Abstract

The final chapter can only suggest how philosophy might respond to such a conclusion. Because descriptivism cannot conclusively be argued against on the basis of mediate assumptions, descriptivists can lose ground only by "losing faith" in their own descriptions, in this case by finding no criteria by which to choose between two mutually-exclusive and exhaustive descriptive systems. Belief should not here become unbelief--which is only a species of belief--but a suspension of belief, and maybe even the atrophy of the desire for certainty altogether. Other traditional motives may be enough to sustain philosophy in a recognizable form. ;Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein are historically and conceptually the most important figures of descriptivism, which, unfortunately, they represent in radically different ways. After a brief chapter sketching the general problems of contemporary philosophy, the two thinkers are introduced separately in two succeeding chapters so that their visions may shine critically unencumbered. There, the many dimensions of each are shown to include the quest for certainty in description. But the two are forced to take each other into account in chapter four, where it is discovered that the description each gives of the basic content and verification of description is not enough to justify it against that of the other. Moreover, verification for each is too mediated to provide the stasis needed for certainty. Chapter five portrays the prior faith each has in the nexus of Cartesian clarity which makes objective reality immediately available to the subject. Even here, however, each conceives of clarity differently: Husserl as intuition, Wittgenstein as communication. Again, there seems to be no way for either side to defend itself against the other; moreover, each discovers clarity alone to be insufficiently reflexive to yield certainty. In chapter six, Husserl and Wittgenstein are shown to attempt the reflexive movement, at first rather clumsily in what amounts to dogmatic monadology and behaviorism, then more imaginatively and negatively by contrasting the results of their respective methods with their "shadow" sides: naive realism and linguistic Platonism. But negative contrast without a positive description of the space in which the contrast is made is either useless or covertly dogmatic. The two unconscious myths inspiring phenomenology and linguistic analysis are shown to exhaust the possibilities for philosophic description. ;Post-cartesian philosophy has so driven apart the philosophic subject and objective truth that its methods are divided between an endless and uncertain analysis of objective concepts and a final though theological certitude. A method has been proposed in this century which pretends both to avoid convolutions and to provide certainty through the simple and adequate appropriation of objective reality as it is, or, rather, as it is for the appropriating subject. This method claims very different adherents who, however, quite independently of each other give it the name "description." Philosophic description is of essential possibilities, which, because they are essential, do not suffer the provisionality of contingent description. Conveniently, essences bear essential relations among themselves: subject and object are immediately and even integrally related by an entire system of essential meanings that they share. In determining the essential structures of objective reality, the philosopher simultaneously determines the meanings they must have for the subject, which, in the last analysis, can be described as the locus of meanings. The essential subject-object relations is therefore established by a prior network of relations, themselves capable of objectification by the philosophic subject. This weld of object to subject enables the philosopher to meet his object without mediation, to know its necessity as his own, and to describe it in the most intimate terms.