Neutrality and Commitment

Mitchell read the manuscript of Faith and Speculation before it was published in 1967, but returned it to Farrer without comment. A case can be made, however, that Mitchell’s inaugural lecture as Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the

Christian Religion at Oxford—delivered on 13 May 1968 and titled ‘Neutrality and Commitment’—constitutes (among other things) Mitchell’s initial reply to Farrer’s first chapter, ‘The Believer’s Reasons.’ Mitchell may not have commented on Farrer’s text, but he was certainly troubled by it and was arguably moved to respond, if only implicitly or subliminally, in this lecture. As stated above, the argument in

Faith and Speculation is often structured in a dialogue form, and in the opening chapter the dialogue takes place between a ‘philosopher’ defending reason and a ‘believer’ defending faith. And, as already cited, when Mitchell first read this chapter he found himself siding with the ‘philosopher’ against the ‘believer.’ It is thus striking that, when formulating his own argument in ‘Neutrality and Commitment,’ Mitchell invokes the same two personae found in the same (compromising) position. Given that Farrer did not die until 29 December 1968, he almost certainly attended Mitchell’s lecture.36

The issue Mitchell explores in this lecture is clearly expressed in the title: the (perceived) problem of reconciling the conflicting demands of neutrality and commitment in the attempt to philosophise or think reasonably about religious

belief—the problem, that is, of being a professional philosopher of religion.

‘Philosophers suspect that the philosopher of religion cannot achieve proper philosophical neutrality. Theologians suspect that he cannot maintain necessary

36

In a personal letter to me, dated 16 June 2009, Professor Mitchell states that he ‘cannot remember if Austin came to my inaugural lecture, but he must have done. We never discussed it and it was not intended as a comment on Faith and Speculation.’ However, as I argue below, the lecture does indeed address the precise issue Farrer deals with in ‘The Believer’s Reasons,’ and it expresses worries about a view at least approximate to Farrer’s, worries that are similar to the concerns that Mitchell later confessed in ‘Two Approaches to the Philosophy of Religion’ about Farrer’s last book. So, even if ‘Neutrality and Commitment’ was not a specific, if indirect, response to the manuscript of Faith and Speculation, it at least provides a clear example of Mitchell’s own thinking about the relation between faith and reason in this period.

Christian commitment.’37 Mitchell continues—in terms reminiscent of Farrer’s ‘The

Believer’s Reasons’—that this particular problem

arises only when the philosopher of religion is himself a believer. As such, it would seem, he is committed to certain beliefs which, in his religious life and thought, are not put in issue. But, as a philosopher, he cannot be so committed, for a philosopher proceeds, as Plato puts it, ‘by destroying assumptions’. It is hard, then, to see how a man can be genuinely a philosopher, if some questions are not open for him.38

As will be seen in more detail in Chapter Four, this is precisely the dilemma Farrer considers in the first chapter of Faith and Speculation. In Farrer’s own words: ‘when philosophical criticism develops it will torture every assumption it has the ability to isolate or define. Meanwhile, the believer, convinced of the reality of what he handles, is entitled to the confidence that his gold will never be proved dross by logical acid.’39 As stated above, the similarity of Mitchell’s and Farrer’s language is

striking, as well as their identical formulation of the dilemma, if not their solution to it. Thus, in ‘Neutrality and Commitment,’ Mitchell concedes: ‘There is, I think, a

genuine problem here—and probably more than one.’40

However, before presenting his own solution to this dilemma (which may or may not differ from Farrer’s, depending on one’s interpretation), Mitchell considers an alternative position (which again may or may not differ from Farrer’s, depending on one’s interpretation). Mitchell disarmingly admits that he may have ‘totally misconceived the character of both philosophy and theology, and that, given a proper understanding of the role of philosophy and religion, a conflict of the sort I have tried to analyse cannot conceivably occur. Broadly speaking, the argument would be either

37

Mitchell, ‘Neutrality and Commitment,’ 119. Originally published in pamphlet form as Neutrality and Commitment (Oxford University Press, 1968), reprinted in Basil Mitchell, How to Play Theological Ping-Pong, 113-131. I will cite from this version.

38

Ibid.

39

Farrer, Faith and Speculation, 12-13.

(or both) that philosophy is innocuous or that religion is invulnerable.’41 From both

philosophical and theological directions, this position is equivalent to fideism. But Mitchell accepts neither this view of philosophy, nor this view of religion, which he associates with certain followers of Wittgenstein.42

Although he specifically refers here to what has widely come be to known as ‘Wittgensteinian fideism,’ Mitchell could just as well have Farrer’s ‘The Believer’s Reasons’ in mind when he maintains that ‘it will not do to maintain either that the religious believer’s account of his faith is sacrosanct and that no philosophical critique can touch it by way of analysing its concepts or assessing its arguments, or that it is open to philosophers to go through religious claims and check their adequacy without making a serious and sympathetic attempt to consider the arguments by which they are supported.’43 Whether or not this is an accurate reading of Farrer remains to be

seen, but based on his comments in ‘Two Approaches to the Philosophy of Religion,’ this does indeed seem to be what Mitchell took him to be saying at the time. But, explicitly rejecting such Wittgensteinian (or Farrerian?) fideism, Mitchell insists that religious belief ‘is not inherently invulnerable to philosophical criticism, and therefore

41

Ibid., 126.

42

See page 127 for the reference to ‘thinkers under the influence of Wittgenstein, reinforcing a fideist strand in theology itself’ who urge that ‘faith can only be judged by criteria intrinsic to religion,’ which forms its own ‘language game’ and ‘form of life.’ Mitchell does not name any specific figures, but as Kai Nielson’s (in)famous essay on ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’ was published the previous year, in

Philosophy 42 (1967), and since D. Z. Phillips had already published The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965) and Religion and Understanding (New York: Macmillan, 1967), it is not difficult to guess whom Mitchell has in mind. The question of whether this is an acceptable interpretation of either Wittgenstein or his followers is extensively debated in Kai Nielson and D. Z. Phillips, Wittgensteinian Fideism? (SCM Press, 2005), which also includes Nielson’s original article. The locus classicus remains Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, edited by Cyril Barrett (Basil Blackwell, 1966).

the individual who is committed to a religious faith incurs a risk of possible refutation’.44 The lecture concludes as follows:

To avoid discussion with intellectual rigor of controversial issues about morality, politics, and religion, about which individuals are or ought to be committed, is likely to lead to one or the other of two undesirable consequences: a reluctance to commit oneself at all; or a refusal to think about or allow others critically to discuss the causes to which one is enthusiastically committed. Rather than aim at a neutrality which is, perhaps in theory, and certainly in practice, unattainable, we should register our commitment to conventions of free, fair, and disciplined debate.45

Not the fideism of either ‘innocuous’ philosophy or ‘invulnerable’ religion but ‘commitment to free, fair, and disciplined debate’ is what Mitchell insists upon in religion no less than in other contested fields such as ethics and politics. He is keenly aware that strict neutrality may well be impossible—and indeed even undesirable— but this does not eliminate the requirement to abide by the ‘conventions’ of rationality.46