Historicism and Eclecticism: The Age of Victor Cousin
2022; Springer Nature (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês
10.1007/978-3-030-84490-5_5
ISSN2215-0307
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Criticism
Resumo“We have never done what we thought of doing long ago at Sens, when you wished to write a critical history of Philosophy and I a great mediaeval romance […]” (G. Flaubert, Sentimental Education, in The Complete Works (New York and London, 1904), 6/II, p. 326). With these words in the final pages of L’éducation sentimentale, the protagonist reminds his fellow student of the youthful plans they had made while still at college in the late 1830s. It may be surprising for us, accustomed as we are to postmodernism and therefore not much inclined to ‘vast narrations’, that a young man with promise should set himself the aim of writing a histoire critique de la philosophie, and so much the more because Flaubert had previously explained, at the beginning of the second chapter, that the same young man, who had been converted to the study of philosophy after opening a translation of Plato at random (quite probably the translation edited by Cousin), “dreamed of formulating a vast system of philosophy, which might have the most far-reaching applications”. But in reality there was no divergence between the two projects because in the intellectual climate of the 1830s and 1840s the fact of ‘practising the history of philosophy’ was an essential and constitutive moment in ‘practising philosophy’, and it has been rightly observed that the production of general histories of philosophy in France culminated – in terms of quantity – precisely in the 1830s (Schneider, pp. 346–348).
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