The Birth of the Past

by Zachary S. Schiffman, Anthony Grafton (Foreword)

How we learned to distinguish past from present and see the world historically. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice How did people learn to distinguish between past and present? How did they come to see the past as existing in its own distinctive context? In The Birth of the Past , Zachary Sayre Schiffman explores these questions in his sweeping survey of historical thinking in the Western world. Today we automatically distinguish between past and present, labeling things that appear out of place as "anachronisms." Schiffman shows how this tendency did not always exist and how the past as such was born of a perceived difference between past and present. Schiffman takes readers on a grand tour of historical thinking from antiquity to modernity. He shows how ancient historians could not distinguish between past and present because they conceived of multiple pasts. Christian theologians coalesced these multiple pasts into a single temporal space where past merged with present and future. Renaissance humanists began to disentangle these temporal states in their desire to resurrect classical culture, creating a "living past." French enlighteners killed off this living past when they engendered a form of social scientific thinking that measured the relations between historical entities, thus sustaining the distance between past and present and relegating each culture to its own distinctive context. Featuring a foreword by the eminent historian Anthony Grafton, this fascinating book draws upon a diverse range of sources―ancient histories, medieval theology, Renaissance art, literature, legal thought, and early modern mathematics and social science―to uncover the meaning of the past and its relationship to the present.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Cultural, World History, Politics

336 pages, Hardcover

First published September 29, 2011

About the author

Zachary Sayre Schiffman is Professor of History, Department of History,
Northeastern Illinois University.
He earned a B.A. (with High Honors in History) from Hobart College in 1969, a M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1970 and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 1980.

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was by far the most fascinating book I had read in years. The theory of Schiffman sounds very simple: we see the past as preceding the present and fundamentally different from it. For us that seems a question of common sense, but it isn't, because in the past that was seen different. The ancient Greeks for instance did not discern this divide between past and present; they saw time as a continuum of occurences, without hierarchy and continuing into the present; the past was just another form of present, and vice versa.

Schiffman reconstructs how this temporal feeling has drastically changed since then. He painstakingly analyses the work of Thucydides, Augustine, Petrarca, Montaigne and finally Montesquieu. For Schiffman a crucial epistemological shift has occured during the late Renaissance, a shift corresponding with the introduction of "relational and contextual" analyzing reality, and the cartesian novelty of numerical relations. At that moment, somewhere in the 18th Century, the past was "born", hence the title of this work.

I know this all sounds very difficult and theoretical (and this is making the reading of this work very tough). I'm not going to elaborate on the details of Schiffmans argumentation. Let me suffice with stating that his analyis is very thorough and his focus often is quite original (about Augustine and the Renaissance, for instance, I read things I never had heard of, though I already read quite some books on them). His theory is working in this sense that some questions I have been struggling with, reading the works of past historians (for instance why they have such another way of looking at things, or ordering their stories) have been more or less answered.

Still I remain cautious. Schiffmans book is an example of purely intellectuel history, and probably a major work in this field. But I am aware of the fact that it is very dangerous to focus that much on texts (from a few authors), a very small foundation indeed. Maybe we should look at this work as a kind of pioneer study, that can inspire other researchers to look if there has been such an epistomological shift in other fields (arts). I also wonder how this phenomenon (seeing the past as preceding the present and differ from it) is present in other cultures. I can imagine that even in our own culture there still are some remnants of the old way of looking at the past. A lot of questions, but this only proofs how interesting and important this work is.

Addendum: since I read this book, in 2014, I've also devoured the work of Reinhart Koselleck and now I realise how Schiffman is building on him. In the meantime a vast literature has been created on concepts of temporalities, but -more importantly - the modernist view of looking at the past has made way, or is making way for other views. See the presentism crave of François Hartog and others, and the disruptive look at history of Zoltán Boldizsár Simon. "Times are a-changing", literally!
Addendum 2. For a more thorough musing on the divide between past and present, typical for the modernist view, see my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Sense of History]

This isn't a real review, but rather a musing on the worth of our looking at the past through modern eyes, as Schiffman registers the birth of this view somewhere in the beginning of the 18th Century)

From my university years I knew there had been an epistemological shift in western culture in the Late Renaissance. I was taught cartesian thinking had made a clear divide between object and subject, so that everything could be subjected to mathematical-relational thinking. This shift was responsible for the tremendous progress western science made during the 17th and 18th Century, and later on. I know this sketch is a bit too rough, but in essence this is the broad picture.

