Following up on my post about thinking historically, here are some further reflections on the methodological insights (and, to my mind, shortcomings) of my favorite historian, David Hackett Fischer.
As noted last time, Fischer is an empiricist who is quite leery of philosophizing, moralizing, essentialism, metahistory, the drive for certainty, the holist desire for completeness, attempts at explaining why things happened the way they did, and so on; he is much more comfortable describing a few of the "infinite number" of "factual patterns" that can be "superimposed upon past events" (Fischer 1970, p. 70). He goes on to say: "A historian's task is to find patterns which are more relevant to his problems, and more accurate and more comprehensive than others, but he cannot hope to find that 'essential' pattern..." (ibid.).
I sense a few difficulties here. First, I'm skeptical that there is literally an infinite number of patterns to be found in the facts of the past; instead, it seems to me that at any one time there are only a few patterns under serious consideration to explain a given historical phenomenon (say, the American Revolution or, more concretely, the development among the colonists of a self-perception that they were "Americans"). Second, Fischer's criterion of comprehensiveness sounds rather similar to the habit of holism that he has criticized in others as a fallacy. Third, Fischer's criterion of accuracy sounds rather similar to doing justice to the reality ("essential" or otherwise) of past events.
Indeed, slightly later in his book Historians' Fallacies, Fischer defines history as "an empirical search for external truths, and for the best, most complete, and most profound external truths, in a maximal corresponding relationship with the absolute reality of past events" (Fischer 1970, p. 87).
As I see it, accuracy, completeness, and profundity are aspirational ideals for the working historian (including the historian of ideas, which to some extent I try to be in my books on philosophers like Nietzsche, Epicurus, and Thoreau). Every researcher who is at all realistic knows that no one work can explain past events in a way that is entirely accurate, fully complete, and profoundly meaningful - yet, even so, we can try our best to achieve those ideals in our historical investigations.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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