Writing History: Essay on Epistemology 0819550671, 0819560766

Citation preview

Writing History

'

-

Writing History Essay on Episterrwl,ogy

PAUL VEYNE Translated by Mina Moore-Rinvolucri

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS� Middletown, Connecticut

MARTHA S. GRAFTON LIBRAR'f . / . MARY BALDWIN COLLEGE

Copyright© 1971 Editions du Seuil English translation copyright© 1984 Wesleyan University Press All rights reserved. Acknowledgments: The author owes much to the Sanskrit scholar Helene Flaceliere, to the philosopher C. Granger, to the historian H. I. Marrou, and to the archaeologist George Ville ( 1929-1967). Mistakes are his alone; they would have been more numerous if J. Molino had not agreed to go over the typed copy of this book, bringing to it his rather frightening encyclopedic knowledge. I have discussed this book a great deal with J. Molino. Furthermore, the enlightened reader will find, in many places in this book, implicit references to--and, no doubt unintentional reminiscences of-the Introduction a la philosophie de Z,histoire of Raymond Aron, vvhich remains the basic work in this field.

Writing History: Essay on Epistemology was originally published under the title Comment On ecrit l'histoire: essai-d'epistemologie in 1971 by Editions Seuil. All inquiries and permissions requests should be addressed to University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire a3753.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Veyne, Paul, 1930Writing history: essay on epistemology. Translation of: Comment on ecrit l'histoire. Includes index. 2. History-Philosophy. 1. History-Methodology. 3. Historiography. I. Title. 016.v46i3 1984 901 84-7281 ISBN 0-8195-5067-1 (alk. paper) 1 s B N 0-8195-6076-6 ( pbk. : alk. paper) \1anufacturecl in the United States of America

5 4

3

To Helen whose lovable theoretis1n has long been an indispensable balance-weight for an obsolete empiricist

Contents

Prologue

Part One: The Aim of History

I II III IV V

Only a True Account 3 15 History Does Not Exist Plots, Not Facts or Geometrical Figures 47 Pure Curiosity about the Specific Intellectual History 71

Part Two: Understanding

VI VII VIII IX

Understanding the Plot 87 117 Theories, Types, Concepts 144 Causality and "Retrodiction" Consciousness Not the Root of Action

Part Three: The Progress of History

X Lengthening the Questionnaire 213 XI The Sublunary and the Human Sciences XII History, Sociology, and Complete History Notes

291

Index

333

31

Prologue

W

hat is history? Judging by what we hear around us, this is a question that needs to be asked again. ''History, in this century, has understood that its real task was to explain''; "Such and such a phenomenon cannot be explained by sociology alone: wouldn't recourse to the historical explanation give us a better idea of it?" "Is history a science?" This is useless debate! "Isn't the col­ laboration of all researchers desirable and alone fruitful?" "Shouldn't the historian apply himself to building up theories?" No. No, such history is not that in which historians deal. At the very most, it is that in which they think they deal or that they have been persuaded they ought to regret not having dealt with. No, it is not useless to know if history is a science, for "science" is not a lofty word, but a precise term; and experience proves that indifference to the debate about words is usually the accompaniment of a confusion of ideas on the matter. No, history has no method-just ask to be shown that method. No, it explains nothing at all, if the word "explain" has any meaning; as for what it calls its theories, they need a closer examination. Let us understand each other properly. It is not enough to affirm once again that history speaks of "what will never be seen twice"; neither is there any question of claiming that it is subjective, a matter of perspec­ tive, that we query the past starting from our own system of values, that historical facts are not things, that man understands himself and does not explain himself, that of him there can be no science. In a word, there is no question of confusing being and knowing; human sciences exist and are good ( or at least those of them that really deserve the name of sci­ ence), and human physics is the hope of our century, as physics was that of the seventeenth century. But history is not that science, and never will ix

x

Prologue

be; if it can be bold, it has undefined possibilities for renewing itself, but in another direction. History is not a science, and has little to expect from sciences; it does not explain, and has no method. Better still, history, about which much has been said for two centuries, does not exist. Then what is history? And what do historians, from Thucydides to Max Weber or Mark Bloch, really do, once they have gone through their documents and proceeded to the «synthesis''? Is their work the scientifi­ cally conducted study of the various activities and the various creations of men in other days? the science of men in society? human societies? Much less than that; the answer to the question has not changed over the 2,200 years since the successors of Aristotle found it-historians tell of true events in which man is the actor; history is a true novel. A reply that at first sight seems innocuous.

