This is a response to a post by Maxime Rovere, to which Martin Lenz called my attention (via Facebook).

The plot of Rovere’s post[1]The post is a summary of a talk he gave to open the Collegium Spinozanum III. The talk is available here, but I have not watched it. So, as usual, I am ill-informed. concerns a series of games that can be played with Spinoza’s text. The series starts with a “plain game,” which he calls “reading the Ethics.” The further members of the series are presented as powers of this plain game (reading the Ethics², reading the Ethics³, etc.), suggesting that they involve repeated applications of the same method to itself, or perhaps to its own result. It is not so clear, from the descriptions of the individual games, that the series actually is generated in that way. For example: the second game is described as “playing with the rules,” meaning: with the rules of the first game, whereas the third game is “playing with the players,” meaning again, apparently: with players of the first game (so that it is not obvious how the third game involves the second at all). But I can’t see that anything depends on this.

I have something fairly critical to say about this structure (I’m sure this will come as no surprise to those who know me). But I should therefore begin by saying that I sympathize with what I take to be the motivations behind it, and sense that Rovere and I might agree about many things. In describing his fifth level game, he calls for reflection on “how and why we practice philosophy, refer to authors, respect certain protocols of exchange and certain norms of writing and on why we should certainly invent and experiment new ones, if we are to survive in an over professionalized and specialized philosophical world.” This call I wholeheartedly endorse.

Nevertheless. The first thing to say is that, although philosophy is a subject which admits of being played,[2]Played as a game, I mean, although something similar might be said about the idea of playing it as theater (an issue sometimes raised by Cavell and everywhere raised by Plato, maybe also by Shakespeare), or playing it in the sense in which Thoreau says that, for better or worse, children and poor students “play life.” it cannot so be disposed of. And this is because, to use terminology lately introduced by Thi Nguyen: wisdom, the end of philosophy, is never disposable.

For the same reason, moreover, it must be impossible to sort our relation to Spinoza, as Rovere proposes, into separate levels (or, as Nguyen might say: to sort our total agency qua readers into separate, sealed-off “layers of agency”). To explain, let me venture to say that this purported series of levels is the same, mutatis mutandis, as the series of scientific methodologies proposed by Lakatos: the scientific method (picked out by a criterion of demarcation), the metamethod (picked out by a metacriterion), and so forth. I say, too, that it is the same as the series that would begin if someone wanted to explain my consciousness — explain, let’s say, why I know some objects and not others — by the existence in me of a certain inventory of special entities, sometimes called “ideas” (and sometimes called Erlebnisse). A new inventory of ideas-of-ideas will apparently be needed to explain why just these ideas and not others are “in me,” i.e., belong to my consciousness (for surely: even if these ideas are spatiotemporally located, their location — say, inside my brain — will not be sufficient to account for this). And so on. This latter series should be familiar to any reader of Spinoza, since it is the series that Spinoza tries to render harmless at E2p21 (albeit the aim is achieved only via the Scholium to the previous proposition, which in turn refers us back to the very difficult Scholium to 2p7). And I even say: it is the same as the series Philo tries to saddle Cleanthes with:

If it requires a cause in both, what do we gain by your system, in tracing the universe of objects into a similar universe of ideas? The first step which we make leads us on for ever. It were, therefore, wise in us to limit all our inquiries to the present world, without looking further. (Dialogues Part IV)

According to Philo, in other words, Cleanthes’ anthropomorphism must involve him in an infinite Gnosticism: the agency of the creator God (the demiurge) will be only the last in an infinite series of gameified agencies, in which the true, absolute agency of the Heavenly Sophia is infinitely far submerged. And then how could the call of the Paraclete — the call of Angst, or, as Nguyen says, of “anxious double consciousness” — ever reach us over such an expanse of schlechte Unendlichkeit?

But I need not insist even on the first of the above identifications; regard them as mere analogies, if you like. The important thing is to understand Popper’s response:

Professor Lakatos’s own attempts to solve the question of the criticizability of a methodology I will not discuss in detail. For I do not think that his “quasi-empirical approach” has any advantages; indeed, it involves solving difficult (and perhaps insoluble) problems such as “Who are the scientific elite?”. Professor Lakatos himself does not accept his own original suggestion (see the text between his nn. 33 and 34); and in the end, after many pages of discussion, he himself admits, of his improved criterion (see the text to his n. 63): “I … can easily answer the question when I would give up my criterion of demarcation: when another one is proposed which is better on my metacriterion. (I have not yet answered the question under what circumstances I shall give up my metacriterion; but one must always stop somewhere.)” My own criterion of demarcation, however, is not threatened by an infinite regress. (The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Schilpp, n. 81, p. 1187–88)

