8

FOR A DEFENSE OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

Beyond the Centaur

THE CORRECT QUESTION to ask a historian is not “What is the Enlightenment?” but rather “What was it?” We should ask what is it that we know about its significance in the history of Europe during the Ancien Régime. Conversely, the historian questioned should resist the disastrous temptation—for someone in this business—to think of the Enlightenment as a kind of philosophia perennis. That perspective risks making it impossible to distinguish with true intellectual honesty and philological rigor between the specific historical identity of the eighteenth-century phenomenon and its legacy in the following centuries, down to our own times.1

In fact, however, this kind of attitude is very common today, amid the prevailing confusion of languages and ideas, and the constant spin of political communication, which jumbles together in the most indiscriminate manner historical and philosophical questions, and radically different periods and events, simply in order to fuel public debate. Today we seem to forget that the questions and answers of historians are different from those asked by Kant on the subject of the Enlightenment, as he reflected, as a philosopher, on his own times. Nor are they the same as those posed by Hegel, who was concerned with creating an absolute foundation for the modern world, or by Marx, in his determination to find in history an ideological and philosophical continuum on which to found his political project for the emancipation of mankind.

It cannot be denied that in the past it was this very interweaving of history and philosophy—the phenomenon of the “Centaur” described in the first part of this book—that most contributed to the advancement of our knowledge, thanks to the powerful images it presented. Today, however, this way of thinking about history raises some concern, especially if it is not accompanied by a clear awareness of a phenomenon’s original premises and final objectives. That kind of blinkered vision leads more and more often to manipulations and misunderstandings, as in the case of the bold historico-theological reconstructions put in place by Benedict XVI on Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of Enlightenment. At other times it takes the form of a philosophical travesty of the history of the Enlightenment, which poses a significant risk, not least in an epistemological sense, to future historical research. This makes it imperative that we go beyond the current state of things to attempt clarifications and distinctions, insofar as possible, and that we uphold, humbly but firmly, the autonomy and prerogatives of historical knowledge in this field.

It should be noted straightaway that in the past the need to go beyond this dual way of thinking did not present itself with the same urgency as it does now. The double nature of the Hegelian Centaur was often interpreted with great wisdom and admirable results by many eminent historians, and without causing any problems. One need only mention how, in the study of the ancient world, some scholars have deemed it useful and legitimate to see the rationalism of the Greek sophists as an early enlightenment phase in Western thought. Eminent scholars like Momigliano and Droysen made use of this idea with critical intelligence and awareness, as they compared Voltaire’s anti-religious mentality with a similar stance in Xenophanes, or as they detected significant common traits between Hellenism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, to the point where the latter served as a model for the establishment of the former as a category.2 Finally, it is impossible to deny that much of the best twentieth-century historical research on the Enlightenment was conducted under the spell of the Centaur, and with very positive results.³ A few examples will suffice.

Carl Lotus Becker’s celebrated study, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), a foundational work for American historical scholarship on these issues, deliberately mixed together history and philosophy. Becker subscribed to Dilthey’s thesis of a basic continuity between the medieval Weltanschauung and that of the Enlightenment, seeing in the former an attempt to secularize Augustine’s City of God on the basis of a rationalistic outlook that was found to be substantially the same in Thomas Aquinas as in Voltaire. Among the works that carry out a philosophical critique of the Enlightenment along Hegelian lines, in the wake of Adorno and Horkheimer’s radicalization of Hegel’s theses, we find two important historical studies, both published in 1959: Lester G. Crocker’s An Age of Crisis, and Reinhart Koselleck’s ingenious though debatable Kritik und Krise, which until recently was still enjoying great international popularity.⁴ As a French literary historian, Crocker’s focus was on demonstrating the historical role played by the Enlightenment in bringing about the moral crisis of the modern world, within a perspective that saw the birth of nihilism and totalitarianism as the inevitable consequence of the philosophes’ attempt to emancipate man through man, while renouncing the idea of God as a fundamental philosophical premise.

