Writing a book

A friend of mine has been talking with me about a book-writing project. She sums up her conversation with me as follows:

    * the book is about the crisis in thought caused by Enlightenment/Reason
    * the idea is to lay out the crisis and then, in subsequent chapters, show how various thinkers tried to ground Reason in reality through some kind of philosopical system which also maintained certain positive values (morality) from the pre-Enlightenment era.
    * that the book can speak to a popular audience and include organic links to Post-Modernism without being a book about why philosophy should be more broadly popular or why Post-Modernism has roots in western philosophy. [end comments from my friend]

One of the problems I have is that I worry about a "name-based" approach to these topics.  The problem is: if we start talking about the crisis mentioned above and we do it using names – as in, Hume says 'x', Kant says 'y', Fichte says 'z' – the impression easily forms that all we are dealing with are the seemingly eccentric and headache-producing blah blah of these individuals.  Why should we care about them?  Even if we mention at the beginning, "well, there's this crisis and here are these people responding to this crisis," the reader will have a hard time avoiding the inference that what we're doing is figuring out what these people say, for some reason.  It's hard to avoid the inference that what's really important is not the crisis that they respond to, but rather 'what they say.'  This drives us in the direction of specialization, and people can get awfully detailed and hair-splitty about what, for instance, Kant said.  But the assumption behind interest in hair-splitty treatments of Kant says is that it's really important to know what Kant said.  But for whom is that level of detail important? Kant scholars.  Just as if I were a big fan of Scientology I might get all detailed about my reading of Hubbard.  (I wonder if they have doctrinal disputes.  They must.  Doctrinal disputes destroyed Ayn Rand and the institutions she built up.)  But what if you are trying to do something different – not, certainly, avoid always and everywhere the mention of the name 'Kant,' but telling the story much more thematically and thus in a way that relates to everyday normal people.

Not that we're talking about a textbook, not that there's anything wrong with textbooks.

If you want to write something more general, and you decide to avoid overly-detailed explorations, you run the risk of being too superficial, and all those Kant scholars are ready to say "but wait a minute you've totally misunderstood Kant."  And that's not unfair on their part, especially if what is written does indeed totally misunderstand Kant.

What would it be like if a space traveler sent from another galaxy wanted to report to his home civilization about the development of human thought on earth.  This traveler is going to all sorts of planets where life has developed to the point where beings are not so totally tied to the daily production and reproduction of life, allowing them to think beyond basic and rudimentary illusions like God and myth.  Those illusions were needed to order the social activity of beings during the long childhood period of a race where fairly immediate necessity ruled everything, and 98%-plus of the population is engaged in the immediate and direct production of food and other necessities.  This traveler and his home civilization are interested in post-necessity civilizations.  He's preparing reports on a number of different worlds and earth is just one of them.  He's not going to get all hair-splitty about, say, the thing-in-itself.  (About which, in a certain context, it is completely legitimate to get all tangled up in.)  He's also not going to focus too much on names, not only because there's too many of them, but also because discussing the trail of thought in terms of names just misdirects the study.  In this way, the traveler wants to write a bit more like Marx.  Marx thinks it is a mistake to explain human history in terms of the intentions, desires, and foibles of this or that leader.  He prefers instead to point to the evolving background conditions located in the changes in productive forces to explain history's movement, just as Hegel does with Spirit.  With this approach, both Hegel and Marx might include what such-and-such leader says or does, but that's never going to be the heart of the treatment.  A lot of the details of what this or that person said or did -- which would be central to other kinds of historical accounts, as for instance with Woodward's three books on the Bush administration -- could be left to the side by Hegel and Marx, as they would focus on much more fundamental and influential 'waves.'  Something like this is what the traveler wants to do.  How would the traveler characterize the movement of thought in general, while including enough detail to give his readers a real understanding of what is going on, in the context of which more specific investigations could occur?

If I were that traveler, I would start with Hume.  A great post-necessity starting point for Western civilization -- not the only possible one, to be sure.  But there I am using a proper name! I would want to start with 'Hume' but not with "Hume the author" but rather with "Hume as symptom of, speaker for, carrier of" the post-necessity dynamics of thought, which would then be followed out all the way to today.  Or at least Derrida.

What approach to the presentation would the traveler take?  Treat it like a story?  Could it be made 'dramatic'?  What do we know in general about what allows readers and listeners to 'relate' to a story, movie, theatre, politics?  Plato was pretty good at this:  his dialectic in dialogue format allowed 'normal' people to 'have their say' against philosophy, while also subjecting them to the responses that philosophy has to those objections.  From Aristotle on, it's been treatise after treatise with very little back and forth.  For instance, no one takes Hume's dialogues on religion that seriously, especially relative to the position granted the Treatise of Human Nature and other monographs.  And he's one of the rare ones to try and use the dialogue format.  The difficulty and mutual frustration on this point is well-illustrated in the title to one of Fichte's works:  "An attempt to force the reader to understand the new philosophy."  And in that work Fichte uses, surprise surprise, a dialogue with a reader.