Carl Becker and the Problem of Historical Facts
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
It is the 151st anniversary of the birth of Carl Becker (07 September 1873–10 April 1945), who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, on this date in 1873.
Most of Becker’s work was as an historian proper, but he also wrote on historiography and philosophy of history. Perhaps Becker’s most famous book was The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932). Becker wears his learning lightly, so while the book is intellectually dense, it is an easy read, and several readings are necessary to getting everything out of the book that Becker put into it. The argument of this book reminds me of E. M. W. Tillyard’s famous study The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the age of Shakespeare, Donne & Milton (1942). Perhaps Tillyard had read Becker’s book of ten years earlier, but he didn’t mention Becker in his book. Whereas Tillyard argued that Elizabethan England was more orthodox than is usually supposed today, Becker argued that the Enlightenment philosophers were a good deal more orthodox than is usually supposed today: “I think the Philosophes were nearer the Middle Ages, less emancipated from the preconceptions of medieval Christian thought, than they quite realized or we have commonly supposed.”
The mechanisms by which the philosophes deceived themselves are humorously sketched by Becker in a passage that gives some flavor of his literary style, which is better than most:
“They denounced Christian philosophy, but rather too much, after the manner of those who are but half emancipated from the ‘superstitions’ they scorn. They had put off the fear of God, but maintained a respectful attitude toward the Deity. They ridiculed the idea that the universe had been created in six days, but still believed it to be a beautifully articulated machine designed by the Supreme Being according to a rational plan as an abiding place for mankind. The Garden of Eden was for them a myth, no doubt, but they looked enviously back to the golden age of Roman virtue, or across the waters to the unspoiled innocence of an Arcadian civilization that flourished in Pennsylvania. They renounced the authority of church and Bible, but exhibited a naive faith in the authority of nature and reason. They scorned metaphysics, but were proud to be called philosophers. They dismantled heaven, somewhat prematurely it seems, since they retained their faith in the immortality of the soul. They courageously discussed atheism, but not before the servants. They defended toleration valiantly, but could with difficulty tolerate priests. They denied that miracles ever happened, but believed in the perfectibility of the human race.”
We could extrapolate this argument backward to time before the heavenly city of the 18th century philosophers, and before the Elizabethans, and argue that the earliest of the early moderns are much less modern than we take them to be, and I think this argument would be largely correct. In one sense this is a problem of periodization, and in another sense it is a problem of mentalities. Philip Daileader in his great courses lectures on the Middle Ages argues in his final lecture than the Middle Ages lasted up until the 18th century, and, insofar as Becker was right, and the 18th century perpetuated a largely orthodox way of conceptualizing the world, we could say that the Middle Ages lasted right up to the 19th century and the industrial revolution.
Even now, even today, there are demographics that remain essentially innocent of modernity except for the technology they use. We can still see traces of this earlier age in the present, just as when we see the first stirrings of modernity in a figure of the high middle ages like Francesco Petrarch we are seeing the first intimations of modernity. The medieval and the modern interpenetrate each other, and we can make choices in any century from the 13th to the 21st that highlights the one or the other.
Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers began as four lectures delivered at Yale in April 1931. This was during the depths of the depression that began with the market crash of 1929, and, at the end of the book, Becker discusses what was the recent past for him, the Bolshevik Revolution, and alludes to further changes that may yet be to come. But he starts out with a sketch of the intellectual perspective of the high middle ages, invoking St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante as imaginary dinner guests, and in imaging what these two might say, finds that it is so dated that we would have trouble appreciating their insights. So if it turns out the 18th century philosophes were more orthodox than we thought, it wasn’t a medieval orthodoxy, since we can scarcely understand or appreciate medieval thought.
We may still be very much in debt to the middle ages today. This was one of the points of contention in the Löwith-Blumenberg debate, of which I said that it seemed every time we entertained what we believed to be a modern thought, turned out upon inspective to be a medieval thought. However, the medieval ideas we carry with us are put into a modern form, so our debt to the middle ages is a debt that has been transformed by accrued interest.
Becker discussed our contemporary scientific outlook, but he also discusses the modern interest in history, of which he says:
“Historical-mindedness is so much a preconception of modern thought that we can identify a particular thing only by pointing to the various things it successively was before it became that particular thing which it will presently cease to be.”
