Dilthey writes that man is, by his nature, historical; and the proposition is not without its attractions — though it is equally not without its want of precision. His insistence — shared, as these things tend to be, by a great many others — amounts to this: not merely that man cannot exist outside of history (a claim which, whatever its romantic piety, is rather a remark about evolution than about the distinctive character of man; it places him among the animals shaped by their conditions, and there it leaves him), but that history, for its part, cannot exist outside of man. The first dependency is modest, empirical, biological even; the second is constitutive. 

— What exactly it means to say that history is constituted by human understanding, spirit, temporality — of this, I shall say nothing at present. I note only that it means something, and something, perhaps, stricter than Dilthey himself was prepared to acknowledge.

Every working historian — provided she has had the good fortune to work not on a single period alone, but across two or three — knows, I suspect, something of what I am reaching toward: the existence of what I shall call, in the absence of a better term, distinct human types. And I do not mean this theoretically; I mean it as a datum, as a matter of phenomenal givenness prior to any apparatus whatsoever. Just as one may date a portrait in a gallery without undue labour — to mistake the twelfth century for the seventeenth is virtually impossible; the Fayum portraits, those uncanny exceptions, prove the rule precisely by being recognisable as exceptions — so may one recognise, with analogous ease, the human type belonging to a given historical moment. I do not propose, here, to say anything about the conditions of this localisability, nor about the territorial limits within which these types reside; I record only the fact of the thing, its phenomenal availability to any sufficiently attentive observer. Should our investigation proceed with any success, and should we arrive at the causes of this typification, I have no doubt that we shall find ourselves returned to the present matter; the Reader may count on it.

We must, however, begin from some distance — which is to say, we must establish the credentials of every category and concept before we presume to advance. How history connects to memory, narrative, representation, the concept as such — of all this we formally know nothing, as yet.

I should like, at this juncture, to say something about my investigative principles — partly because I find myself compelled to articulate them afresh at regular intervals, and partly out of what I can only call a principled resistance to the ambient culture, though I will not deny there is something constitutional in it too. The greater part of what passes today for humanistic research is constructed as an exercise in the triangulation of opinions: it begins with opinions, proceeds through the coordination of statements, and arrives, at last, at further opinions. The difference between modern and classical scholasticism — for that, I insist, is what it is — consists not in the abandonment of authority but in its relocation: the weight of tradition has been replaced by the freshness of publication dates. This, I submit, is regression, not progress. We have learned a very great deal over the preceding centuries; we might have gone considerably further still.

My impression — and it is only my own I can speak to, though it is both rich and various — is that if one were to ask a humanistic researcher to locate herself at some ontic or ontological level — to say precisely what she takes herself to be describing when she describes something — she would, in most cases, be at a considerable loss. In the limit, everything reduces to the study of texts and the coordination of opinions about those texts. — I acknowledge that the critique of the “production of scientific knowledge” lies well beyond the scope of what follows; but to set out my own principles: I proceed on the assumption that it is possible to investigate how things actually are, that research questions can be well posed and well answered, and that the contemporary tendency toward relentless relativisation — by which the genuine discoveries of preceding centuries are perpetually set at naught — is a failure of nerve as much as of method.

What strikes me as altogether incomprehensible — though no doubt some psychological mechanism could be found to account for it — is the standard combination, in current humanistic practice, of this relentless relativism with an uncritical, thoroughly vulgar appetite for metaphors. Between the endless rumination on personal experiences and the invincible susceptibility of the post-religious mind to determinisms of one variety or another — between these two degradations — there lies the rigour proper to humanistic inquiry; and its discoveries, when it makes them, can be irrevocable and won with certainty, their difficulty being not the difficulty of reconciling discrepant testimonies, but the difficulty of the existence of things as such.

It is with this militant naivety — and the conviction that well-posed questions admit of convincing answers — that we shall proceed.

This investigation — and the time has come, I think, to name it: it is an investigation of historical time — is of an entirely private character, in the sense that it follows from personal curiosity and has no purpose beyond the satisfaction of that curiosity. The choice of authors, texts, concepts, trajectories of argument, modes of proof — all determined by my own best knowledge and understanding, and nothing else. I make no claim to exhaust the literature, nor to fill any gap in it, nor to inform any discussion already in progress. What I aspire to, more fundamentally, is to secure a region of inquiry in which things may be played with, argued over, or invented — all other operations being, for the duration, set aside. Secured from whom? From myself, I should think; from that internalised court of opinion which is, when one examines the matter honestly, the only audience any thinker need seriously trouble themselves about. There is no one else here.

In what sense, then, is man by his nature historical?

— At some point, it began to seem to me that something far more precise is buried in those words than their authors would ever have cared, or dared, to claim.