My sincerest apologies for milking the hedgehog and fox for yet another post, but these paragraphs were written shortly after the original hedgehog post.
It seems to me that many works in the history of early-modern philosophy suffer from the what I hereby dub ``the hedgehog effect''; that is, they treat historical actors as if those actors were systematic thinkers, although they really weren’t. Put poetically, they make foxes into hedgehogs.
Take, for example, the set of writings concerning Galileo’s scientific methodology that extends from (roughly) J. H. Randall to W. Wallace. According to this well-known camp within Galilean scholarship, Galileo’s scientific methodology was consciously (as a whole!) constructed to obey the strictures on proper demonstration laid out in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and certain scholastic commentaries thereof. Galilean science, this camp holds, was a type of Aristotelian science, and Galileo himself was a sort of systematic philosopher, a student of Aristotle!
I think this is an exaggeration. Certainly, Galileo coveted the title of “philosopher” (which happened to be the highest paid academic designation of his time), but he had absolutely nothing positive to say about Aristotelians, or any other species of philosopher.
It seems to me that Galileo consciously put his work in opposition to the system-building efforts of his contemporaries in the Universities. He was constructing a new kind of science that differed from Aristotelian science not only in content, but in the set of norms against which its success was judged. In particular (and in contrast to Aristotelian science), this science was not judged according to whether its findings could be incorporated into a grand architectonic of all human knowledge.
For this reason, it seems to me that viewing Galileo as an architectonic-building hedgehog (like Randall and Wallace do) misses the most important of Galileo’s intellectual characteristics: that he is an entirely different kind of thinker than the systematic Aristotelians around him.
But Galileo is an easy case, and I think most contemporary historians of philosophy would agree that he is not a system-builder (see, for example, the Afterward to Daniel Garber’s encyclopedic and essential Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics). I’d like to suggest, however, that the same tendency to overstate systematicity infects our analysis of other thinkers.
Take Descartes, for example. Clearly Descartes’ goal is to formulate a systematic philosophy. In some ways, he is even a poster-boy for all other hedgehogs! After all, he bases his philosophy on a few basic principles---which he believes he knows deeply and with certainty---and tries to deduce the remainder of human knowledge from them. However, the more I read him, the more I think Descartes was a sly fox. Under the banner of formulating a systematic philosophy, he cherry-picked arguments from a variety of sources, constantly shifted his position in response to criticism, and all the while maintained (and this is the particularly ‘sly’ part) `But that’s what I meant all along!'. (Just think of his evolving definition of motion, or the development of Cartesian philosophy after the Replies).
Are we over-systematizing Descartes? Certainly, since we know that his goal was to be systematic, it is charitable to read him in this way. But let’s not forget: having the goal of systematicity is far from actually practicing philosophy systematically.
In general, one of the standard strategies for a history of philosophy paper is to take two incompatible assertion of some past philosopher and show them to be compatible. This is done by revealing hidden assumptions, clarifying arguments, reevaluating the meaning of concepts based on the historical context, etc. But are we turning too many foxes into hedgehogs? What do you think?
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5 comments:
Two things occurred to me:
1. I think you may have either left out or underplayed an interpretive option other than fox or hedgehog: intellectual development. While Descartes might look pragmatic and foxy when we read (e.g.) The World and Principles of Philosophy within 5 minutes of each other, there's a decade of distance between the two. I don't know about you, but I've changed my mind a lot over the past 10 years. So to determine whether Descartes is like Galileo the foxy bricoleur, I think we should look at a single text, and check for the telltale signs of hedgehoggery there.
2. I think many (if not most) history of philosophy papers are actually not particularly concerned with whether the dead white male discussed actually had the psychological profile of a fox or a hedgehog. They tend to want to know, rather, can we reconstruct an argument to save this dead white male? And most such work nowadays imposes the additional constraint that the resources appealed to in the reconstructed argument must have been available to the historical figure (reconstructions of Aristotle cannot appeal to Darwinian evolution).
And keep the posts coming!
Yes, you are right; I had understated the importance of intellectual development. However, I believe my conclusion stands even w/ with the diachronic perspective in view.
My conconlusion, to put it more explicitly, was that a standard strategy in historical scholarship (of philosophy) is based on a false premise. That strategy is to take seemingly incompatible (or perhaps simply not logically connected) assertions of a past philosopher and render them compatible (and connected). One way of executing this strategy is, as you say, reconstruct an argument using the resources available to that historical figure. However, this strategy of reconstruction only makes historical sense if the author placed the same premium on argumentation as we do. Whether we take the philosopher as the author of a single text or as a developing figure, this premise may fail to hold -- and I'm suggesting that it often does.
Take the Principles of Philosophy, for example. First, a confession: I'm currently writing a dissertation regarding the work that does precisely what you describe in your #2. It is my histriographical doubt regarding the validity of my work that leads to my worries here. Second, more substantially, I believe signs of Descartes' hedgehoggery in that work are deceiving. Many (including me) have tried to find coherence in the work because Descartes is, after all, a philosopher and we expect a certain systematicity from him. However, he falls short on so many counts that it seems more reasonable (to me) to claim that he was not concerned with argumentation in the same way that we are (and thus to conceive him as a type of fox), than either to claim that he was a failure or to provide him with arguments that canno be found on the surface of his writing.
In this sense, historical literature ought to be concerned with the psychological profile of an author only to the extent of determining whether the very strategy of argumentative reconstruction makes sense for that philosopher. After we show that this is historically accurate, we can reconstruct his/her arguments using historical resources.
I'd like to add just one more point to muddy the waters a bit.
It's my impression that some (historical) philosophers intentionally try to portray themselves as systematic, while actively cobbling together a variety of pragmatic solutions to problems. Descartes is perhaps the most egregious example, hence the insistent impression of "Zat is vat I meant all along!" But in my own work, I find that Kepler, insofar as he is a philosopher, tries to be more systematic than he really is, particularly in the course of constructing arguments. Similar comments can be made about Newton and even Galileo.
If this is the case, then it becomes even more difficult to distinguish what is systematic, what ad hoc, and what simply changes over time.
(Of course, the authors mentioned were more "scientific" than Descartes, and thus had more to satisfy than just consistency, but they did see themselves as making philosophical claims using "philosophical" arguments, which enforced some desire for consistency, even over time.)
I have a postcard on my desk which shows a smiling hedgehog jumping out of a tree, landing back first, spines out, into a basket of balloons. As a metaphor to the often unexpected paradigm shift in ideas, this is to me the true hedgehog effect. But it is worth remembering that such ideas are always threatening to someones long extablished self interest, as Galileo know only too well!
And a new change in paradigm, the hedgehog effect, may have started all over again with consequences for evey human being on the face of the planet . This is dangerous knowledge!
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