THEORY IS NOT FOR AMATEURS
Hugo Merlo in conversation with Estêvão de Rezende Martins
HUGO R. MERLO
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Hugo R. Merlo is a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Languages and Literature at Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland). He is currently working on a doctoral thesis that is tentatively titled “Lack, Excess and Time in Brazilian Modernist Literary and Historical Imagination.” His research interests include the relationship between literary and historical imagination, the theory of comparative approaches to historiography, and the history of historical thinking in Brazil. He recently published the article “A mestiçagem como conceito histórico: Uma descrição teórica” [Mestiçagem as a historical concept: A theoretical description], Revista de Teoria da História 26, no. 1 (2023), 100–19.
Estêvão Chaves de Rezende Martins received his PhD from the University in Munich and currently works as Professor Emeritus and Senior Collaborator Researcher at the University of Brasília (Brazil). His research is focused on the theory and methodology of history and European international relations. Between 2009 and 2015, he was the president of the Sociedade Brasileira de Teoria e História da Historiografia. For his scholarly contributions, he was awarded a Research Productivity Scholarship Level A1 at CNPq (Brazilian National Council of Research)—reserved for the most distinguished researchers in the country—and an honoris causa doctorate by the University of Ouro Preto. Professor Martins’s recent publications include the chapter “Teoria da História: Usos, práticas, fins,” in Teorizar, aprender e ensinar História, ed. Márcia de Almeida Gonçalves, vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: FGV/Faperj, 2023), 49–75, and “Transnational History,” in Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method—Essays in Theory, Method and Historiography, ed. Stefan Berger et al., vol. 1 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022), 1–26.
Cite this post: Hugo R. Merlo and Estêvão Chaves de Rezende Martins, “Theory Is Not for Amateurs,” One More Thing… (blog), History and Theory, October 2023, https://historyandtheory.org/merlo-martins.
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Hugo Merlo: Professor Martins, I would like to begin this conversation by asking you to introduce yourself.
Estêvão de Rezende Martins: I have been a professor at the University of Brasília (UNB) since 1977; [I have been] an emeritus professor since 2017, but [I am] still active—particularly in supervising research projects in the areas of theory, philosophy, and methodology of history and history of historiography, although now at a less intensive pace. I lived many years in Europe, studied in Austria and Germany, and I still collaborate often with colleagues from many countries from whom I learned immensely throughout my life.
HM: What was the decisive moment that sparked your interest in theory and philosophy of history?
ERM: I had an exceptionally talented young history teacher in high school that had just finished his studies at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) in Rio de Janeiro. This teacher fostered in me an interest in historical studies. However, before I got into the academic study of history, I made a detour for professional reasons; I was strongly recommended to study philosophy, which ended up being my primary field of study, while history was, back then, a complementary field.
As a student of the Faculty of Philosophy, I stumbled upon an issue, much like a grey zone in which some metaphysical ghosts wandered. History was simultaneously understood as everything that people do, everything that can be remembered of these actions based on testimonies and documents from the past, and everything that is said about these by third parties. This ambiguity influenced our capacities to legitimize a trustworthy form of historical knowledge, speculating whether history exists as a universal phenomenon (in a philosophical fashion) or if history is merely a way of processing experience and expressing it in your own words. I became increasingly interested in whether a criterion would allow us to distinguish these different aspects of history. The first aspect that resisted the definition of a quality control criterion was what we currently know as the philosophy of history. Anyone can philosophize about the happening on time without accounting for it. As it was practiced from the middle of the seventeenth century until the nineteenth century, philosophy of history was characterized by a certain freedom and a lack of need to account for its reasonability. The search for reasonability poses some questions: if there is a kind of knowledge that can be described as historical; what would consist of the historicity of this kind of knowledge; and how could one assemble methodological criteria that would allow us to claim that a certain kind of knowledge is disciplined (what we generally call the epistemological fundament of history). To answer this last question, intellectuals strayed away from the speculative reflections upon the character of history and abandoned the term “philosophy of history” and started to practice what we call “theory of history” or “epistemology of history.” Notice that the word “history” remains the same. In the expression “philosophy of history,” “history” is broad, limitless—everything can be a part of it—while in the expression “theory of history,” “history” is restricted to the knowledge produced by specialized professionals—what we generally call “historiography.”
