In order to answer these questions, Gordon suggests, we need to focus on “how concepts ramify.” Ramification, he explains, is “what happens when philosophers begin to imagine the manifold of connections between their own arguments and the world they inhabit.... To observe this strategy is to understand nothing less than the historical inscription of ideas.... to follow philosophical concepts themselves as their meanings branch out into the wider world to which they already implicitly belong.” Or as he puts it later, “philosophy partakes of common memory the moment it begins to ramify into the broader narrative of human affairs.” Continental Divide is both a case study and a methodological manifesto, an account of the ramifications of the philosophical debate at Davos in the fateful decades that followed: the different uses to which it was put, the new meanings that it generated, the barnacles of memory that encrusted it over time.

Gordon’s manifesto will resonate with historians of my generation, who often prefer to reconstruct the sense of an idea from the immediate context in which it was uttered, rather than tracing formal continuities across time or summoning shades from previous lives these ideas may have had. “Ramification” will be a welcome addition to the tools with which we emancipate ideas from the tyranny of an over-determining past. But perhaps we should admit that every item in this tool kit carries with it the risk of underestimating the degree to which what can be thought and what has been thought inform each other. (As Eliot famously wrote, “the past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”) To this general risk it seems to me that “ramification” adds another—in fact the very one it seeks to escape: the danger of choosing arbitrary origins for our histories.

“Ramification,” after all, is about beginning and becoming: “begin to imagine,” “begins to ramify,” “becomes ... embroidered.” It is not only the organic metaphor that is teleological, but also the hope that it articulates for history itself: that by “observing this process” unfolding, we could de-historicize the philosophy, returning to its “actual significance,” to ideas innocent of history. Of course Gordon is aware that the present is, in words he quotes from Leibniz, “laden with the past and pregnant with the future.” He does warn us that “it would be foolish to believe in a pristine moment of philosophical meaning.” But this comes in the same breath and on the same page as his claim that philosophy partakes of memory “the moment it begins to ramify,” as if there were ever a moment in which philosophical concepts were not already dragging their past along with them.

How might a historian identify such a moment? Gordon does not tell us. But it is clear that he does not have much patience for those, such as Hans Blumenberg, who made sense of the conflict between Cassirer and Heidegger by looking into what he calls the “hoary quarrels” of a deeper past. His own choice of starting point seems to be the debate itself: from its buds his branches grow, month by month and year by year, until they reach the reader. The procedure is strikingly future-oriented. Like Prometheus, Gordon looks forward from the stage at Davos and forgets his bumbling brother Epimetheus, who is always looking back. Yet the interdependence of past, present, and future seems to me to require the union of both. Christianity celebrated that union under the name of allegory. All the more striking that allegory is the name Gordon gives to the error—the confusion of philosophy with politics and history—against which he is inveighing.