on intellectual stock price

I’ve made a number of posts over the months about stocks being overvalued or undervalued at various times on various thinkers. Of course I can be wrong about these things; I’m no more omniscient than you are. But it’s also possible to improve one’s understanding of these things with a bit of work and experience. All opinions are not equal, even if we have a difficult time sifting out the better from the worse, and even though everyone makes a catastrophic misjudgment from time to time.

I think there were a few sneering posts about the first blog reducing intellectual life to a shallow chasing after stock values, and yickety yickety yack. These remarks missed the fact that I hold that there is an inherent true value to any thinker, and that it takes a lot of work to cut through the noise and the transient flux of public valuation to get a good sense of that true value.

A general question: in life, what sorts of people do we tend to overestimate?

*people who support us and have done favors for us

*people who like us and defend us

*people we agree with

I doubt these points need any explanation. But only the third one is usually relevant when assessing the reputation of philosophers. We tend to overvalue philosophers with whom we agree.

Take an obvious example of a philosopher highly undervalued in the circles in which most of us travel: St. Thomas Aquinas. A remarkable mind. But in our circles most people are atheists, and most people have no use for distinctions such as matter/form and substance/accident. People disagree with Aquinas, and therefore they have a hard time seeing him as more than a dated reactionary. However, this judgment is wrong. Since human cultures move in periodic rather than linear fashion, conditions will change in such a way that Aquinas gets another crack at being a hero. Either it will become ultra-hip to be Catholic again, or (more likely) substance and accident will come back into fashion, and then Aquinas will have the chance to appear in a more positive light for awhile while other thinkers suffer neglect from this change in fashion.

My point is, collective fashions change, which means that the distribution of collective agreements and disagreements will tend to change.

In recent centuries, who has been the greatest philosopher beneficiary of public agreement? I would nominate David Hume for this prize.

In my opinion, Hume’s stock has been highly overvalued for over two centuries. Don’t get me wrong– he (barely) made my draft Top 25 list, but I’m guessing that he’d be in a lot of Top Five lists, and that’s a drastic overvaluation of Hume.

What’s my objection to Hume? Admittedly, he’s a fabulously clear writer, a remarkable expositor, and a rather fearless critic.

However, he’s also a bit of an ideologue. Starting from the arbitrary postulate that impressions are the root of all knowledge (no one has ever seen an impression, mind you), he cuts everything else down to size. It is an act of remarkable triumphalism, debunking everything in sight based on his own surprisingly unconvincing starting point.

In my opinion, this shows the gap in Hume’s philosophical talent– which is considerable, but not among the all-time very best. What is most characteristic of a philosopher is not the ability to choose the best initial cudgel and use it to beat everyone else to a pulp in arguments better than they beat us to a pulp. Philosophy has a lot to do with a scent for ambiguity, the ability to think two opposite thoughts at once and bring them into some sort of balance that accounts for both.

Philosophy is often pushed to become more like geometry. But I think it ought to have more in common with theater or restaurant criticism. Some of the best writing we ever see takes place in those fields, after all, and (to paraphrase Nietzsche) that means that some of the best thinking we ever see takes place in those fields.

The Hume stock price may stay high for another 50 years or even 75 years for all I know. But Hume is the sort of philosopher who looks a lot better when you agree with him than when you disagree with him. All it would take is a more anti-empiricist age, or more skepticism (pun intended) toward the notion that objects are nothing but bundles of qualities, and Hume would start to look more like… an ideologue rather than one of the greatest philosophers of all time.

When you can appreciate a philosopher, or musician, or painter, or person even when you dislike what they are doing, then you know that you’re onto something of real importance. We can all appreciate those with whom we agree; that doesn’t tell us much about them.