Haskell Fain on Transplanting the Heart of Speculative Philosophy of History into an Analytical Body
Part of the Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 01 July 2024 is the 98th anniversary of the birth of Haskell Fain (01 July 1926–26 July 2018), who was born in New York City on this date in 1926.
Fain’s Between Philosophy and History: The Resurrection of Speculative Philosophy of History Within the Analytic Tradition sought to bring new life to speculative philosophy of history at a time when this was at a particularly low ebb in Anglo-American analytical philosophy. The subtitle tells us the essential thrust of the book, which Fain elaborated in his Preface:
“Philosophy of history, even on its analytical side, can consist of something more than leftovers from philosophy of science. I tried in this book to transplant the heart of speculative philosophy of history into an analytical body.”
This book anticipated some ideas that would later become prominent in philosophy of history, but I don’t want to reduce Fain’s contribution to the mere anticipation of views expressed more completely at a later date by others. Where this work strikes me as most interesting is precisely where it anticipated developments yet to come, but took a different path.
Fain spends a significant part of the book on the problem of narrative, which has only grown in importance in philosophy of history since Fain’s book. Narrative was an idea whose time had come. In my episode on Morton White I observed that White had formulated his own treatment of historical narrative prior to the paradigm shift that was Danto’s work. Fain’s book came out only a couple of years after Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History published in 1968. Fain has a few pages on Danto, so he knew about Danto’s analysis of narrative and discusses it briefly, but Fain and Danto are coming at narrative from such different points of view that Fain doesn’t spend much time on Danto’s treatment of narrative. Because Danto argued that speculative philosophy of history was no kind of philosophy at all, and Fain is trying to make the case for a speculative philosophy of history formulated within the framework of analytical philosophy, Danto is ruling out the possibility of what Fain is trying to do, and Fain is doing what Danto says is impossible:
“Danto is interested in certain philosophical problems in the philosophy of history that stem from the task of constructing historical narratives. He is one of the few analytical philosophers to give the narrative aspect of history so much as a thought, though he does, in the end, mistakenly try to reduce narrative exegesis to causal explanation. What Danto fails to see is that speculative philosophers of history were also concerned with some of the very philosophical problems he appropriates for analytical philosophy alone, for he strives to locate speculative philosophy of history in that no-man’s land between philosophy and history to which I alluded earlier. His strategy is quite simple. He argues first that substantive philosophy of history is not philosophy but history. His second move is to try to isolate ‘philosophical’ history from ordinary history by contending that it is only pseudo-history, clearly distinguishable from the genuine article.” (p. 223)
In an interesting twist, Fain spends more time discussing E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel than he does in discussing Danto. Forster makes a distinction between story and plot that Fain adopts. Forster says of story that, “It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence — dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on.” Of plot Forster writes: “We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.” Fain ultimately thinks that both of these definitions are inadequate — he says that Forster’s definition of a story is too weak, and his definition of a plot is too strong — but he leans heavily on the distinction between story and plot, ultimately summarizing story as what happens next, and a plot as an interest in why what happens, happens. Fain quotes a paragraph from Forster, but leaves out a section that I think is particularly interesting:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.’ This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’ That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by ‘and then — and then.’ They can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.”
Fain in quoting this paragraph left out the bit about mystery, but the mystery in a plot is important to Forster, and he elaborates on this on the next page:
“This element of surprise or mystery — the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called — is of great importance in a plot. It occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time, and it occurs crudely, as in ‘Why did the queen die?’ and more subtly in half explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead. Mystery is essential to a plot, and cannot be appreciated with ‘and then — — ’ To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on.”
Mystery doesn’t quite suit philosophy in the way that is suits novelists and fiction, and maybe this is why Fain chose to skip the bit about mystery. Like Forster, I think mystery is the interesting part, and if a philosophy of history is going to take cues from novelists in order to understand the nature of narrative, then we should reckon with the mystery that Forster locates in the heart of narrative. Aren’t the mysteries of history what drives the historian to his research, and the speculative philosopher of history to try to understand the historical process, as much as it drives the fascination of a detective novel?
