The Brooklyn Rail

Philosophy’s historicization moment—the moment when the realization that philosophy was of its time took hold and the implications of that fact were explored—began in the eighteenth century with Johann Gottfried von Herder and received its most influential formulations in the early nineteenth in several works by G.W.F. Hegel, his Phenomenology of Spirit, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, and his Philosophy of Right. The formulation in the Preface to the last book became the best-known statement of the idea, that “philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought.” In Hegel the idea (one that was to be so influential for Marx and Marxism) was a radical extension of the original Greek enlightenment that began philosophy itself, that what it was to be anything at all, an object or an event, was to be intelligible, ultimately knowable. In the original Platonic formulations, this meant that being, the really real, the substance of anything was “idea,” “form.” Any sensible manifestation of what really is was then to be understood as a “lower degree of reality” because only imperfectly knowable. At the lowest degree of reality were the nomoi, the customs and habits of a community, conventional mores that varied from time to time and community to community, the kind of account one gets in Herodotus. (Some communities bury their dead; some eat them.) Hegel’s revolutionary idea was that even historical change itself could be rendered intelligible, that there was a form of reason at work in collective attempts at self-understanding, and by being at work historical change itself could be disclosed as a progressively common project. Human history made sense, like everything else. Eventually the Hegelian transformation of that picture led to later nineteenth century historicism and the full exploration of the paradox inherent in Hegel’s formulation—that if philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought, the thought by means of which a time was comprehended must also be of its own time. This implied that the past was inaccessible in the terms with which it understood itself, that any attempt to do so had to occur within the horizon of assumptions dominant at the time of the comprehension. There was no possible transcendence of historical time, and even such a claim itself could only be an expression of its time, of how we simply happen to have come to understand ourselves. Hegel avoided this implication by arguing that the notions, the concepts, by virtue of which history could be rendered intelligible could themselves be shown to be not merely a reflection of contemporary norms, but a progressively developed and increasingly self-knowing account of all possible account-giving itself. An “absolute” moment of self-comprehension had arrived; the historical moment was privileged, not contingent. This is not a response that found many adherents, but the problem at stake is still central to anyone who encourages us to “historicize everything”—morality, politics, works of art, religions—and who must then face the question of the normative status of the claim to have successfully historicized. If historicization is supposed to yield some kind of knowledge, we may not arrive at anything as extravagant as Hegel’s, but we would still be operating under the classical assumption that began philosophy in the West—that to be is to be intelligible, here historically intelligible, that a true contextualization had been achieved.

The most difficult problem in the project of throughgoing historical contextualization continues to be what could be called self-contextualization. Simply put, we want to understand what has happened to us; to take the point of view of a future epoch and ask why matters of significance look to us the way they do. This is an interest now fueled by an understandable, widespread dissatisfaction in the form of life developed in the West since the sixteenth century, a form of life that has come to dominate and influence the globe. This is a form of self-dissatisfaction that emerged with Rousseau, and is especially prominent in modernist art. The dissolution of common forms of meaningfulness, or their reduction to the satisfaction of material interests in zero-sum competition, has left us in a situation of unprecedentedly powerful global finance capitalism, the continuing threat of nuclear annihilation, the immanent destruction of the planet’s environment, mass consumer societies, populist and inevitably aggressive nationalisms, the commodification of the art market, the increasing monopolization of publishing, and the incessant manipulation of political will formation by social media corporations, and much else. “Historicization” does not help us understand either art or philosophy unless we can come to understand why the most widespread form of intellectual, educated high culture involves such a passionate hatred of our way of life and its radically diminished forms of significance. We might then begin to remember what we still could love and but seem to have lost, a memory still preserved in the highest forms of all art.