In a recent post, in order to make the case that the period 1880-1920 was a golden age for western philosophy, I offered you a list of works of that period, which I arbitrarily organized as two works per year.
It makes, I think, an impressive list. But it will naturally raise questions....
1. What number of these 82 works constitute "philosophy" in a fairly narrow sense of the term? All such borders are permeable, but my best answer is 36. Or, less than half. I am counting only non-fiction works among those 36. If I add to that number the heavily philosophical novels and plays on the list (Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Bellamy, Shaw and Joyce) I get that number up to 41, or just one-half of the whole.
2. What are the chief subjects of those that I think are philosophy but only in an acceptable broadened sense?
This was a very active time for philosophically inclined thought within the adjacent fields of biology, psychology, economics, and history (where any of those fields may be conceived of as pattern seeking on a grand scale). In psychology our list ranges from Ribot to Jung, in economics from Mill to Mises, and in history from Toynbee to H.G. Wells.
The "Toynbee" in question isn't the one you may be thinking of when you first hear the name. It is the uncle of the one you first thought of. But this earlier figure, Arnold [no middle name] Toynbee, who died before he turned 30, poured a lot of scholarly achievement into his short life, and one of those achievements was to popularize, if he did not outright invent, the term "Industrial Revolution".
He is pictured above.
3. Why is your favorite author included but only by a work NOT considered his/her magnum opus?
In several instances on that list, an important author's works appeared both inside and outside the 41-year period in which I am especially interested. Henry George's classic PROGRESS AND POVERTY was published just a little too early. In 1879. George is represented here by a work on the Irish land question. A nice bit of serendipity, though. Leaving out the broad theory and getting right to application.
An analogous example is that of the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, who published her SCIENCE AND HEALTH in 1875. Too early for my golden age. She is represented in the golden age list by what one might consider an addendum to it, NO AND YES, where as the title suggests Eddy sought to answer the questions raised by that earlier volume. In this case, as in George's, sticking to the premises of the list is a positive, not a hindrance. The later book is a road less traveled for people with some curiosity about Eddy's thought, and as a consequence the fruits on the trees along that road are still hanging on, awaiting your passage.
4. That account doesn't really work for the instance you're thinking of. Got anything else?
In other instances, a thinker may have published multiple works within the golden age designated, yet my choice of inclusion may still seem idiosyncratic. I simply acknowledge that.
Alfred Russel Wallace is represented here only by his pamphlet on paper money. Hmmmm. Wallace was much better known as a naturalist, and an ally of Charles Darwin in the early development of the theory of evolution by natural selection. An online bibliography of his work contains more than 750 publications. Some of them prior to our period but many within it, including NOTE ON SEXUAL SELECTION (1892) and THE NON-INHERITANCE OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERS (1893) etc.
But my list has plenty of other works on the evolutionary debates, including works by Weissman and Huxley, who represent the position in those debates with which Wallace, too, is associated. I think Wallace's advocacy of paper money is an extraordinary outlier in debates of the day and precisely as an outlier it helps illustrate the abundance and creativity of the time better than any of his writings qua naturalist could have done.
5. Why does this make a case for a golden age? Couldn't you make as impressive a list for any other period of like length?
I could try. In the end, though, this involves the advice I would give an omnivorous reader who had gotten to middle age without encountering a lot of philosophy and who wanted to turn his omnivorousness in the philosophic direction: start reading the works of that era, 1880-1920. Use this list if you like and start at them. In the process you will develop the questions that will allow you to move toward the contemporary, or move back toward the ancients, and it would be wrong to disregard your own impulses once they have developed thus.
"Whence over thyself I mitre thee and crown."
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