Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy

Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830

Peter K. J. Park

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438446431
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia moderna

Winner of the 2016 Frantz Fanon Prize for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association In this provocative historiography, Peter K. J. Park provides a penetrating account of a crucial period in the development of philosophy as an academic discipline. During these decades, a number of European philosophers influenced by Immanuel Kant began to formulate the history of philosophy as a march of progress from the Greeks to Kant—a genealogy that supplanted existing accounts beginning in Egypt or Western Asia and at a time when European interest in Sanskrit and Persian literature was flourishing. Not without debate, these traditions were ultimately deemed outside the scope of philosophy and relegated to the study of religion. Park uncovers this debate and recounts the development of an exclusionary canon of philosophy in the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To what extent was this exclusion of Africa and Asia a result of the scientization of philosophy? To what extent was it a result of racism? This book includes the most extensive description available anywhere of Joseph-Marie de Gérando's Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, Friedrich Schlegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, Friedrich Ast's and Thaddä Anselm Rixner's systematic integration of Africa and Asia into the history of philosophy, and the controversy between G. W. F. Hegel and the theologian August Tholuck over "pantheism."

1

The Kantian School and the Consolidation of Modern Historiography of Philosophy

The history of philosophy presents to us reason in its sublime aspect, in its divine striving after truth without concealing its weaknesses, since it shows us its aberrations and entanglements in vain whimsy; it gives us a faithful painting of the transience of human opinions and of the ever more victorious struggle of reason against error and superstition.

—Wilhelm Tennemann (1798)¹

In 1791, Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1758–1825), the important early exponent of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, decried the lack of agreement among philosophers on what constitutes the proper object of the history of philosophy.² There was no agreement on even a concept of philosophy.³ It remained an unresolved question whether the scientific study of nature, for instance, came under the domain of philosophy. None of the existing concepts of philosophy satisfied Reinhold, who was compelled to give his own definition: Philosophy is the “science of the determinate interrelation of things, independent of experience.”⁴ He elaborated this definition term by term: Philosophy is “scientific” as opposed to that which is “common, unordered” or “irregular.”⁵ The “philosophy of the common man” consists of accidental knowledge as means toward the satisfaction of sensual needs and does not qualify as philosophy.⁶ If philosophy is to fulfill its intended purpose, it should satisfy the need of consciousness only, the need of reason itself. Philosophy is the science of the “determinate” or “necessary,” as opposed to the accidental, interrelation of things.⁷ Things accidentally related to each other come under the domain of history and not philosophy.⁸ Philosophy is “independent of experience” since the forms by which reason arrives at the interrelation of things are determined by the nature of human consciousness, the human faculty of representation, which does not originate in experience, but rather makes experience possible.⁹

Due to a “completely indeterminate” concept of philosophy, the idea of the history of philosophy has been equally indeterminate. This is the reason why one commonly confused the “actual” history of philosophy with intellectual history (the history of the sciences in particular) and with the “lives and opinions” of the philosophers. Reinhold also drew a distinction between the history of philosophy and the special histories of particular subfields of philosophy; such as metaphysics, which was often confused with philosophy in general.¹⁰ Reinhold considered the history of philosophy as separate and distinct also from the history of the literature of philosophy.¹¹ This traditional confusion of genres gave him cause to strictly define the history of philosophy as “the portrayed quintessence of the changes that the science of the necessary interrelation of things has undergone from its [first] emergence to our times.”¹²

Reinhold also wanted to exclude from the history of philosophy biographical details of the philosophers, excerpts of their writings, and reports by others of their contents. He wanted to exclude even historical information derived from the philosophers' own writings.¹³ However, he did concede—but only barely—that in the special cases in which the psychological or moral character of a man, or certain circumstances of his life, had a decisive impact on his philosophical system—indeed, if his philosophical system was a peculiar one; that in these rare cases, the history of philosophy may take such historical data (e.g., biographical details) into consideration.¹⁴ However, even the most accurate historical information could supply at best “nothing more than materials for the history of philosophy and not this history itself.”¹⁵ Notwithstanding rare exceptions, recounting the life circumstances of a philosopher would be a “useless waste of time” in the lecture hall and, Reinhold added, would even excuse the lecturer as well as the students from thinking.¹⁶

