fact or fiction?
Zenon Stavrinides
How do you understand the 'History of Philosophy'? The Philosopher's Reviews Editor compares the approaches of two recent books. One is a newly reissued but carefully conventional work, offering a rational and tidy progression to 'Western' philosophy, while the other an equally new, but scrupulously unconventional 'alternative' seemingly aiming to shatter just those certainties.
Martin Cohen, Philosophical Tales: Being an alternative history revealing the characters, the plots, and the hidden scenes that make up the True History of Philosophy. (Malden, MA, USA & Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). Illustrations by Raul Gonzales III. ISBN 978-1-4051-4036-2 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-4051-4037-9 (pbk). Pp. 282.
A Short History of Western Philosophy (2nd edition.
Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2008), by Johannes Hirschberger and Clare
Hay. ISBN: 978 0 7188 3092 2. Pb, 250 pp.
A great man, said the equally great German writer J.W. Goethe, is someone with great strengths and great weaknesses. Something like this seems to be Martin Cohen's own view of great philosophers in Philosophical Tales. As a philosophical scholar, Cohen knows the great canonical figures of philosophy whose important ideas and influential arguments form the subject-matter of standard histories of philosophy served on students (and which their teachers sometimes read on the quiet). But he also knows, and wants us to know too, that behind each of these important philosophers, in the dark shadows created by the floodlight of standard and self-reproducing philosophical scholarship, there are, hidden from general view, significant human weaknesses, frailties, eccentricities, prejudices, absurd beliefs, intellectual wild goose chases, and elements of self-interest, dishonesty and bloody-mindedness. The practice of standard philosophical scholarship of turning a blind eye and not wishing to explore and judge such weaknesses and frailties is precisely what Cohen sets out to challenge in this book.
Each of the thirty chapters indeed tells a 'philosophical tale' - a term which seems to cover a mixed bag of stories, fictions, legends allegations, untruths, half-truths, prevarications, narratives not entirely based on fact - about what lies or may lie unexplored and unappreciated in the shadows of the thought and life of a historically important thinker shunned by standard histories. This, according to Cohen, makes for "an alternative account of philosophers with human frailties, a portrait that may sometimes undermine their status as moral arbiters, sometimes as path-breaking theorists."
Cohen believes that what he is doing, his whole project, is very much in the true spirit of philosophy. He writes:
" . . . although I have tried to be 'scrupulously accurate', there is far less agreed upon about philosophers, let alone philosophy, than its professors and luminaries would have us believe, and so nothing in this book can be taken uncritically, as the end of the matter. It is, instead, an attempt to open up the debates, to open up the decisions that the 'powers-that-be' like to impose. In other words, it is a kind of 'alternative' history of philosophy - the philosophical approach applied to philosophy itself."
Hence the sub-title of the book: Being an alternative history revealing the characters, the plots, and the hidden scenes that make up the True History of Philosophy.
The following list illustrates just a few of Cohen's "philosophers with
human frailties":
* Socrates is a far more elusive figure than some of the other Ancients, such as Lao Tzu, who are regularly dismissed or marginalised by philosophy. The only thing that seems certain about him is that he lived in Ancient Greece. Other than that, he could have been, as some of his contemporaries alleged, a sorcerer.* Plato never produced a coherent philosophical system, and the key ideas in his writing s rightly belong to Diotima and Pythagoras. He seems - like Hume, as Cohen also argues - to have been a writer more than a philosopher.
* Aristotle's reputation during his lifetime and for centures after was that of an arrogant buffoon. It was only the Christian Church that elevated his views, most of which are factually wrong, to the status of divine truth.
* Hobbes engaged in vain efforts to square the circle, hoping thus to demonstrate the infallibility of his reasoning elsewhere about human nature.
* John Locke, despite his reputation as the philosopher of equality and liberty, in fact approved of the enslavement of people captured in a 'just war', and in the Two Treatises "created new concepts of cultural and intellectual inferiority" to justify the slave trade.
* Kant was obsessed with silly rules, such as rolling himself up in his bedspread at eactly bed-time, and was unaware of their limited scope and applicability.
* Gottfried Leibniz dissipated his vast energies in a hundred different directions, including detailed designs for a 'thinking machine' and even a compressed air engine for propelling vehicles.
