I don’t know what I think. A plea for unclarity and prophecy

Would you begin a research project if there were just one more day left to work on it? I guess I wouldn’t. Why? Well, my assumption is that the point of a research project is that we improve our understanding of a phenomenon. Improvement seems to be inherently future-directed, meaning that we understand x a bit better tomorrow than today. Therefore, I am inclined to think that we would not begin to do research, had we not the hope that it might lead to more knowledge of x in the future. I think this not only true of research but of much thinking and writing in general. We wouldn’t think, talk or write certain things, had we not the hope that this leads to an improved understanding in the future. You might find this point trivial. But a while ago it began to dawn on me that the inherent future-directedness of (some) thinking and writing has a number of important consequences. One of them is that we are not the (sole) authors of our thoughts. If this is correct, it is time to rethink our ways of evaluating thoughts and their modes of expression. Let me explain.

So why am I not the (sole) author of my thoughts? Well, I hope you all know variations of the following situation: You try to express an idea. Your interlocutor frowns and points out that she doesn’t really understand what you’re saying. You try again. The frowning continues, but this time she offers a different formulation. “Exactly”, you shout, “this is exactly what I meant to say!” Now, who is the author of that thought? I guess it depends. Did she give a good paraphrase or did she also bring out an implication or a consequence? Did she use an illustration that highlights a new aspect? Did she perhaps even rephrase it in such a way that it circumvents a possible objection? And what about you? Did you mean just that? Or do you understand the idea even better than before? Perhaps you are now aware of an important implication. So whose idea is it now? Hers or yours? Perhaps you both should be seen as authors. In any case, the boundaries are not clear.

In this sense, many of my thoughts are not (solely) authored by me. We often try to acknowledge as much in forewords and footnotes. But some consequences of this fact might be more serious. Let me name three: (1) There is an obvious problem for the charge of anachronism in history of philosophy (see my inaugural lecture).  If future explications of thoughts can be seen as improvements of these very thoughts, then anachronistic interpretations should perhaps not merely be tolerated but encouraged. Are Descartes’ Meditations complete without the Objections and Replies? Can Aristotle be understood without the commentary traditions? Think about it! (2) Another issue concerns the identity of thoughts. If you are a semantic holist of sorts you might assume that a thought is individuated by numerous inferential relations. Is your thought that p really what it is without it entailing q? Is your thought that p really intelligible without seeing that it entails q? You might think so, but the referees of your latest paper might think that p doesn’t merit publication without considering q. (3) This leads to the issue of acceptability. Whose inferences or paraphrases count? You might say that p, but perhaps p is not accepted in your own formulation, while the expression of p in your superviser’s form of words is greeted with great enthusiasm. In similar spirit, Tim Crane has recently called for a reconsideration of peer review.  Even if some of these points are controversial, they should at least suggest that authorship has rather unclear boundaries.

Now the fact that thoughts are often future-directed and have multiple authors has, in turn, a number of further consequences. I’d like to highlight two of them by way of calling for some reconsiderations: a due reconsideration of unclarity and what Eric Schliesser calls “philosophic prophecy”.*

• A plea for reconsidering unclarity. Philosophers in the analytic tradition pride themselves on clarity. But apart from the fact that the recognition of clarity is necessarily context-dependent, clarity ought to be seen as the result of a process rather than a feature of the thought or its present expression. Most texts that are considered original or important, not least in the analytic tradition, are hopelessly unclear when read without guidance. Try Russell’s “On Denoting” or Frege’s “On Sense and Reference” and you know what I mean. Or try some other classics like Aristotle’s “De anima” or Hume’s “Treatise”. Oh, your own papers are exempt from this problem? Of course! Anyway, we all know this: we begin with a glimpse of an idea. And it’s the frowning of others that either makes us commit it to oblivion or try an improvement. But if this is remotely true, there is no principled reason to see unclarity as a downside. Rather it should be seen as a typical if perhaps early stage of an idea that wants to grow.
• A plea for coining concepts or philosophic prophecy. Simplifying an idea by Eric Schliesser, we should see both philosophy and history of philosophy as involved in the business of coining concepts that “disclose the near or distant past and create a shared horizon for our philosophical future.”* As is well-known some authors (such as Leibniz, Kant or Nietzsche) have sometimes decidedly written rather for future audiences than present ones, trying to pave conceptual paths for future dialogues between religions, metaphysicians or Übermenschen. For historians of philosophy in particular this means that history is never just an antiquarian enterprise. By offering ‘translations’ and explanations we can introduce philosophical traditions to the future or silence them. In this sense, I’d like to stress, for example, that Ryle’s famous critique of Descartes, however flawed historically, should be seen as part of Descartes’ thought. In the same vain, Albert the Great or Hilary Putnam might be said to bring out certain versions of Aristotle. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t have any thoughts of their own. But their particular thoughts might not have been possible without Aristotle, who in turn might not be intelligible (to us) without the later developments. In this sense, much if not all philosophy is a prophetic enterprise.

If my thoughts are future-directed and multi-authored in such ways, this also means that I often couldn’t know at all what I actually think, if it were not for your improvements or refinements. This is of course one of the lessons learned from Wittgenstein’s so-called private language argument. But it does not only concern the possibility of understanding and knowing. A fortiori it also concerns understanding our own public language and thought. As I said earlier, I take it to be a rationality constraint that I must agree to some degree with others in order to understand myself. This means that I need others to see the point I am trying to make. If this generalises, you cannot know thyself without listening to others.

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* See Eric Schliesser, “Philosophic Prophecy”, in Philosophy and Its History, 209.