Digressions&Impressions

History of Philosophy as Anti-Status-Quo?

My frustration with this book is not that it lingers on what Machiavelli says to us, for here Levy is fully persuasive, but that it sets political theoretical debate in the narrowest of terms, between a liberal and a republican concept of liberty in which each is barely distinct from the other. The problem is not with reading Machiavelli out of context. (Against Skinner and even beyond Levy, I see anachronism itself as a totally legitimate intellectual practice.) The problem is with an approach to Machiavelli in which he is made to affirm our present way of life.--Robyn Marasco reviewing David N. Levy, Wily Elites and Spirited Peoples in Machiavelli's Republicanism, Lexington.

I enjoy reading reviews because they often make explicit what is submerged in journal articles and allow the attentive reader to reflect on her own practice. And sometimes they make me feel I am not alone on this planet.

So, one reason to be interested in the history of philosophy is to address something like this question: "How from some privileged (arbitrary?) starting point did 'we' get to here?' (Recall) With 'here' defined as either the the personal views of the historian or, more likely, the thought taken to be the cutting-edge as defined by folk at the top departments (when he was a PhD student). Answering the question is, contrary to what is common thought, not an excuse for celebratory Whig history (although it can certainly degenerate into that, too) because it can also unearth surprises (that is, we've been here before, sorta) or can explain why some important insights have been lost or overlooked, etc. (A nice recent (recall) example is Price's treatment of the fate of metaphysics.) That is to say, an interest in explaining the present status quo can lead to genuine (as opposed to celebratory) historical inquiry; this kind of inquiry treats works/thinkers/movements/ideas of the past as causes of the present (the effect). More subtly, it tends to entail that understanding of the present is thereby completed (it need not entail it because one may also (mistakenly) believe -- with a nod to the genetic fallacy -- that knowledge of the present does not require the causes by which it came about.)

There are others ways of engaging the past in which it is not so much a cause of the present but a means by which one can think critically about the present -- as Marasco suggests can be done with  Machiavelli's writings --, that is, to prevent status quo bias. There may be other ways to combat status quo bias, of course, and, as we have already seen, turning to history may reinforce such bias. (As an aside, history for history's disinterested sake -- in which history is a quietist enterprise, also reinforces such a status quo bias. )

To explore history by which one can think critically about the present relies on a kind of limited symmetry principle in reading and engaging with the past. For, it requires understanding a past thinker first in her own (broadly construed) context to some degree* and then bring her insights & answers about that context to bear on contemporary issues, in part, perhaps by recasting our issues entirely. That is, it requires one to think that the present status quo has not fully assimilated all the insights available in the past and that we do not merely look back as superiors riding the wave of progress, but that thinkers of the past may have equal standing in addressing our situation.

As Marasco notes, one precondition for such a limited symmetry condition is to avoid using present debates as the means by which one accesses past thinkers. The reservation here is not the wrong-headed one that a past thinker cannot give us new answers to our questions (because they would not find these intelligible due to anachronism, etc.) It is a perfectly legitimate and sometimes insightful enterprise to deploy past thinkers in this fashion. Rather, past thinkers may help us understand more fully the limitations of our questions.      

On that Mythical Story of Hume in a Bog

{UPDATE: Dario Perinetti has called my attention to a paper by Cathryn Campbell (University of Edinburgh), "‘That Virtuous Heathen’ and the Fishwife: A Fable of the Bogs" he heard presented at a conference that presumably reaches similar conclusions as this post. More once I get my hands on that paper.--ES}

This place [for witches]...once nearly swallowed up David Hume the historian, who was a native of Ninewells, in the neighbourhood. Hume missed his footing in the mire, stuck fast, called for assistance, and was at last heard by some people, who ran to give help; but when they saw it was Hume "the unbeliever," though he was in other respects an amiable man, they turned back saying, "Na, na, the deil has him, let the deil keep him." David Hume got out by some means, and wrote his famous history after that time.--The Autobiography of a Working Man  by Alexander Somerville, 1848, p. 4

