The zero-based philosophy of history

The notion of a zero-based budget is familiar to all accountants.
.PP
When an accountant determines
that the assets of a firm are insufficient
to sustain anticipated payments,
he may seek to rein in the expenditures
by cutting back a little here
and cutting back a little there,
but not infrequently
the competing demands for established commitments
are too great to withstand,
and one ends up by failing to meet
ones budgetary goals.
.PP
A surer method of living within ones means
is to start with the proposition
that no expenditure is absolutely necessary.
One then scrutinizes each potential disbursement
to see how necessary it in fact might be,
and to consider whether one might not be able
to do without it.
.PP
I see a close analogy between the philosophy of history
and the budget dilemmas I have described.
The philosopher indulges not in monetary expenditures but in theories,
each one of which requires a proof of its cogency,
and evidence that it is something more than a flight of fancy.
This obligation to substantiate ones hypotheses
appears to be in general systematically disregarded;
with the consequence that philosophy has become a species of poetry
whose persuasiveness is a function
of the eloquence and the loudness
with which it is articulated.
.PP
We are at a loss to determine
what Marx said about the end of history,
and we become so embroiled in scholarly refutation
that we forget to ask whether,
even if he had said it,
Marx could have known what he was talking about.
.PP
My inquiry about what Marx
might or might not know about history,
or Max Weber or Wilhelm Dilthey
or for that matter, anyone else,
must begin and end with the question
about what *I* can know about history.
The alternative is to adopt
the scholastic refrain, autos ephe,
and consider truth to be a matter
simply of valid of attribution;
to assume the truth of a statement
merely because it has been articulated
by someone of great reputation,
without demanding any other confirmatory evidence,
and without asking
how its author could have known
the truth of his assertions.
.PP
I begin therefore by asking
what it is that I,
as I sit here at my desk,
watching the display on my video monitor
alter with each line that I type,
actually know about the past.
I cannot rely on,
and I must discount what I read in books,
for from them I gain
nothing more nor less
than a present knowledge
of the books' contents,
but no knowledge at all of the past
to which the book refers.
That would be, on my part,
an act of faith.
.PP
What I can remember,
what I recollect about the past
from my own experience
is a very different matter.
Of course the past history which I recollect
is not the history of the world
but is the history of my past,
an account of what I myself have seen and heard,
what I have thought and felt,
have planned and tried
and failed and accomplished.
The truthful answer to this question is,
that I in fact remember embarrassingly little.
.PP
The reconstruction of history unavoidavly proceeds
by relying on artifacts,
objects that stimulate memory,
images and documents that provide 
specific details of the reconstruction.
These artifacts create the illusion of reality
also for the historian,
whom they convince that the memories
which they elicit correspond to the events
as they occurred. 
Nor is this correspondence entirely illusory.
.PP
There are two modalities by which we acquire knowledge
of a contemporary event. 
In the first place,
we may be directly affected by it as observers.
We may actively participate in it as actors.
We also observe ourselves acting,
and the difference between our memory as an agent
and the memory of the observer is less than one might presume.
(Memories of action differ in that the agent 
remembers also his intentions.)
.PP
Memory is the clue to history.
We cannot understand history
unless we understand memory.
Memory is the spontaneous repetition (recapitulation)
by the mind of prior experience.
.PP
Historical judgments rely on a synthetic memory;
a synthesis from noted, documents, diaries, artifacts, books,
out of which the mind fashions images and accounts
that are analogous to its memories.

===========

How do I know there is a past;
what can I know about the past?
can I know more about
the past of Germany or Russia or France
than I can know about my own past?
And what in fact *do* I know about my own past?

My knowledge of the past is a physiological fact
the after image, the echo of the voice,
the memory, the ability to recognize what I have
previously seen, to understand what I have previously heard,
to recognize my handwriting, my words, my thoughts.
Although I think always only in the present,
my present thoughts create "recreate" the past.
And yet, what they point to is inaccessible.

A cartesian reduction to the beginning 
about what I can state with certainty.
Cogito ergo sum we replace with memory
I remember, therefore there is some past.
Husserls Cartesische Meditationen.
That the past is inaccessible
Das Geschehen an sich
as inaccessible as das Ding an sich
.
===========

There should be of course no challenge to the fact
that we have history. that there are history books,
history professors, history departments;
or that the awareness of history, the interpretation
that we give it alters our view and our conduct.
yet what should be understood is that the history
which is taught there is contrived, is invented,
is a fiction, and artifact,
and that though this fact may be concealed by the rigor
with which it is pursued
this fact is not altered
by the fact that this invention
proceeds with great rigor.
What matters is that the past really *is* inaccessible,
and remains so, notwithstanding our most strenuous efforts
to recover it,
and that the history that we cultivate
is not in any sense a recovery of the past
that the recovery of the past is an illusion,
that what we treat as history is really
(only) an intellectual and emotional device
to assist us in the precarious transition from past to future.
For paradoxically, one of the functions of history
is to create an illusion of the present;
where if we look closely,
the present is not there.
We are unable to find it:

==================

I note ambiguity and confusion in the use of the term
history to refer both to the logical, conceptual description
of a society and to that society itself.
In consequence of this failure to discriminate
between the description and that which is described
the critical perspective that there is invariably more to
a society than its history;
that the historians description has limitations
which that which he sought to describe does not possess.
.PP
THe question then arises, whether that history concerning
which we wish to philosophize is the actuality of the social,
political and natural processes, or whether that history
is merely our description, our account, our interpretation
of those processes. I consider the confusion noteworthy,
because it appears to eliminate the contingency, the approximation
of the historical account. Ordinarily, when I give an historical
account or report, I leave open the possibility  of imperfection,
of incompleteness; it remains a story that we tell, and the
reality  about which the story is told remains independen of
and unaffected by the story. When one refers, on the other hand,
of history coming or not coming to an end one refers not to the
end of an account or to the end of a story or a book; the end
of history is not the end of Gibbons History of Rome, but the
end of Rome; so that these two are very different.
.PP
We physicians commonly refer to a history and physical examination
of a patient. When we take a history, we listen to the patient's 
spontaneous account of his experience of his illness; we ask
questions to elicit details, but by no device of the imagination
would we assume that the history which we record, that the historical
record is identical with that which the record purports to describe,
just as the blueprint of a house is not the same as the house,
the description of an airplane does not fly, and the history of
a city is not identical with that city.

======================

It makes a difference I suppose, whether one comes to the
philosophy of history from the field of history or anthropology;
in which case one might plausibly expect to find there a measure
of certainty and truth that was absent from the raw discipline;
or whether one proceeds from philosophy as the primary discipline
in which case one would expect, in a Kantian sense, philosophy to
define the boundaries of knowable history.