This metaparadigm will see the onset of the concept of “progress” in the inquiry and findings of all the arts and sciences. Moreover, it will stress the individual challenge and leadership in this endeavor in the initial three phases. The word “progress” did exist since the Early Enlightenment, but mostly in the understanding of advancement, but not in the concept of Progress as the rationale for human problem-solving that became the hallmark of the Modernist era. Young is the first who wrote on this subject extensively.

Additional epigraphs of the age:

Lessing has captured in this observation the spirit of the Late Enlightenment, as well as the decades that follow in this Second Modern metaparadigm. Humankind is now selfaware, and learning more about its own complexity.

Philosophy of History

Karl Marx (1818– 1883)

In 1857, Marx, always a forerunner of sociological perspectives, addressed his theory of historical materialism from a highly individual perspective. He writes:

Voltaire formulates the most significant characteristics of the first Modern metaparadigm in his reflections on Locke and “free will.” The four phases of this metaparadigm will introduce heightened methods of self-analysis, methods for the analysis of human nature and the natural world, and separate this gain of human understanding and doing from the intervention of the Divine. This is a new epoch in human self-development. From its onset, we will see the view of a sovereign human being, whose very being is to be autonomous in his or her choices, indeed finding, as Hobbes will, that this “free will” is the major purpose of the age, an age that will reconstruct society's vision of authority, law, learning and moral action. As Martin Heidegger was to say in a later Modern metaparadigm, referring to great epochs such as that of ancient Greek thought and its ways of conceiving the human person and his community “But what is great can only begin great. Its beginning is in fact the greatest beginning of all.” He also saw such greatness as a potential within the beginnings of this epoch that begins in the mid-seventeenth century.

Historiography

Hayden White (1928– 2018)

Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe creates a conceptual overview of four hierarchies of forms that have always been used in modern thought to structure the narrative of historical events. Each of the four hierarchies will consist of a foundational level of grammatical style, a narrative form of the emplotment of events furthered by the grammatical style, a well-known dramatic form reflectively honed that gives a cultural significance to the emplotments, and, an ideological implication, given the time of its political-social expression. He describes these forms in how they conjoin events with a thoroughness that enables a logical calculus of the differing semantics typical of four of the forms, that being their foundational sub-structure in what he calls their “deep structure,” “pre-critical,” or “pre-figural” expression. By that he means the non-conscious conscious level of the structure of thought discerned a century earlier by Brentano, Freud, Husserl and others who contributed to initial phases of deepening the functioning of human consciousness beyond the reflective level. All these four hierarchies in each of their four forms generate by their syntax and semantics at this deeper level of thought their spontaneous expression in the artifacts of writing or oral communication.

Having argued in his 1969 paper on Croce and Vico of the complex amalgam of normative and challenging structural logics of history that one must know, White now deepens that insight with a “stylistic analysis” that in some ways is superior to even that of Aristotle, found in his Rhetoric, and to some degree in his Poetics. White's 1973 text will offer a systematic guide into historical analysis of any age:

The conflicts between concepts in the third phase of the first Modern metaparadigm were between the traditional manner of understanding human existence and the new positions insofar as final cause, formal cause, material cause and efficient cause. The prominence of the Divine still resisted the separation of powers, as it were, between the human and the Divine. The stations of aristocracy, propertied commoner and commoner persisted. Every side of the debates sought to distinguish their thinking with helpmeets from tradition, yet also taking, when necessary, insights of the new modernism. Nonetheless, this time was characterized in all the disciplines as the “conflict between the ancients and the moderns.” Writing on this of England in this period, Joseph M. Levine states in a book that takes up this controversy, which was in every nation of Europe in this time:

The leading minds who addressed this controversy in a way that created new modern insights in historical thought, literature and science knew the ancient, but challenged many of their precepts with their own new insights, drawn from empirical study. Below, an introduction to the new ideas:

The real interest (of a nation) may be subdivided into a perpetual and a temporary. The former depends chiefly on the Situation and Constitution of the country, and the natural Inclinations of the people; the latter on the Condition, Strength and Weakness of the neighbouring nations; for as those vary, the Interest must also vary. Whence it often happens, that whereas we are, for our own Security sometimes oblig’d to assist a neighbouring Nation, which is likely to be oppress’d by a more potent Enemy. We are at another time for’cd to oppose the Designs of those we before assisted, when we find they have recover’d themselves to that degree, as that they may prove Formidable and Troublesome to us.

