Against History of Philosophy

The ancients were mediocre, actually

Introduction

At the end of The End of Faith, Sam Harris shows how easy it is to extract what seems to be wisdom from drab texts that are not especially profound. He takes a Hawaiian cookbook

“And therein I discovered it as yet uncelebrated mystical treatise. While it appears to be a recipe for seared fish and shrimp cakes with tomato relish, we need only study list of ingredients to know we are in the presence of unrivaled spiritual intelligence. Then I list the ingredients: One snapper fillet cubed, three teaspoons of chopped scallions, salt and freshly ground pepper… there’s a long list of ingredients. Then I go through with a mystical interpretation of this recipe. The snapper fillet is the individual himself. You and I, awash in the sea of existence, and here we find it cubed which is to say that our situation must be remedied in all three dimensions of body, mind, and in spirit. They have three teaspoons of chopped scallions, this further partakes of the cubic symmetry suggesting that that which we need add to each level of our being by way of antidote comes likewise in equal proportions. The import of the passage is clear: the body, mind, spirit need to be tended with the same care. Salt and freshly ground black pepper; here we have the perennial invocation of opposites. The white and black aspects of our nature. Both good and evil must be understood if we would fulfil the recipe of spiritual life. Nothing after all can be excluded from the human experience. This seems to be a tantric text. What is more, salt and pepper come to us in the form of grains which is to say that the good and bad qualities are born at the tiniest actions and thus we’re not in good or evil in general but only by virtue of innumerable moments which color the stream of our being by force of repetition. Then this dash of cayenne pepper: clearly a being of such robust color and flavour signifies the spiritual influence of an enlightened adept. I go on and on and this is all bullshit because it’s meant to be bullshit.”

This is sort of how I feel about history of philosophy. Kant will say some inane nonsense, and people will treat him like he’s Jesus Christ. He’ll say something vague but clearly false, and people will act like he actually made profound points.

Lots of people have gotten riled up on Twitter at my claim that history of philosophy isn’t very useful. Here, I’ll defend the claim. While it’s useful to have a general familiarity with Kant or Aristotle for useful philosophical background, anything beyond a first reading of these people is time wasted. One thing that’s rather amusing here is that people have gotten very angry about this claim, as you can see in the replies. I wonder why this is. I haven’t seen people get this riled up about my stuff since the debate community did, and here I just made a rather innocuous Tweet.

Now, before I begin, let me clarify what I’m arguing. I’m claiming that ancient philosophers were wrong with alarming frequency and that most of their insights are not super useful to us in a modern era when we’ve incorporated all of their important insights. This does not mean that they were not important for developing our current views or that they were dumb. It just means that, though they were smart and made significant advances in their time, we’ve advanced since then.

1 The theoretical argument

Hanno Sauer, in his paper The End of History, has a pretty good argument. He asks us to imagine a scenario in which we came across a small island nation without open access to communication or the internet. It would be very unlikely that they would make profound contributions to modern philosophy, because they’d have no access to the internet or any modern information or any understanding of the modern philosophical debates. But this is exactly the situation that most ancient philosophers were in. Philosophers today have literally millions of times the available information that Aristotle did—it would thus be a miracle if Aristotle was of contemporary relevance. It would mean that we’ve made no progress in the last few thousand years, and you can make profound contributions without having access to the western cannon. But if that’s true, then knowing historical claims about the western cannon can’t be that important.

This is not because historical philosophers were dumb. Some were very smart—John Stuart Mill is a good example. But no matter how smart you are, one person can’t make all the progress that we have in the last 2000 years. It’s similar to mathematics; Newton may have been a genius, but kids in their first year of college know more math than Newton ever knew. Newton’s writings were ahead of his time, but by modern standards, nothing that he said is especially novel—you won’t learn much new math by reading Newton.

And though my claim doesn’t require the stupidity of the ancients, ancient philosophers were also kind of dumb by modern standards. We know that IQs have been going up dramatically over time. So even philosophers who were 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean at their time in terms of IQ would be just mediocre by modern standards. Thus, it’s pretty probable that Huemer is smarter than Aristotle.

