The History of Philosophy as the History of Bean-Counting

I've argued before that in their floundering around the question as to whether there is such a thing as non-Western philosophy, academic philosophers in the English-speaking world appear unable to decide whether their activity should be understood more on the model of a tradition of, say, dance (e.g., ballet) or, instead, on the model of a technology (e.g., the military use of gunpowder).

It would be nonsensical to ask why the Papuans do not have ballet: they do not have it because it is a regional tradition (incidentally, this seems to be roughly the way Saul Bellow was thinking of the tradition of the novel in literature when he noted that there is no Tolstoy among the Zulus). Correlatively, it would be no less nonsensical to ask why the Somalians ended up incorporating firearms into their society with such zeal. They did so because guns are useful for killing people, or for getting what you want from them by threat of force. To put it bluntly, guns have a place in every culture, in view of their immense usefulness in the advancement of what appears to be a universal human end. This is a usefulness, moreover, that it does not take gun-less cultures all that long to figure out (it's said that when Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1534, Huron men ran out to greet the ship, signalling from shore that they would like to trade furs for guns: this on what official history tells us was the first European expedition in this region).  It doesn't matter what eventual ceremonies a given culture will build up around its guns (sergeants-at-arms, twenty-one-gun salutes, Constitutional mythology, stuff like that), the primary application of firepower will remain everywhere the same.

If philosophy were like gunpowder, there would be no question as to its reach: everyone would share in it equally. If philosophy were like ballet, there would also be no question as to why everyone does not share in it equally. My own strong suspicion is that philosophy is rather more like ballet, but perhaps a better comparison, one that keeps the example of military technology in view, would be to say that philosophy is not like the technology itself of war, but more like a particular military tradition that grows up around the use of weapons and the preparation for war, and involves the pinning of medals, the reference to great battles and strategies of the past, and so on.

In the case of martial pageantry, it is clear what the more basic thing is around which the tradition springs up (in the case of ballet, there is also clearly a more basic thing, dance, which in turn appears to be something humans qua humans do, about which see Ezra Zubow and Elizabeth C. Blake, "The Origin of Music and Rhythm" in Archaeoacoustics, ed. Chris Scarre and Graeme Lawson, Cambridge, 2006, 117-126). But what would that more basic thing be, in the case of philosophy? I suspect it is what is often called bean-counting: the tallying of exchanges (of cattle, grain, etc.) by use of pebbles in bowls, of marks on clay tablets, and so on. Wherever we have traces of this sort of activity, we have concrete evidence of a sort of representational thinking (one pebble stands for one cow, etc.) that we can rightly suppose to be just the small report of a more elaborate system of classifications, of setting up correspondences, and of seeking adequate definitions.

Wherever you have people keeping track of things in this way, I mean, you probably have people trying to come to terms with the nature of the things they are keeping track of. A charitable assessment of what the ancients were up to would have us suppose that wherever there is a trace of a culture trying to keep track of the world for practical purposes (navigation, calendry, etc.), there is something like a 'science', however different from our own: a theoretical elaboration of the grounds of the practice. And I really don't know what philosophy could be other than the very most theoretical reach of this elaboration.

You can insist that it must, in addition and at a minimum, involve reflection on the grounds of knowledge of the science, rather than just on the grounds of the science itself, that it must, that is, centrally involve epistemology. But this is a very recent expectation, one that goes against the primary meaning of the term in question until at least the middle of the 18th century. On some issues, I'm a conservative, and I simply think it's wrong to neglect the meaning of a term that has accrued over millennia for the sake of accommodating recent trends. What's more, the possibility should not be excluded that even epistemology is rooted in the sort of processes I am describing. Recent work by Michael Friedman --who represents par excellence the sort of orientation with which I am sympathizing here-- has made a convincing case, in more steps than I am able to mention, for tracing the Kantian theory of space and time as pure forms of intuition back to certain exigencies of medieval astronomy, which in the final analysis existed for the sake of calendry, which in turn had as its principal purpose the determination of the proper date of Easter and similar exigencies of culture.

Much as scientists studying prehistoric human migration patterns have taken an interest in the biogeographical consequences of the European conquest of the New World, it might be useful to think about more recent developments in bean-counting, and of their relationship to modern epistemology and (perhaps) metaphysics, as providing an example of a more general process. I have in mind in particular the well-studied relationship between innovations in early modern accountancy on the one hand and modern ideas about certainty, probability and doubt on the other (see Hacking's Emergence of Probability for the grand theory, and the sundry studies by Daston et al. for the more narrow investigation of the theory's ramifications). This recent history could perhaps serve as a more accessible model in reference to which one might speculate about, say, the basically trace-less epistemology behind Babylonian clay tablets.

Of course, many in the discipline would see such 'genealogical' work as a threat to the integrity of the discipline, since it seeks to ground philosophical reflection in something that is both more foundational but also much more mundane. But one seldom noticed benefit of such an approach is that it entirely resolves the problem of the global distribution of philosophy: philosophy tends to appear where there is science, and science appears where there are urban settlements with complex and wide-scoped administrative projects. India and China, but not the Kalahari Desert or Greenland.

An adequate approach to the history of philosophy, then, would take India and China into account, not because we are interested in 'the Eastern mind' or some such racist drivel as that, but because these civilizations were sufficiently like the one that has until now been the principal focus of our attention to expose as groundless any claims of Western uniqueness. An adequate scholarly approach would defend global history of philosophy against comparative history of philosophy: an approach that sees philosophy as an outgrowth of a certain kind of sociocultural arrangement, rather than as a divine spark sent down to Greece long ago (with various dimmer sparks cast, perhaps by mistake, to negatively characterized 'non-European peoples'), and passed on from there, through a few intermediaries, to Rutgers and NYU.

Comments

[Cameron Brown]

I'm curious what to make here of the philosophy/religion interface?

In the three major traditions mentioned - Chinese, Indian and Western -, at different times and then to greater and lesser degrees, philosophy and religion have been substantively integrated. The history of the one is often the history of the other. So we might think that they spring from the same basic thing.

But this threatens bean-counting’s founding of philosophy. For one, Kalahari tribes have their mythologies too, suggesting that people try to come to terms with the nature of things irrespective of their proximity to urban settlements, science, etc. There seem to be some basic questions that are rather more like gunpowder than ballet: Who are we? How did we/the world get here? What is the purpose of life/death? And so on. (It's perhaps telling that Gaugin painted his D'où Venons Nous... in Tahiti.)

Second, that Friedman's genealogy doesn't simply stop at calendrical calculations, but instead reaches further into a particular religious ritual, seems to suggest, again, a still more basic thing or impulse beyond bean-counting.

Perhaps you could limit "philosophy" to natural philosophy and thereby try to maintain a connection with practical purposes (and their theoretical elaborations), while jettisoning the 'fundamental' questions of value and meaning. But I suspect the conservative in you wouldn't much like this move. A better move, I think, is to say that philosophy arises from the conjunction of, on the one hand, this deeper thing or impulse that underwrites the omnipresence {distinctly not ‘diffusion’) of mythology, and on the other, bean-counting.