The History of Historiography
Dr. Ramsey Glutherfeld photographed his classmates in the Princeton undergraduate class of 1965. Students of “the mechanical poetry of warfare” will recognize Pandolfi and Erjavec in the second row.
The late Dr. Ramsey Glutherfeld (who took the photograph above of his classmates1 in the 1965 class of Chemical and Biological Engineering undergraduates at Princeton University) argued that historiography preceded history and indeed that most, but not all, phenomena are preceded by the fields that will study them; indeed, that the creation of a field to study something2 is a precondition for that thing’s emergence.
Glutherfeld developed this idea across a decades-long correspondence with Edward Teller, a skeptic for the first ten years who was eventually won over to the theory, which he came to understand, more or less correctly, as an extreme extension of what Eugene Wigner describes in his seminal essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. For Glutherfeld, the effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences is not unreasonable because mathematics creates the possibility for new conditions in nature that can then be observed or recreated experimentally. But “new” here is a misnomer because a new field of study makes possible the existence of the thing studied across all time, past, present, and future.
It was the totalizing nature of creating new phenomena that convinced Glutherfeld never to publish his theory, and he hides all mention of it, implicit or explicit, in his sole monograph, The History of Historiography, in which he restricts his work to technical analysis of papyrus fragments and theorizing on the meaning of the Greek monastery inscription (seen below) that calls Plutarch “the father of history”. What Glutherfeld and Teller feared was a runaway process of scholarly field creation that would in turn cause the runaway creation of novel phenomena. Or the development of new fields of study as weapons of mass destruction.
What they feared nearly came to pass, yet we live on thanks to: 1) the difficulty of pioneering new fields of study and 2) the tireless efforts of men in basements in Princeton, Berkeley, Cambridge, and Wabash College who ensure that each new field has a corresponding equal and opposite field. In this way the chaos of novelty is kept at bay.
Dr. Ramsey Glutherfeld died last month. He is survived by his wife Esther, his brother Hans,3 5 children, and 13 grandchildren.
Students of “the mechanical poetry of warfare” will recognize Pandolfi and Erjavec in the second row.
But not anything.
Hans Libel Glutherfeld, pianist in the Alexander Villoing tradition. See also: José Rodríguez Carballeira (aka Pepito Arriola), Esmeralda Athanasiu-Gardeev, Simon Barere, Dmitry Bashkirov, Birdice Blye, Teresa Carreño, Erazm Dluski, and Anna Essipova Nikolayevna.