Saturday, February 25, 2006
(8:43 AM) | John Emerson:
John McCumber's "Time in the Ditch"
Time in the DitchJohn McCumber
Northwestern, 2001
McCumber’s book includes a history of American philosophy up until 2001, a criticism of analytic philosophy, and proposals for what philosophy should be like instead. I have my own ideas on the third point, but much of what he says on the first two points meshes with my own opinion.
The red meat here is McCumber’s claim that analytic philosophy became dominant in the American university in part because of McCarthyism. During the Fifties the various sorts of accusers seemed to have especially focused on philosophers, and a number of careers were ended. Because analytic philosophy was politically innocuous, it was less dangerous and became more attractive both to individual graduate students and to departments.
I would change McCumber’s emphasis slightly. First, the primary target was not Marxism or Communism, but politically engaged pragmatism of the John Dewey sort. (Many of the analytic philosophers were politically left, notably the logician Irving Copi). Pragmatism is America’s main indigenous contribution to philosophy, and before 1950 it had been a powerful if not a dominant influence in the American philosophical world; but after 1950 pragmatism almost disappeared. Pragmatists differed from analytic philosophers (some of whom were pragmatists in some abstract sense) by their willingness to involve themselves, as philosophers, in social issues and social movements. (Similar takeovers led to the marginalization of the study of political economy and of the institutionalists in economics, the disappearance of the tradition of C. Wright Mills in sociology, and the rise to dominance of the Straussians in political theory). Pragmatists were public philosophers, and analytic philosophers weren’t, and for me that's the big quiestion.
Second, while I think that the negative impact of McCarthyism was important, at least during the early stage, after a certain point positive incentives did all the work. After political neutrality was written into the work-rules of the profession, aspiring philosophers stepped into their roles without the awareness that anything was missing. Those who were interested in the kind of things analytic philosophy did would enter the field, while those who were not went elsewhere. For those who entered the field, philosophical engagement in politics had been written out of their job description from the start – it was no longer a personal choice, and if they wanted to, philosophers could still continue their political activities on their own time. (A 45-year-old philosopher of today entered college as an undergraduate in about 1979, when analytic dominance was already well-established).
A second point of McCumber’s is that analytic philosophy has dominated the field through an institutional arrangement which gives control of the whole profession, ultimately including hiring, to about sixty professors at top universities. (In this he follows Bruce Wilshire: Fashionable Nihilism, SUNY, 2002.) His argument looks good to me, though not everyone agrees, but I think that it can be somewhat expanded.
What’s ultimately is at issue is jobs. Philosophy is proud of having become a profession, and professions are defined in terms of the kinds of qualifications they require for hiring. Analytic philosophy dominates philosophy to the extent that it controls hiring. There are still non-analytic departments, but they have trouble placing their graduates in jobs, since they are (more or less by definition) low-ranking departments. McCumber mentions that deflationary forces on the profession over recent decades mean that almost all hiring comes from about twenty top schools, almost all of which are analytic, so that the minority tendencies can only place students in departments they themselves control. (He also mentions a pluralism revolt led by Wilshire around 1980, but seems to feel, as does Wilshire, that this revolt was not very successful).
This sounds like a cynical, quasi-Marxist smear, but it’s just a consequence of professionalism, and their professionalism (on a scientific model) is something that analytic philosophers are proud of. (Leiter’s Philosophy Gourmet Report makes it pretty clear that philosophy is, first and foremost, a job).
Thinking professionally also helps us answer the question, “What is analytic philosophy?” Defenders of the status quo often deny that there’s any such thing as analytic philosophy, pointing to the diversity within the field. Quine even once denied that the term philosophy has any meaning at all – though the effect was to allow him to exclude people from philosophy who had till then been regarded as philosophers; he did not mean to say that philosophy departments could hire just anybody.
However, a non-trivial extensive definition of "analytic philosophy" can be given simply by listing a handful of teaching lineages, and it is also easy to define by exclusion and list a very large number of philosophers and schools which are just plain not analytic. (Of course,some of these schools barely exist any more, and the non-analytic philosophers driving taxis can hardly be called professionals, and thus are not philosophers any more.) Analytic philosophy has a definable inside and a definable outside, so we can say that it exists.
(More later)
UPDATE:
Dominic Fox Murphy and the mysterious "kmbjttt" have made a number of points in the comments to which I will eventually respond in a new post. There are a few points which can be dealt with immediately.
I think that McCumber made a mistake by stressing McCarthyism per se as much as he did. Overt McCarthyism was only one of a number of positive and negative incentives driving the analytic takeover of philosophy. Included among these, of course, were legitimate philosophical arguments, as well as other non-philosophical motives besides anti-Communism and fear of McCarthy.
Analytic philosophers were included among the McCarthyite targets, and one of the philosophical supporters of McCarthyism was Sidney Hook, a pragmatist student of Dewey's. Thus, the lines were not as clearly drawn as I implied or presumed in my original piece here. However, one of the McCarthyite philosophers, Arthur Lovejoy, was a longtime adversary of Dewey's, and Dewey himself, who was at the end of a long life, did not support Hook.
One target of the investigations was Irving Copi, an analytic philosopher now known mostly for his work in symbolic logic. I think that it's reasonable to wonder whether Copi would have been so resolutely apolitical without the motive of fear.
And as I've said, the goal of the witch hunts was not to replace leftists with rightists, but to replace engaged public philosophers with technocratic specialists. Conservative ideologues weren't happy with the post-McCarthy university either.
Holbo on McCumber / Ogged defends McCumber /
Holbo responds to Ogged / McCumber defends himself
Thirteen cases of McCarthyism in philosophy, including at least six cases in which careers were ended
Pragmatism and the McCarthy Era (Link corrected. Piece by John Capps, Rochester Institute of Technology, 29th Annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy).
Review (not very favorable) of Wilshire’s “Fashionable Nihilism”
Bertrand Russell and the Cold War
Russell, Wittgenstein, and Hartshorne on Nuclear War
