Jonathan Israel

World Congress of Philosophy themes tend to have a tendentious connection with what actually goes on in therm. But Jonathan Israel is perfectly suited to be one of the star guests for the 2008 conference, which aimed to rethink philosophy. His magisterial brace of books Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested has rethought the defining period in modern intellectual history, to almost universal acclaim.

It is perhaps not coincidental that Israel is an intellectual historian, not a philosopher, for fresh air rarely blows through a discipline unless its doors and windows are thrown open.

In Seoul, Israel took part in a panel discussion where all the participants bought into a central idea, “that big controversies have often been the driving force in innovation and ideas, and developing new approaches to intellectual problems.” It is, as it were, the history of philosophy in fights. It’s an approach that Israel believes yields new insights.

“The basic methodology of my work on the Enlightenment, since I seriously devoted myself to this in the early 1990s, has been to focus on big controversies as a way of escaping from the familiar canon, the familiar way of presenting history of philosophy which one finds in textbooks, and the familiar prioritisation and hierarchy of philosophers and ideas.

“For instance, there are very conventional ways of explaining how philosophy fed into the Enlightenment. One knows all about Locke and Newton, for instance; that the great inspiration was essentially English empiricism and scientific advances; that the French then picked this up, then others; and the Enlightenment followed from that.

“One can see how there might be a danger that a certain national perspective could feed into this. And other, indeed unconscious, priorities could feed into this, as I think is actually the case.

“Certain other things, which may have been equally or more important at the time, could be marginalised by such an approach. You’ve got a relatively large body of often illogical writers or conservative writers, and hardly anyone pays any attention to that stuff today. It’s going to be very useful as a mirror, showing you in reverse what’s actually happening.

“There’s been a strong criticism of traditional approaches to intellectual history around for some years, because of the danger of separating the history of ideas too much from the realities and actualities of social history. It’s a critique which I agree with to a large extent.

“The advantage of a big study in big controversies is that you’re getting a more objective, more exact picture. Who were the most important thinkers and why? What aspects of their work were important? How was their thought received and judged? What elements were particularly emphasised, what elements were less emphasised? The results, you may think, are just refinements of what’s supposedly in the canon. But in actual fact, the results are dramatically different. It shows that what we’ve been doing with our accepted, official, conventional notions about history of philosophy is completely distorting everything, and getting totally the wrong idea about the Enlightenment, for example.”

Israel makes for a convincing case, and it is certainly true that one criticism which has been leveled at much Anglophone philosophy for a good century now is that it’s ahistorical. Unsurprisingly, Israel agrees with the charge.

“Humanity is a complicated progression that works its way through all kinds of political, economic and social contexts. I think the analytical philosopher is totally on the wrong track. The analytical philosopher can’t really understand even what philosophy is in the 18th Century sense, let alone practice it effectively, because the analytical philosopher is unable to see the main developments in history, in politics, in law reform, in the struggles about how we reach refined moral concepts, which is, of course, one of the most central aspects of the controversy. Because they have no notion of all these controversies and the history of them, they’re either rather uselessly repeating the basics we’ve had already, or not even getting as far as you would get by taking a historical approach.

“We mustn’t forget that Leibniz was first a courtier, that Kant was a professor in Prussia constrained by certain pressures and norms, including changes in government policy after the death of Frederick the Great. The new regime from 1787 onwards was much more reactionary, in certain respects, particularly with regard to anything you said about religion. These are constraints that no one could ignore, not even a Leibniz or a Kant.

“If the philosopher pays no attention to the context in which things are being said, I don’t see how you can then interpret them accurately, because everybody had to fashion what they said in order to accommodate the constraints and pressures at the time.

“So, I’m sorry, I’m one of the biggest enemies of analytical philosophy there are. I think it’s a complete waste of time. I think it’s even a contradiction in terms to imagine that there can be a real philosophy which answers to basic universal human questions and values, which is not historically based. It’s an idea that doesn’t make sense, even if some people hold it.”

Reactions by philosophers to Israel’s books on the Enlightenment perhaps reflect how much they still resist the idea that history is a secondary concern for them.

