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.
+Her essay also says kind things about my work, so I am also self-interested!:)
*My view is that the views of Huygens and Newton on simultaneity are more subtle than standard pictures of classical mechanics suggest, so the example should itself be treated with caution!
Thanks to Eric for summarizing main issues in my paper well, raising good points of discussion, and especially for praising the paper's attempt to accommodate salience and historical accuracy.
To clarify or respond to a couple of points:
I do give a shout out to Skinner, but I was somewhat motivated to do that by my ecumenical approach. I hoped to avoid the mistakes he made and of course I could engage in the success of contextualism in a way he could not. And although I do speak of figures and texts, I intended to make it clear that it is the complexities of ideas and conversations to which we need to be the most attentive. I wanted to suggest that getting the context right cannot be restricted to studying figures and always requires thinking about movements and debates. And I'm not interested in intentions. I purposely avoid that term. Getting things right has more to do with correctly describing how a problem was variously solved or properly identifying the ebbs and flows of conversations. And although I disagree with some of the recommendations made by Mogens Laerke's and Koen Vermeir's articles in the helpful edition of papers collected by Eric and others, I had hoped to accommodate some of their complaints about Skinner in my new, improved version of what it means to get things right.
In the end, this is exactly the sort of conversation I had hoped that the paper would generate. So, again, thanks, Eric!!
Posted by: Christia Mercer | 08/01/2019 at 06:31 AM
Reading Eric's final paragraph, I seem to hear loud protests, genuinely well-founded, from Dilthey, Collingwood, and their ilk. And I'm sensitive to their protests, I must say.
Posted by: George Gale | 08/04/2019 at 12:13 AM