Re-thinking History by Keith Jenkins

Author:Keith Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134408283
Publisher: Routledge

To conclude. Students in our culture are likely to meet the concept of bias everywhere even though it is problematic only somewhere. Bias, if and when it is used, ought to be used specifically and locally. (As it is, it is used ideologically.) Elsewhere, because what is constructed as history is constructed differently, the problems of veracity are dealt with differently too.

ON EMPATHY

Empathy, like bias, is a term you will surely have met before.11Here the basic question is whether empathy — the claim that one has to get into an informed appreciation of the predicaments and viewpoints of people in the past in order to gain real historical understanding (to see the past from its point of view) — is actually possible? If it is not, and that is my view, then why should attempting the impossible be so high on the agenda? I will approach ‘empathy’ by looking initially at why I think empathizing effectively is impossible; second I will examine the pressures that have put it so high on the agenda; and finally I will offer some concluding thoughts.

I consider empathy is unachievable for four reasons. Two are basically philosophical and two are practical.

The philosophical problem of ‘other minds', as discussed by Wittgenstein and others,12 considers whether it is possible to enter into the mind of another person we know well and who is beside one, and concludes that it is not. Historians, however, have disregarded this conclusion and have continued to raise questions that are based on the assumption that it actually is possible to enter lots and lots of minds, even minds we cannot possibly know well, and which are far away from us in space and time.

This links into the second philosophical problem. For what is effectively ignored in empathy is that in every act of communication there is an act of translation going on; that every act of speech (speech-act) is an ‘interpretation between privacies'. And when, as suggested, this act of translation is not between ‘you and me’ here and now, but ‘us and them’ somewhere else and at some other time, then the task is extremely problematic. For to all past events historians bring their own mind-set programmed in the present. As Steiner says:

Croce's dictum ‘all history is contemporary history’ points directly to the ontological paradox of the past tense. Historians are increasingly aware that the conventions of narrative and of implicit reality with which they work are philosophically vulnerable. The dilemma exists on at least two levels. The first is semantic. The bulk of the historian's material consists of utterances made in and about the past. Given the perpetual process of linguistic change not only in vocabulary and syntax but in meaning, how is he to interpret, to translate his sources….Reading a historical document, collating the modes of narrative in previous written history, interpreting speech-acts performed in the distant or nearer past, he finds himself becoming more and more of the translator in the technical sense…. And the meaning thus arrived at must be the ‘true one’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.