Bifurcated Life

We all get this thumbnail sketch of the history of philosophy that goes something like this: in the beginning were the Greeks. They were cosmologists and philosophers of nature until Socrates and the sophists came along and turned the whole thing around toward ethics and epistemology. Philosophy was also basically a way of life until it ran into its nemesis, Christendom, which demoted it to a supplementary activity practiced by the more bookish of the saints. Aristotle and/or Plato, wedded to systematic theology, ruled the roost until science, protestantism, and politics reawakened philosophy's independent aspirations in the person of Descartes. He and his “new philosophy” led to all the permutations of modern epistemology from British empiricists to German rationalists and idealists. Things took an even more decidedly epistemological turn after Kant and went along swimmingly in that vein until the twentieth century and the turn away from consciousness and toward language.

Another way of telling this story is to speak of which branch of philosophy was “first philosophy” in each era: ancient – metaphysics; medieval – philosophical theology; modern – epistemology; contemporary – philosophy of language (and then, some say, of mind).

This a schema that few perpetrate absolutely. Most professional philosophers would acknowledge (I hope) that each categorization is at best representative, that each claim must admit a hundred exceptions.

Yet the schema is curiously pervasive. The ethicists are perhaps best at insinuating an alternative historiography, as well they might be. But most philosophers, regardless of their specialty, seem intent on arranging their conception of the history of that specialty so that it falls into the schema. I think this is terribly silly. The histories of specific sub-discourses vary wildly with respect to each other and it's not at all clear to me that they can be coordinated according to each era's supposed first philosophy.

In particular, I am interested in the historiography that would emerge from tracing sub-disciplines immanently, without regard to standard periodization. What would a genuinely focused history of philosophy of history or of philosophical method look like?

Is it in fact meaningless to speak of ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary philosophy “in general” and “as a whole”? One piece of evidence in favor of this possibility is the way in which, the moment one turns to a specific “philosophical” discipline — say logic or aesthetics — suddenly thinkers who aren't “philosophers” become necessary to tell the story properly.

(This can be a problem. Recently I was interviewed for a fellowship and asked to describe my research project. Speaking of philosophy of history and then of social criticism I mentioned, naturally, several historians and several sociologists as particular interests. “But why are you interested in them,” I was asked, “aren't you a philosopher?”)

Philosophy in general is a difficult thing to talk about without making up farcically imprecise and blatantly deceptive generalizations, unlike natural science in general or literature in general or religion in general.

Maybe philosophy isn't even really a thing?

Sunday through Wednesday I enjoyed a four day period of migraine-fueled, deadline-busting, insomniac paralysis. Rather than finish my paper on Aristotle's dialectical method as exemplified by his use of Anaxagoras, Democritus, and Empedocles in De Anima, or, alternatively, finishing my other paper on how Vico and his verum-factum principle are the secret thread that ties together the best of the Frankfurt School, I did nothing. Couldn't. Migraines'll do that to you.

Well, not exactly nothing. I read some light fantasy. When your head is busted you can't do something that requires concentration or, you know, thinking. But you also can't just sit there enjoying that obnoxious awareness of the squishiness of your internal organs that comes when you're sick.

Actually, I read a lot of light fantasy. I read Dave Duncan's quartet, collectively known as A Man of His Word, straight through. A big fantasy series really shows its true inner nature when you pursue it prologue to epilogue in one multi-day sitting.

I've done this before, either in frantic bouts of procrastination / evasion of stress (as during exam week as an undergraduate), or, more legitimately, during other migraine-marathons. I read eight of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files that way. I read the first three of Game of Thrones that way. I read the first five Harry Potter novels that way.

Butcher and Rowling should not be read that way because they recap at length in every novel. I hate that. (Though it makes sense for the literary consumption habits of most of their readers, I guess.) I'm pleased to say Duncan is kinder to the migraine marathoner. Each novel picked up where the last left off.

Weird thing though. The first novel was splendid. Really great form, with an exceptionally satisfying finish. But then the next two novels basically felt like a set-up for the third. And the third climaxed about 150 pages in, such that the rest felt like an extremely extended and weirdly mystical epilogue. That's a lot of epilogue, even for someone like myself who enjoys the weirdly mystical.

That aside, I'm sold on Duncan. Really enjoyable writer. There's a freedom or playfulness in the story and world he constructed that remind me of my favorite writing memory ever. It was the first time I felt the fueling frisson of writing something that I knew other people would enjoy. I was about fourteen, part of a writing club with some other home-schooled vagabonds, and the story was a sort of sprawling fantasy-comedy that I never finished and subsequently lost. But it was a riot to write and read to people. I think I called it “Kings, Queens, and Dark-Haired Girls”. I wrote it by the seat of my pants, and kept discovering hidden connections that I'd somehow unconsciously planted in earlier chapters. For some reason Duncan's quartet felt as if it had been written that way. Though I suspect it wasn't, based on the clear plottedness of the final book/extended epilogue.

Sometimes I wonder if those of my highbrow friends who laugh at my equal readiness to read a trade paperback sci-fi novel or the latest dour, filthy Houellebecq or that copy of Middlemarch I got for fifty cents off the library for-sale rack — I wonder if those friends have a point. But then I get a migraine, read a series like Duncan's, and recover my enthusiasm. Long live literary omnivorousness. And if you need a good story, hit up the first book of A Man of His Word, The Magic Casement. (Bonus: all the book titles are taken from phrases in Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” and the chapter titles likewise, from other poems.)

The semester is all but complete. Here in Boston the green buds are mocking our books. Harried grad students juggle paper deadlines and grading deadlines and plan ambitiously for the summer, which plans they will fail to carry out and thereby further ruin their already fragile psychic health. My own quixotic plans are as follows:

Select approximately forty precise readings for the class I'll be teaching in the fall, scan them, and prepare reading questions about them.

Read both Irwin's and Schneewind's histories of ethics.

Research and write a longish paper on the concept of social evolution, which paper will include reflections on the concept's role in the writings of Spencer, Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Dewey, Mead, Parsons, Wilson, Gaus, Habermas, and Brunkhorst.

Fight my way through Kant's first critique over and over again like personal devotions until I begin to get it in a less superficial way.

Finish my intensive German reading course and hopefully, you know, begin reading German.

Blog like crazy for the stats, the glory, and the cash.

Finish my novel.

All of this will be managed of course through structured procrastination. What are your plans, dear readers?

I used to say that although I was getting a PhD in philosophy, I only wanted to research, never to teach. I still prefer research. But nearing the end of my first full year teaching a two-semester-long introduction to philosophy, I’m astounded by the benefits of it for my own intellectual development. As a researcher, I’m coming to believe, teaching may be an essential formative practice.

First, there was the clarifying problem of expressing what was most important about the texts I assigned. Boston College is very gracious in allowing its core philosophy course to be taught through any collection of texts the professor chooses, so long as they give some sense of philosophy’s history and touch on ethics. Naturally, one chooses one’s favorites, items from one’s personal canon. That’s what I did; but then I was forced to justify in lectures and conversations with my students why I valued these texts. Perhaps for another, more self-aware researcher, the results of this exercise wouldn’t have been so surprising. But they certainly surprised me.

I found that I value Bk. X of the Republic above the rest of it, that I am obsessively admiring of Aristotle’s dialectical method, that Augustine is a marvelous entree to the problems of hermeneutics, that Rousseau’s opening paragraphs are like the anthems in a rock opera when you unpack them.

Second, I discovered how much more concentrated a proper introductory class should be. I used just three texts in my first semester, and spent far too much time on historical and exegetical trivia or striving to show how some obscure allusion related to a given philosopher’s overall argument. Next year, each semester will involve selections from over two dozen books. What that means for me is hours upon hours of reading to select these passages, reading of core texts that I would otherwise neglect to return to in the excelsior thrust of more specialized research projects. Moreover, the way one reads, when in the role of teacher selecting a passage to base a lecture upon, differs radically from the way one reads as a researcher. It’s difficult to describe, but somehow one looks for absolute significance in a passage rather than significance relative to one’s systematic questions; one looks for the passage the unpacking of which will unlock the text for the uninitiated, and often it can feel as if in this process the text is unlocked anew for oneself.

Finally, I literally discovered a new research interest through teaching. I had never connected dialectical method (in the Aristotelian sense, the method one uses for intellectual training, casual encounters, and the philosophical sciences) to the historicity of ideas. Yet that connection grew clearer and clearer throughout the semester with each of my additional extempore remarks on the subject. I ended up opening a file for the subject in my philosophical journal, and am beginning to connect it in interesting ways to Collingwood’s hermeneutics of question and answer, and to Weber’s interpretive method.

Far from being a waste of time, or lending itself to the stultification of a researcher’s mind, I’m beginning to think teaching might have a sharpening effect.

