Historia indicates a cognitive step whose first details show that its unity did not lie in an exclusive relationship with what had occurred and the time which can be ‘‘reconfigured’’ in a narrative - in other words, in an exclusive relationship with something like history. One can even say, going back to Heraclitus on Pythagoras, together with what Herodotus asserts, that historia was neither originally nor exclusively attached to history.
If one wants to take account of the full extension of its uses, it appears then that its unity is found in the structure of the cognitive operation in which it is inscribed, a double structure that one could define as that of a judged judgment (‘‘judgment’’ being understood in either its epistemic or legal sense). Historia is a first judgment (or group of judgments) made about the phenomena by a first authority. It will itself be the object of a new judgment, this time a decisive one, emanating from a second authority. It thus constitutes an operation necessary but not autonomous, which leads to a ruling on what is just or real, and sometimes on both when reality is justice, as in Herodotus (see Darbo-Peschanski 1998).
Let us look at three examples. First, the historia of which Heraclitus speaks in connection with Pythagoras (above, p. 32). Pythagoras attains, according to Heraclitus, a knowledge only of the various and the multiple (polymathy) rather than a single knowledge of a different nature (a sophil). For Heraclitus, knowledge/wisdom ( to sophon) consists in effect of‘‘knowing that a thought (gnome) governs all through all’’ (VS 22 B 41). In his criticism of Pythagoras, he thus gives historia the form of a judgment related to the data of experience, which must be subjected in its turn to reason, because only the order of the logos coincides with knowledge. Because one has a knowledge that is only individual (‘‘knowledge specific to itself’’) and which cannot master diversity and plurality, it becomes itself plural and false (‘‘multiple learning/art of bad quality’’).
Second, there is the historia peri phuseos that Plato attributes to Anaxagoras. Here again one sees in yet another way the double structure of a judged judgment, although Plato, by refusing to take into account a knowledge rooted in the phenomena, polemically attributes to it the claim of being in itself a knowledge of causes sufficient to stop wisdom. As with all ‘‘wisdom’’ (sophia) of this type, it is supposed, he says, ‘‘to know the causes of each thing, under the terms of which each one comes to existence, under the terms of which it perishes, under the terms of which it exists’’ (Phaedo 98b5-e1). Anaxagoras, however, gives a single causal principle to each thing: Mind (Nous). But as soon as it is a question of knowing the causes of the order of things in detail, he makes nothing more of Mind and interposes between it and reality a quantity of other causes. One would thus confuse what is really a cause with that without which a cause cannot be a cause (Phaedo 99b3-4).
Anaxagoras’ physics indeed establishes a hiatus, but also a form of continuity, between the fundamental reality of the world governed by Mind and what we can perceive of it. Mind (Nous) has set in motion a material mixture made of germs or seeds (spermata) unlimited in number and smallness (VS 59 B 1, 4), inducing separations and recombinations from which bodies come. In this, Nous is an efficient cause of what exists. But the seeds are not atoms, the ultimate degree of smallness, from the composition of which bodies are made. Infinitude of smallness in matter prohibits it. So there is a real gap between the reality of the matter moved by Mind and what actually appears to us, but it is a matter only of that which increases the limitations of the capacities of the senses to know the infinite smallness of the mixtures that are the seeds and the number of things differentiated. Because of their weakness, Anaxagoras denies to the senses the role of judges of truth (VS 59 B 21), but can affirm that ‘‘the phenomena are the sight for invisible entities’’ (opsis ton adelon ta phainomena, VS 59 B 21a). It will then be necessary to apply oneself to the study of the phenomena and to judge their causes, which is what Plato gives both as task and as limit to the historia peri phuseoos of Anaxagoras.
Plato, however, for his part, stops Anaxagoras’ step towards historia and, by doing so, isolates it from a cognitive movement in which it does not have full autonomy, although it still constitutes a necessary part. By radically separating the cause that is Nous from the swarm of other causes and by posing a radical incompatibility between the two systems of explanation, he refuses to take into account the continuity that Anaxagoras establishes between perceptible reality and imperceptible reality, and perhaps between the knowledge of Nous and that of some ‘‘of the things possessing Mind in themselves’’ ( VS 59 B 11). If one maintains with Plato that Anaxagoras was really engaged in a historia peri phuseos, it is nevertheless necessary to restore to it the character of which it was deprived by the Platonic problematic, and which does not seem to contradict in any way our hypothetical definition. We are dealing with research into the causes of perceptible reality, thus with an ensemble of judgments that deal with the data of sensory experience, but which do not suffice in and of themselves and must be related to the supreme cause that is Nous, and by a more subtle mode of knowledge, in the same category as that of Nous itself, which loses its affinity with phenomena in order to effect their imperceptible foundations.
Finally, there is Herodotus. For him, the phenomenal objects of historia are ‘‘those things that have come into existence by the acts of men’’ ( tagenomena ex anthropon, praef.), the grand deeds that the Greeks and barbarians have made manifest and thus are given for observation (apodechthenta) - that is, the entire material that time threatens to eradicate by eroding the perception that one can have of it ( exitola, aklea), everything that one observes or hears through the narrative. His historia does not refute the hypothesis of definition advanced above. This hypothesis marks in effect its connection to the judiciary activity of the histor, well attested in Iliad 18, most notably in the description of the famous scene represented on Achilles’ shield. The histoor, solicited by both parties, is embodied in the ancient judges who render their sentence at the end of the scene and, like them, would also be the object of a judgment on the question of knowing who has pronounced the straightest judgment. He has knowledge of the totality of the cause, yet he too cannot escape the procedure of judged judgment that remits the definitive sentence, itself superior to that of the judges, perhaps the sentence of the people assembled around them. In Herodotean historia, where, as has been said, all reality is a matter for justice, the investigator gathers diverse accounts of the same event and, either tacitly by writing them in his text or explicitly by giving his own opinion (doxa) on events in relation to other opinions, judges them in the first instance. However, in the second and last instances, it is to the reader/auditor, invited repeatedly in programmatic declarations throughout the entire work to choose on the basis of his own convictions, that the right to give the final judgment belongs.
World History