For something to be recognized as historiography, its reasonability criteria must be explicit. This is the opening point of another reflection within the theory of history, which concerns not only the requirements of empirical demonstrability of historical research—that is, the theoretical fundaments that allow one to claim that the knowledge produced is grounded in reality—but also the method used to conduct such research and if that method can be applied and controlled by peers in an institutional setting to guarantee the legitimacy of the knowledge produced.
HM: This is very noticeable in the history of the “theory of history” as a field in Brazil. Historians refused to use the term “philosophy of history” and strayed away from the more speculative reflection associated with that name.
ERM: In reality, professional historians in Brazil rejected the philosophy of history. They thought kind of like this: I am not going to discuss whether Hegel was right, or maybe Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, whoever; I want to know whether the text that I wrote about the regency period in Brazil [1] is empirically controllable and if this controllability convinces, argumentatively, the researcher and reader. So, the philosophy of history was put aside. Even though historians read Raymond Aron, Robin G. Collingwood, William Dray, and John Passmore in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, there was a sense that the philosophy of history was a function deviation (with a risk of losing oneself in pure speculation). For someone that studied philosophy as I did, it made more sense to defend the opposite. Still, this critique has a point—one cannot substantiate historical knowledge based on speculative philosophy. My experience taught me that no historical knowledge is produced without clear empirical research. Therefore, we cannot make assumptions about historiography based on a counterfactual or virtual universe.
HM: One of the most relevant aspects of your work is to reflect critically on specific ideas that are often deployed but rarely discussed. One of these ideas is the concept of “historical thinking.’’ In a recent text, you described this concept as follows: “Historical thinking and historical consciousness are front and back of the same coin.” [2] What do you understand as historical thinking per se?
ERM: The question is very pertinent because it presupposes a philosophical hypothesis (quite common in the twentieth century) present in Martin Heidegger’s, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s, and many other authors’ works that says that human existence itself is historical. That is, the historicity of human beings is a quality intrinsic to their condition of existence. Why does this assumption seem reasonable and not just a pointless inductive extrapolation? Because the universe is where we suddenly find ourselves at birth. At a particular moment, we are born not only biologically but mentally. We burst into a world full of things and people. This world is filled with a culture produced by historical beings. And everything that belongs to this vast mental aquarium I call historical culture. Other animals are also inside this world, only they don’t talk about themselves. The only animal that talks about [itself] is the human being. And it does it because its experience in the world challenges it. Koselleck is the one who most clearly thematized, in the twentieth century, the human being’s sudden need to turn to the experiential environment in which it finds itself, moves, and acts.
This need is translated into cognitive operations with which we reflexively relate to our experience and into ways of locating ourselves and our here and now. For this, we produce chronologies: to measure time. Time can be measured by the Gregorian or Aztec, Brahmin, or Muslim calendars. The only important thing is that there is a measure to put into practice cognitive, relational thinking by which we use the experience to explain our environment. We are not thrown on the planet knowing that we are on the planet. To do this, we have to deal with our empirical experience and with our acquired or inherited memory. When we don’t do this by thinking for ourselves, we are simply tributaries of what happens to us and what we inherit. If there is such a thing as a thinking paralysis, this would be it. We acquire historical consciousness when we reflect on what we have lived and inherited. At this moment, we become not only tributaries of history but masters of knowledge and experience—authors of history. Historical culture is the mental environment; historical thinking is how we appropriate experience; historical consciousness is when we know that we are tributaries and creators of our historical experience. In this respect, history opens up a potentiality for human autonomy.
HM: Is there any other way to reflect on our positioning, permanence, or impermanence in a particular place or temporal position?
