The Descent of Ideas

The History of Intellectual History

DonaldR. Kelley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351545105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The 'history of ideas', better known these days as intellectual history, is a flourishing field of study which has been the object of much controversy but hardly any historical exploration. This major new work from Donald R. Kelley is the first comprehensive history of intellectual history, tracing the study of the history of thought from ancient, medieval and early modern times, its emergence as the 'history of ideas' in the 18th century, and its subsequent expansion. The point of departure for this study is the perspective opened up by Victor Cousin in the early 19th-century on 'Eclecticism' and its association with the history of philosophy established by Renaissance scholars. Kelley considers a broad range of topics, including the rivalry between 'ideas' and language, the rise of cultural history, the contributions of certain 19th- and 20th-century practitioners of the history of ideas in interdisciplinary areas of philosophy, literature and the sciences, and finally the current state of intellectual history. The central theme of the book is the interplay between the canon of philosophical thought and the tradition of language and textual study, the divergence of the latter marking the 'descent of ideas' into the realm of cultural history.

Chapter 1
Prelude: The New Philosophy of Victor Cousin

In our eyes Eclecticism is the true historical method, and for us it has all the importance of the history of philosophy. Victor Cousin

The 'history of ideas' had a nominal existence in the Enlightenment, but it was in nineteenth-century France that it emerged most conspicuously as an independent practice. It was still associated with philosophy, to be sure, but it also became recognizable as a branch of historical scholarship distinct from the old conventions of 'doing philosophy'. Or rather, it was joined to a particular way of doing philosophy, a so-called 'eclectic' way, in which history in effect took precedence over unassisted and unencumbered reason and became 'first philosophy'. The modern philosophy of eclecticism appeared in France in the early nineteenth century. Eclecticism had important antecedents in early modern Germany and in antiquity; but it was Victor Cousin, student of philosophical schools from Plato and Proclus to Descartes and Kant, who revived the term, established his own school, and found a rationale for this conception which incarnated the history of philosophy and that more particularized pursuit which he called l'histoire des idées.¹ So it is Cousin's work that marks the point of entry for this study of the backgrounds of the history of ideas.

1. French Eclecticism

In December 1815, in the first year both of the Restoration Monarchy and of his own teaching at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Victor Cousin was lecturing on the history of philosophy. In post-Revolutionary France this was a field in great disarray, and Cousin harked back to the great schools of the Enlightenment, commending three of these in particular - the French, the Scottish, and the German traditions, which were represented respectively by Condillac, Reid, and Kant. 'It would be an interesting and instructive study', he told his enthusiastic young students, 'to examine the weaknesses of these schools by engaging one with another and by selecting their various merits in the context of a great eclecticism which would contain and surpass all three.'²

Over his next five years of lecturing, before being dismissed in 1820, Cousin had established his own doctrinal school, an Eclectic (capital E) philosophy - whose name he 'first stammered' in 1816 - which purported to draw on and to transcend these earlier systems.³ Thereafter French eclecticism was publicized by Cousin's many scholarly publications, the lectures he gave after returning to his chair of philosophy in 1828, his international contacts, his many disciples, and his public career as minister of education. For a half-century before his death in 1867 Cousin had an unparalleled influence as virtually the 'official philosopher' in France, with his version of eclecticism being widely regarded as a 'state philosophy';⁴ and translations of his works extended his renown also into Germany, Italy, and the Anglophone world.

Cousin's eclecticism was in part a search for his own intellectual forebears - literally an ego trip, following the fashionable Ich- and Mo/'-centered idealism of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Maine de Biran - and a way of locating himself in philosophical tradition. The link with antiquity was established especially through Plato and Proclus, whose works he edited. The Neoplatonist Proclus, who stood precariously between paganism and Christianity, was the last in the line of ancient philosophers before Justinian closed the Greek schools in 529. For Proclus Platonic ideas had originated with Pythagoras and (contradicting sectarian opinion) were preserved by Aristotle. As Cousin's disciple Jules Simon wrote, 'All the Alexandrines are eclectics, but Proclus is the most eclectic of all'; and so indeed he was represented by Cousin.⁵ To Plato's pure insight Proclus added the precious gift of Hellenistic erudition.

The great chain of ideas linking Cousin with Plato and Proclus was continued in the twelfth century, when philosophy came to center on Paris. The originator of this French tradition was Peter Abelard, who had created an 'intermediary system' in 'the great quarrel of the time, which was that between the Realists and the Nominalists'.⁶ Five centuries later Descartes, who was Abelard's only peer, also became his nemesis as the 'destroyer' of Abelard's scholastic system and, thereby, 'father of modern philosophy'. There were other links in the chain, but the philosophical canon and Cousin's own culminating posture, seven centuries after Abelard and two centuries after Descartes, seems clear Obviously Cousin, editor of the works of both of these predecessors, was claiming a place in this philosophical genealogy by adapting and combining their ideas in the higher mediation of eclecticism.

