HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF. — It is the understanding of the course of human events in the overall development of civilization.
OUTLINE:
I. General conception
II. Historical development: A) Classical antiquity. B) The patristic-medieval Christian conception. C) The modern conception. D) Historicism. — III. Evaluation.I. GENERAL CONCEPTION. — Whereas history properly so called investigates the connections between facts in order to express their concrete configuration within the spatial-temporal coordinates that contain them, the philosophy of history seeks to grasp the “meaning” of these facts with regard to an ultimate understanding of man’s being and destiny. In relation to pure philosophy, which considers man’s being in its universal structure and content, the philosophy of history considers the articulation and complication of his temporal becoming, or rather the meaning of the multiplicity of civilizations and of the oppositions manifested in the religious, economic, political, and social struggles of which history properly consists. In this sense, the philosophy of history is called upon to resolve the “tension,” or better, to clarify a complex of tensions in which man’s being presents itself in its particularity as a “historical being,” as homo faber and animal sociale.
First of all, a) the tension between “freedom and necessity”: for although, on the one hand, every act must be recognized as free and therefore self-contained, in reality it enters into the continuity of the development of the whole when it rises above the atomism of the singularity of individual arbitrariness. Thus the same individual fact may rise (e.g., the conquest of Asia by Alexander the Great for the ancient age, the Crusades for the Middle Ages, the French Revolution for the modern age...) to universal significance. Again, b) there is the tension between “contingency and inevitability”: insofar as the individual act, in its precise individuality, is immersed in the complex of its conditions, whose contingency or present indifference is removed solely by the decision of freedom, which nevertheless preserves its possibilities intact; and, on the other hand, the act itself reveals itself as the inevitable conclusion of a process and an epoch and at the same time as the point of departure for a new direction of history itself, so that contingency a parte ante seems to have become inevitability a parte post. Then, c) the tension between “individual and society”; insofar as every act is always the work of “someone” who places himself at the head of the movement of history so as to lead others along or impose upon them a (purported) principle of universal salvation, whereby he himself inscribes himself within society and precisely finds others within II. Moreover, d) the tension between “religion and politics”: insofar as both assume the task and claim the right to interpret and actualize man’s being in its totality, but in opposite directions, one toward transcendence and the other toward immanence. Finally, e), as a consequence of the preceding tensions, the tension between “time and eternity,” depending on whether history is envisaged as a ribbon unfolding infinitely through the succession of temporal dimensions, or whether time itself is considered to be “contained” in eternity and therefore referred and subordinated to eternity, where God’s judgment concerning man is fulfilled. Ultimately, then, the problem of history constitutes the testing ground for every interpretation of man’s being, considered both from within his original possibilities and from without, through his actions and their consequences with regard to what, from age to age, has concretely been the “figure of the world.”
But, with regard to the “value judgment” concerning the history of humanity, the central problem — indeed the sole and essential one once the principle of human solidarity or “sympathy” is accepted, whereby each person experiences the adversities of others as his own — evil (v.), its appearance and growing complication in history, whose course often assumes the reality of a catastrophe. Man’s entry into history presents itself in relation to evil, which indicates the crisis and fall of his freedom: the understanding of history seeks to be the “recovery” of that freedom, in order to hold back the evil by which it has been invaded and to regain the good that it has lost or that is denied to II. Since time, the passage of time, does not resolve but aggravates the problem of evil, reference to eternity on the part of history is essential for defining the precise meaning of the philosophy of history.
II. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT. — A) Classical antiquity. — Properly speaking, a philosophy of history is absent from classical thought, nor could one arise within it, for at least two reasons: first, because it lacks the notion of the perfect equality of all human beings; and second, because the time to which becoming is subject has a cosmic structure in Greek thought. For the first reason, classical civilization was chiefly concerned with the history of that particular privileged human nucleus constituted by the collective body of Greece and Rome, leaving the “barbarians” outside history and relegating the origins of humanity to the sphere of myth; for the second reason, in its very understanding of its own history, classical civilization had to sacrifice the freedom of individuals to the inevitability of the cosmic event. Indeed, classical philosophy placed the becoming of human freedom within the circle, or “wheel,” of cosmic becoming; Greek philosophy not only divided time solely according to the periodic course of the stars, but also conceived the fate of human civilizations as unfolding infinitely according to a “cyclical alternation” of periods of civilization and barbarism, which found its formula in the theory or myth of the “eternal return,” taken up at the conclusion of modern thought by F. Nietzsche. This myth is already present in pre-Socratic speculations. Anaximander teaches that all things arise and return to the ἄτειρον (frg. B 1; Diels, I, 89, 11 ff.); Empedocles refers the outcome of events to the conflict and alternating supremacy of creations and destructions brought about by love (φιλία) and hatred or strife (κότος, νείκος), according to two cosmic periods or processes, each comprising two stages: the world of friendship and the sphere during the period of love, the world of strife and the dissolution of the elements during the period of hatred; of these two worlds, the present is the world of strife (cf. esp. frg. B 17; Diels I, 315, 16 ff. V. E. Bignone, Empedocle, Turin 1916, p. 548 ff. The discussion of the “double cycle” in K. Reinhardt, Parmenides u. die Geschichte der griech. Philosophie, Bonn 1916, p. 53 ff.). The Pythagorean theories of the “Great Year” and the very doctrine of metempsychosis must be traced back to the same meaning: in a more precise sense, it seems that the essential core of the theory of the “eternal return” belongs to “primitive Pythagoreanism,” according to a testimony of Dicaearchus (cf. Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae, c. 19; ed. Nauck, Leipzig 1886, p. 26. Cf. B. L. van der Waerden, Das Grosse Jahr u. die ewige Wiederkehr, in Hermes, 80 [1952], pp. 129–55). In the Statesman, Plato describes the universe as subject to the following vicissitudes: a) God guides the universe in its circular course, but once the “periods of time” allotted to it have been completed, it resumes its movement in the opposite direction (Polit., 269 c. d). b) This change of direction is accompanied by gigantic cataclysms affecting both human beings and animals (270 C). c) But this catastrophe is followed by a complete renewal of all humanity, the old people who...
“will become young again and the young children,” and those who had already died, conversely, are reconstituted and return to life, following the inverse cycle of generation”; these are the “earth-born” (γεγενεῖς), whose memory has been preserved in the myth of Cronus (271 c-d. Cf. also: Crizia, 109 d; Leggi, 667 ff.). Timeo, 22 a). Aristotle limits himself to affirming the alternation of cycles of civilization according to a process of ascent and decline, so that “the arts and philosophy itself were invented by the human mind several times and lost several times,” either because of wars that prevent study, or because of floods, or other calamities, as s. Thomas comments (Metaph., XII, 8, 1074 b 10 and Comm. by s. Thomas, ed. Cathala, Turin 1915, no. 2597. V. also: De Coelo, I, 3, 270 b 16; Meteor., I, 3, 339 b 19; De anim. motu, 3, 699 a 27; Polit., I, 10, 1329 b 35). The Stoics gave the doctrine of the “cosmic cycles” greater consistency because reality is no longer founded on the universal “form,” but on the individual “event” (Diano), as the outcome of the physical process, either by insisting on eternal repetition (as, for example, Chrysippus: cf. frg. 623-27 in Stoic. Vet. Frog., ed. H. von Arnim, II, Leipzig 1903, pp. 186 ff.), or on the cataclysm or universal conflagration (ἐντιφύσις), through which the cosmic cycles are renewed (as in Zeno: cf. frg. 98 and 109; cited ed., I, pp. 32 ff.). Fire, considered at once as the generative and dissolving principle (εἰς πῦρ οἶον εἰς σπέρμα: frg. 596; cited ed., II, 184), is not the ἀπειρον of Anaximander (cf. frg. 610; cited ed., II, 186), but the “artificer fire” of Heraclitus (cf. Simplicius, In De Coelo, ed. I, J. Heiberg, Berlin 1893, pp. 294, 4, 307, 15). In the last phase of Greek philosophy, the motives of the “eternal return” and the “end of the world” became dominant; the “eternal renewal” of the world (παλγγενασία of Chrysippus: frg. 627; Stoic. Vet. Fr., II, 191, 1), the “eternal repetition” of events, and the doctrine or myth of “restitution” (ἀποκατάστασις) are the dominant elements of Hellenistic culture in the last centuries before Christ and the first centuries after him. There is still no awareness of the irreversibility of time and therefore no properly true succession of present, past, and future; rather, everything “remains in place” (Eliade), because everything can return to the present, and thus everything comes to a halt, is reduced to the present, and myth, as a prehistory, takes the place of history’s becoming.
