From a Philosophical Point of View: Selected Studies

plan.

PART I

Prolegomena

In this opening part, I reprint a few programmatic pieces, including the prologue to my book A Philosophy of Culture and the concluding chapter of my Age of Analysis. To help the reader with some allusions in the latter piece, I should point out that earlier in the book from which I had excerpted it, I had made use of Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor about hedgehogs, who know one big thing, and foxes, who know many little things, while urging Anglo-American analytic philosophers to use their techniques on the problems treated by more humanistically oriented Continental thinkers. In this same spirit, I recommend in The Social Role of Philosophy that modern empiricists should spread their interests as widely as Locke, Hume, and Mill did by including ethics and political philosophy among their concerns as well as epistemology; and in New Horizons in Philosophy, I argue that a philosophical interest in language should include an interest in aspects of culture other than natural science and formal logic.

CHAPTER 1

Prologue to A Philosophy of Culture (2002)

I BEGAN MY serious philosophical thinking under the influence of several major currents of thought, among them the pragmatism of John Dewey and the analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore. I found Moore a persuasive advocate of the view that the philosopher should analyze extralinguistic concepts, attributes, or propositions, and arrive at truths that are analytic and not dependent on experience for their support; but I soon discovered that Moore was unsure about the notion of analysis that underlay his main philosophical efforts, because he had developed serious doubts about the idea of an analytic statement. At about the same time, I came to know Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine, who, in reaction to their mentors—C. I. Lewis in Goodman’s case and Carnap in Quine’s—did not seek analyses of intensional entities such as concepts, attributes, and propositions, because they thought that reference to such entities was obscure and because they had no clear notion of how their identity was to be established. Sharing these doubts, I came to think that the philosopher’s task is an empirical enterprise requiring an examination of how we do and should use language rather than an effort to decompose concepts.

Soon afterward, Quine, Goodman, and I concluded that the search for an empirical criterion of synonymy and therefore of analyticity was hopeless, and that if one ever did emerge, it would make the distinction between analytic and synthetic a matter of degree. I was also encouraged in this belief by Dewey’s epistemological gradualism and by the epistemological holism of the logician Alfred Tarski, who held that logical statements may be components of conjunctions tested by experience. Around the middle of the twentieth century, study of Wittgenstein’s later works, with their emphasis on the need for the philosopher to recognize the many different uses of language, as well as contact with J. L. Austin reinforced my view that philosophy is primarily a study of language and led me to think that Mooreian analysis of concepts was a remnant of classical rationalism from whose influence even James and Dewey did not wholly escape.

Once I had shed the vestiges of rationalism in my own thinking, I came to see more clearly that Dewey was right to claim that much of the history of philosophy had been a fruitless quest for certainty; but I also saw that even he, perhaps under the influence of logical positivism, had unconsciously participated in that quest in his later writings when he accepted something like a sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic statements in his Logic. At about this time, I was writing a book on American social thought that focused on what I called the revolt against formalism in the work of Dewey, the jurist Holmes, and others, so I was much interested in cultural history, which was certainly an empirical discipline. Thus the two souls within my breast—the philosopher and the historian—were epistemically united. I tried to bring them together in a book on the philosophy of history, where I concentrated on the language of explanation and narration, with special attention to the roles of generalization and valuation in historical inquiry.

Soon after that I began thinking seriously about Quine’s view that epistemology is a branch of psychology; this line of thought led me to believe that the philosopher may view moral thinking in a holistic way and therefore should not limit holism to thinking in natural science. From this I concluded that Quine was on the wrong track when he said, as Carnap had, that philosophy of science is philosophy enough. I also came to realize that James’s psychologically oriented investigations of religious experience and Dewey’s of artistic creation were philosophical even though they were not exclusively concerned with language, and I saw the error of Wittgenstein’s view in his Tractatus that Psychology is no nearer related to philosophy than is any other natural science.¹ This position allowed me to see that philosophy of religion, philosophy of art, philosophy of law, philosophy of history, and philosophy of politics are coordinate with the philosophy of natural science, thereby buttressing a view I had already expressed. In an essay published in the early 1950s,² I had observed that although there were many mansions in philosophy, the more splendid ones housed metaphysics, logic, epistemology, and ethics, which lived on a commanding hilltop, while somewhere downtown were the two-family dwellings for political philosophy and jurisprudence, the small apartments for esthetics, and the boardinghouses for philosophers of the special sciences. In reaction to this invidious ordering of the philosophical disciplines, I came to think that a more democratic division of housing should be devised, one that provided better quarters for the deprived disciplines. After I came to believe that metaphysics and epistemology were empirical disciplines, I had an even stronger reason for urging this reapportionment since I came to see more clearly that those privileged parts of philosophy could not defend their conclusions by a priori methods. I also came to believe that ethics may be viewed as empirical if one includes feelings of moral obligation as well as sensory experiences in the pool or flux into which the ethical believer worked a manageable structure (to use a James-like figure that Quine had once used when characterizing the purpose of science).

As I reflected on my expansive conclusion about the various branches of philosophy, I began to think that the most interesting and most fruitful products of so-called linguistic philosophy were in the philosophy of culture. This appeared to me to be illustrated in Quine’s work in the philosophy of science, which he at one point called a study of a Wittgensteinian game or an institution; in Goodman’s work in the philosophy of art; to some extent in Holmes’s legal philosophy; and in Rawls’s work in the philosophy of politics. Consequently, I decided to write a critical history of recent philosophy of culture to show, among other things, how such work and my own in semantics, the philosophy of history, and ethics were part of an effort to escape the influence of classical rationalism. I saw this effort as the hallmark of a movement that included Hume and Mill; that was to some extent supported in the nineteenth century by figures I call thinkers, to distinguish them from the great philosophers who wrote about culture; that was encouraged to some extent by those I call half-hearted antirationalists; and that was impeded by irrationalists. Although [A Philosophy of Culture] is in part a historical study of the roles of reason, sensory experience, and sentiment in twentieth-century philosophy of culture, it is one in which I am mainly concerned to show why certain philosophical ideas about culture should be accepted and others rejected. Therefore, I do not hesitate to express both favorable and unfavorable opinions of some of the views I examine—all this in the interest of furthering the aims of the philosophy of culture.

However, I am not concerned to explain by reference to social circumstances why certain philosophical beliefs arose at certain times and why others succeeded them. I leave that different and difficult job to others who, I hope, will not carry it out at the expense of gliding over philosophical views and the arguments offered in their behalf. In my opinion, the sociohistorical explanation of the emergence of philosophical beliefs depends on an understanding of them that can be gained only by a careful study of what philosophers have said. Philosophical beliefs are not black boxes whose historical antecedents and consequences can be discerned without knowing what is inside them, but inasmuch as the philosophical task of reporting the beliefs of a philosopher is empirical, it is not radically different from the task of historians who try to say why those beliefs arose when they arose and what their effects were on society. That is why annalists who deal with ideas would do well to study the work of analysts who work in what might be called cultural philosophy.³ I think cultural philosophy or philosophy of culture is more inclusive than philosophy of science because the latter is a study of only one cultural institution and therefore coordinate with studies of other institutions that make up a culture or a civilization. For this reason, I add a terminological point that will by now be obvious: I use the word culture as some have used the word civilization—to denote those institutions—and therefore not as some anthropologists use the term.

About a half century ago in my Age of Analysis (1955),⁴ I said that nothing could be more important than applying the techniques of analytic philosophy to subjects in the philosophy of culture; but little did I expect that by the end of the twentieth century my hope would be realized in the work of several philosophers trained in the analytic, linguistic, and pragmatic traditions who managed to free themselves from the vestiges of rationalism in logical positivism. I think that this ironic development in the history of philosophy bodes well for its future, since it opens up new avenues for humanistic inquiry. It also shows that study of the many aspects of culture is not the exclusive preserve of muddle-heads, philosophasters, and charlatans. Indeed, the relation between sane, sound, and sober philosophy of culture and its competitors today is reminiscent of what David Hume said in the introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature (1739) when he compared the use of what he called experimental reason in discussions of logic, morals, criticism, and politics with that of its rivals: Amidst all this bustle ’tis not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence; and no man needs ever despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colours. The victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and the sword; but by the trumpeters, drummers, and musicians of the army.⁵ I would prefer to use a less military figure, but I agree with what Hume was driving at as I scan the intellectual scene today. I also agree with Hume’s remark in his introduction that there is no question of philosophical importance whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man, and that the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation.⁶ Would that Hume had remembered this when he distinguished sharply between statements that are based on experimental reasoning and statements established by abstract reasoning.

¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London, 1933), 4.1121 (p. 77).

² See A Plea for an Analytic Philosophy of History, in my Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 61. Reprinted below.

³ See my essay Why Annalists of Ideas Should Be Analysts of Ideas, Georgia Review 29 (1975), pp. 930–47.

⁴ Morton White, The Age of Analysis: Twentieth Century Philosophers, Selected, with an Introduction and Interpretive Commentary (Boston, 1955).

⁵ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1888), p. xviii.

⁶ Ibid., p. xx.

