By Ivo Kokić
Keith Jenkins was a British historian whose interests included medieval, modern, and political history. He is considered a postmodernist similar to Hayden White. Jenkins’ book Rethinking History (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2008, 109 pages) consists of an introduction and three main chapters (the first two of which are divided into smaller sections). In the book, the author analyzes the concept of history in theory and practice, as well as its definition. He also addresses questions of truth, facts and interpretation, bias, empathy, binary concepts (such as causality), primary and secondary sources, and the issue of whether history is a science or an art.
Particularly interesting are Jenkins’ theses on truth, interpretation, and bias. The second part of the book is structured as a series of responses to questions about the philosophy of history. The author begins from the assumption that it is impossible to discover the complete truth through historical research. Nevertheless, he does not reject the concept of truth, since the term is still necessary to describe the knowledge we seek. According to his view, the very idea of truth is what gives the concept of objectivity its power. This is why he devoted himself to analyzing the term within historiographical circles. Through a series of quotations about truth, he demonstrates that it is fertile ground for linguistic games among historians. Truth also serves as a legitimizing factor for creating interpretations of history and drawing certain boundaries around knowledge of the past. Therefore, the book describes such notions as merely “useful fictions.”
An important part of the work concerns the problem of facts and their interpretation. Jenkins acknowledges that certain indisputable facts do indeed exist—that is, undeniable pieces of knowledge. For example, we can factually determine the years during which a war lasted or when a politician came to power. However, such dry facts are insufficient when considering the broader context. Moreover, historians are rarely preoccupied with dry facts because facts alone cannot create a complete historiographical perception. Their goal is also to uncover the causal relationships of a phenomenon, as well as the way in which an event occurred. Precisely for this reason, interpretation is what constitutes historiography. The problem lies in the fact that historians reshape the past into value-laden forms that are not literal reproductions of the sequence of facts that occurred.
Several drawings related to the concept of interpretation clearly illustrate the slippery terrain of historical subjectivity. Jenkins presents an imaginary political spectrum marked “left” and “right.” Naturally, the book (for the sake of simplification) depicts only a small segment of this spectrum. Yet this is a fiction, since the line itself is unlimited. Whoever observes this imaginary spectrum sees a distorted image because they perceive all political ideologies as fitting within that line and therefore assume it can possess a “center.” Thus, the first drawing of interpretation depicts a triangle whose upper point lies directly beneath the middle of the line. This triangle is meant to represent a completely neutral historian without even a trace of bias. Since it is perfectly balanced, it is supposedly able to perceive arguments from both the left and the right entirely objectively because it is equally close (or distant) from both positions. However, such reasoning is fundamentally flawed because a line has no true center—it is impossible to stand at its center. To illustrate this, Jenkins’ second drawing of interpretation shows that the entire perception of left and right (and consequently the center as well) can shift in either direction. If all three categories move together, for example to the right, then the center will still remain between the fictional markers of left and right, yet on paper it will appear further to the right than the supposedly ideal depiction drawn above.
This naturally leads to the question of bias. Jenkins approaches the term very cautiously because it can only be understood as the opposite of “impartiality.” If impartiality means following complete truth, this is already problematic because of the difficulty of defining truth itself. Such an approach is advocated by empiricist historians who strive for an objective re-creation of the past. This principle of weighing arguments from both sides and purely following the facts became dominant as the ideal of historical study. Jenkins is cautious about such an approach because he realizes that one person perceives a particular interpretation as truth, while another sees it as bias. Nevertheless, the author does not completely reject the concepts of bias and impartiality, but merely argues that their meanings are highly specific.
Jenkins explains historiographical debates and concepts with remarkable clarity and precision, especially issues over which many scholars become entangled. Particularly compelling is his illustrative demonstration of the nonexistence of an ideal center from which political history could supposedly be viewed. Through a single drawing, he manages to describe the problem of interpretation as well as bias. This does not diminish objectivity as an ethical imperative, but it can effectively respond to any criticism of a work based on the claim that the researcher is not sufficiently neutral. It becomes clear that there can never be a “sufficient” distance from something that is itself unlimited. Likewise, offering a judgment on a historical phenomenon is not something that should be avoided, but rather the very purpose of a research conclusion.
However, when discussing how difficult it is to discover absolute truth, Jenkins should have more explicitly clarified whether he believes such truth nevertheless exists, even if humans are incapable of fully perceiving it. Indeed, this very book allows for a constructive critique of postmodernism, to which the author is clearly inclined. The claim that absolute truth does not exist is itself a set of unproven and highly subjective assertions, rather than a thesis that should simply be accepted without question.
The writer demonstrates that those who believe absolute truth does not exist are often so convinced of their theory that they treat it as though it were an absolute truth. In this lies the weakest point of postmodernism. This philosophical doctrine presents the thesis of the nonexistence of absolute truth as something indisputably true. That is the greatest paradox of such reasoning. Postmodernists respond very aggressively to criticism of their ideas, evidently convinced that they stand on the side of universal truth while simultaneously defending the hypothesis that such truth does not exist. Like Jenkins, they strive intensely to establish factually acceptable doctrines upon foundations they themselves believe to be nonexistent.