In this chapter I argue that, in distinguishing between what the history of philosophy had been previously and what it ought to be, Reinhold was calling for reform in this field of knowledge. He inaugurated a movement in the writing of history of philosophy that would span the rest of the decade and spill into the nineteenth century. As never before, German university philosophers would explicitly discuss the concept, content, form, purpose, method, scope, types, and value of the history of philosophy. Greater space was allotted to the discussion of these themes in the introductions and prefaces to a growing number of student handbooks on the history of philosophy as well as full-scale works on the same. These appeared alongside a dozen separate theoretical treatises on history of philosophy in this period.¹⁷ That issues relating to the history of philosophy drew more attention in the 1790s than at any other time in the eighteenth century was due partly to the radical changes in the political and social order of Europe then occurring and philosophical reflection in Germany (as elsewhere) on the meaning of these changes for the history and destiny of humanity. During these years, Kant posed the question, “Whether the human race is constantly progressing?”¹⁸ Interest in the history of philosophy received a concrete stimulus in 1790 with the announcement of the Berlin Royal Academy's prize question: “What real progress has metaphysics made in Germany since the time of Leibniz and Wolff?” After looking through German philosophical journals of this period, the historiographer Lutz Geldsetzer reported that “the overwhelming portion of the philosophical research is devoted to historical themes.”¹⁹ One should note that Reinhold's essay, “Ueber den Begrif der Geschichte der Philosophie” (“On the Concept of History of Philosophy”), was published in a journal wholly devoted to the theoretical discussion of the history of philosophy: Beyträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie, edited by Georg Gustav Fülleborn. Seven volumes of this journal appeared from 1794 to 1799.²⁰ That there was increased interest in the history of philosophy among academic philosophers is more than plausible if one considers that the discussion of the history of philosophy was philosophical in nature, beginning with the very concepts of history and philosophy.²¹ “It is above all in Germany and in the northern countries that the most important works of history of philosophy were conceived and executed,” states Joseph-Marie de Gérando in Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie (Paris, 1804).²² Wilhelm Tennemann, the leading German historian of philosophy at century's end and de Gérando's translator, declared with some self-conceit: “The German nation has done far more for the reclamation and culture of the field of history of philosophy than any other nation.” He added, “This is a fact that needs no proof.”²³ More recently, Lucien Braun has commented, “The history of philosophy is, at the moment of its radical modification, a German thing, a Protestant thing.”²⁴ All elements of the history of philosophy were subject to debate, and opinions were so varied that in 1800 one internal observer remarked, “Among the writers of history, no type is more disunited than the writers of the history of philosophy.”²⁵

I view Reinhold, Kant's greatest early exponent, as leading a movement to overthrow the long tradition of history of philosophy writing in the West.²⁶ This tradition has its beginnings with Diogenes Laërtius, the third-century author of Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, which has been one of the most frequently consulted sources on ancient philosophers since its Latin translation and printing in 1475.²⁷ The work organizes philosophers into schools, following their chronological succession and beginning with the biographical details and philosophical views of each school's founder. As late as the eighteenth century, “lives and opinions,” a combination of doxography and biography, was the dominant mode of history of philosophy writing.²⁸ The “lives and opinions” mode is characteristic of several successful works of history of philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One such work is Thomas Stanley's The history of philosophy: containing the lives, opinions, actions and discourses of the philosophers of every sect (1655–62), which draws its material heavily from Isaac Casaubon's Latin edition of Diogenes's text.²⁹ Another example is Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique, expanded and republished several times since the first edition of 1697.³⁰ (Bayle ordered his articles alphabetically by philosopher's name.) An early eighteenth-century example is Gerhard Johannes Voss's De philosophia et philosophorum sectis in the enlarged edition of 1705.³¹ History of philosophy was offered in Acta philosophorum, a journal edited by Christoph August Heumann from 1715 to 1726.³² André-François Boureau-Deslandes' Histoire critique de la philosophie, où l'on traite de son origine, de ses progrez et des diverses revolutions qui lui sont arrivées jusqu'à notre temps, published in 1737, is another work of “lives and opinions.”³³ These were all eclipsed by the Historia critica philosophiae, written by the Lutheran theologian Jacob Brucker.³⁴ Its five volumes (the fourth volume was issued in two parts) appeared between 1742 and 1744; a sixth volume appeared with the second edition of 1766–7.³⁵ It would not be an exaggeration to say that the eighteenth century consulted Brucker. Several generations of philosophers learned the history of philosophy from his work. After finishing his own six-volume history of philosophy, Dieterich Tiedemann complained that his contemporaries still used Brucker as if no new work in the history of philosophy had been done since.³⁶ Johann Gottlieb Gerhard Buhle, another end-of-century historian of philosophy, considered Brucker the true founder of the history of philosophy.³⁷ Goethe learned his history of philosophy from Brucker. Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer referred to Brucker.³⁸ The great bulk of the articles on philosophers and topics in the history of philosophy in Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie are not much more than translations of the relevant parts of Brucker's Latin work.³⁹ (Denis Diderot and his collaborators used Boureau-Deslandes' Histoire critique secondly.⁴⁰) There were yet other foreign imitators.⁴¹ De Gérando wrote that the Historia critica philosophiae was “the vastest composition of this genre that still [sees] the light of day.”⁴² With Brucker's work, the history of philosophy attained new heights of erudition through the study and criticism of an array of sources and with attention paid to the historical and cultural context of the philosophers' ideas.

Nonetheless, Reinhold charged that historians of philosophy, Brucker not exempted, had devoted more space to the lives of philosophers than to their philosophical ideas. Thoroughly dissatisfied with the existing works of history of philosophy, he declared,

The man who has in his possession and power not only the old monuments and sources of the history of philosophy, but all necessary and useful historical, philological, grammatical and logical aids is nevertheless called a mere compiler and mechanical handler of the materials for a future history of philosophy, not inventor of its plan, not architect of its structure.⁴³

If all previous authors of history of philosophy were compilers and mechanical handlers, what new requirement did Reinhold set for a man to deserve the title of historian of philosophy? He required that he have “an acquaintance with the nature of the human faculties of representation, knowledge, and desire.”⁴⁴ That is, he required them to be acquainted with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Reinhold was not happy and would not be happy until a Kantian thinker wrote ...