If you are new to the Band, please see this post for an introduction and
overview of the point of this blog.
In this graphic, we see the division of history into three tiers: the metaphysical, collective, and individual experience of history. The lower levels are approached empirically, while the upper belongs to faith.
It is not surprising to see the correspondence between historiography and epistemology, since history has long been recognized as a branch of knowledge, and as such, has to contend with the limited human ability to make sense of the world. Proceeding carefully with the best possible evidence, revising or rejecting theories when they fail to conform to objective reality, and placing metaphysical structures in their proper place is the only viable way to proceed.
This post will look more closely at the epistemology of historiography in order to determine what can legitimately be called history, and identify the vulnerabilities that Postmodernists and other deceivers have exploited.
Knowledge begins with individual experience
in an vast unknown objective world.
At the individual level, the parallel between the origins of epistemology in the individual's subjective experience of the world, and the historian's consideration of a specific piece of evidence is obvious.
History, like epistemology, begins with the individual's subjective experience of a vast unknown, in this case, the gulf of past time. Reason and representation allow humans to record observations and insights, building more complex understandings of the world beyond the self/selves inductively. These interpretations come with certain assumptions - that the historian presents the evidence accurately and honestly, and that the objective world operates causally - that allow us to identify meaningful historical relationships through logic. What is essential to remember, and where Postmodernists and other purveyors of false dogma go wrong, is that any historical interpretation we build is a construct of limited individuals who are themselves historically contingent. Such an effort must fall short of complete understanding by necessity. This limitation, the semiotic "indeterminacy" beloved by Postmodern binary thinkers, is built into empiricism, only rather than calling it the collapse of the Western Metaphysical Tradition, we refer to it as uncertainty, or sometimes ± for short.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1808 or 1810, oil on canvas, 171.5 x 110 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
There are many reasons for uncertainty; perceptions and apparatuses are limited or unreliable, contexts and causes unclear, but these are reasons to seek more clarity, not give up altogether.
Uncertainty is one of the key differences separating empiricism from top-down approaches to thinking, because it recognizes that there will always be things beyond our knowledge. The only epistemologically legitimate certainty is faith; even the most ardent materialist has faith in the accuracy of his perceptions. But inductive, empirically-based historiography, like any pursuit of knowledge, must contend with the uncertainties inherent in human finitude. Logician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who we encountered in an earlier post on semiotics, breaks down uncertainty in a broadly useful way. His categories need some adjustment to apply to history, but this is of little importance, since it is the ideas he presents that are significant, and not his specific schematic or lexicon. Abstract classificatory heuristics neither have external reality, nor alter the reality that they describe, but they do help identify key issues.
Peirce divides uncertainty, like signs, into three broad categories called Probability, Verisimilitude (or likeness), and Plausibility. It is not the specific terms or the Philosopher's Name that makes a theoretical model useful, but how well it clarifies our understanding of empirical reality. Peirce's concepts of Verisimilitude and Plausibility highlight the nature of uncertainty in history.
Probability refers to the frequency with which a mathematically knowable propensity (or odds) will play out in reality. In a roulette game, each spin is a material manifestation of the same probability. This type of uncertainty is inked to deductive (top-down) reasoning; if you understand the propensity you can calculate the frequency
Probability is most applicable to history when it comes to assessing the accuracy of laboratory-based analytic methods. DNA testing, radio-carbon dating, and geological and other forms of material analysis fit here, as all come with knowable uncertainties implicit in the process.
Verisimilitude is the term Peirce used for uncertainty in inductive, or bottom-up empirical reasoning, since probability, as he defines it, doesn't apply in cases where the relationship between the propensity for and observed frequency of an occurence is unknown. Any attempt to theorize from empirical observation raises the question of whether the sample observed is representative of the whole population. To bridge the gap, something called Bayesian prior probabilities were used to set the probability that trait distribution was comparable, like "normalizing" a survey. Peirce argued that since the nature of the population is unknown, it was impossible to set these priors objectively, meaning any such decision is a subjective one on the part of the analyst. The logical error is to assume that ignorance of the nature of a population is grounds to assume its homogeneity. No objective mathematical certainty can be assigned to the accuracy of inductive conclusions, meaning probability as defined above does not apply. Verisimilitude, or how closely a sample can be shown to correspond to its population is the preferred term.
