At the End of an Age 0300092962, 2001046558

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At the End of an Age

Books by John Lukacs

The Great Powers and Eastern Europe Tocqueville:

The European Revolution

and Correspondence with Gobineau (editor)

A History of the Cold War Decline and Rise of Europe

A New History of the Cold War Historical Consciousness

The Passing of the Modern Age

A Sketch of the History of Chestnut Hill College,

1

924-1

The Last European War, 1939-1941 1945: Year Zero Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900- 1950

Outgrowing Democracy: United States

in the

Budapest 1900:

A History of the

Twentieth Century

A Historical Portrait of a

City and

Its

Culture

Confessions of an Original Sinner

The Duel:

10

May- 31

July;

The Eighty-Day

Struggle Between Churchill and Hider

The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age Destinations Past

E Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 944- 1 946: The Kennan-Lukacs Correspondence

George 1

The Hitler of History

A Thread of Years Five Days in

London,

May

1940

A Student's Guide to the Study of History

John Lukacs At the End of an Affe

Yale University Press

•

New Haven & London

Copyright

© 2002 by John Lukacs.

All rights reserved.

This book

may not be

reproduced, in whole or

any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press ) without written permission from the publishers. in part, including illustrations, in

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Designed by Sonia Shannon and set in Galliard type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by RR. Donnelley & Sons. Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data

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At die end of an age p.

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John Lukacs.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1.

2.

0-300-09296-2 (cloth

Civilization,

:

alk.

paper)

Modern — 1950 — Philosophy.

Postmodernism. 3. Science and civilization. 4. Dualism. 5. Monism. I. Tide. CB430 .L85 2002 2001046558 121

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For my children

Contents

A BriefIntroduction ix A Few Acknowledgments x ONE Convictions:

"modern

."

•

AT THE END OF AN AGE

•

A personal envoi. Main

•

features of the

Contradictory dualities.

•

The evolution of

Modern Age.

"Post-modern."

•

•

The need

to rethink the current idea of "Progress." i

TWO • THE PRESENCE OF HISTORICAL THINKING My vocation. The historicity of our diinking. • •

Professional history.

The

appetite for history.

History

at the

•

•

Justice /Truth.

•

History and the novel.

end of a

•

historical age.

45

THE QUESTION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE Evolution of my doubts. • The history of science. • Cosmological THREE

•

absurdities.

•

The

collapse of determinism.

Freud, Einstein.

•

•

Darwin, Marx,

The ending of materialism. 85

Contents

FOUR 1959.

•

The

limits

limits

•

AN ILLUSTRATION

of knowledge.

of definitions.

inevitability

•

•

The

•

The

limits

of relationships.

•

Insufficient materialism.

limits

of objectivity.

of mathematics.

•

•

The

The

Inevitable unpredictability. •

The limits of idealism.

145

FIVE

•

AT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

Timeliness, and limitations of my argument.

Duhem.

•

At the center of the belief.

•

universe.

• •

Heisenberg and Conditions of

A necessity for Christians. 189 Index

viii

227

A BriefIntroduction This book tions. Its

is

an

without

essay,

or scholarly presump-

scientific

shortcomings include the condition that

only in a few instances

—a

— though

it is

conclusion of certain convictions

expressed in two or three earlier books of mine (Historical Consciousness, first

published in 1968, twice reprinted since; The Pass-

ing of the Modern Age, 1970; and Confessions of an Original Sinner,

1990, reprinted 2000), of

considered a scholarly volume. this present

book is set forth,

which only the

What compelled me

briefly, in

the

four of its five chapters, wherefore there

first

is

could be

first

to turn to

pages of the

no reason

first

for a fur-

ther Introduction.

However — I tend 130 years ago: "And a if at

to

muse upon what John Morley wrote

man will

the hour of sunset a

be already in no

good hope can

nies of music, that the earth shall

of every feeling creature

still

still

be

fall

mean

on him

fair,

paradise,

like

harmo-

and the happiness

receive a constant augmentation,

and each good cause yet find worthy defenders, when the

mem-

own poor name and personality has long been blotted out of the brief recollection of men for ever." Oh JVIorley! Talking through his beard! What a Victorian beard that was! Of ory of his

course there are optimistic and pessimistic beards.

(Somewhat

A BriefIntroduction later

Morley decided to shave

off his beard entirely.)

years later can I (beardless) have such a

hour of sunset of a

life

And

"good hope,"

130

at the

that occurs together with the going out

of the lights of an entire great age and with the swift coming of the incalculable darkness of a

new one?

Not like Morley^ man. But: perhaps

— which

is

why I wrote this book.

A Few Acknowledgments "At the hour of sunset" fewer and fewer friends remain, and

they become Bell,

Bob

more and more precious

Ferrell,

Don

as the years pass. Philip

Detwiler, Joanna

dened each of them with the wearisome ticular chapter

of the

first

drafts

Shaw Myers:

I

bur-

task of reading a par-

of my manuscript. Their com-

ments were invaluable — as was that of yet another old friend, the

Norwegian

physicist Torger Holtsmark.

Then

the entire

manuscript was read by Jacques Barzun and by my wife, Stephanie,

and by my son Paul. Their patient and precise criticisms and

reminders were not marginal: they were I

essential.

am indebted also to Stephen Breediove,

research librarian

of the La Salle University Library, who, marvelously, procured for

me

books and

articles

from often

scure origins and places; and to Dr.

far distant

and very ob-

Helen Hayes,

struggle (again) with the typing of a clear copy

who had to

from an excep-

tionally confusing, scribbled-over manuscript.

1999-2001

x

ONE

At the End ofan Age "A

civilization disappears

with the kind of

man, the type of humanity, that has issued from Georges

it."

Bemanos

Convictions:

A personal envoi.

of "modern."

Age.

The evolution

Main features of the Modern

•

Contradictory dualities.

•

modern."

•

•

The need to

"Post-

•

rethink the current idea

of "Progress."

or a long time

West

I

have been convinced that

began about

that

end of an

are living near the five

than a preoccupation

hundred years ago. This

— which

1

up, in the briefest possible manner, I

knew,

"the East" I

at a

in the

entire age, the age

prejudice, in the literal sense of that dice, rather

we

its

is

word:

why

I

is

a

a preju-

must sum

evolution.

very early age, that "the West" was better than

— especially

better than Russia

had read Spengler: but

I

and Communism.

believed that the Anglo-American

victory over the Third Reich (and over Japan) was, at least in

some ways, a refutation of the categorical

i.

A

prejudice

is

a preoccupation

counter a

a (not necessarily is

common

German

advantageous) mental illumination;

a mental burden. (Tocqueville

opinion because

we

believe

it

somewhere: "To run is noble and

to be false,

virtuous; but to despise a prejudice merely because ourselves, for the

is

same

proposition

nearly as dangerous to morality as to reason.")

3

it is

inconvenient to

abandon a true

principle

At the End of an Age

How-

of the inevitable and imminent Decline of the West. ever

— Churchill's and Roosevelt's victory had to be shared with

Stalin.

The result,

a not yet wholly Sovietized

the age of twenty-two.

age of forty-five,

was crumbling

in I

I

And

to the United States, at

twenty-odd years

was convinced that the

fast.

The

result

was

entire

a short

Modern Age

book

in 1970.

make such

entitled

The

During the

fol-

about the end of an age appeared

different topics.

statements.

ways appeared

I

at the

later,

of the dozen volumes and other essays and

was writing, on very

to

Hungary

thirty years statements

many

my early decision to flee from

Modern Age, published

Passing of the

lowing

was

after 1945,

now

articles

Something drove

realize that

they almost

in paragraphs at or very near the

end of

me al-

my

various books.

But there character. I

a duality in every

human

life,

in every

human

am neither a cynic nor a categorical pessimist. In my

auto-history I

is

(it is

not really an autobiography) twelve years ago

wrote — and

goodness of

now see: again on its last page: "Because of the God I have had a happy unhappy life, which is

preferable to an

unhappy happy

during the decline of the West

not

at all that hopeless

followed

I

munism

(I

and

one."

wrote too: "So living

— and being much aware of — it

terrible."

During the ten

had seen that coming decades before) after

I

Com-

have had the

book of mine

and published and bought by many readers

is

years that

wrote more books; and since the collapse of

unexpected experience of seeing book lated

I

in

trans-

my native

country. But during these past ten years (not fin-de-siecle: fin

d'une ere)

— my conviction

hardened

further, into

an unques-

tioning belief not only that the entire age, and the civilization to

4

At the End of an Age

which

we

are living

Modern Age,

a familiar

have belonged, were passing but that

I

through — if not already beyond — its very end.

>: I

am

writing about the so-called

term which

is

nonetheless rather inaccurate. For one thing, the 2

Ancient-Medieval-Modern chronological division cable to countries

is

not appli-

and civilizations beyond the Western world.

It

was inaccurate when it first arose in the consciousness and in the usage of our ancestors, and it has become ever less accurate since.

The word "modern"

first

appeared in English about four hun-

dred years ago, circa 1 580. At first its sense was close to the original Latin modernus: "today's," "present." (Shakespeare occasionally its

used

it,

meaning "now common") Gradually the weight of

sense shifted a bit forward, including the

that

something different from

is,

"old."

teenth century, in English but also in

pean languages, another

allied

meaning of "new" —

By the end of the seven-

some other Western Euro-

meaning became current among

learned people, a concept which was one of the results of the

emergence of historical consciousness. This was the recognition that there have been three historic ages, the Ancient, the Middle,

and

now the Modern — whence

"medieval," having been in the

middle, between the Ancient and the Modern.

There came another thinking. This 2.

In England,

German literally

the

of consciousness

shift

— indeed,

was the sense that this modern age might

"modern

history" for a long time

Modern Age does not

last for

meant non-Ancient. In

carry that adjective:

it is

"New Age." This is also so in a few other languages.

S

of

"Neuzeit,"

At the End of&nAge a very long time

— indeed,

perhaps forever. This was seldom

expressed definitely, but there

today) in the

inability,

it

was:

it

existed (as

still

exists

exists

or perhaps in the unwillingness, of peo-

ple to contemplate that, like the other ages of

Modern Age too may

it still

or will

come

mankind, the

to an end. It existed (as

it

today) in the minds of those who, by and large,

equated the

Modern Age with an

contrasted with the

age of increasing Reason

—

Dark and /or Middle Ages, Ages of Faith.

One classic example of this (then not unreasonable) optimism may be found in a passage by Gibbon, who in a stately meandering 3 from his majestic theme, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote around 1776: "It may be safely presumed that no people, unless the face of nature their original barbarism.

.

.

.

is

changed, will relapse into

We may therefore acquiesce in the

pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased,

and

still

increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the

edge, and perhaps the virtue, of the

Gibbon died

five years after

human race." the French Revolution, in

He was not spared the

1794, the year of Terror.

knowl-

sight of barba-

rism arising in the midst of Western European civilization,

coming from the

inside.

He

did not

which we cannot blame him; but

at this

some thought to the words — that

is,

comment on point

that, for

we ought to give

to the meanings

— of bar-

barian/barbarism; primitive /primitivism; civilization /culture.

The meaning of the two

are products of the

ians" were,

3.

first

goes back to the Greeks; but the

Modern Age. For

last

the Greeks "barbar-

by and large, people who were not Greeks — that

Sheridan on Gibbon: "Luminous?

6

I

meant wluminous."

is,

At the End of tin Age outside and beyond their civilization, a lodgment in space.

But our usage of "barbarian" or "barbarism" mostly

also

is

— if

not

— directed to people and behavior and acts in our midst,

to people

who are "uncivilized"

(or, as

"uncultured") Such a meaning

is

.

Russians strangely put

it,

the result not only of experi-

ences but of the emerging historical consciousness at the begin-

ning of the Modern Age, of which an early example

the mean-

is

ing of "primitive." This word, appearing in English around 1540,

first

suggested people who

are, as yet,

"behind" us: that is,

behind, rather than beyond, behind us in time, rather than in space: in other words, "retarded." This

the then-changing

was another example of

meaning of Progress

(a

word

that a century

or so earlier had meant only advance in space, that forward). After 1600 the

word

"civilization"

antonym of barbarism and of primitivism out from rudeness, to educate to application of a

civility,"

is,

moving

had become the

("to civilize: to bring

OED

1601

new meaning of "progress"). Much

— again an later,

dur-

ing the second half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a

new meaning of "culture" appeared

(unlike "civil," the current

meaning of "culture" had been unknown to die Greeks and

Romans); being

"civilized"

and "cultured" began to overlap

and become sometimes confused. Certain thinkers (mostiy

Germans, and sert that

later especially

Culture

Civilization

is

American

intellectuals)

would

as-

of a higher order, more important than

— by now, a very questionable assertion.

During the nineteenth century the employment of "modern" was less current; but the optimistic notion of an increasing

and possibly everlasting Modern Age was not. What happened

was that the notion, and the

idea, of Progress

7

had become

At the End of an Age stronger than the notion, and the idea, of an

Age of Reason. Of

course, this occurred mainly because of the constantly increas-

ing inventions and productions of applied science.

We

should

recognize that therefore the appearance of the Evolutionary

theory of humankind was predictable around i860. Darwin was

not a very original thinker;

rather, a

man of his time. One of the

outcomes of his theory was of course the stretching of the origin of mankind back to hundreds of thousands (and by now, to

more than one

million) years into a "pre-historic" era. This

tendency, perhaps not quite consciously, accorded with a view stretching forward to a perennial, perhaps everlasting, future of

mankind; ern Age.

indirectiy to a perennial, perhaps everlasting,

Mod-

By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning

of the twentieth, the number of thinkers who, directiy or indirecdy,

began to question

creased.

kind of progressive optimism

in-

They had their forerunners such as the Neapolitan Vico

two centuries as

this

earlier;

but now there were different writers, such

Nietzsche or Valery or Spengler, who, in their different ways,

tried to

remind

the ultimate

their readers of the

fallibility

symptoms of decline and of

of Western civilization

— in the history of

which the Modern Age has of course been a part.

Finally,

during

the twentieth century, the appeal of the cult of Reason, of the applications of Progress,

to weaken, not only

more

people.

and the usage of "modern" itself began

among

Toward the end of the

modern" appeared, mostly art criticism.

among more and century the word "post-

intellectuals

in the abstract realms

(To a brief discussion of

and inaccurate designation

but

I

of literary and

this belated, confused,

must return toward the end of this

chapter.

8

At the End of an Age

Meanwhile there

exist significant

historical consciousness that has

achievements of great historians

symptoms of an evolving

no precedents. Because of the

we have acquired a fair amount

— and, perhaps more imand thought — during the

of knowledge of what had happened portant, of

how

people had lived

waning of the Ancient and of the Middle Ages. Near the end of the

Roman Empire

or during the waning of the Middle

Ages people knew that some unusual things were happening to them; many of them knew and understood the often worrisome difference of their condition

when compared with

their parents or other ancestors;

the lives of

but they seldom thought in

terms of the end of an entire age. Yet telling people that we seem to be living near or at the to

which they

end of an age

necessarily react with

understand

ticular evidence

of the

Roman

no longer something

incomprehension or even

unexpectedness. Ordinary people, with tory, instantly

is

little

when someone,

of moral rottenness, says,

knowledge of hisreferring to a par-

"It's like

the last days

Empire." This kind of surprisingly widespread

(though of course often inaccurate and vague) consciousness of history

is

a significant

symptom. However — every such kind of

general historical recognition ought to be sharpened by the

understanding of the ending of a very particular age, the one that

began about

five

hundred years ago.

>: So I must now turn from the evolution (and devolution) of the its

word "modern" to that of the Modern Age itself. What were

main

features?

9

At the End of an Age First

of ail,

reasons for

it

this:

was the European Age. There

are three sets of

geographical, etymological, historical. Until

about five hundred years ago the main theater of history was the Mediterranean, and the principal actors were the people along or near

its

shores, with

few important exceptions. With the

discovery of the Americas, of the East Indies, of the shape of the

globe

changed. The European age of world history

itself, all this

began. Yet the very adjective, and designation, of "European" was

something

entirely

new

at that time, five

hundred years ago.

The noun "Europe" had existed for a long time, although infrequendy

used. But "European," designating the inhabitant of a

was new.

certain continent,

invented and used

it

(It

was Pius

seems that among the

II,

Aeneas

first

who

Silvius Piccolomini, a

Renaissance Pope around 1470.) In any event: until about

five

hundred years ago "Christian" and "European" and "white" were almost synonymous, nearly coterminous. There were few inhabitants of the continent tians.

who

denied that they were Chris-

(Exceptions were the Turks in the Balkans, and a small

scattering of Jews.) side Europe,

There were very few Christians

living out-

and there were few peoples of the white race be-

yond it, while

there were few non-white inhabitants of Europe.

After 1492 "Europe" expanded in several ways. Entire newly

discovered continents (the Americas, Australia), as well as the

southern tip of Africa, became settled by whites, and Christianized.

The

lands conquered or colonized by the settlers soon

became parts of the empires of their mother countries; the posts and colonies of the European Powers appeared across the world. Finally,

European

institutions, customs, industries, laws, inven-

10

At the End ofan Age tions, buildings spread over

peoples

who were

most of the world, involving

not conquered by Europeans. But

two world wars of the twentieth peoples of Europe grievously selves,

after the

which the

century, during

wounded each

also

other and them-

almost all of this came to an end. There were no more new

settlements of Europeans (and of whites)

on other

continents.

(One exception is the state of Israel. ) To the contrary:

the Euro-

peans gave up their colonial empires, and their colonists left their

Asian or African homelands. (As late as 1 9 1 4 the entire continent of Africa, save for two

states, Liberia

and Abyssinia, belonged to

or was governed by a European colonial empire. Eighty years later there

was not a single European — or white-ruled — state on

the entire continent. ) Yet the Christian churches in Africa, Asia,

Oceania seem to have survived the reflux of whites,

many places. What also survived — indeed, globe

— was

it

at least in

spread athwart the

the emulation and the adaptation of institutions,

forms of

industries, customs,

art

and of expression, laws that

were originally European. But the European Age was over. It

the

was

over, at latest

by 1945

(if not

already by 191 7),

two Superpowers of the world (meeting

in the

when

middle of

conquered Europe) were the United States and Russia. There remained no European Power comparable to them, not even Britain. This brings

up

a terminological question.

Was

(is)

the

United States European? Yes and no. Yes: in the sense that origins

and laws and

institutions

its

— and for about a century the

majority of its inhabitants

— were of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic origin.

No:

is

since

pean.

And

its

population

now becoming

the United States, too,

is

affected

of the institutions and the ideas of the

11

less

and

less

Euro-

by the crumbling

Modern Age

that

had

At the End of an Age produced

more so than

it

at its

beginning. Indeed, probably

many of the

states

and peoples of Europe. The composition of

the American people has been changing rapidly and drastically,

whence

may

foreseeable that sooner or later whites in America

it is

be a minority. Even more important

the condition that

is

the United States of America was a product of the

born

in the

ideas

and

middle of

it

— indeed,

institutions having

at its

high point

would

fill

an enormous book. Here

better, to suggest

The

I

must

Modern Age

try to

— some of them.

progressive spreading of democracy has

history of mankind, certainly during the past

but in

its

Enlightenment.

the evidences of the ending of the

list

— with

been largely (though not com-

pletely) the results of the eighteenth century

To

Modern Age,

many ways throughout

sum up — or, marked the

two hundred years

Modern Age.

the entire

This

progress was usually gradual, at times revolutionary, and not

always clearly visible this

on

democratic age will

really

means

is

consideration.

another

the surface of world events. last

no one can

tell.

difficult question.

How long

What "democracy"

But there

is

a larger

We are living through one of the greatest changes

in the entire history of mankind, because until relatively recentiy

history

was

norities, it is

largely

(though never exclusively) "made" by mi-

while increasingly it is "made" by majorities. (In reality

not so

much made by majorities

majorities.)

At any

rate, this

has

as it is

made in the name of

become

the age of popular

sovereignty (at least for a while) History has .

12

moved from

the

At the End of an Age aristocratic to the

during the

democratic era

— a passage occurring mostly

Modern Age, and one

great accepted (Western)

that

may

transcend even the

scheme of Ancient and Middle and

Modern times. This spread of democracy was the vision of Alexis de Tocqueville; in the

it is

most

present throughout his writings,

clearly

second volume of Democracy in America, where his very

method of description was

to summarily juxtapose and contrast

how society,

and even more, mores and manners,

formed

politics, arts,

differently in aristocratic ages before the developing

democratic times. historically

more

And within

this very large vision there

limited one: Tocqueville's recognition,

than a century ago, that this had been and process: with aristocracy declining

still

was

and democracy

existence of some kind of aristocratic order

was

still

was

a

more

a gradual rising, the

necessary to

maintain some of the freedoms of otherwise increasingly democratic societies.

(That was the main reason for his

— of course

not unlimited — respect for Victorian England, or even his appreciation of American lawyers

whom he once described as

American aristocracy of sorts. ) Nearly 175 years of the

Modern Age, much of this

is

later, at

past. Still the

the

an

end

Modern Age

was marked by the coexistence of aristocracy and democracy,

something which has

now come to an end.

"Aristocracy" ought not to be categorically defined as

the rule of kings and /or noblemen. "Democracy" also

something more than the

rule of "the people,"

means

more, indeed,

than mere popular sovereignty. But especially in Europe, be-

tween the highest and the lowest

classes (or

and the ruled) there was another, rather

T3

between the

rulers

particular, class in the

At the End of an Age middle: the so-called bourgeois class or classes, whose origins

and

first

go back well beyond the beginning of the

influences

Modern Age and whose its

achievements. This

the origins or the

is

rise

marked much of it, together with

not the place to discourse upon either

meaning of the words "bourgeois" and "bour-

geoisie," except that

perhaps in most European languages they

and importance of cities. Nor

were linked to the

rise

place to expatiate

upon

this the

the often obscured difference between

"bourgeois" and "middle- class." serve that

is

It

should be

sufficient to

ob-

by the end of the twentieth century the very term

"middle- class" had lost

much

(if not all)

of its meaning because

of its tremendous inflationary growth, perhaps especially in the

United States but also in other nations where class,

whether

exist.

Like "modern," "middle- class" 4

no longer

is

a reasonably

At the same time, "bourgeois" remains,

retrospect, a historical reality.

countries,

governing upper

in politics or in society, has practically ceased to

accurate category.

especially in

a

The

in

existence of a bourgeoisie,

Western Europe, and in the English-speaking

was not only a sociological phenomenon (or a simple

one: since the bourgeois emulated and intermingled with the

remaining aristocracies in

many ways)

.

It

nizable forms of behavior and of ideas.

was marked by recog-

We

ought to honor

its

achievements — not only constitutional government and its at-

tempts to balance equality with

4 At the other end of the social the category of a "working-class" largely ceased to exist.

What

but the

fact that

most of

United States, from "middle- class" has also

scale, especially in the

as distinct

has not ceased to exist

is

a proletariat of

non-working one. (As Jesus said: "The poor you have always with you") And we now have the New Poor.

sorts will

— often

liberty,

a largely

14

At the End of an Age the great minds and the greatest artistic creations of the past five

hundred years were the products of people of bourgeois origins and of bourgeois

status.

Which is why it is

in

my opinion,

its

two centuries before 19 14)

reasonable to give the

and,

at least possible

Modern Age

(or at least

a telling qualifier or adjective: the

Bourgeois Age.

The Bourgeois Age was Money;

the

Age of

the

Age of

Industry; the

Age of

the State; the

Age of

the Cities; the

Age

of Privacy; the Age of the Family; the Age of Schooling; the

Age of

the Book; the

Age of Representation;

the

Age of

Sci-

ence; and the age of an evolving historical consciousness. Ex-

cept for the last two, declining

all

of these primacies are

now

fading and

fast.

The modern

state

was

a product of the

Modern Age.

Its es-

tablishment occurred together with the ideal of civilization: a progress from barbarism. It was a response to, or a result of, the

warfare of diverse aristocracies during the fifteenth century, and

of the even more injurious religious wars of the sixteenth. The result

was the strong,

centralized,

and sovereign state

in

most of

Western Europe and England, established by absolute or nearabsolute monarchs

bourgeois royal

whose

classes, since it

rule

was

especially appreciated

provided for their

and centralized absolutism was,

nings, an anti-aristocratic,

even a democratic

and

relative safety.

— to

Thus

its

begin-

some

extent

especially in

anti-feudal

— phenomenon.

by the

Gradually the democratic

element, in this case the bourgeoisie, turned against royal as

At the End of an Age well as aristocratic tury, in

power — in England

in the seventeenth cen-

France in the second half of the eighteenth. Mean-

while—as Tocqueville was the

to point out

first

— the

and the authority of the sovereign and centralized growing, irrespective of whether

its

power

state

kept

sovereignty was repre-

sented by a monarch or by a bourgeois government.

And due to

increasing democracy, in the twentieth century the authority of

the state

grew

further, intending to ensure the material welfare

of most of its inhabitants. The existence of "totalitarian" dictatorships in the twentieth century obscured this issue. Their op-

ponents jusdy feared the limidess and often brutal power of the Total State. Yet Hitier and Mussolini were

unopposed by the

great majority of their subjects: in sum, they were represen-

of popular sovereignty. Hider himself said that the

tatives

was an outdated concept: he was the leader of Volky which, in his words,

had

its

state

a people, of a

primacy over the

State.

By the

second half of the twentieth century, the near-universal principle of

government was

that of popular sovereignty rather than

that of the state; indeed, the

and respect for of this

is

it,

Russia,

began to

where

power and authority of the

decline.

The most evident example

after the fall

of the Soviet Union the

problem was no longer the overwhelming power of the but, to the contrary,

its

state,

state

weakness. Elsewhere, too, the break-up

of entire states has begun, of which the "privatization" of some of

its

former functions and

services,

or the formation of such

supra-national institutions as the European Union, are but su-

perficial—and perhaps even transitory— appearances, together

with the evident lessening of the authority of the

state.

Popular

resentment against "government" merely masks the essence of

16

At the End of an Age

this

phenomenon from which

exempt.

An example

of this

is

the United States

not

at all

the increase of criminality,

some

of the symptoms of which suggest a

Another more

telling

example

is

new

is

kind of feudalism.

that while the opponents of

"big government" are the very people

who

penditure and establishment of "defense" (as

support every exif the

armed forces

were not part of "government"), successive administrations of the United States have been both unable and unwilling to protect the very frontiers

of the American

millions of illegal migrants are pouring

Money,

in

state,

through which

in.

one form or another, has always

existed;

and

money has its history, like everything else; and the Modern Age has been the age of its

money— increasingly so,

perhaps reaching

peak around 1900. During the Middle Ages there were some

money could not buy; but by 1900 there was hardly any material thing that money could not buy, while paper money was exchangeable for its equivalent in

material assets, often land, that

silver

or gold. But during the twentieth century the value of

money diminished

One symptom (and

fast.

cause) of this was

inflation.

When there is more and more of something,

becomes

less

from

and

inflation.

less;

and democracy

Therefore the cyclical

is

rise

its

value

probably inseparable

and

fall

in the value

of

money has largely ceased to exist. That the inflation of words led to the inflation of money

is

an important phenomenon, because

the value of every material thing

economists have entirely

at

long

last

is

not only conditioned

become constrained

determined by what people think

in words.

general,

The

and

inflation of

historically

money went

it is;

(

as a

few

to admit) but

and people think

apace with the

rise

of a

unprecedented, prosperity; but this

17

At the End of an Age prosperity had the latter

little

to

do with what

is still

called "capitalism,"

meaning the preservation and the husbanding of

money, rather than the spending of it. By the end of the twentieth century the inflation

of stocks and of other financial instru-

ments became even more rapid than the the

inflation of money

— at

bottom of which phenomenon another development exists,

which

is

the increasingly abstract character of

on

part, to the increasing reliance

and on

tions

money— due,

in

entirely electronic transac-

their records. Credit cards are but a superficial,

tiiough astonishingly widespread, example of this development in a

world where income

profits

What

— that

is,

when

is,

actual

quick

more

owner-

of course, but

much more profound development:

increasing intrusion of

time

money

capital,

potentiality

more than

creditability

has been happening with

part and parcel of a

a

more important than

more than accumulation of assets, and

than actuality ship.

is

mind

the

into matter. That this happens at

philosophies of materialism are

still

predomi-

mental confusion of our times. In any

nant only

reflects the

event, the

end of the Modern Age

is

also the

end of the Age of

Money — at least as our ancestors used to know it. The Modern Age was, by and in the

large,

numbers of people; and by an

of goods and of their

increase

increase of the production

This was of course the result of

availability.

progress in industry and in agriculture. 5

5.

marked by an

We now live

in a

me-

And of course of trade. Trade was what had led to another characteristic

of the

Modern Age,

to the

bustion engine changed

all

predominance of sea power. The of that; during World

decisive importance of land

power

War II,

internal

returned, at least in the

theater of war.

18

com-

for example, the

European

At the End of an Age chanical age; but

was remarkably

we must

recognize that the

short-lived. It

was

less

Age of Industry

than 130 years ago (in

1874) that the majority of people in England were employed in industrial

work, not in agricultural production. The people of

by 1956 the major-

the United States followed this pattern. But ity

of the American population were no longer engaged in any

kind of material production, either agricultural or industrial.

They were employed

in administration

proportion has grown states

of the world.

has, in reality,

(It

fast ever since,

may be

and

and

in services. This

in

all

"advanced"

said that the age of

democracy

devolved into the age of bureaucracy: but not

only in "government"; also in every kind of so-called "private" institution.

)

Of course industry, world-wide, has now been able

to produce

more and more goods (with varying

durability),

employing fewer and fewer people

qualities

in their

of

mass

production. Consider, too, that advertisement and transportation of these goods

now cost more

(and involve more people)

than their production; or that there are entire countries (and

some

states

of the American Union) whose main "industry"

the attraction and

management of tourists.

the production of consumption has

than the production of goods.

6

It

may

is

be said that

become more important

While

in the past a respected

who was successful in creating production, now he is someone who creates consumption. What is industrialist

was someone

7

Evelyn Waugh: "In a democracy men do not seek authority so that they may impose a policy. They seek a policy so that they may impose authority." 6.

7.

Perhaps this corresponds to the evolution (or devolution) of republican

democracy. The word "democracy" did not appear either in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution of the United States.

19

How-

At the End of an Age even more

raw— use

telling

is

that the perception of

and the — tempo-

of goods has often become more important than

their actual possession.

The Modern Age was the age of the town. The word "bourgeois"

is

connected to the word for "city in about every Euro55

pean language (whence the derivation of the word "citizen

55

—

inaccurately, since the latter categorizes the relationship of an

individual not to a city but to a state). Bourgeois civilization

was

largely,

though not

exclusively, urban.

The

adjectives "ur-

ban and "urbane acquired added meanings during the Mod55

55

ern Age. After that the great

took

cities

place.

of European and American

rise

By 1850 London and

Paris

million inhabitants each; by 1900 there were

Europe and three result left

in the

United

States.

had more than one

more such cities

This was in part the

men and women and new work (though

of industrialism, whereby millions of

the countryside to find a

new

life

often a dreadfully dark and miserable one) in the

was more than

there

in

the amenities of city

that: the civilization life

attracted

cities.

But

and the culture and

men and women

of

many

kinds. After 1950 the decline of the cities set in. Nearly every

European and American

great

Within

a

city

began to lose population.

few decades three dozen or more

and South America surpassed them in

rica,

The once urbane populations had begun cities,

cities in Asia,

size

to

Af-

and in numbers.

move out of

the

into the suburbs. These, originally planned to function as

had become popularity contests. This was not what it was. But then, less than one hundred years later there came a much more lamentable phase: the ever,

by 1828

many

elections

of the Founders wished to see, but there

devolution ofpopularity

contests into publicity contests.

20

;.