Therefore, in the classical age, the problem of the immortality (v.) of the individual, that is, of “each” individual as an authentic person, and hence the possibility of an ontological “recovery” of suffering and evil through the suprastrict judgment rendered by God, is dissolved by the very vicissitudes of peoples, which are continually subject to the irreparable erosions of time that cause them to sink into oblivion. “Fortune” (v.) and “chance” (v.)—that is, the absence of every structure, both in the positive and in the negative aspects of existence—divide the vicissitudes of history, and no one any longer has the right either to hope or to grieve (the pagans are, for s. Paul, “οἱ μὴ ἔχοντες ἐλπίδα”: I Thess. 4, 13). The gods too must bow to the inevitability of fate: Enca, upon his arrival in Italy after the fall of Troy, is described by the Stoic Virgil: “Ilium in Italiam portans victosque penates” (Eneide, I, 72. Cf. s. Augustine’s commentary in De Cio. Dei, I, 3, and s. Thomas’s profound compassion: “In quo satis apparet quantam angustiam patiebantur hinc inde eorum praeclara ingenia, a quibus angustia liberabimur si ponamus... hominem ad veram felicitatem post hanc vitam pervenire posse, anima hominis immortali existente”: C. Gent., III, 48 concl.). In antiquity, man is too distant from God and too bound to the chain of cosmic “events” to have a history of his own.
B) The Christian patristic-medieval conception. — Only in revealed religion (Judaeo-Christian) does history present itself as actual development or progress, insofar as it is conceived as a “history of salvation” (Heiltgeschichte). The term comes from I. Cr. K. V. Hoffmann, of the Erlangen school, but the doctrine derives from s. Irenaeus, who, more than anyone else, clarified, in the struggle against Gnostic dualism, the opposition between the Greek and biblical conceptions of time: cf. H.-Ch. Puech, Temps, histoire et mythe dans le christianisme des premiers siècles, in Proceedings of the VII Congress for the History of Religion, Amsterdam 1951, p. 33 ff.). The foundations or principal moments are: 1. Universal crea-
universal creation by God, which eliminates every dualism and at the same time affirms both God’s absolute dominion over all things (including matter) and the positive value belonging to every creature within its own sphere: man possesses a special dignity because he was created “in the image of God” and destined to live with Him. 2. The fall of man, who did not overcome the trial to which he was subjected by God, frustrating the original divine plan through the abuse of his freedom and thus remaining prey to perdito uncuali, that is, to the play of personal and collective passions which unleash strife and wars (the privative and not constitutive character of evil, since it is the effect and punishment of sin). 3. Promise of salvation made by God to man through the sending of a Saviour or Messiah, who is in fact the eternal Word or Son of God himself: this promise is borne within the human race by the “chosen people,” or Israel, and sustained through prophecy until the coming of the Messiah. 4. The fulfilment of the messianic promise: Jesus Christ presents himself as the Messiah announced by the Prophets, with the “authority” (ἐξοσία) of Him who is sent by God (“Ego autem dico vobis!”), and proves by miracles and especially by his Resurrection that he is the Son of God who inaugurates in history the universal Kingdom of God. 5. The realization of the Kingdom of God in time, which is the life of the Church in the presence and guidance of legitimate Authority, in the invisible life of Grace, and in the testimony of the Holy Spirit unto eternal life (Mt. 16, 18; 28, 18; Rom. 8, 16). 6. The fulfilment of the Kingdom of God with the final judgment at the end of the world, when Christ, Son of God and Saviour of the World, will judge history, which will thus come to an end, and will establish the definitive Kingdom of God for all ages (I Cor. 15, 28). The originality of the revealed conception of history lies in man’s liberation from the dominion of cosmic forces and from sin, so that he may freedom (v.) and dispose of his own destiny through the intervention of divine Providence (v.), which aids fallen human freedom. History therefore has an essentially soteriological and eschatological character; the modern concept of history is consequently a product of biblical “prophetism,” which gives prominence to the past through the future, which in turn embraces and grounds the present, creating—precisely through the future to come—the true concept of “progress” in history (cf. H. Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, Leipzig 1919, p. 307 ff.). The succession of human events thus assumes an original physiognomy: only within, and in reference to, revealed religion can one truly speak of history as “universal history” (Weltgeschichte), embracing the development of the whole human race according to a plan of temporal structure, as Goethe recognized when he wrote that “the sole theme, the proper and deepest one, of world history and of humanity, to which all others remain subordinate, is the conflict between faith and unbelief” (West-östliche Disson. Israel in der Wüste, ed. Cotta, IX, Stuttgart 1868, p. 194). The only history, then, that is relevant to man is “sacred history,” which claims for itself the definitive fulfilment and salvation of man’s being: Christianity, insofar as it presents itself as the sole legitimate heir of the divine promises made to Israel, has removed the national and racial barriers of Judaism and embraces the history of all humanity throughout the ages, the fulcrum of which is therefore represented by the Person and work of Christ the Saviour, as the Son of God made Man (“Durch Jesus Christus wird erst die Geschichte als Weltgeschichte bestimmt”: E. Brunner, Offenbarung u. Vernunft, Zurich 1941, p. 400).