William Hogarth, Humours of an Election: scene 3, The Polling, 1754-55, oil on canvas, 101.5 × 127 cm, Sir John Soane's Museum, London
Verisimilitude applies to inductive arguments, where it is impossible to know in advance if the distribution of a set of traits in a selection of that population is representative of the whole. Peirce proposed mathematical methods for testing verisimilitude that are similar to the mathematical evaluation of statistical hypotheses today.
Verisimilitude is relevant to historiography conceptually, but some adjustment is needed. When a historian assesses a piece of evidence, they have no way of knowing how it relates to it's larger cultural context. Only there is no way of determining how representative it is mathematically. It is a qualitative problem, because the sample, a historical context, is unquantifiable, and unknowable in scope and nature. This is the hermeneutic problem discussed in an earlier post, where the reader (the historian) has to bridge a wide gulf of time to make sense of the artifact. This is impossible to achieve fully; the best a historian can do is keep adding evidence to refine what limited picture of the past is possible. The significance of a piece of evidence, assuming it can be dated, is therefore judged contextually, against interpretations of the existing record. The incomplete nature of that record means that any new piece of evidence has the ability to radically change our historical understanding.
Plausibility is less quantitative than probability or verisimilitude. It is more of an "eye-test" judgment of fit, as occurs when a measurement is so out of whack that it indicates that there may be a problem with the machine or data. Plausibility is a backbone of historical interpretation, and is the only way to approximate some measure of verisimilitude in assessing how representational an artifact is.
Minoan Marine Style Octopus Flask, circa 1450 BC, Archaeological Museum, Herakleion, Greece
With a civilization like the Minoans, where there is a lot of surviving material culture, but the language is unknown, it is virtually impossible to determine the verisimilitude of historical interpretations. This picture on this flask is consistent with their sea-faring nature, but the meaning of the image, if any, is lost to us.
Plausibility is another matter. Interpretations that run counter to the archaeological record or our overall knowledge of Bronze Age technology require extensive corroborating evidence to rise above historical fiction. Of course, this does happen. Plausibility simply provides a check on wild speculation.
Pierce's classifications are not determinative of anything, but are helpful in clarifying the nature of historical uncertainty and how this is vulnerable to corruption. Historians proceed empirically into the unknown, building interpretations out of accumulating evidence. Basic chronologies depend on experimental methods with probabilistic uncertainties. Interpretations of further significance strive for verisimilitude that can only be assessed subjectively as in terms of plausibility. But it gets more complex still. Both the body of evidence and the interpretations are in constant motion, since our larger understanding provides context to evaluate the piece of evidence, while new pieces of evidence force us to reevaluate our larger understanding.
Blind Men and the Elephant, Meiji period (1868-1912) Japan, ivory, 4.1 x 4.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
In some ways, historians resemble the blind men and the elephant of Indian folklore. Each can only describe what he is touching, so each thinks it is something completely different (the trunk a snake, the leg a tree trunk, etc.). Even if they were to compare notes, there is no guarentee that their combined observations would describe the elephant.
The nature of historical evidence presents problems for an empirical epistemology. As is clear in the case of the Minoan marine style vase above, historians depend on written primary source material for insight into the beliefs and customs of a given group of people. But written sources differ from experimental data because they are themselves human creations rather than naturally occurring phenomena. Empiricists build towers of abstract representation (semiotic notations, schematic frameworks, etc.) out of observations, but the historian is building towers of abstract representation out of towers of abstract representation. Our histories are based on older histories, that are themselves often fragmentary and lack context to give them identifiable meaning. Assuming, of course that the transmissions are accurate.
The Aristotelian Constitution of Athens and other texts, late 1st century AD, four papyrus rolls, British Library Papyrus 131, London
The Constitution of the Athenians is a first century manuscript copy of the historical development of the Athenian constitution attributed to a student of Aristotle. It is an invaluable primary source for classical historians. But the content material was already centuries old by the time this manuscript was copied. There is no way to corroborate the text; historians fill in the gaps and assess the verifsimilitude of the srtifact (how representative it is of the historical reality) by qualitative judgments of plausibility.
Our earliest narratives are often much older than the oldest extant copy, raising questions about the reliability of transmission. Philologists will cross-reference multiple copies of an older source if they exist, but a lone fragment or citation is necessarily of uncertain accuracy. Then there is the issue of authorial slant. From the outset personal and collective historical narratives are distorted by propaganda, ideology, self-authoring, and a host of other subjective leanings, both conscious and unconscious.
The arrival of Brutus to England, the slaying of giants and the building of a city, possibly London, from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannae, British Library Harley MS 1808, f. 30
Brutus of Troy was an imaginary founder of the British people and part of a Medieval effort to connect European royalty with the heroes of Greco-Roman myth (contra Renaissance fictions, the classical past never "disappeared"). This gave the young rulers of the West an antique pedigree to match the Byzantine, emperor, who, as we saw in the last post, claimed Trojan roots through the fictional history of Virgil's Aeneid. This is a manipulation of history to serve a collective interest in the present.
Geoffrey's History of the English Kings is an example of a historical fallacy called synthetic history, which refers to the combining of folklore and fact in a single historical narrative. The legend of King Arthur also factors prominently in his account.
Brutus Stone, Totnes, England
A skewed historical framework makes it difficult to assess pieces of evidence. The Brutus Stone in Totnes is one whimsical example. According to local folklore, the stone is where Brutus of Troy first set foot on English soil. The fact that Brutus didn't exist means that that interpretation of the stone, regardless of its importance to a community, can't be considered historical fact.
Given the levels of uncertainty built into the historical process, historiography should focus on evidentiary standards and on the plausibility of the assumed significance of a source or artifact. There is no easy way to do this; responsibly assessing, classifying, corroborating, and interpreting historical data requires tremendous knowledge of the field along with patience and humility. Often, things aren't what you hope they were, and moving past a deeply held theory is challenging for many. None of this makes the alternative - shoddy or fraudulent interpretation - acceptable. The alternative are the dyscivic and dysgenics promoted by the likes of the BBC in support of a sinister effort to erase the cultural identity of the English people, built over centuries by the likes of Geoffrey of Monmouth (above).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's demolition of "what was meant to be a “typical” of Roman Brittain by the BBC: flowing quotas of political correctness backward in time" needs no elaboration.
The most straightforward way to subvert history at the individual inductive level is to lie about the facts. There can be tremendous value in prepetuating historical fraud. But the distortions of historiography pointed out by Taleb above follow a subtler and more insifious process: cherry picking items and misrepresenting how representative they are (disregarding verisimilitude, to use Peirce's term). It is interesting that the defenders of this fraudulent cartoon completely ignore the issue of representationality or verisimilitude, choosing instead to focus on whether a sub-Saharan African could have wound up in Roman Britain. Yet this is an intentionally misleading distortion. The cartoon is presented as "representative", meaning a high degree of assumed verisimilitude to the historical reality. The surviving historical record indicates the opposite, and the substitution of possibility for plausibility indicates that the deception is intentional. The fact that some Africans moved through the Empire is utterly irrelevant to the ethnicity of a "representative" Roman British family. However it is very relevant to the ubiquitous miscegenation pushed with manic intensity by globalist media. The reason for the deception becomes clear; the defining framework isn't historical plausibility but the anti-Western animus and anti-nationalist propaganda typical of Postmodern thought.
It is notable how the striking addition of cobalt blue eyes to these bronze heads is considered a sign of northern European facture. It is also telling that there is time and money to promote "diverse" historical fiction, but the archaeological context of these physical artifacts has not been explored.
When faced with conflicting interpretation, the historian has to turn to informed judgment to determine which more plausibly conforms to the actual past. While some human bias is unavoidable, the honest historian avoids establishing Postmodern phantasy as their starting point.
John Cooke, Discussion on the Piltdown Skull, 1915, oil on canvas, The Geological Society of London
Charles Dawson is in the back row, second from the right. Dawson was trying to enhance his own place in history by changing established chronologies with a radical "discovery." He was not trying to attack the validity of archaeology as a method of building historical knowledge empirically.
Charles Dawson is in the back row, second from the right. Dawson was trying to enhance his own place in history by changing established chronologies with a radical "discovery." He was not trying to attack the validity of archaeology as a method of building historical knowledge empirically.
Instead, they begin with an ideological position, then attempt for force carefully chosen facts to fit. Judgments of plausibility based on our overall historical knowledge of the period, limited as they are, are avoided, lest they expose the slanted, contextually inappropriate "interpretation" peddled by the historian. Which brings us to the next level of historiography/epistemology: the interpretative understanding of the larger world.
Experiential knowledge is the basis of understanding objective reality.
An empirically responsible historiography is attentive to the transition from individual experience to collective theorizing and builds interpretations inductively. Methodologies should focus on assessing plausibility and ensuring that the body of evidence and theoretical inferences align. This is never easy or conclusive; just an ongoing process of discovery and refinement that is the best we can ever hope for empirically as finite subjectivities in a vast, unknown objective reality. Postmodernism professes to be based in "theory", but it rejects the empirical approach by presuming the interpretive conclusion before seriously considering the evidence, then cherry-picking examples to fit. As is typical, they confuse the collective and metaphysical levels of history. The perverted faith will be the subject of the next post; for now, we will stick to the level of inductive inference and identify how that is vulnerable to corruption before taking the plunge into materialist transcendence and discursive epistemes.
Historical Periods: A History
The sheer breadth of our historical knowledge makes some kind of classificatory system necessary to organize and make sense of the material. Defining periods and structuring chronologies is interpretive theorizing, and more specifically, a kind that brings us back to the initial absurdity of defining a period of time as "post" modern. An adjective meaning right now only becomes a fixed point on a time if you abandon belief in the possibility of further change or allow shallow, incoherent fabulists (Modernists) define their nature for posterity. Both are possible - observe the endless recycling of pop cultural forms and the reverence still paid "daring" Modern radicals - but both are predicated on misapplied faith, and both belong in the next post. For now, let's look honestly at historical periodization, in order to identify its uses, limits, and vulnerability to Postmodern distortion.
Diego Rivera, The History of Mexico, 1929-35, fresco, National Palace, Mexico City
Rivera's vast murals (only part of the History of Mexico is visible here) give one limited impression of the history of one country, and are still overwhelming in size and detail. It is the sheer scale of history that makes categorizing by time period, country, or cultural region necessary. As for Rivera, he was a gifted painter, but otherwise a monster. Consider the sheer moral depravity of a demagogue who characterizes the history of a people as a proud struggle against foreign oppression, then advocates Soviet Marxism, a foreign system founded on a machine-like totalitarian logic that demands the annihilation of the very notion of a people.
When we examine the development of the notion of historical periods, the potential for incoherence is there from the start. The idea that human history can be meaningfully divided into periods appears in medieval Christian sources, but these establish the structure according to metaphysical teleology rather than human activity as an end in itself. The work of Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202), a late medieval mystic and theologian who gained some fame as a prophet for his visionary scriptural historiography, is a good example of this thinking.
Joachim of Fiore, Trinitarian Circles, from the Liber Figurarum, MS CCC 255A f.7v, Bodleian Library, Oxford
In this image Joachm shows how the ages of history correspond to the Trinity, moving from life before Mosaic Law, to the Law, to Grace in the person of Christ, to a coming age of Spirit. What is significant is the correspondence between the meaning of human history and divine teleology.
Joachim's history is eschatological, in that it is tied up in the theological fate of the soul and humanity in general. Secular medieval historiography, such as it was, tended to assert continuity with the past. Undifferentiated chronicle timelines downplay change, while fictitious dynastic histories like Brutus of England create false analogies between past and present. It was only in the Renaissance that Western historiography, inspired by classical sources, began treating human history as significant enough in itself to merit classification and value judgments disconnected from spiritual meaning. The metaphysical teleology of Christian historiography and the worldly purpose of ancient historiography were forced together into a delicate balance.
