The first difficulty with history, the one that hits you like an arrow, is the human factor: how should feelings be involved in recording the past.
For example, how should historians themselves deal with their own feelings, and should feelings be allowed to endow historical accounts of events and people, not only of the individuals involved, but in their relationship to each other, as groups and communities that have commonality according to class and culture, and even across populations.
Obviously, everyone experiences a variety of feelings according to how
their life has gone and how they react emotionally according to forces, circumstances, psychology, expectations and traditions, making any comprehension of the feelings involved in a history of this potentially infinitesimal and mentally confusing. Hence, understanding the role of feelings and emotions, the emotional life of the past has caused great difficulty.
Arguments between modern historians, since Ranke, put very generally, veer towards making history an ‘unemotional’ collection of information, empirical facts, minimising or negating feelings on the part of the historian in favour of data. Or the school that opposes this by contrast, stating there is no such thing as empirical history because all history is churned out by historians and is therefore entirely subject to the feelings and persona of historians; that history can only be a kind of reflection of who the historian is.
Bloch and Febvre solved the dilemma between these two spheres with their remit that history must have a notion of feeling built into it, providing that this conception of feeling is entirely scientific according to their historiography and method. They reiterate in fact, that history requires the sensory, sensible element of feeling in
order to be scientific at all.
How did they arrive at this?
Bloch and Febvre* understood the historian as limited by their own species, which lends her or him the ability to have empathy, sometimes profound empathy for other members of their species (and others as well). To the extent that the human historian can emotionally conjecture - provided they first research the historical circumstances, situations and events as thoroughly as possible - as to how and why individuals, groups and communities behaved, felt and reacted, even if they lived 1000 years ago. Any precision here comes from the amassing of information by the historian, doing as thorough a job as possible, to enable them to construct an emotional ‘environment’ within which lived and felt the lives and communities of the past.
Jules Michelet and Augustin Thierry, predecessors of Bloch and Febvre, heralded immersion into the study
of the adventures of people and their customs and social life. They provided Bloch
and Febvre with the tools to shift the concept of an ‘idea’ coming from a single
individual, to a collation of ideas and feelings (unconscious communication is alluded to here) dispersed beyond the individual to groups and communities.
On a wider scale, Bloch and Febvre's concept of feeling or sensibilities as they called them, go beyond historical studies to provide assistance to the general question of empiricism versus idealism. A problem that existed/exists in most disciplines and in its purer form in philosophy. The issue of how ‘ideas’ and the rational relate to the ‘empirical’, the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’, is understood here by adding a conciliatory element; a sensuous processor that brings together and facilitates internal and external information - the visceral human faculty of sensibilities. Although acknowledged in prior historiographical arguments, sensibilities are presented by Bloch and Febvre in the specific form of a scientific method for history. Engaging thus the material human nervous system, the evolution of the body, emotionally and linguistically (which can also be construed in the work of Chomsky and Freud among others), in a systematic and fundamental schema, and hence as scientific. As such this science has common ground with other sciences that also shape Bloch and Febvre's work (examples of these are found in Bloch's essays in my book): psychology, physiology (nourishment), technology (the effect of radio transmission and the history of time keeping), biology, geography and physics.
Other influences on Bloch and Febvre on this path may have been Marx’s inclusion of the role of feelings in his ‘1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ and in 'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon'.And their ideas run parallel to Walter Benjamin's text ‘The Author as Producer’, all themes more recently covered by Gary Tedman’s conception of an aesthetic level of practice (Tedman, 2012, Zero Books).
Iona Singh
* See Lucien Febvre's essay 'Sensibilities and history', RFP 1973.
