It is perhaps a measure of the importance of history in our modern lives, but I still find it hard to come to terms with the way the subject of this book has developed over the course of my research. It has evolved from being part of a methodological debate within the discipline of history towards an exploration of how responses to philosophical uncertainty have shaped the Western world. It has shown me, more clearly than ever, the significance entailed in understanding how knowing the past relates to knowing the present and vice versa. In examining this phenomenon, the study demonstrates that by taking seriously the Indo-Greek philosophical exchange we shall be discussing, it is possible for historians, as well as others outside the discipline, to navigate their work and their lives with a deeper sense of self‑awareness and purpose.
The Postmodern Challenge
But to start at the beginning …it was all much simpler when I began the research. My aim when starting this work a good many years ago, was straightforward. It was to help resolve what I saw as a damaging controversy between traditional empirical historians and a group of challengers styling themselves as ‘postmodern’. The traditionalists were reluctant participants in this debate for they regarded themselves as professionals defending their traditional practices against an attack by a group that the traditionalists regarded as not real historians at all. The defenders asserted that the work of historians simply did not need discussing, for was it not self-evident that historical knowledge was found, ‘by examining sources from the past (so-called primary sources)? Tradition then required those findings be compared with contemporary accounts (what they called secondary sources) to ensure the new versions were different, but not too different, from what had been accepted before. In this way, it was thought, historical knowledge remained both reasonably true and stable, changing only slowly over time. It was all pretty uncomplicated, and it had been the normal methodology in the discipline for a good many years. The postmodern challengers, however, saw it differently.
There had, been signs of change in ideas about knowledge, for some time. In the years before the Second World War, a movement towards greater freedom for pupil expression in general had developed across Western schools, and in the 1950s in the UK, some awkward questions began to be asked of traditional historical practices. Despite these signs of change, which we shall discuss later, the postmodern critique came as a surprise to many. Actually, there were postmodern challenges to the traditions in most disciplines, especially in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Ours was just the historical version of a more generic form. The thrust of the postmodern argument, at base, was as simple as it was initially devastating.
The historical postmodernists pointed out as part of their critique, that however many sources from the past are consulted, the knowledge gained – the interpretation of them – was carried out in the present by present-day people, and thus with their present-day minds. The central point was that no one from the present, across a spectrum from a highly trained historian to somebody casually interested in knowing the past, was able to go back into that past to check whether their interpretation was correct. This may be thought a simple point, hardly worth mentioning, but when the matter was looked at more closely, it became compelling, certainly for postmodernists. So from where then, they asked, did the idea of historical truth come? Surely, they said, the best that could be obtained was historical truth as being the coherence of one’s interpretation with other accepted truths…or in other words, true in relation to other accepted interpretations. Accounts of the past could certainly never be true in relation to what actually happened in the past, because we appear not to ever know what happened in the past. We have no objective position from which to judge present-day accounts of the past.
Worse for the traditionalists, the postmodernists went on to make the point that, as we all know, interpretations can differ. Thus, it was legitimate, they claimed, to argue that as times change we ask different questions of the past. That was largely common ground but they went on to allege that if a particular social group – say for example the upper middle classes or as it has sometimes been crudely expressed, white middle class men in universities – came to dominate the writing of history (which the postmodernists claimed was largely the case) then explanations of the past will reflect that group’s values and interests, perhaps over those of people at large. And, moreover, since, as George Orwell wrote in his famous novel, 1984 ‘who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’ it was clear to all who took the trouble to consider the matter, that the discipline of history was essentially political.
