The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
Continuum Studies in British Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in British Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of British philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Applying Wittgenstein – Rupert Read Berkeley and Irish Philosophy – David Berman Berkeley’s Philosophy of Spirit – Talia Bettcher Bertrand Russell, Language and Linguistic Theory – Keith Green Bertrand Russell’s Ethics – Michael K. Potter Boyle on Fire – William Eaton The Coherence of Hobbes’s Leviathan – Eric Brandon Doing Austin Justice – Wilfrid Rumble The Early Wittgenstein on Religion – J. Mark Lazenby F. P. Ramsey – edited by Maria J. Frapolli Francis Bacon and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge – Dennis Desroches Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought – Gordon Hull Hume on God – Timothy S. Yoder Hume’s Social Philosophy – Christopher Finlay Hume’s Theory of Causation – Angela Coventry Idealist Political Philosophy – Colin Tyler Iris Murdoch’s Ethics – Megan Laverty John Stuart Mill’s Political Philosophy – John Fitzpatrick Matthew Tindal, Freethinker – Stephen Lalor The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer – Michael Taylor Popper, Objectivity and the Growth of Knowledge – John H. Sceski Rethinking Mill’s Ethics – Colin Heydt Russell and Wittgenstein on the Nature of Judgement – Rosalind Carey Russell’s Theory of Perception – Sajahan Miah Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Natural Philosophy – Stephen J. Finn Thomas Reid’s Ethics – William C. Davis Wittgenstein and Gadamer – Chris Lawn Wittgenstein and the Theory of Perception – Justin Good Wittgenstein at his Word – Duncan Richter Wittgenstein on Ethical Inquiry – Jeremy Wisnewski Wittgenstein’s Religious Point of View – Tim Labron
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy Britishness and the Spectre of Europe
Thomas L. Akehurst
Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Thomas L. Akehurst 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-8470-6450-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Akehurst, Thomas L. The cultural politics of analytic philosophy: britishness and the spectre of Europe/Thomas L. Akehurst. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references ISBN-13: 978-1-84706-450-9 (HB) ISBN-10: 1-84706-450-7 (HB) 1. Analysis (Philosophy) 2. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831–Influence. 3. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900–Influence. 4. Germany--Politics and government--20th century. I. Title. B808.5.A34 2010 146’.40941--dc22
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2009019738
Contents
Acknowledgements
vi
Introduction
1
Chapter 1
Nazi Philosophy
16
Chapter 2
The Expulsion of the Invaders
53
Chapter 3
Philosophical Method: Virtue vs Vice
88
Chapter 4
The Virtuous Tradition: Analysis, Liberalism, Britishness
Epilogue
126 163
Notes Bibliography Index
170 198 209
Acknowledgements
The research for this book was made possible by a University of Sussex Seedcorn Scholarship, and subsequent work has been made easier by a Scouloudi Foundation Historical Award. I am grateful to both of these institutions, and to the East Sussex Fire and Rescue service for preventing the whole project going up in smoke at an early stage. Given that the cultural history of philosophy is a relatively unpeopled field in this country, I’ve been very fortunate to find so many readers and commentators. Many of them have had to stray from their preferred fields and display considerable tolerance in engaging with this project. They have, in so doing, immeasurably improved the resulting book. I am grateful to the historians at the University of Sussex who have supported me in my idiosyncratic research choices. I am especially indebted to Knud Haakonssen, Alun Howkins, and Paul Betts. The encouragement of the latter, in particular, has proved fortifying at all points of this process. I have also benefited greatly from the comments of Stefan Collini, James Hampshire, Michael Morris, Andrew Rebera, Jonathan Rée, Darrow Schecter and Brian Young. Ben Jones, Shamira Meghani, Katherine Nielsen, Karen Schaller and Reto Speck read parts or all of the manuscript for me – catching many errors I would have missed entirely. While this book is not unequivocal in its praise of analytic philosophy, I would like to offer unequivocal gratitude (and praise) for the teaching of my own philosophy tutors, among them Hallvard Lillehammer, Neil Manson, and the late Peter Lipton. I am tremendously grateful to my friends: Chris, Emma, Jon, Karen, Kat, Katerina, Matt, Petra, Reto and Tim for their company and conversation. In keeping with the theme of Britishness, I will say least about those whose support has mattered most: Shamira, my parents, and my sister. I’ll send them all postcards. Sections of the argument of Chapters 1 and 2 of this book have previously appeared in ‘The Nazi Tradition: the analytic critique of continental philosophy in mid-century Britain’, History of European Ideas 34 (2008), 548–557.
Acknowledgements
vii
Extracts from Russell’s History of Western Philosophy are reproduced by permission of the Taylor and Francis Group (World excluding USA) and with the permission of Simon and Schuster, Inc. (USA) Copyright 1945 by Bertrand Russell. Copyright renewed 1973 by Edith Russell. All rights reserved.
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Introduction
Hitler’s ideals come mainly from Nietzsche.1 (Bertrand Russell 1935) Nor is it news to philosophers that Nazi, Fascist and Communist doctrines are descendants of the Hegelian gospel. They may therefore wonder whether Dr. Popper is not flogging a dead horse in exposing once again the motives and fallacies of Hegel. But Dr Popper is clearly right in saying that even if philosophers are at long last immunized, historians, sociologists, political propagandists and voters are still unconscious victims of this virus . . .2 (Gilbert Ryle 1947) If Empiricist philosophy is strong to-day, perhaps we may hope to see a revival of Liberalism the day after to-morrow.3 (H. H. Price 1940) By God, Ryle, I believe you are right. No one ever had Common Sense before John Locke – and no-one but Englishmen have ever had it since.4 (Bertrand Russell 1965) The history of Germany is not a good advert for romantic philosophy; I do think that if they had had philosophers of the calibre of Bentham and the Mills during this period, and if they had listened to them, history might have been very different.5 (R. M. Hare 1989)
British analytic philosophy has something of a reputation. Particularly in its early years, the discipline was seen as aloof from the concerns of politics and human life. In his infamous Words and Things, Ernest Gellner condemned Oxford analysis for its ‘conspicuous triviality’.6 More recently, some
2
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
have suggested that this ‘existential gap’, separating analytic philosophy from the concerns of human life, does not merely characterize one short period in history, but is a feature of analytic philosophy as such.7 When, in 1958, the Oxford philosopher G. J. Warnock wrote that he believed British analytic philosophy was politically neutral – potentially compatible with a range of ideological positions – he was doing no more than stating positively what critics of analytic philosophy had been saying and would continue to say. But Warnock went a little further; while finding such an eventuality extremely unlikely, he conceded thaxt: ‘there may be some deep seated similarity of attitude and outlook, in which it may be that future historians will find without difficulty the Weltanschauung of contemporary philosophy’.8 What the quotations at the top of the introduction illustrate is that Warnock was right. There was a ‘deep seated similarity of attitude and outlook’ among the British analysts; contrary to the stated beliefs of critics and analysts alike, we can detect a clear pattern of cultural, political and philosophical beliefs shared by major British analytic philosophers. This is a worldview the analysts elaborated themselves in the pages of their published work. The three decades with which we are centrally concerned, 1930 to 1960, were a crucially important period in the history of British analytic philosophy. In these years it moved from being a marginal grouping in Cambridge, in the late 1920s, to being central to the largest philosophy department in the country, Oxford, by 1960. While these decades frame much of our discussion, our focus is on generations, specifically on the three generations of analysts who co-founded the discipline in Britain. Where it proves useful in understanding our period, we will look at the reflections of these philosophers beyond the boundaries of 1930 and 1960. The first generation under examination here, that of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, both in their twenties by 1900, are credited with the decisive break away from idealism at the turn of the century. The second is the generation of A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin and Isaiah Berlin, all born around 1910, to which Gilbert Ryle in these terms properly belongs, despite being ten years older than Ayer; Ryle’s conversion to analysis happened at the beginning of the 1930s, and he did not gain his Chair until 1945. Third, we have the children of the 1920s, the Warnocks (Mary and Geoffrey), Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim, and, by the skin of his teeth, Bernard Williams. Beginning in the mid-1930s the second generation emerges, and by 1945 the third is also involved. In this period, three foundational generations of analytic philosophers, with growing institutional prestige and responsibility (a process which
Introduction
3
began with Moore gaining his Chair at Cambridge in 1925), could address and fight over what it meant to be a British analytic philosopher. For this tradition, this is the equivalent of Jesus being able to sit down with Paul, Constantine and the Early Church fathers to thrash out the canon, and the definitive history. It is a crucial, and somewhat overlooked, moment in the history of the discipline. Given the chronology outlined above, the discovery of a seam of culturalpolitical assumptions should not be a cause of surprise. Analytic philosophy emerged and came to dominance in Britain against the backdrop of some of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century. In the time between analytic philosophy’s emergence in Cambridge in the first decade of the century and its achievement of institutional dominance in Britain in the 1950s, two new ideologies, Marxist-Leninism and fascism, made dramatic appearances on the world stage, and Europe saw its two bloodiest wars in history. Between 1940 and 1945, many of the most significant British analysts of the twentieth century were also soldiers, intelligence officers or code breakers. What we find in the work of these thinkers are attempts to relate their philosophical enterprise to the chaotic times in which they lived. Yet these reflections and beliefs have been largely ignored by historians. This project reveals two previously unacknowledged themes in analytic discussion. First, as the quotations from Lord Russell, and Professors Ryle and Hare at the top of this introduction illustrate, there was a consistently held belief among these early generations of analytic philosophers that a postKantian tradition of continental philosophy was the direct source of fascist ideology. I will examine these quotations in far more detail later, but what we can see here is the condemnation of Nietzsche, Hegel, and, in the quotation from Hare romantic philosophy, as being in some way the ‘ancestors of fascism’, to use Russell’s phrase.9 This belief was generalized as the analytic philosophers witnessed what they believed to be Germany’s corruption of the European (though not the British) mind, helping to form the notion of a dangerous ‘continental philosophy’, characterized as philosophically inadequate, politically aggressive, and irrational. The divide between analytic and continental philosophy is still with us and although components of it have a far longer history (as I will briefly discuss later), its modern origins lie in the first half of the twentieth century. Peter Simons has provided us with a chronology of the developing divide. On his reading, the ‘first signs’ are present in the period 1918 to 1933; 1933 to 1945 is characterized by ‘catastrophe’; and in the period 1945 to 1968 ‘the rift is cemented’.10 While the first period is clearly important in examining the origins of British analytic philosophy, during the period the
4
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
discipline was barely recognizable; it was practised by only a handful of predominantly Cambridge-based philosophers. Only later did the movement became distinguishable and set about forming an intellectual identity. The chronological frame of this study encompasses, then, the most crucial of Simons’ periods, the second and third (I will have something to say about the earlier period in Chapters 1 and 2). We are presented with a convergence of circumstances. On the one hand, as analytic philosophy gains control of British universities, the divide between British and continental philosophy opens up. On the other hand, the period during which the fissure widens to a gulf is cut through with six years of total war – a war for which, the analysts believed, continental philosophy was partly responsible. The analysts’ purging of continental philosophy, once they were in a position to do so, seems to have been at least partly motivated by these considerations. Randall Collins has pointed out that the ‘unprecedented vehemence’ of the dispute between analytic philosophers and continental philosophers has ‘outlasted virtually every other substantive feature of their programme’.11 On the analysts’ side, I suggest, the vehemence is in part the legacy of the cultural-political assumptions revealed in this study. If one thinks one’s philosophical opponents are implicated in an ideology one has had to fight in a world war, this will likely add vehemence to one’s polemic. Secondly, this project reveals that, contrary to the received view of the analysts as un-engaged politically, there is a strong pattern of thought in this period that ties analytic philosophy to liberalism. As the Price quotation at the top of this introduction makes clear, the analysts believed in a link between the characteristic epistemological position of their movement, empiricism, and ‘a revival of liberalism’. So, while in the years after the war political philosophy was declared dead and the analysts were condemned as those responsible,12 we will see here that in actual fact the analysts considered themselves to be guarantors of political liberalism. Underpinning and uniting these two sets of attitudes was a project of self-definition. An image of the ‘continental philosopher’ and a ‘continental tradition’ helped define the young British analytic tradition. The continentals were the ‘other’ against which the virtues of the British could first be constructed and then juxtaposed. The character of the analysts was also clearly derived from stereotypical notions of Britishness, more specifically of Englishness. In this book, I will use these terms interchangeably, though it is clear from the character traits that the analysts celebrate and seek to model that their perception of their own character is specifically English. However, there is no consistency in their usage of the terms English/
Introduction
5
British; and as I will argue, the significant contrast for the analysts was against continental philosophy, not among English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish thought. Though the identity was recognizably an English one, the analysts appear happy to extend it to all Britons, whom, they no doubt felt, had more in common with each other than they did with the French or the Germans. In keeping with their British identity, the analytic philosophers saw themselves and their discipline as down to earth and reasonable – as Russell says at the top of this introduction, the British invented common sense, and have been the sole guardians of the virtue ever since. The analysts juxtaposed their own native tradition, with its history of intellectual rigour and political liberalism, against the perceived philosophical and political vices of ‘continental philosophy’. Hare makes this explicit in his comment at the top of the introduction – if German philosophers had been of the same quality as British philosophy, then ‘history might have been very different’. We can already see in these quotations, the creation of two identities – one for ‘us’, and one for ‘them’. These identities blended the political with considerations of character and of nationality. This was not simply a difference between philosophical schools; it was a constructed contrast between liberalism and fascism, virtue and vice, Britain and Europe. These nationalist beliefs, together with the condemnation of postKantian continental thought, and the celebration of the liberalism of analysis, are not found by seeking out and then grilling minnows. They are present in the very biggest fish in the analytic pond. To take just the names at the top of this introduction: Russell hardly requires comment, so colossal has he been in the history of twentieth-century analysis; Ryle was arguably the most powerful philosopher of his day, the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics at Oxford from 1944 to 1968, and editor of the leading journal Mind from 1947 to 1971; R. M. Hare took the White Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Oxford in 1960, and wielded massive international influence over that subject. In the course of this study almost all the great names from this period will be canvassed, A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Peter Strawson, Anthony Quinton, and the Warnocks, Mary and Geoffrey. Far from being marginal or obscure figures within analysis, these were the biggest names, working from the biggest philosophy department in the United Kingdom. This project, then, examines powerful beliefs held by very significant figures at a very important time for analytic philosophy. At the centre of this book is a body of evidence pointing to the importance of these attitudes for the analysts. Its first purpose is to establish
6
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
beyond reasonable doubt that these beliefs were widespread among centrally important analytic thinkers. Its second purpose is to illustrate how these beliefs were, on the analysts’ own testimony, active in informing their thinking, and therefore in moulding the discipline of analytic philosophy as it emerged in this country. However, this does not seek to be, and cannot be, the definitive statement on the analysts’ attitudes in this period. Until recent years, there has been very little genuine historical enquiry into analytic philosophy. The majority of the historical work now going on focuses, quite legitimately, on scrutinizing the origins of analytic philosophy, whether this is seen as lying with Russell and Moore, Frege, or elsewhere. Little attention has so far been paid to the period under examination in this book – the period in which the claims about Russell and Moore as the originators of a tradition are first extensively aired. Far more work will be needed to build a picture of British analytic philosophy in the period 1930–1960. Only in the light of this wider work will we be able to gain a more authoritative sense of the significance of the attitudes canvassed here. Author and reader alike are faced with an historical period about which little is known, and much remains to be discovered. In such unexplored terrain, our maps are necessarily provisional.
A Cultural History of Philosophy The fact that few historians have set about the exploration of this uncharted territory is very largely the result of dominant attitudes within the analytic philosophy itself. The discipline is, and has been, inhospitable to historical work, and yet it has been analytic philosophers themselves who have enjoyed a near monopoly on the writing of their own history.13 As a consequence, the history of analytic philosophy has been relatively neglected. Where histories have been written, they have tended to be founded on some fundamentally ahistorical assumptions: [t]he year 1900 is a comparatively meaningless date in philosophy; the First World War did not provoke in philosophy profound changes which echo on in subsequent years . . . The tenuous relationship between our subject matter and common-or-garden historical narrative may be regarded as an index of the rarefied atmosphere in which we shall be moving . . .14 Here, analytic philosophy is painted as occupying a sphere of its own, rarefied, and unpolluted by the vicissitudes of the rest of history. Such
Introduction
7
confident assertions, however, are not, as they may appear to be, the result of detailed historical investigation into the interaction between analytic philosophy and the cultural circumstances of its production – almost no such work exists. Rather, they are the result of the disinclination of those within the discipline to engage in any such enquiry. Many analysts go further than Bell and take a universalist view of the subject. They hold, not that analytic philosophy’s historical development is ‘hermetically sealed’ off 15 from wider historical events, but that analytic philosophy is engaged with timeless questions, and in timeless conversations. History of any kind, it is assumed, is irrelevant to such universal, timeless pursuits. Guided by these ahistorical assumptions, for much of the latter half of the twentieth century the histories of philosophy in Britain manifest a contextfree linearity. First there was Russell, and then there were Price, Ayer and Ryle, then Ryle and Austin, Hampshire and Strawson, and so on. These texts, purely through their form, could leave the reader with the impression of a steady progressive march of the mind, culminating in a, if not perfect, then less benighted, present. Recent important revisionary work, for example by Peter Hylton, Robert Hanna, and Tom Rockmore among others, has sought to disrupt the smooth historical narrative of the tradition by highlighting the wrinkles and the foundational misreadings; but they have not attempted to disrupt the context-free approach the analysts have brought to the writing of the history of philosophy.16 These are still histories of analytic philosophy within its hermetic seal. A history of analytic philosophy that looks beyond the boundary of the ‘strictly’ philosophical, then, might be expected to set alarm bells ringing. Yet, as John McCumber points out: Even those who are wholly resolute in their ahistorical view of their discipline – those many who, in the words of Peter Hylton, see analytical philosophy ‘as taking place within a single timeless moment’ – cannot escape this [the impact of culture]. For in the eyes of such people, political and cultural circumstances are failings and defects that at the very least need to be weeded out. You can’t weed them if you don’t see them, and you can’t see them if you won’t look for them.17 The notion of a cultural history of philosophy, then, should be admissible even within the standard analytic norms concerning history writing, even if it only has the relatively limited use of pointing out where the seal has been broken and cultural-political pollutants have sunk in.
8
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
However, I would suggest that the cultural history of philosophy can have more of a role than this. Both the attempt to conceive of philosophy as having a hermetically sealed history and attempts to view it as universal, are, I think, poor starting points for reflecting on a discipline necessarily undertaken by people living within, and inevitably influenced by, their time and culture. Poor, that is, if what one is interested in is establishing how philosophy came to be the way it is today – a process of development that manifestly did involve influences beyond the strictly philosophical. That the history of philosophy is influenced by more than the strictly philosophical is even more clearly true in the case of analytic philosophy, because the discipline itself dramatically narrowed the bounds of what counts as a philosophical question. This has resulted in traditional analytic histories ruling out on principle not just the examination of wider culture, where we might think of the non-philosophical beliefs of ordinary folk, political events, the arts and so on, but even the examination of areas of theoretical reflection considered to be beyond the bounds of philosophy. This narrowed focus is not the best, and certainly not the only, basis for understanding developments in the history of philosophy. The resistance to anything resembling a cultural history of philosophy has more to it than the foregoing characterization of a sealed discipline, or alternatively, of one dealing with a narrow range of universal questions. There is also an entirely legitimate fear that philosophy will be ‘reduced’ to culture – so that questions that appeared to be philosophical can be explained away as products of a particular time or circumstance. This kind of history apparently manifests a real threat to philosophy as a discipline – explaining away philosophical claims, rather than respecting them enough to examine their argumentative merits. While such historical-cultural deconstructions of philosophy are possible, they are not the inevitable result of the practice of the cultural history of philosophy. They are certainly not what is attempted in this book. I am not claiming that the cultural/political attitudes revealed in this study provide the final definitive explanation for any ‘strictly’ philosophical development. What I am suggesting is that the history of philosophy is not governed only by the making and refuting of ‘strictly’ philosophical arguments in the very narrow sense that this phrase has taken on within analytic philosophy. To be sure, good (and bad) philosophical arguments are active in history. People do, sometimes, change their minds in response to a sound argument. ‘Strictly’ philosophical ideas do therefore have a role in historical explanation. But so, as recent studies have shown, do other things; both
Introduction
9
John McCumber and George Reisch have recently shown that there are significant factors outside the ‘strictly philosophical’ which have moulded the development of philosophy – specifically they show the impact of McCarthyism on American analytic philosophy and philosophy of science, respectively.18 Whether modern analytic philosophy was moulded by strictly philosophical argument or other factors or, as I suggest here, a combination, is a question that has to be answered through historical investigation, and through studies of particular ideas and circumstances. It is no more legitimate to claim that, ‘it’s all culture’, than it is to maintain what has been the analytic status quo and insist, ‘it’s all philosophy’. The fear that philosophy will be ‘explained away’ into a wider culture, then, is not a good enough reason to maintain the hermetic seal around the discipline. We should investigate the causes of historical developments, whatever they are. In this book, the evidence strongly points to the interrelationship of cultural and political beliefs and philosophical ones. It was this web of belief, not simply the ‘strictly’ philosophical aspects, that strongly influenced the formation of British analytic philosophy – in determining who could be studied, and what kinds of question could be asked. Because of the careful policing of what can and cannot be considered philosophy, I have had to use the term ‘cultural political’ to pick out beliefs of the analysts on subjects such as political philosophy, character, and the relationship between nations and philosophical ideas. If a more catholic reading of the term ‘philosophy’ were available, an alternative label would not prove necessary. Indeed, if a more catholic reading of the term ‘philosophy’ was available, it seems unlikely that the assumptions of the analysts canvassed in this book would have remained unexplored for so long. Finally on the subject of the cultural history of philosophy, it is worth noting that this approach, which has enjoyed a very limited revival since the turn of the century, has some other advantageous features.19 It allows the historian to begin to fit the history of analytic philosophy into the wider history of a period. For the first time in the history of analytic philosophy, histories are now being written which can offer something to the historian and to the philosopher. With this thought in mind, this book begins the task of situating the analysts within the cultural milieu of mid-century Britain; and discusses the continuities between the attitudes of analytic philosophers and those present in a wider culture. It also aims to contribute to the growing body of historical work on the cultural and intellectual dimensions of Anglo-German relations.20
10
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
Methodological Considerations Because cultural histories of analytic philosophy are still relatively rare beasts, in this section I will briefly canvass some important respects in which this book differs from what might be expected of a traditional history of the subject. For the sake of clarity – and to allow the reader to skip questions about which they are unconcerned, this discussion is arranged under subheadings: Traditional distinctions; Personnel; and Use of sources. Traditional distinctions Perhaps inevitably, the focus on broader cultural questions has resulted in an approach which ignores some traditionally important distinctions. The conventional approach is for historians to concern themselves with the distinctions, debates and questions which directly engaged their historical subjects, or with those specific features of the debates considered to be potentially illuminating to contemporary philosophical concerns. The historian would chart the different configurations of ideas: in the period under examination here the differences between Russell, the logical positivists and the Oxford ordinary language philosophers would be discussed. These philosophical similarities and differences within the analytic fold are distinctions that I choose to ignore. My interest here is in a series of assumptions that do not respect these demarcations – partly because they relate to a series of broader philosophical commitments that the analysts, of whatever sub-group, had in common: hostility to metaphysics, a subscription to some form of empiricism, a commitment to small scale, precisely defined philosophical investigations, and so on. It is to these shared signature beliefs of the analytic philosophers that the cultural-political attitudes uncovered by this project relate. This commonality is, to use a highly loaded word, an empirical discovery and it has meant that the following project pays less attention to traditional boundaries within analysis than one might have come to expect from other histories of the subject. The philosophical differences within analysis have been well documented and in not engaging with these arguments and not using them as structuring features, I wish to make no general comment on the value of these boundaries, except to say that, viewed through a certain lens, they become substantially less important. It is important to note, however, that on one significant point I do adhere to the traditional approach to the history of analytic philosophy in this period: in placing Oxbridge, and in particular Oxford, at the centre of the
Introduction
11
story. Most historians see the 1930s as a decade in which Cambridge analysis came to Oxford, and this is borne out by contemporary sources. H. J. Paton spent ten years away from Oxford: ‘by the time of my return . . . in 1937 the philosophical climate was already greatly altered . . . the Cam was flowing into the Isis and it seemed to me that a fresh era had begun’.21 Once this transformation is underway, what we might term the ‘era of Oxford philosophy’ begins. In her biography of H. L. A. Hart, Nicola Lacey (2004) points to the significance Oxford had achieved as a philosophical centre by the end of World War II: ‘[i]n 1946, Oxford philosophy dominated philosophical scholarship in England, while British philosophy continued to dominate all over the English speaking world . . . These men . . . felt and behaved as if they ran the philosophical world’.22 Lacey also highlights the numerical dominance of the department: in 1952 the 50 philosophers based at Oxford ‘constituted more than a quarter of all professional philosophers in England’.23 One of the few philosophers to have devoted serious historical attention to this period, Jonathan Rée, also emphasizes the dominance of Oxford philosophy after World War II: ‘[i]n fact . . . nearly all the energy of English academic philosophy in the fifties came from Oxford’.24 While Cambridge and also, to some extent, London, do appear in this project, it is this new era in Oxford that attracts historians’ attention, and because I have no wish to be revisionist in this sense, it is Oxford which has provided my main focus. I will have more to say on the significance of Oxford’s centrality in Chapter 2. Personnel I have already indicated the centrality of some of the main players in this book. So rather than offer a comprehensive cataloguing of inclusions and exclusions, I will briefly discuss three notable exclusions and a notable inclusion. Moore, Popper, and Wittgenstein will be absent. I am concerned with a national(ist) conversation among the insiders of British analysis and neither of the latter were ‘insiders’ in this world, though for somewhat different reasons. Karl Popper did not arrive in the UK until January 1946. He was, and chose to remain, an Austrian citizen, and he found himself thwarted by Ryle in his attempts to get a Chair at Oxford.25 Popper was, then, twice an outsider – his access to the nerve-centre of analytic philosophy was blocked, and he was a foreign newcomer who, therefore, could hardly join in with the post-war British self-congratulation. Ludwig Wittgenstein is a more interesting figure, who was initially read as being an analytic insider, and whose reputation diminished as he came to
12
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
be read through his subscription to certain continental philosophies. Sadly there is no scope for fully charting this transition here; but an examination of Wittgenstein’s career through the prism of some of the assumptions revealed in this book would, I suspect, be rather enlightening.26 Leaving these speculations aside, Wittgenstein, an Austrian who fought on the German side in the First World War, could never have taken part in the British nationalist discourse that was a feature of the post-war philosophical climate. Nor would he have had any interest in engaging in the condemnation of continental philosophers. If claims about his debt to Schopenhauer are accurate, Wittgenstein would not have enjoyed the dismissal of thinkers to whom he owed a philosophical debt.27 The simple reason for G. E. Moore’s absence is that, in his published work, he betrays none of the attitudes discussed in this book. A full examination of his archive would be required to ascertain Moore’s views on the topics under discussion here. He does appear as a venerated ancestor in many of the analytic texts, alongside the other analytic pioneer, Bertrand Russell. Russell, however, has a more active role in what follows. In texts from ‘the Ancestry of Fascism’ (1935) to ‘Philosophy and Politics’ (1950), he contributes significantly to our understanding of the cultural politics of analytic philosophy. The centrality of Russell may surprise some. While he was a hugely popular public figure, by the 1930s he had been outside normal academic life for almost 15 years – having been dismissed from Cambridge over his protests against World War I. What place was left for him in analytic philosophy? Russell was honoured in a way that few philosophers can ever have hoped to be immortalized in their lifetime. Gilbert Ryle, giving a commemorative address to the Aristotelian Society, said of Russell that he changed ‘the very tactics of philosophical thinking’.28 At the very least, then, the Russell of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s was a venerated living ancestor, to be listened to respectfully, if not any longer of central significance. But Russell was also making a determined effort in the 1930s to break back into academia – writing scholarly articles and addressing philosophical gatherings. It was this effort that gave Trevelyan the academic grounds for bringing Russell back to Cambridge after World War II. His work might not have garnered wholehearted approval from all sides of the analytic establishment but, more so than he had been for the better part of two decades, Russell was present in academic circles and he was actively involved in analytic philosophy. Neither was he philosophically isolated. In areas such as moral and political philosophy and on questions such as the role of science and metaphysics,
Introduction
13
his ideas were in step with those of many other analysts. Unsurprisingly, given that they were a group comprised of his disciples, he found much that was congenial in the ideas of the logical positivists. This may have been a man whose best philosophical work was behind him, but the combination of his re-engagement with the discipline, and his celebrated status for past work clearly made him a part of the world of analytic philosophy in this period. His championing of Ernest Gellner’s highly controversial attack on Oxford philosophy, Words and Things, also indicates that Russell, even in advanced old age, had the ability to intervene in, and to stir up, the world of analytic philosophy.29 Just as important as Russell’s re-emergence onto the analytic scene, however, was the nature of the interventions that he made. Time and again in the course of the research for this project Russell has been the philosopher who has brought to the surface and explicated ideas that we find adumbrated in other analytic philosophers. So effective and consistent is Russell in doing this work that his thought appears at times to give coherent explicit statement to the unconscious assumptions of the analysts. Whether this habit is due to Russell’s abilities as a weather-vane or to his abilities as a proselytizer is not clear, and nor is it an important part of this project to clarify this question – but it does make Russell centrally important. In a period of his life that has been characterized by commentators as one of poor intellectual standards, this ability to articulate the assumptions of his tradition must be weighed as an important aspect of Russell’s legacy.30 Use of sources In the research for this project, I have been lucky in being able to explore the cultural politics of British analysts by drawing almost entirely on published material and without requiring recourse to literary techniques that the early analysts themselves would have dismissed as ‘theory’.31 This is advantageous in that it leaves less room for doubt or disagreement as to the meaning intended by the authors under consideration.32 I examine the books and articles written by the analysts on strictly philosophical topics, works like Language, Truth and Logic, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ and Freedom and Reason. But the more general reflections of the analysts have tended to provide the richest evidence – especially when they turn their attention to reflections on the origins and nature of their own discipline. The cluster of books on the history of analytic philosophy written by the analysts in the 1950s and early 1960s has proved especially valuable. Due to the same considerations, texts are more often drawn from the
14
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
journal Philosophy, which catered for a wider audience, than from the rather more austere professional publications such as Analysis, or the housejournal of the analysts, Mind. Published interviews conducted with leading figures in the tradition have also been very valuable, particularly the volume collected by Bryan Magee.33 Most of the texts I examine in this book would straightforwardly have been considered philosophy in any other historical period. However, as a result of the seal around what counts as the ‘strictly’ philosophical within analytic philosophy, there may be some who would, on the basis of this selection of sources, dismiss the discoveries of this project as irrelevant to analytic philosophy, proper – because they do not draw on the most precise logico-linguistic publications of the analysts.34 Not all contemporary analytic philosophers, of course, would support such an objection. Nevertheless, it is one that is worth briefly addressing as it threatens, for some at least, to undermine the aim of the book. There are several points that need to be made in answering this concern. First, and most importantly, this book examines what the analytic philosophers had to say, on the record, about their own discipline, its academic place, and its values. In reading these texts, we do no more than take seriously what the analysts themselves have to say about analytic philosophy. To seek to claim that these reflections on analytic philosophy by central analytic philosophers are irrelevant to analytic philosophy seems, prima facie, rather peculiar. Secondly, some of the texts – I examine – I mentioned three above – are indisputably ‘strictly’ philosophical, and we can locate the attitudes under discussion in this book in those texts. Thirdly, I would suggest that the drawing of hard lines between publications which are ‘strictly’ philosophical and therefore admissible and those which are not is rather harder than it may at first appear. The histories written by the analytic philosophers clearly had a philosophical agenda: to perpetuate and recommend their new way of looking at the discipline. They also contain philosophical arguments, and judgements about the success and failure of those arguments. Finally, it should be no surprise that we do not find explicit articulation of the cultural attitudes of the analysts in their most precise logico-linguistic philosophy. We are looking here at a history of largely unspoken assumptions and of exclusion. If we want to understand why this exclusion takes place, we cannot simply look at the ‘strictly’ philosophical writing, because it is from precisely these works that these issues and figures have been excluded. The most abstract philosophical texts show us what was being done, but if we want to understand why this question was asked and not
Introduction
15
that, or why this thinker but not that thinker, we need to take a broader view. The analysts themselves conceded as much through their writing of histories of their discipline. If analytic philosophy was an entirely selfexplanatory activity, nothing but the ‘strictly’ philosophical work need ever have been produced. As with the resistance to cultural history, there seems to be something a little defensive in the line of argument that seeks to wall off ‘strictly’ philosophical texts, and render other insightful sources a priori inadmissible.
Structure In Chapter 1, I reveal the widely held assumption among the analysts that nineteenth-century German philosophy was, in Russell’s language, the ‘ancestor of fascism’. I will suggest that for the analysts this was a piece of orthodoxy and did not require any serious justification. In Chapter 2, I discuss the analysts’ construction of their own history, their claim to have reconnected with a characteristically British philosophical tradition, and their portrayal of idealism as foreign and dangerous, in keeping with its fascist credentials. In the third chapter I examine the analysts’ belief in the interrelationship between bad philosophy, bad character and bad politics. This inter-relationship and interdependence of the ‘strictly’ philosophical and the cultural-political in the analysts’ critique of continental philosophy is made clearly apparent. I also look at how this holistic critique helped shape the analysts’ own identity. Chapter 4 shows that cultural-political assumptions permeate the analysts’ philosophical thought to the extent that their signature epistemology, empiricism, was allied, in the analysts’ minds, directly to liberalism. Not only did the analysts contrast themselves with the vices of the Europeans in terms of philosophical method and character, they also conceived of themselves as liberal, contrasted with continental political extremism. This powerful assumption, buttressed both by the contrast with the continent and the identification of analytic philosophy with British virtue, reveals a political heart to this apparently apolitical movement.
Chapter 1
Nazi Philosophy
Presently three white specks could be seen dimly through the light of the haze overhead, and we watched their course from the field. The raid was soon over . . . As I went back to my Hegel my mood was one of self-satire. Was this a time for theorizing or for destroying theories, when the world was tumbling about our ears? My second thoughts ran otherwise. To each man the tools and weapons he can best use. In the bombing of London I had just witnessed the visible and tangible outcome of a false and wicked doctrine, the foundations of which lay, as I believe, in the book before me.1 (L. T. Hobhouse 1918) German politics to-day are a realization of theories set forth by Fichte in 1807.2 (Bertrand Russell 1935) This is the imagery and worship of power, of the movement of force for its own sake. This force is, for him, the divine process itself, crushing whatever is meant to be crushed, enthroning that whose hour to dominate has struck – and this, for Hegel, is the essence of the process. This is the source of Carlyle’s heroes or Nietzsche’s superman, of openly power-worshipping movements such as Marxism and Fascism, both of which (in their different ways) derived morality from historical success.3 (Isaiah Berlin 1955)
By 1945, a broad consensus existed among the analytic philosophers that the intellectual origins of fascism could be found in the continental philosophy of the previous 200 years: in Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel and Nietzsche, to name only the most popular targets. As the post-war age began, this view had achieved the status of unquestioned orthodoxy. Here, I aim to offer both a history and an anatomy of this orthodoxy. I will briefly trace the emergence of this belief, from its origins in the First World War, through its revival in the 1930s under the auspices of Russell, among others. I will then
Nazi Philosophy
17
go on to illustrate the political case made against certain key nineteenthcentury continental philosophers in the years around World War II, and the broad acceptance that this critique enjoyed among the analysts. This treatment elides the immediate pre-and post-Second World War discussions of this issue. This reflects the remarkable congruence in the ideas of the analysts over a period between 1934 and the 1960s. The principal difference is simply that after the conflict more analytic philosophers are willing to sign up to the pre-war critique.4 In the final part of this chapter, I will examine the question of historical causation in the analysts’ accounts of the origins of fascism, by paying close attention to the two analytic philosophers who produced full accounts of the origins of Nazi philosophy, Isaiah Berlin and Bertrand Russell. This, in turn, will allow us to reflect on the significance of nationalist assumptions in the position taken by the analytic philosophers. There were, in fact, four philosophers based in Britain who devoted substantial time and effort to the analysis of the ‘proto-Nazi’ philosophers in the middle decades of the twentieth century. These were Russell, Berlin, C. E. M. Joad and Karl Popper. It is no part of my case to prove that it was these men who had the greatest impact on the public in terms of communicating the warnings about German/Nazi philosophy – but it may be worth noting in passing that this is highly likely to be true. Russell was a public figure of tremendous stature, and his History of Western Philosophy (1946) was a best seller. Joad was a philosopher who, in the 1930s and ’40s, equalled Russell in fame and wrote extensively about German/Nazi philosophy in his, also highly successful, Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics (1938) and elsewhere. Popper’s polemic against Hegel, Plato, Nietzsche and others, The Open Society and its Enemies, was well received in intellectual circles on its release, also in 1946.5 Finally, Berlin’s broadcast lectures on ‘Freedom and Its Betrayal’ in the 1950s were listened to by hundreds of thousands of people, turning him into a figure of national recognition.6 Joad has no claim to be considered an analytic philosopher and therefore is not a central concern here (though some treatment of his place in the intellectual life of the 1930s and 1940s is overdue); and Popper, as I argued in the introduction, is not of central significance for our purposes. This leaves us with the accounts offered by Russell and Berlin. While this chapter does take these two as its primary focus, the views elaborated in detail by Russell and Berlin were shared, and explicitly shared, by many of their analytic colleagues. Indicating this breadth of conviction will be an important part of this chapter. Three notes on language at the outset. I use ‘fascism’ and ‘Nazism’ interchangeably, as the analysts appear not to have drawn distinctions between
18
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
Italian Fascism, Nazism and a generic use of the term ‘fascism’. However, both Russell and Berlin place clear focus on German Nazism and not Italian Fascism. Russell briefly discusses Mussolini, and Mazzini is the only figure specifically tied to the Italian movement. Berlin, on occasion, appears to distinguish specific ancestors of French Fascism, but more typically takes a generic approach. The reader will also note that at times the analysts appear to be working with a theory of totalitarianism which unites Soviet Communism and fascism.7 My focus, however, will remain on fascism. When the analysts take specific cases, they nearly always discuss fascism and not communism; this reflects the German-centred nature of the analysts’ concerns. An account of the place of anti-Soviet feeling in the work of the analysts would distract from this latter focus. Secondly, I refer throughout to ‘the anti-canon’ of philosophers. This is a term coined by Jonathan Rée in his Philosophical Tales to describe a canon of condemned thinkers, to be contrasted with the canon of worthy philosophers.8 I follow this usage closely; the anti-canon explored in these pages, however, is united by a political guilt not suggested by Rée in his characterization of the term.
World War I and Anti-Germanism in Philosophy In 1911, the Oxford historian A. J. Carlyle wrote that the: ‘position of the great German nation in philosophy, science and literature was so powerful that students were bound to study German and go to Germany if they were of any promise’.9 The First World War was to destroy such easy reverence for German learning. In October 1914 the ‘Manifesto of the ninety-three’, sometimes referred to as the ‘manifesto of the intellectuals of Germany’, which was ultimately to be signed by ‘virtually the whole German professoriate’ was published.10 Its purpose was to show clearly that there were not two Germanies, one war-like and Prussian, the other a peaceful, culturally rich nation, but just one Germany, determined to win the war.11 The manifesto ‘became a byword among British and French intellectuals for the subordination of German scholarship to the dictates of state policy’.12 The reputation of the German academy was to suffer as a result. The pre-war philosophical scene was dominated by a school of British idealists, most notable among them Bernard Bosanquet and F. H. Bradley. Idealism was institutionally secure within the old universities (both Bradley and Bosanquet were associated with Oxford University, though Bosanquet had ceased to occupy a formal academic position), its students and
Nazi Philosophy
19
adherents occupied high offices of state.13 The wartime debates were to prove uncomfortable for these establishment figures. In the early months of the war, a correspondence in The Times first suggested that German aggression might have a link to the philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Hegel.14 A debate was joined, one best remembered for the evocative passage from Hobhouse’s The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918), which opens this chapter; here Hobhouse draws a dramatic and direct parallel between the German air-raid on London and Hegel’s philosophy. Hobhouse had made a similar case in Questions of War and Peace (1916). What were his reasons for linking Hegel’s thought to German aggression? The deification of the State and the belief that it is the supreme type of human organisation, the contempt for democracy, the unreal identification of liberty with law, which simply puts every personal right at the mercy of the legislator, the upholding of war as a necessity, the disregard of humanity, the denial of the sanctity of treaties and international law . . . 15 It was Hegel’s state – supreme, authoritarian, warlike and opposed to everything that the free democratic world believed in – that Hobhouse saw at the heart of the German war machine. Hegel did not stand alone; he was allied to the ultra-nationalist J. G. Fichte and helped by the intervention of Nietzsche whose contribution had been to remove any remaining moral controls on power. Nor was Hobhouse alone in his accusations against German philosophy. The historian Stuart Wallace points out that the catalogue of the supposed characteristics of the Hegelian state were ‘repeated so often that they have an incantatory quality’.16 The accusations, however, were extended beyond the nineteenth-century German tradition. In his critique, Hobhouse used as his target not Hegel himself but the English idealist Bosanquet’s The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899), which Hobhouse held to be a faithful representation of the Hegel’s ideas.17 The English followers of Hegelian philosophy found themselves caught up in the condemnation of German thought. Bosanquet, who suffered the most criticism, was labelled ‘a Prusso-phile philosopher’.18 The work of two American philosophers, John Dewey and George Santayana, published during the war, extends still further the critique, blaming Hegel, Nietzsche and Fichte as had become mandatory, but for their own reasons extending the critique back to Immanuel Kant.19 Defenders of idealism, like J. H. Muirhead and Ernest Barker, rather than seek to deny a link between nineteenth-century German thought and twentieth-century German aggression, sought to push the blame away from
20
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
Hegel by arguing that it was late nineteenth-century German thought that gave itself over to militarism. As such, militarism was not the true inheritance of Hegel, but rather the fault of later philosophers, like Nietzsche and Treitschke.20 A bookseller on the Strand announced in his window that this was ‘The Euro-Nietzschean War’ and urged passers by to ‘Read the Devil, in order to fight him the better’.21 Nietzsche ‘was a popular target for almost everyone’.22 Nietzsche, despite his pre-war popularity in England, does not appear to have been particularly central to British philosophy. Hegel and Kant (and to a lesser degree Fichte), however, were central to one of the most powerful strands of contemporary British thought. As a result of their Germanic associations, the war greatly harmed the reputation of British idealism, both in philosophical and public circles. But the broadening of the attack to Nietzsche, Treitschke and other more recent German thinkers did nothing to help Hegel’s reputation; it simply added to the perception of German thought as a many-headed hydra – each head as diabolical as the last. This was an increasingly broad-brush identification of a whole canon of nineteenthcentury German thinkers with twentieth-century German nationalism. These supposed masterminds of modern Germany’s crimes were not vindicated by the peace, as C. E. M. Joad observed in 1919: [s]ince the war dissatisfaction with the [Hegelian] theory has grown. For it is in the omnipotence of the State in time of war that the theory finds its most striking logical development. ‘The State of war’ writes Hegel, ‘shows the omnipotence of the State in its individuality; country and fatherland are then the power which convicts of nullity the independence of individuals’. In the hands of writers like Nietzsche and Bernhardi, who have pushed the State’s claims with ruthless logic, the theory develops aspects so revolting that political philosophy has for once been dragged down from the clouds, and the so-called German theory of the State became a byword for execration to the man in the street.23 Indeed it was not just the man in the street that found himself hostile to all things German. There was a general move within the academy away from the German scholarship so praised by A. J. Carlyle at the top of this section. Stuart Wallace has argued that ‘[t]he spell of German Wissenschaft had been broken by the war . . . ’24 Joad gives a more colourful, contemporary perspective, in a lengthy quotation that conveys powerfully the postwar atmosphere:
Nazi Philosophy
21
[o]f all the parallel crises of its kind historically recorded, the intellectual volte face in the English estimate of German scholarship will surely stand out as immeasurably the most startling. The German intellectual method in matters of learning and scholarship, the German patience in scientific and literary criticism, the profundity of German thought in matters of Philosophy, were before the war the theme of ungrudging admiration among English savants. Within the space of two years we have discovered innumerable defects in the German method and have stripped the gilt from numberless exploded reputations. We have found that Wagner is the musical embodiment of a ruthless and chaotic militarism, that Nietzsche’s philosophy is the incoherent babbling of a dyspeptic megalomaniac, that Hegel is the apostle of a monstrous and repellent state which makes insatiable demands upon the lives of its individuals, sacrifices happiness to efficiency, and liberty to false deification of discipline and order. Only those Germans who are sufficiently separated from the emotional condemnations of to-day by the lapse of over a century – Kant and Beethoven – escape the universal disparagement. These are intellectual judgements we pass, and we are not concerned here to weigh them as right or wrong; only be it noted they are the direct outcome of feelings engendered by the war, and immeasurably disparate from their predecessors of four years ago.25 Post-war British academics continued the backlash against German thought and culture that had characterized the war years. A philosophical class approaching the peace with these attitudes would find no easy reconciliation with their German colleagues. Wallace writes: ‘although individual British scholars were in touch again with German colleagues as soon as peace was declared, the institutional framework of international scholarship seemed . . . to have been broken permanently’.26 German and Austrian philosophers were systematically excluded from international philosophical congresses for almost a decade after the Armistice.27 As Wallace has pointed out, this unwillingness to re-establish contacts with German philosophers after World War I, combined with the steady decline of German universities after 1933, made the re-establishment of cordial academic ties between British and German philosophy departments almost an impossibility in the inter-war period.28 The suspicion of German thought that found expression during World War I was given no chance to subside thereafter – indeed, this suspicion would survive the dismemberment of Germany itself in 1945.
22
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
The lack of a post-war British reckoning with their own wartime attitudes and practices also helped to ensure that the hostility to German thought would survive through the inter-war period. Great Britain was, according to Wallace, the only country not to hold a post-mortem on the role of academics in wartime: ‘in Britain the academic community closed ranks. There was no inquest on whether historians or philosophers had been guilty of serious lapses in scholarly standards’.29 The scholarly fighting, like the war, was, with some exceptions, simply suspended by the Armistice. At the end of World War I we are left with a vision of a dangerous German national philosophy embodying the character and the flaws of that nation. Broadly based, it appeared to implicate almost all the major figures in nineteenthcentury German thought and it was seen to culminate in the rape of Belgium. German philosophy had apparently been revealed at the heart of German politics. Joad wrote, and we quoted above, ‘[t]hese are intellectual judgements we pass, and we are not concerned here to weight them as right or wrong; only be it noted they are the direct outcome of feelings engendered by the war . . .’30 This was the situation in 1919, and with no real postwar re-examination of the judgements made in the heat of the conflict all of these judgements stood. The dialogue about German philosophy and its dangerous place as a motivating factor behind aggressive German politics was suspended in 1919, to be re-engaged in the 1930s. The 1920s were, by most accounts, not philosophically dynamic. According to Anthony Quinton, philosophy suffered from ‘the general spiritual devastation of the First World War’.31 A generation of academics had been lost in the trenches, leaving the very old and the extremely youthful to eye each other with hostility across, what Gilbert Ryle referred to as, ‘a boundless military cemetery’.32 Nevertheless, analytic philosophy made quiet progress in Cambridge during this period – the most tangible sign of which was G. E. Moore’s elevation to a Professorship in 1925. The importance of Cambridge should not be over-stated, however; the philosophy faculty was small. Between 1921–1930 the average number of students sitting for a Part I in Philosophy was five and for Part II just over seven.33 This was not the basis for a rapid expansion of the tradition. In the much larger philosophy department at Oxford, the ideas of the Cambridge (analytic) school of philosophy were barely discussed. The guide for Oxford undergraduates, published in 1927, Philosophy in Lit. Hum. Practical Hints for Students of the School, mentioned no-one from the new Cambridge school, except C. D. Broad, and he only ‘in passing’.34 By the early 1930s, however, there were signs that that the fortunes of analytic philosophy were improving in Oxford. H. H. Price had arrived from Cambridge, bringing analytic philosophy with him. Ryle had moved towards the analytic movement,
Nazi Philosophy
23
and A. J. Ayer, recently in possession of his undergraduate degree, was causing a splash with his loud proclamations of the analytic creed. He was to be joined by Berlin and J. L. Austin. This burgeoning of analytic philosophy coincided with the return of a threat from Germany, and the concomitant return of the critique of German philosophy.
