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Philosophy
as a Humanistic Discipline by
Bernard Williams |
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1.
In the formula "humanistic discipline" both the elements are
meant to carry weight. This is not a lecture about academic organisation:
in speaking of philosophy as a "humanistic" enterprise, I am
not making the point that philosophy belongs with the humanities or arts
subjects. The question is: what models or ideals or analogies should we
look to in thinking about the ways in which philosophy should be done?
It is an application to our present circumstances of a more general and
traditional question, which is notoriously itself a philosophical
question: how should philosophy understand itself?
Similarly
with the other term in the phrase. It is not just a question of a discipline,
as a field or area of enquiry. "Discipline" is supposed to
imply discipline. In philosophy, there had better be something that
counts as getting it right, or doing it right, and I believe that this
must still be associated with the aims of philosophy of offering
arguments and expressing oneself clearly, aims that have been
particularly emphasised by analytic philosophy, though sometimes in a
perverse and one-sided manner. But offering arguments and expressing
oneself clearly are not monopolies of philosophy. Other humanities
subjects offer arguments and can express themselves clearly; or if they
cannot, that is their problem. History, for instance, certainly has its
disciplines, and they involve, among other things, both argument and
clarity. I take history to be a central case of a humanistic study, and
it makes no difference to this that history, or some aspects of history,
are sometimes classified as a social science - that will only tell us
something about how to understand the idea of a social science. History
is central to my argument not just because history is central among
humanistic disciplines, but because, I am going to argue, philosophy has
some very special relations to it.
A
certain limited relation between history and philosophy has been
traditionally acknowledged to the extent that people who were going to
learn some philosophy were expected to learn some history of philosophy.
This traditional idea is not accepted everywhere now, and I shall come
back to that point. It must be said, too, that this traditional
concession to history was often rather nominal: many of the exercises
conducted in the name of the history of philosophy have borne a tenuous
relation to anything that might independently be called history. The
activity was identified as the "history of philosophy" more by
the names that occurred in it than by the ways in which it was
conducted. Paul Grice used to say that we "should treat great and
dead philosophers as we treat great and living philosophers, as having
something to say to us." That is fine, so long as it is not
assumed that what the dead have to say to us is much the same as what
the living have to say to us. Unfortunately, this is probably what was
being assumed by those who, in the heyday of confidence in what has been
called the "analytic history of philosophy", encouraged us to
read something written by Plato "as though it had come out in Mind
last month" – an idea which, if it means anything at all, means
something that destroys the main philosophical point of reading Plato at
all.[1]
The
point is not confined to the "analytic" style. There is an
enjoyable passage by Collingwood in which he describes how "the old
gang of Oxford realists", as he called them, notably Prichard and
Joseph, would insist on translating some ancient Greek expression as
"moral obligation" and then point out that Aristotle, or
whoever it was, had an inadequate theory of moral obligation. It was
like a nightmare, Collingwood said, in which one met a man who insisted
on translating the Greek word for a trireme as "steamship" and
then complained that the Greeks had a defective conception of a
steamship. But, in any case, the points I want to make about
philosophy’s engagement with history go a long way beyond its concern
with its own history, though that is certainly part of it.
I have
already started to talk about philosophy being this or that, and such
and such being central to philosophy, and this may already have aroused
suspicions of essentialism, as though philosophy had some entirely
distinct and timeless nature from which various consequences could be
drawn. So let me say at once that I do not want to fall back on any such
idea. Indeed, I shall claim later that some of the deepest insights of
modern philosophy, notably in the work of Wittgenstein, remain
undeveloped - indeed, at the limit, they are rendered unintelligible -
precisely because of an assumption that philosophy is something quite
peculiar, which should not be confused with any other kind of study, and
which needs no other kind of study in order to understand itself.
Wittgenstein in his later work influentially rejected essentialism, and
spoke of family resemblances and so on, but at the same time he was
obsessed - I do not think that is too strong a word - by the identity of
philosophy as an enterprise which was utterly peculiar compared with
other enterprises; this is so on Wittgenstein’s view, whether one
reads him as thinking that the compulsion to engage in it is
pathological, or is part of the human condition.[2] It
does not seem to me as peculiar as all that, and, in addition, we should
recall the point which Wittgenstein invites us to recall about other
things, that it is very various. What I have to say applies, I hope, to
most of what is standardly regarded as philosophy, and I shall try to
explain why that is so, but I shall not try to deduce it from the nature
of philosophy as compared with other disciplines, or indeed deduce it
from anything else. What I have to say, since it is itself a piece of
philosophy, is an example of what I take philosophy to be, part of a
more general attempt to make the best sense of our life, and so of our
intellectual activities, in the situation in which we find ourselves.
2. One
definite contrast to a humanistic conception of philosophy is scientism.
I do not mean by this simply an interest or involvement in science.
Philosophy should certainly be interested in the sciences and some
philosophers may well be involved in them, and nothing I say is meant to
deny it. Scientism is, rather, a misunderstanding of the relations
between philosophy and the natural sciences which tends to assimilate
philosophy to the aims, or at least the manners, of the sciences. In
line with the point I have just made about the variety of philosophy,
there certainly is some work in philosophy which quite properly conducts
itself as an extension of the natural or mathematical sciences, because
that is what it is: work in the philosophy of quantum mechanics, for
instance, or in the more technical aspects of logic. But in many other
areas, the assimilation is a mistake.
I do not
want to say very much about what might be called "stylistic
scientism", the pretence, for instance, that the philosophy of mind
is the more theoretical and less experimentally encumbered end of
neurophysiology. It may be suggested that this kind of assimilation,
even if it is to some extent misguided, at least encourages a certain
kind of rigour, which will help to fulfil philosophy’s promise of
embodying a discipline. But I doubt whether this is so. On the contrary:
since the scientistic philosophy of mind cannot embody the rigour which
is in the first instance appropriate to neurophysiology, that of
experimental procedures, the contributions of philosophers in this style
are actually more likely to resemble another well-known phenomenon of
the scientific culture, the discourse of scientists when they are off
duty, the slap-dash programmatic remarks that scientists sometimes
present in informal talks. Those remarks are often very interesting, but
that is because they are the remarks of scientists, standing back from
what they ordinarily do. There is not much reason to expect as much
interest in the remarks of philosophers who are not taking a holiday
from anything, but whose business is identified simply as making such
remarks.
A
question that intrigues me and to which I do not know the answer is the
relation between a scientistic view of philosophy, on the one hand, and,
on the other, the well known and highly typical style of many texts in
analytic philosophy which seeks precision by total mind control, through
issuing continuous and rigid interpretative directions. In a way that
will be familiar to any reader of analytic philosophy, and is only too
familiar to all of us who perpetrate it, this style tries to remove in
advance every conceivable misunderstanding or misinterpretation or
objection, including those that would occur only to the malicious or the
clinically literal-minded. This activity itself is often rather
mournfully equated with the boasted clarity and rigour of analytic
philosophy. Now, it is perfectly reasonable that the author should
consider the objections and possible misunderstandings, or at least
quite a lot of them; the odd thing is that he or she should put them
into the text. One might hope that the objections and possible
misunderstandings could be considered and no doubt influence the text,
and then, except for the most significant, they could be removed, like
the scaffolding that shapes a building but does not require you after
the building is finished to climb through it in order to gain access.
There is
no doubt more than one force that tends to encourage this style. One is
the teaching of philosophy by eristic argument, which tends to implant
in philosophers an intimidatingly nit-picking superego, a blend of their
most impressive teachers and their most competitive colleagues, which
guides their writing by means of constant anticipations of guilt and
shame. Another is the requirements of the PhD as an academic exercise,
which involves the production of a quite peculiar text, which can be too
easily mistaken for a book. There are demands of academic promotion,
which can encourage one to make as many published pages as possible out
of whatever modest idea one may have. Now none of these influences is
necessarily connected with a scientistic view of philosophy, and many
people who go in for this style would certainly and correctly reject any
suggestion that they had that view. Indeed, an obvious example of this
is a philosopher who perhaps did more than anyone else to encourage this
style, G.E. Moore. However, for all that, I do not think that we should
reject too quickly the thought that, when scientism is around, this
style can be co-opted in the scientistic spirit. It can serve as a
mimicry of scrupulous scientific procedures. People can perhaps persuade
themselves that if they fuss around enough with qualifications and
counter-examples, they are conducting the philosophical equivalent of a
biochemical protocol.
3.
But, as I said, stylistic scientism is not really the present question.
There is a much more substantive issue here. Consider the following
passage by Hilary Putnam from his book of Gifford Lectures, Renewing
Philosophy.[3]
Analytic
philosophy has become increasingly dominated by the idea that
science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself,
independent of perspective. To be sure, there are within analytic
philosophy important figures who combat this scientism …
Nevertheless, the idea that science leaves no room for an
independent philosophical enterprise has reached the point at which
leading practitioners sometimes suggest that all that is left for
philosophy is to try to anticipate what the presumed scientific
solutions to all metaphysical problems will eventually look like.
It is
not hard to see that there is a large non sequitur in this. Why
should the idea that science and only science describes the world as it
is in itself, independent of perspective, mean that there is no
independent philosophical enterprise? That would follow only on the
assumption that if there is an independent philosophical enterprise, its
aim is to describe the world as it is in itself, independent of
perspective. And why should we accept that? I admit to being rather
sensitive to this non sequitur, because, in the course of
Putnam’s book (which contains a chapter called "Bernard Williams
and the Absolute Conception of the World"), I myself am identified
as someone who "views physics as giving us the ultimate
metaphysical truth …".[4] Now I have never held
any such view, and I agree entirely with Putnam in rejecting it.
However, I have entertained the idea that science might describe the
world "as it is in itself", that is to say, give a
representation of it which is to the largest possible extent independent
of the local perspectives or idiosyncrasies of enquirers, a
representation of the world, as I put it, "as it is anyway".[5]
Such a representation I called in my jargon "the absolute
conception of the world". Whether it is attainable or not, whether
the aspiration to it is even coherent, are of course highly disputable
questions.
