Logics of Similitude and Logics of Difference in American and Contemporary Continental Philosophy

In his now classic study, The American Evasion of Philosophy, Cornel West documented how American pragmatism, with its Emersonian roots, side-stepped modern philosophy's epistemological turn in favor of an ethically centered project: "the evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy—from Emerson to Rorty," West writes, "results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism" (1989, 5). The task of philosophy, for the pragmatist, as for Marx, is not to know the world in itself, disinterestedly, but to transform it, to "reconstruct" it. Similarly, the "self" articulated by the pragmatists is one defined not primarily by epistemological projects and functions but in terms of moral agency. What I wish to suggest here, following some suggestions of Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, is another way by which American philosophy, now stretching back all the way to its Puritan and not just Emersonian roots, "evaded," or, in this case, resisted, elements of modernity, specifically its logic of identity and difference, by retaining an older logic, described by Foucault as a logic of "similitude."

From its beginning, in Madness and Civilization, Foucault's life's work was a study of the logic of "dividing practices," viz., the logic that built the walls of modern institutions, preserving sameness and difference—e.g., the asylum, the prison, the hospital—and separating the mad, the sick, the criminal, the poor, the perverted from the normal. With modernity, Foucault claimed, "A sensibility was born which had drawn a line and laid a cornerstone, and which chose—only to banish" (1965, 64). By such a logic the modern subject assertively constitutes itself as sovereign, struggling constantly to define itself as not the repressed other, who has been condemned to the other side of the wall; but, ironically, all the while this modern subject continuously subjugates himself within the endless binary logic of sameness and difference, thereby internalizing the policing mechanism of the social order. "I am not guilty. I am not guilty," Kafka's character K pleads before the magistrate, without even knowing the crime of which he has been charged. "Everyone is guilty of something," replies the magistrate. In a world thoroughly enframed by the grid of an endless taxonomy of deviancy, no one escapes: everyone is guilty of something; everyone is abnormal, perverse in some way.

Against the modernist logic of sameness and difference, Foucault recovers an older logic of "similitude," of which he mentions Ramian logic as an example (1970, 35). Petrus Ramus's system was the Reformation's alternative to the categorical Aristotelian logic of Scholasticism, which the Reformers claimed blasphemed God by subjugating Him to the genus-species schema and thereby making Him utterly unknowable—Ramus called it "barbarous." Ramian logic was central to American Puritanism in particular, structuring the works of Roger Williams, Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, and their contemporaries. Despite their general rejection of Puritanism, central elements of Ramian logic informed the thinking of later American writers, including the Transcendentalists—e.g., Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller—and Charles Sanders Peirce. Indeed, the frequent failure to grasp Peircean semiotics within its New England Puritan context accounts significantly for the distortions of Peirce's philosophy, especially by French structuralists and poststructuralists alike, most notably Saussure and Derrida.

In contrast to the logic of identity and difference, which enframes the world and allows it to disclose itself only within its binary grid of distinctions, logics of similitude disclose the world as an endless play of resemblances: analogy is the structure of nature; macrocosm is reflected in microcosm; microcosm, in macrocosm. Let me underscore two features of this logic of similitude especially significant for our purposes here. First, the structure of resemblances is ontological and established by God, not the mind or fiat of the artist, and words participate with things in the endless play of resemblances that constitute our world: modernity banishes resemblances to the realm of "mere" imagination and falsehood. The premodern poet who proclaims, "the stars are the garden of the sky" (Foucault's example) merely recognizes an essential structure of the cosmos...