Digressions&Impressions

On Siedentop and The Re-Invention of Liberalism (II); against autochthonous tradition

The Gospel of Thomas urges a new project on believers: nothing less than turning women into men! They are to become as ‘one’. By that it is clearly meant that women should be enabled to become rational agents, to recognize that they have the same rational and moral capacities as men. ‘When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner ... and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, then you will enter (the kingdom).’

That reconstruction of the self, which Paul had urged on his followers, is here tied overtly to a change in the status of women. Larry Siedentop (2015) Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism]. p.75  [HT Bart Wilson]

I agree with Siedentop that anti-clericalism may well hide key Christian contributions to liberal self-understanding. I agree with him (recall) that "Christian moral intuitions played a pivotal role in shaping the discourse that gave rise to modern liberalism and secularism." (359) But it is one thing to insist that Christianity played a central, even constitutive role in developing the conceptual scaffolding for Liberal individualism and another thing to claim or imply that only Christianity played such a role. This has unfortunate consequences. For example, earlier in the week, I argued that this commitment leads him articulate a rather impoverished understanding of liberal individual (that somehow misses the contribution of Mill, or at least now identified with Mill's defense of non-conformism). I also noted that Siedentop's argument also effaces the cosmopolitan roots of liberal thought. Today, I would like to develop this thought.

A key point in the book is that Christianity invents by reversing the once pervasive and omnipresent assumption of natural inequality and social hierarchy for a view of natural, moral equality. And while plenty of Christians recoil from the implications of this intuition, as Christian institutions shape society, it has many intended and often unintended consequences that, ultimately, feed into liberalism. This draws on two key methodological "assumptions "that frame the study:

The first is that if we are to understand the relationship between beliefs and social institutions – that is, to understand ourselves – then we have to take a very long view. Deep moral changes, changes in belief, can take centuries to begin to modify social institutions. It is folly to expect popular habits and attitudes to change overnight.
The second assumption is that beliefs are nonetheless of primary importance, (2)

As regular readers know, I believe that habits and attitudes can change overnight, even if we then (recall) pretend for political reasons the change is more modest and incremental, and that when they don't, we should explore how institutions and force prevent change. But in what follows, I'll pretend that memetic change is glacial.  Okay, with that in place, I want to tackle two claims. 

First, in the passage quoted at the top of this post, Siedentop suggests that once Christianity embraced natural equality, gender equality (even gender homogeneity) was a firm conceptual possibility within Christianity. And while it laid dormant for many centuries thereafter, once Christian moral intuitions could shape society, there were no logical barriers against the habits and attitudes of gender equality.* As he puts it: "we have seen that the conventional view in antiquity was that women could not be fully rational beings. Their subordination, like that of slaves, was justified in that way. The Gospel of Thomas urges a new project on believers: nothing less than turning women into men!" (75)  A similar impulse, "a presumption in favor of equality," shaped "the attitudes of Gregory of Nyssa, who in fourth century Constantinople delivered a fierce attack on slave-owning." (119) Nothing is said about Gregory of Nyssa's attitudes toward gender equality.

One could never guess from Siedentop's account that one could find the doctrine of natural equality elsewhere in the Ancient world. My favorite example can be found in Philo of Alexandria's description (in an essay known as, De vita contemplativa or Of the Contemplative life) of a monastic community outside of Alexandria, the therapeutics, that practices gender equality, women joining the "sect with equal deliberation and decision."+ But not not just outside Alexandria; in fact, Philo is explicit that such communities "may be met with in many places, for it was fitting that both Greece and the country of the barbarians should partake of whatever is perfectly good."  In addition, they reject slavery. Their ground for doing so is worth quoting: "they do not use the ministrations of slaves, looking upon the possession of servants of slaves to be a thing absolutely and wholly contrary to nature, for nature has created all men free, but the injustice and covetousness of some men who prefer inequality, that cause of all evil, having subdued some, has given to the more powerful authority over those who are weaker."

To the best of my knowledge there is consensus that Philo is describing a Jewish community; or at least it is an idealized version of possible Jewish life modeled on the description in Exodus 15 of the relationship between Moses and Miriam.* It's important to note that unlike The Gospel of Thomas, in Philo's description the therapeutics maintains, while something close to equality, gender difference. 

