Modern Philosophy

Guido De Ruggiero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429656255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire moderne

Originally published in 1921, this volume represents De Ruggiero's first appearance in English, being the first time his philosophical works were translated. Modern Philosophy presents a positive philosophical position of great interest, avowedly in continuation of Croce and in close agreement with Gentile, which sums up the progress of Italian idealism down to the writing of this book. It is a remarkable piece of historical work, focusing on the development of European philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and was the first volume to comprehensively handle this time period.

PART I

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER I

ANTIMETAPHYSIC AND NATURALISM

§ 1. THE DECAY OF IDEALISM.

THE interval between Kant and Hegel was as brief as that between Plato and Aristotle. When we reflect how many centuries of philosophical thought had to elapse before the gulf was bridged between the doctrine of the Idea and that of the Pure Act, we shall not be astonished that post-Hegelian philosophers without exception failed not only to understand the Hegelian system, but even to regain the road towards it which Fichte and Schelling had traced out. Those who derived their inspiration most directly from Hegel either confined themselves to the function of interpreters and commentators, in which they did not display any great insight, or, once having mastered the simple mechanism of the dialectic, gave themselves up to fantastic and irresponsible system-building.

It would be too naive an error to suppose that these harmless system-builders and literal commentators deserve either the praise or the blame of having discredited idealism and caused the naturalistic and positivist reaction. The truth is that the philosophy of these “epigoni” was itself an expression of that very naturalism and positivism which seemed to rise up threateningly against it. Those who employed the dialectic upon ready-made concepts, and whose chief interest lay in rearranging, with as much aid as they were capable of deriving from Hegel, the mass of heterogeneous material which they took over from the empirical sciences, were much nearer than they believed to the new world-builders who were appearing, armed with the weapons of induction and generalization. There was little to choose between the intoxication of facts and the intoxication of formulae, once the facts had themselves, under the clumsy hand of an unskilful operator, turned into formulæ, promising truth yet pregnant with mystery.

And, on the other hand, both tendencies were equally far removed from that idealism, the object of which was to analyse the inmost nature of fact by resolving it into the actual process of thinking. Whether the network in which they enclosed fact was that of induction or that of the dialectic, in either case it was a mere network, a mere classification; the thought travelled round the facts instead of penetrating them. The title of naturalism thus belongs to both schools.

For a short time in Germany the illusion that the Hegelians and the anti-Hegelians represented two diametrically opposed tendencies of thought was allowed to last. And it is true that those Hegelians who devoted themselves to the history of philosophy, like Rosenkranz, Michelet, Lasson and Fischer, did all preserve, in however attenuated a form, the traditions of the school. But it is not to these that we must turn for the first signs of the influence of Hegelism on German thought: feeble echoes of a powerful voice, these historians were very soon driven from the highroads of philosophy. In order to see the immediate and direct effect of Hegelism, and at the same time the palpable proof of its radical transformation, we must rather study cases in which the doctrine was first drawn, so to speak, from its sheath and brought into contact with the problems and interests which were occupying men’s minds.

Foremost came the religious problem, which was brought to a head by the very fact of the progress made in the empirical sciences and by new discoveries which seemed to jeopardize the existence of the supernatural. This problem, as everyone knows, divided the Hegelians into two wings, the right and the left. The latter was by far the most important, and included men of such different talents and tendencies as Ruge, Bauer, Strauss and Feuerbach; but all its members agreed in taking up an attitude of hostility towards the supernatural and towards institutional religion. Although they recognized no other dress but the Hegelian, yet inside this dress there moved the new naturalism. The fact that they identified the dialectical negation of religion with the materialistic negation of the supernatural shows how completely Hegelism had been turned upside down by contact with the new doctrines derived from natural science.

Such inversions of Hegelian doctrines are common in the history of this period, and always betray the same fundamental tendency of thought. Haym, for instance, denied that the dialectic was the foundation of all life, physical and mental, and asserted that, on the contrary, physical and mental life was the foundation of the dialectic. A familiar instance is the trajectory described by Feuerbach, whose thought passed from God to reason and finally to man. But the most remarkable example of this inversion is provided by the authors of what is known as historical materialism, Marx and Engels, who, after accepting the dialectic, proceeded to maintain that consciousness does not explain the being of man, but that the being of man explains consciousness.

