History is philosophy teaching by examples.
DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS,
Ars Rhetorica (first century B.C.E.)
Like religion and history, philosophy and history have a long, complicated, sometimes fruitful and sometimes difficult relationship. Perhaps the awkwardness in the collaboration is a byproduct of professional instincts. Historians are wary of addressing basic questions of knowing. Philosophers revel in those same questions. But questions of how we know about the past and how we present that knowledge are not just matters of historical method. They run deeper, as an examination of the ties between history and philosophy reveals. David Hume said it even better, in part because he was a superb philosopher as well as a meticulous chronicler, “the most historically minded of philosophers and the most subtly and profoundly philosophical of historians.” Writing of the morality of obedience to tyrants in his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume coupled the two disciplines: “For there is a principle of human nature, which we have frequently taken notice of, that men are mightily addicted to general rules, and that we often carry our maxims beyond those reasons, which first induc’d us to establish them. Where cases are similar in many circumstances, we are apt to put them on the same footing, without considering that they differ in the most material circumstances, and that the resemblance is more apparent than real.” The real test of the reliability of any statement of fact was reference to its history. “To give an instance of this, we may chuse any point of history, and consider for what reason we either believe or reject it.”1
With Hume’s injunctions in mind—and read correctly as joining rather than uncoupling history and philosophy—one can and should ask if history is really philosophy teaching by example. Can the writing of history incorporate the moral concerns of the philosophers, or is historical scholarship inherently amoral? Are ideas timeless like the shadows on Plato’s cave, or are they merely products of a place and time? In the final analysis, historians and philosophers must talk to each other in an ongoing collaborative endeavor.2
The prime obstacle to a fruitful conversation between historians and philosophers is jargon. For example, the Companion to the philosophy of history divides the field into the philosophy of history proper and the philosophy of historiography. The former is a branch of philosophy. The latter is the study of all beliefs, values, and ideas in the past. I take this to be simply intellectual history with a hard shell of jargon. Even the editor of the Companion finds this “a distinction that does not exist in any natural language or philosophical jargon” (and subsequent distinctions of its kind) “too vague” to be useful. I have to second that motion—I had no idea what the distinctions distinguished.3
With all due respect to the differences between the following approach and the way in which working philosophers might approach this same subject, I think that four overlapping concerns of philosophers and historians impose vital connections between the ways in which the two disciplines operate: what is the source of morality, what is the authority of reason and reasoned argument, what is the nature of causation, and what are ideas. When one explores these, one sees how intertwined history and philosophy are and must be.
From the inception of historical writing, some historians and philosophers have assumed that history illustrated principles of morality and true philosophy reveals itself in historical studies. They concluded that history, by an unerring and persistent search for truth, was essential to the philosopher. It was the working out in human time and space of essential rational truths. In turn, the philosophical method—dispassionate, objective, deeply in touch with the laws of nature—appealed to early modern historians. As the English historian and antiquarian Richard Braithwaite wrote in 1638, “[T]he true use and scope of all histories ought to tend to no other purpose, than … to caution us in things offensive, and incite us to the management of imployments in themselves generous, and worthy of imitation.” George Bancroft, the widely read and greatly admired Democratic historian of the United States, thought doing history was a moral enterprise. As he wrote in 1834, at the beginning of his multi-volume history of the United States, “[P]opular freedom rests on the sanctity of morals.” The most cogent recent argument for the moral imperative in history belongs to David Harlan. He boldly stated that the purpose of historical study is to “force us to ponder what might lie behind our own best wishes and good intentions.” History allows its students to “respect the dead” only by allowing them “to speak to the living.”4
Many early modern philosophers of history found the two disciplines tied together by common concern for moral principles. In the first part of the nineteenth century, the German thinker Georg Hegel went so far as to build a philosophy of history in which moral principle was the determining force behind all historical action. Hegel explored the implications of this philosophy of history in his university lectures. Great events were not accidents, and history was not a collection of foolish happenings. Chance affected all human activity, of this there could be no denial, but the Spirit that appeared everywhere in history took larger steps toward its goal of Reason. The process was the now-famous dialectic, in which great movements gave rise to their antitheses, until a synthesis, the manifestation of Reason, allowed people to advance to a new stage of self-awareness.5
Hegel offered a resolution to the apparent disjoint among the historian’s love of facts, the particularity of human action and thought, and the philosopher’s adherence to general principles applicable to a wide variety of historical events:
It is the aim of the investigator to gain a view of the entire history of a people or a country, or of the world, in short, what we call Universal History. In this case the working up of the historical material is the main point. The workman approaches his task with his own spirit; a spirit distinct from that of the element he is to manipulate. Here a very important consideration will be the principles to which the author refers, the bearing and motives of the actions and events which he describes, and those which determine the form of his narrative.
