It
is now forty years since the first issue of the journal
RadicalPhilosophy was published in
January 1972. It contained a statement of intent which began:
'Contemporary British philosophy is at a
dead end. Its academic practitioners have all but abandoned the
attempt to understand the world, let alone to change it. They have
made philosophy into a narrow and specialised academic subject of little
relevance or interest to anyone outside the small circle of Professional
Philosophers…'
A year earlier I had joined with two
colleagues at the University of Kent and with others in Sussex,
Oxford, London and elsewhere, to form the Radical Philosophy
Group. There were three strands in the radical philosophy
movement, which were
sometimes in tension with one another:
1. An
emphasis on the need for the practice of philosophy to break out of the
confines of academic institutions.
2. An alliance between political radicalism and a more engaged form of
philosophical activity.
3. A willingness to draw on the resources of alternative philosophical
traditions. In the founding statement we said: 'There are other
traditions which may inform our work (e.g. phenomenology and
existentialism, Hegelian thought and Marxism).'
I'll return to the first strand shortly, but before doing so, I'll make
some comments on the other two. About the relation between
philosophical and political radicalism there was always a certain
ambiguity. Radical philosophy did not explicitly define itself in
relation to any specific political position, but in practice the people
involved were on the political left, and there was a temptation to take
left-wing politics for granted and to talk only to others who shared the
same political commitment.
Mary Warnock, an Oxford philosopher who (ironically) would later be
known primarily for applying philosophy to practical issues in
bioethics, attacked radical philosophy for wanting to replace
traditional philosophy with political action. In an article
published in
New Society in
1972 she wrote:
'The
present critics of traditional philosophy, the radicals, wish above all
to ensure that philosophy shall have practical effects… This seems to
mean that there is no part of philosophy that is non-political.
The point of the philosopher's work is to change the world – and to
change it he must change the consciousness of the working classes.'
She attributed to us the view that philosophy must be left-wing and
Marxist and 'must start from the working classes', and she saw this as
turning philosophy into an irrational activity and abandoning the
commitment to rational argument. Her description of the radical
philosophy project was a caricature, but perhaps one which we were in
danger of inviting by addressing ourselves largely to people on the left
and taking left-wing political commitment as a given. Warnock
concluded:
'It is not
that I wish philosophy necessarily to be uncommitted. But
commitment should come, if at all, by way of arguments. And it has
always been the pride of philosophy to try to follow the argument, as
Plato said, wherever it leads. To have it laid down in advance, in
the book of rules, that there is one and only one correct way to go,
seems to me to be contrary to what ought to be the free and sceptical
spirit of the subject.'
The need to defend political commitment with rational argument was not
something that radical philosophy ever denied. Of course political
positions have to be supported with rational arguments which do not
already take a particular commitment for granted. In practice,
however, the supporters of radical philosophy did not do enough of that
kind of work in political philosophy. The early 1970s did see a
revival of normative political philosophy, setting out views about the
nature of a good and just society, but it came from a different
direction. It was initiated especially by John Rawls's
A Theory of Justice, published in
1972, which gave rise to a wealth of philosophical work defending other
substantive political positions. Philosophers who defended more
radical positions, for example the political philosopher G A ('Jerry')
Cohen, who was loosely associated with radical philosophy in its early
days, saw it as more important to publish in mainstream journals where
they were not preaching to the converted, and to engage with the
arguments of philosophers such as Rawls and Robert Nozick. With
hindsight I think that they were right.
The third of the three strands in radical philosophy – an openness to
other philosophical traditions – was not a commitment to any particular
tradition or style. There was a lot of interest in Marxist ideas
in the early issues of
Radical
Philosophy, but this was not an exclusive preoccupation.
Since then, the range of traditions which are drawn on in philosophical
work in this country has become much broader. This has included a
renewed interest in Marxism (including what came to be called
'analytical Marxism') and in the philosophy of Hegel, who was a focus of
interest in some of the early issues of the journal. I think it
fair to say, however, that these developments have happened
independently of radical philosophy, although the group was one symptom
of the larger change.
