Zak Smith asked me a question and graciously agreed to let me answer it in public. (Zak is a phenomenal artist and you should really check out his work).
“Historical question: Many philosophies are based (often unconsciously) not just on the truth of assumptions the philosopher is able to lay out, but preposterous assumptions the same as any other bumpkin of their age and class (”It is meet that greeks rule barbarians” etc). Question: What happens (what has tended to happen historically) when a philosophy fails? Like when the assumptions turn out to be wrong? Does anyone notice? Does someone rush in to fill the vacuum? Is there even a pattern?
So the short answer is “Nothing.” Nothing happens when a philosophy fails in the way you describe, because those are’t the parameters by which the success or failure of a philosophy can really be measured.
There’s a gap in the framing of the question in terms of the causality behind “failure.” I can see two ways to understand how you’re connecting the question of assumptions on which a philosophy is built with the question of how or why philosophies fail, which we could call the social and the intellectual failure. By “social failure” I indicate the following question: “Since a philosophy is built on a set of widely-held, often unconscious prejudices and assumptions, does the philosophy fail when those unconscious social prejudices and assumptions fail or change?” By “intellectual failure” I designate the following question: “Since a philosophy is built on a set of widely-held, often unconscious prejudices and assumptions, does the philosophy fail when those unconscious social prejudices and assumptions are challenged or invalidated by another specialized group of intellectuals, such as other philosophers, or scientists, or geometers, or, for that matter, theologians?” So we need to tackle each question separately, though the answers are of course not entirely unrelated.
The second question is easier to answer, because its answer is “No, not really.” Philosophies, like bacteria, tend to evolve quickly in response to environmental pressures of the intellectual variety. Sometimes this response is bigoted or asinine or violent, and that’s when books start getting burned. (I use the word “philosophies” expansively throughout this answer). But neither rival philosophies which may or may not be far superior nor the “advances” of science tend to seriously dent a philosophy’s reputation. After all, there are philosophers who are not yet Spinozists, if you can believe that; clearly a philosophy’s superiority is not the motor of its success. For that matter, there are still people who persist in twisting some remnant of Hegelianism into coherence, despite the advances of both philosophy and science. People are stubborn that way. The Catholic universities in Europe kept teaching Aristotle’s Physics for quite a while after everyone else started thinking the Earth actually goes around the Sun and not the reverse. And there are still philosophers of mind as well as economists who try to theorize rationality and human action without accounting for any kind of concept of the unconscious, a century and a half almost since the advent of psychoanalysis. So “No” is the short answer to the second question.
The longer answer to the second question, which is more of a footnote, is the observation that the question also misunderstands or at least misstates somewhat the root and function of philosophy. Philosophy, despite its historical claim to the domain of natural science, is not about truth or proof, it’s about concepts. It’s not the science of relating to the world; it’s the science of organizing and evaluating our idea about the world. To be honest, any philosophy or at least any metaphysics that falters or fails when a set of specific ideas is replaced with a different set of specific ideas is not a very strong one. That is, I would think poorly of a philosophy that was a framework to explain a specific set of ideas rather than a framework to explain the specificity of ideas as such or of the relations between ideas. This is why I think Plato is bullshit, and Aristotle is awesome. Plato was an oligarch who wanted to justify the socio-economic status quo whatever the cost to logic. Aristotle wanted to define “status quo” and but first he had to define “definition” and he just sat down and got to work. Philosophy is about ideas, and the organization of ideas, and that’s the root of so many of its problems: that’s why philosophers are the progenitors of the proverbial ivory tower both as practice and concept, because playing with ideas, much like playing with your dick, is a whole lot of fun with other people but sometimes you’re alone and you just start playing with it and suddenly two hours have disappeared. You know? To bring back your Greeks and barbarians, the “barbarians” of Plato and Aristotle and Herodotus, while obviously linked to historical ethnic and racial prejudice that has deeply marked philosophy since its inception, are textual figures rather than anthropological objects of methodological study. Knowledge of foreign peoples was, for most of history and for most people, rooted in rumor, legend, and the occasional first-, second-, or tenth-person written account. So that these foreign groups and ethnicities demarcate types rather than facts; they are conceptual figures to argue with or for or against (”But if we do thus and the barbarians do that, doesn’t it mean that the gods sometimes want one thing and sometimes the other, or else all the barbarians would be dead?”). Nobody really cared if the tribesmen of the southeastern Dalmatian hills actually pissed in the mouths of their children as a fertility rite or not, they just wanted a discursive excuse to probe the limits of their culture’s realm of possibility.
