“Philosophy that Teaches through Experience”: Thomas Carlyle’s Historical Discourse in the Works of the 1820s – Early 1830s

In this article, based on the analysis of the works of Thomas Carlyle (1793–1881), written during the literary-critical period of his creative work, primarily “The Life of Schiller” and the essay “On History”, as well as the epistolary legacy of the 1820s – early 1830s, the historical discourse of the English thinker is defined as anti-Enlightenment, since the complex of ideas that had developed by the early 1830s was built around a critical understanding of the main thesis of the enlighteners, according to which “History is a philosophy that teaches through experience”. It is established that with Carlyle’s work “Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’” (1832), which became a reaction to the reading of the famous biography, the formation of his individual historical discourse begins, the presence of which determines the unique place of the English thinker in the intellectual history of the 19th century: from the study of the biographies of all people as a way of identifying “philosophy that teaches through experience”, to the study of an individual biography within the framework of “heroic theory”.