22
PARTISAN REVIEW
animals is no longer merely that he has speech
(logon echon),
as
in the Aristotelian definition, or that he has reason, as in the medieval
definition
(animal rationale)
:
his
very life now distinguishes him,
the one thing that in the traditional definition he was supposed to
share with the animals. In the words of Droysen, who was perhaps
the most thoughtful of the nineteenth-century historians: "What
their species is for animals and plants . . . that is history for
human beings."
2
While it is obvious that our historical consciousness would never
have been possible without the rise of the secular realm to a new
dignity, it was not so obvious that the historical process would even–
tually be called upon to bestow the necessary new meaning and
significance upon men's deeds and sufferings on earth. And indeed,
at the beginning of the modern age everything pointed to an eleva–
tion of political action and political life, and the sixteenth and seven–
teenth centuries, so rich in new political philosophies, were still quite
unaware of any special emphasis on history as such. Their concern,
on the contrary, was to get rid of the past rather than to rehabilitate
the historical process. The distinguishing trait of Hobbes' philosophy
is his singleminded insistence on the future and the resulting tele–
ological interpretation of thought as well as of action. The con–
viction of the modern age that man can know only that which he
himself has made seems to be in accordance with a glorification of
action rather than with the basically contemplative attitude of the
historian and of historical consciousness in general. (Thus one of
the reasons for Hobbes' break with traditional philosophy was that
while all previous metaphysics had followed Aristotle in holding that
the
archai-the
inquiry into the first causes of everything that is–
comprises the chief task of philosophy, it was Hobbes' contention
that, on the contrary, the task of philosophy was to guide purposes
and aims and to establish a reasonable teleology of action. So im–
portant was this point to Hobbes that he insisted that animals too
are capable of discovering causes and that therefore this cannot be .
2 Joh. Gustav Droysen,
Historik
(1882 ) , paragr. 82:
"Was den Tieren,
den p,flan;:,en ihr Gattu.ngsbegriff- denn die Gattung ist, hina tou aei kai tau
theiou metechosin-das ist den Menschen die Geschichte."
The Greek quotation
is probably from Aristotle.
