In Search of Meaning and Purpose in History

To speak of the meaning or even of a purpose of history seems strangely out of time, 19th century so to speak, when thinkers above all of German extraction got lost in the airy heights of speculation. Since then, history has hurt people badly; as actors as well as the victims of history they suffered in such a terrible way that all meaning seemed to be lost or was at least suspicious. As to a purpose of history, that does not seem to be in sight at all, unless the one that is painted on the wall by pessimists as a rather deterrent portent: ever more perfect machines in an ever more perfectly organized world threatening itself with extinction.

Skepticism with regard to all historical blueprints – this may be said to be the prevailing state of mind; but science, i.e. that view of reality which sets the tone in our time and therefore represents the place once granted to wisdom, goes far beyond such skepticism. Science claims bluntly that history can have neither meaning nor tend to any aim whatsoever.

Modern science, which has only been around for about three hundred years, has embarked on a path quite away from previous human thinking. It could even be said that it has caused a break with the whole of history. Meaning has always been a category of understanding man and the surrounding world that has been taken for granted by previous cultures. If they have left any testimonies at all, they speak of a mission or task of man and society, even if only to redeem both from earthly existence in view of salvation in a higher kind of existence. Whenever and wherever we explore past cultures, whether in India, China, Egypt, Israel, the Christian and Islamic states or even in the secular redemption ideology of Karl Marx – it was always important to find a meaning in history and to present its realization to people as the true purpose of life.

Against this background, it is nothing less than a revolution that modern science has so abruptly departed from a tradition that has lasted for thousands of years. Every year tens of thousands of scientific papers are published in which we would look in vain for statements about the meaning of human existence let alone the purpose of history. Not only are both terms conspicuous by their absence – they are expressly and assiduously avoided. As they are considered „unscientific“, their use would threaten to damage the reputation of any author who wants to be accepted by the scientific community. It is not even customary to think about the matter itself, i.e. the fact – extremely strange from a historical point of view – that a main subject of all earlier human thought – the question of meaning – has now turned into a taboo as if we should be ashamed even to talk about it.

Of course, this does not apply to the thinking of the average person; in his mind the question continues to play a major role. It is only from the thinking of the „wise“ of our time that it has practically disappeared. There we are confronted with more than just cautious skepticism, we meet, on the contrary, with resolute decrees. Evolution is said to be a completely blind process, which does not reveal any meaning and does not strive for any aim. As a matter of course, ideas such as those of gods in the universe are resolutely pushed aside, but the same treatment also concerns human rights, humanism, etc. They are said to represent nothing more than mental constructs with no counterpart in reality as explored by science. For example, scientists who study the functions of the human organism would never find a thing called “soul”. They rather conclude that human behavior is controlled not by free will but by genes, hormones and neuronal processes which are subject to the mechanism of blindly acting natural laws. From an objective scientific point of view, human life has as little meaning as the life of weeds or ticks. If a scientifically uneducated public adheres to different views, wanting to attribute a higher meaning to individuals and their collective existence, it is because these people still cling to delusions.

Scientists tend to be especially skeptical when dealing with human cultures. To some of them these appear as a kind of collective illusions. Since one of the most important functions of culture is to confer higher meaning to the life of individuals, some scientists regard them as a mental infection attacking the host organisms – human beings – like an endemic disease.

This view of man and the world expresses more than just doubts about all premature statements about the meaning and aim of history – it pronounces a pessimism with truly dogmatic features. The mere question of whether such an attitude could not in turn be based on a prejudice is dismissed as annoying, as if it were not even worth asking. I think this attitude is wrong and that one of the most important tasks of our time should be to ask anew for the meaning and purpose of history. Even if this may seem paradoxical at first glance, I think that it is indeed science itself that urges us to do so. Since its beginning, science has followed a guiding principle that can be expressed succinctly in one single word: Truth. In the name of truth, it has, over the past three centuries, merciless questioned and dismantled religions and ideologies so far as their statements were unable to withstand objective examination. This was a work of destruction, but a necessary destruction, for illusions do not come true by declaring them true.

However, when carrying out this work of destruction – perhaps one of the most far reaching from a historical point of view – scientists shied away from taking what in my mind is the really decisive step. They assiduously closed their minds to an insight that could be dangerous as it threatened to pull the ground out from under their feet. I am talking about the insight that science without meaning and purpose – in other words without scientifically unprovable values – is not even conceivable and therefore not even possible. If your drive religion and ideology out through the front door, they come in again through the back door.

The values of scientists

And yet here we are dealing with a central truth that we are confronted with every day. If a physicist makes countless measurements, say to determine the laws governing the transformation of electromagnetic into kinetic energy, he must be convinced that it has any valuefor him and for other people to put his life at the service of such an undertaking. Seven hundred years ago, Roger Bacon was in danger of being considered mad and persecuted as a heretic because of similar endeavors. At that time, such interests were contrary to the values in force, and Bacon’s interests therefore seemed to imply contempt for them.

