The Historian and His Facts by Carr選譯 （2）

Now this clearly will not do. I shall not embark on a philosophical discussion of the nature of our knowledge of the past. Let us assume for present purposes that the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and the fact that there is a table in the middle of the room are facts of the same or of a comparable order, that both these facts enter our consciousness in the same or in a comparable manner, and that both have the same objective character in relation to the person who knows them. But, even on this bold and not very plausible assumption, our argument at once runs into the difficulty that not all facts about the past are historical facts, or are treated as such by the historian. What is the criterion which distinguishes the facts of history from other facts about the past?

现在这显然不行。我不打算对我们过去知识的性质进行哲学上的讨论。就目前而言，让我们假设凯撒越过卢比孔，房间中间有一张桌子，这两个事实是相同的或相似的顺序，这两个事实以相同的或相似的方式进入我们的意识，并且这两个事实对于这个人都有相同的客观特征谁认识他们。但是，即使是在这种大胆的、不太可信的假设下，我们的论点也立刻陷入了一个难题，即并非所有关于过去的事实都是历史事实，或被历史学家视为历史事实。把历史事实与过去的其他事实区别开来的标准是什么？

What is a historical fact? This is a crucial question into which we must look a little more closely. According to the common-sense view, there are certain basic facts which are the same for all historians and which form, so to speak, the backbone of history - the fact, for example, that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. But this view calls for two observations. In the first place, it is not with facts like these that the historian is primarily concerned. It is no doubt important to know that the great battle was fought in 1066 and not in 1065 or 1067, and that it was fought at Hastings and not at Eastbourne or Brighton. The historian must not get these things wrong. Bat when points of this kind are raised, I am reminded of Housman's remark that "accuracy is a duty, not a virtue."[6] To praise a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function. It is precisely for matters of this kind that the historian is entitled to rely on what have been called the "auxiliary sciences" of history - archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology, and so forth. The historian is not required to have the special skills which enable the expert to determine the origin and period of a fragment of pottery or marble, or decipher an obscure inscription, or to make the elaborate astronomical calculations necessary to establish a precise date. These so-called basic facts which are the same for all historians commonly belong to the category of the raw materials of the historian rather than of history itself. The second observation is that the necessity to establish these basic facts rests not on any quality in the facts themselves, but on an a priori decision of the historian. In spite of C. P. Scott's motto, every journalist knows today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: It is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. It was, I think, one of Pirandello's characters who said that a fact is like a sack - it won't stand up till you've put something in it. The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all. The fact that you arrived in this building half an hour ago on foot, or on a bicycle, or in a car, is just as much a fact about the past as the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But it will probably be ignored by historians. Professor Talcott Parsons once called science "a selective system of cognitive orientations to reality."[7] It might perhaps have been put more simply. But history is, among other things, that. The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate. Let us take a look at the process by which a mere fact about the past is transformed into a fact of history. At Stalybridge Wakes in 1850, a vendor of gingerbread, as the result of some petty dispute, was deliberately kicked to death by an angry mob. Is this a fact of history? A year ago I should unhesitatingly have said "no." It was recorded by an eyewitness in some little-known memoirs;[8] but I had never seen it judged worthy of mention by any historian. A year ago Dr. Kitson Clark cited it in his Ford lectures in Oxford.[9] Does this make it into a historical fact? Not, I think, yet. Its present status, I suggest, is that it has been proposed for membership of the select club of historical facts. It now awaits a seconder and sponsors. It may be that in the course of the next few years we shall see this fact appearing first in footnotes, then in the text, of articles and books about nineteenth-century England, and that in twenty or thirty years' time it may be a well established historical fact. Alternatively, nobody may take it up, in which case it will relapse into the limbo of unhistorical facts about the past from which Dr. Kitson Clark has gallantly attempted to rescue it. What will decide which of these two things will happen? It will depend, I think, on whether the thesis or interpretation in support of which Dr. Kitson Clark cited this incident is accepted by other historians as valid and significant. Its status as a historical fact will turn on a question of interpretation. This element of interpretation enters into every fact of history.

