Within historiography, there are few themes that recur as often as the question of whether or not the study of history is a science. Even the Marquis Within historiography, there are few themes that recur as often as the question of whether or not the study of history is a science. Even the Marquis de Condorcet devoted a short discussion to it as early as 1794, in his extensive essay Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind: Library of Ideas, which I recently read. In the 19th century positivism and classical Rankeanism firmly established historiography as a real science, but that immediately provoked great opposition and nuances, followed by continuous back-and-forth debates throughout the 20th century.
Jacques Le Goff (1924-2014), just about the best-known French medievalist, ventured his own position in 1977, in a few articles for an Italian encyclopedia. And that position is particularly notable for its pragmatism: for Le Goff historiography is a science, but of a very special kind. Both in method and form, historiography by definition differs from the natural and social sciences, because the object of study (the past) is only indirectly accessible to the researcher, and the study result can almost exclusively be presented trough a narrative. In other words, Le Goff was averse to positivism, and also to the structuralism that was so popular in his time. Nevertheless, he swears by a rigorous application of the historical method, as an unambiguous scientific instrument. And he also sees a place for discovering trends or regularities in history, but not laws: “historical work is to be done with intelligence in the historical process and this intelligence leads to the reconnaissance of regularities in historical evolution.”
Also his position on the form of historiography testifies to his pragmatism: Le Goff distances himself from his colleague Paul Veyne, another luminary of French historiography, who believed that the study and the writing of history was a literary genre. Yes, historiography revolves in the narrative sphere, Le Goff admits, but it does not have the freedom that fiction has (as some extreme postmodernists claim): the past does exist, it is also accessible, but it has its rights, which means that a historian cannot simply do as he pleases. And that forces Le Goff to conclude: “I think that history definitively is the science of the past, but on the condition that this knowledge of the past becomes the object of permanent questioning.”
That a man of practice adopts such a pragmatic position is not surprising. And that same pragmatism is also evident in many other areas in this collection. In this way we also see Le Goff explicitly distancing himself from the craze for the historiography of remembrance (Pierre Nora) and of presentism (the explicit departure from the present to look at the past). There is therefore a great deal of interesting information to be found in this collection. Only, regularly the line of thought of Le Goff is drowned in lengthy explanations that mainly display erudition, and the references mentioned are almost all from the period 1960-1980, so slightly outdated. But reading Le Goff, including his actual historical works, remains very enjoyable and fascinating....more
Reading this book (a collection of essays) was not a walk in the park for me: Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur were flying arouReading this book (a collection of essays) was not a walk in the park for me: Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur were flying around my head, and the philosophical content regularly exceeded that of someone with a 'simple 'historical education. But Carr's angle is certainly worth it. He does not so much search for the meaning of history, and also largely ignores the endless epistemological and methodological debates in historical theory and philosophy. His take is how people (not just historians) experience history, both consciously and unconsciously, both as individuals or as a collective. “While I have been interested in theories of representation, especially narrative representation, as a phenomenologist I am more interested in the experience that lies behind it. What is the presentation behind the representation? we might ask. What is the experience of history, how does it enter our lives, how do we encounter it directly? In other words, what is the connection between experience and history?”
And here is the observation that Carr makes again and again, namely that – after Wilhelm Dilthey – we are historical beings first: "We exist historically by virtue of our participation in communities that predate and outlive our individual lives. Through the We-relation, historical reality enters directly into our lived experience and becomes part of our identity. Our membership gives us access to a past, a tradition, and a temporal span that is not so much something we know about as something that is part of us. This is the primary sense in which we are, in Dilthey's sense, historical beings before we are observers of history; this is the sense in which we are ‘intertwined’ with history.” The classic example (of Dilthey) is that of walking in a street: the curve it makes, the houses in it, the traffic lights, etc., all are a result of conscious and unconscious choice made by people in the past. In other words: we are literally surrounded by history.
This principle means that historians must also be aware that their handling of sources is not 'virginal', that they do not conjure up the past 'ex nihilo' from the documents they consult; they themselves are also marked by the collective past, by their own experiences, by their own expectations for the future and by the collective vision of the future of their time and environment. “What is clear from all this is that history-writing is indeed a time-bound process. Historians, like the rest of us, are embedded in time, and in the present in particular, and a changing present at that. Their preoccupation with the past can be seen as one of the ways people try in vain to escape the present. Fiction and fantasy do the same thing in different ways. Maybe mathematics, too. But it can't be done, and some of the things I've said here may help to explain why this is so.”
Carr's observation is not spectacularly new, but it never hurts to emphasize it again. For this 'being in time and space', and that experience of the past (always in hindsight), also have epistemological and methodological consequences: they make a certain form of teleology inevitable. Auch, teleology: that is like cursing in the church. But precisely because we look at the past from a different temporality ('ex post facto'), we always are driven to give meaning to that past, usually in narrative form, and that makes teleology inevitable. "We want history as a whole to “make sense”—that is, we want it to form a large-scale narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. (…) Teleology is “transcendental” in the sense that it is a condition of our temporal experience of the world. But it is an illusion nevertheless.” I guess Carr is rephrasing the essence of constructivism (our narrative of the past always is a construction), but for him this isn't negative. I'm not sure whether I have to place David Carr entirely in the postmodernist movement (my gut feeling tells me I'm doing him an injustice that way), but he clearly bears the traces of it.
In this review I’ve only touched upon some basis aspects of this collection of essays, but there’s so much more to find in here: delightful insights into aspects of narrativism and temporality, for instance, but also musings on speculative philosophy of history. I guess I’ll come back to this book in the future. (rating 3.5 stars)...more
The past as a social laboratory, that is what this collection says it focuses on, and - admit it - that sounds very attractive. After all, history canThe past as a social laboratory, that is what this collection says it focuses on, and - admit it - that sounds very attractive. After all, history can be seen as the total sum of experiences and situations in which people, animals and things have interacted with each other, whether or not in a respectful manner (but the latter is already a value judgement). And so you could learn a lot by looking at that treasure of experiences. The various contributions in this collection attempt to do this to a greater or lesser extent, each with its own perspective or theme, and also with very uneven success (hence the low rating). And the reason for the latter is not far to seek.
It is an ineradicable classic: “Historia magister vitae”, history as a teacher. But what does that mean? That is not a simple question, there are quite a few issues with this statement. Does 'historia' mean the past itself, or its account, i.e. historiography? Those are two interrelated, but very different things. We have known for a long time, but even more so since the Narrative Turn of the 1970s-1980s, that writing history is not so simple and straightforward, at least not if you expect that this writing provides an objective, almost definitive picture of the past reality. After all, the traces of that past are limited, not everything has been preserved, and when looking at that past, the location and background of the viewer always plays an important role. So different stories of the past are always possible. Which doesn't mean that anything goes; fortunately, we are past that radical phase of the Narrative Turn (although apparently not in audiovisual historical fiction). The relative consensus now is that historiography should be a dialogue with the traces of the past in a scientifically controlled process (the historical method, plus as much transparency as is possible), in which an attempt is made to arrive at an image of the past that is as truthful as possible, an image that is always (or must be) open to correction and completion, so it is always provisional. The saying 'progressive insight' applies perfectly here.
