Nazi Philosophers

This article appeared in the Telegraph a few days ago chronicling the rise of Nazi philosophers in Hitler's Germany:

‘[Most academics in Germany] did not merely reconcile themselves to Hitler. They enthusiastically espoused Nazi ideology, and came up with all sorts of elaborate reasons to justify the purging of Jews, the persecution of dissidents, and the conquest and oppression of other nations. They went out of their way to flaunt their loyalty to the Nazi cause.’

The diagnosis of why this happened that caught my eye:

‘Their deluded enthusiasm for the debased ideology of the Nazis is an instance of the fact that people who spend their lives debating abstract issues can become so distanced from the quotidian world that they can no longer see the obvious.’

This is a thought that I’m not wholly hostile to (although it's not clear it explains the uptake of Nazism amongst academics: plenty of people who occupied the "quotidian world" were Nazis too), but Palmer continues:

‘Philosophers are particularly vulnerable to this form of idiocy, because there is so little content to their subject.  It does not consist in the discovery of new facts, and philosophical theories are only seldom decisively refuted by anything.  Fashion is often the most important factor in explaining which doctrines come to be accepted by any group of academic philosophers.’

I think there is a more charitable explanation to be had.  Philosophy involves teasing out the consequences of various commitments.  This involves three responsibilities, one critical, one ampliative and one justificatory. [I'm drawing on Brandom's Reason in Philosophy here.]  The critical responsibility is to rectify mutually incompatible commitments, it is to ensure that one's system of beliefs is consistent.  If one maintains P, $\neg$Q and P $\rightarrow$ Q, then at least one of these commitments must be jettisoned.  The ampliative responsibility is to become aware of the material consequences of one's current commitments.  Acknowledged commitments give rise to further commitments that one may not yet be aware of.  The responsibility to make oneself aware of these further commitments and to integrate them appropriately into the whole is a responsibility that aims at completeness.  Whereas the ampliative responsibility looks inferentially downstream, the justificatory responsibility looks inferentially upstream.  Agents are responsible for offering reasons for their commitments, by claiming commitments that entitle them to their current commitments.  The justificatory responsibility is directed at ensuring that one's network of commitments is warranted.  Philosophy is aimed at acquiring a certain kind of understanding, an integration of our beliefs into a coherent whole.  Unearthing our inferential commitments however can only take us so far; it can tell us that P, $\neg$Q and P $\rightarrow$ Q are not compossible, but it does not tell us what thereby to so; whether to reject our belief P, our belief $\neg$Q, or whether to reconsider the conditional itself.  As the saying goes, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.

This goes some way to explaining why philosophers aren’t inoculated from evil political ideologies.  An ability to reason is not, by itself, sufficient to steer away from such things.  In fact, an ability to reason can aid dogmatism, as it makes it easier to defend a view, any view, from counterarguments.  The lesson I think ought to be drawn from the sad prevalence of Nazi philosophers isn’t that philosophy “lacks content” (however that view is parsed), but that rational nous alone isn’t enough to get at the truth; we also require the intellectual virtues of open-mindedness, independence of thought, intellectual honesty and humility, and self-awareness.  Reason, in this sense, is rather like courage: whether it is used for good or ill depends on the other character traits of those who employ it.