Unlearning with History of Philosophy
NABEEL HAMID
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In his three-and-a-half decades at SUNY-Potsdam, David has dedicated himself to keeping alive a certain, classical tradition of education. This is the tradition that conceives the task of education to be the formation of persons in the fullest sense. On this model, what the Germans call “Bildung,” the educator’s vocation is emphatically not to equip the youth with technical skills to prepare them for some corner of the job market. Rather, the goal of education is to cultivate certain habits of thought so that a person may become an autonomous agent, that she may be able to set and pursue her own ends rather than serve the will of another. David has pursued his vocation by teaching the entire range of the history of philosophy. Remarkably, he has managed to teach in the course of his career nearly every great philosopher, from Pre-Socratic antiquity, through the medieval lights of Avicenna and Aquinas and the upstart revolutionaries of the early modern period, down to the anxious existentialists of the twentieth century. David has remained steadfast in his commitment to cultivating his students’ minds by means of the abstruse writings from the distant past, even as many in similar roles as his have been reaching for ways to make philosophy instruction “accessible,” or “relevant” to the hot-button issues of the day. He has remained convinced of the durability of the ideas of the mighty dead and, more generally, of his view that “ideas do not have a shelf life” (Curry 2007, 70). For David, history of philosophy has been at the heart of education-as-Bildung.
In fact, David’s preferred pedagogical approach is rooted in his conception of philosophy itself. This conception seems to have crystallized early in his career; its outlines are discernible in the “Postscript” to his doctoral dissertation. There, David makes explicit an “unstated assumption” that had guided his inquiry into Plato’s reasons for introducing the theory of Forms. This is the assumption that,
we cannot understand Plato’s view of Forms without understanding the historical context those ideas developed within, without coming to understand the problems, concerns and solutions of those thinkers who exercised a direct and profound influence on Plato’s thought. Implicit in this belief are certain historiographical assumptions about what it is (if it is at all possible) to “understand” the thought of a dead philosopher—about what it is a historical recreation has to work with and might expect to achieve. Implicit also is the belief that an adequate recreation of, say, Plato’s views will be of philosophical interest. Indeed, that doing the history of philosophy is itself to do philosophy. (Curry 1990, 174)
A tremendous amount is packed into this passage, including, I think, an indication of the guiding thought behind David’s approach to philosophical pedagogy. In what follows, I shall examine David’s thesis that “doing the history of philosophy is itself to do philosophy.” Understanding this claim, I suspect, will also shed some light on his self-conception as a teacher. I proceed by articulating, in turn, what I take to be David’s conceptions of historical inquiry and of philosophical inquiry.
Assuming that history of philosophy is a kind of historical inquiry, what constitutes its distinct goal? On David’s view, this (perhaps unattainable) goal is captured in the murky notion of “‘understanding’ the thought of a dead philosopher.” As a first pass, he suggests that understanding, say, Plato amounts to recreating adequately his thoughts. To that end, the materials available to the historian of philosophy are Plato’s literary remains, as well as any other evidence, textual or otherwise, we may have for reconstructing the historical context in which Plato wrote. The task of recreating Plato’s thoughts further encompasses grasping the “problems, concerns and solutions” of other thinkers evidenced in Plato’s texts. In this regard, history of philosophy bears kinship with other kinds of human-historical inquiry. By piecing together the ineluctably partial record of the past, the historian of philosophy attempts to sketch a plausible picture of the philosopher she seeks to understand, just as the historian of politics might seek to understand the thoughts and motives of significant political agents, and the historian of biology the mental states of the biologist. Insofar as history of philosophy aims to grasp the thoughts of minded agents, rather than merely their outward behaviors or circumstances, its goal is to reenact the experience or rethink the thoughts of those agents, as R.G. Collingwood conceived of the historian’s task.
David indicates two overarching criteria that should guide history of philosophy as history:
In trying to put together what Plato said, and what he would have said in response to certain questions and objections, we are engaged in a philosophical assessment of Platonic thought. What he said, a matter of fact, is determined by the texts. What he would have said is based on the texts and on the belief that Plato strove for consistency and coherence in his beliefs. (Curry 1990, 175)
The first criterion is that of adequacy with respect to textual evidence. In attempting to recreate Plato’s thoughts, “what he said, a matter of fact, is determined by the texts.” The force of this criterion is that the historian of philosophy is not permitted to treat Plato’s texts as mere stimuli for her own philosophical speculations. This is not to say that somebody engaged in a project in, say, systematic epistemology is not permitted to draw on Platonic texts for inspiration, but only that such uses of Plato do not properly belong to the kind of inquiry the historian of philosophy engages in. In seeking to rethink Plato’s thoughts, we must be constrained by the texts as they are available to us, in the context in which they appeared insofar as that is accessible to us.
