Ernst Troeltsch and the Overcoming of Historicism and Relativism
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 17 February 2024 is the 159th anniversary of the birth of Ernst Peter Wilhelm Troeltsch (17 February 1865–01 February 1923), who was born in Haunstetten, Germany on this date in 1865.
There were a number of nineteenth and twentieth century theologians who addressed the philosophy of history, with Troeltsch being one among them. Perhaps the best known case was Reinhold Niebuhr, since he was discussed in William’s Dray’s Philosophy of History and so is rather better known that Troeltsch among philosophers of history. Also, the way Troeltsch has been translated into English obscures his philosophical contribution. The volume translated as Christian Thought: Its History and Application Was titled in German Der Historismus und seine Überwindung and would be better translated as “Overcoming Historical Relativism” or “Overcoming Historicism.” For the philosopher, the latter two are much more revealing titles. We can understand why the publisher would do this, since Christian Thought would be much more likely to sell than Overcoming Historicism. Further, much of Troeltsch’s philosophically interesting work hasn’t been translated into English. The third volume of his collected writings Der Historismus und seine Probleme, the first book of which is “Das logische Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie.” I have the German text of this volume but no English translation.
The opening section of “Das logische Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie” is titled “On the reawakening of the philosophy of history,” and Troeltsch begins with the familiar theme of crisis:
“If one often hears talk today of a crisis in historical science, then it is less a crisis in the historical research of scholars and experts than in the historical thinking of people in general. The two have been very different for a long time.”
He goes on to describe the methods of contemporary history as “an almost exact science.” For Troeltsch, history as a discipline was doing great, developing into an almost exact science, but the historical thinking of people in general was in trouble. What does this mean, that historical thinking is in crisis? We can get a sense of this knowing that Troeltsch was a lifelong friend of sociologist Max Weber (two shared interests but had differing outlooks. Weber become famous for, among other things, what we now call the “disenchantment of the world” (“Entzauberung der Welt”), given exposition in his 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation” (“Wissenschaft als Beruf”):
“…there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather… one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.”
The disenchantment of the world had particular consequences for traditional religious belief, and a theologian like Troeltsch felt obligated to respond to this. Van Harvey, who discussed Troeltsch in his 1966 book The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief, wrote of the problems of faith and history, “…none has caused more consternation and anxiety in the breasts and minds of Christian believers than the application of critical historical methods to the New Testament and, especially, to the life of Jesus.” In my episode on David Strauss I discussed the application of the methods of textual criticism to Biblical texts, which made Strauss notorious in his day, and the target and attacks from all sides.
It is interesting to note that, at the same time traditional history, as an idiographic science, was calling into question the testimony of the Gospels on the basis of textual criticism and historical scholarship, natural history as nomothetic science was calling into question the larger cosmology within which the Gospels were embedded, so that whether science was understood as the idiographic description of the singular and particular, or as the nomothetic explanation of the general and universal, either way, salvation history was called into question. This is the crisis that Troeltsch tried to address — a crisis of history that is also a crisis of faith.
The mythology scholar Joseph Campbell often said in his lectures that the Christian tradition was an exception among religious traditions in its insistence upon the factuality of salvation history as a sequence of unique events that took place at a unique period of time and involving unique individuals. We should not be surprised, then, that Western civilization, with its distinctive focus on individualism, came to maturity specifically as Christendom. The soteriological and eschatological focus on unique and individual events and persons is a kind of theological reflection of the focus of profane Western history on unique and individual events and persons.
But the development of historical criticism and the historical sciences eventually called the details of salvation history into question. The rationalism that relentless drove this development could not be arbitrarily halted, as this rationalism, like individualism, is intrinsic to Western civilization. It was the historical sciences in particular that called into question the larger eschatological framework of popular belief that gave hope in the form of personal salvation in this life, particular judgment of the individual in the life to come, the beatific vision, the resurrection, the Millennium, and final judgment of humanity collectively.
If past salvation history can be criticized scientifically as David Strauss criticized the Gospels, and as natural scientists constructed a picture of the universe at odds with the mythic cosmos of traditional belief, then future salvation history is also called into question, and thus calls human hope into question. A general later in the literary modernism of T. S. Eliot this becomes a poignant if impotent form of faith:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
This was from “East Coker,” one of the Four Quartets, published in 1943, a generation after Troeltsch. Troeltsch’s own life, two generations after David Strauss, had seen these social forces represented by scientific rationalism accelerate. There is an anecdote that, at an 1896 conference, Troeltsch announced to those gathered, “Gentlemen, everything is tottering!” Somewhere I read that the old scholars were puzzled, but the younger men took note.
