Sunday, October 15, 2006
(6:47 PM) | John Emerson:
The Cold War and American Philosophy
"The desire for precision has led for the moment to a restriction of the field covered; and in this sense the movement does not at present deal with certain significant humanistic and philosophic problems."
Charles Morris
How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science,
George Reisch,Cambridge, 2005, p 75.
Reisch's book by and large confirms my speculations about analytic philosophy's rise to dominance in American universities -- though in one major respect it requires me to change my view. It should be read along with McCumber's Time in the Ditch, Mirowski's Machine Dreams, (and presumably Schrecker's No Ivory Tower, which I haven't read yet). These books show how the combination of politically-motivated incentives both positive (fellowships and targeted grants) and negative (firings, threats of prosecution) moved philosophy and other academic disciplines in directions compatible with liberal interventionism and anti-populist administrative liberalism. Philosophy, in particular, moved in the direction of specialization, scientifism, value-neutrality, and political non-involvement -- rather than toward of any substantive political view, whether liberal or conservative.
Reisch focuses on the logical empiricists (often called logical positivists) of the Vienna Circle, scarcely mentioning Russell, Wittgenstein, or Popper. The book also includes premonitions of a further transition, when the logical positivists, in their turn, were also elbowed aside by a later tendency represented by Quine and Nelson Goodman, but this topic is not developed. My recent scattered reading in the logical positivists, for example Reichenbach on temporality and indeterminism, has has given me more sympathy for them -- they were much more willing to do "big picture" philosophy than their obsessively-meta successors were. (Special mention should be given of Otto Neurath, an amazing guy).
I have long thought that the key development for early-fifties American philosophy was the suppression of public philosophy and of normative thinking, to be replaced by specialized value-neutral quasi-scientific thought, and Reisch's book confirms my opinion on this point. The political goal of this transition, as I read it, was not a conservative philosophy, but a politically- and ethically-null philosophy which battled against more engaged philosophies, and Reisch in general confirms this opinion of mine. However, he complicated my understanding of how things happened historically. My earlier opinion was that the apolitical logical positivists muscled out the more engaged pragmatists, but the truth is that several of the logical empiricists wanted philosophy to be politically engaged, and they too were defeated when American philosophy was transformed -- while it was Sidney Hook, a pragmatist student of Dewey's, took the lead in purging philosophy of those who were insufficiently anti-Communist.
John Dewey briefly worked with the logical empiricists on their Encyclopedia of Unified Science, and his disagreements with his collaborators are significant. Dewey's belief that a scientific philosophy should be a politically progressive (or "left") public philosophy was not a problem for the logical empiricists, but his rejection of the physics of model of science was, and he also did not think, as the logical empiricists did, that normative principles are non-cognitive, axiomatic or absolute, and not subject to philosophical investigation or development.
McCarthyism hit philosophy especially hard, as McCumber has also pointed out, and the outcome was to define philosophy per se as apolitical or passively liberal, while also discouraging extra-curricular political involvement (especial of a leftist sort). It must be noted, however, that many of the logical empiricists (notably Carnap) did continue their left political activities even after they had been threatened with investigation.
It's hard not to feel an animus against Sidney Hook's role in all this. In the name of freedom of thought, he began with the already-doubtful claim that Communist Party members should be fired because they were unfree and incapable of valid philosophy, and ended up arguing threateningly that non-Communist philosophers should be careful not to take positions too similar to the Communist position (pp. 278-82). From a nationalist, statist, or militarist point of view Hook's argument is unexceptional, but arguing for a suppression of certain kinds of thought in the name of freedom of thought itself is Orwellian.
Compared to Communist or fascist purges, the effects of McCarthyism were fairly mild -- the number of actual firings and prosecutions was not terribly large. The transformation of philosophy was effected mostly at the level of hiring, promotion, grants, and fellowships (notably at the semi-military RAND Corp.). Furthermore, philosophers were not actively recruited into any political program, and few (or no) philosophers changed their philosophical teachings in response to external pressures. Philosophers who fit the new analytic mold found themselves prospering, while those whose work did not fit saw their careers faltering. Leftist philosophers who survived did so by directing their attentions mostly toward their nonpolitical, non-social interests.
In my opinion, the primary victims of McCarthyism were not the philosophers whose careers were ruined. The primary victim was American philosophy itself, which has been stunted and impoverished ever since the Fifties.
The positive markers of post-McCarthy philosophy were professionalization, scientism, and a tendency toward formalization; the negative markers (p. 345) were a withdrawal from politics (and public philosophy) and a "decline of debate over questions about values and the discipline's responsibilities to these questions". Reisch sums up Reichenbach thus: "There can be no scientific ethics, consequently, because ethical premises are essentially volitional and subjective" (Reisch's summary, p. 356); according to Reisch, for Feigl 'not only science, but all intellectual pursuits were fully independent of ethics and moral concerns" (Reisch's summary, p. 361).
The losers of this game were not only the Deweyite pragmatists, but also many of the logical empiricists. "[Morris, Frank, and Neurath] opposed, and were out of step with, not only the moral and political absolutism of anticommunism, but an institutional and disciplinary absolutism that would isolate philosophy of science from interaction with other disciplines and areas of culture." (p. 379). Reisch's judgment is that "While these pronouncements signal one kind of depoliticization of philosophy of science, they also signal a different kind of repoliticization....a retreat not from politics, but rather from dissent... " (pp. 345, 349).
The geopolitical and military context is inescapable. After WWII all right-thinking people were especially alert to the threat of mass politics, left or right. Furthermore, the difficulties involved in shifting enemies in 1948, after five years in alliance with Uncle Joe Stalin, made a politically-neutral, relatively contentless ideology preferable to anything with any substance, since geopolitical exigencies might demand still another switch sometime down the road. A determinedly apolitical philosophy was satisfactory to administrative liberalism on both counts, and in fact the contentlessness of analytic philosophy is peculiarly suited to the liberalism of this era, which often presented its own views in the form of a default skepticism about all opposing ideas.
For me, Reisch's story is a painful one. I was already a leftish pragmatist in 1964 when I showed up for college, and I can now understand that I never really had a chance. I continually felt myself being pushed in the apolitical direction, and I resisted until I dropped out. When the U.S. mobilized for war in 1941, the academy was mobilized too. We have never demobilized since then, though there have been many twists and turns of policy.
Specialists are workers, and bosses are generalists. For philosophy the cost of specialization has been to become a subaltern null discipline, watching marketers and administrators and publicists and preachers and strategists and financiers and demagogues and promoters make the big political decisions, with no input from philosophy. The aggressive modesty of analytic philosophy looks cute on paper, but it's hard for a student of current events not to think that there's something missing nowadays, and that philosophy might be it.
(Double-posted here).