The second criterion is a species of the principle of charity or rational accommodation. In interpreting Plato on the basis of the available record of his thoughts, we ought to be constrained by the assumption that Plato strove to bring logical order among his beliefs on the myriad subjects he took to be his province. That is, in reenacting the movement of Plato’s thought, we should assume that he assented to any given proposition only on the basis of what he took to be a valid inference from other propositions to which he also assented, on the basis of reasons that he judged to be good. This entails, at a minimum, refraining from attributing to Plato any philosophical opinions on the basis of non-cognitive factors—whether sociological, psychological, or physiological—that may nevertheless have affected him. But the principle further means that, in posing philosophical questions to Plato and attempting to enter in dialogue with him, we must be sensitive, in our framings of the problems as well as in our reconstructions of his possible responses, to assumptions and motives that he could have reasonably accepted as his own. Put simply, we ought to try to meet our interlocutors on shared ground. To be sure, we may sometimes find it unavoidable to use terminology and styles of reasoning that are alien to Plato’s text for the sake of making ourselves intelligible to our contemporaries. But in such cases, charity demands that we ensure that the concepts, judgments, and arguments underlying our language accord with, or are accommodated to, Plato’s, and that we are intellectually honest enough to set aside our modern apparatus if we find that it distorts the evident meaning of Plato’s text. I think David would agree that the principle of charity rests on moral grounds as much as epistemic. When we run afoul of its constraints, we are, in the words of Paul, “become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal,” however much we may appear to speak rationally, even authoritatively, about the other. In violating the principle of charity, we fail to witness the reality of our interlocutors.
So, history of philosophy as a philosophical dialogue with a dead thinker is fraught with danger. But it is precisely this juncture of historical and philosophical inquiries that pertains to David’s thesis, that “doing the history of philosophy is itself to do philosophy.” I turn, now, to the other strut of his thesis, namely to his conception of history of philosophy as philosophy.
For David, philosophizing is at its most authentic when undertaken in a dialogical form and with an exploratory spirit. In the “Postscript,” David makes a crucial distinction, almost in passing, between two modes of philosophical practice. In reference to Plato’s middle period dialogues, the focus of his dissertation, David writes that these reveal,
a Plato who was constantly revising and reworking his views in the face of ever new challenges. A Plato who asserts no “final” position on a number of matters at the heart of his thought and who offers us a number of alternative accounts which do not always cohere with each other or form any systematic doctrine. The dialogues represent philosophy at work, not as presented. This, I firmly believe, will lessen Plato’s achievements only in the eyes of those obsessed with an architectonic conception of philosophy. (Curry 1990, 176–7)
The distinction here is between what we might call exploratory and architectonic models of philosophy. Plato, especially in the spirit that shines through Socrates in dialogues such as the Meno, the Phaedo, and the Republic, epitomizes the exploratory model. It is philosophy as work-in-progress, as open-ended, as willing to backtrack and start afresh. The exponents of the architectonic mode are unnamed, but we might surmise that Aristotle (perhaps), and Kant (definitely) fit the bill. The architectonic philosopher aims to build a conceptual system, ideally one rooted in a handful of foundational doctrines. What’s more, the architectonic philosopher refrains from publishing his thoughts until he is sufficiently convinced of the robustness of the systematic edifice he has conceived. He typically presents philosophy as completed. The exploratory model is clearly the one David prizes. On his view, the heart of philosophical practice consists in the pure examination of ideas, of turning a thought this way and that, asking what else follows from it, and seeing where it leads. Naturally, on this picture, the dialogue, rather than the treatise, is better suited to displaying the essence of philosophy.
