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