The “Past” of History

Certainly in English, though I presume this to be similar in other languages, we have a peculiar word that is used in several senses: the “past.” This can be understood as a generic term under which ‘yesterday’ is a specific instance; though, in this sense, it is also a mere placeholder for whatever occurred prior to the present – whether we know anything about it or not. There is, moreover, a discipline that has emerged in recent centuries that claims it can reveal the past in a distinctive, more substantial manner: the study of history. Using various archeological, investigative, and logical methods, historians think in a manner that aims to clarify what has gone on before. This form of revealing has, however, been rather misunderstood as far as I can tell; though it could be from mere stupidity that such confusion persists, I think that history more fundamentally suffers from being viewed as just another ‘science’ in the same vein as the various empirical, natural sciences such as biology, physics, chemistry, etc. Indeed, this sort of misunderstanding has not only infected history as a manner of thinking but also philosophy and morality.

I wish, therefore, to begin unpacking this confusion and consider the distinctiveness of history as an intellectual endeavour; this should be done not only by reference to what history aims to understand but how it goes about this – and it is my contention that these two aspects are inextricably interlocked, and both help reveal what the ‘past’ is. To begin with a simple observation: it is necessary to recognize that whatever the ‘past’ is, it cannot be in the present. By its very nature, the object of an historical enquiry cannot exist before us. No doubt – as all human engagements must – historical work is done and identifies its objects of interest in the present, but this is entirely different from the manner in which empirical, scientific observation functions. Such study tends to be ‘experimental,’ meaning that a controlled situation is constructed to be able to abstract away a meaningful claim about the behaviour of whatever materials are being investigated. Almost every aspect of this is opposed to the historical form of enquiry; this confusion needs to be abated if history is to be properly understood.

Now, at one level, I presume that many people will find these claims to be quite evident. Obviously, history is not an empirical science, and nobody thinks that there is anything ‘experimental’ in historical investigation. Nevertheless, the methods and process of history do require a very different understanding of how truth is sought and from where one is able to find fault with a given historical conclusion. To my eye, this is what is so frequently neglected and betrays a misapprehension of history as a form of understanding. Often, people have simply memorized a series of phrases that they interpret as historical facts (‘Socrates died in 399 B.C.’; ‘Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800’; ‘Canadian Confederation occurred in 1867’), and these are then taken as ‘true’ in some unqualified sense. What must be recognized is that those very abstracted claims are only conceivable within an historical context and trajectory that must itself be understood to make sense of those claims and any other related to them (‘How did Socrates die, and why when he did?’; ‘Who crowned Charlemagne and did he have the authority to do so?’; ‘Was this “Canada” exactly what it is today?’). Historians have cobbled together archeological findings (I use this broadly to mean any sort of material evidence of things past) as fulsomely as possible and sorted them into narratives that are the history itself. Indeed, more accurately, what a historian produces can only ever be a history whose merit is deemed greater or lesser in conversation with others who are doing the same work. In brief, historical enquiry is concerned with developing a narrative in which a bounty of archeological findings can be synthesized into a coherent whole (so far as they can) that explains all its parts through their very participation in that narrative; the product of such enquiries is what we mean by history, and the only way to overcome a poor historical understanding is not merely with new ‘facts‘ but superior histories as such.

In order to properly understand this notion of history and its difficulties, I do want to distinguish it from other senses in which the ‘past’ is frequently used. I do not have the time here to fully unpack how these various forms of the ‘past’ intersect and interact, but to make note of them will help confine my statements here to a more limited focus. What I say about them might provide a passing insight into their relations, but this is not my predominant concern – indeed, I have mentioned such things elsewhere as well. What I wish to do is briefly describe two other senses of the ‘past’ – the ‘generic’ and the ‘practical’ – so as to recognize that these are not precisely what I am talking about, at least ideally conceived.