The Revival of the Critique It was Russell and Joad, two men who had been witness to the debates over the First World War, who dusted off the crime sheet of the German philosophers and presented it to new audiences in the 1930s. In an address to the Aristotelian Society in 1934 Joad argued that Hegel’s theory of the state was invoked by fascists.35 In an address to the Fabian society, also in 1934, and published as ‘The Ancestry of Fascism’ in his In Praise of Idleness (1935), Russell identified Fichte and Nietzsche, plus a host of others, as being part of a movement ‘which culminates (as yet) in Hitler’.36 Following suit, other philosophers also argued for a link between German philosophy and Nazism. Among their number was Ernest Barker, reprising his critique of Nietzsche and other ‘romantic’ philosophers, first aired during World War I. Viscount (formerly Sir Herbert) Samuel moved from his active political role during World War I (he was Home Secretary from 1916) to writing critiques of the enemies of civilization including, again, Nietzsche, in his new capacity as President of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.37 Philosophers once again took sides, both for and against Hegel and idealism (though once again it was difficult to find anyone willing to defend Nietzsche38). A debate was carried out at length and at times in bad temper, between E. F. Carritt for the prosecution and T. M. Knox for the defence, in the pages of Philosophy under the headline ‘Hegel and Prussianism’.39 The defenders of idealism were, however, not numerous and not all as whole-hearted as Knox. In the same 1934 symposium in which Joad reintroduced the critique of the Hegelian theory of state, G. C. Field’s mild admonition seemed only concerned to defend the British idealists: I should question, for instance, his [Joad’s] association of intolerance of opinion with the Idealist Philosophy. It may be true that Hegel and Gentile have appeared as advocates of the authoritarian State. But our leading British Idealists who have been active in public affairs – and no other school of philosophy has in practice inspired so many of its adherents to such activity – have with hardly an exception been active on the liberal side.40
24
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
While Field argued that the British tradition of idealism was freer of taint than its continental progenitors, he sought to elaborate this defence no further. The idealist G. R. G. Mure, arguing that the Oxford ethos owed much to German idealism and Socrates, remarked in an arch aside: ‘though for the worse of it [the Oxford manner] one need, I suppose, as little blame Socrates as one need hold Hegel responsible for the Great War, or the founder of Christianity for the Spanish Inquisition’.41 The 1930s also saw the return of a venerable J. H. Muirhead to the fray in defence of Hegel.42 This debate then, proceeded along similar lines as the one discontinued in 1919 – unsurprising, as many of those taking part had been either witnesses or contributors to the same debates during World War I. Significant in this regard is that crucial texts in the First World War condemnation of the anti-canon were reprinted in this period – adding further weight to the condemnation. Hobhouse’s The Metaphysical Theory of the State was reprinted in 1938, 1951, and 1960.43 Santayana’s Egotism and German Philosophy (1916) was reprinted for a British publisher in 1939. A new edition of Dewey’s German Philosophy and Politics (1915) was published in America in 1942 (though it is not clear whether it was available in Britain). These texts were clearly felt to be valuable, once more, in understanding the intellectual roots of the German threat. Not that such texts were needed to make the case; there were plenty of contemporary publications to choose from. Indeed, the condemnation of German philosophy proved to be a popular move across the disciplines in the 1930s and 1940s. Of the non-philosophers, Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West and William McGovern’s From Luther to Hitler: The History of Nazi Fascist Philosophy appeared in England in 1938 and 1946 respectively.44 Views of a similar nature were also shared more widely by public intellectuals. If we are to believe the philosopher Frederick Copleston, ‘[o]ne has only to look at letters and articles in reviews, weekly and daily papers, to see these ideas of the Nazis coupled with the name of Nietzsche’.45 These ideas even found their way into a magazine issued for use by commanders by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs. Nietzsche, Fichte and Treitschke are all cited as important.46 At all levels, the weight of opinion appeared firmly against German thought. Even Hegel, with his British following, couldn’t rely on unswerving support from the idealists. Many kept quiet. Muirhead, one of the few to return to the fray in defence of Hegel’s legacy, died in 1940, depriving idealism of one of its most consistent and staunch defenders. Both within philosophy and wider culture, an idea had been bequeathed by the First World War, an idea of a vicious expansionist German philosophy behind the vicious expansionist German army. This had become
Nazi Philosophy
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a staple not just in academic circles, but also among intellectuals and on the pages of the newspapers. We have already noted Russell’s involvement. Where, in all this, were the other analytic philosophers? In the 1930s, noticeably silent. With the exception of Russell, they did not engage in the debate over the guilt of the anti-canon. In the most part this can be accounted for by youth. The second generation of analytic philosophers – Ayer, Austin and Berlin the most notable – were in their twenties during the 1930s. Ayer was precocious in publishing Language Truth and Logic at the age of 26, but it is perhaps not surprising that we do not find his contemporaries inveighing against German philosophy in print. The third generation of analytic philosophers, those born in the 1920s, would not come up to Oxford until the late 1930s, and therefore could not offer much in the way of comment on the anticanon during the pre-war period. On top of their youth Ayer, Austin and Berlin inhabited a world preoccupied with immediate concrete political concerns, which may have distracted them from the theoretical background to the rise of fascism. A keen concern with matters of direct political importance appeared to grip Oxford in particular.47 Ayer, among others, was involved in campaigning for the republican cause in the Spanish civil war.48 As Spain retreated as an issue, there was the famous ‘Munich by-election’ of October 1938. The Master of Balliol, A. D. Lindsay, challenged the Tory Quinton Hogg as an anti-appeasement candidate. Ayer was a leading opponent of Hogg, and Austin dabbled in the art of political sloganeering.49 This active interest in politics does not seem to have translated to an interest in writing political philosophy.50 For reasons that we will discuss in subsequent chapters, their days of study were not filled by reading of the work of Nietzsche, Hegel and other condemned thinkers. Instead they were spending time reading and discussing Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic (1936), a book which preoccupied the analysts for much of the late 1930s. It was only after 1944, with the third generation coming of age and philosophers filtering back to Oxford from Bletchley, France, and London that the analysts began to expound their views on the nature and origins of the conflict.
The Analysts’ Account for Nazism Given their relative lack of enthusiasm for the debate in the 1930s, what is striking is the uniformity with which the analysts accepted the antiHegelian, anti-Nietzschean and generally anti-‘continental philosophy’ (a term whose recent history dates from this post-war period) conclusions
26
The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy
generated over the previous decades. I will deal with the two most comprehensive accounts below, but it is interesting that most of the analytic philosophers who condemned the anti-canon for the crimes of Germany did not feel any need to undertake a justification of this view. Their attitudes are revealed in the odd comment, a passing reference. The culpability of these continental philosophers appears so clear that a case against them does not even need to be made. I want now to give an indication of these responses. Here, I switch from a broadly chronological approach to one that seeks to unite the analytic philosophers’ attitudes across the period. As we will see, the ideas expressed after 1945 are essentially continuous with Russell’s thesis, itself a continuation of the discourse started in the First World War. Russell was clear that ‘the romantic revolt passes from Byron, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Mussolini and Hitler’.51 He also clearly links Nazism with German idealism: ‘[t]he Nazis upheld German idealism, though the degree of allegiance given to Kant, Fichte or Hegel respectively was not clearly laid down’.52 In the early 1950s Berlin began to look hard at the roots of Nazism, which he found in the romantics.53 This is what he had to say on the subject in his radio lectures ‘Freedom and Its Betrayal’ (1952): Rousseau is the greatest militant lowbrow of history, a kind of guttersnipe of genius, and figures like Carlyle, and to some extent Nietzsche, and certainly D. H. Lawrence and d’Annunzio, as well as révolté, petit bourgeois dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, are his heirs.54 In another passage from the same work, he clearly implicates Hegel.55 Ayer, too, located the source of Nazism in its philosophical past: [e]ven politically – I mean if you take the rise of Nazism in Germany, this was in some sense Romanticism gone wrong. People who, I suppose, in some way preceded the Nazis were people like Nietzsche. It’s unfair perhaps to him to say so, but he seems to me to represent a kind of woolly romantic thinking which made Nazism possible.56 This quotation is taken from an interview in the 1970s; but Ayer makes the association between Hegel and totalitarianism explicit in an article published in 1944 (to which I will return below).57 Price, writing in the early months of the war, is straightforward:
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27
[t]he totalitarian political systems which now afflict the continent of Europe are the long delayed effects of the philosophies of Fichte, Hegel and Marx, or at least the psychological attitudes which underlay those philosophies.58 Ryle expressed the same sentiments in his review of Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies. Indeed, Ryle goes further than most in arguing that, from the point of view of philosophers, Popper is wasting his time. Nor is it news to philosophers that Nazi, Fascist and Communist doctrines are descendants of the Hegelian gospel. They may therefore wonder whether Dr. Popper is not flogging a dead horse in exposing once again the motives and fallacies of Hegel. But Dr Popper is clearly right in saying that even if philosophers are at long last immunized, historians, sociologists, political propagandists and voters are still unconscious victims of this virus.59 By 1947, so established is it among analytic philosophers that Hegel lies at the root of totalitarianism, that Ryle thinks Popper is wasting his breath in lecturing to his colleagues. Other analytic philosophers offer some fairly strong hints that they share these conclusions. The Oxford philosopher R. M. Hare adumbrates a link between romanticism and totalitarianism: . . . they have affected history in a way that we analytical philosophers haven’t . . . the romantic philosophers, as the other kind have been called, have affected history enormously, for the worse, I think.60 The target isn’t identified explicitly, but as we will see in Chapter 4, Nazism was central to Hare’s thinking in this period. Hare’s colleague G. J. Warnock also hints at the idealists’ tendencies: ‘Absolute Idealism can be distinguished chiefly as being a system for extremists’.61 The plausibility of the link to Nazism in these quotations, both from colleagues of Ryle, can only be strengthened by Ryle’s claim. Nicola Lacey has argued that such a view was general within Oxford, in particular: [t]he second, and more elusive, aspect of Oxford philosophy’s Englishness had to do with the Allied victory in the war . . . For some philosophers this anti-European attitude also cashed out negatively, in a suspicion that continental philosophy had in some sense contributed to the rise of
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fascism, and that there was therefore something inherently politically questionable about it.62 Here Lacey provides another explanation for the concentration of criticism levelled at the anti-canon after 1945. Perhaps the crises of the 1930s and subsequent war did not allow space for reflection and it was only after victory in 1945, as part of the moral and political reconstruction, that the origins of the defeated ideology became the focus. One has to chop down a tree before one can dig out its roots. We have already seen explicit statements of some link between Nazism and German thought from many of the most significant analytic philosophers of the post-war years: Ryle, Price, Ayer, Berlin and of course Bertrand Russell. Others seem to have offered us strong hints. In the above quotation, Lacey suggests that the post-war period saw a belief in the questionable nature of any philosophy that could potentially be associated with Nazism – an association which may extend to ‘continental’, rather than just German, thought. I will return to this in later chapters. It is important to note here that if Lacey is correct, and I will argue that she is, then we should be able to detect a much more subtle strain of distrust and disgust levelled at continental philosophers by the analysts of this period. What we will see as this book develops is a wealth of further supporting detail linking the explicit critique of Nazism to a wider negative attitude towards continental philosophy, among analytic philosophers. The central figures I will now give an account of the various crimes of the anti-canon, as elaborated by Russell and Berlin, drawing on other analysts where they involved themselves. Russell’s central study of this topic is ‘The Ancestry of Fascism’ (1935). This essay is primarily concerned with the history of ideas, particularly the history of philosophy. Of the other books Russell wrote in this period of most significance to us are: Power: a new social analysis (1938) – which was intended as a contribution to political theory; and his hugely successful History of Western Philosophy published in 1946, but written in the United States during the early 1940s. After the publication of History of Western Philosophy, Russell lost interest in analysing Nazism and turned his attention to the Cold War and the structure of the new political age. In understanding the critique of the anti-canon, the strength of Russell’s lead cannot be underestimated. First, he was a witness to the first war of anti-canon aggression. Some other analysts had also lived through the first
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war, but they were either very young or foreswore a more active political role during the second. Moore fits into this latter category – a mature witness to World War I, he offered no lead in the 1930s. The other analysts (or proto-analysts) were too young to have played an active philosophical part in the debates of First World War, though both Broad (who had been 20 in 1917) and Ryle (17 in that year) were old enough to witness and take part in events. In the case of Ryle, it is quite possible that his later hostility to Hegelian philosophy was, in part, influenced by the belief in Hegelian guilt swirling around in the 1910s. However, it was Russell who was actively and famously involved in the politics of the First World War and Russell who chose to speak on the subject early in the 1930s. A second factor contributing to Russell’s importance was that he had not been caught up in what, by the 1930s, seemed to be the bloodthirsty militarism of 1914. He was famously critical of the war, and imprisoned for his campaigning on that front. Nor was he among those English philosophers who, during the First World War, looked for the intellectual origins of German nationalism in German philosophy. He described the war as ‘two dogs fighting . . . “everything else” was “idle talk, artificial rationalizing of instinctive actions and passions.”’63 Russell’s hands were clean, his failure to indulge in bloodthirsty militarism, or German-bashing, in 1914–1918, gave weight to his polemic against the anti-canon in the 1930s and beyond. If, this time, Russell is prepared to nail his colours to this mast, then surely this underlines the strength of the case against the anti-canon. Thirdly, as we will see in the next chapter, Russell was held to be at least partly responsible for the intellectual defeat of Hegelianism at the turn of the twentieth century. This was a man who could be trusted to know his target. He was also an intellectual hero to the young analysts (who were mostly in their teens or twenties during the 1930s). Despite the appearance of volte-face in Russell’s approach to Germany, the seeds of the position he would take in the 1930s and 1940s were germinating earlier in the century. While Russell was not involved in attacking German thought for its political component during World War I, he was still clear that: ‘the sins of England’ sank ‘into insignificance beside the German treatment of Belgium’.64 He also found the time during the First World War to criticize the Hegelian view of the state, albeit without mentioning the names of any philosophers alive or dead. The theory he had in mind with these comments is obvious, however: [t]he state is sometimes spoken of as though it were an actual entity, something remote and godlike, vastly superior to its citizens and
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deserving of quasi-adoration which none of them deserve. But this is, of course, a mere superstition.65 By 1922, Russell seems to have developed a much keener desire to look for the origins of political movements in philosophical ones. With four years perspective on the First World War, he argued that it, along with various other modern atrocities, could be blamed on ‘the cult of the heart’ which was inaugurated by Kant.66 His willingness in the 1930s to label German thinkers of the nineteenth century the ‘ancestors’ of fascism, is, then, not altogether surprising. Berlin, a much younger man, came to the study of Nazism only after the Second World War. His principal work on the topic did not find a permanent form during his life, delivered as it was as two series of lectures. ‘Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty’ (1952) I have already mentioned. Berlin’s A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts ‘The Roots of Romanticism’ (1965) also offer some reflections on the topic but, as the title of the series suggests, questions of politics were not central.67 These lectures were repeated three times on the BBC in subsequent years. Both sets of lectures have recently been published using transcripts of the recordings. Neither were substantially revised by Berlin and both, therefore, remain a record of the spoken word, rather than closely edited academic philosophy or history. It seems, however, that Berlin was content for both texts to appear in print, both having achieved substantial radio audiences.68 His final lengthy treatment of these issues was written for publication. ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’ was written in 1960, but only published in 1990 with Berlin’s approval, and with only minor revisions to the original text.69 I will take the ancestors of fascism, as identified by Russell and Berlin, in roughly chronological order. Here we are concerned purely with the political theories of these anti-canon thinkers. In a later chapter we will turn to the analytic philosophers’ appraisal of their philosophical merits.
Rousseau, Hegel and the idealists Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the first antecedent of fascism. Russell says that reformers now follow either the doctrines of the English philosopher John Locke, or Rousseau: ‘[a]t the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill of Locke’.70 Rousseau’s influence can be seen in ‘the dictatorships of Russia and Germany (especially the latter)’.71
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The lines are clearly drawn – the democrats on one side, the totalitarians on the other. This is no surprise. According to Russell, Rousseau’s doctrine entails that the individual can be ‘forced to be free’ – because freedom is acting according to the ‘general will’, which has no immediate relationship with the individual will.72 This theory leads to ‘a Totalitarian State, in which the individual citizen is powerless’.73 Rousseau’s general will also allows for ‘the mystic identification of the leader with his people’74 – highly significant in the light of the advent of a German Führer. Berlin says of Rousseau that he ‘was one of the most sinister and most formidable enemies of liberty in the whole history of modern thought’.75 And the dictators were grateful: there is not a dictator in the west who in the years after Rousseau did not use this monstrous paradox in order to justify his behaviour. The Jacobins, Robespierre, Hitler, Mussolini, the Communists, all use this very same method of argument.76 Following Rousseau, Hegel is next in line. Russell is forthright: ‘Hegel’s Philosophy of History is important as the source of much evil, but (I think) no good’.77 Hegel is responsible for not one, but two dangerous political movements: Hegel started two movements in philosophy, the one of extreme conservatism and the other of extreme revolution. The one represented by the conservative Hegelians, the other by Marx and his followers.78 Whether Russell has the Nazis in mind when he talks of conservative Hegelians here is unclear. It seems likely, but it may be that in this case this is meant to refer simply to Hegel’s reactionary nineteenth-century disciples. We have, in any case, already seen Russell make the link explicitly towards the top of this section. Like Rousseau, Hegel has a novel take on freedom, according to Russell: ‘Hegel uses freedom in a very peculiar sense. Freedom in Hegel means the right to obey the police and it means nothing else at all . . . ’79 This naturally leads to totalitarianism, as Russell believed it did in Rousseau. Hegel also held that the state is the ultimate unit of value, and commands complete loyalty from its subjects. Externally the state has no block on its activity – war presents a perfectly acceptable means for the state’s selfexpression. ‘War, is therefore [for Hegel] a thing not to be deplored but is
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good’, a view Russell holds to be entirely repellent.80 The following quotation can be taken as a summation of Russell’s theoretical problems with Hegel’s political philosophy: [s]uch is Hegel’s doctrine of the state – a doctrine which, if accepted, justifies every internal tyranny and every external aggression that can possibly be imagined.81 Ayer, while doing no direct work on Hegel himself, signs up to the link between Hegel’s theory of state and fascism in an article for Horizon published in 1944. The authoritarian view of freedom was perpetuated by Hegel . . . The result is justly described in Russell’s malicious dictum that, for Hegelians, true freedom consists in the right to obey the police. In the same way, the modern apologists for Fascism have been able to claim, not merely that their dictator’s subjects enjoyed the benefits of better government than the citizens of pluto-democracies, but also that they were more truly free.82 Isaiah Berlin too elaborates the link between Hegel and both fascism and communism, in one of the passages with which we opened this chapter: [t]here is in Hegel perpetual talk about what history demands and what history condemns . . . This is the imagery and worship of power, of the movement of force for its own sake. This force is, for him, the divine process itself, crushing whatever is meant to be crushed, enthroning that whose hour to dominate has struck – and this, for Hegel, is the essence of the process. This is the source of Carlyle’s heroes or Nietzsche’s superman, of openly power-worshipping movements such as Marxism and Fascism, both of which (in their different ways) derived morality from historical success.83 Each of these analytic philosophers find in Hegel’s ideas the aggressive state, warlike in external relations, and exerting absolute control over its people – and clearly link Hegel and fascism.84 I will return, below, to the precise nature of the link. The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte is next on Russell’s list. This chapter began with his claim that ‘German politics to-day are a realization of theories set forth by Fichte in 1807’.85 Written in 1934, a year after
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Hitler seized power, the target of this remark is pretty clear. Fichte, a thoroughgoing idealist, believed in an ethic that furthered only the highest, or most worthy people: the Germans. This aristocratic ethic, favouring, as it does, only a select few, is, according to Russell, ‘of the essence of the modern attack on democracy’.86 Putting these ideas together, Fichte produced ‘a whole philosophy of nationalistic totalitarianism which had great influence in Germany’.87 Such ideas inevitably lead to wars, according to Russell, because no other European nation would be content to believe that Germany was the most noble nation on earth, and would be prepared to go to war to prove themselves more worthy of that title, meanwhile Germany would wish to demonstrate her superiority by imposing her will on Europe.88 Berlin, too, highlights the dangers of Fichtean thought. He characterizes Fichte as calling for a leader – ‘a conqueror’.89 Berlin also credits Fichte with the creation of the ‘famous and fatal analogy between the individual and the nation, the organic metaphor’90 – fatal because it allows the individual to be seen as parts of a greater whole, who can then be sacrificed for the sake of that whole. The leader will ‘play upon his nation as an artist plays upon his instrument, to mould it into a single organic whole . . .’91 Nor is Berlin shy in pointing to the results of these ideas. He quotes Heinrich Heine’s stated fear that ‘[a]rmed Fichteans will come, whose fanatical wills neither fear nor self-interest can touch’.92 Berlin continues to quote Heine: ‘[a] drama will be performed in Germany in contrast with which the French Revolution will seem a mere peaceful idyll.’93 Berlin takes this to be remarkably prescient; Heine’s ‘prophecy was destined to be fulfilled’.94 In their attacks on Fichte and Hegel, the analytic philosophers were not content to condemn only their German disciples. Following the pattern established in the First World War, the attack was extended beyond the German followers of Hegel to the British Hegelians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Berlin wrote: ‘so Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet have often assured us – by obeying the rational man we obey ourselves . . .’95 This is only a short step away from the abandonment of reason altogether for Berlin, and results in the argument that a dictator is entitled to mould and shape his people: ‘[t]his is the argument used by every dictator, inquisitor, and bully who seeks some moral, or even aesthetic justification for his conduct’.96 Bradley and Bosanquet are, once again, in trouble as dangerous peddlers of dictatorship. Berlin formed a view of the British Hegelians as offering similar theories to those that underpin the fascist project. Interestingly, while Berlin singles out T. H. Green, among the British Hegelians,
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as a liberal, he quickly overrides this: ‘Green was a genuine liberal: but many a tyrant could use this formula to justify his worst acts of oppression’.97 The pervasiveness of the totalitarian elements of Hegel’s political thought then, according to Berlin, are so powerful that they also infect the thought of acknowledged liberals. Russell seems to hold a similar view: Green taught a whole generation at Oxford to regard him [Fichte] as the perfection of ethical purity. Yet there is in the modern world no governmental cruelty, injustice or abomination which this virtuous professor’s principles fail to justify.98 Russell too, was prepared to draw direct links between the British Hegelians and ‘injustice’ and ‘abomination’. This between colleagues, is strong stuff. Green died in 1882, so neither Russell or Berlin were speaking ill of the recently deceased; Green’s disciples, however, were numerous and well placed (including among their number William Beveridge, Arnold Toynbee, Clement Attlee and R. H. Tawney).99 Green was not, therefore, an easy target; he was a highly influential and greatly admired philosopher and political theorist. Berlin and Russell’s treatment of him, then, is the more notable – the staining of the reputation of a well-respected social reformer, with accusations of holding a philosophical position which could justify ‘abomination’ and ‘tyranny’. Russell and Berlin were not alone in mounting an attack on the previous generation of British philosophers. Warnock’s comment, quoted above, that absolute idealism is a ‘system for extremists’ was made in the context of a discussion of the British idealists.100 In 1964, the analyst Richard Wollheim criticized the British idealists for failure to acknowledge their totalitarian legacy: [i]dealist thinkers have been led to support the notion of a supreme legislator or leader . . . Such a concept has been called ‘Totalitarian Democracy’. If in Anglo-American political thought little or no attention has ever been paid by ‘idealist’ thinkers to this very difficult problem of the practical interpretation of their theory, such self-denial, though saying something for their political wisdom scarcely redounds to their intellectual credit.101 We have already had cause to see that the picture painted by Wollheim is rather misleading. British idealists had been forcibly confronted with the totalitarian reading of Hegel, and during both the first and second World
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Wars had responded. This is one of a number of rather odd historical claims made by the analysts, as we will see in later chapters. We will also see that the number of analysts prepared to portray both German and British idealism using the language of violence is striking. While few of them made an explicit link between Nazism and the British idealists, many more provide compelling evidence of this view in their choice of words. Nor were the analysts alone in making this identification. While Joad identifies Hegel throughout his texts as the source of fascism, both Bradley and Bosanquet are cited extensively in his analysis as holding similar views.102 E. F. Carritt cited a string of British idealists all of whom read Hegel as a totalitarian.103 However, while in wider philosophical circles a debate took place on Hegel’s culpability, in analytic circles his guilt and that of his followers appeared to be a matter of no debate whatsoever. Where Hegel’s political philosophy was discussed, it was condemned. Nietzsche, pragmatism, romanticism Turning now to the next figure in the proto-fascist anti-canon: we saw above that both Ayer and Berlin explicitly link Friedrich Nietzsche to Nazism, though neither felt the need to elaborate or defend the claim.104 Russell deals at length with Nietzsche – and we cannot here go into all aspects of his, extremely hostile, critique. Here I will discuss his treatment of Nietzsche in relation to the English poet Lord Byron – who, rather surprisingly given Byron’s lack of philosophical credentials, Russell discusses in his History of Western Philosophy. The links between these two thinkers and the Nazis is made characteristically explicit: ‘the romantic revolt passes from Byron, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Mussolini and Hitler’.105 More direct: ‘Hitler’s ideals come mainly from Nietzsche’.106 Nietzsche and Byron shared an aristocratic philosophy; like Fichte they believed that only a certain section of the human race is valuable. They also shared a belief that European civilization had to be overthrown and re-formed to favour the aristocratic classes. The aristocratic philosophy of rebellion . . . has inspired a long series of revolutionary movements, from the Carbonari after the fall of Napoleon to Hitler’s coup in 1933.107 Byron influenced Germany through Nietzsche and Bismarck ‘and in this way, nationalism, Satanism and hero-worship, the legacy of Byron become part of the complex soul of Germany’.108 In addition to passing on Byron’s Satanism, Nietzsche adds some evils of his own, attaching to his aristocratic
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ethic a belief in the ‘annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched’109 – the non-noble, to whom no value properly attaches. He also contributes to the history of ideas his own loathing for democracy and his ‘gleeful’ prophecy of future wars.110 Russell does seek to mitigate the case against Nietzsche, not a courtesy he extends to anyone else in the anti-canon, except John Dewey. He accepts that Nietzsche was neither a state worshipper (rather he’s an individualist who believes only in the great men) nor a German nationalist (he believes in ‘an international ruling race’).111 He also tells us that Nietzsche was ‘not definitely anti-Semitic’112 and then implies that he almost certainly was.113 However, he goes on, Nietzsche did not condone ‘certain modern developments’ which ‘have a certain connection to his general ethical outlook’ but ‘are contrary to his clearly expressed opinions’.114 This is, for Russell, an unusually coy remark, but seems, from the context of the passage, to be an acknowledgment that Nietzsche would not have supported violence against Jews. So unwilling was Russell to admit any good in Nietzsche, that he obfuscated this small concession. The Italian nationalist Mazzini, a less significant target, is identified as an ancestor of fascism only by Russell. He is added to the list for two reasons. First, his belief that the moral law can be found in one’s heart is considered dangerous, as each man’s heart may tell him something different: ‘what he was really demanding was that others should act according to his revelation’.115 Secondly, Mazzini believed that democracy became null if it deviated from the moral law. Russell’s comment on this was succinct: ‘[t]his is also the opinion of Mussolini’.116 Russell is also alone in picking out D. H. Lawrence as a Nazi: ‘he had developed the whole philosophy of Fascism before the politicians had thought of it’.117 Moreover, Lawrence’s notion of blood-consciousness ‘led straight to Auschwitz’.118 Russell devoted a little time to criticizing Treitschke on the same basis.119 He also identifies Schopenhauer and Houston Chamberlain on the path to Nazism – but aside from naming them, he makes no other claims and we will quietly let these figures slide.120 The last members of Russell’s anti-canon we will examine here are also the most unlikely-seeming ancestors of fascism, the pragmatists. Russell tells us that ‘Hitler accepts or rejects doctrines on political grounds’.121 This subjugating of the truth to political (or other) need is a view Russell attributes to the Americans William James and John Dewey. Russell argues that once objective truth is abandoned, the question ‘what is true’ can only be settled ‘by the appeal to force and the arbitrament of the big battalions’.122 On top of this dangerous account of truth, James also believed that without
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war men become soft and effeminate. Russell considers this view ‘a mark of brutality’.123 The French philosopher Henri Bergson is also identified as a pragmatist by Russell and placed in the canon of dangerous thinkers. Bergson’s philosophy also ‘harmonized easily with the movement which culminated in Vichy’.124 In a prospectus for a new book delivered to his publisher in the mid-1930s, Russell identifies a philosophical tradition moving through ‘Carlyle, Nietzsche, William James and Bergson and finding its culmination in Mein Kampf’.125 Russell is not alone in this line of thought. Berlin too draws a link between a pragmatic theory of truth and fascism, but he saw Hegel as its champion. In 1952, he claimed: [t]his kind of political pragmatism, this success worship revolts our normal moral feelings; and there is no genuine argument in Hegel which is really effective against this revulsion . . . True values for him are those which are effective; history is the big battalions marching down a broad avenue . . .126 Berlin’s target is clearly not the Americans here, but there is a distinct echo of Russell’s criticism of James and Dewey – ‘big battalions’ as a recurring motif. The critique of the pragmatist conception of truth is part of a wider criticism levelled by Russell and Berlin at the romantic movement in western thought. Both men emphasize that the kernel of romanticism (Russell sometimes calls it ‘the revolt against reason’) is a denial that there can be any objective standards of truth, or any true structures to the world. The essence of romanticism is that the world can be moulded by the will.127 We have already seen that Russell explicitly links romanticism and fascism.128 Berlin does so too. ‘Fascism too is an inheritor of romanticism’, he argues – and this is the case, for Berlin, precisely because fascism inherits the idea that the world can be moulded by the will of an individual, or a nation.129 Ayer too, albeit later, subscribes to this view, describing (in a passage already quoted) Nazism as ‘Romanticism gone wrong’.130 The romantic movement and the view of truth to which it gives rise, is condemned time and again in analytic texts, as we will see in Chapter 3. Certainly a significant motivation for this condemnation is simply that of a philosopher faced with a proposition that he finds unacceptable. Another less immediately obvious but equally powerful motivation is the belief we have seen highlighted above, that the relativizing of truth to a nation, time, or individual leaves the way open for a dictator not only to exercise power,
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but to dictate what is true. It lends dictators ‘metaphysical omnipotence’, to use Russell’s phrase.131 The equivocal position of Kant and some minor players Those condemned include almost all the significant nineteenth-century philosophers working in the post-Kantian tradition. The notable absentee from this list is Kant himself. While Russell clearly disliked Kant, he is highly equivocal on his significance to fascism. In History of Western Philosophy we are told that ‘Kant, the founder of German Idealism, is not himself politically important’132; his influence is only felt via Hegel and others of that tradition. Yet later in the same book we read that Kant’s political philosophy, which made the case for a world government and warned against dictatorship by the majority, made him a political pariah in Nazi Germany: ‘[s]ince 1933 this treatise has caused Kant to fall into disfavour in his own country’.133 This surely makes Kant in some way politically significant? To further confuse the picture, in 1937 Russell had placed Kant very firmly among the philosophical danger-men: ‘Kant died happy, and has been honoured ever since; his doctrine has even been proclaimed the official philosophy of the Nazi state’.134 It is difficult to know what to make of these apparently contradictory remarks and it is not clear whether they reflect a change of mind between 1937 and 1945, or simply a change of mood. It is possible that the ‘doctrine’ to which Russell refers is Kant’s reintroduction of a standard beyond truth and reason in philosophy – a move which, as we will see in Chapter 3, Russell links to the romantic revolt, and to fascism. Berlin is similarly equivocal about Kant, remarking: ‘it is odd to reflect that there is a direct line, and a very curious one, between the extreme liberalism of Kant, with his respect for human nature and its sacred rights, and Fichte’s identification of freedom with self assertion, with the imposition of your will upon others . . . and finally with a victorious nation marching to fulfil its destiny in answer to the internal demands given to it by transcendental reason, before which all material things must crumble’.135 Berlin certainly did not think that this was the whole story, and Kant remained, for him, as for Russell, a rather ambiguous figure. Finally in this survey of the ancestry of fascism, I will briefly examine some contributions Berlin offers to the canon of the condemned. Perhaps the least expected is Claude-Adrien Helvétius whose vision, while far more scientific than either Hegel or Rousseau, seems to get him into similar trouble with Berlin. While Hegel and Rousseau appear to force people to be free,
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Helvétius, deploying a pure utilitarianism, would force people to be good.136 This view ‘has been used as the justification for communism and for Fascism, for almost every enactment which has sought to obstruct human liberty’.137 A thinker who Berlin seeks to tie more directly to fascism is Joseph de Maistre. In the unambiguously titled ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’(1960), Berlin returns to the French thinker he first canvassed as an enemy of freedom in the 1950s.138 In this later text, however, the case is made in far greater detail. In Maistre we are fast approaching the worlds of the German ultra-nationalists, of the enemies of the Enlightenment, of Nietzsche, Sorel and Pareto, D. H. Lawrence and Knut Hamsun, Maurras, d’Annunzio, of Blut und Boden far beyond traditional authoritarianism.139 In this quotation, Berlin offers us another tour through the ancestors of Nazism. He also argues that we find in Maistre, for the first time, the list of the enemies later drawn up by the Nazis – including Jews, liberals, democrats, those who believe in individual reason, conscience and so on. ‘This is a catalogue which we have heard a good deal since. It assembles for the first time, and with precision, the list of enemies of the great counter-revolutionary movement that culminated in Fascism’.140
Questioning the Causal Story What Russell and Berlin offer is a smorgasbord of thinkers whom they wish in some way to link to fascism. Neither man attempts to systematize the anticanon philosophers into what might be called a coherent ‘Nazi philosophy’. Russell, in particular, seems content to list the ancestors of fascism and to argue the case for each, on what he considers to be the merits of the case. He is also noticeably disinclined to cite any direct evidence for the claimed conceptual affinities between the Nazis and the anti-canon. He does not offer supporting quotations from Nazi thinkers, nor does he indicate whether he is drawing on secondary material in his attempts to gain an understanding of Nazism as a movement. Berlin, as one might expect from a historian of ideas, is more conscientious in establishing conceptual parallels; but, here too, the actual mechanics of the historical picture that he seeks to establish are far from clear. This softness in the only two comprehensive accounts offered by the analytic philosophers of the origins of Nazism is worth exploring a little
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further. If indeed Russell and Berlin fail to provide any kind of convincing account about the actual historical relationship between the anti-canon and the fascists, then this poses a highly significant question: why did they believe in this picture? But to pose such a question is to prejudge the outcome of the inquiry. We must first establish the kind of picture Russell and Berlin offer of the historical relationship between fascism and the anti-canon. In ‘The Ancestry of Fascism’ Russell complained that too often ideas are overlooked in the explanation of events. In reality, he argued, while it is economic and political circumstances that bring political ideas into practical fruition, the ideas themselves are of vital importance in understanding modern political phenomena.141 [I]t is important to remember that political events very frequently take their colour from the speculations of an earlier time: there is usually considerable time between the promulgation of a theory and its practical efficacy.142 Ideas do not necessarily become politically active at the time of their inception but when the times call for them, when the political and economic circumstances make them relevant. The language of this explanation is rather vague; political events ‘take their colour’ from past speculations. In attempting to flesh out this account we could look at the most straightforward way for this transfer of colour to occur – this, presumably, is for an important political figure to come into direct contact with the past speculations in question. We know that some of the French revolutionaries, for example, read Rousseau, and that Lenin read Marx. We know that many in the free-market movement read Adam Smith. This kind of causation is also the easiest for the historian, especially, as with Lenin, when the political figure is keen to enthuse about his philosophical inspiration. But this kind of direct link, between a politician and a text, cannot be what Russell had in mind here. Can he be saying that the Nazis, and more particularly Hitler (the only Nazi named by Russell, and the source of the only Nazi work cited, Mein Kampf), read Fichte, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Carlyle, Byron, James, Dewey, and Bergson, Hegel and very probably Kant too? This seems historically highly unlikely, and it seems equally unlikely that Russell believed it to have been the case. Perhaps we are asking too much. Maybe to be part of a tradition you need only to have been in touch with the last link in the chain. This would still appear to require a demonstration that at least one of these philosophers
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exerted a direct influence upon Hitler. No suggestion is ever given that Russell feels any need to show this; while in some cases he asserts what appears to be a direct link without any justification: ‘Hitler’s ideals come mainly from Nietzsche’143; on other occasions there appears to be no historical link. Carlyle’s association with Nazism is made in a single remark: ‘[i]s there one word of this to which Hitler would not have subscribed’.144 This implies no causation at all, and yet this quotation comes from a paper entitled ‘The Ancestry of Fascism’. The same problem holds with Mazzini, whose relations with fascism seem to be purely that some of his philosophical opinions were also held by Mussolini.145 Russell makes no attempt to suggest that Mussolini had read Mazzini. Likewise, Russell makes no attempt to claim that Hitler had read the American pragmatist William James – he merely states that Hitler accepts a view James ‘invented’.146 To suppose any causal link between Hitler’s thought and James is, as Russell’s biographer rightly states, ‘almost breathtakingly naïve and implausible’.147 Curiously, the only direct evidence Russell cites for any of the of these thinkers having any relationship to any government links Fichte, not to the Third Reich, but to the Weimar Republic, and not to Adolf Hitler, but to a democrat: Ebert, the Socialist first President of the Weimar Republic, recommended his programme in the words: ‘Thus shall we realize that which Fichte has given to the German nation as its task’.148 This seems to reinforce our impression of Russell’s complete lack of interest in the mechanics of causation between the ancestors of fascism and their descendents. It suggests that Russell believed that the bad ideas were not transmitted to the Nazis through any diligent philosophical scholarship on Hitler’s part, but rather by some more intangible cultural method. Though Russell never explains this idea of cultural contamination, he at least implies that this is operating in his discussions of Nietzsche and Byron: ‘the legacy of Byron become part of the complex soul of Germany’.149 An idea, then, or a series of ideas, can enter the ‘soul’ of a nation. Precisely how this works is not elaborated by Russell; however, it is clear that he believes the Nazis and their philosophers are bound together by a cultural mood or movement, which the latter had a role in instigating. This movement, which Russell dubs ‘the revolt against reason . . . has gradually dominated larger and larger areas of the life and thought of the world’.150 The picture that emerges here is importantly different from the simple reading of Russell’s account of the intellectual causation existing between fascism and its ancestors. Nazism is not the product of ideas plus political
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circumstance, it appears rather to be the culmination of a particular irrationalist trend in the modern European mind that is now ‘dominating’. Russell’s description of this trend is of the growing of something organic, or the accretion of toxins – in this way thinkers as disparate as James and Fichte can both feed what Russell describes as the ‘cult of unreason’ – very much like the pumping of carbon dioxide into the air – it affects the global atmosphere, whether it is released in America or Germany. Russell’s account of causation is not made any clearer than this analogy suggests. This appears to stop rather short of providing an adequate causal story. But, even if it were accurate, there is no suggestion that Russell was interested in engaging with other crucial questions required to make his case stick. As he himself points out in another connection, philosophers are prone to error in this area: [w]hen they see some political party proclaiming itself inspired by So-and-So’s teaching, they think its actions are attributable to So-and-So, whereas, not infrequently, the philosopher is only acclaimed because he recommends what the party would have done in any case.151 But there is no engagement with this question in Russell’s treatment of the anti-canon either, no suggestion that the Nazi regime might have used members of the anti-canon merely as intellectual garnish for their independently existing political programme. Nor does he seriously engage with the question of whether any Nazi appropriation of these anti-canon thinkers was a legitimate or illegitimate reading of them. Only once, in a very short article for the Leader Magazine in 1944, does he claim that the views of Nietzsche, Fichte and Hegel have been ‘combined and vulgarized’152 – suggesting, after all, that the Nazi appropriation of these thinkers is illegitimate. This side-line concession only raises further questions – given that Nietzsche, Fichte and Hegel had deeply dissimilar metaphysical philosophies and that, as noted by a contemporary witness, ‘Nietzsche revolted against reason, against philosophy, particularly against idealist philosophy’153 – does any philosophy that combines the idealists Fichte and Hegel with the anti-idealist Nietzsche make philosophical sense? And what impact does this have on the question of blame? In the same Leader Magazine article Russell says that nineteenth-century Germans are ‘[t]o some extent’154 blameworthy. This is his only explicit comment on this crucial issue. Implicitly, as we have already seen, and as we will go on to see in Chapters 2 and 3, he presents us with a picture of bad philosophy produced by bad men, unsurprisingly culminating in Nazism. The impression
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he gives very strongly is that such philosophy was ripe for Nazi appropriation, and such appropriation was very much in the spirit of the original philosophers’ intentions. I will now move on to Berlin’s account of the relationship between his anti-canon of thinkers and fascism. In Freedom and Its Betrayal, Berlin calls Hegel ‘the source’ of fascism.155 But he, with some legitimacy, does not seek to give a detailed account of the historical relationships involved, no doubt feeling that such a detailed piece of intellectual history would take too long and prove too dense for a radio broadcast. We are more likely to achieve an accurate picture of Berlin’s thinking on the question of the historical relationship between the anti-canon and Nazism if we turn to his long essay on de Maistre – an essay which also strongly implies an historical claim in the title: ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’. What we find is a certain amount of confusion. On some occasions, Berlin implies that there was no causal connection at all, and that Maistre’s ideas merely ‘have an affinity with the paranoiac world of modern fascism’.156 This claim is made at the top of Berlin’s paper, and it is to this merely conceptual affinity that Berlin returns in the last pages: totalitarian society, which Maistre . . . had visualized, became actual; and thereby, at inestimable cost in human suffering, has vindicated the depth and brilliance of a remarkable and terrifying prophet of our day.157 Again there is no suggestion that there is any link between Maistre and fascism here; he was remarkably prescient, no more. In other places in the text, Berlin seems to be moving towards claiming a causal connection: [i]n practice if not in theory (at times offered in a transparently false scientific guise), Maistre’s deeply pessimistic vision is the heart of the totalitarianisms, of both left and right, of our terrible century.158 Berlin does not elaborate what it means to be at the heart of a political movement ‘in practice but not in theory’ but this quotation does seem to be edging towards claiming some manner of historical relationship. The next quotation seems less equivocal: [t]hey matter [his ideas] because he was the first theorist in the great and powerfully tradition which culminated in Charles Maurras, a precursor of Fascists, and of those Catholic anti-Dreyfusards and supporters of the Vichy
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regime . . . Maurras may have been prepared to collaborate with Hitler for the same reasons as those that attracted Maistre to Napoleon.159 This suggests that Maistre directly influenced the French Fascists. Again, as in the case of Russell, no evidence is brought to justify this claim. One could legitimately argue that, even if Berlin were to have justified a link between Maurras, Vichy and Maistre, calling the paper ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’ seems to be rather over-egging the pudding. Such a title implies that we are going to locate the source of the successful and important fascisms, not failed movements and puppet regimes in France. Indeed, the inclusion of Jews on Berlin’s list of Maistre’s hate-figures strongly inclines one to believe that there will be some link to German National Socialism. Hostility towards the Jews was, pre-eminently, a characteristic of German Fascism; the Italians, by contrast were relatively philo-semitic.160 While the link to Nazism may be implied strongly in Berlin’s text, it is never stated, and considerably more work would be required in showing that Maistre was, via his influence on the French, an influence on Italians or Germans.161 But Berlin does not appear interested in cementing this aspect of his story. As we noted above, Berlin, like Russell, deploys the notion of movements, which encompasses the anti-canon thinkers and the fascists. He is quite clear about the conceptual ties that bind this group together, isolating a romantic movement, which combines with ultra-nationalism, to culminate in fascism.162 But we are never offered anything beyond conceptual affinity. Berlin’s biographer Michael Ignatieff has picked up this question: Berlin was imprecise about how these influences worked through into Nazi ideology. In what historical sense was de Maistre a ‘precursor’ of fascism? Hitler had never heard his name. But again, an historical genealogy of fascism was not what Berlin really had in mind. His problem was philosophical: trying to understand how the Enlightenment faith in moral universals should have been transformed into the Romantic exaltation of all that was irrational in human nature.163 Ignatieff’s claim, that Berlin’s is a purely conceptual project, may offer a much more useful understanding of these texts. But it does not diminish the fact that both Berlin and Russell appear to be writing histories and making historical claims. Russell talks of the ‘ancestry’ of fascism, Berlin of its ‘origins’ – their texts do not clearly differentiate between conceptual affinities and direct historical influence. Yet historically Russell and Berlin
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present no case, as Ignatieff clearly concedes in the case of the latter. Walter Kaufmann made the following observation about Popper’s treatment of this topic: [n]o conception is bandied about more unscrupulously in the history of ideas than ‘influence’. Popper’s notion of it is so utterly unscientific that one should never guess that he has done important work on logic and on scientific method. At best it is reducible to ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’.164 This conclusion could have been made to measure the work of either Russell or Berlin. Neither seems to have the causal story they require to make claims about the ancestry of fascism stick. Neither seemed particularly interested in devising a causal story, nor concerned by its absence. Yet this is no detachable part of their thesis – it is fundamental. It is important to stress that, of the analysts working on this topic, Russell and Berlin provide the two most comprehensive causal accounts – in the case of the other figures we have looked at the historical link is simply stated. None of the analysts attempt to draw a genuine historical line between their anti-canon and fascism.165 Nevertheless, there are very few attempts to mitigate the blame attached to these anti-canon figures. We have seen Ayer make one concession with regard to Nietzsche in the 1970s.166 In the same decade Berlin says: ‘It would be absurd to charge Hegel, for instance, with the sinister shapes into which some of his notions have turned in our day’.167 However, in the 1950s Berlin clearly implies something very different. As we have seen in this Chapter and will see further evidence of in Chapter 3, in the 1950s Berlin clearly attributed sinisterness very directly to Hegel himself.168
Nationalist Assumptions in the Critique of the Anti-canon Of course, the point here cannot be to condemn philosophers for writing poor history. What is interesting here is the combination of the absence of evidence produced by the analysts, coupled with their willingness to believe the worst of the anti-canon thinkers. We know that there was evidence to be found of, for example, the attempts of the Nazis to ally themselves to Nietzsche, or of Heidegger’s membership of, and active involvement in, the party in the early 1930s. But what is interesting is that the analysts show no awareness of these facts, or of any other historical links, and yet by the 1950s believed the case against the anti-canon is so watertight that Ryle could say
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it was hardly worth discussing. We must return, therefore, to the question posed at the beginning of the last section. Where does their confidence in this picture come from? Part of the explanation must be the established nature of the beliefs the analytic philosophers held. After the First World War the origins of German crimes may have simply been a matter that did not require any further detailed elaboration. These ideas had been extant for 40 years by the time Berlin was broadcasting on this topic in the 1950s. They were truly received opinions – passed from Hobhouse to Russell and Joad, then Berlin, Ayer and the rest. Nicholas Martin suggests that ‘the earlier experience had already created the indelible impression in Anglo-Saxony that Nietzsche, aggression, and German nationalism, in whatever form or combination, were identical’.169 What Martin points to is that these are not simply received opinions, but received opinions with a very particular nationalist stripe – that German aggression was of a piece with the ideas of this German philosopher. This is what we find at work in the analysts’ thinking on the subject: a tacit subscription to the notion of a national philosophy or national character. This assumption negated the need to prove a link between the German Nietzsche and the German Hitler. The apparent self-evidence of this assumption was such that it was allowed to pass unnoticed. It may be that the First World War functioned in another way, enabling the analysts to use their own experience of native anti-canon philosophy – the British idealists – in drawing conclusions about their German counterparts. Julia Stapleton has written of the First World War that ‘[t]here is the further irony that the English intellectuals’ leap to the defence of their state was much inspired by the philosophy of citizenship in German Idealism which many of its members had internalized in the previous quarter of a century’.170 It may be that part of the backlash against idealism was the result of a belief that it had directly affected British culture through the British idealists – making the British more war-hungry and militaristic, seducing them into an unnecessary war in 1914. Ronald Stromberg noted that ‘[i]n 1914 it did not seem to matter much whether one was an Idealist or a Realist, Dualist, or Monist, almost everybody rejoiced in the war. But when we think of Russell, or the disciples of G. E. Moore, who showed some resistance, we are inclined to give the edge to the Idealists for belligerence’.171 This differentiation between analyst and idealist may have been enough for the analysts to believe that they had seen the war-like potential of British Idealism, and also (important for later chapters) that they had stood against it. Such an association, if it was made, and we have no direct evidence that it was, might help to explain the analysts’ certainty that
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anti-canon philosophy led to militarism and jingoism – Russell, Moore, Broad and Ryle had seen it happening at first hand. A national German philosophy Russell’s anti-canon is clearly a European and transatlantic phenomenon, and it is not isolated in any one country or region: it encompasses the American pragmatists, the Britons Carlyle, Green and Byron, the Frenchman Bergson, the Swiss Rousseau and the Italian Mazzini. But the Germans are far and away the most significant single grouping, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Nietzsche – more dominant still if the minor players Schopenhauer and Treitschke are included. Many of those who are not German are shown to be tied to Germany in some way, Byron through Nietzsche, Carlyle and Green through the influence of Fichte.172 Even Dewey is shown as an ally to Germany: ‘I find myself in the English tradition, while Dr Dewey belongs with the Germans and more particularly with Hegel’.173 When one considers that this was written in 1939, this is a stinging remark, ‘Dr Dewey belongs with the Germans’. Not a claim that Dewey, one of the critics of German thought during World War I, could have expected or accepted. The romantic movement, of which Dewey’s pragmatism was said to form a part, was also labelled a German phenomenon: ‘[t]he romantic movement, in spite of owing its origin to Rousseau, was at first mainly German’.174 The coming together in Germany of the dangerous totalitarian aspects of European thought is not merely an historical fluke. It is due to something in German culture or in the German character: [i]t was Germany, always more susceptible to romanticism than any other country, that provided a governmental outlet for the anti-rational philosophy of the naked will.175 Here Russell argues that the German character had a congenital weakness for this kind of philosophy. Russell offers a psycho-cultural explanation for the flaw. The outlook, he argues, was ‘profoundly influenced by German history; much of what seems strange in German philosophical speculation reflects the state of mind of a vigorous nation deprived, by historical accidents, of its natural share of power’.176 It is not, therefore, surprising that the century of the ‘intellectual predominance of Germany’177 was the century that gave rise to irrationalism and which finally provided the intellectual fuel for the rise of Hitler (head of the government of the ‘anti-rational philosophy and the naked will’). One can detect strains of an almost
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Hegelian nature in Russell’s explanation here. The notion of a nation having a ‘natural share of power’ seems to fit much better into a Hegelian picture of states guided by an historical spirit, than Russell’s individualist materialism. There is also a possible Darwinist reading of this explanation, if one is to focus on Russell’s idea of nation in racial terms. Clearly the ambiguities of this leave it substantially short of offering a full explanation for the German condition – but the resources Russell seems to be deploying are significant in themselves. He also, as we have seen, clearly links the Nazis to another movement in philosophy that he characterizes as typically German: ‘[t]he Nazis upheld German idealism . . . ’178 This is a clear example of the pattern I have suggested; the German Nazis inherit German idealism. This anti-canon tradition, while mostly German, is definitely European, and not, it appears, particularly British. True, Carlyle, Green and Byron are mentioned but Russell makes clear that Byron, who was not even a philosopher, had next to no influence in Britain,179 and devotes almost no time to Carlyle. Green is never explicitly listed as an ancestor of fascism, and the source of his thought is non-native – the German Fichte. This relative lack of Englishmen is highly significant, as we will see later on. Russell is keen to show that continental ideas, like continental armies, find it hard to cross the channel.180 Before we move on to examine the beliefs of the other analysts with regard to the essential Germanness of the anti-canon, it is worth pausing here to address an objection, no doubt already present in the mind of the reader. Russell, it should be pointed out, did not have a monochrome view of the German nation. He made clear that he saw two Germanies: one of the anti-canon that we have been focusing on here, and the Germany of figures such as Georg Cantor, and Gottlieb Frege, whom he greatly admired.181 He also wrote in 1944 (in a paper that simultaneously reinforces his central belief in the culpability of German philosophy) that he did not think that Germans were ‘by nature worse than other people’, and that they did have the thinkers to move them in the right direction, if only it was they and not the inheritors of Nietzsche and Hegel who were given support.182 Among the British analytic philosophers more widely, as we will see, a general attitude of suspicion towards continental philosophy, and German philosophy in particular, did not always militate against specific groups or individuals. The Vienna circle and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Austrian, rather than German and perhaps this made a difference) were both important intellectual influences on the British analysts during this period. To the extent that they were allies, both were seen as essentially in the British tradition – disciples of Russell. Russell and the analysts then, like many of those
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who took a ‘two Germanies’ approach to World War I, did not simply see all Germans as bad; rather it was believed that the particular evil represented by Nazism was characteristically German. Fewer of Berlin’s anti-canon targets are German, though he does share Russell’s belief in the culpability of Nietzsche, Hegel and Fichte. Rousseau he links heavily to the emergent German tradition. However, he seeks to include thinkers like Helvétius and Maistre who have no apparent link to either Germany or Italy. However Berlin, like Russell, also makes clear that the romantic movement, with its critical, and disastrous, revolt against truth, is a fundamentally German beast. Not only did it occur ‘for the most part in Germany’183 but ‘the Germans are in the end responsible for the whole outlook’.184 Berlin was certainly prepared to generalize on the question of national character. He suggested that, early in the nineteenth century, ‘the Germans’ (seemingly as one) retreated psychologically into ‘an inner citadel’.185 A nationalist German philosophy In another essay, Berlin identified anti-canon ideas not just with the German nation, but with a specifically German nationalism: ‘[f]or Hegel [progress was] . . . the victory of the historic nations over the unhistoric, of ‘Germanic’ culture over the rest . . . ’186 This remark of Berlin’s fits into a pattern of hostility towards Hegel’s supposed political allegiances among the analytic philosophers. Berlin highlights the fact that Hegel was in service to the state. He suggested that the Prussian King would not have called a liberal to his side. He also points to Hegel’s support for the curtailment of freedom of speech undertaken by Metternich.187 On Russell’s analysis, Hegel was an ultra-nationalist, who believed that the Prussian state of the early nineteenth century was the supreme instrument of the progress of history. Both he and Fichte were the ‘philosophic mouthpieces of Prussia’ and ultimately, in aiding Prussian dominance, helped to give ‘the victory to the least internationally minded elements of German culture’.188 This is an historical claim echoed by Ryle in his review of Popper’s Open Society. Ryle talks of ‘the King of Prussia, assisted by his official professor’189 and opines that modern philosophers will not be taken in by such propaganda. Contemporary philosophers are for the most part . . . aware of the equivocal relations between what Hegel taught and what Hegel was authorized to teach. It was no accident that Hegel accepted from Plato and Aristotle and Rousseau just those premises from which his Prussian conclusions could be made to follow.190
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Hegel then, on Ryle’s reading, is not a genuinely independent thinker, but subservient to the interests of the Prussian state. In these accusations we can detect a parallel invited between Hegel’s running to support his political masters when summoned to do so, and the behaviour, during World War I, of the German academics – eager to stand foursquare behind their nation, at the expense, so the British felt, of their academic probity. A tradition of German philosophers’ intellectual capitulation to state power is strongly suggested. Both Ryle and Russell would have remembered the notorious ‘manifesto of the intellectuals of Germany’ and though his name is not mentioned, it is quite possible that the name of the card-carrying Nazi Martin Heidegger may have been in the minds of the British analysts as yet another member of this German tradition. It is entirely unsurprising that the analytic philosophers, who viewed Hegel as a state-worshipper, should see him also as a willing slave to an actual state. It is significant, perhaps, that the accusation made against Hegel by Russell, Ryle and Berlin came after an article by T. M. Knox in Philosophy in which he introduces some detailed and seemingly highly persuasive historical evidence designed to illustrate that Hegel in fact was never the pet philosopher of the Prussian king, and did not mould his philosophical views to suit his political masters.191 His evidence, however, appears to be ignored by the analytic philosophers. Maybe none of them had read the article or the fairly lengthy exchange in Philosophy of which it formed a part. It is equally possible that the idea of Hegel as a servant to Prussia was too established to warrant reconsideration in the face of Knox’s claims. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the analytic philosophers, in the case of Hegel at least, were prepared to tie together explicitly the notion of a German national philosophy with the idea of a culpably state-serving German nationalist philosophy. Once again, German military aggression is tied up with German philosophical thought. What we can see in all of these explanations is a generalized notion of a national German character allied to a national German philosophy – a combined culture that seems, according to these thinkers, to plot a straight path towards Hitler and National Socialism. In the caldron of German culture totalitarian philosophies are mixed together with flaws in national character and ancient superstitions to produce the noxious Nazi party. The strength of these assumptions offers the best explanation for the confidence with which the analysts could espouse their views on the culpability of the anti-canon, despite, as we have seen, their lack of an adequate historical argument for this conclusion.
