Hermeneutics, History and Memory

Philip Gardner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134261628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

History is the true record of an absent past. The trust between historians and their readers has always been founded upon this traditional claim. In a postmodern world, that claim and that trust have both been challenged as never before, drawing either angry or apologetic responses from historians.

Hermeneutics, History and Memory answers differently. It sees the sceptical challenge as an opportunity for reflection on history's key processes and practices, and draws upon methodological resources that are truly history's own, but from which it has become estranged. In seeking to restore these resources, to return history to its roots, this book presents a novel contribution to topical academic debate, focusing principally upon:

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• the challenges and detours of historical methodology

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• hermeneutic interpretation in history

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• the work of Paul Ricoeur

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• the relation between history and memory.

Hermeneutics, History and Memory will appeal to experienced historical researchers who seek to explore the theoretical and methodological foundations of their empirical investigations. It will also be highly beneficial to research students in history and the social sciences concerned with understanding the principles and practices through which documentary analysis and in-depth interview can be both validated and conducted.

Chapter 1
History

Challenges and detours

History, ruled over by its dual monarchy of truth and interpretation, simultaneously seeks to address, to bring together and to hold together, a realist epistemology with an interpretive methodology. It claims the status of truth for its intellectual product, all the while acknowledging, indeed celebrating, the interpretive relations of its production. In the succinct words of Jonathan Rose, ‘There are facts, but they all require interpretation.’¹ This intellectual puzzle is of course not at all an unfamiliar one across the human sciences and has been at the root of methodological debate across many disciplines. But the very nature of history’s object – a past which has ceased to exist and which therefore has no direct empirical presence beyond fragmentary traces – seems to present special epistemological difficulties for the historian. How can accounts acknowledged as interpretations of the past be validated as true accounts of that past? Faced with this fundamental question, it might be expected that historians would be among the most avid of methodologists, driven by the need to explicate and defend the discipline’s characteristic interpretive techniques as demonstrably sufficient to warrant its ambitious truth claims.

In general this has not been the case. Lynn Hunt may indeed be justified in suggesting that ‘as historians learn to analyze their subjects’ representations of their worlds, they inevitably begin to reflect on the nature of their own efforts to represent history’.² The impact of such reflection is, however, more evident in prospect than in fulfilment. Practising historians have often eschewed the methodology of their discipline in favour of faithfully garnering historical intelligence.³ The robust practical success of the largely untheorized strategic union of interpretation and truth has been and remains a remarkable achievement, somewhat akin to the pragmatic successes of an unwritten constitution. It works. At least, it works as long as historians and their reading publics mutually agree that it does.⁴

A conventional understanding of the practical operation of historical interpretation might best see it as the accumulation of countless small streams of disciplined labour on the part of many individual historians, flowing steadily into a widening delta of historical truth. The sceptical, postmodern account might replace this image with that of river flows which may initially appear to connect but which on closer inspection actually resolve themselves into an endless series of oxbow lakes, each separate to itself, leading nowhere. Now that much of its initial drama has abated, the important residual intellectual challenges raised by the central concerns of postmodernism may be seen to constitute an appropriate platform and a timely opportunity for the elucidation of the implicit methodology of conventional historical approaches.⁵ If we follow an astute commentator such as George Iggers, then we might even see such critiques as offering ‘important correctives to historical thought and practice’.⁶ Though these challenges have stimulated some practitioners into a number of often quite productive attempts to clarify more closely the character of the relation of historical interpretation to historical truth, the majority have not seen such endeavours as a particularly good use of their professional energies. Amongst those who have actively and skilfully contributed to the debate in this way, the distinguished educational historian Richard Aldrich gives us a good example of a formulation which acknowledges the dual character of historical research. Aldrich suggests that ‘(t)he historian’s prime duty is to record and interpret the events of the past for contemporaries and future generations’.⁷ This form of words neatly encapsulates an extensive disciplinary consensus which exercises simultaneously the possibility of truth as the unvarnished record of the facts of the past, alongside a recognition of the fundamentally interpretive character of historical research.⁸ It indicates that the past may be known – recorded – as it was, at the same time as accepting that such knowing or recording is always organized through the decisive agency of the historian in his or her own time. It resolves the tensions between these two positions by simply setting them alongside each other, acknowledging both as equally necessary for the production of legitimate historical knowledge. This recognition of a tensive relation at the heart of the historical enterprise, whilst being very well understood by most practitioners, is seldom much explored or developed by them in the way that it has been by hermeneutic philosophers.⁹

