Heraclitus: Philosopher of Process — Premonitions of History

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José Ortega y Gassett was probably the most important philosopher Spain has produced. He was certainly more significant than Santayana, or, I think, than Unamuno. He was primarily interested in the philosophy of history, and he realized that the first philosopher to deal with the implications of the issues raised by history was Heraclitus, the "philosopher of flux", or, in more modern terms, the idea of change. Ortega y Gassett wrote:

"Ha llegado la hora de que la simiente de Heráclito dé su magna cosecha."
(The time has come for the seed sown by Heraclitus to bring forth its mighty harvest.)
Historia como sistema (1941), p. 39-40.

It was of history that Heraclitus spoke when he said: "One cannot step twice in the same river, for there come down waters, and yet other waters."

* * * *

History as a System: Historia como sistema. Spanish edition, 1941; in Raymond Klibansky, Ed. Philosophy and History: Festschrift for Ernst Cassirer (1935), p. 305. Obras Completas, vol. VI.

Note: My opinion of Ortega y Gassett is not mine alone. Here is another: "The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was one of the outstanding philosophers of the twentieth century, and one who focused most directly and consistently on issues of social, or human, systems." (Arthur Warmoth, "José Ortega y Gasset and Human Systems Science", 2005)

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A Lonely, Unbefriended Fact

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History is not based on facts. A fact is something that is produced by historical research, not something the historian finds ready-made. Jacques Barzun, one of the great minds of the past century recognized this when he wrote:

"Nothing flatter than a fact, a lonely, unbefriended fact, rising out of a warehouse mind."

Jacques Barzun, God's Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love Spiced with a Few Harsh Words. (1954; New York: Vintage, 1959), p. 148.

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The Title Page in History

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The title page of a book, almost without exception, is the single most important page in the book. If you found a loose page from a book blowing in the wind and picked it up, you might, if you could read the language written or printed upon it, find it exceedingly interesting. In fact the first thing you would want to know is where it came from. By that I mean you would not want to know what window it blew out of, but who the author was, and the title of the book of which it was a part. The title page is the seal of authenticity of a book. It states not only the title of the book, but usually the author (or at least a name he chooses to go by), and when and where it was published. There are books without title pages, but first and foremost they are a problem to be solved, not a source for answering other questions. In olden days title pages nearly always included the date, often in Roman numerals; most of our contemporary books place the publication date on the reverse of the title page, and for this reason the verso may be considered an extension of the title page.

The ideal title page states not only the title of the book, but usually also the author, an important consideration. Often this is more important than the title, since titles by different authors may be identical, but only rarely does an author write two different books under the same title. Other information often includes the publisher, place of publication, and the date. The title page may include a short listing of the other writings and accomplishments of the author. It will usually tell you which volume of a multivolume work it is. There may be an indication of the status, profession, or position of the author, or his affiliation with some society. (e. g., Dr., Prof., Gen., M. D., Ph.D.)

There may also be other additions to the title page. There may be an epigraph, that is, a short quotation from some other work of literature. Epigraphs sometimes give a clue to the author’s intention in writing the work. It may provide a clue to his learning; for example it may be poetry, perhaps in Latin or Greek. Sometimes there are engravings, or decorative art work. Opposite the title page there may be a frontispiece, which fairly often is of the author, or some person he is writing about. Other images may include maps, pictures of towns, buildings, battles, and so on. All of these can be clues telling us more about the subject of the book; but also the author’s interest, and how he approaches the subject. An history with a frontispiece of King George will almost invariably have a different point of view than one with President George. Sometimes the significance of the artwork is not apparent, but is must have meant something to someone, and it may be important to find out what.

The difference between title pages of different editions of the same work can be very instructive. Unless it is a photographic reprint, only rarely will title pages be identical. Sometimes, finding that the book he expected to be obscure, the book that he hesitated even to put his name on, has suddenly become popular, an author will put his name (or even his real name) on a book that was anonymous in the first edition. Sometimes the title itself will change; there are many reasons for this. The new title page often has a new date, and we want to know it; it is certainly an indication of continued or renewed interest in the book.

