Preface to Historiography

Generically, historiography is writing about the writing of history. As applied to the section “Historiography for History of Philosophy”, I’m using the term in a slightly idiosyncratic way. Those articles mostly concern particular historical interpretations that I think significantly impact — or should significantly impact — other, broader historical interpretation, as well as interpretation of things in the present. Needless to say, this is difficult to divide cleanly from my other section devoted to History of Philosophy, but here the accent is more on the history, and there it is more on the philosophy.

I take historiography to be a kind of supplement to Hermeneutics (see dedicated menu section). Perhaps even especially as presented here, it stands in contrast with what Brandom calls Hegelian genealogy, which I highly value in a different context. The “historiography” here is largely concerned with things and perspectives that the retrospective teleology of a Hegelian genealogy largely filters out. It still involves all kinds of ultimately normative judgments in the process of making judgments of historical fact, but focuses mainly on discerning the irregularities, quirkiness, local retrograde movements, and specific materiality of the actual forward-moving succession of events.

Nature is full of purposes or quasi-purposes, but any appearance of pre-existing purpose or predetermination in history is an artifact of our story-telling.

Telling such a story is a delicate enterprise. There is no invisible hand guiding temporal succession, nor is there inherent unity unfolding in successive events. The raw material of history is strictly an accumulation of accidents. As much as possible, we should let the details speak for themselves. Yet we almost cannot help giving it a plot. This helps us orient ourselves. Inevitably, we select certain details as important and ignore others. We tend to give it direction and shape.

Independent of purpose, though, there is a kind of quasi-material accumulation of forms associated with temporal succession. (I mean that the accumulation associated with succession is independent of purpose, while the forms accumulated may themselves be purposeful.)

Succession has materially inherent directionality to it. Time only flows forward. Successive forms get superimposed on one another so to speak and become indistinct, resulting in something new and unintended, but cumulative. This is not progress, and there is nothing normative about it. It is a quasi-material analogue of arithmetic addition, indifferent to considerations of what is better or worse. But we may experience it as better or worse. And because it does have a materially inherent direction (the pile gets thicker, so to speak, and forms within it materially condition other forms), it is possible for us to take that direction in some purposeful way. We look at a raw accumulation of forms, and imagine a story that has some basis in the actual development.

It’s a bit mythical to speak as if there were two distinct phases to this. We don’t ever have the pure or original thing in a philosophical sense. But various kinds of accumulation are one of the significant features of temporal succession in a world, and we do have actual material cultural artifacts to which we can refer.

My use of “historiography” is also roughly synonymous with nonstandard uses of “archaeology” derived from the work of Michel Foucault, particularly as applied to the history of philosophy by writers like Alain de Libera and Gwenaëlle Aubry.

Univocity

Aristotle is the source of our modern notion of univocity. He was also the first to point out many things of interest that overflow our attempts at univocal representation.

Something is said univocally (i.e., without equivocation) if the meaning is the same whenever the representation is the same. This is an important, desirable property in logic, modern science, and engineering. A lack of univocity is one of the major sources of logical inconsistency or incoherence in representation.

A kind of univocity also applies to a Kantian unity of apperception. The unity of a unity of apperception is more or less equivalent to the univocity of an account of something. So since there is a kind of moral imperative to achieve unity of apperception or improve upon it, there is in that way also an ethical use for univocity. But just as unity of apperception requires constant renewal, so too do our attempts at comprehensive univocal accounts of things.

Aristotle frequently points out things that are “said in many ways” (i.e., not univocally). This refers not just to practices of ordinary language, but to meant realities as well (see Equivocal Determination). Being and cause are among the things said in many ways. He also points out cases where a more fluid, pluralistic approach is appropriate — the classification of animals, for instance — or just applies such an approach. Aristotle wants to be faithful to the variety, subtlety, and complexity of the world and everything in it. This is the famous Aristotelian manysidedness, often praised by Hegel.

Univocity is never simply found; it is a possible property of our constructions and passive syntheses. In the design of representations and schemas, there may be tradeoffs between coherence and correspondence, or consistency and comprehensiveness.

If there is an ethical imperative to univocity, there is also one to manysidedness. These are really two sides of one coin (a sort of responsibility our representations have to reality, as Brandom would say). To paraphrase Whitehead, we should seek univocity and distrust it. (See also Aristotelian Semantics; Mutation of Meaning.)

