Sequoya Yiaueki

Using Jane Addams’s concepts of perplexity and sympathetic knowledge, this article presents Addams’s work as a multilayered practice of discursive action. This practice is based on Addams’s use of perplexity, first as the affective state that uncouples knowledge and action, then methodologically, to formulate the problems that uncouple them. This is followed by a structured practice of caring listening found in sympathetic knowledge. The ultimate goal of her practice of discursive action is to shape the public understanding of social problems and the broader political imagination. Shaping public understanding and political imagination are seen as key tools to tackling questions of injustice and marginalization, which are often themselves sources of perplexity.

In the Logic of Philosophy Eric Weil seeks to lead philosophy to grasp itself philosophically. In order to do this, he thinks that understanding violence and its ever-present latent possibility is essential. The question that has to be asked is whether he succeeds. The answer to that question is ambiguous. He succeeds insofar as he develops a discourse that allows him to understand himself philosophically as a philosopher. That is, he articulates a discourse that makes a claim of comprehensive universality that at the same time explains his free choice to philosophize. Thus it accomplishes his goal. To do so, he in a certain sense reconstructs the Hegelian philosophical project, but from the point of view of his present situation. But he is also required to go further than Hegel did, to grasp a reality that Hegel had a hand in shaping. A reality where pure violence has showed its face. Raymond Aron notes that Eric Weil told him “that he was going to bring philosophy to a close”, and then goes on to note that he could only marvel at such a claim while at the same time ironically smiling about it. If we ask the question whether Weil succeeded or not in light of Aron’s remarks, the answer opens back up, but we must also be suspicious of Aron’s claim. Nowhere in Weil’s text does he claim to write the final word on philosophy, rather he affirms over and over again that philosophy is constantly in the process of starting over. This is even part of his critique of Hegel. Violence, philosophy’s other, moves deeply within us all. Philosophy does not and cannot exhaust the reality of human experience in the world. Weil has not closed the book on philosophy because history is not over and people will constantly work to grasp their own time in thought.

The Logic of Philosophy is a curious book, both in its composition and its reception. The author, Eric Weil, does his reader few favors. It’s difficult to read. The sentences are long: clause after subordinate clause is set one inside the other and stacked one atop another. It is dense. The ideas unfold slowly and there are lots of them to keep track of. Its density is a consequence of its style of composition, which can be best described as arid. Few people are cited directly, and few names are used. Almost every reference is oblique, present in the sentence construction or in the use of a term that almost, but never quite, refers. These references are therefore present to the most searching eye, but shadowy and obscure for those whose culture is not up to snuff when compared to that of Weil’s. And Weil was a man of broad and deep culture.

My main argument is that reading Weil along pragmatist, expressivist, and inferentialist lines helps to better understand what Weil himself was doing. In this chapter I will focus on developing these commitments as they appear in Weil’s work. After, in Chap. 5, I will argue that Weil’s position also helps us to understand certain problems and positions within the pragmatist, expressivist, and inferentialist programs. The question that must be asked, now that both Weil and Brandom’s positions have been presented, is how well Weil’s philosophical program and Brandom’s actually fit together. To that end, in this chapter I will directly develop the aspects of Weil’s thought that fit with this program and claim that these aspects are central to a more profound understanding of Weil’s work. In the next chapter I will apply this understanding and Weil’s presentation of violence to the inferentialist position itself.

The Logic of Philosophy presents a development of historical forms of coherence as they are found in discourse and as they can be logically structured according to the universality and coherence, the comprehensiveness, of their content. Weil claims that these different forms of coherence have the categorial structures that they do because they organize conceptually what is essential to a lived attitude, thus providing an understanding of concrete lived situations. Because categories allow us to understand how claims are structured within different forms of discourse, Weil’s use of the term category is meta-conceptual. It picks out and develops the consequences of different ground-level commitments. This meta-conceptuality is important because several different strands of modern philosophy when taken together—namely pragmatism, expressivism, and inferentialism—also insist on this meta-conceptuality (under the name of a pragmatic metavocabulary). Robert Brandom’s inferential expressive pragmatism is thus a natural dialogue partner with Weil’s philosophical position and it is precisely this meta-conceptual character that I will draw out of Brandom’s work.

Both Weil and expressive inferential pragmatism should be understood as presenting us with an underlying theory about orders of explanation. According to this position, these theories, by starting from a certain conception of orders of explanation, place the emphasis on discursive commitments and thus do not look outside of discourse to ground themselves. Orders of explanation matter because they define the kind of explanatory force a discursive commitment will have. In both Weil and this brand of pragmatism, the goal of the order of explanation to explain the framework within which the development of semantic content makes sense. This is important if we want to understand the possibility of meaning, of reasonable behavior, and of understanding itself. Additionally, I have claimed that both positions place an emphasis on how these discursive commitments are initially implicit, and that for both positions the work of philosophy is to make them explicit. For Weil, this is the distinction that he makes between attitudes and categories. For Robert Brandom, this is found in his inferential semantics and his pragmatic metavocabulary. By showing how implicit content (content that is lived in our lives without being reflexively grasped) is brought out into the light of a structured discourse, these two positions place a great deal of emphasis on the essential role that discursive categories play in structuring our cognitive experience in the world. Discursive categories are seen as structuring the content of our language and the content of our commitments, whether these be the Sellarsian meta-categories of spaces of reasons or the Weilian philosophical categories. I then worked out how different orders of explanation favor different types of positions. This is helpful in two ways. One, it shows how orders of explanation play an essential role in understanding different philosophical positions, and two, it shows how Weil and expressive inferential pragmatism’s orders of explanations justify why certain aspects of a commitment are weighted differently than others. We can exploit the shared emphasis on characterizing orders of explanations to better distinguish the divergences between Weil and Brandom’s position.

