Knowledge from Uncertainty: Ancient Thinking For Modern Historians

 

I should make it clear; this is not a work of scholarly analysis.  Readers will not find here a discussion of major postmodernists such as Frank Ankersmit (1989, 1990, 1995 & 2000) or Hayden White (1973, 1978 & 1995).  Neither will they find their opposers, Perez Zagorin (1990 &1999), Arthur Marwick (1991, 1995 & 2001), Gertrude Himmelfarb (1997 & 1992), Gabriel Spiegel (1990) or John Vincent (1995).

Even Richard Evans’ thoughtful work gets but a short comment.  And certainly this list is very far from exhaustive; there are many more areas that could have been discussed in disciplines other than history, not least Elizabeth Ermarth’s writings on postmodernism in English literature (1992) or Marshall Berman’s geographical focus (1982).  Derida is sometimes described as a postmodernist but as Christina Howells  points out, in her major study of his work, his focus is on deconstruction, which is a way of thinking, quite distinct from postmodernism (Howells:1999:2 & 6).  I shall  be discussing Derrida’s approach to knowledge, and that of poststructuralism, later in the book.

I have no desire to lock horns with postmodernists.  I do not wish to prove them wrong, even if that were possible.  At this stage I want only to explain why I decided that that their way of handling philosophical scepticism was not for me, that whilst like them, I took seriously sceptical questions about historical knowledge, for me postmodernism led to an absurd, untenable situation.

To that end, I have chosen, in this part of the book at least, to look at just one aspect of the postmodern challenge.  It is one, nonetheless, that has been at the centre of historical thinking in the UK in recent years; it concerns the work of Dr Keith Jenkins.  Keith retired in 2008 as Professor of History at the University of Chichester, but his seven books and many articles on this subject, puts him at the heart of historical postmodernism.  Moreover, it is an aspect of postmodernism of which I have a little knowledge, for during the 1980s and 90s, I played a small part in its development.  It was the experience of that part which prompted me later to go on to research scepticism in the ancient world and in the western tradition of philosophy, and thus to gain a position that I now think will be of interest to my fellow historians.  This chapter then, is necessarily autobiographical.

When I left business in 1978 and became a mature student, the college in which I carried out my undergraduate studies had been a teacher training establishment (the then West Sussex Institute of Higher Education); it had just expanded into the provision of university degrees and mine was the first intake in this new expanded role.  Despite its development into more general academic work, the department remained passionate about teacher education.  It was led by Prof. John Fines whose work on student active learning we discussed in the previous chapter.  I first met Keith Jenkins at this time when he was member of John Fines’ team and he taught me for some of my undergraduate studies.

After graduating and completing a Post graduate Certificate of Education, I went on to teach history for around 12 years at a Further Education College near Portsmouth – the South Downs College of Further Education.  There I became Head of History and College Access to Higher Education Co-ordinator.  During this time, I kept in touch with several members of my old history department at the Institute.

With Julia Perrin, my A Level teaching partner at South Downs, we worked with John Fines and Jon Nichols (of Exeter University) in trying out ideas about active learning in the classroom – principally with A level students.  I also collaborated with Dr Andrew Foster from the Institute, in developing alternatives to A levels for mature students.  Andrew was one of the prime movers of the Access to Higher Education movement across the South of England.  This was a hugely popular programme for older students – an alternative to A levels.  At one time, in just South Downs College alone, we had 200 Access students over a range of disciplines.  We shall be discussing this type of education, later in the book, for with Andrew and Julia, I was able to work at forms of philosophical and critical thinking that were common across disciplines.  For now though, the focus must be on Keith Jenkins, for it was my collaboration with him that kickstarted my formal research into scepticism in the western tradition.

Like John Fines, Keith Jenkins was much engaged in ideas about the teaching of history but from a different angle.   Where Fines and Nichol had been interested in the mechanics of teaching in the classroom – the ‘who does what and when’, so to speak – Keith Jenkins was more concerned with what might be in students’ minds when thinking historically.  Like Keith, I was passionately interested in philosophical scepticism in the sense of questioning whether humans can ever find certain knowledge in the past or indeed, in any aspect of human endeavour.  Keith’s background to this was a PhD in the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche followed by an interest in Marxism.  Mine had stemmed from years in business as an estate agent where, as is well known, value tends to be calculated on the basis of supply and demand …the so called ‘hidden hand’, rather than upon intrinsic worth.

The collaboration of Keith Jenkins and I, involved teaching, writing  and in delivering teacher education events.  In the early 1990s I returned from South Downs College to West Sussex Institute as a history lecturer, a co-ordinator of their mature students’ intake and for a while, its head of history, before moving to rural Devon to research full time.  During the years of my association with West Sussex Institute, it transitioned to University College Chichester and then to The University of Chichester, which it now is.

From Marxism to Postmodernism.

In those days – that is, from the second half of the 1980s and on into the 1990s, the Marxist world view fractured, as we discussed in the previous chapter.  The actual experience of living under conditions of Marxist communism had begun to be known in the West and Marxist ideas declined rapidly as an ideology of choice.  The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 really did signify its end and that had a major effect on political thought in the UK, including within academic history departments.  

Jenkins and I started to discuss how an approach to history that used a multiplicity of explanatory factors, might work.  We thought that to make a perfectly reasonable account of the past, all that was needed was to acknowledge the criteria that was being used to select the relevant facts that was being used in its creation.   We increasingly came to regard this as a postmodern approach, for the term had become widely popular during the 1990s and its central position across the arts was, like ours, sceptical of their being any truth to be revealed in any aspect of academia – that all there was, was coherence, probability and power to control discourses.  Such ideas were of course decried by traditionalists as abject subjectivism, but for us, ‘signing’ up to the label of postmodernism held out the promise of linking with a community of like-minded historians.

For example, a relatively recent (2004) paper in Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory & Practice,  by Prof. Robert A Rosenstone, shows that he had been travelling a similar road to us.  He too had developed his own ideas about the portrayal of the past, in his case through film.  Like us he worked out his own position and then adopted the label of postmodernism.  That position was very similar to ours. He explained,

The notion that historians constructed the stories of the past rather than found them in the data was also congenial, since that had increasingly been my own experience.

He went on to say that traditionalists

insist that more study in the archives and more analytic rigor will get us ever closer to the past as it really was.  But that past will always be filtered through and inflected by those elements which ensure slippage between the vanished word of the past and our written histories – and even more slippage when those histories are made up of traces from, or are translated into, different languages. (Rosenstone:Academia.edu:2023:23)

One can hear echoes of E.H. Carr here.  Whether in the arts, in history or in social science, all there was, according to this view, were positions, arguments and patterns found by knowledge makers, and dependent upon their methods and the criteria they applied to their raw material – their data.  It became ‘true’ by the degree of its acceptance by others.   None of it added up to any overall grand story of progress of human kind that we can take as being objectively true.  It was always theoretically open to further challenge.  And with the development of mass educated societies, it often was challenged in practice.  It was all piecemeal…incidental …chance.  We began casting modernist’s belief in the real objective truth of their utterances, as an approach to knowledge long outdated by an inherently sceptical postmodern era.  We agreed with the geographic postmodernist Marshall Berman (1982) who, like Jean-Francois Lyotard, argued that the coming of postmodernity was being driven by new information technology.  Actually, I still think that acknowledging one’s position is central to knowledge-making but, as we shall see later in this book, I do so for different reasons from those of the postmodernists.

The titles of our joint articles read almost as a summary of our work in those years as we moved towards what we called postmodernism. In 1986 there was ‘From Skillology to methodology’ and ‘Goodbye Skills’ as Jenkins and I moved on from thinking about history in relation to the practical or logical skills that historians demonstrated.  1988 saw five pieces relating to the development of methodological self awareness…’Historical facts and other problems’, ‘What sort of history for the core?’ (the ‘core’ was a prelude to the National Curriculum’), ‘Scrapping the old dichotomies – whose past’?, ‘On bias’ and ‘Teaching history in the Postmodern world’.   In 1989 there was ‘A contribution to the empathy debate’.   And in 1990, just before our thinking started to diverge, there were two more on similar topics, one on …again, ‘On skills and Content’ and the other on historical empathy.  This is where our writing collaboration ended for although we still worked and spent time together, and supported each other’s ideas to an extent, we were beginning to think differently about the nature of historical knowledge.

Doubt

The first sign of a problem for me was that it seemed we were holding our position against others, rather too fiercely.  I realised that in my teaching I was disparaging and thoroughly dismissing the empiricism of traditionalists.  Keith was more forthright.  I do not know whether it was the sharp opposition to postmodernism, or just to his way of expressing it, but there were hard words said on both sides.  Richard Evans, for example, noted with apparent approval, Arthur Marwick’s having referred to postmodern ideas as a ‘menace to serious study’ (1997:7) and he added himself that postmodernists were ‘intellectual barbarians at the disciplinary gates’… ‘loitering with distinctly hostile intent’ (p.8).  Jenkins for his part had claimed that ‘postmodernism is ‘precisely our condition; it is our fate’ (Jenkins:1995:6).  Later in the decade he described himself as ‘generous, quasi-transcendental, cross discursive, playful and radical’ and compared this account of himself to a description of Richard Evans as representing ‘practical, technical, “serious men” of the flat earth variety’ who were ‘suffering very badly from the “effects of gravity” ‘and who preside over a ‘meanspirited, often arrogant and dismissive discourse’ (Jenkins:1999;95).  It was a strange situation; as postmodernists we claimed to be representing an epistemologically open ended (ie. philosophically sceptical) position, yet here we were in danger of speaking like absolutists or even like religious zealots.

Gradually as the 1990s progressed, what had seemed earlier on as simply academic ‘knockabout’ or perhaps just a continuation of how Marxists would view their intellectual opponents as dire foes, began, for me at any rate, to change into something else.   Possibly the closest Keith and I came to agreeing with each other in those years, was represented by the first chapter (and only the first chapter) of Keith’s Rethinking History which was published in 1991.  He acknowledged my connexion to the ideas it embodied, at the outset of the first edition.  In this first chapter he regarded …rightly in my view, the philosophical scepticism at the heart of postmodern history to be emancipatory – a means of theoretically enabling students or people generally, to genuinely make sense of the past for themselves – rather as E H Carr had envisaged years before.  Thus, if history could be anything …in the sense that there was not a single true account of the past, then the past was susceptible to a variety of readings, provided they could be supported by reasonable argument.  On this basis we continued to work together on teacher training events, but our thinking was increasingly going in different directions.  During the 1990s, I was really quite conflicted; postmodernism still seemed the best expression of scepticism available, and it did still appear to be a sensible epistemology, but I was having doubts.

For a while I continued to promote postmodernism.  My articles of those years tell the story.  In 1992 there was ‘To be a sceptic’.  In ‘94’ ‘teaching postmodern history’.  By 1997 I was still exploring ways that postmodernism could provide a valid account of knowledge in the classroom through ‘Postmodern Access and the grading problem’.  Finally 1999 was for me the year of decision.  First that year there was tentatively held ‘… postmodernism for school history’ but then, later in 1999 ‘ on whether time tells: a revision of postmodern history’.  This saw the end for me, of speaking approvingly of postmodernism.

The issue for me was argument.  Increasingly some of our group of postmodernist history teachers in WestSussex, and at the Institute, and increasingly Keith himself, had been advocating that we should give up argument, in the sense of using evidence and a clarity of exposition to help change people’s thinking.  It was, they …argued (argued!) suspect – part of an old and outmoded ‘modernist’ project. This kind of view was encouraged by, for example, the writing of Elizabeth Ermarth, speaking from the discipline of Literature.  She regarded anyone using argument to try to convince people of anything, as boringly ‘regular as bad breath’ (Ermarth:1992:51).  For a while I attributed this kind of irascibility to individual personality.  Gradually I came to see that it went a good deal deeper than that.

Along with this antipathy towards argument, was another aspect of postmodernism that its adherents had been displaying, and which I found worrying.  This was that our postmodern position, with its notion that it was our destiny etc. was, in effect, saying ‘the truth is that there is no truth’.  Now it does not take much working out to see that there is a performative contradiction here.  It was rather like the sentence ‘I am dead’ in the sense that to be dead apparently precludes the ability of being able to make that statement.  If there is no truth, then how can I make such a statement, or indeed how sensible is it to use argument to argue that argument is an outdated means of communicating?  The question is then, why did I ignore such an obvious problem for so long?  I do not know the answer to this question, except to note that people often refuse to accept the obvious, if it means they are going to have to give up something in which they have invested heavily, whether that ‘something’ is represented by money, time, effort or reputation.  Finally it dawned on me that our arguments were fatally flawed by such contradictions and that to revel in them, as some were doing, was just to speak nonsense.  There was a reason why this type of thinking was gaining prominence at the Institute and that is because there had been a small group working on a close reading of some of the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the theorist generally acknowledged to have been at the core of postmodern thinking. I joined this group for one of its sessions but did not return as it involved the kind of non-critical approach to texts that had been so widespread in Marxist times.

Re-reading Lyotard

Nevertheless I read again, on my own, Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism.  He made his position abundantly clear in his introduction to The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge (1979) by this statement.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives. (xxiii)

I had been happy with this approach to knowledge; this now familiar explanation had played a part in attracting me to postmodernism years before.  By metanarratives I understood Lyotard to mean those overarching sets of beliefs such as Christianity, conservatism, socialism, liberalism etc that have conditioned and constrained thought and associated culture, for many years and in some cases, centuries.  I agreed that these should not be allowed to determine our thoughts without our being consciously aware of them.  I thought it was good that in our age this was changing – improving.  Modern empirical methods attempt, in theory at least, to create a distance from such metanarratives.   Academic claims, and observations in our everyday lives, are often no longer regarded as true or false as such, so much as probablities or even metaphors for what works and what doesn’t.  I have lived through a time when science has evolved from being either true or false, to being probable, or true within a particular context.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves here.  My point is that Lyotardian postmodernism goes further than just incredulity to metanarratives.  In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard he went on to say that

a postmodern critic or writer is in the position of a philosopher. The text he (sic) writes, the work he produces, are not in principle grounded by pre-established rules and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work.  These rules and categories are what the work of art is itself looking for.  The artist and the writer then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done, hence the fact that the work and texts have the character of events.  (1979:81)

Now this is quite different from incredulity.  I don’t know why I didn’t pick it up, in the first time of reading.  But now, on returning to it, it seemed to me that Lyotard was including sound argument as one of the ‘pre-established rules’ that ‘ground’ the work of the critic or writer. In so far as he was doing that…and I believe that is exactly was he was doing, then he was undercutting our ability to communicate.

