Leaving Your Ego at Home: on being a historian of philosophy

And, herein lies, I think, one of the great things about doing philosophy through historical figures like Leibniz. Whilst it’s very hard to leave your ego at home, there is less personal at stake when trying to discuss what you think Leibniz thought about x than when trying to say what you think about x. For one thing, everyone knows deep down, it would be crazy to think that they understood Leibniz an sich, and, for another, we all know he was a lot better at philosophy that we will ever be! And yet the joy of thinking philosophically is ever present.--Paul Lodge.

If I am granted the (extremely) controversial claim that studying Leibniz is no different than studying any other canonical, and would be canonical, author,* then in the quoted passage from Paul Lodge, one can read (at least) four claims about being a historian of philosopher: 

1. One's ego is less involved in studying a canonical philosophy than philosophizing directly.
2. The people we study are "a lot better at philosophy" than "we will ever be."
3. It is nearly impossible to fully understand a canonical philosopher.
4. Being a historian of philosophy is a joyful activity.

Claim (1) will come as a surprise to those only focused on the often minute squabbles among historians of philosophy. Even so, there is an important element of truth to (1). This is not because historians of philosophy are by nature less ego driven or vain -- Schliesser is exhibit A to the contrary --, but because part of the training of becoming a historian of philosophy is a disciplined bracketing of one's ego. For, whatever one's ultimate goal(s) in being (momentarily) a historian of philosophy (and there are huge disagreements over this), an attempt to grasp another thinker(s)'s text is a key part of it. One central benefit of this disciplined exercise in understanding another is to become self-aware of one's presuppositions that one brings to the text. When historians of philosophy complain about anachronism, what they really worry about is the unthinking, un-methodical, even unconscious imposition of the reader's thought-world onto the text. This unconscious thought-world is a whole series of expectations about how words, concepts, meanings, terminologies, grammar, values, as well as political and cultural practices (etc.) relate to each other. We can become aware of such hard to detect expectations of our ego, when we systematically confront utterances by others that do not fit our expectations in usual even uncanny ways.

So, the historian of philosophy is increasingly skilled at being self-ware of central, usually hidden, features of her own ego while she gets increasingly skilled at entering into another person's text. So, the disciplined student of the history of philosophy is following the Delphic injunction to know herself. Along the way she learns to 'bracket' her own ego in  the midst of grasping the text of another. In practice, this 'bracketing' of one's ego is always imperfect, which is why, say, the writings of historians of philosophy tend to reflect the ruling fashions of the generations of their teachers (give or take). Either way, one way to understand Lodge's claim is to see that when one philosophizes 'directly' (without mediation of historical texts) the hidden life of one's ego is, even if one has a naturally modest nature, not as systematically bracketed all else being equal. In practice, of course, all else is not equal, and there are lots of other philosophical and social practices that can generate some such bracketing of one's ego (say disciplined by formal technologies, or by dissonances through one's cultural back-ground, etc.). Having granted that last point, so many of the worst social incentives in philosophy reward the hyper-projection of one's ego onto metaphysical or social reality; the previous sentence is not as cryptic as it sounds. Here's a small example: status in our discipline tracks rapid come-backs, witty put-downs, and bold conjecture (backed up with plausible enough systematic analysis); we rarely reward, in our public esteem, sympathetic colleagues that are incredibly good at listening to another and bringing out the best feature of their interlocuter's views. (Obviously, when we are drafting a paper we very much appreciate having the sympathetic colleague.) Being trained as a historian of philosophy is to be trained into becoming a sympathetic colleague. (Again, this is compatible with the further thought that a historian of philosophy is uncouth, listens to bad pop music, a jerk, etc.)  

Agreement over Paul Lodge's (2) is not as widely shared as one would wish. There are plenty of historians of philosophy that happily improve on the authors studied. Often this is thought refreshing or in the service of truth. It often generates really interesting works (see anything by Jonathan Bennett). Even the widely-adhered-to-so-called 'principle-of-charity' does not really recognize the full force of (2); this principle encourages readers to let the utterances from a canonical author come out coherent and true by our lights, and so imposes a kind of flattening conformity on a text from the past (for more on this topic see Melamed). Moreover, it is extremely natural to think that by being later in time one knows better. Sometimes this nearness-bias is facilitated by knowledge of scientific and mathematical advances, or even moral development. It is undeniable that modern intellectual technologies can facilitate in diagnosing the ways some claims hang together or if they are even capable of grasping the truth. Even so, in practice modern intellectual technologies have a tendency to distort how we read past texts rather than enhance our understanding--this is why  so many of my fellow historians of philosophy have an instinctive distrust of anachronism (recall the exchanges here).