Philosophical detachment enabled the objective historians to see the big picture. Hegel cautioned scholars wedded to more narrow-gauge approaches, “A history which aspires to traverse long periods of time, or to be universal, must indeed forgo the attempt to give individual representations of the past as it actually existed. It must foreshorten its pictures by abstractions; and this includes not merely the omission of events and deeds, but whatever is involved in the fact that Thought is, after all, the most trenchant epitomist.” The lesson: History and philosophy were twinned because the moral principles in the latter controlled what happened in the former. Too much historical detail only clouded the historian’s visions of philosophical truths.6
Hegel’s approach was attractive to Karl Marx, as he formulated his own philosophical history. Hegel’s philosophy of history merely framed the principle of Reason. Marx filled in the canvas with political and economic detail. Although I prefer to treat Marx in this chapter as a moral philosopher who used history, one might almost as easily include him in the chapter on the social sciences and history, so pervasively influential were his contributions to those fields.
Marx was born in Prussia and married into the gentry there, but he found Germany unreceptive to his increasingly radical political ideas and migrated to France, Belgium, and finally England with his longtime collaborator and sometime patron Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels burst onto the philosophical scene with the Communist Manifesto (1848). Their plan for economic reform incorporated elements of current socialist thought but went far beyond these to argue for a classless state in which all men and women would be equal in law and wealth. In his later, more complex writings on history and philosophy, Marx borrowed the dialectic notion of historical change, though he objected to Hegel’s emphasis on the progress of thought. Marx was a materialist, not an idealist. History was not the becoming of the idea of Reason as Hegel forecast but a struggle for control of the means of production that passed through several set stages. The last of these stages, true equality of possession and production through communism, was the destined end of history.7
Like Hegel’s, Marx’s philosophy of history reached deeply into moral concerns. It may indeed “be pointless to search for a single theory of history” in his work, but there can be no doubt that for him history had deep structures that inevitably dictated its course, and these were fundamentally moral. The base of all history was labor and capital, the ongoing struggle of worker and owner. All the ideas, the culture and the religion, that one could find were but a superstructure built upon that foundation. “In changing the modes of production, mankind changes all its social relations. The hand mill creates a society with the feudal lord; the steam mill a society with the industrial capitalist. … Under the patriarchal system, under the caste system, under the feudal and corporative system, there was division of labor in the whole of society according to fixed rules.” In the end, the struggle could lead only to the ideal moral state of men—a state wherein each gave to others and those in need were never needy. It was a utopian idea of a classless state based on a genuine sharing of material goods.8
Most modern historians and philosophers are chary of such overarching theories, particularly those linking historical reasons to philosophical Reason. “Most historians … would dismiss all such attempts to describe the process of change as failures.” But the dream of a perfect history resting upon a perfect philosophy still tantalizes us in the moments between sleep and wakefulness.9
When there were philosophical voices raised against any overly neat conjunction of moral philosophy and historical dialectic, they sounded not in the rejection of a philosophical history but in an alternative version of moral theory for history. For these critics, history simply taught a more complicated moral lesson than either Hegel or Marx provided. At the end of the nineteenth century, a century replete with historians speaking with the greatest certitude about the deep philosophical principles of history and philosophers finding in history proofs of eternal verities, Friedrich Nietzsche rejected these connections in a way that continues to challenge everyone concerned with the interplay of philosophy and history.
As a young man, Nietzsche was an academic of immense promise. He was appointed to a chair in classical philology at 24, and ten years later ill health forced his resignation and the end of his teaching career. His philosophical essays did not sell well. He lamented, after the publication of Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, that of the 300 in print, his publisher had sold only 114 copies. Perhaps one problem was his literary style. His philosophical essays, commencing in 1878, were organized in aphorisms, short bursts of genius punctuated by splenetic outbursts of despair. Though infections contracted during his service in the German army (he was a medical orderly) would eventually lead to his physical and mental collapse, the uniqueness of his criticism and philosophy grew in proportion to his withdrawal from everyday affairs. A virtual recluse in his later years, he was loved, admired, hated, and denounced. No one doubted, however, that his was one of the greatest minds of his age, “still talked about and written about.”10
The nineteenth-century philosophers and historians agreed that evil, want, and suffering would soon be forgotten. Nietzsche demurred from that facile conclusion. While the standard of living (life expectancy, literacy, the quality of food, housing, and clothing) had improved for the common man, nothing had changed about the way in which men and women viewed their world. Philosophers and historians who catered to the vulgar masses only obscured the fundamental problem. “Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.”11
Though he was not known as a philosopher of history, Nietzsche’s notions of history played a key part in his larger assault on conventional ideas. History proved to him that “man veils and subdues the past,” by which he meant that historians had failed in their duty to see the world as he did. “There could be a kind of historical writing that had no drop of common fact in it and yet could claim to be called in the highest degree objective.” Instead, he judged all history to be subjective, a product of individual need and bias. He did not have much use for the university-trained historical scholars of his day either, seeing them as neither masculine nor feminine but as “mere neuters” looking for truth in all the wrong places.12
Nietzsche found in history a kind of ur-morality. History taught what conventional philosophy denied, that “placing one’s will on a par with that of someone else,” the golden rule at the core of Christian morality, was “really … a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay.” Equality of treatment among natural equals was healthy, but not among unequals. Such “sentimental weakness” ignored the fact, proven in history, that all life “simply is the will to power.” The master’s morality would and should never bow to the slave’s morality. “Therefore it is a gross mistake when historians of morality” ignore the instinctual differences of a noble spirit and a subservient one.13
For Nietzsche, history taught that there were no great ideas. There were only great men. Their nobility of spirit, manifested in part by their challenge to convention, was all that history or philosophy could offer to later generations. This guiding principle led him to oppose democratic reforms and egalitarian laws. They denied, in his view, what nature demanded—rule by the superior beings. Perhaps his conclusion was inevitable from his first premise: There was no objective truth, no Reason or law, no God, nothing that ordained fair play, love of the other, self-sacrifice for the good of the whole, or anything like these false ideals. But in the end Nietzsche did not divorce history from morality. He merely substituted the morality of the superman for the conventional morality of his day. Nihilism had its own morality, rooted in what he took to be historical fact.14
Nietzsche did not have the last word, though his moral nihilism seemed appropriate to the madness of Nazism, a philosophy of history that drew its inspiration in part from his works. In opposition to that facile wedding of superman amorality and nationalism, many humane, liberal philosophers raised objections. The most compelling of these voices was Karl Popper’s. Popper was a secular Viennese Jew and one of the twentieth century’s foremost philosophers. He had lived through history in its rawest form—the German program to erase European Jewry, including the intellectual contributions of Jews to European life. Yet he clung to the idea that liberal democracy and scientific inquiry could still save the world from tyrants and their madness. For him, it was the effort of solving problems that makes us human, not absolute knowledge. So he rejected what he called historicism, “the theory that society will necessarily change but along a predetermined path that cannot change, through stages predetermined by inexorable necessity.” Instead, “There is no logical path” leading to objective and universal truths. “They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love of the objects of experience.” The judgment of the historian was rooted in the morality of a liberal conscience. One might even say that Popper rescued the philosophy of history from history—that is, he reminded the philosophical community that history could teach valuable moral lessons, even though the forces of absolutist tyranny would bend historical accounts to their own uses. As he wrote in The Open Society and Its Enemies, “We can interpret the history of power politics from the point of view of our fight for the open society, for a rule of reason, for justice, freedom, equality, and for the control of international crime” like Nazism and Stalinism.15
A historian reading the foregoing paragraphs on Nietzsche’s heroic anarchism and Popper’s ordered liberty will remark that the two thinkers’ philosophies of history were responses to their own experience and the larger intellectual currents of their times. (A philosopher reading the same lines will say, quite rightly, that five pages cannot begin to describe the complexities of the two philosophers’ ideas.) My point is that moral ideas and their formulations may seem universal to philosophers or schools of philosophy, but the historians will see how moral philosophies and their expositors go in and out of fashion. It is a mistake to read the philosopher as a fellow philosopher would, for this would de-contextualize philosophical writings. As the historian Charles Beard explained to a 1933 meeting of the American Historical Association, “The philosopher, possessing little or no acquaintance with history, sometimes pretends to expound the inner secret of history, but the historian turns upon him and expounds the secret of the philosopher, as far as it may be expounded at all, by placing him in relation to the movement of ideas and interests in which he stands or floats, by giving to his scheme of thought its appropriate relativity.”
Proof of this critique lies in the way in which later generations read Nietzsche and Popper, readings shaped by changed contexts. Instead of indelible words and universally applicable ideas, their contributions are read in the light of contemporary events. Nietzsche, for example, was welcomed in the America of H. L. Mencken as the ultimate individualist, reviled during World War II as the forerunner of soulless totalitarianism, resurrected in the 1950s as a defender of human choice, and criticized in the 1970s as the first of the postmodern relativists. Nietzsche, who believed he was an original and rejected slavish imitations, became whatever the historical moment claimed of him. He became a palette on which readers could paint their own “moral outlooks.” Popper, once lionized for his liberal views, has faced similar revisionism. Martin Gardiner, perhaps the most respected popular writer on science and mathematics in the second half of the twentieth century, concluded, “Today [Popper’s] followers among philosophers of science are a diminishing minority, convinced that Popper’s vast reputation is enormously inflated. I agree. I believe that Popper’s reputation was based mainly on this persistent but misguided effort to restate common-sense views in a novel language that is rapidly becoming out of fashion.”16