Philo's description of the therapeutics also calls attention to a detail that undermines another key part of Siedentop's argument. For, while drawing heavily on Fustel de Coulanges, Siedentop argues (correctly) that the patriarchal family is the basis of the inequality of Ancient political life and that each family is originally a religious cult. (This is important because there is no space for the true individual and equality in the Ancient household.) The center of the patriarchal family is the family shrine. And throughout the early chapters of his argument Siedentop, runs arguments ground in the necessary identity of family as a religious cult and the practice of political inequality/hierarchy.

As it happens, as Philo reports (or imagines) "in every house" of the therapeutics "there is a sacred shrine." It's unclear whether the home shrine is gendered male. I think not because there is a communal "holy place" which is clearly co-gendered: "this common holy place to which they all come together on the seventh day is a twofold circuit, being separated partly into the apartment of the men, and partly into a chamber for the women."

Now I don't mean to suggest that Philo always and everywhere endorses natural equality. But I do claim he did not need Christianity to arrive at it in De vita contemplativa. Philo's life and writings are pretty much contemporaneous with the life of Jesus and his writings may or may not have influenced early Christianity (and the Gospel of Thomas). But there is no reason to believe the influence ran in the other direction. 

Second, among the most striking claims in Siedentop's narrative, is that the political side of liberalism really grows out of monastic self-government in three key ways: (i) democratic values of consensual, bottom up and deliberative government ground in individual association are developed there; (ii) the work ethic is embraced and the aristocratic-intellectualist bias against work is rejected; (iii) the Cluniac reform movement gave rise to the attempts to use canon law to create unified papal sovereignty.  (Chapter 7 is devoted to articulating (i-ii) and chapter 17 to the connection between (i) and (iii).) So far so good (and (iii) is worth returning to.)

But Siedentop presents monastic life as a Christian invention developing out of the practice of Christian hermits in the 'East' (Syria, Egypt, etc.).  Here's the key passage:

[W]hile urban churches compromised with the aristocratic world in which they had developed, the new, chaotic movement of monks preserved the primitive norms of the church....Nonetheless, the gradual organization of monasticism reveals more about the moral thrust of Christianity than what had become the ‘state’ religion of the Roman empire by the late fourth century could do. As hermits or anchorites became cenobites – that is, as asceticism became communal – Christian beliefs began to generate a new conception of ‘community’, an utterly new form of social organization. (93)

Now, Siedentop could have dropped a footnote here and mentioned that there were monastic communities prior to Christianity. Quite famously -- (and not to draw on Philo again, I mention) Pliny the Elder devotes a rather striking passage to them in the Natural History -- the Essenes were a monastic community that share in many of the characteristics that Siedentop praises in early monastic Christianity. But he doesn't. I don't mean to suggest Jews invented monastic life. When I teach the history of political thought, I call attention to the significance (for political theory) of Buddhist monasticism invented half a millennium earlier or so. Many of the characteristics that Siedentop praises in Christian monasteries were pioneered there. I don't know how much of this was known in the Roman mediterranean, but Pliny mentions plenty of contact between Romans and Greeks and Indians. Pliny and Philo are not obscure.

It's possible, of course, that Siedentop is misled in part, by his hero Fustel de Coulanges, who emphasizes the uniqueness of Pauline Christianity. But I also think Siedentop has an earnest desire to show that liberal individualism is wholly, even purely, 'Western' because he wants to promote, if not a battle of civilizations, at least a dominant role for a self-confident liberalism that shapes" the conversation of mankind" (363). And so the Jewish (and other) sources on Christianity and future liberalism have to be homeopathically thinned to the bare minimum.

By contrast, here's what Siedentop says about the Jewish influence on his story:

Conforming to an external will was becoming the dominant social experience. And the voice of Judaism spoke to that experience, as no other did. The message of the Jewish scriptures was radical. Virtue consisted in obedience to God’s will. His will was not something that could be fathomed by reason. It could not be deduced from first principles. Nor could it be read in the book of nature. Scripture alone mattered, because it was the record of God’s commands and promises. Historical events – the medium of God’s will – were privileged over deductive reasoning. The Jewish God refused to be pinned down: ‘I will be who I will be.’
A new sense of time thus went hand in hand with the new awareness of will. (54)

