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DRAFT

Not to be quoted or referred to.

The History of Ideas as Philosophy and History

When the Isaiah Berlin Professorship in the History of Ideas was being established at

Oxford one of the questions to come up for discussion was what should be the name of

the post. Bernard Williams (of whom more later) apparently protested: You cant give it

that name! No one wants to be called a historian of ideas. Williams view did not prevail

but he had a point.1

There is no doubt that the history of ideas is disparaged on two sides

nowadays not philosophical enough for the philosophers, not historical enough for the

historians. Speaking personally, I feel honoured to carry a label that goes back through

Berlin himself to Lovejoy and Carl Becker, but even those of us who do not reject the

name must admit that the history of ideas is, at least, methodologically puzzling.2

Just what are ideas anyway? Anyone with a little philosophical or historical

awareness knows that the use of idea as a generic way of referring to the contents of

the mind is actually something quite historically specific. The seventeenth-century idea

idea, as Quine called it, was part of a constructive intellectual project that developed in

England as a philosophical parallel to the new physics, a project whose presuppositions

analytical atomism, mental self-transparency seem nowadays (to say the least) deeply

1 This essay is based on the first of my lectures as Isaiah Berlin Professor of the History of Ideas, delivered

at Oxford in January and February 2010.2 Many years ago, when the prospects for academic employment were even worse than they are now (hardto believe, I know) I was interviewed on behalf of an American university by a well-known British

philosopher. Although I didnt get the job I did hear something of what he had to say about me. Though I

had, he thought, a number of positive qualities, I was, in the end, he regretted to say, not really a

philosopher but a historian of ideas. This essay is based on the first of my lectures as Isaiah Berlin

Professor of the History of Ideas, delivered at Oxford in January and February 2010.

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problematic. Crossing the Channel to Germany, home of das historische Bewusstsein,

things are a little different. In Germany, the word Idee retains its Platonic resonance.

Thus, when it came to translating Locke into German, the word chosen for idea was

Vorstellung a good choice in many ways, suggesting as it does whatever items are

placed before the mind. The word was adopted by Kant and translated back into

English (again, quite reasonably) as representation thus complicating even further the

understanding of Kant in the English-speaking world. Hence the preferred term in

Germany is Begriffsgeschichte conceptual history. Although the achievements of

Begriffsgeschichte are impressive one thinks of the Archiv fr Begriffsgeschichte,

Ritters Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie, Brunner, Konze and Kosellecks

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, to say nothing of such towering individual figures as Hans

Blumenberg the label itself is equally historical and, arguably, no less problematic.

Concept (as used to refer to an item that structures our judgement) is another

philosophical term of art in this case the result of the need for an English equivalent to

the Kantian Begriff, itself part of Kants triadic sub-division of the mind and its

representations into sense, understanding (the site of concepts) and reason.3

Indeed,

Ian Hacking has argued in his wonderful little book, Why Does Language Matter to

Philosophy?,4

that the transition from a discourse of ideas to one of concepts marks

an epochal shift in our understanding of thought and language (a shift that, he thinks, was

followed in the twentieth century by another, from concepts to sentences). Whether one is

3 It seems to have been common enough to describe thinking as conceiving and the products of thought

as conceptions but the modern idea of concepts as the organizing principles of judgements appears tohave been introduced into philosophical discourse by Sir William Hamilton and Coleridge and was

popularized by William James4

Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1975)

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convinced by Hackings claim or not (I am not) it is clear that any defence of the history

of ideas must include methodological reflection on its subject-matter.

That is one task that I propose to take up in this essay. In the course of it, I want to

develop a conception of the history of ideas that is, I shall argue, both philosophical and

genuinely historical. My views place me at odds, both theoretically and practically, with

the justly celebrated historian of ideas who has done most to bring the methodological

issues at stake in the discipline to reflective awareness I mean, of course, Quentin

Skinner and I shall take the opportunity to articulate the differences between my views

and his. Let me make it clear at the outset, however, that there is one point on which he

and I are very much agreed. Although what I am advocating is a conception of the history

of ideas that is intended to be both philosophical and historical, I do not mean to say that

the historical and the philosophical impulses are always one and the same. It is a

fundamental part of the activity of the historian that she brings to awareness the simple

fact of difference between ourselves and the lives of those whom she studies. To insist on

this and that this awareness has intrinsic value irrespective of any wider use we might

make of our historical understanding has been, I believe, a driving force behind Skinners

long and immensely productive scholarly career. And on this point he is, I think,

absolutely right. The philosopher, on the other hand, wants to make progress with our

(or, at least, her) problems. Whether or not (better: to what extent) those problems are

shared with the authors of the past is an open question. Once again, I have absolutely no

quarrel with this. However, I believe that there is an important region where the two

impulses are complementary. The historical awareness of difference can help us in the

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task of articulating and reflecting on our own concerns even where those concerns are not

shared with the past and it is this view that I shall defend in this essay.

