‘WHAT IF?’
Let’s
hear it for:
Teleology: Philosophy
the explanation of phenomena by the purpose
they serve rather than by postulated causes. (Oxford Concise Dictionary)
The wittiest example of teleology is
Voltaire’s that the nose was created for the spectacles. (Purpose or ultimate
function is Aristotle’s Final Cause for
an entity or phenomenon.)
Respectable historians will thus be
somewhat chary of invoking teleology in their explanations of historical
phenomena. In fact to many of them ‘teleology’ is a dirty word, not used in
public. So they tend to adopt what we could call the proscriptive as opposed to
the retrospective approach. That is, start from the beginning of a process and
take it from there. This creates certain problems for them. It gets them into
difficulties in trying to work out what was
and was not of historical
significance. What, indeed, is an historical ‘fact’? EH Carr’s What Is History? which remains something
of a classic is still recommended to students by way of introducing the whole
subject. The book indeed ponders much on all this.
‘The prospective interpretation is hopeless
because there is no way to show that a shape that is the successor to another
is somehow uniquely necessary.’ (JM Fritzman, Hegel, 2014, 45.)
Some
histories I have read get so engrossed in impedimenta that they end up
explaining away that which is the purported subject. Such as histories of the
Industrial Revolution concluding that it sort of never took place. The
historian taking this approach is then unable to say why the early 19th
century was so very different from the early 18th. The dynamic of
history eludes them. Or that the French Revolution was all spectacle and no
substance: that is, that many Frenchmen thought
there was a revolution but in fact there was not. So, again, why were
things different in late 18th-century France from what they had been
in the late 17th? EJ Hobsbawm
likens this to a person who says of a desert that it’s not really a desert.
There are animal species living in it, as well as plants, some that hold water.
So in fact the desert isn’t a desert at all. Meanwhile crashed aviators have died of thirst
in it. These are extreme, but by no means uncommon, instances of
wood-for-the-trees thinking. Avoiding the very idea of historical
transformation becomes almost obsessional with certain types of conservative
pedant. And it is a result of a severely anti-teleological position. One ends
up with a history in which it seems nothing really happened at all, except
perhaps by accident. This in turn can lead to the despairing view of history as
being just a matter of one-damned-thing-after-another: the forlorn belief
expressed by the disillusioned liberal historian HAL Fisher in his
pre-World-War-II History of Europe. That
is, after the Whig Interpretation of History (i.e. ‘progress’) was looking so
thin in the 1930s. But opposition to the idea that all history is part of God’s
Great Plan doesn’t necessarily require one to think that history is either
meaningless or else doesn’t really exist as such, which is where being
doctrinally anti-teleological gets you. Which means rejecting Aristotle’s
notion of a Final Cause for phenomena
entirely. These non-teleological approaches are not without political motive
for the preservation of the social status
quo; remember Orwell’s Big Brother dictum in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘He who controls the past controls the
future.’
Another problem for anti-teleological
historians is that human beings, who think and plan and develop strategies and
policies, create their own teleologies, and not only conceptually if certain
powerful ones have the ability to put
them into actual effect, or in some cases almost or temporarily. We can scarcely
leave out the personalities and how they changed things by sheer will of such
as Napoleon, or Bismarck, or Hitler, or Lenin etc. There is the history of mass
movements of protest showing that teleological purpose works through popular as
well as individual will. So purpose enters into the fabric of history, which
leads to teleology (which is ‘purpose’)
or attempts at one. At the same time the whole scene is littered with setbacks,
mistakes and accidents, not to speak (for example) of the possibility that
Gavrilo Princip might have missed his Royal targets altogether back in Sarajevo
in 1914. For all the actual assassinations there must have been hundreds if not
thousands of tries that never came off. So chance seems to play a role as well.
So are things both global and personal
created by necessity or by accident and purely meaningless chance? Or by how
much of the former and how much the latter? This makes the whole issue
irresolvable. Fortunately, however, we need not worry ourselves unduly over
such matters. As the American saying goes, where there’s no solution there’s no
problem.
We
can go retrospective.
Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. The
outcome of this decision was that in time he became Dictator of Rome. And the
outcome of that was his assassination, which brought Rome into civil war.
Caesar might have been killed along
the way to Rome if a wheel had fallen off his chariot going downhill. But it
didn’t and he wasn’t.
The decision of advancing upon Rome
was a necessary cause in this sequence, while even if there were accidents
along the way they too formed part of the outcome.
It turns out that in the light of the outcome there can be no distinction made
between necessities and accidents. In retrospect, everything was necessary.
The proscriptive approach demands that
we continue to ponder now-irrelevant imponderables after they have had their
effect. However, the necessity of all the
elements can only be identified by the
outcome, by what was there at the end: provable by the outcome.
It was not wholly certain that a
significant outcome would have been the result when Caesar started out. His
expedition might have ended ingloriously in some swamp or other. Thoughts,
actions and serendipidous circumstances are contingent at the time. The fact of the result turns them all into historical
actors, making them all necessary in the light of what happened, that is,
necessary to the existence of what did happen. This existence, in turn, reaches
back to what made it possible, in other words identifies the previously
unidentifiable, or alters its previous identity.
A woman bystander in a crowd of
pedestrians being shot at by rampaging terrorists narrowly avoided a bullet
while several others around her were shot dead.
By sheer contingency she survived intact. Some years later she gave
birth successively to two children. To the children, from their viewpoint as
living children, it was absolutely
necessary for their mother to have escaped death, necessary for their very
existence. But at the time her survival was purely contingent. An action’s significance can be changed depending on what
it ultimately led to. So we view it from the Final Cause, not the First Cause
proscriptively. This is where teleology is a vital element, and where it really
does not matter whether the vital moments in the lead-up were accidental or necessary. Prince Arthur’s untimely death was very sad
and the nation mourned, but purely by itself it was of little historical importance.
Except that it paved the way to the succession of his younger brother Henry
VIII – and we all know the various outcomes of that –including not least what amounted to a religious revolution
in England! The contingent death of Prince Arthur becomes the necessary death vital in respect of all
that subsequently transpired.
The ‘Cleopatra’s Nose’ theory of
history which instances that had her nose been a bit longer she would not have
entranced the ageing Caesar and so not won him over, with vast political
implications – is whimsically misleading. It seems her nose as well as the rest
of her was just right, and so history proceeded accordingly: otherwise it would
have turned out differently. And so (according to this account) had her nose
been too long there would have been a different history. But there wasn’t, and that’s the point!
‘What If’ history is not history.
Counterfactual history, hypotheses on what e.g. would have happened if one
element or other had been missing, can be useful in understanding what really
happened; it is that which the counterfactual historian is driving at, i.e. in
emphasising the importance of what was there.
Artists will be the first to know that
serendipity played a major role alongside both purpose and artistic ability in
the creation of the final work of art or music or poetry in question. But the
work itself is indisputable truth, in the making of which each of these
elements had very different facets from one another, but within which all have
been turned into a unity that is indissoluble in the resulting work. The
outcome determines the natures of all that went into it. Just to pick out one
at random, Sibelius was an intermittent alcoholic. When his immortal violin
concerto was due for its premiere but was unfinished, a frantic search through
the boozers of Helsinki was the only means of locating him and sobering him up
sufficiently to put the last touches on the work. He was so drunk when arriving
to conduct the premiere of his Sixth Symphony that he stopped the orchestra in
the middle of the first movement, thinking it was a rehearsal, and had to be
led off the stage. Would Sibelius have been as great if he hadn’t taken to
drink? Or would he have been greater? The question is ultimately irrelevant. The
work stands, real and unarguably. It puts everything that led up to its
realisation in its place.
Outcomes don’t just happen! They are determined.
In the lead-up it didn’t seem possible to fathom all the contingencies that
made something happen. Your thoughts and actions count, though, (along with
those of your opponents if you have any) because they DO play their part in
shaping the outcome. Meanwhile we can do our best to lessen –or make use of –
the impact of the accidental. In any
case the outcome, I repeat, does not shape itself.
In his preface to The Philosophy of Right Hegel wrote: ‘The owl of Minerva
[philosophy] spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.’ In other
words, the understanding of truth is only realised after its object has manifested itself entirely (in the preceding daytime,
so to speak). The Final Cause realises itself in revealing the nature and
impact of the previous Causes.
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