So, on this account, the main message of Jewish scriptures is submission to the will of God. This is characteristic of the idea that Jerusalem and Athens are polar opposites (and as Hazony has noted often implies that Judaism is not a religion of reason). This is a form of Judaism as exemplified by the Christian interpretation of the commandment to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. (Here's how Siedentop puts it: "What Paul did, in effect, was to combine the abstracting potential of later Hellenistic philosophy – its speculations about a universal or ‘human’ nature – with Judaism’s preoccupation with conformity to a higher or divine will." (61))  I have noted before that J.S. Mill had a different view (itself indebted to Machiavelli), "Conditions more favourable to Progress could not easily exist: accordingly, the [Ancient] Jews, instead of being stationary like other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most progressive people of antiquity, and, jointly with them, have been the starting-point and main propelling agency of modern cultivation."

My point is not that the liberal individual is Jewish, or Buddhist. But rather that one can tell a version of Siedentop's story, and point to heterogeneous influences and exemplary sources for it, that is truly cosmopolitan. As it  happens, that is historically (in his prophetic sense) more accurate; it's also more fascinating. It's also a myth worth having for a political tradition that self-consciously wishes to shape humanity's common destiny in an egalitarian key. 

 

Rejecting Philosophy: On The Very Idea of Western Philosophy, Again

Some have argued, for example, that considerable violence had to be done to Chinese intellectual traditions in order to shape them into something recognisable on the 'world market' as philosophy (for example, they had to be divorced from what we can only identify, in a trivialising manner, as 'calligraphy'), that this only happened as a result of the pressures of nationalist modernisation campaigns late in the 19th century, and that the result was a mere fossil specimen, easily teachable in new western-modelled curricula, but only because it was by now no longer alive. See for example Anne Cheng, "Y-a-t-il une philosophie chinoise? : est-ce une bonne question?" in Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 27 (2005). This sort of concern, about what exactly it means to belong to a culture that can claim to have its own philosophy, and how this meaning has changed over time as a result of broader historical processes that for the most part do not play out on the plane of ideas, is one to which, for better or worse, academic philosophers interested in promoting diversity will also need to turn their attention. The resistance to doing so exposes yet another deep bias, which is not only harmful to the dead people it ignores: the bias of presentism.--Justin Smith Garfield and Van Norden on 'Non-European' Philosophy.

Almost a decade ago, I was talking to a young scholar who had sought me out to discuss shared research interests (on Newton & Spinoza). We were having an animated discussion, and I mentioned my research on Babylonian economics and astronomy. Undoubtedly, I was bragging a bit about my esoteric interests in a way that a peacock shows off useless tails. My youthful interlocutor said without any apparent satire or irony that the Greeks invented philosophy and so that while my project may well be interesting for the history of science it would have no bearing on the history of philosophy. Something triggered in me, and I shot back that my paper, first, shows how Plato and Aristotle (in the Politics) engage with the relevant material (and recycle tropes about visiting Chaldeans and Egypt) and that some enduring philosophical distinctions can be traced to it, and, second, given that the Babylonians clearly were capable of rather subtle modeling and theory-mediated causal analysis, and supported a cultural and institutional infrastructure to maintain centers of serious learning, we should not rule out that there were practices we would call 'philosophy' present in the culture. (Because I did not sense much receptivity, I decided to keep quiet on the role of omens in Babylonian intellectual life.) My interlocutor did not relent, and suggested that the Babylonians lacked self-consciousness and could not, therefore, be philosophical. Because it vaguely reminded me of the kind of thing Nietzsche satirizes, I wondered if that was the kind of thing nineteenth century German philosophy professors would say. Our exchange sputtered on, but because my attempt at being a philosophical peacock had been defeated, I gave up on the topic.

It was not the first time I had encountered the thought there was something distinctive about 'the Greeks' and the tradition inspired by Socrates et al. At some point, I started to notice that in the Platonic corpus we find a rejection of rustic wisdom, and, in its reception by Stoics, an assimilation of philosophy to the superior life under law in the polity as opposed to the barbarian outside the gates. Along the way, the form of thought of (say) the rather cosmopolitan and often wise Herodotus also got treated as non-philosophical. This alerted me that in the process of waging war on sophists/sophistry, there is also a kind of lack of generosity from within the tradition in recognizing philosophy outside certain political and institutional circumstances. 'Generosity' is probably the wrong word, but it will have to do for now.

