24 YEARS AFTER (PART I)
Reflections on my Time in the Ditch
When I left the Americana philosophy profession in 2001, it was intractably riven by the analytic-continental split and healed not at all by a strange obsession with departmental rankings. As it dwindled in the rear view mirror of my academic career, I assumed that I had dwindled in its (I hadn’t exactly loomed large there anyway). But on a recent visit to Daily Nous, I saw a couple of commentators to a post on “externalist explanations of philosophy”[1] using my name as if they expected others to know it. So I thought it may not be out of bounds, 24 years after my Time in the Ditch appeared, to discuss a few of the reactions to it.
I had experienced at least one of those reactions myself. If you are used to the standard thesis-plus-argument format of philosophical papers, where a precise thesis is first stated and then lucidly argued for, what I will call the “fog of history” can come as a shock. And yet, in history, fog abounds. Was January 6, 2020 an “insurrection”? Who killed JFK? Why did we really fight the Civil War, or for that matter the Revolutionary War? Was the French Revolution a good idea? Did the Reformation reform anything? When did the Roman Empire fall? Or did it?
Historical evidence usually points in a variety of directions. I can testify that if you are a philosopher doing history, you keep thinking that with little more effort, a few more discoveries, the fog will be dispelled. It rarely is. New documents, for example. almost always raise new questions of their own. I was surprised at how unintelligible a document is when it first turns up. You have to fit it into a sequence of events make any sense of it at all—but that sequence itself has to be documented. Circular fog? Fogal regress?
No wonder that, as one historian friend told me, historians don’t tend to call their explanations “true” or “false,” but to describe them in terms such as “suggestive” or “illuminating” (or not). The crisp clarities of philosophy, as dear to me as anyone, are not to be found. Seeking them, in fact, blocks investigation, for foggy mountains can slip past you while you search for clarity.
So when people reacted to Time in the Ditch by saying that it thesis was imprecise and not nailed down, I could only agree. Some things, to be sure, were clear. Documents from Committee A of the American Association of University Professors recorded a number—for the size of the discipline, a surprisingly large number—of cases where careers had been summarily ended (Time in the Ditch pp. 25-26). Historical literature (especially Ellen Schrecker’s No Ivory Tower, Oxford 1986) showed that several of these, including those of senior professors Barrows Dunham, Stanley Moore, William Parry, and especially Herbert Phillips, got a lot of publicity at the time and were explicitly politically motivated.
In other cases, such as that of Morris Judd at the University of Colorado, things were foggier. Judd, a junior philosophy professor, was called in by the University’s president and told to clear out his office at the end of the term. He did, and spent his working life managing a junkyard. He did not see the “evidence” against him until fifty years later—and even then, he said, it made no sense to him. The two witnesses against him were identified, for example, only as “A” and “B”). Disgruntled students? Jealous colleagues? Anti-Semites?
This murkiness, I fear, was intentional: As I document in my second book on the topic, The Philosophy Scare (Chicago 2016), Red hunters soon realized that junior faculty were relatively easy prey: they had no network of friends and supporters on campus, and did not have the protection of tenure. This left them, like Judd, with no reasonable alternative but to go quietly after a private warning from campus officials. It is thus reasonable to believe that there were many cases similar to Judd’s but which, unlike Judd’s, will never be uncovered.
In the absence of clarity, reasonableness became an important criterion, and in two forms: Is it reasonable for us, today, to accept (in one sense or another) some historical explanation? And are the motivations it attributes to the actors at the time themselves reasonable?
Take the second sense first. Would it have been reasonable, given the number and fame of the cases leveled against philosophers, for a hiring department not to take them as warnings? Wouldn’t it have been, not merely unreasonable, but irresponsible for a philosophy department not to worry about political allegiances when making a hire? If it was reasonable for philosophy departments to take such care in hiring, it is also reasonable for us to accept that political concerns influenced at least some hiring, and firing, decisions.
It would also be unreasonable for us to seek complete clarity in the matter. Solid evidence would have to consist in testimony from philosophers and departments that they allowed political considerations to affect their hiring. But an academic personnel decision is deeply confidential; that political influences played any role in it would hardy be something to shout from the rooftops. (I did eventually find that in 1953, members of the UCLA philosophy department, in personal correspondence, did make such admissions regarding a job description—see The Philosophy Scare p. 42. But that evidence defied my *reasonable* expectations.)
I was left with what Plato called a likely story, and philosophers don’t deal in likely stories; basic norms of the philosophy profession tell us to avoid them: If you can’t mail it down, shut up about it. This attitude allows for the kind of “internalist” history of arguments that Scott Soames presents in his fascinating Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, but not for much else. To step outside that is to step into fog.
Moreover, we can “accept” an historical explanation in at least two ways: as the likely story of what actually happened, or merely as a subject deserving further investigation. My personal aim was the second. The reason was simple. I figured that if evidence for McCarthyite influence on American philosophy was there—and the Committee A reports constituted such evidence—somebody would eventually come across it. I thought it was better for philosophers to present and debate that evidence themselves first, rather than be taxed with it later by outsiders.
Let’s face it: I knew even then that there were plenty of people, usually in other humanistic disciplines, who thought that philosophers were arrogantly dismissive of any work but their own kind. (My subsequent life outside philosophy departments confirmed this impression.) If someone like that ever got ahold of actual evidence that American philosophy had been shaped, not merely by superior intellectual quality, but also by political forces, it would be much worse for philosophy than if philosophers themselves recognized and debated the issue first. In short, I saw myself as inside the tent pissing out; others would see me as outside the tent, pissing in. The fog of history engulfed me.
So there was a degree of urgency to the project. When an issue is new and complex but needs discussion, you have to be suggestive and even vague. Criticisms that I don’t state things clearly enough thus miss the mark. I was calling for help, not demonstrating a truth, for the necessary discussion would have to be a communal effort. So I had to publish my research, even in its state of imperfection.
It is true, however, that some of Time in the Ditch’s fog was eventually dispelled. While the McCarthy Era was in general directed against Communism and, in the words of the UCLA Daily Bruin at the time, “anything that might faintly resemble it,” in the case of philosophy it tended to take the specific form of opposition to what testimonies of the time revealed to have been Communism’s single most hateful feature in the minds of many Americans: its implacable atheism. Years after Time in the Ditch came out, I would discover in the UCLA archives a stack of letters protesting the 1947 hiring of Max Otto, a prominent Pragmatist and past president of the American Philosophical Association’s Western Division, for a one-semester visiting professorship at UCLA. No one called him a Communist, or even a leftist, and certainly no one accused him of being a “continental” philosopher (the term did not exist yet); but he was an outspoken atheist. This became public knowledge when the Los Angeles Examiner, the city’s Hearst newspaper, published an article, prominently placed on page 3 (the local news page), entitled “Otto. Center of Atheistic Row, to Teach at UCLA” (see The Philosophy Scare p. xi). A couple of the protest letters even said that hiring Otto in any other department would pose no problem, “but in philosophy, he would have a chance to teach his atheism.” This was no isolated sentiment, for it echoed the judicial decision in the 1940 case of Bertrand Russell’s hiring at CUNY. Russell’s defenders argued that the famous atheist had been hired to teach logic and mathematics, not metaphysics. But the judge wrote:
It has been argued that he is going to teach mathematics. His appointment, however, is to the department of philosophy at City College (quoted at Monk, Bertrand Russeell, 2000: 237).
Neither Otto nor Russell, in spite of all their prestige, ever served in the positions they had been hired for. The junior likes of Morris Judd clearly had no chance.
[1] https://dailynous.com/2023/12/01/externalist-explanations-of-philosophy/