ERM: I suppose there is, but I think it’s a bit outside the Cartesian rationalist pattern of the Western world, of which history is a product. I believe that, in African or Asian wisdom, there are ways of experiencing historicity that don’t follow Descartes and produce results of practical life orientation for people as good as historical thinking produces today. In this respect, the formula we discuss here is the typical formula of a Western experience: of Greco-Roman origin, methodized in Europe and spread worldwide. The fact that the Mediterranean area is where this formula crystallized and consolidated does not give the Mediterranean area or Western Europe the right to give orders to the rest of the planet. In short, I believe that taking hold of historical experience without thinking historically in the Western rationalist Cartesian pattern is possible. Jörn Rüsen tried to test this for several years and found alternatives in Chinese, Muslim, and South African cultures. [3]
HM: This is an opportune moment to ask a question about new trends in the theory and philosophy of history, history of historiography, and historiography generally. Recently, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic reminded us that the exclusive study of what is part of the human domain on the planet does not ultimately explain everything, not even the human experience of the world. There are several possible anthropogenic causes of the pandemic. Still, in any case, recent events put humans back in their place as occupants of a planet that is a larger system than the human domain. At the same time, as you have already said, knowledge necessarily relates to the subject that acquires or constructs it. So, we have two tendencies that seem to operate in opposite directions: a necessary centrality of the subject that produces knowledge and, at the same time, the irruption of these nonhuman or posthuman planetary agencies that challenge the centrality of the human domain. What is the role of academic historiography as a specific way of articulating historicity in this context?
ERM: In the last twenty years, historiography has gained thematic autonomy. This autonomy or diversification is a gain for the field. Women’s history was the first trend that exposed the need for historiography to go beyond the limits hitherto established. It was the first time that a slice of humanity that was invisible to historiography gained visibility. It was then discovered that a considerable number of subjects were not dealt with in history. Take the history of the present time, for instance—it was taboo a long time ago because it dealt with very recent things. Historians needed more hindsight and, therefore, could not have a say on such recent events. I think that the important thing is to understand that when a topic, whatever its origin, bothers the social space and culture of a specific human grouping, this topic becomes an object of interest, concern, and anguish. It generates what Jörn Rüsen defined as a “lack of orientation.” This lack can happen on a personal level. For a long time, this would end up on a psychoanalyst’s couch, and I believe that this is still the case today. But this thematic diversification has made the field less hermetic and open to unique and original research. The methodical tools and theoretical references of history are, in essence, what the human rational agent produces as a reflection on his time, his space, and his people.
In 1984, there was already an ecological prospect that everything would go wrong and the planet would end. I then published an article asking what prevents humanity from committing suicide, an allusion to Albert Camus. [4] There is a moral element to it. Some defend that, even if you want to commit suicide, you cannot “suicide” others. Therefore, “planeticide,” the destruction of the planet to exploit natural wealth, is, in reality, a usurpation of the rights of humanity as a whole by one part of humanity. More recently, there has been a return to the form of humanism widespread in the 1950s and 1960s: a Kantian version of trying to put oneself in the shoes of all the rest of humankind instead of thinking only of oneself. An important Italian author wrote a book at the time in which he classified philosophical thought as humanists and nonhumanists. [5] The non- or anti-humanists were preferential segregationists, and the humanists knew that, to take into account the complete interest of everyone, they had to create a mechanism to foster mutual respect. It’s a form of Kant’s second categorical imperative: “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.” This has now become a moral dictum that should guide human behavior in a universe it does not own. Unfortunately, for 3,500 years, humankind has behaved as if it owned it, grounding this stance with religious theologies and legal rules that conformed the universe to hierarchies of power. History benefits from diving into these subjects, attempting to account for them, and not accepting taboos—on the contrary, studying them upon finding [them].
HM: That said, how do you see the future of the theory of history?
ERM: Since disciplinary historiography is a relatively new practice, it tends to continue to diversify. People experiment theoretically in the same way that they test hypotheses—with mechanisms for correction and substitution—and much like testing hypotheses, sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. There are no limits to theoretical experimentation; limits are organizational creations that the hierarchical power system invents to maintain control over the field. For this reason, theoretical experiments can be seen by many groups or even by specific individuals as a threat to a particular power structure. And the emerging young researchers, in turn, know they are a threat. In this respect, Thomas Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions is proven correct with each new day. Normal science is “permanently under the threat” that a new paradigm will emerge and overthrow the established beliefs. If not, we are back to flat-earthism. Theory of historical knowledge has to remain under constant threat of being transformed and has to change. Otherwise, historiography’s capacity to produce truthful, valid knowledge will be constantly questioned. Historians work with concepts and categories as their tools. The concept is an idea. The applied concept is a category as it conducts the thought. We have a toolbox available to write history. Historians want to know what to do about these tools when they work.