Same thing with other ancient fields. We’ve actually made an awful lot of progress over time. The ancient historians, cosmologists, and physicians just weren’t that good—so why’d we expect philosophy to be any different? As Sauer notes

Finally, consider Hobbes’ justification of political authority in terms of how it allows us to avoid the unpleasantness of the state of nature. Here are some concepts and theories that were not available to him when he devised his arguments:

• Utility functions

• Nash equilibria

• Dominant strategy

• Backward induction

• Behavioral economics

• Experimental game theory

• Biological evidence on the adaptivity of cooperation

• Empirical evidence regarding life in hunter/gatherer societies

• Cross-cultural data regarding life in contemporary tribal societies

• […]

Again, when it comes to deciding whose philosophical work to devote our time and attention to, any person that didn’t have any knowledge whatsoever of the above items would be a dubious choice.

A version of this problem that is somewhat more specific to moral philosophy is that in ethics, it is often important not to assign disproportionate testimonial weight to people of which we have good reasons to suspect that they harbored deeply objectionable attitudes or publicly expressed moral beliefs we have reason to deem unjustified and/or morally odious. Personally, I have made a habit of not heeding the ethical advice of Adolf Eichmann, Ted Bundy, and various of my family members. But upon looking at the moral views held by many of the most prominent authors in the history of philosophy, one often cannot help but shudder: Plato advocated abolishing the family, violently if need be; Aristotle defended (a version of) slavery as natural; Locke advocated religious toleration, only to exclude atheists from the social contract; Kant argued that masturbation is one of the gravest moral transgressions there is; Hegel claimed that it is an a priori truth that the death penalty is morally obligatory, and indeed a form of respect towards the executed; the list of historical philosophers who held sexist, racist and other discriminatory views would be too long to recount here.

Sauer also notes that there are just many more philosophers around now than there were historically. Thus, it’s unlikely that the best philosopher of all time would be an ancient for the same reason it’s unlikely that the best philosopher of all time is located in Wyoming—there just aren’t that many people in Wyoming.

So it would be miraculous if the disproportionately low IQ philosophers who existed historically, who are less numerous than modern philosophers, who lacked almost all the crucial information we have in the modern age were able to keep us. Sauer concludes “We have good reasons for thinking that historical authors were deeply wrong about almost everything, we have statistical reasons for thinking that the best philosophers live now rather than in the past, and we judge historical authors by much too lenient standards.”

2 Most historical philosophers were pretty bad by modern standards

If you actually read what ancient philosophers say, it’s generally not very good. None of it would get published in top philosophy journals today. Thales thought everything was made out of water, Anaximenes thought everything was made out of air, Heraclitus thought that everything was made out of fire and order (modern physicists assure me this is not true). Socrates claimed that virtuous kings would be exactly 729 times happier than vicious tyrants and that this is even more likely to be the right answer because 729 is almost equal to the number of days and nights in a year, and of course, the ratio of happiness between virtuous kings and tyrants happiness would be equal to the number of days and nights in a year??!

If this sounds crazy that’s because it is. Now, it wasn’t dumb given how little they knew. But, well, if someone today told me the world was made of water, you’d know they were probably a child under 5. And if someone claims that virtuous kings are exactly 729 times happier than vicious tyrants, you should guess that they’ve been dropping acid, not that they are actually brilliant and you err to the extent that you don’t take their writings seriously.

Take John Stuart Mill. He was one of the best historical philosophers. And yet his famous argument for utilitarianism was obviously fallacious—he claimed that just as the only evidence that something is visible is that it’s seen and that it’s audible is that it’s heard, so too is the only evidence that it’s desirable that it’s desired. Then he claimed that only pleasure was desired. Now, the claim that only pleasure is desired is false—lots of people would take a life higher in knowledge and virtue and lower in pleasure than a life higher in pleasure and lower in knowledge and virtue. But this isn’t as bad as the other claim, the one according to which we can infer that pleasure is desirable from the fact that it’s desired. When we say something is audible we mean it’s able to be heard—when we say something is desirable we mean it’s worth desiring. You can’t infer from the fact that we do desire particular things that we ought to desire them.

