the dead hand of technique. Against this we get the anti-technicism of Heideg-
ger, and Sartre’s identification of existence with sheer logical unfoundedness.
A similar oppositional dialectic took place within the logicist camp, the imme-
diate network offspring of Frege and Russell. Ordinary language philosophy
was formulated in reaction to the search for a logically perfect language.
Wittgenstein, a dominant figure in the attention space because of the way he
battened on deep troubles, managed by a series of switches to be a major player
in almost every camp.
Has the mathematical impetus spent itself? Since mathematics is another
version of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence, albeit the one that strips ab-
straction and reflexivity down to purest essentials, one might well say that the
two streams merge once again at the point where a self-conscious meta-mathe-
matics becomes mathematically inspired philosophy. And since mathematics
continues to have its distinctive turf—the lineage of operations deriving primi-
tively from counting and measuring—the trajectory of meta-mathematics can
be seen as a balloon which has slipped its moorings and now is floating away
on the high level of generality which is the hereditary turf of philosophy.
The Future of Philosophy
Will philosophy have a future? And why would it not? To say that philosophy
is coming to an end is tantamount to saying that the abstraction-reflexivity
sequence is coming to an end. It is to say that there are no more deep troubles
to drive oppositions, no more law of small numbers dividing the attention
space, no more rearrangements of the networks in reaction to shifts in the
organization bases of intellectual life.
It is a partisan theme which announces that the era of foundational ques-
tions is over, a move within the normal oppositions of struggle over intellectual
attention space. The call for the end of philosophy is recurrent, a standard ploy
in intergenerational rearrangements, usually a prelude to a new round of deep
troubles and new creativity. The version popular in the 1980s and 1990s is
couched in the terms of heightened reflexivity of this era. It fails to take
sociological reflexivity far enough to perceive the nature of philosophical turf.
The search for permanent foundations is another recurrent ploy, the standard
terminology of staking a claim on a certain region of the intellectual battle-
ground. Neither side perceives that philosophy is the terrain of struggle, and
that deep troubles, not permanent solutions, are the treasures which are the
implicit focus of the struggles for possession of the attention space. Philosophy
is the turf of intellectuals who perpetually re-dig their conceptual foundations.
Foundations are their terrain, not because they are bedrock, but because they
are the ever-receding apex of the abstraction-reflexivity sequence—receding not856 •^ Meta-reflections