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).

Introduction

In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the humanities were continuously concerned with justifying their newly autonomous position with respect both to the natural sciences and to the social sciences. Institutionally, they tried to prove that they did indeed belong in a separate faculty, and philosophically, they struggled primarily with their Kantian heritage. As seen above, the latter's subject-object scheme made it difficult if not impossible to know man as a subject in the same way as the objects of the physical and living natural world. Although humanities scholars greatly respected the natural sciences, many of them increasingly felt that these disciplines were not able to grasp what is essential to man.

It is against this background that the *hermeneutic, or interpretative, humanities arose. Whereas the natural sciences try to observe and explain external phenomena, the modern humanities look at phenomena as the expression of inner meanings and values. The hermeneutic tradition, however, has a completely different view of meaning and interpretation than the logical empiricists discussed in chapter 2. Moreover, there was little if any consensus even within this tradition as to exactly how the natural sciences and human sciences differ and what they have in common. Another influential philosophical current of this period is neo-Kantianism, which phrases the distinction between the human sciences and the natural sciences as either involving different forms of concept formation or in terms of different symbol functions. The famous and controversial new science of psychoanalysis elaborates an uneasy compromise between interpretation and natural scientific observation. All of these approaches share a background in Kantian thought, which dominated nineteenth and early twentieth-century German philosophy and as such also informed various other disciplines.

Interpretation is one of the most common everyday human activities, but at the same time also one of the most enigmatic. We regularly ask ourselves ‘what something means’, ‘what somebody means by that’, and the like, not only of linguistic utterances but also of various other kinds of action.

Introduction

From the 1970s, attention in a number of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences has gradually shifted from institutions, systems, and structures and from languages and sign systems towards *practices, that is, towards everyday ways of doing things that are limited in time and space. Methodologically, this *practice turn amounted to a reaction to on the one hand structuralism and positivism, both of which were modelled on the natural sciences, and on the other hand hermeneutics and its foundations in the philosophy of consciousness. Thus, it amounted to a rejection of the idea that concrete cultural phenomena or practices such as speaking sentences or making music are either the more-or-less correct execution of an already given, independent system of rules or the expression of an inner mental state, image, or intention.

Philosophically, the practice turn builds on the linguistic turn of logical empiricism. Post-war analytical philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin primarily criticized both the logical empiricist belief that only descriptive or assertive language use was meaningful and the consciousness-philosophical assumption that linguistic behaviour should be explained in terms of mental states like intentions or beliefs. French representatives of practice theory such as Foucault and Bourdieu elaborated on these analytical philosophical ideas but paid more attention to the role of power in social action than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.

As a first approximation, we may say that most linguistic practices have the following properties. First, they are public or intersubjective in so far as they usually require several actors or players. Second, they are normative in so far as they can be executed correctly or incorrectly. And third, they often if not always involve various forms of power or authority. Moreover, practices are produced neither by structures standing outside of the subject nor by the conscious and explicit intentions of actors. Rather, we may think of them conversely as creating structures and as the context in which individual acts acquire form and meaning. Put in musical terms: social and cultural action may be seen not as the execution of a script or score, which is supposed to be given in advance, but rather as an improvisation or a jam session. This shift in attention leads to a number of important changes in research questions.

Introduction

One recently influential second line of radical criticism of the status and legitimation of the modern humanities can be found in the writings of so-called *postcolonial critics. Like ‘postmodernism,’ ‘postcolonialism’ is an ambivalent term. The word was initially used to indicate the political constellation in the world after the Second World War in which virtually all former colonies had achieved independence but in which various colonial and quasi-colonial relations continued to exist or to have their effects, like the use of English or French as an official language or the continuing economic, linguistic, or cultural dependence on the former colonial motherland. But postcolonialism also refers to a theoretical framework that systematically takes into account the fact of colonial domination and its enduring effects when studying political, social-economic, or cultural developments and relations in the contemporary world.

For the humanities, postcolonialism implies a very different perspective on familiar topics. First, it emphatically presents Western civilization as merely one among many classical traditions worldwide. As a result, it unmasks the *ethnocentrism hidden in both Renaissance humanism and the modern humanities as well as their implicit *universalism, which presents the particulars of classical and modern Western civilization as valid and valuable for all mankind. Postcolonial scholars argue that this attitude wrongly ignores, marginalizes, or dismisses other traditions as uncivilized or unimportant.

Second, and more radically, postcolonial theoreticians argue that the humanist ideas of Western civilization acquire a very different content and meaning in colonial settings. Some even argue that colonial domination and the concomitant racism are integral, if not essential, aspects of European humanism. Hence, postcolonial approaches offer not only a novel view of the canonical concepts, ideals, and works of European civilization but also a radical critique of various hidden assumptions in the humanities as they have developed in modern Europe.

