Rumblings of Reason

Political philosophy relies heavily on philosophy's other branches. By "political" I mean whatever falls within the purview of activities people perform that pertain to their basic social and legal arrangements, institutions, procedures and the like.

In the realm of politics the most crucial act is a decision. Decisions in politics necessarily imply consequences for all in a community—so while we might not need to care much about the character of others' decisions pertinent to their own, private affairs, we must concern ourselves with how decisions are made within the political arena. Decisions we make have a lot to do with how we think—what we permit to enter as facts capable of influencing our decisions, what we focus upon as we come to a decision. That much seems to be clear—even if at times a decision must be reached in a fraction of a second. Sometimes we rely on very well entrenched dispositions, ones built up slowly, throughout our lives—reflexes, habits, mannerisms, etc. But whenever possible, in important issues we shy away from these—or, at least, we ought to, if we expect to act successfully, to promote the best available solution to a problem. My question concerns the overall quality of political decisions in this political society and why it is what it is.

Many believe in the potency of philosophy for determining the overall quality of a culture. Some say that psychology has much more to do with it—while yet others maintain that both of the above are factors to contend with. If indeed whatever element in a person's character carrying determining force is a psychological factor, then philosophy has a lot to do with people's psychology—it provides the rationale for the various alternative modes of dealing with the world. Existentialism, Buddhism, Christianity, Marxism, Skepticism and so forth are all expressions of ordinary conclusions in people's lives, in their intellectual, systematic formulation—contending for a world view. People and their philosophy serve as mutually reinforcing components in their lives, although we must begin with people. They, ultimately, call the important shots, since they are the agents who produce philosophy. Still, by focusing on the dominant philosophical atmosphere one can both assess the culture and explain its features—thereby predicting, to some extent, its directions.

There is no doubt that political decisions reflect certain accepted philosophical principles which run rampant through our society. Most formidable of these is the conclusion that moral problems cannot be managed rationally, that questions about what one ought to do must ultimately be answered by reference to feelings or biases or prejudices or inspirations or instincts or how one was raised, etc. That means that political decisions rest not on reason but on anything but reason. The politics of non-rationality—an apt characterization of our times. By considering what factors seem to count in how politicians select from alternatives, what motivates people in their voting habits, how they talk to each other about political goals, principles, values—freedom, justice, security, welfare—and how unable they are to distinguish the political from that which doesn't concern it, all this points to the irrational character of political decisions.

Richard M. Nixon once wrote (in SIX CRISES) that he hates indecisiveness; a decision must be reached even if it is the wrong one. While in the private realm one might not care about this, in politics there are objections: Nixon's decision must be well guarded against mistake for it may have drastic consequences for us all. The point is not that the people are impotent to produce the right decision but that, by virtue of what is being decided, some decisions cannot be the decisions of everyone; they aren't in the favored position to decide.

Many political decisions are bad simply because they cannot be good. It really makes no difference what I decide while doing surgery if I am unqualified to make the decision in the first place! And for the kinds of decisions politicians must now make they are simply unqualified—they shouldn't be theirs to make. But to admit that would require resignation, literally. The force of this conclusion depends on having a view of decisions: there is a difference between good and bad ones and there are standards which one can use to assess them. If one hasn't got these standards at least accessible, he has no business being in a position to make the decisions.

Philosophers have, for the last sixty-odd years, been telling the world that decisions about what is right or wrong cannot be handled rationally—there cannot be standards about such issues, there cannot be reasonable agreement about such issues as war, free speech, conscription, foreign aid, taxation, public beaches, compulsory education, etc. All these pertain to politics and all are said, by many philosophers, to be outside the realm of reason, science, the knowable.

If one wants to understand something about the character of our political life, he needs to take account of the character of our intellectual life. And that is something philosophy expresses most emphatically, at its fundamental level, at its foundations.

There is good and bad and mediocre philosophy—just as anything else. As an activity of people, it has a basic goal more or less diligently pursued by those who practice it—the professors, in this case, teaching and writing at colleges and universities. There are today signs that the mainstream of philosophy—its central dominant, prominent currents—is improving; yet a lot of it is useless and even rotten. This shouldn't come as a shock—all sorts of other fields suffer from similar problems, e.g., medicine, construction, baseball, sociology, etc. And the arts, of course, suffer too. In some areas, people spot this quickly—and run to government to give us useless consumer protection; with philosophy, as well as the other academic fields, the protection must be generated elsewhere (which should be the case for other consumer protection as well, if it is to work).

