The crisis of philosophy

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Published by State University of New York Press, Albany ©

1990 State University of New York

All rights reserved

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Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCarthy, Michael H., 1942The crisis of philosophy/ Michael H. McCarthy p. cm.- (SUNY series in philosophy) Includes index. ISBN 0-7914-Q152-9-ISBN 0-7914-0153-7 (pbk.) I. Philosophy, Modern-20th century. 2. Philosophy, Modern-19th century. 3. Philosophy and civilization. 4. Civilization, Modern-20th century. 5. Civilization, Modern-19th century. 6. Methodology. I. Title. II. Series B804.M35 1989 190-dcl989-30040

In constructing a ship or a philosophy one has to go the whole way; an effort that is in principle incomplete is equivalent to a failure. Bernard Lonergan Insight XIII

Preface

It has always been difficult for philosophy to define itself, to articulate its nature and purpose, and to state its distinctive relation to other cultural practices. At critical moments in its history, such self-definition has been required and partly achieved. When Socrates distinguished the philosopher from the sophist and cosmologist, when Aquinas clarified the contrast between philosophy and revealed theology, and when Kant differentiated transcendental and empirical inquiry, they were addressing deep cultural .misgivings about their enterprise. The differences in cultural context required corresponding differences in philosophical response. In ancient Greece, Plato needed to distinguish Socratic dialectic from Homeric poetry and sophistic rhetoric and to demarcate Socrates' study of the soul from naturalistic speculations about the heavens. In medieval Europe, Aquinas needed to defend the power and legitimacy of natural reason against all who insisted that Scripture and tradition were the exclusive sources of truth. At a decisive moment in the history of the enlightenn1ent, Kant needed to differentiate the method and purpose of philosophy from those of mathematics and the new science of nature. The preceding examples suggest a significant interdependence between the history of philosophy and the history of culture. An important transformation in cultural context appears to require a parallel shift in philosophical self-understanding. During the past two hundred years, skepticism and uncertainty about the practice of philosophy have never been more acute. This enduring unease is traceable, in large measure, to the fact that philosophy again finds itself in the midst of a cultural transition. The classical culture shaped by Greek philosophy and medieval theology essentially has broken down; the distinctively modern culture that replaced it is still struggling for maturity. The extended crisis of philosophy through the last two centuries is the natural reflection of this ongoing crisis in modernity. Modern culture differs from its classical antecedent in four significant respects: it is predominantly secular rather than religious; its scientific and cultural practices are independent of philosophical and ecclesiastical authority; it enjoys a heightened sensitivity to human historicity and change; and, its

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operative conception of human culture is empirical and pluralistic rather than normative (it no longer takes classical political and social arrangements as the measure of human order). Historical changes of this magnitude can properly be called critical. The Greek noun krisis (derived from the infinitive krinein, to decide) refers to a judgment or decision. Its Latin analogue, discriminem temporis, signifies a division in historical time, a turning point that disrupts the continuity between past and future. To speak of a crisis in philosophy, then, is to speak of a cultural turning point that requires philosophers to make a critical assessment of their common past and uncertain future. It should not be assumed that a crisis in philosophy is only an occasion of peril. As the ancient, medieval and enlightenment contexts indicate, cultural turning points often precipitate historic philosophical development. In the contemporary context, momentous developments in the understanding of nature and history have required philosophers to rethink their conception of human rationality, their explicit ideal of knowledge, and their traditional view of philosophy's theoretical and cultural functions. The results of this reexamination have been uneven. It is generally agreed that classical theories of reason and science are no longer adequate and that the model of philosophic practice those theories supported no longer commands allegiance. But it remains a matter of the deepest dispute where philosophy is to go from here. In earlier crises, the challenge to philosophy came from outside its own ranks: statesmen, theologians, or scientists put the practice of philosophy into question. In the present case, philosophers themselves are the severest critics of their own history. And these critics are thinkers of exceptional power and influence. Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Rorty, in their very different ways, have turned against the philosophical tradition in ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. They have tried to delegitimatize the traditional philosophical disciplines by dissolving their defining problems and by rejecting the vocabulary and distinctions required for their formulation. Richard Rorty, in particular, has made an explicit appeal for a postphilosophical culture, a culture in which the concerns of Socrates, Aquinas, and Kant are no longer taken seriously. To indicate the magnitude of the change he desires, Rorty draws an explicit parallel between his project and the modern process of secularization. Over the course of five centuries, European culture gradually abandoned its preoccupation with religious and theological questions. Theology ceased to occupy the central position in Western universities and became an optional or marginal region of the intellectual landscape. Rorty hopes that a historic transformation has begun in which the Socratic concern for the good, the Thomist absorption with God, and the Kantian attachment to rigorous science will become equally marginal and optional. If Rorty's expectations are fulfilled, the crisis of traditional philosophy will end with its gradual disappearance.

