How Philosophy Becomes Possible: XXXVI. When Philosophy Has No End

For much of its history, philosophy could imagine that inquiry was moving toward completion.

Not necessarily toward an answer that one philosopher would discover and everyone would accept.

The imagined endpoint could take different forms.

A complete account of being.

A secure foundation for knowledge.

A systematic reconciliation of reason and reality.

A rational understanding of history.

A final clarification of language.

The particular destination changed.

The idea of destination remained.

But what happens when philosophy becomes capable of recognising that every conceptual achievement can generate new questions?

The possibility of completion begins to look different.

This does not mean that philosophy can never reach conclusions.

It can.

Arguments can succeed.

Confusions can be dissolved.

Distinctions can be clarified.

Questions can be answered.

But an answer can also change the conditions under which the next question becomes possible.

This is one of the peculiar characteristics of philosophical progress.

A solution does not necessarily close a possibility-space.

It can enlarge one.

Aristotle's account of potentiality and actuality did not eliminate questions about change. It made more precise questions about possibility possible.

Kant's investigation of the conditions of knowledge did not end epistemology. It generated new questions about history, language, society and the structure of reason.

Darwin did not settle the question of human nature.

He transformed it.

Wittgenstein did not finally eliminate philosophical problems.

He changed the question of what a philosophical problem could be.

Again and again, philosophy discovers that solving one problem can alter the landscape in which problems exist.

This makes philosophy strangely unlike a building.

A building can be completed.

A conceptual ecology cannot.

New distinctions alter the relations among existing distinctions. New evidence changes what an old concept can mean. New practices create new problems. New technologies make previously unimaginable situations ordinary.

The world does not remain still while philosophy catches up.

Nor does philosophy remain still while the world changes.

They participate in one another.

This is why the idea of a final philosophical system has become increasingly difficult to sustain.

Hegel provides perhaps the most ambitious example.

His philosophy sought to understand reason, history, society and philosophy itself as moments within a developing whole. Yet even Hegel's system contains a remarkable insight: philosophy emerges from its historical circumstances.

Philosophy is not simply timeless reason speaking from nowhere.

It is reason becoming conscious within history.

But this creates a tension.

If philosophy is historical, then a philosophical system cannot simply close history behind itself.

The conditions that made the system possible can change.

Marx exposed precisely this difficulty from another direction. Philosophy cannot be detached from the material and social relations within which human beings live. But if those relations change, the problems philosophy addresses change with them.

Nietzsche pushed the problem further.

What if the very values through which philosophy imagines truth and reason have histories?

Then philosophy cannot simply complete itself by discovering the correct system.

It must also ask why it values systematicity, certainty, universality or truth in the forms it has inherited.

The philosophical question turns back upon its own conditions.

And once it does so, closure becomes increasingly difficult.

The twentieth century intensified this transformation.

Analytic philosophy often sought clarity through the analysis of propositions, concepts and language.

Phenomenology investigated structures of experience.

Existentialism examined freedom, responsibility and existence.

Hermeneutics explored historical understanding.

Pragmatism treated inquiry as an activity within changing situations.

Structuralism investigated relations within systems.

Post-structuralist thinkers questioned the stability of those systems.

These movements did not converge on one final philosophical vocabulary.

But perhaps that is not evidence of failure.

Perhaps it reveals something about the nature of the task.

Philosophy may not be a discipline whose purpose is to discover the one vocabulary that makes all further questioning unnecessary.

It may be a practice whose purpose is to keep our conceptual possibilities open to what they cannot yet adequately express.

This is not the same as permanent uncertainty.

There is a difference between an open question and an unanswered question.

There is also a difference between refusing to conclude and recognising that conclusions have consequences.

A philosophical conclusion should change what follows from it.

If it changes nothing, perhaps it has not really entered the conceptual ecology.

But once it does enter, it becomes part of the conditions from which further thought emerges.

This gives philosophical conclusions a peculiar temporality.

They are not simply endpoints.

They become inheritances.

Every philosophical generation receives a landscape already altered by earlier distinctions.

We inherit concepts we did not invent.

We inherit problems whose origins we may have forgotten.

We inherit solutions that have become assumptions.

We inherit categories that can appear natural only because generations of thinkers have used them.

The task of philosophy is therefore partly archaeological.

It asks:

Where did this distinction come from?

What problem produced it?

What did it make possible?

What did it make difficult to see?

And what happens if we alter it?

Michel Foucault made this kind of questioning particularly explicit. His genealogical investigations did not simply ask whether a concept was true in the abstract. They asked how particular ways of speaking, knowing and governing human beings had emerged.