From this it may be understood that only in Christianity is time structured in the “development” of its dimensions of present, past, and future: a) first of all, the present. Whereas in the classical conception it is submerged by the “necessity” (ἀνάγνη) of fate and dispersed by the elusiveness of “chance” (ἐνμαρμένη), in the revealed conception the present constitutes the point of consistency of history, insofar as occurrence, or event, is always a synthesis of time and eternity, that is, the point of their “encounter.” It is this absolute significance of the present, which in turn derives from the fulfilment of salvation posited in a future as a certain and infallible point of arrival, that
confers meaning and value upon the past precisely in view of the use made of the present and of the judgment to come: with Christianity there falls away not only the dispersion of history, owing to the “eternal return” that plunges history into the past, but also its limitation within Jewish particularism, which wholly “stretches” it toward the future. In fact, Christianity’s first proclamation is that “the opportune time has been fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come” (πεπλήρωσαι ὁ καιρός καὶ ἤγγιμεν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ: Mc. 1, 15). The “opportune time” (καιρός: cf. G. Delling, s. V. in G. Kittel, Theolog. Wörterb. z. N. T., III, Stuttgart 1950, p. 456 ff.) constitutes the meeting-point of eternity with time, because God’s interventions in history (messianism, redemption, judgment) occur in a given present defined by precise spatio-temporal coordinates (Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem in the time of Augustus and suffered in Jerusalem in the time of Tiberius under Pontius Pilate...); it also constitutes the encounter of time with eternity, because man must turn to God through an act of inward “conversion” (μετανοεῖτε: Mc. 1, 15), which urgently must take place in a present and no longer be deferred. Therefore absolute Gnostic and Modernist eschatologism nullifies the structure of history. b) The past, then, is the preparatory time of salvation and at the same time its guarantee, insofar as it preserves the promises, attests to their progressive fulfilment by God, and to man’s response through acceptance of faith in Christ the Messiah. c) Finally, the future, which, guaranteed by the prophetic structure of history, saves both past and present and thus constitutes the final καιρός that will give humanity its definitive order (Apoc. 1, 3; 22, 10; ὁ καιρὸς ἐγγύς ἐστιν. Cf. also: Mc. 13, 33; Lc. 21, 8; I Cor. 4, 5; I Pt. 5, 6).
Christianity therefore claims for itself the sole valid interpretation of history, because it is the only religion that promises and guarantees definitive liberation from evil, thereby escaping the process of “disintegration” inherent in theories of the heavens: “The Kingdom of God, of which Christ is King, is immeasurable in comparison with any other kingdom... Insofar as this Civitas Dei enters the dimension of time, it is not like a dream of the future, but like a spiritual reality permeating the present” (Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridged by D. C. Sommervell, Italian trans., Turin 1950, p. 677). Thanks to these characteristics of human universality and temporal fullness, Christianity, precisely as “Sacred History,” offers the only universally valid opening for a perspective on the history of humanity, whose epochs are in fact now designated and dated in relation to the expectation and fulfilment of salvation, that is, before and after the coming of Christ. Finally, since the Kingdom of God on earth founded by Christ coincides with the visible Church, the history of the Church occupies the centre of every Christian explanation of history (“Die Wirklichkeit der Kirche gehört in den Mittelpunkt aller christlichen Geschichtsdeutung”: P. Althaus, Die letzten Dinge, Gütersloh 1926, p. 121). Therefore the “theology of history” is the only elucidation of man’s temporal existence, both as an individual and as the entire human race, that draws certainty of its truth from divine Revelation” (cf. H. Rahner, La théologie catholique et l'histoire, in Dieu vivant, 10 [1948], p. 98).