Part One

The Aim of History

Chapter I

Only a True Account

Htnnan Events

H

uman events are true occurrences with man as the actor. But the word ccman" must not frighten us. Neither the essence nor the goals of history require the presence of that character; they de­ pend on the perspective chosen. History is what it is, not because of some nature of man, but because it has decided on a particular way of know­ ing. Facts are considered either as individualities or as phenomena be­ hind which a hidden invariable is sought. The magnet attracts iron, volcanoes erupt: physical facts in which something is repeated; the eruption of Vesuvius in 1779: a physical fact treated as an event. The Kerensky government in 1917: a human event; the phenomenon of double power in a period of revolution: a phenomenon that can be re­ peated. If we take the fact for an event, it is because we judge it to be interesting in itself; if we are interested in its repeatable nature, it is but a pretext for discovering a law. Whence the distinction that Cournot makes between the physical sciences, which study the laws of nature, and the cosmological sciences, which, like geology or the history of the solar system, study the history of the world; for The curiosity of man has not only as its aim the study of the laws and forces of nature; it is still more promptly roused by the spectacle of the world, by the desire to know its present structure and past revolutions. . . . 1

The human presence is not necessary for events to rouse our curiosity. It is true that human history has the peculiarity that the operations in­ volved in knowing others are not the same as those through which we Notes are on pages 291-332.

3

4

The Aim of History

understand physical phenomena; geological history, for example, has a very different aura from human events. Thus we speak of meaning, of understanding, but the correct term is much simpler: finality. In the world as it appears to us, the conduct of human affairs and the under­ standing of them are dominated by the fact that we know in ourselves, and recognize in other people, the existence of an expectation that de­ termines a plan, and of a plan that leads to modes of action. But this human finalism entails no consequences for the epistemology of history; it is not introduced by the historian when he makes a synthesis; it be­ longs to actual experience, and is not peculiar to the account the his­ torian gives of that experience; it is found both in the novel and in the merest bit of conversation.

Events and Documents History is an account of events: all else flows from that. Since it is a direct account, it does not revive, 2 any more than the novel does. The actual experience, as it comes from the hands of the historian, is not that of the actors; it is a narration, so it can eliminate certain erroneous prob­ lems. Like the novel, history sorts, simplifies, organizes, fits a century into a page. 3 This synthesis of the account is not less spontaneous than that of our memory when we call to mind the last ten years through which we have lived. To speculate on the interval that always separates the actual experience and the recollection of the event would simply bring us to see that Waterloo was not the same thing for a veteran of the Old Guard and for a field marshal; that the battle can be related in the first or the third person; that it can be spoken of as a battle, as an English victory, or as a French defeat; that from the start one can drop a hint of the outcome or appear to discover it. These speculations can produce amusing experiments in aesthetics; to the historian, they are the discovery of a limit. That limit is that in no case is what historians call an event grasped directly and fully; it is always grasped incompletely and laterally, through documents or statements, let us say through tekmeria, traces, impressions. Even if I am a contemporary and a witness of Waterloo, even if I am the principal actor and Napoleon in person, I shall have only a perspective of what historians will call the event of Waterloo; I

ONLY A TRUE ACCOUNT

5

shall be able to leave to posterity only my statement, which, if it reaches them, they will call an impression. Even if I were Bismarck deciding to send the Ems dispatch, my own interpretation of the event would per­ haps not be the same as that of my friends, my confessor, my regular historian, and my psychoanalyst, who may have their own version of my decision and think they know better than I do what it was I wanted. In essence, history is knowledge through documents. Thus, historical nar­ ration goes beyond all documents, since none of them can be the event; it is not a documentary photomontage, and does show the past "live, as if you were there." To repeat the useful distinction of G. Genette, it is diegesis and not mimesis. 4 An authentic dialogue between Napoleon and Alexander I, had it been preserved in shorthand, will not be ''stuck" in the account. The historian will most usually pref er to talk about this dialogue; if he quotes it verbatim, the quotation will be a literary effect, designed to give life-let us say ethos-to the plot, which would bring history thus written close to the historical novel.

