Varieties of Experience

Albert William Levi [1911-1918], Ph.D., University of Chicago, was the David May Distinguished University Professor of the Humanities at Washington University. Dr. Levi has taught previously at University of Chicago and abroad at the Universities of Graz, Zagreb, and Vienna. His major interests lie in the philosophy of the humanities and in the history of ideas.

The book Varieties of Experience was written by Albert William Levi. First edition was published by Ronald Press Company, New York in 1957.In this book he has selected articles of different scholars and philosophers on the subjects like Philosophy and the ways of knowing, Matter and Life, Mind and the Cosmos, Individual Decision, Social Living, The Arts, History, and Religion. He has selected articles from authors like Aristotle, Plato, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, Henri Bergson, G.W. Leibniz, Leo Tolstoi, Benedict Spinoza, George Berkeley, David Hume, Oswald Spengler, Karl R. Popper, A.N. Whitehead, John Dewey, Arthur Schopenhauer, George Santayana, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Morris R. Cohen, William James, Charles Sanders, Karl Pearson, Karl Marx, Alexander Meiklejohn and Paul Tillich. In the book he has included his explanations and comments about the articles. Following are extracts from his explanations about the subject of history.

History

All philosophizing about nature ends with some theory of the cosmos. All philosophizing about human experience ends with some theory about history. The one represents our attempt to unify the experiences of matter, life, and mind in terms of some wider doctrine of space. The other represents our attempt to unify the human experience of individual decision, social living, and the arts in terms of some wider doctrine of time…..

But is there a pattern in history taken as whole? Is it possible to say that there is some structure, or direction, or long-range trend which takes in all separate historical events and somehow gives them a unity and meaning? And if so what is the nature of this pattern or structure? To these questions there are several answers and these answers are the most influential alternative theories which the philosophy of history presents….. In a more sober language the alternatives are (1) a theory of progress with this achievable in two ways, (a) through evolution and (b) through revolution; (2) a theory of historical cycles, and (3) a theory which denies that there is any meaning to history at all.

The Theory of Progress

The theory of progress in history is the child of the eighteenth century but it grew into a real prominence in the nineteenth century and today it is perhaps the most commonly accepted of all of the philosophies of history. Its thesis is simple. It says that all historical change exhibits a direction and that that direction is toward the future. It says that the general course if change is in the direction of an increase of value, so that the present is better than the past, and the future will be better than the present. As the world continues, its value properties intensify. The question at once arises: What particular value properties? And of the world grows “better,” better in what sense? It is in answering this question that theories of progress divide into different theories of value…..

Kant’s Idea of a Universal History appeared in1784, and it summed up many ideas of progressive philosophy of history. The first and most important point is that history is purposive. History according to Kant, aims at unfolding to our view a regular stream of tendency. Even if, superficially, history seems but a senseless current of human actions, behind this lies an important natural purpose. Human nature contains certain seeds which finally bud and develop, so that in history one would expect to find a slow but steady development of certain aspects of our nature. And slow nations, as well as individuals, unconsciously follow the guidance of a great natural purpose….. [Kant and his immediate predecessor] find that what history expresses is not exactly God’s but nature’s purpose.

But in the case of society, what can nature’s ultimate purpose be? The answer is simple- an urge toward perfection. Thus history can be read as the unraveling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society. But does our experience support this conclusion? Do we see society growing more perfect before our very eyes? A little, says Kant. Civil liberty is growing. Restrictions upon individuals recede more and more. The enlightenment of men is increasing. There is something in the nature of things which seems to be preparing for a great world state.

Comte’s law of three stages, the passage from theology to metaphysics and on to science is a law which applies to all the intellectual products of the human mind and it is a law of progress. Comte therefore sees the historical evolution of mankind as based also upon this law. All history demonstrates the progressive enlightenment of the human mind, the process whereby religious superstition is left behind and scientific clarity takes its place. But to this doctrine of merely intellectual progress, Comte adds two others, a moral and a social. Selfishness is the primitive ethics and it slowly turns into altruism [the principle or practice of unselfish concern for or devotion to the welfare of others, opposed to egoitism] and love for humanity. And, in the same way warfare is the occupation of primitive society and it slowly turns into peace and the development of industry. There is something enormously comforting in Comte’s account of social progress, for it sees all disvalue in the past. Superstition, selfishness, war are slowly changing into science, altruism, and peaceful industry. It was certainly enormously comforting for the nineteenth century. The only question is: Is it true?

