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Over on H World Fred Spier of the University of Amsterdam has asked one of those wonderfully obvious questions: "Why do members of this discussion group think it is it important to study history?" (Use the Next Message/Thread link to follow the resulting discussion).
I like obvious questions of this sort because they encourage us to think about things we take for granted... as Jimmy Buffett sang:"So damn simple, like the Jitterbug, it plum evaded me." We are often so engrossed in doing history that we loose sight of why we bother.
I won't attempt to summarize the points offered by the good and noble citizens of H-World -- just go read them for yourselves if you are curious. I will, however, offer up my own two cents worth. History for me is the best means we have available to understand our present. For my students, I often present this in the form of a metaphor: History is like a movie, and we were all got to the theatre late. Without being aware of the events so far, we are at a disadvantage in figuring out why anybody is doing anything. Now, we may piece it together eventually, but by then the movie will almost be over -- and we will still be left to guess about what happened before. History is the"backstory" the helps us to make more rapid sense of the unfolding action. Mighty useful, that.
That's part of my answer as well: true understanding requires both synchronic (which most other disciplines do pretty well) and diachronic (which only history does well and comprehensively) understanding. The social sciences are slowly emerging from the "study the present" static modernist vision, but only slowly.
Caleb McDaniel -
4/16/2005
[Blushes] I apologize for my woeful misreading of your comment, Jonathan. I didn't mean to oversimplify it and intended no disrespect. Now I see what you were getting at, and I agree with you: one of the reasons why history is appealing to me as a discipline is because of its range of interests. If it happened and humans were involved, it's history -- and I want to know about it too.
I still think (for myself at least, and maybe this is because I was born with a knife in my brain, as Emerson memorably said of the ruthlessly self-critical thinkers of his generation), though, that more of a gloss is needed to make this reason specific to history. I can imagine a scientist, for instance, also saying that he/she is in science out of a desire to understand everything. But that answer takes for granted that "everything" is accessible to scientific investigation. So while I agree with you that history is the "best discipline within which to pursue total knowledge," I think we have to give a more particular reason for why that is. That's what I was getting at with my Heideggerian allusion to the fact that human beings are historical; I'm trying to use that as prima facie evidence that the best way to understand everything about human beings is to pursue historical understanding.
I'm not at odds with your answer, though, and I'm sorry if I came off the wrong way!
Jonathan Dresner -
4/16/2005
With all respect, Caleb, my answer does not end with the desire for knowledge, nor is it a vague desire: it's not the desire to know something, but the desire to understand everything and I am asserting that the best discipline within which to pursue total knowledge is history. And transmission matters, as well.
Caleb McDaniel -
4/16/2005
On the one hand, I want to agree with Rob and Jonathan that the desire to "know" or "understand" the past is justification enough for studying history. But these same motives could just as easily be used to justify any intellectual study (as Rob explicitly points out), so I'm not sure they provide a specific rationale for studying the past.
For me, at least, understanding the past has to have some connection to understanding the present in order to make it worth pursuing. I realize that's a crude way of putting things, and I wouldn't want to make this binding on all historians -- but it is my personal feeling, and I think even if I disavowed that intent, I would still find myself ineluctably thinking about the present in a historical way, in spite of myself.
But I don't think that this view necessarily reduces the study of the past into a "tool" for understanding the "present," or that it requires thinking that there is an "infinite connecting thread between all of human history," as Rob says. In fact, I think the value of recognizing the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the past is that it often makes the present seem more strange and unfamiliar than it otherwise would. To say that the present has to be worked in somehow to an answer to the "why history?" question is not the same as to say that the present is the transparent telos for everything that has come before.
Similarly, I don't think that a historian who keeps one eye on the present must necessarily posit a transhistorical "humanity" that has universal features. Still, surely we do history partly because we are interested in human beings and think they are in some way similar to us. It's possible to overdetermine this similarity, but here's a minimal way in which human beings are all alike: they are temporal beings. Historical actors are like human beings in the present in the sense that they, too, had a present and a past.
I realize I'm still not answering the "Why Bother?" question. Maybe more later ...
Rob D. Priest -
4/15/2005
Minor ammendment, if I may:
"There might be methodological implications, and other reasons why this helps us act in the present"
--There are actually a lot more reasons, "methodological" was just the first to come to my head--rather pathetic of me!. My point is more that I don't think "backstory" is a main one.
Rob D. Priest -
4/15/2005
"Backstory"? If that's all it is, it would be very sad. My problems with this:-
First: Either,
1) That presumes a kind of infinite connecting thread between all of human history in order to provide the present with that context--I don't really see this.
2) OR We'd have to believe that, fundamentally, humanity is the constant between ages, when in fact what the study of history has demonstrated to me is that humans in different ages/places/contexts are fundamentally different and foreign.
Second: I always assumed the most important thing about history was understanding the past. What's wrong with understanding the past? Why does the past have to be reduced to a tool for understanding the present? In some way, it's no different to literature, politics, or any other kind of study: we study a fairly abstract "thing" or "things" (period, person, text) at a distance from us and try to understand it. There might be methodological implications, and other reasons why this helps us act in the present, but to crowbar in a message about the contemporary seems a bit mistaken.
Third: The notion of "coming to the theatre late" is more a question of cultural memory, and how the present interprets the past, than what historians have to say about the past. We might discover that Churchill secretly nuked Edinburgh, but that doesn't really help us understand how people think of Churchill in the present if nobody knows this. People act according to individual and popular interpretations of history as part of a way of forming the present, they aren't just passively influenced by "what happened."
I do history because I want to know and synchronic answers are inadequate. Having learned, I want others to know (and to want to know) and teaching is the best way to do that honestly.
