follow-up on “the top 25 philosophers”

In the early days of this blog, I posted a “Top 25” list of the greatest philosophers of the West (meaning the tradition initiated in Greece, and that includes Islamic philosophy). At the time I had a few thoughts about how to make the ranking, but also admitted that most of it was done instinctively and by trial-and-error. It seemed to me like a project worth pursuing over the long haul (a book of essays on the 25 greatest ever, with justifications for the rankings), but also like a project that would need to generate its own methods while going along. What exactly makes a great philosopher? I’m not satisfied with any of the definitions I’ve ever heard.

I just redid my rankings for the first time in 11 months; I should really do them once a month to keep an eye on the changes. But I won’t post the new list here, because I’m unsure enough about it that it’s not worth starting controversies over quite yet.

But I’m also considering the possibility that this gets looked at the wrong way. One thing we’re all familiar with is the difference between “analytic” approach (which tends to view philosophy in terms of good and bad arguments) and the “continental” approach (which tends to view philosophy as made up of genius heroes succeeding one another over the centuries). It’s no secret that analytic philosophers tend to be a bit less awed and intimidated by the great figures of the history of philosophy, whereas the continentals tend to view proper names as the true site of philosophical labor. At its best, this tendency is able to resist glib and facile refutations of major figures who will certainly last centuries longer than most of their “refuters”; at its worst, it leads to the known continental excesses of hero worship and the assumption that thinking for oneself is something reserved to a few dozen world-historic figures.

And I can see a lot of truth in both sides, and it feels like a deadlock or trench war. It reminds me in some ways of a tedious related debate that often comes up as to whether history is moved by great individuals or collectives. (The problem itself isn’t tedious, but quite important. What is tedious is the arguments themselves.)

Now, if there’s anything I hate, it’s trench wars and trench warriors. It shows a terrible lack of imagination to come into a pre-existing dispute, adopt one side of it, and attempt to annihilate the opposite side.

To take the second instance just mentioned, individual vs. collective contributions to history, it’s seemed to me for several years that there is an obvious problem with this conundrum: it assumes that the answer somehow lies in people. Is it one person (the genius) or lots of people (the general social energies of a time and place). But the story of any discipline is primarily a story about ideas, and only secondarily about people. Notice that I say a story about ideas, not about arguments. The difference should be clear… An idea can endure for quite some time despite vast fluctuations in the arguments and evidence given on its behalf. In some cases one person may be responsible for it, in other cases quite a number of people may contribute to it.

In short, I suspect that treating the history of philosophy in terms of arguments or proper names are both incorrect. What we really need is a history that articulates the progress of ideas, and ranks the importance of the ideas, rather than of the philosophers or the specific arguments they gave for their ideas. Great ideas are often born long before sufficient discursive justification can be given for them– that tends to happen only after a good deal of time, and often only after a philosophy has become institutionalized and thereby provided with professional bodyguards.

There would be one immediate explanatory advantage to such a model of the history of philosophy. Namely, it would explain the fact that great figures in philosophy tends to occur in clusters. Think of the Milesians, the Eleatics, Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, al-Kindi/al-Farabi/Avicenna (a group more spread out in time than is typical of Europe), Albertus Magns/Aquinas/Scotus, Cusanus/Bruno, Descartes/Spinoza/Leibniz, Locke/Berkeley/Hume, Kant/Fichte/Schelling/Hegel, Husserl/Heidegger.

These clusters are one of the primary facts in the history of philosophy. And obviously it would be strange to think that there were coincidental DNA surges every 75 years or so that just happened to produce a cluster of great individuals in a certain spatio-temporal theater. It makes a lot more sense to think that what happens is that an idea emerges and takes on sufficiently (but not excessively) lucid form. This idea can be viewed from several different sides, and that leaves room for several highly talented people to catch onto what’s happening and see it from the left, right, above, or below, whereas others see it from different angles.

I’ve long been fond of Aristotle’s definition of substance as that which supports different qualities at different times. The more real a thing is, I believe, then the less it is reducible to specific definite qualities, and the more it will remain fundamentally ambivalent to opposite possible manifestations. The most interesting people have two sides. The greatest books and literary characters are those which can support the greatest possible variety of interpretations. The greatest cities may be those that have something for every mood and for every period of history. The greatest loves and friendships endure despite many different fluctuations. And so forth.

And it seems to me that this must be what’s really going on in the history of philosophy– not an entirely original idea, because Whitehead already observes that every phase of philosophy needs two figures, one to express the idea in its somewhat vague wholeness and the other to give it more precision. (But I think he’s simply wrong to say it’s always 2. More often it is 3 or even 4 people, and even more if you add in the more peripheral contributing figures of any of these eras.)

But a wise procedure might be to start by writing a history of philosophy as a history of clusters of names, rather than simply of names or of definite arguments. This would be more challenging than one might believe. For instance, what name can we give to the gravitational point around which Plato and Aristotle both orbited? If you can name it, you’ll have made an important contribution to the way the history of philosophy is written.

An idea starts to emerge, and a fairly small number of people hear the call clearly enough to devote their lives to working it out.

In practical terms, then, I don’t think I’m much liking the procedure of ranking proper names the way I first tried to do so. But neither do I believe that progress in philosophy, or in much of anything else, is made incrementally by piecemeal collective labor. Plenty of collective effort goes straight down the drain, and nothing changes. There’s a bit more heroism to knowledge than that– but the heroism need not be of individuals. In fact, it’s probably rarely a matter of individuals, but of ideas, and it’s probably a fairly small number of people who “get it” with any new idea.

There are probably some fascinating exceptions. One might be able to construct a list of “the most isolated great philosophers of all time,” meaning that there was literally no one else around them, or that their colleagues and rivals simply were not remotely in the same league as they were. But the more frequent case, I’m quite sure, is clusters of individuals orbiting the same idea seen from different vantage points. And by definition, this idea would be deeper than any specific set of arguments that could be made about it, but proper names would also become somewhat accidental too. The typical analytic and continental views of what the history of philosophy is would both need to be modified, if not entirely abandoned.

One last time: the history of philosophy is not about arguments, but it’s also not about heroic individuals. It’s about breakthrough ideas that are somehow deeper than any arguments given on their behalf, but also deeper than the specific philosophies of any individual hero geniuses from the pantheon of thinkers. It’s something more impersonal than both of those options.