Philosophy of History

Hayden White (1928– 2018)

I will track White in this first phase, as well as the second and third phases of this present metaparadigm. He is an excellent example of how thought shifts with the demands of each phase. In one of White's first publications, in the mid-1960s, he writes an essay “What is Living and What is Dead in Croce's Criticism of Vico.” The essay becomes part of a book White co-edited with Giorgio Tagliacozzo, a product of an earlier International Symposium on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century historian, Giambattista Vico.

White begins his essay with an interesting juxtaposition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century historian, Benedetto Croce (1866– 1952) with the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century historian Giambattista Vico (1668– 1744). To make this the basis of his essay, White had to consider the final and formal cause of both Vico's methodology and the final and formal cause of Croce's methodology for their respective times of history. That meant, to carefully comprehend the manner of historiographical agency in Croce, and, correspondingly, not only how Vico wrote historical theory, but how he understood the sources of previous centuries that he considered. This is the conduct of “metahistory” by White, as it is for Croce, and, as we will see for Vico, who could be called the first metahistorian of Modernism.

One of Croce's main efforts was to show “what is living and what is dead” in prior philosophical systems, including among others that of Vico (ibid., 1969, 379). The care in discerning what is still fecund in a thinker from a past century is an ideational skill that demands a command of the ideation of one's present. Again, a “metahistorical” set of judgments. Yet, as we continue, we will see the arbitrariness of such judgments, and, how Hayden White addresses the issue of arbitrariness. White aptly focuses upon Croce's distinction between a “theory of history,” and a “philosophy of history,” as the seminal problems of both Croce and any other who would claim to be a “metahistorian”: