Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Page, Carl, 1957Philosophical historicism and the betrayal of first philosophy / Carl Page. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-271-01330-3 (alk. paper) 1. Philosophy. 2. Historicism. 3. Methodology. I. Title. B61.P34 1995 101--dc20 93-41574

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Copyright ©1995, The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802·1003

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

What is the first and last thing that a philosopher demands To overcome his age in himself, to become timeless.

0/ himself?

- Friedrich Nietzsche

PREFACE

Overemphasizing the historical character of human existence ends by betraying philosophy, for the necessary timeliness of deeds all too easily overshadows the fragile possibility of untimely speeches. Dogmatic assertion of reason's transcendence betrays philosophy no less, for it encourages, first, a disconnection of insight from the caring it takes to cultivate virtue and, subsequently, an all but irreparable split between the tandem moments of theory and practice, endeavor and insight. In this matter of reason's self-knowledge, the collective mood of contemporary philosophy is swinging toward the former, historicist extre~. What is defined and explicated in this book as philosophical historicism claims that the activity of human reason is totally and necessarily determined by the finite actuality of historical circumstance, that despite the intelligibility of universal, primary, and synoptic cogni-

xii

Preface

tive ideals, in reality human reason is necessarily dominated by the purely contingent. I do not oppose this view with the supposition that history is irrelevant to philosophy or that philosophy does not need to take history seriously. I contend, rather, that contemporary philosophy is becoming so infatuated with historical contingency that it threatens to make nonsense of the natural desire to see things whole and clear. With all the good intentions of saving reason from dogmatic pretension and self-delusion, philosophical historicism nonetheless betrays theoretical eros by its insistence that the desire to get to the bottom of things, to the bottom of anything, cannot in principle be consummated and must therefore be wholly retrained. Getting to the bottom of things, seeing things whole and clear-these aspirations help define the spirit of "First Philosophy," Aristotle's descriptive designation for the knowledge of things through their ultimate causes and principles, the knowledge whose perfection but not intelligibility philosophical historicism denies. For the sake of paying due respect to the historical situatedness of reason's exercise, historicism thus alienates us from the given form of our yearning to understand. I am convinced that this betrayal is too high a price to pay, despite the value of historicism's central lesson that the soul, and more particularly the theorizing mind, may not reasonably be indifferent to its historical embodiment. My aim in this book is to show how the meaning of historicity may be preserved without forsaking the natural integrity of theoretical desire and without, therefore, abandoning either the spirit or the tradition of First Philosophy. The reader should be warned that I offer no systematic defense of First Philosophy's alternative to philosophical historicism. It appears here chiefly as the shadow progenitor against which the latter defines itself. My immanent criticisms are directed at the current historicist orthodoxy in its own terms. They are grounded in historicism's own explicit aims and self-understanding as well as in tacit constraints common to all modes of philosophizing. I have spoken of those common constraints in terms of both metaphysical and logical (or account-giving) responsibility, phrases whose meanings are explained and whose relevance is justified in the appropriate places. My own commitment to First Philosophy may, from time to time, distract the historicistically inclined reader, but that commitment alone cannot be held to invalidate arguments I have made every effort to keep commensurable with historicism's own philosophical spirit, stated and implied.

Preface

xiii

What follows is a theoretical critique. It addresses philosophical historicism as a teaching about the true situation of human reason. But historicism's growing philosophical popularity represents as much a practical commitment as it does a theoretical one, namely the moral conviction that we have, at last, found the right way to discipline philosophy's hubristic tendency to place itself above politics, above the city, above its fellow citizens. From this zeal comes all the contemporary emphasis on solidarity. The topic is deep and complex, made particularly difficult by the natural passion for justice. Importance notwithstanding, I have deliberately avoided all discussion of this wider, politically ramifying context. It requires a book in its own right. Instead I have chosen to focus on philosophical historicism's purely doctrinal weaknesses as an interpretation of human reason. The priority is justified since, if historicism is theoretically inadequate in the ways I maintain, it cannot possibly be a suitable basis for practical responsibility to the political domain.

ABBREVIATIONS

BOR

Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1983).

BT

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John M'acquarrie and Edward Robinson (Ne·w York: Harper and Row, 1962 [1926]).

CIS

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

CP

Richard Rorty, Consequences ofPragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

CR

Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth ofScientific Knowledge, 2d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1965).

xviii

Abbreviations

"CWM" "Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit und Methode: Leo Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer," Independent Journal of Philosophy

2 (1978): 5-12. EH

Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1959 [1936]), translated by J. E. Anderson as Historism (London: Herder and Herder, 1972). Page references are to the English translation.

EHO

Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1991 ). EN

Sections refer to G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969 [1830]), with English translations from Hegel's Logic, tr. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) and Hegel's Philosophy ofMind, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

"GS"

Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Gadamer on Strauss: An Interview,"

Interpretation 12 (1984): 1-13. HCE

Martin Heidegger, Hegel's Concept of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).

HK

Robert D'Amico, Historicism and Knowledge (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1989).

"HM"

Karl Mannheim, "Historicism," in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952).

HP

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Introduction to the Lectures on the History ofPhilosophy, tr. I M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

IRH

Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading ofHegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology ofSpirit, tr. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969).

IU

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, tr. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936).

"KH"

Ernst Troeltsch, "Die Krisis des Historismus," Die Neue

Rundschau 33 (1922): 572-90.

Abbreviations

xix

KPM

Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem ofMetaphysics, 4th ed. (en!.), tr. Richard Taft (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990 [1929]).

ORT

Richard Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ).

OSE

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols., 5th ed. (London: 'Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

"PCR"

Jack Meiland, "On the Paradox of Cognitive Relativism," Metaphilosophy 11 (1980): 115-26.

PHM

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, tr. David Linge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).

PMN

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

PPH

David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem ofHistory: A Study ofEdmund Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974).

PR

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952).

PS

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, tr. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

PVH

Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, 3d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).

PWF

Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism Without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986 ).

RF

Erich Streissler, ed., Roads to Freedom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).

SL

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Science of Logic, tr. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanitie's Press, 1969).

SWU

Joseph Margolis, Science Without Unity: Reconciling the Human and Natural Sciences (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

xx

Abbreviations

TM

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989).

TWR

Joseph Margolis, Texts Without Referents: Reconciling Science and Narrative (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

WH

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction-Reason in History, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

INTRODUCTION HISTORICISM: THE NEW COMMONPLACE

Since the middle of the nineteenth century Historismus has been a familiar item in the lexicon of German scholarship. In contrast, only in the latter half of the twentieth century has the kindred (though not equivalent) term historicism appeared as a category in the working vocabulary of English-speaking academics. Despite this apparently late start on their part, it is now fair to say that historicism is a well-worn, if less than well-understood, piece of taxonomic coin. Within the last decade its increased circulation in the conversations of philosophers in particular has been especially marked. The significance of this recent philosophical appropriation of historicism is the subject of the present book. Although the upsurge in philosophical use is recent, it has not taken long for the currency to become debased. As a label, historicism may now be found attributed to almost any philosophical position that makes some approving reference to history, regardless of the specific form in which it should happen to do so. When used in this indefinite way, historicism becomes equally applicable to the views of Hegel and to those of Richard Rorty.Nonetheless, the widespread willingness to

2

Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philosophy

discover historicism in so many different philosophical locations betrays a deeper truth: a new topic has been entered among the received commonplaces of contemporary philosophical discourse, and questions about the relationships between thinking and history are now routinely woven into the fabric of philosophy's concerns. We have come to talk of historicism so glibly because we have become fascinated by the idea that the historical character of human existence bears a profound and unavoidable relation to all the undertakings of human thought. The last remark should not be mistaken as a casual endorsement of historicism. To the contrary, this study is devoted to a thorough and critical appraisal of the historicist gesture in its recent, acutely philosophical form. What I mean by the historicist gesture in general is the reflex insistence upon the fundamental relevance of historical contextualization for either or both of ( 1 ) the intelligibility of human realities and (2) the possibility of human understanding. This reflex may vary in mode from keen self-consciousness to thoughtless intellectual habit. It may result in anything from a wholesale historical relativization of action, speech, and thought to the far less startling claim that in all theoretical inquiry or practical reflection historical considerations should not be neglected. I speak of a gesture in order to indicate that historicism occurs primarily as a set of convictions about the importance of history. Only secondarily will the gesture be accompanied by some articulate philosophical account of the theoretical commitments and presuppositions required for making ultimate sense of the convictions it happens to stress. Common to all forms of the historicist gesture is a focus of attention on the ways in which human life and thought manifest an intrinsically historical character. Call this intrinsic but as yet unspeCified historical character "historicity" (Geschichtlichkeit). To say, then, that the current talk of historicism within English-speaking philosophy betokens a newly accepted commonplace does not mean that there is some fully articulated account of human existence's historicity that is now everywhere taken to be obviously true. It llleans that what has become universally obvious is that philosophy must learn, as it is said, to take history seriously. Less obvious and far more ominous, on the other hand, is the deeper conviction that historicity is philosophically important not simply because human reality appears intrinsically historical but because on closer interpretation this intrinsically historical character works out to be so profound as to demand a radical reconception of philosophy itself.

Historicism: The New Commonplace

3

At the heart of that reconception is an abandonment of all hope of realizing what I shall call the noetic ideals of First Philosophy. First Philosophy translates Aristotle's notion of pr6te philosophia: knowledge of the first causes ( aitiai ) and principles ( arehai ) of things. As a theoretical, human endeavor, First Philosophy has an ethos, part of which is defined by the conviction that the human intellect is in principle and by nature adequate to reality and its primary principles. Fulfilling that potential adequation is not an easy task, since human understanding is not immediate. That is why it makes sense to talk of noetic ideals governing philosophical endeavor. In the case of First Philosophy, its ideals are primacy, universality, and comprehensiveness. More colloquially put: First Philosophy aims at getting to the bottom of everything. Associated with those ideals is a corresponding sense of intellectual virtue, with its attendant habits, traditions, pedagogy, politics, and art. To give it a nanle, I call that virtue "lucidity," but this does not indicate the complex cognitive tact that underlies its proper functioning. Aristotle on one occasion referred to that tact as a phronesis kata philosophian (Topics 8.163b9), as "practical wisdom regarding philosophy." Philosophical historicism has an ethos too, defined in opposition to First Philosophy. It forswears the realization of all theoretical and practical ideals that hold out some hope for the actual transcendence of the hie et nunc or the transfiguration of mortality. It requires forsaking the articulation of Hegelian Wissensehaft no less than it requires forsaking the vision of Plato's forms (eide). It represents a challenge not only to the possibility of insight but also to the meaning of wisdom. In place of the forlorn, vain, or hubristic hopes of philosophizing in the old style, the new orientation proposes that reason (the self-conscious actuality of human intelligence) can and should be guided by a healthy awareness of the inevitable parochiality of human understanding in all its endeavors. It prides itself on admitting that philosophy is no exception, reducing not only the sage from spiritual hero to ordinary mortal but the prophet, teacher, statesman, and lawgiver as well. This is taking history seriously with a vengeance; it is the conviction that defines the spirit of philosophical

historicism. Historicism distinguished by the conviction of reason's total and inevitable parochiality is philosophical in two senses. First, its underlying interpretation of historicity is cast as a comprehensive, fundamental, and accurate account of human understanding and its situation. Philosophical historicism therefore is an heir to the

4


critique of reason or knowledge of knowing's first principles. As such, it is committed to the philosophical idioms of universality, primacy, and truth. Precisely by sharing philosophy's traditional archaeological impulse, with parricidal irony philosophical historicism is led to its rejection of traditional philosophy: if all the activities of human reason are in principle dominated by historicity, then so too are the very activities of philosophy. Traditional philosophy is therefore foolish, not because it naively believes in truth, but because it mistakes the true situation of human understanding. This application of radically interpreted historicity to philosophy's own activity makes philosophical historicism philosophical in a second sense, for it thus engages in the traditional, Socratic task of self-knowledge. Hence, not only is human understanding itself the topic of philosophical historicism, but those who discern reason's necessary historicity reflect also on the historicistic character of their own reasoned activity. Philosophical historicism raises its teaching to the level of self-reflection by relating the thought of historicity to the possibility of thinking it. Such self-reflection is philosophical because philosophy, and only philosophy, has ever been the guardian of reason's pure self-knowledge. Other disciplines examine the consequences of intelligence, and some of them examine its functions, but no other discipline has ever concerned itself with the nature of insight and understanding as such. Certainly no other discipline has ever concerned itself with the significance of reason within the context of human life as a whole. Recent philosophers with strong historicist programs for the radical revision of philosophy have been among the more audible in the current academic marketplace. To single out a few of the well-known: HansGeorg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, and Alasdair MacIntyre all count as historicists in the philosophical sense just sketched. They are united in their rejection of First Philosophy's noetic ideals and seek a new vision for the ultimate regulation of philosophical activity, whether it be in philosophical hermeneutics, the liberal-ironist conversation of mankind, neo-Nietzschean genealogy, or the narrative of traditions. There are of course many others who have dealt sympathetically with related historicist themes: Quentin Skinner, Charles Taylor, Hilary Putnam, Bernard Williams, and Joseph Margolis are names that readily come to mind. In one way or another each of these figures represents the historicism that has come to haunt, and in many cases to dominate, recent philosophical thought. I say haunt because it is not that everyone


5

or nearly everyone is a committed historicist; it is that almost no one feels they can safely afford to ignore the debate provoked by those who espouse strongly historicist doctrines. Historicism is something being talked about, whether one happens to be listening as a Platonist or as a methodological anarchist. At least the topic, though not the doctrine, pervades contemporary philosophy. If the tone of the above remarks has not yet foreshadowed my profound disagreement with the view that historicity mandates the abandonment of philosophy's traditional aspirations, then let me admit that disagreement now. It is, nevertheless, far fronl my intention to deny that history needs to be taken seriously, nor yet to deny that there is something intrinsically historical about human reality. These are general forms of the historicist gesture whose spirit may easily be accepted. I also concede from the outset that the historicity of human existence is relevant to the undertakings of philosophy in particular, not simply as a phenomenon to be examined from the philosophical point of view, but also as a principle constitutive of the philosophical ethos itself. In other words, I allow that philosophy's self-knowledge cannot be quarantined from the effects of historicity. None of these admissions, however, amounts to conceding that historicity entails the necessary parochiality of understanding or, obversely, the impossibility of insight. The logical strength of such sweeping historicistic claims depends on a quite specific interpretation of the nature of historicity in its relation to human reason that is neither the only one available nor the most cogent and compelling. Historicity is open to interpretation, and not all interpretations suffer the defects of philosophical historicism. Demonstrating the latter's inadequacies is the substance (though not the whole purpose) of this book. The merely negative component of my proposed critique is that philosophical historicism does not and cannot make good on justifying the strongly limitative postulates that define its convictions. It therefore also fails to justify its proposed renovation of philosophy. Yet I do not take these negative. results to mean that philosophical historicism is simply bankrupt. The comprehensive appraisal undertaken in this study has two main aspects, and though the negative part should not be undervalued, more important is the positive part that seeks to preserve what is sound in the motivations behind the gesture of philosophical historicisnl and the doctrines to which it gives rise. Historicism has not lacked for critics, yet what has been missing from past polemics is a sympathetic understanding of the partial truths on which historicism's

6


continuing popularity feeds. Just such an understanding I aim to supply. In other words, my purpose is not the simple refutation of philosophical historicism but, as Hegel would say, its determinate negation. For those concerned with reason's self-knowledge, there is every reason to examine such historicism carefully, to layout its character and commitments, to consider its ideals and investments, to evaluate its insights and inadequacies. So far, philosophical historicism has been given little more than a local habitation and a name. In order to arrive at a responsible account of its position and a sympathetic rendering of its spirit, it will be important in the body of what follows to let philosophical historicism speak for itself. In the meantime, philosophical historicism's commitment to a renovation of philosophy marked by the rejection of First Philosophy is salient enough to make both my meaning and reference roughly familiar. Less familiar will be the grounds on which I shall be pressing my criticisms, so it remains for the second part of this introduction briefly to indicate them. The architecture of my proposed critique is visible in the table of contents; for present purposes it will be enough to point out its center of gravity. As an interpretation of the relationship between historicity and reason, the single most important question philosophical historicism must face is that of its adequacy as an account of human reason's actuality. The question is metaphysical. Furthermore, it is metaphysical in a way that those inclined to philosophical historicism have been prone to neglect. They have thereby become prey to naive pictures of how history may be supposed to exercise its effects on human understanding. A sketch of how metaphysics should be understood in this context and why in this sense philosophical historicism is obliged to metaphysical responsibility will suffice to outline the thrust of my counterhistoricist critique. I begin with a consideration of the historicist gesture in general. All the varieties of historicism highlight in some way the shared theme of history's importance. In many if not most cases the precise denotation of history is hardly specified. The customary distinction between history as the events themselves (res gestae) and history as the telling of the events (historia rerum gestarum ) bears some of the required weight, but there is a third, imagistic rather than analytic sense of history that lurks within the manifold preconceptions of modern historicistic points of view: the image of history as an independent, etheric reality.


7

At its most fanciful, history in this sense is pictured as a demonic force sweeping up individual human beings and leaving them washed aside in great tides. Less demonic and apparently far more sober, the same metaphysical image nonetheless underlies history's being thought of as a general medium for human activity, an amniotic fluid in whose currents we all swim. As an ether, history or the historical process becomes a sort of spiritual soup capable of hydrodynamically determining human thought and action. The soup may be concocted out of languages, or conceptual schemes, social and investigative practices, Zeitgeister, or what have you, but the metaphysical implication of them all is the same: to be in it, Le., to be historical at all, is to be open to being pushed around by it. The popularity of such hydrodynamic idioms as "historical influence," "currents of thought," "diffusion of ideas," "the flux of historical change," and so on, is of a piece with this picture of history as ether. Meteorological metaphors-"the climate of opinion," "things in the air," "the winds of change"- manifest the same conceit. Philosophers in particular, ever the ones to poke about after the waves or storms of history have passed, are "also apt to speak geologically of "sedimentation" and of being "embedded." What all these metaphors betray-hydrodynamic, meteorological, and geological-is the inclination to construe historical determination in terms of the naturalistic or spiritless paradigms relevant to the earth sciences. Such a category mistake puts one a long way from the Geisteswissenschaften and even further away from Hegelian phenomenology. Use of such metaphors does not necessarily amount to philosophical error, but it does suggest metaphysical naivete about the precise character of historicity. Not all appeals to the historicist attitude are in immediate need of a well-worked-out metaphysics of historicity. Nor need it be denied that the foregoing imagery can on occasion serve as acceptable shorthand for mentioning complex historical relations. Nevertheless, metaphysical precision beconles much more important once philosophical historicists begin to announce strongly limitative theses about the nature of historical determination. What it lllight really mean for human existence to be intrinsically historical, for human beings to be historically determined, or for thinking to be necessarily conditioned by historical processes, are not issues that can be addressed without paying careful attention to the principles that allow one to suppose the existence and effectiveness of the relations of condition, influence, and constraint required by such manners of speech. There must be adequate justifica-

8


tion of the categories deployed in speaking about the power of those contingent limits and boundaries upon which historicists so typically and so trenchantly insist. At its worst, dogmatic historicism simply assumes that history or historical circumstances somehow manage to dominate human activity, paying little conceptual attention to the structure of determination that would make such domination possible. There are many ways naively to imagine that one can transcend what is called the flux of history, yet it is no less naive to imagine without further account that historical determination is causally supported by an etheric fluid that binds individuals and their circumstances into a homogeneous medium for the propagation of historical effects. Fully accounting for history's determining power entails a metaphysical inquiry, for all imputation of constraint or limit on any real activity presupposes some notion of interaction and effective causality. This much may be said, moreover, regardless of whether one happens to prefer a formal or a material mode of speech in metaphysics: the issue is what makes historical influence or effective domination by history conceivable. A necessary commitment to what may be called the metaphysics of historical determination is, therefore, the often unacknowledged backdrop to historicisnl in its diverse modern and contemporary forms. It is also the ground on which it may legitimately be criticized in terms proper to its own concerns. To date, the most important contributions to a philosophically comprehensive and self-conscious examination of the historicity proper to human existence have been made by Hegel and Heidegger. Their preeminence in this regard is guaranteed by the ontological formulation they give to their reflections on the relation between history and human being. They will therefore play an important part in what follows. Both Heidegger and Hegel furnish systematic, foundational, explanatory frameworks for the description of history and historical relations-the one a metaphysics of spirit (Geist) that seeks to encompass all the major ontological insights of the tradition, the other a temporally elaborated existential analytic of the being of man (Dasein ) that, while new, nonetheless echoes the traditional view of man as a metaphysical animal, or as Heidegger himself would put it, the being for whom being (or Being) is meaningful. One may have objections in part or in whole to the ontological framework proposed in either case, but such objections must be worked out within the context of the metaphysical responsibility they have both already acknowledged.


9

A call to metaphysical responsibility of the sort just sketched may fairly be addressed to any proposed historicization of human activity. My special concern is with the historicist gesture that focuses on those particular human activities traditionally called theoretical, Le., the activities of self-consciously reflective and speculative thought. Philosophical historicism is a picture of the relationship between historicity and the endeavors of human understanding. It portrays how the intrinsically historical character of human existence defines the parameters of reason's activity. The philosophical cogency of any such picture depends on its rendition, tacit or otherwise, of two key elements: (1) the nature of historical determination and (2) the nature of reason's determinability by history. Only by specifying an interpretation of these two principles can the power of history over reason be made intelligible, only thus can one understand the force of historicistic bonds, only thus the potential effect of history on philosophical thinking. The twofold root just exposed helps explain the steps by which philosophical historicism typically proceeds. It begins with an incompletely specified reading of historicity that is marked by a strongly limitative view of historical determination as it operates on human activity in general. Then, in order to underwrite the specification of that generalized conception to the theoretical activities of philosophizing, it must also rely on a certain picture of hunlan reason, one that makes the mind wholly conformable to the effects of historical determination so conceived. The mind's conformability to history is a basic theme. I shall maintain that the specification of historicism's limitative view of history to include all the endeavors of philosophy rests on an interpretation of reason that encodes an inaccurate, though not entirely false, image of the plasticity of human understanding. In broadest outline my main counterthesis may be stated thus: human reason is not as wholly conformable to history as the strongly limitative postulates of philosophical historicism metaphysically require. Establishment of this thesis will also establish that historicity cannot be taken as primitive. The truth about reason is the measure of historicity, not vice versa-a lesson that has always been available from Hegel, who so clearly saw how history and rational self-consciousness are coeval. Nevertheless, because philosophizing is indeed an activity of human beings living mortal lives, philosophical historicisnl is correct to maintain that philosophy cannot be entirely indifferent to history. The generic avowals that human reality is intrinsically historical and that historicity

10


makes a difference to philosophy are not in dispute. Rather, the topical question is: what is historicity that it makes a difference to the theorizing mind? And correlatively: what is the theorizing mind that it can be differentiated by history? A thematically adequate reply to these topical questions would be a huge undertaking. I propose no more than an examination of the recent phenomenon of philosophical historicism against the backdrop of the issues they imply. Let me venture one final formulation of my central theme: can philosophical historicism possibly be correct to maintain that the theorizing mind is differentiated by history without remainder? In the end, my answer remains a straightforward no. Arriving responsibly at that negative answer demands a thorough and sympathetic examination of philosophical historicism's logical and metaphysical limits.

CHAPTER ONE

FROM THE LOGIC OF HISTORY TO THE HISTORICITY OF REASON

Historicism has been said in many ways.! Friedrich Schlegel seems to have been first, using the term Historismus in 1797 to describe a mode (Art) of doing philosophy, alongside other such modes as "ethicism," "politicism," "poeticism," and "logicism."2 Around the same time, Schlegel's close friend Novalis also spoke of Historism in a similar way.3 Ludwig Feuerbach used it as a term of criticism in the 1830s. Subsequent descriptive usages have been noted, and in 1852 Carl Prantl used it to identify his own philosophical position, speaking of a "true historicism." By the end of the 1850s it was also an accepted term for describing the Historical School's methodological approach. Although historicism first emerged in Germany, Benedetto Croce's use of istoricismo in his Estetica (1902) seems originally to have been independent. He soon identified that usage with Historismus. Croce coined storicismo as a neologism for his own work, a term that became translated into English as "historicism." "Historism" was at first the preferred rendering of Historismus, but this changed in the 1940s to "historicism," just as Karl Popper appropriated the latter term for use in his Poverty ofHistoricism. Popper's historicism

12


and its relation to the earlier German tradition is discussed in detail in the following section. In the Introduction, I used historicism as a portmanteau for an unspecified set of variations on a common, deeper, and indeterminate theme that I called the historicist gesture. Understood in that broad sense, historicism encompasses all of its own specific meanings as well as the meanings of such closely related terms as "historism," "Historismus, " and "Historizismus." Ample historical and philological attention has been given to unpacking the trunk of this semantic assortment. My present concern with such matters is circumscribed by the particular task of bringing philosophical historicism into focus as a distinct variety of the historicist gesture, first by contrast with what it is not. The conceptual horizon of historicism's various meanings was set in the Introduction with two definitions. First, the historicist gesture was defined as the reflex insistence on the fundamental relevance of historical contextualization for either or both of ( 1 ) the intelligibility of human realities and (2) the possibility of human understanding. The notions of historical contextualization, intelligibility, and possibility in this definition are all open to specification in accord with the convictions emphasized by particular versions of the historicist gesture. Second, I stipulated that historicity was to be understood in a generic sense. It is shorthand for the intrinsically historical character of hUlllan existence. In this definition, the nleanings of intrinsic, historical, and hum~n existence are all open to a variety of refinements and interpretations. The combination of these two points implies that all historicisms are marked by a contextualizing prescription for SOllle or all activities of human understanding based on a particular description of human reality as historicaL Located within this general horizon is the species of historicism I am calling "philosophical." Philosophical historicism has already been identified by two of its striking outward appearances: the rejection of all realizable noetic finality and the subsequent call for a radical renovation of philosophy. I also noted that underlying those striking appearances is a strongly limitative interpretation of reason's complete historicity. It is worth adding here that complete historicity does not logically imply limitative finitude, at least not until the meaning of historicity is made precise. "Philosophical historicism" is my own nomenclature, so it does not appear in the self-descriptions of nonetheless philosophical historicists. Yet philosophers attracted to the tenets of what in the next chapter will be isolated and defined as philosophical historicism have recently become

From the Logic of History to the Historicity of Reason

13

willing to use the general idiom of historicism to describe their positions. The following examples are typical expressions of the strongly limitative picture of historicity that is at the center of what I nlean by specifically philosophical historicisnl: To adopt a thoroughgoing historicism ... is to acknowledge that, in every cognitive undertaking, we are in the grip of conceptual schemes whose systematic boundaries, essential rules of internal orderliness, relationship to the world independent of our linguistic access, relationship to other similar such conceptual schemes, propensity and capacity for change and evolution, we cannot ever finally fix or fully fathom. 4 Historicism is a position about the limits of knowledge, how human understanding is always a "captive" of its historical situation.... Historicism abandons efforts to prove the validity or "rightness" of concepts, rather it treats concepts, standards, and presuppositions as part of historical traditions which constitute objectivity. The question of which concepts are fundamental is always relative to a tradition. For the historicists cultural practices make possible many objective worlds whose internal criteria leave reflection sceptical about the "ultimate" criteria of reference or realism. 5 Some readers will immediately recognize that the historicism described and endorsed here by Joseph Margolis and Robert D'Amico is rather different in spirit fronl the historicism associated with the later-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century German tradition of Historismus. The latter is marked by a methodological enthusiasm for reading history in a dynamic, evolutionary way and by a philosophical confidence that the study of history is the magistra vitae. It lacks as a defining gesture the skeptical nloment apparent in the above quotations. Historismus did eventually arrive at certain skeptical difficulties as the inlplications of its original principles were worked out, but the skepticism was experienced as a crisis, not an insight. There are also significant differences in theme and scope. For Margolis and D'Amico, historicism is a philosophical attitude determined by a comprehensive picture of human understanding, where understanding means the entire range and reality of cognitive activity pursued by

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human beings. Historismus, on the other hand, is a reflective attitude toward the social, cultural, and political domain primarily determined by a certain picture of how the processes of historical reality may be supposed to work and how they therefore ought to be described. Philosophical historicism is about the nature of reason, its necessary limits and possibilities. This already distinguishes it from theories about the nature of cultural phenomena as well as from theories of how best to explain those phenomena. As a doctrine and putative critique of reason, on just this ground philosophical historicism must be set apart from Historismus. To the latter I shall refer most broadly as "classical" historicism. Also visible in the above manifestos of philosophical historicism is its difference from the form of historicism attaGked by Karl Popper in his well-known tracts The Poverty ofHistoricism and The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper took historicism to be a very particular view about the nature of historical process: that it is governed by binding laws of development-by various destinies or perhaps by a single fate-from which may be deduced social and political reform. He denounced the view as committed to totalitarianism. Closely related to historicism in Popper's sense is the "radical" historicism of the Marxist tradition with its emphasis on the principle of cultural totality.6 For English-speaking philosophers of the last few generations, The Poverty of Historicism has done the most to make the term "historicism" lexically, if not conceptually, familiar. Given that Popper's use is still widely known and even canonical for some readers, I shall be starting with an account of what was at stake in his attack on historicism and how it differs from the concerns of the more recent philosophical form. This account will also be a means to clarifying a few historical and terminological matters that have been obscured by philosophical historicism's current popularity. Literary theorists, particularly in the United States, have in the last decade or two come to speak of a "new historicism." It is foremost a challenge to assumptions about the alleged autonomy of literary texts, marked by the claim that expressive activity is always embedded within a complex context of power relations whose character may be elucidated by historical analysis rather than via the traditional literary vocabularies of allusion, symbolization, allegory, and mimesis. A recent collection describes the following as key assumptions: (1) that every expressive act is elnbedded in a network of material practices; (2) that every act of unmasking, critique,


15

and opposition uses tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes; (3) that literary and non-literary "texts" circulate inseparably; (4) that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature; (5) that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe. 7 The new historicism is more an analytic practice than a lllethodology or a philosophical theory. Despite the clear affinity with Michel Foucault, for example, links with philosophy's epistenl0logical discourse have been minimal. On the other hand, philosophers investigating historicism have for their part shown very little awareness of this well-recognized movement in literary theory. Item 4 in the above list comes closest to philosophical historicism, although it is not obviously needed in the actual analyses that are the new historicism's strength. The theoretical mood of the new historicism is undoubtedly in sympathy with the limitative interpretation of human historicity that marks philosophical historicism. Yet, as a technique for analyzing modes of discourse, the new historicism remains distinct from any philosophical account of the power of speech and reason itself, limitative or otherwise. Philosophical historicism is systematic about this latter question in a way that the new historicism does not have to be for the successful deployment of its techniques. One final opening note: the recent affirmative and philosophical sense of historicism became part of the common working vocabulary of Englishspeaking philosophers sometime in the aftermath of the 1979 appearance of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature. In his introduction, Rorty wrote: "the common message of Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Heidegger is a historicist one.... The moral of this book is also historicist."8 Rorty's historicist ll10ral was a call to abandon analytic epistemology and the Enlightenment conceptions of rationality on which he said it rested. His argumentation was conscientious and struck many as a brilliant expose of inadequacies in the tradition that had nurtured him and whose techniques were his erstwhile stock-in-trade. Yet Rorty was not announcing his thesis with total originality. It was part of a growing disenchantment whose time had come. The philosophical agenda behind his appropriation of the term "historicism" touched the collective, academic sensibility more deeply than anything in the earlier work of either Maurice Mandelbaum or Leo Strauss, both of

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whom had long since raised historicism as a philosophical issue. Mandelbaum had already related the tradition of classical historicism to broad, philosophical questions of relativisnl, while Strauss, prophetically, elaborated a Platonic critique of philosophical historicism before it reached the mature and pervasive form it now displays.9 One reason for the appeal of Rorty's usage is the flattery his praise exercised on the increasing willingness of his audience to embrace historicist views of human reason, where both Mandelbaum and Strauss had on balance offered philosophical censure. It is also unsurprising that the same audience should have been hungering for a rhetorically more appealing label than "relativism" for the holistic, postempiricist, nonfoundationalist epistemology it was coming to favor. Still, many have since become suspicious of the anarchy, both noetic and political, lurking in consequences of Rorty's pragmatism. More of this in Chapter Two.

KARL POPPER AND THE DEMONIZATION OF HISTORY Popper's sense of historicism is the connotation by which the term originally entered the lingua franca of twentieth-century English-speaking philosophy.lo Some prior occurrences may be noted, but it was Popper's polemical and negative meaning that for better or worse added "historicism" to the working list of philosophical labels. It has remained in philosophical circulation ever since he coined it, though its meaning has now been all but replaced by historicisnl in the positive and philosophy-reforming sense. The legitimacy of Popper's appropriating the term "historicism" as he did has been challenged, but it is unfair to accuse hinl of operating in blameworthy ignorance. Popper saw a clear difference between what he called historicism and the position he thought to be already commonly referred to as "historism." The latter was analogous to Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, which Popper interpreted as a doctrine of epistemological relativism. Historism, on the one hand, and the sociology of knowledge, on the other, depended on the possibility of "analyzing and explaining the differences between the various sociological doctrines and schools, by referring either to their connection with the predilections and interests prevailing in a particular historical period (an approach


17

that has sometimes been called 'historism,' and should not be confused with what I call 'historicism'), or to their connection with political or economic or class interests (an approach that has sometimes been called the 'sociology of knowledge')" (PVH 17). Later Popper draws the same parallel with much larger scope: a theory that "emphasizes the sociological dependence of our opinions is sometimes called sociologism; if the historical dependence is emphasized, it is called historism" (OSE 2:208). He thought such views of knowledge's context dependence to be naively self-refuting (OSE 2:216) and in no need of the sophisticated style of rejoinder he launched against what he identified as historicism. In the mid-1930s, when he was working on what eventually became The Poverty of Historicism, Popper was quite within his etymological rights to make the distinction in English as he made it. "Historicism" was indeed the relatively unfamiliar tern1 he supposed it to be. It had been used to translate storicismo, the term Benedetto Croce coined for his own position, yet to that time in the English-speaking academy more attention had been given to the German n10vement of Historismus than to the Italian appropriation of Hegel. Until the early 1940s the German term had fairly consistently been rendered among English writers as "historism." For no traceable scholarly reasons, though probably for phonological ones, there occurred a gradual substitution of "historicism" for the earlier "historism" around the time Popper was disseminating his views. Whatever the confusion that this mutation may subsequently have caused, Popper himself was not its source. Furthermore, in light of his own distinction between historism and historicism he can hardly be accused of abetting it. Popper had many things to say beneath the umbrella of historicisn1 as he defined it, taking in such topics as holism, essentialism, Utopianism, the unity of science, and the doctrine of "intuitive understanding" ( Verstehen), in addition to the more pertinent themes of historical law and development.. Such motley has occasioned misgiving, but while Popper's volleys have been diffuse and distracting to some, his actual target was fairly clear. I call that target "the demonization of history." 'The den10nization of history depends on two steps. First, the phenomena of history are experienced as having a certain order and exercising a certain force over individual human agents. By itself this impression does not specify the precise degree of history's order and force, and by itself it does not yet amount to a demonization. That the processes of

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history have some degree or other of order and force may be indicated by speaking of history's having dynamics or dynamical structure. One might also talk of history's having logic or meaning in a generic sense that does not yet specify the real grounds of such order, or yet its precise relation to human freedonl. The contrary inlpression in this case is that, lacking all meaning, logic, or structure in its own right, history is just "one damn thing after another," as the poet John Masefield put it, that history is just chaos and flux. The second step-the one that constitutes the demonization - supposes that the dynamics of history manifest a disembodied center (or centers) of power independent of ordinary human agents and beyond their capacity to influence. At a picturesque extreme, history can thus be felt to have a will (or wills) of its own. Popper reacts to this demonization as would any Enlightenment philosophe to any theological idol: "Hegel and Marx replaced the goddess Nature in its turn by the goddess History. So we get laws of History; powers, forces, tendencies, designs, and plans, of History; and the omnipotence and omniscience of historical determinism. Sinners against God are replaced by 'criminals who vainly resist the march of History'; and we learn that not God but History will be our judge. It is this deification of history which I am conlbatting" (CR 346 ).11 Continuous with Popper's sarcastic indignation here is the well-meaning selfrighteousness he expressed in the dedication of The Poverty ofHistoricism: "In memory of the countless men, women and children of all creeds or nations or races who fell victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny" (PVH iv). The inexorability of historical destiny is equivalent to demonization. Despite his sincere antagonism, in that same book Popper defined the view he hoped to discredit in a curiously abstract way: I mean by "historicism" an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal ainl, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the "rhythms" or the "patterns," the "laws" or the "trends" that underlie the evolution of history.l2 (PVH 3) As stated, the definition makes it sound as if the dispute with historicism is a purely theoretical one over the proper methodology of social science, but this obscures the social conscience behind Popper's outwardly theoretical attack. His theoretical criticisms are in service of the


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practical concern that postulating a transcendent, unalterable logic to history, demonized as suprahuman power, and attempting to reach an accord with it is socially dangerous by.encouraging either quietism or fanaticism, both producing an inevitable slide into totalitarian suppression. The inexorable laws of historical destiny may have seemed divine to those who sought to march with it, but for Popper they diabolically ensure the abdication of human freedom. The crucial opposition as he expressed it in The Open Society and Its Enemies was between setting free "the critical powers of man," on the one hand, and "submission to magical forces," on the other (OSE 1: 1). By the end of that more politicized tract, Popper declares that "instead of posing as prophets we must become the makers of our fate" (OSE 2:269), unconsciously echoing the Cartesian strain that we become the lords and masters of nature-in this case, of our own. The nub of Popper's concern is the politics of social freedom, and he ultimately attacks historicism not as defective social science but as defective political philosophy. Certain sorts of beliefs in the forces and meaning at work in historical process encourage wildly imprudent visions of what is politically appropriate action. Popper seeks to counter the potentially harmful effects of the latter by refuting the former. For Popper, Marx is the historicist par excellence-"so far the purest, the most developed and the most dangerous form of historicism" ( OSE 2:81). Yet he also includes Hegel, Comte, Vico, J. S. Mill, Arnold Toynbee, and Oswald Spengler within historicism's scope, not to mention Plato, of all figures, as well. The single element to which he most immediately reacts in the doctrines of these quite various thinkers is any appearance of postulating transcendent forces or principles to which the will of individual human agents is necessarily subordinate. It makes little difference whether such historical forces be thought of as cyclic, progressive, or following some other more complicated pattern. Not the shape of history but the determining force implied by its realization is the issue. This underlying theme allows Popper to identify historicism by the following mark: "every version of historicism expresses the feeling of being swept into the future by irresistible forces" (PVH 160). The irresistibility is what counts. Popper does not deny that history may display significant trends that are themselves open to scientific explanation (PVH 115). His own deeper nlessage is that trends cannot overrule individual agency in the same way that the historicist's evolutionary or developmental laws are supposed to do.

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The impression that history is something with an order of its own that overrules the actions and purposes of individual human agents is at the metaphysical core of the historicism to which Popper objects. For such historicism, the binding of individual will does not have to be rigidly deterministic. It is ~nough that the actions of individuals be constrained by the co-presence within history of higher-order, disembodied powers seeking, as it were, their own realization. Furthernl0re, the demonization of history's dynamical structures does not have to be an eschatological belief in history's having a single, necessary, and overarching plot. Reference to transindividual dynamics in history may yield narrative unities not otherwise available, but it is one thing to pick out such narrative threads and another to assert that they add up to a single rope of meaning. Put otherwise, the demonization of history that expresses the sense of being "swept into the future by irresistible forces" fails to specify whether the demons of history have any idea of what they are doing or not. Nonetheless, in either case there is said to exist at least one epicenter of historical process, besides human agency, that is not within the scope of human power to alter or resist. Both Popper and those he calls historicists agree that the face of history is not an image of chaos. Popper avers that the growth of knowledge lends to human history at least one discernible and long-term shape: "there is progress of knowledge, and technological progress, and to this extent there is a plot" (RF 184). He also allows that the histories of religion, literature, art, politics, economics, and architecture all displaya certain orderliness and unity (RF 186, 200). The dispute centers on the metaphysical ground of such order as happens to appear within the processes of history. At the center of debate is Popper's conviction that individual agents should in principle be able to overrule any of history's trends, not vice versa. On my account of Popper's intent, the methodological emphasis on predictability is the epistemological obverse of the metaphysical question who or what rules in history. For the Popperian historicist, the future is predictable because there is some higher-order power or powers capable of overruling the irrational consequences of merely mortal action (this is what "higher-order" meansthe demons of history are neither fickle nor lacking reason). For Popper, the future is not predictable precisely because only human powers are to be met within it. The prophesying he associates with historicism is really philosophical shorthand for the more deep-seated belief that there are destinies in history that may not in principle be overruled.


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The form of the historicist gesture that was Popper's ultimate target can now be summarized: (1) there are at work in the dynamics of history developmental actualities of an independent order that is higher than individual human agents, and (2) human flourishing depends on accordance with the unmediable imperatives of those actualities. I believe that Popper was correct to sense the popularity of this philosophical conviction among both his contemporaries and many, though not all, of the thinkers he calls historicist. I also believe he was correct to criticize the demonization of history's. dynamics, but I enter two qualifications. First, one can reject the demonization of hi~tory without embracing the nominalist extreme with which Popper himself would replace historicism. For Popper, history's dynamics are in no sense potencies to an actuality proper to history. Their reality and their force results from the complex, accidental concatenation of agencies already fully present. "Although history has no ends, we can impose these ends of ours upon it; and although history has no meaning, we can give it meaning" (OSE 2:269). This strong and, it must be added, naive claim (it overlooks the historical conditions of any such decision to give meaning) is of a piece with Popper's favoring the controversial thesis of "methodological individualism" (PVH 136). The latter conviction prompted Marcuse's insightful remark that Popper's "opposition to historicism is in the last analysis opposition to history."13 There is, however, more than one non-nominalist way of construing the actualities to which history's dynamics correspond. Not all of them demand the postulation of transcendent, magical forces. More carefully interpreted than some received readings allow (and certainly more carefully than Popper's own polemical account ), Hegel's conception of Geist, for example, insists on exactly the mediation of historical actuality and individual will whose absence in demonic historicism motivates Popper's attack. I shall elaborate on this more liberal, less demonic Hegel in Chapter Five. My second qualification is that the rejection of history's demonization leaves unresolved many of the methodological issues associated with Popper's claims about predictability in social science. In this I agree with some of Popper's critics that the dynamics of history support a much greater degree of predictability than he granted. Nevertheless, the methodological orientation of Popper's polemical 'strategy should not be allowed to obscure the fact that his underlying disagreement was with history's alleged power over individual agents. Popper took historicism's methodological problems to be direct symptoms of its metaphysical

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folly regarding human autonomy. That folly was for him the heart of historicism. The ultimate weakness of Popper's own treatment is his assumption that history's dynamics are wholly derived from the interplay of already present and fully constituted individual hUll1an agents. On this assumption, such order and force as history may be supposed to possess can only derive from external or functional relations between individuals. It is therefore not surprising that the notion of an historical force or actuality ll10re binding than objectified convention should seem to be both an outrage against autonomy and a hopeless reification. Philosophical historicism's current popularity is itself a judgment against the adequacy of Popper's tacit account of history's dynamics, for philosophical historicism postulates a much stronger force, one that is at work in the very constitution of intelligent human agency. Part of history's force must be explicable in terms of fully formed, self-conscious agency, but what if another part derives from the metaphysical constitution of individual human agents prior to the play created by their activity? What if some of the actualities making themselves felt in history portend not so much what the actors creating history may yet do but what they may yet be? These are metaphysical possibilities Popper did not consider. How does historicism as the demonization of history differ from what has so far been seen of philosophical historicism? Two points may be emphasized at this stage. To begin with, the thematic subject matters are different. Popper's historicism is a doctrine about the nature of social change and of developing human society, whereas philosophical historicism i~ directly about the lill1its of human understanding. Interest in the evolutionary laws of history is, in the first place, an interest in the dynamical reality of human practices, conventions, and institutions, an interest in the determinants primarily of human deeds, not of human thoughts. Of course, to the extent that both praxis and theoria are human activities they may both be supposed to have their historicity. Also, human deed and human thought always occur in mutual, though complex, relation. Nevertheless, historicism in Popper's sense is defined by its original attention to the transactions of sociopolitical activity and to the notion that such deeds are shaped by actualities that transcend individuals. The possibility that human thoughts are also shaped by unmediable forces afoot in history is not a theme. It would be at best a corollary, dependent on the further,


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strong and hardly self-evident assumption that the historicity of reason is either identical with or pertinently analogous to the historicity of action. The second crucial difference is the noncritical character of demonic historicism. That is, Popperian historicists do not in their claims about sociopolitical reality mean to reflect on their cognitive adequacy to that reality. There may be acknowledged metaphysical problems about the existence of the forces and laws postulated by such historicism, but questions about the historicist's epistemological competence to arrive at the truth about history's tantalizing hints of order constitute a separate domain upon which the demonic forces of history do not yet obviously intrude. With some historical irony, Popper's own developed views are closer to philosophical historicism than is the styIe of historicism he condemns. The proximity (though not the identity) has been noted by Robert D'Amico in his Historicism and Knowledge, which I have already quoted as giving a rough idea of philosophical historicism. D'Amico identifies two senses of historicism: (1) wherein "history obeys a lawful order or logic and knowing its 'laws of emergence' allow for historical predictions," and (2) wherein "ways of reasoning are entrenched or embedded in contexts that can be judged either internally or retrospectively from the present" (HK 20-21). While D'Amico's second definition does not adequately capture what I mean by philosophical historicism, Popper's well-known version of fallibilisnl, his insistence upon the relevance of tradition to critical rationality, and the idea of "situational logic" all combine to underline his sympathy with the doctrine of reason's finite historicity, which is at the core of historicism's philosophical form. Whether Popper is himself finally committed to the systematically skeptical moment that marks philosophical historicism is difficult to determine. His confidence in critical rationality might suggest some antipathy, yet he also seenlS happy to say that "all we can do is to grope for truth even though it be beyond our reach."14 Popper may well have had his own, methodologically derived reasons for supposing that human inquiry has necessarily finite limits. What he never developed was any link between those suspected limits and the metaphysics of historicity. Without such a metaphysics, the strongly limitative thesis of reason's inevitable inadequacy remains no more than a suspicion and itself suspiciously subservient to the progressivistic ideals and hypothetical character of modern science.

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CLASSICAL HISTORICISM: FRIEDRICH MEINECKE AND ERNST TROELTSCH The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German academy is the native home of classical historicism. IS In its first uses the term Historismus tended to be derogatory, though as early as the 1850s there was talk of a "true historicism." Historicism in the merely negative sense corresponds to what would now be thought of as a positivism in the writing of history, an overfastidious avoidance of interpretative generalization and a virtual obsession with documents. But this was only one strand in the complex story of a developing historical consciousness. Other more hefty threads included the belief that history was the key to human wisdom, and the growing conviction that history as a science could not be founded on the basis of naturalistic paradigms, strikingly successful though they were in their own domains. As an intellectual tradition in the German academy, historicism received self-conscious articulation in the work of the Christian theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) and the political historian Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954). The sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) is also frequently identified as a classical historicist, but his treatment of hunlan knowledge as an object of the historicistically reformed social sciences is an extension of classical historicism sufficiently distinct in spirit to count as a third variety of the historicist gesture, and as one much closer to philosophical historicism. Mannheim's historicism will therefore be addressed separately, in the next section. Written in the later stages of his own historicist career, Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936) was Meinecke's main contribution to the selfanalysis of classical historicism. I6 His account is more historical than critical and pays little sustained attention to the philosophical difficulties that Troeltsch's writings had already raised in the early 1920s. For this very reason Meinecke is useful as a simpler, less sophisticated exponent of the original spirit of classical historicism. Die Entstehung des Historismus traces the idea-historical appearance of the historicism that was for Meinecke "the highest stage so far reached in the understanding of human affairs" (EH lvii). The path runs from Shaftesbury, Leibniz, Gottfried Arnold, and Vico, through a host of others including Voltaire, Montesquieu, Burke, and Hume, to a final preparatory stage in Herder and Goethe before its ultimate effiorescence in the style of German historiography epitomized in Ranke.


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For Meinecke, the essential virtue of the historicist approach. was its being able to do justice to the individuality of historical and cultural phenomena-hence the Goethian epigraph to his book: individuum est ineffabile. His point was not so much that individuals, whether persons or institutions or nations, are themselves permanently mysterious but that their significance is ineffable to nonhistoricist orientations. The heart of Meinecke's historicist alternative was "the substitution of a process of individualizing observation for a generalizing view" (EH Iv). By this he meant that the ultimate explanatory and interpretative ground of historical phenomena was to be found not in common principles but in the internal, monadological ideas being expressed in each case by cultural individuals. If generalizations were relevant, they were so only as external and supplementary conditions (EH lv-lvi, 492). With individuality the focus, the second great principle of classical historicism derives from the belief that the inner spiritual substance of historical individuals is revealed in the process of their development (Entwicklung ). "There is an intimate connection between evolutionary [entwickelnde] and individualizing thought forms. It belongs to the essence of individuality (that of the single man no less than the collective structures of the ideal and practical world) that it is revealed only by a process of development" (EH lvii). Development and individuality are the cornerstones of classical historicism. Meinecke did not supply a detailed, philosophical account of either notion, but his convictions that there were cultural individuals, that understanding their forms was crucial for the wise appreciation of human affairs, and that they could only be understood as individuals and in terms of their development were vehement. He defined himself in opposition to Enlightenment rationalism and the tradition of Natural Law, both of which he interpreted as seeking an understanding of human affairs based on abstract universalities, e.g., common properties, rather than on the concrete ground afforded by the essences of his cultural monads. Wholly convinced -of the possibility of scientific history based on the principles of individuality and development, Meinecke also opposed what he called the "pragmatic" approach to history, an approach that saw in history no more substance than a formless string of moral examples. Meinecke spoke of historicism as a "thought form" (DenkjOrm), a "way of thinking" (Denkweise, Denkart), yet the scope of his doctrine did not include the actuality of thinking or even, in his case, the subjectivity of the historian. 17 The categories of development and individuality advanced

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by historicism's doctrine are cognitive tools, and historicism itself is a technique for the interpretation of historical reality. As technique, it says nothing about the constitution and limits of the already present powers that make use of it, picking it up and putting it down as needed. It therefore says nothing about the possible application of its categories to the conditions of its own use. The possible historicity of the historian's own subjectivity, qua historian or qua individual human being, is not any immediate part of the claim that cultural realities ought to be understood developmentally and as individuals in their own right. Stronger forms of historicism do, however, lurk in the suspicion that a critically expanded account of historicized cultural reality would encompass not only the subjectivity of the historian but human subjectivity altogether. Such an expansion is far from clearly warranted by the ontological presuppositions of classical historicism and introduces a skeptical ll10ment at odds with the latter's optimistic claim to be the proper realization of scientific historiography. Compared with Troeltsch, Meinecke is arguably naive in his optimism, but this only serves to underline the fact that the intuition originally animating classical historicism has little to do with the epistemological qualll1s that obsess modern and contemporary philosophy. Willing to champion historicist technique against other ways of looking at history, Meinecke does not doubt the historian's capacity for disinterested retrospect on its complicated objects. It may have been the prerogative of the great historian to arrive at viewing individual realities from the ultimate point of view of eternity, but just by countenancing the possibility Meinecke unqualifiedly endorses a noetic ideal that is antithetical to philosophical historicism. He goes so far as to assert that "we may legitimately speak of historicisll1 as born from the continuous working of the Platonic spirit" (EH 510). Odd as it sounds to those used to opposing historical and Platonic points of view, Meinecke's claim makes good sense. For him, not only is historical reality structured by what might be called intratemporal yet transcendent forms, those forms are the possible and proper objects of human knowledge. Troeltsch, like Meinecke, espouses historicism both as methodology and as Weltanschauung. 18 He also grounds its prescriptive intent in the same underlying historicist ontology: It means the historicization of all our knowledge and experience of the cultural world [die geistige Welt]. ... Everything is seen in


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the stream of becoming, in endless and ever new individualization.... Politics, Law, Morality, Religion, Art are dissolved in the stream of historical becoming and are throughout understandable to us only as components of historical developments.... Cultural life ... is a continuous yet constantly changing flux of life in which only transient vortices with the appearance of duration and an existence of their own are always forming. ("KH" 573-74) Individuality and development remain fundamental, though Troeltsch is more impressed, even overwhelmed, by the transience of the forms appearing within the flux of history. The historicist view of cultural reality is opposed to those that take cultural life to partner "otherworldly, mysterious, fixed, unalterable truths." It contrasts not only with Enlightenment thought but with all ancient and medieval thought as well, opposing in particular therefore the tradition of Natural Law. Learning to see not only cultural phenomena but also their substance in this flux of becoming is the heart of Historismus. Its counterpart is Naturalismus, and between them they are the two legitimate pillars of modern scientific thinking ("KH" 574). Once again, historicism is a way of looking, a Denkart. This deter.. mines the interpretation of Troeltsch's frequently quoted definition of historicism as "the historicization of all our knowledge and experience of the cultural world [die geistige Welt]." Just as with Meinecke, in this context the "historicization of knowledge" does not have any human cognitive power as its immediate object. It is not intended to suggest that historical forces somehow condition the orientation of the knower, but rather that the knower imposes an historicizing mode on the explanations that constitute scientific knowledge and on the understandings that constitute the wise experience of historical reality. Naturally, the more conlpelling the truth of the underlying ontology, the less of an imposition the injunctions seem, and it is always this way that Troeltsch justifies them, i.e., metaphysically. Troeltsch was not oblivious to the question of the historian's own historicity, but he does not raise it here as one of historicism's defining thenles. Historicization means that any content that is to count as legitimate knowledge of the cultural world must accord with the ontological principle that cultural realities are quasi-stable eddies in a flux of becoming (and not, for example, instances of "fixed, unalterable truths").

