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History and Historiography in Process Author(s): Anders Schinkel Source: History and Theory, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Feb., 2004), pp. 39-56 Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3590742 Accessed: 19/08/2010 20:16
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andTheory 43 (February 2004),39-56 History

2004ISSN:0018-2656 University ? Wesleyan

HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY IN PROCESS

ANDERS SCHINKEL

"nothingever passes here. The past steps into the background, of course, but it never seems to disappear..." (ElizabethGoudge, A City of Bells) ABSTRACT Althoughin philosophicaldictionariesand the like, Alfred NorthWhitehead(1861-1947) is often praisedas one of the most originalthinkersof the twentiethcentury,his work has been virtually ignored. The articles and books that are concernedwith Whitehead'sphilosophy, with the exception of the work of Dale H. Porter,hardlyever mention the relevance that it has for the philosophy of history and for historiography. I intend to demonstratethis relevance in this article.For this purpose,I will explorethreethemes: 1) the selfevidence of certain kinds of forgetting by historians;2) the fallacy of the view that the occurrenceof these kinds of forgettingin historiography must necessarilylead to truth-relativism;and 3) continuityin history,which persists even when certainrupturesoccur.My treatment of these themes will in partbe a responseto FrankAnkersmit,who took up some of them from a differentperspectivein the Octoberissue of Historyand Theoryin 2001.1 I. INTRODUCTION Some time ago, Antoon van den Braembussche published an article about history and memory in which he pointed out that historical truth embodies a constant dialectical play between the remembering and the forgetting of the past.2 More recently, in History and Theory, Frank Ankersmit drew attention to the fact that the element of forgetting in history has often been forgotten by historians and philosophers of history alike. This is true. Van den Braembussche is an exception. Both authors justifiably emphasize the element of forgetting in history and historiography, but at the same time, what they point out need not surprise us. Drawing from the work of Alfred North Whitehead, I will argue that the explanation for our forgetting of the past lies in the way our consciousness functions. Our perception of the past, although more indirect, is not fundamentally different from our perception of the present. In both cases a selection is made, which means that some elements in our perception will feature more prominently, and
1. FrankAnkersmit,"TheSublime Dissociation of the Past: Or How to Be(come) What One Is No Longer,"History and Theory40 (2001), 295-323. 2. Antoon van den Braembussche,"Historyand Memory: Some Commentson Recent Developments,"JALJILLA: Kirjoituksiahistorian ongelimista, ed. Pauli Kettunen,Auli Kultanen, and Timo Soikkanen(Turku,2000), vol. 1,73-90.

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others will remainhidden in the background.This idea will be explored in part III of this article. An importantquestion is how this relates to the notion of truthin history-a notion that has become increasingly problematicdue to the influence of postmodernismin the philosophy of history. If every historianis necessarily selective, does that not imply that any accountof what happenedin the past is a mere claims to truthare always subjectiveopinion, and thatthereforein historiography invalid? In my view, it does not. From Whitehead's conception of the relation between subject and object it follows that there can be no such thing as purely subjectiveperception.It will also become clear that statements,or, rather,whole texts about some part of the past can be true in many ways and in varying degrees. PartIV is concernedwith this problematic. One of the reasons some philosophershave such problemswith the notion of truthin history is thatthe past is seen as completely differentfrom the present.It is as if there is an unbridgeablegap between now and then. Whitehead'sphilosophy, which is a form of "process philosophy," suggests that there is a much thereis still greatercontinuityin history.Even aftera greatevent, a "revolution," much more of the old in the new than we are sometimes inclined to think. This is the subjectof partV of the article. Before diving into the problematics sketched above, I will give in part II a brief presentationof some basic elements in Whitehead'sthoughtfor those readers who are not familiar with his ideas. This presentationwill suggest several points of relevance of Whitehead'sthoughtfor historicaltheory and practicethat will be elaboratedon in subsequent sections. Whitehead's process philosophy provides an alternativefor the worldview thathas dominatedWesternthoughtfor the past centuries, and that underliesthe postmodernrejection of the notion of truthin the science of history.Centralto this dominantworldview are the ideas that the world is divided into perceiving subjects (humanbeings) and static,perceived objects, andthatthe presentis separatedfrom the altogetherdifferentpast. Whiteheadrejects the division between subject and object, but uses the distinction primarilyto denote two sides of the experientialunits called events, or actual occasions (among otherthings), that form the basic elements of the process of reality.He stresses the continuitybetween past and present,and subjects andthe world; in general, he stresses the relatednessof events both synchronicallyand diachronically.In doing so, he affirms the validity of the historian's search for truth,and underscoresthe historicaldimension of reality. Withhis article"Historyas Process,"Dale Porteralso drew attentionto the relevance of Whitehead'sthoughtfor historicaltheoryand historiography.3 Whereas his focus was on the notion of causalityand its process-philosophicalalternative or variant,I will primarilybe concernedwith the perceptionin history and the possibility of knowing the past. Therefore,I will attendmore to the philosophical foundationsunderlying (and validating) the work of historians than to the
3. Dale H. Porter, "History as Process," History and Theory 14 (1975), 297-313. See also his "Explainingthe HistoricalProcess," Process-Studies9 (Fall/Winter1979), 73-93, and his book The Emergenceof the Past: A Theoryof Historical Explanation (Chicago:University of Chicago Press), 1981.

