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Reply to Historicism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

F. H. Heinemann
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Extract

History has become a real and urgent problem. It harasses us in a double form, theoretical and practical, corresponding to the double meaning of the term “history” as either “a sequence of events in time” or “our knowledge of past events”. The first concerns our attitude to human history. We somehow suffer from “historical indigestion”. We may have mastered Nature, but we have certainly not yet mastered History. Therefore it threatens to dominate us. The mass of past events is too much for us and for our memory, too many dates, too many facts, too many interesting or indifferent happenings. We cannot even keep pace with, or realize, all the important events which fill our own times, like world-wars, revolutions, counter-revolutions, inflation and deflation, with all the misery they imply. Consciously or unconsciously we feel ashamed of the human record, of the amount of cruelty, destruction, murder, and martyrdom inflicted on innocent beings. In spite of all this we cannot escape History. All the great events affect every human being. Moreover, historical knowledge permeates our education and is disturbingly growing from year to year, more in detail and in specialization than as a co-ordinated whole. We may react to this situation in one of three ways: (1) by filling our brain with this unco-ordinated mass of historical knowledge, and submerging our personality in it, (2) by becoming specialists and disregarding problems other than our own, (3) by ignoring the past altogether, and falling back into the state of nature and barbarism. We have witnessed all these solutions and their disquieting results.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 21 , Issue 80 , November 1946 , pp. 245 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1946

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References

page 246 note 1 Wilhelm Dilthey, An Introduction. Paul, Kegan, 1944Google Scholar.

page 247 note 1 The Journal of Philosophy, vol. XLII, 1945, pp. 65 ff.Google Scholar

page 247 note 2 Cp. for details Dilthey, 's most brilliant essay, “Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften,” WW, VII, pp. 88 ffGoogle Scholar. I accept “human studies” as a translation of Geisteswissenschaften, cp. Hodges, L.c., p. 157.

page 247 note 1 Über die Religion, WW, IV, p. 270 (Leipzig, 1914)Google Scholar. The identification of wisdom and history anticipates the identity of philosophy and history of philosophy (Hegel) and that of philosophy and history (Croce).

page 247 note 2 Werke, ed. Medicus, , Vol. I, p. 317Google Scholar.

page 247 note 3 L.c., p. 208.

page 247 note 4 L.c., p. 415.

page 247 note 5 Works, I, 1, p. 382–83.

page 247 note 6 Collingwood, R. G., An Autobiography, ch. XGoogle Scholar.

page 247 note 7 Works, I, 5, 306.

page 249 note 1 L.c., p. 309.

page 249 note 2 Cp. Philosophy, 1945, pp. 81 ff.

page 250 note 1 Troeltsch, E., Der Historismus u. seine Probleme, 1922, pp. 333 ff.; 347, 490Google Scholar.

page 250 note 2 Cp. Heinemann, F., Neue Wege der Philosophie, 1929, pp. 186, 190 ffGoogle Scholar.

page 250 note 3 Dilthey, , Werke, 8, 232Google Scholar.

page 251 note 1 Cp. my above-quoted book, pp. 273, 374, 384 ff.

page 252 note 1 First Principles, p. 546.

page 253 note 1 An Autobiography, Penguin, p. 52Google Scholar.

page 253 note 2 Logic, Engl, ed., p. 324.

page 253 note 3 Cp. for Croce's relativism Mandelbaum, M., The Problem of Historical Knowledge, N.Y., 1938Google Scholar.

page 254 note 1 Cp. for his positive contribution my above-quoted work and Prof. Hodges' excellent book.

page 256 note 1 Note added during the revision. My attention has been drawn to the discussion of historicism in Popper, K. R.'s Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945Google Scholar. Everyone is entitled to use terms as he pleases. But Popper's use of the word historicism as denoting social philosophies which regard history as controlled by developmental laws enabling us to predict man's future seems rather arbitrary. Under its aegis Plato and Aristotle are written off as “historicists” in spite of the fact that they do not accept historical knowledge as true knowledge. Mr. Popper's remarks about essential definition are interesting and help us to understand Hegel's identification of philosophy with its history; but it is in no way necessary that this sort of definition, or rather a specific kind of it, namely genetic definition, should lead to historicism. Mr. Popper overlooks Proclus who forms a most important link between Plato–Aristotle and Hegel and who formulates most precise developmental laws without becoming an historicist in any sense of the word. The cyclical movement of his system has nothing to do with history. This use of the word historicism, which cannot account for the facts of history, should therefore not be accepted as genuine. The word should be used, with Professor Hodges, as a translation of the German Historismus which Mr. Popper translates by “historism,” meaning by it “the method of treating philosophies or religions entirely from the point of view of their historical origin and environment”; this comes nearer to the true meaning of historicism.—As to the refutation of the epistemonological thesis of historicism which had to be as short as possible for lack of space, the following points which may be further developed should be kept in mind. (1) The dependence of some parts of our knowledge on either biological, psychological, social, economic, practical, or historical factors is not denied. The mistake of historicism and all these one-sided standpoints lies in faulty generalization. (2) Judgments which are completely dependent on any of these prelogical spheres are not strictly speaking knowledge, but pseudo-knowledge, because they are based on prelogical affirmation or negation (e.g. journalistic articles hiding the interests of a specific group behind pseudo-scientific language). (3) Moreover, the assumed relations of one-sided dependence are in fact relations of interdependence; the sphere of economics, for instance, depends as much on thought as thought on economics. (4) All these factors, biological, social, historical, etc., do not act in isolation but in interdependence and thereby counterbalance each other.