SPEP Co-director's Address: Progress, Philosophical and Otherwise

Abstract

The topic of my remarks is progress, but I should note at the outset that I have structured this article as something like a theme with variations, rather than a tightly interconnected, progressive argument. I am interested in problematizing how the concept of progress is deployed across a range of discussions. I start with the role of progress in my own field of critical social theory, and then move on to consider the idea of philosophical progress, and finally connect this idea to different visions of philosophical pluralism. So, in other words, I will be starting with the otherwise and then moving on to the philosophical.First-generation critical theorists of the Frankfurt school, especially Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, were famously extremely skeptical of the idea of progress. In his ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, Benjamin depicts what we call progress as merely an ongoing catastrophe hurling wreckage at the feet of the angel of history.1 Similarly, in his lectures on the philosophy of history, Adorno notes that the catastrophe of Auschwitz “makes all talk of progress towards freedom seem ludicrous” and makes the “affirmative mentality” that engages in such talk look like “the mere assertion of a mind that is incapable of looking horror in the face and that thereby perpetuates it.”2 In their skepticism about the idea of progress, Benjamin and Adorno were joined by other major political thinkers of the twentieth century, all of whom deserve to be called critical theorists in the broader sense of that term. Thus, for example, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault offered theoretical critiques of progress, which tended to focus on the highly metaphysical nature of the philosophy of history that undergirded such claims. These critiques dovetail in interesting ways with the political-theoretical critique of progress that came to the fore at around the same time in the work of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, and others, which uncovered the highly ideological role that claims about progress play in justifying imperialism and colonialism.Indeed, the chorus of voices critiquing the idea of progress was so strong throughout the latter half of the twentieth century that one might think that the concept had been relegated to the dustbin of history. And yet the idea of progress has been quietly making a comeback in Frankfurt school critical theory. Starting with Jürgen Habermas, critical theorists have been reformulating the concept of progress in a more postmetaphysical, deflationary, differentiated, and pragmatic vein, in an effort to detach it from the traditional philosophy of history in which it was previously embedded. They have also attempted to respond to the post- and decolonial critiques of progress as inherently Eurocentric or culturally imperialistic.3 These recent reformulations of the concept of progress in critical theory are motivated, at least in part, by the thought that critical theory in some way crucially depends on the idea of progress, that one cannot be a critical theorist without being committed to some notion of progress. But given the metaphysical baggage and colonizing distortions that have plagued the idea of progress, one might also wonder how a critical theory could hold onto this idea and still be truly critical.One can talk about progress with respect to many different goals or benchmarks; given any particular goal or aim that I might have, I can understand myself as getting closer to or further away from attaining it. In that sense, I can talk about making progress in my training for a marathon or in finishing my book manuscript, and all that I need to make sense of such claims is some more or less clear sense of the standard by means of which progress is being measured. The traditional discourse of historical progress as it emerged in the European Enlightenment tradition made a much broader claim about the overall advancement of humankind from some primitive or barbaric condition to a more developed, advanced, enlightened, or civilized state. As Reinhart Koselleck reminds us, the term progress as it was used by Kant “neatly and deftly brought the manifold of scientific, technological, and industrial meanings of progress, and finally also those meanings involving social morality and even the totality of history, under a common concept.”4 Such traditional notions of progress thus depend on a robust metaphysical idea of the totality of history and at least posit a point of view from which this totality can be comprehended.More recent critical theoretical reformulations of the notion of progress are much less metaphysically ambitious. Although some defenders of the notion of progress still claim that there has been demonstrable progress not only in technical-scientific but also in moral-political domains,5 they nevertheless view these as disaggregated phenomena: there is no reason, on this view, to think that technical-scientific progress should lead to moral-political progress or vice versa, much less that either will lead to human happiness, and even within the moral-political domain, economic progress may not be accompanied by moral progress, and so forth. And across all domains progress is understood here in a postmetaphysical vein as a contingent historical