Jonathan Rée is a freelance philosopher and long-time New Humanist contributor. In his new book "Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English" (Allen Lane), he challenges traditional histories of philosophy in order to tell the story of how philosophy was lived and practiced, embedded in its time and place. The book examines its subject - how philosophy became established in English - at 50 year intervals from the 16th to the 20th centuries, taking in not only British and American philosophers, but the philosophical work of literary authors and a cast of long-overlooked characters such as priests, poets, teachers and servants. Here, he discusses his arguments.
How long have you been thinking about this idea?
I’ve been thinking about it since I was a teenager and started getting into philosophy, and looking into the history of philosophy. I went to the University of Sussex where one of the features of the course was that everyone had to study several subjects in parallel: philosophy and history and literature. I was very struck by the different way that they approached their texts. So that, back in the 1960s, sowed the seeds for this book. After going to Sussex I went to Oxford as a graduate student and I was appalled because I became aware of how Oxford was not only teaching us theoretical skills; we were being inducted in a sort of exclusive club with peculiar verbal mannerisms and unfunny jokes. I was beginning to think that philosophy was imposed on philosophers.
I started thinking more about how the histories of philosophies were written. Most books tend to tell you the story from the beginning to the end, and it began to seem as if they were apart of this oppressive conspiracy, making it seem as though philosophy was a self contained thing, going back as a tunnel through the ages. People write histories of poetry but no one would think “before I read Shakespeare’s sonnets I’ll read a history book about what they mean”. But when people start thinking about someone like Hume they often want to read a book about him first, and if his works don’t correspond to what the history books said, they think that they must have misunderstood it. So the stories that get told in the history books get perpetuated from one generation to the next. Although books on the history of philosophy don’t have a very high status within the philosophical profession, I think that they actually have a huge influence over the way that philosophy is perceived and practiced.
You use the phrase “condescending complacency” about the history of philosophy.
When you look at the history of philosophy its seems that it must’ve been bloody obvious all along and you can’t understand why anybody would’ve spent 20 or 50 years tearing their hair out over this problem when a reader of a modern history book can grasp it in all of 10 seconds.
Do you think that the political and social forces which shape ideas often get left out of traditional histories of philosophy?
They do, but that doesn’t worry me so much as the actual complexity and sheer beauty and courage of the work actually being neglected. The individuality of the works and the authors is neglected as they’re all being packaged into some overarching narrative where everything is supposed to fit in with everything else. To compare it to the history of poetry again, you wouldn’t expect a book of poetry to show you how Johnson bridged the gap between Marlowe and Shakespeare, as they’re all individuals doing their own thing. And so it seems to me that one of the effects of these bloody books on the history of philosophy is that they make you think that it is easy to summarise all the philosophers by location easily onto a single map. That seems to me to be selling short what the philosophical tradition could teach us.
And what could it teach us?
If we read them in the right spirit we may get onto the same wavelength as the thinkers in question, but we may also be inspired to do it ourselves. Again with poetry, one of the effects of reading it might be that you try and write your own poems.
In your book you emphasise the relationships between teachers and students. Why is that so important?
That might not be literally teachers and students but imaginary relationships, where people read different philosophers and not only think its interesting doctrine but become fascinated by the author. It appears to me that in philosophy there’s a sort of oedipal struggle going on where you’re not starting from nothing, and you see yourself and being in rivalry, or collaboration, or even writing in tribute to a person from the past or how you imagine them. They become a sort of intellectual conscience to you and you begin to think “what would Heidegger think of that?” I think that’s a very important element of any education, especially a philosophical one.
What is the practice of philosophy and what does looks like?
I get a bit worried talking about accessibility and inaccessibility as it makes it sound as though obstacles have been put up, and that the task of the historian or the teacher is to take them away and make it easy. In a way I think that if it’s easy there’s no point. If philosophy is worth anything, it’s because it really makes you confront ideas that you’ve absorbed uncritically in the past, and makes you start think: “maybe they’re wrong”.
Philosophy is valuable because it empowers you intellectually, to have the courage to realise that ideas that are universally respected may nevertheless be complete bullshit. Not necessarily that they are, but that you really have to think it out for yourself. It is something that a socialist minded person might find hard to come to terms with, as there is something very individualistic about philosophy, in the sense that the practice of philosophy really is working things out for yourself. The opposite of philosophy is taking things for granted.
In the book. you dispute this idea that philosophy is a study of progress towards the truth.
I think philosophy is an individual struggling to understand their own way of thinking. So either on your own or with teachers or books you can make a measurable progress in recognising that things that you took for granted are not necessarily true. But I don’t think that philosophy results in things that can be passed on from one person to another or from one generation to another. In philosophy every individual has their own problems and they have to work on them on their own. It’s a bit like psychoanalysis where you just have to do it for yourself, and so philosophy is essentially working on oneself. If you progress toward some impersonal truth then you’re distracting yourself from what could be profitable or useful for you, as you’re forgetting about the ceaseless self criticism that makes philosophy a reasonably worthwhile activity.
You cast the net very widely and show the interplay between people that might traditionally be included in histories in philosophy. What was your criteria?
I deliberately took separate cross sections of different times in order to avoid unconsciously sinking into the bad habits of historians of philosophy, who all try to lead progressively into the Enlightenment of the present. The technique I used was grouping each chapter by date, within 50 year intervals. I looked through catalogues and databases of things that mentioned philosophy within those years, then worked out from there. It was a deliberate randomisation. The principal of selection was to have no selection at all, in order to prevent my own preconceptions from determining who would get mentioned.
The sub-title of your book is ‘the invention of philosophy in English’, but you make a point about the idea that philosophy is always multilingual.
There have been some very peculiar attempts since the beginning of the 19th century to construct national traditions of philosophy: people have wanted to use the great English philosophers, or the great Italian philosophers, or the great Greek philosophers to construct some entity that is the national philosophy. It seems to me that the whole idea of a national philosophy is utterly misconceived. It may be true that philosophers who share the same mother tongue are able to understand each other better than those that don’t, but I’m not even sure if that’s true.
Philosophy starts when you start feeling alienated in the words that you use. If you’re utterly at ease with them, then you will be utterly oblivious to what philosophy is about. It’s when you start thinking “what does the word ‘mind’ mean? And how does it relate to remind? And does the soul relate to the self?” and you start thinking “I’ve been using these words all my life but suddenly they’re very strange”. It seems to me that the very project of constructing a national philosophical tradition is misconceived in principle and in practice.
Often the case is that philosophers are multilingual and so for much of the history of Europe they wrote primarily in Latin, spoke in some vernacular and read Greek as well. So in the case of English philosophy, people tend to have some idea about what philosophy in English must be, as not very imaginative but very practical and there’s a range of discourse about that. But something that has given English philosophy such vitality is its constant interest in other languages. You could say in general that philosophy is a multilingual activity – it is something that arises from intellectual displacement or intellectual homelessness.
