https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8039-0376
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
Introduction
In a recent paper, Hanno Sauer (Citation2022) argues that
[t]he epistemic aims of philosophy, if there are any, are largely frustrated by engaging with the history of philosophy. […] [W]e can learn surprisingly little about philosophical problems by studying the works of the “great” historical philosophers such as Aristotle, Hegel, or Wittgenstein. Examples for philosophical problems are: what is knowledge and how do we acquire it? What constitutes a just society? How does the human mind work? What are natural laws? Where does linguistic meaning come from? Becoming acquainted with the history of philosophy contributes very little to improving our understanding of those problems and their potential solutions, so we would be better off doing much less of it. (Sauer Citation2022, 1)
The resulting upshot for how to engage in philosophical historiography, and for how to deploy past philosophy to get traction on systematic problems today, is much more modest and much less radical than the implications Sauer himself suggests.
The argument
Sauer puts forward two epistemic principles which, according to him, we readily apply to contemporary people when evaluating their epistemic standing:
(1) It is unlikely that historical authors were right about anything because they lacked the scientific and/or empirical information required for it, since so many philosophical claims or theories depend on scientific and/or empirical propositions. (2) It is unlikely that historical authors were right about anything because they lacked the theoretical and/or conceptual sophistication required for it, since philosophical competence hinges on at least a basic degree of familiarity with current philosophical debates. (Sauer Citation2022, 12)
Some may suggest that these two principles beg the question at issue here. It seems that, if we make familiarity with current debates a requirement for being worthy of our attention, it follows trivially that older philosophy will merit proportionally less of it.
But this criticism does not get it quite right. In a sense, all (valid) arguments are question-begging: the conclusion contains what was already in the premise(s). The real question is whether the premises yield a conclusion that is novel and interesting; it’s not about starting without presupposing any epistemic standards whatsoever or about having to independently justify all of our standards first – we have to start somewhere after all – it’s about which standards, once they and their implications are made explicit, we would like to accept and which we would not. It seems highly plausible that we do, and should, judge our contemporaries by such basic standards of epistemic competence. If some people are more or less exempt from them, including the great philosophers of the past, we need to explain why.
The target
Before I continue with this question, we need to ask what the scope of this argument is supposed to be. Who’s the target of Sauer’s argument? Who’s actually engaging in the practice he decries? I am not trying to accuse Sauer of setting up a strawman, but he does owe us a better and more concrete specification of whom his arguments are actually supposed to apply to. How much of what is called ‘history of philosophy’ is targeted in the end?
For one thing, many historians of philosophy won’t easily recognize what they are doing in Sauer’s description of what philosophical historiography often consists in (Lærke, Smith, and Schliesser Citation2013). Sauer pretends that the only conceivable way to justify the attention we pay to historical thinkers would be to somehow find them vindicated by contemporary science and philosophy. But this is not what historiographers, who tend to think of engaging with historical texts as a much more sui generis enterprise, take themselves to be doing. It is of course possible that people are deceiving themselves about what it is that they are doing, but it would take considerable evidence to show that this is the case here.
On the other hand, there are surely many people who will agree that that there is at least some subset X of all of philosophy such that the epistemic aims that are constitutive of X are best served by focusing only on whatever the most recent body of philosophically relevant theoretical and empirical knowledge is. People who want to find out whether we can know the content of other minds will surely have to rely on recent empirical evidence regarding how mindreading actually works (Carruthers Citation2009). This evidence wasn’t, through no fault of their own, available to people decades or hundreds of years ago, and so their theories won’t be very helpful anymore in adjudicating this question.
But how large is X? Perhaps not very. What Sauer needs to tell us is how large the amount of philosophy is for which (a) an engagement with the most recent empirical data and the most recent theoretical frameworks is pivotal and non-optional and for which (b) an engagement with those historical sources that inevitably had to rely on what is now outdated evidence is detrimental for their epistemic aims, and that amount appears to be relatively limited. If so, then the scope of Sauer’s attack remains relatively limited as well.
The cutoff
When do individuals fade from the present into the past? What are we still allowed to read? Sauer owes us an explanation of this. He suggests in a complementary blog post that ‘if it has page numbers in a journal, I am skeptical’, but surely this is hyperbolic provocation.Footnote1 What, then, is the cutoff earnestly supposed to be?