Okay, with that introduction I can immediately hear you asking the question: if the reconstruction of the past is so complex and difficult, and never finished, how on earth can you really learn from it? Well, that is indeed a question that cannot simply be dismissed. For some it is enough to firmly claim that you absolutely cannot learn ANY lessons from the past; but just like with the Narrative Turn, that is a far too easy and above all unfruitful excuse, I think. Precisely because the past is such a rich collection of experiences and situations, you must take up the challenge and try to ask and answer the question of relevance for the present in a responsible way. For all I care, you can call it a matter of existential responsibility.
I'm going to make a bold attempt of what I think could be achievable lessons of the past (at least in theory). First, the reconstruction of a given past (with all the caveats above) provides insight into how a given situation evolved and provides context for understanding complex things. You can call this utilitarian, but for me that already is a step further, namely taking specific actions based on knowledge from the past. The latter seems to me to be a bit more problematic, because reality, including that of the present, can never be fully understood and therefore is never predictable. I am more inclined to adhere to insights that allow you to better understand salient themes and issues from your own time and thus - best case - avoid making too many mistakes. In fact, this simply means that insight into the past can mainly protect you from hubris based on incorrect assessments. Sounds minimalistic, but it already is quite something (as history learns, pun intended).
With all this it should be clear that I am not a fan of discerning clearly defined patterns, let alone laws that govern history: there is only one law in history, and that is that there are no laws (the equivalent of the statement: “it’s absolutely true that there is no absolute truth”). I would like to make a certain exception for patterns: distinguishing trends and processes in the past is certainly a valuable activity, provided it is done in a methodologically sound way; but elevating tendencies and processes to legal certainties is a completely different matter. In that sense, I find the term 'social laboratory' that is promoted in this volume, a bit risky. Because it suggests too much that as a 'researcher' you can manipulate past reality, experiment with it, in order to discover great truths. I can only accept it in the passive sense, as indicated at the beginning, namely as a qualification indicating the rich complexity of the past.
Finally, but not least, it remains a fact that looking at the past – and I especially don't mean looking nostalgically – is simply fascinating and entertaining, and to a certain extent even provides pleasure. I know this sounds old-fashioned, but I personally think it is certainly not to be despised. I'll end with this, and I'm conscious I've probably only lifted just a tip of the veil. I'll guess I'll come back to this review, to adjust and/or complement. Feel free to comment!...more
Facts are not just facts, they always need an interpretative framework to do justice to them. That is the baseline with which British diplomat E.H. CaFacts are not just facts, they always need an interpretative framework to do justice to them. That is the baseline with which British diplomat E.H. Carr made world fame more than 60 years ago in his book What Is History?. Without being aware of it, Carr became one of the forerunners of postmodernism, in particular the Narrative Turn, which took off in the 1980s. This Narrative Turn particularly focused on historical studies, pointing out that all historiography is a narrative construction. In its most radical version, this narrativism collapsed into complete relativism, claiming that no reliable historical narrative was possible at all because the historian's subjectivity was all-determining.
I have no doubt that E.H. Carr would strongly disagree with this, and that is also the position taken here by his great-granddaughter Helen Carr and the other contributors to this collection. They do adhere to the constructivist character of historiography, but argue that we should look for other, new perspectives as much as possible, preferably from groups that have been marginalized until now. I have to say, I don't really adhere to the minority approach, especially because, in turn, it often falls into a one-sided, reductionist view of history.
On the other hand, Charlotte Lydia Riley's contribution to this book (chapter 17) appealed to me. She emphasizes that history must always be rewritten, not from an ideological or interest-oriented perspective, but in a permanent dialogue with previous views on a particular past. The past as it really was simply cannot be perfectly reconstructed, but an honestly constructed view based on a scrutiny of the sources should be possible, in dialogue with earlier views. “After the history is written, we historians argue among ourselves about which version of the story is most compelling, and we look at the work done by historians of generations before us and we pick holes in it, pull it apart, and write it all again from a different perspective, including different people or using different archives or theories or schools. And then we present our history to the world – or at least, to each other – as a rewritten history. History would be a very different discipline if each topic were ticked off as finished whenever a new book appeared. If we could not rewrite history, then bad histories would stand as facts, and contentious interpretations – or worse, intentional untruths – would go unchallenged and unappealed.” (p. 271).
Her conclusion is not surprising: “We think about our own pasts differently as our lives change. Distance from the past does not always change the way that we feel about it – some memories and emotions stay with people forever. But for most people, even if they don't do this consciously, the past is always being reimagined, just as the future is continuously invented and reinvented, everything being rewritten over and over again. As historians, in our work, part of what we should try to do is capture this sense of fluidity, and contingency, and precarity – the past and the future, as creative endeavors. Imagining the past is a creative endeavor, and it is something that everyone does, all of the time. Historians do it for a living, maybe, but we are not the only ones. History can be comforting, or it can be challenging, but it is always only one of many possible stories. History must be rewritten, over and over again, to reflect this. ” (p. 280). Now that's a fruitful way to look at subjectivity in historiography!...more
Yes, another novel amidst of my historical non-fiction. Because the Bulgarian novellist Georgi Gospodinov cleverly illustrates a number of aspects of Yes, another novel amidst of my historical non-fiction. Because the Bulgarian novellist Georgi Gospodinov cleverly illustrates a number of aspects of our relationship with the past, especially in these uncertain times. His novel is a sample of how the past is used/abused by individuals, ideologies, movements, collectivities, nations... to provide a foothold for the threatening present. The author shows himself to be a student of postmodernism: he adheres to the conviction that the past is a construction. Just look at the myth of the year 1968, he writes: “I assume that there was no 1968 yet in the year 1968. No one shouted at the time: Man, the year we are living in now is the famous year 1968. In fact, everything only happens years after it happened... You need time and a story to make what has already happened, so to speak, happen... with delay, just as photographs were developed back then and images slowly emerged from the darkness.” At first sight, the statement that the past only takes shape in the future, might been seen as counter-intuitive. But it is a good sample of what has been known among theorists of history for some time. But then, of course, this is not the whole story: sure, history is made in reversal, but it is done with the stuff that comes from the past, and you cannot do just anything with that, contrary to what radical postmodernism claims. Anyway, Gospodinov offers a lot of food for thought in this sometimes hilarious novel. His conclusion, “We are the food of time” certainly is a justified statement....more
Novelist Penelope Lively has made it her trademark to sketch how essential and at the same time problematic the past is to human existence. This novelNovelist Penelope Lively has made it her trademark to sketch how essential and at the same time problematic the past is to human existence. This novel is a great example of how that past actively intrudes into the present: (spoiler alert!) an elderly man discovers a photo among old papers that seems to give a very different look at his past marriage (his wife passed away years before); it is a shock that turns his life upside down: “A stone has been cast into the reliable, immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery. What was, is now something else.” What follows is an obsessive investigation and a thorough questioning of that past, not only by the man himself, but also by a few others involved. As in many of her other novels, Lively muses on the unreliability of our memory, on the quasi-impossibility of taking an "objective" view of the past, and on the ever-shifting tastes of what is beautiful. This is a novel that is certainly recommended for historians....more
Rating 2 stars. The central thesis of this book (“all narratives are bullshit, only science counts”) is fairly easy to punctuate (see my review in my Rating 2 stars. The central thesis of this book (“all narratives are bullshit, only science counts”) is fairly easy to punctuate (see my review in my general account on Goodreads: here). In this review I will specifically indicate what this book means for historical studies, because these are the central subject of Rosenberg.
