In Friday’s Read, which will cover the range of the books and articles I read, scholarly and otherwise, I’m going to use a format that I developed for a note-taking blog that I found hard to sustain—I ended up at least liking the format as a way to communicate my thoughts on a text with other potential readers.
Why did I get this book?
Unusually for me, I cannot recall which trail of breadcrumbs specifically led me to this book. I had no acquaintance with Ree’s work, I wasn’t looking for a history of philosophy in English for some particular reason, and I don’t think I found my way to it via some similar book. I suspect I read an early review, but I can’t recall doing so. In any event, I had no fixed purpose or pre-ordained use in mind for it.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes, mostly. I had some fear that it might simply turn out to be a tracing of all ideas and thoughts in English literature and culture that could be deemed to be philosophical in some sense, or that resembled established ideas in major philosophical texts, but it’s rather more specific and focused than that. The opening discussion of philosophy in Hamlet, for example, is not an account of the philosophical content of the play but of the reference to “philosophy” in it, which Ree points out is in its historical context quite literal and would have been understood as such by Elizabethean audiences—that Hamlet has been to Wittenberg because it is a place where “philosophy” could be learned. Most of what he discusses in the book are authors, texts and debates that were described in context as philosophical or pertaining to philosophy even if contemporary philosophy no longer canonizes them as such. It’s also a compelling and lively read that manages to provide context, biography and textual interpretation in a surprisingly concise package while attending to numerous authors and controversies that are generally not known today to anyone but early modern historians and literary critics.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I’ve found it a useful model for some of the restructuring of the history of “liberal arts” that I am working on at the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. I think it’s also a great example of what intellectual history could and should look like (and a great critique of what was wrong with an older style of intellectual history) and I can imagine myself teaching it or addressing it in that context in the future.
Quotes
More than with most books, I found myself marking a great many passages in the book—if I put them all here, this will be far too long. So I’ll offer up some flavor of the writing. What I appreciate is that Ree does a marvelous job of quoting from early modern prose in a way that both captures the changing tone and rhetoric that connected authors and some sense of the individual style of each author, including those who are not generally referenced today.
“The last of Charleton’s orders comprised timorous pedants who ‘stifle their own native habilities’ in order to ‘become constant admirers of the first Author that pleaseth them’ or the philosopher who ‘untied their Virgin Zone’”, p. 75.
“Henry More, the Cambridge Cartesian whose affection for philosophy had upset his Puritan colleagues, shared Vaughan’s belief in ghosts, spirits and substantial souls. But he bridled at his contempt for Descartes and his ‘liquoursome desire to be thought some great man in the World”. p. 76
“[Thomas] Urquhart argued that languages are created not by nature but by ‘the wit of man’ and that we should not hesitate to shape them to our purposes. He had no patience with the humanist foible of preferring ancient forms to recent coinages…he proposed a ‘Universal Language’ comprising several million words in eleven genders, offering exact counterparts to every term in every language in the world. Urquhart described his universal language as an ‘exquisite Jewel’, and wrapped it in an elaborate narrative designed to vindicate the supremacy of Scotland in both philosophy and war.” p. 81
“The Scottish judge Sir William Anstruther denounced the ‘chimerical grandeur’ of university men who wrap their ‘foolish, vain, and useless theories in ‘unintelligible terms, and obscure jargon’, placing ‘rubbish…in the way of solid learning’ in the hope of gaining ‘favour with the ignorant’ and ‘reverence from the vulgar’.” p. 115
“The image of Descartes as a paragon of manliness was corroborated in a thousand-page biography, issued in English in 1693, which presented him as a dedicated gambler, who fathered a beloved daughter who died at the age of five, and once quelled some violent conspiracies on a ship crossing the Baltic by ‘threatening to run them through if they durst but hold up a finger against them.’” p. 119
“The Essay was prized by its first readers not so much for its specific doctrines…as for its supple, rhythmical prose and the dogged determination with which Locke tried to pursue every idea to its sources in experience. Locke’s genial combination of modesty and persistence made Descartes look arrogant, and Montaigne effete.” p. 139
“In 1736 Hutcheson made further enemies by objecting to the award of a degree to a benefactor of no scholarly attainments, and a year later the Glasgow presbytery denounced him for ‘teaching his students…two false and dangerous doctrines, first that the standard of goodness was the promotion of the happiness of others, and second that we could have a knowledge of good and evil, without and prior to a knowledge of God’. But he was a Professor of Moral Philosophy rather than a theologian, so the church had no jurisdiction over him and he was able to shrug off the complaint as ‘whimsical buffoonery’”. p. 161
