A Short History of History - Part I

I've been working on a short of history of history. It's an ambitious project, but a delight to research. Not sure what form it will take in the end, but I'm first writing it as a sort of narrative. Here's the Epics through Positivism. Pre-history and the rest to follow later.

A Short History of History - Part I

History, of course, begins with memory, with the eclipse of memory. What we now regard as fickle, protean, thoroughly subjective, was once the guarantor of the past. Heritage was sung. The power of memory delivered the epics across time and secured the transmission of cultural identity. Sometime around the 7th century B.C.E., the displacement of the rhapsodes began. The rise of literacy introduced a culture based on the manuscript rather than the epic. Memory, which had been the medium of culture, the reflection of nature's creative power in man, was instrumentalized. Mnemonic exercises were developed to increase one's ability to recall stories and facts for purely rhetorical purposes. Set down in writing, the past no longer needed memory to survive.   

The modern reader will sympathize with Herodotus, who's histories sought to uncover the obscure causes of lengthy and costly wars. That these accounts should also include histories of the "barbarian" cultures - the non-Greeks who's language, to the Greek ear, sounded like "bar, bar, bar" - is even more complementary to a modern sensibility. Herodotus' desire to cast light on the strange customs of foreigners seems to suggest a latent spirit of tolerance, that thoroughly modern virtue. However, whether or not we find our values reflected in the principles which ground the Histories, we'll likely find nothing familiar in the method of historical inquiry it demonstrates. For Herodotus, the atomic unit of history was the story, as was the true of the epic before it. The Histories are a collection of stories passed down over generations and compared one to another by the author to find consistency and exclude what appears apocryphal or derivative, the contingencies of transmission. Though still tied through these stories to the protean forms of oral culture, Herodotus exercises rigor and care in evaluating the narratives he has received. The first historian regarded history as an endless empirical inquiry into the past, its horizon forever receding. 

Among the Romans, history realized its full didactic and rhetorical potential. The Roman "art of history" (ars historica) leveraged the power of history to persuade and inspire an audience. History's "lessons" were typically political-nationalist or moral-exemplarist. In the case of the latter, history was understood to be the education of the human race - a belief which recalls Cicero's declaration that to remain ignorant of history is always to remain a child. This view of history diverges significantly from that which came before it. Rather than narrative, the essence of history was rational, didactic. Some three hundred years prior, Aristotle suggested this revaluation by contrasting poetry and history and arguing that the latter stands in relation to philosophy as the particular to the general. This distinction was later simplified by Dionysius of Halicarnassus who wrote that history is, "philosophy teaching by example."  History no longer derived its meaning from the contours of narrative form, but from the reason which was held within it. History was more than heritage, it was a riddle posed to humanity. The historian and the scholar proffered an answer. 

In Christendom history maintained its didactic character, but its course was set within the overarching providential design of Judaism. The narrative of the Fall of Man foregrounded what had been a widespread belief among ancient cultures in a primordial golden age, lost to the progression of time. This absent origin was revered and emulated in the present - for example, the Latin liturgy was meant to re-establish the ur-language which existed before the Tower of Babel. But it was understood that the origin could never be fully reclaimed and all attempts to resurrect it would remain symbolic. Accordingly, it was believed that historical time was cyclical, a repeated attempt to recapture a lost harmony which manifested itself in the rise and fall of nations, the ebb and flow of human affairs. This vision of history provided the framework for St. Augustine's The City of God (427 C.E.). A sense of fatalism pervaded the Christian notion of history which proceeded according to the design of all-knowing Providence. The life of nations, like that of individuals, was seen as a pilgrimage en route to the final judgment. 

The rediscovery in the Renaissance of the Roman ars historica provoked a debate, still unresolved, as to wether history should be practiced as an art or a science. In the 16th century, it was already being treated as a science, as historians began to devise "methods" for historical inquiry. Initially, however, these inquiries were meant primarily to serve the sciences of law and society. It wasn't until later in the century that the autonomy of history as a discipline would be established, along with the first histories of history. Yet, despite this effort to formalize historical practice and its status as knowledge, history in the Renaissance maintained a relation to philosophy and metaphysics. Not only did history retain its Providential structure, it took the Platonic injunction to "know thyself" as its motto. In the tradition of the ars historica, history continued to be seen as the education of the human race. Though its method was disciplined, its mystery remained consonant. 

