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Many of Dr. Adler's books are available through The Radical Academy Bookstore. Books
by Mortimer J.
Adler
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The Great Idea of Dialectic, by Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D. (Continued)
Neutrality is not a virtue exclusively possessed or displayed by the dialectician. It is exercised by others who do not normally look upon themselves in that way. It is, for example, a virtue which the encyclopedist regards as a necessity of his profession; it is also displayed by the historian of ideas who wishes to preserve the purity of his historical approach to controversial subjects by maintaining his detachment from the truth or falsity of the theories, of which he aims to give only a historical account. Though the encyclopedist and the historian are not professed dialecticians, the neutrality they try to achieve is, nevertheless, like that of the professional.[7] Nor is impartiality an ideal only for those who are aged in reporting other men's thought. It is also the ideal of the thinker, insofar as he is concerned with the thought of other men in relation to his own. This holds for every field -- history and science as well as theology and philosophy. Anyone who proposes a theory for which he claims truth is obligated to consider the rival claims of other theories. Wherever such rivalry makes anyone a partisan for the view he holds against the partisan views held by others, such partisanship needs to be supplemented by impartiality in order to get at what is dialectically true about the disputed matters. Some philosophers have shown themselves able to achieve a modicum of impartiality in their understanding of theories they reject. Such impartiality, whenever and to whatever extent it is achieved, is akin to the neutrality that is essential to the dialectician. In a sense, the philosopher who manages to be impartial in his treatment of theories he rejects as false does so by functioning like a dialectician. It may be thought that in this respect he does not differ from the historian of ideas or the encyclopedist who also manages to be impartial toward the views he is considering. But to say no more than this would be to overlook a crucially significant difference between them. The historian of ideas and the encyclopedist are not as such engaged in propounding philosophical theories of their own. But the philosopher, precisely in virtue of being a philosopher, takes that to be his principal task. To combine being a philosopher with being something of a dialectician requires the individual, who would try to do both, to overcome a tension between two different kinds of work that does not exist in the case of the historian and the encyclopedist. That is why it is more difficult for one man to be both a philosopher and a dialectician or, what is even harder, to be equally good at both tasks. Hence it can be said that the pursuit of truth requires a division of labor, not only to get the dialectical task itself done well, but also to enable philosophers, assisted by the independent work of dialecticians, to achieve more fully the impartiality that philosophers themselves acknowledge as ideal.[8] But we are here concerned with quite another problem, the reverse of the problem of combining partisanship with impartiality. The question is whether impartiality can be separated from all partisanship. There are really two questions here. (1) Does the dialectician's effort to be neutral require him to be totally without any doctrinal commitments, totally devoid of any point of view of his own? And (2) can anyone who is concerned with truth be so completely detached or open-minded? Let us acknowledge at once that a completely open mind is the mind of an infant, not a man. To be completely without commitments is an unearthly and inhuman state of intellectual innocence. Since the dialectician is ordinary flesh and blood, the answer to the first question cannot be that dialectical neutrality requires the dialectician as a person to achieve absolute point-of-viewlessness or complete detachment from every vestige of philosophical doctrine. There is no reason why a man who engages in dialectical work should not have philosophical views of his own. In fact, if philosophizing is the general vocation of every man regardless of his more specialized profession, the man who engages in dialectical work is no more exempt from this common calling than is the physician or the engineer, the scientist or the historian. Nor can there be any question whether it is possible for the dialectician to achieve the neutrality requisite for his work in spite of his own personal philosophical views, whatever they may be. We have already affirmed that, though difficult, it is certainly possible for the philosopher to combine an impartial understanding of his adversaries with partisanship for his own point of view. In one sense, it should be easier for the dialectician, because he is more nearly in the position of the engineer or the physician. Philosophizing may be his vocation as a man, but it is not part of his work. He can perform his tasks as a dialectician, just as the engineer and the physician can perform their professional