Abstract
This study takes as its starting point Cousin’s Hegelian-sounding claim in his 1828 lectures that the history of philosophy is identical to philosophy itself—and it does so in order to interrogate the various resemblances and divergences between Cousin and Hegel when it comes to determining the relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy. In particular, the study investigates the difference between the “official” position Cousin takes up in 1833 in which spiritualist philosophy grounds eclectic history of philosophy and his earlier more experimental and provisional positions, which map roughly onto Hegel’s own various ways of articulating the philosophy-history of philosophy relationship.
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Notes
- 1.
For a detailed picture of Cousin’s overall relation (and failures to relate) to Hegel, see Rey’s chapter above, as well as (for example) Janicaud (1984). His own explicit engagements with Hegel’s influence are to be found in: Cousin (1833, xxxvii–xliv) and (2011: 53–6, 189–201); see volume 1, §3.2.1, §3.2.3. Of course, this is not to say, generally, that Cousin’s philosophy during the 1820s as a whole was fundamentally Hegelian—as Ragghianti stridently asserts, “beyond certain suggestions… Victor Cousin was never a Hegelian” (1997: 43; see Manns 1994: 63); it is merely to contend that the 1828–9 courses were often read in Hegelian terms and often for good reason.
- 2.
Even if Cotten ultimately complicates the picture, his claim that “it is customary to consider that Cousin’s relations with Germany reached their acme around the period of the 1828 Cours” (1994: 2) is indicative.
- 3.
Other than the 1822–3 lectures on the philosophy of history that remain in the Cousin-archives, the evidence for these manuscripts is fragmentary and can be gleaned from various letters from Cousin’s Hegelian correspondents, particularly H. G. Hotho, who seems to have copied, supplied and sometimes translated these texts for Cousin (e.g., Espagne and Werner 1990: 77, 95, 97–8). See further Cotten (1994: 5), Espagne and Werner (1986: 68), Janicaud (1984: 454) and Butler and Seiler (in Hegel 1985b: 640). It is important to stress for the argument below that Cousin seems to have possessed the manuscript of the 1816 lectures on the history of philosophy as early as 1818, and so may well have been reflecting on their arguments from this early date onwards. See volume 1, §3.2.2.
- 4.
Thus, Rey, for example, writes, “The lecture course on the Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie is the most Hegelian formulation of eclecticism, even though Hegel’s name appears nowhere in it… One finds there an identity of philosophy with its history that conforms to the Hegelian idea: the history of philosophy is solely philosophy itself in its immanent and necessary development” (2013: 124, 127; see further Piaia 2022: 400–2).
- 5.
See Michel Espagne’s claim: “Victor Cousin merits to be rehabilitated, at least in his work prior to 1830” (1985: 274)—the work of Vermeren, Antoine-Mahut, Rey, etc., can be seen as a following through of this exhortation.
- 6.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
- 7.
One reason why the following is just a “small contribution” is, of course, that, by beginning in 1826, I exclude the very early Cousin from the scope of this chapter. This is partly because 1826 marks the date Cousin began publishing his work in any significant fashion and partly because, prior to 1819, i.e., prior to his historical turn, Cousin had not been particularly interested in the philosophy—history of philosophy relation.
- 8.
Indeed, commentators often have difficulty incorporating Cousin into a narrative of “French spiritualism”, both because the young Cousin avoids the term and also because so much of the spiritualist tradition (e.g., Ravaisson) is constituted via a reaction against Cousin’s “half-spiritualism” (Ravaisson 2023: 32). See Ragghianti (1997: 77), Janicaud (1969: passim).
- 9.
It is worth emphasising that in his earliest work Cousin uses the label “eclecticism” indiscriminately to refer to both an eclectic body of doctrines obtained through psychological analysis (an eclecticism of reason or, in Cousin’s own words, “an impartial eclecticism applied to facts of consciousness” [1833: 47]) and an eclectic body of doctrines obtained through historiographical erudition (an eclecticism of history). In fact, Ragghianti and Vermeren have recently argued that the former eclecticism is etymologically prior in Cousin’s writings, stemming from the influence of Biran’s “proto-eclectic” project of reconciling mind and body (2018: 17, 31). Nevertheless, this does not alter the conceptual relation at stake here—that is, how eclecticism as psychology and eclecticism as historiography relate in Cousin.
- 10.
Cousin writes thus of his initial deployment of eclectic practice: “I proposed to [philosophers] a peace treaty on the basis of reciprocal concessions. I pronounced it from that moment with the word eclecticism” (1829b: xvi).
- 11.
- 12.
The similarities with Cousin’s above position are even more palpable in Walsh’s reconstruction of this passage: “To engage in the history of philosophy is thus to philosophize. But even if this argument is granted the history of philosophy seems to remain an optional extra for the philosopher. We can see this if we ask the question: which comes first, philosophy or the history of philosophy? Hegel’s official answer to this is that philosophy comes first, since in order to obtain a knowledge of its progress as the development of the Idea in the empirical, external form in which philosophy appears in history, a corresponding knowledge of the Idea is absolutely essential. We could not begin to write the history of philosophy unless we knew what to look for in the works of previous philosophers, and we could not know what to look for without having independent philosophical knowledge” (1965: 74–5).
- 13.
Of course, the later Cousin’s grounding strategy raises its own issues concerning how spiritualism will in turn ward off infinite regress by justifying its own first principles, but that need not detain us here (particularly as spiritualist Cartesianism has as good a claim as most philosophical positions to self-evident foundations).
- 14.
Bellantone is the commentator on Cousin most alive to this difficulty (although he is quick to close down some of the more interesting alternatives I explore below): “We must attribute to Cousin the sense to not understand this identity in a purely theoretical and speculative sense. If he had, this identity would have merely been a vicious circle” (2011: 1.29).
