Alexander Klein: The politics of logic

Should philosophy express the national character of a people? Bertrand Russell’s ‘scientific’ philosophy was a bulwark against nationalism

If human life is again to become tolerable, mankind must acquire two things which are at present increasingly disappearing: loving kindness and scientific impartiality. These two things are inter-connected. At present, in every country, the schools teach a narrow nationalism and a view of history quite different from that taught in any other country. There is no scientific impartiality, and the departures from impartiality are such as to diminish loving kindness between nations.

In November 1914, Bernard Bosanquet delivered the inaugural address to the Aristotelian Society’s 36th session. An ageing titan of British idealism, Bosanquet called his talk ‘Science and Philosophy’. It was a broadside on Bertrand Russell’s now-legendary book Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) in which Russell sought to model a new ‘scientific’ method for doing philosophy that made the logical analysis of propositions fundamental. This logic-centric style would come to define what we now know as analytic philosophy.

Bosanquet’s opening complaint about Russell’s methodology was, surprisingly, political. He argued that the ‘scientific’ methodology would inevitably make philosophy ‘cosmopolitan in character and free from special national qualities’. Since logic, and science more generally, respects no political or cultural boundaries, Russell’s philosophy could never function as a distinctive expression of a people. This was a problem for Bosanquet. He held ‘that philosophy, being, like language, art, and poetry, a product of the whole man, is a thing which would forfeit some of its essence if it were to lose its national quality’. British idealism for Britons, and German idealism for Germans.

The cosmopolitanism that Bosanquet thought implicit in Russell’s philosophical methodology was no illusion. Two weeks prior to Bosanquet’s attack at the Society, Russell had delivered a lecture at Oxford that would be published under the title ‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy’. Today it is remembered as a call to arms for logical analysis and it largely restated, in a more pointed way, the methodological outlook of Our Knowledge.

Russell’s essay is not overtly political. And yet privately, Russell told one colleague that the talk ‘was partly inspired by disgust at the universal outburst of “righteousness” in all nations since the war began. It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has given me a disgust of all ethical notions, which evidently are chiefly useful as an excuse for murder.’ To another colleague, he described the lecture as ‘inspired by the bloodthirstiness of professors here and in Germany. I gave it at Oxford, and it produced all the disgust I had hoped.’

It might seem peculiar to find Russell talking about war and murder in connection with a lecture on – of all things –philosophical methodology. But one can see these concerns emerging directly in at least one passage in the lecture itself....

https://aeon.co/essays/philosophy-at-war-nationalism-and-logical-analysis