duties, without having to be active partisans for a particular philosophical point of view. The professional philosopher, on the other hand, cannot do his work without being an active partisan for the philosophical theories or doctrines he holds to be true. In another sense, the dialectician faces a greater difficulty. Impartiality may be an ultimate ideal for the philosopher to aim at, but he can do his work without achieving it or even if he only approximates it to some degree. As history amply shows, a man may be a great philosopher in the originality and power of his work and, at the same time, have failed signally to combine impartiality with his partisanship. Impartiality, in other words, is an ideal for the philosopher, not a basic necessity. But it is a basic necessity for the dialectician, not an ideal. Unless he can maintain neutrality throughout every phase of his work, he cannot produce the result his method aims at. These things being so, the problem is not whether the dialectician can maintain the neutrality that is indispensable to his work in spite of having some philosophy of his own. The real problem is whether the assumptions implicit in the dialectician's method and aim bring him inevitably into conflict with certain points of view. If that were the case, then the very use of the method itself would elicit from certain quarters the charge that the dialectician cannot accommodate all points of view without prejudice or embarrassment to some of them, at least. To estimate the seriousness of this problem, let us consider a few of the most obvious cases in which the exponent of a certain point of view might object to the dialectician's attempt to treat his doctrine, on the grounds that the dialectical method itself inevitably violates its integrity. The extreme skeptic, for example, might say that the dialectical method assumes that incompatible positions cannot both be true and that, when these are contradictory, one must be true and the other false. This assumption the extreme skeptic rejects. According to his position on truth, either no opinion is true or false or all opinions are equally true or equally false. If the dialectician were to construct the controversy implicit in the discussion of truth itself, the skeptical position would be one he would have to represent on certain basic issues. But this, the skeptic claims, is precisely what he cannot do, at least not fairly, because his method requires him to treat the skeptic's position as if it were either true or false. To treat it that way is to misrepresent the skeptic's intention. The trouble is not that the dialectician as a person holds a point of view contrary to that of the skeptic. The fact that he personally holds a theory of democracy, law, or freedom that is contrary to certain points of view represented in the controversies on those subjects need not prevent him from preserving neutrality in his treatment of them. However difficult that may be, humanly speaking, it is by no means impossible. But if his method itself requires him to override or distort what is essential to a doctrine, like that of the skeptic, then it is absolutely impossible for him to apply that method to the doctrine and at the same time to claim that the doctrine has been treated with the requisite neutrality.[9] The mystic, to take another example, might raise an objection more general than the skeptic's. He might say that the dialectical method assumes that discursive thought is the only approach to knowing the truth. It is, therefore, able to deal only with thought that proceeds in terms of definitions and propositions, premises and conclusions, and the whole apparatus of analysis and reasoning or argumentation. But the mystic's approach to reality is by intuition or vision -- an immediate grasp of the whole without analysis or dissection of any sort, a knowledge of truth that can be expressed without resort to any of the logical articulations involved in discursive thought. Hence if the dialectician were to construct a controversy about any subject on which the mystic claims to have insight, he could not represent what the mystic claims to know without distorting it. The dialectical method itself would make it impossible for him to be fair in his treatment of the mystic. In the foregoing example, the conflict seems to be one between the general methodological assumptions of the dialectician and a methodology (if one can speak of the "method" of a mystic) that denies those assumptions. The mystic is not the only one who might raise an objection of this sort. A similar objection might be raised by any philosopher whose method involves a logic which either transforms or transcends the principles of ordinary logic, such as the familiar "laws of thought" -- the laws of identity, excluded middle, and contradiction. The objecting philosopher can with justice point out that the logic of controversy, which underlies the dialectician's method of constructing one, presupposes (a) that a subject of discussion can be identified and thereafter retain its identity unchanged throughout a prolonged and varied consideration of it; (b) that the answers to a given question are either compatible or incompatible; and (c) that if they are incompatible, either they are contradictory and so exclude a middle ground, or they are not and so permit other alternatives. But according to the method of the objecting philosopher, contradictory positions are seldom if ever exhaustive and exclusive. Their antithetical points can be reconciled in a synthesis that embraces both and includes the partial truths they represent. Therefore, by its acknowledged logical assumptions, the dialectical method inevitably violates a philosophy whose method does not honor those assumptions. In constructing any controversy in which that philosophy should be treated as an important point of view, the dialectician cannot accord it the treatment its own method demands. Closely related to the objection just considered is the objection of the philosopher who insists that the only way his doctrine can be understood is as a whole. To treat any part of it in isolation as a position which can be understood in separation from the systematic context of the whole is to distort the meaning of that part. Yet the dialectician's method of constructing a controversy requires him always to represent the position an author takes on a particular issue, in isolation from that author's whole philosophy. He can never bring an author's whole philosophy to bear on a particular issue. In constructing each issue, he can only formulate positions that are opposed answers to the particular question at issue. He must, therefore, do injustice to any philosophy whose proponent insists that his views on particular subjects cannot be fairly treated when they are wrenched from the whole of which they are integral parts.[10] Finally, since the dialectician's method involves him in dealing with the language of thinkers, not for its own sake but for the sake of comparing their thought, he may meet objections from still another quarter. Concerning language in relation to thought or meaning, the presuppositions of his method are (a) that men can have the same conceptions or meanings in mind even when they use quite different words; (b) that they can have different conceptions or meanings in mind even when they use the same words; and (c) that it is possible to discover which is the case from the way in which they employ whatever words they use. In addition, that phase of his method by which he identifies general subjects of discussion, like democracy, freedom, or law, assumes that the words that name such subjects refer to objects of thought that have reality. These assumptions underlying his method might be challenged by those who hold that language can be made to serve as a medium of emotional or practical communication, but that it sets up an almost insuperable barrier to intellectual communication; and who, in addition, maintain that when words do not refer to particular things, they can only refer to other words or to fictions in the mind itself. From their point of view, the dialectical method rests on a questionable metaphysics if it assumes that two men who are discussing democracy, for example, are referring to anything other than the word itself or the ideas each has in his own mind. It might be said in reply that the method of the semanticist also rests on a questionable metaphysics if it assumes that when two men are talking and thinking about democracy in general, there is no reality whatsoever to which their words and conceptions refer (except, perhaps, such particular things as the democracy of Athens or of the United States, which they were not discussing). But far from removing the objection, this reply makes it clear. The semanticist's objection is precisely that the dialectical method cannot impartially treat his view of language and thought, since the dialectician's use of language rests on a contrary view. In constructing controversies on subjects to which the semanticist's view might be relevant, the dialectician cannot use his method and still remain neutral to all relevant points of view. The foregoing examples of conflict between certain points of view and points of view implicit in the dialectical method itself may not exhaust all the typical cases in which the dialectician's neutrality seems to be destroyed or impaired by his own method. But even if an exhaustive enumeration of such cases had been made, it would still represent a small set of exceptional instances. In other words, the dialectician is not embarrassed by his method in handling most of the points of view with which he must deal on most of the subjects he wishes to treat. That still leaves these exceptions to be considered as a limitation or a blemish on the method, for which the dialectician might otherwise be inclined to claim universal scope or the possibility of unqualified success. Confronted with these exceptions, the dialectician seems to have only two alternatives. (1) In order to preserve his neutrality unimpaired, he can concede the limited applicability of his method. It cannot be applied to all points of view on every subject, but only to those that are unaffected by the application of the method itself. (2) In order to achieve universal scope or comprehensiveness of application, he can explicitly acknowledge that his method is prejudicial to certain points of view. When he treats these points of view, he can compensate to some extent for his inevitable loss of neutrality by acknowledging it. On either alternative, the fact remains that the dialectician must, like any other investigator, pay a certain price for the use of his method.[11] As between these alternatives, the dialectician does not need to make a fixed and unalterable choice. It might conceivably be prudent for him to adopt the first procedure in dealing with a subject like truth or language and omit any reference to the skeptic or the semanticist whose views he cannot treat with the requisite neutrality. But in treating a subject like democracy, law, or freedom, the other choice might be wiser; that is, to treat all relevant points of view even if the method of treating some of them distorts them somewhat, but calling attention, of course, to what is prejudicial in the treatment. One subject that has not so far been mentioned might be thought to raise special difficulties for the dialectician, and that is the nature of dialectic itself. The discussion of dialectic across the centuries contains various, apparently conflicting, theories of what dialectic is and what it does. Endnotes 7. In his Prefatory Notice to the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the editor, Thomas S. Baynes, wrote that, in the conflict of opinion, "a work like the Encyclopedia is not called upon to take any direct part. …It cannot be the organ of any sect or party in Science, Religion, or Philosophy. Its main duty is to give an accurate account of the facts and an impartial summary of results in every department of inquiry and research" (p. viii). Referring to this statement by Baynes, Hugh Chisholm added, in the Editorial Introduction to the Eleventh Edition, that "every effort has been made to obtain, impartially, such statements of doctrine and belief in matters of religion and similar questions as are satisfactory to those who hold them, and to deal with these questions, so far as criticism is concerned, in such a way that the controversial points may be understood and appreciated, without prejudice to the argument" (p. xxi). 8. The main reason for a division of labor is that the philosophical and the dialectical tasks are each arduous and exacting and so make demands on time and energy that it would be very difficult for a single individual to fulfill adequately. It is the tension between the pulls of two different kinds of creative work, not the impossibility of combining partisanship with impartiality, that calls for a division of labor. 9. What is said above about the dialectician's attempt to construct the controversy about truth would hold as well for attempts to deal dialectically with the discussion of certain other subjects on which the skeptic takes an extreme position, such as knowledge or the power of human reason. It would also hold for a dialectical treatment of the discussion of the nature of philosophy, on which subject the contemporary logical positivist or semanticist holds the moderate skeptical view that science is involved with objective truth but that philosophy is not and cannot be. Since the problem about the nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical problem, the dialectician's attempt to construct a controversy about this subject would itself be prejudicial to the view held by the positivist or semanticist, for his method of doing so presumes that objective truth is at stake in philosophical issues -- about philosophy or anything else. 10. In his essay "On Some Conditions of Progress in Philosophical Inquiry," Professor Lovejoy mentions this objection to the dialectical dissection of whole philosophies, when they are treated problem by problem and issue by issue. He quotes, without naming, a colleague who said that philosophical knowledge is characterized by "its incapacity to answer any one of its problems, without anticipating in broad outline the kind of answer that has to be given to all the others. In other words, it deals with problems for which no method of successful isolation has yet been formulated. … The various philosophical problems cannot be, treated as so many separate issues." Commenting on this, Professor Lovejoy points out, first, that only a few philosophers hold a view of philosophy that regards every philosophical issue as "inextricably intertwined with all of the others." And, second, he suggests that by a process of hypothetical reasoning, it is possible to deal piecemeal with doctrines whose exponents insist upon their irrefragable wholeness. See The Philosophical Review 26, 2 (March 1917): pp. 155-58. 11. Modern physics provides us with a striking instance of the general rule that every method imposes certain limitations or has certain defects. Over a large area of the phenomena that the physicist investigates, his methods do not embarrass him in any way. But at the fringes, where he deals with astronomical speeds and distances or with subatomic quantities, the contemporary physicist explicitly recognizes that his techniques of observation affect and limit the results he can obtain. The same thing is, of course, true of the biologist who experiments with living organisms, or of the psychologist who tries to observe mental phenomena under laboratory conditions.
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