Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God
Chapter 11: The Problem of Historical Knowledge
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The Self and the Dramas of History by Reinhold Niebuhr
Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God
One of the foremost philsophers and theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was for many years a Professor at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. He is the author of many classics in their field, including The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and Discerning the Signs of Our Times. He was also the founding editor of the publication Christianity and Crisis. The Self and the Dramas of History, was published in 1955 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. This material prepared for Religion Online by Harry and Grace Adams.
Revolution or the American Civil War, for instance, which would refute all conflicting interpretations.
We recently had a vivid reminder of the relativity of historical knowledge, when two former ambassadors to Spain, both historians, Claude Bowers and Carleton Hayes, reported on the civil war in Spain; — Mr. Bowers Mission to Spain and Mr. Hayes’ Wartime Mission in Spain. The one was favorable and the other unfavorable to the Spanish Republican cause. Mr. Bowers regarded the civil war in Spain as a prelude to the World War, and Mr. Hayes thought of it as a prelude to our present cold war with Russia. Both are honest historians and neither falsified the facts; but they chose very different facts and subjected all relevant facts to contrasting
interpretations. Mr. Hayes is a liberal Catholic while Mr. Bowers stands in the Jeffersonian tradition.
Many histories of the French Revolution have been written from the diverse viewpoints of Jacobin and communist dogmas, from Bonapartist and Bourbon perspectives. But historical distance has not resolved the difference between them or given any one viewpoint a clear
victory over the others. Sometimes the historical victory of a cause serves to give the viewpoint of the victorious cause a clear priority over the viewpoint of the vanquished. Accounts of our Civil War now remain comparatively unchallenged even though they can not satisfy the South.
Even Lincoln is reluctantly accepted by the defeated South as a national symbol, provided Robert E. Lee can be bracketed with him as an equal hero. The Cavalier victory over the
Roundheads in the restoration has made the historical interpretation of Cromwell’s protectorate a fairly indisputable matter. Significantly, however, Americans have shown a rather more lively interest in the democratic sects of Cromwell’s army than the British historians have evinced.
Though defeated, their ideas furnished seminal influences for Anglo-Saxon democracy which are cherished on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps one reason why the historical interpretation of the French Revolution remains so inconclusive is that the Revolution itself has not been resolved in French political life. Thus history and the interpretation of history are mutually dependent.
An analysis of some larger patterns of history, such as the disintegration of the "Medieval synthesis" in the sixteenth century, will prove the inevitable "ideological" framework of any historical inquiry and the impossibility of refuting any of the conflicting interpretations conclusively.
The disintegration of the medieval culture resulted in the emergency of two religio-cultural forces, generally described as the "Reformation" and the "Renaissance." Both Renaissance and Reformation were rebellious against a culture and civilization, informed by the Catholic faith, which reached its flower in the thirteenth century and is still regarded as the "golden age" by Catholic historians. From the viewpoint of the children of either the Reformation or the
Renaissance, the disintegration of this monolithic culture was inevitable. Its decay was apparent from the fourteenth century, that is, before overt rebellion shook its authority. The
disintegration is regarded as inevitable because its static social and economic disciplines were not able to contain the new vitalities of a glowing commercial civilization. Furthermore its Papal universalism was not able to come to terms with the power of emerging nationalism; and its clerical authoritarianism was not able to do justice to the cultural vitalities of the movement defined as the Renaissance. The children of both Renaissance and Reformation would probably agree in these estimates; but the children of the Reformation would add further indictments.
They would place primary emphasis in the indictment of the medieval Church, that it had sought to derive political power from its prestige of sanctity; that it had substituted for the Biblical faith an amalgam of Biblical and classical ideas which guaranteed the individual
salvation if he diligently climbed the ladder of merit and rigorously disciplined the "passions of the body," particularly sexual passions; that it presumed to mediate between man and God and to control the keys to Heaven; that it therefore obscured the real Biblical message of salvation, which set the individual under the judgement of God, and promised him forgiveness and renewal of life if he accepted this judgement with contrition and was made aware of his self- worship.
The primary concern of the Reformation was a religious one. Therefore Luther’s defiance of ecclesiastical and political authority; and his "Here I stand; I can do no other, so help me God"
is regarded by the Reformation as incidental to the primary religious issue, while it is
appreciated by the Renaissance as the one fact which makes the Reformation relevant to the struggle for liberty. The Reformation and the Renaissance also have different motives for
objecting to Papal authority. The Reformation regards the clerical authoritarianism as an affront to the majesty of God, while the Renaissance regards it as a threat to the liberty of the mind.
The interpretations of the disintegration of the synthesis are thus partly contrasting and partly similar. There can be no definitive interpretation of what happened which could refute either one or both of these interpretations because the interpretations are informed by specific frames of meaning which must be shared before the conclusions emerging from the frame of meaning, prove acceptable. No amount of "empirical observation" or "scientific objectivity" can resolve such conflicts in the interpretation of historical events because there are few facts which refute interpretations which deal with the motives of the actors, the importance of specific causes of the events and the dominant tendencies of history in which these events are believed to be correlated. In short, the frames of meaning determine the interpretation of facts.
Insofar as Catholicism, though dethroned as the arbiter of culture and civilization, remains nevertheless a vital religious force, it is not possible to prove to its adherents that the
Reformation and Renaissance were both inevitable and justified rebellions against both the content and the authority of the Catholic faith. Some intelligent Catholic historians will persist in the convictions that these rebellions must be held responsible for modern nationalism and for every other anarchic force in life. In short, there can be no definitive refutations of any
interpretation of historical events, though the forces of history may conspire to refute some extravagantly "biased" interpretations, or those which are too contradictory to facts so obvious
that they do not depend upon interpretations for validation.
This persistence of "ideological" elements in historical interpretation has exercised the
epistemologists among the philosophers as much as the peculiar character of historical patterns has baffled the metaphysicians. One philosopher, obviously under the influence of the natural sciences has offered a simple solution for the problem of the relativity of historical knowledge.
He would eliminate "evaluations" in order to get rid of "evaluational distortions." Since all the structures of meaning which furnish the principle of coherence for historiography are contained in these "evaluations" this solution is a rather rigorous one which would leave us with little else but the bare dates of critical events.1 Historical events are established in terms of coherence by precisely the "evaluations" which are so embarrassing philosophically. They point to the
impossibility of reducing historical drama to natural coherences.
At the opposite pole of historical epistemology is the "idealistic" interpretation, initiated by Dilthey and expressed most consistently in the thought of the late R. G. Collingwood, one of the most eminent philosophers of our time. He proves that a philosopher has almost as great
difficulty as a pure scientist in interpreting the dramatic essence of history. He is clear that history must be sharply distinguished from nature, for "the processes of nature can be described as a sequence of mere events but the processes of history can not. They are. . . processes of actions which have an inner side, consisting of processes of thought. What the historian is looking for is these processes of thought. All history is the history of thought."2 The rethinking of the "thought" which inspired historical action, is according to Collingwood, "not a passive surrender to the spell of another’s mind. It is the labor of active, and therefore critical thinking.
The historian not only reenacts past thought but he reenacts it in the context of his own knowledge, and therefore in reenacting it criticizes it."3
Among the many difficulties of this rather implausible rationalizing of history, two deserve special consideration. (1) The unconscious, or only partly conscious, motives of the great actors of history, their resentments, ambitions and jealousies, can hardly be dignified as "thoughts";
and they are in any event more inscrutable than Collingwood supposes. Even if they were entirely overt, the question would still arise whether they could give us the real clue to the meaning of the sequences of events. Collingwood does not consider or refute the thesis of Tolstoi’s great novel War and Peace, which was that historical patterns develop in ironic disregard of the purposes and ambitions of the actors of the drama.
We can not understand the pathetic period in which Hitler dominated Germany by
reconstructing his thoughts or those of all of his lieutenants. Only a philosopher could have attributed such a motive to the historian. The historian would know that Hitler was probably not too conscious of the strange mixture of ambition and resentment which animated him.
Collingwood made the mistake of defining as "thought" what is really the dramatic freedom which distinguishes history.
(2) Historical events are the product of a concatenation of social and historical forces, and therefore the thoughts even of the most eminent actors in the historical drama are unimportant in comparison with the interplay of these forces. If we revert once more to the tragedy of Hitler’s Germany. we would understand it more completely, not merely by reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but by tracing the strange confluence of historic forces and tendencies which permitted Hitler to dominate a nation momentarily and to involve it in disaster. The historian would have to explain why in Germany the private virtues of diligence and obedience could be so easily harnessed to collective evil; why the German people have preserved such
extraordinary docility toward the pretensions of political power; why the German aristocracy was chiefly preoccupied with military tasks, why it became the unwilling tool of the mad Corporal and was unable or unwilling to extricate itself from his power; why the German middle classes, which in other countries became the bearers of democracy, developed an
industrial efficiency surpassing that of any other nation while remaining politically incompetent and impotent. The historian would also find it necessary to inquire into the witting and
unwitting connivance of other "democratic" nations in the rise of Hitler: why France, which is almost as incompetent on the political scene as Germany, should develop static forms of corruption which provided the foil for Germany’s dynamic corruption; and why Britain, politically so much wiser than either France or Germany, should have thought it necessary to remain "uncommitted" in their quarrels and should thus have unwittingly encouraged Germany in her two world wars. These questions are but a few of those which historians have and will ask. In answering them and unraveling the tangled skein of the historical drama, they will make generalizations which will strike the reader as either competent or incompetent, as either
hopelessly "prejudiced" or as comparatively "objective." But not one of their generalizations will be able to pass any of the tests which Descartes elaborated in his Discourse on Method. The field of causation in historical events is so multiple, and the motives of men so complex and obscure, and the dramatic patterns so multifarious that the artist-historian must certainly rely more on phronesis than upon nous to venture any generalization. This fact is so obvious that one would have thought that all the genuine historians would have, while admitting scientific and philosophical elements in their labors, long since organized a common defense against the philosophers and scientists who endanger the procedures of historiography by their scientific and "ontological" pretensions.
Both the historians and the average reader have an understanding for the dramatic essence of historical "facts," and discount as far as possible the ideological bias of the historian or correct the bias by other viewpoints, while the scientists and philosophers look in vain for some
criterion of absolute truth in history. No such criterion can be found, because all observers are directly or remotely "interested" and the stuff of history is too complex to make it possible to convict any particular correlation of events or interpretation of historical sequences of "bias."
Even when events are so far removed from contemporary issues that an "objective" view of them seems possible, some, even remote, analogical possibility may suddenly make a former historical dispute relevant to an immediate issue. The question why the Roman Empire declined ceases to be a remote historical issue as soon as someone tries to prove an analogy between the
policies of Rome and those of the "New Deal." for instance.
NOTES:
1. Maurice Mandelbaum: The Problem of Historical Knowledge.
2. R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History, p. 215, Oxford University Press.
3. Ibid.
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return to religion-online
The Self and the Dramas of History by Reinhold Niebuhr
Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God
One of the foremost philsophers and theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was for many years a Professor at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. He is the author of many classics in their field, including The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and Discerning the Signs of Our Times. He was also the founding editor of the publication Christianity and Crisis. The Self and the Dramas of History, was published in 1955 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. This material prepared for Religion Online by Harry and Grace Adams.