I don’t think Elya will mind if I post this link, which refers to an email conversation she and I had last week following my exercise in emotional rhetoric and the foregoing and ongoing debate on history, philosophy and historiography. (It’s not going away just yet, folks…) I’ll quote part of what Elya writes (but go read the whole thing, including the comments thread):
I was reading a collections of essays on the historiography of ancient Israel, and this reminded me of something I read much longer ago by J. Maxwell Miller on history as “conversations between the past and the present” …
A slightly different approach to simply being “true” to the subject needs to be taken in the history of history. We’d probably agree that (rightly or wrongly) two of the basic assumptions of historiography is that (1) one human society is analogous somehow to the next, and (2) that our current interpretations of reality are superior to what came before, dictating what is acceptable to us. We reject the 19th century Hegelian trend because their ontologies are – to us – not reflective of the world as we understand it. The early humanists and some of their predecessors (Spinoza) themselves rejected the theology-driven official church histories (like Luther’s “four monarchies”). Nicolas of Cusa gives us an interesting early naturalistic look at the Qur’an (and his reasons for rejection) in _cribriatio Alcoran_. Syncellus (Eusebius?) rejected the “lies” (chronologies) of Berossos and Manetho because because they were irreconcilable with his “truth” (Biblical chronology). This is what happens at the level of “truth” however defined, though we are now able to better appreciate their other qualities by treating them on their own terms. How do we justify that we are correct in rejecting Manetho’s god-pharaohs, Eusebius’ chronology, Nicolas of Cusa’s “Jewish influence” on the Qur’an, Luther’s “4 monarchies”, or the Hegelian impulse, except by reference to our reality?
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The second thing that springs from this is that we could also characterize history as a conversation between the past and the present… What we think reflects in what we say about the past, and future historians will look upon us with hopefully the same respect and wonder that we look upon our predecessors and how they perceived their past. When I read Hesiod, I am constantly filled with the wonder that was his world, whether or not I accept that anything he describes actually happened. This tells me, perhaps, that what we are working on may some day be of great interest to our descendants (there’s that analogy again), and that our duty as historians is to record our understanding of the world for them. Being “true” to the people we study is still constrained by the same sort of difficulties anthropologists have with their subjects. We’re not talking about the totality of what happened in the past of course, but we seek the past through our histories to give us bearings in the present, and maybe inform the future. Our assumptions will be laid bare in the next generation, but for now, putting it down as a record is what is important – this is history as dialogue. We are our own subjects.
I might add some comments here later. At the moment, I should get back to the chapter I have to revise.