BCSI-History

scientific history is like a coral reef, based on the premise that “historical knowledge is accumulative and that the steady accretion of specialized monographs will eventually deepen and broaden our understanding of the past.”

In Nietszche’s terms, this is history in antiquarian mode—a past venerated for itself from which facts are harvested and fashioned into statements “true to the past” whose only subject is what was.

If the second conception describes a form of historical practice that we might term “simple accumulation,” the third can be termed “complex accumulation.”

Complex accumulation defeats virtually all forms of causal explanation, because complexity means no consensus can be established on means of disciplining evidence (that is, theory, or “science”).

To normalize history as the study of the past is an entirely understandable condition for engagement in historical practice, but not a necessary one.

One might embrace critique as the purpose of history

Past, present, and future compose no natural order. Their temporal lineage (“one damn thing after another”) is an artifact of our own invention. The past becomes meaningful to us only when it forms a conjunction with us now, not because the past is pliant, so that we can make of it anything we wish for a present purpose, nor because it is oppressive and grasps our future, but because it is fragile and easily lost, so that it can be known “only at the instant it can be recognized.”

Truth lies in the moment of conjunction, not “in the past,” for the past of itself has no truth, nor falsehood. Both lie rather in the moment of recognition, in the knowledge—history—created at that moment. We can wall ourselves off from the past, or amputate the past from ourselves and declare it irreducibly passed and so open for study. But if we do we run the risk that once again, perhaps sooner than we might like, we will find ourselves suddenly standing amazed that the things we are experiencing are not after all tucked away behind a cæsura in a safely sequestered past, but still possible.