What in the hell …

I’ve been reading more work recently that is disciplinary recognizable as history. I find this work attractive for a few reasons. For one thing, while I still have certain anti-realist and anti-foundationalist (essentially Rortian) philosophical intuitions, the history stuff strikes me as useful for not being overly facile about these intuitions. One can and should of course question primary sources, but primary sources provide data which one should be able to respond to in a coherent fashion. More to the point, the standard of evidence in historical strikes me as higher than I think is the case in some of the stuff I’ve read that makes claims about the world. I like that.

I also like the sort of reasoning that goes on at least in good history. It reminds me somewhat of what I like about some of the anglo-american philosophy that I like. It starts from phenomena (and is in that sense empirical) and then reasons about them. This occurs in what I’ve read and liked of Austin’s work on speech acts, and in Grice’s excellent “Logic and Conversation” essay, where he tries to rationally reconstruct what appear to be the implied rules or conventions by which conversations occur. I find that type of reasoning eminently enjoyable, and I like that it involves an implied affirmation of the mental faculties of people who are not written about as capital-letter-surnames - Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc. (None of which is to say the discipline of history is perfect. I’m being a bit unfair here in that I’m implicitly comparing really good history with not very good work in other areas, primarily work which is exclusively theoretical because that’s much of what my education has focused on.)

One thing that I’ve noticed as I’ve read more history is that my own implied view of how theoretical and other work relates has been flawed. I’d basically had that idea that one went to the theory workshop and ground the theoretical lens then went out of the workshop and looked at stuff in the world. If the stuff was blurry, one went back to the workshop and ground the lens some more (or picked up lenses from others’ work) then walked back outside. This sort of theory as application of a rule is precisely not the sort of reasoning I mentioned my paragraph above, which is more extrapolating from data to find rules (or trends). These aren’t absolutely distinct, but there is a difference I think between reasoning from primary (historical) sources vs logical reasoning with less empirical content.

The other bit about the history stuff that I like (and which my wife appreciates a great deal as my reading interests have shifted) is that the conversations make for better anecdotes in conversations with people who don’t read the same books as me. “I had this thought (or “I read this argument”) about Kant recently” is generally interesting to less people than “I read this anecdote (or “I found this argument about the role within U.S. history”) about slave ships.”

Part of the impulse that has made me excited about history is the same impulse I got excited about in philosophy around 1999. I initially got excited about philosophy more or less because I liked the idea of having special knowledge/insight/ability that others lacked, though I didn’t think of it in those terms. I thought that philosophers understood really basic things that others didn’t understand. This meant that philosophers could look down others, in the sense of “be condescending about”/“feel superior to” and in the sense of “stand above and survey,” and explain others’ mistakes to them. To some extent, I actually think this is true. I think there are certain disciplinary qualities about philosophy which others could profit from, and that philosophers – or rather, behavior like the better behavior of philosophers – could help clear up problems in certain other areas of knowledge. (Evolutionary psychology, for instance.) Of course, one doesn’t have to be a philosopher to do this and being a philosopher is no guarantee that one will do this, it’s the type and rigor of argument that’s valuable. The difference is that I used to think there was a special philosophical knowledge with a positive content (initially Kantian, then Marxist, then Hegelian) that others needed to get onboard with.

In 1999 all of that fell apart for me, through a combination of reading a bit of Schelling’s criticisms of Hegel, reading a bit of Foucault, and reading Richard Rorty. I remember very little of the actual contents of any of this, but what happened was essentially that the impulse or intuition – the gut feeling and basic approach – that I had had dissolved. I no longer felt the same need for that sort of positive specialist knowledge that others needed to listen to me (or listen to the people I was listening to) talk about. What I got excited about then was deflationary arguments, taking apart things that were overly complicated, opening up space where space had gotten filled up, limiting over-extended reasoning.

My interest in history came in part from the same deflationary impulse, particularly around what I think are the overly neat periodizations in Negri and others, and the stuff (the lives and people’s stories) left out when the loose ends are tied up too neatly. Interest in that stuff, something I’m excited about in reading more history, connects with the second philosophical interest I developed after becoming excited about deflationary arguments – I got this from Rorty too, and got excited about aspects of this when reading Kierkegaard (though I remember little of the specifics of this anymore as well, other than my excitement) – which is the relationship between philosophy and literature, or between argument and narrative. Rorty argues that moral progress happens more through the spreading of a certain sad stories than it does through arguments in moral philosophy. That strikes me as simply true. Put differently, it’s a matter of primacy: art or philosophy? History is something like literature and art in its attention to the specifics of “stuff,” and it involves commitments (intuitions, impulses, gut feelings – values) which aren’t necessarily – or which it isn’t always necessary to make – explicit or founded upon something larger than themselves. [I know I’ve posted on this someplace, basically arguing that belief-chains should be as short as possible, but I can’t find the post I had in mind. Maybe I just made it up in my head and never posted it, or maybe it was an email instead of a post. Curses.] Put differently, the issue here is one of nonpropositional contents or things which aren’t expressable or reducible to propositional contents – experiential/aesthetic qualities. Like in the posts about music.