Events and Differences Being the account of events, history, by definition, does not repeat it­ self, and is only the history of variations; men will tell of the 1914 War, but not of the war as a phenomenon. ( Imagine a physicist who did not seek out the law of falling bodies, but talked about falls and their dif­ ferent "causes.") Of the text of man, the historian knows the variations but never the text itself; the greater part of what may be known about man-the most interesting part, perhaps-must not be asked of history. An event stands out against a background of uniformity; it is a differ­ ence, a thing we could not know a priori: history is the daughter of memory. Men are born, eat, and die; but only history can tell us of their wars and empires. They are cruel and commonplace, neither completely good nor completely bad; but history will tell us if, at a given period, they preferred indefinite profit to retirement once their forhme was made, and how they perceived or classified colors. It will not teach us that the Romans had two eyes and that to them the sky was blue; on the other hand, it will not leave us ignorant of the fact that where we talk of colors when speaking of the sky in fine weather, the Romans used another category and spoke of the caelum serenum rather than of the

6

The Aim of History

blue sky; that is a semantic event. As for the night sky, they saw it with the eyes of common sense, as a solid vault and not too distant; we, on the other hand, have seen it as an infinite abyss since the discovery of the Medicean planets, which caused the atheist to whom Pascal lends voice the terror familiar to us. An event of thought and of sensibility. No event exists in itself, but in relation to a conception of the eternal man. A history book is a little like a grammar; the practical grammar of a foreign language does not record all the rules of the language, but only the rules different from those of the language spoken by the reader for whom the grammar is destined, rules that might surprise him. The historian does not exhaustively describe a civilization or a period, or make a complete inventory of it, as if he had just arrived from another planet; he will tell his reader only what is necessary so that the latter can picture that civilization starting from what is always taken to be true. Does that mean that the historian is never obliged to enunciate primary truths? Unfortunately, primary truths have a troublesome ten­ dency to be substituted for real truths; if we do not know that our con­ ceptions of the sky, of colors, and of profit-whether justified or not­ are not at least eternal, we will not think of questioning the documents on these matters-or, rather, we will not understand what they tell us. Because of its paradoxical and critical aspect, the "historicist" side of history has always been one of the most popular attractions of the sub­ ject; from Montaigne to Tristes trop iques or to L' H istoire de la folie of Foucault, the variety of values from nation to nation and from century to century is one of the great themes of Western sensibility. 5 Since it is opposed to our natural tendency to anachronism, it also has a heuristic value. For example, in the Satyricon, Trimalcion, after drinking, speaks at length, proudly and joyfully, of a magnificent tomb he has had built for himself; in a Hellenistic inscription, a public benefactor whom the state wants to honor sees in the greatest detail what honors his country will confer on his corpse on the day he is cremated. This involuntary gruesomeness will make real sense when we read, in Father Hue, that the attitude of the Chinese is the same in this matter : People in comfortable circumstances , who have something left over from their spendin g money, do not fail to provide in advance a coffin to their taste, a nd a well-cut one. Until the time comes to lie in it, it is kept in the house like a fine piece of furniture that cannot fail to he a pleasant and consol ing sight in suitably decorated apartments . The coffin is above all for well-born children an excellent

ONLY A TRUE ACCOUNT

7

means of showing the intensity of their fllial piety to the authors of their days; it is a great and soothing consolation to the heart of a son to be able to purchase a coffin for an old father or an old mother, and to . . . offer it to them at a moment when they least expect it. 6

Reading these lines written in China, we understand better that the abundance of funeral things in classical archaeology is not solely due to the chance of finds; the tomb was one of the values of Greco-Roman civilization, and the Romans were as exotic as the Chinese. That is not a great revelation from which to draw tragic pages on death and the West, but it is a true little fact that gives more relief to a picture of civilization. The historian never brings a resounding revelation that up­ sets our view of the world; the banality of the past is made up of insig­ nificant details that, as they multiply, nonetheless form a very unexpected picture. Let us note in passing that, if we were writing a Roman history with Chinese readers in mind, we would not have to comment on the Roman attitude toward tombs; we could be content to write, like Herodotus : «On this point, the opinion of these people is almost like our own." So if, in order to study a civilization, we limit ourselves to reading what it says itself-that is, to reading sources relating to this one civilization­ we will make it more difficult to wonder at what, in this civilization, was taken for granted; if Father Hue makes us aware of the exoticism of the Chinese about funereal things, and if the Satyricon does not bring us the same astonishment about the Romans, it is because Hue was not Chinese, whereas Petronius was Roman. A historian content to repeat in indirect speech what his heroes say of themselves would be as boring as edifying. The study of any civilization enriches the knowledge we have of another, and it is impossible to read Hue's Travels in the Chinese Empire or Volney's Travels in Syria without learning more about the Roman Empire. The procedure can be generalized; and, whatever the question studied, it can be approached systematically from the socio­ logical point of view. By that I mean from the point of view of com­ parative history; the recipe is almost infallible for renewing any historical point, and the words of comparative study ought to be at least as hal­ lowed as those of exhaustive bibliography . For the event is difference, and the characteristic effort of the historian's profession and what gives it its flavor are well known: astonishment at the obvious. An event is anything that is not obvious . Scholasticism would say that

