Macro- and Microphilosophy

Art historians even nowadays still talk about a “Morellian method.” Let us see of what this method consisted. Museums, Morelli said, are full of paintings whose authorship has been attributed inaccurately. But to restore each painting to its real author is a difficult task: often these works are not signed, have been re-painted or are in bad condition. In such a situation it is indispensable to be able to distinguish between originals and copies. But to do this, Morelli said, one should not work (as is usually done) on the basis of the most striking features of paintings, which for this very reason are the easiest to imitate: the lifted-to-heaven eyes of Perugino’s figures, the smile of Leonardo’s, and so on. One should rather examine the most negligible details, those least influenced by the characteristics of the school the painter belongs to: the lobes of the ears, the fingernails, the shape of the fingers and toes. In this manner Morelli discovered, and painstakingly cataloged, the shape of ears typical of Botticelli, that of Cosmé Tura, and so on: these traits were present in originals, but not in copies.

Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm” (1979)

In the essay from which this passage is taken, Carlo Ginzburg lays out the theoretical underpinnings of what has come to be called, and largely thanks to Ginzburg’s efforts, microhistory. In particular, Ginzburg adopts what he calls a “semiotic paradigm” (284). As with the Morellian method described above, what this semiotic approach involves is a “deciphering of signs” (281). The earlobes as painted by Botticelli, the clues left behind at a crime scene, or the symptoms a patient presents to their doctor, each are a sign for something else, and something that is the real target of the investigation—determining whether the painting is an original or a forgery, identifying the criminal, or diagnosing the illness. In the context of doing history, Ginzburg has adopted a similar approach. In his book The Cheese and the Worms, for instance, Ginzburg takes up the heresy trial of a 16^th century miller, Menocchio. As Ginzburg later describes the perspective one could take of this project, as one that “could have been a simple footnote in a hypothetical monograph on the Protestant Reformation in the Friuli,” and a footnote that Ginzburg transformed into a book” (Ginzburg 2012: 203). Now this footnote, or the “negligible details” of a simple 16^th century miller could be taken, on the semiotic paradigm Ginzburg adopts, to be a sign for something else, and in this case the religious beliefs of peasants of the Friuli region. This approach to history has come to be called microhistory.

In Ginzburg’s later take on microhistory, published in his 1993 essay “Microhistory: two or three things I know about it,” a noticeable change occurs. In particular, rather than assuming the possibility of a transition, as susceptible to error as it may be (and as Ginzburg admits), from the microhistorical context, or sign, to the more general or macrohistorical target of the investigation, Ginzburg now recognizes the discontinuity and heterogenous nature of the relationship. As Ginzburg puts it, “Italian microhistory has confronted the question of comparison [between the sign or microhistorical event and the general context or target of the investigation] with a different and, in a certain sense, opposite approach; through the anomalous, not the analogous” (212-213). As Ginzburg will reiterate and stress this point a few lines later, and in reference to Siegfried Kracauer who he acknowledges to having been an important influence, “As Kracauer had already foreseen, results obtained in a microscopic sphere cannot be automatically transferred to a macroscopic sphere (and vice versa). This heterogeneity—we are just beginning to perceive the implications—constitutes both the greatest difficulty and the greatest potential benefit of microhistory” (213). The problem then is one of drawing immediate and clear implications from a microhistorical investigation such as George Stewart does in his extended analysis of the last, decisive battle at Gettysburg in Pickett’s Charge, where the loss of this battle had clear implications for world history, for the United States may well have become, as Ginzburg cites Stewart, “two rival republics [that] would probably have prevented the United States from turning the balance of two World Wars and becoming a global power” (194). Instead of drawing such implications, a consequence of the heterogeneity between macro and micro levels is that the anomalous nature of microhistorical contexts becomes a problem for macrohistorical accounts, and a problem that motivates a rethinking of both the micro- and macrohistorical. On my reading of Ginzburg, this is precisely what provides the “greatest potential benefit of microhistory.”

To clarify what benefits Ginzburg may have in mind, I want to transfer the implications of his arguments to philosophy, to what we might call macro- and microphilosophy. Now Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy could be seen to be a book that attempts, as most books of this type no doubt do, to relate the intricate and determinate details of a philosopher’s arguments, what we could call the microphilosophical approach, to the general historical context within which this philosopher lived and thought, and the other philosophers of this time and previous times that become part of the means whereby the philosopher makes sense of their world, or what we could call the macrophilosophical approach. Russell is explicitly attempting such a project. As he puts it, “To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers. There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men’s lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances. This interaction throughout the centuries will be the topic of the following pages” (xiv). But Ginzburg’s understanding of microhistory, if we are to apply it here, challenges this approach to the history of philosophy. There is no analogous, reciprocal relationship between the micro- and macro- levels but a heterogeneity, or a problematic relation. At the same time, what is not to be done is what Ginzburg finds in F.R. Ankersmit’s work where unlike past historians, who “were preoccupied with the trunk of a tree or its branches; their postmodernist successors [of which Ankersmit is one] busy themselves only with the leaves—namely, with minute fragments of the past that they investigate in an isolated manner, independently of the more or less larger context (branches, trunk) of which they were a part” (211). What Ginzburg sets out to do in history, therefore, is neither demonstrating the clear, reciprocal relationship between the determinate leaves and the larger, macrohistorical context of the branches and trunk, nor is it to focus on the determinate, isolated leaves alone. Rather, Ginzburg’s hope, as with the approach to the history of philosophy I would call for, is to focus on the anomalous and problematic events or arguments (in the case of philosophy) that do not fit neatly into a broader context that makes sense of them, and yet these anomalous events are not isolated and unrelated to these broader contexts. To the contrary, these anomalous events express the problematic nature, or problematic Ideas as I have argued (see here), that make possible the various ways in which the broader context comes to make sense of, and frame the events that are taken to fall under its purview.

A history of philosophy, therefore, is not one where one traces the problems philosophers encounter to the determinate solutions these problems already anticipated, and solutions that resolve the problem and allow philosophers to move on. What a history of philosophy should do, if it is a microphilosophy in Ginzburg’s sense, is to be attentive to the anomalous features in a philosophical work that are often overlooked but which may well problematize our conception of the philosopher and their context, and thus what we once thought was going on, much as the way an earlobe is painted may lead us to question the authenticity of the painting before us.