Althusser’s Hegel

French Marxist Louis Althusser (1918-90) was the academic director of France’s most prestigious university during the 1960s. He open-mindedly helped promote the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, and maintained personal friendships with other important figures such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Althusser left provocative, underdeveloped sketches of a historiography opposed to all forms of historical teleology or predetermination (see also Structural Causality, Choice). In 1960s Paris, this new historiography was considered inseparable from a strong polemic against any and all forms of Hegelianism or Hegelian influence in contemporary social thought. (See also Archaeology of Knowledge).

There indeed have been a lot of bad Hegelianisms to which this criticism legitimately applies. But much careful work in recent decades has by now, I think, established that it need not apply to Hegel himself. In fact, Hegel even appears as a major precursor of the putatively anti-Hegelian historiography.

Before his famous anti-Hegelian period, Althusser interpreted Hegelian Spirit as “process without a subject”. Process without a subject already anticipated the characteristics he later called “aleatory”. In the late period, he emphasized that history is about understanding results, not origins.

In an extremely different context and style, Brandom has developed a reading of Hegel as practicing backward-looking recollective reconstruction of the present rather than asserting forward-moving teleology or predetermination in history.

Aleatory Matter

The resurgence of interest in French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser has largely centered around his late concept of “aleatory materialism”, based on a reading of Lucretius on the alleged spontaneous swerving of atoms in the void.

Like most other recent French writers, Althusser had little use for Aristotle. He repeated many old bad stereotypes and counterposed a good Lucretius to a bad Plato and Aristotle, to whom he mistakenly ascribed — among other things — a modern-style univocal notion of causality. Althusser’s Lucretius, by contrast, stands for recognition of the contingency of events.

It is therefore all the more intriguing to note that Althusser was unwittingly recovering a key feature I have associated with Aristotelian matter. I like the Aristotelian version better, because it does not rely on a quasi-myth of a miraculous originary swerve, but just appropriately asserts the contingency of things.

Aristotelian Matter

Aristotelian “matter” and “material cause” mainly capture notions of circumstance, contingent fact, mediation, and what some 20th century writers called sedimentation.

Early Greek mathematics was not sufficiently advanced to be of much help in understanding natural processes, so Aristotle instead pioneered a logical/semantic approach to our experience of sensible nature. In accordance with this, “matter” for Aristotle is what Brandom would call an expressive metaconcept, rather than being a theory-laden empirical concept like the modern notion. We need to be careful moving between the two.

For Aristotle, matter is not a subsisting thing but a relative concept that has an expressive role. “Matter” and “form” are correlatives, only analytically distinguishable, though the relation is not quite symmetrical (form seems to be more primary). All physical things are conventionally referred to as “composites” of the two, but this should not be taken to mean that either has independent existence. (See also Hylomorphism.)

The relation between matter and form is loosely but definitely not strictly analogous to that between potentiality and actuality. Matter gives concrete embodiment to particulars, whereas potentiality is what provides the space for construction of universals.

Unlike Descartes, Aristotle does not associate matter in any direct way with mathematically analyzable extension. One of his usages for “matter” is as the inferred substrate for sensible properties. But alongside this, a different account is actually more prominent. Some “form” or way of being and doing makes the composite the particular kind of thing it is. In this context, “matter” ends up comprising the concrete circumstances of the actual functioning of a way of being and doing.

Modern people are used to thinking of form as a predicate of some matter. Some in the ancient world thought this way, too, but Aristotle prefers to speak in the opposite way, and to predicate the matter of the form.

Aristotelian matter refers to circumstance, to a body of what is the case about some particular actualized form, more primarily than to a body of stuff. What is of interest with matter is particular matters, or “a” matter, or “the” matter of some particular form — the circumstances of its actualization.

The Greek commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias postulated an ultimate “prime matter” that was distinguished by having no properties at all, which by implication would put all properties whatsoever on the side of form. At the other end of the spectrum, some later commentators spoke of a “proximate matter” (i.e., the matter closest to the form) as highly structured, and as including things like the body of an animal.

