1. The Western Notion of History -- Hegel
Few people realise that the prevailing notion of history which we so readily accept is hardly two hundred years old. It owes much to Kant and Hegel in the l8th and 19th centuries, but did not come from them directly.
Hegel died in l83l, the 50th anniversary year of the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. We can give credit to Hegel for having attempted to put forward a major philosophy of history, which, however, has not stood the test of time. But he also put forward, perhaps for the first time, a history of philosophy. Hegel's history of philosophy and his philosophy of history are closely interconnected. Actually his history of philosophy is an aspect of his philosophy of history as expressed in the phemonenology of the Spirit.
History for Hegel is the unfolding of the potentialities of the Absolute Idea, in the knowing subject and in the known object (the world). The Absolute Idea is the Divine, but not a transcendent Divine who stands apart from history; the Divine discloses itself through history, not standing behind the historical process, but is the totality of the Process itself. History is God, fully immanent.
If you want to put Hegel's philosophy in Indian terms: Jiva is Brahma; the world (Jagat) is also Brahma. But the realisation of the Brahma: identity of the Jiva is not to be realised apart from the world or by renouncing it. The Jiva and the Jagat together constitute Brahma in its unfolding self-manifestation, which is history.
Again, using our samkhya as a starting point, Hegel would have said: Purusa is Geist; Prakrti is Natur. But the two are not really two. Both are manifestations or self-revelations of Brahman as history. Brahma is Purusha in Prakrti, Geist in Natur, Spirit or Mind or Consciousness in the world:
"Dar Mensch, das endliche Bewwsstsein, ist der Geist in der Bestimmung der Endilichkeit". (The human being, the finite form of consciousness, is in fact the spirit under the conditions of finitude) (Hermann Glockner (ed) Hegel—Lexikore, Zweite_verbesserte auflage, Fr.i Frommaus Verlag Gunther Holzborg — Stuttgart, 1957).
This term Geist or spirit is central to Hegel. It means consciousness, both as Absolute Idea and as human thought. Mind, or Spirit, or Geist is "the most concrete, most developed form achieved by the Idea in its self~actualisation. Even finite or subjective mind, not only Absolute Mind, must be grasped as an actualisation of the Idea". (Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, Q 377, Tr.J.B. Bailhi, New York, Harper &Row, 1967. See Miller and Findlay, Rhilosophy of Hindi Oxford, 1970 p.l)
“Mind is, therefore, in its every act only apprehending itself, and the aim of all genuine science is just this, that mind shall recognize itself in everything in heaven and earth“.
The activities of the Mind include art, religion and philosophy as well as science. We do great injustice to Hegel in writing him off as an idealist. Hegel can be understood only in his historical context, his sittlichkeit in human historical development.
The child Hegel lived and grew up in a divided Germany of the end of the 18th century. He was born in August 1770, and his Phenomenology of the Spirit is the work of a youth, published when he was 37 (in 1807), but written earlier, during his Jena period (l80l-l807). '
Like our own time, Hegel's youth was spent in the turmoil of a turbulent Europe, in the wake of the French Revolution (1789). He grew up in a time of great German creativity Goethe, Schiller, Hoelderlin, Haman and Herder, all reacting against the sweeping social changes of late 18thcentury, German society sadly divided into so many small princedoms and city-states. Like in our own time in the world, Germany was moaning the loss of harmony of personal experience, the disintegration of social relations, and was hankering after a new Humanitaet with personal serenity and social harmony.
Like in our own time, people in Germany were then blaming the new industrial civilisation, the rampant commercialism of the new bourgeois civilisation, political fragmentation leading to economic stagnation and inability to compete with France or Britain or even tiny Holland, religious divisions leading to sectarian strife and social disunity.
Hegel blamed Kant for making the great divides between mind, will, and heart; the whole human being no longer existed! One acted here on pure reason, there on practical reason, and made judgements based on a yet different set of laws. Making money, of course, needed little mind and even less heart.
