In scientific disguise
Developing, parallel to common language (which philosophers frequently call natural language), different types of sign systems, humans utilize the latter's mediating force in order to increase the efficiency of their action. "Give me a fixed point and I'll move the world" is the equivalent philosophical statement characteristic of the civilization of the lever and pulley. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty says in a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." "The question is," says Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." Reading the dialogue from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, with the magnificent works of great philosophers (from Plato to Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, Peirce and many more) in mind, one understands Alice's trouble. With the exception of Wittgenstein, nobody really seems to have been bothered by the ability people have to make words mean many things.
Today, we could be directed to a philosophical paraphrase in which, instead of a fixed point, the need for a sign system (a language) is spelled out. Adapted to the scope of the conceived practical experience, such a sign system, when put into practice, will change the world, will "move" it. Diagrammatic thinking, the powerful cognitive model Peirce advanced, exemplifies the idea. Cybernetics, biogenetics, computers, and research in artificial intelligence and artificial life, as well as political, social, aesthetic, or religious concepts are examples of domains where such sign systems have been devised. They have facilitated forms of human self-constitution that contribute to the contradictory image of today's world. Such languages reflect the fundamental process of progressive mediation, participate in the diversification of the languages used, and affect the status and value system of the ideal of literacy. They serve as the scientific disguise of philosophy. Clarity (difficult to achieve in natural language), evidence, and certainty seem guaranteed in the language of science. In addition, objectivity and the ever seductive truth, for which philosophy was never known, are also apparently within reach.
There is to philosophic discourse an internal reason for its continuous unfolding: People constituting themselves as philosophers change as the world they live in changes. Human reasoning is part of the world; the ability and, moreover, the desire to think of new questions, attempt answers, and doubt our own ability to reach the right answer are part of what defines the human being. The consequences of mediation in philosophy should not be ignored. Mediation implies, on one hand, a high degree of integration of human praxis (to the extent of making individual contribution anonymous), and on the other, a no less high degree of the subject's independence in respect to the object of work or reasoning, or the object represented by the other participants in human praxis. While it seems appropriate for science to know more and more about a narrower range of subjects, it contradicts the image of philosophy as it is formed in language and embodied in the ideal of literacy. Due to this metaphorically defined deepening of knowledge, each philosopher is more independent of the other, but more intensely integrated than ever before due to the necessary interconnection of this knowledge. The meaning of this paradoxical situation is not easy to clarify. The overall process has followed two qualitatively contrary directions: 1) concentration on a precisely delineated aspect of knowledge or action in order to understand and control it; 2) abandoning interest in the whole as a consequence of the assumption that the parts will finally be reunited in the social integrating mechanism of the market, whether we want it or not. We now have particular philosophies-of law, ethics, science, sport, recreation, feminism, Afro-Centrism-but no longer a comprehensive philosophy of existence.
The scientific disguise of philosophy contributes to its renewed struggle for legitimacy. It adopts concepts and methods pertinent to rationality. In order to deal with reason, or to do away altogether with questions of reasoning, it unfolds in science and technology. Durkheim tried to apply Darwin's natural selection model to explain labor division. At present, philosophers have become memeticians, and examine computational simulations of Darwinian principles in order to see how ideas survive and advance. Spencer believed that the increase of the productive power of work increases happiness. Present-day philosophers are eager to diagram the relation between work satisfaction and personality. Some even try to revive Compte's positivist philosophy, to improve upon past Utopian schemes, or to invent a calculus of intellectual well-being. Short of a philosophic inquiry, everything becomes a subject waiting for a philosopher who does not want to stay within the boundaries of the history of philosophy.
Once new movements, some better justified than others, and all reflecting the shift from the authority-based civilization of literacy to the endless freedom of choice of the illiterate context, needed a powerful instrument to further their programs, they chose, or were chosen by, philosophy. Secularism and pluralism meet within philosophic concerns with the gay movement, feminism, multi-culturalism, integration of new technology, implications of aging, the new holisms, popular philosophy, sexual emancipation, virtuality, and more along this line. In a way, this reflects the new awareness of efficiency that permeates philosophic activity, but also its struggle to maintain its relations to literacy. Legitimate doubt is generated by the choice of subjects that seem to attract philosophers, and by the apparent lack of philosophic matter. When the language is not obscure, the philosopher seems to discuss matters, not really question reasons, and even less advance ideas or explanatory models. Wholesale generalizations do not help, but one can really not escape the feeling that the process through which philosophy liberates itself from literacy has been less productive than the similar process of science's emancipation from language.
A journey through the many philosophically oriented Web sites reveals very quickly that even when philosophy opts out of the print medium, it carries over many of the limitations of literacy. The ability to open philosophic discourse, to adopt non- linearity, and to encourage dialogue free of the pressure of tradition is often signaled, but rarely accomplished. The medium is resisted, not enjoyed as an alternative to classic philosophical discourse. Such observations have prompted the opinion that scientists are becoming the most appropriate philosophers of their own contributions.
Who needs philosophy? And what for?
At this point, one question naturally arises: Is philosophy relevant after all? Moreover, is it even possible without the participation of natural language, or at least without this intermediary between philosophers and their public? In blunter terms, can we live without it? In the context in which efficiency expectations translate into a practical experience of an unprecedented degree of specialization, will philosophy turn into another mediating activity among people? Or will it be, as it was considered in the culture of a Romantic ideal, humanity's self-consciousness, as expressed in Hegel's philosophy? If indeed philosophy is absorbed into science, what can its purpose be?
As with literacy, the inclination is to suggest that, regardless of the new condition of language, philosophy remains possible and is indeed relevant. As far as its functions are concerned-mediating activity, humanity's self-consciousness, corpus of interpretive discourse about humanity and nature-they remain to be defined in the pragmatic context. It is needless to reiterate that within each scale of humankind, philosophy pursued different interests as these proved pertinent to efficiency expectations. Philosophers never contributed bread to the table nor artifacts. Their skill was to formulate questions, especially the very probing questions-"What is what?" and "Why?"-in their attempt to address the origins of things. Deciphering the reason of things and actions-in other words, understanding the world and its apparent order (what the Greeks called eunomia)-made them simultaneously philosophers and interpreters of science. "How can we know?" and "How can we explain?" are subsequent questions, pursued more stringently by people in search of scientific rationality than by philosophers per se.