achievement, the result of human agency, thus, subject to reversals and regressions. Still, critical theorists, including Habermas, Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, and Rainer Forst, all defend the idea that the history of “European modernity” can and should be told as a story of moral and political development, learning, social evolution, or progress. It is this specific claim about moral-political progress—rather than progress überhaupt or technical-scientific progress—that needs to be problematized if critical theory is to be truly critical, if it is to undertake the difficult work of decolonizing itself.But before I say why, I want to consider two distinct kinds of arguments that have been offered for the claim that critical theory needs an idea of progress in order to be genuinely critical, since these arguments show us how much is at stake for critical theory in defending the idea of progress and also give us a clue for how critical theory might be decolonized. The first argument is that we need the idea of progress toward some goal in order to give us something to strive for politically, in order to make our politics genuinely progressive.6 Progress understood in this sense is connected to Kant's famous third question, What may I hope for? In order for a theory to be critical, it must be connected to the hope for some significantly better—more just, or at least less oppressive—society. Such hopes serve to orient our political strivings, and in order to count as genuine hopes, they must be grounded in a belief in the possibility of progress.The second reason that critical theory is thought to rely on an idea of progress involves a transcendental argument. The idea is that insofar as critical theorists celebrate or side with certain political events in their own time—and here Kant's stance on the French Revolution is taken to be exemplary—they necessarily commit themselves to viewing those events as better than what came before. In so doing, they commit themselves to the idea that at least certain features of their social and political world are the result of a progressive developmental or historical learning process.These two arguments are often closely intertwined in ways that I will discuss in a moment. For now I want to highlight that implicit in these arguments are actually two distinct—though related—conceptions of progress. The first conception is forward looking, oriented toward the future. From this perspective, progress is a moral-political imperative, a normative goal that we are striving to achieve, a goal that can be captured under the idea of the good or at least of the more just society. The second conception is backward looking, oriented toward the past; from this perspective, progress is a judgment about the developmental process that has led up to “us,” a judgment that views “our” conception of reason, “our” moral-political institutions, “our” social practices, “our” form of life, as the result of a process of sociocultural development or historical learning. I call the forward-looking conception of progress “progress as an imperative” and the backward-looking one “progress as a ‘fact.’” Both of these conceptions of progress are obviously deeply bound up with claims about normativity and the possibility of normative standards or principles that could facilitate transhistorical normative judgments, and in that sense, these two conceptions necessarily converge. I will have more to say about that convergence below.The crucial critical point that I want to make, and one that shows why the decolonization of critical theory is so difficult, is this: in much recent work in Frankfurt school critical theory, what I am calling the backward-looking conception of progress as a “fact” plays a crucial, if often unacknowledged, role in grounding the normativity of critical theory and, thus, in justifying notions of progress as an imperative. This follows more or less directly from the combination of two commitments: first, a commitment to the idea that the normative perspective of critical theory must be grounded immanently, in the actual social world, and, second, a commitment to the desire to avoid the twin evils of foundationalism and relativism. These two commitments are in tension with one another, inasmuch as the resolution to ground the normative perspective of critical theory within the existing social world raises worries about conventionalism and ideological distortion. The broadly speaking neo-Hegelian strategy for grounding normativity favored by Habermas and Honneth constitutes an attempt to resolve this tension. The basic idea is that the normative principles that we find within our social world—as inheritors of the project of European Enlightenment or the legacy of European modernity, which has a certain conception of rational autonomy (Habermas) or social freedom (Honneth) at its core—are themselves justified—at least in part7—insofar as they can be understood as the outcome of a process of progressive social evolution or sociocultural learning.8 Thus, the backward-looking conception of (moral-political) progress as a “fact” enables critical theory to understand the normative standards that it finds within its existing social world as not merely contingent or arbitrary but, rather, as justified insofar as they are the results of a process of historical development or learning.But if critical theory's immanent