Introduction
The question posed by the title of the article seems absurd, or at least a kind of exaggeration in details that would highlight a dimension that has no value except in the realm of pure theory. Can ideas be traced back through history? Can this question be answered in the negative at all? In fact, can we talk about the impossibility of dating something at all? If we assume that it is possible to prove the impossibility of dating ideas, what is the position of the histories of philosophy at that time, especially since they are based on the obviousness of this possibility and the obviousness of the transformation of ideas across eras?
The answer to the title implies an answer to each of these questions, whether the answer is direct or not. The importance of the question may not lie in directly answering it with a yes or no, as the answer may include an uncritical acceptance of the obviousness of the contents of the question and the obviousness of the framework that links the negative and the positive, as long as the question is limited to both. But it is definitely important in questioning these contents themselves, that is, in the context of questioning the intuition of ideas and history, and even the intuition of the direct connection between them. This accountability, of course, is not limited to mere theoretical elaboration of the concepts of idea, history, and investigation, but rather goes beyond this elaboration in order to undermine methodologies related to understanding in general. In other words, the question of the traceability of ideas entails questions of understanding their past and present state, in addition, of course, to examining the relationship between this understanding and the investigations based on it as well.
It is inevitable to expose the assumption that ideas can be traced: Which ideas are free to be traced? Does this follow the direction of thought or history? Rather, what are the sources that allow researchers to trace history in the first place? To which type does it belong? It is also necessary to take an additional step back: what is the meaning of the idea? What is the meaning of thought and ideas?
These and other questions constitute the cornerstone that led many researchers to reject the intuitive conception of the history of thought and what was built on it in order to reach a deeper understanding of everything related to thought and thinking, past and present. By “intuitive perception,” I mean a way of thinking that does not make distinctions, for example, between the history of thought and the history of philosophy. This type of perception does not consider the problems of parallelism between philosophy and philosophers. It might even be a perception that believes in the existence of an eternal human dimension. This allows the researcher to investigate an idea in different eras without encountering issues related to context or displacement.
We find echoes of such perceptions in Will Durant’s book The Story of Philosophy, where the main title carries the idea of the history of philosophy while the subtitle indicates that this history is linked to the lives and opinions of philosophers (specifically “Western” philosophers), that is, the history of philosophy seems to be the same as the history of philosophers, and there is no difference between them. We also find it in Bertrand Russell’s book, A History of Western Philosophy, whose dating mainly revolves around philosophers or philosophical schools in a unified narrative that exceeds two thousand years with a problematic review of some historical contexts. We also find it in the book History of Political Philosophy edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, where many of the papers in the book share an implicit assumption of what politics is and thus an assumption of what political questions and philosophizing about them are. Therefore, it is not surprising that within this perception and proposition, the discussion of Aristotle’s political philosophy in the book is mainly limited to his two books, Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, without actually addressing the rest of the topics, despite their connection.
In contrast to these theoretical and methodological problems, we find desperate attempts by others who have tried to reconsider the importance of the history of ideas and the importance of overcoming the problems surrounding it. Thus we find Lovejoy, for example, in an editorial in the Journal of the History of Ideas calling for the importance of the field in its own right, regardless of the applications of its findings. We find Mandelbaum examining what distinguishes the history of thought from philosophy, addressing the problems of the two histories and the relationship of the problems to the subject of each of their research. We also find Dominick LaCapra’s attempt to reformulate the history of thought as a process of investigation, trying to clarify the problems of this perception by reading and understanding texts in general.
One of the most important of these attempts is what Quentin Skinner put forward in his research paper entitled: “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” The problems raised by Skinner can be traced through his controversial conclusion: There are no universal truths and no eternal issues regarding the history of ideas. Interrogating the answers of philosophers of the past to the present day is a mistake. This means – from what it means – that there are no historically transcendent philosophical ideas such as freedom, existence, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, beauty, and others, so that these ideas become as if they were purely philosophical topics transmitted over time, and the so-called philosophies are nothing but attempts to answer contemporary and current problems and circumstances of their time and nothing more. This leads to his conclusion that it is not possible to date ideas as a subject of historical research without falling into many forms that invalidate the usefulness of the field in its traditional form.