But seeing this Interest is so manifest to those who are vers’d in the State-Affairs, that they can't be ignorant of it, one might ask, How it often times happens that great Errors are committed in this kind against the Interest of the State. To this may be answer’d that those who have the Supreme Administration of Affairs are oftentimes not sufficiently instructed concerning the Interest both of their own State, as also that of their Neighbours. And yet being fond of their own Sentiments, will not follow the Advice of understanding and faithful Ministers. Sometimes they are misguided by their Passions, or by Time-serving Ministers and Favourites. But where the Administration of government is committed to the Care of Ministers of State, it may happen that these were not capable of discerning it, or else are led away by a private Interest which is opposite to that of the State. Or, they may be divided into Factions, being more concern’d to ruin their Rivals than to follow the Dictates of Reason. Therefore some of the most exquisite parts of Modern History consists in that one knows the Capacity, Inclinations, Caprices, Private Interests, manner of proceeding, and of (those responsible for policy), since upon this depends, in a great measure, the good and ill management of a State. For it frequently happens that a State, which in itself is consider’d is but weak is made to become very considerable boy the good Conduct and Valour of its Governours. Whereas, a powerful State (can be made weak) by the ill management of those at the Helm, oftentimes suffering considerably.

The analytic revelation is a revolutionary force. With it a blithe skepticism has come into the world, a mistrust that unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our own souls. Once roused and on the alert, it cannot be put to sleep again. It infiltrates life, undermines its raw naiveté, takes from it the strain of its own ignorance, de-emotionalizes it, as it were, inculcates the taste for understatement, as the English call it—for the deflated rather than the inflated words, for the cult which exerts its influence by moderation, by modesty. Modesty—what a beautiful word! In the German (Bescheidenheit) it originally had to do with knowing and only later got its present meaning; while the Latin word from which the English comes means a way of doing—in short, both together give us almost the sense of the French savoir faire—to know how to do. May we hope that this may be the fundamental temper of that more blithely objective and peaceful world which the science of the unconscious may be called to usher in?

Its mingling of the pioneer with the physicianly spirit justifies such a hope. Freud once called his theory of dream “a bit of scientific new-found land won from superstition and mysticism.” The word “won” expresses the colonizing spirit and significance of his work. “Where id was, shall be ego,” he epigrammatically says. And he calls analysis a cultural labor comparable to the draining of the Zuider Zee. Almost in the end of the traits of venerable man merge into the lineaments of the grey-haired Faust whose spirit urges him:

The four evolving metaparadigms of Modernism have been shown in the four phases that recur in a spiral development from metaparadigm to metaparadigm, beginning about 1648 and continuing into the present. The rationale of the four phases of each metaparadigm is a common-sense finding by anyone who considers the stages of problem-solving in any endeavor. Since the evolutionary findings of Charles Darwin, in particular, the issue of how a species poses a problem, develops methods to address it, and how pragmatic attempts of instituting those methods, have been clear in any discipline. The normalization of methods that are successful are usually not marked by a discard of past discoveries, rather quite often either augment them, enable a more discerning comprehension of their possibilities within the present, or provide a significant corollary path of inquiry. The idea of individuation—the self-actualization of a person as they mature within an inherent set of ideas and capabilities, a scholastic discovery of the thirteen century by St. Thomas Aquinas, has been expanded in its dynamics in the thought of Leibniz, who added grammatical verbal evidence. Then, the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher, a century later that formalized verbal grammatical evidence for individuation into the field of stylistics. Then, Wilhelm Dilthey and Edmund Husserl, at the beginning of the twentieth century, added the complex logic of an individual's manner of thought to the earlier stylistic expression. This taking of the problematic century after century is what I have referred to throughout this text as a “spiral” development of the same conceptual problem seen more finely, and its solution more finely developed.