In assembling his eclectic system Cousin ranged as widely in space as he did in time, his appetite for foreign ideas being displayed not only in his courses but also in his translations and in his role in bringing the works of Kant, Hegel, Herder, and Vico to the attention of the French intelligentsia. 'Ί congratulate myself', he wrote later in his famous textbook, 'upon having encouraged my two young friends, MM. Michelet and Quinet, to give to France Vico and Herder.'⁷ Yet against the principles of his own school and in the face of a long tradition of eclecticism by no means unknown to French scholars, Cousin claimed an absolute originality and a unique truth-value for his derivative ideas. Eclecticism had not been drawn from German sources, he protested in 1855. 'It was born spontaneously in our own spirit [notre esprit] from the spectacle of the resounding conflicts and the hidden harmonies of the three great philosophical schools of the eighteenth century', he declared. 'Thus', he concluded, 'eclecticism is a French doctrine and peculiar to us.'⁸

Nothing, historically speaking, could be further from the truth - or indeed from the premises of the eclectic tradition. The defining characteristic of his philosophy was its dependence not only on the three schools he recognized in his early years, but on the whole history of philosophy from its Greek and especially Platonic beginnings, to which Cousin himself devoted much of his historical scholarship. Rejecting 'that blind syncretism which destroyed the school of Alexandria', he shared the premises accepted by German eclectics for over a century that the history of philosophy, including its errors as well as its truths, was inseparable from and indeed an essential part of philosophy itself. (This was the message of Hegel, too, in his lectures, begun in October 1816 and known to Cousin, on the history of philosophy.) 'What I recommend', Cousin declared in 1817, 'is an enlightened eclecticism which, judging with equity, and even with benevolence, all schools, borrows from them what they possess of the true and neglects what in them is false.'⁹

Eclecticism was a philosophy for post-Revolutionary and Restoration times - for the 'new generation' of 1815 it was, in the words of Alfred Musset, 'notre goût'.¹⁰ In many circles eighteenth-century philosophy had worn out its welcome. The Jacobin and subsequently Bonapartist views - 'abuses of the philosophical spirit', in the phrase of one critic, writing out of exile experience¹¹ - called out for a reevaluation of intellectual tradition; and Cousin was among the first to ride the wave of this philosophical revisionism, based on an inventory of philosophically correct ideas culled from the history of philosophy. The most obvious approach to Cousinian eclecticism is therefore a kind of critical Quellenforschung, a chronicle of 'influences' - or record of plagiarisms - native and foreign, which, if exhaustively carried, would turn out to be a review of the whole history of philosophy, to which Cousin indeed devoted much of his scholarly life.

In fact Cousin was anticipated even in France in the quest for a renewed philosophy based on an examination of its history. In 1804 Baron M.-J. Degérando had published his Comparative History of the Systems of Philosophy with regard to the Principles of Human Knowledge (1804), written after the experience of exile and under the influence of 'Idéologie' - that 'science of ideas' which Napoleon so despised. Like Cousin after him and Tennemann and Brucker before him, Degérando believed that philosophy was inseparable from its history. According to Degérando, the earliest systems, established in Ionia, represented a victory over myth and idolatry and the beginning of 'slow progress' toward enlightenment. The sophists were not really philosophers at all; the impact of the skeptics was largely negative; the ancient eclectics offered only a 'mélange of sects'; and medieval philosophy, including the Arabs, made the unpardonable mistake of confusing logic and reality. More significant were the new, 'original', and 'happier' systems of authors like Bruno, Ramus, Campanella, and especially Condillac. For Degérando the true beginning of 'modern' philosophy, however, was in the work of Bacon - in the 'positive' and 'natural' way to the 'advancement of learning' and to what Degérando called a 'revolution in ideas'.¹² In a later edition (1842) he added a notice about the 'new eclecticism in Germany' which he recognized as preceding the 'regeneration' of philosophy in Britain, Italy, and France.¹³ In this connection Degerando quoted Kant's friend and critic Garve's celebration of the history of philosophy as 'not only the tableau of the ideas and opinions of different philosophers ... [but also] the description and explanation of the various revolutions which human knowledge [la science humaine] has experienced from the origins to the present'.¹⁴ In Degérando's comparative study one may catch a glimpse of the epistemological foundations of the amorphous field which Cousin, shifting from individual psychology to collective humanity, called the 'history of ideas'.

The chief characters of Degérando's story were not individual philosophers but their more or less ingeniously devised 'systems', the constituent parts of which were particular 'ideas', which 'formed a body and an ensemble through the connection they have in the mind of the one who conceived them'.¹⁵ In particular Degérando recognized, after the 'reformation' of philosophy begun by Bacon, individual schools of idealism, dogmatism, rational or speculative philosophy, modern skepticism, empiricism, Scottish philosophy, and criticism (that is, Kant) - not to mention 'modern eclectics' such as J. F. Buddeus and Diderot.¹⁶ This discussion was surely significant in turning his own mind toward these German antecedents, though he never connected it with his own methodological innovations. The ultimate purpose of Degérando, like that of Cousin, was 'by studying the history of different sects, their birth, development, successions, conflicts, and mutual relations, to seize upon their true points of divergence, the causes of their oppositions, and the origins of their disputes', and so to judge their utility for modern problems, it was above all in pos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What was the History of Ideas?
• 1 Prelude: The New Philosophy of Victor Cousin
• 2 Eclecticism in Retrospect
• 3 The 'Light of Philosophy Reborn'
• 4 The Way of Ideas and the Ways of Words
• 5 The New Eclecticism
• 6 The History of Literature
• 7 The History of Science
• 8 Human Sciences
• 9 The History of Philosophy
• 10 After the New Histories
• Index