The philosophy of history – its origin and aims The new historical sense which we have just characterized explains the reawakening of interest in philosophy of history. Having recognized that his individual destiny is intimately linked to the historical evolution of the group to which he belongs, man, in the middle of the twentieth century, seeks to understand history in its wholeness, the principles by which it is governed and the meaning it may conceal. The totality of the endeavors to understand history and to integrate it into the wholeness of human existence is what – according to a term coined by Voltaire – is called philosophy of history. We have seen that it is by virtue of his sufferings that man grasps historical reality. “I am suffering from it or I have suffered from it; consequently there is a historical reality”, says the man of our epoch to himself. Thus, he refutes the idea of certain teorists that all history is history of the past and that historical reality is comprehensible only in the form of historical knowledge. By the sufferings it imposes upon man, history reveals itself as a present reality, neatly distinct from the sadow it throws behind itself in the form of historical knowledge. Historical reality is experienced history. The suffering imposed upon individuals by the collective tragedies called “historical” have been, in all epochs, the main motives for the development of a philosophy of history. The first fully conscious attempt to create such a philosophy – saint agustine’s city of god – was motivated by the conquest of rome by alaric’s Visigoths. The triumph of these hordes, their atrocities and, especially, “the outrages suffered by Christian women on the part of the barbarian soldiers” – all these events concerning the collectivity posed a grave problem which, of necessity, aroused a philosophical mind like saint agustine’s. what had that city, considered eternal, done to deserve such a cruel fate? Thus, the fall of the capital of the civilized world led Augustine to meditate on the caducity of secular civilizations and to seek the salvation of mankind in its supernatural vocation. The result of these meditations was the first great treatise on philosophy of history. The intimate relation between saint augustine’s philosophy of history and the pillage of rome by the goths in 410 A.D. becomes obvious from the beginning of the city of god. In its first book, the author rises up Agains the pagans who ascribed to the cristian religion, because it prohibits the worship of the gods, the disasters of the world and especially the recent pillage of rome by the Goths (maximeque romanae urbis recentem a ghotis vasta tionem). The invasions of italy in the sixteenth century and the moral sufferings they imposed on his patriotism and national pride had a decisive influence on the philosophy of history of niccolo Machiavelli. The final chapter of his prince has the title esortazione a libarer I’italia da barbari, exhortation to liberate italy from the barbarians. The greatest attempt at a philosophy of history in modern times - hegel’s – was partly conceived under the thunder of napoleon’s cannons. Hegel was a young professor in the University of jena, when the victorious French troops took the city. The night before the battle of jena, hegel saw through the windows of his room the fires of the French battalions camping in the market place. During this historical night he revised the last pages of the manuscript of his phenomenology of the spirit. The next day the Prussian troops were beaten, and hegel’s apartment wrecked, so that the minister of state, Goethe, had to grant him a subsidy. On the eve of the battle of jena hegel saw napoleon and wrote to a friend : I have seen the emperor – that world soul – riding on horseback through the city . . . .it is indeed a sublime feeling to see such an individual, who, concentrated on one point, on horseback, spread over the world and dominates it. The whole of hegel’s philosophy of history was to bear the stamp of these individual experiences of a collective destiny. His ideas on the stabilization of history, on great statesmen as “managers” of the universal spirit, on their passions and sacrifices, on their right to place themselves above morals, etc. – all these were intimately linked with hegel’s personal experience of the battle of jena and its hero, Bonaparte, an experience at the same time distressing and sublime. The most sensational book on philosophy of history in the twentieth century, Oswald spengler’s decline of the west, was published in 1917, during the third year of world war 1. in his preface spengler wrote: “this war is one of the conditions from which the ultimate features of the new image of the world could be conceived.” Finally, the latest sensation in the domain of philosophy of history, toynbee’s a study of history, underwent the influence of two world wars. Referring to the first of these disasters, Toynbee wrote: “... my mind was . . . not yet set hard when history took my generation by the throat in 1914. . .” event the most static, antihistorical, supratemporal philosopher of our century – Edmund husserl – had to re-interpret his doctrine in a new, historical sense, when the historical catastrophe of hitler’s so-called “national revolution” took him by the throat, almost in a literal sense. The new vigor of philosophy of history we have been noticing since the days of world war 2 is thus well explained by the personal sufferings of so many individuals, undergoing a cruel collective destiny which befell their time, their generation. From the standpoint of their psychological motives, philosophical systems may be divided into “theorogone” and “pathogone”. Theorogone philosophy is motivated by observing the world: the antique +++ was the observer who attended public games in an official capacity. On the contrary, pathogone philoshopy is motivated by the sufferings, the +++, which our human existence imposes on us. If epistemology is, in general, theorogone, we may affirm that in most cases philosophy of history is pathogone. In my book on the philosophical foundation of truth, reality and value, I outlined the differences between philoshophy and science by stating: philosophy examines the relationships between determining thought and the objects determined, that is between man as a subject and the world. The sciences, on the contrary, examine the mutual relationships among the objects determined which constitute the world. Many people do not consider history as a science. What it has in common with science is, the characteristic feature of examining the mutual relationships among its objects. For history, these objects in a logical sense are very frequently psycological subjects. On the other hand, philosophy of history tries to find out how determining thought can determine the concept of history as distinc from the concept of nature; how it succeeds in determining the logical. Epistemological, psychological and axiological conditions of historical knowledge; if and how it ends up by determining historical laws and by conceiving the concepts of meaning and value of history. In the present volume, we are especially concerned with the axiological implications of history or, expressed in a more general way, with the relations between philosophy of history and philosophy of values or axiology. But before going deeper into this subject, we have to clarify a bit more the concept of philosophy of history by examining its origins and its aims. Having determined the psychological origins and the logical character of philosophy of history, let us examine now its historical origins. What are these origins? The opinions answering this question vary. But, in general, the authors agree on the fact that the greeks, although they where the creators of occidental philosophy and of historiography, did not develop a philosophy of history properly speaking. In spite of having produced men like Herodotus, thucidides, polybius, and Plutarch, the greeks were not very history – minded. Greek methapyshics was composed of extra-temporal entities, whitout birth, development and decay – be it the uncreated, indestructible and immobile sphere of Parmenides, the platonic ideas, aristotle’s foms or the natural laws of the stoics. To be sure, in its immense wealth and variety, greek philosophy also produced a heraclitus who discovered the dynamic mobilism of our universe and dialectical movement of all things. He showed us that “+++” that war, in the sense of the strife of opposites, is the father and king of all things. By showing us that +++ (Everything is flowing), that we cannot descend twice into the same river because new waters flow towards us; by showing that being is inseparable from this continuous movement of development and decay, from this endless alternation of creation and destruction, and that the opposites can maintain themselves only by the unity which envelops them and limits theme mutually; by theaching us all this, heraclitus gave modern philoshopy of history its most precious ideas and impulses. Hegel and marx were to draw from heraclitus’ thought into a philoshopy of history was only achieved twenty-three centuries after his death. In examining the reasons for the absence of a philosophy of history among the greeks, many thinkers ascribe the blame to the idea of the cycle, which dominated greek thought, even that of heraclitus. According to an ancient tradition – Sumerian and greek – there is a regularity in the changes of time which, after an always identical cycle, produces a recurrence of the same days, month, years and, with them, of the same events. This idea of an eternal return deprives event of their individual character. “aimez ce que jamaiz on ne verra deux fois” said Alfred de Vigny – love that which one will never see twice. The greek historian had this love, and therefore, there was greek history. But being under the domination of the idea of an eternal return, the greek philosopher din not believe in event which one whould never see twice. Therefore he did not create a philosophy of history. The idea of an eternal return deprives history of all significance and transforms it into a mechanical, unchangeable repetition of confused images of that which really exists: the one and the permanent which, as a typical feature of greek thought, is even to be found in heraclitus. However, the idea of the cycle alone does not explaint the absence of a philosophy of history among the greeks, for that idea is to be found also in some philosophers of history of the cristian era and of modern times, such as vico, croce, spengler, Toynbee. There is a difference between the greeks, on the one hand, and the cristians and moderns, on the other: for the majority of greek thinkers, matter was eternal, uncreated, whitout beginning or end, and the