CHAPTER 2

Philosophy and Man: An Exhortation (1955)

THE READER OF MY BOOK The Age of Analysis has read about a dozen doctrines, as many methods, and a variety of concepts from essence to existence, life to language, logic to love, and practice to perfection. But within this welter several contrasts stand out: first of all, the fundamental one between philosophers who strive to know big things and those who are less ambitious; and secondly, the peculiarly geographical character of this division. It does seem as though the continent of Europe is the land of what Isaiah Berlin calls the hedgehog while the English-speaking world is the home of the philosophical fox. No matter how one resists the idea of geographical determinism in intellectual matters, it is true that Bergson and Sartre span an enormous amount of French thinking in the twentieth century; that Croce was the spiritual leader of Italy for more than a generation; that philosophers like Husserl and Wilhelm Dilthey encouraged the tradition of philosophical vastness in Germany for years, and that they were succeeded by Jaspers and Heidegger. Moreover, the continental philosophers’ interest in subjects outside of philosophy, particularly in biology, history, literature, and the social sciences, is naturally accompanied by an influence that extends well beyond professional philosophical circles, and in this respect they emulate Hegel without being hegelians. It is also true that English thinkers like Russell and Moore were engaged in a more deflationary effort, in whittling philosophy down to manageable size, while the main American philosophers like Dewey and James tried to blunt the point and the edge of scientific and analytic methods, to soften the blow at traditional philosophical sensibility. This is why so many English and American observers of the present philosophical scene in Europe have deplored the persistence of obscurity and pretentiously displayed learning that seem so irrelevant to the real problems of philosophy. It is also why so many continental philosophers—whether they are existentialists, marxists, or phenomenologists—regard English and American analysts and positivists as heartless philistines.

Writing in the magazine Horizon in 1949, a distinguished Oxford professor, H. H. Price, said of the British philosophers’ concern with perception: "I have been told that Continental philosophers find this national pastime of ours very puzzling; and I have heard one of them suggest that it is connected in some ways with the Wordsworthian attitude to Nature, and with our national taste for landscape painting. Perhaps there is some connection (if there is, it is nothing to be ashamed of). But for my part I find it puzzling that so many Continental philosophers are not interested in perception at all, and prefer to spend their lives talking about dreary subjects like Kulturphilosophie. And it is reported that when Henry Sidgwick, the last great utilitarian, was asked by a German philosopher how the English got along without an equivalent for the word Gelehrte, Sidgwick (a stutterer) replied: We call them p-p-prigs. But a match for both of these is the reply of the French existentialist who was asked for his comment on a particularly careful criticism of his views by a logical positivist: He is a cow!"

One wonders about the likelihood of effective communication between cows and prigs, or between hedgehogs and foxes, especially when they are of different nationalities. Nevertheless it is a mistake to think of this geographical division of the Western philosophers as more than a rough generalization having deep historical roots and understandable social and political concomitants. One should not conclude that it is psychologically impossible for courageous souls to penetrate the thick fog that has dropped between some philosophers of the continent and some English-speaking philosophers. For after all, much of contemporary Anglo-American interest in logical analysis, science, and language originates in the work of the Austrians Wittgenstein and Schlick, and the Germans Carnap and Reichenbach, who had learned a great deal from Russell, who in turn had learned from Frege in a more internationally minded period. Moreover, Dewey, Santayana, and Whitehead—three of the great English-speaking philosophers of the twentieth century—have been philosophers in the grand manner, and even the language of the existentialists, which seems so difficult to our ears, has its English translators and, I think, its affinities with developments in England and America.

If there is any gulf between the style, the terminology, and the interests of philosophers all over the world, it cannot be laid up merely to difference of tongue, or location, or historical background, for we know that there are political forces which foster and indeed demand the continuation of such a gulf. The philosophers behind the iron curtain are forbidden to espouse any philosophy other than dialectical materialism, and there are religious institutions in the world which impose rigid limits upon the philosophical beliefs of their adherents. An honest man, therefore, can hardly point to philosophy itself and accuse it of an incapacity to come to universal agreement when such agreement is blocked by terror and orthodoxy.

But let us perform an experiment in imagination—unfortunately only in imagination. Let us suppose that the various social and political curtains and bans have been lifted and ask whether philosophers of different lands and tongues might, even in this state of nature, understand each other—to say nothing about agreeing with each other. What then? Would we come to anything like the kind of cooperation that we find in the sciences? One must answer no, I think, but this time we are in paradise, so we cannot explain our failures by terror and orthodoxy. This time philosophers must look into themselves and there they will find divisions which are at least as effective as terror and orthodoxy in blocking philosophical communication. They will find the doctrine that there are methods of arriving at knowledge which transcend reason and experience; they will find a sharp and untenable dualism between reason and experience themselves enshrined in the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements; they will meet a similar contrast between the so-called normative statements of ethics and the descriptive statements of science. And all of this is the result of a desperate effort to maintain that there are fundamentally different methods of arriving at knowledge which correspond to the supposedly different subject matters of logic, metaphysics, ethics, and science—to say nothing of theology. The hedgehogs do not merely think they know one big thing; they think they know it in a special way; the self-appointed custodians of our morals think they know what they claim to know in a special way; and some logicians persuade themselves that they need only look at meanings or words when justifying their formulae.

