Krise und Überwindung des Historismus (1953)

Friedrich Engel-Janosi’s scholarly essay in intellectual history and philosophy of history surveys historicism from Burckhardt to Toynbee and Vico. Its thesis is that historicism reaches its fullest force when it turns all human forms into historically conditioned objects, yet at that same point exposes its insufficiency: life, dogma, myth, and an “Ur”-history press beyond mere historical appearance. The essay unfolds through exemplary confrontations: Burckhardt’s contemplative historical culture, Nietzsche’s protest, Acton and Döllinger at Vatican I, Spengler’s determinism, Toynbee’s universal comparison, and Vico’s “ideal eternal history.”

Engel-Janosi begins with Burckhardt’s Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen as the most perfect expression of historicism. Burckhardt rejects progress, values the nineteenth century for its historical capacity, and shifts emphasis from objective continuity to the consciousness of continuity. Historical study becomes duty, ascetic discipline, and a source of spiritual happiness.

„Es besteht eine großartige, stillschweigende Abrede, ein objektives Interesse an alles heranzubringen, die ganze vergangene und jetzige Zeit in geistigen Besitz zu verwandeln.“ Man mag sagen, daß für Burckhardt das geschichtliche Bewußtsein weithin den Unterschied zwischen Barbaren und Kulturmenschen bedeutete.

English translation: "There exists a grand, tacit compact: to approach everything with objective interest, to transform the whole of the past and the present age into intellectual possession." One may say that for Burckhardt historical consciousness signified, to a large extent, the difference between barbarians and cultivated human beings.

This “art of remembering” is also ambivalent. By insisting that all past and present be converted into spiritual possession, historicism risks turning memory into burden. Engel-Janosi’s first conceptual move is therefore to treat historicism not merely as method, but as an existential stance whose promise of wisdom already contains crisis.

Nietzsche supplies the counter-principle. Against Burckhardt’s happiness in historical contemplation, he demands an art of forgetting and asks that history justify itself only by strengthening life. Engel-Janosi stresses that Nietzsche’s protest is not ignorance of history, but a challenge to its sovereignty.

Was uns aber hier beschäftigt, ist die grundsätzliche Haltung Nietzsches, sein Widerspruch gegen die Autonomie, gegen die Souveränität der geschichtlichen Betrachtung, eine Haltung, die mit seiner Unterordnung des Werdens unter das Sein übereinstimmt — wozu etwa die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels den äußersten Gegensatz bildet.

English translation: What concerns us here, however, is Nietzsche's fundamental attitude, his opposition to the autonomy, to the sovereignty of historical contemplation—an attitude consonant with his subordination of becoming to being, to which, for instance, Hegel's philosophy of history forms the most extreme antithesis.

The Vatican Council becomes a second drama of the same problem. Acton and Döllinger represent historical method as tribunal; Perrone, Schrader, and Franzelin defend dogmatic-systematic reasoning. The defeat of the anti-infallibilist historical party shows the limit of a historicism that expects truth to await documentary adjudication.

Acton hat den Gegensatz richtig gefühlt, als er notierte: „Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire.“ Für ihn war es ein großes Unglück.

English translation: Acton sensed the antithesis correctly when he noted: "Le dogme a vaincu l'histoire" [Dogma has vanquished history]. For him it was a great misfortune.

Engel-Janosi then turns to Spengler and Toynbee. Spengler appears to radicalize historical relativism, but his biological determinism weakens his claim to a genuinely historical attitude. Toynbee matters more because he relativizes all civilizations, including the present, refusing the tendency in Hegel, Comte, Marx, Gobineau, and Spengler to freeze history at the threshold of one’s own age.

Demgegenüber macht Toynbee mit dem historischen Relativismus auch unserer Zeit gegenüber Ernst: der Strom erstarrt nicht und das Heute stellt eine Welle dar, während das Weiterfließen anhält in Fernen, in denen das Auge des Beobachters sich verliert.

English translation: By contrast, Toynbee takes historical relativism seriously with respect to our own age as well: the stream does not freeze, and the present constitutes a single wave, while its onward flow continues into distances in which the observer's eye loses itself.

Yet Toynbee also brings the crisis to completion. As the scale of history expands, induction and factual narration cease to suffice; the historian turns toward fiction and myth as modes of truth. This is the essay’s decisive move from historicism’s universalization to its overcoming.

Toynbee weiß um die Bedeutung des Mythus in diesem Sinn, von dem er einmal — in einer Anmerkung (III, 259, Anm. 3) — sagt, daß es in dieser Form dem Philosophen gegeben sein möchte, noch die äußersten durch Vernunft und Logik gesetzten Grenzen zu überfliegen.

English translation: Toynbee is aware of the significance of myth in this sense—of which he once says, in a note (III, 259, n. 3), that in this form it may be granted to the philosopher to soar even beyond the outermost boundaries set by reason and logic.

The overcoming of historicism is thus not anti-historical dogmatism, but the search for a deeper “history behind history,” a symbolic or ideal history able to encompass the plurality of civilizations. Vico’s “ideal eternal history” provides the final analogue. The essay’s relevance lies in this diagnosis: modern historical consciousness, once fully universalized, discovers that truth cannot be reduced to chronology, documentation, or comparative law. Engel-Janosi ends by returning to Burckhardt’s hope that from a higher vantage the dissonances of history may be heard as harmony.