What is the History of Philosophy?

If history of philosophy is about anything, it is about understanding historical texts accurately…The first goal is to understand the texts, which might be an end in itself (as it is for me) or might be a step towards doing something else afterward, like playing around with the ideas on one's own, comparing them to other ideas from history, etc. -Peter Adamson

I believe that the fundamental purpose of the history of philosophy (which is continuous with the fundamental purpose of history more generally) is to accurately capture what philosophers of the past were trying to say. If that's not what the history of philosophy is, then I am ready to be corrected. - Sam Rickless

Rickless, an important scholar, turns the history of philosophy fundamentally into inferring intentions of authors. The published texts are means to this end, but obviously one can also draw on unpublished material and other sources of evidence (biography, letters, etc.). We can't always trust what authors say about this, of course, they may be deluded about their intentions or they may deliberately or playfully mystify. They sometimes may discover their own intentions in the process of writing—texts and arguments take on a life of their own, or -- if one dislikes the anthropomorphism in that -- have an internal logic constrained by form and genre (etc.). For example, I did not set out to write on depression in graduate school last week; rather I think (now after the fact) I wanted to capture a vague sense of disconnect and empathy with younger scholars at a conference and, more romantically, try to convey some long-distance encouragement (etc.). But while writing in a tightly constrained format (a blog with a certain voice, history, and trajectory, etc.) I found a form in which to make some such point while simultaneously being (especially after I settled on a particular headline) about something else. Even if a future historian of philosophy were interested in my writings, they would not be very interested in capturing the canonical intentions of that particular blog, or even the whole as of yet indefinite series of Digressions that I know will follow. This is not to deny I have insanely ambitious ambitions for these blogs—to change our philosophical culture, to touch the hearts of some and draw them into a philosophical life, to promote projects I think noble, to showcase Schliesser's ideas, to redefine how we understand what philosophy can be, to hit the ball out of the philosophical park with an essay a day, etc. But the interest, if any, in these Impressions is not the ways they reveal the self-fashioning of an author, but rather their sporadic effects on others and what they reveal about our profession in my times. (I return to this below.)

Adamson, in responding to my post, offers us a subtly different goal than Rickless's for the history of philosophy: it's about understanding texts. (Neither comments on this difference.) Author's intentions may play a privileged role in Adamson's enterprise, but what matters is capturing meanings. The benefit of this approach is that one need not infer to invisible attitudes, but can resolutely stick with the textual evidence. But the moment you start putting pressure on this idea things start to unravel. What exactly is the textual meaning that needs to be understood, and whose understanding are we to privilege? Now, in a famous (1969) article, Quentin Skinner, tried to settle this with an appeal to a counterfactual, privileged observer. To folk interested in learning from sophisticated explorations of this issue I wholeheartedly recommend the papers by Mogens Lærke, Justin Smith, Julie Klein, Ursula Goldenbaum (in this volume). They all offer ways to avoid Skinner's mysterious counterfactuals while using means to stabilize and fix the meaning of a text in time and over time such that (alas, competing) understanding is possible. For some texts this is a very fruitful enterprise.

But there are philosophical authors (paradigmatically I am thinking of Plato, Nietzsche (recall)), who self-consciously may well want (a) affective responses from their readers and (b) may intend different audiences to discern different things in their texts. (Note that with Nietzsche we are in decent position to get at his intentions, with Plato not so.) The way I like to put it is that they expect different readers' souls to disclose different features of the text. A historian of philosophy setting out to get at the meaning of the text will miss this feature. In fairness, Adamson's approach does not rule out an understanding of these texts that can account for (a) and (b), but by sharply separating the understanding of a text from its effects and from doing something with it, he puts himself in a bad position to grasp all the features of a text. (That is to say, his rules are self-defeating.) For, one need not be a pragmatist to understand that often we only understand all the systematic entailments of a text by applying some or its all ideas to new (or old) problems. It's only after reading Rocknak (proto-Transcendental), Baxter (analytical metaphysics), and Bell's (Deleuzian) Hume that it becomes visible that Hume, for whom the law of non-contradiction does quite a bit of work, is simultaneously willing to bracket, when doing metaphysics, self-identity (or A=A).* Of course, this understanding can be contested (probably by all three just named authors), but the key is that the understanding of a text is a hard-won result by way of application. For a lot of folk the denial of self-identity is itself a sign of philosophical incompetence or lack of intelligibility, etc., so it would never be a starting point.

