Error, Illusion, Madness

Bento Prado, Jr., Marco Oliveira, Rodrigo Nunes, Marco Oliveira, Rodrigo Nunes

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781509537051
  9781509537044
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509537068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book makes available in English the work of one of the most important Brazilian philosophers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. First published in 2004, Error, Illusion, Madness is an original contribution to the debate about the nature and role of the subject and its forms of expression. In a context where the category of the subject was being at once dismissed by structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers and sidelined by the intersubjective turn of critical theory, Bento Prado Jr.'s book represented a unique intellectual intervention. He mobilized authors as diverse as Wittgenstein and Deleuze to formulate a notion of the subject as both a critique of identity and an affirmation of difference, a notion that dismantled the foundational character usually associated with this category. In this way Bento Prado Jr. opened up a new and distinctive kind of critical thinking that emphasized subjectivity while avoiding both foundationalism and relativism.

This important book will be of great interest to those working in philosophy, critical theory, cultural theory, and Latin American studies.

1
Error, Illusion, Madness*

For Zeza, my sister from Mangueira Hill

Men are so necessarily mad that it would be another kind of madness not to be mad.

Blaise Pascal¹

When philosophizing you have to descend into the old chaos & feel at home there.

Ludwig Wittgenstein²

I

Crisis perennis or a dated crisis? If dated, since when? It is certain that reason and philosophy were already in crisis when they were born together in Greece, almost as if the worm were coeval with the apple. How to imagine the institution of classical Greek philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) without the sophist’s challenge? For reason to have universal reach and an ontological anchorage—for it to be reason in the most ambitious and unlimited sense of the word—it is necessary to prove it against those who would have it as a drifting island, diluted in the river that carries it: no limit, no permanent form, nothing that opposes the private world to the public world, time to eternity, the concept to simple, lived experience. It is necessary to distinguish between meaning and truth, to instate dialectics, analytics, semantics, ontology, against those who produce paradoxes from negative ideas (nonbeing, error, illusion, madness, etc.), against heroes of meontology such as Gorgias, who dissolves the human voice or rational speech into the anonymous noise of nature, the inarticulate murmur of fish or plants touched by the wind.

In the same way, how are we to understand the undertakings of Descartes or Kant without the unreason against which they fight, namely those who see substantial forms or spirits without an analytical or critical method? The other of reason to be domesticated is certainly not the same in each case, nor does it coincide with the adversary of the classical Greeks, but a family resemblance seems to unite them, as if against their will. Philosophia perennis? A schoolboy’s apologia for philosophy? Not necessarily, perhaps, since I recognize the need to distinguish different moments—and, above all, the contemporary figure of this almost eternal crisis. Let me recall here a first-rate line from Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, in which the philosopher says precisely this: “Never has the crisis been so radical.”³ At the very least, this line signals a distrust of the Enlightenment’s optimism, in which the ideas of social and epistemic progress are connected; but let us suppose that it refers, even more, to the author’s most immediate contemporaneity. This is the same Merleau-Ponty who had undramatically asked, on another occasion, something along the lines of “Is there more truth around today than in the past?” It is difficult to assume philosophical or historical–philosophical naivety on his part. Let us suppose, then, that he is referring to some characteristic of contemporary thought (the text is written at the end of the 1950s), some sort of banalization, an emptying of philosophy without historical precedent: we are well into the civilization of the academic paper. Let us consider that, forty years later, this argument does not seem to be entirely out of place and would be certain to find an ally in Wittgenstein, whose thinking seemed to go in the same direction.

If not, let us see. There are plenty of contemporary philosophical discourses from the last decade or so that speak of the crisis of reason and propose a different diagnosis from Merleau-Ponty’s or Wittgenstein’s. I am talking about the enemies of the new sophistic philosophy (or postmodern thought, in its right- and left-wing versions) who invoke the need to overcome the crisis and restore reason. There seems to be a strange alliance between the neoliberalism of a few philosophers who celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall and promote the restoration of the good spirit of the Lumières, and Lukács’ old initiative in The Destruction of Reason, a bad book by a great thinker.⁴ One should remember here Paulo Arantes’ analysis of the curious convergence of authors like Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas against the backdrop of American and German culture; his diagnosis identifies much ambiguity both at the points of contact and at the points of crisis.⁵ We would have to add to this ideological–philosophical imbroglio the Husserlian origin of the Frankfurtian diagnosis of the dialectic of Enlightenment and its derailment (the idea of a Krisis of both European sciences and humanity)—as Carlos Alberto Ribeiro de Moura has suggested, referring particularly to Herbert Marcuse’s “On Science and Phenomenology.”⁶ We must agree that such a coincidence in the fight against irrationalism, which is identified with the right in one case and with the left in the other, raises a question mark over the heuristic use and theoretical interest of pseudo-notions like irrationalism. Has anyone ever proclaimed him- or herself an irrationalist with sincerity or without irony? Or, paraphrasing Émile Bréhier’s bon mot about libertinism, could we not say on est toujours l’irrationaliste de quelqu’un (one is always someone else’s irrationalist)?