什么是历史事实？这是一个至关重要的问题，我们必须更仔细地研究一下。根据常识的观点，有些基本事实对所有历史学家来说都是一样的，可以说，这些基本事实构成了历史的支柱——例如，黑斯廷斯战役是在1066年打响的。但这种观点需要两种观察。首先，历史学家主要关心的不是这些事实。毫无疑问，重要的是要知道，这场伟大的战斗是在1066年，而不是在1065年或1067年，它是在黑斯廷斯，而不是在伊斯特本或布赖顿。历史学家决不能弄错这些东西。当这种观点被提出来时，我想起了霍斯曼的一句话：“精确是一种责任，而不是美德。”[6]赞扬历史学家的精确，就像赞扬建筑师在他的建筑中使用了风干良好的木材或适当混合的混凝土。这是他工作的必要条件，但不是他的基本职能。正是在这样的问题上，历史学家才有权依赖历史上所谓的“辅助科学”——考古学、金石学、钱币学、年表等。历史学家不需要具备特殊技能，使专家能够确定陶器或大理石碎片的来源和年代，或破译晦涩的铭文，或进行必要的精密天文计算，以确定准确的日期。这些对所有历史学家来说都是一样的所谓基本事实，通常属于历史学家的原材料范畴，而不是历史本身。第二个观点是，确立这些基本事实的必要性并不取决于事实本身的任何性质，而是取决于历史学家的先验决定。尽管C.P.Scott的座右铭如此，今天每个记者都知道，影响舆论的最有效方式是选择和安排适当的事实。过去人们常说事实自圆其说。当然，这是不真实的。事实只有在历史学家要求的时候才能说出来：是谁决定了哪些事实要发表，以及在什么顺序或背景下。我想，是皮兰德罗笔下的一个角色说，事实就像一个袋子——除非你在里面放了什么东西，否则它是站不住脚的。我们之所以有兴趣知道这场战争是1066年在黑斯廷斯发生的，唯一的原因是历史学家认为这是一个重大的历史事件。正是历史学家出于自己的原因决定，凯撒横渡那条小河流鲁比肯河是历史的事实，而千百万其他人在此之前或之后横渡鲁比肯河，根本没有人感兴趣。你半小时前步行、骑自行车、开车来到这栋楼，这和凯撒越过卢比肯河一样，都是过去的事实。但它可能会被历史学家忽略。塔科特·帕森斯教授曾经把科学称为“对现实的选择性认知取向系统”。但历史就是这样。历史学家必然是有选择性的。客观而独立地解释史学家的历史事实的核心是一个荒谬的谬论，但很难根除。让我们来看看过去的一个事实转化为历史事实的过程。1850年在斯大林桥醒来时，一个卖姜饼的小贩，由于一些小争执，被一群愤怒的暴徒故意踢死。这是历史事实吗？一年前，我应该毫不犹豫地说“不”，这是一位目击者在一些鲜为人知的回忆录中记录下来的；但我从未见过任何历史学家认为值得一提的。一年前，Kitson Clark博士在牛津的福特演讲中引用了这个词。[9]这是否使它成为一个历史事实？我想还没有。我认为，它的现状是，它已被提议加入史实精选俱乐部。它现在正等待一个借调者和赞助者。可能在今后几年里，我们会看到这个事实首先出现在有关十九世纪英国的文章和书籍的脚注中，然后出现在正文中，在二三十年后，它可能是一个公认的历史事实。或者，没有人可以接受它，在这种情况下，它将重新陷入关于过去的史无前例的事实的边缘，Kitson Clark博士曾勇敢地试图从中拯救它。什么将决定这两件事中的哪一件会发生？我认为，这将取决于Kitson Clark博士引用的这一事件所支持的论点或解释是否被其他历史学家接受为有效和重要的。它作为一个历史事实的地位将引发一个解释问题。这一解释要素涉及到历史的每一个事实。

May I be allowed a personal reminiscence? When I studied ancient history in this university many years ago, I had as a special subject "Greece in the period of the Persian Wars." I collected fifteen or twenty volumes on my shelves and took it for granted that there, recorded in these volumes, I had all the facts relating to my subject. Let us assume - it was very nearly true - that those volumes contained all the facts about it that were then known, or could be known. It never occurred to me to enquire by what accident or process of attrition that minute selection of facts, out of all the myriad facts 'that must have once been known to somebody, had survived to become the facts of history. I suspect that even today one of the fascinations of ancient and mediaeval history is that it gives us the illusion of having all the facts at our disposal within a manageable compass: the nagging distinction between the facts of history and other facts about the past vanishes because the few known facts are all facts of history. As Bury, who had worked in both periods, said "the records of ancient and mediaeval history are starred with lacunae."[10] History has been called an enormous jig-saw with a lot of missing parts. But the main trouble does not consist of the lacunae. Our picture of Greece in the fifth century B.C. is defective not primarily because so many of the fits have been accidentally lost, but because it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens. We know a lot about what fifth-century Greece looked like to an Athenian citizen; but hardly anything about what it looked like to a Spartan, a Corinthian, or a Theban - not to mention a Persian, or a slave or other non-citizen resident in Athens. Our picture has been preselected and predetermined for us, not so much by accident as by people who were consciously or unconsciously imbued with a particular view and thought the facts which supported that view worth preserving. In the same way, when I read in a modern history of the Middle Ages that the people of the Middle Ages were deeply concerned with religion, I wonder how we know this, and whether it is true. What we know as the facts of mediaeval history have almost all been selected for us by generations of chroniclers who were professionally occupied in the theory and practice of religion, and who therefore thought it supremely important, and recorded everything relating to it, and not much else. The picture of the Russian peasant as devoutly religious was destroyed by the revolution of 1917. The picture of mediaeval man as devoutly religious, whether true or not, is indestructible, because nearly all the known facts about him were preselected for us by people who believed it, and wanted others to believe it, and a mass of other facts, in which we might possibly have found evidence to the contrary, has been lost beyond recall. The dead hand of vanished generations of historians, scribes, and chroniclers has determined beyond the possibility of appeal the pattern of the past. "The history we read," writes Professor Barraclough, himself trained as a mediaevalist, "though based on facts, is, strictly speaking, not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgments."[11] But let us turn to the different, but equally grave, plight of the modern historian. The ancient or mediaeval historian may be grateful for the vast winnowing process which, over the years, has put at his disposal a manageable corpus of historical facts. As Lytton Strachey said in his mischievous way, "ignorance is the first requisite of the historian, ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits."[12] When I am tempted, as I sometimes am, to envy the extreme competence of colleagues engaged in writing ancient or mediaeval history, I find consolation in the reflection that they are so competent mainly because they are so ignorant of their subject. The modern historian enjoys none of the advantages of this built-in ignorance. He must cultivate this necessary ignorance for himself - the more so the nearer he comes to his own times. He has the dual task of discovering the few significant facts and turning them into facts of history, and of discarding the many insignificant facts as unhistorical. But this is the very converse of the nineteenth-century heresy that history consists of the compilation of a maximum number of irrefutable and objective facts. Anyone who succumbs to this heresy will either have to give up history as a bad job, and take to stamp-collecting or some other form of anti-quarianism, or end in a madhouse. It is this heresy, which during the past hundred years has had such devastating effects on the modern historian, producing in Germany, in Great Britain, and in the United States a vast and growing mass of dry-as-dust factual histories, of minutely specialized monographs, of would-be historians knowing more and more about less and less, sunk without trace in an ocean of facts. It was, I suspect, this heresy - rather than the alleged conflict between liberal and Catholic loyalties - which frustrated Acton as a historian. In an early essay he said of his teacher Dollinger: "He would not write with imperfect materials, and to him the materials were always imperfect."[13] Acton was surely here pronouncing an anticipatory verdict on himself, on that strange phenomenon of a historian whom many would regard as the most distinguished occupant the Regius Chair of Modern History in this university has ever had - but who wrote no history. And Acton wrote his own epitaph in the introductory note to the first volume of the Cambridge Modern History, published just after his death, when he lamented that the requirements pressing on the historian "threaten to turn him from a man of letters into the compiler of an encyclopedia."[14] Something had gone wrong. What had gone wrong was the belief in this untiring and unending accumulation of hard facts as the foundation of history, the belief that facts speak for themselves and that we cannot have too many facts, a belief at that time so unquestioning that few historians then thought it necessary - and some still think it unnecessary today - to ask themselves the question: What is history?

