Sunday Evening Assembly 23rd February 1964
To Knowledge Through History
I suppose if I had invented the title for my last talk it would be To Knowledge Through Humility, and if I were to provide a similar title for this talk it would be To Knowledge Through History. Now why through history? Perhaps I could start by referring to the little discussion we had when John Macmurray was here, with people who come to the small philosophy group, in which we were discussing whether it was possible to prove or to disprove the existence of God by argument, and John Macmurray, being a professional philosopher, had often met this before and tried to get us to understand that this question of “Does God exist?” is what philosophers would call a “nonsense question”; in other words it’s a question which should not be asked because we don’t know what it means. Philosophers in these days – over the last 50 years – have been very carefully asking whether a good many of our statements and questions mean anything. They have been taking particular words and trying to discover what meaning those words have; and a great many of the words that we used to think we knew the meaning of in such questions have been quite emphatically demonstrated not to have a meaning – not, certainly, to have a sufficient meaning to be used in a question or an argument.
Now this has been very hard for us to bear; it used to be such fun to have long-winded discussions in which we thought we were getting somewhere, and now to believe that those discussions in that particular form don’t get us anywhere is uncomfortable, but it is one of those uncomfortablenesses that we have to face up to, because it is jolly good for us to be made uncomfortable about our arguments. When you put that question? - “Does God exist?” it can only mean something if you know what God means – what the concept of God really is – and if you know what the word “exist” means. Now, we all think we know what these words mean until we are really challenged to think about them. We all have the vaguest ideas of God when it really comes to putting it down on paper. And equally we have very vague ideas of what we mean by “exist”. If I put the question “Does this table exist?” I’m in a quite different position, because we all have a concept of “table”; it can be round, or square, it can be made of wood or plastic, but it does stand on the floor with the help of legs. So we start off by talking about something of which we have a definite concept, and we know what the word “exist” means in relation to a table because if we tried to walk across the room as though the table exists we bang into it and get bruised, so there’s no question as to what we really mean when we ask “Does the table exist?” And what John Macmurray said to us that we should do if we find ourselves frustrated by this question, is to look back into history to find out what God has meant – not as a proposition but as something moving in the minds and hearts of men right from the beginnings of time, because all races and all groups of people have had an experience of some kind to which they have given this name “God” or some similar name. We’ve got to know what it means to people, to their actions, to their culture, before we can even know what we are talking about; and we have to get rid, too, of this (here I am adding something from another person) as the Bishop of Woolwich has said, we’ve got to get rid of this concept of God out there – as somebody who stands out there and winds the universe up and then lets it unwind and pulls us about with strings or lets us go as he pleases. We’ve got to get rid of that concept because we can’t argue in terms of it at all.
Now beginning from that point I want to talk a little about this business of going back in history. This is very important because it may help you to understand why we study history in school. I hated history at school – loathed it – I took ten subjects in school certificate and history was the one in which I did not pass, because I found it so unbearable that I couldn’t even listen to the teacher, and the only question I wrote anything about when I spent the whole two hours on it was the Industrial Revolution – and my father had taught me all I knew about that.
Now history ought not to be that kind of subject in a school; it ought to be taught meanfully, and here we do try to see to it that it is taught meanfully. What is history? There are lots of different ways of thinking of it and talking about it. Perhaps you could think of it as a way to create and preserve our collective memory; it is the memory of mankind. It is an attempt to get back into the past to try to discover what was true, and therefore to see to it that our memory is a memory of true things. And think how we all, individually and personally, depend upon our memory. Could you exist; could you think of yourself as a person; could you be of any importance to yourself, without your memory? Suppose as fast as you did a thing it vanished out of your mind for ever? Would you have any existence? You would be like the animals from birth to death hurled. Well, if it’s important to you to have a memory, how important it is to every nation and the whole human race to have a memory. And that memory is history. Further, we are all of us in history, and are making history. I believe that it was in a dormitory last Sunday night that I put this idea to someone and he or she thought this was something quite novel, to think that she was making history. Of course she is; every single one of us here is making history. We contribute our little bit to what the human race will in time to come be able to remember.
And in another way what we think – what every single one of us here thinks – depends, not merely on our own thinking but on history. I explained to you last time how those opinions that you think you are quite certain of as being absolutely objective and rational, may well depend upon experiences that you yourself have had in the past which have made you think that way; in other words what you think depends on your history, and so what mankind thinks – what any of us thinks – depends on this great volume of history reaching far back into the past. We think as we do partly because we have a long memory - a memory stretching back thousands of years. So we have a personal history and a group history.
