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A History of History

The word 'history' is derived ultimately from the Greek historia, meaning "inquiry", and by extension "knowledge so obtained, information" and "written account of one's inquiries, narrative, history".[1] It is to these senses that the classic writers refer when speaking of "history".[2] For instance "[t]his is the display of the inquiry [historês] of Herodotus of Halicarnassus ..." [3] would be in the sense of "knowledge" obtained by a first hand inquiry of Herodotus collecting information on his travels. Another well known example is in De Poetica where Aristotle says "[f]or this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history..."[4] Here, one must not read into the text our modern understandings of the terms. The contrast is between two kinds of pursuits and their corresponding products--the poetic activity and poetry (eminently tragedy) as against 'historical' inquiry and 'historical' accounts. While the second is supposed to tell "what happened" and record "particular facts" the other is a production of "what may happen" (i.e., what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity) and thus more concerned with "the general truth".[5] We need not take issue with the Philosopher over the status of "history" to note his use of the term.

These basic senses of the term seem to have survived in the Latin equivalent, and through Latin, in the various Latin-based vernacular tongues of Europe. To take one 'late' example, the title to Niccolò Machiavelli's book Florentine Histories means "Florentine inquiries", or "studies". When Machiavelli says "la istoria nostra" ("my history"), he always mean "my inquiry".[6] An inquiry or study into what? It is at this point that we come to the two main senses of our modern use of this term.[7] One of these senses might be considered the direct descendent of the Greek and Latin. History to us is (still) a kind of study, and by extention, the written products of such studies. Hence we say that John does or is doing history, or refer to his magnus opus as John's "History of Singapore". But if we ask what this study is about, or just what is John studying when "doing history", the answer is also "history"--the history of Singapore. In other words "the aggregate of past events in general; the course of events or human affairs" [8] or res gestae pertaining to Singapore.

History, as we use the word, is thus understood in the first sense as the study of or written account of history in the second sense. But both the second sense and its connection with the first are distinctly modern and cannot be found in classical or even early modern writers.[9] The object of the study 'history' for them is never 'history', but something else, be it Herodotus's concern with "the reason why they [the Greeks and barbarians] fought one another" or the "orders and modes" of Machiavelli.[10] What the second sense of the term make possible, or reflect, is the conceptualization of 'human events in time' as a distinct ontological category. 'History' as the succession of human affairs can thus be understood almost as a something in-itself abstracted from what events precisely are transpiring in 'it'. It is a short step from here to the understanding of this reality as possessing an internal logic of its own. Hence one might speak of "the march of History", "History as linear/cyclical" or even "the end of History."

(We need not look to these more metaphysical considerations made in the name of 'History' to note that even commonly used and popularly intelligible phrases like "John is making history", i.e., by doing something important presumably, which makes John a "maker of history" or "history-maker" draws on this sense of the word. Similar senses are being invoked in such statements as "the weight of history" presumably bearing on some thing today. Surely we do not mean to say "the weight of some history text-books" but rather the significance of some specific locus of 'the past' upon the subject at hand.)

I believe that the forgoing highlights something about the modern consciousness--for the way we use this concept of history reflects deeper assumptions about how we understand the universe and our place in it. In the words of Pierre Manent, we live under the "authority of history". The 'historical' to us, is not only a distinct ontological category as it has not been for the ancients and medievals, a category "which is neither nature nor law and which is the mother and sum of all the successions"; it is also perceived as that which determines and shapes our very being.[11] The modern answer to the question "what am I/are we" is cast in history; just as the same question would be answered in terms of unchanging nature (or the eternal order) for the ancients and medievals.[12]

Given the modern conception of history, what then does it mean to "do history". Let us first recall that the study called "history" is the study of history, history as "that what really happened". "What really happened" might be conceived as the sum totality of events, happenings or "facts" about a specific locus--some "period"--of the past under consideration (i.e., the "19th century", the "middle ages", etc.). These events and happenings are caused by and cause other events and happenings, history as mentioned before, being the succession of interlocking events in time. If the chronologist seeks to set forth the precise sequence of these happenings and the antiquarian to simply relate past facts, the historian's task it is to discover or postulate causes, to explain why things happened as they did, not just tell what happened. Needless to say, such a task requires his first establishing just what happened in what sequence. To do that, the clues from the past--primary and secondary documents, artifacts, oral transmissions, etc.--must be scrutinized, distinguished, compared, their trustworthiness and value established and so on. Here, he tries to be as objective as possible: he does not read his values into the facts but rather allow the facts to speak for themselves. The historian thus weaves his narratives and interpretations, basing his account squarely on the facts. Since there will always be a gap between the available evidence and the actual facts, the historian can only be as objective and as comprehensive as the current stage of research allows, his work being subjected to periodic revisions as new facts come to light and new connections drawn.

But there are complications: Take the very notion of a "period" for example. That there are or can be clear and distinct units in historical time demarcated in an non-arbitrary manner assumes that there is a certain teleological coherence to the succession of past events. Of course nobody living in the "middle ages" ever thought that they were doing just that--"living in the middle ages". The time frame in question becomes intelligible as a "period" only in retrospect. Standing in the confidence of "early modernity", historians looking back into the past demarcated everything between the end of the Greco-Roman world order, and the "renaissance" of ancient learning as literally the "middle ages", that dark valley between two relative high points. Nothing in the events, happenings and facts--nothing in the sum events, happenings and facts of Europe between AD 800 and 1789 themselves tell us that they belong together as a unified "period" set off in a simply factual and pre-theoretical way from the preceding and succeeding "periods". The existence of the "middle ages" as a "period" depends upon a rather specific understanding of the notion of "progress" especially the progress of "human civilization" from the "barbarism" and "stagnation" of Medieval Europe into the more enlightened and "progressive" days of "Modernity".

Take another example, this time about questions of "beginnings" and "endings". That "modern Singapore" "began" in 1819 is something that cannot be discovered by somehow "objectively" looking at old East India Company records or the Malay oral traditions. The "beginning" of a "modern Singapore" is any issue at all because contemporary Singapore (or its opinion leaders) understands itself in a particular manner, i.e., as a "modern society", implying an ideological commitment to "modernity", to "progress", to "development", notions which neither Raffles nor the Temenggong entertained when the agreement was made allowing the Company to set up a factory on the island.

Again consider the notion of history as "sum events, happenings and facts", and the study of history as just that, the study of the "sum events, happenings and facts" pertaining to the "period in question". Now one gets the suspicion that it is impossible to study history, since what we have knowledge of will always be a mere fraction of all possible facts; or studies will have to contend with what is available. Contending with what is available, the historian faces two problems: there are too few facts; there are too many facts. On the one hand, what he knows is a mere fraction of what there is to know--all the facts about the Peloponnesian War is not contained in Thucydides, all the archaeological and epigraphical findings, the minor-historians, etc., or their conjunction. On the other, not all that is known: that Napoleon had a cold on the eve of the battle of Borodino, and that Ivan the terrible had so many wives, are really of the same standing. There must exist criteria of selection and evaluation. in order that the historian might do his work. Or should we not say that that is very much the task of the historian: to select the important from the non-important, the worth studying from the not worth studying. What then, are the criteria? Are they discoverable from the known facts themselves? Does history, i.e., does "what really happened" provide us with the criteria for what is significant and what is not? In other words, does history itself supply us the measure of the historic?

Suppose we leave the problem about the availability of known facts aside and just consider the notion of "sum events, happenings and facts" in itself. "What really happened" is presumably that--"all that happened." But is there any kind of grand coherence to the sum internal to the sum at all, or is the event-chain (or interlocking event-chains) really no more than a series of "and thereafter's"?[13] What really happened? What really and incontrovertibly happened is that human beings live their individual lives and are connected and related to one another through the many associations they are born in or chose to enter into. But how do we move from a mere collection, an immense one too, of 'personal histories' to the 'history of a people'? As Tolstoy observes and shows with consummate artistry in War and Peace, there exists an unbridgeable conceptual gap between private life and the life of nations, and the only way to write history as that which really happened, is to "'integrate the infinitesimal', that is, to find the law covering Napoleon's cold on the eve of Borodino as well as the disposition of his troops and all the innumerable incidents and accidents that make up the reality of a battle--without", and this is the crux of the matter, "without establishing a priori a hierarchy of importance."[14]

Behind the quantitative problem lies a deeper qualitative one. That there are too many or too few facts is not the end of the matter. What qualifies as a "fact"? What qualifies as an "important" fact? The two are connected: unless history is the study of the trivial any particular set of facts is studied only because it is deemed important vis-à-vis some frame of reference, some criterion of importance. Not only that, but facts are facts only in virtue of their place within some conceptual framework, some criterion of possibility. A ecclesiastical and a secular historian confronting the same "data" or "evidence" concerning the spread of Christianity in the first century AD. literally perceive different facts. To the ecclesiastical historian, the "hand of God" and the "moving of the Holy Spirit" are facts, just as they are not for the secular scholar. The worry is that there are no facts that are completely free of theoretical entanglement, though such entanglements are often invisible or transparent to the person beholding his "facts".

