Leon Goldstein’s Tentative Metaphysics of the Past
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
It is the 98th anniversary of the birth of Leon J. Goldstein (06 February 1927 to 24 May 2002), who was born in Brooklyn, New York, on this day in 1927.
It’s almost inevitable that when a discipline is stuck in a rut that involves a fundamental bifurcation, someone will come along to offer a third way that tries to avoid the well-worn ruts. The two ruts I have in mind are analytical philosophy of history and speculative philosophy of history, which is distinction that has been drawn by several philosophers, each in a slightly different way. William Dray called this the distinction between critical and speculative philosophy of history; Maurice Mandlebaum called this the distinction between formal and material philosophy of history; Arthur Danto called this the distinction between analytical and substantive philosophy of history: Each of them defined the distinction is subtly different ways, so there’s some wiggle room as to exactly how precisely these concepts coincide.
Goldstein doesn’t take his conception of an analytical philosophy of history directly from Dray, Mandelbaum, or Danto, but rather from Henri-Irénée Marrou, whose book The Meaning of History Goldstein cites. I’d previously heard of Marrou only once before finding Goldstein’s citation of his book. Morrou isn’t well known in the Anglophone world, with many of his books not having been translated into English. The Meaning of History, published in French in 1959, was translated into English in 1966, but it’s not widely available, and I don’t have a copy myself. It opens with a chapter on “The Critical Philosophy of History”
“…our concern is to develop a ‘critical philosophy of history’ which will be a reflection on history, devoted to the examination of logical and gnosiological problems that arise from the historian’s line of thought. It will enter into that ‘philosophy of the sciences’ whose legitimacy or fecundity no one today would question. It will be in the same relation to the ‘philosophy of history’ as the critical philosophy of mathematics, physics, etc., is to ‘Naturphilosophie’ which, in romantic idealism, was developed in a way that was parallel to the Philosophy of History: as a speculative effort to penetrate the mystery of the universe.”
This and many other passages in the book tip us off to the fact that the critical philosophy of history that Marrou wants to see is not exactly the critical philosophy of history that Dray contrasted to speculative philosophy of history, and it is this conception, Marrou’s conception of critical philosophy of history, that Goldstein cites. Goldstein wrote in Historical Knowing:
“What interests Marrou is the formation of… collective facts; they are certainly not to be found in any document and cannot be established by means of the critical, analytical procedures his two predecessors describe. Since they are not dug out of documents… they are presumably constructed by historians in some other way, and it is the function of critical philosophy of history, in Marrou’s sense, to determine how this is done”
This is Goldstein’s point of departure. He didn’t explicitly go after the distinction as formulated by Dray, Mandlebaum, and Danto to try to show it to be misconceived or misleading, but he opened his book Historical Knowing with a declaration that makes it clear he’s doing something different. Goldstein begins: “…history is an epistemically licit discipline which deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms.” A little further on he elaborates on what exactly he means by this:
“…one feature of history which I think creates a prima facie case for taking it seriously as a licit way of knowing… is the extraordinary amount of agreement as to the character of the human past that history has managed to achieve under what are clearly epistemologically unpromising conditions. Perhaps it is more interesting to attend to the disagreements among historians — and we can learn a good deal about the theoretical and ideological conflicts of an age when we attend to the ways in which its historians disagree. Yet it would be a mistake to overlook the fact of widespread agreement, both as to what the human past was like and as to what the methods are in terms of which we may expect to learn about that past.”
The critical philosophy of history that came out of the Anglo-American analytical tradition sought to bring history and its methods before the bar of epistemological inquiry. Goldstein flips the script on this presumption and says that agreement among historians implies the validity of historical methods, and a critical philosophy of history should try to come to an understanding of how this is the case. So history isn’t to be judged and reformed by philosophy; philosophy is to account for the fact of historical knowing, which Goldstein believes to be a reliable form of knowing.