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itself. The last section of this article,however,will give practiceof historiography an example, througha process critiqueof Ankersmit,of the kind of writingabout history that is to be avoided. Although the primarypurpose of this article is to counterthe relativisticimplicationsof a nowadayspopularphilosophyof history, these are implications for historiography.4Furthermore,the essay provides important generalinsights into the natureof (historical)reality--I could also say: the historical natureof reality-that should be kept in mind by anyone writing abouthistory.
II. SOME FUNDAMENTALELEMENTSIN WHITEHEAD'SPHILOSOPHY

In his major philosophical work, Process and Reality, Whitehead develops a metaphysicalsystem. He does not, however, postulatethe existence of a reality behind reality that is supposedlythe most "real"reality.Whiteheadis not another Plato. He is concernedwith the reality we all experience.Accordingto Whitehead, metaphysics, or as he sometimes calls it, speculative philosophy, "is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted."5 He is not naive: "Philosopherscan never hope finally to formulatethese metaphysicalfirst principles."6 It is of course impossible to give in a few pages even a rough outline of his system. Therefore,I will select the elements of Whitehead'sthoughtthat are the most importantfor arriving at a general understandingof what it is all about. These fundamentalnotions concern the characterof reality and the characterof experience. In Whitehead'sview, reality's most fundamentalcharacteristicis that it is in process, or perhapsI should even say: it is process; it consists of a multiplicity of processes. In accordancewith this view of reality as process, Whiteheadsees events, not things, as the fundamentalelements of which reality consists. The importanceof this idea cannot be overestimated.The problem of philosophers (and scientists) who think of the "buildingblocks" (a very revealing metaphor!) of reality in termsof substancesand things is thatthey cannot see these things as being relatedto one another.Hume is the best-knownexponent of this category of philosophers.In his own (laterpublished)Abstractto the famousA Treatiseof HumanNature, he presentsus with the example of a billiard ball hitting another ball, which then startsmoving. We can see the balls touching each other,and we can see them moving, but we cannot see causality itself, which is, accordingto Hume, a constructof the humanmind.7He states:"in no single instancethe ultimate connection of any objects is discoverable, either by our senses or reason,
4. To this might be added that historiography has changed considerablysince Porterwrote on the subject.Thereis now a much strongerawarenessamong practicinghistoriansof the processualnature of reality, and of the multiplicity of factors involved in the determinationof an event, which has at least to a certainextent changed the vocabularyof historiography. For this reason too, my primefocus is on the underpinnings of historiography. 5. Alfred North Whitehead,Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology [1929] (New York:The Free Press, 1978), 3. 6. Ibid., 4. 7. David Hume, A Treatiseof HumanNature (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2000), 409-417.

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and . . we can never penetrateso far into the essence and constructionof bodies, as to perceive the principle, on which their mutual influence depends."8 Leibniz is anotherphilosopherunable to think the relatednessof what he saw as the fundamentalelements in reality, the monads. They have justifiably been called windowless. Leibniz needs God to guaranteethe relatedness of monads; He is the binding agent between them: "since no createdmonad can exercise a physical influence upon the interiorof any other,this is the only means by which the one can depend upon the other."9 It is hardly surprisingthat these philosophersare stuck with the problem that, althoughthe idea of causality is so self-evident to us, there seems to be no place for it in "objective reality"itself. The difficulty is that in the end, they always think in terms of "things,""objects"with "substance."The problem with such objects is thatthey cannotinterlock,engage with one another,as events can. The same problemarises when a philosopherlike Hume considers the idea of movement. I said before, in the example of the billiard balls, that althoughwe cannot see causality,we can see the balls touching and moving. In Hume's opinion, this is still too optimistic a view of reality.When considering movement, Hume can say nothing about it except that it is a human construct. He can only think of objects being at a certain place at a certain time. Because of the division ad infinitumof time and space into moments without durationand points without extension, he would say abouta "moving"billiardball: "it is here;now it is here; and now it is here-but there is no such thing as movement." The line of thought sketched above is in essence ahistorical.Whitehead'sphilosophy, on the other hand, is thoroughlyhistorical. Events are interconnected, they overlap, and one event can be built up out of several others. Events are defined by their relations to others. Moreover,events, even on the tiniest level, have a minimumduration.Whiteheadcalls this an event's specious present; it is the time the event needs to realize itself. This is in keeping with common sense. Somethingcannot happenwithout taking at least some time, however little. "But,"someone may object, "when I see a chair, I see a thing, not an event or a series of events!"This is true;what we see in the end is an object, a thing. This is partlydue to our mental functioning, to which I will returnlater. But there is also somethingin reality itself that makes us see the chair as a thing, as a unity. is an abstractionfrom the underlying"chainof events-chair." The "thing-chair" In reality,thereis a chain of events, both in time and space, which sustains a certain character. Whiteheadcalls such a chain a nexus. In time, the nexus of events a may change little, because the chair is sat upon very often, or because there is woodworm in it (in which case the changes may not be so small!), but we will still say it is the same chair.I will get back to this theme lateron when I come to speak of memory and identity. Whiteheaduses several differentterms to signify events. He speaks of actual occasions, actual entities, occasions of experience, and sometimes of res verae. Being actual is more than being real. Actualitymeans "beingin process," "hap8. Ibid, 257. 9. G. W. von Leibniz, Monadologyand OtherPhilosophical Essays (New York:Macmillan, 1965), 156 (Statement51).

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pening at this moment."When an event or actual occasion is completed, it has become real in the sense that it is an accomplishedfact.10It is importantto note that an event is also called an occasion of experience.All events have this structure, that there is a subject experiencingone or more objects. We must not think of a subject as necessarily being human;any center of experience can be called a subject. A stone, too, can be a center of experience, and therefore a subject. Everythingthat is experiencedand reactedupon by a subjectis an object for this subject.Now when an actual occasion has stoppedbeing actual and has become a real fact it has also made the transitionfrom being a subject (a center of experience) to being an object (potentialdata for new experiences). When Whiteheadspeaks of an event or an occasion of experience he does not refer to somethingtotally differentfrom our everyday understanding of the term "event."The Battle of Waterloois an event, for example, and it consists of many other events on a smaller scale-think of the many battles that were fought between individual French and English soldiers. During such a hand-to-hand fight, many events on an even smaller scale occur, for instance in the body of a soldier;and so we can go on and on. Victor Lowe, writerof Whitehead'sbiography, remembers:"WhenI asked him whether the emission of a single quantum of energy was an actual occasion, he replied, 'Probablya whole shower of actual occasions.'"11 What happens in an event is that the (objective) past, insofar as it is relevant to this event, is "inherited" by the event (as subject).The relevantpast is experienced by the event. This experience may or may not be accompaniedby emotions and conceptualexperience, dependingon the type of event. People tend to think of experience as primarilya humanthing; most people will say that plants and trees have no real experiences, let alone stones or water or billiardballs. But in Whitehead'sphilosophy,even a billiardball can be a center of experience.As far as we know, no emotions or awarenessof what is happeningare involved in the experience of a billiard ball (otherwise, how cruel the game would be!). to signify this experiTherefore,Whiteheaddoes not use the word "perception" has the connotationof conscious awarenessof what is expeence. "Perception" rienced. The same goes for the term "apprehension."Both terms are, as Whitehead says, "shot through and throughwith the notion of cognitive apprehension."12Whiteheadintroducesthe term prehension to signify apprehension "which may or may not be cognitive."'13 By doing so he avoids the pitfall of when of the speaking experience of non-humansubjects.At anthropomorphism the same time, he draws attentionto the fact that human experience is for the greaterpartuncognitive.