The ‘generic’ past is the first and least definite form we encounter, and it perhaps has a phenomenological primacy as well. It is our vague recognition that ‘stuff’ or ‘events’ have occurred before, but this is essentially the end of its consideration. It is in the way that I may presume that something had to have occurred for certain realities to be present as they are, but I have no real understanding of the ‘past’ that is conjectured here. All human experience has this sense of the past, but it tends to remain less important and rarely impinges upon us in any manner that is not simply in the present. For example, someone might argue that my marital vow exists in this past and impinges upon me, but I hardly think about this in a deeply backward-looking manner because my marriage is also right before me in my day-to-day life as a husband and father. Though reminiscing and reflecting on that vow may be healthy now and then, to do so perpetually could become a distraction from the reality those very vows set me upon and in which I now live. The ‘practical’ past is often similar to the generic, though it is slightly more specific in that it tends to make quite clear claims; moreover, it takes on something of a ‘mythic’ status insofar as it becomes informative or even instructive in how we think about our present actions. The practical past is invoked (for example) when I, as a Canadian, might refer to my forebearers as being adventurous peoples struggling to realise and recreate the civility of the lands from which they came; especially when I treat this as a kind of imperative that – because these are my forebearers – I must also aim to be of a similar mindset, the practicality of the ‘past’ emerges. Of course, this form of the ‘past’ can be just as vague and unknown as the ‘generic,’ though the ‘practical’ past might even be impressively wrong. Indeed, this claim about ‘my forebearers’ radically oversimplifies our understanding of who was on these lands now called Canada in the early days of settlement and entirely misses that many of the people who came here were actually rejecting the traditions of the lands from which they came. Nevertheless, these problems do not necessarily undermine the practical utility of this vague notion of the past, and we evidently think in this manner much of the time.

The ‘historical’ past is distinct from both the ‘generic’ and ‘practical’ notions of the past. The German tongue offers an intriguing expression for what history seeks: it wants a ‘past’ known wie es eigentlich gewesen, or to know the ‘past’ in a manner identical to what it was (this is an imperfect rendering meant to highlight its intent; a more literal translation would be like it actually was). This, I believe, is imperfect, but this goes some way to helping us distinguish it from the ‘generic’ and ‘practical’ views of the past. Where the generic past is basically mysterious, historical investigation desires precisely the dispelling of that mystery – meaning that the overcoming of the generic past is inherent to the historical past; in contradistinction to the ‘practical’ past, the historical past seeks no instruction or ‘lessons’ from what has happened before – all it wants is as precise an understanding of what has gone on in the ‘past’ as possible. In both these ways, our German friends are on to something with this pithy phrase; where it goes wrong is that we might be perceived as trying to understand the past as it was understood by those who took part in it. For example, I may try to reconstruct the fifth decade before the common era to understand Julius Caesar, his actions, and what led to his assassination; but to do this requires much more than what Caesar himself ever could have known of his own time (indeed, for him to have known all this may have allowed him to avoid his early death). It may be the case that I am able to glean a limited understanding of what Caesar himself could have been thinking in his final days, but I can only do this by knowing something much more contextual than what he could have surmised. I wind up knowing what he knew by being able to distinguish it from what he evidently did not know as well. In this sense, historical enquiry generates an understanding of the past that aims for detail beyond what anyone within the purview of a given historical study could have reasonably known. History therefore provides far more fulsome and specific accounts of the past than anything anyone would call ‘generic’ and are so intricate as to prevent us from easily abstracting ‘practical’ dictates without doing severe damage to the produced history.

