Exploring the path not taken: introduction to the symposium on Adriana Alfaro Altamirano’s The Belief in Intuition

Political theorists are perennially wrestling with the canon of texts that are the subject of our teaching and research. In recent years, emphasis has been placed on both increasing the cultural diversity of our canon and increasing representation from underrepresented demographics within the European and European-derived cultures that have long dominated our field.

Yet worthy authors may find themselves excluded from the canon for reasons that have nothing to do with either culture or demography. The deadest and whitest of dead white men may find themselves falling from favour even when they still have much to contribute to our political-theoretical understanding.

Intellectual success in one’s own lifetime is no protection against future oblivion. If one had to predict in 1924 which living figures would still dominate philosophical and political discourse in a century’s time, Henri Bergson would be amongst the most obvious candidates. Max Scheler, while not quite as obvious, would also be a plausible possibility.

Yet while it would be an exaggeration to say that both Bergson and Scheler are ignored today – both are still of interest to intellectual historians, and the former also has some fans among continental philosophers under the influence of Gilles Deleuze – neither is anywhere near canonical in political theory or any of its adjacent disciplines.

This is precisely why Adriana Alfaro Altamirano’s monograph The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler is so valuable. Alfaro Altamirano convincingly argues that ‘Bergson and Scheler’s relative absence in contemporary debates is a symptom … of political philosophy having forgotten some important alternatives it did not take’. The aim of her work is ‘to recover key elements within those alternatives and to show how doing so enriches our present discussions’ (6).

Alfaro Altamirano’s unashamedly presentist project is the opposite of Cambridge-style contextualism in its antiquarian mode. Rather than taking a canonical figure like John Locke and demonstrating, through an avalanche of historical erudition, that he has nothing left to contribute today, Alfaro Altamirano instead takes two non-canonical figures and demonstrates, through close attention to both century-old texts and current political problems, how much they have left to teach.

It is therefore appropriate that none of the contributors to the present symposium are primarily experts on Bergson and Scheler; Kevin Duong and Paulina Ochoa Espejo have both published on the former, but as far as I am aware none have published on the latter. Instead, each contributor is a prominent political theorist who is interested in the same broad themes as Alfaro Altamirano – agency, autonomy, and affect, among others – and is addressing the question of what Bergson and Scheler can contribute to our understanding of these key concepts.

It is striking that none of these contributors criticise Alfaro Altamirano for failing to properly understand Bergson and Scheler in their context. To the contrary, they mostly fault her for being insufficiently presentist and political – for not quite being specific enough in the practical recommendations that she draws from her non-canonical texts.

For Duong and Krause, the main question is how to translate the improved understanding of moral psychology or philosophical anthropology that Bergson and Scheler help us achieve into concrete practices of political activity for democratic citizens. Ochoa Espejo raises the even more specific question of how exactly we can develop the kind of ‘democratic exemplarity’ that Alfaro Altamirano recommends, the kind of small-scale but nonetheless morally path-breaking leadership that, because it lacks hierarchy and hero-worship, is compatible with equality and autonomy in a way that Weberian charismatic leadership is not. In response to these criticisms, Alfaro Altamirano draws on Astra Taylor’s recent book The Age of Insecurity to bring Bergson and Scheler even more fully into our anxious era.

However successful Alfaro Altamirano’s continuing work on Bergson and Scheler may be, it is unlikely that either will appear on the syllabi of our standard ‘Plato to NATO’ introductory courses any time soon. By pointing out that these authors represent a path not taken, Alfaro Altamirano never intended to reverse the course of intellectual history.

Only the most naïve believer in unalloyed progress, however, would reject the fact that every step taken along a given path comes with its attendant losses. Books like the one under discussion in this symposium are valuable because they help us recover some of the valuable insights that would have otherwise been lost along the way.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).