CHAPTER XII
NATURE OF HISTORY
No doubt the title is ambiguous at the same time ambitious. In fact, on one side, a treatment of history presupposes its existence and because also a certain implicit knowledge of that thing we call history (to be of totally indeterminable is not affirmable) and in this sense all are in some measure is something. While, on the other side, in the strong sense of the word, with all its intrinsic intelligibility and all its relation to the groupings of the real, nature of history would comprise the task of philosophy of history.
In our investigation here, we presuppose the existence of "history-as-past" which, connected with this, is a certain objective value of the "history-as-knowledge". And we understand to limit ourselves to a first explicitation and formulation of that which it would be.
We presuppose the existence of "history-as-past". To understand its foundation, it is enough to remember from other branches of systematic philosophy and from that which we have already seen in the preceding parts of this essay, that the material reality surrounding the human being undergoes changes and thus, the basis of time. The human psychical activity situates itself in relation with the biological activity, which is stimulated by the worldly environment. Every single act and the entire behavior of the individual dispose themselves in space-time. With that, there is also the interdependence of the presupposition and complementariness of each other and with the operative schemes which further result in its permanent structure. Finally, the actions of the individuals as they are social animals and cultural existents, they intertwine reciprocally. This is how the human individual actualizes himself/herself. Therefore, putting the human being as actually known and realized, always implies the existence of "history-as-course-of-events". And it is knowable when it takes a determined form, leaving from the knowledge which each has in themselves, of the natural world, and of others as human being and as participant in some way to this same world. It is knowable in regard to the past in as much as presupposed by the intelligibility of the present, and in regard to the future in the measure in which the present situation and the permanent structure of the possibility of human existent they predetermine it.
In order to arrive at a primary explanation of the nature of the history-as-course-of-events, we must obtain a comprehensive formulation, inquiring its eventual unity and its relations of distinction and of interdependence with the transformations of the material universe and with the evolution of life.
When we speak of history, we think of it as passed events. But what are events? When one thinks of the history of ones life, what come to mind are salient facts, which render it in some measure unique: actions, works, experiences. And so for a human group, a city, a tribe, a people, they become as recorded heroic deed, collective or individual as a battle or a tension, a decisive experience as a migration or a new religious vision, the foundation of a city or the construction of time. But the naked fact of birth and death, of growing and of nourishing oneself, is perhaps common to all life, as determined by biological laws? And an earthquake or the eruption of a volcano or the long change of climate as that of Sahara, belongs or not to history? As a pure experience or an individual choice to the thresholds of death, which is not being fleshed out in an observable behaviour, in a testimony, in an experience from other part, in a sign or symbol? However, it also true that historians have always broaden their interests: from single glamorous events to the accumulation of small actions and to small changes to something broad relevant and decisive, from the strictly political aspect or military to that of economic, demographic, social, scientific, technical, artistic, literary, religious, of customs … Moreover, the events become valued more than in itself.
Now, in explaining some nature of history, we bear in mind that history is change, and we ask ourselves, what is changing? And it is that which reveals itself useful, it seems to us, the philosophical consideration of cultures develops partly in precedence. Because the culture, any culture is properly a determination of human behaviour in as much as it is human and of the environment and human world in as much as it is human: a determination in some participated way or at least can be participated by more human beings. We assert then that history is changing itself, transforming itself, evolving itself (in the neutral sense of the term), modifying itself of the culture, for seeing such formulation would be ample enough to embrace the whole that which we understand explicitly speaking of history and in the same time it allows to gather its specificity: that which distinguishes history from other transformations in the real and at the same time determines its relations with them.
The culture of the human group embraces and determines all that which involves the human and all that which is properly human in the environment of the group: its modifications, the meanings that are read in the perceptive level, imaginative, intellective, and of values and possibility. Any behavior and any individual realization takes place there, rather it explicitizes and manifests the virtuality. All that which of a human individual is knowable to others as behaviour and as its results, it belongs to that culture. And if something of all this isolates from that culture, because it transcends it, modifies it, it is already an opening for the change of it - opening which can be ignored or rejected, but which can purely give the way to doubt, to reflection, to acceptance, and so clasping a process of revision, in other words, provoking a change of that culture, the history. We remember what is already said in the chapter on the individual in culture and we note that all the aspects of the historical process: the political history, technology, of art and so forth… the seem to re-enter easily in the concept of change in culture. Also the encounter between two cultures or sub-cultures bring to their evolution or to their flexibility, which is purely a modification in as much as explication and determination greater in reciprocal opposition.
The concept of culture allows purely knowing the specificity of the historical process regarding the other transformations of the material reality and to those of the individual strictly in accessible to the other.
It is obvious that the transformations of the material reality belong in some way and in some measure to history. But in what mode and what measure? In the mode and in the measure in which the natural environment is presupposed by the cultures and becomes from it valued and modified. The diversity of the cultures manifests properly this mode and this measure. The natural environment: geography of a region, its climate, its fauna and flora, its starry skies constitute the object of the natural sciences, while they enter into consideration the culture when they become considered in relation to the human being and to the existence of the group, in the possibility and limits which present in the symbolic valorization, emotive, affective, of value …which is made by such and such other culture, in the transformations which they undergo in relation to it. Thus any natural change of the material reality which constitutes the environment for the human being: heavenly phenomena, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the climate, the distribution of living specie… in a word any natural process - it enters into history in the measure in which it constitutes a meaningful experience for the group in the scheme of its culture, it disturbs the function of this, and so inspires and necessitates cultural changes.
By analogy, the same can be said of the biological aspect of the human being and the processes s/he undergoes. The racial differences, the mortality and natural fecundity, sickness, the unilaterality of nutrition that engraves its quantity of energy and its deformations, they constitute also the natural scheme of which a cultural data holds account even if in modes and measures most diverse. And the transformations that the biological aspect and the human undergoes, demographic evolution and eventually that of the genetic - it would be for natural causes that so also changes it, but to its mode and according to the proper nature. It is enough to think to the new solutions that the numerical increase of the population has brought in Attic and in whole the Ancient Greece by the 17th century and following, or to the pessimism of the said <the Fall of the Middle Ages> certainly connected with the black pest of the half of the 13th century.
Although in relation with the natural processes, the historical process differs from these lasts also for the mode in which it becomes. The natural processes are involved according to the statistical and the classical laws proper to the singular levels of reality and of their crossing, and in particular the continuity and the biological evolution become transmitted the biological generation, while culture is transmitted through tradition and it changes - always dependent on the natural processes - through the work of the human being withh all the complexity that this carries. Here, we will return to the proposition of the causes of the historical process.
Finally, there seems, there are events or changes which are strictly individuals and thus do not belong to history. In fact, many behaviors would be "means-to-end" than symbols and signs and the environmental changes or cultural objects that rather they result, they do not belong to history: objects and environmental changes or having greatly been destroyed.