“History is definitely entertaining. It gives us too much pleasure (along with a host of other emotions and feelings). But that's just another symptom of the problem narrative history faces as a source of knowledge and another reason it's a dangerous substitute for knowledge.” There you are, loud and clear: historical narratives are unreliable, and even dangerous.
Sure, Rosenberg is partially right. Historical narratives often contradict each other, even on the same subject (even after 100 years very contradictory studies are still published on the causes of World War I); so he's right: they don't offer THE truth. Moreover, historical narratives do not allow to make reliable predictions about the future; absolutely correct. Thirdly: they can be dangerous, because they can be abused by anyone (ultranationalists bend history to their will); that too is a fact. And narratives in general impose a straitjacket on reality (from a well-defined beginning to a well-defined end, with a bit of drama and suspense and wrapped in beautiful tropes); these are all things that we know all too well since the linguistic turn of the 1980s.
So, you can certainly not say that this book is completely nonsense. But if you read Rosenberg carefully, it turns out that he narrows historical narratives down to those that explain history on the basis of the motives and desires of historical actors (for example, why Hitler declared war on America at the end of 1941). The author thus sticks to an approach to history that has become largely obsolete: motives and desires of historical actors naturally play a role in historical studies (and it is indeed very difficult to estimate these correctly), but these are usually embedded in a much broader context, with an eye for processes and structures that transcend those actors. Even in more vulgar works, the days of the "Big Men" history are long behind us.
For Rosenberg we have to renounce narratives in the study of history. He only sees salvation in a purely scientific approach. Namely by understanding human cultural phenomena in a Darwinian sense, in other words, blind evolutionary processes as 'the real history'. It may be logical when you see his aversion to ascribing motives and desires to other people, but whether he will really be able to grasp the "soul" of history in this way seems very doubtful to me. Narratives (in the broad sense of the word) have their limitations, and they even pose a risk, sure, but can we do without? It may be to Rosenberg's credit to remind us of those limitations and risks, but his scientistic alternative is no good. Could it be that that is because life, well, just is life? Complex and quirky? I'm afraid people like Rosenberg, blinded by scientism, are never going to see that....more
No greater advocate for a global view on history than the late William H. McNeill (1917-2016). He is the author of groundbreaking works such as The RiNo greater advocate for a global view on history than the late William H. McNeill (1917-2016). He is the author of groundbreaking works such as The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, Plagues and Peoples, The Pursuit of Power, etc. Most of those books may be outdated by now, but the approach that McNeill launched has become commonplace. According to him, real world history is based on the interaction between regions and civilizations, which generate an increasingly complex dynamic that better explains many processes in history. Better, anyway, than simply juxtaposing local and regional histories. Only a global view can provide relevant insights: “new insights may arise with breadth of view; fallible and never completely provable perhaps, yet enormously stimulating to exact and careful study which may find new questions to ask of familiar data in the light of general ideas generated by men like Toynbee.(…) Interaction between large views, bold hypotheses, fallible intuitions , and exact, detailed scholarship is what we need. “
And that is pre-eminently an area in which historians can excel: “All the same it seems clear that unless historians seek actively and energetically to construct a credible portrait of the human past on a global scale, we will have failed to perform our professional function adequately . We cannot afford to make the world in which our fellow citizens live historically unintelligible. We cannot afford to obstruct the effort to achieve a credible view of the human past by insisting on excessive detail that merely obscures the global structure and patterns within which human communities exist and always have existed. I therefore commend world history to your serious attention. It is not a luxury but a necessity, both for our profession and for our time.” I don't really have much to add to that. The past few decades, with the breakthrough of Global History, and in part Big History, have amply proved that McNeill was right....more
For years now, the Dutch specialist of ancient history, Jona Lendering, has been campaigning tirelessly to make his beloved field of expertise (ancienFor years now, the Dutch specialist of ancient history, Jona Lendering, has been campaigning tirelessly to make his beloved field of expertise (ancient antiquity in the very broad sense of the word) more widely known to the general public in the Netherlands and Flanders, and especially to address the specific methodological problems these studies are confronted with. In this booklet ('Deceptively real') he focuses on papyrology, the study of ancient texts on papyrus and other perishable materials. Lendering poignantly presents how valuable the contribution of this field is to our knowledge of ancient history, but also how vulnerable this science is. He specifically zooms in on a number of recent affairs in which false fragments were brought to light, and even one in which a very known specialist was accused of (and in the meantime convicted for) the theft and illegal sale of precious materials. Unfortunately this book hasn't been translated (yet). Dutch review in my general account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.......more
Against Tolstoy “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy contains an appendix in which the Russian writer presented his own philosophy of history. Tolstoy saw thAgainst Tolstoy “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy contains an appendix in which the Russian writer presented his own philosophy of history. Tolstoy saw the past as dominated by forces that transcend individuals and peoples; “the individual is subject to the laws of time, space and causation” is his conclusion, making people into puppets that are swept away by the grand currents of history. It's a theory that he had turned into literary form in his novel in the preceding 1,000 pages.
This booklet by Stefan Zweig is barely 200 pages long, but without saying it explicitly, the Austrian writer made a statement that was clearly directed against Tolstoy. In 10 dazzling stories, he highlights defining episodes between the 15th to the 20th century: the conquest of Byzantium, the 'discovery' of the Pacific Ocean, the battle of Waterloo, the Russian Revolution, etc. His focus is not at all on the processes and structures that led to a particular historical event. On the contrary, Zweig zooms in on individuals who made a certain decision, often in the blink of an eye or purely on instinct, and who thereby changed the course of history. In almost all episodes there is talk of a “fateful hour”, in which actions were taken that went against what was apparently determined by fate. Zweig can't get enough of highlighting the heroism of the little man or the little moment: “Chance success and easy achievement kindle only ambition, but the heart rises in response to a human being's fight against an invincibly superior power of fate, the greatest of all tragedies and one that sometimes inspires poets and shapes life a thousand times over.”
Now, who is right, Tolstoy or Zweig? The answer may disappoint: both and neither. Of course, Zweig rightly pointed to the defining role of the contingent, the 'shooting stars' where individuals make decisions with far-reaching consequences in the whim of the moment. And, of course, Tolstoy also rightly pointed out the processes and forces that drag along individuals and peoples, often without their being aware of it. But if the historiography of the last century has taught us anything, it is that history is an almost opaque entanglement of both the structural and the contingent, writhing both anonymous forces and shooting stars.
How do you deal with that as an historian? How can you translate this entanglement into a study or a story that provides insight into the past? With that, we inevitably find ourselves in the debate surrounding the Narrative Turn, which dominated historical studies theory in the 1970s-1990s, in the slipstream of postmodernism. Seen in that light, both Tolstoy and Zweig are valuable literary attempts to bring the past back to life, according to certain literary conventions. But they are each at the extreme end of a continuum scale. It seems to me that in real historical studies (which do not have to be academic), the interweaving between the structural and the contingent has to be much more intimate. A very challenging and delicate task, because at the same time you have to offer some form of literary pleasure (yes, historiography is a science, a craft ànd an art!). Both Tolstoy and Zweig proved that reconstructing the past remains one of the most daunting endeavours possible....more
This collection contains articles that the German Theory of History specialist Reinhart Koselleck published between 1980 and 2006, thus in the later yThis collection contains articles that the German Theory of History specialist Reinhart Koselleck published between 1980 and 2006, thus in the later years of his life. In this book Koselleck only sporadically touches upon the view for which he has become best known, namely the new sense of temporality introduced by modernity in the period 1750-1850, with a strict separation between present and past, and an absolute orientation towards the future. Instead, he focuses on a whole range of other themes. I only mention a few here.
