Digressions&Impressions

On Getting Things Right (Constraints) in the History of Philosophy

The contextualist revolution that gained significant momentum in the 1980s and the methodological disputes those gains engendered pivoted around a single question: should philosophers accept or reject a principle, which I dub the “Getting Things Right Constraint” (GTRC)? As a first approximation, I render the GTRC as follows: historians of philosophy should not attribute claims or ideas to historical figures without concern for whether or not they are ones the figures would recognize as their own. When philosophers reject the GTRC, they do things like the following: they interpret historical materials with the sole intention of making them relevant to contemporary philosophy; they pluck claims or ideas from texts without concern for their textual or contextual circumstance; or they approach writings without intending to articulate the authentic views of the historical figure. Although I consider any historian committed to the GTRC to be a contextualist, I take there to be very different means to the goal of getting things right. (529-530)

According to the GTRC, historians of philosophy should not attribute claims or ideas to historical figures without concern for whether or not they are ones the figures would recognize as their own.  (533)

Our common goal now is to get things right, that is, to understand as fully as we can the authentic views of the texts and topics we study. (538)

I suggest that we widen the scope of the GTRC to include those contextual materials relevant to the goal of maximizing our understanding. Accordingly, the Getting Things Right Constraint should also ask early modernists to avoid stressing the relevance of conversations and debates without proper concern for whether or not they are ones that the historical figures would recognize as their own. For example, if a student of the Ethics follows Garber’s advice and attempts to discern the way Spinoza responds to the politics of his time, she needs to comprehend accurately the political debates most relevant to Spinoza’s concerns. She should not assume, for example, that Jewish theological debates are irrelevant. Or if the student intends to follow Della Rocca’s lead and take the PSR to be central to the history of philosophy, then he ought to do the right scholarly work to evaluate whether or not, as Della Rocca claims, the PSR “can be found in philosophers” from Parmenides and the Stoics through Aquinas to Leibniz and others. In brief, the revised version of the GTRC encourages early modernists to be concerned with the accuracy of contextual materials as a means to understand the views and ideas of historical figures. (543)

But unlike our appropriationist predecessors who approached historical materials through the lens of contemporary philosophy and in that sense took contemporary philosophy to historical texts, current early modernists like me hope to take insights gleaned from our newly discovered historical materials and apply them to contemporary philosophy. Given our twenty-first century concerns with education, inequality, dignity, health, suffering, epistemic oppression, and discrimination (to name a few), and given the period’s serious treatment of all these (long ignored) topics, the time seems right to use the philosophical diversity at the core of early modern thought to expand our philosophical imaginations and invigorate philosophical conversations. (544)--Christia Mercer "The Contextualist Revolution in Early Modern Philosophy" in Journal of the History of Philosophy, 57(3), July 2019

Christia Mercer's essay is presented as occasioned by the Garber-Della Rocca debate that I blogged about a few years ago (recall here; her presentation seems fairly close to Della Rocca's understanding of the state of play), and a gentle declaration of victory about the status of contextualism in early modern philosophy. But it is (as the last quoted passage reveals) fundamentally a subtle attempt to accommodate two impulses that are sometimes  thought best kept separate: (a) the attempt to get the philosophical past right, and (b) to make that past salient today. The underlying logic is that in order (b) to make the past salient today we must (a) get the past right first. I think this is good advice, but I suspect that in practice an eye toward salience may well facilitate getting the past right. About that some other time more (but recall my critique of Marenbon). I think this accommodation makes her essay a great success.+

To her credit, Mercer argues persuasively that GTRC  is compatible with many different kind of techniques and even methods. To make that seem common sensical is a great (rhetorical and methodological) advance. But the way she operationalizes the criterion strikes me problematic for three reasons worth articulating.