Koselleck, on the other hand, was an expert in social and political history. His aim was to trace the beginnings of the modern world, and of the devastating political and social conflicts that afflict us to this day, back to the rise of critique as the exercise of reason and to its application in every field by European adherents of the Enlightenment, freemasons and literary figures alike. Arising in the period between two civil wars (the wars of religion that had ended in the seventeenth century and the French Revolution), the Enlightenment is depicted by the great German historian as dialectically intertwined with the rise of the absolute State. That crucial metamorphosis of the modern State was originally meant to ensure peace and security through repressive and disciplinary mechanisms. In the event, however, it aided the Enlightenment’s reaction against that State by attempting to separate morals and politics, and by reducing man to a subject and appropriating all private space devoted to the exercise of critique. This resulted in the dialectical rise in the Western world of a crucial historical phenomenon, which was identified by Marx as the autonomization of bourgeois civil society from the State, and which consisted in the widespread use of critique together with the practice of Masonic secrecy and set up oppositions between morals and politics, and between the rights of the individual and the interests of the absolute State. The critique had thus revealed itself to be an insidious weapon. It was originally intended to reassert the rights of morality over politics and to unveil the arcana juris that hid from view the drive towards domination on the part of the Church and individual sovereigns. However, according to Koselleck, through its own perverse internal logic, which was informed by the overriding need to achieve transparency and rationality by means of judgment and doubt, the practice of critique, “via counter-criticism, arrived at super-criticism, before finally declining into hypocrisy” of a moralistic kind.5 This negated the autonomy of the “political,” as theorized in the 1930s by Koselleck’s university tutor Carl Schmitt, and set in motion the current unstoppable crisis of the Western world, which is now incapable of escaping the state of permanent revolution and ideological civil war that was unleashed by the utopian theories of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, and by the French Revolution.

It is interesting to see how this pattern, based on the philosophy of spirit and on the study of the Enlightenment as a moment in the history of Western rationality, has continued to influence scholars whose research ostensibly has no link whatsoever with our Hegelian Centaur. These scholars seem determined to defend the Enlightenment against the accusations issued by the age of Restoration and by the Romantics in the wake of Hegel’s authoritative pronouncements. This applies, for instance, to a study by historian of ideas Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, which was published in two volumes subtitled The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966) and The Science of Freedom (1969). Born in Berlin, Gay had fled from Nazi Germany to the United States. In his introduction, he immediately reveals his debt to dialectical thought, as he identifies the moment of thesis with the “appeal to antiquity” contained in the works of the European Enlightenment, and the moment of antithesis with their “tension with Christianity.” The synthesis, on the other hand, consisted in their determined “pursuit of modernity.”6 Another and more important example is Ernst Cassirer’s now classical 1932 study, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung.⁷

Cassirer’s theses were widely accepted in the past and continue to exercise a significant influence on international Enlightenment scholarship. However, this is due to a disconcerting and persistent misunderstanding that accompanied the success of those theses from the very beginning. Cassirer’s dense study is as admired on the level of its civic engagement as its research is considered dubious and, nowadays, obsolete.⁸ He was concerned not with the nature and characteristics of the historical Enlightenment in general, but only with the new way in which it understood philosophy. His aim was, first and foremost, that of providing a modern version of the Centaur in Kantian terms, in open opposition to the negative pronouncements of Hegel and his followers on the European Enlightenment’s abstract “philosophy of reflection.” Cassirer states this quite clearly in his introduction. After linking his present book explicitly with some of his previous works on the history of philosophy, including his Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance,⁹ Cassirer indicates how “the movement to be described is not self-contained, but looks before and after beyond its own confines. It forms but a part and a special phase of that whole intellectual development through which modern philosophic thought gained its characteristic self-confidence and self-consciousness.” Both this study’s frame of reference and its approach to the history of philosophy, then, explicitly looked back to the traditional model of the Hegelian Centaur: “Such a presentation of philosophical doctrines and systems endeavors as it were to give a ‘phenomenology of the philosophic spirit’; it is an attempt to show how this spirit, struggling with purely objective problems, achieves clarity and depth in its understanding of its own nature and destiny, and of its own fundamental character and mission.”¹⁰

For Cassirer there was no doubt that the Enlightenment had created an entirely new form of philosophical thought, which was founded on the methods of the natural sciences and on the systematic use of scientific reason in every field. That made it meaningless to pursue original philosophical content, great new works of metaphysics and visions of the world according to traditional criteria. Cassirer replied to any accusations of superficiality, eclecticism, and a lack of speculative originality levied against eighteenth-century philosophers by stressing above all the value of their redefinition of the very identity and tasks of philosophy itself. For philosophy had now become a powerful tool for the analysis and transformation of reality via the articulation of knowledge, effecting a momentous shift from seventeenth-century esprit de système to a vibrant new esprit systématique.

