Medieval readings of Boethius’s Consolation tended to smooth the forcefulness of its message, by making its arguments harmonise too easily with the Christian culture that the people of the time shared with its author. Readers today have a distance from the work that enables us to read it more precisely in the context of Boethius’s own times, and to discover how much Boethius’s way of thinking has in common with our own. We can see the Consolation both as a bold defence of human reason in the face of injustice and impending violent death, but also as an uncovering of reason’s inadequacy. Boethius the Prisoner receives some consolation from Philosophy, but more instruction, and the most important lesson that he learns is one about epistemic humility.-- John Marenbon (9 October, 2020) "Why read Boethius Today?" Aeon.
The main message of the very passage, -- the final one of Marenbon's essay -- that has us learn epistemic humility, is that we're in the best or merely a better position to study the past than our predecessor. And let's call the idea that we can read better from a distance "Machiavellian readings" in honor of Machiavelli. --Why Machiavellian? you may ask. Because for Machiavelli a certain distance is required to get an objective view on the object of study (say, the prince).+ And we can contrast this Machiavellian reading or stance with the "Spinozist reading" which is conscious of the fact that as time passes all the evidence that can make understanding a past work, its context, even the very language in which it is written, is a marvelous act of self-deception or political legislation.*
On the side of the Machiavellian stance we might say that technologies of recovery (philology and languages, cultural and hermeneutic studies, archaeology, anthropology, digital humanities, analytic rigor, etc.) are constantly improving. It is such confidence that led analytic readers of Plato in the second half of the twentieth century to ignore confidently two millennia of Plato interpretation. In addition academic specialization allows the cultivation of highly trained readers of an author or even particular works. So, for example, I have friends who have spent most of their adult life studying Hobbes' Leviathan, but who are functionally illiterate when confronted by, say, Gilbert's On the Magnet or Suarez's Metaphysical Disputations (both written half a century before).
The previous paragraph suggests that there may well be a kind of path dependency to making a text from the past seem legible. Martin Lenz has emphasized that such path dependency -- stabilized by canon-formation and education -- generates a kind of sense of clarity. Lenz is critical of this sense (see also here) because it is no better than a kind of pattern-matching. If Lenz is right then most scholarly eureka moments (including, alas, my own) need to viewed with some suspicion because informed by a great deal of unnoticed confirmation bias.
There is a further risk lurking here due to the way philosophical scholarship has been organized. As I have noted before it is a rare department where the selection of historical specialist is governed by such specialists themselves. And, all other things being equal, others prefer to have historical (or comparative) specialists that can discuss topics of contemporary interests as decided by the 'core' or 'authoritative' 'generalists'. And so this generates another sieve of unacknowledged pattern-confirmation bias. (If you don't believe me, how come the previous generation of scholarship made every other historical figure into a proto-Quinean naturalist; and the more recent ones every figure into..?)
Of course, the argument is not that the pattern that is picked out is somehow unreal. Lenz' argument is not skeptical about historical meaning in the way the Spinozist stance is. Rather, what it suggests is that searching for commonalities ("discover how much Boethius’s way of thinking has in common with our own") itself risks reinforcing such confirmation bias.
As an aside, I tried reading Boethius' Consolation one chilly Summer somewhere in the Scandinavian Northlands while conceiving of myself as a poet. I found it bewildering. Marenbon has encouraged me to give it another try before long.
Regular readers may be surprised here because I have a tendency to defend methodological anachronism and lampoon scholarly methods that try to dwell on the strangeness of the past (even comparing folk in Cambridge robes to disaster tourists). But my criticism is not of seeking out the multiplicity of the strangeness of the past -- the patterns that fit ours badly; it's the dwelling on such strangeness that I reject.
To be sure, Marenbon is undoubtedly right that some distance can be useful to weed out shared prejudices against and in favor of certain readings. After all, early reception is often influenced by hagiographic or institutional politics and cleverly instrumentalized anecdotal evidence that is used to devalue or praise an author. There are very sound psychological and political reasons to be mistrustful of students' readings of their teachers, even if the students are themselves eminent (cf. Quine and Davidson on Whitehead).
And as Marenbon notes, sometimes a whole culture conspires against making a certain message explicit. But, of course, that cuts both ways unless one assumes -- and this is far removed from epistemic humility -- in our air we can think more honestly and more aptly than before. This is not exactly, Marenbon's claim. For, Marenbom claims that while the book was a bestseller, it was so in virtue of its exoteric/"more obvious" features. (It would be amazing if otherwise.) But his argument is that "if read carefully," and properly situated "in its historical and literary context," the esoteric/"its hidden complexities and subtleties are what can open its appeal to readers" now. It's easy to make fun of this given that this text appears in Aeon. But since I have defended the practice of esoteric reading, don't expect such fun from me.
The more serious problem is the confidence in thinking one has firmly grasped the proper 'historical and literary context' of a work == okay, don't forget I last read it when I was an angst-ridden, self-important teenager == that in one of its (ahh) registers is the eternal one, transcending context and, simultaneously, attempting to shape the context of temporal reception. Or to put the point methodologically, what counts as context may be stipulated, as Mogens Lærke has argued, but it is not merely given. It may well be a complex conversation between, say, the author(s)'s and reader(s)'s commitments.**
Let me wrap up. Readers aware of my tendency toward skepticism may suspect that I incline toward the Spinozist stance. And the polemicist in me finds it tempting to trot it out as true species of epistemic humility: the past is like a distant shore that can never be reached by mortals like us in the leaky boats we possess. This thought may generate a kind of defeatism. But if we only traveled to safe destinations Boethius would have never landed in that prison cell.
+I am drawing on the introduction to Il Principe.
*This is what I take to be the main message of Theological Political Treatise. Admittedly Spinoza makes an exception for texts whose truths might be invariant in most contexts (or about topics whose essences lack much power, that is, and now I am joking a bit, capacity to confuse).
**It is amazing to me to see somebody claim that Consolations is 'Menippean satire,' but somehow miss this point. Is somebody pulling my leg?
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