By Mark Malvasi | Categories: History, Humanism and Conservatism
Historical consciousness and the attendant self-knowledge show what man has become, what he has made of himself, not only through his deeds but also, and more importantly, through the contemplation of what he has been. Together these insights potentially constitute the foundation of a new humanism, encouraging us to turn backward and inward rather than forward and outward in the quest for truth, reality, and meaning, inviting us at last to face ourselves.
I.
Nothing lasts forever. That facile, almost hackneyed, observation encapsulates the modern philosophy of history. To the modern sensibility, everything—nature, the universe, humanity itself—is fleeting and in some respects ephemeral. Human beings begin to perish the moment they were born. They are not at home among immortal things. It was different for the Greeks. Ancient Greek thought emphasized permanence; it was the unchanging and the eternal that enthralled and animated the Greek imagination. For the Greeks, the universe turned forever within itself, embodying an endless cycle of recurrence. Stillness rather than movement was the Greek ideal.
The Greeks valued nature more than they valued history, for nature had always been and would always be. Nature was everlasting. It had neither come into being nor would it pass away. Men and the gods had not created it. At most, the Olympians had subdued nature and turned it to their purposes. Mortality, by contrast, distinguished human existence. Unlike the cyclical universe, human life was linear, moving inexorably from birth to death. Human action disturbed the tranquility of nature and the cosmos, upsetting the quietude of eternal being. These disruptions were the subject of history.
Some actions and events, however imperfect and finite, were extraordinary and thus deserved to be remembered. These noteworthy feats thereby achieved a kind of mortal immortality. In The Histories, Herodotus explained that the purpose of his inquiry was “to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by Greeks and non-Greeks. . . .”[1] Without such remembrance, Mnémosyne, the words and deeds of human beings would vanish without a trace. Nature attained permanence by nature. Human beings had to struggle and suffer to achieve it, if they hoped, even for a fleeting moment and despite their mortality, to be counted worthy of existence—worthy of having been born at all. The principal task of the historian, therefore, as Herodotus acknowledged, was to record these acts (an undertaking that was in itself a man-made fabrication) so that they might endure in memory.
The central paradox of Greek thought, and the origins of its tragic character, is that greatness requires permanence while all human action, no matter how exceptional, takes place in, and disappears into, time. The works of human hands are ephemeral and ultimately futile. Heroic deeds and profound words of the sort that bestow immortal fame thus cannot be the paramount human aspiration or accomplishment. Instead, at least according to Greek thought after Plato, the good life is the contemplative life. The realm of action is inferior to the realm of mind.
During the nineteenth century, historians sought in objectivity the equivalent of what the Greeks found in permanence. Objectivity yielded indubitable and unchanging truth so that historians, as Leopold von Ranke asserted, could write history “as it actually happened.” Unlike many of his less astute successors, Ranke never intended historians to accumulate a multitude of facts that would enable them to produce an exact transcript of the past, an objective history to which, as Lord Acton hoped, everyone gave universal assent. In Ranke’s view, such a project was as undesirable as it was impossible. “Those historians are . . . mistaken,” he wrote, “who consider history simply an immense aggregate of particular facts, which it behooves one to commit to memory.” [2] Only a systematic and critical evaluation of original documents enabled historians to organize the facts in meaningful ways, to expose the unity of disparate events, and to adduce the truth.