A very different theory of progress (which also originated in the nineteenth century) is that of Karl Marx….. The progress of Comte comes about through slow enlightenment within the mind; the progress of Marx comes about through violent action in society. And this is because while for Comte the greatest of values is enlightenment, for Marx it is freedom…..

It is surely not necessary to point out the defects in this [Karl Marx] theory; how it originated in the nineteenth century and could not foresee certain basic changes in society which the twentieth century was to bring; how it grew out of a European situation and was therefore totally inapplicable to the New World how above all it underestimated the degree to which different social classes could share the same values. But this criticism is out of place here for we are not considering Marxism as a social theory, but as a philosophy of history. But, needless to say, among large population groups it is a philosophy of history which is believed to be true. it a revolutionary variant of the old eighteenth-century doctrine of progress.

The Theory of Cycles

[The theory of progress] has been supplanted by a cyclical theory of which substitutes for the unity of history in the west a plurality of diverse cultures each with its own historic importance and its own problems. The two names associated with this new cyclical philosophy of history are the German Oswald Spengler, who died in the early years of the Hitler regime, and the Englishman Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee’s massiveA study of History (ten volumes) was completed only a few years ago. Spengler’s work, The Decline of the West, was published at the end of the First World War… But, despite this difference, the ideas underlying their work are very similar. Toynbee’s volumes are full of digressions [departure from central topic] and are very pedantic [too concerned with formal rules and details] in their scholarship; Spengler’s are repetitious and oracular [wise and prophetic]. But despite Toynbee’s great popularity and the recent neglect of Spengler, it is Spengler who has undoubtedly the more brilliant and original mind and it is to his version of the cyclical philosophy of history that we will turn.

The shift from viewing history as a single line of development to viewing it as a series of successive great cultures is partly due to the increasing cosmopolitanism of the modern world. When remote parts of the earth are no longer isolated, when we are newly aware of the teeming [extremely large number of people] population of China and India, it is no longer possible to neglect their historical antecedents [earlier happenings]… He declares that the traditional scheme of western history, ancient, mediaeval, modern, is nonsense… Like the Ptolemaic astronomy, [the limited and provincial view of history held by western Christian culture] takes the West as the center of the universe and sees all else as satellites of its central fixity. Such an historical perspective is childishly naïve [simplicity of nature]. But a true view of history would view each culture in its own terms. The eight cultures (Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Arabian, Aztec, Western) are the basic materials for Spenglerian history.

It is from this analogy that both Spengler’s pessimism and his ideas on the decline of the Western World spring. For like the individual, the destiny of any culture is that it will someday die. Spengler already sees the west in the early winter of its decline, with all creative art a thing of the past, its originality gone, living out its last days amid gigantic wars, enormous city populations, a materialistic and money-oriented point of view.

The important moment for any culture, according to Spengler, is the moment when its mature vitality turns into something fixed and rigid, when artistic intuition becomes systematic philosophy, when the relation of peoples to the land and the countryside is lost and populations are concentrated more and more in enormous cities. Spengler holds that the western world is now in such a phase. Whatever our beliefs about a progressive future, we are, thinks Spengler, doomed. No culture, however powerful and optimistic, can escape its inevitable decay.

After the optimistic hopes of the progressive philosophy of history the pessimistic conclusions of Spengler’s theory of cycles are somewhat dampening. But worse is to come. It is not only that the West is doomed, but that the system of values by which it lives cannot be granted validity beyond its own cultural boundaries. One of the ideas which has sustained philosophers in Western culture is the belief that the values of truth, goodness,, and beauty to which it adheres are not just prejudices of Western man but hold universally for all men at all times and places. The idea of beauty as harmonious proportion should hold for the Taj Mahal, the great temple at Peking, the Parthenon, the temple of Luxor, and Chartres Cathedral equally well. The idea of mutual respect among men should be as applicable to Buddhists, Confucians, and Mohammedans as to Christians… But in a sense this is just what Spengler does deny. For between the great cultures there is no real relation. Each culture has its own values and its own experiences and it talks a separate language which no other culture really understands. This means that the Western philosophers are wrong in their strivings toward historical unity. You cannot formulate categories for all mankind or a system of values which can hold universally. There is no plan or aim for “Mankind.” There is only the separateness of great historical entities and a complete relativity of values.

