Nietzsche suggests that concepts influenced by history are like ropes held together by the intertwining of strands, rather than by a single strand running through the whole thing. To analyze such concepts is not to find necessary and sufficient conditions for their use but to disentangle the various strands that have become so tightly woven together by the process of historical development that they seem inseparable. Such analysis would take place most effectively in conjunction with historical theorizing, because it is the historical synthesis of strands that hides their separability from view, and it is thus by going back and forth between historical and conceptual considerations that one can hope to make progress in either the history or the conceptual analysis.
—Maudemarie Clark, “Nietzsche’s Immoralism and the Concept of Morality” (1994)1
Conceptual analysis too often proceeds under the assumption that concepts can be examined and understood completely apart from their history. This assumption is so widespread, and so entrenched, that it can sometimes be hard to recognize the possibility of an alternative, historicized approach to conceptual analysis, let alone to appreciate that such an alternative approach might be better situated to help us understand the concepts that are at the center of some of our most longstanding and intractable philosophical debates.
This book is a case study in historicized conceptual analysis. In it, I argue that our contemporary concept of color is made up of multiple, conflicting strands of thought that have become intertwined only through their historical juxtaposition and interaction, rather than through any “intuitive” or “logical” unity. I have three goals. The first is to challenge the dominance of the widespread project of trying to offer an ahistorical conceptual analysis of our concept of color. If our contemporary concept of color is made up of multiple, conflicting strands, then it is pointless to try to identify a single set of necessary and sufficient conditions for its use. The second is to unravel the philosophical problem of color realism, a problem that we have come to have as the result of the apparent inseparability of these strands. We will only make this problem worse if we continue to ignore the extent to which it results from the entanglement of these conflicting strands. The third is to undermine the appeal of a pair of widely held philosophical views about color, Cartesian anti-realism and Oxford realism. These views take themselves to be opponents in the debate over the problem of color realism, but they share a commitment to thinking that the content of our concept of color is ahistorical and unrevisable, that it is “part of a massive central core of human thinking which has no history” (Strawson 1971, 10). Through the genealogy of our concept of color that I offer in this book, I aim to show that this commitment is mistaken, as are philosophical views that rest upon it.
Having laid out the positive goals of my book, it will help to clarify two things that I am not trying to do.
First, my aim is not to cast doubt upon, or somehow debunk, our ability to think about color. My aim is to understand how the problem of color realism arises, and why it seems so intractable. As the title of the book indicates, the method I adopt is drawn from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. But, in the first instance, I mean only to be inheriting one aspect of Nietzsche’s genealogy, the particular way in which he criticizes “the age-old practice among philosophers . . . [to] think essentially ahistorically” (Nietzsche 1887/1998, 10 [emphasis in original]). The target of Nietzsche’s criticism is a group of “English psychologists” whom we “have to thank for the only attempts so far to produce a history of the genesis of morality” (Nietzsche 1887/1998, 9). Nietzsche’s criticism is that their putatively “historical” method for understanding morality is at bottom ahistorical, in that they tend to focus on one or another aspect of how our concept of morality is now used and then project that aspect onto the origin of the concept. The fundamental problem is that this method leads these “historians” to overlook the ways in which “the cause of the genesis of a thing and its final usefulness, its actual employment and integration into a system of purposes, lie toto caelo apart” (Nietzsche 1887/1998, 50). The problem is not just that these putative “historians” have misdescribed the actual historical development of our moral concepts. The problem is also that their histories rest upon a fundamental misconception of the nature of moral concepts themselves. For example, in offering a history of the moral concept of punishment, these “previous genealogists of morality” have “discover[ed] some ‘purpose’ or other in punishment, for example revenge or deterrence, [and] then innocently place[d] this purpose at the beginning as the causa fiendi of punishment” (Nietzsche 1887/1998, 50). The problem with this origin story is that, as Nietzsche puts it,
[T]he concept “punishment” in fact no longer represents a single meaning at all but rather an entire synthesis of “meanings”: the previous history of punishment in general, the history of its exploitation for the most diverse purposes, finally crystalizes into a kind of unity that is difficult to dissolve, difficult to analyze and—one must emphasize—is completely and utterly undefinable. (Today it is impossible to say for sure why we actually punish: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically summarized elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.) (Nietzsche 1887/1998, 53 [emphasis in original])
Underlying the essentially ahistorical attempt to analyze moral concepts that is given by Nietzsche’s “English psychologists” is a philosophical presupposition: the presupposition is that the contemporary meaning or significance of a concept rests upon a single, univocal use that ahistorical conceptual analysis will (supposedly) allow us to discover. As a way of challenging this presupposition, Nietzsche offers a genealogy of the concept of morality, one that aims to disentangle the different strands of thought that have historically become intertwined in it. Nietzsche’s goal, ultimately, is to show that this concept does not admit of a single definition (or, in other words, that it does not consist in a single strand of thought).