The journal
Radical Philosophy
itself came to be increasingly dominated by a particular style of
philosophy, heavily influenced by post-structuralist discourse theory
and by post-modernism. As it veered in this direction, I myself
increasingly lost touch with it. That style of philosophy can be
just as narrowly academic and esoteric as the style of analytical
philosophy which we had started off by criticising. It exhibits
the same tendency to be inward-looking, to employ a language
intelligible only to the initiated, to focus on texts, often obscure and
arcane, and to derive its content from what other academics have written
rather than from what exercises people in their non-philosophical lives.
This brings me back to the first of the three strands in radical
philosophy, and the one which I consider the most important – the
attempt to take philosophy out of the academy into the wider
world. The crucial contrast here is between, on the one hand,
philosophy which takes its problems from outside the academic
profession, from the questions and dilemmas which exercise people in
their everyday lives and their thinking about their lives, and on the
other hand philosophy which takes its problems from other philosophers,
which interests itself only in philosophical texts and articles in
academic journals, and which addresses itself only to other academic
philosophers.
This strand in radical philosophy was, again, part of a wider
movement. It was broadly in line with the emergence of what came
to be called 'applied philosophy'. The US-based journal
Philosophy and Public Affairs
started publication in 1971 and was followed a decade or so later, in
Britain, by the founding of the Society for Applied Philosophy and the
first issue of the
Journal of Applied
Philosophy. The early 1970s had also seen the pioneering
work of people like Jonathan Glover and Peter Singer who, rather than
confining themselves to questions such as 'What do we mean by the word
'ought'?', began addressing questions such as 'Ought we to legalise
voluntary euthanasia?' or 'Ought we to stop killing animals for food?'or
'How much of our money ought we to give to famine relief?'.
That broad development, exemplified both by the radical philosophy
movement and by the applied philosophy movement, was, I believe, welcome
and necessary. It was a successful opening up of philosophy to the
wider world and a revival of its true vocation. Sadly, over the
past twenty years there has been a falling back. British
philosophy has again retreated into a confined academic world.
Much of the blame lies with the national monitoring of philosophical
research and publications through the Research Assessment Exercise
(RAE), now renamed the Research Excellence Framework. This has
pushed academic philosophers back into writing primarily for
professional fellow-academics. It has encouraged work written in
an esoteric vocabulary which excludes outsiders, bolstered with
references to other academic publications, and addressing questions
raised not by people's lives but by other academic philosophers
responding in their turn to their academic predecessors. It has
encouraged publication for its own sake, rather than writing motivated
by having something to say and a desire to communicate it to the wider
world.
I believe that these have been retrograde developments. We badly
need a revival of what was best in radical philosophy, and what was best
in applied philosophy. I want to make a bold and sweeping claim:
that
all good philosophy is
'radical' in the sense of addressing fundamental human concerns –
dealing not just with trivia and academic puzzles but with questions
which go to the heart of people's struggles to understand their lives
and the world around them. In that sense, too, all good philosophy
is 'applied' philosophy. This has been true of all the great
philosophers of the western tradition.
Plato, the founder of the first academy, was not an academic
philosopher. His philosophical thought was motivated by his
experience of the excesses of Athenian democracy, the even worse
excesses of the oligarchic revolutions, and the act of the restored
democrats who put Socrates to death. The questions which exercised
Plato were: How can we educate political rulers to rule justly?
What kind of knowledge do they need? And, speaking today in
Malmesbury, it is appropriate for me to point out that Thomas Hobbes's
most famous philosophical work was driven by the political convulsions
of the seventeenth century, and by the question of whether it is ever
right to depose the sovereign. This led him to explore the grounds
and limits of political authority, just as it led Locke to do so later
in the century. Hobbes's philosophy was also a response to the
rise of the new science, exploring its implications for our
understanding of the universe, and whether it can be reconciled with
traditional religious belief. Those same questions were at the
heart of the philosophical preoccupations of Descartes and Spinoza,
Locke and Berkeley and Hume.