The values seven hundred years before our time could no more be derived from science as the values of contemporary physicists when, in the manner of medieval ascetics, they endure the greatest discomforts in order to elucidate the hidden structure of atoms or the neuronal processes inside a human brain. The investigation of such natural events has an outstanding value for the modern scientist, just as the preoccupation with the questions of the hereafter had an outstanding value for the 13th century when Roger Bacon lived. Both these and other values cannot be scientifically determined or refuted as absurd – such a judgment can only be made with regard to statements of fact. The thoroughgoing destruction of religions and ideologies carried out by the sciences therefore only concerns false factual claims. By no means was the world created in seven days, and there is certainly no hereafter where smiling huris widely open their arms to welcome a Jihadist. But science has nothing to say about the values of charity, aid to the poor and solidarity proclaimed by Christianity and Islam. And it must likewise remain silent when dealing with that personal religion and ideology that persuade a scientist to ascetically devote his entire life to the description of atoms or earthworms.

In any case, a scientist of our time has a very clear concept of the meaning and purpose of history, as far as his own history and that of his colleagues is concerned: He simply identifies these with the meaning and purpose of our time. The search for truth, as he understands it, is his religion and his ideology. Although a modern scientist deals exclusively with objective being – the laws of which he wants to explore – it is something entirely different, namely his value-oriented subjective will that turns research into a daily duty. This will cannot be derived from objective reality as it describes a radically different dimension usually interpreted as moral imperative. In every historical epoch it motivates societies and every single human being to undertake certain tasks and to see in their fulfillment the meaning and purpose of their existence.

An obvious contradiction

On the one hand, the typical scientist makes a devastating judgment: history in general and the evolution of living beings including man in particular have neither meaning nor purpose, since they are ruled by mere chance. On the other hand, the scientist, like every other person, emphatically excludes his own activity from this proclaimed futileness. For him, his personal endeavor to search for laws of nature seems to be an item of unquestionable importance. In fact, so imbued is he with the conviction that he should devote his life entirely to this specific aim that he stubbornly defends both at the same time: the general meaninglessness of life as well as the meaningfulness of his own actions.

Objective being and subjective will: the material constitution of man and society on the one hand and on the other hand its spiritual reflex and origin in individuals and collectives, we may also say: the contrast between history made as compared to history planned and reflected in human minds should be the object of a scientific inquiry that gets beyond this contradiction. That this may be the key for a more profound understanding of history was already emphasized by Fustel de Coulanges: “Historical science is not merely concerned with material facts and institutions; the real object of its study is the human soul.” Let’s say human consciousness because this belongs to the sphere of facts.

Thanks to research conducted worldwide, questions relating to the objective existence of human societies – from hunters and gatherers to the modern era of Digital Revolution – continue to be answered in overwhelming detail. But subjective intentions, which arose in reaction to objective conditions and filled the spiritual horizon of men, are usually neglected, precisely because there is a tendency to devalue them as mere imagination or superstructure: in other words, as religion or ideology. This is a mark of shortsightedness, as all human life now and in the past consists in subjective mental and emotional reactions to the objective constraints of reality. This response determines whether people will become terrorists or positively value their own lives and that of society because it makes sense to them. An analysis of history focused exclusively on material existence is pointless just as is a purely cultural analysis that ignores objective constraints.

Only when you combine both: the material circumstances and constraints on the one hand, and the spiritual reactions they provoke on the other, history becomes comprehensible. Then history does make sense, and it does have an aim. Of course, it is always a man-made meaning and an aim envisaged by human beings, and at first glance it looks as if each historical epoch defines both in its own and completely different way. The first impression created by dealing with history reflected is rather confusing. It seems to suggest a general relativism.

General relativism?

What is, for instance, the common ground linking cannibalism as formerly practiced daily by the tribes of New Guinea to the empathy that modern European feel with regard to migrants from all over the world? Where is the bridge that leads from this empathy, so self-evident to many in our time, to the concept of master races still upheld in the middle of the twentieth century by science and the general public, master races, which would have the right to assert themselves according to the principle of the „survival of the fittest“ against all weaker people? What is the common meaning to be found in the skull towers of Tamerlane and Hitler’s gassing chambers on the one hand and those of our contemporaries who even demand rights for our animal fellow creatures? What leads from the absolute rule of divinized people in Mesopotamia and Egypt to democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany? What is the common ground between the oppression of women for thousands of years and their entirely different position in Western society? Or what is the common meaning linking the separatist aspirations in Catalonia to the expansion of the European Union?

A fleeting glance at concrete history seems to reveal nothing but irreconcilable propositions – in other words, a chaos of meaning that could tempt us to dogmatically speak of an absence of all possible meaning. This would however be a premature conclusion. People are not as radically different as a first and superficial glance seems to suggest. Across all the differences in history, they are much more similar, much more driven by related needs and hopes than any thoroughly relativistic worldview wants to concede. It is true that the meaning of history is not anchored in any table of laws, it cannot be found by any science in outside reality. The meaning of history is made by men, it lies within them– but there it is definitely to be found. And science may reveal it through the study of history.

Facts versus speculation

As already noted, it is not in keeping with our times to ask about the meaning and purpose of history. To many it seems more appropriate to deny both and to assume that history is aimless and meaningless as a matter of principle. This negativistic attitude is not necessarily based on dogma and prejudice but may arise from healthy pragmatism – an attitude particularly at home in Anglo-Saxon archaeology and anthropology. Scientific progress in the methods and instruments of archaeometry has led to an incredible expansion of historical knowledge even with regard to the earliest times of human development. This upsurge would never have occurred if research had not sought to give concrete answers to concrete questions. For example, whether people were healthier or less healthy before and after taking to agriculture, whether they lived longer or died earlier, whether there was a greater or lesser degree of equality among them, whether wars became more frequent or less frequent, or whether women were equal or men already patriarchs in the earliest days?

In Germany, abstract general theories had already been advanced two centuries earlier regarding the meaning and purpose of history. From Herder via Hegel and Marx an unbroken line leads to Karl Jaspers, who asked in a groundbreaking work about the „Origin and Aim of History“. Today’s leading Anglo-Saxon researchers have turned their back on such theories and almost completely pushed all those big questions and their authors aside. It must be admitted that they did so for good reason, because the historical philosophers of the past, especially Hegel and Marx, erected too massive buildings on too brittle foundations of mere speculation, i.e. on a far too restricted empirical basis. Modern research calls for modesty, it requests first of all a conscientious study of facts – and this undoubtedly is a virtue beneficial to truth.

The question is, of course, what the historian understands by facts. Undoubtedly, facts primarily include material conditions, many of them measurable and clearly localized in space and time. Such material matters provide the basis of every verifiable and in this sense scientifically verified analysis of history; they are the reliable foundation of history made. But this foundation is not enough if men want to understand history as made by other men. However comprehensive the analysis of measurable facts may be, it becomes materialisticif it only considers material facts, without at the same time including the reflection of facts in the heads of their human actors.

The German way of philosophizing about history always threatened to slip into mere speculation, because it gave outstanding importance to the thinking and consciousness of acting persons while neglecting material facts. Hegel’s world spirit rides on a very high horse indeed – so high that modern science would rather refrain from mounting it. But the opposite procedure cannot be recommended either. Rather than following the impulses of modesty, it slides off into hardly disguised materialism, as soon as it keeps away human thinking and consciousness, that is history reflected, treating them almost like foreign matters, because they cannot be measured and, in this sense, do not count among the hard facts of science. What makes people human in the first place, namely their consciousness and their thinking, is then treated as if actually not belonging to man and his evolution.

What is it that makes the study of history so vital?

In this I see a tendency no less deceptive than slipping into trans-factual speculation. Only a handful of specialists are interested in when exactly man invented the making of fire or when he bred maize or tamed horses for the first time. The vast majority of people currently living are so little affected by such knowledge that most of them accept without protest that lessons in history play an ever-smaller role at our schools and even at universities. On the other hand, it is very important for many to be told how former people understood the meaning of life and the aim of history or which alternative ideas they developed to cope with their problems. Anyone, who deals with history, wants to know what role it can play for his or her own orientation. That is why history is so much more than just a collection of facts.

Shouldn’t it be the order of the day to overcome the one-sidedness of both positions? Is it not of utmost importance to look for a connection between facts and the human mind reflecting them? Of course, nobody will be able to indicate more than the direction such a project should take. The mere attempt is rather bold because no single individual may grasp more than a tiny fraction of all those myriad testimonies of facts and mind. But the attempt may well be worth our while. In a book on the subject (not yet published), the statement that there is a meaning and aim in history and that it can be proved empirically sums up my conclusion.

It is not a very original one as far as the aim of history is concerned. Apart from Karl Jaspers, great thinkers like Arnold Toynbee, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell had this aim in their minds when they insisted that mankind will and must unify if it is to avoid ecological and military self-destruction.

Much more difficult and intriguing is the question of meaning which, to my mind, has so far never been treated in a satisfactory way. Is there a conscience common to all mankind as there is a brain common to all members of Homo sapiens? Or do we have to agree with Paul Feyerabend that cultures are separated by irreconcilable differences so that it would be meaningless to speak of any similarities in the mental as opposed to the purely physiological sphere? I think that Feyerabend’s position is wrong and may empirically be proved to be so.