the second Amsterdam lecture

One of the noteworthy facts about the history of European philosophy is that important thinkers have often occurred in clusters. (In Islamic philosophy, to name just one contrast, the important figures were more distant from each other in time.)

Direct personal influence isn’t really the explanation for this, because it wasn’t true in every case that there was personal contact. I think the real explanation is that neither individual people nor collectives of people are the protagonists of the history of philosophy. Instead, it seems that there are certain crucial ideas that arise from time to time, and the first person to grapple with that idea never exhausts it, thereby leaving room for other permutations, which are detected and promulgated in short order.

Whitehead’s theory is that these thinkers always come in pairs, one of them stating an idea vaguely but in depth, the other whittling it down with rigid consistency while depriving it of some scope. But much though I appreciate Whitehead’s remarks about most matters connected with the history of philosophy, this one doesn’t seem right to me. For one thing, the aforementioned clusters of thinkers usually come in threes and fours rather than in pairs.

If we look at this process in the history of philosophy, it seems that there are two basic ways that an immediate predecessor can be transformed: let’s call them radicalization and reversal.

Radicalizing, obviously enough, means that our great predecessor had the right idea, but remained inconsistently devoted to the old regime and didn’t push the central idea far enough. The post-Kantian reaction against the things-in-themselves would be a classic example of radicalization. “Kant was a genius, but just needed to push things a bit further.”

Then there are the reversals: when our great predecessor got something important right, but in some sense the truth is exactly the reverse. Aristotle turning Plato’s eidei into mere secondary substances would be a classic example, and another would be Heidegger’s reaction to the presence-at-hand of phenomena in consciousness for Husserl.

In several places I’ve spoken of “hyperbolic readings” in which, rather than nitpicking philosophers, we imagine their ideas as having gained absolute dominance at some point in the near future, and wonder what would still be missing. The idea there is that we focus too much on the “mistakes” of people’s reasoning, and not enough on the limitations of their reasoning, which is usually the real problem: lack of imagination, and insufficient scope. As a corollary, I claimed that the more important the philosopher, the more plausible it is to attempt a hyperbolic reading.

But I think there’s another way to test the magnitude of a philosophy: namely, try to imagine how its successors might attempt to radicalize or reverse it. The more interesting these maneuvers in any given case, the more interesting the philosopher. As a corollary, it follows that invulnerability to critique is not the sign of a good philosopher, but of a poor one. An interesting philosopher will be the most vulnerable to radicalization or reversal: it can be done to Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, or Husserl, but is less likely to be done to a sandbagger who finds ways to win every argument, no matter what the situation. Invulnerability is an intellectual vice, not a virtue. It’s a sign that one has retreated into some Fortress Impregnable, claiming that the burden of proof is on everyone else, and then mowing down everyone who tries to charge up the hill and give battle. It’s not much of a philosophical life, I’d say.

But then there are authors like Meillassoux who take major risks. It takes guts to say that only contingency is absolutely necessary, guts to attempt “proofs” of non-contradiction and things-in-themselves in the manner that he does, and certainly guts to talk about a virtual God in an intellectual environment where dogmatic atheism is still the default position of intellectuals (despite claims of a supposed tidal wave of theologians rolling back the enlightenment).

Anyway, this what I’ll be speaking about in Amsterdam on Friday night (the second of the two lectures). What if you were a generation or two younger than Meillassoux, a great admirer of his thinking, but trying to radicalize or reverse it? How might you go about doing that? The exercise is relevant to Meillassoux, but also to our understanding of how the history of philosophy works. The fact that he takes so many risks in his own thought gives us lots of options about where to experiment.

We can also ask “what if” questions of the following sort. What if Aristotle had radicalized Plato rather than reversing him, and the same for the Heidegger/Husserl relationship? What if Kant’s successors had reversed him rather than radicalizing him? (I’ve already tried the latter experiment with my fictitious “Tannenbaum” character, the anti-Fichte steeped in Leibniz.) Are there reasons why one maneuver is usually tried rather than another, or is there a continual series of crossroads where it might go either way?