Now, even if we acknowledge the religious origins of the Rickless's approach (with its echoes of divining God's will) and Adamson's (settling an authoritative meaning of the privileged text), they overlook other legitimate purposes for the history of philosophy that are distinct from the projects I advocate. I offer two examples: first, historians of philosophy could be interested in establishing the effects of past texts (or arguments) on the history of philosophy or on other fields of inquiry or on politics/society. This is echt history of philosophy that follows the empirical evidence; it can use authorial intentions and understanding of texts, but what it is interested in is trying to figure out, you know, what happened. Like my mentor, Ian Mueller, I think it is hopeless to try to establish what Plato intended or to establish a canonical understanding of his text; but there is a lot of history of philosophy (maybe all of it) in establishing the roles that Plato's texts, arguments, and tropes played in subsequent philosophical history (not to mention other walks of life). As an aside (and to say something about my own preferences), looking at such reception and functional roles of Platonic texts teaches us quite a bit about the meaning of his dialogues—as his texts reveal, Plato had reflected deeply on the nature of tradition and school formation, after all. He could not foresee future uses of his texts, but he could imagine that his texts could play a role as, say, blueprint for other people's projects, political and psychological. Just because the future is full of surprises it does not follow we cannot foresee some of the roles, if any, our writings (analogous to self-fulfilling prophecies) might play in it. If one writes in the middle of a tradition or a school, one can, in fact, be reasonably confident about the way future readers will use one's texts. (I say a lot more about such matters in my paper on philosophical prophecy.) Okay, let's turn to my second example.

Second, some historians of philosophy might agree with Rickless that a text from the past is a means toward something else. But rather than a means to understanding an author's intentions (Rickless), it might be a means toward the truth--this is advocated by Michael Della Rocca. If one thinks that contemporary philosophers are burdened with a false set of commitments or methods, then one might look to earlier generations as crutches toward the truth. This may well involve quite a bit of attention to understanding a text from the past on its own terms, and all the other important rules of the historian's craft that Adamson advocates, but the aim is not to capture the truth about the past or understand some dead author but the truth as such (about the world, being, the human life worth living, whatever). And, here too, it's not impossible that if one resolutely uses a text, even uses what I call methodological anachronism, one might well indirectly get a better understanding of it than if one first cautiously tries to understand. If we take the claims of Rickless and Adamson literally than Della Rocca and his students are not doing history of philosophy, really; they fall outside the "disciplinary boundaries" that Rickless wishes to impose. I am excited to learn from Adamson and Rickless on any given day, but they are too narrow in their (conflicting!) conceptions of what the disciplined history of philosophy is (it's not just what they do!), and what it might be.

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*I am not against pursuing Rickless' question and encourage reflection on Hume's intentions as a self-fashioning author, who is simultaneously aware of the slipperiness of identity, including the one, one tends to ascribes to persons. But Hume tells us both that there are characters and agents, which have historical and causally transmitted trajectories, as well as that upon closer intro-inspection there is no there, there. He may well be right.

Comments

[Samuel Rickless]

Thanks for these interesting comments, Eric. I don't have time right now to discuss any of this in depth. For now, just two clear and simple reactions. First, I am baffled at your claim that my approach has religious origins. That's just false. Maybe you see some sort of analogy between divining authorial intent and divining God's will, but it doesn't follow from this that my approach has religious origins. Second, I believe that it is straightforwardly false that on my view Michael Della Rocca doesn't do history of philosophy. Della Rocca might have *other* interests *in addition to* getting Spinoza (and other philosophers) right, such as getting at the truth. But, unless he corrects me, I am going to assume (based on reading his work) that much of it is dedicated to getting historical figures right, in which case he's definitely doing history of philosophy.

[Peter Adamson]

Thanks for the further thoughts Eric! So at the end of my comment on your last blog, I said, "Of course this conception of history of philosophy assumes that there is such a thing as a "correct interpretation," which a lot of people would dispute. But we aren't arguing about that now." And what I was alluding to was the sort of worry you raise here, albeit not with such specificity as you lay it out.