For Popper, the difference between science (what he calls the “game” of science) and methodology (Logik der Forschung) is the difference between theory and practice (so Popper’s game of science is not a game in Nguyen’s sense, or at least not an example of “Suitsian play”: it does not have its own ends; the ends all belong to methodology). To be faced with a practical question is to be morally responsible. I may not pass off this responsibility down the hall to the department of “metapractice.” The problem situation, therefore, is always the same, always on the same level: how shall we proceed when, lost as we are in the forest of this world, certainty is impossible? And Popper’s answer is therefore always the same (the same as Descartes’s answer, and in fact — if we remember the role of rational faith — the same as Kant’s): we must guess.[3]See e.g., elsewhere in Popper’s replies to his critics: “As always, science is conjecture. You have to conjecture when to stop defending a favourite theory, and when to try a new one” (p. 984); “If we do make auxiliary assumptions, then of course we cannot be certain whether one of them, rather than the theory under test, is responsible for any refutation. So we have to guess” (p. 998); “Why, it might be asked, does rational criticism make use of the best tested although highly unreliable theories? The answer, however, is exactly the same as before. Deciding to criticize a practical proposal from the standpoint of modern medicine (rather than, say, in phrenological terms) is itself a kind of ‘practical’ decision (anyway it may have practical consequences). Thus the rational decision is always: adopt critical methods that have themselves withstood severe criticism” (p. 1026).

Without saying whether I agree with Popper’s Methodenlehre in every detail,[4]I do not. I can say that I do agree with him about the “metamethod”: I agree, that is, that there is and can be no such thing, not in science nor, a fortiori, in philosophy. Philosophy cannot be so disposed of. The anxious double consciousness cannot be sealed out. If we attempt to sort our reading of Spinoza into an infinite hierarchy of levels, we will fail.

Nor are examples of the failure difficult to find. Apparently Rovere’s audience came close to pointing one out: among those who commented after the talk, he says, “some have recognized the influence of certain authors (Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Foucault) in the way the reading games were articulated.” But to that list of influences we must add Spinoza. This should be obvious enough, if only from the fact that none of the three thinkers mentioned (least of all Wittgenstein!) can be properly understood without inquiring into Spinoza’s influence on them. As we try to play the plain game of reading Spinoza (at least, if we do not forget that this means reading, not only the Ethics, but also the Tractatus theologico-politicus), then the text we are trying to understand is the very text in which our practice of reading is, in many respects, first laid out. As Rovere describes his fourth level game, it “involves looking back at one’s prejudices to understand how our own conceptions transform the text and torment it (as we perfectly may be doing) in order to answer our own questions, and then look at what effect in return our playing actually has on us.” But when we embark on this fourth level of play, we find, so to speak, that Spinoza is one of the players. Hence the plain game, which we thought we were now considering only at several removes, needs at this very moment to be played most directly and most in earnest. We cannot play our fourth level game correctly without knowing what moves he, Spinoza, has already made.

And more than that. If the fifth level game is to “consider the academic rules involved in the previous level, as they imply not only the speaker, but the non-speaking players (the so called audience …),” then, since we are Spinoza’s audience, we must consider the possibility that our relation to him is not at all what we thought. Is “reading Spinoza” really a game that we play, using his texts as the board and pieces? Is it not rather: a game Spinoza plays using us? When that question has arisen for us, then we have reached a new level in our reading of Spinoza. For there are (finitely many) levels to the reading Spinoza, certainly. But that sorting into levels is governed, not by our ends, but by his.

Volume II of Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, published 22 years after Volume I, finds him in a more aggressive mood than when he left off. This appears especially in his extended defense of nominalism, or rather in his extended and sometimes nasty attack on anyone (including his teacher, Reid) who doesn’t accept nominalism. I hope to address that in a future post. Here I begin, instead, with an offhand criticism he aims at Kant.

In context, Stewart is discussing the topic (recently raised by Martin Lenz) of philosophical clarity, or, as he puts it, perspicuity:

I have certainly endeavoured, to the utmost of my abilities, to render every sentence which I have written, not only intelligible but perspicuous; and, where I have failed in the attempt, the obscurity will, I hope, be imputed, not to an affectation of mystery, but to some error of judgment. I can, without much vanity, say, that, with less expence of thought, I could have rivalled the obscurity of Kant; and that the invention of a new technical language, such as that which he has introduced, would have been an easier task, than the communication of clear and precise notions (if I have been so fortunate as to succeed in this communication), without departing from the established modes of expression.

To the following observations of D’Alembert (with some trifling verbal exceptions) I give my most cordial assent; and, mortifying as they may appear to the pretensions of bolder theorists, I should be happy to see them generally recognized as canons of philosophical criticism: “Truth in metaphysics resembles truth in matters of taste. In both cases, the seeds of it exist in every mind; though few think of attending to this latent treasure, till it be pointed out to them by more curious inquirers. It should seem that everything we learn from a good metaphysical book is only a sort of reminiscence of what the mind previously knew. The obscurity, of which we are apt to complain in this science, may be always justly ascribed to the author; because the information which he professes to communicate requires no technical language appropriated to itself. Accordingly, we may apply to good metaphysical authors what has been said of those who excel in the art of writing, that, in reading them, everybody is apt to imagine that he himself could have written in the same manner.

“But, in this sort of speculation, if all are qualified to understand, all are not fitted to teach. The merit of accommodating easily to the apprehension of others, notions which are at once simple and just, appears, from its extreme rarity, to be much greater than is commonly imagined. Sound metaphysical principles are truths which every one is ready to seize, but which few men have the talent of unfolding; so difficult is it in this, as well as in other instances, to appropriate to one’s self what seems to be the common inheritance of the human race.” (Elements, vol. 2, pp. 23–4; the long quote from D’Alembert is from his Élémens de philosophie, here.)

