Michel Meyer and Practical Philosophy

Bibliography of Practical Philosophy
 

Michel Meyer Part II

In my opinion Michel Meyer is one of the two greatest living philosophers (the other being Stephen Toulmin). What they do is called “practical philosophy”, (or sometimes, unfortunately, “philosophy of rhetoric”.) Practical philosophy is a lot like pragmatism; it zeroes in on the way that philosophical principles relate (or fail to relate) to actuality. Practical philosophy is entirely different than “applied philosophy”, which is the name given to lame attempts of analytic philosophers to convince themselves and others that their work is not a complete waste of time.

Few share my esteem of Toulmin and Meyer. The difficulty here can be quantified: of the 300 feet or so of shelf space in the Powells philosophy section, I have never seen a full foot of space devoted to Toulmin and Meyer combined.

(I should say here that my interpretation of Meyer is probably, like my interpretation of Foucault, quite different than his own. Meyer seems to be quite content to be a technical professional philosopher, and does not draw large political conclusions from his work.)

Meyer’s key principle is this: every statement is the answer to a question. The meaning of a statement can be known only by knowing what question it answers. A proposition standing alone is “apodictic” if the question it answers is repressed, and “problemetological” if the answer is understood as pointing to the question. Logic and ontology are apodictic; propositions are understood without regard to their context or their problematology, and science, for example, is understood as a body of truths rather than as a process of investigation, discovery, and questioning. Analytic philosophy is fanatically apodictic, and defines itself as much as anything by the way that it regards most past philosophical problems as“out of question”.

In any actual real-world discussion, Meyer's problematological principles rule. The biggest problem in most debates is to come to an agreement as to what the question, or the point of the debate, really is, and these agreements are always reached by sloppy, ad hoc, non-scientific rhetorical means of the type Meyer discusses. The philosopher's answer is simply to say that this is because ordinary people are emotional and illogical, unlike philosophers who decide all questions rationally. In fact, however, when actual flesh-and-blood philosophers make collective decisions they act about the same as everyone else, albeit with more of a veneer of intelligence, and the actual dominance of analytic philosophy in the profession came about by ordinary processes of bureaucratic politics, and is enforced by hiring practices, in accordance with  routine bureaucratic stipulations.

Meyer points to a Socratic philosophy where everything is potentially in question. Socrates is in some remote sense the patron saint of philosophy, but with the professionalization of philosophy on the positivist model (discussed by Rorty), the dominance of the paradigm paradigm (something which Kuhn himself seems to have regretted), Kripke’s “reactionary revival of essentialism” (Rorty’s words), and the push to make philosophy into a specialized science, have all contributed toward eliminating Socratic questioning from philosophy.

The analytic paradigm of philosophy is so dominant in Anglo-American philosophy that some claim that the adjective isn’t needed and that it’s all just “philosophy” -- since there isn’t really any other kind. (I’ve read that you can get a PhD in philosophy nowadays without reading any philosopher earlier than Wittgenstein). Analytic philosophy tends toward ever-increasing analysis, without any synthesis and always moving further and further away from the substantive original question toward meta-philosophy and meta-meta-philosophy: “Granted that we know that other minds are real, how do we know that they are real?” (Agreed, this example is pretty old: has anything changed since I last looked?)

One problem with defining philosophy as science is that anything in philosophy that is scientifically valid will be absorbed by the science in question (e.g., philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence). Seemingly the philosophy that remains as such will just be that which does NOT succeed in making any actual scientific contribution, but tries desperately hard to do so.  One alternative theory is that philosophy provides “groundings” for science -- but this theory is a ludicrous one, since it’s evident that analytic philosophy is parasitical on science, and that science is self-validating by its success and needs nothing whatever from philosophy.

So the function of analytic philosophy is primarily the gatekeeper function of providing validation –criteria whereby supposed sciences  which are not self-validating by their successes (i.e., the weaker social and policy sciences studied by Foucault) can claim to be scientific. The effect and goal of this, as Hilary Putnam has noted, is to deny normative and political discourse any public authority, or even rational discussibility -- a more sophisticated version of the boo-hurrah theory of ethics. The logical positivists, Bertrand Russell, et. al. tried to cool down the extraordinarily lurid European ideological ferment during the first third or so of the Twentieth Century by providing strict positivist-reductionist standards for what should be regarded as a meaningful statement. At worst, unfortunately, the standards they came up with were so strict that simple ethical statements like “Murdering innocents is wrong” had to be expressed “I hate people who kill  people who I feel are innocent, in ways that I regard as wrong”. (I am not completely sure that under the strictest logical-positivist rules limiting valid thought to logical conclusions from patterns of sense-data, that it would even be possible to say “Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo”.)

The cases I gave were extreme, but analytic philosophy consistently works to make ethical and political discourse more difficult to do and harder to justify. The positivist, analytic professionalization of American and British philosophy, by enforcing a paradigm which put many topics and approaches out of the question, put an end to the great age of philosophy represented by James, Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Kenneth Burke, Whitehead, Harteshorne, and Buchler.

These thinkers all were willing to deal with the big social and ethical questions, and were replaced by thinkers whose trained incapacity and defeatist perfectionism almost always led them into an infinite regress on the model of Zeno’s arrow, the ass of Buridan, or the various other characters treated in analytic koans. There is reason to suspect that this was deliberate; many of the major post-WWII figures (e.g. Popper, Strauss, Berlin), horrified by the outcome of the German experience with philosophy in the grand matter, seemed determined simply to make such thinking impossible in the future. This seems inappropriate to me; for one thing, the American tradition which was smothered had not produced the terrible results that the German tradition had, and it even seems that some German thinkers (e.g. Strauss and Adorno) actually blamed liberalism itself for the crimes of those who destroyed German liberalism. In any case, American philosophy has renounced some of its traditional purposes -- for example, providing a useful recipe for living one’s life. I have even seen this renunciation described as a form of heroic courage or Buddhist liberation, but it strikes me more as bureaucratic “not my department” behavior, and it seems clearly to have left a vacuum which is most often filled by fundamentalist Christianity or varioussorts of intuitive New Age and neo-Leftist homemade philosophy. I think that it is reasonable to ask whether the ladder really should have been kicked away._[1]

CODA

So what does all this have to do with Meyer?

Partly because I found it much more difficult than I thought to sum up Meyer’s ideas, and partly because it seemed like a good idea to state my reasons for being interested in Meyer, I haven't really given much of an exposition of Meyer's ideas here. This is highly risky, of course, since (as I said) my reading of Meyer (like my reading of Foucault) is probably considerably different than his own.

For now I will just say that for analytic philosophy far too much is out of question -- above all the whole question of what should be in question, and including Michel Meyer’s own philosophy which deals with these questions (and which is taught almost not at all in the English-speaking world). And I have gone on to name some of the kinds of things I’m interested in which are also out of question, though these might not be the same ones Meyer would name. And I have even asked why and how these questions have been closed off, and why we are living with such a mutilated philosophy. _[2]

To Be Continued.

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