Frantz Fanon

One of the pioneers of postcolonial criticism was Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). Born on the Caribbean island of Martinique which was at the time still a French colony, Fanon was educated in France as a medical doctor and psychiatrist.

Michel Foucault's Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Kuhn limited himself to the development of the natural sciences; he hesitated to use the concept of paradigm for the social sciences and the humanities. However, if one studies the different views concerning the various aspects of human life that have been formulated over the centuries, one may hit upon a phenomenon we have also encountered in Kuhn. Here, too, one can find the kind of discontinuous developments that Kuhn called ‘scientific revolutions’ whereby concepts, theories, and norms undergo deep and radical changes. Nor can one speak of a steady, linear accumulation of knowledge in the direction of, or a gradual approach towards, the ‘truth’. In other words, in the development of knowledge concerning man – that is, the broad field of the social and human sciences, and more specifically the humanities or Geisteswissenschaften – one could argue that discontinuities have occurred as well. Even more intriguingly, the very distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities, which we take for granted nowadays, appears to be of surprisingly recent origin.

It was the French philosopher Michel Foucault who, independently from Kuhn, called attention to the discontinuous development of the sciences of man. In Les mots et les choses (1966, translated as The Order of Things (1971)), Foucault discussed the historical development of knowledge concerning questions that since the nineteenth century have been the concern of economics, biology, and linguistics. The ‘things’ these modern disciplines concern themselves with can be bundled together as labour, life, and language, respectively. These notions, however, could not be expressed in the theories that had been formulated between roughly 1600 and 1800, when the focus was on the analysis of wealth, natural history, and general grammar, respectively. The ideas from this ‘classical’ period, in turn, could not be formulated in the terms that were available during the Renaissance. One may thus observe two radical ruptures. According to Foucault, these ruptures were not primarily the consequence of the discovery of novel objects or phenomena about which new hypotheses might be formulated. Rather, they occurred as mutations in what he calls the ‘deep structure’ of knowledge. Before 1800, he claimed, it was impossible to formulate hypotheses concerning labour, life, or language as distinct entities or objects of knowledge for the simple reason that there was no room for them in the available conceptual frames.

Introduction: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postmodernism

In the following three chapters, we will discuss a number of topics that have thus far remained largely implicit. Much humanities research makes substantial but often tacit assumptions about *modernity, about relations between men and women, and about the relation of Europe or the West to the rest of the world. When these assumptions are made explicit, they can also be subjected to a more systematic critique, as is done in a number of contemporary currents in the humanities.

The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment are widely seen as specifically modern and uniquely European achievements. Max Weber summarized these ideas in his thesis that, ‘as we like to believe’, Western *rationalism embodies a worldview and a number of forms of social action that, even though they have emerged in a restricted period in time and in a relatively small number of countries, have a universal application and significance. He sees this worldview and these forms of action as manifested in such things as the modern natural sciences, modern jurisprudence, bureaucracy, capitalism, and in the personality of the professional, who has learned to separate work-related and personal matters. He also sees Western classical music, characterized by systematic counterpoint as developed by Johann Sebastian Bach and later composers, as a specifically modern and uniquely Western form of rationalized music (cf. § 7.5). Furthermore, Weber and others also consider *secularization – that is, the disappearance of religious convictions from public and/or private life and the receding of the societal power of the Church – to be an equally logically and inevitable consequence of this ongoing rationalization in the Western world.

The idea of a specifically European or Western modernity is present in virtually all authors and currents discussed above. Hence, they may be called *modernist in so far as they implicitly or explicitly accept this idea, whatever their doubts and reservations. Despite their acknowledgement of the horrors of the twentieth century, they continue to cherish the thought that scientific, cultural, and societal progress is at least possible and that science and art play an important role in its realization. Many of them, moreover, are staunch *secularists who not only are convinced that there is a factual process of secularization but also normatively welcome this process.

Introduction

Feminist critiques of the universal validity claims of the sciences proceed from the simple fact that, over the centuries, scientific research has mostly been conducted by men. Even today, the majority of academic university staff and academy members are male. This holds in particular, but not exclusively, for the natural sciences and for the higher scientific functions.