First, her constraint is author or people-centered ("the historical figures would recognize as their own") Now, one doesn't have to be enthralled by Roland Barthes or data-meaning, to recognize that to get the past right may involve features of the past that the authors would fail to recognize because of their biases (in a statistical or cognitive sense) or because of their shared philosophical commitments. For example, they may take certain conceptual relationships as obvious without ever defending it (often a later philosopher or philosophical movement makes this visible). Arguably, something like this happens to simultaneity in early modern natural philosophy.*

Second, what the first point reveals is that there is more to "understanding" the past than getting the views and ideas of it right.  For example, if one is interested in the philosophical roots of patterns of exclusion -- for example, why were Olympe de Gouges and Sophie de Grouchy almost entirely ignored for almost two centuries after the 1790s (despite being famous in their own day) -- one may well discover features about their views and texts, but one is more likely to discover that mass democracy was bad for women (philosophers). This last claim is something Gouges predicts (recall), but one is hard-pressed to find it expressed by any 19th century figures. Moreover, the explanation for the pattern of exclusion may well involve, as Eileen O'Neill discerned (recall here and here; here), institutional features -- curricular design, textbook narratives -- were the excluded are simply not discussed. One may offer an account of the views of those operating within such institutions that may fail to do justice to the true source of the problem (which would be not just sexism and misogyny against women thinkers, but also the very idea that democracy is being gendered male). That is, maximizing understanding of the past and getting the authentic views of texts and authors right can be mutually supporting, but it need not be so. 

As an aside, regular readers know that I think we often need deliberate anachronism not just to make the past understandable to us, but also, say, as Daniel Schneider taught me (recall), to avoid (unwittingly) taking sides in past disputes. 

Third, Mercer frankly acknowledges that GTRC is indebted (in her case mediated via Rorty) to a criterion to be found Skinner's famous 1969 essay, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” 28. She acknowledges that Skinner's criterion has been much debated (and generously cites a volume I co-edited). She has 'tried to render my GTRC so that it responds to the main complaints leveled against Skinner’s version." Judgments will differ, but I don't think she has succeeded. For, the main cumulative lesson of the chapters by Mogens Laerke and Koen Vermeir  (alongside Justin Smith's) is that Skinner's criterion cannot be salvaged because when one spells it out it relies on (unrecoverable) counterfactuals that cannot be grounded in the historical record. Rather, I think GTRC inherits this problem. How can we historians know whether historical figures would recognize certain views as their own unless they explicitly say so. 

The problem here is not the presence of a counterfactual. (One cannot write history without them.) But rather the criterion relies on a supposition that simply, in the cases of interest, cannot be supported. It seems unduly restrictive to fix the historical figure's identity solely by way of the texts we have; for it is certainly possible, I mean psychologically possible, that some historical figures would allow imaginative extensions of their views to be recognized as properly their own; whereas for others it's also possible (but how do I know that!) that even modest conceptual entailments of their views are thought not properly theirs. (Judging by the evidence we have I think Descartes sometimes falls in this category.) The possibilities (of infinite regress) are endless here. 

Now, I think what these three reasons suggest is that how to do justice to the views and ideas of historical figures, alongside the commitment to understanding the past (understanding is difficult enough that I doubt one can hope to maximize it) in a wider senseand contributing the present, may turn out to require methods in which the intentions, ideas, and views of past authors stop being ultimate arbiters of historical veracity. 

 

On Democratic Betrayal

Donald Trump has praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping over his handling of the protests in Hong Kong, after a weekend that saw police fire tear gas at demonstrators and a mob launched a vicious attack on pro-democracy campaigners. The US president told reporters at a White House meeting with Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, that the weeks of protests had been “relatively non-violent”, adding that Mr Xi should be applauded for letting them continue.  “I think [China] could stop them if they wanted . . . I’m not involved in it very much but I think President Xi of China has acted responsibly, very responsibly,” he said. The comments come after the Financial Times reported earlier this month that Mr Trump agreed to tone down criticism of Beijing’s approach to the protests in order to revive talks to resolve the US-China trade war.--Primrose Riordan and Nicolle Liu reporting in the Financial Times, July 23, 2019.

An idea going back to the ancient Greeks is that (among Greek city-states) democratic regimes support each other, while oligarchic regimes instinctively offer mutual aid. (Part of the empirical support for the idea was the Athenian practice to install democratic leaning regimes in places they conquered and the Spartan practice to install olicharchic regimes in places they controlled.) The idea has had an after-life in the liberal faith (articulated by Addison and Kant) that liberal democracies tend toward peace with each other; just as the post-Napoleonic restoration involved monarchies supporting monarchies. During the cold war the idea was transformed to mutual support among liberal democracies and (against) among communist states.

