Lamprecht, Cambridge Historiography, and a prelude to the philosophy of philosophy:
(The bit on Leo Strauss is just bait.)
Regular readers may recall that I have been interested in the reception of Leo Strauss by analytic philosophers. His first (1936) monograph in English, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis, has an odd position in this reception. Even Strauss' harshest critics tend to express admiration for it. So, for example, in an otherwise critical (1951) review of Strauss’ (1948) work On Tyranny, Vlastos (then at Cornell), writes, “Those who have read and admired Professor Strauss's earlier book on Hobbes will be disappointed in this monograph.” In fact, Vlastos goes on to praise Strauss’ “learning” and “agility of mind” before complaining that “the weakness of this [new] work can be traced directly to his present addiction to the strange notion that a historical understanding of a historical thinker is somehow a philosophical liability.” (593) The implication is that the earlier Hobbes monograph did try to offer historical understanding of Hobbes.
Recently, when I asked Quentin Skinner about his views on the role Strauss' early Hobbes book may have played in the development of Cambridge Historiography, he wrote me the following. (I quote with permission.)
I can certainly say that I was impressed by Strauss’s book myself.
I was partly impressed by his willingness to take seriously the Hobbes archive at Chatsworth. I can’t imagine Oakeshott even knowing of its existence, but Strauss made valuable use of it. A good reminder that serious contextual work has to begin in the archives. But what I chiefly admired about Strauss’s book was his account of how much Hobbes owed to the rhetorical culture of antiquity and the Renaissance. He has a particularly perceptive account of the influence of Aristotle’s rhetoric in Hobbes’s discussion of the emotions in his Elements of Law. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that, in my book Reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of Hobbes (1996) I make a number of references to Strauss’s 1936 book, all of them highly appreciative. Nor was I merely atoning for the nasty things I said about Strauss and ‘secret writing’ in one of my early texts; I really learned a lot from his book, and wanted to say so.
Now, one of the early reviews of Strauss' book was a certain SPL, who reviewed it in (1937) Journal of Philosophy. The reviewer also praises the book for the kind of reasons that Skinner describes in his recent email to me. For present purposes, and to transition into today's post, the central point of the review is that Strauss (accurately) describes Hobbes' turn away from history. I quote the key passage:
And 'philosophy' is here understood as somehow not beholden to the past. Strauss' own rejection of his own early contextualism is itself foreshadowed here. Because to respond to Hobbes, Strauss thinks he needs a new philosophy of history one that brackets the historicism that he takes to have been built on Hobbesian foundations.
Michael Kremer and Trevor Pearce helped me realize that SPL is almost certainly Sterling P. Lamprecht (1890–1973), himself a very distinguished historian of philosophy. And as it happens, he wrote a lovely paper "Historiography of Philosophy" that I discuss here.
After, first, rejecting the idea that 'historiography' is the rhetoric of the historian (a position which he associates with Carl Becker), and, second, rejecting it as a specialized kind of history, that is, a history of what people have thought about the past, Sterling P. Lamprecht, a philosopher then at Amherst, proposes,
here to assign to the term still another meaning and to indicate the implications of this meaning. Events occur in the world. Then the historian comes along, examines those events, and writes his account of those events. His work, itself an event, is about those other events. Then the historiographer comes along. He examines that particular event which is the historian's analysis of the prior events. His work, itself still another event, is about an event which is about the prior events. Historiography, thus conceived, becomes an explanation of the way in which one event can be "about" other events, an examination of the implications of the fact that a given event both has other prior events as its subject-matter and in turn may become subject-matter for subsequent events. Historiography, in this sense of the term, is a branch of metaphysics.--"The Historiography of Philosophy," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 36, No. 17 (Aug. 17, 1939), p 449.
Historiography is a branch of metaphysics, then, or as he also calls it a "prelude to a philosophy of philosophy." (460)
Historiography is, then, about explaining the intentionality of some events whose intentional objects are prior events and can figure into certain kinds of explanations. I want to call attention to three features of Lamprecht's understanding of historiography: first, historiography so conceived is explanatory. It is not entirely clear whether history is also an explanatory enterprise, but the material that follows the quoted passage makes clear that it, too, is explanatory. The explanations are interpretive and generate what Lamprecht calls "comprehensive judgment" ((451); so the explanations need not be causal). Second, formally, Lamprecht treats historiography the way 'we' might treat (or, if that is misleading, then as analogous to the way one might treat) the philosophy of mind. (The significance of this becomes more clear below.) Three, Lamprecht's treatment of the 'historian's analysis' is meant to be relatively neutral between different kinds of historical practices (he draws a contrast between Gibbon and Hegel) despite "the most startling differences." (450) To be sure, Lamprecht is actually rather critical of any final/teleological history (such as Hegel's) and himself has a preference for Thucydides and Gibbon (because their political judgments are sounder basis to reflect on social reality), but this does not impact his metaphysics (although it may explain it).*
Now, before I get to my reason for posting on Lamprecht's essay, it is worth noting Lamprecht's main interest is in defending and explaining what talk of 'meaning' of a historical event might amount to, or what he calls the "legitimacy of meaning." (455) At first he seems to distinguish sharply the truth of a historical statement, which just "is agreement with the past" (455) from its meaning. He argues that "in general, meanings arise in the context of inquiry; what meanings arise depends, not simply on the subject-matter given to the inquiry, but also on the direction in which the inquiry develops." (455) What Lamprecht means by 'meaning' is best conveyed by the terms 'import' or 'significance' (or 'vitality' a term Lamprecht also uses). This is especially clear in his explanation of why one cares about historical meaning:
The historical enterprise always has such reference to future situations unless a certain historian is willing to have his enterprise lose significance by lapsing into bare chronicle. What in any historical subject-matter is important, why it is important, and how it is important are not questions which can ever be settled by looking at the past or by emphasizing one's present likes and dislike. (456)
There is a certain kind of methodologist who rejects the legitimacy of this kind of enterprise of meaning-making within the sciences. Elster, for example, rejects its in his Sour Grapes. But while it is not my present interest to defend Lamprecht on this point, I have been, in general, rather critical of Elster (and those like him) who want to dismiss such meaning-finding projects (see here for explicit criticism of Elster).
