[WARNING: When I started this post I had a thesis in mind and began with every intention to argue in its defense; by the end, however, it was clear that argument had collapsed into pure ramble. But it might still be an interesting ramble, in any case.]
This last weekend I attended a lecture titled “R. G. Collingwood’s Idealist Answer to the Kantian Question: How is Historical Knowledge Possible?” I will admit that I had never heard of Collingwood and my familiarity with Idealism is more or less limited to a few dead Germans from the 18th and 19th centuries; to be honest, I only attended the lecture at Patrick’s suggestion—and he was only intrigued by the word “history” in the title, the only such paper offered at the Midsouth Conference.
The details of the paper aren’t really relevant here—don’t get me wrong, I was fascinated to learn of an English philosopher who resisted the contemporary (and current, if my meager impression of Analytic philosophy is at all indicative) tendency to restrict epistemological discourse to treatments of scientific knowledge. In fact, his insistence upon the importance of and devotion to considerations historical knowledge are in my eyes characteristic of the sort of territory familiar to continentalists but relatively neglected—even uncharted—in the work and thought of most anglo-american philosophers whom I’ve encountered.
However, it was the Q&A portion of the presentation that really piqued my interest, the aftermath of which I hope to articulate and resolve here. The commentator offered the speaker a thought experiment: did the Rosetta Stone bear a meaningful relation to the symbols inscribed on its surface prior to its having been unearthed? The Kantian commentator, the Collingwoodian speaker, and a Hegelian audience member proposed, respectively, that…
…the Rosetta Stone ceaselessly translates the languages inscribed, with or without the human interpretation of an historian.
…the Rosetta Stone, after being forgotten and prior to being rediscovered, was unable to be interpreted, and thus did not belong to history. No such relation between it and its languages can be determined.
…any consideration of the undiscovered Rosetta Stone is a projection of subjectivity, the introduction of the historian. A history is interpreted and extended over the “gap” in the stone’s past.
While the latter two responses are compatible, the first on the part of the Kantian is problematic. In his comments, the Kantian expressed that, above all, the weasliest account of the Rosetta Stone is the position that the stone remains in-itself interpretable in the absence of an interpreter—the linguistic properties of its surface inward reflected as indeterminate matter indifferent to its particular form or external relation (the presence or absence of a human translator). But what does his own response mean—that the stone continues to translate, even if buried and forgotten—if not that the stone’s interpretability or being reflected into another remains indifferent to its particular external relation? Whether or not this response is correct in the final analysis, it is clear that, by the commentator’s standards, his own position is the weasliest.
The speaker’s reminder that Collingwood distinguishes the history from the past is particularly elucidating for Collingwood’s foremost contention: that scientific knowledge is always also historical knowledge. Well, maybe not so elucidating, because for me it only raises further questions: does he mean that, in the same way that things become historical evidence and signal a new space for meaningful relations, scientific evidence similarly introduces new dimension in what was benign, meaningless space? Does he mean that the logic of scientific discovery is itself historical in its development? Does he mean that—similar to Kuhn, Latour, Foucault—science is no neutral domain, but rather is conditioned and responsive to certain social/historical developments or paradigms? However we understand this relationship between history and science, the past is the real unknowable for consciousness—not because it is noumenal or obfuscated by appearance, but because it has already transpired. Whatever the amount of evidence or intensity of historical research, the angle of approach of thought towards the past is asymptotic. In addition to its capacity or actuality in the present, any given object carries a second capacity to document, to carry a trace of its present by which historical imagination creates a coherent, meaningful story in another present.
But I really like the Hegelian’s response to the Rosetta Stone—the mere speculation upon a buried, forgotten artifact automatically means that the artifact has been unearthed, remembered; to talk about an non-interpreted object is to project a historian into a blind spot in our history. This is what Hegel means when he says that the thing-in-itself, the noumenon, is the most abstract understanding of the thing, and thus the most subjective. In plumbing the depths of a substance, in seeking it as it is noumenally, one is surprised to find subjectivity at the core of this conception of objectivity. This is the best example—the Kantian speculates about the objective relations between things outside of any human involvement, and the Hegelian retorts that such an endeavor is itself human involvement.
But this doesn’t really address the problem; after all, there is a clear point in time in which the Rosetta Stone becomes a part of human history: one day the Stone didn’t exist and the next day it did. Or, more precisely: one day the Stone did not figure into our interpretation of history and the next day it bore a meaningful relation to the languages on its surface, it became evidence. What is thus remarkable about evidence is that it is at bottom a creation ex nihilo—this is why Bruno Latour is justified to talk about Boyle’s development of the vacuum as the creation of an object, not only in the sense of mere invention, but understood as a true Event. The Event is an impossibility, an irrevocable rupture in the present understanding, an unforeseen violent shift in paradigm. The Event is a point of no return. In less obscure terms, the development of the vacuum meant the creation of the laboratory. The laboratory as Event could not be undone—one can’t just return to a moment in which trust was not conferred upon repeatable experiments in controlled environments. Is this what Collingwood means when he says that all scientific knowledge is historical knowledge?
I don’t have the stamina for writing. I had planned on eventually making a case for psychoanalysis (because it takes as its point of departure the “(hi)stories” that we tell ourselves about ourselves). But this post is already getting too far afield—and I’d happily write about psychoanalysis on another occasion.
I don’t feel too bad for not having a conclusion—the whole point of this blog is just to get into the habit of writing, right?
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