There is also a demographic argument against (2). There are a lot more people studying philosophy today than at any other given historical moment. For all its limitations, philosophy is more inclusive today and literacy more widespread. So, one might expect us to do better than past thinkers. Even so, there are also first-mover-advantages. A lot of canonical philosophers of the past are in one way or another some such first-movers: they are the first to grapple with new intellectual technologies, or the first to theorize certain enduring cultural phenomena (sometimes these phenomena or technologies endure because of them). Transition periods are fertile because when things are freshly experienced trade-offs are more visible to informed spectators, and practices/views that are taken for granted are re-evaluated.

Even so, it's not easy to convince people of the merit of Lodge's (2) because it offends against a kind of democratic sensibility--you are as good as your last argument. But as I have mentioned before given that our philosophical culture is overwhelmingly problem/puzzle-solving focused, studying a systematic philosopher of the past can train the developing (and advanced) mind to learn to discern interconnected features of philosophy. (In polemical context I have offered Thomas Nagel's Mind & Cosmos as evidence for my claim that even the very best of our philosophers lack sensitivity to systematic entailments.) The few folk that survive historical, ongoing systematic criticism and engagement are those thinkers that have, in fact, a proven track-record of sensitivity to some such systematic entailments. (Again, this claim is compatible with the further claims that (a) others would also survive some such ongoing scrutiny, and (b) that such thinkers also utter many more false-by-science's lights claims.) Of course, not all canonical thinkers are 'systematic' in this sense, but prior to the rise of analytical philosophy most were trained in a steady diet of some such systematic philosophers.

Lodge's (3) is the most controversial of the lot. A lot of historians of philosophy instinctively rebel against it because it is crucial to their psychic health and their professional roles as experts who need to answer impatient colleagues's interpretive questions (about the Cartesian circle, about Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean, about Wittgenstein's truth-tables, etc.) that some such skeptical claim turns out to be false. There is a deeper suspicion against Lodge's (3); it smacks quite a bit of medieval theologians' perspective on finite knowers' relationship to their infinite God. (And so Lodge's (3) may be thought to rely on Lodge's (2).) The study of a canonical philosopher's texts often can seem like a theological enterprise in which the sheer inventiveness and creativity of a past thinker can start to resemble God's ongoing, emanating creation. Getting the meaning right is then a regulative ideal always outside of one's grasp.** If one is a Historicist, one responds to this by seeing it as the historian's creative task to invent/imagine that what is otherwise not to be known by way of engagements of the facts.

There is another, more Nietzschean way to understand Lodge's (3); despite historians's disciplined bracketing of their egos, each generation encounters a canonical author with fresh questions and perspectives. In their critical confrontations with such an author they bring out new insights and so add to the meanings made available by a text from the past. In fact, given that quite a bit of effort by historians of philosophy goes into disclosing texts of the past in accessible editions (and we do not encourage secrecy about our treasures), it is not just the  historian that engages with a past author; lots of fresh insight is accumulated by thinkers that use the past for their own philosophical purposes: this is as true of Deleuze as it is of Jonathan Schaffer. But these uses also reinforce Lodge's (3).*** While one can pretend that Deleuze or Schaffer never existed in reflecting on the nature of, say, Spinoza's (or Plotinus's) monism, it is also the case that Deleuze and Schaffer also contribute to what we may call the inexhaustible surplus meaning that can be discerned when grapping with Spinoza's text. So, rather than seeing in (3) a skeptical thesis, I am inclined to see it as a recognition of the open-ended nature of philosophical inquiry that cannot make fully determinate even the past.

On (4); oh, yes! But, also, a peculiar joy.

 

*I am including the 'would be' to allow that the judgment of history can be biased over extended periods of time. Due to cultural, moral, linguistic and political biases and contingencies of history, some authors never receive the critical attention they deserve so their worth is not sufficiently tested.

** In the TTP, Spinoza insists -- en passant -- that the historical meaning of Hebrew Bible is basically beyond our grasp due to insurmountable linguistic, cultural, and textual barriers.

***I should mention that in an unpublished paper, Lodge has written insightfully  on Heidegger's engagement with Leibniz. I am benefitting from reading it.

Comments

[Paul Lodge]

Thanks Eric!

I'm not so sure about the extension of the expression 'like Leibniz', though I don't think the set has only one member.

On 3), I also favour a non-sceptical reading. And, in part, this is why I am trying to make some headway with Truth and Method at the moment.