Although historians may prove that the reputations and the particular ideas of individual philosophers are creatures of time and place—that is, of history itself—when historians themselves write, their language always has some larger moral tenor. Historians cannot escape such judgment in their writing. Consider this example: If the historian introduces George Washington’s march to the forks of the Ohio in 1754 as a “daring and resourceful twenty-one-year-old messenger sent on a dangerous mission into the American wilderness,” the reader will regard the event and the man as heroic. Had the historian chosen other words, the reader would regard Washington’s introduction to war differently, as in this recounting: Young Washington has just witnessed his Indian allies killing wounded French soldiers: “By afternoon, Washington was back at his own camp, groping for explanations and trying to plan his next move. Since boyhood he had dreamed of battle’s glory. Now he had seen combat but no heroism: only chaos and the slaughter of defenseless men.” The moral sentiments aroused by the two accounts are not a matter of difference of opinion among historians that a greater attention to the primary source evidence could resolve. All depictive language judges. As the philosopher Peter Winch has written, “[A]ny worthwhile study of society must be philosophical in character and any worthwhile philosophy must be concerned with the nature of human society.” Judging ideas in history must be infused with moral philosophy. History teaches that notions of good and evil are contextual. “The idea gets its sense from the role it plays in the system. … The relation between idea and context is an internal one.” The connection lies in the words used to describe good and evil in the past and in the present. “To give an account of the meaning of a word is to describe how it is used; and to describe how it is used is to describe the social intercourse into which it enters.” The historian, tied to the words in his or her primary sources, becomes something like the simultaneous interpreter at the United Nations, turning past moral expressions—the ideals of a people—into modern language.17
The modern historian may protest that any moralizing in historical scholarship, whether part of a larger project of a philosophical history or more closely tied to particular events and people, must be excised from historians’ writings. In his list of “historians’ fallacies,” the historian David Hackett Fischer conceded that moral judgment was not the same as moralizing, for the historian cannot keep “value assumptions” out of his or her work but can avoid the moralistic fallacy: moral opinion masquerading as historical fact. Is Fischer guilty of his own fallacy—condemning the immorality of a profession unaware of its moral obligation not to make moral judgments? In any case, labeling something as a fallacy does not mean it can be excised without losing a vital part of history.18
Consider Gordon Wright’s magnificent presidential address at the American Historical Association meeting in 1975. “The idea of consciously reintroducing the moral dimension into history runs counter to the basic training of most historians, and probably to their professional instinct as well. Each of us has some strong views on the general subject of morality; each of us knows the dangers involved in making moral judgments in our work, or even suggesting a need for them.” But the Vietnam War had influenced an entire generation of historians, many of them sitting in the ballroom in Atlanta to hear Wright, and he continued, “Neither our audience nor the condition of the world in which we live any longer allows us the luxury of escape into a Proustian cork-lined ivory tower free of dust, microbes, and values. … No doubt those of us who profess contemporary history have found the dilemma sharpest; whoever must deal with the more brutal aspects of the Hitler or Stalin era, or with the devastating mass impact of mechanized total war, finds it hard to restrain some expression of that righteous indignation.” If history is to mean anything to its audience, it must recognize that moral judgment is embedded in historians’ accounts. For Stanley Fish, bringing such concerns explicitly into scholarship is inherently to bias one’s findings, bending fact around the desired results. Nothing the historian does, as a teacher or scholar, can foster moral character. But as Jane Kamensky asked, “Does exploring aspects of the past that coincide with urgent matters of present-day concern cheapen or deepen historical writing?” The historian has a potent weapon in his or her findings, and the dramatic depiction of those findings, in the battle for social justice.19
In the end, the historian’s moral judgments remain those of his or her time. But history can lead the mind “from the calm closets of philosophical inquirers, where they have delighted and elevated the minds of the few, into the world of life and action” where moral judgment and ideas are never abstract formulations.20
As the brief discussion of Hegel suggested, the notion of Reason and the ideal of reasoned argument are common to both history and philosophy. A faith in the authority of reason is rooted in Western culture, going as far back in time as the Socratic dialogues (and probably earlier, for fortune has seen fit to preserve only a tiny fraction of classical Greek philosophers’ writings). For Socrates and his alter ego Plato, even the elusive mysteries of the soul could be revealed only by reason. As Socrates tells Glaucon about the soul at the end of The Republic: “Her immortality is demonstrated by the previous argument, and there are many other proofs; but to see her as she really is, not as we now behold her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must contemplate her with the eye of reason.”21
Reason spoke directly to Socrates, but not to his fellow Athenians. The more he harangued his countrymen about politics, law, and war, the angrier they became. When he was tried for treason, he impudently told them that reason dictated they acquit him. When he was convicted and asked to leave the city, reason directed suicide instead. Uncompromising ratiocination led to unmerited death. Had Socrates perhaps failed to understand that the ideal of a reasoned life is not the same as a life of logic chopping? Logic is a closed mathematical system enabling us to prove the validity of certain conclusions based on certain propositions. If the propositions are false, no amount of logical argument can make them true.22
