Historical truth emerges through an oscillating mediation between concrete detail and larger context.

Evidence

Historical understanding is a process of specification, said Michelet: but it would seem more accurate to include both movements in the description, and to see such understanding as a constant process of rectifying the received images we already have of historical events, specifying them, no doubt, correcting them with a mass of detail when the images are vague, yet on the other hand moving away, and replacing them in larger contexts when we have become so absorbed in the empirical complexity of an event as to have forgotten that it can also have a meaning. If historical truth, as opposed to historical accuracy, can be said to have any validity as a philosophical concept, it is hard to see how it could be formulated in any other way than as just such a process of determinate negation. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 708

Categorization

• XREF: This describes dialectical mediation between concrete and total — exactly the Adorno/Benjamin and Lukács lineage this reader is tracing. — connects to: Understanding history means experiencing facts ordering themselves around a model — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 451; Comprehending the interrelation of experienced facts shatters false realism — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 801
• DEFINE: Defines ‘historical truth’ as determinate negation via a double movement of specification and enlargement, not mere accuracy.

Broader Connections

• Understanding history means experiencing facts ordering themselves around a model #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 451
• Comprehending the interrelation of experienced facts shatters false realism #corroborates (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 801