TED COHEN

PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICA: REMARKS ON JOHN McCUMBER’S TIME IN THE DITCH: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE McCARTHY ERA

ABSTRACT. John McCumber is right to think that analytic philosophy has had a particularly central and dominating position in American philosophy, and that philosophy is less significant in American public life than in the public life of many European countries. I believe he is wrong to think that American philosophers have turned to analytical work in order to escape being politically relevant, and that he is wrong to suppose that prominent academic philosophy is something to wish for.

1. INTRODUCTION

John McCumber’s new book, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era is a bold book, timely and very, very useful. It is also broad in its reach. Too broad for me to canvass, even if I were competent, and in fact I am not competent to deal with much in the book: in a phrase, I am far from being one of the book’s proper readers. Such a reader would be something of an intellectual historian, a political historian, a keen social observer, and also a philosopher. I do not match that description. My only qualifications are these: I am a philosopher, of sorts, or so I think. I have my own experience in this profession, now going on more than 30 years, and I have my memories of what it was like to study philosophy in the 1960’s and then be inducted into the profession. Beyond that I have only an amateur’s impression of what philosophy is and has been like in America and in European countries. That being the case, I think the best I can do is to confine myself to some narrow topics of McCumber’s book, a few theses I think I might grapple with, and I will do this by way of making some criticisms in hopes of generating a discussion among those better able than I to take up these questions. Philosophical Studies 108: 183–193, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Before I get to those relatively specific, thematic matters, however, I will take a little time, first to praise two broad concerns of the book, and, second, to carp a little about a few points McCumber makes in passing. 2. PRAISE

In this book John McCumber describes two phenomena worth noting, because both are of considerable interest and importance, and because both have gone, not entirely, but largely unremarked. The first is that the “condition” of philosophy in America – in particular, of academic philosophy – seems different from its condition in other Western countries, and, perhaps, different from what it was in America in earlier times. I think McCumber is right about this, and I will say a little about it near the end of my remarks. The second is the remarkable fact that positivism, in one form and another, has flourished in America more than in any other country, including the (principally German-speaking) countries of its origin. Professor McCumber’s account of America’s hospitality to positivism is rich and valuable. It might be supplemented by these words of a German scholar writing about 50 years ago, writing about the migration of himself and his colleagues from Germany to the United States: “. . . it was a blessing for him to come into contact – and occasionally into conflict – with an Anglo-Saxon positivism which is, in principle, distrustful of abstract speculation . . . it was inevitable that the vocabulary of art historical writing became more complex and elaborate in the German-speaking countries that anywhere else and finally developed into a technical language which . . . was hard to penetrate. There are more words in our philosophy than are dreamt of in heaven and earth, and every German-educated art historian endeavoring to make himself understood in English had to make up his own dictionary. In doing so he realized that his native terminology was often either unnecessarily recondite or downright imprecise; the German language unfortunately permits a fairly trivial thought to declaim from behind a woolen curtain of apparent profundity. . . . In short, when speaking or writing English, even an art historian must more or less know what he means and mean what he says, and this compulsion was exceedingly wholesome for all of us”.1

These two phenomena are connected, as McCumber sees it, and I think he is right about that, too, although I do not altogether agree

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with him about the nature of this connection. To put it briefly, and too crudely, McCumber thinks that American philosophers have sought a kind of work that would leave them busily engaged, but disengaged from the social and political matters that occupy public life, and they have found this work in continuing the legacy of positivism. This is a clever, subtle idea of McCumber’s, even if I do not share it entirely. 3. CARPING

Now for a little preliminary carping. Unlike me, Professor McCumber has studied these matters, and he has assembled a battery of documents, including journalists’ reports, polls, and demographic data, and also a certain amount of anecdotal material. Much of this material is beyond my ken, and I have looked into only a few things. Two items have given me pause, and I pause now to mention them. The first is a parochial matter. I mention it only because it concerns my own department and university, and this is a rare opportunity for me to make a public correction. As evidence of academic philosophy’s commitment to defending its own peculiar and inbred practices he cites a recent personnel decision at my university. I would not have gone into this but for the fact that I am personally well-acquainted with the case, and I was struck by inaccuracies in Professor McCumber’s description. He credits a certain remark to a dean at my university, when in fact the remark was made by the provost. That’s not especially important, although it does make a difference, and possibly a significant one, at least if one is interested in how academic philosophy deals with university governance. But it is a very serious mistake when he describes this as a “tenure” decision. It was not a tenure decision, but, rather, a decision whether to promote an already-tenured faculty member to the position of full professor. The issue had to do with the significance of anonymously peer-reviewed publications. This does indeed make a difference, in my opinion. When I was an untenured beginner, it was quite reasonable, I think, to ask whether I was succeeding in publishing refereed essays. But once I had tenure, and was older, and, if I do say so, had