Nor should historians conflate reason with motive. Historians deal with motive all the time, putting themselves in the place of their subjects and asking, were they X, knowing what X knew then, having the same ambitions as X, how they would have acted. When historians do this, they are reasoning as X might have reasoned. This “rationality principle” is the way in which historians make sense of individual decisions, but how can they be sure that they have X’s reasoning right? Human rationality is not a universal element of history, like the forms in the Republic. Instead, reason is a cultural construction, a byproduct of human desire and literacy in given times and places. In other words, no law of nature dictates the outcome of any human reasoning. The historian’s learned intuition cannot claim any more than the chance of being correct.23
Could the historian nevertheless join formal logic and learned intuition to reach historical truths? The historian who believes in some form of “covering law” will argue that correct results can be deduced from a sufficiency of factual evidence: Simply find the category in which the events fit and apply the right law to deduce what really happened. The empiricist will argue the opposite, inducting or inferring truth from the consonance of past and present. The empiricist need not categorize it but will know it when he or she sees it. But here’s the rub: The deductive historian and the empirical historian face the same obstacle. Both must choose words to describe things. The choice is neither arbitrary nor dictated by any law of logic. When is a patriot a rebel? When is a terrorist a freedom fighter? On the eve of the American Revolution, the rebels (or patriots) called the loyalists “Tories” and referred to themselves as “Whigs.” These terms came into use at the end of the seventeenth century in England. A Tory was a defender of the absolute power of kings, according to the Whigs; and a Whig was a rebel, according to the Tories. When historians choose among these terms to describe the opposing sides in 1775, they are joining in the debate rather than standing above it. To repeat, historians know that words in statements they make, just like the statements made by people in the past, depend for their meaning not on the logic of the statement itself but on meanings that real people in real time ascribe to the words.24
Nor are historians above the mischance of logical fallacy, misusing the rules of argument, either intentionally or by accident. In 1970, David Hackett Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies presented a relentless and somewhat humorless exposé of the illogical arguments famous historians made. Fischer worried that “[t]he work of too many professional historians is diminished by an antirational obsession—by an intense prejudice against method, logic, and science. … [I]n fact historians … go blundering about their business without a sufficient sense of purpose or procedure.” Fischer regarded all fallacies as “wrong turnings.” They misled; they misrepresented; they were wrong. Avoiding them, his challenge to us, would make historical scholarship—and the lessons of history—more trustworthy. But Fischer’s remarkable catalogue of slips and slides into fallacy by the foremost historians never explained why such fine scholars were guilty of such elementary mistakes.25
The answer is “necessity.” Historical writing is not an exercise in logical argument so much as an exercise in creative imagination. Historians try to do the impossible: retrieve an ever-receding and thus never reachable past. Given that the task is impossible, one cannot be surprised that historians must occasionally use fallacy—hasty generalization, weak analogy, counterfactual hypotheticals, incomplete comparisons, and even jumping around in past time and space to glimpse the otherwise invisible yesteryear. All the historian can ask of the philosopher here is tolerance, and all the philosopher can require of the historian is honesty about the methods used.
A third tie between the two disciplines revolves around the question of causation. Aristotle taught that causation is an essential part of knowledge. We cannot fully comprehend anything until we know why it happened. Two of his four types of causation concern the historian: the “efficient cause” (the immediate forces impelling change) and “final cause” (the purpose for which the change occurred). None of Aristotle’s metaphysics really helps the historian directly, for both types of causes seem either obvious or impenetrable. Either the historian asserted that X caused Y or the historian conceded that we could never know the precise cause of Y. For cause was nothing more than the events preceding those under study.26
David Hume pooh-pooh’d such metaphysical inquiries into causation as Aristotle’s when he announced that cause was not a solid thing like a link in a chain but simply the constant conjunction of sets of events in our minds. “If all the long chain of causes and effects, which connect any past event with any volume of history, were compos’d of parts different from each other, and which ’twere necessary for the mind distinctly to conceive, ’tis impossible we shou’d preserve to the end any belief or evidence. But as most of these proofs are perfectly resembling, the mind runs easily along them, jumps from one part to another with facility, and forms but a confus’d and general notion of each link.” Experience, not some law of nature, put these conjunctions where we could see them. Imputing to them some deeper, autonomous, automatic mechanism was just philosophical mischief. Hume was also a historian, so his rejection of mechanical theories of causation seemed then, and still seems, to make a lot of sense.27
But philosophical inquiries into the nature of causation by historians were not going to satisfy the philosophers. In fact, the reverse seems to be the case. Hume’s casual empiricism seemed to throw down the gauntlet to later academic philosophers of history. At least Immanuel Kant said that Hume’s skepticism had woken him from his slumbers. The result was Kant’s fervent belief that history was properly viewed only from a philosophical perspective. In his essay “Ideas for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784), Kant engaged in a circular argument—that history revealed laws of nature and laws of nature governed history—but no matter; the essence was that historical causes were not, as Hume believed, simple products of human intellection. Causes and effects could be predicted in general.28