It’s just too bad that I’m finding my affection for the institutional form of an old school academic career in a time when that institution is utterly dissolving. By the time my turn has come, one will have to choose between being an independent scholar with a non-academic job and a starving adjunct with far too many classes for the pittance he is earning. The old ideal combination of teaching and research opportunities known as the tenured professorship is all but gone as a living option for my generation of scholars.

Or hell, maybe I’ll just end up a sergeant in the eventual red army of radicalized former adjuncts that will sweep neoliberalism from the field of history. Wouldn’t that be nice?

I had this novel idea the other day that the best way to scope out the whole frontier of my corners of the discipline (philosophy of history and social criticism) would be to read straight through the back issues of prominent journals. So I’ve commenced just that, starting with the earliest issues of History and Theory, Constellations, and Telos.

(Were those good choices? That’s a serious question, because these are massive reading commitments.)

Today I read Isaiah Berlin on the problem of a scientific history. A fascinating article — the best I’ve ever read by Berlin, actually — but I think I’ll write about it some other time because I still need to cogitate about certain passages. The other thing I read was by William Dray, a sympathetic assessment of Arnold Toynbee’s massive attempt to formulate some general laws of human history

I’d heard of Toynbee before. My favorite undergraduate professor mentioned him frequently in our historiography class, with much head-shaking and mysterious chuckles. I simply knew that he was of that fascinating tribe, the universal historians. Now universal history comes in two varieties: the kind preferred by Polybius and Eusebius where a political or religious myth is taken to give the complete outlines of the whole of history, and the kind that grows out of the desire to use history to formulate general laws. (There’s also global history, which often takes as its theme topics which, within history, have come to have global effects — axial age theorists, world-system and globalization theorists, theorists of capitalism and modernity, etc.) Toynbee was after general laws.

Dray’s article was a careful exegetical defense of Toynbee against his critics. Apparently Toynbee wasn’t much for precision. For example, despite asserting that civilization is the smallest intelligible unit of historical study he never really got around to adequately defining “civilization.” But his general aim seems to have been to compare about 20 civilizations over the course of their rise, flourishing and decline, to obtain “laws” like the following:

… the stimulating effect of breaking new ground is greatest of all when the new ground can only be reached by crossing the sea…

That was not what I was expecting. If your mind immediately went to civilization-style computer games, so did mine. I thought, “damn, I need to get the Total War developers to read this dude.”

So now even apart from his significance as one of those few, ambitious universal historians, I’ll have to read Toynbee’s volumes for entertainment.

For all his sympathy though, Dray couldn’t help but let on that Toynbee was epistemologically pathetic. Dray defends him from the charge of improper and statistically negligible inductive method by pointing out that Toynbee didn’t merely aggregate patterns and call them laws but actually tried to explain those laws — i.e., to embed them as hypotheses within larger cohesive theories. For example he defended that one about breaking new ground across the sea like this:

 The distinctiveness of these phenomena and their inner connections [...] are both explained by one and the same simple fact: In transmarine migration, the social apparatus of the migrants has to be packed on board ship before they can leave the shores of the old country and then unpacked again at the end of the voyage before they can make themselves at home on the new ground.

Unfortunately most of these explanations involved appeals to common-sense, shared knowledge, the anthropology of wise sayings, and in some cases the revelations about human nature supposedly demonstrated by myths and fables. But (as Berlin pointed out in that other article I read today) these are the stock in trade of the familiar type of narrative historian cheerfully justifying his causal accounts with apothegms from the Bible and Shakespeare. The problems of historical method are myriad and fascinating.

But one positive result of reading this Toynbee article is the following: I discovered another important figure to include in the survey of the concept of social evolution that I’m writing. According to Dray, Toynbee’s most significant generalization was

… that civilizations develop in response to a challenge of adversity, grow through a series of responses to successive challenges, each arising out of the response to the last, break down through eventual failure to respond to a repeated challenge, and disintegrate into a dominant minority, an internal and an external proletariat…

This fascinates me because it resembles in certain rspects the pattern that critical theorist Hauke Brunkhorst claims to have found in “legal revolutions.” More on that when A Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions by Brunkhorst is published in the near future. I read a draft of it this semester and got mah world shook. (Publisher, should you read this send me a free copy and I’ll totally review it in depth here! And I can already tell you my review will be very positive! Consider it, k?)

Anyway, reading History and Theory from the beginning is already paying off.

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