To begin with the opening article, which gave the title to this book: 'Sediments of Time' (in German Zeitschichten). Koselleck refers to the classic distinction between linear and cyclical views of history, but there are also many other layers of time, because certain events move within recurring structures with their own temporality. He refers, among other things, to the difference in generations, to political, social and cultural structures that flow within their particular temporality. He concludes with propagatin a multilayered theory of time, but does not elaborate on that; a missed opportunity, I think (see my end note below).
An absolutely wonderful essay is “Constancy and Change of All Contemporary Histories: Conceptual-Historical Notes”. That is a very abstract title for an indeed very theoretical subject, namely a musing on what contemporary history (‘Zeitgeschichte’) actually is. Koselleck argues that it is necessary to temporalize the different time dimensions themselves (past, present and future). He works out a matrix model that can make you dizzy for a while, but which has a very distinct logic. For example, he distinguishes "present past, present present, present future", to indicate how we experience the past, present and future in the now; "past present, past pasts, past futures" are the experiences of time at different moments in the past; and logically, "future present, future pasts, future futures" indicate temporality experiences we can have in the future. “The duration, change, and singularity of events and their sequences can be determined on the basis of this model”, Koselleck writes, and indeed it is a matrix in which the constant shifting of temporalities can be captured. I realize that this is all fairly abstract, but the relevance immediately becomes clear when Koselleck draws the conclusion that “Every history is Zeitgeschichte and every history was, is, and will be a history of the present”, simple because that present always is shifting, and our time perspective with it. It is a view that clearly reveals both the strengths and limitations of the study of history.
Another brilliant essay deals with the linguistic aspects of our experience of reality, and the consequences for the study of history. Here, Koselleck confirms and corrects the proponents of the cultural/narrative turn, like Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit. The confirmation actually lies in a very obvious observation: that our entire experience of reality and therefore also of temporalities is imbued in linguistics, we always perceive reality through language. But Koselleck points out that a lot of pre-linguistic elements also play a role in human experiences, which he arranges in the anthropological relationships “earlier-later, inside-outside, above-below”. And it are precisely those pre-linguistic elements that make it difficult to capture reality completely through language, and that includes historical events. There’s a fundamental difference between historical reality and its narrative translation. "This difference between a history in the moment of its occurrence and its linguistic processing remains in each case constitutive for the relationship between the two." That was also the conclusion of the narrativists, but Koselleck reverses their conclusion: they stated that historical research is so tied to language that its value is only relative; but for Koselleck it is just the other way around, and the fact that events can never be fully captured in language offers permanent opportunities for historical research to supplement, correct and deepen our views on the past.
These are just a few of the poignant views this book contains. I know this all looks very abstract and difficult to follow, but it are absolutely brilliant trains of thought. It has to be said though that Koselleck’s way of looking at things often isn’t completely satisfying. By that I mean that he touches upon some matters, formulates a great insight, but then but he concludes quite suddenly, regularly without working out his reasoning all the way to the end. I guess he wanted to leave room for others to do that....more
Zoltan Boldizsar Simon (University of Bielefeld & Leiden) here offers a sequel to his previous book History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A TheoryZoltan Boldizsar Simon (University of Bielefeld & Leiden) here offers a sequel to his previous book History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century. That was a very theoretical work in which he searched for the contours of a totally new view on history, away from the modernist concept of history of the past two centuries. In modernism, past, present and future were chained together in a developmental scheme that showed a clear upward trend, fully focused on the future. Simon proposed a new concept in which every moment in history is seen as fundamentally new. The reason for this is that, according to him, we may be entering (or have entered) a completely different era, an era of unprecedented change, given climate change, the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe and the robotization and even destruction of the human species. In that context, a developmental approach based on optimistic progress thinking no longer makes sense.
That very gloomy perspective is also the starting point of this book. According to Simon, we are in the middle of what he calls an "epochal transformation". In itself, that is not that different from the "unpredented change" perspective, but in this book he makes it more concrete, connecting it with the Anthropocene-concept. It is crucial to him that a systemic change is underway in which technology is the engine that radically changes both the human and the natural world. “All this, either separately or together, is expected to launch epochal changes on a planetary scale, entangle the human and the natural worlds through advanced technology, and kick off transformations with potentially unpredictable consequences that the human mind is not even equipped to grasp.” Simon puts a lot of emphasis on the entanglement of the natural, technological and human world, because that is precisely the new reality that has been created and which can possibly lead to unprecedented change.
Concepts such as the Anthropocene already indicate this, but according to Simon there is need for an even broader conceptual framework, and above all a set of conceptual instruments to indicate in the best possible way what is changing and how fundamental this is, and that at the same time works ‘connective’, reflecting the entanglement of nature-human-technology. And for him, this inevitably brings us to history, because our general sense is that we are entering a fundamentally new temporal era. In doing so, he ties in closely with the thinking of Dipesh Chakrabarty: “A new epochality is, I think, a key constituent of the equally novel historical sensibility. Transgressing “planetary boundaries,” potentially arriving at a “technological singularity,” and being in the midst of a sixth extinction can be considered as instances of both unprecedented change and the new kinds of events that signal epochal transformations.” So, as already indicated, it is no longer enough to put events and trends in a developmental framework, and certainly not in a naively optimistic progression scheme. Because it is precisely because we are in the midst of a qualitative, disruptive leap in developments that other concepts are needed.
Simon especially tries to elaborate the concept of "epochal event", in contrast with the concept of "historical event". The latter refers to an event with consequences that can be short-lived or far-reaching, and always is labelled retrospectively. According to the author, that no longer covers the load: if we want to visualize unseen changes, then a qualitative leap in the concepts is necessary, and this is how he arrives at "epochal event", a transformative concept that thus suggests a new era. “The epochal event is not merely a bigger historical event, but another kind of event, a category on its own. Attributing a hyper-historical character to the epochal means precisely that the changes they bring about are not merely “historical” changes as we have known them throughout Western modernity. The kind of change introduced by epochal events is what I referred to earlier as unprecedented change, that is, a change that does not merely unfold from past conditions but brings about a previously inexistent subject in the shape of a singular event”. I have my doubts on this one, because in my linguistic intuition both ‘epochal’ and ‘event’ still are too much linked to a developmental scheme. Simon is aware of this and therefore tries to steer the concept of epochal event in a different direction. After an exploration of numerous other thinkers and their concepts, he arrives at a definition that he believes covers reality much better. This working definition contains 7 concrete aspects, which I am not going to mention here, but which can be the starting point for further deepening and nuance.
Obviously, Simon's approach is very theoretical and abstract, and is inevitably linked to semantic aspects as well, and I wonder whether many people are able to follow this. Fortunately, this book is much more concrete and digestible than his previous (nevertheless very interesting) History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century, which was also more focused on the theory and philosophy of history. It has the merit of being a bold attempt to fathom our ever more complex reality, which may face dramatic and disruptive times, with useful conceptual instruments. Because that is the condition for being able to act adequately. In that sense, Simon's attempt is absolutely commendable!...more
In general, we forget how fairly recent the statement “history will judge” as a concept is, only emerging with the Enlightenment and modernity. The GeIn general, we forget how fairly recent the statement “history will judge” as a concept is, only emerging with the Enlightenment and modernity. The German history theorist Reinhart Koselleck showed this abundantly: modernity (for him from about 1750 onwards) saw history as an ascending line which connects past, present and future and takes them into an ever higher form of civilization and development. Instead of a multitude of histories, history became an autonomous unit (a 'collective singular'), with its own moral power. Joan Wallach Scott follows that view and adds that the nation-state in particular was seen as the guiding goal, the telos of that historical development and thus the bearer of that moral judgment. But it is precisely because of this that the power of the historical judgment is perverted.
Scott beautifully illustrates that in her first two Ruth Benedict lectures, one on the Nuremberg Tribunal that sentenced the Nazi leaders, and the second on the Truth Commission after the apartheid regime in South Africa. Both approaches, however different, made an explicit appeal to history as the ultimate judgmental body. Scott deconstructs those approaches in a very Foucaultian way. She beautifully exposes how both implicitly adhered to the logic of the nation-state and thus served specific meta-political interests. Both agencies ignored the claims of the nation-state to absolute sovereignty and to the monopoly on violence, thus failing to question the very foundations of that nation-state. The Nuremberg Tribunal sidestepped that tricky issue by calling 'The Third Reich' an aberration of history, the Commission of Truth by ignoring the structural basis of white rule (grounded in colonialism). In her third lecture, she also applies such a deconstruction to the movement for compensation for slavery in the United States. That too relies on the judgment of history, but according to Scott it perceives too little that racism is inherent to the constitution of the American nation-state, which also undermines the moral weight of that state and thus to the history of it.
In an epilogue, Scott brings those analyses together and tries to learn from that blind spot. She pleads for a different, non-modernist history approach: “a record of discontinuity and multiple temporalities, a process of contention and conflict, a story of struggles with and for power, with no sharp boundaries between past, present, and future” . And the logical consequence of this is that history has no moral weight at all, cannot be a "redeemer", as postmodernity in the line of Foucault had already shown. At the same time, she has a hard time with that, because such a conclusion seems to take away any ground for action for just change: if history is not a linear uphill line, but only continuous disruption, then there seems no hope for a better future at all . Referring to the Marxist publicist Massimo Tomba, she solves this issue by proposing that history as disruption on the contrary offers a positive prospect: because the future is open, opportunities are constantly being created to work for a better society.
All very interesting, but unfortunately Scott deals with these fundamental questions in her epilogue rather haphazardly and so her train of thougt remains somewhat on the surface. Instead, I would like to refer to Zoltan Boldiszar Simon's book (History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century) that I recently read and where the same question (“what if history is not an upward trend, but a chain of constant fundamental change?”) is dealt with in a much more in-depth manner, up to the question whether such a view still offers perspectives for positive action. (an advanced copy of this book was provided through NetGalley)...more
In line with one of his inspiration sources, the German history theorist Reinhart Koselleck, the Dutch cultural historian Eelco Runia (° 1955) examineIn line with one of his inspiration sources, the German history theorist Reinhart Koselleck, the Dutch cultural historian Eelco Runia (° 1955) examines the temporal relationship between past, present and future; to be more precise, especially the relationship between past and present. He focuses on what he calls “presence”, the phenomenon of a past that is actively present in the present. This is interesting, for sure, and of course not a new topic; remember William Faulkner's saying: "the past is never dead, it is not even past". But Runia approaches it in a very quirky way. Take his controversial article on the report by Dutch historians on the slaughter in Bosnian Srebrenica in 1995, a report that led to the dismissal of the then Dutch government. Curiously enough, that report remained very superficial in its conclusions, and according to Runia, that is entirely due to the fact that the researchers approached their study object from the same frame of reference of that object itself and therefore could not detach themselves from it. For him, it is manifest proof of his claim that the past constantly conditions, even actively manipulates, our own worldview and actions.
Runia finds an analogy for that active working of the past in the figure of speech "metonymy". In contrast to the much more commonly used metaphor, a metonymy makes something absent present in a different context. While with a metaphor the accent is more on giving meaning and explanation, thus establishing a form of continuity, a metonymy puts the stress more on discontinuity. Runia's discourse on this is rather abstract, but he uses it to reinforce his thesis that we should see the relationship between past and present roughly in these metonymy terms. The past is something "in absence" that is present in the present, not passively, but in a very different way. According to Runia, the past is not only not really gone ('a foreign country'), it is also very active: “the past may have a presence that is so powerful that it can use us, humans, as its material.” He compares it to a stowaway (what a beautiful image!) that has been smuggled into the here and now and does something to us, yes, we are “moved by the past”.
To a certain extent, I can follow this, but Runia continues his momentum. He rightly disputes the tendency of historians to focus primarily on continuity (think of the metaphor): shocking, surprising events are systematically explained in causal terms, so ‘ex post facto’, as if what happened hàd to happen. That is indeed the poverty of historicism (after Popper). In contrast, Runia puts up a whole theory that major twists in history happen precisely out of a kind of an urge to disrupt, to establish discontinuity. He disputes that people make deliberate, coherent choices, but on the contrary, recklessly and impulsively choose to jump into the abyss at crucial ("sublime") moments, thereby creating a completely different situation. He quotes Napoleon - "on s’engage et puis on voit" -, and also discusses Lenin's actions in the Russian Revolution in detail. That can also be followed to a certain extent: who has not yet experienced such moments personally, when you blindly commit yourself to important and risky adventures? But Runia sets this kind of behaviour, which seems rather exceptional to me, as a rule, and even as an instinctive urge of all humans in general. And that seems problematic to me. Not only because it seems exceptional, reserved to crucial moments, but especially because Runia in this way reduces history to the performance of “Great Men/Women”. His references to Jean d'Arc, Napoleon, Lenin and Hitler are no help in that regard.
He tries to counter this criticism by stating that also collectivities engage in such a "reckless" behaviour on "sublime" moments. This was the case in radical twists such as the French and Russian revolution, but even the Neolithic agricultural revolution, and the start of early modern capitalism in England, all episodes in which groups of people made choices that went against their own interests and that contained great risks. And afterwards, with the help of historians, they rationalized these "sublime' decisions, and turned disruption and discontinuity into continuity.
I have the impression that Runia's rather quirky and even provocative opinions stem from his expertise as a psychologist. He does not hide that either. He frequently uses psychological terms such as 'parallel processes', or 'active dissonance reduction', etc. He applies them to very specific situations and then generalizes them, to justify his statement that the past has an effect on the present. And he goes one step further. In his closing article, he claims no less than that human evolution has been able to experience such dire changes and acceleration, because mankind has systematically made such reckless choices. Mankind thus unconsciously has applied the 2nd pillar of the theory of evolution, that of competitive selectiveness, to himself, by becoming his own greatest enemy and by posing reckless behaviour. Again, I have the same estimation: Runia makes something that to a certain extent is relevant into a generalization, and that is really a bridge too far.
In short: this is a tantalizing and challenging book, but Runia's quirkiness also plays tricks on him. And if I can also play it psychologically: it seems to me that Runia likes to provoke and deliberately kick ass in the historical household, even enjoys to do this. That's his right, and I like that, because it opens doors that would otherwise remain closed. But a certain form of balance and perspective is still advisable, although I realize well enough that this may sound very rusty.