In the twentieth century, the most important philosophical attempt to revisit Hume’s commonsense historical empiricism was Karl Hempel’s. Hempel was a German logician and philosopher of science who migrated to the United States in 1939 and thereafter held a number of university positions of increasing repute. He was best known for arguing that scientific laws were not trustworthy as predictions of the future. They were instead reliable descriptions of what was happening in the here and now. In 1942, Hempel expressed his theory of “covering laws” of history in terms of formal logic. In a world at war, a formal logic of historical law seemed about as comforting a philosophy of history as one could get, though Hempel and his followers would surely reject such an empirical explanation of their endeavor. In any case, the theory went like this: Assume that general laws exist. If, then, a series of causes—say, C1, C2, C3, and so on—always came before an event, it could be said that there was a general law covering the causation of that event. Setting aside the initial assumption of covering laws (isn’t that what we need to prove?), if this formulation is to be something more than a tautology, one must know a great deal more about the causes of events than we know (or can know). After all, any event of any significance is always preceded by an infinity of prior events. Which of them are relevant (even assuming we could know them all) and which too far off to have any effect on the event is a matter of historical interpretation.29
Now the inquiry gets complicated. For Hempel, historical interpretation had two meanings. The first is the interpretation of the veracity, utility, and meaning of specific pieces of historical evidence. The second is the interpretation of a historical event. The latter requires placing the event in the most relevant of the many historical contexts in which every event existed. That context (where one is bidden to look for the covering law) can be quite narrow or very broad.30
For example, on the third day of the Gettysburg battle, General Robert E. Lee decided upon a massive frontal attack on Union positions on Cemetery Ridge. He ordered three divisions of infantry to attack abreast. The event, celebrated in Civil War history as Pickett’s Charge, was the “high water mark” of the Confederacy’s military effort in the eastern theater, and the result was the near-destruction of a third of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. What caused him to make this decision? Was it frustration at the lack of progress during the previous two days? Was it the sense that a desperate gamble to break through the Army of the Potomac and march on Washington, D.C., was the only way to end the war? Was Lee, ill with dysentery, simply losing his customary mastery of tactics? Were there no other options? (Lee’s chief subordinate, General James Longstreet, advised a march around the left flank of the Union forces instead of a frontal attack.) Because these questions resist answers, we have to think of Lee’s decision, and the events that followed, in a broader context. Gettysburg was one battle in the many fought over the bloody ground between Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. One must factor into the equation the state of the opposing forces over the first three years of war, the theories of war that both sides carried with them from the Mexican-American War to the Civil War, and the state of politics in the Union and Confederacy. All these and more considerations broaden the context. Should we also consider concepts of honor and loyalty, of manliness and idealism, the antebellum young men bore into the fight?
Even assuming the covering law into which these sequences of facts fit exists, the historian knows that no covering law, no general laws, can completely comprehend either the efficient or the final causation of what happened on July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg. But every historian knows that each decision made that day, and the day before, and the day before that, and in the weeks following the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville in May, contributed to the outcome of Pickett’s Charge. Philosophical discourses on the nature of causation are no help here, but philosophical rigor in thinking about causation is.
As explanations for the coming of a major event—the Civil War, for example—philosophical notions of causation teach the historian that when a series of small causal events seems inadequate as an explanation, the historian must raise the level of generality of his or her explanation. In this sense, Hempel was on the right track. Bleeding Kansas (1854–60), divisive Supreme Court decisions like Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), and even the victory of the Republican Party at the polls in 1860 did not cause the Civil War, because the divisiveness of very similar events in previous years were muted by compromises. Secession rested not on politics but on precisely what Lincoln said in his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas: “A house divided against itself” over slavery could not stand. Without a nation that was half slave and half free, there would have been no Civil War. Thus an explanation can be found at a higher level of generality. Call this a covering law and Hempel smiles down upon us.
A final issue of common concern may make collaborators of historians and philosophers in a more substantial way than shared moralism, reasoned argument, and causation: the pursuit of the meaning of ideas. The noble dream of a philosophical history in which the historian is the judge “before which men and nations pass in review” is a “truly philosophical history.” It “expresses simply the normative urge of reason and conscience seeking some power of total vision above the heat of strife.” It is a dream that requires one small assumption (typically of logic—one begins not with realities but with assumptions about reality), that “unless the genuineness of values, transcendence, and constant relations is granted, knowledge is impossible.” In other words, values cannot be so relative to time and place that the scholar in another time and place cannot imagine what ideas were like then and there. This is called idealist history. To understand how it ties history and philosophy, we need to examine its close cousin, the “history of ideas.”31
Ideas are as slippery as eels and as powerful as the sun. They explain, motivate, attract, and repel. They are essential to civilized life, for they are the containers of human wisdom, know-how, and belief from generation to generation and era to era. When we write history about ideas in history we give the idea a permanent public form. At the same time, we interpret the meaning of past thoughts. We analyze, asking and answering where ideas originated, how they changed, and what impact they had upon action.
