Raymond Aron on Tyrannical and Aimless History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Thursday 14 March 2024 is the 119th anniversary of the birth of Raymond Aron (14 March 1905–17 October 1983), who was born in Paris on this date in 1905.
Aron’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity (originally published in French in 1938, revised edition 1948, English translation 1961) has been praised as among the best books on philosophy of history. His memoirs don’t say much about the conception or the writing of the book, but Aron provides an interesting contrast between listening to the lectures of Kojève on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and what he himself was working on:
“Kojève began by translating a few lines of the Phenomenology, heavily emphasizing certain words, then he spoke, without notes, never stumbling over a word, in an impeccable French to which his Slavic accent added a certain originality and charm. He fascinated an audience of superintellectuals inclined toward doubt or criticism. Why? His talent, his dialectical virtuosity had something to do with it. I do not know whether the speaker’s art remains intact in the book that records the last year of the course, but that art, which had nothing to do with eloquence, was intimately connected with his subject and his personality. The subject was both world history and the Phenomenology. The latter shed light on the former. Everything took on meaning. Even those who were suspicious of historical providence, who suspected the artifice behind the art, did not resist the magician; at the moment, the intelligibility he conferred on the time and on events was enough of a proof.”
Even though Aron was clearly taken by Kojève’s presentation, he wasn’t converted. He goes on to write:
“The distance was immense between what I tried to think and to write in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History and what was taught by Kojève (or Hegel).”
If Aron’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History wasn’t straight-forwardly Hegelian or phenomenological, what as it? In other episodes I have characterized this book as an early instance of analytical philosophy of history, and, in some senses it was that. George Simmel’s The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay was published much earlier, in 1892, and Rickert’s The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences is from 1902, although Rickert’s book isn’t usually classed as analytical philosophy of history, since it belongs to the tradition of Windelband and Dilthey. Rickert was analytical in practice, but his theoretical motivations were derived from Neo-Kantian, and Aron was as keen to transcend Neo-Kantianism as he was keen to transcend Hegelianism. Aron attributed to Rickert “a neo-Kantian framework that was all-encompassing.” As we’ll see, all of them — Simmel, Rickert, Dilthey — influenced Aron, but he didn’t pick up the torch where any of them laid it down.
Aron also wrote Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, originally published in 1976, with the English translation in 1983. These two books, the Introduction and Clausewitz, are what is available in English translation of his philosophical reflection on history, but Aron also wrote Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine. La philosophie critique de l’histoire (1938) and Dimensions de la conscience historique (1961). Neither of these have been translated into English.
When Aron received his doctorate, and up until 1968, it was a requirement for the candidate to write both a thesis and a complementary theses. Introduction to the Philosophy of History was Aron’s main thesis, and Critical Philosophy of History was his secondary thesis. Georges Canguilhem cites Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine. La philosophie critique de l’histoire (1938) as beginning with the claim:
“The traditional philosophy of history finds its fulfillment in Hegel’s system. Modern philosophy of history begins with the rejection of Hegelianism.”
This is a point that I have made many times already, though not as elegantly as Aron does so, as being a motivating force in twentieth century philosophy of history. The rejection of Hegel also defines the thrust of Aron’s historical thought, which almost entirely sets aside Hegel. In his memoirs Aron sketches the content of Critical Philosophy of History (La philosophie critique de l’histoire):
“The Critical Philosophy of History grouped together, for purposes of analysis, four writers: Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Heinrich Rickert, and Max Weber. Was this assemblage artificial, arbitrary, or justified by the resemblance of their approaches, the relations among the questions they posed? Wilhelm Dilthey, born two years after the death of Hegel, belonged to a different generation from that of the three others, who were born around 1860 (1858, 1863, and 1864, respectively); none of the four had devoted his life or his entire oeuvre to the question I posed to that work. Wilhelm Dilthey was a historian before ‘criticizing’ his own profession. Simmel’s Geschichtsphilosophie occupies a modest place in his work. The great work by Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, although it is probably the best known of his books, was contained within a neo-Kantian framework that was all-encompassing, and within which the antithesis between the two kinds of science was only a small part. Finally, Max Weber, although he was always concerned with the methods of his knowledge as well as his knowledge itself, owes his fame to his work as a sociologist.”
While I haven’t yet been able to obtain the French texts of either of these books, I found several reviews of Dimensions de la conscience historique in French, one especially interesting by H. Rossire that examines Aron’s philosophy of history from a phenomenological perspective, but he also credits Aron with a pluralistic conception of history — and this is the first time I have seen this phrase, i.e., pluralistic conception of history, explicitly formulated. Rossire quotes Aron as saying,
“Tyrannical and aimless history, without global unity but with partial unities, such is the dogmatic philosophy of pluralism which weighs on our historical consciousness. There would be no total whole, nor any meaning at all.”
And Rossire comments on this:
“…when he speaks of ‘tyrannical and aimless history,’ he is undoubtedly guided by the desire to free historical research from philosophical presuppositions which, often implicitly, influence the historian’s conclusions.”
This connects the phenomenological theme of freedom from presuppositions, which I discussed in the episode on Ludwig Landgrebe, to the post-Hegelian conception of history in Aron that Rossire calls pluralist, and which I would call naturalistic. And there was a limited phenomenological influence on Aron’s thought, as is evident from the earlier quote from Aron’s memoirs. It seems to have been Aron that made Sartre aware of phenomenology. Elsewhere in his memoirs he mentions conversations with Sartre and Beauvoir, “I spoke to Sartre about Husserl and awakened in him a feverish curiosity.” And Aron says that “In studying phenomenology, I too experienced a kind of liberation from my neo-Kantian training.”
