Meta-Philosophy

Morris Judd VII

Raymond B. Allen was the President of the University of Washington. As such, he had to deal with Howard Phillips, the philosopher whose case (together with that of Joseph Butterworth, a professor of old English) became the single most important academic freedom case of the entire McCarthy Era. It was what the German call maßgebend: it set the parameters, procedures, and rationales for how these cases were handled across the country. And it was up to Raymond B. Allen to articulate what those parameters, procedures, and rationales should be.

This was the case, by the way, in which the professorial investigating committee cited the opinion that Phillips, the philosopher, had the reverse burden of proof from Butterworth, his colleague in the English Department:

As a teacher of philosophy, it might be suggested that, without specific proof, his objectivity as a teacher would necessarily be impaired by his strong bias in favor of a doctrinaire political philosophy (see my Time in the Ditch p. 30).

According to Jane Sanders’ history of McCarthyism at the University of Washington, Cold War on the Campus, at one point no fewer than eight members of the tenure committee at the University of Washington voted in ways that defined academic incompetence as “unfitness in a faculty member’s field of scholarship and teaching” (pp. 54-55). This would keep academic freedom cases involving Communist Party members within the Departments and the appropriate faculty committees. Clearly, there was strong support for this at the University.

But President Allen could not allow it. Allen was a complex figure, more complex than he is portrayed in my history of the McCarthy Era’s effects on American philosophy, Time in the Ditch. Today it is hard not to see him as a right wing henchman, which is how I presented him in that book. But he saw himself as squarely in the center—and this view was plausible enough that at his last faculty meeting as President of the University, he was given a standing ovation (Sanders p. 95).

Allen in fact was trying to defend the University from all outside influences—Communist and McCarthyite alike. He believed that it was better for administrators to do this difficult job than to leave the faculty to fend for themselves. But in order to do it, he had to get academic freedom cases out of individual Departments. Allen therefore opposed the eight members of the University of Washington Tenure Committee.

His argument (Sanders pp. 54-55) was that there is a single set of rules for all inquiry, imposed by the very concept—the very unambiguous concept—of objective truth. Though central administrations and Boards of Regents do not have scholarly expertise in individual fields, that doesn't matter because the rules of rationality do not vary across disciplines; they are the same for everyone. Therefore, who should and should not be fired was best left up to central administrations and Boards of Regents, not to scholars in the appropriate field.

Fearful symmetries are in play here. On one side we have the Logical Empiricists, besieged in Vienna by anti-Semitic would-be tyrants, on the one hand, and ambivalent about the Ostjuden on the other. On the other side we have Raymond B. Allen, besieged by McCarthyite forces from outside the university on the one hand, but not wanting to defend the Communists within on the other.

For both, salvation lay in the idea that there could be only one set of rules for rational inquiry--a set empty enough to exclude anti-Semites, religious fundamentalists, McCarthyites, and Communists as need be. For both, too, the uniqueness of that set of rules was absolutely central, and needed to be fought for tooth and nail.

And not only in Seattle and Vienna. News of the moves, countermoves, arguments, rationales, and rationalizations at the University of Washington went right across the country—as I have said, the case  was maßgebend (cf. Sanders pp. 81-83). It must have gone into the office of the President of the University of Colorado. And when Morris Judd—in all innocence, in the belief that the quality of his arguments should actually matter—refused to answer the President’s questions, he sealed his fate.

For this President, like the other one, needed above all to get control of academic freedom cases, get them away from Departments and Tenure Committees and from everyone who believed that different disciplines have rules of their own. Rules that are distinctive and important enough that proper judgment of scholarly merit is properly located within the discipline of the person being judged—not with administrators and Regents.

So Morris Judd had to be fired—fired in order to defend the University against McCarthyite forces.

The whole thing at Washington played out with English professor Joseph Butterworth and Philosophy professor Herbert Phillips both getting fired. Butterworth spent the rest of his life working at odd jobs; Phillips eventually found work as a laborer (Sanders p. 97).

Allen left Washington in glory the following year, just ahead of major budget cuts, and eventually became the first Chancellor of UCLA. He arrived in Westwood just in time to sign off on the hiring of Rudolf Carnap.

And Morris Judd, whose fatal flaws were intelligence, honesty, moral sensitivity, and belief in reason--a man who exemplified everything philosophers should strive to be--went off to work in the junk yard.

He will not be forgotten.

Morris Judd VI

So the Logical Positivists, coming out of Viennese cultural politics, had strong incentives to

(1) adopt the view that rationality plays by only a single set of rules;

(2) make that view, in the specific form of the Principle of Verification, central to their philosophy; and

(3) to fight for it tooth and nail.

This whole stance, in the Viennese context, was entirely understandable. And when the Empiricists moved to America and became known as the Logical Positivists, it fit right in with a debate that was going on in the new country.