Of course, the traditionalists did not like this kind of critique. They did not like it at all; it smacked to them of punches below the belt, of not playing the game. Fortunately for them though, their struggle to defend their method of doing history was made easier because of an inclination among postmodernist historians of the time to overstate their case and to recommend practices that were impractical. Prof Keith Jenkins’ postmodern critique, for example, included the claim that it had become impossible to make historical knowledge in conditions of what they called postmodernity. They meant that term to refer to the present – a time, they pointed out, in which disciplinary interpretation was widespread. We might attribute that condition to the rise of mass education, but to speak of that now would miss the point. Historians, Jenkins argued, had to give up trying to make sense of the past and should turn to philosophy instead. This kind of argument along with a perceived tendency towards negativity, enabled the defenders to reject the challenge out of hand, which they duly did. On one occasion, early in the debate, postmodern arguments prompted an article by a traditionalist in the journal Teaching History entitled ‘Never Publish Anything on Postmodernism Again’. The dispute reached its height in the late 1990s, the historical academic establishment effectively seeing off the challenge during the early 2000s. For many on the traditionalist side, there was satisfaction that methodological calm once again prevailed in historical academia.
It is, however, a false calm. The underlying differences have never been resolved, and they remain effectively on the table, ready to be picked up again at any time. That is not to say that there have been no disciplinary debates since then. On the contrary, as we know, history is a dynamic discipline that keeps on developing as ideas in the present change. In fact, there have been several quite vigorous discussions in the years since the postmodern challenge, notably on gender studies, neuro-history and on digital issues. We shall look more closely at some of the recent debates in later chapters. The point for now is that the grounds for historical knowledge – the fundamentals of how it works…its epistemology, to use the technical term – has not substantially been discussed since Professor Jenkins claimed, during the 1990’s, that history, as a means of knowing what happened in the past, was finished. An unintended consequence of the postmodern critique has been to make discussions about historical theory unpopular. So in the end, although Jenkins’ work didn’t manage to stop history-making, it did discourage debates about the epistemology of the discipline.
It is not my intention here to resurrect that controversy…not exactly. Debate is, of course, beneficial; it is the lifeblood of academic work in the humanities, if not across all knowledge-making. But this was a challenging time for historians. Harsh words were said by both sides, unfortunately. New students to the discipline followed the example set by leaders of the controversy, apparently coming to regard insults to their opponents as equivalent to argument. Sensible, serious debate was often hard to find. They were uncomfortable years for many history students and their teachers, and it was not a healthy environment for the discipline within the humanities. It is good that it’s now mostly in the past. I say ‘mostly’, for it has left behind an echo, for it has left a space into which other, I think deeper, more wide-ranging questions can take root, about what we might be doing when we set out to make sense of the past, and the present too.
I had long been fascinated by questions about what it is that we believe is happening when we claim to know something, and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself in the postmodern camp at that time, at least for a while. My role in that controversy was to draw on my experience as a teacher of history at pre-degree and undergraduate levels to show how a range of fresh pedagogic ideas could function. I was lucky to be able to do this for it was to a very considerable extent the result of an association with some outstanding colleagues who, whilst sharing many of the ideas, did not themselves identify as postmodern historians.
For some years I had worked with an experienced and talented teaching colleague, Julia Perrin, together trying out new ideas in the classroom. Also, in the educational work for which I was responsible I had worked with a particularly inspiring colleague, Dr Andrew Foster, developing and improving some of the newer forms of educational provision, such as Access to Higher Education programmes and franchised undergraduate courses for mature students. I conveyed the insights achieved from those collaborations into the postmodern camp and in turn applied their theoretical ideas to our teaching of adults as well as to our traditional A level students. I campaigned enthusiastically with Prof Keith Jenkins for several years in arguing the postmodern case that knowledge isn’t just found in the past, as many traditional historians assume, but that it is made, by communities, by language, by concepts and, in short by human beings generally, acting both individually and together. Keith Jenkins and I wrote articles for teachers together, presented papers together, and we ran teacher training events in the late 1980s and 1990s… when, for me, it gradually came to an end.