This is an Archival Quality Communication,

James Duvall, M. A.
The original essay was written 10 July 2007

Knowledge Work = Question and Answer

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A body of knowledge, both the activity of knowing and what is known, consists of answers (i.e., assertive acts of thought) together with the questions they are meant to answer. R. G. Collingwood, the most important philosopher of the past century, writes:

My work in archaeology . . . impressed upon me the importance of the "questioning activity" in knowledge: and this made it impossible for me to rest contented with the intuitionist theory of knowledge favoured by the "realists". The effect of this on my logic was to bring about in my mind a revolt against the current logical theories of the time, a good deal like that revolt against the scholastic logic which was produced in the minds of Bacon and Descartes by reflection on the experience of scientific research, as that was taking shape in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Novum Organum and the Discours de la Methode began to have a new significance for me.
They were the classical expressions of a principle in logic which I found it necessary to restate: the principle that a body of knowledge consists not of "propositions", "statements", "judgements", or whatever name logicians use in order to designate assertive acts of thought (or what in those acts is asserted: for "knowledge" means both the activity of knowing and what is known), but of these together with the questions they are meant to answer; and that a logic in which the answers are attended to and the questions neglected is a false logic.
R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography, p. 30-31.

This is the logic of the historian: the Logic of Question and Answer. On this subject there will be more Archival Quality Communication.

James Duvall, M. A.
History Research
Boone County Public Library
Burlington, KY

What the Traveller Didn't See . . .

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Marco Polo is probably the most famous traveller in history; certainly in Europe. He spent much time in the Orient, but it is amazing what he didn't tell us. I once spent a number of years reading the Travels. I took the book to work and read a chapter or two on each fifteen minute break. Most of the chapters are extremely short, and it is a very long book. I spent longer than necessary because I changed jobs at least twice in that time, and lost the book for a stretch of several years, but did eventually complete it. I spent so long at it that I developed a curious relationship with the book, a kind of proprietary feeling, and so I always react with interest anytime Marco or his book is mentioned.

My impression of the book, besides the interesting curiosities he speaks of, is that it is the journal of a merchant. He is interested in cost, value, and merchantable wares. He is greatly interested in natural and domestic resources; he seems to have been the first to tell the West about coal; but he also speaks of other minerals, such as cinnabar, and oil. Interesting customs are his bread and butter. He wishes to report them back to the Qa'an. According to Polo there were many towns in Asia at that time which practiced cannibalism. Many of them ate their dead relatives, ostensibly to keep the person's spirit in the family. Polo uses the phrase "they eat him up rump and stump" a number of times; certainly a colourful way to express the idea.

E. M. Forster has written an interesting essay on the book. He speaks of the great impression it made in Europe, and remarks:

Yet it is not a first-rate book, for the reason that its author is interested in novelties, to the exclusion of human beings. Herodotus was interested in both, and he is a great traveller in consequence. Marco Polo is only a little traveller. He could bring back thrilling statistics, he could also discourse quaintly about oddities, such as the one-eyed cobbler who moved a mountain near Mosul, or the exportation of dried pygmies from India, but he could not differentiate between men and make them come alive, and the East that he evoked is only a land of strange customs.

Forster suggests that anyone who really wants to understand the East should read the Memoirs of the Emperour Babur, of whom he has also written an essay, which includes the delicious line: "One could scarcely travel two miles without being held up by an Emperor."

Of the early travellers who came to America many returned home and wrote reports of the wonders of the new country; but, as they travelled here only in summer, they omitted to speak of the New England winters, and many settlers found the hard way just how difficult these could be. One wrote of the glowing accounts, after bitter experience: "truly they wrote in strawberry time."

Travel narrative is is not history, it is a form of autobiography. A traveller sees only what he sees. He may talk to people who tell him things that he does not see, but then he is dependent on them, and his critical faculties to determine the truth of what he hears. Traveller's accounts can provide important clues to what was going on in a certain area, like a snapshot. Nevertheless, the traveller does not always understand what he sees, and often he is deliberately given misleading information. The locals may want him to think the place is better than it actually is, or to have a little humour at his expense. The traveller will notice some things that the locals know so well they don't pay much attention to them; on the other hand, he will not understand some of the things he sees (or doesn't see), but assume he does, and so he will not ask for the essential piece of information that would give him true understanding.

It is also obvious that no matter how far one goes, and how long he stays, a single person can only see a tiny fraction of a country as huge as ours. It is very easy to think that what we see is all there is. I can illustrate this easily. Francois Michaux travelled through Kentucky in 1802. His memoirs are perceptive and valuable. He still did not see everything: I notice that he says Kentucky farmers did not keep sheep because it was too difficult to keep them in the wilderness. It was difficult; but I find in the estate inventories at this time that many of our local farmers have ten to fifteen sheep, some more. They all have spinning wheels and looms, but without sheep's wool these will be of little use. Michaux was observant and his observations are valuable, it just happened that he did not see sheep as he travelled through the Commonwealth. His conclusion, that farmers did not keep them, was unjustified. We can understand how he came to this conclusion, but we cannot accept his word about what he didn't see . . .

