Both Popper and Berlin formulate their philosophies of history in opposition to treating history like a science. Popper insists on history in the service of life, where it is incumbent upon every generation to reinterpret history for themselves. We can see his enthusiasm as a defense mechanism against historicist “misinterpretation,” of history as totalizing and objective. Berlin sustains the attack on historicism and speaks of the need for “sympathy and imagination” in order to engage in historical interpretation. He introduces a rumination on the role of language in history writing. Berlin’s semantic concerns anticipate Danto’s theory of narrative sentence with its insistence that language is always about interpretation. In demarcating the proper limits of historical interpretation and reinterpretation, Popper, Berlin and Danto tacitly assume that, philosophically speaking, we can know the past more perfectly than the present. We engage in historical analysis in order to escape the ignorant present.
In chapter 25 of The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper argues against viewing history as a natural science and advocates constant reinterpretation to safeguard against the dangerous “misinterpretation” known as “historicism.” Popper decries attempts to find eternal laws of historical development by which one can predict the future and holds any and all attempts at “objective history” to be not only flawed, but also dangerous. As he writes, “There can be no history of the past as it actually happened; there can only be historical interpretations, and none of them final; and every generation has a right to frame its own” (Popper, p. 255). He speaks of the possibility to having different yet complimentary viewpoints, “for since each generation has its own troubles and problems, and therefore its own interests and its own point of view, it follows that each generation has a right to look upon and re-interpret history in its own way, which is complementary to that of previous generations" (p. 254).
The danger with applying scientific techniques to historical thinking is the problem of misrepresentation. He traces this danger back to the logical positivists and talks of how their notion of progress in nature and science quickly spread to encompass other disciplines. Popper is willing to admit that, “history stands it a certain relation to science” and recommends we test our theories for falsifiable content. But he doubts strongly that applying scientific techniques will enable us to interpret history in a healthy fashion. "We see, therefore, that those universal laws which historical explanation uses provide no selective and unifying principle, no ‘point of view’ of history” (p. 252). Popper writes that history is by definition selective. This it appears in an inevitable result of the confrontation between infinite events and finite language: “In order to describe this infinite wealth, we have at our disposal only a finite number of a finite series of words” (p. 248). In history, we always take sides; we always have a point of view.
Interpretation is defined by Popper as a collection of facts that support a theory. Interpretations can never yield historical laws and Popper admonishes us to give up the "naïve belief that any definite set of historical records can ever be interpreted in one way only” (p. 253). He writes further, "“our only authority may give us just that information regarding certain events which fits with his own specific interpretation. Most specific interpretations of these facts we may attempt will then be circular in the sense that they must fit in with the interpretation, which was used in the original selection of facts. If, however, we can give to such material an interpretation which radically deviates from that adopted by our authority, then the character of our interpretation may perhaps take on some semblance to that of a scientific hypothesis. But fundamentally, it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that it is a very dubious argument in favour of a certain argument that it can be easily applied, and that it explains all we know; for only if we can look out for counter-examples can we test a theory” (253-4). Nonetheless, Popper is careful not to allow his pluralism cripple him against condemning the historicists, who he faults for setting out to find “the Path on which mankind is destined to walk; it is out to discover the Clue to History” (p. 256).
What do we expect from history? “We want to know how our troubles are related to the past and we want to see the line along which we may progress towards the solution of what we feel, and what we choose, to be our main tasks” (p. 255). According to Popper, we want knowledge of where we’ve been and indicators as to where we’re headed. History qua history has no meaning. It only assumes meaning when we interpret it. “Although history has no ends, we can impose these ends of ours upon it; and although history has no meaning, we can give it a meaning…it is we who introduce purpose and meaning into nature and into history.” In response to the historicists, Popper says, “History can’t progress, only we can.”
In his essay, “The Concept of Scientific History,” Isaiah Berlin writes that history is about ‘prediction and retrodiction’. Berlin lectures us on how to engage most effectively in historical interpretation. Theory confirmation is not the place of history. It is the disciple of inclusion, rather than exclusion. We look for differences, rather than similarities. Those patterns we perceive in history, says Berlin, are founts of knowledge. History is the discipline of generalization and selectivity. That said, Berlin is not anti-historicist to the extent of Popper and he reserves some kind words for Marx and Kant, whom he calls men of “deep insight and genius.”
