Abstract
The “facts” of history, except for rare survivals from the past, are the facts of meaning much more than the facts of objective actuality. The history of the historians is not that of the past “as it actually happened” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen”, Ranke) because human imagination is incapable of such re-creation. History is rather a process of examining records and survivals, and secondly, a way of “presenting the results of their imaginative reconstruction of that past in ways that do no violence either to the records or to the canons of scientific imagination... For the actual past places a limit upon both the records and the kinds of imagination he may use. He must be sure that his records really do come from the past and that his imagination is directed toward re-creation and not creation” (L. Gottschalk).1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
L. Gottschalk, The Use of Personal Documents, pp. 8, 9.
E.H. Carr, What is History? New York 1963, p. 16.
H. Butterfield, History and Human Relations. London 1951, p. 159.
G.H. Mead,Movements, p. 70.
J. Royce, op. cit., p. 168.
Ibid., pp. 173, 174.
G.H. Mead, Movements, p. 70.
Ibid., p. 83.
E. Neff,The Poetry of History. New York 1947, p. 156.
VI, p. 95. In E. Neff, op. cit., p. 120.
Ibid.,p. 123.
J. Michelet, Le Peuple. Introd., pp. 24, 137.
G.H. Mead,Movements, p. 406.
Ibid.,p. 417.
Ibid.
Ibid.,p. 57.
“Schiller’s famous aphorism Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht is a familiar medieval maxim revised in the late eighteenth century and typical of the medievalism which in many ways characterized the Romantics”. (R.G. Collingwood, op. cit., p. 53, n.1.)
G.H. Mead, Movements, p. 64.
H. Butterfield, op. cit., p. 97.
R.F. Berkhofer, A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis. New York 1969, pp. 240ff.
For example, W. Chambers’ study on the first political parties in the United States supposed not only a comparison with England, but also a certain definition of a party system and a certain theory of political parties in general. R.F. Berkhofer, op. cit. p. 261.
In fact Ranke did not follow the logic of his procedure to its empirical conclusion.
E.H. Carr, op. cit., p. 54.
R. Niebuhr, op. cit., p. 33.
C. Becker, Everyman His Own Historian. Chicago 1966, pp. 233–255. Idem,“What are Historical Facts?” In : T.N. Guinsburg, ed., The Dimensions of History. Chicago 1971, pp. 29–40.
C. Becker, in : T.H. Guinsburg, ed., op. cit., p. 38.
C. A. Beard, “The Noble Dream”. In : F. Stern, ed., The Varieties of History. New York 1960.
R.F. Berkhofer, op. cit., p. 23.
J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston 1971, p. 144.
H. Holborn, “Wilhelm Dilthey and the Critique of Historical Reason”. In : W.W. Wagar, ed., European Intellectual History since Darwin and Marx. New York 1966, p. 76.
Dilthey’s Conception and Analysis of Man in the 15th and 16th Centuries (II, pp. 1–89) is a remarkable polemic with J. Burckhardt’s Civilization of Renaissance in Italy, a historical classic of sociological importance, reviewed by Dilthey in 1862.
R. Aron’s Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine (Paris 1938) does not take the sociological dimension of Dilthey’s thought into consideration. R.G. Collingwood’s treatment of Dilthey in his work The Idea of History (Oxford 1970, esp. pp. 171–176) is misleading, though the former considers the latter’s achievement as “the best work done on the subject” at the end of the 19th century.
J. Habermas, op. cit., p. 147.
Ibid.,p. 180.
Ibid., p. 181.
E.W.F. Tomlin, “R.G. Collingwood”. In : Writers and Their Work. London 1961, p. 38.
R.G. Collingwood, op. cit., p. 105.
Ibid., p. 215.
Ibid., p. 317.
Ibid., p. 283.
Ibid., p. 287.
Ibid.,p. 289.
Ibid., p. 306.
Ibid.,p. 292.
Ibid.,p. 215.
Ibid., p. 205.
F.J. Turner, “The Significance of History”. In : F. Stern, ed., op. cit. p. 201.
R.G. Collingwood, op. cit., p. 174.
Ibid., p. 10.
According to Collingwood, the “presuppositions” of scientific history as opposed to those of natural science are :
History
There is a historical past, consisting of events localized in space and time, the occurrence of which can be ascertained by inference from evidence (R.G. Collingwood, Autobiography. London 1939, p. 110).
The historical past is made up of actions, and the inner side of every action is a thought (ibid.). All history is the history of thought (ibid.)
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 283.
W.H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History. London 1958, pp. 53, 54.
R.G. Collingwood, Autobiography, p. 43; N. Rotenstreich, “Historicism and Philosophy”, in : Revue int. de philosophie, (Bruxelles) XI, 1957, no. 42, pp. 414, 415.
W. Dray, Law and Explanation in History. London 1966, p. 122.
R.M. Maclver, op. cit., p. 193.
C.G. Hempel, The Function of General Laws in History. London 1942; P.L. Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation. Oxford 1952; K.R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. London 1952.
W. Dray, op. cit., p. 162.
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 303.
W. Dray, “R.G. Collingwood and the Acquaintance Theory of Knowledge”, in : Revue int. de philosophie, (Bruxelles) XI, 1957, no. 42, pp. 431, 432.
N. Rotenstreich, op. cit., pp. 415, 416.
H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History. New York 1951, p. 21.
H.T. Parker, “Herbert Butterfield”. In : S.W. Halperin, ed., Some 20th-Century Historians. Chicago 1961.
In : History and Theory. Middletown 1963, pp. 59–90.
Ibid.,p. 76.
Ibid.,p. 72. Here is the core of Walzer’s excellent contribution which combines a historical, philosophical, sociological, and psychological approach to his analysis of the topic. It is an elaboration of Weber’s famous Protestant Ethic thesis and at the same time a refutation of the Marxist interpretation of Puritanism : “In order to get at the world of experience, it may well be necessary to construct some highly abstract model of economic processes and social change. But this construct is not ”real life“. It is only an intellectual approach to reality and only one among several possible approaches. The Marxist historian seeks to reconstitute the world which is perceived, while at the same time detaching himself from the particular perceptions of historical men. But it ought to be those very perceptions which direct his work. Reality is too complex, too detailed, too formless : he can never reproduce it. He must seek, instead, to reproduce only those aspects of historical existence which were, so to speak, absorbed into the experience of particular men. And if he is to avoid anachronistic reconstruction, his guide must be the men themselves. It would be absurd to assume a priori that what is of central importance in late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century history is, for example, the growth of the coal industry. One must look first to see what impact such a phenomenon had upon the lives of men. It is not, of course, only a question of whether they talked about it, but of whether they felt it, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. If they did not, then its significance must be sought in the future.
Marxists become the victims of the very alienation they claim to understand so well when they reverse this procedure and make experience dependent upon what is originally only a creation of the mind. When Tawney writes that Puritanism is the “magic mirror” in which the middle-class man saw himself ennobled and enhanced, he is in no sense enlightening us as to the historical process by which Puritanism developed and spread. For the Puritan is a real man, who can be encountered in history. But the middle-class man is made up, and it is sheer anachronism to describe him as a historical figure, articulate, already in search of an enhanced image. It has been suggested above that Puritanism is a part of the process (the long succession of perceptions and responses) by which men become middle-class. But to know the particular perception upon which it is based or the responses it prescribes, it is necessary to know the Puritan. There is, in fact, no magic mirror; sainthood is no mere enhancement of an already established (even if worrisome) identity. It is a far more active thing than that; it is indeed what Weber suggests — a way of forming an identity.
What must be studied, then,is a mind, or a group of minds, coping with problems, and not passively reflecting them. For the mind mediates between the “objective” situation and the human act and if the act is to be understood, the mind must first be known. The problems it faces are posed by an environment which can of course be analyzed in some objective fashion—for example, statistically. But different aspects of this environment are experienced by different men with different results in consciousness and behaviour. Hence the “objective” construct is of no independent value and has no prior significance in explanation. The first task of the historian is to establish his familiarity with the experience of particular men, with their difficulties,aspirations and achievements, and with the styles in which all these are expressed. This is not to suggest that the historical record should be taken at face value, or the assumption casually made that men always mean what they say. There is, for example, false piety and evasion among the saints which the historian must expose. There is caution and conformity which he must respect, but not too much. For hindsight is also insight into the concealments of respectability and of “Aesopian” prose; and it is often insight as well into purposes half-understood and patterns of thought not yet fully worked out. Hence the methods of the historian must be sceptical, devious and experimental, even while his general approach is open and sympathetic. But ultimately his sympathy is the key to all else: the best judgment of face value will be made by men with some intuitive understanding of other levels of thinking and feeling“. (Ibid., pp. 75, 76. Emphasis added)
In : History. and Theory, pp. 30–58.
S.H. Beer, “Causal Explanation and Imaginative Re-enactment”. In History and Theory, p. 28.
R.F. Berkhofer, op. cit., fig. 2–1, p. 34.
Ibid., p. 69.
M. Bloch, Métier d’historien, Paris 1949.
Ibid.
J. Ortega y Gasset, “The Self and the Other”, in : Partisan Review, July-Aug. 1952.; idem, The Dehumanization of Art. New York 1956, p. 187.
C. Becker, in : T.H. Guinsburg, ed., op. cit., pass.
H.S. Hughes, “History as Art and as Science”. In : F. Stern, ed., op. cit.
Changes in modern painting reflect the changes of method and technique in literature. See W. Sypher, op. cit. In Berkhofer’s view the portrait of modern Clio should be very close to Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror”, a painting which combines the views of the girl’s internal states of mind with different external views of her, and with that girl viewing her own reflection in a mirror (R.F. Berkhofer, op. cit., p. 296). Picasso’s artistic intention, based on a sophisticated intellectual position, reminds us of the “stream-of-consciousness” method (or “interior monologue”) of modern innovative novelists (J. Joyce, V. Woolf, the early W. Faulkner), concentrating upon a direct and dramatic presentation of the whole of consciousness. The ideas underlying their method and technique have much in common with those of W. James who coined the term “stream of consciousness” in his Principles of Psychology, of Cooley, Mead and others.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1975 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baumann, B. (1975). Imaginative Participation in History. In: Imaginative Participation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4871-1_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4871-1_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-4626-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-4871-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive