The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity: Toward a Wider Suffrage

Introduction

Introduction How wide is our usual conception of what we call universal suffrage? The aim of this book is to show that that usual conception is not wide enough and that it is not wide enough because it does not do justice to what the book’s title and one of its epigraphs calls “inhumanity.” The envisaged widening of that common conception referred to in the book’s subtitle is simultaneously a widening of our conceptions of the ethical and the political toward the ecological. The eco-logical. The envisaged progression starts in logic and the philosophy of logic—unless it is prevented from starting at all because philosophers have held too rigid a conception of logic’s scope. Because the widening of suffrage projected in this book culminates in chapters that owe not a little to the writings of Jacques Derrida, an apt way of illustrating the point I have just made about philosophers who have taken what I regard as a one-sided view of logic is to tell a short story that touches upon what some of those philosophers have said about him. Among the philosophers just referred to I single out one who singled out me by sending a letter in which I was advised to steer clear of Derrida on the grounds that “Derrida’s claim to understanding any logic [her emphasis] was a sham.” I was flattered to receive this letter, because its sender is an eminent logician, one after whom a certain logical formula has been named and one 2 | THE RIGOR OF A CERTAIN INHUMANITY whose work I greatly admire. It so happens that Willard van Orman Quine was a colleague of hers at her university in the United States. He was a cosignatory of a letter to the University of Cambridge, England, signed by her, requesting that Derrida not be awarded the honorary degree some dons there wanted him to receive. It so happens too that an article by Quine, whose room was put at Derrida’s disposal when he was a visiting professor in America, was co-translated into French by the latter for publication in a Continental philosophical periodical. Treating of the limits of logical theory, Quine’s article complains that philosophers have been too lax in their understanding of what counts as logic. Is it possible that when my correspondent informed me that Derrida did not have an understanding of any logic, she was being a wee bit too strict, understanding by logic the traditional formal logic, modal logic, non-standard logic and, generally, modern symbolic logic such as that based on Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica? By that standard a considerable proportion of Sir Peter Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory would not count as logic. “Logic” is a word derived from the word “logos.” This Greek word means language or speech or word. What is said through the use of words falls under more or less abstract logic(s) of the sort studied by Quine and his colleague. But are not words entitled to a logic that treats of their use in the saying of them? And what about the relation between these logics, between the logic of what is said, propositional logic, and the logic of saying, the logic of proposing ? What, in particular, about the relation between logics of the said (“propositions”) in which impossibility is standardly opposed to possibility, and, on the other hand, logics of the phenomenology of language in which possibility implies or presupposes impossibility? How this can happen will be considered in the partly retrospective survey of this book given in its final chapter. Suffice it to say on this other sense of impossibility in these introductory paragraphs that if it is to be possible for me to really forgive someone in saying “I (hereby) forgive you,” my forgiving must appear to me as being impossible in the sense that I cannot experience it as no more than an expression of my potentiality or power. I (hereby) propose that we do not turn a key in a lock in a door that would close off a priori the second, third, and fourth of the spheres of language just listed from a study that would seek to give of them an account, a logos or a logic. For the study of the two adjacent fields I have marked out we could, of course, co-opt another word, perhaps the word “rhetoric” used by Aristotle, who supported this movement for a...