Now turning aside from that for a moment I want to put another question to you which is a little bit like the question “Does God exist?” It will bring me back to history again. The question “Does Love exist?” Now at the end of my last talk I said that love was the one eternal reality, the one certainty to which we could hold. Now I am going to question that for a while. How would you answer the question “Does Love exist?”. Do you think that you could prove it one way of the other by argument? What evidence have you for the existence of love? You can see people coming into very close proximity to each other but is that any evidence of the existence of love? It doesn’t need to be. People can be intimately entwined and yet hate each other. How do you know what (sic) it is love or not? Love is one of these things that we can’t bump into. You can bump into a member of the other sex but you don’t necessarily bump into love. Love is a thing we can’t measure, as I could measure this table and find its volume and its weight. Now your personal experience may convince you of the reality of love, or perhaps the opposite. If you’ve has an absolutely rotten experience of other people you may say that love is a sham – it doesn’t exist; if you have had a deeply felt experience of being cared for, then you will be convinced that love exists. But what do you mean by the word ‘exist’?
Now even the word ‘love’ and the way we think of it – the way we use it – that is decided, by a large extent, to history – not merely by your personal history but also by group history. Love has been much talked about – perhaps the most talked about thing - as far back in the past as we care to go. Just think of the different ways in which the word ‘love’ has been used and the different things it has meant in history; the way at times in history it was closely linked up to a romance – at other times divorced from romance. There have been times in history quite different from the present, when love was not connected up with sexual experience; when sexual experience was regarded as an animal part of ourselves, quite separate from love. What does love mean to-day in our particular period of history? I could have brought in one of two magazines that I found in the school and shown you love, love romances; and in that you would see an enormously squishy kiss in progress, in which the man who is sharing this squishy kiss is clutching a luscious female with enormous breasts. That is what the word ‘love’ in our time means to most people, because that is where our history has got us in its grip.
But this is not a picture, an inevitable one; it’s not the only picture mankind has had even of sexual love, or of the physical aspect of it. In our modern times the most desirable object of love is expected to be outsize in the dairy department, small in the hips and long in the legs. You read J.B. Priestly’s Journey Down a Rainbow; he gives you a very satirical picture of a strip-tease in Houston, Texas, in which he questions why this ideal of womanhood should ever have come to be. And if you pick up Sir Kenneth Clark’s The Nude in the library and read back through history there, you will discover that four or five hundred years ago love – what spurred men to love in a woman’s body – was something quite different. The ideal body then – the stirring body – was something quite different. The ideal body then – the stirring body – was a body with breasts like little apples, and long waists, and wonderfully rounded bellies, and wide hips; whereas in these days we have narrow hips and flat tummies, and everybody who can afford it wears a girdle to keep it as flat as possible.
Now you see things we regard as inevitable to-day are not inevitable at all, because people’s attitudes have been quite different in history and people have been stirred by the opposite from what they are stirred by to-day. And you go back still further in history and read your Plato. You will discover that love between men and women is not thought of as very important – it’s hardly mentioned – but love between man and man is the subject of long and beautifully worked out love letters.
So where are we? What has history got to tell us about love? Or even the present? What is there in common between the love in the girls’ magazine and the love that a mother shows for her child? Or that the doctor shows for his patient? Or that the United Nations’ worker shows for an injured refugee? So here again when we ask this question, “Does love exist?” we are faced with the terrible difficulty of deciding what we are talking about, and if we are to understand what we are talking about we’ve got to look right back through history and, to a wide extent in our own time, in order to decide where we stand.
Now look at another word – ‘freedom’. Here we might put another question and ask whether it is a nonsense question or not: “Does freedom matter?” Is that a question we can answer, or is it nonsense? We cannot answer the question until we know what it means, and we cannot know what it means until we know our history. It is used with as many variations as the word ‘love’ is used. Freedom to an Englishman means something different from freedom to an American, and something profoundly different from freedom to a member of the U.S.S.R. Think of our history if you want to understand how we use it. Think of Magna Charter. Think of William Penn’s struggle to defend trial by jury; one of the back stories in our struggle to be certain of our freedom. Of the concept in our law that you are innocent until you are proved guilty, which we think a tremendous part of our belief in freedom. Think how terribly concerned we are with our right to hold an opinion and to the right of free speech. And think how important it is to us – at least at our best – that we should be tolerant of all difference of opinion; how in this country we are even concerned to make sure that a communist can say what he likes in public without being molested.
Turn to the united States – to some extent sharing a common heritage – but what kind of history has determined their attitude to freedom? Think of all the pioneers who went to the United States to escape persecution in this country and elsewhere in the Continent, who went right through that virgin land establishing their own pastures, their own ranches, their own farms; making their own dormitory laws to control their relationships with their neighbours, subject – at least for a long time – to no government, each defending his own rights against his neighbour. Think how that has necessarily altered the Americans concept of freedom – the freedom to do the thing you want by yourself, and get on with it without interference from the government or, if possible, even from the law. And then you can perhaps understand why the Americans are so fiercely anti-communist, because communism claims far more control over the economic activities of man than any other political theory, and this business of spreading out into a great wide open land, establishing your own industries and your own farms and your own ranches – the very antithesis of what is meant by communism. And so that determines what an American means when he talks about “the free world”. It is something different from what we mean because we – in a much longer political history – have come to understand that a good many more restrictions are necessary than the American thinks to be necessary.