Such facts are widely known. But are they also relevant for discussions in the philosophy of science? Do they affect the content of scientific knowledge or the ways in which the sciences are practised and taught? Feminist philosophers of science answer both questions in the affirmative. In doing so, they seem to be turning against not only widely held beliefs concerning science but also against common sense. At first sight, after all, it seems absurd to argue that, for example, the laws of gravity or the hermeneutic process of understanding are specifically masculine. Real scientific knowledge, one could retort, is universal, controlled, and free of ideological distortions concerning gender, race, or class, and to the extent that it is not, it is simply not good science. According to this line of defence, *sexism or *androcentrism may be a deplorable or objectionable trait of the practitioners of science but not of the content of scientific knowledge itself. Or, to speak in terms of classical empiricist philosophy of science, matters of sexism and the oppression of women may well form part of the context of discovery, but they are irrelevant for the context of justification.

Feminist philosophers of science arguing against this line of defence form part of the academic movement of women's studies, which was made possible in part by the second feminist wave of the 1960s and 1970s. The first feminist wave had been confined to demanding universal suffrage and other civil rights for women. In the 1960s, in part due to the improved access of women to higher education, these demands were supplemented with demands for equal rights in education and employment. Under the influence of feminist activism, many universities then established departments of women's studies. Initially, these departments were strongly politicized, but increasingly they became focused on more strictly academic research. In other words, the institutionalization of women's studies in universities and the gradual detachment from more informal and activist women's organizations also brought steady changes to the academic field.

The Scientific Revolution

The image of science that still holds sway in public debate is based on the classical natural sciences that arose in the seventeenth century during the so-called *scientific revolution. One is likely to encounter this image while reading about scientific research in newspapers or in high-school physics textbooks. Views that became influential later on, such as those of Popper or the Vienna Circle (see chapter 3), have only partly replaced it.

According to the classical image, scientific insights are formulated as *theories and are based on experience or facts. Such theories contain laws that specify relations between measurable quantities (in other words: *empirical regularities). Moreover, they have a *universal character: they state that the relations formulated apply to all cases within a specific domain of phenomena. A good example of this is Boyle's law, which is part of the theory of gases and can be found in any physics textbook. It states that for all gases (at a constant temperature), the pressure (p) and volume (V) of a given amount of gas are inversely proportional: p ・ V = constant.

According to the classical view of science, scientific theories are justified because – within the boundaries of precision one may expect – they agree with the facts. These facts have become known to us through systematic observations or *experiments. Such agreement is often specified in a chart or graph in which the values one expects on the basis of a theory are compared with one's findings. Whoever holds a well-founded theory can subsequently use this theory to deduce *predictions about new facts. For example, we can deduce from Boyle's law that when the volume of a given amount of gas decreases, its pressure will increase. When such predictions prove correct, the theory receives a new *confirmation. Especially when a theory expresses such relations in mathematical form, it is easy to formulate predictions. Hence, the classical view of science emphasizes the coupling of mathematical methods with experimental techniques or systematic observations. The insight that science should be pursued in this manner is attributed to the great seventeenth-century natural scientists such as Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and Robert Boyle (1627-1691).

Introduction

Positivism and structuralism are in many respects the direct opposite of the interpretative or hermeneutic approaches discussed in chapter 7, and they also reject the teleological philosophy of consciousness that characterized some of the dialectical approaches discussed in chapter 8. Instead, they proceed from the belief that the social and human sciences should follow the same approach as the natural sciences, and that conducting serious scientific research should hence be oriented towards observations that can be publicly checked or towards the formal features of the object being investigated. In this manner, they reject the idea that ‘subjective meanings’ deserve a special place in the humanities or social sciences. Scientists who believe that understanding is a useful tool are free to utilize it, on the condition that the hypotheses they have formed formed on the basis of understanding are tested in the manner that has proved its value in the natural sciences. For this reason, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was to call positivist and structuralist approaches *objectivist, as distinct from the *subjectivism of interpretative methods (cf. § 10.4).

As remarked above, hermeneutic scholars do not accept this restricted and purely heuristic role for understanding. They point out that the humanities and social sciences study a reality that is already interpreted. Moreover, they see nothing enigmatic or unreliable in interpretation, as it is an activity that all humans continuously engage in, if not a central feature of the human condition. Positivists and structuralists are not impressed by such claims. They argue that important developments in the sciences have been achieved by explicitly abstracting away from everyday interpretations of phenomena, as Galileo already emphasized. Hence, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) argued that scientifically controlled experience should be guiding for the social sciences rather than the concepts shaped outside of science and for needs entirely unscientific. Thus, scientists should free themselves from ‘those fallacious notions which hold sway over the mind of the ordinary person’. According to positivists, researchers in the humanities and social sciences enter an unknown world just as natural scientists do and must leave their everyday prejudices behind at the gates of science

From Empiricism to Pragmatism

Popper's views on the growth and demarcation of scientific knowledge are attractive if not inspiring. His idea of science as a practice in which people consciously expose their work to criticism and in which they strive for truth without ever pretending to actually possess it has become a cherished ideal if not the self-image for many scholars in the natural and social sciences as well as in the humanities. Even more than the classical view or the logical empiricist model, Popper's view has become a ‘standard view of science’.

