Foul Harvest

Every season reaps the foul harvest sown in the season before it. This is not a historical law. All historical laws are false. The latter is true, but it is not a historical law; rather, it is a meta-historical principle. Historical laws concern the basic actors of history. If the basic actors of history perform in generalizable ways, then there are historical laws. I contend that the basic actors of history do not do this.

There are some who claim that the basic actors of history do perform in scientifically generalizable ways. How this is conceived depends upon how one conceives the basic actors of history. Intuitively, it seems that human beings are these actors, and so the claim that human beings behave according to generalizable laws according to the fixity of their nature is a sufficient condition for the existence of a historical law. This is how Mr. David Hume conceived of human nature and history, and indeed he saw history as a repository of data whence to derive laws of human nature. Whether one classes the laws of human nature among the laws of nature proper is another matter.

Others claim that basic physical entities are the basic actors of history. Marquis Laplace, when he infamously claimed that by physical analysis a super-intellect could determine all past and future states of the universe, endorsed this kind of determinism. History is hereby reduced to a single, extraordinarily complex formula. The laws of history are the laws of nature.

Others still claim that various collective entities belong among the basic actors of history. So Herr Marx has his economic classes, Herr Spengler has his civilizations, and M. Comte has his societies, for example. The reasoning behind such theses differs among proponents. As far as historical laws are concerned, M. Comte demands attention. M. Comte told us that the sciences necessarily arise in a particular order in history: Geometry, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Sociology. This is a historical law. Sociology was inaugurated by M. Comte, and it was to be the master of all the sciences. It was to be the science of human affairs, defining the lawful structure of human activity. (Psychology, by the way, was thought to reduce to mere biology.) Societies are governed by unique laws that are not expressed by any other science, and history is subsumed under these laws, and in so doing it is absorbed into sociology.

Sociology after M. Comte, a somewhat different creature, retained this fixation on generalizing data into social laws, under the lordship of logical positivism, itself a rather different creature than M. Comte's classical positivism. In any case, sociology was the ill-conceived effort to absorb history into the epistemology of positivistic natural science. This, too results into the absorption of history under some other discipline, perhaps sociology, perhaps physics. The autonomy of history, in any case, is eliminated, as the basic actors of history are at best no longer historical actors, but sociological (or psychological, or some such) entities, and at worst they are reduced to the basic entities of another science, such as physics or biology, and history becomes a description of the complex outworking of that autonomous field of inquiry.

The autonomy of history, therefore, demands that we reject the idea of historical laws in the sense of a law of nature. To say that these laws are of individual human actors is to do psychology (positivistically). To say they are of collections of individuals (be they structures or what have you) collapses history into sociology (again, of a positivisitic variety). To say that they are of a more basic science is to reduce history to that science, save for some emergence thesis. This, however, would only give us sociology or psychology again.

As we said, Hume believed that history could provide data whereby generalizations concerning human nature could be derived; however, never has anyone come close to succeeding in an undertaking like this, which in itself suggests that no such account of human nature can exist. History is not suitable for such a task, for human nature is not an unchanging substance over which historical change flows. Human nature is, at least in part, a historical product; therefore it is impossible to derive an account of human nature in terms of scientific laws from history. Considering also that human beings are the basic actors of history, then it follows that the basic actors of history do not perform according to scientific laws; therefore, there are no historical laws. The guiding light for the latter argument, not to mention many other instances above, is of course the late Prof. Collingwood. One can deny that the basic actors of history are human beings in order to avoid this conclusion, but we have already seen the consequences of doing that; namely, one ceases to do history and denies the autonomy of the discipline.

Hence the meta-historical principle: All historical laws are false. Now, here is another meta-historical principle: Every season reaps the foul harvest sown in the season before it. There are two historical time-units involved in this principle, namely seasons. One is prior and the other is posterior, both logically and temporally. There is an action ascribed to each season: in the prior season there is sowing to be done, and in the posterior season, there is harvesting. Being that seasons follow one after another, each posterior season is also a prior season to another, more posterior season, and each prior season is posterior to another, more prior season. So in each season there is both sowing and harvesting, for history is a continuum and not a cycle. A task of the historian is to relate what is sown to what is harvested in terms of logical priority and posteriority, not mere temporal priority and posteriority. Were the latter his task, he would have finished his task simply by saying that Augustus Caesar died before St. Augustine was born. The historian must tell us what Augustus Caesar has to do with Augustine. A historian might therefore argue that the idea of Rome that Augustus Caesar inculcated during his reign set a tone for the idea of Rome that can traced through the sack of that great city, and in this way we can understand how Augustine's idea of Rome, say, in City of God, falls in the development of the idea in broad perspective. Augustus Caesar sowed the seed, and St. Augustine harvested some of it. This gives us a more general meta-historical principle: Every season reaps the harvest of the seed sown in the season before it. As a principle, it merely notes that there is historical priority and posteriority.