Perhaps a straightforward summary recognition that the study of history always combines elements of realism and interpretivism constitutes a sufficient methodological announcement for practising historical researchers.¹⁰ Sustained by such a methodological conflation, they may hope to proceed to the time- consuming business of getting up accounts of the past without becoming bogged down in the process of their getting up, without agonizing over the balance of truth and interpretation in the course of doing their histories. Perhaps a simple declaration recognizing the distinction between the truth of the past and the manner of its interpretation will be enough to excuse history from the perils and the pain of methodological introspection.¹¹ Perhaps it will be enough to convince epistemologists and methodologists, let alone postmodernists, that history might be left to plough its important furrow in peace. This seems unlikely. Doubts about the robustness of epistemological claims for history’s findings are, of course, very far from new.¹² They have their own long, recurring history, charting successive waves of disciplinary ‘crisis’.¹³ The words that Maurice Mandelbaum chose to frame his study in realist historical epistemology, now nearly 70 years old, would raise few eyebrows were they written afresh today. ‘It is a well known fact’, wrote Mandelbaum, ‘that not only philosophers but practicing historians have become sceptical of the claim that history yields objective knowledge of the past.’¹⁴

Today, in the midst of the reading – or equally the writing – of histories which routinely bring truth and interpretation together, the force of Jane Austen’s subtle, teasing observation from Northanger Abbey is never very far away. As Catherine Morland remarks as she puzzles over the tiresomeness of the history she is obliged to read: ‘I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs – the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.’¹⁵ Here is interpretation in history traduced as no more than invention; here is the scientific ambition of academic history confronted by the poetic appeal of history as the exercise of imagination.¹⁶ Catherine’s remark, of course, resonates with postmodernist critiques of realist historical writing in our own time: ‘all this must be invention’.¹⁷ Historians need to decide how they wish to respond to this charge, and to the many procedural questions that its raises for their customary practices. Some will resolve upon combative confrontation or straightforward rejection, some will favour comradely debate, and others will show enthusiastic interest. On one point, however, the evidence of history itself seems plain enough. As long as the art of interpretation remains a central aspect of the historian’s methodology, and as long as historians eschew its methodological elaboration or defence, then the discipline of history will always be vulnerable to some variant or other of Catherine’s charge, whether now or in the future.¹⁸ If historians are to continue to hold interpretation as a familiar of their professional procedure and discourse, then they need to understand it, to justify it and to defend it in the face of those who see unelaborated interpretation as a stick which history itself conveniently holds out to those who seek to beat it.¹⁹

There is then another possibility. Perhaps historians should attend better to their own methodological business. They might pay more attention to clarifying the processes of interpretation rather than simply implementing them. Such a strategy may have benefits that are not restricted merely to the more effective defence of the discipline from external critique. Perhaps consideration of the tension between truth and interpretation from within the historical community itself, rather than from outside, may help to clarify for its own practitioners the nature of its most cherished goals, rather than to obfuscate them. Perhaps it may fortify their chances of realization. Perhaps it may help in the production of better histories of the kind that we have always sought to produce in the past and would wish to produce in the future. Perhaps, in short, it will help us to get up stuff even better.

Interpretation is a term that all historians, even those of the most realist stripe, are comfortable in using, almost to the point of casualness, precisely because it conveys so accurately a central element of their everyday professional practice. Historians interpret the past through the medium of the traces that it leaves to the present.²⁰ Few would be brave enough or rash enough to claim that they could dispense with the idea of interpretation.²¹ It is for this reason that for some contemporary historians the conceptualization of the raw materials upon which they work has come to be more accurately engaged through the idea of the ‘trace’, rather than that of the ‘source’. As Peter Burke notes:

Traditionally, historians have referred to their documents as ‘sources’, as if they were filling their buckets from the stream of Truth … The metaphor is a vivid one but it is also misleading, in the sense of implying the possibility of an account of the past which is uncontaminated by intermediaries … As the Dutch historian Gustaaf Renier … suggested half a century ago, it might be useful to replace the idea of sources with that of ‘traces’ of the past in the present.²²

