When Reason Goes on Holiday. Neven Sesardic
Are All Rich People Thieves?
“Let the Massacre Begin!” Said the Ethicist
Excellently Wise and Excellently Foolish
14 Conclusion
References
Index
Credits
Figure 2.1 Praising successes of Soviet agriculture during the Holodomor
SOURCE: © Gerd Arntz, Picture Statistics, Moscow 1934, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2016 (reprinted with permission).
Figure 2.2 The concern for minorities in the USSR
SOURCE: Vsesojuznyj institut izobrazitel’noj statistiki sovetskogo stroitel’stva i chozjajstva pri CIK SSSR: Na strojke socializma. Dostiženija pervoj pjatiletki, Moscow: IZOSTAT, 1933.
Figure 4.1 Carnap protests against the imaginary Gulag
SOURCE: Daily Worker, January 28, 1952.
Figure 4.2 Daily Worker: Save the Rosenbergs!
SOURCE: Daily Worker, January 14, 1953.
Figure 5.1 Gödel’s membership card
SOURCE: Dawson, J., et al. (eds.), Kurt Gödel: das Album. Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 2006, p. 48 (reprinted with permission of Springer).
Figure 5.2 Gödel goes with the flow
SOURCE: Dawson, J., et al. (eds.), Kurt Gödel: das Album. Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 2006, p. 66 (reprinted with permission of Springer).
Figure 7.1 Lakatos biography
SOURCE: http://web.archive.org/web/20130511032620/ http://www2.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/LakatosAward/lakatos.aspx.
Figure 7.2 Éva Izsák (1925–1944)
SOURCE: Yad Vashem (reprinted with permission).
Figure 10.1 Book burning during the Cultural Revolution
SOURCE: akg-images / Zhou Thong (reprinted with permission of AKG-Images).
Figure 11.1 Angela Davis and Erich Honecker, 1972
SOURCE: Bundesarchiv, Image 183-L0911-029 / Photo: Peter Koard (reprinted with permission).
Many colleagues and friends read earlier drafts and helped with useful comments. I owe special thanks to my former graduate student Nathan Cofnas who went through several versions of the manuscript and suggested many significant improvements. I also received valuable feedback from Tomislav Bracanović, Rafael De Clercq, Zvjezdana Dukić, Berislav Horvatić, Andrew Irvine, Tomislav Janović, Paisley Livingston, David Papineau, Sean Scully, Ante Sesardić, Peter Singer, David Stamos, Matej Sušnik, Omri Tal, and Daniel Wikler.
When I was finishing the first version of the book manuscript and when I started thinking about a potential publisher, I decided that my first choice would be Encounter Books. So I was thrilled when Roger Kimball offered me a book contract. I would also like to thank the production manager Katherine Wong for helping with many details and Dave Baker of Super Copy Editors.
Analytic philosophers emphasize the importance of logic, clarity, and reason. This is what made studying philosophy especially attractive for many of us who lived under communism. When we saw how much these philosophers valued intellectual integrity and uncompromising pursuit of truth, we found their approach inspiring and we tried to emulate it. This helped us preserve our sanity in the world of constant lies that surrounded us.
It was therefore a huge disappointment when I started to discover that a number of the most prominent Western philosophers who were rightly admired for their scholarly contributions actually abandoned reason altogether when they turned to politics. I realized that some of the thinkers I once regarded as models of rationality rushed into supporting ill-conceived and inhumane political causes. Some were even apologists for the mendacious communist regime that so obviously trampled on human liberty and that was abhorred by those of us who experienced it firsthand.
My disappointment led to curiosity about the extent of this betrayal of reason by philosophers and its many manifestations. I tried to learn more about this strange phenomenon that has received surprisingly little attention. The results of that research are presented here.
“Many would be wise if they did not think themselves wise.”
—BALTASAR GRACIÁN
Should philosophers be kings, as Plato suggested? Or, to paraphrase William F. Buckley, wouldn’t it be better to be ruled by the first 2,000 people listed in the telephone directory than by the most illustrious of Socrates’ intellectual descendants?
The evidence presented in this book shows that, despite their declared love of wisdom, surprisingly many leading philosophers have shown embarrassingly poor judgment in their excursions into politics. The disastrous way some of the most influential contemporary philosophers have engaged in politics should make us think twice before following their advice. This also raises a question: How could people who are obviously very clever and sophisticated in a field that is intellectually demanding be so foolhardy in practical affairs?
Indeed, twentieth-century philosophers have a bad track record in choosing sides in some momentous political debates. Many contemporary philosophers have disgraced themselves by defending totalitarian political systems and advocating political ideas they should have easily recognized as distasteful and inhumane. To give just three well-known examples, Jean-Paul Sartre championed Stalinism and later Maoism, Martin Heidegger actively supported and celebrated Nazism, and Michel Foucault publicly expressed enthusiasm for Khomeini’s Iranian Islamic revolution.
How could the very people committed to gaining the deepest knowledge about the world and human existence get things so wrong? Could this have something to do with the fact that the three philosophers just named (plus many others with similar unfortunate involvements in politics) belong to the so-called continental tradition in philosophy?
The terms continental and analytic describe two different schools in philosophy that have been in conflict roughly since the beginning of the twentieth century. The distinction between them is notoriously hard to draw in clear and explicit terms, but philosophers usually have no problem assigning most of their colleagues into one of these two traditions. A provisional self-characterization of the analytic style of doing philosophy is the claim that the analytic approach “involves argument, distinctions, and . . . moderately plain speech” (Williams 2006, viii). In one of the best historical accounts of the rise and development of analytic philosophy, this approach is described as being committed “to the ideals of clarity, rigor, and argumentation” and to the goal of “pushing rational means of investigation as far as possible” (Soames 2003, xiii–iv). Basically, then, the trademarks of analytic philosophy would be clarity of thought, precision, and