1. The development of Perelman’s thought is based on the idea that it is necessary to constitue a methodology and a philosophy of the reasonable. This need imposes itself through the recognition that the whole occidental philosophical tradition, nurtured by an absolutist vocation, lead only to impass and aporia in what concerns matters related to domains where we must apply reason to values, and where preferring is the point. The great question for Perelman was that of knowing whether the axiological structurations through which our preferences are organized somehow possess a logic and, if so, what kind of a logic that is.

The act of preferring being linked to the exercice of freedom — only the one who can choose prefers, and only the one who has the possibility of opting can choose —, it soon became clear that, if existing, a “logic of the preferable” could never be a logic of inferences characterized by necessity. A logic that deals with analytic and necessary reasonings, and in which the reasoning process assumes the form of a demonstration, is not compatible with the idea of preference: in a formalized logical system the validity of the reasoning does not depend on the adherence or on the assentmemt given to conclusions. It depends solely on the observancy of the correct application of inference rules to the set of axioms from which one proceeds. Given the axioms and inference rules, the reasonings become mechanic and mechanisable, and the system’s internal coherence makes them necessary. Inside a formalized logical system, if everyone reasons correctly, everyone will necessarily reach the same conclusions: in this case nothing points to the possibility of opting or induces a personal opinion. And, if it were the case, one would have to say that the formal system or the artificial language which formalizes it are innappropriately built.

The constituition of modern logic as theory of demonstration and, more accurately, as the study of the means of demonstration used in mathematical sciences made all that was ignored by mathematicians be considered as alien from formal logic and, in this sense, devoid of logic. The authors of Traité de l’argumentation state that the result of this was “an undue and perfectly unjustified limitation of the domain where our faculty of reasoning intervenes”1. It was as a reaction against the identification of the logical with formal logic — which affiliates a narrow concept of reason — that Perelman developped investigations with the aim of showing the existence of an informal logic, of assessing the possibility of considering the notion of proof in a wider way and, consequently, of making it possible to proceed to an enlargement of the concept of reason itself. So, it is from his insatisfaction on the subject of the limitations of logic considered as theory of demonstration, and reacting against formal logic’s pretension of possessing the monopoly of rationality2 that Perelman will be lead to the thematization of a new rationality, capable of comprehending not only the formal and abstract use of reason but also — and specially — its informal use (that is, the one that is linked to the use of natural language) and its concrete use (that is, in its application to questions of a pratical order, where it is necessary to establish aims, to assess situations, to organize preferences and to deal with values).

However, a new thematization of rationality presupposes the discussion and the deconstruction of the presuppositions of the traditional conception of reason and, since the notion of reason is central in philosophy, the reviewing of the status of philosophy itself, in what concerns its methodology as well as on the subject of its intrinsic possibilities. Besides, one aspect cannot be dissociated from another, and the assertion that “there is a solidarity between the kind of questions and the type of arguments that make it possible to supply a solution”3 enables me to antecipate the idea that philosophy, although not being reduced to a methodology, cannot, however dissociate the raising of questions and the formulation of problems from the methods that will enable them to “solve” (let me say it without yet precising the meaning of this term). That is why Perelman defends “the impossibility for a philosopher to escape questions by saying that the methods do not allow him to solve them; that is precisely what distinguishes the philosopher from the scientist. The scientist can renounce, not the philosopher”4.

What are then the means of which the philosopher disposes to “solve” questions, knowing beforehand that the proposals presented by him cannot be arbitrary, nor inexpressable, nor necessary, so that it will be possible to speak of rationality, and in the name of an enlarged conception of rationality?

2. Before trying to find an answer to this question, and before being lead to the core of what I intend to approach in this article — the rhetorical foundation of philosophy — let us dwell on the singular subversion that all this may imply with respect to the traditional characterization of philosophical activity. For that purpose, let us consider Gadamer’s hermeneutic thought, since it agglutinates (due to the phenomenological basis from which he departs and the universalist presumption with which it is presented) the great motives of occidental philosophical tradition. It is certain that the phenomenology claimed by gadamerian hermeneutics is no longer phenomenology in the husserlian sense, but phenomenology as it stands particularly after heideggerian criticisms5, that is to say, a phenomenology that does not stand by itself, always including an hermeneutic presupposition. However, this does not mean that phenomenology and hermeneutics exclude each other and, as Ricoeur6 pointed, if on the one hand phenomenology cannot be constituted without the hermeneutic presupposition, on the other hand phenomenology remains the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics. It is this last point that, from Pereman’s thought, makes it possible for hermeneutics to be highly polemized. So, just as the “hermeneutical turn” was considered to be the one that most strongly forced the reviewing and transformation of husserlian phenomenology, from now on it will be from the “rhetorical turn” (this is the argument I sustain) that we will be able to question phenomenology, either in its husserlian version or in its hermeneutic version. Furthermore, since any of the conceptions of phenomenology mentioned above carries with the ambition of truly realizing philosophy, or, at least, of defining the originary and true experience from which it rises, the criticism of phenomenology that I shall develop from the “new rhetoric” angle is also the criticism of a certain way of philosophying and of understanding philosophy. It simultaneously constitutes the proposal of a new understanding of philosophical activity, and it is exclusively in this sense that I speak of “rhetorical foundation of philosophy”. It will be up to the reader to decide if it is a more reasonable one, as is my belief.

Why then this interest in gadamerian hermeneutics? In first place because, just like Perelman’s new rhetoric, it emerges as a critical thought on absolutist philosophical tradition. Secondly because if hermeneutics criticized husserlian idealism or the husserlian interpretation of phenomenology, it is the very idea of phenomenology, regardless of its version, that may be questioned if we look at it from the perspectives opened by Perelman. Finally because hermeneutics, as well as Perelman’s new rhetoric, offer a new way of conceiving philosophical activity.

