A Theory of History

Agnes Heller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138638600
• eBook ISBN: 9781317268826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This radical analysis of the role and importance of historiography interprets the philosophy and theory of history on the basis of historicity as a human condition. The book examins the norms and methods of historiography from a philosophical point of view, but rejects generalisations tht the philosophy of history can provide all the answers to contemporary problems. Instead it outlines a feasible theory of history which is still radical enough to apply to all social structures.

Part I

Historicity

Chapter One

The stages of historical consciousness

1 Consciousness of unreflected generality: the myth.

2 Consciousness of generality reflected in particularity: consciousness of history as prehistory.

3 Consciousness of unreflected universality: the universal myth.

4 Consciousness of particularity reflected in generality; consciousness of history proper.

5 Consciousness of reflected universality: world-historical consciousness.

6 Consciousness of reflected generality – as a task (of overcoming the discomposed historical consciousness): planetarian responsibility.

From unreflected generality to reflected generality

Once upon a time there was a man. There he was once upon a time. He was since he is no more. He was, so he is because we know that ‘once upon a time there was a man’, and he will be as long as someone is going to tell his story. It is a human being who was there ‘once upon a time’, and only human beings can tell his story because only human beings know about ‘once upon a time’. ‘Once upon a time’ is the time of human beings. It is human time.

A man was ‘there’ once upon a time. He was there, and not here. But he is here and will remain here as long as someone tells his story here. It is a man who ‘was there’. Only human beings can locate him ‘there’ since only human beings know about ‘here’ and ‘there’. ‘Here’ and ‘there’ is the space of human beings. It is human space.

Historicity is not just something which happened to us. It is not a propensity we ‘slip into’ as into a garment. We are historicity; we are time and space. The two Kantian ‘forms of perception’ are nothing but the consciousness of our Being. The consciousness of our Being is our Being. The Kantian categories a priori – of quantity, quality, relation and modality – are secondary from an ontological aspect. They are not the consciousness of our Being but the expressions of the conscious reflection on our Being. Human beings can conceive of time and space without quantity, quality, relation and modality (as the ‘tohu bohu’, the void, the universal vacuum), but they cannot conceive of categories outside time and space. Even absurdity is temporal and spatial because we are time and space.

‘Every human being is mortal’. The animal perishes, but it is not mortal. Only those are mortal who are aware that they will perish. Only human beings are mortal. Since we are time this is why we have not been and we shall not be. Since we are space, our not-Being means not being here. When we shall not be, we shall not be here but there: in the air, in the wind, in the fire, in Hades, in Heaven, in Hell, or in Nothingness. But even Nothingness is space, just as never is time. We are mortal but we are not dead. We cannot conceive of our ‘being dead’ for we are time and space.

That we have not been and we shall not be, that we have not been here and we shall not be here, means that when we had not been, others were, and when we shall not be, others will be; that when we shall not be ‘here’, others will be ‘here’. It is imaginable that we were not and were not here in the times of Caesar and Napoleon, but it is unimaginable that we were not and were not here when no one was. It is imaginable that we shall not be and we shall not be here when others shall be, but it is unimaginable that we shall not be when no one shall be. ‘Not-Being here’ is only meaningful if others are here. Being nowhere is only meaningful if there is a ‘somewhere’, not-Being, if there is a Being. ‘Once upon a time there was a man’ means that there is someone who tells his story and there will be someone who will tell it. Historicity of one man entails the historicity of humankind. The plural is prior to the singular: I am if we are, and I am not if we are not. The primary question of historicity is the question of Gauguin: ‘Where have we come from, what are we, where are we going?’

From the moment of mortality, from the moment of time and space, we have always raised that same question and therein expressed the historicity of humankind to which the historicity of our Being (of the Being of each individual) has been and always is related. The question never changes but the answers do. The answer to the question, ‘Where have we come from, who are we, where are we going?’, will be called ‘historical consciousness’, and the answers to it, different in substance and structure, will be the stages of historical consciousness.

(a) First Stage: unreflected generality: the genesis

In the beginning there was the beginning.

The sentence ‘in the beginning there was…’ does not mean that there is no more, not even that it cannot be anymore, only that so it was at the beginning.

The threshold of humanity is crossed at the moment when regulation by norms had been substituted for regulations by instincts. Only those beings can be called human whose actions and forms of behaviour develop through systems and institutions of conduct which exist externally to the given member of the species in the moment of his or her birth. At the beginning we are born into a clan, a tribe. Even though there is no social institution without change, alterations can be slow and minute, and therefore imperceptible. The norms and rules of social coexistence are constant and repetitive, not only within the lifespan of one single person, but for all generations which can ‘meet’ each other. The existing order is the order of existence, and it cannot be otherwise. But this order calls for justification, and normally it is legitimated by its genesis. And, for mankind, the most ancient form of legitimation via genesis is that accomplished by myth. To be more precise, it is the primary function of myth to legitimate genesis.

According to Lévi-Strauss all true myths perform a basic task: they account for the contradictions and tensions within the framework of the world of customs by explaining them in a repetitive way. Systems of values are never free of contradictions and inconsistencies. If they were, one would assume that a tiny group of people has developed norms of its own without any contact with various other groups – a genetically absurd assumption because the combination of genetic pools is the precondition of human survival. Such contact between different human groups brings about the combination, the synthesis of various systems of conduct. No process of homogenization is able to smooth out divergences completely, particularly with respect to sexual prescriptions. These latent contradictions have to be justified and are in fact legitimized via the myth of their genesis. Of course, we do not know, and can never know, whether all human groups have developed the myth of the genesis ‘in the beginning’. The sentence ‘in the beginning there was the beginning’ does not refer to actual phylogenesis: it is rather a theoretical construction: the consciousness of beginning is called (defined as) beginning.

It is on the level of unreflected generality that historical consciousness expresses itself in the myth of the genesis. Generality means that the genesis of the system of values, habits, and institutions of the group in question encompasses in its projects the genesis of the world, the universe as such. Why and how a particular system of conduct came about and why it should have come about exactly as it did involves the answer to the question of why and how existence as such came about and came about exactly as it did. The end result of existence is this existence; ‘once upon a time’ is ‘here and now’. ‘Unreflected’ means that ‘man’ is identical with the clan or tribe of the myth. Our species has been very reluctant to strip this ‘primitiveness’ during thousands of years of high civilization. For the Hellenes, every ‘barbarian’ was born to be slave. Several languages have only one word for ‘man’ and ‘human being’, and the civilized Caucasian traveller often referred to the Aborigines of many lands as ‘monkeys’.

The notion of the ‘elected people’ is only a more refined version of the primordial identification of ‘man’ and ‘member of my tribe’. The myth of the Old Testament legitimized the Jewish people as the ‘chosen’ one in contrast to all other human groups, who became second-rate products of the Creation.

On the level of unreflected generality, time is infinite in retrospect. Infinitude is drawn here as an image: it is not conceptualized. The historical consciousness expressed in these myths concludes in the present. Future, past, and present are not distinguished. (Future-directed myths are already beyond the stage of unreflected generality.) Likewise, the image of space is not distinguished from the image of time. The present is not only ‘now’, it is also ‘here’: the ‘here’ of a clan or tribe.

But already the first answer to the question of historicity contains either in a latent or an explicit way all principles and modes of self-understanding which later on characterize all stages of historical consciousness but one.

The answer to the question ‘where have we come from?’ contains a causal explanation in a latent way. The stories of origin are also stories about the ‘why’. At the same time ‘there’ and ‘now’ is the end result in which the ‘origin’ concludes. In all myths there is a hidden teleology. Although myths do not apply notions of ‘laws’ and ‘regularities’, analogy is one of their outstanding features, and assumes a valuable explanatory role in them. The analogical repetition of actions and events (we repeat the past and make it present) is the embryonic form of the notion of ‘regularity’.

The motive of ‘lesson’ is omnipresent in myths. Since genesis legitimizes the existing order as the order of existence, myth tells us what we ought to do and what we have to avoid, what we should fear and what we can hope. The transgressions committed by mythological figures are warnings for the believers. The interplay of fate and human activity gains momentum. It is fate that prevails, but a fate that can be influenced by human practices: it can be induced to show mercy. The practices (healing, human sacrifices, initiation rites, etc.) are prescribed and strictly regulated, but they can be performed both on behalf of the individual and the community.

The myth of genesis is also the image of the world order. It not only explains our being, it also arranges our experiences. These patterns are rational in so far as they ensure the smooth process of reproduction for the individual and the collectivity. One understands the world and acts in terms of this framework. Understanding and action are potentially divided.

Myth is storytelling. The explanation of our Being and the legitimation of our world and systems of conduct is interesting. The stories about the genesis are representative stories, and their attraction is not lost by repetition. But it is reasonable to suppose that even ‘at the beginning’ there were other stories beside the myths. Lucky hunting, fights, or deliverance could have equally been recounted. Were these stories incorporated in the myth or related to it, they would not embody any particular new tendency. But if not so incorporated, they would have needed a specific momentum. The stories of the myth are expressions of a collective consciousness. They cannot be deliberately ‘corrected’, though they cannot be falsified either. However, ‘everyday stories’ can always be corrected, even refuted. If someone narrated the story of a lucky hunting, the other could remark: ‘it did not happen this way but that way’, or, ‘not only this happened but also this’. We may assume that verification and falsification first appeared outside historical consciousness.

(b) Second stage: the consciousness of generality reflected in particularity. The consciousness of history

Kronos devoured his own children. As Hegel remarked, time as history (that is to say, politics, state, civilization) has been born with Zeus..

