History and Human Flourishing (The Humanities and Human Flourishing) 9780197625279, 9780197625262, 9780197625293, 0197625274

Table of contents :
Cover
Series
History and Human Flourishing
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Series Editor’s Foreword
List of Contributors
Introduction
1. History, the Humanities, and the Human
2. In Defense of Presentism
3. The Power of a Well-​Told History
4. Well-​Being and a Usable Past: The Role of Historical Diagnosis
5. Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying: The Strange Case of Consistent Luckiness in Aristotle
6. The Historical Sublime
7. Flourishing with Herodotus
8. On the Consolations of History
9. “Beauty Is Universal”: Virtue, Aesthetics, Emotion, and Race in James Logan’s Atlantic Moral Sense Philosophy
10. Toward a History of Black Happiness: Or, What Can African American History Tell Us about the Cultivation of Well-​Being?
Index

Citation preview

History and Human Flourishing

T H E H UM A N I T I E S A N D H UM A N F L OU R I SH I N G Series editor: James O. Pawelski, University of Pennsylvania Other Volumes in the series Philosophy and Human Flourishing Edited by John J. Stuhr History and Human Flourishing Edited by Darrin M. McMahon Literary Studies and Human Flourishing Edited by James F. English and Heather Love Religious Studies, Theology, and Human Flourishing Edited by Justin Thomas McDaniel and Hector Kilgoe Theater and Human Flourishing Edited by Harvey Young Cinema, Media, and Human Flourishing Edited by Timothy Corrigan Music and Human Flourishing Edited by Anna Harwell Celenza Visual Arts and Human Flourishing Edited by Selma Holo The Humanities and Human Flourishing Edited by James O. Pawelski

History and Human Flourishing Edited by

DA R R I N M . M C M A HO N

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: McMahon, Darrin M., editor, author. Title: History and human flourishing /​edited by Darrin M. McMahon. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Series: The humanities and human flourishing | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022026852 (print) | LCCN 2022026853 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197625279 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197625262 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780197625293 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: History—​Philosophy. | Success. | Conduct of life. | Well-​being. Classification: LCC D16.9 .H548 2023 (print) | LCC D16.9 (ebook) | DDC 901—​dc23/​eng/​20220616 LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​202​2026​852 LC ebook record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​202​2026​853 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

For Robert and Leslie Bonner, students of the past and human flourishing, friends in history and in life

Contents Series Editor’s Foreword  List of Contributors 

Introduction  Darrin M. McMahon

ix xxv

1

1. History, the Humanities, and the Human  D. Graham Burnett

18

2. In Defense of Presentism  David Armitage

44

3. The Power of a Well-​Told History  Maya Jasanoff

70

4. Well-​Being and a Usable Past: The Role of Historical Diagnosis  85 Peter N. Stearns 5. Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying: The Strange Case of Consistent Luckiness in Aristotle  Peter T. Struck

107

6. The Historical Sublime  Dan Edelstein

127

7. Flourishing with Herodotus  Suzanne Marchand

140

8. On the Consolations of History  Darrin M. McMahon

155

9. “Beauty Is Universal”: Virtue, Aesthetics, Emotion, and Race in James Logan’s Atlantic Moral Sense Philosophy  Nicole Eustace

170

10. Toward a History of Black Happiness: Or, What Can African American History Tell Us about the Cultivation of Well-​Being?  184 Mia Bay Index 

199

Series Editor’s Foreword Imagine being invited to a weekend meeting to discuss connections between the humanities and human flourishing. You talk about ways in which the humanities can help us understand what human flourishing is—​and is not. You explore how the humanities can help increase human flourishing. And you consider whether human flourishing is an absolute good, or whether it comes with certain limits and even potential dangers. How do you imagine the conversation playing out? What contributions might you make to the discussion? The volumes in this series were borne out of just such a meeting. Or rather a series of such meetings, each gathering including some dozen scholars in a particular discipline in the humanities (understood to be inclusive of the arts). These disciplines include philosophy, history, literary studies, religious studies and theology, theater, cinema and media, music, and the visual arts. Participants were asked to consider how their work in their discipline intersects with well-​being (taken to be roughly synonymous with human flourishing), along with a series of specific questions: • How does your discipline conceptualize, understand, and define well-​being? • What does your discipline say about the cultivation of well-​being? How does it encourage the implementation of well-​being? • In what ways does your discipline support flourishing? Do some approaches within your discipline advance human flourishing more effectively than others? Are there ways in which certain aspects of your discipline could more effectively promote well-​being? • Does your discipline contribute to well-​being in any unique ways in which other endeavors do not? • Are there ways in which your discipline can obstruct human flourishing? As might be expected, the conversations in these meetings were rich and wide-​ranging. Some of them headed in expected directions; others were more

x  Series Editor’s Foreword surprising. Each of them yielded opportunities to question assumptions and deepen perspectives. The conversations were rooted in disciplinary contexts and questions but yielded many generalizable insights on how to conceptualize human flourishing more clearly, how to cultivate it more effectively, and how to avoid negative consequences of understanding it in incomplete or overblown ways. I cannot properly describe or even summarize the richness of the discussions here, but I would like to point out a few of the highlights included in each of the resulting volumes. Philosophy and Human Flourishing, edited by John J. Stuhr, addresses a number of fundamental questions. What is the value of discussing human flourishing in a world that in so many ways is decidedly not flourishing? In what ways is flourishing similar to and different from happiness? What is the role of morality in human flourishing? How does it relate to systemic privilege and oppression? To what degree is flourishing properly the concern of individuals, and to what degree is it a function of communities and societies? What are key factors in the fostering of flourishing? In addressing these questions, philosophers explore concepts such as mattering, homeostasis, pluralism, responsibility, and values, and consider the roles of individuals, educational institutions, and governments. History and Human Flourishing, edited by Darrin M. McMahon, centers on the question, What is the value of history for life? This core question leads to a number of further inquiries. Is history only about the past, or does it have important implications for the present and the future? If the latter, then how can historical inquiry most effectively contribute to well-​being? Does such inquiry currently focus in an imbalanced way on ill-​being—​on prejudices, class struggles, and wars? Such work is doubtless of great importance, not least by investigating how claims about happiness can serve as propaganda for continued oppression. But would hope for the future be more effectively kindled and concrete steps toward its realization more adeptly guided by increased attention to what has actually gone well in the past and what we can learn from it, or by more focus on how human beings have responded positively to adversity? Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, edited by James F. English and Heather Love, focuses on the transformative power of literature. Scholars examine a range of topics, including the reparative possibilities of a literary encounter, the value of bibliotherapy and of therapeutic redescription, the genre of “uplit,” and evolving methods for studying the activities and experiences of actual readers. A central question of this volume concerns the limits on

Series Editor’s Foreword  xi transformations effected through literature. Several contributors worry that harnessing literary studies to the enterprise of human flourishing might lead readers merely to conform rather than to transform. To what extent might human flourishing serve as a palliative, enabling and encouraging readers to adapt to individual lives that lack moral depth and to social conditions that are rife with injustice, and thus obstruct the difficult and unsettling work of disruptive transformation needed for lasting individual and collective betterment? Religious Studies, Theology, and Human Flourishing, edited by Justin Thomas McDaniel and Hector Kilgoe, explores ways in which individual and collective well-​being can be increased through various religious perspectives and practices, including the Hindu concept of sanmati (“goodwill, wisdom, and noble-​mindedness”), Buddhist meditation, and the cultivation of spiritual joy even while facing adversity. Scholars consider challenging questions concerning the proper contexts for learning about religion and for learning from religion, the right balance between the acknowledgment of suffering and the fostering of well-​being, and the relationship between human flourishing and nonhuman worlds (including both natural and supernatural domains). A concern of some of these scholars is whether human flourishing entails a false universalism, one that seeks to reduce cultural diversities to one particular notion of what is desirable or even acceptable, and whether such a notion could be used to rate the value of different religions, or even ban religious practices (e.g., fasting, celibacy, or other ascetic austerities) that might be deemed misaligned with well-​being. Theater and Human Flourishing, edited by Harvey Young, considers the unique resources of theater and performance for imagining and enhancing well-​ being. Because theater involves both performers and audience members, it is inherently communal in ways many humanities disciplines and art forms are not. Theater allows groups of people—​often strangers—​to come together and experience the world in new ways. More than just an escape from ordinary life or a simple mirroring of reality, theater can provide opportunities for communal reimagining of the world, exploring new ways of thinking, feeling, and relating that can be experienced and then enacted to bring about a more flourishing future. Scholars examine connections between theater and human flourishing in more and less traditional spheres, looking at ways performance practices can be used to critique inadequate notions of human flourishing and to increase well-​being in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from community theater to organizations serving soldiers

xii  Series Editor’s Foreword with post-​traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and from oppressed groups to politically divided societies. Cinema, Media, and Human Flourishing, edited by Timothy Corrigan, looks to film and a whole range of contemporary forms of digital media for what they can teach us about the nature of human flourishing and how it can be cultivated. These forms of communication have vast audiences and thus great power to support or subvert well-​being. Contributors to this volume observe that human flourishing often seems to come piecemeal and as a hard-​won result of conflict and struggle, and they explore ways in which well-​being can be supported by collaborative practices for creating content, by the particular ways narratives are crafted, by certain genres, and by the various values that are embraced and transmitted. Contributors also consider how these popular forms can support individuals and groups on the margins of society by making more visible and sympathetic their struggles toward flourishing. Music and Human Flourishing, edited by Anna Harwell Celenza, complements the commonly accepted and scientifically supported view that participating in music—​as a listener, performer, or composer—​can increase individual well-​being. Instead of focusing on music as a performing art, this volume examines music as a humanities discipline, emphasizing the importance and value of music scholarship for fostering individual and collective human flourishing. How can music scholars (musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music theorists) strengthen the effects of music on flourishing through a consideration of broader cultural, social, and political contexts? Contributors explore how processes of contemplation, critique, and communication within music scholarship can deepen the experience of music, resulting not just in the enhancement of individual well-​being but in the more effective cultivation of wisdom and the greater realization of social justice. Visual Arts and Human Flourishing, edited by Selma Holo, begins with the experience of artists themselves and the function of art in our society. If well-​being is thought of as the happiness of self-​satisfied complacency, then it would seem to be the antithesis of art, which is often disruptive, unnerving, and unsettling, asking viewers to question their assumptions and inviting them to see the world in new ways. But if well-​being is understood more deeply as the flourishing that can arise from the full range of human experience, including the discomfort of contending forms of meaning and contested visions of reality, then it is difficult to think of it without art. Contributors

Series Editor’s Foreword  xiii to this volume consider the overwhelming personal necessity artists have to create, the role of well-​being in art history, the increasing emphasis on human flourishing in architecture and public art, and salient questions of ethics, accessibility, and social justice in the context of art museums. The Humanities and Human Flourishing, for which I serve as editor, is an interdisciplinary, capstone volume that contains contributions from the editors of the eight disciplinary volumes. After the disciplinary meetings were concluded, we gathered together to discuss what we had learned through the process. We considered both similarities and differences across the disciplinary discussions on human flourishing, identifying social justice and pedagogy as two common themes that emerged in the meetings. Like the other volumes in the series, this volume does not pretend to provide simple solutions or even unified answers to questions of how the humanities are or should be connected to the conceptualization and cultivation of human flourishing. Rather, it provides thoughtful questions and perspectives, distilled as it is from a deliberate process of extended engagement from diverse groups of scholars across eight different arts and humanities disciplines. I would like to welcome you, the reader, to this book series. I hope you find it stimulating and even inspiring in its explorations into the complexities of the relationship between the humanities and human flourishing. And I hope you read across the volumes, as they are written in an accessible style that will yield valuable insights whether or not you have particular expertise in the discipline of the author whose work you are reading. To whatever degree you immerse yourself in this book series, though, I am sure of one thing: You will find it incomplete. As deep and as broad ranging as we tried to be in our explorations, none of the participants are under the illusion that the discussions and volumes brought it to a conclusion. We are keenly aware that a group of a dozen scholars, no matter how diverse, cannot speak for an entire discipline, and we realize that a focus on eight disciplines does not cover the entire domain of the humanities. Furthermore, our discussions and most of the writing were completed before the COVID-​19 pandemic, which has made the nature and importance of flourishing all the more salient and has raised a host of new questions about well-​being. Instead, we think of our work as an important beginning, and we would like to invite you to join the conversation. We hope a greater number and diversity of scholars, researchers, creators, practitioners, students, leaders in cultural organizations and creative industries, office holders in government, philanthropists, and members of the general public will bring their interests and expertise to

xiv  Series Editor’s Foreword the conversation, perhaps leading to new volumes in this series in the future. Investigations into human flourishing contribute to our knowledge and understanding of the human condition, and they have practical implications for the well-​being of scholars, students, and societies. We hope our ongoing work together will enable the humanities to play a greater role in these investigations, effecting changes in scholarship, research, pedagogy, policy, and practice that will make them more supportive of human flourishing in academia and in the world at large.

Background and Rationale For readers interested in more information on the background and rationale of this book series, I am happy to share further details on the perspectives, aims, and hopes that motivated it. A key catalyst for the development of this series was the dual observation that a growing number of individuals and organizations are focusing on human flourishing and that most of the headlines in this domain seem to be coming from the social sciences. Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos, for example, made the news when she developed a course on “Psychology and the Good Life”—​and some 1200 students (nearly a quarter of Yale’s undergraduate population) signed up for it.1 As of this writing, her subsequent podcast, “The Happiness Lab,” has reached 65 million downloads.2 On an international scale, dozens of countries around the world have adopted psychological measures of subjective well-​being as a complement to economic indicators, and a growing number of nations have embraced well-​being, happiness, or flourishing as an explicit governmental goal.3 The Organization for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD), founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade, has acknowledged the insufficiency of economic indicators

1 David Shimer, “Yale’s Most Popular Class Ever: Happiness.” The New York Times, January 26, 2018. https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2018/​01/​26/​nyreg​ion/​at-​yale-​class-​on-​happin​ess-​draws-​huge-​crowd-​lau​ rie-​san​tos.html 2 Lucy Hodgman, and Evan Gorelick, “Silliman Head of College Laurie Santos to Take One-​Year Leave to Address Burnout.” Yale News, February 8, 2022. https://​yaleda​ilyn​ews.com/​blog/​2022/​02/​ 08/​silli​man-​head-​of-​coll​ege-​lau​rie-​san​tos-​to-​take-​one-​year-​leave-​to-​addr​ess-​burn​out/​ 3 https://​weall.org/​; https://​www.ons.gov.uk/​peopl​epop​ulat​iona​ndco​mmun​ity/​wellbe​ing/​artic​les/​ measureso​fnat​iona​lwel​lbei​ngda​shbo​ard/​2018-​04-​25; https://​www.gnhc​entr​ebhu​tan.org/​hist​ory-​of-​ gnh/​; https://​www.worldb​ank.org/​en/​news/​feat​ure/​2013/​10/​24/​Boli​via-​qui​ere-​repli​car-​el-​ind​ice-​ de-​felici​dad-​de-​Butan; https://​u.ae/​en/​about-​the-​uae/​the-​uae-​gov​ernm​ent/​gov​ernm​ent-​of-​fut​ure/​ happin​ess/​;

Series Editor’s Foreword  xv alone for tracking progress. It launched its Better Life Initiative in 2011 to measure what drives the well-​being of individuals and nations and to determine how countries can best support greater progress for all.4 The United Nations publishes the World Happiness Report every year, releasing it on March 20, the UN International Day of Happiness.5 These are examples in the social sciences of what I have elsewhere called a “eudaimonic turn,” an explicit commitment to human flourishing as a core theoretical and research interest and a desired practical outcome.6 Over the last several decades, there has been a growing interest in human flourishing in economics, political science, psychology, and sociology, and in fields influenced by them, such as education, organizational studies, medicine, and public health. Perhaps the most well-​known example of this eudaimonic turn in the social sciences occurred in psychology with the advent of positive psychology. Reflecting perspectives developed in humanistic psychology in the mid-​twentieth century and building on increasing empirical work in self-​efficacy, self-​determination theory, subjective and psychological well-​ being, optimism, flow, passion, hope theory, positive emotions, and related areas, Martin Seligman and his colleagues launched the field of positive psychology. During a 1998 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, Seligman pointed out that mainstream psychology had become fixated on understanding and treating psychopathology. He argued that, although extremely important, healing mental illness is only part of psychology’s mission. More broadly, he claimed, psychology should be about making the lives of all people better. He noted that this requires the careful empirical study of what makes life most worth living, including a deep understanding of flourishing individuals and thriving communities. Such study, he believed, would both increase well-​being and decrease ill-​being, since human strengths are both important in their own right and effective as buffers against mental illness. Known as “the scientific study of what enables individuals and societies to thrive,”7 positive psychology has had a

4 https://​www.oecd.org/​sdd/​OECD-​Bet​ter-​Life-​Ini​tiat​ive.pdf 5 https://​wor​ldha​ppin​ess.rep​ort/​ 6 James O. Pawelski, “What Is the Eudaimonic Turn?,” in The Eudaimonic Turn: Well-​Being in Literary Studies, ed. James O. Pawelski and D. J. Moores (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 3; and James O. Pawelski, “The Positive Humanities: Culture and Human Flourishing,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Positive Humanities, ed. Louis Tay and James O. Pawelski (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 26. 7 Constitution of the International Positive Psychology Association, Article 1, Section 2.

xvi  Series Editor’s Foreword transformative effect on psychology and has deeply influenced many other fields of research and practice. What role do the humanities play in all of this? What role could and should they play? How can the humanities help us conceptualize human flourishing more deeply, cultivate it more effectively, and critique it more insightfully? As a philosopher working in the field of positive psychology for more than twenty years, I have been concerned that there are not more voices from the humanities centrally involved in contemporary work in human flourishing. One of the core aims of this project and book series is to make a way for humanities scholars to play a larger role in this domain by inviting them to consider explicitly what contributions their work and their disciplines can make to the theory, research, and practice of human flourishing. Historically, of course, human flourishing is at the root of the humanities.8 The humanities were first defined and developed as a program of study by Renaissance scholars dissatisfied with scholasticism, which they perceived as leading to an overly technical university curriculum removed from the concerns of everyday life and unable to guide students toward human flourishing. They advocated, instead, a return to the Greek and Roman classics, reading them for insights and perspectives on how to live life well. Indeed, the Greeks and Romans had developed comprehensive programs of study (paideia and artes liberales, respectively) designed to teach students how to flourish individually and how to contribute to collective flourishing by participating effectively and wisely in civic life. This emphasis on the understanding and cultivation of human flourishing that was so important to the Greeks and Romans was also of central concern to other philosophical and religious traditions that developed in the ancient world during what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age.9 Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism, for example, along with the later Christianity and Islam, addressed the problem of human suffering and offered ways of promoting individual and collective flourishing. Although different in their cultural context and specific details, each of these traditions counseled against lives exclusively devoted to pleasure, wealth, power, or fame. They held that such lives only magnify suffering and that flourishing is actually fostered through a cultivation of virtue that allows 8 Pawelski, “The Positive Humanities,” 20–​21; and Darrin M. McMahon, “The History of the Humanities and Human Flourishing,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Positive Humanities, ed. Louis Tay and James O. Pawelski (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 45–​50. 9 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 2.

Series Editor’s Foreword  xvii for the transcendence of narrow, individual concerns in favor of a connection with the larger social world, the broader universe, or even the divine. Cultural forms such as literature, music, visual art, architecture, theater, history, and philosophical reflection were employed in the cultivation of virtue and the establishment of the broader and deeper connections valued for human flourishing. Today, the humanities tend to be thought of less as a comprehensive program of study or means to cultivate virtue and more as a collection of academic disciplines. These disciplines are located largely within colleges and universities and are thus shaped by the values of these institutions. Much of higher education is driven more by the aim of creating knowledge than the goal of applying wisdom. To succeed in such an environment, scholars are required to become highly specialized professionals, spending most of their time publishing books and articles for other highly specialized professionals in their discipline. The courses they teach often focus more on the flourishing of their discipline than on the flourishing of their students, requiring students to learn about course content but not necessarily to learn from it. When human flourishing is addressed in the classroom, it is all too often done in a way that makes it difficult for students to apply it to their lives, and in many cases, it focuses more on obstacles to flourishing than on the nature and cultivation of well-​being. It is important, of course, to understand and resist alienation, injustice, and malfeasance in the world and to expose corrosive ideologies that can permeate texts and other forms of culture. But it is also important to understand that flourishing is more than just the absence of languishing. And the argument has been made that “suspicious” approaches in the humanities need to be balanced by reparative approaches10 and that critique needs to be complemented by a “positive aesthetics”11 and a “hermeneutics of affirmation.”12 Meanwhile, students in the United States, at least, are reporting astonishingly high levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidality,13 while at the same time coming under increasing economic 10 Eve K. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve K. Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–​37. 11 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 22. 12 D. J. Moores, “The Eudaimonic Turn in Literary Studies,” in The Eudaimonic Turn: Well-​Being in Literary Studies, ed. James O. Pawelski and D. J. Moores (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 27. 13 Publications and Reports, National College Health Assessment, American College Health Association, accessed December 11, 2021, https://​www.acha.org/​NCHA/​ACHA-​NCHA_​Da​ ta/​Publi​ cati​ons_​and_​Repo​rts/​NCHA/​Data/​Publi​cati​ons_​and_​Repo​rts.aspx?hkey=​d5fb7​67c-​d15d-​4efc-​ 8c41-​3546d​9203​2c5

xviii  Series Editor’s Foreword pressure to select courses of study that will directly help them find employment. Students who in the past might have followed their interests in the humanities are now more likely to major in STEM fields or to enroll in pre-​ professional tracks. Consequently, the number of students earning bachelor’s degrees in the humanities is decreasing significantly.14 Would a eudaimonic turn in the humanities be helpful in addressing these obstacles of narrow professionalism, imbalanced focus, and student pressure? Would it help with what Louis Menand has called a “crisis of rationale” in the humanities, with scholars unable to agree on the fundamental nature and purpose of the humanities and thus unable to communicate their value clearly to students, parents, philanthropists, policymakers, and the general public?15Could the eudaimonic turn provide a unifying rationale in the humanities? Of course, there is a sense in which such a turn would actually be a eudaimonic return. This return would not be a nostalgic attempt to recover some imagined glorious past. The human flourishing historically supported by the humanities was significant, as mentioned above, but it was also very far from perfect, often embracing perspectives that supported unjust power structures that excluded many people—​including laborers, women, and enslaved persons—​from participating in flourishing and that enabled the exploitation of these individuals to the advantage of those in power. Tragically, our society suffers from some of these same injustices today. Instead of a glorification of a problematic past, which could well reinforce these injustices, a eudaimonic re/​turn would invite us to focus our attention on perennial questions about human flourishing, building on wisdom from the past, but committing ourselves to a search for more inclusive answers that are fitting for our contemporary world.16 Not surprisingly, there is disagreement among scholars in these volumes, with some contributors endorsing the eudaimonic turn in the humanities and working to advance it and others putting forward a variety of concerns about the limitations and potential dangers of such an approach—​and some even doing both. Scholars supporting a eudaimonic turn believe it could

14 Jill Barshay, “PROOF POINTS: The Number of College Graduates in the Humanities Drops for the Eighth Consecutive Year,” The Hechinger Report, November 22, 2021, https://​hech​inge​rrep​ort. org/​proof-​poi​nts-​the-​num​ber-​of-​coll​ege-​gradua​tes-​in-​the-​hum​anit​ies-​drops-​for-​the-​eig​hth-​cons​ ecut​ive-​year. 15 Louis Menand, “The Marketplace of Ideas,” American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper No. 49 (2001) http://​archi​ves.acls.org/​op/​49_​Ma​ rke​tpla​ce_​o​f_​Id​eas.htm. 16 Pawelski, “What Is the Eudaimonic Turn?” 17; Pawelski, “The Positive Humanities,” 26; and McMahon, “The History of the Humanities and Human Flourishing,” 45, 54.

Series Editor’s Foreword  xix revitalize the humanities by encouraging deeper investigations into the eudaimonic hopes that initially gave rise to their disciplines and the various ways in which contemporary work can support and develop these hopes. They believe these investigations could bring together scholars across the various humanities disciplines to create a common understanding and language for an examination of questions of human flourishing appropriate for our times. To be successful, such a project would not require complete agreement among scholars on the answers to these questions. On the contrary, diverse perspectives would enrich the inquiry, opening up new possibilities for human flourishing that are more equitable and widespread and that support the flourishing of the nonhuman world as well. Some contributors see significant potential in collaborating with the social sciences in their eudaimonic turn, a process that can be facilitated through the Positive Humanities, a new, interdisciplinary field of inquiry and practice focused on the relationship between culture and human flourishing.17 Scholars endorsing a eudaimonic turn in the humanities believe it could also inform, inspire, and support the work of museums, libraries, performing arts centers, and even creative industries (in music, movies, publishing, and other domains) to advance human flourishing more broadly in our society. They see a eudaimonic turn as also being of potential value to the millions of students who study the humanities each year. Without expecting humanities teachers and professors to take on therapeutic roles, they see considerable possible benefits in a pedagogical focus on how human flourishing can be understood and cultivated, with resulting courses intentionally designed to promote and preserve students’ well-​being and mitigate and prevent their ill-​ being.18 Indeed, these scholars believe the volumes in this series might serve as useful texts for some of these courses. Scholars with misgivings about a eudaimonic turn, on the other hand, raise a number of important concerns. Some contributors wonder whether human flourishing is a proper ideal in a world with so much suffering. Would such an ideal raise false hopes that would actually contribute to that suffering? Furthermore, are there more valuable things than human flourishing 17 For more information on the Positive Humanities, see Louis Tay and James O. Pawelski, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Positive Humanities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), especially the first three foundational chapters. Also, visit www.humani​ties​andh​uman​flou​rish​ing.org. 18 Furthermore, would students who perceive real life value in humanities courses be more likely to make room for them in their schedules, as suggested by the students who enrolled in Laurie Santos’s course on “Psychology and the Good Life” in such large numbers? If so, could a side benefit of the eudaimonic turn be greater numbers of students signing up for courses in the humanities?

xx  Series Editor’s Foreword (e.g., ethics, the environment), and should flourishing be limited in favor of these greater goods? Is human flourishing inextricably linked to problematic ideological perspectives, perhaps ones that place too much emphasis on the individual and downplay or ignore issues of systemic injustice, or perhaps ones that serve the interests of a small number of persons in power and encourage everyone else to conform to the status quo? Is human flourishing a false universalism that might result in a failure to see and acknowledge deep cultural differences—​or worse, that might see these differences as deviances that need to be suppressed and punished? Could an emphasis on well-​being be employed to exploit individuals or groups of people, as notions of happiness have sometimes been used in the past? Are there other unexpected harms that might arise from a eudaimonic turn? The unresolved tensions among the various chapters are part of what makes these volumes compelling reading. Are there ways to overcome concerns about the eudaimonic turn by clarifying its nature and aims, avoiding the dangers raised? Or will these concerns always persist alongside efforts to achieve individual and communal betterment through a theoretical and practical emphasis on flourishing? I welcome you, the reader, to join this discussion. What are your views on the perspectives expressed in these volumes? What points might you contribute to the ongoing conversation?

Process and People I would like to conclude with a fuller account of the process by which the various volumes were created and an acknowledgment of the individuals and institutions who have made this book series possible. With the desire to give contributors ample time to reflect on how their work and their discipline relate to human flourishing, as well as to create opportunities to discuss these ideas with colleagues, we put into place an extended process for the creation of these volumes. After deciding on the eight disciplines in the arts and humanities we would be able to include in the project, we invited a leading scholar to chair the work in each of these disciplines and asked them to bring together a diverse group of some dozen noted scholars in their discipline.19 For each group, we provided participants with some background



19 For a full list of project participants, visit www.humani​ties​andh​uman​flou​rish​ing.org.

Series Editor’s Foreword  xxi reading20 and asked them to prepare a draft essay on how their scholarly work informs the conceptualization and cultivation of human flourishing. Many participants chose to address the background reading—​appreciatively, critically, or both—​in their papers, although none were required to address it at all. We then circulated these drafts to the entire group in preparation for a three-​day, face-​to-​face meeting, during which the disciplinary chair led a discussion and workshopping of the drafts. These disciplinary consultations, held in 2018 and 2019, were also joined by a junior scholar (usually a graduate student) in the field, one or two social scientists with work on relevant topics, and the Core Team. Following these meetings, participants were asked to revise their drafts in light of our discussion, with the chairs serving as editors for the resulting disciplinary volumes. Given the nature of the project, I also read each of the contributions, providing comments along the way. From beginning to end, the process for creating and editing each of the volume manuscripts took well over a year and allowed for deep engagement with the subject matter and with other scholars. The disciplinary chairs and I were careful to emphasize that these discussions were intended to be robust and the writing authentic, with no foregone conclusions about the nature of human flourishing or the value of exploring it, and we were pleased by the range and depth of thinking undertaken by each group. As mentioned above, after we held the eight disciplinary consultations, we held a ninth meeting where we invited the chairs of each of the disciplinary groups to present and discuss drafts of essays for a ninth, interdisciplinary volume sharing what they and their colleagues had learned through the process. We also invited a few humanities policy leaders, including past National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William Adams, to join us and help think about the broader implications of this work. 20 Martin E. P. Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Positive Psychology: An Introduction,” American Psychologist 55 (1) (2000): 5–​14; Darrin M. McMahon, “From the Paleolithic to the Present: Three Revolutions in the Global History of Happiness,” in e-​Handbook of Subjective Well-​ being, ed. Ed Diener, Shigehiro Oishi, and Louis Tay (Champaign, IL: DEF Publishers, 2018); James O. Pawelski, “Defining the ‘Positive’ in Positive Psychology: Part I. A Descriptive Analysis,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 11 (4) (2016): 339–​356; James O. Pawelski, “Defining the ‘Positive’ in Positive Psychology: Part II. A Normative Analysis,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 11 (4) (2016): 357–​365; James O. Pawelski, “Bringing Together the Humanities and the Science of Well-​Being to Advance Human Flourishing,” in Well-​Being and Higher Education: A Strategy for Change and the Realization of Education’s Greater Purposes, ed. Donald W. Harward (Washington, D.C.: Bringing Theory to Practice, 207–​216); and Louis Tay, James O. Pawelski, and Melissa G. Keith, “The Role of the Arts and Humanities in Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Model,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 13 (3) (2018): 215–​225.

xxii  Series Editor’s Foreword The compiling of the volumes was organized and overseen by the Humanities and Human Flourishing (HHF) Project at the University of Pennsylvania. HHF was founded in 2014 to support the interdisciplinary investigation and advancement of the relationship between the humanities and human flourishing. As the founding director of HHF, I am pleased that it has developed into a growing international and multidisciplinary network of more than 150 humanities scholars, scientific researchers, creative practitioners, college and university educators, wellness officers, policy experts, members of government, and leaders of cultural organizations. In addition to the disciplinary consultations described above and the resulting book series, we have published a number of conceptual papers and systematic reviews, developed conceptual models to guide empirical research, and created and validated a toolkit of measures. Designated a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab, HHF has developed ongoing programs of research (including on art museums and human flourishing and on narrative technologies and well-​being) to understand, assess, and advance the effects of engagement in the arts and humanities on human flourishing. We have published The Oxford Handbook of the Positive Humanities to help establish the Positive Humanities as a robust field of inquiry and practice at the intersection of culture, science, and human flourishing. For more information on HHF, including each of these endeavors as well as its current undertakings, please visit www.humani​ties​andh​uman​flou​rish​ing.org. I am deeply grateful to all the individuals and institutions whose collaboration has made this book series possible. I would like to begin by thanking Chris Stewart and Templeton Religion Trust for the generous grants that have underwritten this work. Thanks also go to the University of Pennsylvania for their robust institutional and financial support. (Of course, the views expressed in these volumes are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton Religion Trust or of the University of Pennsylvania.) I am grateful to the more than 80 contributors to these volumes for accepting our invitation to be a part of this work and bringing more depth and richness to it than I could have imagined. I am especially grateful to the chairs of each of the disciplinary groups for their belief in the importance of this work and their long-​term dedication to making it a success. I also wish to express my appreciation for the hard work of the entire HHF Core Team, including Research Director Louis Tay, postdoctoral fellows Yerin Shim and Hoda Vaziri, Research Manager Michaela Ward, and especially Assistant Director Sarah Sidoti, who meticulously planned and

Series Editor’s Foreword  xxiii oversaw each of the disciplinary consultations and used her expertise in academic publishing to help shape this book series in countless crucial ways. Most of the disciplinary consultations took place on the beautiful grounds of the Shawnee Inn & Golf Resort along the banks of the Delaware River. I am grateful to Charlie and Ginny Kirkwood, John Kirkwood, and all the folks at Shawnee for their gracious support and hospitality. Additionally, I am grateful to Jonathan Coopersmith and the Curtis Institute for donating space for the music group to meet, and to Bill Perthes and the Barnes Foundation for similarly donating space for the visual arts group. Thanks to the Penn Museum for a beautiful setting for the first day of our Chairs consultation and to Marty Seligman and Peter Schulman for donating further space at the Positive Psychology Center. Finally, I am grateful to Peter Ohlin and all the staff and reviewers at Oxford University Press for their partnership in publishing the volumes in this book series. I hope these volumes inspire further conversation, welcoming more people from a larger number of disciplines and a greater range of nationalities and cultural and ethnic backgrounds to inquire into what human flourishing is, how its potential harms can be avoided, and how its benefits can be more deeply experienced and more broadly extended. James O. Pawelski February 19, 2022

List of Contributors David Armitage is Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney and at Queen’s University Belfast. Among his eighteen books to date are most recently, as author, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017), The History Manifesto (coauthor, 2014), and Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013) and, as editor, A History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment (coeditor, 2020), Oceanic Histories (coeditor, 2018), The Law of Nations in Global History (coeditor, 2017), and Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (coeditor, 2014). He is currently completing an edition of John Locke’s colonial writings for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke. Mia Bay is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history, whose recent interests include black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. Bay’s publications include Traveling Black: A Social History of Segregated Transportation (2021); To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (2009); and The White Image in the Black Mind: African-​American Ideas about White People, 1830–​1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000). She is also the coauthor, with Waldo Martin and Deborah Gray White, of the textbook Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (2012), and the editor of two collections of essays: Towards an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015), which she coedited with Farah Jasmin Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara Savage, and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line (2015), which she coedited with Ann Fabian. Bay is currently writing a book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson. D. Graham Burnett is professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University, where he is associated with the IHUM program (the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities) and has courtesy affiliations with the Princeton Environmental Institute and the Princeton Urban Imagination Institute (in the School of Architecture). He is the author of five books covering a range of problems in historical epistemology, law, and changing understanding of the natural world, including The Sounding of the Whale (2012), and Trying Leviathan (2007); his edited volumes include KEYWORDS;. . . Particularly Relevant to Academic Life, &c. (2018) and In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from the Proceedings of ESTAR(SER) (2021). He is associated with the collective known as “The Friends of Attention” (www.fri​ends​ofat​tent​ion.net), and he curates the “Conjectures” series for Public Domain Review.

xxvi  list of Contributors Dan Edelstein is William H. Bonsall Professor of French, and Professor of History, by courtesy, at Stanford University, where he chairs the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (2009); The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (2010); and most recently, On the Spirit of Rights (2018). He has coedited numerous volumes, including, with Keith M. Baker Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (2015). He is also active in the field of digital humanities, notably through the “Mapping the Republic of Letters” project. He is currently working on a study of “permanent revolution.” Nicole Eustace is Professor of History at New York University. She received her BA in history, with distinction, from Yale University in 1994 and her PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. Her first tenure-​track teaching position was at Rutgers University (Camden) from 2001 to 2002. At NYU, she directs the NYU Atlantic History Workshop and teaches in both the Early American History and the History of Women and Gender programs. She is the author of Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (2008 /​paper 2011) and 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (2012 /​paper 2015) as well as coeditor of the essay collection, Warring for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812, coedited with Fredrika Teute (2017). Her current manuscript-​in-​progress is called The Curious Case of Captain Civility: The Story of the Indian War Captain Who Fought to Free a Colonial Murder Suspect. Her articles and essays have appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, and The Journal of Social History. She has published in edited collections including David Lemmings and Ann Brooks, eds., Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (2014) and Susan Matt and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Doing Emotions History (2014). Eustace has served on the advisory boards of publications such as The Journal of Social History, Early American Studies, the Early American Places Series of New York University Press, and on the H-​NET listserv, H-​Emotion. She is currently also on the boards of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Society for the History of the Early American Republic and is serving in her second term as a “Distinguished Lecturer” for the Organization of American Historians. Maya Jasanoff is Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard. She is the author of three books about imperial and global history: Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–​1850 (2005); Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011); and The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2017). These books have won numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Cundill Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize. A 2013 Guggenheim recipient, Jasanoff was awarded the 2017 Windham-​Campbell Prize for her contributions to nonfiction literature. Her

list of Contributors  xxvii essays and reviews appear frequently in publications, including The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The New York Review of Books. Suzanne Marchand is LSU Systems Boyd Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Marchand obtained her BA from UC Berkeley in 1984, and her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1992. She served as assistant and then associate professor at Princeton University before moving to Louisiana State University in 1999. In 2013 he was appointed LSU Systems Boyd Professor, LSU’s highest honor. She is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–​1870 (1996) and German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship (2009), which won the George Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association. In 2017, she founded the Center for Collaborative Knowledge at LSU, whose mission is to enhance cross-​college conversations between faculty and students. In 2020 she took a detour into business history, publishing Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe, which was awarded the Ralph Gomory Prize from the Business History Association. She is now writing a history of Herodotus reception since 1700. Darrin M. McMahon is Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Divine Fury: A History of Genius (2013) and Happiness: A History (2006), which has been translated into twelve languages and was awarded Best Book of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Library Journal, and Slate Magazine. A recipient of major fellowships from the Mellon, Humboldt, and Guggenheim foundations, McMahon is a coeditor of Modern Intellectual History and is currently writing a history of notions of equality and a history of illumination in the Age of Enlightenment. Peter N. Stearns is University Professor of History at George Mason University. He has written widely on world and emotions history, including two popular textbooks. Recent books include Shame: A Brief History; Tolerance in World History; The Industrial Turn in World History; Doing Emotions History; and Childhood in World History; among many others. He also edited the Encyclopedia of World History, sixth edition. Before coming to George Mason University, Professor Stearns taught at the University of Chicago, Rutgers University, and Carnegie Mellon University. He served as vice president of the American Historical Association, Teaching Division, from 1995 to 1998. He was also founder and editor of the Journal of Social History from 1967 to 2015. Peter T. Struck is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars program and founder of its Integrated Studies curriculum. His book Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts (2004) won the C. J. Goodwin Award from the American Philological Association for best book in classical studies.

xxviii  list of Contributors He edited Mantikê (with Sarah Iles Johnston, 2006) and the Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with Rita Copeland, 2010). His most recent book is Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Antiquity (2016), for which he also won the Goodwin Award. He is general editor (with Sophia Rosenfeld) of the six-​volume Cultural History of Ideas forthcoming in 2022, and he is at work on a popular book on mythology.

Introduction Darrin M. McMahon

What is the value of history for life? What value, in other words, do history and historians bring to human existence? And how, if at all, might they contribute to human flourishing and well-​being? Those are the straightforward, if capacious, questions that contributors to this volume were asked to consider in preparing these essays. For regardless of the particular orientations of individual scholars, the general question of the value of history for life is surely important to all of us. And yet it is a question that we historians don’t regularly ask ourselves, or ask of our disciplines. To be sure, a number of our leading practitioners have lately written eloquent pleas and apologias for history’s importance, spelling out, often with great insight, what exactly history is and why it needs to be defended (Hunt 2018; Evans 1997; Maza 2017; Armitage and Guldi 2014). Many of us, too, have a vague, intuitive sense that the study of history is of value—​after all, why else would we do it, or recommend that students take our classes or that people read our books? Yet beyond familiar invocations of the importance of studying history for developing critical thinking skills or understanding the times in which we live, seldom do we push the inquiry much farther on an existential level. We all know that history is a good thing. But precisely how and why is more difficult to say. Surely these are questions that need addressing, and that need addressing now, at a moment when one commentator after another proclaims the crisis, even the obsolescence, of the humanities and the liberal arts. Meanwhile, historians (and not just historians) face falling enrollments in their classrooms and widespread indications of public ignorance of the past or attachment to damaging myths about it. We live in a time of temporal foreshortening, increasingly focused on the here and now. And so we confront as foreign and strange those eruptions of the past that force themselves into our midst and catch us unawares. Whether the subject is race relations, religion, the viability of democracy, human interaction with the planet, war, Darrin M. McMahon, Introduction In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0001

2  History and Human Flourishing or those Hawaiian war gods invoked by David Armitage in his essay included here—​history is not going away, but will continue to force itself into our midst. History will continue to “out.” That, in itself, is an argument for seeking to better understand it—​as a way of taking our bearings in the moment and figuring out where we are. But there is a broader case to be made for the value of history for life, and the essays gathered here aim to do so in a timely way. In this respect they can be contrasted with an earlier effort to consider the value of history for life undertaken, famously, by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in an essay first published in February of 1874. Conceived as part of a series of what he described as “untimely meditations,” Nietzsche’s essay considered the question of the “Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” And while he acknowledged that “we need history . . . for the sake of life and action,” he was also mindful of the ways that history and historical scholarship could detract from life and impede human flourishing (Nietzsche 59). It is worth saying a few words about that well-​known essay as a way of considering past attempts to reckon with its central themes, before introducing our own. The question of the value of history for life is hardly new, and it was hardly new at the time of Nietzsche’s inquiry. Indeed, part of what rendered his meditations “untimely” (Unzeitgemässe) was the fact that history’s value in his day was so widely assumed and historical scholarship so widely admired. The nineteenth century, and above all the German nineteenth century, was a great time and place for historical scholarship. Nietzsche wrote of the “mighty historical movement which, as is well known, has been evident among the Germans particularly for the past two generations” and more generally of the “consuming fever of history” that gripped Europeans of the time. True, the previous century, the Age of Enlightenment, was also a time of first-​ rate historical inquiry, producing the likes of Edward Gibbon and Voltaire, among others. The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, himself the author of an acclaimed multivolume history of England, even called the eighteenth century the (first) “historical age.” Yet the nineteenth century went farther, coming to see history and historical development as the seedbed of all knowledge. This was evident in the great nineteenth-​century philosophies of history—​the most important of which were Hegel and Marx’s—​ which imagined the whole of human development as an integrated process working toward ultimate ends (final freedom, in the case of Hegel, the end of class struggle, according to Marx). Nineteenth-​century theologians similarly adopted “historicist” views to understand religion and revelation as

Introduction  3 unfolding processes, presenting God as a being who disclosed himself (they were confident about God’s gender) in time, and the divine as a force best understood in keeping with the spirit of the age. So, too, with the advent of Darwin, did natural scientists come to think of nature not as eternal and unchanging, but as constantly evolving. The earth and the whole of creation, including the animal (wo)man, were shaped by historical development. History was thus at play in virtually all aspects of nineteenth-​century inquiry, and so it is hardly surprising that its formal study achieved new heights (Bevir 2017). Above all at the German research university, the model for so many in the United States, efforts were made to transform historical scholarship into its own particular science or systematic discipline (Wissenschaft), with unique methods and scholarly apparatus, professional journals and research seminars, and the elaboration of stringent criteria for accuracy and truth. The burgeoning authority of history was further enhanced by the new force of nationalism, which engaged historians directly in the project of crafting communal narratives to map and shape the destinies of peoples. Historical work, consequently, was deemed crucial to the life nations, in Germany as elsewhere.1 Nietzsche registered every one of these developments. But in summarizing the many different ways in which the “mighty historical movement” of the times was shaping his age, he presented a typology of three general “species” of history, all of which in theory at least could contribute to enhancing human life, and that had, historically, been called upon to do so. The first and oldest was what Nietzsche called “monumental” history, or history based on the example of great men. As a classically trained philologist, deeply steeped in ancient learning, Nietzsche was well familiar with the fact that history, as a core discipline of the humanities and the liberal arts, had long been regarded as what Cicero called, in an oft-​invoked phrase, the “magistra vitae,” the teacher of life. For ancient historians, and then for their Renaissance imitators and admirers, history was a kind of ethics in action and so very often biographical, a record of the illustrious lives that served to impart the virtues of character by example, or of the sins and dissipations that spelled the downfall of the corrupt. Generations of elite young men learned 1 It is telling that in the year following the creation of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1884, its first president George Bancroft, who studied in Germany after completing his undergraduate degree at Harvard and took his doctorate from the University of Göttingen, invited none other than the so-​called father of modern scientific history, Leopold von Ranke, to serve as the AHA’s first honorary member.

4  History and Human Flourishing about courage or forbearance, magnanimity or friendship from the pages of Plutarch, whose celebrated Lives served as a primer of good living for everyone from Shakespeare to Rousseau (and even Frankenstein’s monster!), just as the lives of the saints and other viris ilustribus provided paragons of Christian and Pagan virtue. This was history as lived experience, philosophy by example, and as such it was invariably eudaimonic, teaching that the good life entailed a life well lived in accordance with virtue. Nietzsche recognized and to an extent approved of this kind of monumental history, which in the pages of such masters as Thucydides or Polybius provided counsel and consolation to leaders and men of action. “Satiate your soul with Plutarch,” he enjoined, and find in the great exemplars of the past “models, teachers, and comforters” (Nietzsche 67, 95). And yet he also believed, with his characteristic chauvinism and elitism, that the example of the great men of the past could only germinate and flower in the minds of men who were great themselves. For all others, including those who “recognize greatness but cannot themselves do great things,” the examples of the past were lost. And although he did not say so explicitly, Nietzsche would likely have regarded the popular historical literature of his day on Großer Männer (great men), and the worship of genius that accompanied it, with scorn (Köhne 2013; McMahon 2013). Like throwing pearls to swine, the lessons of the great could not be processed by “timorous and short-​lived” brains. There was another problem with this type of monumental history in the service of life that Nietzsche intimated, and others recognized: It presupposed continuities between the past and the present that no longer held. History, that is, could serve effectively as magistra vitae, “only as long as the given assumptions and conditions [between epochs] are fundamentally the same.”2 In a world of accelerated change—​a world, as Marx put it, where “all that is solid melts into air”—​those continuities could no longer be easily assumed. To search for lessons in the past was to seek solutions to problems, and applications to conditions, of a wholly different kind. If the appeal of monumental history was thus limited, Nietzsche’s second species of historical inquiry, what he called “antiquarian history,” was in his mind even more problematic. By antiquarian history Nietzsche did not 2 These are the words of Reinhart Koselleck, who develops this point at length in his essay “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” in his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia UP, 2004), 26–​42 (citation on 27–​28).

Introduction  5 simply mean dabbling in the past for the past’s sake—​collecting antiquities and rare books and the like—​although it could easily become that. But more positively, antiquarian history encompassed history that preserved a sense of connection to the past, fostering loyalty and love for what had been bequeathed and handed down. Antiquarian history thus played a central role in any community or nation, for it established continuities of institutions, customs, and beliefs, while cultivating a sense of reverence, gratitude, and belonging. That was all for the good. Yet antiquarian history in his own time, Nietzsche believed, had degenerated into an uncritical justification and embrace of the status quo. Far from enhancing human vitality, it detracted from it by embalming and mummifying living culture. Antiquarian historians thus made a museum of the world, encouraging reverence, but stifling creation, innovation, and growth. As Nietzsche put it, antiquarian history “knows only how to preserve life not how to engender it” (Nietzsche 75). Nietzsche’s third mode of history, “critical history,” could potentially serve to counteract the conservative impulse of the antiquarian kind. Nietzsche was frank in acknowledging that every past is “worthy to be condemned” (Nietzsche 76). Replete with violence, error, and injustice, history needed to be periodically broken up and dissolved, hauled before the tribunal of the present and called out for its shortcomings. That was a service that historians of the Enlightenment had performed in the eighteenth century, condemning fanaticism, intolerance, and inhumanity, and it was continued in the nineteenth century in Germany by many of the left-​leaning followers of Hegel. Hegel himself described the whole of human history as a “slaughter bench,” upon which the happiness of peoples had been continually sacrificed, even as he discerned in the historical process a movement toward final freedom. His history was thus a self-​described “theodicy”—​a justification of past suffering and sacrifice—​but ultimately, as Nietzsche pointed out scathingly, it formed an “idolatry of the factual,” a kind of conservative theology in disguise (Nietzsche 105). Yet a number of his interpreters, including Marx, used aspects of Hegel’s thought to criticize and condemn past injustice in the service of the struggle toward a better future. All history might be the history of class struggles, a history of hegemony and oppression, but deliverance was at hand. By exposing the gross injustice of the past, one could prepare the way for a better world. Nietzsche was no less contemptuous of this brand of left-​Hegelian (and Marxist) history than he was of Hegel’s own. It, too, was “disguised theology” (Nietzsche 102), a type of thought that “holds the last to be the most

6  History and Human Flourishing important” and sees all that has been only as a means to some higher end. Although this type of critical history placed immense hope on the horizon, it fostered deep dissatisfaction with the past and present alike. Whereas Hegel’s history bred complacency, Marx’s bred contempt. Thus, although critical history was surely necessary in the service of life, it largely functioned in his own day, Nietzsche believed, like the monumental and antiquarian kinds, to detract from, rather than enhance, human flourishing. Together, moreover, the three varieties had been swept up by the general “demand that history should be a science,” its facts amassed and accumulated with all the rigors of positivist inquiry in the ostensible service of truth (Nietzsche 77). Historical knowledge thus streamed in “unceasingly from its inexhaustible wells,” and the effect was overwhelming. Produced and consumed for the greater part without hunger and even counter to society’s needs, this knowledge was becoming undigestible (Nietzsche 78). Nietzsche warned variously of the “excess of the historical sense” and the “oversaturation” of the age with knowledge about the past, which had provoked, he believed, a “malady of history.” The symptoms were many—​Nietzsche diagnosed at least five different adverse consequences, ranging from a noxious irony vis-​à-​vis the present to a misleading sense of superiority vis-​à-​vis the past. But in summarizing the way in which the health of the German people had been “undermined by the study of history,” he called attention to two major consequences. In the first place, he claimed, a hypertrophied historical sense wielded without restraint “destroys illusion and robs the things that exist of the atmosphere in which alone they can live” (Nietzsche, p. 95). Nietzsche drew attention to the example of religion, and particularly Christianity, which under the influence of historical vivisection was becoming “completely historical.” Like everything else that “possesses life,” Christianity would cease to live when it was “dissected completely.” As one who would later proclaim himself the “anti-​Christ” and announce the death of God, Nietzsche hardly mourned Christianity’s passing. He was more concerned, however, about a similar process at work with respect to art, which likewise served to bestow upon existence the character of the eternal and the stable. Art’s capacity to disclose the timeless was being undermined by the very same historicizing tendencies that reduced the universal proclamations of the son of God to the specific utterances of an impoverished Jewish carpenter living in the first decades of the Common Era. Context and analytical dissection forced all to submit before the rigors of science. And that, Nietzsche sensed, would have corrosive effects at the

Introduction  7 social level, sapping unity of feeling among the people, and splitting off that part of the nation that called itself the cultured part and lay claim to the “national artistic conscience.” At issue here was Nietzsche’s sense that national communities were always based to some extent on occlusion and myth, on origin stories and narratives that, like religion and art, depended on selective memory and useful forgetting to sustain visons necessary to growth and life. “Every nation, indeed every human being that wants to become mature,” he insisted, requires a similar enveloping illusion” (Nietzsche 95).3 History, as it was currently practiced, tended to destroy them. Nietzsche’s proposed solutions to these ills—​his inchoate appeal to the suprahistorical, which leads the eye away from becoming toward art, religion, and the realm of the eternal, and his vague invocation to learn to “organize the chaos” of past cultures like the Greeks had learned to organize their own—​are arguably of less interest than his diagnoses. Still, there are uncomfortable insights here, not least Nietzsche’s recognition that the “art and power of forgetting” is sometimes necessary for the care and hygiene of life. That proposition runs counter to the grain of most historians’ very being, just as it runs counter to our post-​Holocaust dictum to “never forget.” Yet as Nietzsche would insist, sometimes forgetting is necessary, for the very fact that history was full of “so much that is false, crude, inhuman, absurd, [and violent]” meant that its recovery and retrieval could be incapacitating (Nietzsche 95). Arguably, in the short to medium term at least, many nations after World War II sought to forget in precisely this way—​in order to move on—​instituting varieties of what the Spanish would later call the Pacto del Olvido, the unofficial pact of forgetting that followed the fall of Franco in 1975 and that was instituted to end the cycle of recrimination and the investigation of past injustices perpetrated by both the Right and Left in the Spanish Civil War and the long dictatorship that followed. Needless to say, there can be a fine line between forgetting and repression. But just as psychologists have learned in recent decades that the post-​ Freudian imperative to “work through” the traumas of the past isn’t always healthy or conducive to happiness—​that sometimes victims of abuse or posttraumatic stress disorder simply need to learn to let go and move on—​there are clearly moments in all collective histories, and the personal responses 3 In a celebrated lecture delivered in 1882, the French historian and critic Ernest Renan would make a similar case for the need for national amnesia, stressing that “Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.” See his “Qu’est-​ce qu’une nation?” (https://​fr.wik​isou​rce.org/​wiki/​Qu%E2%80%99est-​ce_​qu%E2%80%99une_​nati​on_​%3F).

8  History and Human Flourishing to them, when forgetting is a necessary strategy in the hygiene of life. Toni Morrison attested movingly to this with respect to her own early literary work. “I never thought I had the emotional resources to deal with slavery,” she observed. “There was some deliberate, calculated survivalist intention to forget certain things” (Morrison 2020). And yet, years later, when she came across an old newspaper story about Margaret Garner, an African American woman who killed her daughter to keep her from being re-​ enslaved, Morrison, herself the granddaughter of an enslaved woman, began the work—​the critical historical and literary work—​that led to the publication of Beloved in 1987, a work that deals fundamentally with slavery, bringing Morrison’s full emotional, artistic, and intellectual gifts to bear on the subject. It is as if an earlier period of hygiene and willed forgetting had given her the strength and resources to later tackle the challenge of the past in the critical mode in the service of renewed life. Morrison’s case illustrates nicely the complicated dialectic between forgetting and remembering on the personal scale. But it also points to the collective or national dimension to these same complicated relations, and to the many ways in which the personal and the political can overlap and intersect. Morrison’s own critical awakening led not only to the willed recollection of the painful past in art but to her enhanced realization that there was “no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby” to memorialize the victims of slavery. The result was the “Bench by the Road” project, initiated in 1993 to place benches as memorials and sites of remembrance in critical places in the United States and abroad.4 Today these benches serve as a kind of counterpart to the statues of slave-​owning patricians and confederate generals, which bear their own uncomfortable witness to the ways in which the nation has chosen to memorialize and forget. Professional historians today, and indeed for some time, have been more comfortable with the critical mode of historical analysis than with its antiquarian or monumental counterparts. Suspicious of silences, and mindful of the dangers of forgetting, they see it as their job to recover the suppressed, investigating injustice, and exploring the often furtive mechanisms of domination in order to speak truth to current power. Recognizing with Nietzsche that there is much in the past “worthy to be condemned,” they often focus on history as a site of oppression, as if to agree with the judgment of Walter Benjamin that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same 4 Morrison is cited and details are provided at https://​www.toni​morr​ison​soci​ety.org/​bench.html

Introduction  9 time a document of barbarism” (Benjamin 256). Mindful of the warnings of the influential Haitian scholar Michel-​Rolph Troullot, they know that the past may not only be forgotten but actively silenced (Trouillot 1995). It is part of their mission to listen for these silences, and where they can, to give voice to those whose voices have been erased. Such critical historical inquiry undoubtedly serves an important role in sustaining and enhancing life, as Nietzsche well appreciated. Few would want to gainsay the many achievements of those who have sought—​and continue to seek—​to further human flourishing by working to understand and remove the many impediments to its fulfillment. For undoubtedly the past is a site of much misery and oppression, replete with slavery, exploitation, racism, sexism, and countless other ills that have carried over into the present and can only be rectified and “cured” when we first expose and understand them. Such efforts must continue in the service of better life, and arguably with even greater urgency in our current historical moment when the inveterate hold of the past—​on race relations, on democratic governance, on structural inequality—​is so apparent. A number of the essays gathered in this volume think about human flourishing explicitly in these terms, and all of them recognize the indispensable need for history to be conducted in the critical mode in life’s service. And yet it should also be clear that not every document of civilization really is, in fact, a document of barbarism. If there is much to condemn in the past, there is also much to praise—​and much to inspire, much to make us wonder and marvel, to give us courage and sustenance, to help us smile, laugh, and hope. To focus exclusively on history’s darkness is to risk missing the light, and it may well be that professional historians, like others in the humanities, have tended to display in their work something of a “negative bias,” devoting more attention to chronicling past ills than to recognizing past health in the acknowledgment of the positive dimensions of historical experience (McMahon 2013). Critique, undoubtedly, is essential. But as the scholar Rita Felski has argued with respect to literary studies, there are “limits to critique.” Like other fields in the humanities, history included, the study of literature must also “curate,” or as Nietzsche would put it, preserve (Felski 2015; During 2020). There is surely a place for celebration, as well, in recognition of the great women and great men, the founding mothers and fathers, who have bequeathed us so much. Similar to the way in which psychologists and other social scientists in recent years have moved to study not just pathologies, but sources of strength—​not just sickness, but health—​historians, too,

10  History and Human Flourishing can play a role in the task of enhancing our understanding of the components of human flourishing. In that way, too, history can be put to the service of life. And that, to repeat, is the common goal of the “timely” essays gathered here, even though they pursue this goal in different ways. Many of the essays are avowedly personal, which is only fitting, given the existential nature of the question at hand. But they all try to take stock of history’s value for life at a time when history’s public importance can no longer be assumed as it was in Nietzsche’s own. To continue the conversation in the twenty-​first century is to do so in very different circumstances. In the volume’s opening chapter, D. Graham Burnett offers a lyrical and deeply personal account of history as a vocation, tracing the fate of the arts and humanities as “ ‘metaphysical’ versions of activities that originally took shape in the language of the gods.” In doing so, he invokes Max Weber’s well-​ known essay Wissenschaft als Beruf (Science as a Vocation), but indirectly he picks up where Nietzsche left off. For in effect Weber’s celebrated injunction that true scholarship in the university should have nothing to do with life’s meaning or value might be said to have announced a world in which scholarship in the human sciences has nothing to do with life.5 That is probably too strong. Yet an academic space in which, as Weber put it, “the illusions have vanished—​that science or other systematic knowledge is the ‘path to true meaning,’ ‘the path to true art,’ ‘the path to true Nature,’ the path to the true God,’ ‘the path to true happiness—​’ ” is clearly recognizable today (Weber 23). And Nietzsche’s specter of knowledge “produced and consumed for the greater part without hunger and even counter to one’s need” will not be foreign to many contemporary graduate students, as Burnett makes clear. For undergraduates, too, scholarship is often difficult to conceive in conjunction with “soul-​craft.” And while Burnett understands the reasons for this transformation, he detects, and confesses to feeling himself, a kind of residual longing for scholarship and teaching that tries to keep the faith, pointing us in the direction of those paths indicated, but closed off, by Weber. Even if only quixotically, that “higher ideal” might still be pursued, and Burnett ends by giving us some indication of the direction historians might take in following it. A history that cultivates close and sustained attention, he insists, that renews its focus on the present, and that, paradoxically, helps to reveal

5 Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s worry about the demand to remake humanistic scholarship—​and historical inquiry in particular—​into a “science” (Wissenschaft) resonates clearly in Weber’s account.