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Conditions on the actuality of historical knowing are another topic. Troeltsch's "historicization of all our knowledge" is still a long way from reason's total and necessary domination by history. The adequacy of human reason to historicized noetic content is not yet in serious doubt. As an historian, Troeltsch remained an enthusiastic historicist, but as a philosopher he was always troubled. He thought of the essential difficulty as relativism, but his was not a relativism deriving from an interpretation of the historicity of the knowing subject. Rejecting absolutes on the latter basis is characteristic of philosophical historicism. Establishing, by way of contrast, the meaning of Troeltsch's relativism will therefore aid the differentiation of classical from philosophical historicisnl. Troeltsch's intellectual career was dominated by the tension between what he took to be the necessary relativity of all historical formations and his own hopes for the validation of absolute norms (Christian ones in particular ). He was at once impressed by the concreteness that history lent to the positing of value, yet also appalled by the contingency he could see no way to overcome. In Hegel's image from the preface to the Philosophy of Right, he never discovered the rose in the cross of the present. Although he lacked Meinecke's Platonic confidence that historical form was a direct manifestation of absolute reality, he maintained the hope that they were nonetheless linked in some other way. In the late essay "Die Krisis des Historismus" he appeals to philosophy to provide the connection, his hope being that philosophy nlight find the ideas that could reconcile the desire for absolutes with the appearance of a chaos of contingency, while history would prevent philosophy from falling into the abstractions he so vigorously opposed in transcendental philosophy, neo-Kantianism in particular ("KH" 588). To those worried about the historicity of philosophy itself, Troeltsch's response will seem weak, yet this very disappointlllent reveals the distinct character of relativism as he construed it. What bothered him was the appearance that the relativities of historical process permitted the embodiment of no absolute ideals; nothing could be perfectly actual in its web of contingencies. He saw historical process as a pure flux of becoming and from this metaphysics of history hastily deduced the anarchy of all its formations, thus generating a relativism that has no necessary detour through the historicity of a knowing subject. The apparent anarchy of cultural facts-and therewith, as far as he could see,


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all. embodiments of value-was what Troeltsch feared, not the impression that all possible acts of thinking are themselves dissolved in and carried aw.ay by the stream of history. None of this is to say that Troeltsch was blind to epistemological questions. As an historian he was preoccupied with the issue of critical standards for historiography-standards for judging the explanatory power of a given interpretation, and standards for judging the worth of the realities thus understood (the latter concern reaching beyond purely scientific history). Furthermore, with respect to the self-reflexive question, both early and late in his career he acknowledged that historical conditions intrude on the historian's own objectivity-for example, "our theories as to general laws of evolution and as to the values found in history are themselves historically and individually conditioned in every case by the standpoint from which they are formulated" (Absoluteness of Christianity 64) and "in history every standard is ineradicably determined by the standpoint out of which it springs. And it always springs out of a living connection with the formation of the future" (Der Historismus und seine Probleme 169).

He states the point strongly, and yet the theme is never part of Troeltsch's developed historicism. Sometimes he contradicts it: "the personal judgments which have lent keenness to the power of perception must give way before the evidence of the real facts" ("Historiography" 719). In the "Krisis" essay it is significant that he does not mention the situational determination of the historian's judgment, despite two-and-ahalf pages of reflection on the "logico-epistemological problems of history" ("KH" 577) as one of three basic elements in historicism's predicament. When he calls there for a rapprochement between critical historiography and philosophy ("KH" 588), despite the qualms expressed elsewhere, he in effect exempts from the flux of becoming both the critical activity of the good philosopher and the disinterested insight of the good historian. In sum, while Troeltsch acknowledges the historicity of at least the consciousness that would seek a valuation of history (which is not self-evidently equivalent to philosophical consciousness, much less reason as such), the topic receives neither systematic nor consistent attention. Classical historicism as articulated by Meinecke and Troeltsch has both descriptive content and prescriptive intent. Descriptively, classical historicism is a thesis about the ontology of social, cultural, and political realities. Die geistige Welt -and note the emphasis on world -consists of

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entities marked by a developmental integrity that implies in each case an historical autonomy as well as a temporalized significance. Prescriptively, classical historicism is a claim about how to proceed with the understanding of what Herodotus called "the human things" (ta anthropina ) for the sake of both scientific and philosophical ends. It asserts that what they are and what they mean will not become apparent unless construed in terms of historicism's descriptive theses. Therefore, classical historicism's ontology of the cultural world is its defining assertion and distinguishing feature. It is not per se a reflection on the historical conditions of the knower's subjectivity (although it is a recommendation for the ambiguously self-determined attunenlent of that subjectivity) and does not raise the question of whether human reason in general has intrinsic limitations of its own. The sense in which classical historicism is concerned with how reason works is both particular and procedural. As particular, it considers reason only as it apprehends the sociocultural world, leaving aside theoretical understanding as it functions elsewhere-for example, in mathematics and natural science. Whether philosophy falls within the scope of phenonlena 'for which it prescribes historicist analysis is not decided by historicist principles alone (Mannheim thought so; Troeltsch did not). As procedural, it specifies a nlanner in which the already constituted and presupposedly adequate powers of understanding are to be employed and in which the already constituted field of inquiry is to be explored. It does not ask how the historian came to be in the position to proceed historicistically or what the conditions of that position nlight be. On the other hand, and by way of anticipation, philosophical historicism is concerned with the functioning of reason in a constitutional and thus universal rather than nlerely procedural and particular sense. Expounding this distinction will be one of the main tasks of Chapter Two.

IDEAS AS CULTURAL PHENOMENA: KARL MANNHEIM Karl Mannheim worked out his sociology of knowledge in the 19208, publishing the well-known set of essays Ideologie und Utopie in 1929. 19 Less well known is his arriving at the sociology of knowledge as an application of classical historicist principles. Having in general affirmed


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classical historicism's ontology of cultural phenomena, Mannheim undertook the analysis of knowledge itself (or, rather, belief) as a component of

die geistige Welt. With philosophical historicism already typified as a later modern heir to the critique of reason, it is reasonable to anticipate potential links between philosophical historicism and the reflective examination of thinking from a sociological perspective. On the other hand, the force of any such links depends on the adequacy of assuming that active reason lllay be analyzed as a cultural phenomenon determined by social dynamics. The exact extent to which this assumption is valid will be examined in various ways over the remainder of this study. In this section I shall be showing no more than that Mannheim's manner of treating the topic of thinking's relativity to its social context cannot fully address the defining concerns of philosophical historicism, thus removing the temptation to suppose that the latter can somehow be proven or justified from the direction of a sociological analysis. Mannheim lays out his commitment to the basic tenets of classical historicism in the essay "Historismus" (1924). In the everyday, practical sphere, historicislll involves "treating all those realities with which we have to deal as having evolved and developed dynamically" ("HM" 84) while, with greater theoretical emphasis, the root of the historicist attitude is "the ability to experience every seglllent of the spiritualintellectual world as in a state of flux and growth" ("tIM" 86). If appreciating the flux of sociocultural realities is the root of historicism, its flower is insight into history's immanent principles of order: "historicism is more than the discovery that men were thinking, feeling, writing poetry, painting, and conducting business in different ways from one age to another. Historicist theory fulfills its own essence by managing to derive an ordering principle from this seeming anarchy of change-only by managing to penetrate the innermost structure of this all-pervading change.... To extract out of the many-sided reality its slowly changing pattern and the structure of its inner balance, is the aim and at'the same time the anticipated final vision of a fully developed historicism" ("HM"

86-87) Thus Mannheim's historicism too begins with the historicity of cultural phenomena, with the flux of the "spiritual-cultural world." Like Troeltsch and Meinecke, Mannheim took the dynamical yet internally ordered character of cultural realities to mandate new procedures in the human sciences, and on this score he counts unqualifiedly as a classical

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historicist. Differences emerge as one considers the specific domains of cultural reality to which each gave historicist attention, and how far each thought he could press historicism's initial insights. Where Meinecke had focused on political history, convinced that historicist principles showed the way to linking Staatsmacht and Staatsrecht, Troeltsch investigated the cultural embodiment of a whole range of values and norms with a view to assessing the validity of their claims to absoluteness. To the extent that institutions and cultural practices depend on ideas and beliefs, to that extent Troeltsch's historicism tacitly includes belief, insofar as it belongs to cultural formations, within its range. Mannheim, on the other hand, went on to examine the historical determination of beliefs as they belong to individual human subjects. Where Troeltsch had simply noticed the way in which historically determined factors could intrude upon an inquirer's intention of objectivity, Mannheim saw in this situational determination of individual belief a more pervasive phenomenon and a whole domain for systematic investigation. Well imbued with the thought of Hegel, Mannheim was in particular struck by the complex interplay of the conscious thoughts of individuals and the reasonableness embodied in the institutions and practices surrounding them: "one may call this a nliracle, but ... our unreflective creation of culture, our actions, our behaviour, and our perception, which carve new worlds in and around us, already possess definite categories and are mentally linked to reflective thought" ("HM" 89). To the extent that belief as it belongs to individual subjects can be construed as part of the changing spiritual-cultural world, it becomes amenable to analysis on the basis of classical historicist principles: "that one could not ... consider ideas and beliefs in isolation, but had to grasp them, instead, as mutually interdependent parts of a systematic totality, this was the lesson we learned from modern historicism" ("Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge" 143). The extension of classical historicist principles into a domain at first sight alien to historicism's external, worldly emphasis on cultural formations requires that beliefs, ideas, opinions, thoughts, be also construed primarily as cultural rather than, say, psychic or perhaps logical phenomena. Such a construal is supported by the positive character of belief and opinion. To hazard an opinion or maintain a belief is as much to take a stand in the world as actually giving laws or founding institutions. Once asserted, belief takes on a public life by virtue of its being a claim to


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truth or value; it establishes a position. It is therefore never wholly private; it always contains an objectification of spirit. To that extent it participates in cultural reality. With individually entertained beliefs thus classifiable as cultural posits, they may be located within the sorts of developmental, evolutionary frameworks typically appealed to by historicism. From that location follows their determinability by whatever "forces" are conceived to be governing such frameworks. The first move underwrites the establishment of an en1pirical sociology of knowledge, and the second underwrites Mannheim's thesis of knowledge's social determination. In the "Historicism" essay he speaks of "the historico-philosophical (sociological) positional determination [Standortgebundenheit] of every item of historical knowledge" ("HM" 103), while in Ideology and Utopia this becomes the "existential determination of knowledge [Seinsverbundenheit des Wissens] " (IU 239), where "existential" refers to the concrete, nontheoretical factors affecting thought. Although Mannheim will often describe the relationship here as "functional" or "structural," he conceives of its determining force in strong terms: "mental structures are inevitably differently formed in different social and historical settings" (IU 238). If existential factors are relevant to knowledge, then they "decisively determine the scope and the intensity of our experience and observation" (IU 240). The very term Seinsverbundenheit makes the same point: being bound to circumstance is more than being connected to or even shaped by it. One central question arises with respect to philosophical historicism: to what extent can the sociological analysis of belief count as a critique of reason? I shall address three aspects of the problem: (1) the extent to which reason as such counts as an object of the analysis, (2) the adequacy of the sociology of knowledge's presuppositions regarding reason's determinability, and (3) the resources the sociology of knowledge has for handling critical self-reflection on the conditions of its own objectivity. I shall argue that significant qualifications must be entered on all three counts. I have already suggested that Mannheim's sociology of knowledge is better thought of as a phenomenology of the social contextualization of belief. Even this more precise characterization is apt to be misinterpreted by contemporary philosophical readers on two closely related points. First, they will likely assume that the contextualization of belief is supposed to be of universal relevance across the entire domain of human intellectual activity. This urge to totalize the sociological insight presup-

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poses both that the knowing subject is the thematic object of the sociological analysis and that the field of that subject's operations is homogeneous. Second, they will also tend to suppose that the thesis of the sociohistorical determination of belief means to talk directly about the cognitive subject's doxastic plasticity, that when Mannheim says such things as "all historical thinking is bound up with the thinker's concrete position in life" (IV 70) he means to isolate "historical thinking" as a mode of subjectivity confined by the limits of its own power to its contingent circumstances. What unifies the two misapprehensions is the lingering Cartesian suspicion that any critical analysis of cognitive phenomena cannot avoid beginning with, if not the pure ego cogitans, then certainly the meditating self and its stream of cogitationes. But Mannheim's analysis does not proceed in the light of the reduction to subjectivity as a field of conscious experience. Showing how it does not will answer the first part of the threefold question posed above. Mannheim originally ·saw the sociology of knowledge as supplying a corrective to the rationalist assumption that context is in principle irrelevant to the validity of belief, that the standards by which truthclaims are to be judged always transcend circumstance. Correction of a universal thesis requires no more than a counterexample. Hence, "the principal thesis of the sociology of knowledge is that there are modes of thought which cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscured" (IV 2). Throughout Ideology and Utopia Mannheim concedes that the validity of mathematical knowledge is not affected by its sociohistorical context, although in the earlier "Historicism" essay he grants this exemption to all the exact sciences ("HM" 101). He thus lets the doctrine of reason's autonomy stand with respect to.purely theoretical sciences. His real target is the assumption that where reason is autonomous ought to be the paradigm for its operation everywhere. Mannheim's counterexamples, the "modes of thought" that cannot be understood apart from sociohistorical context, are in contrast practical and matters of human self-interpretation: "the battle is not about these propositions [viz., mathematics, geometry, pure economics] but about that greater wealth of factual determinations in which nlan concretely diagnoses his individual and social situation" (IU 39). The knowledge singled out by the sociology of knowledge is the knowledge put forward in political creeds, value systems, programs of action -the ideas and opinions that animate social and political change. "The aim of these


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studies is to investigate not how thinking appears in textbooks on logic, but how it really functions in public life and in politics as an instrument of collective action" (IU 1). In effect, Mannheim sets aside the phenomenon of theoria in favor of investigating the workings of phronesis. Obsession with reason's plausible autonomy in the purely theoretical domain has prevented us from understanding how reason really works elsewhere: "philosophers have too long concerned themselves with their own thinking" (IU 1). The last remark heavily compromises any claim the sociology of knowledge might have to being an adequate approach to the problem of reason's self-knowledge. Strictly speaking, Mannheim's sociology of knowledge is already distinguishable from philosophical historicism simply on grounds of scope. It does not include all the acknowledged possibilities and thus cannot in principle pronounce on reason's ultimate limits. What Mannheim understood by the social determination of thinking was partial, being derived from the specific situatedness of self-interpreting, practically committed modes of thought. If one wanted to universalize the analysis, one would either have to derive a new or supplementary principle of situatedness or show how the original paradigm is relevant to other modes of thought, especially pure theory. Perhaps this can be done, and in these days of the postempiricist philosophy of science many will be tempted to imagine it just a matter of detail. Whether simple or not, any such extension would require a legitimation that goes beyond the scope of Mannheim's original conception. Mannheirn does not begin with the hope for a total analysis because he does not begin with the unity of subjective consciousness as the primary phenomenon. In fact, he derives his paradigm of situatedness empirically, working back from ideology as a political phenomenon (IU 67). This same point of departure, entirely removed from the principle of subjectivity, also encourages Mannheim to construe his paradigm of situatedness in terms of belief's determinate contents. In a sense, all those gerunds (infinitives in German)- knowing, thinking, etc. -are unnecessarily confusing since, as all of Mannheim's concrete analyses make clear, the object of any sociological analysis of knowledge is the fit between a subject's specific ideas and the matrix of their rationally informed sociohistorical circumstances. The first thing that intrigued Mannheim was the fancy that many human ideas and beliefs are at least partially, if not often wholly, reflex functions of the life-conditions in which they come to be entertained as

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particular contents of consciousness. The second thing was that the functional relationship between content and context typically (though not necessarily) transcends the aw·areness of the individuals entertaining those thoughts. Mannheim's Seinsverbundenheit of thinking aims primarily at the location of particular ideas within a wider nexus of ideas embodied yet not always discerned in the thinker's historical situation and to some extent internalized without the thinker's awareness. When Mannheim speaks of "modes of thought," "mental structures," "Weltanshauungen," "conceptual apparatuses," and so on, he always means systems of belief, or what might now be described as conceptual schemes. The situatedness of thinking, therefore, is really the situa.tedness of possible thoughts. My last remark is not intended to suggest that the situatedness of possible thoughts has no relation to the situatedness of thinking. I have some further things to say on that topic in a moment. The point so far is that the thematic object of social determination is not the power of reason but its determinate contents and the background patterns that lend those contents meaning. It should be added that this focus does not foreclose on the possibility of analyzing processes of thought, since the path of any cognitive procedure can be traced as a manipulation of contents and their horizonal structures. The distinction of pOSSible thoughts from thinking leads directly into the second part of my original question, whether Mannheim had an adequate account of reason's determinability. Mannheinl's essential weakness on this score is that his paradigm of situatedness is too formal to ground his own stronger sense of thinking's Seinsverbundenheit. It is therefore also too formal to ground the very strongly limitative theses of philosophical historicism. This criticism applies equally well to contemporary philosophers who conceive of reason's contextualization along positive paradigms directly akin to Mannheim's, a particular danger for those inclined to analyze the nature of human understanding in terms of the relations between propositions. Systems of belief (or conceptual schemes) bear a complex reciprocal relationship to the powers of intelligence that in some cases create and in all cases are informed by them. They have a simple priority in being the determinate focus of an otherwise indeterminate potency: the power of intelligence is manifest only in the thoughts it thinks. This priority is formal in the sense that it abstracts from the conditions that bring intelligence to focus: Ideas are the focal point of the intellect regardless


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of whether they originate creatively, by conscious adoption, or merely adventitiously. Applied to the acquisition of belief, the historicist gesture draws particular attention to the ways in which human reason is not purely spontaneous, yet no historicist of any description supposes that the power of human intelligence is in all cases entirely passive, even before the forces of history. For one thing, such a claim would render all critical appropriation of the past and creative approach to the future impossible. Although prior in the way just stated, systems of belief are in another sense posterior to the powers of intelligence in virtue of being its modes, just as sights would be in this sense posterior to vision, and touch prior to particular contacts. This hierarchical relation is revealed in the fact that conceptual schemes may characteristically be altered, refined, or replaced without the power of intelligence they inform being in any sense diminished. Such replacement need not be at the command of individual will, but whether we can change our systems of belief ad libitum or not makes no difference to the fact that whenever and however they do change, the intelligence whose modes they are remains to bear the substitution. Reason as a power of intelligence is manifest in, yet distinguishable from, the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and opinions that actualize it. To analyze the relationship between a given belief and its concrete context in terms of the latter alone, Le., by relating the particular content to the contents implied in the nexus of ideas embodied as its context, is to abstract from this difference. Such an abstraction seems to save the analysis from the perils of psychologism, but it immediately pays the price of impoverishing the language for describing relations of determination. It is no accident that Mannheim talks of functional relations between a belief and its context or of how a belief reflects its sociocultural circumstances. These locutions gloss the fact that no similarity or analogy of content can be sufficient to explain whatever necessity there may be either for an idea's being thought in the way that it was or at the time that it wa~,! Tracing the relations of content between an idea and the half-worked-out ideas of its milieu is not by itself a mistake-indeed, it is sufficient for the initial, empirical phase of the· sociology of knowledge. Yet correlation does not amount to Seinsverbundenheit. If it is plausible to say that a belief somehow reflects its circumstances, what one next wants to know is whether or how much the reflection had to be so and

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whether it has to continue to be so. One might also inquire as to whether a sociological correlation implies only that many individuals were bound to think certain thoughts, or whether all individuals of an epoch in all phases of their intellectual lives were in principle so constrained. None of these questions can be answered by pointing to functional relations of content. The sociology of knowledge is thus limited as an account of reason's determinability. In one sense it is akin to philosophical historicism by posing the question of what determines belief in the individual subject, but by dealing primarily with ideas and at best only concomitantly with the power of reason the sociology of knowledge must fall short of philosophical historicism's primary intent. Philosophical historicism is not directly concerned with the correlations whereby beliefs, conceptual schemes, and the rest reflect their linguistic, social, political, and historical contexts (although such considerations are often adduced as evidence for its more fundamental theses). The fundamental theses of philosophical historicism are claims about the powers of human intelligence, the capacities that are responsible for sometimes formulating and always supporting particular ideas and the systems of belief that tacitly give them meaning. It is one thing to point to the manner in which the content of someone's belief can be conditioned by social or historical circumstances, but something else to claim that the cognitive functions exercised (whether receptively or creatively) in arriving at an opinion or hazarding the truth are in principle dominated by history's dynamics-as anyone using the former as evidence for the latter already supposes. Finally, there is the issue of critical self-reflection. Anything that is to accord with the project of reason's critique must be able to consider the relationship between the content of its critical theses and its own possibility as a claim to knowledge. For example, if the sociology of knowledge is itself a product of parochial circumstances, what does this mean for its validity as science? Mannheim was well aware of the question. He happily conceded that both historicism and the sociology of knowledge were products of their historical circumstances and that they were both therefore limited perspectives. He also saw that such a concession required a new or at least nonrationalist account of scientific truth and objectivity. The question of historicism's validity or the validity of the sociology of knowledge Mannheim answered as a special case of his general response to relativism. Relativism was for him a broader problem than it was for


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Troeltsch because Mannheim had expanded his historicism systematically to include the knowing subject. Yet its form was the same: if all evaluations (whether of goodness or truth) are historically situated, how can they be anything but unsatisfyingly parochial? Mannheim's constant response was that the question is misleading: the horrifying specter of relativism is a bastard product of historicist insight and rationalist prejudice. It makes the mistake of judging the principles governing cultural phenomena by the standards of timeless yet merely abstract validity. In Ideology and Utopia he called his alternative "relationism" (IU 76). Its spirit was already clear in the "Historicisn1" essay: "the mere fact that every item of historical knowledge is determined by a particular positional perspective, and that there is an intimate fusion of the particular historical picture of every epoch with its actual aspirations and concrete values, in no way implies the relativity of the knowledge so obtained. The concrete values which serve as a standard have developed in their fullness of meaning organically out of the same historical process which they have to help interpret" ("HM" 104). The intellectual debt of this conception becomes even clearer further on: "to say that the absolute itself is unfolding in a genetic process, and that it can be grasped only from definite positions within the same process, in categories which are molded by the unfolding of the material content of the genetic flux itself-to say this is not tantamount to professing relativism" ("HM" 130). Quite so. It's a profession of Hegelianism, or rather Hegelianism without the absolute moment. This point needs brief examination. For Mannheim, Hegel is certainly an historicist, but he casts him as a logical, rationalist philosopher of spirit in contrast with the vitalistic, irrationalist philosophers of life ("HM" 106-7). Although he clearly leans toward Lebensphilosophie, Mannheim aims at a synthesis of the two historicist gestures. The result is an endorsement of variations on the theme of what Hegel called Objective Spirit (spirit as it appears bound to finite institutions of Law, Morality, and Sociality) and a rejection of the possibility of Absolute Spirit's realization as absolute (where Absolute Spirit animates Art, Religion, and Philosophy). This is not to say that Mannheim rejects the absolute altogether. What he rejects is that the absolute has any final realization or actual embodiment within the temporal realm. It is, rather, the totality of the temporal realm. The whole of history is full of structures and patterns that have an interim stability, but "the concrete pattern of the absolute is different in every

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age" ("HM" 131), and even the current profundity of historicism as the self-consciousness of the present age will not save it from being replaced once a new "concrete pattern" occurs ("HM" 130, n. 1). For Mannheim the absolute is an indeterminate totality, never concrete. In taking such a stand, Mannheim does not so much refute Hegel as simply oppose him. This becomes especially clear when he takes it for granted that philosophy is exhaustively analyzable as a cultural phenomenon. That is, he assumes that the validity of historicism overrides every possible construal of philosophy's traditional claim to absolute knowledge. (He is consistent enough to acknowledge that the truth of historicism overrides his own claim to know it absolutely, remaining optimistic about a future in which historicism might disappear through simple faith that even such an upsetting history would still be the unfolding of spirit.) Mannheim's truncated Hegelianism subsumes the phenomena of Absolute Spirit under the logic proper to Objective Spirit. His principal reason for doing so is fear of endorsing speculation in a bad sense, Le., fear of seeming to confine the concrete richness of history within a straightjacket of abstract, merely formal categories and fear of seeming "to treat structured meanings as unfolding and self-realizing entelechies" (Essays on the Sociology of Culture 69). This fear prevents Mannheim, as it has prevented so many other of Hegel's readers, from paying sufficient attention to the systematic implications of absolute knowing within the whole of Hegelian philosophy. Critical self-reflection on the sociology of knowledge is grounded in an attenuated form of German Idealism (an attenuation that is the grandparent of pragmatism as well): "there exists ... a subtle bond between thought and reality-subject and object are here essentially identical" ("HM" 104). In my Introduction I stated that Hegel and Heidegger had made the most important contributions to date on the topic of the historicity of human existence and therewith human understanding, so I have no quarrel with the direction of Mannheim's appeal. On the other hand, it is not so much a s lution as a pointer to further inquiry, since he neither systematically develops the Hegelian principles he appropriates nor considers in detail the well-worked-out ontology they presuppose. I shall therefore be addressing the pure form of their connections with philosophical historicism in the later sections on Hegel in Chapter Five. For now, no more need be noted than that the Hegelian doctrine of Objective Spirit is a plausible beginning to justifying the objectivity of the sociology of knowledge, and that the critical self-reflection made


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possible by Mannheim's foreshortened Hegelianism is not obviously adequate to all of reason's self-critical demands. Mannheirn effects a major shift of focus when he extends classical historicism from an analysis of sociocultural formations to an analysis of individual cognitions and their interplay with those formations. Although this is a move toward the themes of philosophical historicism, Mannheim's sociology of knowledge does not support unqualified extension in that direction. It is weak on three main counts: (1) the situatedness of practical, historical thinking does not immediately justify universalization to the complete sociohistorical determination of reason in all its functions, (2) the functional analysis of thinking's determination cannot yield necessary localization of reason, and (3) critical self-reflection depends on appeal to a deeper epistemological framework than the sociology of knowledge itself supplies. As a supplement to the foregoing conclusions, I note that Mannheim's sociology of knowledge is also distinguishable from philosophical historicism on the grounds that he adheres to at least two ideals of First Philosophy. The first is Mannheim's confidence in the overall, Le., universal, meaning of historical process. Troeltsch's qualms notwithstanding, Mannheim affirms an absolute in relation to the totality of cultural reality: "the historicist standpoint ... eventually achieves an absoluteness of view because in its final form it posits history itself as the Absolute; this alone makes it possible that the various standpoints, which at first appear anarchic, can be ordered as component parts of a meaningful process" ("Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge" 172; cf. IU 83). The second ideal is self-illumination. Mannheim attributes to philosophy "the vital task of providing clarification of the observer's own nlind in the total situation" (IU 93). It so happens that contemporary philosophy has failed to live up to this ideal, so the sociology of knowledge may step into the breach. "We become masters of ourselves only when the unconscious motivations which formerly existed behind our backs suddenly come into our field of vision and thereby become accessible to conscious control" (IU 43). The ideals of self-illumination and comprehensive understanding come together in the exhortation that "only when we are thoroughly aware of the limited scope of every point of view are we on the road to the sought for comprehension of the whole" (IU 93). To the philosophical historicist, the inconcinnities of the last statement will appear to be adequate proof

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of the ridiculousness of such ideals. Nonetheless, that Mannheim had difficulty reintegrating the moment of reason's autonomy-a mOlllent he set aside at the very beginning-is not a demonstration that no such integration is possible. Mannheim became entangled on this point because he denied the universal significance of reason's autonomy yet tacitly relied on it to justify his own insights as genuine science on the one hand and wisdom about the human things on the other. Philosophical historicism is the view that this reliance is both harmful and unnecessary.

FOUR VARIETIES OF THE HISTORICIST GESTURE According to Socrates, the greatest obstacle to self-knowledge is the presumption that one already knows enough. In order to understand what is distinct about philosophical historicism, one must therefore guard against the supposition that historicism in some general sense has already been sufficiently well understood. Three versions of the historicist gesture have been identified over the course of this chapter: the demonization of history, classical historicism, and classical historicism's extension into the sociology of knowledge. This is an eidetic or logical matter. In other words, the discriminations rest on simple differences of ideas. Consequently, it has not been any part of this chapter's purpose to present a fully nuanced picture of given historicist thinkers. The point has been to identify key historicist elements and locate them philosophically, rather than within the ragtag configuration of anyone lifetime's inevitably heterogeneous concerns. It is compatible with such a project that elements of philosophical historicism should appear within the work of writers identified as espousing classical historicism. It is also compatible that there should be some overlap of detail between, say, classical and philosophical historicism as one moves away from defining centers to associated peripheries. It is also time to confess the misleading character of my chapter's title. The progression "from the logic of history to the historicity of reason" is not, as might have been supposed, an historical one. It is not a genesis of philosophical historicism from out of the perceived weaknesses of earlier, distinguishable forms. There is no consciousness of continuity along the line I have traced. The line is, like the discriminations I have made, eidetic. Its narrative unity is mine before it is history's. It is an ontol~g~


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cal regression into the experience of history in light of the idea of philosophical historicism. Let me recapitulate. The demonization of history depends on first impressions. It is like imagining gods in the thunder or supposing that the insane are possessed by devils. Fanciful as the demonization of history might appear, such consciousness is at least sensitive to history as a reality, as something that can make a difference to individual human purposes, as a movement with a substance and logic somehow its own. One could say that it mythologizes history's logic. Its metaphysical error is to suppose that history's logic has an entirely nonhuman source, that history's substance is divorced from the substance of human individuals. Its practical folly is to abdicate the sovereignty of human action in face of history's apparently separate, unmediable power. Eidetically, the demonization of history is about history as the domain of action and event. It says that there is at work in the domain of historical action and event an actuality that overrules the agency of individual human beings. With the focus on what has been and is to be done rather than on what might be understood, the demonic interpretation of history need take no systematic view of the possible effect of history's power on the activity of reflective thinking, let alone on that instance of thoughtful activity which generates its own mythology. Coming to know the demonic character of history occurs independently of the effects of that character. Justifying such knowledge, if the question is raised, is also pursued independently. The intention of the demonic view is exhausted in its account of the object of the experience of history. Classical historicism takes a much closer look at the workings of historical process. It agrees that history must be understood in order to act wisely, but it insists that the understanding be as truthful as possible, Le., wissenschaftlich. Although critical awareness is thus heightened, the doctrine or content of classical historicism still concerns history's logic. Its account of history's logic is designed to avoid two extremes. First, it imposes a reflective sobriety on mythological responses, or on what classical historicists thought of as the excesses of the' speculative philosophy of history. On the other hand, it resists the sterility of nominalist, rationalist, and transcendental approaches, the tyranny of whose abstractions would rob history of power and substance altogether. The idea of classical historicism is an idea about the way that \eVolutionaril Y developed cultural institutions and practices inform the __

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domain of action and event and about the spiritual (geistig ) integrity this lends cultural formations. Metaphysically, the central improvement is grounding history's form in nonalien, human sources, while maintaining its power to resist and condition individual human beings. In accord with the self-conscious purpose of truthfully reading history, classical historicism treats of the historian's subjectivity by prescribing a set of ontological categories for the understanding of historico-cultural phenomena. This is not by itself to locate either the historian's subjectivity or human subjectivity as such within the scope of classical historicism's doctrinal themes. There is, therefore, no systematic link between the historicized view of history's logic and its potential effects on the activities of reflection, occasional musings on the historian's prejudices notwithstanding. It does not follow that there is no link to be made. The sociology of knowledge initiates just such a connection by moving the subject, as the bearer of ideas and modes of thought, explicitly within the range of historicist description. The shift was in one sense inevitable, because what human beings do is necessarily mediated by what they think. Any truthful and complete account of historical action and cultural formation must eventually somehow encompass the reflective, self-interpreting activity that is presupposed by ordinary human agency. With the sociology of knowledge, historicist logic is thematically applied to subjectivity for the first time. It even self-critically considers the question of its own historicistically conditioned origins, though the conceptual requirements for pursuing that inquiry rapidly outstrip its empirical and material resources. Subjectivity is a large and, from the point of view of classical historicism, hitherto unexplored and unclearly delineated field. How historicistic categories can ultimately be made to work there, with respect to belief, with respect to science, with respect to understanding, with respect to critical self-reflection -all require further attention. In the light of philosophical historicism, one principal question obtrudes: are there any limits to the historicistic differentiation of the subjective domain? The historical situatedness of nontheoretical beliefs may have an initial plausibility, but the total historicity of reason is not its immediate consequence. Philosophical historicism, the doctrine that reason is differentiated by history without remainder, is therefore yet a fourth, and more radical, version of the historicist gesture.

CHAPTER TWO

REASON'S INEVITABLE PAROCHIALITY

All three varieties of the historicist gesture examined in the first chapter make prescriptions for a disciplined understanding of "the hUDlan things" (ta anthropina ) based on an ontology emphasizing in one way or another individual form and evolutionary development. Insofar as the human things include the manifold activity of understanding, they all tacitly gather subjectivity per accidens within their scope, though none of them includes it per se among the objects to which its principles specifically apply. Even Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, which treats of subjectivity to the extent that beliefs and ideas can be construed as cultural posits, does not examine reason as such and is unresolved on the score of its total historicity. Universalized reflection on the nature of human reason is missing from these nonphilosophical or procedural historicisms, because to the extent that they conceive of subjectivity it is not totalized. They are in essence object-oriented and do not by themselves have the resources for a systematic response to the critical question directed at their own cognitive competence to discern and explain their posited subject matters.

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Mannheim once again is the limit case. When it comes to concrete analyses, he presupposes that the sociologist of knowledge is capable of an adequately disinterested account of beliefs situatedness. On the other hand, the critical question of what justifies objectivity in light of his own situatedness as cultural scientist is answered not with the sociology of knowledge but with a truncated version of Hegel's philosophy of spirit whose philosophical justification is nowhere to be seen. From the modern philosophical point of view, used to the principle of totalized subjectivity and a systematic approach to the critique of reason, there is something naive about overlooking or deliberately postponing critical self-reflection. Hans-Georg Gadamer indicts classical historicism on just this score: "in trusting to the fact that its procedure is methodical, it forgets its own historicity."l Whether or in what sense classical historicism is obliged to remember its historicity, obliged in such a way that it invites legitimate censure should it fail to do so, is a question Gadamer in turn overlooks. Yet that philosophy is so obliged may be granted, for unlike the positive sciences it has no more primary discipline into which it may rightfully defer its most basic questions. Although philosophical historicism participates in the broader, more complicated cultural emergence of historical consciousness, its primary home is in the modern tradition of reason's total and systematic self-criticisnl, a tradition that begins to take shape around the time of Bacon and Descartes, reaches a pristine focus in Kant, and then undergoes multicolored dispersion through the prism of Hegel. Philosophical historicism currently stands as a thesis, a position, a truth-claim, a logos -tacit though its assertion may often be. This chapter is devoted to spelling out that thesis and seeks to do so in a manner that adequately allows philosophical historicism to speak for itself. I shall therefore begin by paying close attention to the formulations of three representative historicist writers. That philosophical historicism may be stated as a thesis does not imply that the concerns of all philosophical historicists are a seamless fabric. Each of the three chosen represents a distinct style of applying the thesis. They are (1) conciliatory pragmatism, (2) philosophical hermeneutics, and (3) ironic historicism. Conciliatory pragmatism has strong roots in the pragmatic tradition of American philosophy, yet it should also be seen against the backdrop of analytic epistemology and philosophy of natural science. By temperament, it is sober in relation to the seeming excesses of writers such as Paul

Reason's Inevitable Parochiality

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Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, or Nelson Goodman and genial toward hermeneutic modes of philosophy popular on the Continent. Among the conciliatory pragmatists are, most clearly, Richard Bernstein and Joseph Margolis. Hilary Putnam's "internal realism" has a fan1ily resemblance but a much narrower philosophical horizon. Richard Rorty, as the author of Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature, could also be included, but he has since then metamorphosed into something else at once more perplexing and unorthodox. Philosophical hermeneutics is Hans-Georg Gadamer's own characterization of a position that states a universally historicized doctrine of human understanding. It emphasizes human inquiry's necessary relativity to tradition, historically conceived, and pays careful attention to the critical resources healthy traditions may be supposed to provide. A similar appeal to the phenomenology of tradition has more recently been taken up by Alasdair MacIntyre, but his examination of rationality has a different background from the one that allows Gadamer to call his critique hermeneutics. Finally, ironic historicism is my name for what has recently become of Richard Rorty's position. It has a neo-Nietzschean flavor in the sense that it devalues truth-telling in favor of art, power, justice, health, and freedom. It wears a playful-to some, frivolous-mask. Ironic historicism might also fairly be attributed to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

CONCILIATORY PRAGMATISM Perhaps the most widely known manifesto of what I am calling conciliatory pragmatism is Richard Bernstein's Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. 2 His pragmatism is conciliatory in several senses. First, it aims at reconciling the abandonment of First Philosophy with the allowance 'that reality, truth, rationality, and goodness are all as meaningful as ever they were under the aegis of traditional philosophy. It is conciliatory in a second sense by showing the deep agreements and emerging consensus between English-speaking and Continental philosophy on the topic of human reason and the virtues appropriate to its operation. That consensus could be summed up as the conviction that what is now called practical rationality is the ruling form for all human understanding and that its virtues are the highest virtues of the intellect.

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Less well known yet equally sober, patient, and devoted to a rapprochement of English-speaking analytic and Continental hermeneutic styles of discourse is the conciliatory pragmatism of Joseph Margolis. I-lis recent trilogy-Pragmatism Without Foundations, Science Without Unity, and Texts Without Referents, to which Margolis gave the general title The Persistence of Reality-gathers into one place his reflections on how to hold on to traditional philosophy's ideals of ultimacy within an horizon of radically contingent historicity.3 Reality persists, in other words, despite all the talk that there is nothing but interpretation. As Margolis is more thematic in his treatment of historicism in particular, he will be my exemplar. Margolis speaks of a "radical" historicism that marks the twentieth century (PWF 52). "Historicism may be read as the thesis ... that the human condition is such that all claims of universal invariances are problematic in a sense in which general claims are not" (PWF 41). Interpreted naturally, this sounds too broad. One does not have to be an historicist to appreciate the difficulties of moving from the empirical to the necessary, from opinion to knowledge, from phenomenon to ground (arche). All the latter differences are coordinate with the distinction between universality and generality as Margolis means it. Interpreted more literally, however, the definition can stand. It says that the problematic status of universal claims is their permanent condition. Historicism alleges that no universal human judgment can ever be more than problematic, that the ascent from opinion to categorical knowledge in all cases and forever falls short of its goal (though it is not, so the conciliatory pragmatist hopes, either unintelligible as an ideal or arbitrary as a direction of inquiry). Several preliminary points may be noted. (1) Historicism is about human judgment, about what can be drawn at a reflective, second-order level from what is, in relation to reflection, a first-order level of experience. It is about the cognitive penetration, recapitulation, evaluation, elucidation of phenomena that have already presented themselves as complex and ordered enough to be thought about. In short, it is about reason. (2) Historicism is about reason as a whole, about all putative universal judgments. The several modes of reason's operation include the hypothesizing of universal invariances and the universal principles of things, the judgment of what justifies the assertion of such universalities, and the self-reflective judgment of reason's competence to make those objectlevel and meta-level (thematic and critical) discriminations. (3) Histori-


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cism asserts that reason as a whole is permanently problematic. That is, reason necessarily falls short of what is experienced as its own congenital imperative toward unqualified, categorical knowing. Finally (4), the permanently problematic character of human reason follows from "the human condition." Something about that condition, as yet unexplicated and unexplained, prevents the actualization of reason's natural, universalist urges. This is philosophical historicism: the doctrine of the necessary and total parochiality of human reason, where reason is understood as the elucidating activity of hUlllan intelligence. It differs from all three of the previous forms of the historicist gesture by making the whole of rational subjectivity its explicit theme. It agrees with them by relying on a principle of historical contextualization, in this case a strong and quite specific interpretation of the historical character of the human condition. Margolis articulates "the deep historicity of human existence and inquiry" as follows: "that man is, uniquely, a being whose existence is historicized ... that man is in some profound sense formed by, a creature of and embodying, a historical language and culture, and that therefore his cognitive and praxical concerns are oriented and limited by the historical horizon of his own particular culture" (PWF xviii). There are several features of Margolis's formulation that invite the suspicion of the counterhistoricist: for example, the bland coordination of "existence and inquiry," "cognitive and praxical concerns," as if it were self-evident that in each pair the members are ontologically homogeneous, or the equally casual assumption that historical horizons are wholly contingent, or the use of the term "inquiry" as a place-holder for all the functions of human understanding including insight, not to mention the vagueness of "some profound sense" in which history forms human being. But these suspicions get at deeper matters than are typically woven into the manifest commitments of philosophical historicism. For now I am concerned with the latter. As an interpretation of reason's historical contextualization, the work expected of historicity is twofold. First, historical horizons are not only orienting and enabling, they are also radically limitative. They are the ultimate boundaries inside which cognitive activity is to occur and beyond which it cannot go. Second, although according to the first point they are the first principles of reason's activity, historical horizons are themselves wholly contingent. They bear no concrete relation to an absolute, no concrete relation to universality. I introduce the qualifica-

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tion "concrete" because, as conciliatory pragmatism will insist, an abstract relation to universal ideals, namely a regulative one, is not only possible but also necessary for the intelligibility of disciplined, epistemically oriented inquiry. The second part of philosophical historicism's twofold interpretation of historicity distinguishes it from Hegelianism, for the latter maintains reason's necessary linkage to history yet allows that there is more to history than utter contingency. If philosophical historicism be formulated as the complete and necessary parochiality of reason, then these two features begin to spell out the senses of necessary and parochial in that definition. Reason cannot transcend its historical circumstances, while the historical circumstances to which reason is thus always and inevitably bound, although real in their own passing way, have themselves no anchor in anything universal or absolute. Nothing but their own inertia prevents their dissolution; their facticity is their reality. The third factor in the above quotation - the complete parochiality of reason, i.e., the universal scope of philosophical historicism - has already been discussed. It can now be added that this totalizing is not only comprehensive but a priori. The claims of philosophical historicism extend, in advance, to all possible future judgments. Historicism is "to deny that the fruits of human inquiry are, in any principled respect, ever conceptually unaffected by the historically developing forms of inquiry itself, and to insist on the transience of whatever may be elaborated within it" (PWF 39). Historicity interpreted a priori as limiting and purely contingent encourages Margolis to speak of the in1possibility of "escaping" history and culture. "No one can escape his local history" (SWU xii), "there is no escape from the historical condition" (PWF 208). Bernstein favors this idiom too: "we cannot escape the dynan1ic power of effectivehistory, which is always shaping what we are becoming" (BOR 167). Moreover, that which prevents escape also prevents perfect appreciation of history from within. Both the heights and the depths are unavailable. "We cannot escape because we are encultured creatures ... unable to penetrate to the originary sources of the enabling culture we absorb and, by absorbing, change" (SWU 43). The hydrodynamic metaphor of "absorption" here is strikingly inappropriate as a description of cultural transmission and alerts the reader to the earth-science paradigm of determination partially infecting Margolis's account. Elsewhere he speaks geologically of being unable to escape from "the historical traditions in


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which humans are forever errlbedded" (PWF xviii), and it is of a piece that he should also fall into picturing history as an etheric fluid: "the flux-of language, of human history ... -cannot be escaped; and being inescapable, that flux cannot but disallow the full (Husserlian or Cartesian) recovery of the originary and the apodictic" (SWU 38). Whatever historicity really is in the end -and Margolis provides no ontology-whatever the source of its determining power, he confidently asserts its principal effect: reason can achieve no closure anywhere. All reason's fruits are intrinsically provisional, finite, partial. Human thought can never knowingly arrive at first principles. At the risk of seeming to presuppose my own earth-science imagery, the necessary parochiality of reason means that human understanding can never get to the bottom of things, or rather can never get to the bottom of anything, not even itself. What then does it mean to be reasonable? The answer to this question explains how Margolis's position is both conciliatory and pragmatic. Philosophical historicism says that historicity interpreted in the foregoing manner is why the whole of human reason is necessarily parochial. It immediately follows that reason is incapable of fulfilling the universal pretensions that appear native to it. Yet a further inference to complete skeptical despair does not have to follow hard on the heels of this humiliation. To allow one's cognitive hopes to be governed by the stark dichotomy between absolute knowledge or noetic chaos is, according to Bernstein, neurotic. It is what he calls the Cartesian Anxiety: "Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness" (BOR 18). But the dichotomy is not evidently exhaustive. Historicism is skeptical with respect to human knowledge of universals qua universals; the question is whether human reason can find any consummation or satisfaction in something less. Pragmatism attempts to preserve a sense of reasonableness with a set of attendant intellectual virtues that does not depend on actual knowledge of universals. It does so by appealing to what human inquirers are already doing in advance of the rational, measure-taking move to elucidate their activity. This response is two-tiered. First, there is the acknowledgment that cognitive discriminations are to be made, that judgments are open to relative if not absolute justification. Margolis is helpful here: "inquiry need not abandon the search for universal regularities; indeed, it cannot if it both recognizes the potentially fatal allure of every uniformity that

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only appears to have explanatory force as well as the rational need to continue to sort reliable and unreliable structures.... There is, therefore, no first-order inquiry without second-order inquiry; are no cognitive powers acknowledged without the reflexive posit of their competence to sort the actual and the apparent; are no contingent cognitive successes without a transcendental attempt to plumb the conditions for their succeeding" (PWF 48). In other words, the conciliatory pragmatist accepts the question of justification, the quaestio juris, as an intrinsic "rational need." By what right one claim has more weight than another remains intelligible, even in light of there being no hope of arriving at an absolute standpoint for their discrimination. Second, if reason cannot ever actually justify itself by its own universal ideals and yet the question of justification cannot be abandoned, then justification must be rooted elsewhere. And where else could that humanly be but in the pre-reflective, pre~critical domain of action (praxis) broadly construed? This is the essence of the pragmatist gambit. If insight is necessarily myopic, then what one has already managed to do becomes decisive. There is an important qualification to be made here: the distinction between the object-level of doing and the meta-level of reflection is not absolute. Physics, for example, is theoretical and itself reflective in relation to mundane experience, while as a human activity in its own right science falls under the synoptically reflective eye of philosophy. Philosophy too is an activity, but it is unique in being the place where reason's self-reflection occurs. It follows from the priority thus accorded practice that all reflection, regardless of level, is parasitic upon a pregiven level of practice. Margolis's pragmatism is conciliatory because it accepts universality as a standard for inquiry. "Our best thought is transient, risked in the extreme. And yet we press on in the direction of closure and invariance and universality. The effort is not illegitimate, though what it finds is doomed to be replaced" (TWR 371). In this it contrasts with the stronger forms of Kuhn's incommensurability thesis, Feyerabend's methodological anarchism, and Rorty's rejection of epistenl0logy and transcendental argumentation. Margolis admits the incompatibility of historicism with transcendental argumentation in its classical Kantian form, namely the attempt to state the uniquely necessary conditions for the cognitions it justifies. Yet the critical, justificatory, second-order dimension of all disciplined inquiry demands some form of transcendental


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reflection, and this he proposes to supply with a historicized version of the quaestio juris (PWF 49). Legitimation is to be understood not on the basis of having discovered the universal cond.itions of reason's operation but on the normative coherence exhibited by ongoing, historical practices. That coherence is in the first place accessible as "salience" that "marks only the compelling core of a society's experience, within which detailed judgments and inquiries seek out the various sources of consensual support" (PWF 5). Saliences in this sense are entirely mutable in principle, if nonetheless de facto stable. All pragmatisms appeal to the ramshackle integrity of pre-critical practice. Margolis's hunt" for a way of letting that integrity do as an approximation to universalistic cognitive ideals is governed by the assumption of historicity. Practice too, and not just judgment, is as such historically limited and contingent. That is why Margolis constantly refers to the "historicization of existence and inquiry." One must be very careful, therefore, not to impute an integrity to practice that uncritically reintroduces some nonideal relation to universality, an error with which Margolis charges Gadamer, Charles Taylor, Jiirgen Habermas, and KarlOtto Apel. For Margolis the integrity of putatively cognitive practices derives from our evolutionary biology: "the realist import of human cognitive powers is itself entailed in the subcognitive conditions of species survival" (PWF 102). The last point in particular is highly suggestive, but at this stage its further examination must be postponed. The topic on which it centers-how the historicized integrity of investigative practices can answer to reason's intrinsic demands for legitimationbelongs to the question of philosophical historicism's own justification and will be treated in the next chapter. Kant called man a metaphysical animal and allowed that, the vacuity of metaphysical claims notwithstanding, there is need to accommodate reason's supramundane urges. In a similar vein, Margolis argues for the accommodation of reason's intramundane desire for universality. The common feature of these two positions is that reality's first principles may not be known but at best merely surmised. We are in essence east of noetic Eden, although paradoxically we still have a very good idea of where it lies. Margolis recognizes that any critical reflection seeking a reconciliation of the skeptical moment with our natural "cognitive optimism," as he calls it, "cannot fail to have a touch of privilege" (PWF 3). In the context of a radical critique of reason, "a touch of privilege" sounds like

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special pleading, but Margolis's simple strategy on this point is to distinguish first-order privilege from second-order privilege. First-order privilege is direct cognitive access; second-order privilege is warranted assertibility on the basis of (historicized) transcendental argumentation. The axiom of limitative historicity implies that direct cognitive access to universals qua universals is denied to human beings. Given the project of reconciliation, this in turn leads to the second-order privileging of praxis in the manner described above. Privileging of any description, however, itself requires justification. As Margolis puts it: "our finding about historicism is itself a would-be universal" (PWF 39), implying that this too is problematic in the way that, according to historicism, all universals are. Historicity is a totalized principle, infecting even "the competence of reason to plumb its own powers" (PWF 48) and, of course, the competence of philosophers to arrive at an appreciation of historicity itself. It remains to be seen whether the appeal to cognitively opaque second-order privilege actually works. The results of Chapter Three will show that it does not and cannot. Obverse to the axiom of historicity is the denial of what Margolis calls "universalism" and "transparency." Both imply the realizability of First Philosophy. Universalism may be understood in either a broad or a narrow sense. The broad sense is that "claims of universal invariances are in principle no more problematic than general claims," which is to say that human beings have in principle the cognitive competence for adequate appreciation of universals qua universals, difficult though such competence may be to realize. The narrow version asserts "first-order cognitive powers capable of directly confirming significant universal claims" (PWF 42), where, as Margolis deploys it, "directly" must be emphasized. Margolis's account of universalism is skewed throughout by the assumption that cognitive acceSSibility must be immediate and distributed across individual truth-claims. Perhaps, and only perhaps, certain modern rationalists have assumed that reason is a power that has only to fall like a searchlight on its universal objects in order to make them known, but this is neither a conlmon nor a traditional view. Aristotle distingUishes what is "more knowable to us" from what is "knowable in itself," a difference along which human knowers must cognitively labor, variously fit and unfit as they will be in their degrees of intellectual virtue. Plato, for his part, illuminates such labor with the


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the image of the Divided Line in the Republic (6.509d). Nor is Hegel a universalist in Margolis's arbitrarily narrow sense, for absolutes Wissen is as far from immediate as can be, while even Descartes, who is unabashed in his reference to the lumen naturale, is well aware of the need to regulate the naturally wayward motions of the autonomous, theoretical mind by a discipline that is by no means easy to acquire. Tied up with Margolis's weak account of universalist alternatives to historicism is his rejecting "the transparency thesis," which he takes to mark the objectionable core of everything that opposes pragmatically oriented philosophy (PWF xvii). It holds that "there is a determinate match or adequation between the cognizable properties of the real world and the cognizing powers of the human mind such that the distributed truths of science or of other disciplined inquiries may be assured that the inquiring mind does not, by its very effort, distort or alter or fail to grasp the world's independent (cognizable) structure" (PWF xvi). Once again, the characterization presupposes a searchlight view of the intellect, sweeping over the universal truths of the world one by one. Margolis does not notice that there might be other w'ays to construe the manner in which human reason moves from potential adequacy to actual knowledge of universals and that nonpragmatists have recognized the need to give an account of that move. It is also strange that Margolis tends to speak of the world's transparency rather than the mind's when it is the mind that, on his own picture, gets in the way with its efforts, distortions, and misapprehensions. Conciliatory pragmatism is quite careful to allow that "within the confines of our inquiries, we can rationally speculate about what the physical world is like independent of those inquiries" (PWF 39), so denial of the transparency thesis amounts to assertion of the mind's intrinsic opacity-a notion that has an oxymoronic ring only temporarily finessed by calling the world's structure inaccessible in itself. In light of such infelicities, the cognitive ideal Margolis means to reject is better called lucidity, for we already understand how to use that as a description of intellectual virtue. Philosophical historicism entails that perfect noetic lucidity is in all cases impossible, even when it comes to reason's self-knowledge. Put otherwise, reason possesses no lumen naturale; it is at best a lunatic reflection of whatever light shines from out of the uncertain integrity of action's physical trace.