There are sufficiently large number of exceptions to such generalizations, to treat these as mere tendencies. Even so, at various moments one may be tempted into thinking that for democracies, grounded on the normative ideal of equality, the support of democracy elsewhere is itself an important interest that guides their statecraft. From that vantage point, one non-trivial blemish (recall) on President Obama's record is the collapse of the Arab Spring on his watch (alongside the disastrous support for the Saudi war-machine in Yemen). Given the importance of American weapons and cash to the Egyptian army, his Administration was more than merely complicit in the downfall of the only legitimately, democratically elected Egyptian President (the recently deceased Mohamed Morsi). 

For many democratic leaders, their legitimacy is grounded in being elected by the people. And this gives them, in their own eyes, legitimacy in the eyes of others. Why this would be so may be hard to say, but presumably it appeals to the egalitarian thought that each of us have a respect for the consent and judgment of others as we would expect them to have it for ours. If the contrast is a (divine) right grounded in the accidents of birth or arms, this may well survive some scrutiny. To disparage democracy would be self-undermining to a certain democratic leader.

In the paragraph above the previous one, I use 'interest' to grant that democracies treat the achievement of democracy elsewhere legitimately as defeasible. There will be circumstances in which a democratic state naturally sacrifices the democratic aspirations of others to reach vital objectives (e.g., survival, prevention of dangerous war, avoid enormous economic damage, etc.). Sometimes pro-democracy rhetoric only incites aspirations that can only be best described as false promise(s) (e.g., Hungary 1956; Syria during the past decade, etc.) Moreover, in some epochs mutual non-interference is a sufficiently strong norm, then states happily ignore each other's constitutional arrangements (or religion, etc.). 

Even so, alongside equality, liberal democracies are also committed to the idea that the world can and ought to be made into non-zero-sum relationships. Part of the liberal faith is that such win-win outcomes are more easily attainable with other liberal democracies. Why this would be so is not obvious empirically. But the thought is that most dictatorships and franchise restricted oligarchies have political economies where one person/group always gains at the expense of others. Whether is this is true empirically may well be worth debating, but it is notable that strongmen all use rhetoric of us vs them and advance the cause of cronyism and in-group rent-seeking. Casual empiricism suggests that a strongman is especially eager to concentrate power and to prevent other sources of countervailing powers to be developed.

Obviously, it's conceptually possible to have enlightened despotism just as it is known to be possible to have democracies elect strongmen who embrace illiberal, zero-sum logic (something I already noticed before Trump was elected; recall also this post). Given the considerable history of savagery by liberal democracies toward the disenfranchised and conquered, one may well think, with justice, that thinking in terms of win-win may be the exception that proves the rule.  An embarrassed silence, perhaps presented with an knowing appeal to political realism, about an expanding community of democracies may well be the appropriate stance. 

Even so, given that President Trump and his administration clearly view China as a rival if not enemy, and opportunities for public embarrassment may well be relished, their lack of interest in its human rights violations (especially toward the Turkic Muslims) and lukewarm support for Hong Kong protesters reveal part of the underlying instincts. It is obvious that this Administration is willing to sacrifice human rights for possible financial gain (the last sentence of the quoted newsreport supports that).

To say that Trump's attitudes towards democratic norms and practices are conflicted is intended as an understatement. That he, thereby, undermines democratic practice abroad and at home is to be expected by now. As Jacob Levy helped me see, Trump's rhetoric is a form of political action that is intended to undermine trust in democracy, the rule of law (cf. his hectoring of Sweden this week), and even minimal ethnic/racial cohabitation.+ Jacob T. Levy's writings (see here) have also convinced me that in a certain sense Trump's attitude is an effect of the Republican party's more general tendency to understand itself (correctly) as a minority (and so to use non-democratic means to 'win' elections).* Lowering mutual trust is a sound strategy if you are a minority and want your opposition disunified.++ 

And in reflecting on these last few sentence, and then looking over President Trump's comments, I had one of those terrifying duck-rabbit gestalt-switches. Trump does not understand President Xi's power as illegitimate in virtue of representing the rule of force; Trump admits he has no interest in the democratic protest(er)s, rather he identifies with the prudential restraint of a minority in control of state power armed to the teeth. 

