24 I 2008
While staying home in Christmas a month ago, I was left with some time of leisure and decided to take a look at Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Even though the text seems very insightful concerning the general notion, or rather, the spirit of history, few problems are evident: his facts are rather dated, his understanding of foreign cultures seem to grasp their appearance rather than essence, and, perhaps more importantly, the term “spirit” could easily be replaced by “god”. The linear passage of spirit from one civilization to th next and the ultimate praise of the Germanic culture bring further doubt onto the validity of its claims. If history truly were an idealist determinist subject, why does it end in two self-destructive wars in the beginning of last century? Should these apparent decadence of “spirit” be deemed historical accidents or ahistorical, independent events? Hegel, who lived a century earlier and belonged to the particularity of his historical context, cannot adequately answer this question.
In comparison, the philosophy of history of Raymond Aron a century later seemed to be a much more rational version of understanding that better captures reality. The very notion of his philosophy of history itself is but an attempt to understand the limit of historical objectivity rather than an all-fitting system of explanation that aims at the basis of historical knowledge. The foundation of his thought, then, is based on intellectual skepticism, whose doubts leads to a notion of probabilistic determinism guided by reason in plurality of interpretations:
The intelligibility of probabilistic determinism characterizes the world in which the life of the man of action unfolds; the intelligibility of psycho-existential comprehension is born of a meeting with others, a discovery and an enrichment of oneself. The intelligibility of works reveals both the meaning immanent in each of them and the law according to which they follow one from the other; meaning that express one aspect of man and his creative capacity, a law that reveals the essence of the search and its progress. Historical totality preserves this plurality, of which the philosopher takes note, an awareness to which is added, with the always provisional discovery of the unique and essential problem, the effort to make sense of a diversity of periods within human society in a drive toward a goal vaguely outlined by reason.[1]
[1] Raymond Aron, “Three Forms of Historical Intelligibility”, in History, Truth, Liberty, Franciszek Draus, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 53.
