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To illustrate my point, let me now turn to a half-forgotten discipline, philosophy of history, which played a not atypical role in the post-war history of comparative literature. Throughout its development from Christian Heilsgeschichte to Voltaire, to German Idealism and even beyond, until its subsequent decline, this tradition, which would later be called “substantive philosophy of history,” marked an unprecedented attempt to come to terms with the temporal dimension of life without relying on religion, or at least without explicitly relying on it.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a discipline emerged that again claimed the name “philosophy of history” for itself. Initially, this new philosophy of history was a subdiscipline of the philosophy of science, and as such, it aimed at understanding and describing “historical explanation” as a particular case of what the neo-positivists called “scientific explanation.” When this ambitious goal was frustrated, it gave way to a post-Wittgensteinian attempt to analyze the historian’s language instead. Although this latter trend still evolved in that same spirit of neo-positivism, it also contributed to the rise of another take on history, one motivated by completely different concerns. The new philosophy of history placed a growing emphasis on the imaginative language of the historian, and history was increasingly understood not so much as a science governed by logical rules, but rather as a text that was organized along rhetorical and dialectical lines and that followed principles of representation and persuasion. As a consequence, in disciplinary terms, the philosophy of history, or what survived of it, was often subsumed by comparative literature.

This seemingly accidental occurrence provided comparative literature with the possibility of escaping the limbo between philosophy and history, between formalism and social critique, between deconstruction and new historicism. Admittedly, comparative literature has not yet capitalized on this possibility; on the contrary, just like philosophy in general, philosophy of history itself has come to be regarded as some kind of vague methodological awareness, an associate of interdisciplinarity.

My suggestion is that, by acknowledging the problem of the alienation of literary studies while rejecting interdisciplinarity as a viable solution to that problem, literary studies, and especially comparative literature, could still work to internalize the philosophy of history in a more consistent way. The study of literature could then reclaim literature as its subject, not necessarily as a subject of literary analysis, which usually serves as a code-name for some specific and usually sectarian methodology, but as a field open to any possible approach within the a-disciplinary borders of literary studies. Such a shift could establish comparative literature not as a thematically or methodologically distinct or novel enterprise within the Humanities, but rather as an attempt to re-unify the knowledge now dispersed among the various disciplines of the Human and Social Sciences.

This re-unification of dispersed knowledge, the maintenance of the comprehensive unity of knowledge in the face of disciplinary specialization, was traditionally one of philosophy’s functions. Not only is the hierarchical understanding of knowledge lurking behind this notion of philosophy no longer acceptable, however, but philosophy itself, with the rise and success of logical positivism, has finally cast off the burden of being general and a-disciplinary. This success was largely due to the neo-positivist war against pseudo-scientific knowledge. But it is important to remember that behind this program of developing demarcation criteria there was another, more concrete target, as became manifest in the more explicitly political work of Popper: the real enemy was the philosophy of history.

Popper’s critique was not new. A few decades before the logical positivists, philosophy of history already appeared to Jacob Burckhardt, that untimely Stoic of the nineteenth century, as a centaur, a contradiction in terms, “for history co-ordinates, and hence is unphilosophical, while philosophy subordinates, and hence is unhistorical.”⁸ His critique contained everything that critics of philosophy of history, from the logical positivists to Hannah Arendt, would later say: the monstrous enterprise was criticized for its logical impossibility and its political dangerousness; its dismissal led to the unseen triumph of a philosophical program.

Hegel would have been surprised to hear that these critics rallied against him by using an argument that he himself addressed at the very beginning of the Phenomenology.⁹ There is one particular criticism, however, that calls for discussion in this context. From Popper to Arthur Danto, logically-minded critics raised the same objection against Hegel – the objection that, in Danto’s work, is called the argument of the ideal chronicler, a chronicler who is omnipresent in history and takes notes of whatever happens and who is privy to what seems to be the totality of history. But historical meaning, Danto argued, is narrative meaning; it is based on co-ordination, not subordination. The total meaning of a narrative can only be defined, theoretically, if the narrative is concluded. This might be the case in a novel, Danto said, but in the case of history, what the historian is trying to describe is a per definitionem unfinished continuum whose absolute meaning therefore cannot be determined.

Or at least it cannot be determined without recourse to prophesy, which was in fact the model or the precursor of philosophy of history, Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history. The name is unfair, as it suggests that there is a commonality between, say, Gioacchimo de Fiore’s work and Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, while the reality is that these differ from each other just as much as either of them would differ from a nineteenth-century historical work. Yet this difference, Danto and Popper would suggest, is only a superficial one. In their view, Hegel fell back into Heilsgeschichte in that he tried to bridge the gap between philosophy and history using prophesy – at least in the structural sense of including the future in his theory of history.

Calculated or accidental, this is a bold misreading of Hegel. Even if one does not consider the entire theory of teleology that is behind his philosophy of history, it is obvious that Hegel consistently refrains from saying anything about the future. On the rare occasions that he does say something concerning the future, he makes it clear that the epistemological status of his statement is entirely different from the rest of the work; it is neither historical, nor philosophical. In fact, the entire philosophy of history is based on the insight that neither beginnings nor the future can be the subject of the historian’s inquiry; the only history that can be the subject of history or philosophy of history is the history that is always already past; it is a complete history precisely because it is disconnected – epistemologically and, therefore, ontologically also – from the future.

But this is precisely the point where comparative literature could redeem the potential of philosophy of history, not by returning to Hegel but by diverging from his epistemology. Burckhardt’s centaur may or may not be a fair figure for philosophy of history, but it is surely one applicable to literature itself. Literature is precisely at the intersection of philosophy and history, or to be more concrete, literature is this very intersection. There is, surely, an “ontological gap” between the historical circumstances of the birth of a literary work and the work itself. But even more important is the way the work itself bridges this ontological gap; time and again, a given literary work reconnects with history.

This dialectic of disengaging and reconnecting is, in terms of the structure of the process, always coincidental: the way in which the abstract universality of language regains referentiality is a matter of coincidence. But coincidence does not equal blind chance; in between the two, there is literature’s own periphery, the periphery of meaning where the abstract universality of language reconfigures in ways that make the ontological structure of language accessible. This peripheral reconfiguration is the basis of literature’s coincidental reconnecting with historical referentiality. The future is the periphery of the present; it appears on the margins of the literary work in indecipherable forms, ready to take up a particular meaning in the actual time that follows.