The Soteriological Quest of Human History
The View from Oregon — 300: Friday 02 August 2024
One of the most venerable distinctions in history is that between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum, which we can gloss as being the distinction between things that happened and the account of things that happened. Recently, I have been calling the former “past actuality,” which is an intuitively tractable way to convey the idea, though I can’t remember where in my reading I happened across this terminology. We can also give the distinction a hylomorphic form and say that res gestae is the matter of history, while historia rerum gestarum is the form that historians give to this matter. This distinction appears in the first few pages of the introductions to philosophy of history by Walsh and Dray, and I talked about the distinction for almost an hour in my episode on Giovanni Gentile. Gentile collapsed the distinction, for reasons I think few today would find compelling, but it does make for an interesting argument.
This distinction gives us two histories: the history of what actually happened, and the history that is the account of what actually happened. Ideally, the account of what actually happened would correspond perfectly to what actually happened, but, for many reasons, this is rarely the case. Often we don’t know or can’t know what happened, so we attempt to reconstruct what happened ex post facto, and our reconstructions are subject to every possible human error, so even the historian working in good faith may produce an account that varies from what actually happened. Past actuality is, in a strange sense, an ineffable history that we are always trying to capture, but never with complete success. In this way we can see the entire history of history as progress, aiming at an ideal of fully capturing past actuality. Although our efforts may fall short, our account improves slowly, steadily, and incrementally as we more closely approximate past actuality in our account of it.
All of this is a lot like how we understand the scientific enterprise: there is nature, out there, that is distinct from our scientific account of nature, but ideally we want our scientific account of nature to exhaustively converge on what nature is in itself. We see the entire history of science as a history in our progress of capturing nature in the net of scientific knowledge, which improves slowly, steadily, and incrementally as we more closely approximate the actuality of nature in our account of it. This, at least, is the Enlightenment understanding of science (and history, mutatis mutandis), which has been relentlessly called into question throughout the last century, especially by historians of science like Thomas Kuhn, who gave us an account of science that, whether or not it is interpreted as progressive, is neither incremental nor cumulative. Foucault performed a similar service for continental thought.
The distinction between past actuality and its record can be compounded if we take science and history together as the history of science (or scientific history), and here we have three histories: there is the history of the universe, unfolding the processes of nature, there is the scientific account of the history of nature, and there is the history of the discoveries of the unfolding processes of nature. Each time there is a new scientific discovery, there is an event added to the history of discoveries, but there is also a revision to the scientific account of the history of nature. Nature always is what it is, but the account of what nature is changes continually with the development of our knowledge of nature, and the account of the development of our knowledge of nature is itself another history that is distinct from the history of nature itself or out current account of the history of nature.
Before modern science, we also had three histories: past actuality in the form of the Earthly city, divine actuality in the form of the Heavenly city, and our knowledge of the history of the Earthly city. We can expand this to four histories if we count our knowledge of the history of the Earthly city and our knowledge of the history of the Heavenly city (i.e., revelation) separately, and we can expand this to five histories if we count salvation history as the distinct points of intersection between the Earthly city and the Heavenly city. Salvation history is an emergent from the contact between the Earthly city and the Heavenly city, parallel to the history of scientific discovery in the above account, which is an emergent from the contact between nature and human effort at understanding nature.
I have formulated this in Augustinian terms because St. Augustine made the distinction between the Earthly city and the Heavenly city explicit, but a similar proliferation of histories can be found in ancient Greek conceptions of the duality of the human and the divine. We can understand Greek conceptions of history in terms of the structures that emerge from the contacts between the human and the divine. Mythology is the emergent history that arises from contacts between the immortals (the gods) and mortals (man). Greek literature is full of this: Zeus is always ready to seduce a mortal, usually through some bizarre ruse like turning himself into a swan, and thereby produce another demi-god with a history of his own that gets woven in to the overall mythology. The human attempt to understand nature, which produces the history of scientific discovery in the naturalistic account of the world, has its mythological parallel in human attempts to influence or to understand the gods through prayer, sacrifice, divination, and similar efforts.