Ranke’s innovative approach encouraged the study of the past in its own terms and not merely as the narrative expression of established authority, orthodox principle, or dogmatic system, whether literary, political, theological, or philosophical. Far from making history more scientific and more objective, Ranke’s determination to reconstruct what actually happened in the past detached the study of history from its intellectual moorings and left it vulnerable to diverse and competing political interests. Ranke’s twentieth-century disciple, Friedrich Meinecke, identified the epistemological weakness that afflicted Ranke’s thinking and that continues to burden historians. The study of history, Meinecke conceded, tended to make all values impermanent, relative, and even arbitrary. Since no belief is, or can be, absolute, universal, and timeless, those inclined to do so can use the past to justify and promote their cause. The effort to transform history into a neutral, objective science arose in part from the salutary desire to insulate the study of the past from the ideological disputes of the nineteenth century. In that politically charged atmosphere, even gifted historians could not always resist the temptation to indulge in partisan activity or to put historical scholarship at the service of a political creed.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of historians had begun to associate history with the natural sciences. So pervasive was the conviction that the study of the past now approximated the study of nature that in his inaugural address as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, delivered in 1902, J.B. Bury could assert that “history had really been enthroned and ensphered among the sciences; but the particular nature of her influence, her time-honored association with literature, and other circumstances, have acted as a sort of cloud, half concealing from men’s eyes her new position in the heavens.” [3] Under the influence of positivism, the learned amateur historian Henry Thomas Buckle aspired to discern uniform and unchanging patterns of human existence, just as scientists had purportedly fathomed the design of nature and the configuration of the universe. Historians, Buckle contended, had not only to make the past intelligible but had also to make future events predictable, which they could accomplish if they understood the blueprint that the past afforded. Only their indolence and incompetence had thus far delayed the creation of a true science of history.
To Buckle and like-minded historians, no problem was beyond solution. No invincible secrets, on indomitable mysteries confounded the rational mind. The universe was transparent. Ideas about reality were objectively intelligible and possessed the certainty of mathematics. Nothing was ambiguous. Subject and object were radically separate and distinct, as were spirit and body, mind and matter. Quantitative deduction emancipated the intellect from error and superstition, rendering human beings at last, as Descartes had concluded two centuries earlier, “the masters and possessors of nature.” [4]
Twentieth-century science itself, in the form of quantum physics, destroyed the assurance of objectivity and precision characteristic of earlier scientific and historical thought. Far from confirming the operation of the universe according to a set of natural laws and mathematical principles, the physicists who contributed to quantum theory demolished the ideas of scientific objectivity, immutability, and certainty. Werner Heisenberg observed that:
The most important new result of nuclear physics was the recognition of the possibility of applying quite different types of natural laws, without contradiction, to one and the same physical event.This is due to the fact that within a system of laws which are based on certain fundamental ideas only certain quite definite ways of asking questions make sense, and thus, that such a system is separated from others which allow different questions to be put. [5]
Rather than offering an objective transcript of reality, science, on the contrary, was itself the product of the human mind and imagination. The most original scientists acknowledged this truth. In Physics and Philosophy, Heisenberg affirmed that “natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” His Danish counterpart Niels Bohr similarly cautioned that “it is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”[6] Theoretical physicists such as Heisenberg and Bohr abandoned constricting definitions and mechanical causality in favor of potentiality, mutability, and flux. They substituted relations for absolutes, accepting relativity, indeterminacy, and degrees of truth.
Whether in science or in history, the error of objectivity was to expect answers without questions and, indeed, without a questioner. The answers that science and history give are but replies to the questions that scientists and historians ask. The facts never speak for themselves, or at least they do not yield meaning without the human effort to organize, contemplate, and interpret them. If quantum physics offers a guide, the study of history, like the study of nature and the universe, is a creative act of the imagination, although one that aims to broaden and enhance the understanding of reality. “It is not I who speak,” N.D. Fustel de Coulanges told his students, “but history which speaks through me. If a certain philosophy emerges from this scientific history, it must be permitted to emerge naturally, of its own accord, all but independently of the will of the historian.” [7] In his address as president of the American Historical Association in 1931, Carl Becker demurred. However diligent and thorough, the historian who restated the facts of human experience without at the same time interpreting them would produce a list, a catalog, at best a chronicle, and would succeed only in depriving history of any significance. “Hoping to find something without looking for it,” Becker complained, “expecting to obtain final answers to life’s riddles by resolutely refusing to ask questions—it [objective scientific history] was the most romantic species of realism yet invented, the oddest attempt ever made to get something for nothing!” [8] Objectivity implies neutrality, the inability or the unwillingness to make judgments, to bestow praise or blame, to draw conclusions. It offers the monotony of a stone, not the variability of a man. It culminates at last in the extinction of the self.
II.
Historical consciousness is neither subjective nor objective but in John Lukacs’s incisive formulation “personal and participant.” The division of subject and object, the misapprehension that historical knowledge and truth exist, or can exist, outside the mind, leads to, and is in fact predicated upon, a kind of determinism: the assurance that historians of varying educations, temperaments, nationalities, cultures, and perspectives will reach identical conclusions about the past. Neither are historical judgments subjective. Human beings are not isolated, solitary creatures whose ideas are wholly inaccessible. They live in relation to, and in relationships with, other human beings. Moreover, knowledge of the human, fragmentary, selective, and inaccurate though it may be, is never ever general, abstract, and bloodless. During the Modern Age man’s knowledge of man may have turned more introspective but at the same time in became more historical.
The concept of an objective history makes sense only if history can be contemplated as a whole, the beginning, the end, and the meaning of which are already known. We still tend to confuse “impartiality,” the inclination to examine both sides of an issue, to acknowledge the accomplishments of Greek and Barbarian alike as Herodotus did, with “objectivity.” Perhaps “duality” would be a better word, signifying the facility to assume multiple perspectives, to see life and the world from diverse angles of vision. But this multiplicity of perspective implies the multiplicity of truth. It requires that human beings understand those who differ with them, and learn to look upon the same world from divergent points of view. There are few more arduous and distressing tasks, especially in a partisan age that regards diversity itself as intolerable.
The problem of objectivity and duality in historical thought did not, of course, originate in the partisan rancor of our times. It emerged from three developments rooted in the history of Western Civilization. First, the advent of Christianity rendered impossible the acceptance of multiple perspectives and multiple truths. Notwithstanding the religious conflicts that despoiled Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Christians everywhere agreed that divine truth was unitary and embodied the revealed word of God. Second, the primacy of self-interest in modern political philosophy meant that a readiness to engage multiple perspectives simultaneously could never form the basis of political order. Selfishness became the supreme political virtue. Finally, third, the revolution in historical consciousness coincided with the revolution in natural science that questioned the validity of observation. The prevailing assumption of modern science was that appearances lie and perception is unreliable. By the seventeenth century, mathematics had become the new language of reality. Ordinary experience was little more than a source of error and delusion. Neither nature nor the world were any longer assessable to the mind or the senses. Both reason and perception were inadequate to explain reality or to discover truth. The earth, after all, really did revolve around the sun.
The most trenchant expression of the consequences was Descartes’ radical doubt (de omnibus dubitandum est). Contrary to the humanists of the Italian Renaissance, Descartes mistrusted human capacities. Skepticism and suspicion remained a matter of intellectual pride until the twentieth century when quantum physics transformed it into a cause for apprehension and fear. Physics made the universe unintelligible if not inconceivable. Reality was beyond rational conception and was equally inaccessible to the senses. Experience became meaningless. As early as the eighteenth century, long before the advent of quantum physics, the Neapolitan historian Giambattista Vico intuited, and tried to resolve, this predicament. He conceded that human beings could not penetrate the mysteries of nature and the universe because human beings had not created them. But they could understand the work of human minds and hands. Since history was soley the product and consequence of human action, human beings, Vico thought, could ascertain historical truth.
Vico, of course, could not have foreseen the technological power that science in general and physics in particular laid before humanity—a power that enabled human beings to intervene into nature in unprecedented ways. Since the middle of the twentieth century, human beings have boasted the capacity to unleash natural processes that would never have existed had they not interfered with and altered nature in the first place. They can now perform in the natural realm acts that Vico limited to the historical. Nuclear fission, to cite the obvious example, is of a different order than the use of wind and water, or even the application steam and petrol, to supplement and augment human muscle. Destructive as it was of traditional social, cultural, political, and economic relations, industrialism still required men to create by using the materials that nature provided. Industrial processes also had a clear beginning and a predictable end. There is, strictly speaking, no final product that such processes as nuclear fission generate. There is instead only the process itself, an endless chain of events the outcome of which its human inventors can neither fully know nor control. Despite this unpredictability, the moment at which human beings initiated natural processes on their own, such as splitting the atom, they increased their power over nature. The logic of their position led to the domination, and perhaps the destruction, of the earth.
Although written down as progress, these actions were born at least in part of despair. “The error of the old doctrine of progress,” declared the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, “lay in affirming a priori that man progresses towards the better. That is something that can only be determined a posteriori by concrete historical reason. . . .”[9] Despairing ever to know truth or understand reality through contemplation alone, modern man began to exercise his capacity to act, often contemptuous of the dangers inherent in such a course. Not only did this imprudence risk unleashing human imperfection and volatility on the world, but it also meant that action came to supersede all other human capacities, such as capacity to wonder and to think. We celebrate the man of action, although the ability to act is doubtless the most perilous of all human qualities, as the man-made threats to existence make clear.
The emphasis on action exposes the refusal to accept human limitations. Acutely conscious of their struggle to transcend the constraints imposed upon them, human beings are tempted again and again to raise themselves above their proper station. Usurping the role of God, they distort the nature of being. “Sicut eritis dei,” Satan promised: “You shall be as God.” Soon enough, if almost invariably too late to save themselves from folly, human beings have time and again discovered the barrenness of such pretensions. Human capacities invariably reveal human weaknesses. The resplendence of the imagination, the vigor of the mind, remain insufficient to illuminate all the secrets of existence. No human being can have full, accurate, and perfect understanding, or even knowledge, of the self, the world, the universe, the past, or another person. Such liabilities are the challenge and the genius of humanity.
A deepening consciousness of history will not enable us to circumvent or surmount the human condition. Quite the contrary is the true. Historical consciousness is inseparable from a more realistic, and thus a more chastened, understanding of human nature and the world. Such evocative understanding, which the Dutch historian Johan Huzinga described as “historical sensation,” invariably connects human beings with the reality that arises from their experience and awakens in their consciousness. [10] Although we may have only our imperfect and incomplete knowledge of the past, the world, and ourselves—a knowledge that we cannot transcend—we nonetheless know that we know. “Thought constitutes the greatness of man,” reflected Blaise Pascal. “[I]f the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.”[11] The evolution of our consciousness has made us aware that we view reality from our own perspective, which is always limited, partial, contingent, and incomplete. This acknowledgement of our limitations may have the beneficial effect of producing in us an intellectual humility.
The historicity of thought also betrays the absence, or at least the inaccessibility, of eternal truth. Elusive but not ephemeral or illusory, truth emerges in and changes through time. “That something is not true for all time,” wrote Ortega y Gasset, “does not mean that it may not have its moment of truth.” [12] Such a recognition establishes the contours of human existence, for it reveals that human beings stand again at the center of the creation, which does not and cannot exist apart from mind. Life has the meaning that we create for it and that we attribute to it. Objectivity, then, is not the criterion of truth any more than human beings are hopelessly tangled in a web of subjectivity. Each person is unique and uniquely able to communicate their personal vision of truth. The personal dimension of knowledge exposes not the relativity but the historicity of thought, knowledge, and expression. Amid the rejection of familiar attitudes and customary beliefs, the fragmentation of knowledge, the paradox of public regimentation and private anarchy, and the attendant rise of confusion and fear, the gradual awareness of the historical character of human existence may result in a deepening self-consciousness that points the way out of our dilemma. To know thyself, as Socrates admonished, has come in our time to mean to know thy past, to know thy history. According to Oretega y Gasset, “Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is history…. He finds that he has no nature other than what he has himself done.”[13]
Historical consciousness and the attendant self-knowledge show what man has become, what he has made of himself, not only through his deeds but also, and more importantly, through the contemplation of what he has been. Together these insights potentially constitute the foundation of a new humanism, encouraging us to turn backward and inward rather than forward and outward in the quest for truth, reality, and meaning, inviting us at last to face ourselves.
