New APPS

There’s a discussion going on over at Leiter about the results of his latest poll: which modern philosopher had the “most pernicious influence” on philosophy?  Heidegger was the strong #1, both in terms of the number of people who hated him, and the intensity of their hatred.  This doesn’t seem that surprising, given that Leiter’s readers, um, lean analytic and since Leiter took their Derrida option off the table.

Much more interesting, it seems to me, is the historical skew of the results.  Most of the figures in the top 20 are 20^th century philosophers, and all but three (Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant) are 19^th or 20^th century (and it wouldn’t be conceptually wrong to put Kant in with the 19c).  Does this reflect poor historical training?  Do influential but controversial positions get absorbed into the ‘mainstream?’

A quick look at the 17^th century might be illuminating in this regard.  I’m pretty sure that if you polled the self-declared moderns as to whom the most pernicious philosopher in history was, they’d unanimously say “Aristotle.”  But of course the moderns didn’t constitute a majority of those doing philosophy, and many of the most influential among them didn’t have academic appointments.  If you polled 17c academics more broadly, the odds are good that Descartes would indeed make the list; among other problems, he and his followers didn’t have a coherent story about transubstantiation.  Descartes wouldn’t be at the top, though.  That honor would probably go to Hobbes or Spinoza, and they would max out the intensity score, too.  Why?  Their materialism was believed to either be or lead to atheism.  Dr. John Templar proposed that Hobbes was the “Malmesburian Hydra, the enormous Leviathan, the gigantic dragon, the hideous monstrosity and British beast, the Propagator of execrable doctrines … the Nonsensical roguish vendor of falsifications” (qt. in Mintz, Hunting of Leviathan,56).  John Eachard, a minor academic, had this to say in the introduction to his book-length critique Hobbes:

“Since Mr. Hobbs by affected garbs of speech, by a starch'd Mathematical method, by counterfeit appearances of novelty and singularity, by magisterial haughtinesse, confidence and the like had cheated some people into a vast opinion of himself, and into a beliefe of things very dangerous and false; I did presume, with your Graces pardon, to think his writings so fond and extravagant, as not to merit being opposed in good earnest: and thereupon I was very loath to give them too much respect, and add undue weight to them by a solemn and serious confutation”

Or, one might say, Hobbes was a “charlatan.”  He advocated absolutism but not for religious reasons (this lost him Filmer’s support).  He waged war against symbolic algebra, and against experimental science as practiced by the Royal Society.  Henry More even managed to argue that Hobbes said the wrong things about witchcraft! (qt. in Mintz, 102-3; see my take on this here)

In the meantime, Spinoza published a book that argued that the Bible was the product of human composition.  As a result, the combination of Hobbes, Spinoza and the now-forgotten Isaac  la Peyrère (who said that people existed before Adam) were grouped into sort of an unholy trinity of heretical perniciousness.

What’s the point?  It’s just that it seems to me that philosophical perniciousness is a historical construct.  Accusations that a certain philosopher has a pernicious influence says at least as much about the person making the accusation, and their training and priorities (both intellectual and institutional), as it does about the philosopher accused.  Declaring somebody "pernicious" is a political and not an epistemic act, an act of boundary-work and community construction.  At least, that’s what Foucault (#3 most pernicious!) might say.