It has lost its subjectiveimmediacy.Furthermore, 10. But "real"is in a sense "less" than "actual." not only the past, but also the futureis ("merely") real, accordingto Whitehead.It is real in the sense that its possible relationsto the present are alreadythere. See Process and Reality, 214-215. 11. Victor Lowe, "Whitehead'sPhilosophy as I See It," in Process in Context: Essays in PostWhiteheadian Perspectives, ed. ErnestWolf-Gazo (New York:Peter Lang, 1988), 51. 12. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World [1925] (Harmondsworth,Eng.: Penguin, 1938), 86 (emphasisadded). 13. Idem.

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As I said, prehension(or a prehension- Whiteheadalso uses the noun to sigWhetherit is, or is nify one "unit"of experience) may or may not be cognitive.14 In principle,a disto on the kind actual of occasion. be, likely cognitive depends tinction can be made between three (non-chronological)phases in a prehension, though not all these phases are relevant when lower-grade occasions are concerned. The primaryphase is the one in which reality "enters"the prehension;it is the "inheritingof the past" of which I spoke. The second phase is called the supplemental phase. Here, the primary objective content of the experience is joined with certainfeelings; it is when, for example, "shapeacquiresdominance by reason of its loveliness."15The final, mental phase is the one in which consciousness plays a role of importance.By this Whiteheaddoes not mean to say that the last phase is cognitively experienced;the functioning of consciousness to which he refers is something of which the experiencing subject is (largely) unaware.For humanbeings, it is like walking: you do not thinkaboutit, and having to think about it would make it impossible. Now, in the mentalphase, two thingshappen.Firstof all, conceptual prehension takes place.16 This is defined as the prehensionof eternal objects.17Threekinds of eternalobjectscan be distinguished: mathematical forms;sensa (red, sweet, heavy, and so on); and subjectiveeternalobjects (dislike, approval,and so on).18Eternal objects are also called pure possibilities, because they are possibilitiesthat can be realizedin actualoccasions. So in the mentalphase,not-beingcan be said to enter the prehension. This means thatafterthe mentalphase, the originalcontentof the prehensionhas undergonesome modifications.There is a differencebetween the objectivecontentof the first phase and the objectivecontentof the last phase, and this difference(in all prehensionsof an occasion) constitutesappearancefor the occasion in question.Consciousness(in the aforementioned meaning)is the factor in experiencethat heightens the relevance of the distinctionbetween appearance and reality.This is a source of error,and of creativity.The distinctionbetween and realityis especially important when humanbeings are concerned, appearance and virtuallyirrelevant in the case of inorganicactualoccasions:"Whenwe pass to inorganicactualoccasions, we have lost the two higher originativephases in the phase, and the 'mental'phase. They are lost 'process,'namely,the 'supplemental' in the sense that, so far as our observationsgo, they are negligible .... The inorganic occasionsare merely what the causal past allows them to be."19
14. In some of his works, Whiteheaduses the term "prehension" to signify the same thing that the terms "event" and "actual occasion," among others, signify. In his greatest philosophical work, Process and Reality, he doesn't use "prehension"and "event"as synonyms. The event is here the greaterunity,thoughthey still overlap greatly.Every event or actualoccasion is an "occasionof experience" and thus involves prehension.Events are the ultimate elements of reality; there is no going beyond events. They may be analyzed in terms of the prehensionsof which they consist, but a prehension cannot occur individually--only as a partof an event. 15. Whitehead,Process and Reality, 213. 16. This is not completely restrictedto the mental phase. Whiteheadsays that conceptualprehension is also possible in the supplementalphase. 17. Whitehead,Process and Reality, 23. 18. Chris van Haeften, Zijn en tijd in de filosofie van A. N. Whitehead, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam,1999, 337. 19. Whitehead,Process and Reality, 177.

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In the following, I will deal strictly with the mental functioning of human beings. As a result of this mental functioning, we are in the end presentedwith "a mass of presuppositionsabout Reality ratherthan Reality itself."20Let me stress again: we are not aware of this change taking place. Our consciousness operateslargely behind our backs. Whiteheadremarksthat "consciousnessis an emphasis upon a selection of ... Therefore,the second thing thathappensin the mentalphase of a preobjects."21 hension is thatreality is made easier to grasp.What we cognitively get to eat is a pre-masticatedversion of reality: easy to chew, easy to digest. Whitehead concludes: "Mentalityis an agent of simplification;and for this reason appearance is an incrediblysimplified edition of reality."22 For now, I hope this will do. Some othernotions occurringin Whitehead'sphilosophy will be consideredlater,but I think a solid basis has been laid. The following will pursuethe course mapped out in the introduction.
III. KINDS OF FORGETTING