At the End of an Age bridges between city and country living, began to spread and

devour both

and countryside. One reason

city

for this

was the

ubiquity of the personal automobile. Another was the growth

of new populations, to

whom the civilized proximities

cultural offerings of cities

and the

meant little or nothing. By the end of

the twentieth century the association of urbanity with citythe presence of an urbane middle-class

living disappeared:

within the

cities lost its

influence

The Modern Age discovered

and importance. the virtues

of privacy. Life in the Middle Ages

— both

— and pleasures —

in

and outside the

dwellings of people — was public, in more than one way. Privacy

was not an

ideal,

it

was not cherished. Soon

Modern Age

of the

material sign of this

"apartment" (the

there

came

after the

a change.

beginning

The most evident

was the new ideal of the bourgeois house or

latter

word

is

telling: it

meant the separation

of working and public places apart from private chambers,

whether geois )

.

in the palaces

of kings or in the houses of the bour-

The very word "home" acquired a new meaning. Among

other things, the respect for privacy distinguished a civilized society

from barbarians or primitive people. This recognition of

inferiority affected

our very language (and our very thinking)

the increasing recognition of imagination (arising side) rather than of "inspiration" (occurring

Thereafter the increasing emphasis

on

from the

in-

from the outside)

political

and

legal rights

of the "individual" seemed to affirm the rights to privacy, at least

But the idea of the private — and thereby autono— mous "individual" was a fiction. In a mass democratic society implicitiy.

(perhaps especially in the United States) the desire for privacy

was much weaker than the

desire for respectability, usually

21

At the End of an Age within a particular community.

Compared with

the wish for

public recognition, the cultivation of private behavior, of private

appearances, of private opinions remained confused, occasional,

and

feeble.

The phrase "peer

pressure," lately applied to other-

wise undisciplined juveniles, has been extant

beyond

their youth: for the

among people well

weakness of the

ideal

of privacy

is

almost always a sign of insufficient maturity.

The modern ground with the

cult

of privacy had,

cult of

what

is still

at first sight, a

called "individualism" (a

questionable term) but at closer sight this connection ;

ing. Privacy

common is

deceiv-

had more to do with the developing bourgeois

cult

of the family. During the Middle Ages children were sent out to

work, often for others. During the early Modern Age children returned to the family (or,

more

accurately, they

within the family for a longer time). There were tions to this, especially

among

were kept

many

certain aristocracies,

excep-

where

chil-

dren were often extruded from their families, a custom continuing into the eighteenth century. But the tendency to protect and

educate children (note the original meaning of "educate": bring up, guide forth) was another

new

bourgeois habit, eventually

spreading up and down, to the nobility as well as to the working classes.

Children were no longer treated

as little adults

or carica-

tures of adults; there arose, instead, the bourgeois cult of the

child

— a cult inseparable from the cult of the home, of coziness,

of interiority, of privacy.

As the nineteenth century progressed, these bourgeois ideals

concerning the protection and the education of children

were adopted by various governments. More important: so as family life

went, toward the end of that century for the

22

far

first

At the End of an Age

longer had to

work

women,

including mothers,

no

— because

of

employment of their husbands.

A

time large numbers of married

in the fields or in factories

the wages and the industrial

working man could afford an apartment or small house for his family,

a cottage or

where his wife would keep house and

govern her children; she no longer needed to to

work elsewhere during

Age,

this

development was

century came vorce,

many

even a

rise at

dawn to go

the day. Like the entire Industrial short-lived.

During the twentieth

changes, including the availability of di-

and of abortion. Yet on many

levels, these

were conse-

quences rather than causes. As happens before or near the end of a great age, the mutations of institutions, societies, mores,

and manners involved the very of die family to fade. social

woman,

relations of the sexes.

The

wife and mother and homemaker, began

Many women,

by certain

restrained for a long time

customs and habits, became eager to prove their

in various kinds of especially in the

employment:

life

of a

a

woman

in the so-called "marketplace"

not the result of financial necessity but, impulse: the

rather,

housewife — especially

proved to be lonely and boring.

abilities

a justifiable aspiration. Yet

United States — the desire of

employed somewhere

ideal

Women

of a

to be

was often

new kind of

in the suburbs

thought

—

—

(or, rather,

convinced themselves) that they were reacting against the ageold and often senseless categories and assertions of male authority;

yet their dissatisfaction often arose not because of the op-

pressive strength but because of the weakness of males. rising tide liberties, its

The

of divorces and abortions, the acceptance of sexual

including pre-marital (and at times post-marital) hab-

of frequent copulation and other forms of cohabitation, the

23

At the End of an Age increasing

numbers of unmarried

the dropping birth rate clear"

family— were,

women

and

single mothers,

— thus the decline of the so-called "nu-

especially after 1955, grave

gesting vast social changes.

They included

symptoms sug-

the perhaps seldom

wholly conscious, but more and more evident, tendency of

many young women to desire any kind of male companionship, even of a strong and brutal kind, self-respect.

of youth

ever,

it is

at the cost

of their

of women had risen, while the respect for them

had declined. Some of during the

need be

In sum, the professional recognition as well as the

legal protection

cult

if

— which

last

not

this

was due to the twentieth-century

was

especially

widespread in America

phase of its urban and bourgeois period.

difficult to see that

lurks the fear of death

How-

beneath the cult of youth there

and even the

fear

of growing up: the fear

of having to assume the responsibilities of maturity. The creasing "freedoms" granted to

century were, in

some ways,

Modern Age, the treatment

young people

in-

in the twentieth

a return to the practice before the

(or non-treatment) of children as

they were smaller versions of adults. nal sense of that word) of children

The education

if

(in the origi-

toward maturity was another

bourgeois ideal fading away.

The age of the

institutional schooling

Modern Age. There were

was another feature of

universities in the

Middle Ages

but few (or no) schools of general learning. By the seventeenth century schooling became extended to younger and younger ages, eventually including children of the poor.

By

the nine-

teenth century the ideal of general and public education, increasingly involving the responsibility of governments, sacrosanct.

Still,

became

much of the training and the proper education

24

;

At the End of an Age of children remained the responsibility of parents in the home.

During the twentieth century this changed. Like so many other things, the role of the schools

became

inflated

and extended,

diminishing the earlier responsibilities of parents. In the United States the principal

became custodial

and

practical function of the schools often

(especially

away from home), though ter

i960

at least

States spent

schools, levels

when both

this

parents were working

was seldom acknowledged. Af-

one-fourth of the population of the United

more than one-fourth of

their entire lifetime in

from ages two to twenty-two. As on so many other

and ways of mass democracy,

inflation

had

set in,

dimin-

ishing drastically the content

and the quality of learning: more

and more young people,

twenty years in schools, could not

read or write without

after

difficulty.

Schools were overcrowded,

in-

cluding colleges and universities. In this increasingly bureaucratized

world

little

more than

the possession of various diplo-

mas mattered. Since admission

to certain schools

the consequently almost automatic acquisition

— rather than of degrees —

depended on increasingly competitive examinations, the word "meritocracy" was coined, meaning that the to be acquired in society

gree and

ing.

As

in so

reality the

many

and positions

depended on the category of the de-

on the category of the

one graduated. In

rise

college or university

wherefrom

term "meritocracy" was mislead-

other spheres of

life,

the rules that gov-

erned the practices and functions of schools and universities

were bureaucratic rather than meritocratic.

It is

bureaucracy,

not meritocracy, that categorizes the employment of people by their

academic degrees. The number and the variation of de-

grees awarded by higher institutions

2s

grew to

a fantastic,

and

At the End of an Age nonsensical, extent. Besides being custodial, the purpose of in-

was

stitutional education

now

the granting of degrees to pro-

vide instant employment.

The cline

inflation of "education"

had much to do with the de-

of reading (and of its declining requirement in the curric-

ula of the schools). This

Modern Age, which was

was another sign of the end of the also the

Age of the Book. The

inven-

tion of the printing of books coincided with the beginning of the its

Modern Age;

it

was both consequence and cause of many of

achievements. At

first it

was the

availability

of books, rather

than of schools, that led to an increase of readers

— until, by the

men and women who could not read beminority among the populations of the Western

nineteenth century,

came

a small

world.

Around

the same time the flood of reading matter, in-

cluding newspapers, rose even higher than the ever-rising flood

of books: with the

rise

of universal literacy (due to the exten-

sion of schooling) there was readers to be tapped.

avoidably reduced

hand.

its

now

But the

quality;

a

new

reservoir of potential

inflation of printed matter un-

and there were other influences

The reproduction of more and more

papers, magazines,

at

pictures in news-

and books; the advent of moving pictures

— again, — not unlike the Middle Ages the routine imagination of large and,

finally,

of television led to a condition in which

masses of people became pictorial rather than verbal. Together

with the extent of their readership, the influence of books was receding

— together, too, with the decline of people's attention

span, or with their capacity to concentrate, indeed, to listen.

With the increasing propagation of "information" and of "communication" the habits of reading further declined.

26

At the End of an Age

I

now come to the most difficult of these necessarily gener-

alized

and inaccurate summaries of devolution: that of

which

in the

Modern Age was

from the

inseparable

only of beauty but of representation.

Middle Ages was symbolic, and

Much

of the

course discovered humanism, the beauty of the

emulation of Greek and mesis," or in another

Roman

art

not

of the

The Renaissance of

idealized.

and the complexity of human nature; and

ideals

art,

it

human

body,

had begun with an

which was marked by "mi-

art

word: "re-presentation."

A deep

shift in

consciousness at the end of the eighteenth century then affected art, first

of

all

poetry and painting. This was the conscious rec-

ognition of imagination, beyond the older idea of inspiration (an early recognition of the inseparability of the observer from

what he observes). During the nineteenth century and architecture were increasingly influenced, inspired and formed, by historicity.

artist's

that

is,

not altogether

Meanwhile realism and nat-

uralism in poetry and painting were the

if

literature

more and more

affected

by

comprehension of the limitations of "objectivity" —

of the entire separation of the observer (and of course of

the artist) from his subject. "Impressionism," thus,

was no more

the mere result of the invention of photography than impressionist

music was the

result

of the invention of the phonograph.

After the early nineteenth century the artist was

no longer

seen as an artisan, meaning a craftsman, but rather as a person

of unusual, indeed, superior century

— even

was oddly, and

sensitivity.

By

before the catastrophe of belatedly, called

"modern

the early twentieth

World War art"

meant

I

— what

a drastic

and brutal departure from the traditions and the achievements of the

Modern Age. This

is

no

place to expatiate upon, or even

27

At the End of an Age to illustrate, this reactionary argument; instead

the

words of the English poet

only

cite

Philip Larkin: "It seems to

me

I shall

undeniable that up to this century literature used language in the

way we

use

all

normal vision

sees,

it,

painting represented what anyone with

and music was an

affair

of nice noises rather

than nasty ones. The innovation of 'modernism' in the

of doing the opposite.

sisted rian.

You have

I

arts

con-

know why, I'm not a histo-

don't

to distinguish between things that

seemed odd

when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen or Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and

seem crazy now, "Crazy"

like

— and ugly:

sentation was also

Finnegans Wake and Pound and Picasso." because the ending of the ideals of re-pre-

marked by an increasing tendency

in letters,

buildings, music, painting, poetry, to ugliness.

>: This Jeremiad has

them

its

One of of the Mod-

conditions, and limitations.

involves the distinction between the passing

Of course almost all of the symptoms of the ending of the Modern (or European; or Bour-

ern Age and the Decline of the West.

geois)

Age have been most evident within the so-called Western

world. But because of the continued influence of Western habits

and institutions and practices

all

over the globe, not a few differ-

ences between the customs of the Western and the non-Western

world ing.

are

now sometimes hardly more

than differences in tim-

The contrast between a bloodless West and the power of the

more primitive peoples of the globe (not to speak of Spengler's Europe /Russia

antithesis)

may

28

or

may not

be deepening.

We

At the End of an Age are of course only at the beginning of the first "global" civiliza-

tion—and only on

certain transitory

and

superficial levels. In

any event: the near future, the beginning of an age that succeed the

will

Modern Age, shows many signs of spreading wider

than the Western world.

Another limitation logical limitation of

to

some

life

is

even more evident. This

is

a chrono-

my Jeremiad, which I must defend,

extent. In almost

all

at least

of the abovementioned spheres of

the rapid dissolution and the malfunctioning of the institu-

tions

and

ideals

of the

Modern Age

gathered speed during the

twentieth century, and especially during

its

second

half. Is this

not too shortsighted a view? Their sources and beginnings and

symptoms had appeared earlier; but then those were not what I

am

writing about.

many

It is

hardly arguable that in

this, as also in

other respects, the twentieth century was a transitional

century

(

as

was

about 1450 to

a century at the

end of the Middle Ages, from

1550) — in every sense, the twentieth was also a

short century, lasting from i9i4to 1989, seventy- five years. After that, the collapse

pire) did

of Communism (and of the Russian

not lead to a conservative reaction: the symptoms of

dissolution continued

during the

(no the

Em-

last

— indeed, many of them gathered speed

decade of the chronological twentieth century

fin-de-siecle then).

No,

pendulum never swings

history

back.

is

not a mechanical clock:

But human events and minds

change, though slowly; something different, something

new

is

beginning.

A third

limitation consists in the condition that the muta-

tion of characteristics and institutions and habits

(though not

at

all

exclusively) evident in the

29

is

especially

United States and

At the End of an Age in the industrially or technically

most "advanced" countries of

the Western world. This should not be surprising: after

American

historical

handicap (as well

as the

the

all,

once American

advantage) was due to the condition that the institutions of the

United States were born in the century

ple of the

in the very

middle of the Modern Age,

of the so-called Enlightenment, whereby the peo-

United States have been less immune to die shortcom-

ings of modernity than other peoples

make-up

carries

some

living

whose mental and physical

memories of older epochs, of an

older and different past. 8 After 1989 an unprecedented situation arose: the

United States was the only Superpower

Does

connote the Apogee of the Modern Age (the age that

this

had given

United States of America) Not at all.

birth to the

>

And then there is Christianity. tying. Yet

something

in the world.

like this

Its

churches have been emp-

has happened before, and often.

(One example: perhaps never

in the

Holy See was

of prestige and power

a

Pope

as bereft

was two hundred years ago, ing?

I

two thousand

years of the as Pius

VI

in 1799.) Is Christianity disappear-

do not think so.

X And now:

the Contra- Jeremiad.

achievements of the

A

list

of the enduring

Modern Age. Enduring; and

lasting;

and

But consider, too, the reciprocal influences of institutions and character. as much, if not more, than the reverse: and die character of most of the American people two hundred years ago was still predominandy Anglo-Celtic, that 8.

Contrary to accepted views, character influences institutions

is,

at least to

some extent, pre-Enlightenment.

30

)

At the End of an Age matters

still

in progress.

be more precise:

We are healthier than ever before.

less affected

by pain and by contagious

(To

illness.

become minimal. Our life-span has become

Infant mortality has

longer and longer. (Again, most of this progress had taken place in the past 130 years.)

Large masses of people are

now

able to

conditions of comfort available only to the richest or

live in

most powerful of our great-grandparents. Large masses of people drive their travel to

automobiles. Large masses can afford to

faraway continents and places in a matter of hours,

with enough ceased to

own

money

exist.

to spend. Institutional slavery has largely

Almost every state proclaims

itself a

democracy,

minimum of welfare to all of its inhabibeen propelled to the moon and back; they

attempting to provide a tants.

Men

have

have landed there twice.

We

cannot crank our

that there

were (and

dences of decay ideal period at fields

of life and

not. Yes,

it

all

are)

lives

backward.

We

must

also

know

no Golden Ages of history. The

evi-

around us do not mean that there was any

any time during the Modern Age. In certain art

and thought: perhaps. In others:

would be

pleasant to

meet Rembrandt or Bach or

Montesquieu or Washington — or perhaps even to age of

Edward VII: but only with

posal,

and in

plenty of

at least near-perfect health.

a then- extant reality

certainly

money

Such

live in

the

our

dis-

at

are illusions

of pain and discomfort and

amid

illness

and

other, less tangible but surely prevalent disillusionments.

Moreover, history and tinuity

life

consist of the coexistence of con-

and change. Nothing vanishes

entirely.

The

institutions,

the standards, the customs, the habits, the mental inclinations

of the

Modern Age

still

exist

around

31

us.

So does the

respect for

At the End of an Age

many of its more,

creative achievements

(One of them

artistic.

is

— political,

social, but,

even

polyphonic music, which was a

unique European creation sometime during the beginning of the era. )

The

of nostalgia

respect for older things has

now acquired

a tinge

— almost certainly part and parcel of the uneasiness

with "Progress." During the past forty years the meanings of the adjectives "old"

and "old-fashioned" — especially

in the

United

States — have changed from "antiquated" or "outdated" to sug-

gest

some

This has

things that are reliable, solid, enduring, desirable.

little

to

do with "conservatism" or

"traditionalism."

"Conservatives," especially in the United States, are

most strident proponents of "Progress";

some of the

their views of the pres-

ent and the future are not merely shortsighted but laden with a

bellowing optimism that

is

imbecile rather than naive.

Nor

is

the respect for old things simply traditionalist, since a blind

obedience to traditional customs marks the mentality and the

most primitive peoples of mankind.

habits of the

In any event, there

is

every reason to believe that the respect

for (and even the occasional emulation

some of

the creations of the

ments in art) not already

will continue

at

they will recognize

a sigh,

five

achieve(if it is

look back and respect

— indeed, that

or

mankind, the other having

Greece and Rome. But here

a significant one.

happened was

its

— the past five hundred years as one of the

"classical" one,

ence—and

will

but no matter)

greatest eras in the history of

been the

(surely

and grow. The time will come

hand) when people

and admire (perhaps with

two

Modern Age

and adaptation of)

six

The

last

is

a differ-

time something

like this

hundred years ago, involving but

32

a

At the End of an Age small minority of people,

At

that time

men began

which

is

not what

to look back at the achievements

the letters and the art of Greece and

and emulating them.

happening now.

is

(All art begins

the Renaissance, a re-birth: the

Rome,

idealizing them,

with emulation. ) That was

word

is

telling. It

beginning of modern historical consciousness

was imperfect and incomplete, because of

marked the

— although that

its

almost unre-

of the Classical Age, of the ancients.

stricted idealization

and

admirers dismissed the entire Middle Ages, their

still

Its

then pres-

ent and their recent past (even though the idea and the term

"Middle Ages" did not yet

from two ages away,

Something is

now

is:

past but

and which

And

else

this

They took

farther back. This

is

their inspiration

not happening now.

our respect and admiration for the age that

which existed immediately before our times

many ways is still close to us and extant within us. a symptom of the evolution of our historical con-

in

is

sciousness

exist).

which may be acquiring novel forms and which

is

not weakening.

There are other

results

of this coexistence of continuity and

change — unplanned and unforeseen ones. They are the unexpected consequences of changes in the nature of institutions

and

in that

of accepted ideas

— wherein we may detect the, often

paradoxical, appearances of dualities.

Again fallibility

it

who

wrote about the inevitable

institutions:

when people tend to stretch

was Tocqueville

of all

human

33

At the End of an Age or carry their original and particular features to extremes, these

become the very opposites of their original Here

are a

intentions.

few examples.

At the end of the Modern Age constitutions and courts have extended lawfulness to private

acts

of

(sometimes to the extent of obscenity) —at

when fewer and fewer people

kinds

all

a

time

appreciate or are able to

cultivate privacy.

Large masses of people are able to acquire residences they legally

them

"own" — when,

in reality, they merely rent

(since they will almost never

pay for them

in full;

nor do they expect to stay in them for more than years).

Permanence of residence, which

civilization,

is

no longer an

cluding taxation,

The

ideal.

is

one

a

few

basis

Many conditions,

of in-

work against it.

egalitarian notion of democracy,

meaning the

les-

sening of class differences, exists at the same time that

many people in

are uncomfortable with a classless society

which they

are unable to identify themselves

which they depend on

paltry

and temporary

and

in

associa-

tions.

Legal, or even social, distinctions of race are diminishing,

and the

rights

and

privileges of formerly restricted

races are institutionalized

and extended — at the same

time that the fear and hostility of races

among

people

may be growing.

We have already seen that the sums spent on education have become enormous, and that the time young peo-

34

At the End of an Age

pie

spend in school amounts to twenty or more years —

same time

at the

that their

deficient, together

knowledge of the world

with their

is

read and write

ability to

and to express themselves well. "Liberals,"

who,

earlier in the

Modern Age, had

advo-

cated limiting the powers of the state, have throughout the twentieth century advocated tion in

many

many fields,

government interven-

including a guarantee to welfare of

kinds. "Conservatives,"

who had

once stood for

become

chief advocates

the defense of traditions, have

of technology and of militarization and even of populism,

all

in the

name of "Progress."

The power and function of government, tions

and regulations

in

more and more

its

interven-

spheres of life,

have grown — at the same time that the selective indignation of people about such extensions of "govern-

ment" goes apace with the decline of the authority and respect for the state.

The

progressive applications of medicine and surgery

and therapy

are astounding

more and more people

are

greatest,

the same time that

dependent on medicine and

on medications throughout one of the

— at

their adult lives.

Here

and perhaps deepest, changes

ward the end of the Modern Age. In the

past

is

to-

most

human illnesses came from the outside: from injuries or infections of many kinds. By the twentieth century most illnesses came from the inside of the human being. We may know their pathogenesis (their symptoms and their

development) but seldom their etiology (their

3S

At the End of an Age origin). This least to

some

means

that

many

of our ailments

extent, psychosomatic (just as

perceptions are, at least to

all

are, at

of our

some extent, extrasensory)

—

another illustration of the increasing intrusion of mind into matter.

The long-awaited equality of women has been legalized and established and,

same time

in

many ways, guaranteed — at the

that the relations, including the

most

inti-

women have become brutalized. Many women have

mate ones, between men and complicated and even

gained their "independence"

at the cost

of increasing

loneliness.

The incredible of the

access to "information," again at the

Modern Age,

end

obscures the condition that, at the

same time, much of that "information"

is

meaningless;

and when many of the purveyors of "information" make it

dependent or, worse, subordinate to "entertainment."

The

ability

of great masses to see and

visit distant

parts of the globe has increased exponentially, not only

through

pictorial

and other "communications" but by

the increasing and cheapening opportunities of travel at the

same time

other peoples

that the

is less

—

knowledge of people about

substantial

and more

superficial

than before.

The

fantastic

development of communications

end of the Modern Age makes

it

at the

possible for almost

everyone to see or speak to people across the world in an instant

— at the same time that real communications,

meaning the

talking

and

listening of people to each

36

At the End of an Age other, including parents

wives, even lovers, has

and

children,

husbands and

become rarer and rarer — in sum:

when personal communications are breaking down. At the end of the Modern Age the position and the power of the United perpower through at the

in the world,

much

is

unique; the only Su-

having achieved such a status

goodwill and of course good fortune

same time

cluding

States

that the respect of

many Americans

many people

—

(in-

themselves) for the present

standards of American civilization and of American

popular "culture" decline.

Such

a

list

of paradoxical dualities

may be endless. But now

and gravest duality — indeed, the

we

arrive at the greatest

est

and gravest problem looming before us

great-

end of the

at the

Modern Age. Recall Gibbon's sentence of

ago: barbarism and less

its

more than two hundred

catastrophes are

the face of nature

is

changed."

years

now inconceivable "un-

Now,

for the

first

time in

the history of mankind, dangers and catastrophes of nature are potentially (indeed, here

ture

actually) threatening na-

and humanity together. These dangers

They include not only ical

and there

are

man-made.

horribly destructive atomic and biolog-

weapons but many

effects

on

the nature and

on

the atmo-

sphere of the globe by the increasing presence and intrusion of the results of applied science.

So

?7

at the

end of the Modern

At the End of an Age

Age

the control and the limitation and even the prohibition of

some of neering

the applications of science

genetic engi-

— becomes a, sometimes global, necessity. At the same

time there

most

— including

exists

no

international or supra-national (and in

cases not even a national) authority that

would enforce

such measures. In view of this prospect the confusion and the

mindedness

Most

characteristic near or at the

"conservatives

,"

votaries of

what

"capitalism" and of technical progress, serve or conserve.

split-

end of an age appears. is still

wrongly

called

deny the need to

pre-

Most "liberals" still cling to outdated dogmas

of the so-called Enlightenment, unwilling to question the validity

of "Science." This kind of schizophrenia

is

evident, too,

among the Greens or environmentalists — otherwise an interesting and promising appearance of a

movement that,

for the

first

time in modern history, prefers the conservation of Nature to the inroads of Finance and Science

who

militate in favor of laws

against nature at the

and authority to

claim to protect families and forbid abortions.

that

very

word "environmental! sm"

ing, as if

halt the ravages

same time militate against laws and author-

ities

still

— since the same "Greens"

is

The

inaccurate and even mislead-

mankind were one thing and

its

"environment" an-

other. Instead of recognizing their unavoidable coexistence,

many environmentalists are also anti-humanists, wishing to exclude all human traces from their cult of wilderness and wildness. They are unwilling to recognize how one of the finest achievements of the Modern Age — in its art, in its habitations, indeed in scapes,

its

civilization

from which

a

— was

human

the gradual formation of land-

presence

38

is

not, indeed cannot be,

At the End of an Age excluded, since the ideal landscape suggests a

harmony between

the land and the signs of a habitation therein. after

Still,

ists is

a

all,

the existence of Greens and of environmental-

promising symptom — despite their

still

present

mindedness of being an ti- conservative and conservative

same time. At the end of the Modern Age,

two hundred fields

of

life,

years,

more and more

for the

people, in

have begun to question the

still

first

split-

at the

time in

more and more

present and

now

outdated idea of "Progress" — an idea which, in its present form, appeared at the beginning of the Modern Age: an ideal as well an idea that has

the

as

now begun to lose at least some of its appeal.

Some time during the word "post-modern"

past quarter of the twentieth century

appeared: another

uneasy sense (rather than

symptom of

a clear recognition) that

ing through (or, rather, facing) the end of an age. "post-" in itself

consciousness in

is it

telling.

(as for

There

is

example

some

we

are

The

the liv-

prefix

sense of historical

in "post- Communist" or

"post-impressionist" or "post-liberal"), the prefix "post-" being historical

matical:

the

(and spatial) unlike "anti-," which is fixed and mathe,

"post-modern"

meaning

(as different

is

not necessarily "anti-modern." Yet

from the sense) of "post-modern" has

been and remains inadequate, and worse than imprecise: vague, to the extent of being unhistorical. This

is

it is

not the place

to describe or analyze the various offshoots (often hardly

more

than excrescences) of "post-modernism," such as Structuralism,

Deconstructionism, the search for "mentalites," and of their

39

At the End of an Age spokesmen. Yes, behind the employment of the

intellectual

we

"post-modern" category

can detect the uneasy and long

overdue recognition that such fixed categories

as

Objectivism,

Scientism, Realism, Naturalism are

now passe — they belonged

to a bourgeois world and

So often the

its era.

acolytes of post-modernism are but another,

aposties

and

updated twentieth-

century version of "post-," indeed, of anti- bourgeois: they are

confused excrescences of "modernism." But ern, or Bourgeois, era

much

of the

Mod-

had well preceded the twentieth or even

the nineteenth century, that apogee of the bourgeois age. Be-

most academics and "post-modernist"

sides,

intellectuals

still

shy away from abandoning their faith in the Enlightenment, in the

Age of Reason — even though the Age of Reason was

arable its

insep-

from the rise of the bourgeoisie, and even though most of

spokesmen were bourgeois. And wasn't romanticism,

in

many ways a reaction to the unalloyed faith in Reason, also part of the Modern Age? "Post-modernism" is anti-rationalist or anti-positivist:

that the acts

but what

else

is

new? The powerful recognition

and the thoughts and the wishes of people,

to-

gether with their expressions, were and are circumscribed by their historical conditions lute,

(whereby

"facts" are neither abso-

nor timeless) was pronounced by Burke, two centuries

before the convoluted propositions of Parisian or American intellectuals.

There

is

a difference

ism and "post-modern"

Age — as we

still

between "post-modern" art.

We

intellectual-

have seen that the

Modern

use that approximate term — began about five

hundred years ago; that "modern," too,

as the

antonym of "an-

cient" emerged, at least in English, about four

40

hundred years

At the End of an Age ago. Yet the widespread usage

and

tive to life

sign,"

art,

such

as

and application of the

adjec-

"modern woman," "modern

"modern architecture," "modern

reaction to the twentieth century?

Or

and so on, appeared

art,"

mostly in the 1895- 1925 period. So: what

de-

is

"post-modern"?

A

Or

to

to the nineteenth?

the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth?

A reaction to, or a step

ahead from — Picasso?

Or

Or

Meissonier?

may be

of art to which "post-modern" again, only in a sic"

we

narrow chronological

Poussin?

applicable sense.

is

One form

music: but,

By "modern mu-

customarily designate the period beginning from

Wag-

ner (or, even better, from Debussy), ending with Poulenc, Ibert, 1

Honegger, Webern, Durufle — the period recognizably

880- 1 950.

step ahead

Is

"post-modern" music therefore a reaction to, or a

from not

only, say, Strauss but also

Gershwin?

If so,

then only orchestral compositions after about 1950 are "post-

modern." In popular music, "modern" was the high period of jazz,

approximately 19 14- 1950, after which "post-modern"

rock, an electronic application of primitivism

is

and barbarism.

In architecture "modern," after about 1895, amounted to antior non-historical, or to anti- or non- traditional. 9

modern"

architecture either does not exist or

it is

And

"post-

hardly

more

than a reaction against Bauhaus and Frank Lloyd Wright and

Le Corbusier — but often only few other smallish other

arts, a

details.

As

in bits of in a

ornamentation and a

few scattered examples in

reaction to the brutal senselessness of

"modern"

The main mark of most nineteenth-century architecture was its eclectic borrowing of historical styles. In a (largely Spenglerian) sense this marked

9.

the decline of artistic (or "cultural") the

mark of a spreading

vitality.

In another sense

historical consciousness.

41

it

was

also

At the End of an Age architecture has

produced either further exaggerations of form-

lessness or

more than

torical

little

the partial application of a few his-

or traditional esthetic styles here and there. If "post-

modern"

architecture

and

art are

nothing more than reactions

to post- 1 895 modernism, the term

Another

is

inadequate and imprecise.

and imprecise word

belated, confused,

is

rent political-sociological term of "modernization." If

anything

a confused

it is

the curit

means

and feeble substitute word for some-

thing like Americanization. Yes,

we

are at

— we are living through — the end of an age. may sense House of Com-

The

best of the "post-modern" thinkers and intellects

this

but that

is all.

What

Sheridan said in the

mons more than two hundred ber's speech applied to

them

years ago about another

perfecdy:

"[He]

Mem-

said things that

were both true and new; but unfortunately what was true was

new was not true." If "post-modern" has any proper meaning at all, it should mean an advance to a new

not new, and what was

and

rising sense

of historicity.

It

ought to amount to

tion—no matter how weak, incomplete, and the end of the

a recogni-

sporadic

— that

Modern Age carries within it an oceanic, though

as yet hardly conscious, rise

of a

new meaning

of history, of a

historical consciousness.

We are at the end of an age: The sense of this has begun it

has not yet

but

how few people know this!

to appear in the hearts of many; but

swum up to the surface of their consciousness.

This will happen, even though there exist

42

many

obstacles

At the End of an Age to

it

— among them,

enormous but corroding

these lines are being written, something

is

institutions.

happening

As

in the

United States that has had no precedent. A great division among the American people has

begun — gradually, slowly — to take

shape: not between Republicans and Democrats, and not be-

tween "conservatives" and are

still

"liberals,"

but between people

who

unthinking believers in technology and in economic

determinism and people who are not. The non-believers

may or

may not be conscious or convinced traditionalists: but they are men and women who have begun not only to question but, here and

there, to

oppose publicly the increasing pouring of cement

over the land, the increasing inflation of automobile

traffic

of

every kind, the increasing acceptance of noisome machinery ruling their

lives.

Compared with

this division the present "de-

bates" about taxes and rates and political campaigns are noth-

ing but ephemeral froth blowing here and there

atop the great oceanic tides of history.

10

on little waves,

That the present pro-

ponents of unending technological "progress"

call

themselves

io. The current Secretary of the United States Treasury declared that "money" should be "returned" to "the people" so that they could buy "bigger cars and bigger houses" He, and his government, not only are proponents of the "production" of more and more "energy" ( instead of its conservation) they are also Cosmocrats, thrusting more and more Ameri;

can rockets and stations into "space." Yet it in the case

of the

scientists' effort to find

—

is

at least possible diat

— just as

the smallest basic particle of the

universe (about which see Chapter 3) our exploration of "space" may be nearing its end. One indication of this is the growing indifference of

people to that pursuit. This was already evident more than thirty years ago when the reaction of people to the first American walkers on the moon did

not

at all

compare with the enthusiasm with which they had reacted to

Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic two generations

43

earlier.

At the End of an Age "conservatives" political

is

but another example of the degeneration of

and social language.