This question is more crucial than Sauer may want to admit, because his argument is, at its heart, one about the economy of our attention: we have to decide, out of billions of people, whose opinions we ought to take seriously. When it comes to making that decision for any random person today, we probably rely on rather basic criteria of expertise. Not everyone can weigh in on climate change, virology or macroeconomics. Rather, being recognized as an expert on these matters requires an in fact rather extensive familiarity with the recent state of the art of the debate within those fields, both in terms of the available empirical data and the mastery of the theoretical framework that is informed by those data. The question then becomes why the great philosophers of the past should be exempt from this criterion.
Fair enough. But who, then, actually clears the threshold? It seems that any plausible answer to this question will have to be generous enough to not rule out everything that was published more than a week ago. But any answer that is this generous will necessarily become comparatively vague and arbitrary, such that it then becomes unreasonable to insist on the absolute definitiveness of whatever vague and arbitrary standard is put forward to channel our scarce attention. Say that we propose, as a threshold of obsoleteness, anything that is older than five years; or ten; or twenty; or a generation; or the gulf that separates the living and the dead; or what have you. It seems clear that the degree of arbitrariness in any proposed cut off is very high indeed. In the end, we are thrown back to the fact that, in deciding whom to pay attention to, we need to look at what’s relevant to the philosophical question we are confronting. Presumably, a lot of ‘old’ philosophy will – and should – creep in through that back door.
The island
Much of the heavy lifting in Sauer’s argument is done by what could be referred to as the ‘island analogy’:
Imagine a tiny island somewhere far away. The island only has a few million inhabitants. They have no modern technology, no scientific knowledge of contemporary physics or biology or astronomy or psychology, no real mathematics or logic and, perhaps worst of all, no internet. […] [T]he rest of world outside of the island spends a disproportionate amount of time studying the writings of the islanders, scouring them for hidden insights and important, thus far undiscovered truths which they hope to recover by pondering what the islanders, many of which are notorious for indulging in a rather hermetic style, may have meant. […] This is an odd situation. Its intertemporal equivalent […] is the situation we are actually in. The tiny island far away is the history of philosophy, and we are paying too much attention to it. (Sauer Citation2022, 1)
But there are (at least) two important disanalogies between Sauer’s islanders and the actual selection process that has bequeathed historical authors to us to render his consistency-argument rather less powerful than it first appears.
Perhaps the biggest disanalogy: the history of philosophy consists of many big islands, not just a single small one, and we didn’t choose them by accident. It is simply false to suggest that at one point, we randomly picked a remote island to henceforth obsess about, as if by rotating a globe and blindly putting our finger on some arbitrary location. What actually happened is that ‘the past’ is not one distant habitat of the benighted, but rather a shorthand for a collection of the most able, lucid, sharp and inspiring minds humanity has ever produced. It is not perfect, and remains fraught with various serious sexist and racist and ableist and classist biases, but it is false to suggest that our canon was assembled purely by happenstance. So his spatiotemporal analogy is much less damaging than Sauer suggests.
These islands have given us their best and the brightest, the ones that stood the test of time. True: our contemporaries enjoy an advantage that is hard to beat: they know and understand things that historical authors didn’t and couldn’t, due to the excusable of vice of being ignorant of the future. But they suffer from an equally large disadvantage, which is that they didn’t, and couldn’t have, survived the relentless scrutiny of generations yet. At the time, Salieri was more popular than Mozart, Iffland more popular than Goethe; but the verdict of history is different now.
We are thoroughly social creatures, and remain deeply dependent on the body of knowledge that has successfully prevailed in the mercilessly competitive tribunal of cumulative cultural evolution. The fact that previous generations picked those thinkers again and again provides very solid second-order evidence (Levy Citation2022) that their work is highly valuable to understanding the world and our place in it.
If historically working philosophers were simply to say ‘the older, the better!’, and use that as their main criterion for whom to study and attempt to learn from, they would be making a gross mistake. But they evidently don’t use this criterion; rather, philosophical historiographers tend to rely on those voices that have been judged, by generation after generation, to be particularly insightful and worthwhile. And the features that make them so insightful and worthwhile may well be sufficiently important to make up for their lack of familiarity with the most recent advances in cognitive neuroscience. In some cases, presumably, they won’t be sufficiently important – Aristotle and Descartes did in fact lack crucial information about the nervous system when they came up with their theories – and in those cases, we should perhaps redirect our attention to those who possess the information that bears more directly on these issues.
