This is lecture 1 of [[James Orr]]'s [[PA Philosophy of History]] course at [[Peterson Academy]]. ## 0. The framing problem: why the question is live **Problem.** History is not inert. It is the terrain of current political conflict — the "history wars" have been fought more intensely over the last 15–20 years than at almost any point in modern history. Two sub-problems fall out of this: - **Authority.** Who gets to speak history authoritatively? The new media ecosystem has produced armchair historians with no formal training and 3.4 million YouTube followers, correcting or being corrected by credentialled professionals with 6.5 followers. Credentials no longer settle it. - **Instability of the past itself.** The past changes as much as the present, because what changes is *which* past we select from to explain who we are, what we are for, and what society we should aim at. **Why it matters (the answer given).** History writes the *moral grammar* of a collective. It signals — without state coercion, just sitting there in the culture — "this is the kind of people we were, could be, how far we have fallen short, what we must not do again." Scaled up: India, China, Russia are not quite nation-states but *civilizational presences*, and it is the history they tell about themselves that underwrites that self-conception. --- ## 1. Tension: chronicle vs. inquiry — what made history *history*? | | Ancient Near East chronicle | Herodotus | |---|---|---| | Who | Mesopotamia, Egypt, Hittites, Assyrians | Herodotus of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum, SW Turkey) | | Form | Shopping list of events in sequence: "I fought 23 battles. I won all of them. I put to death X number of people." | *apodexis historias* — the write-up/demonstration of an *historiē*, an inquiry | | Meaning | None imposed. Occasional reference to gods, always on my side. Bland, not granular. | Grand narrative sweep: why certain cities go from small to great, and others from great to small | **Key claim:** our word "history" comes from the opening sentence of Herodotus' *Histories*. He is the first person to whom the word has ever applied. Everything after is commentary or reaction. ### 1a. Sub-tension inside the founding: Herodotus vs. Thucydides Thucydides of Athens follows almost immediately and is a *co-founding father* — most scholars agree he is consciously differentiating himself from Herodotus. - **Herodotus:** happy-go-lucky. Collects reports from priests, from nomads, stitches them together, says "well, this is what I heard." Weaves theological narrative — Persians overreach, provoke the envy of the gods, gods strike back. Reads more like **anthropology** than history. Nine books; the whole of Book 2 is on Egypt, though the Egyptians play *no part whatsoever* in the climactic Persian Wars — essentially "my holidays in Egypt and what the priests told me." - **Objection turned into a virtue:** his gullibility/credulity is a huge win for ancient historians, because he records without testing. "That seems plausible to me. That doesn't. But this is what I heard." - **Thucydides:** drier, dispassionate, rigorous, cerebral. Focus on personal psychology, economics and resources, military power and strategy, plague dynamics/epidemiology. - **Objection to "purely dispassionate":** underpinning him is an extraordinary moral framework — horror of war, especially civil war. Some of the most extraordinary passages condemning the folly of war are his. Also: what horrors a supposedly civilized society will commit when it believes it has a special agency in the unfolding of history. **Why the Romans don't rank with them:** Livy, Tacitus, Sallust are brilliant observers, but they are not innovating the form. Herodotus invented it; Thucydides immediately reinvented it. --- ## 2. Tension: Lessing's ditch — can history give us *knowledge*? **Gotthold Lessing** (German Enlightenment, 1770s–80s Prussia; Kant contemporary, Hegel born 1770): > "The accidental truths of history can never provide the *Beweis* (proof) of necessary truths of reason." Between the two kinds of truth an **"ugly broad ditch"** has opened, "which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap." | Necessary truths of reason | Accidental truths of history | |---|---| | 2 + 2 = 4 | What time of day did Caesar cross the Rubicon in 49 BC? | | Absolute certainty | Contingent, particular; happened once, *if it happened at all* | | Armchair reason — obtained without getting up | Only obtainable by getting up: collecting sources, talking to eyewitnesses | | Logic, mathematics, geometry | Testimony, inference, judgement | **Response 1 (deflationary):** this is simply what the historian learns to be satisfied with — uncertainty and speculative conclusions. Ordinarily it doesn't trouble us, and probably shouldn't. **Response 2 (the burden varies by period):** - *Ancient history:* evidence is incredibly scarce — a couple of temples, a few pots, a passing mention in Pausanias written 200 years later by someone who didn't like those people. That's your entire sub-tribe near Carthage in the 1st