The Wheel of Fortune, circa 1230, Codex Buranus, Clm 4660, fol. 1r, Bavarian State Library, Munich
The Wheel of Fortune was a popular device in the Middle Ages to symbolize the unpredictiility of circumstances. Here, we see four figures around the wheel: a enthroned king at the top, a falling king on the right, a dead body at the bottom, and a climbing figure at the right. It tells us that one's station in life depends on the whims of fortune rather than anything more meaningful.
This idea lingered in the Renaissance notion of fortuna, the unpredictability that can bring the mightiest down. In humanist historiography, the great won fame by their ability to master fortuna long enough to achieve great things. Machiavelli called this trait virtù.
Renaissance humanists managed to forge a balance between Christian and Classical historiography, but they are fundamentally incompatible. Fig leaves like the Seven Virtues paper over what are essentially orthogonal value systems. If we set aside the peculiar language of the period and focus on the structure, we see two ontologically distinct types of "movement": a metaphysical telos, and a sense of secular or material direction or purpose that can coexist in the right circumstances, but can never truly merge. The criteria for Classical fame and Christian salvation are too incompatible.
Laureti shows humanistic influence in the marble paneling and classical architecture of his setting, but the crucifix and fallen idol make his value system clear.
Laureti was painting during the period of Catholic reform and renewal that goes by many names, the Counter-Reformation being the most famous and Early Modern Catholicism being the most thorough. From this perspective, it was inevitable that Christianity would take historical precedence over the achievements of pagan antiquity. As modernity drew nearer, however, historioraphy moves away from Christian teleology, and the secular, human activity unfolding within the telos becomes the focus. Today, the default assumption regarding history if the West is that is non-metaphysical in structure. The periods are purely categories of human affairs.
This transformation is clearer pictorially.
Raphael, The Battle of Ostia, 1514-15, fresco, 770 cm at base, Vatican Museums
The Battle of Ostia took place in 849 between Saracen pirates and a Christian fleet. The subject is historical, but the prominent figure of Pope Leo IV on the right indicates that the victory was the will of God. The historiography is Catholic, with the pope as the intermediary between providence and human action. Past and present are closely linked providentially.
Paolo Veronese, The Apotheosis of Venice, 1585, oil on canvas, Doge's Palace, Venice
In this painting, the classical language of immortality or apotheosis is used to represent the marvelous destiny of Venice. Although the personification of the city rises heavenward in the manner of a saint, there are no overtly Christian symbols in this ascent. The religious nature of the city would have been assumed at the time, but is is notable that the image expresses an historical subject - the destiny of a human polity - in strictly secular terms. The providential historiography of The Battle of Ostia is nowhere to be found. The message is still timeless, in that classical allegory is perfectly suited to the present.
The rise of academies and learned societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are founded on principles derived from Renaissance humanism, but their activities move further from theology towards more overtly classicizing forms and subjects. The Academies served the ascendant monarchies of Europe, and a secular historiography, rooted in worldly glory and carrying the humanistic prestige of antique origins, differentiated royal propaganda from the rhetoric of the Church. The Sun King, Louis XIV of France, pioneered the idea of controlling culture through royal academies as part of his overall philosophy of absolutism. He understood that politics are downstream from culture centuries before the present day, and established a cultural policy that glorified and legitimated his monarchy. Other rulers were quick to follow suit.
Charles Le Brun, The Conquest of Franche-Comté, circa 1674, oil on canvas, 93 x 140 cm, Palace of Versailles
Louis XIV's victory over the Dutch is shown in purely Classical language of triumph, with various gods and allegories. Louis himself is dressed as Alexander the Great, while the god looking down from the heavens is Jupiter, or the Roman Zeus.
