Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Challenge of Intellectual History

Abstract

Men and ideas advance by parricide, by which children kill, if not their fathers, at least beliefs of their fathers, and arrive at new beliefs.Sir Isaiah Berlin1I was supposed to wind up study of mine, and become Lovejoy of my generation-that's silly talk of scholarly people.Saul Bellow2To become the Lovejoy, with implication that each generation could only have one, was ambition of Moses Herzog in Saul Bellow's novel, written a few years after he had won Nobel Award for literature. Herzog presents life of a professor who has as many sexual escapades and as much personal angst as he has scholarly interests, too unfocused to be another Lovejoy. Bellow's novel is full of letters to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other modernist minds who brought Western intellectual life to a standstill, posing a lasting question mark about possibilities of knowledge. Bellow taught in program of Committee on Social Thought at University of Chicago. His colleague and close friend Allan Bloom also taught in that program. But when Bloom wrote best seller, The Closing of American Mind, he cited Nietzsche and Heidegger as part of German disease that did so much to subvert academic thought, supposedly turning students into zombies, walking air heads responding only to vacuous visual stimuli and mind-numbing music, with Rock n' Roll blasting through a Walkman and having effect of a masturbational fantasy.3While Bellow's epistolary novel interrogated modernist thinkers, Bloom's popular tract of times cited many classical thinkers as a countervoice to modernists-Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Kant, Lessing, Schiller, Locke, and Rousseau. Such minds also figured prominently in works of Arthur O. Lovejoy. But recitation of such names leaves impression that Lovejoy concerned himself only with main currents of European intellectual history. On contrary, two of his most important and often neglected books are The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Reflections on Human Nature* There one finds profound meditations on two vital episodes in history of ideas in America: Enlightenment and philosophy of pragmatism. Perry Miller, arguably America's greatest intellectual historian, skipped over Enlightenment as he proceeded to study Puritans and then transcendentalists, and he never seemed to have much interest in pragmatists.5 But what Lovejoy had to write on Enlightenment and pragmatism is richly ironic.The pragmatists claimed to have liberated modern thought from easy assumptions of Age of Reason, and today's poststructuralists charge that eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers deceived themselves in looking to advent of knowledge as an answer to presence of power. Lovejoy's books offer a different take entirely, making us aware that it is modernist thinkers who may be deceiving themselves with dubious promises of pragmatism and arrogant conceits of poststructuralism and deconstruction, whose proponents claim to be first masters of suspicion. In many of Lovejoy's works, nothing is resolved and everything is left suspended in a state of honest suspicion.Lovejoy was comfortable with contradiction, and hence more in tune with Augustine, who looked to depths of human consciousness for spiritual knowledge, than with Aquinas, who believed evidence for God and human freedom could be found in reason alone. Nowhere is Lovejoy's affinity for emotions of consciousness better seen than in his several essays on romanticism, both English, French, German, and even its origins in Chinese aesthetics and Confucian ethics. It was not reason and notion of order and regulation that appealed to Lovejoy but spontaneous promptings of nature springing forth without reflection or design. He delighted in quoting Voltaire against classicists and scholastics. …