Testifying to Unity: Toward a Global Logic of Historical Testimony

Social and Communitarian Epistemology have recently revived our sense for the role and indispensability of testimony in social life. The Common Sense Knowledge of our daily life depends on ‘historical testimony’ of various types. Historical testimony is hooked in immediate belief based on ‘trust’ but it is also hooked in various types of reduction towards the fundamentals of the individual testimony. Without levity one might assert that no oral tradition or written historical narration as ever been successful without the foundational notions of reliable testimony and justified trust.
Whereas the role of testimony is accepted as some kind of ‘universal’ structuring all processes of historical knowledge, the concepts of what a witness in historical narration might be vary according to local cultural contexts and epochs. As a consequence some sort of a ‘Phenomenology of Testimony’ should be an integral part (a kind of methodological basement) of a Global History of Historical Writing.
This paper characterizes the properties of ‘Testimony’ as a potential universal of the writing and constructing of histories. It concerns itself with drawing out a provisional line connecting the witness in antique historiography with the had’th-based reports of the age of the Prophet Muhammad and finally with the bureaucratic procedures by which Chinese court historians built their massive official history from ‘legitimate Confucian sources’. It will show that although different rules and regimes for testimony in different historical cultures exist these different cultures are neither isolated from each other nor is it impossible or even undesirable to compare these localized logics of testimony. The logic of comparison applied in this paper is of a ‘horizontal type’, taking the functioning and structuring qualities of testimony as its vanishing point, setting aside any claims to an ‘absolute type’ (perfect) of testimony based historical knowledge.