...a witch-haunted bog, memorable for having nearly swallowed up David Hume the historian, who was a native of Ninewells, in the neighbourhood. Hume missed his footing in the mire, and sticking fast, called for assistance, and was at last heard by some people, who ran to give help. Seeing, however, that it was Hume "the unbeliever," they turned back from the amiable philosopher, remarking, "Na, na, the deil has him, let the deil keep him."  Mr Somerville mentions, that Hume got out of the bog, and wrote his history afterwards, but does not relate the means by which the philosopher and historian escaped an absorption of his body, analogous of the absorption his mind had undergone in metaphysical mier. The "deil" would have had him both ways, the story goes, but for a compassonate milkmaid, who helped him out, after compelling him to say the Lord's prayer, as a proof that he was a true Christian.--From a review of The Autobiography of a Working Man (by Alexander Somerville, pub. 1848) in The Eclectic Review (pub. 1848) by Thomas Price and Edwin Paxton Hood

The story goes that over 1770-71, Hume was living in the Old Town of Edinburgh while supervising the construction of his new house in New Town. The North Bridge was not yet open, so he had to take a short cut across the bog left by Nor' Loch after that foul body of water had been drained away. As you might have already guessed, he slipped and fell into the bog and, try as he might, couldn't get himself out. After flailing about for some time he attracted the attention of a fishwife. She recognized him straightaway as "Hume the Atheist" and on that account was not sure whether to help him. Hume implored, "But my good woman, does not your religion as a Christian teach you to do good, even to your enemies?" "That may well be," she replied. "But ye shallna get out o' that, till ye become a Christian yoursell, and repeat the Lord's Prayer and the Belief!" What did Hume the Atheist do? Did he stand his ground and ridicule the superstitious beliefs of this woman? Of course not. To the surprise of the fishwife, he readily complied, and true to her word she helped him out of the bog. Hume retold this story frequently, always commending the fishwife as the most acute theologian he had ever encountered.--Charlie Huenemann at 3quarksdaily.

The biographer of The Life of David Hume, Mossner, also tells the story (on p. 563) and refers to the Caldwell papers. (In fact, I suspect that Mossner's version is the source for Charlie's retelling; Charlie is himself an important Spinoza and Nietzsche scholar.) And, indeed, one can find Mossner's version of the story there in a discursive footnote added by an editor to a reproduction of the letter from Hume to Baron Mure. But that note does not give a further source. It seems to have been first published in 1854, that is, after Somerville's account. So, there is a good chance that Somerville, or the review of Somerville, is the source of their version of the story.

There is, however, one key difference between the Somerville and Caldwell papers account: in Somerville the witch-infected bog is located near Hume's birth-place; the region of Chirnside. This is why the relatively youthtful Hume, once freed, goes on to write his History. Whereas in the Caldwell papers, the bog is in Edinburgh and the whole story has moved into Hume's retirement.

Somerville, himself was born in 1811 long after Hume's death (1776). Somerville tells the story in the context of talking about his parents's birth-region, but even they were not contemporaries of Hume at the time their version of the story was supposed to have taken place. So, none of the sources are eye-witness reports or even traced back to contemporaries of Hume. So, I am now inclined to think that the whole story is myth. It is primarily useful in revealing something about the aims of the narrator and their preferred vision of Hume and his attitude toward theology, philosophy, or mortality (etc.; nobody being interested in Somerville's parents anymore). Such biogrophical and autobiographical narratives should not be treated as history but as clues to the explicit and tacit presentations and self-presentations of a narrator.

One further reason why I think it is myth -- and why I would think it is a myth even if there are reports by self-proclaimed eyewitness or of Hume retelling the story dating back to Hume's life -- is that it echoes, as I noted yesterday, a famous story recounted by Socrates about Thales to illustrate paradigmatic philosophical pitfalls:

Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet. The same jest applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy. Theaetetus,  [174a]

I conclude with one final twist: the association of Hume with Socrates, and a life of philosophy, was encouraged by Adam Smith, as I have also argued, in his narrative of Hume's dying days (which evoke Plato's description Socrates's last days) in (1776) Letter to Strahan. Smith was not alone in encouraging the identification; George Dempster coined the Meme that Hume is "the Socrates of Edinburgh" in a letter to Adam Ferguson written during Hume's life (as Mossner also notes). In my view, Hume invites the association artfully in the introduction to the Treatise, but I have written about that elsewhere.

