Martha Nussbaum on Hilary Putnam (1926-2016)
Philosophy is pretty
unpopular in America today. Marco Rubio says, with typical inelegance: “We need
more welders and less philosophers.” Governor Pat McCrory of North Carolina
also singles out philosophy as a discipline offering “worthless courses” that
offer “no chances of getting people jobs.” Across the nation there’s unbounded
adulation for the STEM disciplines, which seem so profitable. Although all the
humanities suffer disdain, philosophy keeps on attracting special negative
attention — perhaps because in addition to appearing worthless, it also appears
vaguely subversive, a threat to sound traditional values.
Such was not always
the case. Throughout its history in Europe, philosophy has repeatedly come in
for abuse from the forces of tradition and authority. The American founding,
however, was different: the founders were men of the Enlightenment, steeped in
the ideas and works of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and the ancient
Greeks and Romans — especially Cicero and the Roman Stoics. As men of the
Enlightenment they took pride in steering their course by reason and argument
rather than unexamined tradition. Their intellectual independence and
theoretical thoughtfulness served them well when it came to setting up a new
nation. We’ve traveled a long way from those roots, and not in a good direction.
On March 13, America
lost one of the greatest philosophers this nation has ever produced. Hilary
Putnam died of cancer at the age of 89. Those of us who had the good fortune to
know Putnam as mentees, colleagues, and friends remember his life with profound
gratitude and love, since Hilary was not only a great philosopher, but also a
human being of extraordinary generosity, who really wanted people to be
themselves, not his acolytes. But it’s also good, in the midst of grief, to
reflect about Hilary’s career, and what it shows us about what philosophy is
and what it can offer humanity. For Hilary was a person of unsurpassed
brilliance, but he also believed that philosophy was not just for the rarely
gifted individual. Like two of his favorites, Socrates and John Dewey (and, I’d
add, like those American founders), he thought that philosophy was for all
human beings, a wake-up call to the humanity in us all.
Putnam was a
philosopher of amazing breadth. As he himself wrote, “Any philosophy that can
be put in a nutshell belongs in one.” And in his prolific career Putnam,
accordingly, elaborated detailed and creative accounts of central issues in an
extremely wide range of areas in philosophy. Indeed there is no philosopher
since Aristotle who has made creative and foundational contributions in all the
following areas: logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science,
metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, political thought, philosophy of
economics. philosophy of literature.
And Putnam added at
least two areas to the list that Aristotle didn’t work in, namely, philosophy
of language and philosophy of religion. (Philosophy of religion because he was
a religious Jew, and he understood Judaism to require a life of perpetual critique.)
In all of these areas, too, he shared with Aristotle a deep concern: that the
messy matter of human life should not be distorted to fit the demands of an
excessively simple theory, that what Putnam called “the whole hurly-burly of
human actions” should be the context within which philosophical theory does its
work.
That commitment led
him to oppose many fads of his time: for philosophy is prone to simplifying and
reductive fads, from logical positivism to a later fad for computer modeling of
philosophical problems. Putnam knew physics like virtually nobody else in the
field, and so he also knew that it was fatal to reduce philosophy to physics:
philosophy is a humanistic discipline. (I remember a marvelous and profoundly
countercultural course he taught at Harvard, in the days when logical
positivism was just beginning to wane, entitled “Non-Scientific Knowledge.” It
covered ethical knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, and religious knowledge, and
Putnam showed the folly of imagining that physical reductionism could replace
those normative subjects.)
His independence from fads also led him to take a
keen interest in the thought of the ancient Greeks, who looked stupid to the
positivists but who actually had a few good ideas! He learned ancient Greek in
order to work seriously on Aristotle, and he argued that Aristotle had important
insights about the mind-body relationship that contemporary thinkers ought to
take up.
At the same time, and
again like Aristotle, Putnam never gave way to irrationalism, never took up a
skeptical and dismissive attitude to philosophical theorizing: for, as he
stressed, the attempt to order our world by the work of reason is one of the
most deep and pervasive aspects of the hurly burly of human life. He believed
that we are always prone to not just messiness and sloppiness, but, worse, to
capitulation to forms of authority and pressure, and that the work of
philosophy was needed to counter these baneful tendencies.
Most philosophers talk
a lot of talk about following the argument, but eventually lapse into
dogmatism, defending a well-known position at all costs, no matter what new
argument comes along. The glory of Putnam’s way of philosophizing was its total
vulnerability. Because he really did follow the argument wherever it led, he
often changed his views, and being led to change was to him not distressing but
profoundly delightful, evidence that he was humble enough to be worthy of his
own rationality.
Once in the late 1970’s he offered a class on metaphysics at
Harvard with his colleagues Nelson Goodman and W. V. O. Quine. The other two
held views very different from Putnam’s, and they argued well. Putnam became
more and more excited by the debate — so much so that he would leave a
department meeting in the middle of lunch to walk up and down the halls with
Goodman. At the end of that term, his Presidential Address to the American
Philosophical Association contained an elegant argument against himself —
somewhat in Goodman’s spirit, though not exactly.
A life in reason was
and is difficult. All of us, whether we are ignorant of philosophy or professors
of philosophy, find it easier to follow dogma than to think. What Hilary
Putnam’s life offers our troubled nation is, I think, a noble paradigm of a
perpetual willingness to subject oneself to reason’s critique. Our country,
founded by lovers of argument, has become the plaything of rhetoricians and
entertainers (characters that Plato knew all too well). On this day when we
have lost one of the giants of our nation, let’s think about that.