Of course, it is possible to understand and agree with him a little.  It has always been the case that artists, writers, musicians and others of the avant-garde, who have been attempting to break new ground in their work, do not always find recognition at first, or even sometimes at all in their own lifetimes.  And indeed, it has long been a requirement of PhDs that candidates should extend the boundaries of knowledge in their area.  Inevitably this is likely to involve some challenge to existing thinking or practices.  But this is not the same as using argument to deny argument.  That is a step too far.  Sound argument is necessary.  However imperfect it might be thought to be; it has to be used…until that is, someone can come up with an alternative means of communicating …one that doesn’y employ argument.  So far, Lyotardian postmodernism has not achieved that, or anything like it.

So, it became clear to me that in using the ideas of postmodernists as we had done, we had linked ourselves with ideas that were taking us some distance from our original aim of trying to establish a theoretical – sceptical – basis for history and a resolution of the question of whether historical knowledge was found in the past or made in the present.  Worse, in trying to destroy the idea of argument as a means of human communication, Lyotardian postmodernism was allying us with religion, which is a very different kind of approach to knowledge – one to which postmodernists are not normally thought of as being allied.

I was brought up in a Catholic household. I had long ago left Catholicism and indeed Christianity.  I still recalled however how Christians were happy to think that, although in this life, there might not be any certainty for us mortals to grasp, all would be different in the afterlife, when complete truth would be revealed.  St Paul, in his first Epistle to the Corinthians explained;

For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (Ch 13, para12)

The historian John Rist points out that much later, St Augustine said something similar.  In our ‘fallen state’, wrote St. Augustine in his Confessions, ‘mankind (sic) was unable to ever know the nature of the world’.    (Rist:1996:41).  It is ironic that for Christians, they knew when certainty was to come – after our death or after the second ‘coming’.  For Lyotard, it was at some undetermined time in the future.  the overall pattern though, was very similar.

I didn’t realise it at the time, in fact I did not know of it until quite some time later, after much research, but the postmodern position, with its performative contradiction, was not new, nor was it something that could be placed at the door of postmodern personalities.  It had a lineage stretching back for more than four hundred years before Christ.  It was as old as empiricism itself.

The postmodern denial of history …and of knowledge

The idea that postmodernists could just wish away conventions such as rational argument – would in itself have been enough to put me off postmodernism, but worse was to follow.  Keith began arguing that in conditions of postmodernity, it was not possible to make historical knowledge.  To understand the logic of this argument, if indeed it is logical, we need to understand Jenkins’ idea of upper and lower case.  This is not difficult for in this sense, his work seemed to me to be very similar to that of Lyotard.

‘Upper case’, was another name for Lyotard’s metanarratives.  Where the latter spoke of the need for incredulity towards them, Jenkins referred to upper case histories.  In his book On what is history?,  Jenkins speaks of upper case histories as having capsized (…as in sailing a boat) (1995:8&9).  By this, it must be assumed, he measn that upper case ….history with a capital H, as in ‘History’, can no longer function.  That is fairly straightforward but in conversations, he went on to suggest that something similar to upper case history had taken place with lower case history too.  This ‘lower case’ referred to ordinary everyday histories that historians and others produced across the western world, if not the world over – that which accompanied our sense of living in time – a dimension to human consciousness that comprises future, present and past.

He suggestion that lower case histories had become compromised was a major claim.  Since knowing the past is not in principle different from knowing the present, any suggestion that ordinary history could not function, was going to have significance for knowledge in general.  However, since his explanation for how this might have happened was really quite vague, and because he produced no evidence to back up his assertion, I put it down to hubris on his part and at the time, I ignored it.

But the idea surfaced again in his The Postmodern History Reader (1997). He spoke of it as

a sort of end of history argument.  Not necessarily the end of history as such, but arguably the end of those upper and lower case variants expressive of that part of our recent Western past. (p.8)

This tentative approach to giving up historical knowledge was firmed up in Why History? in 1999.  In the introductory essay (p.2) he started by saying

perhaps we are at a postmodern moment when we can forget history and ethics altogether.  Perhaps we are now under conditions where we can live our lives within new ways of timing time which do not refer to a past articulated in discourses that have become historically familiar to us. (p2)

Jenkins had by now included ethics in the human capacities he believed should be swept away.  I propose not to discuss Jenkin’s postmodern position on ethics until later in the book as his argument for ethics, differs from that of history which, he argued, that

in and for itself, there is nothing definitive for us to get out of it other than that which we have put into it. That ‘in and for itself’ the past contains nothing of obvious significance.  That left on its own it has no discoverable point.  (p.4)

That still slightly cryptical explanation was often expressed more crudely in the classroom by the claim that history was promiscuous – that ‘it would go with anyone’.  This generally got a laugh, but behind the jokes, Jenkins’ initial tentativeness had given way across those pages to a more firmly held claim that it included all history, even those ‘constructed in highly reflective ways’ (p.4).   But what was unclear was the standard by which historians’ ability to make knowledge of the past, could be judged…the criterion, for claiming that it was all false.  Moreover it was also unclear what historical knowledge might look like if it were to be a truthful representation of the past…or how one could tell if it were true or not.    Someone, somewhere had to be external to this problem of knowledge in order to be able to make that judgment.  Who or what might that be, I wondered?   In the case of religion it was obvious – it was a deity, but in relation to Jenkins’ argument, there was no one able to fulfil that role…unless Jenkins thought that this person, this supra-human person might actually be him, or people like him – postmodernists perhaps – those supposedly able to see the nature of reality further and more clearly than the rest of us.   It was really quite bizarre.

What was also bizarre was that none of Keith Jenkins’ postmodern friends in West Sussex objected to his argument, but equally, none of them followed him in making similar claims either.  There seemed to me to be a general embarrassment about it.  Even further afield it was impossible to find other postmodern historians being prepared to travel the same road either, into what seemed to me to be epistemological oblivion. There were some though, in this wider constituency who were prepared to challenge him.

In Helen Bowen Raddeker’s most interesting study of Sceptical History (which we shall be considering in more detail later in the book) she makes clear why she and other postmodern historians thought Jenkins was wrong to argue as he had done. She points to the work of Rita Felski and Joan Wallach Scott and suggests

Scott’s recognition of inevitable “paradox (s) at the heart of the historians’ practice” still does not lead her to “deny the seriousness or usefulness of the enterprise” we call history.  Neither accepts that history is coming to an end, nor that it should.  …Felski observes that for many women, for sound political reasons, history is hardly defunct but has continued importance, and the same can be said for other marginalised groups. (2002:38)

Raddeker points out that Jenkins had sought to block any other reading of postmodern scepticism, such as for example that of Alun Munslow and Robert Rosenstone’s Experiments In Rethinking History, claiming that in suggesting general principles for a reinvigorated historical practice, postmodernists were simply acting as modernist historians (p32-33).  Helen Raddeker’s observation that Jenkins was averse to any accommodation at all, with those he saw as modernist was borne out by a short but illuminating exchange he had with Richard Evans.

Any kind of reading of Evans’ work of those years In Defence of History (1997), could not conclude that he was a postmodernist in any way, and yet alongside a wealth of common sense about the discipline, his book contains and some clear suggestions about how the practices of traditionalist historians might co-exist with those of postmodernists. Evans urged his traditional readers not to draw up the disciplinary drawbridge and isolate themselves from new thinking.  Why not, he said, accept ideas from the social sciences and literary criticism, along with linguistic analysis, within the discipline.

It was refreshing to see a historian from the more traditional side of the arguments, who was prepared to reach out to postmodernists. Despite the charges of realism levelled at him by Alun Munslow, Evans’ view of history was actually more nuanced.  It was that…

…as historians, we clearly cannot receive unalterably ‘true’ meaningof a dispatch simply by reading it; on the other hand, we cannot impose any meaning we wish to on such a text either.  We are limited by the words it contains, words which are not, contrary to what the postmodernists suggests, capable of infinite meaning.  And the limits of the languages imposes on the possibilities of interpretation, are set to a large extent by the original author.  The fact is, as Dominic La Capra sensibly remarks, the historical research is a dialogue between two kinds of significance – the historian’s and the document’s. (Evans:1997: 106)

Evans went on to say that he could see postmodernism being gradually assimilated into the discipline.  As it is slowly being assimilated into the discipline, and being slowly accepted by historians, it is being modified, he said.  He placed postmodernism in a context that included earlier claims by, for example, Rankeans, cliometricians, pyschohistorians and early social historians.  These, he said, had argued in their turn that all previous ways of doing history were ‘redundant’, biased or false but, they have nevertheless, one after another, settled down to become proponents of sub-specialisms, ‘coexisting happily with all other sub-specialisms.’ (Evans:1997:201/3)

Maybe being offered a mere ‘sub-specialism was something of an insult to Keith Jenkins.  In any event, he was having none of it. In his view, Evans

replays the old strategy of divide and rule. ‘us against them’ and ‘some of us against others of them’; the really barbaric are kept out, while the more moderate and usable are let in to bolster the ranks. It is the typical assimilationist gesture so beloved of conservative and it permeates the whole of Evans’ text. (Jenkins:1999:97)

So there we had it.  For Jenkins historical knowledge was not determined by metanarratives. Not even consciously; it was not confined by normal conditions of writing or the handling of evidence.  Neither could be described by general principles nor allied with other thinking. For Jenkins it was clear it had to be all or nothing. But what the ‘all’ was, was never spelled out by him, what would count as postmodern history was nowhere explained, and that left us with …nothing.

It was obvious that the time had come for me to exit this farrago of epistemological contradictions.  I had been tardy in coming to this determination because I had started a PhD, looking for precursors to postmodernism…hoping thereby to calm the fears of traditionalists to these new ideas.  And Keith was my supervisor. I had naturally been keen to protect my investment, as it were.  But by 1999, It became evident that this would have to come to an end and that I should need to start over.  Ironically, Keith and I both gave effect to this on the same day.  Our letters explaining that the arrangement must come to an end, crossed in the post.  It was rather sad, as many such ‘endings’ are, but Keith now became free of my constant criticism every time we went to the pub, and I could shake off the constraints of postmodernism once and for all.

A new direction

Of course, it was not necessary to have given up on postmodernism entirely.  After all Keith Jenkins was but one among a number of postmodern historians. Although he was influential, he did not speak for the whole of the postmodern community.  Raddeker, Felski, Scott, Rosenstone and indeed, Evans, had pointed me towards several ways forward.  But it was too late.  My PhD research had begun to show me that it was possible to conceive of scepticism, without trashing empiricism…and thus without giving up on historical knowledge in its entirety.  It was a wholly more satisfying way or thinking about scepticism, it seemed to me at the time.  I thus took the opportunity of a change in my supervision arrangements for a switch to a new direction.  I restarted my research under the supervision of Prof David Andress of Portsmouth University and Andrew Foster who had become Director of Research at Chichester.  This time I was looking not for precursors to postmodernism but to alternatives, and it wasn’t long before I found some.

I had long known of the sophists – the ancient Greek sceptics – and the similarity of their thinking to postmodernism.  I was to find that they were more than just similar. Their position was the same.  Equally importantly though, I found a subtly different kind of scepticism.  A friend of Keith Jenkins, Beverly Southgate, had written of a form of scepticism – Pyrrhonism – that existed in England in the 17^th Century (Southgate:1981:1989:1995).  Southgate saw these movements as being precursors to postmodernism but it seemed to me that they were different from both Sophism and from postmodernism.  Could there be a different kind of scepticism, I wondered… and if so, how could that be?

As it happened, the famous American Postmodernist Richard Rorty came to Cardiff University around that same time. Keith, with his eldest son Phillip who was a PhD student and me accompanied by my daughter Katy who was then an undergraduate studying philosophy at Cardiff,  had the opportunity of a small group discussion with him one Sunday morning at the University.  I asked him about Pyrrhonism and he, like Beverley Southgate thought that it might have been a precursor to Postmodernism.  But he was of the opinion that scepticism of ancient times was actually different from postmodernism because of the existence of medieval Christianity in between – that this intervention changed ideas fundamentally.

I could certainly see how the coming of Christianity, with its certainties and its power to convince and coerce, could affect something like scepticism.  However that failed to explain the similarity of Sophism…from the other side of medieval Christianity, being the same as present day postmodernism.  This would have been something of a quandary for me except that I found there was  a good deal of information available on Pyrrhonism, not least by Richard Popkin, Avrum Stroll (1999 % 2002) and Anthony Long (1999).

The real breakthrough though, came when I discovered the work of Sextus Empiricus, a medical philosopher writing around the turn the 1^st & 2^nd century CE.  And I found too, Luciano Floridi’s 2002 detailed study of him.   It became clear that Pyrrhonism within the western tradition philosophical tradition was a force to be engaged with, if I wanted to understand scepticism beyond what the postmodernists said about it.  But that is not all, for at the same time I found that empiricism, in the sense that I have been defining it, ie. knowing the world through our sense and the sense that we can make of them, is almost exactly the same as scepticism and can be considered to be the application of it in daily life.    So it is to explain in detail what I found and how I understand the concepts of empiricism, scepticism and knowledge, that the central part of this book now turns.

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I

We saw in the previous chapter that although it would have been convenient to think of the struggles to develop active learning in schools as a consequence of the Elton/Carr debate, it could just as easily have been that both Elton/Carr and the school history debate were themselves features of more general changing ideas in much of the West.  Something similar can be said of the Marxist approach to making sense of the past.

The many references to the writings of Karl Marx in Carr’s work What is History? (1961) suggest that Carr was influenced, at least to some extent, by the Western Marxism that pre-existed his work.  These movements, like those that resulted in children having greater freedom in the learning process, had developed over many years.  Events of the Second World War resulted in Marxist ideas and of communism too, becoming more popular for a period.  This was a period during which, it has been claimed, up to a third of the world’s population lived withing political systems influenced by the thought of Mark and his friend and associate Engels.  By the 1960’s and 70’s, Marx’s approach to making sense of history was hugely influential – certainly it was much spoken about as a way of making historical knowledge.  Even after it started to wane as a world political ideology in the late 1980s, some of its effects on the discipline of history have continued on into the present.

There was no struggle to introduce active learning in the teaching of university history, nothing in any way comparable to what was going on in schools.  British universities had long enjoyed intellectual freedom far beyond what was possible in the school sector.  Enthusiasts might have experienced the kind of inertia that faces any innovation, but this was nothing like the organised opposition that faced school teachers and their educators.  Active learning at university level developed steadily throughout the 1970’s and 80s.  The main issue in universities, connecting it with the Elton/Carr debate was the question of whether historians could properly use a criterion, in deciding which facts they selected as relevant in forming historical accounts.  In practice this resolved itself into a stand-off between Marxism and traditional empirical ways of making history.  Although Marxism no longer holds that eminent position in the discipline, it was ironically, its very popularity for a time that contributed importantly towards its eclipse by postmodernism.