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Conclusion We have seen that in the period between 1934 and the 1960s, leading analytic philosophers identified an anti-canon of predominantly nineteenthcentury, predominantly foreign philosophers, all of whom they link to the fascist movement of the twentieth century. In showing the lack of any substantial historical account, and the lack of interest in any historical account among the analytic philosophers, I have illustrated the strength of the belief in the guilt of this anti-canon. The nature of the publications in which the analytic philosophers did their work only serves to reinforce the impression that these views were held with utter certainty. We saw, above, that Ryle argued philosophers did not need to be warned off Hegel, Nietzsche and the rest, they were already ‘immunized’. This belief is apparently characteristic of those analytic philosophers to have written about the anti-canon. Russell’s central texts, the History of Western Philosophy and the ‘Ancestry of Fascism’, and Berlin’s central texts ‘Freedom and Its Betrayal’ and ‘The Roots of Romanticism’, were all designed for non-specialist audiences. Even Ayer’s contribution to the question, ‘The Concept of Freedom’, was published not in a philosophy journal but in a literary magazine. For the analysts the question of anti-canon guilt had ceased to be one that required philosophical debate and clarification, it was therefore not a problem that analytic philosophers dealt with in-house in their professional journals. The conclusions were already drawn; they simply needed communicating to the public in order to prevent a severe case of intellectual infection. It is also worth noting the sheer strength of the analytic philosophers’ critique of the anti-canon. There was almost no attempt to mitigate the case against those seen as fascism’s ancestors. The analysts did insert the occasional lonely nuance, but the culpability of anti-canon philosophers for fascism is relentlessly emphasized. It is striking that, in their more lengthy commentaries, neither Russell nor Berlin seem to wish to make pleas for mitigating circumstances.192 They were quite content to let the full force of blame for siring fascism rest on nineteenth-century German philosophers. An important part of the reason for this must be the strong nationalist assumptions underpinning the English position, with the attendant tendency to see the enemy (the ‘bad Germans’ and their intellectual allies) as a monolithic and wholly negative entity. We have clearly seen that the anti-canon appears to be a particularly German phenomenon, and apparently only relatively distantly related to Britain.
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The analysts’ ability to simply dismiss a vast swathe of nineteenth-century thought as proto-fascist, however, points to a further factor in their treatment of the anti-canon. As we shall see in the next chapter, analytic philosophy was founded on a rebuttal of, which grew into contempt for, Hegelian philosophy in particular, and what came to be known as ‘continental philosophy’ in general. There was apparently no need to review the evidence against these figures; they were philosophically bankrupt, morally and politically dangerous dinosaurs and no-one wanted to recheck the pages of Hegel to find out whether his ghost had been maligned.
Chapter 2
The Expulsion of the Invaders
The contemporary discovery of continental philosophy in the English-speaking countries is actually quite recent. Only about fifteen years ago a course in philosophy that failed to mention Hegel or Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger or Sartre was not considered deficient. But as the anomalies in the geographical definition show, this ‘discovery’ is in fact more akin to the remission, perhaps temporary, of a more active process of forgetting and exclusion . . .1 (David West 1996) Santayana’s prediction, made in 1913, was correct: ‘Hegel will be to the next generation what Sir William Hamilton was to the last. Nothing will have been disproved but everything will have been abandoned’.2 (Peter Nicholson 1990) Idealism, which appeared so suddenly and violently in this country . . .3 (G. J. Warnock 1952)
In the last chapter we looked at the way in which the analysts saw the history of post-Kantian continental philosophy as culminating in National Socialism. This chapter is concerned with the way in which the analysts constructed their own history, and alongside it the history of their immediate predecessors, the British idealists. This chapter begins by outlining the treatment received by continental philosophy and philosophers at the hands of the analysts – it demonstrates a pattern of neglect and marginalization. This picture is furthered in the following section by an examination of the analysts’ writing of the history of both their own tradition and that of the British idealists. What the first half of this chapter demonstrates is the truth of David West’s characterization of the analytic philosophy’s treatment of continental philosophy as ‘an active process of forgetting and exclusion . . . ’4
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In the second half of the chapter, I will argue that the analysts’ own history writing strongly invites us to read this process of forgetting and exclusion as intimately bound up with the cultural-political assumptions seen in Chapter 1. As the title of this chapter indicates, the analysts set up a narrative which characterizes them as the heirs to a native, British, tradition, and which portrays the British idealists as representing the brief and short lived occupation of something fundamentally foreign. This foreign occupation is described through the language of warfare and conflict, and linked, by the analysts, to the political aggression of Germany in the twentieth century. Hence the analysts’ defeat of idealism represents more than simply the ascendancy of one philosophical tradition over another; it represents the expulsion of an invader.
Analytic Disengagement The British idealists, figures such as Bradley, Bosanquet and Green, represented the principal encroachment of continental philosophy into Great Britain, as far as the analytic philosophers were concerned. In this section, we examine the various respects in which the analysts dealt with the idealists in particular, but also with other continental thinkers and groups. The analysts’ principal treatment of idealism and the idealists was a wall of silence. Iris Murdoch, one of the most insightful critics of post-war analytic philosophy, aided greatly by her equivocal position with regard to the tradition, points specifically to the eclipse of Hegel: [i]t is almost mysterious how little Hegel is esteemed in this country. This philosopher, who, while not being the greatest, contains possibly more truth than any other, is unread and unstudied here.5 Having begun to explore the analysts’ beliefs about Hegel, we may now feel that this lack of esteem is not mysterious at all. Indeed, Murdoch, far from being an uncritical friend to the analytic philosophical movement, implies that the reasons are not far to seek. The exclusion of Hegel is only ‘almost mysterious’. It was not just the British idealists, and Hegel, the thinker perceived as their inspiration, who were put aside. Ryle wrote of the period: ‘our copies of [F. H. Bradley’s] Appearance and Reality were dusty; and most of us had never seen a copy of [Martin Heidegger’s] Sein und Zeit’.6 Here, the British Hegelian Bradley is joined in dusty obscurity by the phenomenologists,
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represented by Heidegger – another ‘continental’ school of thought. C. D. Broad illustrated that this neglect also extended to Nietzsche. After the war, Walter Kaufmann had the following encounter: [i]n 1952, when I visited C. D. Broad [in] . . . Cambridge, he mentioned a man named Salter. I asked whether he was the Salter who had written a book on Nietzsche, to which Broad, one of the most eminent British philosophers of his generation, replied: ‘Dear no: he did not deal with crackpot subjects like that; he wrote about psychical research’.7 Such an assessment of the intellectual merits of the anti-canon, was, as we will see, a fairly typical one. The message is clear; the analysts do not indulge in ‘such crackpot subjects’ as those raised by anti-canon thinkers. Clearly the avoidance of these thinkers was not a question of a benign lack of curiosity, it reflected assumptions the analysts had made about the nature and quality of continental thought – assumptions to which I will return in Chapter 3. Ayer, too, pointed to the complete lack of interest among his colleagues in non-native thought: [T]he main body of British philosophers took no serious interest in any French philosopher later than Descartes, who died in 1650, and indeed, once Hegel had fallen into disfavour, in any German philosopher later than Kant whose principal work, The Critique of Pure Reason, appeared in 1781. I did not wholly share this insularity.8 Ayer’s lack of insularity extended to attending international philosophy conferences, speaking fluent French and befriending leading existentialists, including Camus. However, it should not be overstated. Philosophically it counted for very little – the most obvious signs of his catholicism are a series of highly misleading articles on the existentialists published in the late 1940s and 1950s in which he deployed the logical positivist theory of meaning in order systematically to denigrate, or dismiss as trivial, all the existentialists’ significant philosophical claims.9 While he attended World Congresses of Philosophy from 1953 onwards, he gave up attending meetings of the Association des Sociétés Philosophiques de Langue Française because, according to his biographer: ‘he came to he conclusion that he could not learn from the French and they would not learn from him . . .’10 Ayer’s catholicism, then, certainly did not extend to continental philosophy.
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Bryan Magee’s comment on the state of Oxford philosophy in the 1950s testifies to the same kind of generalized resistance to continental thought beyond the simply Hegelian: [A]t Oxford the assumption had always been that the empiricist tradition was philosophy. There had been one occasion when I had raised a question about the existential tradition as represented by philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger only to have it explained to me that these were not philosophers.11 This was a particularly strong form of dismissal. Not only are the anti-canon poor philosophers unworthy of study, they have in some way devolved into not being philosophers at all.12 It is testament to the control the analysts exerted in the 1950s that their beliefs about philosophy had achieved a status of such apparent permanence; the assumption at Oxford had not, as Magee claims, always been that the empiricist tradition was the only philosophy worth considering. But such was clearly the impression conveyed to this particular student. The analytic philosophers, then, very largely ignored foreign thought, besides that which could be seen as essentially continuous with their own tradition.
Structural and institutional exclusion We have so far been discussing the analysts’ dislike of, and unwillingness to engage with, anti-canon philosophy. These attitudes manifested themselves in a variety of concrete ways, amounting to a movement on several fronts to expel or marginalize foreign, anti-canon ideas. The analytic philosophers were far from eager to spend time with their continental colleagues. Raymond Plant has highlighted this lack of contact: [A]part from one or two conferences to discuss theories of mutual interest, conferences which often turned into dialogues of the deaf, there was very little explicit influence or contact between British and continental philosophy.13 Recounting one such meeting, Rée reports that the analysts ‘huddled together in self defence’ to try and avoid conversation.14 Isaiah Berlin observed that they refused to accept influences from outside the ‘magic circle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and Vienna.15
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The avoidance of anti-canon philosophy did not simply involve avoiding continental philosophers. The process of marginalization extended to the analytic philosophers’ treatment of the remaining British idealists – the local members of the anti-canon. Stefan Collini has argued that, for Ryle, Austin and Ayer (taken as representatives of their tradition), R. G. Collingwood ‘was no longer regarded as a philosophical antagonist with whom disagreement promised to be fruitful’ precisely because he was linked to the British idealists.16 Warnock, writing from the vantage point of the 1970s, reinforces this point and goes further, arguing that the principal intellectual affinity between analysts of all stripes was their agreement on who was ‘out’. Austin and Ayer for example, doubtless did not contrive, at that or any other time, actually to agree about anything very much. But each was at least interested in what the other said; both were interested in things said by, say, Russell and Moore and Ryle; and neither, I believe, would have felt it worthwhile even to disagree with, say Joseph or Collingwood.17 Both Joseph and Collingwood were seen as idealists – and therefore not worth the effort of conversation.18 Highly significantly, for Warnock, this assumption of the worthlessness of idealism was the glue that bound analytic philosophers together. I will argue in the next chapter that this selfdefinition by the analytic philosophers against continental philosophy in general and idealism in particular, is fundamental to an understanding of their beliefs, both about themselves and continental thought. The analysts, then, avoided continental philosophers and their British offshoots. They also tried to avoid teaching anti-canon philosophy to their students. Quinton points to ‘the organisation of teaching which bounds lightly from Hume and Kant to Russell and Moore with no . . . attention to the intervening period’19 and, thereby, the exclusion from the undergraduate teaching in Oxford of any reference to Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the British idealists. Nicola Lacey, writing about postwar Oxford, comments: [I]nevitably, Kant and Descartes sat alongside Aristotle and Plato in the Oxford undergraduate syllabus. But Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Hegel were notably absent. Only the so-called English Empiricists – Locke, Berkeley, Hobbes, Hume, and Mill (as well as, to some extent, Kant) – appear to have engaged the enthusiasm of the linguistic philosophers.20
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Michael Ignatieff comments that Berlin read no ‘German philosophy . . . in his Oxford syllabus’ during the 1930s.21 Magee, who studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) in Oxford shortly after World War II reports that it was not only possible, it was usual, for a PPE student who got a first class degree specializing in philosophy not to have read a word of Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (which was a special option), Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, or any other philosopher who had practised outside the British Isles. Most of the questions in the examination paper on the history of philosophy related to four philosophers only: Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume . . . For the rest, it was a question of studying the work of living British philosophers, plus Moore and Wittgenstein (British citizens now dead).22 Adding to this picture, Forguson notes that at the height of the ordinary language movement in Oxford philosophy, in 1957, the logic paper for PPE featured 11 questions out of 14 which ‘invit[ed] an ordinary language approach’.23 What, it appears, that we can conclude from all this is that not only was it usual to avoid all anti-canon philosophers during a PPE course, but if one branched out into continental philosophy, one could not expect to find a suitable exam question on the subject. This policy must have made studying any of the philosophy distrusted by the analysts practically very difficult. An incident involving Ayer and a syllabus disagreement provides us with an insight into the active analytic attempts to resist the teaching of anticanon philosophy. The idealist J. N. Findlay, appointed to a Professorship at King’s College London in 1951, found himself in disagreement with Ayer, by then Professor of Philosophy at University College, London. It was under Findlay’s guidance that courses in the history of philosophy were centralized at university, rather than college, level. This done, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, he ‘succeeded, against the wishes of A. J. Ayer, in having Hegel as the ‘special author’ for two successive years’.24 Richard Wollheim has pointed out that for Ayer teaching was not ‘simply filling people’s heads, it was a matter of opening their eyes’.25 And it seems no possible good could be done by allowing undergraduate eyes to feast on Hegel. It appears, then, that there was nothing passive or accidental in the ignoring of the post-Kantian nineteenth century. Such a possibility is, even in the abstract, highly unlikely – particularly in the case of the British idealists.
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One does not passively forget one’s immediate predecessors – one may wish to forget, or exclude, and this seems closer to the truth of the matter. The marginalization of anti-canon philosophy went further than ignoring it and refusal to teach it. There were also, apparently co-ordinated, condemnations in print. When the analysts broke their silence on continental philosophy, it was to criticize it, often in the strongest possible terms. As Rée points out, ‘Oxfordian attacks on “continental philosophy” were aggressive, even sadistic . . . ’26 Rée recounts that Mind, under the editorship of Ryle, ‘tried to keep readers informed about the antics of the foreign colleagues. Every work of continental philosophy turned out, upon careful examination, to be pretentious rubbish’.27 This is what we might expect from a journal edited by Ryle. We have already had cause to note Ryle’s prominence in the analytic tradition from the early 1930s on, and his clear subscription to the claim that Hegel was an ancestor of Nazism. However, much has also been made of his catholic credentials.28 It has been noted that he took an interest in phenomenology (a characteristically ‘continental’ school) and contributed a review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit to Mind in 1929. However, as with Ayer, the simple fact of the existence of writing on continental philosophy is far from enough to demonstrate catholicism. One has to examine the content. Sein und Zeit, Ryle stated: ‘marks a big advance in the application of the “Phenomenological Method” – though I may say at once that I suspect that this advance is an advance towards disaster’.29 Not only the disparaging conclusion, but the inverted commas around ‘phenomenological method’ testifies to the thrust of Ryle’s convictions on this subject. This attitude showed no signs of changing in 1945, when he described phenomenology as ‘a bore’ which the British will ignore (and, he implies, rightly so).30 One can get a flavour from this of the probable nature of a Ryle editorial policy – and as Rée testifies and an examination of Mind in the post-war years reveals – this was the policy Ryle pursued; phenomenology, and other continental philosophies besides, were ignored where they weren’t disparaged.31 Ryle also contributed to the marginalization of idealism within Oxford University. As Hare recalls, in his capacity as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics, Ryle made a point of getting as many young analysts appointed to teaching positions as possible: ‘an academic politician . . . he transformed British philosophy almost single-handed’.32 He also created the Oxford B.Phil., to give postgraduate students the opportunity to specialize in philosophy.33 Through the new qualification Oxford sent streams of
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analytically trained philosophy tutors out to populate Britain’s rapidly expanding higher education sector. Forguson reports that 59 per cent of the philosophers in other British universities in 1955 were Oxford graduates, up from 36 per cent in 1939.34 Through skilful organization, analytic philosophy gained ground rapidly. Conversely, with Ryle in charge it must have been very hard for a young idealist attempting to take a position in philosophy at Oxford. Cambridge meanwhile, always more sceptical towards idealism, had lost its last major idealist with the death of John McTaggart, two decades before the end of the Second World War, leaving ‘the field in Cambridge to the champions of common sense’.35 Both the old universities then, by 1945, saw analysts in a position of sufficient dominance to control syllabuses and appointments – and well-placed to expand their influence over the rest of the country. We have already gained a sense of what such an expansion of influence would mean for idealism in particular and continental philosophy in general: absence from syllabuses, few opportunities for the study of relevant texts, few opportunities for dialogue. A gulf of understanding? There may be a further aspect to this analytic refusal to engage with, not just the idealists, but philosophy in the post-Kantian tradition more generally. As a result of the moves made against their philosophical enemies by Russell, Moore, Ryle, and others, there was no reason for the younger generation of analytic philosophers to have read German philosophy at all. According to his biographer Berlin did not encounter German philosophy studying either Greats or PPE in the 1930s.36 The history of philosophy paper had been removed from PPE after World War I, making philosophical breadth on the course all the more unlikely.37 But the more standard route to a philosophy post was not Greats and PPE, but Honour Moderations (‘Mods’) and Greats – a route taken by the overwhelming majority of the Oxford analytic philosophers. Hare’s reflections on the course and its implications further reinforce the suspicion. Typically for a Mods and Greats student, the lion’s share of Hare’s time was devoted to the classics, with little time for modern philosophy.38 In common with his philosophical colleagues, he gained an academic post after graduating from his undergraduate degree and so did not write a D.Phil. The result of such an education was that most analytic philosophers were not grounded in the history of their subject by their time as students.
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As Strawson has pointed out, for some, this historical ignorance became something of a badge of honour.39 Also in common with his philosophical colleagues, Hare was employed by a college, with a teaching load of between seven and 25 hours a week. The result: ‘I had little time for the luxury of studying outside my own writing and remain . . . extremely ignorant of the history of philosophy’.40 There is, no doubt, an element of modesty here, but the structural constraints that Hare recounts suggest that those in his position would have had, at best, very little time to give themselves a broad grounding in the subject. In his route through the Oxford system, Hare is highly representative. Apart from those elected to All Souls, who were able to concentrate on research (this applied to Isaiah Berlin between 1932 and 1938, but he combined the position with teaching at New College; and to Austin between 1933 and 1935), the Oxford philosophers spent time teaching and playing their part in what they subsequently dubbed ‘the revolution in philosophy’.41 While those of the second generation of analysts who were undergraduates before the war may have been taught by an idealist, the gradual institutional domination of Oxford by the analysts made it increasingly unlikely that those who took their degrees after the war – Hare, the Warnocks, Hampshire, Pears, Strawson and Wollheim – would have come into contact with anti-canon philosophy to any significant extent (though we have to be a little careful here, as I will suggest later in this chapter that there was, despite the analysts’ claims to the contrary, a persistent idealist presence in Oxford after 1945). It is at least possible, then, that many of the younger generation of analytic philosophers had simply not read the philosophers about whom they entertained hostile beliefs, and against whom they attempted to maintain an embargo. Even those who produced short chapters on idealism as part of their writing on the history of philosophy may well not have read the long and difficult texts of the idealists. A number of commentators have made the point that the errors in the reading of idealism by Moore and Russell were simply perpetuated by subsequent analytic philosophers.42 Walter Kaufmann has also identified a level of ignorance of Hegel in the reviews of Popper’s Open Society and its Enemies (1946).43 This suggests, at the very least, that the readings made of the British idealists by the analytic philosophers as they wrote their history were heavily influenced by the hostile lead given by Russell and Moore. The very fact that only one book-length study of an idealist was written by the Oxbridge-educated analytic philosophers in this
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period testifies to the comfort the analysts felt with the view of idealism that they inherited from Russell and perpetuated to their students.44 This was a stable and widely accepted picture, and clearly not one any of the analysts felt any desire to question. Elaborating this pattern of neglect even further, Tom Rockmore has recently claimed that ‘[i]t is clear that Russell never read Kant carefully. It is not clear, although he once considered himself to be a Hegelian, that he ever read Hegel carefully or perhaps even at all . . .’45 Ray Monk adds credence to Rockmore’s claim, commenting that despite identifying as Hegelian in the early part of his career, Russell didn’t read Hegel until 1897 when his Hegelianism was already on the wane.46 The thoroughness of Russell’s reading of this, at a time when he was already disillusioned, must be open to question. If Rockmore’s contention is correct, then this would go a long way to establishing that the Hegel condemned by analytic philosophers was a largely fictitious construction.47 (Russell Watson has called this creation the ‘shadow Hegel’.48) It is possible, then, that nobody within analytic philosophy had undertaken any more than a cursory reading of Hegel, and it is probable that most had not done even this. It is very likely that those with some knowledge of the history of analytic philosophy will not find any of the foregoing especially remarkable. It does, of course, point to the active exclusion of continental philosophy noted by West in the quotation at the top of this chapter. But many of us are aware of the analysts’ hostility to continental philosophy, and it probably comes as no surprise that they did not wish to teach it, read it, or offer jobs to those working on it. What may be less familiar is the extent to which the same exclusionary project appears to be actively furthered by the analysts’ writing of history.
Exclusionary History I: The Recovery of Tradition We begin our examination of the analysts’ history writing with their claim to have recovered and enhanced a tradition of British empiricism. Probably the most widely read statement of the recovery of this British tradition in philosophy was made in the preface to A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936), still one of the best-selling works of analytic philosophy: [t]he views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein which are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume.49
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Later in the same work he asserts that analysis ‘has always been implicit in English empiricism’, highlighting the national dimension to this tradition.50 In 1940, G. O. Wood, The Times Literary Supplement’s watcher of things philosophical, had picked up on the change, commenting that English philosophy was ‘rediscovering’ its ‘empiricist’ roots. Wood notes ‘the muchcanvassed names of the pioneers of our “empirical” thought – Locke, Berkeley and Hume’.51 After the war, as the analytic philosophers began to take an interest in writing the history of their movement, we find a sudden rush to identify the intellectual roots of analytic philosophy; all point in the same direction. For G. J. Warnock, Russell’s enterprise of analysing concepts down to their particulars is ‘the most constant and perhaps the most fertile enterprise in which British philosophers had been engaged since the time of Locke’; Berkeley and Hume were also practitioners of this method.52 The title of David Pears’ Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy (1967) tells its own story – unsurprisingly we find inside the claim that Russell’s role was to ‘take over and strengthen the type of empiricism whose most distinguished exponent had been David Hume’.53 Russell was far more than just a successful restorer of the glorious past. He was seen as having his own contribution to make, as Stuart Hampshire showed: [C]ontemporary empiricism derives from two traditions which converge and meet in the work of Bertrand Russell. The first is the epistemological tradition descending from Berkeley and Hume; the second is inspired by the formal and exact use of symbols in modern logic, mathematics and physical science. This new formal method is a contribution to the traditional empiricism . . .54 This, despite Hampshire’s reservations, became the official position of the analysts on Russell’s recovery of empiricism. Russell himself endorsed this view in his History of Western Philosophy (1946). Modern analytic empiricism, of which I have been giving an outline, differs from that of Locke, Berkeley and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy.55 Warnock argued that Russell’s ‘thesis appeared to have the double virtue of reviving pre-Idealistic empiricism, and of applying to philosophy the
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well-proved and dazzling procedures of logic’.56 By 1950, Hampshire could write that the view of modern philosophy as a new and enhanced version of British empirical had become ‘a commonplace’.57 As the reader will no doubt have spotted, there is a significant nationalist tinge to all of this. Jonathan Rée has highlighted this state of affairs, commenting that Oxford ordinary language philosophy in particular was livened up by ‘a streak of patriotism’. When it came to the ‘British Empiricists’ – Locke, Berkeley, and Hume – the Oxford philosophers were willing to admit the ‘revolution’ carried out by Russell and Moore had not been ‘the thunderbolt that it is popularly supposed to be’. Ayer edited an anthology of British Empirical Philosophers to make the national tradition more available to students.58 We have already seen Pears’ book refer to a ‘British tradition’ in philosophy. And this link between empiricism and Great Britain is one made by other analysts. Russell himself stressed this point. When asked in 1960: ‘[w]ould you say that you yourself were in the British tradition?’, Russell replied: ‘[o]h, very much so. You see, the British tradition comes primarily from Locke; Locke partly imbued the three great British philosophers’.59 We saw above that Warnock, Pears and Ayer as well as Russell himself, all subscribed during this time to the notion that what had been recovered by Russell was a ‘national tradition’;60 while others appear to imply the same conclusion in tracing an exclusively British history of the movement, from Locke to Russell.61 H. H. Price suggests an explanation for the affinity between empiricism and Britain: empiricism, he comments, is a tendency of the human mind ‘which is peculiarly congenial to the inhabitants of these islands’.62 Nicola Lacey argues: [t]he second, and more elusive, aspect of Oxford philosophy’s Englishness had to do with the Allied victory in the war. The positive manifestation of this was a resurgence of confidence that intellectual culture could deliver an English perspective distinct from the influential traditions of continental philosophy.63 As Lacey suggests, in their hearty vindication of a characteristically British intellectual tradition, the analytic philosophers form part of a wider nationalist reassertion taking place in Britain after World War II. As Brian
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Appleyard noted, there was no single fashion or taste after the war, but all the fashions and tastes were united by ‘the tendency to justify a position as being distinctively British’.64 Stefan Collini has explicitly linked the ‘ordinary language’ philosophy that characterized post-war Oxford with the ‘essentially English’ reaction of authors like Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis.65 I will return to the distinctive way in which the analysts fleshed out the content of this national identity in subsequent chapters. The relationship between empiricism and British character, in particular, will prove important. Russell, then, had reached back through time and reconnected with the last link in the chain of British empiricists. Such a reconnection justified, or perhaps mandated, what we have already seen: the ‘the organisation of teaching which bounds lightly from Hume and Kant to Russell and Moore with no . . . attention to the intervening period’.66 This approach to the history of the subject, with its leap between Hume and Kant and Russell and Moore, highlights a crucial factor in our understanding of the treatment of continental philosophy. It is highlighted still more clearly, and rather poetically, by Warnock. Russell ‘symbolically joins hands with at least two centuries of British philosophy, across a gap of a few years occupied with new and strange things’.67 The ‘gap’ of ‘strange things’ is bridged by Russell, linking the modern empiricists back to their past. What the bridge also allows the philosophers to do is to ignore the nineteenth-century continental beasts in the pit below as they go backwards and forwards about their empiricist business. And, for the analysts, this made philosophical sense. We will see in the next chapter how, for many of the analytic philosophers, philosophy had taken the wrong path with Kant and Hegel. It would therefore make sense to return and attempt to pick up the philosophical threads before the world became caught in Kantian tangles. Implicit, therefore, in a recovery of a British tradition in philosophy that bypasses the nineteenth century, is the claim that the nineteenth-century tradition has nothing to offer. This wholesale deprecation towards the nineteenth-century has been noted by subsequent commentators. Richard Rorty refers to ‘the AngloSaxon belief that no philosophical progress occurred between Kant and Frege’68; while Jonathan Rée writes of analytic histories: ‘[n]ormally averting eyes from nineteenth-century thinkers, especially Marx, it tries to join twentieth-century philosophy directly to Kant’.69 Highlighting Kant’s ambiguous place hovering between canon and anti-canon, Robert Hanna has argued that analytic philosophy was predicated on a quite conscious and deliberate refusal of Kantian conclusions:
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the leading philosophers of the analytic tradition from the 1880s up through the 1950s and 1960s – Frege, Moore, Russell and early Wittgenstein; Carnap and the Vienna Circle; later Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers and Quine – quite self-consciously rejected the main doctrines of the [Kant’s – TA] first Critique . . . 70 This notion of a ‘return to Hume’, with its attendant assumptions about the time wasted on a (post-) Kantian philosophical tradition in the meantime is clearly important in understanding the scope and brutality of the analysts’ critique of the anti-canon. The analysts believed it was a failed tradition. This cannot directly explain the analysts’ belief that this failed philosophical tradition was also fascist, but what it does entail is that the analysts, en masse, had no doctrinal reason to seek to preserve or protect ‘continental philosophy’. As the recovery of the British empiricist tradition implies, the analysts had no investment in the philosophy they condemned, and therefore, perhaps, fewer qualms in tarring it with the Nazi brush. This was helped by the drawing of national distinctions; as Quinton has put it, ‘[t]he nineteenth century is seen as an exclusively foreign affair’.71 These considerations rather have the effect of suggesting that the analytic/continental distinction can historically be accounted for by a philosophical divergence on the value or otherwise of Kantian and post-Kantian thought – diminishing the interest in any rather more cultural-political explanations. There is a curiosity here, however, which points, at the very least, to a particular set of concerns on the part of the analysts. This curiosity comes to light if we compare the history written by the analysts of the immediate post-war years with the evidence provided by more recent scholarship. The analysts’ focus on the British origins of the tradition in this period paints a strong line of separation between the origins of analytic philosophy, and the post-Kantian tradition of continental philosophy. Analytic philosophy is defined as a reaction by two Englishmen against a philosophical school with its roots in Germany. What is now becoming increasingly apparent is that this strong separation between the two schools is in fact very hard to maintain. Robert Hanna has pointed out that the explicit rejection of Kant’s epistemology by many analysts, including Moore and Russell, masked an ‘unconscious absorption’ of ‘Kant’s way of formulating the very distinctions and problems they were dealing with’.72 A recent book by Paul Redding makes a similar case: ‘In contrast to the Russellian creation myth with its simple opposition between analytic philosophy and Kant-derived idealism, the actual picture presented in such works is much
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more complicated’ – suggesting multiple affinities between analytic philosophy and the ideas of both Kant and Hegel.73 Following this train of thought, recent commentators have also questioned whether analytic philosophy was ever as empiricist as its practitioners claimed. The analysts’ subscription to the truths of mathematics and logic renders their identification as empiricists rather suspect – and indeed suggests that the analysts themselves would be better characterized as subscribing to a form of idealism.74 Away from idealism, but continuing the theme of analytic/continental interaction, Bryan Magee is not alone in pointing out that Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was a central figure for British analytic philosophy – if never an insider – actually had a significant philosophical debt to that most continental of figures Schopenhauer.75 On a different but related front, Michael Dummett has argued that the roots of analytic philosophy ‘are the same roots, as those of the phenomenological school’.76 Finally, David Bell has pointed out that almost all of Moore’s ‘revolutionary’ claims were ‘doctrines to be found in the work of Bretano’ who, he points out, Moore would have read about in Mind at the turn of the century (long before Ryle’s editorship).77 As such, he suggests, Russell and Moore’s ‘British’ revolution in philosophy is in fact caused by their engagement with a dialogue going on largely among phenomenologists on the continent. What these considerations suggest is that the analysts’ historical account of the recovery of a native British tradition was a very partial construct – which overlooked foreign, particularly post-Kantian, influence on British analytic philosophy and which highlighted the particularly British roots of the movement. In constructing their origins in this way, the analysts created and reinforced a barrier between themselves and the continental philosophical schools – a barrier which perhaps owed its existence more to the requirements and purposes of analytic history writing in the 1950s than it did to the state of affairs in British philosophy at the turn of the century. We will return to this later in the chapter, by which time a fuller picture of the analysts’ history writing will have emerged.
Exclusionary History II: Marginalizing the Idealists Having examined the analysts’ construction of their own recent philosophical history, I now want to turn to their writing of the history of the idealists. As we will see, the analysts used history to portray idealism as a marginal,
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foreign import to British philosophy, which had short life before being replaced by a superior native variety. The general opinion of the analysts was that British idealism had been decisively refuted by the pioneering work of Russell and G. E. Moore in the first decade of the twentieth century. These two men, initially Hegelians themselves according to their own testimony, soon rebelled against their idealist masters. Russell tells the story in his Autobiography: Moore, like me . . . was for a short time a Hegelian. But emerged more quickly than I did, and it was largely his conversation that led me to abandon both Kant and Hegel.78 Moore’s canonical paper ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ (1903) was widely considered to have fulfilled its ambitions and effectively removed idealism as a serious intellectual challenge.79 The paper represents a fundamental point of departure for the analysts. As Ayer made clear, it ‘had a decisive bearing on the subsequent development of philosophy not only in England but in part of Europe and throughout the English-speaking world’.80 Perhaps because they felt that Moore had so decisively rejected idealism, the analysts expended little effort on the exposition of idealist philosophy, even in their historical writings. As Tom Rockmore writes: ‘[s]tandard works on the history of analytic philosophy usually devote a few desultory pages to British Idealism’.81 Two of the earliest and most influential works of the history of analysis from this post-war period are Mary Warnock’s Ethics since 1900 (1960), and her husband G. J. Warnock’s English Philosophy since 1900 (1958). Both of these texts bear out the comments made by Rockmore; an opening chapter gives a short and hostile account of idealism (in 15 and 11 pages respectively), culminating in the arrival of Moore who, in G. J. Warnock’s words, subjected idealism to ‘destructive criticism’.82 Mary Warnock speaks of Moore striking ‘the greatest blow’ against idealism.83 After a discussion of Moore’s refutation of idealism, the idealists disappear almost completely from the picture, as the progress of analytic philosophy is laid out in successive chapters. The narrative of these texts is nicely summed up by Ernest Gellner, in a comment on a book by Ayer: ‘[t]his, then, would seem to be the plot of the book – the rescue by two brave knights of British thought’, captured by Hegelian philosophy.84 The knights are Moore and Russell, British thought the damsel in distress, and Hegelian thought, of course, is the dragon. One of the features of these chapters on idealism was the way in which the analytic philosophers emphasized short duration of the period during
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which British thought was in thrall to Hegel. G. J. Warnock pointed to the shallowness of idealist roots: [t]he state of British philosophy in the early years of the present century was itself highly unusual and full of novelty [in its domination by idealism] . . . To see in it a tradition is certainly a mistake. It may possibly have been, as Muirhead twenty years later thought that it still was, in ‘the mainstream of European thought’. But it is unquestionable that it had not been there for very long, and that the mainstream of British thought had run for some centuries in very different channels.85 Idealism was a novelty in Britain. His use of italics emphasizes still further Warnock’s already crystal clear message: they may believe one set of things on the continent, but that is not what we believe in Britain. Warnock, clearly eager to stress the foreignness of idealism, labours the point still further: calling it an ‘exotic’ in England and ‘due primarily to German influences. Bertrand Russell, a major cause of the exotic’s demise, was god-son of John Stuart Mill’.86 There is a restatement here both of the alien – German – nature of idealism, and of the native tradition which Russell, the dragonslayer, restored through his link to John Stuart Mill. Russell himself argued that ‘[t]hroughout the period from Kant to Nietzsche, professional philosophers in Great Britain remained almost completely unaffected by their German contemporaries;’87 while Ayer reassures his readers that the idealists had very little foothold in twentiethcentury British thought: ‘in English-speaking countries there has been throughout the present century an almost complete disregard of the extravagancies of German speculative thought’.88 Between them, Russell and Ayer squeeze the foreign influence into a period that appears to begin around 1890 and to end promptly in the twentieth century. Like Warnock, they also make very clear the origins of this foreign thought – once again, it is German. Idealism appears as no more than a temporary aberration in an otherwise seamless history of British empiricism. Bernard Williams too pointed to the ‘brief’ period of the idealist philosophy’s stay in Britain, and suggested that the influence was now entirely eradicated.89 These claims were bolstered with reference to certain thinkers. Ayer told his readers that even F. H. Bradley himself, despite his idealist credentials, struggled against his better, empiricist, nature. Bradley, he stated, ‘found it difficult entirely to free himself from the legacy of British empiricism’.90 Russell, in similar vein, wrote: ‘gradually Kant and Hegel conquered
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the universities of France and England, so far as their teachers of technical philosophy were concerned. The general educated public, however, was very little affected by this movement, which had few adherents among men of science’.91 Even during its short stay in Britain, then, idealism never really had a firm hold – virtue continued to whisper in the ear of even the most hardened cases (Bradley); while the scientists and ordinary man in the street doughtily ignored the whole movement (I will return to the martial imagery in this passage and its implications shortly). Russell made a similar point about Nietzsche. This is taken from a letter to D. S. Thatcher written towards the end of Russell’s life: I do not think that Nietzsche ever had any important influence in England. I believe that more people in Oxford than Cambridge paid attention to him, but they were not the most able people. I should add that I consistently thought ill of Nietzsche, and I may be biased about his influence, which was certainly considerable in Germany.92 Nietzsche, then, had no real influence in Britain, certainly not in Cambridge, and those Oxfordians who dabbled with him were marked by their lack of intelligence. He was clearly only really attractive to the Germans. This quotation, perhaps, offers an insight into Russell’s order of merit, with Cambridge at the top and Germany at the bottom. It is also very much continuous with the rhetoric of the dismissal of idealist thought – like Hegel, Russell suggests, Nietzsche was not taken seriously in this country – certainly not by the best people. Most of the analysts felt no need to distance British philosophy from Nietzsche, and Russell’s comments here were made as a response to an enquiry, rather than as a part of his published output. This may well be because, while there was a Nietzschean tradition in Great Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not one based in philosophy faculties.93 Idealism, by contrast, was an enemy in the midst. The 1945-generation of analysts continued to reinforce the impression that they had helped to manufacture. Quinton makes the following statement in an essay collection published in 1982: [B]ut the brief interruption of idealism in Britain had no lasting effect on the national tradition of conceiving the philosopher, as, in the word of Locke and the practice of a host of others, an underlabourer to the scientist, or, with Moore and the linguistic philosophers, to the common man.94
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Several decades on, idealism here is still seen as a no more than an interlude in British thought. G. J. Warnock, reflecting back on the immediate post-war period from the vantage point of the 1970s, commented that the (idealist) philosophy practised in 1923 now appears to belong ‘to a philosophically obsolete order of beings’,95 which, by 1948, had ‘effectively vanished’.96 Both Quinton and Warnock, here, address the philosophical past as though the collapse of idealism was an event that they witnessed from a detached and indifferent perspective, rather than as participants in the analytic tradition that helped cause the collapse. As with the analysts’ account of the recovery of their native tradition, it is worth holding some of these historical claims up to scrutiny, in order to get a sense of the purposes and motives for this history writing. What we find, once again, is that the analysts’ historical claims obscure a far more complex history. In this case, their historical claims consistently understate the significance of British idealism – thereby marginalizing that tradition in the history of British philosophy. There is an emerging consensus, at least among historical revisionaries, that the analysts’ dismissal of the intellectual foundations of idealism was over-hasty – an over-haste that fits well into the presumptions made by the analysts about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the tradition. Peter Hylton, for example, has, after a detailed reading of the analytic critique of idealism, concluded that all of Russell and Moore’s criticisms in fact had answers.97 In his Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy (2005), Tom Rockmore suggests that this was because ‘Russell and Moore did not understand the idealism they rejected well enough to form telling objections against it’.98 Rockmore further suggests that, in analytic histories, distinctions between the idealists have been ignored; instead British idealists have served as ‘a lightening rod for criticism of Hegelianism of all kinds’.99 On Rockmore’s reading, the homogenous idealism that is found in analytic histories is created for polemical purposes ‘to designate a view one rejects’.100 While we cannot take a definitive view on this philosophical question, we can, I think, gain a sense of the accuracy of the analysts’ historical claims. What we have seen is a suggestion by the analytic philosophers in the decades immediately after World War II that the idealists bothered British philosophy very briefly, though there is no indication of precisely for how long. The suggestion, though, is that their stay was so short, and their thought so peripheral to the mainstream of British philosophy that they were barely worth considering. This is at best a significant exaggeration of the historical state of affairs. We get some sense of the contestability of this
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history by consulting a partisan for the idealists, H. J. Paton, who wrote the following in 1956 about the situation in the early twentieth century: [S]ome modern writers are apt to speak as if a band of pygmies had been dominated by the gigantic figures of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. This may have been so in the eyes of God; it may even have been so in the eyes of Cambridge . . . For philosophers generally, at least outside Cambridge, Bradley and to a lesser degree Bosanquet were the dominant figures, even to those who opposed them.101 Tom Rockmore takes a similar line to Paton, arguing that Hegelians enjoyed a significant following through at least a quarter of the twentieth century. Bradley, he suggests, was seen as the ‘most significant British Philosopher’ as late as 1924 – a picture at odds with that painted by the analysts.102 There is a first phase and a second phase of analytic history writing. The first phase gives few specifics in terms of chronology, but seeks to give the impression that idealism is finished and out of the way. In later texts by the analysts we see specific dates and events becoming more significant – partly because these thinkers have moved into the role of historians and chroniclers attempting to record the precise nature of events for posterity. So it is that in articles in the 1970s and 1980s we find Quinton making clear historical claims. Here we will look at just one such claim, the importance, for Quinton, as well as Hare and G. J. Warnock, of 1945 as the terminal date for idealism.103 Quinton wrote that by 1945: [i]n Britain the last embers of resistance to analytic philosophy, itself inaugurated at the turn of the century by Russell and Moore in total rejection of British neo-Hegelianism, had been stamped out.104 As an historical claim this is rather suspect. We have already noted the existence of H. J. Paton (a Kantian) in this chapter. I have also mentioned (in a forgettable footnote) G. R. G. Mure. Both were idealists working at Oxford in 1945. J. D. Mabbot, also at Oxford, was strongly influenced by the British Hegelians as was A. D. Lindsay who remained Master of Balliol until 1949 before helping found the University College of North Staffordshire, which later became Keele University.105 Idealists persisted both in Oxford and beyond and they persisted in positions of power. Michael Oakeshott had a debt to Hegel apparent in his Experience and its Modes (1933).106 By 1951 he was Professor of Political Science at the London
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School of Economics.107 I have already mentioned the idealist, J. N. Findlay, who was made professor at King’s College London also in 1951. Another thinker strongly influenced by idealism, Ernest Barker, though he retired from his chair in Cambridge in 1939, continued to publish until the late 1950s.108 Scotland too continued to shelter idealists. Idealism, then, was certainly not eradicated in the universities after 1945. More significantly still, Rée has shown that, of the 340 philosophy books reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement in the 1950s, the number of works that could be classed as ‘idealist’ outnumbered works by analysts, 83 to 66.109 This suggests a completely different picture from the one painted by the second and third generation of analysts in their histories. Idealism was not a tradition which had been ‘stamped out’, though it had certainly been weakened. If we return to the precise text of Quinton’s remarks, we discover that he can be read as making an even stronger claim that ‘in Britain the last embers of resistance to analytic philosophy . . . had been stamped out’.110 As we have seen, it was simply untrue that idealism had been stamped out, let alone all resistance to analytic philosophy. When one adds to that a string of non-idealist thinkers working outside the analytic tradition the list is longer still.111 Quinton seeks to make some accommodation with the facts of the case by commenting that Hegel’s ideas did remain in the area of political philosophy, ‘a field which analytic philosophers avoided’.112 The implication appears to be that the intervention of the analysts in political philosophy would have seen the rapid removal of Hegelian ideas – this implication is reinforced by Quinton’s comment that as a result of the continuing Hegelian influence debates in political philosophy proceeded ‘in the idiom of an earlier age’113 – while the rest of the intellectual world had moved on.114 Finally, 1945 seems a particularly strange date to pick as that on which idealism was ‘stamped out’.115 Adam B. Ulam has argued that NeoHegelianism was an aspect of ‘the philosophical foundations of English socialism’.116 The birth of the NHS and the welfare reforms that preceded it were undertaken under the auspices of men who had been trained in T. H. Green’s school of idealism, men like William Beveridge. Ernest Barker tutored Clement Attlee at Oxford.117 Andrew Vincent writes that ‘[i]t is no exaggeration to say that the majority of those who worked on and supported the early 20th-century welfare state reforms . . . were influenced by . . . [the] culture of civic idealism and social duty’.118 Most of the analytic philosophers, as Quinton subsequently noted, were on the left of politics,119 supporters of the social reforms of the Labour government of 1945 – an interesting and rather problematic relationship for those who wished to
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deny any permanent legacy to the British idealists. Quinton subsequently offered a predictable response, admitting that Green’s disciples were influential in welfare reform, but arguing that the principle of state interference for the common good is an aspect of Green’s thought that did not derive from Hegel and that it was this native principle that founded the British welfare state.120 Hegel was not going to be allowed to take credit for these achievements. If the specific historical claims made later in the twentieth century by Quinton and Warnock, as well as a host of those who followed their lead, were at best only partially true, then the insinuations about the extreme brevity of the spell of idealism which characterized the analysts’ history writing in the 1950s and 1960s are definitely misleading. Once the claim that the idealists were only brief interlopers into British philosophy has been problematized, another aspect of the analysts’ account can be drawn into sharper focus. Rée has asked whether the traditions represented by the British idealists, or even the romantic philosophers, were as alien to Britain as the analysts wished their readers to believe: [a]s a matter of historical record, too, it could be more appropriate to see Britain as the home of idealism, from the Cambridge Platonists through the civic humanists and Coleridge to the Christian idealists led by T. H. Green and their successors in the Royal Institute of Philosophy; or of irrationalism and emotionalism, starting with Duns Scotus, and continuing in Burke, Blake, Carlyle, Ruskin and successive generations of British Nietzscheans.121 Here, then, are two traditions of British metaphysicians and idealists trailing back into history and right up to the present. It suggests the possibility that empiricism does not have a unique claim to the title of, to use Pears’ phrase, ‘the British tradition in philosophy’ (my italics). However, we should not get too carried away with the failings of this analytic history. It is important to acknowledge that they did not paint a wholly inaccurate picture. It is clear that by 1945 the idealists were not the force they had been before World War I. They had lost, rather unluckily in some cases, a substantial number of their most important spokesmen. Bradley, the most prominent idealist of the early twentieth century, died in 1924. He was predeceased by another giant of idealism, Bernard Bosanquet, in 1923. The Cambridge idealist McTaggart died in 1925.122 More significant for our purposes, however, is the cluster of deaths surrounding the Second
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World War. Muirhead, one of the most vocal Hegelians left in England, died on 24 May 1940. Collingwood, the brilliant Oxford idealist, died prematurely in 1943, at the age of 54. Harold Joachim, another of the last influential idealist philosophers at Oxford, died in 1938. This weakening of idealism acknowledged, it still seems reasonable to note that the analysts’ historical claims significantly exaggerate both the weakness of idealism after 1945 and the briefness of the duration of idealist influence over British philosophy. As with the analysts’ characterization of their own tradition as at root British, these exaggerations point towards an attempt to exclude continental philosophy – in this case to exclude idealism – by drastically curtailing its historical significance. This historical account enabled the analysts to characterize themselves as having an exclusive right to British heritage and British tradition. Rée implies that in so doing, the analysts obscured a richer, multifaceted, history of philosophy in this country. In combination with the institutional moves that we saw the analysts make against idealism in the first section of this chapter – the disinclination to engage in dialogue, to read continental, or continentally inspired, texts, to teach continental philosophy – this amounts, I would suggest to a compelling case that what we have here is, as West argues, an ‘active process of forgetting and exclusion’.123
The Idealist Invasion The slanted history and the institutional practices that we’ve been exploring so far indicate a strong desire on the part of the analysts to draw boundaries between themselves and other European philosophical traditions. But it has not yet offered us evidence of a direct relation between this desire for rigid separation and the cultural-political attitudes that we began to canvas in Chapter 1 – beyond the intuitive point that worries about the political vices of the continental tradition were hardly likely to encourage the analysts to embrace that tradition. Here, I will suggest that the attitudes canvassed in the last chapter and the exclusionary practices discussed in this chapter are brought together by the analysts themselves, in the way they write their history. As we will go on to see, the analysts characterized idealism as foreign, invasive and they linked the chronology of idealist philosophical decline in Britain to the world wars – particularly to 1945. Moreover, the analysts conceived of World War II as a war to be fought on an intellectual as well as a military front – a conception which results in the politicising of philosophy. As such, I will suggest, the analysts’ rejection of
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idealism and continental philosophy, and their exclusion of it wherever possible, is intimately tied to their assessment of its political vices. In the last section of this chapter, we saw Russell refer to Kant and Hegel as ‘conquering’ the universities of France and England.124 A significant aspect of the analysts’ charting of the history of idealism is a striking but quite natural transference, in the language used to describe the anti-canon; the philosophy of Hegel has taken on the character of its supposed political manifestations. Hegelianism does not merely lead to aggression; it is, of its nature, aggressive. Russell made an even more striking version of this claim in a radio broadcast: [w]hen I was young the British universities had been invaded by German Idealism, but when the Germans invaded Belgium it was decided that German philosophy must be bad. And so I came into my own, because I was against German philosophy anyhow.125 The idealists are identified, once again, as a characteristically German grouping. The aggression of the philosophy, as such, is of a piece with the aggression recommended by the idealist theory of the state. Their invasion of English philosophy is seen as a piece with the German army’s invasion of Belgium – a martial philosophy with the values of a martial people. Russell was not alone in seeing matters in this fashion. The supposed aggression of idealism was summed up by G. J. Warnock in 1958: ‘idealism appeared suddenly and violently in this country’.126 Elsewhere in the same book he refers to ‘the incursion of German Idealism’.127 Twenty years later, the analysts were still deploying the same metaphors. Quinton wrote in 1982 of the ‘rapid conquest of the British mind’ by idealism.128 In 1978, Mary Warnock brought out the monstrous element of idealism; she describes English philosophy as lacking a life of its own during the second half of the nineteenth century: ‘[t]he huge and powerful tentacles of German idealism left little room for private enterprise and less will to resist’.129 Here we see the German idealist as an occupying leviathan, its tentacles choking out independent thought. There may also be hint here of the language of the Cold War – it is private enterprise that is choked by the tentacles of idealism, the characteristic behaviour of the Western capitalist.130 By the 1970s, the analytic philosophers begin to offer timescales for the collapse of idealism and we find another link being drawn between military and philosophical victories and defeats. Quinton, following Russell, argued that idealism was discredited by World War I:
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Bosanquet’s book [Philosophical Theory of the State] remained the standard text of academic political theory until the 1914 war brought it doubly into discredit: for the German origins of its ideas and for the somewhat bonelessly optimistic compliance with the verdict of history. In general, idealistic philosophy came to be seen as a disreputable verbal device which provided a metaphysical justification for whatever distribution of power happened to exist . . . 131 Quinton implies that the military conflict begun in 1914 showed idealist philosophy in its true colours – as a justification for the excesses of power.132 While he also sees 1925 as a significant date in the collapse of idealism,133 Quinton highlights the significance of 1945 as the nadir of Hegel’s reputation in Britain: Hegel’s reputation in the English-speaking world was at its lowest ebb in 1945. That was the year of Russell’s History of Western Philosophy with its genially dismissive treatment of Hegel, and of the stormy invective of the Hegel chapter in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies. In Britain the last embers of resistance to analytic philosophy, itself inaugurated at the turn of the century by Russell and Moore in total rejection of British neo-Hegelianism, had been stamped out.134 Hare and G. J. Warnock concur with Quinton’s final suggestion, that 1945 was the most significant moment in the collapse of idealism. Hare describes the idealist ‘old guard’ as being ‘routed’ under Ryle’s leadership.135 Here we have a striking congruence between the chronology of the war in Europe and the battle between British analysis and German philosophy. Major Ryle of the Welsh Guards, demobbed from the army in 1945, returns to symbolically finish off his stricken idealist foe. The fates and characteristics of idealism and its nation-of-origin are tied together – the allied conquest of Berlin spelling not only the end of Hitler, but the refutation in practice of the idealist philosophy. G. J. Warnock wrote of the collapse of idealism: ‘[i]t seems likely that the war had a good deal to do with it. In the 1920s and 1930s radically different species of philosophy had co-existed in this country . . . after the six years’ near-moratorium that began in 1939, it was to be found that only one of these species had effectively survived’.136 Maybe we can detect here too a suggestion that the idealists’ fate was in some way tied to the fate of the Nazi state that was the practical exposition of their thought? As we have noted, the analysts were not without their philosophical reasons for pointing to
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1945 as the moment that Hegelian philosophy was ‘stamped out’ in Britain, but the parallels in the two chronologies are striking. The significance of 1945 in this intellectual warfare has another side to it. While in retreat from British soil, German ideas were doing better elsewhere. Quinton wrote that: [t]he German army was finally defeated in 1918 and 1945, but German ways of thought, in a particularly wanton and delirious form, have conquered French intellectual life. Its pantheon consists of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger with Nietzsche as the presiding deity. The outcome is a bacchanalian revel of paradox and oracular chatter.137 The French, lacking resilience on the intellectual as well as on the military front, succumbed to Heidegger and his master Hegel. Such an association between French and German thought after 1945 paved the way for the broad brush label ‘continental philosophy’ – based on the belief that the two other great philosophical nations of western Europe were preaching the same faith.138 Ayer, who did the pioneering work on existentialism in Britain, also clearly believed that behind it lay a familiar enemy. He commented in 1959 that ‘[t]he ascendancy of Germany over France in this respect is especially remarkable’.139 Later, he was more explicit, referring to ‘the subservience, since the war, of French to German philosophy’140 and he was keen to point out that Heidegger remained popular in Germany despite his ‘encomia of Hitler. Whether they understood him, whether indeed, there was anything to understand is a question I shall not pursue here’.141 Heidegger was a living vindication of the analysts’ assumptions about the anti-canon, a philosopher in the post-Kantian tradition, who became a card-carrying member of the Nazi party. Though I cannot go fully into this point here, understanding the analysts’ belief in the link between French existentialism, through Heidegger, and the anti-canon is important in understanding the extreme hostility with which Sartre and his ilk were greeted by post-war British philosophers. The treatment of the existentialists is, in tone and content, remarkably similar to the treatment of the preNazi anti-canon. This of course is entirely consistent with Quinton’s claim, echoed, as we have seen by Ayer, but also by Hare and Berlin, that French existentialism was essentially a German beast.142 As far as the analytic philosophers were concerned, the Maginot line proved far less effective than the English Channel in repelling the military and cultural force of the German nation.
