Each of these two schools views “the other with varying degrees of incomprehension and suspicion,” Tebbit said in an interview with the Mehr News Agency conducted by Hossein Kaji and Javad Heirannia.
Tebbit made these remarks in answer to the question: “Is the 20th century the best century in the history of philosophy? Why?”
Following is the full answer:
I don’t think I have been asked such a question before, and I find it exceptionally difficult to answer concisely. There are so many different criteria one could apply to compare the quality of philosophy through the centuries. It depends so much on our historical perspective, and indeed what we include in our history of the century just passed, and how we structure it. In assessing their own age, everyone has their own preferences. Mine are for the philosophies of A.N.Whitehead and Georg Lukacs, two philosophers whose originality and breadth of vision matches any of their predecessors, but this judgement will only be vindicated, if at all, by a very long-term perspective. It is a fact that many of the best philosophers of the twentieth century have fallen beneath the radar for long periods. Some of them, such as the remarkable succession of North American philosophers in the early years of the century, namely Peirce, James and Dewey, for so long disparaged under the collective heading ‘American Pragmatism’, have re-emerged with enhanced reputations in the new century. What we have also suffered from is the arbitrary division of philosophy into the so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ schools, with each side viewing the other with varying degrees of incomprehension and suspicion.
Even if we could agree on what constitutes the history of the 20th century, how can we compare it with past ages? Early last century, Whitehead declared that the history of philosophy is one long footnote to Plato and Aristotle, and in many respects this is still true, a century later. Aristotle in particular is unrivalled for comprehensiveness and originality. How can we look back across the last century and claim that there are any individual figures with the stature to match these Greek philosophers, or for that matter to rival Aquinas, Descartes, Kant and Hegel?
From the standpoint of the present day, the chequered history of the battles in philosophy in our own time is a source of endless fascination. One reason, though, that future generations or different civilizations might judge the 20th century disfavourably in comparison with earlier times – especially the age of the scientific revolution, a century packed with genius and philosophical profundity [1580s to 1700] – is that they will regard the gradual divergence of natural philosophy into specialised sciences and professional philosophy as a disaster. The philosophy of the 17th century and the 18th century Enlightenment changed the course of world history – is it even possible to imagine the same for the 20th?
One distinctive feature of recent decades in Anglo-American philosophy is the increasing clarity and precision that contemporary philosophical training demands. In this respect, it is indeed possible to see it as ‘the best’ century yet. One reason for the flourishing of philosophy as an academic discipline in both Anglo-centred and European philosophy is the unprecedented state funding of professional teachers and researchers, so that there is a relatively stable body of philosophical thought steadily expanding, on a scale unknown to previous ages. The scholarly attention to detail and density of reasoned argument, subject to a vast array of criticism by peers, indicates some kind of ‘progress’ in the discipline, or at least in some areas of it.
Certainly new perspectives on the human predicament, or at least new refinements of old ones, are being articulated every day of the week in North American, British and European universities. Such exemplary professionalism might look impressive now, but might not a historical view many generations hence look back and see this as a rather flat and superficial age, too uncritical of the surrounding political structures and which turned in on itself by too long a neglect of the history of its own subject, a neglect which has only in the past few decades been partly mitigated?
A retrospective assessment of the decades around the turn of the 21st century might see in the process of the naturalisation of philosophy an over-reaction to the stubborn independence of philosophy from the natural sciences, resulting not in a fruitful critical engagement with those sciences, as with the philosophy of the early moderns, but rather in an uncritical submission to the findings of neurophysiology and other sciences.
Future philosophers might skip over our century as a time in which nothing much happened. Such a judgement would come as a shock to many of us, but this has been the way of it since time immemorial.
JH/HK
END
MNA
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