This sounds like the claims made on behalf of historicism, by which I mean Rankean historicism and not Popperian historicism. I could argue that this kind of interest in the history of things follows from the scientific worldview, in which the things of this world are as subject to mutability as believed by Heraclitus and as celebrated by any Elizabethan poet — here I’m thinking of Spencer’s Cantos on Mutabilitie. For Plato this was reason enough to deny the ultimate reality of the changing world. The scientific worldview accepts the mutability of the world on its face, and tries to account for things as they are in their changing appearances.
The laws of nature formulated by scientists with mathematical precision are laws of how nature changes, laws of becoming rather than laws of being, although conservation laws seek to recover the invariant within the changing. So even if our modern perspective is historical in the way that Becker described, it may still be fundamentally scientific rather than fundamentally historical. Or, alternatively, we can say that science is, in its nature, essentially historical.
At the end of Becker’s 1926 lecture “What are Historical Facts?” he tells us how science has transformed the world but history has not. The First World War, which was then in the recent past for Becker, was what it was because of science:
“It was scientific research that made the war of 1914, which historical research did nothing to prevent, a world war. Because of scientific research it could be, and was, fought with more cruelty and ruthlessness, and on a grander scale, than any previous war; because of scientific research it became a systematic massed butchery such as no one had dreamed of, or supposed possible. I do not say that scientific research is to blame for the war; I say that it made it the ghastly thing it was, determined its extent and character.”
Even if science is, in its nature, essentially historical, it is science that shapes the world, and not history. But this wasn’t the main point of this paper. Becker was worried about the problem of historical facts, which has worried historians ever since the idiom of facts came into vogue, and still worries historians today. The nature of historical facts would again be a point of contention decades later in the Carr-Elton debate, but Becker took up the problem early in the 20th century.
In taking up the problem of facts, Becker asks three questions:
“The questions are: (1) What is the historical fact? (2) Where is the historical fact? (3) When is the historical fact? Mind I say is not was. I take it for granted that if we are interested in, let us say, the fact of the Magna Carta, we are interested in it for our own sake and not for its sake; and since we are living now and not in 1215 we must be interested in the Magna Carta, if at all, for what it is and not for what it was.”
He discusses each of these questions in some detail, teasing out the implications of naïve conceptions of facts, but we can already tell by the tendentious way the questions are formulated that facts aren’t going to come out very well from the inquiry. Facts are, in fact, being set up to fail. The scientific worldview tends to reify facts, making them into some ultimate concrete point of reference, but, of course, a fact is a human thing, defined by human beings, and as a creation of the human mind, the very idea of a fact is an abstraction. Historians have made an art form of undercutting facts while claiming to base their narratives on facts. In the historical narrative it is facts against facts, and the most subtle and experienced jugglers of facts are the ones who make their narratives sound the best. Becker doesn’t tell us this explicitly, but he plays on all the weaknesses of facts and of a view of history that has supposedly made itself of facts. Because this game won’t stand up under close scrutiny, the history so conceived fails. The historian, Becker says,
“…cannot deal directly with this event itself, since the event itself has disappeared. What he can deal with directly is a statement about the event. He deals in short not with the event, but with a statement which affirms the fact that the event occurred. When we really get down to the hard facts, what the historian is always dealing with is an affirmation — an affirmation of the fact that something is true. There is thus a distinction of capital importance to be made: the distinction between the ephemeral event which disappears, and the affirmation about the event which persists. For all practical purposes it is this affirmation about the event that constitutes for us the historical fact.”
So that’s an historical fact for Becker — not the thing itself, but the affirmation of the vanished thing. Many historians and many philosophers of history have come to this sad conclusion, but once they’ve reached this conclusion, they don’t all draw the same lessons. The lesson that Becker found in this was that history is imaginatively recreated by the historian and it exists in our minds, and not in the actual world:
“I don’t know whether these remarks will strike you as quite beside the mark, or as merely obvious, or as novel. If there is any novelty in them, it arises, I think, from our inveterate habit of thinking of the world of history as part of the external world, and of historical facts as actual events. In truth the actual past is gone; and the world of history is an intangible world, re-created imaginatively, and present in our minds.”
From this view of history Becker draws five implications:
- By no possibility can the historian present in its entirety any actual event, even the simplest.
- The historian cannot eliminate the personal equation.
- No one can profit by historical research, or not much, unless he does some for himself.
