The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment

Abstract

The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment Hayden White It IS CONVENTIONAL nowadays in any discussion of eigh­ teenth-century historical thought to make at least a small gesture in the direction of rebalancing the nineteenth-century charge that the Enlightenment was deficient in historical sensibility. And it would seem obligatory to make such a gesture in a discussion of the concept of the irrational in eighteenth-century historical think­ ing, for the nineteenth century’s indictment of the historical sensi­ bility of the age turns in large part on allegations regarding the Enlightener’s incapacity to entertain sympathetically any manifes­ tation of the irrational in past ages or cultures whose devotion to reason did not equal its own. But it seems to me that any analysis of eighteenth-century historical thinking which begins with the as­ sumption that the nineteenth century was justified in making the kind of criticism it did of the eighteenth century grants too much to the nineteenth-century historians’ conception of what a proper historical sensibility ought to he. It was Nietzsche who reminded his age that there are different kinds of historical sensibility, and that sympathy and tolerance are not necessarily the most desirable attributes for all historians in all situations. There are times, he said, in the lives of cultures no less than in the lives of individuals, when the 'proper” historical sensibility is marked by a selective forgetfulness rather than by an indiscriminant remembering. And part of his respect for the Enlightenment derived from his appre­ ciation of its willingness to practice "critical” history rather than 303 Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century the "monumental” and "antiquarian” varieties which constituted the historiographical orthodoxy of his own time. If we were to use Nietzsche’s terminology, we would be per­ mitted to say that the Enlightenment attitude towards the past was less ahistorical or unhistorical than "superhistorical,” willing to bring the past to the bar of judgment, to break it up and, when necessary, condemn it in the interests of present needs and the hope of a better life. To be sure, as even Nietzsche admitted, this willingness to "annihilate” the past is as dangerous in its way as that indiscriminate sympathy for old things just because they are old which is the sign of a culture grown stale. For once one be­ gins the work of annihilation, it is difficult to set a limit on it and to retrieve that reverence for roots and respect for the conserva­ tive virtues without which the human organism cannot survive. Still, for its time, the Enlightenment’s "superhistorical” attitude was as necessary as it was desirable, and its consistent hostility to unreason was not unproductive of significant historical insights. Without their uniquely "critical” approach to history, the En­ lighteners would not have been able to carry out their work of dismantling tired institutions and discrediting the authority of a tradition long since degenerated into mechanical routine. A criti­ cal approach to the historical record as given by tradition was a necessary precondition of the Enlighteners’ program for planting a second nature in place of the first, which had been willed to them by their predecessors as the sole possible form that any spe­ cifically human life might take. The principal charge against the Enlighteners is that their mili­ tant rationalism short-circuited any impulse to entertain sympa­ thetically and to judge tolerantly the many manifestations of the irrational that they found in the historical record, and especially in the records of the Middle Ages and remote antiquity. The charge is accurate enough as a description of the approach of the best historical thinkers of the age in the main line of rationalism —Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon— though it hardly does justice to representatives of the variant con­ vention—Leibniz, Vico, Moser, and Herder. But as a judgment suggesting a crucial limitation on the rationalists’ historical sense, 304 Symposium'. The Problem of Historical Knowledge it implicitly begs the question of the uses to which knowledge in general, and historical knowledge in particular, ought to be put. This question is ///^historiographical—having to do with the value that one assigns to...