3. What is the great question of phenomenology, regardless of its versions? Let me put it bluntly: the great question of phenomenology lies in the watchword “To the Things” (Zu den Sachen)7. Nevertheless the return to the things may be made through different paths, as a comparative study of the concepts of phenomenon and phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, for example, may prove. J.-L. Marion referred on the subject that in Husserl “returning to the things means returning to the evidence given by intuition in conscience”8 and that for that reason “husserlian phenomenology goes back to things, up to a certain point. This point has a name: the being of conscience as such”9. For Heidegger the attempt to face the phenomenological maxim more radically leads to the consideration that “taken in its contents, phenomenology is the science of beingness (Sein des Seienden) — ontology”10. Thus J.-L. Marion made this observation on Heidegger: “the ultimate task to which the return to the things should be adressed has a name: the phenomenality of Being itself”11.

Even though this is not the occasion to explore this subject, let me nevertheless underline something which is essential for the development of this article’s plot. Heidegger’s appropriation of phenomenology fits in the need to accomplish a Dasein analytic which as for background the question of the meaning of beingness (Sein des Seienden). What this analytic will reveal is the very hermeneutic nature of the Dasein. This will be the starting-point of Gadamer efforts, in his endeavour to build a philosophical hermeneutics. Ricoeur has rightly written that “the most fundamental phenomenological presupposition of interpretation philosophy is that any question on any being whatsoever is a question on the meaning of this ‘being’” and that consequently “the choice through meaning is therefore the most general presupposition of the whole hermeneutics”12.

4. Meaning, states Gadamer, is always orientation of a possible question13. In fact, from the angle of the author of Wahrheit und Methode, it is the dialectic of question and answer that best characterizes the essence of hermeneutic experience and makes it possible to assert its universality. That is why the analysis of comprehension and interpretation ascends to, and finds its true nucleus in the logic of question and answer14. Interpreting and comprehending is always trying to answer a question that comes to our mind, and it can therefore be said that the comprehension of a text, for example, always has to pass through the explicitation of the question to which that text answers. To have access to comprehension is, first of all, to understand the meaning of the question and, with that understanding, to establish the horizon of meaning through which the answer itself becames susceptible of comprehension.

But in gadamerian hermeneutics the emphasis with which the question’s predominance as to the essence of knowledge is asserted leads the philosopher to radically dissociate the act of questioning from any methodologic venture. He therefore states that it is the question’s predominance that better and more originarily enables to see the limits that are imposed to knowledge by the idea of method. If I wanted to summarise Wahrheit und Method’s leitmotiv in a sentence I would unquestionably choose the following statement: “there is no method that teaches how to ask, how to see what is questionable”15. And, from what has been said previously, it becomes clear this will also be the target at which our criticism will aim. Let me antecipate a little: why would the assertion of our hermeneutic condition justify, and thus pass without the legitimation of the question and answer logic? J. Greisch pertinently observed on this matter: “Gadamer’s hermeneutics acquires its universal dimension at the cost of renouncing normative exigence so that the ‘critical’ questions familiar to the interpretation expert do not derive from philosophical hermeneutics’ competence. The hermeneutic constitution of our being-in-the-world does not need legitimation. If it possesses a ‘logic’, this logic works behind reason, as in Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit a ‘logic’ works without being transparent to conscience”16.

Indeed, for Gadamer the asking while true asking, and not as mere pedagogic or rhetorical asking, would suspend the pros and cons. It would intitute a space previous to decision or positioning and therefore previous to the means through which an answer could be elaborated, where there only would be room for “possibilities of meaning”. In this act of suspending would lie the true original essence of questioning17. However this presupposes the possibility of thought being exerced in a register of pure analyticity of possibilities that, coming from who knows where or how, interpelate it in a space previous to choice and appropriation of the possibilities of meaning that will later penetrate our opinion18. What seems doubtful and artificial to me is precisely this distinction between the level of pure possibilities of meaning — as if they were an autonomous sphere attainable only by a true asking that would aim at nothing but interrogation19 — and the level of opinions and decisions as register of appropiation and answer to the question that occured in us. Because, and keeping to Gadamer’s words, it is said of questions that they occur in us, that they rise and emerge through us, and not that they are produced or placed by us 20. M. Mª Carrilho observed on the subject that “to Gadamer the main difficulty in this transition between knowing and not knowing lies in the resistance of opinion. To overcome it he suggests that the access to the question be considered as if it were a finding coming to one’s mind, that is to say, that this is not the case of a method nor of a strategy”21. But why not see in this resistance of opinion — considered in perelmanian terms as a principle of inertia and of stability regulating our spiritual life — the guarantee of a continuity without which one will not be able to speak of rationality22? And why not state that between truth and opinion there is not a difference of nature but only of degree23, that truths are nothing but our best and most founded opinions24, and that “it is because an opinion has been admitted that it is reasonable to maintain it, that is not reasonable to put it aside for no reason”25?

In the process of asking, as Gadamer conceives it, it seems that questions occur in us as in a dream, as if it were an experience beyond our will and doing26. And, according to his views that is exactly what happens: asking is suffering (in paschein sense) more than it is doing27.

Though admitting that questions are essential to the constitution of any philosophy I will say, as Perelman did, that “if someone should elaborate a philosophy that had nothing in common with our world that would be a dream, not a philosophy. Every philosophy should be capable of integrating our convictions concerning the world we live in. In order to state that some of these convictions are valid, the others being nothing but illusions, each philosophy must take a position regarding all pre-philosophical convictions, which constitute the philosophical raw material, so to speak. There lies then a feature of every philosophy: the world of common sense cannot be neglected”28.

Thus Perelman states that it is by means of reference to common real that the philosopher disposes of a certain freedom, that it is in relation to common thinking that he should prove his rationality29, and that philosophical proof is of a rhetoric nature, its reasonings being linked to commonly admitted theses, that is to say, to common principles, common notions and commonplaces30.

