“philosophy critics”, à la literary critics

After reading all that Edmund Wilson last summer, the thought struck me that there isn’t really “philosophy criticism” in the same sense that there is “literary criticism.”

What makes great literary critics so wonderful is that they are very good at sizing up the unique strengths and weaknesses of individual authors. For instance, I just ran across another passage of Wilson in which he was saying that even though Turgenev is obviously not of the same rank as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, he’s more consistent. In the greater novelists you’ll get certain pieces of boring junk now and then, perhaps due to greater ambition. But Turgenev, he claimed, is one of the most consistently solid novelists we have. Whether or not you agree, this is the sort of thing critics (whether in literature, art, music, or wine) do well– instead of just making loud proclamations of who ranks where, they dig into the inner balance of forces in each author and show us that stars of the second rank sometimes outshine those of the first in this or that limited way.

The reason this sort of critique tends not to be a philosophy skill is that, for obvious reasons, we’re always rushing ahead to the question of whether or not the philosopher in question is right. Since there’s no such thing as “right” in literature, that temptation doesn’t exist, and critics are free to taste authors in the same way that wines are tasted: trying to detect unique overtones in each vineyard and each year, subtly finding traces of “wood” or “tobacco” in each bottle, and realizing that even the best bottles go best only with a certain kind of meal.

One of the reasons I always liked reading José Ortega y Gasset is that he seems to have that literary critic sense about him when reading philosophers. Like literary critics, he has some biases that seem obviously wrong (such as his low appreciation for Nietzsche, his visceral disgust for Kierkegaard, and his exaggerated view that Dilthey is the greatest philosopher of the second half of the 19th century– and I say this as someone who enjoys Dilthey). He’s also a bit confusing on Heidegger, but Heidegger was his contemporary and rival, and it’s rare that people fully understand their contemporaries and rivals in any field.

That said, he has a number of fascinating things to say about 19th century philosophy, in particular his notion that Lotze could have been a much greater figure if not for a certain weakness that made him run away in frustration from the triumph of positivism. That seems right to me, though Lotze’s still good enough. (Read William James on Lotze, for instance. That’ll get you interested.)