Integridad en el paisaje de la historia

Integrity and Historical Research by Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland (eds.), New York/London: Routledge, 2012

  
Reviewed by María G. Navarro

Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland are the editors of a work devoted to exploring in what sense integrity is a virtue relating to historical research. The choice of this particular virtue is not casual. History is obviously one of humanity’s most characteristic areas of research.  The editors and authors of the eleven chapters of Integrity and Historical Research begin with the conviction that without a certain sense of history, and thus without narratives about the social and personal world, all of us might be less human, or even something completely different.

     This book does not merely justify and analyse this commonplace. Integrity can be defined in many ways and applied to many things. Gibbons reminds of this when he states “the word ‘integrity’ is used in many contexts, from the integrity of an ecosystem or a database to the integrity of a person […] The ecosystem has integrity when it is unpolluted and uncorrupted by factors alien to its well-being and flourishing” (p.1). In each chapter the analogy between the integrity of an ecosystem and of history becomes a metaphor, or indeed an analogy to attribute new fields for investigation, new socio-political responsibilities, and in a nutshell, new interstices to historical research.

     All the chapters in this book explore the relationship between integrity and historical research in order to discover the meaning, purpose and impact of history in a different horizon of understanding. One of the speculative and metaphorical products of the association between integrity and history is that, as integrity is a moral characteristic of an individual when he or she displays virtue consistently over time, we can say that the integrity of an ecosystem is the result of estimating the degree and nature of its incorruptibility over time.

     This last aspect is not just significant as an allegory or metaphor. The authors of this volume affirm that historical research transforms the landscape (Nicholas Brown, Rick Hosking, Angela Franks). History in general (not just the history of eyewitness accounts or collective action, for example) corrupts our geological ecosystems to the point of making them the backdrop to the cultural and symbolic transformation of this particular form of research.  

     But history does not just come from rocks; it is also part of the media education of different nations, of our oral culture, and of our literary and film narratives (María Reimóndez, Dave Mosler and Jessica Murrell, Juanita Feros Ruys, Jerome de Groot, Patricia Duncker). The relationship between integrity and history allows us to occupy the interstice between, on one hand, the visual and media culture which produces stereotypes of the activity and profession of historians, and on the other, the representations of time (present, past and future) which historians produce for an audience, in a broad sense.         

     Occupying these interstices is relevant, given that from this place we discover an integrity which applies not only to landscapes, social groups (such as historians), events, narratives, etc., but also to audiences, the politics of memory, generations, novels or TV series (Catalina Botez, Emily Sutherland, Jerome de Groot). Both the action of writing history and its effects (political, geographical, on the landscape, on fiction, on the media) are permeated by the question of what our integrity is and how far it reaches (Tony Gibbons). The book is designed to approach each of these subjects, shining a light on the effects of this integrity: literature, film, Australian landscapes, oral narratives, eyewitness accounts, etc., form part of the materials which challenge not only the authors of this book, but researchers and readers in general. In a way, the fact that they are found in this book responds to the need to approach in a defined way how this virtue affects our action of understanding and writing history.

     The chapters are attractive from a literary point of view, easy to read and enthusiastic, each with an individual approach, with the common feature of providing an annotated bibliography on the subject. Perhaps the only objection to raise is that there is no chapter dedicated to analysing the influence of virtue epistemology on historical research in general, and the different historiographic models in particular.  This hypothetical section would have been useful for understanding in what sense the virtues of the social group formed by historians uses technology, argumentation schemas and strategies, inferential models, heuristics, and perhaps, specific cognitive biases in each era and current in historiography.

     Finally, we can say that this book, edited by Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland, is an exhaustive and consistent compilation of the connection between Integrity and Historical Research. This volume can be presented as a modern contribution to the question of how history affects researchers in the human sciences, and how many research subjects characteristic of the human sciences (occasionally) and unique to contemporary society (in many other cases) should widen the goals of historical research. 

    María G. Navarro. International Network for Theory of History--Ghent University

Que la biblioteca hable del hombre

The Great Ocean of Knowledge. 

The Influence of Travel Literature on the Work of John Locke

by Ann Talbot

Leiden/Boston: Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History vol. 184, 2010

Reviewed by María G. Navarro

The resercher Ann Talbot presents in this book one of the more complex and in-depth studies ever written about the influence of travel literature on the work of the British philospher John Locke (1632-1704).