Like Ankersmit,I would like to distinguish among four different kinds of forgetting. My typology, however, will be very different from his. The first type is the kind of forgetting we all do: it's when we have known something but can't think of it anymore.This happens, for example, when we see someone on television, but can't rememberthe person's name. The second kind of forgettingis what the historiandoes, or anyone who tries to reconstructsome "piece" of the past. This doesn't concern the loss of knowledge. It has to do with what we feel is relevant in our reconstructionof the past. Third is what we could call "conceptualforgetting."Like the first type of forgetting,this is done by everyone, but scientists, including historians,must be very careful not to do it. The fourthand it is forgettingthings last type of forgettingis what we usually call "repression": because we don't want to rememberthem. Let's startwith the (first)kind of forgettingthatwe all do fromtime to time (or maybe even all the time!). To clarify what happenswhen we forget something,a name for instance, or in what year the Battle of Hastings occurred,I would like to compareit to a simple procedurethatwe performvery often, namely:the deletion of files from the hard-diskof our computer.When we delete a file the space it previously occupied is treatedas unoccupied,so that anotherfile may be written in its place. So when we delete a file, the informationis not gone; it is still there, but we can't get access to it anymore.If we regretour action and want to retrievethe deleted file, we can try to undeleteit. To do this, we need the firstletter (or othersign) of the file's name. If we rememberthat, the informationcan be reactivated.However, the more time thathas passed between the deletion andthe undeletion,the less likely it is thatthe file can be retrieved(undamaged),because
20. Alfred NorthWhitehead,Adventuresof Ideas [1933] (Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1964), 269. 21. Ibid., 182. 22. Ibid., 213-214. From this it is clear why Descartes was mistaken in seeing the clearness and distinctnessof ideas as a criterionfor theirreliability.Reality is neitherclear nor distinct.These qualifications apply only to what we make of it: a simple picture,with clearly outlined objects in it.

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something else may have taken its place. The same kind of thing happens when we try to think of a name we have forgotten.Perhapssomeone will say: "Itstarts with a G" and you will suddenlyblurtout: "GaryLineker!"The informationhas then been restored,or reactivated.But it had to be triggeredby something,in this case someone giving you the first letterof Lineker's Christianname. The second kind of forgettingis very differentfrom the first.As I have said, it is the kind of forgettingdone by historiansor anyone else trying to reconstruct the past.When historianswrite aboutsome period in the past, they dwell on some aspects of the periodunderconsideration,and only mentionothers. Some are left out completely. How much attentionan aspect receives depends on its importance as perceived by the historians.They make selections of importantaspects, which all historiansmust do, of course, if they do not want to just pile up information. A similar selection took place long before the historiansstartedwriting, while they were still in the process of collecting information and examining sources. Some things will have presentedthemselves to them as important,and others will have appearedirrelevant(for their purposes). To use the term "forgetting" for what happens here appearsto be a bit misleading, then, and it will appear even more so when a comparison is made with the way we perceive things in the present,as I will do in the next paragraph. By "conceptualforgetting"I mean the forgettingof the fact that concepts are only concepts, humanconstructs,and as such have a history and may change in meaning. More importantly,what a concept refers to in reality may change. Historians(but not only historians)must always bearin mindthat thereis no oneto-one relationshipbetween concepts and what they refer to. "Conceptualforgetting"is anotherterm for what Whiteheadcalls the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," which consists in "neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certaincategories of thought."23 It can, with better reason Finally, there is what we usually call "repression." than the second kind of forgetting,be called "forgetting," because it involves the kind of forgetting.There is a big difsame loss of informationas the "normal" ference, however, for the forgettingof the fourthkind is somehow unconsciously desired, which is normallynot the case. This may occur, for instance, when a person has had a traumaticexperience, or out of a strongfeeling of guilt. In this article, I will mainly be concerned with the second and third kinds of forgetting(the formerof which is not really "forgetting").Sometimes, however, differentkinds of forgettingmay go hand in hand.As with all strict distinctions, the ones made above are artificialand to a certainextent arbitrary-but they are nevertheless useful. Perception, consciousness, and importance As we have seen, in Whitehead'sview, experience is not reserved to conscious is for the greaterpart unconscious, life-forms. Human experience, furthermore, in the sense that we are not cognitively aware of it. A brief recapitulation:
23. Whitehead,Process and Reality, 7-8. For a general treatment of the "fallacy of misplacedconcreteness"see Science and the Modern World,66-72.

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"Consciousness[our mental functioning]is an emphasis upon a selection of ... objects."This is Whitehead'smain point. He also calls it "a mode of attention."24 Whitehead'sconclusion is: "Mentalityis an agent of simplification." So in our perceptionof reality (which is cognitive), the importanceof some elements of experience is raised, whereasother elements are pushed to the background. This has already happened when we perceive reality, or start to think about it. We are not aware of the selection being made, and the emphasisbeing given. This is a good thing, too, for otherwise we would probably drown in an enormousocean of vague impressions. Just now I deliberatelyspoke of the importanceof elements in our experience being raised. "Importance" literally refers to the contributionbeing made by to some other something thing. The importantthing about importanceis that it belongs to reality as well as to appearance.Some events are more importantfor a certainevent than others, which importless. In much the same way, some elements in our experience have more importance in appearancethan others. It depends on their contribution to our perception. Whitehead points out how and "interest"are.25 Both strongly related in meaning the words "importance" refer to some kind of involvement.26 Now how does this relate to history?Surely we cannotexperience or perceive the past the same way we perceive presentreality?Indeed,this goes withoutsaying. But thereis an importantqualificationto be made concerningour perception of the present: we never actually perceive the present. Whitehead makes clear that on an occasion of experience, it is always the immediatepast that is experienced. Furthermore, there are importantsimilarities between our perceptionof the past and our perception of the "present." As I said before, historiansselect from their sources the elements of importance.For the greaterpart, they do so without being awareof it. The functioningof consciousness in the (indirect)perception of the past is the same as in the (direct) perceptionof the present:it simplifies, it directs our attention.The difference between the way we perceive the present and the way the past is perceived lies in the fact that the subjectivity(in the form of the emphasislaid upon a selection of "objects")is, in the lattercase, squared.The writtensources historianshave at theirdisposal are the resultof the same kind of selection procedureas the one taking place in historians'minds. What was then felt to be important-which is no guaranteefor its actualimportance in a broadercontext than the experience of the source's author-is more likely to have a great importanceassigned to it now. So we get a selection from a selection, an emphasison what was alreadyemphasized.27 But is this indeed so very differentfrom ourperceptionof the present?This dependson what we mean by "thepresent."If we mean "thepresentsituationdirectlyperceived by the sub24. Whitehead,Adventuresof Ideas, 269. 25. Alfred North Whitehead,Modes of Thought[1938] (New York:The Free Press, 1968), 8. 26. This is in line with Whitehead'sview of the relation between subject and object. Objects are not passively perceived by subjects. The subject, Whitehead says, has a concern for the object (Adventures of Ideas, 178). 27. This might temperthe optimism of Dale Portera bit, who claims on the basis of his readingof Whiteheadthat"in practice,the occasion does not describeor explainthe whole world any more thoroughly than does the historian"(Porter,"Historyas Process," 306).

