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PARTISAN REVIEW
analytic tradition is dominant might do well to tackle this section of
the book . Such a reading would not, however, confirm in the mind
of anyone who had it the idea that philosophy is an amateur subject
that any clever person can enter and immediately lay about him to
good effect.
If,
for all its merits, this book is not as a whole really successful,
this may be partly the result of its author's idiosyncratic and ques–
tionable views on philosophical method . Nozick wants, he says, to
explain how certain things are possible, as, for instance, knowledge ,
free will, and objective ethical truth. We think that they must be pos–
sible, and yet that they cannot be; and he hopes to liberate us from
this kind of tangle in our thoughts. One is reminded of the therapeu–
tic view of philosophy proposed by Wittgenstein in his later works,
in spite of the fact that Nozick holds the curious belief that for
Wittgenstein philosophical problems were not "real." In method ,
however, Nozick could not be more different from Wittgenstein .
Where Wittgenstein is like a stern therapist interested only in expos–
ing the root causes of our problems, Nozick is more like one who
offers the patient various ways of organizing his life and thoughts.
Wittgenstein believes that whenever, in philosophical perplexity, we
feel that we cannot see our way around, the cause lies in some deeply
compelling but misleading picture of a part of our conceptual life–
as for instance when we represent thinking as an incorporeal process
lying behind what we say and do. So nothing will help us if it does
not put this right. Nozick, on the other hand, seems to think it useful
to give all sorts of explanatory schemes in which the warring ele–
ments in our thought are reconciled in ways that satisfy us in vary–
ing degrees, as if he thought organization were what we lack . And it
is perhaps this that sends him , in many places, to large abstract con–
structions, the search for unifying themes, and the manipulation of
ill-defined notions such as that of "organic unity" and the tracking
of "values qua values." This kind of thing can be frustrating , and
one suspects that it is also dangerous. When Nozick countenances
an argument for retributive punishment based on the idea that the
option of reforming the criminal is not a proper response to "bad–
ness qua badness," he is dealing in the kind of coin that disreputable
ideologues, who lack Nozick's own decency, know very well how to
spend.
PHILIPPA FOOT