Aristotle’s various usages, if reified, would result in a layering of form/matter distinctions. (In the middle ages, there was heated debate over the so-called “unity or plurality of substantial forms”. Theologians were much concerned over the relation of soul to body. Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and others took seriously Aristotle’s description of soul as the “form of the body”. Augustinians wanted a dualistic separation of soul and body, more like the pilot in the ship that Aristotle rejected. They therefore argued that the body already had a form of its own, and that the form of the soul is superimposed on it (a “plurality of substantial forms”). The notion of “substantial form” was a late refinement intended to be strictly univocal, where Aristotle’s general usage of “form” had instead been self-consciously overdetermined, overflowing any such conditions in the course of its dialectical development.)

Aristotelian matter is implicitly not just immediate circumstance, but always a result of a sort of layering or accumulation of circumstances over time, including some feedback loops. This is important for the kind of generalization we should expect from Aristotelian science.

Cartesian extensionality is perfectly homogeneous. Aristotelian matter is anything but that. It is a site of differences (as form is also, in a complementary way). The virtual layering or accumulation I have spoken of is a very weak kind of unity. Aristotle’s notions of necessity and universality are also both deliberately weak notions. Something is said to be “necessary” just if there is no known counter-instance. “Universal” means “said of many things”, not “said unconditionally”.

Aristotelian “science” does not aim to codify laws in the modern, univocal sense. It is an open hermeneutic that seeks to understand processes in terms of patterns, while recognizing inherent contingency in matters of fact. Particularly in the biological works, there is a genealogical intertwining of form and accident that makes it impossible to strictly separate the two. Aristotelian natural teleology is not only purely immanent, but also never univocal, as this intertwining makes clear. It gives us tendencies only, never strict predetermination.

Mutation of Meaning

It is fascinating how the meaning of terms can be inverted over time. Take form, for example. Plato and Aristotle’s notions of “form” include something like what Kant and Brandom would call conceptual content. What Kant and Brandom call “form”, on the other hand, while not properly equivalent to Aristotelian logical/semantic matter, seems to belong to that side of things.

Similarly, when medieval authors wrote about something being “merely objective”, they meant superficial or based on mere appearance, i.e., something close to what modern authors would call “merely subjective”. “Subject” had no mental connotations. It meant something more like a grammatical subject.

Such reversals or near-reversals are only the most dramatic examples. Nearly every philosophical term of interest has undergone historic shifts in its general meaning. When these are not taken into account, the result is endless confusion.

It is pointless to argue about what such a term “really means” in the abstract. Meaning is use, so we need to look at concrete contexts of usage, and ask what it means in this context.

I make opinionated remarks about usage, but always relative to a context. (See also Univocity.)

Intellectual Virtue, Love

In his discussions of ethics, alongside friendship or love and the things that go with those, Aristotle places the highest value on what he calls intellectual virtues. This is often misconstrued as a bias in favor of theory over practice. Such a misconstrual does not take a long enough view of things. Aristotle did value intellectual over manual labor, but took great interest in the kinds of things Kant called “practical”, as the ethical treatises demonstrate.

Aristotle had the idea that the keener our discernment of things in general, the keener our practical judgment will be. I may study the stars or the habits of animals or political constitutions or the nature of intellect or of virtue — and these are all worthy in their own right — but I also improve my discernment of things in general in order to be a better being, which means applying it in a broad way in my whole life, as well as in my particular deliberations and choices.

This all assumes that I already want to be good, and am relatively able to actually be so. That will not be true, according to Aristotle, unless I am fortunate enough to have had the kind of upbringing and life experiences that are conducive to the development of the kind of character in which emotion is already inclined to give reason a fair hearing. For those whose emotions will not listen to reason, the best path forward is to follow others who are more reasonable, but that may not occur without some institution of authority. Insofar as we are or aim to be magnanimous ethical beings who have nothing to prove, rather than needing to celebrate this conditional legitimation of authority over others (and implicitly of the use of force in society to gain compliance with elementary justice and civility), we should be guided by a spirit of friendship and love.

We should use our intellectual virtues in a spirit of friendship to best apply something like Leibnizian wise charity in our lives, especially with those we love, and more especially in generously understanding the particular predicament of the loved one in front of us whose emotions will not listen to reason in such and such a case, so we can more effectively help them. (See also Honesty, Kindness; Interpretive Charity; Affirmation; Genealogy.)

Spinoza

Modernity from the time of Descartes experienced what Kant would call antinomies (unresolvable dilemmas) with regard to questions of freedom and determinism. These were not eternally given, but resulted from specific, contingent historical developments — not only emerging modern science, but also some very specific features carried forward from medieval European theological controversies. (See Errors of the Philosophers; Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul; God and the Soul; Mind Without Mentalism.)

Since the early modern period, many philosophers have struggled to formulate their own incompatible ways of trying to assert both billiard-ball causality and a hyper-strong concept of personal identity to which something like voluntaristic free will was attributed. Even Kant and Hegel used a good deal of socially acceptable voluntaristic-sounding rhetoric that was at odds with their more careful arguments. (In a real world where audiences have prejudices, philosophers who want to be heard have to be careful to gauge their audience, and pick their battles wisely.)

In this context, Spinoza stands apart from the rest. Like the others, he wanted to assert modern-style univocal causality, but the kind of freedom of reason he argued for in Book V of the Ethics did not presuppose the hyper-strong personal identity and free will others wanted to assume. He emphasized the relational character of all determination, and famously mounted a head-on critique of free will.

Ethically, Spinoza was profoundly committed to reason and an immanent understanding of nature and society. He published the first critical textual analysis of the Old Testament, and was among the first open advocates of free speech. His work was a major inspiration to the left wing of the Enlightenment that gave us the ideal of democracy. The Left Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach called him “the Moses of the freethinkers”.

Among philosophers, he also stands out for giving unprecedented attention to emotions and their interaction with reason. He is particularly concerned with the harmfulness of sad passions, and recommends that we use joyful passions as well as reason to help free ourselves from the grip of the sad passions.

Spinoza rejected the theologized Aristotle, and knew no other version. In spite of this, I think Aristotle would agree that Spinoza’s arguments against free will by no means rule out Aristotle’s moderate conception of deliberation and choice. The problem has been that many medieval and modern authors felt it necessary to defend what were actually unnecessarily extreme versions of freedom. (See also Ends.)

While praising Spinoza’s monism, Hegel alleged that Spinoza’s thought led to an “oriental” dissolution of personality into the One, and things like that. We might say he should have paid more attention to Spinoza on the freedom of reason, but Terry Pinkard’s good biography of Hegel attests that he already worried about police scrutiny of his views, and a failure to substantially criticize Spinoza would have placed him in the company of the extreme left. In the literature on Hegel, Hegel’s references to Spinoza are too often simply accepted at face value, which is a great injustice.

To the extent that Spinoza has limits in comparison with Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel, it is perhaps in a tendency to simplify; and in his relatively univocal and static, basically one-level (albeit highly relational) conception of nature.

Pierre Macherey’s untranslated five-volume, line-by-line French commentary on the fine inferential structure of Spinoza’s Ethics is, I think, the best discussion of Spinoza in any language. A smaller work of Macherey, Spinoza or Hegel, has been translated to English, and develops many points I would wish to make.

In a very different vein, the 1934 classic study by Harry Austryn Wolfson pointed out many hidden allusions in Spinoza to arguments and positions from the Hebrew tradition of medieval philosophy. Wolfson called Spinoza “the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns”.

Medieval connections also figure in Gilles Deleuze’s 1968 thesis Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy, which I find to be very uneven. On the one hand, in a long digression expounding the “expression” theme, Deleuze had interesting things to say about relations between implication and explication, or folding and unfolding, in relation to Spinoza and late neoplatonism. On the other, he made what I now think was terribly wrong use of the “univocity of being” thesis of the Latin theologian Duns Scotus, with whom he wanted to closely link Spinoza. I believe both Spinoza and Scotus would have been appalled by this suggestion.

The historian Jonathan Israel has documented the large importance of the Spinozist movement in the Enlightenment. The important scholar of German Idealism, Frederick Beiser, gave a fascinating account of the mostly very hostile German philosophical reception of Spinoza around the time of Kant in part of his first book The Fate of Reason (1987).

Brandom characterized Spinoza as a proto-inferentialist in Tales of the Mighty Dead.

I like the fact that Spinoza’s main philosophical work was simply called Ethics. Spinoza sought to develop a truly philosophical ethics, incorporating a wide range of meta-ethical considerations.

Influence

In some circles, the notion of intellectual “influence” has fallen into disrepute. Influence refers to a partial dependency of A on B, without specifying the nature of the dependency. Granted that it does tend to suggest a causal relation and that causality is a blunt instrument for describing relations between historical philosophers, it seems to me that the vagueness with which the causality is suggested is a saving grace. When I say A was influenced by B, I simply mean that the way that A was had some dependency on the way that B was.