Because that’s where philosophy lives: in the grey area between what can be known and what can only ever be imagined. Science, on the other hand, lives between what can be known and what we’d like to know. And if you want a pattern, one broad pattern is that as the world has become more and more thoroughly “known” and available in a realistic way to those who study philosophy, their types and counterexamples have gotten more and more obscure. It used to be barbarian tribes and foreign cities; now it’s “If there was a god that lived in an alternate dimension and didn’t know our god but had a modem through which it could send instructions to an alien life form, is there any way to demonstrate that…” etc. etc. So philosophy, by and large, is often unmoored enough from reality to react with any range of speeds and intensities to factual provocation, whether that provocation is research science in a lab or shifts in political regimes that necessitate the movement of leftist German intellectuals to New York, like, yesterday. It can react quickly, as Marxian and other socio-political philosophies tend to, in direct response to factual changes, or it can react slowly slash not really at all, as in my earlier example of the Catholic Church and the structure of the Solar System. So it goes. So that’s the second question.
The first question, that is, the question of social failure, only has one answer, a long one, but there is a short version: “It’s complicated.” Here again there’s a bifurcation. We can locate “unconscious social prejudices and beliefs” in two places. Broadly, in some kind of vague general populate, or more specifically, in the institutions and establishments that organize the context, the “present” within which philosophies operate. In the broad sense, the widely held beliefs of “the populace” have had little impact on a philosophy’s internal stability or intellectual appeal. In fact, just as philosophers often enjoy abstract and masturbatory conceptual problems, philosophers often enjoy contrariness and implausibility. We have all seen the smug “Well actually…” of a 19-year-old who just took their first post-modernism or psychoanalysis or labor theory seminar and is about to explain to us how the world really works. Philosophy enjoys not only the limitations but also the privileges of that liminal space between probability and the imagination. One of my favorite arguments in history is that of “Buridan’s Ass. Buridan, a later Medieval French logician, posited that a donkey placed exactly exactly in the middle between water and food, would die of indecision. But that’s nonsense, because anyone who’s ever actually, you know, seen an animal knows that animals always always go for water first if they’re both hungry and thirsty. You can live longer without food than you can without water. It’s common fucking sense and also have you never seen a dog. But this argument was lauded and repeated for a very long time after Buridan first farted it onto the page. So philosophy has often drifted not only from the realm of intellectual facts but also from the realm of common fucking sense and “general knowledge,” without losing its appeal. Conversely, social context can affect a philosophy’s popular success; philosophies can be banned, or suddenly made required reading by threat of death, or whatever. They can drift in and out of fashion depending on the vagaries of the historical moment. But this isn’t “failure” in the sense you intend, this is history.
Which brings me to the next point, that of something “rushing in to fill the vacuum.” Rarely in the history of philosophy is there a true “vacuum.” Generally the ideas towards which existing or dominant philosophies react most strongly are those that are in some way new or threatening or minoritarian or anti-establishment. In most cases, when these ideas are violently stamped out, they often don’t occupy enough space to require any vacuum-filling. But even in the rare instances where a philosophy or set of ideas is unilaterally prohibited, it tends to decay rather than disappear, and often entire parts of it are absorbed with or without comment, as with the pagan Greeks and the Christian theologians in late antiquity. Philosophers are trained to think in a particular way, and it’s hard to unlearn that because of an executive order, even if you’re suddenly required to mouth a different set of ideas. Ideas die out slowly, even when the people and words associated with them disappear fast. The one exception I can think of is the disappearance of Nietzsche from all philosophical conversation in the years after World War II, a void into which rushed the extra-planar sentient vile ooze of Heidegger, a cosmic wormhole the implications of which continue to unfold in the person of Zizek and people who think he’s an actual philosopher. But I digress.