In any case, the question of the crisis of reason appears today also in the polemic between the modern and the postmodern, universalism and relativism, rationalism and irrationalism. This is why it is perhaps worth trying to show the non-pertinence of this way of formulating the problem and to suggest that this description of the crisis is not the best—especially when it is guided by a reading of Wittgenstein, in a not always enlightening polemic about the best interpretation of his texts.

What I want to do in these circumstances is deal with Wittgenstein as an essential protagonist in the contemporary crisis of reason in order to remove him from the context in which the aforementioned debate unfolds and to return him to what seems to be his rightful place in the history of modern philosophy, along a line that originates with Descartes and leads to Kant but, above all, to Pascal. How does modern reason exorcise its other (error, illusion, madness)? What is the validity of arguments that try to limit the reach of reason (the madness and dream arguments, transcendental dialectics)? How does Wittgenstein incorporate and re-elaborate them in his last work, On Certainty? Let me venture a hypothesis: Could we not say that this last book renews the critical undertaking of the Tractactus? In the earlier work, that undertaking consisted in showing what solipsists and realists wanted to say (without being able to do so). Some superiority was granted to solipsism, under the strict condition of recognizing that its truth was unsayable, that it could not survive its theoretical expression, and that it ultimately coincided with realism’s apparently opposite stance. The new philosophy of logic, like the old transcendental dialectics, traces the conceptual genesis of the illusions of metaphysics. In the later book, this was a matter of opposing idealism and relativism (or Protagorean idealism) to realism in the same terms. If that is so, then Wittgenstein, like Kant, was an author who systematically opposed the interest in what metaphysics wanted to say to its necessarily incorrect expression. In the words of Gérard Lebrun, the other side of the critical undertaking would be a sort of “philosophizing” history of philosophy.⁷

II

If I am not completely wrong and it exists, the point would then be to bring out this implicit archaeology of modern philosophy in Wittgenstein’s thinking, which is more Kantian on this score than is normally accepted, particularly in his last writings and, let me anticipate, in the last sentences of On Certainty.

To do so, let me take as our guiding thread José Arthur Giannotti’s Apresentação do Mundo⁸ [Presentation of the World], underscoring the author’s spot-on decision, against the tepid backdrop of the contemporary debate between modern and postmodern thinkers, to render void in one stroke two symmetrical misconceptions present in the literature on Wittgenstein: the relativist and the transcendental–pragmatic, communicative reading of the Viennese philosopher’s mature work. A great insight no doubt, but one that seems to bring along a few problems. In a word, my impression is that there are several indications in Giannotti’s book that he was ultimately led, as though unknowingly, in the direction of Apel and Habermas, authors from whom he nonetheless wanted vividly to distance himself. My first step will be to provide reasons for this judgment by focusing on the philosophical appropriation that Giannotti makes of Wittgenstein’s last writings in the final chapter of his book.

It is true that Giannotti’s text is much more turned against relativist than neo-Frankfurtian readings of Wittgenstein. The whole chapter in which he addresses the dispute is marked by the intent to show that the plurality of language games and their rootedness in the diversity of life forms do not eliminate an essential reference to the horizon of universality. This thesis is systematically assembled. In the first place, it is shown that, if the dynamics of language games unfold against the backdrop of an assumed facticity, this does not deprive their comprehension or analysis of a style that is essentially grammatical or logical (rather than genetic) and transcendental (rather than empirical). That one can thus separate grammatical questions from questions of natural history is demonstrated through the clarification that to show the vital basis of a language game is not to say that this is where it grounds its truth or draws its sense from—unlike in Husserl’s foundational recourse to Lebenswelt or to earth, which, as Ur-archē (and against Galileo’s precipitated and already “positivistic” confusion between the given and the constructed), does not move. We could in fact say, following the direction of Wittgenstein’s thinking, that, if we admit that the earth as Ur-archē does move (though not necessarily objectively, really, or empirically), we will begin to understand the Grundlösigkeit (groundlessness) of the foundation. Giannotti is right to affirm that, according to Wittgenstein, “unquestionable” principles are not what gives meaning and basis to the world, it is rather the task or practice of judging and thinking that does it. Indeed, dialectics, which unites and separates polarity and bipolarity in the operation of language games, gives an unprecedented status to the idea of foundation by introducing the “difficult”—as Wittgenstein calls it—notion of the Grundlösigkeit of the ground. (Recall Heidegger’s commentaries, in The Principle of Reason, on the beautiful verse by Angelus Silesius: Die Rose ist ohne warum, “The rose is without why.”) But, above all, Gia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Publisher’s Note
• Quote
• Foreword—Vladimir Safatle
• Preface
• 1 Error, Illusion, Madness
• 2 Descartes and the Last Wittgenstein: The Dream Argument Revisited
• 3 Wittgenstein: Culture and Value
• 4 The Plane of Immanence and Life
• 5 Relativism as a Counterpoint
• 6 On Deleuze: An Interview
• 7 Bergson, 110 Years Later
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement