Friday, March 03, 2006
(6:47 AM) | John Emerson:
My Gift to Philosophy: Anathema 5.3
When I post my condemnations of analytic philosophy, I get valuable feedback which allows me to refine my work. I then can post new anathemata more refined, sophisticated, and rigorous than the earlier ones had been.Recent exchanges here and at The Valve have forced me me to make some clarifications.
When I use the term “analytic” philosophy, it primarily means “Whatever the thing is which I dislike so much that has dominated American philosophy since 1960 or so”. It doesn’t especially mean Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Popper, Austin, or the logical positivists, though they are obviously ancestral to the people I’m talking about.
I also don’t pay much heed to internal distinctions within analytic philosophy. I have, however, been assured that after about 1980 the field has opened up a bit, and that some of my anathemata are thus outdated. And in fact, the last time that I had much contact with the world of professional philosophy was about 1989 at the latest. There’s been a lot of water over the dam since then, and I'm going to have to do some reading to check up on the present state of the field.
My own commitment to a kind of social pragmatism goes back to the early and mid sixties and was already a little archaic then. A fifty-year-old philosopher of today probably would have entered grad school in about 1980, long after the bloodstains had been hosed away and the dying screams of the massacred pragmatists had faded. This probably accounts for the bafflement mixed with genteel rage that my denunciations have elicited. For contemporary philosophers, it’s like I’m harping about the Albigensian crusade.
Historically, while the Cold War is part of the American story, by that time there had already been an ongoing attempt (tracing back to the early twentieth century) to reorganize philosophy on the model of science and mathematics, bracketing out ethical, political and ideological principles with the goal of achieving neutrality, objectivity, and universality. The main reason for my antipathy to analytic philosophy is that I believe that the effect of this purification has been to make it impossible for philosophy to say much of anything usable about politics, ethics, or anything else “normative”, and that the professional dominance of the analytics has frozen out philosophers, especially pragmatists, who might have had something to say about those topics. (The operative word here is "usable".)
Rather than simply taking an anti-anti-Communist tack, it makes more sense to ask why the European proto-analytics and the American early analytics thought the way they did. During the first half of the twentieth century Europe was a hothouse of prophets, cults and bizarre ideologies, some of which claimed a scientific warrant for their beliefs and projects. One of the goals of the proto-analytics was to produce a form of discourse within which various sorts of misleading and excessive ideological statements would be impossible, and to produce an understanding of science such that it could be known which statements actually were scientific, and which not. (My main source here is Toulmin and Janik's Wittgenstein's Vienna, together with quite a number of more general works about the feverish culture of that time, which made the American sixties look pale.)
Unfortunately, there was overkill. Some of the pseudo-scientific ideologues were actually quite benign: for example, H.G. Wells or Arnold Toynbee. They went into the trash too, and Wittgenstein could not even abide Bertrand Russell’s political pronouncements -- for which Russell did not even claim scientific standing. In the worst case, the entire edifice of ethics and politics was tossed in the boo-hurrah closet and forgotten.
After WWII, Dewey’s idea of a democratic, public political discourse open to all did not appeal to those who had nearly lost their lives at the hands of populists of the right and left. Furthermore, the switch from the WWII alliance with Stalin to the Cold War was made sticky by the fact that many Americans had become too friendly with our Soviet allies. Rather than a right-wing ideology, however, what replaced the Popular Front was "The End of Ideology" and technocratic professionalism. This allowed the recruitment of European scientists who were actually far-left by American standards, and technocratic professionals also would not create any interference if and when it became necessary to switch alliances again (for example, when Nixon made his 1972 trip to Eastasia.) The rise of analytic philosophy was the philosophical version of a scenario which took place in some form in many or most departments of the American university.
It all seemed like a good idea at the time, but I think that many of the effects have been bad and that it's time to reconsider the whole thing. And it's a terrible pity that the pragmatists, who played no role in the European madness, should have been the chief victims of this reformist purge.
”Anathema” (pl. “anathemata”) originally meant “offering” or “gift”
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