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HISTORY AS HUMANITIES*
By Teodoro A. Agoncillo When one looks over the catalogues of universities here and abroad, one finds that history as a discipline is categorized as a social science. At the University of Chicago, however, it is classified as humanities and social science, and the student is given the dubious privilege of choosing whether the discipline should be included in his humanities or social science requirements. Social scientists, generally speaking, are of the belief that history is a social science, a stand that is questioned by the humanists. Among students of history, there has been a disagreement: some consider it a social science, while others classify it with the humanities. In the Philippines, history is considered by the great majority of students and teachers as social science. Only a small minority believes it to belong to the humanities and, consequently, belongs to the realm of literature. As a student of history, I have always held the belief that history as a discipline and as a species of composition has the elements of the humanities and the social sciences. The historian’s methodology is scientific and does not allow the literary artist’s imagination to interfere with the scientific method of investigating the data used in historical writing. On the other hand, the processed data are given life, meaning, and significance by the artistic temperament of the historian and thereby becomes a branch of the humanistic studies. The historian uses his imagination to re-capture the past as closely as his data permit him, but in thus using his imagination he differs from the literary artist in that he could not, should not, allow his imagination to roam wildly but to put a rein to its flight by sticking closely to his facts. It is in this respect that the historical imagination differs from the literary imagination. At any rate, imagination, limited though it is by the materials already established as authentic and credible, is a very important element of historical writing. Without it, any historical piece becomes a dull compilation of data devoid of life. And since history deals with life as it was lived, that piece of unimaginative, uninspired writing is not history but at best a calendar. This leads us to the question whether history as a discipline should be taken as a social science or as humanities in college. But first, let us examine the difference between history and any of the recognized social sciences, economics, for instance. History, as any teacher of history knows, deals with the particular, while social science deals with the general. History, for example, says that King Richard the Lion-Hearted was crowned King of England, but social science says that all kings are crowned. Since history deals with particulars, it does not investigate facts in order to discover so-called laws. On the other hand, social science, because it deals with the general, attempts to formulate laws out of the materials examined. So the economists have the law of supply and demand, Gresham’s law, and other so-called laws which today are taken to heart by students of economics. In history, there are no such or similar laws, although students of historiography are familiar with such philosophers or history as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee who formulated laws or what they thought were laws of history and who, on the basis of such “laws” made predictions. In a social science, as in economics, for example, one can predict trends or possibilities, such as how much people will spend for clothing, food, entertainment, and so forth. In history, prediction is anathema, for it deals
with what had passed not with what the future will bring. It is for this reason that most historians consider Spengler and Toynbee as prophets but not historians. In the social science, it is not necessary to be literary in order to be great. In other words, one can become a great social scientist without being a great writer, although there are social scientists who are also good writers. Thomas Huxley readily comes to mind. A historian, on the other hand, in order to be recognized as great must have a literary style that is at once clear, flowing, and charming. This is because a historian, to be convincing, must succeed in re-creating the past or at least approximating the past as gleaned from reliable and credible sources. Thus, all great historians were also great writers: Gibbon, Froude, and Macaulay in England; Ranke and Momsen in Germany; Taine and Michelet in France; Motley, Parkman, and Prescott in the United States. The historian, therefore, should provide his readers not only with the bones of history, but with flesh and blood as well. Consequently, while the historian uses the scientific method in investigating his materials, he uses the methods known to the humanist in breathing life into the past. This is necessary in order to make the past become the present, which is to say, to make the past alive and contemporaneous with us. This is what the Italian philosopher-historian, Benedetto Croce, meant when he said that all history is contemporary to the humanistic studies. The great French biographer of Christ, Ernest Renan, eloquently said that History is not one of those studies of antiquity called umbratiles, for which a calm mind and industrious habits suffice. It touches the deep problems of human life; it requires the whole man with all his passions. Soul is as necessary to it as to a poem or work of art, and the individuality of the writer should be reflected in it. Because history is a re-creation of the past as seen by the historians, it is not objective. In the process of re-creation, the personality of the historian plays an important role. He displays his passion, his prejudices, and emotion — in brief, his humanity — and as