Now look into the history of Russia in order to decide what Russia means by freedom – and we all shout ‘freedom’ at the tops of our voices when there is any kind of trouble! To the Russian freedom means freedom to get on with a thing and to do it quickly. Because of what they have experienced (they have gone practically from slavery to one of the most organised economic system in the whole of history in about 50 years – the quickest development ever known to man-kind, both in structure and in outlook) they have got used to the idea that if something is necessary, if something is just, if something is right, it must be done tomorrow. We are prepared to wait – for ages. We decide to pull down the slums, but if there are a lot of awkward slum landlords to see we just wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, until in the end there is some frightful television programme that kicks us in the backsides and then we go and do something about it! But to the Russians, if there is some kind of injustice of that sort their theory is haul the slum landlords out by the scruff of the necks, kick them into the dustbin, and build some new flats instead of the slums! So they have got a philosophy in which freedom means doing what is necessary and doing it quickly: so to them we are almost completely un-free because we can’t get on with a job we think is right. So you have got to understand the history of the last 50 years to see why it is so difficult for the Russians to understand the West and the West to understand the Russians. So how can we argue? How can we talk at all unless we know a lot of history? And if we do talk without knowing history we should talk humbly, being prepared to be wrong until we know more history in order to understand what we are talking about.
Now does this mean that we are good in history? That we are bound to be Englishmen? That we are bound to be Americans? Or bound to be Russians? No! when you really understand your history then you begin to come free from it. If only Americans could understand their own history and Russian history, and see why they mean different things by ‘freedom’, it would be much easier for them to tolerate and understand each other, but because they shout the word ‘freedom’ without thinking that their meaning of it is determined by their history, they remain the servants of their particular history.
I could even now turn to science and show how you don’t know what you are talking about in science unless you know something of its history. We might put the question “Does the electron exist?” Is that a nonsense question? It is unless you know the history of the particles of physics; that the electron is just as evanescent a thing, as immaterial a thing, as God is. You can no more pick up an electron and look at it and say “I recognise this job” than you can get hold of God and say you recognise him, because all we know is that we get a flash of light on a photographic plate or in a cloud condensation chamber, and we infer, infer – not see – infer that an electron exists. We don’t know anything more than that something happens which obeys an algebraic equasion (sic), and so the electron is something we have to fill in with our imagination, just as we have to fill in with God with our imagination, and we don’t realise that unless we know the history of science.
There are heaps and heaps of young men who do work in electronics. They are absolutely convinced of the reality of the electron; as convinced of it as they are of their own children, and their wives and their grandfathers, and so if they were put the question “Does the electron exist?” They would emphatically say yes! But if you look back through the history of science you will know how much imagination has gone into this. We talk of all these particles in terms of positive and negative; the latest one is omega minus. Did you know there was a time when there was no positive and negative in electricity, when electricity was a phenomenon that was accepted without being understood, and then the President of the United States suffered a fit of imagining and he said “Let us imagine that there are two kinds of electricity and we call one of them positive and the other one negative”? And if he hadn’t imagined that we shouldn’t have been talking about protons and electrons for omega minus to-day.
We are so saturated in these present-day concepts that we cannot imagine that Benjamin Franklin could ever have imagined anything else, but suppose some brilliant fit of imagination had described electricity in a different way from the two fluid-theory, we might have a quite different kind of physics but it might be just as effective as the physics we have today. So theories are things that enable us to do things. They are not descriptions of absolute reality, and we don’t realise that until we go back into history, and I imagine that the vast majority of people who call themselves electronic engineers have never heard of Benjamin Franklin and the two fluid theory of electricity.
You know there was a time in the Victorian period too, when they thought of atoms as like billiard balls – shaped like billiard balls and banging about as billiard balls bang about on a billiard table. But if only these people has gone back a little further in history to think of how the Greeks thought about atoms – they were brilliant in their imagination – they would realise how tremendously confined that idea of atoms was and was later proved to be.
So you see that every single one of the ideas that matter to us we cannot talk about with any competence unless we know our history. That doesn’t mean that we can’t get quite a long way, but when it comes to answering the ultimate question we have got to be prepared to study its history.
There is one last thing that I might comment on relaying back to the psalm; that psalm – that tremendous feeling expressed by the Hebrews in that psalm – of continuity in history, of something you could rely on, something you could rest upon, something you could be rooted in, that was something that was tremendously deeply felt by Jesus. Nobody was ever more conscious of history than Jesus and he knew that human relationships and everything he wanted to say about human relationships, was deeply rooted in the insight and history of his own race. If Jesus had been a person who thought that he was independent of history, who thought he could be just revolutionary, say outrageous things disconnected from the past, he would have threshed up and been forgotten, and we would never know his name; but it was precisely because of his convictions coming right out of the roots of his history that he became such a tremendously challenging and undefeatable person. He was rooted in the past and so people had to measure up to everything he said and they have been trying to measure up to it ever since.
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 05