Chapter 18 History from WAYS OF KNOWING THROUGH THE REALMS OF MEANING by William Allan Kritsonis, PhD

Copyright © 2011 by William Allan Kritsonis/All Rights Re-served

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HISTORY

INSIGHTS

1. Synoptics is a term that comprises meanings hav-ing an integrative function, uniting meanings from all the realms into a unified perspective, that is, providing a “single vision” or “synopsis” of mean-ings.

2. The chief synoptic disciplines are history, religion, and philosophy.

3. The central category in the field of history is time.4. The subject matter of history is what happened in

the past, or, more precisely, human events of the past.

5. History alone gives to time its integral meaning.6. The unit of historical inquiry, in which the full sig-

nificance of time is revealed, is the event, happen-ing, or episode.

7. Events are concrete.8. Each event begins, proceeds toward its end, and is

completed.401

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9. History aims at describing unique events.10. In history the particular facts are the final objects

of knowledge.

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11. History is like art—especially literature—in that its goal is particular unique presentations in the form of convincing stories.

12. In history, imagination enters into the manner of telling the story.

13. Historical accounts relate to the actual world.14. The creations of the historian are ideally not ab-

stractions but concretions, and they refer to actu-ality rather than to fiction.

15. The ultimate goal of history is to tell the whole story about what happened.

16. The goal of a complete history, even of one event, is never attainable.

17. The whole truth about anything is infinitely com-plex and can never be told.

18. The critical question for the historian concerns the grounds for selecting what he will include in his ac-count.

19. The historian’s task is to decide which limited ma-terials will most faithfully represent the infinite concrete truth about what happened.

20. A history consists of accounts with an ostensible beginning, middle, and end.

21. What kinds of things does history find out?22. The subject matter of history is what persons have

done in the deliberate exercise of their freedom and in the light of moral consciousness.

23. History is the story of what human beings have made of themselves within the context of their physical and social environments.

24. The object of historical inquiry is to understand particular decisions that people have made in the past.

25. Events are consequences of inner deliberation.26. The goal of historical inquiry is to attain an under-

standing of past human events from the inside.27. Historical understanding consists in a recreation of

the past through participation, in thought, in the lives of those who made the past what it was.

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28. History is an autonomous and distinctive field.29. The aim of historical inquiry is to ascertain the

facts about the human past.30. The making of history is the redoing of what was

done in the past.31. A fact is something done, finished, past.32. The past is gone, leaving only traces of itself.33. The task of the historian is to restore that past as

faithfully as may be, and make it live again as thought it were present.

34. The whole point of historical study is to find out what really did happen by reconstructing it in imagination.

35. The making of history is a process of drawing in-ferences from available evidence.

36. The reconstruction of the past requires a consider-able fund of knowledge.

37. The reenactment of the past is achieved when unique events are imaginatively concretized as personal decisions in the light of the claims of con-science.

38. The historian tries to project himself imaginatively into an age, reaching for an awareness of what it must have been like to live in that period.

39. “History never repeats itself” is a true saying, in the sense that events as history treats them, are unique happenings.

40. The content of history is of particular events or-dered temporally.

41. History is the study of what human beings have deliberately done in the past.

42. Events are conceived as outcomes of personal ex-istential decisions at particular times.

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In this final section of Part Two, we consider a sixth realm of meanings, synoptics. This term comprises meanings having an integrative function, uniting mean-ings from all the realms into a unified perspective, that is, providing a “single vision” or “synopsis” of mean-ings. The chief synoptic disciplines are history, religion, and philosophy. Each achieves the integration of mean-ings in a different way: history by imaginatively re-cre-ating the past, religion by the disclosure of ultimate meanings, and philosophy by the critical interpretation of expressed meanings. Since these ways are more di-verse than are the ways of knowing of the different fields in any other realm of meaning, it might seem bet-ter to treat each as a separate realm. While there would be no serious objection to doing so, the three may be treated as belonging to one realm; they share the one fundamental purpose of integrative or synoptic under-standing. They differ only in the manner of effecting the intended integration.

THE SUBJECT MATTER OF HISTORY IS WHAT HAPPENED IN THE PAST OR HUMAN EVENTS OF THE PAST

The central category in the field of history is time. To understand history is to understand the meaning of temporality, and vice versa. The subject matter of his-tory is what happened in the past, or, more precisely, human events of the past. History is not concerned with time in general, but with past time. The appropriate mode of discourse for history is the past tense.

