Slaves of Time? Reflections on Lucian Hölscher’s Concept of ‘Virtual History’

What is the major problem of writing history and what could be its solution? These are the two questions that Lucian Hölscher has raised in his intriguing plea for ‘Virtual History. Perspectives on an Expanded Concept of History’ and that I address in my following commentary. 

1.  First, I need to clarify which historiographical problem Hölscher intends to solve. It is the “ephemeral character” of historical knowledge, interpreted as its “temporal index” that binds it to the time and the constellation in which it originated (p. 9). In Hölscher’s view, this ‘temporal index’ or ‘Standortgebundenheit’ makes it impossible for historical knowledge to claim a “timeless validity” – which he equates with its scientific character. Consequently, the validity of historical representations “is bound to be short-lived” (p. 9), only to be replaced by successor representations that have a similar ‘temporal index’ and thus the same limitation. So, the opposition between the genesis (‘Ursprung’) and the validity (‘Geltung’) of historical knowledge is fundamental for Hölscher’s general line of argument, because it produces the problems that he intends to solve through virtual history. His basic aim is to increase the validity of historical knowledge by decreasing its dependency on the historically specific and thus temporally limited context of its origin. His proposal is to expand the historical context to include the future dimensions of the past.

Simultaneously, Hölscher cautions historians in a Nietzschean spirit against an unreflected continuation of their ‘business as usual’ because “the mountain of possible narratives and interpretations of the past continues to grow” (p. 11).

At this point, there appears to be a basic ambiguity in Hölscher’s characterization of historiography. On the one hand, he argues, in accordance with the tradition of Historismus, that the flow of time produces the ongoing change of history and the ongoing need to rewrite history: “Various times produce different images of the past, even if they report the same events.” (p. 10) Time thus constitutes the condition of possibility of historiography. On the other hand, however, Hölscher presents the flow of time as a fundamental problem for historiography because it supposedly limits the ‘shelf-life’ of historical works by undermining their epistemological validity.

To analyze Hölscher’s problem diagnosis, it is useful to compare it to some ideas that Arthur Danto formulated in his famous Analytical Philosophy of History. Danto was the first to provide a solid philosophical argument for historians’ widespread intuition that history can only be written after the event, that is: ex post facto. This means that historians can only describe change over time retrospectively because the ‘beginning’ of a history can only be identified after its ‘end.’ The writing of histories therefore differs fundamentally from the writing of chronicles: Histories must continuously be rewritten because the ‘end’ is in motion as time goes by. Historical accounts typically contain narrative sentences like “The Second World War started on 1 September, 1939” or “Galilei was a precursor of Newton” – sentences that could not have been written in a chronicle because they describe events by connecting them to a future state of affairs that had not yet been attained at the time of description. In short, the historians’ – later – position in time vis à vis the events on which they report is the precondition of writing history because it allows the historian to connect past events to past future events. Hölscher’s proposal to expand historiography by including virtual futures therefore is an expansion of what historians are already doing, that is: connecting past events to their futures.

Now, although the irresoluble tension between the genesis and the validity of historical knowledge is fundamental for Hölscher’s line of argument, he introduces this idea without clarifying it, hereby generating a major issue of interpretation. This is the case because in Martin Jay’s words “there is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of Western thought (–) than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea or value in a specific context, and its claim to validity beyond it.”  Although historians tend to be contextualists by character and by education, “the relationship between genesis and validity is not necessarily adversarial,” as many historians – including Hölscher – assume. 

The simplest way to refute the presupposition that the relationship between validity and genesis of historical knowledge is necessarily antagonistic is to point at the so-called classics of historiography because classics exemplify representations whose validity can not be reduced to the context of their genesis by definition. In this sense, excellent historical representations – like Braudel’s ‘The Mediterranean’ and Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ – are like excellent works of art – like Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’. This does not imply the claim that these two genres are timeless, but only that both possess an autonomy (aura) that transcends the context of their origin. Because of this quality, they enjoy a long afterlife and remain valid to posterity.  Therefore, in Rainer Forst’s words, “the question of whether the principle of reason (embodied by historical method in history, CL) has a transcendent (or transcendental), an abstract, or, on the contrary, a historical, context-specific character is wrongly posed. The question of justification always arises in concrete contexts and equally points beyond them.”  Hölscher, however, argues from a pure contextualist standpoint when he states that “modern historiography is necessarily always bound to the point of view of its pictures of the past“, meaning that the location of the historian in space and time conditions “the standpoint from which a story is told” and “provides the perspective that gives a historical judgment its persuasive power” (p. 11) – in other words: its epistemological validity.

