Can We Really Understanding Anything in History? - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. Note: nostalgia *is* allowed.
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#14688263
There is an objective phenomena which we can describe as "the past". This concept was at one time a real event, and can be described as the physical arrangement of the components of the universe during any given time.

The past was at one time the present but as the present is the only thing that continues to exist as time advances it is fair to say that the past is not accessible to human subjective experience.

History is the attempt to write descriptive narratives that can recreate events from the past so that the objective past phenomena can be made understandable to readers in the present.

As history is a written description of physical arrangements that no longer exist, it can be said that historical writing is fundementally two degrees removed from reality: in the first degree because the real past is not accessible to human sensory experience, and in the second because history writing is recreating events, in most cases, that the writer never experienced.

This said, it is possible to construct a fairly accurate model of past events through the use of intersubjective evidence within a bounded framework. The more evidence and the wider the appreciation the historian can access the closer the historians written synthesis will approximate reality. This is because multiple witnesses to past events, while none of them may be "right" in their interpretation of events, can provide a model that is not entirely wrong.

Historiographicaly speaking, the "lens" approach is a historians methodology for minimising potential error by acknowledging that different written approaches and different information filters will produce varying understanding of phenomena.

However, when taken as a whole, these various lenses can, again, help a reader arrive at an approximate understanding. History is thus tasking both to write and indeed to appreciate by the reader. Amateur historians will invariably fall into trouble trying to find "the truth" when it becomes evident from analysis of the sources that many are incompatible or contradictory or indeed non existent (having been lost, destroyed, or never written at all).

The reader, likewise, trained by the civilization to look for binary truth non truth values in their appreciation of reality will undoubtably become hopelessly confused when reading historical studies that present multiple often mutually contradictory reports, with the historian then going on to state confidently that they all may very well be true.

This state of affairs, I believe- the contradiction between the historian's imperative to reconstruct the past in a wholistic if contradictory manner and the reader's learned desire for truth-false values- has created the present state of affairs in which popular history is dominated by "secret" histories claiming to have uncovered the "real truth" that can resolve the seemingly contradictory state of affairs in historical writing.
#15259875
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm
the sciences of history and geology, relies on surmising the subject matter from objective traces given to the researcher in the observation of behavior. But these traces are not themselves the subject matter of the science. The intelligible explanation of historical processes entails surmising what can never be observed, and first-person reports of historical events are no more than evidence which the historian places alongside other evidence. Nonetheless, historiography relies on the plausibility of intelligible explanations of great historical changes in terms of mundane conversations and concrete events and seeks evidence of such events wherever possible.


https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/foucaul1.htm
n from this position, this work remains a landmark for the emergence of post-structuralism. A critique of Foucault is particularly important, because he expresses in clear, well-argued form - and has been very influential in this - the rejection of "grand narratives", the rejection of the possibility of grasping from the universe of appearances, periods, tendencies, sequences and so on; in short, the possibility of finding within history that which is Essential. Essence is important, because Essence exists not just behind Appearance, in some beyond, but exists materially in its own right, side-by-side with the inessential.
...

What lies behind the trace is materiality. One cannot go beyond that without slipping into dogmatism. One cannot deny that and avoid scepticism.
For example, the victim of a murder-rape is silent, their violator is articulate. Maybe we never hear the words of the victim, hear her testimony or even see her body. But what kind of science is it that asks use to confine ourselves to the traces, if (in this example) they be only the testimony of the rapist? Perhaps we are forced to return an open verdict in this case. Who knows - but something happened! I cannot presume to speak for the silent, but I must hear the silence.
This example is extreme, and perhaps for that reason unfortunate. It is well-known that the dominant ruling classes of any society write the history, they leave their traces on every monument, every document and their names live forever. Must we not surmise what lay behind? whose hands built the monument to Kubla Khan?
...

The essential methodological error which is common to positivism, structuralism and post-structuralism is the inability to perceive the essence of processes and to understand and distinguish between Essence and the abstract quantitative reflection of the data of perception; the inability to work with true Notions rather than abstract universals.



I like the methodology outlined by Ilyenkov in regards to Marx as summarized briefly here. Marx’s Das Kapital itself is an example of how to do a kind of historical analysis which entails the logical necessity or development of a social formation. Many facts exist in history but not all are relevant/significant to understanding it. In Das Kapital Marx went through a great deal of empirical research in London before he even came to the commodity form as the basic germ cell in which to explain the nature of capital. Something which had long existed but only in the development of capitalism did this peripheral phenomena become universal and shape everything else.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Ilyenkov-History.pdf
The point is not to abstract what is common to a people but to investigate the necessary conditions for a way of life based on some core phenomenon which allows one to explain the other parts.

