Dissense

Modern academia exhibits a strange incongruity. The physics professor who assigns Aristotle to her students is a laughingstock, but the metaphysics professor who assigns Aristotle is typical. The ancient philosopher is equally comprehensible in either context. Historically, he exerted at least as much—if not more—influence in the empirical sciences as in philosophy. And in both cases, modern scholars roundly reject his views. Does this make any sense?

A field like English literature or intellectual history will, by its very nature, rely on original texts. At the same time, the hard sciences will eschew obsolete theories and antiquated historical sources. But what of philosophy, political theory, psychology, social theory, and the host of other disciplines that lie in between? The answer, I believe, is that to the extent they purport to seek “truth,” even if only to disparage the idea, they should emphasize contemporary works and deemphasize historical ones. In other words, they should adopt the pedagogy of the sciences. Banish Bentham, excise Epicurus, dismiss Derrida (okay, he’s a contemporary figure, but he still sucks). Aside from some very limited exceptions (discussed below), reliance on “classical” texts constitutes unjustifiable history-worship.

I can think of two reasons for reading an historical work: (1) Because reading the original is essential to understanding later thinkers, who read and built on/responded to the original; (2) Because nothing beats the original. While both have some validity in certain circumstances, their applicability has been grossly overstated by defenders of the “classics.”

While it is true that Nozick responds to Rawls, who studied Kant, who was influenced by Hume, who falls into the same tradition as Locke, who read Descartes, who rejected the Scholastics, who descended from Aquinas, whose philosophy was based on Aristotle, who was taught by Plato, who lifted ideas from the Pythagoreans, who derived their philosophy from the Orphic Cult of Ancient Greece, one need not become expert in every facet of every one of these thinkers in order to appreciate the independent virtue of Nozick’s work. I’ll go further: one need not even read Rawls to glean value from Nozick. Most great works offer independent insight; to the extent that they do not, it is because their authors suffer from the same history-worship at issue.

There is another variant to the “read the classics to comprehend modern thought” rationale. Under this view, we must read the thinkers that our predecessors read in order to comprehend their point of reference. After all, Thomas Jefferson read Rousseau, not G.A. Cohen. I find this justification even less compelling than the first. In essence, the argument runs as follows: in order to fully comprehend the ideas of people from the past, we need to first fully comprehend the ideas of other people from the past. This already assumes an historical enterprise, though. If you’re an intellectual historian, great; otherwise, we need something else to motivate reading an historical work rather than the contemporary opus on the subject. It also likely overstates the interdependence of ideas. To enjoy South Park, one need not become an aficionado of The Simpsons.

Next is the claim that we read historical works because they have yet to be bested. In some cases, this is probably true. There are some elements of Hume’s epistemology still dominant today. Parts of Kant’s ethics are still in vogue. But in all honesty, these are rare occasions. I have often heard economics departments denounced for the absence of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations on their syllabi, but as impressive a work as it was, colleges need not subject their students to extended diatribes on pin-making in order to educate them on the niceties of comparative advantage. In just about every field, the historical argument is either antiquated or more clearly stated in modern terms.

But adherence to classical texts is more than unjustified; there are, in fact, some very real harms to overreliance on antiquated texts.

First of all, education is a zero-sum game of sorts. Majoring in physics precludes concentration in psychology. Expertise in English literature may come at the expense of computer programming. Sure, some Ritalin-stuffed overachievers may effectively study all those fields at once while throwing in a women’s studies minor for good measure, but everyone has some limit. Accordingly, spending time on historical thinkers detracts from one’s mastery of contemporary debates and developments. Let’s be frank: no one—no one—thinks we should adopt Plato’s Republic as a model for successful government. But the vast bulk of political theory courses preference the noocratic musings of Socrates to legitimate discussions of the philosophical underpinnings of our own liberal democratic society. Welcome to the twenty-first century.

Even more dangerous is the potential for lionizing historical thinkers. Reading Aristotle and Aquinas at the expense of Wittgenstein and Quine conveys the notion that, despite centuries of development, you really can’t improve on the originals. This attaches a sort of superhuman status to these thinkers, their eons-old ideas indestructible while those of modern-day scholars rarely survive a month’s worth of scrutiny.  But given the infallibility of these bright lights of history, why explain the thought when you can more conveniently reference the thinker? Indeed, the average academe appeals to authority more often than logic.

Not only is this bad reasoning, it also squelches discourse. Instead of presenting a real debate on, say, the existence of God, where premises are made transparent and the argument’s steps analyzed for their logical validity, exchanges inexorably approach the following dialogue:

Theist:   I believe in God because Kant.

Atheist: I do not believe in God because Nietzsche.

Theist:   Silly Atheist, Nietzsche is wrong because he conflicts with Kant.

Atheist: Stupid Theist, Kant is wrong because he conflicts with Nietzsche.

If only grad students were so clear! In actuality, they adopt the idiosyncratic and oftentimes inaccessible terminology of their preferred thinkers in order to obfuscate the underlying appeal to authority:

Theist: I believe in God because noumena/antimony/synthetic a priori.

Atheist: I do not believe in God because Will to Power/ressentiment/uebermensch.

Theist: Silly Atheist, Will to Power/ressentiment/uebermensch is wrong because it conflicts with noumena/antimony/synthetic a priori.

Atheist: Stupid Theist, noumena/antimony/synthetic a priori is wrong because it conflicts with Will to Power/ressentiment/uebermensch.

Finally, when scholars adopt this history-driven mindset, intellectual innovation suffers. Why attempt a truly original thought when the giants of history have exhausted every insight? Instead, academics resign themselves to scouring prolix historic works for evidence of some heretofore undiscovered nuance. Their work becomes more interpretive than original, more cleric than intellectual. In other words, they evolve into the opposite of the very figures they idolize.

No one confuses the history of science with science, the history of music with music, the history of art with art. It is time they stop conflating the history of philosophy with philosophy, or the history of political thought with political theory. Understanding the past is great, but not if it comes at the cost of realizing the future.