“There were already three colleges in America…but Berkeley proposed to create a fourth, to cater not only for the children of colonists, but also for ‘savage Americans’, even if they might have to be detained against their will while acquiring a taste for learning.” p. 168
“Hume never pretended to be free of the failings he saw in others: indeed he confessed to a weakness of philosophical will that made him relapse into styles of thinking—about morality, or politics, or causation—that he knew to be unsound.” p. 185
(There’s another 400 pages of quotable material after this point…)
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
Ree is relatively gentle about the point in his introduction, but the major problem with a great deal of intellectual and literary history in its older and more conventionalized forms is simply that it was (and remains) false. For the most part, scholars are perfectly aware of this point, and frequently plead necessity: to teach well, to communicate our disciplinary histories, we have to compress to a handful of figures and place them in a lineage: this person begat that person. It is a fiction that I have come to think does more harm than good, not the least because some people come to forget that it is a fiction and naturalize it—or at the least they forget that a good storyteller learns to tell the same story in different ways. Witcraft gives you the sequence of Descartes-Hobbes-Hume-Locke and so on up to Wittgenstein not in some full historical context, but in the context of philosophy as it was and meant to readers and authors, and makes clear that all the texts and authors that we prune away as minor or forgettable had a great deal to say.
Many disciplines—but especially philosophy—depend on fables of lineage. This text begat that text, this author begat that one. Much as the simple version of evolutionary biology once offered sequences where there were “missing links” and simple progressions of organisms: monkey to ape to australopithecine to homo sapiens. But evolutionary biology has long since learned a more complicated metaphorical and visual language for expressing the relations between organisms, change and time. Witcraft for me is one model of how we ought to represent our disciplines, whether they’re newer or older: recognizing that all the branches we prune off are not just interesting in their own right but were as constitutive of what we do now as the work we’ve canonized.
The other thing that I kept feeling while reading Witcraft is an emotion I’m accustomed to warding off as a historian—that conflicts and debates that we take to be a new issue we are struggling with for the first time are in fact very old, that we are living through repeating cycles. There are still reasons to guard my skepticism here. Our contemporary vanity can lead us to think we recognize ourselves in the past when in fact we are beholding events, actions and ideas that have very different meanings and causes. Or we might be seeing a resemblance that does not have a lineal connection to the present (e.g., it is not an earlier iteration of the same thing we experience, but two convergent cases that arose independently).
But so very much of the disputation around and within English-language philosophy in Witcraft is about language—not just the problem of whether language can accurately describe what is real or true, but also about whether philosophical language must be difficult and esoteric and thus limited to those who have learned this language or whether it must be plain and communicative not just to make philosophically democratically available but to arise out of the real and lived experiences of human beings. At the least, you’d hope Witcraft would give anyone inclined to complain of humanities jargon as a recent scourge some degree of pause. (It certainly shows you how shallow and instrumental the readings of people like Steven Pinker and E.O. Wilson were when they set out to understand “the Enlightenment” or “consilience”.) It doesn’t resolve the debate to know it has a recurrent, deep history, but it puts it in new perspective. I think the same thing could be said for how religion and secularism repeatedly take on new forms and attach to new arguments throughout Ree’s account, or how “liberal arts” and academic learning are understood.
You could build so many alternative lineages of philosophy out of Ree’s narrative, so many different paths to the present—and therefore so many different possible investigations and understandings that can’t be found in contemporary philosophy but perhaps ought to be.
The one “unfair complaint” you could have on reading is that by focusing on philosophy in English, Ree is breaking apart real communities of past readers who read across languages, but he is fairly savvy about this point, and often traces moments of translation as key junctures of re-interpretation and re-circulation of texts—that philosophy in English, for English readers, was often built by such translators who then took charge of telling their readers what the translated text meant and did. Which would be another place where a common sort of complaint in the present—the notion that French poststructuralists took on new and outsize importance when translated that distorted their thought and disembedded them from their real philosophical context (or made them philosophers when they really were not, if you’re going to be a particularly bitter scion of analytic philosophy)—is in fact a very consistent and foundational part of philosophy as a body of thought and practice.