Sidgwick was a pretty incredible philosopher. And he was pretty recent, writing in the 1800s. But his stuff is out of date—he’s responding to old arguments, with old ideas. Much better to read Peter Singer than Sidgwick.

Do any books of ancient philosophy resemble On What Matters or Reasons and Persons in their ability to contain profound truths? Do any of them have the depth and sophistication of Kamm or Parfit or Pummer? If you open up to a random page from Plato or Aristotle or Aquinas, it will almost certainly be nonsense. If you open up to a random page from Huemer or Pummer, it will contained reasoned argument, even if it ends up being wrong (unlikely to be wrong if you’re reading Pummer). Plato thought that the Platonic form of a man was itself a man—a super man, the ultimate man. This is a crazy view. He seemed to think that there was a weird sky realm where the universals hung out; modern Platonists don’t think this. And we don’t think this for a simple reason; we’ve advanced since the time of Plato. Huemer has argued this too—for example, he impressively broadsides Aristotle

In The Republic (book I), Thrasymachus says that government leaders rule solely for their own good, and treat the populace the way a shepherd treats sheep, to be used for their wool and meat. Plato has Socrates respond to this by arguing that the art of the shepherd, as such, is only concerned with the good of the sheep. He goes on to talk about how the art of medicine is concerned with health. He also claims that no one would agree to be a ruler without being paid.

This is all just a terrible way of responding to the challenge. Thrasymachus' statements about the sheep are just an analogy, which only serves to illustrate Thrasymachus' point -- whether shepherds really are concerned for the good of sheep is completely irrelevant. The relevant point is how leaders actually behave in the real world, which requires empirical evidence about leaders. Arguing about shepherds or doctors is pretty irrelevant to that, and arguing about what is the true "art" of medicine or of governing is definitely irrelevant. The one relevant point Socrates makes is that rulers would not be willing to rule without receiving payment. That, of course, is false. (But maybe this was less obvious in Socrates' time?)

This isn't an outlier case, either. The Platonic dialogues have these sorts of useless arguments by analogy all over the place.

He gives another good example when talking about Kant.

What about Kant's argument for the Categorical Imperative? I bet you can't say what the argument was, can you? That's because almost no one covers it in classes or discusses it in the literature. And that's because it's completely unconvincing and not worth discussing, except to make points about bad arguments. Here is a key statement:

But if I think of a categorical imperative, I know immediately what it contains. For since the imperative contains besides the law only the necessity that the maxim should accord with this law, while the law contains no condition to which it is restricted, there is nothing remaining in it except the universality of law as such to which the maxim of the action should conform; and in effect this conformity alone is represented as necessary by the imperative.
There is, therefore, only one categorical imperative. It is: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. (Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals [1969], 44)

Got that? Okay, so that explains why you can’t lie to murderers to stop them from finding their intended victims.

And even if historical philosophers were good, history of philosophy wouldn’t be. Because history of philosophy involves trying to figure out what was in the mind of great philosophers, rather than finding out what’s true. I won’t elaborate too much on this charge here, because Huemer has a good article on it.

Conclusion

So there it is. History of philosophy isn’t super useful. People often think it is because it’s hard to think that someone is spouting bullshit when you dedicate 10,000 hours to interpreting them. That’s why, as Huemer notes, “Most historians of philosophy appear to believe that the philosopher they study was basically right (though they do not argue for this in their work, which, as noted above, focuses instead on exegesis).”

Now, this is of course not to say that no good comes out of it. There are some historians of philosophy that no doubt do good work. But as a whole, it’s not a super useful enterprise.

So I give people permission, 2000 years from now, to throw out my blog posts. They won’t remain relevant.