The topic of history has been treated frequently in modern European
philosophy. A long, largely German, tradition of thought looks at history as a
total and comprehensible process of events, structures, and processes, for
which the philosophy of history can serve as an interpretive tool. This
approach, speculative and meta-historical, aims to discern large, embracing
patterns and directions in the unfolding of human history, persistent
notwithstanding the erratic back-and-forth of particular historical developments.
Modern philosophers raising this set of questions about the large direction and
meaning of history include Vico, Herder, and Hegel. A somewhat different line
of thought in this tradition that has
been very relevant to the philosophy of history is the hermeneutic tradition of
the human sciences. Through their emphasis on the “hermeneutic circle” through
which humans undertake to understand the meanings created by other humans—in
texts, symbols, and actions—hermeneutic philosophers such as Schleiermacher
(1838), Dilthey (1860–1903), and Ricoeur (2000) offer philosophical arguments
for emphasizing the importance of narrative interpretation within our
understanding of history.
Universal or
historical human nature?
Human beings make history; but what is the fundamental nature of the
human being? Is there one fundamental “human nature,” or are the most basic
features of humanity historically conditioned ? Can the study of history shed
light on this question? When we study different historical epochs, do we learn
something about unchanging human beings—or do we learn about fundamental
differences of motivation, reasoning, desire, and collectivity? Is humanity a
historical product? Giambattista Vico's New Science (1725) offered an
interpretation of history that turned on the idea of a universal human nature
and a universal history . Vico's interpretation of the history of civilization
offers the view that there is an underlying uniformity in human nature across
historical settings that permits explanation of historical actions and
processes. The common features of human nature give rise to a fixed series of
stages of development of civil society, law, commerce, and government:
universal human beings, faced with recurring civilizational challenges, produce
the same set of responses over time. Two things are worth noting about this
perspective on history: first, that it simplifies the task of interpreting and
explaining history (because we can take it as given that we can understand the
actors of the past based on our own experiences and nature); and second, it has
an intellectual heir in twentieth-century social science theory in the form of
rational choice theory as a basis for comprehensive social explanation.
Johann Gottfried Herder offers a strikingly different view about human
nature and human ideas and motivations. Herder argues for the historical
contextuality of human nature in his work, Ideas for the Philosophy of History
of Humanity (1791). He offers a historicized understanding of human nature, advocating
the idea that human nature is itself a historical product and that human beings
act differently in different periods of historical developmen. Herder's views
set the stage for the historicist philosophy of human nature later found in
such nineteenth century figures as Hegel and Nietzsche. His perspective too
prefigures an important current of thought about the social world in the late
twentieth century, the idea of the “social construction” of human nature and
social identities (Anderson ; Hacking, Foucault ).
Does history possess
directionality?
Philosophers have raised questions about the meaning and structure of
the totality of human history. Some philosophers have sought to discover a
large organizing theme, meaning, or direction in human history. This may take
the form of an effort to demonstrate how history enacts a divine order, or
reveals a large pattern (cyclical, teleological, progressive), or plays out an
important theme (for example, Hegel's conception of history as the unfolding of
human freedom ). The ambition in each case is to demonstrate that the apparent
contingency and arbitrariness of historical events can be related to a more
fundamental underlying purpose or order.
This approach to history may be described as hermeneutic; but it is
focused on interpretation of large historical features rather than the
interpretation of individual meanings and actions. In effect, it treats the
sweep of history as a complicated, tangled text, in which the interpreter
assigns meanings to some elements of the story in order to fit these elements
into the larger themes and motifs of the story.
A recurring current in this approach to the philosophy of history falls
in the area of theodicy or eschatology: religiously inspired attempts to find
meaning and structure in history by relating the past and present to some
specific, divinely ordained plan. Theologians and religious thinkers have
attempted to find meaning in historical events as expressions of divine will.
One reason for theological interest in this question is the problem of evil;
thus Leibniz's Theodicy attempts to provide a logical interpretation of history
that makes the tragedies of history compatible with a benevolent God's will. In
the twentieth century, theologians such as Maritain , Rust , and Dawson offered systematic efforts to provide
Christian interpretations of history.
