates concerning the natural world. Such a stipulated ‘real transcendental revolution’ would be something like a Promethean gesture to counter the Ptolemaic reaction; a leap by virtue of which the intellect would no longer seclude itself with regard to the rest of the natural universe, but through which it finally dares to reach onto the inexhaustible cosmos of which it is part.
III – THE POST-REVISIONIST READING A PROMETHEAN KANT
From this schematic outline, we appear cornered between an orthodox ‘transcendentalist’ view according to which one must above all reject the reduction of subjectivity to objective phenomena and to the methods used to investigate the Natural world, and a resolutely ‘materialist’ view that re-inscribes thought within the natural order. For the latter, the former appears as the last cry of religious piety, for the former, the latter appears as the ensuing vestige of metaphysical dogmatism. It should thus seem unsurprising to see that the two great rejections of metaphysics in the continental and analytic traditions appear broadly distributed along this axis. Thus whereas for the post-Heideggerean continental tradition the analytic schools remain encumbered by the nefarious hopes for an epistemology over-determined by an unquestioned ‘metaphysics of presence’, for the analytic orthodoxy the Continental appeals to the irreducibility of the experiential and historical-textual-cultural mediation appears as a pious form of anti-realism or relativism, resisting the desirable fate of scientific specialization[15].
Is there a possibility for a dialectical resolution of this dilemma? I believe there is, and that it is precisely Sellars’ systematic philosophy which paves the way. From the revisionist reading I propose that we draw the following lesson: in conceiving of subjectivity as the ground of ontological reflection, radically separated from the material world described by the natural sciences, transcendental philosophy risked to delegate our self-conception to the authority of our phenomenological wisdom, hypostasizing the vocabulary of immediate experience or the concepts laden in the manifest image. This separation of man from the rest of the Natural world prevents us from understanding how it is that the rich kinds of intentionality that we associate with our perceptual, practical and conceptual activities nevertheless develop from the capacities and behavior of sentient beings as well as the inanimate material world. The post-Kantian transcendental philosophers of the Continental tradition ironically begin by seeking to expose unquestioned prejudices latent in the modern philosophical enterprise, but end up instead reifying a given phenomenological, natural-linguistic vocabulary as being ontologically fundamental, accessible from the armchair, and beyond revision. To traverse the orthodox reading means to denounce this piety for what it is, and to render our manifest self-understanding as liable to revision as any of our postulates concerning the natural world. This holds even if we must agree with transcendental approach that the investigation into the capacities for description and reasoning which allow for inquiry into the natural world is not itself an inquiry into the ontological constitution of a kind of entity, not even “the being for whom his being is an issue” or whose mode of being is ‘existence’ (Heidegger)[16].
The idea that the vocabulary to describe our experience of the world – in its conceptual, pragmatic and sensory dimensions- is simultaneously liable to revision but is also harbors a dimension that is not empirical in scope, of course, lies at the heart of Sellars’ famous critique of the Myth of the Given. For the critique of the Given is, also, a critique of the view according to which the categories we use to describe our experience of the world are foundational and non-revisable, accessed directly by introspection, bestowed by the causal affection of the senses, or simply available to awakened historical consciousness. To inflate our phenomenological or intentional vocabularies to the ranks of ‘fundamental ontology’ is to assume that the categories of experience are precisely such unproblematic Givens.
This is why I propose that, although the critique of the Myth of the Given has canonically targeted the view according to which there is a subset of our cognitive states which are foundational with regards to all other states (i.e. following DeVries, states which are (i) epistemically basic or independent of any other cognitive states, and (ii) which warrant the subject’s non-basic cognitive states), we can amplify its scope to target positions according to which these foundational states are not ‘cognitive’ or conceptual at all. Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s ‘pre-ontological’ understanding of being, which includes the pragmatic disclosure of the world of ‘tools’ (Zeug) or the ‘ready-to-hand’ (Zuhandenheit) as a kind of ‘know-how’, and in relation to which knowing-that or cognition (Vorhandenheit) is merely derived, is precisely such a view[17].
The point is not to say that conceptual activity is ‘more fundamental’ with respect to transparent coping, but simply to remind us that (a) non-conceptual behavior only deserves to be called understanding to the extent that it is liable to conceptual articulation, and (b) that the vocabulary that we use to characterize our know-how or non-conceptual experiences is no less problematic than the vocabulary we use to describe entities in a theoretical or cognitive register. Indeed, it is to acknowledge that to describe the pre-theoretical ‘bases of experience’ is to take our practical, sensory and cognitive capacities as the objects of theoretical inquiry, a task whose demands is anything but transparent.