Why the Canon Fight is Different in Analytical Philosophy; on Heroworship

For a brief spell in the 80’s and 90’s, higher education was consumed by the canon wars. For those too young to remember, the canon wars were some earnest and intense battles among people who couldn’t agree on which authors needed to be taught for students to be considered properly educated.--Inside Higher Education (2013).

A year ago Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman succesfully managed to ignite discussion within professional philosophy about the status of the canon (recall my response).* Other humanists might think -- paraphrasing a quip falsely attributed to Heinrich Heine (which doesn't stop the Wall Street Journal from recycling it) -- that philosophy is the Netherlands of higher education, everything happens there three decades later. (Genuine humanists know that debates over the canon are as old as the canon itself.) While there are solid sociological-demographic reasons that help explain why philosophy remained aloof from the canon wars (the short version: professional anglophone philosophy is overwhelmingly white, male, change-averse and unreceptive toward unmasking narratives), there is also a key intellectual reason: within analytical philosophy the (Western) canon is largely irrelevant to disciplinary conversations.+ No command over the details of the text is ever presupposed. This is no surprise because analytical philosophy was founded -- self-consciously mimicking Descartes's dismissiveness toward book-knowledge -- as a revolt against historical approaches to philosophy.

While the days may be gone in which one could count on all literature professors to recite Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Virgil, Goethe, Dante, and the other mighty dead, especially Middlemarch, from memory, to this day working knowledge of some such books provides a shared, contested frame of reference in literary and cultural studies even if nobody thinks that command of such books is a mark of civilization or even a signal of one's cultural capital. And while close reading persists in college courses, the idea that literature can replace Scripture has long been deconstructed, and De Man unmasked; I would not be surprised if it has had its brief, ironic revival prompted by a Simpsons episode.

By contrast even when I present on David Hume's Treatise to professional historians of philosophy, let alone generalist philosophical audiences, I make sure to prepare detailed excerpts of key passages. Hume is the fourth most admired philosopher in history (according to a recent poll); he is the highest ranked English language philosopher--his Treatise the acknowledged masterpiece.** Even the anti-historical logical empiricists would say nice things about Hume. My excerpts are not merely aids to memory; I know that the passages I am calling attention to are simply unknown. Professional philosophy is not a discipline in which texts from the past are internalized. (Yes, there are a few Hume scholars that have working knowledge of some texts, but even among that lovely crowd -- dominated by professional philosophers -- there are very few people that know Hume's major works really by heart.)

Even when working positions come to be known as Humean or Carnapian (etc.), odds are we are dealing with Hume* or Carnap*. It doesn't matter, really, if Hume is not a Humean. (The relationship between, say, Carnap and contemporary Carnapians is very interesting and illuminating.) While there are a few magisterial clubs within professional philosophy -- Kantians often really try to get Kant right (even at the price of introducing anachronism), Wittgensteinians even have a second-order debate whether it makes sense to get Wittgenstein right, etc. --, philosophical puzzles and controversies do not get settled by authoritative interpretation of major texts. Of course, interest in such puzzles can be started by way of some such interpretation. 

The above is not to deny that there is an image of philosophy prevalent within professional philosophy in which a limited number of historical, canonical figures are very prominent: starting with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle through Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant (etc). These folk are often, indeed, implicated in subtle and not-so-subtle forms of ideological domination (or worse). It is worth serious reflection why Gorgias's Helen is unread; why even specialist scholars are unaware of the male feminism of Toland, Mandeville, and John Millar--all eighteenth century figures that were once extremely famous. (Even world class Nietzsche scholars tend to be ignorant on the genealogy of genealogy.) It is shocking that (the first) professional interest in early modern female philosophers only commenced less than a generation ago.  

If we abolish the canon in professional (analytic) philosophy, we just give folk another excuse not to read books. This trend may be unstoppable anyway: the textbook is beloved by university technocrats who hire cheap labor to teach pre-set curriculum with well-defined (achievable) goals.