A sign
that something must have gone wrong with Putnam’s argument, or with
mine, if not with both, is that he supposes that the idea of an absolute
conception of the world must ultimately be motivated by the
contradictory and incoherent aim of describing the world without
describing it: as he puts it,[6] we cannot divide
language into two parts, "a part that describes the world ‘as it
is anyway’ and a part that describes our conceptual
contribution." (The ever tricky word "our" is important,
and we shall come back to it.) But my aim in introducing the notion of
the absolute conception was precisely to get round the point that one
cannot describe the world without describing it, and to accommodate the
fundamentally Kantian insight that there simply is no conception of the
world which is not conceptualised in some way or another. My idea was
not that you could conceptualise the world without concepts. The idea
was that when we reflect on our conceptualisation of the world, we might
be able to recognise from inside it that some of our concepts and ways
of representing the world are more dependent than others on our own
perspective, our peculiar and local ways of apprehending things. In
contrast, we might be able to identify some concepts and styles of
representation which are minimally dependent on our own or any other
creature’s peculiar ways of apprehending the world: these would form a
kind of representation that might be reached by any competent
investigators of the world, even though they differed from us – that
is to say, from human beings – in their sensory apparatus and,
certainly, their cultural background. The objective of distinguishing
such a representation of the world may possibly be incoherent, but it is
certainly not motivated by the aim of transcending all description and
conceptualisation
I do not
want to go further today into the question whether the idea of an
absolute conception is coherent.[7] I mention the
matter because I think that Putnam’s stick, although he has got the
wrong end of it, may help us in locating a scientism in philosophy which
he and I actually agree in rejecting. Putnam’s basic argument against
the idea of the absolute conception is that semantic relations are
normative, and hence could not figure in any purely scientific
conception. But describing the world involves deploying terms that have
semantic relations to it: hence, it seems, Putnam’s conclusion that
the absolute conception is supposed to describe the world without
describing it. Let us pass over the point that the argument seems to run
together two different things: on the one hand, using terms that
have semantic relations to the world, and, on the other, giving an
account of those semantic relations: I shall concentrate on the
latter.[8] Let us also grant for the sake of the
argument the principle, which is certainly disputable, that if semantic
relations are normative, it follows that an account of them cannot
itself figure in the absolute conception. It does not follow that the
absolute conception is impossible. All that follows is that an account
of semantic relations, in particular one given by the philosophy of
language, would not be part of the absolute conception. But – going
back for a moment to the purely ad hominem aspect of the argument
– I never claimed that it would be; and in a related point, I said
that, even if the absolute conception were attainable and it constituted
knowledge of how the world was "anyway", it was extremely
doubtful that we could know that this was so.[9]
So why
does Putnam assume, as he obviously does, that if there were to be an
absolute conception of the world, philosophy would have to be part of
it? I doubt that he was simply thrown by the Hegelian associations of
the word "absolute", with their implication that if there is
absolute knowledge, then philosophy possesses it. What perhaps he does
think is the conjunction of two things: first, that philosophy is as
good as it gets, and is in no way inferior to science, and, second, that
if there were an absolute conception of the world, a representation of
it which was maximally independent of perspective, that would be better
than more perspectival or locally conditioned representations of the
world. Now the first of these assumptions is, as it were, half true:
although philosophy is worse than natural science at some things, such
as discovering the nature of the galaxies (or, if I was right about the
absolute conception, representing the world as it is in itself), it is
better than natural science at other things, for instance making sense
of what we are trying to do in our intellectual activities. But the
second assumption I have ascribed to Putnam, that if there were an
absolute conception, it would somehow be better than more perspectival
representations – that is simply false. Even if it were possible to
give an account of the world that was minimally perspectival, it would
not be particularly serviceable to us for many of our purposes, such as
making sense of our intellectual or other activities, or indeed getting
on with most of those activities. For those purposes – in particular,
in seeking to understand ourselves – we need concepts and explanations
which are rooted in our more local practices, our culture, and our
history, and these cannot be replaced by concepts which we might share
with very different investigators of the world. The slippery word
"we" here means not the inclusive "we" which brings
together as a purely abstract gathering any beings with whom human
beings might conceivably communicate about the nature of the world It
means a contrastive "we", that is to say, humans as contrasted
with other possible beings; and, in the case of many human practices, it
may of course mean groupings smaller than humanity as a whole.
To
summarize this part of the argument, there are two mistakes to hand
here. One is to suppose that just because there is an uncontentious
sense in which all our conceptions are ours, it simply follows from this
that they are all equally local or perspectival, and that no contrast in
this respect could conceivably be drawn from inside our thought between,
for instance, the concepts of physics and the concepts of politics or
ethics. The other mistake is to suppose that if there is such a
contrast, and one set of these concepts, those of physical science, are
potentially universal in their uptake and usefulness, then it follows
from this that they are somehow intrinsically superior to more local
conceptions which are humanly and perhaps historically grounded. The
latter is a scientistic error, and it will remain one even if it is
denied that the contrast can conceivably be drawn. People who deny the
contrast but hold on to the error – who believe, that is to say, that
there can be no absolute conception, but that if there were, it would be
better than any other representation of the world – these people are
counterfactually scientistic: rather as an atheist is really religious
if he thinks that since God does not exist everything is permitted.