Forster refers to “surprise or mystery,” so if a philosopher is uncomfortable with mystery, they can appeal instead to surprise. One of the most striking things about science is that its results surprise us. The growth of knowledge is unpredictable because of the surprises of scientific discovery. In fact, Karl Popper appealed to the unpredictability of scientific research in his argument for historical indeterminism. In the Preface to The Poverty of Historicism, Popper gives this argument an admirably concise form:
1. The course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of human knowledge. (The truth of this premise must be admitted even by those who see in our ideas, including our scientific ideas, merely the by-products of material development of some kind or other.)
2. We cannot predict, by rational or scientific methods, the future growth of our scientific knowledge. (This assertion can be logically proved, by considerations which are sketched below.)
3. We cannot, therefore, predict the future course of human history.
4. This means that we must reject the possibility of a theoretical history; that is to say, of a historical social science that would correspond to theoretical physics. There can be no scientific theory of historical development serving as a basis for historical prediction.
5. The fundamental aim of historicist methods (see sections 11 to 16 of this book) is therefore misconceived; and historicism collapses.
I have mentioned in many episodes that what Popper calls historicism is not what others call historicism, and he would have done better to call it historical inevitably, as indeed Isaiah Berlin did. The point of mentioning Popper in the present context is the centrality he gives to the unpredictability of the scientific process, and therefore the surprise we experience in scientific discovery. The best popular histories of science preserve for us the sense of excitement in puzzling out the mysteries of nature and eventually laying them bare, like a good detective story; better, I think, in many cases.
I think it’s an artifact of Popper’s own interest in philosophy of science that he formulates his argument against historical inevitably in terms of science, because we could just as well say that the work of the novelist or the painter or the composer are as unpredictable as the work of scientists, and it would be difficult to argue that science has had a greater impact on human history than literature, painting, or music, especially prior to the scientific revolution. In any case, we shouldn’t shy away from mystery and surprise in history, since it is, at least in part, the mysterious and the surprising that interest us in history, and which inspires both historical research and philosophy of history.
Fain only mentions Popper in passing once in the book, but he does discuss predictability, especially in relation to Hempel’s covering law model. In the Preface Fain had humorously said of Hempel that, “The standard course of lectures on the philosophy of history begins with the temptation of Hegel and ends with the redemption of Hempel.” Fain treats Hempel respectfully, but keeps him and the covering law model at arm’s length, implying that Hempel constitutes the state of the art in analytical philosophy of history, but something that Fain didn’t himself want to propound, but the last chapter is devoted to Hempel, and here the problem of prediction makes an appearance. Fain writes, “Enthusiasts of the covering law model in its original formulation maintained that explanation and prediction are ‘structurally identical’.” Fain is skeptical, and in his skepticism, he introduces another interesting wrinkle in the argument by comparing human history to natural history:
“One should not really be surprised that the covering law model of explanation should, on closer inspection, be found to fit the study of history so poorly. The positivist view of science which fathered the model placed history on the lowest rung of the epistemological ladder. Nor is it surprising, I suppose, that so astute a philosopher as Carl Hempel should have completely missed the significance of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwinian theory, at bottom, suggests a causal mechanism underlying a series of historical changes. The theory nourishes the understanding of how those changes came about, though it does not provide a table for precisely calculating the appearance and disappearance of species. The covering law model, in contrast, equates the causal understanding of how events happen with the calculation (prediction) of their occurrences.”
For Fain, prediction is the, “and then… what’s next?” of history — the story of history, and not the plot of history. For the plot of history, we must ask for the “Why?” of history. As philosophers we may be interested in what’s next, but we are more interested in the why of what’s happening, i.e., we are interested in the plot of history.