grounding of normative principles within the social world ultimately rests on a claim about social evolution or sociocultural learning processes, then this means that the normative standards that enable us to envision a good or more just society—the discourse principle, for example, or the idea of social freedom—are themselves justified—again, at least in part—inasmuch as they are the outcome of a process of sociocultural development or learning. In other words, the two conceptions of progress delineated above are related in that progress as a moral-political imperative is, for Habermas and Honneth, grounded in the basic normative orientation that is undergirded by the conception of progress as a historical “fact.” The normative perspective that serves to orient the forward-looking conception of progress is justified by the backward-looking story about how “our” modern, European, Enlightenment moral vocabulary and political ideals are the outcome of a learning process and therefore neither merely conventional nor grounded in some a priori, transcendental conception of pure reason. This normative orientation, in turn, provides us with a conception of the “good” or “more just” society that provides the basis for our moral-political strivings.This suggests that, at least as the idea of progress is used in Habermas's and Honneth's works, these two conceptions of progress—the forward-looking notion of progress as a moral-political imperative and the backward-looking idea of progress as a “fact” about the processes of historical learning and sociocultural evolution that have led up to “us”—cannot be easily pulled apart. In other words, it is not possible for this version of critical theory to have progress as a moral-political imperative without believing in progress as a “fact” so long as the normativity of critical theory is being secured through this story about sociocultural evolution or historical learning. So contemporary critical theory as Habermas and Honneth conceive it could only be disentangled from its commitment to progress by also rethinking its understanding of normativity.But why think that such a disentangling is necessary? What, after all, is problematic about the idea of progress as a “fact” and of the role that this idea is playing in justifying the normativity of critical theory? Two sorts of objections are particularly salient here, both of which I have already briefly mentioned, the first conceptual and the second political.The conceptual objection turns on the following sort of question: On what basis do we claim to know what counts as progress in our readings of history? Does a judgment about normative progress not presume knowledge of what counts as the end point or goal of the historical development? In that sense, don't all judgments about normative progress either presuppose some independent, nonhistorical, context-transcendent, normative standard or else collapse into the very conventionalism that they seek to avoid? The worry here is that without such an independent standard, which could only be the kind of metaphysical standard that critical theorists claim to reject, judgments about normative progress become, as Charles Larmore has put it, “irredeemably parochial,” not much more than “an instrument of self-congratulation.”9The political objection concerns the entwinement of the idea of progress as a “fact” with what Anibal Quijano calls the “coloniality of power.”10 The idea that the normative ideals of the European Enlightenment are the result of a progressive, developmental learning process by means of which modernity emerged out of traditional forms of life is uncomfortably close to the Eurocentric logic that justified colonialism and the so-called civilizing mission. Indeed, as Enrique Dussel argued in his critique of Habermas's Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, the very ideas of “Europe” and “modernity” themselves emerged and were consolidated in and through Europe's relation to its “periphery,” which is to say, through its colonial domination of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The occlusion of this relationship leads to the formation of a Eurocentric conception of modernity.11 Moreover, as Marx himself already saw but as has been further elaborated by world systems theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein, European capitalist development was itself possible only on the basis of the expropriation of natural resources and labor power from its colonies; thus in a very material sense, Europe's material “progress” depended on colonialism.12 These ideological and material factors come together in James Tully's pithy formulation that the language of progress and development is the language of oppression for two-thirds of the world's people.13 In other words, the notion of historical progress as a “fact” is bound up with complex relations of domination, exclusion, and exploitation of colonized and subaltern subjects.14These objections put considerable pressure on Habermas's and Honneth's strategies for grounding the normativity of critical theory—thus, its forward-looking claims about progress as a moral-practical imperative—in backward-looking claims about progress as a “fact”—whether these are articulated in terms of notions such as historical learning processes, social-cultural development, or progress per se. It is difficult to see how a critical theory could be truly