8

The Aim of History

history is interested in matter no less than in form, in individual details no less than in essence and definition; scholasticism also adds that there is no matter without form, and we shall see that the problem of uni­ versals is put to historians too. Provisionally we can adopt the distinction made by Dilthey and Windelband : 7 On one side there are the nomo­ logical sciences, which have as their goal to establish laws or types, and on the other, the ideographical sciences, dealing with the individual ; physics and economics are nomological, and history is ideographical . ( As for sociology, it isn't too sure what it is. It knows that there is a place for a nomology of man, and it would like to be that; but often, under the flag of sociology, authors produce what is in reality a history of contemporary civilization-and that is not the worst that is done. )

Individualization But to say that the event is individual is an equivocal qualification ; the best definition of history is not that its object is what is never seen twice. It may be that some considerable aberration of the orbit of Mer­ cury, due to a rare conjunction of the planets, will not be repeated, but it is also possible that it will be in a distant future; the chief point is to know whether the aberration is related for its own sake ( which would be to write a history of the solar system ) or whether it is seen only as a problem of celestial mechanics. If, as if moved by a spring, John Lack­ land •'came this way a second time," to imitate the example, the historian would relate the two comings and would feel no less a historian for doing so. That two events are repeated, even repeated exactly, is one thing; that they are nonetheless two is another, and that alone counts for the historian . Similarly, a geographer writing a regional geography will con­ sider two glacial cirques as distinct, even if they are enormously alike and represent the same type of relief; the individualization of historical or geographical facts by time or space is not contradicted by their eventual subsumption into one species, one type, or one concept. History lends itself to a typology, and one can hardly describe well-characterized types of revolutions or of cultures as a variety of insect is described; but even if it were otherwise, and there were a variety of war the descrip­ tion of which would cover several pages, the historian would continue to relate individual cases belonging to that variety. After all, direct taxation can be considered as a type, and so can indirect taxation ; what is his-

ONLY A TRUE A C COUNT

9

torically pertinent is that the Romans had no direct taxation and the taxes were imposed by the Directory. But what individualizes events? It is not their difference of detail, their '-=matter," what they are in themselves, but the fact that they hap­ pen-that is, that they occur at a given moment ; history would never repeat itself, even if it happened to say the same thing again. If we were interested in an event for its own sake, outside time, like a kind of trinket, 8 we would vainly, like aesthetes of the past, take delight in what was inimitable about it. The event would nonetheless be a "sample" of historicity, connected to nothing else in time. Two passings of John Lack­ land are not a sample of a pilgrimage of which the historian had two copies, for the historian would not find it a matter of indifference that that prince, who has already had so many misfortunes with the method­ ology of history, had the further misfortune of having to pass the way he had already passed ; when told about the second passing, he would not say "I know," as does the naturalist when he is brought an insect he has already seen . This does not imply that the historian does not think in concepts like everyone else ( he does indeed speak of "the passing" ) , or that historical explanation should not have recourse to types, such as "enlightened despotism." It simply means that the soul of a historian is that of a reader of news items; these are always the same, and are al­ ways interesting because the dog that is run over today is different from the one run over yesterday-an d, more generally, because today is not yesterday.

Nature and History Because a fact is made singular, it does not follow that by right it is not capable of scientific explanation ; despite what is often said , there is no radical difference between the facts studied by the physical sciences and historical facts. All are individualized at a point in space and time, and it would be a priori as possible to treat the latter scientifically as the former. One cannot oppose science and history like the study of the universal and the individual. To begin with, physical facts are not less individualized than are historical facts; then the knowledge of a his­ torical individuality supposes its being related to the universal : "This is a riot and that is a revolution, which can be explained, as always, by class struggle, or by the resentment of the mob." That a historical fact

10

The Aim of History

is what (