“Philosophers were often very complimentary about the new information, how it brought to their attention all sorts of secondary writers that they didn’t know about and provided a lot of useful context. So I’ve received quite a lot of compliments from philosophers. But they all then add that, of course, my grasp of basic concepts is not as good as theirs, because they’re trained philosophers and I’m not, and so when it comes to the most important things, I fall short, which is true, no doubt.”

Really? But given what he thinks about the impossibility of a historically under-informed understanding of philosophy, surely he can’t just buy their critique of his alleged naivety?

“Well, if I’m to answer with total honesty, I think I would say which is sometimes true, no doubt.”

In the Seoul session, Israel was able to catch up on ideas developed by his philosophical colleagues, which often take the basic history-of-ideas-as-conflict idea in more theoretical directions. Of particular interest was the work of the session’s convenor, Marcello Dascal.

“Dascal has developed a theory about how controversies impose a logic of concepts which has an inherent tendency to polarise and dichotomise the philosophical debate. The way concepts are formulated in the context of debate has an inherent tendency, as history and experience show, to create polarities and dichotomies around which the discussion unfolds.

“He’s developed a theory about how the greatest innovations in the history of philosophy come from a kind of stalemate situation in which controversy has produced a rigid dichotomy of approach to a problem. The greatest minds, in this case, Leibniz and Kant, were looking for ways to transcend that, to de-dichotomize the rigid polarities that had been created by transcending the framework within which the debate had been posed. This process of de-dichotomization relies on what he refers to as forms of soft rationality, that is to say, trying to soften the iron logic of the polarity that has formed. Kant, for instance, famously with his Critique of Pure Reason, found a methodology to transcend the typical dichotomies and polarities of 18th Century debates, and in this way, created a whole new framework for philosophy.”

Does Israel think that we could apply the lessons of understanding the history of philosophy to help us better understand the philosophy we are doing today?

“Well, I’m sure I’m not the best person to answer a question like that, because I’m so utterly immersed in the 17th and 18th Centuries. I don’t regard myself as a participant in contemporary philosophical debate, in the sense that I follow it very much. It’s just a hypothesis that the best way to understand, to document, and intellectually to grasp the debates of the 17th and 18th Centuries, is likely to be connected to the best ways to comprehend controversies that go on now.

“I also think that the Enlightenment opened up all the most important universal questions, including all the most important political aspects of those questions: how are you going to reach the representative democracy that works; what the relationship is between democracy and egalitarianism; what a secular morality is and how you build it, and so on. Having seen the richness, the diversity, and the cogency of Enlightenment debates, which is greatly underestimated, it just seems to me inherently improbable that we’ve made huge advances beyond that point. What seems to me particularly improbable is that analytical philosophers today would make big breakthroughs that weren’t made then when they don’t even know what those discussions were.”

If Israel sounds as if he’s bullish on the need to rethink philosophy historically, he’s equally convinced that we need to rethink history philosophically.

“I think we’ve got a big problem. We’ve got an enormous hole between philosophy and history. Historians are quite shy of all this, and don’t know what to do with it. For instance, in my paper this morning I was talking about one of the biggest controversies of the 18th Century, in terms of numbers of books that were published and numbers of people that were involved, which was the huge split between the French philosophes, Diderot, Baron D’Holbach, and many lesser men on one side, and Voltaire, Turgot and many lesser men on the other side, which developed into a rift which couldn’t be reconciled because the questions involved were too hard and too basic. And there are many secondary writers, and many complicated aspects to this.

“What these controversies very interestingly show, in a way that I think philosophical debates sometimes miss, is why some aspects of political philosophy, moral philosophy and metaphysics become interlocked and intertwined. This is very important.

“Most historians will simply bypass this and say, well, look, we’re historians. We can’t really handle something this philosophically complicated. Philosophers should sort this out – why do we have to do this? Well, if the historians are not up to it, and the philosophers ignore it, then nobody does it. The result is there’s a big hole in the middle.”

It’s a big hole which Israel has started to fill remarkably well.

Julian Baggini is editor of tpm.