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PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS The full title of Gadamer's most well-known and most influential work runs Truth and Method: Fundamentals of a Philosophical Hermeneutics. 4 Qualifying hermeneutics as philosophical has remained the emblem of his entire corpus. It also betokens a systematic turn to philosophical historicism. When he speaks explicitly of historicism, Gadamer usually means the classical form. By its comparative neglect of subjectivity and the urge to suppress what is assumed to be the subjective intrusion of prejudice upon objectivity (TM 270), it is naive in relation to a "refined form" of historicisnl "which takes account of the existence of the knowing subject in his historicity" (TM 533). The refined form of historicism is "a second-degree historicism, which not only opposes the historical relativity of all knowledge to the absolute claim of truth but works out its ground-namely the historicity of the knowing subject" (TM 529-30). Although Gadamer makes these remarks in the context of discussing Heidegger, it is evident that he agrees with this second-degree Heideggerian historicism that"can no longer see historical relativity as a limitation of the truth" (TM 530). Despite its devotion to the topic of human understanding, Gadamer found that his original presentation of philosophical hermeneutics was badly misunderstood. Two major difficulties emerged regarding the scope and subject matter of what he wanted to address: (1) philosophical hermeneutics was taken for yet another art or technique of interpretation, and (2) its universal scope was thought to be plainly untenable. The two problems are linked. If philosophical hermeneutics were, contrary to fact, a procedure or even a practice, then the assertion of a universally hermeneutic mode of inquiry and articulation cannot but seem outrageous in light of the obtrusive differences between, say, mathematics and historiography, logic and ethics, poetry and philosophy. In these cases, the subject matters are so diverse as to make it seem ridiculous that they should all be dealt with in an identical manner. The underlying mistake is the same: failing to see in what sense philosophical hermeneutics counts as a critique of reason. Recovering that sense prepares the ground for appreciating Gadamer's hermeneutics as a style of philosophical historicism. I begin with the problem of universality. The title Truth and Method prefigures the claim that methodical inquiry as practiced in the positive sciences (both human and natural)


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cannot be fully self-certifying as human knowledge, despite its undeniable cognitive success. There is a dimension of truth or human cognitive openness to the world that is the precondition for any methodical activity whatsoever, a human truth that occurs in advance of and therefore governs all particular inquiries as the ground of their possibility. When Truth and Method first appeared, the hermeneutic setting of science's boundaries was problematic, not so much because Gadamer was asserting the existence of valuable truths besides the truths directly accessible to methodical inquiry, but because all the latter truths were somehow contained within the horizon of the "hermeneutic experience" or the "hermeneutic situation" that Gadamer interpreted as historical and in essential ways finite. The worry was whether and how this hermeneutic situation, plausible to many as regards the human sciences, could be relevant to the others as well, the validity of whose truth-claims seemed at first sight so independent of context. In these days of postempiricist philosophy of science, the thesis of hermeneutic universality is no longer so striking. Hence Bernstein, for example, can speak of the "recovery of the hermeneutic dimension" in analytic epistemology (BOR 30ff.) and uses it to point to an emerging transatlantic consensus on practical rationality as the rule in all human intellectual endeavor. For his part, Gadamer did not arrive at hermeneutic universalism by an induction from physics as a paradigm, but as a simple consequence of phenomenological reflection on what understanding has to be for human beings. Understanding comes to a focus in judgment. Though the content of judgment presents itself as a pure description of its object, a mirroring without mechanism, judging as a whole presupposes a more complex cognitive interaction-as Kant so clearly saw when he asked how synthetic a priori judgments are possible. Gadamer, stimulated by R. G. Collingwood, opens this prior interaction up for analysis by drawing attention to the way in which even the most clearly formulated and adequately defended j~dgnlent is not just a statement but rather the answer to a question. This is the simple key to the universality of philosophical hermeneuticse All human judgment, whether descriptive or evaluative, occurs within the situation of being challenged by experience. Thus arises the hermeneutical Urphanomen: "no assertion is possible that cannot be understood as an answer to a question" (PHM 11; cf. TM 362). Hence all judgment, and therefore any truth it might contain, must submit to the logic implied by the questionability that is its matrix.

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Even self-evident truths, let alone the truths of positive science, count as answers to human questions. For the critique of reason, this logic of question and answer implies that the actual situation of inquiry, which aims at judgment, presupposes an already present framework, vague and poorly articulated though it may be, within which what is questioned appears as able to be questioned. This framework does not have to be thematically appreciated, and in fact usually is not. What may strike the experiencing and as yet unreflective mind as immediately given obtrudes into the foreground only when there is a tacit yet precursorily familiar background. In the act of conscious seeing stimulated by inquiry, one always knows roughly how to look and what to be looking for. The situation is justly called hermeneutical because an interpretative move has already been made in advance of what is experienced as immediately given in encounter, an interpretative move that has set the stage for the latter's possibility and meaningfulness. Nothing is experienced but that it is always experienced as something. What is met with in encounter is in advance referred to a context or set of contexts that are not immediately legible on the countenance of the given. This is not to say that the reference is inscrutable. It is simply to say that the context to which such reference points requires further reflection and insight if it is to be traced or recapitulated. The framework of meaning is not itself encountered but is, so to speak, the light in which what is encountered stands. Gadamer, like Husserl before him, uses the imagery of horizon to get at the tacit presence (distinguishable in kind from immediate givenness) of what highlights encounter. At stake philosophically is the precise ground and origin of this precursory hermeneutic movement, the precise ground and origin of those horizons within which cognitive experience must occur. Significantly different views of those origins may each ren1ain compatible with the basic hermeneutic structure of finding experience questionable as this or that. Human understanding is thus universally hermeneutic for two reasons. First, it is born in questionability. The always inquisitive origin of human judgment reveals that we never immediately understand, and if we do not in1mediately understand then we are fated to interpret, since interpretation just means the attempt to make sense of things for ourselves. Second, human experience implies a necessary to-and-fro between the givens of encounter and the horizons that have lent and might lend them meaning. This to-and-fro generates its own experiential, rather than n1erely textual, hermeneutic circle.


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If the always anticipatory character of inquiry is the object of philosophical hermeneutics, the latter's universality cannot seriously be disputed. On the other hand, the implications of the universality thus far defended are not so strong as to invite incredulity, for the universality of the hermeneutical "as" does not, as a general structure, constrain the validity of specific truth-claims. Physics, mathematics, and logic may all have to have construed experience before they make their judgments, but their construals do not by the fact of construal alone have to be falsifications or even limitations on their pretensions to necessary validity. Were this not so, the Kantian quaestio juris would be senseless. The validity of claims to objectively universal knowledge comes into question only once the hermeneutic situation is further specified as finitely historical, but that specification is not demanded by the above insight into hermeneutic universality. The latter is consistent, for example, with the Socratic hypothesis of forms (eide): the intelligible, untouchable looks of encounterable things in whose light the reality of the latter is appreciated - to mention only one nonhistoricist alternative. Gadamer is right to insist that his hermeneutic universalism is not compromised by the case of mathematics, and what it shows is that, even in the case of mathematics, knowing is far from a pure, unmediated apprehension. It is, however, another question (dealt with in later chapters) whether his fully historicized version of philosophical hermeneutics avoids the originally suspected absurdity of rendering all transhistorical truth-claims in principle invalid. The second difficulty was the misconstrual of philosophical hermeneutics as methodology. Given what hermeneutics already meant to many scholars, Gadamer was taking a risk in using the term for the peculiarly philosophical work he had in mind. To be sure, he could hardly have stated more clearly his distance from the traditional notion-that his book neither was about the methodology of social science nor had anything to do with developing an art or technique of interpretationand it was not unreasonable for him to suppose that the legitimacy of appropriating hermeneutics to philosophical use had already been established by Heidegger in Being and Time. Misconstrual notwithstanding, Gadamer saw his own essential point of departure as thoroughly Heideggerian: "Heidegger's temporal analytics of Dasein has, I think, shown that understanding is not just one of the various possible behaviors of the subject but the mode of being of Dasein itself. It is in this sense that the term 'hermeneutics' has been used here" (TM xxx). The move from "behaviors of the subject" to the

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subject's "mode of being" marks the crucial difference between ordinary hermeneutics and Gadamer's philosophical version, locating the latter squarely within the modern tradition of reason's critique. It is a regression into the grounds of the possibility of inquiry. Hence the fundamental question of philosophical hermeneutics "asks (to put it in Kantian terms): how is understanding possible? This is a question which precedes any action of understanding on the part of subjectivity" ( TM xxx). Not only does such precedence distinguish philosophical hermeneutics in kind from all traditional forms, but it is also the same precedence that distinguishes specifically philosophical historicism. The priority is directly parallel to Heidegger's distinction of an ontic analysis from an ontological analysis of beings. What is ontic occurs as the activity of already constituted beings, their features, their activities, their relationships in space and time, once they are what they are. In contrast, what is ontological concerns the metaphysical constitution of the entities and situations that are the conditions for ontic activity. In Aristotelian terms, the ontic is categorial, while ontological analysis is aitiological, a matter of tracing appearances (phainomena ) to their primary and universal grounds (aitiai, archai). Human understanding has both an ontic and an ontological face. As an ontic activity, it takes place as a series of acts specifiable through the contents that such acts render known. By "act" here is meant the actualization of the power ( dunamis ) of intelligent self-consciousness. It means that consciousness comes to focus in a content. What determines that act is unspecified and could lie anywhere on a-continuum from pure self-determination to complete external domination; to be an act of consciousness in this sense is not yet to be marked as voluntary or involuntary. Nonetheless, underlying the train of individual acts is the single intelligence that is the proper subject for attributions of conscious identity and all forms of intellectual virtue-the identity that consti· tutes a knower. Intelligence as a power, focused in its manifold acts, is the complex precondition for attributing reasonableness, perspicacity, good sense, shrewd judgment, and so on, to a single mind. The power is neither augmented nor diminished by anyone act, while its virtues and vices reveal how well-conditioned or ill-conditioned it is. Philosophical hermeneutics is concerned first and foremost with the ontological constitution of understanding, not with ontic skills acquired by the already constituted knower but with the intelligence that defines


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human being. In other words, philosophical hermeneutics is a contemporary account of what it means to be the zoon logon echon, the living being with speechly intelligence. In the previous chapter, the distinction at stake here was made in terms of how classical historicism treats the working of reason procedurally rather than constitutionally. Accounts of the procedural aspects of understanding's operation layout the typical ways one might go about the ontic activities of inquiry. They may include some account of the Ineta-reflections involved in deciding which of several conflicting interpretations or claims to validity is more justified than others. Overall, they layout what to do in order to count as rational with respect to a given domain. On the other hand, accounts directed toward the constitutional aspect of understanding address themselves to the cognitive and reflective capacities being exercised in the procedures of inquiry and consider what their linlits and circumstances might be in their own right. The former are concerned with how reason works once it is under way, the latter with how it could even begin to get going. Constitutional and procedural considerations complement one another. Indeed, most historicist writers move back and forth between them, because (as discussed in the section on Mannheim) the relationship between the powers of intelligence and what brings them to focus is a complex one. What is actually done is the only clue to the powers manifest in such achievements, and thus the only clue to what is possible in principle. The distinction is no less intelligible for its reciprocal determinations. Gadamer acknowledges its force when he says, "My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing" (TM xxviii ). In casting the distinction in a way that emphasizes passivity on the constitutive side, Gadanler foreshadows his own more specific view about the constitution of human understanding: that it is completely differentiated by what he calls Wirkungsgeschichte or "effective history" (of which more in a moment). One does not, however, have to concede his strong version of understanding's historicity in order to allow the distinction between constitution and activity, ontology and practice, power and exercise, here proposed. According to ~his distinction, it is no part of the primary intention of philosophical hermeneutics to make procedural prescriptions for specific domains of inquiry. Rather, it deline-

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ates the field inside which all specific inquiries take place and tries to discover the a priori constraints on all and any such inquisitive activity. Philosophical hermeneutics is not about any doings of mind, but about the way that human beings find themselves already existing understandingly. To repeat: the universal situation of human understanding is properly called hermeneutic, first, because the face of experience is not immediately self-intelligible, and second, because experience implies a necessary to-and-fro between the givens of encounter and the horizons that have lent and might lend them meaning. This sets the scope and subject matter of philosophical hermeneutics. If so broad a theme contrasts with anything, it contrasts with the rationalistic naivete of supposing that understanding is immediate or intuitive in the sense of needing no discursive supplementation within the instant of insight, with the searchlight view of the intellect, with "that ideal of an infinite spirit for which all that exists and all truth lies open in a single moment's vision"

(TM 543). In this very broad sense, philosophical hermeneutics does not yet add up to the strongly limitative theses of philosophical historicism. Gadamer arrives at the latter by interpreting the hermeneutic situation of all human understanding as rooted in what I shall call finite historicity. "We are guided by the hermeneutical phenonlenon; and its ground, which determines everything else, is the finitude ofour historical experi-

ence" (TM 457). Human consciousness is wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein ("effective.. historical consciousness" or "historically effected consciousness"). To have recognized this fact is also wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein; it is at once "the consciousness effected in the course of history and determined by history, and the very consciousness of being thus effected and determined" (TM xxxiv). Effective-historical consciousness means more than that consciousness is determinable by historical process. For present purposes, it has two important features. (1) The historicity of human consciousness is total. None of the possibilities within its scope escapes the reach of history's overarching logic. Strong as it sounds, this principle implies very little until history's logic, and thus its determining power, is further specified. In Gadamer's case, total historicity becomes limitative once it is conlbined with the principle of finitude and the assumption of history's thorough contingency. (2) The determinability of human consciousness by historical process is somehow constitutive of understanding's operation. This is the thematic essence of Gadamer's


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philosophical hermeneutics, and to it he devotes far more critical attention than to his presuppositions about history's logic. According to the second principle, effective-historical consciousness rules out the cognitive hope of immediately taking up a disinterested, spectatorial stand in relation to what might be known. The historicity of the knowing subject cannot be overlooked; it is part of the actual achievement of understanding. Understanding thus ceases to be the radically free reflection of a roaming transcendental eye at once present within yet somehow unbound by the conditions at work in experience. Gadamer subverts the image of immediate, transcendentally assured objectivity by speaking of understanding as an "event" (Geschehen). Understanding is "to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly nlediated" (TM 290). Weaving understanding into a web of historicized relations corrects the picture of insight as the pristine act of a transcendental substance, a reified ego cogitans. But there is also a positive point. Whereas in the naive, objectivistic view the historicity of the knowing subject is something to leave behind, in the conception of understanding as event it becomes an unavoidable and necessary part of a complex interplay in the moment of assimilation (Anwendung). The necessity is crucial. Gadamer's central insight is not the vague and popular notion that the subject's historicity cannot be held off from the event of understanding, but that this historicity is precisely the condition that makes it possible at alL "The historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world" (PHM

9). The rehabilitation of prejudice or prejudgment ( Vorurteil) away fronl the censure of the Enlightenment "prejudice against prejudice" (TM 270) is a hallmark of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Prejudgments are native to human understanding because they structure the questionability primitive within human experience and, structuring questionability, they condition both inquiry and judgment. Yet the historicity of the subject implied by effective-historical consciousness means that prejudices cannot be thought of as noetic tools, conceptual wrenches to be employed ad libitum, counters pushed around at the whim of a disconnected, separately constituted transcendental onlooker. "The prejudices and fore-meanings that occupy the interpreter's con-

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sciousness are not at his free disposal" (TM 295). They are modes of understanding's actual operation and as such constitutive of the knower's being. According to this picture, one arrives at the moment of questioning encounter already determined qua knower by prejudice. It is not enough merely to possess intellect in order to be a potential knower. To be able to know, the powers of intelligence must already be partially formed, informed, in order to proceed along the specific paths inquiry naturally takes. There is not enough ontological difference between the interpreter and his prejudices to be able to move them with the freedom implied by the image of complete transcendental spontaneity. Only in the subsequent interplay with what is encountered, only in the ongoing course of inquiry, attempted assimilation, and reflective recapitulation, can one begin to sort out "the productive prejudices that enable understanding from the prejudices that hinder or lead to misunderstandings" ( TM 295 ). When what is encountered is sufficiently complex to be making its own truth or validity claim (a text, say, or a foreign cultural practice), this interplay becomes, if done correctly, what Gadamer calls a "fusion of horizons." The contexts of meaning surrounding unfamiliar texts, unfamiliar histories, unfamiliar people, may be played off against one's own horizons of significance in order to arrive at a critical synthesis of their initially disparate claims to worth and truth (TM 302). That inquiry finds itself within an historically given horizon does not mean it is doomed to an historical fate. Gadamer is not proposing a version of what Popper criticized as "the myth of the framework."5 The fusion of horizons states Gadamer's conviction that experience is open to critical reappropriation, that conflicting claims to epistenlic and evaluative validity are open to mediation. Historically effected consciousness is not transcendentally free, yet it does have the freedom of reflexivity: "however much we emphasize that historically effected consciousness belongs to the effect, what is essential to it as consciousness is that it can rise above that of which it is conscious. The structure of reflexivity is given with all consciousness" (TM 341). This reflexive freedom explains how it is "part of the nature of man to be able to break with tradition, to criticize and dissolve it" (TM xxxvii). As will be seen in a moment, though, the principle of finitude implies that breaking with tradition can never be conlplete. One can rise a little way above one's traditional past, but never all the way to first principles. The negations effected by historically effective consciousness are not, and never can be, infinite negations.


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Everything is always and forever being hammered out in the course of history. Partial reflexive freedom allows Gadamer to begin dealing with the problem of prejudice. The rehabilitation of prejudice was not intended to make prejudice acceptable wholesale, for fear that its rejection cuts us off from what renders thinking concrete, effective. There is a "tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition" (TM 270), and indeed deaf to what speaks to us from anywhere. One must therefore engage in a retail discrimination between legitimate prejudices and confounding ones. "Thus we can formulate the fundamental epistemological question for a truly historical hermeneutics as follows: what is the ground of the legitimacy of prejudices?" ( TM 277).. The issue then is not prejudices versus no prejudices, but how to purify the effects of always given prejudices without per impossibile abandoning them. The sort of overcoming of prejudice to which Gadamer objects, the Enlightenment ideal, is the overcoming that would leave prejudice behind alto.. gether and seek to determine the validity of cognition from an entirely transcendental and private sphere unconditioned by the course of past experience. On the other hand, given prejudice must be critically repossessed, if one aims at wissenschaftliches Bewusstsein (TM 301). The ideal of critical self-reflection may thus be reformulated: one must seek not an escape from the historical, but rather one must aim at a lucid presence within ito Hence, in an historicized atavism of the Cartesian lumen naturale, Gadamer declares that one must "acquire as much historical self-transparence as possible" ( TM xxiv). The exhortation also contains a tacit warning: perfect self-transparence is beyond human reach. Here enters finitude. Historicity in its generic sense determines that the knower arrives at the occasion of encounter already conditioned by particular, historically originating prejudices. Specifically, however, historicity for Gadamer entails finitude. Finitude means that even the most disciplined interplay of prejudices cannot ever entirely overcome the parochiality in which reflection begins: "The illumination of this situation-reflection on effective history-can never be completely achieved. Yet the fact that it cannot be completed is due not to a deficiency in reflection but to the essence of the historical beings we are. To be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be

complete" ( TM 302). It is important to see that Gadamer is stipulating what he means by "historical" here. As a general category, historicity does not mandate

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specification in terms of finitude. One need go no further than the example of Hegel for an alternative, nonfinitistic conception. The necessary structure of prejudice and the universality of the hermeneutic phenomenon have been further interpreted by Gadamer. He means more than that self-reflection inevitably begins late in the scene of human experience, by which tiIne forces that originate beyond individuals have already had their hand in forming who they are and how they think. It is that one cannot in principle get behind or undo or see through those effects. "No freely chosen relation towards one's own being can get behind the facticity of this being. Everything that makes possible and limits Dasein's projection ineluctably precedes it" (TM 264). "In understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe" (TM 490). In Heideggerian terms, it is impossible to overtake Dasein's thrownness. Finitude is the name for what prevents this overtaking, for what guarantees that "the self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life" ( TM 276). It is not a property of prejudices, horizons, histories, and traditions themselves but belongs to the activity of negotiating prejudices and horizons. It tells us how far we can go in the critical appropriation of what has been and what might be. Radical human finitude enters Gadamer's account at a meta-level. Only when one responds to one's present and prejudiced being in the light of philosophy's natural demands for primacy, universality, and comprehensiveness does one run up against the apparent limitations of this second-degree, and allegedly necessary, parochiality. The hermeneutic activity of fusing horizons by itself is not logically committed either way on the questions either of what path the ongoing history of interpretation will take or of where that path will end, if at all. Endless meandering, cyclic repetition, asymptotic progression, arrival at the absolute-are all consistent with the interim achievements of enriched interpretative practice. Coordinate with the principle of finite historicity is the thorough contingency of the historical. The first implication I drew out of Gadamer's historicizing the hermeneutical situation was the way in which the knower's determinability by history is, in contrast to the Enlightenment view, a necessary condition for understanding. But this was not all that Gadamer meant by identifying hermeneutical consciousness as consciousness effected by history. For Gadamer, as for most moderns, being historical is synonymous with being radically contingent, and this is the


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significance of calling the horizons of human understanding historical. They are contingent in the sense of being nowhere connected to necessity, to universality, to anything absolute. Yet, speaking logically once again, the notion of tradition is consistent with the possession and transmission of universal understanding. On the other hand, tradition interpreted as intrinsically historical implies it could never have and never will come into such possession. "There is no such thing as 'the present,' but rather constantly changing horizons of future and past. It is by no means settled (and can never be settled) that any particular perspective in which traditionary [sic] thoughts present themselves is the right one. 'Historical' understanding, whether today's or tomorrow's, has no special privilege. It is itself embraced by the changing historical horizons and moved with them" (TM 534-35). If historical consciousness itself is such a creature of necessarily transitory times, presumably all other understanding is as well. The historicity of the hermeneutic situation also implies, then, that the horizons of intelligibility in which human experience stands have no abiding parameters. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is animated by the principle of finite historicity. "Historically effected consciousness is so radically finite that our whole being ... inevitably transcends its knowledge of itself' (TM xxxiv). This is philosophical historicism, but Truth and Method nowhere explains the force of the inevitable transcendence to which Gadamer here alludes. To be sure, Gadamer does explain that human reason inevitably and with good reason begins conditioned in ways beyond its own initial self-awareness. "Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, in society, and state in which we live" ( TM 276), while "the way we experience one another, the way we experience historical traditions, the way we experience the 'natural givenness of our existence and of our world, constitute a truly hermeneutic universe in which we are not imprisoned, as if behind insurmountable barriers, but to which we are opened" ( TM xxiv). Yet the paraphernalia of prejudices, fore-meanings, traditions, temporal distance, the fusion of horizons, and the rest do not explain why it is inevitable that self-transparence cannot be completed. They set the stage for the task of achieving self-transparence, determining only that the stage-not some other transcendental or heavenly locale-is where wisdom may be realized. Reason begins and ends in place, but the inescapability of our originally historical condition does not by itself amount to the impossibility of thoroughly understanding it.

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Gadamer's faith in finitude supervenes on his phenomenology of understanding's tradition, it does not emerge from it. This seems to be the consequence of his conscious appropriation of Heidegger. For both of them, hermeneutics "denotes the basic being-in-motion of Dasein that constitutes its finitude and historicity" ( TM xxx). Gadamer's philosophical historicism is not self-grounding. Heidegger's relevance to its hopedfor legitimation will be treated in Chapter Four. Philosophical hermeneutics refracted through the principle of finite historicity yields a strongly limitative doctrine of human reason: "the idea of an absolute reason is not a possibility for historical humanity. Reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms-Le., it is not its own master.... In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it" (TM 276). Gadamer does not hesitate to draw deflationary conclusions for philosophy. Hermeneutical consciousness "limits the position of the philosopher in the modern world. However much he may be called to draw radical inferences from everything, the role of prophet, of Cassandra, of preacher, or of know-it-all does not suit him. What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now" ( TM xxxviii). Ultimate questions presuppose the ideals of First Philosophy, yet the finitude of the hermeneutical situation means that the dialogue addressing them can never end. "If anything does characterize human thought, it is this infinite dialogue with ourselves which never leads anywhere definitely" (TM 543). Although Gadamer sees himself as speaking in praise, his formulation of an infinite, self-absorbed dialogue never leading anywhere could just as easily describe a sort of rational madness. The critical problem, to be addressed in the next chapter, is whether such neverending, indefinite dialogue is genuinely consistent with the nature and demands of ordinary human inquiry. I shall argue that it is not.

IRONIC HISTORICISM Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature helped Englishspeaking philosopher~ get more comfortable with the holistic, nonfoundationalistic epistemology that had already been gathering momentum for some time. It also helped them get comfortable with a commendatory


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sense of historicism. Since then, Rorty has become a playful neoNietzschean, disturbing to many yet still clear and intelligent within the parameters of his new, conversational paradigm. 6 Rorty's Nietzscheanism. ",Till not be examined in any critical detail, for it is, as I shall indicate, separable from the philosophical historicism that happens to be one of its instruments. A brief look, however, will count as the backdrop for how Rorty makes use of finite historicity. That passing examination will help sho\¥ that Rorty is not quite so frivolous as he has sometimes seemed, but the more important p.oint to laying out his version of philosophical historicism will be to sharpen the question of how far one wants to go and how far one can go in the abandonment of First Philosophy's noetic ideals. Rorty's own, more complex position need not itself be endorsed in order to understand its contribution to philosophical historicism. Socrates was accused of irony ( eironeia ) or dissimulation not because he said the opposite of what he meant but because it was clear to those around him he was not saying all that he thought, that he was not revealing all the truth he had to reveal (Republic 1.337a; Symposium 216e; Gorgias 48ge). Distilled to what is barely more than a slogan, Socrates practiced irony on account of the unavoidable tension between theory and politics. Rorty has come to formulate a version of this tension in terms of solidarity and objectivity, justice and self-creation, community and autonomy-all variations on the theme of "the old tension between the private and public" (CIS xiii )-and he too has recognized that irony is somehow relevant to the situation these pairs describe. Rorty's irony is twofold: there is the irony he names and the irony he practices. Neither form is Socratic. The irony Rorty names is a virtue to be acquired by those members of society who reflect as detachedly as they can on the norms by which the rest of society, with less reflection and greater commitment, runs, i.e., the intellectuals. Intellectuals are in the first place marked by their interest in "final vocabularies" (CIS 73), the vocabularies that encode the ends, determinate and otherwise, by which most current effort proceeds, the vocabularies that are final because beyond them one becomes unsure of what can be said and prone to wonder whether anything really needs to be said at all. In the second place, intellectuals attain to the virtue of irony once they learn to tolerate the belief that all final vocabularies - and this includes the vocabularies of their society and culture as well as their own idiosyncratic vocabularies of self· interpretation (or, as Rorty prefers, self-creation )-are irredeemably

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contingent and parochial, that there is no overarching or divine metavocabulary with which they might nlaster their various contingent and mortal fates. Irony in this sense is the courage to face up to the transience, particularity, and triviality of human existence. It contrasts with the cowardly attempt to seek consolation in metaphysics' soothing litany of ultimates, absolutes, and profundities. Where Voltaire crushed the pieties of religion with satire, Rorty humiliates the pretensions of First Philosophy with the idea that self-respecting reflection can only be ironical. Rorty calls the attitude irony because what he means by ironist intellectuals is that they are "never quite able to take themselves seriously" (CIS 73). They are ironical in relation to themselves in the same way that ironists are conventionally ironical to others. Where no one quite believed Socrates' professions of ignorance, Rortian ironists can never quite believe themselves. One senses here the hermeneutics of suspicion run amok. The Evil Demon, powerful enough to make Descartes forget himself, has once again been conjured up to spook benighted minds. If it be thought that Socrates counts as an ironist in this sense too, one should recall that he always claimed expertise in "erotics" (ta erotika ), Le., in self-knowledge.? The irony Rorty himself practices is of a deeper sort than the irony he enjoins upon society's intellectuals. He does not care whether human understanding really is fated to thorough contingency, to "historicism and nominalism," instead of all the universalist hopes of traditional metaphysics. It is enough that the image of radical contingency persuade his audience to begin doing things, to begin working for the liberalironist polity that he, for whatever reasons, would like to see realized. Or perhaps it is even enough that his readers just pay attention to his telling a clever and entertaining tale of liberal utopia. The deeper irony of Rorty's own discourse is that its possible truth is irrelevant or relevant only to the extent that truth is naturally persuasive. He is interested solely in what he deems good for his audience to believe on hearing what he has to say. In other words, his speeches ( logoi ) have no theoretical or truth-telling ends-not even the ones that seem to say that theory is bad. Rorty is therefore only ironically identified with the ironism he describes. "Historicist ironism" (EHO 41), the view he recommends for late-twentieth-century, alienated intellectuals, is not the same as ironic historicism. The former depends on a claim about what is possible for


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human understanding-namely that final vocabularies cannot be perfectwhereas the latter does not. For present purposes there is no need to consider why Rorty imagines it is a good idea for his audience to believe in philosophical historicism, because his irony makes no difference to the intelligibility of the idea he would put across. In fact, the more consummate his irony, the more persuasive his picture of philosophical historicism should be. Rorty's own irony cannot be Socratic because it renounces the very aim of truth-telling or what he calls "representation." In a word, his irony is sophistical. Rorty's presentation of philosophical historicism began with Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature (1979). "The common nlessage of Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Heidegger is a historicist one. Each of the three reminds us that investigations of the foundations of knowledge or morality or language or society may simply be apologetics, attempts to externalize a certain contemporary language-game, social practice or self-image. The moral of this book is also historicist" (PMN 9-10). Taken literally, historicism here means no more than the possible contextualization of certain sorts of philosophical investigations. Yet Rorty has a stronger view in mind. Just before the passage cited he speaks of traditional philosophy as "an attenlpt to escape from history" (PMN 9), with the clear supposition that this is something that cannot in principle be done. The ridiculousness of trying to escape from history is a motif I noted in both Margolis and Bernstein. It is present in Gadamer as the hope for escaping prejudice. Only committed historicists talk of such escape, as if the law were being violated and for the sake of which transgressions they have been appointed to police the precincts of good, law-abiding reflection. The philosophical historicism of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is, as its author declares, its moral rather than its substance. The necessary parochiality of reason is not so evident a theme because Rorty's immediate concern is the particular one of weaning his readers from the modern paradigm of foundationalistic, certainty-seeking epistemology. The paradigm with which he would replace it is a conversational one, a paradignl whose chief purpose is to stop philosophers from presuming that they participate at some comprehensive meta-level in the "conversation of mankind," where such collective, cultural conversation is presumed to be philosophy's ultimate horizon. As an epistemological paradigm, it means that justification of knowledge is to be achieved and can be achieved only with reference to one's peers in inquiry. In an address contemporaneous with the appearance of Philosophy

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and the Mirror ofNature, Rorty announces: "there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones-no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers."8 In this view, knowing is not a cognitive relation between thought and things, but "a right, by current standards, to believe" (PMN 389; cf. 170). Rorty's talk of there being "no constraints" on inquiry is nlisleading to the extent that conversational restraints turn out to be strong ones indeed, but it undoubtedly suits his rhetoric to suggest liberation from the idols of final truth, presuppositionless beginnings, abiding essences, and so on. He has to mention constraints, not only because his philosophical audience would react badly to the appearance that "anything goes," but also because even if one prefers conversational anarchism, no one desires to listen to chatter, Le., to verbalizations produced for nothing more than the speaker's own self-involved pleasure. Conversational constraints are exactly those that stop others jabbering on in ways we the listeners find boring. (One should sense a deep political problem here; it starts to surface in Rorty's later discussions of cruelty and solidarity. ) Unlike Plato, who sees the context of intelligent conversation in cosmic terms, Rorty pictures conversation as a thoroughly local phenomenon. The conversational constraints he has in mind are the constraints furnished by finite, historical traditions of inquiry. Thus, when he comes to describe the meaning of objectivity, for example, within the conversational paradigm of knowing, it is "no more nor no less than the best idea we currently have about how to explain what is going on" (PMN 385). More generally, "truth and knowledge can only be judged by the standards of the inquirers of our own day" (PMN 178). Of the conversation in which we happen to find ourselves, Rorty elsewhere says that "the pragmatists tell us that the conversation which it is our moral duty [!] to continue is merely our project, the European intellectual's form of life" (CP 172). He coordinates the point that conversation happens always to begin as local with the assertion that it must so remain: "to say that truth and knowledge can only be judged by the standards of the inquirers of our own day ... is merely to say that nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and that there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence" (PMN 178). Precisely because it is forever local, Rortian conversation runs no risk of


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closure, no risk of succulnbing to tyrannical standards of reasonableness, no risk of being measured by alien standards. The dual thesis of necessary situatedness within a contingent context is treated at greater length in Rorty's recent Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. "The fundamental premise of the book is that a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance" (CIS 189). He holds out the following ideal for reflective endeavor: "To try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi-divinity, where we treat everything-our language, our conscience, our community-as a product of time and chance" (CIS 22). All hopes for grasping superhuman meanings must be abandoned. We should "no longer see any use for the notion that finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings might derive the meanings of their lives from anything except other finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings" (CIS 45). Human understanding is thus pictured as shaped up entirely by what other people happen to say or might have said; rationality is "a mechanism which adjusts contingencies to other contingencies" (CIS 33). Furthermore, contingent historicity holds sway over reason as a whole. To accept the claim that there is no standpoint outside the particular, historically conditioned, and temporary vocabulary we are presently using from which to judge this vocabulary is "to give up the idea that there can be reasons for using language as well as reasons within languages for believing statements" (CIS 48). Like R. G. Collingwood, Rorty finds that there can be no reasoned or grounded justification for our ultimate presuppositions, for our final vocabulary. Final vocabularies just come and go, since "the notions of criteria and choice are no longer in point when it comes to changes from one language game to another" (CIS 6). The conversation simply carries on in accord with what strikes our fancy. Indeed, "fantasizing" writes Rorty, "is, in my view, the end product of ironist theorizing" (CIS 125), for it is fantasizing that gets us out doing new things. Once we have been doing them for a while and we can tell how they please us, then we can decide on how good they are. Just as Plato took Protagoras seriously, this is not a view to be treated lightly. The exercise of understanding is necessarily bound to and bounded by thoroughly contingent contexts. This does not imply actually being bound to one contingent framework in particular. The point is that when

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we move we necessarily move from one web of contingencies into another web of contingencies. Furthermore, there is no transcendental justification of the move itself. We cannot step outside of the given into a neutral context for making a critical assessment of which framework is better or worse. "In the process of playing vocabularies and cultures off against each other, we produce new and better ways of acting and talking-not better by reference to a previously known standard, but just better in the sense that they come to seem clearly better than their predecessors" (CP xxxvii). In these respects, Rorty not only endorses the Heideggerian principle of Geworfenheit, "we have to start from where we are" (CIS 198), but also similarly commits himself to an inscrutable fatality about the transformations of our ultimate frameworks, our final vocabularies, as we proceed to elaborate upon the givens of human desire and circ1.!mstance. Rorty's response to fate and Geworfenheit is temperamentally different from Heidegger's, whose notion of authenticity is a descendant of Nietzschean amoTlati. The Rortian ironist is still in fact assailed by resentment. "He is trying to get out from under inherited contingencies and make his own contingencies, get out from under an old final vocabulary and fashion one which will be all his own" ( CIS 97). For the sake of those in pursuit of this most recent version of the characteristically modern attempt to give birth to oneself, to be radically autonomous, Rorty speaks of "acknowledging and appropriating contingency" (CIS 28), of "freedom as the recognition of contingency" ( CIS 46), of becoming "unashamed" of finitude and "mastering" it by recognizing it (CIS 103). And once we are thoroughly unashamed of our own finitude, then anything one can n1ake work goes, for one workable contingency is as good as any other. Rorty's hero of contingency is perhaps preferable to Heidegger's saint of fatality, but the dialectic of cruelty and solidarity necessarily follows, since the projects of radical self-legislation can only be measured (at best) by the persuasion or domination of one's fellows and one's past. 9 Rorty's ironically espoused version of philosophical historicism differs from conciliatory pragmatism by forswearing First Philosophy's ideals altogether. This is because it hopes entirely to forswear the pusillanin1ity of being consoled by truth-telling, without forsaking the pleasures of urbane conversation. Where Margolis argues that universality remains a regulatory ideal of science, Rorty suggests that the ideal is needed only if one has already assumed, not so much mistakenly as


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timidly, that the end of intelligence is accurately to represent the world instead of, say, to cope with the world or to help create oneself in the most interesting image possible. To aim at truth-telling is a cowardly avoidance of the responsibilities of human existence; it is an attempt "to no longer have to have projects, no longer have to create ourselves by inventing and carrying out those projects" (EHO 34). Where Margolis demotes traditional theoretic ideals to a second-order privilege, Rorty demotes the privilege of theory altogether. "Ironists ... do not take the point of discursive thought to be knowing" (CIS 75). Once one recalls that human beings obviously use their intelligence for ends other than truth-telling (this is different from saying that the ability to discern the truth is nowhere necessary for nontheoretical ends ), Rorty's tactics cease to be as baffling as they might otherwise be for those with a passion for insight. He is simply adjusting the hierarchy of ends to which thinking may be directed. It is therefore inevitable that he should sometimes seem frivolous to anyone devoted to the possibilities of theory. Yet that does no more than express a preference for a different hierarchy; the hardheaded Kallikles found Socrates just as frivolous. Rorty is experimenting with talkative yet nontheoretical paradigms for living the best human life: the purely practical paradigm of coping first, since that always seems so universally sensible and can be counted on to embarrass theoretical pretensions, and the paradigm of self-creation second, since that seems so attractive to modern intellectuals for whom autonomy and individuality have become such compelling values. In drawing attention to the fact that coping demands no reference to the noetic ideals of First Philosophy, Rorty does no more than Aristotle did by distinguishing experience (empeiria ) from knowledge (episteme) and isolating leisure (schole), Le., interim freedom from the obligations of praxis, as a precondition for philosophy. Rorty's solidarity-inspiring appeal draws its substance from the virtues of the bios politikos, which Aristotle ranked as very good yet still second best. Self-creation, on the other hand, represents an appeal to the virtues of poetry or making (poiesis), the strength of whose allure to all reflective people caused Socrates to speak of a long-standing and perhaps unresolvable quarrel between poetry and philosophy (Republic lO.607b). Both of these appeals deserve no belittling, yet one should be aware that Rorty nlerely postulates the superiority of the citizen-poet to the philosopher. What makes the conjecture plausible is his rightly censur-

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ing .the all-but-universal weakness intellectuals have for consoling themselves with truth or, failing that, with their ability to reflect. On the other hand, it is all too convenient to suppose that the desire for truth is launched always by mortal fear or vanity. It often is, but as Aristotle tells the story sometimes the yearning to know is provoked by wonder. And essential to wonder is that it seeks no consolation-that is why it so often seems child-like, innocent, wide-eyed.l o In any event, Rorty is clear about his complete demotion of theoretical ends: "this historicist turn ... has helped us substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking and of social progress" (CIS xiii). Rorty effectively accuses his contemporaries of being insufficiently pragmatic, of being unable to give up their nostalgia for absoluteness in the reflections by which we seek consolation for our mortal lot. "My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have what Nagel calls 'an arrlbition of transcendence'" (ORT 12). He insinuates that recognizing our finite, contingent historicity ought to be sufficient grounds for realizing that theory is hopeless and not even worth salvaging at a second-order level, that there are better things to do with our brains. But he knows that he is just doing his best to change the subject of the conversation. His wholesale rejection of theory is not a logical consequence of historicity, since while the traditional perfections of truth-telling are made impossible by it, there is no reason to suppose that less than perfectly grounded truth-telling can have nothing to do with our little, local fantasies and coping strategies, much less have nothing to do with our lives as a whole. Pragmatism in general reminds us that any attempt to "make admirable sense" of things takes place in the middle of and somehow on the basis of a complex set of activities that already have reality and coherence in advance of conscious recapitulation. It goes on to claim that this prior coherence can ground whatever virtues there may be to reflection. Rorty shows us what it sounds like to take this pragmatic strategy to its limit, to the point of declaring that the truth-telling function of discourses (logoi) is for all interesting and significant human purposes negligible and that the virtues of reflection are exhausted in their application to coping and self-creating. Those latter ends have undeniable weight in the overall economy of human life, and in their light Rorty's reading of theory's paltry value is more coherent than many critics have supposed. As noted above, Rorty merely continues the criticism raised by Kallikles in the Gorgias.


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On the other hand, the consistency with which he manages to combine pragmatism and the complete devaluation of theory shows that praxis is a double-edged sword and not, therefore, an unequivocal court of appeal for justifying the historicist hope for interim stability. All philosophical historicists suppose that historicity is a truth that curbs the pretensions of theoretical reason. Rorty, himself careless about the issue of interim stability, forces on sober historicists the question of whether the truth of finite historicity cannot be prevented from cutting out theory altogether, the question of whether some qualifications need to be introduced into the mindlessness of sheer doing in order to preserve an adequate sense of why we talk about truths, insights, knowledge, understanding, being reasonable, and so on, at all. Perhaps the nostalgia, the consoling "ambition of transcendence" to which Rorty objects, is indeed as timid and softheaded as he makes it sound, yet it is not the only way of reading the telos of the reflective desire to make sense of things (lucidity, for exanlple, is not the same as transcendence in the sense Rorty humiliates). Margolis and Gadamer assume that truth-telling is a natural and acceptable implication of such desire and argue for nonuniversal forms of ultinlately satisfying it. Rorty, in Wittgensteinian fashion, would like us to stop scratching the truthtelling itch because it is so easily corrupted into the mistaken wish for fulfillment in transcendence. Indeed, he would like us to stop feeling the itch altogether and get used to construing talk as entertainment, play, experimentation, power-all of which to a very large degree it undoubtedly is. Yet Rorty himself is compelled to acknowledge that talk as the manifestation of our reflective power cannot be fully submerged into the domain of practice. This is why he needs the doctrine of ironism; it attempts to finesse the negativity of reflection by granting the (incoherent) luxury of simultaneous commitment and detachment. Whether the life of an ironist intellectual really is a viable form or not, that it is held up for emulation at all indicates that reflection can never be confined to the particular, can never be perfectly loyal to it. There is another problem too: reflection is not tame, not naturally subservient. Pure intellect (nous ) refuses to be ruled by the city as much as it refuses to be ruled, as Rorty notes, by contingency. This is why he has to .declare the domain of self-creation private, distinguishing it from the public domain of solidarity. But why, on historicist grounds, should self-creation not also be public? What is there to hide? Moreover, Rorty sees that ironical self-consciousness is too strong a tonic for general civic consumption: "I cannot imagine a

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culture which socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious about their own process of socialization" (CIS 87); and so, in order to keep the corrosive effect of critical self-reflection from eviscerating social and political practice, he is forced to declare that his separate domains of solidarity and autonomous self-creation are incommensurable. To most ears, this sequestration sounds at least ad hoc and perhaps jejune as well. Regardless of whether Rorty can defend himself against such charges, his strategy itself admits the impossibility of actually subordinating theory to practice. The desire to make sense of things, or at the very least to make sense of one's own life, is intrinsically unruly; it will always at some point disturb the pleasant continuities of human doing. It is why Socrates was eventually executed and why his execution became a symbol for philosophy. Rorty demotes truth-telling in favor of freedom, yet he cannot entirely suppress the reflective need "to make admirable sense." While it may not itself be convincing, and it has certainly been disturbing to many, the philosophical challenge of his position amounts to the following question: what are the appropriate human ends of this quintessentially human wish reflectively to make sense of things? Like all hardheaded thinkers, Rorty despises consolations, especially theological ones, and this tempts him to revise the hierarchy of reflection's ends in order to prevent talk's being co-opted to such timid and boring uses. Therefore, when he speaks of making admirable sense, he means in the first place to refer reflection to his nontheoretical ends of coping and self-creation. Making sense of one's life as Rorty nleans it is to be playing at self-creation, finding what works and what does not, and in this respect the emphasis could be said to fall on "making" rather than on "sense." As culturally and politically salutary as it might be (though even this is disputable) to wean at least intellectuals and maybe all citizens from consoling absolutes, the sophistry of Rorty's speech is its deliberate avoidance of proving the exhaustiveness of the ends it praises. The deeper philosophical issue, however, is not that human life happens to be suffiCiently complex for it to make some sense to praise directing the power of reflection toward nontheoretical purposes. It is whether one can really make sense of human activity and yet at the same time avoid the critical imperatives of truth-telling. The evident differences between action and meaning, between Dlaking and sense, added to our equally


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evident desire to combine them, suggest that the avoidance is if:Ilpossible, at least for human beings. The very interest in final vocabularies betrays a concern for whether any of the entertainment, play, experimentation, and power struggles in which we are engaged is good or not. Telling the difference between good and bad is an essential function of rational (Le., measure-taking), truth-telling intelligence: "speech (logos) is for making evident what is advantageous and what is harmful, and therefore also what is just and what is unjust; for this is, in relation to the rest of living things, proper to human beings that only they are able to perceive good and bad, just and unjust, and the rest" (Politics 1.1253aI4-16). Thus, for as long as one wants to see that one's deeds are good, there is a natural limit to philosophical pragmatisnl. The urge to discriminate at all guarantees the meaning of First Philosophy.

THE AXIOMS OF PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORICISM It is time to take stock. Three self-conscious versions of philosophical historicism have been surveyed. Margolis's conciliatory pragmatism takes its bearings from the cognitive optimism of science and seeks to reconcile it with the philosophic conviction that universalism and transparency are no longer acceptable or decent options. His statement of historicism, that no universal judgments can in principle be converted from provisional to categorical, is accurate but abstract: it is philosophical historicism from a logical point of view. It says nothing about the ontological presuppositions by which it might be related to the actuality of hunlan knowing. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics begins the repair of this philosophical deficienocy. His phenomenology of tradition as it bears on human self-interpretation goes a long way toward explaining the situatedness of human thinking and its constitutive, as distinguished from procedural, mechanisms. Gadamer also begins, in his sustained attention to the logic of assimilation (Anwendung), a recovery of the significance of intellectual virtue for the analysis of human understanding. Rorty's ironic historicism gives the impression of forgoing epistemology and metaphysics altogether, yet it brings into relief the problems of how best to read the nature of theoretical desire and how best to order the possible ends of reflection.

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Philosophical Historicism and the Be;rayal of First Philosophy

The historicist gesture takes on a ramified form in the hands of philosophers. For them it is more than a vague notion that individuals inevitably reflect the spirit of their age, more than a general impression that the historicity of "the human things" says something about finitude and mortality. Even so, philosophical historicism currently tends to surface first as a mood, an attunement of philosophical consciousness, rather than as a systematically formulated and defended doctrine. As a new way of doing philosophy, its convictions constitute the primary horizon inside which more specific analyses and exegeses are pursued. Hence, the formulation of those convictions tends to be scattered across or confined to the margins of apparently more pressing discourses. This chapter has gathered those fragments together, allowing philosophical historicism to speak for itself. I am now in a position to summarize its doctrinal commitments. Philosophical historicism is defined by two basic moments:

(I) The axiom ofcontingent historical contextualization: History, construed as a wholly contingent process, provides the ultimate framework within which to justify any human claim to have understood the truth or to be doing the good.

(II) The axiom ofreason's finite historicity: The powers of human understanding are necessarily finite, as determined by the contingent, historical nature of human existence. The first axiom warrants explication on several points. (1) It presupposes that reason operates with respect to horizons of intelligibility and significance, Le., with respect to ideas of what is true and what is good. I defended the plausibility of this assumption in my earlier discussion of Gadamer and the hermeneutic situation of human understanding. (2) It is relevant across all domains of intelligent human activity, including those often distinguished as cognitive from moral, as if this were a dichotomy. Reason is as operative in practical and productive affairs as it is in theoretical or truth-telling ones, and indeed no partisan of philosophical historicism either nlaintains or can afford to maintain the unqualified irrationality of the practical. (3) The horizons of intelligibility and significance are open to transformation, elaboration, replacement,


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and so on, but they always remain subordinate to the logic of historical process. This is what it means to say that history is ultimate. (4) All horizons are necessarily parochial because history, as a name for the ultimate horizon, is wholly contingent. This has an implication noted in the body of this chapter but not explicitly formulated in the axioms here. The totalization implied by "all horizons" includes both object-level and meta-level operations of judgnlent. Thus, the contents of understanding are parochial in virtue of their historical horizons, and so too are the rules and modes that inform its operation in virtue of theirs. In other words, both truth and rationality, praxis and prudence, are inevitably local. (5) Historical horizons are contingent, wholly and in principle. It is currently the common historicist assumption that any programmatic substitution of history for the transcendental, or of history for whatever nonhistorical framework one might suppose, is a substitution of the contingent for the absolute, of the parochial for the universal. This is only one possible analysis of history's logi.c, for it is not self-evident that all the horizons of the story of human self-interpretation must be contingent. (A sinlilar lacuna marks the common assumption that the appeal to praxis or human doing manages to sidestep the various conundrums associated with how human beings could possibly know reality. But it cannot be assumed that there is no insight informing praxis simply because it has so obvious a bodily component, just as one cannot assume that there is no reason in history simply because it has so obvious a temporal one.) According to the axiom of contingent historical contextualization, individuals are constrained to think and to act within the confines dictated by their location within history, where "within" implies that there can be no hope of stepping outside of those bounds, or rather that there can be no hope of stepping into an absolute point of view or situation. The second axiom, the axiom of reason's finite historicity, underwrites the necessity or doom of this situatedness. As it happens, the latter is usually buried much deeper in current presentations of philosophical historicism than the first, especially in those cases where constraint is spoken of in a merely formal mode. Yet it is needed as the ground for the claim that historical context is ultimate, that human understanding cannot in principle be referred to a noncontingent finality and that philosophy, therefore, can never get to the bottom of anything. It supports all the talk of never being able to escape, of always being culturally embedded, and S9 on. Axiom II supplies the reason for the

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ultimacy of contingent history. It converts Axiom I from a generalization to a universal truth-claim and gives it the conceptual power to propose renovating the idea of philosophy by the unqualified rejection of First Philosophy's ideals. The doctrinal strength of philosophical historicism needs to be emphasized. It is more than the claim that inquiry is forever provisional and that human knowers are always operating with presuppositions furnished them by a history of which they are largely unaware. It is the claim that inquiry must be provisional, that understanding cannot in essence be perfectly lucid, because the actuality of human reason is historicistically finite. By "actuality" I mean the whole complex of the constitutive and procedural conlponents of reason's operation. That philosophical historicism comprehends this totality is what gives it philosophical bite. Historicism gains its foothold as a critique of reason with the assumption that human understanding is an activity. The suspicion of historical consciousness in general is that human existence as a whole is in some sense historical, and so thinking TIlust be too. The principal inference of philosophical historicism thus runs from contingent historical being to finite historical understanding and, in its current form, typically supposes that history's total contingency may be established in advance of inferring reason's necessary finitude. Leaving to one side this criticism for the moment, I see no reason to challenge the claim that thinking is an activity, the distinction between theoria and praxis notwithstanding (they are types of activity). More important here is that activity is not ontologically primitive, for it is a complex of the constitutive and procedural, the ontic and ontological. The activity of inquiry is outwardly a series of steps that are to various degrees at the command of the inquirer and may therefore in a certain sense be thought of as the inquirer's deeds. On the other hand, the activity of inquiry presupposes a complex set of activating conditions, many of which are beyond the power of the inquirer's immediate agency. The scope of philosophical historicism's limitative thesis is therefore radical, for it claims historical differentiation of the entire motion of reason as it moves from any of its potencies to its acts. The foregoing remarks all elaborate on the theme of radical provisionality. This is equivalent to the unqualified rejection of being able to realize any instance of noetic primacy, universality, or comprehensiveness. Yet why is it "historicism" that encodes the thesis of radical provisionality and not "temporalism" or "Herakleiteanism"?