Enlightenment thinkers rejected the religious interpretation of history
but brought in their own teleology. Teleology or finality is a reason or
explanation for something in function of its end, purpose or goat. The idea of
progress—the idea that humanity is moving in the direction of better and more
perfect civilization, and that this progression can be witnessed through study
of the history of civilization (Condorcet and Montesquieu ). Vico's philosophy
of history seeks to identify a foundational series of stages of human
civilization. Different civilizations go through the same stages, because human
nature is constant across history (Pompa 1990). Rousseau and Kant brought some of these assumptions
about rationality and progress into their political philosophies, and Adam
Smith embodies some of this optimism about the progressive effects of
rationality in his account of the unfolding of the modern European economic system
(1776). This effort to derive a fixed series of stages as a tool of
interpretation of the history of civilization is repeated throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it finds expression in Hegel's philosophy,
as well as Marx's materialist theory of the development of economic modes of
production.
The effort to find directionality or stages in history found a new
expression in the early twentieth century, in the hands of several
“meta-historians” who sought to provide a macro-interpretation that brought
order to world history: Spengler , Toynbee , Wittfogel and Lattimore. These authors offered a
reading of world history in terms of the rise and fall of civilizations, races,
or cultures. Their writings were not primarily inspired by philosophical or
theological theories, but they were also not works of primary historical
scholarship. Spengler and Toynbee portrayed human history as a coherent process
in which civilizations pass through specific stages of youth, maturity, and
senescence. Wittfogel and Lattimore interpreted Asian civilizations in terms of
large determining factors. Wittfogel contrasts China's history with that of
Europe by characterizing China's civilization as one of “hydraulic despotism”,
with the attendant consequence that China's history was cyclical rather than
directional. Lattimore applies the key of geographic and ecological determinism
to the development of Asian civilization..
A legitimate criticism of many efforts to offer an interpretation of the
sweep of history is the view that it looks for meaning where none can exist.
Interpretation of individual actions and life histories is intelligible,
because we can ground our attributions of meaning in a theory of the individual
person as possessing and creating meanings. But there is no super-agent lying
behind historical events—for example, the French Revolution—and so it is a
category mistake to attempt to find the meaning of the features of the event
(e.g., the Terror). The theological approach purports to evade this criticism
by attributing agency to God as the author of history, but the assumption that
there is a divine author of history takes the making of history out of the
hands of humanity.
Efforts to discern large stages in history such as those of Vico,
Spengler, or Toynbee are vulnerable to a different criticism based on their
mono-causal interpretations of the full complexity of human history. These
authors single out one factor that is thought to drive history: a universal
human nature (Vico), or a common set of civilizational challenges (Spengler,
Toynbee). But their hypotheses need to be evaluated on the basis of concrete
historical evidence. And the evidence concerning the large features of
historical change over the past three millennia offers little support for the
idea of one fixed process of civilizational development. Instead, human
history, at virtually every scale, appears to embody a large degree of
contingency and multiple pathways of development. This is not to say that there
are no credible “large historical” interpretations available for human history
and society. For example, Michael Mann's sociology of early agrarian
civilizations ), De Vries and Goudsblom's efforts at global environmental
history , and Jared Diamond's treatment of disease and warfare offer examples
of scholars who attempt to explain some large features of human history on the
basis of a few common human circumstances: the efforts of states to collect
revenues, the need of human communities to exploit resources, or the global transmission
of disease. The challenge for macro-history is to preserve the discipline of
empirical evaluation for the large hypotheses that are put forward.
Hegel's philosophy of history
Hegel's philosophy of history is perhaps the most fully developed philosophical
theory of history that attempts to discover meaning or direction in history.
