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Past Futures: The Impossible Necessity of History
By nature, human beings seek to make sense of their past. Paradoxically, true historical explanation is ultimately impossible. Historians never have complete evidence from the past, nor is their methodology rigorous enough to prove causal links. Although it cannot be proven that 'A caused B,' by redefining the agenda of historical discourse, scholars can locate events in time and place history once again at the heart of intellectual activity. In Past Futures , Ged Martin advocates examining the decisions that people take, most of which are not the result of a 'process,' but are reached intuitively. Subsequent rationalizations that constitute historical evidence simply mislead. All historians can do is to locate them in time, to explain not why a decision was taken, but why then? To illustrate, Martin asks a number of What is a 'long time' in history? Are we close to the past or remote from it? Is democracy a recent experiment, or proof of our arrival at the end of a journey through time? Can we engage in a historical dialogue with the past without making clear our own ethical standpoints? Although explanation is ultimately impossible, humankind can make sense of its location in time through the concept of 'significance,' a device for highlighting events and aspects of the past. In so doing, Martin suggests a radical new approach to historical discourse.
326 pages, Paperback
First published April 23, 2004
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September 16, 2021
Historians typically make lousy philosophers, and philosophers typically make lousy historians. The former discipline is all too often preoccupied with positivistic fact-finding, leaving a plethora of axiomatic stones unturned. On the other hand, the latter tends to be more concerned with questioning and critiquing than forming evidence-based claims. These are gross generalizations, but from my experience at least, I feel like there is a considerable amount of truth here.
In Past Futures, Ged Martin attempts to bring philosophical thinking back into the study of history. On this point, I think he is fairly successful. Past Futures offers enough ‘thinking about thinking’ to satisfy historians like myself with an equal appreciation for the introspective. Unfortunately, Martin fails to extend his historical lens into philosophy. Admittedly, he says quite early on: “[...] it was news to me when a friendly critic told me that my approach is post-structuralist. No doubt there is much that I should have read, and much that I have read that I should have better comprehended […].” Intellectual humility is one thing; intellectual ignorance is another. Martin seems very out-of-touch with the history of philosophy, not just in terms of post-modernism and post-structuralism, but the entire sweep of Western thought itself.
Curiously, Martin formerly held the chair of Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and yet he seems completely unaware about how his own ideas sit in relation to the Scottish Enlightenment and skeptical empiricism. Indeed, Martin’s central thesis is essentially just a rehashed version of David Hume’s well-known argument on causality.
Briefly, Martin posits that time is a continuum of interrelated and causally connected events. As part of this continuum, the past is contained within the present and the future. For Martin, it seems that temporal separateness is more cognitive and conceptual than any reflection of external reality. Given that time is an infinite continuum of cause-and-effect, we can never know everything throughout historical time, nor can we absolutely separate ourselves from the past that we are studying. It follows, then, that complete causal explanation is impossible. This is the first proposition in his two-part thesis. The second part is a prescriptive judgment, which I will come back to shortly.
Past Futures rightly does away with totalizing historical knowledge, including the teleological metanarratives that propose unifying theories of history. However, it stands as a much better critical thinking piece than as a positive epistemological project. Martin does a fine job demonstrating the idea that complete historical knowledge is impossible. It’s where he goes from there that starts getting philosophically flimsy.
After establishing that complete historical knowledge is impossible, Martin suggests that the most a historian can claim is partial and fragmentary historical knowledge. According to Martin, historians can achieve partial historical knowledge by using inductive reasoning, evaluating the significance of events, bracketing their own moral judgments, and – crucially – locating those events in time. The practice of locating events in time involves the qualification of one’s questions by pointing toward something specific. Instead of asking “why?”, ask “why then?”, “why that?”, “why there?”, and “why them?” The overarching goal is the contextualization of history. Everything has its ‘place’ in time, and it is the historian’s task to locate them in their proper place.
Martin argues that the most important way to realize this goal of contextualization is by acknowledging the concept of “past-futures”. This is the process by which historians study how historical subjects understood their individual and collective futures. If a decision has intentionality, it is largely made with an eye toward the future, and therefore contains some idea of what that future could look like.
For Martin, paying attention to these so-called past-futures allows historians to validate their inferences. First of all, I argue that the epistemological emphasis on past-futures is wildly overstated. Although it is methodologically responsible, I would not say that it validates historical knowledge. The argument is inherently circular. How do we know anything about the past? Because we appeal to past-futures. But how do we know about past-futures? Because we can partially know the past. The result of this circularity is that Martin’s thesis collapses into a tautology, in which the very foundation of knowledge about the past is our knowledge about the past. Martin asks whether complete historical knowledge is possible, without asking how any historical knowledge is possible in the first place.
On what basis can we say anything about the past at all? How much certainty lies in partial knowledge? To what extent does this knowledge reflect statements about the past, or statements about the historian-observer? Martin’s epistemological project stops short, taking in my opinion, the far easier task of challenging 'completeness' instead of the foundations of historical knowledge itself. He assumes that we can know things with varying degrees of certainty, but leaves it up to the audience to figure out how exactly this works.
To clarify, unlike Hume, Martin doesn’t doubt the existence of causality. But, like Hume, he says that we don’t really know anything complete or comprehensive about it. It’s unfortunate that, for all of the similarities with Hume, the eminent philosopher doesn’t appear once in Martin’s book. If Martin had read Hume, he would have not only been able to locate his own philosophical ideas in time – an activity that he places at the centre of all good historical scholarship – but he would have been able to open up a dialogue with a well-established critique of causality, inductive logic, and inferential propositions. Moreover, he would have also been familiar with the is-ought distinction, which flows logically from the same concerns with causality.
This brings me to the second part of Martin’s thesis. As the subtitle of his work suggests, he argues that historical explanation is intellectually and physically impossible, yet socially and emotionally necessary. Hence, “the impossible necessity of history”. He even makes a funny comparison between professional historians and “[…] daredevils attempting the impossible”. However, if we accept that complete historical explanation is impossible, then why must we also accept that the attempt to explain history is necessary? How is Martin’s argument from necessity supported by his personal belief that it provides some kind of social, emotional, and cultural good?
Let’s go back to Hume for a second. In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume claims that you cannot necessarily get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Descriptive or explanatory statements are not the same as prescriptive or normative statements. Closely examine any sequence of events – any sequence at all. Where do you see right and wrong in that sequence? Right and wrong are not a part of the objective reality of the world. You can’t put historical events under a microscope and make moral truth-claims that can be tested, replicated, or falsified. Only once you turn that examination inward will you find the source of moral values. Morality is, for Hume, nothing more than the movement of the passions. It is found in the subjective sense perception of the observer, not in the objective sequence itself. Could you say that the ‘ought’ is preferable rather than necessary? Sure you can. But that pushes ethics into the realm of aesthetics or taste, and there is nothing necessarily true about one taste over another.
All that Martin can logically say is that he finds aesthetic value in the pursuit of historical knowledge, even if it is ultimately impossible. Given its intellectual impossibility, the social worth of history is not necessary, but merely preferable. This amended conclusion is much softer than Martin’s, but in many ways it is more satisfying, because it is consistent with the earlier premise that complete explanation is impossible. It also dodges the prickly issue of moral necessity, which he asserts without laying the foundational groundwork to build upon.
Those major criticisms aside, Martin does a lot of things really well with this book. It’s filled with lots of examples from Canadian history, taking subjects that Canadians are quite familiar with – such as Confederation – and posing questions to complicate those familiarities. The prose is clear, the style is clean, and the ideas are easily accessible to a wide range of readers. Finally, it represents an honest attempt to examine the discipline of history in an intellectually serious way. This alone is highly commendable, and makes Past Futures worthy of our consideration.
In Past Futures, Ged Martin attempts to bring philosophical thinking back into the study of history. On this point, I think he is fairly successful. Past Futures offers enough ‘thinking about thinking’ to satisfy historians like myself with an equal appreciation for the introspective. Unfortunately, Martin fails to extend his historical lens into philosophy. Admittedly, he says quite early on: “[...] it was news to me when a friendly critic told me that my approach is post-structuralist. No doubt there is much that I should have read, and much that I have read that I should have better comprehended […].” Intellectual humility is one thing; intellectual ignorance is another. Martin seems very out-of-touch with the history of philosophy, not just in terms of post-modernism and post-structuralism, but the entire sweep of Western thought itself.
Curiously, Martin formerly held the chair of Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and yet he seems completely unaware about how his own ideas sit in relation to the Scottish Enlightenment and skeptical empiricism. Indeed, Martin’s central thesis is essentially just a rehashed version of David Hume’s well-known argument on causality.
Briefly, Martin posits that time is a continuum of interrelated and causally connected events. As part of this continuum, the past is contained within the present and the future. For Martin, it seems that temporal separateness is more cognitive and conceptual than any reflection of external reality. Given that time is an infinite continuum of cause-and-effect, we can never know everything throughout historical time, nor can we absolutely separate ourselves from the past that we are studying. It follows, then, that complete causal explanation is impossible. This is the first proposition in his two-part thesis. The second part is a prescriptive judgment, which I will come back to shortly.
Past Futures rightly does away with totalizing historical knowledge, including the teleological metanarratives that propose unifying theories of history. However, it stands as a much better critical thinking piece than as a positive epistemological project. Martin does a fine job demonstrating the idea that complete historical knowledge is impossible. It’s where he goes from there that starts getting philosophically flimsy.
After establishing that complete historical knowledge is impossible, Martin suggests that the most a historian can claim is partial and fragmentary historical knowledge. According to Martin, historians can achieve partial historical knowledge by using inductive reasoning, evaluating the significance of events, bracketing their own moral judgments, and – crucially – locating those events in time. The practice of locating events in time involves the qualification of one’s questions by pointing toward something specific. Instead of asking “why?”, ask “why then?”, “why that?”, “why there?”, and “why them?” The overarching goal is the contextualization of history. Everything has its ‘place’ in time, and it is the historian’s task to locate them in their proper place.
Martin argues that the most important way to realize this goal of contextualization is by acknowledging the concept of “past-futures”. This is the process by which historians study how historical subjects understood their individual and collective futures. If a decision has intentionality, it is largely made with an eye toward the future, and therefore contains some idea of what that future could look like.
For Martin, paying attention to these so-called past-futures allows historians to validate their inferences. First of all, I argue that the epistemological emphasis on past-futures is wildly overstated. Although it is methodologically responsible, I would not say that it validates historical knowledge. The argument is inherently circular. How do we know anything about the past? Because we appeal to past-futures. But how do we know about past-futures? Because we can partially know the past. The result of this circularity is that Martin’s thesis collapses into a tautology, in which the very foundation of knowledge about the past is our knowledge about the past. Martin asks whether complete historical knowledge is possible, without asking how any historical knowledge is possible in the first place.
On what basis can we say anything about the past at all? How much certainty lies in partial knowledge? To what extent does this knowledge reflect statements about the past, or statements about the historian-observer? Martin’s epistemological project stops short, taking in my opinion, the far easier task of challenging 'completeness' instead of the foundations of historical knowledge itself. He assumes that we can know things with varying degrees of certainty, but leaves it up to the audience to figure out how exactly this works.
To clarify, unlike Hume, Martin doesn’t doubt the existence of causality. But, like Hume, he says that we don’t really know anything complete or comprehensive about it. It’s unfortunate that, for all of the similarities with Hume, the eminent philosopher doesn’t appear once in Martin’s book. If Martin had read Hume, he would have not only been able to locate his own philosophical ideas in time – an activity that he places at the centre of all good historical scholarship – but he would have been able to open up a dialogue with a well-established critique of causality, inductive logic, and inferential propositions. Moreover, he would have also been familiar with the is-ought distinction, which flows logically from the same concerns with causality.
This brings me to the second part of Martin’s thesis. As the subtitle of his work suggests, he argues that historical explanation is intellectually and physically impossible, yet socially and emotionally necessary. Hence, “the impossible necessity of history”. He even makes a funny comparison between professional historians and “[…] daredevils attempting the impossible”. However, if we accept that complete historical explanation is impossible, then why must we also accept that the attempt to explain history is necessary? How is Martin’s argument from necessity supported by his personal belief that it provides some kind of social, emotional, and cultural good?
Let’s go back to Hume for a second. In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume claims that you cannot necessarily get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Descriptive or explanatory statements are not the same as prescriptive or normative statements. Closely examine any sequence of events – any sequence at all. Where do you see right and wrong in that sequence? Right and wrong are not a part of the objective reality of the world. You can’t put historical events under a microscope and make moral truth-claims that can be tested, replicated, or falsified. Only once you turn that examination inward will you find the source of moral values. Morality is, for Hume, nothing more than the movement of the passions. It is found in the subjective sense perception of the observer, not in the objective sequence itself. Could you say that the ‘ought’ is preferable rather than necessary? Sure you can. But that pushes ethics into the realm of aesthetics or taste, and there is nothing necessarily true about one taste over another.
All that Martin can logically say is that he finds aesthetic value in the pursuit of historical knowledge, even if it is ultimately impossible. Given its intellectual impossibility, the social worth of history is not necessary, but merely preferable. This amended conclusion is much softer than Martin’s, but in many ways it is more satisfying, because it is consistent with the earlier premise that complete explanation is impossible. It also dodges the prickly issue of moral necessity, which he asserts without laying the foundational groundwork to build upon.
Those major criticisms aside, Martin does a lot of things really well with this book. It’s filled with lots of examples from Canadian history, taking subjects that Canadians are quite familiar with – such as Confederation – and posing questions to complicate those familiarities. The prose is clear, the style is clean, and the ideas are easily accessible to a wide range of readers. Finally, it represents an honest attempt to examine the discipline of history in an intellectually serious way. This alone is highly commendable, and makes Past Futures worthy of our consideration.
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