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earned some standing in my field, I never again even submitted an essay for such refereeing. I was puzzled by Professor McCumber’s report of this matter, and I assumed that his source was incorrect in its report. So I checked (the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association), and that publication has things right. It is Professor McCumber who has erred. Now for another small matter, but one of relevance today. McCumber says “The history of philosophy, for its part, has never been well taught in America” [55].2 I’m not sure what he means by this. If he means the teaching of the history of philosophy in standard college classes, then perhaps he has some special standard in mind, but, for my part, I do not agree with him. But if he means the study of the history of philosophy, then I know I do not agree with him. In this regard, there seems to me to have been an extraordinary sea-change, of exactly the kind McCumber laments the absence of (He laments this, of course, because he thinks that the history of philosophy is vital to philosophy – a thought I do not exactly share). I turn anecdotal myself: when I was a graduate student, within a decade of the end of the official “McCarthy era”, it was indeed true that a sharp distinction was in place, one between the study of the history of philosophy and what was called “doing philosophy”. Within my graduate student cohort almost all the most talented students were doing philosophy, and very few studied the history of philosophy in any depth. There was a permanent exception: some very talented students were at work in ancient Greek philosophy, many of them the students of Gregory Vlastos, Harold Cherniss, and, later, G.E.L. Owen. But otherwise, just about every graduate student peer of mine was writing a “systematic” dissertation, and I knew of very little dissertation-writing concerned with the history of philosophy. But now, for goodness sake, there has been an enormous change. In my department, my colleagues regularly teach and direct dissertations in the work of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, Kierkegaard, all the philosophers of the Enlightenment, and others too numerous and painful to mention. With regard to the study of, and respect for the philosophical tradition, it seems clear to me that, as someone called it, the “black cloud of positivism” has lifted. I am not myself entirely sanguine about

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this. I am inclined to adapt an examination question once set by Sidney Morgenbesser for students who had been reading Marx and Freud, and ask – “It is often said that positivism went too far. How far would you go”? But my misgivings notwithstanding, I have no hesitation in saying, first, that the study of the history of philosophy is flourishing in the United States as never before, and, second, that one of McCumber’s disiderata – namely the coming together of American and European philosophy – is actually being achieved, or has at least begun, precisely in studies in the history of philosophy. In reading and re-reading this fascinating book I came to realize that Professor McCumber and I disagree, occasionally, about what the facts are (as with regard to how well the history of philosophy is taught in America), and sometimes we have what I take to be a genuine philosophical disagreement (for instance, as to the importance of the history of philosophy). But sometimes I think we are just so different as philosophical personalities that it is what might be called our senses of things that differ. It may help today’s discussion if I illustrate this, drawing on a few seemingly trivial examples. Differences in sensibility sometimes show up better in little matters than in great big ones. In chapter three of his book, during his discussion of how some European philosophy has been misunderstood in America, Professor McCumber offers this example: When I use a hammer, for example, the hammer appears to me, but not in such a way that I am explicitly aware of it; if I am, I will never hit the nail [83].

I am myself not so sure about this. It seems to me, perhaps, like one of those confidently-given examples that is not really scrutinized (not scrutinized as, say, J. L. Austin scrutinizes the standard examples used for years in epistemology), and is simply accepted as given by those who care for Heidegger. But it seems clear enough to Professor McCumber. It is a Heideggerian example, and Professor McCumber says that he is influenced by Heidegger in his own thinking about things. But then let me ask, what if one thought that “doing philosophy”, as we sometimes say, is, or at least could be, more like making a work of art, or even like hammering a nail than Heidegger or McCumber allows. If that were so, then trying to make oneself “explicitly aware” that one were doing that, or encum-