Intellectual Marxism

Some clarifications are necessary. Marxism has fractured over the years, indeed it is unclear whether it was ever a single unified body of thought, but in broad terms this description ‘intellectual’ has also been known as ‘western’ or ‘academic’ Marxism.  But by whatever name it is described, it refers to an intellectual approach to the subject that diverged from its revolutionary version some years after the Russian Revolution, and which became reinforced in the post WW2 era, after the Chilean coup of 1973.  The fact that this right wing coup in Chile involved the overthrow of a democratic government and that, as it has been claimed, was backed by America, has not been lost on Marxists.

At the time there was a general feeling that groups oppositional to capitalistic governments needed to be careful, that the experience of Chile showed that capitalist authorities were unlikely to accept any kind of threat, real or potential, to the existing order, even within a modern democracy.  After all, the bitterly fought American/Vietnam war against communism was only just ending; memories were still fresh.  Thus, more than ever, Marxism of this kind existed in universities and similar places of learning as an intellectual activity, and not on the streets.

In Sussex at least, the work of Marxist historians was clear. From the early 70s onwards, their interests had been related to philosophical issues concerning historical knowledge and no more than that.  It didn’t seem like that though, to a new history student.  When I first started studying as a mature student, it came as a real surprise to find myself reading about historians, and in some cases being taught by history lecturers, who described themselves as Marxist.  I sometimes felt I had slipped down a ‘rabbit hole’ as they say, from the comfortable world of business into some sort of revolutionary cell.  Of course, in reality it was nothing like that. The historians I met in Sussex in the late 1970s and early 80s, may have been socialist or left of centre politically, but their interests were entirely academic – very far from advocating the violent overthrow of the state.

Marxism is a massive subject, way beyond the remit of this chapter…or the book for that matter, but readers new to the subject, will find no shortage of introductory texts, not least Peter Singer’s contribution to the ‘Very Short Introductions’ series, (2018), or Cliff Slaughter’s, Marx and Marxism (1985). Indeed readers could do worse than go direct to Marx and Engels’ seminal work, The Communist Manifesto (Taylor:1967, orig. 1848) which is quite short – little more than an evening’s read.  What is important for us here, is the way that those influenced by Marxism went about making sense of the past.

In my experience in those days, what counted as ‘a Marxist approach to history’ was a tendency to use social class and the relationship between those who owned or controlled the means of production and those who didn’t – the so called ‘class criterion’.  I am using this term ‘criterion’ to refer to the need for all historians to select, at every level, the material they are working with.  A more full discussion of historians’ criteria can be found in the section on critical thinking in the Companion to Knowledge from Uncertainty.co.uk  For now though I’d just like to say that historians have to select from the mass of material that faces them – in libraries, archives and even in their own collections of resources.  It is impossible to say everything about any particular subject.  The issue then is to what extent should a historian make manifest their own selective criteria.  Traditional historians tend not to do so, or to do so not very overtly; Marxists on the other hand  are clear.  They use social class, and more particularly, conflict between classes,  as a way of cutting through the myriad of facts facing a historian in their task of makingsense of the past.

Historians were split into two factions. There were traditionalists and there were Marxists and each group made sense of the of the past in different ways. The Marxists used this class criterion and considered themselves rather avant-garde. The traditionalists, by contrast, regarded themselves as sensible types. They were practical people, they thought. They were not ideologically driven, they thought – they told it like it was, in their view. They appeared to take the existence of historical knowledge as being …well just there, rather as we have seen, did Geoffrey Elton.  Historical knowledge was to be found by historians if they looked carefully enough.

In practice, those historians mostly just told a story hoping that ‘their’ story would be accepted as ‘the’ story.  That was for them what history most obviously was, simply story telling with a little added reasoning to support it, but with little obvious acceptance that a perfectly acceptable alternative explanation was always possible.  And they provided little by way of stated purpose. It was as though the meaning of the evidence they drew upon, was obvious – that all reasonable minded people would interpret it in the same or similar manner.  There was almost as if these historians were part of a group, or club.  One was either ‘one of them’ or simply an outsider.  If the meaning drawn by a historian’s research fell outside of a narrow set of assumptions, they were ignored or dismissed as being in some way biased – not playing the game properly, as it were.  And it was not only Marxist historians who were treated this way.  The work of feminist historians were dismissed in this way too – as biased.

The assumption seemed to be that all ‘proper’ historians would think in ways similar to each other, bound together by a common aim and a commonality of thought. To an extent such a view was not entirely unexpected since the social constituency of the profession was mostly male, mostly indigenous western Europeans, mostly middle class and mostly in universities … often casually described as white middle class men in universities.  I am exaggerating a little of course, but not unknown for a course or a conference paper to just start with the facts of the story. This might be presented with very little preamble or explanation about the historical questions that had produced the story, nor the mindset that had brought a particular focus to the interpretation of the chosen evidence.

A small amount of interpretation was accepted by traditionalists, but not much – again, just like Geoffrey Elton’s approach.  The basic trajectory of the story, the approach the historian was taking, was assumed to be true.  What you saw was what you got. The model was one of ‘facts plus interpretation‘ where the selection of relevant facts – what justified a particular selection and how it was understood – was all too often simply not acknowledged.

The story telling approach to history that characterised traditional historical practice in the 1970s, put history on a par with literature. The difference between the two genres for the traditionalists, was that historians believed their stories were largely true, whereas in literature it was accepted that they had been created.  The Marxists were more inclined to accept that their stories were constructions. They justified them by offering what they took to be the political exigences – that the reality of life under capitalism for so many ordinary people justified that approach.

What drew many students and historians to Marxism in those days was that the Marxists valued histories that focussed on economic and social factors and had little interest in poring over the minutia of the doings of monarchs, battles and politicians.  Economic and social history was generally looked down upon in the 1960s and 70s; traditionalists often dismissed it as ‘history with the hard bits taken out’.  Marxists historians on the other hand used their studies to show a light onto the lives of ordinary people in the past and the movement of money or influence under the surface of society.

Their measure. their criterion as we have discussed, was that of social class, the struggle of the working classes against what they saw as capitalist exploitation.  Marxists didn’t just tell stories; they told of struggles. They had reasons for what they looked at in history and for how they approached the issues of the past.  They explained historical events by reference to who got what out of it, for example in the case of the impetus to war, to the profit of arms manufacturers.  It wasn’t just any old story; it was, they claimed a useful story…and the approach appealed to many students and their lecturers.

What made the traditionalist approach to history every bit as political as that of the Marxists was that to explain the past, the former drew simply on what was apparent to them – what was obvious. They were relying on the world as they saw it, as it seemed to them in the conditions that existed at that time. That past then became an expression of their present and of course it was a ‘present’ in which they were winners. The Marxist, almost by definition, were not in that position of social superiority. Their aim was to transcend the capitalist ‘present’, to turn it into a future – a socialist one. To achieve this aim, they qualified the focus of their gaze beyond the strictly empirical. They chose – overtly – the evidence they considered important.  All this may seem a little complicated at present, but we shall be discussing these issues later in the book, for empiricism is central to how we might finally move forward as historians.

Problems in Practice

There were several reasons for the decline of Marxism as a world movement of emancipation. These have been much discussed by historians and by politicians, but some aspects of this change were obvious at the time, even to history teachers in the classroom.  In the main they can be summarised by the observation that by the second half of the 1980’s it was apparent to all that Marxism had not developed as Marx had predicted.

It was possible to look back over a history of the industrialised West, of some 150 years and although there had certainly been booms and busts in the economies of the nations concerned, some of distinctly dangerous proportions, none had developed into major revolutions as Marx had said they would. Those that did develop in that way, were largely pre-industrialised societies.  More to the point, in conditions of economic stress, there had been a tendency of people affected to turn to the political right,  as the post WW1 rise in Nazism had shown, rather than the left, as Marx and Engels had predicted.   After the Second World War, public policy in the US, Britain and in a still devastated mainland Europe, prevented the kind of economic slump that had been experienced after the World War One. Indeed, by the early 1970s, most major western economies were doing quite well, and standards of living had been rising for 20 years or more.

The same could not be said for Marxist inspired communist countries. By the 1980s it had become clear that the so called ‘actually existing socialism’ that had been lauded by Marxist/Leninists as the way forward, had produced in the main countries that had taken that road – The Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Burma (now Myanmar) – living conditions and political freedoms for its workers hardly inspired emulation. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, was the public face of that rejection for many in the UK.  I recall a prominent Marxist theorist saying to me at a conference around that time that he no longer knew what the word socialism meant anymore…its meaning in the west had been so tied to Marxist style government control over the means of production, distribution and exchange, as they used to say, that all that was left were various forms of capitalism.

During those years, towards the end of the decade of the 1980s, Keith Jenkins and I had begun a collaboration; in the four years from 1986 we wrote eleven articles together and we gave talks to teachers and lecturers wherever it was possible. Our aim at the time was to encourage history teachers to develop their thinking and practice of student centred learning from the limitations of the skills approach, towards methodological awareness.  Ironically, we saw the increasing government control over history teaching, culminating in the National Curriculum, as an opportunity for increased classroom autonomy for history teachers, for the government had been obliged to write into it – to make overt that which previously had been only a vague understanding – namely a defence of interpretation as a central plank in the making and teaching of the subject.  It was not an option for an official curriculum.  As we used to say at the time, anything else would need a name other than history.  It was not possible however to move from this position to one that entirely supported the Marxist approach to history for,  there were difficulties of a theoretical nature.

Problems of Theory

Marx had taken the view, put into historical practice through the words of E.H.Carr, that different people will read the world, and their history, in different ways and thus history was inescapably by this account, subjective. The difficulty was that Marx & Lenin had also argued that human society had developed and would continue to develop, through successive epochs – primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism. It was this theory of historical materialism, as it was called, that gave Marxism its believed predictive power. Some adherents revered it in almost biblical terms. It was so pervasive that the idea that there was some sort of ‘line of march’ in human affairs, that were outside the control of humans.  This idea spread, as we shall see, into postmodernism.

The question about whether Marxism was capable of predicting the future was perhaps something of a self-made burden.  It wasn’t really necessary.  It is easy to see that an historical account of past human societies could quite reasonably see them as progressing through the stages Marx had outlined.  That could have been a perfectly normal historical account, open to debate of course, but certainly a possibility.  If one thought that such an account of past societies was likely, then it is quite possible that an argument for the development of capitalism into socialism might theoretically be reasonable too.  All this is part of the normal business of making history.  Few would agree that what we know of the past tells us for certain what the future will be; there is always the matter of human agency.  But most will accept that the past can be a guide to what might happen in the future.  That is obvious.  However, by seeking to go beyond ‘reasonable’ into alleged certainty, if indeed that was Marx & Engels’ intention they, or their followers, introduced an element of metaphysics into what was otherwise a theory of subjectivism. The two positions do not sit comfortably together and attracted much criticism during the years of its decline.

Problems of Popularity

I would have doubted the idea that popularity could have been the coup de gras for Marxism as a method of making history, had I not seen it with my own eyes.  In those years of the 1980s and into the 90s, Keith Jenkins and I attended many conferences around the UK and we saw for ourselves how the Marxist criterion of class, changed from being the way to make sense of the past to become just one among many methods of making knowledge.

First, and most telling, it was the feminists whose claims first became apparent. They argued that the concept of class may have illuminated our understanding of the way people in societies interacted in general, but the lives of women in so far as they related to men, was a more effective means of understanding what was actually going on in the world – past and present.   Feminists argued that the class criterion had completed its work in opening up debates about methodology, but that now its proponents should step aside, and allow women’s interests to develop as the major way of understanding how the past should be understood. Thus, by this argument, the explanatory criterion for history should change from class to gender.

The response by male Marxists was definite. It was that women ought to wait – wait until the ‘coming revolution’ – and only then would it be appropriate for a criterion of gender to come to the fore. There were fierce debate here.  But it wasn’t just the concept of gender that was used to challenge class.  It wasn’t long before Marxism was criticised for being allegedly ‘euro-centred.’  It was suggested that a concept of ‘location’ – especially that of the third world as distinct from Europe – was a more illuminating analytical tool.  This was followed fairly quickly by the claim that the gay community saw the world differently from that of heterosexuals and that sexual orientation was as valid as that of class or of male/female gender distinctions or even that of location or class, in making sense of the past.

It wasn’t difficult to see the logic of these challenges, but there was also clearly a difficulty for us as historians. Why stop at class, gender (whether heterosexual or homosexual) or place? Why not add ‘age’ as an explanatory category or ‘education’…or personal attitude to the past? This process could go on forever. If it hadn’t already been obvious, it had become starkly so, that any aspect of society could be used as criteria to unlock knowledge of the past. That is to say that by focusing on one particular feature of how human lives interact, then different significance in the past, could emerge. I am speaking for myself now, for Keith Jenkins may have different recollections, but it was around that time that the idea of postmodernism as an approach to knowledge, began to look attractive to us… and simple to deploy. It had selective criteria built in.

Although at the time it seemed as though we were breaking new ground, interestingly, around the same time, Prof. Robert Rosenstone was coming to a similar conclusion in relation to film history. ‘My own innovations’ he wrote in an interesting memoir in www.academia.edu (p20) (orig. in Rethinking History Journal 8. March 2004) had

been driven not by contact with postmodern or any other theory, but arose out of the limitations of a traditional form which did not allow me to express the historical experience that my subjects had undergone.

Like us, he gradually came to think that postmodernism just seemed like a convenient category.  And like me, he later had doubts about this choice of theory.

It was a difficult term to work with, as postmodernism seemed to mean different things to different people, but broadly speaking, it rejected the traditional empirical approach to knowledge as being fundamentally flawed because it didn’t have, or it seem to have, and rarely acknowledged, a criterion for what it focussed on.   Postmodernists agreed with Marxists that proper knowledge required a conscious process of selection from all the available factors.  That is to say it was not, for them, possible to just ‘look and say’ as they considered the empiricists to be doing. They argued that knowledge does not come to us pre-formed, but has to be put together from such basic empirical data that may be chosen by the knower. Thus they did not consider it appropriate to restrict their gaze to only the criterion of class – there was a world of criteria waiting to be used. A couple of useful introductions to postmodernism are David Lyon’s Postmodernism (OUP:1994) and Glenn Ward’s Understand Postmodernism (London:2010).
Postmodernists like to emphasise – and this is why the ‘facts versus interpretation’ distinction has only limited value – is that the empirical data which we use to establish an item of knowledge is itself a previous interpretation. It is therefore possible to see the whole of knowledge – of the past and of the present and – as a human construction and not just something to be found or discovered ‘out there’ in the world. There was no need to make the case for the pre-eminence of any one category as being ‘the’ category for understanding the past, or present. They could all be used – as they were all used in everyday knowledge-making, but now, with postmodernism, they could be used consciously.  What historians needed to do was to consider and bring to the fore, one or other of these categories, and thereby bring out particular understandings of the past…or at least to include in their historical findings, and awareness of the constructive nature of the categories that they were employing.

In this form of describing the knowledge-making process, because the constructivist process was an integral part of the business of making history, a degree of methodological self awareness was called for as a part of the normal process of ‘doing’ history.  Self awareness in the sense of understanding why the knowledge was as it was, had been regarded as a desirable facet of knowledge since the time of the 5th century BCE Greeks, so there was a sense in which postmodernism was plugging into acknowledged good practice.  It meant too that everyone, from a history student or teacher, to a small community working on their local histories, could be ‘their own historian’ at a theoretical as well as a practical level. There would be a sound intellectual justification for, for example, small localised or controversial explanations of the past. History would thereby no longer be in the control of professionals.  it would have become, in a way, democratised.
Sadly, some problems started to become apparent, with this otherwise useful approach to history.
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Student active learning seems natural these days, whether it be field trips, classroom problem solving, individual or group work using historical sources.  Areas of controversy are likely to be less concerned with whether students should find out knowledge for themselves and rather more to do with the exact blend of so called face to face teaching compared with online learning.  These days, the principles of active learning are largely taken for granted, but it was not always so, and it did not happen by chance.

In the 30 or so years from the Elton/Carr exchanges to the establishment of the National Curriculum for history in the early to mid-years of the 1990s, and as a result of the efforts of some talented history teacher academics, the teaching of history in schools was transformed.  However, there was an assumption by many teacher educators at the time that active learning was effectively settling the Elton/Carr controversy.  In intervening on the side of Carr, it was assumed that active learning was confirming the idea that history was a construction. It may have done this in theory, but unfortunately, in the way that it actually developed in practice, it did not do so.  It did little to settle the epistemological uncertainties arising from Elton and Carr.  If anything, it deepened them.

The conditions against which supporters of the active learning movement In the UK strove against, were Eltonian in nature.  Until the late 1970s and early ‘80s, dictated and blackboard notes was the norm outside of university education. The idea was that the teacher had knowledge of the world that needed to imparted to the student, so that accumulated understandings – wisdom – of the culture could be passed down from one generation to the next.  It was thought that the way to do this was to simply tell the students what this knowledge was and for them to record it, remember it, and to confirm that they had done so by reciting it to the examiners as and when asked to do so.  There was an assumption that young people were wayward and easily distracted and until they had become educated, they would not understand the relevance of their teachers’ efforts.  Therefor the ‘telling’ of the desired information had to be carried out in a formal setting, complete with sanctions – punishments – for those who resisted the process.

Of course, there has always been some activity on the part of school pupils and older students, but this was limited to reading, listening, thinking and committing facts to memory. Physical activity and students finding knowledge for themselves was definitely not encouraged.  Readers of a certain age will remember the profusion of mnemonics that used to be enlisted to aid rote learning…for example the age old aid to memorising notes on a music stave ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit’ or history’s own favourite, to help recall the kings and queens of England, which started as

Willie, Willie, Henry, Stee,
Harry, Dick, John, Henry three.

Of course, at the youngest ages of the first five years of schooling, there had again long been a form of activity on the part of pupils – regarded as learning through play. That was inevitable given the active nature of young children and their limited literacy, but as they became older it was soon eclipsed by a learning process that was firmly under the control of teachers. This was rather as in grocers’ shops back in those early days of the twentieth century before supermarkets, when the shopkeeper rather than the customer, controlled the gathering together of the desired items from the shop, for the transaction. It sounds ridiculous now to recall how strange it seemed in those early days of supermarkets – being able to take for oneself, whatever one wanted from the shelves. And so it has proved in the history classroom.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when and how student active learning, or the very similar concept of child centred learning, began. The idea that educators should focus on the child, or student, rather than on the content of the information being transmitted to them was probably first in evidence with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788) as part of the Romantic movement, but there was a slow but steady emergence of similar ideas across Europe in the works, for example of Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi (Switzerland 1746-1827), Rudolf Steiner (Austria 1861-1925), Maria Montessori (Italy 1870-1952), Friedrich Froebel (Germany 1782-1852), Gustav Siebert (Germany 1882-1938).  And the resistance to authoritarian pedagogy was not confined to mainstream Europe or even to the continent.  The Plowden Report in post-war Britain, in 1967, noted how influential had been the American Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey for the development of education in the UK (Plowden:1967:Para.510).

Plowden had commented too how in the UK, change had been prefaced quite early on after the ending in 1898 of the so called payment by results system where teachers were paid according to the results of an annual HMI inspection.  It led, said the report, to a greater freedom for teachers and schools to decide their own curriculum and teaching methods, and that this freedom was subsequently reinforced by the 1905 and 1944 Education Acts.  Within this, the Education Act of 1918, supported by advice from Sir Henry Hadow during the 1920s and early 30s, advocated various practical arrangements like maximum class sizes (of 30 pupils in primary schools) but also that teaching should be more child centred in its approach.

Historians of education, like Plowden, have pointed to the American philosopher John Dewey’s ideas, here as in his native USA, as having had a major effect on how school teaching has developed. But the aim of this chapter is not to write a history of active learning as it developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is rather to focus on the post war years after the Elton/Carr debate – how the discussions about active learning in the UK, during the 1970s and 80s can be thought to have been associated with the coming of the postmodern controversy from around the 1990s.  With the benefit of hindsight, some 40 odd years on, we can now understand that it was the methodological questions that the Elton Carr debate opened, but which the active learning movement only partially answered, that provided an opportunity for the establishment of what some have seen as more extreme approaches to history, such as postmodern thought, to enter into the heart of historical discourse.

The issue that can now be seen, is that if the Eltonian idea of there being an objectively existing past which the historian can reach by following the existing methodological rules is resisted, as Carr most decisively did, then the question of where the past – that is to say the content of the past – comes from, is a fair question.  As far as school and pre-degree history is concerned, it is not one that is easy to answer.  The bringing of politics into the school curriculum, especially party politics of the kind that would likely emerge from a deeper examination of the Elton/Carr differences, was not encouraged in those days.  Indeed, that is still largely the case, today. As a result, the question of whether history is made in the present or found in the past, has not been a real question in which school history students have been invited to engage, because that is a question that involves politics.  Thus there has never been consideration of the nature of past history, of how it was achieved and on what basis.  It has been regarded simply as the past – ie. distinct from the present, or even more simply, by the word ‘content’.   It has been a ‘given’ – a backdrop to school history in whatever style of teaching has been chosen.

Many forms, but with one effect.

There are a variety of activities running under the banner of ‘active learning’, but they all involve in some way the sharing of knowledge making between the present generation and those who have gone before.  There is of course the most obvious one, such as student group activities, where young people determine for themselves appropriate responses to historical questions and relate these with previous accounts.  The ever present challenge of how one teacher (there were no classroom assistants in those days) could handle a large group of potentially boisterous youngers in one classroom – the ubiquitous issue of keeping order – means that it was probably obvious that group work would be popular with teachers who wanted to move away from the severe classroom of earlier years, but there are many more reasons for its popularity, and moreover it is a mistake to conflate active learning with simply group work.

It is perfectly possible for students to be ‘active’ even if they work alone.  All that is necessary is some form of historical input, usually a primary source, a context within which to place it and a question to be answered.  This then needs to be placed by students, compared, or seen in the context of, other accounts…the secondary sources.  What results from this might be seen on a spectrum.  At one end might be the kind of poor teaching that produces the ubiquitous ‘project’ that involves students in collecting what can appear, and sadly sometimes is, a near random collection of facts.  At the other end might be well directed work providing a substantial historically interesting account of the past.  When we speak of active learning, we are speaking of students working with guidance in making sense of the past.  Here it is possible to differentiate between the concepts of child centred learning and that of active learning.  Some commentators use them both to refer to the same phenomenon, but in practice ‘child centred’ has gained an association with pedagogy that allows a greater freedom from guidance than does ‘active learning’, but in truth there is little in it.  More particularly, in these days of mass adult education, return to study courses and adult access to higher education programmes, ‘child centred’ seems too exclusive and if ‘active learning’ is thought to be too restrictive – too guidance heavy – then perhaps ‘student centred’ would be better.

Whatever description is employed, trips out to appropriate locations, films, talks by visiting speakers, individual searching in libraries, museums and galleries are all obvious stimulations and sources of historical ideas.  And of course, the activity does not have to be physical; it generally is, even if not exclusively so.  Later in the book I shall be recommending a form of mental activity that should, I believe, accompany all forms of history making, but certainly it is groupwork in the class that first comes to mind when we speak of active learning.  This may involve a substantial communal project lasting weeks or even a term of study, or it may be just a few minutes discussion in pairs of in small informal groups.  And of course, whole class discussions are a form of student activity – anything in fact that stops the student from being just a passive receiver of ready-made knowledge, is what counts.

It has long been a commonplace in western thought that it is not enough to simply know something. For it to count as knowledge, the knower must have a sense of how or why that ‘something’ is believed to be true, and what evidence there might be in its support.  As we have noted already, in the vanguard of the movement to put detail on that assumption was the American philosopher and theorist of education, John Dewey (1859 – 1952).  We shall be looking in some detail at Dewey’s ideas, later in the book, for without doubt he has been and continues to be, a major figure in thinking about the teaching of history.  The continuing existence since 1935, of the John Dewey Society is testament to that. For now though, we need pick up only on Dewey’s broad ideas about student active learning.

He argued that as part of the process of understanding an element of knowledge, a child must be able to contextualise it within their own lives, within their own social settings, and what was important was not the knowledge itself per se, but how the child understood it.  For example, he said,

If the subject matter of the lessons be such as to have an appropriate place within the expanding consciousness of the child, if it grows out of his [sic] own past doings, thinkings, and sufferings, and grows into application in further achievements and receptivities, then no device or trick of method has to be resorted to, in order to enlist ‘interest’.
(The Child and the Curriculum: 1906: 35)

It followed from this, Dewey maintained, that in practice the best form of teaching involved ‘hands on’ experiential education, which of necessity involved some form of activity on the part of pupils – mind as well as body.  Dewey held that through a contextualisation of the knowledge gained, young people would understand the relevant knowledge, but also the social issues that he believed lay at the heart of what it means to be human.

At the same time, he maintained that a balance had to be achieved. Dewey decried both the setting of narrow curricula that met the needs only of employers and job related education, but also – and this part of it is sometimes ignored – the idea that knowledge does not come simply from the exposure of children to objects of learning.  Children cannot simply create something out of nothing.  Guidance is necessary.

The way is, first, for the teacher to be intelligently aware of the capacities, needs, and past experiences, of those under instruction, and, secondly, to allow the suggestions made to develop into a plan and project…The teacher’s suggestion is not a mold for a cast iron result but is a starting point to be developed into a plan through contributions from the experience of all engaged in the learning process. (Dewey: 2015: orig. 1938: pp71 & 72)

Few if any, of the traditional educationalists who believed that students were wasting their time and not advancing their knowledge, appear to have engaged with Dewey’s work.  It is possible of course that opponents to active learning have taken their examples from weak teaching.

At the ‘chalk’ face

My experience of classroom history, and of teaching more generally, before I began working on degree programmes, was in a further education college, that is to say the upper age ranges of 16 to 19 years and adults.  At various times I have taught special needs, pre-vocational study, GCSE and O Levels, but predominantly A Level and the mature students’ Access to Higher Education courses.  I started my teaching career in the early 1980s, at the point when dictated notes were giving way to active learning and thus I have had experience of both methods. I saw for myself what Cannadine, Keating and Sheldon described as the

tension in English classrooms between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive history teaching methods: the former stressing dates, chronology and narrative; the latter empathy, experience and imagination. (2011:10)

Listening to teachers speaking of past activities in the classroom can be a little like hearing from anglers about ‘the one that got away’.  A rosy glow easily settles on memories of past successes, while a sense of amnesia can accompany any recollection of disasters in the classroom or just plain unexceptional lessons.  Although very much aware of this danger, I will nevertheless say that with few exceptions, I found the coming of active learning to be a positive innovation.

It is true that dictating notes was easy. All one had to do was to select some passages from a relevant text book and read them slowly to the class. They wrote it down as best as they could and if they ended up not understanding or remembering the material, it was broadly speaking their responsibility.  Easy it may have been, but it was deadly dull…for the teacher certainly and from my experience, the students thought so too, although some were all too happy to just switch on to ‘automatic pilot’ and to not have to think too hard.  For the others, that’s why the formal setting was needed, to enforce order, along with maintaining the distance from the students that the teacher was encouraged to keep.  Overall the model was that the teacher was all knowing, and the student was an empty vessel awaiting the pouring in of knowledge.  The reality though, was very different.

By contrast active learning was fun. At times knowledge was gained almost without the student realising it, and in the process, teachers themselves often gained new perspectives on existing knowledge.  It was hard work though.  Preparation took forever.  It was necessary to select and organise documents and other historical sources in such a way that students had a sense that they were finding out historical knowledge for themselves.  Of course, they knew, or could easily know, that what they were doing was following an elaborate paper trail – a treasure hunt even – to find what had been laid for them by their teachers.  But if the trail was laid with sufficient skill, it seemed to students that they were finding things out for themselves, and that was the point.  Even when they worked in whole class settings, it was possible for them to be active in trying to work out solutions, positions, interpretations if their teacher structured the lesson to facilitate this.  I was lucky in my A level experience at South Downs College near Portsmouth, where I worked, in having as a teaching partner a fine historian, Julia Perrin who was a more experienced teacher than I and from whom I learned a great deal.  Together we selected our syllabus, the student options and topics that lent themselves to student active and thought provoking work. We’ll be coming back to some of this experience later in the book.  Compared with dictating notes it seemed like an altogether different job.

What I liked, was that settling students down to some group tasks gave me the time and opportunity in the class room to get to know them, as individuals.  Although one had to have ones’ wits about one all the time – it was not the case that we set the students work and then could slope off for a quick coffee.  But it did enable us to briefly step back and survey the whole class and watch the way the students interacted with each other.  It was possible then to slide up alongside a student who was looked as though they might be having difficulties with the material or with speaking in front of others or working within a group.  I recall thinking at the time how strange it was that I should spend so much time crouched down or on my knees, to be at their level when they were seated.

Because students were ostensibly doing group work, it didn’t mean that the whole time need be spent in this way. Once they were working in groups it was possible vary the focus from the group to the individual or to the class as a whole.  It was clear too that students could learn from each other as well as picking up a variety of transferable skills in addition to the basic learning.  Active learning was flexible learning and that was good.

