>> JOSEPH MARGOLIS: Every people has a sense of history.
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>> JOSEPH MARGOLIS: . If one reads Thucydides, for example (as opposed to Herodotus, whom
I enjoy, but Herodotus is, I think, not in the same league in terms of the concept of
history as Thucydides),
Thucydides is in fact a miracle.
When you read Thucydides, who is writing about the history of the Peloponnesian War, you
can't tell that he's not a modern man. He thinks in an incredibly modern way,
but he's also committed to the changeless order of things. He thinks in essentialist
terms.
So he understands change against the backdrop of what is changeless. It's just the classic
idea of Greek thought
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>> JOSEPH MAROLIGS: Parmenides had set this dreadful problem in a sense that it looked
as if the changing world was not real, and so the whole problem of science as Aristotle
would have seen it would be pointless since science is concerned with explaining processes
of change.
So they needed, and Plato for other reasons in terms of his political and moral concerns,
concerns of a practical nature which also embedded in the changing world, and belief
as well.
So they had to reconcile the changing world with the changeless world in some way, which
is what was in a sense the heart of classical Greek thought.
Now I've suggested that at the end of the eighteenth century, beginning of the nineteenth,
it began to dawn on theorists that what we call the changeless world is itself a construction
from the changing world.
That's a radical idea.
In fact there was a very important pragmatist who wrote in 1923 if I'm not mistaken
C.I. Lewis
a famous paper, it's a brilliant paper, "A Pragmatist Conception of the a priori"
I think he calls it
in which he says exactly what I'm now reporting, that the a priori is at that time and not
today looked at as changeless regularities necessary and changeless order of things
is to be construed as a projection of what looks changeless to us from this vantage of
speculation.
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He doesn't discuss history there but I think that the idea is that with changes in history
we see that we need different projections of what we regard as the changeless frame
of reference of our changing world.
I think this is also related in a different way to Tom Kuhn's idea of shifting from
one paradigm to another.
To propose a new paradigm for science is a little bit like projecting a new a priori
for the a posteriori inquiries of run-of-the-mill scientists, you might say.
And in the case of Dewey it's completely eliminated because all the proposals are provisional
and changing relative to the changing world and there's nothing fixed from Dewey's
point of view, which is the radical aspect of what he was getting at.
Now, the point I need to make is the following, and it]s a terminological point.
It's not history that we need.
It's the concept of "historicity".
Historicity is the idea that thinking itself has a historical structure.
History is a narrative, the idea of a narrative account of events in time.
That is to say, the narrative is deployed in time. Something happens over a period of
time.
But history doesn't tell you anything about the theory of history whereas historicity
is, in fact, a theory of historical time, that it has the character of forming and transforming
human thinking in a way which cannot be understood except in terms of some historical projection,
that is, the forms of thinking themselves change with changing history.
Marx made this point following Lewis Morgan, as a matter of fact, that the change is due
to technological changes.
Change the technology of production, says Marx, and you change thinking.
I think he agreed with this idea of historicity and that is to say that Marx was a Hegelian.
It's Hegel's idea that there is a kind of spirit or Geist which dominates large spans
of historical life and that the spirits of these periods keep changing. They evolve from
one another over time and therefore the human beings who think and work in those ages think
and work in different ways.
That explains, for example, Hegel's lectures on fine art in which he talks about the different
spirits of art in different worlds and in different periods.
We can't handle such an extravagant idiom as Hegel's.
We need to reduce it to something more manageable.
And I think what I'm calling historicity is, in fact, just that theme.
But, in fact, it's historicity that's missing from American thinking.
American thinking is ahistorical in the sense in which it will allow history but it never
touches historicity
and that's what we're missing and that means to say it's an idea which was introduced
about 200 years ago and for some reason it never caught on in America.
There was a period when, of course, America was influenced by Marxist thinking, in the
1930s, for example, in the depression years, and so
something of Marxist historicism was, in fact, an ingredient in American life, but with the
defeat of Marxism in America, which pretty well came to its end long before the defeat
of the Soviet empire, history in that sense disappeared.
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It's also worth saying that Rorty is interested in historicism.
And here it seems to me he has the advantage of Putnam and he does point in the direction
which is fruitful but he, himself, then, true to his own, so-called post-modernist colors,
doesn't want to take responsibility for building it into an improved kind of form
of inquiry because he doesn't believe, he says, in the validity of that kind of sustained
inquiry and he's prepared to dismiss it.
For all of these reasons, it seems to me, American pragmatism has been stalemated for
no damn good reason and it seems to me that a fruitful recovery of the tradition, which,
frankly is part of my own project, if I may say so, but I don't mean that it's merely
mine, is just a way of, so to say, being the scout for a larger enterprise, that it's
where the action is and I think it's also the clue to recovering sort of rapprochement
among all the principal threads of Eurocentric thought.