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Thomas Hippler
Seminar “Rewriting History“
5. December 1999
Critical Remarks on Erik’s paper: “History and the
Possibility of Representing the Past”
According to Erik, Greenaway’s film Death in the Seine is a challenge to “traditional
historiography” and its “lack of conscious self-reflexivity” (p. 19) and, therefore, it explores
new possibilities of dealing with the “past”. However, as pointed out in the paper (note 15, p.
11), the film is a direct adaptation of a work of “traditional historiography” (Richard COBB,
Death in Paris: The Records of the Basse-Geôle de la Seine Octobre 1795-September 1801
Vendémaire Year IV-Fructidor Year IX. Oxford University Press, 1978; EUI-Library:
944.045J COB). It may be useful to have a closer look at that book.
Cobb’s book consists of two parts, the first titled “The Dossier” and the second
“Beyond the Dossier”. Being a “traditional historian”, Cobb first describes his sources and
analyses them critically, i.e. he discusses their validity and their limits. His conclusion is that
“the procès-verbaux, despite the limitations that we have outlined, thus offer a source of
considerable interest to the social historian, and especially to the historian of the very poor
and of those just above the subsistence level, as death among the affluent is only rarely
included, when, for instance, a person of substance from the provinces, whose family is not in
Paris, throws himself into the Seine, or is murdered and his body then thrown into the Seine”
(p. 6). He then goes on by comparison with other source material and historical studies about
the social history of suicide, murder and accidental death in Paris at that time, thus giving
background information of what we can presumingly know beyond the limits of the Dossier.
In the second part of the book, the first chapter on “The juge de paix and the historian”
is particularly interesting for us. “So the juge de paix and his assistants have, for one reason or
other, done rather well not only by their dead clientèle, but also by any historian prepared to
travel with them. In so far as they display a hasty, bluff, and rather unencumbered humanity,
the historian should emulate them. [...] But at this point, the juge and the historian will part
company; the juge will go on to his next assignation: another body, and another after that, and
on and on he will go, till retirement [...], dismissal, or a welcome promotion inland, away
from the riverside, delivers him from the treadmill of the Basse-Geôle. [...] The historian, on
the other hand, has only just started out on an uncertain journey at the moment when he first
notes the detail of a procès-verbal, or the minor differences between this one and another.
From there, he will attempt to move backwards, beyond the terrible barrier imposed by the
fact of self-destruction or sudden death, in an effort to fill out a life generally incomplete [...],
cut off, not just with a random collection of objects in everyday use, but with words, feelings,
people, a childhood, a birthplace, the number of years previously spent in the city,
companionship, marriage, whether terminated or still involving cohabitation, widowhood,
absence of partner, illness, itineraries in life and so on. Very rarely indeed it may even be
possible for him to relate these blurred, fudged lives to public events and to the direct
experience of history.” (pp. 35-37)
These citations should be sufficient to make clear that things are not as easy as Erik puts
them in his criticism of “traditional historiography”. Is it, then, really “possible to interpret
Death in the Seine as a manner of speaking ironically about the lack of conscious selfreflexivity demonstrated in the practice of historical research”? (p. 19). Is it true that
“traditional historiography” is thus deprived of “critical understanding of what it means to
know anything of past reality”? (p. 15). Reading Erik’s paper, one asks oneself who,
concretely, is aimed by his criticism of “traditional historiography”.
The only historian who is explicitly cited is Ranke and his famous dictum that history deals
with the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. However, even in this case the historical context of
such a dictum should not be overseen. When Ranke wrote these words in the preface of his
Zur Geschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker of 1824, he argued within an
intellectual environment largely dominated by Hegel’s objective idealism that attacked any
empirical approach to reality as not “scientific”: “Further, in the case of such a collection of
items of knowledge, which has no right to the name of science, any talk about purpose and
such-like generalities is not commonly very different from the descriptive and superficial way
in which the contents of the science [...] are themselves spoken of”.1 Ranke’s wie es eigentlich
gewesen is precisely a challenge to this kind of idealism that pretends to reach absolute
knowledge without any consideration for the “facts”, i.e. for empirical research. In short, he
claims not to be interested in metaphysical speculation but in the study of history. Read in this
way, Ranke may come to appear to us much less outmoded. In any event, it seems to me that
1
HEGEL, The Phonomenology of Mind. tr. Baillie. London-New York, 1931; p. 67
this kind of criticism of “traditional historiography” is highly problematic as it tends to
underestimate the critical potentials of historical investigation itself.
