Musings on history (1): History and experience.
Oh, what is history? As someone who aspires to write history, this happens to be a question of rather particular relevance. Indeed, it is also something I do even enjoy musing about, but I also do not possess the sufficient leisure of time to pursue to the extent I would like to. Which is unfortunate: after all, would it not be much more reassuring to confidently know what one does before one does it? But then, can there even be a definite answer to this initial question? When asking, “What is history?”, one can expect numerous answers. Some might reply, “History is what happened in the past.” This, perhaps, overly common view does betray a certain naivety, since, in a sense, this equates history with the past. It also devaluates the historian’s craft to that of the task of mere description, expressing an idea of history as being a faithful reconstruction of the past: history as the mimetic representation of a long-gone reality. (As if that even were possible!) Some might ...