So the charge against Kant is, first of all, that he is an obscure, and therefore a bad, metaphysician — where, for Stewart, “metaphysics” is another word for what he usually calls “philosophy of the human mind” (roughly speaking: the subject Cousin and James and Brentano will call “psychology”).[1]D’Alembert also means roughly this, at least insofar as “metaphysics” is the name of a real science. Just before the passage Stewart quotes (again, here), he says: “The generation of our ideas belongs to metaphysics; it is one of its principal objects, and perhaps it should be limited to it; almost all the other questions it proposes are insoluble or frivolous; they are the food of rash minds [esprits] or false minds; and we must not be surprised if so many subtle questions, always agitated and never resolved, have made that empty and contentious science commonly called metaphysics despised by good minds.” Kant is bad, it is charged, in the only way a “metaphysician” (in that sense) can be bad, namely, not in failing to know sound metaphysical principles (since we all already know them, thus need only be reminded of them), but in failing to unfold them so as to make them perspicuous, whether to others, or, presumably, even to himself. And then, second of all, it is charged that this badness is a result of laziness: it is easy to express sound metaphysical principles obscurely, but far more difficult to express them clearly. And then, thirdly, it is charged that Kant’s (supposedly) profuse introduction of new technical terminology is both a cause of his obscurity and a sign of his laziness.

This criticism of Kant is probably not based on any firsthand acquaintance with his works. Stewart is evidently very comfortable in French, Latin, and Greek, and he cites widely from all kinds of literature (not only philosophy) in all of those languages, but never, that I can recall, cites anything written in German, nor indeed any German author, in any language, after Leibniz. This passage, moreover, is the only mention of Kant in the first two volume of the Elements.[2]If Google is to be trusted, there is exactly one further mention in volume III. In fact, Stewart probably has his knowledge of Kant at third hand, via his student, Thomas Brown, who in turn has his information from Charles de Villers. In any case, Brown makes the same point about Kant’s new terminology and the “perplexity” that results:

In this short view of the principles of Transcendentalism, we have endeavoured, as much as possible, to avoid the perplexity of new terms. Of these its author has been profusely liberal; and to them he is probably indebted for a large share of that favour which his system has received. In minuteness of nomenclature, there is an appearance of nice distinction, which prepossesses us with respect for the acuteness of the inventor’s powers. (“Villers, Philosophie de Kant,” Edinburgh Review 1 (1802–3):253–280, p. 263)

So can the charge simply be dismissed, as based on insufficient evidence?

Kant, admittedly, does think that philosophy often requires the introduction of special terminology, since

with all the wealth of our languages, the thinker [der denkende Kopf ] nevertheless often finds himself at a loss for an expression that is exactly apt to his concept, and in the absence of which he is able to make himself rightly understood neither to others nor even to himself. (A312/B368)

But, as is well known, Kant advises against wholesale neologism (“coining new words”) in such situations, calling it a “desperate measure,” and “a pretension to legislation in language that rarely succeeds” (KrV A312/B368–9). Rather, he suggests, our only recourse in such a situation is to look around in “a dead and learned language” to see “whether this concept, along with its commensurate expression, is not to be found there” (A312/B369). In fact, Kant considers the other strategy so unlikely to succeed that he expects, in case we let the Latin or Greek term in question become vague through indiscriminate use, that the concept to which it is apt may be permanently lost:

Because of this, if for a certain concept only one single word is to be found which, in an already established significance, is exactly apt to this concept, whose distinction from other related concepts is of great importance, then it is advisable not to deal profligately with it, or use it synonymously instead of others merely for variety, but rather carefully to preserve for it its proper significance; for it otherwise easily happens that, when the expression no longer particularly occupies our attention, but is lost under a heap of others of very divergent significance, the thought also goes lost, which it alone could have preserved. (A312–13/B369)

So note that each side accuses the other of abandoning the “established modes of expression,” and predicts that the result will be unclarity in communication and in thought.

But wait — if a neologism is so unlikely to succeed, how, then, did these words ever come to exist in any language? To make any sense of this, we need to remember that Kant has only recently made a transition from writing in a dead and learned language himself. This passage reflects on the peculiar difficulty of writing philosophy in “our languages.” In such living, non-learned languages, linguistic legislation is unlikely to succeed. Which concepts will find apt expression in such languages is out of our control. Since we can’t or won’t return writing in dead and learned languages ourselves (why, is not explained), we need to be very careful with the heritage of precise terms from our predecessors, who had the benefit of doing so. For Stewart and Brown, who are living centuries after the corresponding transition from Latin to English in Britain, and who, moreover, tend to regard Scholastic texts as a mass of insignificant jargon, the whole situation is probably difficult to imagine. So, while it must be conceded that some of the difficulty in Kant results from this struggle with the unsuitability of German for expressing the concepts of Scholastic Latin (and that his Latin works are, consequently, less difficult than his German ones), neither Stewart nor Brown can well appreciate what is easy for him and what difficult.