As these historical examples illustrate, by 'applied philosophy' I do
not mean only applied ethics. I include also philosophy which
addresses the great metaphysical questions which everyone asks, such
as: Is there a god? Does our conscious experience end with
our physical death? What makes life meaningful? Is this all
there is? With that qualification, then, why do I say that all
good philosophy is radical philosophy, and is applied philosophy?
Shouldn't it be a matter for choice what kind of philosophy its
practitioners choose to engage in? I shall now offer a brief
defence of my claim.
I take it to be agreed that philosophy is not an empirical
science. It is primarily a conceptual discipline, using
a priori reasoning which does not
rely on the evidence of experience. (I shall qualify this point in
a moment, but let it stand for now.) Assessment of a
philosophical theory therefore has to put a lot of weight on the test of
internal coherence, logical consistency. However, any candidate
theory can be made internally consistent if we are prepared to jettison
enough of our beliefs and intuitions which don't fit. Someone
could defend even an outlandish theory such as solipsism if he or she
were prepared to abandon enough of ordinary ways of speaking. If
all competing theories, then, can be made internally consistent, how do
we decide on the best theory? My answer is that a good
philosophical theory has to be not only consistent but also as
comprehensive as possible. The best theory is the one which makes
the best sense of as much of our shared experience as possible.
That is the qualification I want to add to my previous statement that
philosophy is a conceptual rather than an empirical discipline. It
is not an experimental science, but its starting point is the facts of
experience, both our everyday personal experience and the best currently
available results of the specialist sciences. The task of
philosophy is not to add new empirical data, but to bring together all
those products of experience, to look for ways of thinking about and
understanding them as a whole, and to articulate an overall conceptual
framework which provides the best fit with them. It is the fact
that the philosophical conclusions must be answerable to our experience
as a whole that ensures that good philosophical theories are rooted in
reality rather than being free-floating products of pure thought.
That is a rather abstract argument for why good philosophy has to be
'applied' philosophy in the sense of addressing itself to our
pre-philosophical experience and concerns. Here is a concrete
example to illustrate that claim. One of the liveliest
philosophical debates of recent years has been the renewed controversy
about religious belief and atheism. Though the issues have been
essentially philosophical ones, the debate has for the most part been
conducted not by philosophers but by scientists and theologians.
Consider one prominent element in the debate, the so-called 'fine-tuning
argument' – a refurbished version of the argument from design for the
existence of a deity.
According to this argument, scientific explanations for the existence
of human beings and other living things, the origin of the earth, and
the ultimate origins of the physical universe in the so-called 'Big
Bang' 13.7 billion years ago, all depend upon basic facts about the
physical universe, the fundamental scientific laws and the basic
physical constants such as the force of gravitational attraction, the
speed of light in a vacuum, and Planck's constant. If the values
of these physical constants had been even slightly different, the Big
Bang would not have led to the emergence of life and of human beings,
and perhaps not to an ordered universe at all. The universe, it is
said, is 'fine-tuned for life'.
What the argument then says is that this cannot be a matter of mere
chance. The fact that the mathematical values of the basic
constants are just right for producing life, including human life, must
have been intended. The only plausible explanation for it is a
purposive explanation, a personal explanation. The fundamental
features of the universe are as they are because they were established
by an intelligent personal being for the purpose of eventually creating
human life.
The response of atheist critics of the argument (such as Richard
Dawkins) is that any acceptable explanation of the values of the basic
physical constants would itself have to be a scientific
explanation. Perhaps the basic constants will turn out to be all
interconnected at a deeper level. Or perhaps the best explanation
may be some kind of 'multiverse' theory – our universe is one of many
actual or possible universes, and ours just happens to be the one that
is fine-tuned for life.