This kind of contextualism is known from 19th and early 20th century Historismus and has been seriously criticized – and for good reason. One line of criticism was aptly formulated by Leo Strauss: “Historicism asserts that all human thoughts or beliefs are historical, and hence deservedly destined to perish; but historicism itself is a human thought; hence historicism can be of only temporary validity, or it cannot be simply true.” (–) “Historicism thrives on the fact that it inconsistently exempts itself from its own verdict about all human thought.”  In other words: Reductionist contextualism must be rejected because it results “from a logical fallacy of collapsing validity into genesis.” 

Another line of criticism argues that reductionist contextualism blinds us to the effects that specific events and important texts may exert beyond their origins, that is: in their futures. Nevertheless, Hölscher’s plea for virtual history is based on a wholesale acceptance of the notion of the ‘Standortgebundenheit’ of historical knowledge – the idea that there is a fixed connection between historical knowledge and the historical context in which it is produced. This fixed connection is also presupposed in Hölscher’s idea that the validity of historical knowledge automatically decreases after a brief period because this is the problem he set out to resolve. Virtual history thus is based on the contextual reductionism known from Historismus. At the same time, the notion of ‘Standortgebundenheit’ in virtual history remains as indeterminate as the notion of context in Historismus. As intellectual historians have pointed out, the context is never given, but must first be established by historians with the help of sources and presentday conceptual tools (like speech act theory in the case of the ‘Cambridge School,’ and stratigraphical theory in the case of Reinhart Koselleck).  This means that placing an event or text in its context is fundamentally a historiographical operation with two unknowns because if an event and a text depend on their context, the first two concepts “raise as many questions as ‘context’”.  Therefore it is always the historian who defines this ‘Standortgebundenheit’ or context of events and texts – including their temporal extensions in the future and the past. And therefore, changes of the context over time cannot be considered the reason why historical knowledge loses validity, nor can extending the timeframe be viewed as the solution to increase its validity and attain scientificity, that is, enduring validity.

According to Hölscher, scientificity of historical knowledge could be reached if historians, over time, agreed on the accuracy of historical representations but this argument also remains ambiguous. On the one hand, he acknowledges that historians often fail to agree – since there are different and even contradictory accounts – but on the other hand, he posits “making it possible for later historians to speak of a general agreement at a past time.” (p. 11)

This ambiguity can be avoided if one does not identify the notions of scientificity, timeless validity, and general agreement – and acknowledges both the productive role of time and of disagreement in science. As to the productive role of time and the correlative changes of interpretations, Hans-Georg Gadamer convincingly argued that the proponents of Historismus historicized everything – except for Historismus itself. Consequently, they became stuck on the hidden positivistic image of objectivity as timeless validity. Instead, Gadamer famously proposed to conceive of objectivity in terms of horizons of meaning (‘Sinnhorizonte’) that change over time. Now, although Hölscher implicitly endorses Gadamer’s idea of the changing horizons of meaning over time, he rejects the implication that Gadamer spelled out: the simultaneous rejection of the idea of objectivity as timeless validity. If Hölscher followed Gadamer’s lead, he would, in any case, avoid the problem of his ambiguous connection between historiography and time. Now let’s take a closer look at his proposed solutions.