So much for set up. Lamprecht then moves to the historiography of philosophy. And he treats the philosopher in the manner he treats the historian:
To philosophize, just as much as to write history, is to report on certain facts, to express a personal attitude, and adventurously to offer an interpretation of what the facts mean when approached as the philosopher may happen to approach them. Historiography of philosophy increases the significance of various philosophies by virtue of the way in which it places these philosophies in the settings within which they have most pertinence and meaning. (458)
For Lamprecht, a philosopher is a kind of representative agent of thinking man (alas he is rather gendered on this point). And a non/a-historical philosopher is always writing from a particular perspective or bounded situation even if that perspective is shorn wholly from what he calls 'alogical' elements (so even if it could be the purist of the pure philosophy). If the word 'perspective' rubs you the wrong way, the point is not to make a relativist claim. Rather, "The historical study of philosophy thus enables one to escape many, if not all, limitations of provincialism and parochialism." (459) This is a claim within historiography of philosophy, but it is supposed to be descriptive about philosophy. (Of course, there is also an implied normative claim here in how one ought to do philosophy.)
In fact, this claim in historiography of philosophy is not defended in terms of perspectivalism. Lamprecht's point is not that doing philosophy by way of history of philosophy allows one to combine more perspectives. Rather, while he very sharply distinguishes between the truth of an idea and the history of an idea, he goes on to claim that "the truth of an idea can be established only when we know fully what the idea means, and that what the idea fully means can be established only through its historical setting and context." (459, emphasis added.) Lamprecht means to claim here that establishing a historical truth is never merely a mechanical act of verifying statements in light of past events. That kind of verification is a minimum requirement on historical truth (a minimal competence of the historian), but no more than that (it is necessary, but not sufficient). Nor is Lamprecht claim that when taken in context all ideas are true.
Rather, Lamprecht is invoking a kind of holism about philosophical ideas, whose significance or import requires contextual understanding. Of course, by Lamprecht's lights this understanding also presupposes a kind of forward glance to how ideas in context shape the future of philosophy (which helps explain, in part, our interest in the particular philosophical events of the past). People who know my own work will see that Lamprecht anticipates some of my own views, albeit in the context of a very different general metaphysics.
There is also a subsidiary, instrumental role to this contextualism about philosophy: "Historiography is instructive because it trains one to understand various and varied philosophies as cultural functions with their respective contributions to truth as well as their respective limitations and natural risks of error." (459) I think many contextual historians of philosophy would agree with Lamprecht (and have said so in print without realizing that Lamprecht got there first). My objection to this point is that while historiography may well be instructive in the way Lamprecht supposes, such an enterprise itself comes with opportunity costs. That is: the effort required to gain this worthwhile understanding may well prevent one from contributing to the potentially meaningful ideas worth having in one's age.
However, what's neat about Lamprecht’s position is that a generation before the Cambridge school, he argues for a kind of contextual historiography of the history of philosophy. In the hands of Quentin Skinner, especially, Cambridge's historiography is rooted in a kind of late Wittgensteinianism and ordinarily language philosophy account of meaning. The problem with the development of Cambridge school is not that once this account of meaning was non common-place in philosophy anymore its foundations seem unmoored, but rather that it imposes its account of meaning on its sources, which may often be unproblematic, but sometimes finds it difficult to allow that the philosophical sources it discusses may be shaping the historian's context. (This may be cryptic today, but I have discussed it other places.) For Lamprecht the historian of philosophy can never be wholly independent from the events she tries to characterize and, thereby, does more justice to the (potential) meaning of the ideas studied in their context.
Lamprecht recognizes that the historiographer will, "however, if he be wise, not claim to be able to escape from all limitations, to move in an infinite universe of discourse which contains all possible frames of reference. Rather he will think within his enlarged frame of reference with an ironic enjoyment of the fact that he is once more illustrating in his own career the place of mind in nature." (460, emphasis in Lamprecht.) This near-Borgesian statement is in fact the closing claim of his essay.
*For the interested reader: Lamprecht distinguishes "three [main] elements into which one may analyze the historical enterprise. The given subject-matter which the historian must accept and correctly report gives this enterprise its tie to the past. The various interests which animate the historian in pursuing his task give to the enterprise characteristics that are due to its locus in its particular present. The product of the enterprise yields an interpretation of the past of which both the reference and the means of verification are necessarily future. Past, present, and future are thus all involved in compact interrelationships in the historical enterprise." (p. 457)