Opposition

But there was opposition.  I have heard it said in recent years that some people. looking back to their student days, thought it boring and indeed, at the time, some teachers thought it involved them in too much work.  It is true that a good lesson would take a very great deal of time and effort in preparation, and not all teachers found this kind of teaching appealing for, although it looked easy, in reality it was hard and the skill needed, sometimes took years of experience to achieve. There is little to say here except to agree that to a considerable extent, the quality of the input controlled the outcome.  Although I am sure that, along with my peers, I had my share of unexciting or just plain boring classes, I was and I still am, convinced that if students found their activities boring, it is because of shortcomings in the way it was taught, rather than there being something wrong with the method itself.  But despite the efforts of teacher educators to keep politics out of the history classroom, the value laden nature of the discipline was not lost on others involved with its provision.

It wasn’t the educational authorities that opposed active learning – the heads and directors of institutions, the history advisors or the inspectorate.  On the contrary, they were able to see its merits and they broadly supported these developments.  It was from a higher level that the challenge came, from the political right and centre right positions – the Conservative Party mainly – but it also included figures like the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan.  There had been opposition to comprehensive schools from the time of their first appearance in the 1960s.  This criticism included, for example, the so called ‘Black Papers’, a loose grouping of articles published between 1969 and the late 1970s, named to oppose the many Labour ‘white’ papers of those years.  The writers Brian Cox, A.E. Dyson and Rhodes Boyson, featured prominently in them.  A typical comment from this quarter against the growing popularity was that ‘too much freedom for children breeds selfishness, vandalism and …unhappiness’. More specifically they ‘urged an end to spontaneity and self-discovery in the classroom, and a return to discipline and instruction’ (Cannadine et.al.:2011:179).

Within history itself, the attack was sharper.   The Conservative prime Minister Mrs Thatcher complained about the disappearance from the classroom of traditional history and made it clear that ‘its restoration was something she cared about very much’ (Cannadine et.al,:2011:182).  Her opportunity appeared to come with the establishment of the National Curriculum 1988/89.  Of all the school disciplines, history was singled out for further consultation to try to correct what was seen as ‘too much emphasis on interpretation and not enough upon British history and the assessment of historical knowledge’ (Phllips:2000:16).  This period marked what was perhaps a high point of government involvement in questions about the nature of historical knowledge. The Secretary of State for Education Kenneth Clarke, announced that he had included in the National Curriculum a requirement for history to end around the middle of the twentieth century, after which it became social or contemporary studies.  This intervention was thought by many to have gone too far.  His involvement was met with outrage from even his own side.  The Conservative Peer and historian Lord Blake, called it ‘ridiculous’ and the Historical Association commented that the building of the Berlin Wall would be regarded as history but its destruction would not (Phillips:2000:17). The intervention was short lived and appropriate adjustments were made to return to the status quo.

Consequences of controversy.

Overall, the opposition to active learning largely failed in its aim of stopping students having a role in making sense of the past.  There is however, more to it than that, for the success of active learning in those years, opened the way to what was about to become the postmodern challenge to history making and teaching – a challenge that is, to both traditional and student centred learning. This is because although the traditionalists failed to halt active learning, their intervention made it abundantly clear teaching history, like history in general, was fundamentally political.  In effect, the traditionalists/active learning movement was Elton/Carr in the classroom – both ending in a draw.  There was room for another strike… as it happens, this would be against both of them.

The combined efforts of an army of talented historians, from the ground breaking work of Jeanette Coultham & John Fines on the assessment of ‘skills’, through the creative pedagogy of Jon Nichol, David Cannadine, Jenny Keating, Nicola Sheldon, Peter Lee and David Sylvester and very many others, ensured that a student centred approach to school history prevailed against its detractors.  Despite opposition from a notably determined Prime Minister, a broadly student centred approach to the discipline was included in the National Curriculum.  It survived multiple reviews and exists to this day, firmly established in the UK as a sensible way of introducing children and new historians to the business of making sense of the past.  Sadly though, there are some negatives in this otherwise success story.

In their exchanges, Elton and Carr opened up the discipline of history to the central question about whether historical knowledge is effectively found in the past, as Geoffrey Elton maintained or whether, as Edward Carr claimed, it is made in the present.  The debate showed that there were obviously political influences at work in producing an account of the past, since the effort and expense of making sense of the past was …and is, usually carried out for a purpose – often a very human purpose.  If proof of this were needed, the attempt by Mrs Thatcher, the UK Prime Minister to alter the focus of the National Curriculum towards more traditional practices, demonstrates how politically important history had become.  It shows too how apposite had been the Russian Communist leader Mikhail Khrushchev, in his oft repeated comment in 1956, that ‘historians were dangerous people in that they were capable of upsetting everything. They have to be directed’ (French Delegation to Moscow: May 18th, 1956).

The effect of this realisation of the importance of political values in the making of history was a vindication of Carr’s position, but the supposed need for the avoidance of politics in school history, prevented a full discussion of it.  The so called ‘content’ of history – that is to say the relevant existing historical knowledge – was thus enabled to slide on by without any effective engagement being included in the curriculum.  Students learned some of the skills of historians, but not all of them.  They were taught how to detect bias and to empathise with past figures for example, but rarely were they introduced to the way that ideology works in the forming of historical accounts.  Moreover, there was no provision in the school curriculum for them to apply those methods.  Content just remained what it had been. It was considered unimportant. Indeed it was said sometimes that content was merely the hook upon which the more important component of history – the skills of the historian, were hung. The two categories – the process of making sense of the past and what the effect of that process was, for existing history…the so called content – had in practice become separated. To see the degree of unhelpfulness of this separation, we need only consider what we are doing in the writing and reading this account, here in this book.

We could say I am practising my writing skills and the readers are exercising their reading skills.  In this way of speaking, it doesn’t matter what I am writing about or what readers are interpreting from their reading.  All that matters is the technical nature of the two activities.  According to Coultham and Fines, in their article ‘Educational Objectives for the Study of History’ 1971, the process of describing some of the skills of making knowledge is more important than what is being transmitted – what readers might understand from my writing.  I  think, we can readily agree, this would not be a helpful way of speaking about what is going on in the consumption of this book.

Keith Jenkins and I wrote a couple of articles on this way conceptualising history as skills and content viz. ‘From Skillology to Methodology’ in the Historical Association’s Teaching History Journal and in the Times Higher Education in the same year – 1986.  Although we received much support at the time, it was mainly from those already well disposed to our position.  What wider influence they had, we did not know, but over time, ideas have changed… a little.  Katharina Matro, for example has observed in an online article for the American History Association ‘Teaching Content, Teaching Skills, What I Learned in My First Five Years in the High School Classroom’ that

I know that treating content knowledge and historical
thinking skills as separate does not serve students best….

And in explaining why this is so, she quotes a colleague Bob Bain, Professor of Educational Studies and History at the University of Michigan, who says,

the skills-versus-content debate rests on a false dichotomy. We cannot separate content knowledge from the thinking processes that have produced that knowledge… That kind of separation makes the history we teach seem artificial.
(Aug 17th 2021)

The skills/content separation which Katharina Matro and Bob Bain have highlighted, was a product of a desire to keep politics out of the classroom.  But of course, this related to school teaching only.  In universities it was different.  There was no such problem at that level, but as far as establishing a workable epistemology for history, it fared no better. There were just different reasons.

 

My aim in writing this book is to contribute to an account of history that allows participants to move on from the ongoing standoff between postmodern and traditional historians, to leave that controversy behind.  There is however a second aspect to this discussion.  Since a study of the past and a study of the present have considerable similarities, the historical focus has necessarily involved, some thought about how we might handle knowledge in general.

I believe a fresh perspective for fellow historians is needed.  Debate is of course central to the historical process, but the discipline has experienced something of a schism since the 1990s, from the time when postmodern historians began to critique traditional practice.  That challenge was fiercely rejected by traditionalists and although the controversy has languished somewhat in recent years, the issues remain unresolved and postmodern historians have not gone away.  The epistemological challenge of historical postmodernism is still on the table, effectively unanswered.  This book is my attempt to help achieve a principled resolution of those differences and to provide a basis for historians to be able to think differently about history and to share a broadly common approach in making sense of the past.

In doing this I have been influenced by the American pragmatist philosopher and educationalist John Dewey and especially in his ideas about how to transition from an established controversy.  In his The Child And The Curriculum, he says,

Any significant problem involves conditions that for the moment contradict each other.  Solution comes only by getting away from the meaning of terms that are already fixed upon and coming to see the conditions from another point of view, and hence in a new light. But this reconstruction means travail of thought.  Easier than thinking with surrender of already formed ideas and detachment from facts already learned is just to stick by what is already said, looking around for something with which to buttress it against attack. Thus sects arise: schools of opinion.  Each sect selects that set of conditions that appeals to it; and then erects them into a complete and independent truth, instead of treating them as a factor in a problem, needing adjustment.  (Dewey:2020[orig1902]:67)

For me, ‘getting away from the meaning of terms already fixed upon’ means redescribing what knowledge is and within that, what we might think historical knowledge to be.  I did try taking sides in the controversy between postmodernists and traditionalists; it led to a dead end.

For a while, in the 1990s, I taught and wrote alongside Prof Keith Jenkins in support of positions that developed into historical postmodernism, but it graduately became clear to me that the ideas on both sides of that controversy were muddled.  Moreover, there were broader issues at play – broader than those affecting just the discipline itself. The point was that the postmodern challenge was replicated across much of the arts and humanities, and I increasingly thought that its resolution too, must come from outside of history.  To research the issues more effectively, I decided to step away from history for a while.  Freed from disciplinary constraints, I was able to examine similar debates across different disciplines, different times and places.  I became impressed by a body of ancient Greek thinking from around the 4th century BCE, itself influenced by earlier Indian thought and largely forgotten for many years until recently.  The result of my disengagement was to change not only my perspective on the postmodernists but also on traditional ways of making sense of the past.  And, as something of a surprise to me, it changed too, how I thought about ordinary everyday knowledge and how we humans can more effectively live alongside each other.   

It is tempting to see the postmodern challenge as just another chapter in the exchanges of the Elton/Carr debate – that is the 1960’s dispute between historians, Geoffrey Elton and Edward Carr.  That was a debate that has featured in very many first year introductory history courses over the years.  We shall see that the Elton/Carr debate might be thought to be a contributory factor, or at least part of the change which led to the postmodern challenge, but there are some differences between these two controversies.  First, the context of scholarly debate has changed over time.  Unfortunately, between the two periods, there had grown an increase in animosity within the discipline, as even a quick glance at the material will show.  The intensity of the exchanges has overshadowed reasoned argument in favour of the supposed advantages of rhetorical battle.  Second, and more importantly, the debates themselves are different from each other.  

The Elton/Carr exchanges focused on what we think historians do when producing history.  It had value for historians and history students if for no other reason than because the debate lent itself to being a disciplinary guide …of a kind, for new students.  At the same time, it opened up for consideration, what we might think is going on when we say we can ‘know’ the past, and indeed a lot more besides.  The postmodern challenge on the other hand, is a sustained attack on traditional historical practices along with a critique of the possibility of our making historical knowledge, at all.  Worse, it has explicitly challenged the ability of historians to make knowledge of the past it has also challenged by implication, the feasibility of all knowledge – present as well as past.  The controversy marks, therefore, potentially a crucial…some might say a dangerous, point in the development of our western communal thinking.  But this clash of ideas is unnecessary.

I believe there is real and proper merit on both sides of the controversy. The postmodernists are right to question the ability of traditional practices to produce useful and reliable knowledge, given how historians often pay so little attention to the grounds for their knowledge.  Similarly, the traditionalists are right to insist that, despite there being some logic to the postmodern criticism of history, knowledge of the past …in the sense of what we normally count as knowledge, really is able to be achieved.  It will be seen that a way forward out of the differences between them – the common denominator if you like – is an acceptance, and a careful handling of exactly that uncertainty about knowledge that both sides express in their different ways.

When I moved away from history to explore the broader picture of the discussions about historical knowledge, I focussed on a concept that has been central to the debate – philosophical scepticism.  We shall be discussing in some detail what this term might encompass but for now I would like to say simply that I take it to mean a deep uncertainty about the possibility of humans being able to find truth and certain knowledge about the world.  This is a strange concept and its interest for me had long predated postmodernism.  What had always struck me as odd was that the more one thought about possible bases for our ordinary everyday knowledge of the world, let alone knowledge of the past, the stranger it appeared. The more one looked, the more uncertain it all was.  It is as though human knowledge shouldn’t work – that it is an impossibility – but of course it does work.  Yet here were postmodernists, insisting that we should all give up trying to make historical knowledge!  Their claim had a certain logic to it, as we shall discuss, but …how weird?  How could humans give up on knowledge? It is what we do, as a species.

So, after stepping away from history, I focussed on scepticism and I looked at how it had been treated within western thought, from ancient Greece through to the present.  I deepened my understanding by completing a PhD in this area and I afterwards continued to research the subject, considering the likely consequences for our modern thinking, of its Indian, Greek and Egyptian intellectual origins.  Moreover, and I believe with some result, I probed a probable historical link between western ideas and Buddhist thought.

I found the postmodern claim that modern historical methods, using available evidence, is a problem in the making of knowledge to be simply not so.  Normal historical methods are, by contrast, a part of a solution to the problem of knowledge…and to a good deal more besides.  The practical conclusion of the book is that by adjusting slightly, but importantly, current good historical practice by developing further our sense of critical self-awareness – being reflexive in other words – it is possible to provide the discipline of history with all the confidence it needs to function effectively.  And to an extent – a considerable extent I believe – the same can be said of human knowledge of the world in general.  I have started to call this position Reflexive History or, more generally Reflexive Empiricism.  These are not new terms but I think readers will see that in the way they are treated in this work, they have the capability to produce more thoughtful historical practice and a fresh approach to knowing the world in general.

I found that certainly, we should not ignore or take for granted the question of how we make knowledge of the past, as the traditionalists would have us do, but neither do we need to subscribe to the epochal claims of postmodernists; we do not have to think that the discipline of history, or human knowledge-making, is flawed.  We can have knowledge from uncertainty…what we call knowledge, that is.  I suggest that historians and others can enjoy the intellectual coherence that postmodernists promised a few decades ago, but without the contradictions that their insights entail, nor with the debilitating negativity of their position.

I am starting from a position which believes that historical knowledge cannot be understood as just either interpretation versus facts, as has been long assumed.  Certainly, all history has to be made; it has to be selected by someone and in that sense, it is of course interpretation.  But that does not mean we can say anything we like, but nor is it that we should take ‘facts’ as being fixed ‘givens’ – things that are just there.  It goes deeper than that.  Facts cannot just be rubbished, as I admittedly did tend to do in the 1980s and 90s.  Then, as a teacher in further education and later in universities, I was happy to espouse the postmodern view that what we take to be human knowledge was essentially unstable and that it was not capable of providing a reliable understanding of the world. Now, after much research on these matters, I conclude I was wrong.

in the first quarter of the twenty first century, when the dust of those arguments has begun to settle, but when the dangers and potential rewards of artificial intelligence (AI) seem about to burst upon us, now does seem a good time to be reviewing the issues.  My intention is to offer an alternative account of knowledge, historical and general, and one that I hold to be better, in the sense of being clearer, more firmly based in our cultural history and one that is capable of moving us forward into more effective ways of understanding the past and present.

So, in these coming pages I shall begin the discussion by introducing you to three ideas. First, I’ll help you to understand some of the efforts that history teachers and educators have used, in trying to establish appropriate ways of doing history, and why these have mostly not lived up to expectations.  Second, I’ll show you some of the attractions, but also some of the real difficulties that embracing postmodern history might entail, should you be drawn to it, as I once was.  Third, and more positively, I shall move the discussion towards a broader examination of how people in different times and places have handled questions about how we know the world.

We shall be able to see that it is quite possible to have knowledge of both the past and the present without any of the complications with which postmodernism has been associated. What I mean is that we shall find that it is possible to have a sound and workable grounding for studies of the past, which sees usable knowledge of the past as being constructed by us in the present, and therefore open if we wish, to very considerable interpretation – we can have knowledge from uncertainty in fact.

In support of this position, we shall explore how far our normal everyday approach to knowledge has been suffused, since its formative years in the ancient world, with elements of a Buddhist-like approach to knowledge – a way of thinking known as Pyrrhonism, named after the Greek philosopher traveller who brought those ideas back to his home country of Greece.  We shall see too how this position has chimed with an early Indian philosophy called Charvaka …believed to be the basis for modern humanism.  I shall be suggesting that it is possible that this brief brush with ancient Indian thinking, has given our modern way of thinking a quality of tolerance that it might otherwise not have had.  I shall show how Pyrrhonism has been associated with some of the more important features of our modern world, including modern science, religious toleration and even our present day political democracy.  We shall be able to see that although our awareness of the way we think has changed over time, it has done so against themes that have been constant for some 2500 years.  For these reasons I am suggesting that the time has come for us to return to our intellectual origins and to refresh our thinking.  

This book is written in an autobiographical style.   This is because it is just that – an autobiographic reflection on an intellectual journey I have taken.  But then, of course, that is what all history is, at root…an autobiographical intellectual journey, in the sense that someone, someone with a view or a perspective on the past that they want to communicate to others, has written it.  Someone has had to select what is important to the message, and someone has had to decide how that material should be crafted.  It is obvious that however ‘objective’ a historian feels it appropriate to be, histories do not write themselves.  History, in other words, is created in the present…but that is to get ahead of ourselves, somewhat.

At the same time, to assume from this that my journey has been an entirely personal one, would not be true.  My project could not even have got started, let alone completed, had I not had the good fortune to have met, worked alongside or simply to have talked, at important points, with some enquiring and creative colleagues, friends and relatives.   For example, my treatment of autobiography as a style of history writing, has benefited greatly from the advice, sometime painful advice, of an old friend, Gillian Wayne-Mayo.  There is a careful balance to be found between simple acknowledgement of the existence of a narrator, and naval gazing, and Gillian helped me find it, if indeed I have.  I am grateful too for the keenly critical eye, and timely advice, of Kay Caldwell who has read drafts of the manuscript as they have been written.

I shall mention the sources of other helpful advice and collaborations at various points in the book, but there are two that I do need to say something about, here at the outset – those of my wife Janet and daughter Katy.  Janet and I have stood alongside each other – intellectually in lockstep – since the mid 1970’s when we first started to suspect that there is more to life than meets the eye.  Even then, Jan was probably the intellectual leader.  She has read and critically reviewed most of what I have written since those days when we gradually eased our thinking away from business.  Since those early years, Jan has voluntarily held back from active participation, to deal with everything else necessary to keep our partnership and our growing family of four children moving forward, and this has allowed me to be the ‘front of house’ in representing our ideas.

Katy’s area of interest, and her PhD, is in applied linguistics which is sufficiently separate from my own to put us both outside our comfort zones when discussing matters, but within an exciting area of creativity.  Plus, her positivity is wonderfully contagious.  I am sure I would not have finished the project without her encouragement, participation and at times …just plain prodding.  Of course, as the front member of the partnership, errors and misunderstandings, along with advice sometimes stubbornly not taken, remain my responsibility.

This book is intended for students, their teachers and anyone interested in the discipline of history.  I believe it will interest too, those who want to better understand how we might know the world and live in it in mental tranquillity and in harmony with each other.

Peter Brickley

 

 

 

The aim of this chapter is to disentangle some of the issues relating to the origin and early development of empiricism and scepticism.  This is important for two reasons; first we need to understand the nature of Sextus’ involvement with scepticism and empiricism.  Second, we accepted at the end of the last chapter that although there seemed to be clear evidence that Pyrrho brought back knowledge of Buddhist thought to Greece, others argued to the contrary, that the case for such a diffusion of Buddhism is not without historical difficulty.  We noted that scepticism existed in Greece before Pyrrho, not least in an influential line of thought emanating from Democritus, and therefore the ideas that Pyrrho brought back from India may have been modified by his previous knowledge.  Our exploration into the passage of ideas between India and Greece – or indeed in the opposite direction – is far from clear.  I should like to keep this text from dissolving into  endless controversy, but we need to  try to refine our understanding beyond the general, as far as this is possible.  it is important to know something of the context of ideas that were in play at that time.

 So, although it is tempting to focus immediately on Sextus Empiricus for he is such a major figure in this story, caution suggests that if we want to better understand empiricism and scepticism beyond just a summary of what Sextus wrote about it, we need to dig deeper and try to unravel the potentially confusing accounts of how and from where did empiricism and scepticism emerge and what they were like before Sextus Empiricus became involved.  A great deal of this knowledge has been lost in the passage of time but there appears to have been several stages of development of those ideas between around the 7^th century BCE to the medical theory of the 2^nd century CE.

First, belief in religious deities gave way to forms of naturalism – to forms that is, of proto-scientific secular thinking.  Second, some of these ideas were expressed as empiricism, as I have defined it in this book i.e. knowing the world through one’s senses and the sense that can be made of them. The third stage was that this empiricism gave rise to scepticism – a form of which that has been called ‘dogmatic’ or at times in Greece and more recently, ‘academic’.  As we have discussed before, notably in relation to Prof Keith Jenkins’ discussion about postmodernism, an example of dogmatic scepticism is the argument that ‘the truth is that there is no truth’… implicit in Jenkins’ take on postmodernism.  Readers will recognise from the last chapter that, similar to early Indian scepticism, dogmatic scepticism was almost certainly the basis of Pyrrho’s thought before he travelled to India, and out of which, via his converations which Buddhists, or Buddhist-like thinkers, came the more reflexive version.

Perspectives on the origins of empiricism

Historians and philosophers have in the past suggested that Aristotle was the first empiricist – the first scientist even – but that is a judgement that is becoming unsettled by the new scholarship on the role of Pyrrhonism.  It is now possible to see, through a history of ideas, that although in both India and Greece there was a form of empiricism before Sextus Empiricus, his ideas enriched and potentially transformed it. However, there is perhaps little to be gained in trying to establish a time based hierarchy between philosophers, since much depends on how the concept of empiricism is interpreted.  Moreover, measuring Sextus against Aristotle is not straightforward, for their positions were slightly but importantly different from each other.

They both advocated knowing the world through our senses and the sense that we can make of them.  However, Sextus Empiricus’ position, like of Pyrrho before him, can be thought of as being entirely secular – there being nothing in his epistemology available to us beyond our senses.  In contrast, as has been already discussed, Aristotle’s epistemology relied in the last instance on a religious or metaphysical concept – the mysterious ‘unmoved mover’.

Looking at the broader picture, there is a range of opinion on the origins of empiricism, depending upon a variety of definitions.  The historian R.S. Woolhouse uses a criterion of whether historical agents themselves used the expression to describe their thought, and he argues that the terms ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’ were ‘products of nineteenth century histories of philosophy (1988: Introduction & p2).  Some historians write of it as being a construction of the Renaissance (Paul Kurtz:2001) or of the Medieval world (Stephen Davies:2003).  More usually, apart from those following the traditional story of the western intellectual tradition via Plato and Aristotle, it is seen as associated with Sextus or Pyrrho (Mary Mill Patrick, ed by Anderson:2018, Luciano Floridi:2002, Norman MacColl:2019 & Henrik Lagerlund:2020).  Michael Frede moves the discourse towards medical philosophy, highlighting Heraclides’ commentaries on Hippocrates and the experimental methods of Herophilus 335–280 BC., forerunners of the empiric school of medicine in Alexander in the 3rd century BCE (Frede:1987).  However, the argument of this chapter suggests that both empiricism and scepticism can be thought to have originated further back in time.

Early connections between India and Greece

To see this, we need to consider again, briefly, the general opposition to the idea of an Indian origin to Pyrrhonism, which Richard Bett and others mounted.  It was right to acknowledge, as we did in Chapter 9, Bett’s view that Pyrrho might not have understood the language of the sages he was reported to have met in India.  It was right too, to have acknowledged the variety of their arguments against a diffusion of ideas from India, not least because it is an on-going debate and newer evidence on both sides, might at any time surface.  However, that concern can now be put into a wider context as Thomas McEvilley shows in his impressive survey of this entire period in The Shape of Ancient Thought (2002).  Bett’s opposition pales into insignificance as McEvilley’s major study draws on the evidence of grave goods, and of coins, to argue that there were widespread and longstanding connections between peoples of the ancient world.  In the opening comment in his introductory chapter, McEvilley says of the pre-Alexandrian period that

ancient cultures from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean were shaped by a continuous interplay with one another, an interplay only dimly seen, which is the hidden map of ancient history. (McEvilley:2002).

He goes on to say that there is evidence of trade between Mesopotamia and India, via the Persian Gulf, as early as the 4^th millennium BCE.  In addition to these, there were links also to the west.  The historian Charles Freeman argues that ‘as early as 3200 BCE Egyptian traders had made contact across the desert with Mesopotamia, that is the area in modern Iraq between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates’ (1996:58).  He adds that by early in the 7^th century BCE there is clear evidence of Greeks traveling directly to Egypt, with regular trade between Egypt and Greece via Phoenicia (now Lebanon) (1996:73).  It is not known what language was used, or in what form communications took place between these traders and travellers, but for Freeman and McEvilly, language was no bar to the connections between them.

Within this overall pattern, Pyrrho’s inclusion into the court of Alexander during his campaign to the east, might be seen as no accident.  Apart from the conquest of the Persian Empire, it is well known that Alexandria’s war aims included the establishment of western colonies to spread Greek culture throughout the lands he had taken.  It may have been that this colonising intention by Alexander was the reason why philosophers were included in his court, precisely to understand the cultural norms of the peoples he conquered and planned colonising (McEvilley:2002:Ch14).

Notwithstanding these indications of an ancient fluidity of knowledge between India and Greece, the rise in secular thinking appears not to have originated in that way, i.e. as a passage of ideas simply from one country to another.

Naturalism in India and Greece

McEvilley suggests that faith in religious beliefs in Greece and in Vedic (ancient religious) practices in India, began to weaken more or less simultaneously and suggest that epistemological ideas in both Greece and India mirrored each other to the extent that it was hard to determine from where exactly particular ideas emanated (2002:Ch 13).  He suggests that from the 7^th& 6^th centuries BCE there could be discerned the first signs of variously ‘empiricist, naturalist and proto-scientific philosophies.’  He quotes, for Greece as an example, the poet Archilochus (c680 – c645BCE) who claimed that ‘reward and punishment follow human decision and effort, not dispensation’ (p.26).  For India, the scholar Dale Riepe says although the beginnings of the movement towards naturalism can be discerned from the Upanishads around the 11^th century BCE, the clearest example of ancient secular thinking came later in the 7^th century, with two movements that broke with traditional religious belief.

The first of these dates from around 640 – 610 BCE and is known as Uddalaka. Whether the name refers to a person or to a character in literature has been lost, but Riepe points out that such a loss of information is unimportant because in either case, the issues were publicly raised and thereby talked about at that historical time.  He says that Uddalaka ‘spoke’ of

a method of analysing meanings in terms of the physically observables that would appear publicly to all the senses rather than to auditorily persuasive mystical and idealistic verses used by the ritualists. (Riepe:1961:31)

The second example Riepe offers is more important for our purposes in that it involves a degree of scepticism; it is the Charvaka movement, evident around 600 BCE (p.26).  We shall consider this interesting philosophy in more detail shortly and again later in the book.

McEvilley draws on Dale Riepe’s detailed study, The Naturalistic Tradition in Indian Thought (1961) to define the term ‘naturalism’ to indicate a belief in a secular approach to the human condition in which a scientific view of the world could develop.  It is one, they say, in which humans can understand but not control through their will, or through the agency of a divine being… a God of any kind (Riepe: p.6 & 7; McEvilley: p.325).

Understood in this way, there are two types of naturalism.  On the one hand, and at perhaps one end of a spectrum – at the very edge of it – we can see thinkers in this period, who were barely naturalist at all, for they simply replaced the belief in some sort of deity with a secular, internal, mental version of it.  They posited a secular certainty laying underneath our lived experience of the world, but which could be reached, they believed, by philosophical endeavour (Riepe:1961:7).   McEvilley offers as examples of this type of naturalistic thought, (i) Parmenides (born c 515 BCE) who believed reality to be fixed and timeless, with change being an illusory function of an inevitably flawed human opinion and (ii)  Plato (424-328 BCE) who we have already considered  (McEvilley:Ch13).  It is not that these philosophers rejected entirely the experientiality of knowledge-making, nor indeed at times of a degree of scepticism, but that they subordinated those aspects of human experience to an emphasis on the primacy of mind, soul, or spirit in the universe.  Riepe points out that India had its own secular certaintists.  He offers the 7^th century so called Breath-Wind Magicians as an example of a philosophy that had stepped away from religious belief but still sought the same kind of certainty …in their case by positing that human breath was the basis of all reality.

There are many varieties of secular certainty and we shall see that later in the western intellectual tradition – in the modern world – a form of this position came to be known as idealism.  This mentalist stance is also sometimes associated with the term ‘rationalism’, to emphasise the role in knowledge-making that is derived from reason and logic, as distinct from experience.  It can also be described as ‘metaphysical,’ to indicate that its foundations lie outside of the physical world, in another realm …separate from, and beyond that which we can know through the senses and the sense we can make of them.  These two terms, ‘rationalism’ and ‘metaphysical’, are almost interchangeable, but ‘rationalism’ refers more to methodology – the process through which knowledge is processed – whereas ‘metaphysical’ is largely descriptive.  I shall be using these terms ‘rationalism’ and ‘metaphysical’ as we move forward in the book, as shorthand indicators of these types of secular beliefs. 

