When Reason Goes on Holiday. Neven Sesardic
not unnoticed, and he was acutely conscious of them. He seriously wanted to ‘make people sensible’ and clear-headed, and immune to ill-founded and doctrinaire enthusiasms. He believed that philosophy, if it inculcated respect for ‘the facts’ and for accuracy, was one of the best instruments for this purpose (Hampshire 1992, 244).
Notice that the author of the text just quoted, Stuart Hampshire, who is also a well-known British philosopher, seems to agree with Austin and, furthermore, associates the belief about the political implications of the teaching of philosophy not just with Austin but more widely with “Austin’s generation.”
And yet Austin’s famously meticulous analysis and his sharp logical mind did not save him from “ill-founded enthusiasms.” For after visiting the Soviet Union in the mid-thirties he said that he “was impressed by his experience” and that he had “admiration for the great men who had worked against gigantic odds, Marx and Lenin for example” (Berlin 1973, 6). Being “impressed” with the Stalinism of the mid-thirties is not easily reconcilable with being “clear-headed.” On a different occasion Isaiah Berlin reports that Austin “came back from the Soviet Union deeply impressed by the discipline and the austerity of life and so forth, and remained under the influence for some time” (Hampshire & Berlin 1972, from 0:06). For many details about ordinary life under Stalinism in the thirties and how deeply unimpressive it was, see Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Ordinary Stalinism.4
Another example of the belief that philosophy can help the forces of reason comes from philosopher A. J. Ayer, who in his famous book Language, Truth, and Logic (1936, 35) claimed that the task of philosophy is to define rationality. But someone whose main task is to try to understand the nature of rationality should be the first one to spot irrationality and be on guard against it. Yet just a few months after the book was published Ayer had a baffling bout of irrationality in politics. Over one weekend in February 1937 Ayer was “wrestling with the choice” of whether to join the Communist Party of Great Britain (Rogers 1999, 136). It was a very strange moment to be considering this move. Just a few weeks earlier, thirteen Old Bolsheviks had been sentenced to death in a farcical Moscow show trial. The verdict had been openly celebrated by the British Communist Party.
Any reasonable person must have had serious doubts about the credibility of the accusations and the whole judicial procedure. The London Times reported on January 26, 1936:
The guilt of all the prisoners was already officially announced before the public proceedings began. . . . The Soviet Press is duly crying for death to the “wriggling hypocrites,” the “mischievous vermin,” the “venomous Trotskyist vipers.” . . . The whole process is loathsome. All that can be said of it is that guilt may sometimes be established, innocence never. . . . The general atmosphere can only be compared to the inquiries that were made into witchcraft in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when wretched old men and women were persuaded that they too had departed from the Absolute Good as laid down by authority and that their harmless or venal practices were the result of communing with the Evil One.
But despite all these worrying features and also the bizarre fact that the accused were very eager to confess and help the prosecutors make the case for their death penalty, the British Communist Party took the hard Stalinist line and—only a few days before Ayer’s “to join or not to join” moment—claimed in its newspaper the Daily Worker that “the scrupulous fairness of the trial, the overwhelming guilt of the accused, and the justness of the sentences is recognized” (Redman 1958, 48). Only several months earlier, at the end of another show trial in Moscow in which sixteen Old Bolsheviks were sentenced to death, the title of the editorial in the Party’s newspaper was “Shoot the reptiles!”
And this is the political party that Ayer was on the verge of joining. He decided not to only at the last moment. The funny thing is that apparently Ayer was not bothered much by the Party’s slavishly praising all aspects of Soviet totalitarianism; his reason for not joining was that he “did not believe in dialectical materialism” (Ayer 1977, 187). Apparently Ayer had no major disagreements with Stalin’s politics at the time—only with his philosophical opinions.
But why did Ayer want to join the Communist Party in the first place? According to his friend Philip Toynbee, it was just his “desire for reasonable activity” (ibid.). So relying on this report, we discover something interesting: A well-known philosopher who believed that philosophers can best explain the meaning of the word rational or reasonable regarded becoming a card-carrying member of an organization that fully supported Moscow’s policies during the Great Terror of the thirties to be a reasonable activity.
Bad Arguments and Bad Politics: What Causes What?
Michael Dummett, too, believed in the salutary influence of philosophy on political attitudes. Speaking about Gottlob Frege’s political views that he found so shocking (for more about Frege’s case, see pp. 188–192), Dummett said “Frege’s philosophy ought to have kept him from holding such views but it didn’t” (quoted in Warburton & Edmonds 2010). Here again is the idea that philosophy can (or should) protect people from bad political opinions. Also, according to Dummett, philosophers in particular “have a duty to make themselves sensitive to social issues” and to do something about them. “If you are an intellectual, and particularly if you aim to be a philosopher, and therefore to think about very general questions, then you ought to be capable of responding to general burning issues, whether the public is ignoring them or has fastened its attention upon them” (Dummett 1996, 194). But, as documented in chapter 9, it appears that Dummett’s philosophy didn’t keep him from making a fool of himself in politics, either.
Dagfinn Føllesdal, a philosopher who had a distinguished career at Harvard and Stanford, also stresses the political benefits of analytic philosophy:
We should engage in analytic philosophy not just because it is good philosophy, but also for reasons of individual and social ethics . . . In our philosophical writing and teaching we should emphasize the decisive role that must be played by argument and justification. This will make life more difficult for political leaders and fanatics who spread messages which do not stand up to critical scrutiny, but which nevertheless often have the capacity to seduce the masses into intolerance and violence. Rational argument and rational dialogue are of the utmost importance for a well-functioning democracy. To educate people in the activities is perhaps the most important task of analytic philosophy (1997, 15–16).
Despite his usual sensitivity to rational argument in philosophy, Føllesdal lowered his guard considerably when turning to politics, e.g. when he was bamboozled into allowing his name to be used in a political conflict in a foreign country, although he should have been aware that he was poorly informed about what was happening there (see p. 173).
Many more examples could be given of analytic philosophers who have argued that the critical ability supposedly cultivated by philosophical education is the best antidote to political follies and fanaticism. I happen to disagree with them. I have found no good evidence that being trained in analytic philosophy boosts political rationality. On the contrary, my aim in this book is to show that some of the leading analytic philosophers have held political views that are both deeply troubling and manifestly irrational. At the same time, in contrast to their highly problematic political beliefs and activity, their academic contributions to philosophy usually carried the marks of extremely careful thinking and the highest intellectual rigor.
Wittgenstein famously said that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (1967: I, §38). This book deals with another phenomenon: When philosophers enter politics it is often reason that goes on holiday.
In the text that follows I will drop the qualifier analytic when talking about philosophers, since virtually all of my examples will be analytic philosophers. The illustrations will include some of the greatest names of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy such as Neurath, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Davidson, Dummett, Lakatos, Parfit, and many others, as well as Einstein, who, besides being a physicist, has been embraced by many philosophers as one of their own.
I will explore in detail the