History is what historians do

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Nero

History is what historians do

Μη αναγνωσμένη δημοσίευση από Nero » 28 Οκτ 2018, 20:00

Check any or all of the following statements about history: It does not exist; it is a true novel; it is a narration; it is knowledge of a mutilated past or of its surviving traces, or those of them historians can perceive. Titles like ''Plato's Thought,'' or ''Rural History of Rome'' are nonsense unless they mean ''What I Think About the Thought of Plato,'' or ''What We Know About the Rural History of Rome.'' So long as there are historians, their explanations will always be partial and in Eugen Weber is a professor of history at the University of California in Los Angeles. His books include ''The Western Tradition'' and ''Modern History of Europe.'' complete. Implicit in what historians do, that is not always explicit in what they say. It becomes difficult to forget when you have read Paul Veyne.

Everything is raw material for history, but history is what historians have the vision to find, or what they chose to do; so there are only partial histories. The true historian is moved by curiosity, the rage to know just for the sake of knowing, and by the desire to relate for the sake of relating. When they identify and describe events, historians write history. As with novelists (who simply write lying history, says Mr. Veyne), their interpretation lies in the tale they tell. Description is narration; narration is explanation; there is no historical explanation in the scientific sense, only comprehensive description. Forget the problem of causality, a survival from the paleoepistemological era. The historian does not state the cause of the war between Anthony and Octavius in the way a physicist would state how bodies fall. The historian's ''causes'' of the war are the events preceding that war, much as the causes of what happens in Act IV of ''Anthony and Cleopatra'' are to be found in the three preceding acts.

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We do not know more about mankind than ancient philosophers did, although we have more details. But we have learned from history that no one learns from history, as well as that, as Andre Malraux put it, to know men is not to be surprised by them after the event. Comprehension is a retrospective illusion, if only (but not only ) because the future inevitably enriches the past and colors it. The christening of the princess becomes significant in terms of the tale that follows, as does the birth of Christ in the light of Christianity's later triumphs. And, since events do not coincide with the perceptions of their actors or their witnesses, it is the historian who makes the event, or remakes it, out of the evidence he has the sense or luck to lay his mind on. Historiography is not arbitrary, but it is subjective.

We have exchanged long laundry lists of battles, kings and queens for laundry lists tout court, and traded history in a set menu for a la carte relativism. Who is to say what's better? The historian has a method to deal with evidence; but history, which is a matter of understanding and of ordering facts, has none - or no particular one. To understand the past, we view it with the same eyes we use to understand the world around us in which men do and will, but do not do all they will. Or we see it as we would the life of a foreign people, for the past, as we have been told, is a foreign country. Historians write guides to it, but they are describing races already run and predicting their winners.

In the world of history, Mr. Veyne reminds us, liberty, chance, causes and ends reign side by side. The world of science knows laws; the world of history recognizes chance, which corresponds to Henri Poincare's definition of aleatory phenomena - mechanisms whose results may be completely upset by imperceptible variations in the initial conditions. That is why the landscape of the past is littered by the wrecks of events that did not happen, of things that might have been (how many blundered past the hedge behind which the palace slept?), and why, when historical explanation refers to an event, the purpose is to make it intelligible, not to fit it into a law.

In history, which is not a science but a less exact intellectual activity, there is no order of facts, always the same, that would control other facts. The life, even the economy, of a society cannot coincide with a system, say, of economic laws or be explained by one. It isn't that politics or poetry cannot be explained by economics, only that they are not constantly so explained, or that in political or literary history, as in all history, such explanations are only circumstantial. There are no historical laws. History explains how things happen, the circumstances in which the apple fell from the tree. Science reveals why falling apples fall. To discover a scientific law is to discover an abstraction that works. In history, abstractions may be a necessary shorthand, but they can easily lead astray: There are no forces of production, only men and women who produce; there is no enlightened despotism, only individual monarchs and specific policies.

Condemned to try to capture reality in a network of abstractions, history is exposed to the temptation of reifying these abstractions and treating words as if they were people or things. When we designate an event as revolution or a body of people as a middle class, we invest them with associations that both illumine and deceive. Translated from the 20th century to the first century of our era, or from an urban to a rural setting, ready-made terms like ''religion'' or ''class'' are an invitation to anachronistic misinterpretation, and history books mirror the endless battle between ever-changing truth and ever-anachronistic concepts.

DRAMATIC poetry, says Aristotle, is more philosophical and serious than history because it deals with generalities. Reference to general concepts, such as the struggle between classes or between country and town, makes history more intelligible and more mysterious, and plunges the reader into an allegorical atmosphere where things take on more meaning than they ought to have. But universals and abstractions are mere names, and history needs no explanatory principles, only words to say how things were. History is nominalist.

Nothing is more concrete than history, nothing less interested in theories or in abstract ideas. The great historians have fewer ideas about history than amateurs do; they merely have a way of ordering their facts to tell their story. It isn't theories they look for, but information, documents, and ideas about how to find and handle them. History being what the documents make of it (we pay more attention to the Peloponnesian Wars than to some Bantu conflict only because Thucydides was there), the limits of historians lie in the gaps of their documentation and their experience. Experience is above all the art of asking questions, seeing things we do not notice naturally, looking not so much for keys as for locks to open; so historical progress is not made in depth (towards some essence or some basic cause) but in breadth - a widening of vision.

To this, and to understanding all this, Mr. Veyne has made a brilliant contribution. Students of history should read him to learn what history is about, and especially what it is not about. Historians should read him for sheer intellectual fun. All those interested in history should read him, though preferably in French rather than in the rather wooden translation we are offered. As a rule, German philosophy benefits from translation into English, which simplifies and clarifies. Good French writing loses, because translation divests it of nuance and elegance - and Paul Veyne is a master of both.

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/22/book ... ns-do.html

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Re: History is what historians do

Μη αναγνωσμένη δημοσίευση από ΣΚΕΠΤΙΚΟΣ » 28 Οκτ 2018, 22:09

.
Τό ερώτημα δέν τό έχω λύσει σκόμα .... τό γκούγκλ δέν μπορεί νά στό μεταφράζει τό κείμενο πού βάζεις ;;;

Δέν ξέρω πολλά από ηλεκτρονικά αλλά απορώ ....

Επίσης στόν Τίτλο γιατί επιλέγεις πάλι τήν Αγγλική ;;;

.
Ταφόπλακα τού Μέλλοντος τών Παιδιών μας η Γραφειοκρατεία καί οί Συντάξεις άνω τών 400 € ....

Δουλειά δέν έχει ό Διάολος γαμάει τά Παιδιά του .... Έλληνική Λαική Σοφία

Δέν ξέρεις κάν τό Λόγο ..........γιά νά μάς Ύποτάξης .........Σαδιστάκο ...

Nero

Re: History is what historians do

Μη αναγνωσμένη δημοσίευση από Nero » 28 Οκτ 2018, 22:13

ΣΚΕΠΤΙΚΟΣ έγραψε:
28 Οκτ 2018, 22:09
.
Τό ερώτημα δέν τό έχω λύσει σκόμα .... τό γκούγκλ δέν μπορεί νά στό μεταφράζει τό κείμενο πού βάζεις ;;;

Δέν ξέρω πολλά από ηλεκτρονικά αλλά απορώ ....

Επίσης στόν Τίτλο γιατί επιλέγεις πάλι τήν Αγγλική ;;;

.
Το τίτλο του άρθρου έβαλα που είναι στα αγγλικά,σε αμερικάνικη εφημερίδα

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Re: History is what historians do

Μη αναγνωσμένη δημοσίευση από ΣΚΕΠΤΙΚΟΣ » 28 Οκτ 2018, 22:19

Nero έγραψε:
28 Οκτ 2018, 22:13
ΣΚΕΠΤΙΚΟΣ έγραψε:
28 Οκτ 2018, 22:09
.
Τό ερώτημα δέν τό έχω λύσει σκόμα .... τό γκούγκλ δέν μπορεί νά στό μεταφράζει τό κείμενο πού βάζεις ;;;



.
Το τίτλο του άρθρου έβαλα που είναι στα αγγλικά,σε αμερικάνικη εφημερίδα
Τό ερώτημα συνεχίζει νά μήν μου απαντιέται .... ο γκούγκλης δέν μπορεί νά στό μεταφράζει ;;;

. :sal5:

.
Ταφόπλακα τού Μέλλοντος τών Παιδιών μας η Γραφειοκρατεία καί οί Συντάξεις άνω τών 400 € ....

Δουλειά δέν έχει ό Διάολος γαμάει τά Παιδιά του .... Έλληνική Λαική Σοφία

Δέν ξέρεις κάν τό Λόγο ..........γιά νά μάς Ύποτάξης .........Σαδιστάκο ...

Nero

Re: History is what historians do

Μη αναγνωσμένη δημοσίευση από Nero » 28 Οκτ 2018, 22:20

ΣΚΕΠΤΙΚΟΣ έγραψε:
28 Οκτ 2018, 22:19
Nero έγραψε:
28 Οκτ 2018, 22:13
ΣΚΕΠΤΙΚΟΣ έγραψε:
28 Οκτ 2018, 22:09
.
Τό ερώτημα δέν τό έχω λύσει σκόμα .... τό γκούγκλ δέν μπορεί νά στό μεταφράζει τό κείμενο πού βάζεις ;;;



.
Το τίτλο του άρθρου έβαλα που είναι στα αγγλικά,σε αμερικάνικη εφημερίδα
Τό ερώτημα συνεχίζει νά μήν μου απαντιέται .... ο γκούγκλης δέν μπορεί νά στό μεταφράζει ;;;

. :sal5:

.
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