In the early Modern period, history was not only be made scientific, but science was made historical. The field of "natural history" organized the forms of organic life into taxonomic categories and collected all knowledge - including the apocrypha of legends and myths - associated with each life-form. At the same time, questions regarding the nature of historical temporality became a focus of debate. Was history a life-form itself, developing organically in the fulfillment of a natural law or purpose? Nascent speculations on history as a linear progression vied with older cyclical notions of the passage of time. The philosopher of history, Giambattista Vico, argued that history was the "course and recourse" of civilizations. The cyclical structure of history, apparently evident in the resurgence of antiquity during the Renaissance, maintained a hold on the historical imagination. 

The historians of the modern era abandoned the cyclical notion of history and its attendant fatalism. A belief that humankind fashions its own destiny and, through the progress of knowledge, attains to a more perfect society generated an optimism about the future which would orient most historical thought. The primordial golden age was exchanged for a future utopia and, thus, the shape of time changed from the circle to the ascendent line. 

The idea of progress, resulting at least in part from scientific and political breakthroughs in the 17th and 18th centuries, inspired "conjectural" histories accounting for the evident development of mankind. These "world histories" transcended the parochial biblical history without challenging it outright. Thinkers such as J.G. Herder and G.W.F. Hegel proposed philosophies of history which conflated Providence with Reason. Whereas the tradition of ars historica gave history a rational form, these conjectural histories gave history a rational end: the full realization of reason itself. Mankind was not merely educated by history, but driven by it in the pursuit of reason's perfection. 

This philosophy of history would be given a more secular, "scientific" casting in the works of Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and Karl Marx (1818-1883). Famously, Marx turned Hegel's philosophy of history upside down by claiming that the progress of history and the development of mankind was the result of material conditions - not the spiritual ascension of Reason - and that class antagonisms were responsible for the dissolution of all prior and future social forms. In contrast, Comte's "positivist" approach argued that history was a physical process that followed set patterns of cultural development. This progressive, organic view of history, which was reinforced by analogy with Darwinian evolution, saw human societies as developing from a theological to a positivist stage where science, as the discovery of verifiable explanations of the correlations between phenomena, would predominate.

Positivism, which clearly descended from the model of natural history, exercised a profound influence over many historians who sought to determine the objective circumstances of the past and deduce the general laws of history thereby. This branch of historical research, exemplified by the work of Leopold von Ranke, disposed completely of the "art of history" and its association with literature and rhetoric. In Ranke's words, the purpose was to discover history "as it actually happened." Despite this strident approach, however, other historians continued to acknowledge that history can only be written from a particular "point of view." Thus, many of Ranke's contemporaries, like Johann Gustav Droysen, regarded history always as a partial insight and, like Herodotus, a matter of endless inquiry.

On Time and History

Some variations on the theme of time and history that accumulated over a long period of only reading Benjamin and Adorno.

On Time and History

I

Time - not as a concept but as a process through which events take place - exercises a peculiar form of violence on human beings. In time we forget, which is often a blessing, but thereby forfeit those thoughts and experiences which once defined us. Likewise, we may suddenly remember or, by some lengthy distillation of thought and circumstance, suddenly realize some long obscure fact about ourselves. In either case, what is lost or found is not just a bit of information or a tenuous mental image; a whole order of thought, experience and behavior begins to take new shape, however imperceptibly. As with the celestial revolutions, time alters the arrangement of these more intimate constellations through an elusive yet inevitable force.

II

The present does not advance or retreat; it stands still, obstinate, refusing to budge. And unlike the gaze we throw upon it, it reflects nothing, reveals nothing. The present is like matter: thoughtless, inert. But we are desire, restless before it. 

III

It is out of a great spirit of generosity that we're often ready to forgive ourselves our past transgressions. With the assurance that everything could always be different, that we could become different people, better people, we are provided perpetual consolation. 

The point at which our past is severed and life begins anew is a moment of miraculous instantaneity. Weeks, months and years are washed away in an instant. We preside over the last judgment of our own selves and, mercifully, find something left to be redeemed. 

