The Birth of the Past: An Interview with Zachary Sayre Schiffman
- The Birth of the Past:An Interview with Zachary Sayre Schiffman
What prompted you to consider that the notion of "the past" had its own history?
Many years ago, when I was searching for a dissertation topic, Hanna Gray—one of my advisors at the University of Chicago—recommended that I examine "Montaigne's attitude toward the past," a subject that had always interested her. I eventually decided to pursue this topic because Montaigne's relativism seemed almost historicist—almost, but not quite. If we define historicism as (in Friedrich Meinecke's terms) the nexus of the ideas of individuality and development, then we can describe Montaigne as having an acute sense of individuality—of the uniqueness of all things human—but no sense of historical development. This disjunction is very hard for us moderns to conceive of, and it led me to suspect that, when Montaigne thought about the past, he thought about something radically different than we do. By this statement I do not simply mean to say that he had a different idea about "the past"; rather, I mean to question whether he could even "cast his mind back in time"—an action we take for granted when we think about the past. Essentially, I began to suspect that the past did not exist for him as a conceptual entity lying "back there" on a temporal continuum; and, if it did not exist as such for him—the most radical of Renaissance relativists—it did not likely exist as such for any Renaissance thinker. Needless to say, these ideas remained largely inchoate and left little trace in my dissertation, which was chiefly concerned with establishing [End Page 18] what I then called the "limits" of Renaissance historical consciousness.
I still wonder what Hanna Gray would have done with the topic she so generously bequeathed to me, but I can at least thank her for inspiring what would eventually become a life-long study. As I subsequently expanded my historiographical inquiries beyond Montaigne to include many of his contemporaries—Bodin, Pasquier, La Popelinière, Hotman, and Vignier—I became convinced that late Renaissance historical thought was fundamentally classificatory. In other words, the way to conceive of individuality without an idea of development was to arrange the diversity of unique entities hierarchically. I pursued this line of inquiry in my first book, On the Threshold of Modernity, which examines the impact of relativism in the French Renaissance, and in my second book, Information Ages (co-authored with Michael Hobart), which traces this classificatory view of the world back to its origins in Greek alphabetic literacy. But I still conceived of Renaissance erudites in particular as classifying "the past," despite my (secretly) questioning whether this idea existed for them. It was mostly through extended conversations with Leonard Barkan and Constantin Fasolt that I found the courage and the means to express this idea openly. Barkan conceived of the Renaissance sense of the past as constituting a "symbolic space" apart from time; and Fasolt revealed the instrumentalist origins of the urge to contextualize entities in the Renaissance. Both these approaches to Renaissance humanism and its aftermath served to destabilize the form of historical understanding I took for granted, and they inspired me to elaborate more fully the intuition about "the past" that had occurred to me many years earlier.
At the risk of covering some of the same ground as your essay, would you distinguish among several notions that often get sloshed together in our thinking and writing: the past, anachronism, historical consciousness, and historicism?
"The past" is a very tricky term, largely because it is so commonplace. On this account, I find it useful to distinguish between "the past" as the time before the present, and "the past" as a time different from the present. Priority in time does not automatically entail difference, and it is the sense of difference that constitutes "the past" as a conceptual entity. Simply put, without a sustained idea of the difference between past and present, there can be no idea of "the past." Having made such a categorical statement, I do...
