Philosophy of History

Twenty-First-Century Perspectives

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350227972
• eBook ISBN: 9781350111868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

With a recent surge of interest in the field, a volume taking stock of important theoretical shifts in the philosophy of history is greatly needed. A Philosophy of History fills this gap by weaving together a range of perspectives on the field which finds itself at a crossroads, and asks where it is headed in the 21st century. The book takes a concerted effort to go beyond the customary three-fold distinction between the speculative, analytic and narrativist approaches in philosophy of history. It considers, what comes after the enduring 'narrativist turn'. Chapters incorporate cutting-edge discussions on the relevance of contemporary political phenomena such as populism, the relation between science and history, pragmatism and the paradigmatic challenge of the Anthropocene. It also re-evaluates the continued relevance of major historical thinkers like Leibniz and R.G. Collingwood, and the endlessly fresh insights they can offer to key debates in the field today. Philosophy of History is a much-needed reappraisal of the philosophy and theory of history; offering an up-to-date overview of major developments in the field, and addressing the pressing questions of where to go next in a 'post-analytical', 'post-narrativist' world.

1

A Conceptual Map for Twenty-First-Century Philosophy of History

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen

Philosophy of history is something that is needed now more than ever. Why is this the case? Because we are struggling to understand extremely worrying political upheavals and environmental and health crises like populism, human-induced climate change and the coronavirus pandemic. It is evident that not only human but also non-human actors shape history profoundly. Philosophy of history makes it easier to understand these phenomena and our time more generally; what is more, it helps us to understand how they could be comprehended in the first place.¹

Philosophy of history is a reflective discipline; it provides a meta-level perspective on history, no matter whether ‘history’ is understood as an effort to understand events and processes, as historiography, or as the events and processes themselves. Attempts to apprehend history are typically holistic and synthetic initiatives that look for links between various historiographical objects such as events, processes and actions, rather than atomistic and analytical measures that would break larger compounds into their constituents. How is it that we can make sense of and understand these things and arrange them in specific relations? Do events, processes and actions have any sense or meaning, as and by themselves?

Perhaps, philosophy of history could be defined as a discipline whose subject is the condition of the historical. That is, it is concerned with the question under what circumstances and what premises something is, can and should be considered to be part of history, either as a historiographical object of history writing and interpretation or as an entity in the object world itself. The difference between philosophy of history and the writing of history may be a line drawn in sand, but it is still the difference between a reflective meta-discipline and an operative object discipline. The focus of the former is on the concepts, organizing principles and presuppositions that are used and required in the latter. Naturally, nothing prevents a philosopher of history from saying something about the meaning and significance of events themselves and vice versa, a historian from saying something about what comprehending history consists in.

Given that philosophy of history is a reflective discipline, it is ironical that the history of philosophy of history itself is fairly conservative and moderately unreflective. Typically, it is first a story of the speculative or substantive philosophy of history, and then, the emergence of the critical or analytical philosophy of history and, finally, the march of narrativism or the narrativist philosophy of historiography. Although it is not my intention here to reinforce the traditional narrative about the history of philosophy of history, it is worth outlining it briefly for the benefit of the reader.

The speculative or substantive philosophy of history refers to those philosophers who focus on questions dealing with the nature of history: its direction, laws, moving force, meaning and so on. This covers many great names from the history of philosophy like Kant, Hegel and Marx and others like Herder and Vico. Spengler and Toynbee are usually regarded as early twentieth-century speculative philosophers despite the fact that their works analyse the development of cultures and rely more on empirical studies than on philosophical systems. In addition, Fukuyama’s the end of history thesis is typically subsumed under this category of philosophy of history.

Prior to the emergence of the critical or analytical philosophy of history, whose birth can de dated to the 1940s, there was only speculative philosophy of history. However, it is worth noting that the terms ‘substantial philosophy of history’ or ‘speculative philosophy of history’ were coined by ‘critical or analytical philosophers of history’ in an apparent attempt to demarcate themselves from their predecessors (see Walsh 1951: 14–15). Tucker has remarked that ‘speculative philosophy is essentially a term of abuse’ (Tucker 2009: 4). Indeed, ‘speculative philosophers of history’ were accused of overriding or disregarding facts that conflicted with ‘the tenets of cherished doctrine’, of conceptual imprecision, and of formulating ‘hopelessly’ vague or tautological hypotheses. Perhaps worst of all, speculative philosophers were seen to rely on unexamined a priori assumptions (Gardiner 1981: 2).

It is fair to say that the foundational paper of the analytical philosophy of history is Carl Gustaf Hempel’s ‘The Function of General Laws in History’ published in 1942. And it is no exaggeration to say that the discussion that follows is to a large extent an offshoot of this paper. In general, the analytical philosophy of history had close ties with logical empiricism. The central concern was whether historiography is a science or entails a scientific model of explanation. Some other notable names of the analytical tradition are Arthur Danto, W. B. Gallie, Maurice Mandelbaum, Louis Mink, William Walsh and Morton White. For a detailed account of the history of the analytical philosophy of history, see Jonathan Gorman’s chapter in this book.