Above all, the consciousness of history is the consciousness of change. Not only ‘once upon a time’ is confronted with ‘now’ and ‘here’, but also yesterday and the day before yesterday are confronted with today. Rulers succeed each other, though these rulers are not all alike. There are the powerful and the weak, victorious and vanquished, ‘better’ and ‘worse’. A ruler of today can be greater than another of yesterday or vice versa. No longer are all institutions legitimized by the genesis. Some were installed by particular rulers in a particular time and these rulers themselves then become the protagonists of certain myths: these are the myths of history.

The deeds of great rulers, heroes, bygone times, have to be put on record, rendered immortal. Future generations have to know about them. Of course, future means the future of the same body politic. But since ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ within the continuity are surmised, oral transmission cannot be trusted. As it never fades, writing has to bear witness to the immortal deeds. ‘Putting on record’ is not yet historiography as it is not yet interpretative (see Collingwood), but it is with writing that the consciousness of history emerges.

Being means from this moment on not only ‘Being-in-time’ but also ‘Being-in-a-particular-time’. Every human being is mortal; so is every body politic. Naturally, not our body politic: its constancy and continuity is posited in advance (our descendants are the addressees of the hieroglyphs). But the body politic of ‘others’ most certainly is. Our pharaohs, our monarchs have wiped out others. These others existed, but they exist no more.

In Heidegger’s view, the Persians were the first to develop a consciousness of history; the Jews and Greeks only followed suit. The Persians, Heidegger then argues, comprise the first historical nation. Though the consciousness of history emerged with writing, it was really the Jews and the Greeks (probably under Persian influence) who expressed it explicitly and on a higher level. For them, this consciousness implied more than the mere consciousness of change and of the mortality of the body politic of others. They reflected on their own body politic (their state) as on the upshot of human decision. Men (citizens) created the state, and have defended it, though they could have created it in a different way, and defended it in a different way. So it is that the image of the alternative appears. This image could only break through completely with the Greeks since the political historiography of the Old Testament, in the last instance, combines human decision and divine providence.

Should the state be, as it appears, the upshot of human decisions, then its survival or ruin is equally dependent on human decisions. The image of a possible collapse or destruction of one’s own body politic has emerged simultaneously with the idea of alternatives. Be it expressed in philosophical considerations or in prophecies, the threat invites contemplation and action: we have to find out what to do in order that our state will survive and flourish.

On the level of unreflected historicity, human beings must comply with the prescriptions of traditional habits. The ‘content’, that is to say, the interpretation of good and evil, of correct and incorrect, is fixed: as modes of conduct are legitimized by myth, no room exists for personal interpretation. Basically ‘that which we ought to do’ is traditionally fixed even on the first level of the development of historical consciousness (for instance, Amenhotep’s reforms could not break through), even though the personal initiative is already present as far as the ‘how’ of the action, and mostly of political action, was concerned. But it happens only on the second level of this stage of historical consciousness (most explicitly with the Greeks) that both that which we ought to do and the way in which we ought to do it become a matter of consideration. Although consensus regarding the basic values is preserved, their interpretation is more and more individualized. From this time onwards, individuals could declare: ‘not that is good, but this is good; not that is just, but this is just; not that is true, but this is true.’ Moreover, should I say ‘not that is good, but this is good’, I am obliged to argue on behalf of my interpretation, to justify it, verify it. This is exactly what philosophy does, what rhetoric does, what Thucydides’ protagonists did.

In this stage of historical consciousness generality is reflected in particularity. The supreme good is the good of state (of my state, my people), whilst the good and the happiness of men (of individuals) derives from it. But, within limits, individuals are free to define what the good of the state is, how this goodness can be procured; how it may ensure the goodness and happiness of the citizens, and what has to be done in order to maintain it. Both verification and justification of the interpretation of good, just and true aim at the persuasion of the actors. The individual assumes that if he could persuade others to accept his interpretation, the state would be rescued from the ill fate it is doomed to, or else the best of states could be realized. Thus the consciousness of change entails the intention of change (of perfecting or restoring). Is change good at all? Do we have to choose dynamism or stagnation? Which kind of change is good and which is bad in relation to ensuring the being and well-being of the state? These are the questions raised. (The sons of Israel pondered in a similar fashion on whether or not to elect a king as other peoples did)

Consciousness of history thus implies a new form of rationality. Whereas in the state of unreflected generality rational action meant guarding and observing the homogenous norms of conduct, the reproduction of society being in this way ensured, reflective consciousness queries these very systems of conduct. The norms of rational argumentation develop and the correct and incorrect forms of argumentation are distinguished According to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the convincing argument is logical, demonstrative, and aims at the good. It distinguishes between essence and appearance, between true knowledge and op...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I Historicity
• Part II Historiography as episthémé
• Part III Sense and truth in history or philosophy of history
• Part IV Introduction to a theory of history