What is History For?

Beverley Southgate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415350990
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134267224
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

An experienced author of history and theory presents this examination of the purpose of history at a time when recent debates have rendered the question 'what is history for?' of utmost importance.

Charting the development of historical studies and examining how history has been used, this study is exceptional in its focus on the future of the subject as well as its past. It is argued that history in the twenty-first century must adopt a radical and morally therapeutic role instead of studying for 'its own sake'.

Providing examples of his vision of 'history in post-modernity', Beverley Southgate focuses on the work of four major historians, including up-to-date publications:

• Robert A. Rosenstone's study of Americans living in nineteenth-century Japan
• Peter Novick's work on the Holocaust
• Sven Lindgvist's A History of Bombing
• Tzvetan Todorov's recently published work on the twentieth century.

This makes compulsive reading for all students of history, cultural studies and the general reader, as notions of historical truth and the reality of the past are questioned, and it becomes vital to rethink history's function and renegotiate its uses for the postmodern age.

Chapter 1
Humanities and therapeutic education

I want to demote the quest for knowledge from the status of end-in-itself to that of one more means towards greater human happiness.

(Richard Rorty)¹

Teachers of the humanities–by which I mean here in particular history, philosophy, and literature–have often prided themselves on learning for its own sake: the idea that their subjects may be of some mundane practical use has even been seen as somehow demeaning–as potentially detracting from the value of what they do. And, periodically faced with the philistinism of politicians (seemingly of all political persuasions) obsessed with undefined ‘clear usefulness’,² I have personally shared that view: assaulted by demands for ‘relevance’ and the transmission of ‘transferable skills’, I too have insisted on the inherent value of the humanities themselves, and on their value as enhancing the more ‘spiritual’ (and in practical terms maybe even ‘useless’) side of human life, on their contribution to the Socratic ideal of cultivating the soul.

But I wonder now, in the twenty-first century, whether it isn’t time to reconsider, and in view of the state of the world–with its wars, environmental crises, ‘global terrorism’, human-rights abuses, and ever louder totalitarian style assertions of Manichaean black/white, right/wrong distinctions–more directly and explicitly to apply our humanitarian resources (importantly including our historical study) to answering such perennial questions as that posed by Arthur Lovejoy nearly a century ago–‘What’s the matter with man?’³–and to join forces with Richard Rorty in his rejection of knowledge ‘for its own sake’, in favour of a quest for greater human happiness.

There’s nothing new about suggesting that history, and the humanities more generally, can–and even should–do more than provide a platform for seeking knowledge as an ‘end in itself’, but should, rather, perform a practical and essentially ‘therapeutic’ role in an education that might actually constitute another route to ‘greater human happiness’, and give us cause for hope. In history more specifically, emphasis has admittedly often been placed either on the supposed virtues of ‘own-sakism’ or on vocational banalities. But the humanities have also, after all, always been concerned (by definition, or supposedly) with ‘humanity’ itself–with what it might actually mean to be a human being, with how human beings can be developed and enabled to realise (make real) their full potentials (their latent powers); and by implication they’ve been concerned too, as Lovejoy implied, with what at any time is wrong with us, and with what might be done about it. ‘I study history,’ as R. G. Collingwood explained, ‘to learn what it is to be a man [or person].’⁴

For it has always been clear that people are not as they should or could be–that something needs to be done to improve or redeem them, that they’ve slipped and fallen from their ideal state in the Garden of Eden or some more secular Golden Age, and that they’re capable again of something better. So the task of the humanities sometimes has been, and now, following Richard Rorty’s lead, decidedly is (surely must be) to facilitate that improvement–that restoration and return to health and human happiness. That implies for Rorty that philosophy and, I’m now proposing, history too, should be seen ‘as an aid to creating ourselves rather than to knowing ourselves’.⁵ One of the main points of ‘knowledge’–including here especially what we’ll provisionally call ‘historical knowledge’–becomes the act of self-creation.

As a philosopher, Rorty himself stands in a long tradition. His philosophical aim, of happiness and hope, may well sound strange to many who have been brought up in the mainstream western version of the subject as it has evolved in the Anglo-American tradition (but not the continental European or the eastern) over the last four centuries. An emphasis on rationality and the intellect has all but overridden–indeed, made academically suspect if not disreputable–an earlier approach concerned with such mundane and practical matters as how best (or at least better) to live. But that was the primary concern of many, if not most, philosophers in antiquity, and culminated in the explicitly therapy-orientated philosophies of the Hellenistic period–a period of great monarchies and emperors, when it seemed to ordinary people that little could be done to affect life at a political level; so that what became important was to consider how, within existing constraints, individuals might best live as private individuals.