Actually, though I did digress a bit, but as we’ve drifted from the general populate to regime changes and academic philosophy we’ve slowly worked our way towards the narrower sense of the first question, which is: do the institutions and establishments that organize a given historical moment and its material flows affect affect a philosophy’s “success”? The answer to that is, “Yes, absolutely.” Regime change, religious upheaval, natural disasters, and war are among the easiest examples of changes in the general populace that affect the success of a philosophy, both externally (its appeal to non-philosophers) and internally (the crisis of faith many philosophies experienced after the Holocaust, for example). But these are only larger contexts for the two questions which truly and genuinely determine the success or failure of a philosophy, and here there is a very clear historical pattern that shows one thing absolutely, which is that philosophies survive and thrive in relation to two fundamental questions: are they being taught? and are the texts easily accessible?. These are the two factors which most consistently and dramatically affect the success of a philosophy. Is it being transmitted, and can someone who wants to go out and find it? If you don’t know about something and there’s nobody or nothing there to transmit knowledge of it to you, you’re…probably never gonna know about it. That’s the question of transmission. And if you’ve heard of something and you want to know more but can’t, you’re probably gonna forget about it after a while, because that’s just how people work. Remember the old days with record stores? Sometimes someone told you you really really really had to hear this one band, but you couldn’t find the CD anywhere so you forgot about it after a couple of weeks. But sometimes someone told you you really really really had to hear this one band and of could they have it because it’s The Velvet Underground and your life will never be the same. And that is why “tastemakers” - by which I mean anything from the buyer for your local record store or the DJ of your local college radio station to the executives at HBO and professors at Harvard and Yale or critics for the New York Times - used to be so very, very important. Because until pretty fucking recently, if you had certain kinds of ideas and certain people didn’t like those ideas, you really had no way of getting your ideas out into the world. In 1341 getting a book copied that the Pope disapproved of was a big fucking deal, because only monks and court officials knew how to copy books. In many fields it’s still virtually impossible to find success unless the right people choose to promote your work. That’s certainly true of academic philosophy. It is a philosopher’s place in the canon, and not the coherence of their ideas, that ensures the success of those ideas. Plato and Descartes are the simplest examples. So if nobody’s teaching you, and your work isn’t widely available, you’re fucked. You can survive with only one of those things, and hope to thrive. But often, of course, the two are closely linked, and exist in a kind of feedback loop. Plato squeezed past the death of pagan philosophy thanks to Augustine’s defense of his ideas, but then vanished from European thought for centuries while his work was unavailable, only to return in a dramatic fashion when Byzantine philosophers brought the books with them to Rome. So the same historical line (”Platonism”) is cross-sected once by the problem of pedagogy and once by the problem of availability. An even tighter feedback loop is contemporary academic publishing: if nobody teaches your academic monograph in their seminars, it will probably go out of print, at which point nobody will be teaching it except the people whose dissertations you supervised and loyally trudge around photocopying and PDFing their yellowed copies of your book. Stocisim is probably the best broad historical example of these shifting vagaries. At its height, it was the most popular philosophy in the Roman Empire. In fact, its success was made possible not only by the ferocious brilliance of its founders but by the weakness of the Aristotelians, who had become a running gag ever since someone somehow managed to misplace every copy of his actual works. For several centuries Aristotelianism mostly consisted of a few tips and tricks that old-timers would pass down from generation to generation until the texts were rediscovered just before the fall of the Roman Republic. Again, availability and transmission. But Stocism declined as its complex logical system gave way to a debased quasi-Stoic ethics. Devoid of its physical and logical aspects, Stoic ethics were easily married to Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the truth and the universe and so the original texts of the Stoic school were largely ignored, because people read Stoic ethical manuals by Epictetus and Musonius Rufus instead of the original Greek works. Because people didn’t read the original Stoic thinkers much anymore, their works didn’t circulate widely, which meant that even though they were no doubt well-preserved in those places, they existed only in large repositories of knowledge, like the Great Library in Alexandria and the libraries of Constantinople. But of course, that meant that when those libraries burned, as most libraries eventually do, the few copies of the Stoics died with them. Which meant they weren’t available. Which meant nobody taught them or about them. Until a revival of philological interest in ancient texts led European academics to start sorting out the available fragments of all the ancient schools, at which point they noticed that “Stoic” had a much deeper root than the Roman sense of “composed or ethically balanced,” and suddenly there was a revival of interest in ancient Greek Stoicism. There was probably more interest in the Stoics in 1910 than at any point since at least the birth of Christ. But so it goes. When I say philosophers like to spin out into the imaginary, I mean that entire dissertations have been written on just the most meagre of ancient Greek fragments. Nietzsche invented an entire universe out of the fragments of Heraclitus. It’s not the validity, the coherence, or the truthiness of a philosophy that matters. It’s how widely it’s taught, and how easily the work is accessible. The single most coherent and consistent expression of these questions is institutional, whether those institutions are university syllabi or public libraries or religious censors. But even beyond institutions, it is pedagogy, and not science or public opinion, that determines the success of a philosophy.