century BC. Constraint becomes stimulus: more detective work, more demand on imagination. - *Modern history:* an avalanche. The problem inverts — how to navigate, organise, and spot in the haystack the magic hook that makes sense of everything else. --- ## 3. Tension: is history a science? (Ranke vs. the one-off) ### Position: **Leopold von Ranke** (1795–1886) — history as science - Goal: *"Wie es eigentlich gewesen"* — to show how things **actually were**. - History can be objective like a science because it can have a discipline's machinery: - rigorous source criticism; criteria for good vs. bad sources - primary / secondary / tertiary distinctions (eyewitness vs. more distant) - getting events in the right order - do the accounts cohere? If not, can we explain which is wrong and why? - agreed criteria for the **success and failure** of an explanation, even amid disagreement on details - Institutional context: the German (Protestant) research university. Humboldt's inspiration — research faculties everywhere, a unified institution rather than the medieval scatter of quasi-autonomous colleges, research taken at least as seriously as teaching. **The seminar and the PhD are born here.** **Supporting analogy given:** the palaeontologist working on the Cambrian explosion is hunting evidence for claims about a past *vastly* more distant than a few hundred years ago. Why is that a science and history "just a humanity, like writing poetry"? ### Objection: history studies the unrepeatable Science studies the repeatable; the more a pattern reliably obtains, the better-supported the claim. It's about testability and repeatability. History studies the one-off, the particular, in the past. It will never happen again in quite the same way — *even if* you believe history is cyclical, it won't recur in quite that form. Fundamentally a different posture of human inquiry. ### Ranke's actual legacy Even his opponents implicitly use his methods, or descendants of them. Whatever your philosophy of history, using the basic tools of historical inquiry means his influence runs through his critics. --- ## 4. Tension: *erklären* vs. *verstehen* — which faculty is history in? As the German university divides up knowledge (*Wissenschaft*, from *wissen*, to know): | **Naturwissenschaften** | **Geisteswissenschaften** | |---|---| | To **explain** — *erklären* | To **understand** — *verstehen* | | Chart laws; predict, control, produce | Grasp motivations, psychology, perspective | | Studies objects | Studies subjects | **Which side does history fall on?** This is the question the split forces. **The argument for *verstehen*:** no scientific conclusion can appeal to what a person feels about the world, or invoke human agency to explain how black holes formed. Explanations involving *persons* are a different kind of thing. A discipline defined by studying objects cannot make sense of a body of knowledge that includes subjects — people who are unpredictable, do crazy things, or sometimes very smart things. Science is blind to almost everything the historian must be sensitive to. **A further asymmetry:** a scientific hypothesis, if correct, predicts — it sticks its neck out about a future state. A perfectly accurate historical analysis rests on nothing about the future and cannot stick its neck out the same way. ### Position: **Wilhelm Dilthey** — history as interpretation - Doing history is more like **interpreting a book or reading a letter someone wrote you** than running an experiment. - The load-bearing concept is **sympathy**: however different the context, we share a psychology with past actors. It is possible to imagine being Caesar on that horse looking at that little trickle, thinking *should I do this or that?* — because as mighty or awful as he was, Caesar was a human being. Not everything is recoverable, but the past is not closed off to us. - Interpretation has standards. Just as there are good and bad readings in literary and film criticism, there are criteria for a good interpretation of a period: does it make sense of most of the actors, the events, the consequences? - **Phenomenology of the work:** it feels more like writing a novel — moments of inspiration, little breakthroughs — than chewing your pencil at Fermat's Last Theorem or running round the lab checking results against a hypothesis. ### Position: **R. G. Collingwood**, *The Idea of History* (1946) — Dilthey pushed further > **"All history is the history of thought."** Method: **think Caesar's thoughts after him.