Because
Putnam assumes that if there were such a thing as an absolute conception
of the world, the account of semantic relations would itself have to be
part of it, he also regards as scientistic the philosophical programme,
which has taken various forms, of trying to give an account of semantic
relations such as reference in non-normative, scientific, terms. It
might be thought there was a question whether such a programme would
necessarily be scientistic, independently of Putnam’s particular
reasons for thinking that it would; but in fact this question seems to
me to be badly posed. The issue is not whether the programme is
scientistic, but whether the motivations for it are, and this itself is
a less than clear question. I take it as obvious that any attempt to reduce
semantic relations to concepts of physics is doomed. If, in reaction to
that, the question simply becomes whether our account of semantic
relations is to be consistent with physics, the answer had better be
‘yes’. So any interesting question in this area seems to be
something like this: to what extent could the behaviour of a creature be
identified as linguistic behaviour, for instance that of referring to
something, without that creature’s belonging to a group which had
something like a culture, a general set of rules which governed itself
and other creatures with which it lived? Related questions are: is
language a specifically human activity, so far as terrestrial species
are concerned, in the sense that it is necessarily tied up with the full
human range of self- conscious cultural activities? Again, at what stage
of hominid evolution might we conceive of genuine linguistic behaviour
emerging? These questions seem to me perfectly interesting questions and
neither they, nor their motivation, is scientistic. What would be
scientistic would be an a priori assumption that they had to have
a certain kind of answer, namely one that identified linguistic
behaviour as independent of human cultural activities in general, or,
alternatively, took the differently reductive line, that cultural
activities are all or mostly to be explained in terms of natural
selection. I shall not try to say any more about this aspect of the
subject here, except to repeat yet again the platitude that it is not,
in general, human cultural practices that are explained by natural
selection, but rather the universal human characteristic of having
cultural practices, and human beings’ capacity to do so. It is
precisely the fact that variations and developments in cultural
practices are not determined at an evolutionary level that makes
the human characteristic of living under culture such an extraordinary
evolutionary success.
4.
What are the temptations to scientism? They are various, and many of
them can be left to the sociology of academic life, but I take it that
the most basic motivations to it are tied up with a question of the
intellectual authority of philosophy. Science seems to possess
intellectual authority, and philosophy, conscious that as it is usually
done it does not have scientific authority, may decide to try to share
in it. Now it is a real question whether the intellectual authority of
science is not tied up with its hopes of offering an absolute conception
of the world as it is independently of any local or peculiar perspective
on it. Many scientists think so. Some people think that this is the only
intellectual authority there is. They include, counterfactually
speaking, those defenders of the humanities, misguided in my view, who
think that they have to show that nobody has any hope of offering such a
conception, including scientists: that natural science constitutes just
another part of the human conversation, so that, leaving aside the small
difference that the sciences deliver refrigerators, weapons, medicines
and so, they are in the same boat as the humanities are.[10]
This way
of defending the humanities seems to me doubly misguided. It is
politically misguided, for if the authority of the sciences is divorced
from any pretensions to offer an absolute conception, their authority
will merely shift to the manifest fact of their predictive and
technological successes, unmediated by any issue of where those
successes come from, and the humanities will once again, in that
measure, be disadvantaged. The style of defence is also intellectually
misguided, for the same kind of reason that we have already met, that it
assumes that offering an absolute conception is the real thing, what
really matters in the direction of intellectual authority. But there is
simply no reason to accept that - once again, we are left with the issue
of how to make the best sense of ourselves and our activities, and that
issue includes the question, indeed it focusses on the question, of how
the humanities can help us in doing so.
One
particular question, of course, is how make best sense of the activity
of science itself. Here the issue of history begins to come to the fore.
The pursuit of science does not give any great part to its own history,
and that it is a significant feature of its practice. (It is no surprise
that scientistic philosophers want philosophy to follow it in this: that
they think, as one philosopher I know has put it, that the history of
philosophy is no more part of philosophy than the history of science is
part of science.) Of course, scientific concepts have a history: but on
the standard view, though the history of physics may be interesting, it
has no effect on the understanding of physics itself. It is merely part
of the history of discovery.
There is
of course a real question of what it is for a history to be a history of
discovery. One condition of its being so lies in a familiar idea, which
I would put like this: the later theory, or (more generally) outlook,
makes sense of itself, and of the earlier outlook, and of the transition
from the earlier to the later, in such terms that both parties (the
holders of the earlier outlook, and the holders of the later) have
reason to recognise the transition as an improvement. I shall call an
explanation which satisfies this condition vindicatory. In the
particular case of the natural sciences, the later theory typically
explains in its own terms the appearances which supported the earlier
theory, and, furthermore, the earlier theory can be understood as a
special or limited case of the later. But – and this is an important
point – the idea that the explanation of a transition from one outlook
to another is "vindicatory" is not defined in such a way that
it applies only to scientific enquiries.