But let it be supposed for a moment that these dichotomies are surrendered and see how much of the fog can be lifted. Let it be recognized that a philosopher has as much responsibility to defend what he says by appealing to experience as a scientist or an historian, and that he has no special insights that set him above the crowd; let it be supposed that every statement is, as Wittgenstein says, part of a form of life and therefore that the decision to accept it or reject it involves reverberations beyond itself; let it be supposed that something analogous is true of the decision to accept or reject a moral judgment; let it be supposed, in short, that all of our knowledge, whether moral, metaphysical, logical, or scientific, is bound into one system, a way of life from which no statement escapes or enters without affecting, however remotely, the status of another. Then what? I suggest that the effort to draw sharp lines between the analytic and the synthetic, the metaphysical and the logical, the descriptive and the normative, will appear silly and futile. There will be judgments to which we attach more weight than others, of course, but they will come from many different fields, so that our stock of fundamental beliefs at a given moment will be pluralistically composed. It won’t be possible to isolate all of them as truths of logic, or truths of mathematics, or truths of metaphysics, or truths of science. Disciplinary labeling will not be a mark of certainty, and, indeed, the search for a sharp criterion of certainty or necessity will emerge as equally futile.

Traditional preoccupation with finding a criterion of certainty and identifying it with a given discipline, whether it be mathematics or the empirical sciences, has gone hand in hand with the notion that such a solid criterion could provide a philosopher’s stone. In the medieval age of belief and the seventeenth century’s age of reason, we see classic examples of this effort to single out one faculty or one science as key to the universe or the intellectual globe. One kind of knowing is set up as a model whose method the others are asked to follow whether it be theology or mathematics. In the eighteenth century the triumph of Newton’s physics made mechanics king; in the nineteenth Hegel’s history and Darwin’s biology took on a similar importance, and toward the close of that century psychology made a strong bid to dominate philosophical studies. In place of this disciplinary imperialism, the twentieth century tends to be more democratic and pluralistic. Not only does it avoid setting up one kind of knowledge as central, but it even denies the centrality of knowing as a form of human concern. This is evident not only in the extreme vitalism of Bergson, but also in Wittgenstein’s effort to show that language has many different uses, which are all of interest to a philosopher. It is reflected in the pluralistic metaphysics of James and even in Dewey’s denial of what he calls the ubiquity of the knowing experience. It is illustrated by the later tendency of logical positivists to avoid what has been called the reductive fallacy. Once it becomes clear that there are no sharp lines of demarcation between the disciplines and that no one of them can claim a fundamental position in the scheme of knowing, and once it becomes clear that there are forms of human experience which are just as important as knowing, the way is open to a philosophical study of man in the broadest sense.

If such a dream were realized, which means if the point of view outlined were to be generally accepted, can there be any question but that some of the conflicts and misunderstandings of contemporary philosophy would be resolved? If it were accepted, the grand philosophers would surrender the notion that they can know one big thing without knowing or feeling lots of little things, and the minute philosophers would make an effort to know big things. The analysts would have recognized the need and the importance of treating human behavior in a rational way. Science would no longer be the bugbear or the underling of philosophy but its companion. The philosopher would profit through knowledge of other disciplines, to say nothing of profiting through absorbing other experiences. Differences of all kinds might be drawn, but they would not be made in the sledgehammer fashion of the philosopher who announces that all ethical statements are like this and all scientific statements are like that in a manner that is more like simple Thales and the rest of the pre-Socratics than moderns prefer to admit. Each statement would be studied in its own right, but always in a context that transcends the single isolated statement itself.

It should be realized, of course, that I am not calling for a revival of absolute idealism. But I am prepared to recognize an affinity between that wrongheaded doctrine and the one I advance. Idealism’s insight into the interconnectedness of all things should be transported to a linguistic level. Instead of saying that everything is mysteriously connected with everything else, it is better to say that all statements which express knowledge are logically connected with each other inasmuch as we can always reject some other statement than the one ostensibly under fire by feeling or experience. The significance of this point of view is obvious. If he takes it seriously, the philosopher is obliged to familiarize himself with more than one part of philosophy as traditionally conceived. The hedgehog may lie down with the fox, and the result need not be grotesque. So long as we think of philosophy as a tightly compartmentalized subject in which there are Sartres who move us, and Carnaps who prove for us, we are bound to see the philosophical world torn by something far more depressing than disagreement, and that is the complete incapacity of philosophers to understand each other.

