Time, identity, and history: on the cognitive psychology and figural practice of historiography

Abstract

This article combines cognitive psychological knowledge of identity and temporal perception with theories of literature and historiography. The main focus is how people receive and adopt written information about the past. I argue that in historiographical accounts, when detached events are translated as metaphors or narratives, the writing process is not only guided by a reason and epistemological structure, but also by an attraction to an emotional credibility. In other words, writing history is partly accomplished for the purpose of reconstructing a smooth and coherent temporal order, emerging from a hope to attain an affective confidence which overcomes the absolute alterity of the past. On the other hand, when receiving a written historical narrative, an emotional attunement, a sensation of a connection with the past, helps us to assimilate the substance of that particular history as part of our individual way to perceive temporality and interaction. If historiography is understood on the one hand as an act of articulating the writer's narrative identity with the vocabulary provided by the past events, and on the other hand as a cultural means to strengthen the reader's explanation how ‘meaningfulness’ can be framed from aimless chronological time, it would be possible to scrutinize not only the ‘politics of history’ but also the ‘culture of writing about the past.’

Keywords::

• historiography
• cognitive psychology
• figura
• time
• narrative
• emotions
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Obviously thirteenth century was not an uncompromised ‘figural’ era for the people living it. It appears such only in our simplifying historical view and with respect to our own time. I think this is what Jill Robbins meant when she wrote that in Auerbach's interpretation ‘there is one figure too many’ (1991, 8). However, in the context of this article relevant, and still plausible, are the cultural means that in Auerbach's thought construct the established and shared configuration of time, and on the other hand the consequences that emerge when such a figural worldview is being eroded.

^2. I am using the concept of ‘trauma’ in a broad sense. A traumatic situation can be a flow of unpleasant events, an accumulated collection of smaller accidents or a catastrophe which devastates all that used to be familiar in an instance. See Cozolino (2010, 265–268).

^3. For Stolorow (2007), a trauma is a change in one's worldview or Weltanschauung; it turns the familiar into something strange and threatening (13–16). He uses Freud's (1919) concept of unheimlich, as does LaCapra (2009, 85–89).

^4. Some scholars distinguish between researching and writing history, where the latter is more a task of adjusting, choosing and deciding about source material and putting one's experience and vision to words, see Ankersmit (2012, 59–64), Roper (2013, 315 and 316), and Kalela (2012, 132–145).

^5. Auerbach doesn't state that structuring the world history figurally should reveal any universal history or a model that would also unveil the future. Rather through figural interpretation one could see the general ontological order (veritas) in particular truth (certum). The figural interpretation of the connection between two events was at first a spiritual act, linked to the God's meaning, and later a mode of close reading, with confidence about the ‘true nature’ of the fulfillment [Erfüllung] (Auerbach 1938).

^6. In the words of Braudel (1982): ‘To describe, analyze, compare and explain usually means standing aside from historical narrative: it means ignoring or willfully chopping up the continuous flow of history’ (23).

^7. Auerbach (1959) quotes Michel Montaigne when he attempts to clarify the human need for historicity which is to be found in every individual ‘I describe ordinary and humble life; but it doesn't mean anything; in the most common life is the humanity in its entirety’ (281).

^8. Robert D. Stolorow puts this idea in words better than I probably ever will in his book's (2007) chapter named ‘Siblings in the same darkness’:

Just as finitude is fundamental to our existential constitution, so too is it constitutive of our existence that we meet each other as ‘brothers and sisters in the same dark night,’ deeply connected with one another in virtue of our common finitude. Thus, although the possibility of emotional trauma is ever present, so too is the possibility of forming bonds of deep emotional attunement within which devastating emotional pain can be held, rendered more tolerable, and hopefully, eventually integrated. (49 emphasis original)

Additional information

Funding

This dissertation is a part of the project Reinventing the Foundations of European Legal Culture 1934–1964, funded by the < European Research Council Starting Grant> [grant number 313100] and directed by Dr Kaius Tuori.

Notes on contributors

Ville Erkkilä

Ville Erkkilä is a doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki. At the moment he is working on his thesis ‘Historiography of Us’ which analyzes German legal history, especially through Franz Wieacker and Fritz Pringsheim, from 1930s to 1960s.