This becomes particularly visible in the discussion of “pathos” as a category of
historical research. “Historical scholarship” turns “emotive evens into flat statistics” and,
according to Erik, it is precisely Greenaway’s merit “to try to find some way back to the
pathos” (p. 17) One question, nevertheless, occurs: why should “pathos” be preferable to “flat
statistics”? The answer is that “pathos” is more “meaningful”: “If the production of history is
to construct meaning to the human predicament of being temporal, than new forms of history
writing have to be developed since an account of what has happened does not seem to be
meaningful enough” (p. 17). To sum up the argument: pathos is better in producing meaning
than statistics. However, a strange shift takes place in this sentence. When in a former chapter
of the paper is was argued that “history is about constructing meaning” (p. 9), the above cited
sentence claims that history should produce meaning and that the extend to which it is capable
of doing so determines the quality of a work of historiography. In short, there is a shift from
the descriptive to the normative. It seems to me that this is an untenable position.2
The first reason for this is the contradiction with Erik’s own arguments. With an
argument of this kind, it would be perfectly coherent to classify for instance the Spielberg
film as a superior kind of history writing since it contains certainly more “pathetic meaning”
than any scholarly book – and Greenaway’s film. If, one the one hand, each critical historian
would agree that history writing has de facto the function of constructing “meaning”; I would
argue, on the other hand, that the historian’s task should merely be defined as the
deconstruction of “meaning”, i.e. the critical analysis of how “meaning” has been constructed
in and around a given historical situation. However, “pathos” is certainly not sufficient to
achieve this goal, what is needed is exactly the contrary, a critical distance to the emotive
charge of pathetic events.3
I shall finish this comment with some more general reflections on the role of philosophy of
history. Speculative philosophers – the common sense is quite right about that – usually have
a problem with reality. The philosophical term for this problem with reality is “empiricism”.
Thus Plato claimed that reality is a “shadow” that is taken for the real object, and only
2
A good deal of the problems stem from the fact that we are given no hinds about the significance of
“meaning”.
It is worth noting that the signification of the Greek  is “ being passiv, suffering”, from there
stem “passion”, “passivity” and “pathology”. If “pathos” involves “passivity”, I would argue that the
appropriation of activity should be the historian’s task.
3
philosophers can come to see the “real” world, i.e. the world of “ideas”. Descartes tries to get
rid of empirical reality because there is no certainty that this reality is not a pure illusion
caused by a malign demon; an absolute standpoint for truth can be found only in selfreflexivity. It is useless to multiply the examples.4 History, being a empirical kind of
knowledge, falls naturally under the condemnation of “empiricism” as an inferior knowledge.
Moreover, the objects of history and philosophy were supposed to be radically different:
philosophy deals with “eternal truth” and history only with “factual truth”.
Things changed since the time of the French Revolution. It is still astonishing today to
read the contemporaries writings and to see to what extend this forceful, noisy and violent
apparition of history, of political change and “modern-ness” were shocking. Suddenly the
world was no more the same as before since it changed so quickly and radically, moreover, by
the same event, the very possibility to have any stable “knowledge” about it was put into
question. The invention of “philosophy of history” at the end of the 18th and the beginning of
the 19th century may be viewed as a reaction to this traumatic experiences. I want to argue that
philosophy of history has been an attempt to cope with this challenge of historical experience
to classical reason and its ideal of stability in intellectual matters. Since history, change and
instability could no longer be simply denied or classified as inferior matter as was done before
the French Revolution, they had to be integrated and suppressed (aufgehoben in Hegel’s
words) into a greater synthesis. Development was no longer denied as such but seen as a
teleological process that assured its “reasonability” and prevented thus from bad surprises: in
this respect, “philosophy of history” is little more than an attempt to get rid of history.
I would argue that these issues are no longer problematic for us; on the contrary. As
Eric Hobsbawm pointed out “the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms
that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most
characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women
at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the
public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business it is to remember
that others forget, more essential at the end of the second millennium than ever before”. 5 Our
task as historians is to “bring history back in”, i.e. to understand how things became what they
are now, to analyze tendencies, frictions, struggles in history in order to grasp some of present
reality. This is to argue that history, for us, is no “problem” any more, but a means, a method
4
I am, however, not arguing that all philosophy is working on that model. There is another tradition
which leads from Democit to Machiavelli, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx – just to mention a couple of
names. Is it a pure coincidence that many of these are historians as well as philosphers?
