Religion in Late Modernity

CHAPTER 13. A Paleopragmatic Philosophy of the History of Philosophy

CHAPTER 13 A Paleopragmatic Philosophy of the History of Philosophy Paleopragmatism A mong the most important contributions of Richard Rorty to the revival and extension of pragmatism is a philosophy of the history of philosophy. Peirce, James, and Dewey had all commented on historical philosophers, often with great insight. They also had important points to make about the history of philosophy. One thinks of Peirce’s complaint that modernity has been a long decline into nominalism, and of Dewey’s point about the deformation of philosophy into academic epistemological irrelevance.1 But none of the great pragmatists dwelt at length on the philosophic nature of the history of philosophy as such. Richard Rorty has done that, and it is one of the main themes of David Hall’s recent book on him.2 Rorty’s Neopragmatic philosophy of the history of philosophy is that it is a narrative, and it is as parts of narratives, or of a grand narrative, that his own discussions of readings and misreadings are to be understood. His philosophy of the history of philosophy as having narrative structure is also closely allied with his view of philosophical conversation. The general view that the history of philosophy is a narrative, of course, is Hegelian, and it has come to seem natural to us in the West. Hegel had a philosophic theory about the narrative structure of the unfolding of philosophy’s history, and also an historical account of that history in the form of a narrative.3 Wilhelm Windelband, the Hegelian historian of philosophy put it in narrative form, and so has nearly every other historian, even non-Hegelians such as Copleston, Reale, and, most influential of all, Will Durant. Although Hegel was the great master of the history of philosophy as narrative, he surely was not the first to think of it that way. With a generous enough understanding of what counts as philosophy (one that plays better in East and South Asia than in West Asia or its European extensions) the sermons of St. Peter and St. Stephen as recorded in Acts 2 and 7 present the history of philosophy as having a narrative form. Like Hegel, but probably not like Rorty, the saints had reason to think of philosophy’s history as a narrative because they believed that there was a single main agent of history, God, and that philosophy as well as everything else is God’s story. Natural to us as it seems, narrative is not the only form philosophers have defended for the history of philosophy. Aristotle (Metaphysics A) structured the history of philosophy according to a classification of ideas, not a narrative. Richard McKeon has given this classificatory approach as much sophistication in our time as the narrative approach enjoys.4 Walter Watson (1985) and David Dilworth (1989) have continued the extension of this work, the latter dealing with the history of world philosophies, not merely Western ones, although we should note that Hegel himself dealt with the philosophies of South and East Asia, and with unusual insight for his time, especially if we count his treatment of religious ideas as part of philosophy (as would make sense in most cultures).5 To take the history of philosophy to be either a narrative or a process of filling in possible types of ideas is not satisfactory, however. Much can be learned from both approaches. But to take the history of philosophy to be the development of examples of types of ideas treats it as merely possible, never actual except in accidental ways. According to Watson and Dilworth, for example, what is important about a philosophy is its locations in grids and matrices of possible ideas, and the structure of those ideas can be known from the classificatory scheme. That a philosopher’s philosophy actualizes a position in the scheme provides flavor, but nothing really new. The drama of narrative is far truer to the struggles to build an actual philosophy. On the other hand, to conceive of the history of philosophy as a narrative has its own limitations, however pungent and seductive its drama. The principle limitation is that the narrative form, any narrative form, imposes a story on the material that trivializes and dismisses all the positions that do not fit that story. A good historian would try to tell as fair and inclusive a story as possible, but the narrative form carries with it its own principles of what counts in the story...