The Ethics of History (review)

It is rare that every essay in a collection is well worth reading, but that is the case in this illuminating and stimulating volume. Perhaps this should not be surprising, since its contributors comprise a virtual "Who's Who" of philosophers and intellectual historians who have contributed significantly to the philosophical enterprise in general and to the philosophy of history in particular. Adding to the volume is the fact that the contributors come from varied perspectives: from the so-called 'analytic' tradition (Arthur Danto, Joseph Margolis) to the so-called 'continental' tradition (Jean-François Lyotard, John D. Caputo, Joan Copjec), and to all manner of approaches along this continuum and that arguably even subvert it (Frank Ankersmit, Edith Wyschogrod, Allan Megill, Jörn Rüsen, Rudolf Makkreel, Thomas R. Flynn, and David Carr). The editors of the volume not only should be congratulated for putting it together (and for sponsoring the conference at Emory University on which it is based), but also for contributing important essays to it.

So what are the issues addressed under the rubric of the "ethics of history"? One way to answer this is to focus on the questions the authors ask as they explore this topic:

• • What is the relationship of moral and political values to historical truth? (Ankersmit);

• • What is the relation between the ethical posture of historians and their role as narrators? (Wyschogrod);

• • How should the epistemology of historical investigation connect to the ethics of historical investigation (and what are these ethics)? (Megill);

• • "What basis in morality can we identify that makes truth a duty?" (Danto, 81);

• • "How are we to console the dead who are long since dead? How are we to repair their irreparable loss?" (Caputo, 93);

• • How can the lives or stories of the past still morally concern or speak to us today? (Copjec, who asks this question regarding Antigone);

• • How to represent transcendent moments—theophanic occasions of incarnational grace and saintly joy? That is, "Where can an absolute visit be situated or placed, in relation to a biography?" (Lyotard, 157, who asks this question by examining Augustine's Confessions);

• • Does the fact of our historicity (that, as selves, we are artifacts of history and understand ourselves as such) place peculiar ethical demands on us both as historical agents and as historical interpreters? (Margolis);

• • What are the responsibilities of historians to their profession? To their audience? To their subjects, those who have lived in the past? (Rüsen);

• • Is there any "inner connectedness" between the ethical and the historical that "justifies the idea of an ethics of history"? More specifically, what are the ethical conditions that make a hermeneutical history possible? (Makkreel, 214);

• • Can one be a "committed" historian? (Flynn);

• • Do the ways history resembles fiction (both make use of narrative and the imagination) render the moral obligation to tell the truth irrelevant for, or unrealizable by, history?. (Carr)

In addressing these questions, the authors explore a number of central concepts that appear over and over in the volume, including truth, historicity, autonomy, objectivity, subjectivity, commitment, suffering, remembrance, and responsibility.

Two general questions, posed in different ways by different authors, hold the center of the collection. First, given that objectivity conceived in terms of a simple correspondence in which historians empty themselves in order to record the past as it was is no longer intellectually tenable, what are the norms and values of history as a discipline that help distinguish it from propaganda? Second, given that history is about those who are dead, can historians be said to have obligations or responsibilities to them? For instance, should historians offer moral judgments about the evils that people have perpetrated on each other as a way of respecting those who have suffered? Is this a way historians can act responsibly toward their subjects? If not (and many in fact think not), then how else can we honor their suffering?

Answers to these questions sometimes reveal deep disagreement (Flynn...