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The Nineteenth Century

After Kant the name of the subject was itself in question. Fichte titled a book of 1794 On the Concept of the Doctrine of Science, or of So-called Philosophy (Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie). Hegel set himself, in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), to help bring philosophy nearer the form of science, “dem Ziele, ihren Nahmen der Liebe zum Wissen ablegen zu können und wirkliches Wissen zu seyn”, to the goal where it can lay aside its name of love of knowing and be actual knowing.

For Hegel philosophy comprehends what is, and so its own age: “Das was ist zu begreifen, ist die Aufgabe der Philosophie, denn das was ist, ist die Vernunft … so ist auch die Philosophie ihre Zeit in Gedanken erfaßt”, to comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is is reason, and so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts (Philosophy of Right, Preface). It does not prescribe: “Philosophy cannot teach the state what it should be” (tr. Dyde), and “Um noch über das Belehren, wie die Welt sein soll, ein Wort zu sagen, so kommt dazu ohnehin die Philosophie immer zu spät”, to say one more word about teaching how the world ought to be, philosophy always comes too late for that; “die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug”, the owl of Minerva begins its flight only as dusk falls. What it gives is reconciliation: to know reason “als die Rose im Kreuze der Gegenwart”, as the rose in the cross of the present, is “die Versöhnung mit der Wirklichkeit, welche die Philosophie … gewährt”, the reconciliation with actuality that philosophy grants. He gave the method as dialectic: “Logical doctrine has three sides: [a] the Abstract side, or that of understanding; [b] the Dialectical, or that of negative reason; [c] the Speculative, or that of positive reason”, and in the dialectical stage “these finite characterisations or formulae supersede themselves, and pass into their opposites” (Encyclopaedia Logic §§79, 81, tr. Wallace). Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (1845) answered that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, and the point is to change it.

Auguste Comte used the old word in its old breadth: “j’emploie le mot philosophie dans l’acception que lui donnaient les anciens, et particulièrement Aristote, comme désignant le système général des conceptions humaines”, I use the word philosophy in the sense the ancients gave it, and Aristotle in particular, as the general system of human conceptions; “positive” names “cette manière spéciale de philosopher” that takes theories to have as their object “la coordination des faits observés”, the coordination of observed facts (Cours de philosophie positive, foreword, 1829). The mind, he held, “employs in its progress three methods of philosophizing … Hence arise three philosophies”, the theological, the metaphysical and the positive (tr. Martineau). The positive philosophy needs a new worker: “faire de l’étude des généralités scientifiques une grande spécialité de plus”, to make the study of scientific generalities one more great specialism, a new class of scholars who take up no particular branch of natural philosophy but “take the respective sciences as they are, determine the spirit of each, ascertain their relations and mutual connection, and reduce their respective principles to the smallest number of general principles” (tr. Martineau).

The natural philosophers took a name of their own. William Whewell, in an unsigned review of Mary Somerville in 1834 now attributed to him, found that science “loses all traces of unity”, and that the members of the British Association had “no general term”: “Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge”, and “some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist”. In 1840 he wrote in his own name: “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist” (The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences).

Wilhelm Windelband answered the question in the title of an essay, “Was ist Philosophie?” (Präludien, 1884): philosophy is “die kritische Wissenschaft von den allgemeingiltigen Werthen. Die Wissenschaft von den allgemeingiltigen Werthen: das bezeichnet die Gegenstände; die kritische Wissenschaft: das bezeichnet die Methode der Philosophie”, the critical science of universally valid values: the values name its objects, “critical” its method. In his Strasbourg rectorial address of 1894, History and Natural Science (Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft), he refused the usual split of the sciences into those of nature and those of mind, “ich halte sie in dieser Form nicht für glücklich”, I do not think it a happy one in this form, and put a split by method in its place: the sciences of the real are sciences of laws or sciences of events, “jene lehren, was immer ist, diese, was einmal war”, the first teach what always is, the second what once was, and their thinking is “in dem einen Falle nomothetisch, in dem andern idiographisch”, nomothetic in the one case, idiographic in the other. Philosophy has neither for its object: “ihr eigentliches Untersuchungsobjekt [sind] eben die Prinzipien selbst … Für die Philosophie gibt es streng genommen überhaupt keine Spezialuntersuchung”, its proper object of inquiry is the principles themselves; for philosophy there is, strictly speaking, no specialised inquiry at all.

Dilthey adopted a name for the other half of knowledge. For the half beside natural science “ist, merkwürdig genug, eine allgemein anerkannte Bezeichnung nicht vorhanden. Ich schließe mich an den Sprachgebrauch derjenigen Denker an, welche diese andere Hälfte des globus intellectualis als Geisteswissenschaften bezeichnen”, strangely enough, there is no generally recognised name; I follow the usage of those thinkers who call this other half of the globe of the intellect the human sciences, a usage familiar not least through the wide spread of John Stuart Mill’s Logic, and the least unsuitable of the names on offer (Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1883). The answers of Comte and the positivists, and of Mill and the empiricists, seemed to him “die geschichtliche Wirklichkeit zu verstümmeln, um sie den Begriffen und Methoden der Naturwissenschaften anzupassen”, to mutilate historical reality to fit it to the concepts and methods of the natural sciences.

Looking back from 1929, José Ortega y Gasset described what had happened to philosophy. For nearly a century Europe had suffered “el «terrorismo de los laboratorios»”, the terrorism of the laboratories; the philosopher “se avergonzó de no ser físico”, was ashamed of not being a physicist, reduced philosophy to a minimum, “poniéndola humildemente al servicio de la física”, putting it humbly at the service of physics, and decided “que filosofía era sólo teoría del conocimiento”, that philosophy was only theory of knowledge. “La filosofía había quedado reducida, o poco menos, a la teoría del conocimiento. Así se titulaban la mayor parte de los libros filosóficos publicados entre 1860 y 1920”: philosophy had been reduced, or nearly so, to theory of knowledge, the title of most philosophical books published between 1860 and 1920 (¿Qué es filosofía?, Lesson II).

How the history of philosophy came to begin with the Greeks, and how the word went abroad, is on The West reading the other traditions.