I The History of Philosophy and the History of Ideas

I shall start by returning to the presumed contrast between philosophy and the history of

ideas. It evidently raises one puzzle: where does that leave the history of philosophy?

Which side of the line does it lie on? For some analytical philosophers the history of

philosophy is not part of philosophy in the strict sense and the fact that historians of

philosophy are to be found sharing space with philosophers in the academy is, in the end,

an accident of institutional design and nomenclature. But, more interestingly, there are

others who, while holding to the contrast between philosophy and the history of ideas,

nevertheless place the history of philosophy within philosophy. Here, for example, is how

Bernard Williams opens his admirable book on Descartes:

This is a study in the history of philosophy rather than in the history of ideas. I usethese labels to mark the distinction that the history of ideas is history before it is

philosophy, while with the history of philosophy it is the other way round.5

What, then, is that distinction for Williams? For the history of ideas, he writes, the

question about a work what does it mean? is centrally the question what did it mean?,

and the pursuit of that question moves horizontally in time from the work, as well as

backwards, to establish the expectations, conventions, familiarities, in terms of which the

author could have succeeded in conveying a meaning. The history of philosophy, by

contrast, Williams says ... has to constitute its object, the work, in genuinely historical

terms, yet there is a cut-off point where authenticity is replaced by the aim of articulating

5Bernard Williams,Descartes: the Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p.9

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philosophical ideas.6 Williams takes his own task to be, as he puts it, the rational

reconstruction of Descartess thought, where the rationality of the construction is

essentially and undisguisedly conceived in contemporary style.7

It seems, then, as

though Williams envisages two, or, possibly, even three, kinds of meaning for historical

texts. There is, first, the meaning that the text once had (the province of the historian of

ideas), second, the meaning that it now has and, perhaps also beyond that (it isnt clear to

me whether Williams thinks that this is the same thing as that second kind of meaning)

the meaning that the text would have if it were rationally reconstructed, the latter two

kinds of meaning being the concerns of the historian of philosophy. Is this plausible? It

all depends (as philosophers still like to say) on what you mean by meaning, but on an

obvious understanding I think not. Imagine that a seventeenth-century Frenchman were to

say Paris is north of Lyons (or, more likely Paris se trouve au nord de Lyon). Would

the meaning of that utterance have been different then from what it is in the early twenty-

first century? If knowing the meaning of a sentence is a matter of knowing its truth-

conditions, surely not. We know how to settle its truth-value in just the way that the

original speaker would have done. To grasp the meaning of Paris se trouve au nord de

Lyon we simply need to understand that it refers to two cities and that it is true if the

former is indeed to the north of the latter. Obviously, when Descartes says sum res

cogitans the sense and reference of the terms are far, far harder to establish than Paris

is north of Lyons, but why should anyone think that just because of this complexity

history (or rational reconstruction) will actually change the meaningof what he says?

6Williams,Descartes, pp. 9-10

7Williams,Descartes, p. 10

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Williams gives an analogy which, or so he claims, will help us to grasp his point.

The approach to texts taken by the history of ideas is, he writes, the equivalent of

playing seventeenth-century scores on seventeenth-century instruments according to

seventeenth-century practice8, while, in the case of the history of philosophy the

musical analogy is, as an ideal, Stravinskys Pulcinella, in which the melodic line is

Pergolesis, the harmony and orchestration Stravinskys.9 Yet this analogy strikes me as

deeply unpersuasive indeed, strongly misleading. A musical work has its identity in its

score (that is what makes it the work that it is) but an essential part of the value of a piece

of music lies in the experience that we have of it as performed. For that reason one might

perhaps say that the experience that we have of the work as performed constitutes the

meaning of a piece of music. But this is obviously not meaning in the way in which

we talk of the truth-conditions of sentences being determined by the meanings of the

terms that they contain. We might say, in Williamss spirit, that the meaning (for us) of a

Beethoven sonata is different if performed on a contemporary fortepiano or on a modern

concert grand (and, indeed, that its meaning as performed on the fortepiano now is

different for us than it would have been for Beethovens original audience even if it were

performed on precisely the same instrument). But is it really plausible to say the same

thing about, for example, Kants Transcendental Deduction?

