What (If Anything) to Expect from Today's Philosophers

THERE is an old saying that philosophy bakes no bread. It is perhaps equally true that no bread would ever have been baked without philosophy. For the act of baking implies a decision on the philosophical issue of whether life is worthwhile at all. Bakers may not have often asked themselves the question in so many words. But philosophy traditionally has been nothing less than the attempt to ask and answer, in a formal and disciplined way, the great questions of life that ordinary men might put to themselves in reflective moments.

The world has both favored and feared the philosophers' answers. Thomas Aquinas became a saint, Aristotle was tutor to Alexander the Great, and Voltaire was a confidant of kings. But Socrates was put to death, and Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. Nowadays, Historian Will Durant has noted, no one would think of doing that--"not because men are more delicate about killing, but because there is no need to kill that which is already dead."

Philosophy dead? It often seems so. In a world of war and change, of principles armed with bombs and technology searching for principles, the alarming thing is not what philosophers say but what they fail to say. When reason is overturned, blind passions are rampant, and urgent questions mount, men turn for guidance to scientists, psychiatrists, sociologists, ideologues, politicians, historians, journalists--almost anyone except their traditional guide, the philosopher. Ironically, the once remote theologians are in closer touch with humanity's immediate and intense concerns than most philosophers, who today tend to be relatively obscure academic technicians. No living U.S. philosopher has the significance to the world at large that John Dewey or George Santayana had a generation or two ago. Many feel that philosophy has played out its role in the history of human culture; the "queen of sciences" has been dethroned.

Once all sciences were part of philosophy's domain, but gradually, from physics to psychology, they seceded and established themselves as independent disciplines. Above all, for some time now, philosophy itself has been engaged in a vast revolt against its own past and against its traditional function. This intellectual purge may well have been necessary, but as a result contemporary philosophy looks inward at its own problems rather than outward at men, and philosophizes about philosophy, not about life. A great many of his colleagues in the U.S. today would agree with Donald Kalish, chairman of the philosophy department at U.C.L.A., who says: "There is no system of philosophy to spin out. There are no ethical truths, there are just clarifications of particular ethical problems. Take advantage of these clarifications and work out your own existence. You are mistaken to think that anyone ever had the answers. There are no answers. Be brave and face up to it."

Revolt of the Logicians

Before such chilling views took hold, philosophers always were men who thought, says Yale's Professor Emeritus Brand Blanshard, that "they could sit down in their studies and arrive by reasoning at a knowledge of the ultimate nature of the world." Perhaps in no other age had philosophers greater confidence in their capacity to do this than in the 19th century. Hegel tried to encompass all aspects of life within his dialectical logic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in 18 ponderous tomes. His idealistic principle that the material world exists only in relation to the Absolute mind led to the metaphysics of F. H. Bradley, who denied--even during the course of an hour's conversation in an Oxford chamber--that time or space had objective reality.

By the turn of the century, science and common sense alike dictated a shift away from idealism. "Damn the Absolute," roared William James, and the American pragmatists turned from principles and categories to results and facts. But the most effective rebellion against Hegelianism was carried out by two groups--the analytic philosophers, who prevail in U.S. and British universities, and the partisans of phenomenology and existentialism, who predominate in Western Europe. On some U.S. campuses, they are known as "the logicians and the lotus-eaters."

The analytic revolt began with two convictions: first, that experience contradicted the idealistic theory that material objects are not in themselves "real"; second, that philosophy could not compete with science as a way of studying the real world and thus would have to turn to other tasks. The analytic thinkers decided that philosophy's true job was to answer that old Socratic question "What does it mean?"

The study of meaning takes many forms. One stems from G. E. Moore of Cambridge, who argued that the business of philosophy was simply the analysis and clarification of common sense beliefs. Moore's colleague Bertrand Russell tried to eliminate fallacies by using an artificial language of symbols into which the truths of science and ordinary descriptive statements could be translated in order to test their accuracy. The "Vienna Circle" of logical positivists--who carried their ideas to Britain and the U.S. in the 1930s-declared that the criterion of meaning was verifiability; if the meaning of a statement could not be verified by empirical procedures, it was literally nonsense. But, as Russell pointed out, this criterion was itself a philosophical principle.