Since I regretted that continental philosophers and lit crit types had monopolized these themes (because it left me no space to contribute to the topic) because it's pretty clear that from the start of the Platonic philosophical tradition there are distinctions and contrasts, including ones that get racialized and gendered, that in some political circumstances have pernicious consequences. If philosophy is the best life, as Plato (and arguably Aristotle) and a whole host of others at least through Spinoza argue, then what counts as 'philosophy' is not merely honorific, but practices that are not properly philosophical are tacitly devalued. 

In his piece, Justin Smith reminds us that having (a) philosophy played a role in nationalist modernisation campaigns (NMCs). Justin is undoubtedly right to call attention to this, although he does not emphasize that NMCs are closely linked to the development of the modern research university (funded by that very state, too) with its highly specialized disciplines (it's the age in which natural philosophy gets displaced by special sciences).

Justin allows that it is contentious if "representatives of non-European intellectual traditions would even want, or would have wanted, to adopt as a description of what they are doing, or whether rather describing these traditions as philosophy does not already force them into a mould they did not grow up originally to fit." Now, there are tricky issues here on the nature of such representation; when it comes to participating in a tradition, I tend to think of folk instantiating or extending (or reviving it)--even sometimes of 'heading' it (some intellectual traditions have magisters). I feel that representation always also involves some kind of displacement (but that may be because I am in the grip of some species of Platonism).

More important, Justin raises the possibility that somebody from without while looking in to the traditions we call 'philosophy' comes to reject it because (as Smith hints) it somehow disfigures or distorts their own practice. We need not accept Justin's organicist use of the mould trope (which has deep roots in the Biblical influence on our philosophical tradition) to hint at the issue, to see the issue--even if, when we  tried to fully articulated the issue in careful steps we would domesticate the point from within philosophy.

Now, we're not unfamiliar with rejections of the philosophical life. There are branches of Christianity that seem to treat philosophy as either to be rejected or as the ladder to be thrown away. Al-Ghazali, too, opts for Sufism, I think, as a step beyond philosophy. And, after Nietzsche, quite a bit of Continental philosophy flirts with anti-philosophies (of some sort or another). But these are all within the orbit of the Platonic origin.

But in the essay I quoted, Justin points us to the possibility of traditions that do not require to be cleansed from our vices and our (sometimes miserable) track-record of exclusion (or worse). By allowing us to contemplate the possibility of such a 'philosophical tradition which is not philosophy,' he hints at the promise of a kind of (philosophical?) rebirth, but that, just is Platonism. That's to say, the previous sentence reminds me it's not so easy to escape the clutches of one's tradition while the urge to imagine one can do so (cf. The Tempest) is a permanent temptation.

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.)  

On fetishizing Actors's Categories.

A preface (co-written with Zvi Biener), defending the title 'Newton and Empiricism,' has come under fire from the Otago-school (see this post by Kirsten Walsh). The Otago-school insists that 'empiricism' is anachronistic and that we need to use a distinction between experimental and speculative philosophers (they use the acronym ESD) in order to do justice to even Newton. Here's Walsh:

Over the last four years, we have provided many arguments for the superiority of the ESD over the RED. An important line of argument has been to show that ‘experimental philosophy’ and ‘speculative philosophy’ were the key terms of reference used by the actors themselves, and that they characterised their own work in terms of this division. For example, I have argued here, here, here and here that Newton is best understood as an experimental philosopher.

It's true there are features of Newton's enterprise that fit the 'experimental' paradigm (as understood by early modernists) nicely--the Opticks is characteristic this (as I.B. Cohen recognized a long time ago). The problem is 'Otago' has never come to terms to the fact that Newton's Principia is much better understood in terms of Huygens's Horologium Oscillatorium, which is presupposed in a lot of the technical discussions of the Principia. Huygens' book does not fit the ESD at all. Strikingly in her blog post, Walsh misses this point even though it was signalled in the very first paragraph of our introduction: "Newton...explicitly affiliated himself in the Principia with the mathematical-experimental tradition of Galileo and Huygens." That is to say, the ESD fits the mainstream in the Royal Society (say between 1660-1685) very well, but is un-illuminating in other respects.* Sure, it's legitimate to claim that in some respects Newton is a "development of the experimental philosophy," (emphasis in original) but if you systematically overlook the Horologium, you can't even begin to do justice to Newton's Principia. It's like discussing Virgil in the context of Roman poetry without ever mentioning Homer.

On Starting Out as A Fool

No man may know himself, nor how he must appear even to his friends; but I imagine they must have thought me a but of a fool, that day, and even for some time afterward. I was a bit luxuriant then, and fancied that a poet must play the part. There is much that cannot go into books, and that is the loss with which I become increasingly concerned.-- Maecenas to Livy (John Williams Augustus: A Novel, 15-16 [emphasis in original--ES])*

I have been hesitant to post about John Williams's (1971) Augustus: A Novel because I have been eager to re-read Yourcenar's (1951) Mémoires d'Hadrien, which, I suspect, inspired Williams, first. But  impressions are fleeting and by their very nature can never complete what they aim for. So, I cut a corner here.

The novel tells an exciting story, but is a serious (sometimes too serious) exploration of the most fundamental political philosophy by way of a mixture of letters and notes/diary fragments by a number of characters. This is a clever device in a novel set in history because it allows the author to introduce relevant material that frames the action rather than engage in lengthy, explanatory asides. Chapter One (of Book 1), the thematic introduction of the book, which contains two letters and two such fragments does not let Augustus speak in his own voice. In fact the four entries give us schematic types. The four 'entries' jump around in time  and exhibit indirect form, a theme explicitly stated at the start of the book:

I am a poet, and incapable of approaching anything very directly.--Maecenas to Livy (12)

And indeed, the book is an extended meditation -- an unfolding -- on art (both in the literary sense and in the art of ruling). The novel reaches its climax with a long set-piece (a letter from a dying, nearly delirious Augustus to Nicolaus of Damascus which occupies the whole of Book Three) in which the poetic art and the art of being emperor are said to spring from the same kind of love and involve analogous ordering patterns and self-deceptions. So, the novel calls attention to the oblique status of its presentations. The reader is expected to do some work.

As an aside, we are also warned** that this work of figuring out the oblique point is tricky because of human nature. For, the first chapter closes on: "death and greatness...the two words go around in my head, around and around, until they seem the same." (26) Williams never gives us the latin (Mortem et Magnitudo (allow a gymnasiast his play)), but while there are a great many deaths -- the historical, temporal start of the novel is the final part of the great age of Roman civil war -- the novel is, in fact, also an investigation of the nature of greatness, especially greatness of soul. But in these lines  we are also reminded that the mind has a capacity of conflation, of effacing difference, such that homogeneity results (we might say, there is nothing greater than God, or the universe, and it coincides with death--not a strange thought amidst war). These words ("death and greatness..." etc.) are spoken, as we learn in the novel, by a traitor. (Perhaps some readers will dimly recall this from their school days.)

One of the schematic types (or part-players), a hybrid, poet-politician/patron, (Maecenas) presents himself in the lines quoted at the top of this post, as an anti-philosophical philosopher: "No man may know himself." If true, this would imply that the philosophical life ('know thyself' etc.) is doomed to failure for everybody. If it didn't violate guild-rules on acceptable philosophical speech, it would have the form of a philosophical claim! After all, it's one thing to stake one's claim on the familiar trope that the path or search is more important than the destination; it's another thing to claim that the destination is a kind of two-level mirage (not just no possible self-knowledge, but even no access to the image of you by your intimates).

On 'History as Historians' do it?

There is a kind of low-level gripe one hears among so-called 'contextual' historians of philosophy that have found a home in professional philosophy departments. These 'contextualists' are often trained in HPS programs or are inspired by the so-called Cambridge school of intellectual history associated with names such as Quentin Skinner and John Pocock (neither at Cambridge now). The gripe goes something like this: professional philosophers that do history of philosophy are not really doing history as historians understand this.* Now, there is a sense in which the gripe is trivially true: whenever professional philosophers produce 'history of philosophy' -- and this has astonishing diversity in methods and products -- it is almost never intended to meet the standards of professional historians; if they are not writing for each other, such historians of philosophy in philosophy departments write for fellow philosophers.  But the gripe is also based on some very dubious commitments. I offer five considerations to substantiate the claim in the previous sentence.