Even though Goldstein has taken Marrou as his point of departure and his orientation within critical philosophy of history, he stakes out his own position, and, though he believes that the work of historians has justified the historian’s methods, there remains still the elucidation of those methods:
“If it is the case that much of the outcome of historical research is reported in the form of accounts written in nontechnical language, it is not the case that history is not a technical discipline. The mistake of so many writers on philosophy of history is to think that history is a form of communication or a mode of discourse.”
The latter interesting claim, that history is not a mode of discourse, puts Goldstein at odds with Hayden White, a close contemporary of Goldstein, born the year after, who has been far more influential than Goldstein. I didn’t record an episode on Hayden White last year, although I should have, as his influence has seeped beyond philosophy into wider currents of post-modernism, not only interpreting history but actually shaping history by becoming a force in contemporary thought.
Goldstein is also interested in the fact that history, like philosophy, is carried out in ordinary language, but it is, nevertheless, what he calls a technical discipline:
“History is a technical discipline in the sense that it uses methods which are peculiarly its own. History is a way of knowing, not a mode of discourse; and the proper point of departure of a critical philosophy of history is not the finished product of historical writing but that way of knowing and its technique.”
The fact that critical philosophy of history should address not the finished product of historical writing, i.e., the historian’s completed prose narrative, but the way of historical knowing by which the historian comes to produce his finished product, is the basis, or part of the basis, of Goldstein’s criticisms of Danto.
I said earlier that Goldstein got his conception of critical philosophy of history from Marrou and not from the contrast between analytical and substantive philosophy of history in Danto and other analytical philosophers of history, but Goldstein was aware of of Danto’s distinction, or Danto’s conception of an analytical philosophy of history, and he was critical of Danto. I could still reasonably argue that Goldstein’s point of departure and his conception of critical philosophy of history has nothing to do with the distinction between analytical and speculative philosophy of history, I could say that the division between analytical and speculative philosophy of history isn’t really a fundamental bifurcation in philosophy of history that every philosopher has some obligation to address. Still, I want to place it in this light, and I’ll try to explain why.
The earliest books that I would consider to embody the spirit of analytical philosophy of history are Georg Simmel’s The Problems of the Philosophy of History, originally published in German in 1892, and Raymond Aron’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity, originally published in French in 1938. Simmel kept writing and re-writing his book on history, and the later versions are quite different from the earlier versions, but it does represent a new impetus in the philosophy of history, quite different from what had heretofore passed for philosophy of history in the 19th century.
Interestingly, Aron also wrote Essay on the Theory of History in Contemporary Germany: The Critical Philosophy of History (Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine. La philosophie critique de l’histoire), published in the same year as his better known work on philosophy history, 1938. This other book by Aron hasn’t been translated into English, but in it Aron also is concerned with a critical philosophy of history. Aron’s conception of this is as follows:
“The traditional philosophy of history finds its completion in Hegel’s system. The modern philosophy of history begins with the rejection of Hegelianism. The ideal is no longer to determine at once the meaning of human development. The philosopher no longer believes himself to be the repository of the secrets of providence. The Critique of Pure Reason forbade the hope of accessing the truth of the intelligible world: thus the critical philosophy of history renounces the attempt to attain the ultimate meaning of evolution. The analysis of historical knowledge is to the philosophy of history what Kantian criticism is to dogmatic metaphysics.”
This was written twenty years before Marrou’s book, and Aron has explicitly and rightly connected the growing interest in a critical philosophy of history with a rejection of Hegel and Hegelian philosophy of history. Again, interestingly, Aron’s positive conception of what a critical philosophy of history should be, is closer to the Anglo-American conception of Dray, Mandelbaum, and Danto than the conception of Marrou and Goldstein, since Aron sees the task of a critical philosophy of history as the analysis of historical knowledge. Goldstein accepts the idea of critical philosophy of history as the analysis of knowledge, but, as I said, he flips the script on what most analytical philosophers were doing.
