The philosophy of the 19th century: Systems period (1800-1850) (1)

From 1800 to the present day, we can distinguish three large, fairly well-defined periods: from 1800 to 1850, an extraordinary flowering of broad and constructive doctrines, which claim to reveal the secret of nature and history and to make known to man the law of his destiny, individual and social; the Catholic doctrines that Maistre and Bonald construct in reaction against the eighteenth century, the psychology of Maine de Biran which ends in religious views, the great post-Kantian German metaphysics, those of Fichte, of Schelhng, of Hegel including the spiritualism of Victor Cousin is an imitation, the social doctrines of the Saint-Simonians, Comte and Fourier all have in common this character of prophetic announcement or revelation.

From approximately 1850 to 1890, there was, on the contrary, a renewal of critical spirit and analysis which manifested itself in the restoration of honor to the thought of Kant or Condillac; there . pure philology chases away philosophy from history; criticism replaces metaphysics; physics and chemistry are crowding out the philosophy of nature; practical, economic and social policy replaces prophecy; it is the era of Renan and Max Müller, of Taine, of Renouvier, of Coumot and the neo-Kantians, of Marxist socialism; and the favorite doctrines of the time were Darwinism and the evolutionism of Spencer, whose mechanistic character recalls the ideas of the 18th century.

Finally, around 1890, a new period began; generally speaking, the reality of spiritual values then appears to be opposed to the philosophical results that we believed we could draw from the sciences; The analysis of the conditions of scientific knowledge (criticism of science) shows the limited scope of these results; we seek means of access to these spiritual realities that the previous period considered illusory or inaccessible; not certainly with the assurance of the romantic generations, which was translated into vast doctrines, but with a disquiet which gives rise to the most diverse and even the most opposed movements of thought.

What changed at the beginning of the 19th century was the perspective from which man appears to himself: in his Philosophy of History, there is nothing that is more antipathetic to Hegel than the distinction made by Rousseau between the state of nature and the social state, as if we could grasp an essence of man, immediate, absolute, to which morals would later be added; the human being can only be defined as loaded with history, and we will not reach humanity through an abstraction which strips it of all its acquired assets, but on the contrary through the very law of this acquisition which makes it little by little what it is. This trait of Hegelian thought was universal at this time: all knowledge is mediated; it only takes place by reflecting on the becoming that produced it. Such a view once again poses all the philosophical problems; for Maine de Biran, the study of the self will not be the observation of a ready-made reality, but the reproduction of the act by which it is done; more generally, we will study neither nature nor man, independently of their future; they are only real, substantial thanks to the sequence of states through which they have passed.