Intellectual History, Philosophy, and Literature

The inaugural Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference took place on May 31, 2024, under the theme ‘Methodologies in Intellectual History’. The panel on ‘Intellectual History, Philosophy, and Literature’ invited students to reflect on the status of language and the relationship between intellectual history, philosophy and the study of literature.

The consolidation of intellectual history as an autonomous discipline in the 1960s and 1970s has raised a number of questions concerning intellectual history’s proximity to its sister humanities. Insofar as the intellectual historian studies the use of language, concepts and norms as they change across time, where do we draw the line between intellectual history and philosophy? If all history-writing consists in the construction of narratives, to what extent should we consider intellectual history a ‘poetic’ or ‘creative’ practice? The panellists approached this broad nexus of issues through the narrower lens of their postgraduate research.

Paul Norris, a DPhil candidate in English Language and Literature, explored the hierarchy between poetry, philosophy and history in the work of the English poet Philip Sidney (1554-1586). Ever since Aristotle’s opposition between poetry and history in his Poetics — ‘poetry utters universal truths, history particular statements’— poets and philosophers have tended to insist upon the inferior nature of historical understanding. Sidney’s position in The Defense of Poesy (1595) is no exception, asserting the superiority of the poet’s concern with universality over the historian’s concern with the particularity of events and individual actors. In the mire of the contingent and the empirical, the historian is so ‘loaden with old mouse-eaten records’, and so ‘tied not to what should be but to what is’, that he cannot attend to the ‘general reason of things’ (Sidney). Norris’s paper highlighted the manifold ways in which the trope of the unenlightened historian, overburdened with extraneous detail, has been replayed in order to favour the poet’s insight into their own subjectivity. From Augustine to Sidney to Schopenhauer, interiority has been endowed with privileged access to a more ‘real’ reality—one which is more significant, more essential, than the historian’s mimetic representation of the world.

As the first panel on presentism highlighted, contemporary historians no longer understand historiography as a purely descriptive or mimetic reconstitution of the past. The ‘innocent eye is a myth long dead’ (Nelson Goodman) and no historical interpretation is wholly free of an author’s ‘presentist’ perspective. Intellectual historians also hold a quite different understanding of the relation between language and the ‘general’. In contrast to Sidney’s poet, the ‘general’ is not understood as an independent realm that the author need only capture in the right words, as if good poesy can tap into a transhistorical vision of the ‘good life’. As recently put by John Robertson: ‘there is no external, independent ‘reality’ which language struggles to master… What is out there is constructed through language’.

Maya Gavin, a DPhil candidate in Political Theory, considered the centrality of language to intellectual history in her paper on the widespread adoption of the ideas of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) in American literary departments in the 1960s and 1970s. Marking a formative episode in the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, Gavin traced the elective affinity that emerged between intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge and literary studies as a consequence of Foucault’s American popularisation. This methodological shift was crucially tied to the political momentum of 1968, when mass protests broke out across the United States in opposition to the expansion of the Vietnam War. The dominant paradigm of literary interpretation that had held sway since the 1930s (‘New Criticism’) was felt to be sharply at odds with the spirit of political protest that animated late 1960s academia. On Gavin’s account, it is out of this moment that Foucault’s concept of ‘discursive structures’ or epistemes — systems of knowledge operating underneath consciousness — provided a gilded path towards a more subversive politics within literary theory. Whilst New Criticism had encouraged a ‘close reading’ of texts as closed units of meaning with internal aesthetic value, the ‘post-structuralism’ of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari catalysed a shift towards an emphasis on the external structures surrounding the production of a text. By sifting through the historical layers of cultural production, the historian could trace the dominant narrative structures (discourses) conditioning the subject and the world that they addressed. This transition towards ‘French Theory’ was reflected institutionally in the rise of programmes devoted to Critical Theory and a reorientation in the Modern Languages Association’s (MLA) research agenda. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the US’s foremost organisation of literary professionals was hosting roundtables on formerly unthinkable themes, such as ‘Deconstruction and the Death of God’ and ‘Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth Century’.

Gavin’s paper carefully drew out the conceptual parallels between the reception history of Foucault and a broader reconceptualisation of language as a form of action in Anglo-sphere intellectual history. Historians of political thought in the 1960s pushed forward a new vocabulary to describe texts as ‘speech-acts’, ‘activities’, ‘practices’, and ‘interventions’. Like tools, words are used to do things— to assert, command, promise, praise, or satirise; to make purposeful interventions in localised debates. Within an overlapping time frame, the historicism of the ‘Cambridge School’ and Foucault’s method of genealogy converged on the insight that a text’s historical and social context—its externality, not simply its ostensive or ‘internal’ meaning—was the key to proper interpretation.

This convergence should not mask genuine differences between Anglo-American and continental approaches to intellectual history. The final panellist, João Gado Fernandes Costa, a Master’s student in History of Political Thought and Intellectual History at UCL, emphasised the distinct intellectual inheritance of Quentin Skinner’s methodology in British language philosophy, particularly in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice. Costa illustrated how the consonance between Wittgenstein’s conception of Sprachspielen, Austin’s ‘intended illocutionary force’ and Grice’s ‘implicature’ laid the groundwork for the primacy of linguistic context and authorial intention in Skinner’s collection of essays in Visions of Politics (2002). Complementing Gavin’s focus on the transformative period of the 1960s and 1970s, Costa traced the cluster of work occurring concurrently in intellectual history, linguistics and pragmatics on questions of agency, usage and intentionality. Crucially for Costa, theoretical work carried out in the philosophy of language in the 1950s and intellectual history in the 1960s and 1970s anticipated the development of ‘pragmatics’—the study of language use in context—in the 1990s.

Across the three papers, Norris, Gavin and Costa were united by an interest in the freedom and finitude of the language user. Whilst Sidney celebrated the agency of the creative subject (Norris), Foucault drew the opposite insight: the writer is a ‘function of discourse’ whose words are delimited by socio-historical structures (Gavin). In opposition to the postmodernist erasure of authorial intention, Skinner preserved the agency of the writer to say what they really mean (Costa).

Drawing the boundaries between intellectual history, philosophy and literature remains a slippery task, requiring no less of the interpreter than to think through the relation between reality, language and human experience. Does language access reality, constitute reality or interpose between us and a deeper layer of the way things really are? Are authors fated to write the texts they write — to say this or that about so-and-so? Definitive answers to these questions remain elusive, but the importance of asking them endures. In the various ways in which historians have gone about this task of question-asking, intellectual history is necessarily a ‘broad church’. It houses scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and its subject matter is equally diverse, ranging from philosophical and theological treatises, religious iconography and architecture to the satires and songs of everyday experience. This panel — made up of a literature student, a political theorist, and a linguist — is a testament to something characteristic about intellectual history, in the shared capacity of scholars to reach into different disciplines and speak across specialisation. 

Sophie West chaired the ‘Intellectual History, Philosophy, and Literature’ panel at the 2024 Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference. She is a DPhil candidate in History at Christ Church, Oxford.