The “A Priori” History of Philosophy of Kant and Hegel in the 19th Century Historiography of Philosophy

Philosophy of the 19th century took shape under the influence of Kant and Hegel, who changed the trajectories of the development of philosophy and its history. Until the 19th century, the history of philosophy was a secondary informative discipline; by the 19th century, speculative, critical approaches began to form in it, calling into question the value of the informative one. The 19th century offers two options for writing the history of philosophy: one, as before, tends to inform about the facts and elements of succession in philosophy; the other is focused on finding the causes, grounds, and ultimate goals of the formation of reason and rationality. Neither Kant nor Hegel create special historical and philosophical works; as a rule, these are lecture texts published by their disciples. Moreover, both of them have a clear conception on the history of philosophy. Shaping its new image, both philosophers interpret its relationship with history and philosophy in different ways. Kant introduces the concept of the philosophical history of philosophy. The historical idea of philosophy can only represent what the order and manner of philosophizing were, but cannot show the development of the human mind and rationality. Therefore, the history of philosophy cannot be written on the basis of facts but must be based on rational premises and first principles. The summary of Kant's approach is that the philosophical history of philosophy will not differ from philosophy itself, and the historical history of philosophy is actually impossible. Hegel's assessment of the history of philosophy is not alien to historicity and the establishment of succession, but they are not its ultimate goal: the task of the history of philosophy is to discover some universal scheme, or system, in which the process of changing philosophical doctrines unfolds and defines itself by virtue of the original cause and final goal. Unlike Kant, Hegel sees philosophical processes as historical ones; there is a real rational order behind them. Both philosophers completely abandon the informative function of the history of philosophy. They see its goal in establishing the fundamental principles of reason, but this is actually the mode of philosophy, but not of its history. In such assessments, Hegel is also an obvious supporter of the philosophical history of philosophy, but his sensitivity to the historicity and systemic nature of philosophy contributed to the preservation of informative histories of philosophy. This was facilitated not only by the Hegelian approach, but also by the Bildung idea and the significant successes of classical German philology. Both philosophers idealized an a priori logical approach to the history of philosophy, but realized its impossibility due to the significant role of the empirical basis in the history of philosophy.

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