Introduction  11 to us what is “eternal,” as Nietzsche himself once stressed, is the hygiene we need right now in the service of life. Burnett’s call for history focused explicitly on helping us “understand our moment” is also at issue in the next essay in the volume, David Armitage’s provocative “Defense of Presentism.” Presentism has long been a dirty word among historians, who make it their business to understand past peoples and events on their own terms and are ever wary of imposing contemporary considerations anachronistically. “Historians are trained to reject presentism,” Armitage affirms, “we are likely to argue that our duty is to the past and its inhabitants—​not to the present, and certainly not to the future.” And yet as he shows with analytical rigor and precision, historians employ the word in a baffling variety of ways. By dissecting those different uses and meanings, Armitage seeks to gain clarity about what historians really ought to oppose and what about the present they can comfortably accept. And though he endorses wholeheartedly historians’ need to confront what he describes as a “rampant ahistoricism in other fields and among wider publics”—​as well as the temporal foreshortening that is so much a part of public discourse today—​he also recognizes that to willfully cut ourselves off from the present is as self-​defeating as it impossible. “If historians too freely use presentism as a slur or as a taboo,” he observes, “then we may be guilty of depriving our readers, and indeed ourselves, of one valuable resource for promoting human flourishing: history.” The past, he insists, has a central role to play in the elaboration of human happiness, which always involves a complex interplay between past, present, and future. At both the individual and the social level, human flourishing “is at once present-​centered, future-​oriented, and past dependent.” It is dependent upon the past, “because only history . . . can supply the information and the imagination to shape our choices, in the present, among multiple potential paths into the future.” Invariably, our future horizons are constrained by what has preceded them. By adopting a responsible presentism that attends closely to the concerns of the moment, historians can confront those “eruptions of the past” in our midst that pose unsettling questions, and help to frame the answers that will better guide us in the future. The complex interplay between past, present, and future is also at play in story. And story, Maya Jasanoff reminds us in her evocative and also deeply personal rumination, is always at play in history, not least her own. Many languages do not even distinguish between the two. In French, for example, as in the equivalents in German, Italian, and Spanish, histoire is both a tale that is

12  History and Human Flourishing told and an account of the past. In English the one word (story) is imbedded in the other (history). Story is primitive, Jasanoff asserts, quoting E. M. Forster. It harkens back to the origins of literature and to one of the earliest histories, Herodotus’s “inquiry” or Historia, which, as Suzanne Marchand explains in her essay in this volume, is, at its heart, a collection of really good tales (or, as his detractors would have it, really good lies). But story is primitive in another way, too—​in its power to move the emotions and to draw listeners in, and for that very reason, it can be employed both for better and for worse. Jasanoff considers a variety of the many different ways, while also considering the various evidentiary, intellectual, and ethical reasons why critics have sometimes opposed the use of story to convey the past. Yet, in the end, she concludes that story is simply too powerful a tool for historians to ignore—​and too necessary. Like it or not, “stories about the past cement identity, define community, shape politics, law, and culture.” This means that stories bear profoundly on the present and the future, too. If historians can tell theirs in such a way that they also “kindle the senses, spark the imagination, engage the intellect, and expand the emotions,” so much the better. Historians’ stories can help enrich our lives. Peter Stearns offers another means for historians to pursue flourishing—​ by looking for it directly in the past. A pioneer in the study of the history of emotions, and one of its leading practitioners, Stearns lays out an ambitious program whereby historians might complement directly the work currently being done by positive psychologists who study the characteristics and behaviors of happy people. Not only, that is, can historians further the efforts to write the history of the evaluation and experience of happiness in specific historical settings (or like Daniel Horowitz, to historicize the positive psychology movement itself), they can also examine the history of particular areas where contemporary well-​being experts offer advice about behavior, with the goal of providing deeper context and insight (McMahon 2006; Horowitz 2017; Stearns 2021). Consider friendship, love, and marriage, which figure centrally in the psychological literature on happiness. These are not stable aspirations—​the norms and expectations about them have changed dramatically over time, and particularly since the eighteenth century. Stearns points out, for example, that the idea of finding a “soulmate,” although drawing on older roots, really only emerges in the 1980s, when the phrase became widely popular, picked up among other places by the new online matchmaking services that were in turn becoming one of the main sources of mate selection. As psychologists such as Eli Finkel

Introduction  13 have recognized, ideas and expectations like these can put enormous strains on modern marriages, which are now asked to do things that in earlier times they were not (Finkel 2017). An understanding of the history of particular practices, behaviors, and traits can thus offer essential insight into what it is we think we need for happiness now. Stearns recommends extending this approach to other values and strengths currently advocated by psychologists and social scientists interested in well-​being—​from curiosity and trust to parental satisfaction and gratitude to areas now often seen as impediments to happiness, such as loneliness and consumerism. Giving a rich sense of the potential payoffs of such work, Stearns makes a compelling case for its need. Whereas Stearns ranges across the whole of human history in search of material offering insight into the pursuit of happiness, Peter Struck homes in on a specific and particularly interesting case in the thought of Aristotle, widely considered the most influential ancient authority on human flourishing. Aristotle’s reflections on the subject are most often studied in the context of his major treatise, the Nicomachean Ethics, but Struck focuses on what is likely an earlier work, the Eudemian Ethics, paying close attention to Aristotle’s observation on a special class of persons: those who, through no apparent effort or deliberation of their own, nonetheless seem to flourish. In many ways, this class of persons is an anomaly for Aristotle, who sees human flourishing (eudaimonia) largely as the consequence of human agency. Yet he is convinced of their existence, and the conviction leads him, as Struck shows, to a profound meditation on the lower-​level cognitive processes and operations at work in the mind beneath the level of consciousness and reason. These bear interesting comparisons, Struck notes, to work in contemporary cognitive science on “gut feelings,” intuition, and the parts of the human brain that control “automatic processes” like the regulation of dopamine. Aristotle seems to believe, as Struck puts it, that at some basic level “we are hard wired for happiness,” and that consistently fortunate people are able to tap into that wiring more effectively than others—​getting by, as it were, on their instincts. An impulse to happiness would seem to be present in life in its most rudimentary forms. By teasing that insight out of Aristotle, Struck quite literally shows us history’s value for life and flourishing together. Dan Edelstein is also conversant with the thought of the ancients, invoking in his contribution a first-​century aesthetic category, the sublime, that was revised and revivified in the long eighteenth century by a host of important authors who blended it with their own experience of the past. Drawing on

14  History and Human Flourishing that experience, and above all the reflections of the great writers Stendhal and Goethe, Edelstein uses it to prescribe history in much the same way that the late antique author Boethius famously prescribed philosophy, as a source of “consolation.” Edelstein explains how the contemplation of history—​whether on the page or before a monument of the past—​can not only brace us against the tempestuous bluster of the moment, so driven in our own times by sensationalist news cycles and maddening tweets, but can also invoke healing moments of what he calls the “historical sublime,” which serve to collapse the always fluid relations between the past, the present, and the future, inducing feelings of awe and soothing calm amid the transitoriness of all things. The historical sublime is at once pleasurable and melancholy, akin to mourning in its awareness of loss, but freeing in that it allows us to transform and transcend the moment. It may be the perfect antidote for a culture obsessed with the now. By transporting us in time and placing us in the presence of the past, the historical sublime performs a kind of “secular magic,” Edelstein writes, “conjuring up ghosts or ancient empires to repopulate a barren world.” That emphasis on magic—​or better, the marvelous—​informs Suzanne Marchand’s animated reflections on the relationship between history and human flourishing. Marchand takes as the model of her study another ancient paragon, Herodotus, the man who, as she says, “used to be called ‘the father of history’ when we were modest (and patriarchal) enough to acknowledge fathers.” If the child is the father of the man, the father, in this case, has been rendered smaller over the years—​infantilized and dismissed since the eighteenth century as what the nineteenth-​century English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay described as a “delightful child.” Herodotus, Macaulay believed, recounted amusing stories and played on the page, but he couldn’t rise to the more mature stuff of serious historical inquiry. For Marchand, however, Macaulay’s epithet for Herodotus can be taken as more than just a backhanded compliment. For Herodotus continually delights, pursuing his fancy with a whimsical playfulness, and imbedding stories in his histories that continue to arrest us with the narrative force that Maya Jasanoff describes. He also approaches the world with wonder and a profound sense of its marvelous richness in the way that children can sometimes see the world with fresh and naïve eyes. At a time when so much of our history is “serious”—​not to stay stodgy and at-​times unreadable—​Marchand recommends reconsidering Herodotus as a source of young blood, reminding us that pleasure, play, and delight are life-​affirming, essential to human flourishing and to any history that would enhance it.

Introduction  15 Whatever Herodotus’s youthful appeal, history very often speaks most directly to men and women as they age. That is the premise of Darrin McMahon’s chapter, which inquires why this might be so. We become more aware of history as we ourselves become part of it, McMahon explains, more sensitive, by dint of lived experience, to the transmutations wrought by time. But we are also drawn to the past in search of some of the solace, magic, and continuity to which other authors in this volume allude. History, in that sense, McMahon argues, serves a number of the functions that religion has performed over the ages—​helping us to reconcile death and to connect us to the departed, to mediate and even transcend time as we negotiate mortality. The likeness is more than just superficial, and the similarity helps to explain why scientific history and this thing called “religion” have occupied shared, and at times also contested, terrain since their simultaneous emergence in the eighteenth century as discreet domains and realms of inquiry. McMahon’s essay thus continues the meditation begun by Nietzsche and pursued by Burnett, examining the ways that history might appeal to the eternal as it serves life. The final two essays, by Nicole Eustace and Mia Bay, each grapple with very different subjects, but they work together to sound a critical and cautionary note, one that Nietzsche, for one, might well have approved. Eustace examines the thought of the Philadelphia polymath (and early mentor of Benjamin Franklin) James Logan, a slaveholding Quaker merchant, provincial magistrate, and book collector, who labored over the first purely philosophical treatise composed in British America, The Duties of Man Deduced from Nature, from 1720 to 1742. Logan’s efforts to discern a universal ethics—​and the keys to happiness—​from the study of nature are indicative of Enlightenment attempts to do the same. Yet Logan’s “universal” ethics turn out to be anything but. Founded explicitly on the exclusion of wide swathes of humanity—​above all Native Americans and Africans—​they served to justify slavery and bolster assumed hierarchies, inequalities, and structures of power. Eustace draws from her analysis an urgent lesson for all post-​Enlightenment efforts to employ science to counsel virtue, including efforts by contemporary psychologists to use the science of happiness to inform human flourishing: beware the false universal. Ostensibly universal prescriptions can easily flow from—​and mask—​assumptions that serve to reinforce exclusions and imbalances of power (even when those assumptions are unwitting and in direct contradiction to stated intentions). Eustace thus employs history in the critical mode in the service of life to remind us

16  History and Human Flourishing how many impediments still stand in the way of the free pursuit of human flourishing. Mia Bay does much the same in her illuminating essay, making perfectly clear why African Americans have very good reason to be suspicious of the effort, however well-​intentioned, to ascertain and improve their well-​being. Black happiness, she shows, was a constant theme in the proslavery literature of the antebellum era, and the effort (in this case not well-​intentioned at all) to solicit mirth and good cheer from the oppressed was a preoccupation of many white Americans long after the Civil War. Fantasizing about the happy-​ go-​lucky Negro, the smiling minstrel, and the carefree Stepin Fetchit, white supremacists demanded service with a smile. Happiness, Bay concludes, “is a highly problematic subject in African American history and culture because discussions of happiness or human flourishing among African Americans have often been mobilized in support of white supremacy.” To be ignorant of, or insensitive to, that history would be to imperil efforts to improve happiness from the outset. The contributors to this volume entertained their reflections in the context of a broader initiative, The Humanities and Human Flourishing project, centered at the University of Pennsylvania and underwritten by the Templeton Religion Trust. Focused specifically on questions of well-​being, the project aims to understand the unique ways that the various disciplines in the arts and the humanities contribute to human flourishing, and even more ambitiously, to devise measures to quantify their impact. The historians represented here were asked to read a number of the materials generated by the initiative, and then met under its auspices as a group in October of 2019 to discuss them over the course of two days. The essays in their final form, however, represent the independent reflections of scholars whose views are very much their own. Although the editor of this volume, Darrin M. McMahon, serves on the advisory board of the Humanities and Human Flourishing project and identifies with its overall aims, not all of the historians invited to contribute do. Indeed, part of the explicit goal in putting this volume together was to generate a variety of different perspectives on the pressing questions raised. To that end, the editor and organizers initially invited historians to contribute to the volume who work on a number of different regions of the world outside of the United States and Europe, including China, Africa, and Latin America. But for various reasons that span the basic to the banal, those invitations were frustrated by scheduling conflicts, issues of availability, last-​minute cancellations, and simple bad luck. The result is that this volume is narrower

Introduction  17 in geographic focus than originally intended, and in that respect it mirrors a problem that will be familiar to scholars who work on issues of well-​being in a number of different domains: the literatures tend to draw inordinately on the scholarship and experience of the global north and their “WEIRD” denizens. Which is to say that this volume makes no claims to completeness, and still less to have exhausted the answers to the question of the value of history for life. But we do hope very much that our modest efforts to consider history’s importance to human flourishing will prompt further efforts to do the same in every region of the world where such knowledge may be useful. History, like happiness, is the provenance of humanity. Neither should be constrained by frontiers.

Works Cited Armitage, David, and Jo Guldi. The History Manifesto. Cambridge UP, 2014. Benjamin, W. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations, edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 253–​264. Bevir, Marc. History and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain. Cambridge UP, 2017. During, Simon. “What Were the Humanities, Anyway?” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2020, https://​www.chroni​cle.com/​arti​cle/​what-​were-​the-​hum​anit​ies-​any​ way?cid=​gen_​sign​_i​ n Evans, Richard. In Defense of History. Granta, 1997. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago UP, 2015. Finkel, Eli J. The All or Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work. Dutton, 2017. Horowitz, Daniel. Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America. Oxford UP, 2017. Hunt, Lynn. History: Why It Matters. Polity, 2018. Köhne, Julia Barbara. Geniekult in Geisteswissenschaften und Literaturen um 1900 und seine filmischen Adaptionen. Boehlau Verlag, 2013. Maza, Sarah. Thinking about History. Chicago UP, 2017. McMahon, Darrin M. Happiness: A History. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006. McMahon, Darrin M. Divine Fury: A History of Genius. Basic Books, 2013. McMahon, Darrin M. “Finding Joy in the History of Emotions.” Doing Emotions History, edited by S. J. Matt and P. N. Stearns, U of Illinois P, 2014, pp. 103–​119. Morrison, Toni. Interview cited in Ron Charles, “Twelve Novels That Changed the World.” The Washington Post, May 10, 2020. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale and edited by Daniel Breazeale, Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. 57–​123. Stearns, Peter N. Happiness in World History. Routledge, 2021. Trouillot, Michel-​Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 1995.

1 History, the Humanities, and the Human D. Graham Burnett

Serious engagement with fundamental questions is humbling. And the question before us is fundamental: What role, if any, can the study of history play in the essential good that we are here going to call “human flourishing”? It would be churlish not to be daunted by a question of such depth, significance, and scope. And I must confess that, sitting down to compose a reply, I do feel a little daunted. But it also feels like there is no place to hide. Anyone who has a “professional” commitment to study the past—​anyone who claims the teaching of history as a vocation—​should be answerable on the question as posed. I can see no good excuses for any dodging, sidestepping, or erudite explaining away (or “reframing” away—​an academic stock-​in-​trade). Too much sophistication is probably to be mistrusted here. Someone is asking me to explain myself. Even, possibly, to defend myself. Let me see what I can do, in the name of the work I love. For starters, I want to embrace the terms in which the question has been set: the notion of “flourishing” strikes me as adequately capacious to gather and hold anything we might want to adduce as a good. Within it, I think I discern a residual naturalism (a sense of “health” and “growth”). At the same time, however, the term conveys a sense of “life in abundance” that happily overflows mere “organic vitality” and expands into the zones of spiritual/​ metaphysical well-​being. Words convey moods. And it is interesting that “flourish” somehow manages, in current usage, to elide some of the basic antinomies that so easily whipsaw efforts to think about the good life. One does not sense, for instance, a tension between the individual and the group or community in the term “flourish.” To “flourish” is not, in any obvious way, to “win.” Similarly, the language of “flourishing” feels agnostic about the various excelsiors of “excellence” more generally. In the ideal of flourishing one senses something of the Aristotelian virtue of the mean, even as the term seems in no way hostile to the pursuit of one or another form of greatness (of soul, of achievement, etc.). D. Graham Burnett, History, the Humanities, and the Human In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0002

History, the Humanities, and the Human  19 So what kind of flourishing is at issue? Human flourishing. A moment, then, on that term “human.” It has, of course, come under enormous and increasing pressure over the last fifty years. We have been asked to consider the (often troubling) history of the category: its activation in litany of exclusions, violent parochialisms, and laboriously “principled” injustices. In sifting these stories, attention has fallen again and again on the very particular (and ideologically charged) “human sciences” that gave form—​gave tooth?—​to the concept of the human in the modern period. As a consequence of these historical reassessments (and also in parallel but distinct intellectual and activist traditions), various “post-​humanisms” have been proposed—​ organic, mechanomorphic, even “vibrant.” I’m sympathetic to much of this new work, in part, I think, because I come out of the history and philosophy of science, a field that has been especially concerned with historicizing the human (and interrogating the forms of knowledge that have authorized the category). It is also the case that I am a basically “histrionic” thinker. I like strange ideas. And I like trying to think “otherly.” In this regard thinking as (or with) the nonhuman has, of late, proven a rich resource. But for all that, I remain essentially committed to the category of the human, and understand my work as a scholar and teacher to center on this category in ways I hope to sketch here.1 So, “history and human flourishing.” The problem is as serious (for a historian) as could be imagined. The terms are well chosen. The work is before us. Although perhaps we need another moment of overture. Since there is one more term that we have not yet tested: What about “history”? Are we sure we have a sense of what this is? Embarrassingly, while I must own up to having now been a more or less professional historian for nearly twenty-​five years, I remain seriously uncertain about the scope/​limits/​essence of this enterprise. And yet only if we can be sufficiently specific about just what activities we have in mind as “history” will we be able to speak to history’s merits in relation to that very grand aspiration to “flourish as humans.” Let me try. It has sometimes felt to me that history can be figured as a Janus: one head, but with two faces, each with a mouth; and these mouths 1 In the last ten years I have been increasingly drawn to a slightly different formulation—​borrowed from the French theorist Bernard Stiegler: the “non-​inhuman.” There is a chastened air in that double negative, and it suits a humanism that has put aside its laurels for a penance of sackcloth and ashes. Anyone who proposes to work in, or in relation to, this tradition must acknowledge that there is much for which to atone. I take the awkwardness of Stiegler’s coinage to be a proper overture in the direction of the humility that is needed. We want a “weak humanism,” conceived in parallel to Gianni Vattimo’s pensiero debole (“weak thought”).

20  History and Human Flourishing speak in very different directions. One kind of history leans forward to whisper in the ear of the prince. Which is to say, it is the highest aspiration of one very real kind of history to inform the work to shape, maintain, and ameliorate social/​political order. Such history moves from the assumption that a more just society can emerge through, or by means of, a proper knowledge of the past. To be effective, then, this history must be heard by those who have (or seek to have) power.2 But there is that other mouth. And that mouth does not need the ear of power. Because that other mouth seeks only to whisper the solace of companionship into the ear of anyone who might feel alone. Which is to say, this other mouth has no use for the prince, because it has no designs on the transformation of society or politics. It has chosen compassion over justice, and consolation over power—​and therefore has as its highest aim the simple work of giving us to each other in forms or modes sufficiently similar as to be recognizable, and sufficiently different as to extend our sense of what it might be to be ourselves.3 In this sense, the second mouth sings into being an expanding and deepened “we,” and in doing so makes real a sense that we are at home on Earth, and in the company it keeps. The former project, the first mouth, correlates loosely with the enterprise of history in its social-​scientific mode. The latter is probably synonymous with history as practiced in the key of the humanities. The former enterprise understands the past as relevant to the worldly problems of now (and what is to come). The latter project understands the past as a vast and precious resource in the ongoing work of fortifying ourselves against despair, solipsism, and alienation. The former wants to make the world a better place to live. The latter wants to teach us to live (and to die) in the world onto which we open our eyes. If the former strives for amelioration of our conditions, the latter seeks an imperishable bliss—​but must content itself with the perishable kind (the only bliss immediately available to perishable creatures).4 2 In democratic politics, it is possible to interpret “prince” here to mean “the people.” Which is to say, those forms of history that want to address questions of social order and collective life do not literally have to aspire to land on the night-​table of the president (supposing, for a moment, a president who reads). They can seek to “educate the people” about the past in ways that are intended to inform and transform the political community—​in its social dynamics, or in its formal legal and administrative arrangements, or in its economic architecture. 3 “To recognize one’s own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of spirit, whose being consists only in returning to itself from what is other.” Hans-​Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 [1960]), p. 13. 4 “Imperishable bliss” is borrowed from Wallace Stevens’s Sunday Morning. One of the readers of this essay suggested I offer examples of these two historical modes as I conceive them. There are defenders of each, I would say, in this very volume: David Armitage and Nicole Eustace speak to the first, if in very different ways; Dan Edelstein and Darrin McMahon, for instance, can be read as

History, the Humanities, and the Human  21 This somewhat melodramatic bifurcation of the historical “voice”—​ while important to me, and, I think, significant in thinking about history generally—​perhaps launches our thinking in air that is a little too thin to breathe easily. There are many other ways to parse the term that are a good deal closer to earth, and no less important to the question at hand. So some more plodding distinctions are probably in order. After all, in common usage we mean such different things by the term “history.” Sometimes, we use the word loosely, to designate something like “the stuff of the past; what happened back then.” At other times, the term is used, with a higher degree of methodological self-​consciousness, to denote “our reconstructions of the past; our best efforts to arrive at, and convey, true accounts of what happened back then.” Those of a universitarian disposition or habitat may use the term much more narrowly, to refer to the academic discipline formally held responsible for the research, writing (primarily, though other means of bodying-​ forth research are increasingly seen), and teaching of what, at any given time, are assessed as being our best veridical accounts of the past. In this context, the term designates a department in addition to a “field”—​and possibly even a building on campus. And so, we might want to parse our large question about “history and human flourishing” into a set of more discrete subproblems that the question seems to imply: Does the possession of knowledge of the past contribute to human flourishing? Does the practice of studying the past (either in the sense of reading “histories” written by others, or in the sense of immersing oneself in old texts and artifacts) contribute to human flourishing? Does the work of doing “History” in a disciplinary sense contribute to human flourishing?5 Do individual humans actually flourish in doing any/​all of these things? addressing the second. What about monographic studies out in the larger world of academic history? Any specific title will feel a little adventitious, since each side of the Janus represents a vast domain of historical achievement, and no single author can stand the weight of exemplarity in such a context. But to choose, somewhat at random, a pair of works I admire: as history that wishes to be heard by those who can effect change, take my colleague Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God, which reveals the “constructedness” (and flim-​flammery) of the Christian Right’s conception of the United States; for an example of history in what I think of as the “humanist” key, I adduce the searching work of Greg Dening, for instance the classic Islands and Beaches. Part of what appeals to me in the Janus image is that there is one head there, and—​presumably, though I do not know of this being widely discussed—​one mind. This activates, in the metaphor, the extent to which these very different “vectors” of history articulation (these different “mouths”) do indeed come from a shared locus of reflection and inquiry. Becoming a historian is becoming a recognizable thing, and, in my experience, radically different historians share a remarkably robust sense of what “doing history” is. 5 I’ll define the “work of doing history in a disciplinary sense” as the current professional form of life that involves (1) studying primary sources in such a way as to make them stand in relation to

22  History and Human Flourishing We have parsed. Now it is time to try to say something for real. But is this possible? Is it a good idea? * * * I have a strong memory of coming across one of the I Believe books right about the time I started my academic career. I am not certain how it came into my possession. I suspect I picked it up in the course of reading around in the work of Clifton Fadiman, the dean of American mid-​century aspirational (middlebrow?) learnedness. Anne Fadiman, his daughter, had become a friend and mentor (she was the editor of the American Scholar across a heroic run in the life of that publication), and I had been fortunate enough to have come under her careful editorial pen. The I Believe series was the editorial brainchild of Fadiman senior, who, during the interwar period, conceived to commission and publish a series of “credo” statements by a set of intellectual and artistic and scientific notables. Contributors ranged from H. L. Menken to Bertrand Russell, from Einstein to Dewey. And the charge was as ambitious as could be: to write a kind of “testament of belief ”; to commit to paper that to which one was committed. My recollection is that the first edition was sufficiently successful that a follow-​up volume came in suite—​ perhaps a decade later, permitting the original participants to update their creeds from the new perspective afforded by several years progress toward global calamity.6 What struck me in reading my secondhand copy of the volume, found in a local bookstore (it was a buckram hardback, and the thickish, yellowed pages gave off a tobacco scent of gravitas), was the way the essays seemed to share a feel for the work of declaring “where one stood.” And shared, too, a sense that this work was a shared work—​even a shared obligation. Yes, of course, there was something mid-​century bourgeois-​complacent about this tenor or mood. Yes, the volume can be understood to participate in the discourse of the “Crisis of Man” that Mark Greif has characterized (and historicized) in his The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–​1973. Yes, there was a genuine ponderousness here and there, and also,

the established secondary literature in the field; while also (2) participating in the evaluation of the ongoing efforts of others to do the same; while also (3) teaching these practices, and their results, to postsecondary students of various kinds. 6 A little research reveals that the volume entitled I Believe was in fact the second of the series, published in 1939. The earlier one was published in 1931 as Living Philosophies.

History, the Humanities, and the Human  23 mostly throughout, a clubroom air of entitlement to opine that felt, even in 2000, troublingly unselfconscious, and that would no doubt catch in the craw a good deal worse were I to go back to the book today. But still, I remember finding relief in those pages. Relief from what felt like a want of any comparable willingness to declare in the intellectual spaces and communities that had shaped me (as a student), and within which I hoped to stay (as a scholar and teacher). This was surely, at least in part, a contingent circumstance of my trajectory. For there were, of course, in those years, bold voices exactly making brave statements of commitment—​on race, gender, sexual identity, and preference; on the need for new forms of academic practice. And a few years later, the tragedy of 9-​11 would produce a pained spasm of “seriousness” among historians and humanist intellectuals more broadly (it saw much commentary that was depressing at the time, and some that, in retrospect, looks actively disastrous). But all I can say is, in the course of my own graduate formation in History, I had been led to focus on the mastery of a large, intricate, and contentious secondary literature, and I had been assiduously tutored in the tournament of anxiety that is life as a neophyte scholar. I had gotten essentially zero sense that actually deciding what one thought about things—​and stating that clearly—​was part of the project. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that I felt actively discouraged from any such enterprise. There was too much to know (too much history, too much historiography) to waste time on such musings. The scholars I admired, and emulated, did not advert to any elaborate “commitments”—​beyond knowing history, and being historians. They were professional historians. They no more advertised their “personal philosophies” than did my dentist—​and, in their professionalism (and appealing humility), they might well have dismissed their own “credos” of no greater depth or importance than that of their own dentists.7 But I harbored a (sublated) sense that to be a historian was to be an “intellectual” and that to be an “intellectual” was to have some substantive conception of life that was integral to one’s account of one’s work.8 And 7 Two clarifications: (1) “intellectuality” aside, these historians were certainly progressively oriented people of integrity, so they were committed to “the truth” and to “decency” in very appealing ways (some would argue, not absurdly, that such conventional forms of good behavior are, in the end, much safer and more valuable than the self-​dramatizations of “intellectuals”); (2) while the idea that humanistic scholars have a more pressing obligation to reach, and articulate, a “credo” than a dentist (or anyone else) is easily mocked as mere prejudice, I believe that it is exactly the work of substantive reflection on the good that (at least potentially) exonerates humanists from the eternally encroaching charge of culpable indulgence. 8 Where did I get this idea? My father had been a scholar of Sartre, and this probably haloed, for me, some concept of the “intellectual” in the sense I invoke here. My mother’s reverence for thinker-​ activists like Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and the Berrigan brothers probably reinforced this image

24  History and Human Flourishing it was in this context, I think, that I so admired the idea of an effort, by a set of writers and scholars and thinkers, each to commit to paper a statement of belief. The specific work of disciplinary life in the university as I had experienced it (in graduate school and after) seemed to militate strongly against such exercises, even as “what one believes” could hardly be said to be unimportant to the doing of that work—​and might even be the whole point.9 But even as the idea of “credos” gave me a little thrill, then (and still sort of does), there is very definitely much to be said against such an exercise. This must be acknowledged. For one thing, the ability to bracket—​or at least just pipe-​down-​about—​one’s “fundamental beliefs” is, without question, an essential intellectual virtue. There’s a heuristic here (learning to think differently, when that is needed), and a pragmatics, too (not pissing people off, when that is not wanted), and, finally, even something like a wisdom (one’s “fundamental” beliefs actually change—​so composing and publishing credos often proves a fool’s errand; extreme caution is recommended). Not to mention the simple matter of good taste. The whole lugubrious business of pontificating about one’s beliefs can just feel so nakedly desperate. And then there is the bombast and logophilia of going to the trouble to inscribe one’s commitments. Why bother? Actually living them is probably of greater importance, and manifesting them obliquely (instead of in op-​eds) may be preferable under many circumstances. (from a different direction). Finally, as an undergraduate, I fell under the sway of two very powerful humanistic thinkers (neither of whom was a disciplinary historian): the ruminating Victor Preller (who wrote on Aquinas and Wittgenstein, and had the quiet charisma of a hoary, chain-​smoking, god-​struck left-​iconoclast) and the generous Cornel West (whose large lecture class on “Cultural Criticism” was a touchstone for many of us at Princeton in those years). 9 I think it is fair to say that History itself, as a discipline, proved relatively conservative across those years—​ methodologically conservative (in comparison with departments of English and Anthropology, say), and generally more inclined to take refuge behind a kind of flat-​footed archival empiricism. While the specification of one’s “subject position” became, of course, increasingly standard across the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-​first century in university humanities departments, History was slow to such avowals, and perpetually restabilized itself by reference to a social-​scientific enterprise of positive knowledge-​production—​as it still does. A further hedge/​nuance: I actually did my graduate training in the “History and Philosophy of Science” (at Cambridge), and it is perhaps important to note that the historical study of the sciences has a long-​standing preoccupation with epistemological problems, and can be understood, within historical subdisciplines, as particularly obsessed with methodological issues. “Social Construction” was to the fore across the years of my formation, and the fight that would be called the “Science Wars” was in the offing. So were there issues of “creed” and “fundamental commitment” on that table? There were. But my overwhelming sense (was it just me?) was always that these matters were essentially matters of “navigation” within the specific human-​cum-​institutional landscape of the field—​a field in which everyone was trying to “advance.” One took “positions” at professional conferences. And then people went home, where none of the questions seemed to come up. In retrospect, this seems less like hypocrisy (or even “careerism”) than a certain kind of ingrained court-​culture characteristic of scholarly life.

History, the Humanities, and the Human  25 This last idea has grown on me over the years. In fact, I’ve spent much of the last decade writing for (and helping edit) a magazine/​journal, called Cabinet, that was founded on a kind of (oblique) commitment to obliquity. We always preferred the marginal and fragile to the “important” or “fundamental,” and we tended to choose the concrete particular (in its concrete particularity) over generalizations, however seemingly profound or wide-​ranging. In a spirit I associate with the poet-​sage irenics of Michel Serres, we mistrusted the barely sublimated brutality of “critique.” We diagnosed conceit and fatuity and posturing in most—​possibly all—​efforts to scramble to the “middle” of a matter, and I think we fretted how foundations tended to be poured by those who were willing to “clear the ground” (we did not like that; we preferred the ground messy). Synoptic views over vast domains do tend to be achieved by those who sweep (with greater or lesser violence) the people and things of the world into adventitious heaps, which can then be climbed—​How else to get those lofty perspectives? It is also the case that, just as Cabinet has primarily identified itself with the world of art (its making, its makers, the things made in its name), I have given much of my time and attention in the last twenty years to making work, often with others, that wants to be considered within that unsettled space of waylaid teleologies and purposiveness-​that-​seems-​to-​defy-​clear-​purpose. And in that space of “serious play,” as I have come to think about it, one must be wary of being too sure one is in command of the “chain of reasons” that might be said to motivate any given decision or element of a work—​up from first principles, through to a specific stroke or a verse. Perfect certainty that one knows what one is trying to say and why, when activated in the making of a work of art, often leads to works that might better have taken the form of a declaration. Art that can be reduced to (or replaced by) its “content” is generally called propaganda. All of which is to say, I am in many ways these days more comfortable eliding first principles than “articulating” them, and I have worked hard and self-​consciously, over the last fifteen years in particular, to spend more time straying from foundations than laying them. Actual work is required (by some of us, anyway; those of us with an adolescent appetite for staking positions, those of us bent early to the deforming armature of academic self-​ assurance) to “tarry with the negative”—​to remain with not having decided, to stay with not knowing, to resist settling into the comfortable stance of having both feet firmly planted on the ground.10 I have tried to get better at 10 “Tarry with the negative” is Hegel (from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit), but I here use it more in the sense of a slogan than in any real invocation of Hegelian thought. In many ways, though, it is perhaps a version of Keats’s notion of “negative capability” that is most on my mind.

26  History and Human Flourishing these aspects of thought-​life, which are also aspects of life as it operates in spaces other than reflection and ratiocination. Wait! Did I do it? Did I just explain the question away? Or reframe it into oblivion? Almost. But no. The charge of this edited volume offers a rare challenge: to make explicit some version of what I take to be my deepest commitments; to attempt my own I believe. So let me try. * * * I believe that it is the basic catastrophe of human being that we are, functionally, little hollow passages for the transmission of pain. Left to our own devices, we work as “stents” of varying dimensions by which pain and suffering can be, in effect, relocated. Put pain into us, and we deliver it elsewhere. This is my “anthropology.” Within the language of Christianity, we might say that this condition is what is meant by the strange and difficult doctrine of “original sin.” I take the central work of personhood to be learning ways to defy, arrest, and/​or redress this calamitous aspect of our essential beings.11 Because suffering is guaranteed. But its transmission can be arrested. I believe that we know this. That we all know this deep in our beings. Why do I begin from pain and suffering? After all, I applaud “thinking positively.” Indeed, I salute positive psychology’s emphasis on tactics and strategies for open, empirical, dynamic, best-​practice orientations to life. I have no problem with “happiness.” And, in my starting from suffering, I do not wish to come across as some gaunt Old Testament doomist; tormented ascetic-​pain fetishist; or farcical sorrow-​mongering existentialist. I am just saying what cannot be denied: we suffer. And then I am also saying something else. Something, again, that I think we all know: some people are able to experience great pain (physical anguish, emotional distress) without, in turn, becoming a cause of pain

11 On “central”: I do not mean, in any way, “exclusive.” Cultivating the capacity to nurture others, to love, to understand, to appreciate; developing a coherent sense of identity, agency, and responsibility, and the forms of judgment on which those aspect of personhood rely (and which they make possible); learning how to pay attention to things, in the world and in the mind—​all of this is essential to human flourishing as I conceive it. But I believe that the greatest threat to each of these capacities is “suffering”—​the immediate and direct and raw experience of our own physical and psychic pain; the damage resulting from it to ourselves and others; the fear that it engenders; the amplification and continuous redistribution of it and its effects by those who are powerless to arrest its transmission.

History, the Humanities, and the Human  27 to others. But people seem to vary hugely in their capacities in this regard. This feels to me like a luminous mystery of existence. It merits our sustained attention. Whatever resources we have to investigate this dimension of our diversity must be marshalled in the effort to understand what power this is with which some humans are endowed so abundantly—​and which others of us seem almost perfectly to lack. This is, for me, the most urgent, the deepest, the highest study. Whatever this power is, it richly deserves to be described with the superlatives our languages afford. For me, this power is “sacred.”12 I do not understand it. I do feel my way toward it by means of metaphors. Sometimes it seems to me that what we seek is a kind of “alchemy,” whereby the “base matter” of pain may be actively “transmuted” into the spangled and precious elements of patience, hope, and generosity—​transmuted into “love.” At other times I set my sights lower, and my metaphor becomes one of “digestion.” Perhaps the glamour of alchemical transformation outstrips our abilities; perhaps the best we can hope is to train our “digesters” (the term is Melville’s) to take actual nourishment from the bitter dish that suffering spoons into our unwilling mouths.13 The image is effectively metabolic: Can one learn to derive energy, growth, strength from such nasty fare? I am reminded of the harrowing scene in Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer: the wayward Bud Korpenning, hungry and penniless, shovels coal for a hard-​hearted woman on 53rd Street, who rewards him with a plate of rotten food. He chokes it down, and is flushed back into the street, with his sour stomach heaving. But he will not let himself vomit, since he needs the nourishment: “If I lose it, it wont [sic] do me no good,” he says to himself sternly.14 And then, it is possible to adopt a still more modest hope. Perhaps the best we can do is simply “absorb,” or “neutralize,” or perhaps even simply “store away,” or somehow “hold” the pain that comes into us. Maybe we cannot

12 In saying this I do not mean to suggest, somehow, that this power is inaccessible to rational inquiry. I merely mean that it seems to me to be essentially, finally, “mysterious”—​to be an “orienting” mystery. I cannot imagine this problem being “solved” using the tools of techno-​science alone (I think, in fact, that there are technical, philosophical arguments that essentially prove that this problem cannot be “solved,” scientifically). But that said, I welcome scientific investigation of this power—​neuroscience, social science, any science. This is a perfectly interdisciplinary domain. Transdisciplinary. Super-​ disciplinary. If there was ever an “all-​ hands-​ on-​ deck” problem, this would be it. 13 In ­chapter 10 of Moby-​Dick, Ishmael suggests that “philosophy” is the resort of those who cannot manage life: “So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that . . . he must have ‘broken his digester.’ ” 14 John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1953 [1925]), p. 60.

28  History and Human Flourishing make it work for us. Maybe we cannot turn it into anything useful or good or beautiful. Perhaps the best we can do is not pass it along. This is what I believe. And believing this informs my work. Meaning here both the “work” of a life—​living. And the “work” I actually do as my work: my calling as a teacher and scholar and maker. And so, for me, being a historian, a humanist, and a person who tries to make things that can stand with things that get called works of art—​all of that is inseparable from this central and most exigent challenge: to learn to become something other than a hollow conduit for pain. * * * A moment, then, on religion. Since, are we not in that realm? Well, yes. We are. I think we are. In my view, religions can be understood as powerful repositories of accumulated technologies and strategies by which groups of human beings have succeeded, across time, in addressing the “central problem” I have given here: the problem of modulating human beings from hollow pain stents (pain in here; pain out there) into . . . something else. This is by no means all that “religions” are. And they are by no means equal, in my view, in their offerings on the central problem as I understand it. But if it is legitimate to speak of “wisdom traditions,” I would define this notion as precisely that set of practices and beliefs, stories and rites, habits and concepts that equip human beings to confront pain—​to take it in, to feel and experience it (since, again, simply avoiding it is impossible, and at a certain point a reflexive and dominant need to avoid it can be extremely dangerous)—​and to do something other than pass it along to others. All this is very important to how I think of “the humanities.” For me, for better or worse, the humanistic scholarly enterprises only really make sense as thinly (and, I believe, imperfectly) “secularized” efforts to do work once done in explicitly religious settings. This is hardly an original idea. In a basic way, it is a very old-​fashioned idea—​and one strongly associated with the thinking of the nineteenth-​century French thinker August Comte. The founder of the philosophy of “positivism,” and one of the so-​called prophets of Paris who worked at the long problem of trying to “end” the (sort-​ of-​endless) French Revolution, Comte came to think only science could save us from our exceedingly messy and delusional ways of understanding things. Sketching one of those broad-​brush “histories” of humanity (a go-​to activity of all the early social scientists), he divided civilizational progress into three phases: at first, people tended to personify the forces that appeared to

History, the Humanities, and the Human  29 govern their fates, and so they conjured various anthropomorphic deities, ascribed to them a host of powers, and made humanity answerable to their diktats. This was Comte’s “phase one.” He called it the “Theological” phase. These gods are illusions, of course. And eventually, according to Comte, this becomes impossible to ignore. People sort of “grow up.” They drop the Santa Claus routine. And they chuck Yahweh, Vishnu, Zeus, and all the little godlets. But, as Comte saw it, they don’t drop the sense that the cosmos is “governed” by “forces”—​powers, principles, concepts. There may not be a “Venus,” but there is “love.” There might not be a “Jupiter,” but there is “justice.” In a basic way, Comte thought those sorts of abstractions were, in effect, just gods without faces. They were no more “real” than gnomes. And, therefore, it was a pretty much a waste of time to discuss them, and a form of madness to try to organize individual or social life around them. Nevertheless, the historical phase of human existence in which people worked from such abstractions was a modest improvement over personified deities: Comte called it the “Metaphysical” phase, and he thought of those abstractions as “metaphysical.” He believed that his own time remained mired in a “metaphysical” orientation to the problems of existence—​particularly political existence. And that was the problem. People arguing about “ideas” (like “liberty”) that were basically will-​o’-​wisps led to nonstop fighting. This was why Comte encouraged everyone to step forward with him, and with all true rationalist-​empiricists, into the brave new world of “phase 3,” which he called the “Positive” phase (hence, his philosophy of “Positivism”). In this final phase of human maturity, only things that could be counted and measured would be discussed. You want “liberty”? This is an abstraction. But “buying power”—​that is concrete. You are “free” to buy whatever you can afford. What does it mean to be “free” to buy a Maserati if you can’t afford it? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s nonsense. What was “liberty” if you had to work all day not to die of starvation? Meaningless! How many calories are available to each citizen? That is real, can be computed, and establishes the basic framework of daily life. A bill of “rights,” by contrast, is like the tooth fairy: a cool concept but also an infantile, illusory fiction. In the world Comte envisioned, you could dispense with political theorists—​because they would be replaced by economists. Interestingly, this is, in fact, pretty much what has happened: practically speaking, the folks who calculate GDP are a lot more important to twenty-​ first-​century geopolitics than people who teach Hannah Arendt; the former are our transnational plutocratic clerisy, the latter mostly unemployed.

30  History and Human Flourishing Why go through all this? Well, despite my having, personally, very little enthusiasm for Comte’s schema, I do think he got some things basically right—​including the way that many of our most familiar concepts and projects are really best understood as lightly de-​theologized abstractions. Or, as he would have it, “metaphysical” versions of activities that originally took shape in the language of the gods. Take two important examples: “art” and “the humanities.” But before we dig in on that, we should take a quick detour into some troubling context. After all, it is necessary to call out, and decry, the highly problematic nineteenth-​century (racist, colonial, sexist) matrix out of which the Comtean template for human “evolution”/​“progress” emerged. Comte’s trinitarian, stadial architecture was as much a battle cry for a techno-​rational reductivism (anticlerical, mathematical, analytic) as it was an effort to describe the motor of historical change across the globe. His system was meant to explain both why Christianity was doomed and why all the various non-​Western spiritual traditions ought properly to be extirpated in the name of moving humanity forward—​forward to a brighter destiny where the problems of individual and social life would be solved by means of calculations on data rather than seances with phantoms (or, for that matter, philosophical bloviation, which was, in his view, really little better than those seances, in the end). So all of that is/​was very, very unfortunate. And it gives any “Comte”-​style analysis a bit of bad odor. Moreover, as aficionados of Comtean thought will know, Comte’s own efforts to realize his vision as a politics actually led him to conjure, later in life, a totally extravagant and seemingly perverse vision of society reorganized around a ton of neo-​ecclesiastical pageantry—​all in the name of the “Positive.” Imagine elaborate parades, and costumes, and ritual “holy days” of calculus, and a bunch of other very strange proposals. Not really where you thought he was going to go when he launched on a call for a refreshingly “rational” focus on exclusively nuts-​and-​bolts elements of existence. The weirdness of where he ends up can hardly be overstated. But despite all this, I can’t deny it: I think Comte put his finger on some very important dynamics in Western intellectual life over the last half-​ millennium. In practice, personified theological enterprises have indeed given way to metaphysical instantiations of broadly homologous form. Given time, and enough engineers (and economists), the “metaphysical” elements of these systems tend to fall away (or come to be redescribed statistically or quantitatively), and we are left with a world that feels largely amenable to

History, the Humanities, and the Human  31 a kind of problem solving that, it turns out, machines do very well. We are speaking here at a very high level of generality, but it wouldn’t be wrong, I think, to say that the increasing penetration into social and subjective existence of algorithmic mechanisms structuring (and in more and more cases actually making) our choices represents a predictable unfolding of the logic of Comtean Positivism. That all of this is, from my perspective, “wrong” at the deepest level (wrong about what is “most real,” that is; I myself actually think the gods are down there, under it all), doesn’t mean that it isn’t exactly right, descriptively. Bracket the larger implications. Let’s put aside, for now, what I take to be a remarkable, ongoing, reductivist-​Postivist acceleration in our time. Let’s put aside the mutually reinforcing cycles of monetization, financialization, and calculation that are, in my view, primary drivers of this dynamic. Put aside the disaster that is the accelerating push-​down of calculable “positivist” values (like “wealth”) into the spaces of “metaphysical” values (like “the good”). For now, I propose to stay for another moment with that earlier Comtean hinge: not the one by which abstractions like “justice” give way to an empirical flurry of metrics, indices, and quantification (see “Law and Economics”); but rather the one by which god-​happy theological systems swing into depersonalized metaphysics. It is my view that only this historico-​ conceptual translation permits us to make sense of the whole enterprise of “the humanities” as an ongoing enterprise.15 Yes, of course: the history of the humanities (as an evolution out of the more-​or-​less self-​conscious Renaissance program of “humanism”; as an administrative designation within the modern liberal arts college and research university) is complex. There are many stories to be told. But I don’t think it is wrong to say that the coherence of the enterprises gathered under the rubric of “the humanities” in our time (the practice of secular hermeneutics on texts understood to be without meaningful/​accessible divine “content”; the labor of interpretive historicism; the whole set of activities that use language to engage and analyze those aspects of human experience that appear to elude the ever-​expanding toolkit of medicine, biology, and the adjacent social sciences) is inconceivable absent a development much like the one Comte invokes. This is to say: a group of theological enterprises that have long aimed at accessing transcendent grounds for being (projects that have been 15 Assuming, that is, that it should indeed be understood as an ongoing enterprise; and this is not entirely clear. I open this point later on.

32  History and Human Flourishing predicated on interpretive means by which to access meaning and purpose; enterprises that have developed, preserved, and taught various practices for addressing how-​to-​live and what-​to-​do questions) actually did give way to a set of secular projects that have tried to do much the same work, using many of the same techniques. Why am I saying all this? I am rehearsing this account of the humanistic enterprise because, despite it being somewhat hackneyed, and despite there being a number of substantial critiques of its historical accuracy and normative relevance, I basically believe that the modern humanities really are a metaphysical reinscription of a theological enterprise.16 Working from this commitment, I attempt to practice them—​to do humanistic work; to write and research and teach history (and the pursuit of “historical consciousness”) as a historian—​in a way that is faithful to my understanding of their nature. It feels important to say, immediately, that I think this is a pretty quixotic enterprise. It is extremely difficult to persuade oneself (much less anyone else) that, say, the work of a practicing professional historian genuinely hews to these high aspirations. Let’s take some of my own academic work as an especially invidious counterexample: In what possible way could an 815-​page book on the history of cetacean biology be said to speak to the questions of how to live and what to do? The truth is, I would like to believe I could almost answer that question. But a book like that one (The Sounding of the Whale, University of Chicago Press, 2012) is also a compromise between my churning aspiration to do history as humanistic work (in the deep sense I have tried to invoke earlier) and a relatively stringent series of formal disciplinary conventions and expectations that govern membership in the guild, and determine one’s fate within the modern university. I would say that each of my books and each of my articles represents a more or less strained effort to satisfy these latter conditions without wholly disregarding (or even betraying) the former. The details of how that process played out, project by project, would amount to 16 I will go further, and say that I do not think that they really make much sense absent this genealogical understanding. The taxonomy that holds together the study of literature and language, history (at least some part of it), art and music (though not as practical arts), and philosophy (at least the part of it that is frank about, and interested in, its historicity), but excludes anthropology, sociology, biology, etc. can readily be shown to be conceptually incoherent in several different ways. We have “the humanities” as a division of university life because, across the nineteenth century, learned culture in metropolitan Europe began to seek, in secular artifacts, forms of “soulcraft” once reserved for religious institutions and practices. The new cultural and intellectual enterprises that resulted were installed in pedagogical institutions as part of a larger program of reforms of the relationship between church and state.

History, the Humanities, and the Human  33 a very fine-​grained intellectual autobiography—​one that you don’t want to read, one that I don’t think I would want to try and write, and one that I am absolutely sure is not what is being asked of me here. * * * But I hope all of this makes clear that the question at stake in this volume—​ the question of the relationship between “history and human flourishing”—​ is, for me, the big one. Since I am very definitely someone who thought of the commitment to humanistic history as a “form of life”—​as a vocation in a “metaphysical,” pre-​Weberian sense.17 Which is to say, I believe I got into this activity not as a “knowledge-​producing day job,” not as a “profession,” but as a calling; not as a way to “make a living” (so I could have some sort of life), but as a way to work on figuring out (as a form of life) what could be hoped for as a form of life. I became a historian out of a sense that the study of the past (its texts and persons, its patterns and artifacts) would help me understand and pursue “human flourishing”—​even help me flourish as a human, and, I hoped, equip me to assist others in doing likewise. * * * It is embarrassing to confess such ambitions. It is hard to say whether what is more embarrassing is the hubris of the aspirations themselves or the pratfall failures to achieve them. Something of a toss-​up. But I am not failing these aspirations alone. I am reminded of a painful exchange in a particularly intense graduate seminar a few years ago. If I remember correctly, we were down in the thick of a difficult conversation about the work of Fred Moten (the much-​ discussed African American theorist, poet, and critic), and specifically on his challenging notion of the “freedom to refuse.” Somewhere in there I said

17 I am referring here to Max Weber’s important 1918 lecture/​essay Wissenschaft als Beruf, which comes into English as “Science as a Vocation.” This is an exceedingly rich and historically specific text, the reception history of which is a subject in its own right. But it will not be false to its contents to say that Weber insists upon the enterprise of dedicated, disciplined “knowledge-​production” (the seeking, testing, and conveying of positive knowledge) as the “vocation” of university scholarship. He is definitive that this work leaves no room for the (very real; even urgent—​he acknowledges) problems of “meaning” or “value” in human life. The problems may be real, but university professors have no special claim on them, and Weber is caustically dismissive of any residual conception of the university that trades on the promise that academic study will address such matters—​which, in his view, it absolutely cannot (and must not). It is exactly a reconstruction of the humanistic domain on Weberian “scientistic” grounds that has, in my view, substantially deprived that domain of its primary reason for being and rendered it increasingly impossible to defend in contemporary life.

34  History and Human Flourishing something (probably a little careless; probably inadequately hedged) about the humanities and the traditions of Bildung—​something that probably made it sound like I believed (as I have just confessed, earlier, that I do; however shamefacedly, however hesitantly) that scholars in the humanities, as the custodians of a fragile and powerful legacy of masterworks, ought to be answerable on existential questions. And all of a sudden, a brilliant student to my right fairly exploded on me—​launching into an anecdote twisted tight with righteous indignation. She had recently visited her sister, who was completing medical school, and spent several days with her among the doctors and the hospital work. You might think, the student pointed out, that with all that soulless science, and all that bourgeois professionalism of doctors-​ to-​be, and all the egomania of wealthy surgeons and med-​school professors, that one would find callow sensibilities and a want of sensitivity, soul, and all the stuff that humanists like you (meaning me) pride themselves at being all about. However, she went on acidly, in comparing their respective postsecondary experiences, she and her sister discovered that the med-​school professoriate wildly excelled the humanities faculty in every index of actual “human” decency. Indeed, she wanted to go further: the idea that the group of narcissistic, neurotic, misogynist-​solipsists gathered together as “full professors of the humanities” that she had thus far encountered were to be “custodians” of any human virtues, or teachers of the same, was perfectly ludicrous—​GROTESQUE! No, INSANE! This was a depressing thing to hear. And it was still more depressing to feel like I couldn’t really argue with her. So let’s pause there. Simply for a moment of head-​hung silence. (Pause here—​for real; if you are someone who cares about the humanities, about history as a humanistic enterprise, look up from the page and think about the disaster; return in a minute or so—​my essay will still be here.) What can be said? Well, what occurs to me is to recall that it was also the case that Kierkegaard, surveying Christendom in his day, couldn’t find a “Christian.” And Socrates, surveying learned Athens in his, couldn’t find anyone who seemed a true “lover of wisdom.” In both cases, the pointing up of the gigantic gulf between the promise (of these grand projects) and their hapless traducing was a call to a higher ideal than had yet been realized. What was being sought was a deeper understanding of the commitments that were being avowed (without adequately careful scrutiny). And this is, I think, where we are: in that straining space that glows green with irony—​the green of bitterness, and the green of hope, superimposed.

History, the Humanities, and the Human  35 That student deserved—​all our students deserve—​better. Better from us. Better from the world of university scholarship in arts and letters. Better from the humanities. And if we cannot do better, then I am not sure that the university humanities in their current form are really much worth preserving. Because however impressive I find our amassed scholarship, I do not think that our enterprise is, at its core and at its crown, about merely “producing knowledge” concerning the objects of humanistic inquiry.18 I think it is about working with those objects, and knowledge about them, in order to become better humans. Our aim must be more life, lived better, by more people. When our work fails this objective (when it cannot be shown to connect, or be connectable, to that objective), our work fails. * * * And our work is failing. Diagnosing causes is difficult. There are many. History teaches many things, but one of the most basic is simply that historical change is complex. So “explaining” how anything got to be the way it is will be complicated. Moreover, as a practicing historian, I tend to be basically wary of causal/​explanatory history—​not because I think it is impossible or invidious, exactly, but because I think there is plenty of work to be done in a different key: the form of historical inquiry I associate with Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of recovery.”19 Which is to say, I feel that there is basically an infinite amount of history to be done that works to recover human experiences (i.e., to resurrect and translate their immediacy), and that, on balance, this work does more good in the world (is more needed) than more history that tries to assign blame for various things—​which is basically what causal/​ explanatory history always finds itself doing, in the end.20 But here, let me 18 But again, let me be clear: it is not that I think “producing knowledge concerning the objects of humanistic inquiry” is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think it is a “good thing.” But it is a pretty “small” good thing, in the greater scheme of things. It is not a sufficiently rich, ample, or socially significant activity, taken in itself, to authorize the cultural role many humanists imagine their enterprise merits—​or indeed that it has been granted within higher education for more than a century. 19 For readers of Ricoeur, I should acknowledge that I am using his terminology in a way that departs, to a degree, from his usage. His “hermeneutics of suspicion” does not map cleanly onto “explanatory history” as I invoke it here, and his concept of “recovery” does not align exactly with what historians tend to mean by “recovery.” 20 Although, as earlier, it is not that I think explanatory history is “bad.” On the contrary, it is essential in many ways. It is just that it is not so much my thing—​and I am often surprised by how little attention is paid to alternatives. My own view is that this overemphasis on explanation in historical practice is tied up with the relentless “scientism” of the field—​an impatience concerning the slow work of walking with the dead, a nervousness about the aesthetic/​artistic/​“writerly” aspects of such work, an unseemly preference for “covering claims” and pseudo-​juridical “arguments” over the delicate and essentially “weak” work of giving time to those who are no more (Maya Jasanoff speaks to some of this in her contribution to this volume). There is also the invidious way that the humanities

36  History and Human Flourishing put aside my biases against historical forensics and/​or prosecution, and try to say a few things about why we are failing: why humanistic teaching and learning on campus is falling so short of what is wanted, of what is needed, of what can legitimately be asked of us (by our students, by our country, by the world, by ourselves). Without disregarding the failures of individuals (our various individual failures to rise to our calling), I think it is fair to say that the causes are, in large measure, structural—​and they have much to do with the changing character of higher education in the United States over the last forty years. Aspects of both graduate and undergraduate formation are at issue. For undergraduates and their families, the intensifications of the increasingly “efficient” neoliberal labor market (along with rising educational costs) have up-​ticked pressure on a set of perennial cost/​benefit calculations around higher education and made it more difficult to conceive of much (if any) time at university as dedicated to “soulcraft.” At least not actual instructional hours, which are increasingly seen as better reserved for the straightforward acquisition of skills, or for positioning oneself with the recommenders and mentors who can advance the internships and connections necessary for transition to nonpenurious employment. Soulcraft is, at best, an extracurricular activity—​dominated by athletics and various other social/​community aspects of campus life.21 An increasingly supine (decreasingly covert?) worship of commercial and financial success, together with the high-​ stakes, tournament-​like demands of “startup culture,” have significantly undermined the very idea that the formation of a “character” is a coherent objective; or anyway a project anyone can afford to undertake, given all the other things that are urgently required if one hopes to gain (or just retain) a place in the economy—​an economy where precarity holds the whip (and the distance between winners and losers widens harrowingly). Self-​regulation is needed for success, to be sure—​everyone will tell you that. But some mixture in colleges and universities have been increasingly assimilated into, effectively, “pre-​law” programs—​ and university “writing programs” (the non-​creative-​writing-​“freshman-​comp” kind of writing programs) have privileged prose forms modeled on the legal brief. In this context students, too, have a hypertrophied sense of argumentation “as” thought. But this is not correct. Indeed, the best humanistic work frequently eschews argument, or activates its modes sparingly. In my own view, when doing “humanistic” history of the sort I care about, arguments and explanations both must serve the work of recovery, and not vice versa. “Using” dead people to make arguments always smacks of the vampire. 21 Not entirely unreasonably, in my view. Since, however shameful this should be for humanities professors, many aspects of self-​formation and relation to others are not, it seems to me, taught worse in various gyms and on various playing fields than in plenty of English or History departments.

History, the Humanities, and the Human  37 of therapy, medication, and meritophilic grit/​determination is a workable stopgap (at least), and may even suffice, pragmatically. Some students still have religious structures or commitments in their lives, and in my experience these students tend (counterintuitively?) to have more patience for the idea that secular projects of inquiry can meaningfully engage existential questions. But they also have, in a sense, less immediate need for whatever those secular traditions might offer. Combine all this with the fact that a relatively small percentage of humanist faculty are anyway even willing to represent their work as explicitly and effectively engaged with human flourishing, and one can readily see why the undergraduates who are interested in such questions (and sufficiently “privileged” and/​or “desperate” to pursue them) drift toward psychology. There, the runaway success of introductory courses in positive psychology and practical happiness and (sometimes in adjacent departments) “life design” index the continuing hunger, among students, for thoughtful engagement with central questions of “how to live” and “what to do.” But the humanists are seldom at the helm in those classes. And, of course, many of those giant courses are full of students who will ultimately (like an increasing percentage of their classmates) focus on pursuing degrees that optimize their odds of surviving a more and more unforgiving, even brutal, labor market. I have claimed that relatively few of the humanistic faculty frame their subjects (and courses) as explicitly engaged with those “how to live” and “what to do” questions. To understand why this should be so requires, I think, that we look at graduate education—​for it is in those crucial years of apprenticeship that ambitious young students of history and literature and art are acculturated to the professoriate (despite the fact that many of them will never actually accede to professorial life—​a problem not unrelated, of course, to the waning status of humanistic learning on campus). My basic intuition is that, in fact, many many of those ambitious young students do believe, when they choose to apply to graduate school in the humanities, that the work they will do there will directly engage questions of how to live and what to do. I think that almost all of them believe, deep in their hearts, that the objects to which humanistic scholars address themselves do indeed bear directly on the problems of human flourishing. They must feel this, since it would be inconceivable that they would decide to pursue a PhD in the humanities in the hopes of getting a “good job”—​of, somehow, making their way in a promising “profession.” Given the career-​placement statistics for humanists with doctoral degrees, that would be completely crazy.

