History of/is Philosophy Series

And this is a universal law: a living thing can be healthy, strong, and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself, and at the same time too self-centred to enclose its own view within that of another, it will pine away slowly or hasten to its timely end. Cheerfulness, the good conscience, the joyful deed, confidence in the future – all of them depend, in the case of the individual as of a nation, on the existence of a line dividing the bright and discernible from the unilluminable and dark; on one’s being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember at the right time; on the possession of a powerful instinct for sensing when it is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically. This, precisely, is the proposition the reader is invited to meditate upon: the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture.” (emphasis in original)

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life”

This semester I will take up Nietzsche’s call to the reader and meditate upon his proposition. In particular, I will explore the possibility that philosophy itself is something to be taken up in a way that is, as Nietzsche put it, “healthy, strong, and fruitful.” If we do this as Nietzsche suggests, moreover, then doing philosophy in this way entails having a feel for the unhistorical and the historical in philosophy, and for when one or the other are necessary or to be avoided. But what precisely is one discerning when they have this feel for the unhistorical and historical in philosophy? In Nietzsche’s essay the cattle grazing before us serve as an introduction to the unhistorical, for the cattle forget what happens immediately after it happens, like the main character in the film Memento. In the case of the cattle, they are incapable of creating new memories, and hence of being historical, and immediately forget what just happened. Leonard, the protagonist from Memento who suffers from anterograde amnesia is also, like the cattle, unable to form new memories or recall what just happened. For Nietzsche these would be examples of the unhistorical, but as he points out, and as is rather obvious for us I would think, being excessively or entirely unhistorical would not serve humans well for we need to find a way to balance the unhistorical with the historical, our capacity to forget and move on (like a goldfish as Ted Lasso would advise) with our capacity to remember and learn from the past.

If we take this and adapt it to the history of philosophy, then it would seem then it is possible for there to be both an excessive historicism in doing philosophy and an excessive unhistorical forgetting of the past, and the key is to balance the two such that philosophy is “healthy, strong, and fruitful.” A common way of characterizing the differences between what analytic and continental philosophers do, and this connects with my previous post, is to say that analytic philosophers are concerned with the problems of the present and the history of philosophy is just as irrelevant to their work, on this way of perceiving their project, as the history of mathematics, physics, etc., is to addressing contemporary problems within mathematics, physics, etc. For continental philosophers, by contrast, the assumption is that they are all about digging into the history of their subject, whether through Heideggerian etymology, Foucauldian archaeology and, as was an inspiration to both Heidegger and Foucault, Nietzschean genealogy. But as Nietzsche himself warns, we are to be wary of becoming too enamored with the historical nature of our philosophical endeavors, and similarly with its unhistorical nature? So where does that leave us? This is precisely the question I will be meditating on this semester.

As another semester is about to begin, I am preparing to teach a graduate seminar on the history of western thought (syllabus here). One of the working assumptions that guided me as I put the syllabus together was the thought that philosophy is both historical and unhistorical, and more precisely philosophy both tends to the historical as it comes to think like a state (with reference to James Scott’s book intended, which is on the reading list) and the unhistorical. The title of this series reflects another assumption—namely, the history of philosophy has both a representational and historical role to play and an unhistorical role that eludes representational modes of thinking, which does not mean it cannot be thought; to the contrary, when history is done well, and as Nietzsche encourages as well, including the history of philosophy, then it is precisely what provokes thought and becomes indiscernible from philosophy itself. The history of philosophy is, in the end, philosophy.

Each week during the semester I’ll put up a summary and some reflections of the discussion for that week. It is hoped that this will become a venue for distilling the material, recording the moments and themes that seemed most provocative. In short, this will be a place where I meditate on the historical and the unhistorical, and the way in which philosophy entails both.