It so happens that every author and professor working in the humanities knows one thing if he or she knows anything: that every narrator speaks from a standpoint. Everyone appreciates that there are histories of America or histories of religion that are partisan to different commitments – discussing the same events but in radically different ways. But somehow this message has seemed not to reach philosophy, where ‘the history of philosophy’ is always on offer. Why?

Why does the very domain of thought that established not just the inevitability of situated histories but the real importance of being situated, claiming the stance that is most vital (I refer to Nietzsche’s On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life of 1874), not apply this thinking to its own account?

It is striking, in philosophy, how well the pretense of a single story – a standard account to be improved upon, bit by bit – has held up here despite the battering it ought to have received over the past half century, at least. How is it that that idea of a sufficiently-universal-standpoint-for-speaking-of-x survives in philosophy when it is laughed off the stage everywhere else? Is this not an age that rejects universal standpoints?

Why has the academy not been marked off as a dogmatic authority in its pretense to introduce the students of the country and the world to ‘philosophy’? What philosophy?

If you write about philosophy you have nowhere to go until you begin to tell whatever story in philosophy has claimed you. Nietzsche made the necessity of this quite clear when kicking apart the fraudulent scientism of his time, which had inserted philosophy neatly into the ‘human sciences’. “The objective man is a tool,” Nietzsche said.

The objective person, the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct blossoms … is certainly one of the most precious tools that exist: but he needs to be put into the hand of someone more powerful. He is only a tool….

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford University Press, 1998), 97, 98

To write a book on philosophy is to step up, yourself, into that “more powerful” role and use those tools to do something: to tell the story of things that you inhabit.

Yet more than a century later the posture of neutrality whose falseness Nietzsche exposed remains highly popular (in our supposedly Nietzschean times – plainly not Nietzschean at all but still rigidly bound to the modern scientific story). Only because people today still inhabit the story of ‘master science’ does the pretense endure that every book on philosophy is a work of scholarship: that the scholar, who has no story, is thereby equipped to deliver knowledge that everyone can use. Knowledge compatible with every story! – a very handy conceit for the salesman.

Were we to show more self-respect we would drop this act and speak as we claim to think: that a book on philosophy takes a position, tells a story, and it is not the only story.

For the most part the story we are offered in our so-called works of scholarship is the story of modernity. Douglas Wilson (student of philosophy, pastor, and Senior Fellow at New Saint Andrews College) writes,

It is simply false to assume that the modernists are “story-less.” They have a compelling story. They have a big bang story of creation, they have the story of Darwinian evolution, they have the story of slavery in the Egypt of medieval superstitions, they have Moses bringing in the Enlightenment, they have the story of how religion creates nothing but one Thirty Years War after another, and so on.

Douglas Wilson, European Brain Snakes (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2015), 26

And they have a story of philosophy that meshes with this. Yet the pretense at many a university and in many a book is that that story is the story.

At the same time, there has been a challenge to the modern story from post-modernism, the story that comes ‘after’. Postmodernists, Wilson remarks, “are trying to mount a challenge and offer an alternative story” (“one that cannot be successful because of all the internal contradictions”), but do so without this supposition of a self-evident narrative that the experts can discern in the flux of events.

What is remarkable is that Christians, who had the idea before Nietzsche (and likely played a role in giving it to him), were clear as to the connection between life and truth. Take Irenaeus of Lyons, who says that

We have learned from no others the plan of our salvation than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us.

Anyone who keeps unchangeable in himself the canon of truth received through baptism

(the return of life) reads the world accordingly, separating true from false, pushing aside the “blasphemous hypothesis” that rejects these fundamental realities.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1987), 3.1.1, 1.9.4

And yet Christians routinely reject that ‘postmodern’ idea of committed histories and eat up the modern history of philosophy retailed by the historians.

The history of democracy written with a deficient conception of what democracy is (populism, say) is off to a very bad start. Is there a self-evident understanding of what philosophy is?

Isn’t the force that has turned philosophy into what it is in ‘histories of philosophy’ a culprit, a despoiler, actually, of our wealth?

In the past thoughts were too real to be kept like a cultural portfolio of stocks and bonds. But now we have mental assets. As many world views as you like. Five different epistemologies in an evening. Take your choice. They’re all agreeable, and not one is binding or necessary or speaks straight to the soul.

Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (1973), 625

The reason that a ‘history of philosophy’ is still viable in this domain (one story to be told) has something to do, I surmise, with the mummification of philosophy. To the extent that philosophy has very little to do with life – has withdrawn from life, into its chair in the corner by the ‘fire’ (where it sits happy, bathed in the culture’s peculiar glow, the luminescence of a screen) – it has lost its life, in that it has no battle to do in the world, no struggle of the sort that moved Nietzsche.

The history that narrates that disengagement is thus questionable not for being too dull but for failing to get into its sights what philosophy is.

Why has the university not been flagged, with warning pennants, as both a dogmatic authority (in its pretense to introduce the students of the country and the world to ‘philosophy’ – what philosophy?) but also, and worse, a kind of murderer: an agent that does its number on a living thing and then passes it back to the world dead? Yet we eagerly receive it as the real, living thing. The History of Philosophy.