The artfulness of history - the freedom to take liberties to shape the narrative - is is an ancient idea already present in Herodotus and Thucydides. It is not a coincidence that the Greeks included Clio, the Muse of History among the Nine Muses, or goddesses of the arts. In the humanist thought of the early modern academies, this was transformed to a higher purpose, since it was the ability to artfully manipulate history to reveal higher truths gave history an intellectual credibility to rival poetry or even philosophy. The ease with which this could be manipulated for personal gain was likely not a coincidence.
Eustache Le Sueur, The Muses Clio, Euterpe and Thalia, between 1652 and 1655, oil on panel, 130 x 130 cm, Louvre Museum
A French Academy painter paints the Muses. Clio is shown on the left with a book and a trumpet; signs of recording and commemoration. The Classical idea of immortality as a triumph of fame is implicit in her name, which is derived from the Greek word meaning to recount or make famous.
It is noteworthy that the Muses were the daughters of Zeus and the Titan Mnemosyne, or memory, implying a mnemonic dimension to all the arts.
Enlightenment rationalism spelled the end of European monarchy by promoting a radical philosophy of egalitarianism that reached an apotheosis of its own in the depravity of the Reign of Terror. Enlightenment historiography removed God from history altogether, but replaced Him with faith that the combination of antique wisdom and modern discernment can offer an alternate morality. The impetus for this was historical - the Church was seen as another pillar of the corrupt ancien regieme - but the justifications were philosophical. Both humans and nature were characterized as rational, leaving no place for metaphysics. Where does providential teleology fit in a Newtonian clockwork universe?
Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784–85, oil on canvas, 326 x 427 cm, Louvre, Paris
The precise clarity of David's strict neoclassicism was suited to the rationalist mind of the Enlightenment. The story of the Horatii appears in Livy, but David distills the episode down to a lesson in civic duty, even at the expense of family. This message would resonate with the Enlightenment champions of civic nationalism, rather than traditional aristocracy.
Of course, Newton himself realized that the problem of origins remained, which is why he espoused a mystical history based on Biblical interpretations not far removed in spirit from Joachim of Fiore. The smarter rationalists acknowledged that something had to wind up the clockwork universe, which is why the Enlightenment was the era of Deism and divine watchmakers (a forerunner of simulation theory). But any transcendence was abstract and impersonal, leaving historical meaning a human affair.
The abstract deism is evident in the famous passage from the Declaration of Independence declaring all men to be created self-evidently equal. The problem is that this is decidedly not self-evident empirically, and from a Christian perspective, the Bible is silent on secular rights, inalienable or otherwise. The language is deist, but the sentiment is an expression of the values of the American nation at its founding, which are obviously Christian, but incorporate cultural mores as well.
Enlightenment rationalism offered no outlet for the human desire for transcendence or meaning; one thing that does seem universal empirically. The backlash that came in the form of Romanticism shifted cultural focus onto subjectivity and emotion, rather than reason, but the old pathways to the divine remained closed. So the transcendent found a home in the material world, in the form of the sublime, the feeling of overwhelming awe that we experience in the face of something vast beyond rational accounting. Imposing natural phenomena and the weight of history were two common Romantic themes.
Cole explores the sublime in both nature, in the form of the dramatic light and sky, and history, with the ruin testifying to the inexorable power of time. Human reason seems small in the face of these. Yet, this shrank transcendence from divine splendor to that feeling you get from a cool sunset. All the skillful painting in the world can't wave that ontological reduction away.
Romantic historiography, with its roots in emotion, subjectivity and secular transcendence, includes a number of characteristics. Nationalism is one of these, the self-conscious awareness of sharing an organic culture with distinct historical and geographic roots. It was this emphasis on national identity, along with increasingly obvious modern technological superiority, that removed antiquity from the center of learned culture, where it had been since the Renaissance.
François Gérard, On The Bank Of The Lora, Ossian Conjures Up A Spirit With The Sound Of His Harp, circa 1811, oil on canvas, 184.5 x 194.5 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Ossian was a historical fiction based on collected Celtic folklore and perpetuated by a Scottish poet named James Macpherson in 1760. The idea fired the nationalist imaginations of northern Europeans with the idea of Homer and the great Greco-Roman literary tradition.
