Derek Parfit famously described two rival approaches to the history of philosophy as a contrast between grave-robbers and archaeologists. Grave robbers want to rediscover ideas from the past to be deployed in contemporary battles. Archaeologists are more skeptical about the continuity of ideas. They sometimes view ideas as social constructions from different historical periods, altogether irrelevant for our own times. They warn that the grave-robber mentality ironically leads to undermining the significance of the past, discouraging us from taking old ideas seriously by inducing us to crudely assimilate them into our own vision of the world.
Grave robbers include Straussian approaches to discovering submerged, esoteric meaning in the history of philosophy, as well as analytic philosophical attempts to extract full, persuasive arguments from the past. Archaeologists include those derided by Strauss as "historicists" who insist that history is always a mere struggle for power, and that ideas are epiphenomenal consequences of particular historical struggles.
There is truth in both positions. It is obvious to me (against the young Skinner), that there are indeed "perennial questions" in philosophy, and that we can profitably think through those questions by studying the best arguments across time. It is also clear, however, that a cheap, cynical deployment of the past as "anticipating" the present can lead to gross distortions of what old debates actually consisted in. It can lead us to naturalize our own parochial prejudices.
The difficulty with the history of ideas is that for it to be useful, it must be simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. It must speak to our present concerns, but it must do so in a way that is interestingly different from the ways in which we are already inclined to think.
Leszek Kolakowski notes as much in the opening of his extraordinary Main Currents of Marxism:
In general the history of philosophy is subject to two principles that limit each other. On the one hand, the questions of basic interest to each philosopher must be regarded as aspects of the same curiosity of the human mind in the face of the unaltering conditions with which life confronts it; on the other hand, it behoves us to bring to light the historical uniqueness of every intellectual trend or observable fact and relate it as closely as possible to the epoch that gave birth to the philosopher in question and that he himself has helped to form. It is difficult to observe both these rules at once, since, although we know they are bound to limit each other, we do not know precisely in what manner and are therefore thrown back on fallible intuition. The two principles are thus far from being so reliable or unequivocal as the method of setting up a scientific experiment or identifying documents, but they are none the less useful as guidelines and as a means of avoiding two extreme forms of historical nihilism. One is based on the systematic reduction of every philosophical effort to a set of eternally repeated questions, thus ignoring the panorama of the cultural evolution of mankind and, in general, disparaging that evolution. The second form of nihilism consists in that we are satisfied with grasping the specific quality of every phenomenon or cultural epoch, on the premiss, expressed or implied, that the only factor of importance is that which constitutes the uniqueness of a particular historical complex, every detail of which--although it may be indisputably a repetition of former ideas--acquires a new meaning in its relationship to that complex and is no longer significant in any other way. This hermeneutic assumption clearly leads to a historical nihilism of its own, since by insisting on the exclusive relationship of every detail to a synchronic whole (whether the whole be an individual mind or an entire cultural epoch) it rules out all continuity of interpretation, obliging us to treat the mind or the epoch as one of a series of closed, monadic entities. It lays down in advance that there is no possibility of communication among such entities and no language capable of describing them collectively: every concept takes on a different meaning according to the complex to which it is applied, and the construction of superior or non-historical categories is ruled out as contrary to the basic principle of investigation.
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