Akrivoulis: Historicality and the Limits of Emancipation

Dr Dimitrios E. Akrivoulis, AUTh/NY College

Following Reinhart Koselleck’s investigation of the historical semantics of emancipation, the paper first examines the meaning transformations of the concept and ponders on the limits, backlashes, and retardations relating to its legalisation process. It argues that the situated aporias noted by Koselleck could be read as fundamental expressions of a certain paradox relating to the inability of any emancipatory struggle to fully escape its internal contradictions. What is involved here pertains less to the insufficiency of law as a social struggle product to resolve these situated aporias, than to the very paradoxical tension between lived experience and future anticipation inherent in almost any emancipatory demand. Hence the crucial question is not whether or how the law could temporally resolve and adequately contain the inherent contradictions of emancipatory claims. We prefer to ask instead: What is the situation we find ourselves in, when bearing such claims? In what sense, if any, have the inherent contradictions of our emancipatory demands conditioned and continue to underpin our temporal existence? These questions could be hardly answered or adequately met if our explorations of emancipation remain at the level of its legitimisation.

Emancipation appears to be a concept directed towards both the future and the present. It allows us to aspire a certain political future that is presently not existent as well as to critically interrogate our political present. Drawing from Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of social imagination, the paper further argues that emancipation is always already a projection towards our political future from our historical present, and hence should respond to the necessities, callings and commitments of present political experience. In that sense, there has to be sustained a certain relevance between our present political experiences and future expectations within our emancipatory demands. As time becomes thematised into historical past, present and future, there comes forth the issue of legitimacy of both our lived experiences and our aspired futures. And with the question of legitimacy there emerges the need for an ahistorical transcendental, a new ethical standard. What is going to validate our future aspirations? How could we avert the danger of returning to a principle of radically monological truth? This is a political moment, a moment of risk and fragility. Our criteria of truth and legitimacy need a dialogical dimension rooted in history. We have to ensure that both our horizon of future expectations opened up by our emancipatory demands and their validation are articulated on the basis of thinking about history as historicality, the future-being-affected-by-the-past.

Dr. Robert C. Scharff, University of New Hampshire

Everyone knows the story of Descartes' epistemological turn, the skeptical problems it raises, the metaphysical dualism it establishes, the objective rules of reason it promises for philosophy. Today, of course, philosophers mostly retell this story polemically, discomforted in various ways by the "Cartesian," or "modern," or "Enlightenment" outlook that we have come to resist in many ways but nevertheless still inherit. Some worry especially about the way this legacy encourages us to privilege an image of disinterested and generic rationality--and to make the epistemic analysis of this kind of rationality philosophy's core topic. Others worry more about the metaphysical options that, through the Meditations, still seem to force themselves upon us. If ideas are inside and things are outside, then how "realist" can we ever be? Must we be materialists about Nature? Or, if universal materialism seems unacceptable, then must we be dualists?

For still others, however, the real problem with the Cartesian legacy is not the lingering influence of its specific epistemological or metaphysical doctrines, but the continuing appeal of the kind of philosophical standpoint from which these doctrines developed. Post-positivists like Rorty, Taylor, MacIntyre, Margolis, and Putnam have lately joined post-Husserlians like Merleau-Ponty,, Heidegger, and Gadamer in voicing opposition to the very idea that philosophy might transcend the conditions of its origin, bracket off the concerns of its time and place, and ultimately take the God's eye point of view, or be "from Nowhere." For these thinkers, the deepest and least appreciated problem with Descartes' legacy is that it encourages the illusion that philosophy really can be standpointless, or presuppositionless, or at least that it is capable of coming into complete possession of the process of "choosing" whatever presuppositions it does accept.

One way this problem shows itself is in the hold it maintains over its ostensive critics. It is in fact all too easy to think oneself an opponent, not only of specific Cartesian doctrines but even of the View from Nowhere itself, and still present one's arguments…as if from Nowhere. In this paper, I am concerned with such compromised opposition--concerned, in other words, with critics who reject in ahistorical terms an ahistorical conception of philosophy and its doctrines. In this paper, I focus primarily on two figures from the empiricist-positivist side of the Cartesian legacy, namely, Rorty and Taylor. Their story, however, is in many ways typical of numerous others. Each, I claim, retains more of the standpointless or ahistorical ideal than he realizes. I begin with a brief review of Descartes' own struggle to reach this ideal, in order to stress its ahistorical character and to identify the strong "Cartesianism" that still characterizes much later English-speaking philosophy. I then argue, using Rorty and Taylor as cases in point, that criticism of Descartes' legacy is often so preoccupied with issues concerning his method and his doctrines that the problematic character of the Cartesian orientation itself--and our inheritance of it--is insufficiently considered.

Name

abstract

Name

abstract

Name

abstract

Name

abstract