- Every normal person does know some history, a good deal in fact.
- The kind of history that has most influence upon the life of the community and the course of events is the history that common men carry around in their heads.
All of these points are elaborated in detail in the paper. Really, none of these claims are really radical, and all of these claims could be reconciled with a conventional view of history, or even with an unconventional view of history. One might maintain any or all of these claims and subscribe to any number of philosophies of history. But these considerations do lead to Becker’s best known reflection on history, his 1931 presidential address to the American Historical Association, “Everyman His Own Historian.”
The democratization of history implicit in the title is what we would expect from an American historian, and it dovetails nicely with the five implications that Becker drew from his inquiry into historical facts. I take Carl Becker and Charles Beard to be the two most influential American historians, at least, the two most influential American historians of the 20th century. In both Becker and Beard we find the kind of support for and praise of American democratic institutions that we could expect from American historians, even going so far as to put history at the service of these institutions, as they understood them. But in the title of this address, Becker uses “Everyman” as one word and not as two. That is to say, Becker invokes the democratization of history not in the name of John Q. Public or some other symbol of the American everyman, but in the name of the character of medieval morality plays — the everyman who is intended as a self-insert so that anyone watching the play could imagine himself as the protagonist. There is something deeper in Becker than a celebration of American values as transplanted into history — something that goes back to the medieval everyman.
Just as everyman vicariously can be the protagonist in a morality play, so too everyman can be an historian. In “Everyman His Own Historian” Becker relates the story of the everyman in relation to history. This is something of an abstract history of everyman, like the abstract history of Dasein in Heidegger’s Being and Time and the abstract history of spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, both of which I mentioned in my episode on Hegel. Out of this abstract history of everyman, Becker expanded on his conception of an historical fact that he had earlier given in “What are Historical Facts?”:
“Since history is not part of the external material world, but an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, its form and substance are inseparable: in the realm of literary discourse substance, being an idea, is form; and form, conveying the idea, is substance. It is thus not the undiscriminated fact, but the perceiving mind of the historian that speaks: the special meaning which the facts are made to convey emerges from the substance-form which the historian employs to recreate imaginatively a series of events not present to perception.”
This alienation from the naïve meaning of facts, making history dependent upon the imaginative reconstruction of the historian, is why Becker is sometimes called an historical relativist. To say that it is the perceiving mind of the historian that speaks is to flirt with the denial of a distinction between res gestae and historium rerum gestarum, between past actuality and its record, which I discussed in relation to Giovanni Gentile. This puts us beyond relativism and on the road to idealism of a sort that threatens to undermine any connection of history with a world outside itself. Becker brings himself back from the brink with I would call a kind of humanism:
“We write history from the human rather than from the cosmic point of view because, however indifferent the doings of man may be to the cosmic force of which they are the result, they are vastly interesting to us; and vastly important, measured by the standard of human desires, purposes, and aspirations. If the historian is to write history at all, he must be interested in these desires, purposes, and aspirations, must regard them as important in some sense or other. The most disinterested historian in the world has at least one preconception, which is that he will at all hazards have none.”
Just as Becker’s relativism flirts with idealism, his humanism flirts with anthropocentrism. But history has always traditionally been a humanistic discipline, so it is relatively simple to keep it within this tradition. Becker contrasts this humanistic history with history written from a cosmic point of view. Becker had originally presented his “What Are Historical Facts” lecture in 1926, although it wasn’t published until 1955. A year before, in 1925, Frank Ramsey had invoked Russell’s attitude the cosmic point of view, which is something from which Ramsey had dissented. Ramsey cited Russell’s “What I Believe” which had been published in January 1925. Russell’s book opens:
“Man is a part of Nature not something contrasted with Nature. His thoughts and his bodily movements follow the same laws that describe the motions of stars and atoms. The physical world is large compared with Man…”
This is classic Russell, and he continues on in the same vein:
“The philosophy of nature must not be unduly terrestrial; for it, the earth is merely one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller stars of the Milky Way. It would be ridiculous to warp the philosophy of nature in order to bring out results that are pleasing to the tiny parasites of this insignificant planet. Vitalism as a philosophy, and evolutionism, show, in this respect, a lack of sense of proportion and logical relevance. They regard the facts of life, which are personally interesting to us, as having a cosmic significance, not a significance confined to the earth’s surface. Optimism and pessimism, as: cosmic philosophies, show the same naive humanism: the great world, so far as we know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us either happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance, and are best corrected by a little astronomy.”