TIME

Time enters into other realms of meaning also, but not in the same way as in history. Time in the empirical descriptions of science is simply an impersonal mea-sure of rates of change. The clock is a mechanical in-strument for organizing the data of observation accord-ing to certain intelligible patterns. Similarly, in language and in the arts, time has to do with formal dynamic re-

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lationships within discourse or in esthetic objects. In personal relations time enters as the existential reality of being and becoming, but not as located in an objec-tive sequence. In ethics, while time is a factor in the sit-uation where decisions are made, the standard of judg-ment is timeless. History alone gives to time its integral meaning. It unites the abstract objectivity of parametric impersonal time in science, and rhythmic time in lan-guage and the arts, with the concrete subjectivity of time in personal relations and particular moral deci-sions, yielding a realization of whole time, in which par-ticular unique happenings actually occurred.

THE EVENT, HAPPENING, OR EPISODE

The unit of historical inquiry, in which the full sig-nificance of time is revealed, is the event, happening, or episode. An “event” is something that happened once upon a time. The task of the historian is to de-scribe, order, and interpret events.

Events are concrete. They are not abstractions, that is, aspects of complete things. They are them-selves existential wholes. Many elements are united in the actuality of any given happening. Each event be-gins, process toward its end, and is completed. In a sense it is a finished work, a whole occurrence. The in-tegrative nature of history follows from the concrete-ness of events as the basic units of historical inquiry. If the historian is to present what actually happened, he must bring together the various aspects of human ex-perience into significant wholes, relating past occur-rences in the light of all the ingredients that go into the formation of a complex real-life happening.

History differs from science in this concern for the concrete, singular event. Science aims at generality, history aims at describing unique events. Both are rooted in actual fact. In science the facts are the basis for generalizations and theories, while in history the particular facts are the final objects of knowledge.


History is like art—especially literature—in that its goal is particular unique presentations in the form of convincing stories. The events of the past are re-counted in an imaginative way so as to move the reader by their drama and by their universal human ap-peal. History is unlike art in that, although its works are imaginatively constructed, they are intended as disclo-sures of the actual world and not of a fictional world. Imagination enters into the manner of telling the story, not as the fabrication of events that never actually oc-curred.

Creative imagination also enters into scientific constructions, that, like historical accounts, relate to the actual world. But the creations of science (and of art) are imaginative abstractions, science having refer-ence to actual things, and art to fictions. On the other hand, the creations of the historian are ideally not ab-stractions but concretions, and they refer to actuality rather than to fiction. Since no one history can relate the fullness of any event, every account is necessarily a partial abstraction emphasizing certain aspects that the historian considers most significant. The ultimate goal of history is to tell the whole story about what hap-pened. The historian cannot follow the artist’s practice of deliberately presenting abstractions for the sake of creating certain responses in his readers.

Actually, the goal of a complete history, even of one event, is never attainable. The whole truth about anything is infinitely complex and can never be told. In other words, the historian, who is a finite being writing for an audience of finite beings, has to tell a partial truth. The critical question for the historian concerns the grounds for selecting what he will include in his ac-count. The artist’s grounds for selection are esthetic ef-fect, the historian’s are fidelity to the facts. The histo-rian’s task is to decide which limited materials will most faithfully represent the infinite concrete truth about what happened.

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One other difference between art and history is noteworthy. Works of art are complete compositions, each with a beginning, middle, and end, and as esthetic objects they are independent from all other things. Events, too, are particular happenings, and a history consists of accounts with an ostensible beginning, mid-dle, and end. On the other hand, this discreteness and apparent completeness in the case of history are due to practical limitations rather than to the nature of the subject. Every event is part of a whole world of inter-connections, and every historical account is a fragment of the infinitely rich story of the past. It is quite appro-priate to frame a picture as an expression of its finite perfection and incomparable uniqueness. The happen-ings of history cannot be framed. They are necessarily immersed in the infinite stream of time and bound up in mutual ingredients with an infinity of other happenings.

It was stated above that the subject matter of his-tory is human events of the past. “Natural history” be-longs to science rather than to history, because it is not concerned with time in the full historical sense, but with the temporal succession of occurrences according to the laws of nature. Historical time applies to events that have occurred as a result of human decision. Nicolas Berdyaev makes a distinction between the “true time” of concrete historical action and the “false time” of mechanistic abstraction.1 Benedetto Croce also empha-sizes the essentially human content of history in calling it “the story of liberty,”2 and R. G. Collingwood, in The Idea of History3 writes, “What kinds of things does his-tory find out? I answer, res gestue: actions of human beings that have been done in the past.”