critical—in the sense of engaging in the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age—and still rely on the idea that European modernity represents the outcome of a cumulative, directed learning process for the grounding of its own normative perspective. In the light of such objections, one might favor a different strategy for understanding the relationship between progress and normativity. Recently, Rainer Forst has offered a neo-Kantian constructivist strategy that retains the idea of progress as an imperative but without relying on a backward-looking neo-Hegelian story about progress as a “fact.” Rather, Forst articulates a universal moral-political standard—the basic right to justification—that is grounded not in a backward-looking story about historical progress but, rather, in a freestanding account of practical reason.15 Forst accordingly conceives of progress as a normatively dependent concept in the sense that it is dependent on a universal normative standard that can provide a clear benchmark for claims about historical progress.16 Thus, Forst's neo-Kantian strategy enables claims about progress as a “fact”—perhaps even necessitates such claims, in the sense that once one has articulated a universal normative standard, certain judgments about progress and regress are entailed by it—but it does not rely on them for the justification of its standards.This way of understanding the relationship between normativity and claims about historical progress avoids the entanglement of the forward-looking and backward-looking accounts of historical progress that plague Habermas's and Honneth's accounts. But in so doing it opens itself up to different versions of the conceptual and political objections noted above, objections rooted in the worry that its putatively universal, context-transcendent normative standards and notion of practical reason are really contextually rooted, locally bound conceptions that fail to understand themselves as such. Putting this very schematically, the worry is that abstract Kantian morality and practical reason are really just Eurocentrism in disguise, part and parcel of the West's tendency to regard itself as the universal, as Linda Alcoff argued forcefully in her 2012 American Philosophical Association presidential address.17 Another way to put this point would be to say that a great deal of substantive work is being done here by the notion of practical reason and that judgments about who is or is not reasonable—who is capable of being a discursive interlocutor—also do quite a lot of political work on behalf of the powerful. The decontextualized notion of practical reason “as such” has tended to exclude what Edward Said calls the “subaltern figures like women, Orientals, blacks and other ‘natives’” who had to make a lot of unreasonable noise before they were deemed worthy of joining the community of beings who argue.18 A second, more methodological objection holds that Forst's approach sacrifices the distinctiveness of critical theory as a methodological approach, by giving up the critical theoretical commitment to the idea that our normative principles are to be found within existing social reality and by adopting a foundationalist approach to normativity that runs afoul of the reasons that critical theorists turned to the discourse of progress as a “fact” in the first place. These two objections are distinct but rooted in a common insight, one that figures prominently in the work of Foucault and also of Judith Butler: that the attempt to articulate a point of view outside of power relations—call it the noumenal point of view or the point of view of practical reason “as such”—is methodologically problematic for critical theory inasmuch as it is potentially a ruse of the powerful.19In light of these objections, and in view of the desire to compel Frankfurt school critical social theory to be truly critical, in the sense of being able to engage in the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of our “post”-colonial age, I argue for a different way of disentangling progress as a moral-political imperative from progress as a “fact.” This strategy is partly inspired by Adorno's paradoxical sounding claim, in his lectures on the philosophy of history, that progress occurs only where it ends. Although Adorno's particular concerns with claims to progress are somewhat different from my immediate concerns here—having to do with the horror of Auschwitz and the threat of nuclear war—I am nonetheless in fundamental sympathy with what I take to be the core animating idea of his proposal: that jettisoning false, ideological readings of history as a process of progressive development is necessary if we are to be able to make moral or political progress in the future. In other words, Adorno's key idea is to decouple claims about the possibility of progress in the future—what I have been calling progress as an imperative—from readings of history as a story of progress—what I have been calling progress as a “fact”. This claim is closely related to Adorno's attempt to develop a philosophy of history that is neither a progressive reading of history as a process of development or learning nor a regressive Verfallsgeschichte. In this respect, I argue that Adorno and the early Foucault are fellow travelers—and this despite the fact that they are often taken to be romantic, nostalgic, even conservative thinkers who view history as a story of decline and fall—so much so that Foucault can and should be thought of as Adorno's other other son.20 Crucially, however, Adorno's and Foucault's alternative vision of the relationship between history and normativity—or, rather, the alternative vision of this relationship that one can reconstruct from the work of Adorno and Foucault—is rooted in an antifoundationalist, contextualist account of normative validity. As such, it also provides an alternative to neo-Kantian strategies for grounding normativity according to which progress is a normatively dependent concept indexed to a fundamental moral right. In so doing, the Adornian/Foucauldian idea of the end of progress stays true to the methodological aims of critical theory and is better able to avoid the conceptual, political, and methodological problems that plague alternative critical-theoretical accounts of normativity and of progress.An antifoundationalist and contextualist conception of normativity still enables forward-looking aspirations of moral and political progress, but it necessarily understands all claims to progress as highly provisional, rooted in a contextualist metanormative position, and, as such, always standing in need of ongoing genealogical problematization.21 As for the idea of progress as a “fact,” although an antifoundationalist and contextualist account of normativity could license such backward-looking claims—as I said above, all that one needs to make such claims is a more or less clear sense of what the goal or benchmark is with reference to which such claims are made—because of its contextualism, these would necessarily be modest claims about progress “by our lights” or “for us,” that is, in light of certain normative standards to which we are (provisionally) committed in light of contextualist modes of justification. Although such claims may well be conceptually coherent, they are, I think, still vulnerable to the kinds of objections about the tendency toward conservative self-congratulation and even Eurocentrism discussed above. The proper antidote to such a tendency to self-congratulation is a genealogical rather than a rationally reconstructive approach to history. The core idea here is that, as Samuel Moyn puts it, “the past is more useful for challenging rather than confirming our certainties.”22 This core idea is what animates Foucault's project of genealogy as critical problematization, a project that, like Adorno's philosophy of history, involves a combination of vindicatory and subversive, or progressive and regressive, readings of history.23Drawing on Foucault and Adorno, I further argue that the proper scope of problematizing genealogy includes not only the empirical instantiations or practical applications of our normative ideals and conceptions of practical reason but also the kinds of epistemic violence contained with those normative ideals and conceptions of reason themselves.24 However, in a further reflexive—one might even say dialectical—twist, I claim that this problematizing mode of genealogy plays an important role in realizing the kind of genuine respect for and openness to the other that are arguably central to the normative inheritance of the Enlightenment. Somewhat paradoxically, then, I argue that genealogically problematizing any and all claims to progress as a “fact” is actually the only way to live up to the normative legacy of modernity, particularly to its notions of freedom, inclusiveness, and equal moral respect. Assuming that the post- and decolonial objections to the discourse of progress discussed above are persuasive, accepting the developmental, progressive notion of progress as a “fact” is inconsistent with embodying the value of equal moral respect because it commits us to viewing some of our fellow global citizens as immature, undeveloped, and, hence, not yet capable of autonomous self-rule. Genuine respect for and openness to the other thus demands the ongoing critical-genealogical problematization of “our” self-understanding as inheritors of the normative project of the Enlightenment. It requires what Gayatri Spivak has called the ongoing, vigilant, and persistent “critique of what we cannot not want.”25By arguing that critical theory needs to let go of an ideological and Eurocentric backward-looking notion of progress as a historical “fact” in order for it to be truly critical, am I not implicitly committing myself to a claim about progress even in my attempt to problematize the idea of progress? That is, am I not saying that it would be better for critical theory if it left behind the discourse of historical progress and, in so doing, implicitly helping myself to a model of philosophical progress at the same time that I am critiquing the notion of historical progress? And is this not somehow performatively self-contradictory?Granting for the moment that being caught in such a performative contradiction would be a bad thing, I want to make clear why this is not the case: First, my suggestion is not to give up on the idea of progress altogether but to try to disentangle the forward-looking notion of the possibility of moral-political progress that might fuel political struggles from potentially ideological, self-congratulatory, and culturally imperialist backward-looking stories of historical progress. Second, as I already said, I do not think that there is anything problematic about talking about progress in very