such he cannot help being affected by the events and personalities he is re-creating. It is this subjectivity that characterizes all great historians, a subjectivity that makes for divergencies in interpretation. It is ignorance of the nature of historical writing that made even learned men in the past say that history is and must remain objective — an impossibility since the historian as man or woman cannot run away from himself/herself. We as human beings have feelings, emotions, prejudices, loves, and jealousies which play a part in our writing, whether this be a mere letter, essay, or an extended historical work. It is my belief that an objective historian is unhuman and, therefore, dull and impossible to deal with. I do not know of any such unhuman historian. Since interpretations in history vary from person to person and from time to time, some people fear that the readers might get confused in the wilderness of interpretations. There need not be any such fear, for far from sowing confusion differences among historians make for intelligent and critical appraisal on the part of the readers. What the readers should fear is uniformity of opinions or interpretations, for such a situation can only come about at a time and in a place where freedom has no meaning. Let me recall my days as a student on the old campus of the University of the Philippines on Padre Faura, Manila. In those days history as taught to us concerned mainly with
when they were being enacted. It is, indeed, a sad reflection on the teacher of history not to be able to infect the students with the charm of what happened in the past as recorded for ages; nor is a history teacher less competent for making the past live again before the eyes of the students, as in a newsreel. A good teacher of history is not he who can rattle off dates and names like a trained parrot, but he who makes the past come alive in the imagination of the students. A bad teacher, to cite an example, is one who says matter- of-factly that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hawaiian time, and soon the United States declared war on Japan. This statement, although accurate, is merely factual and unimaginative. A good teacher, on the other hand, will describe how the Japanese airmen wrought havoc on the American navy at Pearl Harbor, the inferno thus created, the confusion, the fear, the anger aroused in the American people in Hawaii, the reaction of the American people and their officials upon hearing the treacherous attack and their morals at the time of the attack and after, and so on. No one can be expected to re-capture all the details of an event, and history is not expected to detail everything that happened in the past. But a choice is given to the individual historian in selecting his materials, and a historian who has a good command of language, assuming of course he has a lively imagination, is in a better position to re-create for the present what happened in the past than one who has no command of language or who has no imagination. All this implies that a good teacher must have a catholicity of taste and the ability to appreciate not alone the subtleties of the arts, but also the implications of philosophy and letters. Is this a tall order? Perhaps it is, but then, as the old saying goes, there is no royal road to knowledge and wisdom. Through unsustained effort, the difficult road can be made as to make the travel less hazardous and more rewarding. It takes infinite time and patience to make a good history teacher out of a fresh college graduate. No summas , magnas , and cum laudes can become good teachers overnight. Experience, by which I mean not only personal but intellectual experience, help much in the making of a good teacher, and as experience grows with the years so does emotional maturity. The intellectual experience that I mention relates to the intensive and extensive studies made after graduating from college, for real education begins only outside of the university. What we learn in college is a small drop in the ocean of knowledge, and most of what we have learned in college needs to be unlearned after graduation. In proposing that history should be a cross-section of people’s life and culture, I do not mean to say that the historians should include everything about the social life, culture, politics, and economy of a country. This is impossible for a man to undertake. Perhaps in the Philippine context, a better solution is for a group of scholars to write a book that would evaluate the achievements of a people along the lines indicated. But while this is feasible, it nevertheless may lack the required unity and coherence and thereby defeat its own purpose. A better alternative, I think, is for a group of scholars in each discipline to submit to a scholar-writer their own findings and let him write the book on the basis of the scholar’s findings and interpretations. Of course, the result of his writing should be gone over carefully by each of the scholars who prepared the original draft in order to correct whatever errors crept into the preparation of the scholar-writer’s draft. In this way, unity of purpose and style is achieved. Perhaps if the writer has a lively imagination and a good style he could produce a book that every reader, whether he be a history student