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ject in question,"than there is a difference, because only one selection is made. But if we mean "the present situationin the world," for instance, the difference evaporates,because everythingwe get to know about events, in whateverpartof the world, that we have not ourselves witnessed has undergonethe same selection procedurehistorians'sources have. So historiansmay overlook things that are important.Perhapsthey will do so because they are things they do not want to see. They can be like a chain-smoker who does not see the billboardsof an anti-smokingcampaign.This is indeed what we usually call "selective perception."But this is misleading, because all perceptionis selective-this is just an extreme example. The same principle of selection applies to memory.Withoutour cognitive involvement, our consciousness "deletes"irrelevantinformation,as Ankersmitpoints out as well. Ourmemory is necessarily selective: we cannot remember everything vividly. Again, some things will virtuallydisappearin the background,whereasotherthings will remain close to the surface, ready to be called upon. Repression is an extreme case of selective memory, just as our smoker offered an extreme example of selective perception. Which selection is made, be it in our perceptionof the present or the past or in our memory,is always influenced by a person's feelings, character,interests, and so on. In the case of repression (of traumaticexperiences), these factors assert a stronger influence than usual. But the subjective influence is always there, in the form of the importanceassigned to events, in the form of the historian's interest.Does this make every selection made by a historiana purely subjective selection? Is a historical interpretation merely an opinion? These quesin next tions are examined the section.
IV. SUBJECTIVITY, AND TRUTH OBJECTIVITY,

As a result of the belief that people are subjectswho find externalreality placed as an object, or ratheran enormouspile of objects, in front of them, we speak of an "objectivestandpoint" as being a non-personalstandpointthat capturesrealiA "subjectivestandpoint" is the opposite of this: and is therefore trustworthy. ty it is not reliable, because it is personal and as a result is contaminatedwith one person's taste, preferences,feelings, and so on.28 In modem philosophy, the distinction between appearance and reality is groundedupon the distinction between subject and object. The idea has been broadly accepted that, because our experience is always subjective, we cannot know realityitself, but only its appearance. This places historians(among others) in an awkwardposition. Historianstry to say something about historical reality.
28. Thereis a strangeparadoxhere. In the bulk of recentphilosophy,it is only the subjectwho can give meaning to the world "outside."It is held that there is none in reality itself, in contrastto what premodernthinkersbelieved. I speak of "meaning"in a very broad sense here:the subjectdetermines what is good or bad, ugly or beautiful;the subject perceives things as causally related; the subject makes classificationsin flora and fauna.The subjecthas to make sense of an in-itself senseless world. But paradoxically,this renders the objective standpointincoherent:it alone supposedly reveals the meaning of the world, but since meaningcan only come from the subject,meaningthereforebecomes meaningless.

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In otherwords: they hope thatthere is truthin what they say. It is not their intention merely to express some subjective feelings about somethingthat supposedly happenedin the past.What drives historiansis the idea thatthey can say something about what really happened-not everything,but certainlynot nothing. How can historiansdefend themselves against those who dismiss their work I suggest that we take a closer look as mere subjectiveopinions, as appearance? at the inheritancefrom Descartes. Does it make sense to divide the world up so strictly into subjects and objects? Is it plausible to say that nothing of the objective world can be found in our subjective perception,or that we can never know what is reality,and what is appearance? Following Whitehead,I would say no to both questions. We have already seen that Whiteheadholds that objective reality enters into each prehensionand every occasion of experience. In occasions where mentality plays a role of importance,as is the case with humanbeings, there will be a significant differencebetween appearanceand reality.But there can be a truth-relaWhiteheadholds that qualitation between appearanceand reality.Furthermore, In this, he disagrees can tive aspectsof objectivereality enterinto the appearance. with Descartes,who saw the objective world as practicallybareof fundamentally to Whitehead,every actuality (as a consequence of being According qualities. involved in process) is a subject,in the sense thatit experiencesthe relevantpast, and afterits completionis an objectfor othersubjects.As I saidbefore, every center of experience can be called a subject.The world is thereforefull of subjects, the majorityof which are not human.It could be said that the world is an experiencing world. From this it follows that "apartfrom the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness."29 However, this does not mean that there is no objective world; it means that the objective world is at the same time subjective. It experiences and is experienced. So we are not dealing with some form of philosophicalidealism here. It is not a matterof esse est perby prehension.That nothing exists that cipi, for Whiteheadreplaces "perception" is not prehendedmeans that nothing exists in isolation. There is nothing that is not somehowrelatedto somethingelse. Some object may not be perceivedby any humanbeing or animal,but it is still prehendedby its environment. In the contextof this article,we arenaturally concernedwith humanexperience, but it is good to keep in mind thatin principleall experience,in humanor nonhuman subjects,is of the same kind. With regardto humanexperience,Whitehead as "thebelief thatthe natureof our immediateexperience describes"subjectivism" is the outcome of the perceptivepeculiaritiesof the subjectenjoying the experiIt is clear thathe himself does not sharethis belief. The first component ence."30 of any experienceis the objectiveworld that is relevantfor the actualoccasion in phase and the mentalphase "add"subjectivityto the question.The supplemental occasion. This subjectivitycan be strong,but it can also be virtuallyabsent. So is there such a thing as purely subjectiveperception,in the sense that the content of the perceptionis entirely the result of "the perceptivepeculiaritiesof the subjectenjoying the experience"?Of course not. Experiencealways involves
29. Whitehead,Process and Reality, 167. 30. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World,107.