For, in addition to the image of philosophy, there are classic works, often drawn from those canonical figures that figure in the image of philosophy, which are routinely but not exclusively used to introduce students to philosophy (e.g., an intro to ethics course with Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Mill--hopefully Sophie de Grouchy before long, too) [recall, recall, and more if you use Google]. Arguably, Nietzsche has become canonical within professional philosophy because teachers could not resist the allure of assigning him in their courses. There could be quite a bit more experimentation and innovation in the pool of such classics. In preparing a course on Islamic philosophy, I encountered Ibn Tufayl (recall) and was certainly not the first to be struck by how easily he could fit in any text-based introductory course in epistemology, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. 

What does exist in professional philosophy is a kind of hero-worship of living authority figures and the recently deceased.* Manifestly odd views can endure because they are associated with some such hero and, more importantly, because they put (often informal, but no less tight) conceptual and methodological constraints on what is acceptable within professional discussion. Williamson describes the mechanisms involved in a recent essay: he patiently explains the fear factor that surrounded Quine for a while [recall my post]. This is why in the overthrow of such heroes we find more than argument--there is also rhetoric; Williamson describes Lewis's metaphysics as "extreme" (9) and memorably, but unflatteringly, notes that Lewis is "also known as ‘the machine in the ghost’ for his eerie computational power, mechanical diction, faint air of detachment from ordinary life, and beard from another era." (8)

This hero-worship is associated with a lot of the worst features of the discipline; the common cruelty, the lack of respect for viewpoints associated with outsiders, the willful ignorance, and the awful systematic demographic patterns of exclusion. So, if we abolish the canon in professional philosophy without ending the hero-worship not much will change about the professional practice.

Isaiah Berlin's Criticism of Cassirer

[Due to technical problems this post appears a few days late--ES]

With this special sensitivity to concealed connections and affinities, for transitions and cross currents, went [A] a rooted distaste for sharp delineation and the drawing of firm distinctions between ideas and thinkers. Cassirer's tendency was [B] to conciliate and appease, [C] to see  the past in the future and the future in the past, to represent the philosophy of the Renaissance....in such a fashion that later developments - those of the eighteenth and nineteenth, and even of the twentieth centuries were all too visible, almost fully formed, in these early beginnings. He liked to think of Leibniz as a kind of early Kant and of Kant (whom he all but worshiped) as almost a modern physicist; of Descartes or Lessing or Hegel as all, in their various ways, seeking to express one large single truth; all thinkers were to him loyal fellow-workers, engaged in a vast, common enterprise; the differences between them in Cassirer's pages became relatively blurred; the harmony between them covered a multitude of ephemeral disagreements, progressively less significant as the horizon widened...like all  efforts at conciliation, it can only be achieved at some sacrifice of the critical faculty.--Isaiah Berlin Reviewing Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, in English Historical Review 68 (1953), 617-19.

Joshua Cherniss called my attention to Berlin's review during facebook discussion after yesterday's post; I am grateful to him for making a copy of it available to me. In the quoted passage, Berlin's "appeasement" -- a word that had become toxic in 1953 -- reveals something of the intensity of Berlin's critical attitude that follows the quoted passage. In particular, the core criticisms of Cassirer (1874-1945), who was already dead at the time of the review, are political and philosophical. So,  for example, Berlin call's Cassirer's book "politically timid," and it is by no  means clear that in granting that "the book as a whole remains lucid, civilized and agreeable," Berlin means to be offering a compliment.

That even the lucidity is not a compliment is clear from the closing lines of the review, where Berlin calls for more "business-like...that is, ice-cutting" approach. In fact, Berlin distinguishes between different kinds of clarity in the review, and he embraces the values of the then surging, analytical movement with which he was very familiar (and of which he would become a fierce critic); Berlin wants the clarity that is subsequent to fine-grained and "firm distinctions" and the pulling apart of atomic concepts from what might have seemed like an organic whole.

One need not be a friend of political timidity, or even Cassirer's "supremely innocent" philosophy, to be weary of Berlin's rejection of conciliation. For, it entails open-ended warfare (and the desire for total victory); that is, in his criticism of Cassirer, Berlin here comes awfully close to embracing the philosophy of Carl Schmitt and shares with it a disdain for harmony. To embrace such open-ended warfare is uncivilized; if by civilization we mean the art of keeping conversation going, then even appeasement can play a tactical role in advancing civilization and conciliation. This art is not very demanding and requires all our "critical faculties," including the self-command not to investigate, say, 'ephemeral disagreements' in the middle of a crisis; it also requires the ability to make careful distinctions in order to find tenuous common ground, especially when confronted with "mysticism and fanaticism" in others.

