Hegel's Philosophical History

As part of the ‘humanities revolution’, in the nineteenth century a professionalized academic historiography developed, , primarily in German-speaking areas. In this period a self-image of historical research emerged that has prevailed to this very day: it sees historiography as a discipline in which practitioners try to recover ‘hard historical facts’ on the basis of archival research while steering clear of interpretations, value judgments, figments of one's own imagination, and vague or elusive and hence unscientific statements. Usually labelled *positivist, this view of historiography has a complex history of its own, however, and its claim to scientific status is less self-evidently valid than the appeal to hard facts suggests. In this chapter, we will discuss Hegel's influential philosophical view of history; the rise of philology, or historicizing textual criticism, as a method or technique of the humanities at large; and the development of Leopold von Ranke's famous views as well as Nietzsche's radical critique concerning the factuality and scientific status of the historical sciences. Finally, we shall examine the emergence of sociology as a rival to both literature and the humanities.

Nineteenth-century academic historiography maintains an ambivalent relation to Hegel. On the one hand, Hegel formulated a philosophy of history based on purely speculative arguments, which were rejected by those professional academic historians who based their scholarly claims on archival research and empirical facts. On the other hand, it was primarily Hegel who, more than any other, developed some of the essential notions adopted by the modern humanities such as the notion of Volksgeist, thinking in developmental terms, the distinction between history and prehistory, and the distinction between Europe and those parts and periods of the world seen as lacking a proper history.

As discussed in chapter 5, Hegel's first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), proceeds from a critique of some central Kantian notions. Most importantly, Hegel historicized the transcendental subject, which for Kant was abstract and formal – without reducing the transcendental subject to a merely contingent or accidental notion however.

Hegel rejected Kant's dualism of the contingent and the necessary and between the receptivity of perception and the spontaneity of understanding (Verstand) − that is, between intuitions and concepts (cf. § 2.2, 4.1c).