The core of Cassirer’s reconstruction, and the fundamental thesis that would profoundly influence subsequent debates, resided in his firm declaration of faith in Kant and Newton’s scientific rationalism, in which he saw the decisive and unsurpassed manifestation of modern rationalism. This is why Cassirer completely turned on its head Hegel’s negative pronouncement on modern science, which Hegel saw as the ultimate basis for a “philosophy of reflection,” that is to say for the narcissism of the subject that looked at itself in the mirror, as embodied in the assumption that man and the methods of natural sciences ought to be the sole points of reference and truth criteria:

The philosophy of the eighteenth century takes up this particular case, the methodological pattern of Newton’s physics, though it immediately begins to generalize. It is not content to look upon analysis as the great intellectual tool of mathematico-physical knowledge; eighteenth century thought sees analysis rather as the necessary and indispensable instrument of all thinking in general. This view triumphs in the middle of the century. However much individual thinkers and schools differ in their results, they agree in this epistemological premise.11

Whether or not one is prepared to share these theses—which are in any case too schematic and reductive with respect to the real intellectual life of the European Enlightenment (more on this below)—Cassirer’s work eventually dominated the scene of international historiography and was at the center of harsh polemics. In Italy, Furio Diaz and Franco Venturi did not hesitate to distance themselves from it. They pointed out how in Cassirer’s analysis there was no reference to the general context, or to questions such as those relating to political economy, to reforms, or to government, which were all crucial factors in any correct definition of so complex a historical phenomenon. In his Cambridge Trevelyan Lectures of 1969, Venturi denounced the way in which “[f]rom Kant to Cassirer and beyond, our understanding of the European Enlightenment has been dominated by the philosophical interpretation of the German Aufklärung.” The only difference was that, among the numerous more or less conscious followers of that paradigm, Cassirer at least “was sincere and entitled his book Die Philosophie der Aufklärung.”12 Nevertheless, it is worth analyzing the contents of Venturi’s absolutely correct denunciation, in order to understand also the limitations preventing historians, both then and now, from really coming to terms with the foundations of the Centaur paradigm. The specific source of that denunciation was a problematical and empirical concept of historicism that could be traced back as far as Ranke, Droysen, and Meinecke, as opposed to so-called “absolute historicism.” The latter was a form of logical and providentialist historicism, of a kind that originated with Hegel and seemed to survive in isolated cases as far as Benedetto Croce’s late works, such as his History as Thought and Action.¹³ It also at times resurfaced in the writings of those who, like American historian Carl Lotus Becker, tended always to “fuse history and philosophy in the Enlightenment,”¹⁴ thus arbitrarily creating a “retrospective history” (4), tracing “history backwards in order to explain an idea or an event” (3), and (as in the case of Delio Cantimori and of Eugenio Garin) postulating the very existence of a kind of long Enlightenment, “from Petrarch to Rousseau” (5). Such scholars tend to forget that although philosophers “are tempted to push upstream until they arrive at the source,” historians “must tell us how the river made its way, among what obstacles and difficulties”; that is to say, they must respect the logic of the historical context and judge phenomena iuxta propria principia.

Venturi denounced in similar terms also the scholars engaged in the new social history of the Enlightenment, such as Daniel Roche, whom he accused of writing about history from an ideologized standpoint—“in the light of the writings and opinions of Marx, Engels and their school” (10)—on the links between the Enlightenment and bourgeois rationalism. These were serious accusations, and in fact rather ungenerous. It was not by chance that Venturi’s final target are the adherents of a French style of social history, with their “pretension of creating a total history, a vision of society as a global structure able to reveal its inner logic, the laws governing its own existence, if it is submitted to a suitable interpretative instrument, whether it be the class struggle, quantification or structuralism” (16). Ironically, these accusations reveal all the limitations and insuperable weaknesses of Venturi’s polemics against philosophers. Indeed, he never questions the main thesis of Cassirer’s book, that of the complete identification between the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the modern scientific rationalism of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Nor does he address in any significant way the vexata quaestio of the differences between historical knowledge, its foundations, and the modalities of philosophical knowledge in epistemological terms, even though that would have been the only really effective way to undermine the received wisdom and go finally beyond the paradigm of the Centaur.

