What is history—and how do we study it? The answers to these questions—to be asked at this week’s Philosophical Happy Hour (17 January 2024: details below!)—though they might seem simple, perhaps even elementary, not only prove difficult and controversial but elusive. And given different answers, the practice of historical inquiry will be greatly changed.
History is not “Objective”
I would here propose that, in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, a great fiction concerning the study of history was commonly accepted: namely, the fiction that there can be such a thing as an “objective” and “scientific” study of the past—a presentation of what has been without any interpretation as to what it means about being human, about good and evil, about right and wrong. This proposal does not intend to claim a study of history must or does or will align with an ideological perspective. On the contrary, a well-wrought study of history must be honest about what has happened and why, even in the face of ideology. Such an honesty does not simply relate “the facts”, for the facts never tell the story that gives unity to any and every history.
That the author of some history believes in the occurrences of fact unfolding within a pattern of irreducible relations—a pattern that flows through human beings and their specifically-human actions like an endless network of conduits—shows only that the author has paid attention to how events happen in the first place. In this regard, we agree in principle if not with Christopher Dawson, a noted historian of the 20th century, who writes:
When Aristotle had written his books on Physics, he proceeded to discuss the ultimate concepts that underlie his physical theories: the nature of matter, the nature of being and the cause of motion and change. In the same way Metahistory is concerned with the nature of history, the meaning of history and the cause and significance of historical change. The historian himself is primarily engaged in the study of the past. He does not ask himself why the past is different from the present or what is the meaning of history as a whole. What he wants to know is what actually happened at a particular time and place and what effect it had on the immediate future. The facts may be of little importance, but if they are true facts, they are important to him if he is a true historian. The historian studies the past for its own sake with a disinterested passion that is its own reward.
Christopher Dawson 1951: “The Problem of Metahistory”, 281
However, as he adds just a little farther on:
…one must admit that if history had been left to these pure historians, it would never have attained the position that it holds in the modern world. It was only when history entered into relations with philosophy and produced the new types of philosophic historians, like Montesquieu and Voltaire, Hume, Robertson and Gibbon, that it became one of the great formative elements in modern thought.
Ibid, 282.
It is thus a legitimate and worthy question to ask: can we today continue any study of pure history? Can there be such a thing? Can history be disentangled from philosophy? What is the philosophy of history? Is there truly such a thing? Is there, then, a theology of history? A sociology, a psychology of history?
Further Reading
To participate fully in this week’s Happy Hour, it is recommended that participants read through the brief essay by Christopher Dawson, “The Problem of Metahistory”, available here in PDF.
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Addendum for Thought
As the history of the world has varied; as one nation or another has gained the ascendancy; as the fabric of social life has been disturbed; so also has the papal power been affected: its maxims, its objects, and its pretensions have undergone essential changes; and its influence, above all, has been subjected to the greatest variations. If we cast a glance at the long catalogue of names so frequently repeated through successive ages, from Pius I in the second century to our contemporaries Pius VII and VIII in the nineteenth, we receive an impression of uninterrupted stability; but we must not permit ourselves to be misled by the semblance of constancy. The popes of different periods are, in fact, distinguished by differences as strongly marked as those existing between the various dynasties of a kingdom. To us, who are lookers-on at a distance, it is precisely these mutations that present the most interesting subject of contemplation. We see in them a portion of the history of the world, and of the general progress of mankind; and this is true, not only of periods when Rome held undisputed sovereignty, but also, and perhaps even more remarkably, of those shaken by the conflicting forces of action and counteraction, such as the times when the present work is intended to comprise—the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—times when the papacy was menaced and endangered, yet maintained and fortified itself; nay, even re-extended its influence; striding onward for a period, but at last receding again, and tottering to its fall; times when the mind of the Western nations was pre-eminently occupied by ecclesiastical questions; and when that power, which, abandoned and assailed by one party, was upheld and defended with fresh zeal by the other, necessarily assumed a station of high and universal importance. It is from this point of view that our natural position invites us to consider it, and this I will now attempt.
Leopold von Ranke, 1834: History of the Popes: Their Church and State, vol.1, xxiii.
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