But most readers know something about the misguided features of philosophy as a human activity. The most severe is the systematic attempt to divorce thinking from reality, the mind from the world, reason from emotion, knowledge from facts. In philosophy these emerge as the analytic/synthetic, theory/practice, ideal/real, ends/means, conceptual/empirical, necessary/contingent and other "technical" distinctions, all of which contribute, at least in many instances, to a philosophical world view that the mind is a weird sort of thing in the world, at odds with nature, in conflict with feelings, unable to know things, unable to formulate plans that work, dreaming in a heaven while reality is rushing past. This view is old and widely known.

One problem many will call to mind is that an attempt to appraise philosophy itself raises a philosophical problem: by what standard are we to judge philosophy? The answer must be: how it contributes to human life. The proposition that this isn't the standard leads to such absurdities that for anyone interested in life and improving it the alternative is irrelevant. If philosophy cannot contribute to human life, then it is useless, pointless, a waste of effort and, as a profession, a fraud. (My task here does not permit the full justification of the standard I am using. I take it, however, that my readers are familiar enough with certain philosophical positions, and find them convincing, so that for them justifying the value of human life would amount to being redundant.)

The point now needs to be made: philosophy is improving. Those looking for hope might well gain encouragement from that alone—even if the effects won't come for some time. In the last few years, following the dominance of analytic philosophy and various, sometimes perverse, versions of Existentialism, many philosophers have undertaken to rethink their most basic dogmas. What I will do is point to some efforts within contemporary philosophy which have contributed successfully to the task of justifying the primacy of the value of human life and political freedom. Few of those efforts had that aim directly in mind, for it clearly is not fashionable—some think it wrong—to advocate values as comprehensive as that, at least not explicitly and boldly. Academic philosophy is all too self-conscious of strictures laid down earlier this century: deal with concrete, small problems, even when you have in mind larger ones. (And when you reflect on the most prominent schools of the 19th century, mostly varieties of idealism, this caution is not without its merits.)

I will give a brief, but—hopefully—informative, report on the state of the field, appropriate to a magazine format. I shall not provide the reader with exact references because most of the people I will mention are listed in directories of philosophers, periodical indexes, and even the newsletters of book services well known to readers of this magazine. (I will be glad to answer specific questions, by mail.)

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REALITY OUT OF FOCUS

The field of study which is designed to get a clear grasp of existence as such, metaphysics, has been under constant attack for more than two centuries. David Hume proposed a theory of knowledge that rendered it impossible to understand reality in general. Hume's analysis of human understanding must, however, be understood to have been prompted by the philosophical and theological trends he was attempting to scrutinize. Before Hume, Descartes made the first move toward rendering reality as such inaccessible to human knowledge. For Descartes it was the human mind alone that could be apprehended directly. This doctrine of the prior certainty of consciousness—the idea that we first knew the faculty or instrument of knowledge, before we could grasp reality, the object of knowledge—set the stage for virtually all of subsequent Western philosophy.

The main victim of the Cartesian doctrine was metaphysics. Since the human mind is the only thing known to us for certain, reality, and its most basic principles or facts, would have to be deduced from what we know of the human mind. Hume merely elaborated on this basic doctrine, changing it considerably but not altering its basic point that we know first of all the nature of mind, and only then, perhaps, reality. With his theory that all knowledge must be made accountable to the sense impressions received by us, it became impossible to get out of our own heads, so to speak. The ultimate results, skepticism and solipsism, were admitted by Hume.

Kant tried to recover part of the world—at least the part that made its appearance via the senses. But in the process he announced that knowledge of reality itself is not possible because the constituents of the human mind serve as "colored lenses," forever hiding what reality really is. Subsequent philosophical trends never recovered from this denial of the possibility of knowing reality.

The various philosophical schools in our century tried to establish principles of knowledge and understanding—standards and criteria of what is true, what is not, and what cannot be either and would have to be judged meaningless—but all began without recourse to anything outside of the mind. Consciousness was thought to be understandable without knowledge of anything of which we could be conscious. That had to come later—or so the story went. This gave rise to theories of knowledge galore: pragmatist, positivist, phenomenologist, etc. And the only thing about reality that could be used to get at the nature of knowledge was language. Today the philosophy of language is still a main field of investigation—the idea being that by examining language, we may get a glimpse at reality (despite the "colors of the lenses" that all languages possess).

But today the heavy prejudice against metaphysics is losing its force. Several philosophers have realized that consciousness without something to be conscious of makes no sense. Reality is reappearing, and its basic features are beginning to be fair game for examination. Such topics as materialism versus idealism, the mind/body identity theory, determinism and free will, monism versus dualism, reductionism versus realism (and other candidates for the basic constitution of reality), and many related topics with metaphysical implications are again on the agendas of philosophical conferences, symposiums, anthologies and other forums of dialogue and debate.

The mind/body problem, for instance, has suffered greatly from the lack of concern with metaphysics in general. The bulk of the dispute is still conducted in terms of what is linguistically more proper, economical, simple, etc., instead of what there is. But lately this attempt to handle the problem has been attacked, and the bulk of these attacks have focused on the method by which the problem has been tackled—without regard to questions of metaphysics. (See, e.g., R. Taylor's ACTION AND PURPOSE, books and articles by E.H. Madden, and recent papers by Fanny L. Epstein and John Yolton in the AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, April 1973.)

Clearly metaphysics is far from the formidable field of study that it used to be in the days of Aristotle, Spinoza and Leibniz. But there are signs that its opponents are getting more meek, while its students more ambitious.

KNOWLEDGE IN FOCUS

As mentioned earlier, the last few decades, since the rise of neo-Kantian positivism, have enjoyed the dominance of skepticism. Probabilistic knowledge, justified knowledge-claiming approximations, and the like were proposed; but the dominant position was that knowledge as such was impossible—or if not, we certainly(!) could not know when we possessed any. Always the qualifications, always the declarations that the mind was, in the end, impotent to know. Some even rejoiced about this and spoke of the ideological advantage of skepticism. If you cannot know, you cannot justify imposing knowledge, or forcing others to act by what is true. (Many arguments for the free society rest on this position! As if knowledge must lead to dogmatism and authoritarianism!) But this was not argued explicitly—and when so argued, it was done badly. Attacks on people's capacity to know the world came from religious circles, also: knowledge breeds human pride. Which is true—but offensive to those who would rather tell us what is true than have us be convinced that we can find out for ourselves.

But today not only metaphysics as a field of study, but the idea that one can know the world (surely a needed concomitant) is on the rise. The view that we can know the world and what we think and say of it can objectively be shown to be true (when we are careful and attentive enough) is definitely being argued more and more.

The reasons for this reaffirmation of man's capacity to know reality include revisions of the concept "knowledge" itself. No longer do all philosophers believe that knowledge means being forever certain that what I today conclude is true will forever be the complete or last identification of what is the case. Contextualism emerged as a powerful force in epistemology through the writings of J.L. Austin, the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, D.W. Hamlyn and Stephen Toulmin as well as many others not in the forefront of academic philosophy, such as Ayn Rand, the novelist-philosopher. My own regard for Ayn Rand as a philosopher is not shared by many academics. However, several recent books treat her thought and a number of well known philosophers such as John O. Nelson, John Hospers, Wallace I. Matson, Anthony Flew, and others have indicated that they have high regard for Rand's philosophical acumen. My assessment of Objectivism is on record; what I want to say here has to do with trends in academic philosophy.

If knowledge does not entail timeless certainty, and cannot be of sense impressions or innate ideas alone, then theories of knowledge which emerge could make room for the possibility of knowledge of what is right and good, the chance for reasoned value judgments.

The most important features of the argument which has convinced many of the availability of knowledge are: the rejection of empiricism as an accurate analysis of what human beings are aware of; the disbelief that reality may be reduced to some one kind of thing, e.g., atomic facts, matter, sensory data, etc.; contextualism concerning the nature of definitions—i.e., a good or correct definition of a concept is open-ended, capable of development, but not in need of being abandoned at the mere suggestion of contrary cases; the inadequacy of behaviorism in psychology and theories of meaning; the abandonment of Cartesian dualism as the only antidote to psychophysical reductionism; the rejection by many philosophers of the unjustified, jump to "blow up" a model which works in one context to cover contexts for which it was not designed to serve as an analytic or explanatory device (e.g., the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was thus blown out of proportion by John Dewey); the serious questioning of the analytic/synthetic dichotomy; the revival of a view of man as an active agent involved in the knowing process, and innumerable other philosophical pointers.