However important this difference between German and English may be, however (and I think it is quite important), it cannot be exactly the core of the issue, because some version of it appears, in the next generation, between different schools of Anglophone philosophy — and, in fact, between different schools of Kantian (or post-Kantian) Anglophone philosophy. On the one hand, Coleridge, who did not know French, and in fact was deeply anti-Gallic,[3]In the Biographia Literaria, he approvingly quotes the remark of a Prussian artist he knew: “A Frenchman, Sir! is the only animal in the human shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to religion or poetry” ([Cambridge: 1920], p. 126). did know German, and became a follower of Kant and, especially, a follower of (and extensive plagiarizer from) Schelling. On the other hand, William Hamilton and his close friend, James Frederick Ferrier, though in some sense the successors of Reid, Stewart, and Brown, both also learned German and were also followers, or at least appreciative readers, both of Kant and of the post-Kantian German Idealists. Nevertheless, the Scottish charge of German incomprehensibility was not lifted. Proposition I of Section I, Epistemology, of Ferrier’s Institutes of Metaphysic, reads as follows:

THE PRIMARY LAW OR CONDITION OF ALL KNOWLEDGE.

Along with whatever any intelligence knows, it must, as the ground or condition of its knowledge, have some cognisance of itself. (p. 79)

Commenting on this, Ferrier first pays Kant the backhanded compliment that, although he had “glimpses of the this truth,” manifested namely in his discussion of the analytic and synthetic unity of consciousness, his treatment is confused to the point where “this is one of the few places in his works from which no meaning can be extracted” (Sect. I, Prop. I, Observations and Explanations no. 19, p. 94). He goes on to say that “Fichte got hold of [this truth], and lost it — got hold of, and lost it again, through a series of eight or ten different publications”; that Schelling, in his youth, promised to build something magnificent on its basis, “but the world has been waiting for the fulfilment of these promises … during a period of more than fifty years”; and that, as for Hegel, “A much less intellectual effort would be required to find out the truth for oneself than to understand his exposition of it.” He then concludes:

Hegel’s faults, however, and those of his predecessors subsequent to Kant, lie, certainly, not in the matter, but only in the manner of their compositions. Admirable in the substance and spirit and direction of their speculations, they are painfully deficient in the accomplishment of intelligible speech, and inhumanly negligent of all the arts by which alone the processes and results of philosophical research can be recommended to the attention of mankind. (Ibid., pp. 95–6)

And he lays a similar charge of German, or worse-than-German, incomprehensibility against Coleridge:

It must be remembered, that we are at present speaking of Coleridge only in reference to his connexion with the transcendental philosophy. He lays a good deal of stress on his possession of “the main and fundamental ideas” of that system. We ourselves, in our day, have had some small dealings with “main and fundamental ideas,” and we know this much about them, that it is very easy for any man, or for every man, to have them. There is no difficulty in that. The difficulty lies in bringing them intelligibly, effectively, and articulately out. . . .  Indeed, it is the ability to do this which constitutes philosophical genius. The mere fact of the ideas being in you is nothing — how are they to be got out of you in the right shape, is the question. It is the delivery and not the conception that is the poser. (“The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 47 (1840):287–99, p. 291)

This echoes (and perhaps even alludes to) the passage from D’Alembert that Stewart quotes against Kant: metaphysics (although the meaning of “metaphysics” is now changing) ought to be easy to understand, because everyone (at least, every “man”) already knows its truths; but the “poser,” the difficult thing — the thing that lazy Coleridge, the plagiarist, has barely attempted — is to express it in this correct, easily understood way.

Here again, though, however, the charge of abuse of language, of unintelligibility, goes in both directions. Among the objects for which Aids to Reflection was written, Coleridge lists first of all:

To direct the Reader’s attention to the value of the Science of Words, their use and abuse, and the incalculable advantages attached, to the habit of using them appropriately, and with a distinct knowledge of their primary, derivative, and metaphorical senses. And in furtherance of this Object I have neglected no occasion of enforcing the maxim, that to expose a sophism and to detect the equivocal or double meaning of a word is, in the great majority of cases, one and the same thing. (Preface, [Burlington: 1829[4]This first American edition, with James Marsh’s “Preliminary Essay,” became the foundation of Vermont Transcendentalism, and greatly impressed the Boston Transcendentalists, as well. Note that (as should be obvious from the date) the text Marsh published was of the original (1825) British edition, not the heavily revised edition of 1831.], p. lviii)

Later on he gives the source of this equivocation, and hence of the consequent sophistry, as “carelessness”:

We should accustom ourselves to think and reason, in precise and steadfast terms; even when custom, or the deficiency, or the corruption of the language will not permit the same strictness in speaking. The mathematician finds this so necessary to the truths which he is seeking, that his science begins with, and is founded on, the definition of his terms. The botanist, the chemist, the anatomist, &c., feel and submit to this necessity at all costs, even at the risk of exposing their several pursuits to the ridicule of the many, by technical terms, hard to be remembered, and alike quarrelsome to the ear and the tongue. In the business of moral and religious reflection, in the acquisition of clear and distinct conceptions of our duties, and of the relations in which we stand to God, our neighbour and ourselves, no such difficulties occur. At the utmost we have only to rescue words, already existing and familiar, from the false or vague meanings imposed on them by carelessness, or by the clipping and debasing misusage of the market. (Prudential Aphorism VI[5]In the 1831 edition, there are only four Prudential Aphorisms. This text was retained, however, as part of a long Comment on Aphorism I., p. 20)