In his discussion of the covering law model and its pursuit of historical explanation, Fain formulates an interesting analogy:
“…it is a serious error to identify the search for causes with the attempt to formulate laws of nature. Searching for causes, one seeks what can be called ‘causal mechanisms,’ which are presumed to underlie the phenomenon that wants explaining. ‘What makes the hands of a clock go round?’ That is the sort of query that makes one reach for a screwdriver, not a table of logarithms. It is a causal question — practical in scope, mechanistic in outlook, the very reverse of recondite. The search for causes, on the covering law model of explanation, seems more an affair of attempting to formulate the second law of thermodynamics than a matter of examining the interplay of gears and springs. Historians, when hunting for causes, are looking for social, political, or economic mechanisms. And just as one can discover and understand the mechanism of a clock without knowing anything about the laws of mechanics, so it is possible for historians to discover and understand the mechanisms underlying historical events without knowing anything about laws of history.”
There is a lot that is implied in this passage, as it usually the case with analogies. Analogies suggest much, but prove nothing, and that is, of course, what makes them so fascinating. At least, I find this analogy fascinating, but I also find it puzzling. For example, can we really understand the mechanism of a clock without knowing anything about the laws of mechanics? Don’t we come to at least a kind of implicit understanding of the laws of mechanics by understanding how a machine works by taking it apart and putting it back together again, so that it works as good as before? Isn’t this implicit understanding of the laws of mechanics a lot like the implicit understanding of how scientific laws enter into historical explanations, and which has been such a big part of the discussion of the covering law model and similar accounts of historical explanation?
For my part, I think it sounds rather attractive to be able to formulate the equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics for history as compared to taking apart the guts of the watch. Isn’t this why we have both experimental and theoretical physicists, which is a kind of scientific division of labor in which one takes apart the guts of the watch and the other formulates the second law of thermodynamics and who can tell you how and why the spring works? I would like to see the same division of labor in history, with traditional historians being the ones who pick up the screwdriver to take apart the watch, while philosophers of history are seeking the understanding of history on another level. As I said, I find Fain’s analogy puzzling, but I am generally sympathetic to his critique of the covering law model, though I suspect that if contemporary philosophers of history wanted to return to the covering law model, they could formulate a more subtle and sophisticated account that would be rather more difficult to dismiss.
Fain continues to probe the logical positivist conception of history, which we might better call a non-philosophy of history, which has its origins in the Cartesian indifference to history that infused the scientific revolution from the beginning. The very last paragraph of the book is particularly telling:
“…it seems as if modern positivism has been a victim of its own historical tradition. What positivism lacked, I contend, was a penetrating speculative philosophy of the history of science, the encouragement to fashion story-lines upon which better histories of science could be constructed. Just as there is more to history than orthodox political history, so is there more to speculative philosophy of history than Hegel’s philosophy of history, which is, essentially, a speculative philosophy of political history. Each kind of history requires its own kind of speculative philosophy of history. Until that point is fully appreciated by professional analytical philosophers, analytical philosophy of history will consist largely of hand-me-downs from analytical philosophy of science, a subject itself in urgent need of nourishment from the history of science.”
Fain published this the same year that the second edition of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared, but Fain doesn’t mention Kuhn. It strikes me that what Fain is calling for is exactly what Kuhn did — providing a penetrating speculative philosophy of the history of science, which proved to be an encouragement to fashion story-lines upon which better histories of science could be constructed. And this is exactly what has been happing since Kuhn published his book: historians of science have been writing new story-lines out of which better histories of histories of science are being constructed. The extent to which this is a speculative effort is another matter, but Kuhn’s conception of this history of science has come to dominate the field, much as Danto’s conception of narrative has come to dominate philosophy of history.
I think Fain had something more pluralistic in mind, in which there might be many conceptions of narrative being elaborated as a guide of philosophy of history, and many speculative philosophies of the history of science, each with its own light to illuminate the subject matter. I have my own interpretations of the history of science that could be accurately called speculative philosophy of the history of science, so I have a lot of sympathy for this, and so for me this was a high note on which to end the book.
