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this, unjust on the other side of the Pyrenees." This simple skepticism
could not be attributed to Hegel without restrictions, but we read
philosophers not as they would like it, but rather as it pleases our time,
and it was Hegel who called our attention to that. According to this
reading, history is self-sufficient and self-supporting; it has no other on–
tological background; everything is historically immanent - every truth,
every validity, any kind of Reason.
So conceived, the so- called historicism turned inevitably against it–
self. To say that truth is historically relative, that nothing can be true
except with the qualification "in this or that epoch" amounts to saying
that there is no truth in the normal sense. Thus we no longer need any
history or historicist philosophy; the question about truth is simply done
away with. Nietzsche knew that; he also knew that he had drawn all the
consequences from God's death, and he wanted to compel us to face the
world as it is - without God, and thus without meaning, without good
and evil, without truth. For the next hundred years the European mind
was to live in the shadow of his nihilism. It is still with us, and it does
not need to express itself in the categories of so-called historicism; the
universal relativism suffices.
There was another side to the Hegelian heritage, though: the belief
in progress and in the consummation of history. The concept of progress,
however defined, necessarily implies that we have at our disposal
nonhistorical criteria or rules of evaluation, that they do not depend on
the actual course of events and that we are entitled, conformably to
those criteria, to say: The truth - Truth
tout court
and not a truth tied to
an historical period - grows or evolves or manifests itself better and bet–
ter in history; or to say: The essence of humanity unfolds and matures in
time. And the idea of the consummation of history suggests that at a
certain point the historical process reaches an absolute form - not in the
sense that Miss
Historia
became tired and gave up any further running, but
in the sense that she came to plenitude, to the perfect shape.
In
spite of his inexorable anti-utopian attitude, Hegel did believe in
an ultimate stage of the evolution of mankind. His anti-utopia was di–
rected against all freely concocted images of a perfect society, which
people repeatedly attempted to infer from moral principles, irrespective
of actual historical process; this criticism was reconcilable with the belief
in the fulfillment of history.
The most successful variant of historicism in our century - that is,
the Marxian philosophy - has inherited the tension between the belief in
the historically limited character of all truths and all ideas on one hand
and the anticipation of a final consummation of human calling on the
other. On the one side, according to this doctrine, there are no eternal
ideas; any creation of culture simply expresses in disguise actual interests of