“The study of history must be combined with a provisional analysis of the current state of affairs by means of a study of current literature, and then looking back in history to find the point of origin of what seems to be the germ cell of the existing regime, and then tracing this provisional germ-cell forwards. It is the forwards movement that allows analysis to confirm or disconfirm the provisional analysis. Ilyenkov quoted Marx: “it is not necessary to write the real history of the production relations.” What is required is a genealogy beginning with the development of the supposed germ cell, tracing the transformation of the entire formation into organs of itself – if this is indeed what is found ‒ in correlation with the conditions which enable that transformation. As Ilyenkov points out, it all hinges on the chosen starting point.


The essential task then in the study of history is to determine the germ cell of the present day, most advanced formation. It was in Evald Ilyenkov’s chapter on abstract and concrete in the same work I have referred to that we find an exposition of how once the germ cell is isolated, its further concretisation can be traced as it colonises, so to speak, all the other elements of the social formation, and in the process of merging with other relations the cell is itself modified, ultimately able to reproduce itself out of conditions which are its own creation.


https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra4.htm#4c01
Thus the significance becomes apparent of the principle of concrete historicism which imposes the requirement of establishing, in a strictly objective manner, the point at which the real history of the object under consideration begins, the genuinely concrete starting point of its origin.


The whole difficulty lies in the fact that the concrete history of the concrete object is not so easy to single out in the ocean of the real facts of empirical history, for it is not the ‘pure history’ of the given concrete object that is given in contemplation and immediate notion but a very complicated mass of interconnected processes of development mutually interacting and altering the forms of their manifestation. The difficulty lies in singling out from the empirically given picture of the total historical process the cardinal points of the development of this particular concrete object, of the given, concrete system of interaction. Logical development coinciding with the historical process of the formation of a concrete whole should rigorously establish its historical beginning, its birth, and later trace its evolution as a sequence of necessary and law-governed moments. That is the whole difficulty.

‘There is in every social formation a particular branch of production which determines the position and importance of all the others. and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine the relations of all other branches as well. It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything, tingeing all other colours and modifying their specific features; or as if a special ether determined the specific gravity of everything found in it.’ (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)
Clearly this law is not restricted in its action to social development or social phenomena in general. Development in nature also takes this form and cannot take any other. Here too, a new concrete form of development emerges on the basis of and within the framework of those that precede it, becoming a concrete universal principle of a new system and as such involving these chronologically preceding forms in its specific concrete history.


These historically preceding elements may long pre-exist the logically prior ones, they may even constitute the condition of origin of this logically anterior, concrete universal phenomenon, later becoming its manifestation or product.

Thus logical development does not reproduce history as a whole, but rather the concrete history of the given concrete historical whole, of the given concrete system of phenomena interacting in a specific manner.
#15276873
Well, there is no such thing as final knowledge about history, no.

And we dont know everything about current events either.

Historians however are supposed to be scientists, and as such are required to take all carefulness they can muster to evaluate past events, and to provide as much evidence as possible for their claims.

Of course when historians apply scientific methods to more current events, they get targeted by the elites. Like that swiss guy Ganser, who says the official version of the events of 9/11, well, has some bloody obvious holes in it.
#15276879
Political Interest wrote:
History is very widely open to interpretation. Historians base their work on primary and secondary sources, on papers, interviews and documents. Most delve into archives and look for evidence. They piece together evidence and then create their historical narratives. When they put down to paper these narratives are written as books and then sold. We buy the books and read them then absorb the narratives. I have come to the realisation that every piece of historical information I have read has been the product of a historian's narrative.

My question is though, how do historians really know? If they read a letter or piece of correspondence they may interpret it in a certain way. However that interpretation may not really explain the context or help to create an accurate narrative. You could have ten historians who may all have failed to truly capture what happened in history. All our histories of a certain time period, a certain state or political system, could all be completely distorted.

Is true historic objectivity ever possible? Will we ever know anything for certain or is it all subject to narratives that simply give interpretations of our history?

Perhaps historiography is nothing more than a collection of narratives based on guess work and interpretation.



Objectivity is a slippery question.

One of the amazing things I have seen, in my life, is the maturation of history as a discipline. Other disciplines, from accounting to zoology, have contributed to the effort.

In accounting, for example, Hamilton kept 2 sets of books. That remained secret for over 2 centuries. But a smart historian persuaded a business major to go over his books, and found the deception. Hamilton caused the Whiskey Tax rebellion, trying to create a stronger federal government.

Another fascinating moment was when the techniques of underwater archeology were applied to the Battle of Trafalgar. England spent the time and money to develop purpose built cannon for warships. Spain simply dragged the cannon they already had onto ships. So despite the quantitative advantage Spain had, the British could get close and have the advantage.
#15276918
While open to interpretation, there still remain untruthful and bad interpretations. Not every sccount is a worthwhile one and we can venture as much based on comparisons of accounts based on shared or different evidence. This plays out in history with the use of modern methods or new evidence challenging old established truths.

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