Those
who are sceptical about the claims of science to be moving towards an
absolute conception of the world often base their doubts on the history
of science. They deny that the history is really vindicatory, or, to the
extent that it is, they deny that this is as significant as the standard
view supposes. I shall not try to take these arguments further, though
it is perhaps worth noting that those who sympathise with this
scepticism need to be careful about how they express their historical
conclusions. Whatever view you take of the scientific enterprise, you
should resist saying, as one historian of science has incautiously said,
"the reality of quarks was the upshot of particle physicists’
practice" (the 1970’s is rather late for the beginning of the
universe.)[11]
5.
Philosophy, at any rate, is thoroughly familiar with ideas which indeed,
like all other ideas, have a history, but have a history which is not
notably vindicatory. I shall concentrate for this part of the discussion
on ethical and political concepts, though many of the considerations go
wider. If we ask why we use some concepts of this kind rather than
others – rather than, say, those current in an earlier time – we may
deploy arguments which claim to justify our ideas against those others:
ideas of equality and equal rights, for instance, against ideas of
hierarchy. Alternatively, we may reflect on an historical story, of how
these concepts rather than the others came to be ours: a story (simply
to give it a label) of how the modern world and its special expectations
came to replace the ancien régime. But then we reflect on the
relation of this story to the arguments that we deploy against the
earlier conceptions, and we realise that the story is the history of
those forms of argument themselves: the forms of argument, call them
liberal forms of argument, are a central part of the outlook that we
accept.
If we
consider how these forms of argument came to prevail, we can indeed see
them as having won, but not necessarily as having won an argument. For
liberal ideas to have won an argument, the representatives of the ancien
régime would have had to have shared with the nascent liberals a
conception of something that the argument was about, and not just in the
obvious sense that it was about the way to live or the way to order
society. They would have had to agree that there was some aim, of reason
or freedom or whatever, which liberal ideas served better or of which
they were a better expression, and there is not much reason, with a
change as radical as this, to think that they did agree about this, at
least until late in the process. The relevant ideas of freedom, reason,
and so on were themselves involved in the change. If in this sense the
liberals did not win an argument, then the explanations of how
liberalism came to prevail – that is to say, among other things, how
these came to be our ideas – are not vindicatory.
The
point can also be put like this. In the case of scientific change, it
may occur through there being a crisis. If there is a crisis, it is
agreed by all parties to be a crisis of explanation, and while they may
indeed disagree over what will count as an explanation, to a
considerable extent there has come to be agreement, at least within the
limits of science since the 18th century, and this makes an
important contribution to the history being vindicatory. But in the
geographically extended and long-lasting and various process by which
the old political and ethical order has changed into modernity, while it
was propelled by many crises, they were not in the first instance crises
of explanation. They were crises of confidence or of legitimacy, and the
story of how one conception rather than another came to provide the
basis of a new legitimacy is not on the face of it vindicatory.
There
are indeed, or have been, stories that try to vindicate historically one
or another modern conception, in terms of the unfolding of reason, or a
growth in enlightenment, or a fuller realization of freedom and autonomy
which is a constant human objective; and there are others.Such stories
are unpopular at the moment, particularly in the wide-screen versions
offered by Hegel and Marx. With philosophers in our local
tradition the stories are unpopular not so much in the sense that they
deny them, as that they do not mention them. continue>
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They do not mention them, no doubt, in part
because they do not believe them, but also because it is not part of a
philosophical undertaking, as locally understood, to attend to any such
history. But – and this is the point I want to stress – we must
attend to it, if we are to know what reflective attitude to take to our
own conceptions. For one thing, the answer to the question whether there
is a history of our conceptions that is vindicatory (if only modestly
so) makes a difference to what we are doing in saying, if we do say,
that the earlier conceptions were wrong. In the absence of vindicatory
explanations, while you can of course say that they were wrong – who
is to stop you? – the content of this is likely to be pretty thin: it
conveys only the message that the earlier outlook fails by arguments the
point of which is that such outlooks should fail by them. It is a good
question whether a tune as thin as this is worth whistling at all.
However,
this issue (the issue roughly of relativism) is not the main point. The
real question concerns our philosophical attitude towards our own
views. Even apart from questions of vindication and the consequences
that this may have for comparisons of our outlook with others,
philosophers cannot altogether ignore history if they are going to
understand our ethical concepts at all. One reason for this is that in
many cases the content of our concepts is a contingent historical
phenomenon. This is for more than one reason. To take a case on which I
am presently working, the virtues associated with truthfulness, I think
it is clear that while there is a universal human need for qualities
such as accuracy (the dispositions to acquire true beliefs) and
sincerity (the disposition to say, if anything, what one believes to be
true), the form of these dispositions and of the motivations that they
embody are culturally and historically various. If one is to understand
our own view of such things, and to do so in terms that are on any
one’s view philosophical – for instance, in order to relieve
puzzlement about the basis of these values and their implications –
one must try to understand why they take certain forms here rather than
others, and one can only do that with the help of history. Moreover,
there are some such virtues, such as authenticity or integrity of a
certain kind, which are as a whole a manifestly contingent cultural
development; they would not have evolved at all if Western history had
not taken a certain course. For both these reasons, the reflective
understanding of our ideas and motivations, which I take to be by
general agreement a philosophical aim, is going to involve historical
understanding. Here history helps philosophical understanding, or is
part of it. Philosophy has to learn the lesson that conceptual
description (or, more specifically, analysis) is not self-sufficient;
and that such projects as deriving our concepts a priori from
universal conditions of human life, though they indeed have a place (a
greater place in some areas of philosophy than others), are likely to
leave unexplained many features that provoke philosophical enquiry.