The new science, too, was fragmenting and divisive. Hegel's understanding of mind and nature was proposed as an alternative to the deadening dualist mechanical paradigm of Newtonian physics, a reaction against the Cartesian separation of res cogitans and res extensa, and against Kant's threefold separation of mind, will and feeling.
Hegel wanted to provide a larger paradigm or framework, not only for art, religion and philosophy, but also for science and history -- a series of Begriffsbestimmungen which follow logically from a single dialectic of the history of the Absolute manifesting itself in history.
He blamed religion and culture also for being divisive. In fact for the young Hegel religion played a major role in bringing about the breakdown of society -- theologians quarrelling about dogmas, but making institutional religion a base for power; a Church separated from society and yet trying to run their "Christian police institutions to control society and punish deviants; a Martin Luther who wanted to liberate the clergy from the Church and yet also wanting to control their minds and their thoughts; promoting theological prejudices about the innate corruption of human nature; and so on.
But Hegel was not really anti-religious. In fact he wanted a new religion that would transform the masses into dignified human beings. But for that one has to go beyond the aesthetic and the religious to a philosophy that includes and absorbs and transcend both. Hegel's philosophy of history is thus offered as the more dialectically developed "true religion",
It may be useful at this point to draw some lines of comparison and contrast between Hegel and Sankara.
In the first chapter of the Brahmasutra-Bhashya we see Sankara saying:
"one and the same self is hidden in all things moving or immovable. The Self reveals itself, without itself changing in a graduated series of beings" (l:l:l1)
He accepts what is said:
Samastasya jagato janmadikaran,brahmotyuktam tasy samasta jagat karanasya brhamano vyapitvam nityatvam sarvajanatvam sarvatmamityeyam jatiyaka dharma uktaeva bhavanti (1:2:1)
The only obvious difference is that for Sankara,though Brahman is the cause of the time-flow as well as its true being, Brahman is unchanged by indwelling the changing world of history.
For Hegel that which unfolds itself in history is the Absolute itself, turning its potentiality into actuality and thereby becoming aware of itself. History is the being of the Absolute for Hegel. For Sankara, Brahman simply projects his power of maya on the avyakta or unmanifest, and the manifest world of history emerges with its names and forms (1:4:3)
Just as Hegel was seeking to overcome the dualism of consciousness and the world by positing the Absolute as the true being of both, Sankara, in seeking to overcome the purusa-prakrti dualism, posits the Brahman as the true being of both.
Hegel's experiencer~experienced dualism does not bother Sankara. The Indian simply posits ananyatva or non-difference between the two. The German goes quite another way. He does not say that the-subject and the object are not different from each other. He simply says that the anyatva of the object can be overcome in thought by realising that it is the same Absolute that operates in subject and object as aspects of its progressive unfolding in history; the anyatva is simply the thesis-antithesis dialectical relation, which is always overcome at a higher level of intuition, in history itself, achieved by proper thought-work or Denkarbeit. This is normal, since, for Hegel, to be human is to be a thinker. Marx redefined Man as worker rather than thinker-- thinking being only part of working.
For Sankara it is not thought that finally overcomes the duality, but a higher kind of jnana or brahmajnana. Thought and reason for Sankara, remain under the spell of maya, for the dualism of thinker-thought is intrinsic to thought. Thought remains in the realm of avidya and maya. Moksa or realisation burns away the power of maya, constituted by ayidya, and releases the jiva from the cycle of births and rebirths, from the cycle of samsara, from the cycle of history.
The differences between Sankara and Hegel are quite fundamental. We note this in passing. We also note that while philosophy of history was largely rejected, his basic framework continues to be operative, with some modifications in prevailing systems like Process Philosophy and Teilhard de Chardin.
2. The Non-mystery of History — Vico, Marx and Dilthey
Hegel's method was speculative. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, picking up an insight from their bare acquaintance with Indian philosophy, flew high in speculative thought, but soon crashlanded. For the age that was dawning was an age of science, which tolerates no speculation not rooted in empirical evidence. Philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries could gain credibility in the west only by relating itself to science and method.
But science itself, at least in Germany, had bifurcated by the middle of the 19th century, into the naturissenschaften and Geistesenissenschaften, taking a cue from the earlier dichotomy between Natur and Geist. Historical School in Germany had already noticed what we now know more clearly the strict empirical sciences presuppose a communication structure of intersubjectivity which the natural sciences themselves cannot examine with their categories. The physical sciences constitute a limited realm of knowledge, based on a different and scientifically unexamined realm of communicative intersubjectivity within the scientific community. This latter realm of the human sciences, including history and art, religion and culture, literature and poetry, philosophy and psychology, sociology and literary of art criticism, already begun to accumulate a huge body of knowledge. This knowledge too was science or Wissenschaft. Parallel to the Naturuissenschaftenwhich dealt with Natur, there were the Geisteswissenschaften which dealt with the world of consciousness, the real human world of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The Germans have always taken this consciousness world much more seriously than the English speaking world has. The Anglophones have obstinately struggled to bring the human world of subjectivity under some laws of mathematical precision and certainty. The dying philosophical school of Linguistic Analysis (stubbornly refusing to die in India, always the last bastion of Anglophone culture) represents a last ditch stand of that struggle.
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) born two years after Hegel died was the architect of the structure of the human sciences. He argued that just as there was a world of objects (studied by the physical sciences), there was a world of subjects -- a life-world, a Lebenswelt, a human world of subjectivity, the world of the experiencer. This world cannot be known by the same laws and methods prevailing in the world of objects. The object-world is constituted by the subject-world, and we should study the laws of the latter too, through specialized disciplines.
By thus creating an almost independent structure for the Geisteswisenschaften or Cultural Sciences Dilthey gave a new validity to 'scientific history', and its new categories of 'Erieben' (experience), 'einleben' (indwelling) and ‘understanding’ (Verstehen as opposed to Erklaerung or Explanation).
Causality may be the principle of explanation in the natural sciences which deal with the natural world. But in the Lebenswelt or community life of intersubjectivity we need to enter into the experience of the experiencer, and sort of ‘live inside‘ him/her.
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has to be supplemented by a new Critique of Historical Reason, and this is indeed what Dilthey attempted. Hegel, for Dilthey, was too speculative and supernaturalist. Dilthey sought a framework for understanding history in purely naturalistic, empirical terms. He wanted to purge Hegel of the mythical element in his philosophy of history—namely the Absolute Idea.
Along with Giambattista Vico in the early l8th century, Dilthey too believed that the historical world is an artifact of human creation. Vico had already, before Hegel, taken the supernatural out of history by making humanity the creator of history. Marx and Dilthey simply went along with this notion that since humanity was history's creator, the same humanity could both understand its own creation and change it.
But in Vico, the idea of divine providence as guiding history had not been totally abandoned. Only he thinks that pronoia or providence acts according to natural laws which human beings can early discover. That is the purpose of Vico's Nuova Scienza - to show that providence has to act only because human beings do not discover the laws of Providence and guide history in accordance with these laws. Once we know the laws and know ourselves as creators of history, we can take over from Providence and guide history in accordance with these laws. Once we know the laws and know ourselves as creators of history, we can take over from providence, but if we keep making mistakes, Providence takes over again, and makes us go through the whole process of creating history all over again — corso and ricorso, course and recourse; so long as human beings fail to do their duty in creating the 'right' kind of history, i.e. in accordance with the laws of Providence, Providence continues to act. Only Hegel tried to read out these laws of Providence as the dialectic of history, meeting Vico's demand. Marx simply went on from where Hegel left it, but Vico's principle that only by making the right kind of history can we really know the correct philosophy of history.
Marx rejects Hegel's reading of the rules of historical law, but, as is well known, took over many aspects from it -- the ideas of the dialectic of becoming a human being by the right kind of history making, and the ideas of alienation and disalienation, or Fall and Redemption, Unheil and heil to use the Christian antecedents of Hegel's idea. The main shift was from Denkarbeit or thought-work to real Arbeit, real work physically handling the material world. Labour is where alienation operates and creates the dialectic by producing its enemy, Capital.
Marx basically accepted the Vico principle, that only by making history you begin to understand the rules that guide history. Marx could not however, accept the Viconian principle that if human beings make the wrong kind of history, providence will intervene. But in place of providence, the best Marx could do was to gently introduce an apotheosis of history itself. It is history that will intervene-and rectify the wrong kind of history that human beings sometimes create. History, personified, deified, becomes an agent in creating history, though always through human actions. The place of pronoia or Providence is now taken over by History itself as an agent.
Wilhelm Dilthey who was a lad of l5 when the Communist Manifesto was published, carries out the secularisation of history beyond the point that Marx had taken it, by eliminating the idea of History as an agent Humanity comes fully into its own as the Creator. Understander and Lord of History, so long as humanity works along the immutable laws of history.
The idea that History is an agent recurs however in many other areas of the intellectual theories of the west -- in the Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian theories of Evolution. The species are created, not by humanity, but by Nature itself through the processes of Natural Selection, and Stochastic randomness, by the rules of population genetics and genetic-mutation. We note that the agent here is Nature, not History personified. Nature was always an agent in western theory; but in phenomena like cell formation, herd formation and social formation of intelligent species like humans, some of the same basic laws of nature are operative; only at a particular points in Evolution, they become the laws of history. In both nature and history, the teleological element comes to the forefront, despite every attempt on the part of science’s principle of mechanical conception of causality to impose a taboo on all teleology. For in both nature and history the telos or goal is always "the successful outcome".
3. New Developments - The Hermeneutic School
Dilthey's attempt to objectify the subjective realm and to produce a Critique of Historical Reason which provides norms for assessing that realm again has not stood the test of time. The biggest attack came from the Hermenetic School especially in its most recent recension by Hans Georg Gadamer's epochmaking Truth and Method.
Gadamer shows that historical reason is historically conditioned. Each student of history brings his/her own mental formation to the study of history. This effective personal history of the observer, i.e. the accident of his birth in a particular culture, his/her linguistic training, skills in various disciplines — all this gives the observer a particular horizon which colours and shapes what he/she observes within that horizon. There is no subjectivity which has itself not been conditioned by history, the Uirkungsgeschiohtg or effective personal history of each subject. Each student of history brings his/her prejudices to the study of history. The best we can do is to set some socially agreed criteria for the critical assessment of the various prejudices that have shaped each historical account when the critic attributes prejudice to a particular historical narrative,the critic must specify the nature of the particular prejudice, objectify it, and see precisely where that prejudice operates. But in order to locate the historian‘s prejudice, the critic must have a prejudice of his/her own about the nature of the former’s prejudice. The latter's prejudice can then be objectified in terms of a prejudice about that prejudice, and critical rationality goes on in an endless circles of prejudices and prejudices about prejudices. Juergen Habermas would say that even scientific hypotheses in the natural sciences are in fact such prejudices. Statements in all realms of knowledge need validation, and the criteria for validation will vary from realm to realm. In the physical sciences it may be the experiment and its interpretation; in the social sciences it may be documentation and fact assessment; in art or literary criticism it may be intuitions about what constitutes quality; in value choices it may be simply community consensus. All validation criteria have to be socially agreed upon.
Where does all this lead us, in relation to the meaning of_history? Clearly western thought offers us very little objective criteria for assessing the meaning of history. The best they can do is to offer us a social consensus, formed after considerable critical reflection, the consensus itself being provisional and subject to further critical reflection about prejudices inherent in it.
4. A few Concluding Comments
From an Asian perspective one can say that the critical-historical method has been impressively effective in dispelling many falsities from the historical record, and to provide it with a more reliable basis.
