Keeping the History of Philosophy

Keeping the History of Philosophy HOWARD COHEN ONE OF THE FIRST and most important problems that faces the historian of philosophy is making contact with the past. Success here is crucial if the history is to be of merit. Traditionally, the techniques of scholarship have provided the point of contact. These techniques--taken as a body I shall call them the method of recovery--are described clearly and forcefully by H. A. Wolfson in the opening pages of The Philosophy of Spinoza. 1Here is a disti//ation of what he says there: The first step, the basic step, in the understanding of any philosopher, one upon which any subjective form of interpretation or any literary form of presentation must rest, is the determination by the method of historical criticism of what the philosopher meant by what he said, how he came to say what he said, and why he said it in the manner in which he happened to say it. (P. vii) In our endeavor to retrace the steps of Spinoza's reasoning, we must therefore, first of all, equip ourselves with a similar fund of knowledge, or philosophical mass of apperception, as it may be called. (P. 5) The task before us then is to reconstruct [for soon to be apparent reasons, I would say "recover"---H.C.] the process of Spinoza's reasoning in all its dialectical niceties and in all its fullness of detail so that it will lead us to a thorough understanding of the statements which confront us in the Ethics. (P. 7) We must ask ourself what works Spinoza himself would have used if he had chosen to document his writings. (P. 8) Woifson's approach to the history of philosophy is quite familiar. Indeed, one is tempted to think of it as a paradigm. Nevertheless, there are ways other than recovery to make contact with the past. The historian can through the use of contemporary conceptual apparatus (notions not known to the subject of the historical inquiry) try to understand and elucidate the problems of past centuries or the works of past philosophers. Another historian of Spinoza, E. M. Cufley, approaches him in this way: Let me begin by sketching a metaphysic of a type which will be familiar to all who have studied the British philosophy of the early years of this century. Perhaps no one has ever advanced this particular metaphysic, but many people have held views about the nature of the Universe which were, at least, expressed in these categories. I shall then explore the possibility of understanding Spinoza's system in terms of this model metaphysic, although it is obviously described by him in a very different way.2 Curley's unabashed use of the method o[ reconstruction may not simply be dismissed t New York, 1960. 2 Spinoza's Metaphysics (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 50. [383] 384 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY on the grounds that his intent was other than historical. He makes it quite clear that the model is to elucidate Spinoza's system--not the other way around. Traditionalists tend to reject this approach to history out of hand. Wolfson, in fact, spends some time taking to task those commentators who treat the Ethics as a logical system without attending to its history.3 He charges them with inevitably misunderstanding Spinoza. Yet reconstruction is becoming a more commonplace technique and one needs to know whether or not this is to the detriment of the history of philosophy. For on its face reconstruction appears more cavalier with the past than the scholarly alternatives. It is not easy to see why an historian should adopt this method, let alone perfer it.~Still, some do. This deserves a closer look. Both recovery and reconstruction may aim to solve the problem of temporal orientation . The historical texts do not speak for themselves. In addition to the inevitable problems of obscurity, ambiguity, infelicity, poor style, bad organization, and lapse of sense which plague all writers and their commentators, times change. Among other things this means that language, style, custom, interests, beliefs, and conceptions of life change as well. For the historian this raises certain practical problems. Words may not have meant...