"Have you stopped beating your wife?" Grice on presuppositions

Speranza

Of course, this is about Lacan. See what happens when you start to using Husserlian jargon without disimpicating it.

The Impossibility of Philosophy without Presuppositions; Sublation

In the introduction to the first chapter of his Greater Logic ,[63] Hegel discusses his goal of creating

"a philosophy without presuppositions".

The locus classicus then is Hegel.

To put it simply, Hegel concludes that it is impossible to begin a logical analysis without intentionally, if tentatively, adopting presuppositions.

One needs an initial working hypothesis or abduction.

We have just explained that Hegel criticized other philosophers for basing their theories on unexamined presuppositions.

Does this mean that Hegel himself is open to the same criticism despite his denials?

Hegel would argue

"No."

The problem with most philosophers is not that they start from presuppositions, which is inevitable.

It is that they never return to critique their initial presuppositions.

Presuppositions should only be accepted tentatively as working hypotheses to be developed and tested.

Hegel argued that his totalizing philosophy and dialectic logic of Aufhebung (frequently translated into the dreadful English word "sublation") always turns back on itself.

This enables one not only to develop the logical consequences of a hypothesis but also to return to and analyze the starting point—to test the hypothesis.

The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first.

"For how can I start stopping beating my wife," asked the unmarried bachelor.

Sublation, then, is the concept we need to understand Grice's disimplicature.

It is a process by which internal contradictions of earlier concepts are resolved, but not in the sense of suppressing difference.

The German word aufheben means paradoxically to preserve as well as negate.

("No, I'm not married" -- "The Bachelor's Diary").

"To sublate" [i.e., "aufheben"] has a twofold meaning in [German]: on the one hand it means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put an end to.

Even "to preserve" includes a negative element, namely, that something is removed from its immediacy and so from an existence which is open to external influences, in order to preserve it.

A bachelor can hardly start stopping beating his wife.

Thus what is sublated is at the same time preserved.

It has only lost its immediacy but it is not by that account annihilated.[66]

Heidegger noted this when he remarked,

"But then, Noth noths." Carnap laughed at this.

In trying to understand the dialectic, many Americans are hampered by having been taught a crude caricature of sublation as a simplistic trinity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

That is, a thesis is presented, an internal contradiction or antithesis in the original thesis is identified, and the two are resolved in a harmonizing synthesis, which destroys all previous contradictions.

This serves as a new thesis, starting the logical process over.

This formula is designed more as a means to discredit Karl Marx (who expropriated Hegel's method) than to understand philosophy.

Indeed, this is how I was introduced to it in kindergarten. ("This is not your pencil.")

The problem with this description is that it suggests that sublation destroys all difference and deviation by converting them into an oppressive compromise.

Rather, as the German term implies, sublation preserves, as well as negates, the prior concept. Sublation is not merely tertiary—it is quadratic.

Thesis and antithesis exist in contradiction.

Through sublation these contradictions are simultaneously resolved into synthesis so that at one moment thesis and antithesis are revealed as identical.

Yet there always remains an unmediated moment, a hard kernel of unsublated contradiction, a phantom fourth, the trace or differance of deconstruction, that resists mediation.

That is, in sublation (or disimplicature, if you mustn't) we have not only the thesis and antithesis and the moment of identity of synthesis, but also simultaneously the moment of difference which resists sublation.

In sublation the difference identified in the earlier stage is always preserved because it is always a necessary moment in the development of the later.

To gussy it up with more fashionable terminology, the earlier concept is at one moment always already the subsequent concept, but simultaneously the very existence of the latter concept requires that the earlier concept is not yet the later concept.

Now, if we change the 'rules', as Quine has it, and allow that a bachelor can 'get a wife', he surely can later start stopping beating her. Or not.

Sublation (i.e., synthesis) can never destroy the differentiation between self and other (thesis and antithesis) precisely because sublation is the recognition that at one moment self and other are truly the same while at another moment they are truly different.

Moreover, the moment of identity is itself different from the self-identity of self and other.

In other words, in the differentiation of self and other, identity is a possibility.

It is through sublation that the possibility of identity is actualized. But at the same time, self and other must remain differentiated in order for actualization to remain possible.

Hence Hegel's famous slogan,

"the identity of identity and non-identity."

-- now in the coat of arms of the Hegel family, in Hanover.

This is a necessary result of the circularity of the dialectic.

Although worded in terms of the proactive resolution of what initially appeared to be contradictions into an implicit and inevitable whole, sublation is simultaneously the retroactive breakdown of what initially appeared as a harmonious whole into unresolved inherent contradiction.

And so on.