THE PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
M. M. SHARIF



When we discuss the philosophy of history, the content of our topic is philosophical and not sociological. Sociology deals with human relations and the forces that determine the laws that govern and the phenomena that arise from these relations from time to time. The sociologist attempts to discover the effects of such forces as heredity, climate, race, instinct, means of production and ideas. He tries to study the specific characteristics, repeated features and constant relations of the lives of individual groups: specific characteristics such as modes and customs, repeated features like rises and falls, conflicts, cycles, isolation, interaction, imitation, migration and mobility; causal correlations such as those that hold between climate and culture, technology and fine arts, city life and criminality, scarcity and suicide, forms of religious and political organisations. The philosopher of history is not concerned with these details of group life; nor does he study the history of the individual groups and specific questions relating to them as ends in themselves. From these fields he only collects material for the solution of his main problems. He is concerned mainly with the life course of humankind as a whole, and his chief problem is the determination of the nature of change in the history of man. His second question relates to the law of change in the lives of individual groups, civilisations or cultures. Thus, his first question is that of the dynamics and destiny of man; and, second, the dynamics and destiny of groups of men. It is to these questions that I mainly devote main attention.

The 20th century philosophies of history are more sociological than philosophical. This turn in the philosophy of history has its advantages as well as disadvantages. Its main advantage consists in a collection of vast material on which a philosophy of history can be based. Its main disadvantage lies in the narrowness of outlook which often goes with work in narrow fields.

Some 20th century philosophers of history such as Paul Ligeti, Frank Chambers and Charles Lalo confine themselves to the study of art phenomena and draw conclusions about the dynamics of culture in general. Their conclusions which touch the two philosophical questions stated above are:

1. That art forms, like waves in the ocean, rise, develop and decline.
2. That the tidal ebb and flow of art in general is an index of the tidal waves of human culture in general and individual cultures in particular.
3. That side by side with these larger waves there arise, so to say, 'surface ripples' or shorter waves within the same art form corresponding to smaller changes in social cultures.

These conclusions I readily accept. But these thinkers advance another hypothesis which to me does not seem true. According to most of them, it is always the same art and the same type or style of art which rises at one stage in the life history of each culture: one art or art form at its dawn, another at its maturity and yet another at its decline, when gradually both art and the corresponding culture die. I do not accept this conclusion. The life history of Greek art is not identical with that of European art or Hindu or Muslim art. In some cultures, like the Egyptian, Chinese, Hindu and Muslim, it was literature which blossomed before any other art; in some others such as the French, German and English, it was architecture; and in the culture of the Greeks it was music. The art of the Palaeolithic people reached a maturity and artistic perfection which did not correspond to their stage of culture. In some cultures, as the Egyptian, art shows several waves, several ups and downs, rather than one cycle of birth, maturity and decline. Unlike most other cultures, Muslim culture has given no place to sculpture, and its music has risen simultaneously with its architecture. Thus it is not true that the sequence of the rise of different arts is the same in all cultures. Nor is it true that the same sequence appears in the style of each art in every culture. Facts do not support this thesis, for the earliest style of art in some cultures is symbolic, in others naturalistic, formal, impressionistic or expressionistic.

There is a group of 20th century philosophers of history who view a society or culture as an organism which has only one life cycle. Like the life of any individual organism, the life of a culture has its childhood, maturity, old age and death; its spring, summer, winter and autumn. Just as a living organism cannot be revived after its death, even so a culture or a society can not be revived once it is dead. Biological, geographical and racial causes can to a limited extent influence its life course, but cannot change its inevitable cycle. They agree with the aestheticians whose position I have just discussed that social history is like a wave, it has a rise and then it falls never to rise again. To this group belong Danilevsky, Spengler and Toynbee. The view that the dynamism of society is like the dynamism of a wave we have already accepted; but are the two other doctrines expounded by these philosophers equally true? First, is it true that a given society is a living organism and, second, that it has only one unrepeated life course? Let us take the first. Is a society or a culture an organism? Long ago, Plato took a state to be an individual writ large. A similar mistake now is being made. All analogies are true only up to a point and not beyond that. To view a society on the analogy of an individual organism is definitely wrong. No society is so completely unified into an organic whole that it should be viewed as an organism.

An individual organism is born; it grows and dies, and its species is perpetuated by reproduction: but a culture cannot repeat itself in the species by reproduction. Revival of an individual organism is impossible, but the revival of a culture by the infusion of new events is possible. Each individual organism is a completely integrated whole or a complete Gestalt, but though such an integration is an ideal of each culture, it has never been achieved by any culture. Each culture is a super-system consisting of some large systems such as religion, language, law, philosophy, science, fine arts, ethics, economics, technology, politics, territorial sway, associations, customs and mores. Each of these consists of smaller systems, as science includes physics, chemistry, biology, zoology, etc., and each of these smaller systems is comprised of yet smaller systems, as mathematics is comprised of geometry, algebra and arithmetic, and so on. Besides these systems, there are partly connected or wholly isolated congeries, unorganised heaps within these systems and super-systems. Thus, "a total culture of any organised group consists not of one cultural system but of a multitude of vast and small cultural systems that are partly in harmony, partly out of harmony, with one another, and in addition many congeries of various kinds."

So much about the organismic side of the theory of Danilevsky, Spengler and Toynbee. What about its cyclical side? Is the life of a culture like that of a meteor, beginning, rising, falling and then disappearing for ever? Does the history of a society or a culture see only one spring, one summer and one autumn and then in its winter it is completely closed? These thinkers concede that the length of each period may be different with different peoples and cultures, but, according to them, the cycle is just one moving curve or one wave that rises and falls only once. This position also seems to be wrong. As the researches of Kroeber and Sorokin have conclusively shown, "Many great cultural or social systems or civilisations have many cycles, many social, intellectual and political ups and downs in their virtually indefinitely long span of life, instead of just a life cycle, one period of blossoming and one of the decline. In the dynamics of intellectual and aesthetic creativity, Egyptian civilisation rose and fell at least four times, Graeco-Roman-Byzantine culture several times. Similarly, China and India had two big creative impulses; Japan and Germany, four; France and England, three; and their economico-political rise did not coincide with the course of their intellectual activity."

This shows that there is "no universal law decreeing that every culture, having once flowered, must wither without any chance of flowering." A culture may rise in one field at one time, in another field at another, and thus as a whole see many rises and falls. If by the birth of a civilisation these writers mean a sudden appearance of a total unit like that of an organism, and by death a total disintegration, then a total culture is never born, nor does it ever die. At its so-called birth each culture takes over living systems or parts of a preceding culture and integrates them with newly born items. Again, to talk about the death or disappearance of a culture or civilisation is meaningless. A part of a total culture, its art or its religion, may disappear, but a considerable part of it is always taken over by other groups by whom it is often developed further and expanded. States are born and they die; but cultures like the mingled waters of different waves are never born as organisms, nor do they die as organisms. Ancient Greece as a state died, but after its death a great deal of Greek culture spread far and wide and is still living as an important element in the cultures of Europe. Jewish states ceased to exist, but much of Jewish culture was taken over by Christianity and Islam. No culture dies in toto, though all die in parts. In respect of those parts of culture which live, each culture is immortal. Each culture or civilisation emerges gradually from pre-existing cultures. As a whole it may have several peaks, may see many ups and downs and thus flourish for millennia, decline into a latent existence, re-emerge and again become dominant for a certain period and then decline once more to appear again. Even when dominated by other cultures a considerable part of it may live as an element fully or partly integrated in those cultures.