footnote to the history of philosophy post

Here’s an additional note to my earlier post on the “cluster” history of philosophy.

When I first did the list last January, I had Plato/Aristotle as #1/#2 or #2/#1. I then had Kant at #3. My inclination at the time was to put Leibniz #4 and Hegel #5, but I mentioned at the time that I realized that was probably special pleading: I happen to like Leibniz a lot better than Hegel, but there’s an obvious sense in which Hegel simply has his act together a lot more than Leibniz ever did, and so I eventually flipped them and had Hegel #4.

There were a couple of things that made me uneasy about that top four. One was that I could never really decide between Plato and Aristotle for #1, and changed my mind every so often. The other was that it seemed suspiciously unfair to have two Greek contemporaries at the top, and two German roughly contemporaries right below them. [ADDENDUM: My wording here is insufficiently precise. Kant was 46 years older than Hegel, Plato 43 years older than Aristotle, basically the same difference. But of course Plato and Aristotle seem more like true contemporaries since they worked closely together at the Academy, whereas Hegel never even met Kant.]

Now I’m starting to think that that’s the whole point of it. The real protagonist of ancient Greek philosophy would not be either Plato, Aristotle, or both of them combined, but rather something that was a lot bigger than either Plato or Aristotle: something that both of them were trying to formulate, but never quite succeeded in formulating. And the next great protagonist would not be any of the series of contemporary major German thinkers, or all of their efforts combined, but rather a pivotal idea that exceeded anything that Kant, Hegel, or their slightly lesser peers were able to put in the form of an individual system.

But just as it is a mistake to say that an apple is just a bundle of qualities, so too it would be a mistake to say that a key era in the history of philosophy is just a bundle of philosophies. We don’t get at the essence of ancient Greek philosophy by adding up a list of specific points made by Plato and Aristotle, or even by picking and choosing between them on a series of definite issues, but by trying to think behind those individual philosophers to something they and their chief contemporary rival(s) never mastered. It’s not a collective amassing of detailed achievements, in other words, but something that comes before such collectives and whips them into motion. Obviously, certain societal preconditions are needed for these periods to emerge, but that doesn’t mean that they are produced by or reducible to the collectives in which they occur: they shape their societies even more than they are shaped by them.

On a related note, I’ve long had the sense (and have published this thought at least twice, I think) that Kuhn’s “paradigms” are in no way a sociological category. What author or scientist or society of them ever adequately embodies a paradigm? The reason paradigms last for awhile is because it takes awhile to start to exhaust all their permutations, and ultimately they are abandoned rather than refuted (Whitehead).

Beyond individual people, beyond collectives, but also beyond discursive statements, there is something that none of these entities ever succeeds in expressing.