The two sides remain Scottish–French and German, and the mutual terms of criticism (or of abuse) remain the same. On the one hand, Ferrier charges Coleridge with a lazy failure to take on the difficult task of intelligibility (i.e., with the vice now usually called, by philosophers, “self-indulgence”). On the other hand, Coleridge charges his opponents with acquiescence in a careless use of traditional words, one that allows them to drift away from their precise meanings and hence erases the conceptual distinctions needed for clear thought and reasoning on the most important subjects. And this continuity is striking, because the sound of the antagonists on each side, and their way with words, has changed greatly. Hamilton and Ferrier positively bristle with technical terms, many of them neologisms — Ferrier, for example, appears to have more or less invented the term “epistemology.”[6]See Wikipedia and (behind a paywall) the OED. Coleridge, meanwhile, even in his prose works, sounds not very much like Kant or (except when plagiarizing) like Schelling, and, although he doesn’t hesitate to lapse in Latin or Greek at the slightest excuse, still the words that most interest him are not technical terms of Scholasticism, but rather good old English words like “reason,” “spirit,” “happiness,” and “freedom” — words whose precise, uncorrupted use is supposed to be found in older Anglican theologians like Hooker and Leighton.

This pattern becomes even more striking when we turn to the next generation of the conflict, which unfolded in New England. Brown, evidently, was, in that context, the philosopher to beat. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (who happens to be a distant relative[7]To be precise, he and I are first cousins five times removed. My daughter, Elana Laurence Higginson Stone, is named partly in his honor.), describes Brown’s central place in the education of the young Margaret Fuller:

At this time [viz., at the age of fifteen] she lived, as always, a busy life, — rose before five in summer, walked an hour, practiced an hour on the piano, breakfasted at seven, read Sismondi’s “European Literature” in French till eight, then Brown’s “Philosophy”[8]Meaning, presumably, his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind. till half past nine, then went to school for Greek at twelve, then practiced again till dinner. (Margaret Fuller Ossoli [4th edition, Boston: 1885[9]Part of a series called (you can’t make this stuff up!): “American Men of Letters.”], p. 23)

James Marsh, meanwhile, in his “Preliminary Essay” on Coleridge, appoints Brown spokesman for the entire school dominant school (“Locke and the Scottish metaphysicians”), and, after criticizing their views on both the nature–spirit distinction (namely: that they make no “essential” distinction at all) and on the meaning of “free-will” (namely: that they treat it as a species of necessity), concludes:

I feel authorized to take this statement partly from Brown’s philosophy, because that work has been decidedly approved by our highest theological authorities; and indeed it would not be essentially varied, if expressed in the precise terms used by any of the writers most usually quoted in reference to these subjects. (“Preliminary Essay,” in Aids to Reflection, pp. xxx)

His principal complaint against Brown (and, through Brown, against all those he stands for) is the same old complaint, that, by allowing originally precise terms to drift into vague, diluted meanings, they make it impossible to write, read, or think the important distinctions that are needed for morality and religion:

Let us suppose, for example, that a man has studied and adopted the philosophy of Brown, is it possible for him to interpret the 8th chapter of Romans,[10]Beginning: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” without having his views of its meaning influenced by his philosophy? Would he not unavoidably interpret the language and explain the doctrines, which it contains, differently from one, who should have adopted such views of the human mind, as are taught in this work [i.e., in Aids to Reflection]? (pp. xxi–ii)

Then, on the other hand, he finds it necessary to defend Coleridge against objections to his “peculiarities of language,” using terms very similar to Kant’s:

In the very nature of things it is impossible for a writer to express by a single Word any truth, or to mark any distinction, not recognized in the language of his day, unless he adopts a word entirely new, or gives to one already in use a new and more peculiar sense. Now in communicating truths, which the writer deems of great and fundamental importance, shall he thus appropriate a single word old or new, or trust to the vagueness of perpetual circumlocution? Admitting for example, the existence of the important distinction, for which this writer contends, between the understanding and reason, and that this distinction, when recognized at all, is confounded in the common use of language by employing the words indiscriminately, shall he still use these words indiscriminately, and either invent a new word, or mark the distinction by descriptive circumlocutions, or shall he assign a more distinctive and precise meaning to the words already used? It seems to me obviously more in accordance with the laws and genius of language to take the course, which he has adopted. But in this case and in many others, where his language seems peculiar, it.cannot be denied that the words had already been employed in the same sense, and the same distinctions recognized, by the older and many of the most distinguished writers in the language. (p. xlvii–iii)

Thus are the two sides, Scottish vs. German, transplanted to America.[11]The status of France had meanwhile begun to change, thanks to Hamilton’s friend, Victor Cousin. Here, perhaps, is the original seed of our own distinction between Anglophone and Continental philosophy. It would have seemed bizarre in the early 19th century, when the most important philosophical border ran between Germany and France.