This insight yields an expansion of what Willem DeVries has called the ‘immediacy of the mental’, which we name here the immediacy of the experiential, and which can be used to characterize the ‘phenomenological’ or ‘existential’ variants of the Myth of the Given:
(Immediacy of the Experiential) For any subject S, if S is in an experiential state with content C, then C can be understood as C by introspective inflection, intellectual intuition or phenomenological analysis, i.e. C is experientially given ? C is available to some form of understanding.[18]
In sum, the vocabularies that we help ourselves to describe experience from the manifest image cannot be simply ‘ontologized’ in pains of vitiating the critical injunction that our descriptive vocabularies be themselves adjudicated, whether these appeal to entities in a relation of knowledge, or ‘tools’ for engaged and circumspect practice.
By the same token, to depreciate all empirical or ‘ontic’ investigation as lifeless abstractions is to confuse the logical and chronological priority of the manifest image with ontological priority. For although it is true that the scientific image derives historically from the manifest image, this is not to say that the scientific image must be merely heuristic or instrumental with respect to claims advanced within the manifest image.
This insight lies at the core of Sellars critique of instrumentalist approaches to the philosophy of science, and informs his defense of the ontological status of the theoretical entities postulated by contemporary science, as suitable successor concepts to the categories of ‘folk-science’ and our manifest self-understanding. Sellars’ basic strategy here, as is well known, consists in reconceiving the distinction between the observable and the unobservable in epistemic rather than ontological terms: for any entity or posit x to be observable is for there to be claims concerning x which can acquire the status of perceptual reports, i.e. non-inferential uses such that they can play the role of language-entry transitions for a given language. Conversely, theoretical entities are those for which no such observational uses exist. It follows that the distinction between the observable and what is unobservable is porous, a feature concerning the use of specific vocabularies and linguistic tokens, rather than a characterization of the contents or referents postulated by the vocabularies as such.
So while it might well be true that observational concepts make up the ‘ground-level’, non-inferential reports triggered by sensory experience, this does not mean that these concepts are either self-justifying states causally acquired from experience, or that they are beyond revision, to be recollected from introspective acumen, i.e. they are not ‘Given’ in the pejorative sense. Sellars clearly summarizes this point in Scientific Realism and Irenic Instrumentalism:
[T]o reject the Myth of the Given is not to commit oneself to the idea that empirical knowledge as it is now constituted has no rock bottom level of observation predicates proper. It is to commit oneself rather to the idea that even if it does have a rock bottom level, it is still in principle replaceable by another conceptual framework in which these predicates do not, strictly speaking, occur.[19]
Once depurated from its residual piety, the thinking mind finds itself to be just as problematic with the Nature which it explores, which is to say that, insofar as knowledge of ourselves, as beings in the world, is just as conceptually labored as knowledge about the world, and so is not fundamentally different than the knowledge of the worldly objects we describe in the third person. This holds, again, even if we reckon that we must distinguish the functional and normative dimension of conceptual thought in non-ontological terms before we understand what it means to make empirical descriptions of what the world happens to be, i.e. that metaphysics is not first philosophy.
This leads us to the next point. From the orthodox reading, I propose that we draw the following lesson: to dissolve the critical exigency to adjudicate our theses about the world, threatens to slip right back into dogmatic metaphysics in all its forms. In the last instance, the ‘disintegration’ of critique reveals itself, in the name of an ‘authentically modern’ stance, as ignoring rather than resolving the epistemological and skeptical problematic that inspired Kant to propose the critical inquiry into the conditions for metaphysics. The basic lesson of the great ‘critics’ and genealogists remains ours: thought does not have guaranteed access to being (as the idealist thesis of intellectual intuition would have it), nor is it its unproblematic ‘expression’ (as the vitalist Bergsonist and Deleuzean panpsychist thesis would have it). Thought must think of the conditions under which it can think being, or indeed anything whatsoever. And it is this dimension of inquiry which, Kant tells us, is not-objective, insofar as to ask about the conditions of possibility to think of what there exists empirically is not itself to undertake an empirical investigation into the material structure of the thinker who questions. It is rather asking what criteria must be met so that any empirical investigation could be carried out, what must obtain so that empirical knowledge can ever take place. So, with the orthodox history, we must also accept, however minimally, a ‘critical’ attitude which curbs our ontological enthusiasm, and which prevents the idealist conflation of the normative and natural orders.