38  History and Human Flourishing So, at the outset, anyway, they believe in the “existential” import of the activities to which they have decided to dedicate five, six, seven, eight years. But across those years, the years of actual graduate training, what occurs significantly compromises, by and large, that belief, and, in my view, seriously undermines their ability to activate those commitments. This process is called “professionalization.” And it involves acculturation in one or another of the humanistic “fields” as they are currently practiced in research universities. And these enterprises have now been trapped in accelerating arms races of hyperspecialized “technical” scholarship for decades. As a result, what is required to rise to the top of these domains—​and only those who rise to the very top have a chance of securing anything like real employment in the academy, and this has been the case for decades; which has, in fact, amplified these dynamics now across several generations—​is now a daunting kind of relentless productivity, governed by the peculiar “social technology” of peer review (itself borrowed, of course, from the natural sciences). The net effect is that a young scholar who hopes to survive the bootcamp gauntlet of graduate school (and then, with luck, a postdoc, and then, with even more luck, six years as junior faculty at a functional institution of higher learning) must at all cost learn, and master, a set of relatively simple, if hugely demanding, techniques by which productively to arbitrage various adventitious “opportunities” in a very crowded, and, in general, fairly mercenary (because of the deranging competitive pressures), subdisciplinary landscape. This is, for many, a profoundly damaging experience. And that is completely understandable. It is a huge amount of work, and, despite the passion, dedication, and intelligence of those who do it, the professionalizing disciplinary matrices nearly guarantee that the results will be neither interesting, nor important, nor beautiful. Exceptions are rare (if wonderful). Sometimes, of course, they are actually punished. Those who do not succeed at interpolating themselves into this perverse enterprise are not infrequently (and not unreasonably) embittered by the whole experience. And those who do succeed tend to be significantly deformed by it. What is certain is that the exigencies of such a regime make very poor training for the project of humanistic endeavor as I have tried to sketch it—​the real work of activating the human past (its people and the things they made and did; the form of consciousness that arises in the process of becoming inward with interpretive inquiry and historical change) in an effort to live better and help others do the same.

History, the Humanities, and the Human  39 Do some of the survivors of graduate school “keep the faith” with which they turned to the pursuit of a PhD? Absolutely. And there are many extraordinary and gifted and passionate scholar-​teachers in the humanities in the colleges and universities of the United States and elsewhere (I am myself, of course, the product of this world, and deeply grateful for the beauty and friendship I have found there). But those special folk have emerged and hold space largely despite our current system of graduate education, not because of it. All of this will be very hard to change. Because everyone who makes the system work has seen their interests in it fully “vest.” And as anyone who has spent time down in the workings of universities will know, they are not easy places to make new or different things happen. Then again, the status quo looks unlikely to endure. * * * I began writing this essay three months ago, in late February of 2020. It is now early June. In the interval, much has changed: the breakout of the COVID-​19 pandemic, social distancing, more than 100,000 deaths in the United States, economic catastrophe; not-​unrelated social unrest has now generated curfew conditions in many American cities. Here in New York City, we are presently not allowed out after 8 pm, and police helicopters float over Harlem and the Bronx. University life, school life, ordinary life—​all of this has been suspended, and there are many uncertainties before this nation, and the globe. Inevitably, that paragraph will date this essay in a particular way. But it is the central proposition of history that every document, every object, is essentially, fundamentally “dated.” Each one comes from its moment, and whatever else it says, it very definitely “says” that. Hence, to read a text historically is to read it for what it says “about” that (mostly despite itself). My own text, then, is “dated” in this sense quite regardless of its allusions to current events. There is, however, a convergence, I would argue, between the “Chronos” and the “Kairos” of this essay—​between, that is, the efforts of the paragraphs herein to sketch the historical unfolding of the university situation of the humanities and the devastating “moment” in which I am now writing. After all, the shocking events of these last weeks have already gone a long way toward precipitating exactly the kind of “crisis” to which I was alluding back several months ago when I wrote the sentence, “the status quo looks unlikely to endure.”

40  History and Human Flourishing To be sure, there are many crises right now, but one of them is happening in the universities, among the graduate students in the humanities (and their teachers). All of us who are healthy and able are quite suddenly reckoning, in newly strained and even desperate ways, with the basic fact that there are no jobs—​and that it looks like there will be no jobs for quite some time. That market was already very sickly. And now it appears truly dead. “Town Hall” and faculty meetings (all virtual, of course—​with all of us holed up for months now, and scrambling to learn new ways to teach and talk in the newly ubiquitous online platforms) are centering on emergency measures and stopgap solutions. We are cutting back new graduate fellowships to free up resources to float a cohort of doctoral candidates who face prospects not seen since the Great Depression, nearly a century ago. Over all those conversations, however, hangs an air of recognition: this is not some temporary challenge; this is a “new normal.” There is every reason to think that the dynamics now at play will enormously hasten changes we already saw on the horizon: further shrinkage of institutional support for, and student interest in, the humanistic domains of the university. It feels “over.” The mood among those who face real insecurity is one of calamity and despair, punctuated by quiet lulls of resignation. Senior faculty and foundation types and university administrators are scrambling—​but paths forward have not yet emerged. * * * They must. And it is my hope that this crisis can mark a turning point—​and the birth of something new. This is the moment for exactly the kind of reinvention of university humanistic endeavor that is desperately needed: a new effort to animate what is best in what we can do, with the best of what we have, for the most urgent of needs. We need a new generation of humanistic “pathfinders,” willing to come to graduate school in the understanding that they will need to go forth and create the new world in which the work we care about can keep happening, since the current forms are passing. We need historical inquiry that understands itself to be an essential part of human flourishing, and that actually is. * * * So what would it look like? We have come this far, and I suppose I still have yet to say anything real in response to the central question. So let me try, with the haste Nietzsche recommends for getting into (and out of) big ideas—​ which, he says, are like cold baths (leap in, and then leap out).

History, the Humanities, and the Human  41 1. The history we need now, the history that conduces to human flourishing as I understand it, enacts and teaches sustained attention. I take the formation of “persons capable of paying attention” to lie close to the heart of education itself.22 I think that unprecedented forces currently militate against the formation of the attentional subject—​with perilous implications. In this context, history—​like all the humanities—​must cultivate, model, and perform modes of sustained attention. To wait with our objects—​to give them attention—​is to permit the unfolding of the elaborate manifold of relations that both implicate and explicate. No meaningful intelligence, no meaningful political subjectivity, no human decency is possible without the capacity to give this form of attention. But the intensifying dynamics of digital hypercapitalism actively work to subvert and suborn this capacity. By “staying with” our objects, and permitting them to disclose their long reach, historians can offer powerful examples of what happens when attention works on the world. 2. The history we need now, the history that conduces to human flourishing as I understand it, must teach us to understand our moment. The point of learning to read a primary source is to learn to see time in an object—​to see a time, another time, another world. While this is a good in itself (for what it teaches about attention, for what it may disclose about the reality of change, for what it may offer as actionable resources in the contest with despair and pain), it is also an apprenticeship in the work of critical understanding. It should be the objective of a training in history to acquire the ability to see the texts and objects of one’s own moment as the “primary sources” of the future. Which is to say, the critical/​emancipatory power of history lies in learning to see a time from elsewhere—​a skill that achieves its crowning importance when we can see ourselves and our own time “as it will be seen.” It is here that the true study of history is ultimately a passion for our own moment—​and for what must be different about our world. Another way of putting this would be as follows: teaching history is important; but teaching historical consciousness is no less essential (and it isn’t the same thing).23 22 The best statement I know of this view is Bernard Stiegler’s Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010 [original French in 2008]). My own work in this area centers on the collective known as “The Friends of Attention.” See D. Graham Burnett and Stevie Knauss, eds., Twelve Theses on Attention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022). 23 I have not used the bulky formulation that is used to translate Gadamer’s wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein (“historically effected consciousness”), but this is what I have in mind here.

42  History and Human Flourishing 3. And, finally, and most importantly, the history we need now, the history that conduces to human flourishing as I understand it, must teach us what is eternal. This may sound daft, but I mean it. The ultimate point of history, as far as I am concerned, is as a kind of elaborate apophatics by which to grasp that which defies time. In this sense, every act of faithful historicism is, in my view, an effort to push the transhistorical to the surface—​from underneath. A simple example will suffice. To call something a “work of art” is to assert that a given object somehow exceeds its status as a “mere” historical artifact. Which is to say, historicizing works of art amounts to an effort to articulate everything about them except those aspects by which they, somehow, defy their temporality and “speak beyond their time.” To be an “art historian” is to look at (and for) works of art with tools that surface them “obversely”: what the art historian in fact cannot actually handle is precisely the “art” part of such objects; where the object will not be historicized (without remainder), exactly there we are in the presence of a work of art.24 There are other things that defy time. And they are, of course, the gnomic (anti)-​objects of historical inquiry. When history surfaces them, when history permits them to be glimpsed at the surface of time (history cannot do better than that, for they will not come into our temporal atmosphere), history affords momentary apparitions of what might redeem us—​beauty, truth, love. These are our best hope against the demons of sorrow and pain.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank a number of readers and critical audiences who helped me refine this essay, in particular: Anthony Acciavatti, Joshua Bauchner, Jonathon Catlin, Dorothea Debus, Jeff Dolven, Simon During, Alyssa Loh, Justin E. H. Smith, Ohad Reiss Sorokin, and the Behrman Fellows at Princeton University. My parents, David Burnett and Claire Gaudiani (scholars both), graciously offered me their perspective on the piece. Darrin McMahon and his editorial readers provided invaluable feedback on an

24 This is the subject of an edited volume on which I have collaborated recently: D. Graham Burnett, Justin E. H. Smith, and Catherine L. Hansen, eds., In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–​2021 (London: Strange Attractor, 2021).

History, the Humanities, and the Human  43 earlier draft. My special appreciation goes always to Anthony Grafton, from whom I have learned so much over the years.

Works Cited Burnett, D. Graham. The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century. Chicago UP, 2012. Burnett, D. Graham. Twelve Theses on Attention. Princeton UP, 2022. Burnett, D. Graham, Justin E. H. Smith, and Catherine L. Hansen, editors. In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–​2021. Strange Attractor, 2021. Dening, Greg. Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land—​Marquesas, 1774–​1880. U of Hawaii P, 1980. Fadiman, Clifton, editor. Living Philosophies. Simon and Schuster, 1931. Fadiman, Clifton, editor. I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time. Simon and Schuster, 1939. Gadamer, Hans-​Georg. Truth and Method. Bloomsbury, 2013 [1960]. Grief, Mark. The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–​1973. Princeton UP, 2015. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Yirmiyahu Yovel, Princeton UP, 2005. Kruse, Kevin. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Basic Books, 2015. Stevens, Wallace. “Sunday Morning.” Poetry Magazine, November 1915. Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations. Stanford UP, 2010.

2 In Defense of Presentism David Armitage

. . . an irretrievable image of the past threatens to disappear if any present does not recognize it as meaningful to itself. —​Walter Benjamin1

It is the rare historian who asks herself what the discipline of history can contribute to human flourishing. How human beings can live more fulfilling lives; how they can best use their various capabilities; how they might achieve their own goals along with those of others: these are matters she might think are best left to her colleagues in philosophy, psychology, or even religion. Questions about human flourishing are fundamentally ethical, but the contemporary discipline of history seems allergic to tacking moral matters. Historians almost never wonder, “To whom is the historian responsible and for what? And how are these values and this responsibility effective in historical work?” (Rüsen 196). They—​or, I should now come clean, and say we—​offer no courses in professional ethics nor do we swear an historians’ equivalent of the Hippocratic oath. (A Thucydidean or Herodotean oath, perhaps?) That does not mean we have no professional identity or any defining principles for our craft: we possess the whole panoply of graduate training, the granting of PhDs, and the processes of hiring, assessment, reviewing, and promotion to maintain professional standards. What we do lack, however, is a broad and open consensus on why we pursue those goals. And that in turn means overlooking for what—​meaning, especially, for whom—​we feel responsible as we strive to achieve them.

1 Benjamin 695: “. . . es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit, das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich nicht als in ihm gemeint erkannte.” Translations are my own, unless otherwise specified.

David Armitage, In Defense of Presentism In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0003

In Defense of Presentism  45 Historians also hardly ever consider how we might promote human flourishing, nor do we debate whether some forms of historical work would advance it better than others. Least of all do we define the value of history according to that capacity. We are generally much more comfortable debating arguments from within our discipline, using our own professional tools, than we are stepping outside our consensus to ask whether the tools are the right ones for the job, or even what the purpose of that job might be. To do so would apparently threaten the prime purpose of history as a professional discipline: to reconstruct the past without the distorting effects of the present. Human flourishing, by contrast, is pursued in the present tense and directed toward our future: the past, and the study of the past, would seem to offer little help in this regard. Historians have certainly assumed so, with sometimes debilitating effects for the health and the public role of our discipline. A recent historical encounter might indicate a different relationship between past and present, and with it one possible link between history and human flourishing. In 2014, two Hawaiian women travelled from Hawai‘i to London, where they found their own past confronting them vividly in the present. At the British Museum, Malle Andrade and Noelle Kahanu had the opportunity to see five Hawaiian images of feathered war gods, known as akua hulu manu that had been given to Captain James Cook in 1779 when he visited Hawai‘i on his last voyage of exploration (see Figure 2.1). Kahanu declined to visit the gods, but Andrade later described the overwhelming effect that the meeting with them had on her: What I experienced was a profound sense, not of my looking at them, but of them looking at me. It was as if they were asking me, “Who are you?” “Why are we here?” “What are you going to do about it?” To be in the presence of sacred objects, created at a time so very different from our own, is to ask ourselves, “How have we changed?” . . . Under their gaze, we are compelled to ask ourselves, “Are we doing enough for our family, our ancestors, our community, our nation?” I feel such sentiments emanating from these ancestral works, as though each was an elder who watches your behaviour with a set of expectations that we need to rise to, individually and collectively.2

2 Brunt and Thomas, eds. 298; on the akua hulu manu more generally, see Caldeira et al. 44–​45.

46  History and Human Flourishing

Figure 2.1  Feather god images (akua hulu manu), Hawaiian Islands, late eighteenth century. © Trustees of the British Museum, Oc, HAW.80, Oc, HAW.78

Two of these Hawaiian gods were more recently displayed for a wider audience at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in a 2018 exhibition held to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first expedition. The remarkable force of these images was palpable there even to non-​Hawaiians: “Their power, when confronted in an exhibition, remains unabated and brings the past dramatically into the present” (Brunt and Thomas, eds. 198–​199, 298 [quoted]). Few traces of the human past are perhaps as charismatic as these Hawaiian war gods, and most of us cannot feel quite so direct an ancestral connection with its traces as the Hawaiian visitors to London: even Kahanu’s reluctance to meet her gods was evidence of their spiritual force. Nonetheless, an encounter such as this indicates just how strikingly the

In Defense of Presentism  47 past can erupt into the present and intervene into our current concerns. And it reminds us that it is only in the present that the past can make any claim on us at all. It does so with an accompanying ethical challenge, “a set of expectations we need to rise to, individually and collectively,” that points toward the future. The poignant rending of the fabric between past and present that Andrade reported could in fact signal a more fertile approach for historians to take. To many, perhaps most professional historians, such a breach would appear profoundly unhistorical—​in fact, quite the opposite of one fundamental value defining our professional creed: the commitment to separate the concerns of the present from the scientific treatment of the past. The past does not speak to us; we speak for the past. Nor does the past look at us: we examine the past. Historians control the interpretation of the past, but it cannot control us. And because the past does not confront us in the way that Andrade found the akua hulu manu staring at her, it does not demand if we are fulfilling our duties to our family, our ancestors, our community, or our nation; it makes no claims about our flourishing as humans. Indeed, the past does not even ask us if we are doing right by history because it demands nothing of us and expects nothing from us. One name for the opposite failing is anachronism, the willful or inadvertent misunderstanding of the past by applying standards or interpretations from outside the immediate era, context, or milieu under study.3 A less polite term for it is presentism, “a term of abuse conventionally deployed to describe an interpretation of history that is biased towards and coloured by present-​day concerns, preoccupations and values.” It is a truth almost universally acknowledged among historians that an aversion to presentism “remains one of the yardsticks against which we continue to define what we do as historians” (Walsham 214). And not only among historians: a leading scholar of literature recently described presentism as “a term of opprobrium to claim at one’s peril” (Dimock 257). And yet, as we shall soon see, the meaning of presentism is not quite as straightforward as these statements might suggest. The range of possible presentisms includes some that are compatible with writing good history and even conducive to human flourishing. It is these forms of presentism that I will attempt to defend in this essay. * * * 3 Spoerhase (2004).

48  History and Human Flourishing “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” The words—​lyrics, in fact—​are Marx’s: Groucho Marx’s, from the opening of the 1932 Marx Brothers’ film, Horse Feathers. If pressed about presentism, most historians would identify as Marxist to this extent: whatever presentism is, they’re against it. For some of the most senior members of the historical profession, at least in the United States, opposition to presentism—​whatever that may be—​is almost a price of admission to the historians’ guild. In this vein, the eminent American historian of the French revolution, Lynn Hunt, entitled one of her monthly missives as president of the American Historical Association in 2002, “Against Presentism.” “Who isn’t, you say?,” she began, as if it were a self-​evident truth that any student of the past must reject presentism on professional principle. A few years later, the equally esteemed historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, similarly condemned what he called “flagrant examples of present-​ mindedness in history writing” in a review of books on slavery and the US Constitution under the banner of “Presentism in History” (292). He invoked the great Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn’s injunction against “an obvious kind of presentism, which at worst becomes indoctrination by historical example,” as if any tendency so blatant that it could lead to “indoctrination” (with all the Cold War baggage that word carries) must necessarily be a Bad Thing. For such eminences as Profs. Bailyn, Hunt, and Wood, presentism may be a shapeless bugbear rather than a substantial entity, yet it is one to be avoided at all costs. They did not define just what presentism is, but of one thing they are as sure as Groucho Marx: they are firmly against it, and they assume that all other historians must be as well. For most professional historians today, presentism is rather like Augustine’s famous definition of time in his autobiographical Confessions: if nobody asks them what it is, they know; if you ask them to explain it, they don’t (Augustine 230). (I will return to Augustine’s philosophy of time in my conclusion.) It is for just this reason that a leading historian in Britain has described presentism as “slippery, amorphous, and polyvalent” (Walsham 217). If historians are so adamant in their rejection of presentism, we should at least be clear what it is we are rejecting. And if we accuse fellow practitioners of being presentist, we should be sure of the failings we diagnose in others. By my count, presentism has had at least five meanings among historians.4 (I will treat later what it has meant for other scholars, in fields such as philosophy, psychology, and the history of science.) These species 4 Dray (1989) and Wilson provide parallel anatomies of presentism.

In Defense of Presentism  49 of presentism variously condemn teleology; the pressure of the present in reconstructing the past; the “present-​mindedness” that shapes historians’ questions; the shrinkage of their horizons to contemporary matters; and the omnipresence of the present in our everyday lives. These forms of presentism are not mutually exclusive, and they sometimes overlap in the ways in which historians use them—​usually to condemn others, but almost never as a self-​ identification. I may be an historian, and you might be present-​minded, but they—​our enemies, or professional outsiders—​are presentists, and thus to be shunned. Among professional historians, the most famous demolition of presentism, though it did not use that exact term,5 came in 1931 from the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield in his short polemical book, The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield wrote in England in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the General Strike, and the rise of the Labour Party, from a perspective on British political history stretching back through the rise of mass democracy in the late nineteenth century all the way back to the constitutional revolutions of the seventeenth century. These shifts in the balance of political power occurred especially in the relations between the monarchy and Parliament, and they were often taken to have their roots in ideas of popular sovereignty derived from the Protestant Reformation, first in Europe and then in England. Butterfield discerned a robust mythology that underpinned a conception of English, and later British, political exceptionalism he called Whig history, after the late seventeenth-​century political party that had led the movement for greater parliamentary sovereignty in reaction to the threat of alleged Catholic absolutism. According to Butterfield, the Whig interpretation of history is “the tendency in many historians to write on the side of the Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.”6 This is presentism as teleology, the belief that history only matters for those elements that were the seeds of progress in the present.7 Butterfield’s Whig historian is smug, partisan, and full of self-​praise; she 5 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms “presentist” and “presentism” had both appeared in English as nonce-​words by the early 1920s, but neither seems to have come into broader usage with meanings approximating those described here until after World War II: OED, svv. “presentism” (first recorded 1916), “presentist” (1923). 6 Butterfield v. 7 For more subtle and informed conceptions of teleology see Trüper, Chakrabarty, and Subrahmanyam, eds.

50  History and Human Flourishing selects her material to suit not just present needs but to justify, even to glorify, those she or her party finds most immediately admirable. As a form of presentism, Whig history is positive, directive, and selective: it underpins a particular vision of the present, usually for political purposes. Such ideological presentism is a specific instance of a broader idealist presentism best summed up in the aphorism from the Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce that all history is contemporary history. Because Croce’s judgment is often quoted out of context, its meaning becomes clearer in a passage from the original essay in which it appeared: “The practical requirements which underlie every historical judgment give to all history the character of ‘contemporary history’ [‘storia contemporanea’] because, however remote in time the events there recounted may seem to be, the history in reality refers to present needs and present situations wherein those events vibrate.”8 Croce thereby recognized that the historian can never be entirely disinterested in her choice of historical questions, the tools she brings to them, or the way she constructs her answers to them with a contemporary audience in mind. Historians have never taken Croce’s view of presentism to be normative, but similar views have other distinguished proponents. For example, the early nineteenth-​century German historian Leopold von Ranke—​the practitioner most often held to be the founding father of the modern historical profession as a procedure for reconstructing “how it actually” (or “essentially”) “was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen)9—​acknowledged the pressure of the present when he wrote early in his career: “That history is always rewritten has already been remarked. Every age and its dominant tendency makes history its own and transfers its thoughts onto it . . . Would one study [history] at all without the impulse of the present?”10 A century later, the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey argued in 1938 that “all history . . . is, in an inescapable sense, the history not only of the present but of that which is contemporaneously judged to be important in the present.”11 The British historian E. H. Carr concurred, in his classic answer to the question What 8 Croce (1938) 5: “Il besogno practico, che è nel fondo di ogni giudizio storico, conferisce a ogni storia il carattere di ‘storia contemporanea,’ perché, per remoti e remotissimi che sembrino cronologicamente i fatti che vi entrano, essa è, in realtà, storia sempre riferita al bisogno e alla situazione presente, nella quale quei fatti propagano le loro vibrazioni”; Croce (1941) 19. 9 Gilbert (1987). 10 Ranke 52: “Die Historie wird immer umgeschrieben, was schon bemerkt worden. Jede Zeit und ihre hauptsächliche Richtung macht sie zu eigen und trägt ihre Gedanken darauf über ... Würde man sie aber ohne den Impuls der Gegenwart überhaupt studieren?” 11 Dewey 235; compare Lovejoy.

In Defense of Presentism  51 Is History? (1961): “we can view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present”; because history is written not simply for the present but in the present, it constitutes “an unending dialogue between the present and that past.”12 We can call this position idealist in that it assumes the past is not an object independent of its observation or its reconstitution in the minds of contemporary historians. A stronger version of this claim, and one explicitly indebted to Croce, was proposed by the British archaeologist and philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood, in his conception of history as a mental reconstruction or “re-​enactment” of past thought in the mind of the present-​day historian.13 Idealist presentism may avoid the opprobrium attached to ideologyical conceptions of presentism. It can do so by frankly acknowledging the active role that the historian’s mind—​her mental categories and structures as well as the horizon of possible questions, meaningful encounters, and plausible interpretations—​plays in shaping history from the fragmentary evidence of the past. Behind these sophisticated, or we might say “thick,” conceptions of presentism lies a thinner and more negative version of analytical presentism. This is what Lynn Hunt, speaking for many (perhaps even most) historians, has termed “the tendency to interpret the past in presentist terms” (Hunt). This definition is confusingly circular—​presentism is what presentists do—​ but it presumably corresponds to what other scholars have more helpfully described as present-​centeredness: that is, the procedure of using current categories or imperatives not only to determine historical topics but then to interpret them in terms distant from, or unrecognizable, to the past itself (Wilson and Ashplant). Present-​centeredness need not imply the strong teleology that Butterfield associated with the Whig interpretation of history, nor does it depend on the philosophical conception of idealism that Croce and Collingwood espoused. However, it is perhaps what is most often meant by vulgar invocations of presentism, especially when one historian condemns it in the practice of another. To these strains of ideological and idealist presentism we can add what might be called a perspectival presentism. This is a concern as much about the teaching of history as research and writing and describes the trend among both historians and their students to limit our interests to modern

12 Carr 24; compare Elias (2006) 8: “Contemporary circumstances decide how [the historian] sees ‘history’, and even what he sees as ‘history’.” 13 See also Dray (1995).

52  History and Human Flourishing history and even contemporary events: or, in Lynn Hunt’s words once more, “the shift of general historical interest toward the contemporary period and away from the more distant past” (Hunt).14 Presentism in this sense is a descriptive category more than an analytical one: it concerns the construction of academic syllabi and course offerings, and the selection of historical subjects as much as the framework for the construction or analysis of history itself. Nor is it unique to historians. For example, some historical sociologists have complained for almost thirty years that their discipline was witnessing the “death of history” as it made a “retreat into the present” (Elias 1987; Inglis 2010; Inglis 2014). For very different reasons, relating to the nature of the fossil record and the rate of diversification of species, biologists have similarly cautioned against “the Pull of the Recent” or “the pull of the present” in their own research (Raup; Jablonski et al.; Etienne and Rosindell).15 Presentism of this stripe is now a particularly pressing concern among historians, particularly in a national field like the United States, because classroom enrolments in history courses have declined by some 30 percent between 2011 and 2017. There is a parallel concern in the United Kingdom, where in 2017/​18 history was reported to be the only academic field to drop out of the top-​ten subjects studied by undergraduates at university since 2012/​13 (Schmidt; Higher Education Statistics Agency). It is an open question whether such local concerns have any wider global significance for the practice of history specifically or for the humanities more generally.16 Nonetheless, at least since Michel Foucault suggested the category of the “history of the present” (histoire du présent), there has been a positive and productive movement to deploy historians’ analytical tools on contemporary structures and problems, as well as to use prompts from the present to pursue genealogical and archaeological inquiries into the past (History of the Present; Rousso; Garland). Perspectival presentism is not necessarily negative—​a “perverse presentism,” as one of its practitioners has called it—​as it may lead to engagements with deeper histories rather than simply to a constriction of temporal horizons (Halberstam 45–​73). It is also especially effective in relativizing the present and making us aware that our own arrangements are not only not inevitable but as much the outcome of good and bad choices, and greater and lesser accidents, as the varied pasts we study as historians.



14 For an illuminating example of such foreshortening, in the field of African history, see Reid. 15 My thanks to Michael Wade for references to the biological literature. 16 Compare Schneider et al.

In Defense of Presentism  53 But what if the present is now the only temporal horizon we can inhabit as creatures of late modernity? This is the proposal for a more substantive conception of presentism offered by the French classicist François Hartog. Hartog writes of a new “regime of historicity” characteristic of our own time in which the past matters less and less in its own terms, the future is increasingly hard to imagine, and “the category of the present has taken hold to such an extent that one can really talk of an omnipresent present” (Hartog, Regimes of Historicity 8).17 If the present is indeed omnipresent, then it might fall to historians, as students of time and change, to compare this condition with other historical “regimes,” and to provide a perspective on our current presentism to cure perspectival presentism. A fish may not be able to analyze the medium in which it swims, but humans—​especially critically trained humans, like historians and other historically minded scholars—​certainly can do so.18 Only then might we hope to escape what another contemporary French historian has ominously termed “the tyranny of the present” (la tyrannie du présent).19 So far, I have attempted to anatomize five distinct but sometimes overlapping conceptions of presentism among historians: first, the teleological (and ideological) presentism classically dubbed the “Whig interpretation of history” by Herbert Butterfield; then the idealist presentism assumed by historians from Leopold von Ranke via Croce and Collingwood to E. H. Carr and beyond; third, the analytical presentism otherwise known as present-​ centeredness; fourth, the perspectival presentism that has shrunk the attention of students and scholars alike to the near-​present; and lastly, the omnipresent presentism proposed by François Hartog as part of our inescapable historical condition. With this anatomy in mind, we might ask whether historians are against all these things at once when they decry “presentism” in our field or more broadly as a cultural phenomenon. To be sure, few if any historians would now wish to be accused of “Whiggism” or the kind of construction of history now mostly associated with writers such as Francis Fukuyama or Steven Pinker, who make teleological claims about human progress in works like Fukuyama’s The Last Man and the End of History (1992) or Pinker’s 17 See also Hartog, “The Present of the Historian”; Hartog, “Presentism and Beyond”; Bouton 309–​ 330; Tamm and Olivier. 18 Lorenz and Bevernage, eds. 19 Baschet; compare Lübbe on the “shrinking of the present” (Gegenwartsschrumpfung); Clark (2003) 7–​11 on presentism as “dehistoricization.”

54  History and Human Flourishing Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018). But can we plausibly deny that we choose our subjects according to our own present concerns and then bring our immediate analytical frameworks to bear upon them? There is always a dialogue between the current state of our scholarly discipline—​the questions and methods that propel and inform it—​and the problems individual historians find most immediately urgent. Even an alleged retreat into the present can be an opportunity for historians to reassert their ability to historicize present-​mindedness itself. I submit that historians should not reject all these tendencies, especially if we can learn from adjacent disciplines where presentism has more positive connotations and where it is more closely connected to human flourishing than to the identity of an academic discipline. * * * It is mostly among historians that confusion reigns about the meaning of presentism. It is also mostly among them—​again, I should say, among us—​that presentism carries predominantly negative connotations. In other fields—​for example, in philosophy, psychology, the history of science, legal history, and literary history—​presentism has a wider range of meanings and broader scale of valuation attached to it. For example, among philosophers of time, presentism is the position that “only present objects exist” and thus “that only the present is real”: that is, the thesis that you, I, and the Taj Mahal exist but that Sappho, your unborn grandchildren, and the Library of Alexandria do not (Markosian 47; Crisp 211). The philosophical alternatives to this position—​ variously termed by philosophers non-​presentism, eternalism, or four-​dimensionalism—​hold that time is a dimension like space: that it extends forward and backward from the present; that past, present, and future objects all exist; and, contrary to presentism, that reality consists of all these objects in past, present, and future time, even though non-​presentists may still disagree whether past and future objects—​Sappho, your grandchildren to be—​are equally real (Bourne). Philosophical presentism seems commonsensical: it accords with our intuitions that the future is unknowable because we have no access to it and that the past, though once known and actually existing, has a different status from the present. Historians have not engaged seriously with philosophical presentism: in fact, they have not, as far I can discover, ever engaged with it at all. This might be because there is some risk of confusing one family of presentism—​the historians’—​with another—​the philosophers’—​but I suspect the absence of

In Defense of Presentism  55 interest reflects a broader unwillingness among historians to reflect on the ontological status of the past, and on our historical epistemology for gaining access to that past and then interpreting and explaining it within the present. Yet when philosophical presentism is stated so baldly across the disciplinary divide between philosophy and history, it challenges historians to be more explicit about our own philosophical commitments. How do we understand the nature of the object we study? Do we believe the past qua past exists? If so, in what sense might we understand its existence? Do we hold, with the novelist William Faulkner, that the past is never dead and that it is not even past? If so, then does it exist only in the present? Or does it exist simultaneously—​perhaps even sequentially—​in a present that is now past and a present that is now present but which is itself receding immediately into the past? If the historian believes the past does exist, does that mean that her métier is an “art of time travel” between present and past, as the Australian historian Tom Griffiths has put it? (Griffiths 2016). Or must we commit, along with a Croce or a Collingwood, to a presentism that is both epistemological and ontological, the position that the past only exists in the present because it is only in the here and now that we have access to its existing objects, shards and fragments, broken echoes and murky memories, though they may be? In defense of this kind of presentism, I suggest that we should: otherwise, how are we to account for our ability to examine the past except as it exists in the present, through the incomplete evidence remaining from the shipwreck of history itself? If we turn now to the status of presentism in psychology, we might find that such a commitment to representational presentism is inescapable. A psychologist would say that our incomplete access to information demands a degree of “filling-​in” to render it meaningful. The exact degree differs between our partial recollection of a fractured past and our premonition of a wholly unexperienced future: in the words of the psychologist Daniel Gilbert, “if the present lightly colors our remembered pasts, it thoroughly infuses our imagined futures” (Stumbling on Happiness 127). Presentism, in this construction, is the unavoidable tendency to populate the future—​and, to a lesser extent, the past—​with our immediate experiences and expectations. In this form of psychological presentism, our imagined future selves are extensions of our present selves, with all our current prejudices and attachments. The psychological problem of presentism accordingly bulks larger for the future, that imagined space where our actions come to fruition, than for the past, the remembered place in which our choices and those of innumerable

56  History and Human Flourishing other actors have already been made. This has led the psychologist Gilbert to conclude with relief and perhaps a touch of schadenfreude that “the good news is that most of us aren’t historians,” trying to escape the trap of viewing the past through the present, but the “bad news is that all of us are futurians, and presentism is an even bigger problem when people look forward rather than backward” (Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness 162). Yet this may be rather cold comfort for students of history. On this account, historians must carry a double burden. In our civilian lives, as it were, we are trapped in a future-​determining presentism; however, when we are in the historiographical trenches, a backward-​looking presentism constrains us. As historians, we could no doubt still relieve some of this pressure by reading more positive psychology: this might conceivably enhance our human flourishing. However, giving up our day jobs as historians would probably not have such positive effects for many of us. Renunciation may not be necessary, however, because historians can turn to their close colleagues in the field of the history of science for more positive models of presentism. Historians of science, in particular, have engaged with presentism more systematically than historians more generally, in part because their own discipline has had a longer and more formative engagement with it.20 Their field was born largely in revolt against teleological “Whig” narratives of scientific progress often written by practising scientists keen to ratify, even glorify, the achievements of their subfields. It is notable in this regard that Herbert Butterfield himself, the slayer of Whig history, wrote whiggish accounts of England and of the history of science, such as The Englishman and His History (1944) and The Origins of Modern Science (1959): scholars of Butterfield’s work have not overlooked this irony (Jardine; Moro-​Abadía; Sewell). The disciplinary inoculation of historians of science against whiggism may have fortified them against the infectious strains of teleological and analytical presentism. More recently, some in the field have returned to consider the possible benefits of presentism and they have proposed some novel forms of it that may have wider utility. Like historians, the historians of science are not agreed on any single meaning of presentism; unlike historians, they seem to believe that, whatever presentism is, they are not necessarily against it. They have variously anatomized presentism, in their own field and in adjacent subdisciplines, to produce a broader and less prejudicial taxonomy.

20 Stocking is a classic early engagement with the topic by an historian of science.

In Defense of Presentism  57 Some of these strains of presentism point the way forward to a more productive engagement with presentism, and more robust defenses of it, among historians more broadly. Historians of science may also now be more tolerant of presentism, and hence more willing to explore its possibilities, than historians because of their closer affiliation with the natural sciences, with their greater investment in causal reasoning than interpretive explanation (Oreskes 595). These modes of academic inquiry are not mutually exclusive, of course. Many historians not only engage in both but see them as dependent upon each other. However, the roots of at least part of the field of the history of science in the natural sciences themselves may lead its practitioners to have a stronger belief that there are continuities over time: the kind of continuities assumed by a belief in natural laws more characteristic of the natural sciences than most of the human sciences. With this affinity in mind, two recent historians of science, the American historian of the politicization of contemporary science, Naomi Oreskes, and French historian of biology Laurent Loison, have proposed a variety of critical forms of presentism that they argue can avoid the dangers diagnosed by other opponents of presentism. Among the species of presentism they propose are what they variously term substantive, normative, empirical, methodological, descriptive, narrative, critical, and motivational presentism. I briefly examine each in turn before concluding with a tempered defense of presentism drawing on these conceptions of presentism generated and debated outside the discipline of history itself. Substantive presentism works on the assumption that fundamental elements of the past and the present are substantially alike and that this continuity allows for explanations and analyses that encompass both historical materials and those from the contemporary world (Oreskes 600). This continuity of substance may be true, though perhaps to differing degrees, for bodies, brains, or rocks. However, even evolutionary biologists—​who would surely agree that natural laws are uniform and that they work through the mechanisms of evolution—​might be skeptical just how far the idea of continuity can be pressed when it has now become possible to speed up evolution and to observe it in experimental time. Historians are even less likely to be persuaded of the merits of substantive presentism. For example, most would question whether human beliefs and behaviors exhibit uniformity and continuity, even over generations, let alone longer periods of time or across space and culture. Most of us would also emphasize contingency over continuity and particularity over perdurability: these features are not incompatible, of

58  History and Human Flourishing course, but historians will tend to avoid accounts that assume lateral contexts rather than longitudinal ones. For all these reasons, this form of presentism might not be the most easy to defend or the one most appealing to historians who do not study the natural sciences within which substantive continuity is more broadly accepted. More closely confined to the history of science, and therefore perhaps also less relevant to history more broadly, even if more defensible in its own terms, is what Loison calls normative presentism (32). This is the effort to use current scientific theories to explain the forms or the limits of scientific enterprises in the past, for example by deploying contemporary genetics to fathom the interpretive constraints of Lamarckian conceptions of evolution or to supplement Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This approach might assume a model of cumulative progress that other historians would find impractical or, outside of the natural sciences, implausible for other fields, such as the human sciences. Other historians’ aversion to anachronism usually leads them instead to engage in what philosophers call interpretive charity: that is, to assume that past actors were rational in their own terms, and that the historian’s job is to reconstruct those terms. Of course, objectivity in this sense does not imply neutrality (Haskell). To reconstruct past rationality is not to approve its products, for example to generate sympathy for the agents of massacre or genocide, however much we might want to comprehend their motivations for mass murder. This procedure of rational reconstruction nonetheless works against the assumption that there is a continuity between past and present and that the two are alike. It leads to the creation of historical accounts even of processes such as evolution that are conducted according to the understanding of historical actors, not that of a recording angel—​or of contemporary scientific orthodoxy—​standing outside time. The historian’s job, then, is to “see things their way,” even if in some regards, such as the knowledge of genetics, we now know better than our predecessors (Clark; Chapman, Coffey, and Gregory, eds.). More modest in this regard, and thereby perhaps more defensible, is what these historians of science have termed empirical presentism. This implies the use of present-​day knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, to supplement or elucidate the interpretations of phenomena, again particularly scientific phenomena, by actors in the past (Loison 30–​31; Tosh). Suspicion of anachronism and the reaction against presentism can induce a needlessly restricting form of self-​denial for scholars, this argument might run. If historians are trying to interpret the origins, diffusion, and effects

In Defense of Presentism  59 of bubonic plague, for example, why should they deny themselves current understandings of, say, the etiology of the disease or the evidence of genetic material, even if those forms of understanding and evidence were neither accessible nor comprehensible to contemporaries (McCormick)? Methodological presentism extends this empirical presentism beyond scientific knowledge to the knowledge of human, rather than just natural, phenomena. The recommendation here would be to use current or recent events to understand the past, for example, by taking the Arab Spring as a lens through which to view the dynamics of the French Revolution (Oreskes 600–​601). Put as baldly as this, such methodological presentism might seem to be indefensible for most historians. It approaches the forms of presentism decried by Lynn Hunt because it limits the historian’s analytical armory to those tools, concepts, events, or processes observable in our present or near-​ present. It thereby closes off a much wider range of analytical options, especially those at hand for participants at the time, however partial or incomplete their perspective may have been. To be sure, there may be much ampler and diverse documentation available to interpret the Arab Spring than there is for the French Revolution, along with the possibility of interviewing contemporary actors, for instance. This might generate new questions for historians of the French Revolution—​because, to recall Croce, all history remains contemporary history, and interest in historical revolutions may increase in light of recent events. Nonetheless, historians will still aim to reconstruct explanations idiomatic to the past, even if contemporary imperatives impel to seek those explanations. The obverse of methodological presentism is descriptive presentism. This is the imperative for historians—​in this case, for historians of science, but surely for other historians as well—​to translate arguments, ideas, and beliefs from the past into terms that are comprehensible in and for the present (Loison 31). On the face of it, this procedure might seem both unavoidable and unexceptionable: for how else are we to communicate about the past to our audience in the present? Avoiding anachronistic vocabulary is one thing if we are not to turn “history into a pack of tricks we play on the dead,” as the intellectual historian Quentin Skinner once famously put it (14).21 But equally we cannot return exclusively to the semantic world of the past itself (Prudovsky). Even Jorge Luis Borges’s character, the modern writer Pierre Menard, found that his attempt to write Miguel de Cervantes’ seventeenth-​century novel Don

21 And see now Frazer.

60  History and Human Flourishing Quixote afresh in the twentieth century produced the same words but an entirely different meaning in the context of its reconstruction (Borges). As the Italian phrase has it, traduttore, traditore: the translator is a traitor. We might wonder just what might be lost in translation, and whether any concept be redescribed without accounting for any intervening mismatch between past and present understandings? Descriptive presentism might be a pragmatic, indeed essential, strategy, but it still needs handling with great care if we are not to subsume history to our own imperatives and to efface its idiomatic peculiarity. For that, we need a “controlled” anachronism, simultaneously revealing through analogy but estranging in its awareness of the difference between past and present (Loraux; Rubin). Descriptive presentism raises the problem of translation; similarly, narrative presentism offers challenges with regard to selection and sequencing. As defined by Loison, narrative presentism rests on the assumption that “the past effectively and causally produces the present” (Loison 31–​32; see also Virmajoki). If we ignore, for the moment, the arguments of philosophical presentism, then we might concur, at least for pragmatic purposes, that this form of presentism rests on plausible grounds. Because the present has nowhere to come from but the past, then tracing that sequence backward before narrating it forward can be defended as a literary procedure and as a causal account of the origins of the present. Similarly, we might go further to argue that the future has nowhere to come from but the present: for this reason, narrative presentism might extend into the realm of projection, if not quite prediction. Even if the historian does not go quite that far, from the past via the present into the future, there is still the suspicion that narrative presentism might be a form of Whig history, and thereby a version of teleological or analytical presentism. By selecting some elements rather than others from the past, we might foreclose possible lines of historical inquiry; more worryingly, by selecting from the past those elements that most closely connect to features of the present, we may equally misdirect our attention or overdetermine our findings (Fischer 135–​140). More promising than descriptive or narrative presentism are the two final flavors of presentism described by Loison and Oreskes: critical presentism and motivational presentism. According to Loison, critical presentism is the obverse of the Whig interpretation of history—​we might call it the “Tory” interpretation—​in that it deploys the historian’s apprehension of the complexity and contingency of the past to dethrone the pretensions of the present. On this account, the present is not the goal toward which the past

In Defense of Presentism  61 had been striving, nor can it be the realization of the past or of past actors’ aspirations (Loison 34–​36). This, too, shall pass; all flesh is grass, one might say. This kind of presentism dampens dogmatism. It might have such a general use, but its particular purchase might be in scholarly fields founded on assumptions about the progress and accumulation of knowledge: fields such as the natural sciences and even the history of science itself. To be critical in this sense is to oppose presentism in its various teleological guises and also in its narrative mode. A group of literary historians has championed just such an approach under the banner of “strategic presentism”: the effort, that is, to “help us better understand and address the ways the past is at work in the present” (Coombs and Coriale 88).22 In similar terms, a legal historian has called for a “New Presentism,” in which “history serves its purpose when it engages the public in discussion about why particular claims rest on misplaced certainty or misunderstood history, and counters bad history with more nuanced and complicated alternatives” (Dale 318–​319). This new strategic presentism might accord better with the natural skepticism about causation and connection built into most historians’ working assumptions. It may thereby be more compatible than other forms of presentism with the practical work of researching and writing history.23 Finally, motivational presentism—​the term comes from Naomi Oreskes—​ is a more self-​aware version of Croce’s conception of history as being always contemporary. We define our choice of historical subjects to meet the demands of our own individual interests as historians, to be sure, but also to answer contemporary dilemmas or concerns. “What matters to us about the past has everything to do with who we are, where we live, and what we think is important—​to us, here and now, in the present” (Oreskes 603). Oreskes herself is an historian of science who studies topics that generate much current controversy, such as the uses and abuses of science by the tobacco industry or the industry of climate change denial (Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt). She practices what she preaches: her major concerns as an historian speak strongly to contemporary debates and reflect her motivations to contribute to present-​day discussion; she has gone further, to enlist the future to illuminate the present by imagining a Chinese historian in 2393 looking back on the “collapse” of our civilization by failing to tackle climate change

22 See also Robbins; Fendler; Kornbluh and Morgan; Dimock; Sawaya. 23 For a brief argument in favor of a “progressive,” critical presentism against a self-​affirming, “conservative” presentism, see Coss.

62  History and Human Flourishing (Oreskes and Conway, The Collapse). For many historians, however, this determination of subjects may be further than they wish to go. Yet it might still be possible to discern motivational presentism in more banal ways, such as the historian’s desire to contribute to ongoing scholarly debate, earning professional approbation or advancement, or securing promotion and tenure. In the end, though, motivational presentism encourages the healthy tendency to scrutinize one’s own choices and to be frank, with oneself and with one’s readers, about the various internal and external pressures that shape our historical work. * * * In light of this anatomy, we might ask if there are versions of presentism here that historians could affirm without suffering cognitive dissonance or professional ostracism? I will conclude by suggesting that there are. To do so, I would like to return briefly to Augustine and to the discussion of time in his Confessions. In Book XI, Augustine continues a dialogue with God that has occupied most of the book and tells his Lord that, because eternity is His, everything Augustine confesses to Him will be in the nature of a reminder not a revelation. Past, present, and future are simultaneously accessible to the divine vision: not so for human beings, who must distinguish them ontologically (Do they each exist? If so, where and how?) and epistemologically (Do we have equal access to them? If not, are they all apprehensible?). Augustine refuses to commit to philosophical eternalism: he insists that time is not like space and that to ask where the past or future is, as if they were analogous to physical extensions of the present, is to commit a category error. Instead, he argues that when we reflect on the past, we look “on its image in present time,” as Augustine himself did when recollecting his childhood in the Confessions, for instance. In parallel, those who claim to predict the future cannot apprehend something that does not yet exist though “perhaps their causes or signs which already exist”: that is, in the present. Augustine then concludes that it is simply a mistake to say that past, present, and future exist—​at least, if you are not God, for whom alone they do. “Perhaps,” he argues, “it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things to come” (tempora sunt tria, praesens de praeteritis, praesens de praesentibus, praesens de futuris) (Augustine 234–​235 [Confessions, XI. 26]).24

24 See also Pawelski.

In Defense of Presentism  63 Augustine argued for an early version of presentism, in the sense used by philosophers of time. His kind of presentism can, I believe, suggest one way out of the impasses we historians have created for ourselves by failing to think hard enough about what should be the central concern of our discipline: time (Colla). If we acknowledge with Augustine that there are three times, but that they are past present, present present, and future present, we might be able to draw more readily upon the insights of those philosophers who have defended their conception of presentism, as well as those of the psychologists who have diagnosed its effects in forming our interests, our motivations, and our judgments. To admit this is to recognize that we have no direct access to the past any more than we can immediately grasp the future: our reconstruction of history can only take place in the present, just as our imagination of events to come occurs in the here and now. The past, that is, has no ontological status independent of the present, just as we have no epistemological standpoint from which to analyse it except that present. “If all time is eternally present, /​All time is unredeemable,” T. S. Eliot argued in his Four Quartets (1941), while meditating on Augustine’s presentism. Au contraire, the historian inspired by Augustine might argue in reply to Eliot: it is only because of that eternal presentism that time—​meaning, for the historian, time past—​can be recovered at all. Perhaps only a foolhardy historian would dare to defend presentism.25 Earlier efforts to do so fell flat because the term is so misunderstood, so frequently—​even essentially—​contested, and so firmly decried that it has almost become indefensible within the historical profession. Confusion about the meaning and import of presentism has led to multiple babies being thrown out with the bathwater: worthwhile campaigns to root out teleology, to refute idealism, to judge the past on its own terms, or to resist the narrowing of historical horizons to the last few decades, all under the name of presentism, have closed off productive avenues for historical research and reflection. They have effectively rendered causal explanation null, prevented serious discussion of historical epistemology, broken the ancient tradition of history as a teacher of life (magistra vitae), and until recently discouraged the emergence of a rigorous “history of the present” (Koselleck, Historia 26–​42; Guldi and Armitage). This is surely too high a price to pay for professional self-​definition alone. 25 So far, only a philosopher, a literary scholar, and an historian of science seem to have taken up the challenge: Hull; Spoerhase, “Presentism”; Barseghyan.

64  History and Human Flourishing Why might this matter? I would argue that it matters a great deal—​ to historians, and for the place of historians within a larger public culture, because such indiscriminate antipathy to presentism also has ethical implications. Historians are trained to reject presentism: we are likely to argue that our duty is to the past and its inhabitants—​not to the present, and certainly not to the future. More than a half a century ago, the late philosopher of history Hayden White observed that history is the “conservative discipline par excellence” whose members have since the nineteenth century “affected a kind of willful methodological naiveté.” His charge can still sting (112). The obverse of this tendency has been a rampant ahistoricism in other fields and among wider publics, accompanied by the temporal foreshortening most dreaded by, but hardly prevented, by historians themselves. By disavowing a long-​standing duty to speak to the present, and leaving to others the task of shaping the future, historians could do little, White argued, to relieve their contemporaries of the burden of history itself. That remains an urgent task if historians are to attain—​or, more accurately, to recover—​their standing within the humanities as architects of human flourishing. But we can only do that if we can discriminate among presentisms and defend those forms that are defensible. For, as the American legal historian Samuel Moyn recently put it in his own brief defence of presentism, “Whatever respect we owe the dead, history is still written by—​and meaningful to—​the living. If so, abuses of the past call for uses in the name of a better future” (xiii).26 Human flourishing—​the individual’s maximization of her human capabilities, and our collective endeavor to realize the best for humanity as a whole—​is at once present-​centered, future-​oriented, and past-​dependent. It is present-​centered because it is only within our own shifting horizon of expectations that we can judge what will best contribute to our own flourishing, as persons and as a species. It is future-​oriented since within that horizon we form plans, and discard alternative projects, in order to achieve our goals more effectively. And it is past dependent because only history—​again, only our individual experiences and that collective record of the human past in all its forms, from the cultural to the cosmic—​can supply the information and the imagination to shape our choices, in the present, among multiple potential paths into the future. If historians too freely use presentism as a slur or as a taboo, then we may be guilty of depriving our readers, and indeed ourselves, of one valuable resource for promoting human flourishing: history.

26 Compare Chang 99: “Like funerals, history-​writing is for the living.”

In Defense of Presentism  65 (We might also, as a result, put ourselves out of business by failing to justify our craft and our profession to publics starkly confronted with the challenges of the present.) Yet once we accept that “every history was, is, and will be a history of the present,” we can at least start to make the case for our contribution to the larger enterprise of human betterment (Koselleck, Sediments 103). When the past erupts into the present, like those Hawaiian gods in the British Museum, it poses unsettling ethical questions for us individually and collectively. Only if we embrace presentism will we be able to hear those questions and to frame answers conducive to human flourishing.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to the participants in the Humanities and Human Flourishing project and to audiences at the Universität Freiburg, the Forschungszentrum Gotha der Universität Erfurt, and the Georg-​August-​Universität Göttingen for their responses, as well as to the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for its support. Above all, my thanks go to Darrin McMahon and Gisèle Sapiro for their invaluable comments and encouragement.

Works Cited Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick, Oxford UP, 1991. Barseghyan, Hakob. “Selection, Presentism, and Pluralist History.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 92, 2022, pp. 60–​70. Baschet, Jérôme. Défaire la tyrannie du present. La Découverte, 2018. Benjamin, Walter. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, I:2, Suhrkamp, 1978, pp. 691–​704. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, Penguin Books, 1970, pp. 62–​71. Bourne, Craig. A Future for Presentism. Oxford UP, 2006. Bouton, Christophe. “Hartog’s Account of Historical Times and the Rise of Presentism.” History, vol. 104, no. 360, April 2019, pp. 309–​330. Brunt, Peter, and Nicholas Thomas, editors. Oceania. Royal Academy of Arts, 2018. Butterfield, Herbert. The Whig Interpretation of History. G. Bell and Sons, 1931. Caldeira, Leah, Christina Hellmich, Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Betty Lou Kam, and Roger G. Rose, editors. Royal Hawaiian Featherwork: Nā hulu ali‘i. U of Hawai‘i P, 2016. Carr, E. H. What Is History? Cambridge UP, 1961. Chang, Hasok. “Presentist History for Pluralist Science.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science, vol. 52, no. 1, 2021, pp. 97–​114.

66  History and Human Flourishing Chapman, Alastair, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory, editors. Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion. U of Notre Dame P, 2009. Clark, J. C. D. Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism and History. Atlantic Books, 2003. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Witches: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford UP, 1997. Colla, Marcus. “The Spectre of the Present: Time, Presentism and the Writing of Contemporary History.” Contemporary European History, vol. 30, no. 1, 2021, pp. 124–​135. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford UP, 1946. Coombs, David Sweeney, and Danielle Coriale. “V21 Forum on Strategic Presentism: Introduction.” Victorian Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2017, 87–​89. Coss, Peter. “Presentism and the ‘Myth’ of Magna Carta.” Past and Present, vol. 234, 2017, 227–​235. Crisp, Thomas M. “Presentism.” The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, edited by Michael J. Loux and Dean W. Zimmerman, Oxford UP, 2005, pp. 211–​245. Croce, Benedetto. La storia come pensiero e come azione. Laterza, 1938. Croce, Benedetto. History as the Story of Liberty. Translated by Sylvia Sprigge, George Allen and Unwin, 1941. Dale, Elizabeth. “Spelunking, or, Some Meditations on the New Presentism.” The Oxford Handbook of Legal History, edited by Markus D. Dubber and Chris Tomlins, Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 311–​321. Dewey, John. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Henry Holt, 1938. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Historicism, Presentism, Futurism.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 2, March 2018, pp. 257–​263. Dray, William H. “Some Varieties of Presentism.” Dray, On History and the Philosophy of History, Brill, 1989, pp. 165–​187. Dray, William H. History as Re-​enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History. Oxford UP, 1995. Elias, Norbert. “The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 4, 1987, pp. 223–​247. Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, University College Dublin Press, 2006. Etienne, Rampal S., and James Rosindell. “Prolonging the Past Counteracts the Pull of the Present: Protracted Speciation Can Explain Observed Slowdowns in Diversification.” Systems Biology, vol. 61, no. 2, 2011, pp. 204–​213. Fendler, Lynn. “The Upside of Presentism.” Paedagogica Historica, vol. 44, no. 6, 2008, pp. 677–​690. Fischer, David Hackett. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. Harper and Row, 1970. Frazer, Michael. “The Ethics of Interpretation in Political Theory and Intellectual History.” Review of Politics, vol. 81, no. 1, Winter 2019, pp. 77–​99. Fukuyama, Francis. The Last Man and the End of History. Free Press, 1992. Garland, David. “What Is a ‘History of the Present’? On Foucault’s Genealogies and Their Critical Preconditions.” Punishment and Society, vol. 16, 2014, pp. 365–​384. Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Gilbert, Felix. “What Ranke Meant.” The American Scholar, vol. 56, no. 3, Summer 1987, pp. 393–​397.

In Defense of Presentism  67 Griffiths, Tom. The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft. Black, 2016. Guldi, Jo, and David Armitage. The History Manifesto. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Halberstam, Judith. “Perverse Presentism: The Androgyne, the Tribade, the Female Husband, and Other Pre-​ Twentieth-​ Century Genders.” Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Duke University Press, 1988, pp. 45–​73. Hartog, François. “The Present of the Historian.” History of the Present, vol. 4, 2014, pp. 203–​219. Hartog, François. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. Translated by Saskia Brown, Columbia University Press, 2015. Hartog, François. “Presentism and Beyond.” Eidos: A Journal for Philosophy and Culture, 4, 2020, pp. 1–​7. Haskell, Thomas L. “Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream.” History and Theory, vol. 29, no. 2, 1990, pp. 129–​157. Higher Education Statistics Agency. “Higher Education Student Data–​ Open Data Released.” January 30, 2019. https://​www.hesa.ac.uk/​news/​30-​01-​2019/​he-​stud​ent-​ data-​popu​lar-​subje​cts. History of the Present. 1–​ (2011–​). Hull, David L. “In Defense of Presentism.” History and Theory, vol. 18, 1979, pp. 1–​15. Hunt, Lynn. “Against Presentism.” Perspectives, vol. 40, no. 5, May 2002. https://​www.his​ tori​ans.org/​publi​cati​ons-​and-​dire​ctor​ies/​persp​ecti​ves-​on-​hist​ory/​may-​2002/​agai​nst-​ pre​sent​ism. Inglis, David. “The Death of History in British Sociology: Presentism, Intellectual Entrepreneurship and the Conundra of Historical Consciousness.” New Social Connections: Sociology’s Subjects and Objects, edited by Judith Burnett, Syd Jeffers, and Graham Thomas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 105–​124. Inglis, David. “What Is Worth Defending in Sociology Today? Presentism, Historical Vision and the Uses of Sociology.” Cultural Sociology, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, pp. 99–​118. Jablonski, David, Kaustuv Roy, James W. Valentine, Rebecca M. Price, and Philip S. Anderson. “The Impact of the Pull of the Recent on the History of Marine Diversity.” Science, vol. 300, May 16, 2003, pp. 1133–​1135. Jardine, Nicholas. “Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science.” History of Science, vol. 41, 2003, pp. 125–​140. Kornbluh, Anna, and Benjamin Morgan. “Introduction: Presentism, Form, and the Future of History.” b2o: an online journal, October 4, 2016. https://​www.bounda​ry2. org/​2016/​10/​anna-​kornb​luh-​and-​benja​min-​mor​gan-​intro​duct​ion-​pre​sent​ism-​form-​ and-​the-​fut​ure-​of-​hist​ory/​. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process.” Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by Keith Tribe, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 26–​42. Koselleck, Reinhart. Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories. Translated by Sean Franzel and Stefan-​Ludwig Hoffmann, Stanford University Press, 2018. Loison, Laurent. “Forms of Presentism in the History of Science: Rethinking the Project of Historical Epistemology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 60, 2016, pp. 29–​37. Loraux, Nicole. “Éloge d’anachronisme en histoire.” Le Genre Humain, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, pp. 23–​39.

68  History and Human Flourishing Lorenz, Chris, and Berber Bevernage, editors. Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013. Lovejoy, Arthur O. “Present Standpoints and Past History.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 18, August 1939, pp. 477–​489. Lübbe, Hermann. Im Zug der Zeit: Verkürzter Aufenthalt in der Gegenwart. Springer, 2003. Markosian, Ned. “A Defense of Presentism.” Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 1, 2004, pp. 47–​82. McCormick, Michael. “Toward a Molecular History of the Justinianic Pandemic.” Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–​750, edited by Lester K. Little, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 290–​312. Moro-​Abadía, Oscar. “Thinking about ‘Presentism’ from a Historian’s Perspective: Herbert Butterfield and Hélène Metzger.” History of Science, vol. 47, 2009, pp. 55–​77. Moyn, Samuel. Human Rights and the Uses of History. Verso, 2014. Oreskes, Naomi. “Why I Am a Presentist.” Science in Context, vol. 26, 2013, pp. 595–​609. Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press, 2010. Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik Conway. The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Columbia University Press, 2014. Pawelski, James. “Attention, Extension, and Ecstasis in Augustine’s Account of Time.” Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 2, 1993, 14–​18. Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin Books, 2018. Prudovsky, Gad. “Can We Ascribe to Past Thinkers Concepts They Had No Linguistic Means to Express?” History and Theory, vol. 36, 1997, pp. 15–​31. Ranke, Leopold von. Das Politische Gespräch und Andere Schriftchen zu Wissenschaftslehre. Edited by Erich Rothacker, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1925. Raup, David M. “Biases in the Fossil Record of Species and Genera.” Bulletin of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, vol. 13, 1979, pp. 85–​91. Reid, Richard, “Past and Presentism: The ‘Precolonial’ and the Foreshortening of African History.” Journal of African History, vol. 52, 2011, pp. 135–​155. Robbins, Bruce, “Presentism, Pastism, Professionalism.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 27, no. 2, 1999, pp. 457–​463. Rousso, Henry. La dernière catastrophe: l’histoire, le présent, le contemporain. Gallimard, 2012. Rubin, Miri. “Presentism’s Useful Anachronisms.” Past and Present, vol. 234, 2017, pp. 236–​244. Rüsen, Jörn. “Responsibility and Irresponsibility in Historical Studies: A Critical Consideration of the Ethical Dimension in the Historian’s Work.” The Ethics of History, edited by David Carr, Thomas Robert Flynn, and Rudolf A. Makkreel, Northwestern University Press, 2004, pp. 195–​213. Sawaya, Francesca. “Safeguarding the Past: ‘Presentist’ Historicism.” American Literary History, vol. 31, no. 2, 2019, pp. 301–​311. Schmidt, Benjamin. “The History BA Since the Great Recession.” Perspectives, vol. 56, no. 11, November 2018. https://​www.his​tori​ans.org/​publi​cati​ons-​and-​dire​ctor​ies/​ persp​ecti​ves-​on-​hist​ory/​decem​ber-​2018/​the-​hist​ory-​ba-​since-​the-​great-​recess​ion-​ the-​2018-​aha-​maj​ors-​rep​ort.

In Defense of Presentism  69 Schneider, Robert, et al. “AHR Roundtable: The Humanities in Historical and Global Perspectives.” American Historical Review, vol. 120, no. 4, October 2015, pp. 1247–​1367. Sewell, C. Keith. “The ‘Herbert Butterfield Problem’ and Its Resolution.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 64, 2003, pp. 599–​618. Skinner, Quentin. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” History and Theory, vol. 8, no. 1, 1969, pp. 3–​53. Spoerhase, Carlos. “Zwischen den Zeiten: Anachronismus und Präsentismus in der Methodologie der historischen Wissenschaften.” Scientia Poetica, 8, 2004, pp. 169–​240. Spoerhase, Carlos. “Presentism and Precursorship in Intellectual History.” Culture, Theory and Critique, vol. 49, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49–​72. Stocking, George. “Editorial: On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1, 1965, 211–​218. Tamm, Marek, and Laurent Olivier, editors. Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism. Bloomsbury Press, 2019. Tosh, Nick. “Anachronism and Retrospective Explanation: In Defense of a Present-​ Centred History of Science.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 34, 2003, pp. 647–​659. Trüper, Henning, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, editors. Historical Teleologies in the Modern World. Bloomsbury Press, 2015. Virmajoki, Veli. “How to Approach History of Science Objectively? Presentism in Historiography.” Futures of Science, November 3, 2020. https://​blo​git.utu.fi/​futur​esof​ scie​nce/​2020/​11/​03/​how-​to-​appro​ach-​hist​ory-​of-​scie​nce-​obje​ctiv​ely-​pre​sent​ism-​in-​ his​tori​ogra​phy/​. Walsham, Alex. “Past and . . . Presentism.” Past and Present, vol. 234, 2017, pp. 213–​217. White, Hayden V. “The Burden of History.” History and Theory, vol. 5, no. 2, 1966, pp. 111–​134. Wilson, Adrian, and T. G. Ashplant. “Whig History and Present-​Centred History.” The Historical Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, March 1988, pp. 1–​16. Wilson, Jeffery R. “Historicizing Presentism: Toward the Creation of a Journal of Public Humanities.” MLA Profession, Spring 2019. https://​pro​fess​ion.mla.org/​histor​iciz​ing-​ pre​sent​ism-​tow​ard-​the-​creat​ion-​of-​a-​jour​nal-​of-​the-​pub​lic-​hum​anit​ies/​. Wood, Gordon S. “Presentism in History” Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Use of History, Penguin Press, 2008, pp. 293–​308.

3 The Power of a Well-​Told History Maya Jasanoff

Every night until I was eleven or so, my family gathered after dinner for “reading.” I nestled on the sofa by my mother’s feet; my brother perched on a chair facing her, and my father slumped in his armchair opposite. In those days he smoked a pipe. My mother read aloud a veritable library shaped by her own childhood favorites: the Arabian Nights and Sherlock Holmes, a hefty complement of Dickens, the Brontës, and the entire Lord of the Rings. I went to bed in the company of quirky characters massed around the margins of a poster map of “Dickens’s London” on my bedroom wall, primed for dreams of dragons, diamonds, and the clip-​clopping footsteps of criminals on cobblestoned streets. When we got to Jane Eyre, I became so enthralled by the world of the book that I drew pictures to illustrate it: young Jane reading in the library at Gateshead; Thornfield Hall in flames (obviously); and Edward Rochester marrying Bertha Mason in Spanish Town, Jamaica. The name “Spanish Town” fascinated me—​the tangy foreignness of “Spanish” mixed with the everyday stolidity of “Town.” It carried with it the whole concept of a backstory: like a page inside these pages, which if you turned it would carry you into a whole different book. (My mother told me there was a novel I could read when I was older, called The Wide Sargasso Sea.) Many years later, encountering Edward Said’s famous interpretation of slavery in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, I recalled my childhood drawing with a shock of recognition. After the reading aloud stopped, I carried on in silence, graduating from Dickens and a middle-​school stretch of the Brontës into high school years of Hardy, Tolstoy, and Woolf. I went to college assuming I would major in English literature, because reading novels was the most immersive, engaging, thought-​provoking thing that I knew. Then I took some courses. Listening to my literature professor was like watching somebody unpack the groceries; after a few rounds, I learned what was inside and where in the kitchen to put it. Listening to my history professor Maya Jasanoff, The Power of a Well-​Told History In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0004

The Power of a Well-Told History  71 was like watching somebody cook: he kept producing new ingredients and preparing them in surprising ways. That was when it all fell into place. My drawing of Spanish Town. Wanting to know the backstory. I didn’t want to analyze the novels I’d devoured. I wanted to step into them, to see their world and know how it worked. I wanted to write history. That reading novels kindled my imagination about the past speaks to a relationship between history and fiction whose closeness is captured by the very words we use. The English language only modestly distinguishes between the terms “history” and “story”; German “Geschichte” and French “histoire,” among others, don’t separate them at all. The proximity of fiction to history has been a source of frequent benefit and occasional consternation to historians. “History begins in novel and ends in essay,” mused Thomas Babington Macaulay, as vigorous a champion of historical narrative as nineteenth-​century Europe produced, but “while our historians are practicing all the arts of controversy,” he complained, “they miserably neglect the art of narration, the art of interesting the affections and presenting pictures to the imagination” (377, 423). The result was that “the duty which properly belongs to the historian”—​“to make the past present, to bring the distant near . . . to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-​fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture”—​had “been appropriated by the historical novelist” (433–​434).1 That was in 1828. The historical profession as it exists today would be quite unrecognizable to Macaulay, and that is a very good thing. Yet almost two centuries later, his lament sounds surprisingly fresh. History exerts as powerful a hold on the fictional imagination as ever. About a third of Booker Prize–​and Pulitzer Prize–​winning novels between 1980 and 2020 have been set in earlier eras. A third of the Best Picture Oscar winners in the same period have reconstructed “true stories” from the past. The golden age of streaming television produced one hit period drama after another, and historical genre fiction thrives, from the sea stories of Patrick O’Brien to the perennial staple of the “Regency romance.” When people say that a history book “reads like a novel,” they mean it as a compliment.

1 From “Hallam’s Constitutional History.” This and the essay on “History” were first published in the Edinburgh Review in May and September of 1828.

72  History and Human Flourishing Yet the place of history within universities, and of historical scholarship in public discourse, has been in measurable decline. The number of college history majors fell precipitously after 2008, enrollments in history courses dropped, and the specter of funding cuts to history programs haunted high-​ schools and universities well before the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.2 (It’s perhaps worth noting that all this has coincided with the widely perceived increase in ideological polarization.) The nonfiction history books that do make it onto bestseller lists are rarely written by academics and skew heavily toward the “Fathers’ Day” favorites of military and presidential history, in place of the less familiar and more varied corners of the past explored by scholars. The bestselling historian in the United States in the 2010s was former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.3 The prominence of such spinners of convention and cliché in the marketplace ends up deepening a sense of division between “popular,” story-​ driven history and scholarly work. The social historian Lawrence Stone once cracked that when an academic “writes a narrative, his [sic] friends tend to apologize for him, saying: ‘Of course, he only did it for the money’ ” (Stone 16). Professional historians, however, in distancing themselves from storytelling, may unnecessarily blunt the sharpest writerly tool at their disposal. It’s not simply that a book that “reads like a novel” will surely sell better than one that reads like a dissertation. After all, there are a lot more reliable ways to get rich than by writing history books. The most urgent reason for academic historians to engage in storytelling is one at the heart of our vocation. As teachers, we are constantly trying to reveal rich, challenging, fascinating, unsettling, multisided, polyvocal pasts to nonspecialists, namely our students. Storytelling is a powerful way of doing just that for nonspecialist readers. How can scholars reclaim it? * * * “The story is primitive,” explained E. M. Forster in his influential 1927 primer Aspects of the Novel. “It reaches back to the origins of literature, . . . and it appeals to what is primitive in us.” He conjured “the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until 2 See Schmidt, “The History BA Since the Great Recession”; Brookins, “Enrollment Declines Continue”; Smith, “Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University without a History Major?.’ ” And this was before the COVID-​19 pandemic. 3 For a stimulating assessment, see Andrew J. Bacevich, “Bill O’Reilly Is America’s Best-​Selling Historian,” The Nation, June 22, 2017, https://​www.thenat​ion.com/​arti​cle/​arch​ive/​bill-​orei​lly-​is-​ ameri​cas-​best-​sell​ing-​histor​ian/​

The Power of a Well-Told History  73 the audience falls asleep among their offal and bones.” In its purest form, Forster held, a story is simply a sequence of events. “ ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story,” he said. A good story, a successful story, leaves the reader wanting to hear more: “ ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief ’ is a plot” (65–​66, 130). Good stories saved Scheherazade’s life, because the sultan always wanted to know what came next. A. S. Byatt has written that the threaded stories of the Thousand and One Nights “consol[e]‌us for endings with endless new beginnings.” History, by these lights, must be the greatest of all stories: it lets readers enter an infinite series of what-​nexts and what-​nexts, running toward the receding horizon of the future. The ur-​story of Forster’s caveman is essentially a chronicle: this happened, then that happened. Introducing a plot into a story explains why things happen in the order they do—​the same way introducing an argument into a chronicle turns it into a history. Literary critics have expanded on this idea to argue that a prose narrative organizes and presents events in a certain sequence so as to produce, in turn, a particular series of effects in the reader (Bal, Narratology). A good narrative has the power to evoke a richer world than its words can explicitly contain.4 By what strange alchemy do words achieve this? Critics working in the area of narratology (a term coined by Tzvetan Todorov in 1969) have looked for answers by analyzing the formal structures of fiction. More recently, literary critics have drawn on psychology to create the subfield of cognitive literary studies, which investigates how narrative engages human capacities for intuition, interpretation, perception, and emotion. One of the central insights of this research concerns “theory of mind”: the ability to identify and understand other peoples’ mental states (on the basis of external cues such as facial expression), and to grasp that those states may differ from one’s own. According to evolutionary psychologists, theory of mind is what allowed human societies to expand and grow increasingly complex; it is the foundation of empathy. According to social psychologists, humans are able to extend theory of mind to fictional characters as well—​which means, cognitive critics contend, that reading literature can foster empathy and even trigger changes in personality.5 4 “Narrative always says less than it knows, but it often makes known more than it says” (Genette 198). 5 See among others: Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction; Goldman, “Theory of Mind”; Kidd and Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind; and Mar, Oatley, Hirsh, dela Paz, and Peterson, “Bookworms versus Nerds.”

74  History and Human Flourishing Reading stories, in short, can make us feel better or worse—​for better or worse. A 1916 article in The Atlantic wryly proposed “bibliotherapy” as a treatment for psychological woes, suggesting that a book could be used in place of a pill or a tonic as “a stimulant or a sedative or an irritant or a soporific.” One of the first people to take the idea seriously was Sadie Peterson Delaney, from 1924 the chief librarian of the Veterans Administration hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, who discovered that books could “have a definite effect on the physical, mental, and moral welfare” of World War I veterans. Almost a century later, the method is going strong. “Reading Well,” an initiative launched in the United Kingdom in 2013, invites doctors to “prescribe” books to patients suffering from anxiety and depression. Though many of the titles recommended under the program are self-​help books, they also extend into fiction, including novels that portray people with mental health conditions, or who themselves seek solace in reading. Though talk therapy is demonstrably more effective than bibliotherapy, it’s a lot cheaper, faster, and easier to get hold of a book: British libraries loaned out 100,000 volumes in Reading Well’s first three months alone (Price 119–​23, 133). Given the psychological power of stories to move emotions, it’s hardly surprising that businesses have seized on their potential to move money. A study of advertisements aired during the 2010 and 2011 Super Bowls showed that the most highly rated commercials followed the five-​part narrative form known as “Freytag’s pyramid”: exposition, complication, climax, reversal, denouement (Quesenberry and Coolsen 437–​454). “Business storytelling,” in which a presenter describes the arc of a commercial idea, has emerged as a favored method of winning investors and clients, bolstered by neuroscientific studies demonstrating that storytelling releases oxytocin, and thereby builds trust and credibility (Monarth, “The Irresistible Power of Storytelling”; Dolan, Storytelling for Work). From storytelling to sell a product or service, it’s just a short step to storytelling as a method of political campaigning. Few Americans have mobilized the power of storytelling more effectively than Barack Obama, whose career after being President (or “storyteller-​in-​chief,” as Junot Díaz has put it) includes producing story-​driven programming for Netflix (Diaz, “One Year”; Reed, “Obamas”). The very features that make stories act so powerfully on the human mind may account for some of the qualms academic historians have with the idea of “telling stories” in their own scholarship. Hayden White’s influential study Metahistory (1973) transformed academic historians’ attention to narrative form. Applying structural analysis to major works of nineteenth-​century

The Power of a Well-Told History  75 continental European history, White showed how they followed one of four modes of emplotment (comedy, tragedy, romance, and satire), used one of four modes of argument, and drove toward one of four possible political programs. The books thus presented narratives that framed and transcended their specific content. They delivered metahistory in addition to, if not in spite of, history itself. Less attention has been paid, though, to the way that historians adopt storytelling as a method within a longer work (“Endohistory”?). By this I mean a narrative style that features thick sensory description, focalizes action through specific characters, and adopts various techniques to heighten emotional engagement—​the kind of history that “reads like a novel.” At least three major objections have been leveled against this type of historical storytelling. First, there’s the old epistemological chestnut: what can we know, and how can we know it? By ascribing intentionality (let alone interiority) to characters, or supplying sensory details to scenes, historical storytelling is often suspected of creeping too far over the border into unknowability. The question of what constitutes reliable evidence has dogged historical practice since the days of Herodotus, “father of lies,” as Suzanne Marchand makes clear in her essay in this volume. Scholars agree that we don’t make stuff up. We provide citations for whatever we assert, which others ought to be able to track down and confirm. This is our version of the replicable scientific experiment. Then there’s the mire of interpretation. In the poststructuralist era, many scholars embraced the idea that every historical source was a kind of narrative, which meant that nothing could be known except as filtered by culture. Simon Schama offered one kind of response to the postmodern predicament in Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (1991), which deliberately muddled fact and fiction “to tear out the seams from the finished fabric of history writing . . . and have readers decide for themselves whether the thing can ever be satisfactorily put back together” (“Historians Shouldn’t Make It Up”).6 By then, philosophers of history and narrative theorists had arrived at the view, as David Carr writes, that by telling stories historians imposed “a narrative structure that the past does not ‘really’ have.” This made narrative at best a kind of wish fulfillment, “reflecting our need for satisfying coherence,” and at worst an insidious method of inflicting “a moral view of the world in the interests of power and manipulation” (Time, Narrative, and 6 See also Jill Lepore, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” The New Yorker, March 24, 2008.

76  History and Human Flourishing History, 13, 16). Carr delivered the compelling counterargument that “narrative is at the root of human reality long before it gets explicitly told about,” and that when narrative historians make sense of the past in stories, they are processing the world in the same ways that humans naturally do. “The storytelling never ends,” Carr concluded. Schama, for one, embraced that (Carr, “Narrative Explanation,” 29–​30). A perusal of monographs suggests, however, that historians have more commonly responded to the slipperiness of evidence by defaulting to locutions which distance their statements from even the whiff of confection. Consider the following two sentences: 1. The queen felt grief that the king died. 2. According to contemporary observers, the queen appeared to feel grief at the king’s death. There’s an obvious stylistic difference between the two. The first gets straight to the point with a transitive verb and no subordinate clauses. The second introduces new subjects (“contemporary observers”) and distances the queen from the action using the intransitive verb “appeared.” Now assume that both cite (in a footnote) precisely the same sources describing the queen’s demeanor. Is there a meaningful argumentative difference between them? Only if the author wants to develop a point about “contemporary observers” as opposed to later ones, say. As a statement about the queen’s grief, they’re empirically a wash. Every historical account involves reconstructing a past reality on the basis of surviving evidence. It involves, in other words, imagination. White himself argued that “the best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic and moral rather than epistemological” (xii). This invites a second concern about storytelling in history, namely what perspective the narrative either explicitly or implicitly prioritizes. The “great man” style of history fell out of favor with academics long ago, not least for consigning the vast majority of humanity, in E. P. Thompson’s famous phrase, to “the enormous condescension of posterity.” So did the “grand narratives” beloved by White’s subjects, which advanced sweeping models of historical change. (That hasn’t stopped either type of history, to be sure, from attracting a big popular readership: witness the “great men” histories churned out by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ron Chernow, Jon Meacham, et al.; and the new “grand narratives” offered by the likes of Yuval Noah Harari and Jared Diamond.)

The Power of a Well-Told History  77 But storytelling outside the frames of great men and grand narratives—​such as microhistory, which thrived in the years after White’s Metahistory—​raises concerns in turn, for privileging individuals at the expense of collectives, for focusing on experience at the expense of analysis, and for adopting shorter time scales at the expense of the longue durée (Guldi and Armitage, The History Manifesto). If microhistory is to serve as metonym, it has to guard against the risks that the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned about in a viral TED talk on “the danger of a single story” which sustains facile stereotypes: Africa equals catastrophe, Mexico equals immigrants, India equals poverty, and so on. James Pogue has astutely articulated a further intellectual, if not ethical, liability of nonfiction storytelling, namely how the lure of lucrative screen rights has created a “book-​to-​film complex” that prioritizes “story as an ultimate good, ahead of deep personal insight, literary style,” serious original research, or arguments that could in any way challenge the “aristocracy of tech and capital” that decides which stories get funded to begin with (“They Made a Movie Out of It”). Storytelling becomes the neoliberal individualist’s soft power. A third objection to storytelling in history has to do with the ethics of engaging a reader’s emotions in a piece of scholarly writing. Manifestly, to provoke emotional reactions deliberately in a reader stands at odds with that long-​held academic aspiration to authorial detachment. Even if an author accepts that there’s no such thing as pure objectivity, there’s always the risk of anachronism in fostering reader identification with subjects who are distant from us in time and experience. Then, too, historical storytelling can creep uneasily toward voyeurism or raise charges of exploitation, particularly when based on records to whose making or publication human subjects never consented.7 Yet as advocates of methods such as “reading against the grain” will know, disciplinary constraints on what counts as a valid historical source, who counts as an important historical actor, or what, by extension, counts as a rigorous historical narrative can end up remarginalizing the historically neglected. Sometimes storytelling can open doors that earlier generations closed. As Toni Morrison put it in her Nobel Prize address: “Tell us what the world has been to you in the dark

7 See, for instance, the 2019 lawsuit brought by Tamara Lanier challenging Harvard’s ownership and use of daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors: Jennifer Schuessler, “Your Ancestors Were Slaves: Who Owns the Photos of Them?” The New York Times, March 22, 2019.

78  History and Human Flourishing places and in the light. . . . Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin.” For all these evidentiary, intellectual, and ethical reasons, historians need to think closely about which stories to tell and how to tell them. Are these reasons sufficient to avoid telling historical stories altogether? Writing during World War II, when the stakes of responsible storytelling could scarcely have been higher, Marc Bloch warned against just such a conclusion: “Let us guard against stripping our science of its share of poetry. Let us also beware of the inclination . . . to be ashamed of this poetic quality. It would be sheer folly to suppose that history, because it appeals strongly to the emotions, is less capable of satisfying the intellect” (8). The challenge is how to balance storytelling’s power to awaken the senses and broaden the mind with the responsibilities that come with writing history. The challenge is how to write a narrative history that is, in some meaningful sense, true. * * * To be sure, I hadn’t thought about any of this when I started writing history myself. I just knew that when I started describing the people and places I’d researched, something wonderful happened. It was as if all the documents I’d read flowed through a funnel and poured onto the page, into lakes of paragraphs and runnels of sentences. Telling stories, I discovered, could be as immersive, addictive, and mind-​expanding as reading them had ever been. The specific method of storytelling I had stumbled into was the “set piece”: a scene thick with visual detail, populated by personality-​rich characters, and narrated from the vantage point of an omniscient observer. A set piece lets the reader lean back and watch the action unfold. What a set piece doesn’t so obviously do, as my professors quickly pointed out, is elaborate an argument. More or less anything I wanted to demonstrate about change over time, analyze about systems, or illustrate in terms of patterns and aggregates, had to be explained outside the frame. So I adopted a method of stitching my scenes together by toggling between scales: I’d zoom in on a particular episode, usually at the start of a chapter or section, and then I’d pan out to discuss the broader context, trajectory, and issues at stake. I tended to think of the zooming in as the fun part and the panning out as the dutiful part. The stories were there because I enjoyed writing them and I hoped readers (including nonacademic ones) might like reading them; they were also there because, as a matter of methodological principle, I wanted to examine how individual actors experienced and described geopolitical

The Power of a Well-Told History  79 events more often studied on an impersonal scale. The expository portions were there because I had to show my colleagues that I had internalized their work and had something new to add. They were there because my profession demanded it. What my flippant dichotomy failed to acknowledge, of course, is how fundamentally the fun part depends on the dutiful part. An argument is to a history what a plot is to a novel; it gives it momentum, purpose, and intellectual force. This came into relief for me while researching the lives of loyalists displaced by the American Revolution. Piecing together the journeys of a young Georgia woman named Elizabeth Johnston, for instance, I felt sympathy for the hardships she faced: children’s deaths, painful family separations, dispossession, and homelessness. Yet Johnston was a slaveowner. She was racist, pious, smug, neither especially perceptive nor reflective, and an unreliable narrator of her own life. I did not remotely empathize with her. I wanted to write a history which showed readers the human stakes of the events I was chronicling; but I couldn’t let the stories speak for themselves, as it were, without sacrificing my responsibility to interpret and provide counterevidence. Advancing an argument forced me to be disciplined and purposeful about my storytelling: to have a reason not only for why I included a scene at all, but to interrogate the perspectives from which I told it, to account for which voices I amplified or diminished, and to think critically about where I positioned myself in relation to it. A good story works because there’s hard—​yes, even dutiful—​thinking behind it. A good argument sticks because it’s the product of rigorous—​and often fun—​intellectual scrutiny. And so I found myself circling back to the power of storytelling, not only as a reader who loves being immersed in stories, or as a writer who delights in telling them, but as a historian interested in thinking about how stories work. What kind of history, I wondered, could novels inform? Fiction probably enters academic history most frequently through the classroom door, when it’s assigned to students as a primary source. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe gets taught as an allegory for British imperial expansion, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South as a reflection on the consequences of industrialization, Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners as a record of postcolonial race relations, and so on. Historical monographs often deploy fiction in a similar way, drawing on them as repositories of potent period details, or citing them as expressions (if not agents) of zeitgeist. In my field of British imperial history, no author turns up more often for these purposes than Rudyard Kipling, whose verses are routinely quoted as

80  History and Human Flourishing the epitome of turn-​of-​the-​century jingoism. But no single work of English fiction about imperialism gets more attention than Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, an indictment of European rapacity during the “Scramble for Africa” that was closely based on the author’s own journey to Congo in 1890. Conrad and Kipling were rough contemporaries, yet their perspectives on imperialism diverged almost as sharply as their life experiences. Even more than Kipling (who was born and partly raised in the British India he wrote so much about), Conrad wrote fiction anchored in his own international experience. Born to Polish nationalist parents in present-​ day Ukraine, he grew up in the Tsarist Russian Empire, moved to France as a teenager to learn to be a sailor, and settled in England in his twenties—​where he learned English, his third language. He worked for twenty years as a professional mariner—​traveling to the Caribbean, Australia, southeast Asia, and central Africa—​before ever publishing a word. I had the idea to use Conrad’s novels as points of entry into the “true stories” behind them—​and in so doing, to deliver a history of the British Empire that accounted for the experiences of a Conrad, in place of a Kipling. What I soon discovered, however, was that simply piecing together the “true stories” was insufficiently fresh and revealing. Critical approaches to Heart of Darkness exemplify the stakes of putting together history and literature in this way. In the mid-​twentieth century, “New Critics,” who believed that a text should be interpreted exclusively on its own terms, independent of its context, had read Heart of Darkness as a meditation on the universal human capacity for evil. Chinua Achebe overturned that view in the mid-​1970s with a blistering essay that insisted on the centrality of the book’s African setting and castigated Heart of Darkness as a racist text by a racist writer. Since then, acknowledging the true story behind the fiction has become a matter of political, even moral, significance. It has also been brilliantly and harrowingly reconstructed by Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes (1996) and Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), which detail Conrad’s precise historical sources. The question that needed answering, I realized, wasn’t what the true stories were. It was why these? The answers were partly biographical and intellectual—​and finding them involved reading fiction in a different, less instrumental way. As Conrad himself pointed out, “Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social

The Power of a Well-Told History  81 phenomena, whereas history is based on documents . . . —​on second-​hand impression” (17). That makes fiction a potentially invaluable record of human interiority, a dimension of human experience that historians struggle to access. By holding Conrad’s fiction alongside other historical and biographical sources, I could better understand how, for instance, Heart of Darkness not only recorded—​and left out—​documentable details (names, events, etc.) of contemporary Congo. I could also see how it stemmed from the imagination of a person who came to Congo primed to notice and neglect certain things in the first place; who had carried with him to Africa the manuscript of a different novel altogether, set in Borneo (later published as Almayer’s Folly); and who wrote about Congo several years after his return, influenced by further preoccupations, prejudices, and pressures. Research complete, I pulled out my familiar narrative tools and sat down to write. But one after another, they came up short. Chronology, normally the narrative historian’s best friend, got tangled when I tried to line up the order in which Conrad wrote his books with the order of the events that informed them. Set pieces were hard to source. Zooming in on characters and panning out to context didn’t suffice when I had to fold in literary analysis as well. It was only then that I realized fiction held one more lesson for my writing of history. The storytelling methods I’d been using would have been perfectly familiar to Macaulay. But the storyteller I was actually writing about, Conrad, was a pioneering modernist, and I was writing about him for a postmodern audience. So why was I defaulting to the narrative practices of the Victorians to do it? It was those techniques, after all, which had sustained precisely the kinds of “great men” and “grand narrative” accounts that I and my peers were striving to unsettle. For a palette of alternatives, I had only to read Conrad himself. Famously formally inventive, he bent and twisted chronology, shifted perspectives, and nested layers of narration within one another. In his books I found stylistic keys for how to write mine. Academic historians excel at overcoming the dangers of the single story. We “complicate,” “nuance,” and “problematize.” We think outside the box. We read against the grain. So when we write, it makes sense for us to push beyond a single, dated mode of storytelling. Indeed, as a number of recent works exemplify, some histories require creative telling. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments deploys what she calls “critical fabulation” to gain insight into African American women’s lives, to walk down alleys and into bedrooms, to enter the mind behind a photograph’s still face

82  History and Human Flourishing (“Venus” 11).8 Lisa Brooks’s Bancroft Prize–​winning history of King Philip’s War, Our Beloved Kin, embarks on what the Abenaki term awikhigawôgan, a process of writing or drawing, by uprooting a “narrative field” sowed by colonial historians and reconstructing the “place-​world” of native people (“Awikhigawôgan” 263; Our Beloved Kin). (Brooks visualizes indigenous networks and geographies in a companion website, a good demonstration of how digital tools can further expand modes of historical storytelling.) Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast draws together ecology, ethnography, and archives to create a lyrical natural history of the Bering Sea, in which whales are at least as significant as people. All these books are highly “readable,” but that’s not the point. Each one uses narrative to voice stories that would otherwise go unheard. They also help answer a final question. If a story is what a reader is after, then why bother reading history at all, instead of just going straight to a novel? Fiction offers a continual reminder of the capacity of storytelling to kindle the senses, spark the imagination, engage the intellect, and expand the emotions. Narrative history can do all that and more. History is the story that really happened. It can widen a reader’s sense of reality, heighten the ability to process change over time, and invite one to wonder beyond “What was it like?” and wander down the avenues of “How did it happen?” and “Why?” The final answer is that historical storytelling is about more than personal fulfillment. It’s a matter of profound public significance. For better or worse, stories about the past cement identity, define community, and shape politics, law, and culture. That makes historical storytelling far too important to be neglected by the scholars poised to present it best. And it means that historical narrative does more than broaden our picture of the past. It enlightens an understanding of the present—​and maybe, if we’re lucky, contributes to humanity’s chances of flourishing in the years to come.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED, July 2009. www.ted. com/​talks/​chimamanda_​ngozi_​adichie_​t​he_​da​ nge​r_​of​_​a_​s​ingl​e_​st​ory?langu​age=​en

8 See also Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); and Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019).

The Power of a Well-Told History  83 Bacevich, Andrew J. “Bill O’Reilly Is America’s Best-​Selling Historian.” The Nation, June 22, 2017. https://​www.thenat​ion.com/​arti​cle/​arch​ive/​bill-​orei​lly-​is-​ameri​cas-​best-​sell​ ing-​histor​ian/​ Bal, Mieka. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. U of Toronto P, 1985. Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft. Translated by Peter Putnam, Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Brooks, Lisa. “Awikhigawôgan Ta Pildowi Ôjmowôgan: Mapping a New History.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 75, 2018, pp. 259–94. Brooks, Lisa. Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. Yale UP, 2019. Brookins, Julia. “Enrollment Declines Continue.” Perspectives on History, Washington DC: American Historical Association, February 2018. https://www.historians.org/ publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2018/enrollmentdeclines-continue-aha-survey-again-shows-fewer-undergraduates-in-history-courses Carr, David. “Narrative Explanation and Its Malcontents.” History and Theory, vol. 47, no. 1, 2008, pp. 29–​30. Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Indiana UP, 1986, pp. 13, 16. Conrad, Joseph. “Henry James: An Appreciation.” Notes on Life and Letters. Doubleday, Page & Co., 1924, pp. 11–19. Díaz, Junot. “One Year: Storyteller in Chief.” The New Yorker, January 20, 2010. https:// www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/one-year-storyteller-in-chief Dolan, Gabrielle. Storytelling for Work: The Essential Guide to Business Storytelling. John Wiley & Sons, 2017. Demuth, Bathsheba. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Sea. W. W. Norton and Company, 2019. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1954, pp. 65–​66, 130. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin, Cornell UP, 1980, p. 198. Goldman, Alvin I. “Theory of Mind.” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, edited by Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, and Stephen P. Stich. pp. 402–424. January 18, 2012. Guldi, Jo, and David Armitage. The History Manifesto. Cambridge UP, 2014. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 26, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 1–14, 2008. Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W. W. Norton and Company, 2019. Kidd, David Comer, and Emanuele Castano. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science, vol. 342, no. 6156, 2013, pp. 377–​380. Lepore, Jill. “Just the Facts, Ma’am.” The New Yorker, March 24, 2008. Macaulay, Lord Thomas Babington. “History.” Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 1. Hurd and Houghton, 1878, pp. 377, 423. https://www.google.com/books/ edition/Critical_Historical_and_Miscellaneous_Es/KXqojFesg7oC?hl=en&gbpv=1&d q=critical+historical+miscellaneous+essays+macaulay&pg=PR5&printsec=frontcover Macaulay, Lord Thomas Babington. “Hallam’s Constitutional History,” pp. 433–​434. Mar, Raymond A., Keith Oatley, Jacob Hirsh, Jennifer de la Paz, and Jordan B. Peterson. “Bookworms versus Nerds: Exposure to Fiction versus Non-​ Fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and the Simulation of Fictional Social Worlds.” Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 40, no. 5, October 1, 2006, pp. S694–​712.

84  History and Human Flourishing Monarth, Harrison. “The Irresistible Power of Storytelling as a Strategic Business Tool.” Harvard Business Review, March 11, 2014. Morrison, Toni. “Nobel Lecture.” December 7, 2013. www.nob​elpr​ize.org/​pri​zes/​lit​erat​ ure/​1993/​morri​son/​lect​ure/​ Pogue, James. “They Made a Movie Out of It.” The Baffler, vol. 49, January 2020. https:// thebaffler.com/salvos/they-made-a-movie-out-of-it-pogue Price, Leah. What We Talk About When We Talk About Books. Basic Books, 2019, pp. 119–​23, 133. Quesenberry, Keith A. and Michael K. Coolsen. “What Makes a Super Bowl Ad Super? Five-​Act Dramatic Form Affects Consumer Super Bowl Advertising Ratings.” Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, vol. 22, Fall 2014, pp. 437–​454. Reed, Ryan. “Obamas Talk Storytelling in Preview for Netflix Doc ‘American Factory.’ ” Rolling Stone, August 21, 2019. Schama, Simon. “Historians Shouldn’t Make It Up, but I Did.” The Independent, April 12, 2013. Schmidt, Benjamin M. “The History BA Since the Great Recession.” Perspectives on History, Vol. 56, Issue 9. December 2018. https://www.historians.org/publications-anddirectories/perspectives-on-history/december-2018/the-history-ba-since-thegreat-recession-the-2018-aha-majors-report Schuessler, Jennifer. “Your Ancestors Were Slaves: Who Owns the Photos of Them?” The New York Times, March 22, 2019. Smith, Mitch. “Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University without a History Major?’” The New York Times, January 13, 2019, A1. Stone, Lawrence. “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History.” Past & Present, vol. 85, 1979, pp. 3–24. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​Century Europe. Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2006.

4 Well-​Being and a Usable Past The Role of Historical Diagnosis Peter N. Stearns

The components of well-​being have a history. In some cases, the history involved may generate interest, without deep bearing on current guidelines for greater human flourishing. In other cases, however, historical analysis is vital to determine both trends and barriers relevant to well-​being, and even to add to the list of essentials. While historical diagnosis has not been central to the first two decades of the positive happiness movement, it can play an active role going forward. For historians, there are real opportunities here. Positive psychology has generated important research findings over the past two decades, and this in turn has inspired a number of institutional steps in business and academe. But the effort has been largely devoid of historical context, raising questions about the relationship of well-​being recommendations to past efforts at improvement and, even more, about the larger social and cultural setting in which people are urged to build up their strengths. Historians can add important dimensions to this effort, on the research side, but also in outreach, by taking advantage of the expanded range of inquiry that has marked the discipline over the past half century. Guiding additional applications and even developing new themes can both extend history’s current service and add important dimensions to the well-​being effort itself. A number of approaches are possible, including of course an effort to situate the well-​being movement itself amid the various popular efforts to promote self-​help and self-​correction over the past century or more (Horowitz). The idea of a project on the impact of industrial society on happiness certainly promises to be stimulating, potentially drawing in students at various levels as well as professional historians (McMahon, “From the Paleolithic to the Present”). Specific topics, like the impact of industrialization on work satisfaction or the replacement of the agricultural festival tradition with a more Peter N. Stearns, Well-​Being and a Usable Past In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0005

86  History and Human Flourishing spectator-​based leisure pattern, can be expanded in the effort to link broad historical patterns to a more informed consideration of well-​being (Stearns, The Industrial Turn in World History; Pinker). Any comprehensive well-​being project should take the history of the modern idea of happiness into account, including the unusual American commitment to smiling cheerfulness and the pressures this can generate (McMahon, Happiness; Meacham). Yet another connective strategy could probe existing groups of voluntary history users to elicit their sense of how history contributes to well-​being, though an informal effort in this domain did not generate very clear links to current emphases in the positive psychology movement: retiree learners saw history more in terms of personal interest or in providing reminders that human society has overcome obstacles in the past. This essay, however, takes a more focused approach, in urging historical attention to several of the key themes raised directly in the well-​being literature of the past two decades. Some of these themes link to historical work already available; others suggest more novel opportunities. Additional challenges include the need to persuade existing well-​being proponents to take an interest in historical findings—​achievable but sometimes difficult amid the excitement of purely psychological research—​and the desirability of expanding the well-​being agenda to include further social components where, again, assessment of the historical record can contribute as well. The need to build a wider audience for a well-​being history must also be addressed (Stearns, Anxious Parents).1 For the opportunity to reconsider history’s role in contemporary life through more explicit interest in contributions to well-​being—​as at least one path toward renewed public vigor for the discipline—​is a welcome one. It does involve facing a public audience that has become disengaged from much interest in history, and it will encounter doubts and indifference from historical practitioners themselves, many of whom grow uncomfortable with any effort to move beyond narrow research specializations.2 But the conjuncture 1 There is another intriguing historical issue here that has received some attention but should blossom further with the history–​well-​being connection: How long do measurable improvements in the human condition prompt a sense of well-​being? We know that happiness improves when a group or region first advances. The question of why the huge reduction in child mortality has not inspired more lasting family satisfaction has been tackled at least obliquely: parents proved quickly capable of turning to other problems, and of course the very reduction in average mortality made any threat to children’s safety or physical health more ominous. But the overall topic—​the ability or inability to retain active appreciation for past progress—​deserves wider and more explicit analysis. 2 Terminology may also be more than trivial. Historians tend not to like cheerful neologisms such as “positivity” that loom large in the well-​being literature. It turns out that while positivity was indeed an uncommon term until the 1950s, when it began a rapid ascent linked initially to boosters like

Well-Being and a Usable Past  87 is worth exploring, and it can arguably not just grab the coattails of positive psychology but address some of the basic components as well. The central claim of this chapter is straightforward: there is in contemporary historiography one core feature whose public implications have not been adequately explored, and which potentially connects directly with the interest in well-​being: the tremendous expansion of the range of human experience that can successfully and usefully be historically explored. The physical senses and the emotions themselves have a usable past; sleep changes over time, and so does mental health, and so does the valuation of happiness itself (Smith; Matt and Stearns; Williams; Reiss). And while not all of this newfound range is applicable to the promotion of well-​being—​ the intriguing redefinitions of smell and disgust, for example, do not fit directly into the current agenda, though I do think it is relevant to consider the high probability that modern people encounter far fewer basic disgust experiences than their ancestors did—​several findings or opportunities for discovery are actually fundamental (Corbin). This is the aspect of history that can both support positive trends in human well-​being and explain some of the key barriers to well-​being goals—​where themes and trends from the past directly impinge on the present. The conjuncture builds on a common interest in probing the meaning and impact of a variety of human qualities (Academy of Finland).3 * * * We can begin with two examples to illustrate these general claims. The first involves a focus central to the growing field of emotions history—​love—​ widely explored for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and open to more explicit analysis in linkage with well-​being prompts. The second, not unrelated, applies historical analysis to another area of well-​being interest, consumerism, where contemporary complications loom large. The modern history of love shows how history can add clarity to a theme central to well-​being in modern Western culture. The history of consumerism, in contrast, shows the importance of history in exploring barriers that must be addressed in promoting another recent well-​being emphasis, aimed at Norman Vincent Peale and then further supported by the shifts in formal psychology, the term has an older ancestry, dating back to 1659. So perhaps we can adjust. 3 A new project in Finland, dubbed the History of Experiences, touches base with the kind of comprehensive agenda that can attach historical research to a better understanding of well-​being.

88  History and Human Flourishing redirecting acquisitive appetites. In combination, the two examples suggest the centrality of historical analysis in dealing with the context for contemporary well-​being—​a context that in some areas can be built upon and in others must be explicitly challenged. It is hardly surprising that love figures prominently in many well-​being formulas. Happily, the emotion has also been extensively explored historically. A more explicit connection offers several benefits to a well-​being program. In suggesting the historical contingency of some aspects of love, historians can help well-​being proponents refine their own formulations (Vaillant; Stossel; Shenk). An understanding of the causes of the rise of love should be central to any contemporary strategy: there is considerable indication that “modern” conditions generate new interests in but also new needs for love, and this adds depth to any current assessment. Finally, exploration of oscillations in the patterns of modern love, into our own time, will further connect well-​being research with the complexities of the contemporary cultural context. There is little question that, in Western societies, a growing expectation of love, as a core emotion in founding and sustaining families, began to gain importance from the eighteenth century onward, as the traditional economic functions of the family gradually declined (Shorter; Lystra, Searching the Heart). To be sure, love was hardly a new invention; historical work has highlighted a new level of expectation, not an entirely novel experience. Social class issues also intrude; the most fervent formulations of modern love have often emanated from the middle class, though there is evidence of wider currency; historians in fact are now exploring working-​class alternatives, at least in the nineteenth century (Lystra, “Working-​Class Americans Choose a Mate”).4 Most important, the rise of modern (and initially Western) emphasis on family love in no sense assured success. Expectations of love could actually complicate family life, feeding disappointments with reality and attendant instabilities, including the rising divorce rates emerging from the late nineteenth century onward. The relationship between new ideas about love and actual family well-​being is hardly straightforward, and historical perspective can actively contribute to exploring this obvious dilemma. Heightened love could also intensify grief, another issue that requires attention. 4 Karen Lystra is about to release significant findings on the working-​class experience of love and courtship in the later nineteenth century.

Well-Being and a Usable Past  89 Nevertheless, the rise of modern love, and the growing belief that families should support emotional satisfaction and contentment, is a vital part of modern history that feeds directly into contemporary discussions of well-​being. Indeed, the new interest in love that began to unfold in the eighteenth century was directly linked to broader claims about human happiness, and the linkage has persisted. Historians can expand an understanding of modern love through charting changes in courtship and in parent–​child relations, particularly from the early nineteenth century onward. And they can also pinpoint the causes of the growing hope for loving relationships: in the economic changes that made the family a cherished emotional refuge; in the need to modify rising individualism with stronger emotional links to others; even in linkages to new forms of consumerism, associated with romance or a loving family (Coontz; Lystra, Searching the Heart; Mintz). Work on the history of love in non-​Western societies, though inviting further development, adds to the analysis. Public discussion of love surged in Japan, for example in the 1920s, with several highly publicized cases of individual women defying their parents to marry their beloveds, or in a few cases committing suicide when they were thwarted (Jones). The love involved was slightly less individualistic than its Western counterpart, but there was clear overlap. The key point involves causation: while Western cultural influence was involved, most assessments urge that the real change emanated from wider modern conditions like urbanization, a more competitive economic environment, and so on. This suggests, again, that a need for love changes and expands as part of modern life, which is something any well-​being assessment must take into account. Most important for our purposes, this insistence on the benefits of love would persist through the twentieth century and into our own time, in Western society and beyond, connecting modern history directly with contemporary well-​being issues but also embracing some complications and challenges. In the United States, for example, the twentieth century would see some new cautions about unduly intense love, from a new breed of marriage experts. It would see courtship replaced by more informal (and commercialized) dating, and then a decline of dating in turn. Vocabularies changed, and the flowery Victorian language became unpopular. And of course further increases in divorce rates, and more recently changes in patterns of family formation, must be considered as well (Stearns, American Cool; Bailey). But basic continuities remain important, which is where the history-​well-​ being connection continues to link earlier developments to current realities.

90  History and Human Flourishing Beginning in the 1980s, for example, the idea of finding a “soul mate” gained surprising new popularity in the United States. The notion harked back to the nineteenth century, and indeed the first reference to soul mate in English seems to have emerged in 1822. But it was in the 1980s that the ambitious phrase became widely popular, picked up among other things by some of the new online matchmaking services that were in turn becoming one of the main sources of mate selection. The quest for happiness through love, and the complications this might entail, continues to burn bright, which is why its history, from origins and causation to more recent adjustments and challenges, offers a vital contribution in exploring this aspect of well-​being (Neff and Taylor; Finkel). Ideally, of course, historical analysis can also improve our grasp of other kinds of relationships that are essential in the current well-​being agenda. We have some start on histories of friendships, but much more can be done (Rotundo; Smith-​Rosenberg; Rosenzweig); somewhat unfortunately, in terms of trends over time, we know far more about nineteenth-​century friendships than about more recent historical patterns, though it is clear that some key changes have occurred. And other kinds of family relationships, as among siblings, need further attention as well. But even in urging additional research to connect historical patterns to contemporary recommendations, the basic point remains: what has been sought in personal relationships has changed over time, and the results, including the current combinations of recent shifts and ongoing continuities, directly contribute to an understanding of what many people seek as part of their own sense of well-​being. Better understanding of historical trends provides a sounder basis for current assessments of the emotional components of positive relationships. While the history of love suggests a largely positive relationship to the well-​being agenda, an exploration of consumerism helps untangle one of the current challenges in the well-​being approach. Historians have contributed a number of fundamental findings on the nature of modern consumerism, beginning with the vital discovery that the phenomenon actually preceded outright industrialization, taking shape in the Western world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb). For their part, with growing recent insistence, well-​being experts have been urging a fundamental recasting of contemporary consumerism, away from the quest for material acquisition and toward an increasing investment in rewarding experiences. Historians can accept this plea—​indeed, many histories of consumerist excess already pointed in this direction—​but they can also work

Well-Being and a Usable Past  91 with other experts in tackling some of the deeply rooted habits and expectations involved. If we are to redirect some consumerist energy, in other words, we need greater understanding of how this energy has accumulated over time—​and particularly in the United States: merely recommending a change in emphasis may not prove sufficient. And here—​without rehearsing the subject in depth—​the starting point must be the various human needs that acquisitive consumerism has served over the past two centuries—​incorporating but exceeding the blandishments of commercial outlets and advertising. Thus the initial rise of modern consumerism, while involving newly available products such as imported sugar, tea and coffee, and new sales techniques as well, built heavily on the status needs of a rapidly changing Western society. Many people, cut off from traditional markers such as property inheritance but earning a money wage, sought to bolster their sense of identity and accomplishment by expanding consumer purchases. Specific groups, like youth or women, might find particular value in consumerism as an expressive outlet amid other constraints. Even the rise of love played a role: as courtship became more important, young people sought goods—​like more attractive clothing—​that would facilitate the process. During the nineteenth century, advancing consumerism took on additional significance as compensation for burdens and limitations in work. Many factory hands gradually learned to accept some of the unpleasant features of industrial labor in return for higher pay and opportunities for a more expressive life off the job—​in other words, for consumerism. Historian Jackson Lears has described a somewhat similar process for many middle-​ class employees later in the nineteenth century, as opportunities for individual proprietorship declined (Lears). Consumer identities also proved extremely important for the growing group of white-​collar employees, who could distinguish themselves from ordinary laborers by distinctive consumer achievements. In all this, consumerism became increasingly attached to family life, a means of expressing personal affection as well as demonstrating success and status. The results showed, predictably enough, in the growing consumer apparatus surrounding family celebrations like Christmas and—​a new invention, gaining ground by the 1860s—​regular birthday gatherings (Pleck).5 5 The history of the birthday is an intriguing opportunity to connect history and well-​being: the idea of celebrating birthdays of ordinary people, including children, is a modern one, intimately connected to new ideas of happiness and joy. But as we will note later, the later evolution of birthdays

92  History and Human Flourishing Finally, extending from these changes in turn, consumerism linked increasingly with children and childhood, first in middle-​class life and then more widely. Gifts for children became increasingly important; toys became more elaborate, and whole industries depended on purchases for kids—​and even infants, for whom store-​bought items began to be introduced into cribs by the early twentieth century. Consumerism, in other words, has a rich modern history: quite simply, more and more people have come to see acquisition as a vital component of their success (or lack thereof) and well-​being. None of this in any way detracts from the current well-​being advice that aims at rebalancing acquisition with more meaningful experiences. Indeed, the history of consumerism as it accelerated further in the later twentieth century enhances opportunities to comment on how acquisitive behavior can easily get out of hand, actually detracting from real satisfaction. But the same history must emphasize the complexity of the context in which the new advice is offered. Many people, and again particularly many Americans, have a deep stake in the acquisitive process, which has come to express a variety of needs and interests over the past two centuries (Stearns, Satisfaction Not Guaranteed). Recent history offers explicit examples of how deeply entrenched consumer aspirations have become, as when workers explicitly turn down opportunities for greater leisure or other qualitative gains because of their laser focus on supporting acquisitive progress. Here is a historical legacy that must be very explicitly addressed in any effort at change. In-​depth knowledge of every byway of modern consumer history is not essential, but an understanding of the main developments, and the intensifying attachments, is crucial to a realistic strategy. The basic point is clear, as the examples of trends in love and consumerism suggest: criteria and guidance aimed at defining and promoting contemporary well-​being involve a larger cultural context. They will prove more effective if this context is utilized—​where trends over time can be further encouraged, as with love—​or confronted, as in grappling with the deep commitments to acquisitive consumerism. The context, in turn, is powerfully shaped by history, and it can only be fully understood if its historical components are directly explored. Attention to the causes of historical changes directly feeds into contemporary assessments of human needs and complicates the relationship to well-​being—​as early as the 1940s some parents were comparing the obligatory birthday party to mob rule.

Well-Being and a Usable Past  93 trends, whether the focus is on how modern conditions may foster greater dependence on love or on why Americans have become so fiercely attached to material acquisition. The same historical perspective, suitably delivered, can also enhance public reception, by situating well-​being recommendations in a larger story of modern trends, favorable and unfavorable alike. * * * To be sure, some staples of the well-​being movement may not require elaborate historical analysis. While the surprisingly rich history of sleep clearly shows that societies in the past seem to have managed this human requirement differently from what current expertise suggests, it would probably be foolhardy to argue that current well-​being advice on the need for rest should reflect deep knowledge of alternative patterns in earlier periods (Ekirch). For the moment at least it is simply realistic to go with the flow and join in the chorus urging the adequate eight hours a night—​adding only that some people might find it entertaining to ponder the historical perspectives on what might seem, erroneously, to be a human constant. In another crucial area, historical findings are arguably more directly useful, but without necessarily strongly affecting well-​ being advice or outcomes. Sensible eating is obviously a crucial aspect of well-​ being. Historians have traced the origins of the modern conundrum of overeating, excessive snacking, and undue reliance on prepared and fast foods; they have charted the rise of compensatory efforts to promote dieting, and some of the complexities that have bedeviled these efforts (including civil rights and feminist objections to discrimination against the overweight) (Levenstein; Stearns, Fat History). This kind of historical record is certainly relevant in discussing the strategies needed to counter contemporary eating problems—​ here sharing some qualities with the assessment of modern consumerism—​ but it is not clear how much they will assist. And they certainly will not alter the core recommendations concerning appropriate food selection and exercise. Again, some people might simply find it interesting to deal with the modern history of eating dilemmas—​the huge surge in food studies suggests a relevant audience; history in this sense would contribute to well-​being in a general way, in exploring the modern human condition. More explicitly, some attention to historical factors might improve the capacity to communicate and persuade, by assessing the barriers to effective nutrition advice that have emerged over what is now a century and a half of attempts to promote greater slenderness. But the connections are admittedly debatable.

94  History and Human Flourishing This kind of hesitation does not apply, however, to a number of fundamental well-​being categories, where for example emotional factors loom large and where qualitative evaluations are inherently difficult—​as, we have suggested already, in the case of attachments based on some form of love, or indeed concerning the history of happiness itself. To be sure, key facets of what researchers are now telling us about well-​ being have not been explored historically. Curiosity, for example, is held to be a positive component of well-​being. There is no reason not to extend historical study of curiosity—​building on existing findings that stress that ambivalent reaction to curiosity in early modern Western culture (Benedict 2001).6 But connecting to more recent patterns, I think we would find that tolerance for children’s curiosity has risen in Western society over the past 150 years, though with some continuing hesitations amid educational systems aimed more at imparting truths than at promoting exploration. But the historical effort has not yet occurred, and so we can only speculate about the results and their possible role in supporting the well-​being findings. Some historians are beginning to evince new interest in hope, another well-​being staple, but again the results are not yet clear. We can do more than speculate about some other crucial categories, where opportunities for historical understanding overlap with current well-​being concerns. The formula is clear enough: accept well-​being concerns as part of a historical research agenda, in order to identify key modern trends where analysis can deepen our grasp of the issues involved. The trends can go back in time—​as with the eighteenth-​century factors that pushed for new interest in romantic love; or they can be more recent. They can offer additional support for the attributes, as in knowing how current recommendations implicitly build on established modern patterns—​as again in the example of love. Or the trends may highlight complications, where well-​being standards jostle against recent historical patterns, suggesting the need for more careful analysis and more imaginative strategies—​as with the intense American attachment to acquisitive consumerism. Blending well-​being staples with a sense of dynamics over time serves as the common denominator. The formula readily applies to some current problem areas. Thus history is essential in grappling with the need for greater trust, a standard item on many well-​being lists. Simply invoking the desirability of trust without dealing with recent historical issues risks the kind of superficiality that would 6 The cautionary phrase, curiosity kills the cat, thus dates from the sixteenth century.

Well-Being and a Usable Past  95 seriously complicate any real gains. For, however desirable the quality (and not only for personal life but also social well-​being, a point to which we will return), trust has a negative contemporary history in the United States. Polls suggest a decline in trust beginning with the deceptions of the Vietnam War and expanding fairly steadily over time both in intensity and in the range of targets involved (from government to the media to science itself). Why the decline has persisted actually warrants further recent-​historical research, including exploration of pre-​decline patterns which might help guide remediation. Observers routinely highlight the rise in individualism, and while this is surely true it warrants closer investigation. For now, the key point is the clear need for historical diagnosis: talking about trust without dealing with its historical context and the factors that have made it increasingly precarious risks futility (Pew Research Center; Putnam). Historical diagnosis also highlights other areas where well-​being advice must address complex recent trends. The decline of parental satisfaction in the United States is a case in point, arguably central to well-​being among adults and children alike. Evidence from the 1960s onward suggests a steady erosion of parental pleasure. Recent comparative data place the United States last among twenty-​two developed nations in the gap between the satisfaction levels of childless couples and those of active parents—​despite, or because of, a really interesting increase in the investment of parental attention in dealing with children as part of an explicit attempt to compensate for new levels of women’s employment. Here again is a classic opportunity for assessing change over time: what were the parental patterns before the deterioration set in; when did these patterns begin to crumble, and at what rates; and above all, what are the causes involved? Does the American problem center solely on deficient public policies, providing less support for parents than is available in other developed countries? Or (as many contend) are wider parental anxieties also a factor, making American parenting more difficult than it once was or (arguably, as comparative data suggest) needs to be? Any concern for greater well-​being must take the parental context into account, and historical materials and approaches contribute fundamentally (Dell’Antonia; Stearns, Anxious Parents).7

7 It is remarkable and revealing that, in an otherwise challenging work, Steven Pinker’s recent effort ignores the family almost entirely. A more nuanced history can suggest a corrective that also adds useful complexity to the well-​being movement.

96  History and Human Flourishing Relevant historical diagnosis does not center on problems alone, or only on the past few decades. Without venturing a full collaborative agenda, several other topics suggest the potential range of a marriage between well-​being priorities and historical analysis. For example: the increasing attention to the importance of gratitude in positive psychology is intriguing—​a vital opportunity to bolster well-​being advice with a fuller sense of the contemporary cultural framework. Well-​ being advocates are surely on solid ground in urging the importance of gratitude to personal satisfaction (as well as promoting a favorable social context) (Armenta, Fritz, and Lyubomirsky). Historians can accept the compelling current evidence while also charting the impact of the new wisdom: the measurable intensification of gratitude recommendations not only in well-​ being literature directly but also in relevant changes in childrearing manuals and character-​building exercises in the schools. At least at some levels, the new advice is reshaping contemporary discussion, introducing novel elements into established categories. The real contribution, however, again centers on context: what are the relevant cultural and social trends onto which gratitude recommendations are being grafted? Do the recommendations build on supportive recent patterns, or are they going against the current grain? Here, in effect, is an invitation to a largely novel historical effort, directly tied to a well-​being staple and the need to situate it accurately. In fact, some preliminary work suggests that gratitude has been on the decline in the United States until very recently, after enjoying considerable attention prior to the early twentieth century (Kashdan). Thus discussions of gratitude did not form an explicit part of childrearing advice in recent decades (in contrast to nineteenth-​century patterns, where the quality was explicitly encouraged). It has faded, for example, in discussions of birthdays, once recommended as opportunities to promote gratitude but in recent decades more fiercely focused on the consumer expectations of the children involved. Social changes have also complicated gratitude: a revealing family study thus suggests a new disparity between husbands and wives, as men often begin to contribute more to household chores expecting wifely gratitude that is often withheld because equity has not been reached (Leithart; Clay; Pleck). On another front, manners books, though still insisting on gratitude, increasingly note spotty response at a time when formality and even letter-​writing decline (Hochschild). And the probable decline of explicit attention to gratitude can at least tentatively be explained: it captures the growing informality of modern life; it picks up on aspects of contemporary individualism, particularly as this

Well-Being and a Usable Past  97 provides a sense that achievements are largely personal (a key element of the “power of positive thinking” movement) (Peale); and it reflects more intense consumerism, which encourages even children to see gifts, for example, as simply warranted as opposed to requiring special acknowledgment. All of this, it must be reemphasized, is preliminary at best: well-​being history can and should explore gratitude trends far more extensively. The findings to date do highlight the need to locate well-​being recommendations in domains like gratitude in a historically informed terrain, if current psychological research is to be translated into effective social strategies. And there is direct reward for historians as well: the new interest in gratitude creates the opportunity for a really interesting extension of historical inquiry, both for its own sake, in expanding understanding of the relationship between past and present, and for its contribution to more productive well-​being advice. Because the history of gratitude is unfamiliar, except for one interesting effort in intellectual history, a brief sense of contrast may spice the illustration. Here’s a bit of nineteenth-​century flavor: a parenting manual urges that teaching a child gratitude would do him more good “than any words he can learn.” Young ladies should learn that quality, “as by so doing, she will afford the person who offers a courtesy considerable pleasure.” Parents will recall their children’s thanks as among “the hours of deepest gratitude.” Games and birthday celebrations with offspring were vital because “when young hearts are pleased” it is easier “to make them grateful.” From a more “scientific” childrearing pamphlet in the early twentieth century: gratitude in children remains vital both because it is “right” and because it makes others “happy and comfortable” and helps to win their “true affection.” And of course the theme was picked up in etiquette books—​“never fail to make an opportunity, though with inconvenience to yourself, in which to express your thanks” (Child 55, 71, 74, 112, 116; Arthur 147; Beecher 165, 207, 278; Birney 121, 122, 125). Obviously, the historical assessment must go on to note how most of this enthusiasm largely disappeared by the middle of the twentieth century, though no one turned against gratitude explicitly. Revealingly the term “genuine gratitude” began to emerge after about 1890, its usage increasing steadily, already implying that standard efforts were under question. New staples like Parents Magazine (launched in 1925) simply did not discuss gratitude one way or another. Dr. Spock largely ignored the topic, save to note that trying to teach children to say thank you is not a good first step, for a bit of childish resistance may be a desirable sign of independence.

