“In and of itself, the idea of peace is a negative idea; it is a police idea. There are things more important than keeping one’s body whole and one’s property intact. Disturbing the peace is bad, not because peace is disturbed, but because the fruitful processes of cooperation in the great experiment of living together are disturbed. It is futile to work for the negative aim of peace unless we are committed to the positive ideal which it cloaks: promoting the efficacy of human intercourse irrespective of class, racial, geographical and national limits. Any philosophy which should penetrate and particulate our present social practice would find at work the forces which unify human intercourse. An intelligent and courageous philosophy of practice would devise means by which the operation of these forces would be extended and assured in the future.”—John Dewey, 1915
“The increase in metaphysical and theologizing leanings which shows itself today in many associations and sects, in books and journals, in lectures and university courses, seems to be based on the fierce social and economic struggles of the present. One group of combatants, holding fast to traditional social forms, cultivates traditional attitudes of metaphysics and theology whose content has long since been superseded; while the other group, especially on central Europe, facing the new age, rejects these views and adopts empirical science as its basis…. In many countries, the masses now reject these [metaphysical and theological] doctrines much more consciously than ever before, and in keeping with their socialist attitudes tend to lean toward a down-to-earth empiricist view. In the past materialism was the expression of this view; however, modern empiricism has left behind a number of inadequate forms in its development and has found a defensible form in the scientific world-conception.”—The Vienna Circle, 1929.
“The real social function of philosophy lies in its criticism of what is prevalent. That does not mean superficial fault-finding with individual ideas or conditions, as though a philosopher were a crank. Nor does it mean that the philosopher complains about this or that isolated condition and suggests remedies. The chief aim of such criticism is to prevent mankind from losing itself in those ideas and activities which the existing organization of society instills into its members. Man must be made to see the relationship between his activities and what is achieved thereby, between his particular existence and the general life of society, between his everyday projects and the great ideas which he acknowledges.”—Max Horkheimer, 1939
Sometimes, often in times of cultural crisis or discord, philosophy finds itself called to account—a demand is made that philosophers speak to the social value or social function of their work. The 20th-century provided a series of such moments—wars among nations that viewed themselves as culturally and philosophically sophisticated, economic crises, the rise of various forms of totalitarianism, the Cold War stalemate, the horrors of colonialism, the colonial wars, and the need to theorize a post-colonial world.
This course will look at three of the ways philosophers in the 20th century sought to express a social function for philosophy: a pragmatist function (given in quintessentially Deweyan terms in the quotation from him above), a scientific function (exemplified in the quotation from the Vienna Circle above), and a critical function (exemplified in the Horkheimer quotation). These are not only social functions for philosophy explored in the 20th century nor are they in every way distinct one from another. Nonetheless, these were among the most serious and sustained attempts to explain what philosophy was for in an era when its value could no longer be taken for granted.
We will look at each of these three views. In the pragmatist camp we shall look most especially at Dewey’s view and how it involved many still contemporary issues: immigration and the immigrant experience (especially in the work of Jane Addams in the Hull House settlement house), the labour movement, public education, and cultural pluralism (including very public objections to Dewey from philosophers such as Randolph Bourne, Alain Locke, and Horace Kallen). Among the scientific philosophers we shall look most closely at various ways that the logical empiricists expressed the social function of their philosophy, from forms of scientific humanism, to post-Marxist liberationist antimetaphysics, to anti-Kantian modernism. And we shall look at the social function of critical theory in the work Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Angela Davis.
Our project in this course is not only historical, of course. We live again in a time in which philosophy—often under the guise of critical race theory or “cultural Marxism”—is under attack, in which academic freedom specifically in humanities and social science fields is being eroded, and in which universities themselves seem unable or unwilling to explain and protect academic work. We shall reflect on how better to express the point of the projects of philosophy in the cultural conversation in Canada and around the world.