I notice that many of the accounts of travels down the Ohio River are accepted by various historians without question. Does Mrs. So and So, or General Whimsy, state such and such about a town along the river? Writers will gratefully accept almost any statement as truth in the most uncritical fashion. It is true that all of these accounts are of great interest to us. The good historian can find a way to use almost any observation he finds. Nevertheless, there are limitations inherent in this type of literature, and any statement read should not be used without criticism. We must always be aware of what the traveller didn't see.

This is an Archival Quality Communication

James Duvall, M. A.
Researcher
Boone County Public Library

Note: Forster's essays can be found in Abinger Harvest: Essays on Books, People and Places (New York: Meridian, 1955)

You can read Michaux's Travels online.

The Past in the Present

AQQ for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .

Fustel de Coulanges wrote:

"Fortunately, the past never dies for man. Man may forget it, but he always preserves it within him."

Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (1864; Anchor ed., p. 14)

This is an Archival Quality Quotation

James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone University
Think Tank & Public Policy Center
Big Bone, Kentucky
Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.

Would you like to download The Ancient City?

http://books.google.com/books?id=2l8NAAAAIAAJ&dq=&pg=PP1&ots=XNXAYl4jj8&sig=3kFyEMGOGcKSSRRpPlzSUyLo4Yo&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dfustel%2B%2522the%2Bancient%2Bcity%2522&sa=X&oi=print&ct=book-thumbnail#PPA1,M1

An Island Called Boone County

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I was working at one of the library tables the other day and had a GIS map of Boone County on the table. One of our pages, Joseph Pace, remarked as he passed, "That looks like an island!" and I had to agree. I was reminded of a book on one of my shelves at home entitled An Island Called California, which is about the ecology of that state. But is any place (even California) really a complete entity within itself? This started a train of thought . . .

Many writers on local history treat their county as if it were an island. The county line is a true boundary only to the surveyor, constable, and tax collectors: The rest of us cross it with impunity. Even islands are connected with the rest of the world, for the Ocean, like the Ohio which is our major boundary, is a connection with what lies on the other side. If the historian only looks at what has happened within the boundaries of his county-island he will never really understand what has happened there, for many of the most important things influencing that history happened far away. Wars, for example, have enormous influence on county history — death toll, patriotism, returning heroes, just think about it — but never does a county start a war, not nowadays anyway. (Ronald Reagan said that governments start wars, not people!) You can talk about what people did here during the "Great War" (now called World War I), but you will not truly understand even that unless you look elsewhere.

Focus on the local can create too much distortion in trying to appreciate the contribution of a single area. How can we look at local history in the broader context? The focus on a county, town, or geographical area is a valid way to see the past. The county is a governmental unit that attracts history to itself. People in a town or area are a community, and though they do not all pursue idential aims, they think of themselves as bound together at least by affection (or occasionally hatred) of their home-town. The local area can be compared to the "cells" in a body; they are a structure, but are part of an even larger structure. You can say a lot about a cell and not understand how it functions in its larger context. The larger structure is, in many ways, not like the "cell" at all.

In Kentucky the county is a definite focus of history. Each county is part of Kentucky, just as Kentucky (for good or ill) is part of the greater United States of America. Kentuckians were noted early for their allegiance to the Commonwealth, and particularly to their home county. The county was a primary focus or center for a core of feelings that are sometimes designated by various terms, such as, loyalty, patriotism, esprit, and "home". There may be mixed feelings, of course. Within a community there may be competition, jealousy, competition, disappointment; and these tensions may become so great that people kill one another, or families move; or (as often happens) individuals, and their relations, continue to live in a state of opposition for long periods. This too is a community focus, and it is certainly a subject for the historian. Often such negative feelings are projected only on the opposing person or family, and the home area continues to inspire only feelings of love and reverence.

It is possible to study some aspects of county history apart from the history of the community as a whole. For example, business and economic relations are embedded within the functioning of the community's social relations. These people buy at this store because they are of a like political party, or these patronize this mill because people at that church don't like people like us. We can study these relations statistically, like the figures from the Bureau of the Census, that give average income, and the number of bushels of wheat ground per year, and so forth. But this is abstract. Everyone in the community knows that Mr. X had to shut down his mill because of incident Y, and "nobody" cared to trade there anymore. Economic theory will only reveal that there was a monetary contraction about that time, and by a certain date there were only two grocery stores in town instead of the four that had been there at the beginning of the recession. It should also be obvious that economic matters cannot be understood in the context of the insular county.