That then became the underlying concern of such philosophies as Epicureanism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Scepticism. In the first century BC, the Roman poet (and enthusiastic Epicurean) Lucretius wrote of people’s mental sickness–of how they don’t really know what they want, and ‘everyone [is] for ever trying to get away from where he is’. They rush from one place to another, driving from the town to the country, and then back again as they immediately get bored. Such behaviour may not be unfamiliar to us. But what it means, explains Lucretius in words that a psycho-therapist today might well approve, is that all the time, in self-hatred, ‘the individual is really running away from himself’.⁶

Stoics and Cynics share with Epicureans the belief that philosophy can bring relief from such self-hatred and frenzied frustration, and can show the way to happiness through the attainment of freedom–freedom from any desire for such distractions as wealth, power, and bodily pleasures. For them all, the point of knowledge and wisdom is very practical: that it should lead to real happiness, with philosophy ‘keep[ing] one on the correct course as one is tossed about in perilous seas’.⁷ But of all these ancient philosophies, it’s Scepticism that is perhaps most relevant and interesting here, as most closely resembling contemporary (postmodern) thought.

Now, to link Scepticism of all things with the provision of any form of therapy may seem particularly perverse, since that philosophy is notorious for having itself often, and on the contrary, provoked serious mental distress. On its revival in the seventeenth century, Scepticism was described by one thinker as nothing short of a ‘destructive contagion’⁸ that was liable to result in personal and professional demoralisation. An acceptance that truth can never be known, it was argued, simply led to a universal indifference that undermined the basis of morality. But the original objective of early sceptical philosophers is clear: namely (in Greek), ataraxia–a word that can best be understood by looking briefly at its derivation. The verb tarassein meant to stir up, to trouble, to disturb; so the tarassomenoi are those whose minds are agitated, distracted, troubled, confounded, frightened; and it’s freedom from such dis-ease that is denoted by ‘a-taraxia’. In short the sceptical philosopher’s goal is untroubled calmness, even in the face of adversity–just the sort of quality that we associate with being ‘philosophical’. Thus, the founder Pyrrho recommended as a role-model the pig he saw on a ship: the pig calmly went on doing what pigs do, despite the great storm by which all on board were threatened, and it thereby exemplified ‘the unperturbed state in which the wise man should keep himself.⁹

That state of unperturbedness is reiterated as a goal by arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein. ‘The real discovery,’ he writes, ‘is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.–The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions.’ The link with therapy is made explicit: ‘The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.’ For ‘What is your aim in philosophy?’ he asks of himself, and replies: ‘To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.’ Humans, he observes in Lucretian mode, are caught, trapped like flies in a bottle–a bottle from which there’s an easy way out if they’d only stop buzzing around so frenetically and unconstructively, and take proper stock of their situation. Just like buzzing flies, humans need to calm down and come to realise what their problem is. And as often as not the solution lies ready to hand: it’s just that we haven’t seen it, because it’s so obvious and has always been there. ‘The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.’ It’s a commonplace that we can’t see what’s always before our eyes, so that ‘we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful’. The philosopher’s task, then, is to open eyes to what’s already there–to reveal what’s gone wrong and (reverting to Lovejoy) what’s the matter with us; which is to diagnose the illness and so enable therapy.¹⁰

It’s not only philosophers who have claimed such therapeutic concerns. Literary theorists too, from the time of Aristotle’s acknowledgement of the cathartic (cleansing) effects of tragedies that ‘purge’ the mind of pity and terror, have often seen an explicitly therapeutic function for their subject. The nineteenth-century poet Matthew Arnold, for example, has been seen as applying his main effort to being ‘a physician of the human spirit’, at what he himself describes as ‘an iron time of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears’.¹¹ Sounding like a social commentator in the twenty-first century, he writes of the time when one discovers that for many ‘the whole certainty of religion seems discredited, and the basis of conduct gone’;¹² and similarly in his poem ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ (1853), he refers to ‘this strange disease of modern life,/ With its sick hurry, its divided aims’. He compares the scholar, described by the seventeenth-century writer Joseph Glanvill as having acquired traditional knowledge and skills from the gipsies, with people of his own time, ‘Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,/ Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,/ And each half lives a hundred different lives’. Having tried many things without success, they are reduced to ‘sick fatigue’ and ‘languid doubt’, and succumb to the strong ‘infection of our mental strife’.¹³ No wonder, then, that in a letter of 1870, Arnold writes of his hope to provide, in such ‘troubled times’, ‘a healing and reconciling influence’.¹⁴

In the following century, that therapeutic emphasis was followed by two very disparate literary critics and theorists–I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis. The former, paradoxically, had such serious doubts about the value of English literature as a discrete academic discipline that he actually thought about retraining as a mountain guide, and in fact went off for a time to teach in China. Indeed, it was his study of the Chinese language that left him more receptive to what he came to see as the inevitability of linguistic ambiguity–and hence of ultimate failure in communication. He concluded that, however precisely authors try to express their thoughts and feelings, a residue of ambiguity must always remain. Individual words are never ‘univocal’, or susceptible to one conclusive definition; and meanings are therefore never conveyed with that ideal clarity to which we might aspire. Meanings indeed (as we all know, having so often been misunderstood) remain elusive: different readers offer alternative interpretations; and, as in cases of any historical evidence, we lack any sure criterion for determining their relative merits. How, for example, could we ever penetrate to Milton’s intended meaning in Paradise Lost, without entering somehow into the poet’s own head in the context of his times? Which is obviously an impossible task: we may edge our way towards some such ‘empa-thetic’ gesture–but we can never actually achieve it, or even know when we’ve got near. So just as for us in postmodernity, it’s necessary to accept the ‘aporia’–that impasse in meaning, beyond which we can never hope to go.