What would later be called analytical philosophy of history came to be heavily influenced by analytical philosophy in the form of logical empiricism, which was admittedly already passé by the time that Danto published his Analytical Philosophy of History (1965), later re-written and re-titled Narration and Knowledge (1985), and Danto was no logical empiricist, but he had picked up enough of the spirit of the enterprise that he was as much on board as any other analytical philosopher, which comes out in his criticisms of substantive, or speculative philosophy of history, which was Danto’s way distancing himself from Hegel and from metaphysics.
Goldstein says that Danto’s discussions, “are really no part of a critical philosophy of history.” There are criticisms throughout the book the connect Danto to an alternative conception of a critical philosophy of history:
“…the proper task of a critical philosophy of history is to tell us about how the presently practiced discipline of history carries out its work and whether or not a discipline which carries out its work in the ways that this one does may be reasonably expected to produce claims to knowledge that are responsible and warranted. Alternative conceptions of the tasks of a critical philosophy of history seem considerably less promising. One may wish to discuss what turns out to be the merely logical possibility of knowing about the human past, but to show that such knowledge is logically possible, or that — along the lines of Arthur Danto — it does not conflict with our ordinary conceptual system, is not to show how such knowledge is to be had.”
Goldstein’s Historical Knowing was published in 1976, and The What and the Why of History: Philosophical Essays was published in 1996, and which is a collection of 19 previously published papers. The What and the Why of History includes Goldstein’s 1991 paper “Historical Being,” which is explicitly metaphysical, and as such it constitutes another illustration of how Goldstein’s conception of critical philosophy of history doesn’t seek to avoid metaphysics, and this distinguishes Goldstein from most 20th century analytical philosophers of history. I could even say it’s an ontological approach to philosophy of history, but argued after the manner of analytical philosophy, and in this way Goldstein is carrying on the earlier tradition of Simmel and Aron, who pursued post-Hegelian philosophy of history without any of the ideological commitments of logical empiricism. In this paper Goldstein repeats his claim from Historical Knowing that it’s not the finished product of the historians work that ought to interest the philosopher, but the process of historical knowing that matters:
“If we attend to what goes on while the historical work — the genuinely creative historical work as referred to above — is being done, one sees something else entirely. It is because what he does leads the historian to say something in particular, that he is led to say something subsequent. Should it turn out that that something subsequent cannot be said, the evidence makes it difficult to say, then the historian may have to re-think the plausibility of the first thing.”
After showing his willingness to engage in explicitly metaphysical philosophy of history, Goldstein is mindful that his position will be characterized as a kind of anti-realism, but the way he frames this suggests that he didn’t want his views pigeonholed in this way:
“…there is nothing I could say along the lines I am pursuing here that would dissuade realists from thinking that my view is arbitrary given the realistic tendency to take its stand with reals which are independent of the ways in which knowledge — of them — is acquired. Nevertheless, I should want to say that historical facts come into being in the course of historians’ work. This involves the application of historical method and historical thinking to the data — evidence — historians use. One might say that the evidence is, in fact, the point of departure for the historians’ work, but that suggests that first the evidence is piled up and then the task begins. The fact, however, is that how the evidence is piled up, what evidence belongs with what other evidence, is itself the outcome of historical research, so I shall not put it in that way.”
I have to observe that Goldstein’s argument here is continuous with the immediately previous quote and the earlier quote distinguishing the finished product of the historian with the reasoning that brings the historian to his account. For Goldstein, it really is historical reasoning and historical knowing that is the heart of the problem. Goldstein seems to be tentatively feeling his way toward an elusive conception of the metaphysics of history, but he doesn’t yet have the conceptual framework for this, and adopting the familiar conceptual framework of analytical philosophy of history would box him into a position he doesn’t want to take.
And we can easily see the dangers here. If we say that historical facts come into being in the course of the historians work, we’re in danger of collapsing the distinction between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum that we’ve seen in several episodes, for example, the episodes on Giovanni Gentile and Michael Oakeshott. All idealist philosophies of history are in danger of conflating past actuality with its record. Goldstein was alive to the danger, but didn’t find a definitive formulation to put it to rest.
