Logic and Violence

James Luchte

The narrowing of discussions of truth into discussions of true propositions (statements, sentences) excludes everything which makes truth intelligible and valuable.[i]

Despite the ravages unleashed against metaphysics in the last century, it is still possible to raise the question of the relevance of logic to philosophy. Indeed, a vigorous resistance to the hegemony of logic continues to thrive in the academy - even though the majority of academic departments in the English speaking world adhere to some variant of logical positivism or post-logical positivism - what is traded in the major universities as the "Anglo-American”, “Analytic” or even post-Analytic brands. Ironically, it is in departments other than philosophy that the alternative philosophies – continental, post-structuralist, “European”, have found a shelter and hiding place. Predictably, there are also ongoing attempts by self-appointed pragmatists in the Continental tradition[ii] to convince the children of the logical positivists that their Father's anti-metaphysical revolution was not only a failure, but that a more plausible criticism of metaphysics exists in the pragmatic realism of their faction of the Continental movement.

This program is so serious, and the convergence between the self-described moderates of Continental and Analytic philosophy so immanent that the original sources of the dispute between the factions are becoming increasingly unintelligible. The divide is either reduced to the sectarianism of professional self-descriptions and practices, as with Critchley,[iii] or is simply dismissed as a temporary embarrassment in the history of philosophy, as with Rorty.[iv] However, the danger of such an amnesia as to the roots of the conflict risks concealing a long standing dispute as to the meaning of philosophy as such. Indeed, we may smile at the iconoclasm of Carnap’s “logical reform of language”,[v] and be relieved in the face of its obvious failure – even to the Analytic tradition. Yet, such a failure in no way dissolves the basic problematic of logic, as raised by Heidegger and others, such as Bataille and Iriguray, in numerous instances. What is at risk in the polemical and rhetorical call for a unity of philosophy is the loss of the productive antagonism expressed by the conflict between philosophies of logic and those of existence. The danger is a consensus philosophy which has no soul or relevance.

In the end, however, there is in this convergence no departure from the criteria of logical identity. The question could be asked: which tradition, Continental or Analytic, has truly failed? Indeed, it might be suggested that the opposites have lost their raison d’etre in the wake of the death of their common enemies – dogmatic theology and authoritarian ideology. In the wake of these alleged victories, everyone who is anyone pledges that he or she is an advocate of reason - it is only the explanation of its possibility and actuality etc... that differs. At the end of the day, however, it could plausibly be argued that such gestures of obedience to reason and logic merely rubber-stamp the trajectory of a logical discourse which enacts violence against the everyday and not-so-everyday phenomena of existence.

The question in the following concerns, on the contrary, the suppression of dissident voices in both the Continental and Analytic "traditions" in their effort to re-enforce - repeat - the logic of identity - of mere reason. While we could easily list the usual suspects in the Continental tradition who have been rendered docile, a voice on the Analytic side that has been truncated is Wittgenstein. Not only is his early indication of the mystical ignored, but also much of the radicality of his later writings and investigations, mostly expressed in his prolific Notebooks. Such scribblings cannot be reduced to the clear and distinct statements of Quine - and they cannot be reduced to variant versions of "and" and "not".[vi] It is ironic that this situation has led to the emergence of at least two Wittgensteins, one Continental and one Analytic, to a significant extent, quite unrecognisable, one to the other.

From a historical perspective, one can find the same battles, and the same misunderstandings, being waged between Hamann, Jacobi and Kant et al. on the cusp of the French Revolution. The question of the authority of reason and logic echoed throughout the streets.[vii] Amidst the humiliation of the imagination, Kant won the day and, after more than two centuries, his alleged compromise continues to hold sway in the mainstream of the Continental School. And while many in the Analytic "tradition" will interpret him epistemologically, they still consider him too metaphysical or too ethical - his philosophy ceaselessly incites the longing for total revolution, his philosophy, in the spirit of Spinoza, requires that its evangelical excesses be tempered by an activist logical Reason. In the end, however, no one can touch the sanctity, authority, of logic or reason.

Ultimately, Kant is no enemy of the objectifying strategems of the analytic reduction. After all, the Kingdom of Ends "exists" only in the numenous Other. Kant never promised anyone a rose garden. That which is at stake, however, is more than the mere jockeying of trends and fashions - at the end of the day, as the logical positivists were too well aware, the question is the meaning of philosophy itself. We are each so many brands fluctuating in the market of logic and reason - even those who seek to carve out some breathing room for wider truths still cower in the face of the Law of Identity and the Law of Contradiction. They lurk in fear, hoping not to be branded with the deadly label of "relativism".