However — this book Its

theme

at a stage

engage in

is

political

or social pamphlet.

do with conscious

of history

about thinking itself. This it is

not a

simple. It has to

is

have arrived

ophy as

is

thinking.

We

when we must begin thinking

something as different from philos-

from psycho-analysis. At the end of an age we must

a radical rethinking

of "Progress,"

of history, of "Science," of the limitations of our knowledge, of our place in the universe.

These are the successive chapters of this book.

44

TWO The Presence of Historical Thinking

My vocation. thinking.

Truth.

The

•

•

The

appetite for history.

and the novel.

•

of our

historicity

Professional history.

•

History

at the

• •

Justice/

History

end of a

historical age.

hen this

I

say that "I

am

statement mean?

stand by

it?

a historian,"

What do

this

Now their first,

man's occupation. Or, more precisely:

institution of higher education.

.

This kind of association

is

to such a desig-

and most probable, association

affiliation. "A historian" — so he

i

people under-

Three hundred years ago they

would have been unaccustomed nation.

what does

is

it is

is: it is

his professional

probably employed, in some

1

of course part and parcel of the bureaucratiza-

who are not thus employed, who are not professors of history. They write history books on their own, which are published. When people know this, their inclination is to iden-

tion of entire societies. Yet there are historians

as an amateur historian; but, more probably, as a writer. There is nothing very wrong with this. A historian who cannot or does not write well cannot be much of a historian; moreover, the his-

tify

such a person

torian's

instrument

more than

the

is

everyday language, dependent on words that are

mere packaging of

"facts."

However,

I

must recount an

amusing, and perhaps not altogether pleasing, experience during a coffee

47

The Presence of Historical Thinking

I

do not wish to object to such a professional designation of

myself: but

it is

not entirely to

my taste.

Yes, early in

my life

I

chose to become a professional historian, to acquire a necessary

degree of certification to enable

me

to seek such employment,

to teach in a higher institution of learning, to be admitted into

the guild of professional historians, to be recognized as such. All of this has

been of course preceded — and succeeded — by

something deeper: by an

interest in history,

but also by

my

developing sense of a vocation. Interest, inclination, vocation:

The consciousness of

three overlapping but distinct phases.

such a distinction is

a difference,

between tion,

may appear only in

though of course not

a vocation

retrospect.

But that there

necessarily an opposition,

and a professional

identification or certifica-

ought to be obvious.

A sense of vocation, though perhaps rare, is not necessarily good. Fanatics have such a sense; obsessive minds

may have

such a sense. At the same time a sense of vocation ought to involve at least

my

some

self-searching.

professional career

I

certain matters of the past

and more; not only

Very early

in

my life and in

began to be interested not only about which

I

wished to

in

know more

in certain periods of the past, but also in

conference where I had given a paper that was perhaps and easy than some of the others. I overheard someone answering a question about who I was: "He is a historian; but he is really a writer." There was something slighdy deprecatory in this statement. (Such is the professionalization of historianship now in the United States. There are other countries and other languages where, even now, such a state-

break

at a scholarly

more

fluent

ment would not be

deprecatory.

48

The Presence of Historical Thinking

certain

problems of their history; in problems of our

historical

knowledge. The motives of such questioning are almost always

mixed and not

They may not be

easily ascertainable.

separable

from personal disillusionment^ and disappointments from the pretended objectivism

case

the gray ice as in

else,

one's motives. In

my

and from

in the writings

on the faces of certain professional historians)

everything

stage of

(in

;

but,

one may know one's purposes better than

my life, diis led me, perhaps at an unduly early

my "professional" career,

material and plan for a

work

to think and read and gather

dealing with problems about our

very knowledge of history itself, questions including a few novel

and

radical propositions.

ness,

a

They

are there in Historical Conscious-

book that took me — with various

thirteen years to complete. It

interruptions

was during

— almost

my work on the first,

often convoluted, draft of Historical Consciousness that, some-

time in the

late

have arrived

at

summer of 1958, what seemed to

considerable magnitude. are related briefly in

stage in

it

will 4.

be

However — this book

it

meant

paragraph

in a

In any event, that was a crucial

book is is

might

Original Sinner almost

summed up

intellectual pilgrimage

tion, of which the present

I

an intellectual discovery of

How this happened and what

book, in Chapter

my

me

my Confessions of an

three decades later; and later in this

suddenly found that

1

and

in

my

historical voca-

summa.

a short essay-like

not about myself. It

is

not auto-

biographical. Yet these introductory remarks are unavoidable.

About

this unavoidability I

cannot but

Catholic poet, Janos Pilinszky,

who

inspired to recognize this condition

49

cite a great

wrote

how

by reading

Hungarian

he had been St.

Augustine

The Presence of Historical Thinking

and Simone Weil: "There

and

are the personal, the non-personal,

the collective areas of

personal except from what never.

is

cannot reach the non-

personal;

from the

Something must become personal

may go forward

to

life-span.

collective,

one

after that

first;

what is no longer personal."

All living beings have their

know

One

life.

But human beings

own

are the only living beings

that they live while they live

instinctively feel, that they are

evolution and their

— who know,

going to

die.

own who

and not only

Other

living beings

have an often extraordinary and accurate sense of time. But have a sense of our historv, which amounts to something

"The

my

question of scientific

is

the

title

a scientific

method,

is

by

its

is

the

knowledge, dependent

Scientific

else.

and subject of

next chapter; the presence of historical thinking

and subject of this one.

on

knowledge"

we

as

nature open to question.

title it is

The

existence of historical knowledge, the inevitable presence of the

past in our minds,

is

not.

We are all historians by nature, while

we are scientists only by choice. Modern scientific thinking

appeared about three or four

hundred years ago, together with and of the universe.

It

a

then

new view of the

meant the methodical

globe

investigation of

nature, and eventually the manipulation of a kind of knowledge

which, once applied, changed the world and our

lives in

un-

imaginable wavs. Eventuallv Science came to

mean

though not

our knowledge

exclusively) the Science of Nature:

so

(mostly,

The Presence of Historical Thinking

of things and of organisms other than ourselves. At the same time, about three or four

hundred years ago, there occurred

another evolution,

Western Europe: a passage from

first in

a

kind of historical thinking that had existed for a long time to a kind of historical consciousness that was a relatively

nomenon. Of first,

these

successive

every

and successful applications; the

at

all.

Yet

sec-

it

and more evidentiy now — as important, than the

— with

may be argued that the second, involvknowledge of man, may have been — perhaps more

ond, hardly ing man's

its

phe-

two developments the importance of the

of Science, has of course been recognized

reason, given

new

if not

more important,

first.

X Shakespeare in Henry V: "There lives."

from

a recognition that every

person (and that every source

The

a history in

all

men's

This poetic phrase has a wider meaning in the democratic

age, issuing

2.

is

first

is

person

is

a historical source)

a historical 2 .

This

is

—

edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy, published in

1694, defined history as the "narration of actions and of matters

remembering." The eighth edition,

in 1935, said

much

worth

the same: "die

account of acts, of events, of matters worth remembering." Dignes de memoirel Worth remembering! What nonsense this is! Is the historian the kind of person whose training qualifies him to tell ordinary people what is worth remembering, to label, or to authenticate persons or events as if they were fossil fish or pieces of rock? Is there such a thing as a person and another such as a historical person? Every event source

is

a historical source; every person

is

is

a historical event; every

a historical person.

The Presence of Historical Thinking

or, rather,

should be

— obvious. No less obvious

is

one

result of

the democratic development of the world. This has been the

widening of the nineteenth- century practice of largely history toward social history,

political

from the history of governments

to the history of the governed. (Alas, so

many of

the propo-

nents and practitioners of the latter have been treating history as a

kind of retrospective sociology. ) Together with

widening

this

there also have been attempts to deepen the scope and sharpen

the focus of historical research. (Alas, so

many of the

so-called

post-modern theoreticians of history have been writing analyses of texts and of statistics employing large quantities of words or

numbers

in the service

There

is

of small amounts of thought.

the past; there

recorded past. The past

minute:

is

is

the

remembered

very large, and

we do not and cannot know

all

is

the

gets larger every

it

of

past; there

it.

Its

remnant

evi-

dences help: but they, too, are protean and cannot be collected

and recorded

in their entirety.

recorded past;

it

the

Thus

history

consists of the recorded

more than

is

and the recordable and

remembered past. The past in our minds is memory.

beings cannot create, or even imagine, anything that

new (The Greek word forgetting.") us,"

C.

tirely

S.

"There

is

not a vestige of real

No

or an entirely

sexes.

There

is

— that

is,

entirely

new

known

a startling

creativity de novo in

one can even imagine an enanimal; or even a third sex.

At best (or worst) one can imagine ready existing

is

Human

for "truth," aletheia, also means: "not

Lewis once wrote.

new color;

the

to us

a

new combination of al-

— colors,

or monsters, or

and corresponding recognition of this

condition in Goethe's Theory of Colours. In the Preface of that extraordinary and difficult

work he wrote

52

that "strictiy speak-

The Presence of Historical Thinking

ing,

it is

useless to attempt to express the nature of a thing ab-

stractedly.

but

ter,

.

.

.

We should try in vain to describe a man's characbe collected and an idea of the character will

let his acts

be presented to us." And: "As

we

before expressed the opinion

that the history of an individual displays his character, so

here be well affirmed that the history of science

This

more than one hundred

way

cal evolution.

to teach

is

quantum

quantum theory

economics, mechanics, are humanities

is

theory; or that

to teach

histori-

its

it

historically.

when

Geology,

taught by

ence to the successive achievements of the geniuses to these sciences

owe

mains grammar,

Not

their being.

whom

not a

thought. That

and weights and measures." 4

ward"

is

social science

"we

forward but

tell

we do

can only think back-

standing,

is

always a fleeting

this

by remembering

it.

when we

But

his tow

us anything about the future with certainty. Intel-

ligent research, together

3.

we

but of our entire view of the future: for even

think of the future

itself.

but an unavoidable form of

true not only of the present (which

illusion)

cannot

live

re-

of dates, and natu-

In sum, the history of anything amounts to that thing is

refer-

taught thus, literature

art a catalogue, history a list

science a sheet of formulas

History

who

William James wrote: "You can give humanistic

value to almost anything by teaching

ral

may

with a stab of psychological under-

enable us to reconstruct something from the

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, London, 1840, pp.

xvii,

xxiv. 4.

3

were compelled to conclude

quantum theory

that the history of

the best

years later

may

itself."

of Heisenberg and Bohr,

a prophetic foretelling

is

science

is

it

William James, Memories and Studies,

S3

New York,

1

91

1

,

pp. 312-313.

The Presence of Historical Thinking

past;

still, it

cannot help us predict the future. There are

reasons for this unpredictability (for believing Christians say that Providence

ment

that

is

is

is

real;

but

of its unpredictability. abstract,

it

can be

grandmother) acdy

like

it

A curious paradox

made

of 99.99 percent

that while science

(or one's

be no one

will

is

ex-

But the material elements of Science

definition of water; yet of a liquid exist:

is

was and

never exist in perfect or unalloyed form.

cannot absolutely

ele-

exactiy the

Abraham Lincoln

to work.

like her.

me

cannot be made to "work," because

really existed; there

him or

let

one); but another (God- ordained)

no two human beings have ever been

same. History

many

we may

riiat,

H0 2

is

in reality,

find, or

a

most

useful

does not and

produce, a distillation

H 0 but not of 100 percent "purity." Yet be2

cause of mechanical causality, scientific knowledge can be put to practical use: to a nearly incredible extent of precision

predictability

One

it

can be

made

to "work."

reason for this paradox

tween mechanical and other happens arable:

is

inseparable

and of

is

the essential difference be-

historical causalities; that

what

from what people think happens. Insep-

but not identical, and also not enduring. People

be wrong in thinking what happens, and they

may

may have been

wrong in thinking what happened. A man thinks that the motor stopped because of the

was the

oil

his

of the water pump, whereas

pump. When he then

the trouble was the oil

trouble

failure

means an

learns that the real source of

pump, his realization of the source of the

increase in the quantity

knowledge. But when

realization that

it

it

comes to

a

and

in the extent of

human

event, a later

what had happened was not what we thought

happened usually involves an increase of the

S4

quality of

our

)

The Presence of Historical Thinking

knowledge, together with a decrease of the quantity in our

memory. (Something happens to us today, something bothersome, whereof

we

can remember the smallest

details.

A

few

we recall that day, having forgotten many of its details; yet we may say to ourselves: "Why was I so upset about that then?" Or: "Why had I not noticed that then?" The quan-

years later

tity

of our knowledge of the details of that day has waned; but

the quality of our knowledge

— and

understanding

— of what

had happened may have increased.

Human tity.

understanding

At times

it is

is

a (sudden, rather

accumulated knowledge. But pose of understanding certainty,

perfect.

One

human

is

of quality, not of quan-

than gradual) synthesis of

happens not often. The pur-

from the

We

also

beings

There are odd and

of them

this

differs

and of accuracy.

standing of other

a matter

know

illogical

elements in

may

instead of being simply consequent to

failure,

on memory.

memory amounts

or defect, of

knowledge. Yet there, too, there at the

bottom of the

know what we wish

is

to recall,

Another example

standing table

human

under-

it.

its

functioning.

precede knowledge,

Another

We

that un-

is

often think that a

to an insufficiency of

some kind of understanding

we both understand and except that we cannot yet bring

trouble, since

those words or names or numbers clearly.

that

always, and necessarily, im-

is

that understanding

derstanding, too, depends

purpose of

scientific

is

up

to the surface of our

mind

the inevitable dependence of under-

on comparison and

That contrast

is

an inevi-

element of color, indeed, of the very act of seeing.

An early

proponent of

contrast.

this inevitable

condition was the Renaissance

painter, poet, philosopher, musician, architect Albert! Critical .

ss

The Presence of Historical Thinking

of the categorical "definitions" of philosophers, Leone Battista Alberti wrote

On Painting: "All knowledge of large, small; long,

short; high, low; broad, narrow; clear, dark; light

and every similar All things are

within

And

attribute

and shadow

obtained by comparison.

is

known by comparison,

.

comparison contains

for

power which immediately demonstrates

itself a

.

.

.

.

"5

our act of seeing depends on contrast, our knowl-

just as

edge of the present depends on our knowledge of the

past.

This dependence of understanding on contrast and com-

mean

parison does not necessarily

we

knowledge. "But where would of things

we know with

the relativity of

be

if

we

all

human

could speak only

certainty ?" asked the sixteenth- century

French historian Henri Voisin de La Popeliniere — who nonetheless

proposed the necessity of advancing to a "complete" his-

tory, including rulers.

5.

6

much besides the recorded acts and discourses of

Four hundred years

later the solitary

Russian thinker

Cited in Nancy C. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance, p. 70: Alberti's friend, Coluccio Salutati:

Princeton, 1970, p. 51. Also ibid.,

"Eloquence

is difficult,

6. "L'histoire

but history

digne de ce

is

even more

difficult."

nom dit estre generate From George Huppert, ."

The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in A very impressive work, proving

Renaissance France, Urbana, Illinois, 1970.

what I overlooked in Historical Consciousness, where I situated the crystallization of tury,

not

modern earlier.

historical consciousness largely in the seventeenth cen-

(Huppert,

"In sum, then, the French prelude to

p. 182:

modern historiography was more than a prelude, it was a stunning first act, full

ful

P. 166: "Here then is historical-mindedness you will — solidly established in the mental habits of a hand-

of consequences.")

historicism,

if

of scholars in the sixteenth century. Neither Locke's psychology nor the

scientific revolution

sense of history as

seem to have been

we understand it.

prerequisites for the

growth of a

This state of mind existed in

$6

all

of its

The Presence of Historical Thinking

human

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that neither creative thinking

is

the result of a synthesis.

understanding nor

"On the contrary, it

own distinctness from oththe privilege of one's own

consists in the intensification of one's ers; it consists in fully exploiting

unique place outside other sism, not subjectivism,

ness

and not even

must be preserved

ful. ..

.

if

solidarity

Our empathy with

elements of our

human

beings." This

is

relativism. "This outsided-

with others

is

to be fruit-

Sympathetic understanding

not a mirroring, but a fundamentally and essentially of

solip-

others [must be] completed with

own perspective.

tion, a utilization

not

my own

is

new valua-

architectonic position in being

outside another's inner place." Outside, yes: but with the inten7

tion to understand the other one, to participate, even necessarily incomplete extent.

Of course:

love

is

if

to a

always the love

of another?

— or at least it was weakened and suppressed — in the course of the next century, precisely during the time when science and Cartesian rationalism became important features of European culture." It was more than a historical oddity. 7. Aileen Kelly, View From the Other Shore, New Haven, 1999, p. 210. 8. Consider what happens when we are concerned or worried about someone who is dear to us. Can we separate our concerns for her from how that concern affects (and will affect) us? There may be an imbalance of these two concerns; between our thinking mostly about her and our thinking mostly about how her situation affects or will affect us. But in any case, these concerns are inseparable: both "objectivity" (an exclusive concentration only on her condition) and "subjectivity" (an exclusive concentration only on my condition) are impossible. Our consciousness and our knowledge (and our concern and our expectations) are participatory, and thus

essentials before 1660. It disappeared again

inseparable.

Simone Weil:

"I

used to believe, with regard to any problem what-

57

The Presence of Historical Thinking

But perhaps the most important element of historical thinking

is

the understanding that our knowledge of history (indeed,

our entire knowledge of the past; indeed, even our personal

memory)

is

not and cannot be restricted to "what actually hap-

pened," since potentiality

inherent in actuality. This

is

"great" historical events as well as of intimate

because

is

true of

human situations,

human inclinations, even when they do not mature into

definite acts, are essentially potential signs of actualities.

As

Johan Huizinga wrote: "The sociologist,

his

material as

the

if

outcome were given

etc., deals

in the

with

known

facts:

he simply searches for the way in which the result was ready determined in the

facts.

The historian, on the other hand,

must always maintain towards point of view. past at

Persians

The

If

his subject an indeterminist

He must constantiy put himself at a point in the

which the known

outcomes.

factors

still

seem to permit

different

must be

as if the

he speaks of Salamis, then

might

still

win

— again,

it

"9 .

.

.

relationship of potentiality

the difference

al-

and

a qualitative as

actuality

much

correspond to

as a quantitative

ever, that to know was to solve the problem; now I realize that it means to know how the problem concerns me." 9.

Johan Huizinga, The Idea of History.

graph, and motto, of one of this

book

(1999), reading

(

my

I

chose this passage for the epi-

books, The Duel. The relative success of

1990) and of the related Five Days in London: 24-28 May 1940 am convinced, largely due to the fascination of readers in

is, I

how

close Hitler

came

at that

time to winning the war, and

how

Churchill was able to deflect him: in other words, in reading of the existence of a potentiality inherent in, and inseparable from, the actuality of

those times.

S8

The Presence of Historical Thinking

— between what

difference

Here

— or

least in a state actuality,

to

is

significant

and what

is

important.

the essential difference between historical and legal

is

evidence

truth

is

between

governed by

not with

and

historical

a constitution) can deal

potentiality.

"The law

justice are

truth;

it is

is

Law

(at

only with

a coarse net;

and

purpose of law has nothing

a slippery fish." Yes: but the

do with

legal thinking.

the establishment of justice. Truth and

not the same things, even though the pursuit of truth

and the pursuit of justice may, on occasion, overlap. But besides the question (or, rather, the obvious primacy) of truth over justice, there are

and

other important differences between historical

legal evidences

inevitably

and thinking. One

and necessarily— is

definite rules

is

that law, after

a closed system, within

and regulations. For

instance,

should not allow multiple jeopardy: a case, erly tried,

ory) ardy:

is

is

decided once and for

open and never

its

subjects

closed;

its

—

own

does not and

when and

if

History (and our

prop-

mem-

specializes in multiple jeop-

and people are rethought over and over again,

and not even necessarily on the There may be

it

all.

it

all

five

basis of

newly found evidence.

hundred biographies of Lincoln, but there

is

hardly reason to doubt that sooner or later there will be a 501st

one with something new

in

because of new materials that

its

contents, and not necessarily

its

author has found, but because

of a new viewpoint. Another great difference ring principally to

— I am again refer-

Anglo-American law — is the one between

motives and purposes. These two are regrettably confused because of the vocabulary and the practices of twentieth- century

psychology and thought, the attribution of motive having

$9

The Presence of Historical Thinking

become

a pestilential intellectual habit. 10

tinguish between the two. Motives

come from

poses involve the pull of the future. At

law

But we must

its

best,

dis-

the past; pur-

Anglo-American

admit only a "motive" which has been, in one way or

will

another, expressed; in other words, an actuality, not a potentiality. 5

acts.

(As Dr. Johnson said: "Intentions must be gathered from

')

At

its

worst, unexpressed motives are sometimes

tributed and accepted in cal characterization

at-

some courts on the basis of psychologi-

or other dubious "expertise."

A proper com-

prehension of the essential difference between motives and purposes

is

an essential condition of the pursuit and of the

protection of justice and of truth

— and of

all

historical thinking

and speaking and writing. Historical thinking accords with the recognition that hu-

man knowledge

is

neither objective nor subjective but per-

sonal and participant. Consciousness (conscientia)

is

participant

knowledge. Nearly four hundred years ago Descartes argued, in his Discourse

on Method, that the study of history was wasteful

we cannot acquire any accurate or certain knowledge of human past, as we can of mathematics and of the world of

because the

nature. Yet another century after Descartes, Vico "said just the

opposite. His claim was that the principles of

the

c

civil

world

5

as

he

calls

it,

are actually

more

human

society,

certain than the

principles governing the natural world, because civil society

io.

One

characteristic

about the motives of

comes into

of Christianity

evil,

while

it

is

the condition that

says plenty about

existence.

60

how

it

says

evil exists

is

a

little

and

The Presence of Historical Thinking

human

creation" 11

world," too,

is

—to which

inseparable

me add

let

that "the natural

from our knowledge of it — for us.

>: The

professionalization of history

certification

of historianship

— has

— or in other words:

brought about

spread, and fruitful results during the past

and

great, wide-

two hundred

especially during the nineteenth century. Still

the finest historians of the past professional degrees.

two hundred

(You can be

a

the

.

.

.

years,

some of

years did not have

poet without having a

Ph.D. in Poetry, and, yes, you can be a historian without having a is

Ph.D. in History. )

A problem for most professional historians

that their certification

still

and

their craft

and

their

methods

are

bound to the practices (and often to the philosophy) of his-

torianship established in the nineteenth century, even

though

during the twentieth century great changes occurred in the structures of states

and

societies, together

with changes in what

most histo-

I call

the structure of events. Except here and there,

rians

have been unwilling or unable to adjust the requirements

of their

when

craft to these changes.

it is

less justifiable)

This

is

understandable (even

because of personal reasons, ranging

from the conformism of an

intellectual bureaucrat to the re-

spectable seriousness of a traditional craftsman.

have met

many

a "historian"

whose main

interest

Many

of us

seems to be

not the study of history but his historianship, meaning his

ii. Peter

Burke,

Vico,

Oxford, 1985,

p. 78.

61

The Presence of Historical Thinking

standing within the profession

have also met history

is

— a failure

in character. Yet

we

many other historians whose interest and work in

— small

impervious to fads

triumphs of character.

More important: many of the methods and practices of research and management of sources established by the great historians of the nineteenth century are

some of the problems with gest something that easily sense,

still

valid.

"sources," let

more and more

even though they

may

But before

me make

I

turn to

bold to sug-

professional historians un-

be reluctant to

state

it:

that

behind the problem of "sources" looms the obvious recognition that is

documents do not by themselves "make"

history that

history; rather,

makes documents. For history is, and always was,

something more than a study of records; and must, by necessity, include of potentiality, then

is),

it is

it

if

history

at least a

is

the

just as actuality

recognition of the element

memory

of mankind (which

something more than the recorded

include something of the

remembered past,

past;

it

it

must

too.

That a new structure of society involves new perspectives Tocqueville saw almost 180 years ago.

He saw the

forest

from

the trees with an astonishingly clear and acute eye. There

is

a

small chapter, consisting of forty- eight sentences, in the sec-

ond volume of Democracy

in America,

"Some

Characteristics of

Historians in Democratic Times," that ought to be read and reread by every historian.

(And Tocqueville

also practiced

what

he preached: these generalizations in Democracy in America

[which was not a history] became, here and there, incarnated his

own

and

history writing twenty years

the Trench Revolution.)

The

later, in

The Old Regime

great clear insight of Alexis

the Forester was his recognition that above and

62

in

beyond the

The Presence of Historical Thinking

Ancient-Middle -Modern periodization of history in the West

democ-

rose the present transformation of entire societies into

the passage from the aristocratic to the democratic age;

racies:

from peoples ruled by minorities to peoples ruled by majorities (even though that themselves)

.

not entirely identical with peoples ruling

And it is because of this evolving democratization of

the world that research

is

some of

There

is

the problem of the quantity of materials with

many ways,

still

and perfectiy,

The nineteenth-century

deal.

current

meaning the

precisely: in

filling

our professional in accordance

historical

knowledge) properly

with the accepted norms and meth-

impressive cathedral, to which

by adding small

—

of particular gaps in history (more

of history being something

tribute

ideal

— was that of definiteness and com-

ods of the profession. There was (and there ideal

historical

briefly.

which the historian must pletion,

modern

— and writing — have arisen. I can only sum up some of

them inadequately and

in

the problems of

like

its

pillars

still is)

merit in this

the building of a vast and

professional

workmen

con-

here and there, including the

of small gaps with one brick,

as for

example

with dissertations or monographs of minor scope. Yet

we must

filling

keep in mind that no cathedral

is

if

needed,

ever completed; that repairs

and restructurings are needed from to time to time; that the very surroundings of the cathedral change; and that every generation will see the cathedral in

perhaps even more important

is

new and

different ways.

And

the condition that even a great

cathedral does not a city make; that with the onset of democracy

we have, by necessity, extended the scope of history,

so far as

themes and topics go, to the

all

lives

63

(and records) of

its

kinds of

The Presence of Historical Thinking

people; so far as

its

"methods" 12 go, beyond the official

History does depend on records, but records.

And

can

hausting

deals

greater than ever before.

is

concerning a small topic, the historian

ideal that, at least

— and

not merely a matter of

the quantity (and the scope) of materials with

which the modern historian

The

it is

archives.

must — have read everything written about

all

of the "sources," in

or even reasonably expectable.

ex-

it,

many cases is no longer possible,

And then there is the other prob-

lem, related to quantity. Democracy, almost invariably, leads to inflation: inflation in the

number of people,

inflation of papers,

inflation

of bureaucracy, inflation of records.

years ago

it

was

at least

One hundred

approximately (though not completely)

possible for a historian to have read almost

all

the papers and

documentary evidence written to and by and about or literary figure. This

is

no longer

necessarily an exaggeration;

so.

A "definite"

a political

history

is

and an "orthodox" history is neces-

sarily a contradiction in terms.

This oceanic rials

for the historian

of their quality. is

rise in

worth

less

is

the quantity of potentially useful mate-

of course inseparable from the problem

(When there is more and more of something,

and

less.)

But that

is

not

all.

The

quality of every

document, of every record, indeed of every kind of human pression, depends 12.

on

its

authenticity.

it

With the oceanic

ex-

tide of

The great German historian Theodor Mommsen, more than one hun-

dred years ago: "History

is

one of those academic

subjects

be directly acquired through precept and learning. For

which cannot

that, history

is

in

some measure too easy and in some measure too difficult. The elements of the historical discipline cannot be learned, for every man is endowed with them." The great Jacob Burckhardt, one hundred years ago: history has no method, except one: bisogna super leggere — you must know how to read.

64

The Presence of Historical Thinking

documents — the combined

results

of spreading democracy,

spreading technology, spreading bureaucracy

— the authenticity

of "sources" with which the historian must deal decreases; in

some cases it even disappears. The nineteenth- century canonical rule regarding historical evidence, the essential distinction be5

tween "primary (that

and

cessive

'

is,

direct)

indirect) sources

and "secondary" (that

suc-

being washed away. Through

is

telephone, teletype, fax, e-mail, and so on,

many

statements

are unreconstructable, unrecorded, disappearing fast.

have important documents

is,

We

also

— for example, letters by Presidents

(and not only speeches by speechwriters and other expressions )

— that were not only not written but not even dictated or

read by

them or signed by their own hand. There

are records of

twentieth-century presidential cabinet sessions that are thentic than a postcard

drawer: no matter postcard,

its

ing, the old

less au-

from one's grandmother found in an old

how mundane

are the

few words on that

authenticity exists because of that spiky handwrit-

stamp and postmark, the yellowed cardboard,

its

musty smell. This drastic mutation in the very essence of historical records has

its

special dangers.

social history

The

recently fashionable practice of

does not confront them,

at least as

sociological rather than sociographical,

the case.

from

13

which

The bringing up of records and

long as

is,

statistics

alas,

it is

often

of all kinds

distant pasts present another kind of danger: as far as the

records go, the danger

13. Sociological: scientific, scriptive,

is

not so

much their authenticity as

pretending to be

definitive.

their

Sociographical: de-

with an appeal to our retrospective and imaginative understanding.

6s

The Presence of Historical Thinking

incompleteness; as far as difficulty

— at

rectness.

Sooner or

go, the danger exists in the

times, impossibility— of ascertaining their cor-

ought to compose Research", a

statistics

list

later a historian

a guidebook:

"New

of warnings about

can mention only a general one.

with an independent mind

Problems of Historical

new

particular problems. I

Many of the present "schools"

of social history depend on the concept of Economic Man, from the

of

— at times veiled — "scientific" belief that the basic realities

human

material, liefs

and of

existence

historic

life

and development

whereof the mores and morals and thoughts and be-

of most people are the superstructures.

early time in cially in

are

my life, has been the opposite:

My belief, from an that (perhaps espe-

the democratic age and in democratic societies) the

most important matter

is

what people think and

believe

— and

that the entire material organization of society, ranging

from

and to

their

superficial fashions to their material acquisitions

institutions

— are the consequences thereof.

At the beginning of the twenty- first century, of the

very end

Modern Age, many professional historians seem to agree

that historical "objectivity"

no longer for

at the

and

historical

"determinism" are

sacrosanct, indeed, that they are questionable. Yet

many of them this means

little

more than

the

mere nodding

of heads otherwise preoccupied, since they keep writing and teaching as

if history

were still determined. The fad for "psycho-

history" in the 1960s, the "post-modern" definitions of conditions of "discourse,"

and the recent tendency among French

historians to write about "mentalit.es"

more than an uneasy

seldom amount,

alas,

to

feeling of progress along the dusty shoul-

66

.

The Presence of Historical Thinking

ders of a great

roadway on which many stones had broken

through the old rutted surface, making the marching a comfortable (not to speak of the heavy motorized

traffic

bit

on

unit)

A learned Hungarian thinker and unequaled master of literary history, Antal as the great

duction

Szerb (he was murdered in 1944, in the same year

French historian Marc Bloch), wrote in

his Intro-

History of Hungarian Literature (1934)

two pro-

to the

phetic and radiant sentences: still

in

its

infancy, so

much

"The new science of psychology is

so that for an auxiliary science

it is

nearly useless. In that field the writer of literary history remains alone, bereft of assistance;

attempt toward a

what he may try could

new kind of knowledge

that

be, at best,

would

an

consist of

the study of the historical developments of spiritual and mental structures; perhaps

tory—that

many

is,

once

one day that

it

appears."

will

be called spiritual

his-

Two sentences worth more than

of the volumes nowadays laboriously composed by pro-

ponents of psychohistory or of sociological

One very random

illustration

history.

of the disinclination of other-

wise well-meaning and thorough and serious historians to consider the personal ities

and participant conditions — and responsibil-

— of knowledge I recently found in an otherwise excellent

large

book by Heinz Huerten, Deutsche

which goes beyond the siastical history.

necessarily

narrow framework of eccle-

In his chapter "The

and the murder of the Jews,"

German

Catholic Church

which Huerten introduces the

in

problematic question whether

Katholiken, 1918-194S,

German

Catholics, priests

and

bishops, have been true to their faith during the Third Reich, he writes: "Since their decisions

were

67

essentially personal ones,

The Presence of Historical Thinking

they cannot be ultimately criticized by science, and even

they be offered scientifically" Even keeping in

German word edge "

is

"Wissenschaft,"

mind

less

that the

meaning "science" and "knowl-

broader than the English "science," and with

all

respect

for Huerten's sincerity, such a separation of the "personal"

the "scientific"

is

can

from

inadequate, insufficient.

