The Philosophy of History: A Re-examination

William Sweet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351884266
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Criticism

The philosophy of history is an area of interest not only to philosophers, but to historians and to social scientists. It has been of central importance in continental European philosophy since the late 18th century, and for the past half-century has had a significant place in Anglo-American philosophy. Interest in the philosophy of history continues to grow. This volume offers both an introduction to contemporary discussion in the philosophy of history, and a 'reassessment' of some of the major movements in the philosophy of history since the beginning of the 20th century. Including the work of leading international scholars in the field, the book presents a wide range of perspectives from different schools in philosophy, and in political and social theory, history, and the history of ideas. Traditional questions raised in the philosophy of history are explored with fresh insight - the nature of history; historical understanding; historical objectivity; the nature of the past; the psychological factors in historical explanation; the human significance of history - alongside issues which are less frequently examined including: the role of science and mathematics in history, history as a social science, and history as an art form. As history itself remains disputed ground, it is important to consider what clues history can provide for our response to issues of contemporary concern such as political realignments and economic globalisation; this volume offers important insights from leading scholars in the philosophy of history.

Part I

History and Historical Understanding

Chapter 1

History: A Thing of the Past?

James Connelly

We do not question that history apart from the historian does exist; and contrariwise we must take it for granted that there is no such thing as history which is merely ‘subjective,’ or, in other words, that whatever is ‘created’ by the historian is not in a proper sense history at all. For that history as a whole has been so ‘made,’ that in it we have nothing but a series of projections of present consciousness in the form of a story of past events, from time to time gathered up or abolished in a larger and more inclusive projection — this has, so far as I know, been upheld by no sober-minded man, nor could be. (Bradley, 1935, p. 8)

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to outline and discuss some recent developments which challenge philosophy of history in its traditional forms, especially ‘postmodern’¹ approaches to the philosophy of history; second, in critically evaluating these postmodern views, to point out certain similarities and contrasts with the work of R.G. Collingwood, regarded by some postmodernists as an honorary forebear.

Sober-minded men? Postmodernism and History

There are many who argue that postmodernist approaches to history threaten its very survival as a distinct mode of inquiry. This view is endorsed by at least one well-known writer in the field: ‘it really is history per se that radical postmodernism threatens with extinction … we can now “forget history” for postmodern imaginaries sans histoire’ (Jenkins, 1999a, p. 9). Scepticism about historical knowledge is hardly new, as Bradley’s prescient remark shows; indeed, Bradley’s philosophical colleague, Bernard Bosanquet, is notorious for suggesting that history is little more than ‘the doubtful story of successive events’ (1912, p. 79). This chapter examines what some regard as the distinctly unsober-minded views of Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, Robert Berkhofer et al., especially as they are represented in the work of popularizers such as Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow, and attempts to assess some of the claims typical of postmodern views of historical knowledge.

Traditional methods of historical inquiry were subject to systematic challenge by the work of White in the 1960s and 1970s as historians became used to some of their methods and modes of inquiry being increasingly questioned. His Metahistory was published in 1973 and is an important document in the first wave of what can now be regarded as a broadly ‘postmodern’ approach. By 1991, when Keith Jenkins published Re-thinking History, postmodernism, post-structuralism and deconstruction had definitely entered into the hallowed portals of historical research, much to the horror of some. Probably 1997 was the annus mirabilis (or horribilis, according to taste); it was certainly an important year of consolidation. That year saw the publication of Munslow’s Deconstructing History, Jenkins’s edited collection, The Postmodern History Reader and the launching of a new journal with the Jenkinsian title Re-thinking History. It also saw retaliation from working historians such as Richard Evans in his In Defence of History and philosophers in, for example, Martin Bunzl’s Real History. Debate seemed to be entering a new phase – a phase in which the application of postmodern ways of thinking to historical studies was well established and had undergone popularization, rebuttal, counter-rebuttal and the collation of leading contributions in the form of a reader. But what sort of beast is this philosophical hybrid ‘postmodernism’ when applied to historical studies?

Postmodernism as applied to history implies, at least, that historical truth, of the sort historians are popularly supposed to provide, is unattainable. This is for two reasons: first, that the past has gone and therefore our statements cannot correspond to it (or be known to correspond to it); second, that language as such is self-referential and characterized by endlessly deferred chains of meaning. From these premises it is concluded that the meaning of the past cannot be captured, constructed or reconstructed in any compelling and decidable way. Thus Munslow in Deconstructing History argues that:

Instead of the presumption of getting closer to the evidence, and hence through it to the truth of what actually happened, an alternative historical understanding is offered. This deconstructive epistemology recognises the existence of the reality-effect rather than the fantasy notion of historical truth, denies that we can discover the intentionality of the author, accepts chains of interpretative significance rather than recoverable original meaning, refuses the seductions of the easy referent, disputes the objectivity of the historian as he/she works within the figurative structure of narrative, accepts the sublime nature of the past imagined as a sense of ‘the other,’ and admits that the form and content relationship is more complex than many in the twin main tendencies would allow. (Munslow, 1997a, p. 166)

Postmodern history is post-empiricist history; but what characterized the empiricist history it rejects? Munslow identifies its key principles:

• The past (like the present) is real and ‘truth’ corresponds to that reality through the mechanism of referentiality and inference – the discovery of facts in the evidence.

• For reconstructionists, facts normally precede interpretation, although constructionists argue that inductive reasoning cannot operate independently of the deduction of generalized explanations.

• There is a clear division between fact and value.

• History and fiction are not the same.

• There is a division between the knower and that which is known.

• Truth is not perspectival. (Ibid., p. 38)

He comments on these principles that:

While it is unproblematic to accept that the reality of the past once existed, it is also reasonable to argue that we cannot gain access to it solely or even primarily through the empirical method. Deconstructionist historians doubt whether we can really know the past as it actually happened by following the six points of the mainstream charter. This is not anti-history, but is a conception of history as what it palpably is: a self-conscious narrative composition written in the here and now that recognises its literary form as its essential cognitive medium, and not merely its mode of report. (Ibid., pp. 163–64)

In place of the empiricist mode of historical understanding, Munslow, Jenkins, Berkhofer, Ankersmit and others offer an alternative which Michael Stanford summarized thus:

• That in historiography the representation is the reality. Texts are self-referential; they do not refer to anything else.

• That to such texts only aesthetic criteria are relevant, not epistemological norms or standards.

• That we have no established texts and no past, but only (more or less plausible) interpretations.

• That criteria of truth and falsehood are inapplicable to historiography.

• That historical accounts are opaque and cannot be paraphrased.

• That the historical past is only the creation of present historians, rather than existing in its own right – ‘constructivism’. (Stanford, 1998, p. 234)

I shall start by examining some of these (and related) claims. The first claim concerns the relationship between language and reality. Following Saussure and Derrida, postmodernist historians subscribe to a view of language which is anti-essentialist and built on the premise of the arbitrary nature of the signifier – that is, the denial of any fixed or natural relationship between signifier and signified. It follows from this that, although historical statements appear to refer to a real past, they cannot refer successfully. As Munslow writes, ‘I am content that while our interpretations possess referentiality they do not access reality, and so history can never be what it once was’ (Munslow, 1999). Another claim concerns the inapplicability of a correspondence theory of truth to statements about the past. This claim is made on the back of a repetitious insistence on the difference between what might be termed ‘history as past’ (that is, what existed in time independently of our acts of knowing it) and ‘history as historiography’ (that is, what we know about the past as written by historians). ‘History as past’ is no more, and this, to the postmodernists, presents an unbridgeable gulf. Thus Ankersmit claims that ‘[t]here is no past that is given to us … so narrative substances do not refer to the past’ (cited in Stanford, 1998, p. 255). However, for some, the position is less stark: we can make statements of a certain type about the past, but we need to distinguish the syntactical and semantic levels. Although at the level of the individual statement, there may be some relatively incontrovertible historical knowledge claims, this is not possible at the semantic level, at which interpretation is paramount. Thus Jenkins claims that:

Though cognitive knowledge is much more difficult to establish ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ than many empiricists … allow, such establishments are just a fact of everyday life at the level of the (true) statement. But whilst this is the case, the main thrust of postmodern critiques is not concentrated at the level of the single, cognitive statement (at what might be called the syntactical arrangements of the past) but at the processes of inferential passage from the singular statement to the narrative discourse: from syntax to semantics … Historical ‘truth’ is not much in dispute at the lower level of the syntactical; the question of objectivity and truth is raised in the middle and upper ranges of historicisations of the past. (Jenkins, 1999a, pp. 108–109)

One consequence of this is that it purportedly follows that there is no way of arbitrating between narratives at the semantic level. White comments that when it comes to apprehending the historical record, ‘there are no grounds in the historical record itself for preferring one way of constructing its meaning over another’ (White, cited in Jenkins 1999a, p. 3).

Postmodernists are suspicious (and often rightly) of the ambition to make large and certain truth-claims in history. As we have seen, they extend this suspicion to the notion of truth itself; and one conclusion they draw is that we should accept that a new form of history might emerge characterized, not by the truth-claims it makes, but by its pragmatic value. Jenkins suggests that ‘we … would be better off getting rid of contextual, objectivist history in favour of what it (arguably) used to be and might become yet again – overt, positioned, reflexive, moral reflection’. He then goes on to quote David Harlan who writes that what matters is ‘not our ability to know the past but our ability to find the predecessors we need’, and then suggests that we should translate ‘the predecessors we need’ into ‘the imaginaries we need’ (Jenkins, 1999a, p. 199).