localized or specific contexts where progress means getting closer to some benchmark or goal. With respect to the progress of critical theory, all that I am committed to is the claim that given certain methodological goals and philosophical aims—including the goal of being critically reflexive about one's own positioning within concrete historical, social, and cultural contexts and relations of power—it counts as (philosophical or theoretical) progress for critical theorists to take on board a post- or decolonial perspective and that, in order to do that, critical theorists need to problematize the discourse of progress as a historical “fact” and the role that this discourse has played in propping up their conception of normativity. But this does not, I think, commit me to any more robust notion of philosophical progress.In fact, robust conceptions of philosophical progress seem to depend on two interrelated ideas that are at least implicitly at odds with what I have been arguing up to now. First is the idea that the proper measure for philosophical progress is what David Chalmers calls “collective convergence to the truth,” where the claim to truth “requires a degree of realism about the domains in question.”26 Second is the very closely related idea that what enables such a collective convergence to the truth is a certain conception of philosophy modeled on the natural sciences, where philosophy is a collective scholarly enterprise that draws on the technical tools afforded by modern logic and that proceeds by way of groups of researchers making small, incremental contributions that are subjected to vigorous critical scrutiny and where those contributions that survive such scrutiny add up to a cumulative body of knowledge.27 On this view, philosophy is at least capable of making progress in just the same way that the hard sciences do—though whether or not the hard sciences make progress is also a debatable assumption, but one that I will not debate here – and, in fact, in recent years, equipped with the technical tools of modern logic, it has begun to make real progress, even if this fact is not widely known or appreciated outside of philosophy departments, largely because the tools are so technical that it is difficult for philosophers to communicate their results to nonexperts.Now, the kind of contextualist position that I was just sketching, if extended beyond the normative domain to cover justification per se, offers a powerful critique of this, let us call it, scientistic conception of philosophy. But there are also independent reasons for being worried about this way of understanding philosophy. First, it can lead to its own brand of obscurantism or esotericism, to an overly technical or rarefied discourse that makes philosophy unintelligible not only to other academics but also to the outside world. Second, the model of scientific progress encourages a style of doing philosophy where the exposing of errors in the philosophical arguments of others plays a crucial role. As Timothy Williamson puts this point: “Precise errors often do more than vague truths for scientific progress.”28 But this way of doing philosophy, though it is often praised for its inclusive, communal structure, also encourages a culture where the point of philosophical engagement is, as Calvin Schrag put it in his talk at the fiftieth-anniversary Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) conference, “obliterating an opponent by an exercise of winning points, forcing the opponent to accept defeat, and thus ending the conversation.”29Both of these aspects of the culture of philosophy—the way it is cut off from the language and concerns of the everyday world and its aggressive, combative culture—have been proposed as reasons for philosophy's much discussed demographic and climate problems, including its dismal representation of women and people of color and its ongoing, endemic record of sexual harassment.30 I do not have that much to add to those discussions here except to point out something rather obvious: it is no secret that the other humanistic disciplines—for example, English; comparative literature; the study of national languages, literatures, and cultures—from which philosophers who identify the aims and methods of philosophy with those of the natural sciences always take such great pains to distance themselves, have done a much better job of diversifying themselves than philosophy has done. To take just one metric, as of 2006, women made up 67 percent of associate professors in the languages and literatures disciplines associated with the Modern Language Association, as compared with 21 percent in philosophy as a whole. In fact, these disciplines have done such a good job of this that they are in danger of becoming a pink-collar ghetto within the academy—and in my view this has everything to do with declining prestige and enrollments in the humanities. These disciplines have also done better at including people of color, though here there is still quite a bit of room for improvement. Thus I think that there is more than a little implicit sexism at work in the ways in which scientistically minded philosophers talk about the rest of the humanities: for example, when they claim that humanistic fields such as English “have largely collapsed as serious disciplines while becoming the repository for all the world's bad philosophy, bad social science, and bad