In which I remember I'm a philosophy student...

I've been writing an essay on the debate between Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege on how names refer to objects. Posting the essay seems like the height of arrogance, especially because it's elementary and extremely boring. But it has set me thinking about the tradition of what's called 'analytic philosophy', and how it fits into the grand scheme of things. This may well be rubbish, but that's kinda what the blog is for...

The philosophy I am taught here almost certainly must come under the heading 'bourgeois philosophy'. In a sense this is uncontroversial, after all, they are the ruling ideas of capitalism. However, it isn't enough to simply dismiss thinkers like Frege and Russell as bourgeois theorists, we have to investigate further the nature of their thought, both in isolation and in how they relate to society more broadly.

To approach Analytic Philosophy from the position of a marxist has its limitations. The reality of this tradition is that, while it is intellectually dominant through institutions in the west, it cannot realistically be said to have the ideological hegemony of, say medieval christianity, or even modern day liberalism. If people have opinions about the questions raised by the analytic tradition at all they would certainly not be referring back to the body of work that appears on my reading lists. This presents clear problems in understanding the role that analytical philosophy is likely to play in social relations, and to some extent it is difficult to explain its intellectual dominance in terms of social forces. There is a danger of sliding into an idealist explanation, ignoring entirely the material structure.

However, here goes: Analytical Philosophy seems to arise out of a reaction to some of the excesses of post-Hegelian idealism. It is the 'common sense' view of things. It is generally materialist or realist, at least about nature. In this sense Marxists might be tempted to prefer it to the idealism that preceeded it-any sort of materialism is better than fantasy and fiction. This, I think, would be a mistake. A central tenet of Analytical Philosophy seems to be that things largely are how they appear-our senses don't lie to us, or if they do then they're still all we've got. This is not the intelligent, nuanced, materialism of Marx, understanding that, whilst what you see exists, the reasons you see it happening for are not what they seem. Marx's acknowledgment of the importance of the underlying structure of things not being automatically given, even when their existence is, is central to his thought, and largely absent in Analytical Philosophy.

To the extent that Analytical Philosophy is 'the common sense view' we must also be wary. Tell someone you are a dialectical materialist and they will, once they've stopped associating you with Stalin, give you a funny look. It's just not logical, they might say, it's too full of inconsistencies. However, one of the few conclusions that I have come to writing this essay is just how incoherent and fantastical some of the consequences of the ideas of the particular philosophers I'm writing about end up being. Is the proposal that the dialectic is a powerful analogy for understanding the way the world, and society especially, changes any more incoherent than the 'third realm' in which Frege's notion of 'sense' supposedly resides, or Russell's 'indefinable variables' and 'sensibilia'? I personally do not think so. Though admittedly maybe I wouldn't.

My final observation is that, like most dominant philosophy, the vast majority of Analytic Philosophy seeks to break down it's target of study into smaller and smaller bits. It seems to be a basic assumption that we can better understand the world by explaining smaller and smaller particles, better understand society by understanding individuals, and better understand human thought by understanding individual minds. This, I think, is both a crippling weakness and an ideological necessity. It is, it seems to me, impossible to understand the nature of the world without understanding the relationships between individual units, both in nature and society. The opposite opinion is born of a specific, dominant, bourgeois individualist mind set. The demand for rights of the individual against the state, and against other individuals, is a clear growth out of the clamour for recognition of a growing bourgeousie. The ideological justification for capitalism comes from the idea that we all compete equally with each other, hence what becomes necessary is an account of us as individuals, not as a group. This has also been seen as a profoundly patriarchal mindset. The basic unit, always represented as the individual man, is actually the family, including a woman whose rights are not the same. There is a great deal of excellent feminist political philosophy that emphasises a very different perspective.

It is this final point that I think is most pernicious. It is important that we resist this atomising of society and of nature. It may be contested that I have assumed a spurious link between logic and politics, and I have. However, i don't think it that unreasonable. I would contest that if being an analytical philosopher was what drove Robert Nozick to write the vile libertarian tract 'Anarchy State and Utopia', claiming that it followed from basic assumptions of his philosophy (previously he had been better known for his epistemology), then we might, just might, think that there's something dodgy about the whole business.