on 'What is History' by E.H. Carr

I have been assigned the reading 'What is History' by EH Carr. This is my interpretation of the first chapter as I attempt to make sense of it in my head. 

The chapter is arranged quite similarly to a dialectical movement that flows through different phases. In the beginning, the author presents a dilemma, two opposing views: That of Lord Acton and that of George Clark - differentiated only by a span of 60 years. 

Where acton represents the 'optimism' and 'clear-mindedness' characteristic of the end of the Victorian Age, Clark represents a pessimistic view, expressing concern about whether an 'ultimate history' could exist at all and whether any serious historian of their times would consider it a tractable problem to solve. 

In the backdrop of this contradiction, which the reader must hold in their heads, the author raises the question 'What is history' which we slowly start a dialectical movement into. 

However, what we start with first is 'the common sense view of history' - perhaps paralleling the beginning of the dialectic in substantial life. This view is informed by the Empiricist epistemology that prevails in Britain in the era the author is writing in. It is also espoused by the Rankian Tradition - to show it as it was. There is a hegemony of facts and fact based history - mirroring the movements in the theory of knowledge in these times. 

To consider history as a collection of facts, which would weave together into a story if we connected and collected enough disparate datums - to consider facts as impartial units of information gained by the observer in a mechanistic, and dualistic universe where there is a rigid boundary between the subject and the object - seems like an enticing approach to the layman. Hence, the comparison to sense impressions in an empiricist epistemology. 

However, it is not that easy. While reassuring the reader about the facts - comparing it to the concrete on which one builds a house, the author goes on to deconstruct their fetishization. Using an example from Pirandello, he says that facts cannot speak for themselves. A fact, in the sense of a recorded phenomena - such as the murder of a man in victorian england witnessed after a bar fight - becomes 'historical' only in the historian's account. 

In a marxist sense, history then becomes an active process - and doing history corresponds to creating a 'selective system of cognitive orientation to reality'. This inner essence that the author seeks to capture, of how the historian animates a once observed phenomena by probing it through the perspective of creating a coherent narrative out of it - may be read in a Jungian sense as projecting the psychic power of contemporary dominant archetypes and interpretations onto it or in a marxist sense as a sensuous process of our cognitive faculties, thus making it labour. 

But the problems with the common sense view don't necessarily end with its insistence that a collection of facts will give an unbiased and final account. By treating the facts it reads as essentially innocent, it fails to take into account the 'fact' that these came into being through the development of a historical process. 

There is a bias for facts in the accounts of the different historians one reads to create their own understanding, which may be accounted for (rather crudely) by considering the material and historical conditions in which the piece of writing was created. However, perhaps more importantly, there is a survivorship bias for the facts themselves. We only know Greece through the eyes of Athenians, or that Medeivals were religious because that is what they wanted to be written about themselves. Fetishizing documentation selects for the classes who actually had access to education and the leisure time to engage in writing about themselves. 

As an aside, this can recursively be applied to the author of this manuscript itself. Though he does not fall to the common pitfalls of universalization, or orientalist views (even though he holds Macaulay in high regard), the manuscript still seeks to be a sole authority on the question. From a postcolonial or subaltern critique, the contemporary historian must now have some recognition of the fact that some stories are not his to tell, and would be better represented by others on that platform. 

To explain this idea the author gives an example of Stresseman and Bernhard from the Weimar Republic. The diplomat never published his work while he was alive, but documents and journals from his whole life were condensed into three volumes by his assistant. Notwithstanding the fact that he probably only recorded what he perceived as career successes, when it got translated to english, it got condensed further. This ended up cutting out essential parts of his interactions with the Foreign Policy diplomats of the east - because that was something that was less important for the interpreters. What is considered as noise and signal by different people influences the temporal propagation of the historical signal of some labour.

Due to this, it is important to study the historian before one studies their history - To view the present they see and the future they envision as a backdrop for the past they shed a light on - because, as the author says, the facts are never pure, they are always refracted through the lens of the one who studies them. 

To wrap up this movement of contradiction within a fact based views the author presents Collingwood's view as the synthesis - History is 'not the past by itself' nor is it 'the ideas by themselves' but a 'relation between the two. All history is a history of thought in his opinion. Doing history then is re-enacting in our mind the historical progress of the thought we are studying. This is a sentiment with very marxist vibes - yet I also observed here an internal contradiction that was not resolved. If it is true that we cannot do such history without connecting with the mind of the people we are writing about, then why do we assume that they think through the same categories or have the same ontology and epistemology? This view is rather post/decolonial in its thinking and is something that I will have to think through carefully to not fall into relativism. 

Relativism is one of the pitfalls the author mentions with a naive reading of Collingwood's view - to think that everything is possible and all of it is history. The other more sinister pitfall is that of reducing it to Pragmatizing and powerplay. To selectively read onto history a narrative that powers your current limited perspective. 

The resolution to this is seen in the movement the author mentions - a certain tension is necessary between the historian and his history - 'to continuously mould his facts to his interpretations and his interpretations to his facts'. And it is this active tension in doing history that is best captured by the author's conclusion - history is a 'continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past'.