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The Intelligibility of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

W. H. Walsh
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In this paper I wish to discuss a problem which, though it has not in the recent past attracted the attention of many philosophers, nevertheless, in my opinion, belongs quite clearly to that branch of the subject which should rightly be called “philosophy of history”: the problem, namely, of history's intelligibility. Two main questions can be asked about this which it is important that philosophers should answer. The first is that of whether history is intelligible in the sense that we can find intelligible connections bètween all or any of its parts. The significance of this question is apparent enough; for has not one of the philosopher's most pressing problems since Hume's time been that of whether any such connections are traceable in the world of fact? It is true that almost every theory on this subject has been put forward after a consideration of the sphere of physical nature only; but because this procedure has been universally followed, it is not therefore to be accepted as right. For history too offers us facts, and it is at least possible that these differ in important ways from those to be met with in nature, with the result that we can discover other sorts of connection between them than those which the physical sciences recognize. The possibility would seem to be worth investigation, and it is with it that I shall be concerned in the first part of my paper. In the other half I deal with the second main question about historical intelligibility. Supposing that we can (as I argue we can) find some cases of historical events being intrinsically, i.e. intelligibly related, we can go on to ask whether history is intelligible in a more ultimate sense. Is history, we can now inquire, a thing which is essentially rational, or is the rationality we can find in it of a merely superficial character? To put the problem somewhat more fully, is the historian able to do more than see intrinsic connections between the events (or some of the events) which he investigates: can he go further and understand the course of history as a whole, so that he is able to say, in the popular phrases, that history “makes sense,” is “meaningful” and “has rhyme and reason” in it? It seems to me that this is a matter which certainly ought to be discussed by philosophers, if only for the assertion of history's rationality which some philosophers have made.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 17 , Issue 66 , April 1942 , pp. 128 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1942

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References

page 129 note 1 For this view compare Hume's, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, p. 83Google Scholar of Selby-Bigge's edition.

page 130 note 1 I introduce this term to mark the distinction, pointed out to me by Professor Price, between such things as a “history” of the rocks and a “history” of the weather. In the latter case we can construct only a plain narrative of successive happenings; in the former, where the operative laws are better known, we can produce a causal narrative. But in neither case do we get history proper.

page 131 note 1 In his British Academy lecture on Human Nature and Human History, pp. 12 ff. My debt to this in the first part of the present paper will be obvious.

page 132 note 1 I identify the sphere of physical nature here and elsewhere with the sphere of physics; perhaps rashly, since organisms are natural entities, and, as Kant made clear, cannot be explained by purely efficient causation. But even with biologists teleological judgments are not, apparently, popular.

page 142 note 1 It may be thought that the confining of rational action to moral action is too dogmatic. But what other truly rational action can be pointed to? I do not deny that we sometimes say that a man acts rationally when he takes rational steps to attain whatever end he has set himself, but this is not the sort of rational action in which I am interested here.