or a mere layman would relish with gusto and thus make history a subject devoutly to be loved. This is not an impossibility. As a matter of fact, we have a good example of this kind of book, the multivolume The Story of Civilization by the philosopher Will Durant and his wife, Ariel. This is, I believe, the best example so far of an eclectic history written in a readable and clear style, with touches of humor and wit. If only this multi-volume work on the history of civilization can be compressed into a single volume without losing its charm, flavor, and accuracy, then it can be used as a textbook on a course in the history of civilization, a two-semester course. Only a man with a disciplined mind can compress such massive work into a single volume. A similar work, that is, a compressed work, has been done with respect to Toynbee’s multi-volume The Study of History, which was abridged into two volumes. In the Philippine colleges and universities, the work of compressing the results of centuries of achievements in the arts, letters, and science is enormously difficult not only because the language of the classroom is a foreign language whose nuances we have not to this day mastered, but also because we do not have an eminent writer in English who could weld together in very readable and accurate fashion the technical knowledge that has come down to us through the ages. We may have the expertise, to be liberal, in the arts, the sciences, and letters, but we do not have the genius who could put them together in orderly, readable, and meaningful fashion. In his absence, I propose that for either a one- or two-semester course in the liberal arts, competent faculty members in the three divisions should be named to prepare a syllabus for each of the three divisions. Each syllabus should be a resumé of the findings in the division, taking care that the whole syllabus — that is, the combined syllabi of the three divisions — should not exceed one- or two-semester work on the undergraduate level. In other words, the experts in each division are called upon to be concise and effective. Since nobody can handle the whole course alone, a relay of experts in each division should lecture to the students. For this purpose, I think the lecture hall should accommodate or hold from eighty to a hundred students. The lecturer does not have to correct the test papers; the faculty members not assigned to lecture should do the “dirty” job. These non-lecturers can audit the lecture classes to familiarize themselves with the disciplines not falling within their competence. This is one of the ways in which college students of whatever ambition or orientation can imbibe a semblance of the liberal arts in one or two semesters. Of course, it is superficial, but since the purpose is not to make the students cultured within one or two semesters but merely to acquaint them with the achievements of man in his peregrination to civilization, this one- or two-semester course, if properly handled, might lead the serious- minded students to delve deeper into the subject and in the course of his long life he might become truly cultured. The ultimate purpose of the course should be to arouse the interest of the students in man’s development of his intellectual endowments and so give them a chance to think for themselves. That’s all there is to it in education. *The original essay, “History as Humanistic Studies.” was delivered at Central Philippine University on 31 May 1977. The article was published in The Manila Review 13 (December 1977): 33-39.
LITERATURE AS HISTORY*
friars led a dissolute life. The common folks who spun those tales of friar misdeeds were not maliciously motivated but were historically minded, unconsciously perhaps, and wanted to perpetuate for posterity the licentious conduct of certain friars by inventing stories whose implications had a ring of truth. And so even without the testimonies of foreign travelers who witnessed and wrote about friar misdeeds, a student of history can rely on the friar tales for an appreciation of their conduct. In using written and oral literature as sources of history, however, the student should be cautious lest he falls into the bottomless pit of pure fiction, and, consequently, cause the intelligent reader to doubt his credibility, if not his sanity. In literature, whether written or oral, the events and personalities described may or may not be real. It is the duty of the historian to determine by severe critical examination whether the author is narrating a real happening or describing a real person, or whether either or both are fictitious, or whether there is a semblance of truth in the description and if so to what extent. It is in this aspect of the historian’s craft that difficulties arise, for the ground he is treading is too soft for comfort and safety and demands wide experience in research, insight, dexterity or expertness in handling materials of such nature as to make facile guesses puerile. Thus, for example, a close study of Rizal’s novels, particularly the Noli, reveals that many incidents he narrated and many personalities he described were taken from actual happenings and persons. The incident depicting the plight of Basilio and Crispin was taken from an incident from San Miguel, Bulakan, where the Spanish parish priest caused the death of a young sacristan. So scandalous was the incident that the people, frightened though they were, made their silent protests felt, so that the priest’s superior was compelled to transfer him to Cavite where, during the Revolution, he was taken prisoner and made to suffer the indignities of a mock bishop. John Foreman, an English Catholic who resided in Manila for almost two decades, identified the priest as Father Piernavieja. This priest, then, became Rizal’s model for his Fray Salví and the murdered sacristan for his Crispín. The other characters in Rizal’s novels are types or taken from real life. Even his own mother may be discerned in the old woman in the church who, during Fray Dámaso’s sermon, knocked the head of her grandchild, as described in Chapter XXXI of the Noli ; Filósofo Tasio was Rizal’s own brother Paciano; Chinaman Quiroga was Carlos Palanca; Ibarra was Rizal himself; Capitan Tiago was a typical native cacique, and so on. In a letter to Felix Resurrección Hidalgo, Rizal said that the incidents he narrated in the Noli were true. “The facts I narrate,” he said in the letter, “are all true and actually happened. I can prove them.” With a frank admission like this, it is not difficult to pinpoint exactly which incidents may be used for historical purposes and which should be discarded as purely imaginary. But in cases where the author does not indicate the veracity or falsity of the incidents he narrates, the historian’s recourse is to read intensively on the period treated by the author in order to gain an insight into history. If there are survivors of the era, they should be interviewed and if their memory has not failed them their accounts of the period or what they clearly remember of it will be of capital importance. Thus, for instance, when I interviewed the late Lope K. Santos, author of the socialistic novel Banaag at Sikat (1905-1906), regarding his principal characters,
