(Published in The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, New York: Scribners’ Sons, 2005).
A respected philosopher keeps a sign on his office door forbidding the discussion therein of any philosophy more than ten years old. At this late stage in his career the restriction includes a good deal of his own work. This may well be the limit case of the anti-historical attitude that has prevailed throughout much academic philosophy of the past 100 or so years, motivated by the view that philosophy, as an academic discipline, need have no more connection to its past than does any other positive domain of inquiry. A physicist, for example, may be interested to know how exactly Newton came upon his discovery of the laws of gravity. But this interest is, as it were, extracurricular, not a necessary part of the specialized knowledge of a competent physicist. It will be enough that the physicist learn the relevant laws in a textbook; Newton’s name need not appear at all, much less the details of his distinctly 17th-century concerns.
Can philosophy be understood in the same way? At the other end of the spectrum from our anti-historical philosopher, we find some maintaining that philosophy is entirely constituted by its history, that the study of philosophy can never be anything but the study of the history of philosophy. Between these two extremes, there is a vast number of intermediate positions concerning the value of philosophy’s history to its present practice. Among those who accept that it is in some degree valuable, moreover, there are vastly different conceptions of the nature of this value. Let us review, with the help of some slightly cumbersome “-isms”, some of the possible perspectives on the history of philosophy from within philosophy today, with an eye toward the deeper understanding of the nature of philosophy itself that informs these perspectives.
Indifferentism. Indifferentism is plainly summed up in the message on the Princeton office door. But this label does not tell all, for, where indifference to history is vociferously defended, the defender is anything but indifferent about what philosophy, as an ahistorical discipline, is, and about what philosophers ought to be doing. Most likely, the indifferentist would like to see philosophy come forward as a science, to adapt a phrase of Kant’s, and believes that it can do so by simply focusing on an appropriate, rather narrow set of questions. In the 20th century, these were questions arising in the analysis of language and the methodology of science, and so it has been with some justice that indifferentism has commonly been associated with analytic philosophy. In recent years, though, most philosophers working in this tradition have come to recognize the usefulness of the history of philosophy, and particularly of the history of analytic philosophy itself, to their own work, and it is now rare that a philosopher of science or language will find a job who does not also have some competence in the history of these subdisciplines. Some of the best analytic philosophers today choose to congregate at meetings of the History of the Philosophy of Science group, to discuss, among other things, the revision of our understanding of the very notion of “analysis” as it was understood in early analytic philosophy by, e.g., Carnap or Neurath. What is sometimes described today as “post-analytic philosophy,” then, might better be thought of as analytic philosophy after its historical turn, and is in any case a sure sign that strict indifferentism is on its way out.
Indifferentists tend to believe that philosophy, like any other discipline, has seen some progress over the past few millennia. One standard example is the resolution of Zeno’s paradoxes with mathematical tools that had to wait until the 19th century to see the light of day. On another understanding, though, what in fact happens when a philosophical question is “solved” is that it ipso facto ceases to be a philosophical question at all and becomes a mathematical or scientific one. Thus, any philosophical question is by definition unanswerable, and the history of philosophy becomes but the prehistory of science, the initial recognition that a problem exists without any clue as to how to render it scientifically tractable. It may be impossible to say which perspective is right; but those who believe that the mathematization of Zeno’s paradoxes was an instance of philosophical progress will likely think that there is no reason to dwell too much in the past. Why waste our time on those who hadn’t yet figured out as much as we have? We may be grateful to them for having discerned the problem and taken some initial stabs at solving it, as an astronomer today might appreciate Ptolemy, but there is no pressing need to figure out the details of their theories and how they came up with them. Those who believe philosophy is cumulative and progressive, then, will likely incline, in some degree, towards indifferentism. The others, though, believe that what makes philosophy unique is that it never really gets anywhere. There may be personal progress that comes from studying it and learning how complex the problems it addresses are, but the discipline as a whole witnesses no real progress over the course of centuries. On this view, history will be of tremendous value, because it is only through the study of philosophy’s history, the way it keeps circling back around the same challenges, always coming up with solutions from within a limited range of options, that one can experience personal progress out of an adolescent optimism, or even arrogance, about these problems’ facile solvability.
