VIII DISTINCTION (SPECIAL HISTORIES) AND DIVISION

The conception of history that we have reached—namely, that which has not its documents outside itself, but in itself, which has not its final and causal explanation outside itself, but within itself, which has not philosophy outside itself, but coincides with philosophy, which has not the reason for its definite form and rhythm outside itself, but within itself—identifies history with the act of thought itself, which is always philosophy and history together. And with this it debarrasses it of the props and plasters applied to it as though to an invalid in need of external assistance. For they really did produce an infirmity through their very insistence in first imagining and then treating a non-existent infirmity.

Doubtless the autonomy thus attained is a great advantage; but at first sight it is not free from a grave objection. When all the fallacious distinctions formerly believed in have been cancelled, it seems that nothing remains for history as an act of thought but the immediate consciousness of the individual-universal, in which all distinctions are submerged and lost. And this is mysticism, which is admirably adapted for feeling oneself at unity with God, but is not adapted for thinking the world nor for acting in the world.

Nor does it seem useful to add that unity with God does not exclude consciousness of diversity, of change, of becoming. For it can be objected that consciousness[Pg 118] of diversity either derives from the individual and intuitive element, and in this case it is incomprehensible how such an element can subsist in its proper form of intuition, in thought, which always universalizes; or if it is said to be the result of the act of thought itself, then the distinction, believed to have been abolished, reappears in a strengthened form, and the asserted indistinct simplicity of thought remains shaken. A mysticism which should insist upon particularity and diversity, a historical mysticism, in fact, would be a contradiction in terms, for mysticism is unhistorical and anti-historical by its very nature.

But these objections retain their validity precisely when the act of thought is conceived in the mystical manner—that is to say, not as an act of thought, but as something negative, the simple result of the negation by reason of empirical distinctions, which certainly leaves thought free of illusions, but not yet truly full of itself. To sum up, mysticism, which is a violent reaction from naturalism and transcendency, yet retains traces of what it has denied, because it is incapable of substituting anything for it, and thus maintains its presence, in however negative a manner. But the really efficacious negation of empiricism and transcendency, their positive negation, is brought about not by means of mysticism, but of idealism; not in the immediate, but in the mediated consciousness; not in indistinct unity, but in the unity that is distinction, and as such truly thought.

The act of thought is the consciousness of the spirit that is consciousness; and therefore that act is auto-consciousness. And auto-consciousness implies distinction in unity, distinction between subject and object, theory and practice, thought and will, universal and[Pg 119] particular, imagination and intellect, utility and morality, or however these distinctions of and in unity are formulated, and whatever may be the historical forms and denominations which the eternal system of distinctions, perennis philosophia, may assume. To think is to judge, and to judge is to distinguish while unifying, in which the distinguishing is not less real than the unifying, and the unifying than the distinguishing—that is to say, they are real, not as two diverse realities, but as one reality, which is dialectical unity (whether it be called unity or distinction).

The first consequence to be drawn from this conception of the spirit and of thought is that when empirical distinctions have been overthrown history does not fall into the indistinct; when the will-o'-the-wisps have been extinguished, darkness does not supervene, because the light of the distinction is to be found in history itself. History is thought by judging it, with that judgment which is not, as we have shown, the evaluation of sentiments, but the intrinsic knowledge of facts. And here its unity with philosophy is all the more evident, because the better philosophy penetrates and refines its distinctions, the better it penetrates the particular; and the closer its embrace of the particular, the closer its possession of its own proper conceptions. Philosophy and historiography progress together, indissolubly united.

Another consequence to be deduced from the above, and one which will perhaps seem to be more clearly connected with the practice of historiography, is the refutation of the false idea of a general history, superior to special histories. This has been called a history of histories, and is supposed to be true and proper history, having beneath it political, economic, and institutional[Pg 120] histories, moral history or the history of the sentiments and ethical ideals, the history of poetry and art, the history of thought and of philosophy. But were this so, a dualism would arise, with the usual result of every dualism, that each one of the two terms, having been ill distinguished, reveals itself as empty. In this case, either general history shows itself to be empty, having nothing to do when the special histories have accomplished their work, or particular histories do so, when they fail even to pick up the crumbs of the banquet, all of which has been voraciously devoured by the other. Sometimes recourse is had to a feeble expedient, and to general history is accorded the treatment of one of the subjects of the special histories, the latter being then grouped apart from that. Of this arrangement the best that can be said is that it is purely verbal and does not designate a logical distinction and opposition, and the worst that can happen is that a real value should be attributed to it, because in this case a fantastic hierarchy is established, which makes it impossible to understand the genuine development of the facts. And there is practically no special history that has not been promoted to be a general history, now as political or social history, to which those of literature, art, philosophy, religion, and the lesser sides of life should supply an appendix; now as history of the ideas or progress of the mind, where social history and all the others are placed in the second line; now as economic history, where all the others are looked upon as histories or chronicles of 'superstructures' derived from economic development in an illusory manner, while the former is held to have developed in some mysterious way by means of unknown powers, without thought and will, or producing thought and will, in fancies and velleities, like so many bubbles[Pg 121] on the surface of its course. We must be firm in maintaining against the theory of general history that there does not exist anything real but special histories, because thought thinks facts to the extent that it discerns a special aspect of them, and only and always constructs histories of ideas, of imaginations, of political actions, of apostolates, and the like.