Finally Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian-born Cambridge don, and such Oxonians as J. L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle decided independently that philosophy was concerned not so much with meaning as with use, and should seek to establish the rules of the various "language games" that men played with ordinary words, describing when a word was used legitimately, and when it was not. About all the various analytic schools had in common was the beliefs that philosophy has nothing to say about the world and that clarity and straight thinking will dissolve most of the classical metaphysical problems.

The Rise of the Lotus-Eaters

On the Continent, the philosophical revolt took a different form. Germany's Edmund Husserl developed a "descriptive science" that he called phenomenology. His method was to examine and describe a particular experience--at the same time mentally blocking off any speculations about its origin or significance, any memories of similar experiences. By this act of epoche, a deliberate suspension of judgment, Husserl felt that the mind could eventually intuit the essence of the object being studied. Husserl's bafflingly difficult approach influenced such modern existentialist philosophers as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.

What the existentialists emphasize about man is that he, alone among other beings, is a decision-making creature blessed, or cursed, with the freedom to choose among a variety of possibilities in an absurd and mysterious existence; to be truly human, man must accept this freedom and conquer the anxiety and despair that threaten it by "commitment" to a way of life. This message can be bracing, notably in the religious version of existentialism, in which the commitment is directed toward a spiritual goal. It can also be nihilistic, notably in the atheistic version, in which commitment is demanded for its own sake only and the despair of the human situation is emphasized more than its conquest.

Both movements, the logicians as well as the lotus-eaters, appear to do away with what has usually been considered the very heart of philosophy: metaphysics, the attempt to comprehend through reason the nature of reality. In The Conditions of Philosophy, a current examination of the discipline, Mortimer Adler charges that the analytic thinkers abandon "first-order questions" that metaphysics used to ask--such as the nature of being, causation, free will--and are concerned mostly with second-order problems of method. The existentialists, on the other hand, continue to ask large-size questions, but because of their man-centered approach they are indifferent to systematic thinking. Thus, for both movements, a question such as "What is truth?" becomes impossible to answer. The logical positivist would say that a particular statement of fact can be declared true or false by empirical evidence; anything else is meaningless. A language philosopher would content himself with analyzing all the ways the word true can be used. The existentialist would emphasize what is true for a person in a particular situation.

The War of the Schools

Both movements have turned philosophy into a private game for professionals. Laymen glancing at the June 10, 1965, issue of the Journal of Philosophy will find a brace of learned analysts discussing whether the sentence "There are brown things and there are cows" is best expressed by the formula (3x)Exw (3x)Exy or by (3x)Bx-(3x)Cx. And while the existentialists speak dramatically enough about the condition of man in novels and plays, their philosophical writing is so dense that Brandeis' Henry Aiken complains: "Reading Heidegger is like trying to swim through wet sand." One typical passage of Heidegger's alleged masterwork, Being and Time, reads: "If the Being of everyday Being-with-one-another is already different in principle from pure presence-at-hand--in spite of the fact that it is seemingly close to it ontologically--still less can the Being of the authentic Self be conceived as presence-at-hand."

Philosophy cannot and need not make sense to the layman in every detail; excerpts from Aristotle or Hegel (or, for that matter, Einstein) may also seem like gibberish to the uninitiated. But it is significant that the analytic and phenomenological thinkers don't even understand one another.

As a result, philosophy today is bitterly segregated. Most of the major philosophy departments and scholarly journals are the exclusive property of one sect or another. Harvard, U.C.L.A. and Cornell are oriented toward analytic thinking, for example, while Penn State and Northwestern are among the minority leaning toward phenomenology. Despite much academic talk about the horrors of conformity, some philosophy departments are rigidly conformist. Instructors or students with the "wrong" approach are forced out. The attitude at U.C.L.A., for instance, is that "a lot of nice young people who might be wholesome philosophers of the non-analytic kind can't get through our requirements."

Many students who do make the grade in analytic courses are disappointed because they had expected more from philosophy. To some, the analytic approach is now old hat, while the older, unfashionable philosophies take on a new excitement. There are many older-line philosophers left in the U.S. who belong to neither of the two warring sides, including Yale's Paul Weiss, Chicago's Richard McKeon, the University of Texas' Charles Hartshorne, and Michigan's Abraham Kaplan, who states wryly: "The word philosophy means the love of wisdom. And the love of wisdom, I suppose, is like any other sort of love--the professionals are the ones who know least about it."

