• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1073 0

of a later point. For example, consider the following sentence: “One afternoon about a year ago, Bob was out in his garden planting roses.” This is what Danto calls a normal sentence, in that it does nothing more than describe what was happening at the time. But consider now the same sentence, slightly modified: “One afternoon about a year ago, Bob was out in his garden planting his prize-winning roses.” This is a narrative sentence, because it implicitly refers to an event—Bob’s roses winning a prize—that hadn’t happened at the time of the planting.

The difference between the two sentences seems negligible. But what Danto points out is that only the first kind of sentence—the normal one—would have made sense to the participants at the time. That is, Bob might have said at the time “I am planting roses” or even “I am planting roses and they are going to be prizewinners.” But it would be very strange for him to have said “I am planting my prize-winning roses” before they’d actually won any prizes. The reason is that while the first two statements make predictions about the future—that the roots Bob is putting in the ground will one day bloom into a rosebush, or that he intends to submit them to a contest and thinks he will win—the third is something different: It assumes foreknowledge of a very specific event that will only color the events of the present after it has actually happened. It’s the kind of thing that Bob could say only if he were a prophet—a character who sees the future with sufficient clarity that he can speak about the present as though looking back on it.

Danto’s point is that the all-knowing, hypothetical Ideal Chronicler can’t use narrative sentences either. It knows everything that is happening now, as well as everything that has led up to now. It can even make inferences about how all the events it knows about might fit together. But what it can’t do is foresee the future; it cannot refer to what is happening now in light of future events. So when English and French ships began to skirmish in the English Channel in 1337, the Ideal Chronicler might have noted that a war of some kind seemed likely, but it could not have recorded the observation “The Hundred Years War began today.” Not only was the extent of the conflict between the two countries unknown at the time, but the term “Hundred Years War” was only invented long after it ended as shorthand to describe what was in actuality a series of intermittent conflicts from 1337 to 1453. Likewise, when Isaac Newton published his masterpiece, Principia, the Ideal Chronicler might have been able to say it was a major contribution to celestial mechanics, and even predicted that it would revolutionize science. But to claim that Newton was laying the foundation for what became modern science, or was playing a key role in the Enlightenment, would be beyond the IC. These are narrative sentences that could only be uttered after the future events had taken place.10

This may sound like a trivial argument over semantics. Surely even if the Ideal Chronicler can’t use exactly the words that historians use, it can still perceive the essence of what is happening as well as they do. But in fact Danto’s point is precisely that historical descriptions of “what is happening” are impossible without narrative sentences—that narrative sentences are the very essence of historical explanations. This is a critical distinction, because historical accounts do often claim to be describing “only” what happened in detached, dispassionate detail. Yet as Berlin and Danto both argue, literal descriptions of what happened are impossible. Perhaps even more important, they would also not serve the purpose of historical explanation, which is not to reproduce the events of the past so much as to explain why they mattered. And the only way to know what mattered, and why, is to have been able to see what happened as a result—information that, by definition, not even the impossibly talented Ideal Chronicler possesses. History cannot be told while it is happening, therefore, not only because the