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bering oneself with thoughts of the history of philosophy, might be disenabling, might indeed leave one never hitting the nail. Now of course Heidegger does not think that philosophizing is much like hitting a nail, nor, I would guess, does Professor McCumber. But let us note that this is itself a philosophical matter, not something simply given. It seems to me an exquisitely important fact that whereas the question of what mathematics is, and the question of the importance of the history of mathematics for the actual practice of mathematics, are not themselves mathematical questions, things are different in philosophy. The question of what philosophy is, and the question of what the relevance is to philosophizing of the history of philosophy are themselves philosophical questions. Let us not beg them. Speaking of Heidegger, I have noted that Professor McCumber cares for Heidegger, or at least some Heidegger, and I should say that mostly I do not. This is partly a temperamental difference on my part. When Heidegger whines, moans, and bitches about the failings of modern life, his remarks do not resonate with me. I don’t think things are so bad: I don’t think that only a god can save us, unless it’s the God I already know. I think Professor McCumber is less bleak than Heidegger, but he certainly is dissatisfied with many things – American philosophy, American intellectual life, &c. Here, too, I find myself out of sympathy with this sense of things. And I think a little analysis – J. L. Austinian analysis, perhaps – is in order. Here is one example: Professor McCumber says “One of the tasks traditionally assigned to philosophy, but missing almost entirely from its most recent American versions, is a certain cultivation of language” [101]. As an example of uncultivated usage he gives this: “The term ‘American’ itself ought, strictly to designate anyone living between Baffin Island and Tiera del Fuego. Reserving its application to the inhabitants of the United States is a synedoche of a sinister cast” [103]. I note that every dictionary I’ve consulted gives as a standard, and sometimes as the principal meaning of “American” a citizen of the United States. Of course dictionaries, at least my kind of dictionaries, do not prescribe, they only record. So, like it or not, “American” has this meaning.

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As a kind of analyst, I confess to being unable to understand Professor McCumber’s remark, or at least to being unable to understand it completely. I know what it means to speak of what a term does designate, and I have some idea of how terms come to designate their denotata. But what does it mean to say that a term ought to designate something or other? If, as a matter of fact, it designates X, then to say that it ought not to do that, I suppose, means that the critic thinks that it should not designate that, and perhaps wishes that it didn’t. And I ask, who says what a term should designate? What is the basis for this “ought”? Is it like saying we should give up the word “gypsy” now that we know that the Romany people did not come from Egypt? Or that out of respect for Wales we should stop calling those who default “welshers”? Or that we should speak of “decimating” only when somthing is being broken into ten pieces? Professor McCumber objects to American philosophy’s failure to “cultivate the language”. I boast myself to be something of a cultivator. I do not use “expect” as a synonym for “anticipate”, or “presently” for “currently”, or “persuade” for “convince”, and I have introduced a few terms into the current lexicon of philosophers of art and language.3 As is pretty well known, German philosophers often make heavy weather of words and their etymologies – most conspicuously, perhaps, Nietzsche and Heidegger. And as is almost as well known, they are quite often wrong about these linguistic matters. Exactly what difference does that make? That is enough carping, and I will not be disturbed if Professor McCumber makes no reference to any of it. 4. CONCLUDING OBJECTIONS

I will close by registering my doubts about some of the theses to be found principally in chapter four. In that chapter Professor McCumber laments the insular character of American philosophy. He quotes Jorge J. E. Gracia, from 1998, as saying this: Philosophy has no place in American public life.

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McCumber notes, as he says, that Gracia’s complaints were somewhat overdrawn . . . but they were not off the mark [93]. And McCumber thinks, also, that even within the academy, philosophy is relatively isolated. Let me say, first, that I think the activity of philosophy is more widespread, in certain academic and quasiacademic circles, than is credited. It is to be seen, especially, in the advent of business and professional ethics, medical ethics, and other areas, many of them taking philosophers well outside the academy. In my own field, aesthetics, it is seen in the relatively recent arrival of philosophers of art who know a great deal about art and often hold joint academic appointments, and write for non-philosophy periodicals. And of course there are now dozens of philosophers actively working in linguistics, cognitive science, and elsewhere. So I do not find philosophy as insular and isolated as others find it, although they may not think that these displays are sufficiently wide to count. I count them very heavily, but perhaps others do not. Let us suppose that it is right that philosophy is conspicuously absent from American public life. Professor McCumber thinks so, and, further, he thinks this is a bad thing, and he thinks that a part of the reason for this disenfranchisement is the McCarthy era. I take the last point first, and briefly. If it is indeed the McCarthy era that is responsible for this condition, then one would expect to find a different condition before that era. I don’t find it. Besides John Dewey I cannot think of an American academic philosopher with any public standing whatever, either before, during, or after the McCarthy era. But now, as to whether this is a bad thing. Having quoted a remark of Robert Audi’s, Professor McCumber goes on to say, Audi presents no evidence that the problems with philosophy are worldwide. In fact, in other countries – countries such as France and Germany, which did not have a McCarthy era or an analog to it – philosophy is, as Hill notes, a much more forceful presence on the cultural scene than it is in America [93].4

