Of course social context affects philosophy! The society you live in affects how you eat, sleep, travel, marry or don’t–everything else. Why not your philosophical behavior?
But philosophers are traditionally eager to deny this, to imagine all philosophy as being done, in Peter Hylton’s words, “at a single timeless moment” (Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy p. vii). Claiming independence from social—and political—pressures is almost a defining characteristic of philosophy.
Philosophers avoid politics primarily, if not solely, by claiming exclusive allegiance to the standards of reason. If what philosophers say is required by universal standards that hold for all cultures and societies, then it can hardly respond to political or social circumstances. Reason buys cultural and political independence.
The problem is that in order for that sort of argument to work, the standards of reason themselves must already have been established: I can hardly defend a conclusion or a topic by claiming that it is what reason demands if I don’t yet know generally what reason demands. So what about our rational standards themselves? Until they have been defined, philosophy is wide open to social, political, and even familial, pressures
At which point the study of the “politics of reason,” the subtitle of both the Philosophy Scare book and this blog, becomes an important and necessary field.
So have the standards of reason been defined? Not fully, and not for all time. Even logic is turning out to be rather protean. And whether logic is coextensive with reason itself is, I think, a lot more open than it is often thought to be. (Hint: a defense of the rationality of dialectics is upcoming on this blog. And if dialectics can be rational, what can’t?).
What is there for a philosopher to do if the very starting point of philosophy, its definition of reason and its concomitant definition of reason’s goal, truth, may be affected by social and political pressures? Answer: reflect on those pressures as best you can, with whatever local tools are available to clarify what I call the ”parameters” that constitute your “situation.” Only when you have identified those parameters, and determined their origins and trajectories, can you formulate what you really need: a clear and rigorous definition of reason.
Such reflection, then, is pre-rational. Is it therefore impossible? Ask Nietzsche; his account, On the Genealogy of Morality, of the “ascetic ideal” is a paradigm of the genre.