Historicism
Finding explanations in the past
I have been chided (chid? chad?, chode? what is the past participle of chide anyway?) in an otherwise interesting and excellent, if scattered, recent book by Alvin Snider, emerit at Iowa in the department of English, in the context of discussing Margaret Cavendish’s (Duchess of Newcastle) 1666 novel The Blazing World:
Cavendish also describes human difference as a matter of “sorts” and “species,” saying that “of these several sorts of men, each followed such a profession as was most proper for the nature of their species” (BW 134). The complexity of “species” as a concept, its importance to logic, natural history, and eventually biology, belongs as a subject to the history of ideas, the last redoubt of a historicism forever returning to the Greeks. John Wilkins (2009, 13–15, 63) indulges that impulse when he mentions that in ancient Greece formal classification “applied to all things, whether artificial or natural (a distinction the early Greeks would not have fully accepted anyway),” and that Plato never bothered to differentiate “between classification of natural things and artificial things.” Not until the centuries had passed did the signifier species attach specifically to breeding and reproduction. Cavendish shows no sign of wielding the word with this history in mind but regards it, much in the same way John Locke did, as “merely the Latinized version of the good English word sort or kind.” [Snider 2024, 186]
If I have correctly read Snider, then any attempt to trace the development and origin of words and the concept they represent is “historicism returning to the Greeks”, despite the fact that in the cited passage I am saying that the meaning of the words were not set by the Greeks (and a specific Greek, Plato, at that). But I am stung by the implication.
Let me first note that in my Species book (both the 2009 edition and the 2018 edition) I say that Locke is right, and back it up by following how some of the people on whose work the European uses in the early modern period depended used the terms. I cite Locke directly in this regard [p63–64], which I suspect is where an early modern English scholar might have encountered the passage. In fact the wording is this:
And if it be true, as it is, that the mind makes the patterns for sorting and naming of things, I leave it to be considered who makes the boundaries of the sort or species; since with me species and sort have no other difference than that of a Latin and English idiom. [Book III, chapter 5, §9, cf. also Book III, chapter 1, §6, chapter 2 §12, chapter 3, §14]
But I also state the limits of my enquiry:
We should not make too much of this, but the terms used in classification shift in subtle and major ways that sometimes obscure the views each author is presenting. We are primarily concerned with the tradition outside biology that has impacted on the biological notions and usage. [11–12]
But, apart from besmirching my honour, this is trivial. As a philosopher I am familiar with attacks upon the uses of history to support some present school or position, especially by scientists, which is why I became, as I note in the preface, a historian of ideas, or as the present day term is, an intellectual historian, as well. And why should I be aware of these things? I read Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism in my late teens and early twenties.
However, the term itself is (like species) polysemic. Popper (1972) specifies his target in this way:
This approach which I propose first to explain, and only later to criticize, I call ‘historicism’. It is often encountered in discussions on the method of the social sciences; and it is often used without critical reflection, or even taken for granted. What I mean by ‘historicism’ will be explained at length in this study. It will be enough if I say here that I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ’laws" or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history. Since I am convinced that such historicist doctrines of method are at bottom responsible for the unsatisfactory state of the theoretical social sciences (other than economic theory), my presentation of these doctrines is certainly not unbiased. [p3]
This is not at all what Frank Ankersmit, a practising historian at Groningen, or U.S. philosopher Maurice Mandelbaum (1971, 42), nor a host of others (see note 1) think is historicism (Ankersmit 2010). Popper’s target is not at all what I think of as a historical explanation (”historicism” is, like most -isms, a pejorative); while Mandelbaum’s definition is exactly what I was taught in historiography as the motivation for doing history.
Historicism I define here as the view that the nature of a thing lies in its history. … as Mandelbaum put it: ‘historicism is the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained through considering it in terms of the place it occupied and the role it played within a process of development’. Change is real, and any present mere abstraction. Obviously, if understood in this way historicism is the historian’s counterpart to the scientist’s scientism. For within the scientistic view only science can give us reliable knowledge of the things of this world – and insofar as its history has any relevance at all, it can be inferred from what the thing presently is like, as geologists can infer the earth’s history from its present state. Which clearly is the exact opposite of historicism. The obvious objection against this argument is that 1) both history and geology or astronomy rely on evidence and 2) that in both cases the evidence is given here and now. So that from the perspective of the inference from evidence to theory there should be no difference between the two types of discipline. But the equally obvious rejoinder to this objection is that it misrepresents history. Historians use their evidence for arguing from the past to the present (in order to establish a thing’s identity) and not the other way round, as is the case in geology and astronomy.