By following this line of considerations we are then lead to state that asking is not gauged only in terms of meaning, because it does not aim exclusively or originarily to disclose “possibilities of meaning”, but specially in terms of pertinence, since with it positions are suggested, insinuated or proposed. And let me add right away that — out of the parameters of formal thinking, where logical nexus becomes independent and autonomous — suggesting, insinuating or proposing a position intended to be reasonable is always to submit speech to the need of a recognition and to the manifestation of an adherence or agreement.

Hence philosophical questioning always means discussing the consequences resulting of what we believe in or of what others believe in and, in that sense, taking position as to these same beliefs. I think that without this discussing and positioning dimension we would have no criterion to distinguish the specifity of philosophical questions. Besides, rigourously speaking, I might even say that there are no philosophical questions; what we have are philosophical takings of position. When we say “philosophical question” we are actually referring to a question whose specificity does not come from within itself but from an unavoidable taking of position as to the problematicity the answer to that question involves. “Philosophical question” then means a question whose answer will be discussed and will appear as problematic. The question will be said to be philosophical or not depending on the discussibility and problematicity of an answer that is always optative. What characterizes philosophical activity is the discussion and the attempt to thematize this problematicity — instead of trying to dissolve it— by taking a position. Since any position can only be discursively elaborated by means of an argumentation, we could say that if there were a motto for philosophical activity that motto would be: “To doubt, to decide and to convince”31.

The question is then an action whose pertinence can only be confirmed a posteriori, even if we possess contextual indexes which enable us to assume and try to show that it is pertinent. But, as it is never totally guaranteed (except if the act of asking could do without legitimation, as Gadamer suggests), asking is simultaneously taking a risk (who can assure us that the pertinence of our question will be recognized?) and accepting the task of attempting to answer the objections and interrogations with which we shall be confronted on the subject of our questions and statements being pertinent or not (once we intend them to be pertinent).

The most important lesson to draw from Perelman’s thought is precisely that philosophy is not characterized by questionability but by the discussibility and problematicity undissociable from a taking of position. Philosophical asking does not necessarily derive from an ineluctably originary hermeneutic experience. It derives from the challenge simultaneously woven and proposed — by means of the word — to those who, putting aside the use of strength, the intolerant sceptre of Truth or an ontologization that would turn meaning into a gift which through the power of interpelation/illumination would drag us out of passivity, dare to speak, to have an opinion and to be stubbornly interventive. In the measure of their possibilities and with the risks — relative and ponderable, at least up to a certain point —which they imply.

5. Perelman seems to deliberately exclude the possibility of considering questions while questions, uncommitted to any explicit or implicit strategy. To him the question is always committed to an interest, and that interest is not merely of a theorical-contemplative nature. In several of his writtings he adverts that it is fictitious to wish to radically separate theory from pratice and that one has to have in mind the exigences of action in thought. Questions are undissociable from the interest of the one who asks, and for that reason there is no room here for Gadamer’s way of placing the terms of this problem. “Rhetorical or pragmatic considerations, obrserves Perelman, inevitably influence interpretation problems, that is to say, semantic problems. Wanting to treat the latter impersonally, as if the questions of meaning were independent of the users’ intentions and mutual relations, is to twist hermeneutic reality such as it appears in poetry, theology, law, philosophy, human sciences and day-to-day communication”32.

It is us who put questions, and if we put them it is because we have an interest and reasons for putting them. If questions occur in us — to resume Gadamer’s idea — one must nevertheless say that this is because there are reasons for them to occur to us and these motives, even though they may not be immediately explicit, should be made patent. Only when we understand and are capable of saying what is meant to be induced, suggested or stated through interrogation can we speak of acceeding to the ‘logic’ of the question, of that question which we put or is put to us. Interrogativity then appears as thought through speech — which is always a form of action, as matter of fact — without which experience could not be told and therefore as a manner of expression of thought of considerable rhetorical importance. “The question supposes an object on which it converges, and suggests the existence of an agreement as to that object’s existence. Answering a question is to confirm that implicit agreement(...)”33. Under this perspective, questioning must be inserted in the “argumentative negotiation”34 through which one aims to regulate a differendum.

6. To return to the things themselves is always to return to the man who thinks them, to the contexts in which he thinks them, to the way he thinks them, to the language in which he thinks them and to those in function of whom and to whom he thinks them. And if — as J. Derrida concluded, in a study on Husserl — “contrary to what phenomenology (...) tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire is forcibly tempted to believe, the thing itself always eludes”35, it must nevertheless be said that it will not be despite of that (perhaps precisely because of that) that we will stop thinking and trying to organize what — for lack of an absolute guarantee and without reccurring to the magical force of the “wavings of the ontological wand”36 which would turn Being into the one condition of all answers — remains and imposes itself as what should be preferred for being considered the most reasonable for each problematic in question.

The rhetorical foundation of philosophy does not give philosophy an absolute and ultimate fundamenting, but converts philosophy in an eminent way of living our unsurpassable rhetorical condition with the freedom and intelligence that we are lead to exerce by renouncing the scope of effective control37 and, consequently, of power as principle (be it the one that is generated in the pretense statement of necessary criteria, be it the one that results of a pretense arbitrarity that legitimates everything). As if prudence (phronesis) were the virtue that humanizes philosophical reason.

7. I shall conclude by trying to clarify the thesis that I have undertaken to defend throughout these pages, according to Perelman’s thought: philosophy is not characterized by the originary experience of questioning but by the discussibility, problematicity and optativity the answer implies. To formulate a question is always to propose or suggest a particular approach to the real. Just as, in philosophy, there are no objective descriptions of the real, but only ways of presenting opinions which concern that real, so there are no questions without presuppositions, questions which cannot be questioned in turn. It is the fact of being susceptible of discussion, revealing of the intrinsic probematicity of the question-answer pair, that renders philosophy fertile, creative and responsible, preventing the philosopher from prematurely detaching himself of the concrete, of nurturing absolutist aspirations or of withdrawing to previous plans of experience self-legitimated by their pretense originarity.