+ To ignore element of

the unavoidable personal

human and

historical

great failure of Objectivism.

— and participatory—

knowledge

But there

of its instances, post-modern) danger,

is

is

of course the

another (and, in

when

many

the recognition of

the shortcomings of historical Objectivism results in Subjectivism. This

is

the case of (the once Marxist) E.

History? (1961). Carr's central

argument

is

H.

Carr's

What Is

that "before

you

study the history, study the historian," and "before you study the historian, study his historical half-truth. (

The recognition

and

social environment." This

is

a

that different persons see the past

and also the present) differendy, and that thus every historian is

different,

does not mean that because he is the product of his past

How about the sons of rich parents who chose to become Marxist? Or — how about former Marxists who

he cannot do otherwise.

chose to become neo-conservatives? 14 Carr's argument 14. Carr's is a twentieth-century,

is

noth-

an automobile- age version of Tolstoy's

nineteenth-century nonsense of History as a Locomotive. Both Tolstoy

and Carr deny free will. Moreover, the important thing is where the driver is going and not, as Tolstoy declared, the mechanism of the locomotive;

68

The Presence of Historical Thinking

ing but a subjective form of determinism denying not only free will

but hopelessly confusing motives and purposes. 15 This kind of subjectivism

idealist

is

also inherent in the neo-

R. G. Collingwood. Recognizing that a

German

histo-

who was born in 1900 would see the past differently from a French historian who was born in 1800, Collingwood conrian

cluded, "There

is

no point

in asking

which was the

of view. Each was the only one possible for the

adopted tivist

it."

The only one possible? This

determinism

have been

German

a

monarchist, or a republican, or a Bonapartist; that

historian could have been an imperialist or a liberal. 16 their perspec-

of the past as well. (To carry this further: the French histo-

German

Germanophile or

historian in 1900 a

the important question this

— subjec-

— again. That French historian in 1800 could

rian in 1800 could be a

is

man who

determinism

is

That would influence (influence, not determine) tives

right point

is

"What

is

a

Germanophobe;

Francophobe or

a Francophile.

Carr driving at?" and not "What make

Carr?"

15. Besides,

Carr cannot quite detach himself from the terminology of

Objectivity. "It does not follow" he writes, "that, because a

appears to take at all

the

on

different angles of vision,

or an infinity of shapes." But the

more

it

more

has objectively

mountain no shape

objective our concept of

mountain becomes. For mountain was meaningless until men appeared on the scene, and saw it, and eventually called it a mountain. (Much later they conceived it as an objective fact. ) Ortega y Gasset in The Modern Theme "Perspective is one of the components of reality. Far from being ( 1923) its deformation it is its organization. A reality which would remain always the same when seen from different points is an absurdity." 16. People do not have ideas. They choose them. See Chapter 3, pp. 88, 141the shape of the mountain, the

abstract that

the existence of the

:

142; also p. 185.

69

The Presence of Historical Thinking

That could even

affect the choice

imaginable that a

interests:

Frederick William

XV and a French historian in 1800 about

I.

here that the twentieth- century subjectivists, from

the early Croce to Becker and Beard and

moderns" from the

at least

it is

German historian in 1900 could prefer to read

and write about Louis

It is

of their

slid into error.

scientific

into subjects

They could not

many

of the "post-

liberate themselves

worldview, from Descartes's world divided

and objects and from Newton's world where causes

always and inevitably precede

effects,

always the product of the past.

and where the present

is

They went wrong not because

they were attacking the illusion of objectivity; they went

wrong

because, like the objectivists, they were thinking in terms of direct causes, of

men

as products.

Thus subjectivism

is

also in-

herent in the neo-idealists Collingwood and Oakeshott, whose

otherwise valuable recognitions of the errors of objectivism and materialism and positivism have moved them toward the morass

of a merely philosophical essentially subjectivist.

— that

However — the purpose of sophical;

it is,

that are real.

abstract

is,

— idealism

that

is

1

rather, a

this

subchapter

is

not philo-

reminder for historians of some things

Such recognitions of

reality are inseparable

from

own limitations, including the limitations of our methods, of our craft. As in all human

the knowledge of our

of our profession,

thought, in history these include the limitations of language. Historians must constantly keep in

17.

See below, Chapter

3, p.

142.

70

mind

that the instruments

The Presence of Historical Thinking

of their

craft

(and of course of

all

their thinking) are

words,

we think and teach and write with words. It is not only memory is the womb of the human psyche, and that the

because that

Muses were the daughters of Memory: Mnemosyne. The sudden development of speech

in children

is

indeed mysterious,

because words are the fundamental signs and symbols of emerging consciousness. units of

They

are

more than

abstract symbols, or

communication; they are symbols not of things but of

— not of something merely physical but essentially of

meanings

something mental. Meaning always has an element of revelation in

(whence

it

And

tion).

memory.

language

it

"symbolic" meaning

exists,

is

a false distinc-

grows, and fades together with

18

Language

what

"literal" vs.

is

not perfect.

can communicate.

It exists

Some

to communicate, but only

things

communicates

it

At the same time the language which can

easily

make

badly.

the finest

and most numerous distinctions of meaning is the best one. The great danger during our present passage

"culture"

is

guage

still

which

is

1 8.

The

latent in the

a verbal to visual

impoverishment of language. But

contains an element of mystery within

inherent in every

fine

from

human volition,

it:

in every

lan-

the mystery

human

act,

Hungarian writer Dezso Kosztolanyi (about the absurdity of

an international language) "Knife. Yes, someone

may tell me that couteau,

Messer do not quite correspond to

But no one can tell me lose their meaning

:

coltelU),

that knife

is

not a

knife."

people lose their freedom" "nation" are one

word

.

.

.

Confucius:

— very true.

)

7i

'knife.'

"When words

(Yet in Chinese "country," "state,"

The Presence of Historical Thinking

and which too is in essence

a matter

of quality. 19 And the quality

human expression depends not only on one's

of every

words but

also

on the

intention of the expression and

historical circumstances.

recognition that ideas

choice of

This corresponds to the,

do not

exist apart

alas,

on

its

overdue

from the men and

women who choose to represent and express them — and when.

Yes:

every is

circumstances

historical

— because

the

meaning of

human expression (and hence the meaning of every idea)

inseparable

how and where and to whom

from not only

it is

stated but when: conditions of historicity that are inseparable

from and inherent are

in the speaker's or writer's intention.

two examples. "There

Imagine

Warsaw or Minsk,

Stalinist bureaucrats

at least as

or

are murderers."

at a public

and chaired by

a

up and

meeting ruled by

Communist government

Now imagine the same words shouted at a meeting of

Young Republicans is

Communists who

a Pole or a Russian, say, in 1948, standing

saying this in

minister.

are

Here

woman

good

in, say,

as a

Chicago, 1952. Or: "A

German Jew

Viennese Nazi." Imagine a German

man

saying this loudly in a crowded Berlin trolleycar in

1942, as he sees a Jewish

man pushed off the platform by an S.S.

man bellowing with an Austrian accent. Now imagine the same 19.

Owen Chadwick, in Catholicism and History:

Archives,

Cambridge, 1978,

loosely 'scientific history.'"

p. P.

2:

"Modern

The Opening of the Vatican

history

is

sometimes

called

44: "All historical events remain in part

mysterious."

72

The Presence of Historical Thinking

words pronounced

in

New York before

an audience of liberals

and emigres. The differences

exist

courage of the

and not only because they were

first

speakers;

directed to different people.

am

I

not only in the qualities of

inclined to think that in the

given (that is, historical) circumstances

somehow the first state-

ments were truer than the second ones: more

came

closer

to the truth, because they were

precisely, they

more remarkable

statements in the pursuit of truth, in the midst of the ugly pres-

ence and prevalence of accepted untruths. They rang with a higher quality of truth. Justice

than

is

is

of a lower order than

injustice.

is

truth,

and untruth

is

lower

The administration of justice, even with

best intentions of correcting injustice,

the

may often have to ignore

or overlook untruths during the judicial process.

We live and are

capable of living with

many injustices, with many shortcomings

of justice; but what

a

is

deeper and moral shortcoming

is

a self-

willed choice to live with untruths. (All of the parables of Christ

taught us to believe in truth, not in expatiate

upon

justice.

)

There

is

no need to

this further, except that the difference

between

the propagation of justice and that of truth, resulting in die difference of the prevalence of injustice

and of untruth, has

perhaps never been as extensive (and startling) as

it is

now,

at

Modern Age, and in the midst of our democratic There may be less injustice — surely of institutionalized

the end of the age.

injustice states

— now

and

all

than ever before. The governments of

many

kinds of legal establishments profess to dedicate

themselves to the elimination of injustice: slavery, exploitation, racial

and economic and

social discriminations.

73

At

least

The Presence ofHistorical Thinking

superficially these practices

seem to have diminished through-

out the world. At the same time there hangs over the world an enormous and spreading dark cloud cover of untruths — especially in this democratic age of mass

and "electronic" com-

munications (more often than not aimed

at the

denominator of their

recipients)

ing discrepancy, which

is

lowest

And amid this

.

common

often suffocat-

replete with the gravest of potential

dangers, few are aware that the indiscriminate pursuit of justice

may turn to insane lengths — indeed, that it may lay the world to waste. (Consider but

some of the inhuman techniques of mod-

ern war; or the puritanical character and fate of Captain Ahab in

Moby-Dick.

We

have seen,

earlier in this chapter, that there is a dif-

ference between historical and legal evidence. But: does the

know what is truth? No, he does not; yet he ought to do better than Pontius Pilate (whom I, for one, could never contemplate without at least a modicum of sympathy). When historian

Pilate asked:

truth?"

The

"What

is

historian

truth?" he also implied:

"What

ought to go one better than

ought to see untruth for what

it is.

His work,

is

un-

that.

He

really, consists

of

the pursuit of truth (where Pilate had stopped), often through a jungle

of untruths, bushes and weeds and thickets, small and

large.

But

it is

not

as

The

simple as that.

often consequent belief, "Eureka!

cal—meaning time

that

it

I

pursuit of truth (and the

found

it!") is also histori-

changes through the ages. There was a

when an avowal of certain

proof of one's belonging to a

truths of faith

real

74

community

amounted

to a

(or the reverse)

The Presence of Historical Thinking

This was followed by the so-called assertion of a scientific truth belief is

Age of Reason, when

became independent of any other

God / God eternal. But we

(wrongly so) Yes: for God-believers Truth .

God is

Truth, which means:

are not

Gods but

the

eternal.

historical beings,

Truth

and the

is

is

descendants

fallible

of Adam. This has been beautifully expressed by the American Christian thinker Caryl Johnston: "There torical tells

we

dimension

in

any

is,

truthtelling. ... It

inescapably, an hisis

5

not that 'history

the truth (or disguises or determines the truth) as

are ineluctably involved with history in

the truth." Note:

We

to tell the

it is

any attempt to

"One way or

ing to realize that the

tell

truth.™

cannot avoid the historicity of our thinking. As

Barfield wrote:

that

another,

way we

what matters

habitually think

is

Owen

our com-

and perceive

is

not the only possible way, not even a way that has been going

on very

long. It

is

the

way we have come

have come to perceive. Habit

is

to think, the

way we

the end product of repeated

action in the past, of prolonged behavior in the past. This true of mental habit as of any other.

And

so, if

men

become incapable of seeing what they once saw, they have gone so for a long time not looking at

20.

Are we ineluctably involved with history

because thinking, "cognition,"

is

have

it is

it."

is

as

at last

because

21

in thinking the truth? Yes,

almost always the result of re-cognition.

But all of us experience occasional and mysterious stabs of truth that are more than recognitions. 21.

Owen

Barfield, History, Guilt,

1979, p. 74- 1 consider this (

1

898- 1 998)

as

clearest (a rare

one of the

and Habit, Wesleyan University

Press,

— so often hardly recognized — English writer

greatest,

and surely one of the profoundest and

combination!) thinkers in the twentiedi century.

7S

I

am not

The Presence of Historical Thinking

But the

amount to best,

is

power truth

the relativity of truth.

not a dose of relativism;

it

What history gives

relative

is

no longer the

is

no

is

at

belief that

assertion merely of cynics or

modes of discourse,

truths, only

whom struc-

and of text. Their relativization of truth is abso-

tures of thought

of ideas,

The

post-modern philosophers, according to

there were and are

And yet:

mind,

a

gives us certain standards, the

to contrast, and the right to estimate.

skeptics but of

lute.

of our seeing and speaking does not

historicity

truths exist. Their existence, unlike the existence

not a matter of our choice. But we are responsible for

how, and where, and why, and when we "Facts"

— inevitably

more important, on

dependent on

their statements

(

try to express

them.

their associations and,

about which see the next

— are not truths. Their statements or expressions can come close to truths — which the best we can expect. A "fact" chapter)

is

is

never absolute.

state unalterably cept (or idea)

Nor

is it

given to us to

an absolute truth.

of truth

is

is

to nail

down, to

We may think that our con-

absolute; yet that, too, only hearkens

toward the absolute. (Our very language true"

fix,

not quite the same

as:

"This

is

reflects this.

"This

is

the truth")

"Truth

is

so subrie a point that our instruments are

too blunt to touch

it

exactiy.

the point and bear

down around

Pascal:

the true." Kierkegaard: is

given to us

alone in

this.

Eliot at least

is

When they do reach it, it,

more on

"The pure truth

is

the pursuit of truth." This

So had his friend C. on one occasion)

S.

they crush

the false than

for

God alone. What

is

not relativism. (If

Lewis considered Barfield (also

76

on

T. S.

The Presence of Historical Thinking

truth does not really exist, indeed,

pursue

it

at all?)

And

if it is

wholly

relative:

why

for believers, the sense that truths exist

ought to be strengthened by the cognition (or consciousness) that the pure truth

is

for

God

alone

— an existence that

pendent of us and yet the potential sense of which

is

is

inde-

within us.

+ A little more than a century ago the English historian Lord a stage

when a

history of the Battle of Waterloo could be written that

would

Acton claimed that historical science had reached

not only be perfectly acceptable to French and British and

Dutch and Prussian rennial,

Cardinal

and

fixed.

historians but

pe-

Already Acton's great contemporary John

Newman said that Acton "seems to me to expect more

from History than History can have (or

would be unchanging,

at least

perspective.

furnish."

ought to have)

Acton believed

the history of the Church)

a

And a century later we

more chastened and

that history (very

was

a

much

realistic

including

supremely important matter —

— and that the purpose of history the definite, and final, establishment of truth — no. Just as the purpose of medicine yes

is

is

not perfect health but the struggle against

illness, just as

the

purpose of law is not perfect justice but the pursuit of it through the vigilance against injustice, the purpose of the historian

is

not the establishment of perfect truth but the pursuit of truth

through

a reduction of ignorance, including untruths.

There are many historians

who would not find such a state-

ment sufficiendy satisfactory. They are not to be blamed for this,

77

The Presence of Historical Thinking

nor are they to be blamed for

own profession:

than their

itual crisis at the

a condition

is

much larger

the intellectual and mental and spir-

end of the Modern Age, of which the bureau-

cratization of intellectual profession: is

which

,

including historianship,

but a consequence. But they ought to be blamed for their

ignorance of (or lack of interest in) an amazing condition: the relatively recent

in the world, superficial

development of a spreading appetite for history

something that

symptoms. For

exists contrary to so

this

happens

at a

time

many

other

when many

know less history than their parents or grandparents had known; but when more people are interested in history than

people

On the one hand, less history is being required and schools than earlier in the twentieth century. On the

ever before.

taught in

other hand there exists an appetite for history throughout the

world — and perhaps

no

precedents.

can

list

nels

22

particularly in the

United States — that has

There are so many evidences of

this that I

only a few. There are history programs and history chan-

on

television, historical films, historical

"documentaries"

and "docudramas," obviously responding to the interests of millions, dealing as

with topics that were hardly featured

two generations

zines,

as late

ago. There exist popular historical maga-

with a widespread readership. There are three times

22. This

widespread appetite for history

exists

when no such widespread

produced its most it is wondrous and hardly imaginable applications during the twentieth century. In the 1920s Henry Ford declared, "History is bunk," and Herbert Hoover's Secretary of Commerce said: "Tradition is die enemy of progappetite for science exists. Yet

ress."

science that has

No "conservatives" or even "liberals" think that way now

78

The Presence of Historical Thinking

as

many

were

local historical societies in the

sixty years ago: their

United States

as there

membership includes many younger

people, not only old ladies in tennis shoes

whose

interests are

primarily genealogical.

Of will

served,

and

Of

that

be aware. Yet the existence of

this

course the historical appetite of people

is

continue to be served, with plenty of junk food.

professional historians appetite for history

is

may

ignored by

many

most administrators of educational

of them

— and, alas, by

institutions.

— perhaps more precisely: of this recent evolution of consciousness — Perhaps the most startling evidence of this appetite

(now

has been the

change in the

at least fifty-year- old)

rela-

tionship between history and the novel. Within commercial publishing, popular histories have been outselling novels for at least fifty years. It

is

now

accepted that serious biographies

belong to history: biographies

sell

quite well, while the very

methods of serious biographers have become historical. in history

and

Interest

developed together about

interest in the novel

250 years ago; they were part and parcel of the then evolving historical consciousness.

That was

a

new phenomenon,

the novel as such hardly existed before that. really a

events

new

not mythical but

could identify themselves in one

when

The novel was not

version of epic in prose. It described people and

who were

Then

since

real,

with

whom

people

way or another.

arose the historical novel, in the nineteenth century,

writers recognized that they could create

more

interest-

ing stories against a rich historical background. But during the

twentieth century a reverse development occurred.

79

More and

The Presence ofHistorical Thinking

more

was not the novel

it

that absorbed history but

So

history that began to absorb the novel.

goes,

we have

history

and for biography has

appetite cantly

seen that the appetite for

and

kinds of readers for

same time

risen at the

— more

was

far as readership

interest for novels has decreased.

and more writers began to sense

they have not recognized

new

all

it

that their

But — signifithis

(even as

meaning), experimenting with

its

hybrid genres that are the opposites of the old historical

novel, since in their confections history

is

not the background

One manifestation of this is the new hybrid the silly name of "faction." 23

but the foreground. thing that has

"Our time

is

emerging

and biography," writes the Kevin

Starr.

23. "All kinds

golden age of American history

as a

excellent historian of California,

"As the American novel, in

fact,

of writers have been trying this (Upton

Irwin Shaw, Styron, Doctorow, Mailer, Sontag, in this country,

novelists are,

many others abroad

all,

.

.

interested in history.

reverse of the historical novel,

has

become more

Sinclair,

Dos Passes,

De Lillo, Vidal, Pynchon

What is significant is that these What they have been doing is the

.

)

.

where history was the colorful background.

For these twentieth- century novelists history

is

the foreground, since

know

it

which is why their works are flawed: for they illegitimately, and sometimes dishonestiy, mix up history and fiction. So they include and twist and deform and attribute thoughts and words and acts to historical figures — Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy — who actually existed. That is illegitimate, since it produces untruths — no matter that some academic historians may say it attracts

them. But most of these authors don't

serves salutary purposes, as

it

introduces

all

really

that,

kinds of people to history, after

wrong. What they ought to recognize, rather, is the untrammeled spreading of a historical consciousness whereby it is indeed possible that in the future the novel may be entirely absorbed by history, rather than the contrary." From the Introduction of my A Thread of Tears (1998 ) all.

They

are

So

The Presence of Historical Thinking

narrow, more internal and fragmented, more solipsistic in inability to grasp

and refract social dynamics

[previous] masters

.

.

have come to the fore

.

American

This

of imaginative as well as

may

be especially true of

biography. During the nineteenth century historians, craft,

due to the

largely

eschewed biography. In

manner of its

and biographers

historians

as the providers

social scientific interpretation." 24

in the

its

many

professional

German- inspired canons of their English tradition

this respect the

was an exception, with enduring and widening results especially during the second half of the twentieth century (one of the few

promising signs

at a

time of intellectual decay), to the extent

that the appetite of the reading public for serious biographies

now larger than ever before, and that every serious now follows the process of historical research.

is

biographer

directions of the novel have

become

dis-

more widespread and more important — toward

history:

and

Meanwhile two cernible:

there

tory

is

one tendency increasingly toward poetry, the other —

at least

some reason

may absorb

to believe that sooner or later his-

the narrative novel almost entirely.

of historical literature will of course appear appearing lyle

— including

New kinds

— they are

some very questionable

was probably right when we wrote, "In the right

tation of History

Maupassant

and Reality does genuine poetry

(in his preface to Pierre et Jean)

:

already

ones. But Carinterprelie."

Or

"The aim of the

24. In Kevin Starr's review of a biography of Randolph Hearst (by David Nasaw, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, 1 8 June 2000 ) — which I read on the very day when I first composed these pages. "Coincidences are spiritual puns .

.

81

The Presence of Historical Thinking

realistic novelist is

our

feelings,

not to

tell

a story; to

but to compel us to

amuse us or to appeal to

reflect,

darker and deeper meaning of events."

25

and to understand the

A historian could have

written that.

More than one hundred years ago Thomas Hardy wrote:

Conscientious fiction alone a reflecting

in the

it is

which can

and thoughtful and abiding

excite

interest

minds of thoughtful readers of mature

age,

who are weary of puerile inventions and famishing for accuracy; who consider that in representations of the world, the passions

proportioned terest

as in the

world

which was excited

ought to be

itself.

in the

This

is

the in-

minds of the

Athenians by their immortal tragedies, and in the

minds of Londoners

performances of

at the first

the finer plays of three hundred years ago. 26

I

am

convinced that conscientious

desideratum which Hardy stated

now

history is

replacing that

as conscientious fiction. It

is

his-

tory which can excite a reflecting and abiding interest in the

minds of thoughtful readers of mature

25. Janos Pilinszky:

"The novel

is

who are weary

age,

the only real genre (perhaps the

is,

too, but only to an extent) the subject of which

of

art

can deal with that, and yet

therefore

I

regret

when

it is

is

time.

drama

No other form

A Critical Biography, Seattle,

82

And move

the driving force of the novel.

the novel in the twentieth century begins to

toward poetry." (Note that this was written by a poet. 26. Thomas Hardy, "Candour in English Fiction," quoted George Gissing:

(and

1979,

p.

261.

in

J.

Korg,

The Presence of Historical Thinking

how weary we

are) of puerile inventions

accuracy (I should say: reality; truth) It

should

now

historicity of our ability

appear that

and famishing for

P

have been writing about the

I

knowledge, rather than about the knowledge-

of all history; in other words, eschewing a philosophy of

and evidences of a historical and

history but asserting the nature

monistic perspective of the world.

A recognition of this,

ing at the end of an age,

28

27.

is

overdue.

From my Historical Consciousness 1984 edition), (

com-

p. 341. Earlier

(1968

wrote "that the Western world has yet to see the appearance of a truly classic historian, a historian Dante, a historian Shakespeare." "To this edition)

I shall

I

add, eighteen years

later,

that I have

grown more

every year: that sooner or later someone, with genius, will suddenly reveal to us a

that this

might occur

certain of this

the natural ease of

new kind of history for which there will

am no prophet, and historian enough to here I am somehow compelled to speculate

have been hardly any precedent. despise prognostication, but

all

I

in the twenty-first century,

and perhaps even sooner

than that."

Of course

this. Here are a few random samaround r98o: "The Western outiook emphasizes the importance of history and pays an ever increasing attention to it. There

28.

ples.

Owen

I

have not been alone in

Barfield

.

is

a

new concept of history

in the air, a

new feeling of its

.

.

true significance.

We have witnessed the dim dawning of a sense that history is to be grasped something substantial to the being of man, as an 'existential encoun(Barfield wrote this around the time when slogans about "posthistoric man" and "the end of history" became current. ) The epigrammatic Ortega y Gasset a generation earlier: "History is not only seeing, it is

as

ter.'"

And in one sense or another, thinking is am a man who truly loves the past. Traditionalists,

thinking what has been seen.

always construction." "I

on

the other hand,

do not

love

they want

it;

it

to be not past but present."

"Man is not a res cogitans but a res dramatica. He does not exist because he thinks, but, on the contrary, he thinks because he exists." "In short, man has no nature, but instead he has history." "The dawning of a new age .

.

.

of historical reason." The historian Johan Huizinga (1935): "Historical thinking has entered our very blood."

83

THREE

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

M "There

is

the belief that the expansion of the

material and intellectual

pow ers of mankind

alw ays Progress. This has

And

visible, limits.

including

its

the

its,

more

not always

at first

the faith in Progress,

implicit optimism, presses against these

limits, the ever greater are the dangers.

can illustrate this with limitless extension

seems to be ship

is

is

in

of

a simile. its

Perhaps one

With the seemingly

pow ers mankind

material

the situation of a captain, w hose great

so strongly built of steel and iron that his

magnetic compass indicates the ferrous mass of the vessel,

but not the position of the magnetic North.

Such

ship cannot reach

a

in circles

goal;

it

and eventually become

Winds and the the captain

its

tides.

fails

.

.

.

ill

sail

a subject

around of the

This danger exists so lon?

(1961), advancing

ture of Scientific Revolutions

time

Thomas

from Objectivism to Subjectivism ("before you study the tory,

study the historian")

.

Kuhn wrote that Science is,

plainer English, the result of scientists.

his-

after

all,

community" — in

the result of "a consensus of the scientific

thought that Wilde's

I

aphorism about certain thinkers applied to diese perfectly: they

was

intellectuals

were pursuing the obvious with the enthusiasm

of shortsighted detectives. At

book was

least Carr's

written (though poorly thought out), while Kuhn's

times celebrated

work amounted

fairly well still

some-

to the errant cerebration of a

flat-footed academic, often substituting vocabulary for thought. 15

purpose of assuring myself mat erly 15.

I

had understood

his propositions

prop-

enough.

A few examples, from successive pages of Kuhn's book. P. viii:

"led to recognize in scientific research of

digms These .'

I

what

I

[I

was]

have since called 'para-

take to be universally recognized scientific achievements

that for a time provide practitioners." (This

is

model problems and solutions to

a

community of

A new paradigm never overnight. No wonder

not what "paradigm" means.

)

P. 7:

"seldom completed by a single man and had difficulty to dating precisely this extended process that their vocabulary impels diem to view as an isolated event." ("Their vocabis

historians have

Does

ulary?"

it?)

P.

tive discipline." (Is

pline"?)

P.

it

8.

"History,

we too

"purely descriptive

80: "Science has

often say,

11 ?

And

is

is

a purely descrip-

"description" a "disci-

seemed to provide so apt an

illustration

of the

generalization that truth and falsity are uniquely and unequivocally deter-

mined by the confrontation of statement with thing apart from their statements?)

P.

(Do

facts

mean

paradigms

any-

tell

us

about the population of the universe and about diat popubehavior." (Do they?) Enough of this.

different things lation's

fact."

103: "Successive

103

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

(One of the lamentable consequences of his frequent employment of the unattractive "the status of tive

word

community paradigms,"

text arose

his

word "paradigm" —

etc., etc.

became fashionable

that thereafter

from

— an unattracin intellectual

commerce. But something more

and worrisome than the

significant

symptomatic appearance of such books was happening ics itself.

While discovering

(in essence constructing, or rather,

naming) more and more minuscule atomic

was

now moving

in phys-

particles, physics

into a sphere of abstractions, seeking for a

Unified Theory of the Universe, to the senselessness of which shall return.

During the

Heisenberg himself was not unaffected by last

twenty years of his

was struggling with the

life

I

this.

(he died in 1976) he

possibility of a mathematical

model,

an equation that would perhaps, and permanently, formulate

our knowledge of the fundamentals of physics. Meanwhile the

meaning of his great

early contribution, that of the inescapable

involvement of the physicist with the physics of matter was,

if

not altogether ignored, brushed aside by another generation of ambitious young physicists, including Nobel laureates such

as

Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg. It is

true that Heisenberg's discoveries involve only extreme

and subatomic including

all

situations.

Meanwhile, in the mechanical world,

of its wonders such as space rockets or the Internet,

the essential "laws" and causalities of tinue to apply. But there are

Newtonian physics con-

more and more evidences

in the

human world, where more and more of us recognize how observation may affect — indeed, it often does affect — the nature of

104

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

the object, perhaps especially in the age of democracy. That "polls"

— of all kinds — may not only influence but actually cre-

ate the very conditions

of elections, that

is,

of choices; that

advertisements of popularity can lead to popularity (repeating

and repeating that someone or something him, or

it,

popular

popular) these are but two of the :

such a recognition. Another as

is

is

may make

many examples of

the increasing use of such terms

"perception" or "image"; another recognition that such are

components of reality

most

itself.

When

intellectual organ, the

more evidences

human

that perception

itself,

nation and

quent

comes to the study of our eye, there are

more and

not the packaging or the

is

gorizing of sensation, but that it sensation

it

is

cate-

an inescapable component of

and indeed, simultaneous with it 16 — as are imagi-

memory — inseparable

to, the act

from, and not merely conse-

of seeing.

X Throughout the Modern Age (indeed, tion" in physics during the tury)

it

was taken

verse,

quarter of the twentieth cen-

first

for granted that

same everywhere and

at

our laws of physics were the

any time — including the whole uni-

and the many millions of years before

earth. I

do not think

tiiat

we needed

1 6.

And,

in

some

is

not

my

instances, perception

below, pp. 131, 137.

IOS

man

appeared on

the proof of uncertainty/

indeterminacy to see that such a belief rogant, but perhaps this

until the "revolu-

is

both naive and

main argument

may indeed precede

here.

ar-

The

sensation. See

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

point

is

by the end of the twentieth century the quest of

that

physicists for a unified theory of the universe at

times laughable

— absurdity, because of the very character of

and because of

their theorizing,

had become an —

theories of the universe.

its

categorical application to

About the first I cannot improve on the

statements by David Lindley, a theoretical physicist

tronomer—himself their increasing

(also a senior editor of Science)

.

— and

Because of

tendency to make everything dependent on ab-

struse mathematical formulations,

the

most recent speculation of the

physicists

is

particles at

theoretical

that elementary particles are not

all

but vibrations of tiny loops of

quantum- mechanical

string,

wriggling around in

twenty-six-dimensional space. This

is

the

modern

equivalent of the classical physicist's hope that all

matter could be understood in terms of

atoms that behaved balls.

.

.

.

essentially like little billiard

Modern particle physics is,

sense, incomprehensible. It

is

in a literal

grounded not in

the tangible and testable notions of objects and

points and pushes and pulls but in a sophisticated

and

indirect mathematical language of fields

interactions

and

and wave-functions. The old con-

cepts are in there somewhere, but in heavy disguise.

as-

To the outsider,

it

may seem that the

theoretical physicists of today are in the grip of a collective

mathematical zaniness, inventing

twenty-six-dimensional spaces and

106

filling

them

.

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

with strings out of obfuscatory glee. Their use of language

as esoteric

is

and

baffling as that of the

they seem to speak in

literary deconstructionists:

words and sentences, but Each speaks

it is

a kind of code.

.

.

gobbledygook under-

in a private

standable only to those similarly initiated.

In one sense, such criticism of modern theoretical physics is philistine

ble progress of physics

and touch into

a

.

.

.

[but] the inexora-

from the world we can

see

world made accessible only by

huge and expensive experimental equipment, and

on is

into a world illuminated by the intellect alone,

a

genuine cause for alarm. [When] the trend

toward increasing abstraction ical

is

turning theoret-

physics into recreational mathematics, end-

lessly

amusing to those

who can master the

technique and join the game,

[it

becomes]

ulti-

mately meaningless because the objects of mathematical manipulation are forever access of experiment

and measurement.

that] another milestone

physics?

.

attractive

.

.

on

... [Is

the road to the end of

What is the use of a theory that looks

but contains no additional power of

prediction, and tested?

bevond the

Does

makes no statement that can be

physics then

become

a branch of

aesthetics? 17

17.

David Lindley, The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified

York, 1993, pp- 18-20.

107

Theory,

New

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

A

(The?) Theory of Everything cannot be but an illusion;

and even

a profitable illusion

What, then,

are

both

illusory

amounts to

and arrogant

less

than a myth. 18

are the cerebrations

of physicists and astronomers about the universe (Big Bang, Black Holes, and so on) in our very times, facilitated by more

and more expensive instruments, radiotelescopes, supercolliders.

This confluence of theoretical physics and cosmology was,

of course, predictable, since physics both pretends and claims universality

verse

(whence

its

assumption to ascertain

how

the uni-

came about and how it evolves) whereby present cosmol-

ogy depends on

a unified theory,

on

a finally

completed under-

standing of the "laws" of physics. But the very fundament of this alleged dependence

is false.

The known and visible and measur-

able conditions of the universe are not anterior but consequent to

our existence and to our consciousness. 19 The universe is such it is

because in the center of it there exist conscious and partici-

pant people tence is

as

who

can see

it,

explore

it,

study

it.

Such an

insis-

on the centrality, and on the uniqueness, of human beings

a statement not of arrogance but of its very contrary, perhaps

1 8. Goethe to Eckermann (1827) about professors who are unwilling to change their minds even in face of contradictory evidence. " 'This is not to be wondered at,' said Goethe: such people continue in error because they are indebted to it for their existence. They would otherwise have to learn c

everything over again, and that would be very inconvenient'

'how can trine

their experiments

is false?'

prove the trudi

when

'But,' said I,

the basis of their doc-

'They do not prove the truth' said Goethe, 'nor is such the is to prove their own

intention; the only point with these professors

opinion.'" (Rathenau, circa 1921: "There are

vested interests.") 19.

To

this I

ated by

may add — for

God-believers

no

specialists; there are

only

— that the world has been cre-

God for the existence and the consciousness of human beings.

108

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

even of humility: a recognition of the inevitable limitations of

mankind.

Here is an example of cosmological nonsense by a physicist, Steven Weinberg: "The universe

no

surprise that,

among

life

planets that cannot support

on which

tion

?

large,

Consider:

and

it

we

The

inhabitants

number who do not

who

five

still

there

who

should be

it

vaster

that

number of

some

is

tiny frac-

are capable of think-

doing here.

5 ' 20

are

logic

—

is

Whereupon this?

I

'No sur-

boroughs of New York City are very

should be no surprise that,

number of its tion

life at all,

"What land of language — and

wrote: prise

and the

there are living beings

ing about the universe, as

7

very large, and

enormous number of planets

the

support only unintelligent

is

who do

like to

walk

among

the

not walk and the

at all, there is

enormous still

some

vaster

tiny frac-

are able to levitate. " 21 5

The propagation of such cosmological course also facilitated by the manufacture of

"powerful"

— and

absurdities

of

is

more and more

more and more expensive — telescopes,

the

use of which and the photographs through which, however, are ultimately dependent that

is,

on the very

act

on the

limitations of the

of seeing.

is

marks, since

it is

—

even more absurd. Con-

sider that during the last decades physicists have particles. I

eye

On the other microscopic end

of the spectrum the present situation

and more subatomic

human

"found" more

put "found" within quotation

they who — with the help of bigger and bigger

and more and more expensive atom-smashers, have produced

20. American Scholar, 21. Ibid.,

Autumn

Summer

1999.

1999.

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

— nowa-

these very particles themselves. These atom-smashers

days

named

supercolliders

tastic speeds,

and they

atomic particles

smashing atoms into smaller and smaller

supercolliders require nels

— accelerate

are

at fan-

bits.

The

enormous amounts of space for their tun-

enormously expensive. (The funding of $8.4

billion for the largest

one of them

in Texas

was abandoned

in

1993.) Their proponents tend to argue that with their help

Science

may

discover the smallest building block of the uni-

Grand Unified Theory of

verse, or thus arrive at the

But of course

their

fundamental than

main problem concerns something more

cost.

The reduction of the universe was

first

to an essential basic particle

century B.C.

—

he had no microscopes or atom-smashers

at

attempted by Democritus in the

theoretically, since

his disposal.

Physics.

fifth

Democritus gave us the name and the theory of the

atom, establishing it as the basic unit of matter, a notion that has

not changed for more than two thousand rialist:

we

he believed that the

human

soul

years.

itself

breathe) consists of nothing but atoms.

and stated that the atom was absolutely

He was a mate-

(including the air

He

also believed

indivisible.

We now

know that this is not so: during the twentieth century physicists have found

— or, more precisely, produced — other, smaller parthe nature of some of these particles?

ticles.

But what

more

exactiy: their tracks

is

scientists themselves.

They

and patterns — are produced by the

And when it comes to subatomic particles

we cannot speak of their "essence" or their "matter" but only of situations

22.

— events

About this,

and not

"facts" 22

see below, pp. 133-135.

no

— that

occur during and

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

because of our measurements of matter. Heisenberg proved this

more than seventy

years ago:

not possible to exclude the

it is

observer from what he measures.

Now consider the names physicists have given to many of these particles

— names that are often nothing but tortuous lin-

guistic inventions.

The above-cited Lindley wrote

that "the

quality of nomenclature in particle physics [has sunk] to

new

lows." Well after physicists discovered the "neutrino" (to be

we now have

distinguished from the "neutron")

"selectrons"

and "sneutrinos" and "worst of all, the whole set of quarks turns into a corresponding set of 'squarks.' initial

to,

Where

the addition of an

S doesn't work, diminutive endings have been resorted

producing a 'photino' to go with the photon, 'gluinos' for

we

gluons." Thus, after

more than

in the presence of

medieval superstition of nominalism: the

tendency to believe that once we've "got

it."

philosophy, art

That

is

five

hundred

years,

we give a name to a phenomenon which

the very opposite of realism,

— indeed,

in

are back

all

intellectual

endeavors

in

— began

to replace nominalism around the time of the Renaissance, at

the very beginning of the

Modern Age.

Near the end of the Middle Ages, "scientists"

few theologians (the

of that time) persuaded a king of France to give

them permission the Church.

a

for an experiment that

They were allowed

to

by measuring him both before and

had been forbidden by

weigh the soul of a criminal after his

hanging. As usually

happens with academics, they came up with a definite soul weighed about an ounce and a half. things, of course.

We

result: the

laugh

But remember how much suffering,

ideas about the soul

were current

in

at

such

how such

in the religious struggles

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

during the transition from the Middle Ages to the

Modern Age.

(Not to speak of the fact that the soul-weighing experiment was

somewhat

less costiy

than the supercollider. )

We ought at least may

consider the possibility that a few centuries hence people

laugh

our

of some of our

at the pretensions

gullibility at the

scientists, as well as at

end of the twentieth century and

at the

beginning of the twenty-first.

We have seen that the earlier assumption — that the physical essence of the entire universe ery of

its

original

would be

and smaller

particle

into the second assumption, the that

many physicists

are

revealed in our discov-

— has now degenerated

myth of the Unified Theory:

now inclined to believe that even if we

cannot find the smallest building block of the universe,

we

can

find a mathematical formula that will explain the entire universe: a tiiat

Theory of Everything. Indeed it is more and more

supercolliders

verse, while they

likely

may not "produce" the basic unit of the may create more subatomic situations

unithat

might be formulated mathematically. But: most mathematical formulas about atomic matters remain untested and untestable, since they are theoretical

verse

is

dated.

23

and

abstract.

The

belief that the uni-

written in the language of mathematics

"What

exactitude?"

is

is

entirely out-

there exact in mathematics except

Goethe wrote.

He was

right, as

its

own

many mathemati-

cians themselves in the twentieth century have confirmed. 24

23.

George Santayana, My Host the World,

122: "It

is

a

marvel that mathe-

matics should apply so well to the material world, [but] to apply history or ideas 24.

is

pure madness"

The mathematician Kurt Godel's

193 1 theorem

dant xo Heisenberg's 1925 Uncertainty.

112

it

to

— a kind of odd pen-

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

My argument

is

know

ings to explain or

When human

not simply that it is not given to

human be-

everything, including the universe.

beings recognize that they cannot create every-

thing and cannot see everything and cannot define everything,

human mind.

such limitations do not impoverish but enrich the

(Another example of how the "laws" of physics do not apply to

many of the functions of the human mind. ) We must recognize, too, that our concepts of matter,

and of the universe,

are models.

A model is man-made, dependent on its inventor. More important: the

model cannot, and must not, be mistaken for the world.

Without the recognition of these the

still

current

meaning of "Progress" would,

ing wrote at the

dawn of the

as

George Giss-

twentieth century, "restore barba-

rism under a mark of civilization;

and hardening

I

their hearts." Or, as

see

it

darkening men's minds

Johan Huizinga wrote in

debate with the French rationalist Julien Benda in 1933:

common enemy

is

and

limitations "Science"

his

"Our

the fearful master, the spirit of technology.

We must not underestimate its power." >: The fundament (and

the unavoidable

component) of de-

terminism, and of Objectivism, and of what Descartes established as "the scientific method,"

is

mechanical

causality.

chanical causality means three things. First: that the

must — always and everywhere — have the same that there

and that of

its effect.

everywhere precede

same causes

effects.

must be an equivalence between the

Me-

Second,

force of cause

Third: that the cause must always and

its effect.

113

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

Neither are

wisdom nor profound

needed to point out that

always lives

this

philosophic disquisitions

kind of causality does not

— indeed, not really — apply to human life

(again: to the

of the most complex organisms in the entire universe) The .

principal element, or instrument, that disrupts these causalities is

the

human mind.

It

intrudes into the structure (and also into

what happens

the sequence) of events: because

is

inseparable

from what one thinks (or from what most people think) haptrue about such sensual experiences as pain or

pens. This

is

pleasure as

much

as

it is

about money or wars, about prices on

the stock exchange or about the clashes of vast armies.

may — later — realize

that

(We

what we had thought happened was

wrong: but such an eventual recognition does not negate the existence,

and the consequences, of our earlier recognition. The

later,

chastened, recognition occurs not because of our "scien-

tific"

but because of our historical consciousness, including the

variable functions of our

A mechanical apply to the

mindless (or

bone

memory.

cause- effect relationship or equivalence

human

body, but only to the physical body in

lifeless) state.

will break, or

may

We

its

can predict at what pressure a

what amount of

a chemical injection will

stop the function of a certain organ: the precise margin, or extent, of intolerability.

tolerable"

thinks is

is,

simply

intolerable,

is

as true

But this excludes the human mind. "In-

(or, rather,

complicatedly? ) what a

what he no longer wishes to

of single persons

as

it is

tolerate.

man This

of large numbers of people.

There are people brave under torture and people weak under torture,

and

their relative

and momentarily extant bravery or

weakness has nothing to do with the calcium content of the

114

)

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

bone of their thumb pressed by the thumb-screw: one out, another won't;

When

torturers.

People

will confess,

another will stare at his convinces him-

a general reports (or rather,

pressure

self) that the

retreat.

one

on

his lines

"intolerable,"

is

will cry

he

ready to

is

who ought to know better are often unable — or,

rather, unwilling

— to recognize this, captive as their brains are

within categories of mechanical causality. In his introduction to

The History of the Seeond World military historian Liddell

stoke

up

War

(1970) the reputable British

Hart wrote: "If you allow anyone to

a boiler until the steam-pressure rises

beyond danger-

point, the real responsibility for any resultant explosion will

with you. That truth of physical science applies equally to cal

science — especially to the conduct of international

"That truth of physical science"

human cable to

(let it.

is

alone "international")

no truth when

it

lie

politi-

affairs."

comes to

affairs. It is certainly inappli-

There are umpteen examples of revolutions breaking

when the oppression of people, was had already begun to lessen — and when

out not when the pressure, strongest but

when

it

people sensed and recognized that. This was as true of 1789 as

it

was of 19 1 7 or of 1956, of the French or the Russian or the Hungarian revolutions

— as

tinet rule of a teacher

the latter has

begun to

(

it is

true of boys chafing

not before, the harsh discipline of

after,

relax)

under the mar-

.

The decisive event is not the pres-

sure itself but the lodging of that idea in the mind.

mind

is

not a passive instrument, even

strongly influenced by

what others

though

it

And

the

can and will be

think. (Again:

what hap-

not apart from what people think happens, because

pens

is

every

human thought and

every

human

act

is

than and something different from a reaction.

us

something more

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

With

this recognition there

goes the entire structure of me-

chanical causality. In Liddell Hart's boiler the lid will fly off at

and measurable point and time, when

predictable

degree of pressure occurs. But sarily

occur

at the highest

human

explosions

a

a definite

do not

neces-

point of pressure; nor are they exactly

measurable and predictable. This

is

so not because of some land

of surviving irrationality at the core of the human species. To the contrary: in the

element

human world

— the lid

the lid

thinking about

is

is

itself.

not simply a passive

And

this brings

us to

the other limitation of mechanical causality: the, seemingly

commonsense, condition its effect.

But that

is

not

intrusion of mind. Yes,

that a cause

as

must

simple as that

necessarily precede

— again because of the

we are pushed by the past;

yes,

many of

our actions, and even thoughts, are largely reactions — but only largely;

not

appositely:

entirely.

We

own

by our

are also pulled

by the future — more

sense or vision of our future. 25 Again

it

does not require great discernment to recognize that the pull of the future

is

evident in a myriad of human situations: in antic-

ipation of pleasure or of pain as well as in the effect of anticipation

when

on

a girl

the very functioning of our bodies and senses (as

who

is

fearing inadequacy

afraid of blushing reddens, or

when

a

man

becomes impotent). In other words: there

human situations in which it may be argued that what may happen tomorrow is the "cause" of what happens today are

(or of what happened yesterday)

.

Human perception often not

only occurs simultaneously with sensation but actually precedes

25.

it

(after

all,

the very act of seeing "consists," as Ortega y

About the difference between motives and purposes,

116

see pp. 59-60.

.

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

G asset put

it,

"of applying a previous image which

we have to a

present sensation") All of the foregoing does not

mean that I am merely arguing

the case of Humanism against Scientism, falling back

on the old

and venerable and sometimes even charming romantic dualism:

Humanism,

this

is

Science; both have their uses, but the

twain shall never meet.

It

would not be worth my while to write

this

is

yet another, romantic

But what

is

and reactionary, essay or book about that.

important

— and

certainly significant

—

is

that the

shortcomings of determinism have been recognized by physicists

themselves. Unfortunately,

them have refused aside the tists,

now

it is

also significant that

to think about the

most of

meaning of this (leaving

outdated condition of people, including scien-

who had refused to acknowledge it at all)

26 .

StiD, the

mean-

ing of the collapse of determinism has been expressed by

many

important physicists besides Heisenberg. Schrodinger in his 1932 Berlin lecture (even

as

he did not entirely distance himself

from determinism) wrote that

until relatively recently "it

was

simply a matter of taste or philosophic prejudice whether the preference was given to determinism or indeterminism. 26.

Nearly two centuries

me

to rephrase, less concisely,

are complicated.

after

The

Goethe

(see above, p. 108, note 18) allow

how the

reasons for such an unwillingness

They include

(a)

an unwillingness to become preoc-

cupied by anything outside of an ever narrowing specialization of search; (b) a nagging anxiety that an eventually less

re-

widening recognition of a

than absolute (and practical) meaning of their science

professional reputation; (c) that a recognition of the

may affect their

meaning of indeter-

minism would consequently impel them to rethink the validity of rationalism, of the Enlightenment, of their view of God's

within the universe

and man's function

— from which they instinctively, and consequently in-

tellectually, recoil.

117

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

former was favored by ancient custom, possibly by an a priori belief.

In favor of the latter

habit demonstrably rested

could be argued that

it

on the

actual laws

diis ancient

which we observe

functioning in our surroundings. As soon, however, as the great majority or possibly all of these laws are seen to be of a nature, they cease to provide a rational

argument

statistical

for the reten-

tion of determinism."

Georges Bernanos

(

1946)

:

"Between those

who

think that

man in the struggle against the determinism of things and those who want to make of man a thing among things, there is no possible scheme of reconciliation." Wendell Berry 1 999 It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines." civilization

is

a victory

of

ct

)

(

:

X All of the

sound and

fury, all

of the frantic assertions of

"modernity" notwithstanding, the twentieth century was largely

one of this has

intellectual

(and

artistic) stagnation.

evidence of

been the protracted reputation of "modern" masters of

thought, such as Darwin and

Marx and Freud and

four regarding themselves as scientists.

modern masters tury, in

One

1

at the

Einstein,

all

They were regarded

as

beginning of the historic twentieth cen-

914, as well as at

its

end, in 1989

— and,

except per-

haps for Marx, even now. Consider the amazing endurance of their prestige,

ago:

most of them having

lived

and flourished long

Darwin (1812-1882), Marx (1818-1883), Freud (1856-

1939), Einstein (18 78 -1955). Nothing like such a protracted

118

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

prestige existed in previous centuries.

Were we to consider who

were thought the giants of intellect and of art, then in 1890,

names:

say,

we would

say, in

get an entirely different

1820 and

list

Goethe, Chateaubriand, Beethoven around 1820

and Nietzsche, Ibsen, Wagner sixty or seventy years are signs recently that the reputations of Darwin,

later.

espe-

and almost not

briefly,

But

sence of their ideas all,

at all in the

now I am compelled to sum up, no matter my own criticism about the structure and the es-

case of Einstein.

after

is

so in the case of Marx, less so in the case of Freud, only

occasionally in the case of Darwin,

how

There

Marx, Freud,

Einstein are experiencing scattered ree valuations. This cially

of great

— for the

purposes of

this

book, which

no more than a long essay.

Darwin's reputation

is still

high and unblemished.

He

buried in Westminster Abbey (Marx and Freud are buried

where

is,

London and

in

is

else-

Einstein in Princeton). Yet Darwin's

achievement, more than that of the other three, was predictable.

Other

gists—were

— anthropologists,

his close forerunners.

keys resembled

no

scientists

men more

intellectual feat:

biologists, zoolo-

The recognition

than, say,

that

mon-

minnows was, of course,

but Darwin's achievement was the explana-

tion of the origin of species according to a scientific system. Yet that too times:

was inseparable from the

intellectual climate

of his

from an expectable reaction to the increasingly evident

— especially in a Bible-reading and Protestant naas Britain — of a strictly scriptural interpretation of

inadequacy tion such

the creation and the evolution of mankind, especially in an age

of "Progress." Progress: the whole idea and meaning and sound of the

word was

in accord

with the perhaps somewhat

119

less

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

more

dynamic but

also

Darwin (and

his colleagues

his very theory

about

"scientific"

What

Evolution.

and followers) did not see was that

human

nature and

more or

(and, around i860, a

word of

origins

its

was

a result

of the

less predictable result)

evolution of human consciousness (again: Science being part of history,

and not the other way around)

There have been several cogent (and other not so cogent) attacks

on Darwinist theory (and it

is

only a theory) during the

past 140 years: critics finding evidence here effect that the process

of Natural Selection

is

and there to the

not leakproof.

not a biologist and cannot summarize them here. tion

is

one of the

basic

What I

I

am

ques-

and near-mechanistic elements of Dar-

winism: that characteristics acquired by an individual

human

being cannot be inherited. For the debates about what is "inher-

and what

is

especially when

it

ited"

are.

Human

"acquired" often miss the issue, which

is

—

comes to human beings — what characteristics

"characteristics" are

both inherited and acquired.

There are umpteen evidences of this human potentiality (again involving,

more often, the intrusion of mind into matter) many;

more than in the zoological world (even though there, too, critics

of Darwin have found some of them) In Chapter .

1

of this

book I suggested another fundamental limitation of Darwinism, which

is

the application of Evolution ever further and further

backward, claiming that humans may have existed as early as one million years ago. That

is

a

prime example of how unreason

lies

buried at the bottom of any and every materialist interpretation

of mankind, because of

its

thesis

of matter preceding

human

mind, with mind gradually appearing: when? perhaps

in dribs

and drabs, much later.

no such

(I

happen to

120

believe that there

is

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

thing as "pre-historic" man, historicity being the fourth dimension of

human

essential fault

existence

from the beginning. ) But perhaps the

of Darwinism

is its

implicit denial that there

fundamental difference, no matter

how

physically slight, be-

tween human beings and all other living beings.

One need not be

a religious believer to struggle against this: for if there essential difference

between human beings and

creatures, then there

is

no reason

to have laws

and mores prohibiting certain human

man dignity, indeed, human lives. I now come to Karl Marx, who four prophets regret this;

acts

Marxist thought

many

times in

I

all

saw

many

is

really no

other living

and

institutions

and protecting hu-

the only one

whose reputation has sunk

have excoriated what

I

is

any

is

among

to a low.

I

the

do not

as the basic failures

my

of

of

writings during

more than fifty years. But I will not kick a man when he is down. And,

as in so

many

find the present

other examples of intellectual commerce,

contemptuous dismissal of Marx opportunistic

and fashionable and failure

of

I

superficial. It

Communism

what was happening

in Russia

all

is

due to the obvious

and elsewhere — even though

in Stalin's Russia,

and

in the institutions

and the habits of the Russian people, including millions of

Communist

Party

members, had

little

or nearly nothing to do

with Marx and with his philosophy. Again, to

list

the

Marx claimed it

is

not the place

many misconceptions and failures of that philosophy.

Marx, too, was while

this

is

a

product of

that he

his times: a materialist. (In

i860

was the Darwin of Economics.) And

to Marx's credit that he

was concerned with

the,

so often and so wrongly exploited, poor working people of his time, the

fundamental mistake of

121

his

system (besides the

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

condition that any system of history

— that

structure

is,

is

nothing but an abstract

largely, nonsensical)

was

his belief in

Eco-

nomic Man. However,

in this brief

running comment

wish to draw

I

attention but to two, perhaps seldom noticed, shortcomings of

Marx, germane

as these are to

of the

total neglect

non of his time

rising,

(as

it is

consistentiy thought

about the nation. is)

different

work of

and most

forceful political

which

in ours too),

and wrote about the

is

phenome-

nationalism.

state,

He

almost never

He did not realize that nationalism was

(and

from old-fashioned patriotism, that the very frame-

was changing,

states

ments were beginning to that

my main concern. One is Marx's

soon not

fill

that nations

up

and national

senti-

the framework of states, and

but entire nations would

rulers or ruling classes

rush at each other. As early as 19 14 Marxism failed everywhere: International Socialism melted

emotions

like a

away

in the heat of nationalist

cold pat of margarine in a hot

skillet.

By

19 14

it

was already evident that a British or a French capitalist or industrialist

his

had

at least as

German

much in common with his workers as with

or Austrian capitalist or industrialist counterparts,

and so had the respective workers.

I

am

mentioning

emphasize that nationalism, unlike socialism,

is

this to

an outcome of

sentiments and ideas rather than of economic interests; of inclinations rather than of calculations; a matter of

than of matter

Another

— whence

its

power and

central portion of the

mind

rather

attraction.

Marxian structure — indeed,

of the Marxian philosophy of history

— was his idea of the Ac-

cumulation of Capital, whereby the big fish would eat up the littie fish, especially in

the last critical stage of the capitalist phase

122

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

of history.

Had Marx only considered something more evident

(and insidious): the Accumulation of Opinions — which

again, a matter of

mind and not of

is,

matter, involving not a

manipulation of masses of monies but of masses of minds, part

and parcel of the age of popular sovereignty. lation of opinions that

made Hider the

It

was an accumu-

chancellor of Germany,

and soon the most popular and powerful leader in the history of the

German

people, just as

that governs,

if not

it is

the accumulation of opinions

decides, every election

— indeed, the history

of most democracies.

At this time the reputation of Sigmund Freud has begun to

become

nicked,

Marx.

must be

It

though not

tattered to the extent of that of

said to Freud's credit that he

totypical thinker of his times than

who

things (and extent?).

He

also

is

not a

man

saw himself as

was

less a

was Darwin, except

of his times at a scientist,

for

least to

and he

pro-

two

some

lived in the

middle of the, often neurotic, atmosphere of bourgeois Vienna.

Again

main

it is

not

thesis

my present purpose,

sum up

the

of Freud for which he has been, here and there,

criticized: for his

overwhelming emphasis on, indeed, for

his

human

life

categorical assertion of the

prime sexual motive of

(especially at the time of infancy)

bly even

or province, to

more

basic,

.

To me, two other, and proba-

shortcomings of Freudianism are (a) his

determinism; (b) his insufficient interest in the functions of conscious thinking. Like Darwin and

was, and remained, tially

primitive

alas, a

Marx and Einstein, Freud

determinist, a believer in the

— essen-

— workings of mechanical causality. For him the

same causes produced the same well as in any engine

— in

effects, in

spite of the

123

any human mind

as

myriad instances and

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

evidences of cates

how But

a

more

his various successors

and compli-

fully,

serious shortcoming of Freud

their

is

our minds and our

even governed, by

not

disturbs

any seemingly, but only seemingly, logical cause- and- effect

relationship. 27

Yes:

mind

the intrusion of

or even not at

emphasis on the subconscious.

lives are influenced,

actualities all,

and of

and

and sometimes

potentialities of which

we are

conscious. But ^consciousness

is

not necessarily ^^consciousness; and, contra Freud, the "subconscious," suggesting depth (there

emphasize depths of thought),

is

is

a

Germanic inclination to

not necessarily the

real

and

the truest substance of our minds and of our lives, against which "civilization" (Freud's "super-ego") struggles or

The problem of our

acts

must struggle.

and words and thoughts

are

problems

of our conscious minds; most of people's troubles are the results of the inclinations and the habits and the results of their conscious thinking. Perhaps especially in a world

cupations, including the are

oc-

most mechanical and primitive ones,

mental and not physical

history

where most

— we have now arrived at a stage of

where we must begin to think about thinking. And

about the actual act of thinking (which of course involves not only the act but its habits and

its

choices) Freud

tells

us nothing.

We are responsible for what we think — because we choose our thoughts. Consciousness includes

intentionality. It contains

27. In this respect it is not Freud's contemporary adversaries Alfred Adler and Carl Jung but the younger and most impressive Viktor Frankl who made the greatest and most important step ahead of Freudianism in psychiatry, the basis of Frankl's "logotherapy" being an emphasis on meaning

and aims of life — in one word, again, the pull of the future, rather than a push of the past: that is, anti-determinist in its essence.

124

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

intentionality (as, for example, there

is

more

to seeing than

meets the eye; and both sensory and non-sensory perception contain a perception of meaning).

It is increasingly

evident

again, especially because of the rapid increase of mental

physical occupations

demonstrate their

failing ability to

The recognition of the

human

attention have to

do

28 )

increasing importance of conscious

should be) a recognizable mark of die

(or, rather,

evolution of

pay attention (including

(And what does

with the "subconscious"? nothing.

is

and not

— that large numbers of people nowadays

their failure to listen).

thinking

—

consciousness. Paul Valery: "If civilized

man thinks in quite a different way from primitive man, it is due him of conscious

to the predominance in

Of

scious products.

reactions over uncon-

course the latter are indispensable, and

sometimes most valuable, substances of our thoughts, but lasting value

depends

in the

end on our consciousness."

Macaulay inveighed against people

words

"I feel that

.

.

.

":

who

is

their

Rose

constantiy use the

"The advantage that the conscious must

always have over the unconscious, the advantage, that

29

if it

be one,

perhaps the main difference between sophisticated and

primitive forms of

life."

Thinking, wrote

Owen

Barfleld, "per-

meates the whole world and indeed the whole universe."

It is

not the result of the brain "but uses that organ to develop and

28.

Simone Weil: "In the

nothing more nor Sir

less

intellectual order, the virtue

than the power of attention."

of humility

is

Two centuries earlier,

Joshua Reynolds: "A provision of endless apparatus, a busde of infinite

inquiry or research,

may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor —

the labor of thinking." 29. Paul Valery,

The Outlook for Intelligence, Princeton, 1989,

12$

p. 159.

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

advance the

intellect.

.

.

.

Only by imagination therefore can the

world be known.

And what is needed is not only that larger and

larger telescopes

and more and more

structed, but that the

aware of its

On stein to I

am

sensitive calipers be con-

human mind should become

increasingly

own creative activity." 30

December 1999 Time magazine declared Albert Ein-

31

have been the Greatest Man of the Twentieth Century. 31

not a physicist, and

I

cannot refer to experiments (there

few) that cast a doubt on Einstein's theory of

exist a

relativity.

But I must attempt to draw attention to some of the limitations

— or more precisely to his view of reality and of the universe and of man's knowledge of them — which

of Einstein's Science

is,

after

all,

stein's

what "Science" ought to be about. To begin with, Ein-

famous formula had its forerunners. In 1855 Ludwig (not

Georg) Biichner, in Kmft und Stoff ( "Force and Matter") wrote: "Force means matter and matter force"

30.

Owen

Barfield, Poetic Diction:

A

— that

is:

E = mc 2

32 .

A

Study in Meaning, London, 1928,

p. 24.

Such encomia have not been rare. George Steiner in the New Yorker "What has been the most splendid moment in the history of the ( 1994) human mind? The date of the composition of the Book of Job? The supper during which Socrates expounded the nature of love? The afternoon on which Shakespeare drafted the third and fourth acts of 'King Lear'? On which Schubert sketched the slow movement of his posthumous string quartet? Isaac Newton under that apple tree? No doubt a silly question. 31

.

:

Yet a guess, perhaps not altogether

Berne.

The

exact dates: between

papers, mailed

and prompdy published

does suggest

itself.

The

by

place:

17 and September 27, 1905. Four in the scientific journal

young examiner at the Swiss Patent Office ..." cannot refrain from adding this whimsical footnote from

derPhysik, 32. I

silly,

March

Annalen

a

Historical

Consciousness, p. 315.

"Moment

is

the product of the mass into velocity.

126

To

discuss this subject

.

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

few years before

(which was an

Einstein's 1905 thesis

intuitive

and illuminating one) signs had begun to accumulate that

cast

doubt on the Newtonian classic and static concept of matter and of the physical laws of the universe. 33 People such as Marie

Curie

(whom

Einstein dismissed) discovered a

new

element,

radium, the essence of which was not static, radiating constantly Planck's discovery of energy pulsating not regularly but in

"quanta" jumps was another break in the Newtonian system, as

he exclaimed in 1900 to his son. Einstein's important contribution in 1905

was

the relativity of simultaneity: speed dependent situations in time. stein's

But there

famous formula that

to Einstein there can be light.

34

But the speed of

on

are other questions

fully,

would

light

is

greater than the speed of

an imaginary absolute in a

varies in transparent matter,

becomes an

sage: 'Every

actuality. Also,

lead us too far into the subject Vis Viva,

moment,

is

scarcely necessary to

that can be snatched

depen-

itself is a

contrary

and we must content

moment

ourselves with mentioning the fact that no enlightened Particles. It

different

about Ein-

dent on the refrangibility of the medium; and energy potentiality that eventually

of

dare at least mention. According

I

no speed

vacuum; the speed of light

really that

is

ever

lost,

by fully

quote the well-known pas-

from academical

duties,

is

devoted to furthering the cause of the popular Chancellor of the Exchequer. (Clarendon, "History of the Great Rebellion .")

of a moving is

particle, raised to the

degree

M.

A.,

A couple consists

and combined with what

technically called a 'better half.'" [Etc., etc.; italics in the original.] In

Lewis Carroll's arch-funny The Dynamics of a Parti-Cle, (Oxford, 1 865 ) 33. And wasn't there something very bourgeois in the satisfying sense that something important has proved to be static and, therefore, safe? 34- If there relativity

can be no speed greater than the speed of

of matter? No: hence the

relativity

127

light,

hence the

of human knowledge.

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

to general belief, Einstein's theory of relativity had

little

to

do

with the actual production of nuclear fission and then of nuclear power. For the purposes of this essay this does not matter. matter are the self-imposed (that Einstein's thinking. Like

minist and remained so.

than unable

— to

infertile,

He was unwilling — unwilling, rather

accept Heisenberg's discoveries and their last thirty years

of Einstein's

life

punctuated by his occasional stumbling attempts

deny Indeterminacy,

to

conscious) limitations of

Darwin, Marx, Freud, he was a deter-

35

meaning. Consequently, the

were

is,

What

all

of them vain.

Of

course,

no man

ought to be blamed because of the decline of his mental powers or after a certain age. But what was wrong, and remained

at

wrong, was "is

Einstein's

view of reality. "Physics," he said

an attempt conceptually to grasp

Bohr: "It

is

Physics concerns

there were

"Quantum

35.

no observers

rest

pictures of nature. tic,

exists,

to observe

theory and general

own domain,

is

said Niels

to find out

what we can say about nature."