So Troeltsch had a problem on his hands, and he came at this question from the historical side, rather than from the theological side, formulating his own principles of historical criticism. Van A. Harvey, in The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (mentioned above), summarized Troeltsch’s historical criticism thus:
“Troeltsch… argued that critical historical inquiry rests on three interrelated principles: (1) the principle of criticism, by which he meant that our judgments about the past cannot simply be classified as true or false but must be seen as claiming only a greater or a lesser degree of probability and as always open to revision; (2) the principle of analogy, by which he meant that we are able to make such judgments of probability only if we presuppose that our own present experience is not radically dissimilar to the experience of past persons; and (3) the principle of correlation, by which he meant that the phenomena of man’s historical life are so related and interdependent that no radical change can take place at any one point in the historical nexus without effecting a change in all that immediately surrounds it. Historical explanation, therefore, necessarily takes the form of understanding an event in terms of its antecedents and consequences, and no event can be isolated from its historically conditioned time and space.”
If one holds a providential philosophy of history these principles would pose a serious problem, though not necessarily an insuperable problem. Raymond Aron, in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, implies that Troeltsch was tearing himself up over this problem. Of this rational-historical critique of religious revelation Aron writes:
“It may be that revelation falls under the attack of a rational critique, but it would be hard for a historical critique to attack it. How could a revelation have avoided borrowings from the past? How ought it to have been produced to be probable? How would an entirely human ethics give authority to evaluate religions whose truth is by definition transcendent and perhaps irrational? If Troeltsch insensibly moves from science, which is positivist by postulate, into a historical philosophy of religion, it is because his faith, stripped of all orthodoxy, implies the confusion to begin with.”
Aron moreover identified Troeltsch’s philosophy of history as a species of relativism:
“…relativism is always connected with a certain metaphysics. According to Troeltsch, the development of history is like the gradual revelation, throughout time, of an inaccessible God.”
In the same passage Aron contrasts Troeltsch’s metaphysics with those of Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim. I would like to discuss the relationship between Troeltsch and Mannheim, but my thoughts on this are still unclear, so suffice it to say that there are interesting similarities and contrasts between Troeltsch and Mannheim, and some day I may get to a further exposition of this.
Aron presents Troeltsch as if he were at wit’s end and his project a failure, but this strikes me as wrong, since Troeltsch explicitly took up the project of overcoming historicism and relativism. I think Aron’s interpretation of Troeltsch is the kind of mistake that we see so often with those who write about Nietzsche. Since Nietzsche wrote so much about the problem of nihilism he is sometimes mistakenly taken to be a representative of nihilism, despite the fact that his entire philosophical project was predicated upon the overcoming of nihilism. Similarly with Troeltsch: he wrote about the problems of historicism and relativism, but his whole project in philosophy of history was the overcoming of historicism and relativism. He makes this clear in his lectures “Ethics and the Philosophy of History”:
“Scepticism and relativism are only an apparently necessary consequence of modern intellectual conditions and of Historicism. They can be overcome by way of Ethics, and by way of the ideal forces emerging from history itself, which are only mirrored and concentrated in Ethics.”
Troeltsch also sees philosophy of history as central to his project. Crisis in Consciousness: The Thought of Ernst Troeltsch (1982) by Robert J. Rubanowice, documents the twin focus on ethics and philosophy of history:
“During the Berlin years Troeltsch turned explicitly to the themes of historicism and the philosophy of history… the philosophy of history became for him the ‘essential problem.’ He had lectured on questions of philosophy during his last five years at Heidelberg, but his full attention to philosophical matters awaited the move to Berlin, where in addition to his research, publications, and heightened political activities, Troeltsch taught courses in the philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, philosophy of culture, introduction to philosophy, ethics, and the history of philosophy. His most important single work in Berlin, written during his most mature period of scholarship, was the still untranslated Der Historismus und seine Probleme, a significant statement on the philosophy of history… It was in the creation of a viable philosophy of history that Troeltsch sought a solution for the contemporary European crisis in consciousness.”