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The British, however, weren’t entirely impervious and the impression that French existentialism was simply a continuation of the dangerous proto-fascist anti-canon must have been helped by the intellectual path of the British existentialist, Colin Wilson. Wilson’s The Outsider was a huge success, and drew widely on continental philosophy.143 After The Outsider, Wilson’s thought took on increasingly fascist dimensions. Alan Sinfield recounts that: Wilson and his friends actually thought about carrying forward their ideas of freedom by founding a neo-fascist political party, based on Wilson’s belief that ‘effective political power ought to be in the hands of the five per cent minority who were equipped to use it’; they had a meeting with Sir Oswald Mosley.144 This must have come as little surprise to the analysts, and cemented their belief not only in the political dangers of the anti-canon, but in the relationship between the nineteenth-century anti-canon and the modern existentialist school with which Wilson was identified. What we have here, then, is a relationship on two levels: first the idealists themselves are seen as a foreign invasion force; second, the chronology of the decline of idealism is mapped onto the chronology of wars perpetuated by the nation – Germany – with which idealism is most strongly identified. This characterization of idealism by the analysts must, surely, be read as continuous with the attitudes we examined in the last chapter, about the politically dangerous qualities of this German and German-inspired philosophy.
World War II as a war of ideas There is a further dimension to this mapping of philosophical conflict onto military conflict. There was, both before and during the Second World War, a sense that it was, in part, a war of ideas. Viscount Samuel, President of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (but not an analytic philosopher), eloquently stated the position in 1945: [U]nquestionably the European and world cataclysm through which we have just passed was in essence a War of Ideas – the outcome of Fascist and Nazi philosophy. We might have said with Burke, ‘It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war’.145
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Joad deployed similar imagery in his For Civilization (1940).146 The analysts too shared a sense of the Second World War as a battle between two rival visions of human life. Monk reports of Russell that ‘[a] recurring theme in his correspondence at this time [the 1940s] was that Europe, in destroying the civilization it had built up over the centuries, was heading back to the Middle Ages . . . The Nazi Soviet pact, he thought, made it clear that the war was one of ideology, a fight between liberalism and various forms of totalitarianism’.147 Hare described the war as ‘a conflict of ideals between Nazism and democracy’148 Ryle in his review of the Open Society, commented on Popper’s view of Hegel: ‘[i]t is right that he should feel passionately. The survival of liberal ideas and liberal practices has been and still is in jeopardy’.149 Here Hegel is represented as a direct threat to liberal values, which the British nation is seeking to defend. Such a view of the war opened up a new front, an intellectual front, and with it new possibilities both for victory and defeat. A nation may lose the military struggle, yet win the battle of ideas, or vice versa. Such a possibility gives philosophers themselves an important role in the war effort – that of winning the battle of ideas. Berlin wrote that Heinrich Heine prophesied that the romantic faith of Fichte and Schelling would one day be turned, with terrible effect, by their fanatical German followers, against the liberal culture of the West. The facts have not wholly belied this prediction; but if professors can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers (and not governments or Congressional committees), can alone disarm them?150 Hare makes similar claims in the 1950s and 1960s,151 and, as we will see in Chapter 4, actually went to Germany to further the intellectual critique of fascist philosophy. Significant too in this regard is Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. It was written in the 1940s, during Russell’s exile in America – and was already in process when he sent a letter to Gilbert Murray on 9 April 1943 in which he wrote, ‘I should be quite willing to do government propaganda as my views on this war are quite orthodox’.152 Russell, then, was quite willing to fight the good fight with his pen. The History of Western Philosophy can be read in this light. It contains a critique of Hegel and anticanon thought as hostile as that in Popper’s Open Society and its Enemies (though less intense). Indeed, Russell explicitly equated the argument of his History and the more openly polemical treatment of the anti-canon provided by Popper. In ‘Philosophy and Politics’ (1950), Russell makes reference to Popper’s critique of Hegel and Plato, and references The Open Society. In the same footnote he comments ‘[t]he same thesis is maintained
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in my History of Western Philosophy’ – i.e. the thesis on the totalitarian nature of Plato and Hegel’s thought.153 This offers new light on Russell’s History – as a text with a clear political purpose, akin to that of Popper’s. Popper described the attack on totalitarian thought made in his Open Society and The Poverty of Historicism as his ‘war work’154; his contribution to the battle against fascism. It seems possible, and indeed potentially fruitful, to read Russell’s approach to the anti-canon in the History in the same light. However, while the analysts clearly did subscribe to the notion that World War II was a battle of ideas, it would be wrong to approach their writings on the anti-canon with the view that the analysts are waging an intellectual war. Rather, for the analysts, this was a war of ideas that had already been won. The vast majority of the material on the anti-canon comes after 1945. Russell’s pre-1945 work is, to this extent, exceptional. Despite Ryle’s comment in 1947 to the effect that liberalism remains in danger from Hegelian thought, there is no sense that this is a genuine fear among the analysts. There were no dramatic moves from Ryle consistent with a belief in imminent danger from continental philosophy. Neither did Berlin, despite arguing that philosophers can disarm dangerous foreign thought, make any wider comments on this. His 1950 lectures on ‘Freedom and Its Betrayal’ delivered on the Third Programme clearly did have a political purpose consistent with the view of World War II as a war of ideas. But if this was a serious fear, one would expect a barrage of anti-Hegelian material from the analysts. What we see is a trickle. This is not all hands to the pumps, this is mopping up. The military war was over, there was a certain amount of re-education to be done, and Hare’s lecture tours of Germany are consistent with this, as is Berlin’s pointing out the origins of Europe’s woes in ‘Freedom and Its Betrayal’. Hegel was being eradicated from Germany by the occupying British forces;155 and he had been intellectually refuted long years ago by Russell and Moore. 1945 represented the point of victory for the analysts, both politically and philosophically. The post-war approach of the analysts was consistent with cementing this victory, not with fighting the war.
Conclusion I would like to make four points by way of conclusion to this chapter.
Culture, politics and philosophy fuse What we have seen in this chapter is an active process of forgetting and exclusion, directed specifically at the idealists, but also against continental
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philosophy more widely. This process was tightly bound up with the analysts’ cultural-political assumptions. At one, basic, level, this is apparent from the fact that the texts in which the analysts seek to exclude the idealists are very often the same texts as those which characterize them as invasive and aggressive. Indeed, the characterization of the idealists and foreign and militaristic is itself a part of the process of exclusion. The cultural attitudes and claims are a part of this philosophical project. As we have seen, the history of analytic philosophy was written by the analysts so as to draw sharp lines between British philosophy and foreign, particularly German, philosophy – lines which were rather sharper in the analysts’ account than they were in reality. This is part of their characterization of the divide between philosophical schools as a divide between nations. Continuous with this, their mode of interaction is conceived of as one school invading the sovereign national territory of the other. Moreover, the analysts’ narrative of the decline of idealism mapped neatly onto the two world wars perpetrated by its nation-of-origin – Germany. As well as emphasizing the nationalist prism through which the analysts saw philosophy in this period, this evidence also links the analysts’ writing of the history of ‘strictly’ philosophical matters, to their attitudes about the political culpability of post-Kantian thought for Nazism canvassed in the last chapter. Hegelian thought is an aggressive, invasive, philosophy, on a par with its political disciples, the Nazis. The end of this philosophy comes, as we have seen, with the defeat of Hitler. It is significant in this respect that analysts who did not explicitly link Hegelianism to Nazism, like Mary and Geoffrey Warnock, participated in history writing that is underpinned by an assumption that Hegelian philosophy is aggressive.156 We have also seen the idea of World War II as a war of ideas between philosophical schools, as well as between armies. Such an image brings together the notion of national traditions in philosophy, with the particular forms of government: idealist vs empiricist, tyranny vs democracy, Germany vs Britain. We will see more evidence for this pattern of thought among the analysts as we go. What we should note here, however, is that this suggests that on the analysts’ understanding there is no cordon sanitaire between strictly philosophical ideas and cultural-political ones. The identification between epistemology, nation and politics shatters this barrier. Again, as in the last chapter, there are some rather ironic Hegelian echoes in this analytic history writing. Their confidence in the idea of the nation as the repository of a philosophy, which we seem to find in their view of their own heritage, and of German thought, is one that fits far better into a Hegelian worldview, which allows the state to have a uniting spirit, than it
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does into empiricism, which would not concede anything so metaphysical, as Rée has noted: The Oxford philosophers’ confidence in the category of ‘British Empiricism’ is surprising in many ways. As a theoretical proposal the very idea of philosophical national character is, one might have thought, compromised by dubious presuppositions of a metaphysical, idealist and Hegelian kind.157 For Rée, the construction of a philosophical national character appears to have assumptions taken from the very philosophy that the analysts claimed to have purged. History writing as a political project What the foregoing considerations suggest is that for the analysts the act of writing history was political, both in the broad sense of being informed by a wider public political climate – which concerned itself with wars, ideologies and so on – and in the narrow sense of seeking to establish hegemony within their chosen academic discipline. I want to briefly discuss this latter respect in which the analysts’ histories are political, in order to point to the significance of the fact that these appear to be histories of progress, both in philosophy and morality, and to further note that such an historical picture looks itself to contain assumptions of a fundamentally Hegelian kind. As we saw in the first half of this chapter, the writing of history allowed the analysts to cement their position within academic philosophy in Britain. By finding allies in the history of philosophy by publishing, as Ayer did, selected texts from their empirical ancestors, the analysts could portray the history of British philosophy as a path culminating in themselves.158 It is significant in this respect that the terminal chapter in Russell’s 800-page History of Western Philosophy is also the culmination of the book, describing, as it does, the discovery of a philosophical method that could finally and reliably provide philosophical knowledge: I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods that it must be sought; I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble.159 Starting from the ancients, Russell’s text marches towards the present, handing out gongs and wooden spoons as it goes, culminating in the very
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last of its 31 chapters with Russell himself and his ‘modern analytic empiricism’.160 Dudley Knowles has written that Hegel’s prescription for the history of philosophy was that it should be an attempt to show ‘how and when the truth dawned, and, along the way criticizing a multitude of false and one sided views’.161 This could be the methodological prospectus for Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. This Hegelian-tinged view of the historical process, as a progress towards the present, is a feature of the analysts’ history writing. Further, by reading past philosophers as proto-analytic philosophers as, for example, Ayer sought to do in Language Truth and Logic, the historical nature of philosophy itself can be reconstructed so as to demonstrate that, far from being historically unusual, analytic philosophy was the perennial form of philosophy when it was undertaken properly. The analysts could therefore claim both that they had performed a philosophical revolution and that this revolution was one which finally revealed the true nature of philosophy for all to see – a claim that bears more than a passing resemblance to Hegel’s famous dictum: ‘the rational is actual, the actual is rational’. In these analytic histories this was a progress not only in philosophical method, but also in virtue. In a very significant assessment of G. J. Warnock’s English Philosophy since 1900, B. A. O. Williams (not to be confused with Bernard Williams) writes as follows: [i]t has the basic straightforwardness of a moral tale. At the start we are presented with a macabre picture of British Idealism, intellectually corrupt, fraudulent, staggering to its end in delusions of grandeur. Coming from foreign places, its rule was never more than the tyranny of occupation; and the rise of the hero, Moore, to drive it out is an affirmation not only of the light against the dark but of the native against the exotic. In the ensuing struggles, Moore had his allies, not always reliable: Russell, brave but unsteady; Positivism, secretly in love with the metaphysical enemy. The epic of Wittgenstein is also told, not without a slight sense of strain at having to take so extravagant a theory so seriously. With Ryle, victorious peace is almost achieved and the story ends with Common Sense again on the throne and the citizens of Oxford, calm but not idle, earning the unambitious rewards for honest toil.162 Here Williams conveys with tremendous power and insight that moral arc of Warnock’s text. Here we see the march of progress and reason through the history of philosophy, culminating in the glorious present of post-war Oxford, the travails over, the end of history finally reached. The idealists, foreign and fraudulent (a claim to which we will return), were driven out by
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Moore and his allies. This was a methodological and a moral victory, as well as a victory of the native over the foreign. This unity of the movement of history with moral development, the passage from worse to better, is yet another aspect of the analysts’ history writing that has strong Hegelian echoes.
History writing and institutional control It is worth making explicit, though it is not a terribly profound point, that the institutional moves against the anti-canon – not teaching their texts, avoiding dialogue, etc. – that we canvassed at the top of this chapter can also be read as part of the analytic construction of history. The institutional moves helped to bring the historical claims the analysts made about the marginality of the idealists closer to reality. As such, their history writing was at least in part a blueprint or manifesto for British philosophy, rather than simply providing an account of past philosophical events. Idealist philosophy and philosophers were marginalized both institutionally and historically. They were ignored in the present, and efforts were made to ensure they would be forgotten in the future. Peter Strawson commented that the heat has often gone out of a revolutionary movement when it begins to write its own history.163 This might indeed explain the cluster of histories written by the Oxford analysts in the second half of the 1950s and into the 1960s. The golden age of ordinary language philosophy was, by 1955, a decade old, within five years it would be over, on most accounts. The writing of history was, for the analysts, what it is for many movements, intellectual and otherwise, which have taken a degree of institutional control. It was an exercise in cementing that control, in providing textbooks for the spreading of its gospel, and authorized accounts of how the previous governors were superseded. The process took on a more important purpose and a more openly polemical form because of the perceived seriousness of the matter in hand. The generation immediately preceding the analysts, and much of the preceding century, was dominated by the strange, the exotic and the politically dangerous. A history purged of these philosophical and political sinners was itself an exercise in the restoration of virtue. There was clearly, then, a strong ideological dimension to the historical narrative the analysts offered to the world in the 1950s and 1960s. As Tom Rockmore has put it: [A]ll history, including the history of philosophy, is written by the victors. English language analytic philosophy was the clear victor in the battle against British Idealism.164
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This is important; when history books record the collapse of British idealism it is often overlooked that this was the result, in part, of an active campaign against idealist philosophy on the part of the analysts, on various fronts, the institutional, the historical, the philosophical. It is an indication of the measure of the victory of the analysts that Rockmore goes on to characterize the twenty-first-century view of British idealism in the following terms: British Idealism . . . now appears like a mere foreign body in the midst of the great British philosophical tradition to which it never really belonged, and upon which it thrust itself.165 The analysts’ historical and institutional attack on idealism was largely successful. Rockmore captures many of the significant dimensions of the analysts’ view, the foreignness of its origins, its imposition on British philosophy. That Rockmore argues this characterization of the history of idealism was still current in 2005 is a testament to the power and dominance of this partial and ideological analytic history of British philosophy.
The analytic history in context Finally in this chapter I want to briefly place the attitudes we’ve canvassed on the part of the analysts into their historical context. The analysts found themselves writing about the history of philosophy in the aftermath of the most bloody half-century in European history. Their desire to separate themselves intellectually from the disaster zone of mainland Europe is neither surprising nor outrageous. As Stefan Collini has pointed out, the drawing of hard lines between continent and island was a common desire after World War II. He quotes David Ogg writing in 1947: ‘[t]hat the Channel divides us from a different mentality is an assertion which would find greater credence now than it would have done ten years ago’.166 This view itself could not be described as baseless. Even those European countries which had not directly given birth to fascist governments had suffered occupation and half a decade or more of propaganda and indoctrination. The British may, quite understandably, have asked themselves two questions: to what extent does Europe’s succumbing to Nazism reveal something about the European character? and to what extent has the European character been (further) corrupted by occupation? These doubts are summed up by Brian Appleyard:
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[t]he idea of the foreign presented them all with a complex problem. Six years of war, during most of which the continent had been enemy territory, had strengthened the sense of isolation from Europe.167 Continental Europe represented a complex web of conceptual problems, good Germans, bad Germans, French resistors, French collaborators, those who did nothing, those who did too much. A similar series of problems would have presented in detaching the intellectually pure from the intellectually corrupt – particularly difficult for the analysts who clearly felt that so much of continental philosophy would require forensic screening for traces of fascism. The desire to simply keep all that moral, intellectual and ideological mess firmly at arms length was a perfectly natural one, especially, if one has a native tradition to fall back on which, as we have seen, the analysts believed that they had. However, the war itself did no more than enhance an already existing series of tendencies. The important assumptions underpinning the analysts’ desire for intellectual self-sufficiency were in place long before the outbreak of World War II. The return to Hume, with its attendant assumptions about the paucity of post-Kantian thought was well under way in the 1930s. The political critique of German philosophy was, as we saw, very clearly a feature of Russell’s work in the 1930s and, further back, of the debates surrounding World War I. The Second World War simply added further momentum to pre-existing assumptions.
Chapter 3
Philosophical Method: Virtue vs Vice
‘Locke was the spokesman of Common Sense’. Almost without thinking I retorted impatiently, ‘I think Locke invented Common Sense’. To which Russell rejoined, ‘By God, Ryle, I believe you are right. No one ever had Common Sense before John Locke – and no-one but Englishmen have ever had it since.’ 1 (Gilbert Ryle in conversation with Bertrand Russell 1965) I shall suggest that philosophy, if it is bad philosophy, may be dangerous, and therefore deserves that degree of negative respect which we accord to lightning and tigers.2 (Bertrand Russell 1950) We saw in the last chapter how the analysts used history to distance themselves from the continental tradition, and to characterize the latter as a foreign and invasive. These moves already suggest one of the principal contentions of this chapter, namely that for the analytic philosophers, the identification and condemnation of an anti-canon of continental philosophers served a definitional purpose. It gave them a shadow against which they could define themselves as the light. This idea about the analysts’ process of identity formation is not a new one. In ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’ Jonathan Rée writes: [n]evertheless, the concept of British Empiricism was called on to do a task which was of considerable importance to the Oxford philosophers. In enabled them to define themselves in contrast with a hated rival, which came to be known, in the course of the decade, by the title of ‘continental philosophy’. Continental philosophy, to the Oxfordians, was the epitome of the intellectual habits that their revolution was meant to eradicate: excessive, interest in the history of philosophy, failure to respect the gap between philosophy and science, and above all a self-indulgent use of language. The continentals, it was insinuated, followed fashions, not
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arguments, and if literary intellectuals were attracted to them, this was only because of their skin-deep sex appeal.3 In this characterization of the way in which the Oxford analysts defined themselves against the continentals, Rée touches on the second significant strand of this chapter. Rée’s account of the analysts’ contrast between themselves and the continentals blends the philosophical and the more broadly cultural – the continentals were too interested in the history of philosophy, which arguably is a ‘strictly’ philosophical problem, but they were also self-indulgent and fashion-conscious, which appear to be rather broader cultural objections. This chapter seeks to take this insight further, and demonstrate the interdependence of the analysts’ philosophical and cultural dislike of the continentals, and the inter-relation of the philosophical and cultural components in the identity positions constructed by the analysts. One significant part of this wider cultural construction of identity is the link drawn by the analytic philosophers between politically suspect philosophy and philosophically suspect philosophy. For the analysts, the anti-canon are not simply philosophers whose ideas have issued in bad political outcomes, they are bad philosophers whose ideas have issued in bad political outcomes. There is a constant, though not often explicit, invitation to draw the conceptual link and believe the anti-canon’s political ideas to be evil because they were such poor philosophers. The dangers, however, are also personal – anti-canon philosophy involves a seduction by, often violent, emotional forces. Russell, as was his way, encapsulates these fears in the quotation that heads this chapter: ‘philosophy, if it is bad philosophy, may be dangerous’. This chapter is divided into three sections. Section One looks at metaphysics and its relationship with character in the writing of the analysts. The contrast is drawn between the metaphysical anti-canon and the antimetaphysical analysts, and between the weak characters of the anti-canon, which lead them into metaphysical speculation, and the strong characters of the analysts, which allow them to escape it. Section Two focuses on two related aspects of the analytic critique of anti-canon methodology – its irrationality, and its irrationalism. Here the character and motives of the continentals are again under scrutiny, as the analysts ask whether their philosophical incompetence is innocent or sinister and identify the motives lurking behind the continentals’ indulgence in bad arguments and obscurity of prose. In this section we also note the great wealth of imagery deployed by the analysts linking continental philosophy with the irrational, before looking at the way in which these ideas fold neatly into accusations
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of political vice – specifically, the recurrence of the accusations of Nazism against the continentals. Section Three returns to the nationalist dimensions of this process of identity formation – reflecting on a connection which will have been clear throughout – between canon/anti-canon and British/foreign.
Metaphysics It is, perhaps, the most familiar accusation against ‘continental philosophers’ that they believe in something called ‘metaphysics’, while analytic philosophers do not. Such a claim was common among the analysts of this period. In 1958, G. J. Warnock described idealist philosophy as ‘highly and ambitiously metaphysical’.4 In 1946, Russell uses metaphysics as one of the characteristics with which to distinguish the British from the continental school of philosophy;5 indeed, Tom Rockmore has argued that the only unchanging element of Russell’s condemnation of Hegel was that Hegel is a metaphysician.6 Stuart Hampshire argued that the empiricist and formal logical streams of analytic philosophy were bound together in being ‘equally designed to exclude metaphysical speculation and metaphysical interpretations’.7 Other analysts were keen to trace the anti-metaphysical credentials of their philosophical ancestors. Russell claimed that the great British empiricist Locke ‘is, as a rule contemptuous of metaphysics . . .’8 while ‘Hume – in whom the new philosophy comes to completion – rejected metaphysics entirely . . . This view persisted in the empirical school’.9 Mary Warnock went further, seeking to give the impression (in a direct parallel to the claims made about the extermination of idealism) that metaphysics had been alien to this country since the turn of the twentieth century. In 1960, she wrote: ‘[a]fter the publication of Principia Ethica, the climate, in England, was on the whole unfavourable to metaphysical speculation’.10 She gave Moore, the author of the Principia, credit for this change of climate. Metaphysics was eradicated, she suggested, not due to the argument of the Principia, but the method of its approach. She reiterates a variation on this claim a hundred pages later: ‘[s]ince 1900, both here and in the United States, metaphysics has been virtually dead’.11 A. J. Ayer sought to make a similar claim, emphasizing that while the British Hegelians undertook metaphysics, this was highly unusual in Britain: British Hegelians . . . committed themselves to metaphysics in a way that the British philosophers have fought shy of, both before and since. That the present century has seen a return to the older and sounder
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empiricist tradition, and its development in more rigorous form, is very largely due to the work of Bertrand Russell . . . 12 Here we have our first concrete indication of the lines the analytic philosophers sought to draw. Already in this quotation we have the alliance made between continental Hegelian philosophy and metaphysics; and between Britain, empiricism, ‘soundness’ and ‘rigour’. Ayer is perhaps the most famous of the British anti-metaphysicians. His ‘Demonstration of the Impossibility of Metaphysics’ (1934) was an application of Viennese logical positivism, and attempted to do exactly what its title suggests, dismiss the possibility of all metaphysical speculation.13 Logical positivism, as introduced to Britain by Ayer in the 1930s, is an important moment in the critique of continental philosophy: it provided the British analysts with a powerful, destructive, polemical tool. While the Vienna circle were clearly not directly a part of the British analytic philosophical scene, they were, and were recognized to be, disciples of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. H. Stuart Hughes has described the Vienna circle as Russell’s ‘most coherent band of disciples’.14 Not only were the Vienna circle empiricists manqué, they shared the British analysts’ intense hostility to the German philosophical tradition. Herbert Feigl, a member of the circle, made this very clear: [r]enewed emphasis [on philosophy as the handmaiden of science] was urgently needed, especially in the German countries that had not yet recovered from the intellectual debaucheries of the post-Kantian romantic metaphysicians . . . [it was] a reaction against the high-flown pretentious verbiage of metaphysical speculation.15 The mission of Vienna circle – the destruction of the post-Kantian tradition in German thought – was the same as that of the analysts. The philosophical structures in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus gave them the tools they needed ‘to sweep into limbo . . . all metaphysical philosophy in the Hegelian tradition’.16 And indeed this was precisely the effect that Ayer believed that his Language, Truth and Logic achieved: ‘[i]ts main effect, especially in England, has been to curb any indulgence in speculative metaphysics’.17 The Vienna circle, then, were seen, certainly by Ayer and Russell, as allies of the British empiricists. There is any number of works on analytic philosophy summarizing the philosophical grounds on which logical positivism attacks metaphysics – and I will not add to them here.18 But the potential of Language Truth and Logic to damage the anti-canon, through its attack on the supposed
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metaphysical roots of anti-canon philosophy, can partly account for its initial popularity among the analysts in Britain. It furthered an antimetaphysical project that Russell had been pursuing for a decade and that Ryle had joined with his ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’.19 Isaiah Berlin, a close friend of Ayer, took a shine to logical positivism and, writing for The Criterion in 1937, made clear that: ‘he particularly approved of its attack on what he called “the vaporous clouds of nonsense” in German philosophy’,20 even more directly: ‘[i]t got rid of a lot of clouds of Hegelianism which were no good . . .’21 The target, then, was clear for the analysts to see. Significantly, although logical positivism rapidly lost support among philosophers (Berlin, for example, saw it as leading to a ‘cul-de-sac’22), its anti-metaphysical aspect influenced the post-war linguistic analysts. R. M. Hare indicated in 1960 that, although logical positivism was not slavishly adhered to, nevertheless it formed the thinking of post-war Oxford in important respects: [t]he Vienna Circle made certain, apparently very damaging, criticisms of the kind of philosophy that was current in their day. In Oxford, and in England generally, we have taken those criticisms seriously and have, indeed, produced a whole new way of doing philosophy in the course of finding answers to them.23 While much has been made of the differences between logical positivism and the post-war Oxford linguistic analysts, in this case they were at one, as Rée has pointed out. ‘Like the Logical Positivists, the Oxford philosophers were united by a conviction that “traditional metaphysics” was thoroughly misconceived’.24 All major stripes of analytic opinion – Ayer, Russell, the Oxford philosophers – were signed up to the anti-metaphysical temperance movement. Among the names we have not yet mentioned, this included J. L. Austin,25 and Peter Strawson.26 In his last philosophical essay, Berlin claimed: ‘I have never believed in any metaphysical truths’.27 Towards the end of the 1950s, metaphysics, in a particularly circumscribed form, made a comeback among the analysts. Strawson’s Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959) and Hampshire’s Thought and Action (1959), together with a revisionary symposium on the subject, later published as a book,28 all demonstrated this loosening up of approach. However, even during this period, it was emphasized that the return of metaphysics was clearly not a return to the meaningless and dangerous German thought of the past. Hare conveyed this attitude, insisting that Oxfordians do after all
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accept metaphysics, ‘[w]e insist only on distinguishing between serious metaphysical inquiry and verbiage disguised as such’.29 He elaborated further on this, along lines that will by now be familiar: we have seen what monstrous philosophical edifices have been created by slipping, surreptitiously, from the ordinary uses of words to extraordinary uses which are never explained . . . nothing pleases us so much as to sit back and have a German metaphysician explain to us, if he can, how he is going to get his metaphysical system started. And as he is usually unable to do this, the discussion never gets on to what he thinks of as the meat of the theory.30 So, even with the tentative return to metaphysics in 1960, it is explicit that this is not a return to German metaphysics, to ‘monstrous’ philosophy – whatever vices may be implied in that term. In contrast to the continental philosophers’ fondness for the outmoded and failed techniques of metaphysics, the analysts asserted their own post-metaphysical mode of philosophy. A significant moment in the furthering of this new methodology came with the founding of journal Analysis in 1933, with A. Duncan Jones as editor, assisted by L. S. Stebbing, C. A. Mace and Ryle. It was the vehicle for the new kind of philosophy, taking Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus as its handbook. The aim was to produce short arguments on closely defined questions, ‘[i]nstead of long, very general and abstract metaphysical speculations about possible facts or about the world as a whole’.31 As the eminent historian of analytic philosophy, John Passmore, makes clear, such an approach was in part a response to Russell’s call for ‘piecemeal investigations’.32 The scope of philosophy then was to be narrowed and focused on small specific, solvable problems. It was, as the quotations indicate, explicitly anti-metaphysical in form. This setting up of analysis in direct opposition to the idea of philosophy as metaphysics is explained by Passmore: [o]nce we reject philosophy’s claim to be a purveyor of metaphysical truths, we see, Ayer argues, that its real function is analysis – the function that Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Russell had principally exercised.33 Russell elaborates on this contrast between the scope of metaphysical and analytic philosophy in his History of Western Philosophy. Modern analysis aims ‘to combine empiricism with an interest in the deductive parts of human knowledge. The aims of this school are less spectacular than those of most
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philosophers in the past, but some of its achievements are as solid as those of the men of science’.34 What we see here is a clear contrast emerging between the analysts, with their small scale, unspectacular but methodologically sound philosophical investigations, and the metaphysicians – and we have seen German philosophers and their followers picked out here – who are engaging in an illegitimate philosophical activity. Metaphysics and character This contrast between the metaphysical and non-metaphysical philosopher was not, however, a simply philosophical one. Subscription to metaphysics was a symptom of a far more worrying malady: it revealed a fundamental weakness in the character of the philosopher, a weakness which had potentially very serious philosophical implications. The analysts took the continental philosophers’ continued subscription to metaphysics as a sign of various concealed vices: weak character; philosophical incompetence; and a desire to use the obscurity of metaphysics to deceive the unwary. Of these, we will deal with the first here, and return to the other two in the second section of this chapter. Some of the analysts, notably Russell and Berlin, drew a link between subscription to metaphysics and emotional need. They argued that the continental tradition represented a ‘revolt against reason’. This took the form of various claims; the one we will focus on here is the claim that anti-canon thinkers turned against reason because it could not provide consolation for the miseries of life. We will see that, for the analysts, subscription to metaphysics was a measure of the weakness of one’s character. Those who could not face the world as it is turned to metaphysics for quasi-religious consolation – inevitably derogating from any commitment to truth in so doing. Those, like the analysts, with stronger stomachs, had no need for such transcendental consolation. Russell traced the origins of the revolt against reason back to Kant and Rousseau. Neither was able to cope with the implications of Hume’s philosophy.35 Rousseau’s response was straightforwardly to deny the power of reason to solve mankind’s problems and to embrace the emotions as a truer guide to life.36 Kant, highly influenced by Rousseau, was unable to reconcile himself to Hume, nor was he prepared to give up reason. He sought another way to safeguard the existence of a moral law, which he felt Hume had undermined. This caused Kant to ‘invent’ a distinction between pure and practical reason to safeguard ethics.37 This, according to Russell,
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was a distinction between that which could be proved (pure reason) and what was necessary for virtue (practical reason). This was not a move for which Russell had any sympathy: ‘[i]t is of course obvious that ‘pure’ reason is simply reason, while ‘practical’ reason was prejudice’.38 On Russell’s analysis, Kant had instituted covertly what Rousseau had explicitly: the elevation his own desires, emotions and prejudices to the level of absolutes. The outcome is sweeping: ‘as a result of his [Kant’s] teaching . . . German philosophy became anti-rational’.39 This reintroduction of an authority beyond reason is, for Russell, the moment that the modern revolt against reason begins. It was this revolt that issued directly in the epistemological subjectivism – the belief one can remake the world according to one’s desires – and which we saw both Russell and Berlin condemning in Chapter 1 as leading to fascism. So, as Russell tells the story, in the face of Hume’s conclusions Kant and, following him, other continental philosophers abandoned reason and set a new standard of philosophical veracity, compliance with their own desires. [Kant’s] fundamental desires were two: he wanted to be sure of an invariable routine and he wanted to believe the moral maxims that he had learned in infancy.40 Kant’s goal was not truth, but the ‘comfort’ of a solution to his problem.41 Meanwhile, Hegel, like many philosophers, was ‘constitutionally timid and dislike[d] the unexpected’ so he ‘invented’ a theory to make the future calculable and predictable, a philosophy which: ‘satisfied the instincts of philosophers more fully than any of its predecessors’.42 Russell compares the consolation offered by Hegelian philosophy to that offered by religion: ‘[e]motionally, belief in the Hegelian dialectic . . . is analogous to the Christian belief in the Second Coming’. 43 Of course, a philosophy based on desire is likely not to tell the truth about the world, but to create ideas which satisfy the desires of the theorist and his audience. Russell makes this clear in a comment on Rousseau: there is no reason whatever to believe that such beliefs [those based on ‘the emotions of the heart’] will be true . . . However ardently I, or all mankind, may desire something, however necessary it may be to human happiness, that is no ground for supposing this something to exist.44 Therefore, in following your desires into creating theory, you necessarily run a high risk of error. There is a strong implication here that Rousseau,
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Kant and Hegel are simply too weak to stare the world in the face and see it as it is. This appears to be a diagnosis – Russell uncovers the unconscious motives of the philosophers he examines and criticizes them on this basis. In all cases these are motives that result in aggressive totalitarian theories and in Nazi political doctrines in particular. He takes this diagnosis a stage further with a group he dubs the ‘power’ philosophers, arguing that philosophers turn to philosophies of power for deep, pathological reasons. Fichte had a desperate desire to feel superior to Napoleon; both Nietzsche and Carlyle ‘had infirmities for which they sought compensation in the world of imagination’.45 Elsewhere Russell goes further in the case of Nietzsche claiming that his entire critique of value is based on ‘almost universal hatred and fear’.46 Meanwhile, the Nazi veneration of power has its immediate source in the humiliation at Versailles and a desire to restore Germany’s battered ego.47 It is not strictly part of our discussion, here, but the reader might like to note that the diagnoses of the Nazi power-worship and the anti-canon power worship of Nietzsche, Fichte and Carlyle take place on the same page of the same essay. The critiques of Nazism and continental philosophers are entirely bound together in this text. Bad philosophy appears inextricably linked to the flawed humans who wrote it and the megalomaniac tyrants who inherited it. To return to the question of metaphysics and character, what Russell does with these diagnoses is to establish a link between metaphysics and temperament; one engages in metaphysical speculation because one cannot cope with the world as it is. Thus an absence of metaphysical ambition marks one out as a strong character. While the continental philosophers were found to fail this test, Russell argued that in acknowledging the impossibility of metaphysics, analytic philosophers have resisted the lure of philosophy as fabrication: [a]ll this is rejected by the philosophers who take analysis to be the main business of philosophy. They confess frankly that the human intellect is unable to find conclusive answers to many questions of profound importance to mankind, but they refuse to believe there is some ‘higher’ way of knowing, by which we discover truths hidden from science and the intellect.48 The analysts’ frankness in the face of these unanswered questions provides a stark contrast with the characterization of the needy continentals. This relationship between character and metaphysics is marked in Russell’s texts. The great empiricist Locke ‘is, as a rule contemptuous of metaphysics
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. . . He allows the validity of metaphysical arguments for the existence of God, but he does not dwell on them, and seems somewhat uncomfortable about them . . . ’49 Locke, then, unlike Kant or Hegel, does not rush to a metaphysical analgesic to soothe his world-pains. He allows others to do so, but with a mixture of contempt and discomfort. Hume meanwhile, as we have already seen ‘rejected metaphysics entirely’.50 Warnock brings this implicit strain in analytic thought to the surface. Although like or dislike of metaphysics ought to be an intellectual question, he says, it ‘is in fact very largely a matter of temperament’.51 He doesn’t analyse this claim at all, but it fits exactly with the pattern of argument we have seen above, and it also fits the characterization of Moore in his book published in the following year. In English Philosophy Since 1900 (1958), Moore is portrayed as the embodiment of the British analytic virtues. His approach was ‘simple’, ‘direct’, ‘concrete’52 and unlike the metaphysicians, was content with the world as he found it: ‘[h]e was neither discontented with nor puzzled by the ordinary beliefs of plain men and plain scientists’.53 Here the down to earth nature of British analytic philosophy is emphasized; common sense views were to Moore ‘perfectly unsurprising, undistressing, and quite certainly true’.54 Unlike the distressed continental, he was at home in the world. This view of Moore as a calm, simple, almost holy figure is one found in many analytic texts, though seldom with the devotion which Warnock displays in English Philosophy since 1900. In a review of Russell and Moore: the analytic heritage (1974), Ernest Gellner accuses Ayer of falling into the same pattern, and in so doing gives us a more generalized account of what he calls the ‘authorized’ image of Moore: [Ayer] on the whole accepts the authorized and self-propagated image of Moore as a spirit so pure, unpretentious and straightforward that he would not allow himself to be bamboozled, as others were, by philosophical departures from common sense – the child who bravely cried that the emperor was naked.55 This straightforwardness and purity is seen by some analysts as significant to the history of philosophy, Warnock claims, that in order to understand the decline of idealism one must understand ‘the character of Moore’.56 It was the strength and clarity of Moore’s character that enabled him to resist idealism.57 Warnock sums this up: [w]e have taken note already of the very powerful impact of his good sense, simplicity, directness, and argumentative rigour upon the chinashop of Idealism . . . 58
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Confronted with the unpretentious down-to-earth reasonableness of Moore, the idealist philosophy, based, as we have seen, on unsubstantial metaphysical foundations, crumbled. It was powerless in the face of a philosopher who did not need the kind of metaphysical consolation that the idealists were peddling. When Warnock comments: ‘[t]hough he did not deny the legitimacy of metaphysical ambitions, he was himself entirely without them . . .’ this is not simply a claim about philosophical position, it is a claim about morality and character.59 Warnock turns susceptibility or otherwise to metaphysics into a criterion for philosophical excellence (automatically ensuring that the idealists are bottom of the pile). Russell is acknowledged to have a metaphysical philosophy, but he is rescued from equation with the idealists partly because of the detail of his system, partly because, unlike McTaggart or Bradley, he is not seeking to use it as a vehicle for consolation.60 Moore’s lack of metaphysical ambition made him, for Warnock, ‘far more extraordinary a figure than Russell’61 because Russell was ‘in a sense playing the same game’ as Bradley.62 The positivists too were ‘less extraordinary than Moore. For in fact they had, surely, their own metaphysical beliefs’.63 Warnock was not alone in explicitly making metaphysical needs, or the lack thereof, an important measure of philosophical excellence. In 1958, Berlin wrote in his hugely influential ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ that to desire definite answers is ‘perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep and more dangerous moral and political immaturity’.64 This attitude throws some light back on our treatment of the British philosophers’ objections to metaphysics. To be seen to be indulging in metaphysics was to betray a need for the world to be other than it was, a need characteristic of the idealists, and one disavowed by the analysts. Such a need, as Berlin comments, if it infects one’s practice, is a sign of one’s immaturity. Worse, it will distract one from the pursuit of truth, and thus destroy one’s professional competence. No wonder Berlin himself was moved to make the extreme claim that ‘I have never believed in any metaphysical truths’.65 In other circumstances this may seem a bizarre, even ridiculous claim. Brought up in a religious family, it seems highly implausible that Berlin never once, even as a child, allowed himself to entertain the possibility of a belief in God – which of course is a paradigmatic metaphysical belief. In the light of the purported relationship between metaphysics and character, we can now see why Berlin was moved to take so extreme a line – not to do so would be admitting to a character flaw, a need that cannot be answered by appeal to science or common sense, and therefore a tendency to dangerous mysticism.