Throughout this volume [Age of Analysis], I have tried my hardest, with an excusable amount of irony in some cases, to present the views of some philosophers whose views are very far from my own. I trust that in my efforts at objectivity I have not succeeded in hiding the fact that my own philosophical sympathies are closest to the pragmatic and analytic traditions, but I must also add that I sympathize with the concerns of some of the philosophers in the first part of this volume. I believe, therefore, that nothing could be more important than reuniting these two contrasting elements in twentieth-century philosophy—the analytic, pragmatic, linguistic concern of the recent Anglo-American tradition supplemented by some of the insights and the more humane, cultivated concerns of the predominantly continental tradition. As long as they are kept separate, as long as the custodians of philosophical technique develop axes with which to sharpen other axes, they risk developing a sense of weariness and emptiness in themselves and in those who read them. As long as the more literate and more cultivated devotees of philosophy persist in ignoring the great achievements of Russell, Moore, Carnap, and Wittgenstein, in forgetting that the giants of the old days to whom they look back nostalgically—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, for example—were tough, technical thinkers as well as men of feeling and vision, they will impede the revival of philosophy’s strength. What Hegel saw in a Gothic dream and conveyed in a myth was a little close to the truth. For while a philosopher is not obliged to make himself an expert in all fields, and to produce dull or bogus summaries of all knowledge in the manner of Herbert Spencer or Hegel himself, he should be trained to discover the important similarities and the important differences between the chief activities of man. Knowing, as Bergson insisted, is not everything, and there are interesting general facts about feeling and doing which a philosopher might well relate to knowing—his main traditional concern. Should he heed the call to examine them without becoming a charlatan he will have done a great deal to bolster the strength of philosophy. We live in dreadful times, when a world in conflict seeks and despises that combination of technique and vision for which the great philosophers are justly famous; their successors should not shirk the responsibility to carry on with equal respect for logic and life.

CHAPTER 3

The Social Role of Philosophy (1952)

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY has witnessed a slow revolution in philosophy that has gone almost unnoticed by the layman. It has been part of its program to insist that philosophy cannot be carried on irresponsibly and pompously; it has said good-bye forever to the days of the fat, two-volumed Weltanschauung. Let those who yearn for those days try to read one of the classics of the glistering age of American philosophy—for example, Royce’s The World and the Individual—and they will see why the era of speculative metaphysics has lost its charm for the young American philosopher. The young American philosopher has become more and more absorbed in analytic philosophy, under which a variety of different doctrines are included, some of them positivistic and others decidedly antipositivistic in character. The temper and tone of the movement is deflationary and critical; its method linguistic and logical. While some of its sponsors emphasize the importance of reconstructing ordinary language, others insist on the need for describing the behavior of words as ordinarily used. What they all oppose, however, is the pretentious method of those who claim to conduct us to the Truth by way of labyrinthine metaphysical systems, aided by the flimsiest threads.

This revolution has a highly respectable philosophical ancestry in spite of the concerted effort to discredit it as philistine. The names of Locke, Hume, Bentham, and Mill attest to that, but they also attest to a fundamental difference between philosophy as conceived by earlier empiricists and philosophy as conceived by their contemporary successors. Their successors have virtually abandoned all of the more humane philosophical disciplines. When one thinks of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Mill’s On Liberty, and even Hume’s History, one sees by contrast how narrow the empiricist tradition has become. The need for specialization, the need to probe more deeply into fundamental questions of logic and epistemology, has robbed most analytic philosophers of the time, energy, and inclination to think about social, political, and moral problems. They venture into mathematics and physics when stimulated by logical needs, and flirt with psychology in the theory of knowledge, but most of their finely ground axes have been used to sharpen other axes. Few of the redwoods of human concern ever fall before them.

This loss of touch with cultural and political questions is one of the most striking features of Anglo-American philosophy in the last generation and it constitutes one of the most unfortunate concomitants of a brilliant period in the history of philosophy. While Marxists and Existentialists carry their street-corner battles into the university and beyond, the ablest Englishmen and Americans treat social philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of history as disreputable subjects which are worthy only of charlatans. This attitude has developed to such an extent that even those who do metaphysics in desperate imitation of the grand manner no longer act out their dreams in social and political treatises but rather content themselves with using low-powered logic on traditional technical problems in an essentially quixotic way. There is some interest in esthetics, of course, but this frequently results in monstrosities which are rightly ignored by all who have any feeling for the arts and literature.

The philosophical drift away from the humane disciplines has been made more dramatic by the fact that the American intellectual and the American college and university are more than ever searching for some kind of philosophical credo. Everywhere in the social sciences and humanities one finds a thirst for philosophy, and in just as many places one finds disappointment with professional philosophers. The immediate result is twofold: on the one hand, a lamentable development of philosophical pretentiousness among journalists, sociologists, historians, and physicists; on the other, too many dry, insensitive philosophers, ignorant of the sciences, indifferent to the history of their own discipline, and lacking feeling for matters of human concern. Among the amateur philosophers there is more undisciplined talk than ever on the problem of value, on the patterns of history, on the nature and destiny of man; and among the professionals a growing sense of embattlement while defending their inalienable right to talk only about sensedata, implication, and the synthetic a priori.

This is the disturbing situation which faces the philosopher who wants to work in the great tradition of logical analysis without cutting himself off from the equally great tradition of social criticism, the philosopher who rightly remembers that Locke on property and Mill on liberty are easily as important as Locke on real essences and Mill on the syllogism. His situation reflects a larger problem: how can serious, technical philosophers honorably regain that position of leadership and respect among intellectuals and the general public which has slowly slipped from their hands?

It should be said very quickly that philosophers will not buy this position. They will not sacrifice their right to investigate the most recondite technical questions; they will not cease writing for the Journal of Symbolic Logic and Mind in order to devote themselves exclusively to Sunday-supplement scholarship. And so the problem becomes one of uniting an interest in analysis with an interest in social and political affairs. It needn’t be a matter of every mathematical logician producing an axiomatized charter of human rights. Some of us are old enough to remember how Marxism pressured the American intellectual of the thirties into jobs for which he had no talent, and all of us are old enough to see the dangers of widespread intellectual Lysenkoism. It is rather a matter of living a life which is not spiritually and intellectually torn, since double roles in this instance can never lead to anything but double talk. There are those who can divide their lives with ease, much as some people play both the piano and the violin, but the philosopher is usually driven by a need for consistency and integrity; if he plays more than one instrument, he is more likely to be a one-man band than to double in brass.

One way to bring about this unity is to encourage the young philosophical analyst to dig his honest and sharp instruments into those places which have so often been the lairs of charlatanry and obscurantism. While responsible philosophers have worked soberly and intensively in metaphysics, logic, and epistemology, the forum has been filled with wild talk on value, history, democracy, human rights, and liberal education. But if only a tiny part of the philosophical energy and clearheadedness which have gone into logic had been devoted to clarification of the issues which surround social and political questions, we might find ourselves closer to the solution of some of our pressing problems.

There is one serious misunderstanding which must be identified and avoided. It would be a mistake to construe this suggestion as another example of philosophical pretentiousness, an expression of the view that philosophy is a lordly discipline which, if it should only decide to turn seriously to social questions, would produce all the answers. We must also avoid a philosophical myth about philosophy, unfortunately sponsored by too many analytic philosophers, according to which philosophy aspires to a higher kind of knowledge than that which the ordinary man and scientist can attain. On this view, philosophy consists of necessary propositions which are impervious to the demands of experience according to some, and indifferent to the demands of scientific convenience according to others. Fortunately, this myth is being challenged successfully by analytic philosophers themselves, so that they need no longer defend in modish language an outmoded conception of their task. Philosophy may be more abstract than empirical science and the ordinary man’s knowledge, and it may be especially concerned with definitions and descriptions of linguistic behavior, but the process whereby it justifies the acceptance of these definitions and descriptions is not radically different from that which goes on in science and ordinary life. For this reason, philosophers should approach the problems of law, political science, and history, not with the idea that they are supplying a method that is absolutely foreign to what already goes on in those disciplines but rather with the idea that they are carrying out more carefully and self-consciously what is an acknowledged part of the process of inquiry. On these terms, their cooperation with workers in other fields will be genuine and not a matter of pompous philosophical dignitaries stooping to conquer all of the difficulties which elude the ingenuity of lawyers and politicians.

What I have been advocating so far will seem insufficient to some, for it amounts to nothing more than getting clear about the fundamental terms of social and political discourse. This is more of the same logomachy and scholasticism, it will be said. What we want from philosophers is a substantive ethic, not a series of abstract definitions that leave us just as far as ever from a solution of our practical problems. Now in spite of the childishness of expecting philosophers to produce dreary systems of ethical rules, there is a certain justice in this attitude. It serves to warn us of its equally absurd opposite, the view that philosophers are forbidden by the very definition of their calling to be concerned with the substantive problems of moral criticism. This is the killing formalism which often takes hold of lively movements. It is the attitude of analytic philosophers who leave moral criticism to those whom they call moralists or to social scientists who are just as anxious to palm off the job on somebody else. In this passing of the ethical buck, one can observe the preoccupation with a rigid classification of the sciences, the unproductive, scholastic division of the intellectual globe.

Here ends philosophy, say the constables of the intellect, and you shall go no farther. The result has been a progressive narrowing of the scope of philosophy, with bloodless analysts doing their jobs on one side of the barrier, forbidden by the definition of their subject from engaging in cultural criticism. But when Locke spoke out against the divine right of kings, and Bentham against the legal outrages of his day, and Mill on liberty, they did not think they were entering a field sharply separated from philosophy. They were interested in the substantive questions which illustrated and gave practical significance to their efforts at analysis. And just this interest in the practical consequences of their analyses made them intellectual leaders of their age. A similar combination of interests has made Bertrand Russell and John Dewey great men in our own time. How can a moral philosopher test his analyses except by seeing how they square with political and ethical judgments that we make or are likely to make? It will be said, I know, that philosophy is the analysis of concepts and that we can know that the concept of man is identical with the concept of rational animal without ever examining a single man or knowing just who is or what isn’t a man. But this is another legacy of an outmoded view of philosophical analysis.