Reading the Logic of Philosophy as opening up the possibility of an interactive and dynamic theory of argumentation implies a reflection on the practice of philosophy as the junction between contrasting and conflictual theses about reality, about the Good, the Just, the Beautiful, about what makes a life worth living as a meaningful whole. These different theses all aim at being taken seriously, as establishing some sort of consensus and authority that ranges over communities, that act upon the individual. What the logic of philosophy shows however is that there are multiple positions that make claims to certainty and that provide an orientation. This certainty and orientation are naïve when they are inherited from the tradition by the fact that an individual belongs to a community. As soon as the individual is faced with the diversity of positions and theses that may exist in the beating heart of their own community, the individual must, if they want to establish mature certainty and a mature orientation, seek ways to establish the authority that leads to consensus.

Eric Weil theorizes violence, what violence means to his theory, and how his manner of theorizing violence throws down a challenge which philosophy must answer if it wants to be comprehensive and reasonable. He shows how violence bookends reason, understood as coherent discourse in situation, and how violence is fundamentally entangled with language since both are the concrete expressions of human spontaneity. This, I argue, forces us to re-examine the rational tradition that characterizes the human individual as a reasonable animal. For Weil, the individual can be reasonable, but only because they can also be unreasonable, because they can refuse the normative weight that reasonable discourse places upon individuals. In other words, this normative weight holds only as long as individuals see themselves as submitted to it. This leads us to read the Logic of Philosophy as a theory of argumentation. What is meant by this?

The recognition of different forms of coherence present in human discourse leads Eric Weil not to any single overarching metaphysical principle, but rather to the possibility of a type of philosophical practice. Philosophy becomes one human possibility among others; the main other being the possibility of refusing all coherence and all understanding. This falls in line with the “anthropological” readings of the Logic of Philosophy proposed by Mahamadé Savadogo and Francis Guibal. Savadogo’s reading sees philosophy as “the tale of human realizations” and sees the logic as “the forms of humanity’s expression,” whereas Guibal’s sees philosophy as human self-understanding and self-realization in an “anthropo-logy within the whole of reality.” This helps us to understand what Weil means when he says that:According to such readings, the refusal of coherence and understanding is a free choice, just as understanding philosophically (coherently and totally) is. For this reason, the philosophical choice is what Weil calls an “absolute principle” (LP, 61). This description brings out the three concepts that will guide this chapter: coherence, totality, and ground. Together these three concepts help develop the notion of comprehensiveness that Weil puts into place in order to understand the different shapes that discourse takes. Weil’s position is the result of the historical development of these concepts and he organizes his own discourse in order to articulate the free choice to understand coherently and totally as what grounds philosophy. The individual who makes this choice and who chooses to understand philosophically does so by refusing incoherence and violence. Once they refuse coherence, they posit a starting point—which can be anything, a first principle, a method, a certain metaphysical reality—and then they try to organize their discourse coherently around it. Together, refusing violence and positing some starting point constitute the opening philosophical gesture. The suite of categories is the history of the individuals (the philosophers) who have succeeded in elaborating discourses that allow a specific form of coherence to be grasped and understood from their starting points, from their fundamental concepts. Because they have succeeded, not only have they extracted a form of coherence that allows them to grasp the world and their experience, they have also articulated a form of coherence that can be used by others in their own grasp of the world. Philosophy is a possibility and an absolute principle for the individual who refuses to accept that the world is meaningless and that meaning is ungraspable. This refusal is the exercise of freedom that characterizes every coherent discourse.

Eric Weil’s Logic of Philosophy is a book about philosophical discourse, about meaning and action, but in being a book about these things, Weil does something surprising. He reformulates them in relation to violence. Discourse, according to the philosophical tradition, is supposed to be what brings people to agreement, what settles disputes, what establishes the Good, the Just, the Beautiful. It is supposed to be what reveals what is real and decides what is true. Weil accepts that characterization of discourse, but, by framing it in relation to violence, Weil uncovers something radical. Discourse cannot itself be separated from violence. If it could, violence would be overcome thanks to discourse, but Weil shows how discourse on its own does not overcome or eliminate violence. Weil asks however what to do when faced with someone who not only refuses agreement, but refuses all discussion. Not because of ignorance, or because of a misunderstanding, but precisely because they understand what discourse and agreement implies. By framing it this way, Weil articulates something that everyone knows but that philosophy forgets: individuals can refuse discourse, not because of a problem with discourse, but because they understand what it entails. This is why Weil frames discourse in relation to violence. The reason that Weil’s formulation is surprising is because he does not present it as solely being a practical problem. It is also a conceptual problem. In other words, it is not merely a moral or political question. It is also a question about the role that violence plays in our understanding.

This volume investigates Eric Weil’s innovative conceptualization of the place of violence in the philosophical tradition with a focus on violence’s relationship to language and to discourse. Weil presents violence as the central philosophical problem. According to this reading, the western philosophical tradition commonly conceptualizes violence as an expression of error or as a consequence of the weakness of will. However, by doing so, it misses something essential about the role that violence plays in our conceptual development as well as the place violence holds in our discursive practices. The author draws comparisons between Weil’s work and that of Robert Brandom. Brandom’s inferentialism creates a sophisticated program at the junction of pragmatics and semantics, philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of mind. The monograph builds on these insights in order to show how an inferentialist reading of Eric Weil is fruitful for both Weilian studies and for inferentialism. This volume will notably be of interest to scholars in philosophy, argumentation theory, and communication studies.