Addendum. A great way to get acquainted with the work of Eelco Runia is through the interview Marek Tamm had with him, and that was published in the periodic 'Rethinking History', in may 2019. This interview is available in open access, through academia.edu. Recommended! ...more
If I have understood this book correctly, Ricoeur's great merit is that he has uncovered the special temporality of stories. Stories are made up of a If I have understood this book correctly, Ricoeur's great merit is that he has uncovered the special temporality of stories. Stories are made up of a beginning, middle and end, even though the story structure can sometimes be manipulated by the author/narrator. That course of the story in itself suggests a linear temporality, from the starting position to the end; think of a detective or a thriller. But Ricoeur discovered that there are more and very different temporalities at play: there is the temporality of the characters in the story, who act but cannot estimate the exact consequences of their actions and cannot see the future (though they always imagine one). This is the baseline of the story, and it progresses in a forward tempo. But then you have the (formal) storyteller/narrator, and he/she is on a completely different point of time: he/she knows how the story ends, knows the future, and so in fact tells the story from a backward temporality. For Ricoeur it is that final ending, that telos, that permeates the narrative and gives it its distinct character.
Right here Ricoeur quite logically draws a parallel with historical work. In the first place, he recognizes in a historical story all the characteristics of a real narrative: a beginning, middle and end with a progressive time lapse, in which not just a lot of facts are listed, but also order and interpretation are involved, because without that story structure those naked facts would remain meaningless. And a historian gets his/her interpretation par excellence through the conclusion of the facts; he/she knows how the past evolved into the present, so he/she knows the outcome, the telos, and is therefore comparable to a fictional storyteller. A historical view therefore always is a narrative for Ricoeur, and for him that has a great strength.
Postmodernists of the "linguistic turn" sometimes have an own take on this. In their version, a narrative is a construction, and the question is whether that construction can really approach reality. Applied to the past, some argued that this narrative with its own plot features is impossible to really cover the past, thus allowing an endlessly possibly number of reconstructions of the past. I will not go into that discussion here, but will suffice to say that those postmodernists have rightly warned about the construction aspect of historical stories, but that their conclusions are absolutely wrong.
As far as I can estimate from this introduction by Dowling, Ricoeur does not really address this issue (at least not in the book ‘Time and Narrative’). What interests me is the consequences of knowing the telos, the outcome of the story, for telling it. Because in historical studies we are confronted with a big issue. After all, the major trap of much historiographical work is that too much is argued in function of the final outcome; this is called the 'teleological trap'. I can understand that: historians mainly want to explain how and why something happened or evolved, and the focus is on statements/actions/processes that made these developments plausible. But then there’s the real threat of what Raymond Aron called the danger of "the retrospective illusion of fatality", a kind of tunnel vision in which what seemed surprising to contemporaries, was in retrospect ("ex post facto") unavoidable. Such a historical discourse, as in a fictional story, can be particularly strong, but it may also be misleading. Because everyone intuitively knows that what happens could have happened in a thousand different ways, or could have had very different outcomes, depending on small factors. That is the famous contingency of history.
Ricoeur here points to an element of transcendence in a narrative: there are not only the characters who act blindly forward, and a narrator who, afterwards, assembles the story according to the outcome/telos; for Ricoeur there is also an implicit narrator who looks much more broadly and can see an ending, a telos, that transcends both characters and narrator. To be clear: Ricoeur does not mean this transcendence in the religious sense, but as a kind of meta point of view. In Dowlings’s words: “Ricoeur's originality lies in having seen that the principle of transcendence holds as well for the narrator, who, in perceiving the world of the story from a 'totum simul' perspective, is projected as a unifying consciousness existing independently of the words on the page. It is the unity of this consciousness that is central to Ricoeur's conception. "
If I understand this correctly, this is a very abstract concept which for Ricoeur immediately indicates the essence of historical time. “Its time, as Ricoeur has taught us, is not the cosmic time of a universe oblivious to human existence, nor yet the time of an isolated consciousness that, as Walter Pater once said, keeps as a solitary prisoner its dream of the world. It is a third time of narrative that, belonging to narrative alone, alone gives back the image of a world of human concern. It is, Ricoeur thinks, the time in which humanity has been dwelling, as unconsciously as it breathes the air, since its appearance on the face of the earth. ”
I'm not sure what to think about this. After all, I have the impression that with this concept of "transcendence in immanence", Ricoeur does not really get away from a philosophical nominalist approach, in which that transcendence takes rather rigid forms. An indication of this is that if you look at the development of historiography, the meta points of view are also constantly evolving: for example, the French Revolution introduced a completely new way of looking at history (the famous break with the past, and the start of the progressive thinking), and in the same way the current climate debate fundamentally alters the course of looking at the past (and the future). So I have strong doubts whether Ricoeur's focus on narrativity and temporality is so universally applicable. Perhaps, to clear that up, I ought to read ‘Time and Narrative’ myself....more
The starting point of Stefan Tanaka (° 1952, University of California, San Diego) is that historical studies still depend too much on chronology basedThe starting point of Stefan Tanaka (° 1952, University of California, San Diego) is that historical studies still depend too much on chronology based on absolute Newtonian time: “in spite of the occasional and quite powerful inquiries into the problem of time, historians and historical thinking still operate within a framework that predisposes us toward a progressivist and mechanistic desire (or, at minimum, vocabulary); time is still accepted as absolute and natural”. And according to Tanaka that leads to an aberrant distortion of reality. Because contrary to what such a chronology suggests, that absolute time is not neutral, on the contrary: “it homogenizes life according to mechanical, linear processes ”, and thus gives a false sense of order and control. For Tanaka, this is also embedded in the Western, modernist approach in general, and thus also in the classical sciences. It is an approach that is itself a historical construction, and - according to Tanaka – this approach by now is completely stalled.
Tanaka is not afraid to make strong statements. According to him the use of chronology is simply disastrous: “Time becomes a quantitative measure to determine distance, difference, and relations. Each place, object, event, and document becomes a unique point on a grid of time and space. Time establishes a distance between events, a sequencing for making connections, and a way to mark repetition or recurrence. It simultaneously establishes a value system – motion is better than stasis, linearity better than repetition, and new better than old – while depending on that which it denigrates”. Chronology makes time into something that is beyond the described activity, concealing reality to suggest the illusion of order and homogeneity. Tanaka quotes Walter Benjamin "history is the strongest narcotic of the 20th century".
The author makes extensive use of the analyses that have since been made of that classic, linear-homogenizing approach by the sector of systems thinking, 2nd order cybernetics and complexity theory. This approach, which was developed in the 2nd half of the 20th century, emphasizes the relational, the continuous interaction between part and whole, the nonlinear interactions that trigger feedback loops and emergencies and thus better reflect the complex and chaotic reality in which we live. This is very fascinating terrain and indeed offers perspectives that transcend classical science.
But of course, the question is above all: what alternatives does Tanaka offer? His argument is quite confused in this area. He picks examples left and right and suggests leads without fully elaborating. But the principles he proposes are good: heterogeneity, multiperspectivism, non-linearity and focus on activity. In practice, he says, this means using multi-temporalities: different ways of experiencing time, in addition to absolute, chronological time. “history then becomes a science in heterogeneous times – repetition, layered times scales, circular causality, and nonlinear processes – that are inherent to the activity of systems. These multiple times coexist; they might be interdependent and at different points, they interact, coincide, conjoin or collide. From this activity, interaction, repetition, or recurrence give rise to patterns and commonality – the spatialization of time. Change can be maintenance (homeostasis), decay, innovation, and/or growth. Events separated by chronological time might not be that different while rates of activity vary: viruses multiply very quickly, society moves rather slowly, geological masses move even more slowly, and today, the environment seems to be moving faster than the latter two”. This approach should make history something completely different from what it is today: “allow history to be also a form of communication about pasts and their relevance to the present, not just a knowledge about the past”.
The book ends with a plea for seizing the digital revolution: historians are ideally placed to deal with the big data, “(the) methodological strength of historians and humanists to understand the surroundings, embeddedness, situatedness, and environment”, which is a curiously positive statement after the bile Tanaka spewed on classical history (and by the way a clear echo here of The History Manifesto by Armitage and Guldi.)
Now, what to think of all this? First of all, I would like to emphasize that Tanaka's aim, a more nuanced approach to the past, is absolutely desirable. Indeed, historiography that relies too much on classic chronology (only separating ‘before’ and ‘after’, and placing everything in a ‘universal’ temporality, with a clear cause-effect relationship) seems too artificial. I have the impression that Tanaka here apparently refers to the traditional positivist approach, with its very strict methodology. He seems to reduce historical research to the use of chronology, which is not really representative for the current historical practice. In his radical approach he turns that chronology into an absolute demon, with horrifying effects, and that too is a bridge too far. The use of Newtonian time has a huge synchronizing and homogenizing effect, creating order and clarity, usually embedded in a narrative structure. Of course, this is a construction, but one with enormous advantages and an enormous strength, as more than 150 years of historiography have clearly shown. In a footnote he quotes Le Goff: “Le Goff understands many of the problems wrought by a unified time but argues that the benefits are greater”, and that is absolutelu right.
I certainly share Tanaka's concern, and his plea for a more pluralistic approach to temporality is commendable. But in his tunnel vision, he has definitely gone too far. Other down sides to this book are the muddled structure of the chapters, and the overload of citations and references.
Addendum: I just read Ricoeur on Time and Narrative: An Introduction to Temps et récit and it's more clear now that Tanaka just focuses on the wrong enemy: it's not so much chronology that is the problem, it's linear causality. Of course, chronology is a strong incentive to a discourse of linear causality, but I know very little historical studies that limit themselves to a chronical approach in the sense of "first this happened, than that". As stated, 'before' and 'after' are relevant categories, but they have to be placed in context (through interpretation), in most cases a narrative that contains much more than just a chronological line....more
In 1972 in Germany the first volume was published of a conceptual study by O. BRUNNER, W. CONZE & R. KONSELLECK (eds). Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. HIn 1972 in Germany the first volume was published of a conceptual study by O. BRUNNER, W. CONZE & R. KONSELLECK (eds). Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (“Fundamental Concepts of History. Historical Lexicon of the political-social language in Germany"). In 7 volumes the evolution of 120 central concepts in political-social thinking was explored, fundamental concepts that were both the result of historical-philosophical research, and guiding principles in this domain. In the second volume, published in 1975, Reinhart Koselleck was responsible for the central concept of "History" ("Geschichte" in German). And in this French collection, it has been translated (in French) and placed as the first article. In the context of my temporary reading program about time and temporality, I saw it as compulsory reading.
Of course, this offers a fairly theoretical approach: Koselleck studies how we arrived at our contemporary concept of History. In essence, he makes clear that our modern concept of history only came about in various steps during the hinge period (the “Sattelzeit”) 1750-1850. Koselleck indicates a transition from histories as moral reports, stories of a series of events, to a concept of history in itself, as an ideal entity, with its own identity and dynamics, in other words history as a process. Eventually that process would become a driving force in itself, in an ascending line of self-development and emancipation, see Hegel and Marx.
The attentive reader will probably notice that this shift from moral histories to history as a process amounted to a secularization of Christian salvation history. That is indeed how Koselleck saw it. Because the idealistic concept of History in the 19th century also had a normative character: the ascending line, the unstoppable rise of progress (of course understood in a Western, modernist, rationalistic sense) was the line that humanity as a whole should and would go. It was simply the unfolding of history, towards some form of paradise. A salvation history indeed!
But for Koselleck there was more to it than mere secularization, and that is where his unique contribution lies. That evolution (both linguistically and philosophically) from histories (stories) to THE History was accompanied by a different sense of temporality. Until 1750-1850 past, present and future flowed together, because human nature remained the same and in fact everything was more or less repetitive; so the past could function as a teacher (magistra vitae) for present and future. Now in this crucial period, in modernity, past and present became separated from each other, and the present became fully at the service of the future. In Koselleck's terminology, this was a separation of the space of experience and the horizon of expectancy.
According to Koselleck, the French Revolution was particularly decisive in this break: from now on the past was considered as a less progressive period, from which lessons hardly could be learned. It was the present and the unstoppable future that counted. The past became something strange (just think of "The Past is a foreign Country"). The past, that space of experience from which people could learn so much in the past, was demoted to a preparatory stage for the glorious future. Only in that sense would it be worth studying history: to show how the process of modernity started and will be realized in the future in all kinds of utopian forms (scientism, communism, nationalism, fascism, etc.).
It is clear that the 70 pages that include the article "Geschichte" in the German edition contain quite a lot of information and insights. Koselleck writes very condensed and compressed in his sketch of how the modern concept of history came about. That does not always make reading easy, certainly because he builds up a certain reasoning sentence by sentence and constantly approaches his subject from different angles (in his main work ‘Futures Past’, Koselleck will do that somewhat more didactically).
Another disadvantage is that Koselleck here only focuses on the evolution in Germany (that was also the approach of the compilation work "Begriffsgeschichte"), but you inevitably ask yourself whether the evolution he has outlined also occurred in France, the United Kingdom, Italy and other countries, and whether there were any strengthening or restraining cross-connections. He seems to implicitly confirm that, but it is a missed opportunity that the approach in this article remains so geographically limited. And finally, it is clear that Koselleck's approach is pre-eminently an intellectual study: he focuses primarily on linguistics, semantics and philosophy, through a study of writers and the concepts they used. With the exception of the French Revolution, he makes no mention of underlying political-economic-social tendencies that could have influenced the conceptual evolution. That of course fits in with the focus of his Begriffsgeschichte, but nevertheless limits his field of vision substantially, and gives the impression that concepts are evolving on a meta level, without being related to other aspects of reality.