Again, Einstein: "Physical reality

its

No,

wrong to think that the task of physics

how nature is. if

reality."

in 1925,

and

it."

relativity,

it

No,

each

would

exist

even

said Schrodinger:

brilliantly successful in

on very different principles and give highly divergent

According to general

relativity,

the world

is

determinis-

the fundamental equations of nature are nonlinear, and the correct

picture of nature

is

at

bottom, geometric. According to quantum theory,

an intrinsic randomness in nature, its fundamental equations are and the correct language in which to describe nature seems to be closer to abstract algebra than to geometry." Adrian Kent, "Night thoughts of a quantum physicist," in Series A, Mathematical, Physical and there

is

linear,

Engineering p. 76:

Sciences,

"The great

London, Roval

Society, 1996, p. 77. Well

.

.

.

Also,

discoveries of 20th-century physics have sunk so deeply

into die general consciousness [? ] that

stand back and try to see

them

afresh "

128

it

now

takes an effort of will to

Not necessarily.

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

"The world tions, of

is

a construction of

our perception, of our sensa-

our memories." "Leaving out everything subjective,"

Einstein once declared, was "the supreme aim of my thought."

He

could not liberate himself from the, increasingly senseless,

subjective /objective antithesis; he could not accept the un-

avoidable element (and limitation) of personal participation.

He

God, but

often asserted his belief in

"Morality

of the highest importance

is

God." "I believe

harmony of what

orderly

God who

in Spinoza's

exists,

in a very strange

— but

for us, not for

reveals himself in the

not in a

God who

concerns

himself with the destiny and actions of human beings." So

—I

once wrote — for Einstein the humanist. Perhaps

we ought

too harsh a dismissal. But that the

title

way:

much

this

was

nonetheless to recognize

of the Greatest Man of the Twentieth Century (not

to speak of the greatest

bestowed on

a

man who,

mind of at the

times) ought not to be

all

end of the Modern Age, could

not free his mind from the axioms of Spinoza and Descartes, at the

Modern Age,

beginning of the

nearly four

hundred

years ago. 36

Yet despite the shortcomings of his philosophy Einstein deserves our respect. While

it is

a

symptom of the

intellectual

stagnation (and confusion) at the end of an age that

36. Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes,

"the objects with which geometry

is

Carbondale, P.

conceptually to grasp reality as something that

pendent of

its

Earlier

exists

p.

77: "Physics is

his youth:

"...

a first

is

an attempt

.

.

129

real-

attempt to free myself from the

Out yonder there was independendy of us human beings." .

n:

considered to be inde-

being observed. In this sense one speaks of 'physical

about

chains of the 'merely personal.'

which

1991,

concerned seems to be of no different

type from the objects of sensory perception."

ity.'"

111.,

"modern"

this

huge world,

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

statements of antiquated ideas are treated with great respect,

other

— also

— crude attempts are made to reject altogether. A repugnant and disturbing example

antiquated

"modernity"

was represented by those German savants (Lenard and Stark)

who

rejected relativity theory because of Einstein's Jewishness;

or by those American fundamentalists

who rejected Darwinism

because of their profession of a "creationism" that fused and rigid, the worst possible combination.

moving

into a barbarian age

when

is

both con-

We may

the craziest myths

may

come popular among hundreds of millions. Compared myths we must give Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein

They were men of their

be be-

to such

their due.

time; they were part of its history; they

have been part of our history too. But, near the end of the

Modern Age,

they were neither prophets nor the greatest of its

minds.

>:

One hundred and fifty years ago the German radical Feuerbach wrote: "The old world made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit." That is as good a summation of the historical philosophy of materialism as any. (Like his

contemporary and friend Ludwig Buchner, a pithy forerunner of Einstein [of sorts], Feuerbach foreran Darwin and even

Marx of Das

Kapital.)

("Men of

letters,"

wrote the Scottish

mystical poet Alexander Smith in Dreamthorp [1863] "forerun science as the

morning

years later the

star the

dawn") One hundred and

overwhelming majority of

computer designers and propagators

130

fifty

scientists as well as

see not only the

world but

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

the future of the world in accord with Feuerbach's maxim.

wrong. We, around the year 2000, are

are

(or, rather,

well ahead with the recognition that matter

They

should be)

— as we knew

it,

as

we will know it — is increasingly dependent on spirit; or that the human mind, with its main instrument, the

we know it, and

as

inner and outer eye, with its

existential limitations,

teristics

its

miraculous powers and also with

both precedes and defines the charac-

of matter.

The

materialistic

philosophy and theories of the nineteenth

century were hardly more than one chapter in the history of Science, even

though

its

consequences are

still all

around us, block-

ing our vision. Physics has ended by explaining itself,

away matter

leaving us with an ever increasing skeleton, a

empty

plex but essentially

more com-

scaffolding of abstract mathematical

formulae. Meanwhile evidences accumulate of the intrusion of

mind

into "matter."

We

need not hack our way through the

verbal jungle of "post-modern" philosophers of the twentieth century, even while

we

recognize

their,

of Objectivism. Unfortunately for so

long overdue, rejection

many of them

but a supermodern kind of Subjectivism, which

is

this

means

a very insuffi-

cient approximation of the reality that the key to the universe

is

mind, not matter.

Not

only the evolution of our medical knowledge but the

very history, the etiology (meaning: the study of the origins) of illnesses, especially

among the so-called advanced peoples of the

— sometimes palpable, but in essence deep and ever mysterious — confluences of mind and matmodern world, ter,

indicates the

indeed, of mind preceding matter.

not belong in

this small

book, with

An illustration of this can-

its

considerable limitations.

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

must

Still, I is

insist that

in itself evolutionary

the very recognition of these conditions

— not in the Darwinian sense but in the

sense of the evolution of our consciousness. illustrations cal

One of my favorite

of this involves not philosophy or physics or medi-

anthropology but the modern history of Switzerland. That

country was

among the poorest in Western Europe

in the eigh-

teenth century, mainly because of the then accepted belief that

mountains were horrid; they were hated and feared; to be avoided in every way.

economic and

And then,

as

Owen Barfield wrote, "The

of Switzerland [became] notice-

social structure

ably affected by the tourist industry and that [was] due only in part to increasing facilities of travel. It

was no

less

due to the

condition that the mountains that twentieth- century are not the

The

man

mountains that eighteenth- century man saw."

materialist explanations of the

sees

37

world and of human

nature have been — at least for some time — made easily adapt-

mass democratic age, partly because of the increasingly

able to a

primitive conditions of public discourse and speech.

must add the vested

interests

espoused not only by

scientists

scholars.

One

(whose Open British

such example Society

Or

this

we

of the materialist philosophies

but by

is

many

other writers and

the Viennese Karl R. Popper

has been praised,

among

others,

by the

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the well-known

international financier

37.

To

George Soros, who wrote

in other words: the attraction

that

Popper

and the consequent prosperity of

Switzerland was greatly due to the visions of the English Lake Poets and of air that was perilous became salubrious and health-

other romantics. (The doctors followed; mountain

and even

lethal in the eighteenth century

giving in the nineteenth.

132

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

provided the greatest intellectual influence in his surest path to intellectual perdition"

"The

life).

Popper wrote,

"the

is

abandonment of real problems for the sake of verbal problems." "Never

yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems

let

about words and their meanings.

and

are questions of fact,

What we must

take seriously

and

assertions about facts: theories

not hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they

"Much of my work One cannot in recent years has been in defense of objectivity. raise."

(And

not stated in words? )

are these

.

speak of anything a fact.

.

.

.

correspondence between a statement and

like

There seems to be no prospect of explaining the

.

correspondence of a statement to a This

.

is

fact."

38

nonsense, because "facts" do not exist by them-

selves—surely not in our minds. There

is

no such thing

an entirely independent, or isolated, or unchanging "fact"

is

"fact"

(

inseparable

and

in

from our association of

our minds

this association

ciation with a preceding fact).

Any

is

it

— which

dissociate "facts" "fact"

is

is

necessarily an asso-

"fact" that

why we must

from the way

in

is

beyond or is

be-

mean-

be very careful not to

which they

are stated. Every

not only dependent on but inseparable from our

ment of it.

Any

with another

neath our cognition, or consciousness, or perception, ingless to us

fact.

as

state-

We must never consider a "fact" apart from its mean-

ing to us or apart from the expression of

its

meaning.

And

statement means speech, and speech consists of words which are matters of meanings.

38. Karl L.

We cannot speak, or even think, about

Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, London,

1982, pp. 19, 138, 140.

133

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

anything of which the existence

is

entirely meaningless

unknown — to us. Allow me to

illustrate this

and good friend of mine. in the front

down, so

it is

He said:

no longer

"There stood a magnolia tree

my OED (that

is:

its

inseparability

it

was cut

there. Isn't that a fact?" Yes: but

word

only (1) because of the present usage of the because of

is,

through an argument with a dear

garden of 17 Ennerdale Road. In 1997

that

— that

from

its

states that "fact," deriving

associations.

"fact"; (2)

About

(1):

from the Latin "factum"

something made) replaced "feat"

in English

about

1500. (Thus before 1500 that "fact" was perhaps a "feat" but not

— thereafter, and especially during the past two hundred

a "fact" years,

we

word.)

39

have unduly extended and applied the usage of the

But more important

is

(2)

:

that "facts" are inevitably

dependent on our associations of them. "Magnolia,"

"tree,"

"front garden," "Ennerdale Road," "1997" are not merely the

packaging of the above-mentioned cel

of that particular "fact"

39. Peter

Burke,

Vico,

itself.

Oxford, 1985,

fact.

They

are part

and

par-

Once you remove "magnolia,"

p. 23:

Vico "attempted ... to reconon the basis of the

struct the beliefs of the early philosophers of Italy

etymology of certain Latin words. For example, he related the wordfatum, 'fate,' to factum, 'made,' and also xofatus est, 'he spoke,' arguing that the Italian philosophers must have thought that fate was inexorable because 'created things are God's word' and 'what is made cannot be unmade.' Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, Chicago, 1991, p. 176: "To modern faith, figures denote fact, whereas words are opinion — as if opinion were not a fact, too, and the figures often a guess." Owen Barfleld, The Rediscovery ofMeaning and Other Essays, Middletown, Conn., 1977, pp. 132-133: "Words are only themselves by being more than themselves. Perhaps the same thing is true of

human beings."

134

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

"Ennerdale Road," "1997" from the above statement, the "fact" is

reduced to the mere absence of a

longer what

Any

That

"fact" then

is

no

was. 40

recognition of the great and mysterious functions of

mind

the

it

tree.

is

from the recognition of brainpower. The

different

intellectualization of

life,

the arranging of people and their

thoughts and their experiences into abstract intellectual categories is

The intrusion of thinking into the struc-

always imperfect.

ture of events

may

be good or bad. But the conscious recogni-

tion of this intrusion cannot be but

In 1749 Julien Offroy de machine,

Man

as a

was at that time

a

Machine.

good in the long run.

Mettrie published

la

Wrong

forward step of

de

as

la

UHomme

Mettrie was, that

sorts: a reaction against re-

human nature, the appeal of which seemed to be drying up. Now, wrote de la Mettrie ligious

dogmas and

doctrines involving

view with which the majority of the French encyclopedists

(a

tended to agree),

now

that

we

about the physical world (that it is

is,

about mechanical causality),

high time to apply such a method of knowledge to the

human

being

itself:

admittedly a very complex machine, per-

haps the most complex machine theless.

And

250 years

computers or in

40.

have learned more and more

we know, but a machine none-

later this is

what people who

"Artificial Intelligence" think. 41

Two hundred

What I mean by association Goethe meant by "theory":

themselves speak for their theory.

believe in

"Let the

facts

Don't look for anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the theory. The greatest achievement would be to understand that everything factual is already its own theory." .

.

.

.

.

.

41 In the new republic of the United States "the invention of a machine or .

the

improvement of an implement

is

T3S

of more importance than a master-

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

and fifty years out of date: they think that brain is mind, which it is

not. Mechanical or artificial "brains"

together.

But

a mechanical

mind

sentence to Pascal's immortal

flat

is

may one day be cobbled

an oxymoron. Let

maxim

me add a

("the heart has reasons

which reason does not know") the mind has functions that the :

brain hardly knows. 42

may

It

be argued that "mind" and "brain" are semantic

distinctions. This

but

it is

is

not the place to refute such an argument,

the place to argue something provable and telling: that,

whether "mind" or "brain,"

its

functions

"laws" of natural science of physics.

do

not follow the

One example

of the dependence of "facts" on their associations) or a sack or any vessel difficult to stuff

more

is full, it is

things into

evidentiy it.

(a proof, too, .

When a box

more and more

But the more we know

something the easier it is to remember and to fit in new matter — as,

for instance, a

name or

a

number or

a date that

(note the very word: re-minds) of something that

know.

43

Self-Made

already

Thus de

la

Mettrie's contemporary

Benjamin Franklin,

Man and Thinker.

Note the

latter,

we

This brings us to the — again — unphysical — distinction

piece of Raphael." 42.

reminds us

difference

between Pascal and Freud, since according to die

the "heart" (or, in his terminology, the subconscious mind)

is irra-

contemporary the Austrian writer Robert Musil is closer do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too

tional. (Freud's

to Pascal:

"We

little intellect

in matters of the soul")

43. E.g., a telephone

number or

a

house number

identical to

our

birth-

date; or, say, 1776.

Here

is

another example of

how

the functioning

accord with die laws of physics: while

body than with a strong one, mind tiian with a strong one.

it is

it is

more

136

human mind does not

easier to

difficult to

wresde with wresde with

a a

weak weak

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

between knowledge and understanding. Again

I

invoke Pascal,

"We understand more than we know." This

who

said:

first,

utterly illogical. Isn't "understanding" a synthesis: a fur-

ther,

and better,

result

seems, at

of accumulated and well- digested knowl-

edge? Sometimes, yes; but in innumerable other instances, no.

A glimpse of intuitive understanding may precede, follow,

tions

knowledge — especially when

and

And when

relations of it

— whether

beings to other

it

most important

is

sense, or

relations

— of one

— or more precisely:

human

being in another.

meaning, of participant understanding the

always,

and

necessarily, incomplete.

understands (or even knows) another

With

son to despair. To the contrary: or uncertainty; or inaccuracy

it is

antiseptic,

relationships.

is

no

says to

B

Human

or

rea-

very incompleteness

—

meaning and is

not exactly

what B hears him say — mostly because of the great B's already existing associations.

the

No human being

gives both

What A 45

And

human being entirely,

this

— that

this

this partici-

completely, or certainly, or even accurately. But this

charm to human

is

an attempt

44

primacy of certainty (or of accuracy), too: because is

— which

relationships of our entire

or wholly detached, ideal of objectivity disappears.

pation

beings.

certainty.

involves the participation

at participation

human

precedes knowledge or not, understanding

more important than It

comes to the percep-

comes to such perceptions and

are, essentially, the lives

human

it

rather than

variety of

"communications,"

is what meant centuries ago. 45. This added meaning and charm exists too, in our knowledge of other languages. To understand another language well means more than a knowl-

44- This sense of participation, including physical participation,

the phrase "carnal knowledge"

137

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

unlike mechanical communications and causalities, are necessarily

incomplete, nay, inaccurate

Numbers

bers.

are static

Numbers: The Language

— unlike the relations of num-

and fixed and unchanging; of Science '

—a

life is

and the

cliche,

not. 46

tide of a

human beings. We ought Kierkegaard who wrote 150 years ago

book. They are not the language of perhaps not go as tiiat

"numbers

far as

are the negation of truth."

Eugenio Montale 130 years

come an

later:

"Today

curacy.

this

Italian

is

poet

negation has be-

intoxicating collective pseudo-truth.") It

for us to recognize that understanding accuracy.

(The

is

sufficient

of a higher order than

Measurement depends on numbers.

Its

But understanding, including imagination,

is

aim

is

ac-

immune to

measurement (and imagination may be immune even to neurological experimentation)

give

.

Numbers

are devoid of wisdom: to

them meaning, to reconcile them with life, we have to think

about them and clothe them in words. To Galileo quantities

were everything:

edge of

its

"I think that tastes, odors, colors,

and so forth,

means the understanding of the different some of its expressions, beyond their dictionary example, that the French "honneur" means something

vocabulary. It also

shades of nuances of equivalences: for slightiy different

from the English "honor," despite their common Latin "un homme honnete"). There is charm and

origins ("an honest man,"

pleasure in recognizing such things lilt

— as

it is

to relish a customary particular

of a phrase on the tongue of a lovable person.

46. I.e., a half-truth

is

not a 50 percent truth but

a 100 percent truth

and

a

compounded together. In mathematics 100 plus 100 human life it makes another kind of a 100. In our lives, that

100 percent untruth

makes 200. In is,

minds, there are soft hundreds and hard hundreds,

warm hundreds and

cold hundreds, red hundreds and green hundreds, hundreds that are

growing and hundreds ary nor fixed.

that are shrinking. In

138

sum, they

are neither station-

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

no more than mere names. They

are

sciousness." 47 (This

than

it

is

reside only in the con-

interestingly, subjectivism

is,

materialism.) Three centuries later

Simone Weil

wrote: "But in applying analysis to physics there

what legitimates

it

may be forgotten.

It is

even more

is

a risk that

only in geometry and

mechanics that algebra has significance." 48 Plato

was the

may have been the first man who invented — that is, he

first

to express

who

— the

into "qualitas"

consciously recognized and therefore needed

word

from

quality ("poiotes": Cicero translated

"qualis"),

which

is

it

something which com-

puters, with their nearly incredible capacity to manipulate quantities,

are incapable even to ascertain, let alone

"know" or "un-

What I wrote in the first paragraph of this chapter — "What kind of a man is A. ?" — rarely refers to anything but to the

derstand."

quality of his character, that in,

indeed,

it

marks

is,

to his mind. Quality

("qualifies") every

human

act

is

inherent

and thought

and expression. Computers store and transmit information. In order to do that they must classify the elements of information;

and

classification necessarily reduces, if not eliminates, qualities

and

their nuances. Classification necessitates categorization

leads to homogenization,

become dependent on

and

whereby qualities and even differences

their preconceived

and programmed

categories.

In this respect consider the extraordinarily acute and very

important distinction they are

now

in

most

made by Owen

people's minds, equality

"Confused

139

as

and uniformity

and Opinions of Galileo, New York, 1957, p. 274. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, London, 1987, p. 139.

47. Discoveries 48.

Barfield:

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

two

are

entirely different principles,

are differently motivated.

.

.

and the demands for them

Whereas the idea of equality

.

is

rooted in the strength of the superpersonal idea of justice, the

demand

for uniformity

sonal sting of envy." puters. It

is

49

on

And

rooted in the meanness of the per-

This has a meaning well beyond com-

deeply relevant to society and

Computers cannot other.

is

— which,

with each

participate, except perhaps

participation, with

listening

politics.

all

of

its

inaccuracies,

in turn, requires attention:

depends

and con-

centration. 50

The nature — and the essence — of scientific and mathematithinking requires categories; yet

cal

mind

are

human

we mean by

national characteristics

historic rather than racial in their origins

or nothing

actualities,

more than

on which

periments; but

life

— we

— which

are

mean nothing

national tendencies. Categories are

science

must absolutely depend

in

its

ex-

and history demonstrate, again and again,

the existence of potentialities (which are,

the sources of actualities). scription

and the human

governed by tendencies rather than by categories. Ex-

ample: what

less

life

may depend on

The very its

more often than

not,

quality of a historical de-

suggestion of a potentiality: the

description of a choice, or of a contingency at a certain time,

and of

a suggestion

of

its

potential consequences.

Meanwhile

Heisenberg's discoveries brought potentiality back into the causalities

of physics; and what are "polls" but attempts to

certain potentialities eventually

becoming

as-

actualities? Signifl-

The Rediscovery ofMeaning and Other Essays, p. 21 1 Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 237: "For while spirit tends towards concentration, material energy tends toward diffusion." 49. Barfield, 50.

140

,

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

cance, too,

is

both to tendency and

related

These

potentiality.

not semantic categories, not definitions but distinctions.

are

The

ability to

recognize distinctions

capacities of the art.

There

is

human mind, not

essential

to speak of the qualities of

nowadays so

the distinction,

whether

cultivated,

one of the most

is

rarely recognized or

in sexual inclinations or in art,

between

imagination and fantasy: the former, though coming from the

innermost I

tirely

self, still

respectful of reality, the latter not.

wrote "respectful of

reality"

(which of course

outside of and independent of us)

— which

is

ism and realism are not opposites. The intelligent the same time a

realist.

He

is

not en-

why

ideal-

idealist

is

at

understands the primacy of mind

over matter; but he recognizes matter, indeed he must be grateful to it

— or to God — for

century

German

soul in

A friar once said to the fifteenth-

mystic Meister Eckhart: "I wish

my body." Eckhart said:

can save

itself

once wrote: is

it.

inside

it."

only in

"I

its

own

"That would be

appointed body."

have a great awe of the

I

useless.

an

A soul

A German poet

human body, for the soul

And there are as great and grave dangers in categoriThere

is

— tendency, or belief,

in

cal idealism as there are in categorical materialism.

the

had your

— often German,

idealistic

but also Russian

determinism.

What matters

is

not what ideas do to

men but what men do to their ideas; how and when they choose them, and how and why they accommodate them to their own wishes, interests, lives, circumstances. Wrong in this sense, too, was the English

"idealist" historian

and thinker R. C. Colling-

wood (sometimes referred to as a prophet of post-modernism) who wrote that history is nothing but the history of ideas. What we must keep in mind is not only that no idea exists without the

141

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

human

who

being

thinks

it

and represents

it,

but also that no

idealism exists in the abstract, that every philosophy of idealism is

also

— and inevitably — a historical phenomenon.

There

is

a distinction

between

a

51

merely anti-materialist

ide-

alism and a realistic idealism that encompasses the coexistence

(and confluence) of matter and

spirit.

This was what Jakob

Burckhardt meant, more than 130 years ago, "if

happiness

is

to be

spiritual one: to

found

when he

our misfortunes,

in

be turned facing the past so

it

"There are ...

51. Historical Consciousness, p. 152:

inherent in the tendency to take ideas

too seriously.

Professor [Michael] Oakeshott says that 'history

is

all

can only be a

as to save the

and facing the future so

culture of former times,

said that

an

as to give

kinds of dangers

When,

for example,

the historian's experi-

ence. It is "made" by nobody save the historian: to write history is the only way of making it.' I understand what he means; but I know, too, that he is

separating the idea of history from history; or, in other words, he

is

dis-

tinguishing between the past and the reconstruction of the past in the historian's

mind which, according

deep-seated sympathy with

to him, alone

much

is 'history.'

In spite of

of the neo-idealist position,

separation of 'the past from 'history which 5

5

I

it is

my this

cannot accept." (There

is,

namely, an implicit contradiction between Oakeshott's statement and Col-

lingwood's statement to the effect that the past is still

living in the present. This

is

very true:

the past in the world and in our lives

is

is

it is

dead but "in some sense only that the presence of

something that

is

both more

widespread and deeper than the process of reconstruction which goes on in the historian's

mind."

Guardini in The Dissolution (End) of the Modem World, Wilmington, Del., 1998, pp. 79-80: Man is not "the creature that idealism

Romano

makes of him. Although idealism espouses the spiritual, it equates the human with the absolute spirit. Consequendy, he possesses no freedom in any forthright sense, nor does he truly carve his destiny into an .

initiative

person

proper to himself.

.

.

.

.

.

Man may

be

finite,

but he

is

also a real

— irreplaceable in his unique act of being — one whose dignity can-

not be supplanted, whose responsibility cannot be avoided."

142

The Question of Scientific Knowledge

example of the

cumb

spiritual in

an age which might otherwise suc-

entirely to the material."

statement

I

now add that

To

this inspiring

130 years later

it

may

and moving

only seem that

people are succumbing entirely to the material. Indeed the danger

may

arise

from elsewhere: from

spiritualisms of

many

that arises at the

kinds

end of an

false idealisms

and fake

— from a spiritual thirst or hunger age,

satisfy.

143

and that materialism cannot

FOUR

An Illustration

1959-

•

The limits of knowledge.

of objectivity. •

•

The limits

•

The limits of definitions.

The limits of mathematics. relationships.

•

•

The

•

of

inevitability

Inevitable unpredictability.

Insufficient materialism.

The limits of idealism.

•

>:

gain

— and for

th a personal account.

Readers

now may

—I

the last time

who

must begin

a chapter

1

my

have followed

think that this

book

is

chapters until

the

work of

probably idiosyncratic, philosophical thinker, rather than a torian. This

is

not

so.

books, the results of more than

fifty

are narrative histories. This writer prefer: this historian

i

.

and

this

is

clear or evident to the

illative:

this

not

my

thinker (or,

if

you

philosopher) consist within the

,

"The action or fact of illustrat-

enlightenment, once spiritual rather than purpose.

illustrious, brilliant,

It is, rather

mind; setting forth

tion, explanation, exemplification"

to

twenty-one published

"The action of making or fact of being

distinguished." This

his-

years of historical writing,

and

On the chapter title: Illustration (OED)

ing." Originally: lighting up, intellectual.

my

Nineteen of

a,

(OED

3)

:

clearly or pictorially; elucida-

— in this case, historically. This

"introducing or stating an inference."

147

or

"To make is

close

An Illustration same person.

My concerns with how to write history and with

how to think about history have never been separate but always They have been

allied.

reflected,

book of mine, no matter how

and even exemplified,

different their

in every

themes or topics

have been.

As much as I thought it possible, I have consistentiy tried to

my

apply

convictions about the hierarchy of historical factors

my perspective of human nature)

(perhaps presumptuously: a successive series of

in

my books. My conviction of the primacy of

mind over matter — that what is important is what people and believe and that the

entire material

zation of the world

largely a superstructure of that

is

think

and institutional organi-

— was

my earliest books. But of my life, my ideas about the

suggested and, here and there stated, in

when, during the fourth decade relative hierarchy

of historical factors were crystallizing

suffi-

ciently to have written the first draft of a chapter of Histori-

sometime

cal Consciousness,

thought floated up to the surface of such propositions

use of

all

tions? 2

They ought

meaning: losophari.

small

This recognition

and — this

had to

try to speak

as I could, yet

is

is

the

— examples.

Primo

vivere,

—

deinde phi-

may

My pub-

have had something to do with an, often that I

important

was not only

dis-

a writer but a teacher of

— a teacher of undergraduates, to whom I

about large and complex topics

without

relations.

a

A History of the Cold War consisted of

my career:

history

What

wrote out, on a sheet of paper, the plan for

took up the plan.

guised, blessing in

mind.

they are bereft of their applica-

book dealing with American-Russian

lishers

2.

I

if

my

to be applied and illustrated by concrete

real, historical

Then

sudden and anxious

in late 1959 a

superficiality.

148

as clearly

and

as briefly

An Illustration two

parts.

The

first

half of the

book was

a narrative survey of

American-Russian relations from 1763 to 1959. The chapters of the second half ("The

titles

of the

Two Peoples: The tendencies

Two Societies: The tendencies of their political theories"; "The Two States: The development of their national interests"; "The Two Nations: The development of of their societies"; "The

The

their national character"; "Conclusion:

movements of our times") ought book, illustrating

to

show

great historical

the structure of the

my above-mentioned sequential

historical factors. I

hierarchy of

employed the same construction, suggesting

the same division and the

same

hierarchy, in

many other books

of mine, notably in The Last European War, 1939-1941 ("Part

The Main

Events." "Part

of the peoples. politics. 4. 6.

The Main Movements.

The march of the armies.

2.

The

II.

relations of states. 5.

States in the 20 It will

th

.

The lives

The movements of

The sentiments of nations.

The convergences of thought and of

others, including

3.

1

I.

Outgrowing Democracy:

belief")

And

also in

A History of the United

Century.

be seen that

this structure: narrative

followed by analytical chapters on successive

summary

levels,

is

first,

particu-

larly applicable to large topics.

But besides

this decision to illustrate

relative hierarchy

my

beliefs

about the

of historical factors there occurred another,

perhaps even more important, event in the history of my interests

around that time.

chapter

3

My readers may recall from the previous

my recognition

of the illusions of unquestionable Ob-

3. A history of one's interests, while not separable from, is something else than an autobiography, and even than an intellectual autobiography.

149

An Illustration jectivity,

my skepticism about the unquestioned applicabil-

and

of the Scientific

ity

Method

to History. Yet

believed in

I still

the existence of two separate forms of thought, the scientific and the historical, and that

was

of the second, whereby

Two

I

did believe in the primacy

(I

riiat.

thought that

Cultures was insufficient. )

I

C

P.

Snow's

thesis

of

had, too, a vague feeling of

suspicion that certain discoveries of twentieth-century science

may

have

at least

suggested some deep-seated questions about

Scientific or Mechanically- Causal or

However,

in 1959

Mathematical Certitude.

something else happened;

thoughts began to

crystallize.

These

in

my mind certain

crystallizations

were some-

times occasional, sometimes startling; often they were helped

and

clarified

by what

I

found during

my undisciplined reading.

And that was the recognition that the very knowledge

us

— that — about the very basic elements of matter that their recogni-

say, is,

(or, let

the cognition) of physicists about subatomic events

tions about the inevitable limitations of that kind of cognition,

corresponds, and impressively, to the inevitable limitations of

our

historical

beings about

knowledge: that

human

is,

of the knowledge of

beings. There

was no longer any

human

Duality.

There was no longer any absolute separation of Mind and Matter.

The world no longer

consisted of Objects and Subjects.

There was no Science without Scientists. There was — there is — only one kind of human knowledge. Bang!

To

this I

devoted a chapter (almost entirely unremarked),

"History and Physics," in Historical Consciousness, published in 1968 (republished and extended in 1984 and 1995). Ever since that time

I

thought that

I

must extend

ISO

this chapter,

or

— more

.

An Illustration directly,

to a

more

tellingly,

commonly

— illustrate

with an example, 4 apply

it

recognizable historical person or period or

problem. Well, the time has come for

For the purposes of an an example),

I

it

Now.

this.

illustration

(and

it is

not more than

have chosen the problem of our knowledge of

Adolf Hider, for more than one reason. Some, perhaps many, things about his

life

will

be familiar to

thought (and read and written)

a fair

my

readers. I have

amount about him,

cluding The Hitler of History (1997); and though

I

in-

do not

choose to write or perhaps even read more about Hider, prob-

him have kept

lematic questions about

surfacing in

my mind

even since the completion of that book. After all, his appearance in

to

— and effect on — the last century of the Modern Age amount more than

countrymen

a historical episode

still

prefer to think)

:

(which it

what many of

is

his

was an event of enormous

historical significance. It is

to

know

we must

not only that another also

it

human

is

not given to any

being completely.

We

eschew the riineteenth-century

human

being

have seen that

ideal,

or illusion,

about the deflniteness or completeness of historical knowledge.

One

example:

we know

that

Hider

first

stated the

need for a

preliminary planning of a campaign against Russia as early as

4.

"History is philosophy, teaching by examples." Dionysius Halicarnassus

(and Bolingbroke, nearly two thousand years

ISI

later)

An Illustration 31 July 1940.

German gued

is

no

fact

from other sources.

also

separable

is

from records

a "fact," ascertainable

is

and

archives

that

which

That

Now I

in the

have

from the statement of that

why I choose my words carefully:

for Hitler

on

ar-

fact,

31 July

1940 "stated the need for" the "preliminary planning" (not yet the definitive plan) of the invasion of Russia. But there

trouble with "fact." It carries within

it

is

more

a sense of definitiveness.

