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How Can We Seize the Past?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
My concern is to understand how it is that contemplation of the past— better, of this or that preferred past—evokes in some people an impression which is distinctively weird. It is unmistakable; and anyone who has felt it will soon know what I am talking about. What is the impression, and whence the impressionability?
To help identify my concern (and make it seem less eccentric) I shall let it emerge from some highly selective remarks about an issue in philosophy of history which is, by contrast, familiar and respectable: the debate between constructionists and realists. We cannot conceivably have direct acquaintance with, direct access to, the past; by their very nature, past events are over and done with and so unavailable for inspection. This much both camps agree on. However, they differ massively over what follows from this truth. For the constructionist concludes that what he calls the ‘real past’, what actually happened, can play no part whatsoever in historical thought. It is necessarily hidden, and we can have no inkling of it. What, and all, the historian can sensibly claim to know is the ‘historical past’, something which is constituted by and exists only in relation to his thought. Against this, the realist maintains that of course historians do not, necessarily or even typically, constitute the past; rather, they construct accounts of it which will be true if they conform to it as it actually was and false if they do not. And he charges his opponent with a number of fundamental confusions: mistaking accounts of historical events for the events themselves, confusing epistemological matters with ontological, and worst of all equating knowledge with direct perceptual awareness. Now, the realist is, in basics at least, fairly obviously right. And his criticisms are reinforced when we note that constructionists tend to combine with their vision of the impenetrability of the ‘real’ past the thesis that we undoubtedly know that there is a real past, with real people and real events. However, this piece of knowledge must for him, like that of an intelligible world for Kant, ever remain contentless, ‘factually vacuous’.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1989
References
1 For the very brief (but not, I hope, irresponsible) account which follows I draw mainly upon the discussion between Nowell-Smith, P. H., Goldstein, Leon J. and Walsh, W. H., History and Theory, XVI, No. 4, Beiheft 16, (Wesleyan University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. I do not attempt to deal with the finer details of constructionism and the criticisms they invite. A fuller treatment would demand an examination of, in particular, the relationship between ‘real’ and ‘historical’ pasts, and the selective—and half-baked—idealism embraced by the constructionist.
2 Barnes, J., Flaubert's Parrot (London: Pan Books, 1985), 14Google Scholar. I adapt the title of my paper from this passage.
3 Hughes, David, The Pork Butcher (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 43.Google Scholar
4 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid's Tale (London: Virago, 1987), 324.Google Scholar
5 Veyne, G., Writing History: an Essay on Epistemology, trans. Rinvolucri, M. Moore (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 297–298.Google Scholar
6 Those interested will find this engaging little tale in James, M. R., The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 299–313.Google Scholar
7 But isn't the camera a kind of past-eye, although one with a tiresomely limited range? If we compare photographic records with, say, paintings we shall probably conclude that it is the next best thing. Of course the camera can lie, but in nothing like the variety of ways in which the canvas can. This is because of what each allows and denies to the creative imagination. Thus, a painting could never possess the evidential status of a photograph. (It would not be much use in contested adulteries, for instance.)
8 Though of course it may co-exist with them. I try to give a fuller account of this distinction, and other of its implications, in ‘Knowing the Past’, Philosophical Investigations, 7, No. 4 (10 1984)Google Scholar. My treatment there is far from exhaustive, and I now think there are kinds of interest which do not fit easily into either category, such as the one which obsesses Wittgenstein in his ‘Remarks on Frazer’ and elsewhere: the ‘commemorative’ interest. It is also evident that some interests which express themselves in ulterior terms are nothing (or little) of the kind. Injunctions to remember the holocaust, its details and horrors, are commonly ‘justified’ (how on earth can justification be called for?) in the name of preventing like atrocities recurring. But this cannot be right. There are reasons enough anyway never to forget such things; and memorializing them cannot conceivably extirpate the capacities and dispositions of human beings for such evil-doing.
9 Eliot, George, Romola (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 43.Google Scholar
10 Op. cit., 50.
11 I try and point to some uses historians make of banalities in the article cited in footnote 8. The trouble is that they do not always know what they are doing—unlike Veyne who sees that history ‘utilizes above all truths that are so much part of our daily knowledge that there is no need to mention them or even notice them—fire burns, water flows’ (op. cit., 89). Notice, also, how apposite are Enright's words: ‘Clichés don't mean but they do have a function. In the beginning was the Word; now there are only words, some of them recurring curiously often… clichés can serve as beacons; they are, so to speak, flashes or glimmers of some residual wisdom, perhaps the fading, still comforting echoes of that original Word’ (D. J. Enright reviewing Bagnali, N., A Defence of Clichés (Times Literary Supplement, 06 1985).Google Scholar
12 If Rousseau is right the second focus of interest must be an indulgence denied historian and philosopher alike:
[It is] within the province of history, when the facts are given as real, and have to be connected by a series of intermediate facts, which are unknown or supposed to be so, to supply such facts as may connect them; and [it is] in the province of philosophy when history is silent, to determine similar facts to serve the same end… (A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (London: Everyman, 1973, 75).Google Scholar
13 As Eco, Umberto has recently reminded us in ‘The Return of the Middle Ages’, Travels in Hyperreality (London: Picador, 1987), 59–85.Google Scholar
14 I am aware that ‘atmosphere of the age’ can have more than one sense, including no doubt that in which an atmosphere, like a set of features, may intelligibly be described as inherent. This is perhaps so when it is equivalent to, say, ‘spirit of the age’, the meaning of which is such as to permit a far-sighted contemporary to describe his own time as one of enlightenment or darkness or revolution. I am not using ‘atmosphere’ in this sense. As I intend it, atmosphere essentially involves distance, hindsight. Early man, though far from stupid, could not conceivably have mused atmospherically: How thrilling the sense of being in on the very beginning of things! Prehistory is not like a new university.
15 And, in different ways, of Eliot, George's, in The Lifted Veil (London: Virago, 1985)Google Scholar where in the toings and froings of their relationship Bertha and Latimer play fast and loose with temporal constraints.
16 And if this were not enough, there is a very real question whether ‘far memory’, granted there is such, could actually provide the sort of ‘direct’ acquaintance which is sought. Quite apart from the familiar problem of what kind of acquaintance memory, ordinary memory, is, remembering has a demystifying effect; and though at any rate many particular memories are saturated with an atmosphere it is far from clear that this is the right sort of atmosphere. The atmosphere of pastness I have tried to describe has essentially to do with a sense of distance, remoteness. Once the past has been brought within memory-reach this atmosphere, with its disturbing charm, is likely to be dissipated.
17 ‘Meaning and the Idol of Origins’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 35, No. 138 (01 1985), 60–69Google Scholar. The illustration which follows is taken from pp. 64–65, but put to a different use.
18 Chatterton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 85.Google Scholar