Some ideas are great—that is, they have great influence on the course of history. Some ideas are also ideals, like democracy and equality. Some ideas are hateful to us, like racism and “ethnic cleansing” (though others in different times and places have embraced those ideas). However the professional historian or the consumer of history feels about any particular idea, when we read about the history of ideas or hear about it in lectures, ideas are passed on to us. How else would we know that the idea of greatness appears in one form or another in every culture and in every time period, at least those for which written or oral evidence survives? As flimsy and controversial as they may be, ideas have a staying power that transcends time and place.
But what is an idea, that anyone can know and judge it? It may be that for all humans, certain ideas are hardwired into our mental apparatus. That, at least, is what two of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, the cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, have made to our store of ideas. (Note that I take the license of treating the two thinkers as philosophers rather than as anthropologist and psychoanalyst, respectively. I do this because it is their philosophy of knowing that interests me, not the academic box in which they, or others, happened to put them.)
Lévi-Strauss’s life spanned the twentieth century and in it he stood astride the field of cultural anthropology. Generalizing from his work with Brazilian Indians in the half-decade before the outbreak of World War II, he demolished the nineteenth-century distinction between the savage mind and the civilized mind, so vital to the rationale for European imperialism. During the first years of the war he served in the French Army, and after France capitulated and Germany occupied France, like other Jewish intellectuals (notably the historian Marc Bloch), Lévi-Strauss was denied employment and faced the imminent threat of deportation to the concentration camps. He was able to flee, ultimately to New York City, and there found a supportive circle of other émigrés from Nazi tyranny. He formed a strong bond with the American Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas, a friendship that broadened Lévi-Strauss’s view of his discipline. Boas taught that “the antagonisms” which racial stereotypes fostered had no place in anthropology, that there was no “racial heredity” and that prejudice was “easily misled by general impressions.” Written in 1928, at the height of the Jim Crow era, these were courageous words. They echoed in Lévi-Strauss’s own essay “Race and History” (1950) for UNESCO. It had not escaped the attention of either man that Hitler and his cohort defined the Jews as a race. In 1942, Boas collapsed and died in Lévi-Strauss’s arms.32
Returning to France in 1948, Lévi-Strauss soon gained his doctorate, published his studies, and was appointed to a chair at the College of France. His philosophy of cultural anthropology bid his readers see ideas in “structural” terms, as “basic similarities between forms of social life” governed by the “universal laws which make up the unconscious activity of the mind.” Lévi-Strauss’s search for commonalities, or structures, in myths extended to art, learning, religion, and all the other cultural expressions of a people, linking what seemed to be the distinct and individual to larger, shared ways of thinking. Such mental structures were supposed to be real; they lay beneath ways of thinking as disparate as sorcery and theology.33
The psychologist Carl Jung asserted the same notion of universal forms in his analysis of the ideas or archetypes in the collective unconscious mind. Born and educated in Switzerland at the end of the nineteenth century, Jung never faced the personal animosities and physical dangers that Lévi-Strauss encountered. Instead, his turmoil came from within, a spirit divided between middle-class modernity and something far more mystical. He developed phobias as a youngster, as well as fainting spells that his later studies in analytic psychology helped him tackle. His close association, followed by a falling out, with Sigmund Freud, and his lifelong wrestling match with religion (his father was a country pastor), also found their way into his thought.
Jung’s contributions to psychiatry were as profound as Lévi-Strauss’s to anthropology. These included the idea of introverted and extroverted personalities, the notion of a bundle of neuroses combining into a “complex,” and the concept of the archetype. The archetype was a “nucleus of meaning” about which there circled a variety of images and feelings depending on the particular culture in which an individual was nurtured. For example, the mother goddess archetype “is often associated with things and places standing for fertility and fruitfulness, the cornucopia, a ploughed field, a garden.” Hollow objects might also suggest the mother goddess. These might be positive or negative in their connotation. Along with the mother, the spirit, the trickster, and rebirth were found everywhere and everywhere had powerful influences upon culture.34
If the historian were to express skepticism of such impressionistically defined and globally applicable ideas, seeing both Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Jung’s archetypes as part of the history of anthropology and psychiatry respectively (see Charles Beard’s address quoted above) rather than as part of a useful historical methodology, Lévi-Strauss and Jung nevertheless have a good deal to say to historians of ideas. In fact, what they say may be essential to the very project of doing the history of ideas. It seems to me that one must assume some kind of continuity, some connection, between the ideas of people in the past and the mind of the historian (and his or her reader) today, or intellectual history slides into the realm of historical fiction. Whenever the historian claims the ability to know and to be able to explain what people long ago meant and thought, the historian is relying on some kind of demonstrable continuity. In an even more basic way, if the historian of ideas can claim to understand what words written long ago meant, the historian must posit some kind of continuity. “We, as humans, make our world comprehensible by imposing mental structures upon it.”35
To summarize: The historian claims to know past ideas with the same confidence with which the philosopher claims to know ideas in the here and now. But for a moment let us take now the other side of the case and assume the null hypothesis that such an idealist history, a history of ideas resting on the collaboration of history and philosophy, is not possible. To recapitulate: The null hypothesis would reject the notion of continuity between past and present as an unsustainable postulate. Following this logic, the only way to defend the continuity would be to show that historians in the present can understand past ideas, and that is the very presumption that the null hypothesis questions. The continuity would thus appear to be an example of a circular argument.36
