If you have ever been at a rock or pop concert, you might recognise the following phenomenon: The band on the stage begins playing an intro. Pulsing synths and roaring drums build up to a yet unrecognisable tune. Then the band breaks into the well-known chorus of their greatest hit and the audience applauds frenetically. People become enthusiastic if they recognise something. Thus, part of the “greatness” is owing to the act of recognising it. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s just that people celebrate their own recognition at least as much as the tune performed. I think much the same is true of our talk of “great thinkers”. We applaud recognised patterns. But only applauding the right kinds of patterns and thinkers secures our belonging to the ingroup. Since academic applause signals and regulates who belongs to a group, such applause has a moral dimension, especially in educational institutions. Yes, you guess right, I want to argue that we need to rethink whom and what we call great.
When we admire someone’s smartness or arguments, an enormous part of our admiration is owing to our recognition of preferred patterns. This is why calling someone a “great thinker” is to a large extent self-congratulatory. It signals and reinforces canonical status. What’s important is that this works in three directions: it affirms that status of the figure, it affirms it for me, and it signals this affirmation to others. Thus, it signals where I (want to) belong and demonstrates which nuances of style and content are of the right sort. The more power I have, the more I might be able to reinforce such status. People speaking with the backing of an educational institution can help build canonical continuity. Now the word “great” is conveniently vague. But should we applaud bigots?
“Admiring the great thinkers of the past has become morally hazardous.” Thus opens Julian Baggini’s piece on “Why sexist and racist philosophers might still be admirable”. Baggini’s essay is quite thoughtful and I advise you to read it. That said, I fear it contains a rather problematic inconsistency. Arguing in favour of excusing Hume for his racism, Baggini makes an important point: “Our thinking is shaped by our environment in profound ways that we often aren’t even aware of. Those who refuse to accept that they are as much limited by these forces as anyone else have delusions of intellectual grandeur.” I agree that our thinking is indeed very much shaped by our (social) surroundings. But while Baggini makes this point to exculpate Hume, he clearly forgets all about it when he returns to calling Hume one of the “greatest minds.” If Hume’s racism can be excused by his immersion in a racist social environment, then surely much of his philosophical “genius” cannot be exempt from being explained through this immersion either. In other words, if Hume is not (wholly) responsible for his racism, then he cannot be (wholly) responsible for his philosophy either. So why call only him a “great mind”?
Now Baggini has a second argument for leaving Hume’s grandeur untouched. Moral outrage is wasted on the dead because, unlike the living, they can neither “face justice” nor “show remorse.” While it’s true that the dead cannot face justice, it doesn’t automatically follow that we should not “blame individuals for things they did in less enlightened times using the standards of today.” I guess we do the latter all the time. Even some court systems punish past crimes. Past Nazi crimes are still put on trial, even if the system under which they were committed had different standards and is a thing of a past (or so we hope). Moreover, even if the dead cannot face justice themselves, it does make a difference how we remember and relate to the dead. Let me make two observations that I find crucial in this respect:
- Sometimes we uncover “unduly neglected” figures. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, has been pushed to the side as an atheist for a long time. Margaret Cavendish is another case of a thinker whose work has been unduly neglected. When we start reading such figures again and begin to affirm their status, we declare that we see them as part of our ingroup and ancestry. Accordingly, we try and amend an intellectual injustice. Someone has been wronged by not having been recognised. And although we cannot literally change the past, in reclaiming such figures we change our intellectual past, insofar as we change the patterns that our ingroup is willing to recognise. Now if we can decide to help to change our past in that way, moral concerns apply. It seems, we have a duty to recognise figures that have been shunned, unduly by our standards.
- Conversely, if we do not acknowledge what we find wrong in past thinkers, we are in danger of becoming complicit in endorsing and amplifying the impact of certain wrongs or ideologies. But we have the choice of changing our past in these cases, too. This becomes even more pressing in cases where there is an institutional continuity between us and the bigots of the past. As Markus Wild points out in his post, Heidegger’s influence continues to haunt us, if those exposing his Nazism are attacked. Leaving this unacknowledged in the context of university teaching might mean becoming complicit in amplifying the pertinent ideology. That said, the fact that we do research on such figures or discuss their doctrines does not automatically mean that we endorse their views. As Charlotte Knowles makes clear, it is important how we relate or appropriate the doctrines of others. It’s one thing to appropriate someone’s ideas; it another thing to call that person “great” or a “genius.”
Now, how do these considerations fare with regard to current authors? Should we adjust, for instance, our citation practices in the light of cases of harassment or crimes? I find this question rather difficult and think we should be open to all sorts of considerations. However, I want to make two points:
Firstly, if someone’s work has shaped a certain field, it would be both scholarly and morally wrong to lie about this fact. But the crucial question, in this case, is not whether we should shun someone’s work. The question we have to ask is rather why our society recurrently endorses people who abuse their power. If Baggini has a point, then the moral wrongs that are committed in our academic culture are most likely not just the wrongs of individual scapegoats who happen to be found out. So if we want to change that, it’s not sufficient to change our citation practice. I guess the place to start is stop calling individuals “great thinkers” and begin to acknowledge that thinking embedded in social practices and requires many kinds of recognition.