Historical Skepticism

Many [historians] have been unable to discern in history “a plot, a rhythm, a pre-determined pattern.” They are accustomed to seeing history as toward the end Macbeth saw life:

….It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The theory of historical skepticism denies that history has any pattern. And it denies this on two grounds; (1) that events simply happen and that any order which is discovered in them is not extracted from the facts but imposed upon the facts, and (2) that history is so much the record of “international crime and mass murder” that to find it orderly and moral is itself an act of the grossest immorality. These two arguments are combined in the work of Karl Popper.

If history has no meaning it is because “history” as most people speak of it simply does not exist. There is no history of the common life of mankind, no records of everyday existence passed on from generation to generation. The history that one learns in schools is the history of political power, of kings and queens, of generals and dictators, of wars and assassinations. It is the record of unjust taxation, brutal conquest, immoral annexation, war after war, in which the gains are a strip of land or a people bound in virtual slavery. And this history has perennial fascination precisely because men worship power.

History is not a work of art. It is not a play which God has written. It is a bloody tale which historians have written under the supervision of generals and dictators.

The result of Popper’s denial that history has a meaning is not complete skepticism, although it is skepticism about history. It does not deny values, although it denies that values naturally emerge from the pages of history. For unlike Hegel, Popper believes. Not that history is the judge, but that it is up to the individual to judge history. It remains the duty of statesmen to cure the evils of society and for teachers to stimulate an interest in values.

The philosophy of history is an interpretation of the passage of the human race through time. And, as such, it might be compared with the meditated course of any individual human life. A person viewing the long life of a friend recently dead might say of it: (1) “He grew constantly in wisdom and understanding as long as he lived”; or (2) “his whole life he repeated over and over again the same tragic mistake”; or (3) “there seems to have been no meaning and no purpose to his existence.” The first view is linear, the second cyclical, and the third skeptical.

The selection from Popper represents the view of historical skepticism which has been gaining ground among philosophers and historians alike.

[Following is the brief introduction of the authors of the article given in the book]

1. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Immanuel Kant, besides being one of the most original thinkers in modern philosophy, was also a typical product of the eighteenth century. He showed that century’s optimism and its faith in reason. Besides his interest in theory of knowledge and ethics, he was interested in social questions as well. Two of his little pamphlets in these fields have become classics, the Perpetual Peace and the Idea of a Universal History, from which the following selection is taken. In this essay Kant develops a theory of social progress, tries to identify a purposive element in history, and reads purpose as the slow approach to a perfect state of civil society.

2. Karl Marx (1813-1883)

Karl Marx, perhaps the most controversial figure of the nineteenth century, and the one who (for good or for evil) has perhaps had the profoundest effect upon the modern world was born in Treves, Germany. He studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin and began his career as a radical journalist. Finally forced to flee from Germany, he lived for a few years in Paris and the migrated to England where he died in 1883. The middle years of his life were spent in writing and in active political incitement, his last years in the writing of his scholarly and original Capital. His most famous pamphlet, TheCommunist Manifesto is reprinted in part as the following selection. In this work Marx puts forward his doctrine of the class struggle, of the inevitable decay of capitalist society, and of the progressive revolution which will lead to the ascendancy of the proletariat.

3. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)

Oswald Spengler was born in Germany and educated at Halle, Munich, and Berlin. He studied natural science, philosophy, and history and later taught in secondary schools until he retired to devote himself to writing. His great work, the Decline of the West, from which the following selection is taken, was published just after the First World War and brought his immediate fame. He received two calls to a university professorship, both of which he refused. He had hopes of being a spiritual leader in German politics, and it was believed at first that he would be sympathetic to Hitler. But this did not happen. He died three years later after the Nazis came to power. In this selection Spengler attacks the usual periodization of history, puts forward his theory of the succession of great cultures, and states his theory of the relativity of values.

4. Karl R. Popper (1902-1994 )

Karl Popper, an Austro British Philosopher was born in Vienna at the turn of the century and educated at the University of Vienna was Professor of Logic and Scientific Method at the University of London. His chief work is The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945, and it is from this work that the following selection is taken. In it Popper states the case for the belief that history has no meaning. His assumptions are positivistic, but unsympathetic to our giving a meaning to history, provided that we acknowledge ourselves rather than history as the source of value.