McCumber II: What should philosophy be?

 
My first piece on John McCumber’s Time in the Ditch (Northwestern, 2001) mostly dealt with McCumber’s theory that Cold War pressures led to the triumph of analytic philosophy. McCumber also made some substantive criticisms of analytic philosophy. I am going to pick up a couple of McCumber’s criticisms which I found to be especially valuable, and add a few related criticisms of my own.

First, I think that philosophy should be a first-order discipline:

“Philosophy, as a second-order discipline, was to reflect the nature and
conditions of that enterprise, whose validity…. was simply assumed. The
confinement of philosophy to such second-order inquiry was also carried through
in ethics. Philosophers of the day were not to take ethical stands or give moral
advice but simply to reflect on the meaning of ethical terms….” (McCumber, p.38).

In other words, ethicists should write ethics, and not just meta-ethics. Philosophy should try to be the most inclusive, most comprehensive, most useful, and best discussion of whatever it is it studies – and I say this in awareness of the fact that this is a never-ending, Sisyphean task. Somewhere in the university people should be studying ethics itself, and I say that that place should be the philosophy department.

Second, philosophy should be more than the search for truths. McCumber (p. 41) cites Richard Hofstader: “The meaning of intellectual life consists not in the search for truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.” Philosophy, in other words, should always have an ear out for questions, whether or not they can be immediately, or ever, answered. But this search for questions should be guided by larger concerns: analytic philosophy is too good about inventing far-fetched hypothetical questions for the sake of proving or disproving some particular point, and not good enough at figuring out which major questions most need to be addressed. (Philosophy as questioning: Michel Meyer).

Third, philosophy should be constructive, or at least should allow constructive thinking on the Deweyan model. A constructive idea cannot be a truth, because it talks about something which doesn’t exist yet. In this, as I think Dewey would say, analytic philosophy amounts to a revival of the metaphysics of "What There Is", and abandons the method of science, which consists of repeated experiments aimed at finding out what can be done. (A constructive or experimental science in human affairs, of course, should be normative, and rather than simply stipulating conventional values, it ideally should make the investigation of “values” part of its subject matter).

Fourth, philosophy (or some of it) should aim for comprehensiveness even at the cost of sacrificing rigor. The analytic and the synthetic movement both are philosophically and intellectually valid, and neither should be favored excessively. And again, scientists do work in both directions. A scientist working on a given phenomenon can either analyze it into its parts, or see how it functions in its larger context, and while most scientists work in one direction or the other, in most cases they need to have an awareness of both.

This point relates to a couple of other points. Aspiring scientistic studies tend to be very protective of their autonomy, to the point of becoming windowless monads. By contrast, there are no firm disciplinary boundaries in the self-confident scientific sciences. Any science can be relevant to any other science, and hybrid studies like biophysics or physical chemistry are quite normal and uncontroversial. Defensive sciences, such as analytic philosophy, economics, or almost any other social science, too often wall themselves off with definitions and stipulations -- to the point that they feel justified in ignoring analyses which come from other fields (notably, in the case of philosophy, the first-order normative discourses, as well as history in its concreteness).

A further problem with defining philosophy as a specialized technical activity is that the specialist is always a subordinate. The boss ideally supervises people who know their jobs better than he knows his, simply because specialists deal with specifically with particular well-defined and routinized topics. The boss, by contrast, has to know something about everything that the specialists do, and must also deal with anything else unexpected or problematic that happens to come up from anywhere. Thus, analytic philosophy’s decision to make itself a technical specialty, while it might possibly succeed in getting philosophy accepted as a science, really amounts to accepting a subordinate position and renouncing one of the claims that philosophy customarily made before 1950.

In turn, the renunciation of holism amounts to the renunciation of public philosophy. Philosophy used to be one of the main tools that intelligent, well-educated people used when they tried to make sense of the world. Meticulous technical discussions of minute points cannot function that way, and that’s what most of philosophy is. Even the rare more-comprehensive works of analytic philosophy are usually not usable as public philosophy, partly because of what seem to be deliberate attempts to make the writing unintelligible to non-specialists, and partly because the analytic framing of philosophical questions tends to miss the questions that most need asking.

Note that I am not talking about “popularization”, which usually means watered-down writing for less-smart, less-educated people, but “general philosophy” on the model of “general science”. For example, imagine three brothers with very broad, all of them eminent in their own fields: one historian, one biologist, and one philosopher. Imagine them deciding that each of them will write a book about their own discipline for the other two. “General philosophy” would be what the philosopher would write.

A final consequence of the absence of holistic philosophy is that the big decisions nowadays are made on the basis of philosophical gut thinking and hunches by committees comprised of economists, engineers, marketing and media experts, fundamentalist Christians, political consultants, military men, and politicians. There won’t be any philosophers there, and given the state of the biz, there aren’t many philosophers who would have anything to contribute there, or even anything to teach the members of the committee. The peculiar mix of technocracy and mass entertainment which rules our lives is in part a consequence of the present devastated state of philosophy.
 

(P.S. One criticism I've seen of my rants against analytic philosophy has been to say that the field has changed since I was last in more-or-less direct contact with it 15 or 20 years ago. I am open to suggestions as to which works of contemporary analytic philosophy would change my mind if I gave them a fair reading. Charles Taylor and Stanley Cavell I already know about, and I don't count Toulmin as an analytic.)
 

Originally at:
http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog/2006/02/mccumber-ii-what-should-philosophy-be.html

Thanks to Dominic Murphy and kmbjttt for useful comments to an earlier piece.


 

 

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