Historicism is the principle of knowing things and phenomena in their formation and development, in an organic connection with the conditions that give rise to them. Historicism means such an approach to phenomena, which includes a study of their occurrence and trends of subsequent development, considers them in the aspect of both the past and the future. As a certain method of theoretical research, historicism is a fixation not of any change (albeit qualitative), but one in which the formation of specific properties and connections of things that determine their essence, originality is expressed. Historicism involves the recognition of the irreversible and successive nature of changes in things.
The principle of historicism was originally put forward and developed in the philosophical systems of Vico Jambattista , Voltaire , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , D. Didro , I. G. Fichte , G. Hegel , A. Saint-Simon , A. I. Herzen . In the 18th and 1st half of the 19th centuries its development proceeded in the form of a philosophy of history, which arose in the struggle against the empty empiricism of the historical science of the Middle Ages and the providentialism of theology. The philosophy of the history of the enlighteners of the 18th century. considered human society as part of nature; borrowing the concept of causality from natural science, she put forward the idea of ​​“natural laws” of history, the unity of the historical process (Herder), developed the theory of progress as a movement from lower to higher (French materialists), etc. The limitations of these concepts of historicism consisted in mechanism, as well as in the fact that in them the place of the real connections inherent in the object was occupied by the connections invented by the philosophers themselves and of a speculative nature. Representatives of German classical idealism developed a view of the history of society as an internally logical, necessary process. However, they brought this necessity to history from the outside, from the field of philosophy. The highest stage in the development of the principle of pre-Marxist historicism was Hegel's philosophy; according to F. Engels , "he was the first to try to show the development, the internal connection of history ..." [1] . Hegel's philosophy of history combines the idea of ​​the specificity of each historical era with the recognition of the general progressiveness of social development as a whole. At the same time, Hegel's historicism was in irreconcilable contradiction with the idealistic essence of his general concept; from the point of view of this historicism, a concrete historical analysis of the phenomena of reality turned out to be impossible.
The enormous role in affirming the principle of historicism was played by the successes of specific sciences - social sciences (for example, A. Barnave , French historians of the Restoration period) and natural sciences ( I. Kant , C. Lyell , C. Darwin ). Prior to K. Marx , the principle of historicism was alien to the understanding of development as a struggle of internal contradictions, which led to the dominance of evolutionism.
Consistently, the principle of historicism was developed by K. Marx, F. Engels and V. I. Lenin. Expressing the essence of the Marxist understanding of this principle, V. I. Lenin wrote: “... Do not forget the basic historical connection, look at each question from the point of view of how a well-known phenomenon in history arose, what major stages in its development this phenomenon went through, and with From the point of view of this development, look at what this thing has become now ” [2] .
A distinctive feature of Marxist historicism is that it extends to all spheres of the existence of objective reality - nature, society and thinking. “We know only one single science,” wrote K. Marx and F. Engels, “the science of history. History can be viewed from two sides, it can be divided into the history of nature and the history of people. However, both of these parties are inextricably linked; as long as people exist, the history of nature and the history of people mutually determine each other ”[3]. As a universal principle of the approach to reality, historicism finds its comprehensive confirmation in the course of the development of science. Over the past century, historicism has established itself as a necessary scientific way of considering various objects, including those that seemed motionless, devoid of history. The historical sciences are not only political economy, the history of society, the history of science, but also geotectonics, anthropology, linguistics, cosmogony, geomorphology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and many others.
Marxist historicism proceeds not only from the movement of the objective world, not just from its changeability in time, but precisely from its development. This approach means that the object must be considered, firstly, from the point of view of its internal structure, and not as a mechanical set of individual elements, connections, dependencies, but as an organic combination of these structural components, as an internally connected and functioning whole, as a system; secondly, from the point of view of the process, that is, the aggregate of historical connections and dependencies of its internal components following each other in time; thirdly, from the point of view of identifying and fixing qualitative changes in its structure as a whole; finally, from the point of view of revealing the laws of its development, the laws of transition from one historical state of an object characterized by one structure to another historical state, characterized by a different structure. Moreover, a distinctive feature of Marxist historicism is the recognition of the unity and struggle of opposites, contradictions as the core and internal mechanism of the development process.
In accordance with the principle of historicism, the processes of development of the objective world should be considered in the form in which they proceeded in reality. Any phenomenon, any subject can be understood and correctly evaluated only if they are examined in specific historical conditions and relationships. “The whole spirit of Marxism,” wrote V. I. Lenin, “its entire system requires that each position be considered only (α) historically; (β) only in connection with others; (γ) only in connection with the concrete experience of history ” [3] . From the point of view of Marxist historicism, cases of archaization or modernization are grossly mistaken, when the object is characterized using concepts and categories that are characteristic not of this stage of historical development, but of steps that are historically previous or later compared to the one under consideration.
Marxist historicism differs qualitatively from similar terminology concepts of pre-Marxist and modern bourgeois philosophy. The unscientific nature of the principle of historicism, advanced before Marx, was that not one of the philosophers could rise to an understanding of the true dialectics of the development of the objective world and its cognition: development was understood either as a change in the external form of an object, or its mechanical movement. The inability of these philosophers to reveal and understand the role of internal contradictions in the process of development of an object led to a plane evolutionary understanding of the principle of historicism.
Criticism
One of the characteristic features of modern non-Marxist philosophy and sociology is the rejection of the principle of historicism, the struggle against it, or the interpretation that emasculates materialistic and dialectical content from it. The main meaning of the philosophical and historical concepts of neo-Kantianism ( G. Rickert , V. Windelband ), Croscianism ( B. Croce ), philosophy of life ( V. Dilthey ), existentialism ( K. Jaspers ), pragmatism, neo-positivism ( K. Popper ), neo-Hegelianism, as well as the theories of the followers of these concepts in the field of specific sciences - the so-called “historical school” in political economy, the “positive school” in history, etc., consist precisely in denying the possibility of an approach to objective reality from the point of view of revealing its regular process I am, in substitution of the principle of the historical relativism. Contrasting the general and the singular, the natural sciences and the science of society, the new and latest Western philosophers of history and sociologists are slipping into direct irrationalism. They deny not only the possibility of knowing the laws of historical development, but also the very existence of these laws. History for them is something absurd, meaningless, so they reduce the meaning of the historical approach to reality to a simple registration of subjective "experiences" or single and unique facts, to a description of individual, unrelated to and not scientifically analyzed historical "situations" that exclude understanding of the internal connection of the historical process. For these philosophers, according to Lenin, “despair of the ability to scientifically analyze the present, rejection of science, the desire to give a damn about all kinds of generalizations, hide from any“ laws ”of historical development, and block the forest with trees ...” [4] . Representatives of those bourgeois concepts of history who have reduced the development process to alternating the same “cycles” (A. Toynbee), to a series of “growth stages” (W. Rostow) that are not connected with each other, have a limited understanding of historicism, etc. [5]
Sources
- ↑ [1] F. Engels. Karl Marx. "Toward a Critique of Political Economy." First edition, Berlin, Franz Dunker, 1859. K. Marx, F. Engels, Sobr. Op., ed. 2, t. 13, p. 496.
- ↑ [2] V.I. Lenin. About the state. Lecture at the University of Sverdlovsk July 11, 1919 PSS, ed. 5, t. 39, p. 67.
- ↑ [4] V.I. Lenin. I.F. Armand. PSS, ed. 5, t. 49, p. 329.
- ↑ [5] V.I. Lenin. Another destruction of socialism. PSS, ed. 5, t. 25, p. 44.
- ↑ [6] https://www.esperanto.mv.ru/wiki/Marxism/Historism