This article "Geschichte" undoubtedly is a striking intellectual achievement, but in this very condensed form and with the limited perspective outlined above, the attempt by Koselleck does not seem 100% successful. I look forward to reading his main work "Vergangene Zukunft"/Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. (in the meanwhile I read it, see my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)...more
I am only going to comment here on the short essay by Patrick Boucheron, one of the most interesting French historians of the moment. In about 40 pageI am only going to comment here on the short essay by Patrick Boucheron, one of the most interesting French historians of the moment. In about 40 pages he briefly outlines the condition of the study of the past at the beginning of the 21st century. The belief in showing the past as it actually was, as if it is something definitively established (Ranke) is long behind us. Instead Boucheron stresses the very clear awareness that the past was a succession of possibilities, of options, of crossroads. At any moment, events could have taken a different turn; in other words, there are an enormous number of 'unfulfilled futures'. Without expressing it explicitly, he thereby emphasizes the importance of contingency in the past (and therefore also in the present). I found particularly interesting his reference to the work of a historian as a 'translator' from that past to the present, whereby the role of that translator is, of course, not innocent, but also not random; he uses the medieval concept of 'inventio', which did not refer to fabricating or making up at all, but to “digging into meaning, looking for traces, or vestiges, the imprints that time makes in things ". A beautiful image, I think, that is an inspiring description of what the work of an historian should be....more
It is impossible to adequately summarize the rich content of this book, but its focal point actually is very simple: “is historical research and histoIt is impossible to adequately summarize the rich content of this book, but its focal point actually is very simple: “is historical research and historical thinking, as we knew it so far, still possible in this era of unprecedented change?” Unprecedented change, that is Simon’s starting point, referring to the nuclear threat, the radical ecological changes and the enormous technological evolutions. These are so profound (and of course, at the time of me writing this, we could add the threat of global pandemics) that a new era seems to have arrived, to the extent that a future without humans is likely, in the most minimal scenario with a transhuman civilization (via artificial intelligence, robotization and technological enhancement), and in the most radical scenario without humans, after the destruction of the human species and/or civilization. Thus, indeed: this posthuman outlook is unprecedented! Now, of course, this is an assumption and a valuation at the same time. Even Simon, in his introduction, says that he is not stating this unprecedented change is real, just that the feeling this change is happening is real. This is the pivotal rock upon which this whole book is built. I think it’s also its strength ànd weakness.
Let’s follow his train of thoughts a bit. The next step in Simon’s theses is that if unprecedented change is real, then the conceptual tools that we have to asses this situation are failing. His culprit is the ‘modern’ concept of history (Simon uses the phrase ‘modern historical sensibility’), in the way Reinhart Koselleck formulated it as a conceptual relating of past, present and future, into a ‘collective singular’ as thé history, oriented along a progressive line towards the future. According to Simon that sensibility was a tool for ‘domestication’: “the modern concept of history is nothing other than a way of making sense of the world and ourselves through the operation of domesticating experienced novelty, and the domestication itself means the incorporation of the new into a pattern of deep temporal continuity, thereby configuring novelty as developing out of the old.” The core of this modern concept is a developmental, process-orientated way of looking at time, pushing everything in a progressive line towards the future. Now, given unprecedented change, this line has been interrupted, or better, it’s no use to look at time (and history) in this way any longer. A new philosophy of history is needed. “With historical narratives of temporal domestication becoming unable to cope with the challenge of making sense of what Western societies came to perceive as unprecedented changes, the modern historical sensibility is no longer a solution to current problems but itself is a problem. Instead of asking over and over again how our modern understanding of history can contribute to the solution of current sociocultural problems, it is time to face the task of approving what those problems demand from historical thinking.” And that is what Simon wants to do in this book: “This book is an effort to come to terms with such a novel configuration of lived time as unprecedented change by conceptualizing it as an emerging historical sensibility.”
This covers only the introductory chapters of this book. Because then Simon undertakes a very detailed conceptual analysis of that new historical sensibility, along 2 tracks: one of history itself, or rather the 'change over time in human affairs' (the classic 'historia res gestae') and the other of historiography, the report of history (the 'historia rerum gestarum'). It is a journey that leads us at many classic philosophical problems, such as the connection between language and reality, but also at analyses of recent trends in history theory, such as presentism and narrativism. It is impossible for me to comment on all of Simon's thoughts here; I must also admit that, as a non-philosophically trained reader, I occasionally lost track of his very abstract discourse.
But quite a few of his analyses were very enlightening and absolutely made sense. For example, I absolutely agree with the criticism he gives on presentist models by François Hartog, Eelco Runia and Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht (although he also emphasizes their merits), and even more in his nuanced yet very critical approach of the narrativistic school that has dominated history theory for the past 50 years. But he goes so deeply into this that in his attempt to adjust these views to the consequences of ‘unprecedented change’, he launches such a bunch of trains of thought and neologisms that is difficult to keep track of. Just a few examples: Simon goes into things like ‘quasi-substantive philosophy of history’, ‘apophatic pasts’, ‘evental historical sensibility’, ‘the expression of historical experience’ (with the ‘of’ crossed out) and many others. Please note, each of these concepts is thoroughly explained and justified, but as a more general reader, it’s almost impossible to follow.
As said, due to a lack of expertise, I cannot go into this in greater detail. What I want to focus on instead is his alternative to the modern historical sensibility, the alternative for seeing history as a coherent, especially ascending developmental process. For Simon that alternative, if it wants to take into account ‘unprecedented change’, can only be based on dissociation, disconnection and disruption, making every moment and every entity a fundamental new one (at least conceptually). He calls this an ‘evental historical sensibility’ (with ‘evental’ being another neologism). In other words, it's a return to some adjusted form of philosophy of history: “history is on the move again but without a definite goal, without a meaning and without a proper substance; even if history is on the move again, it does not go anywhere definite.”
Not surprisingly, Simon now calls this history a ‘disruptive singular’, as a counterpart to Koselleck's ‘collective singular’. And that has quite a few consequences, because if experience and expectation, past and future are completely disconnected from each other, it immediately means that the past can no longer be a source of experience and the future cannot be a source of hope: “The past cannot be a space of experience simply because it no longer concerns the experiences of the same ontological subject that comes-to-existence on the prospective side, but the experiences of a ‘them’ that is anything but the ‘we’ in its formation. In a similar vein, the future cannot form a horizon of expectation as it simply does not concern the prospective projection of a past subject but the birth of another subject that did not exist previously.”
I think it is an open door to stress how counter-intuitive this view is, underlining how deeply ingrained developmental thinking has become in our (Western) culture. So, that brings me back to my starting point. Are we really in an era of unprecedented change? And is this so fundamental that it justifies turning the feeling of disconnection and disruption into an all-embracing vista and making it the core of a new philosophy of history? Posing these questions is already suggesting some doubts. Perhaps I’m just in a state of denial, refusing to see the obvious, but reading this book I continuously struggled with this feeling. Even after I finished the book, I still wasn’t convinced. In my view the developmental look at history still is a valuable tool and just can’t be dispensed with the bath water. I guess that even within a developmental view there is room for unprecedented change. Think of the never-ending discussion between historians on continuity and discontinuity: they’re just concepts of scale, and ought to be put within a large field that has lighter and darker spots, depending on the angle you take. Thus, in my view, there should be room for nuance: yes, what we are witnessing is far reaching and asks for an analysis that does justice to the sense of urgency these evolutions suggest, but perhaps we just ought to soften the progressive take of the modern history concept (and by the way, we’re already doing that since the First World War!).
From the final chapter I conclude that Simon himself leaves room for nuance. In his closing chapter he asks himself whether his alternative concept of ‘disconnected sensibility’ still can be called historical at all. His answer is rather pragmatical: "accordingly, at least for the time being, it just seems more beneficial and appropriate to consider the birth of an evental sensibility to be 'historical’”. I don’t like exclusivism: it may offer a clear and powerful take on reality, but it is seldom adequate. So I think it is a healthy position to still cling to some developmental view of history, of course softening the directional, progressive line. If that is the core message of Simon, we're on the same track.
In conclusion: this is an original and challenging look at what is going on in our world, and what consequences this has for our view on the past, and more broadly, on the connection between past, present and future. Simon rightly addresses a number of issues that undermine our ‘modern’ view of temporality, and he makes a bold attempt to formulate a consistent, alternative view. He maybe got carried too far away, but this book contains enough material to think things over in a thorough way. I’ll end with a buzzkill: whether this book is a miss or offers a fruitful, new way of looking at (past and future) reality, only time will tell!...more
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