This is not the place to discuss what it meant for the philosophical interpretations of the unfolding cold war that Cassirer's philosophical project was unfairly coupled with Chaimberlain's disgraced politics.* Michael Friedman has already eloquently argued (in a different context) that by reducing the philosophical option-space to the more radical approaches represented by Carnap vs Heidegger, philosophy has been diminished.

It is, in fact, it is by no means obvious that Cassirer gets the thinkers of the Enlightenment wrong in thinking that (to quote Berlin again) that they were engaged in a joint project of building "the great cathedral of human culture and learning" with few "really profound differences of principle." As one of Berlin's intellectual lodestones, Benjamin Constant, argued, it is not wrong in so far as this seems to have been a guiding aspiration of many of the leading figures themselves nor unfair in light of the judgment of posterity, which they eagerly hoped would vindicate them. Even Jonathan Israel has to acknowledge that for much of the eighteenth century the so-called moderate and radical Enlighteners appeared as part of a united effort, despite huge disagreements over tactics and philosophies (for some qualification see here).

So, while my own commitments tend to be not far removed from Berlin's, I reject Berlin's linking of his political criticisms of Cassirer with his disagreement over philosophical method captured by [A-C] in the quoted passage at the top of this post. In fact, while I am no friend of Cassirer's historical epistemology nor his dynamics of reason (nor a worshiper of Kant), I do defend the legitimacy of [C], that is, to see the past in the future and the future in the past. Now in Cassirer the point is to articulate the ways in which "one large single truth" may be expressed.

For, the idea that one's philosophical efforts are, in part, realized or even more richly captured in later work guides nearly all our scholarly efforts; it's a regulative ideal that is presupposed in lots of academic activity--from publishing in learned journals, to citation practices, to archiving, to giving of honors and prizes, etc. (There are, of course, more narcissist philosophical projects that do not require the participation of others; some of these may, in fact, be beautiful to behold by outsiders.) The ideal follows from the realization that philosophy is very difficult and our time on earth relatively brief. While we engage in our puzzles and are fully absorbed in various programs, we need some to step back and figure out how all of these belong to the larger whole that we aim to capture.** From the vantage point of that larger whole much of what we do is foreshadowed by those born before us. It does not follow, of course, that one should always look for prior developments and only stress agreement, but, uncharacteristically, Berlin fails to recognize that widening one's horizons is a species of courage and that a steadfast resistance to a rising tide of pessimism is a species of magnanimity. 

On Ignorance

My favorite feature of Daily Nous is the link to non-academic hires; it's not very active, but I return to it every few weeks and I love getting a new impulse to daydream about how trained academic philosophers spread wisdom, positive affect, and conceptual acumen outside the academy serving their newfound companies and communities with integrity. I imagine that those liberated from the academy, spread their wings and flourish. This fantasy is undoubtedly a consequence of my sense that professional philosophy is inhospitable to wisdom and, perhaps, my sense that, despite the presence of collossal brainpower (and astounding resources), it has deeply entrenched means to preserve a status quo bias (perhaps that's related to those very resources).

Sometimes I wonder if I would have recognized the significance of Leibniz if I were an eighteenth century philosophy professor, or Boole in the middle of the nineteenth, or Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth. (To this day Boole's greatness is unrecognized.) I wonder if I would have been receptive to Mary Wollstonecraft or if my heart would have been stone-cold to her call to humanity. Some of these names were obscure in their life time or their best writings unfamiliar to others. And it is not impossible that I would have ignored not just the more radical authors, but also the best-sellers among them with a confident self-assurance that popular philosophy is incompatible with profundity, skill, and insight. How likely would it have been that I would familiarize myself with, say, a Danish religious curmudgeon?

As an expert on west European philosophy between 1600-1800, I recognize that the vast majority of authors from that period that are still of interest today, the ones that shaped the ideas that guide our common sense or that challenged it, when first articulated, were not university professors (yes, I have heard of Hutcheson, Kant, and Adam Smith). This is not just true of the brilliant women of the time who were denied access to universities. And, yes, I know that some of the enduring figures aspired to be university professors (Hume) or wanted to be required reading in universities (Descartes, Hobbes), or entertained offers for university positions (Spinoza). Even so, recognized expertise, based on a dissertation or a track-record of journal publication, is not the only road to philosophy; specialization within the intellectual division of labor is just one way to acquire philosophical craft--it's not a necessary consequence of historical development.  

