Objectivity In History

Objectivity in History

First exposure to history, whether it be at home or at school, will almost certainly be at an age when the child can do no other than expect to be told the truth.

So, from the very beginning, whether we find history dull or exciting, easy or hard, we do at least assume that we are being given an accurate account of the past. Our subsequent growing up can be seen as a process of progressively shedding the literal beliefs of early life, from Father Christmas and Easter Bunny, to parental infallibility and perhaps religion; the literal truth of the history we learn could be regarded as a further casualty along that road. I wonder, though, whether we ever quite shake off the feeling that if a book or a film claims to be historical, then it should represent the past as it indeed was. To take a topical example, is it only British national pride which is offended when American film makers rewrite the history of the last war to the greater glory of the United States? Or are we feeling what we may later learn of Montesquieu, who wrote of Voltaire that the latter was "comme les moines, qui n'écrivent pas pour le sujet qu'ils traitent, mais pour la gloire de leur ordre"?

There is indeed much that we have to learn if we aspire to knowledge of history and of the philosophy behind it, but we will with great probability come to the subject sharing this almost universal prejudice that we have a right to believe what is presented as history. Perhaps an early doubt will creep in when we are told that the very word "history" is the Greek for "inquiry", a doubt quickly strengthened by the most superficial reflection on the frightening ease with which we can and often do misunderstand things we are told in our daily...

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...posure to the ideas of Henri Bergson, aided by an interest in Proust, may encourage the student of the philosophy of history to ponder the relationship between past and present. The present, thought Bergson, is really just a constantly changing update of the past; it contains all of the past. Careful study and analysis of the present, or by extension of any event or point in the past, can therefore reveal aspects of the more distant past, and can go some way to explain the nature of that event or point in time. Much of Proust's great novel consists of this fluid movement through time, showing how past events can become clearer when subjected to the scrutiny of later years and changed attitudes.

By learning and by reflection therefore, while accepting that good history will not be entirely objective, we come to understand that it can nonetheless be good history.