Ramsey, after citing this work of Russell, has this to say:
“Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does… My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits. I don’t really believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable.”
Ramsey was one of the few who were sufficiently interested in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus that when Wittgenstein retired from the philosophical world to become a village school teacher in Austria, Ramsey sought him out in his obscurity to discuss the Tractatus. Ramsey in his criticism of Russell said: “…if I were to quarrel with Russell’s lecture, it would not be with what he believed but with the indications it gave as to what he felt.” And, “I conclude that there really is nothing to discuss.” Wittgenstein in the Tractatus had said: “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” And: “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent.” It’s easy to see the similarity in perspective between Wittgenstein and Ramsey, and easy to understand on this basis why Ramsey had sought Wittgenstein out as he did. Wittgenstein had started as a student of Russell’s, then worked as a collaborator, and then eventually took his own path that sharply diverged from Russell’s. What was once a close understanding between the two men became a profound misunderstanding. Ramsey, too, had been a collaborator on the logicist project of deriving mathematics from logic, and he too had taken a different path than that of Russell, so it’s to be expected that Ramsey and Russell came to a point where they did not understand each other.
I don’t think that Russell was making exactly the point that Ramsey attributed to him, but leave that aside. The attitude that Ramsey was ascribing to Russell was an is widespread, as is Ramsey’s view. Rarely are they laid out as explicitly and as forcefully as in this exchange. The examples of Bertrand Russell and Frank Ramsey give a human face to the clash of worldviews that the two represented. These two views, the humanistic and the cosmic, continue to be in conflict to our own day. The cosmic point of view that Ramsey ascribed to Russell could also be called the scientific point of view. Becker came down on the humanistic side in this clash of worldviews, we are not surprised to see what he wrote about scientific history in “Everyman His Own Historian”:
“…the scientific historian deliberately renounced philosophy only to submit to it without being aware. His philosophy was just this, that by not taking thought a cubit would be added to his stature. With no other preconception than the will to know, the historian would reflect in his surface and film the ‘order of events throughout past times in all places’; so that, in the fullness of time, when innumerable patient expert scholars, by ‘exhausting the sources,’ should have reflected without refracting the truth of all the facts, the definitive and impregnable meaning of human experience would emerge of its own accord to enlighten and emancipate mankind.”
This is probably as wide of the mark of the actual scientific historian as I think Ramsey was wide of the mark in caricaturing Russell’s worldview. Russell, in turn, responded to Ramsey many years later in his My Philosophical Development, when Ramsey was by that time long dead (he had died young in a mountain climbing accident). Russell said of Ramsey’s perspective:
“I find little satisfaction in contemplating the human race and its follies. I am happier thinking about the nebula in Andromeda than thinking about Genghis Khan. I cannot, like Kant, put the moral law on the same plane as the starry heavens. The attempt to humanize the cosmos, which underlies the philosophy that calls itself ‘Idealism,’ is displeasing to me quite independently of the question whether it is true — or false.”
The initial exchange between Russell and Ramsey took place as Becker was also, like Ramsey, suggesting a rejection of the scientific or cosmic point of view in history. Becker, it seems stood with Ramsey, and this works for the kind of history that Becker was writing. It saves Becker from the kind of idealism that Russell rejected on the basis of what Ramsey called feeling, and therefore beyond rational dispute, and, as I said earlier, Becker’s criticism of facts has led many philosophers to idealism or the kind of linguistic transcendentalism I discussed in my episode on Frank Ankersmit. However, we saw in my episode on J. M. E. McTaggart an idealist history that takes a cosmological point of view, but also a personal point of view. McTaggart can’t be reconciled with Becker’s humanism, with Russell’s cosmic point of view, or with Ramsey’s Wittgensteinianism. So we are not consigned to a forced choice between humanism and a cosmic point of view in which human beings are negligible.
There are many ways to construe the relation of human beings to their history, and the nature of the relationship between human beings and their history is a prominent constituent in any worldview. The relativism that makes history relative to the historian who writes history, including the history of everyman, was Becker’s way to construe that relationship. This works, to a point, but if we press that relationship with the earnestness and rigor that Becker pressed the nature of historical facts, we will find it wanting just as certainly as Becker found facts wanting.
