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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

prejudice « Previous | |Next »
July 4, 2003

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Jonathan Miller of Beyond the Fringe fame (with Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, and Peter Cook) and who went on to become of the most original and sought-after opera directors. Though of historical interest this historical view of philosophy still informs the present.

INTERVIEWER

Does your interest in philosophy influence your work as a director?

MILLER

It does. I think philosophically; I’m interested in how we think, in the theory of the mind. What it is to have representations of the world, how we structure it, how we organize it, and so forth.

INTERVIEWER

You belong to the Anglo-American, analytical philosophy; you are not interested in continental philosophers, are you?

MILLER

I hate them! I repudiate them! I think that the last important French philosopher was Descartes. Heidegger is ghastly—he is like an elephant’s fart. By contrast, in England we have Bertrand Russell, Peter Strawson, Stuart Hampshire . . . The job of philosophy is not to find out the meaning of life, or our relationship to the larger metaphysical principles of the universe; it is finding out the relationship of the mind to the world. How the world is represented in the mind; how do we come to have knowledge; what do we mean by certainty. These are the only things about which you can ask questions. I am interested in problems for which you can foresee a solution; questions to which there is possibly an answer.

INTERVIEWER

And if there isn’t?

MILLER

Then you keep your trap shut! There is no point wasting time asking questions for which there are no answers, or pondering problems that have no solution. First of all you have to ask yourself if something is really a question just because it has a question mark after it.

That English prejudice to continental philosophy is a historical---a part of the cultural history of a discpline in the liberal univeristy. It was deeply entrenched in Australian philosophy departments whose pracitioners were beholden to pure reason, absolute truth and had a hatred of historicism. The best that can be said for such a prejudice is that it is stated with clarity and rigour. We have no doubts.

It is still alive and well in some analytic philosophers. who still take it for granted that previous philosophers---eg., Hume, Frege in the analytic canon-- have isolated deep central problems that define the discipline. So there is no need for a history of philosophy. Physicists do not need a history of physics to do physics that aims at non-historical absolute truth. Neither do philosophers.

These kind of analytic philosophers regarded the continental tradition as an aestheticized and historicized form of idealism. Young PhD philosophers working in the continental tradition, after their recoil from a dogmatic scientific realism, were dismissed by the senior faculty on the grounds that they had an insufficiently robust sense of reality and its independence from any form of culture.

This is much better than the above dogmatism that is wielded like a sledge hammer. It is someone thinking. And doing it hard, because they are digging themselves out of a tradition. In doing so Williams shows that analytic philosophy is a particular kind of language, a cultural tradition that has been histotrically concerned with particular kinds of issues.

Thie tradition that Bernard Williams is digging philosophy out of is the flybottle of scientism. Scientism is characterised by Williams as the tendency to "assimilate philosophy to the aims, or at least the manners, of the sciences." This assimilation resulted in analytic philosophy becoming a scientific philosophy and embracing some substantive content.

In the words of Hilary Putnam, from his Renewing Philosophy:

"Analytic philosophy has become increasingly dominated by the idea that science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective. To be sure, there are within analytic philosophy important figures who combat this scientism … Nevertheless, the idea that science leaves no room for an independent philosophical enterprise has reached the point at which leading practitioners sometimes suggest that all that is left for philosophy is to try to anticipate what the presumed scientific solutions to all metaphysical problems will eventually look like."

This is philosophy hitching a ride with science. So how does Williams dig his way out of scientistic flybottle? Through history. He historicizes. We develop a narrative about we go to be where we are now. Thus Williams argument is that:

"I have argued that philosophy should get rid of scientistic illusions, that it should not try to behave like an extension of the natural sciences (except in the special cases where that is what it is), that it should think of itself as part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and of our activities, and that in order to answer many of its questions it needs to attend to other parts of that enterprise, in particular to history."

For Williams philosophy as a humanistic discipline should play an important part in making people think about what they are doing, and acknowledging its connections with other ways of understanding ourselves.

But he ends on a melancholy note. Such a broad reflective enterprise is now coming to seem unnecessary and archaic, and to be something that at best is preserved as part of the heritage industry.

What Williams does not say is that broad reflective enterprise in philosophy was kept alive in the continental philosophy tradition. That is why I find the reductionism of books and reviews like this so disconcerting. Gadamer made a significant contribution to recovering philosophy a humanist discipline. Even if he was a fascist it is ideas that are of interest.


| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:05 AM | | Comments (0)
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