98  History and Human Flourishing Children’s stories, like the fabled Golden Books that emerged in the 1940s, largely avoided the topic, while, in the etiquette books, discussions of prior staples like thank-​you notes were now surrounded with concerns about being “terribly old-​fashioned.” Or, as Miss Manners noted, the whole effort might now seem an unfair burden: “why should I have to grovel with gratitude just because someone feels like throwing a party?” Clearly, some fundamental changes in this aspect of life and relationships altered American life in the decades between 1900 and the rediscovery of gratitude by positive psychology (Cushman; Gale; Mitchell; Parish; Martin).8 The opportunity for this kind of focused historical inquiry will surely apply to other well-​being priorities, such as the desirability of compassion. Here, the historical effort might begin with an earlier context—​with the role of religions in compassion, or the rise of new kinds of “humanitarian sensibility” in the eighteenth century (Haskell Parts I and II). The analysis relevant to well-​being need not be contemporary alone. But the diagnosis should also extend to more recent patterns, where at least the frequency of references to compassion have been declining—​another area where well-​being advice may be targeting unfavorable trends without fully acknowledging the difficulties involved. In partial contrast, exploring the growing interest in empathy, from the early twentieth century, suggests recent developments that may prove more promising. And—​ without prolonging a list that is meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive—​historical evaluation is surely essential in helping well-​being advocates deal with another trend that is in fact widely recognized: the undesirable increase of loneliness. Here is another opportunity to deal with change over time, though one that historians have been slow to tackle—​ understandably enough, since loneliness will be a challenging target. Obviously, recent developments loom large: changes in marriage rates and residence patterns, the surge of the elderly in the overall population, even (apparently) the impact of social media. But some intriguing preliminary work suggests that, here too, very contemporary history is not necessarily the only relevant focus: changes in concepts and even the basic vocabulary of loneliness apparently go back to the later eighteenth century and the emergence of new ideas about the needs of individuals—​inviting a richer historical diagnosis than might be initially imagined. It was in the late eighteenth 8 Noralee Frankel kindly provided the material in this section. Also, any full examination of gratitude trajectories must also take fuller account of religious factors, most obviously in continuing to encourage gratitude toward God.

Well-Being and a Usable Past  99 century, for example, that the word lonely began to acquire its current emphasis on the absence of social contacts; this had not been the term’s initial focus (Alberti 2018). Here is a vital topic that may require both assessment of recent trends—​residential and the like—​and an unexpected earlier adjustment in expectations. One final topic suggests yet another vantage point, where well-​being discussions and historical research can combine in probing a less familiar domain. Death has changed greatly in modern societies: causes and locations of death have shifted dramatically; child mortality has become rare; definitions of a “good death” have shifted to emphasize the desirability of suddenness—​ another intriguing contrast to traditional patterns. We know a good bit, as historians, about how these changes have taken place, and how they have altered death rituals (simplifying them considerably) and even emotions like grief (increasingly discouraged, as least in contrast to nineteenth-​ century standards). But there is considerable debate about what the changes mean, which is where the well-​being emphasis can conjoin. Some analysts talk about the deficiencies of modern societies in coping with death, the increasing effort to avoid the topic (and Google Ngrams clearly reveal the relative decline of attention), and the enhanced fear and superficiality that result. But these assertions are not always carefully grounded in historical evidence, and they invite attention from the well-​being side as well. Are modern people haunted by death, compared to their predecessors, or have some successful adjustments emerged—​as the history of actual American funeral arrangements may suggest? How much do concerns about one’s own death or deaths of others impinge on well-​being (Gorer; Ariès; Laqueur; Stearns, Revolutions in Sorrow)? The topic is ripe for additional inquiry with a well-​ being focus in mind. And—​quite apart from its intrinsic interest as part of the human condition—​the subject will almost certainly command growing attention given the ageing of many modern societies, as issues in contemporary Japan already suggest. Again, the opportunity for conjoint analysis, focused on current well-​being but with full recognition of the impact of modern change, is both enticing and increasingly relevant. * * * The well-​being agenda clearly demands a real grasp of historical context, building on but also furthering the expansion of history’s topical range. Most obviously, to the extent that well-​being advocates (whether explicitly or not) are trying to promote change, or to counter recent trends, they are dealing

100  History and Human Flourishing with social and cultural factors that have been shaped by history and can only be fully addressed if this history is understood. But the historical dimension also applies to topics like love or curiosity, where the modern context is more favorable; and certainly to subjects like death that so obviously extend a mutual agenda. Indeed, a logical next step, already suggested in a general way, would involve active coordination between a cluster of well-​being experts and some flexible historians, to determine more systematically what current well-​being guidelines and issues most obviously require historical assessment (Andresson; Snell; Zimmermann). From the historian’s standpoint, a well-​being agenda will build on a number of topics, particularly involving changes and continuities in personal life, that have already been broached—​like love or consumerism or the nature of modern leisure. The vital expansion of the historians’ agenda, into further facets of the human experience, remains fundamental to active collaboration. But the addition of an explicit well-​being focus also invites an ambitious extension of the range of research around more novel subjects like loneliness or gratitude, where opportunities but also challenges are intriguing. To be sure, a few well-​being staples—​like the importance of resilience—​may be too amorphous to allow analysis of patterns over time. But there will be other opportunities to expand the reach of the historical perspective. Some historians will be concerned about the strongly contemporary orientation of many of the connections suggested herein, even though some important facets stretch back at least to the eighteenth century. The issue of presentism is discussed in David Armitage’s essay in this volume, and it certainly applies to the discussion offered here, though with full recognition that other kinds of historical contributions to well-​being may deliberately center on far earlier periods of time. It will always be informative to consider well-​ being patterns even in earlier periods (and also to add in some more clearly comparative elements), but a considerable presentist bias may prove essential if we are to persuade well-​being advocates to take historical change and continuity into serious account. An interdisciplinary imperative is obvious: many of the issues we have outlined not only derive from the agendas of positive psychologists but also suggest ongoing interactions with sociologists and others—​in addition to further connections with the humanities. The record of successful collaboration between historians and psychologists is not abundant; a potential earlier connection, around psychohistory, largely misfired for several reasons

Well-Being and a Usable Past  101 (DeMause). The examples given here suggest the serious benefits that can result from combining historical work with well-​being analysis, in terms of greater understanding and more successful strategies, but winning attention will not be easy. The desirability of reaching a wider public is another often-​elusive target, but it is an obvious goal for any historical work directed at improving well-​being (Pawelski and Pawelski). A few historians have broken through, around histories dealing with topics like the family, marriage, or childhood, but we must hope for more consistent connections around the expanded focus on well-​ being. And of course a relevant student audience, easier to reach, should not be discounted: university well-​being programs may provide a useful framework, and this is worth some prompt and imaginative experimentation. The current popularity of “happiness” courses might well be amplified through inclusion of the kinds of historical issues sketched in this essay—​while benefiting historical study in turn. But a larger tactical effort is called for, to translate historical diagnosis not only into interdisciplinary expertise but also into benefits for a more general community (Fass; Cross; Demos). The history of well-​being should involve not only new topics and applications but also some serious thinking about audience development. Historians need not, however, be unduly defensive, even as they seek a foothold on new turf. Historical diagnosis does more than provide vital context for well-​being initiatives—​the classic background chapter for an otherwise contemporary focus. It also (again, potentially along with other relevant disciplines) can push the field itself into greater awareness of social complexity. Many well-​being recommendations, though grounded in psychological research, risk a certain shallowness and naiveté in assuming that properly guided individuals can make their own corrections toward a more fulfilling life—​regardless of the social framework within which they operate. This is where overtones of the earlier self-​help approach intrude and raise some legitimate concerns. Historians and kindred social scientists are deeply aware that personal adjustments to a complex contemporary setting—​for example, in the workplace—​may be insufficient, and that too much emphasis on a personal responsibility for happiness can even distract from essential reforms. The same applies to a need for attention to political and even diplomatic factors that normally fall outside the province of positive psychology. The measurable decline in American well-​being during 2017 has demonstrated that even the most ardent individual adjustments may prove inadequate to assure well-​being in a hostile political climate; and the tension could

102  History and Human Flourishing be even greater should military initiatives threaten peace.9 Even the history of gratitude turns out to highlight the social dimension in ways that challenge some of the simpler popularizations of positive psychology: whereas in the past, gratitude routinely focused on contacts with others, some current well-​being recommendations downplay this dimension in favor of the benefits to the individual alone, as in keeping gratitude books or other isolated endeavors. Well-​being history must certainly attend to individual values and experiences, but it urges the social dimension as well. Here, obviously, is another range of topics, on which historians already contribute regularly—​on the nature of political well-​being, or the importance of minimizing war, or the nature of community ties. But there are links as well to the kinds of well-​being issues already on the agenda, even if commonly framed more in terms of personal benefits than social gain: not only gratitude but also trust, to take two obvious cases, already suggest cultural goals that can contribute to the greater good, and not just personal satisfaction. Historical analysis centered on well-​being can help enhance these dimensions as well. * * * Overall, the extension of historical analysis into the well-​being domain will serve at least three related purposes, in addition to the salutary insistence on the social as well as the personal and beyond the potential benefits of attracting a wider audience to historical study. The opportunities for collaborative research are hopefully obvious. Historians can pursue some challenging new topics or take a fresh look at other issues with the goals and methods of positive psychology in mind, and well-​being research will be improved when informed by relevant past trends and patterns. Beyond research, the new connections speak to more effective communication, to student audiences and a wider public as well. A well-​being target that runs counter to modern trends invites different strategies from a prompt that builds on existing momentum: more care is needed for arguments designed to counter acquisitive consumerism than for recommendations about the importance of love. Finally, histories framed with well-​being goals in mind 9 These wider considerations also connect to the larger project suggested by Darrin McMahon: the idea of an ambitious history of industrial happiness. Such a history can legitimately stress gains around living standards, health and longevity, education. But it must also come to grips with the failure of industrial society as yet to correct the kinds of inequalities that agricultural systems had introduced (though it redefines their nature) or definitively to reduce the prospect of war; and the implications of environmental change for human happiness must also be introduced into the mix.

Well-Being and a Usable Past  103 expand public opportunities to ponder relevant aspects of the human experience, whether changes in behavior are implied or not—​and this can enhance the enjoyment of life in its own right, as well as facilitating some personal conversions to additional well-​being goals. It is not farfetched, here, to suggest the desirability of “historical mindfulness” in encouraging people to explore relevant values in their own cultural context. The insistence on the importance, and availability, of a historical dimension vital in understanding how to translate well-​being goals into effective individual and social adjustments remains the fundamental claim. The challenge of convincing both colleagues and a wider public that history is the source of basic discoveries around key aspects of the human experience builds on successes within the discipline over the past several generations—​ that might now win both greater attention and greater utility. “What’s the history of that?” can and should become a standard question, when items on a well-​being agenda are being presented and discussed, and historians can contribute useful as well as plausible answers.

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Well-Being and a Usable Past  105 McMahon, Darrin. Happiness: A History. Grove Press, 2006. McMahon, Darrin. “From the Paleolithic to the Present: Three Revolutions in the Global History of Happiness.” Handbook of Well-​being, edited by E. Diener, S. Oishi, and L. Tay, DEF Publishers, 2018. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and John Harold Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-​Century England. Hutchinson, 1983. Meacham, Sara. “’A Happy Cheerfulness in Their Countenances’: Portraits and the Art of Smiling in Eighteenth-​Century America.” Conference paper presented at the History of Emotions conference, June 1–​2, 2018, George Mason University. Mintz, Steven. A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture. New York UP, 1983. Mitchell, Ley Sprague. Fix It, Please. New York, 1947. Neff, Lisa A., and Anne Taylor. “The Rising Expectations of Marriage: What We Do and Do Not Know.” Psychological Inquiry vol. 25, no. 1, 2014, pp. 95–​100. Parish, Peggy. My Little Golden Book of Manners. Racine, 1962. Pawelski, Suzann Pileggi, and James O. Pawelski. Happy Together: Using the Science of Positive Psychology to Build Love That Lasts. Tarcherperigee, 2018. Peale, Norman Vincent. The Power of Positive Thinking. Prentice-​Hall, 1952. Pew Research Center. “Public Trust in Government, 1958–​2017.” May 3, 2017, http://​ www.peo​ p le-​ p ress.org/​ 2 017/​ 0 5/​ 0 3/​ p ub​ l ic-​ t rust- ​ i n- ​ g ov ​ e rnm ​ e nt- ​ 1 958- ​ 2 017/ ​ . Accessed January 30, 2018. Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Viking, 2018. Pleck, Elizabeth H. Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals. Harvard UP, 2000. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000. Reiss, Benjamin. Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. Basic Books, 2017. Rosenzweig, Linda W. Another Self: Middle-​Class American Women and Their Friends in the Twentieth Century. New York UP, 1999. Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. Basic Books, 1993. Shenk, Joshua Wold. “What Makes Us Happy?” The Atlantic, June 2009, https://​www. thea​tlan​tic.com/​magaz​ine/​arch​ive/​2009/​06/​what-​makes-​us-​happy/​307​439/​. Accessed January 23, 2018. Shorter, Edward. Making Modern Family. Basic Books, 1977. Smith, Mark. Sensory History. Bloomsbury, 2007. Smith-​Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-​Century America.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 1, 1975, pp. 1–​29. Snell, K. D. M. “Agendas for the Historical Study of Loneliness and Lone Living.” The Open Psychology Journal, vol. 11, no. 8, 2015, pp. 61–​70. Snell, K. D. M. “The Rise of Living Alone and Loneliness in History.” Journal of Social History, vol. 42, no. 1, 2017, pp. 2–​28. Stearns, Peter N. American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-​Century Emotional Style. New York UP, 1994. Stearns, Peter N. Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. 2nd ed., New York UP, 2002.

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5 Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying The Strange Case of Consistent Luckiness in Aristotle Peter T. Struck

The study of the history of ideas and intellectual culture consistently oscillates in the uncanny space between the strange and the familiar. This is surely true for those of us who work on classical Greek material. Two and a half millennia separate us, and that distance makes the study of their ideas continually surprising. The material is also, more often that it seems it should be, somehow familiar. This has to do, surely, with generations of decisions to use and reuse this particular cultural stuff as building material for subsequent intellectual and cultural forms, each constructed for distinctive purposes at distinctive times. It is also likely to be true that the sometimes familiar ring of ideas from the past, and even from deep antiquity—​whether from the Greeks, classical Chinese, Mesopotamians, or any other rare and precious strand of surviving literary evidence from ancient human culture—​has also to do with the durability of certain puzzles for humans over spans of time that while large are still finite. If a generation is twenty-​five years, the distance between us and Confucius or Plato is one hundred of those, and if a lifetime is eighty years, then we need set only thirty of them end to end to span from our present back to theirs. The double-​headed quality of intellectual history gives it a unique capacity to unsettle one’s views, clear the table for better insights into the world, and lead to a distinctive form of the happiness that always comes from better understanding. Why it is that knowing things in general makes us happy is a puzzle that goes back at least to Aristotle, but the particular kind of knowledge we gain from the work of intellectual history, construed the way it is here, has a reciprocal quality to it. One gains the satisfaction of knowing something new about the distant past, but this new discovery stands to illuminate one’s present with unique dividends. Take for example two pieces of classical Greek intellectual culture that have been objects of study recently, Peter T. Struck, Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0006

108  History and Human Flourishing one having to do with sexuality and another with race. Classical Greeks mostly did not assume that the gender of the object of one’s erotic desire had any bearing on one’s own gender status.1 Sexual activity among those of the same sex was not a behavior thought to mark some core identity. It would have had about as much cultural consequence as having a desire to eat apples most of the time but also liking an orange on occasion. To proclaim oneself homosexual as a marker of core identity would have sounded as strange to them as a person in contemporary Philadelphia introducing herself to a room of new acquaintances as an “apple-​eater.” Taking another example, from the domain of race, the Greeks had no shortage of means by which they dehumanized others, but a fixation on skin pigmentation was not one of them.2 This adds a further dimension to the revaluations, which have emerged from the sciences and social sciences, of notions of race based on skin color, the dominant mode of construing race in recent centuries, as merely “skin-​deep,” and unmasks how capricious are the modes by which people decide to essentialize others, and sometimes themselves. Findings like these expand our understanding of the past. They also pay a reciprocal benefit in sharpening our sense of the terms by which questions of present-​ day concern are sorted out. In each of these two cases, what were thought by at least some to be irreducible fundaments yield to the understanding that they are actually products of culture and epiphenomena of other networks of ideas, taxonomies, and modes of valuation, assembled for purposes ancillary to the actual state of the world. In this mode, the study of the history of ideas provides an astringent tonic to understanding, with unique power to wake us up from our dogmatic slumbers, improve the alignment of our ideas about the world and the world itself, and contribute to the quotient of happiness we draw from advancing our understanding of our place in the world. As a case study of this kind of work, I’ll focus here on one case of how ancient Greek thinkers construed the topic of happiness itself, a topic about which they had sophisticated ideas. Working through one of the many dimensions of the philosopher Aristotle’s work on the subject will yield insight derived from the simultaneous discoveries of difference and sameness of thinking, which, while focusing on a deeply familiar and enduring 1 For further nuance see the widely influential work by John Winkler, The Constraints of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1989), especially the chapters in “Part One: Andres.” 2 For further nuance, see the path-​breaking collection of papers in Denise Eileen McCoskey, ed., The Cultural History of Race in Antiquity, vol. 1, of The Cultural History of Race (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying  109 question, will uncover some rather exotic ideas. These, in turn, will catalyze a reevaluation of how we might construe happiness in the present. We stand to gain that quotient of happiness that comes from any kind of sharpened understanding of present circumstances, plus the additional increment, by focusing on this particular topic, of a new ingredient for whatever recipes each of us might have to achieve happiness ourselves. Let us begin with sameness and difference. With respect to sameness, the question of happiness is as enduring as any, and since the goal is, to a perhaps unique degree, stable over vast differences of time and place, this makes the variations in ideas for how to reach it all the more striking. Thoughts about happiness will vary, but the desire to understand what it is and how to gain it seems about as universal as any other human goal. Gilgamesh tries to find a way back to happiness after he realizes the crushing finality of death. The Buddha sets out nirvana as the only sensible goal of a human life. And as Darrin McMahon reminds us in his sweeping history of happiness, on page one of Greek history, Herodotus reports a conversation on the topic between Croesus and the legendary figure Solon.3 Whether Croesus, an archetypal wealthy and powerful man, truly had a happy life could only be determined in retrospect, at the time of death, after the potential for being swamped by misfortune was past. On the side of differences, in Aristotle’s reckoning, the question of happiness raises a remarkable array of allied questions. Happiness for him is not a matter of personal contentment, exactly, though that may be a side effect of it. Rather, it depends upon thriving by being a robust version of the kind of creature one’s nature sets one up to be. In building his views (I will look at one sliver of them here) he feels the need to work through questions about not only how human life should be lived, but on how the universe itself is organized at the most rudimentary level. He gives us new ways to rethink happiness as a problem embedded in very large questions about humans, nature, the cosmos, and whether there is a point to the life we find ourselves in. Aristotle’s investigation of happiness will leave us ready to explore inferences that human happiness is about much more than this or that individual behavior, rational choice, or personal disposition. The breadth of Aristotle’s analysis will produce the reciprocal call for those in the contemporary world to imagine whether large pieces of thinking about the nature of the cosmos are also embedded in our own general approaches to happiness. These are deep 3 See Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2006).

110  History and Human Flourishing and forbidding waters, into which fools might rush, and which are pretty well avoided by many. But it is probably the case that most of us have at least some, at least latent, view about the big picture, which will influence the views that cascade from it in ways large and small. Aristotle’s contributions, which will proceed without hesitation into large questions, are a kind of stimulant to the inquiry. Aristotle lived an eventful life in the turbulent fourth century bce. He was a pupil of the philosopher Plato, served in the court of a king in Asia Minor, worked, Darwin-​like, for a period meticulously recording observations on the flora and fauna of the Island of Lesbos, and witnessed at close hand the rise of Alexander the Great, whom he tutored. Then, at the age of fifty, he settled in Athens and started his own independent school, the Lyceum, where he had a decade of extraordinary productivity, setting to writing most of his voluminous output. He developed a philosophy both rigorous and flexible. He paid careful attention to the contingencies and multiple dimensions of things. He used empiricism to build from observable phenomena toward larger principles. He avoided starting from ideal abstractions and focused on the here and now. Even ephemeral things, like the human intellect or soul, he understood as expressions of order in a natural world that has its own internal propensities toward movement and organization. In other words, such capacities as thought, and wider the cognitive realm in which happiness is embedded, are a highest-​order manifestation of a propensity toward order that is present on a gradient throughout all of nature. The dualism of Plato—​who understands the locus of our true selves to rest in a soul that he claims is immaterial and exists in opposition to (and is even imprisoned by) the material world—​is nowhere to be found in Aristotle. Further, he shows no impulse to simplify subjective phenomena into objective ones. These positions provide sometimes surprising results. In what follows, I will focus on a strange case of happiness, that of lucky people, which is particularly apt for revealing the usefulness of his general approach. The topic of happiness, a fundamental one for other Greek philosophers as well, was particularly so for Aristotle. It is the beginning point of his study of “ethics,” which is a cognate English term we use to render the Greek, ta êthika. The modern word probably carries a connotation of eating one’s peas; that is, it has to do with a kind of behavior that, in and of itself, may not be exactly what a self-​maximizing individual might choose, but that is nevertheless the right thing to do. The Greek mostly does not carry that connotation and instead marks out a region of study that seeks to determine what is the

Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying  111 best way to live, which will be best not only for others but for oneself, and the character of a person that attains that best way. There mostly is no daylight between the state that results in true happiness for an individual and the state that results in ethical behavior toward others. So ethics for Aristotle is a kind of “happiness studies.” This has to do with how he understands our behaviors to be organized. When we’re deciding about courses of action, Aristotle set out at the beginning of both his major treatises on ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics, we have many goals in mind. Most of the good things we pursue are instrumental toward some other good, and so are subordinate to it. But there is one goal that is not instrumental to any other. It alone is pursued for its own sake, and all the others have it as their ultimate aim. His axiom is that this is eudaimonia. Happiness is as good a translation of it as any other, but the meaning of the Greek term is a bit more restricted than the modern one; it does not include things like serenity or peace of mind. It starts in Homer meaning good fortune and prosperity, which could include things like opulence, but by the time of the classical philosophers (beginning in the fifth century bce), it takes on a meaning of true happiness, specifically as opposed to the more superficial pleasures of the flesh or those derived from money. In Aristotle it takes on an even more distinctive cast. It means true happiness, in the form of a kind of living well. Aristotle agreed with Plato that no one sets out to be unhappy, which for him means no one sets out to live poorly. For Aristotle happiness consists in activity, not just being in a certain state or condition, and it is activity done well, that is to say, according to virtue or excellence (aretê). What activity happiness is has to do with the kind of thing that humans are. Living things are in motion; they’re on their way toward particular ends. Doing their “living” well involves doing what their natures have given them the equipment and the desire to do. The peak state for a dog will involve lots of things to smell and chase after; bee thriving will involve opportunities to extract nectar and store it up. Human happiness will have to do with what is distinctive to humans, and according to Aristotle, that is our intellects, which we use to pursue both moral and intellectual excellence. These are our distinctive and primary goals as humans, pursuing them well is the activity on which happiness depends, and we pursue this happiness, uniquely, as an end in itself. For the most part, we pursue happiness via our self-​conscious desire centers. We make judgments, nurture habits, and strengthen our natural dispositions such that we have the best chance of gaining it. His account

112  History and Human Flourishing of how this works appears across his ethical writings. I will focus here on a smaller corner of his work, which has to do with a different avenue by which a small and strange group of humans reach happiness. By observation, Aristotle is convinced that some people are consistently lucky. Their good outcomes are not the result of the self-​conscious, discursive exercise of intellect to fashion choices leading to deliberate results. They gain happiness by desiring what they ought when they ought, without recourse to their higher-​order intellects. Their thriving and living well comes to them without thought; they succeed by luck and they do this consistently. This discussion appears mainly in the Eudemian Ethics, and since it is generally thought to be an earlier work of which the Nicomachean is a revision, it may be that Aristotle thought better of it over time. Even still, it is a fascinating exploration, and there is no doubt that it is genuinely Aristotelian. It is important to note at the outset that lucky people are not a central concern for him; they are more of a curiosity. But they are a provocative curiosity. This line of his thinking leads to the conclusion that happiness runs deep. It is built into the cosmos, all the way down, so to speak. At the opening of his Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle discusses possible sources of happiness. After a few opening sentences, he sets out on his study this way: We must consider whether all who are designated “happy” are so by nature, just like they’re tall or short or differ in the color of their skin. Or are they called happy through learning, on the grounds that happiness is a kind of science. Or is it on account of a certain habituation, for many things arise for humans neither by nature nor by learning, but by custom, trivial things to those used to acting trivially, and gainful things to those accustomed to acting gainfully. Or does it come in none of these ways but by two other ones, either like those possessed by nymphs and gods, just like they are inspired through an inspiration of some daimôn, or through chance? For many declare happiness to be identical with good fortune.4

In the treatise that follows, Aristotle considers each of these potential sources. The first three command most of his attention: happiness has to do 4 For the text, I have relied for the most part on Michael Woods, ed. and trans., Aristotle Eudemian Ethics, Books I, II, and VIII, Clarendon Aristotle Series (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), along with Philip J. Van der Eijk, “Divine Movement and Human Nature in Eudemian Ethics 8.2,” in Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 238–​258; exceptions are marked in the notes. Translations are my own, but done with reference to Woods and Van der Eijk.

Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying  113 with nature, since it is an excellence in the behaviors that our nature has set us up to do; it has to do with learning via our intellects (though happiness for humans is more in the doing of learning than in the learning about happiness itself); and it also is connected with habituation, since we need to nurture good habits to increase our access to happiness. The final two possibilities in Aristotle’s list, which talk about a daimon and luckiness, don’t appear to be like the others. As possible sources of happiness, they have a few strikes against them. The classes of nymphs and daimones are not typically given much serious consideration in Aristotle’s corpus; and the idea that divinities would act by playing favorites, which is implied though not entirely made clear, is another red flag, since divinity in Aristotle is characterized by consistency. Then, in the case of the last possibility, the idea that happiness would come from luck is problematic since it would, apparently, make happiness rest on randomness in the universe and mark a core of caprice in it which runs afoul of its more general, observable consistency. Randomness is part and parcel of wider Greek views on happiness, apparent in Homer’s Iliad and the tragedies, in which the winds of divine caprice will sprinkle good fortune on some and suffering on others. And even culpable parties are subject to outsized suffering in the rough justice the divinities decide, or decide not, to mete out. Both Plato and Aristotle are reacting strenuously against such views of the divine.5 Aristotle, for his part, famously thinks that things tend toward their good, always or for the most part. How then would it be possible that the ultimate good of eudaimonia should be determined by randomness? Happiness, while subject to random events like anything else, is not a random phenomenon. Despite what one may anticipate as these possible misgivings, Aristotle’s thoughts on the divine and luckiness as potential sources of happiness are surprisingly complex. In fact, they reveal something mostly underappreciated in Aristotle’s work in general, and they help us see the degree to which Aristotle’s universe is constructed to be on its way toward a goal, the goal of the good, at all levels all the time. Outside the ethical treatises, Aristotle works out a framework for understanding luck and chance. He calls it a category of events for which general rules cannot be formed.6 His ideas on chance are particularly striking because they do not have to do with causal indeterminacy. Aristotle has something

5 See McMahon 1–​12, 19–​65. 6 See Physics 2.4–​6, with some further guidance from Metaphysics 7.7 and 12.3, and On Generation and Corruption 333b55–​59.

114  History and Human Flourishing different in mind. Chance describes a certain kind of relationship between an event and the prior events that caused it. End states that have been reached while something else was being aimed for count as chance. They are surprise offspring, if you will. His example is of a man that goes to the marketplace for some reason (say, to buy pomegranates) and by accident runs into a man that owes him money and gets paid back.7 The getting back of the money is a result of his going to the marketplace, but his going to the marketplace was undertaken for a completely separate end (pomegranates) which had no relationship to that result. This template can be applied not only to human action but also to actions in nature. For Aristotle, nature, just as much as humans, is always up to something, and since his universe is thoroughly teleological, it is perfectly sensible to speak about nature having purposes, and also to speak about events that happen irrespective of those purposes. The nature of a thing is its internal principle toward a certain kind of motion or change, and this motor toward action is not willy-​nilly. The internal natures of things are on their way toward particular endpoints. Most of modern science does not think this way, and in fact the abandonment of Aristotelian teleology is typically thought to be its foundational move. The scholarship on this is vast, and this is not the place to enter into it.8 This much is safe to say, and perhaps helpful in demystifying Aristotle’s views: he does not envision an animate or purposeful demiurge steering things along; instead, we can observe processes that unfold, over and over, along consistent vectors. These are directional and they consistently move toward certain outcomes. These are the endpoints that persuade Aristotle that nature is up to something. This allows him to develop his definition of chance in the natural world. Chance events are those that unfold even though nature was aiming for something else. When a boulder falls down a hillside toward the surface of the earth, it is doing what earthy matter is inclined to do, which is to be with other material like it. If, on its way down, it happens to strike a goat that fancies this particular hillside for the tender grass, then that is a chance result in nature. Poor goat, whose end is not part of the boulder’s purpose. It is like the case of the man intending to buy pomegranates and bumping into the person who was ready to repay him. Within the domain of chance, he separates examples of it that emerge adjacent to nature’s purposes versus those that emerge adjacent to human intentionality. In nature, chance events 7 Physics 2.5. 8 To get started on the question, see Monte Ransome Johnson, Aristotle on Teleology (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005).

Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying  115 are called “the spontaneous” (ta automata); when they occur for humans, he calls them “luck” (hê tuchê). Chance results happen all the time. Different vectors of causation, whether of natural or human origin, are humming along toward end points and they sometimes crisscross in ways that produce outcomes about which a general rule cannot be formed. The Eudemian Ethics takes this consideration a step further. In book 8, ­chapter 2, he moves past describing a single chance outcome to considering the claim that some people succeed by chance consistently. This seems impossible. The whole point of the idea of chance is to account for events that do not happen consistently. But Aristotle, by observation, thinks there are some people who are indeed consistently lucky, and in this section of his ethics, he renders his most thorough consideration of them. He describes their success as due to a second kind of luck. He marks his attempt to account for it as a kind of stretch:9 Since we observe that some people are lucky irrespective of all knowledge and correct reasoning, it is clear that something else should be the cause of their luckiness. Whether that luckiness exists or not, which desires what it ought and when it ought, there might not be a human reckoning of this. (EE 1248a2–​7)

Aristotle at the outset of this section frames the study of luck as a study of a certain kind of desire. Those familiar with Plato will know of desire as something mostly to be avoided. It is often a synonym for appetite, which is placed in an oppositional relationship to intellect. But for Aristotle the case is quite different. Desire is an impulse toward action or change of any kind. Without desires we would not act or behave at all. We have desires behind all our actions, even including the use of our intellects. The consistently lucky people have a desire center that inclines them toward good outcomes, it desires “what it ought and when it ought.” The pursuit of an account of them will mean a pursuit of where this particularly well-​attuned desire center comes from. He considers three possible sources: wisdom, a personal demon, and nature (1247a7–​31). Right away, he tells us that wisdom cannot be the cause,

9 Recent translators and commentators have taken distinctly different tacks on important parts of this gnarled and difficult section of text. My rendering has been particularly influence by Van der Eijk.

116  History and Human Flourishing and he does this by an empirical argument. By his own inspection, he posits that it is precisely weak-​minded people who are lucky, and they cannot give an account of their success, which they would be able to do if it had arrived from wisdom (1247a13–​16). This brings up two further claims. First, it is not just the case that consistent luckiness can’t be explained by wisdom, but a lack of wisdom is actually a prerequisite for it. Second, consistently lucky people lack intellectual power precisely in the domain in which they are lucky. A person might be a math whiz and have a poor understanding of politics. That person would have the possibility of consistent luckiness only in the latter pursuit, not the former: Furthermore they are clearly senseless—​not that they are concerning the rest of things . . . —​but they are senseless precisely in things in which they are lucky. For in seafaring it is not the most skillful who are lucky, but just as in the fall of dice, one man throws nothing, and a different man throws a roll that corresponds with a naturally lucky man. (ΕΕ 1247a15–​23)

The ability to be consistently lucky is circumscribed to terrain over which a person is intellectually inept. Ruling out intellect means we will need to look at a wider set of cognitive functions to find the source of lucky people’s advantageous desires, and look past self-​conscious, discursive inference—​the hallmark of intellect—​for the source of their doing well. Aristotle next looks at the possibility of a personal daimôn as the source of the opportune desires. In classical Greek a daimôn is a kind of intermediate divinity, which is a spirit or even a guardian angel. Most Greeks thought such entities existed, though philosophers had nuanced views on the subject. Plato, for one, has Socrates speak of a personal daimôn, which was possibly a literary device standing for a kind of internal conscience. The idea that a personal daimôn prompts lucky people to have accurate desires seems absurd to Aristotle, but on grounds that may not be entirely expected. His objection is empirical, and again references his observation that empty-​headedness is linked to luckiness. For Aristotle, it makes no sense that a divinity would favor a foolish person and not one that exhibited a strong intellect, the highest capacity of humanity. His eschewing of demonic causation is also in keeping with his idea, cited earlier, that the mark of the divine is uniformity, and not a breaking of regularity, which it would have to be if a divinity doled out gifts on some but not others. (These judgments strike a common chord with Aristotle’s well-​known idea that

Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying  117 the regularity of the motions of the fixed stars is prime evidence that they are divine.) The possibility that consistent luckiness comes from nature detains him a bit longer. Aristotle first wonders whether there might be a natural disposition (or a hexis) that inclines people in this direction. He says that this commonly held idea must be wrong. If it were the case that there is a natural knack for this kind of desiring, we would no longer be searching for consistent luckiness, but instead for a natural disposition, an individual quality or characteristic that acts as a governor of desires. We would have found a new causal account, but we would be left without an account of what happens by chance. But Aristotle is after luckiness, which he thinks does indeed exist, and to drive the point home, at this point he again invokes the example of dice. He is looking at cases where something happens “many times in succession to someone, not because it ought to happen this way, but it would be, for example, like always throwing dice in a lucky throw” (τινι ἐφεξῆς τὰ τοιαῦτα πολλάκις, οὐχ ὅτι οὕτως δεῖ, ἀλλ’ οἷον ἂν εἴη τὸ κύβους ἀεὶ μακαρίαν βάλλειν [1247b16–​18]). It is, paradoxically, nonrandom chance he is after. He then advances in a new and productive direction. He introduces another way to think about nature as a source for the desires that result in lucky outcomes. Building on core Aristotelian positions visible in On the Soul and in the treatises of the Parva Naturalia, a collection of treatises on special topics having to do with the soul and in particular its relation with the body, Aristotle starts to wonder about the source of opportune desires against the background of the starting point of any of our desires. He wonders: Aren’t there impulses (hormai) in the soul, some from reasoning, others from irrational inclination? And aren’t the ones from irrational inclination prior? (EE 1247b18–​20)

The proposed priority of irrational to rational movements is striking. It inclines the investigation toward the more rudimentary levels of his well-​ attested hierarchy of functions in the soul. For Aristotle, the soul is the organizing principle, the form, of a substance that lives. All living things have a soul, including plants. The soul that we have manifests rationality, which is the very highest kind of function possible in souls. But underneath it, like layers of subflooring, there are other layers. There are those that are responsible for perception and motion, for example, and for growth

118  History and Human Flourishing and metabolism. Each of these functions is quite different and nature, according to Aristotle, helps us see how they are organized. Among the many observable living things, they all partake in metabolism and growth (all plants and animals), some add to this perception and motion (animals), and one kind (humans) further adds rationality. It is always true that an appearance of any higher function means all the prior ones must necessarily be present, but not vice versa. Calling the irrational inclinations of the soul prior to the rational ones invokes this gradient and sets us on a downward path along it. This reversion to rudimentary levels is further indicated by the Greek term for “impulses” (hormai) that Aristotle used in the text cited and continues to use regularly in this section of text. This is a technical term for him. The soul’s movements (κινήσεις) that are most familiar to us are the result of self-​conscious, volitional processes in us, whether thoughts or passions, which give rise to desires that trigger action.10 He develops a rather scrupulous taxonomy for talking about such things, speaking of wish (βούλησις), desire (ἐπιθυμία), and passion (θυμός), which each result from different kinds of cognitive operations. These are the central features of the systematic doctrine of De Anima and De Motu Animalium.11 On the other hand, Aristotle generally reserves the term “impulse” for a different class of inclinations. These are automatic or involuntary, are built into lower orders of our natures, and take place without our consciously superintending them. He uses this term to talk about the nonconscious movements of the nutritive soul that regulate the organic processes of metabolism, growth, and gestation (On the History of Animals 572b8, 572b24, 573a27, 574a13, etc.; On the Generation of Animals 750b20; NE 1102b21).12 Linking back to his hierarchy of soul functions, these lowest ones are the ones shared across all living things. It is not surprising that Aristotle also uses the term regularly at an even lower rung of his ontological ladder. He uses it to describe the inclinations of inanimate substances toward the motions they typically 10 See the very helpful note from Woods on 1223a26–​27 with many parallel citations. The soul’s different degrees are associated with certain kinds of movements: choice and discursive thought are associated with the διανοητικόν aspect of the soul; inclinations (ὀρέξεις) emerge from the appetitive (ὀρεκτικόν) faculty, from a wish, desire, or passion. These all take place in the light of day, one might say. 11 The examples are too numerous to mention, but see De Anima 3.10 for a summary account of the origins of motion from inclinations due to desire and thought. Cf. EE 1223a21–​28. 12 In the Politics, the inclination of humans to live in groups is said to be an impulse—​part of our innate construction, and not the result of conscious decision or thought (cf. MM 1213b17). And in the Aristotelian Problemata, the term marks the impulses leading to unconscious movements like yawning (886a35), sneezing (961b25), and sweating (867b7).

Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying  119 make. The term hormê marks the inclination of fire to move up and a stone to move down.13 He leaves no doubt that this category of “impulse” is central to the second, consistent kind of luckiness that he pursues. People who exhibit it succeed by operating akin to the way features of the natural world more rudimentary than humans generally operate. He describes such a system specifically in contrast with the luckiness that is adjacent to self-​consciously guided human actions: Or do we talk about luckiness in multiple ways? For some acts are performed from impulse (ἀπὸ τῆς ὁρμῆς) and others, if people chose to do them, are not, but are the opposite. We claim that they have been quite lucky when they succeed, both in the case of acts from impulse, in which they seem to have reasoned poorly, and again in those done by choice, if they wished for a good thing different from or less than they got. ἢ πλεοναχῶς λέγεται ἡ εὐτυχία; τὰ μὲν γὰρ πράττεται ἀπὸ τῆς ὁρμῆς καὶ προελομένων πρᾶξαι, τὰ δ’ οὔ, ἀλλὰ τοὐναντίον. καὶ ἐν ἐκείνοις, κακῶς λογίσασθαι δοκοῦσι, κατορθοῦντας καὶ εὐτυχῆσαι14 φαμέν· καὶ πάλιν ἐν τούτοις, εἰ ἐβουλοντο ἄλλο ἢ ἔλαττον ⟨ἢ⟩ ἔλαβον τἀγαθόν. (ΕΕ 1247b28–​33)

The consistent kind of luckiness is not an epiphenomenon of rational self-​ aware choice: in such cases people are not following some deliberative action and getting an ancillary bonus. Instead, they behave precisely without engaging their deliberative, rational minds at all successfully, and without self-​consciously pursuing any particular goal. He has in mind a case like a ship’s pilot entering an unknown port and twitching on the tiller at just the right times to avoid submerged rocks. A lucky person in this situation will succeed without thought and instead because triggering desires to move one way and then the next will come in the right ways, at the right times. Claims like this in Aristotle have obvious pertinence to contemporary work in the cognitive sciences on nonconscious, but consequential, modes of thinking, including work on the cognitive importance of the emotions; phenomena like “thin slicing,” in which people’s gut feelings make creditable judgments 13 Prior Analytics 95a1, Physics 192b18, Metaphysics 1023a9–​23, cf. Problemata 937b36. 14 Following the manuscript and not the κατευτυχῆσαι of Bussemaker, whom Walzer and Mingay follow: εἰ γάρ ἐστι φύσει ἡ δι’ ἐπιθυμίαν ἡδέος [καὶ ἡ] ὄρεξις, φύσει γε ἐπὶ τὸ ἀγαθὸν βαδίζοι ἂν πᾶν.

120  History and Human Flourishing quickly and in advance of their discursive rational thoughts; and research into the evolution of the brain that has produced a higher-​order layer of conscious executive functioning over a lower-​order level of nonconscious cognitive operations. Aristotle constructs the topic in a way that aligns with these contemporary approaches.15 Why such twitchy behavior should be capable of resulting in consistently good things is the central puzzle, and it pushes Aristotle into some very broad thinking to solve it. He links it to his well-​known, core principle that “nature always reaches for the better”: For if there is by nature an inclination on account of a desire of what is pleasant, everything would by nature proceed toward the good.16 (EE 1247b20–​21)

As was mentioned earlier, for Aristotle this principle is present throughout the natural world. It’s axiomatic for him, supported by the observable fact that the natural world regularly manifests order and beauty. It needn’t do so, but it does. Such qualities are not haphazard, and the evidence they present is part and parcel of Aristotle’s core positions on nature and teleology. The idea is a commonplace in the corpus. (See, e.g., Physics 199a8–​20, 199b26; GC 2.10 336b27–​37a7; Met 984b12.) These texts show Aristotle beginning to consider the consistently lucky person as a human being operating more like a lower-​level entity in the cosmos. In consistently lucky people, normal cognition is disabled because of their inadequate rational capabilities: “Their desire is not operating according to its natural disposition but it is disabled by something” (EE 1248a7–​8). The underlying processes (present in us all) are more visible in these people because they are not overshadowed by the complex movements resulting from self-​conscious thinking and volition. They have only the more rudimentary system as an activator. Aristotle sees them as a special case of human behavior that reveals something very general about the motions initiated in the natural world generally. 15 Such work was made widely known in Malcom Gladwell’s Blink (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2005). See Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (New York: Penguin reprint, 2008) and Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: 2011). For more on this, see Peter T. Struck, Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016), 22–​33. 16 Taking the πᾶν of the manuscript and not following πᾶσα of Allan, whom Walzer and Mingay follow.

Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying  121 This leads him to ask something that he typically does not ask. As he wonders where such precognitive impulses, made apparent by the lucky people, come from, this puzzle, in turn, opens up a profound question about the origins of motion in humans most generally. Why do we desire what we do when we do? Or before we think about something, what gets us to thinking? He first considers whether luck could be the source: Is luck the cause of this very thing, of desiring what one ought when one ought? Or will it then be the cause of everything? For then luck will also be the cause of thinking and of deliberating, for a person certainly did not deliberate because of having deliberated earlier, and having deliberated about that—​no, there is a certain starting point; nor did he think after having thought before thinking, and so on to infinity. So it turns out that thought is not the beginning of thinking, nor is deliberation the beginning of deliberating. Then what else is except fortune? With the result that everything will be from chance.17 (EE 1248a16–​22)

While he entertains luck as the cause here, he discards it soon, again based on the observation of the order in the universe. Such an outcome would be unsavory, since then “everything” will be from chance, and the obvious consistencies one can observe in natural processes would have no explanation. Luck, empirically speaking, does not rule the cosmos, since then all would be chaos, and it isn’t. The infinite regress argument here raises the deeply interesting question not of what regulates thought after one begins to think about something (for the answer here would be the normal outlines of how reason works) but rather the question of what causes us to think the things we do in the first place. Our chains of thought can’t spring up ex nihilo, and so there must be a starting point. The search for the starting point of lucky people’s actions aligns now with a search for the starting point of any human movement, via thought, desire, or impulse, that we might have. After he abandons fortune as a candidate for such consistently fortuitous urges, the argument takes a fascinating turn: Or is there some beginning beyond which there is no other, and is this beginning, on account of its being the way it is, able to produce this sort of effect? [i.e., consistent luckiness] This is the thing we are seeking. What is

17 This translation follows the text of Van Der Eijk.

122  History and Human Flourishing the starting point of motion in the soul? It is quite clear. Just as in the whole universe it is a god, also it is in the soul. (EE 1248a22–​26)

What Aristotle means by “god” here is unsettled in the scholarship. One possible candidate would be the human mind (νοῦς) and its reasoning power, since Aristotle consistently links contemplation (θεωρία) with divine activity. In Metaphysics 12.9, De Anima 3, and NE 10, it is humans’ distinctive activity by which we imitate the divine and engage our highest most godlike functions. So it would seem appealing to draw the conclusion that in claiming that the divine is the ultimate starting point, he is claiming that thought is. However, he can’t mean this. He has already ruled this out via both the observation that reason is disabled in lucky people, and the infinite regress argument; and to make the case perfectly clear, he does so explicitly again in the sentence that follows. While thought begins our movements “in a certain way,” it is not the ultimate beginning: For, in a certain way, the divine in us (i.e. νοῦς)18 moves everything. But the beginning of reasoning is not reasoning but something stronger. What then could be stronger than even knowledge except god? [It can’t be virtue,] for virtue is a tool of thought. And on account of this, as I was saying earlier, they are called lucky who, if they follow their impulse, succeed although they are irrational, and to deliberate is not helpful to them. For they have the sort of a starting point which is something stronger than thinking and deliberation (others have reasoning; but the lucky people do not possess this) they have divine inspiration.19 But they are incapable of this [thinking and deliberation]: for it is by being without reason that they hit the mark. (EE 1248a26–​34)

God ultimately serves as the starting point of all of our motions, and it is because god is in this role, Aristotle considers, that fortuitous outcomes result for the consistently lucky. With thought, deliberation, and virtue ruled out, what then is the mode by which god is supposed to be operating here? First off, Aristotle cannot mean that god operates in some kind of ad hoc fashion, like a busy-​body helping 18 Following Van Der Eijk. 19 For parallels to the language of inspiration, see Rhetoric 1408b12–​19, where Aristotle describes those in an elevated oratorical state as being divinely inspired. Also see Politics 1340a11–​1342a7, where the effect of a certain inspirational kind of music on the soul is described this way.

Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying  123 a person steer around the shoals of life (he has already explicitly ruled out this kind of a scenario). From other standard Aristotelian positions, in the Metaphysics and other works, we can extract for evaluation some of the ways by which he speaks of the divine being the initiator of movements. A well-​ attested locus of divine influence on the world shows up in the operations of the Prime Mover. There is broad agreement in the interpretation that the Prime Mover is a cause of movements in two senses. It directly causes the kinetic motion of the sphere of the fixed stars (as its final cause), and secondly, through the motions of the heavens as intermediary, it indirectly causes all kinetic motion in the sublunar world. But neither of these is a promising candidate for the referent behind the “god” in the passages earlier. The first sense accounts only for the circular motion of the stars. The second claim is much too broad to be of any specific value in explaining the very narrow phenomenon of consistent luckiness. There is another option, with which I will close. Nearly thirty years ago, Charles Kahn proposed a role for the divine in the sublunar world which presents a possible solution. Kahn disagrees with scholars from the middle of the last century (Ross, Solmsen) and updates and modifies the earlier positions of Zeller, Joachim, Lovejoy, and others.20 His study appears in a scholarly conversation trying to determine the extent of influence of the Prime Mover. Kahn sets out the two modes of causation mentioned earlier, the direct effect on the fixed stars and indirect effect to everything else. But he then proposes a third way, which I have elsewhere called the impulse hypothesis.21 Briefly, the divine operates as the ultimate final cause, or “thing for the sake of which” (using Aristotle’s terms) any change occurs by providing a kind of nudge that leads each entity to complete the immanent causality of its specific nature, and to become the thing that its inner nature is set up for it to become. The specific characteristics and internal propensities toward change that any substance is to have are provided by nature, but the inclination to achieve them comes from outside. The Prime Mover gives the oomph, if you will, to the acorn to grow into the oak its inner nature causes it to become. Its becoming an oak is a product of nature as a cause, but its becoming an oak is attributable to the Prime Mover acting as final cause for it. And in human 20 Charles H. Kahn, “The Place of the Prime Mover in Aristotle’s Teleology,” in Allan Gotthelf, ed., Aristotle on Nature and Living Things: Philosophical and Historical Studies (Bristol, UK: Bristol Classical Press, 1985), 183–​205. Zeller, Joachim, and Lovejoy are cited and discussed further at Kahn 203n1. 21 See Struck 125–​131.

124  History and Human Flourishing beings, as Kahn puts it: “it is our rational nature to exercise moral and intellectual virtue, but the urge to realize this (our desire to do well) is the specifically human form of the universal tendency to move from potency to act.”22 According to the impulse hypothesis, the divine provides a kind of atmospheric voltage that actuates each thing to fulfill its particular “good,” such as nature has constructed it. This idea underwrites the idea that all parts of the cosmos, always or for the most part, reach for the better. In the case of highly complex substances, like humans, this is true in multiple ways. Most saliently, we reach for the better via our rationality, which discursively reasons out how best to pursue our happiness. This higher order good-​seeking apparatus is what typically interests Aristotle. But beneath our rationality, humans also exist with a creaturely self. If the earlier reading of luckiness is correct, then the inclination toward eudaimonia is present even there, too. And to the extent that Aristotle’s low-​level cognitive operations align with the nonconscious modes of thinking under scrutiny in contemporary cognitive science, Aristotle prompts us to look there, too, for an inclination toward thriving. Aristotle mostly has no need to appeal to this hypothesis in his explanations of human behavior. But in my view the phenomenon of consistent luckiness does not succumb to explanation without an appeal to it. People who experience consistent luckiness exist in a state closer to the more rudimentary classes of substances: for example, to lower forms of life or even, at the extreme, to inanimate nature. They experience good outcomes the way that unthinking things often do—​even the roots of a plant are able to find water (Physics 199a23–​30). In general, according to the impulse hypothesis, the divine is precisely responsible for this most rudimentary nudge to move toward the good. In my view, the case of consistent luckiness is an example of this general principle extended to that part of the natural world of which the lower orders of the human organism are an example. Without it, we do not have an explanation for why bare impulses vector toward the good. With it, we do. Without it, we have chaotic events. With it, we see ordered outcomes snatched from the confusion of chance. We should not overstate the possibilities of this line of thinking. If it were a panacea for avoiding bad outcomes—​ given the proposition that it extends throughout the universe—​then it would mean a cosmos where our wandering goat never got surprised by a falling rock. It’s more of a tilt in the cosmos toward good. In the case of humans these gravitational principles toward motion in that direction are humming

22

Kahn 186–​187.

Living the Good Life, Even Without Trying  125 away, and they do so (1) prior to us thinking and deliberating rationally, so that we owe to them our inclination to seek out happiness via our intellects, and (2) they are also present in us as bare substances in the world, which is how consistently lucky people, unencumbered by intellect, reach the good outcomes they do. There is a kind of cognition, if you will, embedded in our physiology. Like the rest of the universe, it inclines toward the good. On this reading of Aristotle, then, we are hard wired for happiness. Not only do we rationally choose it when we are not constrained, either by external force or internal force like addiction, but at all levels our souls and bodies incline toward the good, always or for the most part. But there are a few asterisks to this discussion. The happiness of which our nonconscious levels are capable is limited. Human eudaimonia proper is available via rational choice. Lucky people may get good outcomes, but the specific quality of the benefits they receive will mostly be on a lower level than those available to rational thinkers. The second asterisk is of a slightly different nature. Aristotle thought the eudaimonia that was rationally derived was available only to adult males. He famously, and perniciously, thought women incapable of rationality, and that such people whom he called “natural” slaves were not either. Children also didn’t have highly enough developed rationality to be able to choose and act in considered ways. All humans, presumably, would be candidates to experience the level of happiness that results from consistent luckiness. The questions that Aristotle feels pressed to bring in to his account of happiness may well seem to us at first extravagant. And here the reciprocal possibilities for insight, mentioned at the outset, come back into focus in this case study of the history of ideas. If we seek happiness, some will be inclined to see this mostly as a pursuit having to do with ourselves and our proximate environments. Are our needs met? Do we find purpose in the work we do? Are we free from pain? Are we connected with others in a supportive and nurturing environment? None of these questions force us to come to a settled answer on the overall drift of the cosmos. However, Aristotle’s construction of the question of happiness will ask us to consider the question of our own happiness in this broader context in at least two ways. First, as we aim to secure our happiness, are we doing so within a universe characterized by an updraft toward the good, a downdraft away from it, or one that moves indifferently? This will inflect how we understand our own pursuit of happiness. Second, with respect to human nature, is it mostly bad? Do we work toward the good only by working against our natures? Or is there a finger on the scale in the opposite

126  History and Human Flourishing direction, such that when we just move forward with what we seem to want to do, we tend to end up in the right spot? Different answers to questions such as these will set us out on different pathways to understanding ourselves and our possibilities for happiness. Whether one or the other set of answers to these questions provides a secure map to happiness is not to be adjudicated here. I hope to have shown that this generic kind of work in the history of ideas provides a certain kind of leverage to extract oneself from one’s prior views and offers opportunities to improve their alignment—​and to be happy about it.

Works Cited Gigerenzer, Gerd. Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. Penguin reprint, 2008. Gladwell, Malcom. Blink. Little, Brown and Co., 2005. Kahn, Charles H. “The Place of the Prime Mover in Aristotle’s Teleology.” Aristotle on Nature and Living Things: Philosophical and Historical Studies, edited by Allan Gotthelf, Bristol Classical Press, 1985, 183–205. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011. McMahon, Darrin. Happiness: A History. Grove Press, 2006. Struck, Peter T. Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Antiquity. Princeton UP, 2016. Van der Eijk, Philip J. “Divine Movement and Human Nature in Eudemian Ethics 8.2.” Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 238–​258. Woods, Michael, editor and translator. Aristotle Eudemian Ethics, Books I, II, and VIII. Clarendon Aristotle Series. Oxford UP, 1992.

6 The Historical Sublime Dan Edelstein

Owen died in a freak accident on a whitewater rafting trip with his family. He was eight years old. The accident occurred on a stretch of the Green River in Utah named Disaster Falls. As Owen’s father, the historian Stéphane Gerson, struggled to cope with this horrendous loss, he found himself exploring the past of this ominously named site. Disaster, it turned out, had fallen there before. The first explorer to lead an expedition down the river, John Wesley Powell, lost a boat in these rapids (and fittingly gave them their name). Between that accident, in 1869, and his own son’s death, Gerson identified a long series of accidents that had occurred in this same place: near-​death encounters, boats dashed to pieces, and so on. This historical knowledge could be painful: had he known about it beforehand, would he have taken his family rafting there? It could also offer some solace: many observers considered the rapids to be “an easy run.” Whether Owen’s death was a freak accident or potentially avoidable, history could not tell. But it did offer a different kind of consolation: History channeled [ . . . ] the mythic power of a place in and out of time [ . . . ] Owen and I came together within a history of nature and civilization that neither began nor ended on the day of this death.1

As Gerson suggests here, what history can offer in the face of tragedy is a way to transcend the unforgiving, forward march of time, and to expand (or escape) the present moment by building bridges to the past. Above and beyond the time of calendars and funerals is a “mythic” time that seems to stand still (in illo tempore, in Mircea Eliade’s expression). We experience such a time by collapsing past and present, by living both in and out of the moment. This strange, temporal sensation produces a soothing effect. It is the 1 Gerson 148.

Dan Edelstein, The Historical Sublime In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0007

128  History and Human Flourishing consolation of history, accomplished by what might be described as the historical sublime. * * * The ancients sought consolation in philosophy more than history.2 Philosophy comforted the mind, Epicurus claimed, by calming our anxieties surrounding death and the afterlife. The Stoics taught that philosophy trained us to disregard what was out of our control. When the ancients summoned the imagination to appease the mind, it was generally to contemplate the natural order. In the famous sixth book of De re publica, Cicero recounts “the dream of Scipio,” in which his protagonist rises above the earth, only to find that “the earth itself seemed [ . . . ] so small that I was scornful of our empire, which covers only a single point, as it were, upon its surface” (6.16). The minuteness of our world becomes the metaphor for our petty, sublunar concerns: “how long will even those who do talk of us now continue so to do?” Scipio’s father asks him (6.20). Here it is not a connection with the past that provides a sense of appeasement; it is rather the smallness of the present, especially when viewed from the future, that leaves us feeling awed. The reliance on philosophy and the contemplation of the natural world continued to serve as a source of solace well into early-​modern times.3 But as Western Europeans reconceived of themselves as moderns, in contrast to the ancients, the historical distance between us brought a vertiginous shift in perspective. Some, such as Petrarch, came to “experience loss as the fundamental condition of life.”4 Rather than a tautology, the pastness of the past became a source of nostalgia, as well as wonder. The ruins of Rome, as Andrew Hui has written, “underscored with haunting pathos the vast gulf between the time of humanism and antiquity.”5 But the gnawing sense, as Alfred de Musset later phrased it, of having arrived too late in a world too old, was not without its charm.6 These pleasant effects came to be described, in the Romantic age, as “sublime.” Two writers in particular—​Goethe and Stendhal—​analyzed the mechanism through which the historical sublime became a source of consolation and ecstasy.



2 The classic reference is Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy.

3 For a modern rewriting of Scipio’s dream, see Voltaire, Zadig, ­chapter 9. 4 Petrarch cited in Hui 90. 5 Hui 53.

6 “Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux,” Musset, Rolla (1833).

The Historical Sublime  129

Goethe, Rome, and Kant In 1786, Goethe took a leave of absence from his position as privy councilor to the duke of Saxe-​Weimar-​Eisenach. He had not published a literary work for over ten years, and he was growing frustrated with the decorum and demands of his administrative and courtly duties. He set off to Italy to rekindle his poetic spirit, spending the next two years on the Italian peninsula and in Sicily.7 He later (1816–​1817) published a much-​revised version of his journal from this trip, under the title Italian Journey. The chief destination of this voyage was Rome, “this capital of the world [dieser Hauptstadt der Welt].”8 In some ways, he already knew the city and its history well: “All the dreams of my youth have come to life; the first engravings I remember . . . I now see in reality, and everything I have known for so long through paintings, drawings . . . is now assembled before me” (129). Like most educated people at the time, Goethe would have learned Latin—​and by extension, Roman history—​by reading Livy, Cicero, Caesar, and Virgil. But the experience of being physically present in the Eternal City was wholly different. What Goethe mostly reacted to was the impression of living at a temporal remove: Here is an entity [Existenz] which has suffered so many drastic changes in the course of two thousand years, yet is still the same soil, the same hill, often even the same column or the same wall. . . . Contemplating this, the observer becomes, as it were, a contemporary of the great counsels of destiny [ein Mitgenosse der großen Ratschlüsse des Schicksals]. (133, trans. modified [95])

The proximity of this historical distance, which Goethe emphasizes here, is linked to a comforting effect: to become “a contemporary of the great counsels of destiny” is to find solace in the transitoriness of all things. One might describe this historical feeling as a kind of vanitas, or knowledge that our days on this planet are counted. But any ruin can produce that impression, even a statue of the obscure Ozymandias (“Nothing beside remains”).9 Rome, by contrast, is not just any ruin: it is the ruin of familiar greatness.

7 Biographical details from Safranski. 8 Goethe, Italian Journey, 128, trans. modified [91]. 9 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias (1818).

130  History and Human Flourishing “Today I went to the pyramid of Cestius and in the evening climbed to the top of the Palatine, where the ruins of the imperial palaces stands like rocks. It is impossible to convey a proper idea of such things” (137). Where vanitas is easily translatable into language (memento mori, ashes to ashes, etc.), Goethe’s experience in the shadow of Roman imperial grandeur defies expression. Here we touch upon a defining feature of the sublime: it often results in a breakdown of communication, even stunned silence.10 The difference between Rome and generic ruins is thus the intimate knowledge of its fallen greatness. And the combination of this greatness with historical distance has a different effect than mere vanitas: “As I rush about Rome looking at the major monuments, its immensity [Ungeheure] has a quieting effect [wirkt ganz ruhig auf uns ein]” (133, trans. modified [95]). Past greatness produces a sensation of contentment and self-​control: “I am now in a state of clarity and calm such as I had not known for a long time” (136). Why do the traces of ancient Rome cause such a pleasurable effect? We find a clue in his account of viewing the Colosseum: We came to the Colosseum at twilight. Once one has seen it, everything else seems small. It is so huge that the mind cannot retain its image; one remembers it as smaller than it is, so that every time one returns to it, one is astounded by its size. (137–​138)

The pleasure Goethe derives from observing Roman ruins, then, comes in part from the way in which they put us in our place: “everything else seems small.” Our own beings and times are deflated by the faded greatness of the past. In this passage, Goethe also hints at the aesthetic model for his argument. In the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant defined the sublime as “what is beyond all comparison great” (1.2.A, §25; 94). Goethe’s complaint that “the mind cannot retain its image” is particularly reminiscent of Kant’s discussion of the mathematical sublime. When describing the “bewilderment . . . which, as is said, seizes the visitor on first entering St. Peter’s in Rome,” Kant unpacks this feeling as “the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the idea of a whole.” Goethe’s assessment of the Basilica is very similar: “St Peter’s has made me realize that Art, like Nature, can abolish all standards of measurement” (136). Kant goes on to describe the result of this inadequacy as highly pleasurable: “in its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, [the imagination]

10 This aspect of the historical sublime is emphasized in Ankersmit 227.

The Historical Sublime  131 recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight” (1.2.A, §26; 100). Kant’s work appeared after Goethe produced the first, unpublished draft of the Italian travels, but the poet read the philosopher’s book attentively the year it came out.11 As he considerably reworked his journal before its publication, thirty years after the fact, it is not surprising that he would have refined his description with Kant’s famous analyses in mind.12 But despite this conceptual borrowing, Goethe still introduces a novel element. Kant’s sublime was atemporal: his prime examples are architectural (St. Peter’s, the Giza pyramids), natural (ocean storms, volcanoes, Mont Blanc), and moral (the religious law). Goethe introduces a fourth dimension into the analysis of the sublime, though again, it is not simply the depths of time that produce this effect. Only the contemplation of past historical greatness—​of times “beyond all comparison”—​can turn the study of the past into something sublime.

Stendhal’s Historical Syndrome The connection between grand historical monuments and a sublime sense of serenity was made even more explicit in another work published the same year as Goethe’s. Stendhal’s Rome, Naples, and Florence (1817) described the author’s journey through Italy the previous year, including stops in Milan and Bologna, in addition to the three cities in the title.13 In the backdrop to Stendhal’s travels were the waning French Empire (he participated in Napoleon’s ill-​starred Russian campaign) and his own emotional drama involving a Milanese lover. His description of Florence has notoriously given rise to a supposed psychological condition, dubbed “Stendhal’s syndrome,” which is said to affect tourists who are exposed to high levels of great art, and have ended up in the hospital.14 Such unpleasant consequences may make

11 On Goethe’s knowledge of Kant, see von Molnar. 12 Goethe does employ the term “sublime” (erhabene) in his journal, though affixes it to works of art, such as, in Venice, the marble lions by the Arsenal (“They are of such huge proportions, that all around appears little, and man himself would become as nought, did not sublime objects elevate him [man selbst zunichte würde, wenn erhabene Gegenstände uns nicht erhüben],” 77). 13 Some of the impressions described here date back to his earlier 1811 trip through Italy. For details, see Fillipetti. 14 For the initial description of this syndrome, see Magherini. For a more cautious and critical view, see Claudia et al.

132  History and Human Flourishing Stendhal’s experience an unlikely candidate for a more positive psychological condition, but a careful reading of his journal reveals a much more contented, and literally sublime, result. There is in fact nothing deleterious in Stendhal’s description of his encounter with Florence. On the contrary, the feelings he enjoys are wholly positive, comparable only to love. When the city first comes into view, he writes, “my heart was beating strongly.” The sight of Brunelleschi’s dome conjures up a host of memories: This is where Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci lived! I said to myself. Here lies that noble city, the queen of the Middle Ages! It is within these walls that civilization was renewed; here, Lorenzo de’ Medici performed his role as king so well, and held a court where, for the first time since Augustus, military merit was not preferred.15

This rush of historical recollections produces a powerful effect: “memories flooded my heart, I was incapable of reasoning [je me sentais hors d’état de raisonner], and I indulged in my folly as with a beloved woman” (323). It goes without saying that, had Stendhal’s mind not been full of historical knowledge about Florence, such an effect could never have occurred. This amorous sentiment—​he claims he would happily have embraced the first Florentine he met—​soon gives way to a more elevated, spiritual calmness. Heading straight to Santa Croce, which houses tombs and memorials of famous Florentine writers and artists, Stendhal declares (slipping into the present tense), “My emotion is so intense [profonde], it almost becomes piety. The dark religiosity of this church, its plain masonry roof, its unfinished façade, everything speaks in lively tones to my soul . . .” (324).16 At this point, Stendhal gives a particular name to his feeling—​it is sublime: I was already in a sort of ecstasy, by virtue of knowing I was in Florence, and the proximity of these great men whose tombs I had seen. I was absorbed in contemplation of this sublime beauty that I saw up close and practically touched. I had reached that state of emotion where the celestial feelings occasioned by fine arts combine with passionate sentiments. (325)



15 Stendhal 323.

16 Magherini also focuses on Stendhal’s visit to Santa Croce (64).

The Historical Sublime  133 For Stendhal, the sublime is a very distinct aesthetic category, not to be found in all historical or architectural instances. Comparing Florence to Paris, for instance, he criticizes the latter, stating: “I miss the old Louvre tower. The Gallo-​Greek architecture that replaced it is without the sublime beauty that speaks to my soul, as the old tower of Philippe-​Auguste did” (330). And it is not only in the presence of monumental architecture that his heart beats faster: simply walking down the “sublime streets” of Florence can trigger the same sensation (328). The “simple and sublime” inhabitants of Renaissance Florence fill him with awe (342). A key feature of the sublime, for Stendhal, is the sense of collapsed time. If the “Gallo-​Greek” style of Paris does not hold much aesthetic appeal for him, he celebrates the “Greco-​Gothic” style he finds in Florence (329). When centuries collide in the right way, his heart flutters. Part of this pleasure comes from staring down the historical abyss. Florence’s glory days are closer to Stendhal than Rome’s were to Goethe, but still lie five hundred years in the past: “I spent yesterday in a sort of dark and historical concern [préoccupation sombre et historique] . . . in a state of mute and profound emotion, my eyes open but incapable of speech, I studied palaces built by Florentine merchants around 1300” (327). Stunned silence is once again a feature of the sublime. But Stendhal’s excitement also stems from the sensation that he himself had collapsed past and present: “This medieval architecture ravished my soul [s’est emparée de toute mon âme]; I felt that I was living with Dante” (327–​328). The most sublime experience was to escape one’s own time altogether. Though it starts with an emotional high, Stendhal’s experience ultimately dips into a certain discomfort. This complex mingling of emotions is another distinctive feature of the sublime. Edmund Burke famously argued that “danger or pain [ . . . ] at certain distances, and with certain modifications [ . . . ] are delightful,” and made delight constitutive of sublime feelings (1.7; 40). Kant followed suit, recognizing that “the feeling of the sublime” must include either “a feeling of displeasure” (1.2.A, §27; 106) or “a source of fear” (1.2.B, §28). Already in Goethe there was a hint of “sad[ness] and melancholy” mixed in with his enthusiasm for the ruins of ancient Rome. This disappointment was a result of the devastation he witnessed of past splendors: “what the barbarians spared, the builders of new Rome made havoc of ” (118). Stendhal’s “dark thoughts” similarly derive from the unfavorable contrast between past and present. Where the Renaissance edifices and streets he so admired all evoke “the passions of the Middle Ages,” the

134  History and Human Flourishing current inhabitants of Florence disappoint him: “Alas! Today’s bourgeois of Florence have no passions; even their miserliness is not a passion” (328). The historical sublime thus revolves around loss. But by expanding the common experience of time, it makes it possible to enjoy the presence of a beloved past while also acknowledging its disappearance. By refusing to deny loss, while at the same time transforming it into a kind of delight, the historical sublime can offer an effective form of mourning.

Imagined Histories Goethe and Stendhal remind us how standing in the presence of history, provided we know that history, can have a beneficial psychological effect. Recalling past greatness puts our own times in perspective, calming the mind and causing a frisson of historical vertigo. But are these effects only available to those who travel? In his account of the sublime, Burke suggested that simply reading about the fall of great empires can lead to a similar result: The prosperity of no empire, nor the grandeur of no king, can so agreeably affect in the reading, as the ruin of the state of Macedon, and the distress of its unhappy prince . . . Our delight, in cases of this kind, is very greatly heightened, if the sufferer be some excellent person who sinks under an unworthy fortune. (1.14; 45–​46)

One can certainly find plenty of testimonies that support Burke’s point. Many authors describe the powerful effects of discovering antiquity through books. Hobbes warned against the adolescent enthusiasm that one could derive from such reading: one of the most frequent causes of [rebellion] is the Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and Romans; from which, young men, and all others that are unprovided of the Antidote of solid Reason, receiving a strong, and delightfull impression, of the great exploits of warre, atchieved by the Conductors of their Armies, receive withall a pleasing Idea, of all they have done besides . . .17



17 Hobbes 507 (2.29).

The Historical Sublime  135 Ancient historians are dangerous, for Hobbes, precisely because their accounts are so “pleasing”; it is hard to resist the appeal of their exciting subject matter, and so to fail to recognize the political differences between antiquity and the present. Reading, in this regard, is just as powerful as traveling. In both cases, the temporal divide between past and present can momentarily disappear, revealing contrasts that may paint the present in an unflattering light. Accordingly, less conservative authors recommended the reading of ancient history for precisely this reason. In his Confessions, Rousseau reversed Hobbes’s account: Ceaselessly occupied with Rome and Athens; living, so to speak, with their great men, myself born the Citizen of a Republic, and son of a father whose love of the fatherland was his strongest passion, I caught fire [je m’en enflammais] with it from his example; I believed myself to be Greek or Roman; I became the character whose life I read.18

As in Stendhal’s later case, reading about the past breaks down chronological and geographical barriers to produce an ecstatic state of communion with historical actors. But the thrill of collapsing past and present did not always include this sense of intimacy. Onward from the late eighteenth century, readers also reveled in their imagination of absolutely foreign cultures. Volney’s Les Ruines (1791) begins with a historical reverie, where the author passes in review centuries of ancient history: I replayed the history of former times in my mind; I recollected those distant ages when so many illustrious nations inhabited these countries; I figured to myself the Assyrian on the banks of the Tigris, the Kaldean on those of the Euphrates, the Persian reigning from the Indus to the Mediterranean.19

There is clearly an element of vanitas to this meditation: “Ah! How has so much glory been eclipsed! . . . How have so many labours been annihilated! . . . Thus perish the works of men, and thus do empires and nations disappear!” (10). But it acquires a more sublime dimension as the narrator recalls the greatness of pre-​Greek Mediterranean civilizations. Little was known about them, but their sheer number and proliferation brought about

18 Rousseau 8. 19

Volney 10–​11.

136  History and Human Flourishing feelings of smallness and awe. As knowledge about the distant past increased, this sense of sublime rediscovery extended ever farther back. Vybarr Cregan-​ Reid has recounted how the discovery of The Epic of Gilgamesh, in 1876, shocked Victorian England with the realization that a sophisticated literate culture had existed four thousand years prior in Mesopotamia.20 While travel writers may offer more intimate and detailed descriptions of their journeys through time and space, readers can hope to obtain similar experiences from the comfort of their homes. In a sense, we should not be surprised that ancient Rome can overwhelm a schoolboy in Geneva just as much as a poet standing on the Palatine hill. In both cases, it is really the interplay between historical knowledge and the imagination that explodes in a sublime result. Unlike Kant’s mathematical sublime, no direct sensory experience is required: it is ultimately in the mind’s eye that we witness the historical sublime. This analysis leads to a final set of questions. Can we cultivate this experience? Can it be replicated at will, or is it simply a question of chance and personality? And if we can reproduce it, under the right circumstances, what are its psychological benefits? In addition to helping us mourn, might the historical sublime provide some solace for our modern ills?

The Consolations of History There is a fairly generic way in which “history therapy” could be of psychological help. Many types of depression leave the subject feeling trapped in a hostile present. Baudelaire described this feeling in his poem “Spleen,” a sonnet written entirely in the present tense, and filled with prison-​like imagery: When the cold heavy sky weighs like a lid On spirits whom eternal boredom grips . . . When the world seems a dungeon, damp and small . . . When trawling rains have made [étalant] their steel-​grey fibres Look like the grilles of some tremendous jail . . .21 20 Cregan-​Reid 10–​11. As his title suggests, Cregan-​Reid also describes this experience in terms of a historical sublime, though in his case this emphasis is on geological time. The description of the global flood in Gilgamesh, very similar to that found in the book of Genesis, was one reason why the book caused such a fuss. 21 Trans. Roy Campbell.

The Historical Sublime  137 By calling to mind other times, history may offer an antidote to this type of temporal confinement. To be sure, a mere consciousness of the past’s existence is unlikely to be of much benefit. Reminding a depressed subject that the Roman Empire once covered most of Western Europe will not magically lift their spirits. But immersion in a historical study—​or better yet, perhaps, in historical fiction—​may broaden an individual’s temporal horizon, freeing them from the prison of present entrapment. The power of historical escapism is most movingly evoked by Machiavelli, in a famous 1513 letter written while in impoverished exile: On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for . . . and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.22

Here again we recognize the key features of the historical sublime: the collapse of past and present; the sense of transformed, transhistorical identity; and a rush of pleasurable feelings, set against a backdrop of loss (exile). It was enough to make Machiavelli forget his miserable life on the farm. But there is also a more pointed use for a sublime experience of history. It is perhaps best suited to deal with psychological problems whose own roots lie in a historical disorder. One common such disorder might be termed “historical hysteria,” or a hysterical reaction to historical events.23 Montaigne provides a good example in his essay “Of the Education of Children”: Seeing our civil wars, who does not cry out that this mechanism is being turned topsy-​turvy and that the judgment day has us by the throat, without reflecting that many worse things have happened, and that ten thousand parts of the world, to our one, are meanwhile having a gay time?24



22 Machiavelli 2:929.

23 For a similar argument, in a more contemporary vein, see Moyn and Priestland. 24 Montaigne 116 (1.26).

138  History and Human Flourishing Without historical perspective, any political disturbance can acquire apocalyptic proportions. As Cicero reminds us, “to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child,” and like children we frighten easily with every present scare.25 Our present age in particular is remarkably prone to catastrophic thinking, though for the first time in history our apocalyptic fears are largely human-​made.26 But many of us also live in increasingly narrow slivers of time. The intensity of news cycles pushes us to become both amnesiac and short-​sighted, and to adopt (what David Armitage calls elsewhere in this volume) “perspectival presentism.” With such blinders, it is difficult to keep crises in perspective, and we become more prone to overreactions. The exhilaration we feel when reimagining past worlds can thus be a cure for our tendency to panic about our own. But it takes a certain melancholic disposition for the historical sublime to work its temporal magic. We only seek the plenitude of the past when we find the present lacking. It is for this reason that the historical sublime is well suited for mourning: the desire for an irretrievably lost loved one can only be satisfied by summoning a presence from the past. The historical sublime indeed functions as a kind of secular magic, conjuring up ghosts or ancient empires to repopulate a barren world. Like the narrator of Baudelaire’s The Swan, the subject of the historical sublime finds himself in a temporal exile, physically located in a familiar place, but longing to return there in the past. It is not a delusional experience—​the pastness of the past is not denied. Rather, it is a nekyia, where we descend into the historical underworld, brandishing the golden bough of imagination and memory.

Works Cited Ankersmit, F. R. Sublime Historical Experience. Stanford UP, 2005. Armitage, David. “In Defense of Presentism.” History and Human Flourishing, Oxford UP, forthcoming. Baudelaire, Charles. Poems of Baudelaire. Translated by Roy Campbell, Pantheon, 1952. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. U of Notre Dame P, 1968. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On the Republic, On the Laws. Translated by Clinton W. Keyes, Loeb Classical Library, 1928.



25 Cicero, Orator 395 (34.120). 26 See Dupuy.

The Historical Sublime  139 Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Brutus. Orator. Translated by G. L. Hendrickson, Loeb Classical Library, 1939. Claudia, Innocenti, Fioravanti Giulia, Spiti Raffaello, and Faravelli Carlo. “La sindrome di Stendhal fra psicoanalisi e neuroscienze.” Rivista di Psichiatria, vol. 49, no. 2, 2014, pp. 61–​66. Cregan-​Reid, Vybarr. Discovering Gilgamesh: Geology, Narrative and the Historical Sublime in Victorian Culture. Manchester UP, 2013. Dupuy, Jean-​Pierre. Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Seuil, 2002. Fillipetti, Sandrine. Stendhal. Gallimard, 2009. Gerson, Stéphane. Disaster Falls: A Family Story. Crown, 2017. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italian Journey. Translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, Penguin, 1962. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italienische Reise. Jazzybee, 2016. Hui, Andrew. The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature. Fordham UP, 2016. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: The English and Latin Texts. Vol. 4 of The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by Noel Malcolm. Clarendon, 2012. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by James Creed Meredith, Clarendon Press, 1952. Machiavelli, Niccolo. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. Edited by Allan Gilbert, 3 vols., Duke UP, 1989. Magherini, Graziella. La sindrome di Stendhal. Ponte Alle Grazie, 1989. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Translated by Donald M. Frame, Stanford UP, 1958. Moyn, Samuel, and David Priestland. “Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is.” New York Times, August 11, 2017, https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2017/​08/​11/​opin​ion/​ sun​day/​trump-​hyste​ria-​democr​acy-​tyra​nny.html. Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques. The Confessions. Translated by Christopher Kelly, vol. 5 of The Collected Writings of Rousseau, edited by Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman, 12 vols, UP of New England, 1995. Safranski, Rüdiger. Goethe: Life as a Work of Art. Translated by David Dollenmayer, Liveright, 2017. Stendhal. Rome, Naples, et Florence. Honoré Champion, 1919. Volney, Constantin François de Chassebœuf. Volney’s Ruins, Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires. Bossange Frères, 1820. Von Molnar, Geza. “Goethe’s Reading of Kant’s Critique of Esthetic Judgment: A Referential Guide for Wilhelm Meister’s Esthetic Education.” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, vol. 15, no. 4, 1982, pp. 402–​420.

7 Flourishing with Herodotus Suzanne Marchand

History may not be as “dismal” a science as economics, but its recent preoccupations do strike me as dwelling, all too frequently, on catastrophes and cruelties: the extermination of the Native Americans, the evils of imperialism, the horrors of the Nazi death camps.1 It came as quite a shock when the distinguished American historian Steven Aron presented a paper at LSU a few years ago about periods of negotiation and peace in the settlement of the American West:2 when do we hear about that? Similarly, Darrin McMahon’s history of happiness seems exceptional in a field where the vast majority of the studies seem to be devoted to depressing or dastardly ideas (The Pursuit of Happiness). Of course, historians chronicling the histories of enslavement, persecution, or the cataclysms of the first half of the twentieth century must catalog the terrors of those times, and there are many other persistent myths that need deflating. But history was not always written to depress us, or, on the flip side, to make us confident that we are morally superior to all those who have gone before us (even as we criticize other peoples in the past who believed precisely the same thing). In fact, if we revisit the work of Herodotus, who used to be called “the father of history” when we were modest (and patriarchal) enough to acknowledge fathers, we find a history of a very different sort, one that has been read with pleasure as well as vexation for centuries, and one whose spirit today’s writers and readers might profit from recapturing. Born about 484 bce, Herodotus, it is widely accepted, wrote up his Histories after decades of traveling, evidence gathering, and consulting of native informants; his ninth book leaves off in a way that makes us feel that this life’s work remained unfinished at his death (c. 425 bce), a tribute, perhaps to an insatiable curiosity that would never allow him to complete his tale. 1 Cf. McMahon, “Finding Joy” 103–​119. 2 Aron 2015. Cited with the author’s permission.

Suzanne Marchand, Flourishing with Herodotus In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0008

Flourishing with Herodotus  141 As the inventor of a new genre—​the Greek title could be equally well translated as “inquiries”—​Herodotus felt he had to begin by explaining that his aims were at once analytic and memorializing. He has conducted extensive “inquiries” into the long prehistory and dramatic unfolding of the Persian Wars, he writes, “so that human events do not fade with time. May the great and wonderful deeds—​some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians—​not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other” (Hdt. 1.1; Herodotus 3). This passage has been scrutinzed by readers for centuries, all of whom appreciate its epic and dramatic aspirations; more recently, we have come to appreciate resonances with contemporary medical and natural scientific inquiries. He was writing for Greek readers, of course, and his tale is especially Athenocentric, but often in subtle rather than overt ways, and in fact, readers for centuries have also found him to be, of the Greek writers, the most ecumenical. His many digressions give him an opportunity to listen to and recount other histories, and to weave those together with the history of the Greeks. Herodotus treats Egypt in particular as a place of marvels—​the rhetoric of the travelogue almost demands it—​but he also insists, to the annoyance of later more patriotic Greeks, that it is from the Egyptians that the Greeks borrowed their sciences, arts, and gods. He describes the virtues, as well as the vices, of the Persians. No writer is free of prejudices, wrote the Cambridge classicist T. R. Glover in 1924, but Herodotus found charm in “race after race,” and very rarely called any custom “bad”; “Tyrants themselves he could not quite dislike,” Glover noted, “any more than other people; they were sometimes so extremely interesting . . .” (64, 29). Herodotus bequeathed to historians ever afterward a legacy of panoramic curiosity, taking his mandate far beyond a mere recounting of the Greeks’ improbable victory, and building in a model, perhaps more preached than practiced, of taking more than one perspective into consideration. If Herodotus’ narrative emplotment and authorial perspective is complex, so, too, is his evidence and his assessment of it; he was not a writer to be constrained by requirements that he stick to relevant subjects and report only information garned from sources of impeccable credibility. Although Herodotus’ stated aim is to tell the story of the Persian Wars, he doesn’t even get to the Ionian Revolt until Book 5; his first four books constitute an extensive “oriental” prologue, in which he proffers ethnographic, botanical, zoological, geographical, and archaeological details about the Assyrians, Egyptians, Medes, and Scythians (to name just the major players). To read these first four books, in particular, is to confront a mass of data and stories

142  History and Human Flourishing collected from extensive travel and interviewing of informants from many nations. His method is to offer the reader what he has learned, even when the stories are so improbable that the author himself doesn’t credit them. Herodotus tells us the tale anyway, to give informants the benefit of the doubt, to illuminate modes of fibbing, to amuse us. Because they are so fulsome, if also so ambivalently narrated, his accounts of the sly wisdom of the Delphic Oracle, of Xerxes whipping the Hellespont, of the flying snakes of Arabia (he saw the skeletons!) have for centuries charmed, intrigued, mystified, and provoked his readers, and provided a veritable archive of interesting (if not always trustworthy) information on which a great deal of the history of the Near East rested, at least until the decipherments and archaeological finds of the later nineteenth century partially replaced, and partially confirmed, his evidence. And even afterward, his tales have been used to illuminate the worldviews of the Greeks and their neighbors in the fifth century bce; even stories whose details are not literally credible preserve for us vital information that help scholars bring that world to life. A final notable aspect of Herodotus’ history writing was his sober view of human fates and flourishings, very much the product, in turn, of his belief in the jealousy of the gods and the inevitably, eventual fall of all individuals and states which rise to great heights. His outlook was most clearly conveyed in the tale of the meeting of the wise Greek lawgiver and proto-​ democrat Solon with the vastly rich Lydian Croesus, in which Solon rejects Croesus’ definition of the fortunate man (himself) with the reminder that eventually, the gods (or chance) will revenge themselves (I.32); one can only count one’s life truly fortunate on one’s deathbed, when the risk of disaster has passed. The truth of Solon’s words is demonstrated by Croesus’ own fate, which involves the death of his son, the loss of his kingdom, and nearly being burned to death on a pyre. This whole set piece may well be a fiction; there are problems, for example, with placing the two men in the same place at the same time. The story, too, is meant to demonstrate the superiority of the hero cults of the Greek poleis over the rapaciousness of Lydian autocracy. It is one of the most didactic of all of the many stories in the nine books, and a tale no schoolbook version of The Histories since the Renaissance could do without. It tells us that Herodotus held a very complex view of the operation of free will, choice, and chance, and was deadly serious about the consequences of leaders’ decisions for the fates of their families and countrymen. He is perhaps the ultimate example of the historian able to charm as well as instruct, to coat moral lessons—​if lessons they be—​with fascinating and memorable

Flourishing with Herodotus  143 narrative glosses to demonstrate the interwovenness of history with virtually every other field of inquiry, including zoology, hydrology, and moral philosophy. Herodotus was read, and regularly lambasted, by ancient authors, and fragments, at least, were known through the Middle Ages. His “Renaissance,” like so many others, began in the later fifteenth century, with the full Latin translation made by Lorenzo Valla and circulated thanks to the new printing press. But for a long time, neither Herodotus, nor the near contemporary with whom he was paired (and invariably contrasted) from the nineteenth century forward, Thucydides, was the model for history writing: far from it. From the Renaissance through the seventeenth century, Roman historians who taught moral lessons to princes were preferred; clerics wrote “universal” histories with the book of Daniel or Eusebius, the author of a crucially important Christian prehistory (Preparation for the Gospel), as their models (Burke 151).3 Early modern historians, as Anthony Grafton and Donald Kelley have described, whether clerical or not, regularly employed incisive philological criticism and rigorous historical reasoning; their products, however, tended more to the didactic than to entertainment or narrative elegance (Kelley, Faces of History; Grafton, What Was History?). It was in the eighteenth century—​as these earlier traditions continued, and newer forms of philosophical, national, comparative, and cultural history emerged—​that the Greek writers began to play a larger role. Herodotus in particular became a historical hero, and I wonder if history writing has ever before or since experienced such a flourishing. In what follows, I would like to say a few things about historical inquiries in the eighteenth century, partly to revel in this period’s richness, but primarily to illuminate what we lost in the privileging of a gloomier, Thucydidean form of “scientific” history in the course of the early nineteenth century. I would then like to pose the question: is there a way back? What could we do to encourage more Herodotean turns of mind? To put it mildly: history writing in the eighteenth century was an extremely mixed bag.4 Most recognized practitioners of the art were clergymen or aristocrats, men (and occasionally women) with leisure time and/​or axes to grind, whether the latter were religious, political, or personal. A great deal 3 More popular in the early modern period were Sallust, Valerius, Tacitus, and Livy. 4 On history writing in the eighteenth century, in addition to previously cited texts, see Pocock, “Barbarism;” Miller, “History and Its Objects;” Reill, The German Enlightenment; Carhart, The Science of Culture”; Momigliano, “Eighteenth-​Century Prelude; and Murray, “Ancient History” 301–​306.

144  History and Human Flourishing of what we would recognize as history of some sort was combined with theology, geography, political science, philosophy, mythography, philology, and massively erudite attempts to reconcile biblical and world chronologies, a once highly esteemed enterprise which Johann Gottfried Herder in 1774 described as having become a mere “shouting match” (449). There were multivolume, multi-​authored universal histories, and the first national histories, such as David Hume’s History of England (1754–​61) and John Gast’s History of Greece (1788).5 Some who practiced the art still clung to Cicero’s definition: “Historia est magistra vitae,” history is the teacher of life, a definition which in courtly circles had been coupled with the expectation that the persons in need of such teaching were chiefly princes in waiting, and what they needed to know was how to rule well and die in peace, having avoided despotism or revolution. Others, such as the enormously popular writers of “universal” ancient histories, Humphrey Prideaux and Samuel Schuckford, thought the proper task of the historical inquirer was to connect sacred and profane histories, and to demonstrate to skeptics the truth of the scriptures. Then there were antiquaries—​local obsessives, or the Jansenist-​inflected scholars of France’s Académie des Inscriptions—​who practiced history by collecting and interrogating objects and arcane texts, in the hopes of illuminating forgotten men and moments, or of casting doubt on the historical distortions of the ignorant and powerful.6 Archival scribes, lawyers, and bureaucrats pulled together documents and created what we might call historically informed policy recommendations for political leaders. And finally, one could say that travelers, too, wrote history of a certain sort, collecting ethnographic information could be deployed, telescopically, to create histories of peoples with blank pages in their pasts. Far from being an ahistorical age, as was once charged, the eighteenth century was awash with histories of manners, histories of science, histories of religion, histories of constitution, even histories of women. Many of these were polemical, others superficial or based on what now seem extremely thin or questionable sources. What history’s proper ambit was remained rarely defined, and its standards of legitimacy remained fuzzy, though were vigorously discussed, not only by members of the Académie and of the Göttingen School but also by both clerics (such as the Abbé Millot) and skeptics (such as Henri 5 On Gast, see Murray, “Ireland Invents Greek History” 23–​106. On other early “Greek” histories, see Ceserani 138–​155. 6 See Gossman, Medievalism; Manuel, The Eighteenth Century; Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield; and Miller, History and Its Objects.

Flourishing with Herodotus  145 Bayle and Nicholas Lenglet du Fresnoy). Though they surely received lessons in history, it would be a stretch to suggest that Peter, Frederick, or Catherine the Great, or Louis XV, Joseph II, or George III, based many of their actions on historical knowledge or reasoning—​though we know that Louis XVI, on the eve of his execution, asked for Hume’s History of England so that he could study Charles I’s performance on the scaffold (Blanning 196). But history, one might say, was not divorced from delight, from the other sciences, from political and moral life. Englishmen felt they and their countrymen could learn things from Persians or Egyptians, as well as from Greeks and Romans; ill-​fated French kings could learn from English predecessors. Not surprisingly, the eighteenth century was, as I suggested earlier, the era of Herodotus’ greatest popularity as a writer and his widest use, as a model of the cosmopolitan researcher as well as a provider of reliable facts. Since the time of Joseph Scaliger, Herodotus’ “facts” had been deployed in the creation of learned world and biblical chronologies; this tradition simply accelerated in the early eighteenth century, culminating in Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) whose erudite number crunching depended on the crediting of Herodotus above all other sources on the critical subject of the progression of the Egyptian kings.7 Both Catholic and Protestant scholars lauded the Greek historian for providing facts which supported the truth of the Old Testament; one Jesuit admirer went so far as to pen a book titled Herodotus, Historian of the Hebrew People without Knowing It (Bonnaud). Mythographers of such different persuasions as Jacob Bryant, C. R. Dupuis, and Friedrich Creuzer all cherished his bountiful material on rituals, symbols, and the names and attributes of “oriental” gods (Dupuis, Origine; Creuzer 1810–​1812). But beyond chronology, biblical exegesis, and mythography, too, Herodotus was gaining a growing fan club. Early in the century, Charles Rollin insisted that the historian should avoid the “dry sterility of summaries [abrégés]” which focused on scriptures and leaders, and instead “study with care the manners [moeurs] of peoples, their genius, their laws, their habits, their costumes; and throughout to carefully note their character, their talents, their virtues, and their vices, as well as those of the

7 Buchwald and Feingold, Newton and the Origins of Civilization; Newton writes: “It is foolish to correct Herodotus by Manetho, Eratosthenes, Diodorus, and others who lived after the priests of Egypt had corrupted their antiquities much more than they had done in the days of Herodotus,” he wrote, ratifying here are elsewhere Herodotus as the most trustworthy and perhaps least naïve of the Greek historians. Revised History 91.

146  History and Human Flourishing people they govern . . .” (Rollin xxxv, ii). Naturally, Herodotus was one of this enormously successful historian’s heroes. As more Homeric translations came into circulation, the eighteenth century developed a taste for epic forms—​including epics on Herodotean themes, such as Richard Glover’s Leonidas (1737)—​and for complex plot structures, such as those deployed by Diderot in the The Nun or by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy. This made for readers who, like John Gillies, author of one of the first histories of Greece, found Thucydides’ strict adherence to chronology unsatisfying; moreover, Gillis wrote, echoing the opinion of one of Herodotus’ ancient admirers, Dionysos of Halicarnassus, one couldn’t help preferring Herodotus’ gaiety to the gloom of the author of the Peloponnesian Wars (299, 303). This love of gaiety and toleration for digressions signaled, in the words of James Moore and Ian Macgregor Morris, “the victory of Herodotus over Thucydides. A history limited, in the main, to a narrative of recent politics, disputes, and conflicts was being replaced by one which sought to preserve and understand its geographic and ethnographic nature and attempt a rationalised synthesis to understand the web of causation” (15). Some readers, eager to reform their own aristocracies and states, made a hero of Solon, and minutely investigated the story of his interview with Croesus.8 Others liked the fact that Herodotus had traveled and engaged in “commerce” with others, and they valued his information, despite the fact that it had been gathered so long ago. His measurements supplied points of departure for travelers to Egypt and Asia Minor, including James Rennell, the Surveyor General of India, who took time out of his career to write an eight-​hundred-​page book fact-​checking Herodotus’ geography (Rennell, The Geographical System of Herodotus). Following Herodotean leads, Russians mapped and measured “Scythia,” a very imprecisely sited territory somewhere to the East of the Black Sea and North of Persia, and the great naturalist Geoffrey St. Hilaire devoted great chunks of his Napoleonic expedition to checking fifth-​century facts about crocodiles.9 The Comte de Volney, scourge of oriental despotism, wrote a Chronology of Herodotus (1809); Vivant Denon, a key participant in Napoleon’s Egyptian caper, paid such close attention to Herodotus in his enormously popular account of 8 Bréquigny, Les vies de Solon. Plutarch had reported the story in full as well as many other details about Solon’s life, so this work, like others, drew even more heavily on his Parallel Lives. 9 A small sample of the Herodotean Scythian inquiries includes Lindner, Skythien; and Reichardt, Landeskunde. On crocodile fact-​checking, see Geoffroy-​Sainte Hilaire, “Description,” especially 269.

Flourishing with Herodotus  147 the expedition that, in the words of Andreas Schwab, “. . . Denon engages in a mimesis of and, at the same time, a competition with Herodotus in his ‘rediscovery’ of Egypt,” remarkable when one recalls that the distance between the two travelers’ voyages amounts to some 2,200 years (277). What is observable in this blooming, buzzing world of ancient history readers and writers is that Herodotus and his sources (most notably the Egyptian priests who provided much of the data reported in Book 2, but that is another story) are treated as something like contemporaries, persons whose intelligence, insight, and accuracy might just be equivalent to our own. It was, in fact, common for eighteenth-​century travelers to distrust their contemporaries, or even the evidence of their own eyes, and to trust instead the observations of the ancients, something that led both to major blunders but also to thinking about, for example, changes in landscapes or manners over time that might make ancient and modern knowledge compatible.10 We might say this was a world in which the modern had not been fully victorious over the ancients. And it was certainly a period in which ancient history was not thought to be irrelevant to any discussion at hand, whether that concerned crocodiles or constitutions. It was also an age which valued, as part of its “histories,” details about everyday life in the East as well as the West, curious about such subjects as which peoples offered sacrifices or ate pork—​if only, for some, because these details might help to secure sacred historical truth. This was, I submit, not only a period of historical flourishing, but one in which history assisted—​without claiming monopoly rights, or insisting on particularizing, nationally centered contextualization—​so many other subjects of inquiry to flourish. But this was not a form of flourishing that would last. There is a complicated story to be told about how it came to be that Thucydides, and not Herodotus, became the model for scientific history in the 1820s and 1830s, championed by such profession founders as Leopold von Ranke, George Grote, and J. G. Droysen.11 What the nineteenth century added was not only source criticism, although this did hurt Herodotus’ reputation as so much of the early (and “oriental”) part of his narrative was based on information he gleaned from informants, rather than procured directly, through autopsy, interviews with direct (Greek) participants, or the inspection of documents. It also deepened the distance between ancients

10 As in, for example, discussions about the landscape of Thermoplyae. See Morris 231–​264. 11 See Muhlack 179–​209; also Morley; and Lianeri 331–​353; Marchand, forthcoming.

148  History and Human Flourishing and moderns and applied new canons of relevance and logics of causation. This process actually begins, I would argue, with Voltaire, who shared Rollin’s commitment to widening history’s ambit, but, as Pierre Force has argued, was uniquely committed to a presentist conception of the relevance of ancient and universal histories,12 and, I would add, more than most of his contemporaries, whether skeptics or defenders of the faith, eager to secularize historical narratives. Voltaire’s view, stated succinctly in his entry for “History” in the Encyclopedia, was: “If you have nothing to tell us other than that one Barbarian has replaced another Barbarian on the banks of the Oxus and the Jaxartes, in what way are you useful to the public?” (Voltaire, “History”). As concerns Herodotus, who assumed a central role in Voltaire’s writings on history of the 1760s, Voltaire’s view was that his Histories were only useful to remind western readers of the Greeks’ remarkable victory over the tyrannical “orientals.”13 Of course, such a statement depends on the understanding that the history of such “barbarians” had nothing to do with the history of Frenchmen, a claim Rollin, Newton, and even Dupuis would have rejected out of hand. It is only by dint of excluding religious universals and “irrelevant” foreign cultures that Voltaire was able to define the utility of universal history in a way that largely ignored the contributions of the ancient Near East. The exclusion of the Near East was not only a blow to what we might think of today as the proper kind of world history; it was also a blow—​as it was intended to be—​to all of those writing histories of ancient religious life, whether Jesuits, deists, or atheists. But it averted a number of problems, notably speculation on “oriental” subjects where datable sources were thin, original languages remained unreadable, and religious polemics raged. A pivot in Voltaire’s direction—​at least in the privileging of the present, the exclusion of the East, and emphasis on secular developments—​would not fully take place until the 1820s and 1830s, when German historians, in particular, extricated themselves from religious polemics and philosophical speculation (here Voltaire was the scapegoat, not the hero). It was at this time that professors stopped both teaching universal history and trusting “oriental” documents (even as, in many cases, the decipherments began to 12 See Force, especially 461–​467. 13 “The superiority of this small, generous, and free people over all of enslaved Asia, is perhaps the most glorious thing amongst men. . . . When one reads modern history, the victory of Lepanto reminds us of that of Salamis, and one compares Don Juan of Austria and Colonus to Themistocles and Eurybiades. This is perhaps the sole fruit that one can harvest from the knowledge of these remote times” (Voltaire, “Le Pyrrhonisme de l’Histoire” 26).

Flourishing with Herodotus  149 make some originals legible for a specialized tribe of “orientalists,” whose status remained, for a long time, not particularly respectable), and made the imitation of Thucydides—​the cynical realist and student of power—​their mantra. As this day dawned, it brought with it a narrowing of the scope and aims of history, to the disciplining of historical narration to describe causes and consequences in a much more linear way, to the exclusion, for the most part, of digressions and cross-​cultural comparisons, and with information gleaned from undatable texts or non-​ European informants (remember those Egyptian priests!). A different sort of flourishing for history as a profession ensued; history as a national (and often nationalist) science, history, as Bonnie Smith pointed out long ago,14 with machismo practices and mostly male protagonists, history with the religious prejudices supposedly written out, history in which the ancient Orient has become—​as for Hegel—​nothing more than a dream, Herodotus, for Macaulay, nothing more than “a delightful child” (Smith, The Gender of History; Macaulay 168). Of course the nineteenth century saw histories of Egypt and of Assyria, and the continued use of Herodotus as a source for these endeavors. He remained in constant use by travelers to Egypt and the Near East, and by biblical scholars. But increasingly, universal history and the quest for the Casaubonian “key to all mythologies” became amateurish pursuits, cordoned off from professional history and philology;15 this is something Ranke learned to his cost when his own World History, published near the end of his life, came under scathing fire from specialized orientalists. The professionals only scoffed when the Egyptologist Georg Ebers, having decided that he lacked the direct historical documentation to write a history of Egypt in the age of Amasis II (r. 570–​526 bce), wrote a romance novel on the subject for his mother, based heavily on Herodotus’ Book 2.16 One can certainly accuse Ebers—​as others have accused Herodotus himself!—​of “orientalist” tendencies, but it is striking that in the age in which professional historians were emphasizing the pastness of the past, and the uniqueness 14 Smith 2001. 15 See here Kidd, The World of Mr. Casaubon. 16 On being presented with the manuscript of An Egyptian Princess, dedicated to himself, Ebers’ mentor Karl Richard Lepsius recoiled in horror, remarking “Oh, please!” (Aber ich bitte Sie!). Eventually, after counseling Ebers to make the manuscript more Grecophilic, Lepsius permitted the dedication to stand. “But now,” he instructed, “leave this sort of thing aside and don’t compromise your name as a scholar in future with this sort of extravagance.” As Lepsius predicted, other scholars cheerfully set about ridiculing this “extravagance,” and assaulted the 572 footnotes, causing Ebers much irritation, and forcing him to revise them continuously. On Ebers, see Marchand, “George Ebers.”

150  History and Human Flourishing of each national slice of it, Ebers’s 1864 An Egyptian Princess made the leap of transhistorical and transcultural understanding, incorporating, as had Herodotus, sympathetic—​if not entirely politically correct—​portrayals of Egyptians, Persians, and Greeks. But Ebers’s novel sold, winning the hearts, in particular, of female readers. By 1894, An Egyptian Princess had been translated into sixteen languages, including Arabic; by 1910, the German original appeared in its twenty-​first edition (Ebers 191). Ebers would go on to write numerous other historical novels, many of them featuring female protagonists, and reveling in Herodotean ethnographic, zoological, and culinary detail. It is entirely possible that more fin de siècle readers learned their ancient history from Ebers than from Ranke or Mommsen; and that may be no bad thing. Since the time of Ranke and Mommsen, academic historians have generally felt the need to abide by their Thucydidean strictures, to write “serious” histories in which causes are featured, speculation is outlawed, and most authors stick to recounting the story of one nation or linguistic group. Especially in recent decades, the frailties of past actors are emphasized more powerfully than their achievements. We talk more of exclusions than inclusions, of the abuses of power than its wise use, of the prejudices exhibited by thinkers more than their moments of open-​mindedness, and it seems to me that it might be time for us to correct the balance. Of course, we can’t go back to the eighteenth century, and we can’t all (I definitely should not) write historical novels. But if we are to move in the direction of the “eudaimonic” humanities James Pawelski advocates, we might take on board some of the things Herodotus and Georg Ebers—​rather than Voltaire, Thucydides, and Ranke—​taught us about the wider practices of history (Pawelski 207–​213). What their examples suggest is that we might do well to widen our notion of “relevance” and engage in some digressions and storytelling; to describe the religious rituals as well as the battles, to describe the virtues as well as the prejudices of the peoples of the past—​including the virtues of white, male Europeans, and the unpalatable behavior of non-​Europeans, which is sometimes skirted over in well-​meaning attempts at self-​criticism. We could underline the turns of fortune that strike our Croesuses low; we could, like Solon, remind those with the greatest advantages just how much harder it is for the poor and disenfranchised to make their own luck (cf. Hdt. I.32). Like Ebers—​or Steven Aron—​we could lecture more often about periods of peaceful interaction between cultures, and work to temper our culture’s taste

Flourishing with Herodotus  151 for histories of war and ethnic conflict. We might embrace, rather than condemn, some of the wider popular practices of history in our day, especially in our teaching: historical video games, movies and mini-​series, and historical role-​playing, and admit that sometimes these too are “good” uses of history. And we might try to inject into our lectures some more joy and even—​ looking back to Hdt. 1.1—​some praise for “great and wonderful” deeds, accomplished by both the Greeks and the barbarians. Can we, in our research lives as well, introduce some Herodotean turns of mind? One of the great historians of the past generation has perhaps gone farther than anyone else in testing this proposition: Natalie Zemon Davis, who was willing to speculate about the calculations made by the clever peasant Bertrande de Rols, an early modern French Penelope, who decided to accept an imposter husband after her very flawed “Odysseus” went off to the wars in Spain. Davis was even willing to construct an imaginary dialogue between Maria Sibylla Merian, Glikl bas Judah Leib, and Marie de l’Incarnation (Davis, Women on the Margins). Is it any wonder that Davis’s books—​with titles such as Fiction in the Archives, Pardon Tales, and Trickster Travels—​are so widely read, so memorable, so controversial? Those who have had the pleasure to meet her also know that Natalie Davis personifies human flourishing and has been an inspiration not only to several generations of historians, perhaps especially women, but also to scholars and writers across the humanities, and across the world. I think she would agree that history needs some speculation, some trust in foreign informants, some ordinary people, and yes, even some flying snakes to flourish, and to contribute in turn to the sparking of some of the greatest of positive human experiences: empathy, wonder, to reprise the Enlightened historian of ancient Greece, John Gillies, gaiety. It might do us good to take some lessons from the likes of Natalie Davis and her distant ancestor, Herodotus.

Works Cited Aron, Stephen. “What Can’t We All Get Along?” Invited lecture, Modern History Colloquium, Louisiana State University, March 13, 2015. Blanning, T. C. The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions That Made Modern Europe, 1648–​1815. Viking, 2007. Bonnaud, Jacques-​Julien. Hérodote, historien du peuple hébreu sans le savoir. Jean Mossy, 1785. Bréquigny, Louis-​Georges. Les vies de Solon et de Publicola. Compagnie des Libraires, 1748.

152  History and Human Flourishing Buchwald, J. Z., and Mordechai Feingold. Newton and the Origins of Civilization. Princeton UP, 2012. Burke, Peter. “A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450–​1700.” History and Theory 5, no. 2, 1966, pp. 135–​152. Carhart, Michael C. The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany. Harvard UP, 2007. Ceserani, Giovanna. “Modern Histories of Ancient Greece: Genealogies, Contexts, and Eighteenth-​Century Narrative Historiography.” The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts, edited by Alexandra Lianeri, Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 138–​155. Creuzer, Friedrich. Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen. 2 vols. Karl Wilhelm Leske, 1810–​1812. Davis, Natalie Z. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-​Century Lives. Belknap Press, 1997. Dupuis, Charles Robert. Origine de Tous les Cultes, ou Religion Universelle. 12 vols. Agasse, 1795. Ebers, Georg. Mein Erstling: “Eine ägyptische Königstochter.” Adolf Titze, 1894. Force, Pierre. “Voltaire and the Necessity of Modern History.” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 6, no. 3, 2009, 457–484. Geoffroy-​Sainte Hilaire, Isidore, and Étienne Geoffrey-​Sainte Hilaire. “Description des Reptiles qui se trouvent en Égypte.” Description de l’Égypte ou Recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été faites en Égypte pendant l’expedition de l’armée francaise, vol. 1, Histoire Naturelle, Paris: L’Imprimerie Imperiale, 1809, 115–120. Gillies, John. The History of Ancient Greece, vol. 3. J. J. Tourneisen and J. L. Grand, 1790. Glover, T. R. Herodotus. U of California P, 1924. Gossman, Lionel. Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment. Johns Hopkins UP, 1968. Grafton, Anthony. What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge UP, 2007. Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts. Erster Band” (1774). Herders Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 6, edited by Bernhard Suphan, Weidmann, 1883, 193–501. Herodotus. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Edited by Robert B. Strassler and translated by Andreas L. Purvis, Anchor Books, 2007. Kelley, Donald R. Faces of History from Herodotus to Herder. Yale UP, 1998. Kidd, Colin. The World of Mr. Casaubon: Britain’s Wars of Mythography, 1700–​1870. Cambridge UP, 2017. Levine, Joseph. Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England. Cornell UP, 1991. Lindner, Friedrich. Skythien und die Skythen des Herodot. London, 1841. Macaulay, Thomas. “History.” The Works of Lord Macaulay: Essays and Biographies, vol. 1, Longmans, 1896. Manuel, Frank. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. Atheneum, 1967. Marchand, Suzanne. “Georg Ebers, Sympathetic Egyptologist.” For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, edited by Ann Blair and Anja-​Silva Goering, Brill, 2016, 917–932. Marchand, Suzanne. “Herodotus as Anti-​Classical Toolbox.” in Herodotus in the Nineeenth Century, edited by Thomas Harrison and Joseph Skinner. Cambridge, 2020, pp. 71–​99.

Flourishing with Herodotus  153 McMahon, Darrin M. The Pursuit of Happiness: A History from the Greeks to the Present. Penguin Books, 2007. McMahon, Darrin M. “Finding Joy in the History of Emotions.” Doing Emotions History, edited by Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, U of Illinois P, 2014, pp. 103–​119. Miller, Peter N. History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture Since 1500. Cornell UP, 2017. Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Eighteenth-​Century Prelude to Mr. Gibbon.” Momigliano, Sesto Contributo alla Storia degli Studia Classici, Edizioni di Storia et Letteratura, 1980, pp. 249–​263. Moore, James, and Ian Macgregor Morris. “History in Revolution? Approaches to the Ancient World in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Reinventing History: The Enlightenment Origins of Ancient History, edited by James Moore, Ian Macgregor Morris, and Andrew J. Bayliss, University of London, School of Advanced Study, 2008, pp. 3–​29. Morley, Neville, and Alexandra Lianeri. “The Persian Wars as the ‘Origin’ of Historiography: Ancient and Modern Orientalism in George Grote’s History of Greece.” Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium, ­edited by Emma Bridges, Edith Hall, and P. J. Rhodes, Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 331–​353. Morris, Ian Macgregor. “‘Shrines of the Mighty’: Rediscovering the Battlefields of the Persian Wars.” Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium, edited by Emma Bridges, Edith Hall, and P. J. Rhodes, Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 231–​264. Muhlack, Ulrich. “Herodotus and Thucydides in the View of Nineteenth-​Century German Historians.” The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts, edited by Alexandra Lianeri, Cambridge UP, 201, pp. 179–​209. Murray, Oswyn. “Ireland Invents Greek History: The Lost Historian John Gast.” Hermathena 1865, Winter 2008, pp. 23–​106. Murray, Oswyn. “Ancient History in the Eighteenth Century.” The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts, edited by Alexandra Lianeri. Cambridge UP, 2011, 179–​209. Newton, Isaac. Revised History of Ancient Kingdoms: A Complete Chronology. Edited by Larry and Marion Pierce. Master Books, 2009. Pawelski, James. “Better Together? The Sciences and the Humanities in the Quest for Human Flourishing.” Handbook of Positive Psychology, edited by Shane J. Lopez et al., Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 207–​213. Pocock, J. G. A. Barbarism and Religion, vol. I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–​1764. Cambridge UP, 1999. Reichardt, Carl. Landeskunde von Skythen nach Herodot. E. Schneider, 1889. Reill, Peter Hanns. The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism. U of California P, 1975. Rennell, James. The Geographical System of Herodotus Examined; And Explained by a Comparison with Those of Other Ancient Authors, and with Modern Geography. W. Bulmer and Co., 1800. Rollin, Charles. Histoire ancienne des Egyptienes, des Carthaginois, des Assyriens, des Babyloniens, des Mèdes et des Perses, des Macédoniens, des Grecs. J. Estienne, 1730. Schwab, Andreas. “The Rediscovery’ of Egypt: Herodotus and His Account of Egypt in the Voyage dans las Basse et la Haute-​Égypte (1802) by Vivant Denon.” Brill’s Companion

154  History and Human Flourishing to the Reception of Herodotus in Antiquity and Beyond, edited by Jessica Priestley and Vasiliki Zali, Brill, 2016, pp. 254–​277. Smith, Bonnie G. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Harvard UP, 2001. Voltaire. “History.” 1765. Translation from the University of Michigan Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​ cgi/​t/​text/​text-​idx?c=​did;cc=​did;rgn=​main;view=​text;idno=​did2​222.0000.088, Voltaire, “Le Pyrrhonisme de l’Histoire.” Mélanges Historiques, vol. 1 from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire, vol. 14. Frères Hartmann a la Haye, Stuttgart, pp. 5–114, 1829.

8 On the Consolations of History Darrin M. McMahon

People grow more interested in history as they age. Or at least that has been my experience. For many years I heard words to that effect from friends of my parents at parties—​ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, who claimed never to have liked their history classes at school, but who read books and watched television documentaries as adults, while regretting they hadn’t learned more when they were younger. I am now of a certain age myself, and so occasionally people say something similar at my own parties. I was never really that interested in history, but as I get older. . . . Over the years I’ve also encountered a number of returning students in my classes—​people pursuing degrees later in life, after a career or military service or missed opportunities of one sort or another—​who have echoed the thought often enough to make me think there is something to it. Why might it be so? Why would the past become more interesting, more compelling, as we age? For one thing, surely, the older we get, the less the future seems a limitless horizon. It narrows or shrinks, or at least our perspective on it does. And as the boundless expanse of youth closes in, we see less in front of us than we did. At the same time, the past seems to loom larger, occupying an ever-​greater portion of our existence and our total time on earth. There is more of it, and as it piles up, it can seem less “fixed” and set in stone than it may once have done. Our attitudes evolve and change, and with them, we discover, the past does, too. Reflecting on the perception of the passage of time, the retired literary scholar Victor Brombert observes something similar. Perhaps as one ages, he muses, one becomes more noticeably aware that everything that lies behind us appears to be in motion and unsettled, that memories of separate periods tend to affect one another, that the past, as perceived in time, is subject to mutations.

Darrin M. McMahon, On the Consolations of History In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0009

156  History and Human Flourishing Brombert is writing of memory, not history, and as historians are quick to point out, there is a difference. It lies in that perilous gap between what one actively recalls and what was. Still, memory and history are often closely related, and in effect Brombert offers psychological insight into how a heightened sense of the one might lead to greater interest in the other. As we grow older, our awareness of time’s ravages—​its many tricks, challenges, and changes—​is enhanced. And with that enhanced awareness can come a greater sensitivity not just to our own changing memories, but to those of others, and to the ways in which history and historical forces move through our lives, whether we want them to or not. The experience of aging prompts greater awareness of the past. Or put another way, we become more aware of history as we become part of it, more sensitive, by dint of lived experience, to the transmutations wrought by time. Having endured for a while, we grow more invested in the force we perceive to have shaped us, and to which we feel we belong. That same feeling can lead easily enough to nostalgia—​nostalgia for a past we have known or (mis)-​remember, or simply nostalgia for a time when we were young(er). The sentiment can affect entire generations. Consider the case of what Germans call Ostalgie—​a play on the words Ost (East) and Nostalgie (nostalgia), meaning nostalgia for the vanished GDR. A complex form of shared historical memory, such collective nostalgia is clearly spurred by multiple causes, ranging from economic insecurity to political conviction. But one of them, scholars have argued, is simply the fact that people have a tendency to recall fondly the good old days of youth, no matter where they lived, or how they did so, even behind the Iron Curtain. Nor are historians themselves immune from the sentiment. One thinks of the aging radical who revisits the past to relive heroic struggles of younger years or the veteran who studies the history of a particular theater or campaign in which he or she has taken part. Yet as these latter examples also indicate, the desire to connect with the past of one’s youth need not be motivated exclusively, or even chiefly, by nostalgia. The connection can also be therapeutic and empowering, motivated by the desire to better understand and process what one (or one’s people) has endured. Forms of identity history frequently offer this kind of attraction, particularly to historically marginalized or oppressed groups for whom the understanding of a collective past can serve as the gateway to the shared recognition of sacrifices and struggles, and the necessary impetus to pursue change. History here is a source of pain but also pride, and the way

On the Consolations of History  157 to alternative futures. Similarly, the pull of the past can draw those seeking to come to terms with trauma. Mario Vargas Llosa’s haunting The Feast of the Goat, an historical novel about the brutal regime of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, features a perfect (albeit fictional) example. One of the novel’s protagonists, Urania Cabral, is betrayed by her father, a leading official in the Trujillo regime, and then raped as a young girl by Trujillo himself. With the help of nuns, she escapes to the United States, where she is educated and then spends much of her free time as an adult, living alone, immersed in Dominican history, above all of the Trujillo era. Her bedroom, we are told, contains little else: “testimonies, memoirs, lots of histories” (Llosa 46). Urania describes this interest as a way of staying in touch with her roots. But clearly it is intended as a kind of makeshift therapy to deal with the trauma of a rape at once physical and symbolic, individual and national. There are surely worse forms of therapy. I have known returning veterans who have administered to themselves in this way, seeking to process tours of duty abroad by grappling with their deeper historical origins and significance. Often these students are drawn first to military history, though their interest need hardly remain there. Teachers seek to open doors, and one of the things that historians especially try to cultivate is the ability to understand, and even empathize with, people—​dead people—​whose experience is necessarily different from our own. Time travel, in this respect, is like foreign travel in the other country of the past. It is a way to guard against provincialism and insularity, and to temper one’s own experience by comparison and contrast with that of others. And so one can move easily enough from the military history of Afghanistan, say, or Iraq to that of Antietam, Austerlitz, or Thermopylae. And as bands of brothers and sisters link arms across the ages, they sometimes clasp hands even farther afield, reaching out to connect with the histories and cultures in the places they have served, or with those they have not. Neither nostalgia nor efforts to come to terms with one’s past, of course, are monopolies of the aged, even if the incidence of the two probably tends to increase with the years. But one example of historical interest that is more often than not a late-​onset development is interest in family history and genealogy. On more than one occasion I have overheard retirees in the archives, working in hushed excitement, and it is very clear that, unlike Urania Cabral, these people are motivated primarily by the desire to connect to their roots, tracing the threads of their own lives, and those of their families, deep into the past.

158  History and Human Flourishing Why should people be drawn to this type of history in their later years? True, genealogy is not solely a late-​onset phenomenon, and it is surely the case that many people trace their roots in retirement simply because that is when they have the time to do so. But there is something else going on. Witness the popularity of such programs as PBS’s Finding Your Roots or the multi-​million-​dollar industry driving traffic at sites like ancestries.com and genealogy.com. The vogue for family history and ancestry is clearly a current cultural phenomenon with wider social meanings. It is also deeply personal. To trace one’s genealogy is to follow a lifeline to the past, and yet that lifeline connects us to something beyond ourselves, so that we don’t just drown or disappear in the ocean of time. Those of great accomplishment may have the luxury to think of posterity as a kind of afterlife. Cicero said as much, as did the great French philosophe Denis Diderot, for whom the future offered the prospect of a surrogate heaven, the immortality of fame. But for most of us, whose lives and labors cannot hope to command the attention of strangers to come, family history provides a continuum of sorts, and the family itself a way to live on. It seems to me that the negotiation with mortality that is at stake on at least some level in family history is very often at stake in history more generally. History, after all, is the study of the dead. And while that study can be as varied and life-​affirming as life itself, it is also true that every scrap of evidence we uncover about the past—​every document in the archives, every recovered object or memorial —​is a memento mori, a reminder of death. In that sense, history inevitably involves a confrontation with mortality, but with the paradox that the act of recovering the past is also a means to defy it. Every historian is a necromancer of sorts, a shaman, and a priest, who seeks to bring the dead back to life and to make them whisper to us across time. History, in that respect, occupies some of the same ground as religion, and it is partly this proximity, I would like to suggest, that helps to explain both its attraction in later life and its positive role, more generally, in human flourishing. That history and religion might occupy common ground gains a certain plausibility from the fact that religion, as specialists observe, is generally backward-​facing in its focus on a sacred time of origins that serves to explain humanity’s subsequent future (Taylor xiii; Gauchet ch. 2). And whereas history is always engaged to some extent in a negotiation with death, that negotiation is even more explicit in religion, which invariably attempts to discern the meaning of life by reference to its final boundaries.

On the Consolations of History  159 Still, many commentators have emphasized the sharp divergence between the two. Mircea Eliade, for one, made that divergence a centerpiece of his classic Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Traditional and archaic religions, he argued, are invariably backward-​facing in their desire to seek out and relive the primordial acts or archetypes that occurred among the ancestors and founders long ago, in illo tempore, ab origine. But for Eliade, those archetypes are mythic and eternal, and so explicitly nonhistorical. They can be accessed and recovered again and again through ritual, when one taps into eternity, entering sacred or mythic time, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. But these acts and archetypes are not discrete, inimitable events in time. Indeed, in Eliade’s reckoning, traditional religions (and hence what he calls “traditional man”) have a “negative attitude toward history.” They “defend themselves against it,” seeking to abolish or deny it by assimilating all events into the common forms that give structure to an otherwise chaotic universe: Whether he abolishes it periodically, whether he devaluates it by perpetually finding transhistorical models and archetypes for it, whether, finally, he gives it a metahistorical meaning (cyclical theory, eschatological significations, and so on), the man of the traditional civilizations accorded the historical event no value in itself; in other words, he did not regard it as a specific category of his own mode of existence. (Eliade 141)

Whereas traditional man experiences “the terror of history” and tries to escape it via transcendence, “modern man,” by contrast, is “historical man” through and through. He “consciously and voluntarily creates history,” and he views the past not as a repository of archetypes and unchanging forms but as a series of events of independent meaning and particularity, made by men and women themselves. Denying all transcendent appeal, modern man must continue to wrestle with the specter of meaninglessness (the source of history’s terror). But his historical orientation is at odds with the stance of traditional religion. Historians themselves have articulated a similar dichotomy between history and religion. History, in this telling, forms a part of what the late historian Peter Gay famously described as the Enlightenment’s “modern paganism,” part of a secular turn away from revelation and myth toward empiricism, reason, and science. For Gay, the emergence of history as a discipline and practice in the eighteenth century was a product of the Enlightenment’s

160  History and Human Flourishing attempt to turn history into a science and to dismiss, often with ridicule and scorn, the credulity, fanaticism, and prejudice of earlier religious authors. Gay’s heroes—​Voltaire, Gibbon, and David Hume—​did the latter particularly well, and they helped to hasten the general transition from an older humanist form of history, the ars historica of the Renaissance, to the new ars critica of the long eighteenth century, which emphasized, as its name implies, critical thinking, along with the intelligent weighing of evidence, and the importance of consulting primary sources. As one early innovator, the Genevan-​born scholar Jean Le Clerc, argued at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the “new philosophy” elaborated since Descartes, with its insistence on skepticism, interrogation, and doubt, demanded, in turn, “a new history”: rigorous, reasonable, source-​based, skeptical, and critical in the face of the received prejudices, pieties, and traditions of the past (Grafton 12). Not all the histories of the age lived up to that high standard, of course, and as Gay himself acknowledged, the Enlightenment’s attempt to turn history into a science was not always entirely successful. And yet the movement in the direction of greater critical examination of the past gave impetus to an array of scholarly practices and methods that could easily put history at odds with religion. As Hume famously affirmed, the eighteenth century was “the historical age,” and there can be no doubt that some of its historians, Hume included, delighted in casting doubt on such matters as the veracity of miracles or the historical accuracy of religious texts. So there was, then, some truth to Gay’s general contention that the emergence of modern historiography in the age of Enlightenment placed it in tension with older, religious forms of inquiry. The noted historian J. G. A. Pocock has gone so far to suggest that the eighteenth century witnessed the gradual displacement of theology by history as the dominant mode of orientation and knowledge. And yet what Pocock, like other more recent scholars, has also shown is the extent to which this same displacement grew out of religious inquiry and theological debates. The ars critica drew heavily on philological and hermeneutical methods sharpened since the Reformation. Le Clerc began his career as a theologian and biblical scholar, and Gibbon, the greatest historian of the age, was steeped in sacred and church history. Indeed, as other scholars have recently made clear, the very category of “religion”—​used henceforth to encapsulate and describe a great variety of religious phenomenon throughout the world—​was itself an innovation of the Enlightenment, an “invention” of the long eighteenth century (Harrison; Hunt, Jacob, and Mijndhardt; Stroumsa). The point being that although, as

On the Consolations of History  161 both Eliade and Gay argued in their separate ways, “religion” and “history” may have evolved with a degree of tension in the age of Enlightenment, they also did so through symbiosis, adapting out of, and on, common ground. Given that fact, it is not terribly surprising that each should borrow from the other. The ways in which certain varieties of religion, and above all Christianity, became increasingly historical in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries is a familiar tale. Less so is the story of how history (and historians) borrowed from religion. It is perfectly clear, though, to take one concrete example, that well into the nineteenth century, the Bible continued to furnish a stock of archetypes, character patterns, and narrative tropes (exodus and deliverance, transgression and redemption) that continued to influence ostensibly secular historians (Burrow; Walzer; Sheehan). But arguably the influence of religion was even more pervasive. Eliade himself called attention to that influence, acknowledging that the dichotomies he had originally drawn between religion and history, the traditional and the modern, were too stark. As he conceded in a slightly later work, The Sacred and the Profane, one could find “vestiges” or “survivals” of “the behavior of archaic man in even the most highly industrialized societies.” He concluded that “[T]‌he majority of men ‘without religion’ still hold to pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies” (50, 209). Religion and the modern, religion and history, were more mingled than he had originally acknowledged. With regard to the examination of the past, that is especially clear in the case of certain varieties of German historical inquiry in the nineteenth century, broadly associated with the current known as historicism. Twentieth-​ century observers have described them with a variety of revealing labels, speaking of the “theology of history” or of historical thought as “secularized eschatology,” or even of “history’s religion” (Geschichtsreligion), the religion of history (Löwith; Hardtwig). Writing in these modes, historians and philosophers of history employed their understandings and interpretations of the past to do some of the same work, and achieve some of the same ends, as more traditional religion. Thus, to take one of the most prominent examples, the philosophy of world history espoused by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel became in practice a “theodicy,” a justification of an eschatological final freedom that lay on humanity’s horizon—​and of the many sacrifices required to get there—​as well as a chronicle and account of the meaning and end of human existence. Similarly, the historical materialism of Marx, although militant in its apparent rejection of religion, for which it offered itself as a replacement, nonetheless was proffered as a solution to “the

162  History and Human Flourishing riddle of history” that explained the whole of human development as a preparation for humanity’s ultimate return to our species-​being (Stedman Jones; Slezkine). In both these cases, quite clearly, history was pressed into service to do one of the chief things that religions do so well—​provide meaning and make coherence of the welter of human events (and so, as Eliade would have it, withstand their “terror”). And insofar as individuals can see themselves as participants in the grand dramas that history reveals, they can foster a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves, and see their own actions as contributing to larger enterprises that lead ultimately to their liberation from bondage. To provide a solution to the riddle of existence, to answer the question of why we are here, where we are going, and how we should best get there, was to perform a task that religions had generally performed. In these respects, history and historical reflection crowded into religion’s territory and muscled onto its ground. As one of the fathers of modern historical inquiry, Leopold von Ranke, revealingly declared, “In all of history God dwells, lives, and can be recognized.” The love for the life of the past, he believed, this “inner drive to learn about antiquity in its depth leads to God.” And likewise, in revealing the tapestry of the past, the interwoven “connectedness of History,” historians, too, exercised a religious function, serving as “priests and teachers,” and so, in their way, serving God (Ranke 4). I believe that history and historians continue to poach on religious ground, if seldom as avowedly as Ranke, or in as grand and world-​historical a fashion as Hegel, Marx, or the religions of history of the nineteenth century. Their means are more subtle now. But the appropriations are there to be taken all the same, and they often are put to similar effect. For as with religion, history can be good for human flourishing. Take the question of meaning. Positive psychologists, who make it their business to study the causes and correlates of human happiness, have made it abundantly clear that developing a sense of meaning and purpose in life is a vital element of human flourishing (Seligman 250–​261; Smith). Meaning can be derived from any number of sources, of course, in order to provide what Victor Frankl famously called “logotherapy,” the therapy of meaning, administered in his case by those crumbs of purpose meted out in the Nazi death camps that helped him as an inmate to survive. But religions—​or in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, religion’s history—​are particularly good at providing meaning. And while few people today probably read works of history in the hope of revelation, as many of Hegel or Marx’s readers’ certainly did, seeking in the past the key to the future and the purpose of human

On the Consolations of History  163 striving; and while few people today are likely to view history as a unified whole, making up a totality or ordered enterprise as did Ranke, they still, I think, search for at least some semblance of meaning, some connectedness and coherence, that ties together otherwise random events. As Maya Jasanoff insists in her contribution to this volume, historians provide that. Their work offers stories we can tell ourselves that help to make sense of otherwise baffling sequences and developments. History speaks of purposes and ends. It identifies causes and continuities. It defines narratives for both peoples and nations. It can account for origins. History, in short, can still provide respite from the terror of meaninglessness. It can also provide a sense of connection or belonging to something greater than oneself. That is another of the elements that positive psychologists regularly identify as essential to human flourishing, and that religions very often provide (Lim and Putnam). I noted earlier some of the ways in which history does this directly—​in family history and genealogy, for example, or in the chronicles of movements, struggles, or groups with a shared identity. But there may be something else at play, too, the potential for a more enchanted type of belonging, one that is less tangible, certainly, but that follows, I think, from some of the thoughts developed earlier. It is related to a kind of mystical experience that James Joyce describes in the final lines of his great short story “The Dead,” in which the tale’s protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, stares out into the night after an intense evening of celebration and painful revelation. He fancies he sees the shades of the departed. “His soul,” Joyce writes, “had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. . . . His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.” The boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the departed, the individual and all who have come before dissolve as snow envelops the land, binding them together into a communion of souls across time. The story ends in a kind of ecstatic peace: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (Joyce 97). The sense of unity is with the whole of humanity, all who have lived and all who have died. Gabriel Conroy, in effect, has had a modern experience of that sacred time of which Eliade speaks, and which religions so regularly offer. It seems to me that history—​whether experienced directly before some decaying monument, on an ancient battlefield, on parchment, or the printed page—​can do the same, giving us an intimation not only of the immensity

164  History and Human Flourishing of time, but of our immersion in it, allowing us, as it were, to find our place among the dead and its ghosts. These vivid encounters with the shades of the departed, who beckon us to join them in a kind of fellowship that defies time, can be at once haunting and serene but also epiphanic, as if a tear in time’s fabric might allow us a vision that extends far beyond our own.1 I have no way of knowing for sure, but I fancy that Edward Gibbon experienced something of the sort when, as he famously tells us, he sat “at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764 . . . musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter . . . [and] the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind” (Gibbon 160). Here was an epiphany of succession and transformation, finitude, decay, and death, yet one that opened out into a vison of continuity and everlasting life. Perhaps those friars singing in the crepuscular light moved the man in a way that was in keeping with the phenomenon I describe here, prompting an experience that although not strictly speaking religious, was at least historically religious, one that made a bit of religion of the past. Gibbon, it is true, was hardly a mystical man. And he and his contemporaries had their own word for the overwhelming experience of immensity and grandeur, fear and awe that could overtake one in the presence of ruins from the past, just as they did before the great upheavals of nature or the profound mysteries of religious ritual. They called it the “sublime,” and as scholars have made clear, including Dan Edelstein in his contribution to this volume, the experience of the historical sublime opened up to contemporaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the immensity and distance of the past as well as the transitoriness of being (Crane). It also, as Edelstein observes, “collapsed time” and allowed one to escape it, while occasionally producing “an ecstatic state of communion with historical actors.” For the figures discussed by Edelstein, history provided a kind of solace and consolation. Admittedly, one cannot summon the historical sublime at will. And the soul-​swooning ecstasy of Joyce’s Gabriel Conway may not be an experience that every student of history will share. And yet the very fact that history forces a confrontation with the dead is, I think, of value to human flourishing 1 The historian B. W. Young develops a similar point about ghosts and spectral hauntings in his The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 5, “Hanoverian Hauntings.” And the late German novelist W. G. Sebald makes the haunting of the present by the ghosts of the past a persistent theme of his masterpiece devoted to the memory and repression of the Holocaust, Austerlitz.

On the Consolations of History  165 in its own right, in ways that are somewhat counterintuitive and even paradoxical. Thomas Laqueur, in his masterful The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, notes how important the dead have always been to the living—​an importance that is reflected in the care with which all cultures treat mortal remains. True, some have occasionally flirted with the suggestion of the outrageous Cynic philosopher Diogenes, who urged that his useless body be abandoned at death to wild beasts. Few, though, have taken up this suggestion or pursued it in a systematic way. Care for the dead, as anthropologists point out, seems to be one of those universal practices that make us human. And care for the dead, Laqueur shows, is ultimately about care for the living, helping us to mediate the boundaries of our mortality and fashion our social worlds. Nor, as Laqueur further makes clear, is it possible to tell the history of the changing practices of dealing with the dead as a history of disenchantment. The movement from the lumpy churchyards of the Old Regime to the modern cemetery, mausoleum, or columbarium is, on the contrary, a history of “the reinvention of enchantment in more democratic forms” (Laqueur 14). It involves new rituals and new obsequies that translate homage to the departed for new times. Although it is not perhaps as straightforward as placing flowers on a grave, doing history is a form of caring for the dead. And it may be a form of care that is particularly important to human flourishing in our own age, when our focus is intensely on the present and the future, and in which death is in many respects a topic we prefer to ignore. When friends and family get sick, we usually send them away—​to a hospital or hospice—​rather than let them die in plain sight. As the poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht points out in her book The Happiness Myth, “Most people [today] have not seen someone die, whereas, in past centuries, even young children were brought to deathbeds to witness a period of sometimes agonized dying, and then the much-​respected moment of transformation. This moment was as sacred and revered as the modern-​day birth” (Hecht 55). We hide death from our children now, and as the writer Karl Ove Knausgard observes at some length in the opening pages of his monumental novel My Struggle, we go to great lengths in the modern world to conceal our dead. Bodies are hastily covered over; corpses are quickly removed from sight. When our soldiers fall in combat, cameras are even barred from showing the bags in which their remains are returned. Death, like old age, is an embarrassment we would rather not face.

166  History and Human Flourishing All that stands in direct contrast to the wisdom of the ages. Plato, for example, understood the goal of philosophy as the pursuit of human flourishing (eudaimonia), but he also described philosophy as a “meditation on death.” Or think of the Buddha, who aimed to free human beings from their self-​imposed suffering so that they could cultivate genuine happiness, yet insisted that we keep the end forever in mind. “Of all mindfulness meditations,” he emphasized, “that on death is supreme.” Jews were no less attuned to such wisdom. “All are from the dust, and to dust all return,” the book of Ecclesiastes observes in a pointed line. It was intended as a message to remember. Nor could Christians easily ignore it. The central symbol of their faith, after all—​the cross—​is a memento mori, and many Christians to this day receive ashes on their brows on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, just after the fun of Mardi Gras has come to an end. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the priest declares. What a way to end a party. And yet that same injunction is bound up with the Christian imperative to rejoice and be glad. And in fact a fair number of the world’s religious traditions seem to agree on the somewhat surprising point that thinking about death can be good for our happiness in life. Why might that be so? It is possible that confronting our mortality may trigger what the psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls a psychological autoimmune response or what C. N. DeWall and Roy Baumeister describe as a “terror management” system that allows us to deal with existential threats (Gilbert 177–​178; Dewall and Baumeister). Thinking about death, in other words, may trigger offsetting feelings of happiness, allowing us to manage our fears. Just as the immune system of the body fights off pathogens, this immune system of the mind helps us to process and neutralize threatening thoughts. That may be one explanation for why the curved graph of self-​reported happiness over a lifetime looks a little bit like a smiley face. In one of life’s compensations for our receding hairlines and expanding waistlines, men and women tend to get slightly happier as they get older, after bottoming out in middle age (Rauch). Strangely, it may actually be the increasing proximity of death that gives us an offsetting boost of happiness via this same autoimmune response. Or it may just be, as the sages have often said, that to recall our mortality is to force us to take the measure of what we have—​the gift of life—​to weigh its importance and put it into perspective. The frustrations of the day-​to-​day tend to disappear or turn to dust when measured against

On the Consolations of History  167 eternity. And to prepare for a good death is necessarily to seek to live in a way that makes that possible. There is even evidence to suggest that cultures that think about death regularly in open and constructive ways are happier than those that don’t. As the writer Eric Weiner discovered in his quest to find the happiest places in the world, the subject of death came up surprisingly often when he went looking for happiness. “You need to think about death for five minutes a day,” one man in the tiny mountain kingdom of Bhutan told him (Weiner 65). It is probably good advice. Of course, to read about or research the past is not necessarily to think about death—​at least not in a direct way. Most of history, after all, chronicles the moments when the dead lived—​with the consequence that the past is often filled with the full flower and vitality of human beings whose blood still flowed in their veins. Robert Bellah, the late sociologist of religion, makes this point in the introduction to his magisterial Religion in Human Evolution. In reference to Thomas Mann’s great novel Joseph and His Brothers, Bellah observes that “The past of life, the dead-​and-​gone world is death, yet death, because it is the eternally present, is life. Thus of the past [Mann] writes, “For it is, always is, however much we may say it was” (Bellah x). History and memory make it so. History allows the dead to live, and the dead, in living, give us life, contributing to our own further flourishing. In these respects, history can be doubly transformative. On the one hand, it makes life of death. Helping to rob the latter of its victory and sting, history allows the departed to live on among us in a kind of life everlasting. But, on the other hand, it has the potential to transform the lives of the living by bidding them to contemplate the sobering fact that they, too, shall pass. If history does not always impart this reminder with the same vivid insistence as religion, it inevitably whispers the thought with the turn of every page, leaving us, when we listen, with a solemn sense of our own evanescence. We, too, shall join the fellowship of the dead, and all that surrounds us shall crumble, perish, and decay. Strangely, that somber thought both heightens and attenuates the significance of the here and now, reminding us of the fleetingness and relative insignificance of much that passes before us day to day but also of its preciousness and potential grandeur. If everything, in the end, turns to ashes and dust, then the smallest speck might merit our attention. We matter and we don’t. Life will go on without us when we are gone. That is another of the consolations of history, a thought that can furnish a measure of equanimity

168  History and Human Flourishing and peace, while, paradoxically, opening us to an even greater appreciation of the mystery and miracle of life. In my experience, to conclude, men and women often develop a greater appreciation of history as they age. Drawn to the past, they find there, I think, some of the consolations of religion. And while I don’t mean to deny the many salient differences between religion and history broadly conceived, I do think there are, and have been, interesting points of convergence that offer insight into how the pursuit of history might contribute to the pursuit of human flourishing. History can provide a sense of meaning and connection to forces greater than oneself. It can provide a sense of belonging—​to the lines, lineages, and communities that connect us—​perhaps even to the community that comprises all who have lived and died—​that ultimately bind us all together as human beings. Finally, its injunction to look to the past in an age focused on the present, and its insistence that we take stock of the dead, is salutary. People as they age often come to realize this, and when history is taught or presented well, younger people can, too. Their lives are richer for it, consecrated, as it were, in the blessed life of the past.

Works Cited Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Harvard UP, 2011. Brombert, Victor. “The Permanent Sabbatical.” The New Yorker, January 16, 2018, https://​ www.newyor​ker.com/​cult​ure/​perso​nal-​hist​ory/​the-​perman​ent-​sab​bati​cal. Burrow, John. A History of Histories. Epics, Chronicles, and Enquiries from Herodotous and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. Vintage, 2007. Crane, Susan A. Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-​Century Germany. Cornell UP, 2000. Dewall, C. Nathan, and Roy F. Baumeister. “From Terror to Joy: Automatic Tuning to Positive Affective Information Following Mortality Salience.” Psychological Science, vol. 18, 2007, pp. 984–​990, https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1467-​9280.2007.02013.x. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. “Introduction.” Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, by Kenneth Burke, 1935, 3rd ed., U of California P, 1984, pp. xiii–​xliv. Eliade, Mircea. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Harper & Brothers, 1959. Frankl, Victor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Translated by Ilse Lasch. Beacon Press, 1959. Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World. Translated by Victor Brouges. Princeton U Press, 1999. Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. 2 vols. Norton, 1966–​1969. Gibbon, Edward. Autobiography of Edward Gibbon. Edited by Lord Sheffield and introduction by J. B. Bury. Oxford UP, 1923. Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. Vintage, 2007.

On the Consolations of History  169 Grafton, Anthony. What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe. Canto, 2012. Hardtwig, Wolfgang, “GeschichtsreligionWissenschaft als Arbeit. Objektivität. Der Historismus in neuer Sicht.” Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 252, no. 1, 1991, pp. 1–32, https://​doi.org/​10.1524/​hzhz.1991.252.jg.1. Harrison, Peter. “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge UP, 1990. Hecht, Jennifer Michael. The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong. Harper, 2007. Hunt, Lynn, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijndhardt. The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World. Belknap, 2010. Joyce, James. “The Dead.” The Dubliners, edited by Terence Brown, Penguin, 1993, 82–105. Laqueur, Thomas. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton UP, 2015. Lim, Chaeyoon, and Robert Putnam. “Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction.” American Sociological Review, vol. 75, no. 6, December 2010, pp. 914–​ 933, https://doi.org 10.1177/0003122410386686. Llosa, Mario Vargas. The Feast of the Goat. Translated by Edith Grossman. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001. Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago UP, 1949. Pocock, J. G. A. Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. Cambridge UP, 1999–​2015. Ranke, Leopold von. The Theory and Practice of History. Edited by Georg G. Iggers. Routledge, 2011. Rauch, Jonathan. The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better after Fifty. Thomas Dunne, 2018. Seligman, Martin E. P. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. Atria, 2004. Sheehan, Jonathan. The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Princeton UP, 2005. Slezkin, Yuri. The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Princeton UP, 2017. Smith, Emily Esfahani. The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters. Crown, 2017. Stedman Jones, Gareth. “Religion and the Origins of Socialism.” Religion and the Political Imagination, edited by Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones. Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 171–​189. Stroumsa, Guy G. A New Science. The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason. Harvard UP, 2010. Taylor, Charles. “Foreword.” The Disenchantment of the World, edited by Marcel Gauchet, Princeton UP, 1999, xiii. Walzer, Michael. Exodus and Revolution. Basic Books, 1985. Weiner, Eric. The Geography of Bliss: One Grumps Search for the Happiest Places in the World. Twelve, 2009.

9 “Beauty Is Universal” Virtue, Aesthetics, Emotion, and Race in James Logan’s Atlantic Moral Sense Philosophy Nicole Eustace

Martin Seligman notes that “psychology is not just the study of pathology, weakness, and damage; it is also the study of strength and virtue.” In charting a course for positive psychology, he urges us to examine how psychology can be used to “mak[e]‌the lives of all people better.” Many fellow theorists working in the field of positive psychology, such as Louis Tay and his coauthors, have likewise described human flourishing in terms of both general well-​being and “positive normative outcomes,” including “character /​virtues, ethical choices” and the development of a “moral compass.” Such laudable goals for the promotion of universal human progress on the basis of widespread norms of virtue and morality—​currently encapsulated in the notion of “happiness and human flourishing”—​have animated Western philosophers from the Enlightenment era to this day. And yet history shows that even a universal ethos can produce very uneven outcomes.1 Contemporary scholars in a wide range of disciplines caution that the very category of “the human” comes freighted with paradox. Summing up a key element of feminist critiques of the “false universal,” Rachel Sturman states: “as feminist as well as postcolonial scholars have argued, the liberal and Enlightenment visions of universal humanity turned out to be premised on the possession of specific qualities or capacities that in fact were not deemed to be universal.” Historically, theories of universal humanity have been very unevenly applied to actual humans. In particular, the notion of virtue, as a universal value or normative standard, has marked potential to entrench existing structures of power, reinforcing inequality and injustice. Yet, too often, scholars treat the emergence of Western humanistic thought 1 Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 5–​14, 7; and Tay, Pawelski, and Keith 1–​11, 5.

Nicole Eustace, “Beauty Is Universal” In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0010

“Beauty Is Universal”  171 of the Enlightenment era and the concomitant rise of Atlantic slavery and empire as countervailing, rather than mutually constitutive trends. At the extreme, writers such as Steven Pinker credit the Enlightenment with ending Atlantic slavery, but avoid scrutinizing the ways in which it simultaneously enabled the rise of the racism on which empire and exploitation have relied for centuries since.2 Can there ever be true universalism, unproblematic norms for virtue? Historically speaking, how did Enlightenment universalism come to facilitate racism? Even beginning to address these questions requires a return to reading eighteenth-​century moral philosophy. To pose such questions is to pause and consider when and whether the pursuit of human flourishing may augment human suffering. As Anton Chekhov put it in his classic short story “Gooseberries,” “the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burden in silence.” Describing the rampant poverty and alcoholism among Russian peasants of his day, Chekhov’s narrator Ivan Ivanych proposed a fanciful counter to the silencing of suffering: “Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people.” Amid an essay collection exploring how the field of history may help to promote human well-​being, the present essay offers a Chekhovian tap at the portal of happiness.3 Too often, scholars write as if enlightened European philosophy developed in careful quarantine conditions, uncontaminated by the empires built on slavery. Yet historians are increasingly coming to realize, as the humanities professor Caroline Winterer puts it, that the “enlightenment was a 2 Sturman 229–​234, 229; and Smith. Calling for Enlightenment once, future, and always, Pinker claims, in Enlightenment Now, “Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights. But . . . leftist politics distorted the study of human nature . . . Anyone who disagrees with the assumption that racism is the cause of all problems is called a racist.” See Pinker 373. A more forthright assessment of the limitations of Enlightenment thought, by a theorist who nevertheless lauds the emergence of humanitarianism, comes from Siep Stuurman, who notes that “equality, while universal in theory, was in practice instituted in a national and male framework.” Stuurman refutes claims of distinction between “an egalitarian Radical Enlightenment and a less egalitarian Moderate Enlightenment” by concluding, “the upshot is that the Radical Enlightenment, not unlike the moderates, combines modern equality with several discourses of modern inequality.” See Stuurman. The present essay offers a step-​by-​step examination of the intellectual process through which one learned colonial writer, steeped in eighteenth-​century moral philosophy, seamlessly wove together racism and (false) universalism. 3 Chekhov 381.

172  History and Human Flourishing phenomenon of the age of empires: imperialism was the constant companion of the idea of enlightenment, not incidental to it.” She warns, “these concerns have tended to remain marginal in many accounts of Enlightenment in Europe, as though it can continue to be understood as a self-​contained autonomous process, with non-​European regions tacked on as afterthoughts.” Yet there is no reasonable way to cordon off the development of eighteenth-​ century European moral philosophy from changes in the Atlantic political economy.4 We must attend especially to the reflections of the British American colonists who made their contributions to the creation of the false universal in the crucible of Atlantic slavery. Atlantic imperial spaces provided more than mere context for Enlightenment thought; settler colonists of the Americas and slave traders around the Atlantic littoral contributed significant content. This was particularly true of Great Britain, where members of the Board of Trade “put a premium on direct experience with America,” as the historian S. Max Edelson describes it. He notes that British magistrates pursued the goal of “establishing a ‘continual correspondence’ ” with colonists across the Caribbean and North America so that the latest information and observations coming from all corners of the periphery “could be ‘collected into one viewe,’ ” as a Board of Trade member Edelson quotes described the ideal. In sum, there was an American Enlightenment as well as a European one, and the former influenced the latter far more extensively than has traditionally been admitted. As Winterer emphasizes, “never did enlightened ideas cross the Atlantic just once,” but rather crossed and re-​crossed on endlessly circulating cultural currents.5 The earliest purely philosophical treatise composed in British America was written by the Philadelphia polymath (and early mentor of Benjamin Franklin) James Logan, a slaveholding Quaker merchant, provincial magistrate, and book collector whose personal library was among the largest in any British colony. Upon his death in 1751, Logan donated all 2,600 volumes of his personal collection to the recently established Library Company of Philadelphia, the first successful public lending library in the world, a gift that sextupled the less than 400 books then in the library’s collection. On the basis of his wide reading in classical and modern philosophy, Logan developed an extended essay, “The Duties of Man Deduced from Nature,” over a 4 Winterer 12–​13. 5 Edelson 23 and Winterer 11.

“Beauty Is Universal”  173 twenty-​year period from approximately 1722 to 1742 that marked an important stage in the development of Anglo-​American thought.6 Recapitulating the ideas of British moral philosophers like Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, James Logan posited the universality of a “moral sense” in terms that would hearten today’s positive psychologists. Yet he then added an original contribution that delineated its limitations among people of “barbarous nations.” Reading Logan’s essay today illuminates the cruel alchemy through which Enlightenment humanism could enable racism. For although Atlantic slavery ended, the Enlightenment’s racialization of virtue remains very much with us—​as the vast racial disparities in the system of mass incarceration in the modern United States suggest.7 * * * The recent turn within psychology to emphasizing the positive replicates a key pivot made in moral philosophy between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from the pessimism of Thomas Hobbes to the marked optimism of the eighteenth-​century moral philosophers, such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. In introducing the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman and his many collaborators claim to be offering a radical new inversion of the negative views of human nature that preoccupied much of twentieth-​century psychology. “The exclusive focus on pathology that has dominated so much of our discipline results in a model of the human being lacking the positive features that make life worth living,” Seligman explains. Yet some three hundred years before Seligman, moral philosophers were demanding a similar shift. James Logan encapsulated the eighteenth-​century transition from deploring human pathology to celebrating human potential by dismissing the pessimistic views of human nature advanced by Hobbes. Logan asserted: “Man was formed for Society and Benevolence. Therefore . . . he that in the last age got himself a name by denying this, and asserting the state of Nature to be a state of war, was . . . defective in his philosophy.” We can 6 Logan. All subsequent citations to Logan are to this edition. The phrase “beauty is universal” belongs to Valenti, who aptly sums up Logan’s philosophy with this section title. Logan 274. Long considered something close to a “lost work,” Logan’s treatise has been little written about to date. On its claim to fame as “the earliest purely philosophical treatise composed in America,” see, Shook, ed. On Franklin’s views of Logan’s treatise (which the former found too credulous in its positive view of human nature), see Schactman 286. See also Green. 7 For an overview of the European philosophical context in which Logan made his comments about barbarism, see Pernau 230–​259. On current US incarceration rates, see the Criminal Justice Fact Sheet published by the NAACP: http://​www.naacp.org/​crimi​nal-​just​ice-​fact-​sheet/​

174  History and Human Flourishing hear the echo of Logan’s rejection of Hobbes in Seligman’s call for positive psychology.8 Modern theories of happiness and human flourishing posit an organic connection between maximal personal happiness and the greater public good, a position that both obscures tensions between individuals and society and elides distinctions between pleasure and virtue. Here, too, they follow the lead of eighteenth-​century moral philosophers. Logan asserted forthrightly: “Man was formed for Society, which if not intended for his good would be a contradiction to the wisdom and goodness that produced him, and . . . he was designed for a much greater degree of happiness in himself.” Logan, like today’s positive psychologists, combined a concern for social good with an interest in individual happiness.9 Of course, the science of psychology has achieved tremendous progress in the three centuries since Logan rejected Hobbes. Nevertheless, given that the field remains deeply vulnerable to some of the very same philosophical pitfalls that entrapped Logan, it is well worth retracing Logan’s intellectual path, the better to avoid duplicating his errors along with his ideals. Or, to put it more strongly, given that many of the foremost advocates of the notion of human flourishing today remain advantaged by the same structural inequalities that benefitted Logan, we have an ethical responsibility to examine how the content of his arguments advanced the material conditions of his life. Only then will we fully understand the dystopian potential of even so utopian a project as the promotion of happiness and human flourishing.10 * * * Situated in Philadelphia, the largest port city in colonial British America, Logan maintained trading connections to London and the Caribbean as well as deep into the North American hinterland. He served for decades in many official capacities in the colony, from Provincial Secretary to mayor of the city while profiting as a slave owner, fur trader, and land speculator. His circumstances allowed him multiple interactions with enslaved Africans, over several of whom he claimed ownership, and with Native peoples in the

8 Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 5; Logan 94. 9 Logan 94. 10 For a trenchant critique of the “political implications of the colonization of happiness by policy makers,” see Boddice. And see Illouz.

“Beauty Is Universal”  175 mid-​Atlantic region. Logan evidently regarded his colonial position as an asset that allowed him to develop unique insights into moral questions.11 Logan started from a position espoused by eighteenth-​ century philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic: that human morality manifested in an innate, sensate, appetite for virtue. Shaftesbury began by proposing an analogy between the physical senses and the moral sense, arguing that each operated in much the same way, so that the perception of beauty and the recognition of moral good followed parallel processes. “The Case is the same in the mental or moral Subjects, as in the ordinary Bodys, or common Subjects of Sense,” he explained, the “latter being presented to our Eye; there necessarily results a Beauty or Deformity . . . So in Behaviour and Actions, when presented to our Understanding.” By this theory, moral behavior and actions registered not merely as good, but also as beautiful to the observer.12 Building on Shaftesbury’s foundation, Francis Hutcheson, in his Inquiry into Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, went a step further to argue that the moral sense was not merely analogous to physical senses but actually coterminous with them. Crediting all senses to the “Author of Nature,” Hutcheson proposed the existence of a “moral sense of beauty in actions and affections.” Good behavior and fine feelings excited sensory pleasure that made the promotion and pursuit of virtue a source of deep enjoyment. Hutcheson explicated the connections between emotions, aesthetics, and morals by saying that the “The AUTHOR of Nature . . . has given us Strong Affections to be the Springs of each virtuous Action; and made Virtue a lovely Form, that we might easily distinguish it from its contrary, and be made happy by the pursuit of it.” Hutcheson knew that some might be skeptical of the overlap he proposed between sensory perception and moral assessment, but countered this by saying: “This Moral Sense of Beauty in Actions and Affections, may appear strange at first View . . . But . . . our Gentlemen of good Taste can tell us of a great many Senses, Tastes, and Relishes for Beauty, Harmony, Imitation in Painting, and Poetry; and may not we find too in Mankind a Relish for Beauty in Characters, in Manners?” Distinguishing good from evil did not involve a rational mental calculus, but rather relied on felt sensations of pleasure in viewing and doing right and disgust in observing or acting wrong.13 11 The standard biography of James Logan remains Tolles. For more recent critical commentary on Logan’s activities as a colonial fur trader and land speculator, see Richter 160–​161 and see Soderlund (2015) 175. For current commentary on his activities as a slaveholder, see, Soderlund (2014) 169. 12 Shaftesbury 28. 13 Hutcheson xiv and xv.

176  History and Human Flourishing Logan followed closely on Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, summarizing both authors in depth. His entirely orthodox gloss on existing theories of moral philosophy was as follows: It is so ordered that, as his [mankind’s] outward senses can discern the beautiful the harmonious, etc. and their contraries in outward objects, so his mind has also its eye and ear capable of distinguishing the fair and the foul, the harmonious and dissonant, and the right and wrong in behaviours, actions, and affections and that he is endowed by Nature with a propensity to approve the one and condemn the other.

There was nothing here to either deny or develop the thought of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Logan merely reiterated two fundamental ideas: that the perception of beauty mediated the recognition of virtue and that these capacities represented natural endowments characteristic of all humankind.14 Late in his treatise, Logan returned to the theme of the universality of the moral sense, making unmistakable his position that virtue formed the invariable essence of human nature. He summed up his views by saying, “human virtue, or the practice of it, turns on the affections, and the sway or bent given the implanted moral sense to the soul. All those we term social virtues are founded in the affections and constitute the moral sense, those affections implanted in our species at our formation.” Such unqualified confidence in human nature, untainted by any invidious social or cultural distinctions, would seem to represent the essence of Enlightenment idealism.15 * * * Yet Logan insisted that he had “had some thoughts” on the subject of “the laws originally impressed into Man at his formation” that he “had not met with in the authors who ha[d]‌treated of it” and thus decided he was “willing to submit” his new ideas “to the judgment of such as may be capable of making a just one.” Where Logan believed he could make a novel contribution was in the empirical observation of the source and nature of moral and aesthetic judgments. In particular, Logan had thoughts to share on the subject of the



14 Logan 261. 15 Logan 323.

“Beauty Is Universal”  177 universality of beauty—​that is, on the essential unity of aesthetic and moral perceptions across varied human societies.16 Logan began his discussion of beauty by observing that “there are some who, affecting a singularity in denying all sentiments of Nature in relation to virtue of moral good, likewise assert that there is no positive or real beauty in things, but the whole depends on fancy.” Even on this point—​the intrinsic elements of beauty—​Logan followed precedent. He objected strenuously to the idea that objective beauty did not exist and that moral and aesthetic responses stemmed simply from the whim or caprice of the observer. To the contrary, Logan argued that “We are so framed as to be affected with pleasure from beauty . . . it is ordered we should be so from the nature of the thing itself.” Hutcheson had likewise asserted that all innate beauty rested on invariable principles of design or, as he put it: “Regularity and Uniformity are so conspicuously diffus’d through the Universe . . . that there is scarcely anything ever fancy’d as Beautiful, where there is not really something of this Uniformity and Regularity.” Yet Logan broke new ground in the matter of the comparisons he brought to bear on the question of beauty standards.17 Whereas Hutcheson, like Shaftesbury before him, brought a primarily European frame of reference to the question of the universality of beauty and morality, Logan affected a moral global perspective, drawing both on his intensive reading in global travel literature and on his extensive personal interactions with peoples originating in Africa and North America. When Hutcheson sought to establish the universality of beauty, he did so by contrasting ancient Romans and Goths. He denied that the two groups had differing standards of beauty, all appearances to the contrary. He stated: A Goth, for instance, is mistaken, when from education he imagines the Architecture of his Country to be the most perfect: and a Conjunction of some hostile Ideas, may make him have an aversion to Roman Buildings and yet . . . it is still real Beauty which pleases the GOTH, founded upon Uniformity amidst Variety.

Hutcheson argued, essentially, that while the reasoned appraisals and/​or cultural prejudices of a Goth might lead him into the error of judging his

16 Logan 84.On Logan’s widely regarded accomplishments as a humanist and scientist, see Tolles (1956) 20–​30. 17 Logan 274 and Hutcheson 75.

178  History and Human Flourishing own culture’s buildings as superior to those of the Romans, the Goth’s moral sense would lead him to respond unerringly to the very same “real” elements of beauty, “conspicuously diffus’d through the Universe” that captivated Romans. Hutcheson’s analysis relied on comparing two safely archaic peoples both originating in Europe. If his prejudices against Goths presumed the existence of certain cultural hierarchies, they nevertheless remained free of racial implications. Furthermore, Hutcheson’s analysis pertained to cultural productions, not to people themselves. He focused his comparisons on principles of architecture, not on human bodies. Yet when Logan extended Hutcheson’s analysis by contributing new ideas developed in a transatlantic colonial context, he advanced explicit assumptions about embodied difference and thus augmented the cultural construction of race in perilous ways.18 As Logan developed his argument, it diverged increasingly from the far more circumspect case offered by Hutcheson. Picking apart the position that the perception of beauty depended on fancy, Logan claimed, “for that there are whole nations who prefer black faces, flat noses, thick lips, others affect black teeth, the Chinese small eyes . . . they would from thence infer that Nature has no real characteristics by which beauty can be defined.” Eager to expose this view as a fallacy, Logan argued, “this objection is of no other force than to show the prevalency of custom in some cases over Nature.” In other words, culture could inculcate mental mistakes that natural sentiments would correct if given the chance. For Logan, any expressed preference for non-​European faces and bodies constituted just such an error. In fact, Logan insisted, “if we inquire a little deeper we shall find it thus: that Negroes should prefer their own color and acquiesce in their own common shapes is natural enough, for so monkeys, baboons, and all other creatures by instinct prefer their own species to all others.” Here Logan careened close to claiming that people of African origins were less human than animal. But he quickly veered away from this position in order to defend his views on the universality of sensory perceptions of morality and beauty. Despite Africans differences in color, Logan insisted, “their eyes are made as ours, and . . . when they can choose for beauty they make nearly the same judgments that we do.” He claimed that when given the chance, African adhered to European standards of beauty explaining, “that they esteem flat noses and blubber lips above others is not true.” They only seemed to favor people who looked 18 Hutcheson 76. On James Logan’s encyclopedic reading and extensive library, see Wulf II. On colonists’ efforts to attain cosmopolitan stature through their scientific contributions, see Parish.

“Beauty Is Universal”  179 like themselves, Logan claimed, because “few of them have opportunities of much choice.” Having made his point, he quickly asserted that the same arguments were “so among the savage nations” (meaning the Native peoples of North America) and concluded by adding that “whether the Chinese prefer little eyes is to be doubted.” Logan would allow no exceptions to the fundamental proposition of moral philosophy: that beauty was universal and thus that human beings, regardless of color or country, all shared an innate moral sense.19 Logan believed that his colonial position allowed him to contribute new proofs not only that the human perception of nature’s beauty was universal but also that human responses to cultural beauty were uniform. To prove the constancy of human responses to culture, he turned to the example of music. He explained, “that the human ear is naturally formed to be delighted with tuneful sounds or melody, is as certain as that any other of our senses can be gratefully affected with the proper objects to which they are peculiarly adapted.” While he distinguished between the person who could boast “a good ear” and the “unskillful person without any manner of knowledge,” he insisted that both derived equal enjoyment from music for “it is solely Nature that furnished all the pleasure that either feel.” Yet here again, even as he argued that the human appreciation for music was inborn, he also claimed that European musical achievements transcended all other traditions. He said: There are three things to be observed: as the gracefulness of the simple sound itself to the ear, the concords or proportions of the notes in succession, and the time or measure, in which last even the most barbarous nations, as Negroes and American Indians, are exact, for they beat their drums or kettles in due time and the ground as duly with their feet to answer these in their dances. But the great art and masterpiece of all is the composition of the whole melody or tune, for on this alone must depend the basses and all the parts in harmony.

By this analysis, pleasure in music derived from distinct components: chords, tempo, and melody. Creating a “masterpiece” required attention to all elements, yet “barbarous nations” had mastered only one, time. As Logan argued 19 Logan 274 and 275. The literature analyzing Enlightenment theories on race and beauty is vast. For a good recent starting point, see Camp 679.

180  History and Human Flourishing for the superiority of European natural beauty, so he declared the preeminence of European cultural splendor. According to Logan, all peoples had the capacity to perceive and appreciate beauty, but only European descended peoples could fully personify and produce it.20 * * * Logan’s efforts to contribute to the field of moral philosophy provide a textbook example of the development of the false universal. Self-​interested assertions of merit presented as disinterested investigations of nature call for systematic critique. European moral philosophers like Francis Hutcheson made important early moves toward the development of false universalism by asserting the invariability of moral and aesthetic capacities among Romans and Goths, while differentiating their levels of moral and aesthetic achievement. Yet when transposed to the Atlantic arena by colonial writers and thinkers such as James Logan, the signal examples of unity without parity became “Negros” and “Indians.” Modern racism mapped onto older systems of exclusion, calcifying them along color lines.21 Consider again Logan’s fundamental premise, that “virtues are founded in the affections and constitute the moral sense; those affections implanted in our species at our formation.” His reference to the human “species” called on the most sophisticated scientific terminology of his day, giving the sheen of empiricism to his assertions. By embedding virtue and morality in naturally occurring senses and emotions, he, like Enlightenment thinkers generally, made all-​encompassing claims for human potential. Yet, time after time, Logan took care to demonstrate that non-​Europeans could enact and encapsulate only lesser versions of virtue. Most of the globe’s peoples somehow inhabited “zones of exception” within universalist paradigms. While everyone had the same moral obligations, only Europeans could reach the highest levels of moral achievement and, not incidentally, merit the greatest material rewards.22 The result was a far-​reaching justification of European dominance in every realm of existence. Far from being an objective observer, Logan was a merchant, slaveholder, fur trader, and self-​declared member of the select group 20 Logan 279, 280, 281, and 336n15. 21 As Roxanne Wheeler notes, “Prevailing theories of human variety must be assessed in regard to an increasingly aggressive fiscal-​military state and divergent visions of empire.” She argues in particular that “notions of beauty . . . were shaped by a growing empire, the height of the slave trade and contestations to both during the eighteenth century.” See Wheeler 12 and 39. See also Curran. 22 On the concept of “zones of exception,” see Lowe 16.

“Beauty Is Universal”  181 he described as “men of study.” His leisure to contemplate questions of moral philosophy resulted directly from the astounding wealth he accumulated by appropriating the lives, labor, lands, and resources of enslaved Africans and colonized Native peoples. And yet he attributed his fortune solely to the virtuous use he made of his natural moral and mental endowments.23 As a result, as the historian Caroline Winterer observes, “it is easy to condemn the first generation of Americans who called themselves enlightened, to mock . . . the heartbreaking quantum of misery and injustice they left in the world.” Yet Winterer does not wish to end with this judgment. Against the “quantum of misery” she sets the “kernel” of humanity, that impulse to human betterment that, however compromised, was created in the age of enlightenment. Winterer is joined by many in this position. The eminent seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century American religious historian Susan Juster concludes, in a similar vein: “the ‘enlightened self,’ we have learned after a generation of scholarship, was a mixture of benevolence and savagery—​ capable of rethinking the moral and social bonds that knit humanity together and of devising new ways of subjecting whole populations to repressive disciplinary regimes.” This impulse to separate the wheat from the chafe, to further enlightenment projects of human betterment while letting go of the bleaker aspects of enlightenment legacies, holds widespread appeal. Like many historians, positive psychologists may find themselves drawn in this direction.24 Yet historians specializing in the history of slavery and empire insist that we must not avoid analyzing how forms of human degradation could be instrumental, not incidental, to enlightenment projects. They continue to call for what Nell Irvin Painter so memorably termed “a fully loaded cost accounting” of the full human price of slavery. Many suggest that efforts to reclaim enlightenment ideals risk reproducing their flaws. As Marissa Fuentes has recently argued, we must recognize that “the reification of property relations and economic concerns . . . were coterminous with humanitarian issues, in turn marking the inherent flaws in humanitarian enterprises.” In other words, the logical kinks in enlightenment universalism—​epitomized by Logan’s moral philosophy—​often operated in ways that were constitutive of, not contradictory to, the exploitations of the era. Claims of universality too often rested on normative assertions of value, such that socially

23 Logan 89.

24 Winterer 17 and Juster 257.

182  History and Human Flourishing and culturally constructed hierarchies—​with tangible political-​economic consequences—​were falsely portrayed as inalterable and unobjectionable qualities of nature. If the life and letters of James Logan have something left to teach us about ideals of virtue, this may well be their most enduring lesson.25

Works Cited Primary Sources Chekhov, Anton. “Gooseberries.” The Portable Chekhov, edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Viking Penguin, 1975, pp. 371–383. Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 3rd. ed. J. & J. Knapton, 1729 Logan, James. Of the Duties of Man as They May Be Deduced from Nature, edited by Philip Valenti, Printed for the Editor, 2013. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord. “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit.” Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. 2, John Darby, 1714, pp. 5–176.

Secondary Sources Boddice, Rob. A History of Feelings. Reaktion Books, 2019. Camp, Stephanie M. H. “Black Is Beautiful: An American History.” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 81, no. 3, 2015, pp. 675–​690. Curran, Andrew S. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment. Johns Hopkins UP, 2011. Edelson, S. Max. The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence. Harvard UP, 2017. Fuentes, Marissa. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and, the Archive. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. Green, James N. “Subscription Libraries and Commercial Circulating Libraries in Colonial Philadelphia and New York.” Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, edited by Thomas Augst and Keneth Carpenter, U of Massachusetts P, 2007, 53–​72. Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, 2007. Juster, Susan. Sacred Violence in Early America. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke UP, 2015. Painter, Nell. “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting.” Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line, UNC Press, 2002, pp. 15–​39. Parish, Susan Scott. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in Colonial British America. OIEAHC/​UNC Press, 2012.



25 Painter 16 and Fuentes 130.

“Beauty Is Universal”  183 Pernau, Margit “Civility and Barbarism: Emotions as Criteria of Difference.” Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling, 1700–​2000, edited by Ute Frevert, Oxford UP, 2014, 230–​259. Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Viking, 2018. Richter, Daniel K. Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Easter North America. U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. Schactman, Tom. Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment. St. Martin’s Press, 2014. Seligman, Martin E. P., and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “Positive Psychology: An Introduction.” American Psychologist, vol. 55, January 2000, pp. 5–​14. Shook, John R., ed. “Logan, James” The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, Bloomsbury, 2012, 649–​651. Smith, Hilda L. All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640–​1832. Pennsylvania State UP, 2002. Soderlund, Jean R. Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit. Princeton UP, 2014. Soderlund, Jean R. Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society before William Penn. U of Pennsylvania P, 2015. Sturman, Rachel. “Gender and the Human: An Introduction.” Gender & History, vol. 23, no. 2, 2011, pp. 229–​234. Suurman, Stiep. The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History. Harvard UP, 2017. Tay, Louis, James O. Pawelski, and Melissa G. Keith. “The Role of the Arts and Humanities in Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Model.” Journal of Positive Psychology, vol. 33, no. 3, 2018, pp. 1–​11. Tolles, Frederick. “Philadelphia’s First Scientist: James Logan.” Isis, vol. 47, no. 1, 1956, pp. 20–​30. Tolles, Frederick. James Logan and the Culture of Provincial America. Little Brown, 1957. Wheeler, Roxanne. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-​Century British Culture. U of Pennsylvania P, 2010. Wulf, Edwin II. The Library of James Logan of Philadelphia: 1674–​1751, 2nd ed. Library Company of Philadelphia, 1974.

10 Toward a History of Black Happiness Or, What Can African American History Tell Us about the Cultivation of Well-​Being? Mia Bay

African American history does not provide a great vantage point on the history of human flourishing. Instead, it is one of the most depressing subfields in American history—​second perhaps only to Native American history. It tells the story of a people that suffered stark forms of oppression and subjugation in a society where many others flourished. It chronicles a long struggle to achieve full participation in American democracy that has been only been partially successful at best. In this era of #Black Lives Matter and racism reascendant, can we draw meaningful connections between the study of African American history and positive psychology—​or any form of study of the cultivation of well-​being? I’m not sure. On the one hand, I would freely admit the study of history has been essential to generations of African American activists, who have used it to recover their own past, inform their protest strategies, counter claims of black inferiority rooted in racist readings of the past, and take joy in the rights and freedoms that blacks have gained over time. But, on the other hand, the goals of such history have always fallen short of happiness, or human flourishing. Instead, African American have turned to the past in search of pressing everyday wants and needs such as civil rights, social equality, economic opportunities, and physical security—​or freedom from racial violence. Indeed, happiness is itself a problematic subject in African American history and culture because discussions of happiness or human flourishing among African Americans have often mobilized in support of white supremacy. While proponents of positive psychology tend to see human flourishing as a positive ideal, this brief overview of the history of black happiness will suggest that discourses about human happiness and well-​being can have many uses, not all of which are positive. Mia Bay, Toward a History of Black Happiness In: History and Human Flourishing. Edited by: Darrin M. McMahon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197625262.003.0011

Toward a History of Black Happiness  185

The “Happy-​Go-​Lucky Negro”: Black Happiness as a Racial Stereotype The first problem one faces in thinking about black happiness is that African Americans look back on a long history of slavery, segregation, and other forms of racial discrimination that have made basic well-​being difficult to achieve, and happiness still more problematic. Moreover, throughout much of this history, African Americans have often been discussed in terms of racial stereotypes that characterize blacks as an exceptionally happy and contented group. Such stereotypes first took shape during the slavery era, when slave traders and slaveholders defended their practice of human bondage by maintaining that the African race was naturally subservient and that black people flourished in slavery. More common in the nineteenth century than earlier, these stereotypes likely first developed in religious critiques of slavery and the slave trade, which routinely described enslaved black as “unhappy.”1 Confronted with these critiques, the institution defenders maintained that enslaved people were very happy indeed. Proslavery apologists maintained that slavery was a boon to the blacks of the West Indies, after slavery there came under attack starting in the late 1700s. “The house of bondage” that enslaved Africans entered in the British West Indies was nothing short of a “land of freedom,” wrote slave trader and proslavery apologist Robert Norris in 1789. Among the British, they were “comfortable” and protected from cruelty, while in Africa the enslaved were subject to “most savage and wanton cruelty.”2 His sentiments were amplified by other commentators such as George Pinckard, a British Army physician who visited the West Indies and Guiana in the first decade of the nineteenth century. A one-​time visitor to the West Indies, Pinckard was not uniformly proslavery, but he was favorably impressed with slavery as practiced in Barbados and idealized the institution in terms that he seems to have borrowed from planters there. Barbados, he rejoiced, offered slavery “a happy home!” He acknowledged that not all the island’s planters were kind to their slaves but insisted that more of them were than not, and described the 1 See, for example, “unhappy blacks,” “unhappy Negroes” in M. Brissot. de Warville (1793), “Interesting Account of the School of Negroes at Philadelphia,” The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, April 1792, vol. 92, p. 228; “A letter from capt. J. S. smith to the rev. mr. hill on the state of the negroe slaves,” The Critical Review, Or, Annals of Literature vol. 62 (1786), 127–​128; “A short rejoinder to the rev. mr. ramsay’s reply, &c.,” The Critical Review, Or, Annals of Literature 64 (1787), 78. 2 Robert Norris, A Short Account of the Slave Trade (London: Printed for W. Lowndes, 1789), 11, 14.

186  History and Human Flourishing “negro yard” at a plantation called “Profit” as one of “the happiest communities within the wide circle of the globe.” “Fed, clothed and tenderly watched during sickness” by their “kind and affectionate” owner, the lucky residents of “Profit” had all their “wants supplied” and were “happy and contented.” Having never been free they had no desire to be free and enjoyed their lives at least in part because they were spared the “tumult and vicissitudes of freedom.”3 Used in both Britain and the United States, depiction of blacks as happy slaves did little to discourage antislavery activists, who continued to maintain that slavery made blacks miserable. But as challenges to slavery proliferated, proslavery uses of this stereotype became ever more emphatic. By the antebellum era, black happiness was a constant theme in the American proslavery literature, whose writers even went so far as to maintain “the negro slaves of the South are the happiest . . . people in the world.”4 This view was likewise underscored in proslavery imagery, which often featured slaves dancing and playing musical instruments outside cozy cabins.5 These images of happy slaves were appealing even outside the South, as they allowed those who might otherwise question slavery to tell themselves that blacks acquiesced to slavery because of the “genius of the African temperament,” because they are “instinctively . . . contented” and “quick to respond to the stimulus of joy, quick to forget [their] grief.”6 Moreover, they also trained Northerners in what to see when they traveled south. Although educated at Oberlin College, a distinctly antislavery school, the young Benjamin Henry Whipple, an upstate New Yorker who traveled south for his health in the early 1840s, found the slaves he encountered there fully as contented as the slaveholders claimed they were. “They seem a happy race of beings and if you did not know it you would never imagine they were slaves,” he wrote in his diary. “The loud laugh, the clear dancing eye, the cheerful face show that in this sad world of sin and sorrow they know but very few.”7 Popularized in traditions such as minstrelsy, a form of American musical theater in which whites blacked up and gave performances as 3 George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies written under the Expedition under the command of the late General Sir Ralph Abercromby (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orms, 1806), 204, 206. 4 George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1857), 29. 5 Mary Henderson Eastman, Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life As It Is (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co, 1852), http://​utc.iath.virgi​nia.edu/​pros​lav/​eastma​nhp.html. 6 A white Northerner quoted in Eduardo Bonilla-​Silva, White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-​ Civil Rights Era (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 77. 7 Benjamin Henry Whipple, Bishop Whipple’s Southern Diary, 1834–​1844 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968 [c. 1965]).

Toward a History of Black Happiness  187

Figure 10.1  This image of happy slaves enjoying themselves is the frontispiece in Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or Southern Life As It Is (1952), an upbeat plantation novel written to counter Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1952). Its author, Mary Eastman, rejected Stowe’s critique of slavery and instead sought to capture “the essential happiness of slaves in the South as compared to the inevitable sufferings of free blacks and the working classes in the North.” Alpha Stock/​Alamy Stock Photo

happy-​go-​lucky plantation darkies, notions of African Americans as an especially happy race grew if anything more entrenched after emancipation. A 1901 book on Washington, D.C., to give just one of many possible examples, described the majority of the city’s black population as “lazy, easy going work folk and loafers ‘out at the elbow, loose all over, and content whenever the sun shines on them.’ ” Naturally musical, as well as light hearted, the “tatterdemalion happy-​go-​lucky Negro is always singing, when not laughing or whistling.”8 These racial stereotypes make any discussion of African American happiness suspect as they underscore that black happiness has often been invoked by whites to support slavery and other forms of white supremacy. In short, there is nothing straightforward about talking about happiness, and other positive emotions, when discussing the history of an oppressed group. 8 Mrs. John A. Logan, Thirty Years in Washington; Or, Life and Scenes in Our National Capital (Hartford, CT: A.D. Worthington & Co, 1901), 523.

188  History and Human Flourishing

“We Wear the Mask”: Black Happiness as a Masquerade Indeed, even black accounts of happiness make this point and, in doing so, suggest that the African American experience of happiness is often undercut by an awareness that expressions of black joy could lend support to racist ideas about black people. Perhaps no one put this more plainly than John Lewis, a North Carolina slave who escaped to Canada sometime around 1850. In recounting his experience as a slave to abolitionist Benjamin Drew, Lewis recalled that he was deeply unhappy as a slave, and far more filled with thoughts of revenge than the slaveholders around him seem to recognize. Even when he might have seemed happy, his high spirits were undercut by sadness, as well as a strategic sense that a performance of happiness might appease white observers. “They say slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry,” he explained to Drew: “I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet, at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken: that is as true as the gospel! Just look at it,—​must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself—​I have cut capers in chains.”9 Moreover, the practice of cutting capers in chains—​dancing and skipping with apparent frivolity—​did not end with slavery, but instead remained prevalent well into the twentieth-​century, and arguably beyond. “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” Harlem Renaissance poet Paul Dunbar wrote, in a famous poem that essentially describes black happiness as a ruse. It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—​ This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. . . . Why should the world be over-​wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. 9 John Little in Benjamin Drew, A North-​Side View of Slavery: The Refugee: Or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada (Boston: John P. Jewett and Sons, 1856), 224.

Toward a History of Black Happiness  189 We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!10

First published in 1896, Dunbar’s poem spoke to how even decades after slavery African Americans still felt the need to conceal their negative emotions behind an outward display of happiness—​or what several critics have called a “minstrel grin.”11 Far from just a matter of metaphor, performances of black happiness were widely required in turn-​of-​the-​ century America. In the South, segregation did not just divide the races: it imposed a racial etiquette on blacks that called for displays of good cheer and subservient smiles. Blacks who refused to comply were considered “uppity” and “could put themselves in grave danger.” In 1908, for example, white night riders in Fulton County, Kentucky, even went so far as to lynch tobacco farmer David Walker for the crime of having a bad reputation as a “surly Negro.”12 Walker’s actual crime was likely something quite different; he was murdered at a time when his region’s white tobacco farmers were feuding with the American Tobacco company over crop prices, and sending out night riders to terrorize black farmers who came down on the wrong side of the dispute. But Walker’s reputation as a man who did not cheerfully kowtow to whites may be one reason why he was singled out for especially deadly violence. American race relations outside the South were somewhat less hierarchal and lethal than in the South, but even northern and western blacks felt compelled to participate in happy displays of racial deference. The image of black men and women as grinning, subservient Stepin Fetchits and beaming mammies was literally scripted for them by Hollywood films, which prior to the 1950s rarely featured blacks in any other role. Little wonder, then, that

10 Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Lyrics of the Lowly Life (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company), 1896 11 See, for example, Alan Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic London: Continuum, 2003), 191; and Cathy Covell Waeger, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Ethnic Identities as Globalized Market Commodities,” in Gönül Pultar, Imagined Identities: Identity Formation in the Age of Globalization (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2014), 136, 137. 12 Gerald L. Smith, A Black Educator in the Segregated South: Kentucky’s Rufus B. Atwood (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2015).

190  History and Human Flourishing

Figure 10.2  Born Lincoln Theodore Perry, Stepin Fetchit was a comedian and vaudeville performer who became black America’s first movie star. Most popular in the 1930s, he supplied comic relief in numerous Hollywood movies. He invariably played a servile, slow-​witted, comically lazy, bumbling black man, whose wide happy smile was part of his persona. Masheter Movie Archive/​ Alamy Stock Photo

as the black writer Alex Haley noted in 1964, even African Americans who lived in the North “simply and pragmatically adopted the grinning, feet-​ scuffing, head-​scratching, ‘Yassuh-​boss’ masquerade.” They did it because Southern and Northern whites alike responded favorably to this behavior, which left them “amused and psychologically disarmed,” therefore usually more likely to be cooperative “in granting or supplying the Negroes’ usually meager wants.”13



13 Alex Haley, New York Times, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” March 1, 1964.

Toward a History of Black Happiness  191

“Is the Negro Happy?”: Scholarly Studies of Black Happiness I emphasize these black masquerades of happiness because they have long compromised any study of black well-​being by making any simple claims about happiness suspect. A case in point is the highly skeptical account of black happiness that appears in the article “Is the Negro Happy?,” which appeared in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1929, and is, as far I can tell, the earliest scholarly study of black happiness. The article’s author was Albert S. Beckham. The third African American to receive a PhD in psychology, Beckham, who earned his terminal degree at NYU, would eventually go on to become the first African American to hold the title of school psychologist. But at the time he took on the question “Is the Negro Happy?,” these credentials were still in the future. A “young Negro psychologist” with a master’s degree from Ohio State, Beckham began his career as an instructor at Howard University in 1924 and founded that institution’s first psychology lab before going on to pursue his PhD. Beckham was a scholar of “the psychology of races from the normal and abnormal viewpoints” during the early years of his career, and his research in black happiness was inspired by a query from a famous psychologist in one of America’s largest universities, who asked Beckham “what he termed a practical question—​‘Is the Negro Happy!’ ” In doing so, this distinguished senior scholar also informed Beckham “that he had been told by northern and southern whites that they believed that the Negro is the happiest of the entire population.”14 Confronted with a stereotype-​driven consensus that he seems to have found suspect at best, Beckham decided to dedicate his research to answering the scholar’s question. Beckham, who was convinced that any answer to the “question of Negro happiness and contentment must come from the Negro himself,” set about addressing this question by conducting a four-​year study in which he and his students collected opinions from “2000 Negro college students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, from 500 unskilled laborers, 300 preachers, 210 physicians, 200 housewives (not employed in any outside occupation), 108 school teachers, 75 lawyers and 50 musicians.” All completed a questionnaire in which they had to answer three questions: 14 Albert S. Beckham, “Is the Negro Happy?: A Psychological Analysis,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 24, no. 2 (1929), 196.

192  History and Human Flourishing 1. 2. 3.

Do you believe the Negro is happy! Answer Yes or No. Are you happy as a Negro? Answer Yes or No. Should the Negro be happy? Answer Yes or No.15

Taken together, the answers Beckham’s subjects were ambiguous at best. Opinions varied by both occupation and gender, but overall only 33.5 percent of Beckham’s subjects believed the Negro was happy, and a similarly small number (34.3 percent), answered yes to the question “Should the Negro be happy?” But for all that, although approximately two-​thirds of Beckham’s subjects were convinced that blacks were unhappy—​and should be unhappy—​a whopping 75.5 percent reported that they themselves were happy as Negroes.16 Beckham was clearly confounded by his results. His subjects were happier than he thought they would be, and happier than their largely negative answers to his questions about whether blacks as a group were, or should be, happy would seem to predict. Moreover, the black laborers he surveyed were generally happier than his black professionals and student subjects, despite their social and economic disadvantages. Perhaps these disadvantages helped explain why. “The Negro laborer is usually a happy man,” suggested Beckham, as he struggled to make sense of his data. However, he was not sure whether the happiness reported by members of this group was “real or imaginary,” and he even toyed with the idea that it might be simply a matter of ignorance: “The uneducated opines the happiness of the group because his own happiness consists in simple wants and meager pleasures.”17 But in the end, Beckham concluded that the unlikely prevalence of individual happiness among his subjects, and especially in “the average Negro,” was confounding enough to be a matter of “social and abnormal psychology,” and ought to be defined as a complex. To the already long list of [psychological] complexes let us add another,” he suggested. One more won’t hurt; it is the Negro complex. This is not necessarily synonymous with the inferiority complex although it might be at times. It is an

15 Beckham 186, 187. 16 Beckham 189. 17 Beckham 189.

Toward a History of Black Happiness  193 emotional sublimation that enables the Negro to escape from dire reality. In this state he is able to simulate happiness. This has been his salvation. The Indian is lacking in this particular (sic.). It is the existence of this complex that enabled the Negro to survive more than 200 years of slavery and a half century of economic and social pressure as a subject people.18

Beckham’s suspicions about black happiness seem to have been largely borne out by subsequent scholarship on black life. Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who completed an exhaustive study of American race relations under the sponsorship of the Carnegie Foundation in the late 1940s, also came to believe that his black subjects tended to simulate positive emotions. “Much of the humor that the Negro displays before the white man in the South,” Myrdal wrote in his classic book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), “is akin to that manufactured satisfaction with their miserable lot which the conquered people of Europe were forced to display before their German conquerors. The loud, high-​pitched cackle that is commonly considered as the ‘Negro laugh’ was evolved in slavery times as a means of appeasing the master by debasing oneself before him and making him think that one was contented. Some Negroes still ‘put it on’ before whites in the South for a similar purpose.”19 These researchers’ suspicions about African American happiness are echoed in more recent scholarship on happiness, which has tended to show African Americans to be less happy than whites. The news is not all bad. In a development widely attributed to the improvements in the “objective circumstances in the lives of blacks” that have taken place as a result of the civil rights movement, the gap in the self-​reported happiness of blacks and white has narrowed over the last fifty years. Whereas “in the 1970s, nearly a quarter of all blacks reported being in the lowest category—​‘not too happy,’ compared to a tenth of whites, by the 2000s only a fifth of blacks put themselves in this category, as compared to a tenth of whites.”20 And in 2010 positive life evaluations among black Americans reached an all-​time high. In the Gallup National Well Being Index (which describes Americans as “thriving,” “striving,” or “suffering,” according to how they rate their current 18 Beckham 190. 19 Gunnar Myrdal An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Transaction, 1944), 960. 20 Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress,” NBER Working Paper No. 18916, issued in March 2013, 2.

194  History and Human Flourishing and future lives on a ladder scale with steps numbered from one to ten) for that year 57.9 percent of blacks described themselves as “thriving,” as compared to only 52.4 percent of whites. Similarly Gallup Healthways data from 2008 to 2013 reported higher levels of optimism among blacks than whites at this time. These findings were a conundrum to researchers who noted that improved sense of well-​being in blacks recorded during these years was not bolstered by comparable improvements in the black-​white earning gap and the education gap.21“These findings do not accord easily with the status and situation of black Americans, or the picture that comes from the recent riots in Baltimore and Ferguson,” Carol Graham of the Brookings Institute noted in 2015.22 They might well be an “Obama effect” rather an expression of enduring new optimism among blacks, she suggested.23 History has borne this prediction out. Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, black life rating scores have plummeted. The percentage of black people who reported themselves to be thriving in 2020 was 48.1 percent, which constitutes a nearly 10 percentage point drop from its all-​time high of the 57.9 percent who made this claim in 2010, and 6 point drop from 53.1 percent who described themselves as “thriving” in 2016. Likewise, self-​reported personal happiness among blacks and other people of color has also fallen dramatically. In a 2020 Gallup poll, only 77 percent of nonwhites reported being “very” or “fairly” happy versus more than 90 percent of whites—​a drop of 11 percentage points from the Obama era. As journalist Christopher Ingraham writes, “record nonwhite discontent in the era of a president who weaponizes racial discontent may not come as particular surprise.”24 As is well known, the Trump era has been marked by a “surge in hate crimes,” as well as a COVID-​19 pandemic that has both dramatized and amplified American racial and economic disparities.25 An economic crisis, as well as a health crisis, the pandemic was particularly 21 Stevenson and Wolfers 2. 22 Carol Graham, “The Surprising Optimism of Black Americans,” Brookings (blog), November 30, 2001, https://​www.brooki​ngs.edu/​blog/​soc​ial-​mobil​ity-​memos/​2015/​09/​25/​the-​sur​pris​ing-​optim​ ism-​of-​black-​americ​ans/​. See also Carol Graham, Happiness for All (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2017), 96. 23 Graham, “The Surprising Optimism of Black Americans.” On what Graham calls the “Obama effect,” see also Russell Berman, “Blacks and Hispanics Are Embracing the American Dream, as White Americans Give Up on It,” The Atlantic, September 4, 2015, https://​www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​polit​ics/​ arch​ive/​2015/​09/​the-​sur​pris​ing-​optim​ism-​of-​afri​can-​americ​ans-​and-​lati​nos/​401​054/​. 24 Christopher Ingraham, “Happiness Gap between Whites and Nonwhites Surged during Trump Era, Gallup Finds,” Washington Post, January 17, 2020, https://​www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​busin​ess/​ 2020/​01/​17/​happin​ess-​gap-​grows-​trump-​era/​. 25 Ingraham, “Happiness Gap.”

Toward a History of Black Happiness  195 devastating among blacks (and other people of color) whose “lower levels of income and wealth, higher unemployment, and greater levels of food and housing insecurity” left them “fewer buffers to absorb economic shocks.”26 The history of black happiness underscores that inequality is not just a social problem; it is also a psychological one. Higher levels of wealth and income shield more affluent Americans from many of the struggles, stresses, and insecurities experienced by lower-​income Americans. Moreover, these disparities extend across the color line in ways that suggest the eradication of economic exploitation and oppression is crucial to the psychological health of Americans as a group. For happiness is not just precarious among blacks; it is declining among lower-​income Americans in ways that indicate that the well-​being of a large number of Americans is likely to decrease if economic inequality in the United States continues to grow ever more dramatic while the welfare state continues to erode. Even before the pandemic, lower-​income Americans reported lower life satisfaction, greater “pain, worry, and anger,” and more “chronic pain and mental distress” than those with higher levels of income, according to a 2017 study by happiness researcher Carol Graham. Many of these negative emotions, Graham notes, are closely associated with “the objective markers of being poor: dangerous neighborhood, poor quality schools and hospitals, lack of health insurance, unstable employment and working hours, and high rates of single parent households and unplanned pregnancy.” But they are also linked “social determinants of health” such as the “difficulties of being poor in a country where the very visible lifestyles of the wealthy are increasingly out of reach.”27 The history of black happiness—​that is, of an exploited class forced to hide its emotions in order to survive relentlessly hostile work and living environments—​illuminates these difficulties. Moreover, it could well be the past as prologue for Americans in general, and especially those in the service professions, which are among the fastest-​growing professions in the nation today. As sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild first noted in her 1983 classic The Managed Heart, such workers are forced to perform cheeriness, thus creating an estrangement from their actual feelings in a way that constitutes an “occupational hazard” of their work.28 The situation has only 26 Peter Coy, “The Legacy of the Lost Year Will Be Devastating Inequality,” Bloomberg.com, March 10, 2021, https://​www.bloomb​erg.com/​news/​artic​les/​2021-​03-​10/​covid-​pande​mic-​made-​rac​ial-​inc​ ome-​ine​qual​ity-​much-​worse. 27 Graham, Happiness for All, 80. 28 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

196  History and Human Flourishing grown graver since then. Numerous companies from Trader Joe’s to Disney to Pret A Manger requiring false cheer of their low-​paid employees, while a 2017 summary of ninety-​five medical studies reports that such workplace practices result in “trouble sleeping, headaches and chest pain,” while also being linked to “aggression in the workplace.”29 What then can history—​African American history, in particular—​tell us about the cultivation of well-​being? It gives us the most important insight that few works positive psychology engage: it suggests that, all performances aside, human flourishing never truly exists within a context of exploitation and oppression.

Works Cited Beckham, Albert S. “Is the Negro Happy?: A Psychological Analysis.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 24, no. 2, 1929, pp. 186–​190. Berman, Russell. “Blacks and Hispanics Are Embracing the American Dream, as White Americans Give Up on It.” The Atlantic, September 4, 2015, https://​www.thea​tlan​tic. com/​polit​ics/​arch​ive/​2015/​09/​the-​sur​pris​ing-​optim​ism-​of-​afri​can-​americ​ans-​and-​ lati​nos/​401​054/​ Bonilla-​Silva, Eduardo. White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-​Civil Rights Era. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001. Coy, Peter. “The Legacy of the Lost Year Will Be Devastating Inequality.” Bloomberg.com, March 10, 2021, https://​www.bloomb​erg.com/​news/​artic​les/​2021-​03-​10/​covid-​pande​ mic-​made-​rac​ial-​inc​ome-​ine​qual​ity-​much-​worse. Davies, William. The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us on Well-​Being. London: Verso, 2015. De Warville, M. Brissot. “Interesting Account of the School of Negroes at Philadelphia.” The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, vol. 92, April 1792, pp. 258–​260. Drew, Benjamin. A North-​Side View of Slavery: The Refugee: Or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada. Boston: John P. Jewett and Sons, 1856. Graham, Carol. Happiness for All. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2017. Graham, Carol. “The Surprising Optimism of Black Americans,” Brookings blog), November 30, 2001, https://​www.brooki​ngs.edu/​blog/​soc​ial-​mobil​ity-​memos/​2015/​ 09/​25/​the-​sur​pris​ing-​optim​ism-​of-​black-​ameri​can.

29 Noah Scheiber, “At Trader Joe’s, Good Cheer May Hide Complaints,” New York Times, November 3, 2016; Timothy Noah, “Labor of Love: The Enforced Happiness of Pret A Manger, The New Republic, February 1, 2013; Paul Jaskunas, “The Tyranny of the Forced Smile,” New York Times, February 14, 2015; Jon Rehm, “Do Employee Forces Smiles at Stores Cause Mental Distress,” Workers Compensation Watch, September 28, 2017, https://​worke​rsco​mpen​sati​onwa​tch.com/​tag/​for​ced-​ cheer​fuln​ess/​. For more on the marketization of happiness in modern life, see William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us on Well-​Being (London: Verso, 2015).

Toward a History of Black Happiness  197 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence. Lyrics of the Lowly Life. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1896. Eastman, Mary Henderson. Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life As It Is. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co, 1852. Fitzhugh, George. Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters. Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1857. Haley, Alex. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” New York Times. March 1, 1964. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. Ingraham, Christopher. “Happiness Gap between Whites and Nonwhites Surged during Trump Era, Gallup Finds.” Washington Post, January 17, 2020, https://​www.was​hing​ tonp​ost.com/​busin​ess/​2020/​01/​17/​happin​ess-​gap-​grows-​trump-​era/​ Logan, John A. Thirty Years in Washington; Or, Life and Scenes in Our National Capital. Hartford, CT: A.D. Worthington & Co, 1901. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Transaction, 1944. Noah, Timothy. “Labor of Love: The Enforced Happiness of Pret A Manger.” The New Republic, February 1, 2013. Norris, Robert, A Short Account of the Slave Trade. London: Printed for W. Lowndes, 1789. Pinckard, George. Notes on the West Indies written under the Expedition under the command of the late General Sir Ralph Abercromby. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orms, 1806. Rehm, Jon. “Do Employee Forces Smiles at Stores Cause Mental Distress.” Workers Compensation Watch, September 28, 2017. https://​worke​rsco​mpen​sati​onwa​tch.com/​ 2017/​09/​28/​do-​employ​ees-​for​ced-​smi​les-​at-​sto​res-​cause-​men​tal-​distr​ess/​. Scheiber, Noah. “At Trader Joe’s, Good Cheer May Hide Complaints.” New York Times, November 3, 2016. Smith, J. S. “A letter from capt. J. S. smith to the rev. mr. hill on the state of the negro slaves.” The Critical Review, Or, Annals of Literature, vol. 62, 1786, 127–​128. Smith, Gerald L. A Black Educator in the Segregated South: Kentucky’s Rufus B. Atwood. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2015. Stevenson, Betsey and Justin Wolfers. “Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress.” NBER Working Paper No. 18916, issued in March 2013. Waeger, Cathy Covell. “Blackface Minstrelsy and Ethnic Identities as Globalized Market Commodities.” Imagined Identities: Identity Formation in the Age of Globalization Syracuse, edited by Gönül Pultar. NY: Syracuse UP, 2014, 124–​138. Whipple, Benjamin Henry. Bishop Whipple’s Southern Diary, 1834–​1844. New York: Da Capo Press, 1968.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Figures are indicated by f following the page number abstractions, Comte on, 28–​29, 30 Académie des Inscriptions, 143–​45 Achebe, Chinua, 80 acquisition. See also consumerism and success/​well-​being, 92 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 77 African American history, 184–​96 African Americans, 16. See also Black happiness life rating scores, after Trump, 194–​95 optimism reported by, in 21st c., 193–​94 positive life evaluations by, in 21st c., 193–​94 aging and awareness of time, 155–​56 and happiness, 166–​67 and interest in history, 15, 155–​56, 168 ahistoricism, 64 akua hulu manu, 45–​47, 45n.2, 46f American Historical Association, 3n.1 anachronism, 47, 58–​60 “controlled,” 59–​60 Andrade, Malle, 45–​47 Ankersmit, F. R., 130n.10 anti-​Christ, Nietzsche as, 6–​7 antiquarian history, 8–​9 Nietzsche on, 4–​5, 6 antiquaries, 143–​44 aristocrats, as historians, 143–​44 Aristotle, 13 biographical considerations, 110 on consistent luckiness, 107–​26 De Motu Animalium, 118–​19 Eudemian Ethics, 13, 111–​12, 115 on flourishing, 13 On Generation and Corruption, 113n.6

investigation of happiness, 109–​ 10, 111–​12 Metaphysics, 113n.6, 119n.13, 122–​23 Nicomachean Ethics, 13, 111–​12, 122 Parva Naturalia, 117 Physics, 113n.6, 114n.7, 119n.13, 124–​25 Politics, 118n.12, 122n.19 Prior Analytics, 119n.13 Problemata, 118n.12, 119n.13 Rhetoric, 122n.19 On the Soul (De Anima), 117, 118–​19, 118n.11, 122 Armitage, David, 1–​2, 11, 20–​21n.4, 44–​ 65, 100, 138 Aron, Steven, 140, 140n.2, 150–​51 ars critica, 159–​61 ars historica, 159–​60 art making, 25 Nietzsche on, 6–​7 work of, 42 art historian, 42 Assyria, histories of, in 19th c., 149–​50 Assyrians, Herodotus on, 141–​42 attention, 26n.11, 41, 41n.22 Augustine, discussion of time, in Confessions, 48–​49, 62–​63 Austen, Jane, Mansfield Park, 70 awikhigawôgan, 81–​82 Bacevich, Andrew J., “Bill O’Reilly Is America’s Best-​Selling Historian,” 72n.3 Bailyn, Bernard, 48 Bancroft, George, 3n.1

200 Index Barbados, slavery in, proslavers’ views on, 185–​86 barbarism documents of, documents of civilization as, 8–​10 Logan on, 173, 173n.7 Barseghyan, Hakob, 63n.25 Baschet, Jérôme, 53n.19 Baudelaire, Charles “Spleen,” 136 The Swan, 138 Baumeister, Roy, 166 Bay, Mia, 15–​16, 184–​96 Bayle, Henri, 144–​45 beauty Enlightenment theories of, 179n.19 human responses to, universality, Logan on, 178–​79, 180n.20 perception of, Logan on, 176–​80, 177n.16, 177n.17 and recognition of moral good, 175 and recognition of virtue, 176 universality of, Logan on, 177–​78 beauty is universal, 173n.6 Beckham, Albert S. “Is the Negro Happy?,” 191–​96, 191n.14, 192n.15, 192n.16, 192n.17 on Negro complex, 192–​93, 193n.18 Bellah, Robert, Religion in Human Evolution, 167–​68 belonging, sense of, 168 Bench by the Road project, 8 Benjamin, Walter, 8–​9, 44 Berman, Russel, 194n.23 Berrigan brothers, 23–​24n.8 Bevernage, Berber, 53n.18 Bible, 161 biblical exegesis, 18th-​c., 145–​46 bibliotherapy, 74 biology, and presentism, 51–​52 birthday celebrations, 91–​92, 91–​ 92n.5, 96–​97 Black happiness, 16, 184–​96. See also African Americans as masquerade, 188–​90 as racial stereotype, 185–​87 scholarly studies of, 191–​96

bliss, perishable vs. imperishable, 20, 20–​21n.4 Bloch, Marc, 78 Boddice, Rob, 174n.10 Boethius, 13–​14 The Consolation of Philosophy, 128n.2 Bonilla-​Silva, Eduardo, 186n.6 Bonnaud, Jacques-​Julien, Herodotus, Historian of the People of Israel without Knowing It, 145–​46 books. See also novels discovering antiquity through, 134–​36 Borges, Jorge Luis, 59–​60 Bouton, Christophe, 53n.17 Bréquigny, Louis-​Georges, 146n.8 Brombert, Victor, 155–​56 Brooks, Lisa, Our Beloved Kin, 81–​82 Bryant, Jacob, 145–​46 Buchwald, J. Z., and Feingold, Mordechai, 145n.7 Buddha, 109, 166 Burke, Edmund, 133–​34 Burnett, D. Graham, 10–​11, 15, 18–​43 et al., eds., In Search of the Third Bird, 42n.24 and Knauss, Stevie, Twelve Theses on Attention, 41n.22 The Sounding of the Whale, 32–​33 business storytelling, 74 Butterfield, Herbert, 51, 53, 56 The Englishman and His History, 56 The Origins of Modern Science, 56 The Whig Interpretation of History, 49–​ 50, 49n.6 Byatt, A. S., on the Thousand and One Nights, 72–​73 Cabinet (journal), 25 Camp, Stephanie M. H., 179n.19 Campbell, Roy, 136n.21 Carr, David, 75–​76 Carr, E. H., 53 What Is History?, 50–​51, 51n.12 Casaubon, 149–​50, 149n.15 catastrophic thinking, in present age, 138 causal reasoning, 57, 63 Ceserani, Giovanni, 144n.5

Index  201 chance. See also luck for Aristotle, 113–​14, 121 Herodotus on, 141–​42 in natural world, for Aristotle, 114–​15 Chang, Hasok, 64n.26 Chekhov, Anton, 171, 171n.3 Chernow, Ron, 76 children/​childhood consumerism linked to, 91–​92, 96–​97 curiosity in, tolerance for, 94 and death, 165 gratitude in, 97 rationality in, Aristotle’s views on, 125 Christianity, 26, 30, 34, 161, 166 Nietzsche on, 6–​7 Christian Right, 20–​21n.4 chronology, 18th-​c., 145–​46 Chronology of Herodotus (comte de Volney), 146–​47 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 3–​4, 138, 138n.25, 143–​44, 158 De re publica, 128 Clark, J. C. D., 53n.19 Claudia, Innocenti, et al., 131n.14 clerics, as historians, 143–​45 cognitive literary studies, 73, 73n.5 Collingwood, R. G., 50–​51, 53 compassion religion and, 98 as well-​being priority, 98 Comte, August, 28–​31 Conrad, Joseph, 79–​81 Almayer’s Folly, 80–​81 Heart of Darkness, 79–​81 consumerism. See also acquisition children/​childhood and, 91–​92, 96–​97 as compensation for burdens of work, 91 and courtship, 91 as expressive outlet, 91 and family life, 91–​92 and gratitude, 96–​97 history of, 87–​88 human needs served by, 91 love and, 89 modern, 90–​92 as status indicator, 91–​92

and well-​being agenda, 87–​88, 90–​ 92, 94 well-​being research and, 102–​3 continuity, 164 Cook, James (Captain), 45, 46 coronavirus pandemic. See COVID-​19 pandemic Coss, Peter, 61n.23 courtship, 89 and consumerism, 91 COVID-​19 pandemic, 39, 72, 72n.2, 194–​ 95, 195n.26 credo statements, 22, 23–​24, 23n.7 Cregan-​Reid, Vybarr, 135–​36, 136n.20 Creuzer, Friedrich, 145–​46 crisis, 39–​40 critical fabulation, 81–​82 critical history Nietzsche on, 5–​6 in service of human flourishing, 8–​10 critique, 25 limits of, 9–​10 Croce, Benedetto, 50–​51, 50n.8, 53, 59, 61–​62 crocodiles, fact-​checking about, 146–​ 47, 146n.9 Croesus, 109, 142–​43, 146–​47 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 170n.1, 174n.8 culture, human responses to, universality, Logan on, 178–​79, 180n.20 curiosity children’s, tolerance for, 94 Herodotus’, 140–​41 and well-​being, 94, 94n.6, 99–​100 Curran, Andrew S., 180n.21 daimon for Greeks, 116–​17 and luck, for Aristotle, 116–​17 as source of happiness, for Aristotle, 112–​13 Darwin, Charles, 2–​3 dating, 89 Davis, Natalie Zemon Fiction in the Archives, 151 Pardon Tales, 151 Trickster Travels, 151 Women on the Margins, 151

202 Index Day, Dorothy, 23–​24n.8 dead, the, care for, 165 death attitudes toward, 165–​66 children and, 165 history makes life of, 167–​68 thinking about, as good for happiness, 166–​67 and well-​being agenda, 99–​100 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 79 Delaney, Sadie Peterson, 74 Demuth, Bathsheba, Floating Coast, 81–​82 Dening, Greg, Islands and Beaches, 20–​21n.4 Denon, Vivant, 146–​47 Descartes, René, 159–​60 desire, for Aristotle, 115, 121 consistently lucky people and, 115–​16, 117, 120 nature as source of, 117 DeWall, C. N., 166 Dewey, John, 50–​51, 50n.11 Diamond, Jared, 76 Diaz, Junot, 74 Diderot, Denis, 158 The Nun, 146 digester, Melville’s concept of, 27, 27n.13 Dimock, Wai Chee, 61n.22 Diogenes, 165 Disaster Falls, Utah, 127 divine Aristotle’s idea of, 116–​17, 122–​23 Greek views on, 113 in impulse hypothesis, 123–​24 as ultimate final cause, for Aristotle, 123–​24 divorce, 89 Dos Passos, John, Manhattan Transfer, 27, 27n.14 Dray, William H., 48n.4, 51n.13 Drew, Benjamin, 188, 188n.9 Droysen, J. G., 147–​48 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 188–​89, 189n.10 Dupuis, C. R., 145–​46, 147–​48 Dupuy, Jean-​Pierre, 138n.26 Eastman, Mary, 186n.5, 187f Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, 186n.5, 187f

eating, sensible, well-​being and, 93 Ebers, George, 149–​51, 149n.16 An Egyptian Princess, 149–​50, 149n.16 Edelson, S. Max, 172, 172n.5 Edelstein, Dan, 13–​14, 20–​21n.4, 127–​ 38, 164 Egypt Denon on, 146–​47 Herodotus’ treatment of, 140–​41 histories of, in 19th c., 149–​50 Egyptians, Herodotus on, 141–​42 Eliade, Mircea, 159–​62 in ille tempore, 127–​28 Elias, Norbert, 51n.12 Eliot, T. S., 63 emotions cognitive importance of, 119–​20 mingling of, and sublime, 133–​34 negative, low income and, 195 empathy, as well-​being priority, 98 empire, Enlightenment and, 170–​71, 171n.2, 181–​82 empiricism, Aristotle’s use of, 110 Enlightenment, 2–​3, 5, 15–​16, 171n.2 American, 172 European, 172 and history, 159–​61 limitations of, 171n.2 modern paganism of, Gay on, 159–​61 racism and, 173, 180, 180n.21 and religion, 160–​61 and slavery and empire, 170–​71, 171n.2, 181–​82 theories of beauty, 179n.19 theories of race, 179n.19 Epic of Gilgamesh, The, 135–​36, 136n.20 epics, popularity of, in 18th c., 146 Epicurus, 128 epistemology, historical, 63 equality, 171n.2 eternal, history and, 7, 10–​11, 15, 42 eternalism, 54 ethics for Aristotle, 110–​12 and historians’ work, 44 and rejection of presentism, 64 universal, 15–​16 ethics (term), 110–​11

Index  203 etiquette books, on gratitude, 97–​98 eudaimon, 3–​4 eudaimonia, 113, 124, 125, 166 Aristotle on, 13, 111 eudaimonia (term), 111 Eustace, Nicole, 15–​16, 20–​21n.4, 170–​82 executive function, 119–​20 Fadiman, Anne, 22 Fadiman, Clifton, 22 fame, immortality of, 158 family formation, patterns in, 89 relationships in, 90 family history, 157–​58, 162–​63 family life, and consumerism, 91–​92 Faulkner, William, 54–​55 Feingold, Mordechai, 145n.7 Felski, Rita, 9–​10 feminism, 170–​71 Fendler, Lynn, 61n.22 fiction. See also novels and bibliotherapy, 74 historical, 137 history and, 70–​71, 79–​81 and narrative history, comparison of, 82 and theory of mind, 73, 73n.5 true story behind, 80 Fillipetti, Sandrine, 131n.13 Finkel, Eli, 12–​13 Finland, History of Experience project, 87n.3 Fitzhugh, George, 186n.4 Florence, Stendhal on, 132–​34, 132n.15 flourishing, 170. See also well-​being Aristotle on, 13 critical historical analysis and, 8–​10 definition of, 18 as future-​oriented, 64–​65 history that conduces to, 41–​42 human, definition of, 19 as past-​dependent, 64–​65 past/​present/​future in, 11 as present-​centered, 64–​65 Force, Pierre, 147–​48, 148n.12 forgetting art and power of, Nietzsche on, 6–​8

and remembering, dialectic between, 7–​8 Forster, E. M., 11–​12 Aspects of the Novel, 72–​73 Foucault, Michel, 52 four-​dimensionalism, 54 Franco, 7 Frankel, Noralee, 98n.8 Frankl, Victor, 162–​63 Franklin, Benjamin, 15–​16, 172–​ 73, 173n.6 Frazer, Michael, 59n.21 Fresnoy, Nicholas Lenglet du, 144–​45 Freytag’s pyramid, for narrative, 74 friendship, 12–​13, 90 The Friends of Attention, 41n.22 Fuentes, Marissa, 181–​82, 182n.25 Fukuyama, Francis, 53–​54 The Last Man and the End of History, 53–​54 Gadamer, Hans-​Georg, 20n.3, 41n.23 Garner, Margaret, 7–​8 Gaskell, Elizabeth, North and South, 79 Gast, John, History of Greece, 143–​ 44, 144n.5 Gay, Peter, 159–​61 gender of history, 148–​49 genealogy, 157–​58, 162–​63 Geoffroy Sainte-​Hilaire, Étienne, 146–​ 47, 146n.9 Gerson, Stéphane, 127–​28, 127n.1 Geschichte (term), 71 ghosts, 163, 164n.1 Gibbon, Edward, 2–​3, 159–​61, 164 Gigerenzer, Gerd, Gut Feelings, 120n.15 Gilbert, Daniel, 55–​56, 166 Gilgamesh, 109 Gillies, John, 146, 151 Gladwell, Malcolm, Blink, 120n.15 Glover, Richard, Leonidas, 146 Glover, T. R., 140–​41 God death of, Nietzsche on, 6–​7 as disclosed in time, 2–​3 gratitude toward, 98n.8 historians’ service to, 161–​62

204 Index god(s). See also divine Comte on, 28–​29 jealousy of, Herodotus’ belief in, 141–​42 and motions of the soul, for Aristotle, 122–​23 Goethe, 13–​14, 128, 129–​31 biographical details, 129, 129n.7 Italian Journey, 129, 129n.8 good life, 3–​4 Goodwin, Doris Kearns, 76 Gossman, Lionel, 144n.6 Göttingen School, 144–​45 graduate education, and humanities, 37–​ 39, 40 Grafton, Anthony, 143 Graham, Carol, 193–​94, 194n.22, 194n.23, 195, 195n.27 grand narratives, 76, 81 gratitude in children, 97 “genuine,” 97–​98 political climate and, 102 positive psychology and, 97–​98 social dimension and, 101–​2 toward God, 98n.8 as well-​being priority, and historical analysis/​diagnosis, 96–​98, 100 great men histories, 76, 81 Greece, ancient, modern histories of, 143–​ 44, 144n.5 Greek intellectual culture, 107–​8 Greeks, Herodotus and, 140–​42 Green, James N., 173n.6 Greif, Mark, The Age of the Crisis of Man, 22–​23 grief, and well-​being agenda, 99 Griffiths, Tom, 54–​55 Grote, George, 147–​48 Haley, Alex, 189–​90, 190n.13 happiness in African American history, 16, 184–​96 aging and, 166–​67 ancient Greeks on, 108–​9 Aristotle’s investigation of, 109–​ 10, 111–​12 colonization of, by policymakers, 174n.10

economic inequality and, 195 environmental change and, 102n.9 forced, in service professions, 195–​96, 196n.29 Greek views on, 113 in history, 12–​13 human impulse to, 13 industrial society and, 85–​86, 102n.9 love and, 89 modern idea of, 85–​86, 108–​9 past/​present/​future in, 11 personal responsibility for, 101–​2 practical, 36–​37 and public good, 174 pursuit of, context and, 125–​26 as rational choice, 124–​25 sources of, for Aristotle, 112–​13 views on, sameness and differences in, 109–​10 happiness courses, in universities, 101 Harari, Yuval Noah, 76 Hartman, Saidiya Lose Your Mother, 82n.8 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 81–​82, 82n.8 Hartog, François “Presentism and Beyond,” 53n.17 Regimes of Historicity, 53 “The Present of the Historian,” 53n.17 hauntings, spectral, 164n.1 Hawaiian feathered war god images, 45–​ 47, 45n.2, 46f Hecht, Jennifer Michael, The Happiness Myth, 165 Hegel, Georg W. F., 2–​3, 5–​6, 25n.10, 148–​ 49, 161–​63 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 143–​44 hermeneutics of recovery, 35–​36, 35n.19 hermeneutics of suspicion, 35n.19 Herodotus, 14 as “delightful child,” 148–​49 as father of history, 140 as father of lies, 75 Historia (Histories), 11–​12, 140–​41 as historical hero, 143 Macaulay on, 14 method used by, 141–​42

Index  205 narrative emplotment and authorial perspective used by, 140–​42 “oriental” prologue of, 141–​42 popularity in 18th c., 145–​47 on Solon and Croesus debate, 109, 142–​43 sources for, 141–​42, 147–​48 views of, in 19th c., 148–​51 writings, notable aspects of, 140–​42 higher education, humanities in, 33–​39, 35–​36n.20, 40 histoire, 11–​12, 71 historians ancient, 143, 143n.3 early modern, 143 and psychologists, collaboration, 100–​1 historical age, first, 18th c. as, 2–​3, 159–​60 historical consciousness, 41, 41n.23 historical diagnosis translation into interdisciplinary expertise, 100–​1, 102–​3 and well-​being priorities, 85–​103 historical hysteria, 137 historical man, 159 historical mindfulness, 102–​3 historical scholarship, 2–​3, 72 historical sociology, 51–​52 historical storytelling. See also narrative; story; storytelling academic historians and, 72, 74–​75 and advancing an argument, 78–​79 and ascribing intentionality, 75 and emotional reactions, 77–​78 and exploitation, 77–​78 and interpretation, 75–​76 within longer work, 75 objections to, 75–​78 public significance of, 82 historical sublime, 13–​14, 127–​28, 137–​ 38, 164–​65 and loss, 134 as source of consolation and ecstasy, 128 and stunned silence, 129–​30, 130n.10 historical unfolding, 39–​40 historicism, 161–​62 history as academic discipline, 21, 24n.9, 72 activities seen as, 19–​21

as caring for the dead, 165 causal/​explanatory, 35–​36, 35n.19, 35–​36n.20 and confrontation with mortality, 158, 164–​65 consolations of, 127–​28, 136–​ 38, 167–​68 death of, 51–​52 as disguised theology, Nietzsche on, 5–​6 as “dismal” pursuit, 140 and education of “the people,” 20n.2 as ethics in action, 3–​4 and human flourishing, 18–​19, 21, 33, 44–​45, 64–​65 in humanist mode, 20, 20–​21n.4, 31–​33 Janus image of, 19–​20, 20–​21n.4 as methodologically conservative, 24n.9 as national science, in 19th c., 148–​49 popularity of, in 18th c., 143–​47 popular practices of, in present day, 150–​51 and power, 19–​20 as profession, in 19th c., 148–​49 as professional discipline, 45 and religion, 158–​60, 168 secular trends, 19th-​c. views on, 148–​50 as site of oppression, 8–​9 in social-​scientific mode, 20, 20–​21n.4 and sustained attention, 41, 41n.22 that conduces to human flourishing, 41–​42 19th-​c. philosophies of, 2–​3, 148–​51 therapeutic aspects of, 156–​57 three species of, Nietzsche’s, 3–​6 (see also antiquarian history; critical history; monumental history) and transformation of society/​politics, 19–​20, 20n.2 and understanding our moment, 41, 41n.23 universal, 19th-​c. views on, 148–​50 value of, for life, 1–​3, 10 as vocation, 10–​11 Voltaire’s views on, 147–​49, 148n.12 and well-​being, connection of, 85–​ 86, 86n.1 work of, in disciplinary sense, 21, 21–​22n.5

206 Index history (term), definition of, 21 history courses, enrollments in, 52 History of Experience project (Finland), 87n.3 history of science, and presentism, 56–​57 history of the present (histoire du présent), 52, 63 history’s religion (Geschichtsreligion), 161–​62 history writing, in 18th c., 143–​44, 143n.4 Hobbes, Thomas, 173–​74 on reading about ancient history, 134–​ 35, 134n.17 Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost, 80 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, The Managed Heart, 195–​96, 195n.28 Homer, 111 Iliad, 113 hope, and well-​being, 94 Horowitz, Daniel, 12–​13 Hui, Andrew, 128, 128n.4, 128n.5 Hull, David L., 63n.25 human, concept of, definition of, 19 human experience, expansion of, historical analysis of, 87 human flourishing. See flourishing humanism, 23–​24n.8, 31–​32, 33n.17 and knowledge production, 35, 35n.18 and problems of human flourishing, 37–​39, 40 weak, 19n.1 humanities, 28 definition of, 31–​32 eudaimonic, 150–​51 and human virtues, 33–​35 as ongoing enterprise, 31, 31n.15 theological enterprise and, 31–​ 32, 32n.16 in universities and colleges, 33–​39, 35–​ 36n.20, 40 Humanities and Human Flourishing project, 16–​17 humanity, universal, 170–​71 human nature, 125–​26 human sciences, 19 Hume, David, 2–​3, 159–​60 History of England, 143–​45

Hunt, Lynn, 48, 51–​52, 59 Hutcheson, Francis, 173–​74, 175, 175n.13, 177–​78, 177n.17, 178n.18, 179–​80 Inquiry into Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 175 I Believe series, 22–​24, 22n.6 identity history, 156–​57 Illouz, Eva, 174n.10 imagined histories, 134–​36 imperialism, 171–​72, 180n.21 Atlantic, 172 imperishable bliss, 20, 20–​21n.4 impulse hypothesis, 123–​24, 123n.21 and consistent luckiness, 124–​25 impulses (hormai), for Aristotle, 117, 118–​ 19, 118n.12 and consistent luck, 119 income level, and negative emotions, 195 individualism, 94–​95, 96–​97 industrialization and happiness, 85–​86, 102n.9 and well-​being, 85–​86, 102n.9 Ingraham, Christopher, 194–​95, 194n.24, 194n.25 inspiration, divine, Aristotle on, 122, 122n.19 intellect, and consistent luck, for Aristotle, 115–​16 intellectual history, 107–​8 intellectuality, and professional historians, 23–​24, 23n.7, 23–​24n.8 interpretive charity, 58 interpretive explanation, 57 Japan, love in, 89 Jasanoff, Maya, 11–​12, 14, 35–​36n.20, 70–​ 82, 162–​63 Jaskunas, Paul, 196n.29 Johnson, Monte Ransome, 114n.8 Johnston, Elizabeth, 79 Joyce, James, “The Dead,” 162–​63, 164–​65 Juster, Susan, 181, 181n.24 Kahanu, Noelle, 45, 46–​47 Kahn, Charles, 123–​24, 123n.20, 124n.22 Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 120n.15

Index  207 Kant, Immanuel, 136 Critique of Judgment, 130–​31 on feeling of the sublime, 133–​34 Goethe’s knowledge of, 131, 131n.11 Keats, 25n.10 Kelley, Donald, 143 Kidd, Colin, 149n.15 Kierkegaard, 34 Kipling, Rudyard, 79–​80 Knausgard, Karl Ove, 165 Knauss, Stevie, 41n.22 knowledge, from intellectual history, 107–​8 knowledge production about objects of humanistic inquiry, 35, 35n.18 history and, 24n.9 Kornbluh, Anna, and Morgan, Benjamin, 61n.22 Koselleck, Robert, 4n.2 Kruse, Kevin, One Nation Under God, 20–​21n.4 Lanier, Tamara, 77n.7 Laqueur, Thomas, The Work of the Dead, 165 Lears, Jackson, 91 Le Clerc, Jean, 159–​61 lending library, first public, 172–​73 Lepore, Jill, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” 75n.6 Lepsius, Karl Richard, 149n.16 Levine, Joseph, 144n.6 Lewis, John, 188, 188n.9 Lianeri, Alexandra, 147n.11 Library Company of Philadelphia, 172–​73 life design, 36–​37 Lindner, Friedrich, 146n.9 Lindqvist, Sven, Exterminate All the Brutes, 80 Living Philosophies, 22n.6 Llosa, Mario Vargas, The Feast of the Goat, 156–​57 Logan, James, 172–​73, 173n.6, 174n.8, 174n.9 on beauty, 176–​80, 177n.16, 177n.17 biography, 174–​75, 175n.11 The Duties of Man Deduced from Nature, 15–​16, 172–​73, 173n.6

material prosperity of, vs. moral philosophy, 180–​81, 181n.23 on moral philosophy, 176, 176n.14 rejection of Hobbes, 173–​74 as slaveholder, 175n.11 on social good and individual happiness, 174 Logan, Mrs. John A., 187n.8 logotherapy, 162–​63 Loison, Laurent, 57–​61 loneliness increase in, 98 and well-​being agenda, 98, 100 Lorenz, Chris, and Bevernage, Berber, 53n.18 Louis XVI (King of France), 144–​45 love, 12–​13 and consumerism, 89 and family life, 88 and grief, 88 and happiness, 89 modern, 88–​90 in non-​Western societies, 89 as well-​being priority, and historical analysis/​diagnosis, 87–​88, 94, 99–​100 working-​class experience of, 88, 88n.4 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 50n.11 Lowe, Lisa, 180n.22 Lübbe, Hermann, 53n.19 luck (hê tuchê), for Aristotle, 113–​15. See also Aristotle: on consistent luckiness as cause of thinking/​deliberating, 121 as source of happiness, 112–​13 Lyceum, 110 lynching, 189 Lystra, Karen, 88, 88n.4 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 14, 71, 71n.1, 81, 148–​49 Machiavelli, Niccolo, on historical escapism, 137, 137n.22 Magherini, Graziella, 131n.14, 132n.16 magic, 13–​14 magistra vitae, 3–​4, 63, 143–​44 Mann, Thomas, Joseph and His Brothers, 167–​68 manners books. See also etiquette books on gratitude, 96–​97

208 Index Manuel, Frank, 144n.6 Marchand, Suzanne, 11–​12, 14, 75, 140–​ 51, 147n.11, 149n.16 marriage, 12–​13 marvelous, 14 Marx, Karl, 2–​3, 4, 5–​6, 161–​63 mass incarceration, racial disparity in, 173, 173n.7 mathematical sublime, 136 Kant on, 130–​31 McCoskey, Denise Eileen, ed., The Cultural History of Race in Antiquity, 108n.2 McMahon, Darrin, 15, 16–​17, 20–​21n.4, 102n.9, 109, 109n.3, 113n.5, 140n.1, 155–​68 The Pursuit of Happiness, 140 Meacham, Jon, 76 mean, Aristotelian virtue of, 18 meaning, search for, 162–​63, 168 Medes, Herodotus on, 141–​42 Melville, Herman, 27, 27n.13 memento mori, 158 cross as, 166 memory, and history, 156 Menard, Pierre (Borges’s character), 59–​60 Merton, Thomas, 23–​24n.8 metahistory, 74–​75 metaphysical/​metaphysics, Comte on, 28–​31 microhistory, 77 Miller, Peter N., 143n.4, 144n.6 Millot, Abbé, 144–​45 mind (νους), Aristotle on, 122 minstrel grin, 189 minstrelsy, 186–​87, 189n.11 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 143n.4 Montaigne, Michel de, on historical hysteria, 137, 137n.24 monumental history, 8–​9 Nietzsche on, 3–​5, 6 Moore, James, 146 morality, 170 moral philosophy, 18th-​c., 171–​72 moral sense as analogous to physical sense, 175 of beauty, Hutcheson on, 175

universal, Logan on, 173, 176, 178–​79, 179n.19 Morgan, Benjamin, 61n.22 Morley, Neville, and Lianeri, Alexandra, 147n.11 Morris, Ian Macgregor, 146, 147n.10 Morrison, Toni, 7–​8, 77–​78 Beloved, 7–​8 mortal remains, care for, 165 Moten, Fred, 33–​34 moviemaking, 77 Moyn, Samuel, 64 and Priestland, David, 137n.23 Muhlack, Ulrich, 147n.11 Murray, Oswyn, 143n.4, 144n.5 music, human responses to, universality, Logan on, 179–​80 Musset, Alfred de, 128, 128n.6 Myrdal, Gunnar, 193, 193n.19 mythography, 18th-​c., 145–​46 narrative, 73, 73n.4, 74–​75, 162–​63 Freytag’s pyramid for, 74 historical, Macaulay on, 71, 71n.1 and human reality, 75–​76 narratology, 73 national amnesia, 6–​7, 7n.3 national histories, 143–​44 nationalism, 2–​3 naturalism, 18 natural sciences, and history of science, 57 nature, for Aristotle, 113–​15, 120 and consistent luck, 117 proceeding toward the good, 120, 120n.16 negative, “tarry with,” 25–​26, 25n.10 negative capability, 25n.10 Negro complex, Beckham on, 192–​93, 193n.18 nekyia, 138 New Critics, 80 new philosophy, and new history, 159–​60 New Presentism, 60–​61 Newton, Isaac, 147–​48 Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, 145–​46, 145n.7 Nietzsche, Friedrich on big ideas, 40

Index  209 and eternal realm, 7, 10–​11, 15 on malady of history, 6 three species of history, 3–​6 (see also antiquarian history; critical history; monumental history) untimely (Unzeitgemässe) meditations, 2–​3 on value of history for life, 2–​3 Noah, Timothy, 196n.29 nonconscious thinking, 119–​20, 124–​25 nonfiction history books, 72, 72n.2 nonhuman, 19 non-​inhuman, 19n.1 non-​presentism, 54 Norris, Robert, 185–​86, 185n.2 nostalgia, 156 novels historical, 149–​51 past imagined in, 70–​71 nutrition, well-​being and, 93 Obama, Barack, 74 Obama effect, 193–​94, 194n.23 Olivier, Laurent, 53n.17 O’Reilly, Bill, 72, 72n.3 Oreskes, Naomi, 57–​62 orientalists, 148–​50 original sin, 26 Ostalgie, 156 overweight, 93 Ozymandias, 129–​30, 129n.9 Pacto del Olvido, 7 pain, 26n.11 humans as hollow conduits for, 26–​28 Painter, Nell Irvin, 181–​82, 182n.25 parental satisfaction, decline of, historical diagnosis and, 95 parent–​child relations, 89 parenting manuals, on gratitude, 97 Paris, Stendhal on, 133 Parish, Susan Scott, 178n.18 Pawelski, James, 62n.24, 150–​51 Peale, Norman Vincent, 86–​87n.2 Pernau, Margit, 173n.7 Perry, Lincoln Theodore, 190f Persian Wars, Herodotus on, 140–​42

Petrarch, 128, 128n.4 philosophy consolation of, 128, 128n.2 as meditation on death, 166 in Moby-​Dick, 27n.13 presentism in, 54–​55 Pinckard, George, 185–​86, 186n.3 Pinker, Steven, 53–​54, 95n.7, 170–​ 71, 171n.2 Enlightenment Now, 53–​54 Plato, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116–​17, 166 Plutarch, 146n.8 Lives, 3–​4 Pocock, J. G. A., 143n.4, 160–​61 Pogue, James, 77 policy recommendations, historically informed, 143–​44 political climate, and well-​being, 101–​2 Polybius, 4 positive psychology, 12–​13, 26–​27, 36–​37, 85–​87, 96, 100–​1, 102–​3, 162–​63, 170, 173–​74, 174n.8, 184 and gratitude, 97–​98 positivism, 28–​31 positivity (term), 86–​87n.2 posterity, as kind of afterlife, 158 post-​humanisms, 19 poverty, and negative emotions, 195 Powell, John Wesley, 127 power, as “sacred,” 26–​27, 27n.12 Preller, Victor, 23–​24n.8 present history of (histoire du présent), 52, 63 as omnipresent, 53 tyranny of (la tyrannie du présent), 53 present-​centeredness, 51 presentism, 11. See also New Presentism analytical, 51, 53, 56–​57, 60 antipathy to/​opposition to/​reaction against, 48, 58–​59, 64 backward-​looking vs. future-​ determining, 55–​56 critical, 57, 60–​61 defense of, 63, 63n.25, 64 definition of, 47 as dehistoricization, 53n.19 descriptive, 57, 59–​60 empirical, 57, 58–​59

210 Index presentism (cont.) as epistemological and ontological, 54–​55 eternal, 63 history of science and, 56–​57 idealist, 50–​52, 53 ideological, 49–​50, 51–​52, 53 meanings among historians, 48–​49, 54 methodological, 57, 59 motivational, 57, 60–​62 narrative, 57, 60 normative, 57, 58 omnipresent, 53 perspectival, 51–​52, 53, 138 philosophical, 54–​55 “progressive” critical vs. “conservative,” 61n.23 psychological, 55–​56 rejection of, ethical implications, 64 strategic, 60–​61 substantive, 57–​58 teleological, 48–​50, 53, 56–​57, 60 and well-​being agenda, 100 presentism (term), 49n.5 presentist (term), 49n.5 Prideaux, Humphrey, 143–​44 Priestland, David, 137n.23 Prime Mover, 122–​24 princes, history as teaching for, 143–​44 professionalization, 38 progress, past, appreciation for (or not), 86n.1 psychohistory, 100–​1 psychologists, and historians, collaboration, 100–​1 psychology presentism in, 55–​56 Seligman on, 170 Pultar, Gönül, 189n.11 race. See also Black happiness classical Greek culture and, 107–​ 8, 108n.2 cultural construction of, 177–​78 Enlightenment theories of, 179n.19 skin color and, 107–​8

racism, 170–​71, 171n.2 Enlightenment humanism and, 173, 180, 180n.21 Ranke, Leopold von, 3n.1, 50–​51, 50n.10, 53, 147–​48, 149–​51, 161–​63 World History, 149–​50 rationality, Aristotle’s views on, 125 reading, discovering antiquity through, 134–​36 “Reading Well,” 74 recovery, 35–​36, 35n.19 Rehm, Jon, 196n.29 Reichardt, Carl, 146n.9 Reill, Peter Hanns, 143n.4 religion, 28 as backward-​facing, 158–​59 and compassion, 98 Enlightenment and, 160–​61 functions of, 15 history and, 158–​60, 168 Nietzsche on, 6–​7 and secular inquiry, 36–​37 religion of history, 161–​62 Renan, Ernest, 7n.3 Rennell, James, 146–​47 resilience, and well-​being agenda, 100 Rica, Alan, 189n.11 Richter, Daniel K., 175n.11 Ricoeur, Paul, 35–​36, 35n.19 Robbins, Bruce, 61n.22 Rollin, Charles, 145–​46, 147–​48 Rols, Bertrande de, 151 Roman historians, 143 Rome Gibbon on, 164 Goethe and, 129–​31, 133–​34 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, The Confessions, 135, 135n.18 Said, Edward, 70 Santa Croce, Stendhal’s visit to, 132, 132n.16 Sartre, 23–​24n.8 Sawaya, Francesca, 61n.22 Scaliger, Joseph, 145–​46 Schactman, Tom, 173n.6 Schama, Simon, 75–​76 Scheiber, Noah, 196n.29

Index  211 scholarship, 10–​11 Schuckford, Samuel, 143–​44 Schuessler, Jennifer, “Your Ancestors Were Slaves: Who Owns the Photos of Them?,” 77n.7 Schwab, Andreas, 146–​47 science. See also history of science history as, 6–​7, 10n.5 Weber on, 10–​11 sciences, historical study of, 24n.9 scientific history, 15 scientism, 35–​36n.20 Scipio, dream of, 128, 128n.3 Scythian inquiries, Herodotean, 146–​ 47, 146n.9 Scythians, Herodotus on, 141–​42 Sebald, W. G., 164n.1 secularized eschatology, 161–​62 secular magic, historical sublime and, 13–​14 self-​help movement, 85–​86, 101–​2 Seligman, Martin, 170, 170n.1, 173–​ 74, 174n.8 Selvon, Samuel, The Lonely Londoners, 79 Serres, Michel, 25 service professions, and false cheer, 195–​ 96, 196n.29 set piece, 78 sexuality, classical Greek culture and, 107–​ 8, 108n.1 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord), 173–​74, 175, 175n.12, 177 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Ozymandias, 129n.9 Shook, John R., 173n.6 sibling relationships, 90 skeptics, 144–​45 Skinner, Quentin, 59–​60 slavery, 7–​8 in Austen’s Mansfield Park, 70 defenders of, on enslaved people’s happiness, 185–​86, 185n.1, 186n.3, 186n.4, 186n.5, 186n.6, 186n.7, 187f Enlightenment and, 170–​71, 171n.2, 181–​82 and unhappy Blacks/​unhappy Negroes, 185, 185n.1, 186 sleep, and well-​being, 93 Smith, Bonnie, 148–​49, 149n.14

Smith, Gerald L., 189n.12 Smith, Hilda L., 171n.2 social determinants of health, 195 social good, individual happiness and, 174 Socrates, 34, 116–​17 Soderlund, Jean R., 175n.11 Solon, 109, 142–​43, 146–​47, 146n.8, 150–​51 soul, for Aristotle functions of, hierarchy of, 117–​19 motion in, starting point for, 121–​23 movements of, 118–​19, 118n.10 soulcraft, 32n.16, 36–​37, 36n.21 soul mate, 12–​13, 89–​90 Spoerhase, Carlos, 63n.25 spontaneous events (ta automata), for Aristotle, 114–​15 Stearns, Peter, 12–​13, 85–​103 Stendhal, 13–​14, 128 Rome, Naples, and Florence, 131–​32, 131n.13 Stendhal’s syndrome, 131–​34, 131n.14 Stepin Fetchit, 16, 189–​90, 190f Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 146 Stevens, Wallace, “Sunday Morning,” 20–​21n.4 Stevenson, Betsey, and Wolfers, Justin, 193n.20, 194n.21 Stiegler, Bernard, 19n.1 Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations, 41n.22 Stocking, George, 56n.20 Stone, Lawrence, 72 story, 11–​12 Forster on, 72–​73 history as, 72–​73 as powerful tool, 11–​12 story (term), 71 storytelling, 150–​51. See also fiction; historical storytelling business, 74 digital tools and, 81–​82 Herodotus’ use of, 142–​43 in political campaigning, 74 as set piece, 78 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 187f

212 Index Struck, Peter T., 13, 107–​26, 123n.21 Divination and Human Nature, 120n.15 Sturman, Rachel, 170–​71, 171n.2 Stuurman, Siep, 171n.2 sublime, 13–​14, 164. See also historical sublime; mathematical sublime and escape from time, 133 Goethe on, 131, 131n.12 Kant on, 130–​31 and mingling of emotions, 133–​34 Stendhal on, 132–​34 and stunned silence, 129–​30, 130n.10, 133 suffering, 26–​27, 26n.11 silence of, 171 Super Bowl ads, as narratives, 74 suprahistorical, Nietzsche and, 7 Tamm, Marek, and Olivier, Laurent, 53n.17 Tay, Louis, 170, 170n.1 teaching, 10–​11 teleology, 48–​50, 49n.7, 51, 63 Aristotelian, 114–​15, 114n.8, 120, 123–​ 24, 123n.20 presentism as, 48–​50, 56–​57, 60 terror management system, 166 theodicy, 161–​62 Hegel on, 5 theologians, historicist views of, 2–​3 theology, displaced by history, in 18th c., 160–​61 theology of history, 161–​62 theory of mind, 73, 73n.5 Thermopylae, 147n.10 thin slicing, 119–​20 Thompson, E. P., 76 Thucydides, 4, 143, 146, 147–​49, 150–​51 time Augustine’s philosophy of, 48–​49, 62–​63 awareness of, aging and, 155–​56 as central concern for historians, 63 as a dimension, 54 escape from, as sublime, 133 “mythic,” 127–​28 philosophers of, presentism for, 54 Todorov, Tzvetan, 73 Tolles, Frederick, 175n.11, 177n.16

traduttore, traditore (the translator is a traitor), 59–​60 translation, problem of, 59–​60 trauma, “working through,” 7–​8 travelers, history writing by, 143–​44 Troullot, Michel-​Rolph, 8–​9 Trujillo, Rafael, 156–​57 Trump, Donald, 194–​95 trust political climate and, 102 as well-​being priority, and historical analysis/​diagnosis, 94–​95 unity, sense of, 163 universal ancient histories, 143–​44 universalism, 171 Enlightenment, 171, 181–​82 universals, false, 15–​16, 170–​71, 172, 179–​80 Valla, Lorenzo, 143 Van der Eijk, Philip J., 112n.4, 115n.9, 121n.17, 122n.18 vanitas, 129–​30, 135–​36 Vattimo, Gianni, 19n.1 virtue, 170–​71 as essence of human nature, Logan on, 176, 176n.15 racialization of, in Enlightenment, 173 virtue (aretê), 111 vocation, 10–​11, 33, 33n.17 Volney, Constantin, Les Ruines, 135, 135n.19 Voltaire, 2–​3, 150–​51, 159–​60 on Herodotus, 147–​48 views on history, 147–​49, 148n.12 Zadig, 128n.3 Waeger, Cathy Covell, 189n.11 Walker, David, 189 war, 102, 102n.9 Weber, Max, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Science as a Vocation), 10–​11, 33, 33n.17 Weiner, Eric, 167 well-​being, 18. See also flourishing American, decline in, 101–​2

Index  213 contemporary, cultural context and, 92–​93 curiosity and, 94, 94n.6 eating/​nutrition and, 93 emotional factors and, 94 gratitude and, 96–​98 hope and, 94 Humanities and Human Flourishing project focus on, 16–​17 improvements in human condition and, 86n.1 personal responsibility for, 101–​2 political climate and, 101–​2 priorities, and historical analysis/​ diagnosis, 85–​103 sleep and, 93 trust and, 94–​95 well-​being agenda historical context and, 99–​102 and presentism, 100 well-​being programs, in universities, 101 well-​being research, goals for, 102–​3 West, Cornel, 23–​24n.8 West Indies, slavery in, proslavers’ views on, 185–​86

Wheeler, Roxanne, 180n.21 Whig history, 49–​50, 51, 53, 56, 60 Whipple, Benjamin Henry, 186, 186n.7 White, Hayden, 64, 74–​75, 76 Metahistory, 74–​75, 77 white supremacy, 16, 184, 187 Wilson, Jeffery R., 48n.4 Winkler, John, 108n.1 Winterer, Caroline, 172, 172n.4, 172n.5, 181, 181n.24 wisdom, and consistent luck, for Aristotle, 115–​16 Wolfers, Justin, 193n.20, 194n.21 women as historians, 151 in history, 151 rationality in, Aristotle’s views on, 125 Wood, Gordon, 48 Woods, Michael, 112n.4, 118n.10 Wulf, Edwin II, 178n.18 Young, B. W., 164n.1 zones of exception, 180, 180n.22