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PARTISAN REVIEW
of Ayer's book describes, consisted of a series of heroic attempts to
solve the problems of traditional metaphysics. These attempts by
Frege, Russell, Carnap, and the early Wittgenstein were called "at–
tacks on
metaphysics ~"
but in fact they were among the most inge–
nious, profound, and technically brilliant constructions of meta–
physical systems ever achieved. Even if they failed, modern symbolic
logic, a good deal of modern language theory, and a part of contem–
porary cognitive science were all offshoots of these attempts .
The second thing that happened is almost unrecognized, even
today. Beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, cer–
tain philosophers began to reject Hume's project - not just Hume's
project with respect to causation, but the entire enterprise of divid–
ing mundane "reality" into the Furniture of the World and our "pro–
jections ." These philosophers have in common a rejection - a root–
and-branch rejection - of the enterprise mentioned, and a concern
with the quotidian, with the
Lebenswelt,
with what a philosophy free
of the search for a 'true world' (N ietzsche's phrase!) might look like. I
myself see Husserl as such a philosopher (Ayer's treatment of Mer–
leau-Ponty, whom he chooses as his representative of phenomenol–
ogy, is rendered worthless by Ayer's failure to understand that Mer–
leau-Ponty rejects Ayer's entire problematique .) Wittgenstein and
Austin were such philosophers. Nelson Goodman is such a philoso–
pher. Ayer does treat this last figure with a proper respect, but even
here he cannot see quite
why
Goodman wants to be such a relativist
- because Ayer has not seen the emptiness of his own resolution of
the words-world problem.
The beginning of a philosophical movement which does not
seek to divide our
Lebenswelt
into furniture and projections may it–
self only be a fashion, to be sure . But if it is the direction philosoph–
ical thought is going to take - and I rather hope that it is, because the
old project deserves at least a respite, if not a permanent burial–
then this is bound to effect the way in which the culture generally
views almost all questions of general intellectual procedure. Much of
our discussion - the discussion whether values are "objective" or
"subjective" for example - is still trapped in the categories fixed by
Hume. Stanley Cavell has recently suggested that a less distanced at–
titude towards the life-world (the only world we have, after all), may
be a matter of some lasting moral importance . (He connects this
with a way of reading Emerson and Thoreau .) Nelson Goodman has
suggested that a rejection of the question "is it the world itself or is it