Whatever the effect, on the discipline as a whole, in our corner of Sussex these were enjoyable times. Julia and Andrew were exciting colleagues to work with; Keith was highly knowledgeable with a sharp sense of humour and we became good friends. Slowly though, I began to realise that some of the claims my postmodern colleagues were making were unsustainable. I became acutely aware, too, that there were weaknesses in my own arguments — serious ones. This didn’t necessarily mean that the traditional historians were right, only that the challenge was flawed. Eventually, I broke off from ‘frontline’ activity in pursuing postmodern historical practices. I wanted to sort out what was important within the controversy, at least in my own mind, so I began a PhD study on postmodernism and the nature of history, which I completed in 2005. I found, through that programme of study, rather to my surprise, that there was very little real difference between the two sides. The postmodern challenge was certainly not the epochal change that their proponents claimed and despite its effective critique of traditional methodologies, parts of its basic argument was definitely flawed.
To see the issues more clearly, during part of the PhD study, I stepped outside the confines of history as a discipline and focused on general epistemological matters. To be clear, this was not the same as giving up on the discipline as Jenkins was advocating; it was just a temporary strategy to enable a better understanding of the core issues. I shall shortly be making the case that the underlying theory of postmodernism was philosophical scepticism and I traced that philosophy back within the Western Intellectual Tradition to its origins. For now, let us accept that scepticism is similar to, but not necessarily the same as, postmodernism. Its proponents argue, or suggest, depending on the form it takes, that humans are, or may be, unable to ever find certain truths about the world. I found that a central result of that tracing was that the traditional empirical method, that is, knowing the world through our senses and the sense we can make of them, always being aware that it could be different, had for centuries fulfilled much of what postmodernists were demanding of traditional historians. Sadly, many traditional historians hadn’t been doing it very well, in that they had forgotten the final part of empiricism – that its results could, and probably would in time, be different. They had begun to believe that their analyses were true and that approaches to knowledge that did not contain that truth claim, were not examples of knowledge at all. In the last couple of centuries, their form of empiricism had begun to take on the attributes of realism, which we shall be discussing. Nevertheless, I saw a degree of congruence between their positions – between traditional empirical historians and their postmodern challengers.
I also found, interestingly, that despite priding themselves on being in the vanguard of academia, in running their philosophically sceptical arguments, postmodernists had not always thoroughly researched their own position. Their narratives detailing the origins of postmodernism seemed rarely to extend very much further into the past beyond the enlightenment. They had apparently not realised that there was more than one type of scepticism, that there were several, with subtle differences between them. It turned out that those differences mattered. Nevertheless, to cut a very long story short, I still found that the traditionalists and their postmodern challengers had more in common than they realised, and that a resolution of their differences was possible, if they were willing for this to happen.
But it seemed to me that the moment had passed. The heat of the controversy had died down by the mid-2000s, and it hardly seemed worthwhile stirring it up again. I had satisfied my own curiosity. I could understand the controversy…or so I thought, and it was time to move on. And there it would have lain… had I let it.
A second enquiry
But, like an itch that just has to be scratched, I couldn’t leave it alone. I kept poking around amongst the materials. There were questions I felt I had not explored properly, questions I had ignored…questions like how exactly did those forms of scepticism originate? How did they come to be different from each other? Why did they sometimes cohere, why sometimes did they compete with each other? What was the relationship between Christianity and scepticism…and what is the consequence of all this for our lives in the present, outside of the academy? I was acutely aware that, in trying to cover some 2,400 years, I had passed over some important aspects of scepticism and its relationship with postmodernism.
Additionally, during my own journey to make sense of the controversy, I had stumbled upon several dead ends, and it now made sense to help new students avoid the unnecessary complexities that I had at times struggled with. So, a few years ago, I set about revisiting my account of scepticism in the Western Intellectual Tradition, this time to make my findings accessible to an undergraduate audience. The result is this book that you are reading.