You're right to suspect that I was deliberately avoiding talking about figuring out what an author was actually consciously thinking as he/she wrote, since I would like to leave room open for other ways of discerning what is going on in a text (e.g. unintentional betrayals of things the author thinks deep down, or unconscious reminiscences of other texts they know very well). However I think Sam is largely right anyway, since most of the time historians of philosophy can unproblematically imagine themselves trying to understand what the author wishes to say. You pick rather leading examples by mentioning Plato and Nietzsche, who are maybe the two most "literary" authors in the history of philosophy. Which is great, but that's one reason it is insanely complicated and difficult to read and work on them. (I have only published a little on Plato and it always comes very hard, precisely because he seems to anticipate and undercut anything you might want to suggest about the text.) A lot of the time though you are reading texts that much more straightforwardly lay out arguments for theses - not always with the Euclidean relentlessness of Proclus' "Elements" or Spinoza, but still one usually feels one is trying to follow an explicit chain of argument.

As for the broader issue that texts may simply have no fixed meaning we can get at, I realize one doesn't need to be steeped in Derrida to think this. It may indeed seem rather simplistic and naive to say to oneself, "ok, there is one right answer to the question 'what does this text mean?' and I'm out to find it." But one doesn't, I think, go too far wrong if one thinks of a text as having a range of possible interpretations, some of which are at least much more satisfying and convincing than others. And that is pretty close to just trying to get the text "right", for all practical purposes.

Once you get down to the nitty gritty of interpreting a text in a reading group, say, you are going to hold yourself and others to the standard of offering interpretations that "make sense" of the text. To take an extreme example, if you have been arguing that you can take a philosopher to be holding position P, and then someone points out to you that on a nearby page the philosopher says not-P, it would be ridiculous to say "oh, but P is such an interesting claim, so I don't particularly care."

Maybe what this boils down to is that history of philosophy, while it is very philosophical, is genuinely a kind of history too. We are not just trying to jog loose insights of our own, we are trying to understand historical documents. I would have no objection to people reading Aristotle, or whoever, to get inspiration for their own ideas -- even reading him very closely for this purpose. This could be a fun, worthwhile, philosophically satisfying and useful thing to do, for sure. But if they ultimately aren't that bothered about offering an interpretation of the text that is supposed to help us understand that text (which is what my rules are intended to help us do), I'm not so sure that they are really doing history of philosophy.

By the way a lot of what you're describing here (like, following the way that Plato was read by later Platonists), or thinking of a philosopher as writing for posterity (a great point by the way) fits dead center in my conception of the history of philosophy, as far as I can see. It just means you are looking at a wider range of texts and thinking about their joint meaning and interpretation because you are taking into account their interrelation. Actually that's probably the sort of history of philosophy I am most interested in, I'm not much for focusing on one text to the exclusion of thinking about what influenced it and was influenced by it.

[Eric Schliesser]

Peter, yes, I argue that thinking about what you nicely call 'joint meaning' of different texts is often key to the significance of the history of philosophy. (Mogens Laerke has written very insight-fully about methods that might disclose such joint meaning.)

[Michael Mirer]

As someone looking at this conversation from outside the bounds of institutional philosophy, I have to wonder how much this conversation gains from the idea that doing the history of philosophy is distinct from other areas of historical inquiry in more than just subject matter. That is to say,should those interested in working in the history of philosophy look at the work and methods of people working in, say, the history of ideas, or intellectual history,(apparently distinct modes of inquiry) or even literary and cultural history?

To be clear, I don't think any of the above conversation dismisses such pluralism, but the lack of cross-pollination between these circles does seem curious to me (but again, I may simply be ignorant).

Also, Peter Gordon's essay introducing students to Intellectual History (here: http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/history/files/what_is_intell_history_pgordon_mar2012.pdf) although clearly addressed towards undergrads and grad students, might be of interest at least insofar as it offers some insight into the different critical assumptions of different schools.

[Eric Schliesser]

Michael, Adamson explicitly appeals to work done in philology, so there is quite a bit of shared methods with other historical enterprises in his work. Moreover, I point to the views of Laerke, Smith, Goldenbaum amongst others and all of them advocate drawing on methods and results of other disciplines, including anthropology, intellectual history, and archeology. So, I think if you allowed yourself to investigate further, you may be surprised by what you find.