HM: You have already given a similar answer in a text where you talk about historical education and historiography in a world without frontiers. It is precisely an attempt to show how the boundaries dissolve in the growing globalization and how historiographical practice and historical education also have to respond to this new historical conditioning, correct?
ERM: Correct. And historiography does it, at least as a project. Today, the world has become borderless because the available means of communication have made the world bigger than the street corner or the mountain valley that nobody had ever left. Historical education—I have always defended this thesis—is a way for you to help people realize that they can think independently. Most times, people need a little push from a parent, a teacher, or a friend, and off they go on their own. Historical education is much more than the history classes in elementary school.
HM: Absolutely. To finish our conversation, I would like to know what you have been reading recently and what you would like to suggest to the readers of this interview?
ERM: One of the generic things I always suggest is learning many languages because the world is still a tower of Babel. Although I translate things, I know that sometimes the translation has a treasonous part, as the Italian proverb “traduttore, traditore” (translator, traitor) has it. That said, I have been very interested in this world without borders/boundaries that I talked about before. I have been reading many things related to comparative international and transnational history. I consider it an excellent approach to breaking the umbilical cord of simplistic nationalism. I recommend reading the works by Stefan Berger, [6] from the University of Bochum, a great specialist in the comparative history of the formation of nations. I also recommend reading Michel Espagne for similar reasons. [7]
Next, I recommend reading everything that you think you will never read. Recently, I read a very interesting book about the formation of the working class in the steel industry in Volta Redonda (Brazil), which is a paradigmatic experience for the workers of large industrial complexes. [8] We must seek this shock of reading something that we believe is outside our specialty to avoid an overspecialization that is not intellectually productive, especially for those who want to research and teach the theory of history. On the other hand, it is a mistake to think that anyone can teach theory of history. Anyone can teach a lesson on the organization of intellectual work, how to optimize research, set up a project, or handle information. But to believe that it is possible to know the epistemological foundation of a scientific specialty like history just because you went to history school is wrong. Does everyone have to be an expert in the theory of history? No. Most people deal with theory without being specialists, and that is perfectly natural. For example, some people claim to be specialists in the history of the slave trade in a particular geographical context. This researcher doesn’t have to stop researching and write a book on the theory of slavery, trafficking, or any other concept they use in their investigation. He will write the book on trafficking directly. A good example is Brazilian historian João José Reis. He doesn’t work formally with trafficking, but without the concept of trafficking, he can’t explain the Malê revolt. [9] Theory is a specialty like any other; therefore, teaching theory or writing about it is not for amateurs. One must have immense historiographical knowledge. And that is also why it is essential not to restrict your reading to your area of specialization.
Notes
[1] The regency (1831–1840) is a period in the history of the Brazilian Empire between the abdication of Brazil’s first emperor, Pedro I, and the moment when his son was declared of age by the Brazilian Senate and crowned as Brazil’s second emperor, Pedro II. During this decade, four regencies formed by imperial representatives ruled the country.
[2] Estêvão C. de Rezende Martins, “Educação histórica e historiografia em um mundo sem fronteiras,” REUNINA 1, no. 1 (2020), 171–83.
[3] Jörn Rüsen, ed., Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002).
[4] Estêvão Chaves de Rezende Martins, “A Ecologia Como Questão Filosófica: Abordagem Ética” (presentation, IV Encontro Nacional dos Departamentos de Filosofia, Cuiabá, Brazil, 1984).
[5] Pedro Dalle Nogare, Humanismos e Anti-humanismos (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2009).
[6] See, for example, Stefan Berger, The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997) and Stefan Berger and Christoph Conrad, eds., Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
[7] See, for example, Michael Espagne, L’ambre et le fossile: Transferts germano-russes dans les sciences humaines XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Colin, 2014).
[8] Estêvão Chaves de Rezende Martins is referring to a master’s thesis: Danilo Spindola Caruso’s “Reestruturação produtiva e movimento operário em Volta Redonda” (MA thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2009), http://cemesf.vr.uff.br/wp-content/uploads/CARUSO-Danilo-Spinola.pdf.
[9] The Malê revolt was a Muslim slave revolt that took place in the regency period of the Brazilian Empire in January of 1835. Estêvão Chaves de Rezende Martins is referring to João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, transl. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