Appropriationism. This label may describe any approach to the history of philosophy that seeks to take from it tools that may be of service to one’s ahistorical philosophical task. An appropriationist asks of the history of philosophy: What can it do for me? Representatives of different strains of appropriationism will have different answers to this question.
Reconstructionism. This breed of appropriationism searches philosophy’s past for arguments that have stood the test of time and can still be of service in defense of some philosophical position advocated by the appropriator. For instance, a reconstructionist who believes that no better account of personal identity than Locke’s —which roots it in continuity of memory— has been offered since the late 17th century will cite Locke’s argument for this theory in support of her own, similar one. The same reconstructionist, though, will not feel obligated to adopt, or even take an interest in, Locke’s support of, say, a cosmological argument for the existence of God. The reconstructionist takes piecemeal from philosophy’s past, as she finds useful for her own project, and will generally not feel obligated to consider whether the argument she borrows from a past figure was really offered in response to concerns similar to hers. As Jonathan Bennett supportingly describes this approach to history, dead philosophers should be approached as colleagues, with the one minor but not insurmountable difference that they are, well, dead. In this spirit, 20th-century scholars of the philosophy of Descartes have been able to portray him as engaged, to use Bernard Williams’ phrase, in a “project of pure enquiry,” without acknowledging that he was also engaged in a project of empirical physiology, and other areas of 17th-century philosophy that have since been outsourced to the appropriate science departments.
Neo-x-ism. An absolutely dogmatic Marxist would be an entirely uninteresting character, not because Marx was wrong, but because a follower who adheres utterly to every aspect of his predecessor’s thought is in essence only a relay station for that thought’s dissemination, not a thinker in his own right. Any noteworthy Marxist thinker, other than Marx himself, will be in his or her unique way a neo-Marxist, even if the prefix remains only implicit. Thus Lenin, a Marxist if there ever was one, nonetheless modified some of Marx’s central doctrines concerning the essential class-rootedness of conflict to account for the new phenomena of imperialism and the growing antagonism between the colonizing and the colonized parts of the world, that at least the early Marx couldn’t possibly have foreseen. Similarly, Lacan adopts the basic categories developed by Freud for the analysis of the psyche but explicates them in terms of a poststructuralist philosophy of language. Lenin and Lacan are not reconstructionists; they do not pretend that Marx and Freud were concerned with the same problems they themselves face, or even that their predecessors would approve of the way they are tackling these problems. But they are appropriationists of a different stripe, mastering and defending the ideas of a predecessor, while showing how these ideas can be of use in application to new and unforeseen problems.
Neo-x-ists will speak of working within a “broadly x-ian framework” while dealing with questions that admittedly did not concern x. Conversely, a reconstructionist will find and extract passages in which some predecessor x dealt with the same questions that interest her today, without, in performing this extraction, feeling obligated to confess to any broadly x-ian framework or world-view.
Contextualism. A contextualist will, to the extent possible, let her philosophical predecessors, through the texts they have left behind, speak for themselves. If a great thinker from some bygone era turns out to have believed in ghosts or astrology, then so be it; these features of his thought need to be acknowledged and understood just as much as those that have stood the test of time. Facing up to these odd and sundry concerns of our predecessors, a contextualist thinks, has more than just the virtue of shocking our shockingly narrow colleauges. Contextualism, in its honesty about the distance between our concerns and those of our predecessors, reminds us that past philosophers were not just early models of ourselves, but were concerned with a largely different set of problems and saw their role and responsibility as thinkers very differently. In this way, contextualism can help us to overcome the tendency to see the past as a mere prelude to the present. And this benefit may be of more philosophical significance than it first appears. For contextualism, understood as the “merely” historical study of the history of philosophy, helps history to be something more than history of the present, in the same way that the study of, say, natural selection in now extinct evolutionary lines can help to drive home for us the important point about evolution that it is not a teleological process that has had as its end all along the emergence by evolutionary means of its crowning accomplishment, homo sapiens. The present state of philosophy is not the end toward which the past has been striving, just as human beings are not the end toward which evolution has been striving. Against this view, it might be pointed out that the tradition of philosophy has been a common project, whereas evolution has been a blind and stumbling affair. But the contextualist will remind us that, even if we might recruit the dead to help us with our philosophical tasks, this does not mean that they would recognize as much commonality with us as we claim with them if per impossibile they could have been given advance warning about their posthumous affiliations.