Like Williams, I think that rational reconstruction has a central role to play in

our understanding of philosophical texts. But the account that Williams gives of what

rational reconstruction amounts to is to my mind wholly unconvincing. To explain how

it works, Williams gives us the Stravinsky/Pergolesi contrast. Now to my ears, at least,

8Williams,Descartes, p. 9

9Williams,Descartes, p. 10

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Pulcinella is a work by Stravinsky, even if the melody is taken from elsewhere. An

essential part ofPulcinellas identity as a piece of music is the parodic context with

which Stravinsky surrounds the melody. Should we see the rational reconstruction of

historical texts in the same way? Would Williamss book have been better titled:

Rhapsody on a Theme by Descartes?

Of course, when we interpret a philosophical text we are engaged in recovering

its meaning but we must not be misled by that phrase into a misunderstanding of what

that involves. Here is a very crude view of meaning. What we have in front of us is a text

so many black marks on pieces of paper. Their meaning is what brings them to life for

us just as when we see a drawing of a few lines and circles as aface or grasp a series of

sounds as a melody. On this view, meaning is something ineliminably experiential it is

something that you or I grasp and the question then naturally arises: is meaning-for-you

the same as meaning-for-me or: is meaning-for-us-now the same as meaning-for-them-

then? I have no doubt that Williams (one of the most acute philosophers of the twentieth

century) would be appalled at having such a caricature view of meaning attributed to him.

Nevertheless, his (as it seems to me) misguided analogy with the playing of music on

authentic instruments encourages just this kind of subjective view and hence leads to the

mistaken apparent alternative that we must either aim to recapture the meaning of a text

as experienced at the time (the obviously impossible task of the historian ideas) or

construct its meaning for us (at the price, he claims, of replacing authenticity with

another, philosophical ideal)

Against this, I want to insist that when we ask what is the meaning of the text?

there is only a single question here: namely, how should we understand the text? But that

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This conception of language goes together with what I call the language-chess

analogy.11

In a game of chess we can give an account of what is being done at any stage of a

game (what move is being made) without giving an account of the particular state of

mind of either the participant or the observer. This is because we know the rules of the

game (and can presume that the players also know and are following the same rules).

Moreover, we can make a sharp distinction between the move itself and what follows

from it. A game of chess can be thought of as a huge, descending tree-structure of

possibilities. To make a move is to select among one of those possibilities and so close

off a whole ramifying set of branches (and twigs and twiglets). These we may think of as

the consequences both immediate and increasingly remote of the move. Each move

has a determinate set of such consequences, even though we all (even the most gifted

players) have only limited insight into what those consequences are.

To the extent that the same is true of language in general, an apparently very

plausible view of interpretation presents itself. The interpretation of philosophical texts,

we might say, should start with establishing their meaning in the way that the observer of

the chess game might set out the sequence of the moves. Only after that had been done

would one go on to such further questions as what the logical consequences of this or that

the analysis of the structure of thought; secondly, that the study of thoughtis to be sharply distinguished

from the study of the psychological process of thinking; and, finally, that the only proper method for

analysing thought consists in the analysis of language. Michael Dummett, Can Analytical Philosophy be

Systematic, and Ought it to Be?, in Truth and other Enigmas (London: Duckworth, 1978), pp. 437-58, p.458.11 See my Hegel's Dialectic and its Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Ch. 1. By

goes together with I mean encourages and is encouraged by. Logically, the language-chess analogy

entails the view of language as public and prior to individual speakers but the entailment does not go inboth directions. Indeed, the view of language as prior to individual speakers that dominated in French-

language philosophy (based on the Saussure-inspired distinction between langue and parole) differs in

some important respects from the language-chess analogy. In particular, the Saussurean vision (particular in

the hands of many of its later advocates) is holistic, where the language-chess analogy is not.

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philosophical terms are very often terms of art, coined by and defined with greater or

lesser degrees of explicitness as the case may be, by particular speakers. This is obviously

so in some cases (think of Kants use of the term transcendental) but may be true too

when the word is not originated by a particular author. So, although we may ask What

does justice mean?, we also need to ask What does Rawls mean by justice? And

this latter is not a psychological question, a question about Rawlss state of mind, but a

question about his textual practice: how do we find it used in his texts?