Note the Romantic emotionalism in the ruined tower, sublime atmosphere, wild pose, dramatic light, turbulent forms, and supernatural subject matter.
The Romantic fusion of culture, nation, and history was a potent rhetorical brew that captured the unique character of the European nations, but something was missing. The legacy of Enlightenment secularism blinded it to the importance of Christianity in European history, and religion often appears as a cultural artifact rather than a path to transcendence. This cultural Christianity is a factor in the current European existential crisis.
Carl Gustav Carus, The Ruins of Eldena Abbey near Greifswald with a Thatched Cottage by Moonlight, 1819-20, oil on canvas, 43 x 33.2 cm, Private Collection
This painting includes familiar Romantic features like an imposing ruin and dramatic presentation, but it also captures the nationalist historiography of that period. The traditional half-timber house, with a warm glow in the window and a fire in the chimney, exists in harmony with its distinct forest setting. The Gothic ruin asserts the venerable roots of the Germanic Christian history of the culture. But while the house, an archetype of worldly comfort is lived in, the church, or God's house, is a ruined ghost of a different time.
You can actually see transcendental value move from the metaphysical (God) to the material world of human experience (nature, nation).
Of course, this vision was not to be.
The sublime ruins and nationalist passions that Romantic history its flavor masked the epochal changes in the European way of life brought on by the Industrial Revolution. In fact, the interest in the emotional and subjective aspects of experience can be interpreted as a reaction to the dehumanizing logic of mechanization.
Penry Williams, South Wales Industrial Landscape, circa 1825, oil on canvas, 55 x 99 cm, The National Library of Wales.
Constable was popular for his timeless views of rural English culture. Note the bucolic way of life, Gothic cathedral, and unpredictable weather. These paintings were already nostalgic, as industrialization and mass agriculture shattered traditional communities for urban squalor and hellscapes like Williams'.
At a time when age-old traditions were being consumed in the coal fires of industry, some more sensitive observers were aware of the damage done, both to the landsacpe and to individuals transformed from members of established families and communities to fungible factory cogs. The Gothic Revival movement was driven by the appeal of a more authentic past, before the dehumanizing upheavals of industrialization.
Edward Burne-Jones (design), Faith, Hope & Charity, made by the William Morris Company in 1871, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
Pre-Raphaelite artists like Burne-Jones and designers like William Morris turned to a romanticized image of the medieval past as a tonic to the alienation and loss of community that plagued urban, industrial England. This sort of history is more a fantasy of Romantic nationalism then a rigorous study of the past or serious revival of faith.
While historiography was becoming secular, empirical knowledge of the past was increasing.
Adam's designs were extremely popular with eighteenth-century English nobility. Although fanciful in color and detail, the elements are based on a new understanding of Roman domestic interiors from discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum. As knowledge deepened, "antiquity" began to shift from a humanist ideal to a historical subject.
Title page and details from the capital and entablature of the portico of the Temple of Hephaestus (449-415 BC) from James Stuart and Nicholas Revett,The Antiquities of Athens and Other Monuments of Greece, 1762; the Philopappos Monument (2st century AD) from The Antiquities of Athens measured and delineated by James Stuart F.R.S. and F.S.A. and Nicholas Revett Painters and Αrchitects, vol. III London, John Nichols, 1794
James Stuart and Nicholas Revett first published their The Antiquities of Athens and Other Monuments of Greece, in 1762. They had taken advantage of better relations with the Ottoman Empire to secure access to sites that had been closed to Western scholars for centuries. Note their Janissary guide preparing tea in the lower picture.
Their book was a sensation, launching the Greek phase of Neoclassicism and contributing to an increasingly refined sense of historical periods. The historical distance between these two monuments, built nearly five hundred years apart, became stark in Stuart and Revett's sharp engravings.
As Romanticism gave way to Modernity, the modern university system began to form, and historiography became a subject for professional academics rather than learned amateurs like Stuart. What was already a tendency towards periodization became subject to academic classification, where the clear delineation of sub-fields is necessary for defining managable, coherent courses and areas of expertise. The system is flexible in its ability to accommodate our expanding historical knowledge base - Early Dynastic China easily slots in beside Medieval France - but it presents vulnerabilities for Postmodernists to exploit. How do we define periods? The very act imposes an arbitrary break in the continuous flow of history.
Emperor Justinian and Members of His Court, early 20th century copy of 6th century original, glass and stone mosaic, 264.2 x 365.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Was Justinian the last Roman emperor or the first Byzantine one? The distinction would have been meaningless to the people in this mosaic, but where we place him has an enormous impact on his treatment by modern scholars.
Periodization means siloing is a problem. Scholars in a particular sub-field develop particular foci, often disconnected from what their peers in other areas are doing. But transitional phases between these periods, have long been recognized as historically interesting.
Greco-Buddhist art fused Hellenistic and Indian styles to give early Buddhist sculpture a distinct form that evolved in countless directions as it spread across Asia.
Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages was first published in Dutch in 1919 and remains an important work. Huizinga paints a portrait of late medieval Burgundy suspended between the standard periods of Middle Ages and Renaissance.
The very act of defining periods creates a sense of isolation. The establishment of defining characteristics (a spirit of the age) presents history as a series of distinct, evolutionary stages. Postmodernists have attacked the validity of periodization on these grounds, pointing out that the categories don't map perfectly onto reality, and therefore can't exist. Of course they don't exist, they're representational abstractions based on a sketchy empirical record, but if Postmodernists were serious thinkers, they wouldn't be Postmodernists. What the categories do allow us to do is frame new evidence, which in turn allows to rethink our categories or create new ones. Empirical history is a constant process of refinement, and classification systems shift accordingly. This isn't proof that the systems are meaningless, only that they, like human epistemology in general, are never complete.
The term Mozarab refers to the art and culture of the Arabized Iberian Christians living during the Muslim invasion of Spain. The accuracy of the word has been disputed, but as this church with Moorish arches indicates, some kind os cultural exchange was happening. What it doesn't mean is that "Christian" and "Moorish" disappear as general historical categories.
Not surprisingly, the Postmodern critique of historical periodization has an internal contradiction, since the very term suggests a place on the academic historical timeline. Works like Guy De Bord’s Society of the Spectacle or Jean Baudrillard’s "Simulacra and Simulations" link their sociocultural theory to historical development; in fact, it is by occupying the end of the timeline that Postmodernism can masquerade as an historical inevitability. It is on this perch at the "end of history" where Postmodernism resembles the false teleological claim of Marxism to represent the "final stage" of a purely materialist historical process. This will be addressed further in the next post, when we examine how Postmodernism replaces personal subjectivity, objective reality, and metaphysics with an amorphous self-contradictory blob called "theory." For now, we'll wrap with a look at the historical incoherence at the origins of the modern notion of historical periodization.
The title page of the first edition of Jacob Burkhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1960.
Burkhardt is often credited with inventing the modern notion of the cultural history with this groundbraking study. Here, he defined the art, literature, thought, and social customs of the Renaissance as expressions of the same set of period values. However, his historiography rests on familiar, contradictory assumptions that are easily deconstructed or subverted.
The study presents a range of historical evidence, but subsumes it within a top-down narrative that combines an Enlightenment faith in rational discernment with the Romantic notion of a "spirit of the age" incoherently asserted by Hegel and others. Burkhardt accepted the self-presentation of the humanists at face value, never questioning their claim to represent a radical break in history. As a result, the book isn't a bad read, but completely misses the historical trends running through the period.
The ability to define periods of history on one's own terms, with an absolutist top-down authority, was an essential forerunner to the Postmodern replacement of history with discourse.
This has been a lengthy journey, but is is important to identify the levels and processes that go into the construction of history and how they have been understood and misunderstood over time. The combination of verisimiliude and plausibility described at the beginning really is the only epistemologically legitimate way to build historical knowledge, but it lacks the seductive certainty of grand narratives. Periods are necessary for classification, but there is a tendency to treat the period as something meaningful in itself. Burkhardt certainly fell for this. The next post will wrap this discussion of Postmodernism and history, to clear the way for a move into some architecture.
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