I mention the books not available in English — and I hope that this other works on philosophy of history will eventually be translated — to make the point that Aron’s translated book on philosophy of history did not appear in a vacuum, and that Aron continued to write on philosophy of history throughout his life. Understanding history seems to have been something of a passion and a mission for Aron. A paper by Perrine Simon-Nahum states:
“History was at his life’s center. Above all else, the notion of history provided a framework for a philosophy that turned its back on the idealism of the preceding philosophical generation. Instead, it sought to rethink the inscription of the individual in the historical world in light of the tension between freedom and determinism.” (“Raymond Aron and the Notion of History: Taking Part in History”)
Aron’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity, as it indicates in the title, is putatively concerned with objectivity in history. I previously discussed the problem of historical objectivity in my episode on George Trevelyan. Aron’s book-length study of historical objectivity takes us much deeper into the problem, and from an explicitly philosophical perspective, whereas Trevelyan was writing as a working historian. Trevelyan makes a salient remark on bias in terms of the historian’s selection of his topic. This is an important observation, but it is only one of the many senses that have been attached to the idea of objectivity as it relates to history. Aron identifies three limits of objectivity, which in turn suggest three forms of objectivity that observe these limits:
“The idea of limits of objectivity may be understood in three different ways. Either scientific propositions, beyond a certain extension, are no longer universally acceptable; or they are hypothetically objective, subject to a certain arbitrary selection verified by experiment; or, finally, all history is both objective and subjective according to the laws of logic and probability, but prejudiced in favour of an individual or a period which for that very reason could not demand universal agreement. In other words, where does science stop? At what point does it break away from decisions alien to positivist knowledge? How are presuppositions and empirical research combined?”
Aron is working on essentially the same problem that preoccupied Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert — the relation of scientific method and scientific knowledge to human action, which is also action in the context of history. Aron helpfully tells us in the introduction that, “…the book is dominated by the two paragraphs which open Section II and by those which close section IV.” In the first two paragraphs of Section II we find the same problem in somewhat different terms:
“The science of the human past enjoys a unique privilege: it has to do with beings who have thought and whose life and conduct it wishes to rethink. Now there is good reason to distinguish between understanding, which attempts to show a relation immanent in reality, and the explanation of the inorganic or organic world. Man understands himself and he understands what he has created. Such, in short, is the basic distinction that we would propose between the two types of knowledge. However, we shall not have to use it; only the difference between understanding (grasp of an intelligibility objectively given) and causality (establishment of causal rules according to the regularity of series) will be important.” (p. 45)
This distinction between two kinds of knowledge Aron traces back to Dilthey, and he discusses the long tradition of a distinctive form of understanding that the Germans call Verstehen. Where we reach the limits of scientific objectivity, explanation in terms of causality ceases, and we have only the understanding to guide us; this is at once both a limit on (scientific) objectivity and a limit on causal explanation.
Section IV, also singled out by Aron, is titled “History and Truth” with the final subsection at the end of the book titled, “Historical Time and Freedom.” Here is part of that final section:
“Liberty, possible in theory, effective in and through practice, is never complete. The past of the individual limits the margin in which personal initiative is effective, the historical situation fixes the possibilities of political action. Choice and decision do not rise from obscurity; perhaps they are subject to the most elementary drives, in any case partially determined if they are referred to their antecedents.” (p. 347)
Earlier I quoted Aron on the aimlessness and pluralism of history. Here Aron references an incomplete liberty and partial determination. This is a philosophy that distances itself from absolutes, and deals in limitations, qualifications, and conditions. This is a much needed antidote for most of what we find in philosophy of history, and in fact it reminds me of a quote from Bertrand Russell, who held a similarly fragmentary and pluralistic view of the world:
“Academic philosophers, ever since the time of Parmenides, have believed that the world is a unity. This view has been taken over from them by clergymen and journalists, and its acceptance has been considered the touchstone of wisdom. The most fundamental of my intellectual beliefs is that this is rubbish. I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love.” (The Scientific Outlook)
I think that Aron had a similar view, and that his philosophy of history is an expression of a fragmented and pluralistic conception of the world, which for Aron becomes a conception of history. In light of this conception of history, Aron adds another location on the conceptual map of history that I mentioned in the episodes on J. G. A. Pocock and Friedrich von Schlegel, and this location is what Aron calls historical philosophy:
“…our book leads to a historical philosophy opposed to scientific rationalism as well as to positivism… This historical philosophy would make possible the understanding of actual consciousness, of the passions and conflicts which stir man, and of the historical ideas of which only an abstract transformation is given by the ideas of the moralists. Since it is a national or class philosophy, it would, in any case, be a political as well as a scientific philosophy, for the whole man is at once the philosopher and the subject matter of the philosophy.”
Aron suggests here that this historical philosophy is a kind of philosophical anthropology, and he goes on to define how exactly his historical philosophy is related to philosophy of history:
“This historical philosophy is also in a sense a philosophy of history, but only if one defines history not as a panoramic vision of man’s whole existence, but as an interpretation of present or past as linked to a philosophical concept of existence, or as a philosophical conception which recognises itself as inseparable from the epoch which it interprets and from the future which it foresees. In other words, the philosophy of history is an essential part of philosophy; it is at once both the introduction to it and its conclusion. It is the introduction, because one must understand history in order to think in terms of human destiny, at any or every time; and the conclusion because there is no understanding of development without a doctrine of man. If one conceived of philosophy according to the schema of the deductive theories, such a double nature would be contradictory, but it becomes intelligible in the context of the dialectic of life and mind which ends in self-realization of the being who places himself in history and measures himself by truth.”
Here we see wholeness recovered by way of the wholeness of the person; Aron’s philosophical anthropology supplies the unity that he denied to the world at large.