In fact, discussibility is simultaneously condition of exercice of freedom and free exam, dialogical principle perpetuating the opening to alterity, denial of all dogmatic authority and ruling of a critiscim that postulates appropriation and committed relation as formation criteria of a human competence which cannot be substituted for any acquired knowledge or technique.

Discussibility implies thinking man as a risk and the relation which constitutes him as a situated enigma: one the one hand, to state the possibility of discussing is to state the precarity of all agreement, to stress the ephemeral quality of all encounter, to desconstruct the utopy of a perfect and completed knowledge; on the other hand, it corresponds to asserting that not knowing is never absolute: the absence of the whole (which is not the absence of everything) is the principle of the quest not for meaning but for pertinence, in possible articulations, mediated by a word which gives us reasons for thinking, feeling and speaking to those for whom one thinks. Philosophical thought is not the discovery of the way to a proximity that would culminate in a coincidence. It means devoting one’s efforts to the production of a speech which makes possible the inscription of a community. And it will be from the effort to achieve this community, that is built around speech, that one will speak of reason, claim to be right and that it will be possible to elaborate a regulating ideal of rationality.

NOTAS

1 Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité de l’argumentation, 5ª ed., Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1988, p. 4.

2 Cf. Max Loreau, “La rhétorique comme logique des sciences humaines”, Critique, nº 221, October, 1965, pp. 877.

3 Chaïm Perelman, “L’idéal de rationalité et la règle de justice”, Éthique et Droit, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1990, p. 150.

4 idem ibidem, p. 150.

5 Cf. Rui A.L.M. Grácio, “Fenomenologia, metafísica e hermenêutica”, Caderno de Filosofias, nº 2, January, Coimbra, 1990, pp. 13-45.

6 Cf. Paul Ricoeur, “Phénoménologie et herméneutique: en venant de Husserl”, Du texte à l’action. Essais d’herméneutique II, Éditions du Seuil, 1986, p. 40.

7 Let us point out that it was only the later Heidegger who asserted that “To the Things” was the basic maxim of phenomenology. As Herbert Spiegelberg remarked, the closest Husserl came in his publications to using this phrase was in his Logical Investigations, where he asked for “no mere words but the things themselves” and in his manifesto-article on “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” he asked that research start “not from philosophies but from the things and problems”. (Cf. H. Spiegelberg, Doing Phenomenology. Essais on and in Phenomenology, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands, 1975, p. 15).

8 Jean-Luc Marion, “L’étant et le phénomène”, Phénoménologie et métaphysique, P.U.F., Paris, 1984, p. 173.

9 idem ibidem, p. 191.

10 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7º ed., Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 1976, p. 37.

11 Jean-Luc Marion, “L’étant et le phénomène”, Phénoménologie et métaphysique, P.U.F., Paris, 1984, p. 199.

12 Paul Ricoeur, “Phénoménologie et herméneutique: en venant de Husserl”, Du texte à l’action. Essais d’herméneutique II, Éditions du Seuil, 1986, pp 55-56.

13 Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 4ª ed., J.C.B. Mohr, Tübingen, 1975, (trad. esp.) pp. 441.

14 Cf. ibidem, pp. 447-458.

15 Cf. ibidem, p. 443.

16 Jean Greisch, L’age herméneutique de la raison, Les Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 1985, p. 113.

17 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 453.

18 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 454.

19 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 444.

20 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 444.

21 Manuel Mª Carrilho, Razão e transmissão da filosofia, Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1986, p. 15.

22 Cf. Ch. Perelman, “Opinions et vérité”, Justice et Raison, 2ª ed., Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1972, p. 203.

23 idem ibidem, p. 202.

24 idem ibidem, p. 205.

25 Ch. Perelman, “Évidence et preuve”, Justice et Raison, 2ª ed., Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1972, p. 149.

26 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 10.

27 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 444.

28 Philosophie et méthode, Actes du Colloque de Bruxelles (1972), Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, p. 195. Ital. supplied.

29 Cf. Ch. Perelman, “Le réel commum et le réel philosophique”, Le champ de l’argumentation, Éditions de l’université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1970, p. 264.

30 Cf. Ch. Perelman, “Philosophie, Rhétorique et Lieux communs”, Bulletin de la Classe de Lettres et des Sciences morales et politiques de l’Academie Rotal de Belgique, 5ª série, T. LVIII, 1972, pp. 144.

31 Cf. Ch. Perelman, “Libre examen hier et aujourd’hui”, Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1949, N.S., 2ª ano, fasc. 1, p. 39.

32 Ch. Perelman, “Perspectives rhétoriques sur les problèmes semantiques”, Logique et Analyse, nº 67-68, 1974, p. 251. Ital. supplied.

33 Chaïm Perelman e Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité de l’argumentation, 5ª ed., Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1988, p. 214. Ital. supplied.

34 Cf. Ch. Perelman, L’empire rhétorique, 2ª ed., J. Vrin, Paris, 1988, p. 24.

35 Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène, 3ª ed., P.U.F., Paris, 1976, p. 117.

36 It is a Michel Meyer’s expression; cf. “Y a-t-il une modernité rhétorique?”, De la Métaphysique à la Rhétorique, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1986, p. 10.

37Logique et Analyse

Artigo
Início	Curriculum Vitae \| Publicações \| Argumenta \| Música \| Na espuma dos dias \| Contacto Cursos \| Acções de formação \| Explicações


		Rui Grácio PERELMAN’S RHETORICAL FOUNDATION OF PHILOSOPHY “Perelman’s rhetorical foundation of philosophy” in Argumentation 7, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993, pp. 439-449. “Philosophical argumentation, like juridical argumentation, constitute applications, to different domains, of a theory of argumentation which we consider as a new rhetoric. By identifying this theory with the general theory of persuasive speech, which seeks to obtain the intellectual as well as the emotional adherence of an audience, no matter which, we state that all speeches which do not aspire to an impersonal validity proceed from rhetoric”. (Ch. Perelman, L’empire rhétorique, p. 177). “But, if one does not admit that the philosophical thesis may be founded on evident intuitions, it will be necessary to reccur to argumentative technics to make them prevail. The new rhetoric then becomes the indispensable tool of philosophy” (Ch. Perelman, L’empire rhétorique, p. 21). 1. The development of Perelman’s thought is based on the idea that it is necessary to constitue a methodology and a philosophy of the reasonable. This need imposes itself through the recognition that the whole occidental philosophical tradition, nurtured by an absolutist vocation, lead only to impass and aporia in what concerns matters related to domains where we must apply reason to values, and where preferring is the point. The great question for Perelman was that of knowing whether the axiological structurations through which our preferences are organized somehow possess a logic and, if so, what kind of a logic that is. The act of preferring being linked to the exercice of freedom — only the one who can choose prefers, and only the one who has the possibility of opting can choose —, it soon became clear that, if existing, a “logic of the preferable” could never be a logic of inferences characterized by necessity. A logic that deals with analytic and necessary reasonings, and in which the reasoning process assumes the form of a demonstration, is not compatible with the idea of preference: in a formalized logical system the validity of the reasoning does not depend on the adherence or on the assentmemt given to conclusions. It depends solely on the observancy of the correct application of inference rules to the set of axioms from which one proceeds. Given the axioms and inference rules, the reasonings become mechanic and mechanisable, and the system’s internal coherence makes them necessary. Inside a formalized logical system, if everyone reasons correctly, everyone will necessarily reach the same conclusions: in this case nothing points to the possibility of opting or induces a personal opinion. And, if it were the case, one would have to say that the formal system or the artificial language which formalizes it are innappropriately built. The constituition of modern logic as theory of demonstration and, more accurately, as the study of the means of demonstration used in mathematical sciences made all that was ignored by mathematicians be considered as alien from formal logic and, in this sense, devoid of logic. The authors of Traité de l’argumentation state that the result of this was “an undue and perfectly unjustified limitation of the domain where our faculty of reasoning intervenes”1. It was as a reaction against the identification of the logical with formal logic — which affiliates a narrow concept of reason — that Perelman developped investigations with the aim of showing the existence of an informal logic, of assessing the possibility of considering the notion of proof in a wider way and, consequently, of making it possible to proceed to an enlargement of the concept of reason itself. So, it is from his insatisfaction on the subject of the limitations of logic considered as theory of demonstration, and reacting against formal logic’s pretension of possessing the monopoly of rationality2 that Perelman will be lead to the thematization of a new rationality, capable of comprehending not only the formal and abstract use of reason but also — and specially — its informal use (that is, the one that is linked to the use of natural language) and its concrete use (that is, in its application to questions of a pratical order, where it is necessary to establish aims, to assess situations, to organize preferences and to deal with values). However, a new thematization of rationality presupposes the discussion and the deconstruction of the presuppositions of the traditional conception of reason and, since the notion of reason is central in philosophy, the reviewing of the status of philosophy itself, in what concerns its methodology as well as on the subject of its intrinsic possibilities. Besides, one aspect cannot be dissociated from another, and the assertion that “there is a solidarity between the kind of questions and the type of arguments that make it possible to supply a solution”3 enables me to antecipate the idea that philosophy, although not being reduced to a methodology, cannot, however dissociate the raising of questions and the formulation of problems from the methods that will enable them to “solve” (let me say it without yet precising the meaning of this term). That is why Perelman defends “the impossibility for a philosopher to escape questions by saying that the methods do not allow him to solve them; that is precisely what distinguishes the philosopher from the scientist. The scientist can renounce, not the philosopher”4. What are then the means of which the philosopher disposes to “solve” questions, knowing beforehand that the proposals presented by him cannot be arbitrary, nor inexpressable, nor necessary, so that it will be possible to speak of rationality, and in the name of an enlarged conception of rationality? 2. Before trying to find an answer to this question, and before being lead to the core of what I intend to approach in this article — the rhetorical foundation of philosophy — let us dwell on the singular subversion that all this may imply with respect to the traditional characterization of philosophical activity. For that purpose, let us consider Gadamer’s hermeneutic thought, since it agglutinates (due to the phenomenological basis from which he departs and the universalist presumption with which it is presented) the great motives of occidental philosophical tradition. It is certain that the phenomenology claimed by gadamerian hermeneutics is no longer phenomenology in the husserlian sense, but phenomenology as it stands particularly after heideggerian criticisms5, that is to say, a phenomenology that does not stand by itself, always including an hermeneutic presupposition. However, this does not mean that phenomenology and hermeneutics exclude each other and, as Ricoeur6 pointed, if on the one hand phenomenology cannot be constituted without the hermeneutic presupposition, on the other hand phenomenology remains the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics. It is this last point that, from Pereman’s thought, makes it possible for hermeneutics to be highly polemized. So, just as the “hermeneutical turn” was considered to be the one that most strongly forced the reviewing and transformation of husserlian phenomenology, from now on it will be from the “rhetorical turn” (this is the argument I sustain) that we will be able to question phenomenology, either in its husserlian version or in its hermeneutic version. Furthermore, since any of the conceptions of phenomenology