Lara Thurnherr

Why should we care about history? How does historical science work? And what can we decidedly not learn from anything but the present? This seems like a valuable question for me after just having finished my BA in History. Swiss historian Herbert Lüthy talked about this in an Essay in 1961, titled: “Geschichte als Selbstbesinnung”. I recommend you read the Essay, but if you don’t want to (or can’t, because it’s in German), here is a quick distillation.  

History is only understandable to us from the present. This statement is somewhat ambiguous, so let’s clarify. It doesn’t mean we can rewrite history however we want to fit our needs, feelings, or trends. Instead, it’s a statement about historical methodology. History, whether it’s about ancient civilizations or recent events, is only accessible to us in the present time. We can only understand it because we make it relevant to ourselves.

Subjectivity is a fundamental part of all human research, including historical science. It  isn’t just about observing what’s directly visible. Researchers choose their own questions and hypothesis to examine, and though create their own object of research. This applies to both natural and human sciences. The idea that natural sciences are objective and humanities are subjective belongs to a time when people thought they could completely eliminate the observer from the natural world. But when Galileo looked through his telescope, he already knew what he was looking for. What he saw fit into the idea he had formed of it. It wasn’t just stubbornness or ill will if his adversaries didn’t see the same thing. The world, whether historical or natural, doesn’t give an answer where it’s not asked. Werner Heisenberg once said, “The object of research is no longer nature per se, but rather human questioning.” Different types of laws of nature can be applied to one physical process without contradiction, depending on the fundamental conception of the law. But the fact that sciences and their fundamental hypotheses change doesn’t make them unreliable. Physics isn’t a science of charlatans just because today’s physicists see the world differently than their predecessors did fifty years ago. Historians also see the past differently than their predecessors did. This doesn’t make history nonsense or subjective speculation. 

There is a temptation to turn the page and say: A new epoch has begun, and what was, is forgotten and bygone tomorrow. Unfortunately, however, our escape from history into outer space will inevitably fail, because we will first drag outer space into our history. Our ancestor’s legacy in general, but especially its ugliest and most unreasonable parts, weighs too heavily on us, on our mentalities, emotions and collective reflexes, on our states and societal structures for us to ever trust the historically clueless “common sense” in dealing with it. 

Of course, we could spare ourselves the trouble of knowing how things once were, even though we would lose an infinite amount of insight. But to know how it came to be, to understand the process that we ourselves must continue, that we cannot spare ourselves, without blinding ourselves morally and physically. This immediately becomes clear when we consider the hackneyed slogan of the unresolved past, which haunts our world like a spectre, preventing it from emerging into utopia. For the entire “unresolved past”  is present today as an unresolved present. Like the individual person, every human community is not at peace with itself when it is not at peace with its past. And no generation can avoid for coming to terms with its past anew, in order to be able to knowingly shape the future it wants to live in.