The same change was taking place outside the Hegelian school. Herbartianism, for instance, originally a speculative doctrine, was gradually losing all its philosophical character under the chilling influence of mathematical and psychological methods. The Aristotelian Trendelenburg, again, tried to effect a compromise between spirit and nature in the form of the concept of movement, and failed to perceive that his mediator was no mediator at all, being itself merely nature: so that, while he believed that he was building a bridge between nature and spirit, he was really reducing spirit to nature. Similarly the historian Ueberweg, after struggling for years to maintain an eclectic position between idealism and realism, finally lapsed into pure and simple materialism.

The students of the special sciences, history, jurisprudence and sociology, were the least liable to lapses of this kind. Living as they did on intimate terms with concrete realities, it was easier for them to preserve the idealistic attitude with which they had started, and they were less inclined to shackle themselves within the schemata of naturalism. It would be interesting to follow up these offshoots of idealism in the works of great historians like Mommsen, Ranke and Ihering. Their thought always transcends the formulae in which they profess to confine it; and even when they declare themselves positivists and naturalists, they are very far from accepting the doctrines of the philosophical schools so entitled. A vein of idealism, again, however much attenuated and inclined to evaporate into a certain abstractness, is discernible in the two founders of the so-called psychology of peoples, Lazarus and Steinthal. But their theories, born out of due time and suffocated by the dominant naturalism against which they were unable to struggle, had little influence in their day, and have only lately been taken up again owing to the revival of the historical attitude of mind.

It must not be imagined that the transition in German philosophy from idealism to naturalism, which we have sketched above, was effected by a sudden change; it came about rather by a gradual transformation. It would be a serious error to overlook the gulf that separated a man like Strauss or Marx from one like Büchner or Dühring. The former passed their lives in an intellectual environment in which the sense for history was deeply rooted; and their conversion to naturalism had a unique character which marks them out from others and renders the process interesting to the historian. We shall therefore examine a few of the instances of this transformation which have most significance for the development of German thought.

§ 2. THE TÜBINGEN SCHOOL.

The founder of the theological school of Tubingen, F. C. Baur, derived his original inspiration from Hegel and Schleiermacher. From the former he got the idea of the history of religion, from the latter the foundations of dogmatic theology. Like Hegel, he was convinced that without speculation historical research cannot go beyond the superficial aspect of things, and that the more the historical subject belongs to the domain of the spirit, the more important it becomes not merely to reproduce what individuals have done and thought, but to re-think in oneself the eternal thoughts of the eternal spirit whose working is history.¹

This at any rate was his programme, but it was never carried out. The deeper Baur penetrated in his historical studies, the farther did his analytical tendency of thought take him from anything like a synthesis, and the more inclined did he become to break up the reality of the religious experience of the ages into its component parts. Most painstaking in the search after facts and proofs, most punctilious in the distinction of historical truth from legend, he ended by losing sight of the significance of religious development and undermining with his criticism the entire structure of Christology. He believed that he could vindicate the element of human reality and historical fact in religion without in any way prejudicing the element of divine truth and the transcendental significance of the facts; for his own work, he believed, was purely historical and independent of any theological presuppositions. The truth was exactly the opposite. For the very desire to distinguish the historical fact from its transcendental significance implied a theological presupposition; and on the other hand the naturalistic procedure of historical research, issuing as it did in the reduction of a divine history to a merely human history, was bound to destroy the meaning of the divine history simultaneously with its truth. If no glimpse of the divine shines through historical fact, there is no hope of our being able to detect it elsewhere. In history there cannot be both a kernel and a shell: history is either all kernel or all shell. In vain do those who can only see in it the latter imagine something existing beyond it, perceptible by other means.