But it is equally just and advantageous to maintain the opposite thesis: that nothing exists but general history. In this way is refuted the false notion of the speciality of histories, understood as a juxtaposition of specialities. This fallacy is correctly noted by the critics in all histories which expose the various orders of facts one after the other as so many strata and (to employ the critics' word) compartments or little boxes, containing political history, industrial and commercial history, history of customs, religious history, history of literature and of art, and so on, under so many separate headings. These divisions are merely literary, they may possess some utility as such, but in the case under consideration they do not fulfil merely a literary function, but attempt that of historical understanding, and thereby give evidence of their defect, in thus presenting these histories as without relation between one another, not dialecticized, but aggregated. It is quite clear that history remains to be written after the writing of those histories in this disjointed manner. Abstract distinction and abstract unity are both equally misunderstandings of concrete distinction and concrete unity, which is relation.

And when the relation is not broken and history is thought in the concrete, it is seen that to think one aspect is to think all the others at the same time. Thus it is impossible to understand completely the doctrine, say, of a philosopher, without having to some extent recourse[Pg 122] to the personality of the man himself, and, by distinguishing the philosopher from the man, at the same time qualifying not only the philosopher but the man, and uniting these two distinct characteristics as a relation of life and philosophy. The same is to be said of the distinction between the philosopher as philosopher and as orator or artist, as subject to his private passions or as rising to the execution of his duty, and so on. This means that we cannot think the history of philosophy save as at the same time social, political, literary, religious, and ethical history, and so on. This is the source of the illusion that one in particular of these histories is the whole of them, or that that one from which a start is made, and which answers to the predilections and to the competence of the writer, is the foundation of all the others. It also explains why it is sometimes said that the 'history of philosophy' is also the 'philosophy of history,' or that 'social history' is the true 'history of philosophy,' and so on. A history of philosophy thoroughly thought out is truly the whole of history (and in like manner a history of literature or of any other form of the spirit), not because it annuls the other in itself, but because all the others are present in it. Hence the demand that historians shall acquire universal minds and a doctrine that shall also be in a way universal, and the hatred of specialist historians, pure philosophers, pure men of letters, pure politicians, or pure economists, who, owing precisely to their one-sidedness, fail even to understand the speciality that they claim to know in its purity, but possess only in skeleton form that is to say, in its abstractness.

And here a distinction becomes clear to us, with which it is impossible to dispense in thinking history: the distinction between form and matter, owing to which,[Pg 123] for example, we understand art by referring it to matter (emotions, sentiments, passions, etc.) to which the artist has given form; or philosophy by referring it to the facts which gave rise to the problems that the thinker formulated and solved, or the action of the politician by referring it to the aspirations and ideas with which he was faced, and which supplied the material he has shaped with genius, as an artist of practical life—that is to say, we understand these things by always distinguishing an external from an internal history, or an external history that is made into an internal history. This distinction of matter and form, of external and internal, would give rise again to the worst sort of dualism, would lead us to think of the pragmatical imagination of man who strives against his enemy nature, if it did not assume an altogether internal and dialectical meaning in its true conception. Because from what has been said it is easy to see that external and internal are not two realities or two forms of reality, but that external and internal, matter and form, both appear in turn as form in respect to one another, and this materialization of each to idealize itself in the other is the perpetual movement of the spirit as relation and circle: a circle that is progress just because neither of these forms has the privilege of functioning solely as form, and neither has the misfortune of functioning solely as matter. What is the matter of artistic and philosophical history? What is called social and moral history? And what is the matter of this history? Artistic and philosophical history. From this clearing up of the relation between matter and form, that false mode of history is refuted which sets facts on one side and ideas on the other, as two rival elements, and is therefore never able to pay its debt and show how ideas[Pg 124] are generated from facts and facts from ideas, because that generation must be conceived in its truth as a perpetually rendering vain of one of the elements in the unity of the other.