It seems clear to me that the disagreement between the defenders of the
fine-tuning argument and its critics is not itself a scientific
one. It is a philosophical disagreement. For the critics the
explanation has to be a scientific explanation, because that's the only
kind of explanation there can be. For the defenders of the
argument, the ultimate explanation cannot possibly be one more
scientific explanation. So the disagreement is about what counts
as a good explanation, and about the relation between scientific
explanations and purposive explanations.
More fundamentally it is a conflict between two metaphysical
perspectives, naturalism and anti-naturalism. Defenders of the
fine-tuning argument must be committed to the claim that a creator
possessing intelligence and knowledge and will existed independently of
and prior to the existence of the natural universe, without any physical
embodiment or spatio-temporal location.
Naturalists will say that this is philosophically untenable. It
is impossible that there could be a disembodied consciousness with no
physical basis. We can, they would say, make no sense of talk of
the content of consciousness detached from any kind of sensory apparatus
as a source of external data. And we can make no sense of any talk
of agency other than that of embodied beings acting on a physical
world. They will then have to acknowledge that naturalism in turn
has its problems. In particular, in the context of the present
debate, naturalists of a scientific bent will want to give an
evolutionary account of the origins of human consciousness, and it is
not clear what they can say about how things like beliefs and intentions
as we consciously experience them could emerge from a purely physical
evolutionary process.
These are familiar philosophical disputes. There is a range of
philosophical theories offering competing accounts of the relation
between the physical and the mental. These theories all persist
because – picking up my earlier point about philosophical method – any
one of them can be made logically consistent, provided that its
defenders are prepared to make the necessary linguistic adjustments and
to acknowledge unfilled gaps. For example, any dualist will have
to say at some point that we cannot give any further account of
how physical and mental events
interact – they just do. And any materialist will have to say at
some point that we cannot give any further account of
how certain kinds of physical
processes can be at the same time conscious mental experiences – they
just
are.
My point is, then, that we cannot resolve the conflicts between these
competing theories, and between naturalism and anti-naturalism more
generally, simply by the piecemeal examination of individual
concepts. The best theory will have to meet not only the test of
coherence but also that of comprehensiveness. It will be the
one which can best account for our experience as a whole. And that
is why philosophers have to engage with the questions and beliefs and
experiences which occupy people in 'the God debate'. Can we live
by science alone? Are there other kinds of knowledge and
understanding, distinct from science, which we can draw on and which we
need? If so, what are they? How can we best account for what
people think of as 'spiritual' needs, and 'spiritual' or 'religious'
experiences. Any satisfactory philosophical theory about the
nature of reality will have implications for the possibility of personal
survival after death, and will therefore have to consider how best to
account for the kinds of experiences which people have regarded as
encounters with the dead or as evidence of resurrection or
reincarnation. I think myself that naturalistic answers can be
given to these questions, but the questions are necessary and answers
are needed.
And my point is too, that serious philosophical debate, such as the
debate about naturalism and anti-naturalism,
has to tackle these questions, and
they are not just philosophical questions. They are questions
which exercise any thinking person, and about which many people have
strong and deeply held beliefs. They are the sorts of question
which academic philosophers are inclined to dismiss as exhibiting a
naïve misunderstanding of the nature of philosophy. How
should we live? What is the purpose of life? Why are we
here? What's it all about? Good philosophy cannot ignore
these concerns, which are fundamental to people's lives. It is in
this sense that all good philosophy is 'radical' philosophy, and all
good philosophy is 'applied' philosophy. The attempt in the 1970s
and 1980s to drag philosophy out of the academy badly needs to be
renewed.
Comments
Post a Comment
Our authors very much value feedback from readers. Unfortunately, there is so much spam on the internet now that we now have to moderate posts on the older articles. Please accept our apologies for any extra time this may require of you.