 

 

On Marilynne Robinson's Edomites

Assmann’s argument is the sort of razzle-dazzle that depends on coinages like “mnemohistory,” which is the exalted and useful discipline of interpreting history that collective memory has displaced and suppressed so thoroughly only the writer has an inkling even of the fact of suppression. In this cognitive implosion a fusion occurs between Moses and the Aton cultus which conventional history simply cannot achieve. Assmann is writing this book in response to Freud’s abysmal question about the origins of anti-Semitism. “Strikingly enough, his [Freud’s] question was not how the Gentiles, or the Christians, or the Germans came to hate the Jews, but ‘how the Jew had become what he is and why he has attracted this undying hatred.’” He paraphrases Freud’s answer thus: “Not the Jew but monotheism had attracted this undying hatred. By making Moses an Egyptian, [Freud] deemed himself able to shift the sources of negativity and intolerance out of Judaism and back to Egypt, and to show that the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality came from outside it.” So we are to concede, apparently, that these are “the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality.” Comment is unnecessary, though I will draw attention here to the notion of victimization I remarked on earlier. We gentiles have the Torah to blame for our worst moments, it would appear.

Like others of these writers, Assmann argues that ancient polytheism was essentially tolerant, “cosmotheism,” and readily accepted other gods, translating them into the terms of the culture that received them. Granting that Melqart, a god of Carthage, did indeed lounge around in a lion skin looking just like Hercules, we have the fact that Rome loathed Carthage, and was despised in turn, and reduced that great city to bare earth and then plowed salt into the ground. Athens and Sparta had just the same pantheon, and they fought to the death. And Rome conquered Greece, whose gods it had thoroughly Latinized. That is to say, whatever the merits of polytheism, at best it only obliged people to find other than religious grounds for hostility, which they were clearly very able to do. How the wars of the Hebrews against the Canaanites are more culpable than the wars of the Romans against the Etruscans I fail to see, or why anyone should imagine that these wars were less formative for European civilization than those distant, inconclusive wars among the Semites. Or, for that matter, why they do not prove that the character of the civilization was already formed when Rome set about the conquest of Italy. Jack Miles attributes the structure of Western consciousness to monotheism on the grounds that “the Bible was the popular encyclopedia of the Middle Ages.” But in fact through most of the Common Era in Europe the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, existed almost exclusively in Latin, a language incomprehensible to the great majority of people, who were in any case illiterate. So its influence is easily overstated. Yet ferocious intolerance has characterized most of Western history in the Common Era.

Polytheism is as fashionable now as it has been since fascism was in its prime. As a corollary to the current tendency to blame monotheism for intolerance and aggression and genocide, there is an assumption that polytheism must have been tolerant, pacific and humane. This notion is old, too. In The Natural History of Religion, Hume says, “by limiting the powers and functions of its deities, [idolatry] naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to a share of divinity, and renders all the various deities, as well as rites, ceremonies, or traditions, compatible with each other … [By comparison] when one sole object of devotion is acknowedged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious.”

It is striking to see how the cultural discourse is circling on itself. Perhaps the real familiarity of their arguments explains why these writers I have looked at offer so little in the way of evidence. For example, Assmann, the most scholarly of them, says the Old Testament is deeply informed by aversion to Egypt, then offers no support from the text. And, coincidentally perhaps, little evidence is to be found in the text. One Mosaic law of unambiguous relevance, which goes unmentioned by him, is Deuteronomy 23:7: “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother; you shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land.” This law provides that both Edomites and Egyptians may enter the assembly of the Lord on favorable terms — after three generations, that is, which seems long, but which is liberal by comparison with the ancient Athenians, for instance, who never naturalized the descendants of foreigners. Nor, as I understand, do the modern Germans. This one verse is sufficient to demonstrate that there was not hatred but in fact a certain bond between Hebrews and Egyptians.

This idea, that the hatred of the Other is the signal preoccupation of the Old Testament, is carried to great lengths by Regina Schwartz..."--Marilynne Robinson, "The Fate of Ideas: Moses" in When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), pp. 114-116. [First published in 1999 in Salmagundi.]

