Thinking about Thinking: What Kind of Conversation is Philosophy?

1. That We Are a Conversation

1 o n e That We Are a Conversation saying a said Philosophy is sometimes presented as a system of propositions. The fundamental model is then a legein ti kata tinos.1 “Saying something about something” would be paradigmatic of every philosophy. Hegel and other thinkers, however, have pointed out various difficulties inherent to this model. For example, one can ask how we could discuss the totality of beings, ta panta, ta onta, to pan, or being itself as something, or to say something about this something. In order to know the totality or being itself as “something,” there would have to be something else from which it would differ. Saying something about the totality of being or about being itself would thus presuppose something else beyond the totality or being itself that could be predicated of them. What would that be? Hegel concluded from these and similar arguments that the determination of being or the universe must lie in a kind of self-determination through which the inner truth of the totality unfolds and explicates itself, and that the truth of beings is neither a something nor a thesis or ensemble of theses, but nothing else than the comprehensive, self-articulating identity of all determinations. 2 That We Are a Conversation Such a critique of the view that holds the legein ti kata tinos to be the model of all philosophical thought takes aim at the phrase “something about something.” Instead, it tries to approach the truth in other ways, whereby propositions play only a subordinate role. The legein or “saying ” itself, however, is not called into question but taken for granted.2 Do not all philosophers appropriate it, while reflecting on their theses or questions? Many philosophers are talking, and much is said; we must therefore not only examine what is said but also investigate the formal structures of saying as stating truths or opinions. In doing so, however, we often forget that all saying implies, besides a speaker, someone who is addressed or spoken to. The event of saying, thanks to which the said exists, is addressed by someone to someone who is not the speaker.3 The formula of the paradigm with which we began must at least be completed by a tis (someone) and a tini (to someone): Tis tini legei ti kata tinos, someone says something about something to someone. What is said exists only as something addressed, i.e., thanks to a speaking or saying that comes from another in order to arrive at someone who thereby is addressed. It implies an oriented event that originates in an addresser who directs it to an addressee. Does a said allow us to isolate it methodically from the interpersonal event of saying, so that we can determine its peculiar structure without considering its existential dependence on the addressing that links the addresser and the addressee who are involved in it? The philosophical tradition seems to have treated it often as such. In modern philosophy, for example, the history of thought has been interpreted as a succession of isolated systems, each of which unfolded a theory of beings (including social, intersubjective, and individual ones) in their totality. On this view, individual thinkers certainly could profit from their predecessors, react to one another, and suggest better solutions to common problems, but the particular structure of their interaction was hardly thematized. What interested the great thinkers, according to the usual interpretation, was the universality and “intersubjective” verifiability of the theories they developed, and the criterion for their merit was sought in the validity of these theories for every rational That We Are a Conversation 3 ego. The interchangeability of all egos was thus presupposed in the accepted theory of truth. If it is not possible to isolate the said from the sayer, a revolution in philosophy and metaphilosophy is inevitable. We can then neither determine what philosophy is, nor can we practice philosophy, unless we know how dicta and scripta (statements and texts) differ from yet are completely dependent upon personal addresses and, by extension, on dialogues and discussions. The realm of philosophy can then no longer be viewed as a pantheon of heroic but isolated individuals or monological systems, which together (as a library) would compose the history of philosophy. If philosophers are necessarily connected by addressing and being addressed, the philosophical tradition is an eventful and ever shifting history of...