Patristic theology of history defended these principles against the attacks of heresy originating both in Judaism and in paganism. Some Fathers of the first centuries (cf. Didaché, 16, 4; Ep. Barn., 15; Giustino, Dial., 80, 81; Ireneo, Adv. Haer., V, 25 sgg.; Ippolito, De Christo et Antichristo; Lattanzio, Div. Inst., VII, 17 sgg.; Tertulliano, Adv. Marc., III, 24), taking literally an expression from the Apocalypse (20, 2), believed that the second coming of Christ was imminent, and that He would then reign for “a thousand years” (Chiliasmo: V. MILLENARISMO) on earth with the elect. Soon, however, the conviction gained ground that the end of the world remains hidden in the secret of divine Providence, and that the history of humanity is configured, according to the biblical pattern of the struggle between good and evil, as the spiritual conflict between the City of God and the City of Satan, as s. Agostino—under the influence of the Donatist Ticonio—systematically interpreted it in the De civitate Dei. The Augustinian scheme Orosio (v.) and became predominant throughout the Middle Ages, culminating in Frisinga (v.). A return to the “historical realism of chiliasm” may be seen in the FIORE, IL (v.), which was taken up in the Renaissance and secularized by modern idealism.
It was still on the framework of the Augustinian conception that, against the free-thinkers of deism and the Enlightenment, Bossuet (v.) conceived his Discours sur l'histoire universelle, in order to demonstrate the supreme dominion of Divine Providence over the changing fortunes of human events. Unlike s. Agostino, however, Bossuet sought to emphasize the concrete connections among facts according to causes and effects, and elaborated his historical edifice in an optimistic sense—even with regard to temporal history—as the advance of the triumphant Church through the stages of history, from antiquity down to his own time. It was against Bossuet’s theology of history that the disruptive work of Voltaire and the French Enlightenment (Condorcet, Turgot, Volney, down to Comte) was directed, in order to restore man to his rights. Isolated from the development of European culture, in an Italy politically and spiritually divided, the Scienza Nuova of Vico (v.) contains a supersession of the classical cyclical conception and of Enlightenment historiography in Christian Providence, according to a close cooperation of human freedom with God, insofar as “the facts of the actual history of all nations, their origins, progress, states, declines, and ends... proceed according to the eternal laws of ideal history” (Scienza Nuova, § 1096: ed. Nicolini, II, Bari 1928, p. 153).
C) The modern conception. — Philosophy of history in the proper sense is an achievement of modern thought, insofar as it has claimed the development of history for the expansion of human freedom, freed from every external dependence (physical or theological). The advent of philosophy of history therefore coincides with the secularization of Western culture and marks its stages through the Enlightenment, idealist Romanticism, and historicism. The theological Enlightenment has its representatives in Reimarus and Lessing, who develop Spinoza. The contribution of Reimarus and Lessing to philosophy of history consists chiefly in their criticism of biblical history, which they strip of every supernatural and revealed character, no differently from what R. Bultmann’s Entnythologisierung does today: with the Wolfenbüttelsche Fragmente, Reimarus above all denied the historical character of Christ’s Resurrection, while Lessing, in the essay Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (1777), denied that Christianity could make that insertion of eternity into time—through Christ’s prophecies and miracles—which must enable man to make a “choice” of eternal import (this is the “problem of Lessing” that will be discussed by Kierkegaard): absolute incommensurability between history and dogma, between time and eternity.