Secondly, since we are concerned above all with facts about human events and actions, considerations of meaning are always present. Why is this so? Because every "fact" in the history of humanity is an irretrievable admixture of a physical occurrence and human significance. While it might be possible to simply record that at such and such time, the man named "Brutus" pushed a "dagger" into the body of the man called "Caesar" and thereby causing the latter's physical destruction as a living organism, it is neither interesting, nor even very intelligible. Brutus was among those who "murdered" Caesar. But the very notion of "murder" has an intelligibility that goes beyond its being a merely physical event. One cannot begin to make sense of the events of the Idles Ides of March without reference to intention and beliefs, and therewith, to the ideological or ethical-political paradigmatic setting within which considerations of "justice", "loyalty", "patriotism", the Roman aristocrats' distaste for "tyranny" and so on are made intelligible.[15]

"Facts" themselves lead us to "values": unlike the motions of dead matter, there are no human facts that are not "value-oriented" if they are to be at the same time human. To cut a very long story short, let us, recalling Tolstoy's challenge, reiterate that "what really happened" is unintelligible unless ordered, and ordered according to some evaluative standard of human significance. The narrative of history, if it is not to be no more than a concatenation of "thereafter's" must be a narration articulated as an ordered whole. "Facts as they are" do not tell us anything at all, until fitted into some conceptual framework that enables us to distinguish the important from the infinitely many; the possible from the merely fanciful or imaginary. It is not always obvious at all that such a framework is available to history from history itself.

This is only the tip of the iceberg and space considerations prohibit a more extended treatment that this subject justly demands. I'll merely note, in concluding this brief discussion on history, that while there is no need to claim that somehow the past does not 'exist' (it does) or that there is no 'reality' to speak of (there is), nevertheless what we call 'history' does not exist apart from our conscious and retrospective articulation of it. And such articulations are always mediated through somebody's world view--assumptions about what is and what can be, about the good and the just. While there will always be better and worse histories measured by the standards of scholarship, accuracy, honesty, or in general, a more convincing "fit" with the available evidence, to think that there can be some one single neutral, objective, non-partisan account of history might well be an illusion--the illusion that there is some factual "past" waiting to be discovered, wie es eigentlich gewesen as it were, independently of characterization from some particular point of view. To borrow a line from Hegel, just as the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk, history comes into being only when it is narrated.

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Notes (a list of references will be given at the end of Part 3)

[1] I've used both the physical Liddell-Scott dictionary and the electronic version available at the Project Perseus Homepage extensively for the purpose of this section. The root form of historia is histor- all the derivations of which are connected with 'inquiry', 'research' and so on. James Shotwell's discussion is useful (see Shotwell, p. 5). By the time of Herodotus, the word acquired a certain technical sense to it, and the 'historian' is set against the mere 'writer of prose' or 'logographer' (ibid., pp. 169-172).

[2] It is both surprising and revealing that Thucydides never once use this or related word in his writings. A search ran on the Project Perseus On-Line Lexicon returned frequency '0' for all derivatives of histor- under the writer Thucydides. See also Shotwell, p. 194.

[3] Herodotus, Histories I, i.

[4] Aristotle, Poetics 1451b3.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Machiavelli's Virtue (Chicago, 1996), pp. 127-130, 139.

[7] C. S. Lewis in an essay title "Historicism", distinguishes no less then six different senses to the word "history". Nevertheless, the primary distinction for us remains that between the historical process and the historical pursuit (see esp. pp. 227-228).

[8] The Oxford English Dictionary OED2 Ver 1.11 on CDROM.

[9] Shotwell, pp. 4-5.

[10] Herodotus, Histories I, i; Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, preface and VIII, 29. How the pre-modern 'historians' perceive and articulate just what they think they are doing is worthy of a separate study.

[11] Pierre Manent, La Cité de l'homme (Paris: Fayard, 1994). Cited in Daniel J. Mahoney's review essay: "Modern Man and Man Tout Court: The Flight from Nature and the Modern Difference", Interpretation 22, no. 3 (Spring 1995), p. 418.

[12] A useful source for a discussion of this can be found in Anderson, pp. 28-40.

[13] Xenophon begins and ends his Hellenica, supposedly a continuation to Thucydides with a phrase that means roughly "and thereafter".

[14] Chiaromonte, p. 33. Leon Tolstoy, War and Peace III, iii, 1.

[15] "There is no such thing as 'behavior', to be identified prior to and independently of intentions, beliefs and settings." Consequently, a "science of behavior" is impossible except as a science of uninterpretated physical movements". Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, 1984) p. 208.