Indeed, it has even become madness to seek a sense of truth which expresses an existence which is open to the Other, to disclose a sense of truth that seeks to exceed logic. Or, as Levinas writes, ‘beyond being’. Yet, as Heidegger has disclosed in his 1928 lecture, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic,[viii] it is such an openness to a manifold existence which is the historical and existential condition for the emergence of logic in the first place disclosed as a restriction of the field of truth via a linguistic strategy of reduction. Temporality is already always beyond being, as the meaning of Being.

Kant’s garden, in this light, grows with the authority of logic, reason - and of sanity, in Foucault’s sense. It has for its condition of possibility the radical, principial exclusion of that which is Other, the weeds, and of the Other as such – misfortune, that which stands and expresses itself in a contradiction to its stable, linear Identity. We must therefore begin an exploration of this/at Other, and of the relationship of logic and violence with respect to the logical reduction and restriction - partitioning - of the field of "truth". My overriding question, in the spirit of Mason may be stated succinctly:

Is the operation of reductive exclusion, entailed in the construction of a logical system, a positive act of self-definition for existence, or is it an act of violence, one which transgresses not only the very pursuit of the truth of existence, but also the contested ethical imperative of philosophical inquiry?

Truth: Exit the Cave

My question can be re-written against the background of Plato's allegory of the Cave - and of its meaning and interpretation. To be brief: is logic the light of the sun in the attainment of truth - "Enlightenment" - or is it instead the shadowy cave of untruth? Alternatively, is the conception of escape proposed by logic, and subsequently projected upon the allegory, a futile and violent attempt to deny the predicament of our shadowy existence? Are the shadows - the truth - and the light - shadows? Is logic a strategy of escape from the intensities and ambiguities of chaotic sensuality - and its regime of selection and exclusion - the cave?

It is certainly possible that the contenders in this dispute can each appropriate the allegory as a vehicle for the concretization of their own respective philosophical understandings and agendas. It is my task to disentangle this interpretive morass in order to detect traces of an intimate acquaintance with "truth" in each of the positions and orientations. Is logic the "truth" or is it violence against the "truth"?

The unspoken apologies are all too evident in the various attempts at self-definition or self-interpretation on the part of logic and the logician. One would be hard-pressed to find a logic book that did not begin with an explicit reduction of the field of linguistic activity to that utterance or inscription which it designates as a "statement". Not any sentence will do, but only a select group or set of sentences. The confessions on the part of these analysts is significant. Quine et al. are very explicit and honest about the relative irrelevance of their inquiries - in that they themselves have openly established the fact of their own reduction of the field of linguistic activity to the protocols of logic truth.

A wish, prayer, command, or question - none of these utterances, voices (logoV), is admissable as a statement, as a logical sentence. In other words, most of human communication is excluded in principle. I do not have to exhibit an etymological analysis of the word "principle" to detect that it indicates a systematic exclusion or incorporation of that which stands in contradiction to its trajectory and activity of identification.

Yet, if we take a quick look at the word, we find a meaning which entails a primal seizure of the polymorphous[ix] topoV[x] of truth. Indeed, after its "work" is done, there is little talk about such questions of "origin" or "existence".

Such questions, if they remain at all, are merely flushed into the Derridean vortex of linguistic dis-integration. The trace of the "real" world is poo-pooed as passe, as vulgar realism, "naturalism" or dogmatism, in Fichte’s disparaging sense...

Yet, the strategy and trajectory of the erasure of the origin can never be as successful as its propaganda portrays. There are always artifacts, little pieces, traces, makeshifts of evidence, cracks in the teflon projection of its hegemony of principle.

As indicated in the early phenomenology of Heidegger, that which I deem as my world (amid my projection of the singular meaning of existence) may be in the end a mere projection like the rest. Yet, it is no mere entanglement in some matrix of solipsism. Such a charge (of solipsism) would be already giving too much to those who seek a logical or epistemological criteria of "objective truth". Indeed, the charge could be levelled - and it was by Heidegger in his 1936 lecture course What is a Thing? - that logical and scientific objectivities are just more species of projection. The challenge is to ascertain that the truth of existence is not a clear-cut matter of ultimate certainty. We must be open to the play of interpretation and life. Indeed, this play is that of existence itself and our interpretations are finite attempts to indicate and express such a play. Such a state of play ceaselessly disrupts the vain attempts to segregate the subject and object in a clear and distinct manner. Even Descartes was forced to find refuge in a monotheistic logic of the One, though he preferred to swan around in a gown gazing at candles.

