ABSTRACT
Yet the student of the history of ideas cannot let the matter rest there; especially if that student counts nothing human alien from him. For ‘philo sophy of history’ remains the name of a variety of enterprises to which
men have found themselves impelled; one can trace the presence of some thing inviting the use of the term in Paul and Augustine, in Bossuet, in Adam Smith and Burke, in Kant, in Hegel and Marx, in Acton; one could continue indefinitely. It is not that in these very different writers, the use of the term indicates some isolable common concern, as one way dis cern in an exactly identical symptom in a group of sufferers from the same disease. A group of children suffering from measles may have, at the same time, rashes of a more or less identical quality. Rather the kinship is more akin to what Aristotle in the last chapter of his Categories discerned to obtain between different forms of having. A man may have five shillings in his pocket, an unread copy of Russell’s Principles o f Mathematics on his shelves, expectations from his aun t; he may have a devoted wife, a son in a comprehensive school, an uncle serving a sentence in jail for fraud. What is here in common between the various forms of having? Are some forms more nuclear, nearer to the heart of the matter of having (as Aristotle believed substance to be nearest the heart of the matter of being) than others? Is there a frontier traceable between the literal and the meta phorical uses? The inquiry is tantalizing; but I mention it only by way of illustration. When we say that in a man’s thought we can discern some thing we call ‘a philosophy of history’, we do not mean to suggest that it always fulfils the same function, that he invokes its resources to make pre cisely the same move in some precisely comparable game of intellectual chess. It is even true, where a writer whose total oeuvre was as massive and as complex as Hegel’s, that the term indicates a number of very different concerns. Those who knowing only the Hegel of the Encyclo paedia, come to the young man, slowly achieving, out of a mass of discrete and discursive reflections, sometimes nearly existentialist in temper, the structure of his Phenomenology o f Spirit, are brought up sharp by the con trast between the tentativeness of his Jugendschriften and the self-confident architectonic construction of his later years. Yet it could be argued that for both the young and the mature Hegel, something called ‘philosophy of history’ lay near the heart of his perplexity. One can well ask how far the term indicates, in both periods, an identical enterprise.