he said that the leading lady, Meni, was the late Filomena Francisco (León and Carmen Guerrero’s mother), while the hero, Delfín, was himself. On the other hand, Yoyong the lawyer was Rafael Palma. More important, historically speaking, than the identification of characters in real life is the social and economic condition that the reader gets from the literary works whose importance in this respect increases as documentary evidence becomes scarce. In the Philippine context, social history under Spain is extremely difficult to write, for the sources for this type of historical composition are very few and far between. The gaps separating the periods insofar as documentary evidence on social history is concerned are so wide that one has to rely on literary and semi-literary works in order to diminish the distance in time and space. Thus, for the social history of the Philippines during the decades before 1880, Rizal’s novels are indispensable. Less important but nevertheless necessary to complete the picture is Pedro A. Paterno’s novelette Ninay (1885) which, though inferior to Rizal’s novels from the literary point of view, describes faithfully Filipino customs in the 1880s. The reader, however, is warned not to rely too much on Paterno’s historical works, particularly those dealing with pre- Hispanic times, for they belong more to the realm of fiction than to history. Rizal’s novels are more reliable than any of Paterno’s works, for as Rizal himself admitted to his friend, Ferdinand Blumentritt, in a letter written in 1887, “The Filipinos will find in it [Noli] the history of the last ten years.” I need not go extensively into the study of Rizal’s novels in order to show how literature can be used as materials for the writing of history. Rizal’s description of the cabeza de barangay, the meeting at the tribunal, the superstitions of the Filipino religious sisters, the modus operandi of caciques like Capitan Tiago, the description of the religious procession, the condition of Binondo, the government neglect of public works, the friar mischiefs which led imaginative Filipinos to concoct what I call friar tales which rival those of Boccacio, the smuggling operations of the Chinaman Quiroga, the state of elementary and college education during the second half of the nineteenth century, the agrarian troubles which extended to recent times, and a hundred other incidents and events necessary in order to understand the history of the Philippines, or at least of the Tagalog region, are materials of history which no historian worth the name can ignore. What the documents in the archives and the travelogues of foreigners like Careri, Le Gentil, MacMicking, Jagor, Foreman, Bowring, and many others, do not reveal the literary works of contemporary writers delineate with clarity. The Tagalog poems of the pre- and post- Revolutionary periods tell us something about what the authors felt and thought secretly in language so metaphoric as to be understood by the Spaniards in the Censor’s Commission. No document in the archives describes the real feelings of the Filipinos during the critical period of revolutionary fervor, and this gap is ably filled by the poems written by Filipinos in the native languages, particularly Tagalog. Francisco Baltazar (1788-1862) was the precursor of these writers, including Rizal, who brought with him to Europe the 1870 edition of Plorante at Laura, for it was the poet, who, employing allegory effectively to
Thus, Lope K. Santos’s socialistic novel, Banaag at Sikat (Rays and Sunrise, 1905-06), describes not only the condition of the period, but also some of the events in Manila, as, for instance, the strike of the cigarette-makers and the activities of the newly founded labor unions. On the other hand, Faustino Aguilar’s novels, particularly Busabos ng Palad (Slave of Fate, 1909), Pinaglahuan (Eclipsed, 1907), and Nangalunod sa Katihan (Drowned at the Seashore, 1911), are of social and historical significance not only because they reflected the thinking of the lower and lower middle class Filipinos of the period but also because they dealt with contemporary social problems, certainly of capital importance in the writing of the history of the early American period of our history. On the Revolution, Isabelo de los Reyes’s Ang Singsing ng Dalagang Marmol (The Ring of the Marble Maiden), originally written in Tagalog and translated into Spanish, may be read with profit. In the drama, Patricio Mariano’s play, Dalawang Pagibig (Two Loves,
- and Severino Reyes’s Walang Sugat (Not Wounded, 1902), among many now hardly remembered, give us an inkling into the late Spanish period, a period remembered primarily because of the accounts of Spanish writers which are decidedly and understandably biased. Those plays and others staged during the first years of the American occupation represented Filipino viewpoints and so serve as a counterpoint to the Spanish views. With the two sides represented, a balanced overall of the history of the last years of Spain in the Philippines may be had. Aurelio Tolentino’s play Kahapon, Ngayon at Bukas (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,
