The Teleology Problem in Intellectual History
Whither are we tending?
This is the second installment of an attempt to identify and give examples of certain logical and rhetorical deficiencies prevalent within intellectual history over the past forty to fifty years. The first part can be read here.
In today’s note and in a couple of future installments[1], I want to examine how intellectual historians—not universally, but broadly speaking—have continued to work from within a teleological philosophy of history, even as the academic discipline of history (and the academic humanities as a whole) has deprecated what it often characterizes as either the naïveté or the willful bias of teleological narratives. Even more to the point, I want to analyze how intellectual historians have, for the most part, maintained their teleological assumptions solely in practice and not in theory.
That is to say, intellectual historians have not made an explicit case for teleology, and I suspect that is because they largely presume that they are not teleologists. My argument is that they are able to occupy this position first of all because historians have tended to misconstrue the term when applying it critically to others’ work; and secondly because it has been a long time since intellectual historians have spent any significant time or energy working out the question of how it is, precisely, that ideas (or “discourses,” if you prefer) bring about historical change.
It is not as if intellectual historians ceased arguing about methodology at some point in the past, but I would contend that the debates that intellectual historians have had with one another under the general rubric of “method” or “theory” have been either superficial or circular or both.[2] It may not be the worst consequence of these wasted words, but one of the casualties of this logomachy has been the attention that intellectual historians pay to their own language, to how the very structures of their sentences encode fundamental assumptions about history and causality. Syntax matters, and the slipshod grammar that these intellectual historians use to describe what ideas do and what relationships ideas have to individual actors, to institutions, and to other ideas is not just aesthetically regrettable, but conceptually incoherent.
Although not exactly kind, I think it is more charitable to assume that the endemic lack of precision across intellectual historians’ books and articles is a consequence of inattention rather than a lack of understanding. In fact, my point is, at least in one sense, that intellectual historians do know better, and that the lack of rigor and self-discipline in their prose indicates that their mental energies are being directed elsewhere—generally to the historiographical or political implications of their arguments.
This overriding concern with the “impact” or “intervention” one is making is, perhaps, only realistic. If historians mainly pay attention to the aspects of their project that we might think of as its metadata—the semaphore-like keywords that make one’s arguments legible at a distance, the historiographic self-labeling that permits the reader to wiggle one’s new work into a space on their mental shelves—it is because in their hearts they doubt that anyone will be reading all that closely. As scholars we have largely resigned ourselves to the fact that most of our colleagues approach the responsibility of “keeping up with the literature” with triage in mind. It is extremely unlikely that anyone will tarry over a particular sentence long enough to quibble about word choice or ruminate about the implications of its syntax.
My point, however, is not to grouse about declining standards but to make the case that we ought to pay attention to the deeper intellectual errors that careless grammar can illuminate for us. The presentation of my case studies will have to wait for the next installment, but before rushing into them, I wish to make explicit how I think we should define teleology and why—if it is true that intellectual historians have not been rigorous about excising teleological assumptions fully from their work and instead have just stopped thinking about the issue—I think that teleology is objectionable and should have no part in our scholarly practice.
Teleology is the assumption that history is not blind but has a direction, that it is possible not just to impose a narrative retroactively on human actions but actually to discern some kind of continuous line of action that—though it may be circuitous and involuted—is oriented toward something. And if a historian assumes that history has an orientation, it means that they can plot that line and describe any particular segment of it as an advance or a retreat, because even if the segment is, technically speaking, not moving but merely connects two points, the historian can see that those points are at different distances from that orienting something, and that chronologically the points are not coeval—one came before the other. The historian can thus speak of successes and failures and—most importantly—ironies and tragedies because their evaluations of historical changes need not match the assessments made by people really living at the time of those changes. What historical actors may have considered a victory the historian can point to as laying the foundation for a cruel sequence of reverses, for instance.
This divergence of the historian’s perspective from that of historical actors is more than just retrospection. Irony and tragedy are both delicately dependent on a finely calibrated sense of proportion—an ability to determine the ratio between what did happen and what ought to have happened, between what would have been merited and what was received. A tragedy that cannot maintain or that deliberately sabotages its sense of proportion quickly becomes a travesty; irony that loses control over proportionality dissolves into the instability of camp. To claim to find irony or tragedy in history is to assert that one can not only perceive significant empirical connections between two events, but that one can also determine the essential or ideal proportion one event bears to the other. In other words, one claims a metaphysical insight into the meaning of one event compared with another within some overall schema or pattern.