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How has philosophy come to the point that some of its most original thinkers are calling for its abandonment or reconception? The remote origins of the present crisis are traceable to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. As the natural sciences matured and emancipated themselves from philosophical authority, philosophy began to lose its regulative theoretical function. With the emergence of mathematical logic and the empirical human sciences in the nineteenth century, the realignment of theoretical inquiry had reached a turning point. Revolutionary changes in the content of human knowledge had led to an even more fundamental change in the ideal of knowledge itself. Empirical science had become the paradigm of reliable cognition and the accepted measure of reality. In this empirical climate of opinion, philosophy's epistemic standing was compromised in two ways; first by its close association with metaphysical rationalism, and second by the conflation of its methodological practice to the exercise of speculative reason. At the close of the eighteenth century, as the first stage of the enlightenment was culminating in the French Revolution, Kant appeared on the scene to assess the meaning of the Copernican legacy. Kant recognized the greatness of modern theoretical science, but he wanted to limit its scope and validity. He shared the empirical opposition to traditional metaphysics and theology, and he raised to the level of principle their critique of speculative reason. Yet, he argued that empirical knowledge rested on a deeper foundation of transcendental categories and principles; the recognition of these transcendental supports undercut natural science's claim to serve as the measure of being. The proper function of philosophy in an age of enlightened criticism is to submit reason itself to critique. Kant invented the discipline of transcendental epistemology and charged it with three related responsibilities: to protect the purity of pure reason, to preserve the rigor of theoretical knowledge, and to assess existing cultural practices against the requirements of reason and the criteria of science. Kant's transcendental strategy was intended explicitly to preserve the dignity of philosophy by assigning it a field of inquiry, a distinctive method, and a set of obligations more fundamental than those of its scientific rivals. Kant was able to maintain the distinction between science and philosophy only by supporting a network of basic but controversial dualities. The most important of these Kantian dualisms were those between pure and empirical representations, transcendental and empirical methods of inquiry, and pure reason and nature as fields of existence and knowledge. In general, Kant assigned the investigation of the transcendental subject to philosophy and allocated the objects and relations of inner and outer sense to empirical science. Two important traditions in nineteenth-eentury thought rebelled against Kant's dualistic scheme. Hegel and his disciples attempted to overcome duality in the direction of absolute idealism. Bluntly stated, they wanted to idealize