I often suspect that I am so immersed in my scholarly activities (refereeing, grant-writing, journal publication, giving lectures, PhD supervision etc.), and so consumed by ongoing scholarly discussions, that I miss the most important philosophical insights and developments of our times even if, miraculous enough, these would occur within (English language) professional philosophy. (This is not to deny that relative to the period that preceded it between, say, 1514-1781, academic philosophy has had an excellent run since Kant and Dugald Stewart.) I expect that future scholars -- my kind of people -- will scan my D&I contributions and will use it as evidence that, in fact, not even those cosmopolitan analytical philosophers that indulged themselves, and were so indulged, in reading outside the tribe were aware of the great instauration of philosophy started in 2004 in the vast metroplis of...

There is a popular genre of historical writing that is about witnesses to history, that is, people like you and me that just happen to be present at events that become part of historical memory and left a record of their observations. Yet, many of us, almost certainly the vast majority inside and outside the academy, are writing about and contributing to non-history's rapid impressions that disappear without a trace.  

If there is a crisis in Heidegger scholarship, it's not what you think

Heidegger scholarship is in crisis these days, and not just because his anti-Semitism has recently been put on full display. The crisis, rather, is that almost ninety years after his major work was published and sixty years after his best work was finished, Heidegger scholars still cannot agree on what he was driving at.--Thomas Sheehan, reviewing Krzysztof Ziarek, Language After Heidegger.

I admire Sheehan's review of Ziarek's book (which I have not read). It tries to be fair to Ziarek (and Heidegger). Not unlike this review, it avoids the hysterical praise and hysterical dismissiveness that characterizes so much of the reception of Heidegger. Even though Sheehan disagrees with Ziarek methodologically and substantially, he tries to be informative and (I hope) fair to the book under review. It also makes a useful  distinction between two approaches in the history of philosophy that goes beyond Heidegger scholarship. I quote:

One approach (the one that I prefer) is to hose down Heidegger’s language to get at what he was trying to articulate, and then to express that in what Milton called “an answerable style.” An alternative approach is the circular one of remaining within Heidegger’s language while attempting to explain it. This approach, which medieval logicians called modus psittacinus (Aristotle, τρόπος ψιττάκινος, Hist. anim. VIII 12, 597b27-29), is widely favored in contemporary Heidegger scholarship

So far so good. So why the critical title to this post? First, I deny that Heidegger's antisemitism  is a source of crisis. Not because it is unproblematic or irrelevant (and for good measure we can throw in other unsavory behavior and silences/evasions by Heidegger); rather Heidegger's problems with complicity in badness (or worse) recur through philosophical history. Those of us that do philosophy in an institutional context would be politically and philosophically naive, if not self-deluded (the worst philosophical sin in light of the Delphic injunction), if we thought that we avoid complicity with badness (of varying horribleness) just because we are not nazi-fellow-travellers. If we fail to confront our own inner (and institutional) Heidegger -- and merely treat him as the easily to be dismissed other --, we don't start the project of understanding our own place/role in the world we claim to wish to understand (change/improve/explain, etc.).  

Second, and less important, Sheehan (and he is not alone) misunderstands the point of the history of philosophy. He thinks that what really, really matters (in the sense of avoiding crisis!) is to get at Heidegger's intentions (and what he means or might have tried to say, etc.). But if Heidegger is fruitful or highly suggestive to ongoing research -- and while it is not my genre there is considerable evidence this is so -- then I do not see any reason to think there is any scholarly crisis at all. Even if some scholars do not intend or understand themselves as contributing to ongoing research, their efforts may (indirectly) do so--and we should rejoice in that rather than despair about getting some professor's mere intentions right.  

Dennett's Faustian Bargain, revisited

For several years, I have been posing the following choice for my fellow philosophers: if Mephistopheles offered you the following two options, which would you choose?

(A) You solve the major philosophical problem of your choice so conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history).

(B) You write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required reading list for centuries to come. 