Fuller, though in the Scottish camp at age fifteen, was, by the time we know of her as a thinker and a writer, a Transcendentalist. That is (in case her work in translating Goethe and von Arnim didn’t make this clear): she had gone over to the Germans.[12]The word “transcendentalism,” incidentally — a term that occurs sometimes in Fichte, but not, as far as I know, in Kant or the other German Idealists — was introduced into English in Brown’s review of Villers: even Brown, we see, was not above a neologism now and then. See (still behind that paywall) the OED. As Higginson puts it:

And sharing also the drawbacks, she also shared inevitably the prejudices that her companions inspired. These prejudices might be divided into two general heads; it was thought that they were unintelligible and it was said — if this was not indeed the same allegation — that they were German. It is now difficult to recall the peculiar suspicion that was attached to any one in America, forty years ago, who manifested much interest in German thought. Immanuel Kant is now claimed as a corner-stone of religion by evangelical divines,[13]Quomodo ceciderunt fortes. but he was then thought to be more dangerous than any French novelist. (Margaret Fuller Ossoli, pp. 282–3)

But, of course, Fuller and the other Transcendentalists don’t sound very much at all like Kant, or even Coleridge. Brackett describes very well the difficulty of her style:

Even in the later writings, where it is more easy to catch the thought, the inexhaustible flow of metaphor and illustrations keeps one continually on the alert. In this she reminds one of Shakespeare. The figures and illustrations tumble over each other and trip each other up, while in the unquestioning demand which she makes upon the previous information of her readers she is not unlike Carlyle. (Brackett, “Margaret Fuller Ossoli,” The Radical 9 (1872):354–370, p. 360)

There are two parts to this characterization. The first part, in which Brackett compares her to Shakespeare, could also well be said about Emerson. That Shakespeare is very difficult, when regarded as a philosopher, can easily be verified by reading Cavell’s work about him. But his difficulty, like Emerson’s or Thoreau’s, is not of a kind that prevents us from assigning his works to high school students. It is, therefore, not the kind D’Alembert meant to rule out in metaphysics. Indeed, D’Alembert actually compares good metaphysics to good drama:

One can say in a sense of metaphysics that everyone knows it or no one, or to speak more accurately, that everyone is ignorant of that which not everyone can know. There are works of this kind, such as plays; the impression fails [est manquée] when it is not general. (loc. cit.)

Of philosophy that is difficult in this way, one can hardly say, as Kant says of his critical philosophy, that it “can never become popular, but also has no necessity of being so” (Bxxxiv). As Fuller herself writes about Shakespeare — or at least, she has her recurring character, Aglauron,[14]In another dialogue, she describes Aglauron thus: “Aglauron is a person of far greater depth and force than his friend and cousin [Laurie, the other character], but by no means as agreeable. His mind is ardent and powerful, rather than brilliant and ready, — neither does he with ease adapt himself to the course of another. But, when he is once kindled, the blaze of light casts every object on which it falls into a bold relief, and gives every scene a lustre unknown before. He is not, perhaps, strictly original in his thoughts; but the severe truth of his character, and the searching force of his attention, give the charm of originality to what he says. Accordingly, another cannot, by repetition, do it justice. I have never any doubt when I write down or tell what Laurie says, but Aglauron must write for himself.” There is some complex joke here. “Laurie” sounds like it could be a female name, but the character is male. “Aglauron” sounds like a male name, and the character is supposedly male, but the Greek name ῎Αγλαυρος is actually female. Possibly the meaning is that Aglauron “must write for himself” because “he” is actually Fuller (the American Man of Letters!). say this:

Were I, despite the bright points so numerous in their history and the admonitions of my own conscience, inclined to despise my fellow men, I should have found abundant argument against it during this late study of Hamlet. In the streets, saloons, and lecture rooms, we continually hear comments so stupid, insolent, and shallow on great and beautiful works, that we are tempted to think that there is no Public for anything that is good. . . .  Of Shakspeare, so vaunted a name, little wise or worthy has been written, perhaps nothing so adequate as Coleridge’s comparison of him to the Pine-apple; yet on reading Hamlet, his greatest work, we find there is not a pregnant sentence, scarce a word that men have not appreciated, have not used in myriad ways. Had we never read the play, we should find the whole of it from quotation and illustration familiar to us as air. That exquisite phraseology, so heavy with meaning, wrought out with such admirable minuteness, has become a part of literary diction, the stock of the literary bank; and what set criticism can tell like this fact how great was the work, and that men were worthy it should be addressed to them? (“Dialogue,” Papers on Literature and Art, p.163; this passage is quoted by Higginson, pp. 291–2)

And as for the other part of Brackett’s characterization, concerning the demands Fuller makes on “the previous information of her readers”: this also does not apply to Kant, at least, not in the way Brackett presumably intends it. What Fuller assumes about her audience is not a certain more or less Scholastic education, but rather a broad knowledge of European art and literature, and a familiarity with the lives of famous European personages, from Ireland to Russia. Stewart is actually closer to this than Kant.

So here we have a dispute about something — some issue concerning the nature of philosophical clarity, and the correct use of words in philosophy, a dispute which is perceived by the (mostly English speaking) antagonists as somehow entangled with national differences. The dispute is never explained, and would be hard to explain, in a general way, and yet it visibly persists for generations while the philosophical systems on each side, and even the overall styles of philosophical writing, shift beneath it. All of which should sound familiar.

Thomas Brown’s objection to transcendental idealism (as he understands it, based on Villers): it is too realist.

