The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll by Ben-Ami Scharfstein;

Author:Ben-Ami Scharfstein; [Scharfstein, Ben-Ami]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Does Philosophy Progress?

I start this page with a feeling almost of nostalgia for the years of work that I am about to end with the words I set down now. It takes an effort to dismiss the idea that now that I have finished I know enough to begin again. I also dismiss the idea that I should end with suggestions for research. These I have left implicit in the first, introductory chapter. What I most want to do here is to learn how the writing of this history has affected the way in which I think of philosophy. What follows is therefore a coda meant to make clear—to myself, too—the attitudes that I have either developed or reaffirmed as I worked.

The first of these attitudes is that comparative philosophy ought to set an example of fairness of exposition and decency of appraisal. Unfortunately, as I have come to see, such fairness and decency are not entirely helpful to the effort to philosophize. Why say this? Because such qualities can easily discourage creative thought by the limits they impose on its freedom. Creative thought struggles loose of scruples. It nourishes itself by begging, borrowing, stealing, distorting, and reworking others’ ideas, and by encouraging the vain but invigorating hope that the result will prove itself forever superior to the thought of all rivals. (If I know myself, I will quote more than once from that very human skeptic, Montaigne, who says in his unfairly but eloquently dismissive vein, “Trust in your philosophy now! Boast that you are the one who has found the lucky bean in your festive pudding!”)1

The ideal of fairness makes the amoral intensity of creative thought more difficult to sustain. In any case, the ideal is put into play for a purpose that is rather different from philosophizing per se. Given the ideal, whoever studies the history of philosophy gets to play the role of what anthropologists and sociologists call a participant observer, someone who studies a group by participating in its activities but who remains in the end detached from it. In the case of philosophy, the historian’s effort to understand, which is to place, define, explicate, compare, and react, is in temper detached from the philosophical issues under discussion. This is because, ideally, the historian should understand a philosophy as it was understood by its partisans, its opponents, its successors, and its successors’ opponents. So to be fair, the historian first has to show how a philosophical position can once have been and may even remain persuasive. This the historian can do only by withdrawing for the while from every other position and acting as a temporary partisan. It is only after this partisanship has displayed the position to its best advantage that the historian’s critical remarks are allowable—they are, after all, only natural, they bring the historian’s own views to light, and they make it easier to judge his work. But they are allowable only on condition that they are identified as criticisms, do

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