With this distinction in mind, we can readily see how historical inquiry into philosophical texts, as David conceives it, would be inseparable from philosophical inquiry, as David conceives it. Recall that, in attempting to rethink the thoughts of a dead philosopher, we seek to retrace the sequence of conceptions and inferences she herself formed in her mind. As an effort to rethink past philosophical thought, doing history of philosophy is tantamount to doing philosophy because philosophy, at its heart, is nothing other than the exploration of the space of reasons, of discovering what else follows from assenting to some proposition. In studying Plato as the Collingwood-esque historian would, we are effectively philosophizing alongside Plato. To gain maximum benefit from the exercise, it would behoove us to follow Plato’s thought where it would lead. If his chain of thoughts leads us to Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, we must be willing to follow him to those sources and, as we do with the Platonic texts, parse these latter, considerably more obscure authors, to the best of our abilities, all the while abiding by the same methodological criteria we brought to Plato. Thus, philosophizing alongside Plato requires, additionally, reconstructing from the fragmentary historical record the dialectic as Plato may have perceived it, in order to discern why he might have made the philosophical moves that he did. This is the kind of project in history of philosophy exemplified in David’s dissertation. There, he puts his model of historiography into practice by exposing the crucial role of Plato’s predecessors—Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras—in shaping the dialogue spanning several generations that led to the theory of Forms as presented in the Republic. Taking the exploratory character of Plato’s text seriously allows David to see the ore coursing through its veins, as it were, and, thereby, to identify certain interpretations as unacceptably narrow, such as G. E. L. Owen’s framing in terms of the problem of the referents of incomplete predicates.
The Platonic model of history of philosophy as philosophy illuminates nicely David’s conception of, and approach to, pedagogy. In his 2007 essay, “Blinded by the Light,” David borrows William James’s memorable image of a newborn child’s perceptual world to describe the condition of the undergraduate philosophy student—more generally, of anybody engaged in philosophy—as a “buzzin’ bloomin’ confusion.” The goal of the philosophy teacher, however, is not to eliminate this confusion. Rather, for David:
Introducing students to that confusion and modeling for them the ways of negotiating that confusion, I am arguing, is a responsible and reasonable goal. Perhaps even noble as well. (Curry 2007, 70)
As David rightly sees it, philosophizing inevitably takes place in a state of cognitive uncertainty. It is exactly when one’s settled beliefs about foundational matters are disrupted, and one finds oneself momentarily unmoored, that philosophical inquiry becomes most fitting. But instead of treating the occasion as a cause for alarm, the philosophy teacher’s job, David submits, is to guide the student through an open-ended examination of her newly unsettled beliefs. His goal as teacher, he writes, is “to create, disseminate, share, and foment confusion. We might call this a process of active unlearning” (Curry 2007, 69). For David, the excellent teacher recognizes that the student must first unlearn what she has unthinkingly absorbed from the world in order then to learn afresh. Unlearning is a precondition, not of learning this or that fact about the world or mastering the use of an instrument, but of learning to hold beliefs on the basis of reasons one has grasped and could articulate if challenged. The teacher’s goal here is to cultivate the habits of mind by which the student can take ownership of her beliefs by having worked them out for herself. Active unlearning is the starting point on the path toward the goal of education-as-Bildung, that is, of becoming an autonomous, thinking person. This is, of course, the method of Socrates, whose philosophical midwifery begins by inducing unwelcome confusion in his often-recalcitrant interlocutors before guiding them in self-examination. In the Socratic model, pedagogy and philosophy are inextricable.
Now, engagement with the history of philosophy, in the way David thinks it should be engaged, offers opportunities for active unlearning in spades. One of the benefits of reading the great philosophers of the past consists in their potential to dislodge the unthinking presentism to which we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, susceptible. When Descartes invites us to meditate with him as he sets about unlearning the prejudices of his youth, he not only models the practice of self-examination and of coming to form rational beliefs that, for David, is the core of philosophizing, but does so while articulating a conception of the self far removed from the one most of us ordinarily inhabit. In following Kant’s account of how it could be possible for my perception of this apple to mean what it does, we not only get a masterclass in philosophical analysis but also encounter a radically different set of presuppositions, creating an opening, however slight, for substantive unlearning. The Socratic approach undertaken in a field as vast as humanity’s collective intellectual heritage is how David has seen his role as at once philosopher and pedagogue.
History of philosophy in what I have dubbed the exploratory mode thus aligns well with David’s thesis, that “doing the history of philosophy is itself to do philosophy,” while also elucidating the intimate relation between philosophy and education. But what about the other, architectonic mode of philosophy? Does the system-building philosopher have equal need for history of philosophy as David conceives it? More directly: is doing the history of philosophy itself to do systematic philosophy?