5
Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991. London, Michael Joseph, 1994; p. 3
or a tool to understand “what is going on”.
In order to do so, we should not simply reject the methodological heritage that has been
developed in the academic discipline of history. To make my point clear, I would argue that
even the most naïve 19th century historical positivism is preferable to the “eternal present” of
today’s forgetfulness of the past. It is certainly true that “traditional historiography” needs to
be criticized, not so much because of its “lack of self-reflexivity” however, but because it
often failed to ask to right questions to history. It was the negative result of the historian’s
reaction to the hegemony of philosophy at the beginning of the 19th century, that every
conceptualization tended to be banned from the realm of history. Thus, a strange situation
occurred in which philosophers tried to answer their questions without regard to empirical
reality, whereas historians just collected historical facts without asking any questions to the
past.6 But today, this should not be the case any more. Historians should simply be more selfconfident about their work and about its importance. Of course we are using models in order
to describe reality – all sciences necessarily do. But a model of social reality is not a “fiction”:
it is subject to empirical falsification; it may be criticized and replaced by other models that
are more useful in explaining reality. That is the normal way sciences work and so does
history.
A Response to Thomas Hippler
Erik Tängerstad
In his critical remark to the paper I presented in the seminar, Thomas writes that I have argued
that Greenaway’s film Death in the Seine should be seen as a way to explore “new
possibilities of dealing with the ‘past’”. He has taking his point of departure in a vague and
non-precise concept that I have used: “traditional historiography”. He argues that
historiography in general, as it has been developed during the last two centuries is not so
burdened with a lack of self-reflexivity, as I would have assumed. Instead, he argues that the
writing of history (first and foremost the academic writing of it) has developed as a sound
reaction to speculative philosophy and to philosophy of history. He even states that
philosophy is not anymore a problem to historiography and that historians “should be more
6
Nevertheless, even this blind collection of facts has been absolutely necessary. My personal research
work, for instance, would be completely impossible without the fruits of all the work that has been
done by historical positivist. It would not be honest to conceal this debt.
self-confident about their work and about its importance” when carrying out their profession
in the traditional way.
When reading Thomas critical remark, it become clear to me to what extent my text is
obscure. Admittedly, the paper I have written is not crystal-clear and to some extent I think
that Thomas and I will actually agree on many points where it now seems that we should be
disagreeing. Therefore, I am very thankful that Thomas now makes it possible to straitened
out a couple of misunderstandings. Having read Thomas’ text a second time, however, I also
think that there are some fundamental problems inherent in the position taken by him. As a
matter of fact, he does not just show off a considerable lack of self-reflexivity in what he
writes, but more than that, he is both conscious and proud of this lack of self-reflexivity and,
furthermore, he argues that exactly this lack should be seen as a virtue when writing history.
Obviously, to such an attitude I cannot agree.
To begin with, some of the misconceptions of my argument that Thomas has presented should
be clarified. First of all, I have never said that Greenaway’s film could be seen as a new
possibility of dealing with the past. What I have said is that Greenaway points to the fact that
history can never be seen as identical with the past and therefore the non-reflected assertion
that history should be understood as a representation of the past must be critically revised.
When reading Thomas comments of my paper, it seems to me that he is unable to grasp this
difference between the past on the one side and history and historiography on the other.
Therefore, I think it is important that the argument is recapitulated.
When writing history we are using source-material to underpin our interpretations and
conclusions. This source-material is not identical with what we argue to study, and therefore
we have to construct a link between what we actually study here-and-now, namely the sourcematerial, and what we argue that we study, which would be the past their-and-then. This link
or connection between what we are actually doing and what we claim that we are doing — the
connection between written history and the past — is a mental construction (however
collectively constructed), not an empirical fact that would in some way correspond to some
“reality out there”.
Therefore, this construction is made up by a collectivity of human being over an infinite time
span, and we call this construction “history”. The point to be underlined here is that this
“history” is not identical with “the past as such”. As a matter of fact, there can be no direct
connection between these two entities. But there exists a connection between “history” and
“our human notion of the past” and this connection is exactly the collectively made up
construction between what is generally called history and what in everyday language is called
the past. However, and this most apparently be repeated over and over again, no identity
between “the past as such” and “our human notion of the past” can be claimed, and therefore
history cannot be considered to be a representation of “the past as such”, because as human
beings we have no access to this presumed “past as such”.
Nevertheless, time after time people — also renowned and respectable historians like Eric
Hobsbawm — try to uphold this mythical idea that the production of history should be a way
of representing not a discursive notion of the past, but actually the past as such. Although it is
preposterous and only proves the point that when it comes to reflect temporality also famous
historians show a remarkable lack of self-reflectivity, this idea is often heard.
One of the corner-stones in Kant’s critical philosophy — which is also the fundament of
modern science — is that our human faculty of knowledge has no access to “the thing in it
self”; we can only know “the thing as it appears to us” through our human senses. Therefore
what we know of the world is not identical with the world as it really is. Of course, this does
not mean that the world does not exist, only that we can have no knowledge of the world as it
exists beyond our notion of it. And our notion of the world is discursively constructed,
upheld, communicated, and dispersed. Our notion of the world, of reality, and of ourselves is
a construct that is made up within discourse. But, and this should be repeated with emphasis,
this does not mean that the world, that reality, that we do not exist. It does only mean that we
can have no knowledge of these things beyond discourse. Our knowledge is bound up within
discourse and we cannot know anything beyond discourse.
The strange thing is that as soon as anybody in any discussion (not just in the debate we have
within the seminar) starts to critically question knowledge, he or she is immediately attacked
by a number of people who starts defend the notion that our knowledge of reality is identical
with reality. This is also the case when anybody criticise the notion that historiography should
be a representation of the past as such: any such critic would immediately have to defend himor herself against the accusation that he or she would argue that reality does not exist. Of
course, any such response to a systematic critique of knowledge is nonsense. What makes
such a response interesting is, however, that it reveals some of the structure of the discourse in
which it is uttered: we really live in a discourse in which people cannot differ between our
collective notion of reality on the one side and reality beyond the scope of our senses on the
other. This can be understood as a marker of how little people — also celebrated researchers
— have perceived the point of Kant’s critical philosophy and to what marginal extent modern
science has been taken seriously within modern society as a whole and specifically within
academic research.
What I have been trying to say is that since we cannot argue that history is a representation of
the past as such — because knowledge has no access to the past as such — historiography (as
it has developed during the last two centuries and as it is now institutionalised and turned into
a tradition) must be critically revised. The lack of such a revision among professional
historians equals a lack of self-reflexivity within the profession. This is what I have been
repeating over and over again, but still the same Thomas does not seem to have understood it.
Instead, he is out to un-critically defend the tradition of historiography. He writes:
“Our task as historians is to ‘bring history back in’, i.e. to understand how things became what
they are now, to analyze tendencies, frictions, struggles in history in order to grasp some of
present reality. […] In order to do so, we should not simply reject the methodological heritage
that has been developed in the academic discipline of history. To make my point clear, I
would argue that even the most naïve of 19th century historical positivism is preferable to the
‘eternal present’ of today’s forgetfulness of the past. It is certainly true that ‘traditional
historiography’ needs to be critized, not so much because of its ‘lack of self-reflexivity’
however, but because it often failed to ask right questions to history.”
When writing things like this one starts to wonder whether Thomas has ever self-critically
asked himself what he think he is doing. It seems apparent that he has not grasped that I have
tried to discuss the consequences of the problematic relationships between knowledge and
reality, between history and the past. Rather it seems that he is incapable of even
understanding that these problematic relationships exist in the first place: “I would argue that
these issues [of the philosophy of history] are no longer problematic for us; on the contrary”.
Instead of critically and self-critically reflect on the work we are doing as historians, he
argues that we should, unlike our failing predecessors, start to “ask the right questions to
history”. Moreover, this we should do without wasting time and energy on being selfreflective. Not even the question what “right questions” would be seems to be significant to
him.
The usage of the concept “traditional historiography” in my paper is, as is already admitted,
elusive and creates more confusion than clarity. That being said, it makes me truly sad to have
to write that if the term “traditional historiography” would be shifted out with the name
“Thomas Hippler” the argument of the paper would perhaps be more concrete and easier to
follow.
IN his critical comment, Thomas has also failed to understand when I am quoting Greenaway
and when I am putting forward my own argument, thus mixing up Greenaway’s argument
with my own. He has also not understood the difference made between “pathos” and
“pathetic”. These and other aspects of my argument that he has misunderstood can surely be
ascribed to my failure of precise formulations, and I will try to be more clear in my expression
the future.
To sum up, Thomas is taking precisely that position that I am trying to question. Therefore, I
guess, this could be the beginning of a long debate.