I agree with this remark almost entirely, my one reservation being that I am not ready to say that this is a problem with American philosophy. Yes, indeed, philosophy has had a much more forceful presence in the politics and culture of France and Germany than in the United States. I am only at best a very amateur political historian,

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and I do not wish to go into this, but I must ask, And who is the better for all this philosophy in the public life of France and Germany? The disgraceful role of French intellectuals is documented in Tony Judt’s book Past Imperfect, and I will settle for this remark about contemporary matters in Germany: In a recent review of Another Country, a recent book by Jan-Werner Müller Mark Lilla says this: The point of these portraits [Grass, Habermas], and of Mr. Müller’s more analytic chapters, is to show how the history of the German intellectuals continues to weigh on their evaluations of the past and present. One puts this book down relieved to know that, at the decisive moment, the destiny of Germany was in the hands of able politicians and not these Luftmenschen, however admirable they may otherwise be as thinkers and writers.

As to earlier matters in Germany, Professor McCumber has himself written and spoken very well about the value of Germany’s customary high regard for philosophers. But what about America? I am familiar with the often-noted, so-called “anti-intellectualism” of American life, and I do sometimes lament it. But, as Professor McCumber himself observes, this is connected to a very healthy skepticism, a rational skepticism also characteristic of American life. Professor McCumber’s book is studded with wonderfully perceptive, keen observations. One of them is that America is perhaps the only country we know actually founded on a kind of philosophy, but that founding itself seems to require that philosophy then be over. An overstatement, maybe, but, I think, a brilliant point. It has made me think again about a remark of Jefferson’s. Jefferson himself was an enormously welleducated man, a thinker of the first rank, and one of those who built what Professor McCumber thinks of as this country’s philosophical foundation. And he said this: State a moral case to a ploughman & a professor. The former will decide it as well, & often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules [Letter to Peter Carr, 1787].

I think of that strange and wonderful remark – itself a piece of philosophy, largely of the Humean variety, along with this observation made about 50 years ago, about the same time as the remark I quoted earlier from Erwin Panofsky, by another German forced into immigration to America:

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. . . I am relying on the healthy and sympathetic attitude of the American mind toward the personal, the anecdotal, and the intimately human.5

These assessments of America and American scholarship by those big-hearted and grateful Germans, Erwin Panofsky and Thomas Mann, ring true to me. They make the current condition of American philosophy less troublesome and more agreeable to me than it is to Professor McCumber, and although he and I may disagree about a few facts, I think that the difference is largely one of temperament and sensibility, and I respect his. I conclude by saying that Professor McCumber has written a very, very stimulating book. No matter how much you may agree with it, every competent observer knows that the current condition of philosophy is somehow unusual. Some think that we are floundering, not knowing what to do next. Some think that what we are doing is waiting for another generation of major figures (new Quines, Rawlses, &c.), rather like Heidegger’s telling us that we need a god. And there are a few, very few, I guess, like me, who think that this isn’t such a bad thing, because we think that at least one kind of real philosophy requires always starting over, never taking anything for granted or as given. Professor McCumber’s book will make you think about that, perhaps for the first time, and that is no small achievement. NOTES 1

Erwin Panofsky, “Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplated European”, published initially as “The History of Art” in The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America, ed. by W. R. Crawford (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), reprinted in Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955). 2 McCumber adds that “. . . at midcentury it was still possible for Plato scholars to know no Greek”. National differences may be of interest. One might say that it was possible at the end of the century in France for scholars of modern culture to know no science or mathematics. See the recent book by Sokal and Bricmont, and, especially, a review of that book by Thomas Nagel. 3 Terms like “direct, associated perlocutions” and “twice-true metaphors” and “true judges”. I think of their introduction as useful, at least I hope, but not particularly noteworthy. 4 Given McCumber’s observation about what the term “American” ought to

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designate, it is surprising to find his use of “American” here. And of course he uses both “America” and “American” throughout the book to effect designations he says these terms ought not to have. 5 Thomas Mann, “The Making of The Magic Mountain”, Atlantic Monthly, 1953, reprinted in The Magic Mountain [Modern Library, no date].

University of Chicago Chicago, IL 60637, USA E-mail: [email protected]