Conceptual Prehistory

Etymology as Ur-philosophy

Liberals are often held up as moral relativists, which is odd on two counts: 1) they constantly refer to the basic moral unity of the human species, and 2) they are quite willing to judge the past by the standards of the present. This could not be more different from the moral relativism of ancient peoples, especially in Europe, who tend to see different peoples as incommensurable but themselves as identical with their ancestors. Modernity sees unity across space, difference across time; whereas tradition sees unity across time, difference across space.

This temporal fluidity characterizes Begriffsgeschichte, or conceptual history, and obscures as much as it reveals. If you dropped a 19th century philology professor at the university of Basel into 2022, the term ‘gay science’ would mean something rather different for him than it would for the rest of us—the history of this concept has outpaced him. As it turns out, the history of the term is one of political and structural conflict.

Conceptual history assumes that contingency plays a decisive role in the evolution of ideas—put a different way, it assumes that where a concept ends up often has nothing to do with where it began. We can see this in a minority of cases, but often important cases. Our example of ‘gay’ is one; we could think of others—‘cult’ originally meant something cultivated but at some point took on an ominous tone; ‘nation’ originally was a matter of blood but later came to be something propositional. The semantic change in the term ‘freedom’ furnishes us with an especially clear illustration.

Liber, the root of ‘liberty’, was in Latin the root word for ‘free’, but more than that, it was the root for children, vegetative growth, and the god of fertility. Behind this seemingly random jumble of things, in the archaic concept of ‘freedom’ we have the concept of a common stock, a metaphor for growth based on shared ancestry, something immutable, permanent, and inherited—the complete opposite of what freedom later came to mean, even in classical times. This is a reflection, at least in the Roman world, of the Struggle of the Orders, a conflict between patrician and plebeian from Roman legendary history, where elites enfranchised an underclass at the expense of the common stock, all in the name of ‘freedom’. Similar semantic changes in the term frei can be found in the Germanic world, and similar conflicts can be inferred.

Sometimes concepts do change over time. But we should be on the lookout for temporal continuity, first, because historically continuity is the rule, and second, because our most foundational concepts are prehistorical—contingencies are lost to us, at least at first glance. What does it mean for a ruler to be legitimate? What does it mean for something to be true? What does it mean for something to be at all? Here, at the most crucial junctures, the history of concepts fails us, and we turn to philosophy.

But perhaps philosophy is not our last resort after all. If the basic assumption of conceptual history is right—that development matters—to trace an idea’s development beginning in medias res would only mislead us. Perhaps we can turn to etymology, as we did in the case of ‘freedom’.