A category can have a history without being merely arbitrary.

It can be historically produced and still have real consequences.

Indeed, its historical production may help explain its power.

Once again, history becomes a source of philosophical possibility.

We can ask not only whether a concept is adequate.

We can ask what kind of world it helps produce.

That question brings philosophy into still closer proximity with practice.

If concepts alter what people can see, do and imagine, then conceptual change is not merely intellectual.

It can be political.

It can be scientific.

It can be technological.

It can be personal.

A new concept can make a previously invisible relation visible.

A distinction can make a previously unrecognised injustice articulable.

A scientific theory can make new experiments possible.

A technological concept can make new forms of action possible.

A philosophical distinction can change what someone notices in their own life.

Concepts therefore have futures.

And those futures cannot always be predicted from their origins.

This is why the idea of philosophical closure is so difficult.

A concept can travel.

It can be translated.

It can be appropriated.

It can be misunderstood.

It can be transformed.

It can encounter something that its originators never imagined.

The possibility-space of a concept is therefore larger than the intention of its creator.

The same is true of philosophy as a whole.

Philosophy has repeatedly become something its practitioners did not initially expect it to become.

The Greeks did not set out to create the history of Western philosophy.

Descartes did not intend to generate centuries of debate about the mind-world relation.

Kant did not know that his critical philosophy would become the starting point for German Idealism.

Marx did not control the political and intellectual futures of Marxism.

Nietzsche could not determine the uses to which his thought would later be put.

Wittgenstein could not prevent his work from becoming part of traditions he might have rejected.

Philosophy exceeds its authors.

That may be one of its defining characteristics.

A philosophical idea becomes part of a world larger than the thinker who formulates it.

And once it enters that world, it can participate in further conceptual evolution.

Perhaps, then, philosophy has no end not because it has failed to reach one.

It has no end because its success changes what an ending would mean.

Every sufficiently powerful philosophical clarification alters the space of possible clarification.

Every sufficiently deep question changes the kind of answer that can count as adequate.

Every encounter with something genuinely new can force concepts to move.

The openness is therefore not a defect in philosophy.

It is part of what philosophy has become.

The ancient philosopher asked:

What is the world?

The modern philosopher asked:

How can we know it?

Later philosophy asked:

What makes knowing possible?

Then:

How did these conditions become possible?

Then:

How do language, history and society participate in them?

And finally:

How does philosophy itself participate in changing them?

The question now turns once more.

If philosophy participates in the evolution of its own possibility-space, what should it understand itself to be?

Not a final system.

Not a collection of eternal doctrines.

Not merely an academic discipline.

Perhaps philosophy is better understood as a practice of conceptual participation.

It enters worlds already structured by concepts.

It notices tensions.

It creates distinctions.

It translates.

It encounters other forms of inquiry.

It is changed by those encounters.

And its altered concepts enter the world again, where they can change the conditions of future thought.

The process is circular.

But it is not a circle in which nothing changes.

It is more like a spiral.

Each return occurs at a different level because the conditions have changed.

Philosophy returns to the question of being after science has transformed nature.

It returns to the question of the self after psychology and social theory have transformed individuality.

It returns to ethics after history has revealed the consequences of political systems.

It returns to language after recognising that language is not merely a transparent vehicle for thought.

It returns to itself after discovering that philosophy is one historical practice among others.

The question remains.

But the questioner has changed.

And so has the world in which the question is asked.

Perhaps that is why philosophy has survived every declaration of its death.

The declarations assume that philosophy is a thing that can be completed.

But philosophy is not merely a body of propositions.

It is a relation between concepts and the world.

As long as the world can surprise us, as long as our concepts can fail, as long as different forms of life can encounter one another, and as long as human beings can ask whether they have understood something adequately, there remains room for philosophy.

Not because there is always another doctrine waiting to be invented.

But because there is always the possibility that something we currently take for granted will become questionable.

And that may be the deepest transformation in the possibility-space we have been following.

Philosophy began when the world became questionable.

It became a way of living when the questioner could be changed by the question.

It became historical when the conditions of questioning became visible.

It became reflexive when philosophy itself entered the field of inquiry.

And perhaps it becomes open when it recognises that there is no final standpoint from which the process can be brought to an end.

The task is not to arrive somewhere from which no further question is possible.

The task is to become capable of asking better questions when the world gives us reason to do so.

Philosophy has no end.

Not because it goes nowhere.

But because every place it reaches changes what it means to go further.