During the Summer my mom called attention to a lovely, recent essay by Robinson in the NYRB. (Thank you mom!) In that essay Robinson vindicates the Puritans and Cromwell as (for example) legal reformists who develop the idea of the rule of law. I may be the only would be aspiring contributor to the Republic of Letters who had missed the impact of Robinson's novels and essays and even Obama's endorsement of her. (Serves me right for skipping the NYRB for a few years!) I am trying to use the remainder of this Summer to catch up on what I missed. When I Was a Child I Read Books contains two essays, "Open thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism" and "The Fate of Ideas: Moses," which are the bedrock on which the recent NYRB essay is built. These two essays are often read in tandem by those with an interest in advancing, what we may call, contemporary political theology (see, e.g., Paul Steaton critically; Scott D. Moringiello admirably).

The long quoted passage is kind of exemplary of Robinson's philosemitism. She is very acute on the ways in which biblical scholars and even very progressive intellectuals have a tendency to attribute bad features of European civilization or today's culture to a disparaged version of the Old Testament.

As an aside, she uses "Old Testament" and not "Hebrew Bible" because they have "very different cultural histories [and] the order of the books is different." (96) En passant, Robinson raises the question to what degree these can be said to be, in fact, the same book(s).*

Be that as it may, Robinson, who is often humane and wise, is pretty compelling that often the unlovely critiques of the Old Testament are grounded in lack of familiarity with the actual text. She notes that for much of the history of Christianity such familiarity cannot be presumed among many. (The revival of knowledge of the Old Testament occurred during the reformation by humanists and reformers.)+  And one of her more endearing features is to quote Scriptures to unmask dangerous nonsense presenting itself as scholarship. I don't mean to suggest she is committed to simpleminded literalism or infallibility of scripture; not unlike her hero, Calvin, she uses sola scriptura as a means to expand one's judgment and sensitivity and to ground what she calls free thought. 

Even so, I think something is off in her reading of Deuteronomy 23:7. And I will suggest it's the kind of offness that characterizes the advocate. Before I get to that, everything she says in the passage quoted above is true -- both true as readings of others and about the larger purported truths to which they refer. More important, given the contemporary scene, the passage she quotes from Deuteronomy helps provide background to the kind of claims my friend (and sometime co-author) Yoram Hazony makes (recall, for example, here and here) about what he calls the order of nation states which co-habit in peace. Hebrew, Egyptian, and (especially?) Edomite can be expected to cohabit. In fact, and again with a nod to the contemporary headlines, this is a Hebraic nationalism that rejects ethnic/racial purity and is open to immigrants becoming part of the community (and intermarry). Hazony himself has written eloquently on this (recall).** 

Okay, with that in place, I would like to quote 23:7 in Deuteronomy's slightly larger context:

3An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the LORD for ever: 4because they met you not with bread and with water in the way, when ye came forth out of Egypt; and because they hired against thee Balaam the son of Beor of Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse thee. 5Nevertheless the LORD thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but the LORD thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because theLORD thy God loved thee. 6Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days for ever. Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother: thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his land.8The children that are begotten of them shall enter into the congregation of the LORD in their third generation. KJV

It's pretty clear that the Old Testament treats Ammonites and Moabites very differently from Egyptian and Edomite. What's especially striking is not the historical rationale offered by Moses,++ but the insistence that one should not aim to make peace or (I think) trade with  Ammonites and Moabites. To put the point anachronistically, in the order of nation states there will be states that are perpetual enemies (e.g., Ammonites and Moabites) and those that are not (e.g., Edomite and Egyptian. Since the Jews had been slaves in Egypt this is indeed remarkable.) It seems that there is something about the national character of perpetual enemies (lack of hospitality and, to sound Hobbesian, war-preparedness) that makes them (these nations) incapable of change.*** 

I think Robinson would be inclined to read, and she would not be wrong to do so, this passage of the Old Testament as showing that an unwillingness to open one's hand to the stranger is, according to it, almost the worst national character-trait. So, the passage supports her larger spirit.  

Even so, I close with a yes, but. 

Even if one allows (for the sake of argument) that national character is fixed, I am unsure what the assumed mechanism is by which flawed national character infects each individual such that it makes members of these nations permanently unwelcome. But it's pretty clear that the passage justifies inhumane treatment of those taken to belong to natural enemies. So, surely Robinson is correct to say that the Old Testament shows no signal preoccupation with hatred of the Other. It would be pleasant if we could all be Edomites. But that's compatible with the injunction to be on guard, in the sense of keeping out, alas, some distinct Others, forever.