(3) Another striking contrast between the language of philosophical texts and chess

concerns the extent to which we grasp the meaning of philosophical terms. In chess, we

know the powers of each piece (anyone who doesnt know that the king can castle simply

doesnt know to play the game). On the other hand, the truth (if it is one) that justice

requires equality is a conceptual one, part of the meaning of the term. Yet such

conceptual truths (the meanings of philosophical terms) are not fully available to all

competent speakers in the way that every competent chess player grasps the rules

governing the pieces they are a matter of the deepest controversy in a way that the

powers of a chess piece are not.13

(4) A related important feature of philosophical language is that it is characteristically

textual in the following sense. For simple empirical terms, our understanding is a mixture

of linguistic knowledge (knowing, for example, of an adjective that it can be used to

characterize a substantive within a judgement, that kind of thing) and perceptual

13 You might think that there is a parallel in the case of chess. There are certain things that we need to knowto make a move (the basic powers of the piece) and certain things that are true a priori which we may or

may not know (that moving that piece will lead to checkmate in six moves). But the parallel here is a false

one, for the conceptual truths of philosophy are not the kind of indirect consequences that players foresee to

a greater or lesser degree in chess. If they are true they license inferences now, at once the question is

whether they are true or not.

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recognition being able to pick out the things that fall under the term (picking out red

things as red and so on). Something similar is, I think, true of philosophical concepts.

But here the recognitional element is not a matter of picking out objects by perception so

much as identifying the beliefs that instantiate the concepts, and those beliefs are, in turn,

governing patterns which govern the structure of texts. So someone who believes in legal

positivism will show that in the things that she says about law that law and morality are

different things, for example; that we can identify the law without using normative

concepts, and so on. Perhaps she will say explicitly that she is a positivist; perhaps not,

and it will be up to the interpreter to show the presence of that belief by the pattern that is

to be found in what she says elsewhere. In any case, it is the pattern of the text that is the

final arbiter.14

(5) So far, I havent questioned an apparent parallel between chess and philosophical

texts. Just as a game of chess is an ordered sequence of individual moves made according

to rules, so a philosophical text, we might think, is (at least roughly) an ordered sequence

of sentences operating according to (more or less explicit and more or less agreed) rules

as steps in an argument. Of course, some bits of philosophy look more like sequential

arguments than others (Aquinass Five Ways of Proving That God Exists more so than

HeideggersBeing and Time, to state the obvious) but, even where philosophy aspires to

the coercive condition of a deductive argument, there is an important difference

14 Putting these two ideas together, we can see how close the business of textual interpretation and the

substantive questions of philosophy can come. Take a question like: What is transcendental idealism? It

would be absurd to think that we could answer such a question without looking at what Kant means by

transcendental idealism. But we want to know too: What does transcendental idealism entail? Is it, forexample (as Kant claims) equivalent to empirical realism. And at this point the question is not (just): is

transcendental idealism (as Kant construes it) equivalent to empirical realism in Kants sense. It is a

question about transcendental idealism and empirical realism as such perhaps what Kant means by

empirical realism is inadequate, for example.

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(3) Only happiness is desired

Therefore:

(4) Only happiness is desirable in the sense that it ought to be desired (strictly:

if anything ought to be desired, happiness is the only thing it can be).

Here then we have what we might call a rational reconstruction of Mills argument. Is it a

good argument? Well, it appears to me to be valid and at least it doesnt rest on the

simple confusion between something that is capable of being desired and something that

ought to be desired that Moore takes to be its obvious reading. The soundness of the

argument, however, must depend on the plausibility of the premises. Yet is it Mills

argument? This is more difficult to decide. Certainly, Mill spends a good deal of effort in

Utilitarianism arguing for what looks very much like proposition (3). And a way of

reading the passage about the evidence for visibility consisting in being seen might be

that we should take it as intended to be an argument in support of (2) (roughly speaking,

it would say to the reader: we are looking for the class of visible things; perhaps there are

visible things that are not seen, but the only evidence we have for what things are visible

is what we see; the best inference from the evidence that we have is that the class of

visible things and the class of seen things is co-extensive). On the other hand, there seems

to be nothing in Mills text that looks like an argument for (1). But might we not attribute

it to Mill as something that he takes for granted, a belief that would complete an

enthymematic argument? The reconstruction is, you might say, a friendly amendment: if

it is not exactly Mills argument as he intended it to work, at least it gives his position a

better chance of being accepted than Moores allegedly obvious confusion of meaning.

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So, whether or not it is in any psychological sense Mills argument, he ought, you might

think, to welcome it.

Why stop there? A large number of works written in English over the last half-

century interpret past philosophers by reconstructing their arguments, not by adding

premises that it would be plausible to attribute to them but by removing ones that the

commentator believes to be dubious and substituting ones that he or she thinks more

plausible. P.F Strawsons The Bounds of Sense (in many ways the inspiration for this

style of history of philosophy) for example, gives an interpretation of the Critique of Pure

Reason that involves both addition and subtraction.

