A PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
By Miss R. BEDFORD, M.A.
(Head
of the Department of Philosophy,
The
Women's Christian College, Madras)
History
in terms of Philosophy may be described as the Biography of the Universal
Spirit. This Spirit may be likened to the seed of a tree which bears in itself
the complete nature of the tree. The seed in essence is not only the beginning
of the tree’s life, but is also the net result of its entire active existence.
So also, the Universal Spirit is the only eternal powerful essence which bears
in itself the whole long event called History. The essence is the constructive
principle in terms of which alone we can understand its total movement. History
then may be interpreted as the process or medium through which the Spirit knows
itself. In Hegel we find an echo of the wisdom of the Upanishads when he says:
‘History is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the
knowledge of that which it is potentially.’ ‘Itself is its own object of
attainment, and the sole aim of Spirit. This result it is, at which the process
of the world’s History has been continually aiming, and to which the sacrifices
that have ever and anon been laid on the vast altar of the earth, through the
long lapses of ages, have been offered. This is the only aim that sees itself
realised and fulfilled; the only pole of repose amidst the ceaseless change of
events and conditions, and the sole efficient principle that pervades them.
This final aim is God’s purpose with the world.’
The
essence actualised in terms of individual or particular acts, events and facts,
empires, heroes and martyrs, inventions, discoveries and laws is history in
ordinary parlance. Every monad in existence is but a summary of all events
past, present and future, the ultimate ground and premise of all knowledge. In
each the whole is in some way ideally contained, representative or perceptive
of the whole universe from its particular point of view. The ‘events’ are
phenomenal and external; and any history of events divorced from the essence
must necessarily conform to Napoleon’s definition of History ‘a fable agreed
upon’.
A philosophy of history is some theory of history as a whole. There have been several such theories. During the middle ages St. Augustine’s ‘City of God’ with its story of Sin and Salvation presented the first complete philosophy of history. The keynote was the idea of Providence, endowed with infinite power, displaying its guiding hand in the entire course of human history. During the eighteenth century the idea of Divine Providence was supplanted by the idea of intellectual progress, with the basic underlying principle, ‘Reason directs the world’. With Darwin and Spencer came the idea of Evolution. Hegel’s metaphysical theory views history as a Spiritual Evolution. According to Henri Bergson, it is a manifestation of the vital principle ‘Elan Vitale’, the driving force behind evolution, which drives it to take more and more complicated forms of expression, towards its goal of higher and yet higher efficiency. To Samuel Alexander, God is the impulse to advance through the various emergent levels of Space-Time, God being the creative emergence that is being born.
Philosophy today in the light of modern scientific knowledge witnesses a revival of Platonism. Plato analyses the world stuff as a featureless medium in which immaterial Forms or Ideas become manifest. Modern physics too analyses the world into a more or less featureless unknown flux, describable in terms of mathematical laws. To Plato the particulars which make our world of sensible things are only semi-real. The real world for him is the World of Forms or Ideas. A history of sensible things or ‘particulars’ ever changing and ever fleeting would be in Platonic language ‘mere opinion’ not knowledge. The Philosopher’s duty is clear. He must elevate the soul from the realm of opinion to the knowledge of Ideas. History properly interpreted then would be a more or less comprehensive knowledge of Ideas, the story of creation in the featureless flux, through progressive realisation of the likeness of Forms or their manifestation in it.
History
then is the evolution of the World-Spirit or Idea par excellence through the
medium of the world of sense. This World-Spirit would have itself adequately or
completely represented. The goal is complete identity. The identity aimed at is
not the identity of the fact but identity of the spirit. It is not the sensible
things that try to realise themselves, but the Universal Spirit which is ever
trying to realise its unique nature.
If
the Spirit is the cause of the being of sensible things and? is responsible for
all the qualities they are found to exhibit, the question may be raised, how is
it they rise, develop and decay Or in popular language we may ask, how do we
account for wars and pestilence, death and disease, ignorance and sin which
destroy, daily and hourly, seemingly innocent millions of men, women and
children? What of cultures, philosophies and religions, Museums, galleries and
libraries which flourish for a time and are not? The answer is, the
world-spirit is something like a potter who has the perfect idea of the perfect
pot in his head. The idea in itself will not give the pot; it must be realised
through some suitable medium. If the given medium does not lend itself to produce
a pot identical to the perfection aimed at, the potter would destroy the pot,
or the pot discarded and left to itself would die a natural death. The potter
aims at having his ideally perfect pot. He is prepared to repeat the process
endlessly, till in the actual the ideal is realised.
The
essence of spirit is freedom. A false or inadequate realisation is bondage. It
is the completely realised soul that is completely free. History is indeed the
biography of this Truth. Galsworthy’s Tatterdemalion portrays Alicia standing
before her exquisite masterpiece dashing her brush, dipped in Chinese white, in
huge smears across the picture. The explanation came in a quivering
voice, ‘It was blasphemy. That is all! Anything short of perfect identity in
spirit must ever be in one word ‘Blasphemy.’ Mortality, death and decay are
attributable to this imperfection. They pertain to the world of false
representations. The perfectly realised is beyond death and destruction.
Individuals and nations, whole races of men and things, rise and fall, die and
decay, but the Form lives on. What dies is the medium unfit for so glorious a
realisation.
Toynbee
in his ‘Study of History’ enumerates the breakdowns of no less than twenty-six
representative civillsations, of which sixteen are said to be already extinct
and nine others in a state of disintegration. According to Spengler
civilisations are born just as a human being is born and go through the same
succession of ages ending in death. Sir James Jeans in his ‘Eos’ says the human
race can be expected to survive for two thousand million years longer,
culminating in the ‘final eternal night’. While I am inclined to agree with him
that we are today, in terms of temporal history, ‘utterly inexperienced beings,
standing at the first flush of the dawn of civilisation’ the end cannot be
‘Eternal Night’ but: transcendent glorious Light.
It
was Shelley who wrote:
‘The
world is weary of the past,
Oh
might it die or at least rest.’
Civilisations
have come and gone. Their breakdowns have been termed ‘Failures’! In a highly
pessimistic mood one does feel ‘weary of the past’. But Tennyson’s view on the
question of ‘failures’ is more to the point:
‘That
men may rise on stepping stones of their
dead
selves to higher things.’
Toynbee
in making a survey of the Saviours of mankind records: ‘The first to fail were
the swordsmen, the next the archaists and futurists, the next the philosophers,
until only Gods were left in the running.’
Our
destiny is to build a City of God, to claim kinship with the Universal Spirit
and be identified with it. With Goethe one must have the spiritual insight to
say:
I
work the living mantle of God.’
What
constitutes the Temporal History of man is no doubt the work of the Earth-spirit
as he weaves and draws his threads on the loom of Time. Who can escape the
so-called ‘Elemental Rhythm,’ ‘the alternate beats of Yin and Yang’ which that
master historian so beautifully calls ‘Song of creation’. Creation and
destruction must indeed go together. The collision produced is not discord,
but, as he would have it, harmony. ‘Creation would not be creation if it did
not swallow up all things in itself, including its own opposite.’