1 The Meaning of History, Meridian Books, Inc., New York, 1962.

2 History as the Story of Liberty, Meridian Books, Inc., New York, 1955.

3 Oxford University Press, Fair Lawn, N.J., 1946, p. 9. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.


LINKING HISTORY WITH THE REALMS OF

PERSONAL AND MORAL KNOWLEDGE

This essential human reference of history is what links it with the realms of personal and moral knowl-edge. The subject matter of history is what persons have done in the deliberate exercise of their freedom and in the light of moral consciousness. History is the story of what human beings have made of themselves within the context of their physical and social environ-ments. It is the account of the moral adventure of hu-mankind, of decisions for good and for evil, and of the judgments revealed in the consequences. Collingwood holds that the value of history is self-understanding. “Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a man; second, knowing what it is to be the kind of man you are; and third, knowing what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is.… The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”4

UNDERSTANDING WHAT AN EVENT REALLY ISWe are now in a better position to understand

what an event, the basic historical unit, really is. An event, as the etymology of the word suggests, is an outcome. An outcome of what? An event is what comes out of human deliberation. It is a decision to act in a certain way. The object of historical inquiry is therefore to understand particular decisions that people have made in the past.

It is clear that history is not the same as chronicle, that is, the relating of observable acts in temporal se-quence. The elements of chronicle are not events at all, in the sense indicated above, but simply outward be-havior., On the other hand, events are consequences of inner deliberation. Chronicle is the skeleton of history, history without any animating principle, history without

4 Ibid., p. 10. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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any personal significance. The confusion of history with chronicle is one of the chief sources of distaste for his-tory on the part of students. They can hardly be ex-pected to be interested in a recital of dead “facts” that have no apparent relevance to them as persons in search of meaning.

The goal of historical inquiry is to attain an under-standing of past human events from the inside. This re-quires an imaginative identification by the historian (and by those who read his works correctly) with the persons whose decisions have caused the happenings of the past. Historical understanding consists in a recre-ation of the past through participation, in thought, in the lives of those who made the past what it was. His-tory from this standpoint is making the past come alive in the present.

The concreteness of history is consistent with this analysis of the inner meaning of events. As explained in Chapter 16, personal knowledge is concrete and exis-tential rather than concerned with abstract essences. Actuality described as a chronicle of observable phe-nomena is not history because it is not personal. Actual-ity as the personal reenactment of the past in the present is the object of historical understanding, and since it is personal, it is concrete.

HISTORY IS AN INDEPENDENT AND DISTINCTIVE FIELD

Is history, then, merely a subdivision within the synnoetic realm? No, history is an autonomous and dis-tinctive field whose special office is to integrate mean-ings from the other realms primarily in the mode of temporal relation. Historical understanding is personal insight expressed in ordinary language, informed by sci-entific knowledge, transformed by esthetic imagination, and infused by moral consciousness.

The aim of historical inquiry is to ascertain the facts about the human past. The word “fact” is espe-cially appropriate to history since in its derivation a “fact” is something made or done. Now history is about things done by persons; it concerns acts or deeds. Also


history is something that is made by the historian. These two sets of acts are related in that the making of history is the redoing of what was done in the past. Specifically, in a double sense. A third sense is also rel-evant, namely, that a fact is something done, finished, past.

THE PROBLEM OF UNDERSTANDING THE PAST

The problem of understanding the past is quite different from that of immediate perception, as in art and personal knowledge, or of prediction on the basis of repeatable observations, as in science. The past is gone, leaving only traces of itself. The task of the histo-rian is to restore that past as faithfully as may be, and make it live again as though it were present.

THE WRITING OF HISTORY

Writing history does not consist in taking certain given happenings, arranging them in chronological or-der, and weaving them into an interesting tale. The his-torian has no ready-made events to relate, except as he uses the results of some other historian’s labors. He has to make his own events; his facts are not given, but made. The whole point of historical study is to find out what really did happen by reconstructing it in imagina-tion.