REASON IN ETHICS

Even during the reign of emotivism in many influential Anglo/American philosophical circles, there were attempts to argue for some room for reason in our moral life. But the room was small—Charles Stevenson's views testify to this best. At bottom the answers to ethical questions were produced by one's gut, not his head. Emotions set the goals, reason selects the methods. This is putting how we feel into the driver's seat and how we think (or whether we do or not) in servitude. It's no wonder that political decisions as well as many of those made by people in their day to day affairs come off so confusedly, that people can't begin to come to terms on the big questions, on such things as what they are to do, to choose, to achieve in life!

But then some things happened—many things—which prompted gradual reconsiderations of these and similar turns. Not only did philosophers begin to examine arguments for the possibility of knowledge, but they started to defend the right to argue for ethics. This right had to be earned—they had to establish it. The study of moral judgments was revitalized with a view to grounding judgments. Interestingly, this was accompanied by some refreshing self-righteousness; philosophers have begun to criticize and praise each other. As one example of this, Cavell's review of David Pole's book about Wittgenstein was a devastating moral indictment. I find that refreshing as well as risky, but that goes without saying. Moral judgments must be made very carefully; to be just in one's evaluations of others is no small matter. (The possibility of moral knowledge implies greater responsibility in the area of moral judgment, not less. It is subjectivism, where standards cannot be satisfied, that makes evaluations spurious as well as rampant. After all, judgments that can be made in line with standards of correctness are far more readily open to criticism, double checking and prudence than emotional ejaculations.)

The impetus for considering values as open to rational assessment emerges shortly after, perhaps even overlaps, the rejection of skepticism. If knowledge didn't need to satisfy standards which rendered it impossible, but which many thought it must satisfy, then moral judgments, too, might be acquired without the need to reduce the standards of accuracy to those applied in mathematical physics, the model of "empirical" knowledge. Indeed, antireductionism left the door open for a contextual view of standards of precision and accuracy. What is needed to support judgments in physics serves the purpose of that field of study and so on, in psychology, astronomy, chemistry, etc.—it was a mistake to ask for anything else. Toulmin's THE USES OF ARGUMENT did much to develop the case for this. Others took it even further and argued that values required their own standard of precision and truth. (I argued this in some of my works, albeit uninfluentially.)

In short, many philosophers find it no longer axiomatic that ethics escapes the need for reasoned treatment. In fact, many argue that treating one's life rationally, living it by giving priority to rational considerations, is the standard of the well conducted life, the excellence appropriate to each person (barring those incapacitated by forces beyond them). But this is a minor move thus far, mostly carried out by those who have always favored the Aristotelian approach—Henry Veatch, Laszlo Verseni, and some Oxford analysts. And the English philosophers are very reserved about ethics—substantive, normative ethics is still a rare phenomenon on the contemporary scene. (The most affirmative ethics has come from some of the young philosophers, moved perhaps by their worries about the Viet Nam war and the omnipresent State.)

TOWARD A THEORY OF LAW

The influence of contextualism on the philosophy of law is just now emerging. H.L.A. Hart, Hans Kelsen, Alf Ross and other legal positivists no longer have the final word about the nature of law. Here the problem was that with no room for reason in ethics and politics, the foundation of law had to be sought (i.e. posited) in will, not reason. A legal system gained validity because it was ultimately willed, consented to, accepted—not because it was right. In plain words this position led to the separation of justice and law; the moral element in legal systems was missing, at least so far as theories about the nature of law went.

But this approach is also experiencing dying pains. Hart has been criticized severely by Ronald Dworkin, Rosco Hill and others. Yet this does not spell a return to naturalism in law, either—the view that to be a valid law a provision of the legal system must meet with total moral justification. All that seems to be emerging is that the foundations of a legal system must be morally justifiable, that provisions viewed as fundamental—constitutional edicts, bills of right, the basic human rights on which laws are founded—must be supportable, and not just any system of legal edicts could claim validity as a legal system proper, even if some features could be construed as meeting the requirements. (The task of determining at what point we are entitled to call something a proper legal system is itself now under careful scrutiny but with greater hope for the function of rational arguments instead of happenstance or rule of thumb (will).)

Aside from work on such broad levels, there is unfortunately still a great deal of irrelevancy in the philosophy of law. The method generated by epistemological positivism continues to be employed in the tackling of issues related to the nature of human action, responsibility, intention, deliberation, volition, choice and decision. Yet here too, in the works of Joel Feinberg and Herbert Morris, we can detect impatience with so-called formal analysis: analysis which is not capable of producing conclusions related to particular judgments of fact. As D.H. Lewis' book (appraising the analytic movement) is called: clarity isn't enough.

POLITICAL RAMBLINGS

That is about all we have now in political philosophy—ramblings. Marxism, anarchism and the politics of sentiment are the most dominant, at least in the bulk of textbook political philosophy coming our way these days. The timidity in ethics is even more evident in politics. Here, however, we get closer and closer to one of the sorest points in philosophy, the problem of commitment. It is no longer easy to dismiss philosophers who defend the propriety of committing oneself to conclusions—so long as the conclusions are well founded, argument is not in order, not at least about the right to be committed. But I still detect fear here. Many philosophers believe in some form of emotional neutrality, an attitude toward philosophy which is almost apologetic: we have no answers, we merely analyze; we unpack, criticize, clarify and reach conclusions which, although rationally warranted, we must stand apart from—if only in witness to our openness.

Here the Viet Nam situation did a lot to upset matters—albeit more on an emotional and not a solid philosophical basis. The American Philosophical Association recently saw its most vehement floor battles involving the issue of whether the organization should make public statements about moral/political issues. This is not unlike what we have seen in other fields. But it is interesting to recall how the most fervent moral skeptics, like Kai Nielsen, Raziel Abelson and Hillary Putnam (people who have stood for the impossibility of reasoned moral judgments), argued most vigorously for taking a moral stance. I might mention that this didn't sit well with many graduate students—the latter must be credited with reopening old issues, demanding more than ramblings, in at least many cases known to me. (This bears emphasis: students do have the power to influence their education and education in general—but usually by sticking to their studies with dedication and perseverance, by becoming pushy in the face of orthodoxies. Not by burning down the library or altering seating arrangements in classrooms.)

The significant contributions to political theory emerge from remote corners these days. Economists, political scientists and nonacademics are included in the ranks. The most valuable offings from philosophy include the exchange between Robert Paul Wolff and Jeffrey Rieman (IN DEFENSE OF ANARCHISM and IN DEFENSE OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY), the exciting little volume by the distinguished British philosopher H.B. Acton (THE MORALS OF MARKETS), and articles spread out in the journals INTERPRETATION, PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC POLICY, ETHICS, JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, POLITICAL THEORY, SOCIAL THEORY AND PRACTICE. But don't expect to find a lot of sense and wisdom in the above lineup—clear, pointed, and honest pieces are difficult to find.

Unfortunately John Rawls' A THEORY OF JUSTICE turned out to be a disappointment. Rawls delivered little more than a massive volume of confusing arguments, intuitions, equivocations, impossible hypotheses—and, most bewilderingly, an attempt to make a neutral, uncommitted case for justice in a human society. (Which does not mean that many critics actually regard it a disappointment. Some, surprisingly, do, however.)

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Philosophy is supposed to attend to fundamentals. And words on fundamentals have lasting influence, be they good or bad, mistaken or correct. Ideas, as Richard Weaver's book is entitled, have consequences. There is nothing radical about that idea, though one needs to remind people of it occasionally.

Philosophy is on the rehabilitation trail, at least when we compare it to the last few decades. The signs I have focused on are still meager—much more is necessary to remake and upgrade the intellectual and philosophical atmosphere of a culture. Before we see this improvement affecting the quality of political decisions, we will see much that is negative, much that reflects the undirected, although sometimes very brilliant, thinking done in the name of philosophy.

But no age can force out the despicable, the wrong, the thoughtless, not even in some ideal, utopian benevolent dictatorship. Ours is not and will not be a struggle-free progress toward the improvement of human life, even when it comes to such a violence free area as an inquiry about the nature of reality and man's place in it. But there is no inevitable law of history driving us either to the collective grave or the security of eternal bliss. What philosophy is going to amount to in the future depends on the people who work on it. (Those who denegrate philosophy and its concerns as well as products in principles must realize, if only from experiencing how one cannot make political, even personal progress without some measure of good philosophy to work with.) And today we are entitled to say that the prospects are better than they have been in many years. In my estimation the philosophical community is just now getting a good dosage of solid, purposeful thinking—a commodity that can benefit any area of study of human life, especially the most fundamental: one's understanding of the world and his relationship to it.

Senior Editor Tibor Machan teaches philosophy at the State University College in Fredonia, NY. He is the editor of the recently-published book THE LIBERTARIAN ALTERNATIVE, and has published in a number of academic journals, including THE PERSONALIST and THE JOURNAL OF HUMAN RELATIONS. Dr. Machan is also editor of REASON PAPERS, a new journal recently announced by Reason Enterprises.