Journal of the History of Philosophy

The Intelligibility of History ABIGAIL L. ROSENTHAL WHAT MOTIVATES US TO ACT AS WE DO? Shall we say environment and heredity? But heredity is said to supply us with certain tendencies and capacities only. What, within the environment, shapes the course of development of these tendencies and capacities? Parental influence? What "influenced" parents? Their parents? How did a family line in the United States (say the family which, after several generations of prominence, finishes in suicide and schizophrenia in A Mingled Yarn ~Yale University Press, 1972]) come to transmit signals for behavior so different from the family's signals among the Siriono Indians of Bolivia? Is the answer, "cultural and historical differences"? If it is, then apparently the whole question is handed over to the social scientists. Nevertheless, what questions should social scientists ask of a culture? Who or what should they interrogate within it? What should they identify as an answer? If to be "scientific" is to be neutral as regards "values," then we may take it that the social scientist is doing his job when he (1) records the dicta of the interrogated culture from inside another, his own, without offering a preference between them on other than ad hoc grounds, or (2) records the dicta of a culture from inside it. A social scientist is then a member of one culture interrogating another, or a member of one culture who has, pursuant to his investigations, become a member of another. (See Tobias Schneebaum's Keep the River On Your Right, or Carlos Casteneda's Journey to Ixtlan 1for cases of the latter. In the eighteenth century this sort of thing was done in imagination--as in Gulliver--and by accident, in the twentieth century, in fact and deliberately.) The attempt to "understand" the environmental component of one's action has seemed to founder in the cultural relativism that social scientists, our main source for the understanding of such matters, take to be the proper, scientific attitude. But one wants to understand this component precisely to rise above relativism, if that were possible, and so to achieve for human self-understanding that "void" out of which social influences could be abstracted, as Galileo learned how to abstract the components of force and the pressure of air out of a given volume of space, measure each and read them back in.2 We cannot actually live outside culture, any more than as New York: Grove Press, 1969,and New York: Simonand Schuster, 1972,respectively. 2For a discussionofthe void'ssignificancein Galileo'ssolutionto the problemofmeasuringthe forces involvedin the motionof bodies,see Giorgiode Santillana, The Crime of Galileo(Chicagoand London: Universityof ChicagoPress, 1955),pp. 61-64.For thisreference I am indebtedto mycolleague,Professor MalcolmBrown,whoseknowledgeof Greek has also been most helpfulto me in mypreparation of this essay. [55] 56 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY physical beings we can live without air, but we can control our lives better by understanding , taking the measure of, the pressures in and by which we live. To do this, a non-relativist standpoint, some societal equivalent of Galileo's hypothetical void, seems to be required. Among philosophers, Hegel is conspicuous in claiming to be able to make entire cultures as well as human history intelligible, while avoiding relativism. He made that claim a significant part of his philosophic thought. However important the view was to Hegel, it was only one of his views. A defense of Hegel's views is necessarily extraHegelian in that Hegel defends his own views intra-systemically. What "defends" a single Hegelian argument is its coherence with the rest of the arguments in his system; what shows the adequacy of one Hegelian explanation is its ability to absorb the problem it has explained into the argumentative system, where a counterargument would fall short of the same absorption in his system. So while the view that cultures may be diagnosed and this diagnosis serve to make individual and human history intelligible is certainly Hegel's,3the defense of that view here offered is necessarily mine. I would like to show the truth and usefulness of a view whose truth and usefulness I learned from reading Hegel. If this defense cannot be a formal one, the...