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nature by reconceiving it as the objective expression of absolute spirit. The idealization of nature led, almost predictably, to a countermovement committed to the naturalization of the mind. The naturalistic strategy received its strongest support from Darwin's evolutionary theory, which traced the causal origins of the human species back into the animal kingdom. Where Hegel had conceived the human spirit by analogy with divine Geist, the naturalists emphasized the continuity between rational human activity and the behavior of the higher primates. The nineteenth-century naturalists aimed at more than an ontological reversal of idealism. By bringing human reason and knowledge within the realm of nature, they hoped to naturalize philosophy itself. They accepted Kant's decision to make epistemology the foundational philosophic discipline. But they balked at his assertion that the theory of knowledge must be transcendental rather than empirical in character. The naturalistic strategy in epistemology was to make the theory of science an empirical scientific theory. The emerging discipline ofexperimental psychology. was selected to undercut Kant's transcendental strategy by becoming the scientific theory of reason and knowledge. The attempt to naturalize philosophy by transferring its epistemological functions to empirical psychology met stern and immediate opposition. Hostility to psychologism provided the critical bond b~tween Frege, Husserl, and the early Wittgenstein. Although sensitive to philosophy's precarious situation, they rejected the solution offered by naturalistic psychology. Yet, they could not agree on a constructive program, providing philosophy with a theoretical project in complementary relation to empirical science. Frege restored rigor to philosophy through the practice of logical and semantical analysis; Husserl revitalized Cartesianism with his creation of transcendental phenomenology; in the Tractatus Wittgenstein identified philosophy with logic and metaphysics while sharply segregating both from empirical factual disciplines. Between 1879 and 1930, a concerted effort was made to reconceive philosophy as an authentic theoretical discipline and to recover its epistemic legitimacy. These programmatic exercises, of course, did not occur in isolation. The attempt to redefine philosophy provoked intense dialectical struggle among naturalists, neo-Kantians, phenomenologists, and adherents of linguistic and logical analysis. If the first' phase of modernity had been marked by the emancipation of science from ecclesiastical and philosophical authority, its second stage was shaped by a reconsideration of the arguments urged in support of scientific autonomy. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophy was attuned to the creation of a new science of nature. The dominant philosophical movements developed original accounts of reason and method to explain the unprecedented success of mathematical physics. In the nineteenth century the ideal of verifiable empirical knowledge was extended from natural into moral

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philosophy. The history of human ideas, institutions, and practices became the focus of the new empirical sciences of man. In this transition to a heightened historical consciousness, the influence of Hegel was prominently felt. Although Hegel's speculative idealism and his comprehensive philosophical synthesis were largely rejected by the empirical human sciences, many of the most important Hegelian themes were incorporated into their practice and outlook. Hegel's emphasis on concreteness and historical development, his stress on human sociality and culture, his attention to the multiple expressive embodiments of spirit, and his confidence in the imnlanent intelligibility of human history, gradually subverted the Cartesian and Kantian picture of human rationality and subjectivity. Hegel's emphatic historical consciousness initiated the second phase of the enlightenment and, in so doing, effectively challenged the original self-understanding of modernity. The challenge of historical consciousness is apparent in three critical areas: the conception of human reason, the understanding of empirical science, and the reassessment of foundational epistemology. The dominant images of reason in the first stage of the enlightenment were fashioned by Descartes and Kant. Scientific reason had to be purified of all reliance on authority and tradition, liberated from all traces of history and all dependence on culture. This ideal of rational purity reached its culmination in Kant's transcendental ego, which, in its fundamental atemporality, was withdrawn from history altogether. As the naturalists had wanted to relocate human reason in nature, so the partisans of history wanted to relocate it in culture. In direct contrast to the Cartesian and Kantian pictures, historicized reason is situated in time, embedded in a social and linguistic community, and dependent for its ideas and beliefs on a process of cultural education. In the second stage of modernity, reason lost its purity. The reconception of reason led inevitably to a new understanding of knowledge. The Cartesian picture of science is that of an axiomatic-deductive system of propositional truths resting on a foundation of self-evident principles. Knowledge in the strict sense is equivalent to science, and science is explicitly modeled on the Euclidean ideal. Although Kant alters some important features of Descartes's epistemological account, he preserves his insistence on apodictic certainty and stipulates the apriori character of scientific judgments. Kant's ideal of science is even more rigorous than that of Descartes. When historical reflection is brought to bear on the practice of science, however, a very different picture emerges. The self-evident axioms, the invariant logical structure, the required apodictic and a priori judgments, the Euclidean ideal itself, all become questionable. A new postclassical theory of science begins to emerge, in which scientific beliefs are treated as probable opinions rather than certain truths. The propositions of science signify verifiable facts rather than invariant necessities: they are regularly challenged

