Intellectual Honesty

Walter Kaufmann on a Neglected Virtue

In his book The Faith of a Heretic, Walter Kaufmann spells out an ethic of intellectual honesty. (The book covers many other topics, but that's the core of it.) He sets admirably high standards for himself and anyone else who would, in the words of his fellow philosopher Jan Patočka, live in truth. As Kaufmann presents it, intellectual honesty is a challenging virtue because we're all liable to limit ourselves to the comfortable confines of what we already know - or think we know.

Here are some of the particular practices suggested by Kaufmann that I found especially significant:

• Develop a keen intellectual conscience, i.e., make your beliefs, opinions, statements, and philosophical commitments a matter of conscience. Specific qualities here include being imaginative, careful, and scrupulous.

• Don't fear disagreement. Indeed, "fear of disagreement is for a philosopher what fear of getting hurt is for a soldier — cowardice." Shun facile agreement, seek out disagreement, and explore plausible alternatives to your own long-held views.

• Avoid self-deception. Because (as I like to say) self-deception is the easiest thing in the world, avoiding it can be quite difficult and involves, among other things, trying to see your own faults — perhaps with a little help from your friends or your intellectual opponents.

• Don't think in labels or assume that label-like concepts ("good", "evil", etc.) have one central meaning that everyone agrees on. The most important concepts are fundamentally contested.

• Raise your standards and demand more of yourself. Most people are honest, but (according to Kaufmann) minimally so because they don't want to rock the boat. The deeply honest person should seek out other perspectives, criticize their own positions, remain open to objections, and retain only what stands up in the face of thoroughgoing examination.

• Don't begin with your own viewpoint and then repudiate whatever conflicts with it; instead, repeatedly encounter other viewpoints in a spirit of dialogue, opening yourself to objections, concerns, alternatives, modifications, replies, and refutations.

• Get specific. For instance, when weighing the place of a particular character trait in your own personal ethic, reflect on the ramifications of abandoning it altogether, consider what can be said against it, imagine what society would be like without it, etc.

• Don't be noncommittal. Take a stand, stick your neck out, and engage in what John Herman Randall (in his book on Aristotle) called "the passionate search for passionless truth."

Although these principles are admirable, it's hard to put them into practice!

Photo by Felipe Pérez Lamana on Unsplash