But, to pass judgment on our selves, we must become other than ourselves. We must stand both beyond and before our selves. What can be seen from this dislocated perspective? Certainly not life, which remains obscure, as it is the occasion of the reflection itself. Life is only revealed as something to be judged at the time of death, the moment of its closure and completion. Thus, it seems that there is a fundamental misunderstanding between moments and lifetimes. Here, the part cannot know the whole by virtue of some common substance. It can only speculate as to what such a thing might consist of and, inevitably, hang some idol in its place. 

IV

In certain desperate moments, one's life can be reduced to ambition, memory and the perspicuous gap which comes between them. Ambition races ahead of memory to reveal a world in which the past is redeemed; but, memory lingers in the distance, surveying the ruins of past redemptions gone awry. The distance between memory and ambition, the past and its redemption, seems to open an impassable void. Experience, which is constituted in this void, is always facing, at one moment, forward, at another, back. In shifting from one pole to another, from ambition to memory, redemption to what is yet unredeemed, a certain attitude emerges, unhappily called despair. 

The idea of history can unravel this circuit, though not without certain strange effects. By conceding individual memory to universal history and individual ambition to history's obscure intent, one exchanges desperation for sublime indifference, desire for a sort of generalized compulsion. The striving and resistance which constitute life and vitality find new coordinates detached from the body and scattered throughout both space and time. From this perspective, one looks both before and beyond the grave, counted among the dead while walking among the living.

V

To stand toward History as the inheritor of every lost cause, of every revolution which betrayed its founding principles, of even those silent revolutions which were accomplished through the accumulation of actions which never anticipated their consequences - this is the height of nausea, of that vertigo which oscillates between cosmic insignificance and cosmic responsibility. It is an ethics which engenders hysteria, and sets in motion a feverish and restless mind. The act of remembrance becomes morbid, compulsive, obscuring the present with countless shadows. 

We can, and must, resist this pathology by latching onto the present, by keeping ourselves awake. But, the present carries its own vertigos, of which History is only one violent eddie. It's as if we have always to pinch ourselves and say, it's not just a dream.

VI

What can we say - in a very naive, psychological manner - is the value of History for us? Do we accumulate historical facts and anecdotes simply to furnish casual conversation or to arm ourselves in debate? Perhaps. But, neither of these purposes addresses what could rightfully be called the allure of History. History attracts us because it introduces an aura into the world. In learning the histories of our families, our cities, our country, we learn to see all around us the traces of human experience: devotion, expectation, struggle and abandonment. In this way, when we look out at the world our gaze is returned. We see in the mute materiality of buildings, streets, rivers and open country the specter of humanity which passed upon them — a humanity which, though estranged by the passage of time, is somehow still our own. Thus, History provides a sort of reconciliation with an alienated environment; it pierces the veil of opacity which hangs heavy on a modern world. 

VII

When is the present? We know that it is not a mathematical point in space, a dot on a finite or infinite line. Nor is it a delimited extension of consciousness into an endlessly emergent time. Empirically speaking, the present, as we experience it, is always already the past. What we perceive as present at hand is in fact the chimera of past experience. Our present seethes with memory. So the precise time of the present is impossible to locate. 

How, then, should we conceive of this moment? Is it the nexus of near infinite objective factors all interacting with imperceptible complexity? Or is it is the jagged relay of image and recollection, a circuit which plays time in its qualitative rather than its quantitative register? 

It seems as though the present must be antithetical to these abstractions. To abstract from the present is to lose the present itself. We encounter the present viscerally in moments of decisiveness, points at which time is catalyzed by the imminence of possible futures. The present seems always to announce itself, like an alarm bell, shaking us from an atemporal stupor. 

VIII

The past is a dangerous place. Many who go there return to the present armed with illusions. Because it is helpless to defend itself from our fantasies, history becomes the fodder for our myths, seductive narratives that transform the present and suggest an inevitable future. No history is innocent of such transgressions. To remember is always to revise, to change, to approach the past through the practical concerns, both conscious and unconscious, of the present. Knowing this to be the case, we should enter into the past with caution and even cunning, like refugees. The past is not our home, and to make it such would be to colonize an aura, to contain the effect of the past within the present.