A Personalist Philosophy of History

Bennett Gilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351216241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Historical study has traditionally been built around the placement of the human at the center of inquiry. The de-stabilized concepts of the human in contemporary thought challenge this configuration. However, the ways in which these challenges provoke new historical perspectives both expand and enrich historical study but are also weak and vulnerable in their concept of the human, lacking or omitting something valuable in our self-understanding. A Personalist Philosophy of History argues for a robust concept of personhood in our experience of the past as a way to resolve this conflict.

Focused on those who know history, rather than on the abstract properties of knowledge, it extends the moral agency of persons into non-human, trans-human, and deep history domains. It describes an approach to moral life through historical experience and study, rather than through abstractions. And it describes a kind of historiography that matches factual accuracy to both the constructed nature of understanding and to unavoidable moral purpose.

1 Receiving the past

1.1 Much of the study of history in our time is concerned with the influence of the material world on human behavior, with the pre-human and the post-human, with objects, and with super-human forces. In this book, by contrast, my concern is to develop a theoretical basis for understanding where human beings fit into their own history. This history includes our relationships with non-human forms of life and their relationships with us. In fact, understanding the human as personhood leads us to expand the concept of history. Of course we as humans all do fit into human history, and of course historians try to fit us all in. But the many new perspectives in our times and in the coming years suggest that we must think through afresh, without prejudice to any of these perspectives or defenses against them, a philosophical understanding of those things we experience in history that is consonant with full appreciation of these non-human forces. This field is the reception of the past by the knowers of the past.

All sentient beings experience in their lives forces that form themselves and the beings they affect into history. This kind of sentient being I shall call a person, whether human or non-human. A person has her historical existence on the point at which these forces break upon one another over herself and other persons. Reflection upon history as the moving line of these points involves us in our nearest concerns and gives us greater or lesser degrees of distance from them at one and the same time. The formation of the history persons live and hold by these forces staggers us into reflection on them. This paradox is one of the sources, perhaps the most fruitful source, of the philosophy of history. We study them, but the reflective part of life asks for something more than study and something besides action. These two ways have their logics and their own demands, but the response that must comprehend both our existential involvement and our critical disinterest should equal the energy of our history as strongly as mortals can make it do, stronger than either passion or objectivity. A fortiori, this fullest response to history, the most real heart of representation of the past and of its meaning, is compassion as it will be explained in this book.

To understand compassionate comprehension of the past, it is necessary to account for those beings who receive or know the past. The goal of the argument for this claim is to characterize human experience of the past as concrete, featureful history.¹ My first step in this is to consider what stake those whose experience is historical have in being knowers and recipients of the past.

1.2 What gives us the right to pry into the lives of past actors and to judge their acts? By what authority do we investigate them? Do they lose their dignity and independence merely by dying? These are not questions about what forces us to act or not to act, but rather about how we decide the stakes that gives us entry to the matter when we study history.

For example, if you take in your hand a flower bud – say, the bud of a camellia – and peel open its outer covering, you will see its still-forming petals, wan as chartreuse or flushed olive green; and if you disturb a riper bud, in which the petals have begun to acquire the colors – white to pink to deep red – to which they are destined, you will likewise see the shape the flower will come to have, congruent from its formation to its bloom to its stamens, anthers, and bracts. It has a logic of sorts, a similitude among the unfolding appearances of the flower in all the days from the first setting of the bud, before our unaided eyes can intrude, up to the noonday of the open flower, and on to its setting seeds. In the bud you observed a logic of genetics, of environment, of life.

But you also intruded into this life. You pushed yourself into its closed world, you interfered with its future. Did you do something wrong to it? If the flower you inspect has browned and fallen, you see it as past. It is “dead” in some sense, and yet what you see is continuous with the life flowing inside the bud from the plant, earth, and sun. It is a life, not only a death, that continues in the seed and the blackening food the flower’s substance provides, so that when you rip apart the spent flower, you are meddling with its life as surely as you pestered it when you subjected the bud, plucked or not, to your closer observation. Our insistence, when engaged in such infringements, upon doing what takes us to our goals, comes from the invasive force of our life and its work. What we do in this example is not very different from the ingestion of prey by predator. Commonly we do not much conceive of the dead flower as subject to harm. We do sometimes pause a little before killing a flower bud, and we sometimes regret it a bit in passing. Is our cut into the flower’s life as worthy of doubt when it is going to seed as it is, in however small a measure, when it is sprouting? Why would or would not its past be less sacred than the promising future?