And what interesting — and telling — about this "fact" that even before the German occurred on 31 July 1940 — that is

is

is,

it

on

aerial assault

Britain began,

invasion of England was

on

Hitler's declaration definite plan. It

it

31 July 1940 did

— an

(but only at

not yet amount to a have decided (and

first

sight) unreasonable, decision. In

particular time. likely that,

certainty,

He

or did; but

exacdy what was in his mind

could have thought otherwise;

it is

at

we

any

quite

while pondering this choice, he was also thinking,

at times, otherwise.

volubility

"fact."

we can know what Hitler said

cannot know, with

and

monologues.

his

He

was

a secretive

man,

in spite

of his

tendency to overwhelm his hearers with his

He himself emphasized his secretiveness on more

than one occasion. 5 This

One

not only that

obvious potentiality that sparks our

belongs to that particular

In any event,

5.

is

and sharpens our cognition about this remarkable, and

at first sight

sum,

in the works. It

also that Hitier could

is

thought) otherwise interest,

still

and when the planning for an

is

one of the reasons why those

example: Hitler to Admiral Raeder on 21

three kinds of secrecy: the

first,

May

his to

1939: "I possess

when we talk among ourselves; the second,

1)2

)

An Illustration

who stated that the evidence of Hitler's beliefs, plans, and decisions were all there mMein Kampf'are wrong. In addition to rians

his secretiveness, Hitler

many

what he

purposes, often successfully.

said,

whether

followers or by others,

But: did he believe

away by

not in the

his

recorded of

or unofficially, whether by his

officially is

What was

of course part of the historical record.

what he was saying? At

some evidence (even ried

a believer in the spoken,

We have many evidences of this. He used speech

written, word. for

was

times, yes; there

is

physical) that he seems to have been car-

own

when he

oratory

spoke. (I write "he

— another matter that we cannot state with certainty. But there are also many evidences — and crucial ones — that

seems"

he did not always believe what he was saying. There are two important instances of this. volves Jews

One

involves Russia, the other in-

— his two basic obsessions, almost

Until the very

last

days of his

life

"Jewish Bolshevism." Yet there are

he

made

all

historians say.

statements about

many evidences of his admi-

ration for Stalin, including expressions of his awareness that the latter

was anti-Semitic. Most interesting — and mysterious 6 — is

the occasional duality of his statements (and even decisions)

about Jews. In Mein

Kampf and

elsewhere he declared that his

realization of the Jewish "pestilence" crystallized in Vienna, be-

tween 1908 and 19 1 2. Yet we have evidence that

I

Hitler's fanati-

keep for myself; the third, those are problems about the future about I must keep thinking." In many other statements Hitler avowed his

which

secretiveness. 6.

See Chapter

2,

Owen

Chadwick:

"All historical events

mysterious"

TS3

remain in part

An Illustration cal

anti-Semitism crystallized

Munich,

in the late spring

(if that is

the

word) much later,

of 1919; that there

is

in

no conclusive

record of anti-Semitic statements by Hitier before that; that he

had Jewish acquaintances

in Vienna; that he,

on

occasion,

an appreciative guest in Jewish houses. 7 Even after 191 9 evidences that he was inclined to protect, or even

was

we have

make

favor-

able references to certain Jews (especiallv artists); that he

lowed Himmler to make contact with

certain Jews

al-

and allow

abroad in the middle of the war; that he appar-

their departure

entiy not only took care that there be

no written record of an

order to physically exterminate Jews after 1941 but that he

showed no

interest in

reading reports

— indeed, he refrained from looking at or

of— their

extermination.

He

knew, of course,

and he repeated occasionally, that anti-Semitism was rhetorical

and

political

learned in Vienna. But

ments and decisions?

weigh"

how much

his

did that count in his state-

How much did his own beliefs weigh in Note

these words: "Much," "count,"

"balance." These are inadequate words, because they

connote quantities.

was

powerful

and popular instrument. That he had

the balance of his actions? cc

a

A better phrasing of the question would be:

Judaeophobia

his

fundamental obsession? That

is

more

of a qualitative question, and the best this historian can say yes

is:

and no. Or: in some ways yes, in some ways no. Or: sometimes yes,

sometimes no. Or: probably we

will never

words: Hitler carried

with him into the grave. But

7.

his secret

know. In yet other

Asserted by this writer in The Hitler of History, and illustrated magisteri-

ally

by Brigitte

Hamann in Hitler's Vienna

IS4

(1998 )

An Illustration then that

is

true of every other

human being. Only consider:

of these matters, or secrets, are matters of the mind. ascertain, relying

on medical

But when

physical condition.

ler's

being, his principal interest

with

workings and

effects.

original Latin

things about Hit-

is

with the person's mind,

about that he can never say

He is engaged in a mental construction.

anything with certainty.

The

And

can

a historian thinks of another

human its

many

records,

We

all

word

for "construction"

is fictio

(not factum:

the facta serve the fictio).

We are faced with a challenge. But the capacity to think, and to mentally construct; to understand and, yes, to imagine, are the great gifts of

human

existence. Perhaps, paradoxically, the

understanding of the limits of our knowledge of other beings ity

may actually (and not only potentially)

of our knowledge

— a knowledge

enrich the qual-

that cannot be antiseptic

and distant but, on the contrary, need be personal and pant, since

it

involves a

knowledge of the

species (an understanding within

inevitably participant).

human

species

partici-

by the same

which self-knowledge

itself is

These are the conditions and the

limits

And they correspond to the very condiof scientific certitude. We now know that the

of historical knowledge. tions

and

limits

behavior of a subatomic particle that

tiiis

uncertainty

surement but to

is

is

not always predictable, and

due not to inadequate precisions of mea-

a principle that can be

demonstrated by experi-

ment. The limits of our knowledge and the conditions of our participation are unavoidable.

>:

ISS

An Illustration More than

half a century separates us

from

His history and the history of the Third Reich

mented

now

as

much

as

anything

else in the

Hitler's death.

probably docu-

is

By

twentieth century.

hundreds of books and thousands of studies and

articles

have been published about him. These published writings flect

ter

re-

the opinions and the inclinations of their authors as a mat-

of course. There

nothing

is

new

in this.

Nor

is

there any-

thing particularly novel in the authors' often selective use of

documents,

texts, statements,

evidence that sustain their views.

And in the case of Hider there may be additional considerations illustrating the illusory nature

What does Hitler?

it

mean

it

our time) to be "objective" about

The old (pre-modern) meaning of "objective" changed

through centuries; ing;

(in

of Objectivity

it

was once the opposite of its present mean-

connoted a connection between the knower or thinker

and the subject or aim of his knowing or thinking. The present usage of "objective" suggests that (a) one must not be governed

by prejudices; (b) one must recognize, and eventually record, not only Hitler's vices but also his virtues — that his "positive" as well as "negative" qualities.

very far with

this. I

on many occasions

those working for him, ical

It

wants." But:

But we do not get

He

was

also courageous, self-

steadfast, loyal to his friends

self- disciplined,

and to

and modest in his phys-

what this suggests ought not be misconstrued.

does not mean: lo and behold! Hitler was only 50 percent

bad.

8.

evidences of

myself have written that Hider "had very

considerable intellectual talents. assured,

is,

Human

nature

is

not

like that. 8

In The Hitler of History, pp. 43-44, where

i$6

I

In

Germany Hider

employed

is

my argument

—

(see

An Illustration still

— such a touchy subject that few academic historians state

something

like the

above.

More

regrettable

is

the

German

— to sepa-

inclination

— understandable,

rate Hitler

from the history of the German people during

though not

period.

(An extreme example

dictum:

"One must not speak of National

lerism")

At the same time some German

German

to relativize the

past

is

his

Professor Klaus Hildebrand's

— that

from the record of World War

justifiable

II,

is,

Socialism but of Hit-

historians have

begun

they pick and choose

mostiy by comparing the

brutal deeds of German National Socialism with those of Soviet

Communism.

(This was their fundamental argument during

the "Historikerstreit" of 1986- 1987.)

They have not

yet

come

to terms with Hitler.

Other German historians have written of the necessity of "objectifying" or "historicizing" the years 193 3- 1945, Hider,

National Socialism, the Third Reich, instead of "subjectifying" or "demonizing"

him or them — a commendable

proposition,

except that "objectivity" and "historicity" are not the same thing. 9 "Objectivity" requires the desirability of an antisep-

Chapter

3, p. 138) about a half-truth not being a 50 percent truth but a mixture of a (100 percent) truth with (a 100 percent) untruth. Consider also La Rochefoucauld: "There are evil men who would be less dangerous if

9.

they had

no good

in them."

Professor Andreas Hillgruber: in 1940 Hider's offers to Britain were

What does this mean? Another nationalist, the knowledgeable and "revisionist" historian Rainer Zitelmann: the "subjec-

"subjectively, honest."

tive" factors in the

must

condemnation of Hider ought to be dismissed. "We

The black-and-white picmean that — especially from an

see things [less simply] but scientifically.

tures are

no longer convincing." Does

—

diis

the image of Hitler must be gray? That is not what Zitelmann seems to mean. He would, I think, agree that because of the

"objective" distance

i$7

An Illustration tic

separation of the observer from the subject, a narrowing,

whereas "historicizing" requires a broadening of perspective.

The

first

means distancing yourself from the

ond attempting

from

"place" and

from

to rise above

a "time" but

To be

a person, the

we

first

a

detachment from

a

second possibly a detachment

not from a person.

is

is

one thing; to attempt to

another; and the second

exculpatory than the

can

the

"objective" about Hitier

understand him

ple:

it;

"subject," the sec-

is

not

at all

more

perhaps even the contrary. For exam-

first,

expect a Jewish historian to be "objective" about

we

Hitler? (Or, indeed: can

about someone

who

expect anyone to be "objective"

did him harm?) Perhaps not; but

we

can

expect him, or indeed anyone, to attempt to understand. But that attempt

must depend on the very

quality of his participa-

modicum of understanding his own Hider was, after all, a human being, so that

tion, including at least a self:

the sense that

some of his

characteristic inclinations

from those of the person

were not entirely different

now thinking

about him. So, instead

of the desideratum of a complete disconnection between the observer and the observed, the effort to a mental participation.

And

here enters another inevitable condition of place or time.

Ten or thirty or sixty years

coexistence of

good and

evil,

after Hitier's

death a Patagonian or a

die composition of

human

nature

likened to the coat of a zebra, with black and white stripes in

its

may

make

be

up.

But what matters is not the ratio of black stripes, not their quantity but the — and intensity — of their blackness. And in this respect no quan-

quality titative

do.

(Zitelmann: "scientific") analysis or a meticulous pointillism will

What

haps even

kind of blackness

— a question that transcends scientific or per-

artistic analysis.

IS8

An Illustration Zambian may be more "objective" about him than a German or a Jew: but will

he understand Hider better? Even more impor-

tant than the relative distance or proximity of place tive influence

of time

else:

contemporary or of an eyewitness but

the influence of history. Hider and Hider-

ism were an exceptional, but not entirely the history of

the rela-

— by which I do not only mean the "par-

ticipant" condition of a

something

is

Germany and of

the

episode in

isolable,

German

people. Hider

was exceptional, but German nationalism was not.

It

preceded

among Germans was inconceivable — it would have been impossible — without German nationalism. Of course this is not a uniquely German phenomenon. him; and his popularity

Thinking and "observation"

interfere

with the "object," not

only because of present mental conditions but also because of

not only that what happens

inseparable

from

what people think happens; what people think about

their

the past. It

is

collective or national past

is

inseparable

is

from

their thinking

about their present. Their ideas about their history shapes their politics.

10

That the very the physical object

act is

of observing and measuring

may

alter

the essence of the Uncertainty or Inde-

There are many examples of this: of so many present political and dependent on thinking back about the Second World War, and not only in Germany. On the one hand the sometimes extreme anxiety and sensitivity of the press and of some people reporting io.

ideological inclinations

right-wing appearances and manifestations,

thoughts about World so-called right-wing

all

due to

their ideas

and

War II; on the other hand the strong inclinations of

and populist

parties

and people toward "revisionist"

War II are fundamental ingredients of their political views of their country and of the world, in many instances. interpretations of World

TS9

An Illustration terminacy principle. This

phenomena, perhaps

effect

especially in

particularly involving popularity

merable examples to, acts (let

is

when

observable in

many

mass democratic

and

other

societies,

There are innu-

publicity.

the reporting of, or die publicity given

alone ideas) stimulates the sudden and multiplying

appearance of many similar

acts.

generate choices and acts

is

That impressions of popularity

nothing new; in

its

own way

it

belongs to the history of fashions. But the publicization of popularity

is

more than an impression:

repeating and repeating that

some

idea

is

popular

it

it

whereby

By

someone or something or even

may become

example — and application — thereof (often also of

generates popularity.

One

lamentable

a function

of "polls"

popular. is

news items) and then of

potentialities (the "prediction" of

their publication,

how many

people

may or will vote) may become actualities. Many of these exemplifications of a "Heisenberg effect" may be superficial. Yet they tend to confirm the limits of Objec11

tivity

and of Objectivism

in

both the physical and the non-

physical world. In the latter, of course, the applications of Inde-

terminacy are limited: the very act of observing of the object only

when

this involves, after

quantum

all,

its

alters the

quantum numbers

nature

are small. Still

elementary particles of matter. Thus

physics does not allow a completely objective descrip-

ii. This may relate to what, in some of my writings, I have called a mutation in the structure of events. The accumulation of opinions may be more important than the accumulation of capital. The prediction of opin-

ions

may create public opinion, just as the prediction of profits may lead to

a rise in the price of shares.

160

An Illustration tion of nature.

To

describe "as

it

really

desideratum of historical description description: a definition) stated

happened" — the famous (or,

more than

perhaps,

by the great German historian

Ranke more than 1 50 years ago — is an unfulfillable desideratum in the

in

The

world of matter too. "In our century," Heisenberg wrote Physicisfs Conception of Nature, "it has

become

clear that

the desired objective reality of the elementary particle

crude an oversimplification of what really happens."

is

too

is

the

12

+ A widespread

and lamentable

intellectual

tendency

one to nominalism. "Definitions" said Dr. Johnson, "are for pedants" (a in Dickens's

maxim wonderfully

Hard

Times).

To

tricks

exemplified by Gradgrind

this habit

not only

scientists

but

many kinds of political thinkers have been prone. (The categor12.

"As a

final

consequence, the natural laws formulated mathematically in

quantum theory no longer

deal with the elementary particles themselves

"We cannot we cannot describe what next. Any statement

but with our knowledge of them." In Physics and Philosophy: completely objectify the result of an observation, 'happens' between [one] observation and the

about what has

happened'

.

.

.

of the classical [Newtonian] concepts and — because of the thermodynamics and of the uncertainty relations — by its very nature incomplete with respect to the details of the atomic events involved. The demand 'to describe what happens' in the quantum-theoretical process between two successive observations is a contradiction in adjecto. " In biology, too, "it may be important for a complete understanding that the questions are asked by the species man which itself belongs to the genus of living organisms, in other words, that we already know [I would say: understand] what life is even before 'actually

is

we have defined it scientifically."

161

a statement in terms

An Illustration ical

attribution of motives,

one of the most lamentable habits of

the twentieth century, involves almost alwavs a definition of sorts.)

Many

ment of their

historians,

craft consists

that their duty

not.

Here

One

is

to

know

that the instru-

of words, should have been aware

description, not definition. Often they

were

are at least three examples.

of them

is

anism" applied to reasons.

who ought

the category of "totalitarian" or "totalitariHitler. 13 This

mistaken, at least for two

is

One is that no government, not even the worst kind of

tyranny, can be total.

the same things.

)

(A police

state

and totalitarianism

are not

Also, a feature of Hitler's Third Reich was the

continued existence of

many

traditional

German customs and

other "free" habits of everyday life (meaning here nothing more

than habits not explicitiy forbidden bv governmental rules and regulations), contributing, alas, to Hider's popularity.

More

own recognition of the limits of totalitarianism, meaning the total control of the state. He did not use the word "total." He also claimed — alas, with some substance — significant

that he

is

was

Hider's

a democratic ruler par excellence, since he

ported by the great majority of the

German

was sup-

people. Significant

of his revolutionary ideology was his often expressed disdain for the supremacy of the state (in this his philosophy was contrary

—

—

much belated This habit became near-universal after 1949, after a Western, and especially American, realization of the tyranny of Stalin, 13.

consequently putting him (and

Communism)

Hitier and National Socialism. This

in the same category as was exemplified by Hannah iVrendt's

The Origin of Totalitarianism, a thoroughly flawed book for very many two hasty chapters about Commu-

reasons (including her decision to add

nism to her anti-Nazi

thesis ... in

1

949-1 95 1 )

162

An Illustration not only to Hegel's but also to Mussolini's and state

belongs to the past, he said; the

Volk, the people,

before the state and supersede and survive

it.

The

Stalin's).

The

state

came is

not

much more than a rigid and constricting framework, a "Zwangsform"; Reich,

it is is

the Volk that matter; and Hitler's state, the Third

an instrument of the Volk. 14

This was one of the essential differences between Hider and Mussolini, state

who

but the

declared: "It

state that

is

not the people

who make

the

makes the people." Campaigning against

the individualism of Italians, Mussolini tried to institutionalize

and enforce the submission of the individual to the

state.

He,

unlike Hitler, occasionally used "totalitarian" as an adjective (as a matter of fact,

it

may be Mussolini who

early as 1926) , even

though his

rather than totalitarian.

why the tion of

That

is

regime was authoritarian

one — but only one — reason

frequent (and originally Communist- inspired) defini-

Hider and Hitlerism

work by

Italian

invented the word, as

the

German

is

wrong.

A

massive

historian Ernst Nolte in the 1960s, Three

Faces of Fascism, categorized

14. Hitler in

as "Fascist"

and defined diree right-wing move-

Munich, November 1934: "In Germany bayonets do not I have not been imposed by anyone upon this people.

terrorize people

From

this

people

I

people

return.

I

have grown up, in the people

I

have remained, to the

My pride is that I know no statesman in the world who

with greater right that

I

can say that he

is

representative of the people."

Salzburg, April 1938: "In the beginning was the Volk, and only then the Reich."

Nuremberg,

5

came

September 1934: "Foreigners may say that the

No! We are the State! We follow the orders of no earthly power but those of God who created the German people! On us depends

state created us.

the state!"

An Illustration ments of the twentieth century: the French Action Francaise, Mussolini's Italian Fascism, and Hitler's National Socialism.

Nolte was wrong: the Action Francaise had been a pre-Fascist

and Hitler and Hiderism But

it is

phenomenon. 15

a post-Fascist

not only German historians

who have not come to

terms with Hider. The continuing and protracted use rather,

(or,

misuse) of the "fascist" category has been the outcome

of the mental, or perhaps psychic, discomfort of intellectuals

having to face the condition that Hider and National Social-

ism were a phenomenon to which such categories tionary" or "right-wing" did not properly apply

as "reac-

— whence their

adoption of the adjective and the categorical definition of Hitler

and the Third Reich

our basic

as "Fascist."

To

carry this even further:

political definitions, originating in

France after the

French Revolution, "Right" and "Left," in Hider's case do.

Was

will

not

he, for example, to the "Right" or to the "Left" of

Churchill?

(Or of the Pope?) In

his case,

none of these

defini-

and

defini-

tions will do. 16

Of tions.

course science does depend

on

categories

But we know — or ought to know — that

their limitations.

definitions have

For one thing, they consist of and depend on

and are expressed by words: and words

are necessarily imprecise

During the following thirty-five years Nolte, one of the two principal historians on the "Right" side of the Historikerstreit, became an acceptable German historian of "revisionism," writing questionable books 15.

German

some of the achievements of the Third Reich. The English wag who, upon the news of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin said that "All the Isms are Wasms" (one of my favorite phrases) was praising 16.

rather than wrong.

164

pact,

right

An Illustration and malleable — which their

meaning.

applicability.

qualifies

(and sometimes even adds to)

We cannot define the unavoidable limits of their

"This

is

true even of the simplest and

concepts like 'existence and 'space and time.'

most general

5

'position'

and

5

'velocity

clearly defined concepts

.

The words .

.

.

within the mathematical framework of actually they

were not well defined,

seen from the relations of Uncertainty.

is

.

of an electron, for instance, seemed

Newtonian mechanics. But as

.

One may

say that

regarding their position in Newtonian mechanics they were well defined, but in their relation to nature they were not." 17

Here again our recognition of the

limitations of definitions in

the historical and the scientific universe (or, rather, in our historical

and

scientific

knowledge of the world) coincide and

correspond.

I

have emphasized Hitier's popularity, which was extraordi-

nary in

its

nature and in

its

extent. It

popularity of most other dictators.

not a dictator

(

was not comparable to the

He

often said that he was

and there were some reasons for him to make

such an assertion); more important, he knew (and

we know,

or ought to know) that without his popularity he could not

have achieved anything. But Hitler's popularity was not a simple matter.

Numbers 17.

are insufficient to define or explain

Heisenberg, quoted in Historical Consciousness,

165

p.

281.

it.

We

pos-

An Illustration sess a

few

statistics

Himmler's

secret police

within their limits, ful

about the popularity of the Hitler regime.

took polls during the war; they

telling.

But only within

are,

limits. If, after care-

and successful research, including hitherto unavailable

evi-

dence, a historian or a political scientist were to "prove" that, at a certain time, only

20 percent of the

tants of a particular region, or

herents of Hitier, this does not

German people

(or inhabi-

town) were unquestioning ad-

mean

were

that 80 percent

potential (let alone actual) opponents. Conversely,

his

such a

if

study would "prove" that only 10 percent of Germans were

opposed to Hider and /or to National Socialism,

mean

that 90 percent

is

too.

But

it

does not

were unquestioning adherents. Of course

applicable to other political

this

this

phenomena

in other places

should be sufficient for us to understand that neither

material or electoral or opinion statistics are adequate for the

understanding of Hitier's impact on the

German people.

There are relationships that can be expressed,

illustrated,

or

demonstrated by numbers. But relationships always involve

something more than matters of quantity — surely when we think or talk about the relations of human beings. However,

now know

we

that mathematics itself necessarily consists of rela-

tionships—whence the

absolute truthfulness of

mathematics

has been proved an illusion. At the beginning of the

Age, Galileo could

say:

"The book of nature

is

Modern

written in the

language of mathematics," with which his contemporary Descartes

wholly agreed. Other seventeenth-century contempo-

raries:

pleased

Hobbes: Geometry

God

"is

the only science that

hitherto to bestow

166

it

hath

upon mankind." Spinoza:

"If

An Illustration mathematics did not Einstein

still

man would not know what truth is." three centuries later. No: if man did

exist,

thought

so,

not exist, there would be no mathematics. In 193 1 the absoluteness of mathematical "truth"

was disproved by GodePs famous

theorem, according to which mathematics, too,

on

its

own preconceptions.

is

dependent

18

A few years before Godel physicists began to ask much the same question. Bohr and Heisenberg asked whether

it

was true

that only such experimental formulations of nature can arise as

can be expressed through mathematical formalism. Mathematics

provides most important and telling formulations of certain

material realities; but mathematics does not ities

completely or indefinitely.

Quantum

that certain mathematical statements

preempt those

physics also found

depend on the sequential

time element in their measurement: that P times the equivalent of

Q

is

not always

Q times P when, for example, P means mo-

mentum and Q position. 19

In other words: the order in which

certain mathematical (and physical) operations are

may

real-

affect their results;

performed

they are not independent of

human

concepts of time and perhaps even of purpose.

18.

A century before Godel, Goethe: "What

is

exact in mathematics except

own exactitude?" 19. It may be needless to argue that this is applicable to human or historic conditions, and not only to measurements of "popularity." One admittedly its

crude example: In 1940 Germany's victory over France was not equivalent its effects or in its significance. The latter was and more enduring. Why? because history, and life, move forward, whereas mathematics is necessarily static. We perceive the relative

to France's defeat, either in greater,

"greatness," the "size" of events,

from their consequences.

167

An Illustration This

is

one reason to prefer the term "event" to "fact"

in

history as well as in physics.

I

now

have

ship of the

But there

is

written

enough about the

inevitable relation-

knower with the known, involving

participation.

of course another kind of inevitable relationship,

we

inherent also in the recognition that

perceive (let alone un-

derstand) "facts" through their associations. In Hitler's case

both our interest in and our judgment of him are not only

dependent on but generated by our comparison of Hider and of the Third Reich with other

(though

as

we

able: in at least itarian,"

We

modern

"totalitarian" dictatorships

have seen above, these terms

some ways

may

be question-

the Third Reich was less than "total-

and Hider was both more and less than

a dictator)

have seen that an increasing number of "conservative"

historians, as well as other writers, especially in

Germany and

Austria but also elsewhere, have produced works comparing Hitler with Stalin, and the evils of National Socialism with the evils

of

Communism. They compare

and the extents of

their crimes

statistics

— with

of their victims

the purpose, in almost

every case, of qualifying and reducing, at least implicidy, the

uniqueness of the evidence of the

evil

record of National Social-

ism and of course of Hider. Indeed, some of these historians have gone beyond comparing. They

Communism

relate Stalin to

Hider, and

to National Socialism, by arguing the priority of

the former: that Hider and National Socialism were an expectable,

and probably inevitable, reaction to the crimes committed

168

An Illustration by Lenin and argue or to

Stalin

and Communism. 20 This

is

not the place to

what Hitler and National Socialism

illustrate that

and many of the German people (among the most educated peoples in the world) wrought in the center of Europe was

something

else

and something more ominous than what

Stalin

(and, before him, Lenin) had brought about in a backward country. lin's

And

while history does not repeat

deeds (and his reasoning) were

itself,

at least

many of Sta-

comparable to

those of Ivan the Terrible, while the uniqueness of Hitler should

be apparent, too, from the condition that he was (and

comparable to any German leader in the

But there

is

is)

not

past.

another consideration of the relationship of

Hitler's effects that has,

by and

large,

not received the attention

may deserve. This is that the influence of Hitler (and National Socialism) on the development of Stalin's mind (and of Russian Communism) and on the development of Mussolini's mind (and of Italian Fascism) was much more than any of the reverse it

influences. Yes, Mussolini

and Stalin preceded the

rule of Hitler,

and both of them had some influence on Hider himself; but

when we

20.

consider the historical development of the three dic-

One of their, regrettably accumulating, arguments is their employment

of "evidence" that Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941 was a reaction to Stalin's plans to attack

Germany

in 1941-

Not only

is

this

untrue but the

what had happened then: not because Stalin was anything like a pacifist but because at the time he had acted like a coward. He tried in every way to convince Hider that he wanted to maintain (indeed, to very opposite

is

intensify) their

good

relations,

sian defense measures

up

even

at the cost

German provocations, even in view of the massive evidence of German forces gathering across die frontier and preparing to attack.

response to vast

of forbidding serious Rus-

to the last minute, withholding any Russian

169

An Illustration tatorships,

and of their ideas, Hider and National Socialism had

an increasing and evident influence and impact on the other two.

I

wrote before that

as a "Fascist";

adjective

it

it is

an egregious error to define Hider

would be even more nonsensical

"Communist"

to apply the

to either Mussolini or to Hitler. But

National Socialism, nationalist socialism, was applicable both to Mussolini

and Stalin,

went on. For all kinds

especially as time

of reasons, and in different circumstances, both Mussolini and Stalin

became increasingly anti-Semitic and more and more

nationalist

— this

phenomenon

is

especially

illustrates

noteworthy

many

in Stalin's case. This

things: the strength

and die

traction of National Socialism; the impact of Hitler

many successes; and — in 1930s and early 1940s

at-

and of his

addition to the historical forces of the

— the universal human tendency of peo-

ple to adjust their ideas to circumstances, rather than adjusting

circumstances to their ideas (the latter being

much more

rare

and much less successful than the former) The character of men .

as well as

of nations and movements

judgeable — from their relations

and

is

most apparent — and

effects

on other men and

nations and movements. In sum, relationships (and their per-

ception) are more than secondary elements of the development, indeed, of the essence of events.

Much of this we now know,

when it comes to physical "facts" (or, rather, as I wrote before: events). Modern physics now admits that important factors may not have clear and precise definitions; on the other hand, these factors may be clearly too,

defined with regard to their connections. These relationships are thus

not of secondary but of primary importance. Just

"fact" can stand alone, apart

from

170

its

as

no

associations with other

An Illustration "facts,"

modern

physics

now

tends to divide the world not so

much into different groups of objects as into different groups of connections. In mathematics, too,

it is

being increasingly recog-

nized that the functions of connections

than the

static definitions

may be more important

of "factors." Euclid said that a point

is

something which has no parts and which occupies no space. At the height of positivism, and during the last phase of unquestionable classical physics

believed that an even

— say,

more

exact definitions of "parts" as well as physicists

around 1890 — it was generally

perfect statement

would

consist in

and of "space." But mathematicians

have since learned that

this tinkering

with

definitions tends to degenerate into a useless semantic nominal-

ism.

Consequendy they no longer bother

nitions of "points" stead, to the line

and

"lines."

to find absolute defi-

Their interest

is

directed, in-

axiom that two points can always be connected by a

— thus to the relationships of lines and points and connec-

tions.

X History does not repeat

be repeatable; history uniqueness marks regularity.

Much

is

tiality,

likely to

existence, science

so.

and

be;

must depend on

what

is

not

we

can,

though only within

likely to

happen, rather than

In history

happen. This, in other words, means poten-

rather than actuality; or,

actuality

must not

true in these juxtapositions, but not en-

limits, at least predict is

unpredictable, science

human

tirely—or no longer

what

is

experiments must

itself, scientific

also the reverse.

more exactiy,

That

171

potentiality within

potentiality, or probability,

An Illustration

now involves must turn

scientific

at the

knowledge too

is

something to which

end of this subchapter; but before that

I

I

must

again illustrate the existence of unpredictability with the example of Hitler.

Unpredictable: unlikely.

The two terms

are not the same;

but both involve mental functions, probable or improbable anticipations of expectations. This does not

wise formula ("We

live

ward"), because our thinking of

ward —

is

we

forward but

inevitably dependent

deny Kierkegaard's

can only think back-

possibilities

— looking

for-

on circumstances, indeed on our

knowledge and /or understanding of the

past. Well, the entire

Hider phenomenon, producing and influencing much of the history of the twentieth century (and not only in

Europe), meaning the appearance of nationalism, a Third Force between

a

Germany and

dynamic and powerful

Communism and

ism, or Russia and America, etc., etc.,

was

and even more unpredictable was the

Capital-

rather unpredictable;

possibility of

an obscure

and lonely and classless and foreign-born demagogue becoming the chancellor of Germany, assisted by the conservative estab-

lishment of the

two major that

German

reasons.

Hider wanted

nation. Yet this happened, for at least

One was it

the operation of Hider's free will,

to happen;

what men want to be

even more important than what they "are";

Bonaparte or

Stalin,

believed that

it

of the

was

Hider was not

his task

like

is

often

Alexander or

a native-born leader, but he

(and destiny) to become the leader

German people. The other, allied, reason was his recogni-

tion of the potential (rather than actual) appeal of the ideas he

represented and, even more, expressed.

power

Still:

predictable, or likely? Before 1932

172

was Hider's it

rise

to

was not; but he

An Illustration surely believed that

it

was.

Nor was

Germany would lose the war: winning

it

in 1940

inevitable that he

and

his

and 1 941 he came close to

it.

However:

my

argument

is

not an emphasis on the will to

power. The other, and perhaps more interesting, problem or question ple,

is

this:

were

Hitler's actions predictable?

They

including historians, think so even now.

without some reason — on Mein

Kampf

Many

Hider's

rely

own

peo-

— not

proposi-

tion of his ideological world- view, including his concrete propositions about Russia, France, England, Italy, Jews,

which he

then seems to have accordingly and rigidly and ideologically followed and put into practice throughout his stunning career.

But

this

is

stances in

too simple. Apart from the

— not

infrequent

— in-

which Hider himself said that Mein Kampf ought not

to be taken verbatim or even too seriously, the claim that be-

cause of Mein

Kampf many

predictable

an imprecise exaggeration

is

of Hitler's choices of actions were

— as

is

widespread argument that the Depression, the

nomic crisis likely

had

in

1930- 1932, made Hider's

rise

to

but unavoidable. Again, apart from the

virtually

least to

no economic program

my mind,

sion and

in

Germany

unemployment

in the

still

German

eco-

power not only fact that

Hider

1930-1932 (which,

was an advantage, not

unemployment

depression and

in

the, alas,

at

a handicap), depres-

led to a Hitler, while

United States led to a

Roosevelt. Adolf Hider, despite his often repetitious and dog-

matic declarations, was not predictable. Despite

Communist ideology in in

1

1939, he

made

a pact

all

with

of his

Stalin.

anti-

Then

94 1 he invaded Russia — not simply because of the princi-

ples of

anti-Communism or of "Lebensraum," proposed

in de-

An Illustration tail

in Mein

Kampf; but mainly because, not unlike Napoleon,

he convinced himself that an independent or neutral Russia was England's

last

hope on the Continent. There

tween Napoleon and Hider, the

first

a

are parallels be-

Corsican-born French-

man, the second an Austrian-born German, and both their invasion of Russia almost

they were very different

starting

on die same day of the year;

human

beings. 21

And

still,

the same Hider

who declared and preached and objurgated about race and Jews throughout his career would say often during the late 1930s and early 1940s that race

was

a "myth,"

and

(in 1945) that Jews, too,

are not a physical but a "spiritual" race. Like the

other

human

ness; his

being, Hider's

of every

was marked by unpredictable-

mind took unlikely turns on occasion.

