Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique Of Analytic Philosophy

Fashionable Nihilism This page intentionally left blank. Fashionable Nihilism A Critique of Analytic Philosophy Bruce Wilshire State University of New York Press Published by State University of New York Press, Albany State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, State Street, Suite , Albany, NY Production by Dana Foote Marketing by Patrick Durocher Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilshire, Bruce W. Fashionable nihilism : a critique of analytic philosophy / Bruce Wilshire. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN - - - (alk. paper) — ISBN - - - (pbk. : alk. paper) . Philosophy. . Analysis (Philosophy). I. Title. B .W ′. —dc For my Pluralist colleagues, here and there, young and old, and to the memory of my grand teachers at New York University. This page intentionally left blank. There are many things to know in this world, but how to live is the only thing that really matters. —Leo Tolstoy Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up in our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. —William James I may know something but insulate the knowledge, as it were . . . live as if it were not there. If knowledge is to bear fruit in us, we must think of it daily . . . [it must] affect me bodily here and now. I know of it, to be sure, when I am asked; but I think there is time. No, there is not much time. —Karl Jaspers In those days I was convinced that I sincerely and totally affirmed certain propositions, such as, “The sun is shining.” I would have said that my belief in the reality of the sun’s shining was complete and unreserved. But the sunlight didn’t reach me, didn’t suffuse me through and through. —Anonymous This page intentionally left blank. CONTENTS Preface / xi Nihilistic Consequences of Analytic Philosophy / “The Ph.D. Octopus”: William James’s Prophetic Grasp of the Failures of Academic Professionalism / The Pluralist Rebellion in the American Philosophical Association / Phenomenology in the United States / Nature or Nurture?: The Significance of Indigenous Thought / Conceptual Problems in Grasping Genocide / Henry Bugbee: Philospher of Intimacy / William James on the “Spiritual” / Looking for Bek / Acknowledgments / Index / This page intentionally left blank. PREFACE What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . Our whole European culture is moving for some time now, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward catastrophe: restless