Maybe a New(ish) Way to Do History of Philosophy?

University of Western Ontario is starting a History of Philosophy roundtable, discussing, as the name implies, various topics in the history of philosophy. I’m of two minds about studying the history of philosophy – my attitude towards the practice is a mixture of enthusiasm, dread, dismissal. The reasons why are a little complex, but that’s what blogging is for.

In my time as a graduate student, I've come across two approaches to the history of philosophy that seem pretty mainstream. One is history of philosophy as antiquarian studies: philology on writer X that seeks to get X right. One is understanding historical developments in current terms: asking if Aristotle was a functionalist on philosophy of mind – that question makes no sense to me. It applies the concepts of a long-ago philosopher to current debates with little heed to the radically different context of two writings.

I did my first few years of training in philosophy in a very historically-minded department, and I think I came out better for it. When I engage the work of a complex, difficult philosopher, I put a lot of effort into understanding their terminology, concepts, historical context, and the reasons why they thought the problems at the focus of their work were worth the trouble. I emerged with the ability to read a complex work in a very deep and careful manner rather quickly. You might think this leaned toward the antiquarian definition, and to a degree this was true.

But the individuals who played the biggest role in my education treated their historical subjects as their specialties, but they had no particular loyalties to them. At Memorial, I never worked on history of philosophy with any professors who said their specialty writers were the apex of philosophy, or that those writers were the only ones to get the universe really right. I’ve come across that attitude among some students who work on history of philosophy, and I hope that disappears from them.

My friend Jeremy once came up with the perfect definition of such a slavish historical philosopher: For a devoted X-ian, the only time X was ever wrong was when X himself said some element of X’s own corpus was wrong.

However, I’ve discovered over the past few years that I don’t want to work on history of philosophy, or secondary material generally, as my main specialties. I didn’t want to use my intellectual capacities in the service of illuminating the work of another writer. I didn’t want to spend the bulk of my time arguing over interpretations of another writer, with other writers whose careers were also spent commenting on the same writer as me. I’m just not humble enough to be that subordinate, even to someone who had proven themselves as remarkable as Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Heidegger, or Russell. I find secondary material to be writing about philosophy. But I want to write philosophy.

For me, the history of philosophy is a tool for creating concepts and working through contemporary social and ethical problems in philosophy. For example, I’m interested in Spinoza, but not just exegesis of Spinoza’s writings. He’s one of the few philosophers in the Western tradition for whom ontological matters – questions about being and what is – are closely integrated with ethical questions. This kind of reasoning is very important for my own work, but it’s difficult for mainstream philosophers to see this kind of convergence as legitimate. Being able to say that a big name like Spinoza did it too grants my ideas at least a small grasp on that legitimacy.

More than that, I engage with philosophy’s history to find the hidden subtlties of thought and strange concepts in dark corners that we usually don’t mention to undergraduates in the field. I’m looking for peculiarity that can inspire, or strange elements that could have sparked a completely different revolution in philosophy but never caught on because of some social or institutional factor beyond the writer’s control (this is my view of why Johann Fichte didn’t invent phenomenology in 1801).

I’m interested in taking part in this roundtable at Western, provided I can get transportation to London three or four times during the next term. I revere no one, although I respect them very much. And my applications of past to present are very indrect and convoluted. But I hope to find welcome, or at least sympathy. I’m not exactly someone who fits in.

How to Read Philosophy, and Be a Philosopher

In the course of preparing a presentation I’ve been invited to give at a conference at University of St Gallen in Switzerland later this Fall, an intriguing idea came to me about the history of philosophy. It’s too complex to fit into the space I have for the presentation, but it’s promising enough that I think I can work with it for a while. It’s also connected to a conversation I had Friday evening about how philosophy is taught at the introductory and undergraduate level.

My friend has begun to find it ridiculous that we are teaching undergraduates philosophy by having them argue against or otherwise try to attack the works and ideas of the giants of our fields. If a philosophical work or corpus has survived with a prominent role in the history of ideas for hundreds or thousands of years, it seems absurd that we would teach people by demanding that they refute Aristotle at age 19. It trivializes a work of monumental scope and power. It demeans the concepts that have revolutionized thinking over the millennia. I didn’t recall being taught that way.

My first philosophy instructor was (and still is) an old Cambridge man, who waxed to me this summer about the old way of teaching philosophy, where you truly know your history, can genuinely understand the thoughts and social milieux that shaped the thinkers you’re studying. You can’t start refuting all over the house until you know why every word is just the way it is. This is philosophy as serious scholarship, the meticulous investigation into a way of life that in most cases no longer exists, so that one can understand most deeply how a great piece of work was produced, and how it was meant to affect its own time, its own readers.

However, there is a different way to read philosophy which I consider equally legitimate as serious scholarship, but is easier in some respects, but far more difficult in others. Werner Herzog talks about how the meaning of his films, particularly Aguirre The Wrath of God, changes depending on who is watching them. The work is no less great, even though the people who receive it transform its meaning significantly and radically. In fact, it’s greater because it can have all these different meanings in different contexts of culture and history. Philosophy has such a long tradition that its great works have undergone similar transformations. It is easier than scholarship because it doesn’t require so much historical and contextual work. But inspirational readings are more difficult because the work stands out as even more alien when it is transplanted into a new context.

