Historical Time, Mind and Critical Philosophy of History

Abstract

Critical philosophy of history comprises a field of study much concerned with the problem of time and mind. The intimate relation between philosophy and history has given rise to a series of issues concerning the “territory of time.” The theme, the time and mind, has been treated from a variety of perspectives. Historically, it first received treatment from philosophers as part of the problem of the determination of the forms of thought, conceived in a way which continues to be regarded as the distinctively philosophical attitude to the question. Meanwhile, philosophies of history which interpret the historical process have reflected the centuries-old debate centering around the crucial issue: how do we know the past? At the turn of the twentieth century challenges to Newtonian physics, particularly to the notion of time as being “absolute,” contributed to the lively controversies concerning the nature of historical time and the epistemological status of historical knowledge. The controversy emerged in the 1880’s and became an active issue during the early decades of the twentieth century. Central to the issue has been the view that the point at which philosophy and history meet provides a comprehensive scheme within which historical data may be systematically analyzed and comprehended: the individual mind.

Time presupposes a view of time.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account of its past.

Johan Huizinga

Time is a discovery which is only made by thinking. We create it as an idea and do not begin until much later to suspect that we ourselves are Time, inasmuch as we live.

Oswald Spengler

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 411; Johan Huizinga, “A Definition of the Concept of History,” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 9; Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, ed. Helmut Wagner, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 1962), p. 77.