Remark on the Role of History in Philosophy

The role of the history of philosophy in the practice of philosophy is a peculiar one. In questioning the motivations of a philosopher who begins his practice with history, or has his practice pervaded by history, a point of comparison naturally arises: the special scientist does not begin their practice with the history of the special science, nor is their practice pervaded by this history. No field can truly escape its history, but its contemporary practitioners can certainly decline to explicitly engage with it, let alone decline to make it a constitutive feature of their practice. So, why can't, why shouldn't the philosophy so decline? There's at least one crucial disanalogy between the philosopher and the special scientist in this respect, and it's a crucial disanalogy between philosophy and special sciences: the latter make real progress. To whatever bizarre kind of progress one might think philosophy has been susceptible, it is clear that the kind of progress the special sciences have made deserves that name.

For myriad reasons, I suspect it would be quite useful for a special scientist to study seriously the history of their special science, but there is one important kind of uselessness in this study: e.g. no contemporary astronomer could, by any standards of rationality, accept the general principles of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. A philosopher could, by many standards of rationality, accept the general principles of Aristotelian ethics. The philosopher in fact has rational colleagues with whom they can argue until the sun goes down (or, rather, until the earth sufficiently rotates) about those general principles—the astronomer does not. There is a general sense that Aristotle, no matter how long he’s dead and gone, is and will remain alive to philosophical thinking and discourse. Philosophy cannot put away its history because it has not earned the right to dispense with the general theories of its predecessors, or to place its contemporary theories on a pedestal higher in kind, and until it earns this right, figures in our history stand to us as any other, as potential sources of inspiration, dialogue partners, and competitors. Perhaps it cannot earn this right—such is philosophy, such is life.

Given the distinctive relation of philosophy to its history, one would expect that the study of the history of philosophy proceed in a distinctive way.

Engagement with the history of, say, chemistry, may proceed by, say, attempting to capture the facts of the historical record as closely possible; its interest would lie in furthering our present understanding of those facts, or unearthing hitherto unknown ones. As such it will begin with the existing historical scholarship and proceed to methodically search for advancements, or to meticulously argue for re-interpretations of the record against competing interpretations. This kind of work is likely to take place in an office in the university’s History department, as such work is not constitutively the work of chemistry—chemistry has moved on. The history of chemistry is studied, in this way, as valuable principally for the purposes of history, rather than for the purposes of chemistry, which purports to have little need for antiquarian excursions. Given philosophy’s relative impotence—its incapacity to put away its history, once and for good—engagement with the history of philosophy is undertaken not merely for the purposes of history, but for the purposes of philosophy. This may be the substantive reason for the striking sociological fact that the history of philosophy is far and away most prominently studied in offices in the university’s Philosophy department. The philosopher’s engagement with history is therefore rightly conditioned by philosophical interest, and this should have profound consequences concerning the form and method by which it proceeds. (This is not to suggest there is no need for work undertaken for the purposes of history, which have independent interest.)

At once it is not so clear what those consequences are, because at once it is not so clear what makes for ‘philosophical interest’ or the ‘purposes of philosophy;’ for it is philosophy’s failure to ever settle a secure collective course that has placed us in this peculiar position. It is at least clear that we have good reason to suppose that the form and method of the philosopher's engagement with the history of philosophy will depart from those of history simpliciter, and it is at least clear that we cannot ground any strong separation between our contemporaries and our predecessors. Rarely does one attempt scholarship of a contemporary with whom they engage, though its clear that one should respect and take care to understand them. Yet engagement with the history of philosophy is engagement with philosophy, and engagement with philosophers of the past is also an engagement with our fellows, as all readers have acutely felt.

Here the burden of proof has shifted: as a matter of present social fact, there is an onus on the philosopher undertaking a positive project to explain its dealing with history, instead of just dealing with today—getting right to the goods; the above reflections suggest the real onus is on the one who privileges today. If the philosopher has not earned the right to set history aside, they haven't established good reason for just dealing with today. With respect to perennial questions, the efforts of those at any time and place stand at first on equal footing. One has to examine the rationally available theories, of one's predecessors and one's contemporaries, and take the best of them as sources of inspiration, dialogue partners, and competitors. We may have some prima facie reason to suspect contemporaries would figure in the best of these—we’ve the fortune of coming up in a tradition longer practiced; our historical hindsight and so the apparent problem-and-answer-space should be proportionately larger. But we also have some prima facie reason to suspect that historical figures would dominate the best of these; if we’re not making real progress, if there’s not a qualitative difference between the general theories of today and those of yesteryear, there have just been so many more theories in the whole history than have been crafted only by contemporaries. Further, the process of history, forgetting many names and retaining others, at least does some, albeit notoriously imperfect work, in identifying those with whom it is worth engaging. The known names of today have stood the test of their immediate colleagues, the known names of history stood that and the test of time.

Knowing exactly how one ought to proceed, how one ought to weigh the inclusion of contemporary or historical thinkers in their work, or where in time one would like exactly to look for their interlocutors on a given subject, requires difficult assessments about what make for good philosophy about that subject, about what sociological conditions tend to generate it and about when those sociological conditions have been most closely approximated. The first assessment, in the end, has to be made on one's own two feet. But if its to made with any seriousness, it must be an astute judgment from a position of some, always limited, holistic understanding of the body of philosophical work—the preponderance of which belongs to ages past. Thus its not only likely that one's best interlocutors will belong to history, further, one's very determination of those interlocutors will require deep and wide engagement with history. Sellars famously claimed that "Philosophy without the history of philosophy, if not empty or blind, is at least dumb." I think he ought to have rather emphasized its blindness.

Contemporary analytic philosophy has beyond reasonable doubt demonstrated its possible cleverness; much is smart, for whatever that's worth. I suspect it may not be worth as much as we hope. Often trading cleverness for sight—hindsight; foresight; insight—reinventing the wheel without vivid awareness; thinking in days, weeks, years, at most decades ahead, but never writing for centuries or for the ages; missing the forest for the trees, in the aspiration to get one's points past the logic police, at the altar of which may be sacrificed richness, depth, and consequence. We could stand, I think, to learn more from our predecessors. Not merely the content of what they thought, their assertions, arguments and conclusions, but the form in which they proceeded: the way they wrote, what they took the aims of philosophical work to be, by what means they could be achieved, what matters and why. I think we could stand to internalize this more than we do—to have our writing and the form of our practice of philosophy shaped by it, rather than merely adding it to scrap-heap of data, wherefrom it would be fortunate to be plucked for its highest realization in citation. For we have no grounds to assert a qualitative superiority of our form of proceeding, either, and its this which our practice contradicts most ubiquitously (we sometimes write about, but hardly ever in the ways of favored history).

Here I follow a remark of John Rawls, that in content and form we ought to "learn moral and political philosophy, and indeed any other part of philosophy by studying the exemplars—those noted figures who have made cherished attempts—and if we are lucky to find a way to go beyond them."