6.
There are other respects, however, in which historical understanding can
seem not to help the philosophical enterprise, but to get in the way of
it. If we thought that our outlook had a history which was vindicatory,
we might to that extent ignore it, precisely as scientists ignore the
history of science. (One can glimpse here the enormous and implausible
assumptions made by those who think that philosophy can ignore its own
history.) But if we do not believe that the history of our outlook is
vindicatory, then understanding the history of our outlook may seem to
interfere with our commitment to it, and in particular with a
philosophical attempt to work within it and develop its arguments. If it
is a contingent development that happens to obtain here and now, can we
fully identify with it? Is it really ours except in the sense
that we and it happen to be in the same place at the same time?
To some
extent, this is one version of a problem that has recurred in European
thought since historical self-consciousness struck deep roots in the
early 19th century: a problem of reflection and commitment,
or of an external view of one’s beliefs as opposed to an internal
involvement with them – a problem, as it might be called, of
historicist weariness and alienation. It may be a testimony to the power
of this problem that so many liberal philosophers want to avoid any
question of the history of their own views. It may also be significant
in this connection that so much robust and influential political
philosophy comes from the United States, which has no history of
emerging from the ancien régime, since (very roughly speaking)
it emerged from it by the mere act of coming into existence.
One
philosopher, and indeed an American philosopher, who has raised the
question within the local tradition is Richard Rorty, and he has
suggested that the answer to it lies in irony:[12]
that qua political actors we are involved in the outlook, but qua
reflective people (for instance, as philosophers) we stand back and in a
detached and rather quizzical spirit see ourselves as happening to have
that attachment. The fact that "qua" should come so
naturally into formulating this outlook shows, as almost always in
philosophy, that someone is trying to separate the inseparable: in this
case, the ethically inseparable, and probably the psychologically
inseparable as well, unless the ironist joins the others (the outlook
that Rorty calls "common sense") and forgets about historical
self-understanding altogether, in which case he can forget his irony as
well, and indeed does not need it.
In fact,
as it seems to me, once one goes far enough in recognizing
contingency, the problem to which irony is supposed to provide the
answer does not arise at all. What we have here is very like something
that we have already met in this discussion, the phenomenon of
counterfactual scientism. The supposed problem comes from the idea that
a vindicatory history of our outlook is what we would really like to
have, and the discovery that liberalism, in particular (but the same is
true of any outlook), has the kind of contingent history that it does
have is a disappointment, which leaves us with at best a second best.
But, once again, why should we think that? Precisely because we are not
unencumbered intelligences selecting in principle among all possible
outlooks, we can accept that this outlook is ours just because of the
history that has made it ours; or, more precisely, has both made us, and
made the outlook as something that is ours. We are no less contingently
formed than the outlook is, and the formation is significantly the same.
We and our outlook are not simply in the same place at the same time. If
we really understand this, deeply understand it, we can be free of what
is indeed another scientistic illusion, that it is our job as rational
agents to for, or at least move as best we can towards, a system
of political and ethical ideas which would be the best from an absolute
point of view, a point of view that was free of contingent historical
perspective.
If we
can get rid of that illusion, we shall see that there is no inherent
conflict among three activities: first, the first-order activities of
acting and arguing within the framework of our ideas; second, the
philosophical activity of reflecting on those ideas at a more general
level and trying to make better sense of them; and third, the historical
activity of understanding where they came from. The activities are in
various ways continuous with one another. This helps to define both
intelligence in political action (because of the connection of the first
with the second and the third), and also realism in political philosophy
(because of the connection of the second with the first and the third.)
If there is a difficulty in combining the third of these activities with
the first two, it is the difficulty of thinking about two things at
once, not a problem in consistently taking both of them seriously.
7.
In fact, we are very unlikely to be able to make complete sense of our
outlook. It will be in various ways incoherent. The history may help us
to understand why this should be so: for instance, the difficulties that
liberalism has at the present time with ideas of autonomy can be traced
in part to Enlightenment conceptions of the individual which do not
fully make sense to us now. In these circumstances, we may indeed be
alienated from parts of our own outlook. If the incoherence is severe
enough, it will present itself to us, who hold this outlook, as a crisis
of explanation: we need to have reasons for rearranging and developing
our ideas in one way rather than another. At the same time, we may
perhaps see the situation as a crisis of legitimation – that there is
a real question whether these ideas will survive and continue to serve
us. Others who do not share the outlook can see the crisis of
legitimation, too, but they cannot see it as a crisis of explanation for
themselves, since they did not think that our outlook made sense of
things in the first place. We, however, need reasons internal to our
outlook not just to solve explanatory problems, but in relation to the
crisis of legitimation as well. We need them, for one thing, to explain
ourselves to people who are divided between our present outlook and some
contemporary active rival. If things are bad enough, those people may
include ourselves.