The historian should be aware of what is happening elsewhere to help him (or her) understand the ways in which this county is unique, and in which it is typical. In Boone County (Kentucky) history I find that one of our historians, Paul Tanner, who worked in the Revenue Office in Frankfort for many years, did a lot of statistical work on slavery in Boone County. He wrote the best work to date on the subject. He does not content himself with figures for Boone County. He makes many comparisons between Kentucky counties; but even more importantly, he compares these figures to counties in other states. Boone County, he finds, had a higher population of mulattoes than any other county in the entire South. What is the significance of this? You cannot begin to interpret this fact until you create the fact. Once this is known you can start to think about it, and perhaps find an answer. You will never find an answer, however much internal research you may do, so long as you treat the county like an island.

This is an Archival Quality Communication

James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone, Kentucky

History and the Book

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Poetry is that encounter of the reader with
the book, the discovery of the book.
Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, p. 80.

With this I must disagree. Borges is such an interesting writer it is a great shame that so many people have discovered him. (Do they really understand him? Perhaps too well.) It is always good to have special books in your collection that no one else knows about, such as Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, or Alice Hegan Rice's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (I mean the book), C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, or the mysterious Etidorhpa, published in 1895 by one of our local authors, or . . . but I will not give them all away, or everyone will be reading them. It is the discovery of such that may truly be called the encounter with the book, and so I must (respectfully) disagree with the idea expressed by Borges in this quotation.

Poetry is expression, language at its best, and so it is not just an encounter with a book, or even something written on paper. The essence of poetry is the frisson we experience in the encounter with a mind expressing itself with much greater ability than we are able. That is, expressing thoughts and feelings we have known only in a fugitive way. (If we had never experienced them at all we would not appreciate the achievement when we encountered it.) It is, as Owen Barfield says in Poetic Diction, a movement of the mind into strangeness. By this he does not mean weirdness (at least not the weird as such), but a journey into a realm or vista which allows us to look at things, especially common things and ideas, in a way that is new to us.

There is an encounter of the mind with the book, however, and it is primarily in the realm of history. It is much more true — I do not say Borges's statement is false, after all, in the coffin we call a book, poetic skeletons do (sometimes) reside — it is much more true to say that history is the encounter with the book. History is not only a science, and I would argue that it is the primary science, without which all the others are impossible, but a species of literature. As literature it is language, or art, and as such it must be judged on its literary merits. History, even more than poetry, or other species of literature, (which can always be told as a tale or ballad), depends upon books, both as documentary evidence and as a medium of publication. Books are the way history preserves its traditions of scholarship and interpretation. We can easily conceive of a novel that does not depend upon other novels (though the good ones all depend upon the novelistic tradition more than most people suspect), but it is hardly possible to even imagine serious history without access to other books.

History is a very strange book, certainly a palimpsest, such as Lanier sang of in "The Symphony":

Life! Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,
Love, Love alone can pore
On thy dissolving score
Of harsh half-phrasings,
Blotted ere writ,
And double erasings
Of chords most fit.
Yea, Love, sole music-master blest,
May read thy weltering palimpsest.
To follow Time's dying melodies through,
And never to lose
the old in the new,
And ever to solve the discords true —
Love alone can do.

Borges may have had something similar in mind in describing an encounter with the Book of Sand. As Heraclitus found it impossible to step twice into the same river, for there come waters, and then other waters, so it is impossible to read twice the identical page of history; it is, as in the epigraph by Donne, with with Borges begins his story, a rope of sand.

This is an Archival Quality Communication

James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone, Kentucky

Note: Online access for the entire text of Sidney Lanier's beautiful poem "The Symphony".

. . .often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible . . .

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AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .

Professor Ulrich of Harvard says in a book of her essays published this year:

Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering intitials on linen sheets. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible. People make history by passing on gossip, saving old records, and by naming rivers, mountains, and children. Some people leave only their bones, though bones too make history when someone notices.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. xxxiii.

This comment that reminds us that history is not always about the big stuff. Like leaves dropping in the forest, that eventually become an entire geological layer of earth, the small acts of our lives may ultimately be more powerful than those wild acts that make the record books. Our bones may send a more powerful message than scaling mountain peaks.

Those shouting the loudest are often those who have an agenda; but political and historical agendas have a way of swinging back and forth until they reach equilibrium. Then we can hear those still, small voices that are much more interesting.

This is an Archival Quality Communication.