Although it was published in 1969, echoes of its criticism are still present in contemporary discussions about the history of thought and what it means in our current time. This present state raises the question: Can the history of ideas overcome the theoretical impasses formulated by Skinner? In other words, if historians of ideas today are locked into the same problematic theoretical frameworks that existed half a century ago, is it even possible to talk about a dating of ideas devoid of these problems? Rather, is it possible to imagine a dating of ideas with ideas as its subject?
There is no doubt that answering such questions is very difficult, but it is worth trying. And because the impossibility of dating ideas necessarily means the impossibility of dating philosophy (since the description of philosophy is added to the concept of the idea), it is certainly necessary to review what Skinner proposed before presenting an initial criticism in order to begin delineating the features of initial answers. The following lines will therefore review the most important points of Skinner’s article before delving into its problems and before attempting to overcome them.
It must be noted first that the first section of the article is focused on the history of ideas in general, as describing ideas as philosophical is nothing but a branch of the more general conception of what an idea is. As a result, the possibility of the history of philosophy cannot be questioned except after questioning the history of ideas and investigating the problem of its possibility or not. It may also be necessary to note that this article will address Skinner’s paper published in 1969, although he published a revised and abridged version of it in the first volume of his book Visions in Politics in 2002.
Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas
Skinner begins his article with what he considers to be the fundamental question facing historians of ideas whenever they approach an intellectual work: What methodologies must be followed in order to arrive at an understanding of the work? Skinner uses the word “intellectual” to describe any work that practices one of the modes of thinking, whether the work is literary or philosophical, and whether it revolves around politics, ethics, or anything else. In addition, Skinner points out from the beginning the ambiguity of the concept of the history of ideas itself and the variation in its concept among its practitioners, and thus he acknowledges from the beginning that his concept of the history of ideas is broad enough to include all historical research on intellectual issues.
Regarding the existing methodologies in approaching intellectual works, Skinner says that there are two main methodologies: First, there is what can be called the textual methodology, which is the approach that emphasizes the independence of the text in determining meaning, or the supremacy of the text as the primary key in the process of understanding. Second, there is the contextual approach, which gives key importance to the factors surrounding the text in determining its meaning. In other words, the context of the work becomes an inevitable framework in perceiving what is contained in the text.
While Skinner tentatively acknowledges the strengths of both of these approaches, he also points out that they share the same flaw: “Both methodologies, it can be shown, commit philosophical mistakes in the assumptions they make about the conditions necessary for the understanding of utterance.” It is necessary to pay attention to Skinner’s distinction between idea and utterance, since utterance is broader in scope than its counterpart. This distinction is one of his points of difference with what Arthur Lovejoy calls “unit idea.” These units of ideas can be understood by likening them to cooking ingredients: just as varying combinations of ingredients and their proportions produce different dishes, varying combinations of unit ideas and the relationships between them produce different ideas or systems as well. Thus, as Lovejoy put it, in order to understand the history of philosophical systems, they can be deconstructed into their basic components, that is, into their conceptual units.
What Skinner is calling for when he uses the term “utterance” is greater than the connotations of meaning contained in “idea,” especially with the specific connections that ideas carry between words and the possibilities of their meanings. The distinction is based on the foundations of the intentionality and purpose accompanying the utterances, as Skinner believes that the difference in the subject behind the word necessarily requires shifts in meaning that cannot be fixed. From this standpoint, it is possible to understand Skinner’s objection to the stability of ideas or their ability to become a unit of historical investigation, according to Lovejoy’s conception. He says that there are no fundamental ideas that can be fundamentally mixed, and therefore, investigating any idea requires, in the first place, subjecting its composition to research. In other words, Skinner demands a central place for ideas themselves within historical inquiry.
This much will suffice, for now, in distinguishing between the concepts of idea and utterance, especially since Skinner did not address the details of their problems except in the last third of his article. What he reviews before that is related to the criticism of the two aforementioned methodologies, starting with the textual methodology, which sees the text as the only key to understanding.