But idealist history does not rest on logic. Its advocates insist that historical proof is not the same as scientific proof but is possible only because of the unique characteristics that people in the past and people like the historian share. If ideas are simply the product of personal experience, then no genuine empathy is possible without the historian’s duplicating the experience of his or her subject. If such near-identities of experience were impossible, the entire project of empathy would fail.37
What can bridge the gap of years and context and make such idealist empathy work? The answer is the historian’s imagination. For Wilhelm Dilthey, the German intellectual historian whose lectures on historical imagination are still staples of idealist history, the historical imagination is akin to the poetic imagination. According to Dilthey, the poet can be understood by later historians because and only insofar as the poetry has drawn upon “a basic trait of life.” The historian of literature or art assesses the impact of his or her subject through imaginative association. The historical account of the poem or painting works because of the (admittedly presupposed) common aesthetics of imagination. The historian learns what the artist knew about his or her own work and uses that to fuel the historical imagination, figuratively taking the scholar back to the artist’s time and place. Because “thoughts sustain themselves independently of their original context,” the historian’s imagination permits him or her to know the past. Perhaps even more important, as poetry or pictorial arts are true to themselves, so the art of the historical account may be true to itself, works of art like those it studies. By extension, all history is possible to the idealist historian.38
The idea that ideas floated in some ether apart from the human condition did not seem to fit the American intellectual atmosphere (too German, perhaps?), certainly not the liberal view of ideas. In 1943, Merle Curti, a social historian, turned his attention to American ideas. His Growth of American Thought was an instant classic, winning the Pulitzer Prize the next year. In the preface to the third edition, nearly forty years later, Curti explained his approach. “The original edition of The Growth of American Thought assumed that ideas could best be understood in terms of their social context and social utility. … It emphasized the role that the church, government, and business, the development of schools, publishing and libraries, the impact of wars and economic crises [have on ideas].” Curti admitted that he was well aware of the other tradition, linking ideas to one another according to their “philosophical foundations,” and did not object to a fusion of his approach and the internalistic one. But the history of his times, of two world wars, a cold war, and totalitarianism with its manufacturing of ideas and compulsive adherence to certain doctrines, had convinced him that ideas cannot be seen apart from their contexts.39
Curti’s was both a valuing of ideas in general and a proposal of how we should weigh particular ideas. But Curti was not particularly concerned about the truth of ideas. Unhindered by the long European tradition of internalist, philosophically defined intellectual history, and stimulated by the way that real life seemed to foster ideas in America, Curti democratized intellectual history. The substitution of thought, something everyone engaged in, for ideas, something for elite minds to conjure, was the tipoff. Curti brought everyone into the tent, not only by demystifying the study of ideas but also by crediting popular notions and ordinary thinking.
Curti’s transformation of the notion of social ideas came just in time to save intellectual history in America. For part of the Red Scare of the period 1947–57 was an antipathy to “eggheads” and intellectuals. The actual connection between some literary, artistic, and scholarly figures in the 1930s with the American Communist Party became the hook on which “red-baiters” hung this anti-intellectual campaign. As Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in America explained, “[T]he intellectual, dismissed as an ‘egghead,’ and oddity … would be made the scapegoat for everything from the income tax to [the Japanese sneak attack at] Pearl Harbor.” When not persecuted, the egghead was belittled and dismissed as ineffectual and effete. How better, then, to save American thought from the same fate than to associate it with robust national institutions like churches and schools?40
Fully reuniting history and philosophy is an uphill effort. As Ernst Breisach, a learned student of both history and philosophy, has reported, “Historians, for plausible reasons, have rarely responded with alacrity to opportunities to engage in theoretical debates.” The divide had grown as academic training in the two disciplines diverged. D’Arcy:
Most historians were not themselves philosophers and therefore they were not themselves aware of their own serious predicament; nor were they able to offer a well-considered and balanced defence of historical knowledge. They were not trained to meet those who challenged the historical method as inherently vicious and they had no philosophical knowledge to call upon when attacked by philosophers who trusted no other forms of knowledge save deduction and induction. This was indeed a situation which has continued even to this day.
To say that there is very little “interplay” between historians and philosophers of history today is something of an understatement, matched only by “historians are de-motivated regarding the study of philosophy of history.”41
But history shares so many characteristics with philosophy that every historian should concede that the two disciplines are companions. For like philosophy, history is never quite done. Not only is there more to say, but each generation, each school, each student of the past refuses to accept any account or analysis as final or definitive—not for long, at least. So the historian endlessly revisits wars, movements, and individual lives in the same way in which philosophy revisits essential questions of human valuation. A truly philosophical history, then, is not one that deduces universal principles or unvarying values but one that celebrates the ongoing quest to know about the past, to know what is and what is not evidence, belief, and reality.42