Schiffman has made it clear to me that this shift was also responsible for another way of looking at time. He elaborates about the relational-contextual way of thinking that was brought about by cartesianism, and the clear divide it caused between the present and the past. I wasn’t aware of it, but previously, in antiquity and in the Christian medieval world, time was 'felt' as a continuum: past, present and future were just one, a continuum let’s say of occurrences (or of different pasts), one after the other without much of a hierarchy. This reminds me of anthropological studies on hunter-gatherer cultures and their look at time and reality.

Clearly, the modern historical science that has developed after this epistemological shift (especially in the 19th century) has given us a wealth of insight in the process of human history. But I can also see the reverse side. The narrative school has made clear that these historical stories are constructions, and that framing and representing (telling a story) has a tremendous impact upon the way we look at things in the past, with the risk of offering a distorted view. Now, I’m convinced that the scientific process of continual re-thinking and correcting can lead to a more or less secure assessment of the past. But there are always some things that remain in the dark. I’ll just name a few of them.

Reading the work of Marguerite Yourcenar has made it clear to me that on the individual-existential level there is great continuity in human history: we all are confronted with the same existential challenges, like birth, upbringing, the search for stability or for ambition, the search for happiness and fulfilment, the fight against disease, loneliness, unhappiness, unjustice, and finally the coping with death. Every human being in the past, the present and the future is and will be exposed to these challenges, only the context and therefore also the options differ. I still am a fan of the progress-frame to look at human history (I’m convinced that there is a growth in options), but it we must not forget that our place in reality (seen from a individual level) still is the same. That’s one.

Another insight I had, through reading fiction (novels), is that the past regularly and unpredictably breaks into the present: this may look obvious if you understand this in terms of causal relationships (the present is the product of everything that has been going on in the past), but regularly and without warning, the past seems to jump forward in the present and have very distorting consequences. Reading Beloved by Toni Morisson, I became aware that past remembrances are not as innocent as they seem, as for instance when you read Proust (painstakingly trying to remember “lost time”); in 'Beloved' we see that traumatic experiences in the past can suddenly jump up and have a tremendous impact upon the present, distorting the view of reality.

In all these cases I get the feeling that making a clear divide between past and present, like we nowadays do in the historical profession, isn’t necessary a good approach. It has its merits, but it just is too simplistic. And as I continue to notice: reality is vastly more complex than we pride ourselves to think.

[Dave Schoettinger · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the middle of the last century William Faulkner wrote a line that is sometimes paraphrased as, "In the South the past is not forgotten, it is not even past." Zachary Schiffman would tell you that the reason that this thought of Faulkner's stands out as memorable is that we denizens of the 21st century are so used to thinking of "the past" as distinct and separate from "the present", that Faulkner's passage seems strange and difficult to contemplate. However Professor Schiffman would tell you that this was not always so and that our current concept of "the past" dates only from the 18th century. This book is the professor's explanation of why this is so.

I found this idea intriguing, but trying to follow the author's complex prose and unfamiliar vocabulary made me feel like I was following him through a field of ankle-deep mud. I made it to the other side, but I'm not sure it was worth it. The book includes many interesting descriptions of the lives and thoughts of trendsetters in the writing of history, but I found it difficult to stay engaged with the narrative.

[Brandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for a grad class.
Woof, this puppy was a difficult read. Definitely not my area of expertise and definitely not written for the casual reader.
What turned me off about it, more than it's inaccessibility, was that, as Schiffman states, it is not a work of scholarship, but a synthesis. There is no real new scholarship here. And although he tries to prove his argument, I'm left cold. Maybe he kind of shows how the concept of "history" developed, but I'm not totally convinced. I also don't think that he adequately shows why we should care. I could go on, our 2 hour class was basically spent dissecting this book. But honestly, the whole thing, the scope, the argument, the writing, exhausts me. Gave it 3 stars because I did learn some things and do enjoy a challenge from time to time.