The philosophy of the 19th century: Systems period (1800-1850) (2)

Generally speaking, removing from previous doctrines everything which gives them their apocalyptic and visionary character, you obtain new doctrines which have a skeptical and discouraged aspect, or which, conversely, expect a lot from human forces and very little from natural necessity. The materialism of Marx is the Hegelian doctrine of the State, deprived of its religious meaning, like the positivism of Littré, it is the doctrine of Comte, detached from his fantasies about the future Church and the organization of definitive relationships between the temporal and the spiritual. Hegel had distinguished with great force and almost violence between history and philology, history which describes the advent of the spirit, while philology, limiting itself to the critical study of documents, takes away from history this epic aspect that an immediate reading of the texts gives them (2). This distinction falls completely in the era that concerns us: Renan, Max Müller, Eduard Zeller, Burckardt and so many others consider themselves philologists, who are at the same time historians; the general result of this criticism is a transformation in the aspect of the past; it generally becomes much less mysterious, much more similar to the present; history in the strong sense that the word had taken with Bossuet or Saint Augustine, as periods specifically distinct by their entire spiritual structure, tends to disappear with Renan; with him, as with Rohde for example, we see faculties acting in the distant past that are exactly the same as ours, and, in their perspective, each era becomes our contemporary; as Hegel feared, criticism makes us lose, with the feeling of a strong distinction between the present and the past, the presentiment of a final future to which history leads us; everything is equalized and Lucretius’ Semper eadem omnia often returns in a tone, it is true, more ironic and glacial than pessimistic, but also, for example in linguistic research, as an indispensable rule of method. Cournot, with his views on chance and accidents, constitutes the theory of historical knowledge, which, emphasizing, in the production of any event, the convergence of an immense number of independent causes, one on the other, removes the possibility of finding meaning in history. And between Marxist determinism and Cournot’s indeterminism, there is undoubtedly an opposition; but we find there an agreement to deny any esoteric doctrine on the final stage of history.

Hence a rather singular situation: affecting ignorance or skepticism about the determination of ends, the philosopher’s attention is transferred to the exercise of thought which knows or of the will which acts and to the formal conditions of this thought or this will. It is a fertile period in general views on knowledge and in logical research as well as in speculations on the foundation of morality; the mind, tired of searching for an imaginary object, withdraws into itself to observe the laws of its exercise: there is no attitude that was more antipathetic to a Count or a Hegel who struggled all their life against such formalism. With it, attention shifts to Kant’s criticism, especially to the Critique of Pure Reason: this is the beginning of German and French neo-criticism; in the same spirit, Taine honors Condillac’s analysis; this is the time of the great success of J. S. Mill’s Logic, which is, in truth, even more than logic, an empiricist theory of knowledge; finally, we see the emergence, linked to this movement, of the criticism of science which will develop especially in the following era.

Hence so many cold, severe or ironic works, which owe these qualities to what, perhaps, is the essential trait of this calmed period which goes from approximately 1850 to 1890, namely indifference to the object. This indifference which struck Nietzsche so keenly and which he so severely reproached historians is a completely general trait: formalism in philosophy corresponds to Parnassian art in French poetry, even more so, Mallarmé’s art goes to the extreme in the search for the pure formal conditions of a poem; “marvelous attempt”, writes Paul Valéry; ”where Kant, rather naively perhaps, had believed he saw the Moral Law, Mallarmé undoubtedly perceived the Imperative of a poetry: a Poetics.” Same bias of indifference elsewhere in the landscaper or in the naturalist novel. “Faith in absolute philosophical truth,” wrote Coumot in 1861, “is so cooled that the public and the Academies hardly receive or welcome anything of this kind other than works of erudition and historical curiosity.” English thought then regained an influence in Europe that it had lost for a long time; Mill’s logic, Darwin’s transformism, the evolutionism of Spencer mark as the natural inclinations of the mind in this period.

(2) For example, he speaks out several times against Niebuhr’s attempt to demonstrate that all the beginnings of Roman history are pure legends.