Der Historismus und seine Probleme is volume three of the collected works mentioned earlier. In this volume, Troeltsch in Das logische Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie (“The Logical Problem of Philosophy of History”) writes:
“The philosophy of history is by no means a latecomer to science, a problem that was discovered only slowly, and which at least should have been present in the outline of science itself. Rather, it only came at the precise moment when it was needed, when the needs of the worldview demanded it. It is more a matter of worldview than of historical research, and the two only came together at the moment when the consideration of the essential spiritual goals required historical knowledge and when history demanded a fundamental classification in philosophical thinking. The need arose from both sides at the same moment and for the same reason. Cultural awareness demanded a confrontation with the changing of the great periods of culture, which became more and more known and obvious, and history demanded an answer to the question of unity, goal and meaning as soon as it had spread over sufficiently diverse areas. But both resulted from the break with the remnants of the Middle Ages and the Church, with the activity of a thinking bourgeoisie that saw a new era ahead and had to come to terms with the old times.”
Here philosophy of history appears as a kind of tool for mankind, a technology of history, and we come into possession of this tool for thinking when the historical moment is ripe — and the moment is ripe when we have experienced the convulsions of modernity and the expansion of historical knowledge that requires that we make a place for ourselves in this changed era of history in which we find ourselves today. We could call this a providentialism of reason, in which philosophy of history arrives on the scene precisely when it is needed. Hegel called this kind of serendipity the cunning of reason.
For Troeltsch it is ethics and philosophy of history that come together to overcome historicism and relativism. We find these themes again in Troeltsch’s article on historiography for the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, and published from 1908–1921. In the article Troeltsch identified three particular problems for problems for philosophy of history:
(1) The problem of finding a complete system of values
“…history is to be interpreted and evaluated by comparison with a system of values which it is the task of ethics to construct. Every single historical aggregate must, therefore, be judged by the measure of its approximation to this system, or to particular standards forming part of it. Whether that judgment is carried out with glowing personal emotion or with graphic and impressive imagery, it is always based upon such an objective system of values, of which the writer may be unaware, but whose validity he assumes.”
(2) The problem of metaphysical or ethical development
“…it must remain an open question whether this kind of development attains its end in the present life, or in a further progress of souls in a life beyond. Certainly experience does not support the former alternative. Similarly, as the system of values can be realized only approximately, and as the possibilities of an approximation are, for the individual so varied, his share in the final system must also remain an open question.”
(3) The problem of individuation
“…every historical phenomenon, viewed from the standpoint of the ethical philosophy of history, bears a double character; it is, on the one hand, a concrete manifestation of the Idea, having a relative right of its own, and, on the other, a mere approximation to the absolute system of values. In spite of all obstacles and defects, there obtains everywhere an individual and concrete progress towards the ideal. Final perfection itself, indeed, might be conceived of as simply the sum of the individual realizations of the Idea.”
Here’s how Troeltsch summarizes the entanglement of these problems:
“…each historical phenomenon is to be estimated by reference only to that degree of approximation to the Idea which is set before it and is possible to it. In this way every epoch has a relative justification, though it must, at the same time, be judged in the light of an absolute end. This shows the necessary relativity of the philosophy of history, and yet makes it possible that the relative shall appear to be included in the movement towards the absolute. The absolute in the relative, yet not fully and finally in it, but always pressing towards fresh forms of self-expression, and so effecting the mutual criticism of its relative individualizations — such is the last word of the philosophy of history. This implies, however, that in the writing of history and the description of historical phenomena — in spite of all appraisements by reference to final and absolute values — there still remains the concrete individual character of the objects dealt with, and there remains also the non-rationality of personal life, with its rightful claims in face of all the ideals of universal value that hover before the human mind.”
I think Troeltsch was trying to do something new, or, at least, something unfamiliar, but he didn’t complete the project, and no one else has seriously taken it up. In yesterday’s episode on George Trevelyan I discussed Trevelyan’s essay “Bias in History” and I said that moral bias in history has been pervasive, and that it has, effectively, called history into question, opening up history to skepticism through the abuse of moralizing history. But Trevelyan, like Lord Acton, carves out a special exception ror moral bias, not merely as something inevitable and unavoidable, but as the moral duty of the historian.
Moralizing history is all too familiar to us, but Troeltsch was suggesting something beyond moralizing history. I think he was trying to philosophically formalize the moral duty of the historian that Lord Acton and Trevelyan recognized and enunciated, but could not justify. This moral duty of the historian would also correspond to what W. H. Walsh called “a programme for providing a standard set of moral and metaphysical ideas” for the historian, and which Walsh thought to be extremely difficult or impossible.
