Trevor BurrowsJan 14, 2025

"... and [I] have come to the conclusion that #logic and #history are two distinct ways (and perhaps the only ways) of apprehending 'reality'; history being, however, the more comprehensive, since there is no logic of history but [there] is a very interesting history of logic.
[...]
To me, nothing can be duller than historical facts; nothing more interesting than the service they can be made to render in the effort to solve the everlasting riddle of human existence."

Carl Becker, Letter to Frederick Jackson Turner, May 16, 1910

#WhyHistory #HistoricalThinking #ReadingNotes

Show threadTrevor BurrowsJan 18, 2025

Pinning this bc apparently I *am* going to read more and write more about Becker, lol.

That letter to Frederick Jackson Turner led me to Becker's famous "Detachment and the Writing of History," published the same year. I've read this before but probably early grad school? It's been a long time.

Holy crap, what a fascinating essay, both for its time and in our *present* time, like literally, right now.

I was able to download a pdf here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1910/10/detachment-and-the-writing-of-history/644705/

#PhilosophyOfHistory #HistoricalThinking #WhyHistory #ReadingNotes #CarlBecker

Detachment and the Writing of History

The Atlantic
Show threadTrevor BurrowsJan 18, 2025

I have a lot of random thoughts about this piece and I'm not going to try to piece them together into something coherent right now. Just some random quotes and scribbles:

First, Becker has a number of whopper quotes here, but I think this one takes the cake:

“… there is in truth no unit fact in history. The historical reality is continuous, and infinitely complex; and the cold hard facts into which it is said to be analyzed are not concrete portions of the reality, but only aspects of it. The reality of history has forever disappeared, and the ‘facts’ of history, whatever they once were, are only mental images or pictures which the historian makes in order to comprehend it.”

No unit fact in history --- that is way more bold a statement than I remembered!

Show threadTrevor BurrowsJan 18, 2025

The larger point of the essay - or one of its larger points - is that there is no escaping the present for the historian. The ideal of detachment is an illusion - one that, he says, is very much of our age.

That general idea also leads to some whoppers, but this might be the biggest:

“The ‘facts’ of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them, and into every fact that he creates some part of his individual experience must enter.”

Show threadTrevor BurrowsJan 18, 2025

Becker's smart move here is this very close-up consideration of the idealized historical process, from collecting and taking apart sources, identifying theoretically relevant facts, and assembling them into something larger.

But he uses this to ultimately argue that, no matter how one cuts it, the historian has to play the role of selector, which is really the role of interpreter. And because history is continuous, and we are a part of history, our assessment must reflect our particular moment in time.

“Unfortunately, the historian and his concepts are a part of the very process he would interpret; the end of that process is ever changing, and the historian will scarcely avoid changing with it[…]”

Show threadTrevor BurrowsJan 18, 2025

oh, he delivers a super suave line in distinguishing the components of study (historical facts, as visualized on notecards) from history:

"a case full of [note]cards may be magnificent, but it is not history"

Show threadTrevor BurrowsJan 18, 2025

Ok, three more things I want to put down here, two of which are sort of asides he makes that I think are just brilliant and are #ThingsThatMakeYouGoHmm:

First, he invites us to imagine the *child as historian*, albeit indirectly.

He (correctly, I think) says that historians are more comfortable, more successful even, when dealing with periods closest in thought and action to their own. Those that are "strange and remote" are harder to translate, in essence. He uses the example of religion and the Middle Ages: historians explain away the monasteries as economic institutions, or a saint's weird behavior as pathological, because our age struggles with "the religious motive."

Show threadTrevor Burrows

And it is here that he suggests a child has no such qualms:

"For the normal child, St. Simeon would be perhaps one of the least remote objects of the whole Middle Age, because the child, even the twentieth century child, lives in a world which we do not know, and which we are therefore pleased to call the world of fancy. The child is, in fact, perfectly detached from all those dull practical interests with which mature men are so preoccupied. He is as indifferent to them as if he did indeed live in another planet; and yet he makes a synthesis of the historical reality that would fail to satisfy, I suppose, even M. Renan."

I love this, have nothing more to add to it, just love it.

Jan 18, 2025 at 2:36pmWeb
Show threadTrevor BurrowsJan 18, 2025

Second of final three notes:
In a brief aside about sources, he hits really profoundly at the problem we now have, when historical sources are so abundant, seemingly so exhaustive.

No amount of notecards - not even a "wilderness of slips" - could adequately capture and analyze those sources.

And he hits on this paradox, noting that the more sources we have, the harder it gets to fulfill history-as-science bc of its impossibility:

“if scientific history is inseparable from complete analysis of the sources, we are confronted with the disquieting paradox that the less knowledge we have of history the more scientific that knowledge becomes”

Jeezy creezy that's good.

Show threadTrevor BurrowsJan 18, 2025

And the last observation: as mentioned above, Becker really leans into the idea that the theoretical ideal of detachment in history is a reflection (symptom?) of our time.

This is where I couldn't help but feel like it speaks to our moment, esp. in the US. He closes with the suggestion that detachment may not reign as an ideal forever, as, indeed, it has not always been the motivating principle of historians:

“The state of mind best calculated to find out exactly what happened is perhaps incompatible with a disposition to care greatly what it is that happened; and whatever value the notion of detachment may have just now, the time may come -- there have been such times in the past -- when it is most important that everyone should care greatly what happens.”

And he ends with a bit of uncertainty. I interpret it as asking: even if objectivity is impossible, what happens when objectivity as an ideal slips away? What sort of histories, then, will that make?

Show threadTrevor BurrowsJan 18, 2025

I want to come back to this later and try to make something more coherent out of it all, but it was a great re-read, some fifteen years after I probably first read it, and one that feels in tune with larger questions we are wrestling with now.

(Also, lots of notes on religion in history/religious history here, which itself is really interesting.)

Ok, done with this for the moment, but keeping this thread pinned as my Becker thread, since apparently that's a thing I'm doing.