Not Thinking Like a Liberal by Raymond Geuss

Author:Raymond Geuss [Geuss, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Philosophers, Philosophy, Criticism, Political Science, History & Theory
ISBN: 9780674270343
Google: 4zBaEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarvardUP
Published: 2022-01-01T20:36:39+00:00

When Appropriation Is Not Plagiarism

This raises some important general issues about the identity of movements and the different modes of cultural appropriation. To start, no actual historical institution or movement that has been able to maintain itself for centuries will really have been completely immobile and unchanging. There is a clear sense in which Catholicism has been in existence for over two thousand years, so to live and reproduce itself for that long Catholicism must have been able to develop new doctrines from within itself, to absorb new material and new views from outside, and thus to engage in controlled processes of change and metamorphosis. Also, no large-scale historical movement or ideology is as exhaustive, internally connected and unitary, monolithic, closed, and coherent as some of them would like to claim. Very few movements are so cognitively disabling that they render their devotees utterly incapable of any coherent thought or correct observation of the world. Catholicism was the final framework for so many people in so many places for so long that they were bound to have had some interesting things to say, which they, of necessity, expressed in the only framework that they had available. This means that even in the huge and tedious corpus which is medieval philosophy, there is lots of material that stands in a very loose relation indeed to the purported theological doctrines that form its macro-structure. It is just a question of liberating it; in fact, one intention of some of the early members of the Frankfurt School was exactly to “redeem” (erlösen) the past.1 Perhaps it is a residual thought derived from religion to think that though some people, attitudes, and movements are completely incorrigible, unteachable, and not to be tolerated, none is exactly irredeemable.

This point is, I think, sufficiently important and sufficiently neglected to bear repeating: The fact that some philosopher has bizarre general views about the existence of a normatively binding human nature does not mean that every single observation or argument which he or she deploys about human motivation must be completely wrong and utterly useless. Medieval moralists were not either inherently stupid or unobservant, so there might well be lots of individual things or connections that they were able to see, arguments that they could make, that did not really depend on the implausible theological framework within which they tried to locate them. In fact, one might ask whether it was not exactly because their general view of the world was so peculiar that they were able to see some things especially clearly.2 Of course it is a delicate task to extract the individual insight or, in fact, the important utopian truth, behind the general ideological construct, and present it in a more appropriate way. That is why “redemption of the past” is so difficult. Obviously a truth “extracted” from its theological context won’t be the very same thing it originally was, and this is not an unimportant fact about it, but that is a separate issue.

On the other

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