But in many other cases, the value of those old philosophical contributions will lie in being able to better appreciate and understand a thing that is in itself historical – which is to say: ourselves. In order to understand ourselves better and more fully, we need to understand what we are made of, and in the case of us humans, what we are made of is to a rather large extent determined by our intellectual heritage. Therefore we must, contrary to what Sauer claims, pay a lot of attention to that heritage, even if its torchbearers are less well informed about the nuts and bolts of current rocket science.
Even if we agree with Sauer that there can be progress in philosophy, this progress is not cumulative. The history of philosophical thinking is a tangled mess of Kuhn losses and hangovers, and an archeologist’s eye is simply irreplaceable to retrieve the former and weed out the latter.
Some things survive in present day thinking that can only be understood historically; the QWERTY arrangement of letters on keyboards is perhaps the most famous example for a skeuomorph, a feature of a product or design that is retained even though it no longer serves the purpose that it used to serve. This is fine when keeping the feature around is harmless, but can become a nuisance when the obsolete element starts holding us back. We may be tormented by various seemingly irresolvable puzzles with regard to how our mind should ever be able to acquire knowledge of the external world, which we are only ever able to recognize as pseudoproblems once we retrieve the homunculistic origins of those puzzles that model sensory perception after a camera obscura (Noë Citation2004). Or we may accept the reliance on allegedly commonsensical and pretheoretical ‘intuitions’ in some corners of modern philosophy as perfectly natural and indeed inevitable (Della Rocca Citation2013). The philosopher’s job, then, would be merely to bring those intuitions into equilibrium, ignoring some, overriding others, prioritizing others still, until we realize that this ‘method’ has its own (rather recent) history and is anything but natural. This, too, is something that the presentist myopia of Sauer’s arguments necessarily hides from our view.
Some things, on the other hand, disappear from our intellectual heritage even though they would have been worthy of preservation. ‘Kuhn losses’ happen when, in moving from one disciplinary paradigm to another, the explanatory gains that are made are accompanied by corresponding epistemic losses. Teleological accounts of nature and history had no issues accounting for a wide range of phenomena; under the postmetaphysical condition ushered in by Darwin (among many others), a range of insights can be lost, as a battery of riddles previously thought to be solved is resurrected. We don’t keep returning to Aristotle’s De Anima because it may be on a par with modern cognitive science and psychology and then, once it turns out not to be, never return to it again.Footnote2 We turn to it for the contrast medium it injects into our current philosophical endeavors that allows us to make visible the wonky pictures that hold us captive. We can never keep fully in view what we may have kept that is hard to make sense of, and what we may have lost at our own peril. This is why it remains a good idea to return to and attend to the past (within reason and moderation).
It is not always advisable to engage exclusively with the ‘best’ (most informed, most sophisticated) points of view. The epistemic benefits that we hope to obtain may be better served by including not only the most competent and most informed voices. The epistemically best epistemic community need not be the one that consists only of the epistemically most meritorious individuals. Sauer suggests a kind of ‘epistemic sorting’ (Heesen and Bright Citation2021), an exclusive night club with an exquisitely tough door that will only admit the richest (in data) and most beautiful (in conceptual sophistication). But recent work in non-ideal social epistemology suggests that this approach is not uncontroversially the best one: at the individual level, more information tends to be preferable. But epistemic communities can sometimes suffer from optimal information, and would thrive more under second-best conditions. Sometimes, it can be preferable to allow a more diverse selection of views, many of which seem false to us now, to stick around to see whether they can prove themselves worthy after all.
This observation is related to the point I made earlier about the epistemic benefits only a historical approach can equip us with. When scientists and philosophers share information, beliefs can spread and a group of believers can come to converge on the truth. But the very same mechanisms of socially sharing evidence can also lead to the opposite result of scientific consensus forming around a falsehood. We can model our continued engagement with the history of philosophy as a deliberate attempt to introduce a provisional lack of intradisciplinary network connectivity so that we can curate pockets of epistemic diversity to immunize the discipline against infelicitious Zollmanification (Zollman Citation2010). This can be particularly beneficial when the problems are hard and the methods unclear, as is evidently the case in philosophy. To avoid an unlucky streak of bad arguments and evidence making the whole discipline go off the deep end, it is good to diversify the pool of concepts and theories at least somewhat to counteract the blinkering effects of such epistemic path-dependency.
