some criteria for “greatest philosophers”

part 2 of setup for “the greatest ever”
by doctorzamalek
January 15, 2009

Now reclining at home in Zamalek with pistachioes and dates, I turn to the second part of the setup…

What are some of the criteria we should have in mind when identifying the greatest philosophers? There is no simple criterion, like the time on a stopwatch in the 100-meter dash. It’s more like dance or gymnastics, where the judges must consider a variety of factors, and where one or two mistakes are not necessarily disqualifiers. I hope it should be obvious that “great philosopher” does not mean “philosopher who made the fewest intellectual gaffes” (analytic philosophy is far too obsessed with avoiding blunders; sometimes a couple of intellectual pratfalls can actually give a bit of spark to your philosophy). Heidegger is on to something when he says “he who thinks greatly must err greatly,” self-serving though the phrase was in his own case (he applied it to his dealings with the Nazi Party). Philosophy has much to do with depth and comprehensiveness. It is easy to imagine a skilled logician able to defeat everyone in oral dispute, yet also unspeakably shallow and trite in comparison with all those he defeats– not only easy to imagine, I should have said, but easy to encounter such a person.

The best way to structure a list of criteria for greatness in a philosopher is to tie the list candidly to my own philosophical views. Readers of this blog or my printed works may know that I favor a philosophy centered on objects that are real quite apart from their impact on all other objects.

For the purpose of a useful play on words, let’s shift from the word “object” to “substance”, a classical term not entirely unlike my use of “object.” While I do have objections to classical substance, they are not especially relevant for the moment. So, let’s talk about which philosophers are most “substantial,” meaning something like “great.” What are the features of a substance (or object, or assemblage– the latter term being a synonym for “substance” in my usage)?

1. Freedom from relations. What this tells us is that the greatness of a philosopher is not the same as influence. It’s generally true that a greater philosopher has more chance of influencing other, just as a more massive star has more likelihood of attracting other masses– but of course, this can’t happen if no other objects happen to drift near the star! Would we judge its massiveness by how many planets were orbiting it? Of course not. There are too many accidental circumstances involved. A star far more massive than our sun could have far fewer than our 8 planets, or even no planets at all. The same for a great philosopher, who might have no planets in orbit, and for purely chance reasons.

Also, don’t forget the case of Herbert Spencer, referred to earlier as the only philosopher ever to sell 1 million copies of his books in his own lifetime. Are we tempted to call him the greatest philosopher of all time? I don’t think anyone is. Why not? Possibly because we have our doubts about the validity of these judges… They lived mostly at the same time as Spencer, which suggests a passing Zeitgeist… They were at best smart amateurs (a great kind of person!) and at worst they were “cracker-barrel agnostics.”

Or consider the case of some contemporary philosopher invited into the Oprah Winfrey book club and selling 3 million books as a result. I would never despise such a person, who might be an outstanding popular educator. But it is unlikely that such a person would be one of the great philosophers. At any rate, if by some chance they were, we would not say they were great because Oprah Winfrey’s subscribers bought the books.

To take a more serious example, a good case could be made that Fichte is currently much more influential than Leibniz. After all, Leibniz seems stranded in a goofy, out-of-date metaphysics made of tiny, mirrored but windowless soul-like entities, their relations to all other entities loaded in their heart in advance by God. It seems too distant from what we do now. By contrast, Fichte’s “correlationist” stance is very much a mainstream way of looking at things today. But do you really want to claim that Fichte is a greater philosopher than Leibniz as a result? I think this would be a serious mistake.

2. Ability to support different qualities at different times. In the case of philosophers, the analogy would be the ability to support different interpretations at different times, and also to be deeper than their own content. Obviously, you don’t have to be a Nazi sympathizer to admire Heidegger– there are Marxist and liberal Heideggerians by the bucketload, and pehaps relatively few Nazi Heideggerians at this point. You don’t have to despise the masses to like Nietzsche, or be a Catholic to admire Aquinas, or be a Muslim to love reading Avicenna. But there are numerous authors admired for the most only by those who agree with them. This suggests an interesting principle: only if the opposite party wants to claim you as one of their own do you have some sort of substantial greatness. Heidegger is the best recent example simply because he’s the most controversial of all great philosophers. Despite being a to-the-core Nazi, he was an intellectual idol to plenty of Marxists, French thinkers, and Jewish thinkers. There are probably no Jewish or Slavic admirers of Alfred Rosenberg, by contrast. If people can stomach your ideas only when agreeing with them, then you are essentially an apparatchik, an interchangeable spare part useful for achieving some clique’s aims in fighting their enemy clique. But the real philosophers shock both cliques, to such a degree that their own allegiances are in some sense beside the point.

3. Substance is never predicated of something else. There are many average priests who could safely be called Thomists, and many continental philosophy scholars who could safely be called Heideggerians. And there is no shame in this. But the greater the philosopher, the less easy it is to “predicate them of another philosopher.”

For example, if you call Levinas and Gadamer “Heideggerians,” their followers might protest, and it may even be a bit of an oversimplification. But it’s not entirely ridiculous; the classification makes some sense.

But if you call Heidegger a “Husserlian,” without irony, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless you’re trying to prove a very specific point. In Heidegger Explained, I did call Heidegger “a heretic among the phenomenologists,” but this was simply meant to show that Heidegger’s core insights are radicalized versions of parallel insights found in Husserl. Calling Heidegger a “Husserlian” clearly makes sense only as an origin story, not as a useful description of Heidegger’s career as a whole.