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both objects and a subject.The way I perceive a tree is differentfrom the way my brotherperceives the same tree, and we attachdifferentfeelings and associations to it, but we both perceive a tree; my brotherdoes not see big brancheswhere I do not, and we agree more or less on the color of the leaves. Our perceptionis partlydeterminedby the objects of experience, andpartlyby our own bodily and mental constitution.As Kant triedto show us concerningthis second factor,perception works in the same way in all humanbeings. But historical interpretations can still be colored too strongly by subjective factors. Objective reality has enteredinto historians'perception,yes-but what have they done with it? How has it been modified? I would like to concentrate on the selection made by historiansof what is importantand what is relatively because this is the essence of historicalinterpretation: the weighing unimportant, of the importanceof factors.31 As I said before, we can distinSo we returnto the notion of "importance." an event in has the between guish importance reality (process/the stream of an has in the event and the events), importance appearancecreatedby the menevents will be more likely than others to tal functioningof historians.Important leave traces, as they contributerelatively more to the future. That means that these events have a greaterchance of being important in the perceptionof historians. However, there are no absolute guaranteeshere. Some importantevents leave no visible traces, and even if they do, it is still possible that historianswill not acknowledgetheir importance,or that they are left out of their unconsciously made selections. Moreover, the body of sources historians have at their disposal is the result of selections made in the past, and as a consequence subjectivity is multiplied. It follows that something else is needed to secure the "objectivity"of historical interpretations. This "somethingelse" is a reference to truth.As Whitehead a "truth is This is evisays, qualificationwhich applies to appearancealone."32 a or be true statements it can. about We must define dent; table cannot false, only truthas "theconformationof Appearanceto Reality."33 To some readersthis may sound naive; perhaps the definition will remind them of the younger Wittgenstein. But Whitehead's is not a simple theory of correspondence. Different truth-relations are possible. A landscape painting in the style of the to the depicted landscape,and the same holds Impressionistshas a truth-relation "realist" true for a seventeenth-or eighteenth-century painting of the same landmeant "if we ask what is we can only answer Whitehead 'truth,' by says: scape. when two composite facts participatein the same patthatthereis a truth-relation tern.Then knowledge aboutone of the facts involves knowledge aboutthe other, extends."34 so far as the truth-relation In some cases, we will find truthand untruthcombined, for instance when we see an image in a mirror.The image will participatein the same (althoughmir31. This "weighingof importance" happensboth uncognitively and cognitively. The challenge for historiansis to make themselves aware, to the greatest possible extent, of the uncognitive processes that precede theirperception. 32. Whitehead,Adventuresof Ideas, 240. 33. Idem. 34. Whitehead,Adventuresof Ideas, 241.

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rored) patternas the object reflected by the mirror.But the image in the mirror suggests that there is a space behind the surface, which in reality is not there at all. There may be a cupboardbehind the mirror,with old boots in it and a box of tools, for example, but these objects and this space do not participatein the same patternas the space and objects the mirrorshowed us. Luckily, we have means of finding out what is true and what is not. In the case of the cupboardbehindthe and we will know that the image was mirror,we can just open the mirror-door, at least in one way deceptive. The same principlecan be appliedto historicalwriting,and has been for a very are more plausible, long time. It is evident that some historical interpretations more likely to be true,than others.HaydenWhite, cum suis, however, would say that there are only aesthetic and moral grounds for choosing between historical Perez Zagorin,following Roger Chartier, interpretations.35 opposes this view; he remarks:"thereseems to be no basis underWhite's view for invoking the facts of the historicalrecordto refute the rewritingof history in revisionist narratives which allege that the Holocaust is a myth invented by Zionist propagandaand that the death camps and gas chambersnever existed."36Obviously, there are these facts. As St. Augustine says, "The historiandoes not himself producethe sequence of events which he narrates."37 Saying that the gas chambers never existed means ignoring an enormousamount of evidence. It is "desiredforgetting," if it can be called forgettingat all. It follows from Whitehead'sphilosophy that historicalwriting can be true in many differentways. A historical work may be true to reality in the way it capturesthe "atmosphere" of a certaintime-but this is very difficult to ascertain.It in also be true a more statisticalway, or because factorshave been given the may right measureof importance.Some of these things are more easily demonstrated thanothers.But the ways to do so are not new: a criticalhandlingof sources,the use of as many differentsources as possible, and so on. The "subjective" element in historicalwritingis reducedand correctedby discussionsbetween historiansof different"schools."38 It can also be reducedby makingourselves awareas much as possible of the selections we make.In the end we can neverbe completely sure about the truth of a historical interpretation; will capture"the no interpretation the whole and but the truth."39 But thereare no groundswhattruth, truth, nothing soever for dismissing the notion of truthfrom the realm of historiography.
35. HaydenWhite, Metahistory:TheHistorical Imaginationin Nineteenth-Century Europe[1973] (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), xii. 36. Perez Zagorin, "History,the Referent, and Narrative:Reflections on PostmodernismNow," History and Theory38 (1999), 20. 37. Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching[426-427] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59. 38. Dale Porterspeaks, more systematically,of "the dual natureof historicalevents and historical that is reflected in narrative" and "invites reciprocitybetween analytical and narrative understanding historians."(Porter,"TheEmergenceof the Past," 178-179). 39. This is the ideal historians strive to attain,though. In this they are no differentfrom scientists in the naturalsciences. CharlesSanders Peirce defined truth,from an epistemological point of view, as "thatconcordanceof an abstractstatementwith the ideal limit towardswhich endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief." (C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles SandersPeirce, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss [Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1931-1935], V, ?565.)

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ANDERS SCHINKEL V. HISTORY,MEMORY, AND IDENTITY

From the way I have been talking about finding the truthabout history, it may appearthatthere is an almost unbridgeablegap between the presentand the past. Historians,it seems, can only gatherclues-look for the traces left by events in the past, which resemble the footsteps of a dinosaur.But the past cannot be felt, for it is gone. Or is it? Ankersmitlinks the notions of historyandmemoryto the notion of identity.He asserts thatcertainevents in history (preceded,perhaps,by unnoticedchanges in the consciousnessof people) may cause a radicalbreak-upbetween past andpresent (or future),in which a civilization'sidentityis lost and a new one formed,consisting primarilyof the awarenessof the loss of the former identity. His article deals with "the kind of forgettingtakingplace when a civilization 'commits suiThe past really is gone cide' by exchanging a previous identityfor a new one."40 here, and with it an identity.A civilizationthat has been maltreated by fortunein this mannercould be comparedto a personwho, because of an accident(being hit by a car, for instance),has completely lost his or her memory.Such a person has also lost his or her identity,and a new identityin formationwill be greatlyinfluenced by this person'spainfulknowledge thathe or she once was someone else. This raises two importantquestions. The first is whetheror not a civilization can justifiablybe comparedto a single person.Is not the main characteristic of a civilization that it consists of and is upheldby many people? This does not necessarilyexclude the possibility thata comparisonbetween a civilization and a single person could be fruitfulin some contexts, but in the presentcontext it seems to be a bit of a problem.The second questionis whetherthereis an equivalentof "being hit by a car and losing one's memory as a consequence"on the scale of civilizations. From a process perspective,both suggestions are problematic. I will startwith the first question.An individual'sidentityrelies on mentaland bodily continuity.It is because a person'spast is continuallyinheritedby this person, by one's new cells, thatone can be said to remainthe same person.The physical and mental "memory"constitutesidentity;it makes it possible for someone to say "That'sme!" on seeing a pictureof himself or herself takenyears ago.41 At the basis of this lies a series of relatedevents sustaininga character as a whole, to This involves a certain stabilityin the way this put it in Whiteheadianterms.42 if "whole"reactsto otherevents. To put it crudely:you would be rathersurprised a good friend, with whom you always go bowling (which your friend evidently enjoys), all of a suddensaid, "No, I'm not coming; I hate bowling!"However, it is conceivablethat,were he to be hit by a car and completely lose his memory,he would no longer like bowling. He might react differentlyto otherthings as well. What about civilizations? Do they have an identity? Do they "sustaina character"over time? I would say they do. But we must realize thatin pointing out a
40. Ankersmit,"The Sublime Dissociation of the Past,"295. 41. Of course, identity also has a social constituent.Even people who lose their memory will, in some respects, remain the same person for others. They will still be the son of. . ., the wife of. . etc. But here also, identity depends on the historicalconstants. 42. See, for example, Whitehead,Modes of Thought99. Whiteheadhimself does not use the term "identity"in connection with this sustainedcharacterof what he calls a "nexus"of events.

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person's or a civilization's identity we make an abstraction;we abstractunity from diversity."Civilization"is the name for an enormousmultiplicityof events. It is the relationof an "object"as a "thing"to the events that build it, which we see exemplified here. You may have an old cupboardat home thatonce belonged In time, some pieces of board may have been to your great-grandparents. replaced, and the doorknobsmay have been exchanged for new ones, but you would still think of it as the same old cupboard.Objects can remainthe same in spite of events whereby materialis lost or replaced. Although,like an individualperson, a civilization can be said to have an identity, there is a problem with the comparisonof a civilization to a single person. An individual'sbody can only react to an accidentin one way. The person's identity may be alteredcompletely or it may be lost and replaced by a new one. But even if a civilization could in totality be involved in anything like an accident, of the civilization would react in the same way. Some peonot every "member" will remain virtually unaffectedby the event, others will get killed; and the ple mass of great poor people will remainpoor, and will be ruled in much the same way-by other people than before, perhaps, but maybe also by the same. Therefore,if people start forgetting what happened, it will be "desired forgetting" in some cases, and "normalforgetting"in others. The next questionis: can a civilization lose an identity completely,as a person might by being hit by a car,or as a cupboardmight by being smashedto bits with an axe (and even then the remains would be recognizable!)? Can a civilization be involved in (a large-scale equivalent of) an accident?From the point of view taken by process philosophy, this is not very likely, perhaps even impossible. Whiteheadremarksthat "each historic route of like occasions tends to prolong itself."43This is due to the uniformity of what each occasion in such a route inheritsfrom the past. In a route of similaroccasions, the past itself suggests no alternatives. I will give an example most people will recognize. The effect Whiteheadrefers to is something one can witness in almost every family: at a certainage, a child is absolutelydeterminedthat in the future,as a parent,it will do things differently.In most cases, however, the child turns out to be a parent very similarto its own. The longer the route of occasions, the greaterthe uniformity will be, and the strongerthe tendency to prolong itself. Change, therefore, is never abrupt,at least not on the scale of civilizations. Let us consider one of Ankersmit'sexamples: the FrenchRevolution--undeniably an event of enormousimpact. The Westernworld changed, no doubt;but I would not put it that had it, as Ankersmit says, "acquireda new identity"?44 strongly. In my opinion, it sounds too much as if before 1789 Western (or French?)civilization had a certainfixed identity,which was then suddenly lost, to be replaced by a completely new identity.And thinking of "a civilization's identity"as fixed is an example of conceptualforgetting;of the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness."When we say: "this is the identity of this civilization,"we abstractfrom a constantly changing reality.It is like placing a stick in a stream in an attemptto stop its flow.
43. Whitehead,Process and Reality, 56. 44. Ankersmit,"The Sublime Dissociation of the Past,"304.

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Althoughthe (symbolic) impactof a "single event" must not be underestimated, the view presented by Ankersmit is, from my (process) perspective, too unhistorical.Tocquevillehad alreadypointed out thatthe events of 1789 were no cause in themselves, but only channeled what had been caused by many different developments. He states: "Withoutdoubt there has never been a revolution so powerful, so quick, so destructive and so creative as the French. But one would be oddly mistaken if one believed that an entirely new French people arose from it, and that this people would have raised a building for which the foundations did not previously exist."45At one point in Ankersmit's article, in discussing Hegel's interpretation of the condemning of Socrates by the Athenians, he also draws attentionto the slow, invisible processes that precede events of greatinfluence:"Thepast was a mere empty shell; butthe Greekscould still see only the shell and not yet the new content that had graduallyfilterered into it. So Socrates merely made conscious . . . what had come into being This bears a strikingresemblanceto the idea thatWhiteheadexpressalready."46 es in the following passage: We noticethata greatidea in the background of dim consciousness is like a phantom A oceanbeatinguponthe shoresof humanlife in successivewaves of specialization. of whole succession of suchwavesare as dreams their work the doing slowly sapping butthe seventh waveis a revolution-"And the nations baseof somecliff of habit: echo round.",47 So when the cliff breaks, this event seems to appearout of the blue, whereas in fact it was preceded by a gradualweakening of the cliff. Changes do not occur suddenly,althoughit may seem as if they do. To answer the second question: if we may rely on Tocqueville, the French Revolution cannot be comparedto an accident, nor can it be said that an identity was suddenly lost. The French Revolution was no absolute caesura. Many processes often seen as caused by the Revolutionhad startedfar earlier,and were simply continued,perhapsat a somewhat greaterspeed. The FrenchRevolution representsa change in the identityof Frenchcivilization (and beyond that, of the whole of western Europe), but not the death of an identity. Although there is change, there is also continuity.There is, in a way, an unbridgeablegap between the past and the present:we cannot go back in time. But there is no such gap in the sense thatthe presentwould be completely differentfrom the past--not even after an event like the FrenchRevolution. The past is always with us. When an event is completed and has become an object for subjects to come, it has gained what Whiteheadcalls "objectiveimmortality"; the event has become an unalterable fact, with importancein and for the future.And althoughAnkersmitis right in pointing out that events like the French Revolution trigger the formationof myths aboutthe past, this does not mean thatthereis no memoryat all of the time before the event in question occurred. Something new and importanthas been
45. Alexis de Tocqueville, Over de Franse Revolutie, ed. J. M. M. de Valk (Kampen:Kok Agora, 1988), 41 (my translation). 46. Ankersmit,"The Sublime Dissociation of the Past," 315. 47. Whitehead,Adventuresof Ideas, 27.

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added to the memory of many individuals(respondingto it in their own ways), and hereby their identity will be altered-but not erased.
VI. CONCLUSION

One way to make one's own position clear is to set it off against another(wellknown) position. Whitehead makes use of this method to clarify what process philosophy (in the following example referredto as "philosophy of organism") standsfor. Whiteheadcontrastsprocess philosophy with that of Kant:"ForKant, the world emerges from the subject;for the philosophy of organism,the subject emerges from the world ."48 ... view that "the The consequences of the subject emerges from the world"are manifold. It means that there is no absolute gap between subject and object, between our minds and reality "outside."It also means that there is no such gap between the present and the past, for "emerging from the world" necessarily means "emergingfrom the past." What we experience now has its cause in the immediatepast. Furthermore, what we are now has its roots in history.We must not forget that as humanbeings we carrywith us, in our genes, an evolution of millions of years. Even the genetic informationthat is specific to our species is thousandsof years old. So process philosophy stresses the continuity between past, present, and future. It also emphasizes the fact that any event is connected to many other events. There is no such thing as an isolated event. Whiteheadsays: An eventhascontemporaries. Thismeans thataneventmirrors withinitselfthemodesof its contemporaries as a displayof immediate An event has a past.This achievement. meansthatan event mirrors withinitself the modes of its predecessors, as memories whicharefusedintoits owncontent. An eventhas a future. Thismeansthataneventmirrorswithinitself such aspectsas the future throwsbackon to the present, or, in other hasdetermined the future.49 words,as thepresent concerning The way one thinksaboutrealityhas implicationsfor the way one thinksabout knowledge and truth.Ontology and epistemology are not philosophical islands, completely isolated, exerting no influence upon each other. On the contrary: epistemology and ontology supportone another.From Whitehead's claim that "the subjectemerges from the world,"it follows that a perspectiveis never completely subjective.An individual'sperspectiveis constitutedby the position this individualhas in the world, by the place he or she occupies in the spatio-temporal network of events internaland externalto his or her body.50So the perspective is unique to this subject, but thereforenot purely subjective. A perspective arises from both objective and subjectivefactors.
48. Whitehead,Process and Reality, 88. This is not to say that for Kantthe world does not precede the subject,because it does in a way; our impressionshave a cause outside us. But the world that we normally speak about is the phenomenalworld, and this originatesin the subject. 49. Whitehead,Science and the Modern World,90-91. 50. There is no hundred-percent determination here. In Whitehead'sview, people are to a certain extent free. The problem of freedom and determinationis not the issue here, however, so I will not look into it any further.

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This means that there is a basis for speaking about truth.Were there no connection between the "world of the subject" and the "world of the object," it would be nonsense to speak of truth.We would not be able to verify anything. This is the world of postmodern philosophy, where relativism rules supreme. Whitehead'sphilosophy gives us a handhold, or rather,it recognizes the handhold we alreadyhave. We are able to recognize the truthor falsity of propositions aboutreality,though not always. Pointingout thatdifferentpeople hold different views on certainsubjectsdoes not prove that there is no truthin these matters;to claim that is to commit a logical error. The conclusion for historiansis that they are justified in aiming at the truth. They will have to try to be awareas much as possible of the selections they make, of the "forgetting" they do, in short:of the "subjective"factor in historiography. Historianswill have to correctand supplementone another-and when all this is done, we will still not have absoluteguaranteesaboutthe truthof our visions. But this is no cause for worry;have we not always known, thaterrarehumanum est?51 VrijeUniversiteitAmsterdam

51. I would like to thankLasse Gerrits,Dick van Lente, Kees Schinkel, and Willem Schinkel for theirvaluablecommentson earlierversions of this article, as well as the anonymousreferees for their useful suggestions and for pointing out to me the work of Dale H. Porter.