Some philosophers reluctantly admit that they would have to go for option (B). If they had to choose, they would rather be read than right. Like composers, poets, novelists, and other creators in the arts, they tend to want their work to be experienced, over and over, by millions (billions, if possible!). But they are also tugged in the direction of the scientists’ quest. After all, philosophers are supposed to be trying to get at the truth.

When I have presented the same Faustian bargain to scientists they tend to opt for (A) without any hesitation—it’s a no-brainer for them.--Daniel C. Dennett (2013) “A Faustian Bargain” Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, p. 411.+

Daniel Dennet was one of my undergraduate teachers, and I am pretty sure I heard him try out versions of the “Faustian Bargain” on visiting scholars. (In his book, Intuition Pumps, he describes further variants.) I mention this because at some point, while I was completing my dissertation, I articulated a descendant of the Bargain that I have tried out on some fellow historians of philosophy. It goes something like this:

(A*) You conclusively settle all interpretive problems about the relationship between the infinite and finite in Spinoza’s metaphysics (like Descartes's Circle a notorious problem) such that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, Spinoza becomes easy, and you get a footnote in history).

(B*) You generate interest in a previously overlooked text so that it (not you) gets on the required reading list for centuries to come.   

Most scholars happily and promptly settle for (A*); that’s what we are trained to aim at. The spirit of contemporary scholarship in the history of philosophy has its origins (mediated via Quentin Skinner, perhaps) in Germanic Wissenschaft, after all. But a few respondents are, after some hesitation, tempted by (B*). For, ever since some professional philosophical historians of philosophy started to read canonical works in context, it was likely they would stumble across texts that might seem candidates for (B*). And while getting the past right is a non-trivial task, doing justice to the past and thereby shaping a better future is nobler yet.

Moreover, (B*) is also a near-self-less-act; in it one is the nearly anonymous hand-maiden to another's success. Even if it is motivated (one concludes after reading Nietzsche) by a strange kind of desire for revenge or (echoing Walter Benjamin) by a desire to speak for history's losers, it remains the case that one uses one's skill and judgment to make somebody else's previously overlooked views, insights, or arguments available for discussion. Of course, plenty of scholars are motivated by the true and the good, and (B*) might be one way to promote these. Even so, there is also something quixotic about (B*) because it is so unlikely to succeed. After reflecting on canon-formation throughout history, I suspect that enduring novelty is introduced into the curriculum and people's reading habits not by the conjoined efforts of scholars, but by the ideological and curricular needs of history's proverbial winners who write and rewrite the past to give their own commitments an air of inevitability, the so-called (to adopt a fine phrase by Michael Kremer) 'royal road to me' (recall).

When good people serve wicked ends (on Tacitus's Agricola)

To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.--Galgacus (as reported by Tacitus).

It is, indeed, human nature to hate the man whom you have injured [Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris].--Tacitus

One of the great oddities of The Agricola (or De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae, that is, On the life and character of Julius Agricola) is that the greatest speech is not given by its dutiful hero, the successful conqueror of Britain, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the father-in-law of the author, Tacitus, but by the noble born and courageous [virtute et genere praestans] British independence fighter, Galgacus ahead of the great battle (won by Agricola). His speech is an indictment not just of Roman tyranny -- and Tacitus's Agricola is one long argument against the tyrant Domitian --, but of the very idea of empire. In three extended paragraphs, Galgacus is allowed to set forth Caledonian freedom and courage against the slavery, taxation, and vengefulness* that Romans impose on conquered nations. In reading and re-reading the speech, I would not be surprised to learn if one of the screen-writers of Mel Gibson's Braveheart put a fine classical education to good use.

Agricola's contrasting speech has a stirring effect on his troops; but it is a bit anti-climactic. It mentions, of course, Rome's divinely sanctioned greatness, the honor and glory of victory, but it focuses on his men's fortitude, effort, patience, and the doing of one's duty. This despite the fact that at the start of the Agricola, Tacitus makes a point of insisting that Rome is an empire of "servitude," [servitute] lacking even in free speech. In the end the Romans win their victory with relatively little loss of life against their more numerous opponents. History is no theodicy. 

