No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Philosophy of History: A Prolegomenon to Political Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
TheOrganic nature of all philosophic reflection can easily be obscured by the otherwise laudable efforts of specialists in such fields as the philosophies of ethics, political theory, and art. Granting the great speculative philosophers of the past, seeking a unified view of the totality of human experience, erred though an excess of undisciplined imagination, it is questionable whether the less ambitious, piecemeal work of the analytic specialist has saved philosophy from mysticism or has so truncated it that all vital connections with a humanity in search of meaning have been severed. The tendency to compartmentalize philosophy is not limited to any area of experience but in this article I should like to restrict myself to a consideration of the consequences of separating philosophy of history from inquiries into individual and political values. In order to appreciate these consequences we must first agree on the nature of a philosophy of history and the role it plays, or should play, in determining our estimation of human values.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1961
References
1 Thanks to the Stoics and Christianity these two sets of laws are assumed to be coextensive, so that any being satisfying the biologist's definition of man is now taken ipso facto to satisfy the ethican's definition of a moral being. This coextension is by no means inevitable as witness certain classical aristocratic tendencies to discriminate between the moral being capable of political participation and certain human animals fits only by nature for slavery.
2 The Thomistic distinction between the Natural Law and a Positive Divine Law, while recognizing the inadequacy of the Natural Law, is not to my knowledge made the basis of a philosophy of history.
3 Hegel can easily be condemned as presumptuous insofar as he is interpreted as believing that the Spirit had pretty well actualized itself in his own era. But if one is disposed to play his game of reading history backwards and making sense out of it with large doses of selectivity and interpretation, it would seem to me that there is something more intellectually respectable about using a known present as a principle of selectivity than some prognosticated future à la Marx.
4 The ideal itself is not seriously in question; the possibility of a morally neutral cosmos, of a surfeit of meanings without meaningfulness is never explicitly encountered. Why this should be is probably a question more within the province of psychology than philosophy.
5 The attempt to generate society and the state out of a collection of atomistically isolated individuals may have been ill-conceived, but at least it had the merit of recognizing the irreducible moral reality of the individual.
6 I have purposely resisted the temptation to discuss the relationship of metaphysics to this whole problem because in my mind any philosophy of history comprehensive enough to support a theory of value is a metaphysic.