The Aesthetics of History

Abstract

The discovery and description of’ what happened in the past and why’ is simply and surely the definition of history as determined by the available evidence. Understandably this is an awkward undertaking given the often constrained nature of the sources available to the historian, and then there is also the quality of the historian’s inferences which can be pitiable or worse, and then there is the problem of aesthesis aka turning ‘the past’ into that ‘past narrative’ we eventually call history. Now, the problem with ‘doing history’ is that the past and history are not the same thing and they cannot be conflated. The past is the past while history is the narrative we write about it. Plainly this is an impossible undertaking because they do not exist in the same ontic and epistemic space. Therefore, discovering and describing the history of the past is fraught with insuperable problems. The critical problem then is turning past reality into that aesthetic we know as history. This unfortunate problem cannot be resolved because history is not the past, and the past is not history.