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Here, the underlying desires of the philosopher are in fact more of concern than the practice of metaphysics itself. Metaphysics is simply the manifestation of a troubled, possibly juvenile, character. The principal worry is that metaphysics allows those who cannot face the world as it is to fabricate a more attractive, but ultimately false, picture. As such, metaphysics allows the philosopher to derogate from his primary commitment to truth. However, for the analysts, the philosophy here is not primary; it is the character of philosophers that is more important. If there is contentment in the heart of the philosopher then there will be no need for a metaphysical falsification of reality (and it is perhaps for this reason that the analysts readmit a circumscribed ‘descriptive’ metaphysics at the end of the 1950s). Character The practice of metaphysical philosophy, then, appears to be, in part, comprehensible as a fear of the world as it is, and therefore of a weak character. It seems that, for the analysts, to be a good philosopher you have to be more broadly a good person. There is some evidence that the character of the philosopher was potentially more significant for the quality of his philosophy than his entertaining of any particular philosophical outlook. Consider the following description of Locke, Berkeley and Hume: In their temper of mind they were socially minded citizens, by no means self-assertive, not unduly anxious for power, and in favour of a tolerant world where, within the limits of the criminal law, every man was free to do as he pleased. They were good natured men of the world, urbane and kindly . . . 66 There are two things worthy of note here; first the contrast in the assessment of the character of these three philosophers, compared to the characterization that we’ve seen in this chapter of the characters of the anti-canon (and there is, I fear, worse to come on this front). But secondly and equally significant, Russell goes on to point out that their philosophies led to subjectivism in the theory of knowledge – a dangerous doctrine, which we have already seen Russell link to fascism. We have also seen him accuse Kant of being responsible for the doctrine. The apparent difference between Kant’s inauguration of anti-rationalism in philosophy and Locke, Berkeley and Hume’s failure to do so is that they had no need for it because they were happy and content in the world. The same philosophical possibilities were open to the three British empiricists as were open to
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Kant. The fundamental difference between them, for Russell, appears to be one of character. Kant saw the abyss and jumped in – the empiricists continued to picnic on the grassy cliffs. We can read a similar vindication of the analytic temperament in the face of philosophical problems in a comment from Ryle on Hume’s relationship with the Europeans: the voice itself displeases Continental ears. It is too irreverent for some; and its irreverence is too cheerful for others. It conveys no tidings of hope, but also no tidings of despair. But through the youthful accents of the good-humoured iconoclast there rings another accent which jars equally with those who severely disapprove and on those who severely approve of irreverence. This is the accent of the thinker to whom even beliefs or unbeliefs are less important and less interesting than cogency and trenchancy of argument.67 Hume had the strength of character to look clearly at the world with neither hope nor despair. In his good-humoured iconoclasm, he was not perturbed by the results, simply interested in their cogency, and therefore, of course, veracity. No wonder Hume was seen as having no interest in metaphysics. By contrast, the continentals, en masse, don’t like the irreverent, cheerfulness of the British character. This example is made all the more interesting because the paper from which it is taken was originally written in French for a French audience. What the French philosophers made of these generalizations about their preferences in philosophical cadence is unclear. The contrast between analytic humour and continental brow-furrowing is one of which Ryle was particularly fond. Note this complementary, though hardly complimentary, Rylean remark: ‘[i]n short Phenomenology was from its birth, a bore. Its over-solemnity of manner more than its equivocal lineage will secure that its lofty claims are ignored’.68 It’s clear from this that the British no more like the over-solemnity of the continentals, than the continentals like British iconoclasm. The repeated signalling of the analysts’ sense of humour is important on at least three counts. It is used as a deflationary device in the analysts’ writing of philosophy; but it also allows a contrast between the continentals and the British that ultimately cashes out in terms of character. The rather over-serious nature of continental philosophy naturally correlates with the fact that the anti-canon use their philosophy as an emotional crutch – for them philosophy is life-or-death serious. Meanwhile, the
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British are able to confront reality as it is and laugh in acceptance. This can also be read as an assertion of national identity. Humour had come to be seen as a characteristically English virtue, partly as the result of the war; ‘[a] sense of humour, the ability to laugh at themselves – was, it seems, the secret weapon of the English’.69 The continentals’ lack of a humour was, characteristically, turned back by the analysts into a suggestion of some wider vices. Ryle wrote: ‘[c]laims to Führership vanish when postprandial joking begins. Husserl wrote as if he had never met a scientist – or a joke’.70 Here the over-seriousness of continental thought is linked straight back to Hitler – we surely can read the allusion to ‘Führership’ here as nothing else. Also strongly implied in this passage is the claim that, had Husserl only been acquainted with science and humour, like the analysts, he might not have had such a megalomaniac philosophical theory. In the assessment of the character of continental philosophers, Russell stands out as particularly brutal. As we have seen, the affective sources for all of the continental philosophies mentioned turn out to be in feelings most would not define as virtues: hatred, fear, the need to be comforted, egotism. Russell also appears to include in his analysis of the anti-canon any feature he thinks might do their credibility harm, such as Nietzsche’s loathing of women, and possibly unnatural relationship with his sister,71 and Rousseau’s habit of stealing from his friends, and his choosing to have a long-running relationship with an ‘ugly ignorant woman’, solely, according to Russell, so as to make himself feel superior.72 From an early age Fichte displayed ‘a certain arbitrary and self-centred disposition’.73 Even when comparing Rousseau’s peaceable emotions to Byron’s ‘Satanic’ ones, Russell refuses to give the Swiss any credit; rather than ‘peaceable’, his emotions are described as ‘pathetic’.74 What is striking about these character vignettes is that they are brutal, and appear to come from nowhere. There is no indication that Russell had undertaken any deep research into Fichte’s childhood, nor Rousseau’s sexual preferences. This mud slinging, for surely it cannot be fairly called anything else, is a testament to the hostility that Russell was able to generate about his fellow philosophers. While such overt personal disparagement is apparent in Russell, most of the other analysts choose not to take this approach. Isaiah Berlin is an exception. His critique of Hegel’s character is suitably Russellian in its hostility. Hegel, he argued, worshipped power and ‘despises’ people who want others to be happier and who ‘wring their hands when they see the vast tragedies, the revolutions, the gas chambers, the appalling suffering through which humanity goes’.75 Rousseau is characterized as ‘a tramp’
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with ‘many kinds of what we would nowadays call inferiority complexes’.76 Nor should he be pitied; Berlin is at pains to point out that Rousseau ‘detested and disliked’ whole catalogues of people, ideas and nations and harboured ‘deep resentments’.77 This is not, one suspects, a picture intended to incline the reader to sympathetic engagement with the troubled philosopher. These are rare moments of over-excitement from Berlin – Hegel was not in a position to take a view one way or the other on gas chambers and other tragedies of the twentieth century. Nor does it represent the height of judicious analysis to dismiss Rousseau as a tramp. Such over-excitement is, however, a characteristic of Russell’s polemical approach. Russell seems determined to show that the only possible genealogy for the philosophies of the anti-canon is out of the basest, least desirable aspects of human nature. Such a revelation of course would incline us to distrust, condemn or ignore such theories. This is no doubt precisely what Russell intended. Not only are these philosophies based on non-rational desires, they are based on the worst kind of desires. We are invited to reflect that there is little wonder proto-Nazi philosophies were produced by men with such unworthy motives. Russell, however, pushes his blackguarding of the anti-canon even further, arguing that many of the ancestors of fascism – and indeed fascists themselves78 – are actually insane. The revolt against reason, it appears, is also in part a revolt against sanity and it is small wonder that Hitler was insane given that, according to Russell, many of his intellectual ancestors were. Fichte’s belief in the supremacy of his own ego ‘was insanity’.79 With Dewey’s pragmatist account of truth a ‘further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness’.80 Rousseau ended his days ‘insane’.81 The whole romantic movement is characterized as an ‘insane form of subjectivism’.82 Much of Nietzsche’s work is ‘merely megalomaniac’.83 Once again, it is only Berlin who follows Russell in claiming anti-canon insanity and only to a limited extent. For Berlin, the logical outcome of romanticism is ‘some kind of lunacy’ because it puts into question all preexisting structures, as inhibitors to the reign of the individual’s sovereign will. Once the structure of language and thought is broken down, insanity follows. This for Berlin can account for Nietzsche’s descent into insanity.84 Rousseau on the other hand was, on Berlin’s account, simply ‘a maniacal nature’, like a ‘mad mathematician’, whose work has ‘a kind of simplicity and a kind of lunacy’.85 So, to conclude this section, what we see is a link between the philosophical critique of metaphysics and the concern about the origins of the need
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to undertake a metaphysical project. The distinction between the metaphysical continental and the anti-metaphysical analyst, then, is also a distinction between a group of people whose lack of well-being forces them to metaphysics to ameliorate their condition, and a group of people who have no such profound psychological anxieties and are therefore able to face the world without metaphysical props. The importance of character for the analysts, as we have seen, is further emphasized in their wider cataloguing of the contrasting temperaments of analytic and continental philosophers.
Irrationality/Irrationalism We have already seen two aspects of the supposed irrationality of the anticanon – their guidance by emotions rather than reason, and their insanity. We will now go on to examine other aspects of the analysts’ portrayal of the anti-canon as irrational. There are two not easily reconcilable strands of thought within the analysts’ writing on this. The first is that the continentals are attempting to undertake philosophy in a reasonable way, but are simply appalling at making philosophical arguments. We will look at this line of thought first. The second interpretation given by the analysts is that it is not that the continentals simply can’t write or argue effectively, but that they do not seek to do so. Instead they seek to ‘deceive the unwary’ by deploying apparently philosophical argument in order to ‘confuse and bewilder’. This interpretation sees the anti-canon not as irrational, but irrationalist – seeking to undermine reason in favour of the emotions.
Poor arguments and obscurity There is a strand in the analysts’ thinking that appears to put the anticanon’s argumentative failings down to lack of skill. Russell undertakes an extensive critique of the anti-canon’s philosophical arguments. A full analysis of his approach would require a chapter in its own right. And it would be a fascinating chapter as Russell’s tactics are occasionally bizarre, including, at one stage, involving Nietzsche in an imaginary dialogue with the Buddha – during which Nietzsche is severely chastised. Here all I can do is offer some examples of the dismissive way in which Russell treats the philosophical claims of various anti-canon targets – together with some commentary from Russell scholars. On Hegel, Russell writes that his philosophy could not have been written without a lack of interest in facts and ‘considerable ignorance’.86 This he argued is clearly shown by the fact that ‘almost all
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Hegel’s doctrines are false’.87 Nietzsche is repeatedly dismissed as making arguments that don’t make sense, as is Fichte and all of the supposed ‘power’ philosophers.88 Since 1936, scholars have been highlighting what Monk has called, in reference to Hegel, Russell’s ‘ludicrously cavalier’ treatment of anti-canon philosophy.89 But it was a treatment, as Tom Rockmore pointed out, which: ‘succeeded in attracting attention from other even less-informed colleagues of a similar bent’.90 Indeed, in his not uncritical review of History of Western Philosophy, Isaiah Berlin singled out Russell’s treatment of Nietzsche as ‘a distinguished essay’.91 This despite the section concerned being transparently hostile to and dismissive of Nietzsche. Russell’s commentary on Nietzsche’s view of the Greeks and Wagner, for example, was: ‘[t]his may seem odd, but that is not my fault’.92 Berlin, not content with applauding Russell’s treatment of the anti-canon philosophers’ arguments, joined in. We have already noted his condemnation of the ‘vaporous . . . nonsense’ in German philosophy.93 To this he adds further charges against specific targets. Hegel is accused of providing ‘no empirical or scientific evidence’ for his claims, which ‘ultimately’ appear to be ‘a case of metaphysical insight or an act of faith’.94 Berlin also characterizes the proto-Nazi Joseph de Maistre as arguing impossibly badly. He ‘not merely begs the question, argues in circles, but does not bother to be consistent’.95 Berlin compares two groups of thinkers, the first including the familiar villains Plato, Maistre and Hegel, the second including Russell. In contrast to Russell and his ilk, according to Berlin, the Maistres of this world would never allow their ideas to be refuted in rational debate, or admit their falsity.96 Along similar lines, in 1946 Ayer compared the reasoning of Hegel to that of a modern exponent of the same tradition, Heidegger. Few men, indeed, can ever have reasoned worse than Hegel, the arch pontiff of the nineteenth century, but at least he claimed the support of reason for his fantasies . . . Though he misused logic abominably he did not affect to be above it. But now if we turn to Heidegger, the high priest of the modern school of existentialism, and the leading pontiff of our time, we find ourselves in a country from which the ordinary processes of logic, or indeed reasoning of any kind, appear to have been banished.97 Here we notice Ayer’s subscription to the Russellian claim that Hegel was using philosophy as an answer to his own needs and desires – his philosophy, in Ayer’s words, supported his ‘fantasies’. More pertinently here, Hegel couldn’t do logic, but at least he tried; Heidegger, on the other hand,
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doesn’t even make the attempt – he has banished reason and logic entirely. Ayer accounts for this absence by claiming that Heidegger is really a ‘mystic or a poet’ rather than a philosopher.98 He extends this reading to the existentialists more generally – arguing that they offer ‘a poetry of nihilism, the expression of an irrationalist world-outlook’.99 As for the other analysts, we will see below that while, for the most part, they wrote very little on the anti-canon, the widely held conception of it as irrational, emotional and obscure indicates that they too took a dim view of the philosophical powers of the anti-canon philosophers. In a natural alliance with the anti-canon’s apparent inability to produce good philosophical argument is a certain obscurity of style. In reading analytic philosophers’ comments on the anti-canon, one is constantly confronted with claims that this or that continental thinker is obscure. In the first part of Ayer’s autobiography, Part of My Life, for example, Kant is mentioned twice; both times his work is described as ‘obscure’.100 Mary Warnock described German idealism as ‘obscure’.101 Berlin found the same vices in Hegel: [t]his union, this being at one with the universe, has always been, in one way or another, the goal of all the great mystics and metaphysicians. Hegel expounds this idea in ponderous, obscure, and occasionally majestic language.102 What this passage from Berlin points to is the fact that this obscurity is not merely a reflection on a thick prose style, it contains within it the accusation, explicit in this quotation, that what is being undertaken here is an illegitimate project, metaphysics, and for ‘obscure’ one had better read ‘pie in the sky’. Berlin went further in a letter, complaining: ‘it seems impossible to discuss Hegel, or his revolting disciples without becoming obscure and bombastic oneself’.103 The obscurity, then, is entirely one with the Hegelian project. Ayer provides another excellent example of this in his autobiography. Here he makes clear that the obscurity of continental philosophers is essentially a mask for empty and pretentious rubbish. He reports an encounter with a German philosopher soon after the war (no date is offered). The German asked Ayer what the essence of a glass is – and proceeded to explain: ‘I will give you the answer’ he said. ‘The essence of a glass is to be empty.’ I made a sign to our host who filled our glasses. This did not please the
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professor who remarked rather irritably that the essence of a glass with wine was not the same as the essence of a glass without wine. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘I will put to you a deeper question. What is the essence of emptiness?’ [German original omitted]. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘that really is deep’ and I went on to talk about the universities he had visited.104 This derogatory response to the intellectual efforts of a, of course German, professor indicates Ayer’s belief that underneath the high sounding ideas lurks nothing of any substance. His response is also a manifestation of the analysts’ self-conception – in the face of abstract theoretical pronouncement, the empiricist juxtaposes the concrete fact of a full wineglass. These are Paul Redding’s thoughts on the analysts’ dismissal of thinkers as obscure: Such an attitude is in turn expressed in the general easy dismissal of the idealist period of philosophy that goes beyond justifiable complaints about the density and unclarity that perhaps reached its apotheosis in the writings of a Hegel. If a thinker is regarded as having something important to say, of course, then the project of trying to make that something clearer will generally be regarded as worthwhile.105 This comment, focused on the analysts’ treatment of idealism, holds good for the analysts’ treatment of continental philosophy more widely. It’s not simply obscure; it is obscure, and almost certainly worthless. On this reading, the obscurity is one with the philosophical paucity of the continental tradition. Deception But we also find a rather different claim made by the analysts, that the obscurity, poor arguments and pseudo profundity of the anti-canon are sinister and dangerous. That the continentals are not simply irrational, instead they are irrationalist. Russell claimed that some of the anti-canon philosophers deliberately made bad arguments to try and beguile their readers. Poor reasoning and obscurity, then, are not errors, but tools. Such a claim follows naturally from the accusations Russell has already levelled at the anti-canon philosophers. If one is a signed up irrationalist, what commitment does one have to sound reasoning? We have already seen Russell explicitly accuse Kant of this – of ‘inventing’ distinctions between pure and practical reason, which Russell argued were
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obviously bogus, in order to safe-guard ethics.106 The implication seems to be that Kant was being less than honest, maybe with himself but certainly with his audience. In 1927 Russell had said Kant ‘deluged the world with muddle and mystery from which it is only now beginning to emerge’.107 Are we invited in these remarks to believe Kant in some way instigated this deluge deliberately, as a way of refuting Hume’s unassailable arguments? Certainly if we view this comment from Russell in the context of his wider treatment of Kant as an irrationalist this seems like a compelling reading. But even if we don’t quite have direct evidence to state categorically that Russell believed Kant to be wilfully deceptive, his case against Hegel, and idealists in general, is much more explicit. This is a comment on Hegel from Russell’s History of Western Philosophy: [a] man may be pardoned if logic compels him regretfully to reach conclusions which he deplores, but not for departing from logic in order to be free to advocate crimes.108 ‘In order to be free to advocate crimes’ – Hegel, Russell implies, deliberately departed from logic in order to further his own (evil) purposes. This is not an isolated accusation; rather it fits a pattern of condemnation in Russell’s, and other analysts’, writing on Hegel and his followers.109 Russell makes the same accusation against another idealist, the twentiethcentury British philosopher, F. H. Bradley. Most people will admit, I think, that it is calculated to produce bewilderment rather than conviction, because there is more likelihood of error in a very subtle, abstract and difficult argument than in so patent a fact as the inter-relatedness of things in the world.110 The accusation here is the same; Bradley’s approach is ‘calculated’ to confuse – it deliberately sets out to mislead. This claim is echoed by Warnock, who describes Bradley as ‘rhetorical’ in his metaphysical systematizing, while his idealist colleague Bernard Bosanquet was ‘closer to bombast . . . [and] vagueness. And in the writings of lesser men solemnity and unclarity seem to rise not seldom to the pitch of actual fraud’.111 Bradley and Bosanquet practise rhetoric, bombast and vagueness, none of them stylistic virtues in the analysts’ tradition (indeed what school of philosophy would adopt such qualities as virtues? The sophists maybe). The lesser idealists though have taken a further step; they have descended into intellectual fraud – attempting to con their readers. Similarly, having established
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that his contemporary, R. G. Collingwood, was a ‘continental sort of philosopher’, Berlin was naturally led to draw the conclusion that he was ‘deceitful and unsound’.112 This deceptive quality even extends to the method by which idealism arrived in Britain, according to Quinton, who wrote in 1958 that: ‘Idealism first appeared in England in an historical disguise, the doctrines of Hegel being mixed into Jowett’s introduction to the dialogues of Plato’.113 There is an implication here that Hegel sneaked into the country strapped underneath Plato’s lorry – and would certainly not have been granted a visa if he had announced himself at Immigration. This is a rather different claim to those about the deceptiveness of the continentals’ arguments, but the central allegation is still that there is something underhand about the movement and its practices. John Passmore has generalized this attack, commenting that the suspicion of idealism was common among the analysts in Cambridge University, in particular: ‘[c]ontempt for Hegel, and for Hegelian “subterfuges”, was indeed to be a regular feature of the movement which Moore led at Cambridge . . .’114 The implication of the term ‘subterfuges’ is continuous with the critique offered by Russell, Quinton, Berlin and Warnock – that there is something cunning and deceptive about Hegel’s approach to argument. Here metaphysics again becomes important, this time as a tool to disguise the true intentions of the anti-canon. Russell said of Fichte that he was able to disguise his desire for power ‘beneath a garment of metaphysics’.115 He also spoke of ideas ‘obscured by the fog of metaphysics’.116 Berlin takes up a similar theme in his ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. The concrete reality of the ‘empirical self’117 is juxtaposed against the ‘real’ self of Hegelian thought, which can only be achieved by a ‘magical transformation, or sleight of hand’.118 Metaphysics, characterized as unreal, illusory, is the medium through which Hegel is able to effect ‘a magical transformation’ which, of course, turns out to be nothing more than a sleight of hand – a trick. Elsewhere Berlin uses precisely this term, characterizing Hegel’s reconciliation of the particular and the general as ‘a sensational conjuring trick’.119 In a passage we have already quoted, but which is worth quoting again in this context, we find Hare making the same claim, that metaphysics allows German philosophers to get away with deception: we have seen what monstrous philosophical edifices have been created by slipping, surreptitiously, from the ordinary uses of words to extraordinary
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uses which are never explained . . . nothing pleases us so much as to sit back and have a German metaphysician explain to us, if he can, how he is going to get his metaphysical system started. And as he is usually unable to do this, the discussion never gets on to what he thinks of as the meat of the theory.120 Here the key words are ‘slipping, surreptitiously’; the German metaphysician can use metaphysics to mask the weaknesses in the claims he seeks to make. In this quotation, however, the nemesis of the German metaphysician is present, the British analyst (‘us’), who takes pleasure in preventing the metaphysical deception getting started. Seduction Part of the purpose of the obscurity, and the deception which characterized anti-canon philosophy was, according to the analysts, to discredit reason and to appeal directly to the emotions, to seduce, or violate, where they could not convince. [S]o long as the main object of philosophers is to show that nothing can be learned by patience and detailed thinking, but that we ought rather to worship the prejudices of the ignorant under the title of ‘reason’ if we are Hegelians . . . so long as philosophers will take care to remain ignorant of what mathematicians have done to remove the errors by which Hegel profited.121 Again we see that not only Hegel but the Hegelians, a significant part of the idealist movement, profited by errors; that the confusion they sought to spread, according to Russell, was a method of reinforcing their claims about the inadequacy of detailed thinking. If such logical thought can be shown to be complex and contradictory, this strengthens the claims of those who wish to elevate prejudice. This appears to be a pattern within the anti-canon. Russell describes romantic philosophy in general as tending ‘to emphasize the will at the expense of the intellect, to be impatient of chains of reasoning, and to glorify violence of certain kinds . . . In tendency, though not always in fact, it is definitely hostile to what is commonly called reasons, and tends to be anti-scientific’.122 None of this directly suggests a desire to mislead – but it certainly suggests that conformity with good argument and cogent reasoning was not a recognized merit by the romantics. As Berlin
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summed up Maistre’s attitude: ‘if reason is a poisoner to be avoided at all costs, this is all to the good’.123 The analysts were quick to point out the charged emotional language with which the anti-canon write philosophy. Berlin provides the most direct accusation against the anti-canon, in particular against Rousseau. He describes Rousseau’s ‘hypnotic style’124 and elaborates this into a powerful accusation, an in itself very emotionally compelling passage: [y]ou appear to be reading logical argument which distinguishes between concepts and draws conclusions in a valid manner from premises, when all the time something very violent is being said to you. A vision is being imposed on you, somebody is trying to dominate you by means of a very coherent, although often very deranged, vision of life, to bind a spell, not to argue, despite the cool and collected way in which he appears to be talking.125 This quotation encapsulates the totality of the analytic critique of the methodology of continental philosophy. It appears to be undertaking a philosophical task, however, covertly, it seeks to dominate, to seduce, and to do so in order to deliver you into the hands of a kind of mania. The language here is striking, and littered with the imagery of irrationality and violence – domination, derangement, and sorcery. Moreover, the political dimensions of this violence are not very far below the surface. Berlin’s condemnation of Rousseau’s seductive prose comes in a lecture that is principally about Rousseau’s political vices. Rousseau binds his spells for the sake of his vision of freedom which, as we saw in Chapter 1, issues in a totalitarian state; bad philosophy leading to bad politics. The two seem, again, to be inextricably linked in the analysts’ thinking. Ayer makes similar charges against his own pet anti-canon targets – the inheritors of the German tradition in philosophy. In ‘Some Aspects of Existentialism’ (1948) and ‘The Claims of Philosophy’ (1947), Ayer argues that the reason why the existentialists so comprehensively fail to make good logical arguments is that ‘it is not the habit of Existentialists to concern themselves overmuch with logic. What they strive to obtain is an emotional effect’.126 We have already seen Ayer accuse Heidegger of casting off any interest in good argument and being more akin to a mystic or poet than a philosopher. Here again, Ayer generalizes this conclusion to ‘existentialists’ plural, the whole movement characterized as aiming not to convince the mind, but to seduce the heart. We also find such accusations being levelled
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by other analysts at other anti-canon targets. The Cambridge analyst C. D. Broad described the idealist John McTaggart’s metaphysics of love as ‘hitting his readers below the intellect’.127 Claims that the anti-canon were peddling an emotional, rather than a philosophical, method, did not always take such bald form. Warnock runs together three significant strands in the critique of the anti-canon: political vice and extremism in temperament and language. In so doing he highlights the importance for the analysts of the ‘temperature of debate’: Absolute Idealism can be distinguished chiefly as being a system for extremists . . . In natural but unholy alliance with this novel extremism of thought, there occurred a striking rise in the temperature of philosophical writing. With honourable exceptions, the Idealists brought into British philosophy a species of vivid, violent and lofty imprecision which even in general literature had hitherto been rare.128 There is a lot going on in this paragraph. First we have the familiar imputation of political vice – idealists are extremists – which we have had cause to quote already. The use of the term ‘unholy’ is also pertinent to the concerns of this chapter as it is a term which captures the notion of a group that represents the very opposite of virtue. We also see two further significant claims, that the political extremism of the idealists is accompanied by extremism of temperament and extremism of language – an emotional hot and vivid prose style. Even ‘violent’ – though whether this relates to its effects on the individual and is akin to Berlin’s claim about the aggressive nature of Rousseau’s prose, or whether we are meant to read this as relating to political extremism, or both, is unclear. But again it is of foreign origin and, perhaps more importantly, it is totally out of keeping with British sensibilities – Warnock makes the extraordinary claim that idealist prose is extravagant and hot in a manner unprecedented in Britain, even in literature. The strength – and absurdity – of this claim only serves to highlight the radical polarization of philosophy down national and political as well as simply methodological lines. In a more measured environment, it is hard to imagine such a claim making it into print.129 Warnock’s alliance of violence and extremism to the prose style of the idealists suggested a link between the emotional force and appeal of idealism and its dangerous political outcomes. Such a running together of criticism of the anti-canon is also detectable in a comment made by Hare
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during a highly enjoyable interview with Bryan Magee for a 1970s television series. He had the following to say about Marxists and existentialists: [a]lthough there are some good philosophers in these schools, the common sort do little but blow up balloons of different shapes and colours, full of nothing but their own breath, which float here from over the Channel or the Atlantic; and if you prick them with a sharp needle, it’s very hard to say what was in them, except that it was probably inflammable and certainly intoxicating. This may increase the head of steam a bit beyond what natural human group aggression produces anyway; but from faulty plumbing most of it gets on people’s spectacles.130 Not merely hot air, but inflammable and intoxicating hot air at that – and material likely to make mankind more prone to aggression, and therefore quite possibly to political excess. The existentialists and Marxists provide us with the same sort of high-sounding hot prose that the proto-fascist philosophers had to offer. Where Marx’s theories ended up politically was clear to all, while we have seen existentialism repeatedly revealed by the analysts to be a modern manifestation of German romantic philosophy – the French mind having been conquered by Hegel and Heidegger. It is unsurprising, then, that shortly after making the remark quoted above, Hare links the discussion back to Hegel. What we have seen so far is the analysts accusing the anti-canon of being either irrational, unable to make good arguments, or irrationalist, deliberately refusing to do so with the aim of forcing or seducing others to their cause through deception, obscurity and emotional exhortation. One might tempted to seek a reconciliation of these two parallel accounts, the irrational, and the irrationalist. However, the analysts don’t offer one particular route to reconciling these, in principle, reconcilable claims, and it is not the purpose of this book to over-systematize the analysts’ thought in this area. Imagery of the irrational I now want to move on to examine the wealth of imagery the analysts deploy in characterizing the anti-canon as irrational – imagery which reinforces the impression that these continental thinkers are philosophically beyond the pale. In Chapter 2, we gave extended attention to the role of imagery of war and invasion in the analysts’ writing on the period of British idealism. I won’t return to this material again here, except to note that this imagery of invasion is, among other things, a powerful indication of the irrationality
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of the anti-canon. One doesn’t imagine reasoning with an advancing army – resistance requires force. For philosophy, which places reason centrally, a war represents the collapse, or abeyance, of the possibility of reasonable dialogue and therefore of the practice of philosophy itself. An invasive philosophy is no longer playing by the rules of reason – it is resorting to intellectual violence. Appropriately, one of Russell’s earliest engagements with the imagery of unreason comes in his characterization not of the anti-canon, but of their descendants, the fascists. In the 1930s Russell, faced with what he conceived as a cult of unreason, feared that it would also come to dominate in the United Kingdom, in the form of a native fascism. Coming into London by train, one passes through great regions of small villas inhabited by families which feel no solidarity with the working class; the man of the family has no part in local affairs . . . To such a man, if he has enough spirit for discontent, a Fascist movement may well appear as a deliverance.131 Russell writes of the danger that, as economic hardship increases, people will become more willing to be ‘seduced from intellectual sobriety in favour of some delusive will-o’-the-wisp’.132 This seduction is very much what we have been examining in our discussion of irrationality, the luring of people away from reason into a cult of passion, a cult of power, a mystic belief in reality beyond appearance. The second image displayed in the above quotation is that of sobriety. In a seamless cross-over from Nazism to its anti-canon roots, Russell completes this image in a discussion of Fichte by pointing out the converse: ‘the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone’.133 Williams and Montefiore use the same contrast to distinguish analytic from continental style; they describe analytic philosophy as ‘sober’.134 The power of water is also invoked by Russell in his discussion of the anti-canon: Samuel Taylor Coleridge was ‘engulfed’ by Kant,135 who ‘deluged the world with muddle and mystery’.136 Water here is a wild force, another symbol of the power of the irrational. A deluge cannot be resisted, we can only retreat or, like Coleridge, be engulfed. Berlin followed Russell to the water, describing the romantic politics as a ‘swollen torrent’.137 Elsewhere he is more expansive: worship of the night and the irrational: that was the contribution of the wild German spirit . . . Then the tidal wave of feeling rose above its banks
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and overflowed into the neighbouring provinces of politics and social life with literally devastating results.138 Here we have both the tidal wave of German irrationalism causing mayhem and destruction, and the imagery of light and darkness. Berlin was apparently very struck by the darkness of, in particular, Hegel’s philosophy, when he was preparing his ‘Freedom and Its Betrayal’ lectures. The following is the most equivocal of the passages. Hegel’s system: is a vast mythology which, like many mythologies, has great powers of illumination, as well as great powers of obscuring whatever it touches. It has poured forth both light and darkness – more darkness perhaps than light, but on this there will be no agreement.139 Berlin does concede that this mythology has provided some useful ideas; however the emphasis here is on the darkness, in this case allied to our old friend obscurity. Berlin takes this metaphor on, describing the ‘vast shadowy metaphysical ideas, like the shadows of a great Gothic cathedral in which Hegel seemed permanently to dwell’.140 Rousseau’s ideas too have something of the night about them. His doctrine that each man ‘in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody’ is ‘as dark and mysterious now as it ever was’.141 Elsewhere he discusses ‘those who have lost their way in some dark Heideggerian forest’ – demonstrating that Hegel and Rousseau have company in the dark.142 Finally, there is an allusion to the political dimension of these twilight ideas. German idealism produced ‘shadowy and ideological schemata’.143 While Berlin clearly favours images of light and darkness in the contrast between analyst and anti-canon, the single most repeated metaphor in the analysts’ writing is that of disease and cure. Russell is not by any means the most liberal in the use of this image, but he manages to refer to irrationalism as a ‘disease’ in his discussion of Nietzsche.144 The irrational and dangerous aspects of the notion of disease are well known. Disease can spread, rapidly infecting a healthy population as it goes and it is non-rational – it cannot be refuted in argument – it can only be diagnosed and cured. As such, irrationalism-as-disease fits the structure of Russell’s critique very well. Indeed, while Russell doesn’t very often make explicit use of the imagery, diagnosis is exactly what he appears to have been attempting in his treatment of the ancestors of fascism. By uncovering the mistaken assumptions and psychological maladies that afflicted the anti-canon he certainly cannot hope to cure the dead philosophers, but maybe he can vaccinate his readers.
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Immunity and cures were also clearly prevalent in Ryle’s thinking on this subject. As we have already seen, having identified fascism and communism as descendants of Hegel, he goes on ‘even if philosophers are at long last immunized, historian, sociologists, political propagandists and voters are still unconscious victims of this virus . . . ’145 Philosophers are ‘at long last immunised’. More worryingly, however, there are whole classes of people loose in Britain in 1947 that may be infected with the disease of German philosophy. Russell’s fears about the dangers of German thought in 1930s find an echo here two years into a victorious peace. The use of viral imagery is a running theme in Ryle’s review of The Open Society – he stresses the fact that ‘[c]ontemporary philosophers are for the most part now inoculated against Hegelianism’.146 Rée has picked up this language of the irrational in describing the analysts’ suspicions of modern continental thought. He describes a conference between analytic and continental philosophers held in 1958: [i]t was hardly a meeting of minds: the French hosts manifested a respectful curiosity about ‘Anglo-Saxon philosophy’, and ‘the Oxford School’, but the ‘chorus of Oxford analysts’ huddled together in self defence as though they feared some kind of intellectual infection from the overfriendly continentals.147 Rée here takes his lead from Ryle, who, reporting on the same event remarked: I guess that our thinkers have been immunised against the idea of philosophy as the Mistress of Science by the fact that their daily lives in Cambridge and Oxford Colleges keep them in personal contact with scientists.148 Berlin highlights the same set of images when he talks of Hegel and Marx being ‘infected by romanticism’.149 Ryle, Berlin and Russell are joined in their use of the language of infection by the young Bernard Williams. While the influence of Hegel radically changed the rest of European thought, and continues to work in it, the sceptical caution of British philosophy left it, after a brief infection, markedly immune to it.150 A general consensus, then, that while continental thought was dangerously infectious, whoever else may be susceptible, the British philosophers were going to be okay. Whether this was due, as Williams suggests, to an
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immunization afforded by a brief period of infection – the British idealist period – or to the magic bullet of analytic philosophy, is not clear from these quotations. We will see in the next chapter that the analysts set some store by the latter claim, though no doubt the brief infection would have educated the white blood cells of the British. Appropriately, on the second of the two occasions in which Ayer mentions Kant in Part of My Life, he recounts how, having just grasped one of the most ‘obscure’ parts of Kant’s work, he fell into a fever: ‘[b]y the time the fever left me, I had lost my insight into Kant and have never since recaptured it . . .’151 This fever, caused by sunstroke according to Ayer, could, on the analysts’ reading, equally well have been caused by intellectual infection contracted by reading too much Kant. It is notable too that the only time in his life when Ayer understood Kant was when he was sickening for a fever; a highly appropriate, suitably weakened state for comprehension of a member of the delirious and irrational anti-canon. To round off this picture, looking back on the domestic political scene around World War II, Quinton adopted the language of infection in reflecting on the Russellian fear of a home-grown fascist party: ‘[i]n terms of practical politics British Fascism never became more than a comparatively minor problem of public hygiene . . . ’152 The volume and persistence of these images of the irrational in the analysts’ writing about the anti-canon and their attendant allusions to evil – invasion, infection and the shadows – conveys powerfully the belief both in the rank philosophical inadequacy of the anti-canon and the potential dangers of their thought, if it were allowed to get into circulation. It also demonstrates how far such assumptions had entered the language of the analysts – these images being used, presumably, not as part of a concerted policy but just as they entered the analysts’ heads. The fact that the imagery of infection (and intoxication, invasion, and darkness) was felt appropriate in describing the anti-canon reflects the visceral nature of the analysts’ beliefs about these philosophers.
Identity, Politics, Nationality So far in this chapter, we’ve seen anti-canon philosophy portrayed as poor in argument, obscure, metaphysical and, most recently, irrational and emotional. On each of these fronts, we have seen evidence implicitly linking the lack of virtue in the anti-canon’s philosophy and character to the political charge sheet we saw drawn against them in Chapter 1.
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Ryle described phenomenology as operating according to something like a Führerprinzip. Berlin described Hegel’s shadowy system as containing ‘ideological schemata’, Warnock called Absolute idealists ‘extremists’. Russell wrote that Hegel departed from logic in order to more freely advocate ‘crimes’. There is also a direct link drawn between poor argument and political vice. Hare, in particular, makes this connection frequently. We will examine these claims in more detail in the next chapter. But we have already seen him allude to such a connection in his comments on the continentals inflating balloons which are intoxicating, inflammable and prone to increase human aggression.153 There has also been a wealth of images that point to the violence of anti-canon philosophy: Berlin describing Rousseau’s philosophy as seeking to dominate, the idea of the anti-canon as a virus attacking healthy philosophical bodies; And all this on top of the imagery of invasion which we dealt with in the last chapter. To reinforce the impression of the interconnection of the political and the philosophical critique of anti-canon philosophy, it is notable that these claims often appear in the same texts, or indeed on the same pages, as each other. Such images and descriptions should be read as part of the analysts’ understanding of the supposed political ramifications of continental philosophy. The philosophy itself is violent and seeks to dominate; it has violently dominated first a nation (Germany) and then sought to dominate a continent, twice. In addition to the wealth of evidence for the inter-relationship of the political and the philosophical critique, which we have accrued in the course of this chapter, the analysts also make some direct comments on this phenomenon. Significantly, one analyst or another makes an explicit link between the political project of anti-canon philosophy and each of the philosophical failings of the anti-canon so far examined: emotional seduction of the unwary, obscurity and metaphysics. Perhaps most obvious is the case of emotional seduction, where we find Russell characterizing, in the same essay, both the anti-canon and the Nazis as irrationalists, as seducing people from sobriety. Russell also conceives of both anti-canon philosophy and fascism as being irrational. We’ve seen him dismiss the argumentative abilities of the anti-canon. Of the two great dictators of his day he says the following: ‘I am Wotan’ says Hitler, ‘I am Dialectical Materialism’, says Stalin. And since the claim of each is supported by vast resources in the way of armies, aeroplanes, poison gas, and innocent enthusiasts, the madness of both remains unnoticed.154
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We have also seen an explicit link drawn through the notion of the viral imagery. The analysts repeatedly describe the anti-canon as viral; Quinton describes fascism as a problem of public health. Michael Ignatieff, Berlin’s biographer detects a relationship between the obscurity of particularly German philosophy, and the political purposes it was intended to serve: Berlin was impatient with the lofty obscurity of the German philosophical tradition, and when it was accompanied by the low service of fascism, his impatience turned to scorn. He was repelled by the special pleading with which Heidegger had sought to explain his complicity with the Nazi regime.155 If Ignatieff is an accurate guide to his subject’s mind-set, then Berlin too makes an equation between ‘lofty obscurity’ and ‘low service of fascism’, at least in the case of Heidegger. Ayer is more straightforward still, arguing that: ‘[f]ascists have hitherto tended to favour some form of metaphysics . . . ’156 What he later called ‘German susceptibility to metaphysics’157 thus seems to have two axes: it betrays the essential weakness of character of among the German philosophical tradition and it provides fascists with the tools to seduce men to commit crimes. Ayer’s estimation of the significance of metaphysics for fascism was shared by Otto Neurath, a member of the Vienna circle who, after giving a list of philosophers who supported the Nazis, commented: ‘I think this merciless habit in history very often is connected with absolutism in metaphysics and faith’.158 What these continued allusions, both implicit and explicit, demonstrate is that the analysts’ understanding of continental philosophy is bound up with and reinforced by the assumptions they make about the political vices of the continentals. I am not seeking to suggest that the political reading of the continentals causes the philosophical critique; but I am seeking to argue that the two are mutually supporting. The analysts’ tying together of bad philosophy and bad politics was mirrored, as we will see in the next chapter, by the analysts’ tying together their claim to be doing good philosophy, with their claim to political liberalism (i.e. to political virtue). Nationalism The willingness, displayed once again in this chapter, to identify the continental philosophical tradition with Germany and with Nazism again
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signals the importance of nationalist thinking to the analysts. Indeed, they seemed prepared to generalize their own philosophical characteristics and those of their opponents and to see them as part of a wider divide between British philosophy and continental philosophy. Russell divides British philosophers from continental philosophers, as such, suggesting that the British are benevolent, while the continentals are cruel.159 He also does so methodologically, arguing: ‘British philosophy is more detailed and piecemeal than that of the Continent’.160 Elsewhere he provides the logical correlate of this view, explaining that ‘[t]he continental approach is much more rigid’.161 Here Russell generalizes over not only the entire philosophical picture in the UK but also on the continent – as though both represented single monolithic units. We have seen Ayer generalizing over British philosophers, as such, in relation to metaphysics: ‘British Hegelians . . . committed themselves to metaphysics in a way that the British philosophers have fought shy of, both before and since’.162 British philosophers here are a category not just in the present but throughout history. Warnock makes the same kind of claim when he writes that the ‘vivid violent’ style of the idealists had ‘hitherto been rare’ in British philosophy.163 Somewhat later in the century Quinton uses the English Channel as a dividing line between ‘passionately prophetic’ philosophers and ‘orderly bureaucrats of the intellect’.164 In these comments, the British state becomes a philosophically significant unit, with the ‘German’ state, and then ‘Europe’ both representing opposition units. Nationalism is built into the language. We have seen that where a specific nation is identified as the root of the opposed philosophy, it is nearly always Germany. For Bernard Williams, it is German speculative thought that the British disregard. Perhaps most strikingly, it is the Germans who have, according to Ayer, a weakness for metaphysics – a weakness for the very philosophical approach favoured by fascists. It is the German metaphysician, for Hare, who is trying to construct a ‘monstrous’ system. Where another European nation is identified, it is France – but it is a French movement synonymous with the German tradition, the existentialists. We have also seen, throughout this chapter, that characteristics of the two sides have fallen out along lines entirely continuous with familiar national stereotypes. The continentals are extravagant, abstracted, not very practical, tempestuous, and so on. Meanwhile, the philosophical virtues displayed by the British philosophers draw on a recognizable set of stereotypical British characteristics, jovial, practical, not prone to abstraction, even rather anti-intellectual, and owners of that most British of virtues, common
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sense. Indeed it is in the notion of common sense that British philosophy most explicitly links itself to the virtues of the Englishman. Ryle recounts a train journey he shared with Russell. He asked what made Locke so important. Russell replied: ‘Locke was the spokesman of Common Sense’. Almost without thinking I retorted impatiently, ‘I think Locke invented Common Sense’. To which Russell rejoined, ‘By God, Ryle, I believe you are right. No one ever had Common Sense before John Locke – and no-one but Englishmen have ever had it since’.165 The recurrence of appeals to common sense among the analysts has been widely noted. It signified a desire to stick closely to the facts – a certain willingness to believe that if a theory issued in what seemed like nonsense, it should be laughed off. The nationalism of this is quite clear from the quotation: it is the feet-on-the-ground Englishman contrasted with the continental; the latter, in this quotation, being constitutionally unable to muster the same practical mindset. Noel Annan sums this up in a memorial essay for Isaiah Berlin: ‘[h]e distrusted Rousseau’s and Hegel’s theory of positive freedom as a perversion of common sense’.166 This encapsulates much of the English philosophers’ attitude towards the anti-canon – that beyond its political evil, the details of its philosophical failings, or the vices of its members, it presented doctrines that were simply not common sense.167 These contrasts, then, represent analytic philosophy going into alliance with the apparently anti-intellectual British character (Stefan Collini has recently given this supposed characteristic extended attention).168 In ‘The Claims of Philosophy’ (1947) Ayer contrasted two types of philosophers, the pontiff and the journeyman. The pontiff, exemplified by Heidegger, makes high-sounding but ultimately meaningless claims. The journeyman/analyst meanwhile follows John Locke in saying ‘it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge’.169 This quotation, usually shortened to the phrase ‘under labourer in the garden of knowledge’ provides analytic philosophy with one of favourite images. At the Royaumont conference, one of the rare organized meetings between analytic and continental philosophers, J. L. Austin described the analysts’ task as ‘to clean up our small corner of the garden’.170 The philosopher as a lowly manual labourer, cleaning out the weeds so that good seeds can flourish in their place. The imagery of
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the analyst as manual worker is littered throughout twentieth-century analytic texts.171 From these images and the subscription to common sense, to the wonderful mechanical metaphors – discussions of which part of an argument is ‘doing the work’, the notion of ‘stripping a thinker for parts’ – the analysts identified themselves with the ‘ordinary’ practice of the working man. Ernest Gellner sums up the situation perfectly: [t]he appeal of this doctrine lies in the image it gives the philosopher of himself. He can see himself as a man modestly and competently doing a solid, limited piece of work, quite unlike the nebulous, melodramatic, world- or outlook-changing and over-pretentious claims of his nonlinguistic predecessor. A fine picture this, a kind of philosophical cross on the bluff, straight-from-the-shoulder man and of the stereotype of the natural scientist who does one manageable job at a time, and it is well done when completed.172 While Gellner emphasizes the significance of the natural scientist he might equally have invoked that of a plumber. The virtues are in the modesty, the competency, the lack of drama, or excitability about big ideas. This reflects a strong hostility to abstraction in Britain during this period. The tendency is described critically by Orwell in his ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), but found positive subscribers even in academic circles.173 The historian G. M. Trevelyan saw the ‘antidote’ to over-intellectualism as, in Collini’s words, to remain ‘close to the instincts and good sense of ordinary people . . . Soundness is all’.174 No surprise that we saw Berlin condemn Collingwood precisely for being ‘unsound’.175 Trevelyan’s attitude has more general parallels with the message of the analysts in this period; if one substitutes the preferred analytic idiom ‘common sense’ for ‘the good sense of ordinary people’, then what we have here ascribed to Trevelyan is an accurate reading of the analysts’ position. It is striking, in contrast to the analyst as grounded and earthy, how frequently in this chapter we’ve seen the continentals described as ‘lofty’ – ungrounded, disconnected from the real, empirical, world. The analysts’ subscription to assumptions rooted in national identity has not escaped the eyes of scholars. Thus Bryan Appleyard has pointed to its ‘debunking’ style as being characteristically English: ‘a kind of commonsense scepticism, mistrustful of continental theory, which was to find echoes in the hard headed posturing of the Movement. Its very Englishness indeed resulted in its association with the whole ideology of Little England’.176
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The reference to the association of analytic philosophy with the ‘ideology of little England’ seems to be derived from an article in Encounter by Irving Kristol. He writes the following about the state of British philosophy: [a]nd there is no mistaking the fact that this is a very British school indeed. It is almost as if there had been a deliberate effort to caricature the Englishness of English philosophy with all those famous English virtues wildly exaggerated: the detestation of sham and artifice, the plainspeaking, the almost supernatural sensibleness, and with all those famous English vices wildly exaggerated too: the parochialness, the horror at big questions, in short the quasi-philistinism.177 We are facing here, as Kristol rightly points out, a caricature of Englishness.178 If Kristol’s remarks were phrased in a slightly less hostile manner, there would probably have been nothing in them that the analysts would have felt inclined to reject. The characteristics are those that we have seen across this chapter and the last – the shutting out of foreign influence, dismissal of big questions (often addressed through metaphysical philosophy), the demand for clarity, common sense and ‘soundness’. Of course, the contrasts that the analysts, and others, sought to draw in the mid-century, and particularly after 1945, were far from fresh in the 1940s. Collini points to the nineteenth-century roots of the British project of self-definition, initially against France: self-congratulatory contrasts with less fortunate nations, especially France . . . were . . . a staple of political argument in England throughout the nineteenth century, putting stability and practical good sense against revolution and political overexcitability; pragmatic empiricism against abstract rationalism, irony and understatement against rhetoric and exaggeration; and so on. In the negatively characterized half of each of these pairings we can already see the components of what was to become the dominant representation in 20th century Britain of (European) intellectuals.179 The roots of these categories, then, are historically at least a century deep. It is striking, too, that many of the components of this contrast appear to have survived intact – the good sense, calmness, practicality and humour of the empiricist English contrasted with all the vices we have seen imputed to the anti-canon in the twentieth century, rhetoric, political dangers and excessive abstraction. The difference between Collini’s characterization of
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these contrasts in the early nineteenth century and what we have found 150 years later is that the principal target appears to have shifted, from France to Germany. David Simpson describes this striking transfer of the stereotype. As early as ‘the Bismarck years . . . the German had been conscripted to serve the role previously assigned to the French, as the blinkered devotee of method and abstract theory’.180 By ‘the turn of the nineteenth century . . . “Germany” was clearly established as the new evil empire in Europe, even more demonised than France’.181 The new enemy is given the cast-off garb of the old enemy. But, in so doing, something of the older British image of the Germans remains. Simpson detects the characteristically twentieth-century British treatment of the Germans as far back as Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘[h]ere are both sides of the British image of the German – the wild, emotional visionary, and the totalising man of method’.182 What the analysts, particularly Russell and Berlin, offer is a way of understanding the twin tracks of this British-manufactured German identity. In the work of the analytic philosophers, the German system provides a cover behind which to mask the truly wild emotional debaucheries beyond. Such a reconciliation between French and German stereotypes must have been made easier by the perceived alliance between French existentialism and German thought, easing the way for the analysts to bring together the image of the French and the Germans, creating a monolithic ‘continental intellect’. What this history also points to, again, is the significance of politics to philosophy. In this case, as Simpson’s comments make clear, it is at least in part the shift in political power from the early nineteenth century, when revolutionary France appeared to pose the greatest threat to Britain from Europe, to a situation by the late nineteenth century, after the Franco-Prussian war, when Germany became militarily ascendant on the continent of Europe and then became the prime twentieth-century threat to British power. This process is mirrored by Germany’s apparent ascendancy in philosophy, and ultimately becoming the enemy on the philosophical front, as well as on the political one.
Conclusion What we have seen in this chapter is identity positions constructed for analyst and continental which straightforwardly break down as a binary between virtue and vice. The continentals engage in unacceptable philosophical practices: metaphysics, obscurity, poor argument, and appeals to
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the emotions. In contrast the analysts are anti-metaphysical, they subscribe to sound argumentative strategies – partly evidenced by their ability to critique the anti-canon’s poor ones, but also evidenced in their commitment to doing small projects well. The continentals are obscure, which the analysts condemn in favour of philosophical clarity. The anti-canon ‘hit their readers below the intellect’. The analysts do not indulge in such hot prose and rhetoric. On the level of character, we have seen the analysts portraying themselves as jovial, calm, content and upright, in contrast to the continentals, who are riven by anxieties and any number of personality disorders. We have also seen the sheer weight of imagery deployed by the analysts in conveying the irrationality of the anti-canon. And of course, most recently, we have been reflecting explicitly on the way the philosophical and character flaws of the anti-canon are related to their political vices. Finally, we’ve seen again how this catalogue of virtues and vices also manifests as a distinction between the British on the one hand and the continentals, specifically the Germans and to a lesser extent the French, on the other. Nicholas Martin sums up his characterization of the use of Nietzsche in British propaganda during World War I by commenting: ‘The enemy had to be demonized’.183 From what we have seen, it may be fair to conclude that a similar necessity gripped the analytic philosophers in the period of the Second World War. What we see is the construction of identities, identities based around a binary between virtue and vice – on the level of philosophy character and politics. The other task of this chapter – and the reason why it has been the hardest of all to write – is the attempt to demonstrate the interconnection of these elements. As one might expect from a process of identity formation, the analysts do not rigidly separate the character components from the ‘strictly’ philosophical, from the political philosophical, from the plain political. Indeed these elements are so intertwined that one has to do a certain violence to the texts in order to separate them sufficiently to discuss the various elements. Because of this unfortunately necessary violence it is worth here, very briefly, sketching these intertwining webs. Let us start with metaphysics, whether one is pro- or anti-metaphysics – which one might think of as a strictly philosophical question – turns out to be bound up with whether one has a character of a certain kind: use of metaphysics often signifying a weak character. But this in turn signifies a philosophical vice – the willingness to falsify the world in order to satisfy your own desires. This character trait is associated, though not in all cases, with a philosophical position: epistemological subjectivism. Moreover,
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metaphysics itself is associated with fascism, from what we can tell, because its deceptive nature can be used to misdirect people, to seduce them; but also because fascism manifests a power philosophy which seeks to recreate the world according to its ideological commitments – fascists too are epistemological subjectivists. Finally, as we have seen, metaphysics is also associated with Germany, and in particular with the German character. The making of poor philosophical arguments and obscurity of prose are read both as philosophical failings and failings of character – a desire to deceive and seduce. The idea of philosophical prose as deceptive and seductive is linked to the notion of philosophical prose as causing aggression – hot temperature of argument, and again to fascists, who seek to seduce and intoxicate their followers. This again has a national dimension to it, as the analysts inform us of the British philosophers’ preference for small scale flexible investigations. The explicit way in which particular philosophical preferences are tied directly to national identity fractures the hermetic seal around analytic philosophy at multiple points. In each of these examples the philosophical is bound together with character and politics. We will see in the next chapter that exactly the same occurs in the analysts’ characterization of the link between their own philosophical and political virtues. It is only through this cluster of attitudes, some strictly philosophical, some definitely not, that we can fully understand both the vitriolic treatment of the anti-canon and the attendant errors to which it led.
Chapter 4
The Virtuous Tradition: Analysis, Liberalism, Britishness
I think there is some connection, both historically and psychologically, between Empiricism and Liberalism: I mean Liberalism in that large and non-party sense in which we say that the English speaking countries have a liberal tradition.1 (H. H. Price 1940) The only philosophy that affords a theoretical justification of democracy, and that accords with democracy in its temper of mind is empiricism.2 (Bertrand Russell 1950) [A] certain critical temper that you would develop if you did philosophy in the sort of way that Naess and I do it, it would on the whole tend . . . after all, you bring the same intelligence to bear on any of a wide range of problems, even though they aren’t necessarily the same range of problems, and this would, I think, tend to have the effect of making you a liberal radical in social and political questions. This would be more than just historical accident.3 (A. J. Ayer 1974) There is a rather high correlation between the endorsement of analytic philosophy and the adoption of liberal, secular, melioristic ideology of the Enlightenment.4 (Anthony Quinton 1982)
While this was neither a message consistently offered by the analysts, nor a part of the popular perception of them, they did have a clear confidence in the liberality of their own tradition. We can see from the quotations, above, that this analytic tendency was not confined to the immediate period of this project, but can be found, among the increasingly venerable analysts, until very recently. As the comments of Price and Quinton make clear, this is not a purported alliance with liberalism in the narrow, laissez faire, sense of the
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term, but a with a much broader ideology, encompassing democracy and toleration. We have been charting, over the last three chapters, a web of beliefs held by the analysts, and it will therefore be no surprise that in this final chapter many of the points to be made are extensions of what are by now familiar themes. This chapter has two major sections; the first relates the analysts’ confidence in the liberality of their tradition to the political-philosophical assumptions we have seen in previous chapters. The second section relates the analysts’ liberality to British nationalism. Even this division can now be seen to be somewhat forced in that the political, philosophical assumptions we discuss in the first half of this chapter are clearly related to the nationalist assumptions discussed in the second. However, even at this late stage we can’t do more than one thing at a time.
Subjectivism, Nazism and the Death of Political Philosophy One notable aspect of the analysts’ political self-identification as liberal is that it came under public and strenuous attack in the years after World War II, on two related fronts. First, the analysts were accused of holding a subjective position on values, a position which threatened to undermine morality. Secondly, the analysts were accused of paying so little attention to political philosophy that they were held responsible for its death. In both cases, there was at least a grain (and probably rather nearer a bushel) of truth behind the allegations. Yet neither seems to have stung the analysts into fundamentally questioning their assumptions about the liberality of their philosophy. I cannot do full justice to either critique of the analysts here, but it is worth sketching these criticisms in, if only to more clearly juxtapose the easy confidence of the analysts’ own reflections with a context that might be thought to have made them distinctly defensive. In the immediate post-war period the analysts came under attack in intellectual circles for holding a position on ethics that was seen to undermine not just liberalism but any political or moral values. The ethical subjectivism that was the legacy, if not the creed, of G. E. Moore saw the analysts attacked throughout the post-war period for various crimes against morality. Most strikingly, Ayer was accused in 1948 of giving succour to fascism by peddling a theory which would sap people’s concern with fundamental human values.5 Russell too was embroiled in this affair and faced
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widespread criticism in philosophical circles for taking political positions that his meta-ethical views were unable to justify.6 In a book on the subject in 1950, C. E. M. Joad summed up the problem with, specifically Ayer’s, meta-ethical commitments: if there is no objective right or wrong, if moral judgements are, as logical positivists hold, merely ejaculations of emotions of approval or disapproval, then, as Mr Dunham points out, one cannot demonstrate that Fascist practices are evil; one can only express dislike of them. ‘No philosophy’ he comments, ‘would better please the fascists themselves, since moral questions could then be safely left in the hands of the police . . .’ Now can anyone seriously maintain that the spread of such doctrines will have no consequences for ethics, politics and theology [?] . . . Can a man really continue to feel indignant at cruelty, if he is convinced that the statement ‘cruelty is wrong’ is meaningless? An emotion of indignation may indeed be felt; it may even be expressed; but it will not long survive the conviction that it is without authority in morals or basis in reason.7 Joad outlined a perennial problem for the subjectivist – and a particular problem for the extreme subjectivism of the emotivists – among them Russell and Ayer. While these two men, being the most public face of analytic philosophy, caught most of the criticism, the other analysts, as Mary Warnock has pointed out, held similarly subjectivist views on the question of ethical language. Warnock spells out the implications: [I]t was common ground that the two kinds of meaning, evaluative and factual, were totally distinct. The consequence of this dichotomy was that, while disputes about matters of fact could be settled, at least in principle, by observation, disputes about matters of morality could not. Therefore there was ultimately no arguing about morals or politics. Either one had to say, ‘I feel horror at such and such a course of action, even though you do not’, and leave it at that; or one had to turn ‘You ought to do this or that’ into ‘Do this or that’, a command for which no reason need be given and to which, of course, no obedience could be extracted otherwise than by force. Not unnaturally, moral philosophy came to seem both rather empty and rather easy.8 In this context, it is, perhaps, understandable that concerns were raised about the reduction of ethical philosophy, both in its content and status, and the effects that this might have on the moral and political fibre of the nation.
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Away from questions of meta-ethics, the analysts’ commitment to political philosophy was also dramatically brought into question. So apparently disengaged from political philosophy were they that, when Peter Laslett infamously declared political philosophy to be ‘dead’ in 1956,9 the analysts were singled out as the murderers: [t]he Logical Positivists did it. It was Russell and Wittgenstein, Ayer and Ryle who convinced the philosophers that they must withdraw into themselves for a time and re-examine their logical and linguistic apparatus.10 This prompted a lengthy discussion among commentators, and rather later among the analysts themselves, about the reasons and motives for the abandonment of political philosophy.11 I do not wish here to be drawn directly into a discussion of this topic, though some of the conclusions later in the chapter do have a bearing on the question. We should, however, note one clear exception to this pattern of analytic disengagement with matters political-philosophical: R. M. Hare, like his analytic colleagues, was convinced that philosophical errors underpinned German behaviour during World War II. Unlike his colleagues, he felt the urgent need to correct those errors. To this end he travelled to Germany in the 1950s to deliver a series of lectures in applied ethics. In his ‘Peace’ (1966), Hare issued a retrospective manifesto for the role of the moral philosopher in the political world: [I]f we could understand the thinking processes which could persuade a man like Hitler that what he was doing was right, we might be on the way to immunizing people against such ideas. It is perhaps true that, if philosophers had done their job better in the last two centuries (both the job of clarifying ideas to themselves and the job of getting other people to understand them) there would not have been a Nazi movement?12 Hare placed the philosopher centre stage in the post-war disinfection of the European body politic. His first works of applied ethics ‘Reasons of State’ (1953), ‘Ethics and Politics I: Can I be blamed for obeying orders?’ (1955) and ‘Ethics and Politics II: Have I a duty to my country as such?’ (1955), were all first delivered as lectures in Germany, before being broadcast on the BBC. They clearly delivered messages Hare felt it was important for the Germans to hear. The first lecture stressed to the German audience that they had a duty to think critically about the actions of the state.13 The second lecture attacks the notion that obeying orders is a moral imperative. Hare rapidly showed that such a view is incorrect – the refutation provided,
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unsurprisingly, by David Hume.14 The third lecture, ‘Have I a duty to my country as such?’, answered in the negative.15 The topics addressed touch on what have now become caricatures of German squirming after World War II, including the old favourite, the Nazi who was ‘only following orders’. As well as being far more interested in matters political than his colleagues Hare, a subjectivist himself, also attempted to overcome the problems posed by Joad and others. Later in this chapter, I will offer one explanation for his unusual engagement with political philosophy. I will also suggest that, despite Hare being exceptional in the time and energy devoted to analysing the possible sources of liberal values within a subjectivist framework, his attitudes fit very much within the web of understanding that I will demonstrate guided the analysts’ thought about the relationship between empiricism and liberalism. This short section allows us to draw out a series of teasing issues. As we have seen, the analytic philosophers were so apparently uninterested by political philosophy that they were accused of bringing about its demise. Moreover, they were accused of destroying the basis for a belief in values – and so of delivering their followers into the hands of Nazis – through their meta-ethical subscription to subjectivism. Nevertheless, the analysts believed, apparently with a serene confidence, that there was a strong link between their empirical philosophy and political liberalism. This, as it stands, appears in need of some kind of an explanation. The key to understanding the analysts’ belief in their alliance with liberalism, despite their lack of work on the subject and the highly public criticism of their subjectivism, lies in their cultural assumptions. The binary between canon and anti-canon, which we have seen set up in the previous chapters, gave the analysts powerful reasons to see their philosophical method as one with essentially liberal outcomes.
The Liberality of the Analytic Philosophers In this section, we will canvass the arguments the analysts put forward for their own liberality by dividing them into two broad sections. The first set of arguments vindicates the analysts politically through a direct contrast with the vices of the anti-canon. Just as metaphysics leads to fascism, so antimetaphysics leads to anti-fascism, and so on. I examine this theme by looking first at their hostility to metaphysics and theory, then at their calls for scepticism and clarity. The second type of argument appears to be more positively based on some significant philosophical links between the
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analysts’ epistemological commitment to empiricism and their political commitment to liberalism. Virtue through exclusion I: Metaphysics and theory Since the analysts believed they had identified the intellectual causes of fascism, one way in which they could assert their liberal credentials was simply to abjure the philosophical methods that lay behind totalitarian philosophy. This would, at the very least, lead to the avoidance of totalitarianism, even if it did not provide a positive vindication of liberalism. The methodological contrasts we saw drawn in the last chapter could, therefore, also been seen as political contrasts. When Ayer wrote in 1948 that ‘[f]ascists have hitherto tended to favour some form of metaphysics . . .’,16 this contained a powerful implication, that Ayer’s own, anti-metaphysical philosophy, would also prove an anti-fascist philosophy. This was a connection he made in an interview with Bryan Magee in 1978. He called logical positivism ‘consciously hostile to the German tradition of romantic metaphysics;’ and having linked this romantic movement to Nazism, in a passage already quoted, he went on: ‘[s]o logical positivism was against the German tradition, both intellectually and politically’.17 Ayer’s understanding of logical positivism was, then, as a theory with real political ramifications. This belief issues directly from the analytic philosophers’ belief in the relationship between Nazism and the anti-canon of metaphysical philosophers. The Nazis are threatened by logical positivism because, according to Ayer, the Nazis favour metaphysics. Ayer’s belief in the anti-metaphysical/anti-Nazi dynamic in logical positivism must have been strengthened by the treatment of its principal exponents, the Vienna circle, during the 1930s, first by the authoritarian Austrian government and the Austrian Nazi party, and eventually by the German regime in Austria. There is confusion in the literature on this topic concerning the extent to which the Vienna circle conceived of themselves as a political movement. Ayer appeared to believe that, irrespective of any direct political activity, the values of the circle were so dangerous to successive reactionary governments that they had to be broken: ‘[t]he German occupation of Austria dispersed the Circle . . . the radical spirit of the group and its rational outlook made it unacceptable to the Nazis’.18 These must have been excellent credentials not just for Ayer, but for the other watching analytic philosophers too. As we have seen, a belief in the relationship between metaphysics and the proto-totalitarian anti-canon was one widely shared by the analysts. It was
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not just Ayer’s hostility to metaphysics, then, that could be understood to have a political dimension. While none made the relationship between their anti-metaphysical and their anti-totalitarian credentials as explicit as did Ayer, such an attitude would entirely fit with the analysts’ other beliefs about the anti-canon. If we recall the imputations of vice and deception, which accompanied the critique of metaphysics in Chapter 3, it would be highly surprising if the other analytic philosophers did not privately conclude that their anti-metaphysical stance was a politically powerful one. But the political distrust of metaphysics was part of a wider political distrust of theory – and on this subject the analysts were more forthcoming. Their concern was that the application of theory to politics would, as with the application of metaphysics, swirl people up in an ideological frenzy, in which humanitarian concerns would be forgotten. Conversely, the empiricists’ anti-theoretical approach would tend to humanitarianism. As Otto Neurath, a member of the Vienna circle, wrote: empiricists on average are less prepared to become merciless persecutors, and not so frequently the enthusiastic followers (for the higher glory of THE transcendent nation, ideal, etc. or something else) because they are not prepared to sacrifice their own end and other people’s happiness to something ‘idealist’ and anti-human.19 In keeping discussion out of the realm of high and abstract ideals to which all other interests must be subjugated, empiricism proves politically salutary. Political virtue rested in resisting the lure of abstractions – which entice us to sacrifice concern for individuals. Theorizing is politically dangerous; analysts don’t go in for theorizing, therefore, analytic philosophers are in less danger of authoritarianism. Warnock suggested that the analysts’ hostility to Heideggerian ‘obscurity’, ‘rhetoric’ and ‘mystery-mongering’20 was related to ‘a certain distrust of “Theories”’,21 which many analysts, especially Austin, considered ‘distorting’.22 By contrast, what Austin demanded, according to Williams and Montefiore, was ‘the unvarnished truth’.23 This of course relates to the claims we found made by the analysts about the dangers of metaphysics in the last chapter, that a theory could be used as a veil for bad arguments and false claims. But the choice of the Nazi-apologist Heidegger as Warnock’s example indicates that politics is not far below the surface here. This becomes explicit in a comment made by Stuart Hampshire, who worked for military intelligence during the war. Afterwards some of his former colleagues in intelligence turned out to be Soviet spies. Hampshire’s
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explanation for this was that their anger about poverty and injustice was manipulated by communist doctrine; they were ‘deceived by theory’.24 Russell drew a clear contrast between the political vices inherent in the anti-canon practice of theory, and the political virtues attendant on analytic methodology, using Locke as an example: Locke, as we saw, is tentative in his beliefs, not at all authoritarian and willing to leave every question to be decided by free discussion. The result, both in his case and those of his followers, was a belief in reform, but of a gradual sort. Since their systems of thought were piecemeal, and the result of separate investigations of many different questions, their political views tended naturally to have the same character. They fought shy of large programmes all cut out of one block, and preferred to consider each question on its merits. In politics, as in philosophy, they were tentative and experimental. Their opponents on the other hand, who thought they could grasp this ‘sorry scheme entire’, were much more willing to ‘shatter it to bits and then remould it nearer to the heart’s desire’. They might do this as revolutionaries, or as men who wished to increase the authority of the powers that be; in either case, they did not shrink from violence in pursuit of vast objectives, and they condemned love of peace as ignoble.25 Here the tentative piecemeal approach that characterized Locke’s philosophy is seen to have anti-authoritarian properties when applied to politics. The virtues of Locke and the analysts prove the precise inverse of the theoretical approach to philosophy, which creates large programmes in pursuit of ‘vast objectives’. The small-scale approach of Locke, focused on ‘merit’ and individual need, results in gradual reform and controlled progressive change. By contrast, for the sake of the ideologically-given grand plan, Locke’s opponents will not hesitate to deploy violence to get their way. As in the previous chapter, the virtues of the analysts in this respect are accompanied by the related vices of the (here unspecified) other. In this case the willingness or otherwise to undertake large-scale theorizing reveals not just philosophical virtue and vice, but also political virtue and vice. We find a similar set of beliefs in the work of Ayer. He wrote comparatively little on political philosophy; in a paper first given in 1967 he goes a long way to explaining why and in so doing highlights the importance of the analysts’ hostility to theory. ‘For a long time now, it seems to me, theoretical principles have played a very small part in English politics . . . There is often a coating of theory but the arguments in which it is deployed are
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mostly ad hoc: they have not stemmed from different theoretical systems’.26 He characterizes this approach as ‘political empiricism’: [t]he result of this prevalent empiricism – and here I am using the word ‘empiricism’ not in the philosophical, but in the political sense, in which an empirical is contrasted with a theoretical approach – is that political science is reduced to a combination of economics and psephology.27 Political empiricism, then, is just the supposedly non-ideological piecemeal and pragmatic approach to solving social problems. It is this anti-theoretical aspect of British political life to which Ayer is keen to draw attention. Clearly, as he implies by calling the British approach to politics ‘empiricist’, there will be a powerful alliance between the anti-theoretical political practice of the British politician and the anti-theoretical philosophical commitments of the British analyst. It was Iris Murdoch who clearly identified the political dimension of the analysts’ hostility to theory: [i]t is moreover felt that theorizing is anti-liberal . . . and that liberalminded persons should surround their choices with a minimum of theory, relying rather on open and above-board references to facts or to principles which are simple and comprehensible to all.28 Murdoch argued that there was no strictly philosophical reason for abandoning theory. ‘It therefore emerges that the choice made by our intellectuals against the development of theories is a moral choice’.29 The hostility to theory, then, has both a moral and political dimension – a feeling that to undertake theoretical work is illiberal. The analysts’ dislike of theory, and their trenchant criticism of those who indulged, was one powerful support to their liberal credentials. Against the high abstractions of theory, the analysts repeatedly juxtapose their own small scale, piecemeal experimental and quasi-scientific philosophical analysis, perfectly designed to drill holes in the most imposing of edifices. If vast systems gave rise to totalitarianism, make such vast systems difficult, if not impossible to produce. Virtue through exclusion II: Scepticism and clarity Together with the distrust of theory went other politically virtuous characteristics. A broad scepticism characterized the tradition, allied to a subscription to clarity which forced murky dealings into bright light. Mary Warnock, writing on the immediate post-war period: ‘[w]e preferred to burst balloons
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rather than inflate them. After six years of propaganda, no-one was about to pull the wool over our eyes’.30 We saw balloons in the last chapter – Hare discussing the continentals inflating balloons with noxious gases and floating them over the channel in our direction. Warnock’s image suggests a group of analysts ranged across the white cliffs of Dover to shoot these balloons before they make landfall. This deflationary scepticism was seen as a tonic. It was to this virtue that Bernard Williams credited the British success in throwing off Hegel, while continental philosophy indulged him: ‘[w]hile the influence of Hegel radically changed the rest of European thought, and continues to work in it, the sceptical caution of British philosophy left it, after a brief infection, markedly immune to it’.31 This scepticism is buttressed by another of the great analytic virtues – clarity. This virtue was required for ‘mental hygiene’32 and also had a political purpose. These are G. J. Warnock’s observations on J. L. Austin’s attitude to teaching: [i]t was not that he thought it mattered whether people in general held correct, or even any, philosophical opinions; what was vitally important was that as many as possible should acquire the habit of, and some skill in, clear methodical thinking, and should be, as it were, immunized against the wilder kinds of confusion, myth-mongering and intellectual trickery. This had with him the force of a moral and political conviction.33 Here we have the familiar viral imagery, and imputation of lurking dangers. But we also have a suggestion as to the kinds of dangers kept in check by clarity – Warnock suggests that there was a political dimension to this commitment. This is a significant insight into British philosophy at this time. As we have noted, the immediate post-war period is often seen as a period in which political philosophy died out. What this quotation does is suggest that at the heart of Oxford philosophy there was a moral mission, and a moral mission that we have seen was bound up in the minds of Austin’s followers, if not Austin himself, with the necessity to preserve the mental hygiene of politics.34 Ayer also drew attention to the importance of conducting philosophy clearly and precisely. In the last interview before his death, he drew, once again, on the contrast with the anti-canon. Ayer was asked to characterize ‘British empiricism’: [s]ticking close to the facts, and close to observation, and not being carried away by German romanticism, high falutin’ talk, obscurity, metaphysics. It’s a tradition, on the whole, of good prose. That is very important.
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If you write good prose, you can’t succumb to the sort of nonsense we get from Germany and now also from France.35 He labours the point further: ‘[o]ne of the great dangers of philosophy is woolliness, and woolliness, particularly among Germans, is always masked by very unclear writing’.36 Here, Ayer catalogues almost all the major anti-canon intellectual vices that we have been examining. He also identifies good prose as prophylactic – if you keep your style clear and unambiguous you cannot fall into German nonsense. It is significant that nonsense, for Ayer, is German nonsense, and only latterly French (it seems likely Ayer considered the ‘French nonsense’ to be emanating from those Frenchmen recognizably drawing on the German tradition, like Sartre and latterly Derrida). In these observations, Ayer touches again on the philosophical nationalism underpinning the British position. We also see ‘woolly thinking’ allied to a ‘great danger’ of philosophy. The link here is not explicit, but it surely cannot be too far-fetched to believe that in highlighting the danger of German philosophy and the importance of the clarity of analytic philosophy in countering it, Ayer had in his mind the political results of allowing the practice of such dangerously woolly philosophy – a link he had already made directly in a previous interview.37 Hare offers the same connection much more explicitly. Clarity, for Hare, is a crucial ally in the war against the political fanatic, ‘[t]here will always be fanatics’, however they thrive on ‘confused thinking’. If a person understands clearly what he is doing when he is asking a moral question . . . if he is able to distinguish genuine facts from those ‘facts’ which are really concealed evaluations . . . then the propagandist will have little power over him. To arm people in this way against propaganda is the function of moral philosophy.38 Clarity is needed to unpick the fanatic’s moral from his factual claims – to sweep away the confusion he will seek to perpetuate. Again here, fanaticism, political vice, is tied up with intellectual and philosophical vice. The analysts’ subscription to clarity turns out to be a political as well as a philosophical virtue. Liberalism and empiricism in alliance But there was more to the analysts’ liberal confidence than simply asserting a set of demands and exclusions – no theory, no obscurity, no credulity.
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As was implied in Russell’s comparison between Locke and his opponents, there was a positive dimension to the empiricists’ belief in the relationship between their philosophy and liberalism. Here we will look at three ways in which the analysts conceived of their thought as positively liberal, as opposed to simply anti-totalitarian. First, we will look at the claim that there is an analogy between the empirical and liberal habits of mind, entailing that an empiricist is likely to be liberal, and vice versa. Secondly, we’ll examine claims that link empiricism and liberalism through ascribing to both some commitment to truth. Finally, we’ll look at the suggestion that analytic philosophy deliberately cultivates in its practitioners character traits that lend themselves to good political decision-making. Liberalism and empiricism – a common mental attitude We begin with the analogy drawn between the empiricist habit of mind and the liberal habit of mind. Price made one such link in 1940, in a passage quoted at the top of this chapter: I think there is some connection, both historically and psychologically, between Empiricism and Liberalism: I mean Liberalism in that large and non-party sense in which we say that the English speaking countries have a liberal tradition.39 Empiricism is hostile to humbug and obscurity, to the dogmatic authoritative mood, to every sort of ipse dixit. It does not conceive of Philosophy as a heresy-hunt directed against those who stray from the truths once for all delivered to our fathers; but as a free co-operative inquiry, where anyone may put forward any hypothesis he likes, new or old, provided it makes sense. The same live-and-let-live principles, the same dislike of humbug of the ipse dixit sort of authority, are characteristic of Liberalism too . . . If Empiricist philosophy is strong to-day, perhaps we may hope to see a revival of Liberalism the day after to-morrow.40 It is the empiricists’ intellectual habits, again contrasted against the authoritarian humbug of another tradition (Hegel is mentioned both before and after the passage quoted), that allies the empiricist with liberalism. The careful live-and-let-live scientism of the empiricist is the natural ally of the anti-authoritarian liberal. In 1940, his perception of this alliance was clearly enough to provide Price with a measure of hope in the face of German invasion. The other analysts were also highly persuaded of the analogy in outlook between liberalism and empiricism. Russell took a similar position in
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‘Philosophy and Politics’ (1950), and in so doing, shows that Price’s hope of 1940 was not simply an unrepresentative clutching at straws: ‘[t]he scientific outlook, accordingly, is the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism’.41 For Russell, John Locke exemplifies this unity: [B]oth in intellectual and in practical matters he stood for order without authority; this might be taken as the motto both of science and of Liberalism. It depends clearly on consent or assent. In the intellectual world it involves standards of evidence which, after adequate discussion, will lead to a measure of agreement among experts. In the practical world it involves submission to the majority after all parties have had an opportunity to state their case.42 We saw above that Ayer referred to the British approach to politics as ‘political empiricism’. Ayer clearly believed that the virtues he took to be characteristic of the empirical approach to philosophy would also lead to liberalism or, in this case more specifically, to his own brand of liberal radicalism in politics: in general it has certainly been true in the last century or so that there has been a close association, so close an association between empiricism and radicalism that it couldn’t entirely be an accident. But I think it’s a matter of a certain habit of mind, a certain critical temper in the examination of political and social as well as philosophical questions, that is responsible for this, rather than some deduction from first principles.43 Pressed to elaborate his position, Ayer did so as follows: a certain critical temper that you would develop if you did philosophy in the sort of way that Naess and I do it, it would on the whole tend . . . after all, you bring the same intelligence to bear on any of a wide range of problems, even though they aren’t necessarily the same range of problems, and this would, I think, tend to have the effect of making you a liberal radical in social and political questions. This would be more than just historical accident.44 He concludes: ‘[a]nd, in a sense, I would expect an empirical philosopher to be a radical’.45 His biographer finds a similar link in the thought of Isaiah Berlin.46 Michael Ignatieff writes that Berlin’s philosophy tutor, Frank
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Hardie, ‘became the single most important intellectual influence upon Berlin’s undergraduate life: orienting him towards the British empiricism that became his intellectual morality’.47 This notion of empiricism as an intellectual morality is an interesting one. Although Ignatieff does not explicitly elaborate on this observation, a hundred pages further on in his book he offers a comparison between Berlin and Albert Einstein which seems to have a bearing on the theme. They shared, Ignatieff suggests, a ‘sense of reality’: There was only one world, Berlin wrote of Einstein, and this was ‘the world of human experience; it alone was real’. This sense of reality – that the world was as it seems, and that it could be known only by patient and careful research – was the only sure guarantee against ideological intoxication . . . 48 The notion of a ‘sense of reality’ invoked by Ignatieff offers us a route to understanding these claims. Empiricists hold, in part, that the only world that we can experience is the world given to us by our senses, and other considerations must be ruled out.49 They denied the Kantian and postKantian notion that reality was, at least in part, mind-created. Such a view could, they felt, be used to justify the notion that reality can in fact be ‘remoulded nearer to the heart’s desire’ – to steal Russell’s phrase. The analysts’ denial of the mind-createdness of the world, their sense of the unique reality of the given world, is tied in to a guarantee against political extremism. The focus on the concrete saves the empiricist from following grand theories, metaphysical chimeras and other strictly exhortations to devalue reality in favour of dangerous ideological fantasy. The very groundedness of the empirical approach was a guarantee against dangerous political ideas. In his essay of the same name, Berlin points to the importance of the sense of reality for staying true to and focused on the particularities of a situation, rather than reading it through a theoretical schema that flattens, simplifies and generalizes.50 No surprise then that Berlin characterized the romantics’ aim as ‘to destroy ordinary tolerant life . . . to destroy common sense’.51 Common sense represents both a refusal to theorize and a refusal to travel far from what appears obvious. Liberalism, here, appears to be predicated on a common sense empiricism. There are two dimensions of this that it is worth noting. First, we see that the alliance between liberalism and empiricism is based on an assumption about the philosophical nature of political evil. Only if you assume that totalitarian politics issues from some kind of philosophically-inspired
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romantic bid to recreate the known reality will an empiricist theory of knowledge give you any guarantee against it. The analytic philosophers did not appear to contemplate that totalitarian ideas may issue out of precisely the small-scale, empirically-based activities that they saw as inherently liberal. What is clear from the quotations is that the analogy between the empirical and the liberal habits of mind was not one the analysts subjected to any real philosophical scrutiny. Prima facie the analogy between liberalism and empiricism is far from self evident; it would require a very careful elaboration of central ideas in order to sustain the work the analysts appear to want it to do. The analysts themselves clearly felt no such need, as they made no such attempt. One recent analysis of the analogy, by Benjamin Barber, concluded that the only parallel to be drawn between liberalism and empiricism is that both tend to collapse into, respectively, political and epistemological extremism.52 Not a result the analysts would have found palatable. At the very least then, a mutually reinforcing relationship between empiricism and liberalism is not intuitively compelling. This raises the question as to why the analysts were so apparently compelled by it. I will return to this shortly. Commitments to truth Beyond the notion of an analogy between empiricist mental habits and those of the liberal, the analysts also appeared to draw a more concrete link between the two systems of thought. The claim was that empiricism is allied to liberalism because both hold some subscription to truth. This strand of their thought is hard to separate from the previous one. Indeed, we might read Ayer’s comments above as implying such a relationship. He proposed a link between empiricism and liberal radicalism on the basis that anyone deploying the schooled intelligence and critical temper characteristic of an analytic philosopher would come to liberal conclusions. There was also a suggestion of this position in Berlin’s notion of a sense of reality. We read these comments as proposing an analogy between the liberal pattern of thinking and that of the empiricist, but it could be read as a stronger claim to the effect that somehow empiricism, because it gives us access to the facts, will also secure for us the right kinds of political outcomes. Is there a claim that the actual truth about the world does not favour extremism, and that therefore if one can get at the facts (via empirical methods), one sees that liberal politics is epistemologically superior? Here empiricist practice becomes the tool through which the truth about politics can be seen.
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This is a position that the analysts did more than simply hint at. In the last paragraph of his History of Western Philosophy Russell is explicit about the importance of truth. In a welter of conflicting fanaticisms one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings. To have insisted upon the introduction of this virtue into philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it can be rendered fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of which I am a member. The habit of careful veracity acquired in the practice of this philosophical method can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding. In abandoning a part of its dogmatic pretensions, philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life.53 This passage shows Russell appealing to the morally salutary power of commitment to truth, a commitment that he suggested was absent from philosophy before his own school introduced it (a claim that is at best ungenerous to the rest of the history of the discipline). But this passage also has the feel of a political manifesto. Scientific truthfulness will light the way to a new age of mutual human respect and understanding – and it is Russell’s analytic philosophy that carries the torch. In another comment Russell masterfully ties the threads of these ideas together: [i]n every important war since 1700 the more democratic side has been victorious. This is partly because democracy and empiricism (which are intimately connected) do not demand a distortion of the facts in the interests of theory.54 Here we can see a repetition of the claim that theorizing is falsifying in some way. But we are also introduced to the notion that somehow democracy is pre- or non-theoretical, straightforwardly true, and therefore because of its clear veracity it requires no falsification of our understanding of the world. This should ring bells as it is a variation on the claim, seen in the last chapter, that in bending the world to fit your theory, and therefore your desires, you falsify the world you seek to represent. The claim here is that somehow neither democracy nor empiricism fall into this trap. It is not
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clear whether this is because these ideas are non-theoretical, or whether they are based on a theory of such purity that no distortion of the facts is required. Finally, we have a wild historical claim – that the democratic side has won every important war since 1700. This three-way alliance between military success, a political system, and truth is rather reminiscent of the rationale of the crusades (or of a rather crude neo-Hegelianism). We find the same suggestion of an alliance between truth and liberalism in Hare’s lectures to the Germans. Hare argued that, in combination, the structure of ethical language and clearly stated empirical fact was a powerful weapon for liberalism and against totalitarians and fanatics. In the following passage, Hare demonstrates the liberal powers inherent in the logic of ethical discourse: [i]n his war with the fanatic, the best strategy for the liberal to adopt is one of persistent attrition. For there are, as we have seen, certain weapons available to him, in the nature of moral thought, which, if he keeps fighting and does not lose heart, will cause all but a small hard core of fanatics to relent.55 The truths of logic, as revealed by analytic philosophy, provide the liberal with tools to use against the totalitarian. But the inoculation of the public against the propaganda of the extremist is a three-stage process, with philosophy providing only the first phase: [h]e will be successful in this aim, if he can get the ordinary member of the public, first to be clear about the logical properties of moral words, as we have described them; secondly to inform themselves about the facts concerning whatever question is in dispute and thirdly to exercise their imaginations.56 Hare, like Berlin and Russell, is content to assume that there are no facts about the world which will ally themselves to the totalitarian. Despite his subjectivism, there is an assumption here of a moral order, reflected both in the formal rules of logic and in empirical data about the world. Unlike his colleagues, however, Hare gave concrete indications as to how this works in practice. Here, I will offer just one of the many instances of this type of argument in Hare’s work. One of his lectures in Germany, ‘Can I be blamed for obeying orders?’ (1955), illustrates the politically salutary power of the logic of ethical language. The purpose of this paper was, fairly self-evidently, to critique what Hare saw as the German attempt
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to escape moral responsibility for war crimes by citing the duty to obey orders. Hare argued that it was the analytic philosophy of David Hume which proved that the argument for the moral necessity of following orders is not only false, but is clearly so from the nature of moral language itself. Hume achieved this by revealing the logical truth that anyone’s desire for me to perform an action is logically independent of whether I ought to.57 Here a terrible political mistake, the supposed blind obedience of the German army and people to the Nazis, is put down to a simple logical error: ‘[t]here is a point beyond which we cannot get rid of our moral responsibilities by laying them on the shoulders of a superior, whether he be general, priest, or politician, human or divine. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not understood what a moral decision is’.58 We get a sense from this of the structure of Hare’s lectures in Germany, combining seemingly simple logical maxims, and an almost preacherly pointing of the moral. On one level, it is small wonder that Hare believed that, with a higher class of philosopher, Germany may have saved itself considerable hardship.59 These arguments, conducted at length in Freedom and Reason, and far more rapidly in Hare’s lectures to the Germans, provide a more meaningful attempt to ally analytic empirical philosophy with liberalism than any of the other analysts provided in this period. Hare’s essential case, though, is not dissimilar to the claims made by Russell about the alliance of liberalism to truth, with empiricism as the method of discovering that truth. Logic, combined with the empirical facts, represents a powerful ally to the liberal cause. Indeed, Hare echoes the claim made by Russell that the fanatic will always need to seek to distort the truth,60 which explains, he argued, ‘why, on the whole (though there are set-backs) liberalism advances against fanaticism’.61 Hampshire, while not straightforwardly an empiricist, nevertheless believed that the analysts’ liberal credentials stemmed from their subscription to truth. Again the contrast is offered explicitly with the anti-canon. Writing about the tradition of Hegel and Heidegger he argued: ‘[t]he first requirement of a philosophical assertion – that it should be true – is no longer even considered, provided it is psychologically impressive and moving’. Worryingly, this appeal to the emotions of an audience leads this kind of philosophy to gain followers rapidly.62 To combat this: philosophers in Britain and Australia, and in Scandinavia and America also, cling to the idea that their first duty is to try to make statements that are true, even if they are not always exciting, and to respect the bodies of
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ascertained truths which are labelled ‘science’ and ‘history’. To meet those of their critics who are uninterested in truth, a pragmatic apology can be found in the fact that none of these analytic philosophers has been friendly with Nazis or with other totalitarian parties, and that is not an accident. Anyone who is a member of these parties or is friendly with them, has to acquire the habit of making statements that are impressive and powerful without any regard to their testable truth.63 There is very much that is of interest in these quotations. Hampshire, like Russell makes explicit a claim that has been heavily implied in some of the other analysts’ remarks, that it is a pure commitment to truth that guarantees the analysts’ freedom from the corrupt ideas of Nazism. This is an argument, of course, that is entirely continuous with the analytic critique of fascism and anti-canon philosophy that we examined in the last chapter. If fascist-favouring philosophy requires distortion of the truth to get off the ground, and the analysts stick, like good empiricists, simply to the given facts, then they achieve immunity from extremism. Clearly this argument only works if you assume, as the analysts did, and as Hampshire conveniently reiterates here, that the anti-canon philosophers had no commitment to truth and that therefore the political movement which they spawned was intellectually bankrupt. While Russell and Hare appear to offer something more than this by building a link between liberalism and empiricism on a positive metaphysical foundation – that there is something about liberalism that is simply true – here Hampshire reverts to the rather more negative characterization of the relationship. Subscription to truth here does not offer us a vindication of liberalism; it simply defeats totalitarianism. Emotional control and liberalism The other dimension to Hampshire’s comments is the place of appeals to the emotions, as the opposite of appeals to truth. This is also something we have seen before. Hampshire suggests that Hegel and Heidegger gain followers due to the emotional appeal of their wares (and this must surely be an allusion to totalitarian political movements, given how Hampshire continues). Commitment to truth, then, becomes an anti-totalitarian strategy in part because it appears to disallow the project of remoulding the world according to the heart’s desire. We noted in the last chapter how important both the accusation of emotional weakness and the use of emotional rhetoric was in the analysts’ construction of the anti-canon. Unsurprisingly, the
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analysts saw their own deliberately un-emotional practice as necessarily politically benign. In September 1935, Russell attended the International Conference for the Unity of Science at the Sorbonne – dominated by the Viennese logical positivists. He wrote about this for Polemic in 1945: [i]n their official sittings [the philosophers] discussed highly abstract matters, but in their spare time they would touch on all the most thorny questions of European politics. I observed, with astonished admiration, that national bias hardly ever showed itself in these discussions. The severe logical training to which these men submitted themselves had, it appeared, rendered them immune to the infection of passionate dogma.64 Logic, here, provides an antidote to, or more appropriately an immunisation against, passionate political dogma – no mean feat in the tempestuous days of the mid-1930s. Russell made a very similar claim about the intellectual habits of empiricism – recall his contrast between the careful gradualist Lockean reformers and their violent opponents, ‘who thought they could grasp this “sorry scheme entire” [and] . . . “shatter it to bits and then remould it nearer to the heart’s desire”’.65 In ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Russell suggests that Locke’s ‘piecemeal and patchwork political doctrine’ was a response to the evils of sectarian ‘enthusiasm’.66 What we see here is that the distinction between the wild emotional debauch of the anti-canon and the calmness of the canon is one with a distinctly political dimension. Ryle and Hampshire both offered insights into the political virtue associated with the empiricists’ emotional control. They suggested that the careful scientific approach to philosophy had positive political effects through helping to increase self-understanding and lessening destructive passions. Ryle argued that even through Locke’s work on epistemology, the Essay on Human Understanding, there is a political message. Lockean common sense suggests a ‘common’ basis of thought for all people and thus a way to toleration.67 Ryle went on: ‘[c]an ordinary, or even highly sophisticated people be converted from bigots into fairly judicious and cautious thinkers by examining, so to speak, the mechanics of their own intellectual operations?’68 The implied answer is a definite ‘yes!’ Ryle holds up the permanent significance of Locke as the lesson he taught us in ‘reasonableness’ and the holding of beliefs based on evidence and arguments. ‘There are bigots, fanatics and cranks in our midst in 1965’, but thanks to Locke we look at them as people to be criticized.69 Ryle seems to make a number of inter-related points here. The paper from which these observations are drawn was an introductory
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piece, delivered to summer school students at Edinburgh University so there is much less detail than might be desirable; however the one clear aspect of Ryle’s message is that Locke provided tools for the removal of bigotry by psychological self-scrutiny. The result: judicious, cautious thinkers; the reverse of the emotionally violent anti-canon. Hampshire made an apparently similar point rather more clearly, while discussing Hume: [h]is philosophy, his theory of knowledge, his ethics, and his political theory are designed to persuade men to understand their passions, and thereafter calmly and without enthusiasm to make arrangements that they should live together peacefully and agreeably, in a decent compromise with the conflicting demands of their nature.70 Significantly, for Hampshire, even Hume’s epistemology has ameliorative powers in the political world. The means to this appear to be, effectively, emotional control through self-knowledge. This sort of cold reasoning with one’s desires and needs again represents the polar opposite of the anticanon’s tendency to elevate their purely subjective desires into truths about the universe. Warnock also linked the calmness of analysis with political virtue. He wrote in 1958 that: ‘[f]or my own part I am inclined to think that they only need feel strongly hostile to contemporary philosophy who have cause to fear or to dislike a clear intellectual air and a low temperature of argument’. Modern philosophers tend to use their pens ‘as an instrument of deflation . . . any age or any society in which these pursuits [minute analysis] were wholly neglected would be, in my judgement, seriously the worse for that’.71 This passage – taken from the last paragraph of Warnock’s book – again points to the social and political uses of the analytic philosopher, as a maintainer of cool heads and grounded argumentation. The imagery Warnock uses here is the same as that used in his account of the faults of the anti-canon, the analysts argue at low emotional temperature; the idealists, we recall argue at high temperature. Warnock warns that any society that was without the analysts’ brand of cool, dispassionate criticism would suffer serious but unspecified hardships. In the case of the emotions, then, the analysts’ positive characterization of their own calmness and its liberal effects seems bound up with their critique of the anti-canon. As such, it may appear that structurally it belongs with our discussion of the analysts’ list of prohibitions. But this structural anomaly raises a rather important point. We came to discussing emotions
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through the contrast Hampshire drew between appeals to emotions and appeals to truth. This makes plain something that must have become increasingly apparent to the reader as we proceeded. The provisional distinction we sought to draw between the analysts’ prohibitions against philosophical tactics used in totalitarian thought (through demanding clarity not obscurity, scepticism not enthusiasm, small scale investigations rather than metaphysics and theory) and their apparently more positive claims about a link between analytic philosophy (particularly empiricism) and liberalism cannot be sustained. The analysts’ positive claims about their own liberality are also very highly dependent on their assumptions about the nature of political vice. The analysts’ belief that empiricism and liberalism cultivate similar habits of mind, rests, as we noted above, on the assumption that political vices do not stem from what the analysts conceived of as empirical investigations, but only from grand theories. Their belief that liberalism and empiricism are united through the idea of truth is based, in part, on the assumption that rivals to liberalism must derogate from truth in order to construct their positions. This seems to be tied up at least in part with the analysts’ assumptions about the deceptive nature of the anti-canon project, and also about the paucity of its intellectual standards. Even the analysts’ positive beliefs about their own liberality, then, are to a large extent bound up with their assumptions about continental philosophy. However, it doesn’t seem quite right to characterize all of what we have seen as reliant on the characterization of the anti-canon: at least not directly. There does seem to be among the analysts a belief that goes beyond the negative claim that democracy wins because fascism loses. There seems to have been a more positive, metaphysical belief in the alliance of truth and liberalism; a belief that through a combination of untheorized scientific and commonsensical facts and logical rules analytic empiricism could provide evidence for liberalism’s veracity. Philosophically this was clearly a very thin claim indeed. The notion of any pre-theoretical data issuing in just one manifestly obvious political interpretation was as open to question in the mid-twentieth century as it is today. Moreover, all the analysts, Hampshire and Berlin excluded, had the problem that, by dint of their subjectivism, there was no way to draw a moral conclusion from any amount of purely empirical data. The relationship between what was True and what was Good, a staple of philosophical thought since Plato and, as Nietzsche realized, a fundamental assumption of scientism, was not one that the analysts could justify philosophically. The analysts, as much as Nietzsche himself, were philosophically committed to
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the dictum that ‘[t]here is no pre-established harmony between the furthering of truth and the good of mankind’.72 Nietzsche, in fact, may offer one way of reading the analysts’ assumptions on this front. The analysts’ subscription to scientism has by now been widely canvassed.73 If one wished to offer a Nietzschean reading of the analysts’ liberalism, one might argue that their faith in the power of modern science was unconsciously accompanied by the belief in the alliance between Truth and Goodness, upon which modern science was formed.74 While it seems likely that such assumptions may well have formed a part of the analysts’ thinking, I will propose an alternative explanation, one that seeks a contextual understanding of a creed that could take liberalism for granted – despite being formed amidst the chaos of the first half of the twentieth century. This returns us to the Britishness of the analysts’ self-image.
Britishness, the Guarantor of Political Virtue In this section, we will examine the overlapping ways in which the analysts drew confidence in both their own liberal credentials, and the self-evident veracity of liberal values, from their assumptions about the nature of British philosophy, British history and British character. First we will look at the analysts’ reflections on the post-war climate in Britain – which they portray as characterized by its liberal homogeneity and distance from the political tempests blowing on the continent. We then go on to look at the way in which the analysts saw British character as buttressing liberalism, before finally examining the way they drew all these strands together, making explicit connections between Britishness, empiricism and liberty.
The political calm of post-war Britain One dimension of the analysts’ liberal confidence appears to have been the lack of any perceived threat to liberalism in Britain after 1945. Despite being accused of dangerous subjectivism and fostering Nazism, Ayer gave confident assurances that British liberal values were secure and entirely correct. He wrote in 1963: the fact is that there seems at present to be no call for any fundamental revision of our moral outlook . . . By and large we find ourselves still at
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home in the moral climate of liberal humanism which was fostered by the Enlightenment and developed, anyhow theoretically, by the nineteenth century utilitarians.75 The British are ‘still’ at home with liberalism, an allusion to the claim that British history has been a history of liberality. No change is required. He wrote, in 1967, that: one reason why political philosophy is hardly a live subject in this country, so that more than most others it has the air of living on its past, is that our society is . . . ideologically homogeneous . . . on fundamental questions of organization no-one has any new ideas . . . In this matter I am like the rest; I have nothing new to offer. Only the old familiar liberal principles; old but not so firmly established that we can afford to take them for granted.76 There is here a warning against taking for granted the stability of English liberal democracy, but it is eclipsed by the assurance of his foregoing remarks. The English nation has, for Ayer, effectively grown out of political theory – why else would it be required to live on its past? It hit, many years ago, on the right answer and has stuck with it – united around ‘old familiar liberal principles’. Reflecting back on the period, Hampshire paints a similar picture, and he offers a contrast with the political turmoil of the continent: [t]hese were the gentle post-war years . . . when Communism and antiCommunism were the preoccupations of Europe, and of the United States but not of Britain, where philosophy flourished within a stable liberal consensus. Marxism, the Communist Party, and the Catholic Church were focuses of thought and of polemic which set the direction for Continental philosophies; but in Britain they were largely ignored. Analytical philosophers might happen to have political interests, but their philosophical arguments were largely neutral politically.77 Politics, in its problematic ideological form, is something that took place elsewhere. Britain was ‘gentle’, the liberal consensus was ‘stable’, British philosophers are ‘neutral’. Meanwhile, on the continent there are communists and catholics and philosophy is ‘polemical’. As Hampshire makes explicit here, these sentiments can be understood as part of the post-war feeling that, in Britain at least, the fundamental ideological questions had been put aside, or resolved altogether.
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The importance of British character For the analysts, this post-war calm was a reflection of the wider virtues of the British people – virtues which provided a powerful guarantee against the kind of political chaos that had recently gripped the continent. This confidence manifests in two distinct claims. The first follows intuitively from the types of claims we have already seen – the common sense that the analysts share with the British people turns out to have a political dimension to it. The second claim relates British character more directly to the liberal virtue of tolerance, and respect for democracy. The analysts’ preference for small scale philosophical enquiry and their distrust of theory and abstraction, which provides one of their bulwarks against dangerous political ideas, of course has a distinctly nationalist dimension to it. The distrust of theory and fondness for common sense and plain speaking are the very virtues that analytic philosophers share with the British people. This alliance, noted in Chapter 3, can now be seen to have an important political dimension. It was just such qualities highlighted by Russell when he wrote of the ‘fear of pushing any theory to its logical conclusion, which has dominated them [the British] down to the present time’.78 Russell highlighted this again in ‘Philosophy and Politics’, writing: ‘[t]he British are distinguished among the nations of modern Europe, on the one hand by the excellence of their philosophers and on the other hand by their contempt for philosophy. In both respects they show their wisdom’.79 As we saw in Chapter 2, even after British philosophy had been ‘conquered’ by the idealists, Russell points out that the two paradigms of analytic virtue, the ordinary man and the scientist, were stolidly unimpressed.80 Not just the analysts, then, but the British nation as a whole, share the politically salutary suspicion of pushing ideas to extremes. The views of the analysts as to the source of the exceptional virtue of the British polity were shared by non-analytic philosophers. While not an uncomplicated fan of what he saw as English anti-intellectualism, C. E. M. Joad conceded that the English were ‘on the whole, kindlier and more humane than any other people . . . ’ precisely because ‘they do not care about ideas’.81 Of course, it was not all ideas that the British objected to, it was abstract ideas, ideas that drifted too far from the sure foundations of empiricism and common sense. During and after World War II, the alliance between the down-to-earth qualities of the working Englishman and liberty was also an important refrain beyond the academy. It was the ordinary virtues of ordinary people that were
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seen as holding the key to British victory in the war, but it was also the ordinary virtues of ordinary people that enshrined the values of the nation. This was reflected in the notion of a ‘people’s war’ – a stark contrast to the ‘hero’s war’ of 1914’.82 Churchill claimed that the British people as a whole have ‘a natural inclination to defend liberty and the rule of law . . . Collectively the ‘common people’ became a moral as well as an economic category’.83 The true home of English liberty was not its coffee houses where men of affairs met to discuss politics, nor the cloisters of her ancient universities, but in the attitudes of working people. No surprise then, that the analysts’ preferred choice was for metaphors which united them with the source of British virtue: both Ayer pointing to philosophers as gardeners, and Hare to philosophers as plumbers are a part of what we can now see to be an alliance between analytic philosophy and the ordinary man with a distinctly political dimension. Stapleton has noted that, ‘[c]entral to th[e] conception of English exceptionalism was an opposition to the ‘abstract’, intellectualist values which were often deemed responsible for the political travails abroad’.84 This opposition was common to the analysts and to the British people. There were also many more direct links made between the British character and the liberal virtues. Such links were central to discussions of Englishness in this period. In the 1930s, as war approached ‘[a] vast amount of attention was lavished on the beauties of national character; the alleged tolerance of the English, their kindness to others, their love of sportsmanship . . . Straightforwardness, simplicity, loyalty, truthfulness, reliability, conscientiousness, were all it seemed quintessentially English virtues’.85 And this celebration of the English virtues continued into the war. Current Affairs, an internal armed forces magazine, informed the troops in 1943 that ‘Britain has taught the world that efficient government can be combined with freedom and respect for human dignity . . . we claim that we are standing for progress, that we are at least trying to solve the problems of our age in a spirit of tolerance and that we mean to establish freedom without which life is meaningless’.86 Britain fought, not just for her empire and independence, but for fundamental human values, values she had taught to the rest of world through her proud imperial history. Even the arch critic of Whig history, Herbert Butterfield, found his attitude turned about by the turning of the tide in Europe. In The Englishman and his History (1944) he wrote: ‘who among us would exchange the long line of amiable or prudent statesmen in English history, for all those masterful and awe-inspiring geniuses who have imposed themselves on France and Germany in modern times’.87 Here again, it is the character of the Englishman that shows itself in the stable nature of British politics.
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This was, unsurprisingly, a vision of Englishness that inspired the British analysts as much as anybody else. Russell in particular was keen to point out the liberality of character that was as much a part of England as the soil. Russell wrote that Locke gave ‘the first comprehensive statement of the liberal philosophy’. He went on: [i]n England, his views were so completely in harmony with those of most intelligent men that it is difficult to trace their influence except in theoretical philosophy.88 So highly assimilated are liberal values into the British nation that they disappear into the warp and weft of everyday thought and behaviour. In History of Western Philosophy, Russell sought to locate the spring of this liberal English character in the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, writing that the former instilled in ‘Englishmen, once for all, a love of compromise and moderation and a fear of pushing any theory to its logical conclusion, which has dominated them down to the present time’.89 By 1688 the English qualities of moderation and compromise were well established: John Locke (1632–1704) is the apostle of the Revolution of 1688, the most moderate and the most successful of all revolutions. Its aims were modest, but they were exactly achieved and no subsequent revolution has hitherto been found necessary in England. Locke faithfully embodies its spirit . . . 90 The Glorious Revolution was a characteristically English affair, moderate in its aims, unlike, we may imply, the high-sounding ambitions of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Not only moderate, it was also entirely successful, such that the English have felt no subsequent need to overthrow their rulers. This is glory of a delightfully understated English kind. In a later interview, with Woodrow Wyatt in 1960, Russell highlighted a slightly different, but not incompatible, set of historical circumstances as providing the historical root for England’s tolerant polity. Wyatt asked Russell to characterize the virtues of English society. He answered: a certain kind of diffused kindliness . . . I don’t think they [the British] have the same inflexible dogmas that are very common in other countries. And I think partly owing to the fact that we haven’t had a foreign invasion since 1066, we haven’t got so much reason for savagery in our history as most countries have.91
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Finally, Russell locates the ‘greatest virtue’ of the English character in its ability to compromise.92 In ‘Religion and Science’, first published in 1935, he referred to England as ‘now, as always an exceptionally tolerant country’.93 What we find in Russell is a restatement of many of the standard tropes of British exceptionalism. We find similar allusions to the benign political history and culture of Britain in Isaiah Berlin, who drew a powerfully evocative contrast between the world of proto-fascist Joseph de Maistre and the world, just across the Channel, of Edmund Burke’s England: Maistre’s famous, terrible vision of life, his violent preoccupation with blood and death belongs to a world different from the rich and tranquil England of Burke’s imagination, from the slow, mature wisdom of the landed gentry, the deep peace of the country houses great and small, the eternal society founded on the social contract between the quick and the dead and those yet unborn, secure from the turbulence and the miseries of those less fortunately situated.94 This rich passage suggests that the romance of Burke’s England was not lost on Berlin. Here, we begin to find explicit contrasts drawn between, on the one hand, the turbulence and miseries of ‘those less fortunately situated’ – a category that surely includes Maistre’s France, and possibly the continent more widely – and on the other we have a vision of a British nation where turbulence is a forgotten aspect of history and where such novel explosions as Maistre’s proto-fascism would never gain a serious audience. The idyll of British life is represented as the inverse of the chaotic world in which ideas like those of Maistre are taken seriously. This echoes of the same kind of Whig assumptions that we have seen in Russell’s ideas and mid-century British attitudes more widely. If we turn briefly to another analyst, C. D. Broad, we find another explicit contrast which highlights the importance of Englishness in the political sphere. Broad, echoing the phrasing of Mussolini, argued that democracy was not ‘suitable for export’.95 It requires an historical political evolution, racial homogeneity and inter-class solidarity.96 ‘I would add, for what it is worth, a certain degree of calmness and phlegm in the average Englishman, Dutchman or Swede which contrasts with the excitability one seems to notice in many other races’.97 Here Broad links English character directly to the English democratic system, and again offers a familiar contrast. The calmness and phlegm which we have seen in previous chapters characterizing English philosophy is also a characteristic of the average Englishman.
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Conversely, the excitability, or passion, which we have seen as an important part of dangerous foreign philosophy, is now seen as a characteristic, not of philosophy, but of particular foreign races. Broad does not specify which foreign races but we could probably make some educated guesses. His specific claim about the exceptional suitability of democracy to the English was one that echoed strands of thought present since at least the 1920s, when Churchill ‘congratulated the Italians on having liberated themselves from a form of government [democracy] to which they had clearly been unsuited’.98 Similar attitudes were also visible in the 1930s. An article in The Times in August 1936 reflected that ‘it may be that the system of parliamentary government which suits Great Britain suits few other countries besides’.99 Broad was a little behind the times in airing these thoughts in the 1950s, but not wildly out of step with wider opinion. The alliance between British character and liberalism, which we find in both the analysts’ work and in wider culture, was not a new one. As Tony Kushner has pointed out, of both Britain and America: ‘[i]n both countries liberal ideologies were welded to exclusively national frameworks, based on notions of “Englishness” and “Americanness” . . .’100 One was not English, and latterly liberal, authoritarian or theocratic, one’s liberal credentials were congenital, taken up with one’s mother’s milk and nurtured by society. This view was complemented by a pattern of argument, not found in the analysts but present in the work of other philosophers, which linked English virtue to English institutions rather than explicitly to English character. In an article on the Oxford Political Philosophers, Eric Voeglin identifies a shared assumption that ‘the principles of right political order have become historical flesh more perfectly in England than anywhere else at any time’.101 Philosophers such as J. D. Mabbot, A. D. Lindsay and R. G. Collingwood, shared fundamentally the same assumptions about the English body politic and the English character as the analysts. Voeglin wrote that ‘contemporary political debate is only to a minor extent theoretical discussion, while to a larger extent it is a cautiously moving elaboration of civil theology and its adaption, if possible, to the disquieting events of the age’.102 Whether in terms of character or institutions, the peculiar liberality of Britain was a powerful theme in post-war British thought. The nineteenthcentury Whig view of Britain as charting a specially blessed path through the turmoil of history found a new lease of life, according to Stefan Collini: ‘[s]tanding alone, Britain resisted where others crumbled, reinvigorating the traditional emphasis on British exceptionalism as a consequence’.103
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Political problems are not British problems We have seen that the analysts combine claims about the liberal calm of post-war Britain, with claims about the liberal character and history of the British. This might be taken to imply a certain complacency about British political virtue. This attitude did not pass unnoticed, or uncriticized. Irving Kristol identified the nationalist sentiments of the analytic philosophers on reading the analytic contributions to the first edition of Philosophy Politics and Society (1956). His comments are worth quoting in full: they reject the questions of political and moral philosophy because, in their heart of hearts, they feel that while such questions might occur to foreigners, they ought never to occur to well-adjusted Englishmen. Throughout their essays there runs the crucial assumption that the problems of political philosophy have been contrived by political philosophers, and that they would never occur to normal, sensible people.104 He goes on: [t]he contributors to Mr Laslett’s volume give the impression of being convinced that, if only those horrid questions are not permitted to be asked, then England will remain uncontaminated by the outrageous perplexities that less fortunate races let themselves in for, and this little island will be able to float peacefully in its blessed ignorance. 105 Kristol identifies precisely the attitude that we have been seeking to illustrate. Political philosophy, and indeed moral philosophy when it seriously challenges cherished convictions, is not to be had any truck with in Britain. The problems of morals and politics are problems for foreigners, who are perfectly entitled to get themselves into unnecessary intellectual knots provided they don’t seek to ensnare the British. Philip Pettit has provided an insightful commentary on this state of affairs: [t]here was probably little puzzlement in the minds of Western philosophers in the early part of the century as to what are the rational commitments in regard to political values. Continental refugees like Popper may have felt that they had something to establish, for they would have had a greater sense of the attractions of totalitarian government; Popper was one of the very few analytical philosophers to contribute, however historically and indirectly, to political theory . . . But the majority of
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analytic philosophers lived in a world where such values as liberty and equality and democracy held unchallenged sway.106 Here the definition of ‘Western’ seems to have been narrowed to Britain and America – excluding all those on the continent. Notwithstanding this quite significant redrawing of a line that is often taken to mark the boundary of civilization to exclude continental Europe, Pettit’s analysis seems highly plausible. Not only did the British have their blessed historical narratives to fall back on, but such narratives appear to have been reinforced by the first 50 years of the twentieth century. While the idea of moral progress had been trampled all over Europe, in Britain it retained credibility. It is interesting in this context to note that when Noël O’Sullivan set out to write a paper on the British philosophical response to totalitarianism, all but one of the thinkers he chose were immigrants from less stable climes.107 Of the thinkers he examines, Michael Oakeshott was the only one to have been born and brought up in Britain and Isaiah Berlin was the only one to have been primarily educated in Britain. The other two were more problematic. Karl Popper, an Austrian citizen, arrived in the UK in 1946. His philosophical response to totalitarianism, contained in The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and its Enemies has far more claim to be a New Zealander’s response to totalitarianism (the place where Popper wrote the books), or an Austrian response to totalitarianism (Popper’s native land) than it did to be a British response. Friedrich Hayek, the other thinker canvassed by O’Neill, was Austrian by birth and became a British citizen only in 1938 at the age of 39, after seven years’ residence. The Road to Serfdom (1944) was written by a man well over two-thirds of whose life experience had been accrued outside Britain. The ‘British’ philosophical response to totalitarianism, as characterized by O’Sullivan then, came very largely from those whose experience was not characteristically British – those who, unlike most Britons, had been exposed to totalitarian government at first hand. Perhaps, as Pettit suggests, in order to be seriously philosophically concerned by the threat of totalitarianism, one had to live under it – or be intimately acquainted with those who did. One could fit Hare into this matrix too. Hare’s war experience separated him from his colleagues. While many analysts served with distinction in the war, few were primarily involved in combat. Hare by contrast was actively involved in fighting the Japanese. As he recounts it, it was the Japanese tradition of hara kiri that stopped him believing in intuitively graspable objective moral standards.108 Taken prisoner, Hare was put to work on the Thailand-Burma railway.109 Given this direct experience of a totalitarian
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power in action it is perhaps understandable that Hare was one of the few analysts to follow up the widely held belief that fascism was at root a flawed philosophical project. For those whose experience had been of the comparative order and safety of Britain, the urgency of the task to correct these mistakes cannot have been so keenly felt. In this context, that it was Hare who went to Germany to lecture them on the correct moral outlook is hardly surprising. Significantly though, as we have seen, he combined a powerful concern with, and wish to correct, the dangerous ideas at the root of totalitarianism with a belief that these problems were elsewhere. These were German problems, or Japanese problems, not British problems. Important to correct foreign confusions, certainly, but the English had already learned these lessons. Hare’s position, then, shared dimensions both of the émigré attitudes of Popper and Hayek, and of the more complacent opinions of his British analyst colleagues. What we see here is one powerful source of the analysts’ political confidence. Britain was under no ideological threat. Her values were stable and homogenous, as they had been through a stable and liberal history. This must have made a philosophical vindication of liberalism seem a much less pressing task – or, indeed, entirely unnecessary. And of course this set of attitudes offers an explanation for the analysts’ wider failure to engage with political theory. One doesn’t start baling the boat until it starts filling up with water. Perhaps significantly, this reading of the analysts’ disengagement from political philosophy was not simply levelled as an accusation at the analysts from outside their ranks. When the analysts Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore sought to account for the lack of political theory in analytic philosophy in their book British Analytic Philosophy (1966), they too turned to a cultural-political explanation: the lack of political philosophy in the recent British tradition [parentheses omitted], and most obviously, of course, the lack of a Marxist tradition are clearly connected with the freedom from disruptive change in British history, the sort of change that demands fundamental political reflection on questions that have to be answered.110 Here the analysts read themselves through their cultural politics; instead of offering a ‘strictly’ philosophical account of the absence of political philosophy, Bernard Williams, one of the most prominent British analysts of the second half of the twentieth century, offers us an historical-cultural reading of his tradition. What is peculiar about this line of argument, if correct,
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is the ability of the British to allow victory to obscure the tremendous disruptive change Britain experienced during the first half of the twentieth century, not just the millions of deaths in two world wars and the levelling of some of its major cities, but also its collapse as an imperial power, waves of immigration from former colonies, the continued rise of the working classes, and the emergence and victory of a new political force, the Labour Party. However, Williams is being rather ungenerous to his colleagues here in reducing their lack of interest in political philosophy to the lack of an external political impetus. As we have seen in the first half of this chapter, the analysts were not apolitical in their philosophical thinking. Their philosophy itself had crucial political dimensions – lessening the perceived requirement for a specific engagement with the discipline of political philosophy. Britishness, liberalism, empiricism The liberalism of the British reflected straightforwardly on the analysts – buttressing their own sense of their philosophical liberalism. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, the analysts conceived of themselves as part of a characteristically British tradition. The British were liberal, the analysts were British, and therefore the analysts were liberal. But the analysts’ relationship with the heritage of liberal England had more concrete aspects. For one thing, there was a persuasive coincidence of personnel between this liberal England and British empiricism. Russell was convinced that history demonstrated ‘empiricism was associated with democracy and with a more or less utilitarian ethic’.111 He argued that the historical connection between empiricism and liberalism revealed a philosophical one: [t]he only philosophy that affords a theoretical justification of democracy, and that accords with democracy in its temper of mind is empiricism. Locke, who may be regarded . . . as the founder of empiricism makes it clear how closely this is connected with his views on liberty and toleration.112 Locke combined, both personally and philosophically, empiricism and liberalism. He stands at the beginning of an empiricist/liberal tradition which includes the utilitarians and culminates in analytic philosophy. We will see below that Hare incorporated Bentham and the Mills into this British empiricist/liberal tradition. Later, Quinton points to their relationship
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to Locke: ‘[t]he three great exponents of classical liberalism – Locke, Bentham and John Stuart Mill – make up a dialectical sequence’.113 The final link in this liberal chain was arguably Russell himself, whose liberal credentials appeared almost genetic. In Bertrand Russell: A Political Life, Alan Ryan points to the fact that ‘[t]he Russells had been defenders of liberal causes since the end of the seventeenth century’.114 Russell’s Godfather was John Stuart Mill; his midwife was the pioneering woman doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.115 And Russell was not merely liberal in heritage. Richard Wollheim: ‘[i]t would, I think, be a matter only of simplification, and not of grave distortion, to look on the whole of Russell’s social philosophy as an attempt, a sustained attempt, to repair that of John Stuart Mill . . . ’116 Philip Ironside, who has made a systematic study of Russell’s social and political writing, follows the spirit of this simplification, arguing that Russell’s ‘work maintained an underlying consistency of purpose, namely, the preservation of certain Liberal values . . . ’117 While Russell was probably the last great liberal link in the chain binding empiricism and liberalism, most of his analytic disciples were, as Quinton subsequently pointed out, staunchly left-liberal in their politics: [t]here is a rather high correlation between the endorsement of analytic philosophy and the adoption of liberal, secular, melioristic ideology of the Enlightenment. On the ideological plane Russell occupies much the same position as H. G. Wells and his followers are for the most part spiritually at home with the Guardian and the Observer, a little to the right, one could say, of Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman.118 These were liberal people, part of a liberal tradition in a congenitally liberal country. This is another aspect of the liberal assurance on which the analysts could draw. Following on from this coincidence of personnel, liberality, nationality and epistemology we have the natural drawing of a relationship between all three in the work of the analysts. Such a relationship exists as an assumption through many of the comments we have seen in this chapter and previously. Indeed, it is implied in the allotting of philosophical qualities to nations. British philosophy comes with a bundle of distinctively British qualities – all reconcilable as part of a national identity; all simultaneously offered as a contrast to a characteristically foreign approach. Isaiah Berlin, who one might imagine would have been sceptical of English nationalism by dint of his Latvian heritage and Jewish ethnicity, appeared nevertheless to divide up the philosophical and political world in clearly nationalistic
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terms. He, in fact, gives us one of the most explicit taxonomies of national philosophies. In ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’ (1959), Berlin argued that Mill was a British empiricist and not a French rationalist, or a German metaphysician, sensitive to day-to-day play of circumstances, differences of ‘climate’ as well as to the individual nature of each case, Helvétius or Saint-Simon or Fichte, concerned as they were with the grandes lignes of development were not. Hence . . . above all his hatred of the human pack in full cry against a victim, his desire to protect dissidents and heretics as such.119 In this quotation the national stereotypes that characterize even Berlin’s thought are revealed. The pairings are as we would imagine, British empiricist, German metaphysician.120 Mill is not just an empiricist, he is a British empiricist, and it is this alliance that sustains his dislike of the human pack, his liberal tolerance. Empiricism and liberalism are combined in the stew-pot of the nation. We find the same alliance between Britishness, liberalism and empiricism in Ayer’s thought. In his last interview he told Ted Honderich: British empiricism is insular in the sense that it has its counterpart in political attitudes in England and so on. We are on the whole a people rather sceptical of high-falutin’ talk.121 Again here we have empiricism united to the political attitudes of England (Ayer’s own liberal attitudes?) and the character of the British people; in this case the example is scepticism about the distinctly foreign habit of high-sounding discussion. The same combination is also present in Hare’s thought. When he travelled to Germany to deliver his moral lessons, he took with him a very clear message. The Germans had made philosophical mistakes. In ‘Peace’ (1966), as we saw, Hare argued that if philosophers had done a better job, then possibly Nazism would not have come about.122 The message he took to Germany was that British philosophers had done a better job – and had been ignored. The Germans’ blindness in following orders was the result of a logical mistake, which was clearly revealed by David Hume, an English empiricist, back in the eighteenth century.123 Later in the century Hare is even more explicit about this: [b]ut the history of Germany is not a good advertisement for romantic philosophy; I do think that if they had had philosophers of the calibre of
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Bentham and the Mills during that period, and they had listened to them, history might have been very different.124 If German philosophers had been as good as English philosophers, Hare strongly implies here, Nazism could have been prevented. The breathtaking confidence of this assertion is evident, still more so in that Hare was prepared to travel to Germany to chide them for their stupidity at close quarters. What we see here, in far more concrete terms, is the same confidence in the alliance between Britishness, liberalism and empiricism that characterized the thought of Ayer and Berlin. Indeed, this is the same alliance that Kushner pointed to when he highlighted the nationalist frameworks to which notions of liberality were attached.125 The confidence Hare displays in the corrective power of the British intellectual tradition was entirely continuous with what, until 1955, had been the British occupation policy in West Germany. The aim of the occupation had been, according to Nicholas Pronay ‘to substitute for [German militarism] the ethical, philosophical and political ideas of Britain and her transatlantic descendants’.126 One of the pressing questions for the British in post-war Germany, according to Noel Annan, who was himself involved in the British occupation administration, was ‘[h]ow, for instance, could one inculcate a sense of personal responsibility in people used to obeying orders without reflection’.127 Hare’s approach, and his choice of topics, then, appears as part of a wider pattern of thinking about Germany in postwar Britain. Hare attempted to use British philosophy and philosophers, like Hume, to correct the errors of German militarism, and in so doing specifically addressed the problem posed by Annan – that of bouncing the Germans out of their supposed habit of blind obedience to authority. Who better to teach the Germans civilization than the British?128 Who better among the British than intellectual descendants of John Locke? What Hare’s behaviour instantiates, albeit in extreme form, is the assumption among the analysts of the relationship between their twin national traditions, liberalism and empiricism – an assumption so powerful that Hare felt able to travel across Europe to bring wisdom to the benighted Germans.
Conclusion What this chapter has shown, first and most straightforwardly, is that contrary to widely held opinion the post-war analysts did believe that their philosophy was politically significant. They clearly saw it as allied to liberalism.
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Any discussion, then, of the analyst-inspired death of political theory after World War II should not make the mistake of assuming that the analysts’ lack of interest in writing political philosophy reflected anything apolitical in their thinking. Secondly, we’ve seen that the analysts’ liberal self-conception was bound up with their characterization of the political vices of the anti-canon philosophers and with their diagnoses of the philosophical roots of those political vices. We have also seen that the analysts’ confidence, both in their own liberality and about the security of liberal politics after World War II, was bound up with a celebration of the liberal character of the British people. These two strands of the analysts’ thinking are complementary – indeed they are interconnected, as we have seen that the characterization of the canon/anti-canon divide is in part based on assumptions about the nature of British and German philosophy, British and German character. The analysts’ characterization of the philosophical divide between canon and anti-canon on this reading is a construction adapted from pre-existing cultural tropes about national character. Finally, what this chapter suggests is the strength of these cultural political assumptions for the analysts. When the analysts’ critics looked at their moral philosophy after 1945 and declared that they had no basis on which to assert their liberal credentials, they were, philosophically, largely correct. The analysts’ subjectivism significantly undermined any strictly philosophical attempt to build a strong defence of liberalism. What the critics failed to see was a web of assumptions based on the analytic/anti-canon binary and the perceived nature of British thought and culture. These ideas provided multifaceted and culturally powerful reasons for the analysts to have confidence in their own liberality. In the face of this identity, the accusations of nihilism and fostering Nazism were negligible pinpricks – for all their philosophical power.
Epilogue
[I]f philosophy professors provide no account of themselves, of how they got to be where they are or of where they’re going, then the impression given to their students is inevitably that they somehow dropped from heaven. What drops from heaven is hardly open to discussion much less to criticism. The usefulness of such a standpoint to the professor can hardly be disputed. But neither can its harm to the student.1 (John McCumber 2001) The excitement that surrounded Derrida often seemed to be premised on the thought that something called Theory enabled you to avoid the hard work, and effortlessly attain some vantage point from which the Western novel, or Western philosophy, or patriarchal science, or whatever the next target might be, could be diagnosed as just another self-undermining discourse or narrative. This is of course an attitude especially appealing to the young, and I think much of the heat of l’affaire Derrida came from the indignation of those who thought, rightly, that mockery and ignorance need taking down a peg, and that universities are a good place to do it. Seen like this, Derrida or his disciples are like mentors encouraging people not to read. And, alas, many in the world, whether ideologues in the White House, or similar fundamentalists in Arabia, have found that a highly congenial lesson to absorb. Hostility to this adolescent attitude also explains an apparent paradox that defenders of postmodernism often seize on. This is that their opponents, careful academics, managed in one breath to say both that Derrida’s works were gibberish, and that they represented a dire threat to Western civilization. The paradox is only superficial, though. Some gibberish – Lewis Carroll comes to mind – emanates not contempt but affection for its targets. But postmodernist gibberish does not. Out from the confusion comes a distinct whiff of the complacency and superiority that come from having seen through something by which the vulgar are taken in.2 (Simon Blackburn 2004)
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By way of conclusion, I would like to make a several points about the attitudes that we have uncovered, and their significance in their historical context, before going on to talk about their wider significance and the relationship of analytic philosophy to its history. Most straightforwardly, perhaps, what we have seen throughout this project is an inter-relationship between what historians of analytic philosophy and analytic philosophers themselves would consider the ‘strictly’ philosophical, and wider political, cultural assumptions. This inter-relationship between philosophy, politics, and character is not one that we have imposed upon an otherwise rarefied sphere; it is one that we read about in the writing of the early analytic philosophers themselves. This book’s principal task was simply to show the weight of these cultural assumptions, their widespread nature among the most significant analysts, and the way in which they inter-relate with the ‘strictly’ philosophical: with the critique of metaphysics and theory; the demand for clarity, temperate debate and small scale arguments; the critique of idealism. Many of the central hallmarks of analytic philosophy in its early phase have been shown to have – according to the analysts’ own testimony – significant cultural and political dimensions. The pervasive nature of these assumptions should, by now, be self-evident. This, then, raises the question of the significance of these attitudes for particular familiar features of the philosophical landscape. The attempted exclusion of continental philosophy from British philosophy departments by the analysts was to a significant degree volitional. There was, as discussed in Chapter 2, ‘an active process of forgetting and exclusion’; it was not merely absent-minded, nor a change of focus, though the latter certainly did occur. It was significantly more hostile than that. This process of exclusion took place at a time when there was a widely held belief among the analysts that continental philosophy was culpable for the political crimes of Germany in the twentieth century. This assumption of culpability does not just run through the analysts’ assessment of the anti-canon’s political philosophy. It’s also present in the analysts’ broader characterization of anti-canon thought and in their writing of the history of the emergence of analytic philosophy and the collapse of idealism. And because, as I argued in Chapter 3, the identification and condemnation of the anti-canon helped the analysts construct their own distinctive nature, we can even say that the cultural political assumptions about Hegel, Nietzsche, and their allies were partly constitutive of the analysts’ own identity. What all this suggests is that the divide between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, from the perspective of the British analysts at least, was never a ‘strictly’ philosophical one. It was a divide that encompassed the
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philosophical, personal, cultural and political; and it was this web of belief that mandated the expulsion of continental philosophy. It may, now, be possible, with the help of hindsight and some precise logical instruments, to separate the ‘strictly’ philosophical critique of the anti-canon from the cultural, political critique. But to do so would require us to do violence to the historical record, and to the writing of some very significant and widely respected analytic philosophers. The nationalism of analytic philosophy has been another significant, and perhaps more disturbing, theme of this book; of all the assumptions that we have canvassed in this project, these appear to be the most visceral. The analysts did, at least, sketch the conceptual relationship between the political crimes of the Nazis and the philosophy of the post-Kantian philosophers. But they never offer even such a limited justification of their nationalist assumptions. They simply state them. The relationship between types of philosophy and particular nations appears to be assumed: the German susceptibility for metaphysics; the alliance between specifically German philosophy and Nazism; the alliance between analysis and liberalism, predicated to a great degree on assumptions about British national history and character. Such views do not appear to fit with the empiricist rhetoric and practice of the analysts which, one would think, would abjure such national generalizations unless they could be supported by a tremendous amount of evidence; evidence the analysts conspicuously lacked. Two general points follow from these observations. The first is an historical point: that while the analysts’ nationalist assumptions do not fit comfortably with their philosophical commitments, their beliefs both about their own virtue and continental vice do fit neatly into strands of the wider public debate on these subjects in the period 1930–1960. The analysts, then, can be read as part of their culture, their time and place. In particular, and rather ironically given the analysts’ stated lack of interest in history, we can read the analysts as part of a post-war culture championing a revitalized Whig history – emphasizing the exceptional liberality of these islands, and the qualities of the inhabitants which have formed it. We do not, then, have to accept the claim that analytic philosophy operates in a realm of rarefied debates on universal questions. This represents an invitation to historians of twentieth-century British culture to go to work on the philosophers with the same care and interest as they have shown to other academic and cultural groups. The second point to be made is more concerned with contemporary philosophy. One of the striking aspects of the research for this book has been the discontinuity between the rhetoric of the analysts about the
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virtues instilled by their own approach and their treatment of these political, cultural questions. Russell wrote that logic immunizes people from passionate dogma and that the philosophy of analytic empiricism suggests or inspires a way of life. The analysts demanded careful scrutiny of arguments, rigour and clarity. None of this prevented them from entertaining prejudices of a nationalist kind. Nor did their subscription to low temperature of argument prevent them from writing in the most vivid and dismissive way about the anti-canon. Indeed, many of the vices imputed to the anti-canon by the analysts have been exhibited by the analysts themselves in these pages. This was clear to some commentators in the mid-twentieth century. H. J. Paton wrote of Russell’s History of Western Philosophy: ‘[a] large field is thus opened up for the display of personal prejudices from which, curiously enough, he imagines himself and his philosophy to be largely immune’.3 The gulf that we have seen between self-image and actual practice is staggering, and was not confined to Russell. This is important, in that it contributes to the debate, started by the analysts themselves, about the relationship between analytic philosophy and character. It appears that, contrary to the analysts’ beliefs, subscription to logic, rigour and the minute analysis of words offered no wider immunization against enthusiasm or prejudice. This might, perhaps, prompt a more thorough philosophical or anthropological enquiry into the actual intellectual ramifications of analytic training. Having, with this last point, already broadened the scope of discussion from the material covered in this book, I want now to go on to make a couple of observations on the legacy of the ideas that we’ve canvassed in these pages. The divide between analytic and continental philosophy persists, although continental philosophy is far more visible in the UK than it once was. As Bernard Williams has pointed out, the analytic/continental distinction now exists within British philosophy departments, or in some cases divides philosophy departments from departments of literature.4 The career of Williams himself also offers us signs of an increasing catholicism in analytic philosophy. His work marked the beginning of the rehabilitation of a, suitably analyticized, Nietzsche. Many analytic philosophers, among them my own teachers, do now engage with continental philosophers. It is no part of this book to make a comprehensive case for the persistence of the assumptions that I’ve outlined – if I’m right they had a significant impact on the profession through their influence on the first three generations of British analysts, and the legacy of this impact remains in structures like the analytic/continental divide, even if the attitudes
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themselves are no longer visible. However, there is a good, albeit somewhat speculative, argument to be made for the persistence of these views. After all, we have seen in this book how tied up the analysts’ positive characterization of themselves became with their negative characterization of the anti-canon. It may be that this identity position makes it almost impossible to dispense with the condemnation of continental philosophy. Where would analytic philosophy be without its nemesis? More concretely, it is clear that such attitudes have not disappeared; significant strands of continuity remain between the founding fathers of analytic philosophy and their late twentieth and twenty-first century successors. What is so interesting about the lengthy quotation from Simon Blackburn, the Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University, which opens this chapter is that we here find the analysts’ critique of the anticanon intact in the twenty-first century. As Hegel encouraged the loss of faith in reason, Derrida encouraged people to stop reading, which is fuel to the fire of the fundamentalists and indeed represents, for some, a dire threat to western civilization. It is the evil machinations of ‘something called Theory’ that perpetuates these problems. Again, on closer inspection it turns out to be ‘gibberish’, ‘confused’ and ‘ignorant’. It is precisely the combination of vices that we have seen throughout this project, bad philosophy, leading to bad politics – and once again it is the continentals who are at fault. Jerry Foder recently bemoaned the popularity of continental philosophy compared to the analytic variety – before consoling himself with a familiar analytic assumption: ‘[a]nyway, our arguments are better than theirs’.5 In 1997, Dagfinn Føllesdal argued that the traditional barrier between analytic and continental philosophy should be set aside and that instead any philosophy which is ‘very strongly concerned with argument and justification’ should be considered analysis.6 Leaving aside the slight sense of intellectual imperialism in the analysts deigning to allow such groups as the phenomenologists into their club, it is interesting that the only two examples Føllesdal offers to demonstrate that his definition is tight enough not to allow in any intellectual riffraff are Derrida and Heidegger – because both, according to Føllesdal, are concerned with rhetoric rather than argument.7 Here central continental figures still serve, by their exclusion, to reinforce the virtues claimed for analysis. There remains, then, an ongoing culture of hostility towards at least some continental philosophy within at least some sectors of analytic philosophy; the precise nature and scope of this is for others to investigate. The contemporary persistence and significance of the analysts’ assumption of their own liberality is also an area that merits further investigation.
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Analytic philosophy remains a discipline that is not conducive to political radicalism. The pre-eminent figure in analytic political philosophy in the last 50 years, the American John Rawls, takes liberal values not as questionable but in an important sense as a starting point. Part of the reason for Rawls’ positive reception in Britain, perhaps, is the persistence of liberalism as an intellectual given for British philosophers, for reasons of an essentially Whiggish kind. There also appear to be important questions about the relationship of the analytic canon of liberal empiricists to the history of British imperialism. Harry Bracken raised these questions in the 1970s, yet they appear to have been ignored within the discipline.8 Is the lack of engagement with such topics among philosophers in part due to the fact that to break the link between Britishness, logic and liberty would upset assumptions that remain fundamental to British analytic philosophy? As this speculation indicates, the field for this kind of research is wide open. One teasing starting point is provided by Philip Ironside in his political biography of Russell. Ironside points out that it was the most empiricist and positivist aspects of Russell’s thought that brought him closest to fascist ideas. His scientism contributed to his racism and was a crucial plank of his belief in eugenics. In contrast it was the romanticism that he shared with J. S. Mill, and which he castigated in others as a source of fascism, that gave rise to his humanism.9 This insight apparently upsets the whole structure of the analysts’ thought on these issues, inverting the equation between empiricism and virtue. As well as offering an interesting prism through which to view Russell’s political engagement, this also has the potential to disrupt the binary between analyst and anti-canon, virtue and vice. To conclude: in historical context, one can begin to understand both the analysts’ hostility to continental philosophy as a dangerous, inverted ‘other’ and the role played by the assumptions of English exceptionalism and the attendant progressive Whig historical narrative. Both were beliefs with long histories, present in Britain at least since the nineteenth century. However, the dislike of history as a contextual subject, which characterized the analytic philosophers in the twentieth century, has for a long time rendered the discipline blind to its own biases. The founders of twentieth-century British analytic philosophy were children of their time and there is no question of blaming people for their historical situation. Rather, the problem is with the tradition of analytic philosophy which they inaugurated, a tradition which, as McCumber notes in the quotation that begins this chapter, does not seek seriously to scrutinize its own origins and assumptions. Analytic philosophy did not drop from heaven; it is conducted in an historical
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situation. Acknowledgement and exploration of this can be philosophically invigorating, and may help the discipline forward from its much discussed and seemingly perpetual state of crisis. The alternative, a continuing refusal to engage seriously in the practice of history, will see analytic philosophy in Britain continue unconsciously to be moulded by the very political and cultural assumptions it seeks to ignore.
Notes
Introduction 1
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Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (Oxford University Press, 1960), 210. First published in 1935. Gilbert Ryle, ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, Mind 56, 222 (April 1947), 170–1. H. H. Price, ‘The Permanent Significance of Hume’s Philosophy’, Philosophy 15, 57. (January 1940), 8. Russell quoted in Gilbert Ryle, ‘John Locke’, in Collected Papers Volume 1, edited by Gilbert Ryle (Hutchinson, 1971), 147. R. M. Hare, ‘The Role of Philosophers in the Legislative Process’, in Essays on Political Morality, edited by R. M. Hare (Clarendon Press, 1989), 1. Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (Victor Gollancz, 1959), 245. Aaron Preston, Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion (Continuum, 2007), 25. G. J. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900 (Oxford University Press, 1958), 170. It is no part of this project to engage in a parallel, but strictly separate debate about the actual historical relationship between German philosophy and events in twentieth-century German history. Peter Simons, ‘Whose Fault? The Origins and Evitability of the Analytic Continental Rift’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 9, no. 3 (August 2001), 302, 304, 306. Quoted in John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Northwestern University Press, 2001), xxi. Peter Laslett (ed.), Philosophy Politics and Society (Basil Blackwell, 1956), ix. For a discussion of this see Jonathan Rée, Michael Ayers, and Adam Westoby, Philosophy and its Past (Harvester Press, 1978). David Bell, ‘Philosophy’, in The Twentieth Century Mind: History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain Vol. 1 1900–1918, edited by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson (Oxford University Press, 1972), 174. Bruce Kuklick, ‘Modern Anglophone Philosophy: Between the Seminar Room and the Cold War’, Modern Intellectual History 3, no. 3 (2006), 551. Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Clarendon, 2001); Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Clarendon Press, 1990); Tom Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy (Yale University Press, 2005). McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era, 12. Material in square brackets is my addition.
Notes 18
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Ibid., George A. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (Cambridge University Press, 2005). As well as those already mentioned, it is worth noting Martin Kusch (ed.), The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge (Kluwer, 2000). Jonathan Rée has been working on analytic culture since the 1980s. See the special issue, ‘Imagining Germany from Abroad: The View from Britain’, German History 26, no. 4 (Winter 2008). H. J. Paton, ‘Fifty Years of Philosophy’, in Contemporary British Philosophy, edited by H. D. Lewis (George Allen and Unwin, 1961), 349–50. Nicola Lacey, A Life of H. L. A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (Oxford University Press, 2004), 132. Ibid. Jonathan Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, Radical Philosophy, no. 65 (Autumn 1993), 7. Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher (Phoenix, 2000), 89. There is more than a suggestion that Wittgenstein was understood, especially by the Oxford philosophers, in part through his alien nationality. See, for example, Lacey, A Life of H. L. A. Hart, 139. See for example Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Clarendon Press, 1997). Quoted in Geoffrey Thomas, Cyril Joad (Birkbeck College, University of London, 1992), 17. Gellner, Words and Things, Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921–1970 (Vintage, 2001), 385–6. On the quality of Russell’s work see Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921–1970, xii. See Chapter 4. I am not seeking, here, to make a broader point about the necessity or otherwise of some kind of theoretical approach to the writing of history or establishing author’s intentions. I simply want to highlight that the directness of the analysts’ comments is helpful in interpreting them. A more explicitly theoretical approach to the writing of the history of analysis would be fascinating and worthwhile. It may, however, precisely because of its methodology, be less acceptable to its potential audience. Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas (BBC Books, 1978). I would like to thank Stefan Collini for pointing out this potential line of argument.
Chapter 1 1
2
Quoted in Thomas Baldwin, ‘Interlude: Philosophy and the First World War’, in The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, edited by Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 367. Bertrand Russell, ‘The Ancestry of Fascism’, in In Praise of Idleness (George Allen and Unwin, 1935), 82. Hereafter ‘Ancestry’.
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Notes
Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty, edited by H. Hardy (Chatto and Windus, 2002), 95. Indeed, if one were writing about British philosophers, rather than British analytic philosophers, there would be a powerful justification for dispensing with chronological structures altogether and displaying philosophers’ attitudes towards certain continental thinkers as being essentially continuous from 1914 until the 1960s. This is not a route I can take here, simply because the analytic movement was too young in 1914 for its views, as a movement, to be identified. Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (Open Court, 1982), 122. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Vintage, 2000), 204–5. An idea suggested by Hannah Arendt, The Burden of Our Time (Secker & Warburg, 1951). Jonathan Rée, Philosophical Tales (Routledge, 1987), 42–3. Quoted in Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914–1918 ( John Donald, 1988), 6. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 33. Baldwin, ‘Interlude: Philosophy and the First World War’, 367. John Morrow, ‘British Idealism, “German Philosophy” and the First World War’, The Australian Journal of Politics and History, no. 28 (1982), 380. Hobhouse, quoted in Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914–1918, 49. Ibid. Morrow, ‘British Idealism, “German Philosophy” and the First World War’, 385. Thomas Weber, H-Net Book Review of Peter Hoeres Krieg Der Philosophen: Die Deutsche Und Die Britische Philosophie Im Ersten Weltkrieg (H-Net, January 2006 [cited]); available from
[email protected]. David Boucher and Andrew Vincent, A Radical Hegelian: The Political and Social Philosophy of Henry Jones (University of Wales Press, 1993), 159–60. J. H. Muirhead, German Philosophy in Relation to the War (John Murray, 1915). On the reception of this see Baldwin, ‘Interlude: Philosophy and the First World War’, 367; Morrow, ‘British Idealism, “German Philosophy” and the First World War’, 382. On Ernest Barker see Julia Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 95. Quoted in Nicholas Martin, ‘“Fighting a Philosophy”: The Figure of Nietzsche in British Propaganda of the First World War’, The Modern Language Review 98, no. 2 (April 2003), 372. Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914–1918, 50. C. E. M. Joad, Essays in Common Sense Philosophy (first edition). (Headley Bros. Publishers Ltd, 1919), 167. Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914–1918, 198. Joad, Essays in Common Sense Philosophy, 238–9. Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914–1918, 191. Ibid., 192.
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Ibid., 198. Ibid., v. Joad, Essays in Common Sense Philosophy, 239. Anthony Quinton, ‘Ayer’s Place in the History of Philosophy’, in A. J. Ayer Memorial Essays, edited by A. Phillips Griffith (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 33. Gilbert Ryle quoted in Ben Rogers, A. J. Ayer: A Life (Chatto and Windus, 1999), 66. T. E. B. Howarth, Cambridge between Two Wars (Collins, 1978), 130. Quoted in Rogers, A. J. Ayer, 68. C. E. M. Joad, John Strachey, and G. C. Field, ‘Liberty and the Modern State’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Proceedings XIII (1934), 17–18. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 89. The essay was subsequently reprinted again in a timely collection of Russell’s political essays: Bertrand Russell, Let the People Think (Watts and Co., 1941). Ernest Barker, ‘The Romantic Factor in Modern Politics’, Philosophy 11, no. 44 (October 1936), 389–91; Sir Herbert Samuel, ‘Civilization’, Philosophy 13, no. 49 (January 1938), 14; Sir Herbert Samuel, ‘Presidential Address: Philosophy, Religion and the Present World Conditions’, Philosophy 10, no. 38 (April 1935), 141. One squeak of a defence came from F. H. Heinemann, ‘A Review of Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher of Culture by Frederic Copleston’, Philosophy 19 (1944), 88–9. These exchanges are reproduced in Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Hegel’s Political Philosophy (Atherton Press, 1970). The debate itself took place in 1940. Joad, Strachey, and Field, ‘Liberty and the Modern State’, 42. G. R. G. Mure, ‘Oxford and Philosophy’, Philosophy 12, no. 47 (July 1937), 299. T. E. Jessop, ‘Review of “the Man Versus the State as a Present Issue” by J. H. Muirhead’, ibid.,15, no. 57 (January 1940), 105–6. L. T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (George, Allen and Unwin, 1960). William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy (George G. Harrap and Co., 1946). Wickham Steed and Aurel Kolnai, The War against the West (Victor Gollancz, 1938). F. C. Copleston, ‘Nietzsche and National Socialism’, Dublin Review, London (1941), 226. Sir Paul Dukes, ‘The Trouble with Germans’, Current Affairs, no. 49 (14 August 1943), 7–8. Rogers, A. J. Ayer, 132. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 144. I will suggest some reasons for this in later chapters. Ayer did attempt to write a book on liberty in collaboration with Stephen Spender in 1936–7. The collaboration failed. Tantalizingly, Ayer then gave a series of lectures and seminars on political philosophy in the summer and autumn of 1937. No records of these events survive, though, as his biographer comments, ‘one can guess at their general spirit’ – strongly anti-Hegelian. Ibid., 132. Bertrand Russell, History, of Western Philosophy (George Allen and Unwin, 1946), 746. Hereafter ‘History’.
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Bertrand Russell, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, in Unpopular Essays, edited by Bertrand Russell (George Allen and Unwin, 1950), 10. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 247. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 41. Ibid., 95. Ayer in Magee, Men of Ideas, 132. A. J. Ayer, ‘The Concept of Freedom’, in The Meaning of Life and Other Essays, edited by A. J. Ayer (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 134. First published in 1944. Price, ‘The Permanent Significance of Hume’s Philosophy’, 8. Ryle, ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, 170–1. Hare in Magee, Men of Ideas, 156. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 53. Lacey, A Life of H. L. A. Hart, 141. Russell quoted in Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914– 1918, 47. Russell quoted in Ibid., 131. C. Delisle Burns, Bertrand Russell, and G. D. H. Cole, ‘Symposium: The Nature of the State in View of its External Relations’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XVI (1915–1916), 17. Bertrand Russell, ‘Dr Schiller’s Analysis of the Analysis of Mind’, in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell 9, edited by John G. Slater (Unwin Hyman, 1988), 39. A book length study by Isaiah Berlin of relevance to this subject has recently been produced by Henry Hardy – Political Ideas in The Romantic Age. This is formed of a manuscript that Berlin composed in the early 1950s. The attitudes revealed in this volume reflect very closely those expressed by Berlin in Freedom and Its Betrayal. The advantage of working with the latter, however, is that Berlin chose to make it public – whereas according to Hardy Berlin laid the manuscript of Political Ideas aside in the 1950s and did not return to it. Isaiah Berlin, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, edited by H. Hardy (Pimlico, 2007). On this see the editor’s introduction to Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism – the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, 1965, edited by H. Hardy (Pimlico, 2000). Isaiah Berlin, ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, edited by H. Hardy and Isaiah Berlin (Princeton University Press, 1990). Russell, History, 711. Ibid., 727. Ibid., 723. Ibid., 725. Ibid., 727. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 49. Ibid., 47. Bertrand Russell et al., ‘Hegel: Philosophy and History’, in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell 10, edited by John G. Slater (Routledge, 1996), 494. From an original broadcast in 1941. The quotation is from Cairns, who is in turn quoting Russell.
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Ibid., 496. Ibid. Ibid., 502. Russell, History, 768–9. Ayer, ‘The Concept of Freedom’, 134. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 95. For an important critique of this perspective see Walter Kaufmann, ‘The Hegel Myth and its Method’, in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Alasdair MacIntyre (Anchor Books, 1972). Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 82. Ibid., 93. Russell, History, 745. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 94. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 70. Ibid. Ibid. Heine quoted ibid., 72. Heine quoted ibid. Ibid., 73. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty, edited by Isaiah Berlin (Oxford University Press, 1969), 150. Ibid., 150–51. Ibid., 133, note 1. Bertrand Russell, Freedom and Organization 1814–1914 (George Allen and Unwin, 1945), 408–9. Thomas Carlyle is worth mentioning briefly here; Russell includes Carlyle, an English thinker from the mid-nineteenth century, in his anti–canon mostly because he was a follower of Fichte. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 94–6. Andrew Vincent, Green, Thomas Hill (1836–1882). (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 [cited 6 October 2006]); available from http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/11404. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 53. Richard Wollheim, ‘Democracy’, in Political Thought since World War 2, edited by W. J. Stankiewicz (The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 117. There is an allusion here to Jacob Talmon’s critique of ‘totalitarian democracy’ and its roots in anti–canon philosophy. Talmon’s book, first published in 1952, can only have furthered the analysts’ existing belief in the relationship between Nazism and nineteenth–century philosophy. Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Heinemann, 1961). C. E. M. Joad, What is at Stake and Why Not Say So? (Victor Gollancz: Victory Books, 1940), chapter VI. E. F. Carritt, ‘Mr Carritt’s Reply’, Philosophy 15, no. 59 (July 1940). Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 41. Ayer in Magee, Men of Ideas, 132. Russell, History, 746. Russell, Religion and Science, 210. Russell, History, 775. Ibid., 779. Nietzsche quoted in Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 90. Russell, History, 791.
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Ibid. Ibid. ‘He is also not definitely anti–Semitic, though he thinks Germany contains as many Jews as it can assimilate, and ought not to permit any further influx of Jews’. Ibid., 791–2. Ibid., 792. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 97. Ibid., See also Russell, Freedom and Organization 1814–1914, 401. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (Unwin Paperbacks, 1978), 244. Though, as we will shortly see, Berlin saw Lawrence as very much a part of the proto-fascist tradition. Ibid., 245. Russell, Freedom and Organization 1814–1914, 410. On Schopenhauer, see Russell, History, 746. On Houston Chamberlain, see Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 89. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 105. Ibid. Russell et al., ‘Hegel: Philosophy and History’, 502. Russell, History, 819. Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921–1970,175. This is Monk’s paraphrase of Russell’s text. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 98. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 119, Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 107–8. Russell, History, 746. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 145. Precisely because it is not concerned with simple, given, facts about the world romanticism can, for Berlin, be either ‘reactionary’ or ‘revolutionary’. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 127. Ayer in Magee, Men of Ideas, 132. Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (Routledge, 2000), 175. Russell, History, 730. Ibid., 739. Bertrand Russell, ‘Philosophy’s Ulterior Motives’, in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell 10, edited by John G. Slater (Routledge, 1996), 341. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 73. Ibid., 22–3. Ibid., 25. In ibid. Berlin, ‘Joseph de Maistre’, 126. Ibid., 119. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 83. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 105. Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921–1970, 177. It has been suggested that pragmatism owes something to Hegelianism. This, in turn, suggests that
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Russell may be drawing a link this way between pragmatism and fascism. (M. J. Inwood, ‘Hegelianism’, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich, Oxford University Press, 1995.) If this was Russell’s thought, and this is conjecture, it still does not help in establishing an historical influence by the pragmatists, on the Nazis. Interestingly the relationship of pragmatism to Italian Fascism was one that had some currency in the United States in the 1920s. Some of those allied to pragmatism did welcome Benito Mussolini. However, while Mussolini was keen to drop the names of pragmatists when talking to an American audience, he rather betrayed himself by being unable to name a single text written by William James. (John P. Diggins, ‘Flirtation with Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini’s Italy’, The American Historical Review 71, no. 2, January 1966, 489.) Russell, who visited America in the 1920s, may have picked up this atmosphere. But it is one thing to say that some American pragmatists liked Mussolini in the 1920s, and quite another to say, as Russell does, that pragmatism helped cause fascism. Bertrand Russell, ‘The Thinkers Behind Germany’s Sins’, in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell 11, edited by John G. Slater (Routledge, 1997), 368. First published in 1944. Russell, History, 779. Ibid., 819. See also Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 83. Russell, History, 620. Russell, ‘The Thinkers Behind Germany’s Sins’, 368. Copleston, ‘Nietzsche and National Socialism’, 231. Russell, ‘The Thinkers Behind Germany’s Sins’, 368. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 95. Berlin, ‘Joseph de Maistre’, 113. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 170. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 11. Zeev Sternhell has undertaken to show that all the significant fascist ideas first appear in France, an argument that may bolster Berlin’s case. But it is not clear that this is the type of historical link that Berlin was trying to draw; and it doesn’t alter the fact that in the 1950s Berlin did not have the warrant for this belief, which was to be provided by Sternhell only in the late 1970s. Ibid., 291. Isaiah Berlin, ‘European Unity and its Vicissitudes’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, edited by H. Hardy and Isaiah Berlin (Princeton University Press, 1990), 196, 202. Berlin, ‘Joseph de Maistre’, 126. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 249. Kaufmann, ‘The Hegel Myth and its Method’, 27. ‘After this, therefore, because of this’. Other thinkers treating this issue had similar problems. Joad, the other philosopher to treat this question in detail, ties himself in causal knots. Ernest Barker acknowledges that: ‘[t]he interpretation of Nietzsche, if not Nietzsche himself, is a parent of the dictator’ – but does not allow this to detract too significantly from criticizing Nietzsche as a progenitor of fascism. C. E. M. Joad, Guide to
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Philosophy (Victor Gollancz, 1946), C. E. M. Joad, Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics (Victor Gollancz, 1944). Barker, ‘The Romantic Factor in Modern Politics’, 389. Ayer in Magee, Men of Ideas, 132. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism’, in The Sense of Reality, edited by H. Hardy (Chatto and Windus, 1996), 234. There was clearly some softening of the analytic/continental divide in the 1970s. This, however, has to be distinguished from the softening of Berlin’s own attitudes – which appear to become more nuanced on the issue of anti–canon thinkers the further he distances himself from analytic philosophy. Martin, ‘“Fighting a Philosophy”: The Figure of Nietzsche in British Propaganda of the First World War’, 376. Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics, 93. Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (The Regents Press of Kansas, 1982), 82. On Carlyle see: Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 94–96. On Nietzsche and Byron see above. Bertrand Russell, ‘Dewey’s New Logic’, in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell 10, edited by John G. Slater (Routledge, 1996), 145. Russell, History, 704. Ibid., 752. Ibid., 746. Ibid. Russell, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, 10. Russell, History, 774. A similar notion is found in Ernest Barker’s essay on this subject. He identifies only one Briton as a progenitor of fascism, and then is keen to emphasize that he was a Scot who read German philosophy: ‘[a]t any rate the only votary for Heroes and Hero-worship in the history of English thought was a romantic Scotsman who had steeped himself in German philosophy’. Barker, ‘The Romantic Factor in Modern Politics’, 401. Bertrand Russell, ‘My Debt to German Learning’, in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell 11, edited by John G. Slater (Routledge, 1997), 107. First published 1955. One a logician, the other a mathematician, they did not occupy the same philosophical territory as did the anti-canon thinkers. Russell, ‘The Thinkers Behind Germany’s Sins’, 370. First published in 1944. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 6. Elsewhere he strengthens this and speaks of the romantic revolt occurring ‘principally in Germany’. Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Romantic Revolution’, in The Sense of Reality, edited by H. Hardy (Chatto and Windus, 1996), 169. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 121. Both Berlin and Russell accept that there have been non–German romantics. But Germany is both the origin and the natural home of the movement. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 54–5. Berlin, ‘European Unity and its Vicissitudes’, 198. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 98. Russell, History, 748. Ryle, ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, 170.
