The Limits of English Wit
Philip Pilkington traces the current conflict between liberals and postliberals back to the debates around analytic philosophy and Hegel at Cambridge in the early-20th century
If you go to a philosophy department in Oxford or, especially, Cambridge today they will glow with the pride of carrying on a tradition. Of course, these colleges tend to emphasize the importance of their tradition regardless, but there is a big difference between pointing to the historic traditions of an institution and claiming to be part of an intellectual tradition. The former is a sort of adornment – a nice supplement to the status of the intellectual work being produced at a university – but the latter is different; it dictates the type of intellectual work being produced.
Their tradition is generally known today as “analytic philosophy”. Of course, analytic philosophy is also very influential in the United States and many of its key proponents in the 20th century – like Searle or Quine – were Americans. But the British lay claim to the movement’s origins. It all started at Cambridge with the work, first, of G.E. Moore and then of Bertrand Russell. Europeans were soon imported into the mix. Ludwig Wittgenstein first – who would achieve mythic, or perhaps even mystical status – and later Karl Popper.
English ‘Wit’ as Argument
Today the analytic tradition seems stale. Early promises of a complete, potentially mathematical formalization of philosophy were not new – the idea of the Mathesis Universalis goes back to van Rooman and Descartes in the early-17th century. Nor was the failure of these ideas anything new – the Mathesis Universalis came to naught, so too did the totalizing ‘logicism’ of Frege, Russell and Whitehead. It is arguable if the edifice of analytic philosophy ever even really held together – Wittgenstein’s later writings, for example, famously become cryptic to the point of mysticism, the very thing that the analytic philosophy was supposed to cure philosophers of. Yet despite its problems, the overall vision that analytic philosophy created structures the late liberal world that we have inhabited since the end of the Cold War. In that sense, analytic philosophy is, as Marx would say, a tradition that weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