I am neither primordially alone, nor an inevitably social, communal being. I am somewhere in between - suspended betwixt the realm of things and the realm of spirit, between the profane and the sacred. Indeed, in distinction from the escapists who see logic as path of exit from the Cave, as the attainment of a monism of logic and of the statement, the Allegory of the Cave can be seen to indicate a general economy of interaction, of existence. The allegory, especially in its parasitism on the contrast between light and darkness, may be interpreted in a different way than a clear-cut severance of the terms. Indeed, it may be argued that each of these 'realms' is merely an aspect amidst a more inclusive and open self-interpretation of existence. In other words, there may be a conception, "theory", or more accurately, a phenomenology of truth, as with Heidegger's aleqea, that is open to the intimate play of phenomena amidst an apprehension which is pre-theoretical - of the everyday and not-so-everyday.

Amid such a phenomenological awareness, Quine with his "ands" and "nots" is nowhere to be seen. In such a self-interpretation of human existence, I and others detect in the agenda of the logicians and the advocates of the authority of reason, a deductive strategy of the suppression of the phenomena. Not only is most of human communication eliminated from the reduced field of logic and reason, but the presumption is also witnessed that "truth" itself - the desire of philosophy - becomes quarantined in the linguistic asylum of the statement or judgment.

To remain within logic as an island of truth may indeed be a prison. It not only confesses to its restrictive agenda, but it also claims, via its purity and detachment - to be the ultimate criteria, system, and protocol of "truth". Can it be such a fountain if it has no existential relevance - outside of the already restricted field of discourse? If it cannot, its self-assertion amidst the general economy of existence can only be interpreted as a phenomena of suppression, exclusion - of violence. The mere fact that logic is a post facto reduction of the myriad contours of existence and a suppression of the self-expression of existence would not be so offensive and problematic if there were not the further assertion that Logic becomes the sole arbiter of truth - the Standard of Truth.

Voices and Phenomena

If logic is a merely restricted field of "truth", and this field has been established as the sole criteria and standard of "truth", then there exists the terrain from which to question this self-assertion with respect to its limited ground. Is it possible to conceive or apprehend a different criteria of "truth" - beyond either the restricted statements of logic, or the mere silent and disconnected sense encounters amidst "Nature" or existence?

For the dissenters, the practice of laying down a regime of severance - of black or/and white as logical opposites is the other face of the violence of an original seizure of a monopoly on truth. It is the first-taking (principle) of [reason] which sets down the criteria, one that attempts ceaselessly to erase its own origin. For the logicians, this practice of exclusion is the act of constituting a system of meaning - of identity. Yet, the latter have already laid their cards on the table - they have restricted "truth", and have committed the hubris of asserting that their own restriction is the very event of Truth.

Yet, theirs is an escapist - even nihilistic[xi] - "theory of truth" - the very structure of the antithesis between sense and idea is a post facto projection which abstracts from the situation of existence. Before the dualistic scenario of sense and idea, of subject and object, there is a temporal, earthly existence. Such an existence already interprets itself, it becomes a phenomenon for itself. In its self-interpretation, it expresses itself via the myriad voices which erupt amidst this topoV of existence.

Instead of the routine scenario of a divorced subject standing over against the object of perception, Heidegger, Bataille and others have attempted to lay out a topoV which is the self-expression of existence and not merely an object that needs to be described from the outside, from a fixed standard of reference. Distinct from the antithetical regime of severance in such an epistemological model, the voice of the dissenters indicates an intimate self-interpretation - a hermeneutics which delves into the contours of this finite situation of terrestrial existence, of world, of historicity.

Such an intimate self-exploration and interpretation - and expression - is not meant to be a solipsistic retreat into the self. This possibility is already excluded via the implosion or displacement of the criteria of logical severance. For Heidegger and Bataille, the self and world are inseparable, though not indistinguishable. Yet, I am amidst my/our world, and I offer a self-interpretation of my/ourself as suspended and activated in the world, as an event of my world.

In this intimacy, amidst a place before or more properly "outside" - "beyond" - logic, "truth" is that which is disclosed via an event of self-examination and expression - as a hermeneutics. In this context, any attempt to displace the intimacy of truth by a criteria of logical forms and protocols must be described as violence against this intimate self-interpretation. The temporal scenario of this intimacy of world already seems to exclude the illusory immortality of logic - such a delusion of stability, permanence - eternity - is thus to be considered impossible, or, at the best, improbable.

Yet - even though there is the disclosure of this event of intimate self-disclosure, such attempts to think differently or to deconstruct or implode the antithetical regimes of logical violence - are met with violence, surveillance, harassment, and silence. Logic and its advocates seek to eradicate resistance to its rule-structure via the suppression and containment of any extension of the field of "truth" and of possible questioning.

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