But Baur adhered firmly to this naive dualism, incompatible though it was with his own philosophy; and though he always promised himself he would make a historical synthesis, he never made it and was incapable of doing so. The fruit of his methods was very soon manifest in Strauss. Less prudent than his master, and of a still more analytical disposition, in his Life of Jesus he simply heaped negation on negation respecting the historical reality of Christ, and ended by reducing it to an empty shadow. Once the shell was removed, could even the tiniest kernel remain? Baur deceived himself into thinking it could, as though there could be such a thing as pure inner spirit, entirely divorced from all outward form: but Strauss was more consistent. On reviewing his religious beliefs he admitted, in his reply to the first of the four celebrated questions, that he could no longer call himself a Christian. The concept of the personality of God appeared to him incompatible with the conclusions of modern natural science. Nevertheless he continued to believe that the ruins of Christianity still preserved the fundamental element of every religion: the feeling of dependence. But what, according to him, was the character of the new God? He was the God of science: not the inexorable Jehovah, but the universe, rational throughout. The essence of the new creed was the consciousness of the intimate relation between the individual and the whole, a very different thing from the external relation of which positive religion speaks. But what exactly is this intimate relation of which Strauss speaks? Man, in his real being, is a personality and can only have intimate relations with a personality, while the God of Strauss is impersonal—is nature. Thus the intimacy which religion claims for its own is really something quite different from what religion supposes it to be. It is the intimacy experienced by the spirit when it goes outside itself and communes with the entire reality in which it lives and has its being: in a word, it is art. This explains his invocation to Goethe and the great artists with which his book on the Old Faith and the New concludes. In Strauss, naturalism breaks its own bounds and enters the domain of poetry.

§ 3. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM.

The two great personalities of German socialism, Marx and Engels, effected the same transition from idealism to naturalism, but in a more drastic and thorough manner. Taking as their starting-point Hegel’s conception of history, they enunciated a doctrine which was at once the antithesis and the complement of the visionary communism of St. Simon, Fourier and Owen. Their study of the great historical revolutions of the eighteenth century which had raised to power the “Third Estate” had warned them against the facile Utopianism of supposing that the preaching of humanitarian ideals could put an end to the new capitalist organization of society. Their study of Hegel suggested to them that historical movements do not arise from external and superficial causes, but originate altogether from within; and that the true criticism of a social and political order consists not in the schemes of a theorist, entangled in the net of his own abstract concepts, but in the practical activity of the society itself, when it destroys this order and substitutes another. Every order, through the internal logic of its development, arrives at a point when it renders its own continuation impossible, and thus generates the antithetical conditions by which it will be negated and its transformation determined into a new form, into a new order which will contain in itself a solution of the problems raised by the two superseded moments. Thus in the history of political economy we are presented first of all with communal ownership of land; but the development of agriculture itself renders this communal ownership more and more incompatible with the exigencies of production. It is finally negated; and after some intermediate phases private property is instituted, which satisfactorily meets the new exigencies.

The principles involved in this view of economic history were applied no less by Marx and Engels to social and political institutions; but they did not refine these down into the mere manifestation and reflection of economic conditions: this separation of kernel from shell was to be the work of their degenerate followers, and was incompatible with their own very delicate historical sense. On the contrary, far from refining down what they called by the rather unhappy and ambiguous term of a “superstructure,” their constant desire was to consolidate it and incorporate it into the economic structure. In short, they did not degrade the state and society to the rank of a mere reflection of economics, but raised economics so as to include in itself the entire fabric of social and political life. History is in the eyes of the creators of historical materialism all of a piece: the divorce found in their immediate successors between content (economic) and form (juridical, social) has not yet arisen. The content is not to them lifeless matter; on the contrary, it is already form; it is not the abstraction of economic science, indifferent to any form, but concrete economy historically conditioned, which is therefore identical with the legal and political organization of a particular historical moment. This is so far true that when a conflict arises between content and form, and new exigencies of production expose the inadequacy of the old forms, even then there is no dualism. The new economic content is not pure matter which is blindly hurled into new legal and political forms created out of nothing; it is matter already organized, already containing in itself the new form: and it is solely due to this fact that it can engage in a struggle with the old form, now ossified and crystallized. This is the reason for the idealistic character of the so-called materialism of Marx, a character which eludes those who are themselves entangled in dualism and are therefore incapable of conceiving the unity of the process of history.

If Marx and Engels had explored this idealistic aspect of their doctrine further, they would have become convinced that dialectic is reality in the making, and they would have protected themselves from the error of anticipating in their thought the future ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
• PART II FRENCH PHILOSOPHY
• PART III ANGLO-AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
• PART IV ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX