The Gift of History

On Hayden White's "The Burden of History"

"It is of course possible that the artist’s purpose may be served by telling a story, but this is only one of the possible modes of representation offered to him today, and it is a decreasingly important one at that…"(http://www.jstor.org/pss/2504510)

If one opens upon Hayden White’s “The Burden of History” the interpretative challenged posed, namely, to think a ‘History’ that historically hinges on conceptions of Art and Science as History, specifying art as ‘mid-nineteenth century art’ and science as ‘late-nineteenth century science’, is a gift. History, this encapsulated Concept and stable Sign/Signifier, is thus disrupted and forced to begin to question itself. White is thus in a tradition of Meta-History, or, history(ies) of/about history(ies). This “current generation of historians”, White notes, “will be called upon to perform [the most difficult task of] expos[ing] the historically conditioned character of the historical discipline, to preside over the dissolution of history’s claim to autonomy among the disciplines, and to aid in the assimilation of history to a higher kind of intellectual inquiry, which…can be properly designated as neither [art or science].”

To this, anyone who takes work seriously, and giving graciously, must re-pay him with a counter-gift. While giving-back may take a myriad of Forms, G.E. Moore’s elaboration on the Fact/Value distinction (the distinction between the ‘Is’ and the ‘Ought’) so present in ‘Naturalistic Fallacies’ of ethics and politics seems quite apt given White’s attempts to challenge History’s (and historiography’s) insistence on as he says the, “continu[ation] to treat ‘facts’ as though they were ‘given’ and refuse to recognize…that they are not so much ‘found’ as much as constructed by the kinds of questions ask[ed] of the phenomena [that lay] before the historian” (p. 114). White, like Moore, seeks a confrontation between those persons (historians in his case) entrenched in verificationistic positivism (and reductive naturalism) and those willing to think other.

The scientist (of the 19th century) seeks to explain phenomena by signifying a meaningful sequence of events with a number of causes that produce a number of effects, which are ‘backed-up’ by the Reality of raw data, of actual facts that took place in the physical world, which are isolated through sense-perception and appropriate conditions of experimentation. The historian borrows this. Whereas theoretically the scientist speaks fact, the artist speaks value, the historian-ethicist speaks both, which as White notes, “is a charge leveled against the historian…[from the scientist] [and from the artist]” (p. 104).

But science isn’t verificationism anymore. Science is a critical method and not a better history; it never replaces myth.

History would need to rise above antiquarianism and presentism, both existing as (in)different collections of happenstance.

“History” never justifies determination. Whether as a scientific/artistic apocalypse based on historical “facts”, “values”, and “predications”, History can never eliminate human autonomy. But neither must humans eliminate History’s autonomy.

To keep history “alive” would be to speak of ‘is’ in time, or, of a History dissolved but then reconstituted…so much for burdens…