Vollenhoven: Base Camps and Expeditions, Chemistry and Alchemy

by Dean Dettloff

D. H. Th. Vollenhoven

Last week was the final class of our Interdisciplinary Seminar (IDS) on the “problem-historical method” of Dirk Vollenhoven, a major figure in the tradition of reformational philosophy that funds the work done at the Institute for Christian Studies. Junior members were asked to provide a formal reflection on the ground covered in the class and our relationship to Vollenhoven and his method. Given ICS's placement in the ongoing transmission of reformational philosophy, I thought I might offer an adapted version of my reflection to a wider audience so as to demonstrate the kinds of conversations that are still being had at 229 College Street. I should preface this reflection with two caveats: first, the picture I present of Vollenhoven and his method is not necessarily orthodox and serves as a kind of perverse and optimistic attempt to make Vollenhoven palatable to my own interests and concerns. That is, I suspect Vollenhoven and hard-line Vollenhoveans might wince at some of the connections and liberties I take in my interpretation here; I take it for granted that if there is a future for Vollenhoven, it is a future that takes off from different lines of flight made available by Vollenhoven's method, rather than a future marked by a slavish or overtly faithful preservation of Vollenhoven (incidentally, I presume Vollenhoven would not have much of a problem with that latter point). Second, I admit to having some outstanding reservations with respect to Vollenhoven's method, but I have chosen to present his approach as positively as possible, thereby suggesting lines of flight for those charitable enough to take them.

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In You Must Change Your Life, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk introduces a distinction between what he calls “base camp” thinking and “expedition” thinking, corresponding to “horizontal” and “vertical” tendencies, respectively. Among his examples of base camp thinkers are the later Wittgenstein, middle Foucault, and late Heidegger. “They perform,” Sloterdijk explains, “each in their own way and for very different reasons, a sort of resignatio ad mediocritatem. The playing of language games, the repeated study of the discourses of earlier power games and the late pietistic waiting for a new sign of being - these are all attitudes in a camp where the path evidently comes to an end, even if the authors have preserved some leftover aspirations to ascent” (178). Another way of putting it would be to say these “performances” are all topological, either concerned with mapping out certain rules (Wittgenstein) and discursive terrain (Foucault) or maintaining the topos of the clearing for being (Heidegger). By contrast, Nietzsche and the more heroic moments in Foucault (among others) are presented by Sloterdijk as moments of vertical thinking, climbing to new heights for thought and being, heights that sometimes give grounds for new base camps and other times remain the privileged sights of virtuosos.

Sloterdijk exhibits his own Nietzscheanism when he gives preference to thinkers of ascent, denigrating the work of maintaining base camps as regressive and stultifying. For my part, I think both have an important and complementary role to play (more on this at the end of this reflection), but the distinction Sloterdijk introduces is helpful. The question that I come to at the close of this IDS on Vollenhoven's historiography is how to situate Vollenhoven and his method in Sloterdijk's miniature “typology,” if I may characterize it so. At first blush, Vollenhoven, with his types and models and charts and maps, scouting out the territory of the history of philosophy in a complex atlas of thought, seems obviously placed as a base camp thinker. He gives us the lay of a thinker's land, and a lay of the land of the growing philosophical map. As a cartographer, Vollenhoven's problem-historical method provides an orientation to the exotic cultural parcel that is philosophy, rejecting an understanding that sees philosophy as a vertical ascension of progress (telos) in thought or even as a simple transmission of ideas, preferring instead to consider the horizontal alleys, main streets, highways, humble paths, etc. that connect seemingly disparate thinkers across time and space. By creating typical “neighborhoods,” as we have sometimes said in class (Vollenhoven attempts to articulate a variety of common patterns in philosophical thought, e.g. “contradictory monism,” that perdure across very different thinkers from very different times and spaces), Vollenhoven's method performs “a sort of resignatio ad mediocritatem,” that is, a reduction of a thinker's living and breathing thinking down to its base elements—but while this might sound derogatory (and for Sloterdijk it is), I take this as a simple descriptor. Articulating a neighborhood never articulates the neighbors, though the boundaries of that neighborhood are wholly contingent on the idiosyncrasies of its inhabitants. Thus Vollenhoven gives us an aerial map, at a “high altitude,” as we have also suggested in class, and such maps are indispensible for seeing the forest without getting hung up on the trees. Sometimes one needs the big picture in order to better understand the details (even if that's where the devil lies in waiting to undermine the initial orientation).

