On Knowing How to History

The View from Oregon – 355: Friday 22 August 2025

History as propositional knowledge is a paradigm of “knowng that,” and it often takes the form of that dread historical triumvirate of names, dates, and places: Alexander the Great died at Babylon in 323 BC. The fact that we have the conception of knowing that, and that historical knowledge especially exemplifies knowing that, immediately suggests the question of whether there is an equivalent form of knowing how in history. Is there a way to know how to history? Could we write a “how to” manual on “historying”? Aside from questions like this being bad grammar, and having to invent unlovely words like “historying,” does this make any kind of sense?

First, let’s take care of the easy part of this. “Knowing how to history” could simply mean knowing how to do history, by which I mean studying history, understanding history, and writing history. These things are eminently teachable, and there are programs to acculturate individuals into the study of history. There are many manuals on historiography that have as their intent the communication of knowing how to profitably engage in historical scholarship. Thus if “doing history” means the study of history, then, yes, this form of historical knowledge is alive and well. So much for that.

It was Gilbert Ryle who explicitly drew the distinction between knowing that and knowing how, and that distinction has been applied and disputed ever since. I’m not going to go into that literature today, but I didn’t ask the question about knowing how to history to engage in obvious claims about historiography. I think there is a possibility that “knowing how to history” means something (or could mean something), and it means something different from knowledge of research practices in history as a scholarly discipline, however dubious the grammar.

Suppose we understand the lived experience of history as the knowing how of history, and if we possess this lived experience, then we know how to history. One aspect of knowing how to history, then, is knowing how to live in a given historical period (which also implies knowing how to live in some particular geographical location, since past historical milieux are always particularistic). Another way to put this is that this kind of knowing how in history would mean knowing enough about a particular place and time such that one might be mistaken for a temporal native, and this in turn implies sufficient knowledge of informal institutions (on which cf. Formal and Informal Institutions: An Addendum on Alexis de Tocqueville) that govern the ordinary business of life.

Collingwood’s reenactment theory of history verges on a recognition of the history as made by lived experience, but he places no emphasis upon altered states of consciousness in which lived experience diverges most radically from ordinary experience. Ordinary experience is reasonably cool and calm and may be played out in a blasé state of mind, but a great deal of history is made by individuals in extraordinary states of mind—a couple of the examples I’ve used recently are J. Glenn Gray’s writings on the experience of combat, which draw heavily on the earlier writings of Ernst Jünger (and when I say that Gray draws on Jünger, I mean experientially and not ideologically), and widespread moral panics like the early modern witchcraze.

For Collingwood, knowing how to do history is knowing how to think the thoughts of past historical actors, and, by doing so, living through what they lived through. Now, the totality of an individual’s thoughts are going to consist both of ordinary experience as well as unusual experiences that verge upon or are entirely given over the altered states of consciousness. Again, Collingwood doesn’t seem to show much interest in altered states of consciousness, and when I read Collingwood the impression I get (your mileage may vary) is of a reasonably calm and cool historical process, attended by proportionally calm and cool thoughts, though within the Collingwood framework we could probably account for passionate moments like Caesar choosing to cross the Rubicon. This would be the exception, however. The rule would be the world that Iris Murdoch sketched in criticizing Gilbert Ryle, albeit for different parts of The Concept of Mind than those offering a distinction between knowing that and knowing how:

“The ‘world’ of The Concept of Mind is the world in which people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus, not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party.”

Hegel, on the other hand, was very much interested in passionate states of mind. He said that nothing great in the world is accomplished without passion, and he also said, “In the press of world events, there is no help to be had from general principles, nor from the memory of similar conditions in former times—for a pale memory has no force against the vitality and freedom of the present.” Can the Collingwoodian framework of reenactment capture this passionate understanding of history? Perhaps some can, but I’ll wager that most won’t be successful. In fact, the success of Collingwood’s thought experience of re-living the thoughts of past historical actors is effectively predicated on the idea that we can feel the memory of former times as equally vital and free as the present moment. If we were not able to enter into the past as equally vital and free, we wouldn’t be successful in our attempt to re-live past thoughts.

We can make a distinction between being able to enter into the minds of past historical actors in their moments of ordinary experience and in their passionate states of mind, which latter are perhaps unrecoverable for us, but this distinction is only meaningful if we implicitly hold that the bulk of history is made up of ordinary experience, and altered states of consciousness are rare and unusual, so much so that we can safely ignore them and proceed as though they are irrelevant. Even if this isn’t true, it might be worth entertaining as a hypothesis, and seeing, on this basis, how much of the past we can reconstruct, even if we can’t recover past passions and enthusiasms. But even being able to understand the frame of mind of ordinary experience of the past would imply a vast background knowledge of informal institutions—how to behave under what circumstances—that would all be valuable as historical experience. Perhaps not as an end in itself, as implied in Collingwood’s philosophy of history, but as a help to the historian. That is to say, it becomes a part of historical research, and in this way the uninteresting form of knowing how to history turns out to be closely related to what I deem the more interesting meaning of knowing how to history.

I have been assuming here that the ordinary state of mind is more straight-forward than altered states of consciousness, but this presupposition may be completely wrong. It is at least arguable that we could more readily enter into passionate states of mind than into ordinary states of mind, for which a great deal of background knowledge is necessary. In passionate states of mind, the world is simplified, and human evolutionary psychology guarantees us that these passionate states of mind are pretty much the same since anthropogenesis. So it may be easier to enter into a rage like the rage of Achilles, with which the Iliad opens, than to enter into the pedestrian consciousness of ordinary experience. But to enter into a rage, or to have a mystical experience, or to be carried away by a moral panic, requires that one fully buys into the passion of the moment, and passions of the moment appear to me to be highly particularistic. So this leads me, somewhat unwillingly, to consider that what’s crucial here are the boundary conditions for the ordinary state of mind to give way to an altered state of consciousness.

One of the strangely lawlike patterns of history is that, even though we can’t enter into past enthusiasms like they were our own, and enthusiasms of the recent past are pretty much ruled out as a dead letter, there will always be a new enthusiasm to come along and sweep the population up into a new passion. Then this passion fades in its turn, and everyone wonders how they got so carried away by it. They say, “Never again!” And, indeed, they never make that particular mistake again, but over and over again they make the same kind of mistake, unable to recognize that their new passion is essentially the same as their old passion, albeit in another costume, and these passions are, in turn, the passions of their grandparents and great grandparents, even if it’s difficult to see the resemblance.

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