For Impurity in Philosophy: Some Programmatic Dicta

FOR IMPURITY IN PHILOSOPHY: SOME PROGRAMMATIC DICTA KAINIELSEN Recall Marx's famous remark, 'Philosophers have interpreted the world; the task is to change it.' Some have thought that here philosophy is being deliberately rejected, indeed repudiated, and what is taken up instead is political activism' The important pOint, such critics continue, is not about whether philosophy should have practical relevance, but about how philosophy is practically relevant. The claim is that people such as Marx, who argue for substantive claims with a normative import, inject an impurity into philosophy. They neglect and sometimes in effect repudiate its irreducibly Socratic character in trying to use it to give for some normative questions positive support for their own preferred answers. Something of what is involved here comes out in a remark of R.M. Hare's concerning his response to people who accuse philosophers of not caring about politics. H are remarks, apropos such a criticism, that he always loses his temper when such an accusation is Bung at him, for he happens to care rather a lot. But there is also a recognition on his part of what is often behind that accusation: 'what they really mean,' Hare tells us, 'is that philosophers ought to be using their philosophy to pr01/e political conclusions.'2 But this, he claims, is not something philosophy can or should do, for 'it aims only at understanding; and its initial move is often to show that we do not understand what we think we understand." In what Hare says here there is both an emphasis and a set of claims, some implied and some direct, which seem to me at best misleading. If philosophers think that they can prove political propositions as one might theorems in mathematics, then no doubt they cannot prove political propositions. We should not, however, be so imperialistic with proof. Depending on the context, we intend many different things when we speak of proving something. I may seek to prove to you that there really is good trout fishing in southern Ireland, that it really is fun to cross-country ski, that Jensen really is incompetent, that buying at Safeway does aid American imperialism, that Heath is indeed a scoundrel or that the Danes, like Norwegians, should have stayed out of the Common Market. What UTQ. Volume XLW, Number 2, Winter 1974 122 KAINIELSEN I do in attempting to prove these rather diverse things can be very different . W e want to beware of pre-empting the use of the word 'prove' so it is only at home in logical and mathematical contexts. Once we acknowledge this point there is no obvious reason why philosophers ought not to use philosophy to prove political or social conclusions. Hare would, I think, reply that there are, however, unobvious reaSOnS or at least less obvious ones and that when they are thought through they are decisive. I want at a minimum to show that they are not decisive and maximally to show that indeed philosophers, good philosophers, can and ought to argue for certain substantive political and social conclusions. But first I need to articulate the kind of argument I wish to oppose while at the same time acknowledging that it makes some perfectly legitimate claims. It could be said that philosophers ought not to be using their philosophy to prove, that is to argue for, political conclusions because that is the sort of thing philosophy, in the very nature of the case, cannot do, for philosophic understanding is only concerned with the (in a broad sense) logiC of certain claims and not with their truth. It is not a philosopher's job to establish matters of fact, e.g., to ascertain how many blacks live in the suburbs of Halifax or how many people have been killed in South Vietnamese concentration camps or indeed even how many women teachers there are in philosophy departments. And, likewise, it is not the task of philosophers to try to establish Or disestablish substantive normative claims, e.g., that American imperialism is at present a worse threat to a decent world order than Soviet imperialism, that Ulrike Meinhof ought to be given life imprisonment, or that the...