Ms Alison Dare, Director of Humanities
‘… the historian’s picture of the past is … in every detail an imaginary picture …’
As a teacher of history, I sometimes wonder about the mysterious space that exists between my understanding and that of my students. It is not just a matter of my knowing more than they do but rather, how the image that I try to create might be received by them; whether I can make them see what I see. Of course the process of learning is far more complex than the transferral of knowledge directly from teacher to student (it’s not, after all, about reading the teacher’s mind). Nevertheless the question of how we ‘see’ history is an interesting one.
The British philosopher and historian, R.G. Collingwood, asserted in the 1940s that imagination was an integral part of the historical process. Rejecting the positivist trend which sought to treat history as a science, he claimed that ‘the historian’s picture of the past is … in every detail an imaginary picture, and its necessity is at every point the necessity of the a priori imagination. Whatever goes into it, goes into it not because his imagination passively accepts it, but because it actively demands it’ (Collingwood, 1946, p. 245). Collingwood’s ideas regarding the importance of imagination certainly align with the current emphasis we place on empathy as a way of understanding the past. The importance of ‘walking in another’s shoes’ is a foundational message given to students when introduced to the discipline. Without imagination, it is impossible to form empathy since empathy involves the imaginative recreation of a person’s life or situation.
What does it mean to imagine? To imagine is to conjure an image in our mind’s eye. It is a process which is inherently creative and the images we create are not formed in a vacuum but come to us from both our immediate and the broader social context. The visual is very powerful and, some would argue, has more immediacy than words — perhaps because as infants we understand the world in images before we acquire words. Certainly, in the history of civilization, pictures preceded words as the basis of language. The advertising industry well understands the power of the visual and uses it to great effect.
To the extent that history is first formed in the imagination — something we creatively conjure up in our minds — it is thus also, to some extent, subjective. History only exists in the narratives that individuals make of past events and, unlike Science, there are very few (if any) universal laws of history waiting to be uncovered by clever individuals. Rather than being the sum of everything that ever happened in the past, history is always the product of human endeavour and thus reflects the subjectivity of the individual(s) who created it.
If, then, history is a subjective exercise, merely the product of individuals and their imaginings, where does this leave notions of truth and objectivity? At the end of the day, we teach our students that history is ultimately about getting to the truth (or truths) of the matter. How many people died in the Holocaust, why the Roman Republic collapsed, the causes of World War One — these are all significant questions that require reasonably concrete, if complex, answers. Moreover, the answers to such questions often have a real bearing on the present day. With this in mind, there would appear to be a contradiction between the process of history as discipline and the goal of historical knowledge.
In some ways, the dichotomy in our Western thinking between the realm of feeling and that of rationality has limited our capacity to understand the crucial role that emotion and empathy play in the construction of knowledge. The philosopher Ronald de Sousa, in countering our traditional way of splitting thought and feeling, argues that emotion can be seen as a kind of perception. According to de Sousa, the way we have tended to see ‘emotion as both subjective and irrational has had two opposite but equally deplorable effects’ (de Sousa, 1987, p. 142). First, he contends that ‘it promotes the idea that emotions are essentially unimportant, or only as distractions from the serious business of life’. Second, he suggests that this approach disallows rational debate regarding the realm of the subjective. It ‘fosters the automatic justification of any behaviour on the grounds that one must go with one’s feelings: since feelings are purely subjective, no sensible debate or rationalisation of them is possible’ (loc. cit.).
How can history be both an imaginative pursuit as well as a discipline which demands objective outcomes? It can be seen that the analytical and imaginative aspects of history are in no way contradictory but rather are both equally essential to the process (Levin, 2006). While there may be few laws of history, it is nevertheless possible — and in fact imperative — that we adopt a methodical approach in the way we construct history. This is particularly the case when using sources which form the basis of historical inquiry. Indeed, the best history is that which is formed from the most rigorous interrogation of sources. Yet, when faced with the often fragmentary nature of sources, as in the case of ancient remains, it is only the imagination that allows us to weave the historical narrative, which is like a thread connecting the various aspects of the evidence, into a coherent whole.
Ultimately, the imagination is deeply personal and idiosyncratic and no-one will ever know how another really sees the past (or even the present) but it is in that liminal space where imagination meets the outside world that old assumptions are challenged and new forms of knowledge are opened up.
References
Collingwood, R. G. (1946). The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Sousa, R. (1987). The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Levin, K. (2006). On the importance of imagination in historical studies. Canadian Social Studies, 38(2).