Imagination's Role in Writing History

 

What is the Role of Imagination in the Writing of History?

The past is irrecoverable. We cannot go back in time and experience something firsthand again. The men and women cannot be brought back to life. The experiences that had occurred cannot occur again.  Objects of historical thought are events which have finished happening and those conditions no longer exist.

As far as present experiences are concerned, the past is non-existent, the physical and mental elements of past events can only be constructed in imagination by the historian’s mind, upon what he takes to be evidence for the past, therefore, his picture of the past, is imaginary in every detail.

When historians try to imagine of events of the past based on the sources, they try to justify their imagination and try to make sense of the situation logically in order to understand what had occurred. This can be considered them having multiple interpretations of what had happened in the past and try to justify each interpretation and try to bring it to a conclusion logically.

The certainty of imagination is considered to be proper when it makes sense logically according to any pictures or other evidence along with eliminating over-imagination.

Historians use their imagination to make sense of what happened in the past, by looking at evidences or historical sources they’ve attained at the moment, they imagine and reconstruct history for being able to describe it.

Collingwood talked about imagination.

The understanding that the events and actions that historians study have already happened ­ that they are finished and so cannot actually be observed. ­ Collingwood claimed that historian must, necessarily, use their imaginations to reconstruct and understand the past.

 Because we cannot observe human events that have already taken place, he argued that we must imagine them.

 While Collingwood concedes that imagining is often thought of as being related to the fictitious, he argues that the imaginary does not necessarily have to be about the 'unreal'. To demonstrate this, he provided the following example: "If I imagine the friend who lately left my house now entering his own, the fact that I imagine this event gives me no reason to believe it unreal."

 To Collingwood, imagining is simply a process we use to construct or re­construct pictures, ideas or concepts in our minds and he points out that this process should not necessarily be correlated with either the fictitious or the real.