am 3. September 1993
.sp
Yesterdays excursion into the biblical past
awakened many old, unanswered questions about history.
One can approach this nebulous issue from two extremes:
1) as I did yesterday, by confronting an ancient text
and presuming to reconstruct from it
an intuitively plausible set of circumstances and events;
such reconstruction is unavoidably synthetic,
but at minimum it makes vivid the incongruousness
of taking a written account at face value.
2) Alternatively one may experiment with the history
which one has lived through oneself,
attempting to revover the reality which ones
acquaintances, ones friends, ones family,
which oneself has experienced,
only to rediscover for oneself the truth of the dictum,
das was geschieht hat einen solchen Vorsprung
vor unserm Meinen, dass wirs nie einholen,
und nie erfahren, wie es wirklich aussah.
.sp
Perhaps it is no accident that in both German and English,
history is story. Geschichte ist eine Geschichte die erz{hlt wird,
and history is a story which is told.
History proves to be unconditionally dependent on the storyteller.
It is a foolish academic pretension,
and an interesting consequence
of the apparent independence
and integrity of the written word,
to assume that it might be otherwise.
There can be no story without the historian.
The historian becomes the history,
much as the musician becomes the music
or the actor becomes the play.
As the music exists only in the performance,
and as the play exists only in the production,
so history exists only in the telling
and retelling of the story,
in the imaginative and intuitive reconstruction of experience.
.sp
An ambiguity is created by the circumstance
that the historian nowadays puts his story on paper,
as distinct from telling it to another person or to a public.
We do not always distinguish between the chronicle (Urkunde)
as the bare record of facts,
and history as the interpretation of fact.
To some extent, the fusion of the two is warranted,
denn das H|chste w{re zu begreifen,
da~ alles Faktische schon Theorie ist.
The written history is intermediate between the
historian author and the historian reader:
As the passionate reader of poetry becomes a poet,
so the serious reader of history becomes an historian,
and creates in his intellect
a representation (Vorstellung) of the past,
a representation which is analogous
but not identical with the representation
after which the original historian composed the text.
.sp
Note the difference
between an eye-witness account of an event on the one hand,
and a document as a legal act, on the other.
Many documents, titles, deeds, contracts,
the whole paraphernalia of legal papers 
contain historical descriptions,
but as the term "deed" denotes,
such documents claim to be actions
and must, from the historian's perspective
be considered events. 
.sp
The prototypical telling of a story
occurs when a parent introduces his child into reality
by telling the child a story.
There it is obvious that the story cannot be "real".
that it is constrained
by the childs limited powers of understanding.
Later when the child is older,
these limitations  may have diminished,
but they have surely on diappeared entrirely;
nonetheless they are denied,
and this denial fosters the erroneous assumption arises
that the story should be exhaustive of reality.
In fact, no story, no account, no description,
is ever exhaustive of anything other than itself.
The story, every story, has a monadic self-sufficiency
which mirrors the identity of the historian
and which irremediably separates it
from anything that might be called reality.
The ontogenesis, the anatomy, physiology
and pathology of the historical illusion are the proper,
but universally unrecognized, topics
with which a philosophy of history must concern itself.
.PP
Remarable about the story is that it
is capable of representing reality for the
adult no less than for the child.
Here is another instance,
where we can best understand what we are,
by listening to and oberving our children.