universe was without progress. Thus, time was for them free from any direction, from any privileged dimension, from any evolution towards an end. All this changed with the adoption by medieval philosophers of the Hebrew genesis. For the christian thinker, time is linear. It has a beginning: the creation of the world and adam. It has a central date: the birth of Christ. It moves towards an end: the last judgment. Since time is thus finite, all nation have to achieve their destiny between the creation of adam and the last judgment. With this, time acquires a one-way direction; it becomes irreversible and, therefore, precious, for, being finite, it must be used before it passes. With this idea of finiteness, the value of time is established – in other words, its historicity. Lucius annaeas Seneca, that great forerunner of Christianity, had already written to his friend Lucilius: “Omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est . . . . . . dum differtur, vita transcurrit . . . facergo, . . . quod facere te scribes, omnes horas complectere.” All things, lucilius, are foreign; time alone belongs to us . . . while you are postponing things, life flows away . . . therefore, do what you write you are doing: use every hour. As for modern thinkers, it was cannot-clausius’ second principle of thermodynamics which taught them the irreversibility of time. If entropy tends toward a maximum, if the amount of free energy diminishes constantly, there is a difference between “earlier” and “later”, and the historicity of time likewise becomes obvious. This argument has, however, sometimes been criticized. Some thinkers insisted that the second principle of thermodynamics is only valid for certain parts of the universe considered as closed systems. Consequently, it does not state anything about the unique character of the history of the world in its totality nor about the history of one of its parts, since neither of them is a closed system. It has also been objected that it is not possible to use the entropy law to define the forward direction of time, for, if we declare that, of two given entropy states, the state of greater entropy will be said to be “later” than the state of smaller entropy, then we have only stated a tautology. It would be wrong to suppose that modern science favors a linear conception of time which is opposed to the cyclic conception of the greeks. Professor godel has shown that there exist solutions of einstein’s field equations which yield closed time-like world lines, thus making time cyclic in the large. A recent hypothesis seems to accentuate the cyclic character of cosmic time. According to this assumption, the unverse is comparable to a breathing organism: the expanding universe in which we live would be followed by a phase of contraction, and this alternation of expansion and contraction would go on and on. Time would thus run in alternating cycles. But even if this hypotesis is valid – it is in fact, rejected by some leading astrophysicists – the cyclic character of cosmic time which it implies will not affect the linear character of our historical time. The reason is that our historical, telluric time will have ended long before the beginning of the hypotetical opposite time sector of a contracting universe. History means to us only the evolution of mankind on this earth or in its immediate neighborhood – if we take into account the possibility of space flight. According to recent computations, the end of this history must occur in about six billion years. At that time twelve percent off the sun’s hydrogen supply will have been converted into helium, and astrophysicists know that beyond this limit a star must lose its stability. The sun will then expand, brighten, and drive the earth’s temperature first above the boiling point of water, then beyond the melting point of lead, up to 800 degrees centigrade. At is maximum size, the ageing sun will have thirty times its present radius, burn up its fuel at a tremendous rate and rapidly exhaust its hydrogen supply. But, to man, this will be no longer of any practical consequence, because, a long time before, organic life will have ended on earth, the oceans will have boiled away, and our civilizations, with all their treasures, will have been turned into ashes. This end of history will look quite different from the picture painted in saint augustine’s description of the “eternal Sunday”. It will much more resemble the greek myth of phaeton, son of helios, who yoked his father’s sun-chariot and, unable to drive it along the course taken by his father, scorched and burned up everything which was on the earth. Thus, contemporary astrophysics makes us realize the finiteness of our telluric, historical time, and its linear character. To be sure, the irreversibility of thermodynamic processes which gives time its direction depends on an interpretation of statistics and, therefore, is in the realm of probability. It is only extremely probable that energy will run down toward a state of uniform temperature, and it is not impossible that, from a certaint moment on, energy will run up again. Such a shift would also mean a change in the direction of time to the other way round. But, although this is a theoretical possibility, envisaged by boltzmann, its probability is so small that the philosophy of history may ignore it. Tulisan ini Saya kutip langsung dari Buku Dosen Saya dalam study Filsafat Sejarah.