18

Kants arguments in the

Transcendental Analytic (particularly the Transcendental Deduction and Refutation of

Idealism) can be defended, Strawson claims, provided that we purge them of their

association with the imaginary discipline of transcendental psychology19

and replace it

with arguments that draw on the idea of a necessary connection between basic concepts.

Certainly, it can be illuminating to discover of an argument, not just why it works but,

equally, why it doesnt. Yet the objections are obvious. Above all, how confident can we

be that the interpreters judgement of what are good beliefs to hold are better than the

original authors? Strawsons interpretation is a case in point. Even conceding that there

are deep problems with Kants theory of synthesis, it is hardly beyond dispute that

Strawsons alternative is superior. How are concepts connected except by their meanings

and dont those yield analytical truths, not the kind of synthetic a priori propositions

that Strawson (and Kant) want? A further consequence of this reconstructive approach is

that, as we move away from the texts as originally presented, we lose context the gain

18P.F Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966)

19[[??]]

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in current relevance of seeing an author of the past purged of elements that the modern

interpreter takes to be indefensible risks disconnecting us from the way that the texts

were read and understood by the authors contemporaries. If you think, like Allen Wood,

for example, that [noumenal freedom] should be ... quarantined from Kantian ethics just

as strictly as if it carried the plague20

then you will probably find it difficult to

understand why the theme of noumenal freedom should have been so centrally important

for Kants German Idealist successors.

But this, of course, is to make a historical objection which will not necessarily

have force with all interpreters. Derek Parfit is supposed to have said that there are two

types of readers for the philosophical texts of the past: archaeologists and grave-robbers.

While the archaeologist will worry whether it is appropriate to attribute the desired belief

to the author under examination, the determined grave-robber will ascribe whatever she

thinks works to the argument and throw away what doesnt, regardless of historical

context. If I am to make my case, I need to show that something like archaeology itself

has a philosophical contribution to make.

III Philosophical Problems

At this point, I want to re-visit an assumption of the last section: that our interest in

studying the texts of the past is to reconstruct the arguments that they contain

(understanding by argument a sequence of deductively valid steps from premises to

conclusion). That we can do so for some of the central texts of the past is what I tried to

show with my example of Mills proof (and I think that there are many other possible

examples). Yet not everything that we find in the canon of past philosophy fits so easily

20Kantian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2008), p. 138

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response to philsophical problems need not be another argument: it may be, but, then

again, it may not. One way of reading Kants Copernican revolution is to interpret him

as resolving an inconsistency by changing one of the (hitherto unchallenged) premises in

order to open the possibility what he believes will be a successful argument against

scepticism about the existence of the external world where previous ones had failed.21

Yet that is not the only kind of response to philosophical dilemmas. One that is

particularly characteristic of post-Kantian Continental philosophy depends on the thought

that the apparent conflicts characteristic of philosophical problems are the result of a way

of thinking that is unreasonably and inappropriately limited. Thus, for Hegel, it is

necessary to move beyond Vorstellung (representation) and the understanding to a

speculative form of discourse, at which level the apparently compelling conflicts will fall

away.22

I want now to give an example of how the rational reconstruction of

philosophical problems can illuminate our understanding of the texts of the past. The

eighteenth century saw an ongoing dispute amongst those who studied (what we now

call) organic nature regarding the nature of organic growth the ways in which it comes

about that the seed transforms itself into the plant, the embryo into the adult animal

between those who were called at the time evolutionists and epigenetists. The

problem, it seems to me, was not merely empirical but conceptual: if growth was to be

21Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend

our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori by means of concepts have...

ended in failure. ...We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of

metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge... We should then be proceeding

precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis. (Critique of Pure Reason, B xvi,)22

It is in this spirit, I think, that we should read Heideggers famous rejection of Kants attempt to give aproof of the existence of the external world. The scandal of philosophy is not that this proof [of the

existence of the external world] has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again

and again.Being and Time, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967) p. 249

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fact of organic nature. On the other hand, the Idealist philosophers of nature Schelling

and Hegel, in particular, but also their precursors such as Herder and Goethe wrote

about organic development in a peculiarly fervent and excited way. Here, for example, is

a passage from HerdersIdeas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind:

Bearing in mind these transformations, these living operations in the egg of thebird or in the womb of the mammal, I feel we speak imprecisely if we talk of

seeds that are merely evolving, or of an epigenesis by which the members aresuperadded externally. It isBildung(genesis), an effect of growing, inward

Krfte, brought together in a mass by Nature in order that they might manifestthemselves.23

For Herder, as for Schelling and for Hegel (or so I claim) nothing less than a new

metaphysics a new conception of the ultimate nature of reality and a radically new

conception of philosophical explanation could do justice to the requirement of

explaining organic development without falling prey to one or other horn of the dilemma.

And this is a philosophical requirement that seemed, I believe, as obvious to the thinkers

of the time as it may seem strange and misguided to us now. My aim in the reconstruction

of what I have called the problem of development is not to defend the course that they

took, but to show its reasonableness in the intellectual context in which they found

themselves to help us to enter their world. The question in this case is not: is this a

belief that it is right to attribute to the author as an unstated part of an otherwise

incomplete argument?, so much as: is this a problem to which it is reasonable to see the

text as responding? Such attempts at rational reconstruction are, of course, more

23 Siehet man diese Wandlungen, diese lebendigen Wirkungen sowohl im Ei des Vogels als im Mutter-leibe des Tiers, das Lebendige gebret, so, dnkt mich, spricht man uneigentlich, wenn man von Keimen,

die nur entwickelt wrden, oder von einer Epigenesis redet, nach der die Glieder von auen zuwchsen.

Bildung (genesis) ist's, eine Wirkung innerer Krfte, denen die Natur eine Masse vorbereitet hatte, die sie

sich zubilden, in der sie sich sichtbar machen sollten. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der

Menschheit, Werke, 6 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989) Bk V, Ch. 2, p. 172.

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may be because we want to know about the concepts involved and their implications.

This is not to say that no questions of intention arise. Philosophical texts are extremely

complex -- terms are often left undefined (or defined in more than one way) and

arguments are presented without the premises which would make them persuasive.

Frequently, too, there is the question of whether a particular view is being advocated or

whether it is merely being presented hypothetically -- in order, perhaps, to illustrate its

weaknesses. For all of these reasons it is quite right of Skinner to deny that the text itself

forms theself-sufficientobject of inquiry and understanding (p. 4, my emphasis): many

hypotheses are necessary which go beyond what one would call narrowly the text

itself.26

Texts are deliberately produced artifacts and any theory of interpretation which

neglects that fact or treats it as being of minor significance is bound to go wrong. But it

does not follow from this that interpretation must match the authors intentions in the

sense of directing itself towards what the author may be said to have meant by saying

what he said (p. 31) and characterizing it in terms which the agent himself could at

least in principle have applied.27

The suggestion that we can describe a pattern

accurately only by using an agents own terminology -- his own criteria of description

26Even this is too simple. Perhaps there are philosophical texts in which it would be wrong to imagine that

we could ever properly say whether a particular viewpoint was being advocated, attacked or merelyexamined -- and not just because we are not in a position to tell: that it was actually important for the author

of the text to refuse to allow himself to be determined as doing any one to the exclusion of the others

(readers of Wittgenstein or Kierkegaard will appreciate this suspicion).27 One might think that this quotation contains a way in which my position and Skinners could be

reconciled: why not say (in concession to Skinner) that an author could be said to mean what an apparently

anachronistic interpretation would have her mean because she might in principle have been brought to

accept a characterisation, given in our terms, of the sort that I am now advocating? The trouble is that thenotion of attributability in principle (like the logical positivists verifiability in principle) has here

become impossibly vague and elastic. Since we can, without further external evidence, be brought to accept

the truths of mathematics (this, as Michael Dummett has pointed out, is a plausible account of just what we

mean by the idea of mathematical reasoning) then it follows by parity of reasoning -- absurdly -- that we

could already be said to mean all the mathematical truths that are in principle available to us.

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commendatory force? This brings me to my second critical reply to Skinner. It is not

clear to me that to concede the above point must lead us back to anything like the

principle of attribution; there seems to be no more reason why knowledge of the

authors intentions should be involved in grasping that part of the meaning of

courageous that relates to its force than in understanding its sense or reference.35

VI Intentions

I have taken issue with Skinners insistence that what the text is meant to mean sets the

limits to a properly historical form of textual interpretation. I agree with him, however,

that attention to the authors intentions is essential to a complete historical understanding

of a text. Let us concede, for the sake of argument, that Kants theoretical philosophy

would be more cogent without the theory of synthesis or that his moral philosophy can be

detached from Kants insistence on noumenal freedom. Such interpretations (if accepted)

will, I believe, have genuine historical value they show us something (albeit something

negative) about the way that Kants texts work. Nevertheless, they invite but do not

answer a pressing further question: why then does Kant himself adhere so tenaciously to

these elements of his theory? To answer this, we cannot remain at the level of the text

itself but must form hypotheses about the way in which Kant himself thought about his

text. If (as Skinner and I agree) an authors intentions are not a self-transparent, purely

subjective mental state, but if (pace Skinner) they are not to be identified as the

35The issue is complicated, not least by the fact that sense itself, on the standard acccount, can only be

individuated -- as the grasp of the contribution made by a term -- in relation to the expression, and thus

the speech-act, of which it forms part.

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intended even if we did not reflect upon (to prepare a nutritious meal) and things about

which we may be quite genuinely unsure (to establish a romantic atmosphere).

Here, then, are some conclusions.

(1) We ascribe intentions as we do beliefs because they enable us to make sense of

behaviour.

(2) The language in which we do this does not have to reconstruct or translate the

language of the agent to whom the intentions are ascribed. The agent may have

had no reflective thought on the matter (intending to cook a meal that is

nutritious) or, indeed, not be capable of language at all (the dog).

(3) Agents, certainly, have a great deal of information about their own behaviour but

they do not have some privileged, final authority over its interpretation.

Drawing on these conclusions, how should we apply them to the understanding of that

very particular kind of practice, the production of philosophical texts?

The first thing to say is that the attribution of intentions to authors is similar in

principle to the ascription of beliefs in the reconstruction of arguments discussed earlier:

it is what makes sense of the pattern that we find in texts. Yet, where the ascription of

beliefs may be relatively straightforward (what may we reasonably add to complete

arguments that are enthymematic?) the attribution of intentions is, of course, much less

so. You may think, like Allen Wood and many others, that Kants moral theory would be

much better if we did not see it as centred upon a conception of noumenal freedom. Let

us say that you are right. Does that settle the matter about what Kant himself intended? In

my view, certainly not. Not only are there many texts of Kants38

which, to my mind,

make it quite clear that Kant actually canvases something like a compatibilist view of

38Which I would be happy to show you if there were time

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genuinely historical. Yet you might think (if you were not feeling generous) that what I

have offered so far is neither. I have, for instance, given an argumentative reconstruction

of what I called the problem of development and claimed that this is a kind of

background account that helps us understand a range of texts in the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries in which the notion of organism (as opposed to mechanism)

and the idea of organic development play a prominent role. But this is not

contemporary philosophy I am not claiming that the problem of development is one that

has force for us.40

Nor is it the kind of history that the historian will recognize its more

of a grand claim about a Weltanschauung than the sort of thing that can be checked

against archives, databases or other empirical sources. At the very least, the apparent

analytical cogency with which I presented it presupposes a considerable distance from the

immediate texts. I claimed too that Kants commitment to the idea of noumenal freedom

is deeply rooted in his thought because it is essential to being able to see human agents as

properly held to account before a just and omniscient God. Yet so much the worse for

Kant, Kants modern advocates may reply what we need to do is to reconstruct Kants

thought in such a way that it moves away from such untenable commitments.

To some extent, I have to plead guilty: the objections to this kind of history of

ideas are serious. However, I want to argue that they are worth facing for both

philosophical and historical reasons. To make my case, let me revisit two of the themes I

raised earlier in this essay. In discussing the reconstruction of arguments from the past, I

introduced a contrast (originally made by Derek Parfit) between archaeologists and

grave-robbers. I want now to question that analogy. Vivid though it is, it fails to bring

40Although it appears that Thomas Nagel subscribes to a rather similar argument. See his Panpsychism,

inMortal Questions (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1979), pp. 181-95

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Two features of Searles position are worth noting. The first is what he terms the

principle of expressibility: that whatever can be meant can be said.48

In other words,

language is first and foremost a system of public rules; the private use of language and

innovative or original development must be in some way parasitic on that public

existence. The second is that there is no sharp line of distinction to be drawn between

language and action. It is their common rule-governed character that connects the two:

...a theory of language is part of a theory of action, simply because speaking is a rule-

governed form of behavior.49

These two claims represent language (and action in

general) as held within an invisible network of normative commitments. They were

widely accepted; indeed, I believe that they form the implicit background to Skinners

version of speech-act theory. We have here then, I suggest, a clear example of

philosophical doxa a view taken for granted rather than argued for. In digging out such

doxa and holding them up for scrutiny and objection the history of ideas and philosophy,

understood as critical engagement with unquestioned assumptions about thought and

language, come together.50

The study ofdoxa and the attempt to address philosophical

problems connect because doxa are (very often) part of philosophical problems.51

48Speech Acts, p. 1949

Speech Acts, p. 17, my emphasis.50

The view of language as rule-governed action is relatively easy to criticize now because the tide of

Anglo-American philosophy has turned so strongly against it. I have examined some of the criticisms in