The remainder of Tacitus's narrative is about the dangers facing a successful and popular general under a jealous tyrant. While Tacitus insinuates that Agricola may have been poisoned, we learn that Agricola has developed survival skills that emphasize not the heroism of conscience as taught by the (presumably Stoic?) philosophers -- as exemplified by Agricola's philosophical father, who we are told at the start of the book was executed because he refused, following the example of Socrates, to obey an evil order -- , but the prudence of a good soldier who understands, instructed by philosophy's focus on "reason and experience," and, thus, the road of moderation,  his own political situation all too well. By the book's framing, Tacitus's reader is made to reflect on the awkwardness of good, dutiful men, who do not fear death, serving bad men, perhaps, serving bad ends because the alternative is certain death.** 

Three Cheers for (methodological) Anachronism! (And still be *echt wissenschaftlich*)

Students and scholars are often taught to frown on anachronism (recall this post, and this one) and to embrace so-called actors's categories (recall this polemical post). The Reductio ad absurdum <grin> of this habit is to leave terms from the past untranslated and in foreign script (recall here and here). But as Dan Schneider (a post-doc in Ghent) pointed out, as an aside, in a recent presentation,* when one deploys terms from the past in describing the past, then one is often unwillingly (or unwittingly) siding with one side or another in a past debate. Schneider's observation is important because in philosophy often the key concepts are especially -- if not essentially -- contested. (It is especially ironic that this is so often forgotten by those scholars who most pride themselves on their Geisteswissenschaftliche objectivity, if not neutrality.) Often when we use actors's categories, we generate histories that basically (and predictably) replay the historical schemata of past thinkers (and that makes reading history of philosophy often so boring to those familiar with the denouement [recall this post]).

Let me give an example that is close to my own heart because I have been guilty of it. Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza all use the term 'conatus.' One can find it in English language dictionaries, but I would be seriously upset if my wife used it during Scrabble. The relatively straightforward translation ('effort' or 'striving'), does not quite do justice to what the term might mean in any of these thinkers. It is possible, but I am open to arguments to the contrary, that 'conatus' is some kind of technical term for some or all of these seventeenth century thinkers--accordingly, I have left it untranslated in Latin in some of my papers. But just because they use the same term, it does not follow they mean the same thing. The claim of the previous sentence is reasonably obvious for 'adequate' and 'idea,' which really mean different things for, say, Descartes and Spinoza. When modern scholars only write about, for example, Spinoza this need not generate many problems (and so we often use 'adequate idea' happily), but when we write about both Descartes and Spinoza it is worth alerting the reader that while the terminology is shared they have different positions (or so I say).

Things get even dicier, of course, when one is trying to characterizing positions -- say by appeal to actors's categories -- without awareness that there is a polemic (or obscuring that there is one). For example, it is extremely common to say of eighteenth century thinkers that they are 'Newtonian,' especially when such thinkers are engaged in something we and they (!) find -- to use anachronism -- scientific and they deploy metaphors ('attraction') and concepts ('law') that do figure in Newton's explanations. The term 'Newtonian' does get used during the eighteenth century, so it is not anachronistic as such. But, as I learned and have argued, quite a few thinkers ordinarily classified as 'Newtonian' are really (intentionally) critical of quite a bit of non-trivial features of Newton's and the Newtonian edifice (in particular, the high prestige accorded to applications of mathematics by Newton and his followers and/or the development of natural religion/theology by Newton and his followers).

So, sometimes, in order to characterize the past without taking sides in their debates it is wiser, if not more informative, to use anachronism or specially designed (and thereby anachronistic) new jargon. (I introduced 'anti-mathematicism' to characterize those thinkers with reservations about the high prestige of applications of mathematical techniques that are often mistakenly labeled 'Newtonian.') One does this not to give oneself a veneer of neutrality as such (something that may  well be undesirable if not impossible for a historian of philosophy), but in order to characterize past debates in a relatively neutral fashion (or not).  That is to say, if one adopts actors's categories one can inherit the omissions and polemics of these actors--for some purposes that's fine, of course: a Kantian historian, say, may wish to extend, after all, Kantian philosophy by the story she tells and retells, but to simply adopt actors's categories because of some (often inherited) methodological desideratum is like using a map prepared by the CIA: some of the most exciting destinations will be obscured.

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.)