Problem solving is the root of why distinct temporal periods are required in an individual's inquiry, and well as a collective group who share a discipline. As you the reader may reflect upon your own interests and their gradual development of breadth and depth, so it is how decades are often required simply to fashion the clarity of the problem through definition, and begin to articulate the ideation that may address what is viewed in a way that might solve it. You begin with certain principles, defining with clarity, often seeing how these principles have justified past approaches, but are capable of being applied in new ways. Then, developing a systematic approach with these principles, one can see system-building even in English and American pragmatism.

Philosophy of History

Hayden White (1928– 2018)

I will track White in this first phase, as well as the second and third phases of this present metaparadigm. He is an excellent example of how thought shifts with the demands of each phase. In one of White's first publications, in the mid-1960s, he writes an essay “What is Living and What is Dead in Croce's Criticism of Vico.” The essay becomes part of a book White co-edited with Giorgio Tagliacozzo, a product of an earlier International Symposium on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century historian, Giambattista Vico.

White begins his essay with an interesting juxtaposition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century historian, Benedetto Croce (1866– 1952) with the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century historian Giambattista Vico (1668– 1744). To make this the basis of his essay, White had to consider the final and formal cause of both Vico's methodology and the final and formal cause of Croce's methodology for their respective times of history. That meant, to carefully comprehend the manner of historiographical agency in Croce, and, correspondingly, not only how Vico wrote historical theory, but how he understood the sources of previous centuries that he considered. This is the conduct of “metahistory” by White, as it is for Croce, and, as we will see for Vico, who could be called the first metahistorian of Modernism.

One of Croce's main efforts was to show “what is living and what is dead” in prior philosophical systems, including among others that of Vico (ibid., 1969, 379). The care in discerning what is still fecund in a thinker from a past century is an ideational skill that demands a command of the ideation of one's present. Again, a “metahistorical” set of judgments. Yet, as we continue, we will see the arbitrariness of such judgments, and, how Hayden White addresses the issue of arbitrariness. White aptly focuses upon Croce's distinction between a “theory of history,” and a “philosophy of history,” as the seminal problems of both Croce and any other who would claim to be a “metahistorian”:

Philosophy of History

Hayden White (1928– 2018)

White, writing in the mid-1980s, addresses specific topics in his systematic, hierarchical architectonic of historical thought. Essays that take up certain topics, such as that of individual historians, tangential to his work, or the problem of temporality in narrativity, narrativity as a story form,, enable him to probe deeply into how past and present issues were formulated, and in many instances seen as seminal to his present thought. Looking at one essay, published in 1987 by White, we can see how the third phase of conflict through material argument (evidence) and its implications are developed. In “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” his views on narrative and temporality are presented, most deeply and clearly. White argues that the “form” of the narrative is always a “story.” Herodotus, of course, used his Greek term historia to mean both inquiry into the historical facts and a narrative “story” of what occurred. In this way, White's understanding, with the added dimension of how temporality is effected and how it affects thought, is that of Herodotus. The German language also has this bipolar meaning in the term “Geschichte,” which is both “history” and “story.”

White explains this conjunction of “story” and a chronology of factual occurrence beginning with a quote from Paul Ricoeur:

These epigraphs introduce the transitional shift from the fourth phasal Early Modern principles of knowing (c.1620– 1648) outlined in the Introduction to what becomes the first phasal, First Modern metaparadigm principles of knowing (c.1648– 1672):

Fourth phase (c. 1620– 1648) of the Early Modern Metaparadigm Principles of Knowing

• (1) the collective expression of persons, places, and things, that is, having the totality formed by them in common by dint of shared characteristics

• (2) determinism in the laws of function in intelligent beings and in things without mind or will;

• (3) a conception of duration of states-of-affairs;

• (4) matter rather than mind is the chief content of judgment.