In the mere belief of the subjectivity of perception, [Kant] is certainly not original; for it would be difficult to find a philosopher of the present age, who retains the belief of the actual unmodified representation, by the senses, of the qualities of external matter. In one circumstance, however, we differ from the transcendentalist. We own the subjectivity of our perceptions; but we are convinced of the impossibility of analyzing them into objective and subjective elements; since to us, by the laws of our nature, these elements must ever co-exist.” (“Villers, Philosophie de Kant,” Edinburgh Review 1 (1802–3):253–280, p. 265)

That man was no learned exegete, he did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew, then he might have easily understood the story of Abraham.

— Kierkegaard

Christia Mercer has recently published an article about, let us say, the history of history of philosophy, and responding to it is apparently all the rage. So I am reviving this abortive blog to add my response.

It is more than a little absurd for me to respond, as I have read only some parts of the article in question (principally those quoted by my at-least-Facebook friends Charlie Huenemann, Martin Lenz, and Eric Schliesser[1]Oh, OK. May your page rank continue to flourish.). Still less have I done the kind of research that would be necessary for a full understanding of the work: there is no proper critical edition of the article; I have no access to Mercer’s earlier drafts; I have not poked through her personal correspondence or her wastebasket. Maybe somewhere on a discarded scrap of paper she has written a note that would change everything (and maybe she has destroyed such a scrap, on purpose, as Kierkegaard claims to have done).

My familiarity with the scholarly literature that forms her subject matter is, moreover, not very deep. When I have dipped into it, I have found it at times helpful in one way or another, other times not. Even in the former case, the experience of reading it is for me always uncanny (i.e., unheimlich), and I suspect this is the deepest reason that I tend to avoid it. Whatever indicates, by its very existence, the advent of a philosophy without self-knowledge — a philosophy which calls forth both “history of philosophy” and “metaphilosophy” as special disciplines: a zombie philosophy, one might say; a philosophy naturalized not only objectively but also formally, such that its body continues all mechanical functions, the spirit having departed — whatever indicates this fills me with dread.

Nevertheless, absurdly, I have something to say in response.

To Mercer, this literature — namely, that vast output of secondary literature, written by and for increasingly specialized experts, which our field has produced beginning, approximately, in the 1980’s[2]In English, that is: somewhat earlier in German; also, somewhat earlier in the case of ancient philosophy. — seems a great improvement on what came before. (She does not, as far as I know, explicitly take note of the fact that what came before was not a different kind of specialized secondary literature.) This improvement she ascribes to the widespread adoption of a new criterion of scholarly work, which she calls the “getting things right criterion.”

Now, this principle, that things are to be got right, is the principle of the divine will, by which the world was created. Mercer is very familiar with at least one version of it under the name “principle of sufficient reason” or “of sufficient ground.” The getting things right criterion is proper to beings as such (i.e., transcendental). To claim it as the property of some particular school of historians is an act of rather extreme appropriation.

Does this show, then, that no one can ever get anything wrong? On this point I refer to the usual solutions to the problem of evil, which tend to be effective as metaphysics but personally not very consoling. To appropriate somewhat from one of those philosophers who has so unfairly — and who can say why? could there possibly be any reason? — monopolized the sacred high ground of JHP:

This Harmony makes it such that things are conducted to grace by the very ways of nature, and that this globe, for example, must be destroyed and repaired by natural ways at those moments when the government of spirits demands it, for the punishment of some and the reward of others. (Monadology §88, Phil. Schriften ed. Gerhardt, 7:622)

The true is the whole. The whole will get things right. But we, our philosophical tradition (or indeed our species), considered in isolation from the whole, may, or rather certainly will, get things wrong. And we will pay eventually for our wrongness, that is, our partiality, by our destruction. The event may be upon us.

It is fitting, moreover, that our destruction should be heralded to us by a scholar of Leibniz. Leibniz has something to say about those of his predecessors, such as Descartes and Spinoza, who, in the quest to get things right, had resolved no longer to appropriate, or in other words to disappropriate, to disavow, their own past. He says that they have made a political error. Descartes recognizes well enough that a wholesale refusal to appropriate either the old buildings or the old institutions of our city would be disastrous, even though we have certainly not got either the buildings or the institutions right. But he claims that no such inconvenience will attend on an analogous act with respect to his own private opinions:

It is true that we do not see anyone throw to the ground all the houses of a city with the sole design of remaking them in another way and rendering the streets more beautiful; but we do see many taking theirs down in order to rebuild them . . . . On the example of which I persuaded myself[3]Note that this “I persuaded myself” is the very act in which the ego cogito will catch itself when it first self-appropriates: imo certe ego eram, si quid mihi persuasi. Heidegger might say: when it first propriates (so that this would be, not an Erlebnis, but the Ereignis). Thoreau says it in English: “and here I will begin to mine” (Walden 2.23). (That, incidentally, is one of the few passages Stanley Cavell ever explained to me outright. There were more secrets in his trade than in most men’s.) that it would truly not be proper [qu’il n’y auroit vertablement point d’apparence] that an individual [un particulier] form a design to reform a state, by changing all the foundations and overturning it in order to rectify it, nor even to reform the body of the sciences or the established order of teaching them in the schools; but that, as for all the opinions which I had received until then into my credence, I could not do better than to undertake, once and for all, to remove them, in order afterwards to replace them, either with other better ones, or indeed with the same ones, when I should have adjusted them to the level of reason. (Discours 2.2, AT VI:13,13–14,1)

To which Leibniz replies:

And finally, by this theory [ratio] [that is, Leibniz’s appropriation of the doctrine of substantial form], both the truth and the doctrines of the Ancients are consulted. And just as our age has absolved of contempt the corpuscles of Democritus, the ideas of Plato, and the tranquility of the Stoics in the optimal connection of things, now, too, the traditional doctrines [tradita] of the Peripatetics of forms or entelechies (which have been deservedly seen as enigmatic, and scarcely rightly perceived by the Authors themselves) will be recovered to intelligible notions, as, indeed, we deem it necessary rather to explain this philosophy which was received for so many ages, so as also to make it consist with itself (where this can be done to it) and, further, to illustrate it and augment it with new truths, than to abolish it.

And this plan [ratio] of studies seems to me most accommodated both to the prudence of teachers and to the utility of students, that we neither appear more desirous of destroying than of building, nor be daily thrown, uncertain, into the midst of perpetual changes of doctrine, by the pride of audacious geniuses. (“Specimen dynamicum,” Math. Schriften ed. Gerhardt, 6:235–6)

Whatever you conclude in your own private speculation, even if (like Descartes, or like Socrates) you claim not to be a teacher, you will teach, and you will teach the more powerfully the more power is in you: for Leibniz, that is a matter of metaphysical necessity (for Leibniz, indeed, active power is nothing but teaching). And so the will that throws down, i.e., refuses to appropriate, the doctrines of centuries, in order rather to make room for its own new plan, is as much a tyrant as a Nero who burns Rome.

But Leibniz has perhaps not anticipated our historians of philosophy. The imperative to get things right, as they understand it, does not manifest in pride and audacity, but in a cautious rooting about through archives — and even this they dare not undertake without an elaborate display of credentials and citations. (As the old joke has it: if Descartes were alive today, and were going on the job market, he could not list “Descartes” as an AOS, because he lacks sufficient familiarity with the literature.) Leibniz, I say, has perhaps not anticipated these historians: Nietzsche has anticipated them. The antiquarian function of history (for that is the function we have to do with here), in its healthy state, is, he explains, a function of appropriation:

The small, the limited, the decayed and obsolete receives its own dignity and sanctity [Unantastbarkeit] thereby, that the soul of the antiquarian human being has settled [übersiedelt] in these things, and has prepared for himself therein a homelike nest. The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself. (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Part 2: “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” Werke (Leipzig: C.G. Naumann), 1:303)

And so, if we were to ask: why have those few figures so monopolized JHP, would not the answer be: because their words are our words and their questions are our questions? Because we cannot speak without causing their lips to move in the grave? To the point where we cannot emit even so apparently harmless a piece of commonplace chatter as “the getting things right criterion” without at once invoking the good that is beyond being, ἔτι ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας καὶ πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει ὑπερέχοντος (or, in a more Aristotelian mood: the bonitas sive perfectio transcendentalis).

But, as with the other functions of history, this antiquarian function — again, in its healthy state — involves a kind of injustice to the past:

Spoken with a certain freedom of image: the tree feels its roots more than it can see them; this feeling, however, measures their size according to the size and power of its visible branches. And if the tree already errs therein: how will it be in error about the whole forest round about it! Of which it knows and feels anything, only so far as [that thing] hinders or furthers its own self — but nothing beyond that. (305)

And, as with the other forms of history, its degeneracy sets in when the historians themselves — could it be due to a sudden widespread flowering of the virtue of justice? (Nietzsche says not) — notice the injustice and try to correct it:

Here a danger always lies very near: finally everything old and past that still comes at all into the circle of vision is simply received as equally venerable. . . . Antiquarian history itself degenerates the moment the fresh life of the present no longer animates and inspires it. The piety withers away, the scholarly habit persists without it and turns egotistically–self-satisfiedly about its own center. Then may one behold the unfortunate spectacle of a blind frenzy of collection, a restless scraping together of all that has ever been. The human being encases itself in mustiness; he succeeds, by the antiquarian manner, in demoralizing even a more significant disposition, a nobler need, into an insatiable curiosity [Neubegier], or, better: a lust for the old and for everything [Alt- und Allbegier]; often, he sinks so low that, in the end, he is satisfied with any fare, and devours with pleasure the dust of bibliographical minutiae. (306)

And who indeed could live on such dust? Or what tree could take root in it?

Thoreau says:

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once — for the root is faith — I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say. (Walden 1D.23)

No doubt, as he implies, I am at least as uprooted (deracinated) as Mercer or Descartes or Spinoza, and, no doubt, my uprootedness is my despair (or “quiet desperation”), that is, my lack of faith. But this helps me very little, because — I cannot understand much that he has to say. There are moments when Thoreau breaks the surface like a loon, and, following Machiaveli’s advice to the audacious tyrant, makes a sudden, rare, terrifying display of his power. Of these, one of the most terrifying of all, at least to me, is when he says: “I love better to see stones in place” (1D.13). Build no city, he says. Or: throw down the city you have (though it be no city of mere Luftgebaüde), and never rebuild (“Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries” [14.15]). The ground is no principle. The ground suffices.

But this pitch of philosophy is too high for the likes of me. I remain in my despair, in my sin. There is much that I cannot understand. I do not understand Abraham. Perhaps the learned exegetes will understand him. Nail elyë hiryva.