* Hegel was a monstrous totalitarian, who wrote most of his philosphy while exercising absolute power over his charges - school children in Jena and Nuremberg.
* Wittgenstein, like Aristotle, like Leibniz, like Kierkegaard (like nearly all the philosophers it seems) displayed an 'overweening conceit' about the importance of his ideas, was a political reactionary and borrowed most of his ideas from others, including a then-popular Austrian fascist.
* Speaking of which, Heiddeger actively supported the Nazi party until the defeat of Germany in 1945 and his philosophical 'defence' by Hannah Arendt is less convincing when one learns that she was for many years his secret lover...
It is easy to suppose that Cohen's purpose is to cut to size or
debunk the claims to intellectual superiority of great philosophers, much
as Paul Johnson tried to do with regard to writers and thinkers in Intellectuals.
Yet, if this is Cohen's purpose, it is not his only purpose. One of his
important concerns is to raise some uncomfortable questions about philosophy
and its great figures - questions to which historians of philosophy have
not paid sufficient attention. He asks, for example:
Where do great philosophers come from? And where do they get their ideas? Who decides what is important and what is not? Is it just happenstance that there are almost no women, just lots of wealthy, aristocratic men? Did the Chinese and Indian philosophers really have so little influence on Europe? Why is Descartes's 'modern philosophy full of backwards-looking references to God? Is Hegel (as Schopenhauer alleged) a fool who could not write, or simply too difficult for most of us? Is there a need for some Marxist-style deconstruction of the whole edifice of knowledge to be undertaken?
However, Marx, too, falls to Cohen's scythe, dismissed as an egotist and hypocrite whose intellectual originality was mostly demonstrated in writing letters to Engels soliciting more money. On the other hand, the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, Pythagoras, Hypatia, Mill, Thoreau and Benjamin Whorf are to some extent promoted as great thinkers. If this book can convey to its readers a general sense of unease about their preconceptions of what kinds of persons real philosophers are, and of how far these thinkers combine the moral rough with the intellectual smooth, then it is certainly a book from which much can be learned.
A final point which relates to my own response to the style of Philosophical Tales. What I find distinctive about Cohen's book in comparison to other standard histories of philosophy is the freshness of the writing, including his inimitable light touch, combined with proper scholarship, but also the absence of awe in dealing with great thinkers. I could compare, somewhat fancifully perhaps, Cohen's discussions with David Hockney's watercolours: they both give the impression of having been created quickly without much thought or planning, but in fact they 'work' precisely because they express, first, an intuitive understanding of what is interesting about the subject; second, careful planning; and third, a talent for putting ideas on paper. The only texts I know which are like Cohen's latest book are other Cohen books - his previous 'cohens', as I might call them - such as 101 Philosophy Problems, 101 Ethical Dilemmas, and Wittgenstein's Beetle.
Johannes Hirschberger's Short History of Western Philosophy, on the other hand, indeed, at the other extreme, is a much more conventional tome. It first appeared in an English translation from German by Jeremy Moiser in 1976. That work was divided into four parts: The Philosophy of Antiquity, the Philosophy of the Middle Ages, the Philosophy of Modern Times, and the Philosophy of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The 2nd edition published in 2008 contains in addition a fifth part written by Clare Hay covering Logical/Analytical Philosophy from Frege and Russell to the end of the 20th century. The general organisation of the material is pretty conventional. Each of the five parts contains a series of relatively short chapters covering a succession of sub-periods. For example, Part I is divided into The Pre-Socratics, Attic Philosophy, and The Philosophy of Hellenism, and each of the chapters is itself sub-divided into sections each focused on one or more important thinkers of the period. This sort of pattern is followed until Hay's Part V..