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The answer lies in historicism's philosophical ambition to be the correct way to philosophize, to realize genuinely critical self-consciousness, to be free of all small-mindedness. This ambition underlies the appearqnce of the one word "justify" in the first of philosophical historicism's axioms, the word intended as a placeholder for all the tacit aims of critical self-consciousness. Even Rorty talks of "making admirable sense of our lives," despite his denying the value of doing so in traditionally theoretical terms. He thus accepts a general notion of justification while specifying it in unorthodox fashion. All that is needed for a general notion of justification is acknowledgment of the difference between better and worse in relation to ideas and practices, speeches and deeds, sciences and selves. Justification in this broad sense implies that we can tell such differences and that there is therefore a point to discriminating between them in actual cases. Reason might even be defined as the power to tell fitting differences. In light of historicism's thesis of radical provisionality, the desire to make sense, to discriminate between better and worse, raises an evident problem: how to avoid arbitrariness. That is, if all forms of human understanding, the whole apparatus, is inevitably adrift, constantly open to being replaced in all respects with the new and different, how can our parochial assessments of truth and goodness command any loyalty or confidence at all? How can we make sense of the urge to discriminate differences, if difference is all there is? The force of this question explains why historicism is called historicism, why history rather than time is the favored context. Historicism implicitly rejoins that difference is not quite all there is. History is not so evanescent as time or pure flux, and so it holds out some hope of lending stability to hun1an inquiry where relativity to nothing else but temporal flow would imply noetic chaos. Philosophical historicism is not by instinct an omnivorously skeptical doctrine; it is merely skeptical about First Philosophy's style of philosophizing. Thus, while denying that any final discrimination of better and worse can be made, it seeks from out of historical tin1e ways in which judgment might be given an interim justification. This involves redefining the meanings of objectivity and critical evaluation in terms of the relative stability of historically established practices. In tandem with radical provisionality, then, is the supposition of interim stability. Historicity may doom us to parochiality, yet it does not reduce our lives or our thoughts to chaos. Philosophical historicism also maintains that the hope for a perfect consolation in eternity may safely be replaced by a more accessible set of local comforts. The appeal to

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interim stability is reinforced by the impression that in keeping to tradition and what has been hammered out in the course of intellectual history one may avoid the fatuous abstractions of rationalistic, transcendental thinking. One is led to believe that philosophical historicism is , really a liberation from the enchantments, the naivete, the tyrannies of eternity and the absolute, that it allows us to give proper attention to the here and now, to what is concrete and effective, to the things of genuinely hun1an scale in which our lives are evidently, though not obviously wholly, enmeshed. The temper of this assurance varies with each writer. Rorty recommends playful irony. It is cowardly or foolish to expect that history command absolute loyalty. Nonetheless, playfully unweaving and reweaving the webs of history makes for an interesting enough pastime. Gadamer is more wistful. There is something undeniably attractive about the old ideals, but sadly they are beyond mortal reach. Margolis is Sisyphean in his willingness absurdly to labor on, somehow guided by the possibility of universal knowledge yet somehow also knowing that it represents an unrealizable ideal. Common to all is the desire to make sense of things, and an acknowledgment that one must be able to tell a relatively stable difference between better and worse, if talk is not to degenerate into jabber. The assertion of interim stability shows that philosophical historicism remains guided by the traditional hope of realizing intellectual virtue, of managing as well as possible the powers of the mind as it deals with the alleged contingency of its circumstance and all the conditions of its operation. This virtue may be called the perfection of reasonableness. As reassuring as it may be to hear that philosophical historicism does not intend to be nihilistic, the lady doth protest too much. For all their confidence in the crusade against First Philosophy, philosophical historicists have a troubled conscience. They know that the question of arbitrariness betrays an imperfect logical equilibrium in the tandem thesis of radical provisionality and interim stability, a disequilibrium caused by conflict between the desire to tell differences and the thesis of telling's total differentiation by history. Trying to discriminate better and worse opinions by appeal to the contingent history of other opinions begins to seem about as absurd as Baron von Munchausen's trick of pulling himself out of the sea by his own ponytail. One can appreciate the honesty of Gadamer's asking "Does what has always supported us need to be grounded?" (TM xxxvii), yet a simple no is not an available answer. Such an answer would have to be in bad faith because the


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integrities of human life, even when praiseworthy, are not self-justifying and certainly not self-illuminating. Philosophy always knows this. If we are to rely on what has always supported us, the philosophical desire for reasonableness still demands that we understand what sense there is, or could possibly be, in any such reliance. One might not want to call this a matter of "grounds" or "justification," but whatever one calls it, it is certainly an attempt at philosophical account-giving.

CHAPTER THREE

DIALECTICAL DIFFICULTIES: NIHILISM AND SELF-REFUTATION

The doctrine of philosophical historicism is not an empirical thesis but a comprehensive, a priori account of the limits of human understanding. As a priori it is, like all philosophy, a reading of human experience that goes beyond the latter's a posteriori surfaces. Its dialectical confrontation with the alternative of First Philosophy raises the question of its coherence as an interpretative picture of those superficial and agreedupon details. In the previous chapter, I laid out the reading itself, Le., what philosophical historicism says about reason's actuality. This chapter shows the respects in which historicism has to be a misreading of reason's appearances. Misreadings might in the larger human context be either good or bad, depending on one's view of the relationship between truth-telling and the appropriate ends of human belief. Yet a misreading does not become any the less a misreading for its being useful or in some other sense good to picture to oneself. Regardless of what nontheoretical ends its interpretative picturing might be used to serve, philosophical historicism remains in itself an account, a logos, an articulation of how things might

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actually be. To be willing to talk at all about the inevitable parochiality of reason is to be willing to talk about the true situation of human understanding. By as little as hinting that someone else has the wrong picture, regardless of how one interprets the limits of legitimate assertion and justification, one has accepted the difference between better and worse accounts, as well as the obligation to discriminate between them. Conciliatory pragmatists and hermeneuticists like Gadamer are forthright in putting historicism forward as their own truth-claim. If they did not think of it as a truth-claim opposed to and legitimately overriding First Philosophy, their pragmatic doctrines would demand that they accept the tradition of First Philosophy, whose prodigal and parricidal heirs they happen to be. Rorty has a different attitude to speeches that sound as if they are supposed to be saying things, but his "ironic historicism not only remains committed to a hidden truth - namely, the esoteric wisdoll1 that justifies indifference to truth-telling-it is also parasitic on the assumption, common to ll10St of his readers, that at least some utterances are designed to reveal truths. Rorty mentions rather than uses philosophical historicism, but his reasons for merely mentioning it do not render its status as a truth-claim unintelligible. To do that he would have to show that the very idea of truth-telling, i.e., predication, is senseless for human beings and that talk is really something else altogether. Aristotle's refutation of the last idea remains definitive: its proponent could only be a vegetable, in other words, someone incapable of appreciating the phenomena associated with sentient, human life (Metaphysics

4.1006a15 ). Philosophical historicism is a logos of how it might be with human understanding. To raise the question of its coherence is to raise the question of its logical responsibility, of how well it accords with the requirements of philosophical account-giving. All logoi aim at some truth -minimally, that something is so. Discriminating judgment aims at understanding why things are so and not otherwise. It aims at the relation between ground and phenomenon. Such judgment is as necessary for sound practical deliberation as it is for valid theoretical science. Philosophical logoi are distinguished by their aiming at the most primary discriminations available to human beings. Our general experience in the articulation of discriminating judgment, whether final or not, yields the following basic requirements for logical responsibility: (1) consistency, since nonchalance about contradiction destroys the web of discrimination on which any account as a telling of

Dialectical Difficulties: Nihilism and Self-Refutation

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differences must rest, (2) nonarbitrariness of reasons, since accounts are intended to illuminate the real conditions of the phenomena for which they account, and (3) critical self-reflection, since the way of accounting in all philosophical accounts is itself accountable, in the sense that it must visibly be a good way of accounting. (For detailed elaboration of the last two points, see the beginning of the section entitled "AccountGiving, Arbitrariness, and the Forms of Inquiry" below.) The third requirement encon1passes the first two and may be present to varying degrees of lucidity. All forms of discriminating judgment nonetheless presuppose standards for their justification, regardless of how easily or not they might be upset by further reflection. Logical responsibility in the sense just sketched is a minimal constraint on truth-telling. It entails no immediate commitment one way or another to the realizability of First Philosophy's noetic ideals, though it does acknowledge the fundamental principle of reasoned discrimination. To give up the latter principle is to give up the meaningfulness of truth-telling. Like all critiques of reason, philosophical historicism is an unusual reading of human experience because it is a reading of the conditions of reading itself. It tries to make sense of making sense, and as philosophical it tries to make the best sense of making sense. Philosophical historicists have been confident in the reasonableness of their own critical efforts to be as reasonable as possible about reason, but they have been challenged on how well their doctrine coheres with either their own cognitive deeds or their own critical intent. The question is whether philosophical historicism, as much as it seems to n1ake sense of a lot of other things, does not somehow make nonsense of itself. The charge of incoherence has taken two main forms: that philosophical historicism is (1) self-refuting and (2) nihilistic. 1 Strongly limitative theses of all descriptions have been accused in various ways of refuting themselves, so it is no surprise to find the same point being made against philosophical historicism. There is still no clea.r consensus on the precise structure and consequences of arguments by self-refutation, but the vague form of misgiving as it relates to historicism is not difficult to state. The challenge is whether there is not some destructive inconsistency between insight's thoroughly contingent conditions and the historicist's own insight that understanding is inevi.. tably so conditioned. If every insight is randomly open to replacement, how can historicism be in a position knowingly to describe insight's situation? To state philosophical historicism as if it were known to be

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simply true seems to exceed the limits its own thesis sets for human understanding. The charge of self-refutation is coordinate with the thesis of radical provisionality. The nihilism charge parallels the thesis of interim stability, deriving from the problem of arbitrariness raised at the end of the last chapter. In a pure, doctrinal form nihilism means that definitively sorting out true and false, better and worse, worthwhile and frivolous, etc., is at least hopeless, maybe inlpossible, and therefore silly. Formally speaking, nihilism is not caring to discriminate. Insofar as philosophy is the resolve not to be careless in this way, pure nihilism and the idea of philosophy contradict one another. Nevertheless, philosophical positions can themselves be nihilistic, not because they choose to be careless about discrimination but because they are unable, in principle, to make sense of the possibility of discrimination, unable to prevent the inference that by their own lights everything is permitted, that no one speech is any better than another, that anything goes and therefore nothing counts. Some philosophical historicists have ignored the challenge of nihilism on the grounds of its not being their intent, contrasting themselves on this score with the likes of Paul Feyerabend or Nelson Goodman who seem cheerful about their noetic anarchism. Yet the hope of avoiding nihilism or arbitrariness with the appeal to interim stability is not equivalent to the deed. Good intentions are no rejoinder to logical consequences, even if the notion of logical consequence happens to be reinterpreted in specifically historicist terms. The general standards of logical responsibility entailed by the desire to make sense of things always override random opinions and wishful thinking. Nihilism is not the accusation that philosophical historicisnl does not care to discriminate better from worse opinions, it is the accusation that philosophical historicism cannot sustain the very discriminations it was all along designed to illuminate. This chapter initiates my systematic criticism of philosophical historicism. The peculiar difficulty of any such move is that philosophical historicism describes conditions of judgment which, if true, would require revising the very meaning of criticism. As Margolis put it, "we alter our conception of the Kantian quaestio juris when we historicize inquiry; in fact, we alter the very conception of rationality" (PWF 49). One must therefore be especially careful not to beg the question in favor of nonhistoricist alternatives. The clash between First Philosophy and philosophical historicism is a gigantomachy, a battle of giants, and it is


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the latest version of the age-old clash between the "friends of the forms" and those who would reduce everything to flux (Sophist 246a). To call it a battle of giants means that there is no larger principle, no independent referee with sufficient stature to arbitrate the dispute. But this is not to say that there is no way of making a comparison. The fight, after all, is about something and takes place within the arena of the human effort to make sense of things. A philosophical gigantoDlachy nleans that the standards of comparison must be found from within the battle itself.

THE UNIVERSAL IDIOM OF THE HISTORICIST SCENARIO In response to the puzzle of what sorts of holds may justly be laid upon doctrines of gigantic proportions, one long-standing strategy has been to raise the question of self-reflexive consistency. For a comprehensive philosophical position that seeks to damn other positions, it seems fair to ask whether it might not unwittingly damn and thus somehow disqualify itself as a serious philosophical view. The maneuver is perhaps best known to contemporary philosophers through its appearance in Plato's Theaetetus, where Socrates attempts to refute the doctrine of Protagoras, that "man is the measure of all things etc.," from out of the sophist's own mouth ( 171a-c). Aristotle argues in a similar nlanner against those who would deny the principle of noncontradiction (Metaphysics 4.1008a28-30; l012b13-18). By the time Sextus Empiricus appeals to the strategy in rejoinder to arguments of the Skeptics, it has acquired the technical title of peritrope, or "turning the tables," and has become a standard Stoic debating weapon. Sextus indicates that his original sources were not only Plato but Democritus as wel1. 2 The objection is dialectically attractive because it seems to run the least risk of begging the question against its comprehensive opponents by applying nothing but the challenged doctrine-plus a little logic-to the doctrine itself. The logic needed is not usually remarked upon by those polemically seeking the destruction of relativist views, but I have given my justification of appeal to consistency, nonarbitrariness, and critical self-reflection in the account of logical responsibility. Can the tables be turned in such a way on philosophical historicism? Unlike some of the sweepingly skeptical positions against which the counterargument of self-refutation has often been ranged, philosophical

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historicism makes strong, specific claims of its own about the character of human inquiry and understanding. These claims commit historicism to what I shall call the idiom ofuniversality. It is committed on two main counts. First, philosophical historicism is consistent with and embraces universality as a cognitive ideal. Recall Margolis's testimony on this score: "inquiry need not abandon the search for universal regularities; indeed, it cannot" (PWF 48), and "we press on in the direction of closure and invariance and universality" (TWR 371). Universality is for philosophical historicism a regulative ideal. Historicism does not deny its intelligibility, but only its full accessibility to human knowers teased by the hope of converting their undisciplined impressions of general salience into knowledge of universal law. Second, universality appears not only in the domain to which philosophical historicism applies, but also in the statement of the doctrine itself. Historicism asserts that all forms of human judgment will always be situated within and determined by an essentially contingent framework and that no form of human judgment can in principle transcend that contingent situatedness in any final way. There is nothing parochial about the idea that human thought is always bounded; there is nothing parochial about the idea that the bounds of human understanding are in the nature of the case contingent; and there is nothing parochial about the idea that human understanding cannot in principle be anything but parochial. Considered as a judgment, historicism's content-the truth it would depict-cannot but be universal. Gadamer is forthright: "if the principle of effective history is made into a universal element in the structure of understanding, then this thesis undoubtedly implies no historical relativity, but seeks absolute validity" ( TM xxxiii). Margolis is a little more indirect: "The human condition is such that all claims of universal invariances are problematic in a sense in which general claims are not" (PWF 41, emphasis added). The following point is crucial: although committed to picturing a universal condition, philosophical historicism is not by this fact alone committed to claiming full knowledge of the truth it describes in universal terms, for in any human judgment the same truth may be asserted with varying degrees of cognitive assurance. Judgments (or propositioI}.s) may be analyzed into the components of content and assertion: the content is what is asserted to be true, the assertion is the judging of the content as true. "This separation of the act from the subject matter of


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judgement seems to be indispensable; for otherwise we could not express a nlere supposition."3 The same content may thus be the subject of a "mere supposition," a hunch, an inspired guess, a conjecture, considered opinion, a well-confirmed hypothesis, virtual certainty, or fully justified knowledge. Each of these is put forward with a different degree of confidence in the assertibility of its associated content. Pure entertainment of a content would be something like fantasy or daydreaming, though even these conditions are experienced as snaring our credulity to some degree. Historicism allows, indeed trades on, at least this much, that the situation of human reason permits the intelligibility of a universal picture without its haVing to be actually known. Call philosophical historicism's universal picture of humanity's cognitive situation the historicist scenario. The distinction between the historicist scenario and human knowledge of the scenario in its universality sets the stage for adequate appreciation of the debate over self-refutation. The qualification "in its universality" is necessary because universals can be partially confirmed on historicistic principles, just as single clues can make hunches more plausible. Universals cannot, however, be known as universals. I make three initial observations. That the historicist scenario must be articulated in a universal idiom is no contradiction of its denying to human beings the possibility of universal knowledge. "There is no universal (ahistorical) knowledge for human beings" might be the judgment of a god, for example. Less fanciful is that there is nothing logically peculiar about the analogous claim that "there is no self-consciously justified knowledge for nonrational beings"- nothing peculiar, that is, unless the rocks, trees, and brutes should start announcing that they knew it to be true of themselves. In the latter case, not the judgment's content (which we rational beings can coherently picture to ourselves) but the self-applying assertion of the content by nonrational creatures generates the misgivings that suggest self-refutational incoherence. The same sort of self-application will be the focus of philosophical historicism's self-refutation: what could it mean for human knowers to judge the scenario true of themselves? The meaning of historicism's alleged self-refutation turns on the sort of epistemological self-application just sketched, on applying a scenario presumed to be intelligible in its content to the particular circumstances of its being asserted. Some judgments can be said to refute themselves without this particular sort of self-application, either through being

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nleaningless, which is to be incapable of being true or false, or through having self-contradictory content, which amounts to being unable to be true, Le., logically or necessarily false. In contrast, the sort of selfcontradiction being sought by the self-refutation argument is an inconsistency between the content and the conditions of its assertion, not so llluch an inconsistency in the ideas of the content itself. Historicislll is accused of being epistemic or doxastic nonsense rather than semantic or logical nonsense (where "logical" here is understood in the narrow terms of propositional content). It follows that saving historicism from logical self-contradiction, frolll being made out to be necessarily false, does not guarantee avoiding the charge of self-refutation. When the incoherence in question is epistemic, some self-refuting judglllents have the logical dignity of being meaningful, formally consistent, and contingently false while still suffering from the deficiency of being unassertible ("I am unconscious," for example ).4 The difference between what might be universally true and what might be known to be universally true helps explain why historicists are commonly so insouciant about the formal charge of self-refutation. They trade on the fancy that, even if unknowable in its universality by the ordinary cognitive powers of hUlllan beings, historicism nonetheless describes the true cognitive situation in which human judgment must operate. Philosophical historicism, so the historicist will insist, is the most rationally defensible account of our limited cognitive situation, and if we cannot know the truth of that situation universally or for certain, then so much the worse for certainty and for realizing the cognitive ideal of universality. In such a benighted condition as historicism describes, it should hardly be surprising that insight does not and sometimes cannot match suspicion. But this is simply to reproduce the internal consistency of the historicist scenario. It still remains to consider how or whether the scenario is consistent with its being asserted by the same subjects it is supposed to describe. No doubt there is something awkward about philosophical historicism's several appeals to universality. Its thesis denies human cognitive access to universals as universals, yet (human) historicists forsake neither the intelligibility of pursuing inquiry in the light cast by a hope for knowledge of universal invariances, nor the assertibility of their own universal thesis. Moreover, philosophical historicism is typically asserted with the greatest possible confidence that its principles deserve to regulate all inquiry and ought to overrule all the traditional claims of nonhistoricist


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philosophy. This confidence now becomes the focal point of the selfrefutation argument: if the scenario is correct but human beings cannot in principle know it to be true of themselves, what can it mean for human beings nonetheless to assert its truth with maximum epistemic confidence? What limits, if any, does the condition of finite historicity impose on historicisn1's assertibility, on its claim to be insightful, to be more than a daydream, to be worth saying? What degrees of assertibility would the truth of the historicist scenario contradict? The questions are deliberately tentative because, as indicated above, there is a continuum of different and meaningful ways for the same content to be asserted by hun1an knowers. One type of assertion is definitively ruled out by the historicist scenario. According to historicism, the grounds for justifying any judgment are the unqualifiedly contingent practices of the community of inquirers and agents that are historically developed in the course of their figuring out both themselves and how to get about in their world or worlds. All the potential supports for a knowledge of universal invariance available to the natural resources of human knowers are themselves either ineradicably contingent or unavoidably open to revision and unable to guarantee their own constancy. No universal content can thus be known in its universality, and so the historicistic justification of any universal judgment in its universality is in1possible. Applied to itself, the truth pictured by historicism prevents its ever being justified to the level of universality by human knowers. It rules out full knowledge of its own hypothesized content. In order to be in a position to know that historicism is the correct doctrine of human understanding, one would have had to have performed a cognitive feat that is ruled out by the thesis itself. Is there any inconsistency here? There would be outright selfcontradiction, only if historicism should clain1 that the condition of finite historicity is known in its universality by way of cognitive powers circumscribed by exactly that finitude. As it happens, one can find historicistically committed philosophers misspeaking themselves in just this way. Margolis's otherwise exemplary sobriety deserts him when he asserts that "in whatever reg~rd we suppose we can be critical within the pale of linguistic damnation, we can 'suspiciously' toil on linguistically as before, knowing full well that all our appraisals and reforms obtain 'east of Eden' " (SWU 365, emphasis added). A stray remark by Thomas Nagel n1akes a sin1ilar mistake.

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Philosophy, he says, "is after eternal and nonlocal truth, even though we know that is not what we are going to get."5 These are indeed bad self-contradictions, since the historicist is claiming to possess a level of insight that his own thesis makes impossible. As purely formal considerations show, "it is ahistorically known that there is no ahistorical knowledge" is definitively self-refuting regardless of who asserts it, for the compound proposition logically entails both that there is ahistorical knowledge and that there is not. Note that only the complex form is self-refuting, not the embedded proposition "there is no ahistorical knowledge," which encodes the historicist scenario. 6 Such examples notwithstanding, blatant self·contradictions of the form "it is ahistorically known that there is no historical knowledge" are merely infelicitous. They do not mean that the scenario itself is unintelligible. It is merely unintelligible that human beings, if the scenario be true of them, should know it be so in its universality. There is no need to assert philosophical historicism in such an absolutely self-refuting way, especially given that its evident thrust is toward revising the standards of epistemic success. More carefully done, the formal application of the historicist scenario to the occasion of its assertion yields only the very weak claim that "it cannot be ahistorically known by human beings that there is no ahistorical knowledge for human beings." This self-applicational schema entails no contradiction. All it does is formulate an entailment of the original denial and apply the former to the latter. On the other hand, the universal idiom of this entailment, hidden in the "cannot," demands explicit schematization if the full, concrete force of doctrine is to be formulated. Philosophical historicism is also committed to the following: "it is supposed by human beings as ahistorically (universally) true that there is no ahistorical (universal) knowledge for human beings." As a self-applicational schema, even this stronger version does not generate a contradiction, peculiar as it may seem for human beings to formulate it. Self-application entails the following constraint: if the historicist scenario is correct, then its full truth would at best be accessible to human beings only via a leap of faith or fancy. This does not mean that there are no grounds from which to jump. Historicists have their reasons for supposing the correctness of their finitistic picture of human reason, but once the challenge of self-refutation has been issued, the historicist


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cannot make the stronger claim of knowing the scenario in its universality. Taking its universal content at face value, historicism entails that justification to the level of universality is for human beings in all cases impossible. Given self-application, philosophical historicists are therefore logically prevented from asserting the complete truth of their doctrine as known in its universality. In this strict sense they cannot ever establish all that historicism means, even if they should go on to revise the standards of what is to count as valid knowledge. The best that is available to the historicist is the undischargeable hypothesis of reason's inevitable parochiality, since the inevitability built into the historicist scenario is beyond all possible historicist definitions of warranted belief. None of this is obviously incoherent in the ways that are associated with the more spectacular cases of self-refutation. Perhaps the worst that could be said is that historicists are mystics in the sense that they believe in a picture whose most essential details they are also convinced must renlain opaque to them. Whether one finds this odd or fitting-and historicists are often attracted to the humility and tolerance they think it induces-there is as yet no obvious reason to suppose such mysticism mistaken. The challenge of self-refutation was whether it could mean anything for human beings to assert the strongly limitative scenario of philosophical historicism. One meaning has been ruled out, that it could be asserted as universal knowledge. This result puts the assertion of historicism on all fours with everything from blind guesses to- empirically well-confirmed scientific hypotheses, at least until some account be given of how historicism can maintain an appropriately stable and reliable discrimination of better opinions from worse opinions. Whether philosophical historicism can make good on this demand is the crux of the second main challenge to historicism's coherence, the charge of nihilism. Before I turn to· the topics of nihilism and arbitrariness, two issues remain to be addressed concerning self-refutation. First, historicists themselves have made certain immediate responses to the unalloyed challenge of self-refutation, responses that reveal in greater detail the weakness of the self-refutation argument as usually understood. Second, I shall present another, somewhat unorthodox version of the self-refutation argument that I take to be both conclusive and valid independently of the nihilism critique.

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PRESERVING CRITICAL AUTHORITY? Historicism does not contradict itself by being a straightforward counterinstance to its own thesis. Nor does application of the historicist scenario to the occasion of its assertion force the historicist to claim a level of insight that the scenario rules out. Nonetheless, the original qualms about historicism's coherence as a philosophical logos remain incompletely allayed, since historicism poses and has to pose as a comprehensive critique capable of overruling First Philosophy and guiding the employment of reason in its most primary of endeavors, even while denying actual human knowledge of universal truths. In other words, even if the historicist scenario cannot be known in its universality, it ought nonetheless to be assertible with the maximum cognitive assuranee available to historically bound human beings. Only thus can it seek to govern the entire rational domain and negate all other pretenders to that seat. Some historicists have felt this philosophical pea quite acutely through the insulation of their historical mattresses. Their response has been to seek ways of maintaining, as far as historicist principles allow, a modified epistemic link to the universality encoded into the historicist scenario, since universality remains, albeit ideally, a touchstone of philosophical and critical authority. Two strategies have emerged: either (1) exempt the second-order historicist insight fron1 the conditions primarily applicable to first-order judgments, allowing it to stand as the one and only ahistorical insight available to human beings, or (2) show that the universalized historicist scenario can nonetheless become a legitimate cognitive possession of human knowers without violating historicistic constraints. The third logical possibility for preserving historicism's critical authority-( 3) show how epistemic assurance to the level of universality is not really necessary for historicism's critical, philosophical purposes-cannot be treated independently of the nihilism argument and will be addressed later. The first strategy claims outright or pure self-exemption of the historicist insight from the reach of universal historicity. In effect, it denies the legitimacy of self-application. In contrast, the second strategy admits self-application and global historicistic constraints on all the ordinary powers of hun1an understanding, yet attempts to establish unqualified knowledge of universal historicity nonetheless. To do so it must exploit the difference between the minimal statement of self-applied historicism, "Human beings cannot ahistorically know that there is no ahistorical


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knowledge for human beings," and the stronger version, "It is supposed by human beings to be ahistorically true that there is no ahistorical knowledge for human beings." That is, it must find a way of historical knowing, a level of insight commensurable with historicistic horizons, that allows cognitive possession of historicism in its universality, without having to admit the cognition of universals as a natural, all-time power in human beings. Mitigated Historicism The strategy of pure self-exemption denies that the historicist scenario must be applied to the special situation of judging it to be true. As a dialectical response, the compromise is plain. One wins the intelligibility of asserting, with the highest degree of epistemic confidence, a qualified form -call it "mitigated historicism"-at the cost of diluting the philosophical strength of a totalized theory. This raises a question: exactly how badly does pure self-exemption compromise what the historicist usually hopes for by making the presumption in favor of totalization? My answer is: not as badly as is often thought, but mitigated historicism still turns out to be useless as a vindication of historicism's critical authority over First Philosophy. For an account of mitigated historicism, I draw on two sources: Jack Meiland's notion of "qualified relativism" and David Carr's development of a "partial historicism," elaborated in response to Husserl's later thought. 7 Charles Guignon's suggestion of a "transcendental historicism" as an initial though ultimately abandoned step toward preserving the integrity of Heidegger's project in Being and Time should also be mentioned as belonging to the same family.8 For present purposes, Guignon's version of mitigated historicism adds nothing to what I shall glean from Meiland and Carr. Also, Heidegger's historicism in Being and Time has a much more important and detailed role to play in the following chapter. Meiland describes "qualified relativism" as the view that "no position except relativism is objectively true" ("peR" 119). He does not espouse the view himself, but he maintains that while ad hoc it is nonetheless; and contrary to a common assumption, formally coherent. Meiland then argues that philosophical integrity demands an objective, as distinct from merely eristic, reason for supposing that knowledge of the relativistic condition escapes the factors that relativize all other knowledge. Furthermore, in light of relativism's critical intention to rule out absolutist

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alternatives, it is also obliged to consider whether knowledge of the relativistic condition is not the only instance of knowledge that so escapes. Meiland does not discuss the second point in any detail, and it will be dealt with in my treatment of Carr's "partial historicism." Meiland's first point, however, brings to the forefront the question of what obliges philosophical theory to seek totalization. As a meta-reflection (and this goes for all meta-reflections, including historicism), relativism might with initial plausibility be exempted from at least some of the conditions determining reason's extroverted operation on the grounds that the conditions of reflection are distinguishable fronl the conditions of experience and that the objectivity ainled for .in self-knowledge is different in kind from the objectivity aimed for in knowledge of the world. Even if sustainable, such a move seems to compromise the most fundamental philosophical interest of relativism, namely "to be a unified and universal theory of intellectual activity" ("PCR" 119). Exempting relativism outright "breaks the alleged connection between relativizing factors ... and all intellectual thought" ("PCR" 119). According to Meiland, then, relativism is only interesting on the condition of its presuming totalization. Given the apparent difference between first-order and reflective levels of cognition, it is not immediately obvious what the compromise an10unts to. Certainly this much is clear: relativism loses its interest if it ceases to be an account of reason and judgment as such, Le., if it ceases to be ontological through and through. Although Meiland does not express himself this way, what makes the relativist position philosophical is the underlying metaphysical assumption that the activity of human consciousness is the activity of a single power, complex in its structure and elements though it may be. Thus, even if the structural complexity of human consciousness allows the distinction between experience and reflection (the most ontologically sophisticated version of which remains Hegel's doctrine of consciousness an sich andfiir sich), such a complex nonetheless works in concert, and it is from claiming to have described the nature of that single, evidently articulated power that philosophical doctrines of understanding derive their substance. This is the metaphysical ground for the presumption in favor of totalization, and thus for supposing in the particular case of philosophical historicism that finite historicity ought to be relevant wholesale to human intelligence. Yet the legitimate philosophical demand for a unified theory of consciousness does not necessarily result in a formal, homogeneous totalization


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of the sort Meiland envisages. Meiland supposes that a dualistic theory of the intellect is ipso facto inadequate; he prefers what he calls a "complete" theory, meaning that relativization must unqualifiedly obtain across the noetic board. But there is nothing intrinsically problematic or even inelegant about a two-tiered theory of understanding. Such a theory becomes problematic only if dualism means that there is no way of explaining how the two parts are related. To be sure, relativism is censurably ad hoc if it arbitrarily alleges relativization at the level of experience and absolute insight at the level of self-reflection with no account of why the twofold exists or how it is constructed. Yet such potential inadequacy does not condemn the distinction itself, for it is not as if unities are condemned to having no parts. Duality itself is not the problen1. The problem is that relativism below and absolutism above make it harder to tell the story of reason's unity and, therefore, how historicity relates to reason as whole. There is no a priori reason to suppose that this story cannot be told, whether by relativists or others, and every historically significant story told so far has acknowledged in some form or other the phenomenon of a difference between consciousness and self-consciousness. The charge that pure self-exemption must compromise relativisn1's philosophical and critical integrity is therefore inconclusive, since the question of the unity of consciousness cannot be settled on formal grounds alone. l\ point similar to Meiland's was made some tin1e ago by Maurice Mandelbaum when he coined "the self-excepting fallacy" to describe the tendency of comprehensive epistemological theories to overlook their possibly embarrassing self-applicational consequences. 9 In calling it a fallacy, Mandelbaum, incorrectly, made it sound as if there could be no possible grounds for self-exemption, but his main idea was to defend and establish the philosophical presun1ption in favor of totalization. That is, any exemption must be objectively well motivated, well grounded in the phenomena being accounted for. Given philosophy's ontological and a priori impulse, it is indeed a philosophical vice for a doctrine arbitrarily to exempt itself from the scope of its thesis (which is not a necessary consequence of inadvertently doing so), or to exempt itself for no other reason than to avoid self-contradiction. Such inferences may reasonably be called fallacious. The option of justified self-exemption, however, is not thereby ruled out. It is well to appreciate this inconclusiveness in light of how strongly historicists typically endorse the presumption in favor of totalization,

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as if there could be no possible reason for qualifying it. Margolis, for example, is trenchant. Finite historicity casts its shadow over all the operations of reason (PWF 40), and failure to appreciate the pall it throws over the assertion of historicity itself is outright naivete. "In calling into question the valid fixity or cognitive transparency or eternalizing interpretation of any human representation of the world, ... Heidegger should have grasped the reflexive import of this very insight on his own phenomenological claims" (PWF 191). Margolis's complaint is not that Heidegger therefore talks nonsense, but that he talks from a position he has no right to assun1e, given totalized historicity. Yet only if the latter were known to be true would one be obliged to give up privilege altogether. As things stand, the difficulties of self-application might just as easily persuade one to give up totalizing the principle of historicity. There is no logical contradiction in supposing that the correct ontology of human reason might exempt reflexive self-consciousness from first-order historicization, and as ontological it would still preserve the desirable traits of universality and comprehensiveness. On the other hand, such a sophisticated account of the complex unity of consciousness would, in light of that complex unity, also be obliged to work out the meaning of first-order historicization anew. This is the metaphysical version of Meiland's second formal problem: what else might escape historicization if one exempts the insight into historicity? Carr's notion of ""partial historicism" addresses this difficulty in concrete terms, taking more seriously than Meiland did the grounds for giving up the presumption in favor of totalization. Carr discerns ""two levels of Husserl's newly acquired 'historical consciousness'" (PPH 240), one that accepts the manner in which historical prejudice can determine the ontic operation of human judgment as it reflects with scientific sophistication upon the givens of the Lebensu'elt, and the other that worries about the manner in which historical sedimentation seems to determine the order of experience at the level of the Lebenswelt itself. These two levels correspond, roughly and insofar as phenomenology allows it at all, to distinctions I have already made in terms of procedural versus constitutive considerations, ontic versus ontological ones. It is the ontological version of historicity that generates totalized historicism, wherein "what gets relativized according to this view is the structure of world-givenness as such" (PPH 249), since it is the ontological version that conceives of historicity as "a feature of transcendental subjectivity itself' (PPH 247).


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With historicity proposed as a category for describing the nature of human reality, Carr is quick to point out that this much commits philosophical historicism to universality. It "claims to state the essence of subjectivity purely as subjectivity" (PPH 248). He goes on to argue, via appeal to self-application, that historicism must therefore be selfrefuting. "The historicist position could only be supported by appeals to a theory of consciousness which is not itself subject to the major stricture of historicism. Only by asserting that consciousness is essentially-and thus ahistorically-characterized by historicity can the historicist give any substance to his view" (PPH 260). I have already explained how the idiom of universality and the denial that human beings can have universal knowledge are not incompatible, so I do not agree that refutation is reached at this stage. What Carr means by "supporting" and "giving substance" does not fully appreciate Margolis's point that "when we historicize inquiry ... we alter the very conception of rationality" (PWF 49). On the other hand, historicism is still obliged to say something about the tension between its critical intent and the universal scenario of finite historicity from which it draws its strength. It is here that Carr proposes the mitigated thesis of partial historicism as a possible way around the incongruity. Partial historicism is the view that historicity determines the whole structure of world-givenness, yet without preventing ahistorical knowledge of the historicistic condition of human consciousness. The domain of transcendental self-reflection is thus somehow exempt. Carr foresees the same two problems noted by Meiland, that the strategy seems ad hoc and that it is not clear what other forms of universal knowledge might not be exempt, in addition to knowledge of reason's historicity. The first criticism is, as I have already shown, inconclusive. The second challenge reveals the dialectical danger of conceding even one instance of universalism, Le., the cognitive privilege of knowing a universal (in this case historicism itself) both in its universality and through ordinary human powers. The question such a concession immediately raises is whether the unworldly glare of the lumen naturale can be prevented from lighting up much more than historicism's own doctrine, thus inflaming once again the hapless passion for realizing First Philosophy's noetic ideals. Carr gives flesh to the bones of this fear. He argues that exempting \transcendental self-reflection from the scope of radical historicity entails fommitment to conSiderably more knowledge of invariance, i.e., univer____

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sal and absolute knowledge, than the theory of historicity alone. On the basis of the principle of intentionality, he undertakes a brief phenomenological version of Kant's transcendental deduction, with the result that "horizon, space, time, object, event -these seem to be indispensable correlates of a phenomenological theory of consciousness, and they amount to a minimal but still articulate account of the structure of the world-as-experienced" (PPH 255). In other words, grant self-exemption at the most rarefied of transcendental levels, namely consciousness's self-reflexive awareness of itself, and comprehensive first-order historicism seems to disappear as well. Whether Carr's deduction is conclusive or not (and it lacks proof, as did Kant's deduction, that the necessity belongs to anything but the form of human experience), the move alone is enough to show that a distinction between experiential and reflective levels of consciousness is conceptually unstable. It is not a simple nlatter, as the self-exempting historicist might naively suppose, to maintain "'universalism above and historicism below," since the unity of consciousness facilitates the downward propagation of universalism as much as it does the upward totalization of historicism. Carr's argument in the former direction may be swift, but as a general philosophical tactic it has an excellent pedigree, having been the center of gravity for almost all modern philosophy. The Cartesian cogito, Kant's transcendental deductions, Hegel's phenomenology, not to forget Husserl's renewed Cartesian meditations-all depend on exempting the moment of self-reflexivity from. the relativizing ravages of naturalization and then going on to elaborate its justificatory relationship to first-order judgment. Perhaps Descartes, Kant, and Hegel are inconclusive too, but one cannot ignore what their programs stand for. Even if historicists feel justified in leaving it to the history of ideas to have exposed the inadequacy of allegedly past and outmoded positions (a clearly disputable claim), the complete triumph of historicism must be postponed until one can be assured that all possible ways of deducing the structure of actual experience from what is given in self-reflexive awareness must fail. In the absence of such assurance, partial historicisDl-indeed, any form of historicism that acknowledges the phenomenon of self-reflexivity-remains critically crippled, for it has not justifiably ruled out the chance that First Philosophy Dlay yet make good on reconstructing the possibility of absolute knowledge out of the moment of self-consciousness from which all significant speech begins. It has not ~ven reliably ruled out the possibility that this has not already been done.


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In sum, mitigated historicism reneges on the presumption in favor of totalization and the legitimacy of self-application. Yet it does not thereby give up its character as a philosophical account of human understanding. Only if the distinction between reflective and experiential levels of consciousness were made arbitrarily or left as an unmediated dualism would mitigated historicism have compromised the nurture it needs from ontological roots. The maneuver itself, therefore, does not wholly compromise what the historicist in general is seeking from the presumption in favor of totalization. Mitigated historicism cannot be rejected on the grounds that opting for dualism is philosophically unacceptable. In fact, its gambit rests on modernity's own defining philosophical gesture, namely the great Cartesian gambit of privileging the moment of selfreflexivity. On the other hand, mitigated historicism compromises the presumption in favor of totalization to this extent: the metaphysics of experience to which it becomes obliged for making sense of its strategic dualism is very plausibly open to being made out in nonhistoricist terms. This imposes on the historicist the work of showing that all nonhistoricist readings are in principle mistaken. That is, it must work to show its philosophical right to reject universalism elsewhere besides the nloment of self-reflection, which is of course to defend philosophical historicism all over again. Perhaps this can be done, but the strategy of pure self-exemption contributes nothing to the project. Mitigated historicism gets the committed historicist nowhere but back to the beginning, back to the gigantomachy. Historical Revelation Historicism's universal idiom does not prevent its being at least supposed, if not known, by human beings. It is only universalism, the claim that universal knowledge is acc~ssible via the everyday cognitive powers of human beings, that stands as the direct antithesis to philosophical historicism. The second historicist rejoinder maintains that the universal content of the historicist scenario can be known by nonuniversalist means, which is to say that the truth of historicism becomes accessible in ways other than those commonly available to human beings in all times and places. Justifying historicism to the level of universality despite the rejection of universalism is behind Gadamer's barely worked out question: "but is understanding the sole and sufficient access to the reality of history?" (TM xxxv). Gadamer's debate with Leo Strauss over the self-refutation

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of philosophical historicism turns on just this point. 10 Gadamer says that his remarks on self-refutation in the supplement to Truth and Method were prompted by objections from Strauss ("GS" 8). Not long after the appearance of Truth and Method, Strauss had written to Gadamer: "The most comprehensive question which you discuss is indicated by the term 'relativism.' You take 'the relativity of all human values,' of all world views for granted. You realize that this 'relativistic' thesis is itself meant to be 'absolutely and unconditionally true.' It is not clear to me whether you regard the 'logical' difficulty as irrelevant (which I do not) or as not by itself decisive" ("CWM" 7). Strauss's own position is that the threat of formal self-contradiction is relevant but not decisive. In taking Gadamer to task over his apparent indifference to the logic of self-application, Strauss also explains to him why the logical difficulty turns out to be not quite so damning as it might appear: I believe that there is no "logical" difficulty for the following reason. The historical situation to which the universal hermeneutics or the hermeneutic ontology belongs is not a situation like other situations, it is the "absolute moment"-similar to the belonging of Hegel's system to the absolute moment in the historical process. I say similar and not identical. I would speak of a negatively absolute situation: the awakening from Seinsvergessenheit belongs to the Erschiitterung alles Seinden, and what one awakens to is not the final truth in the form of a system but rather a question which can never be fully answered-a level of inquiry and thinking which is meant to be the final level. ("CWM" 7) Philosophical historicism can maintain its strongly limitative thesis by attributing the privilege of establishing its universal content, not to the ordinary powers of human understanding but instead to presence within an extraordinary moment in time or history. "The final and irrevocable insight into the historical character of all thought would transcend history only if that insight were accessible to man as man and hence, in principle, at all times; but it does not transcend history if it essentially belongs to a specific historic situation.... One does not have to transcend history in order to see the historical character of all thought: there is a privileged moment, an absolute moment in the


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historical process, a moment in which the essential character of all thought becomes transparent."ll Gadamer confirms his predilection for this account when he asks: "why, just now, at this precise moment in history, has this fundamental insight into the role of effective history in all understanding become possible?" ( TM xxxiv). Here he supposes not only that he is now in full cognitive possession of the truth of universal historicity, but also that his fortunate position in the history of Western intellectual endeavor has vouchsafed that "insight" (a telling word here). Regardless of their suspicions about privilege, it remains fair to say that historicist writers often convey the sentiment of having reached a special philosophical maturity through cultural history. "We" now know, having the privilege of accumulated historical experience, that ahistorical understanding is at best an idle dream, at worst a recipe for tyranny. Having suffered, "we" have learned. This is the watered-down version of Hegelianism that lies behind the second strategy, just as a straightforward sort of Platonism lay behind the first, both of them seeking to maintain a special relationship to universality. There should be no lllistaking that this sort of appeal to the experience of history (rather than, say, to the experience of a lifetime), combined with a rejection of universalism, commits historicism to a form of revelation. Cognitive access to the universality of the historicist scenario is saved by a deus ex machina, and the particular machine that must be dislllantied in order to assess the ultimate validity of such an appeal is the "process of history" (or the process of evolution) that is pictured as giving rise to the absolute situation, to the privilege of finally having had sufficient experience. The revelation does not have to be understood as mysteriously granted by external agents (although the Seinsgeschichte of the later Heidegger could be interpreted along these lines), but if the second exemption strategy is to have any plausibility, the historicist who opts for it must eventually explain the actual construction of the absolute moment, negative though it be, to which appeal is made. Gadamer is more Hegelian than Heideggerian when it comes to the requirement just noted, having a far more sanguine view of the history of Western philosophy than his teacher, but he does not himself spell out the metaphysics of historicislll's absolute moment. The second self-exemption strategy asks whether we cannot let history do our deepest thinking for us. This was the point of Gadamer's

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asking"Is understanding the sole and sufficient access to the reality of history?" for he was asking about the support historical traditions might lend human understanding. Plausible at first sight perhaps, the hope that history might be shown to construct the absolute moment wherein philosophical historicisnl comes to light nevertheless has an intrinsic weakness that is sufficient to vitiate the second self-exemption strategy altogether. Strauss proposed that the threat of absolute self-refutation in the end poses "no logical difficulty," on the grounds that the dynamics of historicity specified by philosophical historicism leave open the possibility of achieving cognitive finality, with the proviso that this cannot be done by the powers available to man as man (Le., such a cognitive achievement is not in principle available at all times to all rational beings). As a defense of philosophical historicism this only postpones an unavoidable incoherence. Even if history, rather than man, is responsible for preparing the absolute moment, how is it possible to appreciate or recognize the occasion, the revelation of what Strauss called the "negative" absolute? Quite apart from the cOlllplex question of how a particular historical epoch or situation might have become conducive to reception of the historicist thesis, insight or understanding cannot in the nature of the case be given, whether by history or anything else. The universal thesis of philosophical historicism cannot merely be received as a gift, it nllist be appreciated and, in accord with the assumption of this strategy, appreciated in its universality. But this very appreciation of historicism's universal truth (not just its possibility) presupposes the exercise of a power that transcends the boundaries of finite historicity. For the content of historicism to count as an insight rather than supposition, regardless of how one might have come upon it, the understanding that actually comprehends such a universal content, not merely surmising it, cannot be parochial. Obversely, if the historicist scenario were truly the condition of human understanding, then that fact could never be recognized. As Emil Fackenheim once put it: "the reduction to historicity, were it total, could not come to consciousness."12 Hegel already articulated the central idea, that a radically finite power cannot in principle have an actual appreciation of its own boundary conditions, in the course of his analyzing Kant's critical philosophy: "No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limitation or defect, until he is at the same time above and beyond it. Living beings, for example, possess the privilege of pain which is denied


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the inanimate; ... A very little consideration n1ight show that to call a thing finite or limited proves by implication the very presence of the infinite and unlin1ited, and that we can only know a limit when the unlimited is on the side of consciousness."13 According to Hegel, philosophical historicists could, not but be insensitive to the pain of their complete detern1ination by history. Yet historicists never describe this as their experience. In fact, they are proud of what they think of as facing up to their finitude. The second strategy of self-exemption begins in accord with the historicist rejection of universalism - it says that the natural or unaided grasp of universals in their universality is impossible - but it goes on to claim that in a particular time and place the experience of history can nevertheless vouchsafe full knowledge of at least the historicist scenario in its universality. Put crudely, the strategy supposes not that hun1an understanding naturally and as a matter of course manages to get outside of its finite boundaries and embodiment, but that at least one universal content somehow and on a rather special occasion manages to get in. Dialectically, this is at least as weak as the first self-exen1ption strategy in that it says nothing about why other universals cannot also be made accessible by the inscrutable machinations of history. But there is a deeper, material problem as well. Even passive recognition of a universal content, parochial though the occasion of such insight may have to be, would amount to a cognitive feat that transcends the limits imposed by finite historicity. Historicist revelation readmits universalism by the back door, albeit in a slightly different form (the difference between Plato and Hegel), and so the second strategy must simply fail as a defense of philosophical historicism's critical authority.

RATIONAL IMAGINATION MAKES AN INFINITE D'IFFERENCE As presented so far, the charge of self-refutational incoherence, so often felt to be decisive, has not held up. Philosophical historicism does itself no service by trying to maintain a privileged relationship to universality, but it was under no obligation to establish such a privilege anyway. The historicist scenario says that human reason can attain no universal

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knowledge, but this does not contradict the cognitively less committed supposition of universal truths, philosophical historicism included. Further, it does not contradict historicism's being asserted by human knowers, as long as they do so in a form short of universal knowledge. And finally, neither does the scenario contradict the possibility of historicism's warranted assertibility, once one becomes willing to reinterpret such warrants within the horizon of historicistic constraints (though this does raise the separate question of whether such a historicistic reinterpretation can be valid; I shall argue in following sections that it cannot). On the score of self-refutation at least, the gigantomachy seems to be at a standoff. It remains to show in what sense philosophical historicism is vulnerable to a form of self-reflexive inconsistency not yet considered. My criticism turns on what it means to imagine the universal content of the historicist scenario, let alone know or perhaps suspect it. I shall argue that the philosophical historicist, as the one picturing the scenario to himself, does not even have a right to the universal idiom that is one of its defining features. Radical cognitive finitude is a fulcrum of the historicist scenario. Equally essential is the specific inflection the scenario gives to cognitive finitude for the particular case of human reason. That is, according to philosophical historicism, human intelligence operates both in the light of universality and at the same time in the shadow of historicity. Neither of these latter components is any part of the most natural paradigm for picturing cognitive finitude, namely the nonrational animals, the animals that lack fully functioning, symbol-generating intellects and the ability to articulate (and get wrong) the difference between good and bad. In the nonhuman cases, it is not implausible to suppose that sentience is in principle confined to the necessary parochiality of perceptual horizons, supplemented by forms of memory and imagination that even in the very clever are confined to particulars. On the other hand, even Hobbes had to admit that there is something essentially more to human imagination, namely the ability to picture as yet unrealized possibilities, to picture how things might be otherwise than they actually are or have been. This power of human or rational imagination, to distinguish it from the sensitive imagination that marks percipience and animality as such, underlies both the universality and the historicity that inflect historicism's picture of human finitude. To begin with, the hypothesis of any universal presupposes the ability to imagine that the entire domain of possibility is structured in a specific way. To understand, for example, that human


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beings might by nature be rational is to have a picture about the whole range of possible human behavior; to understand that natural numbers are by necessity either even or odd is likewise to imagine a structure that determines the whole nlathenlatical field to which number is relevant. Furthermore, although rational animals can in a derivative and truncated sense tell histories on their behalf, nonrational animals do not genuinely have histories of their own because they do not engage in self-interpretation. They do not engage in self-interpretation because they cannot imagine that things might be otherwise than they actually are and cannot imagine that they themselves might act differently from the way they are always already acting. Itself the engine of the res gestae, this same rational imagination also makes possible the retelling of those deeds (historia rerum gestarum ), whether recollected into a simple chronicle or developed into a more complex unity of meaning. Such recollected wholes and unities of meaning are beyond the ken of sensitive imagination. Human beings hope for universal knowledge and live in the medium of historical meaning through rational imagination, thus radically distinguishing the mode of their alleged finitude from the finitude of the creatures who do not speak. The difference is so striking as to force the question of how this can fairly be called finitude at all. Certainly both rational and nonrational animals are mortal, but this is a finitude of existence and does not amount forthWith to a finitude of intelligence, not even in the case of nonhuman animals. To repeat the quotation from Hegel, "living beings ... possess the privilege of pain," a privilege that proves their being above and beyond the evident singularity and limits of the body. Analogously, rational beings also possess the privileges of wonder and dread, despair or amazement, that things are so and not otherwise. This awareness catapults them from the sphere of mere information into a firmament of meaning. One wonders about the distance traversed by such moods, for they conceive the difference between being and nonbeing, they hold an infinite difference together in a single and present unity of consciousness. Philosophical historicism wants it both ways: radical finitude plus the difference in kind that rational imagination makes..The result is historicistic finitude, but it comes with no guarantee that the imaginative power underlying the uniquely human trait of historicity and the meaningfulness of universality can reasonably be thought of as finite in the nlanner the scenario preseribes. In fact, it is incoherent to combine finitude as inevitable parochiality with the capacity to envision a totality of possibility.

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This is the perennial lesson that mathematics teaches to philosophy. Simply to have one truly universal idea implies that rational imagination cannot be finite simpliciter, no matter how difficult we might find it to think all of the universal ideas that are possible to think. None of this is to say that there can be no meaning to the notion of specifically hun1an finitude. It is to ,say that human finitude must be interpreted in terms of rational imagination and not vice versa, for the latter is what allows us even to begin taking the measure of our own minds. To interpret human finitude as inevitable parochiality across the board is too strong. It contradicts the imaginative power that lends meaning to "inevitable" in the very statement of such a view. Put more generally, the idiom of universality itself betrays the presence of a power that cannot be wholly finite. It may, on the other hand, be partially finite, and this is where philosophical historicism makes its substantial point: the conversion of rational imagination into actual insight is subject to constraints that have gone unrecognized by certain interpretations of what it means to be perfectly reasonable, of what intellectual virtue for human souls and their rational in1aginations has to be. Historicism overstates its suspicions when it goes on to claim that rational imagination can never be converted to actual universal knowledge. This has to be an overstatement because the necessary failure of full actualization can be underwritten only by supposing a necessary limitation in the underlying potentiality (the. import of the axiom of finite historicity in Chapter Two). But the very idea of necessity is inconsistent with such total finitude in the power of rational imagination. The original thrust of the self-refutation argument was directed toward the apparent incongruity of claiming an insight into insight's severe historicistic limitations. At each step the focus was on how philosophical historicism could count as an actual cognition of what it imagined as the historicist scenario, as actually having enough substance for its critical intent. In contrast, the considerations of this section have focused on rational imagination as a power, as a potentiality not yet converted into actual insight, partial or otherwise. With this change of emphasis, a decisive version of the self-refutation argument has come to light: intrinsic cognitive finitude is a possible condition, there n1ay even be several forms, yet any creature that so little as talks about it cannot have been condemned to a totally parochial intelligence.