For the Greeks, the distinction between the human and the divine was primarily the distinction between mortals and immortals, so it has a different character than the contrast between the human and the divine that derives from the Old Testament tradition, and it was the tradition of Old Testament prophecy that was taken over by Christians as one of their sources of history — but the Greeks were no less a source for the Christian conception of history, so this yields the complexity of the four or five histories noted above. In this way, the modern scientific conception of the world represents Ockhamist parsimony in reducing the four or five histories of late antiquity to the two or three histories of today.
In the modern world we find ourselves as flummoxed by nature as our ancient ancestors were flummoxed by the gods. We are always aiming at an ideal of perfect knowledge, whether through experimentation or divination, which we are promised, once we are in full possession of perfect knowledge, be it of the gods or of nature, will give us the wisdom and the power to save ourselves. This is, then, the soteriological quest of human history: the search for salvation. And the soteriological quest is fulfilled by eschatology: at the end of history, the convergence on perfect knowledge is at last fully realized and becomes actual. I have framed this in intellectualistic terms, but it is equally valid when framed in terms of perfect action and convergence upon an ideal praxis.
To apply this in turn to the modern scientific worldview, epistemic salvation is perfect scientific knowledge of nature, and we find salvation at the end of history when at last the long, slow, incremental, and cumulative process of the elaboration of scientific knowledge converges at an infinitely distant point in the future — our scientific eschatology, which can be understood as the absolute knowledge that I have been theorizing over the past many newsletters. I have many times quoted the line from Hegel that the owl of Minerva takes flight only at the setting of the sun. We understand only with completeness, fulfillment, and exhaustion. We can give this a naturalistic sense: we will understand this universe, the universe that is the cosmological home of humanity, only after it has run its course, when it has exhausted itself, and what remains is an open and static book for scientific investigation. The corpse of the universe can be studied at leisure, like an anatomist engaged in dissection, and with this leisure of investigation, absolute knowledge is only a matter of time.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work. There are at least two obvious problems here. Firstly, the scientific investigation of the corpse of the universe would itself be a process of scientific discovery, bringing into being a history of scientific discovery and continual revisions of the scientific account of the history of the universe with each scientific discovery. Secondly, Wordsworth memorably said that we murder to dissect. Our account of the cold, dead universe, even if complete and exhaustive, would be an account of a dead universe, and not of the living universe that once was. The second objection can be rejected as trivial, since a complete knowledge at the end of time could synthesize earlier accounts of knowledge of the universe during stages of development prior to its convergence on heat death. The historian at the end of time will have available to him all previous histories; however, as we have seen, he must add to this his own history.
The history of scientific discovery after the end of time, and the revisions it entails for the history of the universe, constitutes another history to synthesize with all previous histories, and this further synthesis becomes another historical act, which can be the object of further synthesis, and so on, ad infinitum. Thus the scientific pursuit of absolute knowledge can only infinitely converge on infinite historical knowledge. As it turns out, then, our modern scientific undertaking is not at all parsimonious since it sets us on a path to an infinitude of histories. This sense of an infinitude of histories is distinct from the sense of an infinitude of histories discussed in newsletter 294, though many of the concerns that I examined in that newsletter are applicable here, mutatis mutandis.
There remains the possibility, if the above-described process is iterated, and some later historian writes the history of some earlier history, trillions of years from now after the universe is dead and no new empirical observation enter into these histories, that the process may become so schematic that the iterated futures all look the same, and so can be collapsed according to Leibniz’s law of identity (sort of like what Russell and Whitehead did in Principia Mathematica with the axiom of reducibility, but conceived ontologically rather than formally). In this case, absolute knowledge is obtainable formally. If one is willing to entertain transfinite time lines, then this formal absolute knowledge of the universe can be rendered according to the canons of realism no less than we suppose to the true for any finite, empirical reality.
