IOU on a future post

I’ve always thought that Leo Strauss showed good judgment in picking Heidegger, Husserl, Bergson, and Whitehead as the four greatest philosophers “of the past forty years”. (He was saying that in 1954, so let’s say he means 1914-1954.)

A debate could be had, as a debate can be had over just about anything, but this list is also my own list for the period in question.

But in the past I always applauded and agreed with the judgment, without (until this week) facing the trickier question of how to rank these four against one another. All four made my Top 25 list, but how would I rank them if forced to do so at gunpoint.

In our circles (by which I mean something like: “former continental philosophers who are concerned with innovative recent trends in the field”) Husserl would probably get booted all the way down to number 4 without much of a second thought. I could see a case being made for number 4, but not a quick case of that sort.

My own forced choice looks like this:

1. Heidegger
2. Bergson
3. Husserl
4. Whitehead

And keep in mind, I love Whitehead. The 20th century was a good one.

But why lower than the other three? Again, I get the faint taste of an ideologue in Whitehead. This may sound surprising, but I’m going to stand by it. There are a few too many times when he posits a rather contentious solution to a problem as though it were obviously the only right one, and then goes on to denounce the alternatives without sufficient consideration of the motives behind them. This leads him to get a bit preachy at his worst moments, and there is already a certain preachiness in Hume, even though it takes on much more ironic form.

Husserl’s stock is far too low in our circles right now. This was someone who worked very carefully through problems and dug up things that he never expected and that many of his readers still simply ignore. His books are filled with unappreciated insights. I admit that he’s a pedantic writer much of the time, fond of needless layers of terminology. But he’s also very funny much of the time, though no one (but me) ever seems to laugh.

Heidegger is tough to rate. On the whole I think he’s a bit overvalued by his admirers, some of whom would call him the #1 all-time greatest philosopher, which is simply absurd. Heidegger’s greatest strictly philosophical fault is his incredible monotony and repetitiousness. But his central idea (the critique of presence-at-hand) is so powerful that the entire near future of philosophy may well be built upon it, and that’s why I have him at #7, and might even be willing to put him at #6 ahead of Descartes. (Having already had modern Germans at 3, 4, and 5, I wanted to give another nationality a chance, so the tie went to Descartes.)

Bergson is still hard to judge due to his nearly “extraterrestrial” character as mentioned in the Jimi Hendrix post earlier tonight. He’s one of those people who stock might continue to rise provided others build on him– provided, that is, that he starts to look like the initiator of something surprising and new rather than like a strange outlier often incommensurable with others of his stature.

If that happens, it may increase Deleuze’s staying power as well. If another 3 or 4 Deleuze-type figures emerge over the next 100 years, working in a somewhat similar idiom, then I think Bergson starts to look even better over the long haul. And I’m already very impressed, as I hope has been made clear.