- and Juan Abad’s Tanikalang Ginto (Golden Chains, 1902) are good sources for Filipino reaction to American colonization during the first decade of the present century. A doctoral dissertation has been written on Filipino reaction to the early American regime, but even a cursory examination of the bibliography shows that the author relied more on what the Americans thought was the Filipino response or reaction than on Filipino literary works which expressed most emphatically the real response not only of the élite but also of the other sectors of the populace. The poems of the period, from approximately 1902 to 1910, cover the whole gamut of feelings and thoughts regarding American intervention in the Philippines, on one hand, and the patriotic élan of the authors, on the other. These literary materials, though ephemeral, have their uses, one of which is to indicate where the Filipino people stood on the question of independence. Unfortunately, the newspapers and magazines of the period were destroyed during the last war and only stray numbers are available in the National Library and in private collections to remind one that once a time the Philippine periodicals published literary works of perhaps not enduring merits but were nevertheless crucial to the writing of our history. It is for this and other reasons that the writing of Philippine history and literature, especially of the early American period, is not exactly an excursion into Paradise. This tragedy is deepened by the thought that a few literary works found a haven between covers. Consequently, for a vertical study of the literature of the period to materialize for historical purposes, a scholar must of necessity rely on the periodical literature. This is now almost impossible insofar as the pre-war periodical materials are concerned, for the last war wiped out those vestiges of popular culture which once delineated in words what the painters did not or failed to capture in color.
From the 1920s onward, the forms of literature that most accurately mirror contemporary history are poetry and the novel. The poetry of José Corazón de Jesús, particularly his short poem and his modern awit , Sa Dakong Silangan (In the East, 1928), and many novels, among them, Servando de Angeles’s Ang Huling Timawa (The Last Slave, 1936), Abadilla and Kapulong’s Pagkamulat ni Magdalena (Magdalene’s Awakening, 1958), Edgardo Reyes’s Maynila: Sa Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila: From the Claws of Light, 1966), Amado V. Hernandez’s Mga Ibong Mandaragit (Birds of Prey, 1969), Celso Ad. Carunungan’s Satanas sa Lupa (Satan on Earth, 1971), and others, are rich sources for the history of contemporary life. In Spanish, the works of Jesús Balmori, especially his Vida Manileña which appeared in La Vanguardia, may be consulted for historical purposes. The Filipino writers in English, on the other hand, began to wake up to contemporary history in the years following the last war in the Pacific. Juan C. Laya’s This Barangay (1950), Steven Javellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn (1947), Edilberto Tempo’s Watch in the Night (1953), and the other war novels of José N. Aguilar, Magdalena B. Bautista, Agustín T. Misola, Wilfredo N. Nolledo, Augusto Piedad, and Bienvenido N. Santos, all testify to the efficacy and validity of literary works as historical sources. What gives credence to these literary works as history is the fact that the authors are contemporaneous with and eyewitnesses of or participants in the events they narrate. Of course, the dialogues are in the main fictitious. Even so, they may be used as historical sources not as they are but as they reflected or implied the thinking and feeling of the people deeply involved in the grim business of war. This thinking and feeling during the war years in the Philippines are not even intimated in official documents, press releases, news items, and speeches, and so the value of those war novels and a few poems published in the Japanese-directed newspapers and magazines is enhanced with the passage of time. In using these literary efforts as sources of history, one should take care not to fall into the error of uncritically accepting everything the literary artist says, for unlike the historian, the former’s imagination is not limited to and restricted by what actually happened. For the literary artist, verisimilitude is enough to make his work convincing. Consequently, the student of history should use discrimination or discretion in choosing which part of a literary work should be used as historical material and which part should be eschewed as unhistorical or anti-historical. Generally, literature is valid as a historical source if its description, say, of local color is realistic, that is, it conforms to the actual condition or atmosphere of a particular time and place. Thus the war novels depict, each in its own way and sphere, the actual condition in several parts of the country during the Japanese occupation, for those who survived the three-year nightmare testified to the validity and veracity of the description. The fact, too, that the authors were contemporaneous with the events narrated makes their description valid and therefore reliable as historical sources. It is not suggested, however, that literary works be made the exclusive or even the major sources in the writing of history. What is suggested is that historians should not rely exclusively on documentary evidence — official reports, contemporary news items, diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, etc. — but should use literary works as sources of information, particularly in re-creating the atmosphere and local color of a certain time and place. The function of the historian is not merely to recite the events in their proper