It is in this sense that my approach is similar to Nietzsche’s. My target is a different group of philosophers, who are attempting to understand a different concept (the concept of color, not morality). And I aim only to disentangle this concept, not to debunk it. My approach is similar to Nietzsche’s, however, in that it involves challenging the age-old philosophical tendency to think essentially ahistorically about conceptual analysis. In the first instance, the philosophers targeted by my critique are those who assume that how we think about color is ahistorically fixed and unrevisable. Like Nietzsche, I argue that attempts to offer ahistorical conceptual analyses of our concepts overlook the ways in which the history of those concepts can involve multiple, intertwined strands of thought. Moreover, like Nietzsche, I argue that contemporary philosophical problems concerning our use of concepts are often the direct result of tensions between these intertwined strands.
The second thing I am not trying to do is somehow show that the historicity of thought about color penetrates color experience itself. That is, I am not trying to show that competing views about the nature of color lead the holders of those views to experience colors differently. The question of the precise relationship between cognition and perceptual experience is an interesting and important issue, and color vision has long been at the center of serious studies of this issue, but I do not intend for anything I say in this book to take a stand on it. If we were to get Aristotle, Descartes, J. L. Mackie, and John McDowell into a room together at the same time, we might well find that differences in their linguistic and cultural backgrounds lead to differences in their abilities to discriminate colors, or in the speed and ease with which they learn how to categorize colors, or in their abilities to remember the colors they have seen, or in what colors they ascribe to stereotypical instances of familiar objects, or in their tendencies to exaggerate similarities within color categories and differences between categories. But none of these differences in color perception, learning, and memory have anything to do with how they think about the nature of color. Accordingly, for my purposes in this book, it will help to introduce a distinction between first-order and second-order color claims:
First-order color claims are claims about what color category one would put the color of something in, or how a particular color looks compares and contrasts with how other colors look. For example, the claim that fire engines are red, or the claim that neon orange looks very different from navy blue, are both first-order color claims.
Second-order color claims are claims about the nature of color properties themselves. For example, the claim that “colors are intrinsic, non-relational properties that exist independently of light and perceivers” is a second-order color claim.
My claims about the historicity of color thought are limited to claims about the historicity of second-order color claims. It might well turn out that there is evidence for the historicity of first-order color claims, but I do not intend to be providing any such evidence in this book, and my argument does not presuppose that there is such evidence. It is enough, for my purposes, to show that there is a historicity to different strands of second-order claims about the nature of color, and that this historicity helps us to understand how the problem of color realism arises and why it seems so intractable, as well as why disentangling these strands might allow us to move beyond this problem.
Z. A.
Los Angeles
May 23, 2015
1. Clark (1994, 22).
Clark, Maudemarie. “Nietzsche’s Immoralism and the Concept of Morality.” In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, edited by Richard Schacht, 15–34. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. Trans. M. Clark and A.J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998.
Strawson, P.F. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Routledge, 1971.