- 15.
In this cursory section, I focus solely on Hegel’s various lecture courses on the history of philosophy, and so leave aside their relationship to the final sections of the Enzyklopädie—as well as, more generally, to the controversial question of the “place for the history of philosophy within the Hegelian system” (Thompson 2012; see Beiser 1995: xxii). As a result, it is far beyond the scope of this chapter to investigate how Hegelian philosophy as a whole reconciles historicity with systematicity.
- 16.
For some of the reasons why Hegel retreats from circularity, see Nuzzo (2012: 24).
- 17.
Jaeschke similarly speaks of the “logico-historical parallelism” of the lectures (2013: 195).
- 18.
Closely related is a biographical reason for Cousin’s adherence to this “official” position: Cousin understands his own career as beginning with psychological investigations in 1816–17, before casting out to find historical proofs of them later in the decade.
- 19.
Much like Collingwood’s “criterion of historical truth” (1994: 238).
- 20.
It might be felt that Cousin’s emphasis on method solves the problem, for his sole prior commitment is a methodological one, i.e., the experimental method of observation. On this line of argument, there is no distinction between a spiritualist system and eclectic historiography, but merely Cousinian method applied successively in distinct domains. Of course, Cousin does indeed premise his philosophical project on an overarching methodological commitment; he writes, for example, in the 1826 Preface to Fragments philosophiques that “my first concern was method. A system is scarcely more than a method applied to certain objects. Nothing is more important than recognising straightaway and determining the method one wants to use… The method of observation is good in itself” (1833: 1–2, 8). And he continues in 1833, “Here as elsewhere, as everywhere, as always, I pronounce myself for that method which places the point of departure of all healthy philosophy in the study of human nature and therefore in observation” (1833: vi). Likewise, he does sometimes speak of the eclecticism-spiritualism relation in terms of a successive application of method, i.e., “observation applied first to human nature and then transported into history” (1829a: 170). Nevertheless, this line of argument less solves the problem than defers it, for the question still arises as to the sequence by which method is applied—put bluntly: why is observation necessarily “applied first to human nature” and only “then transported into history”?
- 21.
He writes, “Such are basically the most general operations of reflections. Developed in time and centuries, they engender four elementary systems which represent and contain the entire history of philosophy” (1829a: 164).
- 22.
A similar position is set out at the opening to Cousin’s “Essai d’une classification des questions et des écoles philosophiques”, where “a very few general problems” accessed through metaphysical analysis are made manifest in the multitude of books the philosopher encounters (1833: 313–4).
- 23.
This is very different from Bellantone’s interpretation which encloses Cousin’s thesis exclusively within some variant of the official position: “What Cousin sought in the history of philosophy was nothing but a confirmation of his theoretical positions”, such that it “takes a secondary, propaedeutic role” (2011: 1.99–100). Pertinently for my project in this chapter, Bellantone explicitly contrasts this closed Cousinian conclusion to the diversity of ways in which the Hegelian identity can be interpreted: “In general, one can say that if one reads the Vorlesungen on the history of philosophy and on the philosophy of history from the Hegel of the Logik, it will be a matter of recognising in history solely a manifestation of an ordo idearum already established; but, on the contrary, if one reads Hegel’s theory of historicity from the Phänomenologie, the priority could be reversed and then history, including its categories, will become the fruit of an internal movement of becoming, a self-movement. Cousin, faithful to his reading of Hegel from Plato and Neoplatonism, offers us a reading of the first type” (2011: 1.97). I am in the process of arguing, on the contrary, that Cousin’s stance on the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy shares—and even radicalises—this Hegelian ambivalence.
- 24.
It is interesting to contrast this parallelism position set out in the 1828 lectures with Cousin’s critique of Degérando for separating historical narrative and rational evaluation into parallel tasks (1825: 436)—Degérando pulls apart the historical and the philosophical in a way that Cousin flirts with but ultimately recoils from.
- 25.
For detailed accounts of this history, see Albrecht (1994), three essays by Schneider (1991, 1998, 2016), as well as Barroux (2019). Elsewhere (Whistler 2018), I have explored some of the general conceptual issues facing any attempt to reconcile eclecticism and systematicity; in the following, I focus far more narrowly on Cousin’s arguments between 1826 and 1833.
- 26.
Quotations below from Reinhold and Krug are taken from Albrecht (1994: 599–601).
- 27.
This is the requirement “that, in an adequate philosophical system, empirical items must be such that all their properties are determinable only within the context of a totality composed of other items and their properties” (Franks 2005: 85).
- 28.
This is the requirement “that, in an adequate philosophical system, the absolute first principle must be immanent within the aforementioned totality, as its principle of unity” (Franks 2005: 85–6).
- 29.
It is worth noting that the term “system” has two fields of application in Cousin’s writings: first, as a formal description of the way his own philosophical ideas cohere into a whole and, secondly, as a taxonomical concept for delineating past manifestations of philosophy. Leo Catana, for one, considers these two uses of system utterly distinct, insisting that “the general methodological sense and the historiographical sense of the concept” need to be separated (2008: 5). However, for present purposes, it seems unnecessary to follow him. A more difficult question concerning Cousin’s system-concept is, instead, whether he, in fact, makes any serious use of it at all. Mélès, for example, has recently criticised Cousin’s history of philosophy precisely on the basis of its failure to classify past philosophies as systems: when undertaking the history of philosophy, Cousin “does not class systems as much as philosophical theses” (2016: 148).
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Whistler, D. (2023). Becoming Cousin: Eclecticism, Spiritualism and Hegelianism Before 1833. In: Chepurin, K., Efal-Lautenschläger, A., Whistler, D., Yuva, A. (eds) Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 247. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_2
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