我可以回忆一下吗？多年前，我在这所大学学习古代历史时，有一门特殊的学科“波斯战争时期的希腊”，我在书架上收集了十五、二十卷书，并理所当然地认为，在这些书中，我掌握了与我的学科有关的所有事实。让我们假设——这几乎是真的——这些卷包含了当时已知或可能已知的关于它的所有事实。我从来没有想过要问，从那些曾经为人所知的无数事实中，经过一次又一次的偶然或一次的磨合，那些细微的事实选择，竟幸存下来，成为历史事实。我怀疑，即使在今天，古代和中世纪历史的魅力之一是，它给我们一种错觉，让我们在一个可管理的范围内掌握所有的事实：历史事实和关于过去的其他事实之间的不停区分消失了，因为为数不多的已知事实都是历史事实。曾在这两个时期工作过的As Bury说：“古代和中世纪历史的记录都有空白。”[10]历史被称为巨大的吉格锯，有许多缺失的部分。但主要的问题并不在于这些缺陷。我们对公元前五世纪希腊的描绘有缺陷，主要不是因为有那么多的契合被意外丢失，而是因为它大体上是由雅典城的一小群人组成的。我们知道很多关于五世纪希腊在雅典公民看来是什么样子的；但对于斯巴达人、科林斯人或底比斯人来说，却几乎一无所知——更不用说波斯人、奴隶或其他居住在雅典的非公民了。我们的画面是预先为我们选择和预先确定的，与其说是偶然的，不如说是有意识或无意识地灌输了一种特定的观点和认为支持这种观点的事实值得保留的人。同样地，当我在一本中世纪的现代史上读到中世纪的人们深深地关注宗教时，我想知道我们是如何知道这一点的，以及这是否是真的。我们所知道的中世纪历史事实几乎都是由几代专门从事宗教理论和实践的编年史家为我们选择的，他们因此认为宗教极其重要，并记录了与宗教有关的一切，而不是其他很多。1917年革命摧毁了俄国农民虔诚的宗教形象。中世纪人虔诚的宗教信仰，不管是真是假，都是不可磨灭的，因为几乎所有已知的关于他的事实都是由那些相信它，并希望别人相信它的人为我们预先挑选出来的，而我们可能在其中找到相反证据的大量其他事实，都已经失去了记忆。一代又一代历史学家、抄写员和编年史家的死亡之手已经超越了上诉过去模式的可能性。”“我们所读的历史，”巴拉克劳夫教授写道，他自己也受过中世纪学者的训练，“虽然是基于事实，但严格地说，根本不是事实，而是一系列公认的判断。”[11]但让我们来谈谈现代历史学家不同但同样严重的困境。古代或中古的历史学家可能会感激这一巨大的筛选过程，多年来，这一过程为他提供了一个可管理的历史事实库。正如利顿·斯特拉奇以恶作剧的方式所说，“无知是历史学家的首要条件，无知可以简化和澄清，可以选择和省略。”[12]当我像有时一样，被诱惑去羡慕从事古代或中世纪历史写作的同事的极端能力时，我感到安慰的是，他们之所以如此能干，主要是因为他们对自己的学科如此无知。现代历史学家不享受这种天生无知的好处。他必须为自己培养这种必要的无知——他越接近自己的时代。他肩负着发现少数重大事实并将其转化为历史事实的双重任务，同时也肩负着将许多无关紧要的事实视为非历史事实而抛弃的双重任务。但这正是19世纪异端邪说的反常，历史是由大量的不可辩驳的客观事实汇编而成的。任何屈服于这种异端邪说的人，要么就不得不放弃糟糕的历史，转而从事集邮或其他形式的反夸里亚主义，要么就以疯人院告终。正是这种异端邪说，在过去的一百年里，对现代历史学家产生了毁灭性的影响，在德国、英国和美国，产生了大量枯燥无味的史实、细致入微的专著，使未来的历史学家越来越了解越来越少，在事实的海洋中沉入无痕。我怀疑，正是这种异端——而不是所谓的自由主义和天主教忠诚之间的冲突——使阿克顿作为一名历史学家感到沮丧。在早期的一篇文章中，他提到他的老师多林格：“他不会用不完美的材料写作，对他来说，材料总是不完美的。”（13）阿克顿肯定在这里对自己做出了预期的裁决，关于一个历史学家的奇怪现象，许多人认为他是这所大学里最杰出的现代史教授，但他没有写历史。阿克顿在他死后不久出版的《剑桥现代史》第一卷导言中写下了自己的墓志铭，当时他哀叹，对历史学家提出的要求“有可能把他从一个文人变成一部百科全书的编撰者。”[14]出了问题。错误的是相信这种坚定不移的事实积累是历史的基础，相信事实为自己说话，我们不能有太多事实，当时的一种信念如此坚定，以至于当时很少有历史学家认为有必要——有些人今天仍然认为没有必要——扪心自问：什么是历史？

The nineteenth-century fetishism of facts was completed and justified by a fetishism of documents. The documents were the Ark of the Covenant in the temple of facts. The reverent historian approached them with bowed head and spoke of them in awed tones. If you find it in the documents, it is so. But what, when we get down to it, do these documents - the decrees, the treaties, the rent-rolls, the blue books, the official correspondence, the private letters and diaries - tell us? No document can tell us more than what the author of the document thought - what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to happen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others to think he thought, or even only what he himself thought he thought. None of this means anything until the historian has got to work on it and deciphered it. The facts, whether found in documents or not, have still to be processed by the historian before he can make any use of them: the use he makes of them is, if I may put it that way, the processing process.

十九世纪对事实的拜物教是通过对文件的拜物教来完成和证明的。文件是事实圣殿里的约柜。尊敬的历史学家低着头走近他们，用敬畏的语调谈论着他们。如果你在文件里找到的话，就是这样。但是，当我们开始认真研究时，这些文件——法令、条约、租金单、蓝皮书、官方信件、私人信件和日记——告诉我们什么呢？没有一份文件能告诉我们的，是文件作者的想法——他认为已经发生了什么，他认为应该发生什么，或者将要发生什么，或者也许只是他想让别人认为他在想什么，甚至仅仅是他自己认为他在想什么。这一切都没有意义，直到历史学家开始研究并破译它。这些事实，不管是不是在文件中发现的，在史学家能够利用它们之前，还需要加以处理：如果我可以这么说的话，他利用这些事实就是处理过程。