Race, Gender, and the History of Early Analytic Philosophy. Matt LaVine
I should expect that my privileged perspective has likely gotten the best of me. I hope readers will not hesitate to point those places out.2
Before we move forward, I need to make one last point. Much of this book will take an approach that is very cool and conciliatory. I want to make it clear that this is not meant as an implicit endorsement of moderate approaches to politics. I am a radical through and through. My goal in writing this book is to start pushing those in the discipline of a certain persuasion to move in a more radical direction. So that I am not mistaken, though, I want to end with as clear of an articulation of my goals as I can imagine—Fuck the patriarchy! Fuck white supremacy! Fuck heteronormativity! Fuck ableism! Fuck all oppression (but these former manifestations of oppression are the only that I discuss here)!
NOTES
1. I will also try to do so in a way that keeps in mind the words of Cornel West:
When it comes to Black intellectuals, we have to, on the one hand, be very open to insights from wherever they come. On the other hand, we must filter it in such a way that we never lose sight of what some of the silences are in the work of White theorists, especially as those silences relate to issues of class, gender, race, and empire. Why? Because class, gender, race, and empire are fundamental categories which Black intellectuals must use in order to understand the predicament of Black people. So, there is, I would say, a selective significance of White intellectuals to the critical development of Black intellectuals. (hooks & West 1991, 35)
2. An example of how I would do this in my own work comes from my first journal article (Chick & LaVine 2014). There, we were trying to show that there were internal inconsistencies in a certain self-conception of analytic philosophy. In doing so, we allowed a Eurocentric framework to frame our own contribution. As a result, our own work was unwittingly Eurocentric. Similarly, “today, we may no longer teach students that the birth of spirit occurs with the Greeks, flowers in the modern period, and comes to fruition in contemporary times, but we might as well be—the structures of our departments, the programming of our curricula, and the presentation of our canon all work together to give precisely this effect” (Rivera Berruz & Kalmanson 2018, 2).
§0.0 Overview of Introduction
In this introduction, I will motivate my investigation into the connection between the history of early analytic philosophy and concerns of social justice gleaned from critical theories of race and gender by introducing representative examples of wildly varied positions on the matter from prominent members of the field. From there, like many works on the history of analytic philosophy, I will discuss what I take “analytic philosophy” to mean. In doing so, I will argue that the phrase is ambiguous between a reading on which it refers to a style or method of doing philosophy and a reading on which it refers to a social-intellectual movement, which placed great emphasis on the potential for that method to contribute to human progress. That style of doing philosophy is one which places logical and linguistic analysis at center stage. The early period of that movement (~1898–1970), which I will focus on, is broken down into five stages. Finally, I will sketch the primary argument of this book, which will involve connecting both types of analysis and all five stages to discussion of social justice.
§0.1 Contemporary Disagreements on Social Justice and the History of Analytic Philosophy
There is much to be gained by bringing together inquiry into race, gender, and social justice and inquiry into, as well as the use of, analytic philosophy. Furthermore, there is actually some significant historical precedent for this. While they may seem rather tame, I think these are of great importance and are the two primary theses I will spend the next couple hundred pages arguing for. I start here because, even though there are many philosophers today who are displaying and evidencing these facts (in fact, there is a very real sense in which I am arguing for the claim that, when understood aright, we will see the culmination of analytic philosophy up to today as Liam Kofi Bright, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Sally Haslanger, and Charles Mills),1 very few people have taken the time to say this explicitly and argue directly for it. On top of that, there are far too many voices who have been saying for far too long that there is, and/or ought to be, a significant disconnect between analytic philosophy and critical theories of race, gender, and oppression.
Going back as far as 1937, analytic champions have been characterized quite to the contrary, with Horkheimer claiming that “radical positivism . . . is connected to the existence of totalitarian states,” fascistic tyranny, and the fear of social upheaval (Glock 2008, 183). Following up on the dominance of logical empiricism, the loose conglomeration of thinkers surrounding Wittgenstein and Oxford that have come to be known as “ordinary language philosophers” have been said to be necessarily conservative in their respect for the ordinary and the common. As Toril Moi sums it up nicely, “[t]heorists from Gellner and Marcuse to Butler and Žižek accuse ordinary language philosophy of being inherently conservative or even reactionary, largely because they take this philosophy to endorse common sense” (Moi 2017, ch. 7).2 Since that time, analytic philosophy’s center has shifted to the United States and has been led by Quine and Kripke—who have said things like the political activity at Harvard in the 1960s was “mischief in the service of . . . headlong ideals” in response to which he was an “ineffectual” part of the “conservative caucus” (Quine 1985, 352) and “the intention of philosophy was never to be relevant to life.”3 This should not be taken lightly either as, for example, Soames (2003a, 2003b) has argued that Kripke is the culmination of the first century of the analytic movement in philosophy.
Views on the primary topic of this book—the relationship between analytic philosophy and social justice activism—are quite difficult to discern not just among these historical figures, but those working on that history as well. Scott Soames, for instance, in his aforementioned two-volume history of early analytic philosophy—which has become the standard text used to teach advanced undergraduates—said that “philosophy done in the analytic tradition aims at truth and knowledge, as opposed to moral and spiritual improvement” (Soames 2003a, xiv). Sally Haslanger, on the other hand, has said that a “critical analytical project,” which combines critical theories of race and gender, as well as analytic methods, is of the utmost importance (Haslanger 2012, 226–28). Hans-Johann Glock, recognizing the existence of such differing opinions, published a chapter, which investigates such wildly conflicting hypotheses as (a) that analytic philosophy is characterized by excluding all moral and political philosophy, (b) that analytic philosophy is apolitical and conservative, and (c) that analytic philosophy is liberal and progressive (Glock 2008, 179–203).
Furthermore, as Meena Krishnamurthy4 and Charles Mills (1997, 2015, 2017) have pointed out, this state of affairs is not helped by the existence of a Rawlsian Myth among the analytic mainstream that there was no important political philosophy between Mill’s death and Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Such a picture should be easily seen as extremely exclusionary as it ignores such important figures as Anna Julia Cooper, Martin Luther King Jr., Simone de Beauvoir, Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Malcolm X (just to name a few). It is so exclusionary that it even leaves out the political thought of analytic figures like Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Bertrand Russell, and Susan Stebbing. Again, this is why the primary aims of this book are to (a) weigh in on this question of the public, political, and practical goals of early analytic philosophy and (b) to investigate issues like what potential there may be for analytic work to contribute to critical theories of race and gender as well as social justice activism, why so little of such work has happened, and why the work that has happened on this front has often been forgotten or ignored. In short, the result of these investigations will be that the existence of positions as different as Haslanger and Soames can be explained by the fact that there is much potential for analytic social justice work, but this potential has all-too-rarely been realized.
§0.2 The Meaning(s) of “Analytic Philosophy”
As should already be clear,