If history is based upon distinction (unity) and coincides with philosophy, the high importance that research into the autonomy of one or the other special history attains in historiographical development is perfectly comprehensible, but this is merely the reflection of philosophical research, and is often troubled and lacking in precision. All know what a powerful stimulus the new conception of imagination and art gave to the conception of history, and therefore also to mythology and religion, which were being developed with slowness and difficulty during the eighteenth to triumph at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is set down to the creation of the history of poetry and myth in the works of Vico in the first place and then of Herder and others, and of the history of the figurative arts in the works of Winckelmann and others. And to the clearer conception of philosophy, law, customs, and language is due their renewal in the respective historiographical fields, at the hands of Hegel, Savigny, and Humboldt, and other creators and improvers of history, celebrated on this account. This also explains why there has been so much dispute as to whether history should be described as history of the state or as history of culture, and as to whether the history of culture represents an original aspect beyond that of the state or greater than it, as to whether the progress narrated in history is only intellectual or also practical and moral, and so on. These discussions must be referred to the fundamental philosophical inquiry into the forms of the spirit, their distinction and relation,[Pg 125] and to the precise mode of relation of each one to the other.[1]

But although history distinguishes and unifies, it never divides—that is to say, separates; and the divisions of history which have been and are made do not originate otherwise than as the result of the same practical and abstractive process that we have seen break up the actuality of living history to collect and arrange the inert materials in the temporal scheme, rendered extrinsic. Histories already produced, and as such past, receive in this way titles (every thought is 'without title' in its actuality—that is to say, it has only itself for title), and each one is separated from the other, and all of them, thus separated, are classified under more or less general empirical conceptions, by means of classifications that more or less cross one another. We may admire copious lists of this sort in the books of methodologists, all of them proceeding, as is inevitable, according to one or the other of these general criteria: the criterion of the quality of the objects (histories of religions, customs, ideas, institutions, etc., etc.), and that of temporal-spatial arrangement (European, Asiatic, American, ancient, medieval, of modern times, of ancient Greece, of ancient Rome, of modern Greece, of the Rome of the Middle Ages, etc.); in conformity with the abstract procedure which, when dividing the concept, is led to posit on the one hand abstract forms of the spirit (objects) and on the other abstract intuitions (space and time). I shall not say that those titles and divisions are useless, nor even those tables, but shall limit myself to the' remark that the history of philosophy, of art, or of any other ideally distinct history, when understood as a definite book or discourse, becomes empirical for[Pg 126] the reason already given, that true distinction is ideal, and a discourse or a book in its concreteness contains not only distinction but unity and totality, and to look upon either as incorporating only one side of the real is arbitrary. And I shall also observe that as there are histories of philosophy and of art in the empirical sense, so also nothing forbids our talking in the same sense of a general history, separate from special histories, indeed even of a history of progress and one of decadence, of good and evil, of truth and error.

The confusion between division and distinction—that is to say, between the empirical consideration that breaks up history into special histories and the philosophical consideration which always unifies and distinguishes as it unifies—is the cause of errors analogous to those that we have seen to result from such a process. To this are due above all the many disquisitions on the 'problem' and on the 'limits' of this or that history or group of special histories empirically constituted. The problem does not exist, and the limits are impossible to assign because they are conventional, as is finally recognized with much trouble, and as could be recognized with much less trouble if a start were made, not from the periphery, but from the centre—that is to say, from gnoseological analysis. A graver error is the creation of an infinity of entia imaginationis, taken for metaphysical entities and forms of the spirit, and the pretension that arises from this of developing the history of abstractions as though they were so many forms of the spirit with independent lives of their own, whereas the spirit is one. Hence the innumerable otiose problems with fantastic solutions met with in historical books, which it is here unnecessary to record. Every one is now able to draw these obvious consequences for himself[Pg 127] and to make appropriate reflections concerning them. It is further obvious that the entia imaginations, in the same way as the 'choice' of facts, and the chronological schematization or dating of them, enter as a subsidiary element into any concrete exposition of historical thought, because the distinction of thinking and abstraction is an ideal distinction, which operates only in the unity of the spirit.

[1] See Appendix II.