There are signs that, hesitantly and sometimes unintentionally, professional philosophers are beginning to take such reproaches to heart. At long last, philosophy may have stopped attacking the Hegelian bogey and be about ready to put its analytic tools to work on the real issues facing man.

Suggesting the glimmer of a detente, French Phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur now teaches a course in linguistic analysis at the University of Paris. Yale's John Wild recently published an article suggesting that the lebenswelt, the "life world" of experience that phenomenology investigates, is the world of "ordinary language" that the linguistic philosophers are studying.

Some analytic philosophers are even daring to "do metaphysics" again. P. F. Strawson, one of the most respected of Oxford's analytic philosophers, boldly subtitled his latest book, Individuals, An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. The book is partly concerned with the difference between material objects and human beings, a highly technical question that, by extension, has to do with the very real problem of whether man can be explained like a flesh-and-blood object of whether he is an organism with a purpose. Another, younger Oxonian, Anthony Quinton, is completing a philosophical treatise, grandly titled The Nature of Things, that starts from the problem of identity and reference: Is a given object simply a bundle of qualities, or is it something more than that? Quinton points out that the question is as old as Aristotle, who grappled with the meaning of "substance." Strawson, as well as such U.S. figures as Harvard's Morton White, emphasizes that analytic technique is a means rather than an end.

The early analytic thinkers believed that with the clarifying of language the old questions of philosophy would simply disappear, but their intellectual offsprings are wiser. "Once you see that language permeates the world," says Morris Kaplan, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, "all the problems you had with the world come back." Strawson agrees that "the insatiable appetite of philosphers for generality has reasserted itself." In,other words, the philosophers are beginning to re-invent philosophy.

In Britain, philosophers are newly concerned over such ancient issues as the relationship of body to mind and the problem of causation in human behavior. David Wiggins of Oxford is currently exploring "the entire concept of event identity--what makes it right to say that event A is the same as event B?" An American illustrates Wiggins' problem with a homely example: "Is my act of flipping on the light switch the same act as my act of alerting the prowler, if in fact by flipping on the switch and illuminating the room, I do alert the prowler?" Although the question sounds as relevant as the medieval puzzler about how many angels can dance on a pinhead, Wiggins notes that it has highly practical implications in fixing intention and responsibility, and theoretical ones in helping to solve the age-old puzzler of free will v. determinism. Free will is back in philosophical style, and Wiggins concedes that the traditional way of stating that problem "wasn't after all in quite such a mess as had recently been supposed."

Time to Wake Up

In the Middle Ages, the questions that philosophy asked were determined largely by theology; today major philosophical issues are posed by science. Says Chicago's McKeon: "The new priests come from the lab and hand us the tablet--how do we handle it?" Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus of M.I.T. is wondering about the possibility of creating a computer that would be completely determined by programming but would behave as if it were a free, intelligent agent. "If something that we knew was just a machine could behave intelligently," he muses, "it would tend to suggest that maybe we are just machines." Would such computers have to be considered conscious beings? Would they raise a civil liberties problem? To some, such questions suggest that science is creating more problems than philosophy can readily cope with; and concepts like antimatter and the expanding universe make some philosophers quite nervous.

Chances are, however, that philosophy will learn to coexist with science and (in Mortimer Adler's phrase) reach its delayed maturity, provided it resolutely insists on being a separate discipline dealing publicly and intelligibly in first-order questions. Caution is bound to remain. Instead of one-man systems, philosophy in the future will probably consist of a dialogue of many thinkers, each seeking to explore to the fullest one aspect of a common problem. Says Oxford's James Urmson, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan: "It is just like Galileo experimenting with little balls on inclined planes before he addressed the heavens."

The question remains: Will philosophy ever again address the heavens? Will it contribute anything to man's vision, rather than merely clarifying it? Caution and confusion are not necessarily signs of disaster, and even Hegel remarked that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." But the shadows are deep and the time for an awakening is at hand.

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