MANY histories of philosophy exist, and it has not been my purpose merely to add one to their number. My purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a cause of the character of the various communities in which different systems flourished. This purpose demands more account of general history than is usually given by historians of philosophy. I have found this particularly necessary as regards periods with which the general reader cannot be assumed to be familiar. The great age of the scholastic philosophy was an outcome of the reforms of the eleventh century, and these, in turn, were a reaction against previous corruption. Without some knowledge of the centuries between the fall of Rome and the rise of the medieval Papacy, the intellectual atmosphere of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can hardly be understood. In dealing with this period, as with others, I have aimed at giving only so much general history as I thought necessary for the sympathetic comprehension of philosophers in relation to the times that formed them and the times that they helped to form.
This is the first of a series of posts on Russell's The History of Western Philosophy (hereafter History), including one, shortly, on why it focuses on "Western Philosophy." The passage quoted above are the first few lines of the History. The first thing to note is the somewhat surprising nod to Verstehen. Russell proposes to offer a contextual philosophy, in which the aim is sympathetic comprehension of philosophers in context. (There are echoes of Collinwood here. Collingwood's The Idea of History was published in 1946, but Russell could have known of Collingwood's lectures in the 1930s.) It is surprising because (recall) Russell's criticism of Bergson are connected to Russell's suspicion of reliance on sympathy. Russell even embraces the stance of "unsympathetic spectatorship!"
Now, the point is not just sympathetic comprehension of philosophers as shaped by their times. The real point of the book, which is explained more fully in the second paragraph, is to offer an account of how philosophy has shaped history. So, right from the start Russell offers a distinction between two sources of evaluation of philosophy:
- (i) an intrinsic one that studies a philosopher/philosophy on its merits;
- (ii) an extrinsic one that is consequentialist in character and studies philosophy on its effects on (a) philosophy and (b) its (social and political) environment.
Russell does not explain what he means by "merit." (Something But it is clear that this is in some sense connected to the why philosophy is practiced in the "academic sense." So, peculiarly, intrinsic merit is given a sociological understanding. I put it like that not because I think this is what Russell intends, but rather because he accepts that under a certain guise or certain normative understanding of philosophy, Rousseau and Burke, are not philosophers at all because they can't be classified as academic philosophers in any sense. By this he does not mean they lacked academic appointments because Spinoza -- who has very high intrinsic value -- also was not an academic (nor was Locke). But rather that they exhibit, I suspect, the kind of virtues associated with academic philosophy in some sense.
What those virtues are I leave aside now, because Russell is working with a distinction between (say) men of letters and proper philosophers while simultaneously deliberately blurring it because he is going to treat men of letters as key to the history in the History. As he puts in the "introduction" (xiv) the topic of the book is the tracing of "a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men's lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances."
That still leaves open what Russell means by 'philosophy' and the intrinsic sense of merit as well as how he establishes the causal interaction among ideas and circumstances. I wish to return to that in this series. But here I want to focus on the fact that the consequentialist evaluation is not merely neutral. Russell is as interested in the positive and the negative consequences of doctrine. In particular, and this is the theme for today's post, Russell embraces a doctrine of what I have called responsible speech. That it is legitimate to evaluate philosophers in terms of how they will foreseeable shape the environment or even have (surprisingly and unintentionally) shaped the circumstances. To show this I go to the closing set piece of the whole book.* While summing up his criticism of the pragmatist conception of truth, Russell writes,
In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of "truth" as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness--the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.
The submission to facts is characteristic of Russell's conception of scientific philosophy. It is connected to his criticism of Bergson and his rejection of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), which has low tolerance for arbitrary facts {[recall my discussion with Jeff Bell}. Notice that (to echo Tarski) the classical conception of truth that Russell accepts itself is defended in consequentialist terms: it produces the right sort of humility, even sanity. That is to say, Russell thinks we can evaluate a regime of truth in terms of its social consequences on the effects of individuals (pride, humility, intoxication, madness, etc.) and society (social disaster, social peace, etc.)
And when Russell evaluates the classical regime of truth alongside the possible pragmatist regime of truth,** he rejects the pragmatist on consequentialist grounds. And while such evaluation may not be fair or thought lacking in merit, a pragmatist is in no position to object since she embraces the consequentialist method of evaluation is a feature not a bug of her system. For the pragmatist conception of truth is "instrumentalist" because truth is going to be the product of inquiry. In particular, it will be the thing to be agreed upon "ultimately" by "all those who investigate." This idea has had an important afterlife in the Kuhnian focus on consensus in science. But what matters here that the grounds on which all those who investigate cannot itself be truth (that would be circular as Russell notes), but rather, is, in part, informed by the purposes, including practical ones, of investigation. It's this feature that makes the instrumentalist conception of truth consequentialist. So, Russell's criticism of Dewey/pragmatist is ad hominem, it is not itself unfair. (To say that is not to say it goes through.)
Russell is careful to say that his rejection of the pragmatist regime of truth on consequentialist grounds is, in part, a judgment about circumstance. Throughout the book,he lets the reader know he is writing at a particular time, namely one that has been shaped by ideas that lead to intoxication and vast social disaster. In such an environment a pragmatist embrace of truth slides us further down the slippery slope. Pragmatism enhances the road to serfdom. To be sure, Russell could well allow that pragmatist conception of truth is worth pursuing in other contexts. Not all contexts, because -- and I will return to this -- Russell insists that in modernity (the "industrial state") fascism is one of the permanent live possibilities (785; note again the soft historicism of Russell).+ So, while he is writing this at a time, the criticism of pragmatism is indexed to a particular kind of epoch.
Let me close, I don't write this to endorse Russell's criticism of pragmatism. Rather, it is notable how important the consequentialist criticism is. Russell is basically claiming that pragmatism is an irresponsible philosophical doctrine when the state is capable of totalitarian powers and itself the object of a romantic (and worse) attachments. In Russell then we see a treatment of inductive risk in earnest: Russell invites us to consider how our philosophical practice can abused.
*Yes, I know there is also a brief concluding chapter, XXXI, on the "philosophy of logical analysis," which, while entertaining and interesting, is also very unsatisfying. Here I just appeal to the authority of Isaiah Berlin, who was then still an analytic philosopher, who writes in his review in Mind, "Russell’s own later doctrines and those of his followers in the fields of philosophy proper (i.e. logical positivism), of semantics ‘, and of mathematical logic, are treated inadequately —no reader of this book could possibly discover from it how great was the part played by Russell himself in the discovery and dissemination of these new and revolutionary doctrines, nor of the profound effect which his disciples, by modifying or attacking his doctrines with the very weapons which he was among the first to provide in their modern form, have had, and continue to have, in many fields of knowledge besides that of technical philosophy." [HT David Gordon]
**It is notable that even somebody as sophisticated as Bernard Williams kind of denies that such comparative evaluation is actually possible (and thinks there is something unintelligible or confused about the very idea of alternative regimes of truth). But here Russell clearly is thinking that such evaluation is (to use Carnapian terminology) an external, optative question and so a matter of free choice.
+"Marxism and Fascism are philosophies appropriate to the modern industrial State. This, I think, is both true and important." (785-6)
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