There
may be no crisis. Or if there is, there will be some elements in our
outlook which are fixed points within it. We believe, for instance, that
in some sense every citizen, indeed every human being – some people,
more extravagantly, would say every sentient being – deserves equal
consideration. Perhaps this is less a propositional belief than the
schema of various arguments. But in either case it can seem, at least in
its most central and unspecific form, unhintergehbar: there is
nothing more basic in terms of which to justify it. We know that most
people in the past have not shared it; we know that there are others in
the world who do not share it now. But for us, it is simply there. This
does not mean that we have the thought: "for us, it is simply
there." It means that we have the thought: "it is simply
there." (That is what it is for it to be, for us, simply there.)
With
regard to these elements of our outlook, at least, a philosopher may
say: the contingent history has no effect in the space of reasons (to
use a fashionable phrase), so why bother about it?[13]
Let us just get on with our business of making best sense of our outlook
from inside it. There are several answers to this, some implicit in what
I have already said. One is that philosophers reflecting on these
beliefs or modes of argument may turn back to those old devices of
cognitive reassurance such as "intuition". But if the
epistemic claims implicit in such terms are to be taken seriously, then
there are implications for history – they imply a different
history. Again, what we think about these things affects our view of
people who have different outlooks in the present, outlooks that present
themselves as rivals to ours. To say simply that these people are wrong
in our terms is to revert to the thin tune that we have already heard in
the case of disapproval over the centuries. It matters why these people
believe what they do; for instance, whether we can reasonably regard
their outlook as simply archaic, an expression of an order which happens
to have survived into an international environment in which it cannot
last, socially or intellectually. This matters both for the persuasion
of uncommitted parties, as I have already said, but also for making
sense of the others in relation to ourselves – and hence of ourselves
in relation to them. Even with regard to those elements of our outlook
for which there are no further justifications, there can still be
explanations which help to locate them in relation to their rivals.
Above
all, historical understanding – perhaps I may now say, more broadly,
social understanding – can help with the business, which is quite
certainly a philosophical business, of distinguishing between different
ways in which various of our ideas and procedures can seem to be such
that we cannot get beyond them, that there is no conceivable
alternative. This brings us back to Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein
influentally and correctly insisted that there was an end to
justifications, that at various points we run into the fact that
"this is the way we go on". But, if I may say again something
that I have said rather often before,[14] it makes a
great difference who "we" are supposed to be, and it may mean
different groups in different philosophical connections. It may mean
maximally, as I mentioned earlier, any creature that you and I could
conceive of understanding. Or it may mean any human beings, and here
universal conditions of human life, including very general psychological
capacities, may be relevant. Or it may mean just those with whom you and
I share much more, such as outlooks typical of modernity. Wittgenstein
himself inherited from Kant a concern with the limits of understanding,
from Frege and Russell an interest in the conditions of linguistic
meaning, and from himself a sense of philosophy as a quite peculiar and
possibly pathological enterprise. These influences guided him towards
the most general questions of philosophy, and, with that, to a wide
understanding of "we", but they also conspired to make him
think that philosophy had nothing to do with explanations – not merely
scientific explanations (he was certainly the least scientistic of
philosophers), but any explanations at all, except philosophical
explanations: and they were not like other explanations, but rather like
elucidations or reminders. In this sense, his ways of doing philosophy,
and indeed his doubts about it, still focussed on a conception of
philosophy’s subject matter as being exclusively a priori. That
is a conception which we have good reason to question, and so, indeed,
did he.
Once we
give up that assumption, we can take a legitimate philosophical interest
in what is agreed to be a more local "us". But it may be said
that when it is specifically this more restricted group that is in
question, it cannot be that there are no conceivable alternatives.
Surely the history I have been going on about is a history of
alternatives? But that is a misunderstanding of what, in this context,
is being said to be inconceivable. History presents alternatives only in
terms of a wider "us": it presents alternative ways, that is
to say various ways, in which human beings have lived and hence can
live. Indeed, in those terms we may be able to conceive, if only
schematically and with difficulty, other ways in which human beings
might live in the future. But that is not the point. What in this
connection seem to be simply there, to carry no alternative with them,
are elements of our ethical and political outlook, and in those terms
there are no alternatives for us. Those elements are indeed unhintergehbar,
in a sense that indeed involves time, but in a way special to this kind
of case. We can explore them on this side, in relation to their past,
and explain them, and (if, as I have already said, we abandon
scientistic illusions) we can identify with the process that led to our
outlook because we can identify with its outcome. But we cannot in our
thought go beyond our outlook into the future and remain identified with
the result: that is to say, we cannot overcome our outlook. If a
possible future that figures in those shadowy speculations does not
embody some interpretation of these central elements of our outlook,
then it may make empirical sense to us – we can see how someone could
get there – but it makes no ethical sense to us, except as a scene of
retrogression, or desolation, or loss.
It is
connected with this that modern ethical and political conceptions
typically do not allow for a future beyond themselves. Marxism predicted
a future which was supposed to make ethical sense, but it notoriously
came to an end in a static Utopia. Many liberals in their own way follow
the same pattern; they go on, in this respect as with respect to the
past, as though liberalism were timeless.[15] It is
not a reproach to these liberals that they cannot see beyond the outer
limits of what they find acceptable: no-one can do that. But it is more
of a reproach that they are not interested enough in why this is so, in
why their most basic convictions should seem to be, as I put it, simply
there. It is part and parcel of a philosophical attitude that makes them
equally uninterested in how those convictions got there.