Secondly, trying to take the perspective of a victim, I would feel betrayed if representatives of educational institutions would simply continue to endorse such voices and thus enlarge the impact of perpetrators who have harmed others in that institution. And victimhood doesn’t just mean “victim of overt harassment”. As I said earlier, there are intellectual victims of trends that shun voices for various reasons, only to be slowly recovered by later generations who wish to amend the canon and change their past accordingly.
So the question to ask is not only whether we should change our citation practices. Rather we should wonder how many thinkers have not yet been heard because our ingroup keeps applauding one and the same “great mind.”
This article is shared with permission by Martin Lenz. It was originally published on Martin’s personal blog, Handling Ideas.
Martin Lenz
Martin Lenz (@Going_Loopy) is professor and department chair in history of philosophy at Groningen University. He specialises in medieval and early modern philosophy. Before joining the philosophy faculty at Groningen in 2012, Martin studied Philosophy, Linguistics and German Literature in Bochum, Budapest and Hull (M.A. in 1996; PhD in 2001 in Bochum) and spent his postdoctoral period in Cambridge, Tübingen and Berlin (Habilitation in 2009).
There might be an asymmetry in the way we assign responsibility to past thinkers: we don’t think that a thinker is great simply because they have blurted out ideas, but because they have also taken the time to reason their way through them and develop them, which is in contrast to racist things that they might have said. It seems that although all thinkers are the products of their environments, we tend to make them more responsible for thoughts they have developed as opposed to thoughts they threw out. If this is true (and I am not sure to what extent such asymmetry is justified), it might explain why someone can be a great thinker despite their stating awful things. Of course, this says nothing about whether all past thinkers are covered by this asymmetry, an issue to be decided by investigating each thinker’s specific works and thoughts.
Thanks for your comment! Yes, I completely agree that the fact that someone palpably worked through their ideas can make one thnik of them as great. In any case, there is a distinction between parroting and working out a thought. So a question to ask would be whether someone would, if pressed, revoke a certain idea.
As Eric Schliesser has argued, Hume was criticised for this reacism in his own day: https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2018/11/a-bad-defense-of-humes-badness.html?fbclid=IwAR3NMxRVR08ieg34v8F6wT75rR22QBzq5If4FPyaVO97zYvBwOkonfT9IW4
If this is correct, then it’s hard to claim that Hume merely “through out” such ideas.
I am still a bit puzzled about what the problem is supposed to be. If I assert that John Coltrane was a great musician, the context of that assertions specifies the relevant domain. I am talking about (free) jazz and his ability as a saxophone player. Suppose he tried out drums and guitar as well, but sucked at it. The latter in no way undermines that he was a great musician, for the context-specific domain is different. I think the same applies to judgments about philosophers or thinkers. When I assert that Hume is an outstanding thinker, I am probably and primarily thinking about his contributions to epistemology. While he also discussed ethics, it’s not as if he offered a comprehensive analysis of all moral issues. Clearly, no one is able to think through every topic. Even the application of a moral theory is almost always shaped by current morals. Just read ethics texts from the 50s to 5e 80s on homosexuality, i.e. reasonably recent ones, and you know what I mean. So, if Hume was racist, I am not sure what exactly that is supposed to tell us about his abilities as a thinker in the relevant context. I guess the idea is that as a great thinker one should get at least the basics right, but that already assumes a context from which we judge what counts as basic. But aren’t we then doing the same thing Hume was doing and aren’t we as likely to get similar basics wrong from a future point of reference?
Long story short, I am not entirely sure how we are supposed to get from a judgment about an outstanding ability and contribution in one domain to assertions about people in general or why a failing in one domain should be taken to undermine our valuation or assessment of that ability and contribution. It’s not as if being a great thinker entails that one never must compartmentalize, be biased, or make mistakes, just like being a great musician does not mean that one has to be able to play all instruments, know everything about all kinds of music, or make reasonable judgments about all areas of music. So, the easiest thing to deal with all of the above seems to be to simply contue admiring the greats without painting overly rosy pictures of the societies they lived in and some of the views they held. But that should be a given part of any decent education anyway. No?
Thanks for your comment! The point you bring out with your analogy has been troubling me as well. Here is what I think about it.
There is no doubt that Coltrane is a significant figure in the history of jazz music, and we shouldn’t lie about that. Many musicians harken back to his work in their reharmonisations, their way of building patterns, phrasing – what have you. – Now my first point about greatness is not to deny that. I rather wonder what exactly we pick out when calling something great: I think that greatness is not a property of the music or playing alone but also of our recognition. The listeners mark a commonly accepted preference and thus make Coltrane canonical. – Now if we accept that highlighting greatness is about our canon or ingroup status, then this choice has a moral dimension. A second consideration is that music or any other art (or domain in the humanities) has a political dimension. Bebop doesn’t play in a vacuum; it is highly politicised. It’s not only about technique, it’s about doing something to traditional jazz, and stronly about ingroups and outgroups. And I guess all these things figure in our picking out greatness. It doesn’t deny or alter the playing technique that Coltrane had, but it figures in what makes it stand out for a large amount of people. NB: One doesn’t need to be a sax player to appreciate these things. Admiring, then, is as much about the admirerer as it is about the admired. – The upshot is: canonising music has a moral dimension. Because it’s not only about the music or technique itself, but about the context in which it arises, and about our reasons for recognising it.
So I while we can distinguish between music and politics etc., they are always connected in our history. It’s to some extent our decision which connections in history we highlight and which connections we ignore – but whatever we do, it is also a moral choice about what we value in our ancestry.