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by successive theoretical alternatives, and they rest on a nondemonstrative and historically variable evidential base. As reason loses its purity, science simultaneously loses its rigor. But where do these important changes leave enlightenment philosophy as a whole? Ifthe tasks of foundational epistemology were to protect the purity of reason, to preserve the rigor of science, and to test the compliance of cultural practices with the requirements of the epistemic ideal, then the entire project has been gutted by the new historical perspective. Since foundational epistemology was the heart and soul of modern philosophy, its decline as a cr~dible enterprise leaves the future of philosophy in question. The first stage of modernity attempted to subvert the epistemic claims of theology and metaphysics. In the second historicist stage, the normative disciplines of ethics and epistemology were severely unsettled. Taken in its entirety, the modern age has left philosophy in crisis, with its past discredited and its future without prospect. According to Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature, The Consequences ofPragmatism), this is precisely where Philosophy belongs. By Philosophy (upper case emphasized) Rorty refers to a historical tradition stretching from Plato to Husserl and Carnap, whose leading thinkers wanted to develop a rigorous science of being, goodness, and truth. From Rorty's perspective, the accepted distinctions in traditional histories of Philosophy between realists and idealists, rationalists and empiricists, actually conceal a deeper underlying unity. This is the fellowship of those who desperately tried to put philosophy on the sure path of science. Rorty opposes this fellowship even when it includes analytic philosophers to whom he is openly indebted. For Rorty, the enduring significance of analytic philosophy lies not in its aspiration to science, but in its demonstrated ability to put traditional Philosophy on the defensive. The same can be said for Rorty's appreciation of the linguistic turn. He draws freely on Wittgenstein, Quine, and Sellars but he uses them for therapeutic rather than constructive ends. His purpose in adopting Quine's pragmatic holism, Sellars' principle of the ubiquity of language, and Wittgenstein's metaphoric therapy is not to make Philosophy finally respectable but to (finally) set it aside. Rorty acknowledges that the historic consequences of the end of Philosophy will parallel those of the end of theology. But in each case he expects Western culture to emerge from the change in a saner and sounder condition. The new philosophy (lower case emphasized) would model itself on literary criticism rather than science. It would be explicitly nonfoundational, nonrigorous, nonpure. The philosopher of the future would be an all-purpose intellectual, like Harold Bloom or Rorty himself, no longer judging the practices of culture from a standpoint beyond history, but willing to add his own variable voice to the ongoing conversation of humankind.

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Rorty believes that if human historicity is taken seriously, the traditional philosophical disciplines of metaphysics and epistemology could not survive. The cultural shift from classical, to historical consciousness marks a turning point in metaphilosophical reflection, a turn that Rorty contends should detach philosophy from its preoccupation with knowledge and engage it more fully with poetry and art. Rorty describes the shift he intends as a transition from epistemology to hermeneutics; if this transition occurs, cognitive practices and epistemic discourse would lose their special hold on the philosopher's attention. Human inquiry and cognition would be seen simply as one more way of coping with the environment that sustains human life. The most enduring consequence of Rorty's holistic pragmatism would be the end of traditional philosophy. I am very reluctant to adopt Rorty's intoxicating story as the final word. He sees clearly that the cultural context of late modernity undermines the Cartesian and Kantian strategies that dominated the first stage of enlightenment thought. The postclassical theory of science is inconsistent with earlier forms of foundational epistemology; and the enlightenment absorption with scientific discourse to the exclusion of other forms of symbolic and linguistic meaning has unduly narrowed philosophy's range of attention. But the relentless emphasis on historicity tends to obscure the permanent human need for cognitive integration, a need Rorty's hermeneuti