Sorry, But This One Is Mostly For Me: History, Ethics, Narrative

 Early in the morning, catching up with the reading I as too tired to do last night, with too much to do this morning, and having overslept, I read A Higher Thing than History: Zach Gibson reviews Hayden White’s second volume of “The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory.”  (LARB). It is a long essay, I suggest it be read in full. It has given me much to think about - the high points follow. I think I have not yet reached the correct level of nicotine and caffeine to do more than feel an impact on my ideas, and, therefore, on my own writing.

I have a vision for "Chasing Ashes" that incorporates history and current events - history both personal and of a wider scope - both versions of history incorporating ideas that have and have not attained the level of myth - the personal incorporating more and more autobiography as I gird my loins to put what is in my head into print - the amorphous mass from which I came and in which I live.

So, these notes are more for me than you. If they lead you to ideas and works, all the better. Right now, I am in the midst of educating myself. 

White’s most noted contribution to historiography is the hard line that he draws between historical reality and its narration. The past itself, as an amorphous mass, is wholly distinct from historical narrative, which “endows this reality with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.” The meaning of events in the past derives from their narration, which White contends is always an act of interpretation. He continues: “Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened.”

The upshot here is the inextricable bond between the interpretation of a historical event, and its emplotment, or “the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind.” White turns to Northrop Frye to identify four main modes of emplotment: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire. To narrate in a given mode is to implicitly bestow a worldview upon the narrated events, serving as an explanatory gesture on the historian’s part.

Romance dramatizes heroism, staging Manichaean struggles between good and evil, virtue and vice, or light and darkness. Comedy holds out hope for triumph and reconciliation; at its most basic, a comic view of history tends to favor a progressive outlook of gradual improvement. Tragedy, meanwhile, sees the human condition as one of irresolvable division—a state of affairs that humankind cannot overcome—but offers consolatory revelations about humanity’s limited agency. Finally, satire “presupposes the ultimate inadequacy” of the visions held forth by the other three modes, and instead ridicules all three for their failure to comprehend the world in its complexity. For the satirist, the past’s romantic heroism holds no relevance for the present day, comic resolution remains forever out of reach, and tragic epiphany amounts to illusion.

***

White’s resolution lay in establishing a relationship between the past and the present as an ongoing process of figuration and fulfillment, a doubly articulated sense of time akin to the resonance between events in the Old and New Testaments explored by early biblical scholars. Figurative causation demands that we look backward to establish what the present might owe to the past, where the former’s values lie, how it might attain its goals, and how it will use its historical inheritance. At the same time, the anticipation of a future fulfillment means that we must forgo determinism and accept the burden of ethical accountability that goes hand in hand with existential freedom.

To anticipate fulfillment is not to give oneself over to historical necessity but to put forth a “challenge to time [and the] denial of change” that Paul Ricœur saw in the act of making a promise. Where he is more flexible than Ricoeur, who saw the keeping of promises as a preserve for self-constancy against a backdrop of change, White maintains that promises remain morally fraught gestures that attune us to how our actions in the present will be responsible to others in the future. Promise-making not only embodies the mutually dependent relationship between figuration and fulfillment but also illustrates the leap into the unknown that accompanies ethical action.

***

When writers move from the historian’s initial question (“What happened?”) toward concluding questions of causation (“Why did it happen?”) or ethical import (“What should I do?”), the look for significance goes beyond “scientific meaning,” making truth and meaning coterminous with the “determination of ‘what is the case.’”

However, White did not seek to collapse historical knowledge into meaningless relativism; the revelation that “science becomes ideology” was never his final aim. Rather, it was his starting point. White hoped to underscore how storytelling (of all stripes) stands as a distinct form of knowledge from scientific empiricism. Primo Levi’s book on Auschwitz, for White, embodies the particularity of narrative meaning, which he praises for juggling “facts experienced, as it were, from outside himself,” alongside “other kinds of materials—opinions, considerations, beliefs, and judgment—which are not fictions so much as simulacra, because they are not given to sense and must be invented on the basis of inner experiences.”

In his Poetics, Aristotle situates history, which deals only in particulars, below poetry. Poetry, he wrote, “is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history” because it speaks in universals and relates “what may happen.” This is true of scientific, reproductive history, but the productive task that White assigns to historical narrative—not the search for meaning in the archive but the production of meaning through emplotment—blurs Aristotle’s disciplinary line. Figurative causality makes it possible for a storyteller to fill the role of the Aristotelian poet and historian at the same time.

The “wager” that White places on the imagination in the “Is My Life a Story?” lecture rests on “the possibility that commitment to an ideal life is in the end both more realistic and more authentic than any simple or complex choice to affirm ‘things as they are.’” White’s unremitting critique of scientific historiography can be seen as an attempt to shake off the constraints imposed on historians. Together, his essays seek to shed the discipline’s superficial commitment to reproduction and move toward the elevated intellectual duty that White assigned to historians in his 1966 “Burden” essay: the productive power of mythos.

Also touching on the issue of narrative and documentation is Bénédicte Sère and Caroline Wazer in Conversation About Inventing the Church.

 I also want to come back to Essence is fluttering (Aeon).

On the other side was Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou, 莊周), perhaps the strangest philosopher of any culture, and a central focus of my book, Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self (2025). Zhuangzi (again, the writings ascribed to him – called the Zhuangzi – were probably written by multiple authors) rejected Confucian role-conformism. He argued that you shouldn’t aim to be a sage-king, or an exemplary mother, or any other predetermined role-identity. You shouldn’t aim, in Wilde’s terms, to be other people. In our highly individualistic culture, we can’t help but expect this line of thinking to continue: just be yourself! But this is not what Zhuangzi says. Instead, he says: ‘zhi ren wu ji (至人無己),’ translated as: ‘the Consummate Person has no fixed identity’ or ‘the ultimate person has no self’. The ethical ideal is not to replace a conformist identity with an individual one. It is to get rid of identity altogether. As the philosopher Brook Ziporyn puts it, ‘it is just as dangerous to try to be like yourself as to try to be like anyone else’.

Why is it dangerous? In the first place, attachment to a fixed identity closes you off from taking on new forms. This in turn makes it difficult for you to adapt to new situations. In her book Freedom’s Frailty (2024), Christine Abigail L Tan puts it this way: ‘if one commits to an identity that is fixed, then that is already problematic as one does not self-transform or self-generate.’ Borrowing a term from psychology, we could call this the problem of ‘identity foreclosure’. The American Psychological Association defines ‘identity foreclosure’ as:

premature commitment to an identity: the unquestioning acceptance by individuals (usually adolescents) of the role, values, and goals that others (eg, parents, close friends, teachers, athletic coaches) have chosen for them.

But the radical message of the Zhuangzi is that it can be just as dangerous a ‘foreclosure’ to accept the role, values and goals that you have chosen for yourself. Doing so cuts you off from the possibility of radically rethinking all of these under external influences.

sch 9/8