Philosophy of history as a philosophy

Abstract

The article presents the authors’ vision of the formation of the “philosophy of history” as a form of philosophical knowledge. Analyzing the retrospective of its formation in the first part of the article, the interpretation of the “philosophy of history” is given not as one of the sections of philosophy in general, but as one of its modes in the semantic horizon of which a specific answer to the main question of philosophy is achieved: what is the source of all that exists? In the context of this consideration of the problem, philosophy is viewed as the highest form of human activity, integrating all types of human activity as expressions of its spiritual and, in this sense, supernatural content. In fact, this concerns the formation of historical self-consciousness as one of the modes of the manifestation of modern civilization. The authors trace how “historicity” has asserted itself in the structure of human thinking from the time of antiquity to the present. Through the views of Herodotus, Polybius and Titus Livy, Blessed Augustine, Machiavelli, Vico, Hegel, and Marx, the step-by-step logic of this process is revealed. In the second part of the article, the authors consider the content of the actual “historical” form of being that is characteristic of modern, bourgeois civilization. Independent human activity appears here for the first time as an unconditional principle of the world order (or reality as such), and interest in the past as a source is replaced by interest in the future as a target setting. Thus, the classical philosophy of history is transformed into historiosophy. In conclusion, the authors touch upon the specifics of historical self-consciousness in the Russian intellectual and spiritual tradition. They assume that the experience of recent Russian history cannot be adequately understood in terms of bourgeois thinking since its content does not correspond to the value orientations of the latter.