As for the meaning of history itself the critical method fails to yield many positive results beyond the idea of a critical-provisional consensus on the meaning of history. Such a consensus has not as yet merged. If there is such an emerging consensus, it is about the unity of humanity, the movement of history towards greater justice and human dignity for all, and the push towards global perspectives. But such a movement is more of a task than a historical fact.
One of the major requirements of such a global perspective is to have global histories which all of us on the globe can call our own. Our present histories are too much oriented towards and influenced by national, ethnic, or regional prejudices. It will take a long time, not only for westerners, but,also for Indians, to accept all history as our history. Indian children are now being taught to regard the whole of Indian history as our history, which we did not so regard before India became united as a nation, though even after India's division many Indians still regard Mohenjo Daro and Harappa as part of our history.
But when we approach the question: "what is the inner meaning of history as disclosing the one increasing purpose that runs through the ages?", we feel rather stumped. The moment we speak of "increasing purpose" (an awkward phrase in any case) we are speaking of some conscious being, for purposes are normally attached to nonconscious beings.
Besides, 'purpose' is a temporal concept, something to be achieved in the future wich the purposer does not have in the present. It is difficult to conceive a notion of purpose in a transcendent Being to whom past, present and future are eternally copresent. That is why there is something philosophically faulty in the very terms of the Principal Miller Endowment Lectures. There are three expressions in those terms which give one pause. What does one mean by "inner" meaning? Is there something called an external or "outer" meaning to history as opposed to "inner" meaning? It seems the term "inner" has a sense very dated in British theology of an earlier generation. They used to distinguish between an "outward" sign of an "inward" grace in their theology of the sacraments. By "inward" or "inner" they meant "spiritual" as opposed to material, it seems. Such expressions are no longer current. They mean very little.
The "increasing purpose" is also an expression difficult for me to understand. Does this mean that the purpose was rather halting and unfervent in the beginning, and becomes more resolute as time goes on?
Western Christian theology has been rather philosophically naive in making claims about God "acting" in history, revealing Himself in history and having a purpose for history. We human beings who are temporal creatures of history can speak about our purpose, our action and so on, but to ascribe such purpose and such action to God is to anthropomorphise Him. This is all right in poetry and devotion, and for the Christian scripture perhaps which is more poetry and devotion than philosophy. A philosophical theology would have to start out with the acknowledgment that such human time—space concepts cannot be, strictly speaking, applied to the one who transcends time and spar
I do not forget the fact that this is what precisely Hegel accused Christian theology of doing — making God so transcendent that he has nothing to do with human history, culture and political—economic action. Unfortunately what modern civilisation is doing seems to me much worse than what a too heavily transcendentalist theology did. Even the New Hermenentik tries to find meaning in history strictly within the subject"object dualist framework of experiencer and experience, or observer and observed or critic and that which is critically examined. The tragedy of Western historiography is that it has thrown God out in both forms of our perception: as transcendent and as immanent.
Our own nastika tradition once tried that route; they did not get very far and very few followed them. Here is a whole civilisation the leading cadres and institutions of all but the most reactionary states are doing the same i.e. the arrogant appropriation of history as a human creation and an object of human study and understanding without any reference to any thing beyond humanity and the world. Humanity as Lord of Nature and History is what both the various forms of western liberal thought (including much current western Christian theology) and the various forms of Marxism (including Marxism-Leninism) which are all now in a process of great upheaval and heart searching, are trying to achieve as the goal and meaning of history -- the "increasing purpose" which history itself is supposed to disclose progressively. Marxism and Liberalism both seek to overcome the inherent dualism of such an approach by integrating the two within the original matter-energy of the Big-Bang and the Evolutionary framework of the linear development.
Now we are in a time when there is a growing reluctance to rest the oars of liberal or Marxist achievement of thought and action. Clearly for me at least, in moving beyond, there seems to be no alternative, but to reintroduce the Transcendent in some way, but not in a purely conceptual way, into our life and worship, if not into our conceptual systems.