Raymond Tallis is a fierce and entertaining critic of much of what passes for modern French philosophy. Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault have especially inspired his ire, which has been spilt in copious quantities across the letters pages of the Guardian this past week. Most recently, Tallis cites Heidegger and Wittgenstein as "the most important philosophers of the 20th century". An interesting question arises in this debate about the reputation of European philosophy. Where are the British?
Which philosophers can you name who are alive and working in Britain today? Probably the most likely to come to mind are Alain de Botton and A C Grayling, De Botton because of his new book on architecture, aesthetics, and happiness, Grayling because of his remarkable output in newspapers, magazines and books. Neither de Botton nor Grayling has tried to apply his skills systematically to the serious social, political and global problems of our time. At least not yet; there is no treatise from them in the mould of a Hobbes or a Hume.
Less prolific philosophers have tried hard to connect abstract theory to applied practice. Mary Warnock on fertility, Jonathan Glover on humanitarianism, Ted Honderich on political violence, Onora O'Neill on trust, Julian Baggini on the meaning of life, Mary Midgley on the limits of science, Simon Blackburn on just about everything and Tallis himself on what it is to be human.
With the exceptions, perhaps, of Mary Warnock and Onora O'Neill, none of these writers has been able to make a deep or lasting mark on our times. Too many of their contributions have been eddies at the edge of the mainstream. They have been unable to project themselves as effective public scrutineers of our mission and morals. None have achieved the kind of recognition and influence of, for example, Peter Singer (on animal rights) or Daniel Dennett (on the implications of evolution). In Britain, that comparable position of social authority has been occupied far more successfully by historians and natural scientists. Philosophers, either by their own choosing or through the resistance of sceptical editors, have largely been silent. This loss has created a huge cultural vacuum.
What should British philosophy aspire to? Immanuel Kant, in his neglected but illuminating essay on The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), compared the roles of what he called the higher faculties (theology, law, medicine) with the lower faculty of philosophy. He did so at a critical moment in Prussia's history. Frederick the Great had died in 1786. He had been succeeded by his nephew, Frederick William II. Whereas the former Frederick gave the academic community enormous freedom to dissent and argue, his successor ushered in a new era of censorship. Discussion of Kant's own philosophy of religion, for example, was banned.
Kant rebelled. He saw philosophy as a crucial tool to test the thought of government and the higher faculties. His essay began life as a letter to a friend, Professor C W Hufeland at the University of Jena. Kant's argument subsequently appeared in a medical journal, of all the unlikely places (The Journal of Practical Pharmacology and Surgery). Kant wrote: "It is absolutely essential that the learned community at the university also contain a faculty that is independent of the government's command ... one that ... is free to evaluate everything ... one in which reason is authorised to speak out publicly." Philosophers were valuable to the extent that they sought out truth, "the essential and first condition of learning".
This sense that philosophers should occupy a special and uniquely privileged position in our national conversation is absent from Britain today. The last philosopher who lived as successfully in the public as well as the academic sphere was Isaiah Berlin. While Britain has tipped into philosophical decline, so America has risen triumphantly. John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Paul Boghossian, Martha Nussbaum. Their reach extends significantly beyond the academy.
These Americans now embody Kant's hope for independent-minded thinking about society in its various states. It seems there is little prospect that such ambition will prosper in modern British faculties of philosophy. Boghossian prefaces his recent study of how we think and whether "we have fundamentally misconceived the principles by which society ought to be organised" (Fear of Knowledge, 2006), by noting that his book is intended not only for philosophers but also for "anyone who values serious argument".
But in our contemporary escape from serious ideas - from the very notion of seriousness itself - our flight into the arms of irony and satire, while wonderfully bracing, leaves us all the poorer. Short-term and ephemeral gratification, perhaps. But longer-term moral stagnation and depravity.