To be sure, this recommendation of increased diversity may be satisfiable by looking at a more diverse list of contemporary points of view, and partly this is certainly correct. But if a selection of the best and most interesting minds of previous generations remains at our disposal, and if this selection contributes to the desired diversity by supplying perspectives that are nowhere to be found today, why refuse to avail ourselves of their insights? Whence the insistence that only the present will do? Here, Sauer doth protest too much, methinks.
The problem is thus much less severe than initially thought: the islanders can meet the proposed standards via epistemically well-calibrated selection mechanisms, and those standards are more controversial and limited to begin with, because they conflate the difference between what’s epistemically best for individuals and what’s best for epistemic communities such as the discipline of philosophy.
The canon
Much less attention has focused on how Sauer’s critique of the case for the history of philosophy and his case against the history of philosophy are independent.
One can accept that engaging with historical authors is very worthwhile, and that they deserve all the attention they get, whilst insisting that the purported epistemic benefits of engaging with them are better served by doing so in an entirely different manner. The particular rationales offered for historical engagement will result in very different patterns of how this engagement ought to be conducted: if the goal is to learn critical thinking, maybe a selection based on superficially convincing but ultimately unacceptable conclusions will be best; if the goal is to trace the origins of a particular argument – say, the ontological proof of God’s existence – a different pattern will emerge; if the goal is to appreciate more diverse viewpoints, yet another pattern will be recommended.
In the end, the suggestion we end up with for doing philosophical historiography is as much about the how as it is about the if: it is clearly useful to some extent to engage with the history of philosophy; and whatever that extent is, we should keep asking more forcefully, for legitimate methodological reasons, whether the texts we study and the authors we focus on represent the most adequate selection of authors and works for our various stated purposes, and don’t just reflect a canon that is, at the very least, more arbitrary and contingent than it would have to be for us to succeed with our stated aims.
Sauer claims that when it comes to their ethical views, historical authors are especially problematic, and that we are even more strongly entitled to ignore what they have to tell us than in the case of their non-moral views. A similar parity seems to hold: why, if I may dismiss the conspiratorial ramblings of my cranky uncle, am I not allowed to dismiss the horrendous/bigoted/obsolete moral prescriptions of past philosophers?
This sounds superficially plausible: it is true that many notable philosophers held deeply objectionable and indeed despicable views. To take just one notorious case: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, for instance, rose to fame during the Weimar Republic and remained a lifelong supporter of the A-Deduction of the categories of pure reason – and he never recanted or apologized for it.
But that we may dismiss past bigotry because it is bigotry is actually the opposite of the truth. That past ethical outlooks are deeply objectionable – which is really another way of saying: alien to our current sensibilities – is a feature, not a bug: it entails that we should engage more deeply with them, not cast them into the fire even more readily. What historical moralizers have to offer is invaluable, a treasure trove of careful arguments for upsetting conclusions, a legion of the world’s smartest and most unconventional minds, preemptively unshackled from the guardrails that sequester our own values into the same three or four safe but hackneyed pathways.
We should lean into that alienness, rather than blind ourselves to it with righteous zealotry. This is not to say that we should embrace Kant’s views on masturbation or Aristotle’s on slavery. Rather, we should learn from why they embraced those views, and to refuse to do so is its own form of political correctness, though perhaps one that is not fueled by prissy censoriousness as much as by Sauer’s sophomoric pseudorationalism.
The upshot
What we end up with is a very different vision of the role and relevance of historical philosophy for the present.
Firstly, it seems plausible that there is some amount of philosophy X that depends crucially on recent empirical data and recent theoretical vocabulary such that less recent philosophy is no longer relevant for X; however, that amount X is probably not very large, philosophical historians rarely or never encroach on it, and there is plenty left to do that is both genuine philosophy and deeply historically oriented.
Secondly, philosophical historiography should be more epistemically diverse, where the shape of this diversity is regulated by the particular stated aims of the historical endeavor at issue. Often, a more relaxed and inclusive canon will be historiographically preferable to yet another interpretation of this or that classical passage.
These two claims are much less radical and much more digestible than Sauer’s originally rather hyperbolic claims. They are also much closer to the truth.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Liam Kofi Bright, David Egan, Tim Henning, Victor Kumar, Neil Levy, Eric Schliesser, Korbinian Rueger, an anonymous referee, and many, many others for various useful discussions and suggestions for improvement.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes
2 Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.
References
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