The Role of Rules (International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 9 (2001), pp. 369-84). Put briefly, the

idea was challenged both by the pragmatist strand in analytical philosophy represented by Quine and his

pupils, and (more surprisingly) by a new reading of Wittgenstein. (I say surprising since Wittgenstein hadbeen widely believed to be the chief advocate of the rule-governed conception of language.) Of course,

though the view was dominant in the U.K. and widespread in the United States, it was far removed from

the view of language to be found in much twentieth-century Continental philosophy in the writings of

Adorno or Gadamer or Derrida, for example.51 Another term fordoxa might be Daniel Dennetts bugbears. (See Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free

Will Worth Wanting(Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1984), Ch. 1, Dont Feed the Bugbears). Dennetts treatment

of free will is entirely unhistorical but his philosophical approach the attempt to defend his view by

loosening the hold of certain unreflectively accepted images and beliefs that apparently entail the contrary

fits very well with what I am here advocating undertaking by means of history.

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In the course of this essay I have engaged with Quentin Skinners account of how

we should interpret the texts of the past. But, of course, historians want to do more than

interpret texts. They want to ask why they came about and what effects they had. On an

extreme view, ideas and ideals are mere epiphenomena; they are, as Namier said

flapdoodle. This view is often ascribed to Marxists evidently, wrongly. Marxists

believe that ideas and ideals play an essential causal role in maintaining unequal

structures of power; that is what the theory of ideology is all about. Skinner agrees that

political discourse plays an essential legitimating role. Thus, he says, the entrepreneurs of

early modern Europe had a recognisable motive for wanting to pursue their ventures

unhindered They needed as a matter of some ideological urgency to legitimise what

they were doing to those expressing such comprehensive doubts about the morality of

their lives.52

Like the Marxists, Skinner thinks that political discourse is legitimating in

its effects but instrumental in its origins.53

In other words: Instrumentality-In-

Legitimation-Out. There is not the space here to take issue with why I think IILO views

of the Skinner/Marx/post-modern (though not, I think, pace Skinner, Nietzschean) sort

are deeply problematic (that they are extremely unflattering to the sincere self-

understanding of philosophers is evident though that is hardly a conclusive argument).54

52 Moral Principles and Social Change, in Visions of Politics, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2002),

pp 145-57, p.14753 Thus he writes in relation to the work of Reinhart Koselleck: Koselleck and I both assume that we needto treat our normative concepts less as statements about the world than as tools and weapons of ideological

debate. Both of us have perhaps been influenced by Foucaults Nietzschean contention that the history

which bears and determines us has the form of a war. (Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual

Change, in Visions of Politics, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2002), pp 175-87, p.177)54

Many of the difficulties are raised in On Voluntary Servitude

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In general, though, IILO views seem forced to depict the history of philosophy as a series

of cunning tricks a ruse or strategem played on the gullible.55

My own preference is for what I will call a LILO approach Legitimation-In-

Legitimation-Out. Legitimation I take here in the very broadest sense ultimately

rooted in human beings standing need to find ways to make sense of their lives in the

face of (or, at least, finding ways of accepting) the unpalatable but inescapable facts of

death and suffering. How those possibilities of legitimation have played out how they

have become exhausted and new ones developed forms a central part of the kind of

history of ideas that I aspire to (which is not, I hope, to deny that questions of economic

interest, institutional power and, indeed, individual psychology also play a role in the

story). In so doing, I would like to think of myself in a tradition that can trace itself back

to Hegel, and includes Nietzsche (as I would argue), Weber, the Frankfurt School

(particularly Die Dialektik der Aufklrung) and the extraordinary Hans Blumenberg.56

Thus we can (or so I would argue) see the tenacity Kants adhesion to the doxa of the

sovereign individual acting freely outside the causal order as explained by the need to see

the individual as apt to be judged justly by an omniscient divine judge. And this, in turn,

is (or so again I would argue) a part of Kants very novel post-Lisbon Earthquake

response to the problem of theodicy, a problem which (as Blumenberg has consistently

shown) is endemic in monotheistic religion, the most central (and now questionable) of

55 It is not clear whether those who perpetrate the stratagems are themselves gullible in Skinners view. InMarxs view, famously, not: the ideologists are themselves subject to ideological illusion hence their

ability to propagate ideology all the more convincingly. For Foucault, individual thinkers appear to be mere

surface effects, carried along on the shifting tides of episteme or (later) some wholly unspecified

conception of power. I am not sure where Skinner stands.56

Yes, and Carl Becker, Lovejoy and M.H. Abrams too

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the resources that Western human beings have used to make their place in the world

intelligible to themselves.

But that is a story for another day.57

Michael Rosen

Department of Government, Harvard University

mrosen@gov.harvard.edu