VII. HISTORIOGRAPHY
Excepting simpleminded chronicles and listings, any
historical work has a
theme of continuity inside of it.
The theme of the Old Testament, whatever
the many
digressions, is the gradual erection of the Israelite
theocracy. Thucydides fused the two parts of the Pelo-
ponnesian war, which were separated by the peace of
Nicias, into one continuous event. Aristotle created our
academic field of
the history of philosophy by conceiv-
ing a
closely-knit continuity of development in natural
philosophy from Thales to
Democritus. Within this
development he even created, rather forcedly,
the
subdevelopments of “monism” and
“pluralism.” Aris-
totle
says himself that it may appear incongruous to
create a continuity of
transition from the “materialists”
Thales,
Anaximander, Anaximenes, to the “ontologists”
Parmenides and Melissus by calling them all
“monists,”
but that he is going to do so anyhow (
Physica, Book
1, Ch. 2). Aristotle also knew well
that there had been
a great difference between the four
“roots” (= ele-
ments) of
Empedocles and the infinitely many atoms
of Leucippus and Democritus, but
he subsumed them
under the rubric of “pluralists”
nonetheless.
Continuity as a methodology in history does not at
all mean that all leading
developments are presumed
to be continuous, that is composed of
accumulations
of small-step events, let alone that developments are
presumed to be always “progressive,” that is
positively
accented forward advances.
After the Renaissance, under the spell of a wide-
spread “idea of progress” (J. B. Bury), and
lasting deep
into the nineteenth century (Bochner, pp. 73-74), such
presumptions sometimes did assert themselves. Thus,
in the history of
science, the inductivism of Francis
Bacon presented such an idea of
progress fairly closely.
It presumed that science advances gradually from
ob-
servation to theoretization,
univalently, forcibly, uner-
ringly. It also
assumed that there are ways in science
of deciding between right and wrong
and that an
experimenting and observing scientist can report on
facts
“faithfully” without at all rendering an opinion
on
them (Bochner, p. 62).
The twentieth century has become very critical of
inductivism in the history
of science, but it has not
decided what to put in its stead. It is not
properly
known what brings about significant changes in science,
and
what the actual mechanism of change is. Some-
times a major change in science appears to be literally
a
“revolution” which came about in a single step, but
at other times a major change, an equally significant
one, may appear to be
the sum of many relatively small
changes in rapid succession. It is very
difficult to find
a rationale for difference of these two types of
change
or a schema common to both types.
The nineteenth century brought to the fore an inter-
pretation of continuity in history which is much
less
naive than the ordinary belief in “inevitable
progress,”
although it is deceptively similar to it. If we
adopt
the term “continuism” (Bochner, p. 61), its
relation to
the idea of progress may be seen as follows. Continuism
also assumes that any event of today was directly
preceded by some event
which must have taken place
yesterday. However, the event of today is not
neces-
sarily an
“advance” over the event of yesterday, but
it is only
a “reaction” to it, and the reaction may be
a
positive or negative one. That is, the event of today
may concur with
yesterday's event and carry it for-
ward, or it
may disagree with it, and oppose it with
something different.
An unmistakably continuist enterprise is evident in
the large-scale work of
Pierre Duhem in the history
of science, which was achieved in the beginning
of the
twentieth century. In this work the author, una-
bashedly,
... forges what seems to be an unbroken chain of human
links, from
Thales to Galileo, clear across the entire Middle
Ages, without
omitting a single decade, or even a single
year of them. He does
not naively whiten out all the dark-
nesses of the Middle Ages; but to Duhem the darknesses
only
indicate a certain lowering of the level of intellectual-
ity, and not at all some chasmal rupture
in the substance
of the flooring
(Bochner, p. 117).
Duhem's continuism is obvious and obtrusive, and
therefore somewhat tedious;
but subtler forms of con-
tinuism have been
fully operative in many areas of
academic activity since the early
nineteenth century.
Continuism has greatly influenced the routines of aca-
demic research, and it has been involved in
an un-
precedented growth of scholarship
and of historically
oriented analyses in many compartments of
knowledge.
Whether it be the study of the origins of the Iliad or
the Old Testament, of Herodotus or Diogenes
Laërtius,
of a play of Shakespeare or the Opticks of Newton,
there is always a strain of continuism
involved in the
investigation. Finally, like all methods in historiogra-
phy, continuism had its
distant roots in antiquity. In
fact, Aristotle's conception of Pre-Socratic
philosophy
was entirely continuist, and has remained so since.
After
Aristotle, versions of continuism are identifiable
in scholarship of any
period, but it was the nineteenth
century which made the most of it.
In the twentieth century a major challenge to
straightforward continuism has
come from the problem
of the rise of Western civilization as a whole. It
has
long been recognized that in Western civilization in
its total
course there had been, at various stages of
its growth, component
civilizations with distinctive
characteristics of their own. This finding
by itself is
not in conflict with continuism. But a conflict might
arise if one posits that two component civilizations did
not affect each
other in a major way although they
were temporally contiguous or even
overlapping. And
that there had indeed been such component civili-
zations has been proposed,
respectively, by Oswald
Spengler and by Arnold Toynbee. The novelty of
such
proposals is wearing off, yet the echo of them lingers
on and is
likely to persist.
Very intriguing is a certain “continuist” question
relating to the origin of Western civilization in its
Mediterranean
littoral. The oldest components of this
total civilization were the Old
Egyptian and the Old
Mesopotamian civilizations. From the distance of our
retrospect
the two arose “almost simultaneously” in
the fifth
and fourth millennia B.C. This poses the prob-
lem whether there were any links between them, and,
if so, what the
links were. They both initiated the art
of writing in a major way; and the
absorbing problem
is whether there was any “stimulus
diffusion” (Toynbee,
12, 344ff.) from the one to the other, and
also what
it really was that made the Mediterranean littoral
eligible
for the rise of both.