** Reconstruct the mind — where he has just been, who he is up against, the size of his army, what his army wants. To do this for the Rubicon you must hold in mind: - the Republican constitution and the deep fear of a king, and particularly of a dictator - Caesar's relationship with his armies - **land for veterans** — a huge source of contention in the Republican period: as the army grows, the rewards grow and the bill grows, and vast tracts of Italy were effectively conscripted and handed by powerful generals to their veterans The resulting interpretation is gradeable — good, bad, mediocre — by how much evidence it uses and how much light it sheds. ### Counter-position: **Karl Marx** — the polar opposite For Marx, thought is *downstream* of almost everything else. Not thought but material processes: material resources, scarcity, plenty. Dismissive of what philosophers can do and sceptical of their grasp of the past. (Collingwood: history *is* thought. Marx: thought is the residue.) ### The reconciling move offered Personal human understanding and molecular brain-state explanation are **two distinct and non-competing ways of explaining the world**. The historian isn't losing an argument to science; a scientific account of human action would be "inconceivably dull" and answering a different question. --- ## 5. Tension: realism vs. presentism — is the object *out there*? **Realist camp (all three).** Ranke obviously; but Dilthey and Collingwood too. Interpretation notwithstanding, they don't deny we are describing a reality out there. We are trying to *discover*, not just hold forth. **Sceptical position: Benedetto Croce** (19th–mid-20th c.), one of the two great Italian historiographers — the other being **Giambattista Vico**, king of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. > **"All history is contemporary history."** History is always folded into our present. We are pragmatic creatures; we meet problems, we see the past handled those problems variously, and we take what we need for the ends of *now*. The reason we do history is answerable solely in terms of the present we find ourselves in. **Evidence marshalled for Croce:** 1. **Plutarch** (c. 1st century AD) — ~40 *bioi*, Greek and Roman lives **paired** (Alexander with Caesar). Not all good men; the point was "be like him, don't be like him." For many centuries the Lives *were* the textbooks — pretty much all the history Roman boys, and boys across the empire, did. Asking whether Plutarch got Themistocles exactly right by our standards **misses the point of what they thought they were doing.** (He isn't a bad historian: within two to four centuries of his subjects, with access to significant resources. But his purpose is to celebrate and criticise — a moralising function suited to Rome at that moment.) 2. **The bookshop front table** — dominated by books on a theme that would have been unintelligible three years ago; an issue erupts and instantly there are little histories and biographies of the key players. 3. **1619 vs. 1776** — the early-2020s US fight over the founding date. The real question: *when does "we" begin? When may we first use the first person plural?* Choosing year zero is a decision, and these contestations matter. --- ## 6. Tension: does history have a shape? (Hellenic vs. Hebraic; and its secular afterlife) **The question:** Does history repeat? If not, does it rhyme? Are patterns micro-level only, or is there a larger trajectory? | **Hebraic** | **Hellenic** | |---|---| | Linear | Cyclical, messier, more arbitrary | | Providence; God as source of all reality, superintending history while standing *outside* it | Fortune, overreach, the envy of the gods; recurrence | | Protology (how it began and why) and eschatology (the end times) | Constitutional cycles (see Polybius) | | Narrative: creation, fall, captivity, exodus, liberation, captivity again, liberation again — the history of the *relationship between God and the early Israelites*, not just of the Israelites | | History invested with purpose and meaning is characteristic of all three Abrahamic monotheisms. **Polybius** — Greek-writing historian charting the rise of Rome and the first great conflicts with Carthage; has serious ideas about pattern and the **cyclicality of constitutions** and political societies. **Are grand trajectories dead?** No — **camouflaged**. Positions on the spectrum: - **Pro-nation historiography** (esp. 18th–19th c. France and Germany): to write the history of your nation, celebrating it, is *already* to take a position. - **Contemporary global history**: transcends national and imperial boundaries — but is equally shaped by a vision of the good society, a conception of international relations, the authority of international law. **Cliodynamics** (emerged in the last ~15–20 years). From **Clio**, muse of history, one of the nine — a classicist's metonym for history. **Peter Turchin**: we can now predict the future reliably, because we have far more data than previous historians, can see how patterns fit, and can project forward. *The old "is it a science?" argument resurfacing.* Fierce critics; also significant support. **Note the irony:** cliodynamics confirms Croce. We study a past phenomenon *because* we're worried about, say, drone warfare with that country over there — and see what we can project forward. --- ## 7. Meta-frame: the ancient discourse and the modern discipline *(Implied by the lecture rather than stated. The claim: the Enlightenment did not invent the arguments — it institutionalised them, secularised them, and added one genuinely new problem.)