To reiterate, the question here is not whether a philosopher can make good use of texts from the relatively distant past. Kant, our archetype of the obsessive system builder, made much deliberate use of Plato, among many others. So has every other thinker who has harbored ambitions to bring conceptual order to some part of reality or to our experience thereof. Even an author as outwardly disinterested in historical precedents for his philosophy as Wittgenstein found it judicious in the Investigations to invoke St. Augustine. Ditto for the mass of contemporary neo-Humeans, who are happy to play fast and loose with the Scotsman’s texts in defense of their “naturalist” ideologies. After all, for the system-builder, doing philosophy is nothing more than to articulate and defend by rational argument a plausible, coherent, tightly interconnected picture of some part of reality, to give an account of how things in the broadest sense hang together in the broadest sense, as Sellars put it. If Plato or Augustine or Hume have worthwhile insights pertaining to the matter at issue, the systematic philosopher is surely entitled to borrow, steal, amend, and twist their thoughts to suit present purposes. I very much doubt David would deny Kant the right to redescribe Plato’s notion of an idea as a concept of reason unconditioned by sensibility and, consequently, as lacking objectively valid content.
The question for David, rather, is whether a historical inquiry of the sort he undertakes in his dissertation is also tantamount to doing systematic philosophy of the sort Kant does in the Critique of Pure Reason, as it is tantamount to doing philosophy of the sort Plato’s Socrates carries out in the dialogues. More generally, one might wonder whether historical inquiry of any kind is necessary for the systematic philosopher, or whether the latter could perfectly well make instrumental, decontextualized, and piecemeal use of past philosophical texts as and when she sees fit. If that were indeed the case, David’s thesis would turn out to be considerably more limited in its scope.
I think David has a more expansive view of history of philosophy’s involvement in philosophy as such. Specifically, I think David might accept a response along the following lines on behalf of the historian’s claim to the work of the systematic philosopher: those system builders who deny the relevance to their work of a historical understanding of philosophy’s past do not adequately understand either the questions they seek to answer or the terms in which they are to be answered. This seems to be the suggestion of the very last sentence of David’s dissertation. In emphasizing the need to understand Plato’s debts to his predecessors, David suggests that those who in general neglect or downplay the importance of such an exercise effectively “fail to see that their philosophical difficulties and understandings are inextricably tied to history which led to their possibility” (Curry 1990. 177). I take David’s thought to be that the meanings of philosophical terms, and thus of questions couched in those terms, are not properly intelligible in isolation from their causal histories. And perhaps, that meanings in general, and so philosophical meanings as well, are not discrete items such that we could latch onto some while leaving aside the others. In order to have an adequate understanding of the notions the systematic philosopher must use, she needs to understand how they have acquired their standards of use and misuse, to understand why they mean what they mean. Such meanings are not determined by individual fiat but are shaped by more or less complicated historical pathways. This is the case not just for locutions that have explicit referents in philosophy’s past, such as “Platonism” or “Spinozism.” Rather, even terms that are apparently innocent of any historical burden, such as “virtue” or “causation” or “perception,” are not fully intelligible without a reasonable grasp of how they have come to mean what they mean, and so, how they ought or ought not to be used in systematic philosophy in the present. Of course, articulating meanings under the presupposition of radical holism is an infinite task. But it should nevertheless serve the philosopher as a guiding ideal. On this picture of what it is to do philosophy (well), David’s claim, that “doing history of philosophy is itself to do philosophy,” lays claim to the work of the architectonic philosopher as much as to that of the philosophical explorer or pedagogue.
David’s conception of philosophy and its history in light of his conception of the goal of education as the formation of whole, autonomous persons goes some way toward explaining his insistence on teaching philosophy as he has done. He has resisted the takeover of universities by professional managers and their instrumentalist view of education as another commodity to be priced and costed. David has certainly rankled many a university bureaucrat. His pedagogy openly challenges their cynical efforts to determine the absolute value of philosophy, like that of every other university discipline, by a formula purporting to measure ROIs in the labor market. On such a perverse view of education, David’s courses count as useless. For his part, David has embraced the charge of uselessness, having declared himself on the side of the “self-evident truth […] that studying useless things is a necessary component of any educational system that seeks to build character” (Curry 2013, 236). His moral courage and belief in his vocation are inspiring and humbling. I can only hope to emulate David’s principled commitment to teaching philosophy in a manner true to the nature of the subject: difficult, unending, and magnificently useless.
Bibliography
Curry, David C. K. 1990. “Flux and the Forms: Examination of Plato’s Notion of Change in the Middle Dialogues.” PhD Dissertation, University of Virginia.
Curry, David. C. K. 2007. “Blinded by the Light: A Reflection on the Teaching of Introductory Courses in Philosophy.” In Ideas that Work in College Teaching, edited by Robert L. Badger, 67–75. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Curry, David. C. K. 2013. “Uselessness: A Panegyric.” The Good Society, 22 (2): 236–246.