Is the history of philosophy distinct from that of other disciplines?

What is the degree of independence of the history of philosophy with regard to the history of other intellectual disciplines? We refuse to pose it dogmatically, as if it were a question of settling the question of the relationship of philosophy, taken as a thing in itself, with religion, science or politics. We want to pose it and resolve it historically; that is to say that it cannot admit of a simple and uniform solution. The history of philosophy cannot be, if it wants to be faithful, the abstract history of ideas and systems, separated from the intentions of their authors, and from the moral and social atmosphere in which they were born. It is impossible to deny that, at different times, philosophy has had, in what could be called the intellectual regime of the time, a very different place. In the course of history, we meet philosophers who are above all scholars; others are above all social reformers, like Auguste Comte, or teachers of morality, like the Stoic philosophers, and preachers, like the cynics; there are, among them, solitary meditators, professionals of speculative thought, like a Descartes or Kant, alongside men who aim at an immediate practical influence, like Voltaire. Personal meditation sometimes is simple self-reflection, and sometimes borders on ecstasy.

And it is not only because of their personal temperament that they are so different, it is because of what society, in each era, demands of a philosopher. The noble Roman, who seeks a director of conscience, the popes of the thirteenth century who see in the philosophical teaching a means of strengthening Christianity, the encyclopedists who want to put an end to the oppression of the forces of past ask very different things of philosophy; they alternately become missionaries, critics, teachers.

These are, it will be said, accidents; no matter what society wants to do with philosophy; what is important is that it remains, in the midst of the different intentions of those who use it; whatever their divergences, there is no philosophy except where there is rational thought, that is to say thought capable of criticizing itself and making an effort to justify itself with reasons. Isn’t this aspiration to a rational value, one might think, a sufficiently characteristic and permanent feature to justify this abstract history of doctrines, this “history of pure reason”, as Kant says, who sketched out the idea? Sufficient to distinguish philosophy from religious belief, this trait would also distinguish it from the positive sciences; because the history of the positive sciences is completely inseparable from the history of the techniques from which they came and which they perfected. There is no scientific law which is not, under another aspect, a rule of action on things; philosophy, on the other hand, is pure speculation, pure effort to understand, without any other concern.

This solution would be very acceptable, if it did not have the immediate consequence of eliminating from the history of philosophy all the doctrines which make a part of belief, of intuition, intellectual or not, of sentiment, that is to say master doctrines; it therefore implies a firm opinion on philosophy, much more than an exact view of its history. To isolate a doctrine from the movement of ideas which brought it, from the feeling and the intention which guide it, to consider it as a theorem to be proved, is to replace by a dead thought a living and significant thought. We can understand a philosophical notion only by its relation to the whole of which it is an aspect. How many different nuances, for example, in the sense of the famous: Know yourself! in Socrates, self-knowledge means the dialectical examination and testing of one’s own opinions; in Saint Augustine, it is a means of attaining the knowledge of God through the image of the Trinity that we find within ourselves; in Descartes, it is like an apprenticeship in certainty; in the Upanishads of India, it is the knowledge of the identity of the self and of the universal principle. How then can we grasp this notion and give it meaning, independently of the purposes for which we use it?

One of the greatest difficulties that can be opposed to the idea of an abstract history of systems is the fact that one could call the displacement of the level of doctrines. To give a salient example, let us think of the ardent polemics, continued for centuries, on the limits of the domains of faith and reason. One could find many doctrines given at one time as of revealed faith and considered to others as a doctrine of reason. The dryness and poverty of philosophy properly so called in the High Middle Ages is compensated by the treasures of spiritual life which, from pagan philosophy, have passed into the theological writings of Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine. The affirmation of the immateriality of the soul, which in Descartes is rationally proven, is for Locke a truth of faith. What could be more striking than the transposition that Spinoza subjected to the religious notion of eternal life, interpreting it through notions inspired by Cartesianism! From these facts, which could easily be multiplied, it follows that we do not sufficiently characterize a philosophy by indicating the doctrines it supports; it is much more important to see in what spirit it sustains them, to what mental regime it belongs.

This means that philosophy cannot be separated from the rest of the spiritual life, which is still expressed by the sciences, religion, art, moral or social life. The philosopher takes into account all the spiritual values of his time to approve, criticize or transform them. There is no philosophy where there is no effort to order values hierarchically.

It will therefore be a constant concern of the historian of philosophy to stay in touch with general political history and the history of all disciplines of the mind, far from wanting to isolate philosophy as a technique separated from the others.

However, these relationships with other spiritual disciplines are by no means uniform and invariable, but present themselves in very different ways according to periods and thinkers. Philosophical speculation can be ordered sometimes to religious life, sometimes to the positive sciences, sometimes to politics and morals, sometimes to art. There are times when the role of one of these disciplines predominates, while the others are almost obliterated; thus, during classical antiquity, we assist on the whole, to a gradual decrease in the role of the sciences, accompanied by the growth of the role of religion: while, at the time of Plato, the evolution of mathematics is of particular interest to the historian, this will be, at the time of Plotinus, the invasion of the oriental religions of salvation will have to call attention; it is at this point that we will have to pose the problem, still so difficult to resolve, of the specific influence of Christianity on philosophy. The current era sees, around philosophy, a struggle for influence so bitter that this meditation on the past is not entirely useless.

Source: Émile Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie – Tome premier: L’Antiquité et le Moyen âge, Librairie Félix Alcan, Paris, 1928. Tanslation and adaptation by Nicolae Sfetcu © 2022 Multimedia Publishing