Earlier events take their significance not from the intrinsic meaning they had for people at the time those events occurred, and not from any causal relationship they had with some later event, but because the earlier and later events can be seen together as an interplay of dynamics within a more encompassing historical line of development. It is as if we see two rocks in a stream and are watching a leaf trapped in an eddy created by the combination of their positions—our characterization of the leaf as “trapped” depends entirely on our awareness of the stream as a current and our presumption that the leaf ought to be moving, that the positioning of the rocks has thrown off the way things would otherwise have been.
It might seem that I am working toward an objection about the normativity of this perspective, that I simply don’t like all that “ought to” business. But in fact my dissent is not about historians having values or even about historians measuring the past against their values. What I find insupportable is the idea that history is a realization of a value or of some set of values. Anything that trucks with a view of history that plots humanity (or some subset of humanity) moving not just through time but forward or backward in relation to some ideal is not history at all, but some variety (however secularized) of eschatology, and all arguments for eschatology emerge from outside of the study of history.[3] We cannot study history and work our way into some eschatological understanding; if we try to mix history and eschatology, it is because we started with the latter and stuff it with enough of the former to make it into a sort of mannequin, something that we can hang subsequent, more technical arguments on—how we should periodize or if we should periodize, how we should weigh different categories of evidence against one another, how determinative is the economic relative to the cultural, etc., etc. Swarmed by these largely pragmatic concerns of how to do history, we lose track of the fact that underneath it all, we are dressing a mannequin, not a human.
In the next installment, I’ll be moving on to cases, or rather to one case: as with my previous post, I’m going to pick on James Kloppenberg’s Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (2016), although I’ll also be drawing on some of his other writings for illustrative purposes. As I said before, my intention here is not to single anyone out—I think the problems I identify are regrettably pervasive among intellectual historians—but to choose a historian successful enough that I can do no harm with a critique. I won’t deny, however, that there is a strategic element to my choice as well: the teleological character of Kloppenberg’s work—and of this book in particular—is much easier to demonstrate (the book is called Toward Democracy, for pity’s sake), and he has been explicit enough about the importance of Christianity to his worldview that I can identify the source of his teleology without relying on inference or supposition. As a brief example of how openly teleological his project is, here is how Kloppenberg described the book in a rather defensive response he wrote for a symposium on Toward Democracy in The Journal of Politics, Religion, and Ideology:
By presenting my history of democracy against the backdrop of its conceptual components, I hoped to show how different cultures moved, never in a straight line but always, erratically, toward more robust versions of self-rule.[4]
I’ll wrap up by pointing out that what I find most insupportable in this sentence is the word “always.” “Toward” gets the italics, but it is “always” that really does the work of transforming democracy from a concept that people have argued over and fought in the name of within history to a transhistorical ideal that can be seen as a unifying thread stitching disparate events into a single tapestry, a saga in which each event is an incremental advance or reverse that draws its meaning from the hope that the story will one day end, and will end happily. This is eschatology.
Until next.
[1] I have struggled to put together my thoughts on teleology and intellectual history, so I have written at greater length than I wanted to. Breaking it into chunks will allow me to edit it down and will give any readers who look this over a chance to digest more reasonably sized slabs of prose.
[2] For example, we have spent far too much time arguing over which individuals and texts should receive our most focused attention, when this is actually a very simple matter. While significant discoveries do occur from time to time that change the way we think about canonical thinkers, most “historical studies” of already well-documented white men are closer to belles-lettres than they are to scholarship. Real histories convey new knowledge to their readers; they don’t merely shuffle prior interpretations into new configurations. The greatest potential for delivering new knowledge to one’s colleagues (and to other interested readers) is to write about people who are not already very well known.
[3] The distinction between teleology and eschatology—at least in terms of how I am using the terms and critiquing historians’ practices—is slippery, but I’ll try to be more precise in the next installment.
[4] Kloppenberg, “In Search of Archimedes: A Meditation on Historical Judgment,” The Journal of Politics, Religion, and Ideology 19.3 (2018): 399. Emphasis in the original.