This is the sixth installment of the series of posts on my conceptual genealogy project. Part I is here; Part II.1 is here; Part II.2 is here; Part II.3 is here; Part II.4 is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here.
In this post, I discuss in more detail the two main categories of genealogy that were mentioned in previous posts: vindicatory and subversive genealogies.
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III. Applications of genealogy
In the spirit of the functionalist, goal-oriented approach adopted here, a pressing question now becomes: what’s the point of a genealogy? What kind of results do we obtain from performing a genealogical analysis of philosophical concepts? I’ve already mentioned vindication and subversion/debunking en passant along the way, but now it is time to discuss applications of genealogy in a more systematic way.[1]
III.1 Genealogy as vindicatory or as subversive
By now, it should be clear that genealogy is a rather plastic concept, one which can be (and has been) instantiated in a number of different ways. Craig offers a helpful description of a range of options:
[Genealogies] can be subversive, or vindicatory, of the doctrines or practices whose origins (factual, imaginary, and conjectural) they claim to describe. They may at the same time be explanatory, accounting for the existence of whatever it is that they vindicate or subvert. In theory, at least, they may be merely explanatory, evaluatively neutral (although as I shall shortly argue it is no accident that convincing examples are hard to find). They can remind us of the contingency of our institutions and standards, communicating a sense of how easily they might have been different, and of how different they might have been. Or they can have the opposite tendency, implying a kind of necessity: given a few basic facts about human nature and our conditions of life, this was the only way things could have turned out. (Craig 2007, 182)
In this section, we are primarily interested in the goals associated with genealogies, in particular the distinction between vindicating and subversive genealogies (the third option raised by Craig, ‘neutral’ genealogies, will be the focus of the next section). However, before discussing these goals more specifically, let us pause for a minute on the kinds of origins that may become the object of genealogical analysis, according to Craig: “factual, imaginary, and conjectural”. We can accordingly distinguish three kinds of genealogical projects. Factual genealogies pertain to developments actually having taken place in time and space, as documented in extant sources such as texts, but also other kinds of material evidence. Imaginary genealogies are like founding myths, which may not be believed to the letter by practitioners (not even as possibilities), but which help them explain and make sense of current practices and beliefs. Conjectural genealogies are different from purely imaginary ones in that things could in theory have unfolded as described conjecturally, but these descriptions do not require the kind of evidential documentation involved in factual genealogies.
Imaginary genealogies are arguably not particularly prominent within philosophy, but there are a few interesting examples such as Aristophanes’ myth of the origin of love as described in Plato’s Symposium. Conjectural genealogies, in contrast, have enjoyed and continue to enjoy quite some popularity among philosophers. For example, recent uses of evolutionary arguments in ethics (FitzPatrick 2014) – in their majority of the debunking, subversive kind (Kahane 2011) – are typically of the conjectural kind, not necessarily grounded in material documentation or empirical evidence (though there seem to be some exceptions). State-of-nature genealogical enterprises such as the ones by Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, and more recently by Craig (1990, 2007) and Williams (2002), are overtly conjectural (Williams in fact describes his genealogy as ‘fictional’ and ‘imaginary’, but it seems to me it comes closer to being a conjectural genealogy).
As such, conjectural genealogies do not seem to offer a fruitful vantage point for the kind of conceptual genealogy of philosophical concepts articulated in this paper; histories of philosophical concepts based on speculation and conjectures are not going to be very illuminating. In this sense, the philosopher engaged in this enterprise must be more like a ‘proper historian’, dealing extensively with documented sources.[2] And so, the relevant kind of genealogy for our purposes is what can be described as ‘factual genealogy’ (as already suggested elsewhere in this paper). The model here would be that of the French school of historical epistemology as represented by Canguilhem and Foucault, as well as more recent work in the HPS tradition, with their focus on grounding the analyses on sources and documentation.
And now let us turn specifically to the purposes of engaging in a genealogy. As suggested in the passage by Craig above (and elsewhere in this paper), a typical understanding of genealogy involves the idea of passing a judgment of value on a given practice, doctrine or idea by means of a genealogical analysis: genealogies are often used to show that something is good, or else that something is bad. Koopman (2013, 62) describes these projects as ‘normatively ambitious’ (and goes on to contrast them with the ‘normatively modest’ genealogical method of Foucault). Craig seems to think that the evaluative component is inherent to any genealogical project, and thus that evaluatively neutral genealogies are in a sense conceptually unviable (or else hopelessly uninteresting).
As noted above, vindicatory genealogies are closer in spirit to the commonsensical notion of genealogy, whereby tracing a person’s pedigree serves to legitimate and/or increase her social and political standing. Subversive genealogies, in contrast, turn the commonsensical notion of genealogy upside down; they seek to decrease or question the legitimacy of a given practice or concept by exposing its ‘shameful origins’. As examples of vindicatory genealogies, Koopman (2013, 59) cites the ‘new British genealogists’ Williams, Craig, and Skinner, possibly inspired by the ‘old British genealogist’ Hobbes. Nietzsche is of course the quintessential example of a subversive genealogist, but Koopman also mentions a few precursors such as Darwin[3] and Hume. More recently, evolutionary debunking arguments (in ethics (Street 2006; Kahane 2011) as well as elsewhere) can also be viewed as examples of subversive genealogies. (Koopman (2013) focuses specifically on Williams and Nietzsche as representatives of vindicatory and subversive genealogies, respectively.)
To further discuss these two kinds of genealogy in general terms, we can continue to follow Craig (2007), who offers lucid formulations of each. He distinguishes between genealogies that are intrinsically vindicatory/ subversive from genealogies that are merely accidentally so, and then goes on to describe the four categories. He starts with intrinsically subversive genealogies:
In the intrinsic type we have an account of the history of certain attitudes, beliefs or practices that their proponent cannot accept without damage to his esteem for, and certitude in, the attitudes, beliefs or practices themselves. For one thing, it may in some cases actually be a part of the belief-system that the belief-system itself had a quite different kind of origin – most religions are like this, perhaps all. (Craig 2007, 182)
He then goes on to describe how Hume’s account of the origins of monotheistic belief as related to processes that have no apparent connection to truth (some of which are based on motivations that are ‘positively disreputable’) will surely affect negatively the faith of the believer who takes Hume’s story onboard. Similarly for Nietzsche’s account of Christian morality as a self-deceptive expression of ‘hatred, resentment, and bewilderment’. (His example of an accidental subversive genealogy is Darwinism.)
Vindicatory genealogies are described in the following terms:
Some genealogies, by contrast, are vindicatory: the story they tell is in one way or another a recommendation of whatever it is they tell us the story of. […] The genealogies – by which I mean the causal stories – of many of our beliefs are intrinsically justificatory in a very strong sense: they give an essential place to the very facts believed in, so if that is how they came about they must be true. Or a genealogy may vindicate a practice, exhibiting it as arising our of the need to find a solution to a problem; and we may then regard it as intrinsically vindicatory if the problem is one that any human society […] will want to solve. […] A genealogy is accidentally vindicatory, on the other hand, when the increased prestige it confers on its object is due to features that are relatively local, or of limited timespan. (Craig 2007, 183)
Unlike subversive genealogies, vindicatory genealogies show us that we have good reasons to hold the beliefs and practices that we hold: either because the belief-forming process is shown to have been reliable and truth-conducive, or else because the beliefs and practices present themselves as solutions to inherently important problems. Though this need not always be the case, vindicatory genealogies will typically confer a certain necessity and inevitability to their objects (‘they must be true’) – recall that Hegelian teleological historicism can be broadly viewed as a kind of vindicatory genealogy. By contrast, subversive genealogies will typically highlight the contingency of the beliefs and practices in question.[4] (Recall Craig’s quote at the beginning of this section, distinguishing genealogies emphasizing contingency from genealogies emphasizing necessity.)
How does the distinction between these two kinds of genealogy fare when applied to the conceptual genealogies of philosophical concepts that are the object of the present analysis? Here too, it seems that this is a useful distinction. A conceptual genealogy of this kind may be vindicatory if it shows that a given philosophical concept or doctrine has a ‘venerable pedigree’, for example that it was developed and/or maintained by some of the great figures of our philosophical canon. One example that springs to mind is the enthusiasm with which proponents of the ‘Language of Thought’ hypothesis (e.g. Fodor) received historical analysis showing that this general idea had antecedents in Latin medieval philosophy, Ockham in particular (Panaccio 2004). In contrast, a conceptual genealogy may be subversive if it shows that the historical (and thus conceptual) grounds for a given notion or doctrine are either confused, shaky philosophical ideas, or else philosophical theses to which we no longer want to commit. One example of the latter would be ??? [suggestions by readers welcome!].
We have seen that, while he considers the possibility of a third, evaluatively neutral kind of genealogy, Craig quickly dismisses it (I will discuss his reasons for doing so shortly). If he is right, then any genealogy has an intrinsic evaluatively component, and thus the vindicatory vs. subversive distinction will be exhaustive. However, in the next section I argue that this third category is not only viable; it is also quite promising, in particular from the point of view of philosophical methodology. I will use the term ‘explanatory’ for my own characterization of evaluatively neutral genealogies of this kind. (Koopman (2013) also defends the third option, which he describes as ‘problematization’, and attributes it to Foucault.)
[1] Koopman (2013, Chap. 2) and Craig (2007) will be the main sources for this section.
[2] To be honest, I am generally suspicious of conjectural genealogies in general, which seem to me to be detrimental to progress in a number of different disciplines by producing ‘just-so stories’. But this is not the place for an extensive discussion of my reservations.
[3] The connections between Nietzsche and Darwin have received much attention from scholars, a recent example being (Johnson 2013).
[4] However, I do not maintain that contingency is inherent to subversive genealogies, while necessity is inherent to vindicatory genealogies. It seems to me that subversive genealogies emphasizing necessity as well as vindicatory genealogies emphasizing contingency are both at least conceptual possibilities.
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