Naturalism evolves into empiricism and scepticism

At the other end of this posited spectrum, there can be seen those who rejected ideas of rational certainties – secular or religious – in favour of a reliance on phenomenal awareness; Riepe and McEvilley both call this version of philosophy, simply ‘naturalism’, in the sense that we understand today as being associated with modern scientific thinking.  For our purposes we may regard it as broadly the same as empiricism.  These terms ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ are not mutually exclusive but indicate emphases.  So for example, using empirical methods to know the world does not mean that human rationality plays no part; on the contrary, logic – a practice especially favoured by rationalists – supports the experiential aspect of knowledge and here I include mathematics as a form of logic.  They both help us make sense of experience and to be able to turn crude data into usable knowledge…in other words they are both part of  ‘the sense we can make of that experience’ definition we have been using.   The point is that in empirical methods, reasoning does not replace the data received through the senses, nor does it subordinate it to any supposed primacy of mind, soul, or spirit and neither does it guarantee the acquisition of truth. It is better thought of as an epistemological tool to aid thought and communications.

The actual term ‘empiricism’ seems not to have been used until the Egyptian medical discourse surrounding Sextus Empiricus, some 700 years later, but what these scholars were referring to in this early period is pretty well exactly the approach to knowledge that we have been calling empiricism elsewhere in this book (i.e. knowing the world through the senses and the sense that can be made of them).  For clarity I should say that I use the term empirical for any phenomenon that can be understood in that way, regardless of whether the historical agents themselves used the term.

As we explored in Vol 1 of this book, it doesn’t take much reliance on human experience of the world, with its all too human messiness, to generate uncertainty.  The lack of a stable or hierarchical basis for knowledge, such as the metaphysical philosophers were able to have, or those who believed in religious deities enjoyed, is the seed bed from which a sceptical position could emerge from empirical practices.  And that is exactly what seems to have happened in India and Greece alike, in the 7/6^th centuries BCE.  The historian K.N. Jayatilleke suggests that the conditions for the emergence of philosophical scepticism are these.

When a metaphysical theory is fairly well developed, there is a tendency to inquire into the grounds of its truth.  Similarly, where there are a number of conflicting theories about a particular problem, it would be natural to ask which of them was true. Both these queries lead to an investigation of the nature of truth and knowledge, which may give rise to logical and epistemological doctrines.  This seems to have been the general pattern according to which interest was first stimulated and advances made in the solution of the problem of knowledge both in India as well as in Greece (1963:23).

Xenophanes (c570 – c478) provides a clear example of one who had passed through this this mental process.  According to McEvilley, he declared legends to be useless and supposed signs from heaven as entirely ‘meaningless’ (2002:329).  But Xenophanes would not accept secular certainty either.  He said, famously

And as to truth, there never was nor will there be, anyone who knew the truth about the gods and the other things I am speaking of.  Even if someone should once by chance say what is actually the case he [sic] would not be sure of this.  For only illusory opinion is available to anyone (2002:329).

McEvilley points out that this view has been widely quoted, morphing into the more familiar statement that ‘even if someone should be speaking the truth, he [sic] would not really know whether he was or not’ (p.329).  It is this apparent inability of humans (so far at any rate) to be able to reach any kind of objective truth, which is the aporetic awareness that we discussed earlier in this volume.

We shall see, as we track sceptical empiricism and especially Pyrrhonism, through the western intellectual tradition, that Jayatilleke and McEveley are right.  Empiricism does not necessarily imply scepticism.  An awareness of aporia can be a prelude to idealism or other forms of metaphysical philosophy.  Indeed, the examples of St Augustine (353 – 540 CE) and in the early modern world by Michel de Montaigne (1553 – 1592 CE) show, it can be used as a reason for religious belief.  More generally though, it does go pretty well hand in hand with scepticism, whether of the dogmatic kind or that of Pyrrhonism.  What is important, is the nature of the response to aporia that lies at the base of it.  And here somewhere in the middle of this spectrum – and this centrality probably accounts for his popularity over the years – was Aristotle.  As we have already seen, Aristotle embraced an empirical methodology but at the base of his response to aporia was the mysterious ‘unmoved mover’ – an arguably metaphysical entity.  For Pyrrhonists by contrast, and as we shall see more clearly after considering Sextus, there was nothing closing down aporia in the making of knowledge – nothing that is, beyond self-awareness.

Pre-Pyrrhonism in both India and Greece: Charvaka and Democritus

The example of Indian naturalism that was mentioned by Dale Riepe, is Charvaka (sometimes called Carvaka or lokayata.  It is important for us for it can be seen as having embodied sceptical empiricism, which Uddalaka did not.  Whether or not this scepticism existed originally in Charvaka, or developed later, is not known.  Indeed, Joshua J Mark, in his helpful introductory contribution in the online World History Encyclopaedia (17 June 2020), stresses how little is known for certain of this philosophy.  He notes that no primary sources for it exists and that its origin is shrouded in mystery.  He says that it is believed to have flourished in India around 600 BCE (Buddha’s dates are 515-465 BCE).  Joshua Mark says that it is unclear whether the name Charvaka was a person or is the name of the philosophy and whether the term Brhaspati – another name associated with Charvaka – was its originator or a pupil.   It is unknown too, why the term lokayata (meaning ‘of the people’ or ‘worldly’) is also used in connection with Charvaka.

Despite these potentially debilitating difficulties, Dale Riepe, K.N. Jayatilleke, Thomas McEvilley and Ramkrishna Bhattacharya (2002) have offered at least a partial understanding of the philosophy, based on secondary sources.  They have suggested that it was something of a ‘halfway house’ between early naturalism of the empirical kind and the more self-aware thought begun by Gautama Buddha. In fact, Jayatilleke says that was one of the first clear accounts in India of scepticism (p24).

There is a suggestion by these scholars that two perspectives existed within Charvaka; one that it rejected all forms of knowledge, accepting only hedonism, and the other that it restricted its opposition to religious belief (Jayatilleke: 91 & Bhattacharya: 1963:) Beyond these two perspectives, there appears to be general agreement that Charvaka tended to reject belief based thought and that it relied mainly on phenomena – that is to say, what was evident to the senses, for its data.  We might see here a hint of early Buddhism and Pyrrhonism.  It is only a hint though, for without the self-awareness of Buddhism or Pyrrhonism, Charvaka entails a degree of dogmatic scepticism.  What I mean here is that it does not explicitly apply its sceptical gaze to its own argument.   However, neither does it carry a critique of empiricism and so it doesn’t suffer from the illogicality of dogmatic scepticism.  In fact, Charvaka stresses empiricism by celebrating the knowledge and experience that we reach through phenomenal means i.e. the sense we can make of the world through our senses.  Interestingly, modern humanism has claimed Charvaka as its founding philosophy (Copson & Roberts: 2020:20/21).  There is therefore no doubt that scepticism, in this more restricted sense of applying only to religion, can certainly function in practice.  This is a feature to be discussed again later in the book, for Charvaka is certainly an interesting pluralistic epistemology.

On the Greek side there has been a similar trend in thought.  There was a gradual shift away from religious belief – an emphasis towards a secular naturalistic view of the world, and towards examples of early pre-Pyrrhonian scepticism.  Had we more space to discuss these issues, we could examine the 7^th century Ionian pre-Socratic philosophers from Miletus – Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes (Robinson in Popkin: 1999:6), and indeed in relation to India, Jainism and other pre-Buddhist thinkers, but a clear example of pre-Pyrrhonian naturalism in Greece, is Democritus (460 – 370 BCE).   He, like the Charvakas, certainly held a pluralistic awareness of aporia.  For example, he argued that

In reality we apprehend nothing exactly, but only as it changes according to the condition of our body and of the things that impinge on or offer resistance to it (Robinson: 1999: 19).

Democritus mentored the sophist philosopher Protagoras (490 420BCE) (whose work we encountered earlier) and Anaxarchus (380-320 BCE).  The latter philosopher as we previously noted, tutored the young Pyrrho before his exposure to Eastern ideas.  However, until Pyrrho’s more reflexive scepticism began to be widely known, these early versions of scepticism remained dogmatic in that they did not extend their scepticism to their own thinking.  Also, as Sextus Empiricus pointed out, Democritus believed in atomism – that the world comprised minute independently existing elements, a theory that is not entirely out of step with modern science.  At the same he espoused a sceptical position.  Sextus Empiricus rejected Democritus’ atomist position as having any similarity with Pyrrhonism. He regarded it as dogmatic scepticism.

So, to summarise, empiricism as the term is being used here, appears to have started incrementally.   Gradually in the 7^th century BCE people began doubting religious certainties in a movement towards naturalism. This then spread to doubt about other aspects of human life. Some philosophers in the 6^th century BCE began to employ what we have come to regard as dogmatic (sometimes described as ‘academic’) scepticism.  It was through Buddhist thought, or maybe that of Chavaka, or perhaps a mixture of both, (the exact mix is simply unknown) interpreted by Pyrrho, that this original dogmatic scepticism became later presented by Sextus Empiricus in a self-aware form that could function as a workable epistemology.

To understand how that early empiricism, once infused with Buddhist/Pyrrhonist self-awareness became capable of being developed into the foundational epistemology of the western world, we need to explore the medical philosophy of the ancient world.  Why was medical philosophy important in the development of empiricism?  The answer is not wholly clear, beyond noting that the desire for comfort and the avoidance of pain seems to have been a basic human trait in all ages and it is therefore unsurprising that the best minds would focus on how the process of achieving those ends, might work, in theory as well as in practice.  The next chapter picks up ‘the story’ there.

_______________________________________________________

 

 

 

Timeline Relating to Ch18 

4^th Millennium BCE trade exists between Mesopotamia and India.

3200 BCE Egyptian traders make contact across the dessert to Mesopotamia.

Early 7^th century   Vedic practices in India begin to weaken.

7^th century BCE evidence of Greeks travelling to Egypt and trade between Egypt and Greece via Phoenicia.

7/6^th centuries in both India and Greece, first signs of a naturalistic stance against religious belief.

c600 BCE beginning of charvaka seen.

c570 – c478 BCE Xenophanes.

Born c515 BCE Parmenides.

515 – 465 BCE Gautama Buddha.

490 – 420 BCE Protagoras.

460 – 375 BCE Hippocrates.

460 – 370 BCE  (approx.)  Democritus.

424 – 348 BCE Plato.

384 – 322 BCE Aristotle.

380 -320 BCE Anaxarchus.

365 – 275 BCE Pyrrho.

324 BCE Pyrrho returns from Alexandrian campaign in India.

150 – 190 CE Sextus Empiricus.

129 – 216 CE Galen.

353 – 540 CE  St Augustine.

16^th century CE Pyrrhonism’s integration into mainstream western philosophy and culture.

1553 – 1592 CE Michel de Montaigne.

1711 – 1776 CE  David Hume.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 18:  Origins of empiricism and scepticism in India and Greece.

The aim of this chapter is to disentangle some of the issues relating to the origin and early development of empiricism and scepticism – that which impacted via Sextus Empiricus, on Pyrrhonism.  This is important for our ability to understand the nature of Sextus’ involvement with scepticism and empiricism.

It is tempting to focus immediately on Sextus Empiricus for he is the major figure in this story, but if we want to better understand empiricism beyond just a summary of what he wrote about it and about Pyrrhonism, we need to dig deeper and try to unravel the potentially confusing accounts of how and from where did empiricism and scepticism emerge and what they were like before Sextus Empiricus became involved.  Some of this knowledge has been lost in the passage of time but there appears to have been several stages of development of those ideas between around the 7^th century BCE to the medical theory of the 2^nd century CE.

First, belief in religious deities gave way to forms of naturalism – to forms that is, of proto-scientific secular thinking.  Second, some of these ideas were expressed as empiricism, as I have defined it in this book i.e. knowing the world through one’s senses and the sense that can be made of them. The third stage was that this empiricism gave rise to scepticism – a form of which that has been called ‘dogmatic’ or at times in Greece, ‘academic’.  As we have discussed before, notably in relation to Prof Keith Jenkins’ discussion about postmodernism, an example of dogmatic scepticism is the argument that ‘the truth is that there is no truth’.  Readers will recognise from the last chapter that dogmatic scepticism was almost certainly the basis of Pyrrho’s thought before he travelled to India, and out of which, via Pyrrho, came the more reflexive version.

Origins

Historians and philosophers have in the past suggested that Aristotle was the first empiricist – the first scientist even – but that is a judgement that is becoming unsettled by the new scholarship on the role of Pyrrhonism.  It is now possible to see, through a history of ideas, that although in both India and Greece there was a form of empiricism before Sextus Empiricus, his ideas enriched and potentially transformed it.  However, there is perhaps little to be gained in trying to establish a time based hierarchy between philosophers, since much depends on how the concept of empiricism is interpreted.  Moreover, measuring Sextus against Aristotle is not straightforward, for their positions were slightly but importantly different from each other. They both advocated knowing the world through our senses and the sense that we can make of them.  However, Sextus Empiricus’ position, like of Pyrrho before him, can be thought of as being entirely secular – there being nothing in his epistemology available to us beyond our senses.  In contrast, as has been already discussed, Aristotle’s epistemology relied in the last instance on a religious or metaphysical concept – the mysterious ‘unmoved mover’.

Looking at the broader picture, there is a range of opinion on the origins of empiricism, depending upon a variety of definitions.  The historian R.S. Woolhouse uses a criterion of whether historical agents themselves used the expression to describe their thought, and argues that the terms ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’ were ‘products of nineteenth century histories of philosophy (1988: Introduction & p2).  Some historians write of it as being a construction of the Renaissance (Paul Kurtz:2001) or of the Medieval world (Stephen Davies:2003). More usually, apart from those following the traditional story of the western intellectual tradition via Plato and Aristotle, it is seen as associated with Sextus or Pyrrho (Mary Mill Patrick, ed by Anderson:2018, Luciano Floridi:2002, Norman MacColl:2019 & Henrik Lagerlund:2020).  Michael Frede moves the discourse towards medical philosophy, highlighting Heraclides’ commentaries on Hippocrates and the experimental methods of Herophilus 335–280 BC., forerunners of the empiric school of medicine in Alexander in the 3rd century BCE (Frede:1987).  However, the argument of this chapter suggests that both empiricism and scepticism can be thought to have originated further back in time.

To see this, we need to consider again, briefly, Richard Bett’s and others, general opposition to the idea of an Indian origin to Pyrrhonism.  It was right to acknowledge, as we did in Chapter 17, Bett’s view that Pyrrho might not have understood the language of the sages he was reported to have met in India.  It was right too, to have acknowledged the variety of their arguments against a diffusion of ideas from India, not least because it is an on-going debate and newer evidence on both sides, might at any time surface.  However, that concern can now be put into a wider context as Thomas McEvilley shows in his impressive survey of this entire period in The Shape of Ancient Thought (2002).  Bett’s opposition pales into insignificance as McEvilley’s major study draws on the evidence of grave goods, and of coins, to argue that there were widespread and longstanding connections between peoples of the ancient world.  In the opening comment in his introductory chapter, McEvilley says of the pre-Alexandrian period,

Ancient cultures from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean were shaped by a continuous interplay with one another, an interplay only dimly seen, which is the hidden map of ancient history (McEvilley:2002).