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ACCOUNT-GIVING, ARBITRARINESS, AND THE FORMS OF INQUIRY The primary function of an account ( logos) is to render the phenomenon for which it accounts intelligible at a cognitively more sophisticated level than the one at which it originally appears. It is the attempt to say something illuminating about things taken to be worth understanding. Such understanding is achieved by laying out, as best one can, the factors responsible for the phenomenon (aitiai). They are its causes, its grounds, its reasons for being thus and so, and not otherwise. The aitiological link is crucial. If one cannot see how one set of grounds is responsible over any other possible set, or if one can see how another distinct set could do just as well, then the account is arbitrary and fails to generate the intended intelligibility. It fails because the difference between possible reasons becomes unstable to the point of meaninglessness. One makes no sense of anything if the alleged reasons could equally well have been any others, for this implies that the words being used are telling no differences. "Speech that is indistinguishable frolll silence is nihilism."14 What may be thought of as counting as good or sufficient reason-giving is open to interpretation, but the generic constraint of avoiding arbitrariness remains in force whatever particular standards are eventually decided on. The avoidance of arbitrariness is an essential component of what was called, at the opening of this chapter, logical responsibility. The foregoing is true of all account-giving. Accounting for reason's self-knowledge adds the following complications. Making sense of things is in the first place an extrovert, first-order cognitive activity. It is nonetheless always accompanied by a reflexive self-consciousness that makes it possible to develop an introvert, second-order account of what is going on in such first-order activities. Reflexivity is thus the condition for the meditation on method, for epistemology, for all forms of critical rationality. Yet reflexivity also implies the unity of account-giving consciousness, and this means that any occasion of giving a logos is open to the question of whether the way it makes sense of the phenomena it explains also makes sense. Not all occasions of account-giving are obliged to articulate fully their critical presuppositions, but it is the mark of philosophical account-giving to be as self-conscious in this way as possible. This is the meaning that critique has come to bear within English-

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speaking philosophy in particular. Arbitrariness is, strictly speaking, a defect of first-order accounts; it is the failure to make a concrete aitiological connection. Nihilism in the sense meant here is a defect of second-order accounts; it makes concrete aitiological connections impossible in principle. To charge philosophical historicism with being nihilistic is not therefore to accuse the doctrine of being itself an arbitrary explanation. In fact, the axiom of finite historicity, which indicates a universal and necessary ground, is by philosophy's standards as aitiologically responsible as could be. Rather, as a doctrine of the conditions for making sense of things, the allegation is that philosophical historicism makes nonsense of making sense. While itself nonarbitrary, its interpretation of historical contingency and finitude as the necessary fate of all possible accountgiving threatens them with unavoidable arbitrariness in each case. If its principles cannot in the end support the possibility of stable justification, then it must fail as the critique of reason that it purports to be. Insofar as historicism itself falls within its own scope, the peculiarities of such self-application suggest that historicism too must be arbitrary, but this inference is a specification of the self-refutation charge. It also depends on establishing historicism's general nihilistic effect. The logically fundamental question is whether historicism reduces all possible speech to nihilistic silence because its own speech leaves no room for the telling of differences it claims properly to have understood and illuminated. It bears repeating that as much as historicists want to reject all forms of First Philosophy, they do not intend to be nihilistic or even strongly skeptical. As noted in my Introduction, the very nomenclature "historicism," rather than "Herakleiteanism," for example, proclaims the hope of vouchsafing an interim stability for discriminatory and truth-telling tasks. "Historicity is not to be confused with arbitrariness.... We never escape from the obligation of seeking to validate claims to truth through argumentation and opening ourselves to the criticism of others."15 Bernstein's voice here is the voice of conciliatory pragmatism. Maybe Rorty, a fellow pragmatist, would take him to task over the value of truth-telling (and praise him for the emphasis on solidarity), yet even Rorty does not reject the need to grasp what is better and worse in what is said and in what is done. "In the process of playing vocabularies and cultures off against each other, we produce new and better ways of acting and talking."16 His position, that theory (already marginalized by the preemptive demotion to talking) is vain and therefore senseless for human beings, is itself an essay at wisdom-one of the reasons why his


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claims may justly be called sophistical. All pragmatists are philosophers to the extent that they accept the need to make sense of what has already been done and what they are in the middle of doing. The question is whether the resources they specify as the human lot are up to the task, or whether in the end those resources are no better or maybe even worse than silence. Philosophical historicism is open to the accusation of nihilism because it is conlmitted not only to the idiom of universality but to the idiom of justification as well. In this context, justification has the broadest general sense. It concerns the discrimination of better and worse accounts, of why one way of reading or construing experience is and should be preferable to another way. As already noted, Gadamer finds justification in this sense central. "We can formulate the fundamental epistemological question for a truly historical hermeneutics as follows: what is the ground of the legitimacy of prejudices?" (TM 277). Likewise Margolis notes that "any assurance that the race is actually capable of knowing how the world is ... requires some legitimation of the sources of that assurance" (PWF 2). The language of legitimacy is continuous with the idiom of justification. It is rooted in "the rational need to continue to sort reliable and unreliable structures.... To sort the actual and the apparent" (PWF 48). Rorty's existential rather than theoretical version of the point is contained in the following angst: "the ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being" (CIS 75). If something can be wrong, then justification in the broad sense meant here is both intelligible and prescribed. Historicism rules out justification to the level of universality, Le., understanding that may safely be taken to have gotten to the bottom of things, understanding that grasps the first principles of the phenomena it illunlinates. Historicism thus rejects the classical distinction between opinion (doxa) and knowledge (episteme). There is no ascent from or ultimate transfiguration of surmise; we are always at best only hazarding universal or primary truth. This truncation of cognitive possibility creates an immediate difficulty. Until some alternative principle of discrimination be introduced, it reduces all human judgment to the same level. The plenum of mere opinion tells no difference between oracles

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and science, between idle speculation and disciplined conjecture. Moreover, if there is no way of telling how one opinion might be more or less justifiable than another, then there would be no reasonable point to the choice between them, Le., nihilism. Of course, nobody believes that each opinion really is as valuable as every other, and nobody believes that there is never any satisfactory way of telling the relevant differences between better and worse opinions, even if pointing out the nonalgorithmic, often rhapsodic quality of how opinions do in fact happen to get sorted out is an appropriate corrective to the abstract standards of Enlightenment rationality and their untoward consequences for practical philosophy. Philosophical historicism is marked by the necessary retreat from knowledge of universals in their universality. It is not thereby a retreat into anarchy (as heuristically useful as the recommendation of anarchy may sometimes be for the purposes of ongoing inquiry). In the tasks of reading experience, historicism still claims to vouchsafe the philosophical possibility of distinguishing good generalizations from bad ones, superstition from science. It holds to the meaning of disciplined or systematic cognition where discipline and system derive their meaning from approximation to the ideal of universality. "Human inquiry pursues universals without universalism, foundations without foundationalism, essentials without essentialism, ... rationally directed at guessing ... the necessary within the contingent, the a priori within the empirical" (PWF 48). Disciplined understanding just short of insight into first principlesthat is what historicism vows to preserve. Its resources have important limits. The denial of present insight into universals as universals dictates the pragmatic turn that has been a theme over the last two chapters. If we cannot ever actually see the universal truth in a moment of selfconscious lucidity, then our opinions about it can only be more and less stable, on the basis of what goes on outside the partial penetration of experience's meaning achieved by present understanding. Philosophical historicism is pragmatic in this quite particular sense, that the other activities of human ratiocination must somehow make do for the failure of perfect insight. The doings to which it appeals are not practices in the sense of sociopolitical actions. They are mental doings, exercises of rational imagination that are directed toward cognitive achievenlent. The support available from the busy doings of past attempts to understand is subject to the same constraint that prompts appealing to them in the first place. Whatever prevents perfect lucidity in the present


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also prevents past opinions from supporting an actual cognitive link to the postulated universality and primacy they are supposed to be approximating. Even if the link were there in potency, it could never have been fully recognized, could not have been appropriated by human knowers in anything more than partial and surmised form. It follows that the ballast held to be stabilizing present opinions about what is primary can, on ·historicist lines, derive only from what is immanent in the activity of opinion formation and its elaboration. This immanentist strategy is determined by no more than denying universalism. It therefore marks, say, Kantianism as well.!? The difference between Kantian transcendental philosophy and philosophical historicism lies in the axioms that permit the historicizing of the quaestio juris. According to those axioms, all exercise of the rational imagination is wholly and inevitably differentiated by historical process. This rules out in advance any domain of pure, atemporal reason whose transcendental conditions could be exploited as a potential source of cognitive assurance. All that are available are the transcendental conditions of thoroughly historicized reason. Simple empirical, Le., sensory, constraints are uncontroversially one subset of those conditions, as they are for Kant. Philosophical historicism does not dispute the cognitive success of perception, or the minimal realism that this imposes, since that is the presupposition of historicism's being an account of how deeply human reason may legitimately discern the meanings of what perception presents. Historicism is concerned less with what is given than with the principles and significance of information already supplied. More important, therefore, are the transcendental conditions of historicized reason as it operates aiming at those meanings and principles. Call those conditions the fOrms ofinquiry. Inquiry (zetesis ) is not only a general name for all the relevant doings outside of final insight (noesis ); it also underlines that the hoped-for stability derives from a ground that is intrinsically ongoing and open-ended. Inquiry includes all investigative activity, from the idlest thought about a possible truth, to methodical experimentation. Its canons may vary from the most established practices of normal science to the revolutionary recommendations of Feyerabendian anarchism. Most generally, inquiry is the play of rational inlagination as it aims at cognitive achievement or insight. It is for historicism an ever-changing set of language games that by itself has no fixed and final form but thqt nonetheless is not an image of chaos.

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Philosophical historicism seeks to introduce the hierarchical order of better and worse to the plenum of opinion via the forms of inquiry. With respect to any given domain, better and worse accounts are to be sorted out, more and less methodically, more and less improvisationally, by reference to the folk wisdom that slowly accumulates over historical time, within the relevant community of inquirers. The activity of forming and elaborating upon opinions generates its own shape and determining force. Interim standards emerge from actual inquiry, growing by themselves from the soil of inquiry's history. Historicism in effect postulates a "reason in history" at work in the course of inquiry, which by a List der Vernunft keeps it, if not on a straight line to universal knowledge, at least not veering off wildly at every intellectual whim. Such reason in the history of inquiry does not have to be a deterministic teleology, for that is only one among several possible ways to read the logic by which such a governing principle might work itself out. Yet even if neither deternlinistic nor simply convergent, the emergent forms of inquiry must nonetheless guarantee that human opinion is either reliably in the neighborhood of universal truth already, or by some path or other getting closer to that neighborhood.

RETAIL SANITY, WHOLESALE MADNESS Simple to fulfill as the preceding requirement sounds, philosophical historicism's axioms prevent its doing so. The principles of finite historicity imply that any canons and criteria of reasonable procedure, having been themselves generated within a wholly contingent historical process, are in principle open to unpredictable, chaotic change. Interim forms might accidentally have emerged and lasted long enough to yield a transient stability, but the pure contingency of the historical process that generates them provides no ground why those specific forms and not others should have come to be. According to finite historicity, on any given occasion of explanatory or interpretative activity we might as easily and"with no reason specifiably relevant to the subject matter in hand have been interpreting or explaining things differently. This introduces a moment of arbitrariness that prevents the establishment of even interim cognitive assurance. The current forms of inquiry may permit the sorting of opinions, but if there is no logic except fate, chance, or


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whim to the way those forms themselves come and go, then there is no reason to suppose that any given sorting procedure is doing its job well, Le., in suitable proximity to universal and primary truth. Success, as Nietzsche said, is the greatest of liars. It might seem that, by focusing on the radical contingency of the forms of inquiry, I am doing little more than affirming a desirable consequence of the historicist position, namely its conlmitment to openendedness and the unattainability of closure. Thus the historicist will reply that of course no frameworks for inquiry are final, but this does not prevent us being perfectly reasonable within the temporary spaces they clear. In one sense this is correct. Once a framework has been established, whether by history or by decision, it makes all 'manner of relatively rational procedures available to the investigators who remain within its horizons. In another sense, however, such a reply misses the point. The problem is not that historicity implies there can be no perfect set of canons for inquiry, but that historicity prevents any set from being approximately good. No matter how reasonable we may seem to be within a temporary context, finite historicity entails the utter contingency of the principles being relied upon. That contingency prevents any reasonable supposition, let alone knowledge, of being in the neighborhood of universal truth. "We are then in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues-retail sanity and wholesale madness."18 While historicists are impressed with the problem of arbitrariness, they are by and large uninlpressed with the objection that appeal to the forms of inquiry cannot avoid it. Perhaps the deepest reason is the confidence they illegitimately borrow from pointing to the actual history of inquiry, as if it were unproblematically consistent with or perhaps even identical to what inquiry is constrained to be on the basis of historicist principles. In other words, they confuse actual history with historicism's theoretical reconstruction of it. Bernstein warned against confusing historicity with arbitrariness, but that warning is otiose. No one is confused about the interim cognitive stability that historicists ~ould like to derive from the actualities of history. Furthermore, no one doubts that as a matter of fact the real practices that constitute human histories have always helped and continue to help stabilize inquiry and insight. The challenge of nihilism is not only that historicism cannot in

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principle make justification intelligible, but also that precisely this defect means that the historicist interpretation of real cognitive practices fails to make sense of the stability it may readily be conceded they bear. The axioms of historicity make it impossible that human beings should be cognitively managing to muddle through in the way they really and evidently do. That human inquiry possesses an interim stability of its own in advance 'of either historicist or nonhistoricist reflections is the phenomenon, not the explanation. Let this be entirely clear: nihilism indicts neither the reality nor the coherence of the practices to which the historicist appeals, it indicts the historicist's reading of those practices. Specifically, nihilism charges that historicism's axioms are inconsistent with its philosophical hope of justifying interim stability from out of them. If actual practice manages to support the approximation of inquiry and insight to the ideals of primacy and universality, then it cannot be doing so on historicist principles. Real inquiry hides a transcendence of historicism's immanentist principles. Pragmatists in general imagine that they are automatically safe from arbitrariness because the real practices that have been hammered out in the course of history cannot, in virtue of de facto coherence, be arbitrary. Such coherence is indeed some reason to suppose they are not arbitrary, although they are obviously haphazard. Yet the evident nonarbitrariness of actual practice is not the point. The point is that the historicist scenario does not logically permit standards of truth-telling to enlerge from the ramshackle integrities of investigative practice, regardless of the level of tacit rationality that the latter might in actuality possess. That there is an order reveals nothing of why it is trustworthy. To the historicist, the apparent shapeliness of history as we actually have it seems to provide ballast for the otherwise unsteady course of inquiry, yet it actually does so because its substance is more than could possibly be present if inquiry were confined to the immanent resources specified by historicism's axioms. The discipline furnished by what transcends inquiry, the presentiment of which is given in the very notion of justification and more evidently in the ideal of universality, is smuggled in under an incompletely analyzed notion of history. In certain cases smuggling might not be objectionable, but in the present case it incriminates historicisnl's philosophical intent. One response to the wholesale madness implied by radical provisionality has been a sort of conventionalism. Gadam~r's weary plea, "Does what has always supported us need to be grounded?" is one version. Else-


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where he is inclined to the view that tradition's facticity is sufficient justification (e.g., TM 281), all of which sits uneasily with his insistence that traditions can and ought to be critically appropriated. Margolis is ternpted by a more athletic stand: "order is a historical construction saved from arbitrariness by its own candid transience and dialectical stamina" (TWR xi). But this is just whistling in the dark. Historicism allows no good reason to suppose that "dialectical stamina" is cognitively relevant, as humanly relevant as it might be to carryon talking. There is a neo-Nietzschean aestheticism lurking in the background here, a toying with the idea that perhaps art, in this case the art of talking, really is higher than the truth. In such a view, the contingency of history begins to look not quite so disturbing-at least for as long as the questions of art's truth and the ultimate ends of human will are left to one sidebecause history's contingency can be thought of as a simple mirror of the expression of free will. Inquiry expresses human will, and it could even be said that there is an art of inquiry, but inquiry is not thereby identical to artful self-expression. The canons of inquiry cannot have their substance by pure convention because they seek to arbitrate differences whose meaning transcends the situation of deciding between them. Traditionally, the difference aimed at in deciding between better and worse opinions has been thought of in terms of truth, but the intentionality of opinion alone is enough to make the point. The attempt to tell differences, historicistically or otherwise, necessarily aims beyond the inlmanent features of telling itself. Opinions are directed toward cognitive achievement, which means they are more than modifications of a stream of consciousness. The models, representations, and ideas elaborated within the play of rational imagination might be thought of as products, artifacts of the mind, but they are intentional artifacts. If they were in no sense about anything, they would lack the interest they clearly have. If opinions were only about ourselves, then judgment would be completely eclipsed by expression, science by poetry, talk by song-an idyll not only contrary to fact but one we would find intolerably boring. Moreover, war and killing people on account of what they believed would be senseless if opinion were no more than expression. To accept the notions of truth-telling and account-giving is to accept the meaning of cognitive achievement and therefore the measuring of opinion by standards that exceed the limits of pure decision. Conventional agreements are not doomed to irrational arbitrariness, but they

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are only reasonable when there are no important differences at stake in the alternatives they decide. If there are relevant differences in the options being considered, then it becomes meaningful to arbitrate between which has the better and worse right to be chosen. Pure will or selfexpression cannot measure the differences that the sober historicists allow must be measured. A second rejoinder to the wholesale madness inlplied by radical provisionality is return to the constraints admitted at the experiential level with the hope of discovering some other limit besides the particularity of sense. This is, in effect, to seek an historicized transcendental aesthetic. The favored idiom is evolutionary. The history of atten1pts to read experience that are encoded into the most persistent features of our categorial schemes must be at least partially correct, otherwise the species would not have survived. Rorty hints at a Darwinian picture of mentality "as an increasing ability to shape the tools needed to help the species survive, multiply, and transform itself' (EHO 3), but in specific relation to historicism Margolis is the most systematic. "The realist import of human cognitive powers is itself entailed in the subcognitive conditions of species survival" (PWF 102). "Theory, science, cognition itself are guided by the largely tacit, biologically grounded activities of human societies seeking to survive and reproduce their numbers" (PWF xviii ). Deriving the possibility of cognitive approximation to the world's real structure from the givens of human evolutionary history is a promising form of transcendental argumentation. 19 Nonetheless, it is simply unavailable to the philosophical historicist, for whom all motions of the mind are radically differentiated by historical process. Put most simply, because the historicization of reason is complete, nothing gets to inform it that does not pass through the baffles of historicity, and nothing passes through those without being infected by the virus of radical contingency. Even if we suppose, slipping for a moment into a God's-eye perspective that historicism typically eschews, that the human perceptual apparatus has been constructed by the forces of biological evolution and its adaptations to the world's structure are in that sense built into our cognitive machinery, the reflective appropriation of its deliverances, structurally informed though they may therefore be, is still differentiated by historicity. The forms that evolutionary history may in fact provide cannot reliably be received by historicized reason; the link is at best accidental. Margolis has no logical right to the


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supposition that "human inquiry is ... so 'linked' to the world's structures as to yield cognitively informed behaviour" (PWF Ill), because historicity is a barrier that provides no guarantee of not deranging any migration of the world's form into self-conscious human understanding. Margolis's double-think on this score is encoded into the question-begging nomenclature of "subcognitive conditions of species survival," for "subcognitive" in this case is an attempt to slip in a way .of reliably informing the human mind beneath the cognitive stratum that is supposed to be universally and completely differentiated by historicity. A third dialectical twist remains to be considered. In face of the logical embarrassment of arbitrariness, the historicist might be tempted to retreat from making truth-claims altogether. This has at least two awkward consequences. First, it gives up on the deflationary critique of First Philosophy. Without the truth-claim, philosophical historicism is at best a literally irrational recommendation for doing other things with our speeches. It could therefore be endorsed or neglected with equal validity. This is why Rorty recognizes that his job is not to argue, but simply to change the subject. The second difficulty is closely related: if we are not making truth-claims, what could we be saying? There are, naturally, many other things that we could be doing with words, from wild, iibermenschliche projects of self-creation, to maintaining the eerie propagandistic tyranny of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Giving up historicism as a truth-claim is to give up on the desire to make telling speeches. No one whose attention has even momentarily been caught by the idea of philosophy really wants to do that. Those who give the appearance of doing so are displaying the desire to seem wise by being clever with words, and that depends on a carefully hidden speech explaining why it is in truth good to contrive such an appearance. There is no escape from the imperative toward illumination, toward seeing by the light of the Good. It is the natural concomitant of being the talking animal. To give up truth-telling is a dialectical bluff initiated by no more than having lost an argument. Historicism's original philosophical intent was to tell the difference that history makes to thinking; only subsequently has it been discovered that a specious coherence seems to be preserved by the suppression of theory altogether. The bad faith of the neo-Nietzscheans on this score is evident in their choice of conversational partners-who else but the great truth-tellers of the philosophical tradition? Yet what is so interesting, on historicist grounds, about them? The ultimate origin of historicism's nihilistic infirmity lies deeper

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than the foregoing dialectical considerations have yet revealed, the objection's cogency notwithstanding. On first hearing, it would seem wildly implausible that the immanent forms of inquiry should themselves turn out to be the measure of cognitive achievement. It is implausible because we usually suppose that the measure of truth is in an important sense independent of what human knowers might have to do to ensure themselves access to it, that cognitive achievement hnplies a transcendence of the knower's own strategies for arriving at or staying in the neighborhood of truth. Although philosophical historicism complicates the topic in important ways, this much may be conceded our natural intuitions: warrants of assertibility do not directly measure the truth itself, even if the former should turn out to be the sole criteria of our access. Historicism makes this minimal admission by allowing the ideal of universality, since universal truth is beyond all possible historicistic warrants. Therefore, regardless of what might or might not be achieved by the procedures of inquiry, there remains a sense in which the ultimate difference between better and worse opinions has to be that better opinions have more of or are closer to the universal truth. Even if it were known, as it is not, what perfect epistemic method had to be for human beings, the assurance that method's procedures were indeed perfect would entail knowledge of why they vouchsafed truth, or as much truth as is humanly possible. Warranted assertibility, therefore, can never do for truth: it is the criterion of our possessing it, not the measure of truth itself. Philosophical historicism insists that human beings are in principle incapable of immediately taking the measure of truth and hence that warranted assertibility is as good as we can get. Yet historicism is obliged to explicate warranted assertibility under the particular constraints of immanence. The pragmatic turn to reason's immanent, self-directed doings is thus responsible for the contemporary exaltation of inquiry's rationality over judgment's truth. "A true understanding of the thing itself must be warranted by appropriate forms of argumentation that are intended to show that we have properly grasped what the thing itself says" (BOR 154) or, more provocative, "the only criterion for what is a fact is what it is rational to accept."20 Historicism's basic strategy for the preservation of interim stability amounts to this: judgments are better and worse in accord with the rationality of the procedures that generate them. Opinions may be sorted out in accord with which ones have been arrived at more rationally,

Dialectical Difficulties: Nihilisnl and Self-Refutation

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rather than in accord with which are more true-a maneuver that is the other side of the coin of having rejected the accessibility of truth's ultimate standards, namely universality and primacy. If insight can be only partial at best, then the n10st important thing"is to be able to carryon, leaving behind as soon as possible what is known in advance to be necessarily inadequate. The oddity here concerns the direction of such carrying on, for what is acknowledged as the best direction possible is toward what is also declared thoroughly inscrutable. Where traditionally insight into first principles was the goal of inquiry-"it is to be expected that those who know will pass their time more pleasantly than those who inquire" (Nicomachean Ethics lO.1177a26)-further inquiry is now the appropriate outcome of always inadequate insight, the "infinite dialogue with ourselves which never leads anywhere definitely" (TM 543). Rorty says it most generally, a distant echo of Hobbes on human felicity: "the end of human activity is not rest, but rather richer and better human activity" (ORT 39). The new hegemony of inquiry over insight is precisely why dialogue and conversation have become the paradigms for human cognitive endeavor, since, on the assumption that insight is necessarily myopic, closure has to be mistaken -the ideal of universality notwithstanding. This in turn breeds an enthusiasn1 for open-ended horizons and infinite tasks that prevents Gadamer, for example, from seeing that what he takes to be a virtue, that "there are no lin1its to the interior dialogue of the soul with itself' (TM 544), could just as easily be a description of insanity. Yet there are limits. This is just what rationality is supposed to prescribe. Coordinate with the pragmatically compelled rearrangement of understanding's functions is a reinterpretation of intellectual virtue that underwrites the particular meaning of rationality in this case. The pragmatic historicist has to specify rationality (which in its most general sense means the virtue of discursive intellect) independently of any concrete relation to the universal and primary truths at which it aims. The rationality of inquiry can only be parsed in terms of what belongs immanently to human understanding as it toils on (to adapt Margolis's phrase) always and inevitably east of cognitive Eden. To do this is not usually believed to be a hardship, because the seemingly independent exercise of rational imagination, dianoia, that manifests itself in conjecture, representation, theory-construction, and the like, is thought to be a domain of activity immanent in the required sense. But this conceptual activity is not as independent as required.

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While there is clearly a subjective autonomy to the discursive exercise of the human intellect, the forms it manipulates and the rules by which it does so do not self-evidently originate either with it or with any other faculty of the human mind. We freely exercise our rational imaginations, but the domain of what may be rationally imagined is not created wholly ex nihilo. This raises the question of whether what seems reasonable in the play of imagination does not derive from a nonimmanent source. Until historicism can show definitively that it does not, it has no right to assume that any part of the playful elaboration of opinion has a shape or coherence entirely of its own, that it is sufficiently immanent to preserve the stability historicism seeks within the parameters of finitude. The historicist all too glibly assumes that what counts as rational in the pursuit of universal and primary knowledge can be specified independently of any access to such truth in its universality and primacy. Forn1ally, the problem of arbitrariness indicates that something must be awry with that underlying assumption; materially, the mistake is that what counts as rational cannot be elaborated independently of the interaction of opinion formation and its intentional objects. The attempt to vouchsafe the interim stability of cognitive endeavor by appeal to the immanent forms of inquiry alone proposes an impossible task. To contradict oneself is certainly to be irrational, but it is a sophisticated form of unreasonableness. Being unable to take the measure (ratio) of anything, being unable to tell what counts, is a form of incoherence closer to madness than the first. Historicism both acknowledges the discrimination of better and worse and takes on the philosophical obligation to nlake sense of how such differences might be mediated. What it fails to do, and cannot but fail to do, is reasonably ensure that there is any way to tell these differences critically. The historicist's generic hope is that by a well-disciplined juggling of the relative heights of various imperfect clain1s to truth, we will be able to arrive at an assessment of their genuine stature. This is evidently absurd. The critical transformation of opinion is necessarily trigonometric, not linear. Stated less figuratively, there is no way of disciplining the move fronl an opinion held to be worse to an opinion held to be better without some reference to the truth both positions are attempting to articulate. The way such reference works may be obscure, and it is certainly neither immediate nor a simple isomorphism of mind and reality, but philosophical critique is ill-served by ignoring its clandestine effects on the actual forms of human inquiry.


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Confined to an immanentist interpretation of rational imagination, philosophical historicism has no way of distinguishing n1aking interim, objective sense from merely making sense up. Interim stability, when it can in principle contain no reference beyond its own facticity, can never be free of the threat of narcissism or worse. In virtue of the particular way it exalts opinion, philosophical historicism renders the traditional notion of knowledge's perfection impossible. The metaphysics of history on which it stands to guarantee this triumph, however, reduces its own hopes for partial cognitive success to formlessness. As Socrates states in the Republic: "nothing incomplete is a measure of anything" (6.504c ).

AFTER REFUTATION: REHABILITATION For as long as it maintains good philosophical conscience, historicism must lose its battle of the giants outright. It is self-refuting because the scenario it pictures cannot be true of the creatures with sufficient imagination to be capable of talking about its universal ideas. It is nihilistic in the straightforward sense that its metaphysical presuppositions make nonsense of the hope for interim stability in the discrimination of better from worse opinions. Philosophical historicism is unavoidably incoherent; it fails in logical responsibility. Dialectical courage demands that historicists face up to that fact, just as Frege did when Russell showed that his foundation for arithmetic pern1itted the deduction of a contradiction, and therefore everything else. To many, the results of this chapter will seem too formal to carry much weight in relation to the suspicions that motivate historicism's concrete claims. It is now a commonplace to remark that relativism has been refuted once too often, as if the observation effectively damned all such disproofs. No doubt at least some incoherence proofs are as badly abstract and therefore off the philosophical poin~ as this counterthrust implicitly charges, but it does not follow that all formal objections are irrelevant. Historicists are for the most part content to mask whatever logical uneasiness they might feel with a visceral sense of still being somehow on the right track, despite the infelicities from which they must avert their eyes. Regardless of the good intentions that might thereby seem to be preserved, such an attitude lacks philosophical conscientiousness. Dialectical responsibility cuts both ways.

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Yet refutation cannot be an end to it. "The bare result is the corpse which has left the guiding tendency behind it. ... To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of a11."21 Hegel's testimony to the poverty of mere refutation is well known. Less familiar is Aristotle's version of the same point: "one ought not only to state the true account, but also state what is responsible for the false one; this contributes to assurance, since whenever a good account comes to light of why something appears true when it really is not, it makes us more assured of what is true" (Nicomachean Ethics 6.1154a22-26). My articulation of philosophical historicism and my account of its incoherence have already located many of the insights historicists take themselves to be preserving. They include the hermeneutic character of human experience, the openness of inquiry and the nonalgorithmic character of its progress, the value of discourse's nontheoretical ends, and the rationality tacit in tradition. All these points are surely worth upholding; they are also all consistent with the spirit of First Philosophy. The remaining chapters of this study complete in a thematic way the task implicitly thus begun of providing a determinate negation of the historicist gesture in its philosophical form, a rehabilitation of historicism's motivating insights. As a doctrine, philosophical historicism has been judged false. Its falsehood must now be comprehended within a larger, more hospitable whole.

CHAPTER FOUR

HEIDEGGER: THE METAPHYSICS OF FINITE HISTORICITY

Philosophical historicism depends on the image of mind as self-contained, autonomous in its rationality, purely constructive in operation. According to this image, every articulation of the intellect is a posit, the taking of a position, and thus a dianoetic deed open to all the vagaries assailing any mortal endeavor. Like all doctrines of reason's self-assurance since Descartes, philosophical historicism devotes the greater part of its attention to explicating how the mind might be steadied in face of assaults on its self-styled integrity. Historicism's defense of its own legitimacy appeals to the interim stability made available by the history of inquiry's communal practices, but that appeal cannot work under the constraints imposed by the hypothesis of radical provisionality-the hypothesis, not shared by Descartes, that human reason is permanently and totally exposed to historical contingency, that 'no human posit can be absolved from its parochiality and so be made final, absolute. As laid out in Chapters Two and Three, the principle of radical provisionality is at once philosophical historicism's glory and doom. Only radical provisionality guarantees

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historicism the right to use historical contextualization as a basis for redefining philosophy from the ground up, only radical provisionality necessitates the rejection of First Philosophy, rendering intelligible historicism's unqualified assertion of critical superiority. Yet it also renders senseless the hope for interilll stability in the historical forms of actual investigative practice. Radical provisionality was, in my definition of philosophical historicism, coordinated with the axiom of reason's finite historicity. That second axiOlll formulates the historicist sense of reason's total and permanent exposure to contingency. Finite historicity is the metaphysical ground of why reason never escapes the parochial, why it is fOrever culturally embedded, why the movement of thinking from its potencies to its acts is wholly differentiated by historical time. That no posit can in principle be absolved from its parochiality is the specific difference of philosophical historicism within the family of modernity's immanentist doctrines of reason. The critical question, raised and answered in the negative over this and the final chapter, is whether philosophical historicism's interpretation of human historicity as totally finite can plausibly be maintained. There is no logical necessity that forces the interpretation of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) in terms of radical finitude. Its generic sense I defined as the intrinsically historical character of human existence, but human existence is an odd mixture of life, whose medium is singular, and thought, whose medium is universal. l To assert reason's finite historicity is to interpret that general structure, that odd mixture of singular and universal, in a particular way. Finite historicity mandates cognitive constraint at the second-order, reflective level. Thinking may always begin historically contextualized, lllay always find itself in medias res, but finite historicity guarantees that no reflective or speculative mediation of that beginning with other possibilities can result in arrival at an absolute moment. This principle first emerged clearly and complete in Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics: "historically effected consciousness is so radically finite that our whole being ... inevitably transcends its knowledge of itself" (TM xxxiv), "in understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe" (TM 490). Margolis, while less vocal overall about radical finitude, has his own version of the point: "the flux-of language, of human history, ... cannot be escaped; and being inescapable, that flux ... cannot but disallow the full (Husserlian or Cartesian) recovery ... of the originary and apodictic" (SWU 38).

Heidegger: The Metaphysics of Finite Historicity

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Margolis is less vocal because he does not appreciate the need to render such talk of "inescapable flux" metaphysically intelligible, whereas Gadamer acknowledges that any appeal to radical finitude requires ontological backing. He expects that it may be derived from Heidegger's Being and Time. All historicizations, whether of reason or any other human power, demand a metaphysical defense. It must be understandable how historical constraint works, and in the case of philosophical historicism it TIlust be understandable how history works as a constraint on the actuality of human reason. "A hermeneutics adequate to the subject matter would have to demonstrate the reality and efficacy of history within understanding itself" (TM 299-300). In my Introduction I called this the problem of historicism's metaphysical responsibility. Its first application arose in connection with Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. Mannheinl's talk of functional relations between the opinions of individuals and their social circumstances, of how beliefs reflect contexts, was found to be inadequate to the limitative strength of sociological determination as he conceived it. Margolis's jargon of history's flux is just as metaphysically irresponsible when he makes it sound like a self-evident reason for the inevitable parochiality of human intelligence. Responsibly accounting for history's determining power demands metaphysical support because any imputation of constraint or limit on any real activity presupposes notions of interaction and effective causality. The philosophical historicist must therefore have some answer to the following pair of questions: How can it be that history effects or affects reason? How can it be that reason is effected or affected by history? Historicists often imagine that they have done enough self-critical work simply by acknowledging that even philosophical thought, and most especially their own, is somehow historical. The chief business then becomes showing not what this historicality of thought means or how it is possible, but ,,"hat philosophical procedure should be on the hypothesis of its truth. The acknowledgment of the simple fact of history seems to be enough in relation to philosophies that dismiss the relevance of history altogether-the sort of philosophies that might, with obvious injustice to Plato, be called Platonistic or that might in another mood (also with some injustice) be described as committed to Enlightenment conceptions of reason. Yet First Philosophy is neither Platonistic in this bad sense nor committed to Enlightenment styles of rationalism. First Philosophy seeks an absolution from parochiality, yes, but it does not seek its abandonment or annihilation. That history makes a difference to

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Philosophical Historicism and the Betrayal of First Philos-ophy

thinking is not in question. The ultimate issues are what sort of difference, and if the difference can be redeemed, how? When it comes to accounting for· the foundations of their convictions, as contrasted with giving out manifestos for the future course of good philosophizing, contemporary historicists do not so much explain the nature of historical determination or reason's historical determinability as they rely on slogans about contextualization. In some cases-such as Gadamer, for exanlple-the slogans are understood for what they are, nanlely shorthand for a metaphysics yet to be given or already articulated elsewhere; in others, the shorthand is mistakenly thought to be a sufficient account of the relations supposedly binding reason to its contingent circumstances. Nevertheless, the metaphysics is, in all cases, necessary. The crux of my rehabilitating historicism is a critical estimate of how reason's finite historicity might actually be supposed to work. My point is not to show that all possible accounts of reason's finite historicity have to be mistaken -that was demonstrated in Chapter Three. Rather, by exposing historicism's metaphysical weaknesses, in addition to its formal incoherence, I aim to reveal (1) what is truly at stake in the question of reason's historical determinability and (2) how much controversial metaphysics there has to be in inlagining that reason is both dominated and localized by history. I also aim to make clear what is mistaken about trying to prove reason's parochial finitud.e by showing no more than that it is historical, as if the effectivity of history had its reality apart from and in advance of the actuality of human reason, and as if the effectivity of history could have nothing but an entirely localizing effect. Most contemporary philosophical historicists have not thought very deeply into finite historicity's metaphysical presuppositions, so it is almost impossible to guarantee an exhaustive reconstruction of what they mean and must mean to say on this score. It would also be very easy to open myself to the countercharge of knocking down only strawmen. For my critical examination of the metaphysics of reason's historicity, therefore, I shall examine the most powerful ontologies of historicity that have been elaborated to date, namely Heidegger's existential analytic of human existence (Dasein), and Hegel's metaphysics of spirit (Geist). Between the two of them, they encompass philosophical historicism's basic metaphysical commitments. They are also, of course, the greatest formative influences (to use a historicist, though not a philosophically historicist, idiom) in the very


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tradition that has issued in the doctrine I am criticizing. The direct link between Heideggerian thenles and contemporary historicism needs no remark, but the connection with Hegel is less immediate. Hegel belongs, in the end, to the tradition of First Philosophy. He is a formative influence in the tradition of philosophical historicism because his system has to so many appeared neatly dissectible at the joint between reason's necessary contextualization and its coming to inhabit an absolute standpoint. All historicists from Dilthey to Gadamer, Troeltsch t,o Mannheim, have been inspired by the former yet spooked by the latter. The doctrine of spirit, shorn of its pretensions to the absolute, is therefore a major source of historicism's metaphysical comfort. 2

DASEIN, DISCLOSEDNESS, AND DETERMINING POSSIBILITY Being and Time, The Essence of Reasons, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics form a trilogy by the early Heidegger that prevents all future philosophy from supposing that epistemology filay reasonably be pursued independently of metaphysics. 3 In Heidegger, modernity's project of reason's critique is reconnected to the ontology of human existence. Being and Time is the heart of the trilogy just nanled. It is, among other things, the most sustained philosophical account of the relationship between history and human reason to have been given since Hegel. Yet Heidegger's thinking underwent an important change of emphasis sometime after the publication of Being and Time, a change that caused him never to return to its incomplete, and perhaps incompletable, project. 4 There is no need here to assess the origins or the meaning of Heidegger's Kehre, because it is only the Heidegger of Being and Time who essays the metaphysical defense of reason's finite historicity, only the Heidegger of Being and Time who explicates a systematic ontological framework wherein history may be said to differentiate the power of thinking. The later doctrines of Being's history, destiny, and eschatology are neither systematic nor ontological but pictorial, in the nlanner of the speculative philosophy of history, and they are work~d out more as hints than as teachings. They do not work at rendering intelligible the relations of effectivity presumed by philosophical historicism; rather, they

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assert them and describe some of their appearances. Heidegger was quite aware of the difference just drawn; he deliberately abandoned the metaphysical orientation of his earlier career. But what philosophy starts to sound like once it gives up metaphysics is not of relevance here. What matters is whether we ought to be persuaded by the picture of finite historicity responsible for that abandonment to begin with. Over the course of this study, I have defended the meaningfulness of critical questions I do not hesitate to call metaphysical. I would also call them ontological or essential or structural. If those questions make any sense, then it is fair to seek the testin10ny of the earlier Heidegger on the topics they address. Moreover, regardless of whatever Heidegger made of the successes and failures of his project, Being and Time's acknowledged difficulties have not stopped historicistically inclined readers quarrying stone from its crumbling edifice for use in their own foundations and flying buttresses. Moreover, they have for the most part much preferred this material to the less manageable megaliths of Heidegger's later work. 5 The restricted aim of this examination is to show that for the metaphysical justification of reason's finite historicity, regardless of what else it might legitimately be used for, what Heidegger himself seems to have regarded as the rubble of Being and Time is unsound. The explicit treatment of history, history-writing, and historicity ("historicality" in the standard English translation) occurs in chapter 5 of the second division, the book's penultimate chapter. To many readers, Being and Time's most impressive lesson here has been that the meaning of "historical," applied both to events and to narratives, is not adequately grasped through naive reference to the phenomena of the historical world, because such an historical world exists only in virtue of the ontological peculiarities of the creature that lives to all appearances within and often determined by it. 6 There are deeper reasons in the nature of human being that account for why such things as the past, present, and future, not to mention monuments and texts and inscriptions, can be called historical at all. Thus, not only does one have to speak of the events making up history and the narration of those events, of how a potentially meaningful history befalls an already constituted human reality, one also has to speak of the sense in which history is in advance constitutive of human reality. Historical phenomena can only be appearances of, and appearances to, creatures that are already in themselves historical. Historicity is what allows human beings to be both open to and the source of historical significance. Heidegger's


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account has implications for the disciplined forms of historical knowing, but he develops them only slightly. More important, neither history nor historiography can be adequately understood-so their treatment toward the end of Being and Time implies-without first elaborating a full ontology of human being in which to locate the metaphysics of historicity. Such an ontology is precisely what philosophical historicism needs for its metaphysical defense. The issue of reason's inevitable parochiality emerges earlier in Being and Time than the thematic treatment of historicity. This is not surprising, given that human intelligence is a precondition for human action and therewith for all ordinary historical phenomena. Historicity emerges as but one aspect of a prior structure of finitude marking human reality, a reality that for Heidegger is in essence given over to understanding. Therefore, my current task is to examine the limitative effect of this radical finitude on human reason and to assess the extent to which Heidegger's account of it justifiably establishes the historicist axiom of reason's finite historicity. Reason is the self-conscious actuality of human intelligence. No term of that definition, including the definiens itself, appears as a category in the ontology of Being and Time. Being and Time nonetheless contains a thoroughly worked-out account of how reason defines human reality, of how human being exists understandingly, of what it means to call man the zoon logon echon. The nominal project of the book is "the question of the meaning [Sinn] of Being" (BT 1) or, in other words, the articulation of what makes beings beings, the very first of all first pr"inciples. By two steps this project becomes reoriented around an ontological analysis of human reality. First, what makes beings beings is not so splendid an appearance within human experience that we may immediately fall to describing it-"nature loves to hide" (Herakleitos, Fr. 123). Yet, second, the very question of being's meaning, the puzzlement before its apparent absence in explicit form, itself signals the defining prerogative of human beings that is to be always in advance among beings dealing with them, talking about them, and reflecting on them, in terms of their being. Being cannot, therefore, be entirely lost to human beings. We are already, somehow, adequate to reality. To be puzzled by being is to be already within the horizon of its meaningfulness, even if it is not recognized as such. Our every utterance betrays a commerce with things that grasps them as existent, as actual, as being something: all encounter and self-reflection is formulated with an "is." The capacity thus to

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bespeak being, to articulate experience in ontological categories, marks human existence as a special mode of being that Heidegger calls Dasein. Human beings are literally onto-logical, they talk always in terms of being or reality, speaking constantly of what is and what is not, because they already appreciate the beingness of things. Thus, not only is the being of beings not lost to human beings, but potential cognitive adequacy to it defines our very reality. Dasein's primitive ontology is not the thematic ontology of disciplined philosophical reflection. Hence Heidegger speaks of a "pre-ontological comportn1ent" (BT 32), where "comportment" is designed to get away from the paradigm of inner subjectivity and to precede all distinctions of practical and theoretical as modes of understanding. Thematic awareness is not the point. The clue Heidegger takes up is the minimal one that human being is the site of being's diffident disclosure. "We keep within an understanding of the 'is,' though we are unable to fix conceptually what that 'is' signifies" (BT 25). Only where there are human beings do reality, being, existence, actuality, and, correlatively, nothingness, absence, potentiality, begin to come to light. This is the meaning of Dasein. The designation indicates the peculiarly locative character of the creature that bespeaks being. The "there" (da ) of Dasein expresses the intimate connection between the nature of human being and the event that is things appearing as real, as actual, as existent. While Dasein makes it possible for things to appear in their reality, this being given over into the event of truth as ontological disclosure correlates with the self-consciousness of human being: the creature able to appreciate things in their reality is also the creature that understands itself to be here and now, in contrast to any there and then. Thus, the element of finitude lurks in the very nature of truth, the revelation of realities as real. By itself, however, this is no reason to suppose that the primordiallocalness of truth amounts to parochial limitation. In the fourth and final part of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, where Heidegger condenses the topics of Being and Time into the theme of finitude and disclosedness, he ends by asking: "is it permissible to develop the finitude of Dasein only as a problem, without a 'presupposed' infinitude?" (KPM 168). Wherever this unanswered question of Heidegger's may eventually go, it is clear that the Daseinsanalytik locates understanding at the very core of human being. Human experience begins as the experience of Being-in-the-World (div. 1, chap. 2). It is the experience of self and other in always


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questionable and unsettled interrelation. Being-in-the-World is the first structural specification of what is brought to light in the primordially disclosive effect of Dasein. Having analyzed the poles of world and self (chaps. 3 and 4), Heidegger returns to the unity of disclosure, to characterize its structure in greater detail. The structure of disclosure is Being and Time's doctrine of reason. Heidegger begins by identifying two fundamental components: Befindlichkeit and Verstehen (BT 171). Befindlichkeit designates the sheer placedness, the being-there, of Dasein, a placedness grasped for the most part affectively rather than discursively. It is how one finds oneself before one has thought about it, the minimal level of self-consciousness prompted by the everyday question Wie befinden Sie sich? (How are you?). Through its moods, rather than through its reflections and insights, Dasein appreciates that encounter takes place within a world, Le., within an overarching context of meanings, and that the world, or at least parts of the world, matter to it. There is an element of brutality to this disclosure, for Dasein realizes that this being given over into a world, this being always already circumstanced, is not something that it chooses. Human being always finds itself as not having been entirely responsible for its own being and all that has and will continue to affect it. This is the sense of "thrownness

[GewoJjenheit] " (B T 174). Verstehen, or understanding, allows Dasein to begin thematizing what it discovers in Befindlichkeit. In the effort to keep clear of mentalistic idioms that easily betray the phenomenological primacy of his analysis, Heidegger characterizes understanding structurally, in terms of possibility. Things are understandable by being placed in the contexts of their possibilities; Dasein begins to understand itself in terms of its own possible ways of being. Verstehen is Dasein's openness to fields of possibility. The two moments of Verstehen and Befindlichkeit combine. Finding oneself faced with a world is structured by a precursory appreciation of one's own puzzling being and the puzzling being of things and other selves encountered: Who am I? What is going on? Appreciating the halo of possibility naturally connotes what would usually be- spoken of in cognitive or intentional terms, but Heidegger treats this as "projection" (Entwurf). Actual understanding is a projection of what is met with in th~ encounter of Being-in-the-World against the backdrop of the various and maybe heterogeneous structures of its possibilities. Human reality exists disclosively, yet Dasein never finds itself perfectly lucid. Dasein's stand in the world always begins as a questioning stand: Who am I?

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What is this? What is going on? What needs to be done? Who should I be? The last two questions reveal that disclosure, while essential, is not exhaustive. Human being is as much doing as it is thinking. Heidegger's phenomenology of Being-in-the-World shows at least that human doing cannot be without thought, cannot be mere behavior. Human action, even the most degenerate, is always an exploration of possibility, and possibility has meaning only to a creature with understanding. Yet whence the urge to explore possibility? What makes us responsive to the meaningfulness of what might be, to the intelligible as such (which involves appreciating all that might be)? This question points to a more comprehensive structure in which the disclosive combination of "thrown-projection" must be placed, a structure that makes sense of why human reality is not just the appreciation, but also the exploration and determination, of possibilities. Two points need to be noted about the meaning of determination here. First, at this level determination of possibilities is not confined to practical procedure. It includes arriving at any actual understanding, theoretical and otherwise, as well as resolving on and executing a course of action. What to think is as inuch a part of Dasein's actualizing of its Being-in-the-World as is what to do. Second, in a sense only half of what self-determination involves is treated from the perspective of Being and Time. The actual activity of determining one's possibilities is not itself a theme. Being and Time describes only the conditions for the possibility of any such actualization. "In the existential analysis we cannot, in principle, discuss what Dasein factically resolves in any particular case.... Nevertheless one must ask whence, in general, Dasein can draw those possibilities upon which it factically projects itself" (BT 434). The transcendental orientation of Heidegger's account, while not the analysis of a transcendental subject or ego, must be kept in mind throughout. Within the formal bounds of the existential analytic, the need to determine possibilities takes the form of care (Sorge ). Care, explicated in chapter 6 of Being and Time, is the primary form of Dasein as "thrown projection" because it makes sense of how the combination of being thrown and being open to possibility add up to a structural presupposition for human activity, Le., care is the moment that grounds why possibility is a motivation to think and to act. Verstehen and Befindlichkeit on their own cannot ground the primordial experience of being drawn to respond, cannot ground the imperative to move from the point at which one finds oneself thrown among possibilities. Care raises the question of


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fulfilling responsibility in the face of discovering one's thrownness. It is the closest Heidegger comes to the Platonic principle of eros and may be distinguished from the latter by its submissiveness. At once particular by thrownness yet transcendent via projection onto a field of possibility, Dasein is set up for the question of its unique style of finitude. As regards philosophical historicism, the focus must be the framework within which Dasein determines or realizes its possibilities. Are there any intrinsic limitations to the fulfillment of Dasein's care as Dasein responds in thought and deed to the self-consciou's discovery of its thrownness?

FINITUDE AS FATEFUL MORTALITY Dasein finds itself as a focal point, as a moment of determination in the center of a field of possibilities that are understood as possibilities, and understood as containing possibilities for itself. Things are possible fOr other creatures, but only Dasein has possibilities, only Dasein appreciates possibilities. Care reveals Dasein's own potentiality-for-Being as a question, and it is a question because in relation to Dasein as particular, as here and now and mine, not all possibilities are of equal worth. Dasein cannot be satisfied with a pageant of random determinations. Heidegger supposes that the responsibility marking care is in principle differentiated by a call to the perfection of existence as Dasein's mode of being. Perfection is the correlate of potentiality, though Heidegger does not envision the perfection of Dasein's unique mode of being as fully determinate form (one could say that the soul is not an idea). For that reason the perfection corresponding to Dasein's potentiality-for-Being is described in terms of totality and authenticity. Totality is how an existent self can come into view as a single thing, while yet maintaining the potentiality-for-Being that defines its abiding structure; authenticity (Eigentlichkeit ) is how some possibilities can be conceived as more proper (eigen ) to Dasein's potentiality-for-Being than others. 7 Perfection or fulfillment is not a given. According to Heidegger's phenomenology, Dasein's potentiality-for-Being is typically dispersed by the demands, dominations, and fortunes of the everyday world. Care exists for the most part dispossessed and deaf to the inner imperative toward self-possession and self-knowledge, deaf to authenticity. Dasein

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has always already fallen into alienation from its proper self, has in advance abdicated its responsibility for self-determination entirely to its circumstances. Recollection of the wisdom of self-knowledge and selfpossession is made possible by what Heidegger calls "anticipatory resoluteness"-anticipatory in virtue of being able to view one's life as whole, resolute in virtue of commitment to one's authentic possibilities. In anticipatory resoluteness, one's intelligence is exercised to the full. If there is any ground for reason's finitude, therefore, it will be present within anticipatory resoluteness, "the phenomenon of primordial and authentic truth" (BT 364). Anticipatory resoluteness is the explicit topic of division 2, chapter 3, but it is the center of gravity for the whole of division 2, presupposing the first two chapters and demanding the specifications of the remaining three in temporality, historicality (historicity), and the derivative notions of abstractly infinite, chronological time. It is the ultimate and pristine inflection of care, made possible by the combination of what Heidegger names as death (chap. 1) and guilt (chap. 2). Death is coordinate with anticipation, totality, and, later, temporality; guilt is coordinate with resoluteness, authenticity, and, later, historicity. My aim in what follows is to show that neither of the two necessary aspects of anticipatory resoluteness justifiably grounds a sense of finitude sufficiently limitative for the needs of philosophical historicism. The Certainty of Death Dasein comes into view as whole, despite its peculiar indeterminateness, in light of the phenomenon of death. Death "limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein" (BT 277). Death thus sets at least one horizon of Dasein's potentiality-for-Being. How extensively does this one horizon disrupt or define the whole field of possibility that surrounds Dasein's thrownness? Within the field of Dasein's possibilities death is obviously unique, but it is also distinctive in being phenonlenologically the most unavoidable, the one possibility that is thoroughly necessary, the proof that Dasein is not pure freedom, not sui generis. It is what Heidegger calls one of Dasein's "ownmost" (eigenst) possibilities, which means that ontologically speaking it cannot but belong to Dasein, regardless of authenticity, inauthenticity, or indifference. The death that is mine is utterly inalienable. Recognition of death's necessity recalls Dasein from its everyday dispersal,


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from its being determined by what is alien, by what is not itself. Death makes Dasein mindful that its own possibilities matter. "If Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being" (BT 294). Dasein's ownmost potentiality-for-Being is not, however, limited to the unique possibility of death. There are other possibilities proper to Dasein as the meaning of its potential authenticity: one does not perfect oneself by suicide. It may therefore be asked how appreciation of mortality fits into the economy of Dasein's ownmost potentialities-for-Being, i.nto the economy, that is, of the best life, of eudaimonia. Acknowledgment of mortality is a necessary condition of living the best human life because it is a condition of deciding to do something worthwhile with one's life as whole. The thought of mortality sobers us and faces us with the question of what really is best, given the powers or potencies of the specifically human existence in which we find ourselves. Heidegger says that mortality deternlines a finitude across all of Dasein's possibilities: they "are determined by the end [Ende] and so are understood as finite [endlich]" (BT 308); "only Being-free jOr death, gives Dasein its goal outright and pushes existence into its finitude" (BT 435 ). In a play on words, Heidegger's sense of finitude here derives directly from mortality; the possibilities we realize can only be the possibilities of mortals, of ones who die. Does this mean that all possibilities are somehow themselves mortal as we are? Are they cut off at death and thoroughly localized by the contingency of a particular mortal life, as if the latter's finite quantity is the final measure of its quality as well? Heidegger does not show this, nor does he begin to show it. Or does it mean that all possibilities can only be authentically understood when posited in the light of mortality? Heidegger says that "anticipation of the possibility which is not to be outstripped discloses also all the possibilities which lie ahead of that possibility" (BT 309), by which he means that anticipation of death brings home to Dasein the truth that the fulfillment of existence, whatever it is to be specifically, can only occur in the time between now and its death. Wisdom, as Socrates said, is learning how to die. It does not follow that there are no possibilities of being-whole or being fulfilled within existence, or that the possibilities made real within existence are themselves finite in the manner of life's mortality, localized by the untimely timeliness of death. Heidegger's account of death, essential as it is to the basic ontological structure of authentic human existence,

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gives no reason to rule out the possibility of self.·apotheosis before death (or even at death), and gives no reason to rule out a mode of existence that transfigures mortal life by fearlessness of death. The ancients referred to the possible transfigurations of human existence as virtue or excellence (arete), all forms of which transcend the merely mortal. They transcend the mortal by being perfections of human possibilities, modes of activity fulfilled in their every moment ( energeiai ) and not on their way to a state yet to be attained ( kineseis ).8 Anticipation of death is a condition for authentically abiding in resoluteness, but this does not by itself set limits to what may come to be before death. Aspiration to virtue, the forms of love and friendship, and struggles for reputation and mutual recognition all contain components that reach beyond mortality and simple timeliness, a phenomenon apparent in the idea of posterity and in Aristotle's otherwise senseless question of whether the living can affect the feliCity of the dead (Nicomachean Ethics 1.110la22). It is not self-evidently foolish to be concerned about one's posthumous reputation. To raise it as an issue at all reveals that the horizons of self-worth are set beyond the bounds of survival. Being-a-whole is not just a matter of surviving a long life, but a matter of living it well (Politics 1.1252b30 ). The idea of mortal finitude determines Heidegger's account of primordial temporality. Primordial temporality is the ontological framework presupposed by authentic care. It is deduced along the following lines: futurity is the "Being-towards one's ownmost, distinctive potentialityfor-Being"; pastness is the condition for "taking over one's thrownness"; and presentness makes possible the encounter wherefrom action occurs, the experience of situatedness (BT 370). None of these formulations introduces limiting conditions of its own into the structure of care, but Heidegger nonetheless goes on to speak of the "finitude of primordial temporality" (BT 378). It is the same play on words as before. Heidegger claims that while the three components of primordial temporality are equiprimordial, futurity nonetheless has a hierarchical priority within that whole. But futurity has its essential meaning because of Dasein's death, its Ende. Hence Dasein "does not have an end [Ende] at which it just stops, but it exists finitely [endlich]. The. authentic future is temporalized primarily by that temporality which makes up the meaning of anticipatory resoluteness; it thus reveals itself as finite" (Bt 378). This deduction of finite, primordial temporality as the meaning of care is, however, truncated from the --------- -

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start. It cannot be the full meaning of care, because it leaves out all connection with Dasein's ownmost possibilities besides death, possibilities that Heidegger has himself admitted. The analysis of prinlordial temporality is governed at the outset by the assumption of mortality's complete hegemony in the economy of Dasein's possibilities. In the paragraph where Heidegger asserts the finitude of primordial temporality, he begins: "Care is Being-towards-death," as if this were exhaustive. That he intends the narrowing is made quite clear in the following sentence: "We have defined 'anticipatory resoluteness' as authentic Being towards the possibility which we have characterized as Dasein's utter inlpossibility" (BT 378). This may be the appropriate way to analyze primordial temporality, insofar as mortality nlay be its proper and ultimate horizon, but if so, primordial temporality cannot, by Heidegger's own previous analysis, fully encompass the meaning of care. Dasein's potential wholeness is greater than a mortal totality, as the very notion of authenticity originally conveyed. The foregoing is not an objection from the perspective of ordinary time. Heidegger is well aware how disturhing his analysis must be in relation to the everyday understanding of time as infinite. He rightly maintains that this sense of time as an infinite field of nows with directionality and succession must be grounded in Dasein's understanding of Being before it can have any right to pronounce on the cogency of his analysis of primordial temporality. My objection is lodged from the perspective of the transcendence implied not by infinite time but by resoluteness and the meaning of Dasein's wholeness. The presentiment of being implied by Dasein's care includes intimations of immortality as well as a Being-towards-death. Were it not for Heidegger's own arbitrary assumption that mortality dominates care completely, his analysis of primordial temporality would contain no comfort at all for the defenders of radical finitude. Care as potentiality-for-Being, mortality notwithstanding, remains consistent with a sense of Dasein's wholeness that corresponds to the spirit of First Philosophy.

Ambiguities of Fate Recognition of mortality formally sets the stage for Dasein's authentic questioning of what it is to be. The concrete issue of Dasein's potentialityfor-Being, on the other hand, is not set by death but by happiness (eudaimonia). Happiness is not Heidegger's term. A late modern, he

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naturally construes happiness as self-realization in freedom. In the mode of everydayness, Dasein has already abdicated the responsibilities toward itself tacitly written into its primordial orientation of Being-in-the-World. The neglect of self-possession Heidegger interprets as a deficient mode of something potentially more authentic. Dasein experiences the problem of needing to be true to itself in the phenomenon of conscience (Gewissen ) (div. 2, chap. 2). Conscience breaks the spell of the "they" (dQ$ Man) (BT 316), but it also comes with the negative valence of awareness that one has already been untrue to oneself, that one finds oneself existing as fallen. The negative valence is the transcendental meaning of guilt. Conscience is Dasein's being called forth to "the possibility of taking over [ilbernehmen], in existing, even that thrown entity which it is" (BT 333), to the possibility, in other words, of self-possession, autarkeia, self-knowledge-in short, to the possibility of wisdom. What does this "taking over" entail? What sort of transcendence, if any, is at work here? What sort of finitude? The first clues for answering these questions are given a few pages earlier, where it seems that there are indeed severe limits to Dasein's taking over its thrownness: The Self, which as such has to lay the basis for itself, can never get that basis into its power; and yet, as existing, it must take over Being-a-basis.... In being a basis - that is, in existing as thrown - Dasein constantly lags behind its possibilities. It is never existent befOre its basis, but only from it and Q$ this bQ$is. Thus "Being-a-basis" means never to have power over one's ownmost Being from the ground up. (BT 330) Later, in the chapter on historicity, Heidegger refers back to this passage: "have we not said in addition that Dasein never comes back behind its thrownness?" (BT 434). Two questions obtrude. First, what is the origin of these necessities, whereby Dasein never has full power over its basis, constantly lags behind its possibilities, never comes back behind its thrownness? It may be conceded that Dasein could never take over its context as if it had effective reality before being in that context. In other words, it makes no metaphysical sense to picture actual escape from circumstance into, say, a timeless transcendental domain. This was made clear in the discussion of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. It may also be


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conceded that any taking over is constrained to begin from where, and as, one finds oneself thrown. But these easily derivable necessities do not self-evidently set any localizing limits to one's final state. Dasein will never create itself whole, obviously. The difficulty concerns whether there are any a priori limits to the perfections Dasein may realize in response to its thrownness. The first question asks after the meaning of the power being denied in the above passage. The power of self-perfection or virtue is a different sort of power from either the power of self-creation or the power of escape, and each has a different relation to the basis from which it may be supposed to begin. Between these extremes lie manifold resolutions toward, and deeds of, self-rectification. Heidegger will soon say that anticipatory resoluteness underwrites the possibility of "acquiring power over Dasein's existence and of basically dispersing all fugitive self-concealments" (BT 357). Thus, while Dasein cannot "have power over its ownmost Being from the ground up," it nonetheless has some other sort of power, in this case a power to resist fallenness. And later again, Heidegger will speak of as Dasein's "own superior power, the power of its finite freedom" (BT 436), by which Dasein overcomes the powerlessness of being merely abandoned to thrownness. In sum, Dasein is somehow tied to the basis revealed in thrownness and yet at the same time not necessarily dominated by that basis. My first question concerned the relation between Dasein and its basis, the second concerns the basis itself: does the basis revealed in the resolution to take over thrownness have any intrinsic limits? One of the most impressive features of finding oneself thrown is finding oneself already partially determined in ways not of one's choosing. These may be called the particularities or the contingencies of thrownness. Yet Dasein is not just thrownness; it is thrown-projection. In other words, finding oneself thrown is also finding oneself in the midst of a field of possibilities, only son1e of which are so far actualized as to determine the contingencies discovered within thrownness. Thrownness itself is no reason to suppose that the whole field of possibility, Le., understanding, is dominated by those contingencies. Indeed, understanding could only illuminate or disclose those contingencies in virtue of itself being beyond them, in virtue of being able to construe them against a background of possibility that includes the intelligibility of their not having been at all. Heidegger favors describing the circumstances of thrownness in terms that appear more limitative than his own ontology of thrown-projection, care, acknowledgment of mortality, and responsi-

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bility toward an authentic way of life so far requires. The limitative structure hitherto unsuspected within thrown-projection is marked by the tandem notions of situation andfacticity, which are suddenly made to bear significant weight no sooner than Heidegger has announced the principle of resoluteness (BT 343). Filling out Heidegger's account on this score will bring the discussion back to the issue of Dasein's power of freedom discovered in elaboration of the first question. In a sentence highlighted in the original, Heidegger writes "The resolution is precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time" (BT 345), and a little further on: "Dasein ... can project itself only upon definite factical possibilities" (BT 346). "Factically possible Oat the time" and "definite factical possibilities" are wholly suspicious addenda, suspicious because nothing has prepared the reader for the demarcation of the field of possibility into factical and presumably nonfactical portions. Facticity is in general tied directly to thrownness, not to projection (BT 174, 329). It refers to the set of possibilities Dasein discovers itself to be already and not of its own accord, what above were called the contingencies of thrownness. Characterized in this way, facticity does not have a directly limitative effect on understanding. The need to suppose it has some relation to projection arises as follows. Thrownprojection implies a field of possibilities. Authentic determination of possibilities, because a worthwhile self or way of life is at stake, is not just a matter of randomly selecting roles and options. Dasein is not so purely free that it can realize possibilities ad libitum, as if it were putting on and removing masks. Yet it can resolve on the transfiguration of what it finds in thrownness. Resoluteness needs not only an object but also a guide toward good objects. This is why Heidegger moves to order the field of possibilities with more than the generic structures hitherto revealed as Being-in-the-World. Facticity is part of that ordering, with its hint of limitation yet to be fully worked out. Situatedness is the other side of that coin; it is what facticity looks like to resolute Dasein. The situation "delimits the existential structure of that authentic potentiality-for-Being which the conscience attests" (BT 347), though the scope of this "delimiting" Heidegger does not specify. Situations are revealed only to resolute Dasein. They are more than circumstances; they are disclosed as the circumstances and medium in which authentic possib.ilities are to be realized. Anticipatory resoluteness as the primordial form of resoluteness is also qualified by facticity. It


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does not spring from idealistic flights of adolescent fancy "soaring above existence and its possibilities; it springs from a sober understanding of what are factically the basic possibilities for Dasein" (BT 358). An important early passage suggests that facticity exercises a limitative effect on'the field of possibility. "The concept of facticity implies that an entity within-the-world has Being-in-the-World in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its 'destiny' with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world" (BT 82). The notion of destiny ( Geshick ) is not explicated until the section on historicity in division 2, but expressed in passing it certainly sounds as if Dasein's authentic or proper possibilities are dominated and particularized ("bound up") by actualities beyond its power. The issue, then, is what sort of effect these hitherto unsuspected outcroppings in the field of possibility have on the reach of understanding. "Dasein's historicality will prove to be, at bottom, just a more concrete working out of temporality" (BT 434). Historicity answers to the question of how primordial temporalizing can have content, of how Dasein can guarantee self-constancy in the space between birth and death and how it can determine an authentic self once it has realized its mortality. Death "guarantees only the totality and the authenticity of one's resoluteness" (BT 434) but reveals no viable possibilities for ongoing existence. The latter appear once thrownness is grasped as a situation and anticipatory resoluteness issues in the imperative to take over own's thrownness. It is just at this point that I-Ieidegger asks "Have we not said in addition that Dasein never comes back behind its thrownness?" and he elaborates thus: The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms ofthe heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over. ... Once one has grasped the finitude of one's existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one ... and brings Dasein into the sinlplicity of its fate [Schicksal]. (BT 435) Fate is the inner substance of what resolute Dasein inherits, and Dasein's task is to see it clearly enough to choose it. To the fateful situation as revealed by authentic resolution, Heidegger also adds the claim ~f destiny (Geschick), which connotes the manner in which individual fate is

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always tied up with the fate of its community, the Dasein of its Beingwith-Others (BT 436). The choosing offate and destiny, or rather their being let be, Heidegger calls the "power of finite freedom." In exercising such freedom, Dasein overcomes the powerlessness of being merely abandoned to thrownness. One gains that power through "a clear vision for the a~idents of the situation that has been disclosed" (BT 436). Fallenness implies that an effort of discrimination must be made, that Dasein must resist the "endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest." Yet Heidegger gives no criterion for deciding between the fateful and the trivial or, more pressing, between the fateful and the evil. Without such a criterion, no limitative claim for fate can be justifiable, for only thus can it be intelligible to say that the fateful has greater cause to be chosen. Furthermore, while "fateful" sounds contingent and particularizing, nothing that Heidegger says guarantees that, for the circumstances of thrownness are not exhausted by its local contingencies. One finds oneself in a particular situation, Le., one finds oneself "there" (da ), but the horizons of any "there" are not particular. in this way. In a sense it is fate to be the child of one's parents, a member of one's race, the inheritor of one's culture, but no family, race, or culture is so fully determined in its own right that its horizons are all as contingent as its actual institutions and practices. Heidegger's mention of fate gives no reason to rule out the possibility that philosophy, for example, is written into every sufficiently rich human tradition, perhaps remotely yet nonetheless fatefully available for those called to it. The particularities of fate and destiny do not self-evidently limit the horizons of possibility that surround them, even while they can be said to structure the field of possibility in the immediate neighborhood of one's thrownness. "Fate" and "destiny" sound as if they should particularize possibilities, but they are as ambiguous in this regard as the original notion of basis. Either they are a subset of the actual contingencies in which Dasein finds itself, in which case they are of themselves no ground for supposing that projection is limited, or, if they describe a substructure of what is projected around thrownness, Heidegger has given no metaphysical account of how they could limit the entire field of possibility. Heidegger does not, therefore, justifiably establish limitative finitude in the medium out of which admittedly historicized Dasein must determine itself as both thinking and acting. This leaves the question of


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whether there is any limitative finitude in Dasein's power to make such self-determinations. Gadamer, it will be recalled, thought there was. Although he exhorts us "to acquire as much historical self-transparence as possible" (TM xxiv) he also insists that "the illumination of this situation - reflection on effective history-can never be completely achieved" (TM 302). This he takes to follow directly from facticity, another name for the brutality of Geworfenheit: "no freely chosen relation to one's own being can get behind the facticity of this being. Everything that makes possible and limits Dasein's projection ineluctably precedes it" (TM 264). "Ineluctably" is the focal point 'here, for Heidegger speaks of a much more penetrating "moment of vision" than Gadamer's hermeneutic myopia admits. Heidegger is careful to deny that the choosing of one's fate or, in Gadamerian terms, appropriating one's tradition is a matter of merely repeating, for and in oneself, traditional or fateful possibility. The gesture of taking over one's thrownness, once disciplined by the recognition of mortal finitude, issues in the realization that at least some of one's ownmost possibilities are tied up in what one inherits. Releasing them from what is handed on is a creative rejoinder to the past, a retrieval into living reality, rather than simple repetition. This complex response is what Heidegger calls Wiederholung (BT 437). By this maneuver, Heidegger avoids outright historical determinisnl. The authentic present must be characterized by a "monlent of vision" that effectively disengages Dasein from the bondage of the here and now. The moment of vision sees into what fate makes possible, yet it is "at the same time a disavowal of that which in the 'today' is working itself out as the 'past' " (BT 438). It is the Hegelian moment of infinite negation, indeterminate freedom. Gadamer could not save the critical appropriation of tradition without such a vision, and so contradicted himself; Heidegger admits it outright. In this respect he preserves the possibility of First Philosophy. On the other hand, Heidegger's historicistic ambiguity emerges in consideration of what is to fill the moment of vision. Dasein exercises the capacity for insight most authentically when it responds to and accepts its fate. In doing so, it is being as historical as it can and ought to be. But as already argued, the limits of this fatefulness have not been ontologically established to the level that the ordinary connotation of fate suggests. One may suppose that fate specifies many possibilities, but this is not the same as to say it localizes them all.

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REASON'S FREEDOM To talk of the historicity of things or of the historicity of human being as if the idea itself justified the assertion of limitative finitude, or with the expectation that it trumped any mention of First Philosophy's noetic ideals, is philosophically senseless. Both Heidegger and Gadamer have understood that, if it is to perform any critical work, the idea of historicity requires explication against a background of ontologically more fundamental categories. In Gadamer's case, historicity is located within the structure exhibited by the transactions of interpretative understanding, while Heidegger, more primordially, founds historicity in the literally ontological or being-addressing and being-addressed structure of human existence. It is often supposed either that Heidegger demonstrated finite historicity or that its truth. became so overwhelming in Being and Time that he was compelled to abandon the book's inconsistently metaphysical manner of approach. Yet just as with Gadamer, regarding whom it was shown in Chapter Two that the notion of finite historicity supervenes on the more fundamental ideas of his philosophical hermeneutics, so too with Heidegger does limitative finitude merely obtrude into the analyses and fundamental conceptions of the Daseinsanalytik. It is not compelled by them. Heidegger's abandoning Being and Time may therefore be strong evidence for the charm of radical finitude, but it provides the doctrine itself with no further and independent support. Moreover, such unforced abandonment furnishes no reason to suppose that the traditional metaphysical orientation of fundamental ontology has to be mistaken. It is merely inconsistent with the hypothesis of radical finitude that Being and Time, as it happened, failed to bear out. Heidegger's great philosophical service is to have shown, once again, in careful metaphysical detail that both history and time are abstractions, that they are, in the first place, generic concepts designed to encompass a host of unspecified determining relations, that they are not realities or powers in their own right. Historicity and temporality are richer categories for describing effective determination because they name conditions for the possibility of various human activities, but once this clarification is achieved, it becomes obvious that history and time may not be analyzed for their effect on understanding independently and in advance of the categories used for explicating human being. Historicity means not that human reality is inevitably and by nature wholly carried away


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by a flow of historical time-this etheric image no longer has any critical sense against the background of Heideggerian metaphysics-but that the actuality of being human always involves a complex and necessary mediation that is properly denoted historical. By itself, this says nothing about the limits or actual shapes of such mediation. From Gadamer, one can learn how Wirkungsgeschichte has to enter the dynamic of appropriation and assimilation of meaning in the present, yet there is no reason to follow him in his account of it as an unavoidably dominating and constraining force, salutary as it is to keep in mind how infrequently and with how much difficulty one ever rises above thoughtless prejudice. From Heidegger, one can learn of the subterranean connections between history and authentic selfhood, questioning and quest, time and selfinterpretation, yet there is no need to concede the peculiarly impotent form of heroism he advocates. One need not concede, strange as it is to say it this way, that fate is as fixed as he makes out. There is a formal reason in the character of Being and Time's project for why it could not possibly justify limitative historicity. Philosophical historicism must exhibit the grounds of actual constraint on present activity. Moreover, that constraint cannot be ontic; it must be operative in principle, i.e., ontological. This forces on historicism a metaphysical ascent. Heidegger's account is not so much an outright metaphysical ascent as a transcendental regression into grounds of possibility. This does not prevent Heidegger's analysis from being suitably ontological, but it does prevent him from analyzing the actuality of constraint. Hence, no speculative philosophy of history appears in Being and Time to fill out the reality of fate, destiny, and so on. This missing element is furnished by the later Heidegger in his doctrines of the history and eschatology of Being. The transcendental account of historical human being is in advance restricted by its legitimate yet circumscribed intent to delineate generic conditions of historical decision. But decision, to mention only one kind of understanding's acts, is not itself a generic structure, and it always contains more in its actuality than the conditions for its possibility. This greater actuality is not confined to the facticity of its occurrence, to the efficient causality of its happening here and now, but also includes all specification of the possible. A host of determinate meanings are therefore lost to transcendental analysis. Most awkward of all, the specifications that must be lost to transcendental analysis are the specifications that result in fulfillment or perfection, for these are the most complete

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realizations of what is possible. No more is determinable in the specific form, although that form may itself set up a structure inside which other possibilities are permitted to occur. Hence, for example, one might acquire the virtue of courage, but there is no meaning to be given to the fancy of becoming more or less or differently courageous: courage is courage, and the continued performance of courageous acts does not further determine or even augment the perfected form of courage itself. Thrownness or situatedness or prejudice can abide only as potencies, setting the stage for multiple acts of understanding and self-realization, and only as potentialities can conditions for possibility enter the equation of determining the present. They cannot therefore be limitative in the required manner. In a nutshell: genera cannot be differentiae. Both Heidegger and Gadamer advocate a reconciliation with finitude. Heidegger has- 11 more radical conception of the peculiar freedom that belongs to thinking~ and therewith a more radical conception of reason's philosophical tasks and obligations. In consequence, he is less dogmatic about the limitative character of human finitude and more willing than any recent historicist to concede philosophy the chance of a prophetic role. This aristocratic streak makes him correspondingly more pessimistic. Gadamer's good-natured optimism, on the other hand, tends to smother the monstrous aspect of critical reason's negativity, a monstrousness that Socrates once confessed to the beautiful Phaedrus on their walk outside the walls of the city (Phaedrus 230a). Heidegger, for his part, rather than trying to turn philosophers into exemplary citizens-Gadamer's decent but inadequate hope, inadequate for its presupposing the tameness of philosophers or, in what amounts to the same thing, overlooking what Plato thought of as philosophy's divine madness (Phaedrus 248d, 244a )-reserves for philosophers the role of poet-prophets, following essentially in the footsteps of Nietzsche, who conceived the strategy of hiding philosophy's negativity in art. A mOT fati is the evident progenitor of Gelassenheit, though it serves a more vigorous sense of purpose. The gesture of reconciliation is still present in the later Heidegger to the extent that the prophet and shepherd of Being is vouchsafed a participatory grace. It .is, ,however, a servile one. The subtle balance implied by human rationali'ty as the locale and occasion of truth or, as Heidegger would put it, the belonging together of Being and man, is tipped suffiCiently in favor of Being to leave human beings without a destiny that is identifiably their own. One may still seize a rather more reckless fate by ignoring the appeals of Being altogether, but according to Heidegger this


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has to lead nowhere. Man the indeterminate, the unfinished, animal must submit to the commands of Seinsgeschichte in order to become authentic, to become most himself. Reconciliation with finitude is an ambiguous rubric. It could describe the admirable resolve to do without consolation, to stop seeking otherworldly solutions for mundane, mortal fears. Yet it could just as easily imply an ignoble consolation of its own, namely, illegitimately relieving the dissatisfaction of having failed to achieve what is known to be difficult but has not yet been shown to be definitively unachievable. Wisdom demands that we understand our mortality and that we understand how strenuous is the business of understanding. Perhaps this can be called a reconciliation with human finitude, though Hegel's shade will always remain to be appeased: "whoever talks of a finite and purely human reason or only of such a reason's limitations, lies against the spirit."9 Heidegger reminds us, where Gadamer does not, that whatever human finitude ultinlately amounts to, the freedom of thought, the negation implied by critical appropriation, wrecks the image of total Seinsverbundenheit. It dissolves the fancy that intelligent self-consciousness is "only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life" (TM 276). Seldom has it been adequately appreciated how disruptive is the admission of critical distance in any form. Effective history, when construed as a pageant of expressive acts, has little or no room for the mirror of reflection, but once one claims the right in the present to speculate on the past, the possibility of reflection must be integrated into the ontological structure of the show on which one reflects. If there is in any sense a critical glance to be cast over history, then historicistic continuities must be looser and more porous than the seamlessness of vitalistic and causal paradigms suggests. The moment of vision is discontinuous with life, and so life's limitations can never cross over to set intrinsic boundaries for the whole of thought. It follows that only with violence can intelligence be made completely at home with the particularities of its mortal fate. The intelligence that reveals contingency must be beyond it, in order to make that illumination possible. Moreover, one cannot in principle curb the negativity of critical detachment, although one can in practice dull it. To see that even one thing is not good, or that another thing is better, is to have an idea that creates infinite distance, since the good thus becomes intelligible, regardless of how far away we may be from

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actually knowing it in full. Vague notions of "partial distance" will be of no help, for at best they are variations on the incoherent thenle of interim stability, and at worst they simply restate the fetish of finitude. The transpolitical moment of vision is preserved in Being and Time, yet the remaining aspects of Dasein's authentic self, all its concrete possibilities, derive from the givens of heritage, fate, and destiny. Dasein itself is· made to hover on the edge of an exquisite indecisiveness, as if the task has become so delicate a matter that virtue in any form can only be realized in perpetual postponement of determination. Any decision about what to think or what to do must fasten upon one possibility to the regrettable exclusion of others, equally valuable. "Freedom," writes Heidegger, "is only in the choice of one possibility-that is, in tolerating one's not having chosen the others and one's not being able to choose them" (BT 331). Understanding therefore plays no active role in the mediation of those concrete possibilities: it discerns but neither discriminates nor synthesizes. Understanding is never called upon for the alchemy of transfiguration. Authentic Dasein is at best a Beautiful Soul. Historicity as developed in Being and Time does not provide adequate grounds for the assertion of limitative or localizing finitude. Even so, Heidegger's fundamental ontology ventures a worthwhile account of what it means to say that human reality must be historical, while remaining sensitive to the uncanniness of human intelligence. Although Dasein is where truth transpires, the negativity that makes this possible also has a dislocative quality. It is dislocative because any actual here and now in which Dasein finds itself may be compared, however indeternlinately, with all other possible times and places, all other thens and theres. Illumination is possible only where there is not complete identification. On the other hand, the general lesson of historical consciousness is this: the ideal of wisdom or perfect illumination needs to be carefully interpreted if it is not to catapult our instinctive trust in the light of reason into the absurd hope of fastening onto a transcendent Jenseits. If the love of wisdom comes to rest anywhere, it cannot be as the result of a mystical translation into some time-independent domain-a view of philosophy that was lampooned by philosophers as long ago as Socrates in the Theaetetus (173c). The postulate of some other place for the perfection of life and thought is a naive reaction to the natural dislocativeness of reason. The search for a more convincing account of historicity may therefore turn confidently to Hegel because he pays profoundest attention to the


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phenomenon of intelligence's negativity while exploring the metaphysical constitution of history. He does not begin by presuming to domesticate it. Rather, he seeks to reconcile reason's moment of negativity, its infinite freedom from the given, with the bounds, whatever on closer scrutiny they should turn out to be, of the here and now. Hegel wants, as he wrote in the preface to his Philosophy ofRight, "to recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present ."10

CHAPTER FIVE

HEGEL: HISTORY'S RATIONAL ACTUALITY

Hegel's full-scale metaphysics of history accounts for both the dynamical structures that make history possible and the actual appearing of its specific forms. In this it is superior to Heidegger's half-scale, transcendental version of similar themes. Not all of Hegel's n1etaphysical account will be relevant to the question of reason's differentiation by historical time. The general question has two fundan1ental sides: what is thinking such that history has a hand in it, and what is history such that it has a hand in thinking? These two aspects are in Hegel thoroughly fused. Not only does he render a metaphysically disciplined justification of how human understanding is capable of absolute knowing, he also takes history to be absolutely relevant. My current task is to establish whether or to what extent Hegelian metaphysical ideas lend aid to historicist convictions concerning reason's contextualization. The phenon1enon of negativity ensures that reason as a power of intelligence can never be thoroughly localized. On the other hand, negativity is only one moment, albeit essential, in the complex that is reason's complete actuality. Hegelian metaphysics permits the question

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of whether fully operative theoretical reason is in any other sense strongly, though not totally, differentiated by history, negativity notwithstanding. Any positive answer to this question will help throw light on the sorts of considerations that seduce historicists into their mistaken extreme, the good reasons from which they make their bad induction. My exegeses are extensive because I am primarily concerned with presenting Hegel's account of history's actuality, and hence its determining power, as the proper metaphysical context for appreciating historicist intuitions. That is, Hegel's account reasonably encompasses all the phenomena of contextualization, grounding them and making sense of what they mean for the nature of reason and its actual operation. Make no mistake though - Hegel is not a philosophical historicist, and his system cannot be turned into philosophical historicism without radical deformation. Although I shall have occasion to criticize Hegel on the one point of tying the full realization of philosophy to the history of Western civilization, Hegel's own idiom nonetheless remains that of First Philosophy, since he maintains that human reason is, by its own nature, adequate to reality's first principles. Philosophy's attendance on worldhistory is, for him, a matter of reality's incomplete development, not reason's intrinsic and incorrigible weakness. I shall examine, first, the Phenomenology of Spirit, since that is Hegel's treatise on the development of reason's self-knowledge. It will also be important to show how, contrary to common assumptions about how history figures in the work, the Phenomenology does not directly answer any questions about the metaphysics of history's actuality. The ground prepared by the Phenomenology thus leads over into Hegel's concrete philosophy of history as the context for answering those questions.

HEGELIAN HISTORICISM To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science [Wissenschaft], to the goal where it can lay aside the title "love of knowing [Wissen]" and be actual knowing-that is what I have set myself to do. (PS 3)1 Such is the unabashed, First Philosophical spirit and aim of Hegel's

Phenomenology. By the book's end, science or the adequation of the

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human intellect to first principles is affirmed, at least as a possibility (PS 490). This moment of "absolute knowing" (absolutes Wissen), the noetic orientation unencumbered with any suspicion of inadequacy to universal and primordial truth, represents the very thesis whose denial defines philosophical historicism. On the other hand, least of all will phenomenology, says Hegel, "be like the rapturous enthusiasm which, like a shot from a pistol, begins straight away with absolute knowledge" (PS 16). Actual adequation of the intellect to its primary objects is far from immediate, either logically or temporally. To prepare the element of science, the medium in which absolute knowing may proceed, is, as with the acquisition of any virtue, a time-consuming, developmental process. "To beget the element of Science ... it [viz., knowing] must travel a long way and work its passage" (PS 15). Hegel hints throughout his preface, returning to the question of history in the final paragraph (PS 492-93), that, even in the particular case of arrival at absolute knowing, this "working of its passage" consumes not just time but the historical time of developing Western culture. Thus, when he speaks of hoping "to show that now is the time for philosophy to be raised to the status of a Science" (PS 3, emphasis added), he is already thinking of the now in terms of his own worldhistorical epoch, for "it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era" (PS 6). Overall (and its demonstration goes beyond the thematic confines of the Phenomenology), Hegel claims to be in a unique position finally to make good on the love of wisdom. Philosophical desire he supposes has been universally felt by all those of philosophical temperament throughout history, but hitherto it has been less than fully appreciated, and only in this historical moment is it able to be consummated. Hegel relativizes philosophy to history but allows that, in his own Napoleonic and postLutheran age, cultural history has at last made possible philosophy's adequation to its primary object (adequation does not yet amount to fulfillment, since working out all the details will also take time to come) (PS 7). While genuinely first principles are thus naturally available to human beings, their availability is relative not to the span of a single human life, its accidental circumstances, and its painstaking accession to virtue, but only to the span of a certain sort of cumulative, recollected, communal human history. Call this, as distinct from philosophical, "Hegelian historicisnl." It is the view that reason is so contextualized that perfect intellectual virtue depends not on the intrinsic capacities of the individual soul, or even on

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those capacities plus the good fortune of living in a freedom-loving, discourse-abiding, leisure-furnishing political community, but on the soul's natural capacities and good fortune in necessary conjunction with its community's extrinsic position in the history of Western civilization, construed as the evolution of spirit ( Geist ). Spirit may be understood as the whole essence of human reality, an essence that is physical, animate, sentient, practical, political, theoretical, religious, artful, and philosophical. To call all these aspects of human reality spiritual (geistig) amounts to more than renaming their human character. It implies (1) that human existence and its modes can reach full actuality only in proportion to the adequacy of their self-recognition, and therefore (2) that understanding is both a condition of and expressed in every aspect of human reality: The most important point for the nature of spirit is not only the relation of what it is in itself to what it is actually, but the relation of what it knows itselfto be to what it actually is; because spirit is essentially consciousness, this self-knowing is a fundamental determination of its actuality. 2 The issue most relevant to historicism is the now that is the time for philosophy to be elevated to science. In what sense does it have to be Hegel's time? Why is it not always the time to actualize the adequation of intellect to first principles, for those with the relevant capacities and good luck? Why, for example, is the thought of Plato not full-fledged philosophizing, or the thought of Hobbes? Philosophical and Hegelian historicism agree in the implication that neither Plato nor Hobbes could have philosophized with ideal universality, the former on the grounds that no one can, the latter on the grounds that only the historically privileged can. Answers to the above questions are not straightforward, and exploring them takes up the rest of this final chapter. Phenomenology as Logical Process The goal of Hegelian phenomenology is "absolute knowing" (absolutes Wissen), the justification that philosophy as science ( Wissenschaft) is possible or "Spirit's insight into what knowing is" (PS 17). "In the Phenomenology DISpirit I have exhibited consciousness in its movement


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outwards from the first immediate opposition of itself and its object to absolute knowing. The path of this movement goes through every form of the relation ofconsciousness to the object and has the Notion of science for its result" (SL 48). I gloss the sense of absolute knowing as follows. Intelligent human existence at the moment when it self-consciously reflects is marked by an uncanny restlessness. 3 It is uncanny because self-awareness disconnects whoever is reflectively self-aware from rootedness in the situation that in hidden ways has yet made reflection possible. The immediate negativity of reflective, critical intelligence produces a sense of homelessness. It is restless because the disconnection is not satisfying, is not by itself an actual noetic achievement. It seeks fulfillment in a completion of understanding. Philosophy is the name for the desire that the uncanny restlessness of intelligence be converted from a disturbance into noetic tranquillity. Conversion in this sense does not require the dissolution of the tension. The ontological structure of experience remains intact. If it is to be overcome in the course of human life, it is not suppressed or annihilated, it is transfiguredaufgehoben, in Hegel's word. Wisdom means the achievement of this transfiguration, through calming the restlessness of intelligence. In order that the wish for such calm be not another dreary piece of mortal vanity, its seeds must be present, and at least partially visible, in the situation it transfigures. They lie in the very awareness of restlessness. To notice one's restlessness signals a monlent of stillness that is not itself disturbed by the unease it locates. The same moment of stillness is the source of noetic self-confidence, the obstinacy of opinion, and the standard for ultimate cognitive success. "The individual has the right to demand that Science should at least provide him with the ladder to this standpoint, should show him this standpoint within himself. His right is based on his absolute independence, which he is conscious of possessing in every phase of his knowledge; for in each one, whether recognized by Science or not, and whatever the content may be, the individual is the absolute form, Le., he is immediate certainty of himself.... Science must therefore unite this element of self-certainty with itself, or rather show that and how this element belongs to it" (PS 14-15). The witnessing moment within the negativity of human intelligence presents itself as an Archimedean fulcrunl inviting philosophical resolve to move the world. Initial restlessness soon takes the form of a questioning, a seeking (zetesis ). In many cases it will be significantly pre-verbal. Hegel rejects

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the picture of an endless seeking. There may be something ineradicable about the conditions provoking reflection and responsible for its uncanniness, but the soul is not committed to a bad infinity of indefinite or even asymptotic progression. It is not so much a content that dislocated intelligence in the first place seeks. Rather, dislocated intelligence seeks first and foremost assurance of its place, assurance that it is not absurd (atopos). It is nostalgic or home-seeking, and it is the home-coming of intelligence that is represented in the notion of absolute knowing. Arrival at the absolute standpoint is not arrival at omniscience but arrival at the point of reason's assurance that it is in principle adequate to all that might be known or worth knowing. It is absolution from mere restlessness, from confusion, though it is not on that count cessation of motion altogether. It is commotion's rectification into the divine circularity of "thought thinking itself' (noesis tes noeseos ).4 Once one has the knack of circular motion, one can proceed to tracing the circles within circles that elaborate the content of philosophical knowledge, distinguishable in this case from philosophical knowing. "The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but at the same time the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases" (EN § 15 ).5 Rectification of intelligent activity is a description, in real terms, of what is logically a train of justification. Hegel freely refers to both as movements (Bewegungen ) and developments (Entwicklungen ), a nonchalance that invites confusion about the movement or process of phenomenology itself. All the talk of motion has encouraged some readers to suppose that an ontic process is the immediate object of descriptionthe actual progression of world-history, perhaps, or at least a history of consciousness, a paleontology of the mind, to use Engels' phrase. Yet Hegel is all along describing a logical development that is the purified inside of what happens also to have in its details a rather more haphazard (though still ordered) outside. In the manifestation of any actuality whatsoever, there is for Hegel a necessary connection between the outward sequence of timely appearances and the inner logic of their ordered determination. Precisely in virtue of this overarching and necessary connection, encapsulated in the fundamental principle that "essence must appear" (EN §131, SL 479), he will happily talk of ideas developing. In fact, the logical sense of development is primary. "The development of all natural and spiritual life rests solely on the nature of the pure essentialities [reine Wesenheiten] which constitute the content of logic"


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(5L 28). Development in Hegel's sense is the modern heir to the dynamism introduced into form ( eidos ) by Aristotle's notion of energeia. It is a way of saying that the manifestation of a complex form is necessarily time-consuming, yet also that the time-taking occurs as a demand of the idea itself rather than as a consequence of recalcitrant materials lying around in some already given temporal receptacle. Development is not primarily an ontic process of change; it is the articulation of essence which is the logical structure of real or thingly change. Time is not outside of ideas; it depends on the process of their articulation. 6 In the Phenomenology's introduction, Hegel uses a much more narrative idiom than he does in the preface, written later, to describe the process of phenomenology. This gives an even stronger appearance of anticipating an actual chronicle, or type of chronicle. From the introduction one gleans the well-known imagery of the educative pathway of consciousness's experience, the famous highway of despair (P5 49). Against that imagery one must balance the description in the final paragraph of the "Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance" as a "comprehended [begriffnen] organization" (PS 493) and the remark of the preface that "the task of leading the individual from his uneducated standpoint to knowledge had to be seen in its universal sense" (PS 16). This reminder follows a characterization of the whole project: "'it is this coming-to-be of Science as such or of knowledge [Wissen], that is described in this Phenomenology of Spirit. ... This process of coming-to-be ... will not be what is commonly understood by an initiation of unscientific consciousness into Science; it will also be quite different from the 'foundation' of Science;' (PS 15-16). Phenomenology is different from a foundation because "foundation" as Hegel means it here is a matter of content. In contrast, phenomenology is restricted to the coming-to-be or appearing (Erscheinung) of absolute knowing, where this knowing ( Wissen ) is distinguishable, though not separable, from an exposition of science itself ( Wissenschafi). Hegel speaks of absolute knowing as the "soil" or the "element" or the "aether" of science, while "this element itself achieves its own perfection and transparency only through the movement of its becoming" (PS 14). Otherwise put, the preparation of science's soil may (once science has been achieved) be considered in its own right. The theme of the Phenomenology is the absolute standpoint, the moment where reason is assured of adequacy to reality, not absolute knowledge. Even so, Hegel's is not a transcendental investigation of the sort that

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presumes a determinate and well-bounded domain as a given for freefloating meta-analysis. Self-knowing is never an immediate, introspective intuition. The major difficulty facing all critiques of reason is that transcendental, second-order forms of knowing are always as much in need of justification as are any of the contents whose determinacy they might happen to succeed in grounding. Hegel does not beg this question. 7 Yet this does not mean that the distinction between form and content, theme and horizon, is intrinsically illegitimate; the trick is not to misinterpret it. The Phenomenology is, in one respect, a gallery of all the possible ways of making just this error and a recollection of all the ways of overcoming those mistakes. Putative forms of knowing are only manifest in the ways they grasp and handle their materials, and each carries within its own self a tacit measure of its cognitive adequation. In looking back to his Phenomenology, near the beginning of the Encyclopaedia Hegel later writes: "in these circumstances it was impossible to restrict the quest to the mere form of consciousness. For the stage of philosophical knowledge is the richest in materi.al and organization, and therefore, as it came before us in the shape of a result, it presupposed the existence of the concrete formations of consciousness, such as individual and social morality, art and religion. In the development of consciousness, which at first sight appears limited to the point of form merely, there is thus at the same time included the development of the matter or of the objects .discussed in the special branches of philosophy" (EN §25). The content is there, yet with respect to the process of the emergence of absolute knowing, it is there only per accidens. Phenomenology is also different from "what is commonly understood by an initiation of unscientific consciousness into Science"-first because the education of given individuals is an accidental matter in relation to its logic or meaning, and second and more important because, while "the task of leading the individual from his uneducated standpoint to knowledge had to be seen in lts universal sense" (PS 16), this "universal sense" is not an empirical generalization across actual cases. When Hegel characterizes phenomenology as describing the "experience" (Erfahrung) and the "formative education" (Bildung) of consciousness as it proceeds to the absolute standpoint, he is not supposing a merely typical account. Instead, he is presenting a logical reconstruction of how the essence of consciousness entails the pOSSibility of absolute knowing. What is peculiar about Hegel's logic, in this as in all cases, is its being dialectical rather than fornlal. Here that means that the idea of knowing


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has no independent or a priori intelligibility apart from its development and thus apart from its manifestation. It is not available wholesale, in advance of working at realizing it. The concreteness, which for Hegel is its inner articulation, must slowly be built up piece by piece, each postulated as essential and tried out, not merely discerned. Nondialectical thinking is like wanting to know all about swimming without having gotten into the water. Seen within the context of the whole system, the Phenomenology represents philosophical science, having already in the course of actual history realized and become aware of itself, giving its reconstructive scientific speech about the necessities at work in the possibility of its own emergence-appearing knowing (erscheinendes Wissen )-a speech of justification that necessarily presupposes a realization of the wisdom for which it accounts. Hegel's own wisdom is the only actuality present; everything else is an abstract nloment of his self-interpretation. For this reason, the pheNomenological "experience" of consciousness has the unfamiliar meaning of consciousness's purely logical development in light of the idea of Hegelian wisdom. It is also why Hegel can later call his phenomenology a deduction of "the Notion of pure science" (5L 49).8 The desperate drama of "natural consciousness which presses toward trQe knowing" (P5 49) has exercised an understandable fascination. Nonetheless, the progress of consciousness is a picturesque characterization of what is logically erscheinendes Wissen, appearing knowing, which is also apparent knowing by being not yet perfected knowing. The designation "natural consciousness" has proved distracting as well, in that it too easily suggests something like everyday consciousness or actual opinion. But natiirliches Bewusstsein is not an independent reality; it is an abstract moment in the process that is appearing knowing. What "natural" means in this context is the same thing it means everywhere for Hegel, namely an ~xternalization of spirit. Just as nature in general is spirit unillumined by knowledge of itself yet also the necessary moment of spirit's self-alienation before it regains itself, natural consciousness is, by analogy, externalized consciousness without knowledge of its own true self yet also a necessary condition of its home-coming into absolute knowing. In his interpretation of the opening to the Phenomenology, Heidegger notes that "natural consciousness by no means coincides with sensible consciousness" (HCE 52).9 He goes on to characterize it as a certain abiding gesture of consciousness, namely the tendency always to look "at

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one side-which it does not even take for one side but for the wholethe side of direct encounter with the object" (HCE 73). The natural gesture of consciousness is twofold: (1) a presumption that being and thought are independently different or, in other words, that consciousness's certainty of its content could never be identical to the essence of things known, and (2) the maintenance of such self-alienation by insistence on being the ultimate form of knowing. Natural beings insist that they are perfectly real and die for it; natural consciousness insists that it is absolute knowing and suffers the highway of despair. Yet the highway too is picturesque, for there really is no subject to be actually suffering and' actually experiencing the dialectical process. Singular, historical knowers whose actual level of understanding happens to be stuck in a particular mode of opining will be left struggling for an insight into what knowing really is or what it might otherwise be, and in accord with their intrinsic ingenuity, circumstances, and historical position they might or might not end by making a contribution to the culture-historical perfection of such an understanding. The transitions in the Phenomenology do not directly represent anyone, or even a set, of those actual achievements; instead, they recapitulate them in purely logical form, on the assumption that they do add up, and have in the event added up to a cumulative whole. No shape of consciousness in the phenomenological story performs an act of ingenuity (though no such act could have been recorded in phenomenological form had not someone at some point in remembered historical time made the leap). "Only the totality of Spirit is in Time.... The moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and spirit, ... have no existence in separation from one another" (PS 413). The dialectic of the Phenomenology betrays but does not report the ingenuity of individual, historical philosophers. Their insights have been recollected or inwardized ( er-innert ) by Hegel and subsequently presented. IO Moreover, this is not to say that merely ontic history has determined Hegel's being in the position to do so, for that history has on its logical inside been necessitated by the idea of wisdom. Such necessity it was that agitated the minds of actual philosophers all along. The Phenomenology ofSpirit is not the chronicle of any journey, universal or particular. It is an artfully contrived Chinese Box that we open from the inside. The process of phenon1enology retrospectively articulates the timeless inside of what, from a distinct vantage point further along in philosophical science, may be viewed as a cumulative set of historical


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events and realities. Phenomenology itself does not tell us that actual history was needed for its logical story-hence the almost complete absence of proper names from the stage of Hegel's book, and confinement of all mention of actual history to the wings of its preface and final paragraph. Only at the end are we reminded that the preservation of consciousness's Galerie von Bildern, "regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History" (PS 493). And the preface warns us not to be alarmed at the apparently inordinate amount of historical time thIs process, viewed from the outside, happened to take (PS 17). The Phenomenology is not directly about any spatio-temporal process. In relation to the res gestae of Hegel's cultural heritage, its implications remain subterranean. By a wealth of anonymous, though hardly concealed historical allusions, the reader is constantly invited to suppose that the logical coherence of the presentation, simply in virtue of this in1plicit relation to the historical record, itself proves that appearance of absolute knowing had to take historical time. Yet just because the clamor of world-history contingently seems to have foreshadowed Hegel's ability to tell the phenomenological story and now haunts its logical presentation, this is not by itself a reason to suppose that the logical process requires exactly that history. If the Phenomenology gives any reason for supposing that theoretical understanding is necessarily tied to real history, then this must be inferred from the logic, and from no more than the logic, it actually presents. Grounds of History: War, Work, and World Does the logic of phenomenology in any way justify historicistic localization of theoretical reason? Do any of its Gestaltungen des Bewusstseins plausibly add up to a ground of history that forces insight to wait on history for its adequation to universal first principles? The two most basic structures pertinent to these questions are "Self-Consciousness" (PS 104-38) and "Spirit" (PS 263ft"). Although one may talk of the history of individuals, in its modern sense history is a worldly phenomenon. II Polities, societies, and cultures, of whatever scale, are the primary historical entities. History as worldly makes no appearance in the Phenomenology until the third major and originally unnamed subdivision (chaps. 5-8). In fact, it does not appear until chapter 6, where, after several announcements, the category of spirit emerges clearly for the first time. The historicity of spirit has

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nonetheless been prepared for beforehand. In Alexandre Kojeve's condescending image, man as a brick in the edifice of universal history has already been manufactured by the first four chapters (IRH 32-33 ).12 Those four chapters compose the other two main subdivisions: "Consciousness" (chaps. 1-3) and "Self-Consciousness" (chap. 4). In the appearing of knowing, nothing essential is lost. Thus, the structures implied by the dialectical descriptions of chapters 1-4 remain permanently in place within human life as a whole. What had to be given up in the phenomenological progression was the mistaken notion that they themselves amounted to the whole. These moments or shapes might also in some sense, be writ large upon the pageantry of world history-it is illuminating to note that there have been cultures of Mastery, such as the pagan world, and Slave cultures, such as the Christian one (IRH 52). But such insights are corollary to the phenomenological story, not its proper theme. The current question is whether the universal structures implied by consciousness, self-consciousness, and spirit constitute a ground for history, or for calling things historical, that localizes reason's adequation to what is most real. Self-consciousness is the first definitive step, because only with selfconsciousness do conscious freedom, and therewith the possibility of a distinctly human world, emerge. Self-consciousness in Hegel's formal, phenomenological sense implies both a detachment from the natural world and an urge to measure reality in terms of the immediate relation "I = I," which he uses to symbolize the purely reflexive and abstract nloment in hunlan self-consciousness. In the previous shape, consciousness, the relation of pure contemplation, was marked neither by detachment in this sense nor by any urge to measure the real in terms of a complex self-relation. Consciousness is defined by precisely the opposite gesture: it locates reality wholly in the intentional correlate of its consciousness, effacing its own reality in favor of the reality apprehended. The "I" of consciousness is posited as no more than a unity of apperception; it lacks any complex self-relation. A complex self-relation is the consequence of recognizing that certainty in consciousness fails to make sense of the truth it presumes to grasp. Consciouspess is nonetheless fundanlental. It represents the ability "to reveal Being by Logos by Speech formed of words that have a meaning" (IRH 30). What completely distinguishes self-consciousness, because it now has its own independent reality to defend, is that it does not passively reveal being, it actively negates it. This negation follows from the self-conscious


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pursuit of self-certainty, the urge to establish the self as the measure of the real and therefore itself as most real. The impetus toward subordination of the other marks self-consciousness as desire (Begierde ), for desire is an insistence that the other be amenable to one's reality, that the other does not in advance and always have to contradict it (PS 104-5). But self-consciousness, based on the inner infinity of the "I = I" relation (by which infinity Hegel means being able to maintain identity and difference at once), ensures that human desire is also inflected as infinite. Specifically, human desire thus posits a realm entirely distinct from given nature for the possibility of its satisfaction, namely the realm of freedom. It attempts to subordinate the given within a circle of selfcertified realities. This is the foundation of the human world. Freedom based on infinite negation-which nleans for Hegel the simultaneous nlaintenance of radical distinction yet continued relationcannot be fully assured of its own reality,. even if it should successfully subordinate the given for all time. The latter achievement guarantees merely that freedonl is more real than nature, but it does not reflect back the reality of freedom in its own right, or that freedom is as real as can be. In order to be fully assured of its own reality as infinite desire, self-consciousness must therefore have the recognition of another being at least as real-Le., ontologically developed -as self-consciousness itself. The primordial structure of human desire thus emerges as recognition (Anerkennen ), for in recognition the reality of self-consciousness is open to being freely acknowledged, that is, acknowledged in accord with the level of its own reality (PS Ill). Neither animal nor utterly servile recognition adequately counts. Freedom is the stage of the human world, and the struggle for recognition is its original drama. Foremost among the implications of a struggle for recognition are the phenomena of war and work. War may be understood in a structural manner. 13 It denotes that in actual human existence one's human reality is not idly in question but truly at stake. Battles for prestige occur at all levels of distinctly human concerns, and to lose them is always a loss of substance. War is a variation on self-consciousness's defining theme of desiring desire. It therefore takes place squarely within the domain of freedom. Self-consciousness is tempted to suppose that it can make itself the measure of reality by winning the struggle for recognition outright, but this is incoherent, since vanquished freedonl cannot freely acknowledge its victor. (Hegel does not note it in his account, but friendship [philia] is the exit from the stJ:"uggle for recognition to mutual acknowl-

