- 12 Jun 2016 07:41
#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.
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.
The concepts "WAR" and "PROGRESS" are now obsolete.