The great late scholastic Francisco Suárez did develop an unfortunate theory of “influenza” as something literally passed from cause to effect in the process of causation, but this is certainly not what historians have in mind in speaking of “influence”.

More speculatively, the objection seems to concern any application of a modern notion of univocal causality to what we otherwise want to refer to as autonomous subjects. It is true that modern univocal causality and the autonomy of reason operate on entirely different levels, so directly applying the one to the other would be a category mistake. But I submit that that is not what is going on when we say A was influenced by B. (See also Agency.)

A bit of elementary Aristotelian semantic analysis is helpful here. The historic philosopher A is “said in many ways”. She participated in the autonomy of reason. Simultaneously, she was subject to many empirical determinations. “She” is said in a different way in each of the two previous sentences. Therefore, there is no contradiction and no category mistake in affirming both. (See also Historiography.)

Ever since the middle ages and the controversy over so-called Averroism, Western culture has been affected by a desire to affirm a hyper-strong concept of personal identity. Under this notion of identity, all references to persons always univocally refer to what in modern terms would be an autonomous subject. (Modern people have become so used to thinking in this actually very extreme way that they look at the ancient world and say silly things, like that the ancient world had no concept of persons or individuality.)

Kant’s Rousseauian sympathies led him to sometimes speak this way. But this is not a necessary consequence of Kant’s analysis. Kant’s analysis requires that there is an autonomy of reason in which we participate. It does not require that my empirical subjectivity subject to empirical determination somehow be equated with a transcendental subjectivity blessed with the autonomy of reason, or mysteriously replaced by it. That is precisely the difference between a good concept of the autonomy of reason and a bad concept of free will.

Here Kant’s alleged dualism is more helpful than his Rousseauian sympathies. We should say that it is a category mistake to simply equate transcendental and empirical subjectivity, or to substitute one for other in an argument.

Kant says the transcendental I has no content; therefore in particular, it has no content overlapping the content of my (or any) empirical self. It is a pure index of the unity of a unity of apperception.

I am therefore reluctant even to refer to “a” transcendental subject as if it were individuated, let alone claim it as mine.

The Platonic terminology of “participation” is useful in cases like this. Empirical “we” don’t quite have transcendental subjectivity, because it exceeds us, but we do “participate” in it. Only my empirical subjectivity’s limited participation in transcendental subjectivity is specifically mine. It is not even clear that my whole empirical subjectivity is included in this participation. “My” participation in transcendental subjectivity in any event does not make empirical me into a transcendental subject or give me ownership of transcendental subjectivity. Meanwhile, transcendental “I” am no mere subject. (“I am every name in history,” as Nietzsche said.) (See also What Is “I”?; Subject.)

Material Culture

Ethical or spiritual culture is about value expressed in our doings, and ways and patterns of doing. Material culture is the literal reification of such values into material objects — a piece of carved stone or painted pottery, for instance, or a book (perhaps even a web page). Hegel would surely recognize that Geist is also embodied in the pottery or the book.

Among other functions, cultural artifacts and culturally contexted material objects of all sorts supplement our memory with a kind of external storage, as archaeologist Colin Renfrew suggested. They differ from psychological memory in that they are publicly accessible. Something is lost, but something is also gained by this. The archaeologist has no choice but to work from this sort of data embodied in objects.

Material culture is like revealed religion in Hegel — it is open to all, with nothing esoteric about it. It turns traces of the operation of the transcendental into publicly accessible objects.

A certain kind of reification can be a good thing, a fulfillment even — an actualization making explicit what was implicit. Embodiment is a good thing, not the embarrassment Porphyry attributed to Plotinus.

Foucault developed a whole metaphorical “archaeology” of intellectual and cultural history, focused not on implicit subjectivity but on differences in materially explicit forms. There is a lot to be said for this sort of approach.

Some time between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago in Africa, human material culture began to change much faster than human biology. By the time of the European Upper Paleolithic, our kind of apes had clearly become cultural animals.

Individualistic prejudices in the modern West lead people to downplay the importance of culture in human behavior, but individual personality itself is a sort of micro-culture. Aristotle used the same word (ethos) for personality and culture. (See also Aristotelian Matter; Historiography; Freedom and Free Will.)