This principle, together with the lessons drawn from the revisionary history, provide the basis to understand the twofold ambition proper to the Sellarsian project, which Jim O’Shea has helpfully schematized in terms of the “causal reducibility cum logical irreducibility” of the manifest image with respect to the scientific image[20]. That is, the ambition to reconcile the idea that intelligence is, on the one hand, something that occurs in a resolutely material universe, bound by objective laws like everything else, and the idea that there is a dimension of thought which remains nevertheless not tractable by an empirical account of its material conditions. Thinking is causally reducible insofar as it is only by virtue of being instantiated in material bodies that intelligence can operate. But thinking is also logically irreducible insofar as it is the concept of the subject as a logical unit which provides the functional kernel of agency, intelligence and reasoning, and it is this dimension which can be abstracted and specified irrespective of the material constraints of the system. Subjectivity is in this functional sense transcendental with regards to its empirical or material constraints. For to specify what a system ought to do in order to count as engaging in conceptual thought, that is, how it ought to behave to count as sapient, again, is not to say anything about what it must be, even if it turns out that the pragmatic routines implied by intelligence can only occur under very specific material constraints.
The reconciliation of the normative conception of thinking which depurates Kant’s metaphysical overtones, with a naturalism that depurates its Aristotelian overtones in light of contemporary natural science (as Johanna Seibt emphasizes) remains one of the most distinct facets of Sellars’ work, i.e. the attempt to reconcile transcendental philosophy with a kind of naturalism, thereby interrupting the anthropocentrism to which the former had been hitherto delivered. In particular, this last aspect of the Sellarsian project – arguably the idea around which his entire work revolves – constitutes the promise for an nominalist metaphysics and ontology that is no longer hostage to the ‘substantialist’ approaches that would have, in Heidegger’s eye, made it the accomplice to the kind of ontotheological prejudices incubated since Plato and Aristotle’s equation of being with ousia, passed through the centuries unquestioningly. This insight places Sellars in the company of several thinkers within the Continental tradition (Whitehead and Deleuze, for instance) for whom a process ontology promises to avoid the reification of propositional form into nature, in apprehending a resolutely disenchanted world. Gesturing towards Sellars and Whitehead’s visionary approaches in this regard, Johanna Seibt writes:
“20th-century analytical ontology did not succeed in overcoming the traditional preoccupation with ‘static’ entities, despite its scientific orientations and despite scientific developments (relativity theory, quantum physics) suggesting the primacy of processes or events. Since the formal tools of analytical ontology, such as the predicate calculus, are standardly interpreted over a domain of substance-like “objects,” 20th-century ontological research—with few exceptions noted below—has even reinforced the topical and theoretical bias of the tradition. Only most recently analytical ontologists have begun to explore the idea that an ontological scheme could postulate that dynamic entities are entities in their own right or even are basic entities in terms of which the familiar notions of ‘static’ types of beings (things, persons, facts etc.) may be defined[21].
However controversial Sellars’ commitment to naturalism and scientific realism may be – and consequently that of those ‘right-Sellarsians’ who follow this aspect of his work – it is important to notice the scope of its ambition as potentially interrupting the choice between dogmatic materialism and transcendental idealism. This prospect comprises two essential elements: first, as indicated above, a nominalist ontology that would avoid reifying abstract types into metaphysical items (thus, refusing to model the structure of the world in the sentential form of fact-stating discourse); second, an integration of man into Nature by providing simultaneously robust successor concepts to the manifest phenomenological categories to describe experience, and a metaphysics of epistemology which would compliment normative transcendental explanation of conceptual use with an illustration of how our neurophysiological makeup incarnates the functional routines proper to sapient behavior. In short, to preserve the critical bulwark against dogmatic metaphysics, while rising to the secularization of the subject that remains so as to integrate man into Nature.
It is with this task in mind that, I believe, we can understand the prospect of a third, post-revisionary stage, sighting an appropriation of the critical method that at once depurates the metaphysical conservatism laden in the Kantian edifice, rejoining it to contemporary science, while salvaging the methodological and epistemological scruples that provided a critical bulwark against dogmatic metaphysics.