What is essential to recognize is that this is a construction. I do not mean to say that this is an arbitrary creation, but the fact that it must be built up is nearly self evident. Just like with our vague notion of the ‘generic’ past, the ‘historical’ past must be sought in the present; that seeking, however, is for remnants of a bygone era that only needs to be sought and remade precisely because it is bygone. What history investigates and reveals is inherently not extant, and there must be an imaginative element that fills in the gaps of whatever ‘evidences’ we do have access. What is distinctive about this, especially when compared with other fields of enquiry such as those of the empirical sciences, is that there is no singular ‘referent’ that can be harkened back to in order to verify claims. Unlike in the various empirical sciences where one can perform a replicatory study that performs the same tasks in order to verify if matching outputs emerge, history can do no such thing. Rather, there are smatterings of evidence (an ancient manuscript, a carved tablet, half a third-century coin, a shattered arrowhead, etc.) that themselves can only be understood by placing them in a context that is itself given by the historical study. What this means is that there is no ‘history’ prior to the historical work actually being executed; history is the product of historical work, not its object of study. The historian, then, is not a man who has accurately described some scene he is observing such as a particular sunset or a child milling about in a flower patch. Rather, he is a man telling a story that tries to make sense of the fragments that have come to us from moments that have (often, rather long ago) passed us by, and the only way in which to judge his accomplishment greater or lesser is by reference to the manner in which others have done the same. What is judged is the degree to which all the available archeological evidences have been accounted for and how convincingly his narrative allows for those evidences to peaceable coexist in his narrative.

What should be clarified by this overview is that the sort of truth that historical enquiry pursues is quite distinct; it must adhere to certain material, archeological facts (meaning that its narratives are not mere literature or fiction), but it also does not have access to the source from which a truth is ‘derived’ in the manner of the empirical sciences. Instead, history as such is constructed out of the particulars of the narrative that can only gain life through the narrative – its truths are specific, not abstract. We can therefore perceive two clear criteria that go into generating a proper history: proper awareness and integration of the relevant, known archeological materials, and a narrative that convincingly integrates these various materials into a coherent framework. To use Michael Oakeshott’s insightful analogy: “When an historian assembles a passage of antecedent events to compose a subsequent he builds what in the countryside is called a ‘dry wall’: the stones (that is, the antecedent events) which compose the wall (that is, the subsequent event) are joined and held together, not by mortar, but in terms of their shapes. And the wall, here, has no premeditated design; it is what its components, in touching, constitute.“ Gibbon’s history of Rome was hardly undone by reference to some ‘objective history’ that could be referenced; rather, subsequent historians needed to provide more nuanced and careful analyses to demonstrate where Gibbon erred whether due to a poor account of the evidence or concocting questionable connections between various archeological remnants – in other words, his critics learned to build sturdier ‘walls.’ Thus, we can see that overcoming a ‘bad’ history requires either an appeal to the materials at hand or a reformulation of the narrative that connects them. In the former case, new archeological evidence could surely transform our understanding of a given historical reality, and integrating those evidences would provide more informative histories. In the latter case, someone might be better able to account for how various facts (such as the relations among various state leaders known through their private letters) are integrated and help explain one another. There is no ‘past’ to which we can turn and compare our various historical claims. Rather, the historical narratives themselves are the only referents we have, and we must therefore judge them by better criteria than that of an abstract notion corresponding to some specific, concrete circumstance.

Historical thinking is, therefore, deeply dialogical and comparative. Understanding history as a constructed yet rigorous narrative allows us to appreciate its distinct mode of truth-seeking, one that resists reduction to empiricism while maintaining a commitment to evidence and coherence. For this reason, reading a singular history of some given instance (say, the state of Canada) is unlikely to provide a solid historical perspective; someone wanting to think through the history of Canada is better to read multiple histories, to compare their material referents, juxtapose their evidential syntheses, and consider how balance between accounts could be even more rigorous. This, in my view, is the beginning of true historical thinking – and we must recognize that historical ‘facts’ are antecedent, not precedent, to historical thinking. Of course, this means that historical enquiry is fraught with the risk of bad actors, motivated reasoning, and evidential voids – but none of this should terribly worry us unless we think that history must be known in its totality for us to live in the present, which is evident nonsense. In fact, many of the worries about those denying various historical realities (say, the horrors of chattel slavery or the Holocaust and Second World War) tend not to be so concerned about the historical evidence but instead the moral views of the people in question. Surely, these are things to worry about, but the true lovers of history should know their footing is well planted and get along peaceably, leaving the fight to the moralists and activists.