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edgment. ) Spirited battles for prestige are only one moment, the moment of pure freedom, in the overarching shape of self-consciousness. So, with the hope of winning through to a position of pure mastery destroyed, it is to the other monlent, the negation of nature, that self-consciousness must return. It returns wiser, knowing that destruction and indifference are not adequate realizations of negating nature. Once the hope for total mastery has been dissolved, work arises out of the relation between desire for freedom and the naturalness of this desire itself. The given no longer has to be devoured and incorporated -that is the strategy of simply finite or animal desire. Instead, it may be shaped and transformed after self-consciousness's own purposes. Those purposes are encoded in self-consciousness's ideas, hence the negation practiced by self-consciousness is not real but ideal, thoughtful not thingly. Moreover, the purposes of chastened self-consciousness are not purposes of nlastery and self-exaltation, not purposes of radical freedom; they are purposes of technique and home-making. They are visionary transformations of the given. The structure of recognitive desire has its dialectical limits, for it was all along an extremely selfish response to the limits of the equally extreme selflessness of consciousness. Human desire, despite Olympian aspirations, remains Titanic, wedded to the earthly clay whose ideal negation defines desire and sets it on the trail of self-seeking. Yet this is also a plausible origin of human history. By the time Hegel has completed the dialectic of Master and Slave, he is "at the threshold of history in the proper sense: the war and work of self-consciollsness."14 Intelligent desire reveals itself as heir to the fundamental and fecund tension between the aristocratic and masterly desire for enjoyment, and the banausic, slavish need to work and to transform-a politically benign way of describirtg the essential conflict between theory and practice. Yet the war and work of self-consciousness does not immediately issue in a recipe for actual world history but, rather, primarily explicates the category of action as both praxis (Master) and poiesis (Slave). "Selfwilled human action does not by itself lead to historical event. Action and deliberation constantly occur, but history happens seldom."15 Lowith's remark needs some qualification, for he means history in the modern sense. Actual struggles for recognition, the desire for honor, the hope for a refinement of pleasure and enjoyment, the developments of technique, may all be seen as manifestations of the underlying dynamic, and they may all be called historical in the most general sense because they are


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built on the ideal negation of nature, i.e., upon the negation that results not in destruction but in rule and transformation. Within that realm of ideality, the human world, one may identify history in a narrower sense, the sense attaching to evolving, communal cultural wholes. But this sort of reality is essentially ll10re complex than recognitive desire or visionary labor can generate by themselves. An evolving. whole that may in some sense command individual agents must postulate a structure of adaptation and response to the condition of recognitive desire that permits accumulation of experience over collective time. The logic of self-consciousness shows only that human action is always and everywhere conditioned by an unstable combination of the demand for selfpossession and the hope for universally valid worth. The first and most natural human experiments with the tension just described are analyzed by Hegel through the gestures of Stoic and Skeptic. They turn out to be intellectualistic attempts to maintain the abstract ideal of masterly freedom, dreamy solutions to the tension between understanding and action, lacking on the one hand forthrightness and on the other hand thoughtfulness. The final shape of Unhappy Consciousness is self-consciousness as fully self-aware. It acknowledges the hopelessness of masterly freedom and submits, therefore, to the necessity of transfigurative work, pressing on in the light of its own dispirited, workaday ideas, uncertain of their outcome yet sure that pure mastery is no longer available. With the admission that action should not exhaust itself in a fruitless struggle for supremacy an10ng the masters, the seeds of human community are also sown. Unhappy Consciousness alone remains a selfish if unspirited worker. Yet work itself, freed of any imperative to pure mastery, will eventually bring unhappy but artful and reasonable selves together and remind them of the dynamic of recognition, for human life depends on cooperation, and work too requires validation. A human world emerges, once the community of souls begins to stabilize or objectify its experience of the struggle for recognition. This is the emergence of spirit, "the universal work produced by the action of all and each as their unity and identity, for it is the being-jOr-self, the self, action" (PS 264). Acknowledgment of the significance of acts performed in freedom is no longer dependent simply on the unmediated yes or no of one (infinite) desire facing another. Such acts may, in the shape of spirit, be referred to an objectified structure intended to be of universal validity, an ideal institution that provides a framework for the n1eaning of action,

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as well as a standard of recognition that is less prey to the willfulness native to the battle for prestige. The ~eal work of the community, as opposed to the ideological responses of individuals, manages to clear a space and a time in the given. Once this clearing is made, the negation of nature need no longer obtrude as so pressing a responsibility. Nature is conquered, the jungle held back fronl the city, and the politics of a people begins. The remainder of the Phenomenology traces variations on the theme of worldhood or what is built up as a result of visionary labor returned to community, the objectification~ of patient as opposed to domineering, mastery-seeking freedom. There is no need to consider these details, since the notion of "world," equivalent in so many respects to actual "spirit," is by itself the central history-grounding category. With the many worlds of social, cultural, political life, a communal category of human reality has emerged, actually transcendent of individuals. Being in a particular way real, worlds are able to affect lives. The notion of worldhood encompasses historical change as ordinarily understood. It can be said, for example, that the modern world has replaced the ancient world, or that the world of art and the world of music have changed over time. One might or might not be willing to call those transformations developmental, but certainly what comes after is to some extent mediated by what went before. Cultural accumulation, enrichment, development, progress, regress, decay, corruption-a whole host of categories can all find some place under the heading of "world." The human activity that generates and maintains a world or worlds is neither casual nor creative. Deriving from the dialectical limitations of self-consciousness, it is necessitated by the inner logic that defines and impels human action as freedom-loving and, in the spiritual sense, self-seeking. This inner necessity also guides the character of the response. The objectification of freedom is not indulgence of license or whim or ambition or poietic impulse. It must be capable of disciplining the unstable forces of idiosyncratic self-consciousness. Worldhood plays such an important role in the Phenomenology because the detachment that characterizes human reality, the moment of negativity that defines the desiring, human self, is construed as alienation and homelessness. Worlds are made to be freedom's home. They are artful necessities, just like bread and cloaks. What historicity might a world possess, according to Hegel's phenomenal logic? Stirrings of a historicity native to human reality may be


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discerned in recognitive desire and visionary labor, insofar as war and work constitute a matrix of distinctly human and in one sense unnatural, Le., free and self-directed, activity. This grounds historical action, but it does not yet amount to the evolutionary or developmental historicity possible for a genuine world. A world is a collective whole that rests on communally objectified recognition and memorialization of the value of self-disciplining, lord-fearing work. This level of recognition transcends both artisan and warrior, whose own greatest deeds are always singular; such objective recognition generates historicity of a more complex order than idiosyncratically free action. The Phenomenology does not just point out worldhood; it says what worlds are, or rather what they have to be. They are objectifications of spirit. This means that their reality derives, and can only derive, from adaptive human response understood as the labor of a patient freedom that knows it cannot be purely self-determining. To fantasize that the making of new worlds is the construction of entirely new selves, and with an entirely new set of thoughts, is to have missed the point of the dialectic between Master and Slave as essential moments of human consciousness. The ideality of human response, whereby human beings negate nature as the given in order to set up their own purposes, is never a pure self-expression, never a total self-creation, but always implies a moment of self-interpretation against a background of circumstance and already present capacity. Even the gestures that look radically autonomous, ranging from deeds of creative art to arbitrary and tyrannical acts of pure willfulness, occur within contexts established by tacit self-interpretation (the understanding that makes it seem good to sing and write or good to be cruel and send others to their death on a whim). This being so for individuals, it is even more so for individuals in community, since the actuality of community depends entirely on the nlediation of ideas. As the outcropping of adaptive, self-interpretative response, any given world always has conditions that it cannot in principle carry away in the evolutionary flow of its own unfolding (should its foundational, overarching idea mandate such development). It follows that no Hegelian world, no shape of actual spirit, can be a total historicization of the specific activity it shelters, much less a total historicization of the whole of human existence. The philosophical historicist will, of course, leap (from no evident metaphysical ground) to suggest that the conditions for self-interpretation are as historicizable as

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the results of such interpretations. I shall address this objection in the final section. The implications for the theorizing mind are ambiguous. Human existence is necessarily worldly, and worlds visibly move, taking many of the human things with them. It can even be said that worlds come and go, effaced but sublated according to the Hegelian, simply replaced according to the philosophical historicist. The question is whether or to what extent worldly commotion must take theoretical reason with it. Specifying the primary issue in terms of worldhood confirn1s in concrete detail the point that Hegelian historicism cannot justify the inevitable parochiality of thinking, or even the inevitable parochiality of culture for that matter, because inevitable parochiality demands a total historicity that the Hegelian account of worldliness does not provide. This is a necessary condition for the emergence of an absolute moment, but it also establishes a paradigm of metaphysical responsibility against which historicism pales, for we have been shown precisely in what respects it is meaningful to assert that reason is determined by history. Hegel nonetheless insinuates that, in the real time outside the phenomenological progression, the admittedly time-consuming process of reason's adequation to universal understanding is tied in crucial ways to the overall development of spirit seeking its wholesale absolution. The concrete character of this link is more appropriately explored by a consideration of Hegel's philosophy of history, since there the forms of society, politics, and culture are dealt with in their own right, rather than as the shadow-history of knowing's possibility. The emphasis in what follows will fall on world-history or the progress of Western civilization as a whole, since it is to the totality of spirit's development that Hegel links philosophy.

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF HISTORY Just as it is metaphysically naive to suppose that time by itself is an eroding flux, wearing away at the reality of things, rather than that determinate processes result in decay, so too it is naive to suppose that history is an ether carrying all determinate human possibilities and purposes along in its irresistible current, rather than that idea-governed worldly processes must take time to develop their ordered complexity.


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Flux, potency, and change have reality only in relation to the actual. In regard to the nature of historical process, Hegel has paid more attention to this principle than anyone before or since. First to be examined is Hegel's account of history's substance, Le., the origin of its effectivity and the reality of worldly commotion. This will show in detail how reason is implicated into the historicity of the world and set the stage for a final consideration of the relation between worldly commotion and the theorizing mind. "Reason Governs the World" The simple classification of Hegel as a speculative philosopher of history obscures the fact that, in addition to reviewing history (res gestae) in terms of its rational significance, he also furnishes a detailed account of its metaphysical structure.l 6 Hegel's overall philosophy of history is poorly understood if seen as a rhapsodic interpretation of the suggestive pattern in the events of Western and a little Eastern history, because his more well-known, and admittedly more surprising, claims about history's pattern rest upon a thorough consideration of what it means for anything to be historical and for anything to be timely at all. 17 In the second draft (1830) of his Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel writes: The only thought which philosophy brings with it is the simple idea of reason -the idea that reason governs the world, and that world history is therefore a rational process. From the point of view of history as such, this conviction and insight is a presupposition. Within philosophy itself, however, it is not a presupposition; for it is proved in philosophy by speculative cognition that reason ... is substance and infinite power; it is itself the infinite material of all natural and spiritual life, and the infinite form which activates this material content. I8 In exactly the same breath with which he states the notorious hypothesis of "reason in history," Hegel draws attention to the fact that reason in history can only be justified by "proofs in philosophy" about the reality of reason. The proofs achieved by speculative cognition depend on the metaphysical explication of Geist, and it can be no secret that in the passage just cited Hegel is hinting that such a metaphysics, while consis-

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tent with Aristotle's doctrine of causality, involves a significant reinterpretation of it. ("Infinite form" is meaningless in Aristotle. For Hegel it denotes the way a complex idea maintains identity and difference among its component determinations.l 9 ) Whatever the form of world-history is to be, therefore, it must be understood from this basis in philosophical science. Hegel makes the same reference to a prior metaphysics in one of the texts taken to be his Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, where he raises the question "of how it comes about that philosophy appears as development in time and has a history. The answering of this question encroaches on the metaphysics of time."20 In short, Hegel is well aware what sort of ontological foundation is demanded by his pejoratively so-called speculative philosophy of history. Reason in history is a distracting phrase, partly because it is presumed to be aprioristic in the bad sense of imposing a representational straightjacket on infinitely rich material, and partly because it seems morally insensitive to be rational in face of history's randomness, absurdity, perversity, and horror. It is easy to be awed by the pointless suffering and massive incomprehensibility that the historical picture first presents, and thus to be offended by the idea that something as dispassionate and as abstract and ineffective as the reflective intellect could possibly be a relevant or humanly dignified enough response to the anguish and deep perplexity called forth by this vision of human affairs. For Hegel, history seems "a slaughterbench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States and the virtue of individuals are sacrificed" (WH 69). Such a vision induces the mood of rational resignation, of forsaking the search for intelligibility, because nothing less than pure commiseration seems to be proper in light of the apparently pointless sacrifices. It is not the place here to assess the relative worth of compassion versus understanding, or to ascertain in what sense they might be combined in good measure, but it is enough to note the strength of Hegel's own reconciliatory intent. 21 "Reconciliation ... can only be achieved through a knowledge of the affirmative side of history, in which the negative is reduced to a subordinate position and transcended altogether. In other words, we must first of all know what the ultimate design of the world really is, and secondly, we must see that this design has been realised and that evil has not been able to maintain a position of equality beside it" ( WH 43). Hegel's position represents an uncommon stance toward contingent evils. There is no redemption, one by one, of


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instances of misfortune. In fact, the players on the stage of world-history, the world-historical individuals, must in pursuit of world-history's higher purposes inevitably "trample many an innocent flower underfoot" ( WH 89). Evils are redeemed only as a class-that is, working its worst, evil cannot in the end surmount the patient actuality of spirit. In this picture, the task of philosophical reconciliation is not to appreciate the causally determined necessity of each singular event, but rather to appreciate the location of any given event in the looser web of cosmic meaning. "If we say that universal reason is fulfilled, this has of course nothing to do with individual empirical circumstances; the latter may fare well or badly, as the case may be, for the Notion has authorized forces of contingency and particularity to exercise their vast influence in the empirical sphere. We are not here concerned with empirical details; they are at the mercy of chance" (WH 66). This is not to say that spiritual form does not reach all the way to what is particular, that it sOlllehow fails to inform all its materials. The realization of spiritual form requires an internal play of contingency that it does not explicitly order, although it is still the framework for that play.22 From the philosophical point of view, insight into the necessities of history, in addition to being an account of history's reality, is a much needed corrective to the resigned interpretation of human existence as randomness. In the Dl0dern epoch, the horror of contingency is an illusion created by the hope of being entirely one's own master, while its more recent exaltation is merely another way of attempting to master, in this case passiveaggressively, the challenge and embarrassment of contingency. In its unqualified form, the charge of apriority is simply incompetent. Hegel clearly lays out an entirely different conception of reason. That conception also happens to function as a critique of the very attitude of which he himself is accused, a critique of apriority that Hegel himself puts forward (WH 139ff. and EN §549). Two features of Hegel's own conception lllay be noted here. First of all, reason within human existence is not an abstract gaze, a looking-on with wry indifference. Rather, it is present in everything human; it is modulated as feeling, knowledge, cognition, desire, and will ( WH 25). "In all hUlllan perception thought is present; so too thought is the universal in all acts of conception and recollection, in short, in every mental activity, in willing, wishing, and the like. All these faculties are only further specialties of thought. When it is presented in this light, thought. has a different part to play from what

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it has if we speak of a faculty of thought, one among a crowd of other faculties" (EN §24, Zusatz). Reason is not an independent, partitioned faculty. It is the intelligence of human life. "Man is thoughtful in everything, but in feeling, e.g., in perceiving, willing, imagining, he is not purely thinking" (HP 63). The rationality of history is the ramified outcome of human life as intelligent desire, intelligent choice, intelligent action. Hence "nothing great has been accomplished in the world without passion" ( WH 73). Reason in the sense just outlined amounts to the potentially selfconscious spiritual substance of human life, yet for Hegel reason also means the potentially self-conscious spiritual substance of everything. "A thought is the universal as such; even in nature we find thoughts present as its species and laws" (HP 90). The reason that "governs the world" does so in the same way that nous was said to do by Anaxagoras (WH 34, EN §24), the way, as Hegel puts it, that the laws of motion are the mind of the solar system. To say that worldhistory proceeds rationally is, at this level, not to assert that there is some purposive design at work in the whole. It is to say that history is real in its own right to the extent that it is rational. The substance of things is their intelligibility, their logos. This is directly related to Hegel's famous dictum from the Philosophy of Right that "what is actual is rational and what is rational is actual" (PR 10 ).23 In effect, the rationality of history is what stops it from being nothing. The interpretation of history as "one damn thing after another," or even a constant repetition of the same damn things, is just to say that history has no reality besides event, no ontological unity of its own, no substance by which to affect or effect anything else. Hegel's investigation of reason in history is an inquiry into how history can be something, and therefore into how it might possess resistant and determining power. If history were truly irrational, Le., had no measure in itself but pure contingency, then it could exercise no limitative effect at all, a metaphysical consequence overlooked by the champions of historicistic flux. This is philosophical historicism's deepest metaphysical failing. There is, so to speak, a law of diminishing returns in the trade-off between turning history into a pageant of contingency while at the same time asserting that it has the substance and power to dominate reason-the more contingency, the less effective reality; the more flux, the less difference it is capable of making.


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History as the Story of Freedom A necessary condition for regarding an event or activity as historical is relating it to an overarching whole. Only in relation to some such whole can it be meaningful to characterize events and activities as phases or moments in a temporally ordered process, and thus determined within it. Moreover, for any such temporal ordering to result in historical localization, there must be a necessity in the ordering of the phases. Therefore, if history actually does anything or effectively holds any human action in place, there must be ideas at work in it, where ideas are the principles that furnish overarching and internally ordered unity. "Meaning is, as such, connection with a universal, relation to a whole, to an Idea" (HP 54). The idea ultimately at work in all the forms of human history is the idea of freedom. Freedom is the inner logic of Hegelian history. At its most fundamental, it is not a political principle, in the sense of an ideal ontic state that might be won by individuals or groups of individuals, although it does have a specification in the political sphere that brings it closer to usual conceptions. "Freedom is both the substance of right and its goal, while the system of right is the realm of freedom made actual" (PR 14 ).24 Far more important is freedom's metaphysical meaning as the essence of spirit, "the absolute characteristic and function of which is effective reason, Le., the self-determining and self-realizing notion itself-Liberty" (EN §552). "The essential, but formally essential, feature of mind [ Geist] is Liberty: Le., it is the notion's absolute negativity or self-identity" (EN §382). In terms of the Phenomenology, freedom is the moment of self-consciousness. Freedom stands for the manner in which intelligence must possess itself in order to be capable of consciously illuminating what is not itself the power of intelligence, including other aspects of the self as well as its world. The possibility of there being such a thing as a "notion" (Begriff), a recognized recapitulation of real structure, presupposes a special self-identity that nlust be capable of being lucid, of not getting in the way once it is put to work in actual cognition. As the necessary condition for lucid self-understanding, freedom becomes also the necessary condition for the actuality of spirit, because spirit's realization is directly proportional to what it knows itself to be. The moment of freedom acts as leaven in externalized human existence. Hegel defends the view that the cumulative dimension of our collective I

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experience, the series of externalizations that make up the cultural history of ideals, values, ways of life, and so on, itself constitutes a spiritual "Yhole governed by this moment of freedom as spirit's essence. From the philosophical point of view, seeking reason in history, worldhistory is "the record of spirit's efforts to attain knowledge of what it is in itself' ( WH 54). And what spirit is in itself is freedom. Knowledge is meant broadly here. It is not merely reflective or observational, it is recognition of reality. When spirit comes properly to know itself, spirit is present and active in the full form of its transparency to itself. The mindfulness of spirit, when it minds itself, already carries within itself the elaboration of active spiritual existence, but that elaboration has proceeded as a series of partial elevations into a medium of explicit awareness. The proper mode of spirit's existence is to interpret itself. World-history is driven by the need to render that interpretation as complete as possible. World-history is "the progress of the consciousness of freedom" ( WH 54). Hegel says progress of freedom, not progress to freedom. Freedom is present all along, a sign of its ontological, rather than ontic, meaning. "What Spirit is now, it always has been; the only difference is that it now possesses a richer consciousness and a more fully elaborated concept of its own nature" ( WH 151). Freedom in this sense is the formal principle of all and any attempt to enter the "second world" into which human being as spirit raises itself ( WH 44). Only in the lighted space of self-consciousness does the stage of autonomous or noncompelled activity open up, and freedom amounts to the ontological establishment of just this stage. Freedom finds fulfillment when spirit as a whole is perfected. World-history is not the only form of human, cultural history, but given that all the aspects of politics and society are manifestations of spirit - recall that spirit encompasses physical, animate, sentient, practical, political, theoretical, religious, artful, and philosophical moments-it is the widest horizon for all forms of spirit's self-interpretation and potential adequation to itself. World-history is therefore one of the easiest places in which to see what Hegel means by the interest of spirit. In general, developing spirit has interest precisely because it originally seeks its own perfection (in Heideggerian terms, it cares about its authenticity). Self-interpretation is more disciplined than self-elaboration, for the former aims at a correctness the latter presumes, a goodness of fit between interpretation and its impelling conditions. Elaboration and variation, adventure, repetition, and play are bearable only on the


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condition that the activity of which they are modes is understood to be itself already generically worthwhile. At the deeper level, spirit is moved to move itself in accord with what it sees as relevant to its selfinterpretation, to what it can discern of its own good. In the case of world-history, spirit's self-interpretation is already operating in the domain of communal objectification, precisely because it is the horizon of all worldly phenomena (understanding world in the sense elaborated in the previous section). Hegel adds that world-history begins only once spirit actually conceives a universal interest, that is, an interest in its own self as such. Thus, although village artisans and tribal patriarchs (to mention only two possible types) embody the first murmurings of culture in the broad, spiritual sense, and, according to how well their deeds are remembered, can be thought of as helping to constitute a protohistory, it turns out that in Hegel's worked-out philosophy of history, fanlilies, villages, and tribes are regarded as pre-historical, simply because they are not yet forms of actual spirit, because they do not self-consciously objectify a universal self-interpretation. For that reason, their archives are of no interest to anyone but themselves and their progeny. (Their heroes, on the other hand, may be of more than parochial interest, but all heroes, even in their universal meaning, stand beyond the sort of community that is the necessary ground for setting up evolutionary, historically effective wholes. That is what it means to call heroes mythical rather than historical.) Until the gesture of universalization, which may of course have to suffer its own eventual dialectical discipline, lodges itself in social conscience, the full interest of spirit has not been engaged. Patriarchal society, so long as it does not see itself in a universal light, must remain a twilight of genuine spirit. Hegel proposes that the first universal objectification of spirit comes with the institution of law. With law, regulation of the community is objectified into directives that reside in the objective medium of language, rather than in the subjective medium of personal authority and feelings of obedience. The laws are formal commandments that structure a community into a commonwealth, on which "Mnemosyne, for the benefit of the perennial aim which underlies the present form and constitution of the state, is compelled to confer a lasting memory" ( WH 136). Hegel's account illuminates the honor customarily afforded lawgivers while also explaining an essential difference between history telling and mytho-poetic memorialization. The objectivity of language as the medium

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of law's universality forges a link between history-telling and historywriting. Free and insightful institution of law is a primordial expression of spirit's urge to self-interpretation. Freedom here should not be taken in the sense of radical spontaneity; it is not arbitrary. The need to deal with human beings in association or in incipient community is law's ground. It is an adaptive response to the need for regulating a communal plurality of souls. It is necessary because individual souls have distinct and conflicting desires and particular wills. The spiritual adventure of world-history begins when this regulation is made a universal selfregulation, Le., a regulation from out of understanding intrinsic human need. What is free, therefore, about self-regulation is its being disciplined by the given powers and possibilities that make up the self that recognizes the need for such regulation. In law-giving the interest of spirit is actively engaged. Hegel's principle carries with it a critical standard: there are better and worse ways to institute regulations of self-interpretation. The caste system of Indian society, for example, Hegel takes to be an inferior, even broken, form of Sittlichkeit, because it attempts to regulate human society as if political differences were natural differences. This sort of error will be a mistake for any association that is recognizably political in Hegel's spiritual sense. Self-regulation is free through being maximally responsible to its own self. The interest of spirit allows Hegel to draw attention to world-historical phenomena. We flatter our perspicacity to note that the politics of Caesar's imperial Rome have striking analogues with the petty struggles for power and recognition in any Gaulish village, as if the difference were only one of scale. Hegel does not deny that the analogies are thereindeed, his phenomenology of spirit would lead one to expect it-but he adds that "no fully formed intellect can fail to distinguish between impulses and inclinations which operate in a restricted sphere and those that are active in the conflict of interest of world-history" ( WH 45). This higher-order spiritual interest is part of why history is so attractive. "When we contemplate the struggle of the Greeks against the Persians, or the momentous reign of Alexander, we are fully aware of where our interests lie" ( WH 45). On account of such interest, we keenly feel the tragedy of Alexander's untimely death and can be moved again and again by the tale of the Battle of Marathon. One might be tempted to dismiss this as parochiality, but Hegel questions more closely the meaning of the differences involved. They are not accidental differences. From a revisionist perspective, it could be said


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that the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire was a lucky triumph of barbarians over advanced civilization. But what is the real meaning of "advanced" in this situation? No doubt the Persians were refined, but the determining principle of their Sittlichkeit was nonetheless despotic: as Hegel puts it, only one is in essence free, and the state is ruled as a household. For as long as Persian civilization remained conditioned by that conviction, it was, as an experilnent in genuine human community, doomed to eventual eclipse. Greek civilization, in contrast, is where our interest lies, not simply because the Greeks happen to be our civilizational forebears. They are our civilizational forebears not by accident but because they managed to stand for and pass on the higher truth about human existence: that at least some are free. According to I-Iegel's complete scheme on this score, the world-historical significance of Christianity, and hence the reason for its power and dominion, is that it ushered in the realization that all are free. This gives a way of interpreting where our interests lie, for example, in witnessing the Crusades, outwardly a confrontation between a martial federation of unrefined nations against a highly developed civilizati9n. In our own time, Hegel's story of freedom also helps make sense of the overwhelming symbolism we have felt about the destruction of the Berlin wall and the downfall of commu.. nism in Eastern Europe. When it comes to judging particular cases, an Hegelian approach to these phenomena will no doubt raise many difficult questions. Nevertheless, three essential points stand by themselves. First, societies and civilizations may be judged according to the degree that their instituted interpretations 'of their own spiritual imperatives allow the manifestation and play of those inlperatives (Hegelian and classical historicism have much in common on this point). Furthermore, not all spiritual imperatives can possibly be unique to a given society or civilization, because all societies and civilizations are commensurable on the ground of their individual adequacy to the dynamics built into anything that counts as a civilization or society in the first place. Those dynamics were uncovered in the previous analysis of war, work, and world. (On this point Hegelian historicism contradicts Ranke's classically historicist dictum that all nations are equal before God.) One might in some circumstances be tempted to say that human beings are living in different actual worlds, but whatever their outward differences they are all at the very least homes for communally self-disciplining recognitive desire. And according to Hegel's larger picture, the gesture of such home-making, once

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made, will agitate for a realization in the perfect regulation of self conscious human freedom, thus generating a march of spirit that takes up the lives of nations as well as the lives of individuals. Finally, the interest of spirit that is revealed in attempting to make any of these judgments points to history's substance. Effective history occurs as the original and continued engagement of spirit's interest in its own story of freedom. The history that matters, and that can make a difference across generations, is the history of universalized and constantly recollected self-interpretation (where universal implies the intent to be true to the actual character of spirit). In the overall web of human life and action, "here and there in this mesh there are firnl knots which give stability and direction to the life and consciousness of spirit; these knots or nodes owe their fixity and power to the simple fact that having been brought before consciousness, they are independent, self-existent Notions of its essential nature" (5L 37). Human reality is historical because history means embarkation upon a distinctly human adventure, a spiritual odyssey that is marked at its core by an infinite and restlessly self-seeking transcendence of the nonhuman given. On ascending a step or two from the metaphysical bedrock of history as the self-conscious development of freedom, one encounters the more imagistic aspects of Hegel's philosophy of worldhistory. Here one comes across the threefold or fourfold day of worldspirit as it rises in the East and begins to set in the West, the land of evening. There is also the doctrine of a dialectic of peoples and nations, where one by one they successively become vehicles for the march of world-spirit, and then again the heroism of world-historical individuals. Of these matters I have had little to say. Regardless of their apparent extravagances, freedom in Hegel's extended and fleshed-out sense is most plausibly a moving force in human affairs. "When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract conception of fullblown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind [Geist]" (EN §482). Freedom moves the historical world as Aristotle's god moves the cosmos, by being the object of mortal desire. Yet the determining power of history's logic is not monolithically binding on the events and realities of the human world as it spreads itself out in time and space. There are of course no deductions of pens, or any deductions of individual action, or \deduction of dates for essential moves in the development of spirit. IReason in history is profoundly not a matter of a superior force or power


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of actuality threatening to bind human freedom. It is not demonic. The reasonableness of history is exactly the reasonableness of human spirit. There is no law of history here, no external form imposing its alien actuality on the malleable potencies of human existence. Far from being an enenlY of the open society, Hegel preaches a doctrine of supreme responsibility to ourselves and ourselves alone. In the end, the problem of history is not whether it is rational or not, but whether we can rise to reasonableness in face of what it moves to embody. Children of Their Time History is not demonic, since there are no powers at work in it that are not already powers of human spirit. For this very reason its effectivity over individual human agents is greater than even the demonic picture supposes. With supreme right is history ever ready to convict individuals of failing to live as well as their civilization makes possible, of failing to be as cultured (gebildet) as they ought to be, of failing respectfully to recall and reanimate the spiritual labor of their forebears. The truly forgetful, the barbarians, are not doomed to repeat history. They fall out of it and would indeed be very fortunate accidentally to repeat it. Hegel's account of history's actuality leaves man free yet terribly responsible, a responsibility that Hegel is prepared to express in terms of a filial bond to the process of world-history: Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own tinle apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age. (PR 11; cf. WH 81, HP 112) Outwardly, then, Hegelian and philosophical historicism coincide in localizing philosophy (wpich may be identified with the primary or ideal use of theoretical reason) to historical period. In Hegel's case, historical periods are more well-defined, depending on specifiable alterations in spirit's selfinterpretation, whereas philosophical historicism supposes merely that after a while the questions and concerns of earlier philosophers become outmoded and superseded by the questions and concerns of later philosophers. Transitions, beginnings, and endings are usually obscure, but the differences are evident, once the temporal distance is great enough.

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Hegel's localization of philosophy must be distinguished froITl philosophical historicisnl's on three main counts. (1) Localization within world-history is as far from a differentiation by contingency as can be. Philosophy's changing over time is not random, not an arbitrary modification of some general flux of culture. To be relative to the history of civilization, understood as the objectification of spirit, is to be related to something that has a place and a shape to its phases-although one must make allowances for its being a progress in freedom. 25 Relativization to history is not what causes philosophy's noetic shortcomings. For Hegel, it means that philosophy is on the way to realizing its ambitions for universal knowledge, and only because a movement toward universality is afoot in history can it have an effect on the interests of philosophy. (2) Although necessarily localized within world-history, philosophy is not inevitably parochial, since it is localized only for as long as world-history takes to complete itself. Philosophical historicism, supposing that history is a flux of contingency and in that sense formless, supposes also that the indefinite flux continues indefinitely. In contrast, once reason in history is assumed, the possibility of an end to history must also be seriously considered. Even if the end of world-history sounds too extravagant, Hegelian historicism is at least consistent with the possibility that philosophers might one day find themselves in an age that makes some and maybe all of the ultimately true insights available. Gadamer tried this as a rejoinder to the charge of self-refutation, but it is inconsistent with the defining hypothesis of inevitable parochiality or, in Gadamer's case, finite historicity. Finally, (3) Hegel's localization of philosophy has nothing to do with supposing a finitude of human reason-hence his being so sanguine about the eventual appearance of fully realized philosophy. If reason itself were intrinsically finite, history could make no ultimate difference to the possibility of fulfilling its universal ideals. There is no "historicity of the knowing subject" in Hegel's relativization to history, because for Hegel the knowing subject is not so self-confined as the latter conception presupposes. If there is any ground for supposing a localization of reason's actuality, it will not be on account of an intrinsic limit in potency. "The originally hidden and reserved essence of the universe has no force which could withstand the courage of knowing"

(HP 3). The power of intelligence is not differentiated by time. It is itself a determining power within the spiritual process whereby time is eventu-


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ally effaced (PS 487). History as a determining force exists only as created by the universalizations achieved by intelligent, self-conscious spirit, by human beings becoming aware of themselves and what their actions mean. Historical, human time conquers the dissolving effects of natural processes with the objectification of spirit that is the beginning of politics: "only Zeus, the political god from whose head Pallas Athena sprang and to whose circle Apollo and the Muses belong, was able to check the power of time" ( WH 145). Hegel uses Zeus as an image of the political horizon in which the resistive recollectiveness of spiritual Mnemosyne occurs, making possible cultured, musical civilization. He goes on to note that, as the merely political god, Zeus is devoured in turn by the corrosive negativity of spirit in its purest form, a negativity that cannot be bound by any finite, political institution. The mythical allusion is appropriate, since it reanimates our own cultural wisdom, but, as I argue in the final section, the myth turns out to be wiser than Hegel. While Zeus' paternity represents that genuine political life is a necessary condition for philosophy, Hegel does not mention that Athena sprang fully formed and fully armed from her father's forehead. Interpreted more fully, the myth says that while politics is the necessary condition for philosophy, the historicity of the city does not make a difference to philosophy's perfection. Prosaically put, philosophy by nature has political and cultural conditions, but this does not guarantee that philosophy as a totality must develop culturally. (It would, however, be foolish to deny that the actual practice of philosophy lacks a cultural component altogether. ) For the moment, it is sufficient to underline Hegel's point that human reason is in principle adequate to reality, such as it be. What relativizes reason to history on Hegelian grounds is that reality takes time to become adequate to itself. When philosophical historicists assert that we are all, and must be, children of our time, they mean that our understanding just of itself happens to fall short. The presumption is that there is, in each moment, always more that could have been understood than actually was, and that there always will be more-that we can never get to the bottom of things. Hegelian historicisnl claims that there was no more available to be understood than was actually understood by the philosophy of the age, and that there comes a point when no deeper penetration or wider comprehension is needed. Philosophy is "the spirit of the age as the spirit present and aware of itself in thought" (HP

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25-26), and what makes that reflection philosophy, rather than opinion, is its being a lucid recapitulation of the age, the gray on gray of Minerva's Owl. As lucid with respect to its own time, "philosophy does also stand above its time.... This, however, is only formal, and in fact philosophy has no other content but that of the time" (HP 112). If the negativity of reason guarantees that reason cannot be thought of as embedded in its time, and if philosophy is capable of lucidly appropriating its time, what is the force of Hegel's localizing philosophy within world-history? I interpret his point to be essentially an ancient one: man is by nature a political animal. "Within the state, freedom becomes its own object and becomes its positive realisation.... Only in the state does man have rational existence.... Man owes his entire existence to the state.... Only in this environment, Le., within the state, can art and religion exist" ( WH 93-95). It is not surprising that the same problem confronted by the ancients confronts him: what is the precise relationship between being the political animal yet also being the creature with speechly intelligence (logos)? The state is an existent embodiment of the relation between individual will and universal spiritual substance; it is the concrete framework for all free spiritual life. This free spiritual life achieves explicit self-consciousness in the forms of art, religion, and philosophy, of which philosophy is "the highest, freest and wisest" (WH 104). One way of picturing freedom, of transcending the political, that Hegel is concerned to combat has already been abjured in previous chapters. There is no stepping outside the ties of society, politics, and culture, for they are the soil and locale of all human worlds. There is not a somewhere else in relation to the places they all determine. But this is a straightforward point, sometimes obscured by the rage for justice that follows upon recognizing exploitation and oppression within our human all-too-human worlds. Although unavoidable, the forms of Objective Spirit do not, on that count, have to be sovereign. It is a common discursive fallacy to suppose that materially necessary conditions must, and by right, rule in the hierarchy of determination-a mistake often made by those providing funds - but this cannot be so. If it were, the more complex could never in the order of time emerge from the less. When Hegel writes that "no one can escape from the substance of his time" (HP 112), he has quite carefully said "substance," which signifies a metaphysically less complex state than fully articulated spirit (a level


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of complexity Hegel calls subjectivity; cf. PS 10). Even without adverting to the freest form of subjectivity, namely philosophy, Hegel allows that the outward forms of culture and state do not in principle dominate the individual citizen. "This inner centre, this simple source of the rights of subjective freedom, the seat of volition, resolution, and action, ... all this remains untouched and protected from the clamour of world-history" (WH 92). This inner center of subjective freedom is "definitely not of a subordinate nature" ( WH 90), despite the way individuals get sacrificed to the grand designs of world-historical progress, to the slaughterbench of history. They are slaughtered because the rights of subjective freedom, while ultimate, are nonetheless abstract, untested, not yet fully real. Inner freedom is the absolute source of right, but the rights of worldhistory override it because world-history is more developed. Insofar as the freedom of individuals is expressed in no more realized mediunl than their own particularity, they are exposed to the demands of a more universal yet equally freedom-loving process. Thus, Archimedes falls under the blade of Roman imperialism, the world-spirit's vehicle for realizing the spiritual superiority of the rule of law. Such is the stuff of tragedy, for both Rome and Archimedes represent spiritual goods, but spiritual development, so Hegel maintains, is won only under the pain of actual self-contradiction: pathei mathos. It should be added that worldhistory's contradictions do not have an obvious economy. Hegel allows, for example, that it is more noble to resist the march of world-spirit on grounds of private morality than it is to have one's own scurrilous intentions become, by the cunning of history's reason, its instrument

(WH 141). The inner infinity of subjective freedom is never completely overcome by the determinate fornls of objectified spirit. 26 Society and the state furnish the locale of spirit's efflorescence, but they do not and cannot bind the absolute moments of freedom experienced as radically autonomous self-consciousness or the negativity of reason. All the forms of objective spirit are "only ministrant" to the revelations of fully realized, Le., self-conscious, freedom and a "vessel of its honour" (EN §552). Freedom. and lucidity notwithstanding, Hegel nevertheless teaches that philosophy has been held off from full-fledged knowledge, and from full-fledged self-knowledge, until his own time. What remains to be considered is the metaphysical comfort, if any, this grants the philosophical historicist.

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LIMITS OF SELF-INTERPRETATION When Hegel makes philosophy, a human endeavor, wait upon worldhistory, he means more than that a certain level of cultural development is necessary before philosophy can begin. The First Philosopher may concede the latter point, for it is no more a ground for radical historicization than that life had to wait on a certain level of chemical complexity, that sentience had to wait on biological complexity, and that history in general had to wait for sentience to become self-conscious. That philosophy depends on a minimal level of cultural development-in a word, civilization -is part of what Aristotle meant by noting that theoria presupposes leisure (Metaphysics 1.931b25). Not all human societies provide leisure, and of those that do, not all tolerate to the same degree its use for theoretical pursuits. Hegel makes the stronger claim thatsubsequent to the emergence of civilization, within our single, civilized world - philosophy is differently possible at one historical point than at another. This agrees with philosophical historicism in the implication that, because of history, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Hobbes, could not possibly have stood in the full, Le., primary and universal, philosophical truth. Hegel disagrees with the philosophical historicists on their two further points that no one could ever stand in the full truth, and that past history makes at best only an accidental difference to present attempts. Hegel's localization of philosophy to world-history depends on more than that philosophy develops its doctrinal content over historical time. This is an issue of merely extensive adequacy, and the historicity it generates is not inconsistent with First Philosophy's view of reason's nature. First Philosophy maintains that human reason is as such intensively adequate to universals in their universality.27 It is a separate question what sort of extensive adequacy to demand of philosophy as a specific rational endeavor, and, in general, questions of extensive adequacy have meaning only on the basis of assuming some form of intensive adequacy. The assumption that philosophy's articulations grow more elaborate and sophisticated over the course of accumulating experience would no more conlpromise philosophy's intensive adequacy to first and universal principles than does the same phenomenon in the historical development of mathematical knowledge. Mathematical insight was no less possible for Theaetetus than it was for Kurt Godel. Likewise, one might say, philosophical insight was no more available to Hegel than it was to Plato.


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Even the philosophical historicist allows this universal truth: that the intensive adequacy of human understanding is the same over the history of Western philosophy. In historicism's case, intensive adequacy is taken to fall always short of universals in their universality, and historicism's chief difficulty is maintaining that the inadequacy is in principle permanent. Not only is the claim incoherent in ways already examined, but also the inevitable parochiality cannot be induced from merely empirical history (nor can the end of history, for that matter, and for the same reasons). Variations in the way distinct disciplines elaborate their content over the course of continued and cumulative inquiry, whether as simple amplification, linear progress, successive revolutions of the entire domain, or some n10re complex combination and dialectic, are differences in the pattern of extensive adequacy-interesting enough for questions of methodology and philosophy of science, but not directly related to the topic of reason's self-knowledge. Elaboration of content is not the only factor that drives the ordinary history of human endeavors, inquiry among them. Because spiritual realities are actual only in proportion to the adequacy of their selfrecognition, they are always complex wholes containing at least form and content, results and practice, ethos and theses (these pairs do not, as will be apparent in a moment, exhaustively account for a given spiritual reality). Satisfying human activity of any sort, theoretical or practical, is therefore always accompanied by an interpretation, frequently tacit, of what makes it satisfying or true or good or worthwhile, and by an interpretation of how best to maintain that satisfaction, truth, and value. Such self-interpretations are also commonly open to revision over historical time, often in the light of increased extensive adequacy. Theory and practice or method and result can, within a specific domain, exercise a mutual determination on one another. So Hegel does not assert anything controversial in supposing that there exist spiritual actualities whose content and form, i.e., whose level of concrete development together with their level of self-recognition, vary significantly over the historical course of Western civilization. In the idiom of previous sections, this is sin1ply to confirm worldly commotion and the resonances between Hegelian and classical historicism. There are many endeavors, perhaps some of them necessary, for which it takes time to arrive at a stable, culturally refined understanding of what really is at stake and how best to deal with it, even after the basis of civilization has already been established. According to Hegel, the ethos

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or form of civilization itself undergoes such development when institutions built on the premise that only one or some are free are replaced by institutions based on the recognition that spirit demands freedom for all. In this case, societies learn better what it means to live in societies. Similarly, societies can learn better what it means to live by law, what it means to live with respect for the past, what it means to live among other societies. Groups within society can learn better what it nleans to make music, to write, to theorize, even as the wider community also collectively learns better how to live with those things. Hegel teaches that, as a species of rational endeavor, philosophizing undergoes the style of development just described (in complex relation, as it happens, to all the other worlds of spirit). This seems to offer the philosophical historicist some hope, since by dropping the developmental claim that philosophizing is essentially better over the time of worldhistory, the historicist may feel licensed to infer that philosophizing gets not essentially better but just essentially different over time, and therefore never final. Within the Hegelian context, the move is not justifiable because only the developmental thesis grounds the necessity of reason's attending on history. By rejecting it, the historicist has no Hegelian way of explaining the essentiality of reason's differentiation by history. This is the general inadequacy of all versions of truncated Hegelianism. Almost no one has been able to believe Hegel's proof of absolute knowing (although few have shown they have followed it), so the temptation among historicists attracted to Hegelian doctrine has always been to forgo that incredible final step into perfected philosphical science while at the same time endorsing a relativization to incompleted history as understanding's permanent condition. Philosophical historicism goes further by adding that the relativization is necessary and that history must always remain incomplete in the sense of being forever a play of contingency. On both counts this is un-Hegelian. First, because the latter is just an unproven, not to mention implausible, assumption about the nature of historical process. In particular, it assumes that history can have no form of its own against which reason, perfected or not, might locate itself. And second, because any necessity of reason's relativization to historical process could be visible only from a perspective that takes in reason as a whole. One has to know, absolutely, what reason really is, in order to assert its inevitable parochiality. One must be in a position to see around it, in order to see what holds it in place. This is an Hegelian version of the self-refutation objection. Without


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Absolute Spirit in the case of the Hegelian system, and without the absolute standpoint in the case of phenomenology, one has no possibility of assurance that the analysis of anything before those mon1ents is completely correct. One cannot therefore set aside the disturbing talk of absolutes and expect that everything else in the Hegelian account remain unaffected and true. Nonetheless, the chastened philosophical historicist may give up on the hopeless thesis of inevitable parochiality, accept Hegel's account of necessary but interim parochiality, and deny that world-history (or whatever one wants to call the process that holds philosophy off from its ideal of knowing) is yet complete. This tactic permits avoiding the mormukuleion of an absolute moment, of justified insight into universality, by a postponement of reason's philosophical perfection to some indefinitely distant future. In conclusion, it remains to be shown that Hegel's account of reason's interim parochiality does not permit a conception of worldly commotion that indefinitely prevents reason's arriving at its ideal or philosophical mode of operation. Let me briefly recapitulate the account of worldly commotion. According to Hegel's metaphysics of spirit, worldhood is the medium of historical efficacy. In other words, the only difference that history can make is a difference in the world. Worlds are created by adaptive response to the conditions and circumstances of free human action, established with a view to making the radical negativity of human desire and its inflections at home. They stabilize the meaning of individual actions in a community of human souls, and they depend for their existence on the continued recognition by individuals that they are doing the task tolerably well (such recognition can vary from acute self-consciousness to thoughtless acquiescence). As an adaptive response, all world-making involves selfinterpretation. The objectification of spirit institutes worldly forms intended to be appropriate to the needs and circumstances of spirit as such. Thus, worlds furnish a framework for the possibilities of what might actually be done, while depending on an understanding of the general conditions and circumstances for satisfying human activity. Worlds are therefore radically open to error. Cultures, societies, and civilizations can as much mistake spiritual good as can individuals. By saying that worlds are radically open to error, I do not mean they are constantly going completely wrong. The latter is equivalent not to being radically open to error but. to being fated to radical error. Error in self-interpretation is not a matter of being completely wrong. It is a

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matter of missing the mark, of wandering more or less from the center. On this score, worlds fare generally better than individuals, because their medium is intrinsically universal, though it might reasonably be argued that all forms of human action contain some inkling of the good. Self~interpretations may be judged as better and worse in relation to the circumstances and conditions they intend to enconlpass. Yet interpretations can be off-center without losing viability, for the latter depends not on missing the mark but on the degree and direction of eccentricity. Although eccentricity is the norm-human action by and large muddles through, and one would be hard-pressed to think of a worldly institution that was right on target - this does not license the inference that everything must be equally bad, or good. The necessary detour through self-interpretation sets a limit to the difference that can be made by a transformation in the world. Human existence as a totality may be enriched by the development of any given world. How substantial is such a difference? There are enrichments that bring enlargen1ent of the forms by which various human possibilities n1ay be realized. Consider, for example, the difference Alexander the Great makes to the political world by introducing the notion of empire (as contrasted with hegemonic league). No matter how readily his contemporaries and his posterity might agree on the superiority of imperial life to life in the polis, it cannot mean that the whole of human existence is thereby translated into a new domain or that it is rebuilt from the ground up, for the dynamics to which both the old and the new forms are responses remain in their original place, unmoved yet transformed. The powers that make possible and demand the formation of the political world are not themselves altered in successive interpretations of how best to realize and respond to them. In general, there may be significant transformations in the way any of the powers and conditions that drive objectifying self-interpretation are themselves understood, but this does not add up to an historical translation of actual human life (let alone human understanding). Action and its objectifications, in virtue of its self-interpretative moment, do not and cannot alter the powers they are properly described as, realizing. This is just another way of talking about freedom's responsibility. In sum, action can never do for total being, regardless of how necessary it is for human being to engage in the tasks of world-making. Form and content, existence and self-recognition, may therefore change over time, but if that time is historical and worldly, such changes cannot


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be wholesale because existence and self-recognition together count as the realization of potencies unmoved by the acts of interpretation present in both. Because spirit is most itself in act, the transformations of the frameworks that lend meaning to hunlan activity seem to imply a substantial change in human existence as a totality. Furthermore, it is only with actualization that anything truly comes into its own, and potency has being only in relation to actuality. From this it seems to follow that the modes of actualization are of special importance. They clearly are. Yet one cannot stare too closely at the fully deternlinate show of the actual alone. As Hegel is fond of reiterating, actuality must be comprehended as a result. This ties actuality to underlying potencies in a manner that makes it impossible to speak of transforming the whole, when only the interpretation of the mode of actualization has been changed. The conditions of interpretation, which include both the standards implied by and the standards uncovered in the attempt to realize the good life, as well as such fundamental powers of the human soul as intelligence and recognitive desire, not to mention the necessity of community for genuinely human life, provide constant ballast to the peculiar anarchy induced by the idea of freedom, the anarchy of supposing that one might do anything. They are the pernlanent axis about which the totality circles, preventing it from running away down what looks like the endless inclined plane of historical evolution. Perhaps one too swiftly concedes that an improvement of the world is a profound change in human reality. Perhaps we are prone to become a little too amazed and fascinated with what, as it happens, we have managed to do for ourselves. More sophisticated and more mature ways of life, the grace of civilization as opposed to the ugliness of barbarism, greater ease and comfort, are all, even for Hegel, matters of only finite adaptation. They are matters of Objective Spirit. Yet at this point the philosophical historicist will want to object: it may be conceded that the conditions and potencies of a given act of interpretation are necessary for the stabilization of that particular act or some small, local set of such acts, and furnish a critical standard for its interim success, but this implies nothing about a universal abiding framework for the possibility of human self-interpretation. My rejoinder is threefold. First, it may be conceded that some acts of self-interpretation do occur against the backdrop of frameworks that are specifically historical; there are worlds within worlds. The problem is

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whether the embedding of interpretations within interpretations or worlds within worlds can proceed indefinitely. Given the determinateness and singularity of an act of interpretation, it cannot, for the indefinite regression of worlds within worlds would prevent at least one interpretation from having the substrate, historical or otherwise, that defines its act as interpretative. This is a metaphysical analogue of the formal refutation in Chapter Three. Allowing that at least some interpretations may be relativized to other interpretations, a universal historicization of the conditions of interpretation could be achieved only by proving the metaphysical intelligibility of a necessary historical flux at the base of a finite nesting of worlds. Moreover, that flux would have to be different from and nowhere implied by the historicity of Hegelian spirit; it would have to be a flux that effects, affects, and differentiates human reality prior to the acts of self-interpretation -a very tall order. Th~ burden of proof is on the historicist to show what such a process could be, and to show how it might effect the deternlinations asserted. One cannot just dream up some clandestine process going on behind the scenes. Hegelian doctrine states, and plausibly explains, how history and the historical are necessarily posterior to interpretative human action (the objectification of spirit) and its conditions. The philosophical historicist is obliged to show both that this is wrong and what the correct alternative is. Finally, for all the entrancement with change, there is not even prima facie plausibility to the thought that desire and satisfaction, intelligence and the urge to make sense of things, the need for recognition and assurance as to what is worthwhile and valuable, are not recognizable universals of civilized human existence and therefore of all world-historical experience. These are the most important structures holding in place the significance of self-interpretative action, and there is not even the beginning of a reason to suppose that they have suffered change over the history of Western philosophy. Perhaps the economy of basic human powers could change over the course of evolutionary history, but such change is on a time-scale that makes no difference to what has happened over the time from Plato to the present, and it is within that time frame that historicistic determination is said to hold sway. And even if the economy of human powers did change over evolutionary history, it could not lose the fundamental structure of objectifying self-interpretation without ceasing to be recognizably human. There is an arrangement of fundamental human powers, impressively documented in Hegel's Phe-


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nomenology, not to mention the cosmos of Plato's dialogues, that has given no outward sign of change in the course of the history of Western philosophy and could give no such sign because it sets the conditions that make effective history possible. The most basic conditions of selfinterpretative action, worlds of difference notwithstanding, have not altered in the tinle between Thales and our own. It follows that, no ~atter how plastic our worlds over that time, our self-interpreting selves cannot have been made wholly new. There is therefore no inference from the commotion of the world to the wholesale translation of reason. It has been shown how ~eason as the power of human intelligence cannot be carried away by history. Because history is constructed out of self-interpretative response, reason as exercised in such constructions must be at least partially prehistoric. Furthermore, the recognition of better and worse in the tasks of self-interpretation pins philosophy, as the ideal exercise of reason, to the same prehistoric location, regardless of any further dimensions it might also possess as a rational, human endeavor with a world of its own. Philosophy must be prehistoric to the extent that it aims at a complete and lucid validation of the hunlan transition from condition to self-interpretative response. Engaged in that task, philosophizing is not moved by actual response itself. Philosophy considers the significance of p'~rticular self-interpretations, but it does so by referring them to the dynamics presupposed in the transition to action. And it does so even in the case of its own style of activity. In this moment of tracing dynamic to response, philosophy is not a step in self-realization. There is nothing that it proposes to do-that is why it is gray. The intelligibility of error or missing the mark means that reason's distance from reality is not merely negative but potentially critical as well. Reason is in principle also active as the means for seeing or correcting or avoiding error, and it works by a careful consideration of the bases and possibilities of self-interpretation. It may not be dominated by anything that it knows to be in error (although it might choose to submit). Fully accurate critique is philosophy's goal, but this represents an ideal function of critical reason, the realization of which historicism rejects. Although rejection on the basis of assuming that human reality has a higher order of historicity capable of sweeping reason along with it is impossible, Hegelian historicism still renders intelligible the question of whether or to what extent reason's ideal operation may yet be affected by worldly commotion. The recount of worldly commotion was spoken in the idiom of spirit.