4. Substance (for me, at least) is never adequately expressible in a logos. Philosophy is not a matter of discovering a greater amount of accurate content, because strictly speaking, there is no such thing as accurate content. Not because everything is relative, but for the opposite reason: because the real is non-relative, and hence not fully translatable into the relation known as knowledge.

I remember a remark of Leo Strauss, saying something like: “among Jewish philosophers, Spinoza may be more original, but Maimonides is greater.” Without weighing in on the Spinoza/Maimonides question, I must nonetheless denounce Strauss’s principle here, since it implies that originality and truth are in some sort of primary opposition. I wouldn’t reverse it and say that originality is more important than truth, because this sounds like the old relativist game again. The problem, in fact, is that people think of both originality and truth as forms of content. In other words, for them truth means “accurate content” and originality means “new content.” I hold, instead, that neither originality nor truth are primarily a matter of content in the first place, since the content of any statement (whether it be Maimonides’ “true” content or Spinoza’s “original” content) is a translation, distortion, transformation, caricature of the real spirit of their philosophies. This spirit may be elusive and hard to define, but so are objects themselves. Socrates: “But Meno, how can I know what qualities virtue has unless I first know what virtue *is*?”

It also follows that we should be especially careful not to overestimate those philosophers with whom we agree and denigrate those with whom we disagree. Catholics should guard against excessive estimation of Aquinas and dismissal of atheist philosophers. French thinkers should beware the temptation to rank Descartes automatically higher than any German (unless good grounds exist for doing so). Melancholic and authoritarian personality types should give Giordano Bruno as much of a fair hearing as Heidegger, and so forth.

Another problem with reducing truth to true content, as discussed in the Platonic dialogues, is that some robotically trained fool spouting right answers would be no different from someone of the greatest depth and wisdom. This paradox is sometimes addressed with the addendum: “well, you can’t just have the right answers, you also have to be able to justify them.” But this solves nothing. For the justifications themselves will merely be further verbal propositions, which can also be memorized (and even believed) by robotic dupes. Content cannot be the source of truth. Originality has something important to do with truth– not originality as “unprecedented content”, but as seeing things first hand with one’s own eyes. And here is the one grain of truth in Strauss’s otherwise cranky-sounding remark. For it is quite possible for Maimonides, or whoever, to be one of the greatest philosophers of all time despite relatively little new content. It’s unlikely, but it’s quite conceivable.

5. A substance has new emergent qualities. This is another “originality” sort of criterion. Despite the imagined case just mentioned of a Maimonides who was deeply original despite little new surface-content in his doctrines, it’s more likely that the new qualities of a great philosopher are to some extent visible. You can replace one hammer with another and nothing much changes. But you can’t replace Nietzsche in Basel with another Greek philologist without having much change.

6. A substance is an assemblage made of different parts. In the present case, this means: (a) the great philosopher weaves unforeseen sets of influences together, and (B) does this seamlessly, not giving us an undigested, eclectic mass. Point (B) is the one where much continental philosophy fails, since the field is filled with doctoral dissertations not fused together with a single powerful theme, but which show the wires coming from the backs of their barely engineered aggregates: “The Question of the Name in Plato, Descartes, Benjamin, and Irigaray,¨ or whatever. (I hope that mortar didn’t land too close to any real person’s actual work! My apologies if it did; it’s a purely invented example.)

7. Substances are marked by redundant causation. This means, for instance, that I would still be the same substance if three of my drops of blood were removed, replaced by other A+ blood, or even replaced (in that tiny quantity) by some incompatible type. (Medically inclined readers are free to correct me if a few drops of the wrong blood type are in fact lethal; I am not aware of this being the case, if it is.)

Redundant causation in the case of a philosopher, although somewhat difficult to verify, would mean that they are not entirely the product of their influences, and that their philosophy is compatible with several different sets of biographical circumstance. But this is a hard criterion to use, in practical terms, for anyone but a shrewd biographer.

8. A substance can have retroactive effects on its parts. Again a hard criterion to use practically, because it sounds too much like the “influence” criterion that we have already discarded.

Finally, a substance is positive. It doesn’t just withdraw behind everything we say about it; it’s a positive reality, though one that is hard to make directly manifest. This point, which has controversial consequences, implies that a philosophy is greater the more reality it allows, not the more reality it critically denies. The controversy is that this criterion systematically punishes figures such as Hume and Fichte for identifying reality more and more with its manifestation to us rather than its reality in and of itself. And this, my friends, is one dogma for which I am willing to go to bat. I do not believe that realism and anti-realism are on the same footing, but hold instead that realism is per se a more philosophical position, although this is not always true on the individual level– I’d rather hang out with Baudrillard and certainly Hegel and Husserl than with 1,000 of the most committed vulgar realists, even though I share more “content” with the latter group.

The 2,100 word mark is again coming into view, this time for this second post alone. So perhaps we have heard enough about criteria, and should go to the actual effort at ranking (after I have had my dinner).

But remember, we [aren’t] judging dance or gymnastics here. Someone might totally flop on 2 or 3 of these criteria, but still be among the greatest philosophers who ever lived.