Hirschberger explains in the Preface to the first edition that the book helps give us a bird's-eye view of the history of philosophy so that "having grasped the outline of the whole, we are in a better position to understand the parts that make it up". He adds that "essential features and the significance of philosophy as a whole emerge more clearly in a condensed treatment than in a detailed one." But then it may be asked: what constitute the essential features and the significance of Western Philosophy manifested in its 25 or 26 centuries of development? Hirschberger's view (judging from his general treatment of the subject) is something like the successive attempts to rationally engage with and account for a cluster of problems about the nature of reality; the nature of human knowledge and understanding and its relation to reality; the nature of God and his involvement in the world; the analysis of ethical notions like those of virtue, justice, obligation, happiness and so on; the character of social life and the conditions and aims of the state and its institution ? the list could be considerably extended. Our author says that in order for us to come to a balanced judgement in our search for the truth concerning the historically important attempts to deal with the problems of philosophy "we need opportunities for comparison; we need to see things not just from one angle but from many; in short we need to see the wood, not just the trees".
How useful is this book as a bird's eye view of the development of philosophical thought? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the treatment of some philosophers and their ideas is more accurate and insightful than of some others (this much can be said of many histories of philosophy, short and long, including Russell's and Copleston's). A series of chapters in Part I provide sketches of the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato and the Sophists, Aristotle, and hellenistic philosophy which focus on the responses made by these thinkers to the problems about the universe and moral life.
The part dealing with scholastic philosophy again deals fairly with the metaphysical and religious views of main medieval thinkers such as Anselm, Abelard and Albert the Great - the big trees in the wood of philosophy - but also mentions a multitude of little trees and shrubs who left hardly any traces in history books, like Rhabanus Maurus of Fulda and Alexander of Hales!
The philosophy of modern times receives an unusual treatment. Most histories of philosophy represent Descartes as the father of modern philosophy, and in a sense this is undeniable since he adopted the 'new science' of Kepler and Galileo and tried to develop an epistemology in harmony with it. However, some parts of his Discourse on Method, including his 'proofs' for the existence of God, are permeated with the spirit and vocabulary of scholasticism. Spinoza is treated with unjust brevity - his ethical views hardly get a mention - but Leibniz receives a more detailed and sympathetic treatment.
Hirschberger makes a strong case for the view that it is empiricism which marks the beginning of modern philosophy, in that it represents a break with Platonic-Aristotelian metaphysics. However, his actual account of empiricist philosophy is rather idiosyncratic. He gives thumbnail sketches of Hobbes (not often counted as an empiricist, though he was definitely a naturalist) and Locke. There is complete silence about Berkeley, and surely this is odd, since it is Berkeley's attack on Locke's representative theory of perception and the theory of abstract ideas which inspired Hume and much subsequent empiricism. Our author says a little about Hume's theory of impressions and ideas, but nothing about his celebrated treatment of belief in an external world, causality and inductive scepticism, which woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers.
Hirschberger discusses at some length and in some detail Kant and the German idealists, including prominently Hegel and Schelling. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche receive relatively detailed but unsympathetic treatment. Marx is discussed with special reference to his materialism, and this brings in some consideration of Lenin and Stalin! Part IV ends with useful sketches of various trends in 'continental philosophy' including Bergson's vitalism, phenomenology, and existentialism of the German and French varieties.
In Part V, Clare Hay takes over the story of philosophy and draws a sympathetic bird's-eye view of some of the main strands of Analytical Philosophy from Frege and Russell, through the early and later work of Wittgenstein, to Quine, Davidson and Kripke. Hay's contribution of about 50 pages provides a clear introduction to some important issues in contemporary philosophy centred on attempts to construct a theory of meaning.
The book does succeed in providing a measure of understanding about Western philosophy. In selecting the elements with which to construct the bird's-eye view of the development of the subject, the main author Hirschberger, and to some extent Hay, had to apply a judgement which was at once philosophical and historical. I may speculate that they had to ask themselves the following questions: (1) How can I select those important philosophers whose ideas shaped, enriched and advanced thinking about the perennial problems of philosophy? (2) How can I present these philosophers in ways which show how one philosopher's ideas influenced or provoked reactions from other philosophers? And (3) how can I construct a condensed account of the development of philosophical debate which will make the reader appreciate that a little understanding of philosophy can serve as the basis and starting-point for a deeper, maybe lifelong, study of the subject which could develop more extensive, though never comprehensive knowledge?
The authors' judgment has helped the composition of a history of Western philosophy which, despite a few glaring omissions, contains nearly all the essential problem-themes, and compares well with other histories of philosophy of similar length.
Zenon Stavrinides