He goes on to say that there is evidence of trade between Mesopotamia and India, via the Persian Gulf, as early as the 4^th millennium BCE.  In addition to these, there were links also to the west.  The historian Charles Freeman argues that ‘as early as 3200 BCE Egyptian traders had made contact across the desert with Mesopotamia, that is the area in modern Iraq between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates’ (1996:58).  He adds that by early in the 7^th century BCE there is clear evidence of Greeks traveling directly to Egypt, with regular trade between Egypt and Greece via Phoenicia (now Lebanon) (1996:73).  It is not known what language was used, or in what form communications took place between these traders and travellers, but for Freeman and McEvilly, language was no bar to the connections between them.

Within this overall pattern, Pyrrho’s inclusion into the court of Alexander during his campaign to the east, might be seen as no accident.  Apart from the conquest of the Persian Empire, it is well known that Alexandria’s war aims included the establishment of western colonies to spread Greek culture throughout the lands he had taken.  It may have been that this colonising intention by Alexander was the reason why philosophers were included in his court, precisely to understand the cultural norms of the peoples he conquered and planned colonising (McEvilley:2002:Ch14).  Notwithstanding these indications of an ancient fluidity of knowledge between India and Greece, the rise in secular thinking appears not to have originated in that way, i.e. as a passage of ideas between these two countries.

Naturalism in India and Greece

McEvilley suggests that faith in religious beliefs in Greece and in Vedic (ancient religious) practices in India, began to weaken more or less simultaneously and suggest that epistemological ideas in both Greece and India mirrored each other to the extent that it was hard to determine from where exactly particular ideas emanated (2002:Ch 13).  He suggests that from the 7^th& 6^th centuries BCE there could be discerned the first signs of variously ‘empiricist, naturalist and proto-scientific philosophies.’  He quotes, for Greece as an example, the poet Archilochus (c680 – c645BCE) who claimed that ‘reward and punishment follow human decision and effort, not dispensation’ (p.26).  For India, the scholar Dale Riepe says although the beginnings of the movement towards naturalism can be discerned from the Upanishads around the 11^th century BCE, the clearest example of ancient secular thinking came later in the 7^th century, with two movements that broke with traditional religious belief.

The first of these dates from around 640 – 610 BCE and is known as Uddalaka. Whether the name refers to a person or to a character in literature has been lost, but Riepe points out that such a loss of information is unimportant because in either case, the issues were publicly raised and thereby talked about at that historical time.  He says that Uddalaka ‘spoke’ of

a method of analysing meanings in terms of the physically observables that would appear publicly to all the senses rather than to auditorily persuasive mystical and idealistic verses used by the ritualists. (Riepe:1961:31)

The second example Riepe offers is more important for our purposes in that it involves a degree of scepticism; it is the Charvaka movement, evident around 600 BCE (p.26).  We shall consider this interesting philosopher in more detail shortly and again later in the book.

McEvilley draws on Dale Riepe’s detailed study, The Naturalistic Tradition in Indian Thought (1961) to define the term ‘naturalism’ to indicate a belief in a secular approach to the human condition in which a scientific view of the world could develop.  It is one, they say, in which humans can understand but not control through their will, or through the agency of a divine being… a God of any kind (Riepe: p.6 & 7; McEvilley: p.325).

Understood in this way, there are two types of naturalism.  On the one hand, and at perhaps one end of a spectrum – at the very edge of it – we can see thinkers in this period, who were barely naturalist at all, for they simply replaced the belief in some sort of deity with a secular, internal, mental version of it.  They posited a secular certainty laying underneath our lived experience of life, but which could be reached, they believed, by philosophical endeavour (Riepe:1961:7).   McEvilley offers as examples of this type of naturalistic thought, (i) Parmenides (born c 515 BCE) who believed reality to be fixed and timeless, with change being an illusory function of inevitably flawed human opinion and (ii)  Plato (424-328 BCE) who we have already considered  (McEvilley:Ch13).  It is not that these philosophers rejected entirely the experientiality of knowledge-making, nor indeed at times of a degree of scepticism, but that they subordinated those aspects of human experience to an emphasis on the primacy of mind, soul, or spirit in the universe.  Riepe points out that India had its own secular certaintists.  He offers the 7^th century so called Breath-Wind Magicians as an example of a philosophy that had stepped away from religious belief but still sought the same kind of certainty …in their case by positing that human breath was the basis of all reality.

There are many varieties of secular certainty and we shall see that later in the western intellectual tradition – in the modern world – a form of this position came to be known as idealism.  This mentalist stance is also sometimes associated with the term ‘rationalism’, to emphasise the role in knowledge-making that is derived from reason and logic, as distinct from experience.  It can also be described as ‘metaphysical,’ to indicate that its foundations lie outside of the physical world, in another realm …separate from, and beyond that which we can know through the senses and the sense we can make of them.  These two terms are almost interchangeable, but ‘rationalism’ refers more to methodology – the process through which knowledge is processed – whereas ‘metaphysical’ is largely descriptive.  I shall be using these terms ‘rationalism’ and ‘metaphysical’ as we move forward in the book, as shorthand indicators of these types of secular beliefs.

Naturalism evolves into empiricism and scepticism.

At the other end of this posited spectrum, there can be seen those who rejected ideas of rational certainties – secular or religious – in favour of a reliance on phenomenal awareness; Riepe and McEvilley both call this version of philosophy, simply ‘naturalism’, in the sense that we understand today as being associated with modern scientific thinking.  For our purposes we may regard it as broadly the same as empiricism.  These terms ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’  are not mutually exclusive but indicate emphases.  So for example, using empirical methods to know the world does not mean that human rationality plays no part; on the contrary, logic – a practice especially favoured by rationalists – supports the experiential aspect of knowledge and here I include mathematics as a form of logic.  They both help us make sense of experience and to be able to turn crude data into usable knowledge…in other words they are both part of  ‘the sense we can make of that experience’ definition we have been using.   The point is that in empirical methods, reasoning does not replace the data received through the senses, nor does it subordinate it to any supposed primacy of mind, soul, or spirit and neither does it guarantee the acquisition of truth. It is better thought of as an epistemological tool to aid thought and communications.

The actual term ‘empiricism’ seems not to have been used until the Egyptian medical discourse surrounding Sextus Empiricus, some 700 years later, but what these scholars were referring to in this early period is pretty well exactly the approach to knowledge that we have been calling empiricism elsewhere in this book (i.e. knowing the world through the senses and the sense that can be made of them).  For clarity I should say that I use the term empirical for any phenomenon that can be understood in that way, regardless of whether the historical agents themselves used the term.

As we explored in Vol 1 of this book, it doesn’t take much reliance on human experience of the world, with its all too human messiness, to generate uncertainty.  The lack of a stable or hierarchical basis for knowledge, such as the metaphysical philosophers were able to have, or those who believed in religious deities enjoyed, is the seed bed from which a sceptical position could emerge from empirical practices.  And that is exactly what seems to have happened in India and Greece alike, in the 7/6^th centuries BCE.  The historian K.N. Jayatilleke suggests that the conditions for the emergence of philosophical scepticism are these.

When a metaphysical theory is fairly well developed, there is a tendency to inquire into the grounds of its truth.  Similarly, where there are a number of conflicting theories about a particular problem, it would be natural to ask which of them was true. Both these queries lead to an investigation of the nature of truth and knowledge, which may give rise to logical and epistemological doctrines.  This seems to have been the general pattern according to which interest was first stimulated and advances made in the solution of the problem of knowledge both in India as well as in Greece (1963:23).

Xenophanes (c570 – c478) provides a clear example of one who had passed through this this mental process.  According to McEvilley, he declared legends to be useless and supposed signs from heaven as entirely ‘meaningless’ (2002:329).  But Xenophanes would not accept secular certainty either.  He said, famously

And as to truth, there never was nor will there be, anyone who knew the truth about the gods and the other things I am speaking of.  Even if someone should once by chance say what is actually the case he [sic] would not be sure of this.  For only illusory opinion is available to anyone (2002:329).

McEvilley points out that this view has been widely quoted, morphing into the more familiar statement that ‘even if someone should be speaking the truth, he [sic] would not really know whether he was or not’ (p.329).  It is this apparent inability of humans  (so far at any rate) to be able to reach any kind of objective truth that is the aporetic awareness that we discussed earlier in this volume.

We shall see, as we track sceptical empiricism and especially Pyrrhonism, through the western intellectual tradition, that Jayatilleke and McEveley are right.  Empiricism does not necessarily imply scepticism.  An awareness of aporia can be a prelude to idealism or other forms of metaphysical philosophy.  Indeed, the examples of St Augustine (353 – 540 CE) and in the early modern world by Michel de Montaigne (1553 – 1592 CE) show, it can be used as a reason for religious belief.  More generally though, it does go pretty well hand in hand with scepticism, whether of the dogmatic kind or that of Pyrrhonism.  What is important, is the nature of the response to aporia that lies at the base of it.  And here somewhere in the middle of this spectrum – and this centrality probably accounts for his popularity over the years – was Aristotle.  As we have already seen, Aristotle embraced an empirical methodology but at the base of his response to aporia was the mysterious ‘unmoved mover’ – an arguably metaphysical entity.  For Pyrrhonists by contrast, and as we shall see more clearly after considering Sextus, there was nothing closing down aporia in the making of knowledge – nothing that is, beyond self-awareness.

Pre-Pyrrhonism in both India and Greece: Charvaka and Democritus

The example of Indian naturalism that was mentioned by Dale Riepe, is Charvaka (sometimes called Carvaka or lokayata.  It is important for us for it can be seen as having embodied sceptical empiricism, which Uddalaka did not.  Whether or not this scepticism existed originally in Charvaka, or developed later, is not known.  Indeed, Joshua J Mark, in his helpful introductory contribution in the online World History Encyclopaedia (17 June 2020), stresses how little is known for certain of this philosophy.  He notes that no primary sources for it exists and that its origin is shrouded in mystery.  He says that it is believed to have flourished in India around 600 BCE (Buddha’s dates are 515-465 BCE).  Joshua Mark says that it is unclear whether the name Charvaka was a person or is the name of the philosophy and whether the term Brhaspati – another name associated with Charvaka – was its originator or a pupil.   It is unknown too, why the term lokayata (meaning ‘of the people’ or ‘worldly’) is also used in connection with Charvaka.

Despite these potentially debilitating difficulties, Dale Riepe, K.N. Jayatilleke, Thomas McEvilley and Ramkrishna Bhattacharya (2002) have offered at least a partial understanding of the philosophy, based on secondary sources.  They have suggested that it was something of a ‘halfway house’ between early naturalism of the empirical kind and the more self-aware thought begun by Gautama Buddha. In fact, Jayatilleke says that was one of the first clear accounts in India of scepticism (p24).

There is a suggestion by these scholars that two perspectives existed within Charvaka; one that it rejected all forms of knowledge, accepting only hedonism, and the other that it restricted its opposition to religious belief (Jayatilleke: 91 & Bhattacharya: 1963:) Beyond these two perspectives, there appears to be general agreement that Charvaka tended to reject belief based thought and that it relied mainly on phenomena – that is to say, what was evident to the senses, for its data.  We might see here a hint of early Buddhism and Pyrrhonism.  It is only a hint though, for without the self-awareness of Buddhism or Pyrrhonism, Charvaka entails a degree of dogmatic scepticism.  What I mean here is that it does not explicitly apply its sceptical gaze to its own argument.   However, neither does it carry a critique of empiricism and so it doesn’t suffer from the illogicality of dogmatic scepticism.  In fact, Charvaka stresses empiricism by celebrating the knowledge and experience that we reach through phenomenal means i.e. the sense we can make of the world through our senses.  Interestingly, modern humanism has claimed Charvaka as its founding philosophy (Copson & Roberts: 2020:20/21).  There is therefore no doubt that scepticism, in this more restricted sense of applying only to religion, can certainly function in practice.  This is a feature to be discussed in more depth, later in the book, for Charvaka is certainly an interesting pluralistic epistemology.

On the Greek side there has been a similar trend in thought.  There was a gradual shift away from religious belief – an emphasis towards a secular naturalistic view of the world, and towards examples of early pre-Pyrrhonian scepticism.  Had we more space to discuss these issues, we could examine the 7^th century Ionian pre-Socratic philosophers from Miletus – Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes (Robinson in Popkin: 1999:6), and indeed in relation to India, Jainism and other pre-Buddhist thinkers, but a clear example of pre-Pyrrhonian naturalism in Greece, is Democritus (460 – 370 BCE).   He, like the Charvakas, certainly held a pluralistic awareness of aporia.  For example, he argued that

In reality we apprehend nothing exactly, but only as it changes according to the condition of our body and of the things that impinge on or offer resistance to it (Robinson: 1999: 19).

Democritus mentored the sophist philosopher Protagoras (490 420BCE) (whose work we encountered earlier) and Anaxarchus (380-320 BCE).  The latter philosopher as we previously noted, tutored the young Pyrrho before his exposure to Eastern ideas.  However, until Pyrrho’s more reflexive scepticism began to be widely known, these early versions of scepticism remained dogmatic in that they did not extend their scepticism to their own thinking.  Also, as Sextus Empiricus pointed out, Democritus believed in atomism – that the world comprised minute independently existing elements, a theory that is not entirely out of step with modern science.  At the same he espoused a sceptical position.  Sextus Empiricus rejected Democritus’ atomist position as having any similarity with Pyrrhonism. He regarded it as dogmatic scepticism.

So, to summarise, empiricism as the term is being used here, appears to have started incrementally.   Gradually in the 7^th century BCE people began doubting religious certainties in a movement towards naturalism. This then spread to doubt about other aspects of human life. Some philosophers in the 6^th century began to employ what we have come to regard as dogmatic (sometimes described as ‘academic’) scepticism and it was through Buddhist thought, interpreted by Pyrrho, that this original dogmatic scepticism became later presented by Sextus Empiricus in a self-aware form that could function as a workable epistemology.  To understand how that early empiricism, once infused with Buddhist/Pyrrhonist self-awareness became capable of being developed into the foundational epistemology of the western world, we need to explore the medical philosophy of the ancient world.  Why medical philosophy?  The answer is not wholly clear, beyond noting that the desire for comfort and the avoidance of pain seems to have been a basic human trait in all ages and it is therefore unsurprising that the best minds would focus on how the process of achieving those ends, might work, in theory as well as in practice.