James Duvall, M. A.
History Researcher
Boone County Public Library
Burlington, Kentucky

Teaching History to the Young

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It was probably a frustrated history teacher who asked his class in an exasperated tone: "Are you all ignorant, or just apathetic?" A student answered: "I don't know and I don't care." If this was done with conscious irony it was a brilliant reply; but it is more likely that he really did not know or care.

No wonder there is so much apathy and ignorance about history. As it is usually taught it is very far from the concerns of ordinary people. Why should I, or anyone, get so excited about Manifest Destiny, or the mercantile system? Does anyone, who is not actually doing a Ph.D. on the topic, care to discuss the Wilmot Proviso? It could be interesting. But how do you connect with it? How can a student feel this is part of what makes this nation and himself what it is?

Most attempts to make history more exciting trivializes the whole thing. It will not do to make history a course in current events. That is not history, not yet; maybe not ever. The method of pretending the student is making original discoveries from (carefully selected) documents presenting conflicting views is little better. Who really shot McKinley, or blew up the Lusitania? Is the Kensington Rune Stone actually genuine? A semester of this and the student comes to think that everyone's opinion on an historical subject (including theirs) is equally valuable, that is, not valuable at all. The conclusion is usually that historical truth is nowhere to be found, or is submerged somewhere in a mass of conflicting opinion.

How do students come to realize that history is connected to us because it is really about the present? We cannot see the past. It does not exist. Even yesterday is real to us only in memory. We discover our own past through historical thinking. It is common to discover a note or letter and find that we are re-enacting a state of our own mind a number of years ago. We may have forgotten, or retain only a residual impression of what we were then thinking. All thinking of past thought, even our own, is historical, and we must reconstruct it through historical thinking simply because it is not now present to us. Someone who is an hundred years old is very little closer to the events of the American Revolution or the Codex Hammurapi than a teenager. It is not age that allows us to understand the past, but experience. Sage thinkers of earlier days used to say "History maketh a young man to be old." A young person may well be a better historian than an older one.

Young people must be taught to think historically. This can only be done by starting with what they know. I think this means starting with local history. It is the area in which a person lives that most impinges on their life. It is here that the first questions about the world, culture, and the social web arise. It has often been said that all politics is local politics. It is just as true to say all history is local history. It is at this level that students will come to know and feel, so that the teacher may find their interest has risen to the level that they will say "I know, and I care."

This is an Archival Quality Communication

James Duvall, M. A.
Annals of Boone County
Kentucky
Local History Research Specialist

Mostly the Same

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"To have a culture, mostly the same people have to live mostly in the same place for a long time."

Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance (2005)

The seeds of action are already there

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AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .

Allan Nevins writes of the importance of history in his magisterial essay "In Defence of History":

Mankind is always more or less storm-driven; and history is the sextant and compass of states which, tossed by wind and current, would be lost in confusion if they could not fix their position. It enables communities to grasp their relationship with the past, and to chart on general lines their immediate forward course. It does more. By giving peoples a sense of continuity in all their efforts, and by chronicling immortal worth, it confers upon them both a consciousness of their unity, and a feeling of the importance of human achievement. History is more than a mere guide to nations. It is first a creator of nations, and after that, their inspirer. Without it this world, a brilliant arena of human action canopied by fretted fire, would indeed become stale, flat, and unprofitable, a congregation of pestilent vapors.

History gives us insight into the present. It does not enable us to foretell the future; but it does keep us from being utterly surprised by it, for we know that the future, whenever it comes, will have grown out of the present.

It may be true, from a superficial point of view (as I have read), that history is the record of a series of bad guesses, and shocking surprises. But when we really examine the situation, the seeds of the action were already there, just waiting to bloom.

This is an Archival Quality Communication

James Duvall, M. A.
Local History Research Specialist
Annals of Boone County, Kentucky
Boone County Public Library
Burlington, Kentucky

Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.

AQC Archives and History

AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .

Archival Quality Communication


Archives are a major source of material for history. They are important for various reasons, particularly in that they tend to be very comprehensive.

Are they objective? Not necessarily any more objective than any other source. Archives tend to save material that is favourable to the institutions that they are associated with, and to suppress, destroy, or at least fail to acquire, materials that do not reflect well on the institution, or persons associated with it.

This means that archives should be used as selectively as any other source of material. There may be a built-in bias that is masked by the fact that many archives have so much material that it seems incomprehensible they do not have everything there is. Nevertheless, it may be so, and often is.

History does not depend on archives, however much or often historians may use them, history depends on evidence, and evidence is where you find it.

This is an AQC for 22 Aug 2007

James Duvall, M. A.
Annals of Boone County, Kentucky
Boone County Public Library
Burlington, KY

ABC means Archival Quality Communication

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