But that, Richards believed, is not to be seen as negative–any more than postmodernists believe it is for us. Indeed, it’s just there–in the ‘aporia’–that the moral and therapeutic dimension of literary study comes in. For an appreciation of ambiguity can be seen as equivalent to (or as resulting in) an openness to alternatives–a recognition that one must be limited and may be wrong, that there’s a whole range of possible meanings, available to different minds from different contexts. And that very recognition can hardly fail to necessitate a more tolerant disposition towards the views of others.

That’s one way, then, in which a careful study of literature might have a moral point. But tolerance of multiple meanings in literature (and hence in society more generally) does not, for Richards, imply that some order, however provisional, has not been attained: poetry, for all its ambiguities, remains a means of overcoming the disorder by which we’re otherwise threatened; like an historical narrative, its cohesive power enables the construction of a unitary route (however provisional) through surrounding chaos. And apprehension of that imposed poetic order provides a form of psychic therapy for the individual–as well as a stabilising function for society. ‘Man,’ as Graham Swift puts it in his novel Waterland, ‘is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes, he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake … but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories … As long as there’s a story, it’s all right.’¹⁵ ‘All sorrows,’ as the story-teller Isak Dinesen has more recently indicated, ‘can be borne if you put them into a story, or tell a story about them.’¹⁶ And poetry (and literature more generally) is one way of enclosing individual sorrows within a universal human story. The desirability of such ordering of human experience remains, for Richards, as a psychological and political presupposition; and, given that goal, poetry (properly studied) provides one means of attaining it. Literature thus proclaims its own essentially therapeutic function, and may well in that respect have some lessons for history.¹⁷

As a second example of a literary theorist, F. R. Leavis is imbued with a moral earnestness that has served to make him sound hopelessly dated–even an object of ridicule. Fashions come and go, and Leavisites are now far from à la mode. But Leavis again well illustrates my contention that there has been a therapeutic function assigned to literary studies–therapeutic not in the physical sense, of course, but in the moral. So Leavis identifies what he describes as ‘the great tradition’ of English novelists, and in it places Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad; and what these authors have in common, he asserts, is their significance ‘in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life’.¹⁸

For Leavis, then, literature is closely linked to life: it has a moral point, and in the promulgation of that moral point lies its essentially therapeutic function. Writers who seem to him to lack a suitably moral approach to life itself cannot be admitted to the literary pantheon. So Arnold Bennett is refused admission, since, as Leavis claims, he ‘seems to me never to have been disturbed enough by life to come anywhere near greatness’; and he similarly quotes with approval D. H. Lawrence’s repudiation of Flaubert, as having ‘stood away from life as from a leprosy’. The great are to be distinguished, rather, by their ‘reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’–characteristics amply embodied in George Eliot, who incorporates into her writings the moral problems and tensions that she perceives in her own life. It is her consciousness of such aspects of life itself, and her incorporation of them in her work, that make her a great writer: ‘Without her intense moral preoccupation,’ as Leavis concludes, ‘she wouldn’t have been a great novelist.’ Likewise it’s his noble celebration of ‘certain human potentialities’ that sets Henry James apart: ‘He creates an ideal civilised sensibility; a humanity capable of communicating by the finest shades of inflexion and implication.’ And Joseph Conrad similarly ‘is the servant of a profoundly serious interest in life’, and is ‘peculiarly alive’ not only in his time but to it. That is to say, he is ‘sensitive to the stresses of the changing spiritual climate as they begin to be registered by the most conscious’. ‘Amid all this mass of destruction and disintegration,’ as D. H. Lawrence puts it and as Leavis might, ‘one must speak for life and growth.’¹⁹

Similar concerns have been expressed by literary critics in the United States. Lionel Trilling in particular, writing after the Second World War, emphasises the moral or, as I would put it here, the therapeutic importance of the novel. By being forced to consider the moral dilemmas and choices faced by fictional characters, readers are provoked to reconsider their own positions. They are also presented with a diversity of possible viewpoints, some of which may challenge their own; and so they are encouraged to extend the range of their understanding and tolerance. The novel, then, acts as a moral agent by teaching ‘the e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• What is History For?
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Humanities and therapeutic education
• Chapter 2: History for its own sake
• Chapter 3: Professed purposes
• Chapter 4: Hidden agendas
• Chapter 5: Life and needs in postmodernity
• Chapter 6: History in postmodernity Future prospects
• Chapter 7: Histories for postmodernity–some aspirations
• Chapter 8: Histories for postmodernity–some examples
• Afterword
• Further reading
• Notes
• Bibliography