The Humbling of the Pride.

• Author: Auxier, Randall E.
• Position: Review

The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation, by Nicholas Capaldi. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998. xiv + 532 pp. $176.

Since some humanistic readers might be somewhat puzzled as to exactly what analytic philosophy is, it seems appropriate to begin this review with an illustrative image. If one imagines that the truth is like a big Water Buffalo, then analytic philosophers are sort of like a pride of lions hunting it down. And indeed the best hunters, the most clever among analytic philosophers, brought down a Water Buffalo at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, what remains to us today are the scrawnier lions quarreling over the privilege of gnawing on a bit of bone, long since picked clean of anything digestible.

One might well call into question the hunt itself, as Capaldi does throughout the book, remarking that truth never was a Water Buffalo, but one might as well tell a lion to be an owl. Analytic philosophers are what they are, and the wise humanist leaves them to their hunting. Their search is barbarous, but it is at least an honest barbarism, expressing the genuine nature of the beast.

Capaldi was trained by lions and hunted with them for a long time, bringing down a gazel or two along the way, but one suspects he was never a lion. For what sort of lion eats the kill and then thinks privately: "there is nothing of wisdom in this"? No true lion can have such a thought. To be a lion is to live in forgetfulness that truth is valued for its rumored ability to make one wise. Wisdom is not a word in the vocabulary of analytic philosophy. As Capaldi consistently points out, analytic philosophers have substituted scientific knowledge of a certain sort for wisdom, and allowed themselves to think that knowledge of the truth either automatically makes one wise or, if it does not, wisdom is of no value. Lions will be lions, and when one gets them in a group, "pride" does indeed seem the aptest collective noun.

Following this image, Capaldi has written a huge book on how and why lions hunt. And this points up its main (perhaps its sole) weakness. Only people who are concerned about the habits of lions would have any reason to pursue the question. On the other hand, if one is not a lion and yet finds oneself surrounded by lions every day, one's interest in reading such a work would be significantly heightened. Analytic philosophers being far more ubiquitous in everyday academia than lions in the wild, perhaps the book will find an audience. But the analytic philosophers themselves are no more likely to read it than actual lions would be.

Capaldi traces the hunting and feeding habits of analytic philosophy to the Enlightenment. "We propose to identify the origins, the original core of ideas, the development of those ideas, and assess analytic philosophy, and we shall do so by putting that movement in historical perspective" (1). Capaldi has thus resolved to remove the lions from the wild for closer study, for in their natural habitat analytic philosophers are almost as unhistorical in their form of consciousness as wildlife, rarely reading anything more than ten years old, feeling no obligation to incorporate the effort and learning of prior generations, reinventing the wheel rather shabbily every few years (a point to which we shall return shortly). Capaldi characterizes this general outlook with the term "elimination," which is "an explicit substitution of new ideas for old ideas . . . radical replacement through innovation" (2). It is part of a larger problem with "the Enlightenment Project," the central topic of the book. Capaldi approach es this task with four major theses, each of which I will discuss in its turn.

The first major thesis is that the analytic tradition is a continuation of "the Enlightenment Project," which is the "attempt to define, explain, deal with the human predicament through science" (2), akin to what Babbitt called "Baconianism." This project is characterized by a certain conception of reason--the tendency to treat Reason, conceived scientifically (in the narrowest sense), as the autonomous arbiter of all truth and knowledge, "freed of any higher authority," self-evident and self-justifying. Reason understood in this way is ahistorical, answering neither to context nor circumstance, and is understandably therefore antihumanist. Such a conception of reason has always had its critics, of course. Hume, with his merciless attack on "false philosophy" in his Treatise, upon which Capaldi has written previously, is a notable...