This small guilt about violating a camellia bud – like that of eating leftover food in the refrigerator we think might have been saved for someone else – is the germ of the problem about inquiring into the past with which this book will be concerned as part of the project of theorizing personhood in history. We can take from the matter of camellia bud questions as to what moral reasoning warrants our study of the lives and deeds of past actors and groups of actors and what are the consequences of such warrants. Other philosophies of history consider what history means, in what sense the past exists, whether it can be known, what kind of knowledge or experience of it we have, what use the study of it is, and how it is best studied, if at all. These are not my concerns, although I will have something to say in passing about many of them.

The question of our right to study the past is similar to, but not the same as, various construals of some of these other questions. As, for example, when we ask whether our time is well spent on studying the past –

workmen [restoring old structures] say that old buildings are OK for looking at once in a while but “it’s flesh and blood what matters.”²

– we are asking whether spending time and energy on the past is a right thing to do in comparison with the urgent needs of the living. Or, when we state what the human experience in the past means, we are arguing that we do the right thing in taking the benefits the study of it gives us.

The form of the questions suggested by observing the camellia bud is that of asking of anything whether it is good or bad, or right or wrong, no matter with what justifications we assume it to be endowed.³ We ask of everything if it is good or bad, and in doing so we work out our ethical principles. By asking these questions about our knowing the past, I do not claim that there is no such right, but rather I suggest doubts necessary for understanding this right. The question relies on notions of rights belonging to the dead as if they were self-evident, though unspecified, and carry fully valent obligations on the part of living inquirers. It further suggests that anyone intruding upon the dead, whether a professional historian or a casual reader, museum visitor, or sightseer, must claim a right for her historical activities and interests that does not negate the indicated rights of the dead. The question put so far simply waves a pennant over these two bundles of rights – those pertaining to the present living and those pertaining to the past dead – because it rides on the surprising claim that there is anything here at all to cause worry. For consciousness without awareness of the past is impossible; and thought about history is an empirically verifiable universal practice of all humankind, without which civilization is not conceivable.

And so we hesitate to raise this small scruple as to our authority over history because it leads not only to questioning our use of what we cannot do without but also because it threatens an avalanche of moral duties that might bury the most trivial of acts. This is an argumentum ad tormentum, or perhaps it is an appeal to fear. Why should the broad view of moral claims be terrible? It is the case that age-old moral questions are exemplified in every choice we make. Can this be more a source of guidance and strength than of juridico-deontic despotism?

Part of the argument for not fearing the avalanche is that we ought not exclude at any current moment some possible outcomes of our historical researches. Human predictive power is very weak. Every thing can affect every other thing, so we develop ways of making triage and judgments in these matters. But we don’t triage by arbitrary or uninformed exclusion of some consequences.

The division of a bar of chocolate is a favorite example of the morally trivial choice among philosophers, but to whom is it trivial?⁴ And when? Chocolate is an agricultural product, and its cultivation and harvest involve all the issues of labor, capital, and commerce that every other product involves. The trade in chocolate is global, with workers at one end and consumers at the other, all of whom, along with the middlemen, face common social and spiritual issues. From another angle, dividing up the bar of chocolate between you and me reflects issues in our relationship: is the divider a self-sacrificing rescuer, a co-dependent enabler? Or a miser? Is one of us angry at the other, or in love with the other, or both? If I split the bar so as to save some for myself later, this reflects my relationship to money and to food, among other things.

The claim that there is a moral dimension to all human acts, behaviors, and thoughts requires not knowledge of whether any or all are good or evil at all times and in all circumstances but simply the bare availability of all choices to judgment. In the face of this simple and clear claim it is not possible to argue that any acts, behaviors, and thoughts are too trivial or too anything to have a moral dimension.⁵ The simplest things often move us the most, and sometimes what we push away as uninteresting or unworthy is the most significant. Even in what is not here and now, past as well as future, we still have moral questions that we must confront.⁶

There can be no question but that as we learn more about the world we understand the interdependence of all existent things and especially of life. Everything we do has effects that our other actions amplify or diminish. The assertion above of universal minimum moral valence is just another expression of this truth. Some of us call it the chain of life in which love binds us

The argument about our weak predictive power speaks to things that have not yet come to pass, but how does this broad view of universal obligation apply to what has already happened? Allow that breaking a chocolate bar in two has some picometric bit of the moral weight of Adolph Eichmann’s stocking a freight train with 1,000 “deportees” from Budapest to Auschwitz or, to move from the extraordinary to the quotidian, of, say, a doctor’s (or a nation’s) decision not to give free health care to those in need – allow this, yet nonetheless no quantum of moral obligation to the dead has been argued, for neither the dead nor history knows good or bad or feels pleasure or pain of any sort (at least, in this context). If people in the past cannot be hurt or benefitted, they would seem to have no rights. How can anyone have obligations to them, even such obvious virtues as truthfulness or respect? A corpse is merely atoms in motion. But, on the other hand, if what we owe to personhood entirely expires upon the death of the person, unconscionable things must be allowed, such as lies and disrespect. Because nothing in general other than the passion of disgust constrains us from what we do to the vestiges of the dead, people sometimes argue we have a kind of right that is, at least almost completely, unregulated by responsibilities in so far as the dead can neither reward nor punish us. More specifically, we presume we can talk at will about past actors because we have power and they have not. There is no question that morality has no more coercive force to exercise here than in any other matter, setting aside force of natural or divine reward and punishment because it is quasi-moral or pseudo-moral, even if one credits its existence. While in some matters relevant to the rights of the deceased the positive law constrains and coerces our truthfulness and respect toward dead persons and toward the collective past, we generally are free to act in all kinds of ways about the past and as to past persons.

In circumstances of the lack of natural and material constraint, the question of the authority by which we study the past stands apart from any coercion by which rights are to be respected. It belongs, in the end, precisely to the domain in which no material presence, no ordinary causality, and no supernatural judgment is to be considered. The philosophical consideration of history pertains to what has expired, to wit, to the powerless, whatever their powerfulness in life. When we consider what authorizes or warrants our study of the past, we are not looking at what we have the freedom to do or even, necessarily or directly, at what is the right way to do it. This is not precisely justification, and it is not authority in the sense of the word as an enforcer or in command moral theory. That which authorizes our study lies in the domain of a purely ethical relationship – pure of command, authority, and compulsion. It generates obligations that we accept or deny according to our wisdom, prudence, or virtue. I will argue in Chapter 3 that rightly understanding our temporality makes what joins us to the past as clear as what frees us from it. At the center of this argument will be a unique notion of moral obligation, depicted as a whole view in Chapter 2 and advanced on more technical grounds in Chapter 4. Those in the past, too, are freed from time. The untensed place wherein they and we share this freedom is part of our personhood.

Consider again the blown camellia bud. The passage of time shows us that what is enfolded in its brown petals is only partly different from what was enfolded during its green and rosy stages. There is something in it that is not yet expired because its future shares part of its nature with the past. We likewise share what is not expired by being part of ongoing life – part of life in general. In the historical domain, the lives of the past actors have expired and seemingly left them powerless. But personhood has not ended, any more than the life the flowers nourished by decayed tissues has ended. We share personhood with those whose personhood continues for us. This historical enlargement of life authorizes our intellectual, emotional, sensory, and moral awareness of the past. Following this approach, the logical and ethical consequences of the relationship of human personhood to life enlarged through past time clearly have both natural and non-natural aspects. But how and why this authorizes our intrusion into the lives of people in the past is more purely a human matter. To distinguish this side of it from the natural side, consider the role of pastness according to time as ordinarily understood in our understanding of history as writing accounts of the past, that is, as historiography.

1.3 The claim that our actions in any present time suggest a moral relationship to past persons might just barely survive our common sense intuition about the closure of the past, though to do so might require a relaxed attitude toward eccentric definitions of terms. But my proposition that current, or future, actions might hurt people in the past, or affect past events or circumstances in some way, seems to slap common sense in the face. It proposes a kind of deflation of the closure of past time that is part of our ordinary understanding of causally ordered time passage, differen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Receiving the past
• 2 Moral agency personalism
• 3 Shaping up time
• 4 The long experience of obligation
• 5 From moral force ethics to personalist philosophy of history
• Bibliography
• Index