As with my PhD study, I conducted this research outside, and quite independently of, the controversy between traditional historians and postmodernists, and separately too of the history of the discipline, returning to it only later to consider the relevance of any further findings I might have. The reason I did this was because, well, firstly, it had worked for me in studying for my PhD, in getting below the well-worn arguments of the existing controversy. Also though, I am, impressed by the American pragmatist philosopher and educationalist John Dewey’s ideas about how to transition from an established controversy. In his The Child And The Curriculum, he argued that to move on from a major controversy, it was necessary to alter fundamentally our thinking about its constituent parts. He said that,
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)
In this book, Knowledge from Uncertainty, ‘getting away from the meaning of terms already fixed upon’ means redescribing what we think knowledge to be, beyond the vision of either traditionalists or postmodernists.
If, as a result of my PhD study, I had been surprised at how alike the basic positions of postmodern and empirical historians really were, I was astonished at what I found upon examining the issues more closely, post-PhD. As I shall explain in the chapters that follow, what I found was, firstly, further confirmation that the postmodern position was not new, as its proponents had claimed. It is a modern version of an account of knowledge that had permeated much of the philosophy of classical Greece in the 5th century, and which had been opposed by the famous philosophers Plato and Aristotle. I also found a similar, but importantly different scepticism, that arguably has lain at the heart of post-Reformation Western approaches to knowledge and has been, to a remarkable extent, lost to modern scholars until relatively recently (Annas & Barnes: 1994: p. ix).
I found that this different form of scepticism – Pyrrhonism – originated not in Greece, but, controversially, in India. I found that although 4th century Indian philosophy brought into existence Pyrrhonism, this period was far from marking the beginning of scepticism. I found that it had existed as far back in time as we can determine – anywhere, in fact, where religious ideas did not completely hold sway or had weakened. An example of this is the 6th century BCE Charvakean position, often claimed by modern Humanists as being the origins of their approach to knowledge (Copson & Roberts:2019:20). I found, more particularly, that Pyrrhonism had as strong a claim to being part of the origins of modern intellectual thought as did the product of the great philosophers of ancient Classical Greece. Indeed the Greek scepticism known as academic scepticism (a more moderate form of the dogmatic scepticism that constitutes postmodernism) is a mix of Pyrrhonism with earlier Greek Democritean scepticism and the remnants of Platonism.
I found that in Europe, all forms of scepticism had been suppressed by medieval Christian leaders but had been resurrected by that same church around the time of the Renaissance. I found that Pyrrhonism and academic scepticism had been closely involved with the Reformation, the formation of the Anglican Church, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the basis of Western democracy. In short, I found that these two forms of scepticism have played a pivotal role in shaping our modern Western consciousness. A large part of this book is a story of those findings.
My account returns to the discipline of history towards the end of the book, demonstrating how, with the outlook of Pyrrhonists in mind, differentiating it from academic scepticism, students and others can gain a simple and clear understanding of what they are doing when they create historical accounts. Moreover, it is one to which I think both traditionalists and any remaining postmodern historians can relate. What this actually means in practice is that I suggest the adoption, or the strengthening where it already exists, of a more reflexive approach, whether it involves looking at the past or the present. Ok, so this position is not epochal either, but it has never claimed to be so. It is perhaps closer to the traditionalist position than that of the postmodernists, but in truth is draws from both positions in a way that is not simply a mix of both approaches. It is a fresh account of knowledge that differs from what went before, but is able to accommodate both sets of existing combatants. Moreover, far from carrying postmodern negativity or that peculiar defensive kind of respectability that traditionalists exude when under pressure, the approach to history and to general thinking that I am promoting, coheres with some of the most useful approaches to knowledge in the present. i am referring now to naturalism, modern science and logic, humanism, mindfulness and the ideas that have given rise to artificial intelligence.
Unsurprisingly then, I conclude the book by reflecting briefly on what my findings might mean for our modern lives in general, as well as for our science and personal and community ethics. Again here, I offer the possibility of a softer, more gentle approach to knowledge, and thus to the ups and downs of life in general. It is one that respects the centuries of human philosophical discussion that exists within our modern gaze, but which is practical enough to enable us to actually live some of those ideas and to benefit from them.
Login