Various objections can be raised against Popper's position, however, regarding both the philosophical and historical adequacy of his philosophy of science. The philosophical objections are based on what at first sight appears to be a rather esoteric doctrine that has come to be known as the *Duhem-Quine thesis. The most important criticism concerning the historical adequacy of Popper's views was formulated by the American historian and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996). As Kuhn's insights can be seen to some extent as an elaboration of the Duhem-Quine thesis, both lines of criticism in fact point to the same shortcomings.

The Duhem-Quine thesis has proved to be of monumental importance in intellectual history. If correct, it not only upsets Popper's philosophy of science but also has much broader philosophical implications. It undermines not only the distinction between metaphysical and empirical scientific statements but also the distinctions between theory and observation and between logic and experience. The thesis ultimately comes out in favour of a more *pragmatist position, which only accepts such distinctions to the extent that they make a practical difference in our activities (scientific or otherwise). Clearly, a substantial number of fundamental presuppositions of mainstream Western philosophy are at stake here.

For everyday scientific practice, these principled objections do not immediately have major repercussions. Theories with a wide empirical reach, a high degree of precision, and a simple structure remain preferable over theories lacking such qualities, and scientists who do not take criticism of their work seriously still risk placing themselves outside the scientific community. What is questioned in this critique of Popper's philosophy of science is the interpretation of the results of scientific work.

The Tasks of the Philosophy of the Humanities

The *humanities include disciplines as diverse as literary theory, history, art history, musicology, linguistics, film studies, religious studies, and philosophy. The German term for these disciplines, *Geisteswissenschaften, was coined in the nineteenth century. In the Anglo-Saxon world, many of these disciplines used to be referred to as moral sciences; nowadays, alongside the term humanities, terms like humane sciences and the broader liberal arts are also used. In France, they belong to what is generically known as the sciences humaines. In many universities, the disciplines gathered together under these labels are united organizationally within a single university section or *faculty.

What, if anything, do these different disciplines have in common? Do they share some unity at the level of content; do they have a common core? Do they have a particular object or a particular method in common? Are they fruits from the same tree? At first sight, the differences seem to predominate. Academics working in the humanities conduct their work in a wide variety of settings such as university institutes, archives, museums, libraries, excavation sites, at home, and, increasingly, also on the internet and on social media. The topics they occupy themselves with diverge just as widely, as do the sources they refer to and the tools they employ. For many, it suffices to have a computer with a word processor, an internet browser, and perhaps a PowerPoint application at hand, and to have access to a good library, archives, or museum collections. Practitioners of other disciplines, however, will also need access to laboratories or to specialized software for their research.

Researchers in the various humanities disciplines often maintain more professional contacts with colleagues in their own discipline living abroad than with the members of their own faculty working in other fields. They publish their work in separate journals, and their books appear with different publishers. Even the languages in which their work is published may differ: whereas in some disciplines, only publications in English will be taken seriously, other disciplines do not have this tacit or explicit demand. Likewise, funding agencies and professional organizations may differ widely across disciplines.

Philosophy of science textbooks tend to restrict their attention to the natural sciences, which allegedly represent what ‘real science’ is. In some other cases, the epistemological and methodological problems of the social sciences are dealt with as well. Textbooks that cater to the needs of students in the humanities, however, are few and far between. The present book aims to fill this lacuna. It provides humanities students with the necessary means to reflect on the character of their field of study as well as on the place of the humanities in the world of science at large and their position in contemporary society and culture.

This book neither propagates a particular view on, or approach to, the humanities nor gives advice about how to conduct research. Rather, it discusses the development of the Western humanities and the diverging views that exist with regard to their tasks, character, and methods. These views – and with them the very distinction between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities – have taken different shapes in the course of history. By not only discussing general epistemological and discipline-specific methodological questions but also paying ample attention to the historical developments that have contributed to the development of the humanities, this book hopes to be of interest to scholars in the humanities (both current and future) as well as readers primarily interested in the natural and social sciences.

The book consists of four parts. In Part One, we discuss humanism, the scientific revolution, and a number of standard views on science, including logical empiricism and critical rationalism. Several epistemological notions that are relevant for understanding the humanities are introduced, including Kant's version of the subject-object scheme, the implications of the Duhem-Quine thesis, and the rejection of the so-called myth of the given. Finally, we discuss the historicization of the philosophical view of the sciences that occurred in the 1960s.

In Part Two, we discuss the emergence of the modern humanities.