Hegel regards history as an intelligible process moving towards a specific
condition—the realization of human freedom. “The question at issue is therefore
the ultimate end of mankind, the end which the spirit sets itself in the
world”. Hegel incorporates a deeper historicism into his philosophical theories
than his predecessors or successors. He regards the relationship between
“objective” history and the subjective development of the individual
consciousness (“spirit”) as an intimate one; this is a central thesis in his
Phenomenology of Spirit . And he views it to be a central task for philosophy
to comprehend its place in the unfolding of history. “History is the process
whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept” . Hegel constructs
world history into a narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public
freedom of the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the
individual freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the
modern state. He attempts to incorporate the civilizations of India and China
into his understanding of world history, though he regards those civilizations
as static and therefore pre-historical. He constructs specific moments as
“world-historical” events that were in the process of bringing about the final,
full stage of history and human freedom. For example, Napoleon's conquest of
much of Europe is portrayed as a world-historical event doing history's work by
establishing the terms of the rational bureaucratic state. Hegel finds reason
in history; but it is a latent reason, and one that can only be comprehended
when the fullness of history's work is finished: “When philosophy paints its
grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. … The owl of Minerva spreads
its wings only with the falling of the dusk”
It is worth observing that Hegel's philosophy of history is not the
indefensible exercise of speculative philosophical reasoning that analytic
philosophers sometimes paint it. His philosophical approach is not based solely
on foundational a priori reasoning, and many of his interpretations of concrete
historical developments are quite insightful. Instead he proposes an “immanent”
encounter between philosophical reason and the historical given. His
prescription is that the philosopher should seek to discover the rational
within the real—not to impose the rational upon the real. “To comprehend what
is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason” His approach is neither purely philosophical
nor purely empirical; instead, he undertakes to discover within the best
historical knowledge of his time, an underlying rational principle that can be
philosophically articulated.
Hermeneutic approaches
to history
Another important strand of philosophy of history proposes to apply
hermeneutics to problems of historical interpretation. This approach focuses on
the meaning of the actions and intentions of historical individuals rather than
historical wholes. This tradition derives from the tradition of scholarly
Biblical interpretation. Hermeneutic scholars emphasized the linguistic and
symbolic core of human interactions and maintained that the techniques that had
been developed for the purpose of interpreting texts could also be employed to
interpret symbolic human actions and products. Wilhelm Dilthey maintained that
the human sciences were inherently distinct from the natural sciences in that
the former depend on the understanding of meaningful human actions, while the
latter depend on causal explanation of non-intentional events. Human life is
structured and carried out through meaningful action and symbolic expressions.
Dilthey maintains that the intellectual tools of hermeneutics—the
interpretation of meaningful texts—are suited to the interpretation of human
action and history. The method of verstehen (understanding) makes a methodology
of this approach; it invites the thinker to engage in an active construction of
the meanings and intentions of the actors from their point of view. This line
of interpretation of human history found expression in the twentieth-century
philosophical writings of Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Foucault. This
tradition approaches the philosophy of history from the perspective of meaning
and language. It argues that historical knowledge depends upon interpretation
of meaningful human actions and practices. Historians should probe historical
events and actions in order to discover the interconnections of meaning and
symbolic interaction that human actions have created.
The hermeneutic tradition took an important new turn in the
mid-twentieth century, as philosophers attempted to make sense of modern
historical developments including war, ethnic and national hatred, and
holocaust. Narratives of progress were no longer compelling, following the
terrible events of the first half of the twentieth century. The focus of this
approach might be labeled “history as remembrance.” Contributors to this strand
of thought emerged from twentieth-century European philosophy, including
existentialism and Marxism, and were influenced by the search for meaning in
the Holocaust. Paul Ricoeur draws out the parallels between personal memory,
cultural memory, and history. Dominick La Capra brings the tools of
interpretation theory and critical theory to bear on his treatment of the
representation of the trauma of the Holocaust. Others emphasize the role that
folk histories play in the construction and interpretation of “our” past. This
is a theme that has been taken up by contemporary historians. Memory and the
representation of the past play a key role in the formation of racial and
national identities; numerous twentieth-century philosophers have noted the
degree of subjectivity and construction that are inherent in the national
memories represented in a group's telling of its history.
Although not himself falling within the European lineage, R. G. Collingwood's philosophy of
history falls within the general framework of hermeneutic philosophy of history.
Collingwood focuses on the question of how to specify the content of history.
He argues that history is constituted by human actions. Actions are the result
of intentional deliberation and choice; so historians are able to explain
historical processes “from within” as a reconstruction of the thought processes
of the agents who bring them about. He presents the idea of re-enactment as a
solution to the problem of knowledge of the past from the point of view of the
present. The past is accessible to historians in the present because it is open
to them to re-enact important historical moments through imaginative
reconstruction of the actors' states of mind and intentions. He describes this
activity of re-enactment in the context of the historical problem of
understanding Plato's meanings as a philosopher or Caesar's intentions as a
ruler: This re-enactment is only accomplished, in the case of Plato and Caesar
respectively, so far as the historian brings to bear on the problem all the
powers of his own mind and all his knowledge of philosophy and politics. It is
not a passive surrender to the spell of another's mind; it is a labour of
active and therefore critical thinking.
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