If the harvest is foul, then foul seed was sown in a prior season. At present we reap many foul harvests, and we sow the foul harvest of next season. The foulness of the harvest follows from the foulness of the seed sown, and the foulness of the seed sown follows from the foulness of the historical actor that sows the seed. Therefore, the foul harvest follows from the foulness of historical actors. This foulness has been stated in a meta-historical principle, but it is tempting to argue that such foulness can only be derived historically. To say that a historical actor is foul is to know what it means for an actor to be foul, and then to find a season in which the actor sows seed for a foul harvest. This argument is sound, but it does not dismantle the meta-historical principle as stated. The principle simply states that foul harvests follow from the sowing of like seed. It alone does not claim that any foul harvest has actually occurred.

A stronger argument against the principle is to make foulness out to be a historical construct. If we cannot understand foulness except through history, then we are invoking a historical entity in a meta-historical principle, and therefore that principle is viciously circular qua meta-historical. It can be used as a merely historical principle, to describe a particular harvest as foul, where foul is a product of a defined historical development, but again, it is not meta-historical. Thus the principle qua meta-historical must be defended on the grounds that foulness is a meta-historical concept. Foulness, as I am using it, is a broad term meant to include such moral terms as evil, injustice, and the like. If at least one such term can be established to be meta-historical, then this principle can be sustained as meta-historical. Thus the integrity of this principle depends on a moral ontology that includes meta-historical terms: in some sense, evil (or whatever the terms are) is the same for Caesar as it is for me or any other possible basic historical actor, or human being.

If we grant the integrity of the principle, then the following consideration proves interesting. Suppose there is such a sowing as the Fall of Man. The harvest of that seed is all posterior history, and it is a season of foul harvest. In this sense, history can be conceived as a single season of foul harvest following from a change in the basic actors of history. It is also conceivable to think that human beings, as in some sense historical products, could be changed again, restored, as it were, in history, not by their own performance, being condemned to a foul harvest, but by the performance of a good gardener, sowing good seed. This of course demands that human beings not be the only historical actors, but this, I believe, coheres with all claims made thus far.

This illustrates a way of viewing historical time not as divided into atomic units in an absolute sense, but as divided relatively, as explanandum relates to explanans. The season of foul harvest is the explanandum, whose explanans is the Fall of Man. Another example would be the explanandum, St. Augustine's idea of Rome (with all its components), and the explanans, Augustus Caesar's idea of Rome, and the sack of Rome, and so on. This also serves to illustrate the possibility of very complex relationships between a complex explanandum and a complex explanans. Returning to the original example, we can see how human beings as (in a sense) historical products may be explained as foul relative a certain explanans, but how a re-explanation of human beings according to a new explanans that answers the prior explanandum can change (in a sense) what a human being, as a historical actor, is. When it is God doing the explaining, we can see how the unfolding of historical events can change the disposition of human beings relative God; that is, how God considers a human being to be. For God's ordering of historical time by explanandum and explanans and action by a new explanans to effect a new explanandum also orders historical actors. This is a history with great continuity and yet with radical breaks.

Note that an explanans works in two directions. With the temporal direction, it works in the sense of explanatory priority or "causation" broadly conceived (that is, not the limited sense known to Enlightenment philosophy or natural science). Against the temporal direction, it works teleologically. So the death and resurrection of Jesus, says the Christian, is teleologically prior (in the sense of an Aristotelian final cause) to all that came before it since that earlier explanans: the Fall of Man. It is causally prior (in the sense of an Aristotelian efficient cause--a cause that initiates or stops change) to the explanandum that is the present age, which Christianity knows as the Last Days. Both of these are logical directions. By the same token, the explanans, the parousia, amounts to the present age being teleologically posterior to the New Heavens and the New Earth, and the New Heavens and the New Earth being a causal explanandum posterior to the present age. An explanans in the sense I am employing it here is therefore akin to a pivot on which the surrounding history turns. History has its radical breaks, and its radical continuities, according to the ordering of historical time.

Such are, I hope, the speculations that will set in motion a far richer philosophy.