mentioned above carries with the ambition of truly realizing philosophy, or, at least, of defining the originary and true experience from which it rises, the criticism of phenomenology that I shall develop from the “new rhetoric” angle is also the criticism of a certain way of philosophying and of understanding philosophy. It simultaneously constitutes the proposal of a new understanding of philosophical activity, and it is exclusively in this sense that I speak of “rhetorical foundation of philosophy”. It will be up to the reader to decide if it is a more reasonable one, as is my belief. Why then this interest in gadamerian hermeneutics? In first place because, just like Perelman’s new rhetoric, it emerges as a critical thought on absolutist philosophical tradition. Secondly because if hermeneutics criticized husserlian idealism or the husserlian interpretation of phenomenology, it is the very idea of phenomenology, regardless of its version, that may be questioned if we look at it from the perspectives opened by Perelman. Finally because hermeneutics, as well as Perelman’s new rhetoric, offer a new way of conceiving philosophical activity. 3. What is the great question of phenomenology, regardless of its versions? Let me put it bluntly: the great question of phenomenology lies in the watchword “To the Things” (Zu den Sachen)7. Nevertheless the return to the things may be made through different paths, as a comparative study of the concepts of phenomenon and phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, for example, may prove. J.-L. Marion referred on the subject that in Husserl “returning to the things means returning to the evidence given by intuition in conscience”8 and that for that reason “husserlian phenomenology goes back to things, up to a certain point. This point has a name: the being of conscience as such”9. For Heidegger the attempt to face the phenomenological maxim more radically leads to the consideration that “taken in its contents, phenomenology is the science of beingness (Sein des Seienden) — ontology”10. Thus J.-L. Marion made this observation on Heidegger: “the ultimate task to which the return to the things should be adressed has a name: the phenomenality of Being itself”11. Even though this is not the occasion to explore this subject, let me nevertheless underline something which is essential for the development of this article’s plot. Heidegger’s appropriation of phenomenology fits in the need to accomplish a Dasein analytic which as for background the question of the meaning of beingness (Sein des Seienden). What this analytic will reveal is the very hermeneutic nature of the Dasein. This will be the starting-point of Gadamer efforts, in his endeavour to build a philosophical hermeneutics. Ricoeur has rightly written that “the most fundamental phenomenological presupposition of interpretation philosophy is that any question on any being whatsoever is a question on the meaning of this ‘being’” and that consequently “the choice through meaning is therefore the most general presupposition of the whole hermeneutics”12. 4. Meaning, states Gadamer, is always orientation of a possible question13. In fact, from the angle of the author of Wahrheit und Methode, it is the dialectic of question and answer that best characterizes the essence of hermeneutic experience and makes it possible to assert its universality. That is why the analysis of comprehension and interpretation ascends to, and finds its true nucleus in the logic of question and answer14. Interpreting and comprehending is always trying to answer a question that comes to our mind, and it can therefore be said that the comprehension of a text, for example, always has to pass through the explicitation of the question to which that text answers. To have access to comprehension is, first of all, to understand the meaning of the question and, with that understanding, to establish the horizon of meaning through which the answer itself becames susceptible of comprehension. But in gadamerian hermeneutics the emphasis with which the question’s predominance as to the essence of knowledge is asserted leads the philosopher to radically dissociate the act of questioning from any methodologic venture. He therefore states that it is the question’s predominance that better and more originarily enables to see the limits that are imposed to knowledge by the idea of method. If I wanted to summarise Wahrheit und Method’s leitmotiv in a sentence I would unquestionably choose the following statement: “there is no method that teaches how to ask, how to see what is questionable”15. And, from what has been said previously, it becomes clear this will also be the target at which our criticism will aim. Let me antecipate a little: why would the assertion of our hermeneutic condition justify, and thus pass without the legitimation of the question and answer logic? J. Greisch pertinently observed on this matter: “Gadamer’s hermeneutics acquires its universal dimension at the cost of renouncing normative exigence so that the ‘critical’ questions familiar to the interpretation expert do not derive from philosophical hermeneutics’ competence. The hermeneutic constitution of our being-in-the-world does not need legitimation. If it possesses a ‘logic’, this logic works behind reason, as in Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit a ‘logic’ works without being transparent to conscience”16. Indeed, for Gadamer the asking while true asking, and not as mere pedagogic or rhetorical asking, would suspend the pros and cons. It would intitute a space previous to decision or positioning and therefore previous to the means through which an answer could be elaborated, where there only would be room for “possibilities of meaning”. In this act of suspending would lie the true original essence of questioning17. However this presupposes the possibility of thought being exerced in a register of pure analyticity of possibilities that, coming from who knows where or how, interpelate it in a space previous to choice and appropriation of the possibilities of meaning that will later penetrate our opinion18. What seems doubtful and artificial to me is precisely this distinction between the level of pure possibilities of meaning — as if they were an autonomous sphere attainable only by a true asking that would aim at nothing but interrogation19 — and the level of opinions and decisions as register of appropiation and answer to the question that occured in us. Because, and keeping to Gadamer’s words, it is said of questions that they occur in us, that they rise and emerge through us, and not that they are produced or placed by us 20. M. Mª Carrilho observed on the subject that “to Gadamer the main difficulty in this transition between knowing and not knowing lies in the resistance of opinion. To overcome it he suggests that the access to the question be considered as if it were a finding coming to one’s mind, that is to say, that this is not the case of a method nor of a strategy”21. But why not see in this resistance of opinion — considered in perelmanian terms as a principle of inertia and of stability regulating our spiritual life — the guarantee of a continuity without which one will not be able to speak of rationality22? And why not state that between truth and opinion there is not a difference of nature but only of degree23, that truths are nothing but our best and most founded opinions24, and that “it is because an opinion has been admitted that it is reasonable to maintain it, that is not reasonable to put it aside for no reason”25? In the process of asking, as Gadamer conceives it, it