Thus Vollenhoven gives us an aerial map, at a “high altitude,” as we have also suggested in class, and such maps are indispensible for seeing the forest without getting hung up on the trees.

However, perhaps Vollenhoven might be something of a climber, no Nietzsche, of course, but a thinker of verticality nonetheless. Indeed the very purpose of his method is to allow its users the ability to get a handle on a variety of base camps, of philosophical topoi, such that the holder of the map might not take up residence in these camps but ascend, to take an expedition, beyond these camps. The problem-historical method allows the navigator to wander through good and bad neighborhoods in a way that prepares them to notice the qualities that make those neighborhoods good and bad, thereby helping the navigator to avoid remaining enchanted by the comfort of a particular neighborhood. Especially intriguing here is the allusion to Walter Benjamin made by Calvin Seerveld at the close of his article “Vollenhoven's Legacy for Art Historiography,”[1] where he notes Benjamin's “principle that the historian is redemptive in redressing past injustices by memorializing them.” We might actually push this allusion a littler further, suggesting that, like Benjamin, Vollenhoven's method considers history not as a set of neutral data to be categorized, indeed not even merely memorialized, but as living material to be judged and redeemed. Thus the Christian philosophical historian takes up a creative and living role with respect to the philosophies she encounters, leading onward and upward to new heights of ever-more redemptive philosophical work through the difficult task of discernment (consider here the use of Vollenhoven's method by Zuidervaart).

In fact, there is another way in which Benjamin might illuminate Vollenhoven's method, namely with Benjamin's distinction between the “chemical” work of commentary and the “alchemical” work of critique, a distinction that has some resonating similarity with Sloterdijk's distinction between horizontal and vertical thinking:

The aging work can be seen as a funeral pyre, before which stands the commentator as the chemist, the critic as the alchemist. Whereas for the chemist the wood and ash alone are the objects of his analysis, the alchemist is only concerned with the mystery of the flame: that of life. So the critic asks after the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the hard ruins of the past and the light ashes of that which was experienced.[2]

Let's start with the possibility that Vollenhoven is a chemist. His typology certainly allows for a robust commentary, as demonstrated in our reading of Vollenhoven's work on Parmenides, for example.[3] There Vollenhoven was attentive to the chemical reactions at work in Parmenides' relationship to his contemporaries and the philosophical climate of his day, that is, to the problems posed by reality itself and Parmenides' social world. Yet dry as the problem-historical method sometimes is, it seems wrong to say Vollenhoven reads someone like Parmenides with the interest of merely understanding the wood and ash alone, that is, the burnt out remains of one more item to be tossed on the growing pile of wreckage that is history (to wax a little by allusion to Benjamin's “On the Concept of History”). It seems that there is something more going on beneath Vollenhoven's historiographic investigations, that his relation to aging works and funeral pyres is a relation with something at stake, something other than academic laurels or the obsession of a completionist. It may be that his commentary is not commentary for its own sake but is put in the service of clarifying problems and possibilities in the constructive work of systematic philosophy.

In other words, perhaps Vollenhoven is not merely a commentator but a critic, and therefore an alchemist, concerned with the mystery of life, with the living flame that animates the philosophical tradition. His typology, read in this way, is a means of turning over coals in the pyres of past philosophers, seeing which ones are still hot and which ones deserve to burn out. This work of judgment is a dangerous one, open to dismissals and imperialism, and Vollenhoven's method is sometimes employed in precisely this way, to further the task of Christians patting themselves on the back and denouncing “apostate” and “synthesis” thinking, repeating the classic violence of the Christian tradition by hiding behind pretenses to philosophical rigor. But, intimidated by the possibility of these abuses (which are hardly unique to Christian approaches to historiography or thought), would we prefer the safety and respectability of a commentator, who simply puts together a periodic table of philosophical elements? Or is the risk of criticism, of redemptive judgment (that is, one not unlike Benjamin's own project, seeking to contribute to active, material justice through the scholarly task), of putting these periodic elements together in an alchemical way, not only preferable but obligatory for a Christian historiographer? I would dare to take the latter position, and I think Vollenhoven would, and does, too (though admittedly Vollenhoven would likely bristle at my attempt to draw him so closely to a Kabbalist Marxist). To see the typological figures introduced by Vollenhoven and utilized and refined by his progeny (contradictory monism, priority mentalism, monarchianism, etc.) in this way is to see them as tools that aid in the work of discernment, not lab tests that determine once and for all the makeup of particular thinkers. To see the problem-historical method as an alchemical one is to make Vollenhoven a resource for taking up a creative and critical approach to the history of philosophy for the sake of redemption. Vollenhoven's historiography might be, then, a way of viewing things “from the perspective of redemption,” to invoke a theme in Critical Theory, and therefore a way of transcending the conceptual blockages of the past and opening us up to a better future (this is precisely how Vollenhoven has been used by such thinkers as James Olthuis, Nik Ansell, Bob Sweetman, Lambert Zuidervaart, and plenty of others at ICS).

