Truth and History (HI3T9)
Module Convenor: Henry Clements
This module offers an intellectual history of modern historical thought that is specifically concerned with history’s relationship to “truth,” a relationship as embattled as it is fundamental. From the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophes to the nineteenth-century German idealists and the twentieth-century postcolonial critics of European thought, historical thinking has been structured by a constitutive contradiction. On the one hand, the foundational gesture of modern historical thought has been to illustrate that all claims to philosophical, religious, and moral “truth” are belied by the specificity of their historical context. An attentiveness to history, its proponents assert, reveals such claims to be culturally specific, “all too human,” particular rather than universal. Yet on the other hand, history—the position that nothing escapes history, that everything is historical—has also become perhaps the single most hegemonic feature of modern thought. History, as a way of apprehending the world that arose in explicit opposition to the overweening truth-claims of modern European “reason,” has itself achieved a hegemonic status in contemporary intellectual life, has itself been raised to the level of truth.
The module will explore this contradiction in the work of foundational figures in the historicist tradition such as Herder, Nietzsche, and Dilthey, as well as in the work of more contemporary thinkers such as Hayden White, David Scott, and Sylvia Wynter. This breadth of inquiry is intended to illustrate how the issue of truth and history has structured not merely the history of modern historical thought but also scholarly debates over race, postcolonialism, the humanities, the West, and so forth.
The aim of this module is twofold: first, to educate students in the history of historical thought from the eighteenth century to the present, and second, to illustrate that modern historical thought has been animated by an ongoing preoccupation with problem of truth. By the end of the module, students will not only have a better understanding of the history of the discipline in which they are being trained but will also have the conceptual tools necessary to wield history as a truth-making practice—while also understanding history’s limitations in this regard. Perhaps the central question they will be able to answer by the end of the module will be: how can history, as a form of knowledge, forward a claim to truth while also preserving its role as a check on truth claims? By grappling with this question, students will find themselves better equipped to assess the power and the perils of their degree.
Syllabus
Week 1: Power and Silence
Week 2: Narrative
Week 3: Art & Science
Week 4: 1492 (or, “the World”)
Week 5: The Gods
Week 6: Modernity
Week 7: The Particular
Week 8: The Universal
Week 9: The Colony
Week 10: The West
Week 11: Myth
Week 12: Reality
Week 13: Facts
Week 14: The Other
Week 15: Genealogy
Week 16: The Humanities
Week 17: The University
Week 18: Desire
Week 19: Truth
Assessment
- 1500 Word Essay (10%)
- 3000 Word Essay (40%)
- 3000 Word Essay (40%)
- Seminar Contribution (10%)