One task of political philosophy is the clarification of fundamental words like liberty, democracy, and equality, but the success of such an effort at clarification is to be measured partly by examining its significance for concrete political judgments and action. Any definition of democracy which leads us to say that Soviet Russia is a democracy is obviously an absurd definition. And it is grotesque to say here with Humpty-Dumpty that we can define words as we choose, or that Russia is a democracy on Stalin’s definition. The philosopher’s need to accept or reject concrete ethical judgments flows directly from the fact that he can only test the adequacy of his analyses by checking them against the moral convictions which he and others share. The philosopher’s responsibility is analogous to that of the empirical scientist, except that the empirical scientist is more concerned with checking his theories against the evidence of the senses than against the language of science and common sense. The view that the relation between philosophical definitions and the language which they explicate is fundamentally different from the relation between scientific theories and the observed facts which they explain is another manifestation of the untenable dualism between the analytic and the synthetic which has dominated so much philosophy. In the case of ethics and political philosophy, it is responsible for much of the self-imposed helplessness which some philosophers feel in the presence of social questions.

I am not urging that every philosopher turn himself into a full-time moral judge. Any philosopher who prefers the peace and quiet of mathematical set-theory to ethics is welcome to it, and I hope the day will never come when a social or political tithe is exacted from those who cherish a life devoted to epistemology. What I am urging is that special interest in social and political problems need not constitute an abandonment of philosophy, and that those philosophers who choose to clarify or analyze social, political, and moral discourse must be familiar with the facts of political and social life. Moreover, they will enrich and improve their analytic work if they are familiar with those facts, not as a disengaged anthropologist knows the convictions of his primitives or as a psychoanalyst knows the fears of his patients but rather in a more direct and personal way. Such direct and personal knowledge can come with being engaged in social and cultural affairs. It need not mean abandonment of the calmness which is demanded by analysis, any more than looking robs an astronomer of the power to theorize.

I have made two pleas so far. The first is for greater analytic interest in social and political ideas, in the description and understanding of culture and politics. This will not involve a fundamental change in the method of analytic philosophy; it will merely add to its subject matter. Of course, the enormous growth of our knowledge about society and politics since the days of Locke and Mill will make it impossible for a philosopher to go it alone. He will need training in history and in the social sciences like that which a philosopher of physics must have in physics. My second plea is more controversial because it calls for a greater concern with normative ethics than is fashionable among analytic thinkers today. Here I am not merely asking for an extension of the method of analysis to a neglected subject matter but rather for a realization of the fact that the line between the analytic and the synthetic is so blurred as to make it virtually impossible for an analyst of ethical notions to avoid being seriously concerned with the substantive questions of personal and social ethics. Furthermore, the prevailing notion that there is a set of specialists who are moralists and who therefore make it unnecessary for philosophers to treat moral questions seriously has opened the door to frauds and fools. The questions of substantive ethics are questions for all men; they should never become the private domain of professional moralists. If they do, one of the priceless legacies of western civilization will have been lost to the Grand Inquisitor.

As if he were writing in order to confirm one’s gloomiest views of the future, a recent writer asks: Is the intellectual obsolete?¹ and propounds an answer which is in striking opposition to the point of view for which I have been contending. A freely speculating mind or intellectual, he says, is one who seeks the truth and who follows the argument wherever it may lead, whereas a mental technician is a practical mind who serves a party, a leader, or a government so slavishly that he surrenders the right to criticize their aims and methods. The mental technician on this view may exercise ingenuity and skill in achieving the aims set for him by his employer or leader but he is, in the last analysis, a slave. We are given the impression that there is no mean between these two extremes and we are given to understand that the kind of free, practical philosophy for which I have been pleading is hopelessly out of date.

Now I have no doubt that there are many people who fit into one or the other of these neatly carved categories, but it seems to me that a third kind of brain worker is being squeezed out of the picture in an effort to simplify the past and future of the intellectual. I mean the man who uses his wits in an effort to further aims of which he approves, which he periodically re-examines, and which he feels free to reject whenever experience, feeling, or reflection lead to such a conclusion. This third type of individual is the nearest thing in the intellectual world to a free, rational, whole human being. He is neither a metaphysician nor an apparatchik. His interests fall between those of the speculative philosopher and those of the technician. He will not be obsolete so long as the ideal of the free man survives. He differs from the freely speculating mind in the degree to which he addresses himself to practical questions, and from the servile mental technician because of his refusal to sell himself into intellectual slavery.

Intellectuals are more likely to secure the kind of influence whose disappearance is lamented, not by writing on Go¨del’s theorem, on the ontological argument, or on the synthetic a priori, but rather by dealing with questions of more immediate human concern. These are rarely speculative questions in the traditional sense. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding was written by the man who wrote the Second Treatise of Civil Government in defense of the Whig cause, and his political influence arose from having defended that cause. Mill’s essay On Liberty was the main medium of his great influence as an intellectual, and not his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, which was addressed to specialists in epistemology. It was Bentham on legal outrages, and not Bentham on the theory of fictions, who assumed a role so rarely assumed by philosophers today. The lamentable fact of our intellectual life today is not the disappearance of the purely speculative thinker, for he continues to exist in profusion in universities throughout the United States. What we should be worried about is the disappearance of that in-between thinker who may be called the free practical mind, that is to say, the man who is interested in political questions but who refuses to attach himself to a party or government so obsequiously and so blindly that he gives up every right to criticize the goals or the methods adopted by them. One of our great problems arises from the difficulty intellectuals have in preserving their dignity and integrity as citizens and human beings while they work for the government.

Having been kicked out of the government, having been prevented from riding on campaign trains, intellectuals are not doomed to remote scholarship, to joining only the American Association of University Professors, and to convincing their fellow citizens of the responsibility and seriousness of their calling. This is much too abject a surrender. It implies that the free intellectual’s social influence is a thing of the past, something which has been eliminated by the vast impersonal forces of history.

With this I cannot agree. In my opinion this dubious argument closes every avenue by which the intellectual can carry out his traditional cultural functions. True, the free practical intellectual who tries to familiarize himself with the facts of social life, to defend a set of values, and to advance plausible solutions to social problems, runs the risk of dilettantism. But so does any human being in an effort to solve his personal problems. And why speak so disparagingly of the production of bright ideas for essentially practical purposes masking as intellectual activity? Why speak as though there were a contradiction between producing ideas for practical purposes and engaging in intellectual activity? This is a conclusion which can be drawn only by those who accept the dichotomy between the yogi and the commissar, the metaphysician and the intellectual goon, as an exhaustive division of the life of the mind. But surely somewhere between the metaphysical journals and the gossip columns there is a place where an intellectual can still perform his traditional social function—if he has ideas.

This conclusion does not force us to minimize the importance of pure scholarship. But if we are thinking of the intellectual as an effective force in politics, we must acknowledge that pure scholarship, for all of its importance, is hardly the medium through which intellectuals have usually made their practical impact on the political world. We can pursue scholarship in a mighty fortress defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, but this of itself won’t win us the influence of an Erasmus or a Mill. We must regain those historic jobs of which we have been robbed. We can still be the spiritual custodians of what is good in our tradition and the implacable critics of what is bad. The tasks of the practical intellectual continue to be what they always have been: to pursue the truth, to expose sham and injustice, to seek ways of avoiding the destruction of the world, to help make it as happy and as sane as it can be. If such intellectuals are spurned by governments, by parties, by the public, or accepted only on impossible terms, they must go their own way and they must protest. But they cannot protest effectively unless they have something to say, and they cannot say anything worth hearing unless they have ideas. Therefore, let some practical intellectual produce the twentieth-century counterpart of Mill’s essay On Liberty, for example, and he will prove beyond doubt that the intellectual is not obsolete.

Fortunately, there are signs of a new era in philosophy. I hope they are reliable. For if some analytic philosophers will apply their methods to social and political ideas, they will do a great deal to ward off the attacks on English and American philosophy which are now so common among those who fail to understand that the days of sentimental encyclopedism are over. If philosophers contribute to the clarification of some of the most serious problems of men and then try to deal with them, they may help those who must solve practical questions. Those who want more than this from philosophers reveal their own weakness, not that of philosophy. For the ultimate decision of what to do is to be made by each man for himself, and those who seek catechisms, confessors, and commissars should look elsewhere.

¹ See an article by Stuart Hughes bearing this title in Commentary, October 1956. The remarks that follow are an adaptation of a response to Prof. Hughes in the January 1957 issue of Commentary.

CHAPTER 4

New Horizons in Philosophy (1960)

THE MOST ARRESTING and most distinctive feature of philosophy in the English-speaking world of 1960 is its concentration on linguistic and logical analysis. While dialectical materialism is the official philosophy of the Soviet bloc, and Western Europe continues to be strongly affected by existentialism, Britain and the United States are primarily the homes of what is called analytic or linguistic philosophy. Analytic philosophers are neither sponsored nor controlled by any government or political party, and they do not appeal to the Bohemian or the beatnik. They invite both Marxist and existentialist scorn because they spurn the pretentiousness and murk of much traditional philosophy. For good reasons, analytic philosophy has never become the favorite subject of the bistro or the espresso cafe´, and it needs no proof of its seriousness. It respects the values of the reasonable man rather than those of the irrational man, though it fully recognizes the existence of irrationality.

Analytic philosophy begins with an awareness of the fact that philosophy is not a rival of science and that it cannot provide us with another way of studying the world with which the scientist deals. When in the nineteenth century natural science grew so highly specialized, it became evident that nobody could encompass the whole of knowledge. And so the drift of philosophy was away from encyclopedism, away from thinking that the philosopher was a superscientist, a universal genius, a know-it-all.

Not only did it become evident that universal knowledge was humanly impossible but it was seen how dubious it was to think that one could construct a system in which all our knowledge could be derived from a few