Ending Speculation
LEVITAS, IRVING
Ending Speculation THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY By Bruce Mazlish Harper and Row 484 pp. $10.95. Reviewed by IRVING LEVITAS Lecturer and Critic Dividing philosophies of history into the "speculative"...
...Let us hope so: Surely men will not be satisfied with waiting for the cake of analytic philosophy prepared by Hexter's experts...
...The analysis of Marx and Comte are so sociological they can be extrapolated as an introduction to sociology...
...Comte, in fact, actually coined the word "sociology...
...Both thought the morals of the day were reprehensible-in their eyes a reflection of "bigotry," meaning religious influence...
...Perhaps, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the report of death is exaggerated...
...Certainly, too, the attitudes of Voltaire and Condorcet toward the significance of morals and government deserve mention...
...Spengler and Toynbee receive the precise and thorough criticism they deserve as outstanding examples of speculative philosophy of history gone awry...
...And if the quasi-theological meanderings of a Toynbee are excepted, there is an element of a better-world hypothesis...
...The inclusion of Freud in this book may be surprising, as Mazlish himself indicates...
...This attitude is understandable in the light of the ambiguous treatment given seven of the 10 representative figures he cites...
...Better that philosophers do the speculating with some degree of calm and objectivity...
...Reviewed by IRVING LEVITAS Lecturer and Critic Dividing philosophies of history into the "speculative" and the "critical" (or analytic), Bruce Mazlish has written a book that is, in effect, a funeral sermon for the speculative tradition...
...Incidentally, the author's attempt to psychologize over Marx is odd: Why does only Marx receive this treatment in full...
...Indeed, since to each of these ages Vico attributed a particular type of language, he should also qualify for entrance into Mazlish's second pantheon-of linguistic analysis...
...Except for Voltaire, Spengler and Toynbee, his other "great speculators"-Vico, Condorcet, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Marx and Freud- were no less significant as founders of scientific sociology than as philosophers of history...
...Although Mazlish grants that the speculative approach has made men historically conscious, he would forgo any further speculative activities until the tools of linguistic analysis used in critical philosophies of history become sufficiently refined for general use...
...In perhaps his most sympathetic chapter, on Vico, Mazlish represents this Neopolitan as the progenitor of most of the general lines of the speculative school...
...But Mazlish does not mention Spinoza, who in the 1660s did exactly what he credits Hegel with doing 150 years later...
...A chronological listing of the great speculative philosophers of history will show that they lived at a time in which it was assumed that the human condition could be improved...
...In the specific area of philosophy of history, however, there can be no question of Vico's primary position, with his cyclic theory of Three Periods: the age of the gods, the age of heroes, and the age of man...
...He thus joins with philosophers of all other areas of intellectual enterprise, for even the students of esthetics and ethics have accepted linguistic analysis...
...Here the speculative emphasis on periods, events, personalities and environmental circumstances (such as Vico's Three Periods or Toynbee's many "civilizations") gives way to a concern with linguistic analysis of such terms and concepts as temporality, causality and similarity...
...And Mazlish's treatment of the concept of alienation in Marx does not escape the by now trite juxtaposition of the "young Marx" with the "later Marx," tendentiously pitting the later "Marxist" against the early Left Hegelian...
...they will want speculation anyway, even if it is baked by non-specialists...
...The author's farewell to the speculative tradition therefore amounts in part at least to his transfering some of its leading practitioners to the newer discipline...
...The analysis of Hegel, in contrast, seems almost idolatrous...
...But in his concluding paragraph he declares that the two leading guides in any further speculative philosophy of history would be Marx, with his emphasis on technology and economics, and Freud (called by the author "the last of the great classical philosophers of history," though Toynbee is more recent) who shifts the emphasis to self-consciousness by stressing psychological change "brought about under the influence of sexuality...
...To sound a death knell over this type of speculation and to limit further philosophies of history to the critical tradition may lead to necessary verbal refinements, but one has the feeling this would also destroy something that has proved to be of inestimable value in organizing man's historical thought...
...In other words, the speculative philosophers were fulfilling a need, that of proclaiming history in some sense was on the side of man, or at least, in Mazlish's terms, Western man...
...They over-speculated, an error of the philosophes, but they surely had heuristic effects...
...The treatment of Kant almost suffers from l??se majest?©, even though it is germane...
...Interestingly, he notes that Vico did not apply his method to ludaeo-Christianity and Hegel simply extended the method to include all systems...
...There is always a Utopian element, in either cyclic or linear versions, even in the cyclic theory of Vico...
...It is to the critical or analytic school, then, that Mazlish turns for true elucidation of philosophic problems of history...
Vol. 49 • October 1966 • No. 21