It’s difficult to read philosophy well, or indeed any great work, when you are part of the community. Every filmmaker, the Hollywood hacks, commercial directors, no-budget indie directors with a stolen digital camera, is in the same community as Kubrick, Murnau, and Herzog. Writers are in the same community as Eliot, Joyce, and Cervantes. Philosophers are in the same community as Plato, Russell, Deleuze, and Kant. The danger of the trivializing attitude of refutation being your only engagement with a work is that you make a mockery of the giants of your field. The scholarly attitude becomes dangerous when it becomes worship, and you sterilize your own creativity in a terrible inferiority complex.

The inspirational attitude is to pick up a work and a philosopher as if you are talking to an old, strange friend. This friend will shock and terrify you, and also mystify you completely. But if you can engage your alien friend in a respectful conversation, a productive dialogue, then you can become a great figure yourself.

Lessons from History, Or When Not to Read Too Closely

I was reflecting on last Tuesday’s John Ralston Saul talk at McMaster this weekend, and another idea occurred to me. The actual subject of his talk was understanding Canada as a Métis nation, a life grown of pluralism that was founded in the historical situation in the country for many years, where the indigenous peoples and the English and French settlers were on a level playing field. This shifted, he said, in the nineteenth century, as European philosophies of racial nationhood took hold. But he said that Canada had a very special essence in this founding atmosphere of pluralism and multiple identities.

I found Saul’s talk very intriguing and useful. But my social scientist, cultural theorist, and historian friends thought differently. They raised questions and commented to me that Saul’s theory was naive. They raised the valid point that his romanticizing the early indigenous-settler relationships as a creative multiplicity of identity and lifestyle (and it was quite romanticized) papered over the genuine terrifying harm that settler-descended people had done to the indigenous. They argued that history was much messier than Saul’s simple story, and I agreed with them.

But I hold firm that Saul’s talk was intriguing and useful - as philosophy. As history, it missed major complications that made a mockery of his account of the Canadian story. Of course, the complications of history as it actually occurred always make a mockery of any simple story. The point of a simple story is not to be an accurate retelling of events, and anyone who thinks that is the point doesn’t understand the messy muddiness of how history works.

A story like Saul’s is told not to recount the past, but to create the future. A plural Canada whose people embrace contradiction and multiplicity in their national and personal identity is a Canada where I would love to live. Saul told a just-so story to explain his philosophy of identity (because that’s what it was, not a genuine historical account). Such a philosophy is connected with Canadian history to give its audience an anchor in their own lives, a tool to apply the concept to their own lives, taking it out of the abstract and into actual application.

The problem with just-so stories that are delivered as interpretations of historical events is that they gloss over the events that don’t jive with the story. So those in the audience with a better mind for history than philosophy will dismiss the concept as poor history and leave it at that. It’s a long-standing problem for creative philosophers to find ways to articulate their concepts in a manner that people can latch onto them and incorporate them into their own lives. It can be tough to get our ideas out of the abstract.

History's Disconnection

It is an immensely weird experience to read Time Regained in 2009. The last volume of In Search of Lost Time is Proust’s portrait of Paris during the First World War, though in all fairness and accuracy, I should call it The Great War. Proust died in 1922, and wrote most of Time Regained while the war was ongoing. So he never saw the catastrophic development of the German economy, the resurgence of nationalism, or the Nazi Party and the Second World War.

His Paris of 1916 is utterly traumatized and largely broken by the bombardment and the slow, dragged out terror of the war. I think people today, or even people from the 1950s onward, really appreciate how horrifying the Great War was to the people who were living through it. We see the war historically, as a prelude to the greater cataclysms of the Holocaust, the rape of Nanking, the massacres of Slavs on the Eastern Front, the nuclear bombings, and the firebombings. The almost worldwide destruction of the 1940s made the bloody trenches in France and the years-long artillery barrage of the Eastern Front look like a scuffle at a bar.

But the characters of Proust, and the man himself, are watching the collapse of their entire world, quite literally I think. The quaint, mannered lifestyle he described in the entire rest of the story simply don’t make sense in a world where every night brings the constant fear of Zeppelin bombings, and there’s a stupendous chain of trenches and battlefields barely a hundred miles away from your city. At this point, I begin to see In Search of Lost Time as cataloguing the history of a forgotten, innocent world. Where I’m reading right now, one of the major characters has just died, shot in the face with a machine gun while covering his regiment’s retreat. It makes the narrator’s previous anxieties over what arrangements to meet for a restaurant date seem nonsensically trivial.
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In other, awesome, news, The Kids in the Hall are back together to produce new material. It’s a murder mystery in a small Canadian town called Death Comes to Town, which will play on CBC in January 2010. It will be an eight part miniseries, and will include such scenes as Mark McKinney’s Grim Reaper taking a Greyhound to the town of Shockton, and Bruce McCulloch playing a 600 pound man. I am, needless to say, quite excited.