Carlyle and the Mythology of the Hero in History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 04 December 2024 is the 229th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Carlyle (04 December 1795–05 February 1881), who was born in the village of Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, on this date in 1795.
Thomas Carlyle is not going to win many friends or influence many people in the twenty-first century, and in the twentieth century John Romer called him the barmiest of the Victorians, but he was a figure to reckon with in the nineteenth century. There is a story about Carlyle that reveals something about the man: Carlyle had lent his manuscript of The French Revolution to John Stuart Mill, and Mill’s housecleaner mistook the manuscript for trash and burned the whole thing. Carlyle didn’t despair. He didn’t follow the example Bishop Berkeley, who, when his manuscript of the sequel to A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge was lost, abandoned the project never to return to it. Carlyle said to Mill that it would be good for him to re-write the whole thing, which he did. There are few men who could respond with such goodwill to such a loss.
Among the most famous quotes from Carlyle is claim that the three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion. This is from his 1827 essay, “The State of German Literature.” The context is significant, since Carlyle says that it was the Germans who, “…gave to mankind the three great elements of modern civilisation, Gun-powder, Printing and the Protestant Religion…” Carlyle was responding to a 17th century French writer, Dominique Bouhours, and in this Franco-German rivalry over the origins of modern civilization, Carlyle surprisingly took the part of the Germans.
My personal favorite quote from Carlyle, which may or may not be a quote, as no one seems to have been able to find it in Carlyle, is the remark attributed to Carlyle by Carl Sagan as a response to looking up into the stars in the night sky: “A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. It they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.” If Carlyle said this, or anything like it, it is certainly one of the most curmudgeonly quotes in history. Recall that Kant said, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” How a man reacts to the splendor of the night sky says a great deal about his character, and indeed about his attitude to nature, and man’s place in nature. For Kant, the identification with self with both starry heavens above and moral law within was immediate; this was an expression of identity, and it is the familiar naturalistic identity of the contemporary world in which man is a naturalistic being in a naturalistic universe. Kant’s Enlightenment reflection on the stars is something we can all recognize, but Carlyle’s attributed quote, while readily understandable, and no less naturalistic than Kant, strikes us as unexpected; Carlyle can be as shocking as Nietzsche.
In these stories and quotes from Carlyle we can glimpse something of the man and his mind. His perspective was largely naturalistic, as I’ve already implied, and somewhat pessimistic. He had a great industry for work — his writing are voluminous but are little read today — with a firm grasp of the big picture, and he was himself perhaps the embodiment of the saying that one need not hope in order to do one’s work. Anyone whose unflagging industry involves rewriting an entire book lost to unfortunate circumstances is prepared to work regardless of the calamities of life.
The book that comes up time and again when Carlyle is mentioned is his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), which many take to be Carlyle’s definitive statement of his conception of history. It’s easy to dismiss this as a piece of vulgarity, an uncouth philosophy of history that places heroes front and center, and certainly no one today wants to be accused of hero-worship, but Carlyle needn’t be reduced to vulgar scope. Wilhelm Windelband framed Carlyle’s interest in heroes in a distinctive way that places Carlyle in a different light than that to which we are accustomed, placing him in a lineage that includes John Stuart Mill, Comte, and Henry Thomas Buckle:
“Here the proper sense of the antithesis is disclosed: on the one hand the life of the masses with the changes taking place conformably to general law — on the other hand the independent value of that which presents itself but once, and is determined within itself. In this respect the essence of the historical view of the world has been by no one so deeply apprehended, and so forcibly and warmly presented, as by Carlyle, who worked himself free from the philosophy of enlightenment by the assistance of the German idealism, and laboured unweariedly for the recognition of the archetypal and creative personalities of history — for the comprehension and veneration of ‘heroes’.” (A History of Philosophy: with especial Reference to the Formation and Development of its Problems and Conceptions, p. 654)
In my episode on Windelband I talked about how Windelband distinguished nomothetic sciences, which emphasize the lawlike and the universal, from the idiographic sciences, which emphasize the contingent and the particularisitic. History, Windelband argued, is an idiographic science, and what Windelband is saying in this passage is that Carlyle’s approach to heroism captures the idiographic dimension of history, while the nomothetic dimension of history is captured by general laws that hold good for the masses but not for the exceptional individual. In my episode on Henry Thomas Buckle, Carlyle’s younger contemporary whom Carlyle nevertheless outlived, I mentioned that, for Buckle, heroes are nothing in and of themselves, they merely an expression of their time. Carlyle, no less a Victorian than Buckle, gives us the antithetical view, that the times are an expression of the great men who have created them.
We can expand Carlyle’s conception of the hero in history by applying the concept of heroism beyond individuals, perhaps to institutions, for example. In my episode on Ferdinand Gregorovius I noted that in Gregorovius we can see the urban parallel to the great man theory of history, which I expressed such that the great city theory of history: Universal History, the history of what humanity has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Cities which have evolved here. I had adapted this from Carlyle, mutatis mutandis, where the original appears in the first paragraph of the first lecture of his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History:
“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”
We could also extend this idiographic treatment of history to singular ideas, which have often shaped great men and great institutions and great cities, though all of this takes place against a background of the regularly recurring incidents of life that can be described nomothetically — often must be described nomothetically, as most of the record of the regular business of life has been lost. We excavate this nomothetic record of the ordinary business of life with archaeological finds, but the books that describe social history only began to appear in historically recent times; of most of history, we are innocent of any record, save the archaeological record, of the non-heroic in history. So is it the heroic and the idiographic that is the substance of history, or the non-heroic and nomothetic that is the substance of history? Either claim could be defended, and it would be a worthwhile exercise to produce a rigorous argument on both sides of the question, since each position highlights a different aspect of history. I interpret Henri Pirenne’s conception of history to focus on that aspect that is the norm in human affairs, we Pirenne described:
“All historical construction — which amounts to saying all historical narrative — rests upon a postulate: that of the eternal identity of human nature. One cannot comprehend men’s actions at all unless one assumes in the beginning that their physical and moral beings have been at all periods what they are today. Past societies would remain unintelligible to us if the natural needs which they experienced and the psychical forces which stimulated them were qualitatively different from ours. How are the innumerable differences that humanity presents in time and space to be explained if one does not consider them as changing nuances of a reality which is in its essence always and everywhere the same?”
What Pirenne decribes in this passage from his paper “What are historians trying to do?” is all about the bulk of human life, which is neither exceptional nor heroic, but Pirenne does recognize the innumerable differences that humanity presents in space and time, and these innumerable differences perhaps describe a continuum that varies but little for the most part, but occasionally, for the exceptional individual or event, sharply diverges from the norm — but then returns again. We may contrast this conception of history to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s formulation of history as purposive movement:
“…history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped; or shall I seek to avoid the indignation of the medievalists by saying, from which it has changed?” (The Rise of Christian Europe, page 9)
Purposive movement in history requires a catalyst, and a great man, or a great institution, or a great city, or a great idea can be the catalyst that provides the directionality for purposive movement. And just as we can observe in relation to Pirenne that, even we history departs from the norm in the person of the hero, it nevertheless returns to the norm, in relation to Trevor-Roper and purposive movement we can observe that the result of purposive movement in history is to shift even the bulk or ordinary life toward to new modus vivendi, so that it is not precisely the same norm to which we return following a singular and transformative moment in history, but to some “new normal” that has been conditioned by the new presence in history.
I said earlier that Carlyle’s conception of history is naturalistic, and for me one of the most interesting aspects of Carlyle’s implicit naturalism is to be found in his 1830 essay “On History,” in which he presents a comprehensive vision of history as the unification of the present with the whole future and the whole past:
“History, as it lies at the root of all science, is… the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought. It is a looking both before and after; as, indeed, the coming Time already waits, unseen, yet definitely shaped, predetermined and inevitable, in the Time come; and only by the combination of both is the meaning of either completed. The Sibylline Books, though old, are not the oldest. Some nations have prophecy, some have not: but of all mankind, there is no tribe so rude that it has not attempted History, though several have not arithmetic enough to count Five. History has been written with quipo-threads, with feather-pictures, with wampum-belts; still oftener with earth-mounds and monumental stone-heaps, whether as pyramid or cairn; for the Celt and the Copt, the Red man as well as the White, lives between two eternities, and warring against Oblivion, he would fain unite himself in clear conscious relation, as in dim unconscious relation he is already united, with the whole Future, and the whole Past.”
Here Carlyle recognizes history as the root of all science and as embodying human spiritual aspirations. It may be that this mixture of nascent scientific knowledge and spiritual aspiration has been, in part, responsible for history not having yet achieved a fully scientific form: it still has too much of human, all-too-human aspiration in it to be a value-free scientific inquiry, as Max Weber would have it, and as would be required by a rigorous naturalism. And we have countless examples of how this spiritual aspiration has been perverted and betrayed, making history serve ignoble ends, but the same can be said of science, of any science or the whole of science. We haven’t given up on science, despite its failings, and perhaps we shouldn’t give up on history as a distinctive admixture of knowledge and aspiration, despite its equal if not greater failings.
Carlyle is, as I said, primarily naturalistic in his outlook, even if not rigorously so, but by centering history on heroes, he brings back history to its mythological origins, even if he recognizes that history is the foundation of the sciences. We can’t very well talk about heroes without recognizing that heroes are figures of mythology, and any history that centers on heroes is, at least in art, a mythological account. Spengler is another philosopher of history who is primarily naturalistic in his thinking, notwithstanding his many idealistic accents round the edges, but for whom the hero and other mythological elements are vitally present, because the mythological dimension of history is part of the incommensurable particularism that marks off one culture from another. While there may be a monomyth of the hero, which was Joseph Campbell’s argument, the monomyth is schematic, while particular heroes like Theseus, Aeneas, Arjuna, Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, or steady old Väinämöinen in the Kalevala, are interesting because they are unique. This naturally grows out of the idiographic imperative implied by taking great individuals as the motive forces behind history.
Heroes are individuals; they have individual personalities, and this is one of the things that makes them interesting. Heroes aren’t merely heroes, but also examples to be emulated. Heroes not only shape history, they also shape later individuals who aspire to shape history. I talked about this in my episode on exemplary history. A hero echoes down through time, making further heroes, who make history in their turn, so that history itself echoes down through history.