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History is the recording of eventsfrom the past. More importantly, it is a recording of events that some believe have influenced the present. An infi-

nite number of events have and will occur

on the earth. Not all of these events were

or will be considered significant enough

to be noteworthy. It is the teacher’s job

to convince the student of the notewor-

thiness of events of the past. How much of the presented information will the student accept on faith, and of that amount,

how much will later be rewritten or dis-proven?


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THE MAKING OF HISTORY

The making of history is a process of drawing in-ferences from available evidence. What evidence does the historian use? He may use anything at all that he finds relevant to the reconstruction of the past. In-cluded are the accounts of eyewitnesses to past events, written documents, monuments, artifacts, and (perhaps most important of all) the whole present world of things and people, since the present state of the world is largely a consequence of the past actions of men. His-tory may then be defined as that imaginative re-cre-ation of past human events that best accords with the evidence of the present, or more briefly, as the best possible explanation of the present in terms of the past.

HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTIONS

Historical constructions are made by the interpre-tation of evidence, separating relevant from irrelevant factors, reliable from unreliable reports, and primary sources from secondary, tertiary and higher orders of sources (the latter referring to sources that are them-selves historical interpretations or interpretations of in-terpretations rather than original records or artifacts). Each interpretation is a historical hypothesis, a state-ment of what might have happened, and the conse-quences of each such hypothesis are developed to see how well they agree with the available evidence.

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST REQUIRES ACONSIDERABLE FUND OF KNOWLEDGE

As pointed out above, an event may be inwardly understood only as an outcome of deliberate human de-cision. Many factors enter into the outcome, in that each decision concerns what to do given certain mate-rial and social circumstances, personal goals, and moral principles. The reconstruction of the past therefore re-quires a considerable fund of knowledge. The more the historian knows of the empirical, personal, moral and even esthetic factors that went into the making of the

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decisions to be reconstructed the better will be his hy-potheses about what occurred in the past.

PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SCIENCES ARE

IMPORTANT TO HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

Particularly important in such historical analysis and explanation are psychology and the social sciences. For example, from political science generalizations are available concerning the various modes of exercising power. Every decision is made within the context of cer-tain influences, pressures, and forces, about which po-litical science yields valuable information. In psychology generalizations may be found regarding such factors as drives, unconscious motivation, developmental stages, and character types, all of which may aid greatly in the formation of fruitful hypotheses about how past deci-sions were reached. Sociology can contribute relevant knowledge of possible formative elements such as so-cial structure, roles, norms, and social class, and an-thropology can help in the formation of hypotheses from the standpoint of cultural patterns. Economic and geo-graphic influences may also be of great importance in the formation of the events the historian endeavors to recapture.

THE ARTS ARE RELEVANT TO HISTORY

Valuable as the generalizations of the various sci-ences are in framing historical hypotheses, they are not sufficient to account for the unique particulars of his-tory. Here is where the arts become relevant, particu-larly drama, which is a fictional presentation of persons making decisions affecting their destiny. The novelist’s or playwright’s convincing portrayal of life in fictional form can provide helpful suggestions to the historian as he seeks to present his convincing portrayal of life, an-swerable to the conditions and evidences of actuality.

REENACTMENT OF THE PAST AND PERSONAL ENGAGEMENT


IS REQUIRED TO UNDERSTAND HISTORY

The reenactment of the past is achieved when unique events are imaginatively concretized as per-sonal decisions in the light of the claims of conscience. The past as human events cannot be understood simply as a description of objects or even as an artistic presen-tation. What is required is an active personal engage-ment with people in the past regarded as moral sub-jects involved in the struggle to fulfill their destiny. In-terpretations on this basis are certain to reflect the pre-dispositions and personal biases of the historian more than would be the case with knowledge in the empirical realm. Nevertheless, history is not merely a record of the historian’s personal reactions, for the historian is obliged to show that his interpretations and explana-tions best account for the available evidence. This obli-gation puts a check on subjectivity and opens the way to the progressive criticism and improvement of histori-cal knowledge.

AN EVENT SELECTED MAY FALL

WITHIN A GIVEN TIME SPAN

Although the event is the basic unit of historical knowledge, a “history” in the usual sense is an account involving many events in their mutual interrelations in time. The events selected may fall within a given time span (say, 1900 to 1950), and they may be limited to a certain class or type (such as military, economic, or sci-entific events), or to happenings taking place within a given area (such as the United States or Africa) or in connection with a particular institution or person.