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That idiom makes two basic assumptions: (1) human action and human understanding are always conjoined in a complex relationship of explicitation or experiment and posited self-validation, and (2) the actuality of understanding is not fully formed a priori, but depends on the development of the reality it understands. Furthermore, this spiritual account of understanding makes its distinctions prior to the distinction between theoretical pursuits and practical pursuits. Both classes count as selfinterpreting, self-recognizing human endeavors and fall under the former conception. Self-critical reason is at work no less in the history of jurisprudence than it is in the history of mathematics, and philosophizing is no less a deed with worldly effects than the ruling of nations. Hegel relates the spiritual conception of reason, or rather rational existence, to philosophy in two ways, according to the moments of form and content described earlier. Thus his version of interim parochiality relates, first, to philosophizing's content and, second, to philosophizing's knowledge of itself. As regards content, philosophy brings the reality of its time to lucid self-awareness. The most that is available for philosophical reason to understand is the accumulation of all spirit's self-explications made to date. Philosophical intelligence is in principle capable of such lucidity because spiritual actuality exists only in virtue of the motion of reason. It can therefore be only a matter of accident that a human age fail to understand itself philosophically - perhaps through paying insufficient attention to the requirements of remembrance, principal among which is education, perhaps through the absence of patient and ingenious enough minds, perhaps through natural disaster. Hegel will sometimes write as if the specific rational endeavor of philosophizing is localized entirely on account of its relation to civilizational exfoliation, as if Hegel sophos is unqualifiedly identical with Hegel mousikos, and that therefore he could not be fully wise without the full development of civilized culture behind him. In a straightforward sense, Hegel's own Bildungsgeschichte had to take up the whole historical march of Western civilization, for he could not have been the complete man of Western culture without it, but in what sense does this history need to have passed for philosophy to be in a position to understand the universalities it embodies? In what sense is Plato less adequately positioned to understand the meanings of politics, the nature of art, the impulse to religion, the love of wisdom? If Plato is confined merely to noting, with perfect accuracy, the level of his civilization's adaptation to these basic


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forces, then perhaps philosophical reason could be thought of as simply wedded to the latter's historicity. By Hegel's own account, though, this cannot be all that reason does, for reason is also always critical. Critical here means that the ideal operation of reason in any age must not only know the actualization of spirit in its own time, but must also understand the relationship between that complex objectification of spirit and the potencies underlying its self-interpretation. Once again, there is nothing in principle that can get in the way of this comparison, since what the comparison traces is the history of spirit's self-interpretation as motion from a set of potencies to corresponding acts. So Plato, as the embodiment of philosophical reason, cannot be confined to being the spokesman for Athenian civilization. The unrepentant historicist will want to say that my defense of Platonic, relative to Hegelian, insight does not show that philosophic reason gets to the bottom of things, but merely that world-historical commotions make no essential difference to the attempt. This suspicion forgets the parameters of the current discussion. It has already been demonstrated on both logical and metaphysical grounds that inevitable parochiality is incoherent. Presently under examination is the possibility of a legitimate but only temporary parochiality, and it has just been shown how philosophic reason does not necessarily attend on worldhistorical differences in the manner Hegel suggests. At least one important reason why Hegel was tempted to suppose the necessity of this connection was his expectation that spirit's self-consciousness always be objectified at the communal, historical level. Yet, while it might take European civilization two millennia to comprehend and objectify the basic possibilities of spirit, philosophic reason, by being released in at least one of its essential phases into the space between condition and response, is not prevented from anticipating it. Nothing essential restricts philosophic reason to the actual ideas its epoch happens to make available. The proper Hegelian version of the historicist suspicion just raised takes up the second part of the main question, namely interim parochiality in relation to philosophy's form, not to its content. In the uncriticized version of the first part, philosophic reason is able to trace the selfinterpretation of its age to underlying parameters. Correspondingly, the question of philosophy's self-understanding is not whether it has in fact gotten to the bottom of things, but how well it knows that it has done so. Hegel supposes that philosophy's self-recognition, in this case knowing that it actually knows in accord with the essence of knowing, must wait

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upon world-history, for the reason that only the completion of worldhistory furnishes a human reality sufficiently articulate for reason, as it engages in bringing that reality to recognized self-consciousness, to be sure of its own adequacy to the real. Since reason can in principle only know itself in relation to engaging a content, its content must arrive at a certain order of complexity before reason's own full power can ad"equately be reflected out of that content and back into reason itself for appreciation of what knowing is. This subtle doctrine is at odds with any picture of reason as pure transcendental spontaneity, a roving inner eye that as soon as rational intelligence appears in evolutionary time is automatically adequate for insight into first principles. It has already been acknowledged that philosophy presupposes spiritual objectification to the level of civilization; Athena springs from the forehead of Zeus. Indeed, Hegel gives a rich account, in the dialectic of self-consciousness, of how human intelligence depends on politics for incitement to the task of reason's selfknowledge. The issue is whether world-historical developments are necessary for philosophic reason to learn that "the Absolute is Spirit" (EN §384). Once again, a contrast with the ancients is instructive. What could Hegel possibly know about knowing that Plato or Aristotle did not, and that could only have emerged in the historical experience between them? On the Hegelian view, in all ages philos,ophic reason is engaged in the activity of tracing spirit's contemporary objectifications to a set of abiding grounds for self-interpretation. So, with no change in the ultimate grounds and no difference in the general form of selfrealizing processes (Le., the development of spirit), this activity itself can reach no greater or lesser order of complexity over world-historical time, regardless of the complexity achieved by the particular processes traced. Consequently, insight into knowing's first principles can be differentiated only by accident: one either catches sight of how to tell it in the midst of philosophizing, or one does not. Plato was in no less a position to consummate the wisdom of reason's self-knowledge than Hegel.


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FORM AND FLUX Intelligent, human activity has many inflections. At the first and most general level of classification, it is difficult to improve on the traditional, Aristotelian division: there are practical moments, defined by the realization of our intrinsic human good; there are theoretical moments, defined by contemplation of the truth; and there are productive moments, defined by generation of other, hopefully beautiful, realities. The division is not absolute, and, wisely, Aristotle referred all three components to a single, if manifold, human nature: man is the political, rational, and imitative animal. His categorial analysis is antistrophe to a metaphysical synthesis, and the synthesis points to a degree of interpenetration barely hinted at by the classificatory scheme alone. We imitate, reason, and rule in all of our undertakings, regardless of their practical, theoretical, or productive emphasis. Historicity has become such an important notion for recent philosophy because it encodes the recognition that history, somehow or other, belongs to the metaphysical synthesis behind human endeavor rather than to the categorial analysis that follows upon it. The same recognition is at the root of all talk about the intrinsically historical character of human reality, necessary embeddedness in historical circumstance, and never being able to escape from its horizons, but these latter fornlulations are most often designed to serve the prejudice that historicity implies reason's necessary parochiality rather than that human reason's operation necessarily implies historicity. The latter view is COlllmon to both Hegel and Aristotle, for it takes only a little imagination to see how the political, rational, imitative animal must also be historical in the minimal sense demanded by the insight that history is our native domain. Nowhere have I denied that history is relevant, either to human endeavor in general or to philosophy in particular. Indeed, history is absolutely relevant to both. In a sense this is easy to say, because what history means in such assurances is not specified. But that is just the rub, for historicists too are obliged to account for exactly what history is, in order to establish their deflationary critique of human reason. Moreover, once history and its effects are referred to the metaphysical level implied by historicity, it is no longer enough to look at history from a distance, Le., categorially. One must get up close, and not only up close but inside, to look at history's first principles. One must look aitiologically, archaeologically, because only history's first principles offer any explana-

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fion of history's determining power. They do that because they are what makes history actual, i.e., effective. Hegel's richly developed historicism works out to be an astonishing inverse of philosophical historicism's metaphysical presuppositions: history does- not lend its. actuality to reason, but reason lends its own actuality to history. Stated baldly, the thesis will still seem to philosophical historicists a perfect expression of First Philosophy's censurable hubris. Nonetheless, Hegel spelled out what he meant with a precision of argument and attention to detail that puts the historicist to shame - to shame, because historicist writers by and large just assume that they know how history can bind thinking to its time. Without an account of all four of those main terms-"history," "bind," "thinking," and "time,"philosophical historicism remains, in Gadamer's sense, a disabling prejudice, one of those prejudices that "makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition" (TM 270). In particular, it makes us deaf to the part of the tradition that is the whole of First Philosophy from Thales to Heidegger's Being and Time. The Hegelian thesis of reason in history is, in spirit, as old as Western philosophy. As Hegel was aware, it recalls the doctrine of Anaxagoras, who declared, according to Plato's Socrates, that "nous regulates and is responsible for all things" (Phaedo 97c). One does not have to agree with either Anaxagoras or Hegel on this cosmic score to realize, in particular, that philosophical historicism's emphasis on contingency metaphysically undermines its allegations of total and necessary detern1ination. Hegel's account of historicity reveals a law of diminishing returns for the philosophical historicist that has yet to be fully appreciated: the more history be construed as a plenum of contingency, the less actuality and therefore less power to determine anything it can possibly possess. Flux has only the power to destroy. Likewise, chaos cannot inform the mind, but ultimately shapeless it can only drive it mad.

NOTES

Chapter One 1. Herbert Schnadelbach, Philosophy in Germany: 1831-1933, tr. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Gunther Scholz, "Historismus, Historizismus," in Historisches W6rterbuch der Philosophie, ed. J. ~itter (Stuttgart: Schwabe and Company, 1971-84); KarlGeorg Faber, "Auspragungen des Historismus," Historische Zeitschrift 228 (1979):-, 1-22; Rolf Gruner, "Historism: Its Rise and Decline," Clio 8 (1978): 25-39; George C. Iggers, "Historicism," in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973); Maurice Mandelbaum, "Historicism," in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967); Calvin G. Rand, "Two Meanings of Historicism in the Writings of Dilthey, Troeltsch, and Meinecke," Journal of the History ofIdeas 25 (1964): 503-18; Erich Rothacker, "Das Wort 'Historismus,'" Zeitschrift fur Deutsche Wortforschung 16 (1960): 3-6; Hayden V. White, "On History and Historicisms," translator's ihtroduction to Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology: The Transition in German HistoricaL" Thinking (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959); Carlo Antoni, L'Historisme, tr. Alain Dufour (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1963 [1956]); Dwight E. Lee and Robert N. Beck, "The Meaning of 'Historicism,'" American Historical Review 59 (1953-54): 568-77; Karl Heussi, Die Krisis des Historismus (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1932).

204

Notes

2. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Rehler (Munich: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1963), 18:91. The use is neither published nor systematic, but mentioned in passing in a series of philosophical notes. 3. Novalis Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), 3:446. It occurs as part of a note in the materials for his projected Enzyklopiidistik (1798-99). 4. Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism Without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 199. 5. Robert D'Amico, Historicism and Knowledge (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1989), pp. x-xi. 6. John E. Grumley, History and Totality: Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault (New York: Routledge, 1989); Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984); Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist Theories of History, tr. Jeffrey Herf (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981). 7. H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. xi. See also Wesley Morris, Toward a New Historicism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Thomas Brook, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 8. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 9-10. 9. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism (New York: Liveright, 1938), and History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Leo Strauss, "Political Philosophy and History," Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949): 30-50, reprinted in his What Is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1959]), pp. 56-77; and Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 10. Karl Popper, The Poverty ofHistoricism, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964). All page references are to the third edition. The substance of the book was completed by 1935 and first published in 1944-45. See also the follOWing by Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols., 5th ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); "Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences," in his Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth ofScientific Knowledge, 2d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1965), pp. 336-46 (address given in 1948); "A Pluralist Approach to Philosophy of History," in Roads to Freedom, ed. Erich Streissler (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 181-200. Discussion includes Nicholas Tilley, "Popper, Historicism, and Emergence," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 12 (1982): 59-67; Peter Urbach, "Is Any of Popper's Arguments Against Historicism Valid?" British Journal of the Philosophy ofScience 29 (1978): 117-30; Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, Has History Any Meaning? A Critique of Popper's Philosophy of History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978); John Passmore, "The Poverty of Historicism Revisited," in Essays on Historicism, ed. George H. Nadel, History and Theory, supp. 14 (1975): 30-47; Alan Donagan, "Popper's Examination of Historicism," in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1974),2:905-25; Herbert Marcuse, "Karl Popper and Historical Laws," in his Studies in Critical Philosophy, tr. loris de Bres (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), pp. 193-208; W. A. Suchting, "Marx, Popper, and 'Historicism,'" Inquiry 15 (1971): 235-66; Richard Wollheim, "Historicism Reconsidered," Sociological Review, n.s.,2 (1954): 76-97. 11. Nearly twenty years later, Popper chose to repeat himself verbatim on this point (RF 182). A similar polemic may be found in Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954). For a close analysis of historical determinism, see Ernest Nagel, "Determinism in History," reprinted in The Philosophy ofHistory, ed. Patrick Gardiner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 187-215.

Notes

205

12. Popper continued to characterize historicism in roughly the same way. "The central historicist doctrine [is] that history is controlled by specific historical or evolutionary laws whose discovery would enable us to prophesy the destiny of man" (OSE 1:8); "Historicism [is] the view that the story of mankind has a plot, and that if we can succeed in unravelling this plot, we shall hold the key to the future" (CR 338). 13. Herbert Marcuse, "Karl Popper and Historical Laws," p. 198. On the controversy over methodological individualism, see John O'Neill, ed., Modes of Individualism and Collectivism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973). 14. Popper's introduction to Conjectures and Refutations, pp. 29-30. 15. Schnadelbach, Philosophy in Germany, and Geschich~philosophie nach Hegel: Die Probleme des Historismus (Munich: Karl Alber, 1974); Rolf Gruner, "Progressivism and Historicism," Clio 10 (1981): 279-90, and "Historism: Its Rise and Decline," Clio 8 (1978): 25-39; Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise ofHistoricism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975); Pietro Rossi, "The Ideological Valences of TwentiethCentury Historicism," in Essays on Historicism, 14:15-29; Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, and The Problem ofHistorical Knowledge; George C. Iggers, The "German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968); Antoni, From History to Sociology and L'Historisme; Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History Since Hegel, tr. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); Walter Hofer, Geschichtschreibung und Weltanschauung: Betrachtungen zum Werk Friedrich Meineckes (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1950); Friedrich Engel-Janosi, The Growth of German Historicism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1944); Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1959 [1936]); Heussi, Die Krisis des Historismus; Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1922). See also note 1 above. 16. Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1959 [1936]), translated by J. E. Anderson as Historism (London: Herder and Herder, 1972). Page references will be to this English translation. See also Friedrich Meinecke, "Ernst Troeltsch und das Problem des Historismus," in Werke, vol. 4, ed. Eberhard Kessel (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1959 [1923]), and "Historicism and Its Problems," in The Varieties ofHistory, ed. F. Stern (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 267-88. 17. Here and throughout this study, "subjectivity" is meant broadly. It denotes the activity of human self-consciousness as both sentient and reflective. It is a phenomenological rather than metaphysical classification, and it has no commitment one way or another on thinking substances, transcendental egos, or even the nature of selves. 18. Ernst Troeltsch, Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte (Tubingen: Mohr, 1902), translated by David Reid as The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1971); "Moderne Geschichtsphilosophie," 'in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pp. 673-728 (Aalen: Scientia, 1962 [1904]); "Historiography," in Encyclopaedia ofReligion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914); "Dber die Massstabe zur Beurteilung der historischer Dinge," Historische Zeitschrift 116 (1916): 1-47; "The Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics," app. 1 (address delivered in 1922), in Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory ofSodety: 1500-1800, tr. Ernest Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950); Der Historismus und seine Probleme; "Die Krisis des Historismus," Die Neue Rundschau 33 (1922): 572-90; Christian Thought: Its History and Application, ed. Baron F. von Hugel (London: University of London Press, 1923), appearing in German as Der Historismus und seine Uberwindung (Berlin: Rolf Heise, 1924). Commentary includes Toshimasa Yasukata, Ernst Troeltsch: Systematic Theologian of Radical Historicality (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1986); Robert J. Rubanowice, Crisis in Consciousness:

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Notes

The Thought of Ernst Troeltsch (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1982); Otto Hintze, "Troeltsch und die Probleme des Historismus," Historische Zeitschrift 135 (1927): 188-239; Karl Mannheim, 44Troeltsch, Ernst," in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 15: 106-7; Meinecke, 44Ernst Troeltsch und das Problem des Historismus." 19. Karl Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1929). All page references are to the English version, Ideology and Utopia, tr. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936). The latter expands on the German version with part 1, "Preliminary Approach to the Problem," written by Mannheim for the English edition, and part 5, ·a translation of 44Wissenssoziologie," which originally appeared in the Handworterbuch der Soziologie, ed. Alfred Vierkandt .(Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1931), pp. 659-80. See also the following by Mannheim: 44Historismus," Archiv fur Socialwissenschaft und Socialpolitik 52 (1924): 1-60, translated as "Historicism" in Essays on the Sociology ofKnowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 84-133; 44The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge," in Essays on the Sociology ofKnowledge, pp. 134-90; Essays on the Sociology ofCulture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), esp. part 1, 44Towards the Sociology of the Mind: An Introduction"; From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Structures of Thinking (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982). Discussion includes Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, eds., Knowledge and Politics: The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute (New York: Routledge, 1990); Brian Longhurst, Karl Mannheim and the Contemporary Sociology of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1989); Steven P. Vallas, 44The Lesson of Mannheim's Historicism," Sociology 13 (1979): 459-74; David Bloor, 44Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathematics," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 4 (1973): 173-91; W. Stark, The Sociology ofKnowledge: An Essay in Aid ofa Deeper Understanding of the History of Ideas (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958); Helmut Wagner, 44Mannheim's Historicism," Social Research 19 (1952): 300-321; Jacques Macquet, The Sociology ofKnowledge, Its Structure and Its Relation to the Philosophy of Knowledge: A Critical Analysis of the Systems of Karl Mannheim and Pitirim A. Sorokin, tr. John F. Locke (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973 [1951]).

Chapter Two 1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), p. 299. 2. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). See also Carl Page, 44Axiomatics, Hermeneutics, and Practical Rationality," International Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1987): 81-100. 3. Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism Without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Science Without Unity: Reconciling the Human and Natural Sciences (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Texts Without Referents: Reconciling Science and Narrative (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 4. See note 1 above. Wahrheit und Methode originally appeared in 1960. Its subtitle, missing from the first English translation, remains untranslated in this most recent one. See also Philosophical Hermeneutics, tr. David Linge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976); 44Hermeneutics and Social Science," Cultural Hermeneutics 2 (1975): 307-16; Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, tr. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); 44The Problem of Historical Consciousness," in Paul Rabinow and

Notes

207

William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); Reason in the Age ofScience, tr. F. G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981). Commentary includes Carl Page, "Philosophical Hermeneutics and Its Meaning for Philosophy," Philosophy Today 35 (1991): 126-36; Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987); Brice R. Wachterhauser, ed., Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1986); Robert Hollinger, ed., Hermeneutics and Praxis (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Josef Bleicher, ed., Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy, and Critique (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); David Couzens Hoy, The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978); Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, HI.: Northwestern University Press, 1969). 5. Karl Popper, "The Myth of the Framework," in The Abdication ofPhilosophy: Philosophy and the Public Good, ed. Eugene Freeman (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1976), pp. 23-48. 6. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also his "From Logic to Language to Play," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 59 (1986): 747-53; and "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres," in Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. 8chneewind, and Qu·entin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 7. Symposium 177d-e, Phaedrus 257a, and Theages 128b. On erotics and self-knowledge, see David Roochnik, "The Erotics of Philosophical Discourse," History ofPhilosophy Quarterly 4 (1987): 117-29. 8. Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism," originally delivered as the presidential address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1979, published in its Proceedings and later reprinted in Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism. The citation is from p. 165 of the reprinted version. 9. Emil Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee, Wise.: Marquette University Press, 1961), draws attention to the inevitable degeneration of what he calls "pragmatic make-believe" into "ideological fanaticism" (pp. 4-7). 10. Seth Benardete, "On Wisdom and Philosophy: The First Two Chapters of Aristotle's Metaphysics A," Review ofMetaphysics 32 (1978-79): 205-15.

Chapter Three 1. Stanley Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); Emil Fackenheim, "The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth," Proceedings of the Seventh Inter-American Congress of Philosophy (Montreal: Laval, 1967), pp. 77-92, and Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee, Wise.: Marquette University Press, 1961); Karl Lowith, Nature, History, and Existentialism, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. Arnold Levinson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966); "Die Dynamik der Geschichte und der Historismus," EranosJahrbuch 21 (1952): 217-54, and "Wahrheit und Geschichtlichkeit,"

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Notes

in Truth and Historicity, ed. H.-G. Gadamer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, -1972), pp. 9-21; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), and What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1959]); William Desmond, Beyond Hegel and Dialectic: Speculation, Cult, and Comedy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992). 2. For the historical background, see Mark L. McPherran, "Skeptical Homeopathy and Self-Refutation," Phronesis 32 (1987): 290-328; Miles Burnyeat, "Protagoras and Self-Refutation in Later Greek Philosophy," Philosophical Review 85 (1976): 44-69. 3. Gottlob Frege, "Function and Concept," in Logical and Philosophical Writings, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 149. 4. See Carl Page, "On Being False by Self-Refutation," Metaphilosophy 23 (1992): 431-47. Work on the formal aspects of self-refutation includes F. C. White, ~~Self-Refuting Propositions and Relativism," Metaphilosophy 20 (1989): 84-92; Henry Johnstone Jr., "Self-Application in Philosophical Argumentation," Metaphilosophy 20 (1989): 247-61, Validity and Rhetoric in Philosophical Argument (State College, Pa.: Dialogue Press of Man and World, 1978), and Philosophy and Argument (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1959); Steven J. Bartlett, "Hoisted by Their Own Petards: Philosophical Positions That Self-Destruct," Argumentation 2 (1988): 221-32; Steven J. Bartlett and Peter Suber, eds., SelfRefirence: Reflections on Reflexivity (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987); Michael Stack, "Self-Refuting Arguments," Metaphilosophy 14 (1983): 327-35; J. M. Boyle, "Self-Referential Inconsistency, Inevitable Falsity, and Metaphysical Argumentation," Metaphilosophy 3 (1972): 25-42; J. L. Mackie, "Self-Refutation: A Formal Analysis," Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1964): 193-203; John Passmore, Philosophical Reasoning (London: Duckworth, 1961), esp. chap. 4, "Self-Refutation"; Frederic Fitch, "Self-Reference in Philosophy," Mind 55 (1946):

64-73. 5. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 10 ( emphasis added). 6. See Mackie, "Self-Refutation," pp. 194-97. 7. Jack Meiland, "On the Paradox of Cognitive Relativism," Metaphilosophy 11 (1980): 115-26; David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Edmund Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974). See also Jack Meiland, "Concepts of Relative Truth," The Monist 60 (1977): 568-82, and "Is Protagorean Relativism Self-Refuting?" Grazer Philosophische 5tudien 9 (1979): 51-68. Discussion includes Edward Beach, "The Paradox of Cognitive Relativism Revisited: A Reply to Jack W. Meiland," Metaphilosophy 15 (1984): 1-15; William J. Wainwright, "Meiland and the Coherence of Cognitive Relativism," Metaphilosophy 17 (1986): 61-69; Harvey Seigel, Relativism Refuted: A Critique ofContemporary Epistemological Relativism (Boston: Reidel, 1987), pp. 10-22. 8. Charles Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem ofKnowledge (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983). 9. Maurice Mandelbaum, "Some Instances of the Self-Excepting Fallacy," Psychologische Forschung 6 (1962): 383-86, reprinted in his Philosophy, History, and the Sciences: Selected Critical Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 60-63. See also Mandelbaum's "Subjective, Objective, and Conceptual Relativisms," The Monist 62 (1979): 403-28, reprinted in Relativism Cognitive and Moral, ed. Jack Meiland and Michael Krausz (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 34-61. 10. See Gadamer, "Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit und Methode: Leo Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer," Independent Journal ofPhilosophy 2 (1978): 5-12; "Gadamer on Strauss: An Interview," Interpretation 12 (1984): 1-13; "Historicism and Hermeneutics," Supplement I, lin TM, esp. pp. 532-41. \ 11. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p.

F8.

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12. Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity, p. 85. 13. Hegels Logic, tr. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), sec. 60, p. 92. 14. Stanley Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. xix. 15. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 167-68. 16. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xxxvii. 17. See also Carl Page, ~'From Rationalism to Historicism: The Devolution of Cartesian Subjectivity," St. Johns Review 42, no. 2 (1994): 95-111. 18. Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 4. 19. Gerard Radnitzky and W. W. Bartley III, eds., Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology ofKnowledge (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1987). 20. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 21. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 3.

Chapter Four 1. While broader than usual, my definition is technically a "precising" one. For the philological background, see Leonhard von Renthe-Fink, Geschichtlichkeit: Ihr terminologische und begrifJlicher Ursprung bei Hegel, Heim, Dilthey, und Yorck (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964); Gerhard Bauer, Geschichtlichkeit: Wege und Irrwege eines Begriffs (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1963); Gunther Scholtz, "Erganzungen zur Herkunft des Wortes ~Geschichtlichkeit,'" Archiv fiir Begriffsgeschichte 14 (1970): 112-18. 2. William Desmond, Beyond Hegel and Dialectic: Speculation, Cult, and Comedy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992); Dennis J. Schmidt, The Ubiquity of the Finite: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Entitlements of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Robert Solomon, In the Spirit ofHegel: A Study ofG. W F. Hegels Phenomenology ofSpirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Stanley Rosen, "Hegel and Historicism," Clio 7 (1977): 33-51; Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Jean Ladriere, "History and Destiny," Philosophy Today 9 (1965): 3-25. 3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962 [1926]); The Essence of Reasons (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969 [1929]); Kant. and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th ed. enl., tr. Richard Taft (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990 [1929]). Useful supplementation may be found in the editions of roughly contemporary lecture courses by Heidegger: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, tr. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). For commentary on Being and Time, see Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, tr. Michael Gendre (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1991); Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being in the World: A Commentary on Heideggers Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); JosephJ. Kocklemans, Heidegger's "Being and Time": The Analytic of Dasein as Fundamental Ontology (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990); Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, rev. ed. (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989); Charles Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of

210

Notes

Knowledge (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983); Otto Poggeler, Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, tr. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987 [1963]). 4. For Heidegger's own assessment, see "Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 193-242, and the letter to Richardson appearing as the preface to William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), viii-xxiii. See also Otto Poggeler, "Historicity in Heidegger's Late Work," Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 4 (1973): 53-73; Ernesto Grassi, "The Rehabilitation of Rhetorical Humanism: Regarding Heidegger's Anti-Humanism," Diogenes 142 (1988): 136-56. 5. Exceptions include David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortnlity: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986); Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986). 6. Jeffrey A. Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem ofHistorical Meaning (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988); David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); David C. Hoy, "History, Historicity, and Historiography in Being and Time," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Bernard E. Rollin, "Heidegger's Philosophy of History in Being and Time," Modern Schoolman 49 (1972): 97-112; T. Wren, "Heidegger's Philosophy of History," Journal of the British Society jOr Phenomenology, vol. 2, no. 3 (1972): 111-25; Calvin O. Schrag, "Heidegger on Repetition and Historical Understanding," Philosophy East and West 20 (1970): 287-95, and "Phenomenology, Ontology, and History in the Philosophy of Heidegger," Revue Internationale de Philosophie 12 (1958): 117-32. For a sketch of the larger picture, see Michael Gillespie, "Temporality and History in the Thought of Martin Heidegger," Revue Internationale de Philosophie 43 (1989): 33-51. 7. Michael E. Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger's Concept of Authenticity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981); Charles Guignon, "Heidegger's 'Authenticity' Revisited," Review ofMetnphysics 38 (1984): 321-39. 8. Aryeh Kosman, "Substance, Being, and Energeia," in OxjOrd Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 2, ed. Julia Annas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 9. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Introduction to the Lectures on the History ofPhilosophy, tr. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 135. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 12. See also Emil Fackenheim, "The Historicity and Transcenaence of Philosophic Truth," Proceedings ofthe Seventh Inter-American Congress ofPhilosophy (Montreal: Laval, 1967), pp. 77-92; Robert Pippin, "The Rose and the Owl: Some Remarks on the Theory-Practice Problem in Hegel," Independent Journal ofPhilosophy 3 (1979): 7-16.

Chapter Five 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). All page numbers will be to this edition. Specific commentary includes Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974); Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading ofHegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology ofSpirit, tr. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969); Martin Heidegger, Hegel's Concept of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); J. Loewenberg, Hegel's Phenomenology: Dia-

Notes

211

logues on the Lift of Mind (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1965); Otto Poggeler, "Die Komposition der Phiinomenologie des Geistes, "Hegel-Studien, SUppa 3 (1966): 189-236; Pierre-Jean Laharriere, Structures et mouvement dialectique dans la Phenomenologie de l'esprit de Hegel (Paris: AubierMontaigne, 1968); Kenley Dove, "Hegel's Phenomenological Method," Review of Metaphysics 23 (1970): 615-41; Otto Poggeler, Hegels Idee einer Phiinomenologie des Geistes (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1973); Johannes Heinrichs, Die Logik der Phiinomenologie des Geistes (Bonn: Herbert Grundmann, 1974); Werner Marx, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: Its Point and Purpose-A Commentary on the Preface and Introduction, tr. Peter Heath (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Merold Westphal, History and Truth in Hegel's Phenomenology (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979); Robert Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G. F. Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Joseph Flay, Hegel's Quest for Certain,ty (Albany, N. Y.: SUNY Press, 1984); Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel's Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1985); Thomas Rockmore, Hegel's Circular Epistemology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Kenneth R. Westphal, Hegel ~s Epistemological Realism: A Study ofthe Aim and Method ofHegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). Helpful general works include J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-Examination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958); Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Stanley Rosen, G. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Georg Lukacs, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics, tr. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1975); Charles Taylor, Hegel (Carnbridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, tr. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976; Alan White, Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem ofMetaphysics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983); Robert Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions ofSelf-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 2. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Science of Logic, tr. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 37. 3. Carl Vaught, The Questfor Wholeness (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1982). 4. Metaphysics 12.1074b34; De Anima 3.4. Walter Kern, "Eine Ubersetzung Hegels zu De Anima III, 4-5," Hegel-Studien 1 (1961): 49-88. 5. Section references (§) marked EN are to Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). The English translations come from Hegel's Logic, tr. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), and Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 6. This is all very compressed. For Hegel on time, see Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, tr. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969); Joseph Flay, "Time in Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, " International Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1991): 259-73; Oscar D. Brauer, Dialektik der Zeit: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Metaphysik der Weltgeschichte (Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromann, 1982); Mark Okrent, "Time, History, and Development in Hegel," Internatioool Studies in Philosophy 14 (1982): 57-76; Michael Murray, "Time in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit," Review ofMetaphysics 34 (1981): 682-705; John Burbidge, "Concept and Time in Hegel," Dialogue 12 (1973): 403-22; Klaus Hedwig, "Hegel: Time and Eternity," Dialogue 9 (1970): 139-53; W. E. Williams, "Time in Hegel's Philosophy," Dialogue 9 (1970): 154-67; Bernhard Lakebrink, "Hegels Metaphysik der Zeit," Philosophisches Jahrbuch 74 (1966-67): 284-93. 7. Robert Pippin, "Hegel's Phenomenological Criticism," Man and World 8 (1975): 296-314. 8. Hans Fulda, Das Problem einer Einleitung in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1965); Kenley Dove, "Hegel's 'Deduction of the Concept of Science,'" in

w:

w:

212

Notes

Hegel and the Scieru:es, ed. R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky (Dordrecht: Riedel, 1984), pp.271-81. 9. Heidegger, Hegel's Coru:ept ofExperienCe. 10. On recollection as inwardizing, see Verene, Hegel's Recollection. 11. Hannah Arendt, "The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern," in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961), pp. 41-90. 12. Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading ofHegel. 13. Donald Phillip Verene, "Hegel's Account of War," in Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Z. A. Pelczynski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 14. Rosen, Hegel: An Introduction to the Scieru:e of Wisdom, p. 164. 15. Karl Lowith, "Die Dynamik der Geschichte," Eranos }ahrbuch 21 (1952): 249. 16. "Speculative" here is meant in terms of the distinction between speculative and critical (analytic) philosophy of history made in W. H. Walsh, Introduction to the Philosophy ofHistory (London: Hutchinson, 1951), not in Hegel's sense. See also Arthur Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 17. Commentators appreciative of this point include Herbert Marcuse, Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, tr. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987 [1968]), on which see Robert Pippin, "Marcuse on Hegel and Historicity," Philosophical Forum 16 (1985): 180-206; Michael Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground ofHistory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Reinhart Maurer, Hegel und das Ende der Geschichte, 2d enl. ed. (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1982); Brauer, Dialektik der Zeit. 18. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction-Reason in History, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 27. 19. George O'Brien, Hegel on Reason in History: A Contemporary Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). The remainder of Hegel's text is constructed to show the same relation to Aristotle's doctrine of the several senses of being. 20. Introduction to the Lectures on the History ofPhilosophy, tr. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 23. 21. P. Cornehl, Die Zukunji der Versohnung (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971). 22. Dieter Henrich, "Hegels Theorie iiber den Zufall," Kant-Studien 50 (1958-59): 131-48. 23. Emil Fackenheim, "On the Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual," Review ofMetaphysics 23 (1970): 690-98. 24. Richard Schacht, "Hegel on Freedom," in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre (New York: Doubleday, 1972); Bernhard Lakebrink, Die europiiische Idee der Freiheit, vol. 1: Hegels Logik und die Tradition der Selbstbestimmung (Leiden: E. 1. Brill, 1968). 25. Manfred Riedel, "Fortschritt und Dialektik in Hegels Geschichtsphilosophie," Neue Rundschau 80 (1969): 476-91; Rolf Ahlers, "The Dialectic in Hegel's Philosophy of History/' in History and System, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1984). 26. Michael Foster, Die Geschi£hte als Schicksal des Geistes in Hegelschen Philosophie (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1929). 27. For the distinction between intensive and extensive adequacy, see Edward Craig, The Mind ofGod and the 'Works ofMan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 19.

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INDEX

absolute historical moment, 106-8, 174 absolute knowing. See Hegel, G. W. F.: absolute knowing adequacy of reason, extensive vs. intensive,

190-91 Alexander the Great, 182, 194 ambition of transcendence, 76, 77

amOT fati, 74, 152 Anaxagoras, 178, 202 Apel, Karl-Otto, 53 arbitrariness. See also nihilism account-giving and, 113-15 contingency and, 118-19 forms of inquiry and, 118-23 immanentism and, 126 provisionality and, 83, 84 Archimedes, 189

Aristotle, xii, 54, 75, 76, 162, 163, 176,

184,200,201 Metaphysics, 88,91, 190 Nicomachean Ethics, 125, 128,

142 Politics, 79, 142 Topics, 3 Arnold, Gottfried, 24 Athena, 187,200 Bacon, Francis, 46 barbarians, 185 Beautiful Soul, 154 belief as posit, 32-33, 38, 45, 129 Berlin wall, 183 Bernstein, Richard, 47, 50, 51, 57, 71, 114,

119, 124

230

Index

binding of thought, the. See also metaphysical responsibility; Seinsverbundenheit actuality of history and, 202 conciliatory pragmatism and, 50 negativity and, 153 sociology of knowledge and, 33, 36-38, 40,42 universality and, 92 bios politikos, 75 Burke, Edmund, 24 Carr, David, 99, 100, 102-4 Cartesian Anxiety, 51 Chinese Box, Phenomenology ofSpirit as a, 166 Christianity, 28-29, 168, 183 classical historicism, 24-30. See also flux, history as; Historismus; Mannheim, Karl; Meinecke, Friedrich; sociology of knowledge; Troeltsch, Ernst cultural phenon1ena as subject of, 14, 29-32,42-44 evolutionary development and individuality in, 13, 19, 25-27, 31, 45 historicity of the subject in, 25-26, 27-30,42-44,46,56 vs. Hegelian historicism, 183 Collingwood, R. G., 57, 73 Comte, Auguste, 19 conceptual schemes, 13, 36-38, 119 conciliatory pragmatism, 46, 47-55, 74, 79, 88. See also Margolis, Joseph contingency. See also radical provisionality actuality and, 178 arbitrariness and, 118-19 discrimination and, 84 Hegel on, 177 history as pure, xii, 48, 49-50, 66-67, 80-81, 129-30, 186 ironic historicism and, 70, 73-74 Troeltsch on, 28-29 universality and, 95 critical self-reflection. See also historicity of the subject, the; lucidity; negativity of reason; reason's selfknowledge; refleXivity of selfconsciousness logical responsibility and, 89, 113-14 metaphysics of history and, 153-54 self-interpretation and, 197

sociology of knowledge and, 33, 38-41 on tradition, 47, 64-66 Troeltsch on, 29 Croce, Benedetto, 11,17 Crusades, the, 183 D'Amico, Robert, 13,23 Darwin, Charles, 122 Democritus, 91 demonic view of history, 7, 16-23, 42-43, 185 Derrida, Jacques, 47 Descartes, Rene, 19, 34, 46, 55, 65, 70, 104, 105, 129, 190 developmental laws in history, 14, 18-19, 22-23,25-27,31-33,43-45 dialogue, infinite, 68, 125 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 133 effective history ( Wirkungsgeschichte ). See Gadamer, Hans-Georg: effective history Engels, Friedrich, 162 Enlightenment rationalism, 15, 18, 25, 27, 34,54-56,62,65-66,84,116,131, 200 eros, xii, 139 escape from history, 50-51, 71, 81, 130-31, 201 ether, history as, 6-8, 27, 50-51, 151 eudaimonia, 141, 143 Evil Demon, reincarnated as historicity, 70 Fackenheim, Emil, 108 fallibilism, 23 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 11 Feyerabend, Paul, 47,52,90,117 final vocabularies, 69-70, 73, 79 finite historicity. See also finitude; inevitable parochiality axiom of, 80-82, 118-19 critique and, 103 metaphysics of, 129-55, 157-202 self-recognition and, 95, 108-9, 110-12 vs. historicity in general, 4-5, 12-13, 50, 62,66-68,130 finitude. See also finite historicity; Heidegger, Martin: finitude animal, 110-11, 170 human, 112, 135, 136, 139-55

Index First Philosophy. See ak;o lucidity absolution and, 131-32, 161-62 character of, xii, 3 consistent with historicism, 128, 143,

149 and the gigantomachy, 87, 90, 98, 99,

123,150,202 Hegel and, 133, 158, 190 inquiry and, 68, 79 intensive adequacy and, 190 logical responsibility and, 89 noetic ideals of, 3, 41, 54, 103, 125 not rationalistic, 131 rejection of, 4, 6, 47, 68-69, 70, 74, 82-84,88,114,130 self-consciousness and, 104 flux, history as. See also classicial historicism; metaphysical responsibility chaos and, 18, 186,201-2 classical historicism and, 26-28, 31 determination and, 8, 131, 174-75, 178,

196,201-2 forms of inquiry, 50,117-18,120-21, 124-27, 129. See also interim stability Foucault, Michel, 4, 15, 47 Frege, Gottlob, 127 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 4, 46, 47, 53,

56-68,71,77,79,80,84,88,92, 105-8, 115, 120, 125, 130-33, 144, 149, 153, 186, 202. See also philosophical hermeneutics effective history ( Wirkungsgeschichte ),

61-63,67-68,151,153 fusion of horizons, 64, 66, 67 hermeneutic circle, 58-59, 62 hermeneutic universality, 56-59, 66 prejudice, 63-65, 67, 151, 202 Gelassenheit, 152 gigantomachy, 90-91, 105, 110, 127 Codel, Kurt, 190 Goethe, J. W. von, 24, 25 Good, the, 123 Goodman, Nelson, 47, 90 Guignon, Charles, 99 Habermas, Jurgen, 53 Hegel, G. W. F., 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 17, 19,21,

28,32,39-41,46,50,55,66,100,

231

104, 107, 108, 109, Ill, 128, 132, 133, 149, 153-55, 157-201. See also Hegelian historicism; negativity of reason absolute knowing (absolutes Wissen), 40,

55, 133, 157, 160-67 Absolute Spirit, 39-40, 193, 200 freedom, 168-69, 172, 179-85, 194 interest of spirit, 180-83 localization of reason, 157, 167-68, 179,

185-86, 188, 190 master-slave, 168-73 Objective Spirit, 39-40, 188, 195 phenomenology, 160-67 reason in history, 9, 175-78, 185 recognitive desire, 169-71, 183 self-consciousness, 167-71

Sittlichkeit, 182-83 spirit (Geist), 8, 21, 132, 160, 167, 172, 175,179-80,184,195,200 .Stoic and Skeptic, 171 substance vs. subjectivity, 188-89 Unhappy Consciousness, 171-72 visionary labor, 171, 173 war, 169-70 work, 169, 170-72 world, 172-74, 193-94 world-history, 158, 162, 168, 175-85, 193,200 Hegelian historicism, 158, 159-60, 172-74, 183, 185-88, 197-98. See also Hegel, G.W.F. Heidegger, Martin, 8, 40, 56, 59, 60, 74,

99, 102, 107, 129-55, 157, 165-66, 180,202 anticipatory resoluteness, 140, 143, 145, 147 authenticity, 139-40, 154, 180 Befindlichkeit, 137-39 Being, history of, 107, 133, 151, 153 Being and Time, incompleteness of, 133-34, 150-52 Being-toward-death, 140-43 care (Sorge), 138-39, 142-43 destiny (Geschick), 147-48, 151, 154 facticity, 138, 146-47, 149, 151 fate (Schicksal), 143, 147-48, 151, 154 finitude, 136, 141-42, 152-54 guilt, 140, 144

232

Index

Heidegger, Martin (continued) historicity (historicality), 134-35, 140, 147, 154 human being as ontological, 135-36, ISO localization of reason, 135, 141-42, 145, 148-49, 154 moment of vision, 148, 149, 153 overtaking, 66, 144-45, 149 possibility, 137-39, 141, 146-48, 154 situation, 142, 146-47, 152 temporality, 140, 142-43, 147, ISO-51 thrownness (Geworfenheit), 66, 74, 137, 139-40, 144-49, 152 totality, 139-40

Verstehen, 137-39 Herakleitos, 82, 114, 135 Herder, J. G., 24 hermeneutic circle. See Gadamer, HansGeorg: hermeneutic circle hero of contingency, 74 Herodotus, 30 Historical School, 11 historicism, lexical notes on, 1-2, 11-17, 24 historicist gesture, 2, 5, 6, 9, 12, 21, 24, 37,42-44,45,80 historicist scenario, 91-97,105,109-10, 112. See also universality historicity ( Geschichtlichkeit ) consistent with First Philosophy, xii, 5, 201-2 general sense of, 2, 12, 49, 150-51 hydrodynamic metaphors of, 7-8, 151, 201-2 vs. finite historicity, 4-5, 12-13, 50, 62, 65-68, 130 historicity of the subject, the. See also critical self-reflection classical historicism and, 25-26, 27-30 demonic view of history and, 22-23 historicist gesture and, 43-44, 45-46 metaphysics of, 129-55, 157-202 neglect of, 56 reflexivity and, 102-4 sociology of knowledge and, 33-34, 38-42 historism, II, 12, 16, 17 Historismus, 1, II, 12, 13, 14, 17,24,27. See also classical historicism

Historizismus, 12

Hobbes, Thomas, 110, 125, 160, 190 horizon,3~4~5~ 135, 148 Husserl, Ednlund, 58, 99, 104 immanentism, 117, 120, 124-27, 130 inevitability, historical, 18-20, 185 inevitable parochiality. See also finite historicity; radical provisionality as a doctrine of human nature; 88, 192 Hegelian historicism and, 174, 186, 192-93 as hypothetical, 97 not implied by historicity, 5 philosophical historicism and, 3, 49, 81 rational imagination and, 111-12 intentionality, 104, 121, 126 interim stability. See also forms of inquiry; justification; pragmatism, historicist discrimination and, 83-85, 124-27 nihilism and, 90, 114 sought for in praxis, 77, 120 internal realism, 47 ironic historicism, 4, 46, 68-79, 88. See also Rorty, Richard and contingency, 70, 73-74 as sophistical, 71, 78, 115 istoricismo, 11 judgment, 57-58, 92-93, 121, 124 Julius Caesar, 182 justification. See also interim stability;

quaestio juris conversational paradigm of, 71-73, 76, 123 evolutionary strategy for, 53, 122-23 idiom of, 115-18 logical responsibility and, 88-91, 120-21 philosophical historicism committed to, 52-54,83-85,114 Rorty's rejection of, 72-73 Kallikles, 75, 76 Kant, Immanuel, 46, 52, 53, 57, 59, 60, 104, 108, 117 Kojeve, Alexandre, 168 Kuhn, Thomas, 47, 52

Lebensphilosophie, 39 Lebenswelt, 102 Leibniz, G. W., 24

Index logical responsibility, xii, 85, 88-91, 98-99, 113-14,127. See also truth-telling Lowith, Karl, 170 lucidity. See also critical self-reflection; First Philosophy negativity and, 154 as noetic ideal, 3, 77, 179, 188-89, 198 as self-illumination, 41-42 transparency and, 54-55 as unattainable, 65, 67, 116, 137, 149

lumen naturale, 55, 65, 103 Luther, Martin, 159 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 4, 47 Mandelbaum, Maurice, 15-16, 101 Mannheim, Karl, 16,24,30-42, 45, 46, 61, 131, 133. See also classicial historicism Marathon, battle of, 182 Marcuse, Herbert, 21 Margolis, Joseph, 4, 13, 47, 48-55, 71, 74,

75,77,79,84,92,95,102,103,115, 116, 121, 122-23, 125, 130, 131. See also conciliatory pragmatism; pragmatism, historicist Marx, Karl, 19 Masefield, John, 18 master-slave. See Hegel, G.W.F.: masterslave mathematical knowledge, 30, 34-35, 56, 59,

111-12, 190 Meiland, Jack, 99-102, 103 Meinecke, Friedrich, 24-26, 27, 28, 29, 32. See also classicial historicism nletaphysical responsibility. See also binding of thought, the; flux, history as call for, xii, 9 determination of reason and, 6-10,

131-35 in Hegel and Heidegger, 8, 132 historicity and, 150-51, 175, 178, 196,

201-2 history as ether and, 7-8, 50-51, 174-75 sociology of knowledge and, 36-40, 131 methodological individualism, 21 Mill, J. S., 19 mitigated historicism, 99-105

Mnemosyne, 181, 187 Montesquieu, Baron de, 24 mortality, 140-43, 149 Munchausen, Baron von, 84

233

myth of the framework, 64 Nagel, Thomas, 76, 95 Napoleon I, 159 Natural Law, 25, 27

Naturalismus, 27 negative absolute, 106, 108 negativity of reason. See also critical selfreflection; Hegel, G.W.F. absolute knowing and, 157-58, 161 finitude and, Ill, 153-55 freedom and, 168-69, 179, 189 ironism and, 77 moment of vision and, 149 philosophical hermeneutics on, 64, 149 politics and, 77-78, 187-89 self-consciousness and, 168-69, 172 neighborhood of truth, 118-19, 124 neo-Kantianism, 28 new historicism, the, 14-15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, vii, 74, 119, 152 nihilism, 84, 89, 90, 97, 113-27. See also arbitrariness Novalis, 11 objectification of spirit, 33, 172-73, 189,

193-95 ontic vs. ontological, 60-61, 82, 102, 151 Orwell, George, 123 Owl of Minerva, 188 partial historicism, 99, 100, 102-4

peritrope, 91 philosophical hermeneutics, 4, 46-47,

56-68,79,88, 130, 144. See also Gadamer, Hans-Georg philosophical historicism axioms of, 79-85, 118 as critique of reason, 3-4, 9, 13-14, 46,

48-49,56-60,68,87-88,129,201 finite historicity and, 44, 129-32 general meaning of, xii, 44 immanentism and, 126-27, 129-30 not concerned with conceptual schemes,

38 not a skepticism, 83, 91-92, 114 as pragmatic, 116-17 rational imagination and, 112, 126-27 self-application and, 92-93, 96, 98-99 as specification of the historicist gesture,

2-4,9-10,12-14,49

234

Index

philosophical historicism ( continued) as truth-claim, 46 vs. demonic view of history, 22-23 vs. First Philosophy, 3 vs. Hegelian historicism, 158, 160, 185-87, 192, 196 vs. sociology of knowledge, 31, 33-35 Plato, 3, 16, 19, 26, 72, 91, 107; 109, 131, 139, 160, 190, 196-200. See also Socrates Gorgias, 69 Phaedo, 202 Phaedrus, 152 Republic, 54-55, 69, 75, 127 Sophist, 91 Symposium, 69 Theaetetus, 91, 154 Popper, Karl, 11, 14, 16-23, 64 practical rationality, 47 pragmatism, historicist, 51-53, 72, 76-77, 79,114-17,120,124-26. See also -interim stability; Margolis, Joseph; Rorty, Richard Prantl, Karl, 11 prejudice. See Gadamer, Hans-Georg: prejudice procedural vs. constitutive, 30, 45, 61-62, 79,82,102,131 Protagoras, 73, 91 psychologism, 37 Putnam, Hilary, 47, 124

quaestio juris, 52, 53, 59, 90, 117. See also justification radical historicism, 14 radical provisionality, 82-83, 90, 120, 122, 129-30. See also contingency; inevitable parochiality Ranke, Leopold von, 24, 183 rational imagination, 109-12, 116-17, 121, 125-27 reason in history. See Hegel, G.W.F.: reason in history reason as a power actuality of, .82, 112, 135 belief and, 36-38 determination of, 60-61, 151-52 prehistoric character of, 197 reflexivity and, 100-101

time and, 186-87, 197 reason's self-knowledge, xi, 4-5, 9, 35, 54-55,113-14, 158, 191, 198-200. See also critical self-reflection recognitive desire. See Hegel, G. W.F.: recognitive desire reconciliation with finitude, 152-53 reflexivity of self-consciousness, 52-53, 64-65, 100-105, 113-14, 153-55, 168. See also critical self-reflection rehabilitation, xii-xiii, 5-6, 9-10, 127-28, 158 relationism, 39 relativism, 16, 28-29, 38-39, 99-101, 106-8 res gestae vs. historia rerum gestarum, 6,

III Rorty, Richard, 1, 4, 15-16, 47,52,68-79, 83,84,88,114,115,122,123,125. See also ironic historicism; pragmatism, historicist Rosen, Stanley, 113, 170 Russell, Bertrand, 127 saint of fatality, 74 Schlegel, Friedrich, 11 Seinsgeschichte, 107, 153 Seinsverbundenheit, 33, 36, 37, 153. See a/l;o binding of thought, the self-excepting fallacy, 101 self-interpretation, 44, 79, 81, Ill, 173-74, 180-81, 184, 190-200 self-refutation infelicitous, 95-96 insouciance regarding, 90, 94, 127 metaphysical correlate of, 192-93, 196 philosophical incoherence and, 89-90 self-application of historicism and, 91-112, 127, 186 Sextus Empiricus, 91 Shaftesbury, 3d earl of, 24 Skinner, Quentin, 4 sociology of knowledge, 16, 30-42, 44, 45, 131. See also classical historicism and the absolute, 39-41 Socrates, 4, 42, 59, 69, 70, 75, 78, 91, 127, 141, 152, 154, 202. See also Plato solidarity, xiii, 69, 72,74,77, 114 Spengler, Oswald, 19 storicismo, 11, 17

Index Strauss, Leo, 15-16, 105-8, 119 Taylor, Charles, 4, 53 Thales, 197, 202 Theaetetus, 190 totalization of historicity in philosophical historicism, 3, 45-46, 50,62,173-74 reflexivity and, 81, 99, 100-105 sociology of knowledge and, 33-35, 41, 44 Toynbee, Arnold, 19 transcendental historicism, 99 transparency. See lUCidity: transparency and Troeltsch, Ernst, 24,26-30, 32, 39, 41, 133. See also classical historicism truncated Hegelianism, 39-41, 46, 133, 192-93 truth-telling, 70-71, 74-75, 78-80, 87, 89, 114, 120-23. See also logical responsibility

235

universalism, 54-55, 79, 103, 105, 109, 116-17. See also universality universality. See also historicist scenario; universalism adequacy of reason and, 190-91 and contingency, 95 idiom of, 92-99, 115 rational imagination and, 111-12 asregulativ~ 51-52, 74,103,116,124 vs. generality, 48, 93 Vico, Giambattista, 19,24 Voltaire, 24, 70 warranted assertibility, 54, 95, 97, 110, 124 Williams, Bernard, 4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 77 world-history. See Hegel, G.W.F.: worldhistory world. See Hegel, G. W.F.: world Zeus, 187,200

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