seems that questions occur in us as in a dream, as if it were an experience beyond our will and doing26. And, according to his views that is exactly what happens: asking is suffering (in paschein sense) more than it is doing27. Though admitting that questions are essential to the constitution of any philosophy I will say, as Perelman did, that “if someone should elaborate a philosophy that had nothing in common with our world that would be a dream, not a philosophy. Every philosophy should be capable of integrating our convictions concerning the world we live in. In order to state that some of these convictions are valid, the others being nothing but illusions, each philosophy must take a position regarding all pre-philosophical convictions, which constitute the philosophical raw material, so to speak. There lies then a feature of every philosophy: the world of common sense cannot be neglected”28. Thus Perelman states that it is by means of reference to common real that the philosopher disposes of a certain freedom, that it is in relation to common thinking that he should prove his rationality29, and that philosophical proof is of a rhetoric nature, its reasonings being linked to commonly admitted theses, that is to say, to common principles, common notions and commonplaces30. By following this line of considerations we are then lead to state that asking is not gauged only in terms of meaning, because it does not aim exclusively or originarily to disclose “possibilities of meaning”, but specially in terms of pertinence, since with it positions are suggested, insinuated or proposed. And let me add right away that — out of the parameters of formal thinking, where logical nexus becomes independent and autonomous — suggesting, insinuating or proposing a position intended to be reasonable is always to submit speech to the need of a recognition and to the manifestation of an adherence or agreement. Hence philosophical questioning always means discussing the consequences resulting of what we believe in or of what others believe in and, in that sense, taking position as to these same beliefs. I think that without this discussing and positioning dimension we would have no criterion to distinguish the specifity of philosophical questions. Besides, rigourously speaking, I might even say that there are no philosophical questions; what we have are philosophical takings of position. When we say “philosophical question” we are actually referring to a question whose specificity does not come from within itself but from an unavoidable taking of position as to the problematicity the answer to that question involves. “Philosophical question” then means a question whose answer will be discussed and will appear as problematic. The question will be said to be philosophical or not depending on the discussibility and problematicity of an answer that is always optative. What characterizes philosophical activity is the discussion and the attempt to thematize this problematicity — instead of trying to dissolve it— by taking a position. Since any position can only be discursively elaborated by means of an argumentation, we could say that if there were a motto for philosophical activity that motto would be: “To doubt, to decide and to convince”31. The question is then an action whose pertinence can only be confirmed a posteriori, even if we possess contextual indexes which enable us to assume and try to show that it is pertinent. But, as it is never totally guaranteed (except if the act of asking could do without legitimation, as Gadamer suggests), asking is simultaneously taking a risk (who can assure us that the pertinence of our question will be recognized?) and accepting the task of attempting to answer the objections and interrogations with which we shall be confronted on the subject of our questions and statements being pertinent or not (once we intend them to be pertinent). The most important lesson to draw from Perelman’s thought is precisely that philosophy is not characterized by questionability but by the discussibility and problematicity undissociable from a taking of position. Philosophical asking does not necessarily derive from an ineluctably originary hermeneutic experience. It derives from the challenge simultaneously woven and proposed — by means of the word — to those who, putting aside the use of strength, the intolerant sceptre of Truth or an ontologization that would turn meaning into a gift which through the power of interpelation/illumination would drag us out of passivity, dare to speak, to have an opinion and to be stubbornly interventive. In the measure of their possibilities and with the risks — relative and ponderable, at least up to a certain point —which they imply. 5. Perelman seems to deliberately exclude the possibility of considering questions while questions, uncommitted to any explicit or implicit strategy. To him the question is always committed to an interest, and that interest is not merely of a theorical-contemplative nature. In several of his writtings he adverts that it is fictitious to wish to radically separate theory from pratice and that one has to have in mind the exigences of action in thought. Questions are undissociable from the interest of the one who asks, and for that reason there is no room here for Gadamer’s way of placing the terms of this problem. “Rhetorical or pragmatic considerations, obrserves Perelman, inevitably influence interpretation problems, that is to say, semantic problems. Wanting to treat the latter impersonally, as if the questions of meaning were independent of the users’ intentions and mutual relations, is to twist hermeneutic reality such as it appears in poetry, theology, law, philosophy, human sciences and day-to-day communication”32. It is us who put questions, and if we put them it is because we have an interest and reasons for putting them. If questions occur in us — to resume Gadamer’s idea — one must nevertheless say that this is because there are reasons for them to occur to us and these motives, even though they may not be immediately explicit, should be made patent. Only when we understand and are capable of saying what is meant to be induced, suggested or stated through interrogation can we speak of acceeding to the ‘logic’ of the question, of that question which we put or is put to us. Interrogativity then appears as thought through speech — which is always a form of action, as matter of fact — without which experience could not be told and therefore as a manner of expression of thought of considerable rhetorical importance. “The question supposes an object on which it converges, and suggests the existence of an agreement as to that object’s existence. Answering a question is to confirm that implicit agreement(...)”33. Under this perspective, questioning must be inserted in the “argumentative negotiation”34 through which one aims to regulate a differendum. 6. To return to the things themselves is always to return to the man who thinks them, to the contexts in which he thinks them, to the way he thinks them, to the language in which he thinks them and to those in function of whom and to whom he thinks them. And if — as J. Derrida concluded, in a study on Husserl — “contrary to what phenomenology (...) tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire is forcibly tempted to believe, the thing itself always eludes”35, it must nevertheless be said that it will not be despite of that (perhaps precisely because of that) that we will stop thinking and trying to organize what — for lack of an absolute guarantee and without reccurring to the magical force of the “wavings of the ontological wand”36 which would turn Being into the one condition of all answers — remains and imposes itself as what should be preferred for being considered the most reasonable for each problematic in question. The rhetorical foundation of philosophy does not give philosophy an absolute and ultimate fundamenting, but converts philosophy in an eminent way of living our unsurpassable rhetorical condition with the freedom and intelligence that we are lead to exerce by renouncing the scope of effective control37 and, consequently, of power as principle (be it the one that is generated in the pretense statement of necessary criteria, be it the one that results of a pretense arbitrarity that legitimates everything). As if prudence (phronesis) were the virtue that humanizes philosophical reason. 7. I shall conclude by trying to clarify the thesis that I have undertaken to defend throughout these pages, according to Perelman’s thought: philosophy is not characterized by the originary experience of questioning but by the discussibility, problematicity and optativity the answer implies. To formulate a question is always to propose or suggest a particular approach to the real. Just as, in philosophy, there are no objective descriptions of the real, but only ways of presenting opinions which concern that real, so there are no questions without presuppositions, questions which cannot be questioned in turn. It is the fact of being susceptible of discussion, revealing of the intrinsic probematicity of the question-answer pair, that renders philosophy fertile, creative and responsible, preventing the philosopher from prematurely detaching himself of the concrete, of nurturing absolutist aspirations or of withdrawing to previous plans of experience self-legitimated by their pretense originarity. In fact, discussibility is simultaneously condition of exercice of freedom and free exam, dialogical principle perpetuating the opening to alterity, denial of all dogmatic authority and ruling of a critiscim that postulates appropriation and committed relation as formation criteria of a human competence which cannot be substituted for any acquired knowledge or technique. Discussibility implies thinking man as a risk and the relation which constitutes him as a situated enigma: one the one hand, to state the possibility of discussing is to state the precarity of all agreement, to stress the ephemeral quality of all encounter, to desconstruct the utopy of a perfect and completed knowledge; on the other hand, it corresponds to asserting that not knowing is never absolute: the absence of the whole (which is not the absence of everything) is the principle of the quest not for meaning but for pertinence, in possible articulations, mediated by a word which gives us reasons for thinking, feeling and speaking to those for whom one thinks. Philosophical thought is not the discovery of the way to a proximity that would culminate in a coincidence. It means devoting one’s efforts to the production of a speech which makes possible the inscription of a community. And it will be from the effort to achieve this community, that is built around speech, that one will speak of reason, claim to be right and that it will be possible to elaborate a regulating ideal of rationality. NOTAS 1 Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité de l’argumentation, 5ª ed., Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1988, p. 4. 2 Cf. Max Loreau, “La rhétorique comme logique des sciences humaines”, Critique, nº 221, October, 1965, pp. 877. 3 Chaïm Perelman, “L’idéal de rationalité et la règle de justice”, Éthique et Droit, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1990, p. 150. 4 idem ibidem, p. 150. 5 Cf. Rui A.L.M. Grácio, “Fenomenologia, metafísica e hermenêutica”, Caderno de Filosofias, nº 2, January, Coimbra, 1990, pp. 13-45. 6 Cf. Paul Ricoeur, “Phénoménologie et herméneutique: en venant de Husserl”, Du texte à l’action. Essais d’herméneutique II, Éditions du Seuil, 1986, p. 40. 7 Let us point out that it was only the later Heidegger who asserted that “To the Things” was the basic maxim of phenomenology. As Herbert Spiegelberg remarked, the closest Husserl came in his publications to using this phrase was in his Logical Investigations, where he asked for “no mere words but the things themselves” and in his manifesto-article on “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” he asked that research start “not from philosophies but from the things and problems”. (Cf. H. Spiegelberg, Doing Phenomenology. Essais on and in Phenomenology, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands, 1975, p. 15). 8 Jean-Luc Marion, “L’étant et le phénomène”, Phénoménologie et métaphysique, P.U.F., Paris, 1984, p. 173. 9 idem ibidem, p. 191. 10 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7º ed., Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 1976, p. 37. 11 Jean-Luc Marion, “L’étant et le phénomène”, Phénoménologie et métaphysique, P.U.F., Paris, 1984, p. 199. 12 Paul Ricoeur, “Phénoménologie et herméneutique: en venant de Husserl”, Du texte à l’action. Essais d’herméneutique II, Éditions du Seuil, 1986, pp 55-56. 13 Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 4ª ed., J.C.B. Mohr, Tübingen, 1975, (trad. esp.) pp. 441. 14 Cf. ibidem, pp. 447-458. 15 Cf. ibidem, p. 443. 16 Jean Greisch, L’age herméneutique de la raison, Les Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 1985, p. 113. 17 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 453. 18 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 454. 19 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 444. 20 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 444. 21 Manuel Mª Carrilho, Razão e transmissão da filosofia, Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1986, p. 15. 22 Cf. Ch. Perelman, “Opinions et vérité”, Justice et Raison, 2ª ed., Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1972, p. 203. 23 idem ibidem, p. 202. 24 idem ibidem, p. 205. 25 Ch. Perelman, “Évidence et preuve”, Justice et Raison, 2ª ed., Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1972, p. 149. 26 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 10. 27 Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, op cit., p. 444. 28 Philosophie et méthode, Actes du Colloque de Bruxelles (1972), Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, p. 195. Ital. supplied. 29 Cf. Ch. Perelman, “Le réel commum et le réel philosophique”, Le champ de l’argumentation, Éditions de l’université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1970, p. 264. 30 Cf. Ch. Perelman, “Philosophie, Rhétorique et Lieux communs”, Bulletin de la Classe de Lettres et des Sciences morales et politiques de l’Academie Rotal de Belgique, 5ª série, T. LVIII, 1972, pp. 144. 31 Cf. Ch. Perelman, “Libre examen hier et aujourd’hui”, Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1949, N.S., 2ª ano, fasc. 1, p. 39. 32 Ch. Perelman, “Perspectives rhétoriques sur les problèmes semantiques”, Logique et Analyse, nº 67-68, 1974, p. 251. Ital. supplied. 33 Chaïm Perelman e Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité de l’argumentation, 5ª ed., Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1988, p. 214. Ital. supplied. 34 Cf. Ch. Perelman, L’empire rhétorique, 2ª ed., J. Vrin, Paris, 1988, p. 24. 35 Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène, 3ª ed., P.U.F., Paris, 1976, p. 117. 36 It is a Michel Meyer’s expression; cf. “Y a-t-il une modernité rhétorique?”, De la Métaphysique à la Rhétorique, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1986, p. 10. 37Logique et Analyse