THE GROUPING OF EVENTS INTO PERIODS

A further method of simplifying historical analysis is through periodization, that is, the grouping of events into periods for which certain general characterizations may be made. For example, the “Renaissance,” the “Colonial Period,” the “Age of Reason,” and the “Jackso-nian Era” are names for historical periods about which

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certain statements can be made regarding typical styles of thought, movements, social structures, domi-nant personalities, and the like. While these periods in effect constitute generalizations about events, they may themselves be regarded as concrete macroevents requiring the same kind of explanation as happenings resulting from individual decisions. The historian tries to project himself imaginatively into an age, reaching for an awareness of what it must have been like to live in that period. He then considers how people living at that time might be expected to have behaved, and he checks his predictions by whatever evidence of their ac-tual behavior has been preserved to the present time.

COMPREHENSIVE THEORIES OF HISTORY

Going beyond the generalization effected by peri-odizing, some historians attempt to describe certain general principles or laws of historical development by which the past may be explained and the future course of events to some extent predicted. In this manner comprehensive theories of history are developed in which particular events are seen as examples of univer-sal laws. While theorizing of this kind may possibly have some value, it does not properly belong to history since it swallows the singular event up in generality. “Laws of history” belong to the social sciences rather than to his-tory proper, since their logic is that of empirical inquiry and not of distinctively historical study. Laws are time-less, abstract, and impersonal, unlike the personal con-cretions in time that are the proper subject matter of history. “History never repeats itself” is a true saying, in the sense that events as history treats them are unique happenings. While analogies between events may be of scientific interest and may even enter into the recon-struction of events by the historian, these regularities are not themselves the goal of historical understanding.

HISTORY IS THE STUDY OF WHAT HUMAN BEINGS

HAVE DELIBERATELY DONE IN THE PAST


In summary, history is the study of what human beings have deliberately done in the past. Its content is not, as in science, generalizations about observable oc-currences, but particular events ordered temporally. These events are conceived as outcomes of personal existential decisions at particular times. Hypotheses about what happened are formed by the imaginative re-creation of the past, using relevant empirical knowl-edge from every field, together with personal under-standing and ethical insight. Finally, these hypotheses are tested and progressively improved by checking them with effects of the past in the form of present evi-dence.

Much of people’s understanding of history is

based on interpretations of the written or spoken stories of the past, in some cases hundreds or thousands of years ago. Every story has two sides,

or more, and the side of the story that is ac-

cepted and passed on is generally that of thevictor. At a time when people are try-

ing to

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present arguable evidence as fact, should teachers also be trying to en-

courage students to think independently to

determine whether or not to believe everything they

hear and read?


Picture

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WAYS OF KNOWING

1. How does one understand history?2. How does time give history its integral meaning?3. How does history differ from science?4. How is history like art? How is history unlike art?5. What is the ultimate goal of history?6. Why is the goal of a complete history, even of one

event, never attainable?7. What is the historian’s task in selecting materials?8. What is the distinction of “true time” of concrete

historical action and the “false time” of mechanis-tic abstraction?

9. What kinds of things does history find out?10. How is history linked to the realms of personal and

moral knowledge?11. Why is it important as the object of historical in-

quiry to understand particular decisions that peo-ple have made in the past?

12. What are the differences between chronicles and events in history?

13. How is historical understanding improved by the historian using his creative imagination?

14. Why is the personal reenactment of the past in the present important for historical understanding?

15. Is history merely a subdivision within the synnoetic realm?

16. What is historical understanding?17. What is the aim of historical inquiry?18. Why is understanding the past historically quite

different from that of immediate perception?19. What is the whole point of historical study?20. How does one write history?21. How would you describe the making of history?22. According to the book, how do you define history?23. How are historical constructions made?24. Why does the reconstruction of the past require a

considerable fund of knowledge?25. How are the social sciences and psychology impor-

tant to historical analysis?


26. Why is reenactment of the past and personal en-gagement required to understand history?

27. What is meant by historical analysis through peri-odization?

28. What is the purpose of comprehensive theories of history?

29. Are general principles or laws of historical develop-ment useful for understanding history? Why? Why not?

30. Why are concretions in time the proper subject matter of history?

31. In summing up history, what is it?

Documents

Chapter 18 History from WAYS OF KNOWING THROUGH THE REALMS OF MEANING by William Allan Kritsonis, PhD