Constitutivism. A constituvist tends to believe that philosophy just is a particular tradition, fundamentally rooted in history and comprehensible only synchronically. For her, it is our primary task today to investigate how we came to inherit the philosophical concerns we have, rather than to continue to seek answers to questions as though they were timelessly meaningful. Thus for Marx, each era’s philosophy is one of the superstructural reflections, along with other outcroppings of culture, of the class relations that fundamentally define that era; for Foucault, philosophy, as the contemplation of timeless questions, is in need of replacement by a genealogy of the concepts that came to predominate, for the most part in only very recent history, in philosophical discourse. There is an air of subject-changing in these accounts of the history of philosophy: they want to reveal the true nature of philosophical discourse, rather than to continue to participate in it. When Frederic Jameson describes Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained as an allegory of late capitalism, he is not engaging with Dennett’s arguments in a way that could even permit the author to respond. He is explaining Dennett’s concerns, his very conception of philosophy, as the product of a history of which Dennett need not be at all aware. Dennett may say this is unfair (though more likely he will not say anything at all); Jameson, for his part, could respond, true to his Marxist constitutivist convictions, that the deepest and most fundamental account of the philosophy of any era, including recent analytic philosophy, will be one that roots it in its time and place. Any account that does not do this will fail to grasp what the theory it is studying is really “all about”. And surely, any constitutivist would insist, such a failure is a philosophical failure, perhaps the cardinal one.
Most scholars working in the history of philosophy will combine in varying degrees some or all of these various approaches. Many scholars believe that, qua historian of philosophy, one is required to accomplish some serious historical research, preferably involving archives and manuscripts, in order to claim any expertise on the subject that interests her. A real historian must know at least a few languages, understand the basics of historiographical method, and know at least a bit about the social and political background of the era that interests her. But, qua philosopher, at the end of the day she must also prove able to do what other philosophers today demand of their colleagues, namely, offer some insight into the essences of things, or show that what was thought to have an essence lacks one, or show, as Rorty says, how things hang together in the broadest sense. This may be done simply through the discussion of what some past thinker thought on these topics, but the crucial thing is that essences, hangings-together, and other such philosophical staples be tackled directly or through the mediation of one who has gone before, rather than resting content with, say, a tally of the dates and recipients of some 17th-century philosopher’s letters.
Some historians of philosophy might not be exactly sure what they’re doing. While many of us know of no other way to talk or write about the history of philosophy than by purporting to explain what the philosopher in question actually meant, we are too sophisticated to believe that this is what we are really doing. We claim to be setting the record straight, but sense that at least to some extent we are pushing our own agendas. These need not be mutually exclusive tasks, however. A feminist historian of philosophy may wish to push her worthy agenda, for example, by setting the record straight concerning the great number of largely ignored women active in the central philosophical debates of the 17th century, such as Anne Conway and Damaris Masham. And yet, even after this correction to the record is made, and women gain their rightful place in the canon, it would be naïve to think that the record has been set straight once and for all. A future generation will undoubtedly discover something else that has remained sub rosa in earlier generations’ reception of our shared past. There are ever new and different, previously undetected angles from which to consider philosophy’s past. So long as it interests us, we will never cease to find new ones. The ones we find, moreover, will always be at least partially a reflection of our own interests, even if we hold out just letting the texts speak for themselves as the soundest methodology. We might worry that this is to allow rather too much “as if” to enter into our understanding of our own projects: know that you can never do more than reflect your time and place in your reception of the past, but approach the past as if you had the power of discernment to say once and for all what it was all about. This and similar worries, though, far from indicating professional incompetence, might better be understood as proof that the study of the history of philosophy is a quintessentially philosophical endeavor, and carries with it all the aggravation and perplexity we might expect from any endeavor deserving of this label.
Bibliography
Bennett, Jonathan. Learning from Six Great Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume. 2 Vols. (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Ed. Jan Van Der Dussen. (Oxford University Press, 1994).
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Vintage, 1994).
Gracia, Jorge G. E. Philosophy and Its History: Issues in Philosophical Historiography (SUNY Press, 1992).
Hutton, Sarah. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Rorty, Richard, and Jerome B. Schneewind, Quentin Skinner, Lorraine Daston, Dorothy Ross, James Tully (Eds.). Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979).
Williams, Bernard. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Prometheus Books, 1978).
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