By Sebastian Sârbu.
True enough history may be defined as being the ,,magister vitae”, as the sage old men from ancient times coined this paradigmatic vision.
Far from operate with hollow assertions, we should subject to the critical thinking, scientific examination the arguments by which we try to prove that history is truly an objective science, therefore a ,,magister vitae”.
Let’s pretend we don’t try to apotheotically endorse, the way we may still find in the speciality literature, the fact that history is the perpetual checkmate of the other sciences, we shall engage an approach meant to support the interest of science, beyond the sectarian positions, quite marginal actually which shrink the history down to a brand new species of relativism, a cultural one, applied to the global shifts, but nihilist at its core.
From gnoseological angle history gets in its crosshairs the cognitive modelling of the reality starting from down to earth ontological context and re-configuring the empirical data in agreement with the positive laws, the only ones which may provide the instruments of the objectivity and for probing the concrete.
While from a social angle, however, history as a science is focused on anthropological knowledge, researching the collective mentality, compressing time and pursuing in all this time the causal ratio which connects the events one to each other.
From ethical angle history is also bent to reset and re-settle if the human truth, by way of suspending the sequential order of the natural – causal and temporary, and granting of a utterly novel and universal dimension of heroic type, or mythical or else on the contrary the safeguarding of the human truth often prerequisite antagonisms, which by personification and actual stripping the action off its objective elements, are portrayed the actors here involved both antithetically and profoundly characteriologically. In this case subjectivity heightens whereas the probability lessens, and thus the venture is limited, the way time was compressed.
The various cultural constructs, the philosophical trends, social doctrines, interdisciplinary theories, schools of thinking, political ideologies have sought to found a paradigm, an ex cathedra working frame, and sometime extra cathedra of history which has been and still is regarded as an integrated science, if not altogether sub-tired to other sciences or progressist ideologies which , like in some chemistry laboratory is testing models and practices in the scientific approach putting on airs of mathematics and Kantian starched formalism.
In this case it is classical the example of the methodical – scientific failure to represent the dynamic – evolutionary representation of the historical reality like some linear course of running the events, whereof, here, the political accolade paid as a tribute to the ,,progress of civilisation”.
From this stand point, we rather back the theory of social – historical discontinuities, starting from a widely acknowledged fact that the world in itself is a dynamic system rather obeying the laws of dynamics and nor the statistical – mathematical laws neither the deterministic ones.
To determine, means nothing else but measuring and assert as being true whatever is here to be proved. The basis for induction for history represents a reverse process or asymmetric of cognition, the one that starts from effect back to cause, from experience to knowledge.
This represents of course the positivist method of analysis and research which is valid up to the point where rebuking its own objective venture, it falls into the formal logic sin of reductionist species, that it does not transcend.
At the same time, unlike the scientific knowledge, the empirical knowledge, is contradictory, subjective, relative and limited to just a particular slice of existence, down to a tightly contained case.
The scientific knowledge, however, on the contrary is universal, united, objective. Yet the outcome of both should be addressed based on criteria, methods and practices which pertain to the cognitive subject’s capacity, who is himself part of the reality it quantifies. So, if we quit applying of linear methods or lab-type ones when researching scientifically of the phenomena and the historical processes, we’ll find out that the historian’s mission is not to build up hypothesis, laws or new theories, having the aim of mathematically prove them accurate, or else of influencing the historical thinking hampered by the objectivity complex sprung off the wish to address history systematically.
The proto-chronism sin cannot lead to invoking an original sin turned hereditary by the way in which the nostalgia of paradise allegedly pre-existent into the human DNA, leads, from the intellectual angle, to either perpetuation or not of the primeval, more carnal faults, and these should manifest in continuation to those who would promote the cosmopolitanism. It is as if the de-constructivist theory would be mistaken for an actual de-construction of the concrete world, a token telltale of lack of accurate focus, or a theory of conspiratorial plots, which always surface from the hollow abysses flawing some theories popping up in the way of the cultural trend of establishing a general guideline in the knowledge of history, therefore of contextualisation only of what we use to call history in itself, or a historical phenomenon in itself.
We further retain the aspect that in our clarifying and cathartic efforts from the stand point of simplifying the common watcher’s comprehension on the history lived and narrated, shall only have relevance the history in itself, before approaching the actually lived history, the historical phenomenon in its space – temporality.
And this may be understood by only the fact that what we use to call ‘claimed knowledge’ originated in the common sense, as a Berkeleyan species, must be supported in the scientific circles by those evidences, which do not pertain to the rational discursiveness or some formal logic exercise.
There are nations where oral tradition plays a major role in what is called education to form and fundamental of knowledge, implicitly that grammar of persuasion, starting from symbolics and imagology.
However these instruments are very easy to use for manipulation and dismantling of the collective mental.
For the idealist Germany, whose prominent leading mind was in his time Hegel the philosopher, the idea, the deep set feel as sensitive certitude, the immaterial ideal stood at the foundation of history, of the very onset and the building up of the world. Even the State itself was looked at rather dogmatically, idyllically by Hegel who has set its worth as being a divine institution, and as a consequence the topmost product at a historical scale of the Universal Reason. Just thinking about, how this concept basically is not different from the ancient world’s philosophy, from stoicism. And again, history, as history looked at through the eyepiece of the cultural anthropology, shows us how these nations which benefited from a protected historic millieu, under economic, military and political pressure developed that philosophy, axiology, moral and educational paradigm in agreement with its own life psychology, but also jointly with the material and social existence conditions.
K.Marx supported the opposite namely that the idea, the culture, the conscience are determined by the economic, the social-historical millieu, the material basics.
From this point of view Marx had the right hunch, but he looked on the fatality of the material conditions on human society, failing to be realist and failing to see that the economic in itself is not wrapped in a compact packet, a fated gift, but each society in various successive historical periods developed its own custom-made economic model depending on the political ideology and the values system by which he conceived the constitutional order and the social organisation type.
Therefore history should have to be regarded through the prism of the two co-ordinates: education and science, conditioned by the social – historical practice itself; and due to the fact that culture is always a product of the spiritual heredity of a nation of ideas’ biography and the genesis of institutions, bespeaking about the national character echoed in all aspects of the public life.
History, therefore, is not just an autonomous science but an institution subjected to changes itself seeks to spot and quantify, to rationalize using specific means.
Karl Popper developed his own theory of science, where he proved that, this being a valid cognitive principle where the objective reality is concerned, a hypothesis could also be put to the test of negation and not just exclusively to the confirmation bench test.
In this regard he provided as an example the Marxism, which as a historical reality was the result of an exclusive confirmation, whereas the positivist laws of science and also mainstays of the universal evolution flagged this as an anti-natural conscience flaw, its implementation without taking into account the claim stated by us namely that the historian’s venture is not to just build up hypothesis, experimental models, or law arrays to serve the purpose of some political ideology, but to take into account the stark reality whose main agent is the human being, acting as a proactive subject builder of the reality.
Dismantling the conspiracy of history, Popper, unwillingly expressed himself like a true historian, who beside and beyond turning the history reality into a relative issue, he made a relative issue out of the very cognitive mode and doing so he most sincerely he expressed his ice-cold, objective, demystifying approach in what concerns not only history but also those who tinkers and tampers with it in order to just accept the harness of some ideology and make it beyond its natural laws.