history”; that they are full of “sophomoric nonsense that passes for ‘philosophizing’” epitomized by the work of Judith Butler;31 or that their work is “foolishness” and “nothing would be lost and something would be gained if these people were pruned from universities and offered work with brooms.”32All of this suggests that one way to make a certain kind of progress in philosophy—namely, by becoming more inclusive of and less hostile to women and people of color—is to challenge and question the hegemony of the idea that the only or proper way to do philosophy is to conceive of it on the model of the natural or “hard” sciences. But this means, paradoxically, to refer to Adorno's dictum once again, that progress occurs where it ends: a certain kind of progress in philosophy will be enabled by letting go of the belief that philosophy is or should aspire to be like the natural sciences and that this means that it makes or is capable of making a certain robust sort of philosophical progress.33 In other words, the way to make progress in philosophy is by giving up on the hegemony of a certain conception of philosophical progress, a conception that is enabled by the idea of philosophy as a scientistic enterprise. Genuine philosophical pluralism, pluralism not just about philosophical topics or figures but also about methods, is necessary for philosophical progress.Of course in making this argument, I realize that I am preaching to the choir. I doubt very much that very many people in SPEP would accept the scientistic conception of philosophy as a discipline that uses the tools of modern logic to enable a convergence toward the truth understood in realist terms that I have been discussing. I would even go so far as to say that skepticism about this conception of philosophy is, more than any other single feature, what distinguishes the kind of philosophical work that goes on at SPEP from other approaches to philosophy, both mainstream analytic approaches and other ways of practicing Continental philosophy.34 But if we do not accept this scientistic conception of philosophy, then how should we understand philosophy? Are we left with the kind of “great man” approach to philosophy that the scientistic approach self-consciously sought to displace, one that substitutes oracular pronouncement for logical, rigorous, reasoned argument?35 Many of the discussions of the virtues of the scientistic conception of philosophy and its concomitant conception of philosophical progress rely implicitly if not explicitly on this kind of opposition. The suggestion is that if we reject the scientistic model of philosophy, then all that we are left with is philosophy as oracular pronouncement; and oracular pronouncement by genuine geniuses may be all well and good, but philosophy departments cannot possibly hope to train geniuses, and oracular pronouncements by nongeniuses who nevertheless aspire to that status are invariably silly and sophomoric.36 But this opposition between the scientistic conception of philosophy and the great man or magisterial conception is a false dichotomy. Other, more pluralistic conceptions of philosophy—and of the possibilities for progress therein—are possible. A third option would conceive of philosophy on the model of exemplarity: to do philosophy, on this conception, is to “exemplify a way of going on [philosophically], and in this way embody (i.e., perform) a thesis” about what philosophy is and what it means to engage in that project. As Steven Crowell formulates this idea, drawing on his reading of Heidegger and of Husserl, the philosophical tradition is “a tradition of singular exemplars operating on the basis of poetic inventions of how to go on which, precisely in their poetic inventiveness, always break with that tradition.”37 Such exemplars can succeed or fail—there are better and worse ways of going on—but insofar as they are always rooted in particular, normatively inflected lifeworld contexts, this success or failure cannot be understood on the model of a cumulative, progressive science converging toward the truth.If this conception of philosophy is compelling, and I think that it is, then we do not have to accept the false dichotomy between the scientistic conception of philosophy and the Great (or pseudo-Great) Men conception. Nor, I think, are we left biting the bullet and saying that women and people of color who feel excluded from the former conception of philosophy should have their shot at aspiring to be “Great Men or Women,” too.38 Rather, we are left with the perfectly reasonable and even rather obvious suggestion that women and people of color can and should be taken to exemplify important and compelling ways of going on philosophically in response to various contexts, experiences, crises, and problems. While these exemplars do not add up to a cumulative body of quasi-scientific knowledge converging toward the truth, they do provide compelling ways of both taking up the philosophical tradition and inventively breaking with it, which is to say, of inheriting it, in the Derridean sense of that term.39 Moreover, this notion of exemplarity both calls for and underwrites its own kind of pluralism: since there is a wide variety of lifeworld contexts, experiences, problems, and crises that occasion philosophizing, there will be a variety of ways of going on philosophically and thus a variety of ways of measuring what might count as progress.