ToK Unit - History

        When the idea of the subject, the very word “history” comes to people’s minds, for the most part, it will call up images and ideas of World Wars, seemingly never-ending strings of European monarchs, discoveries, and dates (sometimes not even attached to specific events anymore). However, that is simply a small frame encapsulating a fragment of the bigger picture. History, if it is said to be the study of the past, must then include happenings of two minutes ago, two milliseconds ago. Those are often marginalized or entirely left out of our schema of the Area of Knowledge. However, it may go further than that, as Carl Becker expresses in his piece What are Historical Facts? our concept of history consists of solely historical facts, not happenings, and these facts exist in the “now.” Historical facts are not history in itself as we understand it; they are not the happening. When I say “Brazil was discovered in 1500,” I am simply expressing my interpretation of what happened, but the actual act, the origin of the claim is not occurring, it can never occur again. My claim, therefore, is in a period of time separate from the happening. Historical fact exists right now, in the present, as it is not the actual event responsible for the generation of the affirmation, it is an idea. So how can we say “history” only exist in these faraway times if we are making claims of this nature today?

Another misconception about history is that, to many, it seen as a (sometimes quite literally) set-in-stone set of claims that define who we were, are, and can help predict who we will be. It is hard fact that can’t be changed, as it has already happened. However, the concept of historiography will prove otherwise. People who study history as a discipline oftentimes engage in applying the concept of historiography where the points of view of two historians are set to dialog or even debate with each other, in order to find a closer approximation to establishing an affirmation of “what really happened.” For example, to dialog with the claim I previously used as an example one could claim that a certain historian, Boris Fausto, a Brazilian historian, for example, doesn’t call the land that constitutes Brazil today by the name “Brazil” until 1822, when it becomes independent. Therefore, he would argue that my claim was not correct, as it calls 1500 land by the name “Brazil,” when it really wasn’t that. This brings into question the truth behind history. If, through historiography, our ideas about history become so malleable, how can we ever find concrete truths? It seems to be the case that we, actually, as with all knowledge that we must create representations of, perceiving it as we are and not as it is, cannot.

The claim in itself then begins to diffuse into different ways of knowing. It then starts to be affected by perception, language, emotions. This leads to another side of history that is sometimes overlooked: its connection to imagination. When we must fill its “knowledge gaps,” history becomes ridden with small bridges of fiction. So, to what extent does it lose its reliability completely? Maybe not entirely, but it definitely sheds its characterization as a hard-fact-only subject. History is not set in stone and it is not just the far past. History is more of a mutating, chaotic quilt of claims that constantly accompanies our consciousness in terms of existence in time.