Perhaps the most surprising element of Berlin’s analysis is his definition of history. He defines history as doing all we can to make the past make sense. In order to engage in true historical interpretation, though, we need an ample capacity of sympathy and imagination. “[W]e cannot evade the task of interpretation, for nothing counts as an historical interpretation, unless it attempts to answer the question of how the world must have looked to other individuals or societies if their acts and words are to be taken as the acts and words of human being neither wholly like ourselves nor so different as not to fit into our common past. Without a capacity for sympathy and imagination beyond any required by a physician, there is no vision of either past or present, neither of others nor of ourselves; but where it is wholly lacking, ordinary – as well as historical – thinking cannot function at all” (p. 44). This turn recalls Collingwood’s empathy theory to a point. Berlin seems to be painting in broader strokes by prescribing sympathy and imagination as transcendental preconditions for any sort of historical knowledge whatsoever.
The meaning of history for Berlin is much less grandiose than a Popperian injunction: “The immediate purpose of narrative historians (as has often been repeated) whatever else it may be besides this, is to paint a portrait of a situation or a process, which, like all portraits, seek to capture the unique pattern and peculiar characteristics of its particular subject.” (p. 31) Elsewhere he writes, “History is merely the mental projection into the past of this activity of selection and adjustment, the search of coherence and unity, together with the attempt to refine it with all the self-consciousness of which we are capable, by bringing to its aid everything that we conceive to be useful” (p. 41).
Like Popper, Berlin is fascinated by the relation between language and history. He speaks of how history requires that language aid it, and make it coherent and interpretive. He writes: “In a developed work of natural science…the links between the propositions are, or should be, logically obvious…This is very far from being the case in even the best, most convincing, rigorously argued works of history. No student of the subject can, I think, fail to note the abundance in works of history of such phrases as ‘Small wonder if, ‘It was therefore hardly surprising when,’ ‘The inevitable consequences swiftly followed,’ ‘events took their inexorable course,’ ‘In the circumstances,’ ‘From this is was but a short step to,’ and most often of all, the indispensable, scarcely noticeable and deeply treacherous ‘thus’, ‘whereupon’ ‘finally’ and the like.” (p. 21) These concerns anticipate Danto and his theory of narrative sentences.
While Arthur Danto’s essay Narrative and Style” is concerned primarily with art, we can easily apply what he says about narrative sentences to the realm of historical discourse. The main point is that language is always about interpretation. It stands to reason, then, that history, defined as a form of representation with the aim of bridging past and present, must rely on language to an extent unsuspected by Popper and Berlin.
Danto’s theory of narrative sentences is elaborated via a distinction between fixed causal continuity and an ever-changing semantic continuity with a deep interpretive element. Danto defines narrative sentences as “sentences by which an earlier event is described with reference to a later one, yielding thereby descriptions under which events cannot have been witnessed at the time of their occurrence, for whatever reason it is that their future was hidden to those who might have witnessed them” (Danto, p.201). In case we are troubled by the seemingly hopelessly anachronistic flavor of this language, Danto reassures us that “We have no difficulty with them, however, since their future is our past, which the narrative sentence serves to organize under narrative structure.” He further allows that certain narrative sentences can make claims on the future, without making historical claims. In order to make historical claims on the future, however, one requires either hindsight or revelation! As he writes, “The difference between a future we feel we have a right to expect and a future we have no right to expect and cannot even formulate, may merely be indexed to different levels of ignorance rather than difference orders of change” (Danto, p. 203).
Danto makes much of the basic narrative structure of history, contrasting it carefully with a causal chain: “There has to be a difference, one feels, between the end of a narrative and the latest link in a causal chain, even if the causal chain terminates with it” (p. 205). Danto draws our attention to the fact that “Historical knowledge always seems more than human knowledge” (p. 204). That this is so is testament to the incredible force of narrative. He writes that, “ends of stories belong to stories, not to reality” and quotes Carrier as saying “You can tell a story ending wherever you choose about whatever you wish.” The idea here is that depending on the goals we have in store for history, our starting and end points will be different.
Danto’s analysis of narrative sentences has telling implications for our understanding of historical interpretation. The very notion that there can be times in the present when we can’t utter certain sentences implies that all our interpretation must be, in a sense, reinterpretation. The moral Danto seems to formulate is that we can know where we have been, but never where we are.
While this seems a far cry from both the Popperian duty of “re-framing” history and infusing it with meaning, as well as the “prediction and retrodiction” of Berlin, we mustn’t see the move in Danto as removing history from the service of life. Rather, the narrative inevitabilities and constraints he illuminates for us are a further means of distinguishing between proper and improper modes of historical interpretation. Here a common goal emerges for this triumvirate of thinkers: to steer us clear of the error of misinterpretation and anachronism.
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