The third component of the conventional narrative of the history of philosophy of history, narrativism, emerged in the early 1970s with the publication of Hayden White’s (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination of the 19th Century Europe. Another landmark publication is Frank Ankersmit’s (1983) Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language published ten years later in 1983. ‘Narrativism’ is generally understood as a shift regarding the scientific status of historiography with a realization that history writing is conditioned by and contains various literary tropes and features. Narrativists typically emphasize that, like in literature, historians produce texts and that texts contains narratives which are not evaluable by empirical or even by any epistemological means.

I have provided this traditional account of the history of philosophy of history so that the reader gets a basic understanding of the intellectual landscape in which the philosophical debates on history have taken place and which still influences what is written. One will quickly realize that this conventional account does not eas ily accommodate all scholarly traditions. One concrete example exemplifying how it streamlines a more complicated history is the way it disregards the Dutch tradition in theory and philosophy of history, which took root in the 1970s largely independently, it seems, from either narrativism or analytical philosophy of history. Analogies and interest with and concern over the social sciences rather over literature seem to have been formative for this tradition (Bos 2018). Gadamer and Collingwood are not easy to situate in this account either, even bearing in mind that there was something like analytical hermeneutics. The clear lesson is that history is richer than the views of history: numerous warranted accounts of the history of philosophy of history can be composed, depending on what concepts are taken as organizing notions of this past.

One should always remain intellectually curious and attentive to alternative modelling. The chapters of this book are perhaps most fruitfully understood through the set of concepts and conceptual pairs laid out below, which have various genealogical links to numerous traditions in the history of this field. If philosophy of history can be organized around the rich set of concepts and organizing principles found in the chapters of this book, so arguably can its history or histories.

* * *

There are good reasons to say that we are now in a novel situation without any clear paradigms, looking for new ways to go forward, or perhaps, any way to go forward. Philosophers and theoreticians of history, and perhaps historians and other scholars interested in the historical, are eagerly looking for new organizing principles. The catalyst for the project that led to this book was the conference The Role of Philosophy of History, held at the University of Oulu, 5–7 October 2017. Most of the writers of this book gave a keynote address at the conference, and subsequently, more scholars were invited to address remaining gaps in the intellectual terrain. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of cutting-edge philosophy of history now and looking forward in the twenty-first-century.

The purpose of this introduction, in turn, is to provide the reader a map for navigating the wide field of philosophy of history. Considering how different, and sometimes contrasting, the chapters of this book are, I believe that this kind of map is needed. Some have called for the end of dichotomies and binaries, for example Domańska, Tamm and Simon in this book. While I fully understand this sentiment, when one considers the broad scope and contrasting ambitions of the chapters in this book, it seems that the time of binaries is not yet over. Or perhaps it will be the case that some binaries will prove useless, while others or new ones will prove their mettle. In any case, the contributions of this book can be fruitfully placed in relation to each other by way of conceptual tuples. This discovery was enlightening for me, and I hope that it will be so for the reader too. The map that emerges is like a metro map in which numerous nodes are linked with numerous stations, or conceptual positions, but not one of them is linked to all.

The nodes that structure the conceptual map of this book could be divided into general philosophical concerns as well as more specific issues within the philosophy of history, although it is difficult to make clear-cut distinctions as to what is what in this regard; often, concepts are relevant both in philosophy generally and in philosophy of history specifically. The conceptual set includes such binaries as postmodernism/post-postmodernism; humanism or anthropocentrism/posthumanism or post-anthropocentrism; liberalism/the crisis of liberalism or post-liberalism; the era of truth/the era of post-truth; naturalism/anti-naturalism; pragmatism/anti-pragmatism; affectivism/rationalism; narrativism/postnarrativism; empiricism/post-empiricism; realism/anti-realism; popular history or history from below/professional or sanctioned history; and a critical or deconstructive/conservative or preservative approach to history. Conceptual links go from one chapter to another through several lines.

This conceptual map indicates that contemporary debate in philosophy of history revolves around these poles. There is also something else that is found in various degrees of explicitness in all these chapters: a future-oriented perspective that tries to redefine the contours of philosophy of history by taking inspiration from tradition, by introducing new key concepts, by redefining old concepts or by redrawing the boundaries of philosophy of history.

Further, all the chapters in one way or another consider the relation between philosophy and history, or between philosophers of history/historiography and historians. The million-dollar question concerns the form of their cooperation: What form should this cooperation take? Is one field or the other or its practitioners more dominant? Should historians provide empirical substance to prevent philosophers of history from talking about straw men or fictional presuppositions? Should philosophers offer concepts that provide shape, order and insight for the object field, which would be an unorganized mess without this conceptual clarity? Imre Lakatos’s Kantian epigram of history and philosophy of science springs to mind: ‘Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind’ (Lakatos 1971: 91). Is the situation the same regarding philosophy of history and history? Or do these fields mesh more intimately with one another?

Someone might point out that Lakatos talked about ‘history of science’ and not about ‘science’, and therefore the proper relation is between philosophy of history and history of history. This is true (read Herman Paul’s contribution in this book on this idea). Nevertheless, (contemporary) science and (contemporary) history cannot be excluded from the history of science and the history of history, respectively. The question of cooperation deals with the relation of a philosophical approach and a historical approach – the former being a reflective endeavour which tries to make sense of the latter, more practical venture.

* * *

Some readers may find the plurality of the contents of this book perplexing. The chapters not only focus on different concepts and topics but also vary in style and degree of philosophical abstraction. Some are more explicitly philosophical, while others are concerned with the issues closer to the heart of practising historians. One worry is that this state of affairs widens the existing gulf between theory (or philosophy) and practice. It has been argued that many historians, who are mainly interested in the tangible problems of history writing and research, are doubtful about the value of philosophical and abstract theoretical reasoning.² This concern is understandable, but I think that the scenario of a deepening rift can be avoided.

First, philosophy of historiography is in a better situation than many other subjects engaged in meta-level reflection of an object d iscipline. The distance between history writing and practice and their philosophical and theoretical analyses is relatively narrow. Understanding the practice and the practical problems of history research and writing is well within the reach of those who identify primarily as philosophers. Through her education any philosopher is familiar with multiple books, interpretations and disagreements of history. As members of their community, they are automatically consumers of history. To consider the matter the other way around, philosophical argumentation and concepts can be grasped without any superhuman efforts by practising historians, although philosophical problems are perhaps less well known as historiographical disputes. In this sense, I believe that the proximity of the object and meta-discipline is greater than in many other similar philosophical areas. For example, it may be challenging for a philosopher of science to follow and understand contemporary cutting-edge science even if she has a relevant science degree.

Secondly, philosophically, it is not clear that there is a principled difference between theoretical and philosophical problems and practice. That there is such a difference in kind cannot be merely assumed, but it needs to be argued. Indeed, one significant philosophical approach, pragmatism, wishes to establish exactly that there is no such a distinction but at most a difference in degree between theory or philosophy and practice of history. This is to say that on the basis of surface differences one should not jump to the conclusion that there is a fundamental cleavage between the approaches.

Naturally, the ultimate challenge is to show that familiarity with ‘practical problems’ is useful for a philosopher and that understanding philosophical and theoretical questions benefits the historian. I suggest to the reader that it is not possible to write history that is free of theoretical or philosophical load and presuppositions. Choices regarding epistemological, methodological, ethical concerns and so on must be made implicitly or explicitly in practice. Similarly, doing philosophy of historiography without familiarity or concern for the ‘real’ questions of historiography would very likely amount to building straw men. It is instructive to conceive of the chapters in this book as constituting their theoretical or philosophical content like a sliding scale. Variations between them are differences in degree rather than in kind. This plurality and smorgasbord of theory and practice should be celebrated, not deplored. Of course, not everything is for everyone, but I appeal to the reader to read chapters that appear more philosophical and those that appear inspired by practical concerns – and only then judge if and in what way they might be useful.

It is nevertheless worth asking, can one detect any emerging tendency or pattern on the basis of this collection of chapters beyond the set of organizing concept and guiding concerns? Any judgement of that kind should naturally always be taken with extreme caution. Although this sample of writers contains many influential players in contemporary theory and philosophy of history and historiography, one is not warranted to treat this group as representative of the entire field. Having said this, some preliminary musings can be outlined. It may be that the zenith of narrativism is now behind us. The influence of narrativist philosophy, and specifically Hayden White, is probably most clearly seen in the contributions by Claire Norton and Mark Donnelly (Chapter 7) and by Ethan Kleinberg (Chapter 5), but even they are now exploring new ways to write history and ground philosophy of history.³ It is also notable that interest in a more substantive type of philosophy of history appears to be gaining in strength. The analysis of language in different ways assumed a central role in both narrativism and the analytic philosophy of history. However, language plays a far smaller role in posthumanist adaptations (Domańska, Tamm and Simon) as well as in applications of large-scale models to history in a more traditional form (Tucker), if in any notable role at all. This trend could perhaps be summed as follows: ‘We seem to be moving from the literary approach to a new substantive philosophy of history, decentring the human from the perspective of the Anthropocene. Well, quite a revolution.’⁴

Good examples of this trend can be found in the Anthropocene and other post- and non-humanistic concepts that have recently emerged on the horizon of philosophy of history. Further, it is also notable that interest in histories from below or popular histories is gaining in strength (Megill, Donnelly and Norton). But are there...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• 1 A Conceptual Map for Twenty-First-Century Philosophy of History
• Part I Debating Key Concepts in Philosophy of History
• Part II Popular History, Populism and Politics
• Part III (Re)drawing the Boundaries of Philosophy of History
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright