The Longing for Total Revolution as Critical But Ideational Genealogy

ABSTRACT

Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution is not just an important study of an extremely influential strain of post-Kantian philosophy, which according to Yack culminated in both Marx and Nietzsche. It also exemplifies an unusual approach to the history of thought: a form of critical genealogy that, unlike the Nietzschean and Foucauldian variants, seeks intellectual charity by ascribing mistaken ideas not to non-ideational psychological or social sources, but to a web of beliefs that would have obscured from fully rational historical actors the mistakenness of the idea being genealogized. This approach to intellectual history can justify the history of thought on logical grounds that are unavailable to those who attempt to justify it on the basis of the inherent interest of the past or the usefulness of intellectual history in providing resources for present-day use.

Keywords:

• antiquarianism
• critical genealogy
• history of ourselves
• history of the present
• intellectual history
• history of political thought
• pearl diving
• Bernard Yack

Notes

1 I should mention that Yack might not agree with my interpretation of his methodology. The Preface to The Longing for Total Revolution professes a pragmatic rather than methodological orientation, one that is to be evaluated by its particular interpretive fruits. Nonetheless, I see in his method a value that is entirely separable from its particular interpretive fruits.

2 See Jones 2002.

3 My use of the term intellectual charity is in deliberate contrast to the term interpretive charity. Regrettably, although the latter term is a better fit for what I mean, it has been appropriated by analytic philosophers who, following Donald Davidson (1973-1974), consider it charitable to interpret the other as agreeing with oneself, since this entails attributing to the other the rationality that one accords to oneself. This view is incapable of charitably understanding an other with whom one disagrees—who is treated, by the Davidsonian philosopher, as engaging in some form of irrationality or “epistemic vice,” as a rational, virtuous person would, of course, reach the analytic philosopher’s own conclusions. (One is tempted to call this approach analytic narcissism.) By “intellectual charity,” then, I mean the attempt to understand the other’s rationality even when one disagrees with the other’s conclusions, which is the very opposite of the analytic philosopher’s “interpretive charity.” See Friedman 2021.

4 See Friedman 2019, 234-47, and Friedman 2021.