Much has changed in the intervening half-century, but the clash between philosophers and historians is still with us. It has now taken a new form, however, and refers largely to different theoretical horizons and research questions. Whether we like it or not, the “postmodern” virus has left its mark, attacking previously solid organisms, creating widespread uncertainty and raising questions that should not be underestimated.

As we saw in part 1, the great challenge for historians of the Enlightenment today comes above all from the work of Michel Foucault. More specifically, it comes from Foucault’s attempt to revive the paradigm of the Centaur as “historico-philosophical practice” in the wake of the great German historiography of the Aufklärung. He focused on new and insidious themes that represent typical postmodern concerns, such as the subject, power, and above all truth, which is now unveiled in its quality as will to power, a rhetorical exercise that aims at domination, but remains devoid of all real knowledge. After Foucault, and more specifically after his frontal attack on the traditional way in which scholars following in the wake of Nietzsche and Heidegger view the Enlightenment, the issue that needs to be resolved if we are to go beyond the Centaur and emancipate historians from the philosophers’ claim to primacy in this field, is definitely that of upholding the epistemological status of historical knowledge. Obviously, this must be done without any great claims to a glorious past, but with the awareness that history is not in any way inferior to any other form of knowledge, and therefore has the potential to achieve original and autonomous results towards solving the historical problem of the Enlightenment.

As is well known, in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries historical knowledge and its cognitive foundations in European culture faced a huge challenge. The rapid spread of a new historical Pyrrhonism, more generally the so-called “crise pyrrhonienne,” had infiltrated many aspects of human knowledge.¹⁵ This attitude of total skepticism, which called into doubt the possibility of attaining any real form of knowledge, originated with the translation into Latin of the works of Sextus Empiricus in 1569, and spread across the Republic of Letters with the success of Montaigne’s Essais. It gathered momentum with the religious controversies between Catholics and Protestants, who were desperately in search of a truth criterion by which to distinguish between the tradition of the Church, the pope, and the Councils, on the one hand, and the sole authority of the Scriptures on the other. After affecting theologians, scientists, and jurists, eventually it called into question the authority of historians as well. This crisis revived ancient and disturbing questions, first asked by skeptic philosophers at Plato’s Academy during the third century BC: Could man reasonably aspire to the possession of truth? And if so, on what basis was this knowledge justified? Mabillon, Bayle, Huet, Le Clerc, Muratori were some of the protagonists of the debate on the validity and truth of the testimonies of the past, and more generally on the epistemological autonomy of history as a discipline.16 The heated debates on fides historica and the decisive role played by new auxiliary sciences, such as philology, diplomatics, and numismatics, that were supposed to validate historical evidence (or, as the saying went, historicis argumentis fidem faciunt), culminated in foundational texts such as J. M. Chladenius’s 1752 Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, in which it was the evidence of common sense grounding testimonies that defined the precise boundaries within which it was possible to ascertain the truth of past events from an epistemological and philosophical point of view.

Historians triumphed over the attack from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century skepticism thanks mainly to the work of antiquarians who for the first time provided the solid bases needed for the new critical-philological method that has come down to us through the later syntheses and analyses of such great scholars as Gibbon, Ranke, and Droysen. As Arnaldo Momigliano wrote, “Antiquarians rescued historians from skepticism, even though they were not writing history books. Their preference for original documents, their acumen in detecting forgeries, their expertise in collecting and classifying sources and, above all, their boundless love of culture are the antiquarians’ important contributions to the historians’ ‘ethics’.”¹⁷

