On Writing a Social History of Analytic Philosophy
Christoph Schuringa on how a supposedly apolitical philosophy has been shaped by the social and the political
[book-strip index="1"]
To write a social history of analytic philosophy, the dominant mode of academic philosophy in the English-speaking world and beyond, is to subject it to a kind of treatment to which it is constitutionally averse. Analytic philosophy is peculiarly resistant to being treated as the product of culturally and politically situated human beings that it is, for various interrelated reasons.
In the first place, analytic philosophy is resistant even to the idea of having a history. It thinks of itself, somehow, as no tradition at all. This is quite obviously false, and spectacularly so. Analytic philosophy is precisely the tradition in European philosophy that connects itself back to eighteenth-century modes of thought, circumventing the whole post-Kantian tradition and regarding it as a great doomed detour, and to a culture of bourgeois liberalism that dates back to that period. The historical ignorance that analytic philosophy cultivates prevents its practitioners from so much as glimpsing this.
Connectedly, analytic philosophers suffer from the fantasy that they are speaking from no particular viewpoint at all. They are just putting arguments, in a historical, cultural and political void. What matters, they tell us, is the clarity and precision of these arguments – and perhaps above all the ability to make conceptual or linguistic distinctions that are crucial to getting things right.
But how do these arguments work? In late analytic philosophy, it is remarkable that the arguments tend to rest, not merely implicitly but avowedly, on philosophers’ own intuitions. In analytic philosophy seminars, participants are forever appealing to their own intuitions, and asking others for theirs. It hardly occurs to analytic philosophers that these intuitions might be skewed in various ways due to their possessors’ positionality, or that the convergence among intuitions that they often find within their group might have something to do with how engagement in analytic philosophy is self-selected for. The intuitions are fed into, and derived from, highly schematic thought experiments, like the ‘trolley problem’. These days, much of the work of analytic philosophers consists of making use of their vaunted intuitions in order to (as they like to say, borrowing from Plato) ‘carve nature at its joints’. This is analytic metaphysics. The fundamental constitution of reality is to be established by philosophers consulting their intuitions.
It was not always thus, and not all analytic philosophy reaches these heights of decadence. In fact, part of the interest in writing a social history of analytic philosophy is in the genuinely fascinating intellectual projects of many of its protagonists. And, as I understand a social history of philosophy, such a history seeks to explore and explain ideas, rather than to treat the ‘production’ of knowledge in abstraction from its substantive content – as if the way the intellectual sausages are made is all that matters, with no need to savour the sausages themselves. As the story develops, from 1898 to the present day, the treatment I give it in A Social History of Analytic Philosophy also alters. This is thanks to a substantive thesis I subscribe to: namely, that analytic philosophy ‘proper’ is only formed after 1945, in the United States, and that its formation consists in the amalgamation of what were distinct and divergent movements prior to World War II. Prior to the War, there were a number of what we might call ‘proto-analytic’ formations – prominently, the work done in Cambridge deriving from Bertrand Russell and from G. E. Moore, and the logical positivism cultivated in Vienna. These formations practised philosophy in ways that differed markedly from each other, and it would take significant work, undertaken by, amongst others, the philosophers Susan Stebbing and Max Black, to put them into dialogue. Here to do social history is largely to examine the self-conscious formation of these different intellectual strands under specific cultural conditions – those of Bloomsbury and of ‘Red Vienna’ respectively. To these philosophers, an explicit negotiation with the liberal heritage was still a vital concern. After World War II, as the new single formation called ‘analytic philosophy’ took over the philosophy departments of American universities one by one (in a process much slower than is often now imagined, looking back), the type of social-historical treatment to which analytic philosophy is amenable also changes. Since there is no self-conscious methodological unity, the whole formation is apt for ideology critique in the proper sense. The dominance of analytic philosophy now has to be seen in terms of its suitability as a core instance of bourgeois capitalist liberal ideology. For the most part, these philosophers are now liberals of the type who have never even considered alternatives to liberalism – and who probably don’t even know that they are liberals.
A particularly interesting passage in the history of analytic philosophy in which its negotiation with its own ideological texture is at issue is that of the incorporation of modal logic (the logic of necessity and possibility) into its remit. The study of inference involving claims of necessity and possibility had been effectively outlawed from analytic philosophy. The reason for this is not far to seek. Such notions simply do not fit the empiricist-bourgeois paradigm, which conceives of the neutral but (allegedly) autonomous subject as faced with an array of inertly given individual items. (The autonomous subject is itself also conceived highly individualistically; community is simply the aggregation of individual subjects.) For the empiricist, the constitution of reality is simply a matter of what individual items, as it happens, fit in what boxes; there is no room for what is necessary or what is possible to enter in. When a great breakthrough in formal logic was made in the nineteenth century, it was by the English mathematician George Boole, whose methods and interests were entirely ‘extensionalist’ (it was just a matter of what went in what boxes, extruding ‘intensional’ notions such as necessity and possibility). But in the twentieth century, technical developments in modal logic just made it impossible to go on like this. The most influential figure here, the Princeton philosopher David Lewis, who bought wholesale into the empiricist notion that reality is, as he put it, ‘a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another’, performed an extraordinary move. Possibility and necessity could be brought into the Humean picture by redescribing ‘possible worlds’ (usually conceived of as alternative scenarios) as actually existing worlds. For example, statements to the effect that such-and-such is necessary are, for Lewis, actually statements that such-and-such is the case in all the ‘possible worlds’. (‘Possible world’ is here a curious misnomer, because these worlds are all fully existent.) The effect of all this is extremely curious. Lewis had disarmed the threat that modal logic had been rightly seen to pose. But hardly anyone actually adopted his ‘modal realism’. That is now what mattered. Instead the whole field of analytic philosophy had been shifted into a mode where the deeper philosophical questions that had made modal logic so difficult to incorporate no longer mattered. Instead a Lewisian conception of philosophy as a kind of engineering, tinkering with this bit and then that, now reigned.
To subject analytic philosophy to a social history is to produce consternation and confusion among its adherents. One primary source of analytic philosophers’ frustration is that they just cannot imagine what a social history might be, other than a crude causal explanation of what seem to be intellectually respectable ideas in terms of hidden influences. History does not work like that, and my book does not take any such approach. But their presuppositions mean that it will remain largely illegible for them. Again, they will reach for the defence that surely the alleged unmasking of supposedly brute social forces applies just as much to things other than analytic philosophy, and especially to its bête noire, ‘continental philosophy’. Or it will be claimed that the treatment offered does not capture every single case of analytic philosophy. Indeed, the rebuttal will be advanced that there is, after all, no such thing as analytic philosophy.
That is all very much to be expected: it all follows from analytic philosophy’s nature. But what, then, is the point of writing such a book?
It is very much my intention to place this book in the hands of those within academic philosophy who have the intellectual breadth of vision and energy to want to take philosophy in new directions. For this purpose it is crucial, in particular, to expose the way in which analytic philosophy colonizes existing radical movements of thought, such as feminism and critical race theory, in order to rob them of critical force and replace them with its own liberal simulacra. It is imperative that those within analytic philosophy who are seeking to advance a social programme – as many now are – find their way, beyond these simulacra, to the real thing. That will involve superseding analytic philosophy rather than trying to remain within it. But it is not just a question of bringing analytic philosophy down in order to bring oxygen back to philosophy. I have written a sweeping narrative history of analytic philosophy of a kind that those inside it have, understandably given their devotion to a mindset of making only almost impossibly modest claims, shied away from. I hope this will be of interest to those who would like to reconstruct and appreciate its grandeur as well as its failures. Apart from anything, it is interesting to study how a group of people can sustain the fantasy that they are located nowhere in particular in history, and that they remain uninfluenced by the social world that so palpably shapes them.
[book-strip index="1"]