Two conclusions follow from this. In the first place that historicism and scientism mutually exclude each other: one cannot consistently embrace the two of them at one and the same time – though at different times one could. And next, that no historian can avoid subscribing to historicism. For what could be the purpose of his activities possibly be if he rejects the historicist claim a thing’s nature or identity lies in its past? Only this gives sense and meaning to the historian’s efforts. [227–28]
When I studied the philosophy of history, I already had Popper’s notion in mind, but I too easily adopted it. In fact I would now call what he attacked positivist history, which is clear enough from the mention of Comte in his list of villains. But there is another attack made upon “historicism”: that is is an instance of the genetic fallacy: that the truth or validity of a proposition is derived, in whole or in part, by its origin. But in my intellectual history of species, I quite explicitly do not make out a “true” sense or definition of the term and concept. I have my preferences, as is expressed in my new edition, but the history itself is about the historical development of a notion that plays a central role in the past 300 years or so of natural history, leading to biological discussions of the units of life sciences. Even in my 2009 edition of Species, I wrote
I seek absolution from each of these three professions—philosophy, history, and biology. I believe I can show there is a basic error involved in the essentialism story that can be resolved by a conceptual history. Scientific history is at least partially conceptual, so I don’t think it is illicit to write a conceptual history. But the conceptual history of an idea? That might be too much. Well, this is not exactly the history of an idea. It is a combined history of various ideas and words that have a subtle ambiguity in philosophy and biology. And it is my claim that this ambiguity has confused the present debate over species in both fields. [ix]
Snider’s chiding suggests absolution has not come. While we are mentioning Locke as a source in this debate, consider that he thought in philosophy it was
… ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge; which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences … [Epistle to the reader, Essay 1689/90]
In this era of the archaeology of knowledge, philosophy needs the history of ideas too.
A subsidiary problem has to do with knowledge that is both general and specific, or, as the neo-Platonist philosopher Wilhelm Windelband defined the matter, nomothetic (law-stating) and idiographic (specifics-describing) sciences:
… we have before us a purely methodological classification of the empirical sciences that is grounded upon sound logical concepts. The principle of classification is the formal property of the theoretical or cognitive objectives of the science in question. One kind of science is an inquiry into general laws. The other kind of science is an inquiry into specific historical facts. In the language of formal logic, the objective of the first kind of science is the general, apodictic judgment; the objective of the other kind of science is the singular, assertoric proposition. Thus this distinction connects with the most important and crucial relationship in the human understanding, the relationship which Socrates recognized as the fundamental nexus of all scientific thought: the relationship of the general to the particular.
…
The former disciplines are nomological sciences. The latter disciplines are sciences of process or sciences of the event. The nomological sciences are concerned with what is invariably the case. The sciences of process are concerned with what was once the case. If I may be permitted to introduce some new technical terms, scientific thought is nomothetic in the former case and idiographic in the latter case. [Wilhelm Windelbandt, Rectorial Address, Strasbourg, 1894 (Rektoratsreden der Universität Strassburg, 1894), 126, emphasis added]
This is the old question whether history is a science or an art (or psychological or phenomenal narrative). There’s a slew of literature about this, and it relies upon the distinction that some (maybe only one) science is universally true if it is true at all, while all other sciences are localised in time and space. For instance, psychology applies to a small group of organisms with central nervous systems on one planet in one stellar system between around 500 million years ago to now, while physics applies invariantly everywhere and everywhen. Hence, the universal science (physics of course) is explanatory but history is not, as it is just a narrative. And narratives are descriptions and descriptions explain nothing.
Opponents of this distinction say that explanations do, in fact arrive to us from the past, or at least our connections of past evidentiary statements to make a narrative. And some might snarkily say that physics has its limits, in the very early universe, and in black holes, and in the abstract (is mathematics natural and universal? etc.). And what about chemistry? Surely this is universal, subject to the right (universally obtainable) boundary conditions. If it is, then what about organic or biochemistry? Is physics not universal because some items have orbits while others have hyperbolic trajectories? Yadda &c.
I would assert that all explanations are historical in some respect. I have said before, physicists only know what could be the case. Astronomers are required to know what actually is, and astronomy is an empirical and historical science, necessarily. Likewise we need history to understand the present, and no straightforward reductionism will explain anything of a contingent or localised nature.
The types of explanations historical accounts provide is too big to fit in the margins of this post, but I’ll maybe get back to it before I buy the farm.
Note
See Lee and Beck 1954, Iggers 1995 (ironically, a history of an idea), Lerner 1993 (a literary canon definition) and Hoover 1992.
References
Ankersmit, Frank. “The Necessity of Historicism.” Journal of the Philosophy of History 4, no. 2 (January 1, 2010): 226–40. https://doi.org/10.1163/187226310X509547.
Hoover, Dwight W. “The New Historicism.” The History Teacher 25, no. 3 (1992): 355–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/494247.
Iggers, Georg G. “Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term.” Journal of the History of Ideas 56, no. 1 (1995): 129–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/2710011.
Lee, Dwight E., and Robert N. Beck. “The Meaning of ‘Historicism.’” The American Historical Review 59, no. 3 (1954): 568–77. https://doi.org/10.2307/1844717.
Lerner, Laurence. “Against Historicism.” New Literary History 24, no. 2 (1993): 273–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/469407.
Mandelbaum, Maurice. History, Man, & Reason, Baltimore and London 1971.
Popper, Karl R. The Poverty of Historicism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.
Snider, Alvin. Natural and Artificial Bodies in Early Modern England: Literature, Natural Philosophy, Objects. New York: Routledge, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315668918.
Wilkins, John S. Species: A History of the Idea. Species and Systematics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
———. Species: The Evolution of the Idea. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2018.
Windelband, Wilhelm. Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft. Strassburg: Heitz, 1904. http://archive.org/details/geschichteundnat01wind.
Windelband, Wilhelm, and Guy Oakes. “History and Natural Science.” History and Theory 19, no. 2 (1980): 165–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/2504797.