A Tapestry of Contrasts: Huizinga’s Hermeneutics of Historical Inquiry

One of the most intriguing objects in the Johan Huizinga Archive is a small white envelope with minuscule, closely written pieces of paper. These are Huizinga’s notes on ‘historicism’, made in 1922, in response to a lecture by Ernst Troeltsch on the relativizing effects of historical scholarship on moral and religious certainties. In a curious sort of self-interview, on one of the larger shreds of paper in the envelope, Huizinga asked himself whether he shared Troeltsch’s worries. His answer was clear: ‘the strong spirit, the truly living man does not feel thus’.

This paper unpacks why Huizinga, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not worry about objectivism and relativism. It shows that Huizinga’s historical work was rooted in a hermeneutics that pointed beyond the ‘Cartesian anxiety’ that fueled, and still fuels, so much reflection on objectivism and relativism. In Huizinga’s hermeneutics, historical inquiry was first and foremost a privileged means for increasing one’s self-understanding through contrasting one’s own habits and patterns of life with voices, ideas, and practices from people in other times and places.

In Huizinga’s own words, jotted down on a tiny shred of paper in the small white envelope: historical inquiry ultimately aims at ‘an understanding of ourselves’, rather than at objective knowledge of the past.