The epistemic value of philosophy stans

Have you had an obsession, or a more enduring love for a philosopher that you only know through their work?  Have you felt a sense of friendship, or at any rate, a sense of fellow-feeling with philosophers in the past?

I asked philosophy twitter this question, and received a range of interesting answers, collected here. Among people's avowed kindred souls are a great many philosophers who had some problematic ideas: Hume, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, among many others. How can we navigate this? 

Agnes Callard recently argued against cancelling Aristotle (I am still not sure what is meant by "cancelling Aristotle", as e.g., at SLU, Aristotle is one of the few philosophers that are mandatory for our core curriculum in philosophy and so has to be on the syllabus, see also here). Anyway, her argument about not-cancelling Aristotle is that one can read him as an alien: 

.... I can imagine circumstances under which an alien could say women are inferior to men without arousing offense in me. Suppose this alien had no gender on their planet, and drew the conclusion of female inferiority from time spent observing ours. As long as the alien spoke to me respectfully, I would not only be willing to hear them out but even interested to learn their argument.

I read Aristotle as such an “alien.” His approach to ethics was empirical — that is, it was based on observation — and when he looked around him he saw a world of slavery and of the subjugation of women and manual laborers, a situation he then inscribed into his ethical theory.

These claims about reading a philosopher with problematic ideas as an alien are, of course, empirical claims. I can't generalize about the phenomenology of reading philosophers of the past, especially of reading philosophers from cultures and circumstances much different from us.

Purely speaking introspectively, I don't read philosophers that way. Often my work is driven by enthusiasm for a particular philosopher or for some philosophical idea, or for combining them in a new way, which my daughter refers to as my "philosophy stans". My latest philosophy stans are the American pragmatists, particularly John Dewey, Jane Addams, and C.S. Peirce. I never got to learn about them as an undergraduate, and until recently my exposure to pragmatism was limited to William James, for whom I harbor a long-term admiration.  As I read about Jane Addams and how she put her philosophy into practice by through her settlement among immigrants in Chicago, working at low wages and in dire material circumstances, I could not help but feel admiration for her. 

Fleur Jongepier discusses her love for Iris Murdoch in this wonderful guest blog post at Eric Schliesser's Digressions and Impressions. She dwells on the epistemic and perhaps even moral benefits of cultivating such love, 

I have reason to fall in love with a philosopher who cared deeply about topics that human beings outside of academic philosophy typically also care about. I want to feel passionately about a philosopher who believes that working on humanly important questions is compatible with being a rigorous philosopher. 

What Jongepier here points at is, I think, a very interesting form of exemplarism. A philosopher you deeply enjoy and love can become a kind of exemplar to you, particularly in their humane way of dealing with topics of enduring philosophical interest. As Mengzi put it 

If befriending the other fine nobles of the world is still not enough, then ascend to examine the ancients. Recite their Odes and read their Documents. But can you do this without understanding what sort of people they were? Because of this, you must examine their era. This is how friendship ascends [Book B5.8, 141]

Mengzi's account of friendship is one about benefit and edification (a bit reminiscent of Aristotle)--it can't be mutual benefit and edification, obviously, given that the ancients are dead, but our acquaintance with the ancients helps us to become better philosophers, maybe even better human beings all around. A Zhuangzi stan could help us guard against the feeling that philosophy always needs to be serious, a Nietzsche stan reminds us that philosophy can have both pathos and humor, a Jane Addams stan indicates that it's possible to live your philosophy as well as write it. 

In that respect, deeply resonating with and finding friendship in problematic philosophers is also interesting from an exemplarist perspective, e.g., how to deal with Hume's racism or Nietzsche's misogyny? Linda Zagzebski's account of exemplarism draws heavily on the emotion of admiration, an emotion that attracts us to such moral exemplars as saints, heroes, and sages. An enduring question for Zagzebski's account is that the people we stan are never perfect (possibly with exceptions such as Jesus, Confucius, the Buddha).

Maybe our admiration needs to be more selective and reflective. How can our philosophical admiration differentiate so we have the benefits of one-sided philosophical friendships through the ages without falling into the same kinds of unreflective biases.  Nathan Nobis discusses some potential ways to come to terms with moral flaws of philosophers, such as apologism ("at the time everyone was sexist"), but this strategy doesn't work well, particularly if we feel a connection with other, less problematic elements of a past philosopher's work.  If you don't read these people as aliens, but as friends, it's impossible to gauge their ideas with a dispassionate frame of mind. Rather, reading them with empathy requires one to come to grips with the question of how, say, a careful deliberator like Kant could come to such careless conclusions about homosexuality, or how Hume could hold such unreflective racist beliefs. Maybe this encourages intellectual humility about our unexamined beliefs, or the totality of our beliefs and how they hold together. 

 

Comments

[Evan]

Thanks for the post. This instantly reminded of a book that Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote about W.E.B. Du Bois that I hadn’t had a chance to read and kept putting off. It’s called Line of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity. It was on my “to read” list for a long time since undergraduate. Perhaps I should start reading it during this pandemic free time. There is a paragraph in the summary that reads:

“With its romantic notions of human brotherhood and self-realization, German culture held a potent allure for Du Bois. Germany, he said, was the first place white people had treated him as an equal. But the prevalence of anti-Semitism allowed Du Bois no illusions that the Kaiserreich was free of racism. His challenge, says Appiah, was to take the best of German intellectual life without its parochialism—to steal the fire without getting burned.”

The idiom: “steal the fire without getting burned” may be useful as well. I imagine it would be extremely difficult to have to deal with ethically and politically problematic teachers and colleagues. Du Bois didn’t have the luxury of “keep things things in the past” since at the time, anti-semitism was still prevalent amongst his own intellectual circles. Perhaps his way of dealing with these intellectuals can shed light on how we can also deal with past problematic philosophers and perhaps current ones as well.

Book: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674724914

[Derek Bowman]

So I'm not sure if my relationship to Socrates fits this model or not.

I do in some respects take Socrates as an exemplar - of certain virtues, and of an approach to philosophy. But I simultaneously hold him up to a criticism which I then reflect at myself.

For example, when the Thirty Tyrants asked him and others to arrest Leon of Salamis on trumped up charges, Socrates went home and refused to participate. (Plato's Apology, 32c-d) This is, in one respect, brave and principled. And yet he *just* went home, apparently doing nothing to warn Leon or otherwise actively resist.

Insofar as I take Socrates as an incomplete exemplar, I'm thereby forced to interrogate my own desire to be content with simply avoiding complicity in the injustice around me. (See Republic 496d-e)

But just as I'm dissatisfied with that response from Socrates, I'm dissatisfied with it from myself. I don't claim to have done much of great consequence as a result of such dissatisfaction, though it has motivated me to look for (and occasionally find) ways to go beyond my natural comfort zone.