2. Hölscher’s basic proposal “to expand the short shelf-life of historical works and remedy their fixation on the ephemeral present in which they are written” (p. 27 f.) is to ‘unlock’ this fixation by expanding the notion of history from ‘what really happened’ to ‘what possibly could have happened’ – that is:
by including virtual history.  This expansion can be realized when historians start showing that every present is wedged between different pasts and futures, which were viewed as possible at the time but were never realized – except for the one possibility that transformed into ‘historical reality.’ Now Hölscher’s aim is “to liberate historiography from its static attachment to the present moment” and thus, to make historical narrations “dynamic.” “As I want to demonstrate, history consists not only of the ephemeral and contingent images of the past created by the present age, but also of the images that were created in the past, and that will be created in the future.” (p. 14) So, while historians, until now, have tried to increase the validity of historical representations in a synchronical manner, that is: by expanding the number of perspectives from which past events are studied (by including an increasing number of formerly marginalized and repressed voices, for instance), Hölscher proposes to do so in a diachronical manner, that is: by expanding historical representation with the ideas, hopes, and fears etc. which actors had in mind but that did not become reality. By including the imagined but not (fully) realized possibilities in historical representation, the historical past will include ‘past futures’ and ‘future pasts.’

I will leave aside the question whether the reconstruction of the ideas, hopes, and fears etc. of past actors concerning the past and the future isn’t part and parcel of what ‘normal’ historians strive for. I will also leave aside the question on what grounds the proposed diachronical extension of history is supposed to ‘unlock’ the fixation of historical representation to a moment in time. In this paragraph, I will only go into two other questions: a) how Hölscher distinguishes virtual history from fictional history and counterfactual history; b) on which grounds Hölscher expects that virtual history would extend the ‘shelf-life’ of historical works.

a) Like most historians, Hölscher has serious doubts about the validity of counter-factual history because ‘what if?’ questions could easily lead historians into the swamps of ‘unfounded speculation.’  “Virtual history is not a counterfactual history,” Hölscher posits (p. 21), although it includes that which was possible in the past and not actual. Hölscher’s simultaneous recognition that what has happened in the past was only one of various possibilities, however, creates the problem how to distinguish real possibilities from unreal possibilities, that is, from ‘unfounded speculations.’ To keep ‘speculations’ out, he restricts the range of actual possibilities to the possibilities as they were imagined by the historical actors, including “their justified fears and aspirations, sometimes expressed in dreams, images, and literary fiction.” (p. 21 f.)

So, although virtual history may include dreams and literary fiction, it unsurprisingly does not blend with fictional genres.  More surprisingly, Hölscher holds that including the contemporaries’ unrealized visions of the future may enhance history’s practical usefulness because “they continue to accompany history subconsciously as future possibilities.” (p. 22) This leads me to my last question: Is it reasonable to expect that virtual history will extend the validity and thus the ‘shelf-life’ of historical works?

b) I think the answer to this question must be yes and no. Yes, because the systematic inclusion of ideas about past futures and future pasts will put the actual, historical past in a broader perspective on the grounds that the horizons of expectation and the actors’ horizons of experience condition one another. This insight has been formulated before but is nevertheless valid.

At the same time, the answer must be no because virtual history is hampered by another blind spot that it inherited from Historismus. Now I am referring to the circumstance that history is exclusively conceptualized from the viewpoints of the historical actors. Hölscher basically conceives of virtual history as the intentional contents of their minds and identifies this content with the domain of the actual possibilities. Virtual history therefore remains blind to what the actors did not imagine: for what happened ‘behind their backs,’ independently of what they thought and intended. This is a fundamental problem because a big part of what was and is going on in the past, present, and future – like traffic jams, global warming, population ageing, inflation, and financial crises – is unintended and cannot be explained only through the lens of ideas and intentional actions.  This observation implies that virtual history may inform us better about what contemporaries imagined as their pasts and futures (planned, hoped for, feared, and everything in-between) but not necessarily better about what actually happened – which, as Danto clarified, can only be established retrospectively by the historian who knows the future of the past and who thus has a viewpoint that is, by definition, unavailable to the contemporaries. Only by exploiting this feature – the non-openness of the future, so to say – historians can try to increase the epistemological qualities of historical representations over time and so increase their ‘shelf-life’. Hölscher’s plea for virtual history in its present form does not address the fundamental problem of the unintended consequences of social action, but maybe he will do so in the future. Only time will tell.