Notes 190 191 192
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Ibid. T. M. Knox, ‘Hegel and Prussianism’, Philosophy 15, no. 57 (January 1940). Although as we have noted, Berlin does do so some decades later.
Chapter 2 1
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David West, ‘The Contribution of Continental Philosophy’, in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, Blackwell Companions to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Blackwell, 1995), 39. Peter P. Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists: Selected Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 230. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 52. West, ‘The Contribution of Continental Philosophy’, 39. Iris Murdoch, ‘Hegel in Modern Dress’, in Iris Murdoch: Existentialists and Mystics, edited by Peter J. Conradi (Chatto and Windus, 1997), 146. First published: May 1957. Quoted in P. M. S. Hacker, ‘Analytic Philosophy: What, Whence and Whither?’, in The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plots and Heroes, edited by Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar (Routledge, 1998), 13. In actual fact Ryle himself had seen a copy of Sein und Zeit, having reviewed it for Mind in 1929. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, third edition, (Princeton University Press, 1974), v. A. J. Ayer, More of My Life (Collins, 1984), 24. Thomas L. Akehurst, ‘Ayer and the Existentialists’. (MA dissertation, University of Sussex, 2003). For a view more sympathetic to Ayer’s cosmopolitan credentials see Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2006), 397. Rogers, A. J. Ayer, 237. My italics. Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, 157. This claim was not unusual. There was a pattern among the analysts of dismissing continental philosophers as poets, or mystics. I can’t fully address this point here, although some of the explanation for it is implied in Chapter 3. Raymond Plant, ‘Philosophy’, in The Twentieth Century Mind: History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain Vol. 3 1945–1965, edited by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson (Oxford University Press, 1972), 97. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 15. Berlin quoted in Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, 135. Again the significance here of Vienna as an ally against the mainstream of continental thought. Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, 334. G. J. Warnock, ‘Gilbert Ryle’s Editorship’, Mind 85, no. 337 (January 1976), 48. Though Joseph had started out life as a realist and Collingwood would have greatly preferred to be thought of in another way. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1970), 56; Clement C. J. Webb and C. A. Creffield, Joseph, Horace William Brindley (1867–1943). (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 [cited 24 October 2006]); available from http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/34243.
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Anthony Quinton, ‘Victorian Philosophy’, in Thoughts and Thinkers, edited by Anthony Quinton (Duckworth, 1982), 179. Lacey, A Life of H. L. A. Hart, 142. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 83. Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, 88. Lynd Forguson, ‘Oxford and the “Epidemic” of Ordinary Language Philosophy’, The Monist 84, no. 3 (2001), 333. Mark J. Schofield, Findlay, John Niemeyer (1903–1987). (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 [cited 13 June 2006]); available from http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/65670. Richard Wollheim, ‘Ayer the Man, the Philosopher, the Teacher’, in A. J. Ayer Memorial Essays, edited by A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 13. Ibid. See for example Warnock, ‘Gilbert Ryle’s Editorship’, 55. Quoted in Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 7–8. Gilbert Ryle, ‘Review of the Foundations of Phenomenology by Martin Forber’, Philosophy 21 (1946), 268. At least in the early period of his editorship. Ryle was editor of Mind until 1971 – it is not clear whether his stance changed over the years. R. M. Hare, ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, Utilitas 14, no. 3 (2002), 284. Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, 382. Forguson, ‘Oxford and the “Epidemic” of Ordinary Language Philosophy’, 336. Of course, not all of these would have been analytic philosophers. Forguson does not provide numbers on this; though he does tell us that at any time the total number of ordinary language philosophers in the UK was never more than 20 per cent of the total. The percentage would be far higher taking into account all philosophers in the analytic tradition. Howarth, Cambridge between Two Wars, 126. Berlin is actually an exception to the general picture in that we know he read Hegel and some post–Hegelian philosophy during the research for his biography of Marx. See Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, edited by H. Hardy (Chatto and Windus, 2004), 43, 67, 174. Collingwood, An Autobiography, 60. Hare, ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, 282. P. F. Strawson, ‘The Post–Linguistic Thaw’, Times Literary Supplement (Friday 9 September 1960). Hare, ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, 286. A. J. Ayer et al., The Revolution in Philosophy (Macmillan, 1956). See Stewart Candlish, ‘The Truth About F. H. Bradley’, Mind 98, no. 391 ( July 1989), 331; Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists: Selected Studies 230; Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy, 50. Kaufmann, ‘The Hegel Myth and its Method’, 58–9. The only study apparently being Richard Wollheim, F. H. Bradley (Penguin, 1959). Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy, 50.
Notes 46 47
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Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (Vintage, 1997), 114. For this conclusion to be solid, more work would have to be done on both Russell and Moore. Richard A Watson, ‘Shadow History in Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (1993), 99. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (Penguin, 1990), 9. Ibid., 42. G. O. Wood, ‘A Re–Assessment of Hume: Critics of the Philosopher and the Man. Reparation to an Ambiguous Shade’, Times Literary Supplement (Saturday 1 March 1941). Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 36. D. F. Pears, Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy (Fontana Library, 1967), 11. Pears later also involves the eminent Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin in the revival, writing: ‘Austin made philosophy more empirical . . .’ D. F. Pears, ‘An Original Philosopher’, in Symposium on J. L. Austin, edited by K. T. Fann (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 56. Stuart Hampshire, ‘Ideas Propositions and Signs’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XL (1939–1940), 1. While Hampshire is clear on the sources of the tradition, he goes on to attempt to unpick the two traditions to some extent. Russell, History, 862. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 39. Stuart Hampshire, ‘Scepticism and Meaning’, Philosophy XXV, no. 94 (July 1950), 235. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 13. Rée’s first quotation here comes from D. F. Pears, ‘Logical Atomism: Russell and Wittgenstein’, in The Revolution in Philosophy (Macmillan, 1956). Bertrand Russell and Woodrow Wyatt, Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (The World Publishing Company, 1960), 116. Interesting to note that the belief in the characteristically British nature of empiricism was shared by those, like G. R. G. Mure, Warden of Merton College Oxford, who were openly hostile to the analysts. ‘In the years between the wars I had watched without enthusiasm the return of British philosophy to its native empiricist tradition’. G. R. G. Mure, Retreat from Truth (Basil Blackwell, 1958), vii. This line of descent became such a powerful guiding feature, according to Peter Hylton, that many analytic philosophers forgot Russell was far from being an empiricist before World War I. Their reading of the early Russell as an empiricist has, for Hylton, seriously distorted modern understanding of Russell’s early career. Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy, 9. Price, ‘The Permanent Significance of Hume’s Philosophy’, 8. Lacey, A Life of H. L. A. Hart, 141. Bryan Appleyard, The Pleasures of Peace: Art and Imagination in Post–War Britain (Faber, 1989), 49. Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, 138. Quinton, ‘Victorian Philosophy’, 179. First published 1958. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 9.
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Richard Rorty, ‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres’, in Philosophy in History: Essay on the Historiography of Philosophy, edited by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 60. Jonathan Rée, ‘Philosophy and the History of Philosophy’, in Philosophy and its Past, edited by Jonathan Rée, Michael Ayers, and Adam Westoby (Harvester Press, 1978), 1–2. Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, vii. Kant was one of the few figures who appeared to rest on the dividing line between analysis and continental philosophy. Some of the analysts thought he was fundamentally a sound philosopher, who got involved with the wrong people. As Quinton, summarizing the attitudes of his colleagues, put it: ‘Kant, himself a serious philosopher fallen among the metaphysicians’. (Quinton, ‘Victorian Philosophy’, 178) This seems to be the attitude of R. M. Hare. He was greatly influenced by Kantian philosophy, but a substantially analyticized version of this philosophy. (A similar analytic appropriation is characteristic of Strawson’s monograph on Kant. P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ [Routledge, 1999]. First published 1966.) As we have seen already, and will have further cause to observe, this debt does not prevent Hare making a critique of the German tradition. The inclusion of Kant in canon or anti–canon seems, then, to be a question of which side of the line he falls. It didn’t appear, in this period, to upset the fundamental analytic/continental taxonomy. On Hare’s debt to Kant see Hare, ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, 284, 97. Quinton, ‘Victorian Philosophy’, 178. Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, vii. Paul Redding, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8. McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era, 68. Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Duckworth, 1993), ix. David Bell, ‘The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very British Coup?’, in German Philosophy since Kant, edited by Anthony O’Hear (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 206. Russell, Autobiography, 61. John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Penguin, 1968), 207. One analyst who clearly distanced himself from this belief was G. J. Warnock: ‘[i]dealism . . . wasn’t refuted though it was damaged by criticism’. (Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 10) This claim was not due to Warnock’s disputing of the power of Moore’s arguments, but rather to his belief that metaphysical systems: ‘are more vulnerable to ennui than to disproof’. (Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 11) A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 20. Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy, 33. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 10. Mary Warnock, Ethics since 1900, first edition (Oxford University Press, 1960), 14. Ernest Gellner, ‘Ayer on Moore and Russell’, in The Devil in Modern Philosophy, edited by I. C. Jarvie, Joseph Agassi, and Ernest Gellner (Routledge and Kegan
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Paul, 1974), 185. This comment is directed at Ayer’s Russell and Moore: the analytic heritage (1971). Gellner goes on to claim that in fact the ‘plot’ of Ayer’s book is an attack on Wittgenstein. While this may very well be true of Ayer’s 1971 text, by which point, Gellner rightly claims, idealism was not a target worthy of serious assault, the image sums up the case in hand very well. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 7–8. Ibid., 9. Russell, History, 801. A. J. Ayer, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Logical Positivism, edited by A. J. Ayer (The Free Press, 1959), 9. Bernard Williams, ‘Man as Agent – on Stuart Hampshire’s Recent Work’, Encounter xv, no. 5 (November 1960), 39. A. J. Ayer, ‘An Appraisal of Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy’, in Metaphysics and Common Sense, edited by A. J. Ayer (Macmillan, 1969), 168. First published 1967. Russell, History, 748. Russell quoted in Philip Ironside, The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell: The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 46. On this see, for example Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, edited by Gerard Delanty, Studies in Social and Political Thought (Liverpool University Press, 2002). We have already seen C. D. Broad also distances himself from Nietzsche, but again in private as a response to an enquiry. Anthony Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers (Duckworth, 1982), 160. Warnock, ‘Gilbert Ryle’s Editorship’, 52. Ibid. Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy, 105. Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy, 9. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 8. Paton, ‘Fifty Years of Philosophy’, 342–3. Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy, 45. Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 160. Hare, ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, 284; Warnock, ‘Gilbert Ryle’s Editorship’, 49. Following them Leslie Armour implies that, aside from a couple of stragglers, the game was up for idealism after 1945. Leslie Armour, ‘The Continuing Idealist Tradition’, in The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, edited by Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 428. Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 160. D. A. Russell, Mabbott, John David (1898–1988). (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 [cited 18 April 2006]); available from http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/65671. Gary McCulloch, ‘Lindsay, Alexander Dunlop, First Baron Lindsay of Birker (1879–1952)’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 [cited 31 October 2006]); available from http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 34537. Josiah Lee Auspitz, ‘Michael Joseph Oakeshott (1901–1990)’, in The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott, edited by Jessie Norman (Duckworth, 1993), 11.
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Kenneth Minogue, Oakeshott, Michael Joseph (1901–1990). (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 [cited 14 June 2006]); available from http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/39816. Julia Stapleton, Barker, Sir Ernest (1874–1960). (Oxford University Press, 2004 [cited 22 November 2005]); available from http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/30588. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 20. Note 128. Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 160. See Dorothy M. Emmet, Philosophers and Friends (Macmillan, 1996). Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 160. Ibid. What Quinton’s texts do provide is a clue to the ease with which the analysts were able to ignore those idealists who remained – they had been removed from philosophy and relocated elsewhere. Julia Stapleton argues that the decline of idealism after the First World War has been greatly over-stated, and that, in fact, idealism exerted a considerable influence on the emerging discipline of political science, represented by Barker, Lindsay, and Alfred Eckhard Zimmern. It is significant too that Oakeshott’s chair was in political science, and Mabbot’s principal interests were in the same area. This doesn’t of course alter the fact that the analysts were claiming that idealism had arrived and then been thrown out – not that idealism arrived and then diversified into other areas. Julia Stapleton, ‘Academic Political Thought and the Development of Political Studies in Britain 1900–1950’ (D.Phil., University of Sussex, 1986). Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 160. Quoted in D. C. Band, ‘The Critical Reception of English Neo-Hegelianism in Britain and America, 1914–1960’, The Australian Journal of Politics and History 26, no. 2 (1980), 237. Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics, 162. Note 32. Vincent, Green, Thomas Hill (1836–1882) ([cited]). It was also, among others, Ernest Barker and three idealist colleagues who sat on the education consultative committee that set the groundwork for the grammar school system. The influence of idealist political thought, then, extended in multiple directions into the post–war world. Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics, 117. Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 49. Anthony Quinton, ‘Social Thought in Britain’, in The Twentieth Century Mind: History Ideas, and Literature in Britain Vol. 1 1900–1918, edited by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson (Oxford University Press, 1972), 131–2. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 13. Howarth, Cambridge between Two Wars, 126. West, ‘The Contribution of Continental Philosophy’, 39. Russell, History, 748. Russell and Wyatt, Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind, 116. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 52. Ibid., 36. Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, x. Mary Warnock, Ethics since 1900, third edition (Oxford University Press, 1978), 1.
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Alan Sinfield has pointed to the significance of these allusions to the market in creating a link between commercial freedom and intellectual freedom. Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, second edition (Athlone Press, 1997), 86. Quinton, ‘Social Thought in Britain’, 131. We do not, yet, have a concrete idea as to whether the critique of idealism during World War I did in fact contribute to its decline. John Morrow writes that: ‘only a detailed biographical investigation would allow one to determine the extent to which the “other interests” provided by men like G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell came to appear particularly attractive to those developing an interest in philosophy in the years after 1914, in the light of claims about the dangerous implications of Idealist political theory’. Morrow, ‘British Idealism, “German Philosophy” and the First World War’, 388. Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 187. Ibid., 160. Hare, ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, 284. Warnock, ‘Gilbert Ryle’s Editorship’, 49. Anthony Quinton, From Wodehouse to Wittgenstein (Carcanet Press, 1998), 302. Though there is no explicit mention of this it is quite possible that the Italian idealists could also be encompassed under the rubric ‘continental philosophy’. Ayer, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, 9. A. J. Ayer, ‘Reflections on Language Truth and Logic’, in Logical Positivism in Perspective: Essays on Language Truth and Logic, edited by Barry Gower (Croom Helm, 1987), 24. Ayer, More of My Life, 28. The implication, made explicit elsewhere by Ayer, is that there is in fact very little to understand. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 143. For Berlin, existentialism is a product of romanticism, which is a German movement. R. M. Hare in Magee, Men of Ideas, 156. Colin Wilson, The Outsider (Victor Gollancz, 1956). Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, 93. Sir Herbert Samuel, ‘Address’, Philosophy 20 (1945), 287. C. E. M. Joad, For Civilization, Macmillan War Pamphlets (Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1940). Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921–1970, 253. R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Clarendon Press, 1963), 158. Ryle, ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, 171. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 119. For example R. M. Hare, ‘Peace’, in Applications of Moral Philosophy, edited by R. M. Hare (Macmillan, 1972), 72. Given as a lecture in 1966. Russell quoted in Barry Feinburg and Ronald Kasrils, Bertrand Russell’s America: His Transatlantic Travels and Writings 1896–1945 (George Allen and Unwin, 1973), 203. Russell, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, 15. Popper quoted in Alan Ryan, ‘The Critique of Individualism’, in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jack Haywood, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1999), 94.
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The British occupiers sought, according to Nicholas Pronay to ‘stamp out the whole tradition’ – ‘the ideas and the ideals on which the authoritarian and militaristic political systems of Germany had been based’ and this was to include the purging of the principles of Hegelian idealism. Nicholas Pronay, ‘Introduction: to “Stamp out a Whole Tradition”’, in The Political Re–Education of Germany and Her Allies after World War 2, edited by Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson (Croom Helm, 1985), 1. Even Anthony Quinton, who by the 1980s was prepared to follow Kaufmann in denying explicitly that Hegel was a Nazi (Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 174) in the same collection talks of German philosophy ‘conquering’ Britain. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 13. A. J. Ayer and R. Winch (eds), British Empirical Philosophers: Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid and J. S. Mill (Routledge, 1952). Russell, History, 862. Ibid. Dudley Knowles, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel and the Philosophy of Right (Routledge, 2002), 66. B. A. O. Williams, ‘English Philosophy since 1900, by G. J. Warnock’, Philosophy XXXIV, no. 129 (April 1959), 168. Strawson, ‘The Post–Linguistic Thaw’. Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy, 31. Ibid., 31–2. Quoted in Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, 138. Appleyard, The Pleasures of Peace, 49. Samuel goes further: ‘[f]or a country at war with Fascism, wartime Britain appears remarkably xenophobic’. Raphael Samuel, ‘Introduction: Exciting to be English’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity: Vol. 1 History and Politics, edited by Raphael Samuel (Routledge, 1989), xxvi.
Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
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Ryle, ‘John Locke’, 147. First published 1965. Russell, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, 9. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 13. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 3. Russell, History, 669. Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy, 51. Hampshire, ‘Ideas Propositions and Signs’, 1. Russell, History, 633. Ibid., 669. Warnock, Ethics since 1900, 56. Ibid., 162. This strong claim, like that about the death of idealism, is overstated. I will not have space to demonstrate this here; but the list of idealist metaphysicians canvassed in Chapter 2 can be considerably enhanced with non–idealist metaphysical philosophers – among whom G. E. Moore himself could feature. Ayer, ‘An Appraisal of Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy’, 168.
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A. J. Ayer, ‘Demonstration of the Impossibility of Metaphysics’, Mind 43, no. 171 (July 1934). H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (The Harvester Press, 1979), 398. A view echoed by circle members. Herbert Feigl, ‘The Origin and Spirit of Logical Positivism’, in The Legacy of Logical Positivism: Studies in the Philosophy of Science, edited by Peter Achinstein and Stephen F. Barker (The John Hopkins Press, 1969), 3. Moritz Schlick, ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’, in Logical Positivism, edited by A. J. Ayer (The Free Press, 1959), 54. First published as ‘Die Wende Der Philosophe’ in the journal Erkenntnis, Vol. 1, 1930–1. Feigl, ‘The Origin and Spirit of Logical Positivism’, 12. Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, 47. See also Dale Jacquette, ‘Fin de Siècle Austrian Thought and the Rise of Scientific Philosophy’, History of European Ideas 27 (2001), 309. Ayer, ‘Reflections on Language Truth and Logic’, 27. For example A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (The Free Press, 1959); Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy. Gilbert Ryle, ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 32 (1932–3). Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 83. Berlin quoted in Ibid., 88. Ibid., 87. R. M. Hare, ‘A School for Philosophers’, Ratio (1960), 117. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 8. Stuart Hampshire, ‘J. L. Austin 1911–1960’, in Symposium on J. L. Austin, edited by K. T. Fann (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 44. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 12. Isaiah Berlin, ‘My Intellectual Path’, in The First and the Last, edited by H. Hardy (Granta Books, 1999), 31. D. F. Pears (ed.), The Nature of Metaphysics (Macmillan, 1957). Hare, ‘A School for Philosophers’, 115. Ibid. Analysis manifesto quoted in Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 363. Russell quoted in ibid. John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Duckworth, 1978), 389. Russell, History, 857. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 84–5. Russell, History, 729. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 85. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 85. Russell, ‘Philosophy’s Ulterior Motives’, 340. First published in 1937. Ibid. Ibid., 341–2. Ibid., 342. Russell, History, 720. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 99. Russell, History, 795.
188 47 48 49 50 51
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Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 99. Russell, History, 863–4. Ibid., 633. Ibid., 669. G. J. Warnock, ‘Criticisms of Metaphysics’, in The Nature of Metaphysics, edited by P. F. Strawson (Macmillan, 1957), 124. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 14. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 55. Gellner, ‘Ayer on Moore and Russell’, 187. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 12. His italics. Ibid. Ibid., 28. Warnock repeated the same claims to Bryan Magee some years later. See Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, 51–2. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 54–5. Ibid., 40. The accommodation of Russell’s more systematic, metaphysical thought with the post–war analysts’ tendency to abhor all system was a tricky balance. Warnock provides space for Russell as offering metaphysics of a non–vicious kind. Pears speculates that Russell’s taste for systematizing came from Leibniz, and that: ‘[h]is philosophical temperament combines in an unusual way the caution which is characteristic of British philosophers with the kind of speculation which, rather absurdly, we call Continental’. (Pears, Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy, 269) While Pears appears to scoff at the absurdity of the ‘Continental’ appellation, this passage only reinforces the separation of the two schools. Pears generalizes over the characteristic of the ‘British philosopher’ as such. He suggests that Russell’s philosophy cannot be entirely British due to his tendency to systematize – a feature he has picked up from a foreigner, Leibniz. That Russell himself should, on occasion, fall foul of the analytic drawing of lines, simply reinforces the importance of those lines. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 54. Ibid., 56. Ibid. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 172. Berlin, ‘My Intellectual Path’, 31. Russell, History, 728. Gilbert Ryle, ‘Hume’, in Collected Papers Volume 1, edited by Gilbert Ryle (Hutchinson, 1971), 165–6. Ryle, ‘Review of the Foundations of Phenomenology by Martin Forber’, 268. Ryle is commenting on the philosophical scene in Britain. Samuel, ‘Introduction: Exciting to be English’, xxv. Ryle quoted in Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 15. Russell, History, 791–2. Ibid., 712. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 91. Russell, History, 780. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 97. Ibid., 40.
Notes 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88
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Ibid., 40–1. Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis, 178. Russell, History, 18. Ibid., 856. Ibid., 717. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 794. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 145. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 37. Russell, History, 762. Ibid., 757. On Nietzsche see Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 90. Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis, 178. Russell, History, 624. On Fichte see: Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis, 174. Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921–1970, 255. See also Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy, 49; and R. F. Hoernlé, ‘Concerning “Reason” in Human Affairs’, Mind XLV, no. 179 (July 1936), 285. Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic Philosophy, 50. Isaiah Berlin, ‘A History of Western Philosophy [Review]’, Mind 56, no. 222 (April 1947), 165. Russell, History, 788. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 83. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 80. Berlin, ‘Joseph de Maistre’, 166. Ibid., 161–2. A. J. Ayer, ‘The Claims of Philosophy’, in The Meaning of Life and Other Essays, edited by A. J. Ayer (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 2. First published 1947. Ibid., 3. ‘Some Aspects of Existentialism’, 13. A. J. Ayer, Part of My Life (Collins, 1977), 81, 264. Warnock, Ethics since 1900, 163. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 87–8. Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, 43. Letter written approx. 30 September 1936. Ayer, More of My Life, 26–7. Redding, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought, 8. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 85. Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (Routledge, 1993), 64. First published in 1927 Russell, History, 769. My italics. On Hegel; see also ibid., 857. Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (George Allen and Unwin, 1969), 17–18. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 6. Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, 44. Though Berlin also credited him with many virtues. Quinton, ‘Victorian Philosophy’, 179. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 209.
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Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis, 174. Russell, History, 864. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, 132. Ibid., 134. Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Sense of Reality’, in The Sense of Reality, edited by H. Hardy (Chatto and Windus, 1996), 35. Hare, ‘A School for Philosophers’, 115. Russell, History, 832. My italics. Ibid., 751. Berlin, ‘Joseph de Maistre’, 166. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 27. Ibid., 43. A. J. Ayer, ‘Some Aspects of Existentialism’, The Rationalist Annual (1948), 12. Quoted in Howarth, Cambridge between Two Wars, 126. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 53. Quinton, much later in the century, echoes these criticisms, though in a rather more measured way: ‘[t]he lesser idealists were content to repeat what their predecessors had already said in the typically amorphous and rhapsodic style of the movement’. Quinton, ‘Social Thought in Britain’, 131. Hare in Magee, Men of Ideas, 156. Russell, ‘Ancestry’, 105–6. Ibid., 107. Russell, History, 856. My italics. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore, ‘Introduction’, in British Analytical Philosophy, edited by Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 13. Russell, History, 705. Russell, An Outline of Philosophy, 64. Berlin, ‘The Romantic Revolution’, 185. First delivered as a lecture in 1960. Berlin, ‘European Unity and its Vicissitudes’, 197. Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal, 74. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 36. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Political Judgement’, in The Sense of Reality, edited by H. Hardy (Chatto and Windus, 1996), 50. First broadcast 19 June 1957 on the Third Programme. Ibid., 106. Russell, History, 794. Ryle, ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, 170–1. Ibid., 170. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 15. Ryle quoted in ibid. Berlin, ‘European Unity and its Vicissitudes’, 198. Williams, ‘Man as Agent – on Stuart Hampshire’s Recent Work’, 39. Ayer, Part of My Life, 264. Quinton, ‘Social Thought in Britain’, 116. Hare in Magee, Men of Ideas, 156.
Notes 154 155 156 157 158
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Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis, 178. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 174. A. J. Ayer, ‘Correspondence’, The New Statesman (10 July 1948). Ayer, ‘Reflections on Language Truth and Logic’, 24. Quoted in John O’Neill, ‘Unified Science and Political Philosophy: Positivism, Pluralism and Liberalism’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 34 (2003), 589. See Russell, History, 669–70. Ibid., 668. Russell and Wyatt, Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind, 116. Ayer, ‘An Appraisal of Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy’, 168. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 53. Quinton, From Wodehouse to Wittgenstein, 335. Ryle, ‘John Locke’, 147. Ryle goes on to argue that there is truth in these remarks. Ryle, ‘John Locke’, 148. Noel Annan, ‘Tribute to Isaiah Berlin’, in The First and the Last, edited by H. Hardy (Granta, 1999), 86. The common-sense strand of British thought in its twentieth-century form emanates from Moore (Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 204–5). Russell was always less of a subscriber to the simple veracity of ordinary beliefs – but Ayer, one of Russell’s disciples, was keen to bring the scientism of Russell together with the common sense of Moore, arguing in Language Truth and Logic that there is no ‘difference in kind between’, ‘the laws of science and the maxims of common sense’. (Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 33) Russell himself did not believe that common sense was to have the last word, arguing in The Problems of Philosophy that common sense could not offer a guide to life. Nevertheless, when not elevated to the level of a credo, as he felt it was in the work of Moore, Russell was, as we can see from this quotation, prepared to accept the virtue and the characteristic Englishness, the idea enshrined. For a discussion of Russell on common sense, including the relevant passage from The Problems of Philosophy, see Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, 53. Significantly, regardless of whether an analyst sat on the scientific or the common-sensical side, the rhetoric was much the same – reflecting the fact that, as the Gellner quotation below reveals, the stereotype of the scientist was very much of a piece with the stereotype of the unintellectual Brit. Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Ayer, ‘The Claims of Philosophy’, 6. Quoted in István Mézáros, ‘The Possibility of a Dialogue’, in British Analytical Philosophy, edited by Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 320. This is Mézáros’s translation. See for example, Hare’s equation of the philosopher and the plumber in Magee, Men of Ideas, 154. Ernest Gellner, ‘Contemporary Thought and Politics’, Philosophy XXXII, no. 123 (October 1957), 342–3. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (Secker and Warburg, 1962). First published 1941. Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, 125–6.
192 175 176 177
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Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946, 44. Appleyard, The Pleasures of Peace, 165. Irving Kristol, ‘A Philosophy for Little England’, Encounter VII, no. 1 (July 1956), 85. We a find similar, equally hostile, view in the idealist G. R. G. Mure’s comments about analytic empiricism. Mure, Retreat from Truth, 19–20. Specifically of Englishness as Rée has pointed out and not Scottish or Welshness. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 13. Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, 69. David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 84. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 85. Roland Stromberg discusses the blending of the idealistic, the irrational and the martial in the British image of Germany. Stromberg, Redemption by War, 144. Martin, ‘“Fighting a Philosophy”: The Figure of Nietzsche in British Propaganda of the First World War’, 371.
Chapter 4 1 2 3
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Price, ‘The Permanent Significance of Hume’s Philosophy’, 8. Russell, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, 25. A. J. Ayer, Arne Naess and Fons Elders, ‘The Glass Is on the Table: An Empiricist versus a Total View’, in Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, edited by Fons Elders (Souvenir Press, 1974), 28. Dots appear in original text. Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 49. See, among others, Giles Romilly, ‘A Visit to Oxford’, New Statesman and Nation 26 June 1948. C. E. M. Joad, A Critique of Logical Positivism (Victor Gollancz, 1950); C. E. M. Joad, ‘Logical Positivism Fascism and Value’, The New Statesman and Nation, 31 July 1948. Marjorie Grene, ‘Discussion: “on Heidegger”’, Encounter x, no. 4 (April 1958), 67; Hoernlé, ‘Concerning “Reason” in Human Affairs’, 285; Joad, A Critique of Logical Positivism, 122–3; Leslie Paul, The English Philosophers (Faber and Faber, 1953), 338. Joad, A Critique of Logical Positivism, 148. Mary Warnock (ed.), Women Philosophers (J. M. Dent, 1996), xli–xlii. Laslett (ed.), Philosophy Politics and Society, vii. Ibid., ix. This is a mislabelling on Laslett’s part. Only Ayer would have identified as a logical positivist. For a range of contemporary perspectives see: Isaiah Berlin, ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’, in Philosophy Politics and Society Second Series, edited by Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Basil Blackwell, 1962); Gellner, ‘Contemporary Thought and Politics’; Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, Philosophy Politics and Society Second Series (Basil Blackwell, 1962); Mary Warnock, Gilbert Ryle, and Anthony Quinton, ‘Final Discussion’, in The Nature of Metaphysics, edited by P. F. Strawson (Macmillan, 1957), 161. Hare, ‘Peace’. First delivered as a lecture in 1966.
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R. M. Hare, ‘Reasons of State’, in Applications of Moral Philosophy, edited by R. M. Hare (Macmillan, 1972). R. M. Hare, ‘Ethics and Politics 1: Can I be blamed for obeying orders?’, in Applications of Moral Philosophy, edited by R. M. Hare (Macmillan, 1972), 4. R. M. Hare, ‘Ethics and Politics 2: Have I a duty to my country as such?’, The Listener (20 October 1955). Ayer, ‘Correspondence’. Ayer in Magee, Men of Ideas, 132. A. J. Ayer, ‘The Vienna Circle’, in Freedom and Morality and Other Essays, edited by A. J. Ayer (Oxford University Press, 1982), 175–6. Neurath 1943 letter to Carnap, quoted in O’Neill, ‘Unified Science and Political Philosophy: Positivism, Pluralism and Liberalism’, 588. Eccentric capitalization appears in the original. G. J. Warnock, Morality and Language (Basil Blackwell, 1983), 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Williams and Montefiore, ‘Introduction’, 11. Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1989), 10. Russell, History, 670–1. A. J. Ayer, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, in Metaphysics and Common Sense, edited by A. J. Ayer (Macmillan, 1969), 242. Ibid., 246. Iris Murdoch, ‘A House of Theory’, in Iris Murdoch: Existentialists and Mystics, edited by Peter J. Conradi (Chatto and Windus, 1997), 179. First published 1958. Ibid., 180. Marcuse makes a similar point. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Arc Paperbacks, 1986), 198–9. Mary Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places (Duckbacks, 2002), 45. Williams, ‘Man as Agent – on Stuart Hampshire’s Recent Work’, 39. Rée, ‘English Philosophy in the Fifties’, 11. G. J. Warnock, ‘John Langshaw Austin, a Biographical Sketch’, in Symposium on J. L. Austin, edited by K. T. Fann (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 7. Stuart Hampshire made a similar suggestion about Austin: Hampshire, ‘J. L. Austin 1911–1960’, 42. Warnock is writing after much of the criticism of the analysts for their failures in political philosophy. There may be an element of retrospective justification here. Ted Honderich, ‘An Interview with A. J. Ayer’, in A. J. Ayer Memorial Essays, edited by A. Phillips Griffith (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 212. Ibid., 225. Ayer in Magee, Men of Ideas, 132. Hare, Freedom and Reason, 185. In a footnote Price assures us that this is a tradition that Hume shared despite being a Tory. Price, ‘The Permanent Significance of Hume’s Philosophy’, 8.
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Russell, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, 28. Ibid. Ayer, Arne, and Elders, ‘The Glass Is on the Table: An Empiricist versus a Total View’, 27–28. Ibid., 28. Dots appear in original text. Ibid., 27. Arne Naess, the philosopher to whom Ayer refers here, was also trained in the analytic tradition. We can detect the same idea in Wollheim, ‘Democracy’, 118. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 49–50. Ibid., 194–5. Alan Lacey, ‘Empiricism’, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich (Oxford University Press, 1995). Berlin, ‘The Sense of Reality’, 31. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 146. Benjamin R. Barber, ‘Solipsistic Politics: Russell’s Empiricist Liberalism’, in Bertrand Russell Memorial Volume, edited by George W. Roberts (George Allen and Unwin, 1979). Russell, History, 864. Russell, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, 32. Hare, Freedom and Reason, 180. Ibid., 180–1. The role of imagination in Hare’s moral re–education of Germany is an important one, but it is not centrally relevant to our concerns here. Imagination, he says, is the domain of the artist. Hare, ‘Can I be blamed for obeying orders?’, 4. Ibid., 8. Hare, Freedom and Reason, 180–1. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 184. Stuart Hampshire, ‘The Philosopher as Superman’, Encounter x, no. 3 (March 1958), 73. Ibid. The other countries mentioned all had an analytic tradition. Russell, quoted in Rogers, A. J. Ayer, 116. Russell, History, 670–1. Russell, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, 25–6. Ryle, ‘John Locke’, 152–3. First published in 1965. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 156. Stuart Hampshire, ‘Hume’s Place in Philosophy’, in David Hume: A Symposium, edited by D. F. Pears (Macmillan, 1963), 10. Warnock, English Philosophy since 1900, 173. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (Penguin, 1994), 238. For one recent study, see Preston, Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by Keith Ansell–Pearson (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Book 3. A. J. Ayer, ‘On Making Philosophy Intelligible’, in Metaphysics and Common Sense, edited by A. J. Ayer (Macmillan, 1969), 7. First published 1963.
Notes 76 77 78 79 80 81 82
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Ayer, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, 259. Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, 9. Russell, History, 625. Russell, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, 9. Russell, History, 748. C. E. M. Joad, Guide to Modern Wickedness (Faber and Faber, 1939), 372. Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, Writing Englishness 1900–1950 (Routledge, 1995), 110. Angus Calder, The People’s War: 1939–1945 (Pimlico, 1969). David Morgan and Mary Evans, The Battle for Britain: Citizenship and Ideology in the Second World War (Routledge, 1993), 24. Julia Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850 (Manchester University Press, 2001), 114. Samuel, ‘Introduction: Exciting to be English’, xxiv. R. Aris, ‘Germany’s New Order’, Current Affairs, no. 41 (10 April 1943), 13. Butterfield quoted in Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850, 173. Russell, History, 624. Ibid., 625. Ibid., 628. Russell and Wyatt, Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind, 113–14. Ibid., 115. Russell, Religion and Science 248. First published 1935. Russell, who as I will suggest below was a part of the British liberal tradition, did not come to these ideas only as a result of World War II. As far back as German Social Democracy (1896) Russell argued that while ‘the “English mind” was accustomed to compromise in politics’, the German mind was not, showing from an early point a predilection towards making fundamental assumptions along nationalist lines (Ironside, The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell: The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism, 31). But it should be acknowledged that Russell is far from uncomplicated on this issue. He seeks to distinguish the Englishman at home from the Englishman abroad (Russell and Wyatt, Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind, 123). He is powerfully critical of particular manifestations of British imperial power: ‘[t]he characteristic doctrines of German nationalism are all to be found in Carlyle . . . And in British imperialism as practised in Asia and Africa, all the impulses that seem repulsive in German nationalism have found vent. The Empire has been a cesspool for British moral refuse; Germany had no such outlet, and had to endure its despots at home. “I wanted to take service in India under the English flag”, said Bismarck in his youth; “then I thought after all, what harm have the Indians done me?” The self–righteous Englishman will do well to ponder this reflection’. (Russell, Freedom and Organization 1814–1914, 415–6) This is another example of Russell’s ability to occupy, within very short periods of time, apparently mutually exclusive positions. The self–righteous Englishman who Russell is cautioning here, could on another day have been himself. Berlin, ‘Joseph de Maistre’, 112–13. C. D. Broad, ‘Some Common Fallacies in Political Thinking’, Philosophy XXV, no. 93 (April 1950), 101. Mussolini famously claimed that Fascism was not suitable for export.
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121 122
Notes
Ibid., 102–3. Ibid., 103. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (Penguin, 1999), 15. Material in square brackets is my addition. Ibid., 25. Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination (Blackwell, 1994), 273. Eric Voeglin, ‘The Oxford Political Philosophers’, Philosophical Quarterly 3, no. 11 (April 1953), 100. Ibid., 107. This notion of an ‘English civil theology’ is a fascinating one; sadly there is no time here to explore it. Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, 137. Irving Kristol, ‘A Philosophy for Little England’, Encounter VII, no. 3 (September 1956), 74. Kristol, an American and a part of The Congress for Cultural Freedom, set up to combat Soviet ideas, clearly felt that this confidence was not helpful to the struggle for the free world. On Kristol and the Congress see Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton University Press, 2001), 108. Kristol, ‘A Philosophy for Little England’, 74. Philip Pettit, ‘The Contribution of Analytical Philosophy’, in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, Blackwell Companions to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Blackwell, 1995), 10. Noël O’Sullivan, ‘Visions of Freedom – the Response to Totalitarianism’, in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jack Haywood, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1999). Hare, ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, 281. Ibid., 282–3. Williams and Montefiore, ‘Introduction’, 15. Russell, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, 14. Ibid., 25. Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 295. Alan Ryan, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1988), 3. Ibid. Richard Wollheim, ‘Bertrand Russell and the Liberal Tradition’, in Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy, edited by George Nakhnikian (Duckworth, 1974), 209. Ironside, The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell: The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism, 5. Quinton, Thoughts and Thinkers, 49. Isaiah Berlin, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, in Four Essays on Liberty, edited by Isaiah Berlin (Oxford University Press, 1969), 193. First published 1959. We have not needed to deal with the English image of the French philosophe. For more on this see Rée, Philosophical Tales, Rée, ‘Philosophy and the History of Philosophy’. Honderich, ‘An Interview with A. J. Ayer’, 213. Hare, ‘Peace’. First delivered as a lecture in 1966.
Notes 123 124 125 126 127
128
197
Hare, ‘Can I be blamed for obeying orders?’, 4. Hare, ‘The Role of Philosophers in the Legislative Process’, 1. Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, 273. Pronay, ‘Introduction: “to Stamp out a Whole Tradition”’, 1. Noel Annan, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany (HarperCollins, 1995), 160. The British desire to civilize Germany is discussed in Francis Graham–Dixon, ‘Civilizing the Germans: British Occupation Policy and the Refugee and Expellee Crisis, 1944–1949’. (D.Phil, University of Sussex, 2008).
Epilogue 1
2
3
4
5
6
7 8 9
McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era, 11. Simon Blackburn, ‘Derrida May Deserve Some Credit for Trying, but Less for Succeeding’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, no. 1666 (12 November 2004). H. J. Paton, ‘History of Western Philosophy and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day’, International Affairs 24, no. 4 (October 1948), 566. Bernard Williams, ‘Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look’, in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, edited by Nicholas Bunnin and E. P. Tsui–Jones (Blackwell, 1996), 26. Jerry Foder, ‘Water’s Water Everywhere’, London Review of Books 26, no. 20 (21 October 2004), 17. Dagfinn Føllesdal, ‘Analytic Philosophy: What Is It and Why Should One Engage with It?’, in The Rise of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Hans–Johann Glock (Blackwell, 1997), 7. Ibid., 12. Harry Bracken, ‘Essence, Accident and Race’, Hermathena, no. 116 (1973). Ironside, The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell: The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism, 200.
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Index
anti-canon see also continental philosophy, German philosophy, nationalism, political philosophy definition of 18 analysts write exclusionary history of 14, 54, 56–60, 62–75, 76, 81–2, 131–6, 164, 167 analysts’ view of deception of 106–9, 112, 132 irrationality/irrationalism of 103–16 Nazism of see Nazism obscurity of see obscurity poor arguments of 103–6 seduction of 109–12 analytic disengagement from 54–62 Austin, J. L. 2, 5, 7, 23, 25, 57, 61, 92, 120, 132, 135 Ayer, A. J. 2, 5, 7, 23, 25–6, 28, 32, 35, 37, 45–6, 55, 57–9, 64, 68–9, 78, 83–4, 90–3, 97, 104–5, 110, 116, 118–20, 126–9, 131–6, 138, 148–9, 151, 161 Berlin, Isaiah 2, 5, 56, 58, 60–1, 77–81, 92, 94–5, 98, 101–2, 104–5, 108–11, 113–15, 117–18, 120–1, 123, 138–40, 142, 147, 153, 156, 159–61 Chapter 1 Bosanquet, Bernard 18–19, 33, 35, 54, 72, 74, 77, 107 Bradley, F. H. 18, 33, 35, 54, 69–70, 72, 74, 98, 107 Britishness 4, 27, 64, 121–2, 148–61, 168 Broad, C. D. 22, 29, 47, 55, 111, 153–4 Carritt, E. F. 23, 35 character, importance of for the analysts 4–5, 9, 15, 47, 65, 86, 89,
94–103, 116, 118–25, 137, 144–8, 150–5, 162, 164–6 national 46, 49–50, 83, 151, 162 Collingwood, R. G. 57, 75, 108, 121, 154 common sense 1, 5, 60, 84, 88, 97–8, 120–2, 139, 145, 150 communism 1, 18, 27, 31–2, 39, 115, 133, 149 continental philosophy 3–5, 15, 16, 25, 27–8, 48, 52, 53–60, 62, 64–6, 75–9, 81, 87, 88–9, 91, 100, 106, 110, 117–19, 135, 147, 164–8 see also anti-canon cultural history of philosophy 6–10, 15 Derrida, Jacques 136, 163, 167 empiricism, analysts’ view of as ally to liberalism 4, 10, 15, 126, 130–5, 136–44, 145, 147–8, 150, 158–61, 166, 168 of analytic philosophers 62–5, 69, 88, 91, 93, 122 Englishness see Britishness Europe 3, 5, 15, 27, 33, 35, 42, 47–8, 68–9, 75, 77–81, 86–7, 100, 115, 119, 122–3, 129, 135, 145, 149–51, 156, 161 existentialism 55, 78–9, 104–5, 110, 112, 119, 123 fascism see Nazism Fichte, J. G. 16, 19–20, 23–4, 26–7, 32–5, 38, 40–2, 47–9, 57, 80, 96, 101–2, 104, 108, 113, 160 First World War see World War I
210
Index
Gellner, Ernest 1, 13, 68, 97, 121 German philosophy/philosophers 5, 15, 19, 21–5, 29, 32, 46–8, 49–50, 51, 55, 58, 60, 76–8, 82, 87, 91–2, 94–5, 104–5, 108, 115, 118, 136, 161–2, 165 see also anti-canon and nationalism Green, T. H. 33–4, 47–8, 54, 73–4 Hampshire, Stuart 2, 5, 7, 61, 63–4, 90, 92, 132, 143–7, 149 Hare, R. M. 1, 3, 5, 27, 59–61, 72, 77–8, 80–1, 92, 108, 111–12, 117, 119, 129–30, 135–6, 142–4, 151, 156–8, 160–1 Hegel, G. W. F. 1, 3, 135, 137, 142–4, 164, 167, accused of Nazism Chapter 1 accused of philosophical vices Chapter 3 followers excluded from British philosophy Chapter 2 Heidegger, Martin 45, 50, 53–6, 58–9, 78, 104–5, 110, 112, 114, 118, 120, 132, 143–4, 167 Hobhouse, L. T. 16, 19, 24, 46 Hume, David 57–8, 62–6, 87, 90, 93–5, 97, 99–100, 107, 130, 143, 146, 160–1 idealism 2, 18–20, 23–4 analysts’ exclusion of 59–62, 66–75, 85–6 analysts’ view of 15, 26–7, 34–5, 38, 46, 48, 53–4, 57, 82, 84 invasion of 75–81 infection, language of 27, 51, 115–16, 129, 135, 145, 166 Joad, C. E. M. 17, 20, 22–3, 35, 46, 80, 128, 130, 150 Kant, Immanuel 3, 5, 19–21, 26,30, 38, 40, 47, 53, 55, 57–8, 60, 62, 65–9, 72, 76, 78, 82, 87, 91, 94–7, 99–100, 105–7, 113, 116, 139, 165 Knox, T. M. 23, 50 Kristol, Irving 122, 155
liberalism, analysts’ view of 38, 80–1, 118 see also Britishness of analytic philosophy 1, 4–5, 15, 126–7, 130–8, 165, 168 allied to empiricism 136–44 and emotional control 144–8 of Britain 148–62 Locke, John 1, 30, 57–8, 63–4, 70, 88, 90, 93, 96–7, 99, 120, 133, 137–8, 145–6, 152, 158–9, 161 logical positivism 10, 13, 55, 91–2 as anti-Nazi 131, 145 critique of as nihilistic 127–9 Magee, Bryan 14, 56, 58, 67, 112, 131 Mazzini, Giuseppe 18, 36, 41, 47 de Maistre, Joseph 30, 39, 43–4, 49, 104, 110, 153 metaphysics 74 analysts’ view of 10, 13, 38, 42, 77, 83–4, 89, 90–103, 104–5, 107, 111, 114, 116–19, 122–5, 130–2, 135, 139, 144, 147, 160, 164–5 allied to obscurity 94, 105, 108–9 related to character 94–9 Moore, G. E. 2–3, 6, 11–12, 22, 29, 46–7, 57–8, 60–1, 64–8, 70–2, 77, 81, 84–5, 90, 97–8, 108, 127 Murdoch, Iris 54, 134 National Socialism see Nazism nationalism see also Britishness of British philosophers characterisation of philosophy 118–23, 127, 136, 159, 165 characterisation of the anti-canon 45–51 German philosophers accused of 20, 29, 35 Nazism analysts’ view of as related to anti-canon/continental philosophy Chapter 1 3, 5, 15, 53, 59, 80–2, 86–7, 90, 95–6, 99, 102, 113–18, 125, 130–1, 144, 147–8, 153, 157, 160–2, 165, 168 logical positivism as fostering 127
Index Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 1, 3, 53, 55–8, 69–70, 74, 78, 96, 101–4, 114, 124, 147–8, 164, 166 accused of Nazism Chapter 1 obscurity in philosophy, analysts’ view of 89, 103–6, 109, 112, 114, 117–18, 123, 125, 132, 135–7, 147 see also metaphysics Pears, D. F. 61, 63–4, 74 political philosophy 9, 12, 73, 133, 155, 157 of the anti-canon 20, 25, 32, 35, 38, Chapter 1 ‘death’ of 4, 127–30 Popper, Karl 1, 11, 27, 45, 49, 61, 77, 80–1, 155–7 pragmatism 35, 37, 47 Price, H. H. 1, 4, 7, 22, 26, 28, 64, 126, 137–8 Quinton, Anthony 5, 22, 57, 66, 70–4, 76–8, 108, 116, 118–19, 126, 158–9 romanticism 26–7, 35, 37, 47, 102, 115, 135, 168 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 16, 26, 30–1, 38, 40, 47, 49, 94–5, 101–2, 110–11, 114, 117, 120 Russell, Bertrand Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 166, 168 importance of 11–12, 28–30 war work 81 Ryle, Gilbert 1–3, 5, 7, 11–12, 22, 27–9, 45, 47, 49–51, 54, 57, 59–60, 67, 77, 80–1, 84, 88, 92–3, 100–1, 115, 117, 120, 129, 145–6
211
Schopenhauer, Arthur 12, 26, 35–6, 57–8, 67 science 9, 12, 18, 21, 38, 43, 45, 63, 70, 88, 91, 94, 96–8, 101, 104, 109, 115, 121, 137–8, 141, 144–5, 147–8, 150–1, 153, 163, 168 Second World War see World War II seduction, philosophy as see anti-canon Strawson, P. F. 5, 7, 61, 85, 92 subjectivism 95, 99, 102, 124–5 127–30, 142, 147–8, 162 theory, analysts’ suspicion of 121, 123, 130, 131–4, 136, 141–2, 147, 149–50, 152, 163–4, 167 Voeglin, Eric 154 Warnock, Geoffrey 2, 27, 34, 53, 57, 61, 63–5, 68–9, 71–2, 76–7, 82, 90, 97–8, 107–8, 111, 117,119, 132, 135, 146 Warnock, Mary 2, 5, 61, 68, 76, 82, 90, 105, 128, 134–5 Williams, Bernard 2, 69, 84, 113, 115, 119, 132, 135, 157–8, 166 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 11–12, 48, 58, 62, 66–7, 84, 91, 93, 129 Wollheim, Richard 2, 34, 58, 61, 159 World War I 6, 12, 16 24, 26, 29–30, 33, 46–7, 49–50, 74, 76, 87, 124 and anti Germanism in philosophy 18–23 World War II 11–12, 17, 30, 58, 60, 64, 71, 75, 86–7, 116, 124, 127, 129–30, 150, 162 as a war of ideas 79–81, 82
