History of Philosophy as Philosophy

In my previous post, I talked about Socrates and what his style of philosophy meant to me. I started with this anecdote:

Socrates walks into a library and asks a historian, “has anyone ever asked this question?” The historian awaits for the question, becoming more dumbfounded as silence stretches on, until finally he asks, “what question?” Socrates replies, “haven’t you been listening?”

The introduction to this essay is here: Problems and Implications within "History of Philosophy"

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY AS PHILOSOPHY

Let us examine this tautological wordplay before directly delving into the concept of history of philosophy as philosophy. What my fictionalized Socrates is trying to imply by the rhetorical question “haven’t you been listening?” could refer to two possible jokes. The first, and perhaps least obvious, is the personal attack to the historian that Socrates as the gadfly is not so much concerned with historical facts. His role as gadfly is to question, and so he leaves the task of providing empirical data to the historian. His role as gadfly is to do philosophy in the present time through verbal dialogue, as opposed to the historian’s role of recalling old facts and data. Hence the accusatory question alluding to the historian’s responsibility: “haven’t you been listening?” The second, and perhaps more apparent joke, is the fact that Socrates himself has asked the very question he was referring to, making the answer “you, Socrates, just asked that question” the most immediate one the historian could give. The historian, thinking that Socrates was referring to someone other than himself, was at a loss and expected another question to be stated, so that he could perhaps provide Socrates with a date, name, and context pertaining to that question being asked in the past. However, even if someone else had asked that very same question before, (which likely many have), the tautology of the question turns it into itself as soon as it is uttered. The one who utters the question owns it in the act of uttering, no matter if the question originated from another. The speaker thus undertakes the question himself, separately from the original questioner, both in time and space. Therefore whatever answer that proceeds from it is inexorably that of the most recent questioner’s, not to the original questioner(s) who asked the same or a similar question in the past.

I would like to draw a parallel between this anecdote and the attitude taken by some historians of philosophy. Hatfield aligns with the argument that “…one should seek to discover the problems that motivated his or her philosophizing. This is good advice: it suggests trying to ‘get inside’ the philosophical activity of a past author, to ‘rethink’ the problems that motivated him or her.”[1] and later “…recognition of the past philosopher’s overall aims and projects will aid interpretation.”[2] Hatfield insists that such an understanding of past philosophers is only possible with an ‘accurate’ historical context in mind. He even goes as far as saying that a contemporary historian may be able to identify Kant’s ‘true’ project of which Kant himself was perhaps not aware[3]. Although I do understand that historical context may illuminate some facts about the philosopher in his time, I vehemently disagree that a result of such examination and consideration will enable a philosopher to ‘get inside’ and ‘rethink’ the problems he or she had in mind. Perhaps if Hatfield were capable of jumping in a time machine to find the real Kant, at which point he could initiate a psychoanalytical interview with Kant about his life and work, I would deem this sort of presumptuousness to have at least some authority. However, ignoring the impossibility of time travel for a moment, even a psychoanalyst can only guess what the inner workings of his subject’s mind is, and this guess often takes many sessions of analysis. This leaves mind-reading capabilities, another science fiction, to be the only manner in which ‘getting inside’ Kant’s mind may be possible. And as if mind-reading through space wasn’t difficult enough, how about reading a dead man’s mind?

This is not to say that knowing a few historical facts that are relevant to the social context of the time, or knowing what Kant wrote in a previous separate work, what education he had, etc. is useless. What I am criticizing in Hatfield isn’t so much his preferred method, but the way in which he criticizes philosophers such as Strawson, Rorty, and Friedman for conducting their own philosophical experiments on past philosophers or philosophies without emphasis on historical context. Where Hatfield finds, through the illumination of history, limits to Strawson’s, Rorty’s, and Friedman’s philosophical experiments, one could just as easily find limits in a philosophical experiment which holds historical context as the most important factor.

Copleston accurately observed the problem of historical construction, stating that “…at what point the historian of philosophy in a certain area or nation or culture should begin is a question which, within limits, must be left to his personal judgment in regard to relevance.”[4] For Copleston, then, a historian’s reconstruction of the past is a subjective one, and therefore one that may change from person to person. To cite historical anecdotes as evidence for what Kant may have thought can offer only a rough guide at best, one that tunnel-visions into history as opposed to philosophy as the inspiration for philosophizing. Further, depending on which historical facts a historian wishes to give relevance to, varying sets of intentions or historically important influences which affected Kant’s philosophy could be construed, thus making the practice even more questionable. To emphasize the importance on historical context over pure philosophical inquiry, then, is purely a personal standard of Hatfield’s; a fault that Hatfield himself criticizes Strawson for committing.

And so Hatfield, through criticizing Strawson’s method of analyzing Kant, fell into the very same pitfall he saw Strawson fall into. “[Strawson] want to interpret the doctrines in a way that emphasizes what can be made ‘acceptable’ while jettisoning what cannot be repaired. Acceptable by what standard? By the standards of philosophy as Strawson sees them, indeed, by standards of argument such as those exhibited in his previous book…”[5] Hatfield repeatedly accuses Strawson of applying his own schema to understanding Kant as opposed to understanding Kant on his own terms. In emphasizing the importance of a text’s historical context over what it may mean to a present day philosopher, Hatfield is merely preferring his own academic background, that of history of philosophy, over Strawson’s preferred method which largely ignores this field.

Therefore when a historian of philosophy such as Hatfield and Ayers, criticize other analytics (eg. Hatfield on Strawson and Kant, and Ayers on Russell and Leibniz), citing mistakes in historical context as opposed to logical mistakes in language and reason, which is the arena such philosophers choose to play in, they fail accurate criticism. Instead of acknowledging the voice of the current author as the one producing new knowledge, as producing philosophy, they are judging him or her on the false pretense that he or she is attempting to align themselves historically with the philosopher they are analyzing. What should be criticized, in other words, is not the method which philosophers adopt when thinking about past philosophers, but the results benefited from the thought experiment they took on when analyzing historical texts. Are these results useful or not to present day philosophy? Are there viable results from Rorty’s analysis of Western Philosophy, or is he shooting in the dark with his ideas of pragmatism? Is Strawson contributing to the discussion about Kant usefully in a philosophical sense? These should be the starting points in critique.

And so as philosophy occurs as questioning in the present, so should the critique of other philosophies operate in this way. By putting too much emphasis on historical context, a philosopher risks taking on, as Hatfield suggests, the past philosopher’s project as opposed to his own. Today’s philosopher should not wander in another’s park, pointing at errant trees he failed to cut down as the problems he left behind, at problems that may house some truth. Instead of barking up at the trees that were left behind, trying to scare the squirrel out of the tree which may never get cut down (or the problem never solved), today’s philosopher should be on the outskirts, cutting down his own trees so as to make the park larger, giving it more room to wander. In others words (in an attempt to take away the ambiguity of my extended metaphor), to identify another’s problems accurately may be useful, but only where it helps in advancing one’s own philosophy. Or else, one is merely doing history, and so the sub-discipline is not longer one of philosophy.