Less drastic in form, but coinciding in substance with the preceding view, is Kant’s conception, according to which history appears as the execution (Vollziehung) of a hidden plan of nature in order to bring about a perfect political structure (Staatsverfassung), as the “Kingdom of God on earth” (Reich Gottes auf Erden), both from within and from without; this presents humanity with the sole situation in which nature can fully develop the capacities (Anlagen) that it has placed in humanity (Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, 1784; Ges. Werke, ed. Cassirer, IV, Berlino 1913, p. 161 sgg). Herder, under the impulse of Romanticism, considers the development of history as a “whole”: hence his interest in primitive peoples and in the ancient civilizations of the East, which he displays in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (ll. I-X and XI-XII). For Herder, history is the resultant of two series of forces: on the one hand, the external environment, and on the other, the secret operative element which he calls the “spirit of the people” (Volksgeist), in which each individual nation expresses its own individuality in subjection to God, whom—agreeing with Shaftesbury—he calls the “Spirit of the world” (Weltgeist): Herder recognizes the divine plan of history, that is, the “path of God above the nations” (Gang Gottes
über die Nationen) and celebrates the Person and work of Christ, who «sought the spirit and left aside the dead letter» of the Mosaic Law, thus advocating a Christianity as straightforward ethical wisdom without dogmas (cf. Briefe an Theofron, in Sämtliche Werke, XV, Stuttgart and Tübingen 1830, Letter V, p. 100 ff. Cf. Ideen..., I. XVII). Hegel gave the most systematic conception of history, combining Spinoza’s single substance and the absolute Reason of Kant-Herder with the dogmas of Christianity: history has as its ultimate end the realization of the Absolute in the becoming of humanity, in which, as Kant had already observed, the negative and evil constitute the turning point (the “dialectical mediation”) by which absolute Reason, through its “cunning” (List der Vernunft), proceeds to action, making use of the “national spirits” (Volksgeister), which constitute the “apparent dialectic” through which the “universal Spirit” is produced in the development of the whole, or Idea (cf. Philos. d. Rechts, III, 3 B, § 340, which ends with the identification of history and the judgment of history according to Schlegel’s formula, Weltgeschichte als Weltgericht). The agent and “Person” of universal history is the “Spirit of the world” (Weltgeist), which expresses pure freedom that wills itself and has its effective reality (Wirklichkeit) in the politics of the State: the instruments of the “spirit of the world” are the “world-historical men” (weltgeschichtliche Menschen), who bring about the “transitions” of historical epochs, such as Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon (cf. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Einleitung, ed. Lasson, Berlin 1930, p. 39 ff.). The core of Hegel’s philosophy of history, as of his entire philosophy, is that it is an inverted and immanentized theology, in which every evil and every contingency of the finite has been volatilized. From Hegelian philosophy of historical materialism (v.) of Marx, through the mediation of Feuerbach’s criticism, according to which the god immanent in Hegel’s history is nothing other than humanity itself, so that “the secret of theology is anthropology, but the secret of speculative philosophy is theology” (Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie, in Sämtl. Werke, II, Stuttgart 1904, p. 222). Therefore the task of philosophy is the “realization and humanization of God” (Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, § 1; cited ed., II, p. 245). Against rationalism and idealism, and in a direction opposed to Feuerbach-Marx, Kierkegaard vindicated the substance of the Christian conception, setting the Incarnation of Christ as the central “event” of history, in reply to Lessing’s principle that “contingent historical truths cannot be the proof of necessary rational truths” (cf. Diario, 1854, XIᵃ A 269 and XIᵃ A 98 against Hegel’s “chatter” concerning philosophy of history: Italian trans. III, p. 300 ff. Cf. S. Holm, S. Kierkegaards Historiefilosofi, Copenhagen 1952, p. 30 ff.).
D) Historicism. — With the disintegration of transcendental idealism through positivism and neo-criticism, which eliminated the Absolute and hence every theological reference of reality, history was conceived in the ultimate concreteness of mere occurrence, on this side of any teleology, as also of every dualism of particular and universal, history and supra-history, idea and fact, fact and value. The supreme totality of Reason thus gives way to the category of Life, which posits and re-posits itself in individual facts, mediating itself in an ever new immediacy. Hence the abandonment of philosophy of history, bound to a notion of “progress” that must nullify the present’s actual reality. The fundamental error of Hegel’s philosophy of history was, according to Dilthey, that of having subordinated “life” to the abstract concept and to a mysticism of cosmic nature, whereby all reality is transferred into the logical Idea (cf. W. Dilthey, Das Problem d. Philos. des Geistes, in Gsch. Werke, IV, Leipzig and Berlin 1921, p. 247 ff.). Along this line of theoretical simplification historicism arose, in which neo-Hegelianism, freed from every metaphysical or theological reference, came to its conclusion: in this way “history has produced relativism, which considers every individual historical formation, every institution, every idea and ideology solely as a transitory, causally determined moment in the infinite flux of becoming,” so that things possess only a relative value (cf. Fr. Meinecke, Geschichte, Staat und Gegenwart, in
Logos, 22 [1933], p. 163). The most radical form of historicism is that defended by B. Croce (d. 1952), who affirms the identity of philosophy, history, and philosophy of history, and defines historicism as “the affirmation that life and reality are history and nothing but history”; consequently, every form of dualism must be rejected, even in the purely cultural sphere, according to Croce’s theory of the equivalence and circularity of the forms of the spirit (Lo storicismo e la sua storia, in La storia come pensiero e come azione, 5th ed., Bari 1952, p. 51. On p. 65 is the assertion that “historicism is a logical principle, indeed it is the very category of logic, logicality understood in an adequate manner, that of the concrete universal”). In this way every problem of the spirit is dissolved into its effective historical dimensions, since “only the logic of historical knowledge is adequate to thought” (Filosofia e storiografia, Bari 1949, p. 17). For this reason Croce aptly declares that “history is never an avenger, but always a justifier” (Teoria e storia della storiografia, 6th ed., Bari 1948, p. 177). Crocean historicism therefore cuts off at the root every philosophy of history, which is neither philosophy nor history, since in its various Enlightenment and idealist forms, including the Marxist one, it proposes to give a conclusive “meaning” to history taken as a whole.
A middle way seems to be that of existentialist historicism, insofar as it regards “freedom” as unlimited openness toward the “future,” in which the future therefore has a “progressive” meaning that rigid historicism rejects because of its metaphysical-ethical undifferentiation. The later Jaspers elaborated the theory of “axial time” (Achsenzzeit), which allows the perspective of a universal history, denied by historicism, since it is possible to relate the development of the various civilizations to that period extending from 800 to 200 B.C., in which similar spiritual phenomena of construction and dissolution emerge among all the peoples of the East and then in Greece (cf. Vom Ursprung u. Ziel der Geschichte, Monaco 1949, p. 19 sgg.). Jaspers too recognizes the incomparable value of the person and doctrine of Christ, according to the Hegelian dictum that all history leads to Christ and refers back to him, so that the appearance of the Son of God constitutes “the axis of universal history.” He merely observes that this is valid only for those who accept that Christ is the organ of divine Revelation: something which no longer has meaning for modern man, since everything presents itself in being only in the form of a “cipher,” which each person interprets from his own “situation” (Einführung in die Philosophie, Zurigo 1950, p. 95 sgg.). More sober and more open to the prophetic and eschatological conception of history seems to be Heidegger’s position: “projection” toward the future is constitutive of human being (Dasein), insofar as this is realized in care (Sorge), which therefore projects human being toward the end, that is, death, so that “the primary meaning of existentiality is the future,” and time then expresses being as that “totality” (Ganzheit) which is originally effected by care (Sein und Zeit, Halle a. S. 1927, p. 327 sgg.). Within this temporality, which Sorge structures toward the future, the later Heidegger includes openness to the “sacred” (das Heilige), that is, the becoming present (Anwesenheit) of divinity, which completes—as the fourth component together with earth, sky, and mortals—the “fourfold” (Geviert) of human being, which thus takes shape as a “remaining before God” (cf. the Darmstadt lecture: Bauen, Wohnen, Denken, Darmstadt 1952, p. 76 sgg.). Man does not attain such “openness” toward divinity through philosophical ontology, but rather through poetry and mysticism, in which for the present the two original forms of God’s “presence” to man are fulfilled; thus all historical time stretches toward the future in expectation of a revelation of God that may save man from the anguish of death (cf. Was ist Metaphysik?, Einleitung alla 2ᵃ ed., Francoforte a. M. 1949, p. 18. Also Brief über Humanismus, Berna 1947, p. 101 sgg.).