Hider's

life

demonstrates the exceptional potentialities of

willpower; but the is

life

life

human capacity (and divine gift)

of free will

not why unpredictability must be recognized as valid through-

out the world, including our very knowledge of physical matter. It

must be recognized mainly because of the

ical causality.

We

limits

of mechan-

have seen that the direct and mechanical

tribution of causes to effects

is

unhistorical

and unreal. This has

now become demonstrable in the very world of physics. tainty figures

among

More concretely: particle

is

atom

is

not an actuality

An accurate description of an elementary

impossible — on one level because of the dependence

21 Also: Napoleon, .

who actually occupied Moscow for a few weeks, was

defeated by the Russian winter, whereas Hider,

reach

Uncer-

the "causes" of every subatomic event.

the temperature of an

but only a "potentia."

at-

Moscow,

whose army could not

survived the cruel Russian winter; as he said in April 1942:

"We have mastered

a destiny

which broke another man 130 years

174

ago."

An Illustration of every description on words. But that

(meaning:

"exists"

function, that

"chance";

it is

all:

a particle

or a tendency for being.

And

not merely the addition of the element of

is

also

something different from mathematical

mulations of probabilities. Probability particular event at a particular

is

for-

never definable as a

moment. According

berg, "It represents a tendency of events events."

not

can be observed) only as a probability

as a possibility

is,

this probability

it

is

to Heisen-

and our knowledge of

22

"Quantification" became a fad within the historical profession, gaining respectability in the 1960s. This

describe

why and how many of its

is

not the place to

applications are insufficient,

and even misleading — except perhaps to say that while the very purpose of historical "quantification"

is,

or claims to be, to es-

tablish "facts" that are verifiable, the principal historical statistics quantification

very questionable

The tics

22.

employs

resides in their often

verifiability.

history of Hitier illustrates

may be

problem of the

insufficient. Statistics

how

even

verifiable statis-

cannot explain the extraordi-

Also Louis Victor de Broglie in 1939: "The notions of causality and of had to undergo a fresh scrutiny, and it seems certain that

individuality have this

will

major crisis, affecting the guiding principles of our physical concepts be the source of philosophical consequences which cannot be yet

Twenty years later this historian was attempting to some of them; and another forty years later — at the very end of Modern Age — this book represents a, necessarily, imperfect, attempt

clearly perceived."

recognize the to

summarize

their

meaning.

T7S

An Illustration nary achievements of the

economy and

of the Third Reich, the swift

soon

rise

the productive capacity

of German national prosperity

after 1933, the astonishing quantity

armaments

thereafter,

and the no

and functioning of the

till

and of the food

when

the very end, even

thousands of tons of bombs were raining on their towns.

their

extraordinary prevalence

industrial production

German people

available to the

less

and quality of

and

cities

Armed as they were with statistics (and not often inexact

ones) throughout the war, the economic experts of the Allies

were stunned by

mone

this condition.

Weil understood

this

Yet the religious thinker Si-

phenomenon

at once.

During the

war, in 1942, she wrote: "If Hitler despises economy,

it is

bly not simply because he understands nothing about

because he knows

(it is

one of the notions of simple

probaIt is

it.

common

sense that he clearly possesses and that can be called inspired since such ideas are so

independent It

seems to

reality

me

little

and

as a result

difficult to

ceives clearly

.

.

a

understood) that economy is not an does not

have laws.

.

.

.

deny that Hitier conceives, and con-

kind of physics of

possesses an exact notion of the Hitier's extraordinary

really

human

matter.

power of force."

.

.

.

He

23

power, his extraordinary

rise, his ex-

traordinary successes, his extraordinary appeal to his people 23. 1

have quoted

this often.

"Was

Sebastian Haffner:

Also the excellent German historical essayist

the

German economic

miracle [and

it

was

a

miracle] of the Thirties really Hitler's achievement? In spite of all conceivable objections

one

entirely true that

no

.

.

.

will

probably have to reply in the affirmative.

economic matters, prior to 1933, had played

part in his political thinking." The Meaning of Hitler,

pp. 28-29.

176

It is

virtually

New York,

1979,

An Illustration were largely due to matter.

There

is,

at first sight, a

his self-discipline, his strength

his conviction

of the primacy of mind over

paradox here. His character, and

were strong. Yet the fundamental source of

was hatred. Compared to the power of his hatred,

even his love of the national leader

German people — the

— amounted to less.

and physical

results in physical inclina-

matter of mind.

acts, it is essentially a

while hatred amounts to a moral weakness, often,

and

at least in the short run, a

Hider's people

— including

leaders,

and most of

hatreds.

They were,

it

can be,

And alas,

of his National Socialist

— did

instead, inspired

not

really share

such

by a kind of confidence,

national and ideological, that led to their adversaries, opponents, enemies, victims talities.

24

source of strength.

many

his generals

purpose of a

In this he was quite unlike

Napoleon. Even though hatred often tions

living

contempt

— whence

for their

their bru-

That confidence was the main source of the extraordi-

nary successes and achievements of the Third Reich, including a

world war during which fewer than eighty million Germans prevailed over the continent of Europe

and fought for nearly six

years, against the

overwhelming power of hundreds of millions

of their enemies

who

end. is

could not conquer them until the very

No material or statistical explanation for this will do. Nor

there any material explanation for Hider's popularity

his

among

people before the war. Soon after he had become Chancel-

24.

Franz Stangl, the commander of the Treblinka death camp, said

the

war to

a journalist

that that time in Poland taught

thing

human

has

its

after

who asked him before his execution: "Do you think

origins in

you anything?"

Stangl: "Yes.

human weakness."

177

That every-

An Illustration the startling economic

lor,

oration of

improvement and the sudden evap-

unemployment were consequences

as well as causes

of his popularity. Still:

extraordinary as Hitier's career was, he and his Ger-

many were

eventually conquered by the material (and numeri-

cal) superiority

of their opponents. (That, too, was not merely

a question of matter;

it

was inseparable from the conviction of

their otherwise very disparate leaders

and of their peoples that

they must extirpate Hitler and conquer the Third Reich en-

We must understand that the frequent primacy of mind

tirely.)

over matter does not mean their separation; rather, the contrary It is

not only that Christians (and

what many of the

greatest

and most

idealists)

ascetic Christian saints

Christian thinkers have asserted: that

God

must understand

we must

and

be grateful to

not only for having created us with our minds, but for

having created matter, because matter in matter;

render

it is

it

only

human

poisonous or

understanding Galileo and

interference

evil.

that, three

Newton, the

)

or

itself is

good. (Yes,

all

and participation that can

What belongs here is the necessary more

centuries after Descartes

inseparability of matter

and

and mind has

been demonstrated — and ought so to be recognized — by physics.

Matter is transmutable: the formerly categorical distinctions

between animate and inanimate, between organic and inorganic matter are no longer absolute, just as the partition of the world into objects

and subjects no longer holds, and just

the object of research

is

no longer nature itself but our investiga-

tion of nature. This does not

on our

observations. It

as in physics

mean

means

that physical events depend

that our cognition of their exis-

178

An Illustration tence, rather than

our "observation,"

is

an inevitable element; 25

that the science of matter deals not "only" with matter but with

man

the knowledge of matter as scientific

tions.

thinks and describes

method must be conscious of its own, human

The

materialist

misleading, because

view of the world

it fails

is

both

it.

The

limita-

insufficient

and

to take into account the inevitable

intrusion of the mind.

The very recognition of this

has been a historical develop-

ment:

The mechanics of Newton and

all

the other

parts of classical physics constructed after

model

started out

from the assumption

say; tacitly accepted as

its

would

[I

an assumption] that one

can describe the world without speaking about

God or ourselves. This possibility seemed almost a necessary condition for natural science in

general.

But

some

at this

point this situation changed to

extent through

cannot disregard the tion] that science

is

quantum physics. fact [I

would

.

.

.

We

say: condi-

formed by men. Natural

sci-

ence does not simply describe and explain nature; it is

a part of this interplay

ourselves;

it

between nature and

describes nature as exposed to our

method of questioning. This was 25.

Goethe: "The term 'observation'

is

179

in

a possibility of

some ways too

passive."

An Illustration which Descartes could not have thought but

it

[ ? ]

26

makes the sharp separation between the

world and the

I

impossible.

If one follows the great difficulty

eminent

scientists like Einstein

had

which even

in

under-

standing and accepting the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, one can trace the roots of this difficulty to the Cartesian partition.

This partition has penetrated deeply into the hu-

man

[I

would

say Western]

mind during the

three centuries following Descartes take a long time for different attitude

it

and

will

it

to be replaced by a really

toward the problem of reality. 27

[See Correspondences, pp. 186-187.]

+ There

is

another paradox latent in the example of Hitier.

His mind gave him confidence, and successes; but his mind contributed, and caused, his downfall. There

and paradoxical, example of this. all

evidences

— in 1938

is

one

also

particular,

He believed — against almost

(which was

his

triumphant year) that he

would not live long (he was less than fifty then) and that conse;

quently he had to speed up the timetable of Germany's conquests.

26.

He

Why not?

convinced himself— wrongly— that time (because Pascal did. Cassirer: "There

is

in the Cartesian

of distrust, almost an antipathy, to history." 27. Heisenberg,

quoted

in Historical Consciousness, p. 286.

180

mind

a kind

An Illustration of the Western powers' rearmament) was working against him

and

against his

Germany, which was not

ning in 1938, he thought that he was actually more was. Yet "actually," in this context,

is

Begin-

at all the case. ill

than he

an imprecise word. His

increasingly frequent gastrointestinal ailments were, to use a

modern and not very

satisfactory

word,

at least to

"psychosomatic." Their etiology, as indeed

is

had

force of character

its

extent

the etiology of

many such ailments, was existential, not merely this was bound to be an exaggerated condition

man whose

some

— and

physical in the

life

of a

source in his belief in the

power of the mind and of the will. Perhaps

we may

detect God's

this paradoxical condition: this

exemplified) the primacy of

over

now

flesh,

catastrophe

started to

hand

in the

development of

man, who so often spoke of ( and

mind over

and of

matter,

move downhill and

spirit

eventually into

— because of the developing state of his mind, which

affected his body,

whose symptoms, in turn, impressed him with

the deep inner sense that he had not long to

mind over matter

raised

him

to the highest

His

belief in

power on

a conti-

live.

nent; and this belief was to destroy him in the end.

However, more important and more purposes,

more evident than

the failure of his idealism.

sufficient

ing the material

unto

He

itself

and, for our

the etiology of Hitler's illnesses

thought that the power of the ism was

telling,

was

spirit

a deterministic idealist.

is

He

of German National Social-

to defy

much of the world,

power of his enemies.

includ-

He was not alone in this.

There were two of his best generals, Alfred Jodl (on 7 November 1943):

"We

world history

will

will

win because we must win,

have lost

its

181

meaning."

And

for otherwise

Field Marshal

An Illustration Walther Model on 29 March 1945 (note the date!): "In our struggle for the ideals of National Socialism ...

matical certainty

[

!

]

we will win,

that

as

long

as

it is

our

a mathe-

beliefs

and

remain unbroken." Determinism, whether materialist or

will

idealist,

whether mechanical or spiritual,

always wrong.

is

And in this respect Hitier was not an isolated phenomenon. After 1870 in Europe there appeared a philosophical and ideological reaction against the materialistic

and positivistic thinking

of the nineteenth century. The main proponents and representatives

of this reaction were German.

It

included a reaction against

the French Enlightenment and also against the French Revolution of 1 789. This antimaterialist reaction in Europe,

1875 to

1

94i

— more

from about

accurately, this post-materialist and, yes,

post-modern movement

in

European

intellectual history

— can-

not be properly assayed without considering the history of nations at the

same time. In 187 1 Ernest Renan

that the victory of the

the

was

Germans

German schoolmaster. largely a defeat of

at

said to the French

Sedan had been the victory of

In 1945 the defeat of the Third Reich

German extreme

idealism

German national fanaticism.

cisely:

of idealistic

Peguy

said, the intrusion

of politics and of

its

— more

pre-

It is true that, as

rhetoric leads to

the degeneration of truth and of thought. But

it is

precisely

because of this pervasiveness of political power that the history

of ideas cannot be treated

as a specific

and

isolated "field."

We

have seen that scientists, too, are not at all immune to the prevailing political and philosophical ideas of their times. cal

A philosophi-

skepticism of causality, part and parcel of their reaction

against the rationalism of the French Enlightenment, existed

among German thinkers in the early

182

1920s. It preceded Heisen-

An Illustration

own

berg's

discovery of the limits of mechanical causality. This

mean

does not

that Heisenberg's discovery (not to speak of

its

experimental evidences ) was a predictable result of a "Zeitgeist."

Our

ideas are the results of our choices. Yes, our choices are

influenced (and sometimes even produced) by our times and by the world around us; but the consequences of our ideas,

do with our

ideas, are

not simple

results.

Ideas

what we

do have conse-

quences, but these are seldom direct or simple or unequivocal: the intrusion of minds, and of human inclinations, occurs; ideas

and

their

consequences are formed by their wearers and

carriers

themselves.

There ing Hitler.

is,

moreover, a duality

He

in every

being, includ-

believed in the fundamental and categorical im-

portance of race; yet he often denied ries.

human

racial theories

and catego-

He declared the superior importance of people and of their

beliefs to the state; yet

sions

many of his

were made on the

and

political

strategic deci-

not on ideological

basis of statecraft,

preferences, let alone racial or national sympathies.

He

excori-

ated materialistic views of history; yet he was attracted by super-

modern

projects of technology, of travel, including travel into

space. Finally,

moved as he was by fanatical hatreds, we can also

detect in Hitler, here and there, elements of fear.

In this respect a

last

word about National

Socialism

about the dangers of a deterministic idealism. The

failure

materialism, and of the bourgeois standards of an age,

up in

a spiritual

and intellectual vacuum which

our times, was due to be

and surprising ing

its

rise

filled

some very

after 1930,

its

opened and

also

attraction, includ-

intelligent people

183

of

somehow. The unpredictable

of National Socialism,

attraction to

— and

between the

An Illustration two world wars, was due not only to the

dislike or

even fear of

Communism, but also to the disillusionment with the materialism of the international

capitalist

order (or disorder) and with ,

what seemed to be an antiquated and liberal

was

a

parliamentary order (or disorder). National Socialism

new

third force, youthful

thing "reactionary," attractive to seventy years

later, in spite

ler's brutalities,

tional

and corrupt

hypocritical

and

vital,

the opposite of any-

many young

people. Sixty or

of the accumulated evidence of Hit-

such inclinations continue to

Communism is gone;

exist.

Interna-

but there are few reasons to believe

that the post-capitalist and post-bourgeois materialism of an

American type

inspires or will continue to inspire

people throughout the world. Once more a

ogy may

fill

what

vacuum. The

is

rise in

this.

fill

appetite exists:

(though not

it

in

mythical

faiths,

existence of supernatural

all

but a minor

is

there, a

reemergence of

most

brutal Hitierian

its

exists, often, alas,

of national hatreds but in beliefs in

and of Fascism

an ideological vacuum

and

of ideol-

the historical interest in and occasional

Whether here and

nationalist socialism

form) might

new kind

unquestionably a spiritual and intellectual

attraction of National Socialism

symptom of

many young

I

cannot

tell.

not only in

But the

many kinds

kinds of unrestricted spiritualisms,

involving

and

more and more beliefs in the

superterrestrial

haps especially in the Western Hemisphere)

.

phenomena

(per-

We must not (can-

not) regret the slow but inexorable decay of a categorical ratio-

nalism and of materialism; but aware

we must

be of the grave

dangers and sickening irrational appearances of idealistic deter-

minisms of many kinds. In any event

— due to the evolution of consciousness (which 184

An Illustration is

probably the only evolution there

is,

the Darwinian theory of

"evolution" being part of it, and not the converse) the intrusion

of mind into matter increases. In other words, gradual spiritualization of matter; are

still

they

28

we are facing the

many of the results of which

unpredictable and even unimaginable,

good or bad

as

may be — but surely bad when and if the spiritualization of

matter devolves into a

false idealism.

what happened to money. A and its paper certificates exchangeable to gold or silver at par value. Yet for decades now, our money or stocks and bonds are not even on paper or in our actual posses28.

One

evident example already

century ago, in 1900,

money was

among

us:

physically solid,

sion; they are potential "values," consisting of configurations of graphic

dust recorded on disks or films, in distant institutions somewhere

This

is

else.

explained to us as part and parcel of the Information Revolution.

Yet the very

word "information"

form our inner

selves. Its

is false: it is

proper description

18s

is

not in-formation; the

it

does not

imaging of matter.

Correspondences

The limits of

We will never know

historical

exactly

knowledge.

became the

why Hitler ruler of

The

limits

of

scientific certi-

Impossible to deter-

mine the position and the speed of the parti-

tude.

Germany.

cle in the

same

in-

stant.

The limits of

German nationalists

The

ob-

were not only prod-

scientific

ucts of history: their

jectivity.

physical object.

The

The

historical jectivity.

writings

limits of

ob-

The very act of observing

may alter the

made his-

tory.

The limits of

By employing "Fas-

definitions.

cist"

or "right-wing"

categories

we will not

illusory

relativity

of sci-

character of

entific categories

nominalism.

measurements.

and

understand Hitier.

do not

"Facts" exist

by them-

selves.

Electoral or opinionstatistics are

not ade-

The

illusory

character of

In subatomic situations

P xQ is not al-

quate for the under-

the absolute

ways equivalent to

standing of Hider's

truth of math-

QxP.

impact on Germany

ematics.

and

its

people.

Hitler and

Not the "es-

Modern physics pro-

volves the

National Socialism

sence" of "fac-

ceeds best by examin-

study of the

influenced the course

tors" but their

ing not different

relationships

of Stalin and

relationship

objects but different

of men, of na-

munism and of Mus-

matters.

groups of connec-

tions, of

solini

History

classes,

in-

of

movements.

Com-

and Fascism

more than any of the reverse combinations.

tions.

Correspondences Historical

Hider's potentiality

The primary

The temperature of

thinking

(what he wanted to

importance of

an atom

or could become)

potentialities,

tentia."

was not what he was

of tendencies.

is

anti-determinist

and

tele-

ological.

(in actuality).

Historical

Hitler's choices

causality

is

not

were

often unpredictable.

mechanical,

The

limits

of

Matter

is

is

only a "po-

transmuta-

mechanical

ble; the

causality.

tion between organic

sharp distinc-

mostly be-

and inorganic matter

cause of free

no longer exists.

will.

Also:

what happens is

not separ-

able

from

what people think happens.

-pi

The need i

r_

for a

Men

are potentially

new, historical

both beasts and an-

philosophy.

gels;

j

r

A ^ ^i_ At the end of

the

Modern

Indeterminacy means the collapse of the di-

Age Des-

vision of the

world

the spirit are worse

cartes's parti-

into Objects

and Sub-

than the sins of the

tion

and the

sins

of

falls

away.

jects.

flesh.

Historical

The

evils

thinking con-

rule

were both causes

sists

of words.

The principles

Physics cannot escape

of "classical"

the reality

of and results of his

physical logic

limitations) of lan-

language.

are

of Hider's

no longer

unconditional.

guage.

(

and the

FIVE

At the Center of the 'Christians should be the

salt,

syrup, of the earth."

Bemanos.

Universe

not the

Timeliness, and limitations of my

argument.

•

Heisenberg and Duhem.

center of the universe. belief.

•

•

Conditions of

its

history, including history.

argument, every law, every has

its

At the

A necessity for Christians.

verything has i

•

history

thesis, every

— which means

Every

hypothesis

that they cannot be

perfect or complete or eternally unchanging.

Of

course this involves the priority of historical over "scientific"

And

thinking.

that recognitions of the limits of both kinds of

thinking correspond to such an extent that, after more than four

hundred

years, the time has

come

to realize that there

is

only

one kind of knowledge, dependent on the inevitable limitations

human knower. This recognition comes at the end of the Modern Age, the two great achievements of which were the of the

invention and the applications of the scientific evolution of a historical consciousness.

ments the

first,

naturally

ment having been ress), has

and

as a

inseparable

method and

the

Of these great develop-

matter of course

(its

develop-

from the modern idea of Prog-

been widely recognized and appreciated, while the

second has not. Yet since the second amounts to nothing

191

less

At the Center of the

Universe

than a knowledge of human beings about themselves, there are

ample reasons to appreciate, widen, and elevate

its

importance,

end of the twentieth century, during which we

especially at the

have had plenty of shocking evidences of the complexities and

human

of

dualities

(Whence probably

beings, including their capacity for

the rising appetite for history, at a time of

general decay of civilization.

though not

evil.

insignificant,

Still, this

may

be an ephemeral,

phenomenon. ) Cartesian and Newto-

nian science led to the fabulous capacity of mankind to manage things.

But we ought to recognize that not only the fundament

of the above but

man

beings

its

prior necessity

— and of their place

is

our understanding of hu-

in the universe, to

which

this

chapter will be addressed.

There

an extremely important timeliness for this kind

exists

of thinking. For the

mankind) for

it

human

has

first

time since Genesis (or: in the history of

now become not only imaginable

but possible

beings to destroy large portions (or, potentially, life

explosions or by

man-made poison-

of humanity, and perhaps even most of

may happen by man-made

ing of the atmosphere by disastrous genetic manipulations: (

still

fortunately )

look and think:

new and

all)

on this earth. This

we

do not know. But we must take a step back and

this

is

something new. Need one argue that this

awful potentiality of mankind's self-destruction

ele-

vates the importance of mankind's self-knowledge even above

that of its material applications of theoretical "science"? Still

— I am aware of the unavoidable limitations due to the

very historicity of it is

my

propositions. It

not entirely impossible that

may not

be

likely,

but

new discoveries may consider-

At the Center of the even dramatically,

ably, or

It is also

affect the

proposition of the

historical — that

encompassing nature of edge.

Universe

possible that

I

all-

human — knowlmay have put too much emphasis is,

on the epistemological meaning of quantum theory (which after

all,

a theory) , a caveat to

in a subchapter

which

I shall

is,

turn in a page or so,

about Werner Heisenberg and the hitherto un-

mentioned French

physicist

hem. But before that

I

and historian of science Pierre Du-

am compelled to

admit another evident

and common-sense consideration. Whatever quantum theory (and some of structures

its

man-made measurements)

tells

and mechanics of subatomic matter,

in

us about the

our everyday

world the rapidly increasing applications of physical science and technology

still

depend on Newtonian

physics,

no matter how

questionable the universal validity of the latter has become.

This

is

especially applicable to

biology.

And

this

computers and

also to physical

condition corresponds to the history, indeed

to the retrospect, of the

Modern Age.

I

wrote

earlier that the

Modern, or the Bourgeois, or the European Age, has hitherto been the richest

half- millennium in the history

many ways comparable

to the classic achievements of the near-

millennium of Greece and Rome.

happened

after the

of mankind, in

end of

And — something that has not

a previous great

epoch — a respect

and nostalgia for the achievements of the past years has

begun to emerge. And among

Newtonian physics

its

five

hundred

many achievements

will continue to prevail, because

of its ever-

And who knows whether (and when) both Newtonian and quantum physics may not be

extending technical applications.

superseded by something

else?

m

At the Center of the

Still:

my

main

Universe

and the theme of

interest,

book, deals

this

not with the applications of physical or of historical theories but with their meaning — in sum, with recognitions of the conditions of

human

thinking at the end of an age.

must once more,

this I

and to

And

because of

for the last time, return to Heisenberg

a fine twentieth- century thinker

who

preceded him, the

French Pierre Duhem.

I

need not reiterate

my appreciation of Werner Heisenberg.

There remain, however, two considerations.

One

is

that Hei-

senberg's ideas were not uninfluenced by his times:

we have

seen that there was a chronological, indeed a historical, corre-

spondence between German ideological anti-materialism and anti-mechanical causality after

World War

I

and the germina-

tion of Heisenberg's Indeterminism. After his discovery of sub-

atomic Uncertainty, thirty years, including World to pass until in

1

War

II,

had

954-1955 Heisenberg's convictions about the

philosophical or metaphysical or epistemological consequences

of the

latter

had crystallized.

I,

am inclined to think that

for one,

Heisenberg's epistemological propositions

achievement

as considerable as his

may have been an

experimental discovery of

Uncertainty /Indeterminacy in subatomic physics. Yet convictions are not always final. Heisenberg

twenty years, during which

we saw

was to

that he

but also not entirely unlike other physicists

live for

— not

another

quite

like,

— was working on

an eventual mathematical formulation about the dynamics of

At the Center of the atomic

particles. 1

Universe

The other consideration is metaphysical. Hei-

senberg's experimental proofs of his Uncertainty principle established the impossibility of the complete accuracy of the

mea-

surement of small particles of matter; but does this impossibility

amount to a limitation of our knowledge of their very existence? / think so: because of my

belief that the existence of anything

meaningless for us without our knowledge of it, no matter

may

imprecise or faint; but this 2

minor) reason why so few,

if any,

is

how

be one (albeit only one, and a physicists have paid

any atten-

tion to Heisenberg's metaphysical propositions during the past fifty years.

And

because of metaphysics

it is

must turn

briefly to Pierre

and philosopher, born

1

.

— and cosmology— that I

Duhem. This extraordinary physicist

in 1861, died in 1916, already

broken in

Wasn't this an attempt toward another kind of "finality," in addition

(or,

perhaps, at least to a limited degree, contrary) to the conclusive character

of his earlier convictions?

dared to ask

I

this in a letter to

1967. His detailed two-page answer denying this 2.

The

learned,

ley L. Jaki

sometimes

brilliant,

(one of whose merits

is

is

in

Heisenberg in

my possession.

but interminably opinionated Stan-

his exegesis

of Pierre

Duhem)

elevates

Einstein and dismisses Heisenberg repeatedly, including this passage in Jaki's

otherwise excellent introduction to The Physicist as Artist: The Land-

scapes of Pierre

Duhem, Edinburgh,

2: "The illogical character of moulds of positivism [But Utter disregard for logic has become

1988, p.

casting Einstein's relativity theory into the

wasn't Einstein a determinist? ] part

and parcel of the standard

tum mechanics which, principle as

its

as

.

[ ? ]

.

.

.

philosophical interpretation of quan-

its

well

standard interpretation ...

identification of the operationally exact isn't

.

known, has Heisenberg's uncertainty Although that principle merely sets a limit to

is

integral part.

accuracy in measurement,

.

experimental science dependent on accuracy?

IPS

is

with the ontologically

a fallacious exact."

But

At the Center of the health,

Universe

and well before Heisenberg's Indeterminacy/ Uncer-

tainty. (I

have found no evidence about Einstein appearing in

Duhem's writings.) Duhem's in the history

and

greatest contributions

in the theory

of physics.

He

was a

work on thermodynamics.

physicist, especially in his

were those first-class

Resistance

to his appointment to the highest positions of French science

was

a result of academic politics, connected

tary and, at that time, unusual

with Duhem's

soli-

avowal of his Catholic and con-

servative beliefs. Yet since his untimely death

tation (especially in France but also

Duhem's repu-

among many

scientists

throughout the world) has risen much higher. The astonishing quantity of his writings careful handwriting) a

is

startling

enough.

He

wrote

(in his

ten-volume history of physics and cos-

mology: Systeme du monde: Histoire

des doctrines cosmologiques de

Platon a Copernic, Paris,

191 3- 1959 — which, again because of

academic and publishing

politics,

much

of

it

after his death.

was published only gradually,

While he was working on those

volumes he wrote La Theorie physique: Son published in 1906, which

is

more

of which an American edition

telling for

exists:

Physical Theory, Princeton, 1954,

objet,

3.

our purposes, and

equipped by a detailed Broglie,

and prefaced by the American physicist Philip

This

is

not the place to

some of which Phenomena:

An

are

now

list

first

The Aim and Structure of

word by the great French physicist Louis de lated

sa structure,

P.

and

fore-

trans-

Wiener. 3

the extraordinary extent of Duhem's works,

available in English: for example, To Save the

Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato

to Galileo,

Chicago, 1969 (introduced by Jaki). The very title of the work (Duhem gave it in Greek) corresponds, rather extraordinarily, with Owen Barfield's

Saving the Appearances, London, 1957 (an American paperback also

196

At the Center of the

Universe

What is Duhem's great and lasting achievement? There is — as

suggested by the

his historical

title

of his monumental ten-volume work

—

approach to science: "The history of science

alone can keep the physicist from descending into grave errors" (p. 270).

that all

Among

Duhem

other things,

was ignored or denied not only by

historians: he

cal physics,

established something scientists

but by nearly

drew attention to the medieval origins of classi-

preceding Copernicus, Galileo, Newton. But more

Duhem ("whose monumental work combines German thoroughness with French lucidity"). To Save the Phenomena and Saving the Appearances correspond, too, in their emphasis on the inescapable and basic reality of what we see: for Duhem, for example, the sun rising in the east and setting in the west; for Barfield, the existence of a rainbow which is something else than an optical illusion. To this I must add another stunning achievement of this charming genius (a rare combination!) Duhem's artwork. He was a drawer and a painter of extraordinary ability and beauty. It is the abiding merit of Jaki to have found and collected most of Duhem's drawings and paintings in a beautifully produced album: The Physicist as Artist: The Landscapes of Pierre Duhem, Edinburgh, 1988, with an erudite introduction. Again a correspondence. There are many physicists who have been addicted to music (and there are correspondences between the structures of cosmological and musical harmonies); but few physicists whose inspiration was artistic and visual. And it was a visual recognition that inspired Heisenberg at a decisive moment. He told us that at the age of sixteen he had read in a Gymnasium physics textbook that atoms were the exists), including a reference to

.

.

.

:

smallest indivisible building stones of matter: but the illustration in the

showed atoms connected with hooks and eyes which were supposed was greatiy put off by this illustration. I was enraged that such idiotic things should be presented in a

text

to represent their chemical bonds. "I

textbook of physics. this

I

thought that

book made out — if their

to have hooks and eyes

if

atoms were indeed such structures as was complicated enough for them

structure

— then

they could not possibly be the smallest

indivisible building stones of matter."

197

At the Center of the important for our purposes

Universe

Duhem's

is

clear

and severe exposi-

tion of the inescapably theoretical essence of physics. Let illustrate this

me

merely by a few titles of his successive subchapters:

Theory anticipating experiment.

The mathematics of approximation.

An experiment in physics is not simply the observation of a phenomenon; pretation of the

it is,

besides, the theoretical inter-

phenomenon.

The result of an experiment in physics is an abstract and symbolic judgment.

The laws of physics

are symbolic relations.

A law of physics

properly speaking, neither true nor

false

is,

but approximate.

Every law of physics it is

is

provisional and relative because

approximate.

Every physical law

Hypotheses

are

is

provisional because

it is

symbolic.

not the product of sudden creation, but

the result of progressive evolution.

The importance "The

Physicist

in physics

of the historical method.

Does Not Choose the Hypotheses

in

Which

He Will Base a Theory; They Germinate in Him Without Him" (tide of subchapter 3, in part II, chapter VII). Duhem begins: "The evolution which produced the system of universal slowly unfolded

itself in

the course of centuries; thus

gravity

we have

been able to follow step by step the process through which the idea gradually rose to the degree of perfection given

198

it

by New-

At the Center of the ton." This process

is,

more than

forty years separate Copernicus'

times

it is

rapid: in

1819-1823

Universe

often, slow.

"A hundred and

main work from Newton's." At

less

than four years separated the

publication of Oersted's electromagnetic experiment from pere's conclusive paper presented at the Paris

Am-

Academie des

Sciences.

Duhem makes

a brilliant distinction

between accuracy and

precision / certainty:

A law of physics possesses a certainty much less

immediate and

much more difficult to esti-

mate than a law of common passes the latter

sense, but

it

sur-

by the minute and detailed

precision of its predictions.

Take the common-sense law: "In Paris the sun

rises

every day in the east, climbs the sky,

then comes pare

it

down and sets in the west" and com-

with the formulas

telling us the coordi-

nates of the sun's center at each instant within

about a second.

.

.

The laws of physics can

.

ac-

quire this minuteness of detail only by sacrificing

something of the

common-sense

fixed

laws.

and absolute

There

between precision and

is

certainty of

a sort of balance

certainty;

one cannot be

increased except to the detriment of the other. 4

4.

Was

this a

forerunner

— or another version — of Heisenberg's discovery

about electrons? Precision

>