Skinner begins by saying that this methodology presupposes the presence of eternal elements or universal ideas in texts that the historian of ideas must search for or strive to find. Skinner calls this assumption the primacy of the paradigm. Following this assumption, the process becomes a process of investigating what a philosopher or thinker says about these elements and ideas drawn up in advance. This is, of course, a kind of prior framing of the idea, its boundaries, and its elements, as the historian approaches the text with preconceptions about the meanings and contents of the idea, so the process becomes merely a distinction between what is present or absent from it in the text.
Through this introduction, Skinner addresses the myths on which textual methodologies are based:
The myth of teachings (doctrine): This myth appears whenever a researcher or historian assumes that a thinker must disclose his teachings about all the topics that make up an idea. This myth takes many forms, and Skinner addressed it as summarized below:
- Extracting teachings from scattered statements: In this form, the idea (x) is taken to consist of (y, p, i) in an absolute way, and therefore any talk about y, p, or i means a talk about x. Skinner represents this myth with the idea of the separation of powers as attributed to Marsilius of Padua. Some researchers in political thought claim that it is possible to consider Marsilius as the founder of this separation of powers following his treatment of the executive role of the ruler and the legislative role of the people in his book The Defender of Peace. But Skinner points out that Marsilius’s proposal is essentially linked to what existed during the transformation of the Roman Republic into an empire and the accompanying centralization of politics, and therefore it is wrong to turn these scattered statements into a whole.
- Absence of teachings: This form is the opposite of the previous one. Instead of transforming scattered expressions into specific teachings, the thinker is blamed for his failure to formulate his proposal as a whole according to certain foundations or standards. This means that the absolute idea (x) with its elements (y, p, i) becomes the standard against which the thinker’s proposal is measured. If the thinker approaches y without arriving at x, the thinker is blamed for his failure to achieve the idea. According to Skinner’s expression, what determines the direction of historical research in this case is the accepted paradigm of the essence given to the idea, such that every deviation from this paradigm is considered a departure from the essence and therefore a departure from the teachings.
- Systems of teachings: This form of myth occurs whenever the products of different thinkers are considered part of a single system that they were trying to establish. This form is an extension of the previous two forms, as the researcher trapped in the myth of the teachings faces the danger of slipping towards these systems whenever he tries to extract each organized entity in light of his prior reifications of the teachings.
- The myth of coherence: This myth is based on the idea that there is a certain consistency in the statements of a thinker who chooses to talk about a topic. If this consistency is absent from the researcher, he must try to find it whether in the text or in the thinker’s other products, as there is no doubt that there is an inner consistency that links everything that the thinker proposes into a coherent, consistent system. Skinner proposes this myth (at least in its second part, which is related to internal consistency) in response to Leo Strauss, who believes that there is something in the interior of philosophical texts that may contradict its exterior for one reason or another (especially in what Strauss called the Ages of Persecution). In other words, examining between the lines may result in deciphering the mystery of the apparent textual contradiction, which may result, for example, from the thinker’s attempt to conceal his true proposition.
But Skinner refutes this claim in three ways: First, this type assumes – incorrectly – that intellectual originality is linked to dissent, so to speak, that is, that the original philosophical proposal must not be in agreement with the prevailing one. This notion of opposition is based on some of Strauss’s attempts to justify texts that ostensibly align with the dominant view, claiming they conceal underlying contradictions. Second, Skinner refutes the claim on the part of the inner reading assumption that readers who “fail” to read between texts are necessarily indifferent readers, an idea that Skinner rejects as it monopolizes the meaning and marginalizes the appearance. Third, Skinner disputes this idea regarding the definition of the boundaries of alleged eras of persecution, asking what criteria must be met for an era to be considered persecutory or for the text’s presentation to be considered esoteric. The blurring of standards leads to the possibility of considering every text as potentially having hidden meanings, and thus every interpretation is legitimate.
- The myth of prolepsis: This myth appears whenever the later importance of an idea is attributed to the time of its utterance. In other words, the myth is present whenever its importance to us, for example, is mixed with its importance to the thinker of that current time. Skinner exemplifies this myth with what Karl Popper said in the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies when he described Plato’s political visions in the Republic as those of a “totalitarian party politician.” The evidence from this is that what we consider in our time as the basis of comprehensiveness is only part of an intellectual crystallization that does not belong to the time of Plato, and therefore it is inappropriate to read his visions with unbearable importance.
- The myth of parochialism: It is not easy to explain this myth briefly, as it is fundamentally linked to presentism, intellectual frameworks, intentionality, the process of understanding, and other controversial issues. But in general, it can be said that the researcher or historian trapped in myth is the one who misreads texts and works according to their standard frameworks because he is unable to read them except within what is familiar to him. Skinner exemplifies this myth with two examples from the history of ideas: First, the researcher may take advantage of his later temporal location and read the proposal of thinker X as if he were influenced by thinker Y by virtue of the researcher finding a specific familiarity with him, even though this familiarity may be entirely imagined. Secondly, since the researcher’s contemporary ideas are hierarchical according to certain relationships, the researcher may fall into the trap of assuming the same hierarchy of meaning while reading historical intellectual works.
Skinner’s critique of textual methodology takes up more than half of the article (36 pages out of 53), and we encounter his critique of contextual methodology only in the last quarter. Skinner defines the notions of contextualism with a quote from Crabtree’s essay “Political Theory”: Contextualists are those who believe that intellectual texts are “a response to more immediate circumstances,” that is, that texts are the product of their contexts. Therefore, we must read texts within the contexts that will explain this response to us.
Skinner acknowledges the ability of contextualism in theory to avoid many of the common errors committed by textual methodology. He also acknowledges that most criticism of textualism is based on a general conception of contextualism. But he objects to the causality implicit in contextualism, so to speak. According to him, the contextual methodology in its Marxist and Namierite versions involves a philosophical error in linking actions and circumstances, as these actions appear as if they are merely an inevitable result. Therefore, even if the social context is able to help the researcher understand the text, it is necessary that the work not be read only in light of this context because the act of producing the text contains something that goes beyond contextual cause and effect. What Skinner means is that it is necessary to avoid confusing knowledge of the motives for action with understanding the action itself.
This problem is related to what is intentionality mentioned above. Skinner emphasizes that investigating the circumstances surrounding the text is not enough to explain it, but rather investigating the meaning of the text within its contexts (i.e. in terms of the connection between the meaning of the action and the circumstances in which it occurred) and investigating the various relationships between the phrases are two necessary steps towards understanding. This emphasis is based on what Skinner calls rhetorical forces: when the subject utters an utterance, behind the act of uttering itself is a rhetorical force that accompanies the meaning, meaning that there is something related to the subject’s intention in coming up with the utterance, stripped of the fabric of contextually possible meanings. Therefore, the way the utterance was expressed in its connection with the rest of the expressions is also important in understanding the meaning or reshaping its frameworks.
In light of all this proposition, Skinner concludes two basic things: First, intentionality must be understood as going beyond the causal relationship between context and text. This means considering the utterance within the scope of its linguistic potential, in which the subject plays a role in adapting it. Ultimately, this involves moving beyond the assumption that the text is merely a result of the contexts that produced it. Secondly, Skinner concludes that understanding texts requires a dialogue between their philosophical dimensions and historical evidence, lest the researcher fall into the trap of careless interpretations. The second conclusion is specifically related to the trap of presentism on which textual methodology is based, a trap that would mislead the understanding of any text, whether historical or contemporary.
So, Skinner concludes, historians of ideas must take his conclusions into account if they want their histories to do the work justice. At the same time, he emphasizes that this does not conflict at all with the philosophical value of the history of ideas, in that this history seeks to find the meaning of texts within the problems of their era, not our problems, and therefore investigating the relationship between them would reveal the diversity of different intellectual possibilities.
Within Philosophy Outside History:
As a main conclusion, then, Skinner acknowledges the possibility of dating ideas in terms of reading ideas in their historicity and understanding them in their social and linguistic contexts (that is, by the connection between utterance and subject and what they engage in), but he opposes the possibility of tracing the development of ideas historically. I am not going to discuss the problems of his presentation in matters that are not related to the history of ideas (the problems of esoteric reading or his marginalization of shifts in the intellectual horizon, for example), so I will limit myself in the following lines to analyzing his opinion about the fallacy of treating the idea as a subject of historical investigation.
There are two main problems: First, Skinner’s proposal draws a sharp disconnect between the historical legacy of social contexts and the individuals who live in them. In other words, despite his belief that understanding contexts is a necessary condition for understanding the utterances produced within them and his belief in the necessity of taking intentionality and linguistic dimensions into account, Skinner overlooks the fact that these contexts, in turn, are based on a horizon of meanings whose existence precedes the existence of individuals. This means that individuals’ intellectual output about their reflections and problems is shaped not only by their interaction as individuals or groups, but also as historical beings. Therefore, it is reasonable that individuals in their proposals have an outcome that is actually based on some kind of awareness of the intellectual proposal that preceded them. We find Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, for example, dealing with Aristotle’s proposal that preceded them by more than a thousand years and employing his vocabulary and ideas in presenting their own philosophies. Wouldn’t it be acceptable to talk about the shift of ideas here? Is it not possible to address the change (on the grounds that change is less severe than development) of idea in the presentation of each of them in the sense that they are engaged in an intellectual dialogue? Every employment has its contexts and meanings, there is no doubt about that. Skinner’s complete rupture, however, neglects the creators’ awareness of previous works and their use of ideas. In this light, the history of ideas seems less monstrous than Skinner made it out to be, especially when considering the displacement of meanings and contexts.
The second problem is related to the dependence of the “idea” in Skinner’s proposal on essentially intellectual works. In other words, the idea that Skinner addresses in his proposal is already framed within intellectual history in its narrow sense, that is, what can be considered the conscious intellectual product of individuals on a topic. I fully realize the importance of his clarification that the citations in his research are inspired by his field of specialization in political thought, and it is natural that most of his criticism centers on the problems he finds during his research. But I do not believe that this clarification is a justification for the absence of addressing the history of the “non-intellectual” horizon at its core, that is, “ideas” that are not necessarily the main subject of the discussion. I do not doubt the necessity of investigating the context and purpose, nor the necessity of placing ideas in their historical context, but at the same time I wonder what this criticism means in what is not considered a chapter of thought in the traditional conception that it presents.
Within this traditional conception of the history of ideas, intellectual texts are the basic stone of dating, that is, those texts that are defined by their topics and themes. If a historian wants to write a historiography of the work on ethics, there is no harm in going through the moral philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Ibn Sina and others, given their exposure to the question of ethics in research, and there is no problem with the matter as long as historiography is limited to these topics and themes in their manifestations, of course. But this conception excludes ideas that have not necessarily been the subject of intellectual research, or ideas that are not traditionally classified within the scope of philosophy. This applies, for example, to attempts to write a history of race, a history of gender, or other concepts that are of prominent importance in our time. On the one hand, whoever dates such concepts must take into account the problems raised by Skinner in the complex and interactive relationship between contexts, concepts, and thinkers. Yet on the other hand, since sources for these histories might not directly address the subject, historians must tease out meanings beyond the purely textual/intellectual, potentially broadening the idea itself. It is like trying to reconstruct a concept (not necessarily a direct or integrated concept) from scattered references and uses of its meanings and similarities. This can be represented by trying to write a history of race that takes into account the great discrepancy between the contemporary concept of race and its discursive components, and the previous concept of race and the connotations associated with it.
Is the history of ideas possible then? Yes, but it is clear that if it wants to overcome Skinner’s problems, it must first adopt a broad concept of ideas and not limit its subject matter to what is traditional. Secondly, it is necessary to take into account that following an idea through history does not mean in any way that it acquires an independent life, as thought has no life except through the lives of the actors in its production and reproduction. This means that the historian of thought must get rid of the hierarchical model with thought at the top and practice at the bottom, as the connection between the two is too complex to be reduced to a vertical causal relationship. Then intellectual history can be considered history and thought, as it should be.
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