In the last few decades the postmodern has posed another challenge to the work of the historian, one no less disturbing and insidious than that of seventeenth-century Pyrrhonism. This time, the issue was raised by supporters of the theory of the “linguistic turn,” or “rhetorical turn,” and by deconstructionists and relativists of all stamps.¹⁸ It is, fundamentally, a postmodern skeptical stance that recognizes only narrative or rhetorical dimensions in historiography and rejects any claim to truth-finding on its part, and it is currently flourishing. Moreover, dangerously, it is acquiring more and more credence worldwide, and for reasons that it is vital not to underestimate. In the first instance, there is a widespread desire to forget the horrors of our recent past, such as the Holocaust and the different varieties of totalitarianism, and with it an attendant temptation to relativize historical truth to the point where it is rendered meaningless and banal, all in the attempt to anesthetize painful memories. This has given rise to negationist and relativist currents, with the latter attitude reaching so extreme a nihilism that its proponents deny the existence of any kind of factual truth and perpetuate the law of the strongest, being once again inspired to see the will to power as the sole and ultimate truth and the explanation for the very essence of man. Nietzsche can perhaps be seen as the spiritual father of this—to historians rather worrying—new episode in the history of skepticism. As Carlo Ginzburg has shown, it was specifically a reflection by Nietzsche on truth and falsehood that in the 1970s inspired several exponents of the “linguistic turn.” The philosopher’s poignant remark deserves to be quoted in full:

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.19

Ginzburg has given a very effective reply to modern Pyrrhonists, in which he pointed out how the pursuit of truth already played an important role in the Aristotelian view of rhetoric, and then in the writings of Quintilian, Valla, and Maurini, and how the status of proof constituted the rational core of the original concept of rhetoric, which had subsequently been set aside in favor of the current reductive view of rhetoric as merely the art of argumentation.

There have also been other, no less important replies to the new postmodern skepticism’s stand against the idea of history as the pursuit and testimony of truth. Indeed, it is not enough simply to point out that a historian, while he or she can be considered a kind of rhetorician, is also expected to prove his or her argument. Furthermore, we must also realize that skepticism and relativism are not an absolute evil per se, and that they have always been at the origin of every serious reflection on truth over the course of the centuries. All in all, we should always keep in mind that there are different kinds of relativism, and different types of skepticism.²⁰ The moderate skepticism of thinkers like Gassendi, Descartes, and Hume is at the origin of modern philosophical thought. In the same way, there is a form of empirical and problematical historicism that is characterized by programmatic relativism, eschews any kind of nihilistic extremism, and has long existed alongside the modern concept of truth as daughter of time and within reach of human objectives and capabilities. This is the position adopted by all of the sciences. As Lessing used to say (though he remains as largely unheeded today as he was in his times), absolute and eternal truth pertains only to God.

A clear example of this stance is found in discussions of historical methods by Koselleck and Momigliano. Both authors acknowledge the inevitable coexistence, in the work of historians, of objective source criticism and their own subjective points of view, which themselves operate in history.²¹ There has always been some unease over the idea of historicism as, in Momigliano’s words, “the acknowledgement that each one of us sees past events from a certain point of view, or at least that our perspective is influenced by our individual and changeable collocation within history.” He also points out that, while “this is an uncomfortable view, because it implies the danger of relativism,” it does not in any way invalidate the cognitive status of historiography. In fact, all forms of knowledge are subject to the same condition, for the very reason that they are human constructs. What matters are the rules of the game within the discipline itself, i.e., the verifiability of all data and conclusions. “Like that of all common mortals, historians’ work is verifiable in so far as it is falsifiable: i.e., they can get it wrong and they can be shown to be wrong.” It follows that “since all we can do is study change from a changeable point of view, we might as well do it properly,” which means always searching for historical truth through a rigorous critical study of sources, elaborating new issues and models of analysis, and then verifying them with incontrovertible proof, always keeping in mind that “the inevitable corollary of historicism is the history of historiography, that is to say the awareness that historical issues have themselves a history.”22

Other eminent philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur, Hilary Putnam, and others, have also made important contributions, especially from an epistemological point of view, to the exploration of the conditions for a new critical realism of historical knowledge and of its legitimacy from the starting point of the rules of self-government that apply within the scientific community.²³ The outcome of this new search for objectivity, conducted against the new Pyrrhonists and in the context of rampant nihilism and strong skepticism towards the very idea of historical truth, seems to me to be well summarized in the peremptory and entirely welcome assertion by Roger Chartier, according to which “it is necessary to state with all our strength that history is ruled by the intention and principle of truth, that the past that it takes as its object is a reality that is external to its discourse, and that its knowledge is verifiable.”²⁴