At the end of the 18th century the study of travel literature was an alternative to academic studies. The philosopher John Locke recommended with enthousiasm these books as a way to comprehend human understanding. Several members of the Royal Society like John Harris (1966-1719) affirmed that the learning that could be obtained through these books was different from the one that provided the educative system of that time. Travel literature could make see the source of the ignorance of the ancients; it stressed the curiosities and extraordinary facts and led to a revision of beliefs and scientific theories of the ancient world. Besides the account of a broad diversity of sujects contributed to the creation of matters of fact, and this was important in order to put rational limits to the descriptions of the world that were commonly accepted.

The book The Great Ocean of Knowledge. The Influence of Travel Literature on the Work of John Locke is an exhaustive and rigourous study of Locke’s thought. It shows a deep knowledge of postmodern critiques to the modern notion of Enlightment and applies these historiographical critiques to a documented analysis of Locke’s library and what could mean, for him, the travel literature he read. These are some of the most important contributions of a book that is a historiographical research work on travel literature and its intelectual effects; it sets a specific model in order to analyse the genesis of Locke’s thought and, besides, offers a critical and contemporary study of the significance of European Enlightment. These aspects, that are to be associated to the character of the research carried out by Talbot and also to her intellectual disposal, have to do with the two questions the book answers to: what kind of works were in Locke’s library?, how is to be evaluated the impact of travel books on the philosopher’s thought?

In a library of more that 3600 books, 269 works could be classified today as philosophy and 275 as travel or geography. This significant proportion is forwarded as an evidence of Locke’s interest for this kind of literature. But, what did he thought about this material? What did it mean to him?

First, Talbot raises these questions and analyses them as an historian. Aftewards she does it as a critique of the historiographical conceptions of modernity about the origins of Enlightment. And finally, she analyses them as an expert in the political and moral thought of Locke.

The result is a reference work about the thought of Locke, but also about the history of the ideas of Enlightment and about research models of historiography to deal with all this, and to present it. That is why, in my opinion, this book is an innovative work in all the three above mentionned fields.

Two important factors influenced Locke. In the first place, the absolutist society he lived in, a society where the learning model was based on the study of the classics and of the Bible. In the second place, his knowledge of the research techniques he learned of two authors influenced by Bacon, Robert Boyle and Thomas Sydenhan. Locke used what he had learned from them in a unique way to examine contemporary questions on politics, human behaviour, beliefs and religion.

The 275 works of travel literature in Locke’s library are classified by Talbot into four categories: books related to projects of the fellows of the Royal Society, clearly linked to baconian tradition; works influence by the Neo-Thomist School of Salamanca, in Spain; books that linked Confucianism to atheism and materialism and, finally, travel books that had an utopian character. The author analyses the influence of each of these works of travel literature on the theory of knowledge of Locke, and also on his political and moral philosophy.

Locke’s library was comparable to those of other fellows of the Royal Society, but the impact of this literature on his work was unique and non comparable to any other case. It seems that Locke selected his books paciently, in the same way a doctor looks for indexes, signales, evidence, exceptional and challenging cases for himself and his theories. His bibliographic quest, similar to the one of a collector, was filled with true scientific and philosophical passion, as he saw each travel book as an opportunity to evaluate and check what he had proposed in his own work.

The problem of what laws do govern human behaviour, the variations between one society and another, questions that have to do with the problem of the universality of moral or the origin of human knowledge, can no longer be understood without the image of this library rich in travel literature, where Locke spent most of his life reading and writing, chewing, ruminating all these stories of extraordinary places and people.
The question of human nature transforms itself into a fascinating philosophical investigation thanks to Talbot’s book, and it is so for two reasons: it helps us to approach the figure of John Locke and the philosophical and political meaning of Enlightment, and it does it without breaking its relationship with the experiency of the discovery of other human beings and unknown places. A radical experience both for Europeans and for its ‘others’ that was made possible by Enlightment by means of travel literature.

The book is structured in fourteen chapters and a conclusion to which two appendices are added. In them, the author offers a list of the travel books cited by Locke, and a complete bibliography of the manuscript sources.

In my opinion, the work of Talbot offers an interpretation of the thought of Locke made from the point of view of social anthropology.

María G. Navarro. Seventeenth-Century News 2011 vol. 69 Issues 3&4, 162-164

El cumpleaños como kairos (mío, tuyo, de cada uno)

Historia y hermenéutica

by José Luis Villacañas y Faustino Oncina

Barcelona: Paidós, 1997

Reviewed by María G. Navarro

La publicación de Historia y hermenéutica representa, temática y estructuralmente, una nueva invitación al diálogo. Con ocasión del octogésimo cumpleaños de Hans-George Gadamer, el metodólogo de la historia Reinhart Koselleck ofreció la conferencia 'Histórica y hermenéutica' el horizonte de la pregunta que encierra la conferencia fue abierto por Gadamer con su tentativa de respuesta 'Histórica y lenguaje'. Con todo, la descripción de un libro que invita a una lectura estructuralmente dialogal es incompleta si no se muestra, al menos sintetizadamente, el tema del diálogo...

En su conferencia Koselleck aborda cuál es la relación espistemológica entre Histórica —la doctrina de las condiciones de posibilidad de las historias efectuales asimiladas comprensivamente— y la hermenéutica. Koselleck sostiene que el estatus epistemológico de la Histórica la hace irreductible a un caso de hermenéutica; a fin de fundamentar esta tesis, Koselleck ofrece una definición de una teoría de la historia o Histórica y describe aquellas condiciones de posibilidad de las historias, considerando que, en conjunto, tales consideraciones revelarían una prelingüística categoría trascendental de posibles historias.

La tesis de Koselleck oculta una particular definición de la historia de los conceptos y de su naturaleza; en efecto, la naturaleza del concepto, como indicio y como factor de la experiencia histórica, permite a Koselleck utilizar la historia conceptual como un procedimiento auxiliar para la investigación histórica. Las estructuras en las que Koselleck piensa —los a priori de la racionalidad histórica que llegarían a hacer posible la previsibilidad de la acción social— devienen en estructuras conceptuales que el historiador utilizaría para un proyecto de la Histórica. Sin embargo, ¿es el contenido de esos conceptos el mismo que actúa sobre los hombres del pasado? Y aún cuando se rastrease la historia de los conceptos a través del tiempo, ¿pueden ellos mismos determinar y describir las condiciones de posibilidad de la historia? E independientemente de cuál fuera la respuesta a esa pregunta, ¿podría dejar de tenerse a la Histórica como una teoría al margen de todo proceder hermenéutico?

Tal y como él mismo manifiesta, su argumentación está construida en base a las interpretaciones, confrontadas, de dos lecturas: Ser y Tiempo y Verdad y Método.

Koselleck supone la interpretabilidad antropológica de aquellas determinaciones de la finitud de la existencia en la obra de Heidegger que “han quedado obsoletas” —“precursar la muerte”, “amigo-enemigo”, “ser-en-el-mundo”, “estar arrojado”—, pero de cuya reelaboración y actualización podrían derivarse —más allá de la heideggeriana categoría de la historicidad del Dasein, que no hace suficientemente descriptibles historias concretas— las categorías trascendentales que nombran la posibilidad de historias.

En la segunda parte de su esbozo argumentativo, que provocó la respuesta de Gadamer, Koselleck apunta, de manera determinante, hacia la categoría de lingüisticidad: ella posibilita efectivamente una doctrina de la comprensión como hermenéutica con dimensión histórico-ontológica. Sin embargo, la Histórica trasciende de las fuentes históricas y de la propia lingüisticidad en la medida en que busca no los sucesos, sino sus prelingüísticos y extralingüísticos marcos estructurales. Incluso frente a la inevitable mención lingüística que hace trasmisible a la Histórica, teóricamente, sus determinaciones categoriales acreditan su “propio valor autónomo”, ya que, desde un punto de vista metodológico, la Histórica no es meramente ni estrictamente una teoría ligada filológicamente a un texto.

Y sin embargo, responde Gadamer, porque el fundamento de la civilización humana está cifrado en la constitución lingüística de los hombres “en todo conocimiento histórico anida un comprender” y el particular texto de una Histórica se formula lingüísticamente. Si se considera la hermenéutica tal y como la concibió Schleiermacher, como “una comprensión investigando”, entonces ésta abarcaría de raíz el proyecto de la Histórica, en la medida también en que incluso las categorías trascendentales o las condiciones de posibilidad de historias se formulan lingüísticamente, desde la conceptualidad de una época. Entonces el proyecto de una Histórica no puede obviar metodológicamente la “transformación que les acontece a los conceptos del pasado cuando intentamos pensar en ellos”.

María G. Navarro. Anales del Seminario de Metafísica 1999 249-251