Historical facts refer to events that occurred in the past. Historians are divided between Ranke, who views them as objective facts, and Droysen, who interprets them as subjective perceptions.
‘Historical facts’ can mean the individual events that occurred in the past themselves, or they can mean only the facts of the past as subjectively grasped by historians. A historian’s approach to historical research depends on which of these two concepts of ‘historical fact’ they emphasize.
Ranke equated historical fact with objects in the natural world created by ‘the finger of God’. He believed that the individual facts of each era or the past possessed an inherent, self-contained value that transcended the flow of time. Therefore, he considered a historian’s arbitrary interpretation to be a desecration of sacred history, arguing that the historian’s role was to describe past historical facts as they were. To achieve this, he believed historians must understand history through rigorous verification and confirmation of historical sources, and must not distort history by prioritizing their own objectives.
This position of Ranke reflects the major current of 19th-century historiography. Historians of the time sought to introduce scientific methodology into historical research, aiming to establish history as an objective and empirical discipline. Ranke’s approach, emphasizing ‘history as it was,’ prioritized the absoluteness of historical facts, an influence that persists to this day. His methodology led to efforts to accurately reconstruct past events through ancient philology and document analysis.
In contrast, Droysen emphasized that historical facts are ultimately facts academically constructed through the historian’s subjective perception. Therefore, he did not view history as merely a collection of past events; he saw the historian’s task as understanding and interpreting past events to construct them into a form of knowledge. He argued that relying solely on source verification to grasp objective facts could only yield partial and uncertain explanations of the past.
Droysen’s position emphasizes the interpretive nature of history. This is not merely a matter of listing past events, but rather an endeavor to explore the causal relationships and meanings between them. From his perspective, history is not a simple record, but a narrative construct reflecting the complexity of human experience. This interpretive approach became the foundation for emphasizing the importance of diverse interpretations and perspectives in modern historiography.
However, even though Droysen emphasized the historian’s subjective perception, he did not view the historian as arbitrarily understanding and interpreting past facts. He believed that in the process of recognizing certain individual facts of the past as historical facts, there exists a ‘history as a category’ that decisively acts before the historian’s subjectivity intervenes. That is, he saw ‘history as a category’ as a priori determining the historian’s historical perception. Here, the category forming historical perception is the ‘ethical world’. Humans live not in the natural world given from the beginning, but in the ethical world created by human will and action. Therefore, history occurs within this ethical world and can only be grasped in relation to it.
A crucial point in Droysen’s theory is the role of the historian. He believed historians must not merely describe the past but must reinterpret it for the present and future. This stance emphasizes the meaning and value history provides to contemporary society, suggesting historians must fulfill their role as socially responsible intellectuals. Discussions about the social role and responsibility of historians continue in modern historiography, representing one of Droysen’s intellectual legacies.
In short, while Droysen asserted the subjectivity of historical perception—contrary to Ranke’s objective approach—he also held that a pre-given ethical world determines the historian’s perception and interpretation of history. Therefore, his subjective theory of historical perception never descended into relativism.
Ultimately, these two approaches to historical facts enrich the diversity and depth of historical research. Although Ranke’s objective factualism and Droysen’s subjective interpretivism appear to be in opposition, both approaches have actually contributed to the development of historiography. Modern historical research strives to integrate these two perspectives, continuously attempting both to understand past facts as they were and to interpret them for application to the present and future. This integrative approach is making historiography a richer and more multi-layered discipline.