8. I
have argued that philosophy should get rid of scientistic illusions,
that it should not try to behave like an extension of the natural
sciences (except in the special cases where that is what it is), that it
should think of itself as part of a wider humanistic enterprise of
making sense of ourselves and of our activities, and that in order to
answer many of its questions it needs to attend to other parts of that
enterprise, in particular to history.
But
someone, perhaps a young philosopher, may say: that is all very well,
but even if I accept it all, doesn’t it mean that there is too much
that we need to know, that one can only do philosophy by being an
amateur of altogether too much? Can’t we just get on with it?
To him
or her I can only say: I entirely see your, that is to say our, problem.
I accept that analytic philosophy owes many of its successes to the
principle that small and good is better than broad and bad. I accept
that this involves a division of labour. I accept that you want to get
on with it. I also admit something else, that it is typically senior
philosophers who, like senior scientists, tend to muse in these
expansive ways about the nature of their subject. As Nietzsche says in a
marvellous passage about the philosopher and age:[16]
It
quite often happens that the old man is subject to the delusion of a
great moral renewal and rebirth, and from this experience he passes
judgments on the work and course of his life, as if he had only now
become clear-sighted; and yet the inspiration behind this feeling of
well-being and these confident judgements is not wisdom, but weariness.
However,
there are things to be said about how one might accept the view of
philosophy that I am offering, and yet get on with it. Let me end by
mentioning very briefly one or two of them. One thing we need to do is
not to abandon the division of labour but to reconsider it. It tends to
be modelled too easily on that of the sciences, as dividing one field or
area of theorising from another, but we can divide the subject up in
other ways – by thinking of one given ethical idea, for instance, and
the various considerations that might help one to understand it. Again,
while it is certainly true that we all need to know more than we can
hope to know – and that is true of philosophers who work near the
sciences, or indeed in them, as well – it makes a difference what it
is that you know you do not know. One may not see very far outside
one’s own house, but it can be very important which direction one is
looking in.
Moreover,
it is not only a matter of re or philosophical writing. There is
the question of what impression one gives of the subject in teaching it.
Most students have no interest in becoming professional philosophers.
They often take away an image of philosophy as a self-contained
technical subject, and this can admittedly have its own charm as
something complicated which can be well or badly done, and that is not
to be despised. It also in some ways makes the subject easier to teach,
since it less involves trying to find out how much or how little the
students know about anything else. But if we believe that philosophy
might play an important part in making people think about what they are
doing, then philosophy should acknowledge its connections with other
ways of understanding ourselves, and if it insists on not doing so, it
may seem to the student in every sense quite peculiar.
We run
the risk, in fact, that the whole humanistic enterprise of trying to
understand ourselves is coming to seem peculiar. For various reasons,
education is being driven towards an increasing concentration on the
technical and the commercial, to a point at which any more reflective
enquiry may come to seem unnecessary and archaic, something that at best
is preserved as part of the heritage industry. If that is how it is
preserved, it will not be the passionate and intelligent activity that
it needs to be. We all have an interest in the life of that activity –
not just a shared interest, but an interest in a shared activity.
Footnotes
1
The point, in particular, of making the familiar look strange, and
conversely. I have said some more about this in "Descartes and the
Historiography of Philosophy", in John Cottingham ed., Reason,
Will and Sensation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). – The
reference to Collingwood is to An Autobiography (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1939), p 63 seq.
2
The former view was expressed, in a vulgarized form, in the literature
of "therapeutic positivism". The latter is richly developed in
the work of Stanley Cavell.
3
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992: preface, p x.
4
Ibid., p 108.
5
Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1978), p 64.
6
Renewing Philosophy, p 123.
7
An outstanding discussion is A.W. Moore, Points of View (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997).
8
This is the point that should be relevant to the question whether
philosophy would form part of the content of the absolute conception.
Moreover, if Putnam wanted to say that any statement which merely
contained terms governed by normative semantic relations was itself
normative, he would have to say that every statement was normative.
9
Descartes, pp 300-303.
10
A rather similar line was taken by some defenders of religion at the
beginning of the scientific revolution.
11
Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks (Edinburgh University
Press, 1984). It should be said that Pickering’s history does raise
important questions about interpreting the "discovery" of
quarks.
12
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press,
1989), especially chapters 3 and 4.
13
This is (in effect) a central claim of Thomas Nagel’s book The Last
Word (Oxford University Press, 1997.) His arguments bear closely on
the present discussion. I have commented on them in a review of the
book, New York Review of Books XLV, 18 (November 19, 1998.)
14
See e.g. "Wittgenstein and Idealism", reprinted in Moral
Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981.) The question of idealism is
not relevant in the present context.
15
This needs qualification with regard to the more recent work of Rawls,
which displays a stronger sense of historical contingency than was
present in A Theory of Justice.
16
Daybreak, sec. 542.
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