Language, Truth and Historical Correspondence

In subjecting postmodernist views to further scrutiny, let us start with the nature of language and the notion of an unbridgeable gap between past and present. We might start by first conceding that historians have (at least sometimes) construed ideologically laden terms or descriptions as ideologically neutral terms or descriptions. Whether deliberate or unintentional, such construals serve to mask the positioned nature of the historian’s historical (re)construction. From this concession, the conclusion swiftly follows that historians should be more sensitive to their use of language and readier to admit that the terms and concepts they employ might be value- or ideology-laden in ways which they had not previously appreciated. But historians’ relative lack of sensitivity to language (where it existed) was not equivalent to misconceiving the nature of language as such: which historian was ever committed to the view that language has a natural and intrinsic relation to its non-linguistic objects? One might at this point observe that there is often considerable overstatement in the writings of postmodernist philosophers of history. In seeking to distance themselves from their predecessors they exhibit a tendency to exaggerate differences and to attribute to their foes attitudes and beliefs which they could not possibly have held.

In considering postmodernist approaches to language it is tempting simply to rest content with the observation that ‘language, like economics and love, is wonderful in practice, but just won’t work out in theory’ (Richard Powers, cited in Spiegel, 1997, p. 260). But perhaps this is too flippant. As we have seen, postmodernists, such as Jenkins, want to assert the claim that all interpretations and readings of the historical past are ultimately arbitrary, whilst simultaneously retaining access to certain basic historical facts. For the moment let us postpone the second point and consider the first, and make the suggestion that postmodernists are again guilty of exaggeration. The arbitrariness of the act of interpretation as such (and hence the arbitrariness of a particular interpretation) simply does not follow from the purported primordial arbitrariness of the relationship between a signifier and a signified. Once the links between signifier and signified within a system have been made, usage is not arbitrary: on the contrary, it is embedded in practices, language, customs and beliefs; language users court incomprehension if they ignore this embededness; and although usage changes, it does not do so by random saltatory leaps.

Again, let us briefly examine a related claim – the claim that language cannot refer to the historical past. The problem for the postmodernists here is that they tend to be caught between formulations which are either too strong or too weak, often alternating from one to another according to circumstances. One line of argument is that historical statements cannot refer because language can never, as such, refer to anything external to itself. But, if this is the claim, it is simply too strong for the purpose: it rules out everything, including what postmodernists wish to retain – for example, the possibility of articulating their own arguments and statements and retaining a residue of certain and unarguable knowledge about the past at the syntactical level. If, on the other hand, the argument is that statements about the past cannot refer, simply because the past is gone and correspondence is thereby rendered impossible, this is too weak a claim. First, it begs the question by assuming that the past is unknowable because it is the past (Jenkins, 1999a, p. 110); second, further clarification of what exactly is being claimed is required. Is it the claim that historical statements do not refer to the past? Or that they cannot refer to the past? Is it that we do not (or cannot) know that they refer? Or is it that we do not know how they refer?

We can agree that the past qua the past is not given to us, but does it follow that we have to accept Ankersmit’s conclusion that the past is inaccessible to us? On the contrary, we do not have to accept the conclusion, and we should make the counterpoint that historical narratives necessarily refer to the past, and our experience is that they do so successfully. On this premise the important questions would be (epistemologically) how this is possible and (at the level of the individual claim) how successfully does this or any historical narrative refer to the past.

Oddly, it would seem that postmodernists are wedded to a correspondence theory of truth from which, because it fails the first obvious test of co-presence between past and present, they immediately seek divorce, without (it would appear) taking the trouble to ask whether they had chosen the right partner in the first place. Writers such as Munslow (for example) seem to argue that because an account written by an historian cannot be the same as the past itself, the possibility of making true statements about the past is undermined. Of course, if we assume that the correspondence theory of truth is our only possible theory, and then construe what constitutes correspondence very narrowly, it follows that we cannot get (or if we could get, could not know that we had got) a true account in the present of the past. This is because correspondence on this view seems to amount to the thesis that a statement can only be true if it is (in some sense) identical with that to which it is supposed to refer. In other words, the only acceptable map of the past is constructed on a scale of one-to-one. This must be wrong, but such a conclusion shows that careful examination of what it means for a proposition to be true of something is required.²

Two comments are perhaps appropriate here. The first is that the whole problem may be misstated in so far as it presupposes a radical separation between the present as such (and our knowledge of it) and the past as such (and our knowledge of it). It is not at all clear that there is such a radical separation, together with an associated radical epistemological distinction between how we gain knowledge of the present and knowledge of the past. Second...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: The Philosophy of History: Today, Yesterday and Tomorrow
• Part I History and Historical Understanding
• Part II Explanation and Objectivity
• Bibliography
• Index