To see the problem-historical method as an alchemical one is to make Vollenhoven a resource for taking up a creative and critical approach to the history of philosophy for the sake of redemption.

If Vollenhoven articulates base camps, if he engages in commentary, it is so that one might embark on the right expeditions, not so that one might be satisfied with filling in the edges of the map (“here there be postmoderns”). The articulation of those camps must be done with a great deal of interpretive charity and sensitivity (as Vollenhoven demonstrates in his readings of the Pre-Socratics), but the work of redemptive critique remains imperative. Here I should make explicit that redemption is not a work of obliteration or one-way gavel-pounding but a transformation, meaning the alchemical-critical task is not one of animosity toward its dialogue partners but one that leads both the alchemist and her interlocutors to new heights—both parties of the interpretive, historical relationship are transformed. Vollenhoven, a thinker of ascent, a thinker whose maps encourage one to leave the safety of tempting base camps for the horizon of redemption? Perhaps it is less far-fetched after all.

It seems to me that both of these tendencies, articulating the base camp and embarking on an expedition, are present in some sense in Vollenhoven. Perhaps Vollenhoven is the unifying thinker that Sloterdijk is unable to account for by driving a wedge so deeply between base camps and expeditions. Or perhaps Vollenhoven is a very particular example of one or the other tendency, of maintaining the camp or critically ascending to the summit. My own persona tends to resonate with vertical thinkers, with expeditions, resistant to typiconic articulations altogether, and I may be guilty of forcing Vollenhoven into my own Procrustean box of concerns—but perhaps, understood in a nuanced way, Vollenhoven's method provides a means of holding these two tendencies together, or, better, a means of refusing to see them as necessarily distinct. To articulate a base camp is to provide the motivation for an expedition into unknown philosophical territory, without the comfort of recurrent and reliable patterns of thought. (For that matter, contra Sloterdijk, it bears noting that Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Heidegger all only articulate their respective base camps in order to move into new realms of freedom, unburdened by the pictures that hold us captive, the imposing regularity of power discourses, and the enframing of being.) Vollenhoven's base camp articulation is done in the service of helping others to take on an expedition, even if that expedition likely leads to the creation of new base camps, like a modal ontology, which might need their own redemption and transcendence (pace Vollenhoven, Dooyeweerd, and co.). Whatever the case, the promise of Vollenhoven's method, even if this promise was opaque or overshadowed here and there in Vollenhoven or some of his followers, is the possibility of redemptive critique, that is, not acidic critique or imperialistic critique, but a reading of the philosophical tradition that sifts through the wreckage of history (Benjamin again) to see what coals are still hot and what coals deserve to stay cold. And we may be so bold as to consider, too, the possibility that there remains an alchemical task in reading Vollenhoven's own philosophical historiography, to fan the glowing embers and see what sparks still have life.

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[1] Calvin Seerveld, “Vollenhoven’s Legacy for Art Historiography,” Philosophia Reformata 58 (1993): 45-79.

[2] See Anson Rabinbach, “Critique and Commentary / Alchemy and Chemistry: Some Remarks On Walter Benjamin and This Special Issue,” in “Special Walter Benjamin Issue,” special issue, New German Critique 17 (Spring, 1979): 5.

[3] D.H.Th. Vollenhoven, “Methodological Dangers in the Interpretation of Parmenides” (Bob Sweetman's translation of the Dutch article of the same name in Philosophia Reformata 30 (1965): 63-112)

Dean Dettloff is a Junior Member in the PhD program at the Institute for Christian Studies, where his work concentrates on the intersections of philosophy of religion, Critical Theory, and media studies.