* ### What the ancients had - History as **inquiry** (*historiē*) — personal travel, testimony, judgement. - History as **moral instruction** — Plutarch's paired Lives as the curriculum; exemplarity as the point. - History as **lessons for the present** — and this persisted right up to the end of the 18th century: Hobbes translating the whole of Thucydides; **Machiavelli's *Discorsi***, studying Livy's account of the Republic's rise for usable lessons. - Already fully formed: the **Herodotus/Thucydides split** between capacious, credulous, meaning-weaving inquiry and austere, causal, material-and-psychological analysis. - No guild, no protocols, no institution — but also no anxiety about certainty, because there was no rival standard called "science" to fall short of. ### What the Enlightenment and after added - **The explosion of national histories** in the 18th century. **David Hume** was rescued from poverty by locking himself in an attic and writing a many-volumed *History of England* that sold hugely and bought him the leisure to do philosophy. **Adam Smith** — much historical work in the *Wealth of Nations*. Historical writing is a signature of the **Scottish Enlightenment**. - **Secularisation. Gibbon's *Decline and Fall*** is self-consciously post-Christian in how it narrates history unfolding, and in its temper toward the influence of Christianity — evidence of a new **secular self-confidence** in the writing of history. - **Professionalisation, and its resistance.** When modern history was proposed as an Oxford degree in the mid-19th century there was heavy resistance: modern history was not a gentleman's subject — something to *influence*, perhaps, not study. The proper history was Greece and Rome, *as moral instruction*: read the histories of successful empire-builders while building a bigger empire. (Note this is the *ancient* rationale, alive and well in 1850.) The modern guild of professional historians really opens up only at the end of the 19th century; its infrastructure only in the early 20th. - **The new problem: Lessing's ditch.** Once there is a gold standard of necessary, armchair-obtainable truth, historical knowledge is *defined* as falling short of it. The ancients lived with contingency; the moderns have to justify it. ### The repetitions (old quarrel, new vocabulary) | Ancient form | Modern form | |---|---| | Herodotus (anthropological, interpretive, meaning-weaving) | Dilthey / Collingwood (*verstehen*, sympathy, re-enactment) | | Thucydides (austere, causal, resources, strategy) | Ranke (*wie es eigentlich gewesen*) — and, on the material side, Marx | | Plutarch's moralising Lives | Croce's "all history is contemporary history"; 1619 vs. 1776 | | Polybius on constitutional cycles | Turchin's cliodynamics | | Providence, eschatology, God outside history | Camouflaged teleologies: progress, the good society, the authority of international law | | Machiavelli reading Livy for lessons | "What can we project forward about that country over there?" | **The genuine differences:** institutional machinery (seminar, PhD, source criticism, peer discipline); the loss of an agreed superintending purpose; the inversion of the evidence problem (scarcity → deluge); and the reflexive turn — **historiography** (*historia* + *graphē*), the discipline's own thinking and writing about what it is doing when it does history. --- ## 8. Vocabulary - **historiē** — inquiry; **apodexis** — demonstration, write-up - **historiography** — the writing of history; a division within history that thinks and writes about what we are doing when we do history - ***Wie es eigentlich gewesen*** — how it actually was (Ranke) - **erklären / verstehen** — to explain / to understand - **Naturwissenschaften / Geisteswissenschaften** — natural sciences / human sciences - **protology / eschatology** — study of the beginning / of the end times - **cliodynamics** — quantitative predictive history (from Clio, muse of history) --- ## 9. Course roadmap (8 lectures) - **L2** — the birth of history: Herodotus, his achievement, and his impact on the formation of Hellenic identity - Then: Thucydides; Polybius (rise of Rome, Carthage, constitutional cycles); the Roman historians (Livy, Tacitus, Sallust) - Then: doctrines of providence — theologically inflected history, protology and eschatology - Running throughout the first half: **Hebraic linear vs. Hellenic cyclical**; and **objectivity vs. interpretation** - Also flagged: speculative "mega-history" and the choosing of year zero --- ### Minor errata in the lecture (worth not repeating in an essay) - Gibbon is described as "the greatest historian of the Scottish Enlightenment" — Gibbon was English; the Scottish Enlightenment historians proper are Hume and Robertson. - The university reformer named is **Wilhelm** von Humboldt (founder of the University of Berlin), not his brother Alexander the naturalist. - Caesar was **assassinated** in 44 BC, not executed. - Polybius charts Rome's rise in the **second** century BC (the Punic Wars run 264–146 BC), not the beginning of the third. --- Back to: [[PA Philosophy of History]] Next Lecture: [[The History of History]]