Remember what Morris Judd found out when, in 2002, he finally got to see his file? The exact words of the Boulder Daily Camera’s story were:

It confirmed what many people had suspected was the real reason for Judd's dismissal: His name had been added to a list of suspected subversives because he wouldn't give a straight answer to former CU President Robert Stearns' questions, "Are you a member of the Communist Party," and "Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"

Morris Judd later said the answer to these questions was No. But he did not believe it was proper for the University to ask them. Unfortunately, everybody was asking them, especially in the case of a Philosophy Department where background checks had been ordered on every single member.

Morris Judd may well have been asked such questions by his Department chair, for example, or the promotion and tenure committee at Colorado. But when he was asked it by the President of the University, the context was very different, and his refusal to answer propelled him into a situation where he could not survive.

That context is complex but important, and it will take a moment to explain.

In the McCarthy Era, Communists were never fired simply for being Communists—this is a free country, after all. Americans are dedicated to open inquiry and critical thinking, etc., etc. Americans aren’t afraid of ideas!

So the rationale for firing Communists, supplied by philosopher Sidney Hook, was that the Communist Party had nothing to do with ideas—it was, in fact, an assault on them.

Marxism and other heresies were acceptable for critical discussion within academia. But being a member of the Communist Party meant that you were following, not truth, but the Moscow line. You had sold your soul to Moscow; were therefore not a respectable scholar; and were therefore undeserving of academic employment.

This argument, I should note, did not sound as bad then as it sounds today; it gained a lot of currency from the Hitler/Stalin Pact. Anybody who stayed in the Communist Party after that was about as politically astute as Martin Heidegger.

So: Professor X is a Communist, but we can’t fire him for being a Communist, so we’ll fire him for not being a “respectable scholar.” The next question was, who decides who is or is not a respectable scholar?

A lot of American academics felt that this should be up to individual departments, who alone had the expertise in their fields to decide such things.

In their view, the rules of rationality are at the disciplinary level, and there are many (or at least several) different sets of them. Somebody in one discipline could not be presumed able to judge the scholarship of someone in another, and non-scholars could not be presumed able to  judge anyone.

This view amounts to a tightening-up of Kant's battle cry of academic (i.e. philosophical) freedom: Über Gelehrte können nur Gelehrte urteilen!

But it was intolerable to a man named Raymond B. Allen.

Morris Judd V

There has been an awful lot of attention paid, beginning with the Logical Positivists themselves, to the content of the Verification Principle. The Principle, roughly stated according to the Carnap text I discussed last time, holds that only sentences which can be empirically verified by the scientific community have meaning—and rough statements were all it ever got. Nobody ever figured out exactly what “verification” consisted in, and as for “meaning”—they just stipulated.

I’m interested in the Principle's form—not its logical form, but in the kind of form which function follows. And here we see its form is that of an exclusion which is

(a). very broad—broad enough to take in the “theses” of both the Ostjuden and their bitter enemies, the anti-Semites—and a whole lot of other stuff along the way. Husserl, for example, thinks you should submit phenomenological theses for verification, not by others, but by yourself; that is what he calls Evidenz. He’s out. Kierkegaard thinks that real truth is personally transformative—that can’t be adjudicated by a community, so he’s out too. And so on.

(b). absolute: utterances are distinguished from one another by their meaning, whatever that may be; so once you’ve called something meaningless, there is nothing further to say and no reason to mess with it any further. Husserl and Kierkegaard are no more or less meaningless than some Austrian anti-Semite.

(c). new—indeed, according to sociologist Randall Collins, this kind of exlusion was “unprecedented” in the entire history of philosophy, all the way back to China 5000 years ago (Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998 p. 751).

The form of exclusion brought about by the Principle of Verification represents a major innovation not only within philosophy, but in academia itself. From the first academy--Plato's--on, all judgments are supposed to be subject to critical scrutiny, and this includes judgments that someone else’s philosophy is worthless. So philosophers have traditionally tried to read and understand one another even when they did not like one another; Socrates talked with the Sophists. But the Logical Positivists changed this: to them, “metaphysical” philosophers were meaningless and so not worth reading.

Importantly, this judgment itself was exempt from criticism—for in order to revise it, one would have to collect the necessary data by actually reading the person. Labeling philosopher x “metaphysical,” i.e. meaningless, was a final verdict—a sort of philosophical death penalty.

Is it ever right to tell people not even to read the writings of other people? I don’t think so, especially in the case of people who consider themselves educators; but I can understand doing so in the case of anti-Semites. I, and I daresay the world, would be happier if no one had ever read Oscar Panizza (to say nothing of Adolf Hitler).

So telling people not to read Hitler and Panizza is wrong but understandable. But what if the price of telling people not to read Hitler and Panizza  is that you must also tell them not to read Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, or Derrida?

This could be even wronger, and for two reasons:

(a). the writer in question may in fact not be a “metaphysician.” Perhaps she really is, somewhere in the depths of her pages, offering theses for rational adjudication by a community. If so, se has been wrongly convicted.

(b). Or maybe the court—the community—has been wrong about the law. Maybe the person’s actions come under a different set of laws.

And here is the fateful thing: that can‘t happen in the case of the Logical Positivists, because for them there is just one set of rules for determining whether something it meaningful or not.

Behind both (a) and (b), then, lies a philosophical absolutizing of one of modernity’s least attractive components—the view that rationality operates by a single set of rules.  Modernity began with that view, for it was born with the conviction that everything premodern is ipso facto unworthy; hence the querelle des anciens et des modernes. But that doesn’t make it right.

The single-set-of-rules view was much more defensible back in Vienna. There, it would work out to something like this: If we countenance the Ostjuden playing by their rules, we will have to allow the anti-Semites to play by theirs. Nobody decent or sane wants that, and so the Ostjuden have to go into the outer darkness along with Husserl and Oscar Panizza.

The way the Logical Positivists lumped together philosophical approaches which differed from their own with contemptible pseudo-discourses like anti-Semitism was thus entirely understandable in the context of the times. The struggle was a desperate one and, as we know, the good guys lost.

What is not so understandable is what we find when we move back from this distant time and place (yet so close, to so many of us) to the State of Colorado—and to its University.

Morris Judd IV

What connects the Ostjüdisch immigration to Vienna with the Philosophy Department and President’s Office at the University of Colorado? What would connect American philosophers to something as foreign as central European social movements in the middle of the Twentieth Century?

Short answer: Logical Positivism. The long answer will take a while, and let me begin by asking a different question.

When the Logical Positivists inveigh against “metaphysics,” do they really mean metaphysics? Metaphysics as we understand it is a philosophical enterprise claiming to provide knowledge that does not come from the senses. Is that their real target?

In Carnap’s 1928 “Preface” to the First Edition of the Aufbau, the enemy is not just a few people holding professorial chairs, but something much larger. We see this where Carnap talks about the “inner kinship” between scientific philosophy, architecture and other unspecified efforts to gain “meaningful forms of personal and collective life.” Were architects also fighting philosophical claims to possess non-sensory knowledge?

Writing at a time of extreme social turmoil in Vienna, where he had arrived from Berlin two years before, Carnap is calling all of modernity to his side. At times he almost paraphrases Marx: “It is an orientation which acknowledges the bonds that tie men together, but at the same time strives for free development of the individual.” (Marx had written about a society in which the liberation of all was the condition for the freedom of each.)

The political dimensions of Logical Positivism have been investigated by people like Michael Friedman, Ron Giere, George Reisch, Alan W. Richardson, Thomas Uebel, and others far more knowledgeable than I. The question I want to ask is: what exactly is being gotten at under the title of “metaphysics” in the “Preface” to the Aufbau?

The answer, at least in part, is a mode of discourse which arises, like all discourse, out of what Carnap calls “emotions, drives, dispositions and general living conditions,” but which does not submit the theses thus formulated for rational justification by others.

Anti-Semitism, for example. Heidegger’s Nazi engagement was still five years in the future when Carnap write the “Preface,” but it is not hard to see that “metaphysics” is already a code word, if not for Nazism, then for anti-Semitism and other anti-modern discourses—all the viciously irrational forces that were messing up European history. This explains their strong animus against it—contempt is not too strong a word.

Seeing anti-Semitism as the real target of Carnap’s critique of metaphysics has merit beyond its explanatory power. Suppose that Carnap is to be read as the Americans read him—that is, when he says “metaphysics” all he means is the propounding of unverifiable assertions as if they were scientific. Would you respect him? With all that is going on in Vienna? With armed gangs roughing up Jews, and the government caving in to it with alacrity? Shouldn’t Carnap—and all other decent people—be up in arms against them? If Carnap doesn’t think “anti-Semitism” when he writes “metaphysics,” shame on him!

But if he wants to attack anti-Semitism, why not do so? Why disguise it behind a broader trend, unnamed in the “Preface,” and then openly attack what seems to be a different example of that trend, academic metaphysics?

Many reasons, but in part because an attack on anti-Semitism would ipso facto be a defense of Jews—and in particular of the Ostjuden. Even assimilated Viennese Jews were cautious about defending the Ostjuden (Joseph Roth was a major exception), because it could backfire. One of the things anti-Semites liked to do, and had done for centuries, was ‘expose” Jews who thought they could assimilate (read, if you can, Oscar Panizza’s 1893 play “The Operated Jew;” it will make you physically sick). Associating yourself, as an acculturated Austrian Jew, with the Ostjuden could provide fuel for this particular genre of anti-Semitic writing. But even non-Jews, like Carnap, were reluctant to defend the Ostjuden. After all, the Ostjuden were religious fundamentalists, and not exactly modern in their own outlook. They, too, were not about to submit their “theses” to rational adjudication.

Problem: how to attack the anti-Semites without being drawn into a defense of the Ostjuden? Answer: find a principle broad enough to exclude both, and then call what you are attacking by another name. The Principle of Verification, will do quite well. It will enable you to exclude both the ravings of the anti-Semites and the humble beliefs of the Ostjuden (what philosophers today call “folk beliefs”). It will enable you to attack anti-Semitism without naming it, because your overt target is the broader field of “metaphysics.” And by making verification not merely the condition of science but of all “meaningful” discourse, you can make your exclusion absolute—as absolute as it should be. For what is senseless should not even be voiced:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.