a thought again provoked by Wilson

The more I reflect on the addictiveness of Edmund Wilson’s reviews, the more I realize that it stems from a feeling of starvation on my part. We simply don’t have people in philosophy who write and think in this manner, and I really wish we did. There are not “philosophy critics” in the same sense that there are “literary critics” or “art critics” or even “restaurant critics.”

It’s easy to see why not. Art critics and literary critics are of course concerned with sorting out the first-rate from the second-rate; that’s a big part of their jobs. But when they are confronted with Cézanne or Dostoevsky, it would be pointless for them to “refute” either of these figures. Instead, a critic sizes up the strengths and weaknesses of major figures just as one does when tasting wine, and it requires no less subtle a taste in the former situation as in the latter.

This doesn’t happen in philosophy very often, because one is always in such a rush to decide which philosophers are right and which ones are wrong, or at least which points each of them is right or wrong about. This is completely understandable as well. Right and wrong is obviously a much more dominant concern in philosophy, much more applicable, than it is in the arts.

Nonetheless, what this often leads to is a painful lack of subtlety and tact in many historians of philosophy. I can think of only a handful of philosophical histories and biographies I’ve read that parallel the sorts of complex balancing acts that people like Wilson pull off in literary criticism.

I would love to read the philosophy equivalent of Axel’s Castle, for instance. Something like Wilson’s treatment of Proust, which beautifully describes both sides of the Proustian moon (the brilliant and the slightly ridiculous) is exactly what is needed for figures such as Aristotle, Kant, Hegel. It’s hard to get much of a sense of Plato as an intellectual force if you’re merely keeping a scoresheet of correct and incorrect propositions found in the dialogues.