Many would probably also assent to Geoffrey’s Cubitt’s observation: ‘We are all relativists now, at least to this extent: we know that our historical knowledge and understanding and curiosity – and indeed our conceptions of historical method – are themselves historically positioned.’²³ Yet such a recognition of a subjective dimension within the historical process is not matched by a form of historical writing which, as Hayden White insists, characteristically depends for its claim to truth upon the rhetorical force of objectivity.²⁴ This raises a potentially awkward disjunction ‘between the desire to re- create the past and the urge to interpret it’ (original italics).²⁵ In practice, it is often a problem which historians are able to resolve by blurring the distinction between the process of interpretation and the achievement of historical truth through the ubiquitous device of the omnipotent narrator, the historian as a voiceless authority relating an unalloyed account.²⁶ Yet it manifestly remains the case that ‘Here is the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen”’²⁷ – as it really was – and ‘Here is the past as I have interpreted it’, are propositions of apparently quite different epistemological orders, with the latter holding out the prospect only of, ‘an endless process of re- evaluation and recapitulation’ whilst the former promises ‘a bold step from ignorance to truth’.²⁸ All historians who recognize that their job rests on the exercise of interpretation will acknowledge the dimensions of this paradox, for it lies at the root of the distinction between the meaning of the word and the nature of the activity to which, in practice, it attaches. At this level, an untheorized approach to interpretation constitutes a weakness, a vulnerability for the way that history presents its epistemological credentials, particularly in the face of an increasingly critical and demanding wider academic community. If interpretation stands at the heart of the business of the historian, if it accurately comprehends the delicate, painstaking and sophisticated process of the historian’s craft, then it should be brought forward explicitly, alongside the substantive histories which it generates, for wider scrutiny and discussion. It should be actively celebrated and not grudgingly acknowledged. It should be a strength and not a weakness.

Part of the problem of interpretation in relation to historical practice has been a tendency to collapse the verb in favour of the noun. As the Australian historian David Duffy wrote more than 30 years ago, ‘we could well do with a verb – a new concept – to refer to the work that historians do’.²⁹ As things stand, we generally speak of our interpretations as a synonym for our products, rather than seeking to explain what it is that we actually do when we are engaged in the process of interpreting the past.³⁰ As far as our readers may be aware, historians disappear into the jungle of raw materials constituting the archive and thence return with the finished article. What happens in between remains for the most part a mystery.³¹ For some, the mystery is warranted as a legitimate and necessary expression of the expertise of a professional training operating beyond the grasp of the layperson.³² Others, it is true, have usefully sought to elaborate aspects of archival work, offering valuable guides to sources and exemplars of the practical procedures involved in working with primary sources.³³ For the most part, however, these operate at the technical and descriptive levels, seldom straying far into the question of interpretation itself, or the epistemological problems to which it gives rise. John Tosh, for example, in the course of his excellent The Pursuit of History, alludes to, rather than directly addresses, the issues involved, noting ‘that any attempt to reconstruct the past presupposes an exercise of imagination’ and that historians’ use of the documentary record requires ‘that they have a “feel” or instinct for what might have happened’.³⁴ In recognizing that in the engagement with the past, ‘the historian is anything but a passive observer’, Tosh also adduces the historian’s need for ‘ingenuity and flair’; ‘not so much a method as an attitude of mind – an instinct almost – which can only be acquired by trial and error’, amounting to that which ‘the experienced scholar does almost without thinking’.³⁵ This provokes a concern that the expression of professional practice through mundane and imprecise terms, however initially appropriate this may appear to be, ultimately strains to capture delicate interpretive issues which call for more systematic attention. Tosh himself, having gone so far as to broach such matters more openly and constructively than most, registers a recognition that the argument needs to go further. ‘Set out in this way, it may be that none of the qualities or skills required of the historian seems particularly demanding.’³⁶ And again, ‘(w)hen spelt out in this way, historical method may seem to amount to little more than the obvious lessons of common sense’.³⁷ To the extent that we see the process of interpretation as methodologically important, we may decide that we wish to explain it better to ourselves, as well as to our readers, as one of the key elements in the historian’s armoury and one which cannot be left in terms merely of ‘instinct’, ‘feel’ or ‘flair’.³⁸

‘Few historians’, wrote Lynn Hunt in 1998, ‘lose sleep over their metaphysical or epistemological commitments.’³⁹ More recently, Quentin Skinner judged of historians that ‘it is hard to deny that they have sometimes gloried in presenting themselves as straightforward empiricists for whom the proper task of the historian is simply to uncover the facts about the past and recount them as objectively as possible’.⁴⁰ Historians are, in other words, more commonly given to exercising the practice of their craft rather than reflecting upon it.⁴¹ In this sense, ‘The archaeology of knowledge’, for Paul Ricoeur, ‘does not speak of the place of its own production.’⁴² And as Martyn Thompson has observed, despite wi...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 History
• Chapter 2 History and hermeneutics
• Chapter 3 History, hermeneutics and Ricoeur
• Chapter 4 History and memory
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index