A few days ago, I used the lack of historical figures in its top-20-pernicious list to propose that Leiter’s poll about pernicious philosophers said a lot about the politics of academic philosophy, and not so much about anything else. “Pernicious,” in other words, is a political designation. In the comments, Jon Cogburn wonders:
“You had me up until the historical construct bit. Aren't we in danger of presupposing that something can't both be a political act of boundary policing *and* a statement with a truth value? I mean I think that it's objectively false that Heidegger is a pernicious philosopher. I also think that calling one's colleagues charlatans in public forums is objectively pernicious. Maybe I [am] trying to police a boundary here, but aren't some boundaries objectively worth policing?”
This is a fair question; let me try to pursue and answer in three slightly different ways.
First, I think that the politics and power relations behind truth claims are often much more interesting than the claims themselves. The best example of this principle that comes immediately to mind is Marx’s 1843 “opiate of the masses” remarks on religion. Marx was not mainly saying religious statements were false (Feuerbach had already done that), even though he clearly thought they were. He was arguing that the sociology behind the religious statements was a lot more interesting to study than the content and its truth value. That certainly applies to a lot of Leiter’s poll results, where one of the important political considerations is the way that academic communities form themselves and police their own boundaries.
For example, Leiter “limited this to serious philosophers, so no charlatans like Derrida.” Whatever one says about the merits of Derrida’s work, it is very important to the owner of one of the most prominent blogs in academic philosophy (and one of the primary people that sources like IHE go to when they want an opinion about academic philosophy) that Derrida not be considered a “philosopher.” In many contexts, this is much more worth talking about than the merits or demerits of Derrida’s work, though it’s probably worth remarking in this context that Derrida’s early “Plato’s Pharmacy” precisely concerns itself with the way that the Platonic metaphysical apparatus depends upon keeping certain scapegoat figures marginal. In one sense they are banned from the community, in another they’re included as a figure whose haunting presence then justifies reaffirming the ban…
Second, consider Jon’s proposal that “it's [a] objectively false that Heidegger is a pernicious philosopher. [and b] … that calling one's colleagues charlatans in public forums is objectively pernicious.” I agree with (b) for the most part, and could point to ethical norms that support that statement. These norms are objective insofar as lots of people in the relevant communities accept them and/or find them persuasive, and I don’t think that view of ethical norms is too far out there.
The (a) part is more difficult. A case that Heidegger has had a pernicious influence on philosophy might go like this: phenomenology had begun to do some interesting work on embodiment and the way that we live socially. Heidegger dropped into that a huge corpus of work that basically diverted philosophy from these important questions into head-scratchers like the need to wait for a “new sending of being.” This return to a very theological mindset got in the way of the ability of philosophy to consider the normative implications of what phenomenology (and other folks like Bergson) had been discovering. Not only that, although Heidegger did in fact claim that thinking was historical, he failed to consider the ways that external factors are essential in understanding the historicity of work. This failure to consider institutional and other political factors was part of what enabled people like Derrida to over-emphasize the supposedly arbitrary nature of political events (Falguni Sheth dismantles the Derridean argument about the arbitrariness of law pretty thoroughly in the context of race. This is also the gist of Foucault’s early complaints about Derrida on Descartes, and of his argument that, even if the author was dead, a la Barthes, the political function of authorship was more vital than ever).
A related complaint is that Heidegger's approach to technology – which required treating pretty much all post-renaissance technology as “essentially” the same – similarly delayed the emergence of much better work, as we find in people like Katherine Hayles, Langdon Winner, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour.
I’m pretty sure Jon doesn’t agree with most of that (and I don’t agree with all of it), and I would expect that we could have a productive discussion about Heidegger’s perniciousness (or not) to philosophy. One of the merits of Heidegger’s work is, of course, his willingness to challenge the idea that truth should be understood as the correspondence between what one says and some sort of objective reality. But I’m not sure it adds a lot to our conversation to use truth-language in our assessment of Heidegger.
Finally, consider the case of mathematics and science. The literature on this topic is huge, and I don’t know much of it, so I won’t attempt to contribute here. What I can say with greater confidence is that a willingness to contextualize truth claims can be important. Take (surprise!) the case of Hobbes on mathematics. Hobbes hated symbolic algebra, and made an unfortunate spectacle of himself by repeatedly insisting on objectively wrong results. Thus, at least, a very reasonable and even correct doxa.
But it turns out that he was not being a complete idiot: the problem was that he fundamentally understood mathematics on classical Greek lines (see also this important and neglected book) such that mathematics was about counting, and that (therefore) homogeneity was important. So for him, algebra and its symbols kept not only comparing apples and oranges, but (even worse), nobody seemed to care. Thus, for Hobbes the debate was about the very meaning of mathematics and of knowledge itself. That in turn matters, I think, because it points to a fundamental tension in his political thought between what amounts to an almost postmodern view of language, and the opposite view of mathematics. So, again, I think it’s important to be able to raise these sorts of contextual and political questions.
In short, my worry – and here the reference is of course Foucault – is that claims to truth will be used to marginalize contextual and political issues, especially when those issues are important to the folks who are marginalized by those truth claims (Exhibit A: “scientific” racism). So I worry that this risk is much greater than the one that disallows statements having a truth value, especially in academic philosophy.
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