Yes, Kantian epistemology was already metaphysically contaminated. But should it follow from this that epistemology must be without exception laden by dogmatic assumptions? Or is it possible to think of an epistemology depurated from its metaphysical prejudices, as necessarily propaedeutic to ontological speculation? Yes, Kantian epistemology and its subsequent radicalization in the Continental tradition exacerbated anthropocentrism and the myopia of thought in relation to the expanses of a cosmos indifferent to our interests. But should it follow from this that every epistemology must, necessarily, be destined to anthropocentrism, trapped to the confines of thought, ideas or appearances? Or is it possible to resist the anti-realist fate assigned to epistemology and to say, instead, that it is possible to reconcile critique with a realism through which we would understand the conditions of possibility for thought insofar as it represents a reality foreign to itself? Yes, the hermeneutic and deconstructive inquiry into the history of Western metaphysics reveals the lingering reduction of being to presence as substance which initiates the ‘ontotheological’ derail. But does it follow that every metaphysical attempt will be destined to such ‘essentialism’, or that it must forever indulge in a metaphysics of presence impervious to the problematic of time? Or is it possible to reject the Platonist and Aristotelian hypostasis of substance and of essence, in sight of a future metaphysics within which process and dynamicity are inherent to the thought of being?
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[1] O’Shea, James, Naturalism With a Normative Turn, Polity, 2007.
[2] See in particular Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh, University of Chicago Press, 2002.
[3] Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press, 1981.
[4] Brandom, Robert, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, Oxford University Press, 2010.
[5] Kant 1933: Bxiv
[6] This is an attribution made by Robert Brandom. See Brandom, 2000, 32.
[7] Brandom, Robert, Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutic of Magnanimity, available online at http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/downloads/RGHM%20%2012-11-21%20a.docx
[8] As is well known, Heidegger also proposes to disassociate Kant from “epistemology”, by establishing a continuity between the question about synthetic a priori judgments and the attempts to ground Metaphyica Generalis, or ontology in the broadest possible sense, as inherited from the Scholastic ontology. See Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Indiana, pp. 11-12.
[9] Kant, Immanuel, Preface to Critique of Pure Reason, second edition.
[10] The two canonical texts in this regard remain in my estimation Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, and Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
[11] See in particular Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by Ray Brassier, Continuum, 2007.
[12] Kant’s attempt to neatly separate the quid juris (or epistemological questions concerning justification) from the quid facti (the causal-factual questions concerning the lawful relation between natural events) becomes precarious once the presumed autonomy of the former is evinced as being tacitly determined by the material efficacy of the latter. As Brandom puts it, “…what the genealogists dug down to is not just causes distorting our reasons, but causes masquerading as reasons.[12]” However, it is important to remember that the genealogical challenges to Enlightenment reason also questioned the very notions of facticity and causation which Brandom incorrectly takes to characterize all genealogical thought.
[13] Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, chapter 4.
[14] Catren, Gabriel, Outland Empire, in The Speculative Turn, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, re. press, 2011.
[15] One might object that this way of reconstructing the historical period in question conspicuously ignores the legacy of Wittgenstein, who did as much to raise doubts about the aspirations of the early analytic semantic project and of logical empiricism, as perhaps Heidegger did with regards to the scientific aspirations of Husserlian phenomenology. Nevertheless, it remains true that, in the long run, this has done little to dissuade the ensuing vector towards scientific specialization in the field. Thus, Scott Soames, in his two-volume history of 20th Century analytic thought, seems content in describing Moore and Russell as having done away with the Hegelian rot, and welcomes the increasing specialization in the discipline as a sign of maturity and progress. See Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, introduction.
[16] Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, reprint 2008.
[17] Ibid.
[18] DeVries, Willem, Getting Beyond Idealisms, in Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, Oxford, 2010, pp. 217.
[19] Sellars, Wilfrid, Scientific Realism and Irenic Instrumentalism in Philosophical Perspectives: Metaphysics and Epistemology, Ridgeview, 1967.
[20] O’Shea, James, Naturalism With a Normative Turn.
[21] Seibt, Johanna, Process Ontology, Published in Metafisica e Ontologia, ed. G. Imaguire Verlag, Munchen, 2005, pp. 1-2.